Night People

by J L Aarne

  Wyatt could feel his eyebrows lifting as she spoke. Yes, his dad had a strange sense of humor. He often told jokes which nobody laughed at except for him. What Lorrie described didn’t sound like something Aaron would do, not even as joke. It didn’t sound like the sort of thing that would even occur to him. Aaron Sinclair was a very tidy person. He had worked as the lead custodian at the local high school for thirty years, and a lot of the time he started doing the dishes before his wife had finished clearing the table. He mowed the lawn on the weekends, made the bed, did the laundry and never left his towels on the bathroom floor. Wyatt tried to imagine him face-down in a bowl of soup and couldn’t really do it without also imagining him dead.

  “You put your hand on his arm and what?” Wyatt asked when neither of them had spoken for a while. “What happened?” That awful fear rose up again and he asked, “Did he hit you?”

  “No! No, of course not, he’d never…” She didn’t finish that statement, but sat there frowning, her eyebrows drawn together. “I don’t think he would. But he’s been through something hard. Who knows? No, he didn’t hit me, he… he growled at me.”

  “He what?” Wyatt knew he had heard her correctly, but the idea of his father growling like an animal at his wife was as alien to him as the idea of him eating his soup like a starving dog. “He growled at you?”

  “Well, I mean… I don’t know what else you would call it,” Lorrie said, a bit defensively. She sipped her tea and glanced at the clock. There was a knock at the door. “That’ll be your sister. Go let her in, won’t you? I’ll get your father.”

  Wyatt got up to answer the door. “Where is Dad anyway?”

  “Watching the TV,” Lorrie said. “You’d think he’d never seen one before.”

  Kat was surprised to see him when Wyatt opened the door. She hugged him, and he realized, with amusement, that she was proud of him. Proud that he had braved the darkness, kept his word and come to dinner. A part of her, probably even a big part, hadn’t believed he would.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said, pulling back. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” Wyatt said.

  She studied him for a moment before deciding to believe him. “Good then. What’s for dinner?”

  Their father did not put his face in his enchiladas at dinner, he used a fork. He smiled a lot, which occasionally had the effect of making him look somewhat vacant, but otherwise he seemed himself, although quieter than usual.

  “So, Dad, how was the camping trip?” Wyatt asked.

  “How was the camping trip?” Aaron repeated.

  They all waited for him to say more.

  “It was nice, dear,” Lorrie said when her husband went quietly back to eating. “It’s so pretty in the hills this time of the year. I took some pictures. There’s one of us standing by the trees in our coats I think would make a nice Christmas card next year. Your father wasn’t feeling well though, so we came home a day earlier than we’d planned.”

  Aaron smiled. “Wasn’t feeling well,” he agreed.

  Wyatt stared at him with a deep sense of unease. Something was wrong with him. He opened his mouth to comment on it and Aaron caught his gaze and held it. There was an unspoken warning in the look. That uneasy feeling spread, and Wyatt looked away, sick and confused. This was his dad, so why was he suddenly possessed by the unshakable conviction that if he spoke up about his strange behavior something very bad would happen?

  Bad like what? He didn’t know, but the certainty remained, so he said nothing.

  “Did you go fishing?” Kat asked.

  “Fishing,” Aaron said.

  “No, we roasted hotdogs. I didn’t think he should get out in the water this time of year. Not yet. I certainly wasn’t about to,” Lorrie said. “There was a little café in the town nearby. We stopped there a couple times and ate.”

  Kat frowned between them. She was sensing the tension in the room, too, but she didn’t say anything either, except, “Oh. Well… that sounds nice anyway.”

  “When does the doctor say Dad can go back to work?” Wyatt asked. He didn’t try to ask Aaron. He was starting to realize he wasn’t likely to get a straight answer out of him.

  “A couple of weeks if he’s feeling up to it,” Lorrie said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” Aaron said. He had finished his dinner and sat back sipping from a cup of coffee as he looked around at them all. Their father was the only one in the family who preferred coffee. “A couple of weeks.”

  Lorrie glanced over at him, her throat working, then shook her head and stood abruptly to begin clearing away the dishes. Wyatt had only eaten half of his enchilada, but he let her take his plate anyway. When she went to the kitchen, Kat went after her and Wyatt stayed and sat across the table from his father, his mind racing.

  Horrible possibilities were racing through his head.

  “Dad?”

  Aaron watched him across the table and said nothing.

  “Dad, did something happen? While you were camping? Did—?”

  “No,” Aaron said.

  It was the first thing he had said all evening that was not a repetition of someone else’s words. The sick, uneasy sensation in the pit of Wyatt’s stomach became a painful gnawing, and he realized his heart was racing because he could feel the force of its pounding beats tickling in his throat.

  “While we were camping, it was nice,” Aaron said. “Something did not happen.”

  “I… Okay.”

  Wyatt stood, images flashing in his mind of a creature like a shriveled fig stuffed inside Ned’s skin. He shook his head and forced the memory away. He couldn’t think like that. It was nonsense. His dad was just recovering from something traumatic. He was sick. He would be better soon, and Wyatt would feel like an idiot for what he was thinking.

  From every word you say, they learn how to be more like you. More human. Silas had told him this and Wyatt tried not to think about it, but he couldn’t help it. It’s still learning, he thought. He watched his father drink his coffee, watching him back with an odd avian sort of curiosity, and he wanted to scream. You’re still learning, aren’t you?

  No, he was wrong. He was seeing monsters where there were no monsters. Jumping at shadows that, for a change, were not there. Shadows that were only shadows, not shadow people. He had seen some amazing, horrifying things in the past months when Silas was around, and they had been real, he wasn’t trying to convince himself that they hadn’t been, but this was in his head. He had started to see those horrifying things in ordinary places, that was all it was. His dad was sick, and Wyatt had been spending far too much time with Silas.

  “I suppose I should go home. It’s getting late,” Wyatt said.

  “Yes. Late,” Aaron said.

  “I’ll just go say goodbye to Mom,” Wyatt said.

  “Goodnight,” Aaron said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, goodnight, Dad,” Wyatt said. “And, you know… feel better.”

  “Yes,” Aaron said. “Goodnight.”

  Wyatt hoped that the fear didn’t show on his face as he said his goodbyes to his mother and sister, but he was sure that his emotions were clearly written all over him. Kat looked disappointed and, she probably attributed his fear to the dark, same as always. He let them both think whatever they would and went home, talking to himself in the car, telling himself every reason why he was being stupid and irrational. By the time he pulled into his parking space, he had done a pretty good job of convincing himself that he was just imagining it.

  Chapter 11

  The only other night person Wyatt knew besides Silas was his aunt Tallulah. He hadn’t seen her in over a year, but he didn’t call ahead when he went to visit because Aunt Tallie liked to always have an excuse handy for why she couldn’t visit. She was going out to dinner, for drinks, she had a date, she had errands to run, she had to go do the grocery shopping, she had friends coming over, she was teaching a class all day. The excuses always sounded reasonable,
but they were excuses all the same. He needed to talk to her and he didn’t want to argue so he decided drop in unannounced.

  It was ninety miles from his place to her house in Deming, so he had called in to work expecting the trip to take some time, assuming she would talk to him at all. He was a little worried that she might not be home, but she was. She didn’t look unhappy to see him when she opened the door, but she wasn’t thrilled either and he saw it before she managed to cover it up and put a smile on her face.

  Aunt Tallie was what Kat would look like in about thirty years if she took care of herself. Fit and pretty, tall with dark hair she kept the grey out of with regular visits to the salon. Today she was dressed casually, light jeans, a black T-shirt and bare feet; she wasn’t on her way out, but he half expected her to try to tell him that she was. She would apologize, like always, but she would have to go. She would already be running late.

  Instead, Tallie said, “Wyatt, honey, what are you doing here?”

  It wasn’t a social call, he reminded himself, and tried not to be offended that she wasn’t glad to see him. “It’s kind of hard to explain in… well, a few words,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  “Of course, you can. I was just making lunch,” she said, holding the door wide for him to enter. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll make you a sandwich. Do you like rye bread? I can’t recall.”

  “Sure,” Wyatt said.

  He waited while she closed the door and followed her into the kitchen. Tallie’s house was small, but it was cozy, and it was a lot closer to her job than the apartment in Lynnwood. The stones in the mason work, both outside and in, were smooth rocks that had been taken probably a hundred years before from the nearby Nooksack River. There were two bedrooms, the larger of which she had converted into a small study, and a single bathroom, which had not been part of the house when it was first constructed but added later. Tallie had once told him, laughing, that when she bought the property, there had been an old outhouse in the back falling to ruin. One day she intended to tear it down and have the ground there dug up to see what, if anything, she found. Back when outhouses were far more common than indoor plumbing, people dropped and threw a lot of things down them. She had once been at the sight of such a dig and they had unearthed the remains of infant’s skeleton. The outhouse had been gone for years, but Wyatt had no idea if she had ever found anything or if she had ever looked; it had not come up again.

  There was a breakfast nook in the kitchen and a sandwich sitting beside a glass of juice on one side. Tallie had been sitting down to eat when Wyatt knocked at the door. She went to the fridge to prepare him something while he sat down.

  “You don’t have to do that. I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Wyatt said.

  “I know, but it is lunch time, isn’t it?” she said. “It would be rude if I just sat there and ate in front of you.”

  “I’m not that hungry,” Wyatt said. When she paid no attention and reached for the loaf of bread on the counter, he said, “Aunt Tallie, seriously. I’m not. Can we… talk?”

  She stopped what she was doing and stood stiffly beside the counter with her back to him. Then she sighed, put the bread away and walked over to sit across from him at the table. “You know, don’t you?” she asked.

  Wyatt stared at her. “What do I know?”

  “Please, don’t do that. You know,” she said. “That I can see. You know that I see the things you see.”

  Wyatt let out a deep breath, a strange, releasing sensation in his chest like a tightly clenched fist opening. “Why didn’t you ever say?”

  She regarded him from beneath lifted brows and an exasperated expression crossed her face. “I would think that was obvious, honey. Has saying it all these years made your life easier?” He didn’t answer her, but he didn’t have to. “No. You’ve been in therapy since you were three years old. You’ve never had a girlfriend or—or a boyfriend. You lasted less than a single semester at university. You… you’re not happy, Wyatt, are you?”

  Wyatt loved his aunt, she was one of his favorite people, but she always had been a little condescending. Usually it wasn’t directed at him, but he was surprised to find himself angry rather than embarrassed by what she said. It was all true, all humiliatingly accurate, and all he could think was, How dare you?

  “I never told anyone, and it has made all the difference,” Tallie said. “I’m a respected academic, I have a career, colleagues, friends. If I started talking about seeing monsters everywhere, what do you think would happen? I’d lose everything. If I’d done it all along, I never would have had anything. Some of my work raises eyebrows as it is, and I have a hard enough time being taken seriously when people I respect compare my theories to science fiction. Or worse, fairy tales.”

  Tallulah Sinclair taught anthropology and ancient history at Western Washington University. She had studied archaeology, anthropology and theology in college and had a doctorate in one of them, though Wyatt wasn’t sure which. She had written a lot of books in her various fields, none of which he had ever read. If she put forward a theory about the origin of some prehistoric god, claimed that maybe, just maybe, the god had been something else, like a creature only some people could see, her stuffy old colleagues might raise their eyebrows and laugh it off as science fiction, but if she claimed to those same colleagues that she herself could see those creatures and knew them to be real, she would never be taken seriously again. She would lose her job and her reputation would be in ruins.

  “Do you think I expected you to make a public statement about it?” he asked. “I don’t care about any of that. You should have said something to me. I thought I was alone. I thought I was crazy. Everyone thinks that, but I thought it all my life. I was afraid of my own mind.”

  She sat back like he had slapped her and blinked. “I’m sorry.”

  “You think I don’t know I’m a loser, huh?” Wyatt asked. “You think I need you to tell me?”

  “Wyatt, that’s not what I meant,” Tallie said.

  He nodded. “I know. But it’s what you said.”

  Tallie reached across the table and took one of his hands. “Sweetheart, what do you want?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. Is that all you came here for? To hear me say I’m sorry?”

  “You know a lot about these… things. Creatures. Whatever they are. You went to school and you studied so you would know all about them.” He had figured this out not long after he realized that she was like him. Wyatt took his hand back from her. “I want to know what you know.”

  She laughed. “You’re right, I do know quite a lot,” she said when the laughter had trailed off. “My every area of study was geared toward learning more about them, so I would know more about me. But I can’t tell you everything I know in a single afternoon. I studied for years. I’m still figuring it out.”

  “Snakes, then. Serpents,” Wyatt said. “What about snakes?”

  She tapped her fingers on the tabletop on either side of her forgotten sandwich and considered him. “I have a better idea,” she said eventually. “Why don’t you tell me what’s been happening. What brought you here? Then I will tell you whatever I can to help.”

  So, he told her. He told her about Silas, the harpy, about Herschel and Ned and the thing that had taken Ned’s skin. He told her how Silas had explained what they were to him, and how they had become friends, or so he had thought. He told her about Thorn, which made her smile until he repeated what Thorn had said about the black-eyed children and the Midgard Serpent. He told her about the sword and the dying man he’d met in jail. The only thing he was careful not to tell her about was his father and what he suspected had happened to him in the forest. She was Aaron’s sister and, while she was a night person like Wyatt, she was nothing like Silas. Anything Wyatt said about his father would only scare her and make her less likely to help him.

  When Wyatt finally stopped talking, Tallie let out a low whistle. Then she got up from the table, took her sandwich to the count
er and put the glass that had contained her juice in the sink. She opened a cupboard and took down a bottle of whiskey.

  “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink,” she said. She brought two small glasses back to the table and poured whiskey into them both. “It sounds like you’ve been very busy.”

  “You believe me?” Wyatt asked. He was not used to being believed. He still hadn’t been sure that she would. “Really?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of things, Wyatt. I’m not a warrior like your friend, Silas, but I see them, too,” Tallie said. She tossed back her drink. “I don’t mess around with the scary ones and usually they leave me in peace, which is all I want.”

  “Do you think it’s true, though?” Wyatt asked. “That we’re supposed to… I don’t know, guard people? Protect them from the things they don’t know are there? Silas thinks that’s why we’re like this.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe that is the point of us. Who knows? People—all people—have been asking what the point is since the beginning of time. Everyone has that question inside them. Even if you don’t believe in any gods, it sits there in your mind and you wonder why? Why are we here? Maybe for people like us, that’s the answer, but maybe not. It’s the sentinel theory, that’s all.”

  “Sentinel theory?” Wyatt asked.

  “In 1966, Frederick Snyder put forward the idea that social animals in groups do not all sleep at the same time,” Tallie explained. “The group almost always contains members that are awake to protect the rest from predators. There have been some recent studies on humans that seem to indicate that the same behavior evolved in us too, back when we were hunter-gatherers.”

  “Okay,” Wyatt said. “So, you think that’s what Silas was talking about? Except, of course, this scientific study wouldn’t include us, would it?”

  “The concept is the same, though,” she said. “The thing is, we’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We don’t live in Tanzania. What your friend is talking about is more along the lines of divine purpose, and you have to ask yourself, even if he believes it, even if it might be true in a lot of ways, do you want to fight these creatures the rest of your life? You still have the option to walk away.”