Night People

by J L Aarne

  His tongue wouldn’t allow him to be so verbose in his explanation. It was a lump of sticky clay in his mouth. “Easy way out,” he said.

  Thorn laughed. “You think killing the Midgard Serpent would be easy?”

  “Not really,” Wyatt said. “But… not right. Another way.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Thorn said. “It’s all happened before, after all.”

  “It has?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “You should really read that book your aunt gave you.”

  “I am. It’s boring. Some of it… is boring.” Wyatt took a deep breath and let it out on a long sigh. “Thorn?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that really your name? Sounds… I don’t know. Not real.”

  “No. Names have power.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you can name a thing, you can own it. It belongs to you. Maybe not all the way, but a little is enough.”

  “Why ‘Thorn’?”

  Thorn was smiling, Wyatt could hear it in his voice, though he had never seen Thorn smile. “It’s a strong word. ‘Thorn.’ A sharp word, a word that draws blood. Like I said, names have power. Even false names have power.”

  “Will you tell me your real name?”

  Thorn was quiet for so long that Wyatt had to squeeze his hand to be sure he was still there. “Not today,” Thorn finally said.

  Wyatt sighed again, disappointed, but not surprised. If Thorn had kept his true name a secret this long, he wouldn’t just give it away for the asking like it was nothing. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to fall asleep now, okay?”

  “Goodnight, Wyatt.”

  “Goodnight.”

  He dreamed, and the great snake was there in the dark, he felt it even before his hand found it and his fingers slid along its smooth scales. Its scales were the scales of a giant. Each one like the floor of a mansion or castle, overlapping on and on without end. In the utter blackness, Wyatt felt his way along the body of the beast and could not imagine that it would even know he was there. It was so enormous, he had to be like a speck of sand or a flea. Smaller maybe, like a bacterium. No wonder civilizations from the dawn of creation had worshipped it and its millions of tiny cousins. Even without seeing it, this monster was breathtaking. He felt now what Tallie had said, what she had read to him in her study; there was a part of his mind waking up in recognition as he stood close to it, ran his hand along its side and marveled at its magnificence. A deeply buried, primal piece of him remembered it.

  “I know you,” he whispered.

  The serpent shifted, and it was as though the world shifted with it. The ground shuddered, and Wyatt’s feet slipped on the unsteady floor where he stood.

  I know you, the serpent replied. Its voice was a hiss in Wyatt’s mind that pulled at something deep in his belly. Deeper, in the core of him. I know you. You are draped in stardust and moonbeams. I know you, lunatic. I see you.

  “Lunatic?” Wyatt asked. It was a taboo word in the world of mental health. He had only ever been called that by his sister, and she had been mostly joking. “You’re a lunatic. I’m not a lunatic.”

  Moonstruck. Are you not? You must be or else you would not be here.

  It meant that he was a night person, Wyatt realized. It was an odd way of referring to it, but in a way, it made perfect sense. Hadn’t his perceived madness shaped his entire life? In a very real way, it had been because of the moon. Moon-madness, like they used to say before it was rude to call people crazy.

  Wyatt also realized at that moment that he was having a dream so lucid he was having trouble remembering that it was only a dream. He couldn’t remember ever being able to so deeply analyze a dream before while still inside it. Or knowing that it was a dream from the moment it began. He also couldn’t recall ever having a dream with no pictures or images at all.

  I see you, the serpent hissed.

  Wyatt tensed and took a step back, his hand falling away from his exploration of its scales. The ground shook again as the serpent moved, then an eye opened before him, an eye so big that he had to tilt his head back to stare into the slit pupil like he was looking up the slope of a steep mountainside. The eye was like a sun, bright and golden and gigantic enough that he found it difficult to imagine the head of the animal to which it belonged. John Bledsoe had dreamed of an eye like a sun. He wondered if this was the same eye. In the faint light of the serpent’s eye, he could make out indistinct things, like the fold of scales around the eye, but they were like rock outcroppings on the face of a cliff and the head was so vast that he could not recognize any specific features standing as close as he was to it.

  Set me free.

  “What?”

  Set me free.

  “I… can’t do that.”

  Yes, you can. Set me free.

  Preparing himself for death, Wyatt squared his shoulders, stared into the eye of the serpent and said, “I won’t then.”

  The serpent blinked, the thin membrane of its eyelid dimming the light for an instant.

  “I’m sorry,” Wyatt said. He was, too. He felt genuine pity for the serpent, but it was impossible. Even if he had known what it was talking about, he would not have been able to bring himself to do what it asked.

  Go then. I will see you again, lunatic.

  “In my dreams,” Wyatt said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t possible to see this creature any other way and if he ever did, he knew it would mean the end of the world.

  Is that what you think this is?

  Wyatt swallowed around the awful drumming beat of his heart. “I have to be dreaming,” he said. “I was in bed. I took a sleeping pill. I fell asleep.”

  Then it must be a dream.

  Wyatt sensed that the serpent was amused and that terrified him. This creature was a snake, but it wasn’t, not actually. Or not like any other snake in the universe. It was intelligent, brilliant even, and a stupid monster, even an enormous one, might be defeated, but what if it was smarter than the people holding it prisoner? A monster like that could outthink them as well as overpower them and then they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “Why haven’t you escaped?” Wyatt asked.

  There was a soft hissing of breath and the light went out as the serpent closed its eyes again. I will, it said.

  The next instant, Wyatt was deep beneath icy water. The water was so cold that his fingers and toes instantly went numb and the numbness began to creep up his arms and legs toward the rest of him. His lungs burned, and he was blinded by the absolute, icy darkness of the water, and crushed by the pressure of its depth. There was a billion tons of water above him, squashing the life out of him and he couldn’t see which way was up and which was down. A bubble escaped through his nose and he began to panic. It wasn’t a dream after all, and this was how the serpent was going to prove that to him. It was going to punish him for refusing to set it free by drowning him at the bottom of the ocean.

  His face broke the surface of the water and Wyatt awoke shivering and gasping in his bed.

  Chapter 14

  In the morning, Wyatt called Silas, but the number was no longer in service. The first time, he thought it was a mistake, so he tried again, but it was no mistake. The phone number that he had no longer worked. With a sinking sense of unease, he realized that he had no idea where Silas lived, and he doubted that if he had a landline phone its number would be listed. Wyatt had seen his address once on his driver’s license and he remembered that they were practically neighbors, but he couldn’t remember the address and he had a lot of neighbors.

  Dr. Graham was another matter; her office wouldn’t stop calling him. Clarice, her assistant, had called him twice more the previous day while Wyatt was dreaming, and it was only 10:00 a.m. but she had called again. The messages were always the same, though they were becoming more curt with every repetition. He was having a strange back-and-forth argument with himself about Dr. Graham, and because he hadn’t yet reached a c
onclusion about it, he hadn’t decided if he was going to call her back. On one hand, he felt like he should because it was rude to just disappear on her like that and she had been his therapist for many years. She had helped him, or at least, he had felt like she was helping him. He felt like he owed her an explanation. Except when he thought about it, he wondered if he owed her anything at all. It seemed like the guilt he felt was not really his guilt, but like it had been taught to him; programmed into him. It was the same guilt he felt about not taking his medication, which he had stopped. Granted, he had only stopped a few hours earlier when he woke up from his insane dream about the serpent and decided then and there not to take his morning pills, but it was a first step.

  The next step was finding Silas. He had to tell him about the dream because it hadn’t felt much like a dream at all. It still didn’t. He remembered all of it, every single strange detail, and it was uncomfortably similar to the dreams John Bledsoe had written about. Almost identical, actually.

  Beyond that, Wyatt didn’t know what he was going to say to Silas. He was angry with him, but at this point, that seemed unimportant. Something was happening and maybe they weren’t the only people who could stop it (he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe such things) but they were the only people he knew who might be able to do something and it felt wrong not to try. The problem was, Wyatt wasn’t sure what it meant. What was happening? What did it all mean? What could they hope to do about it?

  Presumably, Silas would have some answers.

  Wyatt stopped in his pacing, which he had been doing while talking to himself aloud and staring down at the sword that was still on his coffee table. It took up a lot of room on the coffee table, so his remote controls, an empty beer bottle, a half-finished glass of warm orange juice and John Bledsoe’s journal were clustered around it. There was a red stain on the glass tabletop that looked like ketchup. It was a very strange sight, he knew it; that remarkable, beautiful sword resting amid his garbage, but it also felt like the perfect metaphor for his life at the moment.

  “This is why we don’t have visitors,” Wyatt told Hedges. The cat stopped following him in his pacing, sat down and began washing herself.

  If he called Dr. Graham and cancelled his appointments, she would lecture him. She would tell him the dire consequences of not taking his medication. She might not say it aloud, but she would blame Silas because it had all started with Silas, hadn’t it? She wouldn’t even be wrong about all of it. There were bound to be some bad side effects of going cold turkey on his meds, and it had all started with Silas because before Silas, he had been just some crazy nobody college dropout with a debilitating phobia of the dark who lived alone with two cats and no future prospects. And now? Now he had a sword laying in the middle of his coffee table demanding his attention, and he still probably didn’t have much of a future waiting for him because there was a good chance he would be dead.

  Whatever else he was doing though, he had made a choice by not taking his meds that morning. A small decision, not earth-shattering, and it didn’t sit well with him just yet because he’d learned to depend on them and now he was facing the idea of going forward with all the new, insane shit in his life completely unmedicated. He was having some serious anxiety about it. He would have no filter to protect him from the truth and no pillow to cushion the fall when he got knocked on his ass. He was going to have to deal with the big stuff all on his own, at least once it hit him.

  And he was going to have to call Dr. Graham’s office and cancel his appointments whether he liked it or not because she was still going to charge him for them if he didn’t.

  There was a knock at his front door and Wyatt jumped, startled out of his thoughts and back into the reality of his living room by the sound. The knock came again, louder and quicker, then the doorknob rattled as whoever had knocked tried the door.

  Wyatt did not immediately go to answer it because he remembered the black-eyed children standing just outside the door. Except black-eyed children demanded entry and could not walk through the door without it, like vampires. They knocked on doors, but they didn’t jiggle the knob when no one answered it.

  “Who is it?!” he called. Standing there in his bathrobe and boxers beside the sword on his coffee table, Wyatt realized that he looked insane. Which was fine as long as there was no one there to see it. “Go away!”

  “Open the stupid door, you cock. I need to talk to you.”

  It was Kat. Wyatt closed his robe and went to answer the door. As soon as he opened it, Kat pushed past him.

  “Come on in,” Wyatt said as he closed the door. “Don’t you have a key?”

  “Yeah, I left it at my place. I wasn’t coming over here,” Kat said. She went straight to the kitchen and opened one of his cupboards, digging around for something.

  Since he was pretty sure she wasn’t looking for allspice, Wyatt said, “There’s a bottle in the freezer.”

  He had bought a new one to replace the one he had drank the last time she came to visit.

  Kat opened the freezer, found the bottle of whiskey, opened it and drank. “Have you seen Mom?”

  Wyatt put his hands in the pockets of his robe and thought about lying. Then he realized he didn’t have to. “Not since we had dinner together.”

  She narrowed her eyes on him. She had caught the evasive note in his voice because she knew him too well not to. “Have you seen Dad?”

  “Yes,” Wyatt said.

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Kat nodded to herself. “I saw Mom today. That’s where I went. That’s why I didn’t have my key. I wasn’t coming here, but then I saw Mom. I’ve never seen her like this, Wyatt. She was… I mean, the other night at dinner, she was a little strange, but this…”

  She took another long drink from the bottle.

  “Kat, what happened?” Wyatt asked, picturing in his mind the little grey parasitic thing inside of Ned. He couldn’t help it; his mind went back to that night in the park a lot now. There was one just like it inside his father and it knew that Wyatt knew about it. What might it do? He tried not to think about it, but he had to know anyway. “Is Mom okay?”

  “She’s lost her fucking mind,” Kat said. She put the whiskey bottle down on the counter with a bang and stared at him through the kitchen pass-through. “She’s twitchy and weird acting and she was babbling some nonsense about how Dad isn’t really Dad, he’s someone else. An imposter. She said that, ‘an imposter.’ Isn’t there some kind of bizarre condition like that in one of those abnormal psychology books you used to read all the time? Crapgrass or something?”

  “Capgras,” Wyatt said. He shook his head. “Not Mom. She can’t have Capgras. It’s… well, it’s really rare, for one thing. Why does she think Dad’s not Dad? Did he do something?”

  “I have no idea. It was crazy talk, all of it,” Kat said. “She even said something about putting him in an institution, but at this rate, she’s the one who needs see a doctor. You know I kinda thought she was joking at first? Except that’s not Mom.”

  No, it wasn’t. Wyatt could see why Kat was disturbed by it, but he was just glad that Lorrie seemed to be all right. His worst fear was that the fleshgait would hurt her, but so far it hadn’t done anything. Perhaps hurting their mother didn’t seem like something that was in the creature’s best interests. It would blow its cover.

  “She’s probably just stressed about something,” Wyatt said.

  He was trying to reassure Kat, but she glared at him. “Like what? She’s retired. She gardens, she reads romance novels, she—What the hell does she have to be stressed about so much that it turns her into a lunatic?”

  …I know you, lunatic. I see you.

  Goosebumps rushed up his arms and Wyatt looked away from Kat so she wouldn’t see his reaction. She didn’t seem to be paying close attention to him, but she had always been incredibly observant, and he would rather not have to explain or make up a lie.

  “You know, they don’t c
all them lunatics anymore,” he said. He still found the word offensive, a lot more offensive than “crazy,” which was the big baddy everyone flinched at, even if it felt like an honorary title when the serpent said it. Kat was not the serpent. “And Mom probably does a lot of stuff we don’t know about other than gardening and reading romance novels. I mean, I have shit I do that you don’t know about. You do too. We’ve all got lives and stress and she probably just has something going on right now and… I don’t know, maybe Dad’s part of it. Look, he had a stroke and okay, so they went camping, but then what? He still had a stroke. He could have died.”

  Kat looked surprised by him at first, but then she just looked angry. “Don’t you lecture me about what Mom and Dad do, okay? You’re not around much, but I am. I know.”

  She wanted to be upset, he realized, and she wanted him to be upset with her. It pissed her off that he seemed calm. For once, he sounded reasonable and she sounded hysterical. Wyatt sighed. “Fine,” he said.

  It was like a switch flipping in his mind. He had been trying to be reassuring and pretending to be understanding because he didn’t want to scare her more with what he knew. Except he still remembered her blowing up at him on the phone. She had told him that she thought he was brave, then she had turned right around and called him a baby for being scared of the dark. He still didn’t know which one she truly believed, and if she didn’t want him to try to comfort her, he didn’t understand what she was even doing in his apartment.

  “Fine. You know them, and I don’t. You’re around and I’m not because I’m a lunatic. I actually am, no joke, so just… whatever. What the hell do you want from me?”