Night People

by J L Aarne

  “Looks like you got domestic violence,” he said.

  He said it like Wyatt had a bad case of the flu. It made him laugh. “Nope. I’m taking up martial arts.”

  Jimmy looked him over head-to-toe before he shrugged and went back to his order.

  “I am,” Wyatt said. It seemed like Jimmy didn’t believe him. “Krav Maga.”

  “Okay, man,” Jimmy said. “Looks like you’re paying some dude to fuck you up, that’s all. Maybe what you really got is masochism. Ain’t none of my business either way.”

  “I’m not paying him,” Wyatt muttered.

  When Wyatt worked with Jimmy, they rarely talked much. They had nothing in common and they had worked different shifts until recently, so they had never tried to be friends. He didn’t know how Jimmy felt, but Wyatt didn’t dislike him, he just didn’t like him very much. They worked around each other on nights they worked together and rarely said more a few words to each other, always about work. Pass me that knife, will you? Don’t worry about it, I’ll get the mop. I’ve got the lady at table six, she just ordered coffee and blueberry pie. Things like that. What they didn’t talk about was their lives, so even though Wyatt had known Jimmy for a couple years, he didn’t know him at all.

  It was an arrangement that suited them both, except for when the night was slow and there was no one else to talk to. Then they stood around hoping for business to pick up.

  One night a month after Wyatt had switched full-time over to nights, it was slower than usual, and Jimmy tried to make conversation. He had been working up to it all evening and Wyatt had waited him out, then got to thinking about his own problems and forgot.

  “Fucking boring, man. Why’d you want to switch over from dayshift anyway?” Jimmy asked as they stood there.

  They had cleaned the bathrooms, wiped down all the tables, swept, mopped, done all the dishes, checked all the condiments on the tables, and now they were bored because it was four in the morning and there hadn’t been a single customer in two hours.

  Wyatt was thinking about Silas and the journal. His newest theory was that Silas was a black-eyed person secretly working for the serpent in an elaborate plan to trap him into being the key instead of the lock. The part he kept getting stuck on was, oddly enough, his eyes. His eyes and the fact that he was nearly forty years old. Wyatt had only ever seen black-eyed children and though, in theory, there had to be adults, he had never seen one and no one, including Silas, had ever told him a story about a grown-up black-eyed person. And his eyes were brown, not black. Wyatt knew they were brown because he’d had that annoying crush of his since Silas first sat down at the bar in the very diner where he now stood and ordered a Rueben sandwich.

  “Wyatt,” Jimmy said sharply.

  Wyatt stood up straighter and looked around, expecting to see a customer waiting at the bar. The diner was still empty. “What?”

  “Never mind,” Jimmy said, amused.

  “Sorry,” Wyatt said. “Guess I just spaced out. What did you say?”

  “Why’d you want to switch over to nights?” Jimmy asked again. “I thought you were scared shitless of the dark. I used to see you running for your car like your pants was on fire if you got out of here too late.”

  Wyatt shrugged. “I got over it,” he said.

  “You got over being afraid of the dark?”

  “Yeah, mostly.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Therapy.” Wyatt surprised himself by saying the word with a straight face.

  “Right. Therapy,” Jimmy said. “So, what? They gave you some pills and now you’re all better?”

  A woman walked into the diner and Wyatt picked up a menu. “Something like that,” he said distractedly.

  It was the blonde woman with the snakes in her hair who usually ordered tea. She smiled when he placed the menu on the table and set her purse on the seat beside her.

  “What can I get for you to drink?” Wyatt asked.

  “Tea,” she said. She opened the menu.

  “I’ll get that for you while you decide,” Wyatt said and went around the bar to get her hot water.

  “What’s the order?” Jimmy asked, eager for something to do.

  “No order yet, just tea,” Wyatt said.

  He got the water and the server of teabags and returned to the table. “Do you know what you’d like?”

  “Bacon and eggs, I think. Eggs over easy, sourdough toast,” she said. She closed the menu and passed it to him.

  As Wyatt took it, she held on and leaned toward him. “And I would dearly love to have a conversation with you, Mr. Sinclair. Sometime very soon.”

  Wyatt stared down into her face, a polite but distant smile ready to appear, but he froze as he looked into her eyes. They were golden, and the pupils were narrow slits. The snakes twining through her pale hair were white and pink-eyed with the same angry slits for pupils.

  Wyatt licked his lips and took the menu from her hand. “I don’t know what we’d talk about, Miss—”

  “Mrs. Tanith,” the woman said. “We have so many things we could talk about. I say talk… really I mean for you to listen.”

  “Uh huh,” Wyatt said, backing away.

  She had not threatened him or made any aggressive movements toward him, yet he felt threatened. He couldn’t imagine a conversation with a woman like her, especially considering current events, that didn’t end with threats or violence. She was a snake woman, he didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what the topic of that particular conversation would be.

  “Bacon and eggs,” he said. “I’ll get that right out to you.”

  Jimmy was smiling when Wyatt walked back into the kitchen. “Was that lady trying to hit on you?”

  “Bacon and eggs, over easy,” was all Wyatt said. “I’ll make the toast.”

  Jimmy already had the bacon on the grill. He cracked the eggs on the grill and they sizzled. “Poor bitch is barking up the wrong tree, ain’t she?”

  Wyatt ignored him.

  “You know you’re kinda fucking extra moody, right?” Jimmy said. He turned the eggs over and glanced over his shoulder at Wyatt. “Like bipolar as hell sometimes, dude.”

  This was the real reason Wyatt didn’t like Jimmy. He thought of himself as observant and felt honor-bound to share all of those observations.

  “Shut the fuck up, Jimmy,” Wyatt said.

  He put the toast he’d buttered on the plate with the bacon and eggs and left Jimmy standing there with a dumb look of surprise on his face.

  Mrs. Tanith thanked him when he set the plate on the table before her. As she took a paper napkin from the holder and spread it on her lap, she said, “We are cousins, you and I. Did you know that?”

  Wyatt glanced at the little albino snakes coiled in her hair staring back at him and tried to keep his cool. She scared him, but he was becoming angry too. He had grown used to the night creatures who visited the diner after dark. He even liked some of them. There was a big, brown-skinned guy named Sam who came in regularly on Friday nights that Wyatt believed was an ifrit or a djinn. He carried a pack of tarot cards with him and he did Wyatt’s fortune with them about once a week. He wasn’t that good at it, but he smiled and laughed a lot and Wyatt liked him. Sam’s skin burned to the touch and he always wore shades over his eyes, even at night, but Wyatt had never felt threatened by him. Even Peter, who was an asshole, was not a bad guy or evil.

  Perhaps Mrs. Tanith wasn’t evil either, not at her core, but she served the Midgard Serpent and that made her his enemy.

  “He speaks to you. You hear his voice, don’t you?” she asked. She picked up a piece of bacon and took a bite. “You know his name?”

  “The Midgard Serpent,” Wyatt said.

  She laughed. “That is not his name.”

  “I don’t care what his name is,” Wyatt said.

  “Don’t you stand for anything, Wyatt Sinclair?”

  Wyatt crossed his arms and looked down at her while she finished her slice of bacon and pic
ked up her fork. “No, I don’t think I do,” he said eventually. “I don’t give a shit about any of this. I feel like I’m trapped in some fantasy nightmare, but you know what?”

  “What?” She took another napkin and wiped her fingers.

  “I’m mad,” he said. “I’m pissed off. That’s what I stand for right now. So, you want to threaten me or something? Go ahead.”

  “I’m not here to threaten you,” she said, surprised. “I’m just curious; how do you know you’re on the right side?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we are cousins. You have many cousins. Of course, it seems the natural thing to do, to throw your lot in with the light. Except you are not of the light, are you? At a very basic level, you are one of us. By blood and by right if not by creed. What has the light ever given to you other than pain and suffering?”

  “I’m human,” Wyatt said sharply. “Defending the people of the light is what I’m supposed to do.”

  “And do you always do what you’re told you are supposed to do?” she asked. She calmly dipped her toast into the broken yolk of an egg and ate the corner. “He calls to you and you are drawn to him, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Wyatt said, a little doubtfully. He had wondered about that allure the serpent had for him from the beginning. If it meant something more than anyone ever said. The serpent said he was “of the blood,” whatever that meant. He dismissed the idea. “But I’m not going to answer any of his calls. He’s wasting his time.”

  “Such loyalty,” Mrs. Tanith said with a smile. “Admirable, but it’s ill-placed. Would it surprise you to know that Mr. Delano is one of ours as well? Not merely a distant cousin like yourself, either. More of a… brother.”

  It did surprise him, but he didn’t trust the woman. She was speaking in rhetoric and what she said could mean a lot of things. All he did know was that she had just confirmed to him that one of his many crazy theories about Silas was true, it remained only for him to find out which one.

  “Something your friend Silas may have neglected to tell you…” Mrs. Tanith said. She lifted her cup to sip her tea. “More is asked of a lock than of a key. Always. You should ask him about it next time you’re together.”

  “I am done talking to you,” Wyatt said. “Jimmy will bring out the check.”

  Wyatt went back to the kitchen and when Mrs. Tanith approached the register to pay, he let Jimmy take care of it. He spent the rest of the morning in the kitchen cleaning it until it was spotless and doing the prep for the dayshift. He cooked when people started trickling in for breakfast and let Jimmy take the floor and the register. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, or for anyone to talk to him; he needed to think.

  He didn’t like what he was thinking.

  Later that day, after Wyatt had gotten some sleep, he walked to the dojo like he did every day. He took the book with him this time and talked to Silas in his head the whole way there, trying to determine what needed to be said and what Silas’s reaction was likely to be. He was no closer to knowing when he got there than he had been when he walked out his front door.

  “I’ll wing it,” he told himself as he entered the building.

  There were a couple of men doing weights, one spotting for the other. A woman was hitting the heavy bag and another, younger man was hitting the speed bag. It made a rapid bapita-bapita-bapita sound that followed Wyatt into the office.

  Silas was expecting him. “Hey, I was thinking we’d do something a little different today, if you—”

  Wyatt held out the book. It was a rather ordinary looking book, which Wyatt had thought the first time he saw it. He had been expecting a spectacular thing at the time though, and Silas had been asking him almost daily about the book for weeks. He flinched like Wyatt had offered him something dangerous.

  “I finally remembered,” Wyatt said.

  He continued to hold it out until Silas took it from him.

  “Thank you. I’ll take good care of it,” Silas said. He set it aside on the desk.

  “So, something different?” Wyatt said.

  “The serpent is a sea monster. I thought we should go to the beach and have a look,” Silas said.

  A thrill of anticipation and excitement rose up inside Wyatt at the idea. He had wanted to go to the beach since the first dream where he almost drowned at the bottom of the ocean, which was exactly why he had not gone. He preferred to not think about or encourage the emotions the serpent gave rise to within him. He would ignore them and think of them as evil and forbidden. If he could label what he felt for the monster as evil, he could fight it or deny it. So he had thought. That thrill though, it was like joy; like the joy of a child promised a day of building sandcastles on the seashore.

  The feeling went with him on the drive out to the ocean. It wasn’t a long drive, Lynnwood was right on the ocean, but it was long enough for Wyatt to have the beginnings of second thoughts. A tiny, niggling pang of uncertainty and doubt. He had been feeling that way for weeks, every time he experienced the allure of the serpent and fought it.

  “Have you been having the dreams?” Wyatt asked.

  The question broke the silence between them and Silas seemed reluctant to answer. “Some,” he said.

  He was lying. Wyatt couldn’t understand why he would lie about it, or why he thought Silas was lying about it, but he did.

  “You haven’t been,” he said.

  “I said I have,” Silas snapped.

  “But you’re lying,” Wyatt said. “Why?”

  Silas didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just stared out at the road while he lit a cigarette and pretended not to feel Wyatt staring at him. “He doesn’t want to talk to me. There’s nothing left to say.”

  “What does that mean?” Wyatt asked.

  Silas shrugged. “Do you know what a katabasis is?”

  “No,” Wyatt said.

  “It’s when the hero in a story descends into the underworld and comes back with something, or with knowledge, to complete his quest,” Silas said. “I’m not a hero. I’m not even very heroic.”

  Wyatt laughed and turned away from him. “You think I am? I didn’t bring anything back from that place, not even knowledge. They’re just dreams, but everyone seems to know about them. I thought you’d have them, too.”

  It was only the third week of March, but it was warm and sunny enough to draw people outside. They saw joggers and people walking their dogs and kids playing. There were women in skirts and shorts. There were men in tank tops, even a few who had stripped them off. It was spring and soon it would be summer, and people were out enjoying it. They weren’t thinking about earthquakes in California and Mexico. They weren’t thinking about Tsunamis hitting Indonesia, killing hundreds. They probably knew about it, each and every one of them, but it was a nice day.

  Silas pulled off the highway into a parking area above the sand and parked his truck beside a pickup with a red and white speedboat on a trailer behind it. When they got out, Wyatt forgot for some time about Silas and walked toward the ocean. The sun on the water made dazzling lights dance on the sand and the smell of the sea as it hissed when it crashed into the rocks was tangy and sweet. Wyatt breathed it in and heard laughter farther down the beach. Even with earthquakes and flooding and the increasing danger of tsunamis and hurricanes all over the globe, there were still people who took their dogs and their children to the beach on a sunny day. It made him smile and when a frisbee landed near his feet, he picked it up and gave it a toss, sending the kids and their dog running and laughing back down the sand.

  He reached the edge where the wet sand and seaweed met dry sand and broken rocks and he stared out at it. There was a little boat about a hundred feet out and he could see a man and woman moving around on it. There was a plump woman in shorts and a tank top swimming off to his right. As he glanced her way, she rolled over in the water, smiled at him and began swimming a backstroke.

  “The Pacific Ocean, which runs along our coast, is the deepest o
cean in the world,” Silas said, coming to stand with him. “They say more than eighty percent of the world’s oceans remain unexplored to this day. You know what that means?”

  Wyatt pushed the toe of his shoe into the sand where it was dark and wet. “Anything could be down there,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Silas said.

  “What do we do?” Wyatt asked.

  “What do you mean?” Silas asked.

  “I mean, training me to fight and protect myself is great, but what’s it for if we don’t stop it?” Wyatt said. “We have to stop it. How do we do that?”

  Instead of answering him, Silas said, “This is where we all came from, you know. Everything that crawls and flies and swims. It all started in the ocean. Before that, we were slime. That seems appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “What I think is we need a plan,” Wyatt said.

  “Plan?”

  “For what to do.”

  “Yes. We should have a plan.”

  Wyatt turned away from the water and stared at Silas. He was behaving very strangely. He seemed dazed and like his mind was somewhere else. He was usually the sharpest person Wyatt knew. He didn’t miss anything, and he was ready for everything. Except as Wyatt looked at him, Silas continued to stare pensively out at the water.

  He looked sad.

  “Don’t you dare give up,” Wyatt said. He reached over and took Silas’s shoulder and gave him a shake. “What are you doing?”

  “John had dreams like yours,” Silas said. “He told me about them. His wife had them, but she had that thing you’ve got, too. That draw. That… desire for him.”

  “Him?” Wyatt asked.

  “Jörmungandr,” Silas said.

  Wyatt nodded. “And John would be…?”

  “Bledsoe,” Silas said. “John B. Bledsoe. Do you know, the B stands for Bartholomew?”