Fairy Lights

by Lorn, Edward

  His eyes darted, hunting sounds his ears were unaccustomed to: a crinkle of dead foliage, a snap of dry twig, the rustle of leaves as creatures took flight from branches. Over all this, the static hiss of the waterfall seemed to whisper sinisterly in his ears:

  “You’re all alone out here, Bobs…All alone and no one’s coming. Oh, and by the way, Bobs…what was that thing earlier? That gray thing you saw on the path? The one covering your tracks? Huh, Bobs? What—was—that?”

  Why the personified falls sounded like Tony’s mother Brenda, Bobby didn’t know, but he figured it had something to do with the fact that they’d not been able to find her.

  Even now, over the constant splashing of the falls, he could hear forest animals wandering about. Sound carried out here in the mountains, far away from the drone of any So-Cal city and the cacophony that is the California Freeway System. So why hadn’t Brenda been able to hear her son screaming for her? Why hadn’t she answered?

  This, above all else, bothered Bobby. Bothered him bad.

  Tony sucked snot and wiped at his eyes. There was just enough light left for Bobby to see his friend and how terribly ragged he looked.

  Something growled and Tony jumped.

  “The fuck was that?” Tony’s voice cracked with an audible screech!

  “Just my stomach,” Bobby calmly told him. He tried to leave any residual anger he carried over from earlier events out of his voice. The last thing he wanted to do was start a fight. It would do neither of them any good. Would only compound on their current problems by adding more stress and unneeded turmoil.

  Something flickered between the trees, and at first, Bobby thought he was seeing things. It was there and gone in a flash, but it came again, this time staying lit long enough to prove to Bobby that he hadn’t imagined it.

  A firefly. A green firefly.

  How odd.

  “Yo.” Bobby leaned over and slapped Tony on the calf with the back of his hand. “Look.”

  The green firefly flickered on again. This time, though, it didn’t go out. The bug hovered between two trees, about twenty feet away, and Bobby thought he could actually hear the buzz of its wings. The thing darted up and right. Bolted straight down. Never left an area any bigger than a foot tall and equally wide, as if it were trapped in some kind of invisible box. Like a mime.

  If Bobby had been asked, he’d have said the thing was trying to get his attention. It buzzed and dimmed. Droned and brightened. The volume of sounds seemed directly linked with how fast it flapped its wings, if indeed its wings were the things making that annoying chittering sound.

  “What is that?” Bobby asked.

  “You’ve never seen a firefly?”

  “It’s green,” Bobby whispered.

  “So it’s an irradiated firefly. The fuck’s your point?”

  “I’ve never seen a green firefly.” Bobby got up and dusted his hands on his now-dry pants.

  “I’ve never seen my asshole either, but I know there’s a damn good chance it exists, you know, because there’s shit in the toilet when I stand up.”

  Bobby ignored his friend, who seemed to get stupider by the hour, and approached the spot where the firefly zigged and zagged in its invisible one-by-one box. The closer he got, the louder the firefly became. When he was within three feet of the darting insect, four more green lights flickered into existence.

  Bobby made a noise that sounded like “Eeeeep!” before stumbling backward. He crashed down onto his rump and his teeth clicked painfully together.

  Tony, being the terrific friend that he was, erupted into laughter.

  Bobby rubbed his hip with one hand while the other hand massaged his jaw. His molars felt as if they’d spent the day gnawing on steel ball bearings.

  When he finally looked back up to the five lights hovering between the trees he saw that five had become as many as twenty. As he tried to count to make sure this new number was correct, the mass of glowing insects doubled again. Now it sounded as if he were in a blender set to puree. The drone of their wings was mind-numbing. Their glowing bodies illuminated the surrounding forest, and the trees seemed to seep a shockingly green effluence. Small black shadows were tossed across every trunk, where they capered like mad demons.

  The small gray thing on the path earlier that day flashed into Bobby’s mind. He rolled forward and shoved himself to standing.

  “I—I don’t like this, dude,” Tony muttered from beside him.

  Bobby watched in terror as the forty-some-odd fireflies doubled again.

  And all at once, they shrieked.

  The blast of sound hit both boys, knocking them backward. Somehow, Bobby kept upright, but Tony cried out as he tumbled and smacked into the ground. Bobby heard his friend’s cry as Tony went down, but did not see it happen.

  The shrieking ceased almost as quickly as it had come.

  The fireflies—or whatever they were—no longer zipped to and fro. The capering shadows were still. It dawned on Bobby that this was because they were no longer flying. The glowing bodies clung to the sides of the trees like stringed Christmas lights. Everything shone the color of lemon-lime Gatorade.

  Bobby felt as if he were being watched by each softly-glowing body. Whatever these things were, he thought of them as sentient. As aware.

  Fear crept up his back, shivering like a naked climber ascending Everest. He ground his teeth as if someone were behind him raking their nails down the face of a chalkboard.

  Now that they’d landed, the buzz of their wings had ceased. The only sound was the hiss of the waterfall at Bobby’s back and the thundering of his pulse in his ears as his taxed heart struggled to keep up with his fright.

  “What do you want?” Bobby asked before he even realized he was talking.

  No response.

  From the ground, Tony hissed, “The fuck you doing?”

  Bobby waved his friend off. “Hush.”

  The feeling that he was being watched intensified.

  Somewhere in the abiding darkness, where the light of the fireflies did not reach, there came a rattling.

  6

  Lucy pulled up behind Charlie’s truck shortly after dark. Past the observatory and through the trees, the stars twinkled on the horizon.

  After having called North Star for the location of Charlie’s truck and them telling her its exact location, Lucy had grown far too worried to be stuck behind a desk. Now, as she sat in her own park-issue Ford Ranger, its headlights shining on the chrome bumper of the truck ahead and tossing slivers of light back at her, she wondered if not calling the cops had been the most sound idea. Her logic had been solid, though. No need to call in police from Pauma Valley without first making sure there wasn’t a logical explanation for Charlie having not checked in.

  Now she felt foolish. There was obviously something terribly wrong. That much was obvious. The truck was empty. No one was in sight. She rolled down the window and listened. Typical night sounds played on the air: crickets and hoot owls and the wind through the trees. Nothing else.

  “Chaz!” she called. The sound of her own voice caused her to jump a little. She needed to be careful before she screwed around and gave herself a coronary.

  She tried to recall the trainee’s name. Came up short.

  “New guy?” she yelled, and instantly felt even more foolish than she had just a minute before.

  “Goddamn it, you assholes, answer me! I don’t wanna have to call the PD in on this.”

  A screech owl shrieked and Lucy almost filled her cake pan with brownies.

  “Fuck,” she grumbled, shaken. “Now what?” she asked her questioning eyes as they glared uncertainly back at her from the side mirror, her face illuminated by the headlights splashing back off the other truck’s rear bumper. “Well, you’re no fuckin’ help, Luce.”

  She popped the handle and her door swung open.

  Was she really getting out?

  Yeah. She was.

  She pulled the Maglite from the ringlet on her h
ip and clicked it on. She shone its beam over the ground and across the fence that surrounded the observatory grounds. Nothing out of order. She noticed the unlatched padlock dangling from the clasp on the open gate as she stepped through to the interior property. She took three steps alongside Charlie’s Ford Ranger, and ran the beam of the flashlight down its side.

  Red fingerprints on the chrome driver’s side door handle.

  That was most definitely blood. She could even smell it now. Blood and old blood—two scents every woman was intimately familiar with.

  Her heart skydived into her guts. Her mind began scrolling through possibilities. The one Lucy latched on to was this: the homeless population had recently been run out of the area by the park’s renovation project. Squatters would not have taken kindly to this. One if not many of these angry bums more than likely fell upon Charlie and his trainee and chopped them into itty bitty pieces before divvying up the remains so they could piss on them.

  “Ah shit, Chaz. Ah shit, buddy. What happened out here?”

  Once again, the screech owl answered, and Lucy, in her most respectful tone, told it how severely it could get fucked.

  Then, she thought: I’m a sixty-two year old woman. In 1972, I participated in an orgy with four men and eight other women and no protection was used. In 1978, I snorted ’shrooms and made cocaine tea because I got my gal pal Bernice’s instructions backward. In 1980, I voted for Ronald Reagan because I’d always liked his movies. That same year, I thought Xanadu would win best picture. But this—being out in the middle of the woods…in the dead of night…all alone…unarmed aside from a can of pepper spray and my feminine charms…Well, it is, by far, the stupidest shit I’ve ever done.

  “Sorry, Chaz!” Lucy hollered as she rushed back to her truck as quickly as her legs would carry her.

  Once inside, she engaged both the driver side and passenger door locks, ripped her cell phone from her Forestry jacket’s pocket, and dialed 911. When the young-sounding female dispatcher answered, Lucy politely told her that there was fuckery afoot and could they please send someone? She appreciated it, and hung up.

  Now there was only the need to decide where she should wait until the cavalry arrived. She settled on any-fucking-where but here.

  Sure it niggled at her that she was leaving behind a coworker. Charlie could be in that observatory right now, bleeding to death, holding on to life by nothing but a thread of spider silk, but Lucy couldn’t allow herself to think of such things. She only, truly, gave a passing fuck for the old man. He was, after all, only a coworker. And if it came down to a choice between letting Charlie bleed out or saving herself—friends and neighbors, this old lady was going to see another sunrise.

  She started the engine, slammed the shifter into reverse, did one hell of a perilous three-point turn that almost landed her in a ditch, and tore ass back the way she’d come. She’d have to call that dispatcher back and let the woman know where the authorities (funny, wasn’t she technically part of the authorities?) could find her. Until then, she focused on not running herself up a tree in her haste.

  7

  Tony was pretty sure they weren’t alone out here. Forget the creepy green bugs with the glowing butts. There was something else. Something bigger. And it was rattling.

  “Do you hear that?” Bobby asked.

  “The fuck you think?” Tony shot back.

  “What is it?”

  “Rattlesnake, maybe.”

  “Good call.”

  “You don’t really think it’s a rattlesnake, do you? Because I was just guessing.”

  “No. Not really. Sounds too big to be a snake.”

  “Right.”

  “Should we run?”

  “Run where?”

  Bobby sighed. “Good point.”

  For a moment, Tony watched Bobby watching the glowing trees. Bobby seemed fascinated, and Tony couldn’t figure out why. He supposed the same mindset drove stupid bitches upstairs and their dumbfuck boyfriends into cellars instead of out the backdoor in those horror movies he liked to watch on Chiller.

  The big thing in the woods rattled again. The first time, it had sounded like a bunch of raw beans being jounced around in a wooden cup. Now it sounded like ball bearings in a steel drum bouncing on a trampoline. No, that wasn’t quite right. Almost, but no cigar. The sound had a clanking quality, sure, but it was more organic. Something of flesh and bone was making that sound, but Tony had no idea how he knew that. Shit, maybe he didn’t know any such thing. Maybe there really was a life-sized Bingo tumbler stumbling around Palomar Mountain.

  B-10! Who’s got B-10!

  Tony laughed at himself.

  “What’s funny?” Bobby asked. He didn’t seem angry. Just curious.

  “Just thought of something funny. You won’t think it’s funny. Well, you might, but—”

  “Tone?”

  “Yo?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Okay.”

  Tony shut up.

  Something splashed into the pool behind the boys, spraying water onto the back of Tony’s t-shirt.

  “Wha-wha-what the fuck!” Tony screeched as he skipped forward, swatting at his back as if a hive of bees were crawling up his spine. He tore his shirt off and held it up in front of him. The green glow from the tree bugs was enough to see that his shirt was wet and not covered in menacing insects.

  “Thank fuck,” he muttered.

  When he lowered his shirt, there was a monster standing in front of him.

  Tony froze. Tried to make sense of the thing rising and falling in the dim green light. He thought that the rise and fall was it breathing, but he couldn’t be sure. Its body was lithe, and when it stood to its full height, Tony was reminded of Biology and Mr. Spencer showing them a film of praying mantises fucking. After the male got his jollies, the female would rise up and swipe his head off. Then the ungrateful bitch would eat him. That was what this thing looked like—a post-coital lady mantis.

  Somewhere a million miles away, Bobby screamed.

  Once upon a time, when Tony was four or five, he’d seen a little girl get run over in the middle of his street. He’d been playing in his front yard while Dad washed their Subaru when the car came squealing to a stop, and Tony yanked his head up to see what was the matter. The tank of a car—a Buick of some sort—had come to rest on the little girl’s leg, shattering it. Her scream was more confused than scared. More what-the-fuck than holy-shit-that-hurts. And that’s how Bobby sounded. Bobby’s scream made all this real. His friend was cool-headed and analytical. Hearing Bobby scream like a little girl with a compound fracture scared him more than any monster these woods could throw at them.

  Tony turned and ran.

  He hoped Bobby followed. He liked Bobby. Didn’t want anything to happen to him. But Tony wasn’t slowing down to make sure.

  8

  Tony hadn’t seen the monster arrive. His face had been hidden behind his shirt as he inspected it. But Bobby had seen it clearly. Thin body clad in leathery skin. Pendulous breasts, fat round belly, and two spindly legs. Four spider-like appendages jutting from its back like some kind of butt-ugly Shiva, and at the end of each appendage, a sphere of neon green light not unlike the fireflies. It was a creature straight out of nightmares. And it’d had sense enough to cut its running lights when Tony dropped his shirt. When the thing (nine feet tall, at least) had unfolded itself like a pocket knife, Bobby felt his bowels loosen. Had he eaten anything in the past few hours, he might have slicked his shorts.

  Bobby’s mind was pretty sure they were going to die. Every bone in his body resisted the idea, though, so he ran anyway. Tony had taken the path farthest to the right, and Bobby soon overtook his friend. He slowed down, not wanting to leave Tony behind. Tony caught up, passed him, and cut into the woods at a sharp angle. Bobby came to a skidding stop. He backtracked several feet and easily found the detour Tony had taken. He jetted in that direction.

  For a while, Bobby didn’t think about why he cou
ld see where he was going. The neon green bodies of the fireflies gave plenty of light to maneuver by, but why hadn’t he outrun the cone of their illumination. How many of these things were there that they’d lit up this much forest?

  Bobby, huffing and puffing, tennis shoes slapping dirt and grass in a quick legato rhythm, looked up from the path ahead, where he’d focused all his attention in an attempt not to trip over some random root or rock, which would send him tumbling down the path like a plane touching down without landing gear.

  And then he saw. He saw so clearly that his already charging heart leaped into his stressed larynx where it threatened to choke him.

  Ahead, Tony was barreling left and right, zigzagging through what seemed like a never-ending maze of bushes and tree branches. And ahead of him, the fireflies appeared as if Tony had a headlight with a green filter dead center of his chest. Beyond the rolling green leading Tony on—nothing but darkness.

  All at once it became clear to Bobby what was happening. His friend wasn’t leading the escape. Tony was simply following the brightest path. The bugs were helping light the way. Weren’t they?

  “Ah crap!” Bobby erupted.

  Because that wasn’t it at all. The more his mind played over the evening’s event, the more he locked onto another horrifying possibility. The bugs had preceded the monster he’d seen pull itself from the waterfall’s pool. And quite a few at a time, they’d shown themselves, lighting their fluttering bodies until Bobby and his friend were completely bathed in that alien light.

  And then they had shrieked.

  As if calling someone.

  Or something.

  Was that their purpose? To locate and mark the monster’s prey?