Until... | Book 3 | Until The End

by Hamill, Ike

  Amber opened the padded envelope and slipped out a book. There was no note included.

  “I’m supposed to read the whole thing?” she whispered.

  The title made it clear to her that there was no way she was going to read the whole thing.

  “Unique Fauna of New England: A Field Guide and Memoir by SE Prescott, 1908,” she read aloud. The cover of the book made it look like a real publication. Inside, it was handwritten pages. She thought it might be some kind of Xerox or something until she saw that part of the title page was water stained. Some of the ink had spread out—yellow on the edges and purple in the middle of the stain. The pages crinkled as she flipped them.

  “I’ll probably get fleas from this thing,” she mumbled.

  Amber shook her head and flipped through the book as she tried to think of how she was going to send the book back to where it came from. She didn’t have a physical address for Ricky and she wasn’t going to invite fresh conversation by asking for one. The one personal detail she knew about him was that he was a sheriff, or a deputy sheriff at least. She could always put his name on the envelope and address it back to the…

  The thought stopped in her head when she saw a flash of bright pink. She paged back and saw the note tucked into the book. It read, “This chapter.”

  ”Impossible to Find,” was the name of the chapter. The handwritten text was difficult to decipher at first but Amber quickly made sense of it.

  # # #

  Beyond Wilson’s Stream, on Willimantic land, a strange variety of salamander can be found. They are difficult to locate, not because of rarity, but appearance, or lack thereof. From my reading, I believe this new clade to be unique to this region.

  Accompanied by my companion, Scout, I set off one evening to catalogue the local population of Lampyris Notilua in the woods near Wilson’s Stream. This beetle is difficult to locate during daylight hours, and hard to miss at night. The glow that it emits is weak, but on a moonless night under a thick canopy of leaves, one can manage a count. Once he understood my objective, Scout put his nose to the ground and led me to a community of glow worms. I was collecting samples when Scout gave a squawk and ran back to my side. Fresh blood stained his nose.

  After lighting my lantern, I cajoled him back to the spot of his injury. I feared what we might find. At first, I saw nothing. When Scout growled at the roots of a tree, I lowered myself down, bringing the lantern light with me. That’s when I discovered the animal.

  This Caudata relative was approximately seven inches in length, with a girth of approximately three inches. I witnessed only the shadow of the creature, and I only saw that for a moment before the shadow dissolved. When it moved, I saw it again until it was able to compensate for its new backdrop. My attempt to capture the animal for closer inspection revealed that I was correct in my assessment. It was the salamander that drew blood from Scout. The creature nipped at my hand as I reached and sank its teeth into my glove. I transferred it to a bag for transport and continued my survey.

  I was weary when I reached home, but nonetheless eager to examine my discovery. The creature was shy of candlelight, withdrawing deep into my terrarium whenever I cast too much light on it. Paging through several taxonomies, I found no mention of its kind, so I was determined to properly examine it. Changing more rapidly than a chameleon, the creature immediately blends into its surroundings. It first seems to take on the characteristics of the backdrop and then seemingly disappears altogether. When I had sketched the shape of it, I put it back in the terrarium and turned my attention to Scout. He wouldn’t cease to paw and lick at his wound. Applying bitter salve only made him cough and gag, but he still licked. I put him to bed in one of the horse stalls in case he was sick in the night.

  In the morning, I discovered that Scout had perished during the night. The wound on his nose was no longer obvious and I could find no reason for his death. I buried him beyond the orchard—his favorite place to play in the summer—and I returned to my study to smother my grief with my work.

  I moved the entire terrarium to the light so I could make a more thorough examination of the salamander. This proved to be a mistake. Upon exposure to sunlight, the creature writhed and twisted. For the first time, I was able to see the anatomy clearly, but not for long. It seemed to cook before my eyes, dissolving like wax over a flame. Soon there was nothing left to examine. I found no trace of it once it melted away.

  The next evening, with one of Scout’s sisters secured carefully on the end of a leash, I returned to the woods. Judy wasn’t as sharp as Scout and I couldn’t persuade her to sniff out salamanders. I only found one by sitting perfectly still for several minutes and keeping my lantern at the edge of my sight. When the salamander moved between me and the light, I spotted the shadow it cast and I swept it up.

  Back in my study, this second salamander didn’t survive my lamplight. Wary of the sun, I decided to examine it under nothing more than the focus of several lamps, but even that was too much. The salamander tried to hide under bark in the terrarium and then suffered the same fate as the other one when I took away that shelter.

  I concentrated for a few moments and then admitted what was already clear. Too much light was the issue. If I was going to catalogue this salamander, it would have to be from the light of a single candle.

  Judy and I went back out to find another.

  Several days later, after countless unproductive hunts, I was ready to proclaim that the whole thing had been an invention of my overactive imagination.

  That’s when Scout returned.

  He was still dirty from the dirt that I shoveled on top of him. The dog’s body was dirty but clearly the same. The eyes were the big difference. Later I discovered that the teeth had changed as well.

  Scout met Judy and I on the path that led from the orchard to the stream. I was riding horseback. The horse was spooked by the sound of his growling before I even laid eyes on the dog. The hour was just after sunset. I dropped down from the saddle and struggled to hold the reins as I apologized to Scout for having buried him prematurely. That’s when I saw the difference in his eyes. They reminded me of the luminescent beetles that I had been cataloguing. There was a spark in each pupil that was easier to see when I didn’t look directly at them.

  There wasn’t much time to look into his eyes though. Judy barked and growled back and then the dog and bitch met each other with gnashing teeth. Scout had the immediate advantage. His teeth were noticeably sharper, gleaming white in the light from my lantern. When I approached to intervene in the bloody fight, Scout shied back. I believe it was the lantern that he didn’t like.

  Judy was badly mistreated by the encounter. Her left foreleg was useless to support her. She had to hop and limp to keep up as we rushed home. I treated the wounds the best I could to no avail. Of this animal’s demise, I was certain. In the morning, I returned to the hole where I had committed Scout to the ground. I dug in the same loose dirt and was shocked at what I found. Scout was still there, buried under the dirt of the orchard where I had left him. Puzzled, I stared down and tried to understand how I could have been so mistaken. It made no sense to me.

  I moved more dirt away from him and saw that he still had blood on his head and chest—this was Judy’s blood from the fight. I was even more puzzled.

  I stood and pondered as the sun rose higher in the sky and finally cast a beam on Scout’s corpse. He writhed and twisted in the light, trying to wriggle his way deeper into the dirt. I clamped a gloved hand onto one of his paws and dragged him up out of the hole only to witness him burn in the light, just like the salamander. I couldn’t stand the suffering and let him burrow again into the dirt.

  That’s when I fully understood the true depths of my own ignorance.

  I have no explanation. My only cogent thought is that I can draw several direct correlations between the behavior of the salamanders and Scout. Given that Scout was bitten by one of the salamanders, I have to wonder if their condition is contagious in
some way.

  I resolved to explored the matter further. To date, I haven’t found time to pursue that goal.

  # # #

  Amber frowned and closed the book to look at the cover again. She paged to the introduction and read it carefully, trying to decide if the book was some kind of joke.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she told herself. Ricky wouldn’t have sent the book as a joke, and she had seen things that were equally as strange as what was described. It would be stupid for her to ignore the connection to the things that had attacked her. They looked like lizards when they could be seen and they were definitely bloodthirsty. She pushed away the book for a second and then pulled it back. Flipping through, she didn’t see any other passages that were even remotely as strange as what she had just read.

  “Where did he find this?” she asked herself.

  Amber was holding the phone in her hand, about to call him. She decided not to reach out. In an hour or two, she might figure out the mysterious book, but if she reached out to Ricky he would probably take that as an invitation to keep bothering her. It would be best for her to see if she could understand the book on her own first.

  The door behind her closed. Shawn didn’t say a word to her this time.

  Amber picked up the book and walked inside.

  “What do you have there?” Evelyn asked.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of nuts in front of her. Evelyn always insisted in putting out food for guests—it was only polite.

  “Just a book,” Amber said. She put it down on the table and went to throw away the envelope and get a glass of water. When she turned back around, Evelyn had the book on her lap, running her fingers over it with her head pointed down, almost like she was reading it.

  “This is an old book. Hand made, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Your new boyfriend sent it?”

  Amber sighed. “Ricky is barely a friend, let alone boyfriend.”

  “You need to pay attention to anyone who gets under your skin like that, Amber. If your head is making such a strong reaction, it’s overruling your…”

  “Stop, Evelyn. Stop talking about my head like it’s separate from me. I know how I feel about Ricky. I took your advice and I’m trying to leave all that stuff behind me. The reason I’m so terse with him on the phone is because he keeps trying to rope me back into that drama.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, putting the book back on the table and trading it for one of the nuts. She cracked it with her teeth and then pulled it apart. “What’s the book about?”

  “More nonsense. Did you figure out what you want from the store?”

  “Shawn beat you to it. He already brought what I wanted.”

  “Great. I’ll be in my room.”

  Amber turned in the door and went back to grab the book. She didn’t want to forget to return it. With that in mind, she went back to the trash and fished out the envelope that she had thrown away.

  # # #

  Amber cursed herself when she woke up.

  It was dark out. Somehow, she had fallen asleep. It was her first weekend off from working nights and she wasn’t completely adjusted to her nocturnal schedule and now she had messed it all up. Amber was in a foul mood as she tidied up her bedroom and stuffed dirty laundry into her bag.

  Still foggy from her nap, she wasn’t thinking clearly. She didn’t have to haul everything down to the laundromat. While Amber was in Maine, Evelyn had finally gotten her washing machine fixed. Of course that meant that she wouldn’t be able to do laundry in the middle of the night as well. The washing machine shared a wall with Evelyn’s room and that woman heard everything.

  Amber slung the bag over her shoulder and decided to leave her laundry on top of the machine and do it first thing in the morning.

  She knew something was wrong as soon as she exited her room.

  Evelyn’s door was open. The light was off in Evelyn’s bedroom, but that didn’t mean anything. Evelyn never turned on the lights in her bedroom. Half of the bulbs in there didn’t even work.

  “Cousin Evelyn?” Amber asked.

  She approached the open door slowly.

  All she could think about was how she had fallen asleep without putting any seeds in front of the door. If Evelyn had been attacked by monsters, Amber would never forgive herself. With one knuckle, she rapped on the door.

  “Evelyn?”

  There was no answer.

  Amber paused, trying to think of a way that she could avoid going in the room. The only person she could think to call was Shawn, and there was no way she was going to do that. Her legs just wouldn’t carry her forward, so she retreated instead. Amber put her bag of laundry on top of the washing machine and crouched to fetch the sharpened stake that she had stashed behind it. With that in hand, she felt more brave.

  A deep breath later, she was standing back in the doorway.

  “Evelyn,” she whispered.

  Using the stake, she reached in through the gap between the door and the frame and she flicked on the lights in there. Her cousin was halfway on the bed, with her legs and one arm draped over the side. Amber dropped the stake and rushed forward.

  “Oh, Evelyn, no,” she said.

  The tears that began to fall were mostly for her cousin. Some were for herself, and the way that their last conversation had gone. It wasn’t so much what she had said, but the anger she had felt towards Evelyn. She couldn’t live with the idea that they had left things that way.

  “Please don’t be gone,” she whispered. “Not yet. We have plans, remember? You wanted to go see Cousin Ruth in the spring. We were going to go down to the ocean and listen to the waves break.”

  Amber only let herself indulge in her grief for a few minutes. She pulled Evelyn up onto the bed and posed her in a dignified way. It wasn’t unusual to see Evelyn laying on top of the afghan, fully dressed. That was the way she liked to nap. Before calling anyone, she spread a throw blanket over her cousin, to hide the stain that was spreading on her dress. Evelyn wouldn’t want people to see her like that.

  When her cousin was presentable, Amber went for the phone. Before anyone else came, she hid her stake behind the washing machine again.

  Four: Ricky

  “Hey, Logan, this is west, right?” George asked the guy sitting in the lounge chair.

  “It must be,” Logan said. “An hour ago the sun was right in my eyes.”

  George nodded. He paused for a minute to watch Logan play his video game. There were a couple of students who only played games in the student lounge. Logan said that he couldn’t keep the system in his own room or he would play it all the time. He was completely addicted. When he was playing, there was nothing else that could steal his focus.

  Logan looked over when George started moving the other chairs around to make an open space.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to perform the Ceremony of the King’s Flame.”

  “Huh?” Logan asked. His eyes were glued to the screen.

  “It’s an old magic ceremony,” George said. “Transcribed from the mouth of Abil-Ili and stolen from his sepulcher by grave robbers, fifty years after his death.”

  “What are you even talking about?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be done in a few minutes.”

  George started arranging the string and painting the floor with pure spring water from a vial. When he lit the candles, Logan quit his game and sat in one of the chairs to face George. Apparently, there was something that could grab Logan’s attention away from his game.

  George spread out the pieces of paper and knelt just outside of the circle. Before he started reading, he leaned in and put a stuffed animal in the center of the pentagram that he had painted on the floor.

  “You’re not supposed to have open flames,” Sandy said. She took a chair next to Logan.

  “It’s just for a minute,” George said. “It’s religious. They can’t infringe on my reli
gious practice.”

  “That’s true,” Logan said. “Kirk had his student ID taken with a colander on his head.”

  “That’s religious?” Sandy asked.

  “Yup. He’s a Pastafarian. He worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

  “No way,” Sandy said.

  “It’s true,” George said. He turned to them. “Can you guys stay quiet for, like, three minutes. I have to recite this precisely and I have to really concentrate.”

  They both nodded.

  George began reading. Everything was written out phonetically, so all he had to do was read it precisely. It wasn’t too difficult, although he had to work to not do a Spanish accent. Most of the time he read aloud, it was in Spanish class, so his tongue automatically wanted to roll all the Rs.

  Logan coughed in the middle of the last line and George nearly stammered.

  As he finished, the stuffed animal rocked and then fell over.

  George sat back on his heels.

  “What was supposed to happen?” Sandy asked.

  “Nothing,” Logan said. “It was just a religious thing.”

  George moved fast. The stuffed animal was already starting to vibrate a little. The floor was still damp where George had brushed the spring water into a circumscribed pentagram. As the stuffed bear vibrated, the water marks were darkening to a red color and some of the drops were beginning to move towards the center of the circle. None of this was described in the papers in front of him, but George had a pretty good idea what to expect. He reached down and grabbed the box of matches. Sliding a matchstick out, he was just about to strike it when the candles all extinguished at the same time.

  “What was that?” Sandy asked.

  “Wind,” Logan said.

  George struck the match.

  The stuffed bear stopped vibrating. It was on its side. The glass eyes stared right at George. As the matchstick burned down towards his fingers, George almost threw it aside to grab another. Just then, the bear’s arm moved and it pushed itself up to its feet.