The Darkest Night

by Mike Ramon

Chapter Fifteen

  It had been a day since Tom had visited the ex-priest who shared a name with the guitar great who died at the age of twenty-seven, and Tom was grateful for the lack of any eerie visitations in the night. Now, as the clock on the wall above his desk ticked past 7:00 PM, Tom found himself sitting in his office at the Review. The only other person still in the building was Janice the cleaning lady. He searched through the paper’s online archives. He typed in the keywords “disappearance, missing, unexplained”, and for the time frame he chose the earliest date available for the online archives as the start point and the current date as the end point, which gave him a time span of over forty years.

  There were 62 results, and Tom began clicking through to them one by one. The first item was a brief piece about a boy who had been thought missing but was found hiding in his uncle’s barn out on Rt. 90. The second item was about an elderly woman who had wandered away from her retirement community; her family was especially worried because the woman suffered from dementia and may not have been able to find her way home. The third item reported that the woman had been found alive and well, if a bit cold and hungry.

  Tom knew he had to refine his search. It could take him hours just to find one story that had any possible connection to the Home. He added in more keywords, adding the word “unsolved” as well as street names near the Home, and 8 results came back. The most recent was the story of the disappearance of Jessica Gardener. Tom read the headline for the next story:

  Cedar Falls Teen Still Missing

  He clicked through to read the story, which was dated October 8, 2004:

  Marie Spence, 15, was reported missing by her parents one year ago when she failed to make it home from school.

  He read quickly, looking for anything that would connect this story to the Home. Marie Spence had been a freshman at Ridgewood Academy, a private secondary school on the east side of Cedar Falls. From kindergarten through eighth grade Marie had ridden a bus to school, but when she started high school she had begged her parents to let her walk to school; riding the bus was for little kids, she contended, and it would be another year before she got her own drivers license. Her parents relented, and so every morning before school, and every afternoon when school let out, Marie walked the distance between her home and the school, which usually took her about a half-hour. Tom had to admire the girl; when he was fifteen he’d been so lazy that even a ten minute walk to school would have seemed too long.

  He read on, finding that the girl had lived with her parents in Rivermist Estates, which was a gated community. He opened a new browser tab and navigated to Google Maps. He keyed in “Cedar Falls, IL”, and when the map came up he zoomed out a bit to get a larger view. He found the spot on the map where Ridgewood Academy was located, and followed the most likely route the girl would have taken to get home. About halfway to her own house she would have passed close to the Home.

  -----

  As Tom was reading about Marie Spence, and drawing awful conclusions about her ultimate fate, Patricia Gomez was arriving home from the rec center she worked at part-time. A modest but sizeable inheritance left to her by her maternal grandmother meant that, so long as she lived frugally, she wouldn’t have to work a regular, nine-to-five job, but she liked spending a few hours at the rec center every week, teaching kids arts & crafts, giving lessons on learning Spanish and helping Deb out with her fitness classes. Today had been one of the fitness class days, and when Patricia got home she was physically drained, her muscles begging for a hot shower.

  She stripped down and jumped in the shower, getting the water to just the right temperature, which for her was as hot as she could stand it. She let the water wash over her body as the bathroom filled with steam, fogging up the mirror over the sink. She massaged her biceps, her thighs, her calves, working out the knots that had formed there. Though her muscles ached, it was a good kind of ache, the kind that spoke of a day spent really doing something.

  When she was done showering she toweled herself off before stepping out of the shower, tossing the towel into a corner. She wiped off a section of the mirror and looked at her reflection. She blew out her cheeks, turned and shut the shower curtain, then walked to her bedroom, where she put on a pair of baggy shorts and a loose-fitting t-shirt.

  Her next stop was the kitchen, where she fixed herself a salad--romaine lettuce, chopped tomatoes and cucumber slices, with just a bit of shredded mild cheddar. She ate the salad with a glass of cheap wine (her husband had always teased her for what he called her “pedestrian” taste in wine) while catching up with the day’s news on the web. The salad and the wine were good, the news a mixed bag.

  The salad eaten, the wine glass drained, Patricia washed the plate and glass and set them to dry. As she left the kitchen she shut off the light, and darkness and silence reigned in that room.

  -----

  As Patricia was finishing the job of washing her dishes, Frankie Gardener was watching the credits roll at the end of a South Park rerun. His parents were spending the night out of town, visiting Grandma Seibert, Mary’s mother. Grandma Seibert hadn’t been feeling well lately, and whenever his mom talked about her he could hear the worry that she tried so hard to conceal. It was the first time Frankie had been left home alone overnight, and his mom had told him (somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand times) that he could come if wanted to, that there was plenty of room at Grandma Seibert’s.

  Every time she said this Frankie assured her that he would be all right, and told her that he wanted to stay home; he would go with to Grandma Seibert’s the next time they went to visit. Hank Gardener told his wife to leave the boy alone, that they had to trust him enough to stay home alone some time, and now was as good a time as ever. Eventually she had relented, but on the condition that Frankie listen to her recite every emergency number she could think of, which wasn’t necessary, considering the fact that she had already written these same telephone numbers on a piece of paper that she stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet, under the heading EMERGENCY #’S.

  The wind picked up outside, blowing phantom notes in the gutters. The sound sent shivers up Frankie’s spine for reasons he didn’t understand. He felt just a little bit ashamed of the feeling. Here he was, the first time he was left alone overnight, and he was getting scared because of the wind. Frankie went to the big window looking out onto the street. The street was deserted as the last faint rays of sunlight sank below the horizon, not to return until morning.

  Frankie closed the curtain, went back to the TV and flipped through the channels looking for something else to watch.

  -----

  Tom arrived home at nine o’clock, just as a light, cold drizzle started falling from the evening sky. He had grabbed a burger at Wendy’s on his way home, not feeling up to cooking for himself. He kicked off his shoes and sat on the sofa, stretching out his legs and resting his feet on the coffee table. He went through his notes as he ate, reading about the disappearances. There was Marie Spence in October of 2004. There was Peter Danko, nine years old, in May of 1995. Kent Freise, twenty-two, went missing in the late summer of 1982. Three year old Sammie Jo Hayes disappeared one year before Kent Freise. She had wandered away from her front yard when her mother went inside the house to answer the phone; the call lasted just long enough for Mr. Hayes to inform his wife that he would be late for supper, and when Mrs. Hayes went back outside little Sammie Jo was gone. The family lived on Cortland Road, one block away from the Home.

  There were two more that Tom felt were more than likely connected to the Home, one in 1976 and the other in 1971. The Review’s online archives only went back as far as January of 1970, and Tom was not going to pay another visit to the library to search further back.

  Tom set his notes aside and paid a visit to the bathroom to relieve his bladder. He still felt uneasy in the bathroom, and he had made a conscious decision to always keep the shower curtain pulled closed, as if that alone could keep the vision of his wife away. It was al
most silly, but it gave him some measure of comfort, at least.

  He decided to pass on a shower, which would entail pulling open that shower curtain, and instead headed straight for bed without bothering to undress. The rain was starting to pick up outside, but he hoped it would blow through by morning. Nothing felt more wasteful than a rainy day in summer.

  -----

  Patricia couldn’t get to sleep. The wind was blowing against the window in sheets. The clouds above had come alive, and flashes of lightning lit up the room for brief moments, followed by thudding claps of thunder. When she was young her mother told her that she shouldn’t be afraid of thunder, that it was just the sound of God clapping. As another flash of light was followed by another peal of thunder that rattled the windows, Patricia decided that God must be very angry at someone.

  -----

  When he heard something tapping against the window Frankie got out of bed, moved to the window and pushed aside the curtain. He discovered that what he had heard was the sound of hail pelting the window. The hail was small, no bigger than a dime, but it was plentiful, striking the window and falling down. Some of it had gathered in a small drift on the outer window ledge.

  Frankie let the curtain fall back into place, and moved back to the bed. He pulled up the covers and closed his eyes. Lightning flared, the light shining through the thin window curtain and brightening the room momentarily. For just a second Frankie could see the veins in his eyelids before the light faded away.

  A gust of wind brought on another round of that strange whistling music in the gutters. Frankie wished with all of his being that his parents would walk in the front door, that they had decided not to stay the night with Grandma Seibert and had come home. It was a foolish thought; they would not be home until morning, and until then Frankie was on his own. It was a lonely feeling.

  -----

  An angry burst of lightning flashed out of an angry, roiling sky and struck an electrical substation just west of Renner Avenue. A loud, electric whine buzzed through the night, dying with a bright flash of light and a shower of sparks from the substation. A small fire began to burn, but the rain put it out quickly, and a haze of smoke rose up around the substation. In the morning half the residents of Cedar Falls would wake up to find that they had no power.

  -----

  The storm still had more to give, and the hail knocking at Tom’s windows was now coming down in quarter-sized chunks. The sound of the storm--the rain, the thunder and the hail--conspired to rob him of sleep. He tried plugging his ears with cotton balls, an old trick his grandfather had used when he wanted to take a nap, but that didn’t help at all. He eventually took the cotton balls out of his ears and tossed them in the plastic wastebasket under the bedside table.

  -----

  Frankie hid under the covers, more ashamed of himself than ever. Twelve year-old boys weren’t supposed to be afraid of a storm. That was chickenshit little kid stuff. He forced himself to lower the covers so that his head was sticking out from them. It made him feel a little better about himself. Just a little.

  -----

  Patricia stood in her darkened kitchen. The light switch was useless; the power was out. She couldn’t get to sleep, and so she had gotten out of bed to get herself a glass of water. Now she dropped a few ice cubes into the glass (the ice still left in the trays would be melted before morning) and waited for the water to chill a little. When she finally took a drink the water felt good going down, soothing here parched throat.

  A bright flash glared through the kitchen windows, and she had to shut her eyes against it. Before the light had died out a shuddering crack of thunder erupted, drowning out the clatter of hail being driven by the wind into the windows and the sides of the house. In that moment, with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Patricia felt that the windows must surely shatter at such a report. But the windows held.

  -----

  Frankie heard the same peal of thunder, but as he was further away from the source he wasn’t filled with the same momentary fear his bedroom window might shatter because of it. What he was more concerned with was the hail. It was coming down harder than ever, and seemed to contain some malevolent sentience, intent on shattering every window in the house.

  -----

  Tom held the penlight as steadily as he could between his lips as he fiddled with the switches in the fuse box. None of the lights in the house worked, and he had hoped that maybe the problem was just a blown fuse. He still remembered the last time a bad storm had knocked out power for the whole neighborhood; it had taken ComEd two days to fix the problem and for the lights to come back on.

  Everything looked straight with the fuse box, so it probably was the entire neighborhood. He slammed the door of the fuse box shut and headed back upstairs from the basement, He went into the kitchen and searched the drawers for a candle and a lighter. He found a couple of half-used candles pretty quickly, but had no luck finding a lighter. Michelle had been the smoker, and since she was gone he hadn’t had much use for one. Eventually, after stubbing a toe and barking both shins in the dark lit only by the thin, weak beam of the penlight, he found a box of matches. The side of the box read Flame-O Brand. When he slid the compartment that held the matches open he found that there were only three matches left in the box; there was no telling how old the box was.

  Tom set the candles--big, fat purple ones each contained in its own heavy glass--on the counter next to the penlight. He took out one match and dragged it across the striker strip on the side of the box. The strip itself looked worn down, and the match failed to light. He dragged it across two more times, pressing down harder each time. After the third try the match head started to crumble.

  “Damn,” Tom said to the empty kitchen.

  He tossed the useless match in the trash and tried the second match. He was careful not to press so hard, and the match head didn’t disintegrate like last time, but after seven attempts to light it he gave up and tossed it in the trash as well. That left one match. Tom grabbed it, held it between his fingers, and placed it on one end of the striker strip at an angle.

  “Let there be light,” he said aloud before dragging the match across the strip.

  And then there was light, and he saw that the light was good. Tom lit both candles with the match before blowing it out. He ran the match under the tap for a second, an old safety measure passed on by his mom, before throwing it in the trash with the two duds.

  Tom took the candled into his bedroom, setting them on the dresser near the window, and sat on the edge of his bed. The storm outside flashed and roared, showing no sign of abatement.

  -----

  Patricia sat at the kitchen table, feeling wide awake now despite the late hour. She watched the play of light against the walls of the kitchen, and listened to the sounds of the storm--the thunder and rain, the hail ticking against the windows, the mad gusts of wind. The glass set on the table before her was empty now. As another clap of thunder boomed the empty glass vibrated slightly on the table. In the silence that followed the thunderclap Patricia heard another sound. It was a creaking sound, like someone stepping on rotted wood. It was coming from somewhere in the house.

  -----

  Something knocked against the bottom of the bed. Frankie held his breath. It happened again, harder this time. Frankie threw the covers away and jumped out of bed. He stood there for a moment watching the bed. Nothing happened. He got down on his knees and leaned his head down to peer under the bed. The space beneath was dark; he couldn’t see anything…but that didn’t mean that nothing was there.

  Frankie stood up and backed away from the bed. There was a flash of lightning, the light distorted by the rain sheeting down the window. The bed jumped as if a tremendous fist had thudded against it from below, and Frankie turned and ran, slamming the door shut behind him. He stood in the dark hallway, his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs in hot, ragged gasps.

  -----

  As Frankie stood panting in his hallway Tom Dw
yer was sitting on the edge of his own bed. He rested his head in his hands. He rubbed at his eyes, knowing that if he went to the mirror in the bathroom and looked at his reflection he would see that those eyes were raw and red. He was tired, but a queer uneasiness had settled over him that he couldn’t quite shake off. He dismissed the storm as the cause of the uneasiness, or at least as the main cause. Living in the Midwest one got used to bad thunderstorms. It was something he couldn’t put his finger on that kept him awake as the candles on the dresser burned weakly in a feeble attempt to banish the darkness of the night.

  The candles seemed to realize the futility of their battle, and they died out with a disquieting suddenness. It took Tom, still sitting on the bed, a few moments to realize that they had ceased their steady flickering. He looked over at the shadows where he knew the dresser to be. He stood up from the bed, but before he could take a step toward the dresser something gripped his right ankle. Then something gripped his other ankle. In his shock he didn’t think to start screaming until those twin vises pulled on his ankles and he found himself lying face down on the carpet. Then he started to scream, but his screams were drowned out even to his own ears when another giant clap of thunder boomed over his house. The unseen hands that had taken hold of his ankles started pulling then, and he realized that they were dragging him under the bed. That was when he started to struggling, kicking his legs fiercely against the force of the dual grip that something--some thing--had on him.

  -----

  Patricia stood in the middle of the living room, cocking her head. She was trying to pinpoint from which direction the noise was coming. When she was in the kitchen she had thought it was coming from the living room, but now that she was in the living room it sounded like it was coming from elsewhere. She strained to hear, closing her eyes (though it was dark enough that closing her eyes made little difference), but she couldn’t quite get a lock on it. She opened her eyes.

  What could be making that noise? Some animal that had found its way inside, taking shelter from the storm? She didn’t think it likely. She always checked to be sure that all the doors and windows were shut and locked before going to bed, and this night had been no exception. Then what? She didn’t know, and not knowing bugged the hell out of her. The noise came again, and this time it sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. She walked to the kitchen as fast as she dared in the dark, feeling her way there from memory. Once she was in the kitchen the noise stopped, and in the scant moonlight coming in through the windows she could see that the kitchen was empty.

  She had just about decided that she must be going crazy when something cold and rough brushed against the back of her neck. A sharp yip escaped her as she jumped. She turned around, but could see only thick shadows. She reached one hand out into the darkness, feeling for…she didn’t know what. She was afraid to think of what might be there in front of her, unseen. She gasped when her hands touched something solid. And then something had a grip on both of her wrists, and she was pulled from the kitchen.

  -----

  Frankie stepped back down the hall slowly, keeping his eyes on the end of the hall where his bedroom door still stood closed. He had tried the hall light switch, but nothing had happened when he flipped it up. As he backed up he reached his parents’ bedroom door, which stood on his right. He heard a noise coming from his right just a second before something gripped his shirt and pulled him into the bedroom.

  -----

  Tom managed to free one ankle, and kept kicking at whatever unseen thing had a hold on him. Every time his foot connected a chill ran up his leg and through his body. The lower half of his body up to his hips was under the bed now. He kicked again and again as he clawed the carpet, trying to pull himself forward. The grip on his ankle tightened, sending pain shooting through his leg. He kicked again, putting everything he had into it, and the thing that had him released its grip ever so slightly; it was just enough for Tom to break free. He shot out from under the bed and stood up. His right ankle throbbed from that last hard squeeze, but he was steady on his feet. He fled the bedroom.

  -----

  Patricia was lifted off of her feet, and as she hung suspended in the air she could feel invisible arms holding her, and she felt a great well of strength coursing through those unseen arms. As the rain came down in a torrent, and as hail rapped against her windows, she was tossed like a ragdoll against the wall of her living room. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but when she bounced off the wall her fall was checked as she landed on the sofa. She lay there, trying to breathe.

  -----

  Frankie also found himself to be a plaything for whatever strange presence had snuck into his house in the night. He was thrown onto the bed where his parents would normally have been sleeping, and then he was swept off the bed onto the floor. He was grabbed by the shirt again, and as he was pulled up the shirt tore, one patch seeming to float in midair as he fell back to the ground. There came a sound then that sounded eerily like an angry grunt, and as the piece of cloth was released, falling to the carpet, Frankie was gripped by both ankles and swung around. His head missed the corner of his parents’ dresser by a hairs breadth, and he was released mid-swing. He landed on the bed, but the momentum carried him over, and he tumbled head over feet to the ground once more.

  “Please, stop it!” he yelled. “Please, just stop!”

  He was picked up off the ground again. He was carried over to the window, and the window exploded outward in a hundred glittering shards. Now there was a gaping hole where the window used to be, and the rain and the wind blew the curtains around crazily. Whatever thing had a hold of Frankie tossed him through the window, and as he landed on the soggy ground outside a word came to him that he had either heard in class or read in a book--he couldn’t quite remember which. The word was “defenestrate”. A funny word; he wished he could remember what its meaning was.

  -----

  Tom made it to the end of the hallway before he ran face-first into some invisible barrier. He stepped back, rattled. He was struck in the chest; he thought he knew what it would feel like to get struck with an aluminum baseball bat. He was knocked to the ground with the force of the blow, and then something was on top of him, pressing down on him, pressing on his chest, making it hard to breathe. He felt something on his face; it was like a gust of breath, only it was cold. It also smelled of something rotten, and his stomach turned at the foul stench.

  -----

  Patricia got up off the couch and made a run for the door, but her legs were taken out from under her, and she went down hard, slamming her left elbow hard enough to send a shockwave up the length of her arm.

  “Oh God, please let this be a dream! I want to wake up!” she pleaded.

  But it wasn’t a dream, and she knew that.

  -----

  Frankie tried to stand up, but something heavy landed on his back and he was pressed flat to the muddy earth. Then the weight lifted, and he thought he might have a chance to get up and run. Before he could act on this thought he was struck in the ribs; it felt like he had been kicked, and hot pain flared in his side. He was grabbed by his ankles and pulled away from the house. He tried to see where he was being dragged off to as rain fell on him and hail pelted painfully against his face. A lightning flash lit up the night momentarily, and he saw that he was headed toward the tool shed near the back fence. He did not want to go inside that tool shed. He felt that if he did, he would never come out.

  He pictured himself being found there in the morning, when his parents came home. They would find the house empty, and the window in their bedroom busted out. Then one of them (he thought it would be his father) would run out the back door, stand outside the broken-out window, and follow the drag marks through the muddy grass. The marks would lead him to the shed; he would open the doors slowly and find his son.

  Frankie shook his head, trying to shake the image away. And then he started struggling for his life.

  -----

  Patricia
made another attempt to reach the door, and this time she was able to reach it. She tried to pull the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. She pulled again, but still the door didn’t open. Then she remembered that it was locked. She had made sure to lock it before going to bed. Now she wondered why she had ever done such a foolish thing as that.

  -----

  Tom knew that he was going to die. He couldn’t breathe and he was going to die. Above him he could see only darkness, but there something pressing down on him, and it wasn’t going to let up until he was dead. He thought of Frankie and Patricia, and he wondered if they were okay, or if they were fighting their own desperate battles that night. Then he thought of Michelle (not the thing in the bathtub, that hadn’t really been her; it was just a spookhouse imitation), and he thought of the way her face looked when she got mad, not serious mad, just a little mad, the kind of mad he could make her laugh her way out of. He wondered if he would see her again in whatever world awaited him after this one.

  If I can’t see her again, then please let there be nothing. Without her, let there be nothing.

  He felt lightheaded, and it was a giddy sort of feeling. He thought:

  This isn’t so bad. I always thought dying would be worse.

  -----

  The doors of the shed were pulled open by invisible hands, and Frankie was pulled toward the open maw of the structure. He twisted and squirmed. He screamed as loudly as he could, but he was being drowned out by the noise of the storm. He was tugged forward, but he managed to get a grip on the side of the door jamb. He held on, fighting to break free.

  -----

  Patricia turned the deadbolt and swiped the chain free of its catch. She turned the doorknob and pulled, and this time the door opened inward. It felt like a minor miracle. She felt something tug at the back of her shirt, trying to pull her back into the house, but whatever it was had a loose grip and she was able to pull free. She bolted away from the doorway.

  -----

  The thing was still pulling on him, but each tug felt weaker. Frankie’s fingers were blanched white as he held his grip on the door jamb. He had a thought then, a bright, shining thought that burned away all others: it, the thing that had a hold on him, was losing strength. He didn’t know how or why he should know this, but suddenly he was certain of it. It only had so much strength to expend, or so much time in which to expend it (or some combination of the two), and it was running out. The thing gave one final tug, but Frankie held on.

  -----

  The weight on his chest felt lighter. Tom thought it was just a trick of the mind as consciousness started to slip away from him. Then the weight lifted even more. Then it was gone. For a moment Tom didn’t breath, but then he started sucking in air in huge gulps. He could breathe. It wasn’t a trick being played on him by his brain; he could really breathe. He was so overcome with joy that he started to laugh. He didn’t stop laughing even when he started to cry.

  -----

  Patricia stood in the middle of the street, looking at the rectangle of darkness that was the entrance to her home. She had thought the thing (whatever the hell it was) would follow her outside, but it hadn’t. She had the feeling that it was gone entirely, but she didn’t trust the feeling. She stood out in the rain until her shirt and shorts were soaked through, and she was shivering in the cold, wet night. When her teeth started to chatter she finally made up her mind to trust her gut and reenter the house. As soon as she stepped foot inside she was sure of it. The thing was gone, and she was alone. She closed the door and locked it, then found her laptop, opened it, and quickly typed out an e-mail. When the e-mail had been sent she walked to the couch and laid out on it. She curled herself into a fetal position. She had the strange inclination to suck on her thumb like a small child, and the thought made her laugh at herself. She closed her eyes and was asleep in less than five minutes.

  -----

  Tom got up off the hallway floor. The house was silent but for the sounds of the storm. He stood in the silence for a while, letting it wash over him. He wiped away the last of his tears, wiping the dampness off on his shirt. He hobbled to bed then, his ankle flaring with pain. He got into bed and covered himself up, then fell asleep.

  -----

  Frankie crawled in through the broken window, making sure to clear away any stray shards of glass still stuck in the frame. He cut his foot on a piece of glass that had fallen to the dirt, but he didn’t mind. What was a minor cut compared to what could have happened in the shed?

  He walked to the bathroom, trailing wet footprints behind him; the trail of prints left by his right foot also contained some blood. He found the first aid kit that was kept in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Frankie opened it and took out the small spray can of Bactine. He sat on the edge of the tub, lifted his injured foot onto the opposite knee, and sprayed the cut with the antiseptic. It stung a bit, but not as bad as he thought it would, and soon it felt sort of numb.

  When his foot had dried he took out a large Band-Aid from the kit and stuck it to the bottom. He went to the hall closet and took down a large towel, which he took to his parents’ bedroom and placed on the carpet beneath the broken window, hoping it would catch most of the rain that was blowing in. He would have to think of an excuse to tell his parents about the window, but he was sure he would come up with something. Then he went back to bed. Amazingly, sleep came easily. By the time he woke in the morning the storm had passed.