by Hamill, Ike
The cellar used to have windows built into the foundation of the house. The panes were so thin and brittle that Uncle Walt decided to do away with them. He ended up just boarding up the holes. With apologies to his craftsmanship, I swing the blunt end of his steel bar at the nearest window hole and break through the planks. With a few good hits, more sunlight is streaming into cellar. I do the other window on that side. It’s not worth doing the ones on the other side of the house—the sun won’t hit those until this afternoon.
I pick up my two stakes and glance at the flashlight to make sure it’s still on and working.
This is it.
It occurs to me that I don’t have to go through with this.
I got one last night when the truck exploded and I mushed up four of them in the house. Maybe that’s fair? Mr. Engel and one truck for five of them? Of course, I would still be stuck with not having a place to stay and selling my uncle’s place without finishing the job of cleaning it.
All the pros and cons still exist, but the question remains: have I satisfied my need for revenge?
I look down at my wrist where the punctures have pretty much closed. It’s not a terrible injury. I don’t need retribution for it or anything. But it irks me that these things exist at all. That alone is enough reason for me to try to finish this job. People are not supposed to be prey. This is not only about defending my uncle’s property. This is about eradicating a threat to our primacy as a species.
I stand tall with this thought and I start down through the bulkhead doors.
Shadows
(This is the hardest thing I've ever done.)
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I’ve buried my mom, my wife, our baby, and my uncle. I’ve endured a lot of grief. That trauma was thrust upon me. I didn’t have to walk down the stairs into that pain with open eyes, like I’m doing now.
Sunlight cuts through the cellar in places. By bashing out the boarded up windows and placing the mirrors, I’ve created a few shafts of light. I’m not sure it was the best idea. The bright light makes the shadows even deeper. Every dark spot seems to crawl with shifting shapes. I’m almost certain it’s just an artifact of the contrast.
Almost certain.
In comparison to the sunlight, my flashlight beam is barely visible.
I start at the nearest corner and begin working my way around the cellar, poking my stakes into the shadows.
I find one almost immediately.
With my first stab, the eyes open and clawed fingers reach towards me. They halt when they get to the shaft of sunlight. With all the dazzling light around, the eyes fail to entrance me. I can study the orange irises. They’re like two flames. Their gaze tries to entrance me closer, so I’ll be out of the light. I’m finding it easy to keep my wits and resist. There’s a chance that I’m just growing accustomed to the hypnosis now. This one has deep scars on its wrist, like it tried to reach through a broken window.
I smile and send my two stakes at the eyes.
It doesn’t even blink before they make contact. Right until the end, it was trying to catch me with its hypnotic gaze.
When it screams out its final sounds, I hear shifting around me. There are more down here. Maybe a lot more.
I find another under the oil tank. Its green eyes narrow as it regards me. Once the eyes are open, it’s a lot easier to see the whole body. The camouflage illusion fades and I can see the way that it’s clinging to the bottom of the oil tank. I wonder if it doesn’t have the energy to camouflage and hypnotize at the same time. Maybe it doesn’t feel the need to do both.
A third attempts to creep up while I’m watching the one under the oil tank turn to slime.
My feet are in shadow and it almost wraps its talons around my ankle.
It freezes when I turn. It’s like we were playing a game of Red Light, Green Light and I spun just in time to stall its progress. The yellow eyes flicker with hate until I stab them. Is it hate though? I don’t want to attribute emotions to these things. As far as I know, they’re just clever animals.
That’s three down here, four from the house, and one burned up with the truck. Eight total, so far, and I haven’t seen the one with violet eyes. It occurs to me that I didn’t see the eyes of the one that burned up in the dooryard. Could that be the one I’m looking for?
I’m trying to remember—what were the color of the eyes that I saw in the shed when I went in through David’s door?
The question vexes me while I continue to search.
I’m almost convinced that I’m done when I find two more in the far corner. These two weren’t trying to attack, like the yellow-eyed devil. They both have orange eyes. While I’m jabbing one with the stake, the other creeps forward.
The wide eyes almost look like they have spiral galaxies trapped in their pulsing light. I wish I had my phone. It would be fascinating to take a picture of those eyes and really study them. Could they be wormholes that lead to another solar system? Is it an illusion, or are they actually as deep as they look?
Someone else will have to answer that question.
I’m content with driving my spear into the eye.
It flinches back from the flashlight, hissing when the beam strikes its skin. Colors flash through the scales. I impale it with my stake.
The total stands at ten.
I want to take a break.
I have to keep going though. If I lose my nerve now, I might not find it again.
I go back to the start. None of this means anything if I’m not thorough.
Standing in the middle of the mirrors, I close my eyes. With one of the stakes, I reach up and tap on a beam, trying to replicate the rhythm that they make with their claws.
My eyes fly open when I hear something. I see exactly where the sound came from.
It makes perfect sense.
The thing is over near the stairs. I should have guessed. They’re smart enough to know that it was likely I was going to come down that way, so they hid a sentinel near the stairs to grab me when I came down. While I’m trying to puzzle out exactly where the head is, I notice something else.
They’re well camouflaged to match their surroundings, but they can’t bend light. When my flashlight beam lands directly on it, I don’t really see anything. Held at a steep angle, the shadows give it away. I sense a strange parallax when the light hits it at an angle.
I probe it with a stake until I see the eyes and then I stab it.
Blue—the eyes were blue.
That makes eleven. The cellar is clear.
Now that they’re all gone, I can feel the difference. The dread I felt has evaporated along with the slime. I stand for a full minute, looking at the way the sunlight swirls through the dust. It’s beautiful. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, right?
The cellar looks almost too clean.
“Spiders,” I whisper.
That’s the problem—where are the spiders?
Sometimes, I can be pretty dense. I run for the stairs.
(I search my senses.)
I search my senses.
There’s no feeling of dread in here. I’m standing in the barn, looking up at the loft because of the revelation I had in the cellar. The vampires must eat spiders. I didn’t see any spiders in Mr. Engel’s basement, and I didn’t see any in my cellar. These are places that definitely should have spiders. Maine is famous for giant, fat-bodied spiders. At least in my family it always was. Mom would complain about them all the time and Uncle Walt would always defend them.
“They don’t do any harm and they eat tons of mosquitoes,” he would always say.
The barn, in particular, was home to some giant arachnids. I never liked them much, but I left them alone in deference to my uncle.
But now I can’t see a single web. My flashlight doesn’t reveal any at all.
I also can’t find any evidence of the vampires though. There’s no sense of dread and my light isn’t doing any of the parallax shifting that I disco
vered. The siding of the barn is so inconsistent that the place is full of random shafts of sunlight now. Once the sun came up fully over the horizon, it riddled the barn with ambient light.
I make a thorough search of the first floor and then climb to the loft.
Granted, I can’t reach the highest peaks. I set up the flashlight to point to various spots and then I move away from that light source so I can see everything from different angles. There’s just no way. Even with their camouflage, I would see them if they were here.
At one point, they had to be here. That’s the only way to explain the lack of spiders. Maybe they roosted up here for a bit during the night. Some of them waited here while the others tried to tap me out of the pantry. After that, the bulk of them must have moved to the cellar where there was less light.
I don’t know—it’s a theory.
I comb through the barn several times, trying to find them. It’s like looking for my keys when I’m late for an appointment. I know exactly what they should look like, but there’s no trace of them. I have to force myself to slow down and really see the barn.
I’m sweaty and dusty by the time I’m sitting on the stairs and I admit defeat.
“Maybe that’s all of them,” I say.
It doesn’t feel true. I had this weird sense of dread when I was close to one in the house. It’s like that skin-crawling feel when someone is staring at the back of my head. I’m not getting that feeling out in the barn, but I still can’t help but think that I’m missing something.
The flashlight beam is still strong. Uncle Walt replaced the bulbs in all his flashlights a few years ago. The new bulbs emit a really harsh light compared to the old ones, but they last forever now.
Sweeping the light around aimlessly, I catch one corner of a spiderweb above me. The spider is gone and the web won’t be rebuilt. That’s a shame. I bet the whole barn will be swarming with flies before long. I can only hope that the spiders return quickly.
“Flies,” I whisper.
I stand up slowly.
“Why are there so many flies in the kitchen?” I ask.
All the spiders are gone, sure, but why did I see flies in the kitchen but nowhere else? I’m walking pretty fast towards the shed. I force myself to slow down and take my time. I can’t assume anything. My gut doesn’t give me any warnings, but it would be stupid to trust that alone.
Holding the flashlight away from myself at an angle, I check the shadowy corners of the shed hall as I move towards the kitchen.
I step through the pantry fast—that place still feels like a prison cell to me. I don’t want to be incarcerated again.
For a moment, I don’t see a single fly. I’m about to admit that maybe I was wrong, but then my skin starts to crawl. Something is here.
That’s when I spot the flies. They’re still there, over by the refrigerator. I sidestep a wide arc around the appliance. The flies are concentrated by the back of it. I shine my light.
The first thing I see is the corner of one of the metal racks from the interior of the fridge. Stuffed between the rack and refrigerator body is a pack of hamburger buns.
I creep forward and see a plastic bottle of ketchup and then the husk of an ear of corn.
There wasn’t much food in there. I have been eating mostly from the pantry. I’m guessing that everything that I had in the refrigerator is now stuffed behind it.
The flies buzz in an angry cloud when I reach my stake forward and poke at the hamburger buns.
Something shifts inside the fridge.
(The door won't open.)
The door won’t open.
I try to wedge my stake into the rubber seal between the refrigerator door and the frame, but I can’t get it to budge. When I bang my stake against the fridge in frustration, I hear the thing inside. It shifts and the scales rub against each other making a dry, papery sound. When I hear that sound, my wrist throbs. It looks like the claw wound is weeping again.
I put one of the stakes down and slink forward until my trembling hand grabs the towel that’s tied to the refrigerator’s handle. The whole time, all I can picture is the door sliding open and long boney fingers slipping out to snare me.
I get a grip on the towel and back away.
With my first tug, the refrigerator actually rocks forward a little.
The second time, I really jerk it.
The towel starts to rip and then the door pops open.
For a second, I don’t see a single thing inside there. Someone has emptied the refrigerator and left it bare. Maybe it was just the vacuum that made it so difficult to open.
I know better than that. I circle at a distance until I can pick up the broomstick with the flashlight taped to it and get a good angle.
That’s when I see her. She’s up near the top corner, clinging to the plastic. When you really get a good look at them, they’re pretty small. She’s the size of a small alligator, I would guess. Her eyes make her look human. They’re such an amazing violet color.
I think I read that in ancient Europe, only royalty could wear purple. If that color was anything like this, I understand. The color of her eyes suggests infinite wealth and prosperity. It conveys a feel of deep satisfaction. Even with the sunlight dazzling through the broken windows, her eyes are bright.
Her eyes invite me to come inside the refrigerator. It will be our safe place as soon as I crawl inside and shut the door. Who needs light and oxygen? I’ll have complete happiness in there. Why would I possibly want anything else?
I take a step forward.
With my next step, I drop the stake that I fashioned out of the shovel handle.
I’m still holding the broomstick with the flashlight taped to it, but I let the light droop. I don’t need it anymore. There’s plenty of light coming from her perfect violet eyes.
The eyes seem to grow even larger with my next step.
It’s like they’re swallowing my whole field of vision, and that’s a wonderful thing.
Violet is the overwhelming color, but the eyes are actually made up of a billion points of light, like tiny stars in swirling galaxies. There’s an entire reality inside those eyes and it’s a perfect existence. Some people believe in reincarnation. If they could see her eyes, those people would understand that coming back to this life would be torture. The only afterlife I want is to be encompassed in that beauty.
Her mouth opens and I see the dripping fangs. It doesn’t matter. Those teeth are waiting to bite me and I really couldn’t care less. She’s welcome to this mortal flesh as long as that payment grants me entrance to the universe inside her violet eyes.
Light can’t last forever. Darkness always wins.
I don’t know where that thought came from, but it conjures an image for me. The invading image is Kimberly. It’s not the last memory I have of Kimberly with agony stretching her face. I had a handful of ice chips melting between my fingers as I watched them prep her for surgery. Whenever I think of her name, that’s what I always picture, but that’s not the image that comes to me now.
Instead, what I see is Kimberly on the day that she told me she was pregnant. I was in a terrible mood that day, and she held up the stick that she had peed on—the pregnancy test with its blue plus sign. She said, “Your darkness can’t last forever. Light always wins.”
Somewhere along the way, I reversed her words.
My version is clearly more true.
I take another step. I’m going to join that violet paradise in the refrigerator. That universe fills my eyes and banishes the memory of Kimberly that I had conjured.
A brilliant light glares from my right and I’m blinded by it. I stagger to the side, but I’m still assaulted by the beam. It’s a reflection in the glass that’s stacked on the windowsill. The blast from the truck broke the window, the vampire’s OCD forced it to collect the glass, and now it has reflected the sun into my eyes and broken the violet spell that entranced me.
I blink at the sunlight and glance back at the ref
rigerator.
For a fraction of a second, I see her for the disgusting serpent that she is. She’s part snake and part lizard. Her teeth are dripping with saliva and bacteria. She’s a parasite.
And then her eyes find me again.
I want nothing more than…
The sun interrupts the thought. I’m saved by that beam of light.
I raise one hand to block my view of her eyes and I raise the broomstick stake in the other. The flashlight reflects oily rainbows on her scales. She’s not even trying to camouflage herself anymore. All her energy is invested in hypnotizing me with her violet eyes, but I can’t see them anymore.
I aim the stake without seeing the target.
I thrust it forward.
I hear and feel the supple give of her flesh as the stake drives home.
She screeches and thrashes and I pull back and stab again.
One eye has burst. The other searches wildly for some way to escape. The refrigerator is her only refuge from the sunlight in the kitchen. She can’t avoid my attack.
When I finally hit the second eye, her body convulses and begins the process of liquifying. She melts around the wooden shaft of the broomstick.
“I’m going to need a new fridge,” I whisper.
The slime bubbles and evaporates. The evil mist rolls from the bottom of the refrigerator and I step back from it as it dissipates.
“Twelve.”
I’ve removed twelve of them. I finally found the one I thought of as the leader, and it rings true. She was the most powerful of them. The sinister feeling that pervaded the kitchen is nearly gone.
(It's nearly gone.)
It’s nearly gone.
I have one more place to check.
The freezer door opens easily. There’s no camouflage at all to the serpent that I find there, curled up with the melting ice. Of course, all I can think about is the ice chips that I was supplying to Kimberly. It was the last act of kindness I could give her, while she was giving everything to our child.