Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  She wasn’t embarrassed. She shouldered the door open and smacked into a resisting body which, as planned, was pushed back. But she could never have expected the abrupt pivot in gravity that accompanied her emergence from her bedroom. The figure outside her door fell, but it did not tumble down the stairs—it tumbled down the angled ceiling before crashing flat against the front door.

  Only the instinct to squeeze kept Gracie from falling on top of him. She dropped her phone, heard it clatter far below. Though she couldn’t keep hold of the doorknob, she did so long enough for her legs to swing beneath her and to angle her descent towards the railing. She banged against it, grabbed, lost her grip, grabbed again and held halfway down the balustrade.

  She looked down and saw a man limply squirming, trying to claw his way back from senselessness. With only the bleed from the porch-light illuminating his face, it was still possible to identify Millett, though some trick of the shadow produced a strange after-image as he turned his head from side to side, a second, smooth face of obsidian offset from the features of flesh; it disappeared when Gracie tried to see it, but flickered into view after she blinked and it pulled from the corner of her eye when she glanced away.

  As she expected, the passage beneath the stairs was open.

  Gracie briefly considered trying to climb up the railing. She could then crawl along the wall to her “escape hatch” window—with the hope that whatever phenomenon upsetting the pull of gravity was confined to her house. But she was angry. Her sense of ownership reared; the truce between home and world had been invalidated by intrusion, and she felt obligated to fight back, to make right her sense of security, and for Gracie, that meant eliminating the threat—of not just the man, but of the mechanism, as well.

  She clambered down the balustrade, careful to keep her weight distributed amongst protesting spindles. When her shoulders were parallel to the top of the opening, she “opened” her body towards the wall and ducked under the step. She groped in the dark and propped her forearm across the first panel between steps, praying it would hold when she shifted to it. She contorted to slide her other hand under the stairs and folded her fingers around the next plateau. She let her first leg dangle into open space. Then the second. And just as she began to pull herself up, she felt two hands grip and pull on her toes.

  She shrieked and kicked, got one leg free, tried to heft herself up, but couldn’t. She kicked at the fingers clutching her foot and felt them drop away. She got her other forearm flat on the next panel above and crawled upwards—until she tumbled backwards down the cellar stairs in Millet’s house. Her wrists and knees took the brunt of the impact on the concrete floor. Her arms and legs throbbed and wouldn’t obey her orders. But she pushed through the pain and forced her feet under her, and though new stings shot through her as she pulled herself upright, she stood.

  The stairs were empty; the door above was closed. Fortunately, a light was on over the workbench along the wall, or else Gracie knew she would be trapped in darkness.

  She stumbled through the clutter, kicking carefully, worried she might not have the strength to stand once more. She paused at the thread-webbed map. She clutched two handfuls of layered skeins and pulled. She felt great satisfaction throwing the torn map and rumpled, multicolored mass to the floor, but she knew the act was only preliminary to victory. She had no particular reason to believe her course would affect the change she hoped for, but she pursued it with desperate certainty. She opened the brown metal door and entered.

  There was little light to see by, but enough to recall the basic layout. She ignored the four mounds and the arcana-strewn table. She crossed to the altar. She grabbed the black, two-faced totem by the base. She was surprised by how cold it felt, but unsurprised at how heavy it was. As she brought it up over her head, she uttered a two-word prayer that the thing wasn’t shatterproof. She lunged forward as she brought the totem down with all her strength against the wall. She could barely see the separation, but the telling sound heralded success—a sound followed almost immediately by a scream.

  Gracie whirled around. The man’s scream had come from the basement. Knowing she had no other means of escape, Gracie brandished the stunted rock base in front of her and went back into the main room.

  She heard a horrid wheezing, and then saw a hand slapping the floor near the foot of the stairs. Thinking it might be her one chance to strike a blow before Millett recovered, she rushed towards him, ready to slam the base against his head.

  Instead, she dropped the rock on the floor and gasped. There would be no need to pummel her adversary. Millett had already stopped moving, stopped breathing. The loss of blood from where his legs were cleanly shorn just above the knees had killed him; blood now dripping from stair to stair to pool around Millett’s torso.

  She’d closed the door on him.

  “Honey, are you OK?”

  The woman’s voice came from the other side of the door at the top of the cellar stairs.

  For a moment, Gracie didn’t know what to do. There was no other exit. She’d dropped her phone when she flew out of her bedroom.

  But Mrs. Millett didn’t know that.

  “I’ve already called the cops,” she bluffed. “They’re on their way!”

  Gracie almost hoped to hear confusion or alarm, to have the door swing open and see the widow Millett there, wide-eyed with horror at the sight of her mauled husband. That somehow, she didn’t know what had been happening in her house. That maybe she wasn’t some other thing masquerading as one of the four victims in the other room. Though Gracie might never know the answer exactly, she knew something was wrong when no challenge was forthcoming. Instead, after a few moments, she heard low voices murmuring excitedly and a rush of motion. She traced the squawking of floorboards overhead, wondering if the daughters were being gathered as reinforcements or for exodus. Then the front door opened and shut. Gracie heard the car engine roar to life followed by a squeal of tires. She exhaled.

  She looked at the base of the totem on the floor. She wondered what had caused gravity to go mad at the instant she’d opened her bedroom door. Perhaps she was right about Janus—and perhaps an old god from a faded pantheon had interceded, that the barest memory of a ghost of a god had flared with anger at his despoiled legacy and the abuse of his totem’s power, tasking Gracie with its destruction (that clear inspiration of the rightness of action) even if it meant extinguishing the last of his deific might in the world. To Gracie, the specifics didn’t matter. There was her world to think of, and her house to attend to. And good or bad, she’d prefer to allow in only the invited. She wiped down the black rock as she tried to remember if her fingerprints might appear anywhere else in the house. Discarding the stumps Millett left behind would be a more involved and gruesome task. Gracie hoped any permanent stains would be confined to the secret room beneath the stairs, a space she planned to lock away and never revisit.

  As Summer’s Mask Slips

  Gordon White

  As she drove to her father’s house—now hers, she supposed—Sarah knew that she still remembered those woods too well to have a chance of really losing herself in them. Still, she wanted to wander the trails and desire paths once again and to shed her burden bit by bit like breadcrumbs in her wake. To let the forest carry it away, even if she might never find her way back to the empty home.

  When she was younger, she’d spent her summers out here with her father, given free rein of the wild tract between his house and the lake below. But as she returned now, a decade later and on the cusp of autumn, it was almost a different world. She had always been back in the city with her mother by the time the seasons changed, so the unfamiliar smolder of the fall’s colors around her as she drove further and further into the country made it seem as if she had caught the world in the middle of putting on, or taking off, a disguise.

  In fact, she’d only been out to his house one time during a season other than summer. She’d come up during the winter for Chri
stmas the year before she left for college. She recalled pressing her face against the living room’s picture window, staring at the skeletal branches groping with their stripped fingers towards the hangnail of a moon. Just the sight had made her shiver in a way the snow on the ground never could have.

  “The emptiness is beautiful, isn’t it?” her father had said, but Sarah didn’t think so.

  For her, the summer woods were the real woods. The green and full of life woods, warm and wild. That vibrant, verdant thing was the true version and honest face.

  The still and hollow woods, with the early nightfall and the knuckles of the forest gripping at the bone-sliver moon, that wasn’t beautiful. It was something only an old man should find beauty in. Someone nearing the end of his life, consoling himself with frozen memories for the long dark sleep of winter.

  Not something for her father to say. Not yet.

  The next fall Sarah went to college, then found a job, and as the seasons rolled on she visited her father less often. Then he called to say that he’d gotten sick, or rather he’d been sick for a while but was only just diagnosed. He went to the hospital, he got thin and strange, and then he died. The changes all came so quickly that it seemed to Sarah as if that spindle-man that he’d withered into had been her real father, her winter father, hidden away and biding its time. As if the man she’d loved was a seed husk that had been ginned away into something raw and wicked.

  Those thoughts of the end, Sarah worried, would be the ones to take hold and define him in her memories. She knew that it was best not to dwell in morbidity, though, and instead she should plant a garden of bright summer thoughts of her father and their time together. So, after the paperwork was done, she decided to return to his house with the aim of filling herself to bursting as she emptied it out. In this way, Sarah planned to gather and tend to those small sprigs of happiness, so that they might one day grow into a consolation.

  But her resolve remained intact only as long as the drive from the city to the dirt road cut-off. The strength fell from her soles, through the car’s floorboard, and crunched like gravel beneath the tires as she ground her way past distant neighbors, further and further towards her father’s isolated cabin.

  Why live in such a remote area? The question echoed across the fields as she pulled into the driveway beside his truck. It had been an adventure when she was young, but it wasn’t too long before she was old enough to worry about him not just for being so far from everyone else, but for wanting to be. Even before they knew he was sick, she would get vivid impressions, like waking dreams, of him lying in the woods or sprawled face down in his kitchen with no one to help to him. No one to find him.

  She had tried to laugh away these fantasies, calling them ridiculous. She didn’t know yet how right she was. How absurd it was to think that her father would have been fortunate enough to meet some quick and silent end.

  Sarah unlocked the front door with the key she’d gotten from his belongings at the hospital. There used to be a spare beneath the planter, but when she checked it out of habit, it was empty. Inside the house, however, her father’s things were everywhere. A pair of old boots lay by the door, a coat on the rack. A paperback book was propped half-open on the arm of his chair, basking in the late afternoon sun. Everything was suspended mid-moment, as if he had just stepped out and would be returning any minute. As if she might suddenly hear the back door open, instead of just the chimes shivering in a breeze.

  In the living room, photographs frozen behind drugstore picture frames bore silent witness as she took inventory. There was Sarah the high school senior. As a little girl on a trip to England. At her college graduation, in the last photo of her mother and her father near each other, but not together.

  The banality of the milestones her father had collected filled Sarah’s pockets, rooting her to the floor. As she looked from picture to picture, she realized that she was trying to pinpoint the moment when she could have seen death pushing through her father’s features. When she could have seen his sick and barren self getting ready to emerge.

  Even if she found it now, though, what good would it do? She couldn’t go back in time to tell him, Look, there is this thing inside you. Even if she could, would it have hastened his sick self’s emergence and dragged that winter out over years instead of months? Would finding it now smudge every photo of him from that point forward with the taint of her failure?

  She had come to get away from these thoughts, but had not come far enough yet. Feeling the need for air, she exited onto the back porch and gazed out past the small yard at the wall of trees that encircled it. Although the leaves were baking away into browns and oranges, although it was not the forest of her young summers, it called to her just the same. It had the same rough shape and features, only just changed a little, she hoped. Time must have left her that much, certainly.

  Walking out through the ankle-high and unkempt blades, a distant memory returned of how her father used to mow the lawn of the little house that they all lived in together when she was just a child. Sarah could see him standing in that fenced-in yard, drenched in sweat and the smell of cut grass. Even back then and back there, surrounded by other houses, the air prickled with the scent of the wild onions that encroached from the suburbs’ small feral patches.

  She remembered how the onions’ roots grew all twisted together, spreading out to connect to one another at seemingly random points, but coalescing into a wild and angled whole.

  Her father used to say that there were many paths to the water, she just had to pick one.

  This, she thought as she entered the woods, is how I will confront the loss. By coming at it horizontally.

  Although the woods were altered by the years of her absence and the unfamiliar changes of fall, there was enough for Sarah to recognize her woods within it. She remembered the main path and the long walks that she and her father would take. Sometimes, on pleasant days, they would take out the old canoe he kept hidden a little up from the shoreline.

  “Why don’t we chain it up?” she’d asked him once as they paddled across the flat and muddy water.

  “Who’d want to take this old thing?” he said. “I’m surprised it even floats.” Then he shifted his weight quickly, rocking the boat just enough for Sarah to grab the sides and laugh.

  “Besides,” he said, “nobody comes down here but you and me.”

  “What about them?” She pointed across water to the small landing on the far shore. Sometimes a handful of men sat in folding chairs and held fishing poles, but never seemed to be doing much else. One time, one of them waved.

  “Them?” Her father laughed. “They’re too far away to do anything.”

  Even then, she’d realized that the outdoors had been such a part of his life that he’d wanted to make it a part of hers. He never said why, and with the loss still fresh she didn’t want to push too hard against the still-forming scar, but maybe it was something from his own childhood. Maybe it was a place to retreat when the flat empty spaces beyond the trees became too much to bear.

  But whatever woods her father had seen, they weren’t hers. Her forest was only an echo of his. It was a place of memories. A place of lessons.

  It was learning how to tie a knot or how to play real hide and seek, as he called it. It was learning how to find a trail. It was her father asking what kind of birds are they that sing these songs? What does it mean when they all go quiet?

  What does it mean when the insects go quiet, too?

  When nothing makes a sound?

  It came back to her quickly in the now-silent forest, how the steady buzz of woods will break for an intruder.

  Behind her, somewhere between the carpet of fallen leaves and those still clinging to the branches, a stick snapped and its report shot through the still world. Sarah froze, counting the seconds as if it had been a flash of lightning and she was waiting for the thunder.

  But there was nothing more.

  Only
one crack without another could mean that it was just a falling branch or other singular event.

  Or, her father reminded her, something that doesn’t want to be found.

  Sarah knew what animals sounded like and that they would only pause for a second before moving on, their unencumbered minds failing to comprehend threats that didn’t immediately materialize. But even then, the insects and the birds should start right up again. Life should flow on around minor disruptions like the wind through the skirts of the branches.

  It shouldn’t be this still and this quiet. Not for this long.

  Sarah began to walk again, trying to remember how to do it quietly. Slow steps, maybe, rolling heel to toe. Maybe toe to heel. Behind her, the lengthening shadows of the sentinel trees barely breathed in the faint wind. There was no movement yet, but she felt the weight of eyes on her, the gravity of observation.

  The awkwardness of her steps struck her as abundantly absurd. As absurd as this unfounded sense of dread. As absurd as the possibility of being followed through the empty woods.

  But not as absurd, she knew, as having this feeling and not doing something about it.

  Further down the path, closer to the lake but away from the house, she remembered that the trail wrapped around a rock outcropping. The sharp angle would cut off the line of sight behind her and allow her a small distance, just enough to catch her breath. Beneath her quickening steps, twigs broke and the echoes behind her made a double set of steps for an imaginary ghost of a pursuer, pushing her to move faster still.

  She was embarrassed for herself, acting like a child. But she didn’t slow down.