Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  Behind the house, near the edge of the surrounding woods, a pair of swings twists in an early winter breeze. Unable to contain her grief any longer, Charlotte’s house invites the breeze to cleanse its stagnant halls, throwing open its doors and windows and spilling a kaleidoscope of sorrow into the night.

  Charlotte gives chase, but for every lamentation recaptured and rebottled to nurture and protect, another escapes her lips, feeding the breeze until it becomes a gale. When it becomes clear her efforts are wasted, Charlotte takes to the swings. If she cannot stop her despair from taking flight, she will follow it into the sky. Charlotte swings up, up, up—toward the swollen moon as it drifts through the amnion of distant galaxies—and lets go. For a moment, she hangs suspended in the tempest. Then it retreats with all her cultivated misery in tow, and Charlotte plummets back to the earth to sow her garden of heartache anew.

  “For what do you weep?” someone from within the wood whispers. The voice is low and dark, like distant thunder, and though it carries undertones of stealth and misdirection, it offers the first kind words Charlotte has heard in months.

  “I weep for the death of my heart, that its ghost may forget how to love.”

  “Even those who walk between worlds are haunted by the memory of loss.”

  “I among them.” Charlotte rises, brushing blades of winter grass from her dress and steps toward the edge of the wooded area. “Who are you? Why do you speak with me? Do you not know that I am forsaken?”

  “I am a granter of wishes. I can give you that for which your heart breaks.”

  Temptation in the form of a flutter deep in the pit of Charlotte’s stomach draws her nearer to the shadowed wood.

  “Nothing of such value is given freely.” Charlotte’s voice trembles with an amalgam of hope and fear. “What payment is due such a service?”

  “Love,” the voice says. “Sacrifice.”

  A vine wide as her palm and armed with thorns like fangs twists from the foliage into the moonlight. It lashes out, slicing through the thin fabric of Charlotte’s dress and leaving behind three sets of parallel wounds on her abdomen.

  Charlotte cries out but does not flee. She touches the slits on her belly, smearing thick drops of blood against her shivering flesh. Fingers slick with red, Charlotte steps closer and attempts to wrap them around the vine, but it has no depth and passes through her grasp like vapor. She presses her fingers to her mouth.

  “Love,” she says, bending at the waist and brushing her bloodied lips against the shadow, returning its kiss. “Love is sacrifice.”

  The vine shudders. Its barbs scramble up the stem, coalescing into a razor sharp grin. “Flesh of your flesh.”

  Lapping at the fluid coursing down the concave hollow of Charlotte’s stomach, the dark umbilicus sprouts arms and legs. They probe her wounds, diving between layers of muscle and disappearing into Charlotte’s body like smoke in reverse.

  Her belly swells, the slits become gouges, and a sound like ruptured earth erupts from her throat. It is agony. It is rapture. It lasts forever and is over in the beat of a newborn’s heart.

  Charlotte kneels, clutching her abdomen. The slashes have disappeared; tiny fingers trace their absence from the inside.

  Deceiver.

  Whore…

  Words like wasps hover round Charlotte’s home, waiting for an opportunity to sting. Her much expanded midsection has captured the town’s attention, and to the hive of buzzing tongues, each postulate regarding her condition is less palatable than the last.

  The presence of another draws Charlotte from sleep. Fearing the worst, that the elders have come for her and the unborn child, she tumbles out of bed and heads for the door.

  “It is only I,” a calm, familiar voice reassures.

  Charlotte ceases her escape and turns to confront her husband. He sits, hands clutching one another between his knees, on the edge of the bed they once shared.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to make amends. To beg your forgiveness and be a father to our child.”

  Wrapping her arms protectively around her belly, Charlotte speaks the words she’s practiced time and again inside her mind.

  “This child belongs to me and me alone”

  Her husband winces as if struck. “Not mine, then.”

  “No.”

  “I suspected as much. As do many of the others.” It is clear from his face that while he accepts this explanation, her husband had hoped the earliest rumors were true. That the miscarriage had been no more than a deception and the child inside her was the sum of their shared efforts.

  “And yet my errand remains the same.” He rises and crosses to Charlotte, taking one of her hands in his own. “Forgive me, wife. I was a coward.”

  A sensation like falling into the sky forces Charlotte to her knees. She looks into her husband’s eyes and hopes the urgency reflected there is not her own.

  “I forgive you, but you cannot stay. The elders will never allow it.”

  “It would not be the first time I rejected the will of the elders for the promise of a family.”

  “That was different.”

  “Was it? Tell me, wife. How came you to be with child this time?”

  Charlotte pulls her hand away and returns it to its place upon her stomach which has begun to knot.

  “Be it by medicine or by magic, it is the same in the eyes of the elders.”

  Instead of words, a wail of agony pours from Charlotte’s throat and she curls round her tightening middle.

  Her husband gathers her into his arms and rests her on the bed. “I’ll fetch the midwife,” he says when she’s past the first contraction.

  “No! They must never see!”

  “See what?”

  Charlotte cries out again as another wave of pressure threatens to split her open. “Help me,” she pleads. “Help me, and you can stay.”

  Hours later, Charlotte’s screams are replaced by the shrill cry of a newborn.

  Deceiver.

  Whore.

  Murderer…

  When they come to question her, Charlotte tells the elder’s vassals that, despite his rumored claims to return home, she hasn’t seen her husband in months—not since he left following her most recent miscarriage. About the infant sounds coming from the adjacent room, she tells them nothing, keeping the bundle of coos and gurgles tightly swaddled as they search the house and surrounding land time and again for evidence of a crime.

  They find none, overlooking the dim, shifting outline of a man huddled in the bedroom corner. Charlotte too learns to overlook him, and in time, he disappears altogether.

  As the girl blossoms from infant to toddler, Charlotte grows ever more pale, spending day and night watching her daughter play with toys inked upon the walls of their secluded existence. Her only regret is that, unlike the jacks and the swing, her daughter’s dark touch is unable to animate the other shadow child and grant herself a playmate.

  Walking home through waves of winter ash, a bundle of groceries held close to her chest, Charlotte is confronted by a woman cloaked in familiar wounds.

  “How’s your daughter?” the woman asks, cheeks streaked with rage.

  On both sides of the street, people have halted their journeys to bear witness. Charlotte’s answer is tentative. “Well, thank you. I was sorry to hear of yours. I pray they find her soon and in good health.”

  The woman spits in Charlotte’s face and hurries away, choked sobs trailing behind her. Sharp glares aimed at her heart pierce Charlotte’s winter coat, but they fail to embed themselves in her fading flesh.

  When she arrives at home, Charlotte is greeted by the sound of not one, but two children giggling. She rushes inside, terrified of what she knows she will find. Her daughter swings wide arcs across the nursery’s yellow walls, dusky locks trailing behind her like smoke. A second, unfamiliar, shadow child pushes her as the original watches, silent and unmoving as a statu
e.

  One by one, the town’s children vanish. One by one, their shadows appear in Charlotte’s home, the ranks of her daughter’s playground companions swelling into the dozens.

  Deceiver.

  Whore.

  Murderer.

  Witch…

  Little more than a whisper, Charlotte watches as a mob gathers outside—larger, angrier versions of wasps equipped with more than mere stings. Near the back, draped in robes, the elders watch with a singular pious gaze.

  “Give them back!”

  “Come out, or we’ll drag you out!”

  Someone throws a stone; it crashes through the window, and a river of children’s laughter leaks out.

  “I hear them. They’re inside.”

  “More lies. She must be destroyed!”

  The children gather round Charlotte, pulling her away from the windows just as the first blazing torch sails into the living room. In the nursery, her daughter twists in the swing. Charlotte tries to gather the girl into her arms, but they no longer have any substance. The girl laughs and points to the original shadow child still inked upon the wall.

  Exhausted, Charlotte sinks to the floor. This close to the shadow child, she can see flecks of dried blood admixed with the ink. Her blood.

  The flames spread. They creep down the hall, a light made to devour shadow.

  “Flesh of my flesh,” Charlotte says. “Love is sacrifice.” She presses her lips to the imprint and flows backward into herself. The children follow her into darkness.

  Charlotte wanders the boundless forest in a veil of midnight, surrounded by giggles and rustling leaves as tiny shadows dart from tree to tree through beams of moonlight. Ahead, she glimpses a break in the dense timber and, beyond that, a memory of her former self. Its slight frame shudders, exuding a fountain of grief.

  Charlotte calls wordlessly to the shadows and draws one to her breast. Then she moves to the edge of the night and asks the woman a question to which she already knows the answer.

  No Abiding Place on Earth

  Matthew M. Bartlett

  —Mary, don’t forget your cudgel.

  Mary mutters, how could she possibly forget, grabs the knotted, leaded blackthorn cudgel from the umbrella stand, knocking Daniel’s cane to the floor. He shouldn’t have said anything, he knew she was in a snit, and of course she knows to bring the cudgel, but…but a father’s job is to err on the side of protecting his daughter if he can. And for his trouble, she snaps at him. Mary, little Mary-kins, not so long ago just a doll-faced girl, curious and giggly and adoring, now hardened, weary-eyed, humorless. She slams the door behind her as he pushes himself up from the chair, groaning like a man much older than his 54 years, bends slowly to pick up the cane, stabs it back into the stand. He pulls back the curtain, scans the barren treetops. Their stripped limbs wave in the wind, a skeletal convocation pleading for an offering from the frowning, furrowed sky. Tendrils of mist, the ghosts of snakes, curl around their trunks. The telephone wires bounce gently like recently deserted tight-ropes.

  There don’t seem to be any of them out there, not now.

  From the other side of the hedges he hears the car door slam shut, the whinny and purr of the engine. She is okay. She will be okay. The cudgel will be enough.

  November, that brown and brittle season, has swung in hard on the heel of Halloween, and most days linger in a dusky malaise from start to finish, suspended in a bluish-grey solution of dread and dead leaves. Last night the wind kicked up hard, barren limbs smacking at the house like dried husks of hands. The windows rattled and shook in their casements and the cat drew close to Daniel in his easy chair, her chin in the crook of Daniel’s arm. When the wind yelped around the corners of the house, the cat whimpered, pressing closer. Daniel hoped fervently for the power to stay on.

  Most of them keep their distance when the lights are on.

  It started with the power outages. The first was in mid-September, resolved quickly, unremarkable. Another two days later, lasting nearly three hours. The next week brought four separate outages, over seven hours without electricity each go-round. Flashlights, candles, early to bed. Charge your devices while you can. When in doubt, throw it out.

  Another call to MassGrid, a subsidiary of The Global Electricity Group PLC. The unhappy union of squirrel and transformer, said the voice somewhere back in the phone’s speaker, distant, like a call from the outer reaches of the universe. That’s what you said every time I called last week. Are the squirrels committing mass suicide? Silence for a beat, a rote apology. We’re sorry sir. Crews are out and active, doing all they can.

  Uh-huh.

  The scratching at the windows starts up. The doorknob jiggles. The muttering, the guttural rumbling, the sighs at the windows, at the doorjamb.

  After a time, the house awakens with a hum and the lights flicker bright, too bright, blinding, then back to their usual weak dimness. The things retreat to the trees, beyond the reach of the streetlights.

  The outages still come, two or three a day, lasting hours.

  It was early October when Daniel first saw them. He was out for a walk, and he chanced to look up high in the grey sky and one was descending, some kind of strange owl, plucked bare. Pallid, knobby breast; flimsy, webbed wings dangling from twig-like arms, it flew only with a great deal of exertion. When it was a few yards off it began to coast, spreading its wings wide, and lit in a copse of trees, its long-toed feet scrambling to grasp a gnarled branch. Twigs snapped and a flurry of leaves and…and the trees were full of the things. Daniel took a few tentative steps in their direction, then clasped his hand over his mouth. Their heads resembled those of elderly men, wispy white hair, wizened, slack mouths curtained with pink, blistered dewlaps. One turned its hooded, sagging eye in his direction. Then the others did the same. They coughed and wheezed and began flapping their sad wings as if to launch. It sounded like the smacking of slackened cheeks when someone rapidly shakes his head back and forth.

  Then they did launch, all of them, at once. Daniel dropped to his knees, covered his head. They swarmed above him, flapping and wheezing and muttering. When they had passed, he turned and saw a boy—the Bernier kid, probably—running down Prospect Street, the horrid flock flying low above him, bellowing and belching and screeching. The front-most creature swooped down and grabbed the boy by the collar and left sleeve of his shirt. He cried out as he was lifted into the sky. The flock ascended into the clouds, the boy struggling to release himself, to punch at the horrid thing that carried him, small legs kicking uselessly at the sky. Daniel stared after them, helpless.

  Since they came, everything deteriorates with alarming rapidity. The cat litter dampens and clumps into concrete. The milk curdles minutes out of the refrigerator. The bread, fresh from the machine, sprouts green bruises. Peaches erupt with black blisters and crumple, flies bursting from their rotten cores, buzzing madly. Tea cools before it reaches Daniel’s lips. He cracks an egg and the yolk is black gelatin. The smell is rank, gag-inducing.

  Even the bulbs in the lamps don’t have the reach they once did.

  The worst thing is that there’s nothing about the creatures on the news. Daniel watches the two local channels, scans the daily paper, which the carrier, brave soul, still somehow manages to fling onto the doorstep every day but Sunday. There are three houses on the short dead-end street, three including the one he shares with Mary. The other two have shed their tenants and whatever belongings they could fit in their cars. Daniel wonders where they’re going and whether they’ll get there. He doesn’t know how widespread the problem is. He wishes they’d talk about it on the news.

  Mary’s been gone four hours, the longest stretch yet. The local markets are locked up tight or else busted open, trashed and looted, and she has to go further and further to find canned food and simple provisions.

  Daniel is again left alone with his thoughts. They are not welcome companions. He considers his belly, now hanging over his belt-line. His
belt digs into his flesh when he sits, carving painful welts into his waist. His own heartbeat nags him about his mortality. He is aware of it more and more as he ages, especially in the silences when Mary’s gone out or sits sequestered in her room. It thumps out the years like a kitchen timer. Like anything else, it will stop, ring the harsh and jarring bell of finality. It could do so at any moment, as his father’s had; the old man had simply crumpled to the kitchen floor while scrambling eggs, the spatula gripped in his white-knuckled hand.

  Further, Mary has been complaining that she can hear his snoring from her room. He probably has sleep apnea. Stops breathing who knows how many times a night. And he speculates at what tiny cancers might even now be multiplying somewhere in the murky purple depths of his body. He turns over in his tired mind every fatal scenario he can conjure. Death flies among his thoughts, a black wraith tracing a zig-zag path among moon-drunk birds.

  Daniel turns on the television to silence his thoughts. Channel 22 is interviewing a beloved coach about his retirement…and damned if one of the things isn’t perched atop city hall in the background, blurry, but unmistakable; its spindly legs twitching; rheumy, hate-filled eyes surveying the town common. Daniel sits up in the chair, stares. His hands open and close. He wants to shout, to warn the people on the screen. The thing’s talons scrape the brick, red clouds spill down onto the walk below. A couple walking below see the thing, flinch, scurry into traffic, protecting their faces with crossed forearms among the screaming of car brakes and the shouts of horns. Not a word from the reporter as the coach prattles on, oblivious. The thing launches awkwardly from its perch, lurches through the sky and off-screen.

  He calls the station’s You Report It Hotline. The phone rings and rings.