Four Dark Nights

by Bentley Little

  Unwilling to speak a single word, Samantha only tugged on the spread again, the fabric straining, the weight of her father’s corpse like an anchor between them, mooring them to this spot.

  At length, Brian nodded and they continued on.

  They walked the gauntlet. More gulls swept down to join the others and a new kind of cold not bom of the water or the air settled into her bones as they opened a path for her to pass through. On each side of her, the black-eyed birds kept baleful watch, but soon the waves were lapping around her thighs again and then her knees, and the cotton-draped corpse was dragging along the rocky bottom.

  Samantha glanced up at the island, at the trees and the thick brush, at the rocky shore just ahead, and she remembered with utter clarity that night five years before. The women—three of them, draped in red, beautiful things with skin like alabaster and hair raven black. They stand at the shore of the island just at the water’s edge, their arms spread wide, palms up, and flames dance upon their open hands.

  With a start she blinked and saw only the dark ocean around her, the island ominous ahead, felt the weight of the dead man they were carrying. In that instant the memory had been so rich and real as if she had been seeing it all again. That night with all the talk of death and of Viking warriors and Valhalla and…

  Samantha frowned and glanced back at Brian. So smart, his mind filled with retained knowledge from a thousand books. She had forgotten, really, how smart he was. That night he had told them more than any of them would have known about the myths of the Norsemen who legend said had settled here for a time. Samantha wondered if that had made what they had both seen that night harder for him to accept, or easier. Scottie had started to tell them about the legends and about the gulls keeping people away.

  The gulls.

  The birds were still staring at her. Samantha did not want to look into their eyes and so she kept her gaze forward. But she remembered what Scottie had said. The gulls wouldn’t let anyone get within ten feet of the island. They’d peck your eyes out.

  Samantha was perhaps two feet from shore, only a white froth around her ankles, the corpse dragging behind her. She paused and stared at the place where the waves slapped the rocks. They would have to heft the waterlogged corpse up onto the land and then drag it through the brush. Maybe they could rest for a while; now that they were here, another ten minutes seemed very little to ask. Not here on the shore, where someone with keen vision looking out from the cottage might spot them, but there in the brush , . . past the roosting gulls.

  She wondered if it was their nesting place and if that was why the legions of sea birds clustered so tightly together there, where the rocks met the undergrowth. The trilling of the birds continued, an almost orchestral sound, though the ones floating nearby were silent.

  Samantha glanced back at Brian, who nodded grimly. She wrapped the spread around her arm and together they lifted it out of the water and carried it onto the shore.

  The moment her foot touched dry land, the trilling stopped. It was replaced almost immediately by a deafening flurry of wings beating air and then the gulls began to scream.

  A cloud of birds rose from their roosts on shore and moved toward her and Brian like a tornado. Others had been circling above and dropped down at them now as though they had forgotten to fly and were concerned only with attack. Those in the water flew the several feet that separated them, wingtips slapping the surf.

  Brian shouted as a gull slammed into his chest.

  Samantha screamed as tiny talons tugged at her hair and a bird struck her face, wings battering her. It pecked her cheek, cutting her, and the salt air stung the wound as blood dripped down her face. Talons raked her arm through her thick sweatshirt and the birds swarmed like insects around her.

  In a frenzy, she shouted and cried out and covered her eyes with her arms. She screamed at them and beat the air, and felt the satisfying connection as her left hand batted a gull from the sky. She kicked something near her cold-numbed foot that pecked at her leg.

  “Sam!” Brian called from behind her. “Back into the water! Get back into the water!”

  “No!” she roared, blood streaming like tears down her face. When she screamed again, the words were for the gulls, for whatever power suffused the monument that gave the island its name, whatever presence lingered in that altar and the ground beneath it.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed hysterically.

  Eyes still closed, birds scratching and pecking at her, Samantha bent down and scrambled until her hands closed on the sodden bedspread. Her exhaustion forgotten now, she pulled up on her end and she ran up the rocky shore, not slowing when she twisted her ankle on the difficult terrain. The birds flew right into her now, struck her, and she staggered back. Again she screamed but the words were unintelligible now.

  With another surge of energy she pushed forward again and the bedspread snagged on the rocky shore. Samantha pulled it sideways, stumbled beneath the onslaught of the birds. The fingers of her left hand loosened and the spread slipped loose and it opened and the wet, pale, gleaming corpse of Carl Finnin rolled out and flopped onto the rocks.

  Despair overtook Sam’s frenzy and she dropped into a crouch beside her father and threw her hands over her head to wait for the birds to drive her down onto the ground. They could tear her apart, but she was not leaving him here.

  A flutter of wings.

  A curious trilling.

  The onslaught ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Slowly, Samantha looked up, wincing at the pain in her face and hands where they had injured her the worst. Dozens of gulls had alighted upon the ground near the dead man. Like solemn mourners at a wake they filed past the hideous corpse with its sewn-up grin, stuffing leaking out from behind one torn eyelid.

  Brian stood perhaps ten feet off shore, his neck a bloody mess and a pair of long, deep scratches on his left cheek. He stared wide-eyed at the birds and then looked slowly up at Sam.

  Even as he did, the gulls began to drift off in ones and twos, some floating again on the water, others taking to the sky, and the largest mass hopping back to roost on that strange zone between rock and brush.

  But where there had been an unbroken, rustling carpet of the birds stretching across their intended path before, now there was a ten-foot swath of bird shit dappling the ground, a gap among the roosting gulls.

  Almost like an invitation.

  7

  There was no path. Subconsciously, Samantha had expected that when they reached the thick brush that led up the steep hill that made the bulk of the small island, there would be some narrow way by which they could travel inward toward the altar. But there was no path.

  Of course there was no path.

  The gulls had kept tourists and curiosity seekers away. If she were to believe the legends—and oh how she believed— the last people to visit this small isle with any regularity were Vikings who had set up a trading outpost on the rocky coast of Maine. A path would have required the tread of human feet to wear it down over time.

  Another time she might have felt a sense of wonder about being the first person to intrude upon this wild spot in so very many years. But Samantha was wounded, scratched and bleeding; exhaustion had partially numbed the muscles in her shoulders and neck and arms, but not completely. So rather than wonder she felt only dull anger at the lack of a clear trail. Brian suggested, his voice muffled as though he were in a daze, that they might try to circle around and see if there was an easier way inward and upward.

  Samantha crouched, pulled the edges of the bedspread in both hands and turned around so that she held it over her shoulder like some mighty sack—a macabre, grotesque Santa Claus. She waited then, for if Brian did not pick up his end, the corpse would just slide out onto the ground again. Seconds ticked by. She did not look back at him.

  Finally, she felt the shifting of her burden as he hefted it off the ground. Then she started forward. The low brush was not difficult, mainly a matter of being careful where she set he
r feet down, as each step might have caused her to stumble. The going was steep and so she bent into it, her calves prickling with needles of pain from the exertion, tendons and ligaments protesting. But Brian had the bulk of the weight, coming up behind her, and he made no complaint so she felt the need to stifle any groan or curse she might otherwise have uttered.

  The way became even more difficult as they pressed on through the small trees that populated the interior of the island. It was spring and the leaves had started to return, but each branch remained a skeletal claw that threatened to add to the damage the gulls had done.

  Samantha kept her head down, her elbows joined in front of her face, her hands clasped over her right shoulder gripping the bedspread. And they pressed on.

  After several minutes, the trees and the very air itself seemed to darken around them. She frowned and glanced upward. The night sky was still relatively clear, the moon and stars still there, but somehow they suddenly seemed far more distant than ever before, as if they had retreated farther from the world. Or as though Monument Island was trying to hide itself away from their view.

  The terrain flattened out and Samantha paused, then stumbled forward as Brian took two more steps before realizing she had done so. When they were both standing still, they looked around and realized they had come to a son of plateau. Perhaps one hundred feet ahead, the island continued upward toward its highest point, but here it had flattened out and the trees were taller and more sparse, mostly full-sized oak and ash trees. Samantha was relieved. The going would be much simpler now.

  With a deep breath, she set her body again to transport their burden, and continued. She had not gone a dozen steps before she saw it there, off to the left, in a barren clearing on that plateau. No trees grew around it; rather there was a kind of rough circle of large rocks jutting from the ground there. Each was as tall as she was, some narrow, as if slivers had been driven up out of the earth, and others as much as ten feet across. But that image in her mind of them being driven up from the earth was what struck her right away. She had read about stone circles before. Stonehenge was perhaps the most famous, and she had seen pictures of that. Slabs of granite erected on a plain so that they created a pattern, a circle, a place of worship. But very much man-made.

  This wasn’t like that at all. Though there were other rocks that protruded from the ground on this plateau—and it was a craggy island, so that was normal enough—this circle seemed to have formed naturally. Which was impossible, of course. Samantha knew that. And the Vikings who had come here must have known that, too. Almost certainly, the extraordinary nature of that spot was what had led them to build their altar at the center of the circle.

  For the altar was all the stone circle was not. It was the same stone, of course, the sort of flinty ledge that comprised most of the rock on the island. A geologist could have told her what it was called, but Samantha had been seeing the stuff all her life and so in her mind it was simply rock. Brown and gray and stratified.

  Once upon a time, someone had broken it away from the hillside, this enormous piece of stone that must have measured five feet by ten. They had chipped and sanded away at one side to flatten it and laid it upon a foundation of half a dozen much smaller stones that functioned as its legs. The elements had smoothed it over the ages.

  “Do you hear that?”

  Samantha glanced behind her to find Brian staring back the way they had come. She followed his gaze but saw only the trees and brush, the ocean beyond them, and a few cottages that had lights in the windows. The sea breeze seemed to wash over everything, but Samantha heard nothing out of the ordinary. When Brian turned to look curiously at her, she shrugged.

  “I don’t—”

  “Singing,” he said. A nervous smile flickered across his features. “Listen.”

  Again she scanned the slope of the island behind her and the surface of the ocean. The hush of wind and surf was omnipresent, static white noise that was inaudible unless you tried to pay attention to it. For a long moment, Samantha could hear nothing else. Then she wrinkled her brow as another sound came to her, a sweet, high melody. As suddenly as it had become audible to her, so did it stop almost immediately.

  Samantha shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Music from one of the cottages. Maybe just the wind on the rocks. If it finds a crevice or something, the wind can whistle.”

  Brian looked at her as though she were crazy and shook his head slowly. “That’s not the wind.”

  A flash of anger went through her and Samantha gritted her teeth. What the fuck was wrong with him, letting himself get all freaked out now, after everything they’d been through today.

  “It’s almost over,” Samantha told him. “Try to keep your shit together for a few more minutes, okay?”

  He winced as if she had slapped him and Samantha did not blame him. The edge she heard in her own voice was disturbing, but she refused to let him see that it bothered her as well. Earlier that day as they caught up over coffee, everything had seemed so much clearer and more tangible. It had made sense to her then that Brian had showed up at her father’s funeral. Seeing his face had triggered her memories of Monument Island and the ghost fire and the legends Scottie had told them about.

  There was something fateful about that. In the back of her mind it had even occurred to her that there was a whole lot of destiny at work here, not merely that life had put her together again with the only person in the world who might have helped her do this thing, but that there might be a second chance for them. It had been years since Samantha had spent any time with a guy she really cared about whom she felt reciprocated. The idea that fate had thrown her together with Brian again with some determined purpose—a way to discover the love they had once shared—had not seemed terribly far-fetched at all. Particularly not given the other things crowding in her mind at that time.

  Now he was just getting on her nerves.

  “You’ve changed,” he said glumly, eyes on her.

  Samantha frowned. “Yeah?” Then she nodded. “Yeah. I guess I have. You, too. Life will do that to you.”

  A sadness seemed to flow through him and his eyes to cloud over. Then Brian fixed his grip more firmly on his end of the bedspread and nodded to urge her on. He said nothing more about what he had heard, but Samantha found herself listening more carefully to the wind and the surf and glancing anxiously at the deeper shadows in the places where the trees grew closer together.

  With a deep breath, Samantha lugged her father’s body in its linen-closet shroud to the stone circle, slipped among the obelisks that jutted from the ground and rested the corpse upon the altar there. Brian approached to set his end down as well and the body folded awkwardly under the bedspread, limbs poking the sodden fabric as though the corpse were moving of its own accord.

  “Take the spread off,” Brian said. “He’ll never bum otherwise.”

  Samantha was bent over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath, and she blinked in surprise at his tone. His gaze had grown hard and he looked not at her but at the dead man upon that slab of rock. The plastic gas can still hung tethered to his belt, sliding against his soaked jeans. Now Brian reached down to grasp the can by its handle and he investigated it to make sure it had not opened during their crossing, that no seawater had gotten in. When he was through, he regarded her at last.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll start gathering wood.”

  Without another word he moved between the standing stones in the circle and was gone. Samantha edged sideways to try to see him and caught just a glimpse of his silhouette in the darkness, gray shadow against black night. For a long moment she peered through the gap between two stones and found herself hoping he would cross her field of vision again, but he did not. As if entranced, she gazed at the snatch of clearing she could see between the stone and the budding branches that scratched at the sky with each gust of wind. It was as though the stone circle were a cage.

  Something rustled behind her and S
amantha felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Spooked, she spun to see that the wind was blowing back the bedspread. It flapped heavily, still soaked, but it pulled back enough to reveal the feet of the corpse on the stone slab. Water dripped from the toes of her father’s black socks and suddenly it seemed awful, even shameful to her that she had left his shoes back in the cemetery.

  Daddy.

  When she could see his face—that monstrous death mask— it was easy to distance herself from the cold, dead thing. But as she stared at those black socks clinging to lifeless feet, an image forced its way into her head of her father wading into the frigid water of Ogunquit Beach with her. Samantha might have been ten or eleven, certainly no more. The salt spray had a flavor she could taste on the air and the beach was packed with people flying colorful kites and Quebecois women who had come down from Montreal and wore bathing suits that required a remarkable and wonderful shamelessness that made her eyes go wide with something very like admiration.

  Yet there was her father, that late spring afternoon, stepping into the water with his hands up, moving so tentatively, almost daintily despite all the people around him who might think he looked silly. And he had looked silly, but Carl Finnin hadn’t cared at all. When his daughter had giggled and covered her mouth, already waist deep, he had given her a scowl that hid a smile beneath.

  “You’re lucky you’re a girl,” he had said. “The cold water does a job on guys.”

  Then a wave had come and washed over him high enough to reach his navel and her dad had hissed air in through his teeth and pulled his legs tight together, bringing his hands down to shield his groin. Samantha had giggled even more loudly at this little dance her father had done, for he looked as though he had to go to the bathroom.

  With a small groan he had dived into the water and come up seconds later to let out a small shout, something about the cold. When he saw his daughter’s grin, Carl Finnin had splashed her and then swum closer to her, humming an ominous tune.