Wither

by J. G. Passarella

  The rush of flight again, not memory, but now. She is flying again, swooping down over the field of circles, where he is running, running in circles. Another boy. The one who interferes with her chosen. She swoops down to clutch this one, claws aching for the feel of flesh crushed beneath them. She wants to punish him, to tear him apart. He senses her, looks up, his face a pale blur of fright. He is…

  “Alex!” Wendy’s eyes snapped open, sleep instantly vanquished in a bright blossom of fear. She sat on the floor of her bedroom, shivering, arms wrapped around her bent knees, alone. It had been the worst dream yet. And she prayed it was only a dream.

  She was lost without his heat beside her, maybe lost forever…

  By the time he’d returned to his dorm room, Alex was wide awake. After the freaky fire incident in the woods, when he thought Wendy had severely burned her arm, he thought his heart would never return to its resting rate. Later, he had calmed down, but Wendy had completely surprised him by taking him into her bed. Despite a layer of physical exhaustion and the memory of sheer pleasures, his mind was bouncing around, out of control, trying to sort out everything that had happened in a few short hours. No chance sleep would come anytime soon, so he decided he might as well jog out all his kinks, give himself time to think in the familiar solitude of Marshall Field. In other words, a mental cool down.

  He completed his stretching routine and curled his hands behind his neck, breathing deeply as he walked out onto the crumbling track. This was an old familiar place, he wasn’t nervous here, even at night. He began his first lap at a light pace, breathing easily through his nose, not pushing himself…. Yet.

  He also had to admit that while he found the ritual in the woods unusual in an extreme sense, it had also been incredibly sexy and… fun. “At least until it got really spooky.”

  Alex finished the first lap, reset the chronometer on his watch to zeroes, pressed the start button, and broke forward in a brisk run. Even though he could judge his pace accurately without it, the watch provided a backup when he was distracted. He quickened his pace after glancing at his watch, really wanting to work up a sweat tonight. His mind wandered to memories of intimacy with Wendy, leaving the immediacy of his physical exertion behind.

  He came around the last turn of the track to complete his third lap. As he neared the home team bleachers, he felt a cold draft of air wash up from behind him, a rotten breeze. He gagged, glanced back, and nearly screamed at what he saw. A clot of night and shadow was nearly on top of him.

  He stumbled, got quickly to his feet, and sprinted forward without looking back. Never look back! His coach’s voice yelling at him in trial runs. He ran with every ounce of strength, crossing the lanes of the track toward the grass. He had just run his best ever hundred-meter dash time.

  A mantra. Don’t look back. Don’t look back. But the scared, primal animal inside him was in command tonight, not the coach. He glanced back. Nothing behind him. Where—?

  It hit him between the shoulder blades, slamming him to the ground. Rolling with the blow, he avoided its claws as they scored the ground where he had been a moment before. Back on his feet, moving quickly before it could adjust its attack.

  Alex zigzagged across the grass, as if eluding a sniper’s scope, then hurdled the Cyclone fence. Definitely not one of his sports. His pants ripped as he came down awkwardly. He fell to his palms just as the flying thing struck the fence with a rattling clang that bowed the Cyclone fence like one of those snag lines that catch landing jets aboard aircraft carriers. It shrieked at him, a strange, drawn-out, fear-inducing sound that made his skin crawl. Alex looked ahead at the home team bleachers. Twenty feet away. He could make it if—

  —pain exploded on the side of his head as a clawed hand nearly ripped his right ear off.

  Staggering, stumbling, he threw himself through the gap between the third-and fourth-row benches. The brittle concrete foundation scraped the skin off his arm from wrist to elbow. When he stood up abruptly, he struck his head on an iron support, a bright spike of yellow sparks lancing through his brain.

  He listened for the flying thing, but heard only the ringing in his ears. Hunched over, he scampered deep under the bleachers until he had enough headroom to move about freely. He looked up at the horizontal slices of night sky visible between the wooden benches overhead.

  Long moments passed in silence. Alex thought that it—whatever it was—might have flown away, that maybe he was safe. He rose from his hunchbacked position. The seat above his head exploded, spraying chunks of decayed wood like shrapnel at his face. In the middle of the ruptured seat, a black clawed hand shot down, grasping convulsively. And just beyond, a snarling visage filled with long yellow teeth. He dodged but felt the claws catch his nylon warm-up jacket. He purled away, trying to wriggle out of the jacket. The cloth tore, and overbalanced, he fell to the ground.

  The weight of the thing above him came down on the split bench with the force of a pile driver. Any moment the creature would come crashing through right on top of him.

  Under the bleachers, Alex rolled across the concrete, avoiding the scrabbling arms. He was deathly cold, watching the flying thing’s clawed arms and feet clang against the iron struts, raking furrows through the broken concrete, missing him by inches and less. The sheer bulk of the thing kept its whole body from dropping down through the rusted iron framework of the bleachers, but that barrier couldn’t be trusted to remain sturdy beneath that incredible weight and ferocity.

  His glimpse of the demonic face had brought with it a terrible recognition. A charcoal drawing, on sketch paper, before Wendy had folded it up and tossed it into the flames. Wendy had somehow known this thing existed, but how? She had been trying to banish this…“bogeyman.” Obviously that spell had failed.

  Suddenly the creature was gone, rising back into the starry sky, withdrawing long limbs from the ruptured bench. His scraped arm ached, and his torn ear throbbed with every rapid heartbeat. A sticky trail of blood ran down his neck. His only chance was to make a dash out from the bleachers, get into a building, somewhere, under a car, something, before the creature realized he had slipped free. But he needed a fair head start to make it anywhere close to a safe haven, if such a thing existed. Marshall Field, unfortunately, was isolated from the rest of the campus, so his only hope was some sort of diversion.

  His gaze never left the slices of dark sky between the benches. That’s why he noticed when a constellation of stars winked out to his left. He dropped to a crouch as the bench over him shattered. Scampering sideways, crab-fashion, he evaded the sweeping hand, flashing claws. Gone.

  He looked frantically to the left and right. Where the hell is it?

  The rusted iron framework above him had begun to creak under the stress. A fine grit of rust showered down on him, coating his sweats and stinging his eyes. Suddenly a large section of rotted timber struck his shoulder. He cried out in pain, falling even as the clawed hands burst through the debris once again.

  One thick arm scooped him up like a doll, slammed his body against the broken bench seat and iron supports, trying to pull him through the splintered gap. He blanked out for a second, then regained awareness as he slipped free of the grasp.

  He scrambled back, his breathing an agony. Several broken ribs, definitely, he thought, pressed in fear against an iron stanchion. His wrist was a mess, too, a bad sprain, already swelling. Was he still entertaining a mad dash across the Danfield campus with broken ribs?

  The palm of his good hand pressed the loose concrete around the stanchion, a saucer-size piece shifted, scraped against the ground. He looked around, away from the ticket booth, and realized he had one chance to create a distraction. A large trash Dumpster sat fifteen yards beyond the bleachers.

  Darkness streaked across the star-flecked sky.

  He tossed the chunk of stone like a Frisbee toward the hulking Dumpster. The concrete wedge hit the side of the bin with a thundering racket, and in an instant, the thing pounced with a terrifying
ferocity.

  Alex scrambled to his feet, took a couple of steps, and knew it was useless. Behind him he heard the creature’s ravenous destruction in the Dumpster. A momentary silence fell, which frightened him even more. When he couldn’t hear it, he didn’t know where it was, what it was doing. He trotted gamely toward the ticket booth. After that he would be out in the open and it was at least a quarter mile to the nearest campus building. He thought he might even be able to make it…. If he stopped gasping with every painful step. Why hadn’t he borrowed Oz’s car tonight of all nights?

  Then the inhuman roar of the creature and the thunderous weight of it pounding across the bleachers seats, clawed feet splitting timber, the iron framework first creaking then groaning. All around Alex, reality distorted like a Dali-esque image, with the metal framework bending and twisting all around him. It felt like an earthquake and the sky was falling all at the same time. A creaking explosion as everything gave way and the ticket booth was still too far away.

  He didn’t even have time to look up as the tortured metal and rotted timbers came down to crush him like a giant’s fist in one murderous instant, the last flash of pain so brilliant and quicksilver that it winked out in a merciful darkness.

  He never heard the sirens.

  Paul dreamt he was a child again, cowering inside the doghouse he’d built for the family’s beloved Lab. So lucid was the nightmare that close overhead he could see the plywood roof and rusted shingling nails bed hammered in astray. Outside the doghouse, he knew (with a dream’s dread certainty) something hungry was hunting him…

  Thud!

  Paul woke with a start, nearly tipping the folding chair in which he’d been dozing. He shook his head, still baffled with sleep. Karen lay sweat-sheened and feverish, the sheets kicked free and her nightgown raked up above her breasts. She gave a low moan and arched her back, as if the bed itself was burning, as if she was offering up the naked swell of her pregnant belly on some dark altar.

  “Karen?” Paul asked, frightened, and heard her groan in reply. He saw a strange bruise at the base of her throat, a purpling of the skin, like a ligature mark—

  Thud!

  Something heavy landed on the pitched roof overhead, and in that single heartbeat’s silence before the attack began, Paul knew deep in his heart that his nightmare had found him in the waking world.

  “No!” Karen cried from her own fever-dream as the scrabbling overhead turned destructive. It sounded to Paul in those first furious moments like a wrecking crew attacking the roof with crowbars. He heard the stuttering pop-pop-pop-pop of roofing nails coming loose as whole sheets of shingles were torn free…, heard the explosive splintering of the first plywood being ripped from the frame…

  The whole house shook beneath the attack, and a fine rain of powdered drywall sifted down like fairy dust over the bed where Karen lay writhing. In that instant Paul understood that the thing on the roof wanted Karen for itself, and would not be denied.

  No time to think. No time to plan a defense… Paul ran to the bedroom window and threw open the screened sash. Ignoring the three-story drop, he swung his upper body outside and turned so he was sitting on the sill. He gripped the edge of the roof, the shingles gritty beneath his fingertips. He contorted himself until he managed to get his work boots on the windowsill, and then stood, hauling himself up onto the roof…

  The full moon had brightened in its ascent until it became bone white and radiant, like a bleached skull. It cast a brilliant cold light over the rooftop landscape of chimneys and satellite dishes.

  And illuminated the dark goblin at work on Karen’s rooftop. It was enormous, a hunched black thing…its spine a tortured ridge in the moonlight…its crooked arms draped in tatters like Spanish moss.

  The monster’s back was to Paul as it focused entirely on its task of destruction. It tore another long sheet of shingles free and tossed it aside. Raised a claw like a cage of branches and punched through the plywood, shrieking as it worked—

  Paul cast about for a weapon. Fixed on the crumbling chimney a few yards away. The mortar was rotten, the bricks leaning precariously. Project number four on his priority list of repairs before winter. He tugged two bricks free of the crumbling stack and had the fleeting thought Don’t be an idiot! You can’t fight it up here…. This is its domain…

  He pushed the fear away and embraced the cold fury that shot through him like a current of mercury. He hurled the first brick-It struck the goblin between its broad shoulders, and when the monster turned in outrage the second brick hit it full in the face. It shrieked in agony as the sun-rotten brick shattered, driving fragments of splintered brick into its eye.

  Paul staggered back a step on the pitched roof as the goblin swelled in rage, its hunched back broadening around it like a cape. It fixed him with a look of pure hate, and though he’d never before seen a face so horrible he recognized it nonetheless as human…

  At 2 a.m., long after visiting hours had concluded for the night, Abby’s father came staggering onto the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Hed been out drinking at the Tap Room all evening and reeked now of cigarettes and cheap beer. He was a self-pitying drunk, a barroom Job, and tonight as his drinking mates stood him one sympathy round after another he’d become increasingly maudlin, lamenting his shitty life…an even shittier ex-wife…and most of all the shitty twist of fate that had landed his little girl in the hospital…

  His circuitous homeward journey behind the wheel of his Camaro took him through Windale’s rolling hinterlands, and when he looked up suddenly and found himself outside Windale General he decided then and there that he had every right—as a parent, as a victim—to visit Abby.

  He’d slipped easily past the groggy security guard in the lobby and rode the elevator up to the quiet PICU. For once, luck was on his side, and the night RNs on duty were occupied elsewhere as he passed their abandoned station.

  He entered Abby’s little alcove and sat by her bedside, listening to the quiet beep-beep-beep of her heart monitor. She was resting curled up on her side, sucking the two long fingers of her right hand while her left played absently with her blond hair. He didn’t understand why she still wore the metal halo, didn’t understand why they’d said at first she’d never walk again but had now changed their minds. Doctors. He knew only that he disliked them. Especially that smart-ass with the fucked-up foreign name who looked at him as if he had no fair claim to fatherhood.

  Abby wasn’t sleeping, but neither did she seem entirely awake, and lay staring past him at the wall. “Hey, baby,” he said quietly. Nothing. She still wasn’t talking; and he felt no urgency to encourage her. He felt nervous with her here, among strangers. Vulnerable. Both of them.

  He reached out to touch one of her bare legs where she’d kicked free the blankets. He could feel his daughter’s pulse at the knee, tiny and lost.

  Her eyes flicked to him then, as if noticing for the first time he was there. “Hey, sugar,” he said, giving her a smile that he hoped bound them, father and daughter, in secret covenant. He leaned across the space separating them to give her a kiss on the brow, and noticed the deep discoloration at her throat, as if she’d been caught in a garrote. At the same time he caught a whiff of something unpleasant exuding from her skin—

  Her hand shot out and clamped around his Adam’s apple. Her nostrils flared, and he thought he saw her smiling as he dropped to his knees at the bedside,…trying to free himself from her crushing grip on his throat…

  The little girl sat up, eyes rolled back in her head. With her free hand she wrenched the halo free, tugging until the cranial screws came loose. Thin rivulets of blood trickled down from her hairline. She swung her legs out of bed.

  She released her father and he pitched forward, choking and retching on the floor. From his vantage he saw his daughter’s bare feet on the tiles, and looking up he saw her move as if in a trance away from the bed. She didn’t seem to notice the IVs she was trailing until the rubes grew taught; then she turned and wit
h a single savage jerk yanked the needles free of her veins.

  He lay curled up now, holding his bruised throat, looking up at his daughter. She froze suddenly where she stood, alert like a doe to some unseen danger. She cocked her head and listened, tracking the sound across the ceiling tiles. She made a weird warbling sound, a coo, and then she urinated, the stream soaking her hospital gown and pooling at her bare feet.

  He cowered beneath the hospital bed and watched as the little girl who had been his daughter followed the sound she alone heard out of the room.

  In the dream that wasn’t a dream, Abby was walking again, the tiles chilly beneath her feet as she moved through the silent PICU corridors. She felt drawn forward by an invisible tether, like the irresistible sound of music playing in a distant room-Her eyes were closed now, she no longer needed them to follow the call that drew her through night-silent corridors. Her feet turned to a whisper as tiles became carpet. She trailed the long fingers of her right hand (her becoming fingers) along the wall like a blind girl, and with the confidence of the blind knew her touch would not betray her but would lead her safely through this unlit terrain…

  Here. She opened her eyes and found herself in another short corridor, before a set of pine doors. The doors opened for her, and she seemed to glide forward weightlessly.

  The chapel was empty, its darkness heavy with the smell of extinguished candles. The doors shushed closed behind her, sighing on their tired hinges. As she floated deeper into the waiting darkness she dropped her hands, fingertips gliding over the smooth ranks of pews to either side. Above the simple altar rose the chapel’s sole adornment, a great abstract mosaic of stained glass through which the full moon shown.

  Abby hung suspended before the altar, dappled in the kaleidoscope of filtered moonlight. She could hear the call of the moon beyond the glass, a single deeply resonant note, like the sound a mountain might make…