Lisa had tried so hard not to hate her. The woman suffered several obvious—yet undiagnosed due to an extraordinary talent for lying—mental illnesses. Still, it was difficult not to let that poison seep into her veins when she considered the multitude of shitty decisions on her mother’s part that had nearly ruined her life. She would not be that woman no matter how determined Angel was to drive her to it. She would not take the path of least resistance.
The street was desolate, even the houses darkened, as if the entire town was in hiding. A palpable tension clung to the air, a silence pregnant with horrors yet undreamed. But Lisa did not fear it. She had already endured a parent’s worst nightmare.
Lisa set down her bag, then stripped off her sweater and wrapped it around her hand, leaving her in just her bra. The hair on the back of her neck bristled like porcupine quills from the stares of unseen eyes. She had to make this quick. She balled her fist and drove it into the glass just above the knob. The window splintered into a spider web. She punched it one more time, and glass tinkled into the office.
Mommy, the wind sighed against her cheek. Lisa shook it off and brushed away the loose fragments before reaching in to unlock the door. Once inside, she shook out her sweater, then tugged it back on. The floor looked like a murder scene. She rubbed her knuckles. She hadn’t hit anything that hard in years.
Lisa dug her phone out of her bag and switched on the flashlight app. Cheerful posters, mostly of things to do on the lake, adorned the walls. Two metal desks sat side by side with a narrow aisle between them. Before the desks, a door on the left led to the museum, while one on the right opened onto the library and archives, neither of which could be very big since Lake Passage had only existed for a hundred years or so.
The phone’s battery had already drained to seventy-five percent. Lisa chose the archives and closed the door behind her, wishing for a lock. A windowless room, not surprising. Air and sunlight were old documents’ greatest enemies.
This could have been your life, getting your folklore degree and immersing yourself in research. If it wasn’t for him. Or especially her.
She should have never let him talk her into going off the antidepressants. What the hell did he know about psychiatry? He was a fucking attorney. And she hadn’t met one yet who didn’t think he or she was an expert on every other subject too.
She pushed down the bubble of rage burning in her chest. She welcomed emotion, any emotion, after so many years of feeling nothing at all. But her bitterness toward Jeremy wouldn’t stay buried much longer. Lisa pulled the blue construction paper from her purse and unrolled it, staring at the symbol. A mountain? A sail? A doorway? A window? For fuck’s sake, it could be anything if she thought about it hard enough.
Something skittered in the walls, or outside them, nails clacking against wood. Lisa jerked her head up and swallowed the panic creeping up her throat. She pulled several large, bound volumes of local newspapers from a shelf and began her search for something she could not even name.
The cell phone clung to fifteen percent battery life. Though Lisa had discovered nothing relating to the symbol, the time spent in the archives hadn’t been a total waste. Children had gone missing here every year since Jessie’s death, a relatively even mix of tourists and locals. Most people first assumed drowning as the cause, which might have sufficed if not for the fact that girls accounted for every victim. Both divers and sonar had explored the lake dozens of times, and a pattern emerged suggesting the work of a ritualistic serial killer. Every little waterlogged body bore the unmistakable features of burned flesh.
The burning came after the drowning. A scouring of evidence and a lot of trouble to go through only to toss them back into the lake afterward.
“Many residents are afraid to go out at night,” read the final paragraph of the most recent report. “They claim the dead wander in the darkness, seeking the living to join them. Some attribute the story to the legend of the Weeping Woman, who kidnaps children as she wanders the Earth, searching for her own murdered offspring so she can enter Heaven. Local Native Americans, on the other hand, believe the Mishi-ginebig, a man-eating water serpent that lives at the bottom of lakes, is responsible for the disappearances.”
Hard to believe people still clung to superstitious nonsense. Then again, the island housed a center catering to New Age woo-woo bullshit, and billions of people entrusted every aspect of their lives to invisible sky deities. Even the internet generated new urban legends all the time. Humans were hardwired to respond to feelings over logic, to search for patterns and impart to them purposeful agency. To believe in the supernatural.
They want me to go outside. They want me to come with them.
Lisa shuddered. Angel had no way of knowing about Jessie, unless Jeremy had told her. But what kind of father shared that story with a six year old?
She crept out of the archives and back through the office to the front door. She peered through the shattered glass but saw nothing, no one, though the growing light now drenched the town in a bloody, rust-colored hue worse than the darkness. Outside, she followed the sidewalk past shops and scenic lookouts, walking slowly to listen for footsteps behind her. But that was stupid—the dead didn’t have footsteps. They didn’t generally walk around, either. And the sky didn’t turn black, and an entire town’s children didn’t vanish in the night.
The missing children were the key. And as long as she kept searching for answers, she could silence the part of her that hoped she never saw Angel again.
Crimson light rolled like mist from the lake into town, coating all it touched in an unseasonable chill, the breath of ghosts. It crept steadily forward as if herding Lisa there, demanding she make the ascent up the forlorn hill to her destiny. In the south, the red and orange glow of a fire chased away the blackness as it reached high into the sky.
“Is that you, Mishi-ginebig?” she asked to break the terrible stillness.
Mommy…we can see you…
A slimy tentacle of liquid slid from the syringe into her vein. She’d been banging her head against the wall until a hard lump the size of a quarter formed in the center of her forehead. She’d crack it open, let the darkness flow out of her and down the wall, which wavered and rippled through her vision like water. It was happening again. It always happened after the needle. She was here but somewhere else. Time dilated until it seemed to stop entirely. The room started to breathe, and her entire body wilted as the sensation of warm honey drizzling from the top of her head down to her toes stultified her. There was a message in the pulsating walls, in the breaths.
They were waiting for her. Laughing at her. Always.
She’d been sixteen when she bashed open her stepfather’s skull. They sent her to juvie for two years and let her out with an expunged record. The abuse had been obvious to everyone. Hell, even her evil bitch of a mother didn’t deny it. But Lisa had nowhere to go after that. The indiscriminate streets welcomed her like a long-lost friend. She had been hungry. She had prayed to anything that would listen. Not long after, a random trick and a forgotten condom resulted in Jessie, the only thing completely and undeniably hers. The only thing that had ever loved her.
She would bash Jeremy’s skull in next.
Lisa blinked. She stood in a guard shack just off the main road. Behind her, the rain-slick, potholed drive stretched like a sea snake toward the old hospital, where no wellness center had ever stood. The rain had stopped, and roiling red clouds parted to reveal the black vault of the sky with its numinous promise of oblivion.
I am Hell. I have chosen it.
The fire was moving north, and it was not extending toward the featureless, obsidian sky but descending from it. Seething, writhing as if in some torment. Driving her up the hill as if she were livestock.
The first thing that hits them is the cold—the bone-penetrating cold, even in summer, of a northern lake. They see nothing but teal and turquoise threaded with sunlight. The color of water when you’re under it.
They open their little mouths to scream, but cold water flows in, choking them. They struggle, flap, and thrash their hands and legs in all directions. Suspended in water, there is nothing to grasp except at the hands around their throats. Adult hands, too strong. They clutch at the water instead, but it is always slipping away.
They shake their heads hysterically and look in all directions. There is nothing but the portentous, darkening color of the water. They try to breathe again through their noses, but the lake infiltrates their lungs. The iciness, the heaviness, is filling them up.
They close their eyes. Maybe it’s just a nightmare; children are so prone to them. The ambient noise of bubbles and breaking waves is almost soothing, despite how their hearts crash against their breastbones with the force of adrenaline. The sound of deep waters, as though it’s breathing. The sound of blood pumping through their veins.
Their lungs ache, as if their chests are going to burst. But they don’t want to let out the air. It’s all they have left.
They open their eyes again and look up. They were taught to fear strangers, and yet part of them inherently trusts any adult. Their bodies are weary from the lack of air. The cold has numbed them. Instinctively, they try to breathe again, only to be rewarded with a surge of more water.
There is a reason we fear the water. Why we populate it with monsters.
There is no worse way to die than to drown.
She had tried to make the doctors understand that Jessie was no ordinary girl and never had been. That her demands had not ended with her death. They didn’t believe Lisa when she said Jessie’s father had no eyes and never stopped grinning, that he had appeared out of the darkness like a jinni because she’d summoned him with her nameless prayers.
Lisa gazed at the flames and the dark shapes within them. Poor Angel, a mere herald. A servant so new she had not fully comprehended her purpose, except to bring them to what she knew as home. Lisa dug the crumpled construction paper out of her pocket and studied the symbol there:
The wall of flames advanced, and small human forms separated themselves from the inferno. The missing, who were also the dead. No one, especially the investigators, had in their benevolent sexism considered the possibility that a woman might be the culprit. The maternal instinct prevented such atrocities, unless you were perpetrating them for your own child.
And so they burned, as she had burned their children, to erase any traces of her work. Then she had cast them back into the lake for the drowned child-god who spoke to her in dreams and in lonely wails and who, like any child, could drive her mother mad unless placated. To send Jessie home was to commit to whatever path preserved her own sanity and to remain devoted to her one true deity. If “mother” was god to a child, then her child was nothing less than a savior.
The wrath in their scorched faces made it clear the children did not see it that way. And children, being exceptionally vindictive creatures, exercised that indiscriminate rage on everything in their paths. Already much of the town was a blazing ruin. Houses were smoldering down below, collapsing. So many loved ones missing or dead; their families had done what any normal person would do if they heard a familiar voice begging to be let inside. One more chance, perhaps to say the goodbye denied them. Perhaps to submit to the hell in which they were already living.
Lisa turned her attention to the strange, pointed brick arch on the hill, one side crumpling in on the other. The doorway to the Needle Room, as she’d thought of it. Did anyone know what they’d done here? Inducing bouts of madness in order to discover a cure for it. Jeremy had left her there that summer and never come back. Or she had always been there. She was there still.
Every exit is an entrance to somewhere else.
Lisa climbed the hill, scuttled over broken and crumbling bricks damp with the bloody rain that smeared her palms. She stood before the arch. The wind off the lake hissed a wet insistence that she step forward. And she—
—was banging her head against the cinderblock wall again, leaving a spot like a crushed raspberry on the yellow paint.
“She says it’s Mishi-ginebig,” the doctor said. “The lake monster. She can’t accept what she’s done. Therefore, a monster must have done it. Boogeymen and monsters are how we’ve always coped with the evil human beings are capable of.”
Mishi-ginebig. Bunyip. Rusalka. Spawn of the thing that had come when she called, however inadvertently.
Jessie tugged on her hand. Lisa looked at the doctor, who was consulting with the head nurse, then down at her daughter with her stringy hair and gray, water-grave skin, her too-small eyes, and upper lip that protruded beaklike over her lower. The walls flickered like a section of bad film.
“We’ve always been here, Mommy. Waiting. Dreaming. It’s your turn now, to be mother to all of us.”
Outside the window, a small black hole in the sky swallowed the sun. Beneath that black sun, children enrobed in flames marched up the serpentine driveway.
“It will be all right,” Jessie murmured. “It only hurts for a few minutes.”
They passed through the wavering wall. She had always been there and had never been there at all.
“Welcome home, Mommy,” Angel said. Then Jessie opened her strange mouth and worked it over the little girl, inching down from her head to her bare feet. The ebony stain in the sky spread like an oil spill. Lisa’s brain was splitting in two.
Jessie’s hand closed around hers. The fire embraced her with a terrible, beautiful heat. So did the children, who both hated and loved her, as any child did its mother.
Burning bodies arranged themselves into a sigil. Nonsense syllables chanted to the sky overwhelmed the thrumming of her pulse. The infinite and starless void opened above her, and in it, numberless ineffable wonders like Jessie watched, anticipating her permission to be born. Such doors the experiments had opened in a mind all too willing to explore the worlds beyond. They knew not what they had done.
Lisa lifted her face to the fiery darkness, the flames singeing her lips like a long-awaited kiss, and whispered, “Mother is here.”
About the Author
Jennifer Loring has been, among other things, a DJ, an insurance claims assistant, and an editor. Her short fiction has been published widely both online and in print. She has worked with Crystal Lake Publishing, DarkFuse, and Crowded Quarantine, among many others. Longer work most notably includes the contemporary/sports romance series The Firebird Trilogy and the psychological horror novella Conduits. She lives in Philadelphia, PA with her husband, their turtle, and two basset hounds.
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Website:
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1493991.Jennifer_Loring
Unlocked
By Sara Schoen
Prologue
Melody
I could feel his presence, but I willed myself not to open my eyes. I hoped that if I seemed asleep, he’d leave me alone. He had been visiting me at night, every night for the last several weeks. At first, I hadn't known anyone was coming in. I thought I was the one leaving windows open, feeding the cat and then forgetting about it, leaving the doors unlocked but never ajar, even leaving the water running in the kitchen sink. I thought I was going insane, when really, he was just making himself at home in my apartment. I shivered, hoping he thought it was from a dream.
How had nothing worked? How was he getting in?
“Do you have a family member or a boyfriend over, Melody?” my neighbors would ask when I returned home from work. Each time, I said no. My family was on the West Coast, now visiting a town in the mountains of Colorado. Escape, Colorado, if I remembered correctly.
“You saw someone in my house?” I’d question, slowly rolling my gaze over my small two-story apartment. I had heard the claims from other neighbors but never found anything. That woul
d explain all the odd occurrences in my apartment recently, but without proof that someone was breaking in, I didn’t want to report it. There was rarely ever a hair out of place when I returned, but something was going on. “Thanks for letting me know. I’m changing the locks and adding security cameras today, so that should fix the problem.”
I took extra precautions and made sure someone knew where I was almost every hour of the day. Just in case I turned up missing. Of course, at the time, I thought I was being paranoid. No one else, no one normal anyway, would spend twenty minutes checking the house when they came home from work or get up half an hour early to make sure the doors and windows were locked. Then every day when I left for work, I’d question myself.
Why am I so paranoid? I’ve never seen this guy everyone claims they saw in my apartment.
But now I knew.
Maybe it was because I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. Whether I was getting on or off the metro, coming home, running errands, or anything, I couldn't escape the chill that raced down my spine when I caught sight of the shadow moving just out of sight. A few times, I had seen someone who seemed to be following me, but they always turned before I did.
13 Night Terrors Page 36