Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz

by Tim Marquitz

  That’s when it begins to creep in, as love turns to bitterness and hate. Her despair draws it to her like a moth to a flame. It cannot resist the sweet, sweet agony. Her tears are the sustenance of the thick, black fog, her pain its ambrosia. She sees it sweeping in under the door and allows herself a bitter laugh. The staff thought they’d taken all her cigarettes away, but before they stole the pack from her hands, she’d hidden one in her purse. It’s been waiting there for her; for a night when she’d need it most. Tonight is that night, and she’s going to take one final drag before surrendering to the black beyond.

  “It’s time, Angela. You’ve resisted us far too long, but now you too must know our embrace.” The words of the blackness are like a melody and in the room it begins to grow.

  “You must allow me then,” Angela says, smiling wryly as she lights her cigarette, “one last dance.”

  She blows a puff of smoke at the abominations emerging from the walls, shrieking and clawing their way into her room. Their wraith-like appearances, the faces of all those they have devoured in the past, the decaying flesh that hangs from their bones is not their own, but of those that she once knew, and many strangers before them. The darkness has existed for centuries, feeding off of the forgotten and the weary.

  It’s not enough to kill her, she knows. The darkness is stretched far too thin, attempting to suck the lives from all those around her. It’s underestimated her. She’s been dancing to this song all her life. The steps have been memorized. It’ll need everything it’s got if it hopes to destroy her. She is no easy victim, and far from their usual willing prey.

  “Not enough, shitheads,” she says, taking another drag.

  Angela closes her eyes and, with her mind, calls to the remaining parts of the dark. As if on command, it leaves Suzanne’s bedside, the sobs of a broken-hearted young woman cleaning the restrooms downstairs, and an old man who’s just heard the reason his family won’t be coming for Christmas is that his youngest son has died. The darkness comes from all corners of Brandon Lodge to collect itself in Angela’s room. All around, the residents and staff are startled to see the lights flickering, and feel a shaking in the earth. Something monumental is happening, apocalyptic. Angela is drawing all the darkness to herself.

  It’s going to kill her tonight, she’s decided, and she’s taking it into the oblivion with her.

  “More,” she says, blowing another puff of smoke, “Come on, give me more you filthy cocksuckers! Are you so ancient that you can’t even destroy me? A feeble old-woman? Maybe you should have one of the orderlies assist you up the stairs, open a few of the doors for you! What’s the matter? You taking a rest? You’re going to have to do better than that. I’ve sent thousands of your brothers and sisters howling back to the abominable pit that spawned you, so what makes you think it’ll take any less than all of your power to best me?”

  “We will silence you, old bitch!” they scream in return, howling in anger as the walls spew more of the wraith-like beings; they are sticky and covered in the afterbirth of another world.

  The shrieks continue to grow louder and the room shakes all the more, fury caused by the vengeful dark. Too long has it waited for this moment; too long has it been forced into taking small morsels instead of satiating its ravenous hunger, near-starved because of one woman, who even now clings to life and taunts them. She laughs as the picture frames fall from the walls, and monstrous hands reach down from the ceiling as if the walls themselves are liquid. It is the end at last, and what a glorious end it will be.

  With a mighty howl she takes the darkness into her and too late does the entity realize the trap it has fallen into. She crushes her cigarette and dies, trapping the force within her, choking it. It is done.

  The staff of the Brandon Lodge finds her lying peacefully in her bed the following morning, a smile writ upon her lips. In her hands there’s a crumpled note. Puzzled at its message, the unwitting staff throws it away. They do not realize the treasure they hold.

  It reads: “The birds have left the garden, but do not worry. They’ve merely gone to escape the cold. When Spring returns, so too shall they.”

  Suzanne dies within the week, but not in sadness; in joy. Her eyes close serenely, and somehow she knows it is because of Angela, who waits on the other side to explain it all. It’ll be a fine story to tell, a secret for them both to share.

  The Long Death of Day

  Timothy Baker

  The end of the Earth came not with a whimper or bang. No herald trumpets of angels filled the air in glorious announcement. Neither did the dead rise and walk to consume our flesh. The end crept like a chilled blanket across our skies, dimming the light of the sun till the Earth turned dark. But that wasn’t the worst of it. With the unending eclipse came something from beyond the outer rim of our solar system; came as the ever hungry worms of a cemetery devour the newly buried dead.

  For all this, I had a front row seat.

  My clock says it’s one in the afternoon, but looking out my window I see only deep shadow beyond the wall of floodlights that surround my house. Their children wander in that shadow, surrounded by an inky darkness they seem to emanate on their own, much like our earthly squid. In what number, I don’t know. Thousands. Perhaps millions, by now. Eating whatever lives and breathes while their sky-living elders scrape and devour the surface of the Earth.

  Through my skylight, the sun hangs, obscured in black with only the edge of its corona shining like two facing, slender shining coins. The sky is clear and stars hang precariously, threatened by the howling wind. Beyond the mountains, across the valley, a deeper shadow lines the horizon. It grows and spreads by the hour. It’s the unearthly cloud that contains them, deep in its ever expanding belly, their bodies hidden from sight. Won’t be long now. The window shakes in its thick frame and I feel the earth shudder beneath my feet.

  She is sleeping on the couch not a few feet away. I can barely see her outline in the candlelight. She is quiet now, but just ten minutes ago she was moaning and tossing. No escape from our waking nightmare, even in sleep. Despite the slow end of all that lives on the planet, I can only think of one precious life. I hate to say it, but I wish she were lying beneath a sighing pine tree, her terror and despair gone with her breath. It makes me sick to think she is still alive, all hope lost, all love vanished. My heart is shattering. I watched the light in her eyes fade these last few weeks, the distance between us growing. She doesn’t speak anymore. When she looks at me, I don’t believe she sees me. At least not the living me, the one who loves her. Behind my reflection I see in her dark eyes, I think she only sees a dead husk staring back. A reaper that looks vaguely like me. She may be here, but she is already gone. But I am selfish. I want her here beside me. Even in her pain.

  I wish she were already dead.

  ~

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  Her name is Selena, and she is the love of my life. We laid together on a hillside in the cool grass, her body warm against mine, her head on my shoulder. The comet’s tail fanned out across the sky like a great white, wind-blown horse tail. Though traveling at immense speed, it seemed frozen in the sky just for us. For thousands of other lovers, too, I suppose. I pulled her tight against me and whispered something weak, as lovers do, comparing her beauty to the stars and how they didn’t compare. I believed it then. Still do. Her face, before the darkness and death’s arrival in the sky stole her radiance, is the only beautiful image that remains for me now. I hold on to it to save me from the swallowing maw of insanity. It’s all I have left.

  She patted my chest and called me a silly, sweet man. Like most women I’ve known, she never believed herself to be attractive. Sometimes she chided me for saying it or sighed and shook her head, thinking I lied to get in her pants. It wasn’t a lie, and I had no agenda. To me, Selena was beautiful; that smile and those eyes made my heart thump harder every time she gifted me with them. And her heart, her soul, touched me and kept my cynical spirit from turning da
rker. She brought out a love in me I had no idea existed. But that night she accepted my compliment graciously and, I hope, believed it just a little.

  Her lips touched mine, tasting of strawberries. She lay back and we turned our eyes to the comet. An emblem for us, I thought at the moment, two people lucky enough to find each other and love bright and true. But a small sadness came over me, knowing the comet would leave our sight, fading away into the black. I hoped the metaphor wouldn’t carry that far.

  Under that moonless sky, lit only by the cold light of that blazing terror, Selena and I made love for the very last time.

  The massive object dubbed Comet Delano (for the discovering astronomer) missed our tender planet by well over a hundred million miles. Not even close enough to be designated a Near Earth Object. Not even a near-miss. Scientists had been watching it for some time, adjusting their trajectory predictions, attempting to calm fears across television and internet that it posed no threat to us. So large, the term Planet Buster was thrown around, scaring people to near panic, and to the delight of the apocalypse believers. The current trajectory was to take it behind the sun and on a track very near Venus. Then it would hurl back to the black cold from whence it came. At least, that was the prediction.

  As Selena and I walked along the trail to my glass and steel mountain retreat, her hand in mine, I looked back to Delano. Nearer the horizon, it glowed brighter, its coma larger and less diffused. A trick of the angle of view, I thought, like the illusion of a giant moon as it rises. My reasoning dismissed it, but something dark gnawed at my insides.

  That night Selena and I slept side by side, arms and legs touching. Dreamless. One does that when your only dream lies beside you, finally where it belongs. I haven’t slept like that since.

  When I woke the next morning, she was gone, having left a vase of yellow wildflowers on the fireplace mantle, picked before sunrise (they are still there, hanging heads wilted). I touched them and inhaled their sweet scent, thinking of her as she drove into the city to visit her father in the nursing home. A week she would be gone and I could get some work done.

  I am, well, was, a computer security tech. Skilled enough, and in such demand, I became rather wealthy, able to live away from the squirming masses and work in solace, seeing the world through satellite. When I finally acquired my mountain home, I made it so I would never have to leave. I’m not a survivalist or end-times believer, by no means, but the world is a fragile place, reliant on technologies too big to fail. So my home is off the grid; food stocked, generator if needed (enough wood cut to last a frigid winter), house built to withstand gale force winds, weapons (again, if needed). But honestly, I chose this lone place because I just don’t like people. If they weren’t the greed stricken monkeys they were, well, I wouldn’t have had a job.

  When I logged on that morning, I went to any news of the comet, curious about the flaring I witnessed the night before. There was some speculation that Delano had blown apart by solar winds, not uncommon for these mostly icy giants. That theory disintegrated with one picture. The Hubble telescope had been turned to follow Delano as it disappeared behind the sun, and in a series of spectacular photos that captured the burning away of its ice blanket, the last one made my stomach twist: behind the flaring light of the sun one could make out a gray jagged rock the size, it was said, of Texas.

  For the rest of that week, I shored up distant corporate security systems, wrote code, played hacker checking for weaknesses, and deflected a terrorist attack into the CIA’s mainframe. The threats were endless out there. In that time, I kept in touch with Selena via the internet. The news was not good. MRSA had invaded her father, and the infection was burning through his body faster than the antibiotics could fight. His death was imminent. Selena was an only child, her mother dying the year before, and alone she wept, with only my voice to comfort her, wishing I was there to wrap my arms around her. When she asked me to come, I lied. Overloaded with work, I said, Homeland Security at the top of my list with threats coming in like piranha on chum. Guilt twitched at my brain, but as I said, I disliked people, and hospitals make me want to run in terror. The thought of a funeral sent a wave of nausea through me.

  She said she understood, but I knew she lied, too. I had hurt her. I heard it in her voice, seeing her shoulders slumping in disappointment in my mind’s eye. And for a brief flash, that sharp edge asteroid passed in my thoughts, hurtling through space to duck behind the sun like a hidden stalker ready to pounce.

  By the end of the week, Selena had not returned. Her father had died and the funeral would be in three days. When we spoke her voice sounded deadpan, her words, functional. Alone, she was doing what she had to do, holding back the grief the best she could. I listened to her in silence, having little to offer. There just are no words that can lessen that feeling of loss when death comes knocking, I felt, and I am not one for platitudes. Only a touch, a gentle hug has any effect, and I wasn’t there for her. I was too late for that. When she returned to me I would make it up to her. Help her forget. And with time, forgive.

  At that time, Comet Delano was to return from its far side sun trip. It was late. This left the astronomers in chaotic conjecture. Astronomic calculations are usually within a very narrow margin of error. But the comet was two days behind schedule. The best guess without data was that Delano had finally disintegrated under the sun’s crushing gravity and relentless expulsion of radiation. The talk show scientists sounded positive, but in their eyes, doubt loitered.

  The day after Selena’s father had been lowered into the dark earth, the day she was to return to me, the news spread like wildfire across the networks, the net, scientific forums, and in the dumbfounded exchanges between astronomers (I’m a skilled hacker, you recall): Venus was late, too, having not appeared in its scheduled spot from behind the sun, a location predicted and charted for thousands of years.

  I dropped what I was doing—a contracted job tracing ANONYMOUS members—and watched and read everything I could find on this phenomenon (an understatement), enthralled. The science world had become short on hypotheses. Not that they didn’t have any, I knew, they were just scared shitless. But the religious had no problems. This was the sign; this was The End. They were filling every corner of the cyber void, preaching it. Christians, Islamists, New Age cults, UFO worshippers, and more; all their predictions were happily coming true, their varied, opposing beliefs finally vindicated. The scientists remained disconcertedly silent, perhaps thinking the fanatics were right.

  I knew what had happened. Occam’s razor dictated it. This wasn’t God, no one’s god. It was nature in its most vicious indifference. Venus was gone, disintegrated by a planet killer.

  I was numb as I raced to the bathroom and vomited into the shower.

  I ran the shower cold, letting it run over my head, then went to my liquor storage and broke the seal on a sixty year old bottle of bourbon. Outside, I carried the bottle with me, taking large sips as I walked, sitting on an outcropping of rock, which jutted out beyond the trees, giving me a wide view of the sunlit valley below. Some five miles away, a running dust cloud arose from a vehicle pulling onto my long winding driveway; Selena coming home.

  Had I’d known what more was coming, had Selena not been in my life, I would have drank the entire bottle, and staggered off that rock to my death.

  When she pulled up in her Jeep Cherokee, she got out and gave me a weak smile. I hugged her hard and she laid her head against my chest, one arm wrapped around me, barely squeezing. She jangled the jeep keys in her loose hand. I asked her how she was.

  “Tired. Very tired. I just want to sleep.”

  Her arm fell and she pulled away, closing the Jeep door. Head down, she walked toward the house.

  “Grab my bag, would you?” she said without looking back.

  In the upstairs bedroom, Selena sat on the bedside, her head in her hands. I sat the suitcase down and said I was happy to see her. She said nothing. Without looking up, she reached a hand out to me
. I took it and she gripped it tight, holding it to her face. Her skin felt cool against the back of my hand. A tear rolled from her eye, stopped by the meeting of her cheek and my hand. Her coolness made it feel hot. I wanted to say something, find the perfect words to lift the pain away, if only for a moment. But once again I was silent, unable to find any words of consolation. My loose hand moved to brush her hair back, but she pulled away, lying back on the bed with a deep exhalation. Selena patted my hand and released it, covering her eyes with her forearm.

  I moved to the suitcase and carried it nearer the closet, talking as I pulled a blanket from the top shelf. My head buzzed from the bourbon and I spoke not just to fill the silence; I needed to break the tension, to communicate with her, to connect again, but all that came out concerned the missing comet and Venus and their mutual fate. When I pulled the blanket across her she was breathing the breath of sleep.

  Throughout the evening and night she slept. I stayed awake, dividing my time between checking on her and sweeping across the cyber-ether looking for anything on the comet and the fate of Venus. I knew the worst had happened but hoped to find anything that said I was wrong. Anything. But no such luck.

  In my media room, I sat with my ass planted on my plush leather couch with my keyboard in my lap. The giant wall monitor flashed as I flew through email, internet news, satellite video, group chat, reading and absorbing as fast as I could. The sound absorbing walls disappeared in my peripheral vision and I felt the darkness closing around me.

  So engrossed, I had a bare sense of Selena beside the couch. Standing there how long, I don’t know. The movement of her arm made me jump, stifling an alarmed “shit” in my throat. Selena stood with her hand pressing into the armrest as if she were about to fall, her other hand held across her mouth. Her words came muffled and whispered.