Seize the Night

by Christopher Golden

  “Easy, killer!” I said, and gave an apologetic smile to the increasingly agitated Bernice. I patted the seat next to me until he came over and sat. “What happened to the biker? The big guy.”

  Uncle Ned had sliced his knuckles. He clenched his fist and watched the blood drip onto the tiles. “Cops found him that summer in the water. Not enough left for an autopsy. The current and the fish had taken him apart. Accidental death, they decided. I saw the younger biker at the Gold Digger. Musta been five or six years after the Good Friday quake. He acted like he’d forgotten what happened to his partner until I bought him the fifth or sixth tequila. He got a real close look at what happened. Said that to him, the gurglin’ was more of a slurpin’. An animal lappin’ up a gory supper. Then he looked me in the eye and said his buddy got snatched into the darkness by his own guts. They were comin’ outta his mouth and whatever it was out there gathered ’em up and reeled him in.”

  “Holy shit, Uncle Ned.” Goose pimples covered my arms. “That’s nuts. Who do you think was out there?”

  “The boogeyman. Whatever it is that kids think is hidin’ under their bed.”

  “You tell Dad? Probably not, huh? He’s a stick-in-the-mud. He’d never buy it.”

  “Well, you don’t either. Guess that makes you a stick-in-the-mud too.”

  “The apple, the tree, gravity . . .”

  “Maybe you’d be surprised what your old man knows.” Uncle Ned’s expression was shrewd. “I been all over this planet. Between ’66 and ’74, I roamed. Passed the peace pipe with the Lakota, ate peyote with the Mexicans, drank wine with the Italians, and smoked excellent bud with a whole lot of other folks. I get bombed enough, or stoned enough, I ask if anybody else has heard of the Help Me Monster. What I call it. The Help Me Monster.”

  The description evoked images of Sesame Street and plush toys dancing on wires. “Grover the Psycho Killer!” I said, hoping he’d at least crack a smile. I also hoped my uncle hadn’t gone around the bend.

  He didn’t smile. We sat there in one of those long, awkward silences while Bernice coughed her annoyance and shuffled papers. I was relieved when Sally Mackey finally stuck her head into the room and called my name.

  The nurse wanted to send me to Anchorage for X-rays. No way would Dad authorize that expense. No veterinarians and no doctors; those were ironclad rules. When he discovered Uncle Ned took me to the clinic, he’d surely blow his top. I wheedled a bottle of prescription-strength aspirin and a set of cheapo crutches on the house and called it square. A mild ankle sprain meant I’d be on the crutches for days. I added it to the tab of Shaw family dues.

  Dad never came home. I cried, the kids cried. Bit by bit, we moved on. Some of us more than others.

  I won’t bore you with the nightmares that got worse and worse with time. You can draw your own conclusions. That strange figure in the woods, Dad’s vanishing act, and Uncle Ned’s horrifying tale coalesced into a witch’s brew that beguiled me and became a serious obsession.

  Life is messy and it’s mysterious. Had my father walked away from his family or had he been taken? If the latter, then why Dad and not me or Uncle Ned? I didn’t crack the case, didn’t get any sense of closure. No medicine man or antiquarian popped up to give me the scoop on some ancient enemy that dwells in the shadows and dines upon the blood and innards of Good Samaritans and hapless passersby.

  Closest I came to solving the enigma was during my courtship with husband number two. He said a friend of a friend was a student biologist on a research expedition in Canada. His team and local authorities responded to a massive train derailment near a small town. Rescuers spent three days clearing out the survivors. On day four, they swept the scattered wreckage for bodies.

  This student, who happened to be Spanish, and three fellow countrymen were way out in a field after dark, poking around with sticks. One of them heard a voice moaning for help. Of course, they scrambled to find this wretched soul. Late to the scene, a military search-and-rescue helicopter flew overhead, very low, its searchlight blazing. When the chopper had gone, all fell silent. The cries didn’t repeat. Weird part, according to the Spaniard, was that in the few minutes they’d frantically tried to locate the injured person, his voice kept moving around in some bizarre acoustical illusion. The survivor switched from French to English, and finally to Spanish. The biologist claimed he had nightmares of the incident for years afterward. He dreamed of his buddies separated in a dark field, each crying for help, and he’d stumble across their desiccated corpses, one by one. He attributed it to the guilt of leaving someone to die on the tundra.

  My husband-to-be told me that story while high on coke and didn’t mention it again. I wonder if that’s why I married the sorry sonofabitch. Just for that single moment of connectedness, a tiny and inconstant flicker of light in the wilderness.

  High noon on a Sunday night.

  Going on thirty-eight haunted years, I’ve expected this, or something like this, even though the entity represents, with its very jack-in-the-box manifestation, a deep, dark mystery of the universe. What has drawn it to me is equally inexplicable. I’ve considered the fanciful notion that the Shaws are cursed and Mr. Help Me is the instrument of vengeance. Doesn’t feel right. I’ve also prayed to Mr. Help Me as if he, or it, is a death god watching over us cattle. Perhaps it is. The old gods wanted blood, didn’t they? Blood and offerings of flesh. That feels more on the mark. Or it could be the simplest answer of them all—Mr. Help Me is an exotic animal whose biology and behavior defy scientific classification. The need for sustenance is the least of all possible mysteries. I can fathom that need, at least.

  A window must be open in my bedroom. Cool night air dries the sweat on my cheeks as I stand in the darkened hall. The air smells vaguely of spoiled meat and perfume. A black, emaciated shape lies prone on the floor, halfway across the bedroom threshold. Long, skinny arms are extended in a swimmer’s pose. Its face is a smudge of white and tilted slightly upward to regard me. It is possible that these impressions aren’t accurate, that my eyes are interpreting as best they can.

  I slap a switch. The light flickers on but doesn’t illuminate the hall or the figure sprawled almost directly beneath the fixture. Instead, the glow bends at a right angle and gathers on the paneled wall in a diffuse cone.

  “Help me,” the figure says. The murmur is so soft it might’ve originated in my own head.

  I’m made of sterner stuff than my sixteen-year-old self. I resist the powerful compulsion to approach, to lend maternal comfort. My legs go numb. I stagger and slide down the wall into a seated position. Everybody has had the nightmare. The one where you are perfectly aware and paralyzed and an unseen enemy looms over your shoulder. Difference is, I can see my nemesis, or at least its outline, at the opposite end of the hall. I can see it coming for me. It doesn’t visibly move except when I blink, and then it’s magically two or three feet closer. My mind is in overdrive. What keeps going through my mind is that predator insects seldom stir until the killing strike.

  “Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’ Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.” I hum tunelessly, like Gram used to after her brain softened into mush. I’m reverting to childhood, to a time when Dad or Uncle Ned might burst through the door and save the day with a blast of double-aught buckshot.

  It finally dawns upon me that I’m bleeding, am sitting in a puddle of blood. Where the blood is leaking from, I’ve not the foggiest notion. Silly me, that’s why I’m dead from the waist down. My immobility isn’t a function of terror, pheromones, or the occult powers of an evil spirit. I’ve been pricked and poisoned. Nature’s predators carry barbs and stings. Those stings deliver anesthetics and anticoagulants. Have venom, will travel. I chuckle. My lips are cold.

  “Help me,” it whispers as it plucks my toes, testing my resistance. Even this close, it’s an indistinct blob of shadowy appendages.

  “I have one question.” I enunciate carefully, the way I do after
one too many shots of Jäger. “Did you take my dad on August fifteenth, 1977? Or did that bastard skip out? Me and my brother got a steak dinner riding on this.”

  “Help me.” The pleading tone descends into a lower timbre. A satisfied purr.

  One final trick up my sleeve, or in my pocket. Recently, while browsing a hardware store for a few odds and ends, I came across a relic of my youth—a black light. Cost a ten-spot, on special in the clearance bin. First it made me smile as I recalled how all my childhood friends illuminated their Funkadelic posters, kids as gleeful as if we’d rediscovered alchemy. Later, in college, black light made a comeback on campus and at the parties we attended. It struck a chord, got me thinking, wondering . . .

  Any creature adapted to distort common light sources might be susceptible to uncommon sources. Say, infrared or black light. I hazard a guess that my untutored intuition is on the money and that thousands of years of evolution haven’t accounted for a ten-dollar device used to find cat-piss stains in the carpet.

  I raise the box with the black light filter in my left hand and thumb the toggle. For an instant, I behold the intruder in all its malevolent glory. It recoils from my black light, a segmented hunter of soft prey retreating into its burrow. A dresser crashes in the bedroom. The trailer rocks slightly, then is quiet. The moment has passed, except for the fresh hell slowly blooming in my head.

  The black light surprised it and nothing more. Surprised and amused it. The creature’s impossibly broad grin imparted a universe of corrupt wisdom that will scar my mind for whatever time I have left. Mr. Help Me’s susurrant chuckle lingers like a psychic stain. Sometimes the spider cuts the fly from its web. Sometimes nature doesn’t sink in those red fangs; sometimes it chooses not to rend with its red claws. A reprieve isn’t necessarily the same weight as a pardon. Inscrutability isn’t mercy.

  We Shaws are tough as shoe leather. Doubtless, I’ve enough juice left in me to crawl for the phone and signal the cavalry. A quart or two of type O and I’ll be fighting fit with a story to curl your toes. The conundrum is whether I really want to make that crawl or whether I should close my eyes and fall asleep. Did you take my dad? I’ve spent most of my life waiting to ask that question. Is Dad out there in the dark? What about those hunters and hikers and kids who walk through the door and onto the crime pages every year?

  I don’t want to die, truly I don’t. I’m also afraid to go on living. I’ve seen the true, unspeakable face of the universe, a face that reflects my lowly place in its scheme. And the answer is yes. Yes, there are hells, and in some you are burned or boiled or digested in the belly of a monster for eternity. Yes, what’s left of Dad abides with a hideous mystery. He’s far from alone.

  What would Clint Eastwood do? Well, he would’ve plugged the fucker with a .44 Magnum, for starters. I shake myself. Midfifties is too late to turn into a mope. I roll onto my belly, suck in a breath, and begin the agonizing journey toward the coffee table, where I left my purse and salvation. Hand over hand, I drag my scrawny self. It isn’t lost on me what I resemble as I slather a red trail across the floor.

  Laughing hurts. Hard not to, though. I begin to sing the refrain from “Help!” Over and over and over.

  WHISKEY AND LIGHT

  DANA CAMERON

  No one had settled here for a long time, maybe forever, before us.

  The wild savages who were living nearby when we arrived never came within eyesight of the rocky mound and ruin of an oak, and wouldn’t talk about it, neither. And the first ones of us who came after them, well, it was either war, or disease, or the curse of the place that kept the area around the mound from being settled right away.

  Our kind came from a seagoing people, and that natural harbor a few miles from the mound—sheltered, wide, and deep—was too good to leave unused. When there were too many people near the harbor and not enough room, a deal was struck: take the land close to the mound, farm it free of taxes, but the men stay there, in perpetuity. It was, easy enough to see, Stone Harbor’s way of keeping a barrier between itself and the mound, but with the hunger for land being what it was, Farmington soon became a going concern. The folks who lived here were the kind who weren’t welcomed elsewhere and didn’t have the money to look for a better living than that rocky inhospitable land. But it could be farmed, and it was. Every year, Stone Harbor sent a priest to say the rituals that kept the evil of the mound at bay. Farmington wasn’t a prison colony, but it might as well have been, the folks it attracted.

  The mound was spit up out of the ground at the edge of the fields like the earth itself couldn’t bear to keep it inside anymore, a rocky outcropping with a wide, flat stone perched on top. The dead oak that marked the outcrop stood bare against the sky, a little humped, like a miser cackling over his hoard. Its back had been braced against the wind and the salt for two hundred years, some said; it had been a mature tree when Gammer Avon was small, and she could remember back then better than she could remember last week. Maybe there had been other trees on the hill then, but the oak—or maybe the demon—had smothered them all, leaving bare branches thrown against the sky, defying decay, denying defeat.

  There was a rusty iron pike fence around the base of the rocky mound, like at the burying ground behind the church, to keep the animals from rooting about where they shouldn’t. The tumbledown stone wall marking our plot’s boundary was just before that. Repairing the stone line would have required getting nearer the mound than anyone was brave enough to do. No reason to go there anyway, as nothing grew out of the soil along that boundary.

  One day, my little sister, Jenn, who is the light in my life, found her way out there, peering through the iron pickets. Da caught her, and thrashed her within an inch of her life. I didn’t interfere, didn’t protest, even though it meant I’d catch a beating too, for not keeping an eye on her. She had to learn. Better a beating than death and damnation.

  No one had ever seen the demon, so maybe there wasn’t one living in that dead, blasted spot between the last of the fields and the untamed woods, as some, almost always kin from outside, claimed. But the men who lived in Farmington, tough enough to endure a monthlong sea crossing and eke out a life from that unforgiving soil, avoided the mound like it was the plague; they grew more fractious and violent as the blessing time drew near, and were downright dangerous until the priest arrived and the ritual was completed according to book and verse. The animal was marked with the warding glyphs in indigo dye on its shaved skin and left bleating by the flat rock perched on lower boulders in the afternoon. The next morning, nothing more than broken bones and matted hair would be found. I knew it wasn’t bears. Bears, like the savages and anyone else with sense, didn’t go near the place.

  The priest being late was one of the favorite stories at harvest time, when the days were still long enough and bright enough to celebrate and there was plenty of food and the endless winter nights were still months away. Tales about the demon itself, to warn the children and scare them into obedience, were told only in summer, when there were hours of evening light. Some said it was a serpent, or a great worm, and others said it was a beast more like a lion or a giant boar, but teeth figured in all the stories, and everyone agreed that the demon craved live flesh, live blood. It didn’t take anyone as old as Gammer Avon to remember the winter when the blessing time was delayed a day or two. The screams of the slaughtered goats and pigs could be heard through shuttered windows during a gale.

  It was only in the summer, too, that the men would show their tattoos, parts of the glyph patterns and wards put on the sacrificial animal, a kind of drunken taunt, a fractional gesture of defiance against a safely contained evil. It was never the entire glyph they made, in indigo and ash, but more than enough to prove their defiance of the large needle and mallet, and their parents, if not of the demon itself.

  But the stories became fewer with fall, and were gone entirely long before winter drew down, and feasting was over, and supplies got thin. In those last dark months, until the priest
arrived, the men stayed up later, drank more. Drinking led to fights, and offers to finish the mark and leave you at the stone were counted as bad as a threat of death. Drinking led to rash proposals to storm the rocky hill and confront the demon there with fire and tar. But there was not enough whiskey in Farmington or Stone Harbor or even the whole of the world to get the men to take on what they feared in the first place. So they redoubled their drinking and tried to put the shadows behind them. Because they were scared, because they didn’t have the courage to kill the thing and wanted to crawl under the blankets. There was always too much whiskey and never enough light.

  Trudging through the snow and frozen mud, we gathered in the church on Sabbath, to hear when the priest would arrive. The ship had never been so late as this year, and while annually it seemed to be a closer thing than any of us liked, with the weather and the tides against us, talk started to get ugly, blossoming into tauter nerves and sharper tempers than usual. No fewer than three black eyes in the church, and more than a dozen bandaged fists. I liked the church. No fights here, at least for an hour during sermon, and the big space was filled with light. Whitewashed walls reflected the one stained glass window over the altar—salvaged from another church that burned in Stone Harbor—which was about the only colors we’d see until spring. Blue and red and green and gold—I wished I could curl up inside those colors. The cross in the center of it was pretty, too, if a little stark in its silver and black and a little crooked from the botched repairs.

  Da, his friend Mr. Minter, and Mr. Daggett escorted the stranger to the steps just in front of the big stone altar. They didn’t look happy, and he didn’t look like no priest. The man was dressed oddly, even odder than the folk in Stone Harbor, with bold colors—bright red and rich blue—that seemed ridiculous compared to our gray wool and brown homespun, and a little irreverent, as if he were trying to compete with the stained glass.