Seize the Night

by Christopher Golden

  Whatever explanation arranged the morning’s details into coherence, it would have to wait. The screaming was now a chorus, blending its agonies. Although he had assumed Tony was lurking to one side or the other of the door, the screams called into question that assumption. Wherever the old man was waiting, August was going into the tower.

  For a moment—an instant—as he was rushing across the threshold, August had the sensation of striking and passing through a liquid, as if the doorway framed a fall of black water. By the time he was reacting, clamping shut his mouth, attempting to conserve whatever air remained in his lungs, August was on the other side of the entrance, inside a room whose brick walls and dirt floor were bare, near the top of a flight of stairs that corkscrewed into the earth. A circular opening in the ceiling admitted sunlight into the space; none appeared to have followed him through the door. The knot of screaming wound up the stairs; August hurried down them.

  There had been, he thought, a wellhead at the foot of the hill, in the tower’s approximate position. During August’s first visit here, Tony had pointed it out to him, a concrete tube a foot and a half high, three feet in diameter, with a lid that extended another couple of inches all the way around. There was a spring in that spot, Tony had said. The old guy who had owned the property before them had dug out the spot, gone down ten, fifteen feet, poured concrete walls to keep it from caving in. Once he was finished, he had a well for the garden he planted in the meadow, and for himself and his family, should they ever have need of it. Tony supposed it was a good resource, though it became a hazard during the winter, when a decent snowfall transformed the hill into a sledding course for Forster and his friends. He and Rebecca had not figured out what to do about the thing.

  August felt reasonably sure that excavating the well further and installing a set of stairs would not have been among his stepmother’s choices. Already, August had descended at least fifteen feet, the air dimming as he went. Where had Tony found, or stolen, the time for such a project? The stairway had been cut into the rock below the shallow topsoil, each step topped with a flat slab of stone. It was difficult to picture his father hefting slab after slab into place; although, was it any more extraordinary than Tony crippling and killing an angry eighty-pound pit bull with his bare hands and teeth?

  But that wasn’t the point: in truth, neither action made sense in relation to Tony, to the existence he and Rebecca and Forster had here. Yes, that was what the family members of criminals always said, wasn’t it? Not my father/son/brother/whatever. This was more than the standard denial, though. The rock of the stairway’s walls was smooth, polished as if with the passing of many hands over it, and not the rough surface of recent excavation. The screams below rang off it, almost seemed amplified by it. The air was dry to the point of parched, rather than the heavy damp of a well. All of it was more of the wrongness August had recognized outside the tower, a kind of warp to everything that he felt as a pressure behind his eyes, an ache in his molars.

  The stairs ended in an archway cut in the rock. While the light had faded to a faint glow, August’s vision had adjusted to it, which allowed him to distinguish the tunnel opening in front of him. From somewhere within the thicker darkness farther down the passage, Tony and whoever was with him continued their screams. August wasn’t certain how long they’d been screaming—probably not as long as it seemed—but surely, his father and the other person or people should have screamed themselves hoarse by now.

  Trying to move slowly enough for his eyes to grow accustomed to the steadily diminishing light, but quickly enough to reach Tony and his companions, August stepped through the archway and moved along the tunnel. In low light, peripheral vision picked up a lot of the slack: was it Tony who’d told him that? He thought so. It sounded like the kind of quasi-interesting fact with which his father had peppered their phone conversations during the middle stretch of August’s adolescence, when he’d been angry at Tony all the time, for not staying married to August’s mother, for agreeing to her having full custody of him, for staying in New York while he and his mother moved to Pennsylvania. Tony would deliver some nugget of information, and if August didn’t snarl at him, his father was off and running, stretching that nugget into as much more conversation as he could manage. The tactic had served its purpose, which was to keep the two of them talking, and subsequently, August had proved an asset during trivia night at the bar he and a few of his fellow officers frequented.

  And here was his peripheral vision kicking in, showing the walls to either side of him carved with a series of unfamiliar characters, each the size of his hand. Most of them were combinations of loops and swirls that wrapped around and doubled back on themselves, forming arabesques whose precise design defeated his passing glance. In their midst, however, he found a pair of simpler characters, a circle, broken at about nine o’clock, and a square whose interior was filled by a line that drew in toward its center in a series of right turns—a maze, he thought. Both the incomplete circle and the maze repeated at irregular intervals. With so little light, and his ears crowded with screaming, it was difficult to be sure, but the characters did not appear recent. He trailed his right hand over the wall; the edges of the figures were even with the surrounding rock.

  August was losing track of the number of details for which he was unable to account. Could all of this, the stairs, the passageway, the carvings, have been here before Tony and Rebecca had bought the place? Had his father ever verified that what he’d been told was a well was, in fact, a well? Why would he have, though?

  Ahead, the tunnel branched left, right, and straight on. Screams poured from each opening. August leaned in each direction, attempting to locate the source of Tony’s cries. Left? He couldn’t decide. Pick one. Left. He turned and started that way.

  Almost immediately, the air was clouded with a stench that forced him back a step, coughing. He had smelled it previously, when he had assisted a raid on a drug house out near the airport. The three guys who ran the place had suspected one of their regular customers of being a criminal informant. The guy wasn’t, but his general twitchiness had appeared to belie his protestations to that effect, with the end result that two of the dealers had tortured him to death with a pair of carving knives. Afterward, there had been great pools of blood, which one of the murderers had had the inspired idea of using a wet-vac to clean up. This had worked reasonably well, except that the men had not gotten around to emptying the blood, so when August and his fellow officers swarmed the house five days later, the wet-vac was sitting in a corner, full of something that swished suspiciously. That something, as the cops found out once one of them unclipped and removed the lid, was spoiled blood. Already, August had smelled some foul odors on the job, but this was especially vile, rotting meat mixed with copper. It was a point of pride with him that he had not vomited, but he alone knew what a close thing that had been.

  That same smell hung around him now. The orange juice he’d drunk earlier boiled at the back of his throat. He swallowed, continuing forward. Oh, Tony, he thought, what did you do? Maybe it was an animal. Please let it be an animal.

  It was not. Dressed in filthy rags, the man was lying on the opposite side of the modest chamber into which the tunnel emptied. From a small hole in the middle of the ceiling, a shaft of light stabbed the floor. August blinked at its brilliance. Ten feet away, the heat it threw off raised sweat from his skin. August circled to the right, keeping close to the room’s brick walls. Undiminished, the screaming continued. The man in front of him had been the victim of incredible violence, his chest split open, ribs broken and pushed to the sides as if for some brutal anatomy lesson. The heart was missing, the object, presumably, of whoever had exposed it in the first place. At some point in that process, the assailant had splashed the man’s blood on the walls, from which it had run down into puddles that had darkened and decayed. Estimating time of death was not part of August’s job, but it was plain the man had been here for, at minimum, several days.

/>   Which meant nothing good, as far as Tony was concerned. Not to mention Rebecca and Forster: how would they react to learning that the man they loved had committed such a savage murder? Sick at the prospect, August leaned against the wall to his right. The slight change in perspective this produced brought into focus the dead man’s face, tilted up and back, the mouth open in a final cry, the eyes bulging, and August saw that the corpse sprawled at his feet was that of his father.

  His heart kicked. Everything in him seemed to rise up, as if threatening to exit his body through the top of his head, then to drop, carrying him to the floor. His mind was a blank, all other thoughts blown to its margins by Tony’s ravaged body. That blank, he understood a moment later, was a grief so immediate and profound it doubled him over, flooding his eyes with tears, forcing sobs from his lips. No matter that one part of his brain had resumed the this-doesn’t-make-sense complaint (as the blood demonstrated, the man in front of him had been dead for days, at least; even if there were another explanation for that detail, August should have heard the sounds of his father’s murder, despite the screaming that vibrated the air). Tony’s corpse made all of that seem inconsequential, irrelevant.

  August had wondered, upon occasion, what his response to the death of a family member would be. It was the catalyst in so many of the crime and police dramas he had watched growing up—the hero’s wife or husband or mother or father is killed, often in a horrifying manner, and in response, the hero seeks out and has revenge upon those responsible. While it was possible that, later on, he would be overcome by the desire for vengeance, all August wanted right now was to remove his father’s remains from this strange and terrible place. He wiped his eyes, his nose, used the wall to help himself to his feet. His legs wobbled. If he crouched, he could slide his hands under Tony’s back to his armpits, hoist him up from behind and half carry, half drag him out that way. Not the most graceful method, but it would allow for the gaping wreck of Tony’s chest.

  The arm slipped around August’s throat and was dragging him backward almost before he knew it. Strong—it was monstrously strong, its muscles tight against his neck as it squeezed. August didn’t bother grabbing for the hand. His feet were still on the floor. He backpedaled hard and fast, going with the choke, overbalancing his attacker. His assailant’s feet slipped and he went down, pulling August with him. August twisted as he fell, gripping his left hand with his right to brace the left elbow he drove into his attacker’s ribs. He heard a grunt, another when he brought the elbow in a second time. His assailant’s grip had slid, placing his right hand in easier reach. August seized it with both of his hands and twisted it off him, maintaining his hold on it as he scrambled to his feet, yanking the arm straight and torquing the wrist into a lock. His attacker cried out. August kicked him in the ribs he hoped were already broken. “Who are you?” he shouted. “Why did you kill my father?”

  The man moaned.

  August applied more pressure to the joint lock. “I will snap your goddamned wrist,” he said.

  “August,” the man said.

  “How do you know my name, huh? Did he”—he flicked his head toward Tony’s body—“tell you before you cut out his fucking heart?”

  “August,” the man said.

  “Do not say my name,” August said. “Who are you? Why did you kill my father?”

  “August,” the man said, “it’s me.”

  Though his voice was hoarse with pain, some note in the man’s words caused August to stare at his face more intently. Both the man’s long beard and ponytail were white, and his nose looked to have been broken at least once, but August recognized Tony looking up at him—albeit, a Tony from twenty, twenty-five years in the future. The room around him appeared to shimmer, but August retained his grip on the man’s wrist. He stole a glance at the dead man. As surely as he could tell from where he was standing, it was Tony lying there. August looked at the man who had choked him. The resemblance was uncanny. “Who are you?” he said.

  “It’s me, Tony,” the man said.

  “Sorry,” August said, “you’re about two decades too old for the part. Try again.” He pressed the man’s wrist.

  The man grimaced. Voice tight, he said, “The last big fight your mother and I had—the two of you had moved. I came down for the weekend to see if we couldn’t work things out. We couldn’t. She told me she was going ahead with the divorce. I accused her of lying to me, of leading me on. She was standing at one end of the dining room table. I was near the front door. You ran out of your bedroom, which was on the other side of the kitchen. How long you had been listening, I’m not sure. You were in your short pajamas. Your face was red; you were crying. You screamed at the two of us to stop it, which I guess we did. Afterward, I came to see you in your bedroom before I left. You were inconsolable. I kept telling you it was nothing to do with you, I just had to go, but you knew better. You knew everything had changed.”

  “Jesus.” August released the man’s hand, stepping away from him.

  “I know.” The man he could not yet think of as his father struggled to stand. Clothed in a loose gray shirt and black pants, the slight curve in his spine worse, he was thinner than August had ever known him, as thin as he’d been in some of the old photos he’d shown August. His eyes, though—his eyes were the same steel blue. Rubbing his side where August’s elbow and foot had found it, he said, “I’ve thought about how I would explain all of this to you if I had the chance. There was a quotation I was going to use, from Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: ‘I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.’ It seemed perfectly applicable to me, but I wasn’t sure if you’d agree on the relevance.”

  “Oh my God,” August said, “it is you.” His vision doubled, blurred; he swayed drunkenly. The screaming seemed to be happening inside his head as much as outside it.

  Tony’s hands were on his shoulders. “Hey,” his father said, “hey.” August’s mouth opened, but there were too many questions, tripping over one another in their haste to be asked. “I understand,” Tony said. “It’s a lot to absorb. Nor is this the worst of it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Would you come with me so I can show you something?” Tony dropped his hands from August’s shoulders.

  “What?”

  “It’s better if you see it for yourself.” Already, Tony was backing toward the doorway. “I’m not going to try to hurt you,” he added. “I only did that as a, a . . . precaution. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been down here a long time.”

  “You didn’t recognize me?”

  “It took me a moment,” Tony said. “I’m sorry. Come this way.” He spun on his heel and exited the room.

  Staying in place was hardly an option. August followed Tony out of the room into darkness and cool, the short distance to the junction of the four passageways. There, Tony turned left. This tunnel sloped steeply down. Whatever faint remnant of the sun’s glow had accompanied August’s initial progress was long gone, despite which, he could discern the general details of the passage, whose walls bore the same weird graffiti he’d observed earlier. In fact, it was these markings—the Möbius characters, the broken ring, the maze—that were responsible for what illumination there was. They didn’t glow; rather, so black were they that they caused the surrounding darkness to appear lighter, as if they were drawing it into themselves. The air was dry and full of screaming.

  “Who is that?” he said.

  “Who’s what?”

  “Doing all the screaming.”

  “Oh. That’s me. And others.”

  On the right, the tunnel wall was interrupted by a succession of rough openings, each about five feet high by three wide. Tony stopped at the fourth and ducked into it. Mindful of his head, August went after him.

  The space into which they emerged was more cave than proper room. Approximately circular, it was illuminated by a series of holes drilled in
the center of its high ceiling, through which beams of phosphorous-white light slanted to the floor. The odor of dust mixed with that of rotten blood. The cave’s circumference was studded with ledges and outcroppings, a dozen of which supported human bodies. As far as August could discern, every one of the figures was in the same condition as the one he’d discovered in the smaller room, the chest wrenched open, the heart taken.

  Nor did the resemblance end there. “Come.” Tony waved him to the right, where the nearest corpse lay prostrate. Were Tony not standing in front of him, he would have identified the man dead on the rock shelf as his father. Dressed in worn and bloodied karate pants and a torn white T-shirt, he appeared far closer in age to Tony as August had last seen him than did the white-haired figure watching for his reaction. August cleared his throat and said, “If I checked the other bodies in here, they’d all look like this one, wouldn’t they? Like you.”

  “They would.”

  “You realize how fucked-up this is.”

  Tony frowned. “Language.”

  “Seriously?” In spite of the body broken and violated before him, of the ever-increasing horror of the entire situation, August laughed. “Since when did you become such a prude?”

  “Since I spent twenty years in here,” Tony said, flinging his hand to take in the cave and what lay beyond it, “in the tower.”

  “How is that possible?” August said. “How is any of this?”

  His father leaned against the outcropping that held what appeared to be the corpse of his younger self. “This place, the tower, is a prison. Except it’s also the prisoner. Never mind that part. The point is, it contains an extremely dangerous man. To be honest, dangerous doesn’t begin to cover it. Nor does man, for that matter. The tower houses a monster, and I mean that in the most literal way. It was a man, once, a long, long time ago. Now he’s more shadow than flesh, shadow and thirst. As long as he thirsts, he suffers terribly. Whenever he satisfies his thirst, he earns a respite from his pain.”