The Face of Midnight

by Dan Padavona

  “The bike is gone,” she said, looking off to where the brick barbecue pit stood against a backdrop of craggy forest wall.

  I thought maybe the wind had blown the bike over so I couldn’t see it in the tall grass, but closer inspection verified it was gone.

  “Donna thought of everything. She really had us cut off out here.”

  Cut off.

  Maybe we were.

  I could barely see the lights of Barton Falls off to the east. To the west spread empty land cut sharply by the moonlight. It was easy to feel cut off, isolated from civilization.

  We trudged solemnly through wet grass. Dead tendril clumps seized my ankles and tried to drag me down. My pant legs were soaked through when we reached Myers Road.

  I stood at the hill’s precipice, peering left and right.

  “Which way do you think?” I asked.

  “If she came from Barton Falls, then left.”

  “That was my guess, too.”

  We scuffed down the gravel hill, the soles of our shoes drawing gullies in the dirt. We sounded loud amid the nothingness. I looked around for the coyote or whatever animal had followed us on our trip up the hill. The meadow was lifeless, almost mournful.

  Becca, already exhausted from moving Donna to the kitchen, was out of breath.

  We reached the intersection. No car.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I guess it must be down the other side.”

  As we reversed course, the moonlight glimmered off something behind a stand of trees. I leaped across the ditch and helped Becca over. Parting bramble and decaying overgrowth, I aimed the flashlight at the trees and saw the tire tracks. I followed matted grass and located the Subaru hidden behind a willow tree.

  When I turned the key and the engine rolled over, I yelled a happy curse and started laughing.

  Donna had wisely taken the car through a shallow section of ditch. I retraced her tire tracks and climbed onto Myers Road.

  “A full tank,” I said, pointing at the fuel guage.

  I was tempted to turn down the hill and just leave the old house behind—the Pennsylvania border was an hour away—but I knew Becca would never stand for it. So I drove up the hill, listening to rocks ping off the undercarriage and crunch under the tires like old bones. Something large and spindly crawled across the windshield. The wipers squished its insides across the glass.

  I parked the car at the top of the dirt driveway. The forest was black through the windshield, the country house gray and glowing.

  The crowbar was inside the trunk, hidden under a cover plate and a strip of carpet. I handed the keys to Becca when we climbed out of the car.

  “What are these for?”

  “Just in case anything goes wrong in there, I want you to take the car and get the hell away from this place as fast as you can.”

  Though I had no logical reason to worry, it was impossible to shake the creeps after what we’d gone through. It made me think of horror movies where the killer was never really dead.

  Donna’s body missing from the kitchen. A blood splotch left behind.

  Donna’s shadow lumbering out of the den, the living room, rocking and swaying in the dark bedrooms.

  Stabbing her with the switchblade and watching her rise again with lifeless eyes.

  You can’t kill evil.

  “Nothing is going to go wrong,” she said. “Take a deep breath. Don’t let your imagination get the best of you.”

  The wiring between the house and generator was severed. Now I knew why the power had gone out. We’d have to make do with the flashlight.

  We found Donna where we’d left her. She hadn’t risen from the dead after all.

  Yet I gave the body a wide berth as I stepped around her, fearful she’d grasp my ankle with the cold hands of the dead.

  I carried the bags down from the bedroom and stuffed them into the Subaru’s trunk. Then I stared down at Donna and scratched at my chin.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said.

  I wedged the crowbar between the door and frame and shoved my weight against the end. The lock held strong, but the ancient door was flimsy and dilapidated. The wood snapped as though a firecracker had gone off in the kitchen. Fissures ran toward the center of the door.

  I moved the bar down a few inches and gave another shove. This time a chunk of wood broke off, taking the lock set with it. The lock was shiny, new, and modern; no wonder it had given Becca a struggle. I threw what remained of the door open as dust mites assailed us.

  The basement smell rose up with vile intent. I plugged my nose to keep from vomiting.

  “Jesus. Let’s make this quick.”

  Becca nodded. She had one hand over her mouth and a green look to her complexion.

  The cellar staircase was too narrow to accommodate the both of us, so I took the lead, tugging Donna by the ankles as Becca pushed against her shoulders. Once the dead weight was fully out of the kitchen, I was on my own supporting Donna. Becca aimed the flashlight against the wall so it wasn’t in my eyes.

  Donna’s head clonked down the steps. Her neck was broken, malformed, lolled at a ninety-degree angle. Blood, along with something gray and chunky, dribbled out from the corners of her mouth. I tried not to look.

  I kicked aside a cobweb-covered box of light bulbs and heard it fall a long way down before smashing. It was too dark to see where the stairs ended.

  I stumbled down a step and lost hold of Donna’s feet. Becca was too late to grab the body, which tumbled down and smashed me against the wall. I cried out. Donna’s weight pinned me to the wall, her head thrust into my chest. The rancid substance dripped from Donna’s mouth down my shirt.

  “You okay?”

  I groaned.

  “I can’t move. Dammit, she’s heavy.”

  Becca tried to squeeze around Donna to help me, but there was no room on the staircase.

  She pulled while I shoved. It took three heaves before Donna fell backward onto the steps. Relieved to breathe freely again, I relaxed for too long and felt Donna’s mass shift on the staircase. Before I could get her under control, the steps buckled and her feet kicked up. She tumbled over the side. Her body smacked the cellar floor, heavy and wet.

  “Oh, my lord,” I said. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  Becca breathed heavily beside me, shining the flashlight anywhere but down where Donna had splattered.

  “Don’t look,” she said.

  “Trust me. I won’t.”

  “It’s getting late. We’d better get on with it.”

  Becca flashed the light down the steps. A tunnel of cobwebs swayed with the newly-stirred air. I could see a rutted concrete floor at the bottom and not much else. It was a long, long way down.

  The deeper we descended, the more a musty, earthy scent mixed with the decay.

  Something scratched through the dark. More rats, probably.

  Water stains blemished the concrete. I took the light from Becca and swung it where I expected the far wall to be and saw only black. I hadn’t realized how cavernous the cellar was until the flashlight beam perished in the darkness.

  An old washer and dryer, pockmarked by rust and blanketed in spiderwebs, stood at the foot of the stairs. A black spider the size of my palm spun a beetle into a cocoon.

  “Can’t imagine coming all the way down here just to wash clothes,” I said.

  “I can’t imagine coming down here at all.”

  A rotten egg odor hung under the awful decay scent, the result of water seeping up through the concrete and receding for decades. The crumbling texture of the floor was evidence the water was winning.

  Sweeping the light into the cellar revealed a mound of junk—broken and splintered two-by-fours, a digital clock with a shattered display, a rotted stack of shelving crawling with bugs, about a hundred rusty wood screws of various lengths, a winter hat with a tear up the front, an antique dresser turned on its side and smashed. Enveloping all of it were more spiderwebs.

  I real
ized I’d been wasting time. I didn’t want to see the results of Donna falling off the staircase.

  I most wanted to get out of the basement. I kept worrying the stairs would collapse and we’d be stuck down there.

  We walked along the stairs into the depths of the basement. The light found Donna face-down, thankfully. One of her arms was bent the wrong way. A leg appeared to fold between the knee and shin. Blood seeped out from under her.

  “Drag her to the back of the basement,” Becca said.

  “I can’t see the back wall. Why don’t we just drag her under the stairs?”

  “It can’t be too far. How big can a basement be? Shine the light.”

  I spread the beam straight ahead and found the concrete wall about twenty paces in the distance, covered with cobwebs. Tarnished rebar jutted out of the wall like iron maiden spikes. Most of the wall was hidden behind a big metal storage closet and the water heater.

  “You see?” she asked. “Not far at all.”

  I didn’t think I could drag Donna another foot, but I wanted the ordeal done with. Becca grabbed one ankle. I grabbed the other. We had to turn Donna, who was facing the other direction. As we spun her around she left a bloody, slimy trail of grue, the rutty concrete tearing clothing and clawing flesh. Some of that flesh stuck to the concrete.

  “Almost there,” she said. “You okay?”

  My face was wan, eyes blurry from trying not to breathe.

  The death scent assaulted me at the storage locker, and my stomach buckled in on itself. I let Donna’s leg drop and leaned over to vomit. Becca plugged her nose and looked in the other direction as the flashlight rolled away.

  I thought the sickness was over before another surge roiled out of me and splattered on the concrete. A lot of it ended up on Donna.

  “Take a deep breath,” Becca said.

  The irony almost made me laugh—she was still plugging her nose.

  “The smell…it’s coming from the storage locker.”

  She glanced up at cobwebs hanging down like stalactites from an impossibly tall ceiling.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here before something grows on us,” she said.

  The locker door hung open a crack. Though I didn’t want to know the source of the stink, my hand reached for the door.

  “Oh, don’t look, Steve. It’s probably just…”

  Her words floated away to another time and place.

  The door creaked open.

  My mind refused to process what lay inside.

  I think I screamed. From somewhere far off, I heard Becca screaming, pleading with me to look away.

  It was Riley. Only it wasn’t Riley, he was so difficult to recognize.

  A split ran down the center of his face, the chasm open to bits of bone, cartilage, and bloody flesh. The red rivers Donna had raked across his face were black and crusty now. His eye sockets were white snow, chunks of brain matter crusting his hair and forehead. I jerked back at the sight of a cockroach crawling from his open mouth.

  Another body lay stuffed into the back of the locker.

  A woman’s body. The coagulated stump of a neck crawled with beetles where the head had been.

  I didn’t need to examine the body to know it was Erin Tuttle’s.

  A third body was slung over her lap. I recognized his clothes. The junkie.

  I heard myself crying. I couldn’t feel my legs.

  As I dropped down to my knees, Becca grabbed me from behind and dragged me from the locker.

  “No. I can’t leave him here. Riley’s my friend.”

  “He’s dead,” she said. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

  Becca tugged me until my legs started to work again. I cried out. The hollow basement echoed back at me.

  She thrust the flashlight into my hand. The weight of it grounded me, giving me something real to grasp hold of when all around me was nightmare.

  Donna wouldn’t have gone this far. She’d been unstable, not a murderous monster.

  Something shifted at the back of the basement. Too heavy to be a rat.

  I swung the light toward the noise. My view was blocked by the storage locker and water heater.

  Then a dragging sound.

  I imagined Donna crawling after us.

  “Go,” Becca said, whispering into my ear.

  My will to survive drove the pins and needles from my legs.

  We stumbled toward what we believed was the staircase. It wasn’t. The flashlight beam was too narrow and weak, and the dark played tricks on us, leading us to the pile of junk in the middle of the floor.

  “Wrong way,” I said.

  She issued a nervous laugh.

  As I got my bearings the sound came again. Something big in the dark.

  Near the stairs?

  I pulled Becca back when she started toward the exit.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “You didn’t hear that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Donna isn’t The Midnight Killer.”

  When I breathed it felt as if pieces of broken glass lay in my chest.

  “Then who was on the DVD? Who killed all those people?”

  Becca’s eyes were black stones in the dark.

  The stairs groaned.

  The sound might have been the decaying wood settling.

  I knew better. We both did.

  Her hand touched mine, a gesture no different on its face than when we’d sat together in the den, talking. It meant more now. Something was on the stairs. Something which meant to kill both of us.

  We hid in the darkness without hearing the noise again.

  Why had we wasted time dragging Donna into the basement?

  “I think we’re alone,” I said.

  “Let’s go.”

  I pushed Becca in front of me and aimed the light up the stairs. Nobody was on the staircase.

  We climbed the long tunnel of stairs, brushing cobwebs aside and keeping an eye out for an extra shadow. It appeared just as dark above as it did below. Not being able to see the kitchen made me feel buried alive.

  We kept climbing and climbing as grit rained down from the stairs and bounced off the concrete.

  Then we were out of the basement.

  Becca shoved the splintered door aside before I realized we’d made it to the kitchen. Though dark, the kitchen seemed bright compared to the cellar.

  I stood at the threshold and listened.

  The upstairs was quiet.

  “Probably just rats on the stairs,” I said, trying to assure myself.

  Becca wasn’t convinced. The look of warning she gave me got me going again.

  A phone rang upstairs.

  My phone.

  Impossible, as we’d checked the bedrooms.

  I looked questioningly at Becca. The ringing stopped.

  The quiet was heavier than the dark.

  “Leave it,” she said, the mistrust over the sudden reappearance of my phone evident in her voice.

  When we were halfway across the kitchen floor, something scraped against the back of the house, a chiseling noise running along the wood.

  The rotary phone was gone, torn off the wall. A mess of wires hung out of the plaster.

  As I stepped back toward the cellar stairs, a shadow moved across the back door.

  The shadow grew monstrous.

  Then the shadow receded into the night as though I’d imagined it.

  I listened for footsteps circling the house but heard only wind.

  “I don’t think that was a policeman,” she said.

  “No.”

  My throat was parched. I’d spent the last few days terrified a cop would find us. Now I prayed one would bang on the door and get us out of there.

  I knew how vulnerable we were. The back door was unlocked, and the front door was fastened by a rusty deadbolt that wouldn’t stop a child.

  I wanted equal space between us and each door. I led her to the living room, where we stood with
our backs to the wall, hearts thundering.

  The mind is an insidious thing. It fabricates shapes in the darkness where only shadows lie, turns swaying branches into the claws of monsters. I knew this time the monsters were real.

  I moved my gaze to the windows. The glass swam with shadows.

  Then the door imploded, and something tore Becca away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Face of Midnight

  Becca screamed from somewhere in the house. I crawled back to my knees.

  Splinters and dust and dirt stuck against my skin and stung my eyes. I climbed to my feet and staggered against the wall as deep pain wrenched the back of my neck. I’d been hit, knocked unconscious.

  For how long?

  Cold poured through the open door.

  A thudding noise echoed through the walls, then silence. I was too disoriented to tell where the sound came from.

  The house became quiet, troubling. Hearing Becca flee through the house provided evidence she was alive. Now I heard nothing. Just the dead weight of the house groaning and shifting with the wind.

  I started to push off the wall and stopped. The shadows were somehow out of place. I looked over to where the big fireplace was, then behind me into the kitchen. It was too black to make anything out.

  Someone was downstairs with me. Someone waiting where the shadows congealed with the dark.

  I felt him out there, listening, maybe in the kitchen, maybe in the den or back near the fireplace. I didn’t breathe, didn’t move a muscle, a rabbit frozen by a wolf scent.

  Minutes ticked away. I took comfort knowing the killer was after me instead of Becca.

  If she was still alive.

  I stuffed that thought down where I couldn’t see it anymore. She had to be alive.

  Then the tension in the air lessened. He was gone.

  Gone because he’d found Becca?

  I remembered my phone ringing somewhere upstairs. A trap, I knew.

  The phone was our best chance. Our attacker had toyed with me, planting the phone upstairs and dialing it, trying to lure me deeper into the house so he could slip inside unnoticed. I shivered at the possibility he’d been inside the house since we arrived.