Evil Stalks the Night

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  “I never should have come back here,” Jim sighed after Jeremy had gone to bed, as we sat on the porch studying the late stars. The wind had picked up and bellowed angrily through the trees around us. “I came because you did and,” he added hesitantly trying to find the right words, “I was tired of the fear and sick of running away all the time.”

  “I came because Jonathan didn’t want me anymore,” I confessed. “Ever since the accident, it was never the same.”

  “What accident?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you about it? I thought I had.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Last year, Jonathan had an accident in the squad car while he was on duty, after I warned him something might happen. Afterwards he started turning away from me. He couldn’t stand the waiting.”

  “Waiting?”

  “Waiting until I saw something else happening to him, I suppose.” I shrugged in the moonlight, shivering from the cold breeze coming in. “He treated me oddly from then on, as if I wasn’t there anymore or something. That was the beginning.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice but it crept in anyway. “When the love’s gone for some people, it’s gone. He found someone else, that’s all.”

  “Sarah, can’t you see the pattern?” Jim’s eyes were looking at something far away. “It’s right there in front of you and you haven’t seen it?”

  “Seen what?”

  “All this.” He spread his long fingers around us symbolically. “We’ve been manipulated like puppets—our lives, our loved ones—until we were forced to run to the only place we had left to run to. Here.” His voice was brittle when he said the word. “Like good little puppets we obeyed. We came home.”

  “You’re saying it’s been behind everything that’s happened to us? Jonathan’s accident. My divorce. My money problems. Everything?” I was stunned and yet in another way I wasn’t surprised. I was stupid not to have seen it. The pieces of the puzzle were fitting together and it made sense. What else had it done to Jonathan?

  “Oh, Jim.” I was no longer angry at my ex-husband. He’d nearly died because of me and somehow he’d either suspected or known I was the cause. No wonder he’d left me. Wanted nothing to do with me.

  Jim stared into the night as if he were trying to see our adversary far away in the haunted woods. To know it was out there, waiting and deviously scheming more foul deeds, sent shivers through my soul.

  “Can’t you see we’ve been torn from everyone we’ve ever held dear?” There was an intense hatred in his voice as he tented his fingers and continued to glare towards the lightless woods. I felt the presence of malicious murmurings lingering on the restless breeze.

  It was there, plotting in and polluting the forest.

  “It’s taken almost everything from us,” Jim said.

  “There was someone you loved, too?” I asked. I was the only one he could bare his soul to. All the others were dead, so he turned to me and poured out truths and fears he’d apparently kept to himself for too long.

  “I fell in love with a girl named Amy.” He paused, whether from old pain and grief or something else, I didn’t know. “Oh, she was sweet. You would have liked her, Sis. I was on the road. I saw her as I was getting into my truck after I’d gone grocery shopping one day. I don’t know why, but I looked up as I was turning the key and there she was. It was the strangest thing. I felt compelled to follow her back into the store.” He smiled a brief, sad smile. “You know how shy I am. Well, you wouldn’t believe what I did to meet her. I walked up and introduced myself and actually asked her for a date. She was the prettiest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, but it was more than that. She was good, had a good heart. It was as if she was my soul mate from the moment she smiled at me and…I loved her.”

  I grinned in the gloom. “Well, did she go out with you?”

  He didn’t answer for so long I thought he hadn’t heard me. “As a matter of fact, she did, many times. I married her, Sarah.”

  I’d always thought there was nothing my brother could do to surprise me, but this bit of news left me speechless.

  “I loved her very much. Too much.”

  “You’re married?” I’d found my tongue. “You got married and didn’t tell me? Should I forgive you for this?” I laughed nervously because I could sense he hadn’t told me everything. Yet.

  “Yes, I got married…” His voice faded away.

  “Wow! You don’t sound very happy. Where is she?” My brother had a wife and hadn’t breathed a word of it to me and now he was stalling in giving me further details. I was happy for him, even with our problems. I wanted to know about her, and of course, couldn’t wait to meet her. “Is she coming here?” I asked, excited.

  “No. She’s dead,” he replied and fell silent.

  I could have said a lot of things, but silence was all I could manage.

  We sat there for a long time wrapped in our own little worlds. It was too much for me. Jim and I had always shared everything, even our losses.

  I touched his cheek and retrieved my hand when I found it wet.

  “It’s all right, Sarah,” he said, brushing off my pity. “I learned to live with it a long time ago. It’s been years. I’ve accepted it.” I wouldn’t have asked him, but he kept talking and I listened. “I’ve no doubt she was murdered. It killed her. I feel it.”

  “You don’t know how she died?”

  Jim stood up and walked to the railing on the porch. “No. One day she …vanished. She never called, or wrote, and never returned.”

  “Did you two have a fight or something?”

  He spun around to face me and I could tell he was angry. “No!

  “At first, I racked my brain trying to figure out if I’d done something to send her away. But I’d done nothing. We loved each other, we were happy. Anyway, she wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t have walked off and left me without a good reason.

  “I searched everywhere. I looked every place she could have gone. I called her parents and her friends. Everyone I could think of or knew of. No one had seen her. She was nowhere. I nearly went crazy with grief, but I never found her. I still call her parents every so often, to see if they’ve heard anything. They haven’t. It has destroyed them, poor people. She was their only child.

  “It’s hopeless. I know she’s dead. I know what happened to her.” He was gazing towards the woods and our old homestead. “I’ll get even. I’ll get that goddamn thing. I swear I will.” The words were daggers, sharp and lethal.

  “It can’t win all the time. It must have a weakness. We have to find it. Destroy it.”

  The human mind has an uncanny way of stuffing distasteful realities into its dark corners until the last possible moment of confrontation. My mind had done it all my life and was doing it again. I couldn’t face the ugly truth until it pounced on me and sunk its teeth in. My mind had erected a wall around the horrors. They lay there imprisoned, seething and rioting. I was safe on the other side, so far, yet I knew someday I’d have to open those gates and let them out and soon if I wanted us to survive.

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “We have to find a way to destroy it.”

  “No one else will.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening to us,” I muttered. “It’s the twentieth century, and we’re being stalked and picked off like flies by a vindictive entity, a ghost or a demon—or whatever the hell the thing is.”

  “It’s why we’re losing, Sarah. Something is systematically eradicating us while we sit in shock unable to fight back, because we don’t believe it’s really happening. We can’t accept it. We want explanations, a reason for what has happened, what is happening, when there simply is none. We’re cursed someway and it doesn’t matter what it is out there or why…it’s killing us off one by one and we have to stop it. Outsmart it.”

 
“If we can,” I replied tiredly. We were going in circles over the same old ground looking for clues and not finding anything. What was new?

  “Oh, I know we can. I have a few tricks up my sleeve. It doesn’t have us beaten yet. Not by a long shot.” As Jim bravely uttered the words, the pitiful screams of a child—a terrified, dying child—filled the air around us.

  Along with malevolent laughter.

  We clung to each other frozen in fear and when the screams continued, Jim took my hands away. “I can’t stand it!”

  He walked off the porch into the night.

  I glanced up at Jeremy’s window, and then hurried to catch up with Jim. We ran to the woods, the screams guiding our way.

  We’d run for what felt like forever, when my brother dropped to the ground.

  “What’s wrong?” I was breathing hard as I crouched near him. I shook his shoulder to get his attention, but he acted as if I weren’t there. After sprinting towards the sounds, we seemed no closer to them. We’d run this way, then that, our ears alert to any change in the tormented crying. It would stop and start again, but in a different place. When I saw Jim sink against the roots of a tree and bury his head in his hands, I was about ready to give up, too.

  “I can’t run anymore, Sarah.” His breathless voice was barely audible over the night wind. “I have to rest. Besides, I don’t hear it now. Which way should we go?”

  I shook my head, pushing the hair from my face. I was as drained as he was, even more so, and scared. If I had to run for my life, I wouldn’t stand a chance. “I don’t know which way.” I couldn’t see his face in the green murkiness. The moon had cunningly hidden itself behind the gathering storm clouds.

  “Listen,” he whispered, grabbing my shoulder so hard it hurt. “Do you hear anything?”

  “Yes, I hear…laughter.” But I didn’t need to answer for him to know I heard what he heard. It was as if we were those terrified summer children again, stumbling through the night woods all those years ago. I had the eerie feeling we’d been through this before, many times, long ago. A pattern was laid and we were repeating it, though I desperately wanted to change it. What could we do now to break the loop?

  “It’s tricking us.” Jim’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “It wanted us out here in these woods.”

  I could smell the sudden jump of fear in him, like the time when we were children. “Maybe there’s no child in danger at all.”

  Jim stood up and I could feel his body shudder. “It’s lured us out here. There is no child,” he spat, and spun around, a silhouette against the tall waving trees. There was a deathly hush now. Something out there was scrutinizing us, and waiting. I felt it.

  Our moment of anger had passed and we were left defenseless, two frightened people remembering terrors from our childhood we’d rather forget.

  “You could be right, except, I know someone’s going to die tonight.” I didn’t know what to do. We could walk in circles the whole night through these cursed woods and still not find what we sought. I had an awful hunch whatever was to happen had already happened, and no power in heaven nor on earth could change it now. We’d heard those cries, but it was possible they hadn’t originated from the forest at all. We’d gone on a wild goose chase, in the middle of the night running around like crazy fools. Why?

  I’d been a fool for thinking we could save the child in the first place. We weren’t supposed to.

  Jim spoke stealthily, as if he was certain we were being spied on. “Sarah, do you know what a bull’s eye is?”

  I thought he’d finally gone over the edge. “The center of a target?”

  He took my hand and we walked out of the woods, retracing the way we’d come. I had no idea we’d gone so far from the house.

  Something inside of me didn’t want to go.

  I turned my head and looked into the darkness. I knew a child lay there somewhere in a pool of their own blood and though I accepted the child was probably dead, I still wanted to help.

  Our walk evolved into a trot and then into a dead run. “Bull’s-eye,” Jim said. “It’s what we are right now, I bet.”

  The fear struck me and nearly slammed me to the ground. I slid to my knees.

  Jim yanked me up and we ran on.

  There was hideous laughter and it was close behind, closing the distance between us. I knew this had happened many times before.

  Inside of me a voice screamed I should stop. Turn and fight! Change the behavior and change the outcome. Do it this time. Do it and win or do it and end it all.

  Yet what about Jeremy back at the house?

  The second time I fell, something had knocked me down. We were so close to the house, I could see the lights shining ahead.

  “Sarah, for God’s sake get up! We’re almost there!” Jim whimpered and began to tow me behind him.

  I didn’t reply but cried out in pain as something tore through my leg. I heard more laughter and with a final burst of energy crawled up on my one good leg, dragging the other.

  “Jeremy,” I moaned as I hobbled on. I wasn’t sure if I could make it to the house and felt salty warm tears flowing across my lips as I tried not to give in to the pain.

  The house was so near.

  Then something dug into my shoulder and for the last seconds of consciousness, I was aware of a struggle going on between the thing which had its claws in me and my brother. Then everything went black.

  * * * *

  The next thing I knew I was sprawled on my couch and Jim was placing a bandage around the lower part of my right leg. The pain was a dull ache now.

  “What on earth happened out there?” I groaned, in a voice which couldn’t have been mine. It sounded more like a mouse.

  Jim patted my leg and gently laid it down in what he thought was a more comfortable position. “There, isn’t a real bad cut, but it’s deep. You need to stay off your leg for a while, Sis.” His face was clear in the light and I was shocked at the exhausted misery in it. There were gray circles around his eyes and though he was smiling at me, I could tell he was pushing it. “Now, I want to look at your shoulder.”

  “It almost had me, didn’t it?” I was numb, as if it’d happened to someone else. It wasn’t real. I could remember the fear out in the woods but I couldn’t connect it with here and now.

  “That was too damn close, Sarah, is all I can say.” Jim was examining a series of holes in the top of my shoulder. My blouse had been torn away around the wounds and the punctures were large, but clean; they weren’t bleeding anymore. He rinsed the washcloth he’d used on my leg and cleaned my shoulder. Then he tenderly put antiseptic on it. “Does it hurt much now?” There was guilty concern in his face as he studied me.

  “No, very little, actually.” I stretched my leg and rolled my jeans down over the bandage. You couldn’t tell I’d been attacked. The cuts were no longer bleeding. A fact strange to both of us. But we chose to ignore it.

  “Sarah, you’re supposed to be psychic. Didn’t you see what we were walking into?” Jim seemed almost angry at me for not knowing. I flashed him an annoyed look and went to put on a clean blouse. I could hear him pacing around downstairs as I slipped into a sweater.

  I shuffled down the hall and peeked in on Jeremy. His breathing was deep and regular. I limped down the stairs. I couldn’t have lost too much blood, but I was weak from the strain and shock of it all.

  I collapsed on the couch and looked up at my brother. “I’ve told you before, my psychic abilities don’t work that way. I’m psychic, but it’s a bizarre and sporadic gift. I don’t see everything. Especially if someone or something’s too close to me, I sometimes never see anything. Funny, isn’t it? I can help other people but I can’t seem to help those I love most or myself. When I die, I’ll die like everyone else…unexpectedly.”

  “I’m sorry,” he blurted
out. Crumpled on the couch, he looked drowsy already. His head kept dropping to his chest. I stuffed a cushion under it and he sighed in exhaustion.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about. You did what you thought you had to do. It took courage to run out there that way. Wanting to help that child.”

  “I put you in danger. I didn’t use my head. We can’t fight it. We can’t win.

  “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  I scooted over next to him. “Oh, you’re wrong there. We’ll find a way to defeat it. Somehow.” I was thinking of Jeremy. I couldn’t let anything happen to my son. I’d die first. “We have to find a way.” Deep inside, though, I was afraid we were doomed and it was only a matter of time. Then the whole family would be gone, wiped off the face of the earth without a trace. Game over.

  “Why am I still alive anyway?” I questioned the empty walls, but they remained silent. I felt a chill as I tried to keep from falling asleep too. I was so tired. I shivered as it got colder.

  “I’ll help. I promised.” The words were spoken inside my head but I knew it wasn’t I who spoke them. Then I recognized the voice. It was my grandmother. She was the reason I was still alive. I was sure. She’d saved me.

  I found a cover for Jim, who’d fallen asleep on the couch, and made my way upstairs. Slipping into Jeremy’s room, I stared a long time at his innocent face. Finally worn out, I lay down beside him, gathered him into my arms and closed my eyes.

  A child had died tonight. Tomorrow would come too soon. I didn’t know what it would bring, but I’d face it when it came. I was too weary to think anymore. Jim, my son and I were safe. There was nothing else I could do tonight. But rest.

  As I slipped into dreamland I could hear children’s voices and laughter, distant and haunting, and my mother’s voice calling us all home for supper. I thought it was real and we were all safe still. I smiled, remembering.

  I wished I could go back, before it all began, and be happy again.

  Chapter Thirteen