by Ray Wallace
So just what in the hell, exactly, am I doing out here?
Feeling as though he was guiding the car on autopilot, he turned at a street sign with a familiar name printed on it. This struck him as odd considering the fact that he’d never been in this particular neighborhood before. But then he remembered stopping at the library earlier and using one of their computers to search for directions.
Almost there, whispered the voice in his head.
A few minutes later, he reached his destination.
He parked at the side of the road, stared out of the driver side window at the nice, two story house with the two-car garage and the well-groomed hedgerow out front.
"I bet the roof doesn't have a single leak in it."
He leaned over, popped open the glove compartment and pulled out the .22 caliber pistol hidden inside, the one he'd bought from a guy at Dirty Larry's a few months back. At the time, he hadn’t been certain he’d even wanted a gun, had bought it on a whim and some vague conviction he’d feel safer—from what, he didn’t know—if he had one in his possession. Now he was glad he’d gone through with the purchase. It would make what he’d come here to do that much easier.
He tucked the gun down the front of his pants, pulled his shirt over it. Then he got out of the car and crossed the road, ducking his head against the rain as he walked through the opening in the hedgerow, the voice whispering to him all the while, urging him onward. And before long, he was there, standing beneath the roof of the front porch, out of the rain. He hesitated only a moment before raising his hand and ringing the doorbell. While he waited for someone to answer the door, he pulled the gun from beneath his shirt and held it behind his back. Maybe fifteen seconds passed before the door opened and Keith’s landlord stood before him.
"Mr. Warnick?" said the man Keith had come to see, obviously surprised to find him here.
"So you remember me."
"Of course." A bemused expression found its way onto his face. "Why wouldn't I?"
"Oh, I don't know, you seem to have forgotten about fixing the roof where I live."
The smile disappeared. "I told you, once the storm has passed—"
Keith stuck the gun in his face.
"Yeah, about that. I think we need to have a little talk."
The man's eyes went wide as his hands came up in front of him. "Look, I don't want any trouble..."
Keith smiled, just a little.
“I guess it’s too late for that.”
He entered the house, pushing the door closed behind him.
Interlude
Less than a mile offshore, the waters churned with agitation. A sudden impulse had come over the great leviathan, an urge to crawl forth from the ocean, to reveal itself in all its glory to the petty humans, to force them to bow before it, to bend them to its will. But it resisted. Now was not the time for such actions. It had to be patient. No easy task, to be sure. The hatred it felt, that had been a part of it for so long now, demanded action. As it fought to maintain its self control, a host of memories flooded its mind, unbidden and unwelcome…
The turbulent, yellow skies of its homeworld. The red, glaring circles of the twin suns around which it orbited. The ancient, towering obelisk that stood at the world's southernmost point—surrounded on all sides by a bleak and inhospitable wasteland—shining its black light upon those instilled with the strength and courage to find it. And within that black light, minds and souls were laid bare, and arcane secrets were revealed to the worthy.
The leviathan recalled the events that had driven it from its homeworld. The floating ships that had appeared in the skies. The ensuing war. The titanic forces unleashed by the armies on both sides of the conflict. And it felt the shame—or something close to it—that accompanied its memories of the final battle, of how it had used the secrets it had learned while basking in the black light of the obelisk to flee when certain defeat seemed imminent. Opening a rift in spacetime, it had escaped. But not unscathed.
Its injuries were many and of more than the physical variety. Its psychic abilities had been corrupted, damaged in a way that left the leviathan wondering if it would ever be truly whole again. While drifting through the cold reaches of empty space, it used the last of the black light's secrets to protect itself against the void’s cruel and deadly nature as best it could. And then it slept.
Eons passed.
When it awoke, it found itself within the planetary system of a lone yellow star. Still hurting, it guided itself toward the nearest planet by warping the subtle energies of the void. Cocooned in fire, it plummeted through the oxygen rich atmosphere before plunging into an ocean of water, its relief immediate and palpable as it descended into the dark embrace of the deep. And there it healed, sleeping and waking in long, cosmic cycles. On occasion, it would rise to the surface, take in the sight of the strange, blue world it had found, of the even stranger lifeforms it would observe wandering one of the planet’s primary land masses. And it would descend once again, returning to the ocean floor where it would sleep and heal and dream.
Until...
On one particular occasion, during its ascent from the watery depths, a chaotic jumble of voices invaded its mind like a proliferation of errant radio signals. As it breached the ocean’s surface and moved toward the nearest shore, it took in the sight of the creatures responsible for the noise, cowering in obvious terror at its approach. At first glance, the humans resembled the bipedal invaders that had brought such destruction down upon its home planet. And for this alone it hated them. In that moment, it considered wiping them out, forever silencing the incessant furor of their collective imaginings. Instead, it decided upon another course of action. When it was fully healed, it would enslave the humans, turn their world into the hell its own had become. In this way it hoped to find some measure of contentedness, to slake the omnipresent need for revenge incessantly burning inside of it.
Decision made, it slid back into the ocean, left those who had seen it—the first of their kind to do so—to spread the word of what they had witnessed.
Nearly a thousand years passed before it revealed itself again. On that particular occasion, it made a mostly successful attempt at conjuring the storm, aware of the effect the gray weather would have upon the fragile human psyche. It also reached out and infected the dream thoughts of those who lay sleeping with images of death and decay.
After that, it ascended from the ocean depths with greater frequency as human civilization advanced and moved outward across the planet. On most of these occasions, it chose to stay hidden, not wanting to offer widespread evidence of its existence, preferring the idea of the fearsome myths and legends it inspired, of the dread and dark dreams it instilled in its future subjects…
Now, as the leviathan lurked beneath the waters near the town known as Hidden Bay, it managed to control its hatred, to suppress its rage, all the while finding comfort in the knowledge that it wouldn’t have to do so for much longer. More and more, not only could it infiltrate the dreamworlds of the humans, it could also influence the very reality they inhabited when they arose from sleep. Soon, a mere instant as measured on the wheel of cosmic time, it felt confident it would regain the full extent of its powers. And when it did, the many years of its reign would begin.
Monday, July 4th
These days, it was always good to have an excuse to get out of the house.
Last week, when Henry’s ghost had reached for her, when it had tried to place its hands around her neck, Annette thought her time had come.
He wanted to kill me.
But he hadn't.
Because he couldn’t.
Although, she still considered it a minor miracle she hadn’t had a stroke or a heart attack in the aftermath of their little confrontation. "Little" because, as it turned out, she’d never been in any real danger throughout the ordeal.
He had reached for her and she had backed away. And that had been the extent of it. He couldn’t leave the room. The room where he'd decide
d to end his own life. It was as though some invisible force had prevented him from extending his arms through the open doorway, from getting his fingers around her throat—as had obviously been his intention—and throttling the life out of her. Whenever she was at home, though, she made a point of staying out of the hallway leading past that particular room as much as possible. Especially at night. Yes, the hallway had proven to be a safe place but she saw no reason to take any unnecessary risks. Who knew how these things worked, after all? Or when the rules, whatever rules applied to a situation like this, might change? Or if there were even any rules at all.
Pulling into the driveway, she pressed the button on the remote that would open the garage door. Once inside, she turned off the windshield wipers and killed the engine. Then she got out of the SUV and started carrying bags of groceries into the house, wincing on occasion at the pain in her feet and hands.
"Damn rain's never gonna end."
Local programs existed to help elderly people with tasks that might prove too burdensome at their age. One of them involved having groceries delivered right to their homes. Annette wanted nothing to do with any of them. She was intent upon remaining as independent as possible for as long as possible. "Just don't put too many items in one bag," she would tell the employees over at the Shop-N-Save. "I’ll admit I'm not as strong as I used to be."
She spent ten minutes or so putting the groceries away. Her thoughts drifted to past July 4ths, to the seemingly countless firework displays she’d seen throughout the many years she’d been alive on this planet. This year they’d been canceled, of course, because of the weather.
Too bad, really. I don’t know how many I have left.
When the last of the groceries found their way into the refrigerator, she put a pot of water on the stove for tea, thought about doing some reading until her evening shows came on. As she waited for the water to boil, she checked her cell phone which she’d left in the car while she was shopping, saw that she’d missed a call from Susan, her oldest granddaughter.
"I'll call her later," she said out loud even though she was the only one in the house, a habit she’d picked up after Henry decided to do what he’d done and left her with a lot of alone time.
She wandered into the living room, trying to remember where she'd left her eBook reader, found it on the coffee table, grabbed it and skimmed over the titles of the books she had yet to read, settled on a thriller that had been topping the bestseller lists for weeks now.
"Guess it's time I see what all the hype’s about."
A short while later, the teapot began to whistle so she returned to the kitchen, grabbed a cup from the cupboard and a teabag from the jar on the counter next to the refrigerator. After pouring the water and adding some sugar free sweetener, she headed to the living room once again, intent on curling up on the couch and getting some reading done.
A sound from the staircase brought her up short.
The seventh stair from the top always creaked in a distinctive way whenever stepped on, a sound she had come to know well in all the years she had lived in this house. Looking toward the staircase, she watched as Henry descended into view, stopping when he reached the bottom. He returned her gaze, a smile of what appeared to be genuine pleasure finding its way onto his lips, an expression so unlike the one that had twisted his features the night he had tried to strangle her.
"Hello, my dear," he said, his voice as precise and clear as if he were actually there, as if he'd never really killed himself, hadn’t been dead and buried these past five years now. "I must apologize for the last time we saw one another. I’m not sure what came over me. You do know I’d never do anything to hurt you. Don’t you?"
Tuesday, July 5th
Emily sat at the desk in her room, crayon in hand, a blank sheet of paper laid out before her. Another dark and dreary day meant another day spent inside the house. Brianna, one of the local teenage girls her mother paid to babysit for her during the week, was in the living room, watching TV and talking on her cell phone. Emily could hear both the TV and the girl’s voice through the open door of her bedroom, neither of them loud enough that she could discern any of the words.
About half an hour earlier, Brianna had asked if Emily felt like playing a board game.
"Maybe later," she'd said then made her way back to her room.
She liked Brianna and normally would have jumped at the chance to play a game with her. Today, though, there was something she needed to do. The urge had been there since she’d first opened her eyes earlier in the morning, like it had followed her up and out of sleep, from whatever dreamland she’d visited during the night. And the time had come for her to act upon it.
She’d grabbed the crayons and a sheet of paper from the desk drawer, climbed onto the chair which was just a little too big for her then sat there for a minute or so staring at the empty white rectangle before her. She knew what the urge wanted from her, what it required of her: for her to draw something. A very specific something. Much different than the flowers and bright blue skies, the rainbows and unicorns she normally liked to create.
Seemingly of their own volition, her fingers pulled the black crayon out of the box.
And she started to draw.
She outlined the ocean waves about two thirds of the way up the page, black beneath the cloud-covered night sky she saw in her mind’s eye. The moon went in the upper right hand corner. She drew blue and yellow and red stars, shaded in the area around them with a dark gray color. Then she filled in the area beneath the waves, left the bottom half of the page blank, knowing what would go there.
Closing her eyes, she conjured the image she wished to create within her mind, needing to see it clearly. Several seconds passed. With a sudden intake of breath, she opened her eyes and went to work again, drawing a round, bulbous shape emerging from the bottom edge of the paper. In the middle of this shape she made a smaller one, rounded, misshapen, with a black circle at the center of it.
The eye.
After shading in the rest of the ocean around the monstrous figure, she sat there staring at what she had created for several minutes. She knew there was more to the creature, tentacles suspended from beneath the head, reaching down ever deeper into the watery depths.
I should have left more room, she told herself. Then: Next time I will.
This would do for now.
She got up from the desk, walked across the room and turned off the light, went out to the living room and told Brianna she was ready to play a board game now.
The day passed.
Darkness fell
Once Emily got ready for bed, her mother came into her room and talked to her for a little while, told her she’d take her to the movies over the coming weekend. “We’ll see whatever you want.” Then she tucked Emily in and gave her a kiss on the forehead.
As she stood from the bed, ready to leave the room, she stopped and stared at Emily’s desk for a moment before making her way over to it.
“What’s this?” she asked, picking up the drawing that lay there.
“The monster,” replied Emily, all eight-year-old matter-of-factness.
This earned her a strange look. "Why did you draw this, honey?"
“I don’t know. I just had to.”
Her mother continued to stare at her for a few seconds before returning her attention to the drawing and asking, "Can I have this?"
"If you want."
Her mother came over and stood next to the bed once again.
“If you get scared, I’m right down the hall.”
“Okay, Mommy.”
When she was alone, she thought about what her mother had said, how she could go to her if she got scared. But the monster didn’t frighten her. She knew that it meant her no harm.
And before long, secure in this knowledge, she drifted off to sleep.
Wednesday, July 6th
Jerry sat on the porch behind David Lees's double wide trailer, listening to the rain tap dance across the aw
ning overhead while he stared across the yard at the metal tool shed standing about thirty feet away. Behind him, the door opened and closed as David stepped onto the porch and handed him a can of beer, his third since he'd gotten there an hour earlier. David took a seat on the plastic chair next to him and took a long pull from his own beer.
"He's not going to hurt you, you know," David told him after emitting an appreciative belch.
"That's not what concerns me," said Jerry, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. He was afraid and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Thus, the anger. He'd been afraid ever since he and David had gone out to the beach and found the man sitting there. The man with no eyes. The gray man. A constant, nagging fear that hadn’t left him, not completely, no matter how much he’d managed to drink in the meantime.
"Then what is it?" asked David.
"Come on, man, do you really need to ask?" This time he didn't bother to hide his anger.
"I admit, yeah, it's a little bit freaky and all but... Don't you think it's kinda cool, finding out the world ain't quite what you thought it was?"
"A little bit freaky? I guess that's one way of putting it. And, no, I really don't think it's cool. Not at all."
There was only the sound of the storm for several long moments.
"So why did you drive out here?"
David lived on two acres of land a few miles outside of town with plenty of trees between his and the neighbors' properties. Jerry had seen nothing but woods to either side of the road during the last half of the trip from his place so, yeah, David's abode did have a bit of an "out here" feel to it, as in "out here in the middle of nowhere."