by Ray Wallace
"You know, I'm kinda wondering the same thing myself."
David grunted a laugh, swigged his beer.
"What's so funny?"
The larger man shook his head. "Sorry, it's just that I don't believe that for a second."
He stood up and set his beer on the porch's wooden railing. Then he went back inside the trailer, appeared a short while later with a flashlight in his hand.
"Come on," he said, turning on the flashlight. "You might as well get it over with."
Jerry reluctantly climbed to his feet and followed his friend across the yard, drinking his beer along the way, trying to squash the uncomfortable feeling rising up inside of him, threatening to bloom into something he might not be able to control. A breeze rustled the leaves of the nearby trees and a low peal of thunder came rolling out of the distance as they approached the shed.
"Wait a second," said Jerry as he raised the can of beer and drained the rest of its contents in a few long swallows. After crushing the can in his hand, he shrugged his shoulders a few times as if loosening up for a fight and said, "All right, let's do this."
And with that, David opened the door to the shed.
Inside, Jerry could see nothing but darkness, deep and pervasive. Then the flashlight clicked on and there he was, the gray man, sitting on the floor with his back to the rear wall of the shed, shelves of tools and various types of lawn equipment standing to either side of him. He raised his head as if to stare directly into the beam of light aimed his way. But, of course, he wasn't staring at anything because he had no eyes, just those two open sockets where the eyes used to be.
"Well, god damn.”
"You see. He's not so scary."
Now it was Jerry’s turn to laugh, just a little. "If you say so."
After standing there for a minute or more, taking in the sight of the man with the tattered clothes and the gray skin of a corpse, Jerry turned and walked back to the porch, waited for David to go inside and grab some more beer.
"So what's the plan?" asked Jerry when the two of them were seated next to one another again.
"The plan?" A shrug. "How the hell should I know?"
"Has he spoken? Has he said anything at all?"
"Not a word."
“So you’re just gonna keep him out there?”
“You got a better idea?”
Actually, Jerry did. It involved putting the gray man back in David’s truck, driving somewhere far away and leaving him there. But he kept it to himself. It wasn’t really his problem, after all. Instead, he drank his beer and listened as David told him about an incident at work the other day, grateful for the distraction, anything to keep him from imagining what went through the mind of a living dead person, the sorts of things he might dream about.
Thursday, July 7th
It came back in increments, pieces of the life he’d forgotten. Small things at first, the images becoming richer and more detailed as the days went by. Before long, he had most of it back. At least he thought he did. If parts of his memory were missing, old memories in particular, moments from his youth, how would he know? If there was no external record of these moments—a photograph in an album, perhaps—then he had no way of ascertaining whether or not a particular memory was, in fact, missing. He knew it was pointless to let such a possibility bother him but, nevertheless, it did.
The act of seeing things with his own two eyes offered the most help in his recovery. When he’d finally gotten up from his bed at the hospital, weak and trembling like something newborn, and went into the tiny bathroom attached to his room, he spent nearly half an hour leaning on the sink, looking into the mirror, studying the face of the man staring back at him.
“Thomas Edward McHenry,” he’d said in a low voice. “Son of Martha and Allan McHenry. Both dead. Martha nearly ten years now from the cancer that had started in her liver. Allan a few years later from a brain aneurism.”
The recollection infused him with a strange amalgam of emotions: joy at the fact he could remember these details of his past mixed with the inevitable sadness imparted by such information. By the time he made it back to his bed, he’d been able to picture himself at church, standing before the congregation, spreading the word of God.
They kept him at the hospital for two more days.
And now, sitting on the porch in front of his house, he stared into the slow and steady drizzle of the storm, his gaze drawn to the place where he’d been standing when the lightning struck. Mrs. Shan, the elderly woman who played the organ during Sunday services, had found him, unconscious, lying on the ground. Many of those who had come to visit him at the hospital told him it was a miracle, an act of God Himself, the fact that he bore no scars or lasting injuries from his encounter with nature’s fury. When he had asked Dr. Sylvan her thoughts on the subject, she had offered him a tight smile and said, “I’m sorry, Pastor, but I don’t believe in miracles.”
“Then what’s your explanation?”
She shrugged. “You were lucky. Plain and simple. It happens.”
That would be me, all right, the luckiest man in the world.
So then why this feeling he couldn’t shake? Why this idea that the world he had known before the lightning strike was not the same as the one to which he’d returned? He was convinced that something had changed during his absence. Something subtle but profound.
Something in the shadows.
He found himself fixating on them, continuously distracted by them. They seemed deeper, more pronounced than he remembered. While staring across the yard, the familiar landscape made dull and dreary by the muted afternoon sunlight, he let his gaze settle upon the ground beneath the remaining, swaying branches of the oak tree that had taken the brunt of the lightning strike. The shadows mesmerized him as they moved and twisted like something alive. And not just alive. No, they seemed to move in a way and with a purpose suggesting intelligence.
Now you’re just being ridiculous.
But was he? The more he looked, the longer he stared, the more he wondered.
The fear he’d felt upon awakening at the hospital came back to him. And as the feeling grew, the more convinced he became that something deeply, undeniably wrong was taking place. It was as though the darkness of those four days, those lost days, had followed him into the waking world and manifested itself in the shadows.
It doesn’t want to let me go.
Standing from the chair where he’d been sitting, he turned away from the tree and what he saw on the ground near its roots. Once inside the house, he made his way to the bedroom where he fell to his knees, placed his elbows on the bed, clasped his hands together in front of him and started to pray.
Friday, July 8th
Stephen was drunk, to the point that if he was pulled over there’d be no point in even trying to deny it.
"Should’ve called Karen, had her come pick me up," he muttered as he did his best to maintain the speed limit and not draw any unwanted attention to himself. The whole reason he'd gone out drinking, though, was to get away from Karen. There'd been too much talk in recent days about the state of their relationship for his liking. The other night, she’d come straight out and told him she wasn't happy, that she hadn't been happy for a long time. Not that the words had surprised him. It still hurt to hear it said so bluntly, though.
"Yeah, well that makes two of us," he'd told her, angry and defensive. Which wasn't entirely true. Because there were times he was happy, truly happy. Unfortunately, the feeling had nothing to do with his relationship with his wife.
The windshield wipers slapped at the raindrops dotting the windshield as Stephen pulled into the driveway, relieved to have made it home without incident. After parking the car and killing the engine, he grabbed his phone from where he’d tossed it onto the passenger seat and checked the time: 1:17 AM. Karen should have taken her sleeping pills hours ago and long since made her way to La La Land.
The thought of what he could only hope awaited him in the back yard sent a thr
ill of excitement throughout his body. He got out of the car and hurried through the rain to the front door of the house. After letting himself in as quietly as possible, he cursed under his breath as he stumbled into the small table near the entrance, almost knocking the lamp on top of it to the ground. Heart beating heavily in his chest, he didn’t move for a few moments, listening for any sounds that would let him know his wife might be up and about.
Nothing.
And so he made his way down the hallway to the bedroom, wanting to check in on her, make sure she really was dead to the world before he headed outside once again. Standing in the doorway, he let his eyes adjust to the near total darkness of the room, alleviated only by the traces of moonlight drifting in past the blinds and the red gleam of the digital alarm clock. After a minute or so, he still couldn't be sure so he walked as quietly as he could across the carpeting over to her side of the bed.
She wasn't there. The covers were rumpled, though, letting him know she’d been there at some point during the night.
Where could she be?
He left the room and made his way out to the garage, saw that she hadn’t taken her car anywhere.
In the living room, he speed dialed her number, spotted her cell phone lying on the coffee table when it started ringing. He ended the call and set his phone down next to hers, trying to decide what he should do next. His gaze drifted over to the sliding glass door, as if drawn there by a will other than his own. Lightning flashed, briefly illuminating the porch outside. The screen door was propped open. Even in his inebriated state, Stephen knew for certain it had been closed when he left the house earlier.
He went out to the porch, the rain coming down hard now, rattling the roof over his head. At the screen door he stopped and stared into the darkness shrouding the yard, the dim shapes of the trees standing there like sentinels.
There!
He saw movement. And he heard something. A cry. Of pain? Or something else entirely.
He went through the open doorway and into the rain, splashing through puddles as he crossed the yard. It didn’t take him long to find her.
His wife lay on the ground, naked, eyes closed, squirming in obvious pleasure, completely oblivious to his presence. And she wasn't alone.
"Karen?"
No response.
"Karen."
This time she opened her eyes, looked directly at him. The water woman—his lover—turned her head to look at him too. His wife smiled—how long had it been since he'd seen her smile?—and said without the slightest trace of guilt or embarrassment, "Oh, Stephen, it's the most wonderful thing imaginable..."
For a few passing seconds, he could only stand there and stare at her, at the two of them, trying to figure out how he felt about all of this.
"Come here," his wife said, reaching for his pant leg. "Please."
And before he even realized what he was doing, his hands went to his belt, his zipper, were tugging at his shirt, pulling it up and over his head and tossing it to the ground. Then he was down in the wet and the mud with his wife—the woman he had, once upon a time, loved like no other—along with the other woman, the one who had no place in this world—or hadn’t until the storm came along. And in that moment, and the many that followed, he discovered a happiness he hadn't known in a long time and a deep and abiding gratitude at having it so effortlessly returned to him.
Saturday, July 9th
James dreamed he was in a small boat, sailing the high seas. Alone. Not a speck of land to be seen in any direction. The sun glared down at him out of a clear, blue sky. Until the clouds rolled in. Billowing, gray thunderheads appearing as if from out of nowhere, devouring their way across that flawless, azure expanse, plunging the world into sudden twilight. Then darkness. Rain. A howling wind. The waves came alive all around him, washing up and over the edge of the boat, threatening to capsize it and throw him overboard. Then he would be at the mercy of the sea, mercy he knew would be in short supply. Not to mention the thing he’d seen earlier, when the world had been calm and bright. A vast shadow patrolling the watery depths, waiting until the time was right—his dream-self knew with a terrible certainty—to make its way to the surface and claim him.
Something thumped against the bottom of the boat, directly beneath the section where he lay huddled in fear. Another impact. A third. Each delivered with greater force than the one preceding it. With the fourth hit, the boat went over, plunging him into the water.
After several long, terrifying moments, he clawed his way to the surface, gasping for air, riding up one side of a mighty wave and down the other. He could only pray that this was the worst of his ordeal, that whatever had upended the boat wouldn’t find him, wouldn’t drag him down into the darkness from which no one ever returns.
But, of course, it did find him.
Something wrapped around his ankle, wound its way up his leg until it encircled his waist and, before he could even cry out in protest, pulled him under. Down and down he went until nothing but blackness, infinite and absolute, surrounded him in every direction. Then, some interminable time later, while the breath burned in his lungs, a deformed, gray circle appeared before him, growing larger as it came nearer, ever nearer. At its center he discerned another, darker circle. And still it approached until it claimed the entire field of his vision. Hypnotized, he found he could not look away. What is this thing? he asked himself, not wanting to admit—even in these, what were assuredly the final moments of his existence—that he knew the answer to this question. There was no feigning ignorance, however, when the great, gray circle before him blinked.
He screamed then. Or tried to. But the water rushed into his mouth, down his throat and into his lungs, killing the scream before it could ever be born...
James awoke with a gasp.
Sitting up, he flicked on the light next to the bed, all the while trying to extricate himself from the remnants of the dream. It had been so vivid, the feel of the ocean, the sensation of it rushing into his body.
The eye.
He shook his head, swung his legs over the side of the bed and placed his feet on the floor only to find himself standing in several inches of water.
"What the hell?"
Except for the bathroom, the loft he lived in consisted of one large area sectioned off by heavy curtains. He left the bedroom and went down the hallway to the studio, stopped in the doorway and looked to where his latest creation stood leaning against the wall. He'd put the final touches on the painting earlier in the day, the image of the great leviathan rising up from the ocean. Impossibly, water flowed in a wide, steady stream from the lower half of the painting, out onto the floor. Waves undulated beneath the glowering, cyclopean eye of the giant creature while gray clouds drifted across the nighttime sky. The tentacles reaching down into the watery depths twisted and writhed in endless motion.
Mesmerized, he walked into the room, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, to convince himself it was all a trick of the lighting, the workings of his overactive imagination. Halfway to the painting, he stopped as something emerged from the canvas to splash down into the water near his feet. Like a snake, the tentacle wriggled forward and wrapped itself around James's ankle before he even realized what was happening. It pulled him off balance, causing him to fall to the floor with an inarticulate cry. Then he was dragged feet first toward the waiting leviathan.
"Oh, God," he said as his legs disappeared into the painting. A moment later, the water rushed up and over his head
Am I still dreaming? he wondered, hoping it was so.
Down he went—for the second time that night—into the cold and the dark.
It’s only a dream, he kept telling himself. Only a dream.
Unfortunately, this time, it was one from which he never woke.
Sunday, July 10th
So this is it, thought Keith as he took in the sight of the police cars blocking the road up ahead.
The end of the line.
He sped across th
e wet pavement, the blue and white lights of the cars chasing him reflecting from the rearview mirror. For a few seconds, he’d managed to forget where he was at, what had transpired to bring him to this place. And then it had all come back to him in a rush that had nearly made him lose control of the vehicle. These moments of forgetfulness had been happening with increasing regularity as time wore on.
His face was all over the news. The last time he'd stopped for gas, the store attendant had been watching TV. And there was his face on the screen with the word "Manhunt" in bold print underneath it. He’d been smiling in the picture, looking like he didn't have a care in the world, like things couldn't possibly be better. For a moment, he’d wondered where they’d gotten the image then realized it was from his wedding photo, the one the newspaper had run years earlier. They'd edited Brenda out of it, of course.
Too bad, he’d thought. She’d looked so beautiful.
The attendant tried to hide the fact that he recognized him, didn't do a very good job of it. If it wasn’t for the fact that the area behind the counter was enclosed in protective glass, Keith would have pulled out his gun and shot him. Instead, he just paid for his gas, a pack of crackers and a bottle of soda then walked out to his car. Standing at the pump he could see the attendant through the store window, looking at him and talking on the phone.
A couple of miles from the store, Keith turned down an empty side street and parked behind an old building with an overgrown lot where he ate his crackers and drank his soda. The rain tap-tap-tapped across the roof, as insistent as it had been the very first day it had rolled into town and invaded his home. And all the while, the voice continued to speak to him:
They deserved it. You know that, don't you?
"Yeah, they deserved it all right," he said when he’d eaten the last of the crackers. Then he tilted the seat back and closed his eyes. "Every last one of them."