by Ray Wallace
She didn't bother giving him a menu as he only ever ordered one of two items they served there—the country fried steak or the club sandwich.
"I think I'll go with the club tonight. On wheat. Fries and a sweet tea."
She smiled and wandered back to the kitchen to put in his order. The place was less than half filled with customers and it didn't take him long to get his food. It didn’t take him long to eat it, either. He wolfed it down, ready to hear the squawk of his walkie-talkie at any moment. It came as a pleasant surprise when he was able to finish his meal in peace.
"Now you be careful out there," said Janet as she always did after he paid, left a generous tip, and made his way to the exit.
Outside, he ducked against the rain and hurried to his vehicle. Lightning split the heavens as he pulled into traffic—which was light due to the weather and the hour—and headed further into town with no particular destination in mind. Halfway down Main St., he hung a left on Wilkinson, drove toward the four-lane bridge that spanned the usually placid river winding its way through Hidden Bay to the ocean. With all this rain, though, the river was far from calm these days. Out of curiosity, he parked at the end of the bridge, grabbed his poncho from the back seat and pulled it on before exiting the vehicle. He followed the walkway along the side of the bridge out to the midway point, placed his hands on the railing and leaned out over it, took in the sight of the angry, roiling waters below. They flowed by less than ten feet beneath where he stood, dark and intimidating, visible in the wan lighting of the moon and the lights standing thirty or so feet apart along both sides of the bridge.
How much more rain before the river overflows its banks?
If it kept raining hard like this, he figured a few more days at most. He sighed. That's all the town needed on top of everything else that had occurred in recent weeks.
He stood there for another minute, fascinated by nature's power, mesmerized by the rushing roar of water, thought of what would happen to a person who happened to fall in there. When he turned to leave, he noticed another pedestrian along the other side of the bridge. A woman, judging by the long hair being tossed about by the wind. She held an umbrella above her head, struggled to keep it in place, to keep herself from getting too thoroughly drenched. Later, he would wonder why she had even bothered with the umbrella considering what she did next.
A few cars went by, tires hissing across the rain-soaked roadway. As he walked, he kept an eye on the woman, watched as she placed her hands on the railing, much as he had done. Then she lifted herself up on top of the railing so she could lean out even further.
"No!" shouted Phil as a sickening dread took hold of him. "Stop!"
Before he could say anything else, the woman went over the side of the bridge, disappearing from view.
He looked over the railing along his half of the bridge once again, caught a glimpse of the woman as she went by, the waters tossing her about like the proverbial rag doll before pulling her under.
"My God," he said in a tone barely above a whisper: "Why?"
The skies offered a rumble of thunder, the closest to an answer he knew he would ever get.
Friday, July 15th
He knew this storm.
If there had ever been even the slightest iota of doubt, it had been vanquished long since. With every day the storm stuck around—hell, every hour—his conviction only grew. Excepting its duration, this system was identical to the one that had visited the area all those years ago. He'd pored over the weather charts his father had compiled just to be sure. Same signatures. Same storm. How this could be, he still hadn't the faintest idea. For now, he could only accept it for what it was, stop questioning what his instincts had told him from the beginning.
Standing on the beach, John faced into the wind, stared out across the seething surface of the ocean before lifting his gaze to the sky and the mass of clouds above him. The storm was amazingly well defined, had the wide, circular pattern of a hurricane with an eye at its center. Though it lacked the intensity of a hurricane, the driving winds and the relentless, lashing rainfall, he liked to remind those tuning in to his nightly broadcasts that it certainly deserved to be taken seriously. And after such a long stretch of gray and gloomy days, he couldn’t imagine any of them not doing so.
The storm had already outlasted its previous visit to the area by several days, far longer than a system of this size had any right to stick around. Almost as if there was some unknown force, some sort of active sentience behind its design and duration. A silly thought, yes, one that no academician worth his salt would ever spend much time entertaining. But when faced with the impossible, even normally levelheaded individuals could entertain some rather outlandish theories. Much as John found himself doing these days with increasing regularity.
Wearing the raincoat and matching yellow cap that had served him well in his meteorological investigations over the years, he wondered what he hoped to find out here, braving the elements when he could have been inside, enjoying a cup of tea. He’d been down to this section of beach several times in recent days. It was a common practice of his, going outside and getting the feel of a storm firsthand. The forecasters from other stations were never quite sure how he managed it, how he could predict the behavior of inclement weather more accurately than they could when all of them relied on the same basic technology.
"What's your trick?" they'd want to know when he ran into them. "What are you hiding from the rest of us?"
He'd only smile and shake his head, answer in his most cryptic tone of voice: "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
And they wouldn't though the answer was a rather simple one:
He just knew. Like his father before him, when he came in contact with the rain, felt the winds swirling about him, observed the lightning flickering across the sky, it would just come to him: Tomorrow evening, early. Or: Two mornings from now, just before noon. That's when the storm will move on. And that's why he was here now, why he'd stood on this very section of beach all of those other times in recent weeks. He was trying to figure out this particular storm's intentions, kept waiting for the knowledge to come to him.
But it hadn’t happened.
This particular system confused him on a number of levels. So much about it defied explanation, made no rational sense at all. During all of his attempts to unravel its mysteries, one overriding sentiment made itself clear to him:
There's something not right about it.
A chill passed through his body as he stared out toward the area of relative calm at the center of the storm where the eye would be located. And for a brief, terrible moment he imagined he saw an actual eye there, gigantic and monstrous, looking back at him with the hateful arrogance of some ancient, alien deity, one that found every living creature wandering the face of the Earth beneath contempt. In that moment, he felt himself possessed by an irrational, all consuming fear he had never known before. Without thinking, wanting only to get away from that place as quickly as he could, he turned and fled across the beach, harassed by the wind as he stumbled across the wet sand.
Yes, he knew this storm all right.
And as he reached the car, got in and sped away, he could only wish it wasn't so.
Saturday, July 16th
It had been a good day.
Due to the weather—the fog that clung to the earth until late in the morning; the low, fast-moving clouds that covered the sky throughout the afternoon and into the evening; and the rain, of course, always the rain—Stephen and Karen had spent much of it on the couch, watching movies and enjoying one another's company. For dinner, they ordered Chinese takeout and decided to eat it on the back porch. As the day faded into night, they caught one another casting glances into the deepening shadows of the yard, out where the trees grew. Then, as full night settled in, they went into the house, closing the sliding glass door on the weather and whatever else might be waiting out there, headed straight for the bedroom where they made love, submitting to the pass
ion recently rekindled between them. Afterward, they took a shower together, talking just loud enough to be heard over the hiss of the falling water as they took turns washing one another’s bodies.
At 10:30, they turned off the lights and went to bed. Stephen held his wife in his arms, eased into slumber by the warmth of her body, the scent of her shampoo every time he pulled in a breath. Yes, it had been a good day, the kind they used to spend together back when their love was fresh and new and something they both desperately wanted to keep alive. Now it had been returned to them. A fire that had gone out burned brightly once again. And, ironically enough, it was water that had brought it back to life. More specifically, a woman made of water.
Since the night he’d come home drunk to find his wife outside in the rain, everything about their relationship had changed. The following day, when Karen brought up the subject of children once again—previously a bone of contention between the two of them—Stephen could find no reason to object. In fact, he couldn’t recall why he’d been so opposed to the idea in the first place. The very thought of it filled him with a deep and nearly overwhelming joy.
A family.
They were happier than they’d been in a long time, much longer than either cared to admit.
And they had the water woman to thank for it.
On two more occasions, they rendezvoused with their strange, mysterious lover. Then, after much discussion on the subject, they decided to put a stop to it. They were husband and wife, after all, sworn to one another and no one else. There was just no place in their relationship for a third party, especially when that party wasn't even human. And so, throughout the nights that followed, they’d made a point of avoiding the back yard.
It’s for the best, really, Stephen told himself as he drifted off to sleep, same as he’d done for the past several evenings now, comforted by the feel of his wife’s body pressed up close to his.
In the dream, he stood in the living room, staring through the sliding glass door. Out beyond the screened-in porch, he could see the water woman staring back at him. She waved her hand, beckoning him. Instead, he closed the blinds and turned away. Walking barefoot across the room, he stepped into a stream of water, maybe an inch or two deep, flowing across the carpeting. He followed the stream to where it entered the house through a crack under the front door. Then he followed it back the other way, through the living room and down the hallway to where it flowed into the bedroom he shared with his wife. As for Karen… She lay on the bed, kicking her legs and thrashing about. The water woman, her body gleaming in the dim lighting, stood next to the bed, leaning down with her hand pressed firmly over the lower half of Karen’s face, preventing her from breathing.
“No!” Stephen shouted. Or he tried to. But just then he came up and out of the dream to find his jilted lover standing over him, barely visible in the surrounding darkness, the contents of her hand and most of her forearm having already flowed into his nose and open mouth. As he struggled to rise, to force the living water from his lungs, the woman showed him her other arm, the parts that were missing, letting him know what she had done while he’d been sleeping. And for a few fleeting moments, as the rain tapped at the window next to the bed, he thought about Karen and how the two of them had found happiness once again, if only for a little while.
Sunday, July 17th
Pastor McHenry knew that at some point during the sermon he'd lost his way. What had started as a declaration of hope in the face of adversity, as a reminder that when forced to weather one’s own personal tempests in life one need only ask the Lord for guidance, had morphed into a diatribe against the way the Devil had usurped the power and majesty of the storm outside in order to use it for his own nefarious purposes.
"I have seen the handiwork of the Dark One with my own eyes!”
He could tell by the way many within the congregation were looking at him that he should stop.
You don’t want anyone to think you’re crazy. Remember?
But he couldn’t stop. All the anxiety and fear of recent days needed an outlet. He couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer. And so he went on:
“When the lightning struck me down… After I came to… I realized that God had changed me, that I had been given the ability to see the world around me in a different way, to understand that a certain aspect of our reality had fallen under Satan's influence!"
The shadows.
It always came back to the shadows, the negative, empty places bereft of the Lord Above's holy light. In the brief moments he dared step outside the church these days, he could see the vague forms of the Devil’s minions in the shadows, the dark circles of their eyes watching him.
Watching and waiting.
Initially, he hadn't known just what, exactly, they were waiting for. But then, two days earlier, he’d awoken from a fitful sleep to find the information first and foremost in his mind, delivered to him in a dream.
A divine message.
How could he have possibly kept it to himself? Didn’t he have a duty to warn those who came to hear him speak of the danger they were in? Wasn’t he compelled to try and save them?
"The demons prepare to walk among us now. Not in a figurative sense. No. Because with every passing day, with every hour the storm covers the sky above us, Satan uses its power to corrupt and weaken the barrier between this world and the next."
He paused to let the message sink in, to take in the sight of all those wide eyes staring back at him.
"It’s only a matter of time now before the gates of Hell are torn asunder, before the ancient evil residing there finds itself free to walk unfettered within the realm of man..."
An hour later found him alone in the church once again. As the parishioners had left the building, he’d kept a close eye on the shadows near the building's main entrance, offering up a prayer that the sacred structure would continue to hold the evil at bay. Because if it didn't, if the things lurking in the shadows found a way to enter the church, where would that leave him? What would he do? What could he do?
He could only hope—and pray—it would not come to that.
Standing at the rear of the nave, he gazed past the rows of pews toward the pulpit, took in the sight of the stained-glass window set into the wall behind it, the one depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Normally, beams of sunlight would stream in through the clear sections surrounding the cross and the holiest of men hanging upon it. But with the storm clouds occluding the afternoon sky, only a dim light managed to find its way through the window, leaving the area behind the pulpit filled with shadows. When he detected movement there, Pastor McHenry uttered a cry of despair and disbelief.
They flowed down the steps with a slithering, serpentine motion. Even from here, he could see the dark circles of their eyes peering at him, pulsing with black, unholy light. Prayers fell from his lips as he backed away until, at last, he felt the doors of the main entrance press up against him from behind. Still the shadows came, slithering across the floor like deadly snakes intent on filling him with their poison. And he could hear laughter, rough, sibilant laughter above the sounds of the storm.
You have to leave this place. You have to get away.
The very thought of it filled him with unspeakable dread. But he knew he had no other choice. So he turned and unlocked the doors and, before he could talk himself out of it, he threw them open.
As he did so, the shadows that had been waiting beyond the walls of the church came rushing in. They coalesced into a swirling mass of darkness that surrounded him, pressing in on him from all sides. He could hear it as it spoke in a thousand guttural voices, uttering the foulest profanities. There was more laughter too and the sound of someone screaming. Pleading. Then it faded to silence, until nothing but the darkness remained.
Now and forevermore.
Amen.
Monday, July 18th
When Jerry got the phone call from David Lees, he didn't know what to make of it. Although, truth be told, he didn't k
now what to make of a lot of things these days, not in a world where dead men with no eyes could walk around.
"I think something's about to happen," his friend told him.
Jerry asked him if he'd been drinking.
"No, I'm perfectly sober. Just got home from work a little while ago. Went to check on our friend...
"Like I always do just to make sure that he... Oh, I don't know... He doesn't need anything, I guess, that everything's all right."
Yeah, everything's just wonderful, thought Jerry but he kept it to himself.
"And each time he's been in there, sitting on the floor. Until today. When I went out there the door was hanging open and he was gone."
Jerry could only hope this meant the gray man was out of his life for good. What David said next, though, put an end to this bit of wishful thinking.
"I found him less than a mile down the road, walking along like he didn't have a care in the world. Managed to get him into the back of the truck."
"Well, there you go then. Mystery solved."
Just then, a horn beeped from in front of the duplex where he lived.
"Can you come on outside?" asked David.
"Shit," Jerry muttered as he ended the call. He pulled on a baseball cap, threw on a light jacket to protect him against the rain then opened the door and went out to where David's truck sat idling at the end of the driveway.
The big man rolled down the driver side window and said, “Get in.”
Jerry stood there in the rain thinking for a moment. Then, with a sigh, he did as he was told.
"Last night, I had a dream," David said as he pulled away from the duplex. "Can't remember much about it. Mainly the feeling it gave me."
"Oh, yeah?" Jerry wanted more than anything to tell his friend to turn the truck around and take him home. But he didn't. For better or worse—and at this point he figured it could only get worse—he was involved in this, whatever this was exactly. No point in trying to get out of it now.