In Creeps The Night

by Natalie Gibson

  Biggs unlocked the back of the rig and opened up the doors. “I’ve missed you, darlin’! Hope you’re glad to see me.” He made his way past the stacks of boxes he had picked up on this run. With several stops ahead tomorrow, the inside of the trailer would be harder to navigate although not impossible. Exhaling a long, easy sigh, he reached the door to the entrance of the small room he had built into his vehicle. It wasn’t much, but to Biggs it was his home away from home.

  Opening the door, he switched on the stereo that sat on a small dresser next to his bed, singing along to Boston’s More Than a Feeling. Biggs regarded this as his personal anthem. When the final notes faded, he opened the cooler wedged along the side of the small space. “Good evening, my dear.” Biggs stood over the top of the cooler, looking down at the beautiful, naked body of Shelly Burnes. He had killed her only a few hours ago, and the sweet memory was still fresh in his mind. She had proved to be an awesome lay, so he reciprocated by paying for services rendered with a quick slash of his knife, cutting her stomach wide open.

  Lifting her lifeless body from the cooler, he draped her over his massive shoulder, grabbed his shovel, and made his way back outside to the heavily wooded area along Rroute 301. With minimal traffic, it was his favorite spot to discard unwanted cargo.

  The air felt warm as Biggs walked a few feet into the woods. Dropping the body onto the ground, he began to dig. Each shovel of dirt brought memories of their time spent earlier that evening. As he finished, thoughts of the final act made him gasp in excitement, and he smelled the sweet scent of her blood once more, savoring it.

  Finished, Biggs tossed the shovel aside and crawled out of the neat, well-defined hole that would be the final resting place of his latest victim.

  Biggs gathered the corpse into his arms, talking as he walked the short distance. “You’ll have lots of company here.” It was another routine he enjoyed…the final conversation. It was one-sided, but he preferred it that way. He needed his words to be the last thing she’d hear as he buried her body in the cold earth.

  “What’s that on your arm, Shelly?” Bending over her body, he noticed a small tattoo of an odd-shaped symbol on her upper arm. It was slightly faded, and he didn’t remember seeing it before. It looked ominous, almost as if it glowed beneath the bright light of the moon. He shivered involuntarily. “Don’t you be scaring ol’ Biggs like that!” he shouted as he smashed the shovel down on her head.

  He leaped out of the grave and peered at the body. “Not nice to scare me,” he mumbled, shoveling the dirt faster into the hole. Finished, he walked the short distance from the woods to his little paradise. Exhausted, he crawled into bed and quickly fell asleep.

  Biggs startled awake, unsure what had roused him. Groggy, he rubbed his eyes and stared at the clock. The neon green numbers read 3AM. He held his breath and listened again. It sounded like claw marks; perhaps an animal wanting a warm place to sleep.

  “Damn raccoons!” Picking up the shotgun hanging over his bed, Biggs made his way to the end of the trailer and opened the roll-up door. He stood looking over the terrain, seeing nothing except his breath. “What the hell? How’d it get so damn cold this time of year in Georgia?”

  Jumping down, he made his way around the truck, staying away from the side so the animal wouldn’t take him by surprise. Hearing the scratching again, this time near the front, he cautiously moved forward. Looking up, he noticed a glow at the front of the eighteen-wheeler. “What the...?” And then he saw her.

  Shelly Burns—or what had once been Shelly Burns—stood before Biggs, glowing. Deep dark orbs where her eyes were only hours before stared at him with malice. He backed away, stumbling and falling to the ground. “This is impossible. You’re dead, you bitch!”

  An icy chill slid down his back. Afraid, yet needing to know, Biggs turned his head and looked behind him. Crawling toward him, circling him, were dozens of women. Some young. Some old. But all very dead. His screams sliced through the night like a banshee.

  Sheriff Denton stepped out of his cruiser in the early morning light, wiping his face on his shirt. It was going to be another hot day. Walking to the front of the eighteen-wheeler to knock on the door, he paused, noticing something in the dirt shoulder.

  “What the fuck happened to you, you poor bastard…” Denton kneeled in front of the dead man. The skin on his face had been raked away in long furrows, the expression of terror impossible to forget. Buried in the ground to the shoulders, his fingers were bloodied and broken as if he had tried to claw his way out. His hat was askew and the dirty patch on the front read “Biggs.”

  Denton scanned the perimeter and noticed dozens of holes—unburied graves—everywhere. Quickly running to the first, he saw a woman’s fresh corpse. A fast check on the other graves showed bodies in various states of decay, but they all had one thing in common—they were all murdered women.

  “I need backup units,” the sheriff said into his radio, “and god knows what the hell else out here. Looks like I’ve found a dumping ground for a lot of our missing women in Georgia.”

  A chill passed over the sheriff as he stood next to the rig. Goose bumps broke over his flesh, and he backed away toward his cruiser, watching in disbelief.

  Dozens of ghostly wisps slithered out of the dead man’s mouth, winding along the gravel before splitting apart and snaking back into the graves. The sound of female laughter echoed in the forest…then suddenly disappeared.

  SUSAN CONCEIVED HER brainchild by accident. The ancient typewriter she used in her pig-headed refusal to go digital had sticky keys, and out of the word “something” only the last six letters made it onto the paper. Ething.

  One look at the non-word and it began: the throbbing behind her temples, the giddy feeling in her gut, the agonizing ecstasy of inspiration. Ething. She could make a world from that word. Forget the short story her typo had ruined; this was a novel, a series, a masterwork. This was both Hugo and Nebula Awards and a movie deal. Ethings…creatures spawned from artificial intelligence…persecuted by humankind and driven from the earth…evolving for centuries on sentient ships in deep space and raising young Ething clones to both hate and worship the beings that exiled them….

  Possessed by the idea, she pounded out twenty pages before the gnawing in her stomach forced her to stop. Weak from hunger yet trembling with the need to put flesh to the story burning in her mind, Susan stumbled from her den and into the kitchen. Nothing in the fridge or the pantry lent itself to a quick meal and she didn’t have time to cook. The pain in her head was almost tangible. Inspiration had congealed, birthing one figure in her imagination. The dark and unpredictable scion of Ething genetic engineering…Adam. Adam’s a good name for an anti-hero. Adam demanded life. Who was she to deny him? Good writers are always slaves to their muse. She grunted, picked up the phone and ordered a pizza. Back to the den.

  For once she hated the fact that she used a typewriter. You couldn’t type without a light on, and epic stories like Adam’s were best born in the dark, uninterrupted by the inanity of what her father called “the real world.” Sorry dad, but this world is real to me, Susan thought, her fingers flying across the keys. Her eyes ached from the dim light of the one lamp she’d left on and her head felt like splitting, but she wrote on, helpless to stop the words and glorying in her helplessness. This is what writers live for, she realized as she paused to tear a distracting hangnail from her thumb. A drop of blood beaded on her fingertip. She licked it off and wrote on. This is the creative high.

  Sometime later Susan roused herself in a narrow place between dialogue and chapter’s end. Bent over the typewriter, her every muscle aching, she felt a flutter of panic as she realized she hadn’t a clue how much time had passed since Adam’s conception. She kept no clocks in her writing den. Maybe it is time for a break. The doorbell rang a second time, insistent enough to filter through the haze of hunger and sleeplessness and frenzied creative energy that had centered her senses on the paper-thin world strewn over the desk.
She stood, fell, crawled to the threshold of the den and heaved herself upright. On shaking legs she made for the front door. How long has it been since I’ve eaten? The light filtering in from the windows had the cold gray look of dawn about it. Hell, I don’t even know what day it is. Definitely time for a break.

  The door swung outward before she touched the knob.

  An open pizza box sat on the welcome mat, the cardboard soggy and streaked with mildew. What few slices the animals had missed sprouted patches of white and green mold. Over the box stood a man dressed in a high-necked black uniform, his bald head patterned with tattoos in luminescent ink. Dark skin pulsed and throbbed in time to some alien heartbeat, flickering ghostly one moment and solid the next. Susan froze.

  No. No, no, no. That is not possible.

  “Hello Susan,” the man said, a long silver tongue snaking out from behind four hollow fangs. Dual pupils in each eye dilated, watching her reaction.

  Exactly how I imagined him.

  Before she could slam the door he leapt forward and pinioned her arms against her sides. “Not the delivery you were expecting, I’m afraid,” he whispered, cold breath hissing against her cheek. “But you do know me, don’t you?”

  “You’re not real,” Susan said. “I’m dreaming. This can’t be real!”

  “It’s getting more real every second,” he said. “Just like I am. Now tell me: what’s my name?”

  His hands on her arms flickered again into ghost-flesh and she twisted away. As he lunged for her she clawed at his face, feeling his skin regain substance as she gouged his cheek with her nails. Shocked by the contact, she stumbled back. Carelessly, almost lazily he touched his face, smiling at the watery black liquid that covered his fingers and ran dripping down his jaw. Ink. Susan blanched, tripped over the rug and fell backward. On all fours she scrabbled toward the den to escape the impossible tattooed man. “Get out of my house!” she cried.

  He followed her. “I’m not in your house, Susan. I’m in your head. Name me.”

  “Get out of my head!”

  “You want me here. You brought me here. I can’t leave until you give me what I need.”

  She sat in her chair at her writing desk. She had never left it. Had I? Hungry. Have to finish. My head, my head hurts. “What do you want?”

  Again his breath sent shivers down her spine as he stood behind her, crowding her chair closer to the desk as he slid his arms over hers. “Name me,” he said again, his lips just brushing her ear.

  “Adam. Your name is Adam,” Susan said. Fevered tears flowed from her burning eyes. It hurts and I can’t stop. Can’t stop now. He won’t let me. “Tell me what you want.”

  The silver tongue flicked out, stinging her cheek with sudden metallic coldness. “You gave me birth. Now I want you to give me life.”

  His flesh solid once again, he pried her hands from their death-grip on the armrests and placed them on the typewriter. Susan felt wetness and looked at her fingertips. They were worn raw and ragged, nails bitten to the bone. Blood stained the keys, but she couldn’t pull away. Not again. Not ever. Adam wouldn’t let her.

  The lips against her ear curled into a smile. “There you go. Now—write.”

  LET ME GIVE you fair warning—this tale does not come with the ubiquitous happy ending that you have come to expect. Why should it? Happy endings are for the weak and the deluded; for those folk who think that everything will turn out right in the end.

  Think again.

  I am sat here in the kitchen. Not my kitchen, you understand. Nothing in this house belongs to me…not yet. I’m assuming there’s a house; I’ve never seen beyond this room. I can’t move but at least I can see and hear. I suppose I should be grateful for that, at least.

  I was blind when they took me—those hateful sadists with their maniacal grins—blind and deaf. That I now find myself capable of sight and hearing would be nothing short of a miracle if it didn’t come at so heavy a price. That small handful of wet, dripping matter on the counter top? I can see it clear as day, and I know what it is. It’s a piece of my flesh. A piece of my face. Dear God, they just cut off a piece of my face and left it in front of me.

  Why?

  It can’t be a reminder. There is no way I will forget the feel of the knife piercing my skin, gouging into the soft meat behind. What, then? A threat? I can’t even move—what do they think me capable of?

  There is a cold, sharp breeze from the air conditioning. It whistles through the gaping wound where my perfect nose used to be and it hurts so much. Where two nostrils used to sit, now there is only one, the delicate strip dividing them split with a blunt blade and tossed into the bin before my eyes. They were smiling whilst they did it, smiling and laughing, exchanging knowing looks as they took turns at my disfigurement.

  My own smile is somewhat ragged. There is no mirror close enough for me to see it, but I can feel the air whispering against my lipless mouth. I have maybe a dozen teeth, all broken and malformed in one way or another thanks to their heartless ministrations. It is not a mouth made for mirth but I can do little else but smile—a butcher’s knife saw to that. Cutting deep into my ravaged flesh the older of the two—the man—drew a searing incision from each corner right up the side of my face. Then the woman—presumably his wife—reached into the deep groove made by her partner and pulled out the meat he had cut away.

  “Ugh, it’s all over my fingers,” she laughed. Laughed! She threw it down onto the kitchen counter and wiped her hands on the back of her jeans. That’s the piece I’m looking at now, wet and glistening beneath the kitchen light: unable to turn away from it, unable to even close my eyes.

  This last torture seemed to have been enough for them, for now at least. They left the room hand in hand, the woman leaning against the man and giggled. The sound chilled me to my very core, like the soulless laughter of the damned, but not so much as what that brute of a man said as he exited the room.

  “The kids are going to love this one.”

  Children? They have children? I wanted to feel sorry for them, brought into the world by these monsters but I only had enough pity for myself. Alone, unable to move, my face hacked to pieces for the pleasure of these sadists and their brood. I determined then, that I would make them pay. I would haunt their dreams and stalk their nightmares for the rest of their miserable lives until they descended, screaming into madness and the cold embrace of an early grave.

  They would live in perpetual fear of the dark, in case they should come across my face in the shadows. Twisted, deformed and mutilated by their own hands, it was only fitting that it be the last thing they see.

  The lights went out and the kitchen door opened. The man strode in, the leader of the pack, silhouetted against the light from the hall. Behind him, amorphous shapes writhed against the light, no doubt the rest of his devilish kin.

  “Daddy’ll only be a second, kids,” he said.

  He was on me in an instant, peeling back the top of my head, where he had cracked it open with a cleaver hours before. I felt the air rush into the cavity and would have screamed, had I a tongue to give voice to it.

  My tormentor drove his fist into my head, forcing an object into my gullet. There was a click and a sudden blazing heat as the inside of my head was consumed with fire. The pain was like nothing I had ever felt before and I wished that I would die.

  The next moment it had subsided. I could still feel that burning, lodged deep inside of me, but it no longer hurt. I felt rejuvenated. My senses were heightened and I could feel my strength returning. It may have been some hideous trick played upon me by my own mind, but I felt an enormous sense of power. I looked out through my new eyes and saw my face reflected on the wall in flickering tongues of fire.

  Those narrow eyes, cruelly pointed at the top; a ghastly hole sat beneath them in mockery of a nose and below that a mouth—my mouth. Jagged teeth set in a permanent rictus grin, behind which burned a flame that would consume the world. This was power. I was the stuff of nightm
ares.

  The children would come soon. They would look upon me and fear.

  I sat, glowing in the darkness, and smiled.

  TABITHA DIDN’T KNOW what thrust her toward the cemetery. Her broad shoulders hunched and a chill scurried down her spine as the wind whistled through the rustling elm and the dark yew. She pulled her coat tight, straining across her ample body, and took the unusual shortcut without a second thought.

  As she walked briskly through the church gates, she glanced at a stranger kneeling by a grave, unaware. Unwilling to disturb the gentleman, she walked quickly down the York flagstone path. As she passed the grave and the mourning stranger, she shivered, and her face tingled in the cold chill of the winter’s evening.

  At home, as warmth hit her, she barely glanced in the mirror before settling for the night with a hot chocolate and book. So her pixie-green eyes, turned sky-blue, was a strange surprise the next morning.

  It was a perverse and inexplicable desire to see the distraught man again that took her through the graveyard the following night, but he was gone, and the chill that surged through her was one of guilty disappointment. She lingered near the grave for a moment, wrapping her scarf tightly about her neck, and hurried home, ignoring the mournful cry from the bird that rang out across the burial ground.

  The next evening, rain washed down the pavement, glistening in the amber glow of streetlights as she entered the cemetery. Her mousy brown hair sparkled in the drizzle and she pulled her hood up over her curls. The wet headstone shone and she caught a woman’s name, Lucia, chiselled and gleaming in the lamplight, and she conjured notions of lost love and heartache.