The Living and the Dead

by Greg F. Gifune

  “I believe you.” Despite her fear and relentless guilt, she also felt a sense of relief, release at having told this relative stranger so much. “I believe you both.”

  “Whatever we’re dealing with, it’s real. It’s alive. And if it’s alive, then it can die. It can be killed.”

  “You know something about that don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “About what?”

  “Killing.”

  Rather than answer, he looked to the doorway, where Perry had appeared without their knowledge—all tattoos, rumpled clothes and mussed hair at the edges of candlelight—his video recorder trained on them and on, the little red light piercing the shadows.

  “How long have you been standing there?” Lana asked irritably.

  “Chill,” he said, shifting positions and watching them through the small flip screen. “I’ve been rethinking this whole thing. In this situation I need to take full advantage. Whatever’s going on, it’s some sick shit, right? And I’m a filmmaker, so I should record it. I could end up with some great footage for a documentary. The whole human element under pressure angle is awesome, and with the storm and kind of being trapped and all, I mean, come on, I couldn’t write this shit any better. Besides, maybe what I have—that shot of the ocean—is like the most important footage ever shot. If it really shows some sort of creature I could be sitting on the next Patterson film or—”

  “Stop recording us,” Duck said.

  “I’m just saying if I shoot all night who knows what else I’ll get?”

  “I mean it.”

  Perry finally looked up from the screen. “What’s wrong?”

  “Turn it off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t the only shots you’re gonna have are close-ups of your fucking colon.”

  Pale as a ghost, Perry switched the recorder off. “Dude, you got serious anger issues.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe we don’t want to be recorded?”

  “Not really, no. Everybody wants to be recorded. Shit, look at reality TV, blogs, You Tube, home movies, the Internet—it’s endless, man. Everyone wants to be famous, doesn’t even matter for what.”

  “This is real life.”

  “So is that.”

  Lana sighed in frustration. “Their generation has no concept of privacy.”

  “That’s because it’s a useless and archaic concept. It doesn’t matter who you are, everyone wants camera time these days. It’s all about being seen, heard, read, listened to, watched—get it?” Perry lifted the recorder as if offering up some sacred instrument of profound importance. “It’s the here and now. It’s the future.”

  Before either could respond, Lennox stumbled into the kitchen like a child awakened by nightmares and running for the safety of her parents’ room. Trembling, she pointed behind her, eyes wide and moist, and in a pleading whisper said, “You need to come in the other room.”

  Duck grabbed the shotgun. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something’s scratching at the window.”

  23

  The worn sign advertising the cottages swayed in the wind. Beyond it, the house Chris had grown up in looked smaller than he’d remembered, and had become hideously dilapidated since the last time he’d seen it. As always, the muddy yard was littered with junk, and his mother’s old car was still just feet from the house, rotted out junk now, as it had been for some time. Chris had vivid memories of riding in that car as a child, his mother driving. His father never drove it, not once. Men drive trucks, he used to say. Just one in an array of moronic and ignorant viewpoints the old man insisted on voicing every chance he got.

  He and Anita sat in the parked car and watched the dark house for several minutes. Neither said a word.

  “His truck’s not here,” Chris eventually offered.

  “It sure doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”

  He nervously tapped his fingers on the wheel as a flood of memories attacked. Everywhere he looked he saw himself or Lacy or his mother or father or childhood friends they’d had—experiences, events, good, bad and everything in between, and all of it crashing down on him, a hammer from the past bent on smashing him to bits. Chris felt his eyes fill. He pawed at them angrily.

  “Let’s just go,” Anita urged. “Let’s get back on the highway and go.”

  But Chris was already lost in the past, his eyes darting back and forth across the property, straining to see through the rain and the wipers. A dull ache pulsed across his left wrist. It had been injured in his youth and to this day whenever it rained it throbbed and stiffened up. He worked it slowly in a circle and rubbed at it with his thumb.

  Anita noticed, and knew about the troubles he sometimes had with his wrist. “Is it bad? I think I have some Aleve in my purse, if—”

  “No, it’s…it’s OK. I need to feel this right now.”

  “Don’t you think you’re already feeling enough pain?”

  Rather than answer, he asked a question of his own, one he already knew the answer to. “I’ve never told you how I broke my wrist, did I?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “My father broke it.”

  She blanched. “On purpose?”

  Chris squinted through the rain. “There was this old lady in town, Mrs. Clark. Busybody type, never missed a trick, you know?” He smiled but it was involuntary. “One day she saw a bunch of kids hanging out behind the General Store smoking cigarettes, and she mistook one of those kids for me. In truth, I wasn’t even there. Well, she got right on the phone and called all the parents, including mine. I’d been at my friend Jimmy’s house, and when I got home my father grabbed me and started yelling about smoking and how I thought I was a big man and all this other nonsense. He smoked, of course, but that seemed beside the point. Also beside the point was that I truly had no idea what the hell he was talking about. He took me out here, and even though I swore to him it hadn’t been me and I could prove it if he’d just talk to Jimmy’s mother, he sat me down on that stump, handed me a lighter and a full pack of non-filtered Lucky Strikes. He said, ‘You want to smoke, boy? Then smoke.’ He made me smoke the entire pack, one cigarette after another until the pack was empty. Didn’t matter that I’d never smoked a cigarette in my life—had no intention or desire to—or how much I cried or vomited or begged him to let me stop. I wasn’t stopping until those cigarettes were gone.” He cleared his throat, eyes trained on the stump in the distance. “Even for most sadistic parents that would’ve been sufficient punishment, but not for my old man. Because while I smoked all those cigarettes he got himself a bottle and started drinking, so by the time I was done he was drunk out of his mind. Somewhere in that dysfunctional and disturbed brain of his he decided that if I’d been smoking cigarettes down at the General Store I must’ve stolen them, because how else could a kid my age get them? So he told me to bend over and place my hand flat on top of the stump. I did. He held that hand in place with his, then took out a heavy pair of pliers from the back pocket of his overalls and told me this is what happened to thieves. He smashed it down across my wrist three or four times until it broke.” Chris finally looked away, trained his eyes on the automobile carcass that had once been his mother’s car. “My mother took me to Doc Crowley, only doctor in town in those days. She took me in that car. I can still remember sitting there crying and being in so much pain and my mother telling me everything would be all right as long as I told Doc Crowley I’d fallen and broken my wrist. There was no other way, she said. And she was right.” He stayed quiet a while, then said, “Couple days later when my friend Jimmy found out what happened, he told his mother and she called my old man, explained to him that I hadn’t been smoking cigarettes downtown, I’d been at her place the whole time. Wasn’t off the phone five minutes and he was knocking me around like a punching bag. Who the hell did I think I was embarrassing him like that? That’s what he wanted to know. So I got a couple black eyes and a split lip to go along with my bro
ken wrist.” He looked at Anita. “I was nine years old.”

  “You don’t need to be here, Chris,” she told him. “You don’t owe him anything. Let the bastard rot up here like everything else.”

  “I wish I could,” he said softly. “But it’s not that simple.”

  “Do you realize that since we’ve been here we haven’t seen a soul, except for whatever the hell that was at the cemetery?” She reached over and switched on the radio. Static. Nothing but static up and down the entire dial. “How could all the stations be down? It doesn’t make any sense. Chris, what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “But I need to get out for a minute.”

  “Don’t leave me here!” she said, clutching at his arm. “Where are you going? Why do you—there’s no one here obviously.”

  He gently removed her hand from him and opened the door. “I’ll be in sight the whole time, I promise. I need to do this, do you understand?”

  Without waiting for a response, Chris stepped out into the rain, closing the door behind him. The air was thick and alive with a wide range of smells. He wandered from the car, carefully negotiating the muddy yard and taking in the house and surrounding areas.

  Remnants of deep tire tracks left by Dempsey’s heavy truck led away from the front of the house and out in the direction of the road. Duck’s cottage wasn’t far. Maybe the old man had gone there. Chris didn’t know Duck well at all, but had met him and knew he was friendly with Dempsey and worked part-time for him.

  His phone vibrated suddenly, buzzing at him. He snatched it from his belt and read the display. Still no signal but he’d received a voicemail tagged EMERGENCY from his friend and fellow psychologist Dee Reynolds, who had agreed to handle his patients in his absence. Shielding the phone with his arm he hit the appropriate buttons and waited while the system retrieved his message. It had been sent several hours ago but he’d only gotten it just then.

  A few moments later, feeling numb, Chris climbed back into the car, and without looking at Anita said, “I just got a message from Dee Reynolds. Evan Dodd murdered his wife and children last night with a shotgun and then turned it on himself. He’s dead. They’re all dead.”

  “That’s impossible,” Anita whimpered.

  Chris turned, looked at her. She’d been uneasy and on edge when he’d gotten out of the car, but now she was clearly terrified. “I’m telling you I just got the message.”

  “And I’m telling you,” she said in a tiny voice that sounded as if someone had begun to strangle her, tears streaming her face as her entire body bucked and trembled uncontrollably, “that’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, pointing to the window over his shoulder. “He’s standing right behind you.”

  24

  With Duck leading the way, the group inched their way back into the living room. The curtains on the windows had been closed, and the last remnants of what little light remained beyond them had all but died. Wind sprayed heavy rain against the panes, drumming the glass in constant rhythm, and thunder moaned in the distance, but as Lennox pointed to one window in particular, one facing the road and closest to the front door, Duck crept close enough to hear what had frightened her: a faint scratching sound, barely audible amidst the clamor of the storm. He motioned for the others to stay back and moved stealthily toward the window, straining to identify the source. A scraping, high-pitched noise, it sounded like someone was slowly dragging a sharp object back and forth across the sheet of glass. Perry activated his recorder and aimed it at the window.

  A few feet ahead of him, Duck carefully placed the shotgun barrel beneath the curtain and lifted, gradually revealing the window behind it.

  Like a black mirror, the window appeared dark and bottomless, liquid. Undefined shapes blurred by the rain pouring across it blended with the motion of trees flailing in the wind.

  The scraping sound remained.

  Duck raised the shotgun higher, bringing the curtain with it.

  Lightning blinked, and something on the other side of the window gave a subtle shift, separating from the darkness and glass, emerging from it to form a discolored, torn and overgrown fingernail slowly scratching its way across the pane. One finger became two, then three and four, until an entire hand—the flesh rotted and cracked—was pressed against the window, the brittle overgrown fingernails tapping and clicking against the glass one after the other, smallest finger to index then back again. It seemed almost playful, perhaps mocking.

  "Come on, what—no way, this is—" Perry's voice, shaking as violently as his hands, faded into oblivion.

  A face pushed through the darkness and pressed against the glass, distorting the features of what appeared to be a dark-haired young man of perhaps sixteen or seventeen. What once may have been an attractive face was reduced to decayed flesh dangling from segments of skeletal bone shining through the tears and fissures. The eyes, though blue, were dull and lifeless, yet they could see, as the thing shifted its hideous stare from one in the group to the next, and eventually settled on Lana.

  She wanted to scream, but all she could manage was a strangled choking sound. Her body snapped rigid like a soldier at attention, and though her natural inclination was to run in the opposite direction, her feet remained fastened to the cottage floor. "No," she whispered. "No, don't do this, I—don't do this, not this, this isn't right, it's...not this…"

  Duck let the curtain go, swung the shotgun around with one hand and reached for the front door with the other. "Everybody stay back!"

  "Don't go out there," Lennox begged, "you'll let it in!"

  "I know who he is," Lana mumbled, looking to Lennox as if for verification. "He's here for me, he must be here for me, he…"

  Duck unlocked the door, and with a defiant scream, yanked it open. The storm exploded into the cottage, gusts of wind spraying them with rain and the smell of dirt, forest and ocean. He leveled the shotgun, his shoulder braced against the doorframe for support.

  Darkness. Rain. Madness.

  "Close the door!" Lennox screamed. "Can't you smell it?"

  Lana backed away, hands to her face and eyes squeezed shut in a desperate attempt to erase the vision of that face. She could smell it too…moist earth…the grave…death.

  "Where is it?" Duck stepped through the doorway and into open air, the shotgun panning back and forth. "He was there, I—we all saw someone!"

  Perry stumbled up behind Duck, the recorder aimed out at the night. The screen revealed nothing but a sea of black, until the light adjusted in an attempt to compensate for the growing darkness. It was then that he saw it. "Look," he said, pointing. "There."

  At the start of the tree line, forty or so yards across the muddy and flooded yard, something watched them. No ghosts or dead phantoms, but an opaque humanoid smudge standing out against an already black horizon. It possessed a powerful build and stood upright on two legs, its arms folded tight to its sides, large head faced forward and red eyes burning like embers through the rain.

  Duck blinked in an attempt to focus, to correct what he was seeing. But it remained.

  Stunned to silence, for a moment they all listlessly watched the shadow. Still indistinct against a backdrop of darkness and rain, they could make out no features or specifics, but its outline in silhouette was unmistakable.

  Those were not arms folded in tight against it. They were wings.

  "What the fuck is that?" Duck heard himself ask.

  Shooting over Duck's shoulder, Perry did his best to hold the camera steady. "What does it want?" he asked, voice cracking.

  "Kill it," Lennox said in sudden monotone, her manner eerily calm. "Kill it."

  "Wait, there's something else." Perry nudged next to Duck, forcing himself into the doorway, still watching through the video screen. "There…see?"

  At the midpoint between the creature and the cottage, Abel Dempsey lay collapsed in the mud, body twisted and awkward, as if it had been flung there from a grea
t distance.

  "It's Dempsey," Duck muttered. "I gotta get out there to him, I—"

  "He's not moving, bro. I'm not even sure he's alive."

  Duck stepped through the doorway, the shotgun raised and aimed at the shadow. The rain pelted him as his finger curled round the trigger. He steadied himself for the kick.

  "Do it," Lennox urged.

  The figure slid back toward the trees and vanished in the rain, absorbed into darkness and forest, its black form effortlessly blending into night.

  "Lana," Duck said without looking back. When she didn't answer, he turned and saw she had retreated into the cottage, still shaken

  "I didn't believe it," she mumbled, "not—not really, I—"

  "Lana!"

  The urgency of his voice snapped her out of her trance, and she joined him on the front step. Without saying a word he handed her the shotgun then wiped rain from his brow, straightened his already soaked hat and ran for Dempsey's body.

  Lana held the shotgun low but level, ready to fire if need be.

  They watched as Duck ran, slipping and sliding as he went, failing at his attempts to gain a foothold in the mud. When he reached the body he gave a quick look at the woods then crouched down and touched the fallen man.

  "Come on," Lana said through gritted teeth. "Come on."

  Thunder boomed, followed by a lightning strike that hit somewhere in the forest, popping and crackling as it devastated branches on a nearby tree.

  Suddenly Duck was upright again and running for the cottage. The old man lay limply in his arms. He began calling out to them while still quite a distance away, but they couldn't hear him until he was within a few feet of the front door. "—alive we need to get him inside!"

  He staggered through the doorway and Lana backed her way in behind him. Lennox slammed the door shut and engaged the locks while Perry kept recording, following Duck as he carried Dempsey down the hallway toward the bedroom.