Night Movies

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “We’re coming with you, son. I don’t know if everything you’re sayin’ is true, but we ain’t no strangers t’ weird things goin’ on out thar in those Faulkesville woods, an’ if somethin’s out thar that could do what it did t’ Becker or worse, it needs to be stopped.” His tone left no room for argument.

  The men lifted Mr. Becker to his feet and were out the door, piling into Mr. McCauley’s pickup and Mr. Jedsoe’s old clunker. Mr. Larsson lingered, however, and turned to the stairwell where Sam had retreated. He was not a man of profuse emotion, but a lot could be gleaned from his expressions.

  “You’re a smart girl,” he said to her, his voice soft. “Smarter maybe than th’ rest of us old coots. I know you was here and you heered what that city man said.”

  Sam nodded dutifully.

  “We’re goin’ out to see what’s what. And I ‘spect that I’ll come home. You been through a lot, and I think I owe you that much.” His voice grew husky. “You’re a smart girl, Sammy, and inquisitive. You always were. And I love you for that. I love you...so if you love me back and respect me at all, you’ll stay put here, with the doors locked. Don’t follow us. Promise me.”

  Surprised and touched, Sam nodded again.

  “Say it,” he whispered.

  “I promise.”

  He nodded. “Good. Ain’t nothing worth saving, girl, if I don’t have you safe at home, and the piece a’ mind knowin’ it.”

  Without looking at her – his eyes and mouth looked tight in his profile – he swung out the door. Among shouts and headlights, the party of five men headed out to Faulkesville woods.

  Sam watched them go – especially Mr. McCauley, whom she liked very much, and Mr. Ricci, whom she thought quite handsome. In fact, she found herself looking into the darkness long after they were gone. She felt very little other than a fuzzy numbness, and said a silent prayer that the day would come quickly, and all would be right and as it should be.

  * * * * *

  Ricci said they were looking for a cemetery too old for America. Chuck wasn’t sure how that could be, but Ricci insisted. In cases like these that he had read about and the one he had seen, the rite that opened the floodgate caused unusual time anomalies as well as those of space. He sat in the truck bed with Ted and Hank, while the newly conscious and still shaky Becker slumped against the window on the passenger side. They had dropped Hunter off at Chuck’s place on the way – poor dog had been through enough that night and had been reduced to shaking and whimpers. Now, they were winding along the road to Becker’s farm.

  Becker had taken to feverish mumbling, and though the men would have liked to dismiss it as the ramblings of a mind in shock, none of them could quite ignore the words or the unpleasant chills they wrought just beneath the skin.

  “Started with th’ fungus first, month before last. Looked kinda like mushrooms, I guess, little caps growin’ up th’ sides of them trees, but bigger ‘n any mushrooms I ever seen. And they had...well, uh, roots, I guess, or shoots a’ some kind, all tangled up in the ferns and brush and around th’ base a’ th’ trees. Them roots were growing in among the tree roots thar, and the whole was black and blue and kinda see-through, and both them colors glowed, I swear it! Glowed like they had their own dark moonlight to ‘em. And that ain’t th’ only thing tharabouts, neither. Thar’s thems what feed on those mushroom things. I can’t rightly tell ye what they look like exact, as I ain’t never got a good look at ‘em. They only come out at night, and what with them noises they make, I got to keeping indoors when they was about. But I seen their eyes – that same black that glowed, and that same blue. They had them eyes and mouths, too, all over their bodies – and some kinda...arms, I guess, that keep waving and shifting, bein’ and then unbein’, like...well, like the bodies were changing their shape an’ texture. As t’ color, I’d guess they’s a color our eyes can’t see, as more often ‘n not, they look more like outlines without nothin’ to fill ‘em.

  “And they’s the small ones. I heerd them bayin’ and howlin, and I’ll be damned if somethin’ else bigger an’ louder didn’t answer back before settin’ them littler ones to screamin’....”

  “Becker,” Chuck said. His friend’s rambling was agitating his already frayed nerves – all that talk of black and blue glowing eyes and mouths.

  “That thing we shot in the woods – it’s an avatar a’ Nyarlathotep or Hastur, it ain’t clear which from th’ dreams...but it screams like its throat goes straight t’ hell, an’ I swear, them formless things – the big and the little – they respond. Or maybe that thing we shot is just one form the formless things take, like when they’s wantin’ to move all physical-like, with a shape....”

  “Ny– who? Becker, tell us who attacked you. This Hastur fella?” Hank asked.

  “They’re gods,” Mr. Ricci offered.

  “What?”

  According to ancient occult beliefs, they are alien beings...entities, if you will, of great power and great evil, revered by dark cults as gods and the rest of those in the know as monsters.”

  Hank sniffed skeptically, but said nothing.

  “No bodies,” Becker mumbled, “but they got mouths. Oh Lord, they got mouths. And eyes like black holes, but they glow, too.... I got one – shot it and even got it into th’ back a’ my truck – but they’s others the like a’ it out thar, too, and they came fer the corpse. The Faceless God told ‘em too, I s’pose. It has many faces, many names. I heard its voice, and the piping of the mad idiot god, and the screams of windless movement and formless thought. So much...too much in those damned dreams.”

  “You ain’t makin’ sense, Jonas,” Chuck said.

  “Mr. Becker,” Ricci said with a degree more patience than Chuck. “It would be extremely beneficial if you could tell us what happened out there in the woods tonight.”

  Becker uttered a dry, hoarse laugh. “You’ll see. Oh, heh heh, you’ll see.” And he could be induced to say no more.

  In the anxious silence that followed, Chuck found his thoughts kept returning to a nagging unanswered question brought up by Ricci’s explanation at the store. It had yet to be specifically stated among the men, but it hung there between them all the same. Someone had to have opened that floodgate in the woods and called those things out from beyond. It was the first Chuck had ever heard of it, but Becker...he lived out there, right there, next to those woods and those things. Becker, who was too stubborn to leave, and had chosen that farm, near those woods, on purpose. Becker, who kept those books on his shelf in the den because he said it made him looked learned.

  “Becker.”

  “Huh?” Becker had dozed in the silence.

  “Why, Becker? Why’d you call dem things? What the divil you up to?”

  Becker blinked. “What?”

  “Did one get away from you? Dat why you all beat t’ hell?”

  “Chuck – “

  Whatever Becker had been about to say was clipped short by the sight before them.

  The glow from the woods behind the Becker farmhouse was unmistakable to all as they pulled into the long driveway, but as they parked next to the overturned truck, it was Ted who first noticed the things moving in the sky just beyond the slope of the farmhouse roof. Chuck couldn’t quite make out what, exactly, they were, as it was only the movement, or the impression of movement, made by the swirling of pale, glowing mists.

  Ricci leapt from the truck almost before it had stopped and took off running toward the back of the house, his bag with the book flapping heavily against his side. The other men, older and a bit slower-moving, followed as quickly behind as they were able, guns and knapsacks of supplies in tow.

  What happened next as they reached the spot where Ricci stood was quick, and after, those men surviving would recollect, although rarely discuss in the years to come, differences in time and order of events based on their individual experiences.

  For Chuck, the words Ricci was shouting from the book he held white-knuckled against a whipping wind seemed to b
e angering the moving things in the sky and those crunching and thrashing amid the trees in the woods a few yards away. Chuck didn’t recognize any of the words; they were not in any language he had ever heard. There were repeated phrases, but the exact nature of pronunciation was lost in the wailing from the woods and the wind. By the end, Ricci was screaming the words, his face and arms bleeding from a hundred tiny cuts made by whirling twigs and rocks. Chuck and the others stood awestruck by the glimpses of forms that light and shadow suggested, and were riveted motionless until something like an octopoid tentacle reached from a tree branch and snatched up Hank. His screams pierced the din for only a moment before he winked out of existence, swallowed whole, apparently, by the thing which had grabbed him. This mobilized Chuck and the others to wariness, their guns swinging uselessly toward every flash of movement, every glint of outline. Ricci kept screaming his incantations in their alien language over and over. He didn’t move away from the trees, but the air-swimming things didn’t glide anywhere near him, either. Becker was hoisted by unseen arms into the air above them and then thrown so hard against the ground that blood was forced with the last of the air from his lungs. Somehow, the sound of his bones cracking reached Chuck’s ears over the din; it sickened him and set him firing at the darkness without really being aware of it. From the desperate shouting next him, Ted had begun the same.

  Ricci’s voice grew even louder, so loud that Chuck was sure the man’s throat had to be bloody and raw, and all movement, all glowing, all noise ceased so suddenly that the last syllable of Ricci’s chant still hung in the deathly-silent air. Chuck heard, by degrees, the pounding of his heart and the heavy breathing of the men around him, and then, after a moment, the laughter of the young man from the university. It was neither victorious nor mirthful laughter, though Chuck supposed Ricci wanted to believe it was. It was not wholly mad laughter, either, but as the three men trudged, scraped and bruised, back to Chuck’s truck, too stunned to talk, too exhausted to do anything but leave that scene of prior horror and insanity, Chuck couldn’t help feeling the need to laugh, too, and that certainly seemed like madness to him.

  * * * * *

  Sam rolled over beneath her covers, aware instantly of what had happened in the woods. It was a temporary setback at best; for all Mr. Ricci’s best resources, he had accomplished little more than stopping up the floodgates. They remained unlocked, however, and more importantly, despite the obstruction, they remained open. It would be the work of a month, maybe two, to continue what she had started.

  The blood sacrifices of her parents had been sufficient in the eyes of the ancient gods to grant her the verbal keys to the floodgates, and she had not been disappointed with the boundless knowledge she had been granted, knowledge of many things seen and unseen that the little ones had drawn from the earth and water, the trees and rocks, and that the big ones had drawn from the skies and stars not only of her universe, but of those beyond hers.

  She was proud of how much she had accomplished given her imperfect tools. She had envied the pristine copy of Mr. Ricci’s book, the one with the names and invocations to Shub-Niggurath the Goat with a Thousand Young, Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, Hastur, and of course, the blind idiot god Azathoth. She recognized several of the formulae in their entirety, including the secret notes of the initiated indicating optimal times and places. Her copy had not nearly been so complete, but as Mr. Larsson had said, she was a smart girl, and industrious as well, and she had been able, through both research and clandestine correspondences, to be able to fill in the gaps.

  Sam half wondered how it would be to spend an afternoon alternately kissing Mr. Ricci and discussing with him those mysteries of the outerverse which, even with his limited understanding, still set him apart from the hopeless rurals surrounding her. She supposed it wouldn’t do to have her new friends in Faulkesville kill him, or Messrs. Larsson or McCauley, for that matter. Not now, not until she was old enough to enroll in Miskatonic University herself. It was okay if that took time.

  Time was, after all, along with space, hers to manipulate as she chose.

  She snuggled beneath the covers and waited for the dreams to come and deliver to her new knowledge from the Faulkesville woods and from far, far beyond it.

  THE HUNDRED-YEARS’ SLEEP

  

  AS IT SO OFTEN IS with the things that impact your life the most, I knew nothing about the Sleepers and their cults of followers, nor would I have cared. Spirituality, let alone religion, had never been priorities in my house growing up. An only son in a small Irish-American family subsisting on averted gazes and unspoken words, I was born Catholic but my family never brought me to church, nor was any sense of the spiritual instilled in me during everyday life. My mom was a worrier and a list-maker, my father a construction worker and a drinker, and they tackled these jobs with the whole of their hearts and souls. To them, that left no time for gods or ghosts in the day, and nothing but exhaustion and uninspired sleep to pass the night. At nineteen, I already had mounting debts, so I had little time to sleep at all, and less to dream.

  The Sleepers spoke to people in dreams. In fact, that’s how they found Natalia.

  Natalia...my sole reason for wanting to keep this dirty, twisted, illogical world going, simply because she was in it, and she made my little piece of it brighter. Now that I sleep, I see her in the vines, her soundlessly screaming mouth pulling her face out of shape. Those are my bad dreams. In my worse dreams, we are together and happy, and we never close our eyes, not even to blink.

  Many things fascinated me about Natalia back then, not the least of which was that she was the only actual princess I had ever met. Her family was directly descended from royalty and she was, in fact, in direct line of rule, though neither the poverty of her small Eastern European country nor its governmental unrest lent her family financial or political security. Quite the opposite, in fact – it was closely whispered that Natalia was sent with caretakers (her “aunts") to seek political asylum in America.

  While in her homeland, her being a princess meant certain death, here in the wild woods of upstate New York, it meant nothing much, really – a conversation-starter at parties, and an awkward one at that. She would never talk about it if she could help it. She wanted to forget. No glass slippers or golden balls here.

  The first time I saw her, she was napping on a friend’s couch, and she took my breath away. I wanted to kiss her, crazy as it sounds. She looked so peaceful, so soft, almost glowing in the slant of afternoon sun streaming in from a window across from her. It was a crazy compulsion, wanting to kiss a strange and sleeping girl like that, and I stifled the urge. But if you’ve ever met someone like that, someone whose presence sort of stupefies you and somehow changes the hues of the world with every moment you are near her, you probably understand what it felt like to first encounter Natalia.

  I loved her. Her beauty was inarguable but severe and aloof, as if ice and not muscle defined the angles and contours beneath her skin. I loved her accent, and the way that when she was amused, the corner of her mouth would turn up just a little while she looked at you with dark eyes from beneath thick, dark lashes. I loved the smell of her skin and her short black hair, scents like blackberries and heady brilliant-hued flowers.

  She loved me, she said, because I was smart and quiet, and kind of cute in that clueless sort of way. I’m not sure what she meant by that, but I was glad to give her any reason at all to love me back.

  * * * * *

  At the end of the Hundred Years’ Sleep, it is said that there will be deep and impenetrable night swallowing the stars. There will be a cacophony of screams. There will be fire that will raze the cities of men and shreds of flesh carried by rivers of blood. There will be blazing symbols of power. And there will be the return of the Sleepers. More people believe in this than Scientology. More copies of the Doctrine of the Sleepers are sold on Amazon than any of the occult texts which have gained, through misdirection and movie inaccuracies, a kind of pop
culture fame.

  All across the world, there are groups of people who believe these prophecies, who devote their lives to making them happen. These people keep to the shadows, the night places, the off-the-grid and out-of-the-way places where their secret meetings and arcane rites herd fear and ugliness through the world. In these places, blood soaks carpets so that it sponges up wet around their footfalls. In these places, the dead lie still but find no peace. In these places, doors and windows look out on vistas of terrifying magnitude and alien strangeness, and the rabid laughter of inhuman voices drives the unstable to madness.

  It was here, in these places all over the world, where it was discovered that the Hundred Years’ Sleep was reaching its end, and the rarest, most sacred, and powerful opportunity was at hand. The era of the Ancient Ones, the elder gods of myth, was to begin, and deaths would make it happen.

  It was Natalia who told me about the Hundred Years’ Sleep and the Sleepers themselves. We had gotten very close, inspecting and experiencing and sharing the world and each other as if no one else existed. It felt good when she confided her secrets in me, when she fantasized about a future with me in it. I’d never had that kind of closeness before, certainly not with my parents, never with my limited circle of friends, and never with girls. It made me feel like more than just an echo of a person. I liked that. Hell, I thrived on it.

  A few days before the sirens, she gave me a book from her library to read. She had hundreds. That’s where I first read about the Hundred Years’ Sleep, in a book on the occult called Unaussprechliche Kulten. One of the original German editions which she helped me translate, bound in leather with iron clasps, it told of a cult ritual that would bring about an end to everything human. It was fascinating, even thrilling to me, the way campfire stories and urban legends are thrilling. But it was just a story.

  Actually, when I think about it, the tales of the Sleepers reminded me of something I’d read much earlier in my life, in an old book of Grimm’s fairy tales – an English translation of the German, that time. A princess pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fell asleep. It wasn’t until a prince came along a century later and, moved by her beauty, kissed the sleeping princess and woke her up. Also just a story.