Night Movies

by Mary SanGiovanni

  When I asked her why she was giving me fairy tales to read, Natalia told me about her dreams – about ancient and impossibly slanted buildings forming huge cities, of creatures only visible in glowing outline of irregular shapes. She told me about the messages of death and change and resurrection they whispered to her – those things I just spoke of, or at least parts of those things. She claimed she didn’t know enough English to verbalize it all in a way I would understand. I think she just didn’t have the words in her heart, in her soul, to get past the horror.

  They weren’t just dreams, see. Not to her. It was crucial to understanding Natalia to accept that she saw patterns and cycles in the universe, and those patterns, deliberate as they were, contained signs and messages. I thought it was all just a part of her eastern European folklore, a charming quirk of her foreign upbringing, but I’d never dare dismiss it. When the sirens began, I can almost say I expected it. At least, I didn’t doubt Natalia’s belief in what those sirens were signaling.

  See, Natalia had a way of believing something so strongly, so perfectly, that you found yourself believing it, too.

  * * * * *

  When the first of the sirens went off, Natalia and I were asleep. We often fell asleep, just holding each other, in the silent and tucked away places of our hometown: my basement rec room, her library sofa, the abandoned cemetery’s office or tranquility gardens, the side street behind Krausers, and a dozen or so places in the nearby woods where we would watch stars between the speckled canopy of leaves and branches. This time, we were camped out in one of those wooded clearings, having nodded off on the hood of my car where we had been reclining against the windshield, talking about outer space. It seems funny to me now that we had been talking about life from other worlds just hours before we saw it. She had even been telling me about the Sleepers.

  “My people believe the Sleepers, they come from another planet in another dimension,” she said. “There are many mens who think it wise to offer them...what is the word? Appeasements? Lullabies, I think. Twice a year they do this – May and October. To keep the Sleepers from waking.”

  “Oh yeah? What kind of things do they do?”

  Natalia’s face darkened. “I do not know. They do not tell me this thing. But...they fail this last May. It is why I am here.”

  I glanced at her to see if she was being serious. The look in her eye told me she was.

  “Really? I thought you were here on political asylum.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh,” I replied, not quite understanding. “I guess I always assumed there were factions looking to take over the country, maybe hurt you or your family, and they sent you away to avoid, like, terrorists or radicals or something.” I held my breath, listening for her feelings in her ensuing silence. Was she upset that I had brought it up? It was the one thing we never talked about, not in any kind of detail.

  Finally she smiled, but it was a tiny thing, twisted by bitterness. “In a sense, that is true. There are radicals in my country, but they are more...religious than political. Sleeper cults, determined that now is the time to bring their gods back to earth. They require...different kind of appeasement. Sacrifice, that is the word. A farmer, a priest, a sage, a whole list of people they need to kill to awaken the sleepers. Then they need to kill a princess to keep the Sleepers awake for good. And when they kill me, the end of everything will begin.”

  “Baby, I’m sorry. I had no idea. These people sound crazy.”

  “My parents are strongly opposed to the ideals and agendas of these cults. They send me to live with.... “

  “With your aunts,” I finished quietly.

  “No,” she finally said, although the hesitancy still clung to her words. “They are...I don’t know the word. Mages? Very learned. Very knowledgeable in occult, and knowing spells and sigils and incantations to protect me from the cults. They are part of my father’s counsel. I am safest with them than anybody. Except maybe you.” She smiled at me, and I felt an overwhelming surge of love for her. I wanted to keep her safe and would spend the rest of my life, if that’s what it took, protecting her. I told her so.

  “That is noble, and a reason why I love you. I think you’d brave even the Sleepers and their legion of unholy things to protect me.”

  “You really believe the Sleepers exist, don’t you?” I asked gently.

  “I used to think I just couldn’t afford to discount the possibility,” she said, and turned her head to look me in the eye. “But they’ve spoken to me, in dreams, like I told you. Things are different since. The smell of the air, the taste of food and water, the skittishness of the animals. Even the trees shudder in a strange way. I believe, yes. I feel it in every part of me. Which means the cults have been successful in killing many good people and will come for me soon. If I die and the Sleepers awaken, we will become memories, Declan. Mere stories. We will become the fairy tales.”

  I pulled her closer, but didn’t answer. I didn’t know what I believed, if anything at all. I supposed that scientifically, there had to be life on other planets, even sentient life, and probably on millions or even billions of them. I could even entertain the possibility that there might be other dimensions containing other universes and possibly billions of planets with yet even stranger alien life. But that any of it could be here, on this single little rock floating on one little part of one arm of a single galaxy among countless others in a nearly infinite universe? The odds seemed against us in that regard, and frankly, I was glad for it. This world, and all the life on it that so often seemed incomprehensible to me, was enough to contend with.

  I didn’t get the chance to express any of that to her, though. By the time I found some inadequate words to try, she was already asleep on my chest, breathing softly. And I remember thinking that everything I needed in this world, this universe or any other, was right here with me, right then.

  Then I must have drifted off, too, because I had one of Natalia’s nightmares about the Sleepers. She would have said, I guess, that they were finally speaking to me, as well, and maybe trying to use me to get to her, but I can’t say for sure. It certainly seemed like a dream, although it was incredibly vivid. In it, the history of the Hundred Years’ Sleep played out in graphic detail.

  I saw a great battle from back when the earth was just jungle. I saw what I knew to be the Ancient Ones from the starless edge of a different universe. I’m not sure any description would do them justice, but there were masses of shining blue-black flesh peppered with eyes and mouths and tentacles. There were mile-long, miasmic swaths of black cloud in the sky and acidic ichors that burned paths through the new life on the ground.

  I also saw those other-dimensional formless things who would come to be the Sleepers, just as Natalia had described them, with iridescent and irregular outlines. These shapes were also colossal in scale, so much so that the invisible swipes of their appendages felled trees.

  I saw meteorites rain fire and tumultuous waves of ocean water tossed into the sky. Flashes of light in colors I’m pretty sure we don’t have names for lit up the night sky of the dream. There was what I could only guess might have been blood, sprayed across foliage and sand and rock, and there were utterances I assumed might be prayers and battle cries, but in the end, the Sleepers were nearly wiped out.

  The Ancient Ones cursed their remaining enemies with a restless death. It was powerful magic, so powerful that the curse could not be completely lifted even by the most skillful wielders of ancient and cosmic arts. However, it could be lessened, and so the priests of that old and alien race transmuted death to sleep, a sleep that would last eons, until all could be set right. Every 10,000 years, there would come a single century in which the stars would be positioned just so and the land and sea of this world fertile and brimming with life energy, and at the end of this century, the Sleepers would have a chance to awaken and reclaim their domain, feeding off the life energy of the lesser creatures who were, I guess, just simply in the way. I saw the Sleepers’
perception of what Natalia had called appeasements and lullabies. These were sigils carved in rocks by the sea and in the walls of deep canyons and at the entrances to caves, followed by a series of ritualistic practices I didn’t fully understand. And I saw the Sleeper cults’ sacrifices. I will never be able to unsee the atrocities of that part of the dream.

  I had just been forced to witness the evisceration of an elderly woman when it occurred to me I could hear her screaming even in my ears. It took a moment, but I realized it was a real sound from outside my head – an air raid siren, the kind of canopy of wailing that filled all the air around and above you. It reminded me of old war movies, or those storm warnings towns in the Midwest used to send people scrabbling to their storm cellars. I’d spent my whole life in upstate New York and had never actually heard one in our town before. It took another moment for me to sit up, aware all at once that the sound meant some enormous and immediate danger.

  Natalia was already awake and standing by the passenger door of my car. Her head was cocked and her eyes were fixed on the sky, and she looked as if she were listening for something beneath the siren.

  “Babe?”

  She shook her head and looked at me. “We need to go. They’re here. The other mages couldn’t stop it....”

  I hopped off the hood of the car, keys already dangling in my shaking hand. “Where?”

  “To my aunts.”

  * * * * *

  We saw many terrible things on the way into town. There was the dented school bus, flipped completely over on its roof. That was pretty bad. Blood was smeared against the side, and a single tiny pale arm hung limply from one of the broken windows. There was the police car half in a ditch created by caved in pavement on Main Street, and the bloated police officer flung over the hood. A severed tentacle the color of dead skin was wrapped around his neck, and its suckers were still weakly working to draw out the last drops of blood from the officer’s jugular. We saw downed trees splintered like toothpicks, houses caved in, gouges in the street. It reminded me a little of those old Godzilla movies I used to watch as a kid. It really did look like something huge had come crashing through, kicking cars aside and stomping through buildings.

  We saw a lot of dead people. Other than my grandfather’s and my great aunt’s funerals, I had never seen real dead people before. And these dead weren’t washed, drained, manicured, combed, and made up for public viewing. They were bloody, rotting, torn apart or twisted into unnatural angles. Their faces had grown stiff in expressions of shocked horror and pain. Some were curled up in fetal positions, haloed in pools of blood and muck. Others had broken arms thrown up in useless defense probably seconds before something crushed them into the pavement. There were hands, arms, legs, even a head strewn throughout the rubble of the residential homes. Broken glass littered the streets. And there were fires, just like it said in that book that Natalia had given me.

  Just like she had told me about the arrival of the Sleepers.

  The most terrifying of all, of course, where the vines. They were black with long thorns and jointed like splintered twigs but incredibly strong, given the way they seemed to bore through wood, glass, metal, flesh, and bone alike. They were coated with a kind of shiny, slimy substance that smelled vaguely of acetone and gasoline, a cloying smell that turned my stomach sour. And the vines were everywhere – along the curbs into the storm drains, wrapped around the wheel wells of cars, along the sides of buildings snaking in and out of windows and doors, around telephone poles, speared through trees and even the sides of brick and stone buildings. I have found out since that day that they are drawn to sudden movement and heat, and resistant to axes, weed killers, and fire. They waver when attacked, becoming something less substantial, and it’s only then that maybe, maybe, you stand a chance of escaping their grasp. But they’re fast. They move fast and they choke and puncture and kill fast. It’s not often that I’ve seen a victim of theirs move faster.

  I’m not sure why I thought Natalia’s house would look any better than the others we had seen. Maybe it was because of the desperate hope in her eyes and the nervous way she soft-chewed her nails as we made our way across town. I saw tears in her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them spill onto her cheeks. It made my heart ache for her. I wanted to say something, wanted to block out the world again with her, now more than ever, but one horror after another took the wind out of any words I tried to say. So maybe it was as much for me as for her that I pictured her house untouched, her aunts okay. I guess I needed to believe we were working toward something, toward someone who could fix it all, or at least stop it from getting worse.

  But her street, her whole neighborhood was torn open and torn down. Raw wounds in the street exposed sewage and gas lines while telephone wires from downed poles sparked and writhed in the street. We couldn’t drive the whole way, but instead, had to skirt around the mess to make it to her front lawn.

  Her front door was caved in. We could smell the blood even from the front porch.

  Even now, I get a lump in my throat thinking about Natalia finding her aunts, all three of them stabbed all over, with throats slashed and symbols carved into their foreheads. No gods or monsters had done that. She didn’t cry, but every time I picture that look on her face, it breaks my heart over and over again.

  I made Natalia stay close behind as I went from room to room with a knife from her kitchen. I wanted to get her away from the terrible sight of those bodies’ cloudy eyes, the way the linoleum floors crackled under our feet from the sticky, drying blood. But I also wanted to make sure that whoever had done those things was gone now. We found no other trace of the cultists.

  As I stood there in the upstairs hall, panting and clutching that kitchen knife, Natalia dragged me, silent and serious, to the library. She showed me a safe hidden behind a fake section of the bookshelves. It had not been discovered by the cultists, and for that, she seemed relieved. She spun the tumbler lock back and forth so fast I couldn’t quite catch the combination, then flung open the door and pulled out the contents.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting two thin, very old books into my hands. The covers looked sort of leathery, but that wasn’t exactly right. I had the inexplicable but sure notion that they were made of some kind of skin, but not from any living thing I had ever seen. There was no title or author name stamped on either book, nor were there title pages.

  “What are these?” I looked at her, confused.

  “Knowledge. Information. My aunts’ most prized grimoires.”

  I turned the yellowed pages in the first book with care, afraid they’d crumble to dust between my fingers. “I...I can’t read this. I don’t understand what – “ but then I did. I honestly don’t know how, but suddenly the lines and squiggles made sense to me. When I looked up, Natalia was gesticulating with her hands, her eyes closed, her lips moving in quick, silent words. When she opened her eyes, she said to me, “I can feel them coming, Dec. If they find me – “

  “They won’t,” I told her.

  “If they do,” she insisted, “then what is in those books is only thing that can protect you. I cannot teach you those books; there is no time. But I did same incantation to help you understand them that my aunts did for me. Do you? Do you understand that language?”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said, and sighed. “It should last for about two weeks. Study them in that time. Learn the things you need to protect yourself and others. There are ways to send the Sleepers back to the great Dreaming Cities. Maybe some day....”

  “Natalia,” I began. It was all so overwhelming, and I wanted to ask her about what she was implying beneath her words, the way she seemed to be suggesting I would be doing this alone. I wanted to reassure her again that I would always protect her, keep her safe. I wanted to tell her again that I loved her, because I knew deep down that she believed her time was running out, and that I would be facing this alone, without her. And Natalia had a way of believing something so strongly, so perfectly, that
you found yourself believing it, too.

  I was going to say all these things, but as she was speaking, she slumped against one of the open windows and put her hand down on the sill. She hadn’t noticed the needle-like tip of the vine that had snaked its way up the side of the house and over the broken glass. I hadn’t noticed it either until I saw all the color drain from her face, and a look of sick and knowing horror distort her features as she looked down at her hand. The tip of the vine had pricked her finger, while several other tendrils had begun to wrap around her wrist. I ran to the window and began stabbing and slashing at the vine. In the yard below, I saw hooded figures gathered beneath the window, looking up at us, but I couldn’t worry about them just then. The vine was snaking its way up her arm now, and my knife was glancing off it. I dropped the knife and dug my fingers in, trying to yank it off her. She whimpered, trying to pull herself free, but it wrapped tighter. Her skin was growing waxy and red, and just before the vine tore off her arm, she finally began to scream.

  In that scream, all the fear and pain of her sixteen years of running and hiding and dreaming welled up and out of her. Her face, her beautiful face, was splattered with blood, her mouth pulled open in a scream that was losing steam, losing sound. I saw her love for me in her eyes. I saw her good-bye in her eyes. And yet again, I couldn’t find the damn words to give her anything. I held onto her, fighting the vine that wrapped around her throat, digging my ragged little finger nails and even my teeth into that slimy, stinking, bitter vine stalk. The burn scar on my jaw is a testament to the failure of that move, but damn if I didn’t try everything I could to save her.

  The vine that lifted me off my feet and smacked me across the room broke my collarbone. It’s healed since, but still aches when it rains. I had the wind knocked out of me, though, and by the time I was able to scrabble to my feet and make it back to the windowsill, she was yanked out the window. For one endless moment of abject horror, I could only watch the robed figures bent over her sprawled and bleeding form. They waited until the escape of her last breath, then turned and left. They left her there, this precious prize they had searched sixteen years to find, left her in a sleep from which she would never wake up.