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Night Movies

Page 18

by Mary SanGiovanni


  It was Chloe who reached out and touched the cell first, her fingers gliding lightly over the strange metal, the raised symbols, the –

  * * * * *

  “Symbols, yes we noticed those, too,” Detective Davenport broke in with a meaningful glance at the hospital room’s wall clock. “Any idea what they mean?”

  Vague irritation turned something over inside her. In the same impatient tone, she replied, “How could I possibly have any idea?”

  Detective Davenport acknowledged that with a nod, and Chloe continued.

  “But when I touched the solder ridge –”

  * * * * *

  – Chloe had noticed there was a crack in it. She couldn’t be sure, but she was fairly certain the crack hadn’t been there a moment before.

  “Hey, look at this,” she said to the others, and followed the crack with her finger around the better part of three sides of the skinny door panel.

  “Be careful,” Tim said close to her ear. She felt a pleasant warmth at his proximity. “Those edges look sharp.”

  “Is it cracked all the way through? Can we open it?” Chris squinted, trying to see into the fissure and beyond it to the interior.

  “Question is,” Selby said, “should we open it?”

  That was when they heard the laughing coming from inside.

  Chloe exchanged startled looks with Selby, Chris and Tim. Something was in there.

  Audrey, on the other hand, flushed with pleasure. “Open it,” she whispered between excited breaths.

  “What is it?” Chris asked.

  “Maybe we should –”

  Selby’s would-be suggestion was sheared off by a series of sharp cracks from within followed by a gust of frigid air. The door panel, clearly outlined by the cracks now, groaned and by instinct, they backed away. Only Audrey hovered close, and when the panel fell heavily in front of her and sledded down the dirt pile to their feet, she squealed in delight.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” She beamed at them. “Like my dreams.”

  “What is it?” Chris asked her.

  “I dreamed that thing last night too,” Selby muttered.

  Chloe heard those exchanges in periphery, but her gaze was focused on the strip of darkened interior of the cell. It gave the illusion of being somehow deeper inside than it might appear from the outside. Like your dreams, yes, she thought. Except those are just debris being swept up inside the black hole. She wasn’t completely sure she understood what the thought meant; the idea was very hazy. But something about all of it was undeniably familiar.

  Four points of illumination in the gloomy interior grew and took shape.

  * * * * *

  Chloe described what happened next to the four men in the room with her, and while her cracked voice kept rumbling over the broken glass in her throat, she had a surreal sensation of time overlapping, of past and present pinched together, of memories superimposed on vision and the visceral emotions and reactions of those around her, past and present, mirroring each other. In the hospital room, her voice and the machines monitoring her shuddering slip of life were the only sounds in the room. In the woods –

  * * * * *

  – Only Audrey’s high-pitched manic giggling underscored the stunned silence. No birds chirped or hooted or cried. No branches snapped and cracked. The woods waited to see what the humans would do with this alien object, this infected tooth in its gums. More so, Chloe thought, the woods seemed to be waiting to see what the creatures inside would do to the observers gaping in disbelief.

  The deep blue of twilight spilled outward from that cell and seemed to wash over everything, darkening the sky and the shadowed woodland spaces until they formed a kind of thick shape of their own. Chloe was aware in the periphery of her thoughts that it was far too early in the day for darkness, but the notion was eclipsed by the sight before her. In the inky interior, the beings inside the cell glowed a soft, light green. The phosphorescence illuminated and delineated individual bones beneath a membrane too thin to be called skin. They looked to Chloe a bit like small Chinese dragon skeletons, with over-sized, taloned paws and long skulls of wide, sharp teeth. The backs of their skulls arced up and curved in like sickles, while a bony frontal ridge split off and tapered into horns. Chloe couldn’t see anything like eyes or even eye sockets, nor could she see any purpose for so long a muzzle other than to harbor those teeth. The long coils of segmented tails curled under them. Bands of what Chloe could only assume were the same kind of metal as the cell had cracked and fallen away from the necks and wrists of all four.

  They looked dead...until the tail of one twitched, making Chloe and the others jump. Selby cried out.

  The leftmost one in the line-up lifted its blind head and unhinged its bottom jaw, emitting its own wail. The others stirred, uncoiling and stretching, and within seconds, the four were outside the cell. One spit something that gave off an acrid smoke as it began to dissolve a hole in a nearby rock. A few seconds more and the tiny bones of one were crushed beneath a large branch of tree wielded by Chris, in whose grimace Chloe could see terror and revulsion.

  There was no blood, only a splattering of clear gel on Chris’s hands and shirt.

  Audrey wailed in anguish, turning eyes of fiery anger on Chris. Her cry was echoed by a seething roar from the creature closest to Chloe. It swung its skull in Chris’s direction, and panic leeched the color from his face. He raised the branch again like a club. The creature’s lower jaw unhinged and it began to laugh, the membrane of skin thickening a moment and pulsing with the most awful, sickly colors. It darted off between two pines and the other two followed suit, their glows swallowed by the wooded gloom.

  Audrey sank to her knees, scooping up the smashed skull of the fallen creature. Its glow faded quickly and the membranous skin of its body began to dissolve, the bones turning to a whitish powder that the evening breezes eventually picked up and blew quickly away. What little was left burned off like smoke which seemed to envelop Audrey’s head, gliding up her nose and down her throat, into her eyes, before the remnants dissipated into the air.

  “Audrey? Chris? Tim? Is everyone all right?” Chloe touched Tim’s arm and saw concern for her in his eyes. He took her hand and squeezed it, nodding. Chris nodded too, exhaling heavily and eyeing Audrey with suspicion. Chloe suspected her sudden anger at his attempts to protect them from the creatures that had slithered out of the cell confused him. It confused Chloe, as well. “Selby, you okay?”

  Selby, hugging herself by a nearby tree to stop her body from shaking, gave a weak thumbs-up in Chloe’s direction.

  “What the hell were those things?” Tim peered into the gathered dark that had consumed the creatures. Chloe wasn’t totally sure, but thought the direction they had gone was thankfully opposite the one she and the others would need to go to get back to the retreat.

  “I think,” Chris said, “that we ought to get back to the cabin. We need to tell Lynn and Dr. Gilray and the others. Maybe call the police.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” Chloe said.

  “Uh, Audrey?” Selby eyed her with a mix of suspicion and concern. Her words hung in the air for several seconds while a shadow passed across Audrey’s features. In the next moment, she looked up, a bright smile both on her mouth and in her eyes, as if all her reactions in the last few minutes had never happened.

  “Forgive me, yes. Chris is right,” Audrey said, rising to her feet. “We should get back to the cabin before it gets any darker.” She sniffed once and crossed in front of the cell to lead them back.

  Chloe noticed Audrey graze the silvery panel almost lovingly as she passed by, a secret brush with a lover’s hand. It made her feel cold all over.

  * * * * *

  “What about those other...uh, things from the spa– I mean the, uh, cell?” The question came, surprisingly, from Ray Giamatta. The detectives and even the doctor glanced back in surprise, as if they’d forgotten he was leaning there in the doorway. Detective Davenport’s expressi
on, though, indicated to Chloe that he would have asked the same thing.

  Tears blurred Chloe’s vision. She hadn’t known or even suspected where those things had gone or what they’d done until the party made it back to the cabin. Everyone in charge of the Shining Life Wellness Retreat was gone. Dr. Gilray, Lynn, even Marguerite, the housekeeper. All gone. She remembered wondering with sick dread if maybe those things had come to the cabin before they could get back and taken them away, or that maybe Dr. Gilray and his staff had fled the scene to save themselves. It had taken quite a while, by her estimation, before it dawned on her that maybe they had known about the thing in the woods, that maybe....

  She realized the men were watching her, expectant. She swallowed and it hurt. “Kim and Jennifer were still there but had no idea where the others had gone. Dr. Gilray, Lynn, and Marguerite....” she shook her head. “Maybe we were set up.”

  “They left you?” Ray Giamatta’s features turned soft and concerned.

  “We didn’t know at first. We were worried. We explained what we found to Kim and Jennifer. I don’t think they believed us then. Not fully. But they saw we were serious. Scared. They saw its...oozing stuff. From the one Chris killed.”

  The women had seen the drying, flaking gel on Chris’s shirt and on his pants where he’d wiped his hands. The gel on Tim’s shoes and drying on Selby’s cheek. “It didn’t matter what had scared us; we were obviously scared, and as far as we were concerned, someone needed to be called. Police, animal control. Someone.”

  “So you didn’t go back out into the woods? Back to the cell?”

  * * * * *

  It had been too dark to go back out into the woods, though not for money, God, or country, as her grandma used to say, would she have gone back out there anyway. Those other...things...were still out there. No, it was decided instead that they should lock the doors, keep a vigilant ear for the return of the staff, and in the meantime, call the police.

  The plan proved more difficult than they could have anticipated.

  Their cell phones got no reception that far out in the woods; that had been stated in the fine print regarding the retreat, as was a clause about no internet access, no television, no iPads, no e-readers, no contact with the outside world. There was only one phone in the cabin, and that was in Dr. Gilray’s office. They moved as one group down the hall behind the stairs to the last door on the left. It was locked, as Jennifer suggested it would be.

  They looked helplessly at one another. They were not the types who broke down doors or even picked locks; they were the types who attended life-affirming weekend retreats like this one because life happened to them rather than for them. They were the types who fretted for several long minutes about the consequences of such actions on a door to a room they didn’t belong in. There was some resistance from Jennifer and Kim; they were still not convinced that whatever the others had seen warranted breaking and entering. The majority insisted on action, though, and after some deliberation, it was agreed that Chris and Tim should try first a bobby-pin, then a credit card, to finesse the lock open. Neither worked.

  Before dismay could fully settle into them, Lynn and Marguerite did return. They had been to town, Lynn said, to restock groceries, but neither had seen nor could account for Dr. Gilray. Lynn in particular seemed surprised (and probably more suspicious than her professionalism would allow her to show) that her weekend charges were so visibly shaken, and now huddled around Dr. Gilray’s office door, trying to break in.

  Their explanations tumbled over each other, coherence and reason lost in the shuffle of words, but Lynn nonetheless shooed them out of the way and produced a key to the office.

  The second and third obstacles happened rather suddenly and without explanation, and Chloe admitted to the detectives that she had little understanding of why or how. She felt certain Audrey might have understood by then; her slightly amused expression each time a segment of their plan met trouble exasperated her, and she found herself, not for the last time, wanting to slap some sense into the woman.

  Her giggle fueled Chloe’s frustration, for example, when the lot of them burst into the tidy little office with its fine expensive furniture, its framed awards and full-page magazine articles touting Dr. Gilray’s successes, and discovered there was no phone anywhere in evidence. There wasn’t even a phone jack in the wall, which seemed to surprise Lynn as much as anyone. When Lynn asked Marguerite, who cleaned the office at least once a week, what had happened to the phone that had been on the desk, the housekeeper explained in very broken English something about the doctor telling her to take it away, that the dreams would be better when it was gone. They had assumed, of course, that use of the word “dreams” was a mistake, that either Marguerite had misunderstood the doctor, or that her limited English inventory could not be used sufficiently to explain.

  * * * * *

  Chloe told the men in the room (minus the doctor who had reluctantly left when paged over the loudspeaker suddenly to attend to a patient down the hall) that she believed “dream” was exactly the word the doctor used, and precisely what Marguerite had meant. The doctor, she believed, had been having dreams about the cell longer than any of them.

  “How do you know that?” Detective Davenport asked her. “That he was dreaming about the cell?”

  “I think Dr. Gilray did exactly what those monsters in the cell told him to, in the dreams.” She was vaguely aware of the cryptic quality to her statement, but when she didn’t elaborate further, the detectives gestured for her to continue.

  * * * * *

  The next logical step in their minds had been to get into their cars and reconvene at the police station in town. Lynn had adopted the view that whatever had happened out in the woods was serious enough to address immediately. It had, after all, disrupted the tranquility of their little cabin paradise. Paying customers were upset. It had gone so far as to rattle them into what at best were misconceptions of common natural phenomena and at worst, flat-out hallucinations. Whether they had been under some chemical, natural, or preternatural influence or had simply had their nerves undone and life unshined, as it were, the key to restoring peace of mind was to see that these customers were satisfied they were safe. All this had been imparted to them by Lynn in direct and indirect ways, and went a long way toward assuring Chloe that Lynn and Marguerite had no part in some nefarious plot to hand them over to those creatures.

  Assurance of safety, however, was soundly blown out of the water by the sight of their cars, as they piled out onto the front porch, in twisted heaps on the gravelly drive. Shouts and sobs followed, along with panicked pacing and the wringing of hands. The cars had been fine, Lynn assured them, when she and Marguerite had passed them only twenty minutes before. No one said much, except to question the skies as to what could possibly have done that to their cars, and what to do now. It looked to Chloe like giant fists had crumpled and torn through soda cans. Dr. Gilray’s car was not among the wreckage.

  “We gon to die here,” Marguerite said.

  Audrey answered with a thin, high giggle.

  * * * * *

  “What did you do then?” Detective Davenport asked.

  Chloe closed her eyes for a moment, remembering that last night. It had been horrible. She shuddered in the hospital bed. “Lynn was convinced Dr. Gilray would be back with answers, a phone, a car we could leave in. She couldn’t understand his absence, but was convinced there was a good reason, and his return would set things right. He never returned.”

  Detective Davenport flipped through his notes and nodded grimly. “We didn’t find him among the...uh, remains. He’s in the wind at the moment, but we’ll find him.”

  Chloe wasn’t so sure about that, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she told him, “We couldn’t just sit and wait but we were exhausted. So we checked and double-checked to make sure the place was locked up tight, and then we went to bed with the solemn promise from Lynn that she’d let us know if she heard word.” The hospital bed fel
t very small just then, and the air too dense inside her. She wanted to jump up and run and keep running, but her limbs were heavy from the sedation.

  “It was a bad night,” she said. “It took a long time –”

  * * * * *

  – to fall asleep. In her dreams that night, the blackness went so much farther than just behind her eyelids. In it, she could hear insane bitter laughter punctuated by growls of pain. Chloe could make out sentiments more so than individual words, feelings so strong and clear they seemed like her own. She felt violently angry, unafraid and uninhibited, frustrated and confused. Thoughts beyond the simplest trains of logic were difficult to hold onto, though she could remember once knowing powerful secrets of vast galaxies and intimacies of multiple solar systems. She had been stripped of credibility, denied compassion. She had been abandoned, banished, lost. She felt both drugged and very strong and knew beneath the haze that she was incredibly dangerous. She had been labeled and was hurtling through space that was not her own, through endless punishing time to hear disjointed thoughts and fragmented memories, both hers and theirs.

  Where do you belong? Nowhere, nowhere anymore....

  Before the severe coughing had jarred her awake, though, she had seen inside the black hole, swirling with debris and chaos stretched out of time and space and shape, and it had been terrible. Beyond it, the cell had found known space, and lifetimes had passed before it was close enough for Earth’s gravity to pull it in and for it to embed itself like a splinter in the flesh of the planet.

  The coughing was a separate thing, outside the dream, outside her world. She frowned before she was fully awake, blinking into the darkness.

  A deep, thick cough, wet and heavy, bounced around the hallway outside her bedroom door. From the sound of it, Chloe figured it was someone down the left end of the hallway – Selby, Chris, or Audrey.

  Audrey. She remembered the thin, high laugh, the way Audrey had wrapped herself in her own thoughts for the rest of the night, smiling softly and occasionally humming, answering any attempts at conversation with simple answers. However, those thoughts overlaid the most direct and disturbing one, an idea no one seemed up to the task of addressing. The creature Chris killed had broken down right under Audrey. Its dust or something had gotten up inside her. Its gel had been on her clothes and hands, too. That something might be very wrong with Audrey now seemed a strong possibility.

 

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