Night Movies

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Chloe tossed back the covers. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton nightgown, and the night breeze blowing in from the open window raised goosebumps on her arms.

  She crept to the door and listened a moment, waiting for another round of coughing. Silence stretched just long enough to make her turn back for her bed before phlegmy hacking broke it. She eased open her door and slipped into the hall.

  The coughing was indeed coming from Audrey’s room.

  She made her way to the door and knocked, waiting for a response. There was none, and Chloe felt even more uneasy. She opened the door.

  Chloe found Audrey standing at the foot of the bed, one hand pressed against her chest as if to hold it in place against the wracking coughs. The woman looked up with glassy, unseeing eyes as Chloe entered, and sank slowly to the bed, her hand falling away from her chest.

  Audrey didn’t look well. The golden color of her tan had been leached away. Shadows beneath her eyes, in the hollows of her cheeks, and around her mouth made her look exhausted as if from illness or emotion. Her hands shook and there was dirt caked in her hair. The souls of her bare feet were black with dirt as well, and the white tank top and gray sweat shorts she had worn ostensibly as night clothes were streaked with dark smudges. Pieces of leaves and pine needles stuck to them.

  “Audrey? What...where – did you go out to that thing again? Oh, please tell me you didn’t go out there, alone in the dark....”

  Clear gel coated the dirty woman’s fingertips. A greasy smudge caught and reflected the window’s moonlight off her cheekbone.

  “Couldn’t sleep. Bad dreams.”

  “What did you do?” Chloe whispered.

  “Nothing,” Audrey muttered, her gaze unwavering and empty. She sniffled. “Caught a chest cold.”

  “I heard you –”

  “I’m fine,” Audrey said tonelessly.

  Chloe was considering what to say next when she noticed a thin trickle of blood issuing from one of Audrey’s nostrils, beading and then dripping over her lips.

  “Audrey,” Chloe said, “are you okay? You – your nose is bleeding.”

  “Really?” Audrey’s voice was faint, matching the distracted indifference in her eyes. She ran a shaky hand beneath her nose and smeared the trickle of blood across it. “Oh. Huh.”

  Chloe wanted to grab her, shake her, look into those gulfs of indifference to whatever faraway place her mind had gone and slap her back to the here and now. The truth was, Audrey scared her, devoid as she was of the vibrancy that had so very much characterized her the day they had met.

  She was about to say something, anything to pierce that haze of vacancy, when Audrey’s jaw dropped open. A low, inhuman whine issued from her throat, unwavering and growing louder. Chloe backed away from her, the single thought that the creatures in the woods were inside that throat eclipsing all other thoughts. Audrey’s eyes rolled back into her head and she began to shake violently. The whine descended into a roar, then snapped off. Something was happening in her chest.

  Audrey collapsed to her knees, violent spasms whipping her head forward. Her palms smacked the floor in front of her, hard. Beneath the damp, hanging curtain of her hair, she gagged. Chloe caught glimpses of her face, streaked with tears, the black of her pupils seeming to swallow the orbs of her eyes in darkness. Her head pulled back and whipped forward again, her breaths coming in hard, short gasps. The odors of overturned dirt and unwashed hair, of fear-sweat, emanated up from her.

  Then she vomited. It splashed on the floor beneath her, hanging from her chin in bloody strings, a puddle nearly black with clots. Chloe whimpered, the scream inside her trapped but building pressure. Audrey looked up at her and for a moment, she was a feral thing, savage and alien, lost and inhuman. Then she lurched forward again and expelled another wave of thick fluid. Something clinked and splashed in the puddle of vomit. Chloe frowned, drawn closer in spite of herself. Another clink followed as something else fell from Audrey’s lips and bounced off the first object. Chloe’s squint grew wide and terrified as the pressure of the scream inside her found first her heart, then her throat, and then her mouth.

  The first object was a sheered scrap of metal very much like the thing in the woods, curled on one side and from Chloe’s view, very, very sharp. The second appeared to be some kind of metal spring.

  Beneath her curtain of hair, Audrey was retching up more blood, along with thin bars and scraps and gears of metal, chunky fleshy bits of her insides caught in the torn and sharp edges. Chloe imagined Audrey’s tongue a ravaged slab of flesh limp in her mouth, her stomach torn, her throat gouged. Had she swallowed pieces of metal? Pieces of that thing in the woods? How could she? Why?

  Audrey finally stopped, her whole form heaving from the exertion, her breaths punctuated by the occasional spitting of some last remnant. Then she began to change.

  Something unseen lifted Audrey just high enough off the ground so that she dangled a bit, drained from the effort of vomiting. Her head bowed so that just beneath the fringe of her hair, Chloe could see the bloody chin resting on a bloody chest. Her arms hung limp and her legs dragged slightly beneath her. Then she flinched. Chloe heard a loud crack, followed by a short groan and another crack, and the blood-soaked tank top caved in on one side. Another sharp crackle and Audrey’s shoulder met her ear, her arm telescoping up into itself with a series of pops and sounds like tearing fabric. The other arm followed. Chloe’s only coherent thought was how very loud the cracking of bones was, unmuffled even beneath flesh and muscle. She couldn’t quite accept that invisible hands were twisting and pulling on Audrey’s spine, drawing it out. It was difficult to process the change in Audrey’s skin color, or the sharp white things bursting through the worn edges of that skin before sinking back in to reform new structures beneath. She turned her head, unable to stomach the new shape Audrey was being pulled and shoved into.

  Like the cars out front, she thought.

  A metallic shriek that came from Audrey’s unhinged jaw made Chloe jump, instantly bringing fresh tears to her eyes. She had to get out of there, to get help – not for Audrey, whose mouth made sounds like dying electronics and whose re-appropriated limbs clawed in her direction. Chloe was no heroine, but she didn’t want to die, nor did she ever want to see such a transformation happen to anyone else. She bolted from the room, leaving the mess that was Audrey to slash the air behind her with broken fingers.

  She found Lynn’s spine folded over the windowsill in her room, her upper half hanging out the window, glazed eyes gazing up at the stars. One of her legs was missing, as was a hand, and streaks and bloody prints from those missing appendages stained the white fur rug by the bed a dark pink. The walls were splattered, too, and further, it appeared someone had recreated the same kind of symbols that had been on the cell over and over, in part and in full, with smeared flourishes. Her eyes took in all her mind could hold before the damn of tears burst. She heard shouting down the hall and ran to Chris’s room. She skidded to a stop in the doorway when she caught sight of one of those terrible glowing bags of bones from the woods. Chris, gravely injured, had Selby swept behind one large arm, while in the other, he fended off the serpentine strikes of the monster with swipes of a crowbar. Chris gestured, and with a feeble shout, sent Selby to Chloe. The two ducked out of the room as the creature dodged the crowbar and descended on Chris’s face. His screams were drowned in a gurgle and in the snapping of bones like logs on a fire.

  The others were not in their rooms; Chloe swallowed the lump of dread in her throat, and with Selby tagging behind and crying softly, they crept down the stairs to the main floor.

  Downstairs, Marguerite had been torn in half, each piece of her seated on one of the couches while the blood from her ragged ends pooled between them.

  They found both Kim and Jennifer vomiting violently out on the back porch, their spasms echoing Audrey’s in intensity and output. Chloe saw chain links, slivers of wood, rocks amid the bile and blood. They were beyond help.

>   Selby paused at the door, clutching her stomach. A fat drop of blood was sliding toward her upper lip from her right nostril.

  “You okay?” Chloe touched her arm.

  “Stomach pain. Like something moving.”

  “What?”

  Selby looked up at her, and the quality of her eyes was different. The self-conscious sarcasm had dulled to a listless indifference. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They found Tim, alive but barely, while one of the monsters leaned over him, dipping its hands into the torn-up hole in his shoulder. He cried out every time those inquisitive claws descended. When he heard Chloe, his face turned to her, a faint light of hope flickering in the suffocating pain of his eyes.

  This hurt Chloe’s heart the most; she had instantly liked Tim, and had, after months of self-imposed isolation, looked forward to spending more time with him, getting to know him. Now, the ragged mess of his shoulder pulsed out a black sludge with his weakening struggles, and it filled her with rage. She grabbed a fireplace poker and swung it at the creature, who ducked and lunged at her. A slice of cold pain opened above her eye. She slid in Tim’s blood but caught herself. She swung again, and this time, the cracking of bone as the poker connected with the creature’s back satisfied her. She raised the poker and brought it down again, again, again, until the repulsion and the fury were spent. The body broke open like a seed pod, dissipating its dust into the air, like the other one’s had. She threw an arm up over her nose and mouth and hoped the chalky smell still in her nostrils had no infected her. When it had gone and the remnants of the thing were completely evaporated, she sank down by Tim’s side, crying again.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  The mess in his shoulder had begun to seep across his chest, dissolving and devouring him. “But I...I didn’t...I was too late....”

  He smiled softly. “You tried.” He squeezed her hand. “You’re amazing.”

  “Tim,” she began, but the look of something leaving his eyes stopped her. Pain wrapped around her heart. His hand fell out of her grasp as the rot ate toward his wrist. She absently picked up a shred of his pajamas that blood had adhered to his arm and closed it in her palm.

  “Chloe!”

  Selby’s frantic cry sent Chloe whirling around. The last of them had its tale wrapped around her neck, its arm working its way into her mouth. She was clawing and scratching at it to pull it off, but it didn’t budge. It didn’t even seem fazed. Chloe crossed the room toward it, the fireplace poker raised, but before she could reach them, it withdrew its arm. The stringy, bloody contents it held high over Selby dripped blood down onto her face, into eyes which were rapidly seeing the same nothing as Tim. It tossed the mess at Chloe who, by regrettable instinct, dropped the poker and caught the mass as it hit her square in the chest. She screamed, dropping some part of Selby’s insides. The steaming, meaty smell nauseated her. It coated her hands and stained the front of her nightgown.

  When the crazy glowing thing lunged for her she ducked and picked up the poker, thrusting it wildly overhead. She didn’t realize she’d speared the creature until it thumped onto the floor next to her and began to dissolve.

  Outside, whatever was left of Jennifer and Kim howled and Chloe jumped. They were pawing at the door, all disjointed limbs bending the wrong way. Chloe screamed again, this time inside her head, but when the scream found its way to her mouth, it was little more than a choked sob of confusion and terror.

  The sound of splintering wood decided her course of action. Chloe bolted from the house and out into the dark woods, alone.

  IV – Room 216

  Chloe’s ordeal in the woods was mostly a blur. She could remember slashes of white moonlight through the trees. Rocks cutting the soles of her feet. Tripping over roots. Dodging low branches like old women’s fingers, long and scratching at her face. Wailing and screeching like twisting metal bouncing between trees behind her, their direction impossible to guess but their proximity like a breath on her neck. Close. That thing, or the things the others had become – they all sounded the same now. Darkness pouring over her back, pouring down her throat, drowning her. Shadows her eyes could not break into recognizable shapes. Cracking and snapping, like little bones breaking under her feet and all around her.

  The dawn had come by degrees, which she registered only in the back of her mind. She had heard a car drive by. Only one, but it indicated a road, and where one car had passed, another had to follow eventually. She had bounded off in the direction of the sound and stumbled out onto the road in front of Ray Giamatta’s oncoming truck.

  * * * * *

  Several long minutes passed before Detective Davenport stirred from his chair. His eyes looked as tired as Chloe felt, and something about the set of his mouth betrayed more than disquiet in his head. “Thank you, Ms. Wells. We realize that took a lot of effort, and we appreciate it.” He rose. The way his hand shook, just a little, as he closed the notepad and shoved it into the pocket of his pants confirmed it. He was scared – maybe not of what had happened, but of what might happen yet.

  Chloe nodded. She was done talking, and glad to be. She had told them everything she knew. There was nothing more to say.

  Both of the detectives shook her hand, gently. Detective Davenport left his business card on the table by her bed.

  “Just in case you need to reach me for, well, anything,” he told her. “My cell is on there, too.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He tried to smile at her, but couldn’t quite do it. He nodded a good-bye to her at the door, and the detectives were gone.

  Ray Giamatta, the man she had come to think of as having saved her life, approached the bed with shy, almost timid steps.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to him. “For picking me up.”

  Ray answered by squeezing her hand. “It’s gonna be okay, Chloe,” he told her. He had a kind face, and smelled good. Her eyes fluttered closed. She was very, very tired.

  “Those detectives will find that man, that Gilray. If he set you all up, they’ll make him pay for that. And...they’ll catch that thing in the woods. They’ll....” His voice trailed off. “It’ll be okay. Everything will be all right.”

  The last thing she remembered thinking before sleep took her was that Ray seemed to be trying to convince himself more than her.

  * * * * *

  In the early morning hours, she awoke in a dark room and for a minute, she thought she could smell dirt and pine and animals rotting in the dappled sun of deep woods. She struggled against the dark and the smells; the former resolved itself into the shapes of the hospital room, and the latter faded completely, if it had ever been there at all.

  Chloe hadn’t told those detectives everything. She did know what the words on the cell door meant. She had dreamed it, and felt their meaning like a tight, white-hot fist gripping her chest. The words were useless, a superfluous afterthought, perhaps to soothe consciences. They had meant nothing to the unfortunate recipients of the burden dumped unceremoniously onto their planet. Nothing, that was, until the door had been opened and events had progressed beyond the point of being able to heed anything like a warning on a door.

  Either that alien race hadn’t realized what kind of deviations and mutations the illness would have on other species, or they just hadn’t cared. Their words were a second knowledge though, strong and sure as gut instinct. She understood....

  Danger, the door had read. Quarantine. Insane – High Risk.

  She was sure that what the dreams didn’t explain, the infection made clear right before insanity and death blotted out the ability to reason. The others had known what she knew now as soon as those alien patients had gotten inside them. Those creatures were undesirables, banished to a cell which was both prison and padded room, the anathema cell. Those creatures were another species’ criminally insane, and their insanity was contagious, deadly, mentally and physically. They had been sent from their home world because even advanced medici
ne from light years beyond the Earth couldn’t cure it.

  It did different things to the human body, though. It brought terrible changes and awful knowledge. Both would spread on contact with the remnants of the bodies in the cabin, just as it had with the bodies of the alien escapees. Just as it would with the one left alive. There would be no containing it.

  The infected would still dream, and dreams would be only part of it...

  V – Dr. Seever’s Story

  Dr. Seever came to check on Chloe Wells in room 216 at about 7 a.m. He nodded to the police guard recently stationed at the door and entered the room. His understanding was that government personnel – CDC and military – were on their way, which piqued the doctor’s interest. If Chloe could tell him about what she was exposed to, he might be better equipped to advise on how to help her get well.

  She was awake but listless. Her upward gaze was largely vacant. Dr. Seever attributed it to the medication.

  “Chloe? How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Fine.” Her voice sounded less strained. That was good.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  He checked the machines she was connected to, making notes in her chart, then checked the tubes in her arms. All looked good.

  “Okay, Chloe, a nurse will be in to see you in a bit to take some blood and bring you some breakfast. Orange juice, toast. I know you’re not hungry, but I’d like you to do the best you can with it, okay?”

  Chloe leveled a steady but indifferent look at him. Dr. Seever, who had only heard part of Chloe’s story the day before but understood her to be connected to a series of grisly murders in the woods, jotted another quick note in the chart. Poor girl was in shock. As much as he’d heard of her tale proved that – aliens in the woods and all. A chemical hallucinogenic, maybe something dumped or spilled in the woods or the cabin’s water supply, was Dr. Seever’s guess – and probably why the government was in such a hurry to get to the girl. Still, she was his patient, and he’d call Harry up on the psych floor when he got back to his office and discuss a transfer, since her vitals were stable and her levels were good. Meds were great, but Dr. Seever believed the best course for treating her PTSD would be medicine in conjunction with therapy. Girl had clearly experienced trauma.