When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  They waited for what seemed a long time. Carla rapped again, harder. After a moment the sound of shuffling footsteps could be heard from inside and the door opened a crack. Jack couldn’t see who was peering out, but he could tell from the expression on Carla’s face that it had to be one of her parents. “So...you’ve come back, haven’tcha?”

  Carla’s voice was hoarse. “Hello, Mother.”

  The door opened wider, allowing Jack a glimpse of the darkened interior and the occupant of the house.

  The woman standing in front of them was old and stooped. Wearing a frayed gray housedress, her white hair was tied in a bun behind her small head. Her eyes were the same watery-blue as her daughter’s, her face sunken, chin bony. She drew an equally faded gray sweater closer to her cadaverous frame and peered up at Jack. “Your husband, I take it? Looks mighty young to have been married some twenty-odd years now.”

  “He’s not my husband, Ma; just a friend.”

  Carla’s mother glanced at him once more, than turned to her daughter. “Well, come on in then if you’re a mind to. I always knew you’d come back.” She turned and began heading into the gloomy interior of the house.

  Carla seemed to have regained some of her nerve; she stepped past the threshold of the front door and followed her mother into the dismal old house. Jack glanced back at their rental car, then followed Carla inside.

  The house was dark and dusty. He stood in a small entry hall. To his left was the living room, shrouded in shadows. To his right was another room, cloaked in darkness. Carla moved down the hall, following her mother toward the rear of the house and Jack trailed after them, trying to take in as much as he could. It was obvious the place hadn’t been cared for in a very long time. The furniture he passed was old and drab. The wallpaper was faint and peeling. Dust motes swirled in the atmosphere, illuminated by the light from lanterns that were placed along various portions of the hallway. He passed a kitchen on his left but didn’t pay much heed to it because now he was in the rear of the house where both women were. As he entered the room he saw what appeared to be a den or family room lit by several oil lamps. The furniture here looked more cared for, the dust less of a nuisance. The old lady sank back in a worn easy chair and bade her daughter to sit down. Jack cast a quick glance around the room, noting the strange sculptures decorating the end tables and bookshelves, the equally weird paintings depicting strange subjects matted in frames, and the wall of books that took up one wall. The odor of mold was in this room as well, but that could be because of the books. He felt an irresistible urge to look at the books, but he sat down on a red sofa opposite Carla and her mother.

  “So...” Carla began. She looked nervous. “How’s Dad?”

  The old woman looked at Carla as if she were the dumbest person alive. “Humph. Guess you don’t know, don’tcha? What, with you packing up and leavin’ us like that all those years ago. Your father’s gone on to the other side.”

  Even though it was dark in the room, Jack could clearly see Carla’s face turn pale at the mention of this. Jack’s initial impression was an obvious guess; in the time Carla was in California, her father had passed away. She was hearing this for the first time and was justifiably shocked at the news.

  “No!” Carla said, hand going to her mouth, eyes wide. “It can’t be, it—”

  “But it is, child,” the old woman said, leaning forward and attempting to take her daughter’s hands. “It is. And you know what your father told you. You still remember, don’t you?”

  “No!” Carla was clearly frightened, and now Jack was nervous. This wasn’t the reaction somebody would have upon hearing that a parent had died. This was something else, something of a more primal fear.

  “Yes,” the old woman croaked. “You do remember. He always knew you would come home. You were always his little girl. And you know how much he would have wanted you to go with him. To go with us.”

  Carla shot out of her chair, screaming at the top of her lungs. The suddenness of her act and the intensity of her scream stunned Jack. For a moment, all he could do was look up at her stunned as she screamed, eyes bugged out, face deathly pale. Then she turned and began running down the darkened hallway toward the front door. Jack bolted out of his seat and chased after her, never even thinking of Carla’s mother or the affect her sudden turn of behavior had on the old woman.

  CARLA REFUSED TO speak of the incident. For the remainder of the evening she was silent and fearful. She refused Jack’s offer to go into town—Burkesville, population 145—for supper at the little cafe on the main drag of town, so he went by himself. By the time he returned to their motel room she was asleep, the thin sheet drawn over her as if she were using it as a shield against some otherworldly invader. He watched her sleep for a moment, then stepped outside and sat on the porch of the motel, smoking silently and thinking.

  He’d had to chase her past their rental car before he caught her. Once he grabbed her, she’d jumped as if shocked by a strong electrical current. For a moment it almost appeared as if she didn’t recognize him; she was looking at him, but her eyes were still wide, all pupils now, and while she was seeing him, she was looking at him in terror. But then as suddenly as the expression came upon her face, she’d seemed to gain control of herself and collapsed into his arms, sobbing uncontrollably. Jack managed to get her into the car and drive them to their motel.

  And now she was refusing to speak to him about it. The most she’d said were fitful mutters of, “I shouldn’t have been so foolish!” or “He knew, he knew all along,” and “I’ve felt them calling to me all this time.” Jack listened to her and tried to make sense of what she was saying, but couldn’t. Quite frankly, he was beginning to fear for her sanity.

  He smoked two cigarettes, then stepped back in the room. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was eight-thirty, still early, and he was far from tired. In fact—

  “Jack?”

  Carla was awake, her head supported by two pillows, looking up at him. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, and now she sat up slightly, the top sheet slipping down into her lap. She’d fallen into bed wearing her clothes, and now as Jack approached the bed he tried to think of something to say to ease her troubled mind. “You okay?”

  “No,” she said. “But I think I owe you an explanation. Sit down.”

  Jack sat down at the foot of the bed.

  “You probably won’t think much of me after I tell you this,” Carla said, her voice husky. “But the reason I reacted so strongly the way I did was because of what my mother said.”

  “Something about your father going to the other side,” Jack said; he’d developed a theory on that himself while he was outside smoking. Her father was now deceased. Her parents were crazy. They’d heaped a tremendous amount of psychological torment and probably physical abuse on her as a child, and somehow the phrase ‘going to the other side’ was the kicker. Maybe it meant death. Maybe they’d had some kind of crazy suicide pact.

  Carla nodded. “When my mother told me he’d gone, I knew right away. But he’s not dead. Not really.”

  “Excuse me?” Was he hearing this right?

  “You’ve got to understand something about my father, Jack,” Carla said. “He was a very dangerous man. Not dangerous in a physical sense. He didn’t rob banks or kill people or anything like that. But he was a dangerous man. He messed with things only a crazy man, or perhaps an evil one, would mess with.”

  Jack stared at her, trying to make sense of it all. Carla looked at him, her composure getting stronger. “The closest I can describe what my father was, was a...a mystic. Or a wizard. He was very deep into the occult. I grew up with it.”

  “Your dad was a devil worshipper?” Jack asked.

  “Satanism was child’s play to my father,” Carla said. “What my father was into was beyond Satanism. It was...it was about going further back, to the outer reaches of time and space, to a time before our very being, to a time before the earth was even formed.”

/>   “I don’t think I’m following you,” Jack said.

  If Carla heard him she didn’t indicate it. “I grew up with it. It was all I knew for years. I thought it was normal. My mother knew about it, but I never realized she was into it the way my father was. Mom cleaned house, sent me to school, made sure I had clothes, made sure we had food. My father worked. When he came home he shut himself in his rooms in the attic and dabbled.”

  “What did he dabble in if he wasn’t a devil worshipper?”

  Carla was silent for a moment, as if thinking of how to continue. “When I was younger and I asked my mother what daddy was doing, she would tell me he was studying. One time I got the nerve to peak into his room. It...even then, it was creepy. There were desks and lots of old books and papers all over. He had a skull, a human skull, on the table, and there were all kinds of papers tacked on the walls with weird shapes drawn on them. There were other weird shapes drawn on the floor in chalk. Weird symmetrical shapes, circles over triangles and stars, shapes that I can’t even describe. I didn’t understand any of it at first, and what I saw scared me. In fact, it was almost ten years later before I saw that room again..

  “Sometimes I would lie awake at night trying to fall asleep while my father was deep into his studies. Sometimes I heard him in there saying something in a weird language. Sometimes it sounded like he was...praying.”

  Jack shivered. Christ, even he was getting a little spooked by all this.

  “Sometimes I heard other things.” She looked down at the bed, as if afraid to continue. “One time I heard him speaking that weird language and...I could swear...I heard a second voice, as if it was answering him.”

  “What was it saying?” Thinking of what it was like for Carla as a little girl in that big dreary house, going through what she was describing to him, was giving him a severe case of the willies.

  “Nothing you would recognize as what we know as language, But then...it was a language in a sense. A language far older than the world itself.”

  This was getting too much. “I don’t think I’m following you, Carla,” Jack said. “What the hell do you mean by ‘far older than the world itself’? There’s no such fucking thing.”

  Carla stared at him for a moment. “If you only knew,” she said. “There are things out there...just waiting to gain their foothold on our world. They can’t wait to enter our world and tear us to pieces. We’re beneath them. They were here long before earth was inhabitable to the creatures that live here now. And for some reason they...they lost their foothold here. They were banished to another dimension. And...somehow...my father found out about them through studying obscure texts he managed to track down in remote parts of the world when he was in the military. He began to...communicate with them. He...he made them an offer...and they accepted!”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Jack tried to sound angry, but he was also beginning to be a little afraid, too.

  Carla ignored him. “One afternoon when I was sixteen years old I came home and saw what he’d been doing the night before had worked.” The huskiness returned to her voice. “He’d been involved in something intense in his rooms. He’d been praying again, chanting to something, and a few times I heard him refer to it by name—he called it a...a...it’s hard to pronounce. And then I heard this sound, like the blowing of the wind. It was like there was a hurricane outside, the wind blowing the trees hard in a sudden gust. It was so windy I actually went to my window and looked outside.” She looked at him, deadpan. “But there was nothing. The wind wasn’t blowing at all. But I could hear it, howling and moaning around the house as my father’s prayers and incantations grew worse.

  “When it was over there was silence for perhaps five minutes. Then I smelled this horrible smell, like...garbage or something. Or shit. It was awful. And then I heard a voice that sounded like a thousand bullfrogs croaking together at the same time in the stillness of a swamp. It had a voice, and it told something to my father in that croaking voice and my father answered it...” Carla’s voice began to hitch. “He answered in that same croaking voice!”

  She paused a beat before continuing; Jack could feel his pulse quicken as his belly turned to ice. “I pulled the covers over my head and huddled there, so afraid. I couldn’t sleep. I was awake all night and when I got up to go to school I tried to pretend that I didn’t hear what had gone on. I came home from school through the back way behind the house and I saw it. Whatever daddy called had pulled itself through the woods behind the house and left a ten-foot wide swath of dead vegetation in its path. It went deep into the woods, as far as I could see, and it left a slimy, smelly residue. And...as I followed its tracks from where it started I saw that it had set off on its path from our house. The entire west wall of the house was coated in that shit. It had crawled out of our attic!

  “That night my father actually joined us at the dinner table for the first time in months. He looked insane. He kept...trying to put his arm around me, trying to...be the father he never was to me. And he kept saying that he’d summoned it and that it was going to come back for the three of us. That it was going to take all of us to the Other Side. And that the dimensions would be turned inside out, allowing them free reign into our world.

  “That was the last night I ever spent in that house. The next morning I took the hundred and seventy-two dollars I’d saved in my bank, and a change of clothes and my toothbrush and stuff, and packed them into my book-bag. I didn’t even go to school that morning, just hitched a ride into Philly and bought a one-way bus ticket to as far as I could go.”

  “How far was that?”

  “St. Louis, Missouri, at first. I got a job waitressing and lived in a motel for a while. I was gonna stay, but I felt that was too close to Pennsylvania. I saved up two hundred bucks and bought a bus ticket to California a few weeks later. I’ve been there ever since.”

  Jack thought about this as he sat on the mattress. It was a warm muggy night and the air conditioning was on low, cooling the room nicely. “So, I take it you got to California and met your husband and everything was hunky dory after that, right?”

  Carla looked at him with something that resembled shame. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No. I don’t think you’re crazy. But I think your mother is pretty off her rocker. I mean, just look at her—”

  “You don’t know her the way I do.”

  “She’s a fuckin’ nut!” Jack snapped. “Jesus Christ, she’s fed you this shit since you were a kid, Carla! Can’t you see that? She probably made the shit up when you were little to keep you in line. There’s no such thing as what you’re talking about, things beyond time and space and all that bullshit. What the fuck is this shit about things coming from...” he sputtered to remember the right description. “...beyond whatever the hell they’re beyond. And all this bullshit about your father offering whatever it was he offered and—”

  “My father offered them the three of us,” she said, her features serious. “He offered my family. We were to be the gate to let them regain their foothold in the world.”

  “Bullshit!” Jack hissed.

  “My father was a coward,” Carla said, her mouth set in a grimace as she stared at Jack, her brown eyes cold and determined. “He was the kind of person everybody in town pushed around. From what I gather, he must have been that way as a child. He could never stand up for himself. I know that now. He used to tell me that the world was no place for people like us, that it would just chew you up and spit you out. That it was created to hurt you. He fed me this over and over. And I can see how I let this affect me. I got into an abusive marriage and I’m in an abusive working relationship with my boss, Lori. I let people take advantage of me. He was like those two kids that shot up that high school in Colorado—mad at the world. He was mad at the world and he was going to make it pay. Only instead of going on a killing spree, he turned to things even more dangerous. What my father finally did can very well be the end of the world as we know it.”
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br />   “How can the bullshit your dad was into be the end of the world?” Jack said, his voice rising. “The guy was a lunatic! All he did was dabble in a little black magic bullshit that doesn’t exist!”

  “You aren’t listening,” Carla said, glaring at Jack. “This isn’t just black magic. My father discovered something more ... more real than black magic. The Old Ones are real. They once ruled the earth. They’re more real than the deities we’ve created out of our flights of fancy. So real that the select few that have stumbled upon this knowledge have come away with such fear of what would happen if they were to ever break through the barriers that...” She seemed to be at a loss for words. “This is more than just the occult, Jack. It’s about harnessing a power that holds the balance between maintaining the earth as we know it, to creating the right atmosphere to throw open the gates of chaos. But my father...he found a way to communicate with them, something few men have tried. Most people foolish enough to try have failed with horrible consequences. But not my father. He made a deal with them. He offered himself and his family as sacrifices, what they would need, in order to gain their foothold into our world.”

  “What, so your old man offed himself, is that it?” Jack sneered.

  “No. He probably planned to use us as...as portals.”

  Jack threw his hands up in disgust. “What X-Files bullshit!”

  Carla ignored him. “Dad was excited that the ritual worked. He said all it would take would be for the three of us to perform the rites and the Old One he summoned would claim its sacrifice. Once the three of us were claimed and in their world, the dimensions would turn inside out. It would have a rippling effect around the world. It would be like the sound of a great storm, with a great roar of wind only there really would be no wind—that would be the sound of the universe tearing itself inside out and then it would peel back and it would be like a great dark cloud blotting out the sky. Only it wouldn’t be the clouds of a storm...it would be the peeling back of the universe.”