FIRST EDITION
Lords Of Twilight © 2014, 2011 by Greg F. Gifune
All Rights Reserved.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This one’s for Clint Salisbury
“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
ONE
The girl does not run. Through clouds of breath he sees her standing in the center of the snowy road, still as a mannequin and staring straight at him with hollow black sockets where her eyes should be. In a winter world of endless white, the dark craters look like pools of ink mistakenly spilled on an otherwise pallid canvas. The nightmare is dying, decaying right before him, returning to the shadowy lies of night from which they came. Around them, on this desolate wooded road, the storm is over but renegade snowflakes still fly about in the delicate light of early morning.
But for his labored breath, it is eerily silent.
A whimpering sound behind him draws his attention. He glances back quickly at the puppy trembling near a snow bank on the side of the road. “It’s OK,” he says, his voice gravelly and strained, foreign as it echoes across the frozen landscape. “Stay there.”
He turns toward the girl. She still hasn’t moved. She won’t. He knows this now. There is nowhere else to go, and like him, she—it—is weakening.
A gust of icy wind cuts through him like a razor.
Despite his pain and exhaustion, he summons a primal screech he hopes will silence the tempest of demonic whispers slithering through his head, and raising the ax, staggers forward along the road.
Emma opens her arms in welcome, even as he stumbles closer and slams the blade down into the top of her skull.
* * * *
Even then, he knew they were watching. He didn’t know how or why or even what they were, but he knew there were eyes on him. Eyes that could peer deep inside him where all those things he didn’t want anyone to see crawled to darkness and hid away. He could feel it. He could feel them. But it all seemed little more than a dream, really, a vague premise drifting through an exhausted mind. The possibility that something was out there but on its way to him, or perhaps had already arrived, he couldn’t be certain either way, refused to leave him. All he knew for sure was that he was no longer alone with his thoughts and fears. Something else had joined him in these things. Something sinister.
“For God’s sake,” he sighed, “get hold of yourself.”
Even before the storm most of the locals had been spooked, but Lane knew better than to allow such foolishness to frighten him or cloud his judgment. He had no doubt his feelings of paranoia were a subconscious reaction to the goings on in town of late, yet they remained impossible to dismiss.
It all began about a week before, when three cows from one of the farms in town had turned up missing, only to be found hours later strewn across an open field like discarded garbage. The carcasses had been mutilated, with wounds which appeared to be precision cuts, many of them burned into the animal’s flesh, as if some sort of laser tool or high-tech scalpel had been used. According to the local newspaper, the animals’ sexual organs had been removed, along with their rectal areas, eyes and mouths. These sorts of things had been reported before, but never in or even near Edgar, and as rumors swept through town like wildfire, blaming the mutilations on everything from satanic cults to drugged-out teenagers to space aliens to shady government agents, the tension in town grew worse. When within days, a handful of people reported seeing strange lights in the skies, things only got worse.
There’s a reasonable explanation, he thought. And if I believe anything different I may as well buy into the theory that garden gnomes are responsible.
The swirl of snowflakes caught his attention, mesmerizing him as they had since childhood. He watched the ribbons of snow fall gracefully from the gray sky, spiraling toward Earth in beautiful twirling garlands, the newborn flakes riding the wind before exploding into bursts of powdery dust. There was only an inch or two of accumulation but the weather reports had called for close to two feet before the storm was said and done. Lane knew he couldn’t be long. He had to get home while the roads were still passable.
His old pickup shimmied and rattled as he pulled it up an incline and onto the property he’d been told about. Perhaps forty yards ahead was a rundown shack of a house, interchangeable with any number of others sprinkled throughout these woods and lonely back roads. He’d driven by the place a few times but had never stopped. Now that he had, he still wasn’t certain he’d have the guts to get out and go through with this.
Lane saw the man’s breath first, tumbling from him in smoky plumes. Tall and rugged, with a shabby salt-and-pepper beard and dark eyes, he was already ambling toward Lane’s truck, a bloody machete slung over his shoulder. Behind the man, a partially skinned deer carcass hung in the open doorway of a garage to the right of the house. Lane gave a quick glance over at Vince, his little lab puppy that was white as the falling snow. The dog was sound asleep, so Lane pushed open the driver’s side door and hopped out of the truck. The smell of innards and death—the kill—filled the air, but it was so cold out it quickly dissipated. He was glad he’d kept his sunglasses on. Nerves had left him a bit lightheaded, and daylight reflecting off the snowy ground cast the area in an otherworldly glow, making everything much brighter than inside the truck. He pulled his coat in tight around him. “Morning.”
“Surely is that,” the man said.
“Are you Mr. Snead?”
“A-yah.” He slowed his stride but kept coming. “I know you?”
“We’ve never met. Clyde Reeve suggested I come and see you.”
“Did he now?” Snead finally came to a stop a few feet from him.
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“Clyde Reeve I know. You I don’t.”
“I’m Lane Boyce.”
Snead scratched at his knit hat with the battered fingers of a man who had spent his life laboring with his hands. “You that New Yawk boy?”
No one had called Lane a boy in a very long time. He’d recently turned forty-seven, which probably made him somewhere in the vicinity of ten years younger than Snead. “Boston, actually.”
“Baston, right.” Snead squinted as if he’d suddenly lost sight of him. “Ya been in town a while now, seen ya around.”
“Going on seven months, moved here the beginning of May.”
“Ya livin’ up to Freddy Tate’s place.”
“Well it’s my place now, but yes. I bought it from Mr. Tate’s widow.”
He jerked a thumb back at the deer carcass. “Lookin’ to buy some venison, are ya?”
“Not today.”
Snead sucked air through the gaping space between his front teeth, wiped a trickle of snot from his nostril with the back of his hand and gazed out at the snow-covered trees along the backside of the property. “Somethin’ else then?”
“Yes.”
“Half hour do ya?”
“Yes, that—that’s fine.”
“Fifty dollahs, cash in hand.”
Lane pulled two twenties and a ten from his wallet and gave them to him, hopeful Snead hadn’t seen his hands shaking.
The big man motioned to the shack with his chin then turned and started back toward the deer remains. When he looked over his shoulder and saw that Lane hadn’t moved, he chuckled. “Well go on then, what ya waitin’ for? Clock’s a-tickin’.”
Lane crossed the yard, climbed two rickety steps then hesitated before the closed front door. He glanced over at Snead, who gestured for him to go ahead, so he turned the knob and stepped directly into a filthy and cluttered kitchen, the table covered with old mail, empty beer and liquor bottles, coffee mugs, drug paraphernalia, a box of Frosted Flakes and a plate stained with egg yolk. The house was cramped, dusty and old, a basic box. Nothing looked as if it had been cleaned in months. Beyond the kitchen was a small den area outfitted with a threadbare couch and an old rocking chair. A ragamuffin of a little girl sat on the floor doodling in a coloring book, a box of crayons spilled about her. In the far corner a potbelly woodstove crackled, filling the house with thick, oppressive heat. Clad in a robe and slippers, the little girl looked up at Lane through a curtain of matted hair and smiled. His heart broke for her. She couldn’t have been more than five or six. Masking his true emotions, Lane smiled and waved hello. She waved back then returned to her coloring book. What in God’s name am I doing here? With a sigh, he moved through the kitchen and into a short hallway. At the end stood a bathroom, the door open, and to his right was a bedroom, a string of beads hanging in the doorway.
Moving the beads aside with one hand, Lane ducked through and into a tiny bedroom. Everything smelled vaguely of pipe tobacco laced with body odor. Lane removed his sunglasses and gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the relatively dark room: A bed, a bureau, and a small washbasin on the floor. The only window was outfitted with thick plastic sheeting rather than glass, and the scarred plank floor was bare, as were the walls. Propped in the corner was a large wooden crucifix that looked as if it had been left there mistakenly.
On the edge of the mussed and unmade bed sat a woman in a full slip, a cardigan sweater tossed over her shoulders. Petite and shockingly thin, her bare feet just barely touched the floor. Her toenails were painted circus red but the polish was chipped and fading, and her skinny legs were littered with bruises and scrapes. Her brown hair was a rat’s nest held off her shoulders with a plastic clip, and her eyes were dull and heavily made up with black shadow and liner, causing her already pale complexion to appear even starker. “I’m Marla,” she said, sounding and looking as if she’d just awakened from a deep sleep.
He cleared his throat. “Hello.”
“Can always tell the ones who never done this before.”
Emma’s face drifted past his mind’s eye, her lips breaking into a smile as she whispered to him from the past. You’ve never done this before, have you?
Marla gave a wry smile. “Relax, it ain’t nothin’.”
As the memory of Emma thankfully retreated to the darkness from which she’d come, Lane tried to estimate Marla’s age. She bore the decaying and haggard look of a longtime meth addict, so it was hard to know for sure. His best guess was she was somewhere in her late thirties to early forties.
She stifled a yawn. “How much time you got?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“How you want to spend it?”
He stood there stupidly, unsure of what to do or say.
“It’s OK, you can tell me. Don’t be shy.” She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the bureau, shook one free and rolled it into the corner of her mouth. “I’ve heard it all and done most of it, ain’t like you’re gonna shock me.”
“I don’t want sex,” he told her.
“Say again?”
“Sex, I…I don’t want sex.”
“Well darlin’ that’s what I’m selling.” She plucked a disposable lighter from her ample cleavage and fired up the cigarette. “Hell’s wrong with you? Whatcha lookin’ to buy, furniture?”
Lane fought the urge to leave, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. “All I really want is some of your time.”
Marla drew a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled through her nose. “OK.”
“I thought maybe we could just sit together a while.” Even as he said it he realized how pathetic it sounded. Lane’s face flushed and he looked down at the floor. How had his life come to this?
“So…you just wanna look and jack-off or somethin’?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said, voice shaking. “I’d just like to sit here with you. We don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to.”
She puffed her cigarette, sizing him up through vines of smoke slowly climbing toward the ceiling.
“That’s all,” he added. “That’s all I want.”
“You don’t even want to talk dirty or nothin’?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, turning back to the beads, “I shouldn’t have come, I—”
“You the one that bought the Tate place?”
Lane looked back, nodded.
“You all alone out there?”
“I have a dog.”
“The Tate place, shit, talk about the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere.” She sniffled, wiped her nose and flicked cigarette ash on the floor. “You ain’t married or got a girlfriend or nothin’?”
“I’ve been divorced about a year and a half now.”
“How long was you married?”
“Twenty years.”
“Long-ass time.”
“Yes it is.”
“Almost fifteen for me.”
“Congratulations.”
“Your wife run off on ya, did she?”
“No. It was my fault.”
“You don’t got no kids?”
Normally he would’ve found such questions intrusive, but they distracted him from his embarrassment at having gone there in the first place so he made no objections. “No.”
She pondered his response a while. “How come?”
It never ceased to amaze him how people had no qualms asking such a personal question once they learned he was without children. Didn’t it occur to them there might be any number of reasons, and none of them their business?
“We tried twice when we were younger but my wife miscarried both times,” he explained. “After the second pregnancy failed we decided not to try again.”
“Oh. Sorry. Really, I am.”
“It was a long time ago.”
Snow ticked against the plastic sheet covering the window.
“Lot of weird shit happenin’ in town, you heard about it?”
He nodded.
“Some say the end of the world’s coming, judgment day and all that. Bad for business, makes everybody run to church, try to save their ass before it’s too late. But they’ll be back. Only time sinners ain’t sinnin’ is when they’re scared, and don’t nobody stay scared forever.” She took a pull on her cigarette. “You think that shit’s for real? Judgment Day and all that?”
“I sure hope not.”
With a slight smile, Marla dropped her cigarette into the washbasin on the floor. It died with a quick hiss. “Come on over here and sit down with me.”
Lane did. The bed was so soft and worn he could feel the springs digging into the backs of his legs. Up close, Marla smelled like she’d just had sex in an ashtray, but there was something in her sad eyes he felt connected to. She took his hands in hers and gave them a gentle squeeze. Her skin was slightly damp.
“How long’s it been since somebody put their arms around you?”
Rather than answer, Lane let his head rest on her shoulder. She brought her free hand around, pulled him close and held him tight. Despite his shame and embarrassment, he melted into her as tears filled his eyes, and even when the world became a wet and blurry mess, he did not let go.
* * * *
The ride back was treacherous, but he and Vince arrived safely. Lane shut the engine off, sat in silence and watched the house through the steadily falling snow. This place still didn’t feel like home to him and probably never would. That had become a concept just beyond his reach it seemed, a memory of another place and time he could never return to. Like so much else, it was gone and he’d never get it back. The house was quite small, a squat weathered structure amidst seventeen acres of woodland. A single-story, one-bedroom with a modest front porch and a hand-dug cellar, it was originally built in the late 1930s, and until Lane took ownership, had belonged to the same local family for decades. Even for such a rural and scarcely populated town as Edgar (a burgh of less than five hundred residents located in northern Maine), his property was, as Marla had said, the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. The town proper was more than five miles away and consisted of only a few stores, a post office, town hall and a one-engine firehouse (Edgar didn’t even have its own police department, and fell under the jurisdiction of the state police, the closest barracks being miles away). More than two miles separated Lane from his nearest neighbor, an older couple he’d never met or spoken to. Many nearby areas didn’t even have names. They were simply numbers on maps where people still lived with generator-driven electricity or none at all, and often little to no indoor plumbing. Things weren’t quite that primitive in Edgar, however. Lane had electric, a woodstove for heat, and indoor plumbing. Most of it even worked on a regular basis. But modern technology was scarce. He didn’t even own a television. He’d planned on buying one once he moved in but with no cable or satellite service available and only a roof antenna there seemed little point. And there was no cellphone reception in Edgar either, so his only real connection to the outside world was his landline telephone. That and his laptop, which he rarely used and even then only for basic Internet and email use (provided his antiquated dial-up connection felt like working). Mostly he read or listened to music or news on a portable radio, and although being detached from technology and the world at large was a difficult adjustment at first, Lane was surprised how little he missed it and how quickly he’d become accustomed to living without it.
Lords Of Twilight Page 1