Deep Night

by Greg F. Gifune

  Can you hear the night, Seth?

  The gauze-like film over his eyes weakened, and the cabin slowly blended into focus.

  Can you hear it coming alive?

  A shifting of shadows and a break in the moonlight drew his attention to the floor. Someone was whispering nearby, but Seth could not make out any specific words or phrases. He peered through the semi-darkness, following the sound.

  Our minds are the battleground, Seth.

  Silhouettes moved together on the floor, near the sleeping bag. Seth’s vision was still cloudy, but better, improving with each passing second, and he was able to discern three distinct shapes. The closest to his bed was Christy. He could see the side of her face in the moonlight. She knelt next to the sleeping bag and Louis was lying on the floor, looking up at her with a mesmerized expression. But there was something wrong with his eyes, something slightly off, as if he were sleepwalking with them open. Yet he could see and was clearly cognizant of what was happening. Also on the floor but a few feet away, Darian sat watching them; a strangely docile smile on his face that looked almost drug-induced. Raymond, Seth thought. Where’s Raymond?

  Christy slowly pulled the shirt Seth had given her off and tossed it aside. Completely nude beneath it, she knelt before them, her face pale as the rest of her body.

  They’re phantasms traveling through our minds, never provable, never seen and always hidden in the dark.

  She went to Louis, and he welcomed her in his arms as they both disappeared into the darkness, falling back beyond the scope of moonlight. Darian watched them silently until two small hands reached up out of the darkness. He took them, allowed them to gently pull him down, out of the moonlight as well.

  Time seemed eerily malleable just then, moving like dark liquid behind his eyes, slowly flowing and shifting from one point to the next. Silently. Deliberately.

  That’s the vehicle they use for movement, for infection from one person to the next.

  Seth felt a sudden pressure on the bed. Christy’s sorrowful face appeared above him, slinking closer, her hands gliding up across his body. He wanted to move, wanted to call out, but found it impossible to do either. Christy’s face hovered above his, her hair dangling down, the ends tickling his cheeks. She looked so devastatingly sad, yet the heat from her body was undeniable, pulsing from her in waves. Her small breasts pushed against his chest, and her hands slid down his chest, across his stomach and into his underwear, gripping him. He felt himself harden against her cold touch.

  Sin. They use our sins against us.

  Christy’s lips brushed his ear. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Because what is sin? Think about it, Seth, what is it really?

  He watched her slide back down his body until her face—like a pale ghost hovering near the foot of the bed—was within inches of his erection. She removed him from his clothing, her fingers moving deftly as she stroked him then pushed him into her mouth.

  It’s human nature. Our nature, Seth, it’s how we’re made.

  The wetness engulfed him, but it was cold inside her, cold and disturbing.

  They use the dark half of human nature against us.

  Seth’s tongue felt dry and heavy, the words like lead blocks in his mouth. “Stop,” he managed, slurring the word badly. “Don’t—what—what are you doing…”

  Greed, arrogance, fear, violence, gluttony, sloth, hatred, jealousy, depravity—it’s all as much a part of us as love and affection and compassion are.

  She released him with a loud popping sound and he felt a tingling sensation vibrate up through his body. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s all right to scream.”

  And they know it.

  As she took him back in her mouth, suckling loudly, darkness rolled over him like an incoming fog, dense and alive.

  They know all our secrets, Seth.

  He reached up through the inky blackness, took either side of her head in his hands and tightened his grip, locking his fingers in her hair.

  All of them.

  The black void parted, Christy’s slowly gliding head came into focus, her eyes looking at him, her mouth tight around him and drawing him deeper and deeper.

  Like sin itself it lies dormant, sleeps within us only to come alive later.

  Seth began to thrust into her, ignoring the overwhelming feelings gushing through him, feelings that told him what was happening, what he was doing, and why.

  But we have to allow it.

  He thought of Peggy, and of how young Christy was, how wrong this all seemed, but the thoughts tumbled free of his mind even before he could focus on them.

  Gone, like rolling mist.

  All he could see was the pretty, innocent, sad face of a young and willing girl, and the sensation and vision of her mouth on him, sucking him so greedily, so savagely now.

  No one will know. No one will ever know.

  His body bucked, slamming into her harder, and he felt himself come, exploding into her as she received him.

  Free will, Seth.

  “It’s all right to scream.”

  Christy’s head snapped back, as if yanked away by invisible hands, her back arching to an impossible angle and her body rigid in seizure. Things moved beneath the skin on her face, stretching it like rubber as they darted back and forth across her features and throat until they had formed a large tumor-like bulge in her temple.

  With a single unexpected surge of mental clarity and physical prowess, Seth shot up into a sitting position. For several seconds he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t seem to draw any oxygen into his lungs at all, and sat gasping, his mouth opening and closing with frenzied repetition like a fish out of water struggling for life.

  Finally, as if suddenly remembering how, he began to breathe, pulling in deep breaths one after the next until he felt the panic passing, giving way to another kind of fear.

  He looked around frantically as he scrambled to his feet. Both beds were empty, and so was the other sleeping bag. He was alone in the cabin.

  More footfalls on the porch, small and fast, scurried about.

  Seth rubbed the remnants of sleep and blurriness from his eyes and dropped into a crouch. The blood in his ears pulsed violently, and his heart pounded with such force he could hear it thudding in his chest. Despite the terror consuming him, he forced himself to trace the faint moonlight to the windows at the front of the cabin. Through the small segregated panels of glass in each, snow continued to fall across the black background of night.

  In an attempt to make as little noise as possible, he did his best to take slow and shallow breaths, but his entire body was trembling. Everyone was gone, and there was something…some things out on that porch…on the roof.

  Wait, he wondered. Am I…Am I awake?

  Wake up, Seth.

  A shadow darted across the lower part of the window, interrupting the moonlight long enough to catch his attention.

  “Open the door.”

  Seth spun toward the voice. Christy stood in the corner behind him, half concealed in shadow, eyes closed as if in prayer. “Christy?” he whispered loudly. “What—what’s happening?”

  “Open the door.”

  “Be quiet, there’s something out there.”

  “Yes,” she said, “there is.”

  As she stepped deeper into the room and into the moonlight, Seth noticed she was no longer wearing the sweatshirt he’d given her, but rather the blood-stained shirt she’d had on when she first ran over the ridge. She looked cold and pale and horrifically sad, a bloodied waif lost in the night, a night that owned her.

  “Where the hell is everyone?”

  Christy sorrowfully raised a hand and pointed to the door. As if in response, something scratched at the outside wall, something short and low to the ground.

  Seth backed away, stumbling over the sleeping bag while still trying to keep Christy in his line of sight. “What the fuck’s happening!”

  The noises on the roof returned…scurryin
g, scraping noises.

  “Raymond!” he called. “Raymond, where are you!”

  He can’t hear you, Seth.

  A gust of wind kicked up, smashing into the cabin and blowing open the door in a furious rush. Snow blew about the doorway and over the threshold.

  Night slipped in.

  Christy moved to the door, her stride otherworldly and erratic—stiff and jerky—like a doll walking without jointed limbs. As she crossed to the porch and stepped out onto the ground, her bare feet sunk into the snow until it had reached her mid-calf. She turned and looked back at Seth a moment and the bloody shirt rode up a bit, billowing slightly in the wind. She was nude beneath it.

  A plethora of distorted, tormented voices swirled through the night, between the trees beyond camp, mixing with the gusting wind. As Christy ran for the forest, shuffling through the heavy snow with an awkward and ponderous gait, they turned to screams.

  Hideous screams beyond anything Seth had ever conceived possible.

  With a scream of his own—a scream of unbridled horror—he followed, running out into the snow. But his was a panicked run, one with no rhyme nor reason, just terrified flight, and he found himself staggering through the heavy snow in only socks and long underwear, his arms flailing about and the forest and the night and the falling snow and his cloudy breath all blending together in a montage of uncontrollable terror. Rational thought and logic were left behind, fallen away from him like some lost article of clothing, caught up and carried away on the night winds, swallowed by the forest.

  “Help me!” someone screamed in the distance.

  He fell forward into the snow but scrambled back up to his feet quickly. The world tilted and swirled around him then came into focus. His chest wet and heaving, Seth looked to the thick forest ahead of him. It stood silently draped in white, the flakes falling through the massive trees in an oddly serene contrast to his fear.

  Christy was nowhere in sight.

  He looked behind him. The cabin sat in the distance, the front door open, smoke rising from the chimney. The SUV parked alongside it now little more than a large lump of snow. He’d covered a larger distance than he’d realized.

  More faraway screams tore through the night.

  Seth turned toward them, watched the darkness.

  A rapid blur in the night ahead of him—someone—someone or something was running behind the trees, running parallel to him at inhuman speeds.

  Horrible sounds of things ripping and shredding echoed through the forest.

  Seth pushed forward, up a steep slope of drifted snow, and realized he had reached the ridge overlooking their camp. As he turned, he lost his balance and nearly fell backwards into the snow, but as he caught himself, he saw Christy several yards ahead of him in the forest, running. Ignoring the cold and snow, the icy wetness that had soaked through his socks and into his feet, through his underwear and into every pore in his body, Seth ran on, following her.

  Night became day in a brilliant flash then returned to darkness.

  Lightning? During a snowstorm? It was possible but…

  Though his eyes were tearing from the cold and his breath-clouds obscured his range of sight, Seth ran even harder, the pain in his feet increasing with each step.

  The sky blinked bright and faded back to black again.

  It was lightning, or something comparable to lightning, but it lacked the neutrality of nature. This possessed a consciousness, specific purpose and intention.

  And it had found him.

  “Raymond!” he screamed. “Ray!”

  The fear fired through him like electrical current, and he thought he might pass out, but instead he staggered forward, tripped and catapulted through the air. He crash-landed in the snow a few feet away, his fall causing a puff of it to rise up from the ground like an explosion of powder.

  Seth rolled over onto his knees and looked around frantically. He was in a clearing ringed by a seemingly endless expanse of enormous trees. Snow blew about, but just above the treetops, through the darkness and swirl of flakes, he could make out a section of cobalt sky. Breath surged in thick clouds from his nostrils and open mouth, his chest heaving rapidly, lungs sore from the cold and straining for more oxygen.

  He attempted to push himself back up onto his feet, but the freezing temperatures had left his hands numb and nearly useless. More tears from the cold, fear, frustration or all three, filled his eyes, and he whimpered helplessly.

  Screams hemorrhaged the short-lived silence.

  Exploding through the trees surrounding him in squealing waves of agony and terror, the shrieks circled and cornered him there in the clearing like a pack of ravenous coyotes closing on wounded quarry.

  The sky trembled and cracked as an unearthly storm coursed across the heavens, stealing his eyes and sending him plummeting into horrible darkness.

  “Raymond,” he gasped, “what have they done to you?”

  Sounds of skin splitting and clothes tearing trailed the screams still echoing through his mind, screams from familiar voices.

  The darkness, thick and endless, encircled him in a slow sweep, a series of black waves crashing over him, swallowing him and pulling him deeper into nothingness, it filled him like a cancer invading his body against his control. He breathed the darkness into his lungs, felt it bleed through the corners of his eyes, rush deep into his ears and absorb into his pores until there was no longer physical separation. He and the darkness had become one, the same.

  Seth realized his attempts to struggle against the night he’d found himself lost in were futile. He felt the rigidity in his body slowly uncoil and release, submissive now, he became a lamb led to whatever slaughter the darkness had planned for him.

  This is home, something whispered to him from not so far away.

  Seth forced his eyes open. The huge trees loomed over him like sentries.

  The strange light returned, blinking through the forest in rapid intervals like a strobe. Flickering across the sky, it illuminated the barren trees with a color similar to lightning, causing their enormous branches to appear as giant tentacles reaching down through the darkness. Those that intertwined and formed a canopy high among the treetops, bathed in the blue hue, looked like a vast network of old bones.

  Death.

  It wasn’t until Seth had regained his feet and looked more closely that he realized the branches didn’t simply look like bones, they were bones. Bones that had once belonged to human beings somehow fused with the trees and strung among the branches as if to mark a passage or gateway between this world and some other.

  The strobe shifted and swept back to the ground, to the clearing, to Seth, who stood staring at it, terrified but mesmerized.

  It moved away, revealing trees beyond the clearing, and through the dense woods, the outline of another cabin became visible in the distance.

  And then quickly as the strange light had appeared, it vanished.

  Swaddled in shadow and the intermittent touch of muted moonlight, a form moved, a woman running through the snow toward the cabin.

  Christy.

  Something moved neared Seth’s feet.

  He looked down at the snow. Like demonic acorns scattered from above, countless eyes buried in the snow stared back at him: human eyes opening, lids brushing aside the powder, lashes blinking away the flakes so they might see him.

  Blood seeped up from beneath the snow, swallowed the blanket of eyes and grew gradually into a wide blossoming stain, covering it like a carpet of blooming flowers sprinkled about his feet.

  Seth’s mind began to rip like the faraway screams fracturing the silence, and he felt a sudden release and rush of warmth across the front of his thighs. It trickled down his calves and into the snow, gold mixing with crimson.

  Was he laughing hysterically, crying uncontrollably, or wedged at some point between the two? He could be sure of nothing…except that they were shredding his mind and determined to frighten him to the point of absolute, irreversible madnes
s.

  And they were succeeding.

  The blood grew worse, spreading along the snow, encircling him.

  The screams became deafening, raining down and exploding through the forest. Seth felt himself moving forward again, and though he was running it was at a much slower pace than before, his body numb and wet as he staggered into the forest, following the pale specter of Christy loping ahead of him, leading him to the cabin in the distance.

  With low branches whipping past his face, Seth slogged toward the cabin.

  Christy vanished inside the open doorway.

  His lungs burned and his muscles ached, but he seemed to be moving now as if without his consent, continuing his course on automatic pilot.

  He tripped over a drift, rolled through the fall and struggled back to his feet. The cabin was within a few feet of him now, the door open and snow blowing about on a slowly strengthening wind.

  An old pickup truck was parked nearby, almost entirely concealed in snow.

  Unlike their cabin, this one had no porch, only a small single step up to the front door, and was markedly older and not as well cared for. The windows were dark, and though he was sure he’d seen Christy go inside, he could no longer see her.

  Whispers, or the wind, swept past his ears.

  Seth stumbled forward until he’d reached the front step then pushed himself across it to the open doorway. The interior of the cabin was pitch-black but quite a bit of snow had accumulated in the threshold. The door had been open for some time.

  “Christy?” he called. His voice sounded unfamiliar. Weak, slurred, tattered.

  Seth stepped through, shuffling through the snow in the doorway and into the main room of the cabin. His feet became tangled in something, and he felt his knees buckle. As his hands reached the floor he felt around in the darkness for what he had tripped over.

  Loose shelves and an array of items lay scattered about the floor. A storage unit, a freestanding closet-type piece of furniture from which they had apparently come, lay smashed to pieces in a heap just inside the doorway.

  Seth searched the items, feeling through the darkness and using the moonlight for guidance until he located a large flashlight alongside one pile of debris. He scooped it up frantically and switched it on.