Deep Night

by Greg F. Gifune

  “Do you, Peg?”

  She sat next to him and put an arm around him. “Are you prepared to say the rest of the world is crazy and you’re the only sane one left?” she asked. “Are you really prepared to believe that?”

  “Yes,” he said, angrily wiping away the remaining tears. “Because there are such things as monsters. I’ve seen them. We give them power with our apathy. We hand it to them through our sin and our very natures. Maybe I am the last one left, maybe not. Maybe there are others, I don’t know.”

  “They’re us, Seth,” she told him. “They make us possible, not the other way around.”

  “They’re a lie.”

  “We’re a lie.” She stood up, paced a few steps away then turned back to him. “Don’t you care about the baby at all?”

  “It’s not a baby.”

  “Yes, it is, and it’s growing and forming even as we speak. It’s possible now. Anything is. It’s a miracle, an intrinsically beautiful creation, don’t you see? There’s exquisiteness in every living thing if only we’re willing to see it.”

  Seth’s shoulders slumped, and the breath seeped out of him with all the grace of a punctured and deflating dirigible. When he looked at her now, he saw the same woman he’d always seen. His wife, his soul mate, the woman he’d watched paint and create and laugh and cry, who had fascinated and intrigued him even when engaged in the most mundane of daily activities. He knew every inch of her body, how it tasted and felt and responded. He remembered how they’d make love then snuggle against each other in the night, hands together, fingers locked, her breath on his neck. He remembered her in the kitchen, making them tea, smiling, and the way the sunlight through the windows there would lighten her hair and brighten her eyes. He remembered having some of the best conversations in his life with her, and how just lying together on the couch watching an old movie, reading, or doing nothing at all, had been a wondrously loving affair for them both. He remembered her as his best friend. Maybe those memories too were fleeting, destined to be lost in some dusty corner of his mind. Maybe they were all an illusion, as she said, maybe they always had been. Other people’s memories from other times; told to him and blindly accepted as truth.

  Time isn’t always the same when you’re with them.

  “Are they coming?” he asked.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, looked away and responded with an understated nod. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  Something scratched the windows under the cover of drawn curtains.

  “Yes,” he said, standing. “It does.”

  He walked over to her, opened his arms. She gave a semblance of a smile and embraced him. Her arms felt so good around him, her hair so nice against his cheek, and just for a moment he closed his eyes and remembered them one more time. Not him, not her, but them, happy and together, as he was certain they’d once been.

  Peggy said something but he didn’t quite make it out. He brought his hands to either side of her head, kissed her cheek then moved his mouth to her ear.

  For the first time in years, in a soft whisper, Seth spoke to God. “Forgive me.”

  CHAPTER 38

  His concept of physical self was all but lost. It was like swimming up through black water without ever reaching the surface, hands sweeping, feet kicking, head back and eyes straining to find even the slightest indication of light. His limbs no longer felt like natural extensions of his body, though. In fact, they didn’t feel like anything. They, like so much else, had been reduced to phantoms. He couldn’t be certain they were even still there, still a part of him, but he sometimes tried to remember what it felt like to touch something…anything. He could hear and he could sense things—movement nearby, the touch of nurses or doctors, the smells of the hospital, and most of the things they said even in soft whispers—but he couldn’t see, at least not in the traditional sense. In this strange and boundless space he floated free of his body, only reminded of it when someone in some way altered his physical existence. Drifting through endless canals of darkness and armed only with memories of what it once felt like to be alive in a physical sense, he had begun to wonder of late if he was still simply suffering from injuries or if they had done something to him to make certain he remained in this state. Did he feel so free of his body because they had taken it from him somehow? Had they cut his arms and legs off, gouged his eyes from his head and mutilated his mouth beyond repair, leaving him a hideous bandage-clad aberration tucked into some hospital bed in the bowels of an institution where he’d never be found?

  He had done nothing to them. Yet they were tucking him away, leaving him to wither and die, because he was of no use to them unless or until he was able to walk with them as others did. But Louis walked alone. In some ways he always had. Now, he always would, alone in the dark, forever searching for light where no light could ever subsist.

  Flashes of earlier days came and went, blinking across his mind in brief intervals before vanishing into the night. His children, his former wife, the family they had once been, it all seemed so long ago now, so alien. Like the life they had all led, and the world in which they had led it, everything had changed. The metamorphosis had happened blatantly, and yet, no one seemed to care. The war had been won without much of a fight. They had offered virtually no resistance until it was too late, and by then it didn’t much matter. No one cared about him here. No one was coming for him, to rescue him. He understood that now.

  Louis remembered his friends differently. When he remembered them here, in the void, he remembered himself with Darian, Seth and Raymond in the forest. But it was so dream-like, something he could not be certain of. Were they genuine memories or only fantasies and tales his mind needed to tell him, placating fairy tales whispered to sleepy children to chase the boogeyman away?

  He knew there were many other experiences they’d had together over the years—good and bad—but the only thing he could seem to see in his mind when his friends came to him was the forest. And Christy was always there too, not running in blood-soaked clothing but already dead, her head open and grisly, body pale and frozen and stained in the early morning light…

  On hands and knees, they dig her out of the deep snow. Her hair is the first thing they see, tangled seaweed and dead tendrils fanned out around her head like a halo of snakes. No one speaks. They continue digging, pulling the snow away until more and more of her body is revealed. Raymond is the only one who doesn’t help them. Instead, he stands to the side, quietly smoking a cigarette and watching the sky the way he so often does.

  Once her body is rested free of her snowy grave Darian gently scoops the ice from her eyes then closes them with his fingers. He brushes the rest from her face lovingly, like the father he is, caring for this girl that is technically young enough to be his daughter.

  Seth gathers her hair in both hands, rings it out like a cloth and binds it together, laying it against her neck neatly while Louis straightens the sweatshirt, pulling it down below her crotch to better cover her. Darian looks to Raymond. He nods quickly, flicks his cigarette away and finally joins them.

  Together, they lift her from the ground and carry her on their shoulders, Seth and Louis on one side, Darian and Raymond on the other. They carry her above them the way one might transport a casket, trudging methodically through the heavy drifts back toward their cabin.

  When they finally reach their destination, they lay Christy on the floor in front of the fireplace. Darian gets a fire going as the others look on, standing vigil around her until the fire burns strong and bright.

  Seth disappears into the bathroom then returns with towels and a small basin of soapy water. He kneels next to the body and the others follow suit. Darian, ignoring the gore there, cups the back of her head, gently sits her up and holds her steady as Louis and Raymond remove her sweatshirt. Pieces of her brain fall free from it, from the bloodstains pasted across it, but the men seem not to notice. The sweatshirt is discarded and Darian delicately lays her back down, resti
ng her head on a folded towel.

  Nude in front of the fire, Christy looks so young, so innocent lying there; the reflected flames dancing across her hopelessly pale skin. She could be a porcelain doll or a statue carved from ivory. She is beautiful, but not in a carnal or sexual way, rather the way a rose or a sunset is beautiful, the way a child is beautiful. Seth takes a towel and dips it in the soapy water. He begins to wash her hair, cleaning carefully around the gaping wound left by the ax. Darian soaps her torso, washing it painstakingly as Louis washes her legs and feet. Raymond uses a cloth to clean her face, wiping away the blood and brain matter spattered across it.

  When they have finished, the men dry her from head to toe. Darian pulls a large and heavy blanket free from one of the beds, and they wrap her in it, carefully folding it closed over her so that only her face remains uncovered. She looks like she’s alive again, but sleeping.

  “She’s just a kid,” Raymond says, gazing down at her. “We both were.”

  It is the first thing anyone says during the entire process.

  It is also the last.

  Clean and dry and wrapped in the blanket, the four men again lift her to their shoulders. They return her to the forest, laying her at the base of a small crest deep in the woods. It is a beautiful spot, a place where nature unfolds without the intrusion and manipulation of Man. It is still a place where Christy will be left to the ravages of the wild, but it seems different to them now, better somehow than burying her in the snow like trash, hiding her from the very things she brought to them. They have transcended her victimization, the victimization of them all. Only they will not remember any of it. They will return to the cabin and sleep like they have never slept before. They will be devoured by it, swallowed by their dreams, and left alone in the dark with their demonic trophies, each with their own separate piece of deep night.

  The scene played again and again whenever he thought of them, and though he couldn’t be sure of its authenticity, in those rare instances when he allowed himself any hope at all, Louis hoped they had done with Christy’s body what his memories assured him they had.

  Someone came into the room, disturbing his thoughts. Though soft and delicate, he could hear their footfalls. As whomever it was hovered about, making quiet noises as they tended to things, his other senses kicked in. A faint smell of very light cologne came to him. It was a familiar scent, probably the same nurse or orderly of some sort that had been caring for him since he’d gotten there.

  He focused with all his might. Open your eyes, Louis told himself, open your eyes. The darkness rippled, moved like liquid, but refused to part. My God, he thought, this must be what its like to be a quadriplegic, screaming for your body to respond and watching helplessly as it ignores you. He might as well have been trapped beneath a pile of dirt, buried alive in darkness and unable to move or see regardless of how hard he fought.

  Wrestling with the frustration and panic, Louis swam on through the darkness, doing his best to listen. But the sounds had stopped and the smell was gone. Or perhaps he’d just grown used to it, he couldn’t be sure. He listened a while, floating aimlessly. Yes, he thought; whoever it was is gone now.

  His mind shifted gears, and he allowed himself to think about the day he had tried to kill himself and all that lived within him. He couldn’t remember the actual act, only the few seconds he had free-fallen through open space toward the pavement. It had unfolded so slowly, and when he hit, there hadn’t really been any pain he could recall. Everything simply exploded in a bright light and then collapsed into total darkness.

  A darkness he had still not found his way out of.

  “And you never will,” the someone he thought was gone whispered to him. A female voice belonging to some sadistic nurse waiting for him to die, someone he would never see but only feel and hear as she lurked nearby. “Because you’re not alone in the dark, Louis, it only seems that way. Look closely, we’re there too.”

  Home, Louis thought. I just want to go home.

  From the depths of the hospital the faint sounds of a bloodcurdling scream trickled down a lonely and deserted hallway.

  Unnoticed.

  OMEGA

  “My form of religious and political fanaticism is linked directly to these other manias and to paranoia and schizophrenia. We are meant to be crazy. It is an important part of the human condition…This planet is haunted by us; the other occupants just evade boredom by filling our skies and seas with monsters.”

  —John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies

  CHAPTER 39

  Detective Datalia drew a deep breath then let it out slowly. He’d heard more than enough. “I want to thank you for agreeing to speak with me, Mr. Roman, and for your honesty regarding the situation with your wife.”

  “Funny how you’d believe that but nothing else I’ve told you.” Seth smiled, he couldn’t help it. “That’s what we do though, isn’t it. We pick and choose what we believe, what we’ll allow ourselves to believe, and we throw the rest away. You may not be able to believe me now, but you want to—I can see that—and one day you’ll understand how much I loved my wife. You’ll understand how much love it took to do that to her.”

  Datalia stared at him blankly.

  “All through the ages people have talked about what’s happened, about what’s happening even now,” Seth said. “Every culture, every civilization has had them— demons and monsters and ghosts and gods, aliens and serpents—every one without exception. And I know what you’re thinking. It’s because every culture and every civilization we’re discussing involves Man, and wherever there’s Man there’s imagination and dreams and nightmares, there are those with mental illness, those who are delusional and those who con and outright lie. But what if it’s because they’re a part of us, these things we see and hear and dream about? What if they’re a part of who we are, right down to our very souls, and one can’t exist without the other? What if it’s a constant struggle in dominance between the two? What are the odds that the people who see and talk about these things are all liars, frauds and crazies? Isn’t that just as illogical as believing they’re all telling the truth? What if even some of them were telling the truth, Detective Datalia? What if I am? What then? Do you still just pick and choose what to believe then?”

  Again, Datalia offered no response.

  “This is an interesting room,” Seth said, eyes slowly following the ceiling and walls. “The way there’s nothing in here but these chairs and this table, nothing on the walls or the floor, nothing to distract us or to focus on except each other and the things we say. It’s a place where the truth almost has to come out, isn’t it? It has nowhere to hide.”

  “I think we’re through for now.” Datalia pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “Your attorney should be here any minute.”

  “It’s also a good place to think,” Seth said, undeterred. “And when I started to think about things, I thought about what my brother had told me.”

  The detective hesitated, looked down at him.

  “And it made me realize something very important. If they’re really asleep inside me, waiting for me to awaken them and set them free, then they really are with me. They’re with me, and I’m with them.” Seth’s eyes slowly traced the far wall and the tabletop before finally settling on the detective’s face. “And if I’m with them, then just like Raymond said, time isn’t the same.”

  “OK, Mr. Roman.” Datalia gathered the file from the table. “You can discuss this with—”

  “It occurred to me that what made them so effective was their ability to use our own weaknesses and natures against us,” he continued. “So why couldn’t we do the same thing? With faith and love—selflessness—we can find a way, because it’s all in our minds, Detective Datalia. Our minds. And anything is possible there. Anything is possible, because time isn’t the same when we’re with them.”

  Datalia sighed through his obvious discomfort. “This is fascinating, but I—”

  �
��Detective, could you do one thing for me?”

  “Depends what it is.”

  “Petey, my dog, he’ll be safe?”

  “We had someone take him to your in-laws. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Seth remembered Petey’s boundless and unconditional love, and all the things he’d learned from him. How he’d miss that dog. “He’s too old to be in some place with people he doesn’t know. He needs to be with family, where he feels safe and loved. Peggy’s parents adore Petey and he loves them. He’ll be happy there.”

  The detective acknowledged him with a quick nod then turned to leave.

  “You were wondering why I’d only talk to you.”

  Datalia hesitated.

  “It’s because you’re a good and decent man,” Seth said. “You don’t always think you are, but you are. I can tell. Trust me.”

  “Thank you,” Datalia said awkwardly, and again headed for the door.

  “It’s important for us to know who we are, and you should know that about yourself,” Seth told him quickly. “I never did. I never knew. But now I know. I know who I am.”

  Datalia came to a halt near the door and slowly looked back. “And who are you, Mr. Roman?”

  Seth’s eyes filled with tears—tears of joy—and he managed a trembling smile.