Tenebris

by Tim Curran

  TENEBRIS

  Tim Curran

  First Edition

  Tenebris © 2015 by Tim Curran

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  Copy Editor: Steven Souza

  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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  Other Books by Author

  Blackout

  Blood, Bones and Bullets

  Deadlock

  Doll Face

  Long Black Coffin

  Nightcrawlers

  Sow

  Worm

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

  http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Tim-Curran/

  1

  “My God, it almost hit us!”

  Dinah shrugged. “I didn’t see a damn thing.”

  “Then you weren’t looking,” Rita told her. “Besides, you’re drunk.”

  “I prefer to think that I’m sobrietally-challenged.”

  “Sobrietally?” Jim started laughing. “Now that’s a hell of a word for an English teacher to be using. Is it even a word?”

  “I don’t know, but if it is I’m it.”

  Rita sighed. “Why don’t you two quit fooling around. I’m serious. I saw something.”

  “I’m serious, I saw something. Wasn’t that a lyric by the Yardbirds?” Dinah asked.

  “I wouldn’t know, I’m not as old as you,” Jim said.

  “Ouch.”

  Rita was getting miffed. “Listen, I saw something weird and you two are ignoring the fact.”

  It was Dinah’s turn to sigh.

  Jim kept his eye on the road. In the headlights, Route 50 was a blacksnake winding its way through harsh desert wastes, the centerline going on to infinity. There was nothing out there but barren hillsides and scrub, rocks and stands of cholla cactus. By moonlight, it was an alien world, forbidding and lonesome. They hadn’t even seen another car in twenty minutes. In fact, they hadn’t even seen so much as a ma-and-pa gas station or even a weathered, old tumbledown farmhouse. Desolation, sheer desolation. They didn’t call Route 50 “The Loneliest Road in America” for no reason. It would have been a hell of a place to break down, probably wouldn’t even get reception on a cell.

  “Okay, okay,” Dinah said. “Elucidate upon this anomaly.”

  Rita rolled her eyes. “It was a black shape. It swooped down on us. It barely missed us. I thought it was going to come right through the windshield.”

  Jim raised an eyebrow at that. He hadn’t seen anything, but then he’d been staring into the rearview at the time, studying the moon-washed shape of a diminishing Joshua tree that had been so close to the road it looked like it was trying to cross it. He’d only glanced at it for a moment or two, but apparently long enough to miss the show.

  “A bird or something,” he finally said. “A bat. What of it?”

  Dinah nodded. “An avian miscreant, methinks.”

  “I’ve never seen a bird or a bat with a wingspan wider than a car,” Rita said.

  “Now it’s a cryptid: an unknown animal. Gist for the paranormal mill. Where’s Monsterquest when you need them?”

  Rita glared at her. “Shut up, Dinah. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not laughing.” She looked over at Jim. In the green glow of the dash lights, her face looked oddly cadaverous. “It was big, Jim. Real big. I’m not too proud to admit that it scared the hell out of me.”

  That was the part that bothered him, because he could sense the unease just under her words. What she had seen really scared her and Rita did not scare easily. This was a woman who, before her current tenure as principal of Eureka County High, had spent fifteen years banging heads at inner city schools in Chicago. She’d had guns and razors pulled on her. She’d been threatened, physically attacked, and even stabbed once. But she never backed down and never gave in. By the time she came to Nevada, she was legendary in Chicago, the terror of the classroom and the school board, both of whom discovered that this was one tough lady who gave no quarter.

  And now, here she was, out on the dirty backside of Nevada and she was scared. Of some flying thing.

  “There’s some big buzzards out here,” he said to her. “That’s probably what you saw.”

  “At night?”

  “Why not?”

  It seemed reasonable. What else could it have been? A bigass vulture? A condor? A giant bat? All of which made about the same degree of sense: none. But the fact that she was disturbed, of course, disturbed him. He found himself staring intently at the road now, his peripheral vision—and his imagination—trying to ferret out winged shapes in the night. Lights ahead. A semi passed them and he felt instantly relieved. It was a wonder the relief a fellow traveler on the road could bring you. The paranoia had began to seep into him, and their situation reminded him too much of old TV shows where the occupants of cars drove on endlessly, never realizing they were in limbo and that the road goes on forever.

  Don’t let her spook you. She’s probably messing with your head.

  But Jim knew that wasn’t true. Rita was rock solid. She didn’t play games and she certainly wasn’t a helpless, dramatic female from a B-movie. She was not one to press the panic button until there was most certainly something to panic about.

  Dinah, still pretty deep in her cups from the teacher’s convention in Fallon, had forgotten about Rita’s concern and was going on about someone she’d bumped into at the buffet, a fellow she referred to as “Mossy” Linderman. Mossy had taught Latin at Shepley Prep in Elko for something like twenty-five years. When it came out he was something of a predatory pedophile with an astounding (and disgusting) collection of antique child porn, he was removed from his seat at Shepley. It had been a very quiet affair. “They handed him his retirement and told him to take it unless he wanted the police to get involved,” Dinah explained. “They wanted to avoid the oh-so-seamy, dirty scandal that would ensue. The school would have closed. Make no mistake of that. Can you imagine the parents? The lawsuits? The smearing in the press? Oh no, it couldn’t be allowed. Hit the road, Mossy, and hit it now. I can’t believe he turned up. Well, I suppose if you kick over enough rocks something’ll crawl out sooner or later.”

  Jim was ignoring her and so was Rita.

  She blathered on and on but he had a definite case of the heebie-jeebies he could not seem to shake and Rita was peering out the windshield with squinted eyes, looking for God only knew what.

  Jim studied the moonlit pavement, his hands gripping the wheel of the SUV that much tighter. There was something about the desert at night. The road cutting through it could kind of mesmerize you as it moved to the left then the right, back and forth, back and forth, like a golden watch swinging from a hypnotist’s fingers. He’d felt it more than once. The need to close your eyes could be almost irresistible.

  But tonight he didn’t want to close his eyes.

  Hell, he could barely get them to blink. They felt painted on.

  He just wanted to see some lights, some civilization, even a greasy roadside diner or a state boy manning a speed trap. Any
thing. The bleak countryside was getting under his skin. The wind had picked up now and it was making a low moaning sound as it blew through dry washes and skirted distant mesas. Eucalyptus trees trembled and tumbleweeds did not roll, they flew, bouncing over the roof of the SUV with unpleasant scratching sounds. Blown sand powdered the doors.

  “How far?” Rita asked, not breaking the tension but adding to it with anxiety just beneath her words.

  “Twenty minutes, tops,” he told her.

  The tension held. It amplified, becoming so thick it was like static electricity. He could feel it crawling over his bare arms and running up his spine. He kept asking himself what it was all about, why the sudden case of the nerves, but he honestly did not know. Whether it was Rita’s weird sighting or something much bigger, it was beyond him. He only knew that he had a very bad feeling that no amount of rational thinking could dispel.

  “Am I talking too much?” Dinah asked. “You two are oddly quiet.”

  “I’m tired,” Rita said.

  Like hell you are, Jim thought. You look like you just drank two pots of black coffee. You’re so wired I can hear your nerve endings humming.

  He knew that for a fact because his were doing the same. And they were doing it because whatever was building around them was reaching fever pitch now.

  Something was about to happen.

  2

  “It’s coming again,” Rita said, a white seam of terror just beneath her words, “and I can feel it.”

  “What’s coming?” Dinah asked.

  Oh, to be blessedly fucked-up, Jim thought, because the crazy thing was, he could feel it, too. It was like being in a dark room and knowing, knowing someone was in there with you sharing the space. You could feel them but you could never really be sure where they were until they reached out and touched you.

  He tried to keep his eyes on the road because that was the important thing now. The last thing he wanted to do was lose control and stack them up out here in this godforsaken nothingness. He had to pay attention and captain the ship.

  The highway was a ribbon of hot black tar, still cooling from the day’s heat. The wind was pushing clouds of dust around, tossing loose sand and debris about, throwing tumbleweeds straight up into the air.

  He looked at the speedometer. Christ, he was pegging seventy-five.

  He backed off incrementally on the accelerator.

  Rita began to make a low, unnerving moaning sound deep in her throat and Dinah asked just what the fuck she thought she was doing. She didn’t answer; she moaned louder. Jim felt himself going white with terror because there was a tonal quality to it that reminded him of an Indian death-song.

  Then something hit the SUV.

  It scraped along the roof like a tree branch…a very big tree branch. Or a claw, he found himself thinking. Whatever in the hell it was, it was enough to make him cry out and fumble the wheel in his hands momentarily.

  “Take it easy,” Dinah told him. “It was just a tumbleweed.”

  But it was no goddamn tumbleweed and Dinah was the only one who seemed oblivious of the fact. Rita had stopped moaning now. Her lips were zipped tight like they had been stitched together. She wasn’t making a sound. She was barely breathing.

  Jim kept his hands tight on the wheel, his skin creeping.

  He was tensing inside because he knew something was about to happen. In his figurative dark room, that unknown other was reaching out for him. He could feel their fingers pressing in, bare inches from the nape of his neck. And it was at that moment that something entirely inexplicable happened: he smelled a hot, revolting discharge of decay. It was gassy, green, and moist. A stink of maggoty corruption. It filled the SUV, making him gag, making a cold grease slide up the back of his throat.

  Then it was gone.

  That fast.

  He tried to tell himself that it was coming from something outside, but he wasn’t buying it. Even if they had passed some especially fragrant roadkill, the others would have smelled it, too, but they gave no indication that they had.

  Something scraped against the roof again.

  Rita made a low yelping sort of noise, sounding like a stepped-upon poodle and Dinah swore under her breath. Jim refused to comment. He was going to drive and keep driving. Nothing more. Terror made the inside of his mouth feel like it was coated with hot oil.

  “WATCH IT!” Rita cried out.

  Then whatever was out there hit them. It thudded into the back of the SUV and made it rock on its springs. Jim clutched the wheel tightly. If they crashed and burned right now, it would take hours for the CSI people to pry his fingers free.

  “Hell was that?” Dinah asked, looking nearly stone sober.

  “Something hit us,” Jim said, elucidating the obvious.

  Then it hit them again.

  This time it was harder, enough to make him nearly lose control of the wheel. At that speed, he knew, it wouldn’t take too much to send them into a deadly, looping spin.

  “What the hell is this?” Dinah wanted to know. “Who the hell is behind us?”

  Jim could have told her that no one was behind them. He could see the road quite clearly in the moonlight and there was no car within visual distance. He didn’t bother mentioning the fact. Dinah got on her cell and called 911. The call was breaking up but she kept at it, telling the operator what was going on: that some maniac was trying to force them off the road.

  “They’ll never get here in time,” Rita said, sounding absolutely defeated.

  Jim slowed. If they were going to be knocked off the road, then he wasn’t going to add to the inertia. Besides, he had a very ugly feeling that there was no way in hell they were going to outrun what was coming for them.

  “Maybe we should just stop,” Dinah suggested.

  “No!” Rita said. “Don’t do that!”

  “And why not?”

  And Jim almost said, because the…the maniac will get us then, don’t you see that? But that was just his mind wanting badly to buy into the whole scenario, to muffle its mounting terror and plug up all the holes in his leaky sense of reality.

  It hit them again.

  It thudded into the rear quarter panel, then slapped against the driver’s side window, making Rita nearly leap. Then on the roof…that sound again like claws being dragged over its length.

  It’s toying with us, he thought. Whatever in the fuck it is, it’s toying with us.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see some black diabolical form circling the SUV as it sped down the highway. It was like an owl circling its kill in a field or buzzards circling a dead man. He heard a sound like a sheet flapping on a clothesline, a very big sheet.

  Then it came again, only this time he saw it…just for a split second…a monstrous shape that filled the headlights and filled the windshield…then impact. The windshield was hit and hit hard. It went white with hundreds of diverging cracks and fell right onto their laps.

  Rita screamed and Dinah did, too, and Jim lost control of the SUV. It squealed off the highway and into the gravel, spinning around in a nearly complete circle before finding a ditch and flipping end over end. The passengers were thrown this way and that, their seat belts holding them in place regardless of the vehicle’s shattering, crunching gymnastics. It came to rest on its wheels, broken and battered, the engine hissing out hot fluids.

  Jim came to seconds later.

  He was alive. His body hurt badly, but most of it was from the seat belt cutting into him. It took him precious minutes to pop the catch on the harness and pull himself free. Dinah was crushed. She was slumped forward at an unnatural angle, her head twisted around on her neck so that she was staring right at him. Her mouth was wide, blood and what must have been her insides forced up her throat, reminding him morbidly of the time his brother had accidentally stepped on a toad.

  Jim crawled out through the opening where the windshield had been.

  He was cut and bleeding, his head aching, his left leg and right wrist paining him. He felt
like he had been given a real good beating by some particularly large and vicious men. He could hear Rita moaning as he crawled over the crumbled hood and dropped to the desert floor.

  “Coming…” he breathed. “I’m coming…I’ll get you out.”

  As he crawled around the side of the SUV, smelling raw gasoline and knowing that wasn’t a good thing at all, he heard that sound again…that flapping sound that reminded him of a tarp being shaken free of dust.

  He saw something like hooked, shiny claws coming at his face.

  He smelled a ripe, violent odor that he acquainted with the drainage from a slaughterhouse floor…and then he was taken. He was lifted bodily into the air ten or twelve feet and then he was thrown. He hit the dirt twenty feet away, rolling through the cool sand.

  After that, it was hard to know what was real and what was dream combined with shock and trauma.

  He saw something oily black and midnight-plumed, an immense and amorphous thing that seemed to be as much shifting shadow as substance. It tore the driver’s side door off, peeling it free like the roll-back lid on a can of Spam. There was a groaning, buckling sound of metal fatigue and then the door was tossed aside.

  Rita screamed.

  When Jim opened his eyes again, his mouth was full of sand and he was gasping. He had no idea how long he had been out. He tried to stand and went right down again. He blinked and blinked again. Then he started crawling. The SUV was burning, clouds of black smoke rolling into the night. He got within maybe twenty feet of it before the heat pushed him back.

  He saw Dinah.

  She was skewered by a shaft of metal that rose from the smoldering wreckage. She was impaled by it, split right open like someone had taken a scythe to her. Her insides were hanging out. They were on fire.