Night People

by J L Aarne

  Then he saw it and he wished fervently that he had not looked. Perched there above his head on the thickest branch of the tree was a creature unlike anything he had ever seen. It looked at first glance like an eagle, but even concealed in the shadows, Wyatt could see that it was shaped all wrong for an eagle. There were eagle parts. Wings and feathers, razor sharp talons and part of a hooked beak. The rest of it was human, at least in appearance. A woman’s torso, hips and pendulous breasts, coated all over with small, soft feathers. Her face would have been beautiful except that where her nose and mouth should have been, there was a wide, curved beak. She had a bottom lip, but it wasn’t shaped right and after staring in shock and fascination for a little longer than was safe or wise, Wyatt noticed that her bottom lip was partly beak, too. There was a sharp edge framing it and her tongue was long and pointed like a bird of prey’s.

  Her eyes sparked with human intelligence, but they were not human, and they glowed out of the darkness lantern bright and calculating, fixed on Wyatt like he was the tiniest, tastiest morsel of a mouse.

  Wyatt fell back against his car screaming. The door was open, and he was right there, all he had to do was dive inside it, but his muscles were all turned to liquid and would not obey him. He fell awkwardly through the door into the driver’s seat, screaming his head off.

  The bird woman opened her own mouth wide and screamed in chorus with him. Her voice was high and shrill, piercing as an ice pick. Wyatt slapped his hands over his ears to block it out.

  The bird woman launched herself at him, claws like knives reaching for him and he was paralyzed with terror. It was finally happening. The darkness was going to kill him. Of all the things he had seen in the dark, this monstrous eagle woman was going to be the death of him.

  He threw up his arms to protect his face and the light beams from his flashlights crossed and sliced through the night. The bird woman shrieked and flapped her massive wings, veered away from him, but so narrowly that Wyatt heard her body thump against the side of his car before she disappeared over the roof.

  Silas came crashing out of the trees on the other side of the road, sword clutched in both hands exactly the way Wyatt had seen men hold swords in movies. He looked around, saw Wyatt peering at him over the steering wheel of his car and his gaze slid away from him dismissively. That look said that Silas may have come running in response to Wyatt’s manly shrieks of mortal terror, but he was only interested in the bird woman.

  “Where is she?” Silas asked.

  Wyatt shrugged, but Silas wasn’t looking at him, he was staring off into the dark trees. “She went over my car and then she just… disappeared. What the hell is that thing?”

  “Harpy,” Silas said. He paced, holding his sword at the ready. “Woman with a beak like a knife, claws that can slice through you like you’re made of butter, wingspan like a hang glider?”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “Harpy,” Silas confirmed.

  The moonlight gleamed off Silas’s sword and Wyatt saw intricate swirls of leaves and flowers graven into the blade and wondered if it was real or some sort of reproduction Lord of the Rings kind of sword. He didn’t quite dare ask.

  “I think I must be crazy,” Wyatt said. He pulled the door of his car closed, but he rolled the window down so he could still speak to Silas. “I’m losing my mind, but what I don’t understand is how you are seeing what I am seeing. How are you doing that? No one sees them. Not ever. I’m the only one.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Silas said. He walked around Wyatt’s car, looking for the harpy, but not finding her. “Goddamn it.”

  “We should call someone. Unless you have a car. Do you have a car?” Wyatt asked.

  “Yeah,” Silas said, but that was all.

  “Then why aren’t we in it getting the hell out of here before that thing comes back and rips our faces off and eats our guts?” Wyatt asked. “Because I think it wants to.”

  “Oh, she probably does,” Silas said.

  He started back across the road and Wyatt sat up straight and called to him. “Wait! You can’t just leave me here!”

  “Then get out of the car and come on!” Silas called back.

  Wyatt sat back down and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. That’s a horrible idea,” he said.

  Silas once again disappeared into the trees and Wyatt was left alone, listening for the sounds of his death screams. Everything was utterly silent, like the world outside his car was holding its breath.

  Then the harpy screamed, and Wyatt winced and pressed his hands over his ears again. It wasn’t as loud or as painful as it had been when the bird creature was practically on top of him, but the sound still cut through the night like razor wire. It turned his bowels to ice water and jelly. It shrieked and shrieked, and Wyatt could just imagine Silas doing battle with it. In his long coat, his sword like something out of a fanboy magazine for Tolkien enthusiasts, blood on his face, and it was a pretty exciting mental image, but also an alarming one. If the harpy killed Silas, it would kill Wyatt next, he had no doubt about that. He had seen it and it knew that he had seen it.

  The bird woman screamed, and Wyatt thought his eardrums were going to rupture if it didn’t stop soon. Then it did stop, cut off mid-shriek, and that was nearly as bad.

  Wyatt waited impatiently for Silas to emerge from the trees again. To emerge victorious like a noir hero from a graphic novel, covered in blood, sword red with it, the head of the harpy hanging by her feathery hair from one hand. He gripped the steering wheel and stared at the place where he had seen Silas disappear and waited for something like that to happen. And waited. And waited some more.

  A car coming toward him flicked its lights and swerved around him. The driver had his window down and shouted back to him, “Get the fuck out of the road, retard!”

  This is taking way too long, Wyatt thought. What if something happened to him? He frowned and considered that. Do I care?

  The answer was, surprisingly, yes. He didn’t know the man, not even a little, but he cared if he had just been brutally ripped to pieces by a giant bird monster with double D tits and a scream that could strip paint. Silas was the first person Wyatt had ever met in his life who could see the things he saw, and the man was not allowed to die before he explained to him exactly how that was possible.

  Then he could die all he wanted, but not before.

  “I’m going to have to go find him, I think,” Wyatt said. The idea filled him with dread, but the longer Silas didn’t come out of the woods the more likely it seemed that he was never going to.

  “I can’t just leave him out there if he’s hurt. That horrible thing could have killed him,” Wyatt whispered.

  There was another voice, a not entirely unreasonable voice, that spoke up in the back of his mind and told him that yes, that was exactly what he could do. Who was Silas? Some guy running around in the woods, trekking through ditches, seeing things in the dark and waving a sword around. He had probably escaped from the mental wing of Saint Joseph’s Hospital and being eaten by wild animals was almost to be expected.

  But if he left Silas out there and Silas was dying, Wyatt could lose the only chance he’d ever had to communicate with someone who could maybe tell him why he saw the things he saw and, if nothing else, make him feel less crazy.

  Unless the harpy killed him first.

  Wyatt sighed and narrowed his eyes to peer in the direction Silas had run. He clenched his fist around the flashlight in his right hand and muttered, “Whatever. This is so stupid,” to himself.

  But you’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?

  He opened the door so fast and hard that he nearly slipped and fell when he jumped out of the car and that would have been awful. There were things that lived in the shadows beneath cars.

  Wielding both flashlights, he dashed across the road into the trees, trying not to think about what was in there hiding in the shadows of the trees, trying not to think about his car broke down in the road or the
face of that wicked bird-woman monster. He swung the flashlights back and forth, searching for Silas or a whole lot of Silas’s blood, slicing a path through whatever horrific creatures had come to gather around him and eat his flesh. He kept hearing sticks and twigs crunch behind him. There were vicious beasts out there and not all of them were as polite as Herschel and Ned.

  An incredibly vivid image of Silas being eaten by the bird woman and a flock of tiny half-bird half-human babies sprang into his mind and he couldn’t shake it. In his vision, Silas was cracked open like a lobster and their sharp beak-mouths were dripping with his blood.

  Wyatt pushed the vision away and carried on through the trees. “Silas?!” he called. “I think that’s your name. I could be wrong. Maybe it’s Cyrus. Cyrus?! Where are you?! That doesn’t sound right. Silas it is then. Silas?!”

  Something cracked behind him and Wyatt jerked around to look for the source of that sound, but there was nothing there. Trees loomed on either side of the trail Wyatt had stomped into the dirt as he walked, the forest was alive with little sounds; crickets and birds, the wind through the branches of a weeping willow. The path was clear though. He didn’t see anything lurking in the dark and he wondered if the bird woman had frightened everything away.

  “Silas?!”

  A rattling cough came from his right and Wyatt let out an undignified sound of fear and whipped around, searching for the source. Tentatively, he started in the direction of the sound.

  “Hello, Silas?!”

  Wyatt stepped over a bare tree root sticking out of the ground then felt something solid against the toe of his boot. He turned a flashlight down on it and screamed when the golden eyes of the bird woman stared back at him. Then he realized that the head was missing its body and let out a relived breath. The harpy’s decapitated head rolled a few feet away. Her mouth was open, her pointed tongue covered in dirt.

  “Oh, my god! Oh, my fucking god, I can’t believe this,” Wyatt babbled. He backed away from the head.

  His heels came up against something and as he was twisting around to see what it was, he lost his balance and fell. Right into the harpy’s open chest cavity. Elbows deep in warm blood, Wyatt screamed, stumbled and fell back into it again. Tears of fear and frustration sprang to his eyes. Frustration and incredulity because this could not be happening.

  “Hey, over here,” said a rasping voice a few feet away.

  Wyatt glanced that direction, but he was too preoccupied with all the disgusting blood, guts and entrails he had found himself wallowing around in. His heart was racing, and he could hear his own breaths coming in soft, rapid pants. He felt like he was going to throw up and really, sincerely did not want to do that and add to the sludge he was currently scrambling to get out of.

  He finally managed to climb out and lurched to his feet. He had guts and blood hanging from his fingers, from his shirt, even a little bit of it had gotten into his hair. It smelled horrible. At some point in the harpy’s battle with Silas, Silas had punctured its bowel and fecal matter had seeped out of the stomach and intestines into the body cavity.

  Which meant that he was not only covered in blood, but also a good portion of watered-down monster shit.

  “Jesus,” Wyatt hissed.

  “Hello? Hey, kid, are you there?”

  Wyatt flicked gunk off his fingers and followed the sound of Silas’s voice until he reached him. Silas looked like he was dead already. He was white as paper, his face and arms were coated in blood and feathers, his shirt was shredded, and he was lying on the ground in a spreading puddle of his own blood.

  He had won the fight, but the harpy had definitely taken her pound of flesh.

  “Holy shit, are you okay?” Wyatt asked, kneeling beside him.

  Silas closed his eyes and they remained closed so long that Wyatt reached out to shake him awake. Then Silas opened them, and they were glazed and out of focus. “No,” he said.

  “Oh, god. Oh, no,” Wyatt said. He set the flashlight he’d been clutching in his right hand down only to snatch it back up again when he thought better of it. “What are we going to do? What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to do. You’re going to bleed to death here in the woods and how am I supposed to explain that? ‘I’m sorry, officer, I know you can’t see it, but there’s this invisible thing laying here on the ground with its head cut off and that’s why my friend here looks like someone stabbed and cut him a whole bunch of times. Really, I promise.’ No, I don’t think so.”

  Silas’s throat worked, and he closed his eyes. “Truck,” he managed.

  “What?”

  “Truck. My truck, you little fucknut.”

  Wyatt tried not to be offended, but he was. Here he was, way the hell and gone outside of his comfort zone, in the woods with a bleeding, cut up guy he had met only once before on, maybe not the worst day of his life but absolutely the worst day of his year hands down, and he was still trying to help the bleeding guy and now the bleeding guy was calling him crazy. That was just so… rude.

  Silas opened his eyes again and they flicked back and forth before they located Wyatt and sharpened. He stared at him with a compelling, fever-bright insistence and Wyatt stared back, drawn to it despite himself. “My truck. It’s over… there,” Silas said. He raised one arm and gestured in the vague direction of the road. “Help me.”

  “I’m trying,” Wyatt said.

  “You are… not,” Silas said. He gritted the last word through his teeth as he tried to push himself up and only made it to his elbows before he had to stop.

  “Wait! Don’t do that, you’re all…” At a loss for what he was, Wyatt trailed off and put a hand on Silas’s shoulder. “Okay, okay, I’ll help you get to your truck. Just… help me do that.”

  “Help you help me,” Silas said. His lips twitched in an attempt at a smile that failed miserably. “Fine. I might pass out, so let’s do this if we’re doing it.”

  “You can’t pass out. You are a lot bigger than me. What am I supposed to do with you if you pass out? I can’t hold the flashlights if you pass out. Actually, I probably won’t be able to do that even if you don’t pass out, so you’re going to have to hold at least one of them.”

  Silas stared at him impatiently. “Are you serious?”

  Wyatt frowned. Silas confused him. He saw the things in the dark, but he was nothing like Wyatt. He had gone a different way, that was what Wyatt had thought at first; it had been natural to assume it, and maybe that was part of it. Except Silas knew the monsters by name, he went into the dark dressed and armed for battle. He might not be fearless, but so far, Wyatt hadn’t seen anything to suggest otherwise. He was like Wyatt, but he was Wyatt’s opposite. He was a warrior with a purpose. Wyatt just tried to survive day to day without ending up in a room with padded walls.

  It was something that was going to take some real thought and consideration, but right now yes, he needed Silas to hold the flashlight.

  “No, I’m not kidding. If I’m helping you, you have to help me,” Wyatt said. “So, you have to hold the flashlight. It’s important.”

  “For Christ’s sake. Give me the damn flashlight,” Silas said.

  Wyatt put a flashlight in his hand and when Silas had gripped it, he put an arm around his waist and started to help him stand. He nearly had Silas on his feet when Silas passed out, became dead weight and dragged Wyatt to the ground with him. Wyatt caught him and prevented him from bashing his head on anything, but there was no way he could lift Silas and carry him all by himself.

  He sat with him and waited for him to wake up.

  After a few minutes, Wyatt noticed Silas’s sword in the leaves and pine needles a few feet away, so he got up to take a closer look. It was quite pretty. The engravings were on the blade, guard and pommel. The entire sword had them. Art nouveau style scrolling leaves and flowers. Wyatt touched it and the steel was cold. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt and tried to pick it up, but it was a whole lot heavier than it looked, so the tip of the blade still t
ouched the ground and the idea of hefting it as Silas had was ridiculous. He would fall over backward if he tried.

  “Are you playing with my sword?” Silas asked from behind him on the ground.

  Wyatt jumped, turned and nearly dropped the sword on his foot. He held onto his flashlight though. “No, I’m… You’re playing with your sword.”

  “Uh huh,” Silas said. He pushed himself up until he was sitting and reached out for him. “Come on, help me up. The truck’s just back there off the road.”

  “What about the… you know, your sword?” Wyatt asked, going to help him.

  Silas put his arm around Wyatt’s shoulders and got his feet under him. Then he looked around and pointed with the flashlight he was holding toward where he’d parked his truck. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll find her own way home.”

  “She… will?” Wyatt asked hesitantly.

  “Yeah.”

  “The sword will?”

  “Yeah.”

  And this guy had called Wyatt crazy. He once again was having a hard time deciding whether Silas was like him, but far more badass, or if he was just a nutcase whose particular breed of insanity happened to mirror Wyatt’s own. There was also an unsettling third option: Silas wasn’t real at all but merely a symptom of Wyatt’s own mental illness. A vivid delusion that was a clear indicator of a rapid downward spiral. Had he had a complete break with reality and somehow failed to notice?

  Even if Silas was a delusion, Wyatt decided that he still couldn’t just leave him lying there in the dark on the side of the road to die, so he helped him to where he had parked his big, ugly black truck. Silas didn’t lose consciousness again, but Wyatt expected it to happen all the way there and tried to keep him away from hard things like rocks he could hit his head on if he fell.

  Silas had to unlock the truck then Wyatt had to help him climb into it. Once he did, Silas passed out again and after a minute of quiet debate about it, Wyatt took his keys.