Night People

by J L Aarne

  I stopped talking as I realized what it meant if what he told me was true: the entire world could be in danger. It seemed incredible and unbelievable that such a thing could be true, but I could see by his solemn, worried face that he believed it to be so and Mr. Warwick, for all that he is one of us and a vanguard who has undoubtedly seen stranger and more miraculous things than I, is not a fanciful man nor prone to exaggeration.

  “We have to tell them,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “The people are already afraid. Right now, they do not know what to be afraid of.”

  “So, we will tell them,” I said. I suppose it was naïve of me to think it was that simple.

  “That you are having visions and dreams of a serpent in the earth asking you to set it free?” he asked, incredulous. “If they believe you, what do you think they would do to you so that they could feel safe again?”

  I realized what he was saying and stared at him in horror. Many of our kind over the centuries have been labeled witches, tortured and killed, and I had no trouble at all picturing it happening to me. If history had taught us anything, it was that frightened people could be more dangerous than any monsters.

  “We have to do something,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. Give me some time,” he said. “A few days is all. I think I know what to do.”

  I write this conversation word for word as I recall it because I cannot stop thinking about it. It runs over and over through my mind as though we are still there beside the fire discussing it and though the conversation never changes, I cannot seem to stop it. I am not convinced that what we have decided to do, to remain silent, is the right thing, but Mr. Warwick is correct when he suggests I do not want to end up burned at the stake for witchcraft.

  I thanked Mr. Warwick for his time and honesty with me before I left, feeling like I had misjudged him somewhat. Perhaps what I had perceived as dislike from him before had merely been bluster. I think, if the world does not end, we might become friends.

  September 7, 1610

  I have spoken with a few of the men who accompanied Mr. Warwick hunting and they all say the same thing: Mr. Warwick became sick for a brief time and behaved in a very odd way for several days before he began to recover and seem like himself again. According to them, he must have had a fever because he behaved as though he could not speak, except to repeat whatever was said to him. I admit I have never heard of such a thing, but a fever of the brain does cause symptoms that resemble madness.

  The men also say that Mr. Warwick has been different since his illness. He is not the same man in many ways; he is kinder, more patient, less hot-tempered, less violent than before, they tell me. The fever cooked his brain, they think, at least enough to alter his personality to some extent. It seems to be something they all agree is to the good because he is much more pleasant company.

  Praise God, he recovered from whatever illness struck him or I would have no one to confide in now and no hope of understanding what is happening here.

  September 13, 1610

  My beloved Verity is dead. They took her from me. This is what it is like to stand at the end of the world. Though the world continues turning all around me, she is gone and nothing else matters.

  Chapter 16

  Wyatt woke with a jerk and sat up, listening for a repeat of the sound that had yanked him so abruptly out of the first real, dreamless sleep he’d managed to get all week. It wasn’t much surprise that it was once again John B. Bledsoe who had knocked him out cold, either. The man had not been a writer and Wyatt had never enjoyed journals or memoirs. Still, it seemed to work wonders as a cure for Wyatt’s insomnia, and he was reluctant to give up on sleep completely, so he started to lie back down.

  One of his cats let out a shriek that sent his heart leaping right up into the back of his throat. Suddenly completely awake, Wyatt got quickly out of bed and headed to the kitchen where the sound had come from, calling their names.

  He heard movement, but it was dark in the apartment, so he couldn’t see well. Usually Benson and Hedges both meowed in reply to their names, but there were no answering meows. Wyatt felt along the wall for the light switch.

  When the light in the kitchen came on, he stood frozen in shock. The tile floor was covered in blood. Blood was splattered on the bottom cabinets and in a few places as high as the counter. The white of the tiles made the red liquid scream under the bright, unforgiving light. For several seconds, Wyatt couldn’t pull his eyes away from it, but then he did, and it all got so much worse.

  Benson and Hedges lay on the floor just inside the kitchen and their little grey and black tabby bodies were dark and slimy with their own blood. He couldn’t see anywhere that they had been cut or stabbed or shot and it seemed impossible that any of those things could have happened to them. They never went outside, and he had seen them right before he went to lay down and read. They had been playfighting up and down the hallway and he’d shouted at them because they had been getting a little too aggressive. Could they have done this to themselves? That was more ridiculous and unlikely than the idea that someone had shot them.

  Wyatt started to kneel beside Hedges’s body, but something moved inside of her, her belly swelled and deflated before his eyes like a balloon with air pushed back out of it. He shot back to his feet and took a step backward. It happened again, and Wyatt felt a wave of nausea wash over him at the sight. It was like watching the cat be blown up, as if some invisible person had a tube shoved in her mouth and was trying to pump her up like an air mattress

  Just as he thought this, something shiny and black emerged from her open mouth. Wyatt backed up a few more steps as he watched it press between her teeth, then slide out onto the floor, revealing itself to be the head of a slick, black snake. The snake looked back at him and Wyatt felt himself being observed, coldly, but without much interest. It lifted its head from the floor and its eyes fixed on him and Wyatt knew that it was intelligent, he sensed it in the way it followed him with its eyes as he backed away.

  Which meant it was no ordinary snake.

  He found that he was not surprised. Any snake that came into his house and murdered his cats while he lay sleeping would not be an ordinary one. Nor would it do such a thing for no reason the way a normal animal would. There was a purpose to this creature’s actions.

  “What do you want?” Wyatt asked. His voice came more softly than he had intended, but his throat was dry, his heart was pounding, and he was afraid.

  “Set me free,” the snake said. It was an odd, whispery hissing voice, but Wyatt understood it. “Lunatic. Set me free.”

  Wyatt stopped backing up and looked around for a way to get around the snake without putting himself in danger of being bitten. It wasn’t a large snake, but it had killed both of his cats and they had barely made any noise, so he had to assume that it was deadly and very quick.

  “Set me free,” it hissed again.

  It slithered the rest of the way out of Hedges’s body and her bloated belly deflated at the absence. Wyatt watched the tip of the snake’s tail slide out of her mouth and thought he might vomit. He swallowed it down and looked for a way past it out of the kitchen.

  “Even if I could do that, how would I do it?” he asked.

  The black snake was oily beneath the kitchen light, coated in cat’s blood. It stared at him with intense yellow eyes and reared up off the floor, swaying slightly as though to music.

  “You are of the blood. The blood is the key,” it hissed.

  “Okay,” Wyatt said.

  He thought for a moment of trying to crawl or jump over the counter through the pass-through. Which was something he might have accomplished without falling backwards on his ass into a pool of cooling blood if he had been an action hero, but since he wasn’t, he decided that was precisely what would happen if he tried it and changed his mind.

  The snake drew closer to him and Wyatt moved to the right, intending to work his way in a circle around it. “Okay, fine, but I don’t kno
w what that means,” he said.

  The snake hissed at him wordlessly and Wyatt got the impression it was becoming irritated. “Set me free,” it insisted. “You are of the blood. You are the key.”

  That sounded very threatening and sinister.

  “I’m really not,” Wyatt said.

  The snake had followed him far enough into the kitchen that Wyatt managed to maneuver around it. He saw an opening and took it, running for the doorway. He had to jump over Benson and Hedges and his momentum came close to propelling him into the back of the sofa, but he caught himself and dodged around it.

  The light from the kitchen made it possible to see shadows. His own shadow was on the wall in front of him, but as he turned toward the coffee table, another shadow took its place. The snake’s shadow was twenty times the size of the snake itself, or of any snake small enough to slither out of a cat’s mouth. It rose up behind him and Wyatt’s shadow was swallowed by it as it opened a great hood like a cobra.

  He snatched up the sword from the table and whirled around to face the creature, but the snake was not there. It was gone and the only thing in front of him was the carnage it had left behind in his kitchen. He was struck again by the brutality of it. How could such small animals have so much blood inside them?

  “You are the key,” the snake hissed in Wyatt’s ear.

  He whipped around and discovered the shadow had not moved. It was still there, though there was no snake in the light to cast it.

  “What the fuck?” he said under his breath.

  The great hooded shadow snake opened its eyes and Wyatt nearly screamed. The shadow was the snake.

  “Set me free,” the snake insisted.

  Wyatt knew absolutely nothing about swords except which end to hold onto and which end to stab and cut with, but he swung it at the shadow snake. He was as surprised as the snake was when the blade cut it. The snake’s mouth opened in agony and it hissed in rage as it reared back to strike. Wyatt saw it coming and had only a second to act, so he ran. He had hurt it, but it wasn’t a normal snake, or even a snake at all, he was beginning to suspect, so he couldn’t count on it being hurt enough for it to leave him alone. It had come into his home, killed his pets and come after him demanding his blood. He had refused, so it was going to try to take it.

  The bedroom door was half closed, and he knocked it all the way open with his body when he ran through it. He locked the door and laughed to himself; it was one of those locks with a twist button. It was barely a lock. But then, snakes didn’t have fingers, so maybe it was all the lock he would need.

  “Yeah, right,” he muttered.

  “What is happening, Wyatt?” Thorn asked.

  There was a little light coming through the venetian blinds from outside. Enough light that Wyatt noticed the fingers of one of Thorn’s hands sticking out from beneath the bed and carefully did not step on them.

  “I don’t know. Some kind of snake thing killed the cats in the kitchen and now it’s after me,” Wyatt said.

  Thorn didn’t say anything else, but he pulled his hand back under the bed.

  Wyatt was tempted to open the door and check to see if the snake had left, but he decided not to. It seemed like the kind of stupid thing someone would do in a horror movie right before they died.

  “You will set me free,” the snake said from the other side of the door.

  “You know what? No, I won’t,” Wyatt said. The shadow snake was not the Midgard Serpent, but its words echoed the serpent’s words almost exactly, so he knew that in some unfathomable way he was speaking to the serpent when he was speaking to the snake. “I am going to make sure you never get out of that cold, dark hole where you are. I don’t know how, but I’m ‘of the blood’ right? So, there’s got to be a way. I’m going to figure it out and then you can rot down there for all I care.”

  There was a loud bang and the door shook in its frame. Wyatt took a step back, felt his thighs bump up against the side of the mattress and stopped. The bang came again. Again. Then two sharp white points appeared in the door. Another bang and there were grooves cut into the door and he could see that they were made by fangs. The snake’s fangs.

  It was coming through the door.

  The snake’s bright yellow eye appeared in one of the holes. It peered in at Wyatt and hissed. “The blood is the key,” it said. “I require your blood. I do not require you to be alive.”

  “Oh yeah?” Wyatt said, sounding much braver than he felt. “Why don’t you come in here and get it then?”

  “I believe that is what it is trying to do,” Thorn said. “Wyatt, come over here and stand on the other side of the bed.”

  “What, you think a bed is going to stop a thing like that?” Wyatt asked, but he moved to do as Thorn said.

  The snake seemed to be done talking and began to attack the door until the banging sounded like a hammer on the wood. Wyatt watched, crouched beside the bed, as the door slowly, steadily broke inward in pieces. The snake struck the door and the wood shattered and crumbled. It did it over and over until there was a hole large enough for the snake slide through.

  When it entered the room, it was still a shadow creature and it flowed up the wall like ink into water.

  “Do you know how to use that sword?” Thorn asked Wyatt.

  “No, of course I don’t,” Wyatt whispered back to the darkness beneath his bed. “Why would I know how to use a sword?”

  “It would be a useful skill to have right about now,” Thorn said. “No matter. When I tell you, slash at it. Understand?”

  Wyatt watched the shadow snake creep over the wall between the windows at the foot of the bed and adjusted his grip on the hilt of the sword. “Yeah, I think so.”

  He waited, and the snake moved across the wall. Occasionally, Wyatt caught a glimpse of its flicking tongue as it circled him.

  It moved to the floor and when it did, Thorn’s hands shot out from beneath the foot of the bed and he said, “Now!”

  He held onto the shadow snake as it hissed and writhed and twisted. Wyatt stood up from his hiding place beside the bed and swung the sword just as the snake opened its mouth to strike. It was already moving to bite Thorn when Wyatt cut off its head. The head bounced on the carpet and Wyatt lost his grip on the sword, dropped it and sank to his knees, shaking.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “Is it dead?” Thorn asked. “I would like to let it go. The feel of it is very unpleasant.”

  Wyatt stared at the head on the floor. It had looked so much bigger before he cut it off. About the size of a small dog. Dead, it appeared to be no larger than the head of any average snake. The body was no more than three or four feet long and it was curled on the carpet in the slats of light from the windows, not impressive at all, but merely sad and small like the body of a garter snake. Wyatt could almost believe he had imagined everything else. He knew better. The snake had been a monster. It was possible that it had only been a monster because it was possessed by a monster, but what he was looking at (the small, withered corpse of a common snake) that was the illusion.

  He had to keep reminding himself of such things so he wouldn’t go running back to Dr. Graham. It would have been so much easier if he could, he thought while looking at the snake on the floor, Thorn’s hand still clutching its tail.

  “Wyatt,” Thorn said.

  “What? Oh, yeah, it’s dead,” he said. “I… I don’t know how I did that, but I killed it.”

  “Luck?” Thorn suggested. He took his hands back. “I’m sorry about the cats.”

  “I… I forgot about them,” Wyatt said.

  He felt bad about that, too, because he had loved them. They had been sweet and playful, and they had been his only companions for a lot of years. He had avenged them, but their mutilated bodies were still laying on his kitchen floor.

  “What happened to the snake?” Wyatt asked.

  “It went back to being a snake, at least that’s what it looks like,” Thorn said.

>   “Yeah, but… but it wasn’t just a snake, was it?” Wyatt said. “I wasn’t dreaming it. I was asleep and then I heard…”

  “You weren’t dreaming. Unless I was dreaming the same dream,” Thorn said. “I think it was a familiar.”

  “A familiar? Like witches and shit like that?” Wyatt asked. He was starting to shake again and all he could think about was the snake on his bedroom floor because it kept him from thinking about the two dead cats in his kitchen. “Like a witch’s familiar?”

  “Not this time. The same idea, but this was not a witch’s messenger, was it?” Thorn said.

  “No,” Wyatt said.

  He drew his knees up, put his arms around them and hugged them tightly. He wished he had someone, someone other than the monster under his bed, to share such horrible things with, but there was no one. He had Thorn and for a little while he had thought he had (or might have) Silas, but he didn’t have Silas. Even if he went looking and found Silas, he wouldn’t ever have Silas. Silas could teach him the sword, he could teach him to shoot a gun, he could tell him what he knew about the night creatures and other night people, he could tell him what he needed to know to survive. Wyatt could learn from him, but Silas wasn’t going to hold his hand or comfort him, not ever. He had made that clear.

  All Wyatt had was Wyatt, and if he hadn’t known that before, he knew it now. He didn’t have Kat anymore, not if he wanted to keep her and their mother safe and stop them from looking at him like he was insane and might explode at any second. He didn’t have Dr. Graham, not unless he wanted to go back on his medication again. He didn’t even have Benson and Hedges now. He had Aunt Tallie, but only a little, and she wasn’t much of a comforting, hand-holding type.

  Wyatt felt something against his leg and looked down to see Thorn holding out his hand. In the dim light, his fingers looked grey, his nails black. Wyatt smiled and took it, felt Thorn’s fingers lace with his and tighten and it didn’t matter that this was all he had. He had this; that was what mattered.