Worship the Night

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He got back to his feet, next felt for the counter. His heart’s hammering seemed to cause his every movement to misfire. Finally, though, he located the candles and lighter he had set down there a short time earlier. He thumbed the lighter’s grooved wheel, got a flame, and lit the wick of first one fat candle in its jar, and then a second.

  Now holding one of these candles before him – as if its ghostly flame and meager fluttering light were enough to ward off the unknowable immensity of the universe – he stepped a little closer to the door, staring at the towel he had pushed up against its bottom edge.

  He expected to see tendrils curling and coiling into the room around this paltry barrier, a blacker black than the room’s darkness, but as yet there were none.

  Anderson remembered the window he had left open. Would its flimsy metal screen be enough to hold back the blackness, or would it now be filtering its way through the mesh? He turned quickly and, still holding the candle before him, hurried to the far side of the living room. To think he had put his face close to the screen, only a brief while ago! Now he was reluctant even to reach out and close the window, lest a thick black tentacle formed of coalesced darkness tore through the screen and wrapped around his wrist. But he got the window closed, and turned the lever to lock it. He then locked the window beside it, moved into his bedroom to lock those two windows as well.

  He stepped backwards from the windows, into the middle of his bedroom floor, and stood there with his candle.

  He realized he was holding his breath, as if afraid to draw the darkness into his lungs.

  He realized he was waiting.

  ***

  When he returned to the kitchen, to check on the door again – still no insinuating tendrils – he glanced at the counter beside the sink and saw his flashlight lying there beside his lighter. Stupid: in his panic he had forgotten the most important of the supplies he had stashed after last year’s hurricane and outage. He set down the candle and picked up the flashlight instead.

  After sweeping a beam of light across the bottom of the kitchen door he switched off the flashlight to conserve its batteries. Then, by candlelight, he rummaged in the cabinets under his kitchen sink until he found what he was looking for: a silver-gray roll of duct tape.

  He got down on the floor beside the bottom of his apartment’s door, moved the towel aside, and before any fingers of blackness could come creeping under the door drew a long strip of tape across the gap. He fortified that with several more strips. Then, he sealed the length of the door on both sides, and finally the thin space across the top.

  Every residence by law was required to have two means of egress in case of fire, preferably a back way out. His own second way out – typical of all the building’s apartments – was simply another door opening into the same hallway. In his case, this door was right around the other side of the kitchen wall, near his bathroom. So he went to this door and outlined it in duct tape as well.

  What about the four little windows? He considered this, told himself the windows were fairly new and had never been drafty, seemed pretty airtight.

  But moments later he was sealing the edges of the windows with duct tape, too.

  He used up what he’d had left of tape on the roll, but at least it wasn’t until he’d covered the edges of all four windows. Then he remembered he had another roll in the cabinet under his bathroom sink, because his shower head had been leaking and he’d once done a bandage job on it.

  Duct tape against the universe. Sure, it made sense to a human and an American, he thought, trying to humor himself. Not that he succeeded much in that attempt. His humor was as pathetic a protection as the tape itself.

  Whatever this phenomenon...this force...was, it would have him when it was ready. When the stain had spread further. Stain? There he was thinking like an arrogant human again. This blackness was purity, wasn’t it? He and his kind were the stain. A stain to be cleansed...eradicated.

  The thought that the blackness might be sentient terrified him. But even more terrifying, perhaps, was the thought that it held no intelligence. That it was mindless...indifferent. That it had no intent, no mission. That it just was.

  Creeping stealthily from room to room (all two of them), Anderson listened for sounds of humanity around him. Often on the other side of the wall from his sink, he’d hear the neighbor’s shower running and running. God, did they take long showers. But now, nothing. Above him in the kitchen/living room, he’d frequently hear children running up and down the creaky floor. Sometimes, when he lay in bed, directly overheard he’d listen to the rhythmic squeaking of bed springs. People making love (maybe that young couple who were rumored to be running a meth lab). The sound would torment him with memories of his young wife. Torment him with the fact that he hadn’t been to bed with another person, even casually, in almost a decade.

  But there were no sounds from the apartment above, either. He was tempted to fetch a broom, pound the tip of its handle against his ceiling to see if he could establish communication. And then what? Communicate in Morse code? He didn’t know it. And what if by making a loud sound he attracted the blackness to him? Maybe it didn’t realize he was still in here. Maybe he had slipped past its notice altogether, where the others had been less lucky.

  Maybe he should blow out his candles, lest the blackness peek in through the thin slits in the Venetian blinds over his windows. Maybe if he sat here in the dark, overlooked, until...

  ...until what? Help came? The National Guard? The cavalry? The day?

  He greatly suspected that day would never dawn again. Once more, it was an intuition. He felt it in his gut.

  He found himself standing unmoving in the center of the kitchen floor, tensed up as if he might bolt into a run at any second. Run where? Into a wall?

  Slowly he became aware of dumb physical sensations. For one, his throat was dry. He was thirsty. He had milk in the fridge and he told himself he should start drinking it before it went bad. But at the same time, even the thought of putting anything into his knotted stomach at this point made him want to vomit. Besides, when the milk had run out, when the food had run out, and all he had left was tap water, then what? Slowly starve? So why even bother at all?

  He was going to die. Or maybe not so much die, he thought, as cease to be...as if there were a difference. Curiously, he was not falling to his knees weeping, pounding the walls with his fists, yelling at the top of his lungs. Despite his fear, running through every nerve like an electrical current, despite the nausea, he was oddly calm. Was it brave acceptance? More likely it was the soul having been clubbed down so thoroughly that all it could do was blink and...wait. But this clubbing hadn’t only occurred tonight. He felt it had been going on for decades now. Since Tammy’s death, but even before that, really. Maybe from the day of his birth, that beating, that hammering, had begun. Maybe that was why new souls came into this world screaming.

  He had made the mistake, and not just once, of watching videos on the Internet of beheadings by Middle Eastern terrorists and by Mexican drug cartels. Morbid curiosity, he supposed, some kind of masochistic fascination. Masochistic, because these videos had horrified and depressed him. And they had frustrated him, too, because not once did he see one of these victims really fight back, spit or curse at his executioners, kick at them or struggle much. But now he understood what they had been feeling. That clubbed sensation. Dazed, waiting for the coup de grace. Breaking the neck off the bottle was only an afterthought. The soul had already been voided.

  Another dumb sensation niggled at him. He realized he had to urinate.

  “Stupid cow,” he chuckled, speaking to his own body. He realized a tear dribbled down one cheek. He wiped it away on the back of his hand, and turned toward his bathroom. He took one of the candles with him, along with the flashlight, figuring he’d leave that candle burning in the bathroom when he was done. The other candle he left on the kitchen counter.

  As he started around the corner of the kitchen wall, int
o the tiny hallway that ended at his fire escape door, the kitchen went dark behind him.

  The candle had been snuffed out, just in the time it had taken him to turn his back on it. Had the wick drowned in the liquefied wax cupped in the top of the candle? Or had the candle ceased to exist?

  These questions fired through his brain in the merest fraction of a second. He didn’t look back. His only instinct was to thumb his flashlight on and dive into the bathroom. Inside, he hastily set down the remaining candle on the sink, then slammed the door shut behind him. He turned the lock in the knob.

  Then, however much he had been philosophically ruminating on his fatalism, he still squatted down and searched under the sink until he uncovered the other roll of duct tape.

  He commenced sealing off the bathroom door. Well, why not? These pitiful impulses toward survival were just more dumb physical urges, like wanting to drink and to pee. Let the poor cow go through its motions. He pitied it, as if he were an entity apart from it.

  With the four sides of the door patched over, he set the tape aside and stood there facing it. Was this the last little cube of humanity, this room? The final cell for the last human soul? A toilet. How ignoble, he thought. How fitting.

  While he was waiting he might as well empty his bladder, so he did. He didn’t flush the bowl, though; didn’t want to make undue sound. Candlelight reflected on the water standing in his tub. It was like the surface of some pond at night. Mellow. Calming. He sat down on the closed lid of his toilet. He stared at the water. He thought of Jordan Pond.

  His candle flickered for one instant, as if a breeze he couldn’t feel were passing across it, and then the flame was extinguished.

  He wanted to jump to his feet, but he didn’t think his legs would support him. Though he held no religious beliefs, Anderson whispered, “Oh God.”

  He thumbed the switch of the flashlight. It was as if the batteries had died. There was no beam.

  The blackness was absolute. Was this what it felt like, then, to be swallowed as that woman’s husband, Enrique, had been? And yet he still drew air into his lungs. He was still conscious of his body. Was this how he was to spend eternity? Not tortured by demons, but locked alone in a little room? Not the acute agonies of Hell, but a subtler kind of suffering? The suffering of being apart...disconnected? Now that the end had come for his kind – for whatever reason, if there needed to be a reason for an ant hill to be trampled – would every soul be caged in its own tiny cell, isolated from every other soul? Though in a way, hadn’t it always been that way? Each of them caged in the cells of their bodies?

  Then Anderson became aware that he could see the door in front of him. Dimly, but he could just make it out in the murk. The silvery duct tape even seemed to be reflecting a soft radiance. He could see his hands, gripping his knees as he sat there on the toilet lid.

  Anderson stood up, turned and faced the source of the strengthening glow.

  He was face-to-face with a screen of silent, seething static. Gray and white and black pixels, dancing like agitated subatomic particles. But this was not his TV screen, nor even his computer screen. This field of shimmering static was the mirror over his bathroom sink.

  Anderson gazed into the mirror. It being a mirror, he waited for his own reflected face to form from those electrified motes. Was his the face he had glimpsed peripherally on his computer monitor? Did the end entail looking into your own soul?

  And a face did begin to materialize, vaguely, from the churning interference. It didn’t come into sharp focus, and it was not in the colors or textures of physical life, and yet he recognized its outline, the shape of its features.

  He recognized it as Tammy’s face.

  A tear coursed down his cheek again, but Anderson was smiling as he stretched out his arm.

  Smiling as he reached through the glass.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Z-pocalypse, Book 1: The Walking Undead (A novel of the Zombiepidemic) (digital edition)

  W. T. Fallon (author)

  Purchase price: $0.99

  File size: 502 kb

  Print length: 282 pages

  Language: English

  Best sellers rank: #7,653 in digital store

  Product Description:

  When the Z-Virus hits no one is prepared and the world falls in under a week. The undead walk the streets tearing into the flesh of any uninfected person they meet The military retreats to secret strongholds leaving survivors to fend for themselves. One feisty band of survivors led by ex-Navy Seal Rich Stone and his ex-girlfriend Terry Storm a scientist fight their way across an apocalyptic USA. This is a zombie novel like no other because the plague turns out to come from Hell and every viral particle is a microscopic demon. The virus is carried in zombie saliva so to get bitten is to become possessed by the demons. Terry tries to find a way to kill the tiny demons while Rich is kept busy killing the undead hosts. Will the survivors make it to safety if there is any safe place left in a world gone to Hell?

  About the Author:

  Wilda Teresa Fallon is a pen name and an alternate identity I created to protect myself from the forces that have been oppressing me all my life. It all started in my childhood because I was innocent then so my soul was an unlocked door. When I was ten my Grandma Marybeth gave me a beautiful doll with long blond hair and blue eyes just like me she said. One day I was playing upstairs in my room while my parents were downstairs watching TV and just fooling around I looked into my doll’s eyes and held my breath till I got dizzy. I spoke to the doll in my head “If you have a soul talk to me now!” I passed out from holding my breath and I had a dream. In the dream my doll took my hand and helped me to my feet and led me into my closet. She was like a little girl now but still a doll too. We slipped through the clothes in my closet and when we came out the other side we stood in a long hallway in an old deserted house. But the hallway went on forever in both directions and it was lined with infinite closed doors. I was scared so I squeezed the little girl’s hand. She said “It’s up to you which way to go now Wilda.” (Except she said my real name not Wilda.) “If you take the correct path you will reach the Plateau of Perpetual Joy. If you choose the wrong path you will enter the Plane of Eternal Torment.” I was confused and looked to my left and right but both ways looked the same to me. I knew I had to choose though so finally I let go of her hand and took one step to the right. I figured right would mean the right way. But the second I took one step every door in the hallway flew open and a person lurched out of each one. It was gloomy in the hallway so I couldn’t see the people too well and also they were all covered in veils of spiderwebs like they’d been standing in those rooms waiting for many years. It looked like their clothes were all raggedy and they shuffled and staggered like drunk people. I screamed and turned to the little girl for help but I saw she was just a doll again standing there smiling. I saw the doorway where we came through the back of the closet was gone so I slapped my hands on the wall. The People from the Doors were all coming toward me from either side of the endless hallway stretching out their arms to me. I looked back at them one time and I saw none of them had eyes or a face just a long open mouth from forehead to chin. Whispering words were coming from every one of the people even though their lips weren’t moving because their mouths were open so wide. The whispering all joined together into one terrible sound like a wild blizzard you hear whistling outside your windows on a winter night. I kept slapping the wall and screaming and suddenly I tore a hole right through the dirty old wallpaper and fell forward. I was all tangled up and I thought it was the People from the Doors grabbing me but it was only the clothes in my closet. I stumbled into my room and tripped onto the floor. I landed hard. When I opened my eyes my parents were standing over me looking nervous and asking me what happened. I didn’t tell them about my game with my doll I just said I fainted but my head hurt bad so I figured I hit it on the floor when I fell. They decided to take me to the hospital to have my head checked in case I had a concussion. The
y were afraid about why I passed out too but I still didn’t talk about holding my breath because I couldn’t explain why I was playing like that. When my parents took me from the room I looked at my open closet like I expected to see one of the People from the Doors hiding in there behind my clothes with its huge mouth yawning open but everything looked normal in there as far as I could see. Then I saw the doll my Grandma Marybeth gave me lying on the floor. Maybe I fell on her when I fainted because her face was smashed in and the plastic was all cracked but she still seemed like she was staring at me with her beautiful blue eyes and smiling. I was relieved when I came home from the hospital that night and I didn’t see the doll again. I figured my mom or dad threw her out since she was broken. But when I asked them both if they threw out the doll Grandma Marybeth gave me both my mom and dad said they never touched her.

  After that day I had a lot of bad dreams that I knew in my gut weren’t really dreams but were my spirit traveling to the Plane of Eternal Torment when I was asleep. I kept them to myself mostly but stupidly when I was thirteen I told my mom about one of my dreams because she could see I was really tired every day and afraid to go to sleep at night preferring to nap in the daytime. That was when she and my dad took me to my first psychiatrist. So until I was eighteen I was taking all kinds of medications like Risperidone and having therapy like cognitive remediation. The dreams didn’t go away but I was able to lie that they did because I was so used to them by now. Finally when I entered college I was able to convince my parents I was okay. Because I hadn’t talked about any dreams in so long they didn’t push me to have any more therapy or take any more meds. I was on my own now. But it turns out maybe that wasn’t the best thing for me after all. When things got really bad though I didn’t go to my parents for help because I didn’t want to draw the forces to them too. It was my own battle to fight.