Long After Dark Read online

  Something pale moved in the far corner of the basement, a blur of off-white shifting through the darkness.

  He took the last three stairs into the bowels of the house and stepped down onto the cement floor. A deep inhale drew in the usual array of stale basement odors, but amidst the familiar, something foreign.

  Slowly, he reached out for the string, hoping to find it dangling there.

  But before he could grasp it the bulb came on, swinging and swaying back and forth from the end of the cord it was mounted to, painting the walls and corners with swaths of light before moving away, panning to and fro like a prank in a funhouse, revealing quick glimpses of all that was down there with him.

  The pale faced man in overalls huddled a few feet away and struggling with a long length of pipe he was attempting to fit together with other pieces…The patio furniture stacked and pushed into another corner…the lawnmower and lawn chairs…the oil furnace…

  And in the far corner, a woman in a full slip, once white but stained and faded with perspiration and speckles of blood. Her hair and makeup was mussed, eyes wild, hands pressed against the cement walls as if for purchase, or perhaps searching for a way out. As the bulb swung past, Harry saw the bloody bandaged freak lying still near her bare feet.

  “Kelly,” he heard himself say.

  She turned, looked back over her shoulder at him, sorrow in her once-beautiful blue eyes.

  The bulb came to a stop, illuminating most of the basement now, leaving only the corners in shadow. Something overhead in the rafters crawled away, Harry heard its legs clicking as it went. His eyes moved to the pale man, who had finished his work and now stood staring at him, those unnaturally wide eyes boring into him, seeing places he wanted no one to see.

  Kelly fell back against the wall, arms dangling at her sides as if broken. “That’s how they take you down there,” she said in a slurred voice.

  Harry considered the strange network of pipes that ran to the wall and down into the floor, all of them fitted together, turned and fastened one to the next, a maze of thick moist pipes just large enough to fit an animal or perhaps a child but…

  “First they make you fit.” She motioned faintly with her chin to the swaddled thing at her feet, her face contorting into a grimace of terror. “Then they take you down.”

  The man stepped back and away, retreating into one of the corners where the darkness still lived and could conceal him. Only his large, wet, slowly blinking eyes remained visible.

  At the same time Kelly stepped out of her corner, allowing more of the light to touch her. She squinted as if she hadn’t seen light in a very long time. Her flesh was covered in a thin sheen of perspiration, and like her slip, sprayed lightly with blood. The exposed tops of her breasts shook as she stumbled forward, looking like an unsuspecting performer suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

  Maybe she’s just lost her way.

  Behind her, deep in the corner, sat a man in a chair Harry recognized as Aaron Searcy. His pants and underwear were around his ankles, but his shirttails, though tented by an erection, covered his genitals. He stared straight ahead with a demented smile, like some sort of deranged mental patient, his large horse-like teeth shining through the darkness. Kelly glanced back at him, bowed her head and returned to the corner. Sitting on the basement floor next to him, she slid her hand up over his calf, along his thigh and beneath the shirttails.

  The familiarity and comfort between them was more appalling than any act they could commit. That she could touch him with such nonchalance, so casually and effortlessly savaged him like a hatchet to the chest.

  As Kelly’s hand moved up and down, slowly at first and then faster and faster still, the shirttails fell away but Searcy remained still, grinning maniacally as she masturbated him.

  Nearby the bandaged freak began to moan and writhe about. Neither Kelly nor Searcy paid any attention.

  Through rage, tears, and then, as he angrily wiped them away, something horribly cold came awake in him, slithered about and nested.

  It was in that moment that Harry tried to remember the quiet. He’d known it once, hadn’t he? Hadn’t they? Comfortable silences where no words were necessary, where a subtle sigh or change of position, a sideways glance or a whisper of skin brushing skin said everything, made everything all right and life worth living. It had never been the noise, not even the laughter or tears of joy they shared, but the silence, the quiet, the unspoken that had been the true measure of their love. That utter and complete silence when Harry knew he was loved and everything—everything—would be all right.

  “I want it all back.”

  “You can’t have it back,” Kelly said. “It’s gone away now.”

  “There are consequences to what we do. There has to be.”

  “Yes, we answer for our actions. Not just to others, but to ourselves.” She glanced down with disinterest at the cock in her hand. It began to come. She jerked it harder.

  “Mmm,” Searcy moaned, “that’s my good girl.”

  Harry’s legs buckled and he sank to his knees. “There’s been a murder.”

  “Yes,” Kelly said, as if just then awakened from a dream. “I know.”

  11

  It was raining. He remembered it was raining. It was rain, wasn’t it? Pouring over them, so warm and wet and slippery and oddly comforting, at once washing and staining them anew as they sat together in the dark with their secrets. He’d dreamed of this, hadn’t he?

  Harry took her hand in his, felt the rain squish between their palms. It felt so delicate and small, her hand, her precious and beautiful hand, the ring finger still sporting the diamond he’d given her all those years ago. “Do you remember?” he asked softly. “Can you still remember what it was like before?”

  “No.”

  “But you want to don’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Betrayal is a vicious animal.”

  “So is guilt. So is rage.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know, I—”

  “You didn’t want to know. But you always have.”

  “No.”

  “And you will again,” he told her, the sole of his thumb gently caressing the top of hers. “It won’t be much longer now.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you’ll know the truth.”

  “Will it free us?”

  He wished he could see her face, but it remained obscured by the rain. “Only me.”

  Her hand slipped away. But she was not gone.

  She’d been broken into pieces—they both had—and had since patched themselves together like living scarecrows, a conglomerate of ideas and myths and possibilities, of mind storms and things never spoken, precariously held together with glue and rusty staples, their insides hay and grass and dried leaves, once beautiful and alive, now dead, pointless. The concept of torment, of having been tortured by this realization for years and opting to bury it, to conceal it within himself rather than face it for the reality it was had crippled him not only emotionally, but intellectually. Methodically, it chipped away at his sanity and strength, eventually becoming a perfect breeding ground for agony and madness alike.

  On hands and knees, Harry made his way into the pool of light on the cellar floor. He fell back onto his ass and sat there, out of breath and sniffling, no longer tired but instead in a state somewhere between damnation and grace. One was not so very far from the other. They were, after all, brethren. Kelly sat across from him, head bowed, her hair matted down and body bathed not in rain but a thick layer of fresh blood, the whites of her eyes pronounced and frightening against a backdrop of crimson. Harry looked to his hands. Curiously, they had finally stopped shaking.

  The shadow creatures crawled about like predatory insects, circling the pool of light, coming close but never quite crossing into it, their growls and shuffling bodies echoing along the cement foundation, Harry’s torment alive and embodied and stalking him even now, relentless and unforgiving.
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br />   “Get away!” he screamed. Those closest retreated to darkness but continued circling like the ravenous wolves they were. “Get away!”

  “You can’t suffer for someone else’s sins,” Kelly said, her voice gurgling, mouth and throat full of blood.

  “That’s what most people suffer from, other people’s sin.”

  “Sin,” she repeated back, “seems such an archaic word.”

  “What should we call it then?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t call it anything.”

  “I’ve dreamed of this,” Harry said. “I’ve dreamed of this blood.”

  “So have I.” She reached for him with a look in her eyes he had not seen in a very long while, her hand falling just short, the fingertips dripping crimson. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  “So am I.”

  “It’s very late.”

  Something flopped into the circle of light. The bandaged thing, stained still with blood and dirt—filth—emerged from the shadows, moaning frantically as it worked its way across the floor until it reached Kelly. Up close and in the light Harry could see the legs had been hideously severed or perhaps torn or gnawed away, the bloody jagged stumps dressed hastily in soiled bandages.

  That’s how they take you down there. First they make you fit.

  Then they take you down.

  Kelly reached for it tenderly—reminding Harry of how she’d once reached for Garrett when he was still a baby—and dragged the thing onto her bloody lap. It reached for her as well, its arms clinging to her neck as if fearful she might let it go otherwise. Behind the bandages, the same strangely familiar eyes shifted and locked on him.

  And then he knew.

  With bloody fingers Kelly carefully peeled the bandages from its head. The others came closer, breeching the circle, watching…

  Like listening to one’s recorded voice and finding it surprisingly foreign, sometimes gazing into one’s own eyes produced a similar confusion.

  As the last strip fell away and the true horror, pain and devastation on Harry Fremont’s face was revealed, they snatched him away, tearing what remained of his body from her arms and taking it with them back into darkness. He screamed and cried out, but his attempts at words failed, sounding as if his tongue had been removed, or perhaps as if his jaw had sustained crushing injury.

  Despite the darkness, Harry could make out glimpses of the others dragging what was clearly him toward the labyrinth of pipes.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking away. “Am I in Hell?”

  Kelly closed her eyes, becoming one with the blood. “Not quite.”

  In the nightmares they came in a single wave of violence and savagery, pale faces and wide eyes no longer focused on rooftops, intricate networks of pipes, the mutilated version of his soul writhing in agony and terror or this most curious of nights, but him. He scrambled up the cellar stairs toward the sparse light in the kitchen, crawling like a tired old cat up the wooden steps, the bat no longer wet with perspiration from his hands, but blood. His mind urged him to go faster, to push harder, but his body had virtually nothing left.

  Right on his heels, he could hear their jaws snapping; feel their fingertips brushing his ankles, but he somehow made it to the landing, rolling across the tiled floor and frantically kicking the cellar door closed just in time.

  Gripping the edge of the island, he pulled himself to his feet. The door burst open in an explosion of flailing arms, open mouths sporting razor teeth and a chorus of primal screeches…and those horribly wide, moist, nearly childlike eyes, ablaze with purposeful fury.

  But those were the nightmare memories. In the moment he’d found himself on the roof of his house with no knowledge of how he’d gotten there. Bathed in moonlight, he stood near the edge and looked down at the driveway below. Behind him, crawling up over the gutters and out the attic window, the shadow people followed…slowly…knowingly.

  In the clear night and fresh air there was almost something peaceful about it. A surrender of sorts, the prey recognizing in its final moments that the chase had ended and all that remained was that which had been inevitable from the very beginning.

  Harry gazed up at the moon. Smiling through his tears, and without looking back at the others, he opened his arms as if to embrace the night sky, and stepped into oblivion.

  * * *

  Through the darkness, a lonely private street…at the end of a long and winding driveway, a beautiful summerhouse waits atop a small hill overlooking the ocean.

  14 Beach Street.

  Inside, where furniture and voices and living things once resided, there is now empty space and silence. Only the ocean crashing nearby shore can be heard above the echoing footfalls of Harry’s shoes as he strides through a large vacant room consisting of bare walls, dull hardwood floors, high ceilings and windows without curtains. And there, on the floor, is Gloria Searcy, the same scarf wrapped about her head, the same trickle of blood staining her cheek and neck. Only now Harry can see the wound clear through the material and into her shattered temple, a wound caused by some blunt object, a bat, perhaps. She speaks without looking at him.

  “I have a secret.”

  “Kelly’s bleeding,” he tells her. “She’s badly hurt, she’s bleeding.”

  Gloria nods, dead eyes fixated on the floor. “There’s been a murder.”

  “What have you done?”

  “I’m afraid. I don’t know where I am anymore.”

  “Is this your house?”

  “There was a time when it was our special getaway down by the beach, a romantic summer place just for the two of us. That was a long time ago, though.”

  “And now?”

  “The passage of time is a strange thing, don’t you think? It bends and flows, kind of like water. And just like water, what you see doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of its mystery.” She smiles but it seems to pain her to do so. “He brought her here. Here, where he used to bring me. That’s why I told you. I wanted you to come, to see, to know.”

  Harry notices a door at the far end of the room, slightly ajar. Like the rest of this place, it seems oddly familiar. He moves toward it.

  “Don’t go in there,” she warns. “You don’t…trust me…you—you don’t want to go in there.”

  He paces like a caged animal, hands pressed to his temples. “What have you done? God help us, what—what the hell have you done?”

  “What have you done, Harry?”

  There comes a point where you have to see the truth, Harry…

  Gloria begins to laugh. It is a horrible, hideous cackle that pulls back the curtains fogging Harry’s mind to reveal him entering this place days before. Bat in hand, testing the front door, finding it open, stepping through the threshold and into this very room. Somewhere nearby, a stereo is playing. Bruce Springsteen is belting out “Tunnel of Love” but in the next room Harry hears people arguing, shouting at one another.

  You have to see it even though you don’t want to…

  Gloria has beaten him here.

  Even though it’s disgusting and awful and hurtful…

  And in the other room, Searcy, a towel wrapped around his otherwise nude body, tries frantically to explain what is happening to his irate wife as Kelly stands to the side, near the corner of a mussed bed, dressed only in a slip and partially concealed in shadow. She looks as if she’s already gone elsewhere, her physical presence little more than a memory, a whisper still drifting through empty rooms, forgotten hallways.

  You don’t understand yet, but you will…

  Kelly looks up and sees him, and as their eyes meet, something inside her withers and dies. “Harry,” she says.

  Gloria and Aaron turn and look at him in unison, unaware that his face will be the last thing either ever sees.

  “Now hold on one minute, Harry, there’s no reason we can’t be civil here. We’re not children.” Searcy starts toward him. “Just put that bat down and we’ll get this all straightened out.”

  Th
rough the rage, the blood, the screams, the gut-wrenching sound of wood smashing flesh and bone, Gloria brings him back. “I didn’t want you to kill him,” she says. “I wanted you to hurt him, to make him feel and understand what his lies did, the violence they caused. I wanted him to know what I—and you—had been enduring for years, and I wanted him to live with it for the rest of his miserable life, just like you and I had to live with our pain and shame and embarrassment. I wanted the prick to drown in it, and I wanted Kelly to do the same. But I never meant for you to do this…not this…”

  “You’re lying, I—I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  He sees Gloria then, running to him, trying to stop him from bringing the bat down again. Though it’s too late, she runs to him anyway, screaming “Stop!” But he doesn’t stop, he has crossed a line where reason and restraint—even consequence—no longer apply or occur to him. At his feet Searcy lies dying in a bloody heap, his face and head smashed in, his arms and chest and legs already bruising where the bat struck again and again. Overcome with violence and rage, Harry spins toward Gloria as she runs for him, and swings the bat at her. It isn’t until it connects with her skull with a sickening clang that he realizes what he’s done. She staggers, looks at him with a combination of fear, confusion and shock and then topples, falling like some boneless, weightless thing blown over by a gust of wind. She hits the floor, her hand reaching for her temple. It comes back slick with blood so dark it borders on black. Harry wants to drop the bat but can’t. It’s fused to his hand. Gloria smiles as if she can’t quite believe what’s happening and then collapses facedown into a pool of blood. Harry looks to the bed. He still cannot remember, but Kelly too is collapsed in a bloody mess. He sees a flash in his mind, a brief moment when his eyes met Kelly’s and she looked at him with acceptance if not outright submission. Almost as if she knew what was coming and that for her there would be no escape. And with that knowledge, came a level of peace.