Hunted by Darkness

Pierce the Night

Gabriel

It was dark and uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because he didn’t think it was a good idea to come at night, not after all that had happened to them, but Sarah had insisted, she didn’t want to be seen. Rose made it clear the police was looking for her concerning Lucy’s death, although she didn’t know the specifics, but Sarah was in no rush to answer any of their questions, and neither was he. After the conversation with Rose, she felt the sudden urge to see what was going on with her parents, or fake parents, if that’s what they were. She still hesitated on that subject but had made no comment indicating she wanted to go back, so he thought she was inclined to believe him.

They sat in a quiet corner of a Cafe. It would soon start filling up with the lunch crowd, and Gabriel wished they had picked as less popular place, but it was moderately calm at the minute, and they were able to speak without anybody eavesdropping. He also wished Vivian wasn’t there, sitting less than an inch away from him. It was strange, though. Before he met Sarah, he would have been delighted at the attention a girl like her was giving him. He certainly didn’t mind the attention Elsebeth gave him. The only issue was that Elsebeth wasn’t so easy to resist.

He pushed those thoughts away and focused on Rose’s explanations.

‘They came to the therapy group asking for you if anyone had seen you. The police, I mean.’

‘Nobody said anything,’ Vivian added coldly and Rose threw her a glance, a look that ended as soon as it started.

‘Julie only said you were part of the group, but that’s it. Then they waited for us outside.’

‘Interrogated us all, one by one. Paul and Tim said we had seen you last on Friday night, put us all in a lot of trouble…’ Vivian grunted.

‘Yeah, well, they’re not bright, are they? Either way, that’s all we know. I was going to ask if they had looked for you at home, but then I figured if you had been there, they wouldn’t be looking for you. What’s going on?’

Sarah exchanged a look with him. He didn’t know what to say, but the set of her eyes told him she had a plan.

‘One of my friends died. From… before, you know. Anyway, it wasn’t a natural death…’

‘No way!’

Sarah shrugged.

‘I’d give my condolences, but I’m pretty sure you don’t remember her, so you can’t be all that upset.’

‘Vivian! Just shut up, will you?’

‘Well, it’s only the truth! Remember when your grandmother wanted you to say a few words at your aunt’s funeral, but you freaked out because you couldn’t remember her? We’ve all been there, that’s the point, isn’t it?’

‘Whatever,’ Rose dismissed her. ‘I don’t think they got to talk to your parents, though, because they asked me all sorts of questions they could have answered, like how old you are and what do you do, how long you had been coming to therapy. Just odd.’

Gabriel caught another look from Sarah, and they both frowned. It was only later on when they decided to check out the house. He was not keen on the idea. Partly because he had almost abducted Sarah and partly due to the permanent image of Lucy’s and her cousin’s body now tattooed into his mind. He was not enthusiastic about their self-appointed surveillance mission.

‘I just want to make sure they’re ok…’

Her words didn’t convince him. First, because he was pretty sure he was right on the subject, but also because she didn’t sound convinced herself. At the same time, he didn’t know what she expected to find there, but she had been so insistent that he hadn’t been able to say no, afraid she might sneak out and try to go on her own. Not that he had been much help last time she got in trouble, he had to admit.

It was late in the night and, in other circumstances, it would only be normal to find the house in complete darkness. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and they stood across the street, behind a neighbour’s car, watching the house with the same tingling in his stomach he had felt when standing outside of Lucy’s house. The thought alone was enough to give him nausea.

They waited for a while. Slowly, the remaining lit up windows in the street turned dark. Sarah had no intention of knocking at the door, but she had the back door’s key. After a few minutes to make sure everything was quiet, they walked back the way they had run out last time. The alley was in utter blackness, and they both tripped over rocks and rubbish. Luckily, Sarah’s house wasn’t far into the row of houses. Looking around every five seconds, they made it into the backyard. Sarah had her keys ready, holding the remaining keys and keyring in her hand to avoid the clinking noise. The key turned into the lock, but Sarah didn’t push the handle.

‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.

‘It’s open…’

The door swung open. The kitchen seemed empty, but they didn’t dare switch on the light. Sarah switched on the torch on her phone. There was an unpleasant smell, although, thankfully, nothing like Lucy’s house. It was a smell he knew from years on procrastinating on washing the dishes, rotting food at room temperature. It was not a good sign, but he preferred not to say anything, he wasn’t sure what Sarah was expecting from this impromptu visit. He had tried to ask her, during the afternoon but had gotten little or nothing out of the conversation.

He followed Sarah out of the kitchen and into the hall. He saw her briefly check the living room, but there was nobody there either.

‘There is dust everywhere,’ she said, passing her fingers over a shelf.

He remembered the layer of dust over the furniture in Lucy’s bedroom vividly and his stomach twisted. He had just about been able to have a normal conversation, and now he was in the middle of a deja vu.

Sarah stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. He could hear her breathing, calm, slow, but deep. With a final large breath, she took to the steps. The closer they got, and he wasn’t sure what they were getting close too, the more he believed she knew exactly what they would find. He knew too.

It was dead quiet upstairs. More than just silence. It was an absence of everything as if the air was missing. The floor didn’t creak under his weight, their movements made no noise of clothes rubbing against each other. It didn’t smell of anything, not perfume, not dust, not dog, not dirty dishes, not of atmosphere. He imagined reaching out for the wall and not finding it, his fingers missing the resistance of the air around him, something he had never noticed until now when it wasn’t there. And then there were no reflections. The light from Sarah’s torch touched on what was directly under it but didn’t expand any farther than the ring it projected. Picture frames that he knew where there did not reflect any of the light, nor did the metallic radiators, the hinges of the doors, the handles. The light was swallowed away and lost.

The last door on the left was closed. Gabriel knew that must be Sarah’s parents’. Logic would dictate to keep as far from there as possible; they didn’t want to wake up anybody, yet somehow he knew there was nothing to disturb in there. When they opened the door, the lack of sensation was overwhelming. It felt like falling into a hole, a wave of nausea running through him. The bed was made, the covers under a thick layer of dust, particles dancing under the beam of light.

Sarah turned around, her beam illuminating every corner of the room. Gabriel was almost surprised to see anything there when she turned her light towards a new angle, always expecting to find what he imagined as a black hole. Still, no matter how much she looked, there was nothing there, nor was there anything in the walking wardrobe. She pushed the clothes off to the side on the hanging rail, but nothing behind either. He wasn’t sure if he should feel relieved or if he should start being scared.

There was nowhere else to look in the room, but Sarah still stood there, immobile, almost as frozen as the whole place felt.

‘There is nothing here,’ he whispered unnerved.

‘There is, I know there is. You can feel it, can’t you?’

He could, he just didn’t want to think about it or what that meant. The mention of it had been enough to feel a nerve tense somewhere in his neck.

Sarah dropped to her knees and lied flat on her stomach, the torch facing under the bed.

‘God!’ she pushed herself away, hitting the wall with her back, ‘Oh, God!’

She scrambled to a sitting position, her hand covering her mouth, her back pressing against the wall. Very much unwillingly but unable to stop himself, he took his own phone out and knelt on the floor, lowering his head, afraid of what he was going to see. The lit, greyish face of a woman, eyes wide glazed over by a mist of dark grey, mouth ajar, stared back at him, pressed against the floor. Black slithering marks coiled around what he could see of her neck. It was Sarah’s mother. Swallowing bile, he moved to the other side of the bed, moving into the sense-deprived environment and feeling as heavy as lead, and checked under the bed again. Mr Morgan, a similar terror-filled expression on his face, his hair matted against his skull, looked back at him from the narrow space.

A cold sweat had covered his forehead, and he felt the familiar emptiness in his mouth that meant he was about to be sick. He wanted to take a deep breath but there didn’t seem to be any air to breathe in the room, vacuumed away of any feeling and sensory information as it was. When he looked over the bed, Sarah was on her phone, whispering something, then hung up.

‘What did you do?’ somehow making a call right then felt like a bad idea.

‘I called Rose. Left a message…’ her voice cracked, ‘to delete my number and not tell anybody she knew me…’

‘Why!’ it didn’t seem the right time to be breaking up friendships or making any other calls for that matter.

‘Lucy is dead. My parents are dead and, based on this,’ she waved at the bed, hand shaking in the beam of light, ‘so are Alex and Mary… You should run away as far as yo…’

He couldn’t bear it anymore, not now. He reached her in two strides and lifted her from the floor, arms wrapping around her shaking shoulders. Her head rested naturally on his chest as he brushed her hair with his fingers, taking in the beating of her heart against his body, her fingers closing around his clothes. Her warmth against him was comforting. It was like home. Like a long time ago, she smelled of his shampoo.

And then his breath was gone, the hair on the back of his neck standing like needles, the sensation coming back around him and the freezing cold. His breath was visible, a silvery cloud in the darkness.

‘They’re coming…’ she whispered, her voice still like frozen water.

He grabbed Sarah’s hand and pulled her out of the room, but she wouldn’t budge past the hall, her eyes fixated on the stairs. A soft growl came from that direction. He ran to the window of her room, the one over the porch in the backyard, but he could see them out at the back too. Two distinct shapes stood there, much more defined than what they had faced that night in the park, almost shaped like humans, but still empty and black, writhing vacuums. They approached, their shifting eyes scanning the windows.

He ran back to Sarah, who was still standing still, facing the stairs, as if waiting for them to come. There was no way out and his heart was beating out of his throat. He could be sick or he could stand and fight but he didn’t know what he could possibly do. Last time he had almost died and he wasn’t sure, to this day, how he survived. But he remembered something. He had given Alex an order and, if only for a second, he had been unable to do otherwise.

Two human-shaped Old Ones appeared on the landing.

‘Stop,’ he said, with as much meaning as he was capable of.

Nothing happened.

He knew something had happened that day, he knew, inside, that it hadn’t just been luck or confusion.

There had been a sensation, a vibration almost, in his brain and his throat, as if they were connected by more than just tissue and nerves. He had felt a sort of electricity. Where it had come from, he didn’t know.

He stood in front of Sarah, as the two figures approached with slow and calculated movements, still sliding but with the pretend movements of real arms and legs, limbs that spread from them thick and square. The cold was unbearable and there was no air to breathe. Light was extinguishing again and torches wouldn’t help.

‘Move,’ Sarah’s voice was loud and electric.

He looked back, surprised, as if to make sure it was her who had spoken. She grabbed his arm with a claw of steel and pushed him behind her. Close to her body, she could feel her skin’s heat, like a blazing sun, her limbs shaking… no, vibrating, crackling static in her bushy black hair.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Just get ready to run.’

Before he could say anything a blinding bubble of light emerged from her extended fingers and hit the Old Ones, whose edges frayed under the white light that engulfed everything. They writhed and growled and held on to reality but slowly disappeared. Sarah’s body vibrated harder and harder until, finally, they were gone.

The light went off almost at once and they were back in darkness, but normal darkness, with light coming in throught the windows from street lamps and reflections on the glass and metal.

‘What…?’

‘Not now, let’s go!’ she pulled him towards the stairs.

‘They’re gone…’ he almost complained.

‘They’re coming back, I can feel it.’

And as he stopped for a second, he could still feel the cold and the pressure on his chest. They were coming back.

They ran down the stairs and out of the back door. They had barely made it out of the alley when the light around them flickered.

‘Keep running, don’t look back!’ she yelled at him.

She pulled him around the corner, street lamps bursting as they ran past them. Unable to help himself, he looked back and, sure enough, there they were, advancing as if they weren’t touching the floor. Heart pumping, the air felt frozen in his lungs. Not looking where he was going, his foot caught with something, and he tumbled, rolling onto the floor. She had kept running for a few yards before she noticed he wasn’t holding her hand anymore. She was on him in a blink and pulled him up by the arm. He winced and yelped, his shoulder hurt like hell and it was at a weird angle. Swearing between his teeth, Gabriel used his other arm to get up.

‘You should have kept running,’ he grunted.

‘It’s too late,’ she pointed.

They were on them, their human shape vanishing, and getting at them like a wave of oil. Her hand closed around his wrist and pulled him behind her, her free arm stretching a commanding hand out. Gabriel was prepared to see the same bright light he had experienced before, but nothing happened. The Old Ones hit them and they were crushed as if they had been caught by a landslide. Letting out a scream of pain, he rolled to the side, Sarah already getting up on one knee as the dark sludgy figures regrouped and prepared a new attack. He pushed himself back onto his feet, trying to find a way out, but they were surrounded. They’re attention was focused on Sarah. She was trying to repeat what she had done back at the house and probably back at the park, but she didn’t seem able to do it. Nothing was happening again and again while the smell of rot and putridity caught at the black of his throat and made him gag. He pulled his phone out. One of the figures threw a freakishly long arm against her. Her feet came off the ground as if she had taken a leap to fly. She landed heavily against a lamp post a few yards away. Looking over his shoulder, he was prepared to see her hurt or unconscious but, somehow, she got up. She threw her jacket to the ground and faced them. He was no longer behind her and could see her face. It was contorted, eyebrows in a deep frown, the jaw almost square, the nose flaring. Her eyes startled him most of all. White, pure light, beams spreading. It was an expression that didn’t belong to her, that belonged to somebody else, somebody he didn’t know. Somebody he was scared of.

When the Old One came at her again, she punched him right in the face, or what should be the face. He had expected her fist would go through, as if into mud, but it connected squarely with the thing, and it growled, not in pain, he thought, but frustration. She took a few steps towards them, limping noticeably. She connected a couple more punches, but it was hard to miss they didn’t have the power of the first one. This was it, ‘we’re about to…’ he thought as he speed-dialled. His phone fell onto the floor as he ran to put himself in between Sarah and the creature that was about to impale her with a spike-shaped limb.

‘Stop,’ he yelled.

He felt it, then. The tingling, the vibration, the electricity. And the thing stopped, just long enough for him to get there, just long enough for him to take the blow. He didn’t feel pain, just a cold feeling, so cold it burnt. He heard his name faintly before the lights went out, and the world faded.

He didn’t feel any pain.