Chapter 3: The Things in the Dark

Ana sat at the Help Desk, going through the large bin of returns. There had been a nasty cold front with rain lately, which meant business had picked up. She stamped the return date into a copy of A Wrinkle in Time and set it aside. Louise walked by with a stack of books in her arms and a new notice for the bulletin board. Ana watched her pass, then sank back in her chair with a sigh.

It had been two weeks since she had gone out on a proper hunt. Two weeks of misery, forced to hide in her church at night and hopefully catch some passing birds. She had been forced to up her calorie intake in regards to human food, but now felt a bit off as a result.

Eating nearly every day at Matty’s aside, her change in diet was causing her legs to cramp inside of the confines of the wheelchair. It wasn’t the kind of cramp her human muscles felt. Rather, it was the dull ache of having a fist clenched for too long. Last night it had taken her several minutes just to get out of her wheelchair, her legs locked into place. She couldn’t even massage her legs but had instead relied on a super hot bath to try to relax them.

Darren walked past the desk, a massive toolbox in his left hand. The muscles in his arm bulged through the tight fabric of his shirt and she nearly let out a sigh. Her sudden shift in diet had dramatically decreased her sexual cravings, which was an unexpected upswing. Her body was going into survival mode, meaning that even if she bred, she likely couldn’t conceive.

Mixed blessings, she thought to herself. She hadn’t seen the men who hunted her, but she knew it was just a matter of time before they came snooping around again. Well, maybe. It was her hope that they would assume she had died in the blast. It was all the town had talked about the next day, and several rumors had bounced around in Matty’s and at the library. Her favorite theory involved the aliens that had crashed at Roswell crashing their saucer into the lake, but the most common involved some idiots with stolen dynamite.

Close enough. She sipped at her water and let out a sigh. Louise had gone on a diet at least a couple of times since Ana started working for the library. The woman had become an irritable mess for weeks and had grumbled about the wonderful smells that saturated the air around Mattie’s every morning. It was like that for Ana now, except it was a the patrons who came in to browse that smelled so delicious, a cruel reminder that she was never more than a couple steps ahead of her own instincts. She already felt that creeping edge of irritability, followed by a strong desire to suck someone dry.

No, she would abduct a pet or something long before hunting down a human. Or even leave town altogether. Now she wondered if she could fake a vacation and move on to safer hunting grounds for a week.

The minutes crawled by, impossibly slow. Her stomach growled, and she fought the urge to lay her head down on the desk. Storytime was coming up in half an hour, and she would be forced to read books to the equivalent of an open box of doughnuts.

Louise screamed out in the lobby and came in the doors, her arms now empty.

“Darren!” She called for him several times before he appeared, his toolbox left behind.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“We have mice!” The head librarian shook her head violently, a strand of hair popping free of her bun. “I saw a couple of them out in the front lobby. They ran into the storage room!”

“I’ll go get some traps.” He left, walking out the front door.

Louise sat down next to Ana, placing a hand dramatically on her own chest.

“At least it wasn’t a spider,” Ana said.

“Close enough. I don’t need mice in here chewing up the pages and shitting everywhere.” She took Ana’s water and drank half of it in one go. She picked up a book and fanned herself with the pages open.

“Please watch the desk, I need to go use the bathroom.” Ana moved her chair backward and around the large desk, leaving Louise behind. Once in the lobby, she moved as quickly as she could, wheeling her chair into the large storage room. Darren was looking through the boxes, trying to find the traps.

“Do we only have these kind?” he asked, holding up a large rat trap.

Ana swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yeah.” She didn’t think he’d find them so fast.

“Hmm.” He tossed the trap to the side. “I think I can build something that won’t kill them. Not their fault they wandered into the wrong building.”

“What will you do with them after you catch them?”

He shrugged. “Release them out in the woods? Let nature deal with them.”

Oh, I wish you would. She could smell them now, hiding somewhere in the room, two little cupcakes with tails. “How are you going to catch them?”

“Hmm.” He looked around the room. “I could probably bait them with some food. Maybe a box with a hole in the top?”

“They’ll just chew through it.”

“Shit, you’re right.”

“I know.” She rolled over to an old waste bin and held it up. “If you dump this out, it should be smooth enough on the inside that they can’t get out.”

“Then how do I get them in?”

“Easy.” She pointed to one of the nearby tables. “Lay a toilet paper tube on the edge of the table with some peanut butter in it. They’ll fall in with the tube.”

Darren fixed her with an incredulous look. “That’s ... brilliant. I never would have thought of that.”

“Uh huh.” She was salivating over the idea of being able to snack on a couple of mice. They didn’t have much nutritional value, but it would help fill that aching void in her stomach. “There’s some peanut butter in our pantry.” It was one of the few things she kept on hand because she had used it more than once as a lure. Her webs could hold pretty much anything, but coaxing a creature into them took some work.

“Thanks, Ana.” When he smiled, it ignited something in her. Her heart fluttered like a moth to his flame, and she once again noticed the large muscles of his chest and wondered if their offspring would inherit his musculature.

“Yeah, well, just something I read about in a book.”

He left, and she debated climbing out of her chair and trying to catch them by hand. There were two of them, running along the back wall beneath one of the shelves. She looked at the trash bin Darren had set aside and let out a loud sigh.

She would wait. With any luck, she could sneak in for a quick bite after he caught one. Hanging her head, she rolled back to the main lobby, licking her lips in anticipation. The light coming in through the windows was slowly vanishing beneath a blanket of grey clouds. She sniffed the air, tasting the sudden shift in humidity.

A storm was approaching.

-g-

Cyrus hung up the payphone, his shoulders slumped against the wind and rain. He crossed the motel parking lot and knocked twice before entering his room. Jeffrey was lying on one of the beds, tilting a beer to his mouth and watching the news.

“And?” Jeffrey asked, not bothering to look his way. Cyrus sighed, then took off his coat to hang it up on the rack by the door. He took a seat at the little table by the window, his eyes on the small notebook he had left there.

“They want us to be sure.”

“Fuck.” For a moment, it looked like Jeffrey was going to throw his bottle. It had been almost two weeks since the incident on the ridge. They had cornered the Arachne, and she had gone over the side of the cliff, climbing along its edges. Cyrus had used an extremely powerful spell to strike the rocks with lightning, expecting to shock the spider into the water indirectly and maybe even drown it.

The spell had gone awry. It had been a difficult undertaking to properly align the storm rod, and he took a huge measure of the blame on his own shoulders. Instead of a cascade of lightning across the face of the cliff, it had all focused on the center, blasting a large hole through the earth and destroying a centuries-old magical item. This, in turn, had triggered an avalanche of stone into the lake, sending a huge wave across the water. He and Jeffrey had spent the next several hours frantically scanning the shoreline for her body. The Arachne feared water, and he hoped she had been crushed beneath the rubble, doomed to rot at the lake’s bottom.

The local police had shown up the next day and determined, in their limited knowledge, that someone had blown the damn place up. That had resulted in the feds arriving, making for more lawmen than Cyrus had cared to count. With hesitation, the two had fled to this motel. They had made several calls to the Order asking for instructions, but were then stuck in a holding pattern while the Council deliberated their next move.

“So how are we supposed to be sure?” Jeffrey asked, his gaze fixated on the screen.

“The Oracle has started spouting nonsense whenever it’s asked about her, but it won’t say she’s dead. They said it was like radio interference, as if the Oracle was listening in on another frequency. I hate to say it out loud, but she may have gotten away.”

Jeffrey snorted. “Unless she had a submarine under those cliffs, there’s no way she could have escaped.”

“It’s not for us to question their decision. They command, we obey.” Cyrus wrung his hands together. “There’s something else though. Unrelated.”

“Oh?”

“Sir Marcus is dead.” Cyrus had barely known the man, but he had been Jeffrey’s mentor. Marcus had been a legend among the Knights of the Order, a man whose exploits defied explanation. Little had been said of him recently and rumors of his involvement with a powerful coven of witches had slowly spread through the grapevine. The last story he had heard was that Marcus had stumbled across a highly secretive group and had been planning a raid to capture them all for questioning.

“How?”

“In his sleep. It took them a while to retrieve his body, but when they did, they discovered three tiny holes in his neck, like the sting of an insect. The venom was long gone, but...” Cyrus shook his head. “They think it was a succubus.”

Jeffrey stood up, his beer forgotten. When he got to the door, he grabbed his own coat and stepped out into the rain.

“I’m going out,” he told Cyrus, then slammed the door. Cyrus watched him cross the parking lot and then the street, heading for the bar that was over there. He checked the clock and noted the time.

He would give Jeffrey a couple hours to cool down and then retrieve him. He couldn’t blame him for being angry. If Marcus really had been killed by a succubus, there would be no reprieve for his soul until the thing had been destroyed and sent back to hell. Unless the foul demon decided to destroy it long before then. There was no telling what the demon would do.

Cyrus shivered. Many of his brothers had perished since his childhood, but he always took comfort that their souls had moved on as planned. The idea of an eternity of torment or, even worse its absolute destruction terrified him. Some day, he too would meet his fate at the end of something’s claws, or maybe its fangs. Members of the Order rarely died of old age, and those who did tended to be the ones running the show.

Thunder rumbled outside, rattling the thin windows of his hotel room. Opening a bag of sunflower seeds, he sat down at the table and popped a few in his mouth. He worked the seeds around, splitting them with his teeth and setting the shells in the ashtray. He pulled out their map of the woods and gazed over it, tapping the shattered cliffs with his fingers.

Where are you hiding? He drew an X through the lake at the quarry. It was going to be a long night.

-g-

Darren stared at the cardboard tube in his hand with a dollop of peanut butter on it. He balanced it on the edge of the table and looked down on it from above to make sure it was directly over the center of the trash can.

“Huh.” He pushed the tube back just a little, wondering what the best placement would be. Not wanting to overthink it, he left it as is. He tightened the jar on the peanut butter and pushed it back against the wall. Strangely, Ana had a couple jars of the stuff stored in the back of their cupboard at home. as well.Leaning over the bin, he contemplated the drop. Should he put something on the bottom so the mouse didn’t get hurt?

“That looks nasty.” Little Mike used his bayonet to push on the edges of the trap. The two boards folded inward slightly.

“Yeah, it does, but is there something else in there?” Dwayne had spotted the trap, and they had gathered around it for a closer look. “These nails don’t even look sharp.”

“Will that really kill you though?” Hayden tossed in a rock and the boards folded in, the nails slapping together. “I don’t get it.”

“That’s the thing about traps.” Cutter spit in the hole between the two boards. “This isn’t meant to kill a man, but everyone else he’s with.”

“How so?”

Cutter knelt down. “Take a whiff boys.”

Darren didn’t have to. He’d already heard some stories from some of the others.

“Gross.” Little Mike covered his nose. “Fuckin’ Viet Cong and their nasty shit.”

“That’s right. Some traps are meant to kill a man, others to maim. This one, though, is meant to create a liability.” He used the edge of his knife to scrape the tar-like substance off one of the nails. “They rub their shit on here. You step in one of these, you become a liability to your squad, one way or another. In a firefight, it’s far easier to gun a man down when he’s trying to drag his squadmate. Outside of fighting, even a scratch can make you horrible sick, maybe even kill you after the fact. Demoralizing.”

“Disgusting is what it is. Do they dunk the nails in their own shit, or hover over this with their pants down?” Hayden pried up the boards to reveal that a single spike had been embedded in the ground. Even if the nails missed, that spike would easily pierce a boot and pin someone there.

“Now that’s nasty.” Cutter grabbed at the spike and yanked it free, then tossed it aside. “Fill this shit up so that none of our boys get stabbed.”

“Nobody’s getting stabbed today.” Darren said, staring into the depths of the trashcan for several seconds before leaving it be. The mouse would be fine, and he would let it go somewhere safe. The library wasn’t a war zone, after all, and he didn’t need to demoralize anybody.

It was dark outside. Storm clouds had gobbled up any remaining light in the sky, but other than some distant thunder, it wasn’t too bad. He watched the rain fall, fighting off another memory. The smell of wet pavement kept him there, kept his mind from wandering to a place of mud and corpses. Inhaling deeply, he set an anchor for his mind, determined not to drift.

There were no streetlights by the library, which meant a dark walk across the street. Instead, he turned his attention to a streetlamp a couple blocks away. He could see the raindrops clearly there, highlighted by the lamp up above. The rain trickled down his forehead and across his face. Turning his head up into the rain, he held out his hands, pretending that they could ever be washed clean of the blood he saw on them every day.

Bright headlights came around the corner, and the car slowed down when it drew near. Darren squinted through the beam and saw that Sheriff Walters was behind the driver’s seat. Walter’s pulled up alongside him and leaned across the front to roll down the window.

“Don’t suppose you’d see clear to do me a favor?”

“I’ve got time.” Darren opened the passenger door and got in. “Where are we headed?”

“A bar out on the edge of town. I got word of a drunk who broke the jukebox and then beat up a couple regulars. Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask, but I thought maybe you could be my backup.”

Darren frowned. “I don’t have to carry a gun or anything, do I?”

“Nah.” Walters squinted through the rain. “Just have my back when I ask him to leave. It’s just me tonight, but the men he put to the pavement, well, they’re far younger than I am.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Darren sat in silence as the town disappeared behind them. He found it odd that Walters would ask a civilian for help, but he owed the man and figured he was probably the most qualified for it.

The windshield kept fogging up, and Walters would turn the defroster on for a few minutes. The car would grow uncomfortably hot, so he would turn it back off again.

“Damned humidity.” Walters cracked a window. It wasn’t too much longer when Darren could see the lights of the bar ahead. It was situated across the street from a motel that promised a TV in every room. When they pulled up, a few guys were waiting for them outside.

“Evening, Sheriff.” They all ignored Darren, but he preferred it that way.

“Evening, boys. ‘Scuse us, police business.” They walked in together, and Darren immediately walked along the edge of the bar, surveying the scene.

A man sat at the bar with several empty glasses in front of him. Darren was impressed by his ability to remain upright based on the dirty glasses in front of him.

“Are you going to pour me another one, or not?” The stranger slammed an empty glass on the counter hard enough that a crack ran through it.

The bartender shook his head, his arms crossed across his chest. “It’s time for you to settle up and go.” He locked eyes with Walters, who nodded his head and took the seat next to the drunk.

“I got word of a man smashing jukeboxes on this side of town. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

The stranger laughed. “Don’t play coy with me, law man. You’re here to arrest me for disturbing the peace.”

“Might.” Walters cocked his head. “Have we met before?”

“Doesn’t matter.” The stranger picked up a shot glass and frowned when he realized it hadn’t refilled itself. He tossed it over the counter where it shattered on the floor.

Walters sighed. “Son, I’m going to ask you once to come with me. I don’t want trouble and neither do these fine people.”

“I ain’t your son, law man.” When he turned to face Walters, Darren got a good look at him, saw the intensity in his eyes. This was a man looking for a fight, hoping to unleash some rage on the world. The alcohol had long ago stripped away any restraint, and it was just a matter of time before he exploded.

The drunk spun in his seat, leaning back against the counter to meet Darren’s gaze. “Is this your son? Are you law man junior? A chip off the old block?” He squinted, his cheeks bright red. “Nah, you ain’t related. No, you’re a soldier boy. I can see it in your shoulders, back from the war already, hoping to buy yourself the American dream, a pretty little house with a picket fence, maybe bed yourself a woman who will make you dinner while you work at the factory, pop out a couple of kids for you? Better yet, lie there on her back every night while you try to fuck her, watch you cry when you can’t keep it up, let you slap her around a bit and blame it on the war?”

Darren said nothing. This wasn’t the first attempt to get a rise out of him and it wouldn’t be the last.

“What’s the matter, soldier boy? Did I hurt your feelings?”

“Just contemplating how someone dressed a turd up in human clothes and taught it how to talk.”

The reaction was immediate, the stranger launching out of his seat. Darren brought his hands up and blocked the first punch thrown his way, amazed at the strength of impact. The drunk took on a boxer’s stance and threw out a couple of feeble jabs, but Darren wasn’t falling for it.

Walters, however, did. He came up from behind and tried to grab the drunk’s wrist, but the man spun around and backhanded the sheriff hard enough that he fell to the ground, his hat sailing across the bar. Walters got his hands up in time to block a kick to his face, but just barely.

Darren put his foot in the back of the man’s knee, dropping him low enough to be put in a chokehold. He grabbed the drunk and yanked him away from the sheriff, noticing right away that the man wasn’t bothering to struggle. He twisted the man to the side just as the drunk spun in place and nearly caught Darren in the knee with a return low kick, popping free of the hold.

“Ooh, you’re fast soldier boy.” The drunk’s face had hardened into a sneering mask of rage, and he took a casual swing that Darren barely side-stepped. This wasn’t some ordinary drunk, this was a man who knew how to fight, and perhaps even how to kill. “Fast enough to run away from Vietnam?”

“I did my time.” Darren circled, remembering to keep his hands up. That was a hard lesson he had learned in high school, and an even harder one in the jungle. He could hear Little Mike’s voice in his head, reminding him to keep his elbows in. This time, when the drunk swung, Darren countered, smashing his knuckles straight into the man’s face.

It was like punching concrete. All of his knuckles popped, pain shooting up his wrist, but he kept his ground.

The drunk stumbled back a step and plugged one nostril to fire blood out of the other. He touched the crimson streak on his lip and held his fingers out to contemplate them.

“That wasn’t half bad, soldier boy.” The drunk grinned and then moved so fast that Darren couldn’t track him. A hard blow to his shoulder spun him around and then he was kicked in the gut, tumbling back into a table.

Darren held his stomach, grunting in pain as he stood. The drunk stood over him now, one hand on Darren’s collar and the other raised to knock him out.

“Jeffrey, enough!” This voice came from a man with in a pale grey duster jacket. He stood in the door of the bar, surveying the scene with a calm but concerned expression.

“I’m just having a drink, Cyrus. Fuckers stopped serving me.” Jeffrey let go of Darren, allowing him to slide to the floor.

“As they should. We need to go. Now.” Cyrus’s eyes lingered on Darren and then moved to Walters. “Sheriff, I apologize for my friend here. He just lost a friend in the war and he really isn’t himself.”

Walters stood up, pain on his face. “Losing a loved one can be hard, but apologies won’t fix this place up.”

“But money will.” Cyrus slapped down a small roll of cash on a nearby table. “And we are leaving now, if he isn’t under arrest.”

A range of emotions crossed Walters’ face, and he finally sighed, his shoulders drooping. He walked over to Cyrus and picked up the roll of cash and tossed it to the bartender. “You reckon that will cover it, Al?”

Al’s eyes went wide as he unrolled the cash, adding numbers in his head. “It sure will, Sheriff. Plus some.”

“You want to press charges?”

“No, sir.” Al stuffed the cash in his pocket and knelt behind the bar. He came back holding an unopened bottle of bourbon and tossed it to Jeffrey, who caught it. “I’m sorry to hear about your friend. Here’s one for the road.”

Jeffrey gave Darren a mock salute and walked out the door, cracking into the bottle. Cyrus just shook his head and walked across the bar to help Darren up.

“He’s not a bad guy, really.” Their gazes locked for several seconds and Cyrus nodded. “And I reckon you understand him a bit. It isn’t personal.”

Darren nodded, but remained silent. He knew exactly how Jeffrey had felt, but something felt off about the whole situation. If Jeffrey hadn’t been drinking and Darren had, their fight would have made more sense. What kind of man could get so intoxicated but still be able to toss around two grown men like they were nothing?

Cyrus ducked out the door and Walters followed, standing in the frame. Darren joined him, and they watched as the two strangers got into a white pickup truck and pulled out of the lot.

“Son of a bitch,” Walters muttered. “I recognize those guys. They came into town same day you did. Said they were looking for some land to buy.”

“Hopefully they decide to move on.” Darren got a chill watching their tail lights disappear over the hill. “I get a bad feeling off of them.”

“You and me both.”

“So why didn’t you arrest him?”

Walters shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better to let trouble pass you by. He’s just a drunk. We get them out here from time to time. Honestly was just planning on letting him sleep it off in a cell, but his friend seems to have his head on straight. Maybe I book him for assault, but unless you want to press charges, I’m fine seeing the back of them.”

“Your call,” Darren said, looking at where the tail lights had disappeared. Hopefully that really was the last of them. The way that Cyrus had casually thrown down some cash told him this wasn’t the first time that he had been forced to bail Jeffrey out.

“You’re right, it is. Thanks for coming along. Didn’t get hurt too bad?”

“No.” He rubbed his stomach. “Just got the wind knocked out of me.” He didn’t mention how bad his hand hurt. There was a right way and a wrong way to land a punch, and he figured he had simply hit at a bad angle.

“C’mon, son. Let’s get you home.” Walters led the way to his car, and they both got in.

Headed back into town, Walters made plenty of small talk. Darren made sure the talk stayed small, his mind drifting back to the moment he had smashed his fist into Jeffrey. His knuckles were throbbing with pain now, and he made sure to keep his hand hidden from the sheriff.

Once home, he waved farewell with his left hand and went inside the house. There was no sign of Ana, and her door was closed, the light off. He pulled some ice out of the freezer and wrapped it in a towel before placing it over his hand. Wincing, he examined the damage.

It hadn’t hurt at first, but now his whole fist was swollen. Grateful he could still bend his fingers, he figured it was a hairline fracture at worst, and maybe also a couple of sprains across his fingers. There wasn’t much to be done for it except to take some aspirin and hope the swelling went down in the morning.

He ate a quick can of soup. He wasn’t particularly hungry and thought about getting up earlier than normal for a run. There was something about how peaceful the world seemed first thing in the morning, but even more so after a good rain.

He opened the door to his bedroom and frowned. The humidity from the storm had gotten trapped inside, making it feel hotter than it should. He left his bedroom door open just a crack and took off his boots, leaving them upright next to his nightstand. Taking a deep breath, his shirt came off next, and he turned off the light, his eyes on the dark ceiling.

When the shadows moved in to hover over him, he already had his eyes squeezed tight, his fingers clutching his dog tags like a talisman against the dark.

-g-

Between the rain and the lack of adequate lighting, Ana could have easily walked across the road to the library and not been spotted. However, she erred on the side of caution and crossed in her wheelchair, using her key to let herself in.

The inside of the library was like a tomb at night. The only sounds she could hear were the distant rumbling of thunder and the soft pitter patter of rain on the roof. However, when she allowed her senses to expand, she could now hear the steady dripping of a water leak somewhere on the roof, and even the rush of air through a loose pane of glass somewhere in the library proper.

She could also hear the delicate scratching of nails on concrete. She cocked her head sideways to hear better, then locked the door behind her. When her wheel squeaked, she heard the scratching stop.

Something much bigger than a mouse was in the library.

Pulling herself free of her chair, she moved silently along the stone wall. Long ago, she had learned to tell the difference between actual brick work and a facade. Primarily, the difference was that a facade would rip itself free trying to support her weight, and she had sported a pretty nasty bruise for weeks as a reminder of that particular lesson.

The scratching resumed, and now she could hear the sound of a tongue licking something, the rich smell of peanut butter in the air. The door to the storage room was just ahead, but she pushed up on one of the ceiling tiles in the dropped ceiling and moved across the space above the door.

Climbing even higher through a narrow gap, she was now on the rafters above the second floor. Moving from beam to beam, she positioned herself to look down on the entire room. There was the damp smell of water and fur down below, and she could smell the creature’s breath.

Just beneath the table, a very wet raccoon was picking its way through pieces of broken glass, greedily gobbling up the peanut butter on the floor. Apparently Darren had left the jar there, and her best guess was that the raccoon had let himself in to avoid the storm.

Surveying the room, it didn’t take long to determine by the air currents that the raccoon had come in through a loose air vent on the floor level. Smiling to herself, she quietly descended, careful to avoid touching the surrounding shelves. Once by the floor, she quietly pulled the vent off and started building a funnel inside of the duct. The raccoon happily slurped up its snack while she tucked the web into place.

Satisfied with her handiwork, she maneuvered around toward the other side of the room, carefully watching the creature below. Satisfied that there were no other exits, she tumbled free of the ceiling and landed on all eight legs.