...Waits In The Dark

Quietly, with anxiety sharp as spearheads, I carried out the operation. Shovelful by shovelful, I covered the manifestation of my transgressions. Under the stars, in the quiet swamps. I buried her where no man treads. Some local superstitions, nonsense mythologies invented by long dead Indians,  scared off the yokels. It's the perfect place, because the ground is soft enough to dig in, with enough tree limbs and decomposing foliage to create a solid netting to cover the hole.The difficult terrain kept wandering vehicles from happening by. Moving across the swamp pulled a few muscles in my back.

Once I filled the hole, I covered the work with decomposing, plum colored leaves and fallen branches. I finished, but something in my mouth bothered me. An abscess between two molars. It felt like a small pinprick. I poked the sore gum with my tongue. A faint fever warmed my forehead, but in the late autumn night such conditions comforted me. I went back into the car. I almost lost my mind as i frantically searched my pockets. I forgot to take the keys- but then I found them on the floor! I leaned back in the seat, relieved. I turned on the engine, the lights, and took it slow. The mud road clung to the tires. The pistons screeched. The wheels spun, but the car barely moved.  I worried about the tires succumbing to the mud but the vehicle passed along.  In the cold, the mud stiffened, like rising cake.

The mud became rocky dirt with patches of weeds, and this rocked the car until I cross an old iron bridge. The county name, Alma, at the crown. A Meadowlark nested in the hole of the A. The creek beneath hummed in the night, the yokels said.  Crippled souls of the dead wander blind, and crawl into this creek, and once they fall in, they can not crawl out- only moan in despair. The yokels came up with entertaining fables. I stopped in the middle of the bridge, and turned the heat on. I let my numb fingers thaw. I huddled over driver side vent. The others broke. I shivered in my coat, the fox hair that warmed the collar looked like a new color all together. I brushed it with my fingers and found them painted with red streaks. I kept the jacket on the way out. Looking over the barrier, peering down into the creek. Nothing but darkness, with music of running water clear. One small splash, and some bubbles floating, but no wailing of ghosts in white sheets. I took the coat off. Flushed with bitter winds, freezing ropes winding around every bone. Shivering, teeth chattering, holding my breath, I dropped the coat down for those trapped souls below to keep cozy with.

I drove farther more, until the road smoothed out, and lights from the nearest village speckled in the distance. I turned my lights off. In case anyone saw me driving the car. I kept moving slow, slower than the speed limit mandates. Once the road became gravel, other cars came by. I pulled over for them, and let them pass. Then I started again and continued to her home. A quiet farm house, all to myself.

I parked the car in the garage, closed it. Entered the house, and made sure not to leave my shoes on the mat, and not to turn on a single light. Moon light guided me through the unfamiliar chambers and halls of the house. Not as big as I imagined, but clean, spacious, and comfortable. Not a single locked door.

When I found the bedroom I wasted no time dropping my mud splattered shirts on the floor and laying down. My tooth ached still, and after all the work I carried out, my skin dried to stale flakes- I thirsted for something sweet, but weariness wrapped velvet ribbons around me and pulled me in. I lay in bed, the fever and the cold air made for cool sweat that my hair and pillow soaked.  Yet no sleep came. I climbed up, so weary, so tired, my limbs strained and numbed, my eyes watery. To the kitchen I found luck. Some alcohol, fourth of a bottle left of something brown and strong. I sat there in the fridge glow and drank the bottle. I felt tired after that. I turned on the radio, and flipped through the rural stations. I looked out the windows across the farmland. Some cattle swooned and moaned. Out standing in the star light. Docile creatures. I closed those curtains. Drunken numbness bled slow. My ribs hurt. My back hurt. My legs hurt. I thought I heard a sigh from behind me. I crept to the door in the back of the kitchen, sure my alerted senses caused by being within vicinity of an unfamiliar place. I pressed my ear against the wood. Something inside indeed sighed, something raspy sighed far past the door. I took the knob, but it twisted around freely, fixed to nothing. The furnace, of course, I rationally concluded. I felt like a comedian with no funny jokes. I left the empty bottle to drip in the sink, and I carried my drunken bones back to the stairs. I almost collapsed right there at the foot but I caught myself, and pulled along the railing. Once in the bedroom, I smacked onto the covers. I thought I smelled rain, but every star twinkled. I fell asleep at once.

I awoke with the lightning and its terrible thunder crash. Unlike any thunder I ever heard before, this thunder dropped to the earth with t full weight of the atmosphere above. Rain obscured the glass. The neighbor’s lights caught in streaming beads cast their illuminating ray into the bedroom. I reached to pull shut the curtains. But the illness drained my motor skills and heaviness amplified. My contorted, rail thin arm trembled in the pale blue of nightscape light, the bones unfurled from the rested angle to erect. My elbow joints popped, and fingers extended out like thirsty tongues lapping the window condensation. My body poisoned by a toxic cover resting over my feverish body. I lifted my head from the warm pillow, moist with sweat. My heart jackhammered in the night, my jaw throbbed. The abcess in my mouth beat like a tiny heart in the lower corner of the my jaw. At this waking moment since I collapsed back into the mattress, I believed the abscess awoke me. Its condition worsened. The pain started as a soreness when I bit down, but as this advanced state even the root beat with a rapid pulse. I lay in bed, holding my swollen jaw, dry tear ducts squeezing my eye lids, only spit dribbled from the corner of my mouth - my lymph nodes felt like bolts screwed into my neck. My mouth felt drier than wicker timber. i wiped the drool away, rolling over and finding the spit not to be my own as it tasted like a familiar mouth, one that wore minty chapstick. No names nor faces occurred to me, but the taste I recalled from my nocturnal masquerades.

The storm continued. Branches fell onto the neighbor's roof, and collected together like a beaver bam. The rain flowed in irregular patterns as if intentionally structured. I dropped my eyelids and hoped fortune favored plummeting again to sleep but sleep did not come. Despite the infection eating away at my body, I felt more awake, more alert than ever  before. I wanted to switch the lamp on, and get moving through my stack of unread manuals until the sun rose again, yet as the fork shaped veins on my forehead pressed against my skin like tremors beneath the dirt., i thought, not blood, it isn’t blood at all in my veins but but squirming, fattened parasite worms wriggling through my veins into my brain. A wedge drove between the hemispheres of my brain. The fluid thick and yellow jamming the passage of fluids and chemicals in my brain. The mucus felt like gravel in my sinuses and the whiskey headaches struck like hellish taps. The alcohol pass in my veins, and brew in my stomach like an acid vat. I rested my head knowing that my sleeping hours ended. Something foul arose from inside me, and it reached with virulent fingers from my guts up my throat where its thumb pressed against the back of my tongue. I gagged without sound, emitting guttural calls to the night, speaking insincere and incredulous prayers for my health but the damage already did its work and I mustered what spirit remained in my body and I lifted once again.

How the ceaseless replenishing need for water stimulated me to lift my aching body and sit on the edge of the bed awake in the darkness with a clock blinking, the default numerals glowed in blinking neon- 12:00. I went to sleep at midnight. Ignoring the clock, my attention drifted to the neighbor's house. The kitchen light on, as always before, with the rest of the house sleeping like nursing calves. For a brief moment i thought I saw the shadow of an occupant, and my heart leapt as I yearned to find the owner’s young daughter up for a nighttime drink, yet this shadow remained frozen on the kitchen floor. Its almost human shape broke apart with another ugly but unignorable flash of light accompanied by thunder stronger than Thor ripping a semi trailer into pieces. The lingering stammer faded into a traveling whisper then echoed back into another bomb strike of thunder that shook the bed beneath me. No lighting cast from the clouds but still the horrendous thunder hung like the hooves of approaching horsemen. My brain split and the fluid flowed inside my thoughts. Demons in the air, such twisted spirits that delight in no more than the decay of the doomed once the fluid entered my brain i did not see any doubt. I watched the storm outside wash down the glass. I opened the window expecting to hear the howl of wind but instead only the delicate showering of easy rainfall. But the clouds above still rolled, forms ever shifting, composed of fists and gnawing teeth scowling, ever roaming across the night sky driven by ethereal colts.

I gave up looking for the lovely maiden next door. My stomach swayed as a boat does on raging seas. I felt those fingertips raise over the crown of my throat. I covered my mouth, and rose to my feet, the cold wood chilling my soles. The lingering growl echoed in the sky. Dense, sticky heat and the patient metronome of the rain seeped through the window screen. Other than the clouds and ripples of dark puddles the night hung still, suspended over some endless crevasse. As the the rain spilled from the gutters and fell through the ground. The cement, roads, grass, yard, all sunken in darkness bur for rippling rings of silver in the middle of dark pools. Condensation built on the glass and all the fingerprints and blemishes reveal  themselves in random but predictable patterns.

I covered my mouth, screws scraping against the roof of my mouth and a noxious gas leaked from between my fingers.. In the dark, my foot found a sharp point- a nail sticking out from the floor or a loose screw left behind- and i cursed, holding my foot, tainted blood trickled down between the floorboards. I held my foot up but saw nothing in the pale light. I reached for the light switch waiting on my toes until i found the buttons. I pressed the switch again and again. The lights stayed off. I cursed again. I didn’t know where the fuse box was. I unbolted my door and entered the hallway, my bleeding foot leaving a trail of spots behind me as i went two doors down to the bathroom. Once inside my stomach settled and I sat in the dark, wiping blood away with tissues and dropping them in a basket. I took medicines from behind the mirror,a little bit of everything, and using my hand to collect water, I swallowed many different capsules. My body handled it well and I just waited for the drugs to take affect. I passed through the dark once more into the kitchen, where I watched the neighbor's house and drank four full cups of water. Still my mouth and lips dried like paper. I passed through the dark once more following my own blood trail back to the bedroom.

I locked the door, and stepped carefully, sitting on the foot of the bed, the bleeding ceased, but the sickness remained every bit and more so. Sweat trickled down my body and as I lay back into the sweat moistened mattress, I imagined myself in a petri dish of septic bacteria, a doctor’s great eye peering down from the microscope. My fluids swirled, the pain in my mouth awoke and stabbed an icepick between my molars. I waited, the alcohol losing its numbing agent. I never longed for sleep more. I watched time move like a rusted raw. I must’ve been deathly ill. I saw another great eye shift across the wall opposite my bed. I law powerless as the lightning erased the moving shadow and as the whiplash of light died to celestial vapor, more dancing shadows twisted and wove between each other like stitchwork of a ruined aristocratic tapestry. Such wonders the shadows bore to me, formless yet striking, paralysing, and near hypnotic. The lighting flashed, and the shadows scattered like cockroaches only to reform under a new network of patterns and motions- assembling into more defined visions. Such curious creatures appeared- things I never saw before nor imagined could be. I welcomed the poison of whiskey and the delusion of illness if only these sights happened more often. I reached out to these dancing demons as I did the shadows jumped back away from my soft, untoned reach offered, not to be taken, but left to drop once more. I rolled over to see the outside world again.

Through the screen, seeping down the window sill, dripping onto the floor. Rainwater spilled out, seeping into the gaps between the boards and racing down in dark lines. I choked back complaints, my medicine doing nothing for me, rolling from bed the sweat stained sheets clinging to me like pine needles. I closed the window. The vents blew cold air. The chilling numbed my exposed flesh. The condensation on the glass thicked, and in a rush of alarm I noticed a new pattern not there when i saw before. Two hand prints, with slender knives for fingers. I wiped away the condensation. It all came off but for the dual prints. For they came from outside. Then i noticed standing idle in the neighbor's kitchen light, what i believed to see before, not the lovely young daughter, but a cloaked and hooded figure watching from outside the kitchen window under its bronze, fluorescent beam. I hid back in, a sudden shock, a sudden horror- the awful feeling that this figure not only saw me, but made and maintained eye contact from the distance. This terror gripped my heart, and festered, as worried more that it mistook my curiosity as welcome.

I closed the window, bolting it closed and closing the curtain, leaving the room in pitch blackness, i moved to the door to check that I locked it tight. I covered myself with blankets and sheets. Only dreams, only the dark- I lay watching the dark, my eyes on the trench black wall opposite my bed. Nothing flickered. Not a hair moved on my body. Then I heard it, that sighing again- but now unmuffled by concrete walls. A much clearer, identifiable sound emerged. A shovel striking the earth. The soft impact penetrating the raw soil, and ripping it apart. That tearing of dirt as the iron wedge bites through. That sound, I knew it damn well by then. I laid still. I locked my door before. The structure solid African Mahogany boards, fastened with three steel bolts that lock on the inside. The sound, I listened carefully, real as my breath, but coming from outside- where I saw it stand. For sure, I felt it still there causing that horrid boring. I lay with eyes quiet and ears shut. Every little sound I bit and swallowed and they made sound no more. Any sound I ignored, the chirp of grasshopper, the bending of beams in the ceiling, the scraping of dust in the vent, but the burrowing remained-  but now it sounded no sharper, and no nearer, but now the sound of the bleeding gums, scoop after scoop, came not from outside- but from above. In the attic. I heard for real the reverberation against the ceiling above me.

Water splashed against my nose and cheeks. I rose, and elt behind me to find everything I touched, wet. I ran my hands up. Streams leaks down the headrest. I put my foot down, and found the the puddle below my window flowing outward as liquid does but then it narrowed and snaked towards my bedside, blimbing the posts and dripping down the headrest. I tore the sheets and blankets away, casting them to the floor, then i pulled the mattress off, flipping it over to the floor and finding it soaked through. Once the mattress lay on the floor, my anger settled to exhausted humiliation. I felt gratified that no one stood to see my tantrum. I sat on the box spring, unsure what to do next.

Then i saw what looked like slow swimming on the opposite wall, the subtle shifting… as if a piece of the darkened wall silently bent and moved on its own.

A long, drawn out sound like the retraction of a lawnmower choke drawn up from the bowels of my throat and out my trembling mouth. Stitch by stitch, my composure gave way to utter anguish. The wall moved. I saw it! The figure into the corner, how with its yellow fox eyes like a rifle round locked and ready to discharge. Though it knew damn well my condition worsened, it did not strike. It stood in the corner, picking at its lower lip, i could hear the elastic snap, standing, waiting, and in my horror I lay frozen, realizing that this spectre waited there since I last locked the door waiting and whispering. The horrid appearance- her pale skin masked with those plum rotten leaves and a coat of mud.

The alarm clock digits faded and the neighbor's light did too, fatally dissipating under a tide of darkness. Thunder crashed without lightning. I noticed the storm already passed over, yet the charge of electric power striking the earth shook the house, and I did not mistake voices in these cannon raptures destroying ramparts in the sky. I clung to the boxspring as it rocked across the floor. Cracks ruptured the dry wall, support beams under the floor dropped and crashed, leaving dipped and sinking parts of the floor. Gases arose from the holes and cracks, buzzing like flies, tiny material, a thousand little monsters floated within. The gas rose and I breathed it in. The shadow creatures on the wall peeled away, and I heard them crawl across the floor towards me.

The last fragments of light I reached for, my fingers extending to touch one ring of light but desperate reac missed the light died away like the closing of  a well and i now saw nothing but felt my body stew in a soup of own infection. The wall, the darkness, the clouds, the awful expressions of malice, vengeance, spellbinding majesty! Beneath me an ocean of green foam over tumbling waves crash. I will not roll away from my bed, soaked in poison or not. Those demons I see yet. They creep into the darkness after me, their burning eyes and seeping claws hook into my weakened body. Piece by piece, I feel it all coming apart, my feet, my fingers, my arms, my organs. She watches me still as I suffer, she waits for the final lasp of strength. For the last demon to take its mouthful. Then I will be in her hands, when I am rendered crippled and helpless. Those heavy, wet footsteps- each one squishing and leaving behind muddy prints. She holds out for me as I shiver, my dripping wet coat.