After Midnight (7 page)

It
happened on the muggy night of July 23, 2005, when I still lived in the picturesque small town of Picketts Meade, in northern Virginia’s Fauquier County. My elderly aunt had recently died and left me her ramshackle Victorian house. I needed money at the time, so I sold and hocked everything from the inside that I could, from furniture and antiques to my aunt’s old moth-eaten muumuus.

The place was nearly empty, and I was planning on selling that, too. I had already put it on the market, and some potential buyers had viewed it earlier in the day; a young couple in their late twenties. The wife was pregnant and the husband was an up-and-coming doctor at Fauquier hospital in Warrenton; they wanted a bigger house for their growing family, and the wife was in love with antiquated architecture. The price was reasonable, I thought, and they seemed to really like the house.

I liked the location myself, but I thought that the house proper was slightly unnerving; it looked to my young eyes like something from a gloomy gothic novel or a black-and-white Alfred Hitchcock film. It was drafty inside and dusty beyond even my notoriously low standards. (A stickler for clean houses and bodies, my aunt spent the last months of her life in the hospital). I hated it; so big, so ancient, not my kind of scene at all, so to say. I wanted a nice normal apartment in Warrenton; and in order for that to happen, the Bates house had to go.

My room was on the second floor, at the end of a narrow, lonely corridor with dull pink wallpaper peeling from the walls and ugly brown spots adorning the low ceiling. Most nights, I sat up at my desk trying to write mystery novels by comfortable lamplight and failing miserably. My room was tiny, decorated with only the desk, which held my notebooks and cheap
Bic pens, and a small cot pushed up against the wall. From here, I could hear every moan and groan of the vacuum-silent house, the vermin in the walls (I hoped that the young couple wouldn’t find out about that until after the deal had been made), and even a pin dropping on the first floor. I had no radio or CD player and no TV, so the house was perpetually quiet as a tomb; so quiet it was deafening.

On the humid night of the 23
rd
, with thunder and lightning making infrequent appearances outside, I was bent over one of my notebooks, scratching out a terrible Whodunit set in a dreary British fishing village. Sweat poured from my head and dripped onto the page, the wetness from my writing arm left a dark grease stain on the paper, and I generally hated life. There was no AC in the house and I was too tight to waste any of my money on a fan, so I had to put up with the terrible heat.

As I was engrossed in my terrible story, my ears detected a sound other than the normal ones to which I had become accustomed. It sounded vaguely like a door somewhere on the first floor slowly creaking open. That noise froze me like a statue and filled me with near insufferable fear. It was a terrible sound, like the wail of a sick infant
crying desperately for its mother.

I ceased movement and strained my ears to detect the slightest sound; the wind whistled eerily in the eaves. That was all for a moment, until I heard what dreadfully sounded like a shuffling footfall in the house below.

At this a shock of fear ran through me, paralyzing me. At length I was able to sit up straight in my metal folding chair without making any noise. Over the ghostly wind I plainly heard another scraping footstep and a crash as something made of glass exploded on the floor; it sounded as if the action was coming from the kitchen.

Don’t be such a pussy
,
I belittled myself. S
ome asshole is down there wrecking your house, grow some balls and go get him.

A tiny measure of courage surged though me after this half-assed pep talk. I was slightly afraid that the burglar would have a gun, but I decided that it didn’t really matter; I’d just creep up on him. I knew the house well enough, and I was pretty sure that I could manage to sneak up on whoever it was and neutralize the threat.

I closed my notebook and clutched the right hip pocket of my Levis and felt the reassuring outline; thin and rigid. I fished my pocket knife out, and looked disappointedly at it; it seemed a more formidable weapon when there was no foe to skew.

Still frightened despite the confidence which trickled into me, I stood, and the legs of my chair scraped across the wooden floor. As if in answer, a moan of blood-chilling inhumanity rose from the kitchen and drifted through the barren house. The terrible noise would not have been out of place in a
nineteenth century gothic novel. It sounded, frankly, like the wail of a dammed soul, a
hungry
damned soul.

My heart jumped into my throat and my stomach clenched. I stood silently, listening to see if the intruder would come my way; he didn’t, thank God. Though I wanted nothing more than to call the police, my cell phone wasn’t charged
. If anything was to be done, I would have to do it myself.

So, pocket knife in shaking hand, heart thundering in my chest like a herd of wild Clydesdales, I managed to gather enough courage to descend into the darkened bowels of the house, where some kind of enemy lurked. I’m a big guy, mostly useless fat, and my worst nightmare as I prepared to go down into the gloomy chasm was that I would encounter some demented Rambo or Arnold S
chwarzenegger. The thought of being accosted in the dark by a wall of bulging muscle struck fear into my heart.

Of course I knew that I was being unreasonable; buff slabs of meat have better things to do with their time. Whoever was down there was probably just a skinny little crack head, a Dave Chappell lookalike. In that case, if he didn’t ambush me from a dark corner, or slash my passing ankle from under the sofa or the kitchen table, I could take him for sure. I didn’t know why a drug fiend would want to break into an old Victorian
house; the place was obviously filled with not much more than dust and cobwebs. Then the thought struck me that maybe my visitor was high on something. I’d seen on the Discovery channel what some narcotics did to men. Some, held in the wild thrall of PCP, had to be gunned down by police after failing to heed warnings. Some people were even turned into lunatic monsters who could easily defeat the likes of Rambo. A few even flung themselves from high buildings, only to splatter on waiting pavement. If I was facing a madman with no regard for his own wellbeing, a beast with no pain threshold…

Oh, shut the hell up and go defend your home, pussy.

I smiled at my own thoughts, but my heart still hammered and my stomach was still sour, sweat poured off of me in torrents. I really didn’t want to move too much and alert my visitor that I was on the prowl, but I had to. The boards would creak, and he would hear me. Maybe he would set up in a position from which to strike like a quick desert snake, or maybe, being nothing more than a sober burglar, more afraid of me than I was of him, he would flee into the night. It could have been kids looking to party, deface decomposing property, or clandestinely make out. I hoped to find a few idiot teenagers with spray paint, stolen beer, and mussed hair, but my pessimistic nature refused to let go so easily: Rambo, Arnold, Mad Max
and
shrimpy Dave Chappell were lurking down in the murky depths, waiting to attack.

I took a deep
breath, and began to slowly move across the wooden floor, which creaked and moaned loudly under me. Every time this happened I froze and winced, expecting to hear rushing feet on the stairs and the sounds of gunfire. I finally equated the situation with ripping a bandage from a wound; I would have to do this quick, or I’d never do it at all. I could hide in a closet until dawn, but what would that say about me? I would have to live the rest of my life knowing that I cowered, shivering and whimpering, in a closet while I was robbed and victimized.

I strode across the floor, disregarding creaking boards, and gently eased the door open. The hall was dark, the light spilling from my room but a feeble spark. I knew the layout of the house; I could do it without switching on a light, hopefully surprising the in
truder. His eyes would be night-adjusted, and mine wouldn’t, which wasn’t good. Staying rigidly in place, I leaned back into my room and switched off the light, plunging myself into what I imagined a blind man lived every day. I held my palm before me and wiggled my fingers, but saw nothing of them; it was as though they weren’t there at all. The dark was unsettling, unbroken, and unreal. I don’t believe that I had ever seen such. Even outside at night I’d had the aid of stars, the moon, or lights from human made structures. This was nothingness, a void, a vacuum, the view from inside an interred coffin.

After a few sluggish minutes hearing the occasional blood-chilling thump and moan from downstairs, I figured that my eyes would be well enough adjusted to aid me; there was a stove light on in the kitchen, and maybe I had even left the bathroom light on down there. I took a step forward, then another, and before I knew it I was on the third step from the top, mashing my body against the wall. A flash of lightning lit the foyer, and in the ghastly glow I saw the front door, the end table where I sat the day’s odds and ends, and the coat rack next to the door. For a wild moment the rack appeared to be a hostile human standing stiff and motionless. My heart nearly exploded from my chest before I saw what it was. I let out a shivery breath and slowly took the next two or three steps, frantically trying to breathe slowly and quietly, so not to alert the burglar to my presence. From the back
of the house, toward the kitchen, I heard a thump, and the clatter of something glass bursting on the floor. There was a sound like feet shuffling on linoleum and then another ghostly moan which struck an icepick of abject terror into my knocking heart. At that moment, I nearly abandoned my expedition, but pushed on.

I stepped off the last step and onto a board which moaned like the as-yet unseen asshole breaking shit in my kitchen. I froze up for a long moment, my ears tuned to hear the slightest sound. A roaring crash of thunder startled me nearly into a heart attack. I heard another moan from the end of the short hall leading to the kitchen, but it sounded no more excited than before. I took a step forward. To my immediate left was the arch into the parlor, which also opened on the small kitchen. If I was right, then the asshole was somewhere in front of, or beside, the door at the end of the hall. I could go through the parlor, making a giant C, and come in behind the noisy burglar.

I inched into the parlor. My eyes were useless in here; it was as dark as the hall upstairs had been. I took a tentative step forward and promptly tripped over something. I clattered to the floor in a tense heap with a monstrous thud that rattled the windows and shook the floor like an earthquake.

“Shit!” I muttered frantically, realizing that my Pearl Harbor had been canceled, that if a fight was going to happen it would be face-to-face. With my heart pounding, blood thumping in my temples, and pent-up breath caught in my bursting lungs, I jumped to my feet and nearly sprawled once more over the small coffee table. I blotted my sweaty palms on my jeans…and realized that the knife was gone. I almost dropped to my knees in a distraught search, but before that could
happen, a flash of lightning bathed the room in its horrible glow…and I beheld the person who had entered my home unwarranted. In the brief flash, my heart stopped, my lungs dried up and crumbled, and I was filled with such terror that it physically hurt. I didn’t scream. I didn’t have the wind or the rational mind to do anything but doubt what I had seen in the brief, revealing light.

For standing in the threshold between the kitchen and the parlor, the selfsame entrance that I had been planning on using to surprise my uninvited guest, stood a dull cemetery horror beyond my power to properly describe. In that brief flash I saw this man’s face was not only a bloodless hue, but that half the flesh had deteriorated on his right cheek, revealing a dark, gaping cavity. He wore what may have been a dusty burial suit. His eyes had been, possibly in my imagination alone, two pools of dark hunger, gazing at me, and past me, into the fiery depths of hell.

Only a second after being plunged back into darkness, the ghoul began limping towards me, dragging one useless foot along. He let out a long, low moan. I couldn’t see this monster; he was coming at me in total black! Thankfully my paralysis broke and I was able to stumble backwards, my mind reeling and my veins pumping ice water. I backed into the hall, and shortly the ghoul followed, dirty arms outstretched and mouth, full of jagged yellow teeth, open in a wide O. The hot reek of corruption radiating off of him was terrible.

I can’t really recall what happened; I may have been in shock. In any case, my mind has taken great lengths to cover up at least some of what took place, and I do not wish to uncover those horrid memories and
expose them to sunlight. Some things are better left to rot in darkness, and those terrible moments of my life are free to turn to dust, unmissed.

The first clear memory that I have is of me on the parlor floor, the thrashing beast atop me, held away from my face by my shaking arms. The thing was powerful, it tried and tried to lower itself, so that its mouth
might partake of my flesh, I figure. I was panicked, incoherent, like an animal snared in a trap or pinned in a corner by a larger adversary. At risk of being mauled by this creature, I punched the beast’s face with all the strength I could muster. Again and again I bashed and bashed, before my hand slipped through the ghoul’s sodden face, into its brain cavity beyond, and became mired in what felt like cold mud.