Dark Siren (3 page)

Her entire body shook, and her hand now involuntarily released the trash. The clunky plastic thing tumbled loudly down the stairs and rolled all the way to the foot of the big screen, which was now starting to brighten. Emily looked up expecting to see the same dark movie that had played before, but something entirely different was happening now. Someone was walking down the same stairs she had only moments ago walked.

When she saw the original posters from the movies
Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street,
and
IT,
she knew this was the same wall. It couldn’t have been anywhere else. But she was seeing it on the big screen, watching the person—whoever it was—descend through the lens of a movie. And she had seen this movie before, countless times, and countless times she had thought
if I were her, I wouldn’t have gone into the auditorium
. Only now she
was
that girl… wasn’t she?

Wasn’t she?

Emily sucked in a breath of air and rushed at the door to the lobby, knowing full well that if she stayed down there she would have a hard time getting back out. The fire exit door didn’t work as well as it used to, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to push it open without injuring herself, so the door at the top of the stairs was her only way out.

Around her, the sound of the man’s heavy, almost mechanical breathing became louder and louder, and as the seconds passed, it became faster too. As she looked up, she could see through the tiny square windows on the door leading out, light on the other side—the lobby—and seeing the light invigorated her to push toward freedom. But a shape broke the light, and Emily froze.

She backed up a step, then another, and felt panic leap into her throat like hot bile. When she threw her head around to look at the screen, she could see the door to the auditorium, could see the tiny square windows, and through them could see the flickering silver light of the big screen; her own silhouette standing in stark contrast against it.

“This isn’t fucking real!” she screamed, but the only sound she heard was a muffle.

The fire exit,
she thought,
I have to.
She ran, bounding down the steps two at a time using the center rail for support. The man on the screen had pushed the door open and could see her now, rapidly descending the steps. She could hear the sound of her own hurried breathing, delayed by a second or so, as she went pushing past row’s G, F, and E.

None of this could be happening; none of it could be real. It couldn’t be. But when she craned her head over her shoulder to look at the top of the stairs she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that—real or not—this nightmare could very well kill her. This realization made her feet start to shuffle again, and then she was running. She had a decent enough head-start that the man at the top of the stairs—a man with something like a mask wrapped around his head—wouldn’t be able to catch her if she hit the fire-exit hard enough and got it to open on the first try.

But she missed one of the steps, her feet tangled, and she lurched. Her stomach rose as her feet left the ground, and then fell as she plummeted. She struck the metal barrier with the side of her head and hit the stone floor hard with her shoulder. Lights danced before her eyes and her head throbbed from the force of the impact, but adrenaline pumping through her veins kept the pain from becoming debilitating.

She turned to her front, put her palms flat on the floor, and pushed herself up. The only thought racing through her mind was
run, run, run.
The fire escape wasn’t far. If she could only reach it, if she could get up and run fast enough and get past the door, the nightmare would be over. She wanted to scream, to expel the grogginess through her throat and regain control of her body. To push her legs as hard as they could go and rush at the little glowing red sign marked ‘Exit’, but her body felt like it weighed a ton.

Then he was on her. The figure which had a moment ago been standing at the top of the stairs grabbed her by the neck and hurled her across the floor of the theater. Emily screamed as she flew, weightless, across the room, feeling the nauseating rise and fall of her stomach. She hit the ground hard and slid across it. A second later, her head struck an elevated platform with a hard thud. Stars exploded in front of her eyes, her skull felt like it had caved in at the side, and a warm sensation began to crawl down her cheek.

Emily groaned as her stores of adrenaline began to ebb out like blood from a wound, and the fullness of the pain coursing through her made itself known. Blackness was closing, pressing like a veil over her eyes. The man, this hulking, powerful shape in the center of the auditorium, had turned toward her and was advancing.

A gloved black hand closed around Emily’s face. She tried to scream again, but the urge wasn’t strong enough to translate into action. Fingers of cold drilled into her face, her skull, and her heart. As darkness came and this alien cold took over, she knew, the nightmare wasn’t ending; it had only just begun.

CHAPTER ONE

Trapper

The intruder was hiding in the back room, and it had killed all the lights in the building. Alice Werner approached the door at the end of the hall, stepping lightly—more out of habit than as part of any kind of strategy—and breathing calm, long breaths. This wasn’t her first rodeo, but even experienced riders weren’t exempt from the pre-game jitters.

The owners of Mack’s Pub, a couple of old-bloods who identified more with their Irish roots than the American soil they were born on, had never
seen
the intruder, but they knew it had taken residence in the store room like a rabid possum. Alice was the person called when the weird and otherworldly required eviction or extermination. The two most important words in this particular case were
intruder
and
now
.

She knew two things. Number one, the thing which had been upturning kegs of beer, ripping pipes right out of the ceiling, and slamming the door to the store room at all hours, was just as much pissed off as it was unwelcome. The second thing was the intruder
had only recently started making a mess of the place, so it was likely to be some poor, angry new kid on the block, or an old, nasty haunt freshly awoken from a century old sleep.

Having committed herself to a lazy day when she had woken up this morning, Alice hoped for the former.

“Is this the room?” Alice asked, in a low, almost whispered voice.

Mack and Sherry Byrne had walked Alice as far as the corridor leading to the store room, but had stopped at the mouth of the hallway and looked like statues—frozen in time, and deaf to Alice’s words. She frowned and tried again.

“Is this
it
?” she asked, pointing to the door at the end of the hall and speaking a little louder. There were two other doors in the hall, one of them probably led to a kitchen, the other to an office. All of the doors were closed, though the one at the end of the hall looked pretty worse for wear. Thin, jagged lines expanded in a spider web pattern around a central point of impact, but the wood was bent outwards suggesting it had been hit from the inside. Enough force had been put into the blow to cause the wood to chip and crack in some places, and the paint to flake off and collect on the ground in front of the door.

What the hell hit this?
Alice thought.

“That’s it,” Mack said, but before he could say anything else, Sherry said “Don’t get too close.”

One of Alice’s eyebrows came up in an automatic, quizzical gesture. “Didn’t you hire me to get close?”

The couple gave no response. Sherry looked like she was one sharp breath away from a panic attack. She was turning a rosary over in her hands so fast it looked like she was rubbing her palms, her eyes were red and puffy from tears, recent and old, and she was muttering something that could’ve been the Lord’s Prayer.

Alice set her backpack on the ground and cracked her knuckles. Unzipping the backpack, she removed a smaller bag from within and pulled a peculiar looking old Polaroid Instant Camera out. The hairs on her arms stood on end as she carefully handled the machine, an instrument so old it had been taking pictures since before she was born.

The camera was black all over and had a matte finish. A red stripe ran across the top with the word ‘Trapper’ written in black paint. Feeling cool to the touch, it seemed to almost hum in her hand, as if singing with delight—if such a thing was even possible. Alice flicked the camera on, waited for a second, and brought it up to eye level.

“You’re going to take our picture, now?” Mack asked.

Alice spun around and saw him through the eye of the camera. Aside from the trigger button, the camera had a slider toggle on the side. One setting read “REF,” the other read “MAT”. It was always set to REF because setting it to MAT and accidentally triggering it with a human in view wasn’t something she wanted to risk doing. Alice double checked—
REF.
Concentrating her will into the camera, Mack and Sherry’s forms suddenly seemed to shimmer as if seen through water, like swimming shadows in the gloomy darkness of the corridor. Then they disappeared.

When she was looking through the eye of her camera, it was as if she had become a part of the camera itself. Her field of vision wasn’t constricted to a tiny square of light, but rather expanded so that she could see more of the world than she could with the naked eye.

“No,” Alice said, “I’m going to take
its
picture.”

“Is… that how you… do it?”

Alice lowered the camera and let the smile come naturally to her face. “Do what?”

“How you, you know,
deal
with these things.”

“I don’t think a pair of good, church-going Catholics such as yourselves really want to know the answer to that question. Best leave the Necromancy to the heathens, as it says in the Bible.”

“You know the Bible?”

“You sound surprised.”

Something smashed on the other side of the door. Sherry jumped and made a sound half way between a laugh and a cry before hiding behind her husband. Mack’s eyebrows met in the middle and he clenched his jaw. The sound hadn’t startled Alice, but it
had
set her body alight with anticipation and excitement. The drums of war had started beating.

“That thing’s been causing us nothing but trouble,” Mack said through gritted teeth. “I don’t care how you do it, just get rid of it.”

Alice nodded. She reached for the door and let her hand rest on the knob.
Icy to the touch
. “Whatever happens, whatever you hear,” she said, “Don’t open this door.”

I’ve always wanted to say that,
she thought, and she didn’t check for Mack’s reaction as she turned the knob and pushed on the door. It swung open, croaking loudly on its hinges like a fat toad in a swamp, and revealed the dark room beyond. A cool, stale breath which reeked of old beer, wet wood, and burnt electrics rode out to greet her, but she pressed on and swept inside. As soon as the door closed, she understood two more things about the
thing
taking residence in this room.

She wasn’t welcome here. Despite
it
being the intruder,
it
had made this place its home—a place of rest, a lair. Who wants a stranger stepping into the place where you sleep? She was also beginning to understand, judging by the slowly rising electric charge in the air, that it was aware of not only her presence, but also her power… and it hated her for both of those reasons.

“Alright,” she said into the darkness, in an almost casual way. “I know you’re in here, we both know you’re not supposed to be here, so why don’t you just pack your shit and leave?”

She heard a sound from the other side of the room, like a chair scraping across a floor. The only illumination in the room was a rectangle of light filtering in from a small window high up on one of the walls. Dusk was settling outside, and the shaft of pale, orange light was cutting a clean set of lines in an angle across the room. But she couldn’t see what chair had moved, or where it had moved to.

“C’mon, man,” she said, “We both have stuff to do. Can’t you just get out?” No points for trying, but she figured she would attempt the easy approach first.

Silence followed, but her heart was starting to pick up the pace. Alice brought Trapper up to her eye and looked through it. She made a scan of the room, first left and then right, and settled on a corner of the room in which shadows seemed to congregate like flies on a corpse. There were boxes on the floor there, and a set of tall shelves which had been knocked over, their contents nowhere to be seen. Alice concentrated, blinked, and the shadows lightened to reveal… a shape. It was human, but it also wasn’t. The angles and dimensions were all wrong; the shoulders too hunched, and arms so long that the hands—if they were hands—almost seemed to drag across the floor.

If she hadn’t known she was looking for a human, it could have been mistaken for a large ape.

“There you are,” she said, “Aren’t you a handsome devil?” and she moved her finger to the trigger, but the shape bolted before she could press the button, flying across the room in a blur. Alice spun around and attempted to find it again, but the thing was slippery. It smashed through what was left of a wooden table, sending an explosion of splinters in all directions like shrapnel from a grenade. Alice covered her eyes and turned away to shield herself from the spray. She took a step back and her foot came down on an inconveniently placed bottle of wine. The ground rolled underfoot and the world tilted, but she stuck a hand out and held herself against a wall.