Nightsiders (13 page)

“Shit,” said Connor, his voice trembling. “They’re all here now.”

“We’re the flipside,” said a soft, low voice from behind and somewhere off to his left. “We’re the underside. We’re the nightside. And we’re never. Going. Away.”

“Fight or flight,” said Nathan Corbeau, moving slowly forward across his section of the landing and maneuvering his body to block the stairs. He was flexing his fists; they looked huge, bigger than before. It was as if his body was changing, becoming even more monstrous. His mouth gaped, the lower jaw touching his chest.

Robert realized he and his family had somehow moved backward, toward the other rooms. He spun around and saw that Monica Corbeau was standing there, having stepped from one of the doorways, and she looked like something from a nightmare. Her white nightgown billowed around her slender form, as if caught up in a wind, and when he glanced down her legs and her feet, he could have sworn that for a moment he glimpsed piglike trotters rather than human toes.

He blinked, hard, making his eyes hurt, and when he opened them, she was normal, a skinny woman in a cheap nightgown, arms held out as if expecting an embrace. Of the Corbeau children, only Ethan was visible. He stood on the landing to his mother’s left, brandishing a switchblade—perhaps the same one from before, when Robert had come here to confront them. His face was dead; there was no vitality there, just a forlorn emptiness that seemed to swallow his whole head.

“Come on, then. Come and fucking get it.” Sarah did not sound like herself. She had now fully embraced that side of her which had first been drawn out by the rape, the part of her that wanted to kill and would enjoy—even relish—the bloodshed. “Fucking come on, you monsters!”

Connor and Molly began to scream; a series of strange, wailing war cries that echoed down the stairwell. Primal screams.

Robert turned again to Nathan Corbeau, and he saw a look cross the man’s face that made him think they could just win this. That look was confusion, and he had never before seen it associated with Corbeau. It looked wrong, somehow, as if this was indeed the first time the man had ever experienced the sensation of not being fully in control.

A second later, without even thinking about it, he was charging at Nathan Corbeau, knife held aloft, a scream in his throat, murder on his mind. Corbeau, caught up in his own story, mirrored Robert’s actions and ran at him, his face a mask of loathing. The two men connected like vehicles impacting at high speed. Robert felt his shoulder blaze, and the blunt impact of a few ribs cracking. He slashed with the knife, catching Corbeau across the cheek and laying it bare to the bone. His teeth were bared through the wound; it was simply an extension of his terrible grin.

“Die!” He screamed the word, slashing again and again with the knife, and then he felt the other man’s arms around him, pulling him down. They twisted to the right, crashing against the banister, and as the wood cracked and the banister broke, they went tumbling down into the stairwell. Robert was only vaguely aware of more fighting above him, and he sent out his love to his fellow warriors in the hope it would gift them with strength enough to finish the fight.

The climax was approaching; the story would soon be told.

The men rolled down the stairs, thrashing and punching and biting. Robert found within him a savagery he had never expected, a bloodlust that took him completely by surprise. He revelled in the primal joy of causing pain to another human being, and realized he had now lost all sense of himself.

When he rolled to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, Robert realized he was no longer part of a human knot with Nathan Corbeau. He got to his knees, wincing at the pain; a sharp, slicing feeling that could have been anywhere or everywhere on his body. Corbeau lay a few yards away, his face turned to the wall. He was holding his side, his front obscured from view, and his legs were twitching.

Robert moved toward his felled opponent, feeling invigorated. If he stopped to think about it, he knew the agony wracking his body would put him on the floor, so instead he kept on going, making up the ground between himself and the other man. The knife was no longer in his hand, nor could he see it anywhere on the floor. But he still had his fists and his feet…even his teeth, if need be.

Corbeau moaned, and rolled slowly onto his back. The carving knife was sticking out from his stomach at an angle. Blood pumped freely from around the blade, shockingly thick and copious. He was breathing heavily, his naked, reddened chest rising and falling. His porcine face was white, bloodless. One of his hands crawled across his belly and clutched the knife handle. The fingers had fused together, forming a crude hoof.

“So you had it in you after all? I thought as much. You’re all the same, you fucking yuppies: all you need is the right amount of pushing.” He laughed, and blood sprayed from between his lips. “You know how this story ends, don’t you?”

Robert fell to his knees, the pain finally becoming too much. “How does it end, Corbeau? You tell me…tell me fast, before you bleed to death.”

Corbeau’s grin was wide and red and ragged. “It ends like it always ends: with death and desolation. It ends with no winners and far too many losers.” He gripped the knife handle, his knuckles turning white. “It always ends the same way.” Visibly straining, he pulled the knife sideways across his belly, dragging the blade through the layers of flesh and fat and gristle. Then he raised his other hand and plunged it into the wound, hooking his misshapen fingers around his intestinal tract and tugging it out into the open, gutting himself; laying bare the metaphor and making of it the meat of cold, hard fact. “It ends…like
this
.” He gave one final tug on his slick, wet innards; blood sprayed like spilled paint across the floor and up the walls.

Then at last, Nathan Corbeau was still.

There were no sounds coming from upstairs, and Robert feared the worst, yet still he could not move. Instead, he stared at the body of his enemy, puzzling over the meaning of his death. His story, like all stories, had eventually reached its end, but Robert was none the wiser for the spilling of blood and the opening of a gut. He stared into the wound, looking deep inside Corbeau’s corpse for answers to questions he could not even bear to ask. If there were tiny words written there, on the man’s insides, then Robert could not read them. It was all just so much red upon red: wet red words upon a wet red background. It felt like a message but try as he might he could not even begin to understand what he was being told.

Finally he struggled to his feet, bones creaking, head spinning, and limped toward the bottom of the stairs. He looked up, thinking it was such a long way to climb, and put his hand against the wall. It was wet with blood. He glanced at his hand, and what it was concealing. Then he took the hand away and gaped in awe at what was uncovered.

Along the wall, all the way up the staircase, was now written the very ending he had dreaded: words and pictures, all drawn and written in Corbeau’s blood, the same blood that had sprayed so poetically, so finally, when he had opened himself up for inspection.

It depicted a holocaust.

Robert saw Sarah’s death, and how she had torn out Monica Corbeau’s throat with her teeth as the last of her breath left her body. Then, in yet more violent slashes of red, he witnessed Connor falling, slashed and torn, as he tried to protect his sister from Ethan Corbeau’s killing blade. Molly had taken down the boy with her cleaver, only to have him slash her throat with a knife as he fell.

They had died together, his children, brother and sister, side by side. At least they had that, in the end.

Weeping and wailing, he reached the top of the stairs and fell down among the remains of his family, trying to put them back together. But the pieces would not join; the glue had run out and they would remain apart, torn from him by something larger and more complex than he could ever hope to fathom. What he did understand, in that moment of extremity, was that he was the only one left alive for the sequel.

His mind ripped to shreds, Robert smiled through a layer of blood.

This story, at last, was over; a new one was about to begin.

THURSDAY

00:00
A.M.

They came for him much later, after the police and the ambulance crews had arrived at the scene to catalog the list of atrocities.

They had watched the aftermath from the trees, realizing they were now free and wondering what to do with that freedom. They watched as the bodies were carried out, nodding as they recognized three of them: the man, the woman, and the boy—the older one they had never really liked. These people—these intimate strangers—whose remains would never properly be identified.

It was dark again. He was sitting in the woods, crying into his fists, when they emerged from the tree line, hand in hand. They were barefoot, their faces were dirty and they did not seem to know where they were or where they had come from. They approached him with caution, as if he were a wild beast, but when he looked up and smiled, they began to run toward him.

They fell into his arms, feeling like they were home at last. The man and the woman and even the boy—had never treated them well, had beaten them and raped them and made them do things to each other that should never be done, not between brother and sister. They still remembered the time before the man and the woman, when they had lived somewhere else with people who had loved and cared for them. This man, they felt, might care for them, too.

They waited for the man to finish crying, moving away from him, but not too far. They wanted to keep him in sight, within reach. The girl sat on a tree stump and watched the man, wondering what his tears would taste like. The boy ran off after a squirrel, baring his teeth and hissing like a snake.

The man continued to cry. The girl thought he might never stop, just go on crying forever, until he finally stopped living. But soon enough he did stop; and he smiled at her with a look that meant she could trust him, and that he could trust her and the boy in return.

The boy emerged from the trees with the squirrel in his teeth. There was red on his cheeks, and the squirrel still twitched, its hind leg jacking like a little piston. The man laughed, and the boy laughed, too. The girl did not see anything funny, but she joined in because she knew it would please them both.

Shortly thereafter, they left the scene, the girl and the boy each holding one of the man’s red hands. They walked into the woods, going deeper and deeper, until finally they came to a place where mist hung at ground level and the spaces between the trees were black as night. The man leaned down and kissed both the boy and the girl on the cheek, and then he straightened and led them into that darkness; the darkness between scenes, between pages, the invisible gaps between stories as yet untold.

Afterword

Nightsiders
started out life as a straight homage to films like
The Straw Dogs
and
Last House on the Left—
the kind of grungy, violent 1970s extreme cinema for which I have a real (and slightly guilty) fondness. I wanted to put my own stamp on the now slightly clichéd setup of a middle-class family being attacked and forced to turn to violence in order to protect themselves…or in this case, themselves
and
their home.

Then, as I sat down to write, something peculiar happened. The story refused to bend to my will. It began to twist and turn in my grasp, taking on a new shape, becoming something entirely different from what I’d originally envisaged.

So now, rather than a tough, noirish thriller with sociopolitical overtones, I was dealing with something much more ambitious and problematic.

That was when I decided to hand everything over to my muse and just go with it, and it led to the strangest writing experience of my life. The story basically told itself, with no apparent gap between thought and page, no room to react to what was forming in my brain before I saw it on the laptop screen. It was if I were simply transcribing the words being whispered in my ear by a particularly giddy psychopath—perhaps it was even Nathan Corbeau himself.

I like to think that the end product has more in common with Michael Haneke’s
Funny Games
than any of the other films I mention above—indeed, I have come to see it as a sort of literary cousin to that truly disturbing piece of cinema, and hope that my novella is even half as effective and interesting. I have a feeling that some people won’t like the direction this story takes, but I hope that an equal amount of readers will appreciate what I’ve tried to do, and acknowledge the freedom I allowed my creative instinct during this project.

Rather than pay sheepish tribute to what I feel is by-and-large an unfairly maligned subgenre of horror cinema, I have attempted to take a fictional template and push it beyond the perceived boundaries of its ilk, while at the same time trying not to sacrifice the basic scares and thrills inherent in the situation I have created.

The horror in which my characters find themselves is a very real one, and even though that sense of reality is stretched just about as far as it can go, I believe that I have paid honest respect to the roots of this kind of story.