Horror/Home Invasion/Fiction/Suspense
What Happens After Midnight
Part 2
I thought I heard knocking on our bedroom windows. There were two on each side of the room. Scott and I were in bed when a tapping started from outside. It sounded like people were standing in the bushes, moving around to rap on the glass playfully.
I finally awoke with a feeling of alarm, a sense that my dream of tapping had converged with waking reality in some elusive, sickening way.
There were no lights out back, and the bedroom was in deep darkness; it was hard to see anything in the room.
But I made out vague shapes.
When something presents in your vision that is so unexpected you can scarcely credit its reality, it’s hard at first to even understand what it is. It took a few moments before I recognized that the shapes were human-sized, that people were standing around the bed. One near my side, one on Scott’s side, seeming to peer down as he slept, oblivious. Another shape crowding the foot of the bed.
Time stopped.
I understood then that I’d never fallen into a deep sleep. The knocking had woven itself into a half-waking dream. When I woke up I felt sweaty and sick. Had the knocks been real?
This is when the seed of terror was planted. My brain felt like it had been divided into halves: one side saying, This can’t be happening, while the other side insisted, Oh, but it is. A resistance — my belief in a just world — tangled with the sudden sinking knowledge that that world didn’t exist.
My eyes kept blinking against my futile efforts to see clearly in the dark. The sentinels ringed around my bed hadn’t said a word yet, so I peered at them desperately trying to get some clue to their identities. I couldn’t make out much, but as I began to discern their features, the incipient terror sunk even deeper into my bones; they looked surreal. Inhuman.
The tallest of the three intruders stood by Scott’s side of the bed. I couldn’t make out his face exactly, but something looked wrong. He had the body of a man, but the head of a bird.
The one on my side had too many teeth, all razor-sharp, like he’d honed them to resemble the fangs of a wild animal. I’d read of people whose baby teeth never fell out, so they ended up with two sets that were bursting out of their mouths. But they were normal teeth, they didn’t make people’s mouths look like the ravening jaws of a predator.
Tears of dread started to leak from my eyes and fell down my temples.
At the foot of the bed stood a girl, or maybe a short thin guy in women’s clothes. Studying her, I realized gradually that this was not her natural face I was seeing, but a mask. The skin was unnaturally white, like a geisha’s, and there were no features, only eye holes. Her hair was long and straight, and she wore a white, archaic dress. Like a Victorian wedding dress, hanging as it would on a barely pubescent girl, with a dark cloak slung around her shoulders. The white mask rose above her hairline, a square straight edge topping her forehead. In the faint glint of light from the back windows, I suddenly saw something that made my heart seize and clench.
The glint of silver hanging by their sides. All three held large carving knives in their hands.
Through my dread, I noticed something strangely synchronistic. They all held the knives in their right hands. It didn’t look to me like they were all just right-handed. It looked deliberate, choreographed. Ritualistic.
Now, I realized the other two were wearing masks as well, although the child bride seemed to be alone in wearing a costume. The bird-headed one was a plague doctor, the tooth-boy a demon. The realization that they weren’t members of some hybrid alien race made it a little better, but I was still clenching my whole body, trying not to pee myself.
I reached over to Scott, jostling him. He wouldn’t wake up. The asshole had drunk so much, he was going to sleep through the horrible fate that was circling us. A spurt of rage surged through my chest, and it felt good because it made a slight dent in the terror. I was falling a million miles in the dark, and then suddenly the anger gave me something to hold onto, a static climbing rope.
“Goddamn it, Scott, wake up,” I hissed.
The person standing by my side, the one with all the teeth, spoke. It was the first time I’d heard either of the men’s voices. It was ragged, maybe the result of damaged vocal cords, or an excess of whiskey and too many cigarettes. “Don’t bother with him,” the voice told me.
“We’d rather talk to you,” the Victorian child bride said from the foot of the bed.
I was plunged into the abyss again, the brief, rough handhold of my momentary rage forgotten. They were singling me out. It was hard to be sure with the masks covering their faces, but I had the impression they were all staring at me. “What do you want,” I asked. It came out in a rough whisper.
“We want to know your worst fear,” the girl said. Her voice was sing-song, like she was telling me a riddle. “What is the worst thing in the world?”
Now I felt my bladder open, and pee soaked my sheet. Nausea overcame me; I was seized by the realization that I was going to vomit. I used my entire will to force it down. I had an awful sense of connection to the threesome, a dreadful certainty that their actions followed mine in some strange way. That any loss of control on my part would unleash the demons inside them, end any chance of talking, provide a shortcut to the end. To the worst thing in the world.
“What is the worst way to die?” the plague doctor asked me. His voice, unlike the other man’s, was soft.
Now my tears were coming again, harder, and I knew our tormentors could discern them. I forced myself to crush down the sobbing that was trying to heave itself out of my chest. I took deep shaking breaths instead.
A voice rose up from inside me. It didn’t feel like my own voice, but something that issued from a buried place, a place that did not cower away from this evil Victorian child and her demon brethren, but matched them, halfway, in the space between us.
“Dying of boredom,” I answered. I struggled up in bed, feeling the need to face them with a straight back.
A faint laugh edged out from under the effigy of the plague doctor. It contained a note of surprise, an involuntary sound. The Victorian girl-child giggled.
The fact that I’d surprised them weirdly pleased me, even through my drowning dread. As if they were my audience. My superiors, from whom any sign of acceptance was a bestowed honor.
“Is that happening?” she asked. “Are you being bored to death?”
Aware of the danger in this line of questioning — the potential for we can give you a more exciting death, if you wish — I pursued it. “I am. I’m dying a little more every day.”
All at once, I understood what I was saying. In extremis, the truth had fallen out of my mouth. It emboldened me. These people might give me the most horrifying death in the world.
But then I’d be free. No longer trapped, dying by inches.
“Do you want us to help you out of it?” Demon Teeth asked, his gravel voice mocking.
I didn’t answer. He was goading me, trying to get permission to unleash hellfire. The child bride had been asking me a question.
“Does he ever wake up?” The plague doctor bent his knee and gave Scott a shove with his boot.
“When he’s this drunk,” I said, “he can sleep through an inferno.” It was strange; I was outside myself. My voice had steadied. Maybe I was dissociating.
“Well, we’ll have to wake him up for this one,” the girl said.
The teeth demon walked around the bed and leaned in to grab Scott by the front of his T-shirt, forcibly yanking him into a sitting position. Scott finally woke, lifting his hands and furiously trying to shove the demon away. “What the — “ His garbled voice suddenly choked off as his shirt was wrapped into the demon’s fist, tight around his neck.
I watched Scott carefully now as he drunk-woke in stages, a snarling anger his first reaction. As his eyes opened and he slowly processed the scene before him, I saw fear set in.
Bigger and badder than you, I thought.
