“Something in the dark was chasing me,” I tell her. “I was running and it was behind me and it was growling and biting me, biting me on my feet and on my legs.”
She kisses my forehead. “There’s nothing in the dark but the dark.”
“There’s monsters in the dark,” I tell her.
“No such things as monsters, kiddo.”
Even though I know different, I also know she will never fully understand, so I focus on her face, and the perpetual sadness in her eyes. I am afraid and she is sad. These are our markings, burned into our flesh and mind and as much a part of us as spots to a leopard.
“Why are you always so sad?” I ask. “Is it because Daddy died?”
“I’m not always sad, my love.” She’s lying, but smiles and kisses me again. “Think you can try to go back to sleep now like a big boy?”
I look over her shoulder at the darkness from the hallway leaking in under the door… or maybe escaping beneath it. There is nothing to see, nothing hiding behind the curtains or beneath my bed. But we’re not alone. I can feel it. Inside me, I can feel it.
“Sweetie, it was only a dream,” she says, sensing my uncertainty. “Are you still afraid?”
I shake my head. This time it is my turn to lie. “No.”
“Leave her out of this,” I said. “Leave her alone.”
“But I gave her to you, Alan. I gave you your perfect mother.”
“You don’t frighten me.”
“Everything frightens you,” it replied, again using Bernard’s distorted, gargling voice. “You’re still a terrified little boy whistling in the dark, Alan. And I see you. I’ve always seen you. Now, you see me.”
“And what do I see?”
He hunched over a bit, turned, looked down at the floor and back at the wall as if he too were dissolving into it. “The beginning. The end. The old. The new. The past. The future. Different faces, different names, different lives, but you’re always with me and I’m always with you, feeding on you, on your fears and weaknesses.”
“A parasite,” I said. “A bleeder of innocent women and children.”
“No one is innocent.” More blood poured from his nose and mouth but he seemed not to notice. “I set those silly cunts free. I let them see their useless gods.” The thing grinned again with its gums. “I’m on the threshold of something wonderful, Alan. You’re the lost one, lost in your own self-righteousness just like the rest of them. The world doesn’t want to stop me, not really, it gave birth to me—created me—and made me whole. The truth is in the dark, Alan. Here, with me.”
“You’re a disease.”
“No, only a symptom. I’m the open sore festering and blistering across their flesh, eating them from the inside out and laughing at their arrogant attempts to ignore me. They don’t try to stop me, they only pretend I’m not there. Nero fiddled, Alan.” He sighed, ran a bloody hand across his equally bloody dome. “And Rome burns.” He looked around like he had momentarily forgotten where he was. “I set those women free of their hypocrisy and meaningless lives. I gave them purpose. No one cares about some low-rent single mothers and their bastard children. No one cares if they live or die, if they suffer or bleed. The world won’t miss them. The world misses nothing, no one. But I made them immortal. I brought importance to their useless existences. In death, they matter, don’t you see? They have purpose. And now, like all of you, they belong to me. In my darkness, they belong to me. I’m their God. I’m their messiah.”
The figures in the corner stepped forward, their forms crossing into the pool of light, their eyes black as a shark’s, just like in the dream.
I squared off between them, doing my best to keep both in my line of sight. The bloody atrocity against the wall straightened, and a cage of ribs rose then fell within its slimy skin. Unseen things scurried beneath its flesh, scuttling about like spasmodically stirring insects. He caught my eye and grinned at me again, slurping blood from his gums.
It was no longer possible to find any semblance of Bernard in this creature. Gone were any traces of the little boy I had grown up with, played baseball with, rode bikes with, laughed with and experienced so much with. Gone was the young man I had become a teenager with, experienced the loss of our friend with and graduated high school with. Gone was the grown man who attended my wedding, who had been my lifelong friend. Yet even in the midst of this madness I couldn’t help but remember him as a young boy, as it was perhaps the only time he had truly been who and what I believed him to be. For that little boy, for what happened to him, my heart broke, because the innocent small town boy Bernard had once been was long dead. And simple death had apparently not been sufficient. He’d been completely annihilated.
Bernard nodded. He had heard me thinking again. “You and I, we know quiet little towns are never what people think they are,” he said. “Quiet little towns hide quiet little secrets… quiet little screams. Listen to the screams, the whispers in your mind. Obey them. The voices are mine, don’t you see? In this world, and the next.”
“You’re no prophet, no dark messiah,” I said, spitting the words at him. “You’re no sorcerer. It’s all lies. Fucking lies meant to frighten and intimidate. You’re a lie.”
“Not me, Alan—you. You’re only real because I made you real. I fucking made you, all of you. My rituals made you real, and they made me a god.”
The world is not always what you think it is.
“You’re just a sad and pathetic little man,” I said. “A loser full of rage and violence with delusions of grandeur. A deeply disturbed man, nothing more.”
He smiled at those awaiting us in shadow, then at me. “There’s no need to be anything else. Our capacity for evil, mindless brutality and destruction is unequalled. We’re never free of it, Alan. We pretend to be, but we’re never free of it. Those black places in our souls never let us go. Never.”
The real world is the one underneath, and that world is different. It’s shadows.
I ignored the ringing in my ears and motioned to the others. “I know why they’re here. Just like in the dream, they’re here for you.”
“They’re not here to take me to Hell, Alan.” He blinked blood drops from his eyes. “They’re here to take you.”
My blood turned cold. “No.”
“Come together, Alan,” he said. “Wash with me in their blood, feel it running over you while it pumps free of their slowly dying bodies. Let it run in their filthy fucking streets. Bleed them with me, Alan. We’re gods.”
I held the knife down by my thigh, gripping it tightly. “I’m sorry for what happened to you as a child, Bernard. I’m sorry for what your mother did to you—to all of us. For that little boy, I’m sorry. But for what that little boy became, I’m not sorry. For that sorry excuse of a human being I feel no compassion whatsoever. You’re the same now as you were then, the same as you allowed yourself to become. You’re nothing. Powerless. Alone. And you need to die.”
Bernard laughed, his voice bellowing and echoing through the empty space. Blood again gushed from his lips. “What happened to me as a child made you possible, you fucking fool. My rituals allowed you to stay behind, made you real. You should have paid more attention to what the whore told you. I’m already dead and buried. It isn’t me you’re dreaming of. It isn’t me you see. It’s you. It’s yourselves you see, the part of me that lives in you, in all of you.”