The Deep Hours of the Night Read online

I wished I had more coffee, and maybe some bourbon to go along. My head was pounding and swimming as if I’d taken a good blow to the temple. “What did his machine do? Did you see it?”

  “No,” Gamble said. It was hard and short and immediate. His eyes darted out the window, played across the rows upon rows of pines that stood at attention like ranks of soldiers across the sea. “No, I did not. Not in use.”

  We’d both seen it sitting idle; it was impossible not to, with how often Alexander had brought it out to tinker with it. To adjust the knobs on the faceplate that did indeed look like a clock or to add new wires to the colorful web of them exploding from the thing’s back. Or maybe to change out the cylinders that looked like huge metal pills, or to add another switch, another gauge, another dial. He was always working, refining, making sure it was ready before he even attempted to turn it on.

  Once, I’d seen him carry it. He meant to cross over, that much he’d frankly told us, but he wanted to have the machine with him when he did. So he could be sure to come back. He’d designed a strap that went both around his shoulders and around his waist. The wires poked out on all sides, crushed up against his stomach; the knobs and dials were all in easy reach for either of his hands. It had looked almost comical, but the dark gleam in his eyes as he tried it on had stripped any humor from the sight. From the entire shop, in fact.

  We got out of the car and stood on the edge of the woods. “Do you think he went in?” I asked. “Or did he stand here? Perhaps when he used it, his boots were simply left behind.”

  “No,” Gamble said softly. “He went in. Alexander was obsessed with keeping his secrets, at least until he knew for sure. He walked into the trees, probably for quite a ways, before he turned it on.”

  “Then why the boots?” I knelt and looked under the tree branches. There were impressions, what might have been footprints, where the fire had cleared away the underbrush. “Why did he leave his boots?”

  For a long moment, Gamble was silent. Then he knelt as well and began unlacing his own shoes. The gun was a bulge under his coat. “Because,” he said as he worked, “even Moses had to remove his sandals when he approached the burning bush. When he approached his God.”

  3

  The woods were dark and cold and somewhere ahead I could hear the crash of the waves on the lake. It was a distant sound, like the low rumble of thunder in the mountains, just ambience and little more. But, along with the whistle of the wind through the trees, it was enough to layer the forest in odd sounds and strange noises. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stiffen, my spine tingle.

  We walked without our shoes and the ground was hard. Pine needles lay scattered across it, sharp little barbs that cut through my socks and then stuck, sending jolts of pain with every step. I bent and pulled them out as we went; next to me, Gamble did the same. But we kept walking, following those slight impressions that may have been footprints.

  When I first saw the movement, the flicker of something passing ahead of us, deep within the forest, I thought it was a trick of the moonlight. I thought it was mist, perhaps, drifting on the wind. It was far ahead, and we stopped to watch it even though it was mostly distorted by the branches. It hurried across, floating a bit off the ground, and disappeared from sight. It felt odd, just somehow off, but I couldn’t place it. Not then, anyway.

  Gamble looked at me, his lips in that familiar little white line. “Be careful,” he said. “Keep listening.”

  I nodded my agreement, though I can’t say his words helped me. Because if he was scared, when he had a gun, then I had a right to be terrified.

  It’s a universal truth that the fears of our childhood stick with us longer than we care to admit, and that had something to do with the way my nerves were jumping. The way I felt on edge like a cliff-diver about to leap. It was dark and quiet and there were no other people around. It was the dead of night, and in the deep black of the forest that meant we were fairly shrouded in it. The dark is the one thing you can’t run from, the thing that only time and the rising of the sun can erase, and I will say that prompted us to be more frightened than we would have been otherwise. But I will also say that the darkness wasn’t the whole of it.

  Alexander, after all, was gone. Completely vanished without a trace. That it was by his own hand only made it worse.

  We saw the fog-like thing again a few minutes later, this time off to the left. I noticed it over Gamble’s shoulder; he was already stopped and staring. As I watched, it also drew to a stop. In that brief second, I realized what had been bothering me about it. I’d assumed it was mist moving on the wind, but it was going the wrong way. It was moving against the breeze.

  It stopped, hesitated. I held my breath, my throat so tight that I couldn’t get air. It was as if I’d swallowed something, some bit of food, whole. And I was choking on it. But there was nothing in my throat besides fear, fear and a scream that was clawing its way up toward my lips.

  The thing looked at us. The top part of it, where its head would have been, swiveled around and gazed directly at me. I thought I saw the face of a woman, sleek and beautiful and looking like porcelain in the moonlight. Her lips were curved, her skin fine like ivory. But her eyes were dark, jet black, two holes drilled into her face. I was filled with lust and terror, both at the same time, both equally as strong, and I couldn’t move.

  Then she was gone. She didn’t turn and drift away on the wind, but simply broke up and dissipated like true fog. One minute her dark eyes were on mine, the next I was staring at an empty piece of the forest, a backdrop of green branches.

  We stood, and we didn’t run. The scream chopped away at my throat, as urgent as the need to vomit, and I swallowed it down. Again and again I swallowed it. I could see Gamble doing the same, his Adam’s apple bouncing.

  Finally, he turned to me. His gun was still in his coat, but his hand lay near it. “Let’s go,” he said. “We have to find him. We have to.”

  4

  It was then that I realized why Alexander had come to the woods. It was a desire for seclusion, to be sure, but that wasn’t all. He’d known, somehow, that this place was important. That the wall, or the barrier, or whatever it was, came to its thinnest in the heart of the woods. How he’d discovered it, I didn’t know. But he’d been doing this for eleven years, according to Gamble, and he’d surely had enough time. So he’d come here, to the place where the other side allowed itself to be crossed into.

  Or out of.

  I didn’t know if she was a ghost or a spirit or maybe another human, just like Alexander. Maybe someone from that side, trying to come over. Or maybe that side was like the heaven and hell and purgatory the church was always talking about. That had been Alexander’s main belief, the few times he’d mentioned it, and I clung to it as we walked with the forest all around us. I needed something, and while believing that I’d seen a ghost may seem like an insane way to find it, it worked. It gave the woman, and her unworldly beauty, a reason to exist. A reason to be.

  With that thought, that rationale, I was able to keep going. I was able to follow Gamble and follow the footprints. I was able to blot out all the sermons I’d heard on the fire and brimstone of hell and latch onto the ones about the glory of heaven. About sitting at the right hand of God and dining at His table. The woman hadn’t given me that impression – she’d looked more like a vagabond, a wanderer – but if I pretended that I believed the things I’d heard in church, I was able to keep my fear under control.

  We walked for some time; I couldn’t tell how much then and I can’t now. It may have been ten minutes; it may have been five hours. The moon lit our path, falling in pieces through the trees, and we followed the footprints. The lake was still out there, so far away, the waves pounding their hollow beat against the shore. Then, just as I was beginning to remember the bitter cold, the path ended.

  Gamble drew to a stop, kneeling to make sure we weren’t just missing the rest of Alexander’s footprints in the shadows. I let my gaze drift furthe
r along, but saw nothing. It wasn’t that we’d lost the trail, it was that there was no more trail to be found.

  “This is where he turned it on,” Gamble said.

  I licked my lips; they refused to be wetted. “So now what do we do?”

  For the first time I could remember, Gamble looked hopeless. His cheeks drew back and he exhaled a long breath slowly through his teeth. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we call for him.”

  “Call?”

  “Yes.” He raised his hands, cupped them around his mouth, and yelled Alexander’s name. The cry was loud in the dead quiet, so loud and sharp that I gasped in surprise even though I knew it was coming. I took a step back, my eyes darting everywhere, and Gamble yelled again.

  In the next breath, I expected something. It sounds unreasonable, but I believed it would work. If Gamble thought it would, I did as well. I expected Alexander to step out from behind the trees, grinning, arms upraised in triumph.

  But, of course, that didn’t happen. We stood in the forest, November cold all around us, and waited. I imagined the soldiers had felt the same way on the front as they awaited the German assaults. I felt on the cusp of something; the air seemed to be crackling with it. The wind blew softly, though there was no more fog, and we waited.

  It was too late. I looked at Gamble and I could see he thought it to. We’d come this far, to the end of the line, and it was too late. Alexander was gone. We could hide his boots, but eventually people would start asking. We’d have to have a story, some sort of cover. Anything at all to tell the public so that they wouldn’t know. Because if we told them what we suspected, they’d think we were crazy. And then it would be cells for us both, cells and locks and doctors and the end of life.

  I started to turn, to spin on my heel. Pine needles crunched beneath my feet. I even opened my mouth to say something, anything that would perhaps put Gamble at ease. Some words of consolation. But I neither made it even halfway around nor spoke a single word.

  There was a sharp crack and a flash, like lightning striking not ten feet away. A pocket of mist sprang into existence, like the woman dissipating except in reverse, and sparks shot from it. They showered up and streamed into the branches, sending the shadows off at all angles. I heard a high-pitched whine, a shriek, like gas escaping from some enclosed container. Then there was an even brighter flash, and a figure appeared. A dark figure, like a skeleton, standing between the branches. I screamed, at last, grabbing at Gamble’s arm for support and trying to run all at the same time.

  But I couldn’t; of course I couldn’t. Because my eyes wouldn’t turn from it, were drawn to it like it was a vortex with all the power in the universe. And as it took a step toward us, staggering, I knew. I didn’t want to know, wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. Because sometimes things are just what they are, horrible as that is, and there is nothing that can be done to change them. Nothing in this world or in any other.

  5

  It was Alexander, but it was Alexander as a mummy. As a corpse. As a naked, living thing, but one that had rotted and decomposed and withered away even while it still lived. His once broad chest was now a sunken cavity, every rib standing out against his skin, his machine hanging loosely below. His arms were just bones with that skin stretched white over them. His eyes were huge, bulging in their sockets, and his hair was pure white. It was the color of the snowfall that was coming in the near months, long and hanging into his eyes.

  Gamble let out a cry, like a dog that has been shot, and stumbled backward. I found myself doing the same, moving without being able to tear my eyes away, and the only thing that kept me from falling was the trunk of a tree that I happened to run up against. My head was pounding like a pendulum clock at midnight, like the sound of bombs walking across a European field.

  “It’s there,” the thing that had been Alexander croaked. “It’s all there.”

  I stared, chewing the inside of my mouth, my breath coming in dry rasps. He was swaying on his feet, his legs barely strong enough to hold himself erect. He looked so brittle, like his bones were now made of glass. But the worst thing, by far, was his eyes. They’d always been so strong before, dark like a storm over the sea, and now they were glassy and white and bloodshot. They looked like the eyes of a blind man.

  “It’s there,” he said again. “But it’s not the same.”

  Next to me, I could see Gamble trying to pull his gun from his pocket. Trying to get it out and bring it to bear. But something had snagged, and the gun refused to come free.

  “It’s the time,” Alexander said. “God forgive me, it’s the time. It runs, you see, but oh so fast. Because they’re all dead, and they don’t need it anymore.”

  All I could think of, in that moment, were the clocks. We had hundreds of them, scattered all about the shop and looking like so much junk. I could see them all now, but the hands were wrong. They spun and spun and spun, so fast that they were just blurs of black or gold or white. Just blurs of shadow as the hours flew by. And reflected in the glass of each clock was Alexander’s face, ravaged by age and grinning madly.

  “So fast,” Alexander said again, and Gamble got his gun free. But he had no need to use it, because at that moment Alexander pitched forward and fell facedown in the dirt. We could see the little wires poking out all around him. I stood stock still, thinking he would get up, wretched and laughing, alive but not alive and coming at us. But he didn’t. He just lay there, withered and stiff and dead, in the dirt where the fire had gone through a year before and cleared out the underbrush.

  The Lighthouse on Torch Lake

  1

  The lighthouse was a spire of whitewashed stone stretching ramrod-straight into the bitter December air. It rose from the dark eddies of Torch Lake, the light on its pinnacle that of a brightly burning star. Only the full moon, hanging overhead with wisps of cloud moving across its face, could come close to contesting that light. It flashed across the surface of the lake, reaching to the forested banks of the near shore and dropping a globe of luminescence around the lighthouse itself. That globe exposed the base of the tower, not much smaller than the island it sat on, where waves had crashed up to form sheets of ice.

  A tall, dark house lurked on the cliff-edged shoreline, empty save for the flickering light of a fireplace and the silhouette of a man in the window.

  Standing in the warmth of his fire, listening to the logs crackle and smelling the tinge of smoke that only a true hearth could produce, Adam Daniels sighed. He clutched his steaming mug of coffee in both hands and stared out the front windows at the lighthouse, that lone sentinel in a vast sea of night. The sigh wasn’t brought on by the loneliness eating at his heart since Kalie died, or from the thought of another day spent in the middle of nowhere. The sigh came from something deeper, something he couldn’t ignore no matter how unbelievable it was. It came because Adam Daniels felt he was losing his mind.

  He stared for a moment more, unable to take his eyes away, and watched as the beam of light swept over the near shore. Rows of evergreens, capped in light snowfall, stood against the howling wind. They came up to the edge of the lake, to the point where the land fell away into a sheer cliff studded with stone. The drop was fifteen feet and then the lake claimed its own, unrelenting. Finally, with what felt to be a monstrous effort, Adam ripped his gaze away.

  “Impossible.” He lowered himself into the chair before the fireplace, letting its cushions enfold him and taking care not to spill coffee on his hands. He managed, for the most part, and found the few drops he did spill to be cooler than he’d expected. He sipped the coffee, letting the rich, dark flavor pool on his tongue, and listened to the wind.

  The house groaned. Age, Adam had learned, would do that to a house like nothing else. The building’s distinctly gothic lines remained unchanged by renovation. This, according to his grandfather, was because no one had lived in it for roughly a century and a half.

  Adam rested the coffee cup on his leg and tried to keep his eyes on t
he fire. “This can’t be happening.”

  Beside him, Sara said: “But it is.”

  Adam jumped; this time coffee splashed over his hands like the waves against the lighthouse’s foundations. He glared up at her, but kept a slight smirk in the corners of his mouth. “Is a warning too much to ask for?”

  Sara smiled. Her skin was almost as white as the clothing she wore, though with a touch of red that ran deep into her flesh. She’d pulled her light hair back over one shoulder. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to remember that, to you, I am not always here.”

  Letting his glare soften, Adam shrugged. “Watching me, were you? Watching me stare for twenty minutes at a lighthouse that has never existed?”

  “It was more like an hour, but who’s counting?” Sara sat on the arm of the chair, crossing her legs. “Are you all right? You looked…troubled.”

  “That’s hardly a surprise, all things considered.”

  “But you’ve been doing so well.”

  “I know, and I owe you all the thanks for that. For trying to help me understand this.” Adam shifted the coffee to his left hand and reached up to take Sara’s with the other. He slid his fingers between hers and squeezed. “You’ve done far more than you needed to.”

  Sara returned the squeeze and let their clasped hands rest in her lap. “I’m glad it’s been a help, but it’s hardly out of my way.”

  “Still, it’s appreciated.” She felt so real, which sent a brief tingle through Adam like it always did. She wasn’t, just as the lighthouse wasn’t, but the illusion was as solid as the bedrock under the house. When they talked, he knew he was actually hearing the words. When they touched, it was skin he felt, not some trick of the light.

  “Adam, the time is close.”

  He grit his teeth. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” Sara tipped her head toward the winding flight of stairs that led up, away from the sitting room. “He is so close to coming through that I can hear him in the walls, raking his claws across the beams and pulling out nails with his teeth. You must do this, and soon.”