The NightWalk

This music is her lifeline. All she has against the night.

She doesn’t know what it’s called and she only has these flickers of memory of finding and buying it – a second-hand music store, somewhere, flicking through the CDs, listening at random, hearing, feeling, knowing, going straight up to the counter and paying for it without actually looking at the price. It has reminiscences of high school. Of the river in the background, and the girls, with the shoes and tights off, their uniform skirts rolled up a couple of notches, white blouses undone a little, legs splayed on the grass in vain hope of a tan. She remembers that spot, and the four of them, laughing, gossiping – drinking now and then when one of them found a way to get a bottle of gin or whiskey into the equation. Girls with walnut brown hair; or soft blond; or a gentle, swirling ginger. She, a dark brunette, in braids and braces and not as pretty as the other three, but as one of them as any; and their laughter and togetherness being a full match for anything dark or hideous or cruel or spiteful that shoved its way into their world.

A happy place, beside a river, distant music from some unknown source. A happy time. A decade ago.

#

This isn’t that time.

This is the time of pure night. This is the time that caught up to the world, and now the true-dark spews everywhere. The days get shorter and shorter so that she – and anyone else left alive – has to get to work and back in the dark year-round. And that dark… the teenage girl in braids and braces had no idea what was coming. Could she have kept up that laughter and casual drinking, and lazily hanging out with dear friends if she’d known what was on the way?

Dear friends. Dead friends.

She pushes those raw images out of her mind.

Concentrate. Concentrate. The office closes for the night, and though her flat is only a couple of blocks away she knows there’s no guarantee she’ll get there.  There are shadows out in force tonight, all nights, lurking in the gaps, where the darkness pools darkest and the past is at its closest, where it threatens to break through and offer up horror laced with kindness laced with death.

She shrugs on her coat, checks her knives in each pocket, swallows, breathes deep, pops in her headphones. She selects the song, she flicks it onto repeat, and she waits in the foyer, giving the jaunty, confident music some time to fire her up. She waits until she can feel it coursing through her veins before she walks up to the automatic doors and lets them whoosh open, inviting in the night.

#

It’s a short walk. Always potentially deadly.

But a girl’s gotta eat, which means she’s gotta work, and there’s not enough hours in the day to work only in daylight – less and less and less so. If you can’t afford to live and work and shop all under the same, artificially lit roof, then you have to go out into the night. It pays to live as close to your work as you can.

But still.

The dead have outnumbered the living for millenia really, but they do it in such earnest now.

She syncs with the music and steps out onto the pavement. It’s not too bad under the street lights, but in any pool of darkness where they don’t reach, and where the dark gathers and multiplies, there are terrors awaiting. These are things that have no faces, no thoughts. They are shapeless, and their breath is ice and fire. As she walks, she can see them, just the edges of them, wrapped up in an eternal hunt for flesh.

A knot of them surge forward. She reaches into the song, stuffs her hands into her pockets and pulls out both knives. The music beats through her, carrying her forward, blades flashing, to drive these things back. A whiff of long hair, a flash of white eyes, a brief snarl. You can never quite see what they are. Those who have can’t tell the tale.

Dear friends. Dead friends.

She recites those names: Sindy, Lorriette, Cassidy. She knows these girls must have seen those faces, seen that truth, been consumed by it before they could name it. She remembers seeing Loriette, maimed and bloodied, the life all sucked out of her. “Yes. Yes, that’s her. No family, no, no, all gone. All gone in the early days.”

These are days of borrowed time.

Four girls, sitting around just listening to the sound of the river bubbling over rocks, the faint and distant sounds of traffic and unknown music. Nails painted. Secrets shared. A mad crush or two aired in this private sunlight.

Angus Hudson? Really?

What?

He’s so… He’s just…

He’s cute.

These giggling, ignorant girls.

But the memory infuses with the music. Dark things flood out of the alleyway. They falter in the presence of light, closing ranks, pushing out their private night-time. Her knives flash, pushing them back.

Her building is up ahead. Bright foyer lights keep the ground floor safe. The doors part for her, spilling a saviour light. She steps in, stuffs her knives into her pockets. Another night survived. Bill from accounting was taken last week, torn fragments of him found on the street. Every face at every cubicle, silent, wondering about their own turn.

Not tonight though.

She turns the music off, slips out the headphones, presses the up arrow on the panel next to the lift.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work