Let the Long Night End
Part VIII
Night and Day
Night and day, under the hide of me
There's an oh, such a hungry burning inside of me
And its torment won't be through
Till you let me spend life makin' love to you
“I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you
until you fall asleep and dream of the place
where nothing is red.
When is a monster not a monster?
Oh, when you love it.”
∆
OSKAR
September 4th
Oskar watched the lights of adjacent cars speed by as rain came down in a light shower, the moon half-hidden behind a dark cloud that seemed to weep for all the tragedies of the Earth. He had asked Milton if the hiding of the moon would have any effect on Levi, who was still lurking in the bowls of the well when they had left, eyes aglow and with a mouth that seemed to split open at the seams to open unnaturally wide. But the pastor had shaken his head: “It’s not that easy, Oskar. It doesn’t matter if he can see it or not. It’s…something else.”
“An infection.”
“No. A curse.”
Oskar hadn’t considered, until that point, that perhaps what truly troubled him was not Levi’s condition alone – though his heart went out to the boy he could indeed consider a friend of some sort. What frightened him more than anything…was that there truly existed curses in this world. He had hidden from it before, behind the turn-of-phrase of referring to Eli’s condition as an ‘infection.’ A sickness that could be managed. Treated. Even when he’d seen for himself the sight of Eli trembling and bleeding from his eyes, ears, mouth, and pores…it hadn’t truly sunk in. Not then.
A hunger for blood wasn’t a disease. It was a curse.
And he wondered, now, how he ever could’ve wanted to embrace such a thing for himself. There had been a time when he would’ve very seriously considered becoming infected – cursed – just to live eternally with Eli. But now whenever he thought of the prospect, Eli’s bleeding face would curl up like smoke and smother the notion. Levi’s screams drowned out the voice that whispered ‘Let go. Let go of everything that makes you human. Live forever.’
That voice was the enemy.
Milton pulled into the driveway, habitually sending his usual radio signal despite both of them knowing precisely where Levi was. They quietly depart the vehicle, Milton’s handgun hidden within a hostler beneath his jacket, and walk with their eyes to the ground. It is only as they approach the threshold that the two come to a mutual realization: the front door was open.
In an instant, Milton’s fingers delved into the depths of his jacket and came back clutching the hilt of his revolver. “Stay here,” he commands. Oskar swallows, nodding, and the older man disappears into the bowels of darkness.
Lingering behind, Oskar examines the door frame, something peculiar calling him forth from his anxiousness. The door frame was…there was nothing remarkable about it. If someone broken in, then they hadn’t forced the door. Meaning they picked the lock or had a key or a different way in. But then why leave the door open? Unless…
Unless whoever was responsible hadn’t broken in. They had broken out.
Heart suddenly racing, Oskar rushes into the darkness of the house shouting for his ‘uncle.’ If Eli was awake and mobile, then Milton was in danger. And even if he wasn’t, if Milton was jumped and Eli was shot…
Nightmarish possibilities play out in shutter-reel projections across the dome of the boy’s skull. Eli – dead. Milton – dead. Both of them dead. He would have to explain to Levi why his uncle was dead. A Levi who may very well not remember him for days…and when he did remember…
“Milton!”
“Up here,” came the call from above. Oskar takes the steps two at a time and nearly runs headlong into the waiting priest, who quickly side-steps and catches him by the elbow. “Easy there. I told you to stay outside.”
The boy shakes his head fervently. “No, I can’t! It’s not a robber. It’s Eli!”
Milton’s eyes grow wide, a touch of the same fear that had been present at the well returning to his visage. “I thought you said he wouldn’t be awake for another month at least!”
“Sometimes it’s shorter! We have to find him before someone gets hurt. He could…” Oskar hesitates, then speaks more softly. “He could kill the first person he sees. We have to find him.”
“I thought I heard something up here when I came in,” Milton gestures and Oskar follows his movement…to the closed door of his room. The look on the priest’s face tells him they are thinking the same thing: Eli was most likely inside. Dazed, hungry, and waiting for the first person to walk in so he could feed.
Waiting…for them.
“So…how do you want to play this, son? What should we do?”
Oskar swallows, realizing that his hands are shaking. He balls them into fists and repeats to himself – strong, strong, be strong.
“I’ll go in first. If he sees a stranger, he might run or attack. You can come in after me.”
“If he doesn’t recognize you he may attack anyway.”
“I know. But it’s all we have.”
He can tell that Milton doesn’t like the notion one bit, but protectiveness is forced to yield before reality. The man nods, brown eyes drifting to the stairs leading to the guest bedroom. “After you, then.”
Oskar nods and takes a step-
“But Oskar.”
He pauses. “Yes?”
“If he doesn’t recognize you.”
“…” Oskar looks down and away. The words don’t need to be said. “I won’t blame you.”
He climbs the steps…and enters the predator’s nest.
∆
ELI
Eli heard the rumble of the vehicle well before it had pulled into the driveway, its metal frame buffeted by heavy rain. Somewhere in the house, he heard the tinny voice of a man speaking through a radio, saying “olly olly oxen free.”
They were English words, just like the words of his recent dinner – was he in the United Kingdom? It was possible…but the accent wasn’t right and the words themselves didn’t mean anything to the child. So much of the past remained shrouded to his attentions, and the constant inkling that he was forgetting something very important was not doing wonders for his already agitated state.
After his flight he had returned to the home where he had awakened, first inspecting his place of rest. A wine barrel…the décor of the home suggested someone wealthy. The other rooms in the house were well stocked, and there were different scents throughout – the most familiar of which was lingering in the room he now occupied, on the highest floor. A large bed. Posters of ‘Star Wars’ on the walls, a bookshelf with various puzzles and toys arrayed on top.
A Rubik’s cube. A metronome. And…a bag of golden flakes, held beside a small stand supporting a rounded gold cup that seemed to be comprised of similar flakes. It was supposed to be an egg; that much he was certain of. But it had been disassembled. These puzzles must be his own. Eli enjoyed the diversion of brain teasers and complex toys – one of his few reprieves from boredom over several lifetimes.
But the smell was all wrong – the person who stayed here smelled…alive. Young. It was the dominant trace, almost smothering the faint whiffs of fevered rot that lingered underneath. That other scent was closer to his own…yet also dissimilar. And different even to the stronger scent he had been smothered with when he made the mistake of walking into one of the rooms on the second floor, where sweat and decay choked the air.
None of this made sense. There were footsteps in the house, moving in a searching pattern. Eli waits.
“Milton,” came the shout from below. “Milton!”
Eli didn’t know who this ‘Milton’ was – perhaps his latest escort? The shouting sounded like it was coming from a boy…his belated offering?
Sliding into a shadowed corner, the ageless hunter waits for the fly to flit into his web. He flexes his fingers, and they melt once more like hot plastic, stretching and curling into vicious claws. Although ‘It’ had been quieted by their first drink, the voice that beckoned from the darkest part of their heart was far from silent. It spoke with a voice that was more felt than heard, and it did not convey words so much as a single desire.
It did not ask. It commanded – Feed.
The door opens, introducing a slightly sun-kissed young boy with short dark hair and blue eyes. Eli hovers in the dark, feet digging into the ceiling as the boy surveys his surroundings cautiously, stepping carefully as though he were on a lake of thin ice. In the dark of this place, faced away from the moonlight, the vampire was invisible to the boy’s eyes. He smelled familiar – this was not Eli’s room. This was his room.
He smelled like puberty and anxiety flavored with an electric charge of anticipation. Excitement. Eli’s vision grew sharper, and his nostrils twitched as he quietly breathed in more of the scent.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he lowers himself down behind the boy. Eli did not want him to suffer – an easy twist of the neck, and it would all be over.
His feet do not so much as creak the wooden floor as they find purchase, right behind the other boy who examined the bed intently. Eli’s mouth buzzes like a horde of angry bees as teeth elongate and grow thinner. He reaches…
“Oskar!”
The shout from behind freezes Eli in place, and the single word burrows its way into the boy’s skull with the feverish excitement of a worm in new soil. The other boy throws himself to the side without so much as a backward glance, and Eli is broken from his sudden trace by a booted foot planting itself into the small of his back and kicking him to the floor. The impact doesn’t especially hurt, but it does knock the breath from his lungs and his head throbs slightly where it crashes against a small trunk at the foot of the bed.
He attempts to rise quickly, but even recently fed there is still some lethargy in his bones that even ‘It’ cannot entirely blot out, and he moves too slowly to prevent a cool shaft of metal from behind pressed against the back of his head.
“If you so much as twitch, I will paint the floor with your brains. Do you understand me?”
An older, somewhat sandpapery voice. ‘Milton’ most likely.
“Yessss….” The word comes out in a low hiss, his first since awakening. He sounded raspy and unfamiliar even to himself.
“Keep your hands flat against the floor.”
Eli complies, talons carving scratches into the dark polished wood. He hears the approach of the other boy – ‘Oskar.’
“Eli…”
That voice…
“Eli, det är jag. Oskar.”
“Oskar…”
“Kommer du ihåg mig?”
“Nej. Vem är du?”
“Din vän.”
“Bevisa det.”
Oskar delays in responding, and Eli feels a knot of discomfort loosen in his belly. If this boy was who he claimed to be – impossible, because Eli knew he could never have a friend – then he had almost killed someone supposedly close to him. But now it was clear there was something else going on here, no less worrisome but without any regret.
Oskar says something to ‘Milton’, whispered as though Eli could not hear it even if they were in the other room. Still, Eli does not pay attention – the old man’s closeness with his gun meant that, so long as he could muster just the tiniest burst of speed, he could be disarmed.
Then they would be the ones ‘painted across the floor.’
Creaking wood. Oskar becomes visible in Eli’s periphery, his posture tense and anticipatory. He leans in close...
“Ditt namn är Elias,” he whispers. “Du räddade mitt liv. Snälla lita på mig.”
Elias… The vampire thinks. Elias. My name. How could he know my name? Unless…
Eli relaxes, hands burning slightly as they revert into human proportions, feet following suit. There was a firestorm growing in his head, a sharp ache as new memories saw fit to burst like balloons filled with water, splashing across the insides of his skull. A knife. A pool filled with blood. A faceless man, stroking an erect penis. A puzzle cube. Lying in bed with…with…
“Oskar.”
“Elias?”
“Det är jag,” Elias’ eyes grow wet. ”Jag är ledsen...”
He allows himself to be pulled gently into a sitting position, whereupon he is startled by a sudden kiss being placed on his bloodied mouth. This, too, feels intimately familiar, and yet he cannot recall why – he can only enjoy the sensation for what it is. He could feel his hunger sharpen, then recede – impossibly – for the time that they are connected, as though Oskar were sucking all the poison from his being through the shared connection of their mouths. Oskar’s tongue boldly brushes the tips of his fanged mouth and Eli shivers, suddenly thrilled.
When they part, Eli sees that the old man has a look of disbelief on his face, mixed with scattered disgust and awe. The gun rests at his hip. He didn’t look familiar…was he someone Eli had found to take care of himself and Oskar? Probably he was. The vampire resolves to thank him privately when there is a better moment.
For now…his attention is solely to be given to Oskar. Eli directs his wings to slide back into the flesh that made up his back and forearms, then shortens his hands and fingers into normal proportions. The adjustments continue until he is simply Eli again, pale and fair with not a hint of his true nature to be seen.
Except, of course, for the blood covering his mouth, neck, and front. And Oskar had kissed him while he was like this? That was…gross! And sweet.
“Eli…” Oskar looks him over with some uncertainty. “What happened? How did you get like this?”
Eli frowns, trying to remember. “I woke up. I was in the basement of this place. I was hungry and nobody was here so I…found someone.”
The old man breathes sharply. “Christ. No…”
Oskar grips him by the shoulders, looking his friend in the eye. “Eli…where are they?”
Eli realizes the gravity of the situation as he recalls, with mounting dread, exactly where he had chosen to feed.
“The house next door. He’s still on his porch.”
∆
MILTON
Milton’s hands bled through the calluses of his fingers as he drove the spade once again into the pliant earth. He and Oskar worked, sweat mixing with rain that shone in the few rays of moonlight peeking through the clouds. He worked with the speed of the devil himself, and the ferocity of a man half his age. Neither party dared chance a look at the body wrapped and bound within a tarp in the bed of Milton’s truck, sock-bound feet sticking out from the ends along with drips of black blood. The old man hummed to the tune of Debussy’s Reveries.
They dug and dug for over an hour until finally there was a suitably deep hole to plant the body. Lifting it from the truck to the ground, they rolled the man the rest of the way until he fell unceremoniously into the grave-site. Then they picked up their spades and resumed their work, replacing the dirt they had excavated and scattering leaves, sticks, rocks, and grass over the site so that it appeared somewhat flush with the environment.
It’s done. Milton stood there, sick and numb to his core. His throat clenches, a low whimper perched on the tip of his tongue. I’ve helped hide evidence of a murder. I’m an accomplice now.
“Mother, forgive me…” he whispers. Hot tears crawl down from his eyes to water the grave of a man taken by the cruelty of life’s indifference.
He feels fingers entwine with his own. Oskar – mournful, yet silent. Milton wondered if this was truly his first body disposal…he had trusted, despite his better sense, that the boy was innocent to the crimes of necessity that his friend perpetrated. A passenger on a dark train ride against a blood-stained horizon. But that certainty was as dead as the man they had just dumped into a shallow grave.
Oskar kissed him. That thing. Milton still struggled to believe it. That the emaciated, winged animal of perdition they had found hanging from the bedroom ceiling was in fact the same stinking faux-corpse of a boy that had been residing in Milton’s basement for over a month. Oskar had not been afraid in the slightest, or if he had been he’d hidden it extraordinarily well. Not like Milton.
Milton had seen proof of the absence of God. Wrapped in a name that spat irony into his face.
Oskar had kissed a murderer. Milton helped Oskar hide the body. Fredrick Newberrie would never be found. Absent, mourned, vanished into a silence felt like a cold draft. But never properly lain to rest.
“We should say something…” Oskar looks to the older man, and he can see in the boy’s eyes a wellspring of sorrow comparable to his own. The weariness of one who has seen all and wishes to see no more.
Milton clears his throat, wiping the tears from his face. “Lord Jesus Christ,” he begins with trembling voice, the words barely a whisper in the quiet night. “By your own three days in the tomb, you hallowed the graves of all who believe in you and so made the g-grave a sign of hope that promises resurrection even as it claims our mortal bodies.”
“Grant that our brother, Fredrick, may sleep here in peace until you awaken him to glory, for you are the resurrection and the life. Then he will see you face to face and in your light will…w-will…”
Fingers entwine with his own.
“Will see light and know the splendor of God, for you live and reign forever and ever,” Oskar finishes. They cross themselves. “Amen.”
- - - - - - -
There was a crack in the bedroom ceiling.
In the fourteen years he had lived in this house, how had he never noticed the crack in the ceiling?
Because, he thought. You were never really looking.
The weary old man scratched at his face idly, nails raking over several days’ worth of unkempt stubble to yield pleasing relief. His eyes remained half-lidded, hands returning to his sides as the itch was satisfied. The afternoon sun peered through the closed curtains of his bedroom window and yet he did not rise.
“Why do you persist in testing me?”
The ceiling has no answer for him. It never did.
“Haven’t I proven myself? Haven’t I given enough to you?”
He had given his life. His innocence. His brother. His soul. Devoted them unto God, as he was raised to do. And yet God had only taken those things so as to crush them, as was his right. Milton had given everything to God – and God had given everything away.
There was nothing left for him to surrender. His life was hollow. His innocence stained with blood. His brother, dead. And his soul…flayed apart.
The grip of his right hand tightened as he contemplated his situation. For the last forty-eight hours he had lain silently in bed, awake and motionless save for the few fitful hours of sleep he did steal before nightmares woke him sweating into wakefulness again. His bedroom door remained locked, and though Levi and Oskar had both knocked twice apiece on his door he refused to greet them, merely knocking on his bedside table to assure them he was in fact still alive.
Hunger pains gnawed at his belly, as if the hound Cerberus itself were chewing on his innards. Feeding on his sins.
I’m an accomplice to murder. I hid the body. I lied to the police. I’m a criminal now.
The thought should’ve upset him, or even frightened, yet all he felt was numb. He had grown up idolizing the police force as a youth, in part because of Jacob’s example that led to Milton’s enlistment into the Army. He had taken some pride in his lawfulness, both to man and God, to know that despite everything he had not fallen to the same depths that their absent father had. He was no drunk. No bitter, angry shell of a man. Not a criminal, better held in a cramped cell than allowed to pollute the world freely.
Or at least, he had been. Now his childhood aspirations struck him as cruelly ironic – the long set up to a vicious punchline. Milton had failed in every way; he drank regularly. Smoked. His faith was beyond the realm of doubt and far into the reaches of tenuous. He had broken several laws and would likely be forced to break several more if he were to preserve what little peace he had found among his family of monsters.
Now, perhaps, Milton believed he understood his father better.
The demon of the bottle was preferable to the demon that was yourself.
He thumbed back the hammer of the Redhawk in his right hand, listening to the rotating click of the chamber being prepared for fire. Which circle of Hell did he belong to? The seventh, wouldn’t it be: to be boiled in blood for eternity alongside all the other murderers. What a fitting condemnation.
He thumbs the hammer again, letting it click forward into place. He raises a cigarette to his lips with his left hand, having sucked it nearly down to the filter. Did smoking count as a prolonged attempt at suicide? Perhaps he was better accompanied by the tree-melded bodies of those who had taken their own lives, to cry out only when struck or broken.
None of those things would happen, of course. Dante had been a poet, nothing more – and he told a story of a story of a story. The only punishment for those who committed suicide would be the same as all others bound for hell: to be disconnected then and ever-after from God. Milton had never felt further from divinity than he had at this very moment. Did that mean he was in hell?
He hissed and jerked his hand suddenly, flinging the burnt-out remnants of his cigarette across the room where it smoked and sputtered harmlessly into nothing. It had burnt down to the nub and scorched his finger, leaving a pulsing sting of pain that centered him to reality no matter how far into his thoughts he dived.
There was no escape. No redemption.
He was damned.
∆
LANGLEY
September 7th
Langley had been on the phone for approaching two hours, coordinating between various liaisons and workers as he prepared himself breakfast. Caspar prowled silently between his legs, tail waving lightly as he waited for his share. Greedy little bastard – but Langley fed him some spare tuna all the same. Balthazar and Melchior were nowhere to be seen, so there was no worry of jealousy between his housemates. Besides, he spoiled them often anyway.
The ex-ex-detective had just finished a phone interview by someone claiming to work for CNN, looking to talk his ear off – it seemed someone in the department had let slip there was an outside consultant brought on to what was being called the work of “The Midwest Muralist” and of course the public wanted to know all about it. The reporter was polite enough, so Langley fed him the usual lines of bullshit and went on with his day. That ‘everything was being done that could be done’ and that they were ‘closing in on an arrest.’ He made sure to comment on the creativity of calling this killer a muralist before excusing himself and unplugging his phone for an hour.
Tabloids and their fucking brand names. Langley didn’t know if it burned him more that the popcorn-flick nature of the name disrespected the victims or that whomever was committing the murders would most assuredly puff up at being described as a muralist.
After he finished his morning meal he plugged his phone back in. Not two minutes later it was ringing again, and Officer Burns was on the other end of the line with some new information.
“We’ve had two missing persons reports in Virginia since the Gray girl. One of them’s Bernard Hughes; twenty-three-year-old living up in Wolf Trap. Was supposed to be home from a hunting trip with his girlfriend three days ago, was only just reported.”
“And the second one?”
“Fredrick Newberrie, in Waynesboro. Guy was retired, living alone, nothing stolen from his house. Local P.D. found blood on his front porch, can’t be confirmed if it’s his since it was drenched in ammonia.”
Langley hums disparagingly. “Neither of these sound like our guy. Unless they’ve been dredged up in a lake somewhere they would be put on display. That’s the new pattern. Wouldn’t go public like that unless he was going to stop right after or make a bigger splash down the line. And the Newberrie case, that sounds…too sloppy.”
“Normally I’d agree. But get this: a neighbor reported Newberrie missing. Someone you might find interesting.”
“Who?”
“You’ll like this – boy’s name is Milton Matthews. Local pastor, heads up his own church and everything. And he’s an Army vet.”
“That’s an awful lot of suspicious coincidences.”
“Right. Which means they’re probably not coincidences. What do you say about taking a closer look at this guy?”
“I say it’s been too long since my last confession. I’ll go pay him a visit, then. If he is our guy he might be pleased as punch to have someone find him right at home. More dramatic that way.”
- - - - - - -
The first key to any stalk was to pick a good hunting ground, a place that the quarry liked to return to again and again. Habit was the first step to complacency, complacency led to a lack of care, and a lack of care made it all the easier to drive home a .375 through the target’s skull. Langley entertained himself with fantasies of doing precisely that as he observed the first real suspect he’d been given since taking on the Muralist case, on the grounds of the man’s favored environment: Milton Matthews, shepherd to the flock, doing his Lord’s work in a church he had built himself.
Catholics were an interesting bunch. So much of their identity was bound up in the desire for atonement, yet the certainty that any reaching of a zero-sum balance was forever beyond the pale. Langley had known a few in his time at the Bureau; they rarely lasted long in that line of work, burned out into shells by the godless nature of the work they absorbed. The toughest ones stayed on and became the scariest, most stoic sons of bitches Langley had ever known – they could deal with anything, because they believed they deserved everything coming their way. And they believed that in the end God would make it all alright, so long as they endured.
Langley was having a difficult time figuring out which type best suited “Father” Matthews, who fed his flock the supposed body and blood of Christ himself – which looked awfully delicious, admittedly. He walked with his shoulders bowed, and the lines in his face and the calluses of his palms spoke of hard living. Something was weighing him down, of that Langley was certain. But was it God? Or the other guy? Langley declined the offerings when it came to his turn, watching Matthews’ face carefully for a reaction: slight surprise, then curiosity.
Good. Now I have your attention.
The pastor moves on without remark, and before long the small covenant has move on to their next rites. Langley notes the size of the congregation: about twenty-six people, not counting him. More of a small party than a blooming religion, most of them on the older side. He notes the younger members: a young woman with green eyes and somewhat olive-skinned. A scattered few teens and one toddler, mixed among the adults. Near the front…two boys, who seemed to pay the most rapt attention of the bunch. Boys with green eyes, short black hair, and contrasting skin tones…
It was immediately clear that the older one was Matthews’ nephew, Levi. Langley had been most curious to discover Milton had a ward living with him…and the circumstances behind his brother’s death were suspicious enough that some plausible doubt was beginning to coalesce as to how, exactly, Jacob Matthews had met his maker.
The other boy was a question mark. Who was he? Why did he stand with Levi? And why was there something about him that seemed…familiar? The niggling curiosity threatened to swallow him whole, and so Langley refocused on the eldest Matthews. He would get answers soon enough. The second step to a good hunt was patience.
“Today, friends, I have a special request to ask of you.” Matthews exhales his words, as if each one were being emptied at great cost. To the others, it must have seemed as if he were merely weighty with his speech. To Langley, he sounded as though he were drowning. “Many are the times that we, as a people, have imbibed the body and the blood of our savior, that we might feel closer to Him. But though we have taken much, I believe, today, we may have an opportunity to give back.”
A murmur through the crowds. This was new to them, too.
“I have spoken with a representative of the Red Cross, and they have agreed to accept blood donations from members of our church, to be drawn here and distributed among regional hospitals that need them most. In light of the terrible tragedies that have happened in Baltimore and other provinces, I would encourage any and all of you to donate where you may, so that we might bring some light to the darkening world through our offerings. If this interests you, please stay after today’s congregation, and my nephews and I will be happy to receive you.” He nods once to Levi and the boy beside him, who look around to the people at their sides with anticipation.
Langley blinks. No way. It couldn’t be that easy.
“Please keep in mind that we only have the facilities and time to spare for a brief few donations,” the pastor continues. “Any who do not participate this week are free to join the next, or the week after that. We hope to provide a continuous flow year ‘round – if any of you know individuals who would like to participate, regardless of their faith, please direct them to us. And in so doing, we can imitate the goodness and grace of Him who came before. Through the blood of our bodies.”
A hysterical giggle is barely muted by the quick placement of a hand over his mouth, the profiler wrestling with disappointed mirth. Matthews was practically gift-wrapping himself, here. A blood drive. Religious. Two nephews for bait. A direct reference to the Muralist killings. B-I-N-G-fucking-O.
When the time comes to sign the donation waitlist, Langley is sure to scribble his own name on the sheet. He wouldn’t get in today, not with his position. But next week he would be sure to enjoy a private chat with Mr. Matthews and his terrible twosome, see what could be learned.
And in the meantime, search the local forests and lakes for signs of dearly disappeared Fredrick Newberrie.