A Hollow Dream of Summer's End (14 page)

But there was no way out. It had the door, had broken through part of the wall even. There was no way out, except...

Go go go, he told himself, and then instinct took over.

Aiden threw the chair into the window and, seconds later, followed with his body. A dumb move perhaps, but the only other choice was to wait for the teeth and the hope that there were indeed save points somewhere among his twelve years of life.

For the second time in twenty minutes, Aiden fell. Glass rained down with him, and then suddenly he was rolling, sliding, tumbling down the Spanish tiles of the roof. He saw the edge only seconds before he was over it, yet somehow his hand found the gutter and latched on. It was a reflex that saved him for a second time tonight.

The gutter snapped and swung, not quite breaking the fall, but slowing it enough that when the wooden deck rose up to catch him it didn't snap his legs. Glass and dried leaves rained down, followed by the clatter of the gutter. Then he was rolling free, pushing himself up on sore legs and an ankle that stabbed and screamed.

Go, he told himself. Keep going.

And he did. Limping, he pulled himself up and pushed on as a thundering clatter rattled out above. Tiles fell, the creature screamed, and all sounds above spoke of an imminent crash. If the thing had trouble climbing stairs it probably found the roof downright impossible.

Go! Run and don't look back.

Hobbling, he made his way across the deck to the fallen flashlight and scooped it up. His legs were clumsy and his right ankle cried as he drove his weight down upon it and pushed off. Everything below his ankle was awkward, uneven. Everything above, too heavy. Running was like balancing a stick upon a marble and trying to keep it from rolling.

He was ten steps onto the lawn when the thing let out a scream and tumbled from the roof. A long swath of red brick tiles had been knocked free like some absurd crash site. The green canvas umbrella, the wood outdoor table beneath it, and one of the Adirondack chairs all lay in a heap, splintered beneath the convulsing torso of the creature. Furious, frantic, the creature tried to disentangle itself, those legs sliding about on the broken bricks.

He had thirty seconds, a minute perhaps if he was lucky. It'd taken less time when it had fallen out of the treehouse, but it hadn't been wrapped in canvas. It wasn't much time, he thought, but it could be enough. It would have to be. On a flat plane the creature was fast, too fast for him. But on an angle, on a slope like the stairs or the roof...

That's why it didn't catch me, he realized. Back when he'd found it during the game it had been uphill. That's why he had been able to outrun it all those hours ago.

Ignoring the screaming pain and daggers that drove themselves into his ankle, Aiden ran. The damp grass cushioned each step, lessened the pain but only slightly. He focused on a distant spot, a goal close enough to make it to soon. A checkpoint. The edge of the woods. He'd make it twenty seconds, he told himself. Instead he made it in fifteen.

By the time he reached the woods the creature was still on the redwood deck, tugging itself free from the umbrella and flailing. When it spotted him it let out a shriek and jerked. The table spun sideways like an anchor, the redwood banister snapped, but Aiden didn't wait to see if the creature had broken free. He did what he had done before, what had kept him alive this endless night.

He ran.

Only this time, he ran not toward the light but into the darkness.

Sticks cracked underfoot. Branches slapped at him, scraped his face. The flashlight was dying, had been for hours, and offered only a little more light than a candle. It wasn't much to see by or to guide himself through the woods with, but it was close enough. Cobwebs glistened in its beam. The downhill slope was a dark blur, shapes and sticks and stumps emerging as if from a black fog.

He pushed deeper. Faster. The ground accelerated. Somewhere, not too far back, he heard the terrible sound of branches snapping and deadfall crunching beneath a body that cared not for silence. Mister Skitters was coming.

Not tonight, he told himself. He'd run too far, gone too fast. If it was his death the thing was after, it would have to earn it.

He pushed himself, faster and faster. Down the damp darkness, the cold slope of the woods, and into the wild. For a moment he thought of Brian and Freddie, of his two friends and the game they'd played. Of the last time he'd laughed and how distant it felt. He'd run like just like this, half a day ago.

Half a day, or half a lifetime? he wondered. Had the sun not come up this morning, or for a hundred of them?

Perhaps if he ran fast enough he could find them, his two friends, among the dark woods of the preserve. Perhaps his dad and Julie were there. Perhaps that was where it all went, the sunrises and colors and senses of the world that had been stripped bare by that monster and the madness it brought.

Perhaps...

Running among those dark woods, he dreamt of a dawn and a dozen answers, a justice for his friends and his family, for everything that had shifted and changed on that dark night at summer's end.

Perhaps...

The ground was a blur, an unsteady torrent beneath his feet. Too fast, he thought.

And then the ground was no more, the world was sideways, and he was tumbling, falling through darkness and shade. He saw it at the last second, a glimmer of damp rocks and water, the reflection of a moon above in a sky that had been covered in clouds for too many hours. It rushed at him, embraced him.

This shouldn’t be happening, he thought. This shouldn’t be—

And all was white and silent.

18.

GWEEEEEEE!
CAME THE SOUND from the light.
Hwoooock! Tick-tick-tick...

He didn't know how long he had lain there among the rocks. Minutes or hours, the time didn't matter. Only that sound and what it heralded. Only the thing that stalked him.

Straining, he pushed himself up from the rocky creek bed. He found the flashlight, the bulb a dim amber among the darkness. He picked it up, pointed it at the shadows, and chased them away with the dying amber light.

And then his heart broke at what he saw.

Thirty feet away lay a dark oval, a concrete mess of rusty metal, cobwebs, moss and mushrooms. It was the collapsed entrance to the ancient drain he had found earlier.

Anger, absolute and without forgiveness, washed over him. He had run into the woods to escape the terror. And yet in his hurry and confusion he had come back to the very place he had first found it. He had fallen straight into the creek that housed the lair of the beast that had killed his friends.

Hwock! Tick-tick-tick!
came a sound from the darkness inside the ancient drain. Shadows shifted and moved.
Hwock! Tick-tick-tick...

"No," Aiden said, taking a step back from the rotten tunnel as something glistened from within. "No, no, no, please..."

Hwock! Tick-tick-tick!
the shadows rattled and something skittered into the light.

It was a shape, terrible and twisted. Legs were bent the wrong way. A dozen dark eyes blinked beneath sickly lids. But it was different than Mister Skitters. Horns and a hard shell covered places where tumors and skin had dotted the other creature. Tribal tattoos and scars were carved into ancient shell.

It took a tenuous step forward and Aiden took a step back.

Hwock! Tick-tick-tick!
came the sound from the drain as the darkness shifted again. Another glimmer, another glisten, and a second tattered shape emerged. Pincers replaced teeth, fur replaced horns. The details were different but the broad strokes were the same.

Wet lips spat out a familiar song.
Hwack! Tick-tick-tick!

A third shadow crept out of the drain. A fourth. A fifth. Small, large, and somewhere between. For every step Aiden took back they took two forward. A hundred different eyes all blinked. A dozen legs shifted. Tattered bodies pushed against each other to get a good look at this human, this kid who had stumbled into their nest. This invader...

A sixth shape joined them, bobbing on awkward legs. Like the others, it was a tattered mess of torn clothes and tumorous skin. Only the clothes it wore had once been Brian’s. The clothes, and the skin, Aiden realized.

Little else of his friend was recognizable. Only the vague shape, a detail here and there—a tuft of red hair, freckles among the lesions and tumors, fingers among the tentacles—but all else was twisted, transformed.

It had all fallen apart, like Brian had said. All gone to rot.

Gweeeee!
the thing shrieked.
Gweeee!

A scream never left Aiden’s throat. It was stillborn, dead deep within. He had no energy left, no will after this endless night. All he could do was step back, one foot at a time, away from that dark drain.

And then his foot hit something soft and he stumbled backward. The rocks rose up, a hard embrace that rattled his bones. A charge ran up his spine and erupted, two flashbulbs behind his eyes. The creek was hard, rocky, and he'd fallen back onto it.

Fallen, because of something. Something beneath his feet. Something soft and covered in clothes.

A body, he realized.

A body lay in the dry creek bed. A hoodie soaked wet with dew, legs that disappeared into the shadows. And hair. Chestnut with blonde streaks in it.

He recognized the hoodie, the jeans, the hair. The gun that lay a few feet away, the laser tag vest wrapped around its chest. He recognized the body that lay there.

It was his.

A dirt trail led from where he had fallen hours ago, from the ridge above and tumbled down into the dry creek. And up there, at the edge of the creek, circled that horrible thing that had stalked him through this endless night. The thing that had devoured his friends. The thing that stalked him from twilight into...

A dream, he realized. Or a nightmare.

Either way, it was a land beyond the world of the waking, a land where the sun never rose. A land he could soon leave.

As soon as he woke up, he thought. That was all he needed to do! To stop the dream, to end the nightmare!

His heart leapt, a joy perhaps only exceeded by a sunrise, a glimpse of a rendered world freed of shadows and horrors. A promise that all would soon be right.

All I need to do is wake up, he told himself. That's all!

And he grabbed that body that lay before him—his body—and as he shook it the tattered creatures circled and closed in.

Wake up, he said to himself.

"Wake up!" he screamed.

And then he stopped shaking the body and his hands recoiled, cold and shivering. A pool of blood lay beneath the sleeping body. The rocks were red, stained with it. A dark mat of hair, plum, hard and stiff, above a raw patch of skin on the boy’s temple.

The flashlight was no more than a candle, a match in a monsoon, dying in a few final seconds. Yet in that time the light chased away one final shadow, and with it all went cold.

He saw his own eyes, the eyes of the sleeping boy before him, and he realized one thought, horrible and absolute.

He wasn't sleeping.

No one sleeps with their eyes open. No one sleeps on rocks.

Closer, they crept. Closer...

No. No, if I'm not asleep... he struggled to finish the thought, but it was as heavy as the stones that lined that creek, as old as the world itself. If I'm not asleep...

Gweeeeee!
The creatures closed in, chewing through darkness, wet voices screaming:
Gweee! Gweeee!

Then they were upon him, a legion of shadows, teeth sharp and cold and endless as night.

And he thought: if I'm not asleep, then what am I?