Another Pan

“Hello?”

    “Hey. All set for tomorrow?”

“D&D’s writing session? Sure, I have things covered on my end.”

    “Let’s go over it again, just in case.”

“OK, for a level-one spat, I distract her with background music.”

    “For level two, I have a purse full of Snickers bars ready.”

“For level three, I turn off the Internet access, and they lose Skype connection for fifteen minutes . . .”

    “At which point, I step in with the Snickers.”

“And for a level-four fight . . . Um, what do we do for level four?”

    “Let’s go with pastries; pray we never see a four. See you at Christmas.”

“OK. Good night.”

New York (spring)

All nights come to an end — that is to say, all nights see the break of day. For those of us who are afraid of the dark, or at least not very fond of vampires or impending alarm clocks, thankfully, all nights do end. As the sun comes crashing up over the horizon, flooding the world with flashes and revelation, the night and all its creatures retreat, crawling back into their caves. For most of us, that’s great news. Sure, there are plenty of wonderful uses for night — sound sleep, for one; stargazing and fireworks, for two more — but it is a documented fact that evil is a nocturnal animal. There are no
day
mares, for example. No one has ever brought a car to a screeching stop to let a werewolf cross the road at noontime. It’s not how things work. The only monsters that prowl in the daytime are orthodontists.

When it comes to death and destruction and all that, night is right. Under its downhearted blanket, all sorts of things can go wrong. For instance, you could take a tumble down a flight of stairs. Or you might fail to see a hundred reptilian tongues salivating on your pillow, just waiting for that nest you call hair.
Or
you could scream out when the snakes get you, and
someone you love
could take the tumble down the stairs. And now you’ve done it. You and the dark night and all its nighttime creatures. It’s easy to suppose that that’s why daytime was invented. One might even take solace in the fact that all nights come to an eventual end. All nights, that is, except for one.

You probably don’t remember.

The dawn froze in New York City so that the day was long overdue, but no one seemed to notice it. The gridlock on Fifth Avenue was wound tighter than a mummy with a mortgage, but the drivers sat politely in their cars, not making a single noise. A flock of pigeons was kind enough to preserve the silence by pausing in mid-flutter, twelve feet off the ground, in a static explosion of fungal breadcrumbs and greasy feathers. Even the motionless wave of rainwater almost splashing a passing woman, the bicyclist whistling at the oblivious tourist, the foulmouthed businessman holding a cappuccino to his mouth and a cell phone to his ear — all were frozen in mid-step, stride, or syllable.

The only thing moving in the still city was the lady with silky clothes and ivory skin and blond hair. The governess Vileroy. Her body was broken, her hair singed, her elegant clothes in tatters. As she stumbled through the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment, she clutched her throat and gagged in short spasmodic bursts. Her carefully constructed body was falling apart around her, lifetimes of splendid trappings ripping away like curtains. She seemed to be bending in odd directions, like a tangled marionette. Her hacking was the only noise to be heard.

The lady called Vileroy climbed out of the shattered window, then her still-female form angled down the fire escape and crawled to the street below. Somewhere far off, a street lamp extinguished itself. She lurched along the streets of the Upper East Side, bits of skin and hair flying away, her face contorted in agonizing fits of pain. She crossed a road — half woman, half nebulous haze — moving past a car and then a bicyclist, who was pursing his lips to whistle at an oblivious tourist. She whistled her own tune. It was the wheezing sound of trapped air escaping a dead body. Another fit of coughing consumed her, and a black mist escaped her mouth. She was crawling now, on what little remained of her four limbs.

The lady continued to inch forward, pulled onward by a beckoning force. Soon, she no longer inched or lurched, but seeped through the city streets like smog, unseen and undetected. A demon with no purpose, a darkness with no light. A governess with no children. She paused to listen, and the voice called to her again, taunting her. It was the voice of a new darkness. A voice that she knew she needed in order to survive. It was not temporary, like her crumbling body. It was something more precisely measured on the eternal scale.
The voice of a black divinity bigger than this individual demon
. The voice pierced the billowing black fog that was slowly leaking out of the dark lady, leaving behind silky clothes and ivory skin and blond hair. Soon, the lady was engulfed in a sea of reeking black fog — the stench of all the world’s malice, hatred, and merciless intentions.

Her one devilish eye, a crucifix branded in its blue core, did not abandon her as she lost her last vestiges of humanity. It was her most true part — the only part of her that could never die and fall away. When the hindrance of the broken body was gone, the black fog billowed on . . . until it reached the Marlowe School.

In the tranquil night, Marlowe looked like an ancient monument, grand and imposing. No one saw the thick, polluted cloud overtake the school and disappear into the basement. No one was there to see the broken eye rush hungrily for whatever lay under Marlowe.

Damaged and starving for deliverance, the darkness was drawn deeper inside. Past the marble hallways and satellite classrooms and lockers stuffed with hoodies, Harvard applications, and half-eaten snack cakes, it crept toward its purpose. The basement was dusty, full of old, forgotten exhibits and books with the edges curled shut. In the corner was a computer graveyard overrun with cracked keyboards and monitors the size of headstones. But recently, a section had been taped off for a new shipment. Statues, boxes, and aging artifacts were piled together around a sarcophagus. A yellow sign rested against the wall:

Among the chaos of the unassembled exhibit, the demon eye of the former governess devoured the scene until it found a small statue in a far corner.
Neferat
. A plaque rested at the feet of the oddly female statuette, its body curved, its head worn by time but clearly elongated, like a wolf or a jackal. The darkness did not linger long. This was the source of the calling. This was the timeless task. This was the place where she would rest, alone and undisturbed, until she had regained her strength.