The Painted Darkness (6 page)

he also knew he had to get out of his wet clothes and into a warm house sooner than later, so he did the only thing he could think to do: he followed the rabbit tracks. He pushed through the bushes and underbrush, stumbled down a hill and climbed another, all while trying to ignore the pain radiating from where his cold body had slammed into the tree.

Henry didn’t understand what was happening, but he was experiencing more and more signs of delirium and exhaustion the further he went into the woods. Out of the corner of his eyes, he started to see movement. Little things at first, which he could explain away. That one shaking tree branch was due to a clump of snow falling from higher in the tree. Happens all the time after a snowstorm. Those two shaking branches? A couple of squirrels chasing each other, that’s all.

But then, when entire trees were shaking and creaking with growls emerging from deep in their trunks—then Henry grew certain the forest was coming alive around him, stalking him.

Suddenly, Henry sensed one of the trees actually following him, having broken free of the ground, hulking after him and trying to grab onto his yellow raincoat. There were thunderous footsteps chasing after him and the entire world shook from the impacts.

Henry jumped in surprise, started to run…but then he looked over his shoulder in terror and realized the tree hadn’t moved, of course. Maybe none of them had. He stopped running, his chest heaving, his body exhausted.

Henry continued following the rabbit tracks, much more slowly, but soon he heard strange sounds like thousands of birds gathering in the trees above him. They were flapping their wings incessantly and cawing shrilly. He could feel their beady eyes tracking him as he in turn tracked the rabbits, which were following deer trails deeper into the darkest, thickest part of the woods.

Eventually the tracks started up another hill, but Henry slowed to a stop in the snowy brush at the bottom. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to go on. The woods were as dark as night, and the cawing of the birds was louder than ever, and he couldn’t shake the idea that something was following him, even though he saw nothing when he spun around and looked where he had just come from. There was movement everywhere, but it was always just out of his field of vision.

I need to find out what’s at the top of this hill, he thought, tracing the tracks with his eyes. Maybe the rabbits will be waiting for me.

Or maybe not. At least he would know. He promised himself he would at least check the top of this hill. If he didn’t find the rabbits, he would start running home until he couldn’t run anymore, leaving the evil woods far behind.

Henry climbed the hill, his legs burning from the strain. The birds screamed at him, the trees rustled and started pulling out of the ground again to follow him. Dark and light danced around him. His heart raced in terror, and he fell to his knees and crawled, pulling himself along with his hands. He got to his feet again, but he stumbled at the top of the hill, landing on his side in a beam of sunlight breaking through the tree cover.

Henry’s eyes wanted to close, he didn’t want to see whatever monsters were about to devour him, but he made himself look around like he had promised himself—and when he saw where he was, his eyes widened and he felt his heart leap in his chest.

The river route had taken him the entire way around town. Beyond the underbrush was a plowed parking lot and beyond the icy pavement was the Black Hill Community School. His father’s station wagon was parked by the front doors. There were no other cars in sight.

Henry got to his feet, his mind suddenly very clear. The birds had vanished,the trees were back to normal and the daylight was bright and safe.

With newfound strength, Henry climbed the snow bank created by the plow earlier in the day and he crossed the parking lot, taking care to avoid the slick spots. Mountains of plowed snow surrounded the tall light poles.

Henry stopped on the far side of the parking lot. The rabbit tracks appeared there again, leading directly to the school’s front doors, only this time the tracks weren’t soft indentations in the snow.

They were made out of blood.
Henry carefully approached the front doors, confused by the tracks and trying to decide how to explain to his father what he was doing here and why he was soaked to the bone. His mother would ground him for life if she learned where he had gone, and Ms. Winslow would probably never let him leave the house again, but the cold was crushing him and he had to get into the warmth.
When Henry pulled on the door, he was surprised it opened so easily. He had assumed the doors would be locked since the school was closed for the day.
He stepped into the well-lit hallway where the trail of bloody rabbit tracks continued, covering the floor between the rows of lockers.
The school was as silent as a tomb, with the exception of the buzzing lights above his head. There was no one to be seen anywhere.
Then the door slammed shut behind Henry and he was left standing alone in the hallway. Only he wasn’t alone. The coldness in his bones told him so.

bottom of the rose trellis, wrapping his bleeding hands and feet with pieces of his shredded t-shirt when he hears the phone ringing in the kitchen. The sound is far away, but he recognizes the shrill noise in the gusting winter wind. He and Sarah have wanted to replace the antique phone since the first time it rang in their presence, the harsh buzzing scaring them both. Like a lot of things, they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Henry peers through the kitchen window. There’s no monster to be seen, but the table is smashed and the phone is on the floor, nearly ripped from the wall. Cabinets are open, pots and pans are strewn about, and plates and glasses are broken into jagged shards.

Henry wants to ignore the phone, but there’s only one person who might be calling and he needs to speak with her if he’s going to die today, a possibility he’s coming to accept now that he’s bleeding and shivering and the cold is moving up his spine into his brain.

He hurries to the back door, which is locked, and he smashes a panel of frost-coated glass with his elbow. The pain is faster and sharper than he expected. He reaches through the broken glass and unlocks the deadbolt, pushes the door open with a shove.

He carefully crosses the kitchen, watching for any sign of whatever made this mess. The house is quiet, with the exception of the phone. He tries to avoid the broken glass and shards of china—the remains of a wedding gift from his in-laws—on the linoleum and he grimaces in pain as each unavoidable piece becomes lodged into his foot.

Henry lifts the receiver and answers with a quick: “Hello? Hello?”
“Henry?” the crackling voice on the line replies. “Henry, I can barely hear you!”
“Sarah?”
“Henry, if you can hear me, we’re at the end of the driveway. You didn’t answer the phone, I’ve been calling since last night, so I tried to make it home…”
The line goes to static, then clears.
“…we’re stuck and the battery died about an hour ago. We’re going to try for the house…”
The line goes to static.
“…build a nice warm fire, okay? Henry? Can you hear me, Henry? I love you, okay? I want you to….”
And then the line dies.
“Sarah, no!” Henry yells. He slams the phone and tries to dial, but there’s no dial tone.
Henry fully understands what he heard: his wife and his little boy are a mile away, trapped out in the storm, and they’re going to try to travel on foot to the house. That’s insane! It’s freezing, but is it too cold to spend the night in the van? Henry doesn’t know, but Sarah must think so or she wouldn’t endanger Dillon.
Henry has to help his wife and son, he has to find a way…but then he hears another wet thump from the cellar…and then there’s a deep, bitter laugh, too, as if the monster senses more food is coming.
Henry understands this truth in his gut. He drops the phone and runs back into the snowy night, focused on his original destination: the garage. Now he has a different reason for going there. If he can accept that monsters are real, all he has to do is ask himself one question: how do you destroy a monster? The answer is simple and he feels almost giddy. The answer is obvious now that he’s thought of it.
Again the ice and snow is soothing on Henry’s battered and bruised and bloody feet. The chill crawling through his bones is numbing him to the pain, but he isn’t sure that’s a good thing. Once he arrives at the garage door, Henry breaks yet another window. His keys are on the hook by the kitchen door, but he never thought of them and he has no time to waste.
Inside the garage, the walls offer him shelter from the weather, although the air is brisk. His little Honda sits by the garage door, alone in the middle of the empty space. There’s no clutter here, unlike the cellar. In the far corner is the riding lawnmower and the rakes and the red gas can. There are also old cans of house paint and rough paintbrushes and a bag full of torn rags.
Henry grabs the cleanest rag he can find and he gently brushes the glass and broken china off his feet. Next he removes the rose thorns hidden under the blood on his flesh, but some are pushed so deep it’ll take tweezers to get them. He doesn’t have that kind of time.
Henry wraps his feet with the paint rags and he hobbles to his riding lawnmower. There, in the corner, are his work boots, which he had kicked off here the previous fall so he wouldn’t track mud into the house. He slips the boots on and ties the laces tight, grunting as the thorns he missed are pushed deeper into his foot.
Next Henry grabs a deck mop from the rack next to the lawn mower. He snaps open the lid on the red container of gasoline and pours the liquid over the mop’s strands of thick yarn.
And then Henry is back out the door and into the storm.

lime colored linoleum floor, from one wall to the other. Henry took a few tentative steps further into the hallway where the eerie emptiness greeted him with each step. The sound of his boots echoed between the metal lockers. The rows of lights high above his head hummed.

Henry was shivering, but he had forgotten the cold; curiosity pushed him to follow the tracks. He moved slowly at first, still expecting to be caught by a teacher or maybe even the principal, but he increased his pace when it became clear he was alone. The classrooms were empty and those dozens and dozens of empty desks, along with the previous day’s lessons on the chalkboards, were vaguely unsettling, as if everyone had vanished in the middle of class and would never return.

The rabbit tracks led Henry past the dark cafeteria and into the band hallway until they disappeared again at a closed metal door marked MAINTENANCE ONLY. Henry knew this door. His father had brought him here once. This door was how you got to the basement and all of the boilers with their girl names: Hillary, Matilda, Gertrude, Amelia. This was where his father drained the fat bears.

Henry pushed on the door and it swung open. The tracks continued down the concrete steps, but the space was narrow and the tracks smudged together into a river of blood, dripping from step to step. Henry stood at the top of the stairs, gazing into the dim room below. Then came the sound:

Thump-thump-thump.
Henry heard this call of the boilers, crisp and clear at first—but then the noise was miles away and his vision was spinning. The stairs twisted and turned, the dim light bulbs flickered and flashed, and he heard the crackle of running water off in the distance.
Thump-thump-thump.
Henry stood at the top of the stairs, one hand clutching the slim metal railing, the other hand cold against the wall, and he closed his eyes. The tremendous darkness behind his eyelids began to rotate and he could see colors, the same kind of colors that sometimes came to him when he was playing games in the backyard. Bright white stars burst to life. His fingers tightened on the railing, but he didn’t step backwards, he didn’t sit. He couldn’t do anything but stand there.
Four words appeared in the darkness, followed by his name, which glowed bright red within the star-spotted void. The stars spun clockwise and the words twisted and rotated and changed places until they settled into their final positions.
The words were: Henry paints against the darkness.
When Henry opened his eyes, the stairs had returned to normal. The walls were no longer damp and the light in the room below was steady. Yet the sound of the running water hadn’t gone away. In fact, it was louder, somehow clearer, although he couldn’t see it.
There was another change, too. The bloody rabbit tracks had vanished. Henry looked around, confused, but there was no sign the rabbits had ever been in the school.
The sound of the water grew louder, and Henry made his way to the bottom of the steps. This was the break room for the maintenance employees. There were seven metal lockers, two wooden benches, a duct-taped couch, a yellowed refrigerator, and an old television tuned to a golf tournament. There were no windows and the floor looked grimy in the buzzing light.
On the far side of the room was a door labeled DANGER: BOILERS. That was where Henry’s father drained the fat bears.
Henry approached the door. The sound of the running water was even louder now.
“Stupid fat bear, c’mon, you bitch!” his father cried from behind the door.
Henry stopped. He had never heard his father speak like this, with this much anger. Henry pulled the door open a crack and he was even more shocked by what he saw.
One of the boilers had sprung a leak. Water was spraying like a fire hose against the concrete walls, which were old and dark like a dungeon.
Henry’s father was fighting with the emergency shutoff value, twisting a gigantic wrench with all his might. His arms were bulging and a vein was popping out of his forehead. His overalls and work boots were soaked in the dirty water, which was slowly filling the room. The large drain in the middle of the floor couldn’t maintain the pace. The water churned around his father, who was fighting desperately to stop the flow.
Then Henry saw the monsters for the first time, lurking in the shadows. They rose from the water, their scaly hunchbacks ascending like a shark’s fin. Their scarred faces came next, followed by twisted arms and curled hands with razor-sharp claws. The monsters scowled at Henry as they edged closer to his father…but he couldn’t believe they were real. This had to be another one of his imaginary worlds, another one of his games, just like he plays in the backyard or like the skeleton in the tree house and the rabbits with the red eyes—but his imaginary games never terrified him like this.
“Daddy?” Henry said, nervously.
His father looked up in surprise at the sound of his son’s voice and in that moment one of the monsters grabbed the giant wrench, twisting it with an inhuman force, snapping the emergency shutoff value in half.
The boiler hissed and released its pentup pressure directly onto Henry’s father, shredding his shirt and instantly scalding him like he had been dropped into a fryer. His skin peeled off in layers, bloody and horrible. He dropped to his knees, his face melting.
“Daddy!” Henry screamed.
The stream of boiling hot water slowed to a trickle and the ear-piercing hiss ended. There was a deathly silence unlike any Henry had ever experienced in his life. Then the monsters pounced on his father, digging into his exposed flesh with their fangs, sending a wave of blood across the room. The chewing sound was horrible—and within seconds the cooked flesh was ripped from his father’s bones.
As the monsters fed, Henry’s father fell forward into the water, a pool of blood spreading from his body.
Henry gazed at the red eyes of the monsters as they devoured the thick strands of meat— and then he ran from the basement screaming and he didn’t stop running or screaming until he found his way home where he would hide under his bed until the darkness came.