On a Winter's Eve Page 3

fury; mostly fear. Father was rising from the floor where he had evidently been swatted by one of the creatures. All was chaos for several minutes. I managed to ask father what happened.

  “They want the children first,” he muttered, eyeing me oddly. “I jumped in the path of one of them. It hit me; felt as cold as ice.”

  Indeed, the whole side of his face was blackened and frost bitten as though he’d lain on a glacier all night. Father said he hadn’t had a chance to come at them with a lamp to see if it would do any damage. He seemed to think it would.

  Mothers’ eyes were drying now, but were red and swollen. I think she went just a little mad after that second attack. But also she looked determined. I saw murderous intent in her eyes that night – that, and an agony I hope to never see again in the eyes of another. She just stood in the middle of the room, with a burning lamp in either hand, looking this way and that - waiting, watching…

  A Battle

  It had been almost an hour since they took Jack and the girls when they came at us again.

  The assault began just as unexpectedly as previously, but this time they came up through the floor. I happened to catch a glimpse of the floorboards bulging just before the planks erupted into splinters and the thing rose up in our midst.

  As it rose to its full height above me I batted at it reflexively with a lamp, the burning lamp exploding upon contact. The creature turned into a living torch, immolating right in front of me. I got my first impression then at what they really looked like as I watched that one burn. They were tall, lanky--scaled. Their heads were misshapen and abhorrent in the extreme. I discerned an evil, downright maniacal, intelligence lurking within those glowing, jaundiced orbs.

  Right behind the first came another. Father and I, and mother, were swinging lamps as quickly as we could to fend off the attack of the creatures. We destroyed six or eight of them before they left-off the attack. And then father and I were putting out fires all over the room, beating at them furiously with mother’s throw rugs. Occasionally these, too, caught fire.

  We were rather busy for several minutes, fighting the fires and trying to keep watch for those hideous beasts to come up through the floor or to burst suddenly through the shutters. Having seen the short shrift given to the floorboards I knew they could shatter those boarded up windows as though they were made of balsa.

  It wasn’t till we were nearly finished fighting the many small fires about the room that we noticed mother was no longer with us.

  When we did realize it, father and I both lost it. We were sobbing uncontrollably, still fighting the fires, each of us with a throw rug in one hand and a burning lamp in the other, our faces covered in streaks of tears and soot. We had lost almost our entire family that night. All we had left was each other. We knew that very likely the both of us would be dead within the hour, if not within the next few minutes.

  That next attack came as suddenly and viciously as had all the others. Those creatures moved absolutely without sound. They didn’t even howl or scream as they burned into nothingness – they merely writhed in their death throes. And there was another thing uncanny about them. After they burned there was nothing left, not even ash. They didn’t even scorch the floor where they fell.

  We were down to our last couple of lamps each. I had mother’s lamp I’d fetched from the kitchen sitting at my feet. Trying to preserve it, I grabbed up a half-flaming throw rug and swung it as a Norseman might a battle-axe. It took only a touch of flame to fell the creatures.

  Father was completely out of lamps by now. For a weapon he swung a flaming cushion from the couch that burned his hands and arms as he swung it. Once I saw his mustache catch aflame; he didn’t seem to notice. He suddenly caught my eye.

  “Daniel! Grab that last lamp and run for it! It’s full of oil. Keep it swinging, maybe it’ll scare’em off until daylight! Right before dawn, they’ll leave. Sunlight destroys ‘em, same as fire! It’s your only chance, son. If you stay here you’re dead – as sure as I already am. I’m going to avenge your brothers and sisters!”

  Father backhanded a viper-eyed beast pressing him closely, using his flaming throw rug to good affect and grunting in satisfaction as the horrid thing collapsed to the splintered hardwood floor. Embers from the impact floated about the room, one speck of glowing ash starting the lining on the stripped sofa alight.

  “And I’ll avenge your mother…” he sobbed.

  I argued with father for several moments, something I would never typically do; but as well debate a hurricane. Finally I heeded his commands. I threw my burning rug into a creature’s face, satisfied with the silent howls writ large on its hideous excuse-for-a-face and the way it collapsed into a writhing, thrashing, ashless heap at my feet. Draping another yet-burning throw rug about my shoulders I snatched up mother’s old oil lamp and leaped through a shattered window onto the front porch - a porch covered in the blood splatters of my siblings.

  I kept that lamp swinging around me as I ran, and I ran as I’d never ran before, in spite of the deep snow. Once I glanced back toward the old house to see it completely engulfed in flame. Somehow, father had started a good blaze and kept most of the creatures busy while I made good my escape.

  The rest of the night, which was by now nearly over, is a blur to me. Indistinctly, I can recall to mind images of eyes following me in the dark, down the old country road. But they stayed at a distance, ever fearful of my swinging, glowing lamp.

  I seem to dimly recall that the blowing snow was blinding and mesmerizing. Akin to flying through the starfields of deepest space, the gigantic flakes, uncaring of my plight, danced chaotically about my quivering form, catching in my lashes, visible briefly in the randomly directed glow of my erratically waving oil lamp.

  After what seemed an interminable time during which I sped across light years of distance I came to the house of our nearest neighbor whereupon I beat on the door until the shocked people let me in.

  I huddled in a corner all the rest of that horrid night with my back to a wall, facing a window and with mother’s lamp ever burning in front of me. I didn’t dare sleep; I couldn’t have had I wished. Once, the lamp burned low and, in a panic, I yelled for more lamp oil until the poor people gave it to me.

  The law came by several times to speak with me during those first weeks after the incident. Apparently, they thought the house had caught fire and everyone burned up; a flue fire, they said. But father’s remains were the only bones they found in the ruins of that old house. The others were never found.

  Several weeks later found me settled in Virginia with some of father’s distant kin. It’d taken quite a while to find them, but luckily I had names in my memory, people of whom I had heard him speak.

  It was all I could do to answer their questions, however, for my tongue seemed to cleave to the roof my mouth and it took the utmost of will to force a word past my lips. After mumbling those couple of names a darkness descended over my mind. My senses had succumbed to the horrors through which I’d passed; it would be years before I would again speak.

  An End

  In later years I returned to the old home place, seeking - I know not what.

  I could say I sought the solace of closure – to put a period to the absolute darkest chapter of my life. Mainly I sought retribution in those days, my soul burning with a scarlet desire for revenge. The faces of my brothers, my sisters, my parents hovered always before the lids of my closed eyes – their faltering images conjuring sharp stabbing fear, yes – but also a melancholy whose depths can never be measured.

  The backward people of that place were of no help at all in aiding me run the beasts to ground. To them I had become an outsider. They wished to have nothing to do with me, disdaining utterly any acknowledgment of my family’s existence. In so far as they were concerned we might never have existed.

  Nor did they wish to speak of their own experiences – of wretchedly long winter nights, of shif
ting snows and flying ice when even the trees shivered their timbers in nighted forests. Of abandoned cabins and human minds shattered and stripped of every shred of sanity.

  So it was I alone who, during the darkest of nights, sought the spoor of the creatures of those dark woods, running to ground any odd disappearance or rumor of ill repute. I never allowed myself to be without fire or the means to manufacture it, as one can well imagine.

  And run them to ground I did. I came to know well the eerie glow of hate-filled, venomous eyes on blustery wintery nights, dimly seen through naked oaks and shuddering pines. Their spoor was unearthly - their dens, blasphemous in the extreme.

  For years I hunted them thus, my torches wielded as the soldier levels his bayonet for the charge. I slew them in their hundreds during those dark years and came near to losing both sanity and life more times than can be imagined. Ever the thoughts of father and his enduring sacrifice drove me on – mother and the children must be avenged, at all costs.

  But it seemed that no matter how many were slain their numbers continued to be augmented, as if they were kept by the millions in the stock pens of hell, to be released into these woods as if by some satanic shepherd replenishing his flock once its numbers were found to be depleted.

  I do not recall much, now, of that