By the Light of His Lantern Read online

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  Something moved over Lewis’s feet. He opened his eyes and sat up, chest already heaving. When he looked there was nothing there.

  “You’re awake.”

  He startled.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry.”

  The weight shifted at the end of the bed as the girl stood, and Lewis listened as she tiptoed along the side of the bed toward him. She stopped, standing next to him. Her voice, a soft sigh, wobbled out of thin air. Lewis looked at her without seeing her.

  “You need to know something,” she said. “Remember what those guys were saying out there?”

  “What guys?”

  “Those guys you talked to. Out there with all the other people.”

  “You were there?”

  “I’m always here,” she said. “I was listening. But do you remember when—”

  Her point was cut drastically short by a commotion outside. There was a crash of some kind, and with it a group of voices rose in distress. Someone shouted very loudly and shrill, and a man barked what sounded like orders or maybe some kind of caution. And then after this, all of these sounds flowing from one to the next so quickly, the screaming started.

  Lewis stood and picked up his lantern. More screams outside. Doors opened out in the hall. Whispers. Lewis moved toward his door and listened. Measured, hesitant footsteps crept past on the other side.

  “Don’t go out there,” the girl said.

  Lewis, hearing her but not really, cracked his door. The hallway was dark, but there were others there. He opened his door and stepped out into the hall.

  “Put that away!” someone quietly shouted.

  “Huh?”

  “Leave the fire.”

  He thought it over. If he must, he thought he’d rather stay behind with it. He’d hide in his room until the commotion fizzled.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  Someone else responded, behind him. He turned and could just make out their nose and brow, the rest of their face filled by pools of darkness.

  “Sounds like someone’s causing problems.”

  “It might be nothing,” someone said.

  Lewis did as he was told and set his lantern in the bedroom and then closed the door behind himself. Perhaps the girl was in the hall with him, or perhaps he’d closed her inside, he didn’t know. She had a tendency to quiet down around others, he noticed.

  Without voicing it, he and the others agreed to journey down the hall toward the bar together, keeping close. Once they reached the end of the hall there was enough light to dimly see the larger room, the tables vacated, the other patrons crowding the windows. The street outside was darker than Lewis remembered. Some of the torches might have gone out. Maybe they were put out. But it was markedly darker.

  The shouting was in intermission. Lewis and his small group bled apart between the tables. He followed the rear wall from one side of the room to the other toward the table he’d sat at earlier. He thought maybe he’d find Terry and the others that way. When he reached the opposite corner he strained his eyes to search for them in the dark. Voices outside picked up again. Confused and urgent.

  “It’s over there!” someone cried in the street.

  Shouts rose up again. Terrified gasps. Doors down the road from them slammed shut. The voices ebbed into anticipatory silence, a holding of breath. Lewis thought he saw his group around the nearest window. A bald head, a bigger body next to it. Then something crashed outside, or was knocked over, and the screams exploded, shrill and desperate. Someone’s scream was choked out, and then they were begging, begging, crying out in a tone that made Lewis forget all about Terry and the others, and he looked around himself in the dark, eyes wide, waiting for the crowd around him to react so that he, too, would know how. The begging stopped. He pushed and shoved until he was next to the bald man. Next to him, barely lit by the faintest-reaching glow from the entrance, he thought he saw Terry.

  “Terry,” he said.

  The man turned to him. It was Terry, all right. Lewis stood next to him, pressed against the wall with the others trying to get an angle of sight through the window. The street was nearly as dark as the inside of the bar, only a warm halo of light creeping over the dirt road until it was swallowed up into black. Each of them stared intently into that black, watching for the source of the pain and death they heard. Everyone gasped.

  “Get that door shut!” someone called.

  Something broke through the darkness past the window outside, large and burly and rolling, tore through the street like a crazed and giant bear. People still outside—the morons—rushed the entrance of the bar to get away but it was too late. People inside fell over one another in their haste to shut the door, to lock the beast out. Those trapped outside fell apart both in flesh and hysterics as the beast reached them. Lewis stood straight and frozen like an ice statue, ready to shatter at the lightest touch.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happening?”

  Hands grabbed him, Terry’s hands, and he was roughly guided back from the window toward the rear wall. Others followed. Lewis allowed Terry to take them there, didn’t even think about where they were going.

  “What’s happening, Terry?”

  “Something got in somehow. It’s happened before.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Another voice, and Lewis instantly recognized it as the bald man’s.

  “Probably someone opened one of the doors around the perimeter and didn’t shut it. Same reason as the last couple times.”

  “Probably some idiot out of his mind,” another voice said, this one a stranger.

  Meanwhile the screams continued outside.

  “Now we’ll wait in here,” Terry said.

  Every person in the bar cried out. Lewis did as well, though he was more startled by the commotion than what caused it. Then it happened again. A heavy weight crashed upon the entrance. People were pushing each other over now to get away from the door. Chairs fell over. Tables too. People grunted and wheezed as they fell clambering over the furniture. Another crash.

  “Get away from the door!”

  Wood crunched and more warm, mellow light poured in. Every head turned in the entrance’s direction. Lewis saw the silhouettes of others making their way toward the rear of the bar, toward him, weaving and tripping through the tables. The entire room reeked of something sour and pungent. It was sweat, new and old, and it was blood and it was urine and it was feces, but most of all it was fear, burned hot and fuming by the spread of all their panic. Through the panic Lewis glimpsed the front door, bowed inward, streams of light daggering through. The next assault on it would—

  The voices in the room rose to an incomprehensible level, a choir of last-ditch despair. Lewis’s eardrums quivered with it, hurt with it, like glass ready to burst. The light coming in was suddenly much brighter, bright enough that he could see his hands on the floor beneath him as he crouched low in an instinctive effort to hide himself. He crouched there for only an instant before Terry had his arm and was pulling him away. His feet battled to straighten themselves, to carry him, and they kicked and shuffled on the floor behind him as Terry dragged him impressively across the room toward the hallway amidst the screaming and carnage which Lewis hadn’t yet allowed himself to observe. He finally got his feet under him. He followed at Terry’s back, stepped on his heels. He dared himself to look at what was happening at the front of the bar but couldn’t. It was all happening so quickly. Before he knew it, they were nearly to the hallway, where several others were piling on to one another in their race to escape. Congested with several pressing bodies, Lewis and Terry paused. It was then Lewis looked. He turned his eyes to the entrance, where the lantern light shone through its busted doorframe, and in that light he saw the silhouette of something which filled the pit of his stomach with ice, and all he truly saw was its outline. It was nothing like a bear a
fter all. It was large and thick through its body, what Lewis assumed was just its body. But reaching from that round, hardy core were several arms, striking and smashing and whipping side to side. Its shape was that of something so alien, Lewis couldn’t guess what it must look like in the light.

  A table launched from the ground and into the ceiling. Where it took flight in one piece, it rained down in several. The beast’s silhouette scooped up a body, which Lewis couldn’t distinguish as dead or alive, and hurled it much the same way. When the remaining people around it had succeeded in distancing themselves to either side of the room, the beast stormed like a whirlwind into those walls, battering and pinning them, getting at anyone still breathing that it could. Windows broke as dead bodies were chucked through them, and a handful of patrons ran for those windows to escape. Several people made a run for the entrance, now the beast was more toward the center of the room, and made it out.

  “Get the fuck out of the way!” someone shouted.

  The hallway was still teeming with bodies, almost all of which lacked deliberate direction.

  “We’re not getting through this way,” Terry said.

  Just then someone spilled out from the hallway through the opposing crowd, a withered man with terrified, hopeful eyes. In his hand he carried a pistol—one of the old kinds, Lewis noted, that shot a lead ball rather than a bullet. When people saw it they stood aside, and very soon he was approaching the center of the room, gun pointed, trembling, advancing with feet of stone toward the beast. The beast had someone on the floor beneath it. Its many limbs pummeled them into the ground. The armed patron stopped and, arms visibly bobbing under the weight of the pistol, took his precious time putting the beast in the weapon’s sights.

  “Shoot it!”

  There were multiple voices commanding him. He cringed at their words. The pistol went off, a flash of light and acrid gunpowder, and a sizeable hole appeared in the wall beside the entrance. The beast was still. Without a face—or any appendage to call its head, really—it was impossible to tell where its focus truly rested. But at that moment, anyone watching knew it was over for the man with the pistol. The beast rolled toward him, toward everyone at the rear of the bar, its arms or legs or branches or whatever they were pinwheeling over one another, pounding the ground. The man shrank backward. He uttered half a scream before a club-like arm drove his head through his chest.

  All at once the hallway was alive again with trampling feet and clawing fingers. Someone forced their way between Lewis and Terry, sending Lewis reeling back against a table. He tried to grab hold of it. Instead he pulled it over onto the ground. Legs were everywhere. He shielded himself from their kicking, their horror-stricken efforts to jump over him and anything else in their path. He tried to get up. He steadied himself on his hands and knees. As he stood he hit his back against the underside of an upright table. Dropping back to his hands, someone promptly crushed his fingers under their boots. He pulled his aching stub to his chest, immediately felt the blood flowing down his palm. He didn’t know where Terry had gone. Though there was light now coming through the entrance, it wasn’t enough to view the faces of those racing every which way around him.

  Something fell against him, over his shoulder. He leaned away, tried to dump it off himself, but only fell awkwardly onto his back. A body lay next to him, its head hanging from a mostly severed neck. He pushed it away with one foot. There was a crash to the right, something thrown against the wall—another body, maybe. Then it was coming at him. Those stumps rolled toward him. Another scream cut short. Lewis prepared—only mentally—to get to his feet when the table at his side flipped end over end through the air overhead, and in its place a hulking presence loomed, covered in hot fur, dripping with foreign blood. Lewis froze. Somewhere in that trunk of a body, between those muscled limbs, there was a mouth. It drew in air, whistling through its nostrils, and blew it back, a dead-flesh stench. Lewis lay still, eyes fixed on its center, where the darkness was deepest and somehow also moving. The room must have started clearing out finally, as there weren’t as many footsteps around his head. That, or Lewis was in the last place anyone in the room wanted to be, and so he didn’t have to worry about being stepped on for the time being. Not by other people, at least.

  The beast hovered, its shadow weighed upon him, crushed him, pinned him to the dirty floorboards like an insect run through by a needle. Lewis thought maybe if he held still long enough, the beast would let him go. Perhaps it didn’t know he was there. Then it moved one of its limbs, slid a giant foot over the floor next to him. Then another, on his other side. It positioned itself directly over him, squatted nearer. The blood in its fur dripped on Lewis’s naked torso. He felt its body’s warmth.

  In a moment, he thought, he wouldn’t have to worry about his severed finger. It’d be whole again. And his sore, throbbing bones would sink through the floorboards into soft sand…

  Lewis didn’t hear anyone now, no fleeing feet. Even Terry must have left him, he thought. Of course, Lewis couldn’t blame him for not stepping in. If it killed Lewis, it wasn’t permanent. Painful, probably, sure. But nothing worth standing in the beast’s way for one person…

  The beast sank nearer. Its thick body dipped against Lewis. Its fur tickled his face. And the smell… If Lewis had anything in his stomach, it might not have been anymore. He pulled his head back, turned away. Its breath was loud and purring now, its mouth uncomfortably close somewhere in the dark mass. It puffed, sniffed, gulped. Its muscles and tendons audibly stretched as its powerful arms or legs—again, whatever they were—twisted in place to steady its hovering weight. Its body lifted some, poised to drop its hungry face down on him. Lewis, eyes squeezed shut, held his breath. At least in a moment I’ll have the salty sea in place of this monster’s stench…

  Then the beast squawked.

  Squawked? No, that wasn’t right…

  Something cut the dark like a jet through a cloud, and Lewis felt the copper downpour over his face. The beast grumbled. It lifted itself higher, positioned its hidden eyes toward something else around the room. That same squawk was heard, and another dive overhead sent the beast’s flesh splitting and raining its goodies down on Lewis like a torn piñata. The beast cried out. Lewis did all he could to roll and dodge out of the way of its pounding feet, circling round and round for the thing flying around the room. Quickly, he backpedaled away, climbed over several bodies until he reached the rear wall of the bar. He looked left to right in search of Terry. There were others huddled as close to the walls as they could get.

  The beast twirled and thrashed. Now and again Lewis glimpsed the bird swoop from the dark ceiling. Its wings beat the air, disappeared into a corner of the room. Then it fell into view quick as a slingshot. The beast’s cries were increasingly woeful. Over and over again they took part in this dance, turning in circles, until the beast became too exhausted to keep up, to stay facing its target. This was only an opportunity for the bird to rip at the beast from behind. The beast’s silhouette grew more tattered, the flesh of its arms hanging in ropes. A few others in the bar used this as an opportunity to sneak through the exit. Once outside they ran like hell, appeared as ghostly blurs across each window. In its struggle, the beast had cleared the center of the room of tables and chairs, and while it had slowed considerably, Lewis didn’t think it safe enough to try and cross.

  The beast howled. Lewis looked on in awe, unsure how it even happened. He thought he’d been watching closely. One of the beast’s swinging limbs was now a mere stub, blood jetting from it like a hose, splashing audibly on the floorboards. It leaned to the side, held itself up with one of its many other arms. The bird continued to swoop. The beast didn’t defend itself. All its remaining strength appeared spent on keeping itself standing, while the bird dashed and picked in a frenzy of aerial crisscrosses. The arms holding the beast upright bent, straightened, quivered, slipped in the pooling blood.

  A squawk resounded overhead, piercing, and the bird dropped from th
e darkness and attached itself to the beast’s head. And there it clung. Without any clear detail, it was difficult to tell what it did exactly. But there it remained, wings unfurled, the sounds of its talons turning flesh into pulp. The beast didn’t cry out. It didn’t bat the bird away, or give any last effort to escape. The arms propping it up simply let go. Its body thumped, fell into a pile of fur and blood.

  Lewis let out the breath he’d been holding.

  Whereas before he’d wanted nothing more than to escape outside and get away, now it was all he could do to keep from sitting down. While others tiptoed and fled into the street, Lewis fixed his eyes on the beast’s corpse. The bird paced its body up and down, a victory strut, and Lewis followed its course again and again, blinking slowly as if in a stupor.

  He looked up and saw Terry with him once more.

  “Are you all right?” Terry asked.

  Lewis nodded.

  Terry did a quick survey of the bar. “We should leave, too.”

  Lewis focused again on the beast and the bird.

  “I’ve seen that bird before,” he said.

  “Come on.” Terry tugged gently on his arm. “I have a room we can go to, to rest. We should go. Away from here.”

  “Wait!” Lewis pulled away from Terry’s guiding grasp. “My lantern.”

  He turned into the hallway and followed it down, empty now. Terry waited in the bar. He reached the door he thought was his and saw the light of his lantern coming through. He opened it, picked it up. When he lifted his lantern he caught sight of a small figure inside the room. It was her. His light revealed only her little shoes and dainty ankles. Without thinking he pulled the lantern away, took a step back, so that he couldn’t see her at all.