Crawl, Aaron Redfern [books to get back into reading .TXT] 📗

the water bottle.

The darkness is shifting, growing, slowly rising to the surface. A round swath of darker blue in the blue of the water, unfathomably large.

His eyes hold yours for what feels like a long, long time, as though there is a thread between you that ties you together. He watches you as you try to find your voice. Then, swiftly but without seeming to be alarmed, he turns his head. He is looking in the direction of the pool, but up, into the tops of the trees. His eyes dart back and forth.

The water, previously so still, begins to lap at the silty shore as the thing rises. There is a churning on the surface of the water directly over it, yards and yards wide, as the water is displaced by the movement of its submerged body.

The bubbles cease to rise from the bottle as it finally fills to the top. Mike stands and twirls the cap back onto it, and then walks away from the edge of the pool.

The darkness hangs for a moment, then descends, becomes indistinct, and disappears into the blue of the deep water as it falls still. The entire episode cannot have lasted longer than seven or eight seconds.

“There isn’t anything there,” Mike says. “You must have imagined it.” Not it must be gone now,

but it was never there.

He gives you a patient look as he passes you heading toward the cabin. “It’s fine.”

The sense of safety you felt only moments before is gone. You feel like a gazelle on the banks of the Nile, overtaken by a crocodile without warning. Its teeth rip through your neck and you are being dragged down. If you ever find a way out of this place,

(you will never ever get out you will be here forever)

you are not sure that you will ever be able to wade into a pond or a lake again for the rest of your life.

As you turn back toward Mike, who is walking toward the cabin, your back feels exposed to the forest behind you. You brace yourself for the sound of the first high vibrato call, the fan of wings and the sudden lance of pain as their legs dig into you. But not yet. Except for the leviathan in the water, they are still asleep.

You put your feet in motion, following where Mike has already stepped. Deep inside, you know that going into the strange house is a bad idea. But there are no good ideas left in all the world.

And night is coming.

Mike holds the door open for you and gestures you in with a small flourish. You step into a tiny foyer, barely large enough to hold you both, but strangely inviting. A staircase with a dark wooden bannister leads up to the second story, and an entryway opens to another room on your left. In the hallway running between, two empty wooden picture frames hang on the walls. The floor is hardwood, just marked enough to feel fashionably well-worn, and you realize you are standing on a wool mat. The mat is decorated in a pattern reminiscent of dragonflies.

Mike steps in. He shuts the door behind him with a heavy click. A few seconds later, you hear the bolt tap into place.

“There,” he says. “Nothing can get in. We should be safe here for the night.”

“As long as that’s the only way in,” you say.

He nods. “Let’s take a look around.”

The room to the left is a living area. The south face of it, the side from which you entered the house, is taken up by the big bay window. A leather sofa sits below the sill, and a purple chenille loveseat faces opposite. There is a wooden stand in one corner where a television might be positioned, but nothing is on it. The far wall has a fireplace, but it too is empty. Except for a brass chandelier overhead, there is nothing else in the room.

Mike flicks the light switch, and the chandelier springs to life. “That’s good,” he says. He makes his way over to the window. “Hey, you want to pop one open? Get a breeze going through here during the night?” He gives you a cocky grin.

You laugh in spite of yourself. It is short and nervous, but it is laughter. It is the first time in two days you have laughed like you meant it.

He motions to the fireplace. “Seriously, we could get a fire going though. I bet the chimney works. We’d just need the wood.”

“I’m not going out there until morning,” you say. “Not for anything.”

The sky is dim with its first gloamings, and the sun, which you can just see out the side of the bay window, is deepening to orange over the horizon. As you stand there looking out the window, you hear the first of the bone-marimbas give out its rattling call. You wonder if the dead thing you found in your tent this morning was one of the ones that made that sound.

There is one more thing. A brass-knobbed door near the far end of the north wall. It is small, and you think that it must be a closet of some sort. You feel drawn to it for some reason.

You find yourself staring down a flight of narrow stairs. You can only see about halfway down before the stairway becomes obscured by darkness. Not a closet at all, but a basement. You find a switch inside and flip it, and a single flourescent bulb lights the rest of the stairs. At the bottom, where the steps end, there is more darkness.

You leave the matter alone. You don't want to go down there. There is probably nothing down there

(you don’t know that there could be anything)

anyway. You close the door.

The bone-marimba calls again, and is joined by two others. The forest is waking up.

Back in the foyer, you follow the hallway to a kitchen. You beckon for light, and five recessed fixtures in the ceiling comply. The countertops are marble, the deep pan of the sink stainless steel. tiny corner shelves are installed over either side of the kitchen to hold knick-knacks, but there is nothing on them. Over the counter is a long spread of cabinets, and there is an island in the center of the kitchen with a butcher’s block resting on top of it. Not that you have anything to chop. You are running low on food, a problem you will have to deal with another day. There is a refrigerator, but it is empty, and it isn’t running. A quick check reveals nothing in the cabinets either. But off to the side there is a quaint mohogany fold-out dining table with chairs for two.

Mike tries the faucet. No water comes.

“I guess you can’t have it all,” he says. You nod absently, and he looks pleased.

From outside, two of the hollow thrummers also respond, almost in unison. Their sound joins the sounds of the bone-marimbas.

You go back to the living room window, where you can still see some light in the west. Twilight is coming on fast. The sky overhead is becoming a dark blue, like the bottom of the pool. The sun is almost under, and the band of light over it is not wide. If there were clouds, they would be edged in a pink like bloody milk, but there are none. You realize you have seen no clouds in the last two days.

The forest is fully alive with sound.

You should be safe in here. There should be nothing to be afraid of tonight. You are inside, and they are outside. They cannot open doors. But you do not feel safe.

RIIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

They are out there, and you can sense that they will be drawn to the light, and they will want to get in.

(there is nothing you can do bugs always find a way in)

(what if they break the glass)

Outside, the darkness is almost complete. The sun is gone, eaten by the earth, and the golden light on the horizon is a knife’s edge haloed in dying blue.

You reach up to pull the curtains across the big bay window, and then you realize there are no curtains.

Something flutters inside of you, trembling in dreadful anticipation. Moments later, a bug the size of a tom cat thumps

against the window. You can hear the sound very clearly. The two panes of glass it hits both quiver very slightly, but they hold steady. It is mothlike, with fan-shaped feathery wings, and its belly is a light gray. On the undersides of its wings are two huge circles like eyes, and they--

A second creature smacks into the window. It is long and narrow, with ten legs and a many-thorned mandible that opens and closes at you on the other side of the glass. Its three big black eyes stare at you.

Within a minute there are three more, crowding most of what is left of the window, and you can see more shapes flitting behind them, jittering back and forth through the air.

The last of the twilight is gone. Night has arrived.

You cannot tear your eyes away from the window. One of the creatures takes off and is instantly replaced by another, like the first mothlike creature but bigger. They crawl across the surface of the glass, their legs clicking with each step they take, and the sound is just audible amidst the chorus of hellish singing from farther outside.

The sounds go on and on. They are stacked in layers, loud and louder and loudest. The bone-marimbas form the background, a wall of high vibrato, a thousand thousand points that rise and fall chaotically. The other sounds arc over them randomly, or rumble beneath. There are so many sounds. You cannot tell whether some of them are the same. They are everywhere, all around the house, in the forest and the fields and over the roof and on the other side of the walls.

chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. Grummm. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. EEEEEEE-eeeeeeeeeee. Grummm. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. RIIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

You back away until you stumble against the loveseat and fall seated into it. You are still staring at the window, because

(there are millions and millions of bugs and they are going to get)

you cannot help yourself.

The things are moving all across it, trying to get inside to the light. They crawl across the face of the glass. The ones on the window flit off constantly, and new ones instantly come to fill the empty spaces. The window is mobbed with their pale undersides, tangled over with their spindly legs. For several minutes, a bullet-shaped body the size of a wolverine drags itself diagonally along the length of the window.

You