Bad Men

Doug Newton was sitting downstairs in his favorite chair when the power died. His first reaction was that of most people on the island: he reached for a flashlight so he could check the fuse box. When the flashlight wouldn’t work, he went scouting for candles, eventually finding a pack of tea lights behind the spare bulbs in the kitchen cabinet. He dropped a tea light in an ashtray, lit it, then took a second candle and placed it on a saucer. His mother would be frightened if she woke and found that her TV wasn’t working. She liked the light from the tube, found it comforting. Her greatest fear, Doug believed, was that she might be alone when she died, and she would rather die with Nick at Nite than nobody at all.

Doug had just begun to climb the stairs when the candles flickered slightly and he felt the blast of cold air: a window was open. At the same instant a shuffling sound came from above, then a tapping that sounded like small bare feet running on boards.

Finally, he heard his mother cry out.

Doug knew that the cops, with the possible exception of Joe Dupree, hadn’t believed him when he’d told them about the little girl. Hell, Doug wasn’t too sure that he believed it himself, but he’d seen it and he was pretty certain his mother had seen it too, although she later convinced herself that it was just a dream. Ever since then, as he had admitted to Dupree, Doug had kept a pistol by his bedside and a loaded shotgun beside the hat stand in the hallway. He put the two tea lights down on the hall table and picked up the shotgun. Light filtered through the small square window at the first landing as he ascended the stairs, but he didn’t really need it. Doug knew this house: he’d been born here, lived here, and would die here, if he had his way.

His mother’s room was the second on the right. The door was slightly ajar, as it always was, and Doug thought that he could see shadows moving against the wall. From inside came the sounds of thrashing, and what might have been his mother softly whimpering.

Doug hit the door at a run, the shotgun at his shoulder.

The sheets had been thrown back from his mother’s bed and lay piled on the floor. Snow was blowing in through the open window, the flakes billowing and colliding with one another before falling gently on the carpet. The Gray Girl crouched over Doug’s mother, her mouth pressed against the old woman’s lips, while his mother’s thin arms and skeletal hands pushed at her, trying to force her away. Her hands caught in the folds of the Gray Girl’s gown, which appeared to move independently of the limbs it concealed. It seemed to be part of the girl, as though her body had fused with the shroud in which she had been interred, creating a new skin that hung over her arms like wings.

As Doug entered, the Gray Girl disengaged herself from his mother and swiveled her head in the direction of the intruder. He saw then that she was old, desperately old, a child in form only. Her hair, blond from a distance, was now clearly silver-white. Her cheeks were sunken and Doug perceived bone protruding through the parched skin below her eyes, which were entirely black. Her mouth was strangely rounded and Doug was reminded of a lamprey, a creature designed by nature to adhere to another creature and draw the life from it. Beneath the girl, he saw his mother’s face, her lips trembling and tears falling from her face. Her breathing was barely audible, and as Doug moved toward the bed, the light faded from her eyes and he heard the rattle in her throat as she died.

The Gray Girl hissed at Doug, and he saw the rage in her black eyes at what Doug had done, the distraction of his presence depriving her of that which she sought. Her hand reached out, her fingers little more than bone wrapped in tattered parchment.

And Doug fired.

The force of the blast blew the Gray Girl from the bed and tossed her against the wall. She rolled when she hit the floor, then rose up again and stood before him, framed by the window. The shot had torn holes through her gown and the skin beneath, but no blood came, and there was only a smear of gray tissue where she had struck the wall. She stood and regarded Doug with a malevolence that made him want to run and hide, to curl himself up into a ball in a closet until she went away. For an instant, Doug pictured himself cocooned, listening in the darkness, then hearing the pad of those feet as they approached and halted before his hiding place, the door being drawn slowly open as-

Doug fired again, and the gray child disintegrated into a cloud of moths.

The room was filled with snowflakes and insects and broken glass, and the sound of Doug Newton crying for his dead mother, and for himself.