As we approached the end of the hall, Mom and Helene backed out of the large open space and glanced in our direction.  The looks on their faces were of sheer terror.  Even as protective rage welled up within me, tears blurred my vision in response to the look on my mother’s face.  It was almost unbearable.  No, it was unbearable in ways that defy description.  One should never witness such horror reflected back in the expression of a parent.  It’s as unforgivable as it is unimaginable.  It distorted her in some way that could not be accepted.  It struck me repeatedly as I ran toward them.

“Richard!” she screamed again.  Her voice had gone up an octave despite my thinking such a thing impossible.  The sound of it was like a blade cutting through flesh.  It was my flesh, and it cut me again and again and again.

Helene was beyond words and simply cried out in sharp tones of emotional agony.  She rested her back and head against my mother as though she were drained of energy, and then she fell silent.  I could see her body wracked by seizures of grief before she fell limp.  Whatever they faced, it was so dreadful that it pushed her mind over the edge and made her unable to cope.  I suspected she’d passed out.  My mother held her close and continued backing into the hallway.  Her gaze bounced repeatedly between us and whatever hell was taking place in the living room.  She was dragging the teenager.

We reached their position in the hallway and gave our best effort not to run them down in our reckless abandon.  My father slid on the floor and stopped near the two, promptly wrapped his arms around them and spun them toward the kitchen.  That put his body between them and the living room.  With one quick glance over his shoulder, he immediately started sidestepping down the hall in the direction we’d come from, his charges in tow.

I turned the corner through the doorway and froze.  While the others passed behind me, I stood motionless.  My eyes couldn’t have been ripped away from what I saw.  I looked first toward the fireplace and then toward the corner of the room where Brogan had been lying.

“Jesus Christ…”  The words slipped from my mouth without a thought.

“Dave!” my dad yelled as he and my mother dragged Helene down the hall.  “Where do we go?  Where do we go?”

I shot a quick glance over my shoulder at them and said as loudly as I could, “The office.  Last door before the sunroom.”

I turned back toward the living room and watched in awe.  What I looked at assaulted my mind.  How could such a thing be?

Living darkness poured down through the fireplace like a waterfall and splashed in all directions when it reached the floor.  Margaret hung suspended, her feet dangling little more than a foot above the couch.  Innumerable arms of smoke entangled her.

They’re restraining her, I thought, just like they did with George.

One of her arms was held back in an unnatural position and I assumed—I knew it had been broken.  Her head flopped to one side, tendrils of darkness wrapped around it so that it was almost completely shrouded, and one wispy tentacle seemed to be stuck in her mouth.  I suspected much later that that was the reason she’d been so suddenly muffled and silenced.  Despite that, her eyes were wide open.  They suddenly looked directly at me.

“Fuck…” I mumbled.  Her gaze was full of pleading, full of despair and begging for help, but I could offer no such thing.

More of the ethereal mass filled the room as it rushed out from the gaping mouth of the fireplace.  More appendages formed and bound her hands and feet, her arms and legs, her neck, and more and more of her torso.  Her body was distorted into positions I knew no human could endure, and yet her eyes remained fixed on me.  It was such a horrific sight.

I turned away.  I couldn’t watch—couldn’t be looked at like that.

My attention fell on Brogan.  He was covered with so much darkness that it looked like a blanket laid carefully over him.  He had not moved from where he lay the last time I saw him.  I found that terribly confusing.

Upon closer inspection, I could see small tendrils of blackness protruding from the whole that lay atop him.  They caressed him in some way, petting him even, caringly touching his coat as though taking care of a sick child.  The scene so wholly offended my sensibilities that I threw up where I stood.

I looked away and toward the fireplace, but not at Margaret.  I looked at the horror dropping down through the chimney and into my living room, and I screamed.  I screamed like a child would scream after a nightmare.  I screamed like a person ripped asunder by unholy angels.  I screamed, “Get out!”  I repeated it over and over again.

A sickening sound filled the room.  It was almost recognizable yet offensive to my ears.  Despite my mind trying to shut down, I became aware of the darkness pulling Margaret into the fireplace.  Her body distorted and folded over on itself as she was pulled into a space not meant for that purpose.

And then she was gone.  She was pulled up and out of sight as quickly as George had been yanked from the porch.  The sound followed her and I was again sick with the sudden knowledge of what that cracking noise represented: bones breaking.

Yet again I was reminded of a line from Storm of the Century that seemed so applicable.  In my confusion and growing blankness, it took center stage in my thoughts.  It was Andre Linoge’s dictum: “If you give me what I want, I’ll go away.”  I thought about that when all else seemed unthinkable.

“What do you want, damn it!?  What the fuck do you want!?”  I wanted to scream it and willed my mouth to do so.  My ears reported nothing but slurring nonsense in response.  I couldn’t be certain which of them was responding clearly if either.  Whether I had said it or not, no answer was forthcoming.

I was rapidly losing awareness of my surroundings.  A quick glance at Brogan showed he was being tenderly cared for by some horror that had no right to do such a thing.  It seemed to protect him and stroke him lovingly, if such a thing were capable of love, and it hadn’t moved him from where he’d spent the afternoon.

Although in the most despicable of ways, I had my confirmation.  The darkness out there was not all there was to this.  He was proof, and it was proof in the way it treated him, the way they treated him.  The darkness was coming, yes indeed, and perhaps some of it had already arrived, but I suspected at that point we’d not seen it all yet.

We’ve seen darkness, but there’s more to come, isn’t there?  My thought also went unanswered.

The world began to go black.  Tunnel vision formed and I lost view of everything around me.  Dry heaves wracked my body.  Darkness began to fill my vision just as it continued filling the living room.  Darkness touched the heart of me with violence antithetical to the abhorrently offensive way it loving touched a family pet.  Darkness invaded my mind just as it invaded my home.  Darkness violated me like it violated every law of nature I thought I knew.

I was about to pass out.  I was only vaguely aware of that fact.  My mind seemed incapable of dealing with the new reality of our world.

The large room was half-full of writhing blackness when my legs began to crumble beneath me.  My own brain and flesh betrayed me.  Neither seemed capable enough to protect me.

Smoky apparitions akin to animal limbs continued filling the room.  They touched here and there testing everything they could find, inspecting windows, overturning furniture, subjecting walls to invasive examinations.

Is it learning?  Is it trying to figure out its new world?  What the hell is it doing?  And what is it doing to Brogan?  With Brogan?  What monstrosity would kill so unthinkingly yet respond so affectionately to a sick animal?  Is he now one of its own?  Is there something different about him that demands respect?  What the hell is going on?  My thoughts were chaotic.

The body I’d always commanded crumbled beneath the weight of an overloaded mind.  What had happened already and what continued to happen overwhelmed me.  The legs that held me up for nearly 45 years suddenly seemed incapable of supporting my own weight.  My eyes that had provided better-than-perfect vision for more than four decades were giving out and shutting down as though they’d suffered some tragic accident.  My mind that had produced award-winning novels and sustained me as a career for so long was no longer able to wrap itself around the unfolding events that continued to assault my senses.

And yet the darkness kept coming.  It flailed around the room in a sickly dance meant for the dead.  It played life while remaining unreal to everything I knew.  It was untouchable yet touched everything.

As I stared in disbelief, Brogan’s body floated through my declining field of vision.  I was startled by it.  He was still shrouded by darkness and still being petted as though by a loving owner.  It sickened me to see it, yet the offense continued.

He still breathed and his tongue still lolled out of his mouth, yet he remained asleep, comatose, subdued.  As his form approached the fireplace, more black smoke encircled him as it formed the unreal arms of something never seen.  The appendages gently folded his legs.  They pushed his tongue into his mouth and closed it with the utmost care.  Tentacles of nonexistent flesh held his head up and tucked his tail around his hindquarters.  I could only see a small portion of what was directly in front of me and he was all that field of vision showed.

As my body began to slump in the doorway, the only thought that crossed my mind was that he was being packaged for shipment, folded neatly into a pile that could be moved without much fuss.

I thought of Margaret being pulled into the fireplace and up through the flue.  I thought of her bones cracking the whole way as one of those damnable wisps of smoke filled her mouth.  I thought of the tortured sounds of her voice being gagged before I even reached the room and how awful it had sounded.  I thought of George and Mosko being ripped from the porch as though they were yo-yos bouncing back and forth uncontrollably and finally yanked back by the puppeteer that controlled them.

I watched Brogan’s body float to the fireplace as it was neatly gathered together for transport.  And then he was carefully pulled into the fireplace, turned on his side, and whisked rapidly up through the chimney.

I was falling.  Darkness was all I could see.  It whipped around the room and filled it rapidly.

But why does it care so much about Brogan?  Why did it so carefully prepare him for movement?  Why didn’t it rip him up through the fireplace as it had Margaret only a few seconds before?  What’s so special about him?

I leaned against the doorframe and knew I would die.

My father’s hands grasping my arms as I started to fall seemed alien to me.  They were disconnected from reality in some way.  Either that or I was.

I could no longer be certain of what was real and what wasn’t.  Still, I heard his voice.  “I’ve got you,” it said.

His arms wrapped around me and pulled me the hall.  I could no longer see the living room but instead stared up at the ceiling.

I willed my feet and legs to respect my wishes and pick up my body, but they didn’t listen.

Are my feet shuffling?  Are they even responding to me anymore?  I couldn’t tell.  They seemed to drag along the hardwood floor of the hall toward the sunroom.  Or is it the office?  I could not be certain.

“It’s okay, Dave.  I’ve got you.”  That voice…  It sounded like my father.

As the lights overhead dashed by uncontrollably, I tried to look toward the other end of the house.  Something was wrong with the picture I saw.  A large mass of something dark and ominous flooded out of the living room.  It spilled into the kitchen across the hall.  More of it splashed in our direction.

Or is it just my direction?  Is someone with me?  How am I moving?

I looked on in my new dream world and thought I saw the door to the screened-in porch blow inward right off the frame.  It wasn’t possible, I knew, because it exploded toward us and was immediately suspended in midair.  It hung for a moment inside the entryway as more darkness flooded in around it.

The door…  How does it float like that?

My eyes rolled back into my head and I again saw the ceiling and overhead lights passing by.  And then it all turned.  The view was different.  It looked like the ceiling in my office.

How did I get here?  If I’m in fact here?

“Dave, listen to me.  We’re in the office.  What do we do now?”

I thought that was my father’s voice.  My head sagged backward and his face seemed to fill the tiny spot of vision I had left.  Shadow distorted everything.

“Dave, you have to tell me what to do.  We’re in your office.  The door is closed.  What do we do?”

That was definitely his voice.

I must surely be dreaming.  Must one respond in a dream?  It only seems polite.

“Panic button,” I hoped I said in response.

Then the world disappeared.  It disappeared into the darkness.

[Introduction | Part 12 | Part 14]