Terror in the Night

Siobhan looked back as the truck sped on. Amberly was breathing hard.

“How's it look?” Siobhan asked

“So far?” Amberly asked, “It's out like a light but still breathin'”

“We're good?” Siobhan asked.

“We're good,” Amberly affirmed, though her voice trembled.

What did it feel like to be so close to her father's killer? Siobhan hadn't heard that story, how it had happened, but she knew that Amberly had at least been out with her father and cousin that night, whatever she had seen or had managed to avoid seeing.

Still, the night air resounded with demonic cackles. Still, they seemed to keep up with the truck. Though it was likely an illusion of her own terror, Siobhan though she could hear hooffalls among the trees nearby, thought she saw shadows flitting in the dark.

An itchy trigger finger would get her home safe, the professor had said. Siobhan fired on one of the shadows, the shotgun's now familiar report sending up a thunderclap in answer to the demonic cackles..

They rounded a turn, and just before the road behind them vanished out of sight, she thought she saw one. She fired.

In the crimson glow of their tail-lights, the shadows became more defined. Siobhan shot again, and again. Buckshot pounded into macadam, clouds of dust illuminated in hellish red confounding the path behind them and covering their footprints.

The truck swerved. Siobhan took a shot. She heard a howl, like the cackles neither beast nor human but of vastly different character.

Had she hit one?

Each minute that passed felt like hours, so Siobhan could not say exactly how long it was. The cackling calls and responses gained distance after that shot, but began to close in once more.

Siobhan looked back again.

“Amberly!” she called, “How are you holding up?”

Amberly's voice came, quavering still.

“We're good,” she said, “we're good.”

Something in how she said that, in how she said “We're good”, stuck in Siobhan's mind. She focused her vision for a moment on the animal pen where Amberly had unenviable task of monitoring the Not-Deer. Most of that hideous thing was screened from Siobhan's view by the pen doors, but she could see its legs, Amberly's face, and a sliver of what was between.

To her horror, Siobhan realized it was wrong. The Amberly should have been kneeling, but her shoulders were a little too high, and Siobhan could only see the four legs of the Not-Deer. It was probably nothing, but it made Siobhan's blood run cold even as the careening truck took another corner far faster than it was meant to be taken.

It was probably nothing.

“We're good,” Amberly said again. At first Siobhan thought the girl had just noticed that she was still looking that way, but her head was mostly turned away, and those words... Siobhan worked out what it was. They were the same as the first time Amberly had said it. Every quiver, every inflection, it was exactly the same, like a recording rather than an affirmation.

Holding the shotgun in one hand, she reached up to one of the pen's double doors with her free hand and threw it open.

She knew she wouldn't find the scene of the Not-Deer peacefully tranquilized, but the truth was worse than even the darkest of her fears.

The creature was still lolled over on its side, creating the illusion that Siobhan had seen. As for Amberly... there wasn't much of her left. Long bones that had once been her legs laid shattered, dripping with wet crimson strips of meat that hadn't been entirely consumed. Her arms were gone from just above the elbows, their ragged ends hanging limp with broken bone and viscera.

As for her chest, that was still there. The Not-Deer's long, snaking neck was worming in through the ruin of her belly, flaps of meat and viscera hanging from her spine and ribs. It writhed around, and Siobhan's eyes traced its motion, as inelegant flopping made Amberly's chest rise and fall as though she were breathing, as he neck subtly bulged, and Siobhan realized just how high the thing had climbed, just what voice had been answering her.

Like a hagfish, it had eaten Amberly from the inside out. As Siobhan raised her shotgun and tried to bring it to bear, the thing turned, and it looked her straight in the face. Amberly's head, or what was left of it, seethed, her skull having been shattered into a million pieces or consumed. One of her blue eyes fell out of its socket, revealing the abyssal blackness of the Not-Deer's gaze as the monsters long, dark tongue began to worm out from between the lips of the girls face that it wore momentarily as a mask.

“We're good.”

As Siobhan leveled the shotgun, she felt a scratch on one of her legs. In a single heartbeat, her muscles went limp. Like a marionette without strings, she sank supine into the bed of the truck, her limp fingers dropping the shotgun with a faint, fatal clatter. She tried to scream, but found she could only take shallow breaths and move her eyes. Everything else, it felt like her muscles had vanished, like her limbs were nothing more than wet noodles.

She saw that the Not-Deer had scratched her with one of the spurs on its hind leg. Paralytic venom? That must have been how it had taken Amberly without a sound. Now, Siobhan knew, it was going to take her, too.

The Not-Deer practically slithered over to her, not raising its head too high. Not putting itself, Siobhan realized, where it could be seen through the rear-view mirror. It shook the ruin of Amberly's body free as it did, coming forward with only her face and scalp. The thing licked its face, and its rasping tongue dragged skin and hair into the gnashing teeth of its broad, lipless maw, swallowing down the remnants of its last victim in the plain view of its next.

The Not-Deer moved subtly, but swiftly. It climbed atop Siobhan's helpless form, straddling her hips with its hind legs as its malformed forepaws held down her shoulders. That snaking neck coiled above Siobhan's face, its perpetual grin mocking her fear as its blacker than black eye sockets stared into her.

The Not-Deer extended its tongue, which seemed to go on forever, and as the fetid, carrion reek of its breath and the stench of the still-warm blood that slicked its fur invaded Siobhan's nose its tongue forced its way past her lips and invaded her mouth in a blasphemous parody of a kiss.

Siobhan waited, dreading and yet anticipating a sudden violence that would shed her blood and end her life, but none came. It withdrew its tongue from her mouth and lapped at her cheeks, caressing them carefully, like a lover.

“Help me,” Siobhan managed to whisper, for the paralysis would let her raise her voice no higher, “Help me, God.”

The thing, that hideous thing that was not and had never been a deer, lowered its head. The tip of its tongue played with Siobhan's ear in its continued filthy mockery of sensuality. The teeth approached, and as much as she feared finally feeling the monster's bite, Siobhan strained to follow it out or the corner of her eye. Its hot, rancid breath washed over her neck, her shoulder, and her cheek like a tide of pestilence.

Then came the worst of all. It spoke. Not stolen words somehow mimicked, but the same throaty ventriloquism carrying the creatures own words, its own diabolical intellect conveyed in a soft, sibilant voice dripping with infinite malice.

“God can't help you,” it whispered into her ear, “we killed Him long ago.”

Siobhan wept, and the Not-Deer lapped at her cheeks again, licking up her tears, relishing her disgust, her terror, her sorrow.

Then, seemingly having had its fill of tears, it changed its tenor. Its tongue, that impossibly long tongue, wound firmly around Siobhan's throat, sliding along the back of her neck to support her as the tip of it cupped her chin and forced her slack body to look directly at the monstrosity on top of her. Satisfied that she was in its thrall, the Not-Deer shifted its weight, freeing her shoulders and rearing up tall, dragging Siobhan along with it until she was sitting up, almost on her knees but for its twisting limbs locked around her hips.

“Let our union be blessed by true powers,” the Not-Deer whispered, “and hereby consummated.”

Then its mouth opened wide. Unnaturally wide, like a snake, then impossibly wide, membranous cheeks stretched out farther than Siobhan's darting eyes could see beyond, held out by trembling mandibles, the mockery of human teeth above and below framing her world, collapsing all reality into the maw of hell and the gullet of the beast that awaited her.

It was going to swallow her whole, Siobhan realized as its tongue began to pull her in, and in her heart of hearts she knew that compared to what awaited her there, death would be a blessing.