Night Ends, Darkness Remains

Two shots rang out. At the first, the hell maw of the Not-Deer retracted, folding back into its lipless human face and eternal toothy grin as its head jerked to the side. The second was a direct hit on the monster's neck, causing a spatter of black ichor to spray the bed of the truck.

The Not-Deer's tongue released its grasp on Siobhan and she fell to the back of the truck.

Four more shots sounded in the night, and Siobhan realized what had happened. Professor Anders, in the cab, must have seen it in the rear view when it reared up to swallow her, and he still had his handgun.

The bullets found home, striking the monster in its neck again, its chest, its gut, and its shoulder. It fell on top of Siobhan, hard, and began to twitch and convulse. The stink of rot, more pronounced than ever before, exuded from it, practically choking Siobhan as its black blood poured over her.

Then, its twitching came to an end, and its whole body began to melt. Its flesh dissolved first, flowing like wax beneath its skin and fur, oily putrescence oozing from every orifice and wound. The skin went next, ripping open as the volatile sludge of its innards poured out in great gouts as gashes appeared in the fur that then began to putrefy from the edges, the transmutation from hide to oil spreading across it like fire across paper.

For the most part, only the bones were stubborn. Even as it lost skin and organs, though, those black eyes from which no light escaped remained, their non-presence was not a thing that could rot, but two holes in reality that stubbornly refused to be filled in. The last, oozing tendons moved its jaw as bleached bone emerged around the yellowed teeth, and still those eyes of dark infinity looked at Siobhan.

Then, faintly, she heard its voice again.

“We have your scent,” it said, “you belong to us already.”

Then, it was gone – really gone. The eyes were just holes, ordinary eye-socket holes in a lifeless skull as the last rotten fluid ran off the bones to evaporate into vile steam on the bed of the truck.

Then the bones themselves began to rot. The brittle skeleton crumbled like cigarette ash, bit by bit, and then the ashes crumbled into nothing.

It was just like the professor had said – there was no returning a cryptid's body for taxidermy.

The truck didn't stop, continuing the blitz out of the backwoods mountains and on to the main highway. Once there, somewhere close to the light of civilization, the professor pulled into a truck stop and came around to check on what had happened in the back.

By then, the paralytic was starting to wear off. Siobhan could wiggle her fingers and toes, worm around slightly, and talk at an ordinary volume. At her behest, the professor pulled a tarp over the animal pen and its grisly contents. He gassed up the truck, retrieved the shotgun for himself seeing as Siobhan was far from able to use it, and they kept on driving until dawn.

At that point, Siobhan had recovered. In the morning light, Professor Anders pulled over into a stretch of woods that looked a world different from the black mountains in which those horrors lurked. Siobhan sat up as he came around, hugging her knees. He held a shovel and gave the pen a meaningful look.

There was only one thing they could do for Amberly, after all.

“You can wait in the cab if it's too much,” Anders said.

Siobhan shook her head.

“I just won't look,” she said, “don't want... to get the cab dirty.”

Every physical remnant of the Not-Deer had evaporated like it never was, at least to an outside observer, but Siobhan still felt its stink all over her, the taint of its life and its death alike permeating her clothes and clinging to her skin.

The professor took about an hour. Then he came back to the pen and gathered the things that Siobhan preferred not to see. He took them in a few loads, off into the green and golden woods at dawn. After a little more time, he came around again.

“It's finished,” he said, “there's nothing really to see. But if you have something you want to say or do...”

Siobhan nodded. She climbed out of the flatbed and followed the professor to the small grave he'd dug, a disturbed stone stood up as a marker to any who followed that someone had been buried there with respect and purpose.

Siobhan knelt down in front of the low mound of disturbed earth and tried to pray, but found that she couldn't.

“I'm sorry it had to be this way,” the Professor said.

“You're so calm,” Siobhan muttered.

“The things that go bump in the night, and the dark corners of the world in which they hide, aren't very friendly to mankind,” he said. “This isn't the first time I've had to dig a grave. I can hope it will be the last, but if it is that's probably because the next one will be dug by someone else for me.”

“Even so,” Siobhan said.

“At some point,” Professor Anders replied, “It just becomes a fact of your average life. It never stops being a sorrow, but at some point you see so many horrors that they don't really horrify.”

Siobhan nodded. She hoped she never understood, but part of her thought she was already well on her way to comprehension of that dismal truth.

From there, they made their way to the nearest town that looked like it belonged to the modern America, some place just off the highway with bright lights, fast food, and a motel that had at least two empty rooms and few questions to ask of an early check-in for weary travelers.

As soon as Siobhan got to her room, she locked every lock on the door behind her, then stripped off her clothes and shoved them in the hotel trash can. Everything it touched, everything that ichor had soaked and dried from, had to go. Even the expensive boutique bra wasn't worth trying to clean of that filth.

As soon as she was ready, she got in the shower. She turned the water on its full, nearly scalding heat and scrubbed her body over and over until her skin looked almost like the shell of a boiled lobster. Lather came and went. She washed her hair, then washed it again. Then she kept on, Scrubbing, washing, desperately trying through those repeated ablutions to excoriate every imagined trace of the Not-Deer's foul presence, to lift its taint from her body, wash it from her hair, and send it flowing down the drain. The cheap motel's hot water gave up, turning ice cold, and still she carried on, until the bar soap had worn down to nothing and both the shampoo bottle that had been provided and the one she'd brought with her toiletries were emptied.

Only then, rinsed one final time, did she dare to turn off the water, step out of the shower, and dry herself off.

In the bathroom mirror, Siobhan saw herself. She was who she had always been, what she had always been. Haggard, somewhat, goose-skinned from the cold water and tired-eyed from the night of terror. But she was there, and alive in humanity's incandescent glow.

But, as she turned from the mirror back to the bedroom, she thought for a second she saw something – a shadow around her neck, almost like she was wearing a choker. She remembered the Not-Deer's touch, and shuddered.

Siobhan wasn't sure she'd ever truly feel clean, but in a practical sense she could do no more. She crawled into the bed and, leaving the bedside table lamp on, let herself fall into a fitful sleep.

In the afternoon, she dressed in the fresh clothes from her bag and met up with Professor Anders, who brought her to the diner that sat next to the motel. Siobhan was loathe to admit it and sick at heart, but her body was hungry whether she wanted to be or not.

All the same, she noticed that Anders was more quite than he would usually ever be. He had a sort of thousand-yard stare, like he wasn't really looking at anything in the world around him, but something in the far distance of his own thoughts.

“We're not... going back to try again, are we?” Siobhan ventured

“Not this expedition,” Anders said. “I hate to admit it but that thing got us good. Maybe it had such a high resistance to the tranquilizer because it was too similar to its own venom, but in any case I clearly need a different strategy.”

“Or,” Siobhan said, “it was playing possum from the start.”

“Any animal-”

“I'm not sure we can call it an animal,” Siobhan said.

“No?” Anders asked. The thousand-yard stare focused on her.

“It... spoke.” Siobhan said.

“And what did it say?” Anders asked, his tone practically breathless.

“At first, it mimicked Amberly's voice, telling me she was okay, even after it had... you know.”

“Mimicry, I see.”

“That wasn't all,” Siobhan said, “After... after it stung me, it told me things. In its own words, but plain English. Things I don't want to repeat.”

Anders rubbed his chin.

“If they're sapient,” he said, “that is a different matter.”

He seemed interested, intently so, but...

“You don't seem surprised, professor.”

“Of all the things I've encountered,” he said, “the things that go bump in the night... it wouldn't be the first to be at least as smart as we are. Those ones seem to have a sort of kinship with each other. It's what I'd most want to truly understand and yet the one thing I genuinely fear to research.”

The waitress arrived, filling the table with a feast worth of plates. Pancakes, hamburgers, appetizers, loads.

“Try to forget the specifics,” the Professor said, “If it can talk, it can lie.”

Siobhan remembered those eyes, the hateful confidence of that whisper, and the darkness that had almost literally swallowed her. She didn't think it was that easy to write off.

But the food helped her put it out of mind, at least for a moment.

In the evening, the professor started making calls, and the next day they followed the highway of their escape into Tennessee, and the Memphis airport with the flight home the professor had chartered, the guns, truck, and any dubious contents that might have remained being returned to Old Joe. Back to Los Angeles, back to all the brightness and a world where monsters only existed projected on a silver screen, with only the nightmares to show for their expedition.

Just another snipe hunt at the behest of a self-proclaimed cryptozoologist. Just another week in a perfectly average life.

Siobhan couldn't believe that any more. She'd seen beyond the veil of “average life”, and the things that lurked behind. All she could do was decide whether to bury her head in the Santa Monica sand, or turn back and dive into a world of darkness, making hers the abnormal life of a reluctant cryptozoologist.

The worst thought was the choice might not be entirely hers to make.