The New Year

I started putting these things online in the hope that it would encourage me to write more. Knowing that this nonsense is not just going to exist on my monitor (now it might exist on yours!) makes it all feel a bit more real and worthwhile. Also, I enjoyed writing a holiday themed story last month and got some lovely feedback (!). Then New Year's Eve hit and here we are in 2010. It's the perfect time to try something new. So here's my ambitious (for me) plan. I'll write one story a month, each based or set on a holiday within that month. For extra ambition, the stories will be connected, featuring the same recurring cast of characters, hopefully building (as other long form narratives do) a little world that can grow and change and ultimately come to a brutally violent end come next January (maybe). If it works, I'll be thinking and writing consistently and I'll end up with something a bit more substantial than usual. I don't have much planned beyond the first couple months. Let's see if I can keep it up. And if any of you keep coming back. And if any of this amounts to anything.

I'm a little scared about not knowing what comes next... Which brings us to our first story.

Such Things 1: Old Demons and New Year's

The thing in the road had a withered old man’s face and it screamed like an animal when Ren hit it with her car. There was a rippling sound, a big flag in a bigger wind, as it rolled over her windshield and off into the dark.

She screamed too (a sharper, human scream) and stomped the brakes and counted herself down from hyperventilation. Then she watched her hands shake and fought the urge to cry.

“Oh god,” she said over and over again. “I killed him, I killed him, I killed him.”

But when she looked at the thing in the rearview mirror, it was clear that it wasn’t a man.

She noticed the blood it had left on the hood. Then she noticed that there were more of them. Half a dozen, maybe, were shambling by before the car. They stared at her with their big, stupid eyes, old man faces all exactly alike. Identical creases, identical beards, long and matted and gray.

Their black cloaks billowed strangely when they moved. Odd angles sprouted up as their hidden bodies shifted. They seemed to be smoothly creeping forward on all fours. But then were those points near their backs really elbows? Were the matching ones up by their heads really knees?

One stopped. It stood. They were. Elbows and knees. God help her, they were. Elbows and knees. Those joints straightened out and it rose, rose, rose. Crouched low, it had been more or less human sized, but at full height with everything completely extended it must have been eight, even ten feet tall. She lost sight of its head, but the body… The body. The cloak opened up and hung like a cape. The thing was nude underneath it and impossibly thin. A limp, featureless penis, the color and texture of a bruised and dying worm hung heavily between its long grasshopper legs.

It howled. It cried out. The others did too. They all stood, screaming nonsense at the sky. Ren noticed that some of them must have been female, sporting three pairs of deflated breasts, but still the same furrowed wizard’s face and beard.

The headlights disappeared. The car had died. Ren twisted the key but got nothing. She turned in her seat. The first one to stand was now cradling the body of the one she’d run over.

“Oh shit,” she said.

It howled again, unmistakably in anger. The others turned away as it charged in her direction.

Glass shattered and rained into the car. Long thin fingers gripped her throat and pulled her out. She saw pale flesh, the trees and the snow. She closed her eyes and saw darkness instead.

“Look at me,” it bellowed and Ren remembered talking dogs. Last year Lil had spent an entire night online looking up videos of talking animals; pets that owners had somehow trained to speak. They weren’t real, of course. Or they weren’t really talking. Just a series of noises, a bark or a growl, that happened to sound like “I love you” or “mama.” Lil insisted it was ‘cute’ and ‘amazing’ and ‘really, really cute’ but Ren had found it unsettling. Inhuman things with human speech. Throats making sounds they were not intended to. That’s what she’d thought of it. That’s what she thought of this.

“Look at me,” it said again. This time it shook her. Those arms, so thin and spindly, were powerful nonetheless.

Not daring to disobey, she opened her eyes and faced it.

“My son,” it said. “My son.”

“Your son?”

“I’ll kill you as you killed him.”

“Wait! No, please. It was an accident. I wasn’t looking. Just for a second. I.”

Its fingers tightened around her throat, strong but somehow boneless. Her own snot and tears made a river down her face.

“Please,” she said again. “I’m not ready.”

Those strange fingers loosened as its great head titled sideways.

“Ready?” It asked.

“I have things I need to do. There are people waiting for me. Please. Let me say goodbye.”

“My son.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

It looked down at the road where the crumpled body lay.

“Goodbye,” it said to her or to him.

Ren could feel blood boiling up inside her head. If it didn’t let go soon, her skin would split. She knew it.

Once more it turned to her. The other features on its face suggested that it was deep in thought, but those eyes, those big, wet, cow eyes they all had, seemed as distant and dumb as ever.
The thing suddenly dropped back into a crouch. The fingers unwound from Ren’s raw throat. She gasped for air, taking in a mouthful of sour milk stink. She coughed and wheezed, used her sleeve to cover her nose.

The thing modestly readjusted its cloak.

“One year,” it said in that horrible voice. “One year and one day. Settle your affairs.”

“And then?”

“Come back,” it said. “Goodbye.”

Then it reached out, tapped a finger to each of her eyelids before tracing an outline around her cheeks.

The others were already turning to go. The thing picked its son’s body up from the road and followed.

***

“Have you ever seen a demon?”

Ren had tried the car again to find it running perfectly, driven home with her heart beating high in her chest like a bird, stumbled inside, poured herself the last half-glass of flat Dr. Citrus from the room temperature two liter and watched Lil watch TV for seventeen minutes before working up the courage to ask her this question.

“Nope,” Lil said and went back to shaving the callus from her foot. “Saw a dead mermaid once,” she added without looking up. “Khang-ho and I found one on a beach in Denmark.”

“You never told me that.”

“Meh. Kind of a downer. I think I also had a neighbor in high school whose kid disappeared one time. People said it had something to do with those things that like to hide in closets, but I dunno. That’s pretty much it. You don’t hear a lot about that stuff anymore. Why?”

“No idea.”

“No. Why are you asking?”

“You’re done with all of your classes,” Ren said.

“You know I am. Since Christmas.”

“So what now?”

Lil shrugged and held up a particularly large sliver of skin she’d just shaven from her heel. After making a face, she set it on the table.

“That’s gross,” Ren told her.

“I know. Don’t be mean.”

“Don’t put it on the table.”

“I’ll get it in a minute. You should try this thing. Feel my left foot!”

“No.”

“Your loss.”

“Lil.”

“Hm?”

Ren took a deep breath. “You were talking before about getting a place in the city.”

“Yeah.”

“Were you serious?”

“As a series finale. What, you on board now? I thought you were wanting to hang around a while. Build up a portfolio. Quote, unquote.”

“Tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve.”

“These are terrible segues.”

“I mean, new year, fresh start. It makes you reexamine. Your life. Your priorities. You know?”

Lil stopped trying to bite the hangnail on her big toe. She froze like a hunting dog catching a scent. “Say, what’s going on here?”

“What?”

“Ren-Ren, did something happen?”

“Don’t. And no.”

“Yes and yes, Big Rennie. I can see it in your cheeks.” She gestured. “Very funny. All red. You’re not yourself tonight.”

Ren shrugged. “Who else would I be?”

“Boo! Terrible rebuttal. Way off your game. Totally not yourself. So, why were you asking about demons?”

“I don’t know if I should say anything.”

“Then you wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.”

Ren hesitated a moment. “All right,” she said. “I saw one.”

Lil stopped mid-scrape, the callus shaver a third of the way across the ball of her foot. She left the slab of dead skin hanging as she leaned in a narrowed her eyes.

“No way.”

Ren nodded, took a swig of Dr. Citrus.

“You’re lying,” Lil insisted.

“Because I’m such a big liar.”

“You’ve lied to me at least twice.”

“What!”

“But I see your point,” she continued, talking to herself as much as Ren. “You only lie about embarrassing things and there’s no face to save here.”

“Twice?”

“You’re level headed, not prone to embellishments. Hmm. All right. I believe you!”

“When twice?”

“We’re getting off topic. What kind of demon?”

“The horrible kind.”

“Sounds awful.”

“Terribly.”

“What did it look like?”

“Saruman. If Tolkein were Lovecraft.”

“Ugh,” Lil said and thought a moment. “Ugh! You need something stronger than Dr. Citrus. I’ll pay the extra thirty cents and go get you a Mountain Dew.”

Ren concentrated on the glass in her lap. When a minute had passed and she still said nothing, Lil went over and sat beside her.

“What road were you on?”

“Nineteen. By the woods.”

“Well, there you go. That’s a rural road. Rural areas are demon city. I thought all mothers warned their daughters about travelling alone in the quiet places at night.”

“I thought all daughters ignored that advice.”

“They do. Good advice, though. Tell me what happened.”

“I hit it.”

“In the face?”

“With my car.”

“In the face?!”

“In everything. I ran it over. It’s dead.”

“Oh, Rennie.”

Ren slumped in Lil’s direction, her small hands reaching and clinging. “I can’t stay here,” she whimpered. “There were others. It said… I think I’m in trouble. Lil, I can’t stay. If I left, would you go with me?”

“Say when.”

Ren looked over her shoulder at the window. She looked over Lil’s shoulder at the door. “As soon as we can,” she said.

Lil patted her. “Okay then. As soon as we can.”

***

None of it seemed real the next day: the demon, the drive home, the conversation
with Lil. Like the very last page that you read before sleep or a half-hearted fight in bed with the lights off, it all felt faded and false with the sun up. But the blood was still on the hood of her car. Ren could see it from her bedroom window. And when she walked into the living room, Lil had her laptop open.

“This is the one I was talking about earlier,” she said, bounding over. “It’s an old hotel they converted to a tenement.”

Her chummy fervor was hardly surprising. Lil had been pushing for a move all along. It was Ren who had grown nervous and recommended that they consider staying in town one more year. The thought of such a drastic change had frightened her. Now the memory of the thing in the road frightened her much more. A year and a day, it had said. Well. Only if it could find her.

They spent the afternoon planning and preparing, finally deciding to leave the next month. They’d have to save up what they could before quitting. There would be no telling how soon they’d find new jobs and the cheapest apartments for rent in the city were just as expensive as the house they had now.

Ren tried to distract herself with these smaller concerns and eventually met with some success. But that night when the ball in Time’s Square began to drop, Ren felt her stomach drop with it. And as Lil stood on an armchair, proudly counting down the seconds, Ren was focused on the browning Christmas tree in the corner. Its time had come and gone.

“Happy New Year!” Lil shouted. “Another one down!”

“Happy New Year,” Ren repeated and felt like throwing up.