They’ve Always Been Here

They’ve always been here.

The world lurched. John twisted as he fell forward, landing on the arm pressed hard against his side. Fresh pain exploded. Lights flashed. The edges of his vision went black. He vomited his meager breakfast. Sputtered and wiped his free arm across his chin, smearing the puke.

Didn’t think the stars thing was real.

Cold wormed its way through his legs and arms, but the late-afternoon sun still reached him. John rolled onto his back and ran his free hand across his belly, skirting the wound. As he brought his hand to his face, his palm glistened a deep red. The wet smear across his cheek actually felt refreshing.

Skreeeeeee.

The sound echoing from the trees was comforting, actually. A sound from his childhood, when an evening at his grandparents’ cabin in the mountains was a relaxing idea. A constant sound for the past three years, living in that same cabin, which had been home until moments before.

Skreeeeeee.

Another one. The owls were coordinating, communicating in screeches.

Skreeeeeee.

And a third.

They were surrounding prey, getting ready to swoop down from multiple directions, use their talons and beaks to pierce and tear, to rend flesh from bones.

A guttural coughing sob pushed its way up John’s throat and out his dry mouth. What he wouldn’t give for the barrel of treated water back at the cabin.

Why did I run?

The impact had knocked him off his feet. It came from somewhere down the mostly overgrown gravel road that had once served as a driveway. He’d been knocked out of his senses too. Had no idea what was happening.

The second shot, he heard that one. A burst of dirt and dust and gravel flew up inches from his face.

He rolled behind the long-dead car, its carcass covered in decaying branches. He pushed himself off the ground and ran into the woods. No plan. Nothing. Abandoning his home with no way to win it back.

Should have stayed. Died. Near them.

Maybe if they hadn’t given up on civilization, fled to the mountains, to his family’s cabin . . . maybe they’d still be alive.

The press was calling it a total civilization collapse. He’d grown up on what was left of the coast, but the coasts were all gone, so many cities claimed by rising tides, under water or new marshlands. Massive engineering projects had bought some time, but nature couldn’t be stopped. Humans had been too slow to take action, dragged their feet for decades while the planet sent unheeded warning after warning.

People moved inland. There were riots over the displaced. “They aren’t from here!” It was no longer “We’re all Americans.” That had probably been a lie the whole time, anyway.

A system run by rich people who cared for little more than their own wealth couldn’t hold. Massive power outages. Rationing and then no medicines. Heavily armed soldiers guarding food lines and then simply hoarding food for themselves and their bosses. People being murdered in the streets for what little they had.

It had been time to leave. To escape before they were killed for a can of beans or a bag of seeds.

But maybe order eventually prevailed. They had electricity thanks to the solar panels his grandparents installed, but there was no Internet. No cable. No connection to the outside world. Maybe things had leveled off? Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe Clara wouldn’t have died if they’d stayed. A goddamned cut to her palm. And they did everything to keep it clean. Still got infected.

And Effie. Effie wasted away. Her golden hair brittle and falling out. Her skin nearly translucent. It had been two months since he buried her next to their daughter in the cold, hard ground.

And, really, what had been the plan? For the three of them to sit in the woods until Effie and he died of old age and left Clara alone?

What was the point?

John pressed his gore-covered arm over the wound again and surveyed the darkening woods from the ground. Things probably weren’t better in “civilization.” What they’d fled had found him.

The owls screeched again. Poor SOB is about to be dinner. More screeches, the sound of wings glancing off branches. Struggling. Silence.

Why did I come here?

He’d forsaken the cabin after his grandparents died. They were no longer a compelling reason for him to get over his fear of the place, to silence what they called his “overactive imagination.” His dad never forced the issue. He also didn’t sell the place. Willed it to John.

Still, John had never returned. Couldn’t risk seeing it again.

One summer, when he was just old enough to be trusted by himself, his grandparents drove the hour into town to play bridge with friends. He’d wanted to stay and play video games on the old LCD TV in the living room.

The owls were screeching that night, like every night. Until everything went silent around 9:00, and a cold heaviness filled the air and pressed down on him. His skin prickled as if thousands of ants were crawling all over his body.

He shouldn’t have gone to the door. Shouldn’t have flicked on the outside floodlight. Shouldn’t have looked out through the decorative glass.

The figure standing on the ridge alongside the gravel driveway was huge. Nine, ten feet? It wore dark rags, like a weather-beaten old cloak. Massive arms reached out, the muscles impossibly defined, like a bodybuilder’s. Huge hands wrapped around a walking stick that was more like a gnarled branch.

The fingers ended in pointed talons that glinted in the powerful artificial light.

Its legs made no sense no matter how hard John stared. They were like deer legs, skinny with soft brown fur. And hooves like shining ebony.

He avoided looking at its head. Its face. Some deep instinct kept him from looking, but he had to know.

Does it see me?

John’s gaze flicked up, and he was sucked in.

Not a head, but a burnished white deer skull with antlers that rose another six feet into the air.

Eyes that were nothing but swirling red light.

Looking back at him. Looking into and through him.

John couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring his hand back up to turn off the light. Couldn’t make his feet carry him away from the door. Away from the glass.

He was rooted, fixed, and those eyes pulled him in until there was nothing nothing nothing nothing else.

And then headlights came up the driveway, and the creature turned and leaped into the woods, its fluttering cloak the last he saw of it.

It was 1:30 in the morning, and his grandparents were home. He’d stood there for almost four and a half hours.

After that, the cabin wasn’t the same. He didn’t spend as many weeks there in the summer, finding excuses in friends and activities. When his grandparents passed, he no longer felt obligated to go at all.

Then the world was burning, and he needed to get his family away.

The sense of unease he felt while the car crawled the last few feet up the gravel driveway was muted by the terror of the chaos behind them. He had to protect his family as long as he could.

When Clara died, he saw the creature again.

The world had gone silent, and the weight descended upon him.

He wanted to run to the room that had belonged to his grandparents. To climb into bed with Effie, who had wept herself to sleep. To hide until daylight.

But Clara.

Some of that fatherly instinct kicked in. What about Clara? some part of his brain insisted. You can’t leave her out there with that thing. That demon. The part of his brain that said, “She’s dead, and nothing more can happen to her,” wasn’t loud enough, and the concept was too damned new and fucking impossible to make any sense.

The floodlights came on.

It stood over her grave, arms outstretched, staff held in one hand. The other held a colorful loop of plastic.

Clara’s bracelet.

He'd buried it with her.

Cold, angry fear shot through John’s veins. What had it done to her? But the grave didn’t look disturbed.

The creature studied the freshly packed earth.

Then it studied him.

It hadn’t so much as turned to look at him. It wasn’t looking at him, and then it was. And the infinite red eyes took him again, but that time he stood there and sobbed while a part of him that was deep and integral broke loose and floated out through the glass door, into the night, where the creature took possession of it.

Effie found him in the morning, curled up on the floor, his head and shoulders pressed awkwardly against the door.

It wasn’t until weeks later that she asked, “What does ‘They’ve always been here’ mean?”

Damned if he knew, but he’d mumbled it for five minutes straight while she tried to wake him from whatever fugue state he was trapped in.

The night after he buried Effie, her corpse light, fragile, like a bundle of kindling for the fire, it returned.

And it wasn’t alone.

It stood on one side of the graves, clutching Clara’s rainbow bracelet. On the other side, an exact replica of it loomed over Effie’s final resting place. Both hands grasped a walking stick, and a gold chain wrapped around one fist, a heart-shaped locket dangling beneath the fingers.

He knew what was inside it: a picture of Effie, ten years younger, smiling wide, her green eyes brimming with happy tears. The day Clara was born. And a picture of Clara, all of five. She had his nose and the lower jaw that pulled back just a little too far. And she had Effie’s beautiful eyes.

They took something more from him that night.

And he’d lived in a perpetual fog ever since. Barely thinking. Barely feeling. Mildly terrorized by the thought of the things in the woods. The creatures. Demons? Some kind of ancient nature spirits avoiding the expansion of mankind?

He still hunted. Still purified rainwater. Raised vegetables. Made preserves. Survived.

He did the same damned jigsaw puzzles his grandparents had kept in the closet by the front door. Countless times. He was surviving. But he wasn’t living. What was the point of living?

Oddly, being shot gave him purpose. Woke him up. Got the old fight or flight back in the game.

He didn’t blame the person. “Shoot first and ask questions later” made a lot of sense in a permanently broken world.

But he was mad he was being robbed, not of what had become his home, but of the death he wanted. To crawl on top of their graves, fall asleep, and never wake up.

John’s eyes worked themselves open when he realized it was completely silent. Night had come. All he could see were a handful of stars through gaps in branches that were nothing but nothing.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Footsteps in the woods. Heavy. Purposeful.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Another direction.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

And a third.

He hadn’t noticed the heaviness in the air at first. But it was growing. Pressing down on his chest.

He sobbed.

Motion above his shoulders. Two dark forms. A plastic bracelet. A golden heart-shaped locket. He reached for one, then the other. As if reaching for the hands of his dead daughter and wife.

“My girls . . .” It was both a broken whisper and a shouted curse at the universe.

Clara.

Effie.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Motion at his feet.

A smooth white animal skull loomed over him, the orbital bones painted a luminescent pink. The eyes slowly filled his vision, the red lights pulling at him like gravity.

They considered him for a moment.

They considered him for an eternity.