Grinning in the Dark 

GRINNING IN THE DARK 

Ision Yadav

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

What is that?

Tap-tap, tap-tap.

He rolled over, but it didn’t stop. His eyes opened slowly, but he couldn't see. At the window- 

Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

He rolled out of bed and dragged his feet across his room. Some moonlight peeked through his blinds, but otherwise he was in solid, inky darkness. The clock ticked away, useless in the night. He pulled up the blinds, expecting a bird, or a squirrel.

He fell back in surprise. “A-Angus…?”

He saw his mouth move, but the window was too thick to hear his whisper. Angus tapped again. His untrimmed, dirty fingernails prodded the glass like the beak of a dark crow. 

“What are you doing? Why aren’t you-”

Angus stood up from his squatted position and mimed something with his arms. He held them palm up and made a lifting motion. When Cody didn’t move, he started moving his arms in more frantic swings. 

“Oh! Just a second…” He unlatched his window and pushed it open. It creaked like a rusty saw. 

“Come out here.”

“What? Why? It’s the middle of the-”

“Just do it.”

He opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. He probably shouldn’t do that, he knew that very well.

After he clambered out of the tiny gap he stood shivering in the dark. His brother towered over him.

“Why are you out here?”

“Come on,” Angus said. “let’s go.”

“Go where?” 

“You really don’t remember?” He looked at him as if he were an idiot. As he very much thought, Cody knew. “I was just telling you about this yesterday. How are you so stupid?”

“I thought you meant during the day! It’s pitch dark out here!”

“Not a problem.” Angus clicked on a small flashlight. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

“It’s the middle of the night! Can’t we do this tomorrow?” he pleaded, even though he knew he would not change his brother’s mind. 

“You have school tomorrow, stupid. What, are you scared of the dark or something?”

He was scared, and Angus knew it, and Cody knew he knew it. Cody felt the urge to punch that absurd smug grin off his face. But that would not end well for him. He thought of a word he had learned from his reading the week before - futile.

“It’s so cold… can’t I get a jacket?”

“No. We need as much time as possible for this. It’s not even that cold.”

He sighed, and he saw his breath in the gloom. He thought about tomorrow, when he would be running around the playground in the hot sun. Far away from Angus. 

“I don’t want to! You can’t make me!”

“Yes, I can.” He rolled his hands into little fists. Even though he wouldn’t last two seconds against some of the jocks in his class, Cody knew better than anyone that Angus could fare very well against people shorter than him. Against people scared of him. “You’re doing the right thing, Cody-wonesy. People will think you’re a hero after this.”

“We shouldn’t! Mom and Dad will kill us!”

“No, they won’t. Not after they know why we’re doing this. This is the right thing to do, can’t you see that? Let’s just go before they hear your whining.” With that matter settled, he grabbed Cody’s wrist and dragged him towards the woods behind the house. Cody stubbed his toe on an exposed root and almost screamed, but Angus clapped his hand across his mouth. “Shut up,” he hissed. “You don’t want to wake them up.”

“Angus, can’t you stop-”

“I said, shut up.” When Cody saw the look on his brother’s face, he obeyed.

Angus grinned at him. His teeth glittered in the moonlight. 

_______

Silence. Dead and cold, only interrupted by the infrequent chirps of unimportant insects. Small sounds that brought only the slightest relief to the deafening lack of noise. Cody listened to the sound of his thrashing heart and the blood flowing through his ears. They walked along a narrow, barely-there path, only defined by the frequent walks taken by previous owners of the houses nearby. Skyscraper-trees loomed all around him. Cody winced as the occasional twig or pebble poked into his unprotected feet. Just ahead, Angus moved his flashlight around in gentle back-and-forth waves.

“Angus? Where are we going?” His whisper was drowned out by the stillness of the night.

“I don’t know yet. Just stay close to me.”

Cody looked around him, beyond the path. Not that there was anything to see. It seemed as though the rest of the world had disappeared behind a shadowy veil, and all that remained was their small decrepit path. The borders of the world were now only defined by the simple edges of darkness that shrouded the trees around them. He turned his eyes back to the weak light ahead of him, the only sign that they were still in their proper dimension, not fallen into some alternate reality tenanted by shadows and monsters. 

“Angus, I want to go home.”

“I don’t care.” His voice was as cold as the night around them. “I need your help with this. We’re doing the right thing. I heard at school that they were last seen in these woods.”

“These woods go on for miles! Even if they are in here, there’s no way that we’ll find them.” His voice dropped. “How do we even know if those people you eavesdropped on are right?”

Angus’s hair spun out in a fan as he wheeled around. Cody shut his eyes against the glare of the flashlight that now shined directly into his face. “Listen, Cody-wonesy, if you want to go home, go right ahead. But I have the only flashlight, and you have no idea how to get back without me.” 

Cody realized he was right and shut up. He sighed and felt his throat shake and his eyes sting. Don't cry. Don’t cry. If you cry it’ll only make things worse. 

“Go on, go home! If you want to go, then just go.” He turned again and continued down the path. Even just looking at this thin back, Cody knew that he was smiling. Angus won, and they both knew it. For a few moments Cody stood there, considering. But eventually he started walking again, following his brother into the black unknown. He had no choice. If he stayed here, who knows what might get him. 

_______

Angus stopped. He held his hand up in a fist, like those army guys you see in the movies when they realize their squad is about to die.

“Do you smell that?” Cody heard something he had never heard before in his brother’s voice: curiosity. 

“Smell what?”

His brother didn’t respond. Cody sniffed the air tentatively, like an animal who knows it's being stalked by a predator and is trying to find it without giving away that it knows something is there. Then, he smelled it. Something…rotten.

All of a sudden, he felt eyes on him. Even though Angus had his back turned, and there was no way anyone could be awake at this hour, he knew, somehow, something was eyeing him. Sizing him up. Deciding. Would the nutrition he would provide be worth the effort of hunting him? 

His brother started to wander down the path again. “Angus!” he called.

“What? Let’s keep going.”

“Something’s there.”

Angus stopped. “What? What’s there, Cody-wonesy, a dinosaur? Is it going to eat you up?” He aimed the light and the endless expanse of wood that besieged them. “Come on out, wherever you are! I’ve got a nice, fat, dumb little boy for you to enjoy!” 

“Angus! Stop it! I’m serious! I felt something watching-”

“Yeah I’m sure you did, little guy.” Angus turned and walked backward, waving the light in Cody’s eyes. “Right here!” he called. “I’ve got him right here for you! Just follow the light!” He laughed at his own wit. A harsh, ruthless sound. “He’s right here under the-”

The light spun up towards the sky as Angus fell. He grunted as he landed on something, but not the cold forested ground. 

“Angus!” The flashlight lay at Angus’s feet, pointing away from him and whatever he tripped over. “Are you alright?” Cody ran towards where his brother had fallen. “What did you trip on, you big goof-”

“Oh my god! Oh my holy god! Get it off! Get it off! What the fuck is that?!” Again, Cody heard something in his brother’s voice entirely new to him: fear. 

He scrambled off whatever he lay on top of, but not before Cody grabbed the flashlight. “What? What is it?”

Angus grabbed the flashlight from his hand. “Oh my god. Is that-”

Cody saw what lay on the ground in front of them. The flesh in his groin crawled up towards his belly. He felt the spit dry up in his mouth and drew in a breath to scream. 

Angus clapped his hand over his mouth. “Better not,” he hissed. “You don’t want to attract whatever did that.”

In front of them lay a person. Or what used to be a person. They laid face up in the dirt, their limbs bent at awkward angles like a squashed insect. Her hair (Cody assumed it was a her - it was hard to tell at this point) was splashed across the soil in a shape like a ginkgo leaf. Her right eye was rolled up towards her eyebrow. The left eye was missing. The empty socket glared at Cody, open in a perpetual scream that matched her gaping mouth. Flies crawled in and out of her open jaws, buzzing productively. Cody saw them sucking at her dry tongue, dawdling their fat bodies across her dirt-caked teeth. The top of her shirt was torn open, but instead of bare skin that would have excited Angus, all that was there was long, deep slashes that exposed her heart and maroon-coloured ribcage. A messy trench ran across her belly, the edges of the gash slightly flared, as if her organs had been hastily pulled out. 

The light from the flashlight began to waver as Angus’s hands started to shake. Cody felt his gorge rise and turned away so as to not deface the corpse even more. 

“-Haynes woman…”

“What?” Somehow, Cody’s dinner hadn’t come up yet, but he knew it would not be very long before it did. 

“I said, it must be that Haynes woman… that one who disappeared… people said she was last seen in here…”

Cody didn’t reply. His stomach danced inside him. He realized that she didn’t even have her stomach anymore… or her intestines… or…

He pushed that thought away. “Angus?” No response. He opened his eyes and saw Angus had stepped over what remained of the woman and was walking down the path again. “Where are you going, Angus? Don’t leave me here!”

“Come on,” Angus whispered. “We might be able to catch whatever did that.”

“What? You want to catch it? Are you out of your mind? You’ll end up-” He stopped suddenly. From his throat only came foul choking sounds, like he was being strangled. At first he thought it was because of the smell, but then he realized it was something far worse.

He felt a terrible feeling arise within him. It started in his chest and spread gradually outwards towards his limbs. A cold, cold feeling. A feeling of slow and excruciating paralysis. He stood there, his arm reached out in his attempt to beckon Angus back towards him. He felt his thighs and triceps solidify. Then his feet and his hands. He felt his body slowly turn to stone. 

 His mouth hung open, stopped mid sentence. If he had taken the step his brain was about to command his feet to take, he would have fallen over, because he was now frozen… completely still. His body didn’t so much as tremble. Except…

“Cody?” Angus turned around and pointed the light at his brother’s face. Cody’s eyes whirled around in their sockets. They almost seemed to shake, because the rest of his body couldn’t. They spun around like propeller blades, the only part of him that wasn’t paralyzed. “Cody? The hell are you doing?”

Cody looked at him, as if to say, “I’m mute, can’t you see that?” 

(But I’m not mute, I was just talking not even five seconds ago, how could I be mute, why the hell can’t I move? )

Cody turned his eyes away. And saw it. He felt his eyes quiver in his skull once more, then they stilled.

(Something’s there…something’s in the trees)

Now he was still. A standing corpse. Only his mind was left now, left to be horribly aware of what he was experiencing. He was a prisoner in his own body. 

He stared into the dark abyssal woods and watched what approached him. To him, it looked like… a person. Or at least, that was what it seemed to be… or maybe what it used to be. It was dark, dark as the night around him, as if its entire body had been dipped in black ink. Yet somehow, it had a brightness to it. Even though it was as dark as the night around it, Cody could see its outline defined against the trees. It was all his eyes could see. The forest around it seemed to disappear into an unclear, peripheral haze as his vision seemed to focus on that… being walking towards him.

(Angus! Get away! It’s not safe!)

But of course Angus couldn’t hear him, nobody could hear him now, nobody would ever hear him again. He watched as it came closer, at least nine feet tall, he saw its horrible hands

(deinocheirus, I know that one) elongate into claws with one sickening fluid motion, he could see them gleam even though there was no moon and Angus was waving the flashlight in his eyes, blinding him, not that it mattered anyway, because his life was about to end with one swipe of those fingers. It would pull his guts out of his frozen body as he watched, and he wouldn’t be able to scream because his vocal cords now had the consistency of granite. If Angus didn’t turn around, they would both be left there, torn open like that Haynes woman, left for the wolves and the flies to pick up this… this thing’s leftovers. 

Angus must have heard something, because suddenly he turned around. In his fading peripheral vision, he saw Angus’s eyes widen and his mouth open to scream. It looked like he was yawning. Cody couldn’t hear anything.

Then Angus was gone, along with the last light he would ever see, not that he needed it, because he could see the thing that stalked towards him clear as day. He felt its power reach into his mind, planting something there, he felt the ebony roots trickle into the deepest crevices of his mind, he felt it seize him, corrupt him, steal him. He saw the thing’s mouth open in a wide grin, revealing square pearly white teeth, like he had just been to the dentist yesterday. The last part of his mind not already depraved by the thing’s power tried desperately to remember his mother’s face. He wanted his very last thought to be of her, and he recalled what she had said to him yesterday about those assholes who torment him at school. He remembered how she had smiled sweetly, not unlike the smile of the thing that reached its long, ribbed arm towards him now.

(It has no face, no face at all except that beaming grin)

Cody used the last of his mind that was still his own to ignore it, to cast it away, to forget it was there, even as it towered over him and embraced him. 

_______

His eyes opened. 

He wandered aimlessly for a while before he found the path again. When he came out into the clearing, he saw his house. His bedroom window was still open. He shambled around to the front door, but it was locked. He had no key. He suspected no one was home anyway. The sky was grey. A great feeling of time caught up to him and pushed him. He stumbled.

He walked down the street in his pajamas, his feet numb. They had turned numb a long time ago, maybe years ago. He felt a single drop of rain fall from the solemn clouds in the sky. He approached the telephone pole, even though he already knew what was on it. 

He stared at the poster for a long time. Him and his brother stared back. 

After a while he began to grin.