Sanguine Shadows

The night was still and strange; full of a thousand different sounds that should be but were not. Arvell Missick had left the cozy quiet of the cabin he shared with his wife, Sabine, to step into the unnatural silence of the wooded land around them. Not a sound penetrated the night's stillness, making Arvell’s steady breathing seem as loud as trees felled one after the other.

‘Go back inside…’

The voice inside his head had never sounded like his own. Like a friend he'd always known or a family member he spoke with daily, the internal monologue had always seemed to him like an entirely separate, if wholly ignorable, entity.

It was hard to ignore the internal voice now. Insistent and louder than it had been before, the words in his mind arose once more: 'Go back inside…’

Arvell sent his dark eyes into the darker night. He peered between the trees, seeking the source of his disquiet even as the silence of the woods expanded. He was breathing in deep space, standing in the hollowness of the farthest galaxy's edge, so far away he'd never be close enough to come into contact with even the thought of another person ever again.

Shaking himself, Arvell shrugged his shoulders, adjusting the fit of his housecoat as he tapped the toe of one slipper against the hand-stacked wooden porch. He’d come out here to check the unusual silence and smoke a cigar because Sabine didn't like him smoking in the cabin. Wood held the smell, she said, and his life was devoted to keeping that wiry, wonderful bird content. It had been the key to his own happiness for nearly forty-seven years now. A smoke on the porch every now and then was nothing compared to most of what he'd do for her.

Arvell struck a match between the worn fingers of his large hands. The nails glowed strong as moonlight in the meager glimmer of flame, brighter still because of the darkness of his skin against them. He tipped a stout cigar into his mouth and held it between his teeth as he cupped his hand around the match and brought it to the loose tip until it caught. Puffing a few times to make sure the crackling tobacco was burning well, Arvell shook the match. Once the fading red tip held only a core of heat, he dropped it into the forest green glass ashtray he kept along the hand railing at the edge of the porch. He inhaled deeply and blew smoke into the night air, still amazed at how quiet the world around him was.

Bushy silver-white eyebrows sought his hairline as first one, then a whole parcel of rabbits moved from between the trees. Their fluffy feet made whispers of sound on the forest floor, but nothing more than whispers. It was like they were shadows stepping into form, their brown and caramel and tawny bodies lighter than they should be so as not to cause a sound any louder than a murmur.

Joining the rabbits, foxes slinked into the clear area in front of the cabin. Their fur silvered in the moonlight, they all looked like tiny, mythical Kitsune with extra tails of shadow instead of flesh. They sat facing him, fanning out in a loose crescent and tucked their tails around their feet as they stared.

The foxes were not the last of it. Owls of every hue and size fluttered in and lit upon the upper and middle branches of trees that stood to either side of Arvell and Sabine's gravel drive. Screech, Barn, and even tiny Elf Owls, barely distinguishable from the mice and rats flooding the soft dirt below, came into view and sat silent. Even birds usually confined to the day, such as jays and cardinals, took up perch between the pine needles and cones, weighing down the branches of spruces and furs as far as Arvell could see.

The quiet in the face of a wildlife population of this magnitude was staggering. Arvell wanted to call for Sabine to come see, but couldn't find his voice to disturb the silence.

Deer bearing proud sets of antlers sauntered between the thick, rugged trunks of the surrounding trees. A once-avid hunter, Arvell’s fingers itched for his crossbow when he saw the twelve-point rack of one of the bigger bucks. He could no sooner order his feet to move than his voice to speak, however. His cigar hung between his lips, forgotten and dusting ashes now and then across the chest of his maroon housecoat.

Smaller critters such as martens, weasels, opossums, and raccoons joined the inhuman congregation. Soon, more animals filled the clearing and trees than any Arvell had ever seen together in one place in his entire life. This was something for the record books, and he wondered what had prompted such an unusual assembly.

No matter how many animals gathered, the silence reigned. Arvell mused over the possibility that he'd gone deaf, but he could still hear himself breathing. He could hear his startled heart pumping blood through his veins with more force than his cardiologist would like. He hadn't been struck deaf. Something else was keeping the night soundless.

Perhaps they'd been scared into his neck of the woods by large predators, Arvell worried. He knew they weren't common, but there were bears in these woods. As though he'd summoned larger creatures by thought alone, Arvell saw coyotes shuffling between the prey animals. As close as they were to their typical dinners, the coyotes didn't nip or even growl at the rabbits, weasels, or foxes.

Like the rest, they came into the clearing, sat, and silently stared at Arvell.

Bears ambled his way, somehow finding the space to move between the other animals without touching them. They sat like the rest. Silent. Staring. Not a threat to the others.

Arvell had to wonder, were they a threat to him?

“Hmm?” Arvell saw another form sliding between the four-legged beasts sitting motionless amidst the shadows and moonbeams. Pale skin, long limbs, dark hair flowing down her shoulders. She was slender, graceful, silent, and completely nude.

Arvell averted his eyes, thinking about Sabine inside the cabin. “Young lady,” he called out, his eyes fastened on the floorboards of the porch. “Miss, do you need some help?”

He considered calling for Sabine to get the sheriff's office on the phone but the words seemed stuck in his throat. His tongue had gone as still as the animals surrounding his cabin.

Joining his slippered feet on the floorboards of the porch, her bare toes wiggled at him, urging his gaze upward. His eyes were tugged higher; over the damp, grass-covered skin of her calves, the swell of shapely thighs and hips, the curve of a narrow navel. He avoided the mound of hair between her legs resolutely and in an instant found something to distract him from the thought of her decency, or lack thereof, ever again.

The fingertips of her pale hands were elongated claws. White as bone and thick as steak knives, they dragged along the skin of her thighs in motions as soft as someone brushing flower petals across her flesh. Though they appeared sharp as blades of glass, she drew no blood from herself as she moved the enormous claws in slow, rhythmic strokes up her skin.

Arvell took a step back from her, stumbling as his heel caught on his chair. He didn’t fall because she reached out and snatched him, her clawed hands creating vices around his upper arms.

She held him with no obvious strain, even though he had at least fifty pounds on her willowy frame. Pulling him close to her, she sniffed along his neck and jaw, as though the mild cologne of a man forty-years her senior had a pull on her she couldn’t deny.

“Young lady,” Arvell said. His voice was meek and he despised hearing it that way. “Please…” He didn’t know what he was asking her for. Mercy, part of him thought, and the rest of him believed.

As she raised one of the clawed hands and placed one finger against her plump, pale lips, Arvell found himself thinking mercy was something this woman was in short supply of.

“Shhh,” she urged. The sound was a snake’s hiss in the night air; a bare, malevolent whisper that made his hair stand up along his arms and neck.

Her eyes were elongated and black, like a viper’s. They widened in glee as her corpse-colored lips twisted upward in a happy grin. His fear. It was like she could smell the terror on him and it just tickled her pink to know that sickening dread was there.

The hand she’d shushed him with rocketed forward, smashing into his throat with the claws held together to become the point of an organic blade. As his eyes bugged out of their sockets, his still-lit cigar popped from between his lips to crash to the ground. In the silence, it sounded like a gunshot going off, much as the punch had sounded like the explosion of a bomb.

Skin parted for her like water and blood flooded out of him to splash on the wood floor of the porch. The creature in the form of a woman dragged her hand down, slicing through Arvell’s Adam’s apple, parting the skin over the hollow space of his clavicle, down his chest until she spread all of her fingers out at once with incredible force.

Like a medical examiner who loved nothing more than a messy death, she ripped Arvell’s chest open, exposing muscle, bone, tissue, and organs to the silent night air. Arvell gurgled around the blood in his mouth and sagged against her, already deep in the grip of painful death. He’d been too surprised by her attack to cry out in the first place and now had no air left in his filleted lungs to try if he wanted.

Arvell’s murderess eased him down to the floor of the porch as he lost control of his limbs. She offered no taunts, no explanation, no words at all as the light of life left his eyes and the last breath of air escaped his bloody lips. She studied the stillness of his form as she pulled her red claws from his flesh. She stood and turned, leaving as quietly as she’d come back through the trees.

The gathered animals watched her go and before long, they too began to slip back into the strange quiet of the forest.

Inside their cabin, Arvell’s wife, Sabine, was oblivious to the turmoil which had occurred just outside the home she shared with her husband. Deep in dreams, she heard a voice repeating to her in soothing tones, over and over, ‘Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep…’