The Performer

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

Linda saw the light as soon as she emerged from under a moss-covered cliff, from which the roots of ageless pines and firs protruded with stubby black tentacles, clinging to the misty night air halfway up to the sky. The cabin faced the opposite, sloping hillside and was accessed by a reasonably convenient clearing that ran from the abandoned mining camp by the river. But it was nearly eight miles to the camp, and the forest further to the south was so impassable that Linda preferred to take a shortcut to the cabin, crossing a small swamp, on which she had put a simple track herself, and then up a steep slope, a narrow path winding between boulders, small granite outcrops, and pine trees, crooked as the fingers of a hundred-year-old man.

She came here every full moon, and the night walks had become so ingrained in her life that any change in surroundings was impossible to miss. An ancient pine tree had finally fallen, defeated by the autumn winds; meltwater had washed away a boulder, and the huge stone slid down the slope, leaving a breach in the thicket of blackberries. Only the cabin remained absolutely unchanged. No sagging log beds, no gaps in the thatched roof, no cracked window frames. It remained untouched by the time as if covered by some kind of dome, impenetrable to decay.

But now, at last, there was the candlelight. The moment Linda had waited and dreaded for eight years, for which she had lived, half hoping in her heart that it would never come. But the time had come. Linda felt something vast and dark and powerful begin to stir in the depths of her mind, something greater than the individuality of a single person or even a multitude of people.

Linda adjusted the shoulder strap of the rifle, touched the knife hanging on her belt in its leather sheath (a gift from her father), then turned sharply and walked back to the car, parked on the edge of the forest at the foot of the hill. The moment had come to fulfill her destiny.

*****

Here in the North, summer night barely touched with its dark wing the rugged land of dense pine and spruce forests, riddled with high, rocky hills. When Linda had left the house three hours earlier, it was only beginning to get dark, and the sky was already getting bright. How unlike the coal-black nights of her native California...

It doesn't matter, the darkness in her soul said. You must think of something else. PURPOSE.

Linda shuddered. She hadn't heard that voice for a long time. Eight years. Since the day her father had been lynched.

Her fingers dug into the steering wheel so hard that her nails felt like they were about to bleed. The idiots! They didn't know what they were doing, didn't realize what a great sacrifice her father had made for them... And what she was about to make.

Her father was preparing her. More than once, he had said that she would have to take on a great mission one day. He was sure that his time was coming to an end, that a new phase was coming, that she would have to protect the universe from the tumbling waves of darkness.

"Three centuries is too long," he once told her. "You get tired... You get tired of waiting, tired of the incessant tension. And one day, you will make a mistake. Or you will just stop..."

Then, in California, he stopped. And they came for him.

She won't make his mistake. Not yet.

The road took a sharp turn, skirting the rocky hilltop she'd been climbing for the last few miles, and she saw the town she'd lived in for the past eight years. The town that had almost become her home and whose name no longer mattered. The darkness had given her a sign.

Her father had told her that she would sense for herself where to look for a place. She didn't know what he was talking about for a long time, but when he was gone, she was suddenly drawn irresistibly north, and she couldn't stop until she found this little town, and on a hill not far from it, an abandoned cabin where the locals never went. Surprisingly, there were no dark legends about the hut on the hill. It had simply been avoided.

That suited Linda just fine. The fewer romantic horror stories, the less chance she had of encountering some brave teenagers showing off for their pimply girlfriends at the most inopportune moments. None of that matters now, though.

The whole town, all three hundred plus residents, was safely asleep. There was no light in any window except the sheriff's office. But, of course, the sheriff was also dreaming in his home. Only his deputy (and part-time nephew) was on duty in the office. Sipping strong tea and reading another pulp magazine, as always.

Linda stopped outside the sheriff's office, got out of the car, and walked up to the porch. Then, listening for the splash of darkness inside, she pulled out a knife and knocked on the door.

The darkness rose in a giant wave and swept over her head.

*****

It wasn't necessarily a candle in the window of an abandoned cabin. Father said it was something new every time. A smoke signal on the tower of a ruined medieval fortress. The flag on the mast of a half-sunken ship in an abandoned port. The phone bell in the long-locked office of a factory that had been closed for years. The main thing was to wait.

Her legs were buckling with fatigue, and the sack she dragged seemed to get heavier every minute. Linda clung with both hands to the lumpy trunk of old spruce and climbed over the hill's edge. She lay on her back for a few moments, regaining her breath. Then she slowly rolled over, got on all fours, and clinging to the trunk, stood on her own two feet. Her wet hair was in tangles and sticking to her eyes, and her clothes were sticking to her body, restricting her movement.

The candle was still burning in the window of the cabin. Linda staggered a few more steps, grasped the door handle with her blood-slick hand, and turned it. The door opened slowly, and Linda stepped inside.

Inside, the hut was one large room, without any furniture except a candle in the window and a large mirror on the opposite wall. Linda dragged her bag inside the hut, shut the door carefully, and only then looked into the mirror

Her reflection - a tall thin girl with loose hair, covered head to toe with fresh blood dripping from her eyelashes and chin, soaking her clothes and running in rivulets down her sturdy tracker boots - was the only distinct image in the mirror. Beside it, the mirror showed only an impenetrable, rippling, breathing darkness.

You responded.

"Yes," Linda answered without parting her lips.

You came.

"Yes."

You performed.

"Yes," Linda answered again, untied the sack, and dropped its contents on the floor in front of the mirror. The dead inhabitants of the town didn't care, and the darkness needed proof.

We are content.

The darkness first consumed Linda's reflection, then Linda herself, and the entire cabin.

*****

The villagers were at first wary of the unfamiliar girl, as was generally the custom in these parts. But despite her foreign appearance, unusual-looking clothes, and a certain reticence, she behaved modestly, did not force new habits, worked in a small vegetable garden, and arranged a good chicken coop. Her vegetables and fresh eggs were as good as anyone else's. As for her rare trips to the Black Forest, where the old cabin of the Dark Master was rumoured to be... Well, every one had his own quirks. Who believes in such superstitions nowadays, anyway?

But one night, a candle burned in the window.