The Lurker in the Dark

“I swear it Inspector, the man’s not sound,” young Fitzroy was saying, “You’ve just gotta look at him to know he ain’t right.”

“He’s denying it?”, I enquired, “I can’t imagine his defence.”

“No. He confessed the moment he got in the room, but worse than that, he demands to be hanged. You can’t claim that’s sane.” 

“Guilt. I’ve seen it plenty of times before. A man does it out of anger, but when he cools off, he sees what he’s done and can’t live with it.” I said calmly. It was going to be a long night.

Fitzroy’s forehead creased and a look of real worry crossed his face as he spoke, “That man’s not ashamed, he’s terrified, sir. We can’t keep him in the cell because he screams that there ain’t enough light and he’s always looking just past you. Like something’s right behind your back.”

I walked over to the observation room window and looked through the glass. The man was sat in a hunched position with his hands clasped as if in prayer, but his eyes were wide and darting about the room. It wasn’t uncommon for a man under the question to appear nervous, but even at this early juncture I would have admitted there was an almost uncanny sense of distress in the man.

“Ok. I see your point corporal. Lead on through,” I relented. Fitzroy’s expression visibly lightened and I had to wonder what the man could possibly have said to disturb the young corporal so badly. Fitzroy unlocked the door and we headed into the brightly lit room, the man noticeably squirming when the light of the interrogation room spilled out into the dark of the corridor.

I took the right-hand chair and Fitzroy the left, all the man did in response was look at me pleadingly. Straightening the case files, I cleared my throat. “ Mister Albert Stewart, you were found by Corporal Fitzroy and Sergeant Dortman this morning at your house in a state of serious distress, as I am sure you know. Also, discovered was the body of your wife, bearing strangulation bruises matching in size to your hands. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I did it. Please we don’t have time for this,” Stewart replied tersely.

I leant back in my chair and Fitzroy looked over at me questioningly. Slightly nonplussed by the unusual path this interrogation was taking, I enquired, “Are you planning on being somewhere?”

“I would not laugh, officer. It is coming for me.  I do not wish to be somewhere, I wish to be something. Dead. For I assure you it would be better for us all if it does not reach me here.” Stewart replied coolly, his eyes flitting to my shadow as he spoke.

“Well, Mister Stewart. We do not make a habit of executing our prisoners without trial. That decision is for a judge.” I replied. 

This only seemed to anger Stewart. “I am guilty of uxoricide. I cannot recall such a case which has not ended at the gallows. Surely a trial is pointless, the result is easily predictable. 

“You admit to murdering your wife?”, I asked, as incredulous as Fitzroy had been.

“There seems little point denying it. Now, please detective…”, Stewart gasped, as the light dimmed suddenly. A look of pure terror was plain on his face, twisting his bookish features into something akin to a frightened child.

“Why does the dark worry you so much?” I demanded.

“It is in the dark that it will come.”Stewart stammered, staring intently at the light. “She has set it upon me.”

“Is that why you killed her? For setting this thing on you?” 

“No, for what she did...the terrible thing she did to Richard” Stewart said tearfully, his eyes as full of grief as of the terror he had felt but moments ago.

“Their son.” Fitzroy whispered, leaning over to me, “we did not find him in the house and the last sighting of him was with Missus Stewart yesterday evening.”

“What did she do to your son, Mister Stewart?”

“Out at the abominable sight in the woods they killed him. They killed him to bring it here.”, Stewart sobbed mournfully.

“Who are they and where is this site, Mister Stewart?”

“That is a long story, one we do not have time for here .” Stewart responded sharply.

“I will need you to explain it before I can do anything, Mister Stewart.”

“Is this necessary, what more do you need than my confession?” Stewart enquired angrily.

“Evidence is everything, Mister Stewart. Now please, tell me about them and this place?” 

“Very well, should it hasten your verdict. Perhaps a year after I got my tenure, Fiona, who had always been interested in the bizarre, joined an old dining society for literatists such as herself. I did not realise it at the time, but the texts they shared were anything but conventional literature…” 

He tailed off, staring wearily at the shadow my arm cast on the table.

“Mister Stewart?”

He jumped visibly, but continued “Oh…yes. At first, I looked favourably on this new found hobby of hers. She had always adored antiquity and took great pleasure in the tomes and wards that her new found friends spoke of. It was only after the first incident that I began to worry about it. Fiona had recently returned from a trip with the society to some dig site in Scandinavia, when I found what I thought were lacerations on Richard’s back one afternoon.” 

“Like cuts?” Fitzroy interjected.

“Yes, like cuts,” Stewart replied irritably and then to me in a more  desperate tone, “Are we done here? Can we please get on with this?”

I shook my head and gestured for him to continue. 

He did so with obvious frustration, “Well, Fiona claimed that on their walk the previous evening he had fallen into a thorn bush, however the cuts looked too neat to be such, and I soon came to realize that new wounds constantly appeared half healed on his back. I confronted Fiona about this but she denied all knowledge of it.”

“You think she was making them, mutilating her own son.” I asked, not quite believing this bizarre tale. 

“I know so!” snapped Stewart, anger flashing in his eyes, “Maybe a month later, I discovered a knife and a small vial hidden amongst her texts. She claimed that they were just trinkets from her trip to Scandinavia, of interest as they predated the Sámi. I would have loved to believe her, god knows I would have, and I did for a time, I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. What kind of mother would harm her firstborn son?”

Albert Stewart, sighed audibly and then continued, “I had all but put what I had assumed to be just a paranoid fancy from my mind, when I discovered a text she was translating open upon her desk. It was written in some abominable runes, unlike any language I have studied. Fortunately her translation notes were with it and I was able to comprehend a fragment of the alien text. It spoke in vague allusions, yet that which I deciphered spoke most definitely of a blood rite, to please some foul entity, some twisted shape shrouded in darkness.”

Visibly shocked, Fitzroy interjected, “She was a pagan?”

I gestured for Fitzroy to be quiet, but Stewart responded darkly , “Not as you have ever heard of. No Christian has met anything half so terrible as that which lurked on those pages.”

I enquired, “So you believe that she was doing this rite? Why on earth would she?”

“That notion has haunted me many a night, but I can think of no such reason that any sane man would understand. But, I am yet to tell you the most damning part, the blood given in this foul devotion must be, the text specified, that of the first of your son’s.”, Stewart replied. 

He continued, “Following my discovery of this terrible scripture, Richard’s wounds grew worse and worse every week. Although, I could never identify when she must have been causing them. That was until yesterday. They had completely healed, leaving not even a trace of the terrible slashes that had been there but a day ago.”

He sat back in his chair and with a look of terrible certainty said, “Last night I awoke to find her gone from my bed. I woke three more times to her absence. No, she was gone from the house and on the fourth waking, I went over to check the library, but nor was she there, as she had recently become accustomed. Then she returned about four this morning, and returned something to her desk; I could not tell what, in the new moon’s darkness. So when I awoke to her crying, for she claimed Richard had ‘vanished in the night’, I knew what she had done. She and her abhorrent cult had made a sacrifice of him to that lurker in the shadows. I could not look at that face I had once loved, knowing what it had done. So I reached out and… and strangled her.”

He sobbed, but there was no remorse in his eyes, just deep sadness and an almost palpable fear which chilled me to the bone. He continued, “For Richard. So she could do no more evil. But it is no matter. It will come for me, for she was its servant. How blind was I to think her death would change a thing? No tonight is the solstice, tonight of all nights I cannot escape the darkness.”

“Why must you avoid the darkness?” I asked, horrified by the absolute terror that gripped the man.

“It is in the dark it comes,” he replied, growing more nervous by the second.

“And then it will kill you?”

“Oh, no. I would long for a quick death, compared to that fiend’s vengeance. It will…”, he tailed off as the lights flickered. 

Suddenly gripped in a frantic terror, he screamed, “It is coming. Please, oh please god. Kill me.”

I rose as if to restrain him and he cried out, his voice choked with fear, “If you have any mercy in your heart, end this with a bullet.”

The lights faltered and failed. In the dark he lunged for me. I moved to fend him off, but he was not reaching for me, but for my carbine. There was a flash of brilliant, terrible light and in the confines of the chamber the shot was deafening. I thank God that Fitzroy is so partial to the pipe, for in the seconds before his match flared, I felt terror like I have never before. I cannot comprehend, let alone express that primal, malevolent and all consuming fear. Even to look upon the corpse of Albert Stewart in that dim matchlight, half of his skull lost to his rushed and clumsy shot, was an insignificant horror to those few moments. The whole station consoled itself that evening with idle dismissals. The man was clearly mad. Should we mourn the death of a man who wished for the rope? A self confessed murderer, who knew he would be hanged?. But while the others convinced themselves, Fitzroy and I could not just dismiss that man. They had not been there for that terrible moment alone in the dark.

It has, I believe, broken me or at least my mind; the soothings of neither church nor opium can calm my nerves. Once as unconcerned as any man of London, I avoid night patrols and when they force them upon me, I slope timidly from streetlamp to streetlamp, eyes flitting to the darkness. Fitzroy left the force only a few days later, to head to Sweden and its summers of endless light. Maybe he can delay its arrival, for a season at least.

No more can I sleep, for in darkness I fear the encroach of that thing, that terrible thing in the dark. It will not be long before they and it come for me; they will drag me off to some institution and leave me there for it to find one night. No. Before they can take me. While I have the means. I shall go the way of Albert Stewart and escape that Lurker in the Dark.