Short Stories

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Night Demons

Charles Posey
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“Watch it Chuck! You’re about to spill your drink all over you.” Tuff said, grabbing my hand as it twitched uncontrollably. For a nursing home attendant, Tuff treated us rather special.

“Yeah, I still get the shakes every now and then. But I have it under control.” I said hoping the trembling would fade in the next few minutes. “Just toss me another blanket around my shoulders will ya?”

With that, I pretended that everything was alright, but even now after twenty-five years the memory still lingers.

You see I was a cop then; a United States Air Force Security Policeman assigned to the law enforcement section of the Security Squadron at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I was assigned duties as an assistant alarm monitor, but on this night one of the security crew got sick and I was given a post on top of a hill overlooking the base.

“Are you listening?” Prodding my captive, I continued my story. He was a silly looking cuss with balding head and bushy eyebrows in for rehab just like me. I think his name is Mike, or Bill, or Ray, or something like that. “Now, if I am bothering you just let me know?”

Anyway, I sat alone on a far hill. My mind muddled through a constant fog of dreams fighting off the sleep that tugged at my eyes. My only thought, “Where was that relief truck?”

I glanced at my watch; four o’clock.” I still remember that. It was about an hour or so before I would be relieved. So, I settled back on my rock that had become my resting place for the night with my M16 as my headrest.

Dew was beginning to form on the plants around me as the cool ocean breeze sweep through the base. I took a quick finger’s tough of it and ran it across my brow trying vainly to cast off the sleep that tugged at my eyes.

Every now and then I tried to concentrate on my duties, but it was no use. I was law enforcement, jeeps, traffic tickets, patrols and alarm checks were my routine, but here I sat trying to keep the bugs from crawling up my shorts.

Boredom had sat in. I tried to fight it off by allowing my mind to wander over nothing hoping something would occupy the time and use up the reminder of my watch. But nothing did.

I have been on the island ten months, none of them pleasant. Everything around me was foreign; the sights, sounds, smells and people. Night after night my greatest trick was fighting off the constant sting of swarming mosquitoes, dealing with creatures that creped and crawled everywhere with lizards and snakes of all sizes and distinctions. I was tired and ready to go home when this assignment was forced on me.
My only thought now was on an empty bed free of the creatures that inhabited it while I was away.

“Are you listening to me? You know what the doc said. Sleeping sitting up is bad for you. You could bend your neck and shut off your breathing and no one would know it until you were dead.”

Anyway, I sat there looking at the sky all dark blue and rich with clouds floating by. I couldn’t help but think about the others stationed around me doing the same things to stay awake.

There was Stephens, a guard dog handler on post 6 down by the east side of the ammo dump. I know he would be wide awake playing a quick game of tag with his dog, if not chasing some poor Pilipino around in the elephant grass.

“We lost a dog handler like that once. I forget his name.”

He had a can with him that he would keep all of his stuff like cards, books, treats for his dog and toys of all types. He could even use as a stoop to sit on is none was available.

Pete, my best ex-friend, had a tower post in the middle of the ammo dump. From it he could see all the base. I tried to switch with him, but he refused. He said he wanted to catch the ghost that haunted the thirty-one stairs that lead to the top of the tower. He was crazy about ghosts.

Each night, if you were real quite you could hear footsteps coming up the tower and see no one. The problem is you could only count thirty steps and never thirty-one.

Some said that if the ghost ever got to the thirty-first step the guard on duty would die. I never did believe that, but it made you look when the wind came blowing through the base and those metal steps began to sing.

The reason, I wanted the post was for the hot meals and the breaks from the chill of the night in the alarm monitor’s room. Boy, I could go for that about right now. But Pete won’t change with me. Said he had some important business to attend to after shift change and needed to get off early. Post 12 was one of those early posts.

Then there was Goldie, one of four females on flight; a blonde haired beauty from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was 5’4” black as night with dyed yellow-blonde 3” hair, all of 120 pounds. They gave her an M16 because there wasn’t a web belt small enough to fit her. Every time she tried to wear it and a 38 it would droop in all the wrong places.

Now she could expect a call from her husband, the assistant flight chief. Goldie had one of those cushy jobs that an education and good looks brings; checking alarms in the ammo dump.

They said that had class “A” weapons there once. I never seen them I just heard. Anyway, her duty was to go around and make sure the alarms were in good working condition once every shift change. That meant the rest of the time she could spend in the air conditioned, bug free room of the alarm monitor.

Well, that left me out of all those in the northern area, bored and unconsciously asleep; just waiting on that smoking green duce and a half to make its way around to my side of the base just north of the ammo dump.

But I sure didn’t have the time to sit around and think about the others or for that matter me. I got up to check out my post.

Suddenly, I heard a loud screeching coming from far in the distance. It was like something found in one of those old Bella Lugosi movies. You know right before the vampire sinks his teeth into the woman's neck; a genuine haunting sound. I pitched from side to side with my weapon at the ready looking over my shoulder to make sure I was still alone, but I saw nothing. I found myself just as suddenly standing up and wide awake.

My mind was clear now except for the feeling of hair standing on end at the back of my neck. Ugly thoughts and impressions raced through my mind as the sound again filled the air. It was like the piercing sound of an oncoming freight train rushing toward me with the steam whistle stuck open. “Yes, I was sure that I was awake.”

One clear vision hung in my mind out of all the other strange impressions that race in and out, that of tortured souls. As I watched the night grow and move about me with the air stirring through the wild brush, I could feel my skin tighten and crawl uncontrollably. What ever it was reached past my present and into my past and reached emotions I did not know I had. Large goose bumps the size of large lemons began to run up and down my arm

Another screech! A cold sweat came over me and I could smell my own fear. “I tell you, it rushed out of my pores like spilled perfume and stank louder than my mosquito spray.”

I took a breath to settle my stomach and I thought now was the best time to call up some of that military training to deal with what ever it was out there. So, I called the office; CSC.

CSC stood for Central Security Control. It was the hub of all activity in the security sector. I realized it had to be busy with shift change and all, but I had to ask if someone else had heard the sound. I sent in the call.

Moments later, I could hear it go out to all the other posts on this side of the base. I thought to myself, "Surely one of them would acknowledge that they heard it too."

I stood there, the only one on this hill in an area overlooking both the base and a small town just on the other side of the fence. All the other sentries were posted around the flight line and runways.

The sound began again but much louder, much closer this time. I strained my ears to hear trying to forget the sound of my own beating heart. I carefully looked over my area.

Clark was riddled with ghost stories. My ex-best friend Pete once tried to catch a ghost like I said. He was lured into a house by a woman who they said had died several years earlier. No one knows what happened in there that night, but the last time I saw him, he was staring at the walls in the Section 8 ward of the hospital. He was completely gone. That was a month or so after what had happened to me.
The town was quiet, only a few expected lights could be seen flashing on and off. Of course, there were stragglers all the time who had overspent there time in one of the local bars and made their way back to base as quietly as they could. But there was nothing out of the ordinary that would be out this time of morning to make such a sound.

The flightline on the other side of the hill was also quiet. In the hangers, I could see the long figures of the linemen readying the morning aircraft as a few workmen walked about outside. In the tower, I could see the glow of the controllers illuminated a ghostly green as they moved about in front of their radar screens. Everything seemed too peaceful for such a disturbing noise. The thought that I was being tricked in some way by the peace that I saw lay in the back of my mind. I called CSC again.

"Control to Post #11, that's negative on any noise outside of your area, over." That was Johnson at the desk. I shook the radio as if I were shaking them awake. I realized that either they were too busy worried about getting off or too asleep not to have heard it.

I felt suddenly alone in the true sense of the word. It was like for the first time I understood what it meant to be alone and standing in the middle of a crowd. Everyone had their own thing to do; their own concerns, which didn't include me. My fear multiplied at the thought.

“You know fear brings about a dryness of the mouth and gums that is hard to shake even with a drink of water; and all I had was my tongue that I rubbed across my lips just to moisten them.”

The screeching began again, louder, closer, and much clearer. I don't know why I was so frightened or why I dreaded finding out where the sound was coming. I looked for some companion of comfort and found it in the horizon just over my right shoulder.

"Come on morning sun!" I said with excitement. My hope was that it would bring some normalcy back into my life. But I saw nothing except for a flash of yellow light that peaked over one of the distant mountains. I thought at once that it could be an early ray of sun light. Another look and no, it was too small, solitary to be the sun. It only filled a speck in the night sky. I thought it had to be one of the beacons off the radar station up in the mountains.

Although the sound was unnerving, I seemed to ease at the thought that the sun might get here before it did. What ever it was couldn’t be that bad in the daylight.

The early morning suddenly turned cold as my body shuddered once again and I could feel my heart begin to race. The noise, more constant now, grew louder. The calm that I exhibited outward faded quickly as a cold sweat began to run down my back. I called CSC again.

The radio was my only link to reality, my security blanket of sorts. With each call I reassured myself that I wasn't in a new episode of the Twilight Zone. But again the call back was negative. This time it was Randolph, the morning desk clerk. I knew now that I was all alone in this, and whatever was out there was there for me alone. I tried to lose the all consuming fear and turn on those dormant instincts of survival. If anything was going to help me it would have to be them.

For some reason I thought about Tech. Sergeant Elkins and what he had said at an earlier guardmount. "There is an instant between life and death that lasts an eternity." He said. "It is that instant when you first see the gun aimed at you, feel the trigger being pulled, and when the bullet tears through your body."

At the time, I had just passed it off as another simple ploy to scare some respect into the guys on the flight. I knew he wasn't in the last war, so how could he know about life and death unless he'd seen it?
But the words tumbled through my mind.

I stood there wondering what I should do next. My duty compelled me to stay while my fear told me to hide. I rambled over the facts as best I could; tried to put my best educated guest into the question before me. It was probably nothing, just an old car being toned up by some jar head street junkie off in one of the far corners of the base.

“I used to have a friend named Porter, he was a helicopter mechanic. Early in the morning, just as they were getting off, he would detach the mufflers of his supped up 74’ Dodge and race it down one of the abandoned World War II airstrips.”

That was my best guest, a troublesome car engine or the wind whipping through the trees. I didn't know. I knew only that I couldn't depend on CSC anymore.

I turned about looking and straining my eyes to see in the dark when I noticed that light. The light I thought was a radar beacon was no beacon at all. It broke from the mountain and fell into the valley moving in an uncommon fashion as one single entity. It moved down and over the hills into the valley like a large fluid glowing ball unique in every detail. I sensed, no I knew, that this had to be the source of the sound and the reason for my fear. A night demon, I shouted inwardly!

I quickly remembered back to the visits with my grandparents and the stories they would tell. I had heard my grandmother speak of the night demons, telling all her children and grandchildren what I thought were only folk tales. She said that night demons were bodiless creatures neither from heaven or hell. They lived their entire lives in the few minutes between day light and dark, running around the world one step ahead of the sun but always in darkness. Should one be caught by a touch of the sun's light then it would be destroyed forever.

It is to be feared by all men who walk the earth during their passing, because their only pleasure is to devour the souls of unexpected people. They do this without ever harming the body of their victims. She said that they are preceded by a song of death and dread calling to their victims in the only voice that they have; the cries of all the other souls that they have collected. Only the victim ever sees or hears the night demon.

Her description of them was of shadowy figures with deep set eyes that glowed of hellish fires and a grizzly mouth just big enough to open wide and consume their prey.

"I tell you no lie. It was true.”

I tried to reject this as quickly as I had the words of Sergeant Elkins. But I had to put it in the same category as a puzzle and the pieces were beginning to fit. I said to myself, I live in the twentieth century not in the middle ages. I work around some of the most modern machinery in the world. I'm not locked in by some unseen fear, or unexplained phenomena. I’m educated, to some degree, so how could this be.

Just then the cries grew sharper. I knew it was drawing closer. I could see it as it flew over the town moving in an erratic manner with seemingly no aim or purpose. I sensed that it was calling to me, knowing that I was there, knowing that I knew it, and more so, knowing that I was the next to die.

“Ah, those little balls of dryness. You know the type? They still form at the back of my throat when I try and remember my ordeal.”

I eased up the hill just a little bit higher. Instead of sitting on the rock, I climbed up on top of the rock. I was trying to get as high as I could still reasoning in my mind that it wasn’t a night demon. It had no form; no shape; no large glowing eyes. Just as the thought was about to pass my lips that single glowing mass broke into two. I saw them pass over a field in the valley below me and then separate into the four very distinct eyes of two night demons.

I couldn't move a muscle. The radio dropped from my hand as I stood there waiting, watching, wanting to run. My soul cried out to run, but there was no where to turn. There was no place to hide. Even the tall grass and the thick underbrush couldn't hide me now.

My thoughts turned to consider what the world would say when they found my body without a scratch lying lifeless at the top of this hill. What would they say? How would they explain it to my folks, my girl and my friends? I felt the chill of death at my feet, and all I could do was wait for the end.

I could hear the evil sound much clearer now. It broke in to the unmistakable and individual voices of its victims, each calling to me in tremendous screams, crying vainly to be fee. I could hear their pleas, and sadly feel their agony, but I still couldn't move. There was no more room on the top of this hill. I had no where else to go.

I felt numb all over by fear of the sight of the two ghostly devils. They flew over everything, around anything, and through everything. It was as if they had some evil grace about them that made them seem inviting and beautiful, all the while deadly and serious. I wanted to break down the hill running toward the flight line maybe someone would see me, someone would help. But I was frozen in time; a bystander at a bad accident, or a customer at a scary movie. Unsure of what was really going to happen next but too curious to leave.

I pulled my eyes away from the two oncoming demons and looked at the horizon hoping to see a hint of sunlight knowing that if anything could stop them it had to be the sun. I saw nothing except for the clouds that had suddenly rolled in at the last minute. They seemed to be the lid on my coffin slowing closing. They were too thick for the sun to come through and I lost all hope. The sky was getting lighter at the very fringe of the sky. If only it was enough. Sergeant Elkins’s words flashed back into my mind again. It was an eternity and I could feel it.

The shrill of death again broke my concentration and brought my attention back to the oncoming demons. As they drew near, I could see one of them break away and begin its climb up the hill toward me. Its eyes were fixed on me. I could see the long yellowish-green teeth that protruded jaggedly out of its mouth as the ends of which curled a bite forming a smile. I could see the fires that burned and the void that gave it a pupil. It was as large as I was tall and my body whimpered at the sight. Not yet ready to give up life, but unable to cling to it.

The screams now surrounded me. I was too afraid to do anything now except stand there and accept my fate. I watched as the demon climbed straight up the hill taking it what appeared to be hours in a lifetime each movement performed in slow motion. I knew it was only seconds.

The eyes now glowed a sharp red, no longer merely fearsome but completely evil. The voices were so loud that they quaked every fiber of my body. Then I caught sight of the gasping mouth as it slowly fell open just enough for me; drawing me closer in its quickening attack. Drawing the life right out of me! As a prayer passed by lips, I dropped my head backward and looked toward the sky. Then it was upon me!

“Here you go fellas; I got you some extra treats from the kitchen.” Tuff said dropping several small sealed cups into our laps.

“Hey man its jello! You go ahead and eat and I’ll finish the story later. I can’t believe we got jello.”

THE END

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