Nightsiders

3:00 A.M.

He parked the car half a mile away from the access road, and they journeyed the rest of the way on foot. The night was warm but breezy; the wind helped keep them cool as they trod the narrow road toward Number One Oval Lane. The air around them was charged with energy. The trees along the side of the road appeared as if they were being created in that instant, filling in the gaps.

Robert was carrying a large carving knife. He had taken it from the hotel kitchen when he sneaked in there before they left, looking for a weapon. Sarah was content with the smaller blade they had been carrying in the car, along with the camping and cooking gear from their trip to the Lakes (a trip that now seemed so long ago, part of another lifetime). Connor carried his cricket bat. It was old and solid; an expensive gift one Christmas, when he first had fallen in love with the game. Molly was frightened of weapons of any kind, but under duress she had finally relented and taken up a small meat cleaver—again from the hotel kitchen—which she could conceal beneath the sleeve of her cardigan.

Ordinary weapons for an ordinary family trapped in extraordinary circumstances.

Robert could not help but smile at the sight they must have made, tramping along the side of the road, kitchen utensils and sporting goods gripped in their hands, and murder in their hearts. In his younger years, Robert had enjoyed procuring so-called “video nasties” to watch with his friends: notorious films like Straw Dogs, Last House on the Left, Deliverance, I Spit on Your Grave…movies where normal people were driven to atrocious acts of violence in defense of their homes, their family, or their chastity. This moment felt like a scene from any one of those films and their countless imitators…and just as unreal. He wondered if the character of Sergeant McMahon would make a final, vital appearance, or if his part in the proceedings was now over and done with.

“We need a theme, some soundtrack music.” He felt like laughing, but realized that would be insane, and possibly dangerous. If he started, he might never stop.

“What?” Sarah looked at him, the knife blade glinting in her hand. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. It isn’t important.” He stared at the road ahead and waited for the way to clear. There was nothing physical blocking their path, but he felt like he was pushing through layers of something he could not see; invisible curtains, or skeins of flesh that hung down from the sky like drapes.

A sound drew his attention—the cawing of a bird from somewhere above. Robert slowed his pace and looked up: the distant moon flared in his eyes, dimming his vision, but when it cleared, he saw two crows perched on a branch in a ragged tree. The crows shuffled sideways along the branch, as if following him. One of the birds released a white wad of guano and flapped its wings. The crows cawed again and Robert looked away, afraid.

That was real: fear was real. He had managed to deflect its effects since leaving the house, where he had rescued (if that was even the right word for what he had done) Molly, but now it had returned, stronger than ever. This confrontation he sought may be final, a fight to the death, and he had to consider the consequences of whatever action they were planning to take.

He was not fully convinced his family believed in the monstrous nature of the Corbeaus, but they believed in him enough to take up arms and follow him here. At the very least, something would be proved.

He gripped the knife, and it felt good. His hands adapted to the handle, fingers flowing around it as if the thing was meant to be in his hand. Fuck the consequences, he thought, and suddenly he was no longer so afraid.

Sarah reached out and grabbed his hand, and he squeezed her fingers. Familiar warmth passed between them, and once again he was proud of her for saving their personal row for later. He knew the time must come when they would face what he had done, but right now they were united, a team, and ready to go into combat against a common foe. Even if their marriage fell apart, they would always have this, and it would sustain them through the wreckage.

“Remember when we were courting?” Sarah’s voice was soft and quiet, as if she were afraid to break the memory. “When we went for long drives in that old banger you used to own?”

Robert smiled in the darkness. “Yes, of course. How could I ever forget?”

“We used to come to places like this and park up, have a bit of a kiss and a cuddle.”

“Oh, Mum. Please.” Connor’s voice held the faintest trace of laughter.

Molly chuckled softly.

“They were good times,” said Sarah, ignoring her children’s rebukes. “Real times.”

“What do you mean, real?” Robert slowed down, tipping his head to watch her.

“None of this feels real. It’s like a story I remember from childhood, when a family was banished to the woods and started killing strangers so they could steal their money and their goods. All that before: us, when we were first together, the kids being born, all the strains and struggles we had with our careers. All that was real. This…it’s just a dark fantasy or a fairy tale, part of somebody else’s twisted dream.”

Robert wished with all his heart he could feel the same way, but the truth was he felt the exact opposite. None of his memories felt real; only this, only now, seemed real in any way. He anticipated the smell of blood, the taste of death, and it promised more reality than anything he had ever experienced—or thought he had experienced. Everything else was mere background material…

“I know,” he said, lying again; always, always lying. He wondered if any of them had ever told the truth, even once. Everyone in the world was lying, they all constructed their own experiences, picking and choosing from barely recalled memories, rewriting history, reducing the facts to slim pickings through which they rummaged like coyotes in the belly of a corpse. Why should he be any different? Why should he be any better?

This situation was like the logical extension of that theory, the living end.

Something moved through the air to his right, and when he turned to see, he caught sight of the two crows from the tree as they flew in a jagged line toward the house on Oval Lane. If he allowed his mind to wander, and gave vent to his imagination, he could pretend the birds were in fact Nathan and Monica Corbeau, and they were heading back to defend the ground they had stolen.

More lies. More fiction.

The access lane came into view, and they all slowed their movements, desperate to make their approach a stealthy one. Robert unconsciously ducked his body, bending both legs at the knee, and his family copied the posture.

“This is it,” he whispered. “Are we ready?”

They nodded, unwilling to speak.

“You wait here, at the entrance, and I’ll go up there first to make sure everything’s okay. Keep an eye out; I’ll signal when you can follow me up.” His lips were dry and his eyes prickled.

“Why don’t we all go up there together?” Sarah was reluctant to break up the team. Robert knew she viewed their unity as their main strength.

“Just in case we’re expected,” he answered, shrugging and backing away. “That way they’ll think I’ve come alone.”

He moved slowly up the incline, being careful not to make too much noise as he trod on the loose stones, gravel and chippings. The trees and bushes on either side of him whispered softly in the slight breeze, and he heard small animals shifting though the undergrowth. The darkness was more intense here, as if clustered, and he began to doubt they could win this war. The moon was a smudge in the sky, and very few stars were visible in the surrounding blackness.

Robert was almost at the top of the access road. He shifted his grip on the knife, his palm slick with sweat. There came a sound from up ahead: a shifting of stones, a low hissing or panting that sounded somehow familiar. When the dog appeared, he was taken completely by surprise. It was big—probably a mastiff, or a derivation thereof—and it moved with silent speed. Its firm, muscled body hit him so hard it knocked the breath from his lungs. He went down like a bag of rocks, and the knife flew from his hand, skittering across the stones.

The dog had given him a glancing blow, bouncing off him as he fell, but it was up on its feet and heading once more toward him, this time slower, and with grim intent. A low growl sounded in the dog’s throat, and Robert suspected he was done for. The animal lunged, snapping its teeth, as Robert reached for the knife. He snatched back his hand, terrified of losing a few fingers, and reconsidered the direct approach.

“Easy boy,” he said, through gritted teeth. There was a pain in his side; it was huge and heavy, like broken bones rattling in a bag. “Get back!”

The dog leapt at him, and he had no time to act, only to react. No time to hope or to pray (despite his admitted disbelief in God) and no time to contemplate. The dog’s jaws latched onto his shoulder, its teeth going in deep, and he struggled to hold back a scream. The dog’s head moved from side to side, working at the meat, and he felt muscle tearing away from bone.

He had rolled closer to the knife, and as the dog concentrated on tearing off a piece of him, he reached out…reached out…farther, farther. Suddenly, his fingers fell upon the blade, and he scrabbled across the gravel to snatch it up. He found he was holding the knife the wrong way, by the sharp end, and he had to pause to switch his grip. The dog kept gnawing at his shoulder. Hot blood sprayed the side of his neck and his face.

Swiftly, and without thought, he brought the knife round in a wide arc and shoved it under the dog’s belly, feeling the blade sink in and tearing his arm across, to open up its stomach. He felt the contents of the stomach sac erupt onto his hand and run down his arm; stringy intestines wrapped around his forearm, trapping it against the side of the wound. There were also soft fibers in there, not dissimilar to the padding Corbeau’s wife had been pulling from the cushions when he’d seen her earlier. It was as if the dog was part flesh and part puppet: a construct. The dog struggled madly, and for a moment he thought he would black out from the pain, but then it relaxed its grip, the jaws opening slightly, and he was able to kick the body away and crawl a few yards across the stony ground.

He threw up on the ground, but vomiting was the only thing that kept him conscious. After lying back for precious seconds, sharp stones pressing into the rear of his skull, he sat back up and looked around. He could see the house from here, and the upstairs lights were blazing. The lower floor was in darkness. Silhouettes moved stiffly across the upstairs glass, as if he were watching a stylized dance of mummers or Japanese shadow puppets.

After he had regained his breath, Robert stood and staggered back a short way down the access road. He clasped his shoulder to stem the flow of blood, but the intense pain told him some serious damage had been done. The area was going numb; the pain was receding. That, too, felt like trouble.

He peered down and caught sight of Sarah’s outline. “Come on!” He tried to whisper loudly, aware if his family could hear him, there was a good chance other ears might also pick up on his signal. His only hope was that loud music was playing inside the house, or the Corbeaus were so confident that they had become blasé. “Come up!”

Sarah twitched; then she gathered the children together and jogged up the rise. Her face paled when she saw him, covered in blood, with guts knotted around his arm, and holding on to the knife with a force that made his hand shake. “I’m fine,” he whispered. “A dog attacked me.”

“I didn’t even know they had a dog,” said Sarah, moving toward him to examine his shoulder. She took his hand away, inspected the mess, and then placed his hand back on the wound. “It’s bad,” she said, visibly straining to hold back her emotion.

“Dad?” Connor stepped forward, moving in front of his sister.

Good lad.

“It’ll be fine. Just need a bit of patching up.” He smiled, but it hurt his face and his shoulder.

Sarah took off her sweater, then the T-shirt she was wearing underneath. She tore the shirt into bandagelike strips and put back on the sweater. “Best I can do,” she said. It took her several minutes to apply the homemade dressing to his shoulder, but when she had finished, the worst of the bleeding had stopped. Blood still seeped through the white material, forming dark red patches, but it was a slow process: seepage rather than a heavy flow.

Robert led the way as they moved across the drive, stepping carefully so as not to make too much of a sound. Soon they stood before the house…their house; the one that had been taken from them. The darkened lower windows were all shut, but upstairs they were all open, and the sounds of music and laughter drifted out into the night. Robert held Sarah’s hand; Sarah held Molly’s hand; Molly held on to the hand of her brother. And they stood there, in the open, watching the house and waiting; waiting for the signal they needed to pounce.

4:20 A.M.

The lights had been out for just over ten minutes, and Robert was convinced the time had come. They were sitting at the edge of the drive, shielded by the trees, and had been watching things closely. The figures had remained on the upper floors, flitting from room to room. Music went on and off. Once, briefly, they had heard sounds of rather energetic sex—screaming and moaning and the calling of names—but it had only occurred the once. Robert had no idea who had been fucking whom, and he did not particularly want to know.

“I think it’s time,” said Sarah, preempting him. “I think we should make our move.”

Robert stared at his family in the darkness, and to him they resembled a group of primitive hunters, weapons in hand, and hunger in their bellies. There was not a tear to be seen, nor had any one of them professed a change of heart: each was committed to the task at hand, and their determination was visible like war paint on their faces.

“Are you sure about this? All of you?”

They nodded, one by one, grimly.

“Then let’s go.”

They moved out of hiding one at a time, with Robert once again in the lead. He crossed the drive and went around the back of the house, looking for a way inside. The garage, behind the main building, was open, its up-and-over door sticking out like a metal tongue. The Cortina had been parked half inside, with its front wheels resting on the external gravel. Robert walked over to the car and bent down by the front nearside tire. He stabbed the tip of the knife into the tire, pushing his weight against it, and then removed it, smiling at the sound of air hissing out of the slit. He repeated this process on the other three tires, and then returned to his waiting family. “Just in case,” he muttered.

The only windows left open were those on the top floor, and he could trace a manageable access route up an external drainpipe and through the bathroom window. It would be tough going, particularly in the dark and when trying to be silent, but he could do it if he kept his focus.

“I’m going up,” he said, directing his gaze to the window in question.

Sarah followed his eye line, nodded, and turned to the children. “We’ll wait here while your dad climbs up, and once he’s inside he can go downstairs and open the back door. Then we’re in. Then we sort this thing out.” She looked back at Robert, and in the gloom, with her dirt-streaked face, he barely even recognized her.

“Stay quiet. If I’m not down in ten minutes, something’s gone wrong.” He did not know what to suggest if that did happen, so he simply let the sentence trail off into the night.

Sarah stepped toward him and kissed him on the side of the mouth. She did not say anything; she did not need to. Her gesture had said more than words ever could; he knew that now more than ever. Words were not real, they could be molded and manipulated and had more than one meaning, but gestures were made of more solid stuff, and between two people who knew each other intimately their meanings could be easily read.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

He broke away and made for the drainage pipe. It was the old-fashioned kind, made of cast iron, and bolted firmly to the wall. He tested it with his hands, and it did not shift an inch when he tugged on it. He raised his hand and grabbed the pipe above his head, and then hauled himself up, his feet scrabbling quietly on the wall. Soon he had a good grip, and he began to make his way up the face of the building, hand over hand, foot over foot. He did not look down. He could not look down in case he caught sight of the ones he was leaving behind, down there in the dark.

His wounded shoulder ached, but he bit down and tried to ignore the pain. Robert had long believed in the concept of mind over matter, and here was the perfect opportunity to put that belief to the test. Gritting his teeth against the incessant burning at a spot deep within the meat of his shoulder, he climbed. He climbed for his life, or what was left of it. It felt like he was leaving reality behind.

Only when he reached the window did he pause to take a breather. It was a short climb, but in his condition it had been hard going. He hung there, like some giant mutant simian, and fought to regain control of his body. After a short while he felt ready to continue, and hoisted himself onto the outside lip of the window ledge. The ledge consisted of roughly an inch of rotten timber, and he was barely able to get his toes on its crumbling surface. He moved quickly, aware that the ledge could break away at any minute, and even if he did not fall, he would certainly draw attention to his clumsy attempt at entry.

He popped the window latch and opened it fully, then slithered up, forcing his hands and then his arms into the small gap. Wriggling wildly, yet trying to make as little noise as possible, he squirmed though the gap, his body tight against the frame. Then, finally, he reached the point of no return and the rest of his body slid through easily, sending him sprawling on the bathroom floor. He lay there for a moment, holding the knife to his chest, convinced he had disturbed someone with his racket, but when no one came, he dared to believe he had managed to enter unheard.

The bathroom was in darkness, and when he looked up at the light, he saw the bulb had been shattered. He trod carefully, not wanting to put a foot down on broken glass and wake up the whole house, and made his way from window to door. He glanced to his side, at the toilet, and saw it had been smashed. The stench was terrible—a strong meaty odor. The floor around it was wet and chunks of porcelain toilet bowl lay along the skirting boards. The mirror above the sink had also been shattered, and smeared with excrement; at least he guessed that was what it was by the smell. The sink itself was black, and filled with ashes.

Looking at the opposite wall, he glanced at the bathtub. It was filled with what looked like about a ton of bloody meat, and the sight stirred up a roiling nausea in his guts. The full force of the smell hit him, then, after he had seen the mass of decaying matter, and he placed a hand across his mouth to stifle the gag reflex. He refused to accept the meat was moving, that even now something (or was it someone?) was shifting within its terrible mass and preparing to sit up…

It’s for the dogs, he thought. It’s just meat for the dogs…

Sensing yet another shift in his perception of reality, Robert stopped and swallowed hard. His mouth was dry; there was no spit to lubricate his throat. He turned and moved toward the bathtub; he was aware now of a slight sloshing sound, as if something was bathing in that tubful of offal. He stared at the meat; it reached almost to the lip of the old claw-footed tub. As his eyes adjusted to the mess, he realized that a shape was resting on the surface: it was a hand, the fingers smeared with congealing blood. It took him a moment to understand what was wrong with the hand. It had no fingernails.

Gently, he reached down and prodded the hand with his finger. It shifted slightly, disturbing the bloody, chunky fluid to reveal a body beneath the surface. He looked around and saw a toilet brush on the floor. He picked it up, trying not to inspect it too closely, and returned his attention to the bath. He paused a moment, and then leaned over and prodded the sticky meat, pushing it away so he could reveal the body beneath. The body turned, the hand slipping off the chest and a head rolling into view.

The face he saw was that of Sergeant McMahon, but, like the hand, there was something unusual about it, an unfinished quality. The face looked like an incomplete sculpture, where the clay had been shaped and molded into the approximation of human features but not yet teased into its final form. The nose was lacking apertures, the eyes were sealed tight, and there were no ears on the sides of the head. It was an image, a homunculus, a thing either frozen in the process of creation, or that of being deliberately unmade.

Sergeant McMahon, Robert finally realized, was not a man at all. He was a facsimile, a symbol, a shredded being pushed around the stage like a prop, a meat puppet designed for a specific purpose.

He turned away, retching but bringing up nothing from his cramping stomach. He dropped the toilet brush and lurched away from the bathtub, wishing he had ignored it instead of answering the call of his morbid curiosity. Some things, he thought, were better left unseen.

When he reached the door, he stood with his hand on the handle, afraid to open it in case someone was standing right outside, listening to him. The image gained strength, so much that he was forced to close his eyes and count to ten, hoping he could rob the idea of the power it had over him. If this was a novel, he thought, that’s exactly what would happen. But it isn’t a story; it’s real. I’m real. They’re real. Believe it.

But belief was something he was finding increasingly difficult to hold on to.

It took a while to accept his own argument, and even then he was only partially on-side. It was as if there would now forever be a part of him that would never quite believe in the reality of any situation, but would instead stand to the side, self-aware and aloof. If he survived this night, he would never again be able to rid himself of the notion he had been given a glimpse behind the scenes of reality, and that somewhere—perhaps down some deserted back alley, or behind a high brick wall—faceless writers and technicians were working hard to create the scenes he was living through.

He opened the door inward, fast and hard, holding his breath as its edge almost brushed his nose because he was standing so close. The landing beyond was empty. Again, the place had been wrecked. There were broken plates and torn-up magazines and newspapers (most of them red-top scandal-sheets, from what he could make out) scattered across the landing, and the pictures had been pulled from the walls. Wallpaper was shredded; carpet had been torn up and set fire to. It resembled a war zone, and Robert thought the comparison fitting.

He stepped out onto the landing, being careful not to tread on any loose boards. Light shone under a door opposite; one of the spare bedrooms, a guest room. He could hear nothing, so kept moving, putting one foot in front of the other and hoping his luck held. He kept to the center of the landing, away from the walls—and, more importantly, away from the doors. If anyone opened one of them and came out at him, he wanted to allow himself room to make at least an attempt at escape.

His shoulder ached, burning white-hot. Blood ran down his arm and dripped from his hand, onto the ruined carpet. Slogans had been daubed onto the walls in red paint (surely it could not be blood) but they were crude and meaningless, more like signs or sigils than actual words. Then, gradually, they became increasingly legible, and he was drawn to examine the essence of their meaning. The writing had grown smaller as he made his way toward the stairs, and the scrawl transformed into a recognizable language, illustrated with the occasional sketch.

Filled with dread, he read bits and pieces of the story of the Corbeaus: how they took children from suburban streets to call their own, how they travelled from town to town, place to place, to converge with certain points in a narrative written by whatever gods had shaped them. It was written in broad strokes, this plot, like the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, or messages inscribed on an ancient Egyptian tomb wall, but it was there if only you had the eyes to see it.

The medium that told the story was a combination of daubed text and crude diagrams not unlike those seen in prehistoric cave paintings. As he moved along the landing, he saw representations of himself, and of his family, of Sergeant McMahon, and even of the dog he had killed. The story ended at that point, the death of the hound, with the rest as yet unwritten. Disturbed beyond his capacity to understand, Robert spun around and glared into the shadows, fully expecting someone to step forward, paintbrush in hand, and finish the tale.

Light bled under the door he had noticed earlier; shadows trembled in the corners. But he was utterly alone on the landing. He looked again at the words and pictures on the wall, and the universe seemed to quiver above and around him.

He hurried to the stairs, filled with a sort of existential terror. Never before had he felt this way; he barely even understood what this kind of fear meant, or where it came from. He was not equipped to deal with such extremes, and his mind was buckling under the strain of even thinking about it.

Moving down the stairs, he tried to brace himself, to refocus on the moment. Something like that…it could cripple a man’s senses, turn him inside out. He needed to be sane, to be sure of himself and his intentions, but instead he found his mind was straining to fly toward the skies. He turned at the bottom of the stairs and crept along the hallway, heading toward the kitchen, and the back door. He glanced into the door-less living room, and what he saw there stopped him dead in his tracks.

Monica Corbeau was sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall. Her back was rigid, and her arms were held stiffly against her sides. She looked like a statue, a carved stone effigy. Robert was convinced she was not even breathing.

Dead, he thought. He’s killed her.

But as he stared, and studied her features, her posture, the way she was holding herself primly upright, he came to the conclusion she was in fact conscious…but she was not sentient. Her eyes were open; she had not blinked since he noticed her there, alone in the darkened room. Because of his stealth, she was completely unaware of his presence, and her condition had not been disturbed. He gripped the knife tighter, but in the face of such an enemy it felt useless and even slightly absurd.

It was as if, when Robert and his family were not around, the Corbeau family became inactive, seizing up as if petrified. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does that tree even make a sound?

The possible implications of this insight rocked him to the core. He could not understand any of it, but he did realize this meant the Corbeaus were his very own demons, linked to him alone, and they would probably not stop until he was dead.

A thick string of liquid oozed between Monica Corbeau’s pale lips, slid across her mouth, and drooped in a line from her chin. The string lengthened, becoming thin as thread, and then it finally snapped. Robert twitched, taking an involuntary step backward, and was terrified to see the woman move. She did not stir much, just a fraction, but it was enough to make him move away and to the kitchen, where he could reach the back door.

The kitchen was a mess. Food had been piled to rot in the sink, cockroaches scurried across the tiled floor, and huge chunks had been gouged out of the plaster walls to reveal the water pipes beneath. The legs had been sawn off the kitchen table. Someone had started to dig a hole in the concrete floor against the side wall, and again the walls were caked with dried food and shit.

Robert flew across the kitchen and grabbed the door. His hands did not seem to want to take hold of the key sticking out of the lock, but eventually he managed to turn it and open the door. Sarah stood there, mouth agape, and when she looked into his eyes, he felt reality flooding back into place, filling the corners of his life with things he recognized. Things he loved.

5:00 A.M.

A line of deep red sunlight was eating into the horizon as he let his family inside. It was still dark, but that darkness would not hold out for long. Robert did not know if this was a good or a bad thing; all his old preconceptions had been destroyed, blown apart like flimsy huts in a tornado. He decided it probably did not matter either way.

He led them into the hallway, and stopped again at the living room door. This time, the room was empty, there was no one sitting on the sofa. He began to doubt he had even seen Monica Corbeau, and then his resolve began to unravel. What the hell where they doing here, he and his family? They were comfortable, middle-class—and spineless. No way could they win such a fight as this, against opponents such as these. They would be torn apart, their body parts used as ornaments, and no ground would be gained by their pointless deaths.

Just then, when he most needed her, Sarah came up behind him and laid a hand on his waist. His shoulder was no longer aching, a fact he took as a warning, but he felt her hand at his waist like a dead weight. It tied him to the earth, bound him into this scenario, and made him realize for the last time there was no way out.

He nodded. Sarah took away her hand, and he felt its absence like another kind of agony.

They climbed the stairs in silence, gripping their weapons, ready for the fight. He hoped his children would not flinch at the final moment; that they would be able to draw blood and rejoice in the thrill of battle. He knew now he was capable of such a thing, of becoming a beast not unlike the beasts he sought to vanquish.

Once again he passed by the story on the walls, and he was aware of the others gaping at the scrawls and scribbles in horror. The bloody mural’s meaning was vague, concealed, but the very fact that it existed at all was a terror well worth tasting.

“Pretty pictures, aren’t they? Pretty, pretty pictures.” The voice came from behind them, at the top of the stairs but above the bulkhead. Robert turned, but now he was at the rear. He stepped forward, moving aside Sarah and the children, so that once again he stood at the front of the group as they reached the top of the stairs. A door opened behind them, and he knew wherever he positioned himself on the landing he was unable to prevent an attack on his loved ones.

“Do you like our art?” Nathan Corbeau was naked but for a pair of tight white underpants. His muscular legs were shoulder-width apart, his arms held out at his sides, and his face jutted forward from his thick neck. “It took ages to do, but we’re quite proud of it.”

“This ends now,” said Robert, taking another step forward. Something crunched under his foot, but he kept his eyes on Corbeau. There came a hissing sound from behind, like escaping gas, but he refused to be drawn.

“Shit,” said Connor, his voice trembling. “They’re all here now.”

“We’re the flipside,” said a soft, low voice from behind and somewhere off to his left. “We’re the underside. We’re the nightside. And we’re never. Going. Away.”

“Fight or flight,” said Nathan Corbeau, moving slowly forward across his section of the landing and maneuvering his body to block the stairs. He was flexing his fists; they looked huge, bigger than before. It was as if his body was changing, becoming even more monstrous. His mouth gaped, the lower jaw touching his chest.

Robert realized he and his family had somehow moved backward, toward the other rooms. He spun around and saw that Monica Corbeau was standing there, having stepped from one of the doorways, and she looked like something from a nightmare. Her white nightgown billowed around her slender form, as if caught up in a wind, and when he glanced down her legs and her feet, he could have sworn that for a moment he glimpsed piglike trotters rather than human toes.

He blinked, hard, making his eyes hurt, and when he opened them, she was normal, a skinny woman in a cheap nightgown, arms held out as if expecting an embrace. Of the Corbeau children, only Ethan was visible. He stood on the landing to his mother’s left, brandishing a switchblade—perhaps the same one from before, when Robert had come here to confront them. His face was dead; there was no vitality there, just a forlorn emptiness that seemed to swallow his whole head.

“Come on, then. Come and fucking get it.” Sarah did not sound like herself. She had now fully embraced that side of her which had first been drawn out by the rape, the part of her that wanted to kill and would enjoy—even relish—the bloodshed. “Fucking come on, you monsters!”

Connor and Molly began to scream; a series of strange, wailing war cries that echoed down the stairwell. Primal screams.

Robert turned again to Nathan Corbeau, and he saw a look cross the man’s face that made him think they could just win this. That look was confusion, and he had never before seen it associated with Corbeau. It looked wrong, somehow, as if this was indeed the first time the man had ever experienced the sensation of not being fully in control.

A second later, without even thinking about it, he was charging at Nathan Corbeau, knife held aloft, a scream in his throat, murder on his mind. Corbeau, caught up in his own story, mirrored Robert’s actions and ran at him, his face a mask of loathing. The two men connected like vehicles impacting at high speed. Robert felt his shoulder blaze, and the blunt impact of a few ribs cracking. He slashed with the knife, catching Corbeau across the cheek and laying it bare to the bone. His teeth were bared through the wound; it was simply an extension of his terrible grin.

“Die!” He screamed the word, slashing again and again with the knife, and then he felt the other man’s arms around him, pulling him down. They twisted to the right, crashing against the banister, and as the wood cracked and the banister broke, they went tumbling down into the stairwell. Robert was only vaguely aware of more fighting above him, and he sent out his love to his fellow warriors in the hope it would gift them with strength enough to finish the fight.

The climax was approaching; the story would soon be told.

The men rolled down the stairs, thrashing and punching and biting. Robert found within him a savagery he had never expected, a bloodlust that took him completely by surprise. He revelled in the primal joy of causing pain to another human being, and realized he had now lost all sense of himself.

When he rolled to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, Robert realized he was no longer part of a human knot with Nathan Corbeau. He got to his knees, wincing at the pain; a sharp, slicing feeling that could have been anywhere or everywhere on his body. Corbeau lay a few yards away, his face turned to the wall. He was holding his side, his front obscured from view, and his legs were twitching.

Robert moved toward his felled opponent, feeling invigorated. If he stopped to think about it, he knew the agony wracking his body would put him on the floor, so instead he kept on going, making up the ground between himself and the other man. The knife was no longer in his hand, nor could he see it anywhere on the floor. But he still had his fists and his feet…even his teeth, if need be.

Corbeau moaned, and rolled slowly onto his back. The carving knife was sticking out from his stomach at an angle. Blood pumped freely from around the blade, shockingly thick and copious. He was breathing heavily, his naked, reddened chest rising and falling. His porcine face was white, bloodless. One of his hands crawled across his belly and clutched the knife handle. The fingers had fused together, forming a crude hoof.

“So you had it in you after all? I thought as much. You’re all the same, you fucking yuppies: all you need is the right amount of pushing.” He laughed, and blood sprayed from between his lips. “You know how this story ends, don’t you?”

Robert fell to his knees, the pain finally becoming too much. “How does it end, Corbeau? You tell me…tell me fast, before you bleed to death.”

Corbeau’s grin was wide and red and ragged. “It ends like it always ends: with death and desolation. It ends with no winners and far too many losers.” He gripped the knife handle, his knuckles turning white. “It always ends the same way.” Visibly straining, he pulled the knife sideways across his belly, dragging the blade through the layers of flesh and fat and gristle. Then he raised his other hand and plunged it into the wound, hooking his misshapen fingers around his intestinal tract and tugging it out into the open, gutting himself; laying bare the metaphor and making of it the meat of cold, hard fact. “It ends…like this.” He gave one final tug on his slick, wet innards; blood sprayed like spilled paint across the floor and up the walls.

Then at last, Nathan Corbeau was still.

There were no sounds coming from upstairs, and Robert feared the worst, yet still he could not move. Instead, he stared at the body of his enemy, puzzling over the meaning of his death. His story, like all stories, had eventually reached its end, but Robert was none the wiser for the spilling of blood and the opening of a gut. He stared into the wound, looking deep inside Corbeau’s corpse for answers to questions he could not even bear to ask. If there were tiny words written there, on the man’s insides, then Robert could not read them. It was all just so much red upon red: wet red words upon a wet red background. It felt like a message but try as he might he could not even begin to understand what he was being told.

Finally he struggled to his feet, bones creaking, head spinning, and limped toward the bottom of the stairs. He looked up, thinking it was such a long way to climb, and put his hand against the wall. It was wet with blood. He glanced at his hand, and what it was concealing. Then he took the hand away and gaped in awe at what was uncovered.

Along the wall, all the way up the staircase, was now written the very ending he had dreaded: words and pictures, all drawn and written in Corbeau’s blood, the same blood that had sprayed so poetically, so finally, when he had opened himself up for inspection.

It depicted a holocaust.

Robert saw Sarah’s death, and how she had torn out Monica Corbeau’s throat with her teeth as the last of her breath left her body. Then, in yet more violent slashes of red, he witnessed Connor falling, slashed and torn, as he tried to protect his sister from Ethan Corbeau’s killing blade. Molly had taken down the boy with her cleaver, only to have him slash her throat with a knife as he fell.

They had died together, his children, brother and sister, side by side. At least they had that, in the end.

Weeping and wailing, he reached the top of the stairs and fell down among the remains of his family, trying to put them back together. But the pieces would not join; the glue had run out and they would remain apart, torn from him by something larger and more complex than he could ever hope to fathom. What he did understand, in that moment of extremity, was that he was the only one left alive for the sequel.

His mind ripped to shreds, Robert smiled through a layer of blood.

This story, at last, was over; a new one was about to begin.