Note: Stories at Until Night Falls are works of dark fiction and may contain elements of violent crime, horror, and mature themes/subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.
Garrett Newman jolted awake. It was a sweltering summer night, and he had gone to bed with his bedroom window open and an ancient Army surplus table fan blowing. It was a loud 1950s model of all-metal construction with two speeds—on and off—and when it was on, it was like having a model airplane blasting in his bedroom all night, but Garrett knew it was his only relief. Sleeping on the top floor in a house without air conditioning, the noise was a tradeoff he had to make for comfort’s sake.
Why he was suddenly awake, he didn’t know.
He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the clock on his nightstand. The numbers flipped rolodex style, and a black metal card with white digits showed 2:41 AM under a pale green light. The clock normally lit up the corner of his room like a nightlight, but it occurred to Garrett that the light was dimmer tonight somehow. The table fan, instead of blasting, was humming a low frequency buzz and turning like a broken windmill in a lazy breeze.
He pushed back his covers and sat up in bed, listening. He heard nothing that alarmed him, but there had to be a reason he was suddenly awake. He looked at the fan again.
Maybe it was the sudden lack of noise.
He got out of bed. At the top of the stairs, he paused momentarily. He was thirteen years old—just old enough to have begun conquering his fear of the dark—but walking a patrol through the darkened house was a task that required the mustering of some will. He strained his eyes in the dark, watching for any sign of movement at the bottom of the darkened stairwell. He took a deep breath, gulped once, and descended the stairs, which creaked under his weight.
At the bottom of the stairs, he looked down the hall to the right, toward the room where his mom and step-dad slept. Their bedroom door was partially ajar and he could see flickers of white light on the wall cast by the 9-inch black and white TV that was almost always on in their room, accompanied by a low murmur of sound. He took a left and walked down the dimly lit hallway to the dining room, where he paused in the archway. The patio door was open with only the screen door separating the dining room from the back yard.
Garrett approached the screen door quietly and peered into the back yard with his toes on the threshold.
It was not a hot summer night. Instead of crickets and the occasional yowl of a nocturnally randy neighborhood cat, Garrett confronted blizzard-level winds of a violent snowstorm that had blanketed their normally patchy brown and green yard in the desert with an inch of snow. At the far side of the yard, an eight-foot section of their rickety privacy fence sagged in the top corner, as if someone had climbed over it, and a series of footprints in the snow stood out in a perfect, clear path from the fence, right to his feet.
Creak.
A sound came from somewhere in the house.
Garrett’s head snapped around and he peered into the darkness. He thought it sounded like a noise he’d heard a thousand times before; the noise that came from the aged hardwood floor in the hallway when someone walked on it.
He didn’t feel cold and he hadn’t noticed the snow on the dining room floor, but now, with his back to the screen door and the yard-light shining in, it stood out.
Somebody is in the house.
His pulse quickened and the hair on his neck stood up as he began to head for his parents’ room in the darkened house.
Garrett took a step forward. Grains of snow crunched under his foot and he slipped. His hand reached for the countertop reflexively and he barely caught himself without falling down, but his hand made a loud sound when it came to rest on the laminate counter. He paused, frozen like a mannequin, eyes wide, listening intently but hearing nothing.
He paused at the entrance to the hallway and peered from the dining room into the living room. The streetlight outside poured light through the living room window and backlit the partially drawn sheer curtains his mom had hung years before. His heart quickened at the sight of a human shape, but relented just as quickly when he realized it was the coat rack next to the front door, draped in a hooded sweatshirt.
Is there someone in the house?
Maybe his stepdad had tracked-in the snow in the dining room.
But what about the fence?
He looked around, unsure.
Why is it snowing?
He tiptoed down the hall toward his parents’ room. The light from the TV still flickered on the wall and Garrett looked back and forth as he approached the bedroom door. The hardwood floor creaked under his foot as he stepped to the door, and he swore he saw a shadow, as if someone had passed between the TV and the spot where the light painted the wall a sickly shade of yellow.
With one hand, he gently pushed the bedroom door open and peered around the doorjamb. His stepdad was in his usual place on the bed—pillows under the small of his back, leaning against the headboard—but his wrists were tied to the bed and his head was hanging forward. His formerly white undershirt was covered in blood which had dripped down from the gory sockets where his eyes used to be, and his cheeks were coated in a river of blood. The corners of his mouth had pulled back in pain and blood flowed over his teeth, leaving him with a macabre grin as a stream of blood-red saliva ran from his bottom lip onto his chest.
The horror of the scene hit Garrett in an instant and he flinched. He pushed the door all the way open and the room came fully into view. The intruder was a hulking silhouette lit by the strobing of the TV. He was standing at the foot of the bed with his back to Garrett when the bedroom door knocked against the dresser. The intruder stepped to one side as he turned around and Garrett could see his mom was bound to a chair in the corner of the bedroom.
She had been disemboweled and her intestines lay in her lap.
Garrett opened his mouth to scream as the intruder turned to face him. The killer wore a green surgical mask smeared with blood and his eyes were evil and black, like polished ebony marbles, and Garrett thought they could see right through him. The killer raised a large kitchen knife which glinted momentarily. Garrett screamed, and the maniac in the surgical mask lunged at him.
Garrett jolted awake. He was sweating and his chest rose and fell like he was in a panic. He glanced at the clock on his nightstand. The numbers flipped rolodex style, and a black metal card with white digits showed 2:41 AM under a green light. The clock lit up the corner of his room like a nightlight. The 1950s table fan of all-metal construction was blasting and sounded like a model airplane in his room.
He looked around the room. Everything appeared to be normal. Garrett climbed out of bed and looked out his bedroom window… there was no blizzard.
“It was just a nightmare,” he reassured himself. There was no killer in the house. There was no need to wake his mom and risk a big scene.
Everything is gonna be fine.
He had long ago learned to comfort himself. It was just a better option than risking the involvement of his mom or step-dad. Last time he had a bad dream, about bats in his bedroom, his mom had chastised him.
“It’s from all that crap you’ve been reading,” she’d said as she sat in her favorite rocking chair with a blanket, a Bible, and a cat. Somewhere in the Bible there must have been words about magic and the occult that convinced her anything spooky was evil.
Horror movies.
The color black.
Halloween.
Stories by writers like Stephen King.
As far as Colleen Newman was concerned, it was all of the Devil. The work of the Prince of Darkness. This nightmare was something for which she would just find a way to blame Garrett.
He was tired. He crept back to his bed and threw back his blanket. He punched his pillow, pulled the sheet up to his chin, and went back to sleep.
The next morning, Garrett stood at the sliding glass door to the patio and stared into the yard. The scene was the same, but different. There wasn’t a blanket of snow. It was a regular sunny day. The 8-foot section of privacy fence still stood.
At the breakfast table, Garrett resisted the urge to tell his mom about the dream he had the night before, and ate through a haze of exhaustion, tempered by his relief that it had only been a dream.
“When you’re done eating,” his mom said, “put on your grubby clothes. I think Steve has some plans for you today.”
Garrett’s eyebrows went up as his mom stepped to the side. Red stone pavers were stacked outside the patio door near a small mountain of sand.
He called him his step-dad but Steve had never really married Garrett’s mom. That didn’t stop Colleen from referring to him as her husband, sometimes as her common law or natural law husband, depending on her audience. The path of least-resistance for Garrett was just to call him his step-dad.
Steve was a simple kind of dude. Hard worker, tanned, leathery skin, former soldier, former longhair, and heavy drinker. But it was on days and projects like this when Garrett felt a sort of father-son connection with Steve. They would turn on the radio and listen to the local rock station while they worked. Steve had taught him to let the physical labor get lost in the music and the sweat and the repetition. Colleen would find the time to make sandwiches and iced tea for them, and when they were done, their family would get to enjoy a new red stone paver patio.
He spent nearly the entire day in the yard with his stepdad, digging and shoveling and placing the edging. They shoveled a pile of sand into the area excavated for the patio.
“Did you get the hopper?” Garrett asked.
Steve smiled and pointed.
Garrett didn’t know what the machine was really called, but it was one of those vibrating machines that contractors used to pack earth. They spread the pile of sand around with shovels, then Garrett got to tamp it down with the hopper. He was thrilled to use a power tool, something Steve rarely let him do, lest he arouse one of Colleen’s tirades. On this occasion, the men escaped her ire and by the time he was done, the bed of sand was perfectly smooth and undisturbed. Garrett shut down the machine.
“Let’s get this tidied up and ready for the backbreaking work of pavers tomorrow,” Steve said, “so we can just come out in the morning and start layin’ ‘em down.”
Garrett wiped his brow with his shirt.
“That sounds fun,” he said as he looked at the perfectly smooth bed of sand they’d laid down.
Steve grinned.
“I went to my doctor for back pain,” he said, “and he told me it was cuz I’m old.”
He jabbed his shovel into the ground.
“You know what I said?” Steve asked.
Garrett shook his head.
“I said ‘I want a second opinion,’” Steve said. “And the doc said ‘FINE. You’re ugly too.’”
They shared a laugh while they cleaned up their mess, careful not to step in or track patio sand all over Colleen’s clean dining room.
Garrett jolted awake. It was a sweltering summer night, and he had gone to bed with his bedroom window open and an ancient Army surplus table fan blowing. It was a loud 1950s model of all-metal construction with two speeds—on and off—and when it was on, it was like having a model airplane blasting in his bedroom all night.
Why he was suddenly awake, he didn’t know. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the clock on his nightstand. The numbers flipped rolodex style, and a black metal card with white digits showed 2:21 AM under a pale green light. The clock normally lit up the corner of his room like a nightlight, but tonight the light was dimmer somehow. The table fan, instead of blasting, was humming a low frequency buzz and turning like a broken windmill in a lazy breeze.
Am I dreaming again?
He got out of bed. He strained his eyes in the dark, watching for any sign of movement at the bottom of the darkened stairwell. He took a deep breath, gulped once, and descended the stairs, which creaked under his weight.
At the bottom of the stairs, he took a left and walked, as if his legs worked on muscle memory, down the dimly lit hallway to the dining room, where he paused in the archway. The patio door was open with only the screen door separating the dining room from the back yard.
Garrett approached the screen door quietly and peered into the back yard with his toes on the threshold.
I am awake.
In the backyard, an eight-foot section of their rickety privacy fence sagged in the top corner, as if someone had climbed over it, and a series of footprints stood out in the bed of sand he had worked so hard on. The prints led across the bed of sand, right to his feet.
Creak.
A sound, somewhere in the house. Garrett’s head snapped around and he peered into the darkness.
Somebody is in the house. This is real! You’re awake.
His pulse quickened and the hair on his neck stood up.
Garrett took a step forward. Grains of sand crunched under his foot and he slipped. His hand reached for the countertop reflexively and he barely caught himself without falling down, but his hand made a loud sound when it came to rest on the laminate counter. He paused, frozen like a mannequin, eyes wide, listening intently but hearing nothing.
Carefully the teen removed the receiver from the family’s wall mounted rotary-dial phone. He muted the dial with his fingers as he dialed the numbers 9-1-1 then let the receiver hang from the end of its cord.
How can this be real? You dreamed this.
He scanned for danger—from the dining room into the living room. The streetlight backlit the sheer curtains and his heart quickened at the sight of a human shape, but relented when he realized it was the coat rack draped in a hooded sweatshirt.
There’s not a lot of time.
He moved down the hall toward his parents’ room with quick, light steps. The light from the TV flickered on the wall and Garrett edged forward to see through the cracked bedroom door.
His mother sat crouched on her knees on the bed, crying. He edged forward and saw Steve, a section of electrical cord around one wrist, tied to the headboard. He had blood on his cheeks and his head hung, chin against his bloodied chest. Someone…
Someone right on the other side of this door.
...tossed another length of cord or cable onto the bed and Colleen picked it up and began to tie Steve’s free wrist to the headboard. Garrett edged further forward still and caught a glimpse of the surgical-masked killer through the slim door crack as he laid out his assortment of torture tools and rape aids on the foot of the queen size bed. The oversized butcher knife he used to kill the family in Garrett’s dream…
The knife he will use to kill my family, if I don’t stop him.
...rested on the foot of the bed.
It took every ounce of courage within him, but he reached out and pushed open his parents’ bedroom door. In coin toss odds, he won the flip. The killer faced away as he prepared the tools of his slaughter and Garrett had the upper-hand.
He crept forward, trying not to make the hardwood floor creak under his weight as he edged toward the killer’s knife.
His Mom, nervous, looked at Garrett as he crept into the room and unintentionally tipped off the killer who spun around to face the teenager.
It was an odd thing to think at that moment, but Garrett couldn’t shake the idea that he was looking at a monster, yes, but not the kind he had seen in his dream. The killer smelled like he hadn’t showered in a month and his hair was wild, like Charles Manson. He was an adult, but not a hulking beast. The eyes Garrett had seen as those of a supernatural monster, evil and black like polished ebony, were merely the large pupils of an excited sexual predator in a dimly lit room, about to strike.
Not a monster, just a monster of a man.
Garrett lunged forward with the speed only a teenager can manifest, collided with the killer and the two went down in a heap in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. Colleen began to wail as Garrett and the killer struggled.
“Mom!” Garrett yelled, “Get your gun!” He kept his body weight on top of the killer in the confined space but knew he wouldn’t be able to restrain him forever.
Colleen leapt off the bed and sprinted out of the room, returning moments later with a pump-action shotgun that seemed to sap the killer’s will to fight. Garrett kept him pinned to the floor, knife at his throat, with Colleen shouting a constant stream of accusations and hectoring at the perpetrator of so many vile attacks in the Four Corners area.
Colleen stared back at him with crazed eyes, holding the shotgun in her trembling arms, wearing only her underwear.
A neighbor who was retired from the Highway Patrol was the first to arrive. He brought his weapon and took over for Garrett in restraining the killer.
“Mom, I dreamed about this,” Garrett said as they exited into the driveway. “I knew this was going to happen.”
Minutes later, the landing was blasted with red and blue lights as the police arrived, summoned by Garrett’s quick-thinking 911 call. Colleen was already holding court with the neighbors who had gathered around the back of the ambulance where she sat covered in a blanket.
“...and I said to myself ‘This shit stops right now,’” she said, “and I ran to get my shotgun! Who knows what he might have done to me…”
“Mom, where is Steve?” Garrett interrupted.
“They took him away to the hospital already. We’ll go down there but we gotta give a statement first,” she said.
The world was a place in the dark for Steve after that. Garrett foiled the murder of his parents but the killer still had time to mutilate Steve and gouge out his eyes. He had always been something of a meek man, content to let Colleen take the lead, to avoid ruffling her feathers. As a blind man, he became even more dependent on her.
By contrast, Colleen enjoyed some time in the spotlight, for about the first year, anyway. Faux TV News organizations did feature stories on the “Shotgun Totin’ Hero Mom” and assorted trash, and there was some buzz about an eventual book and movie deal, but the players found Colleen controlling and difficult to deal with. Recently, offers had started to dry up and nobody wanted to hear Colleen’s stories anymore.
She was in Garrett’s room, unloading laundry and her attention was drawn to a fan-zine on his bed that had interviews with celebrities and off-beat characters from pop-culture. She opened it to the bookmarked page—a story called “The Intuition of Garrett Newman.” In it, Garrett gave a lengthy interview and confessed to having had a premonition in a dream about the killer—“The Surgeon” as the press had begun labelling him.
She read with fervor. She had been so wrapped up in her own story, all the attention she had been getting, that she had completely overlooked what her son said—what he told her. He’d been telling this story on his own. He dreamed about it. He knew it was going to happen.
“The Surgeon” was a man of Brazilian descent, Alberto Santos, whose parents moved to the United States when he was 3 years old. His parents were reportedly awful people, drinking and drugging all the time, and he was largely left to take care of himself from a very young age. Psychologists who had a chance to examine him later said it was very likely he never felt love as a child and never learned to bond or empathize with others. The authorities estimate he may have killed as many as 54 people in the southwest over 13 years. He tried to cut the phone lines to Garrett’s house on the night he attacked, high out of his mind, and accidentally took his bolt cutters to the electrical lines instead, leaving the home with just a low trickle of power. The authorities said he almost electrocuted himself in the process and failed to complete the job, anyway, evidenced by Garrett’s dim clock and slow fan when he awoke in his room that night. Alberto Santos died in prison while awaiting trial for one of his crimes.
From the moment she’d found the magazine in Garrett’s room, Colleen had pushed and prodded him at every opportunity to monetize his story. She urged him to grant interviews to tabloids and reporters, to appear at conventions on the “unexplained,” and network with TV writers whenever possible, as long as they paid. Garrett enjoyed the occasional pocket money he got from his gigs; a hundred bucks here and there, whatever he got from Colleen when she came back from the bank.
Just shy of his 17th birthday, though, Garrett started to consider leaving home. The interviews didn’t bother him so much. He was distracted by girls and school most of the time, but when their home started feeling like a morbid roadside attraction for alternative tourists, Garrett decided he had to go.
Weird people were hanging around all the time and Garrett suspected Colleen was taking money from people to come to the house, see the place where “The Surgeon’s” crime spree came to an end, and meet the psychic kid.
Colleen’s conservative invective was still a hair-trigger from tirade level, but she seemed less and less concerned with the Bible all the time. She had begun to lose weight and dress differently, and people were constantly coming and going at all hours of the night. Steve spent almost all his waking hours sitting in a lawn chair in the garage, smoking pot paid for by his government disability check and listening to right-wing talk radio.
On a night of no particular note, Garrett saw the corner of what looked like a check sticking out of his mom’s purse and tugged it loose. It was a check payable to his name in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars.
She gave me a hundred bucks!
Naturally, he was fucking pissed. Interviews he’d agreed to do because Colleen told him they were “goodwill gestures” were actually exclusives Colleen had sold to the highest bidder. He flipped the check over. She’d forged his signature on the back. He recognized her handwriting right away.
How many times has she already done this?
“How am I supposed to pay for Steve’s care?” she cried when he confronted her, already obliged to rely on Steve’s blindness as a means to cultivate sympathy and financial assistance and leniency.
She was always critical and acid-tongued. Hard to please. She’d stolen every bit of recognition she could for herself. And when that ran out, she’d exploited every other person in her life, for her own gain. Anybody who tried to confront her about it was treated as an enemy while she wallowed in her role as a victim.
Later that night, Garrett awoke to the sound of his bedroom door creaking open in the darkness. He opened his eyes and could see one of the characters from the house standing in the darkened hallway, looking in. He was a tall doughboy-type who had been hanging around lately; not too bright, quiet, with deep-set eyes that always seemed to be on you.
The man shuffled forward a step, his feet on the threshold, and Garrett forced himself to remain motionless. The hulking shape in the hallway moved… one arm… repeatedly.
“Don’t make me use my 12-gauge,” Garrett said in a low, deadly-serious tone. It was a terrifying gamble. Garrett didn’t have a shotgun. The man knew he was awake and alert, and ten feet separated them. Garrett could hear the man’s heavy breathing.
He took the ruse a step further and feinted quickly with his shoulders, as if he was about to reach for his shotgun in the dark, and that did it. The man disappeared from the doorway.
Garrett stayed in his bed for a few moments more, then quietly got up and closed the door, locked it, and propped his desk chair under the knob.
The next day, Garrett was at the bus station before Colleen was even out of bed. He wore a jean jacket and a baseball cap and had one of Steve’s old Army duffel bags, stuffed to the top with his most valued possessions as he boarded the bus.
He walked past a man sitting in row three, reading a magazine with Garrett’s photo on it. The headline read “Blind Intuition.” Garrett pulled down the bill of his baseball cap and continued to a seat near the rear of the bus.
Fifteen minutes later, when the air brakes released and the bus rolled away, Garrett would allow himself to fall asleep against the bus window as the countryside streamed by. It was his first restful sleep in ages.
Troy Larson is a writer, digital content creator, and broadcast veteran with hundreds of podcast and broadcast credits to his name. Reach out on Facebook and on Instagram.
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