Flash Fiction Anthology

The things in the dark

We were not supposed to go outside after dark. It was not allowed.

Just like during the nearly forgotten pandemics when it was forbidden to leave our houses at all, now it was the same, but only at nights. There were... rumours about things in the dark... Dangerous, bloodthirsty 'things'-- for the lack of a better name. Because the only ones who had actually met them, never returned home. People went missing day after day and the police and other authorities were clueless, helpless.

It was also forbidden to enter the forest at the end of the road, encroaching the town on all sides. The thick woods growing beyond the electric fence, hiding a research facility from view so well that most people living in our town forgot it existed. I did not-- my husband worked there. And it was from there that he called me tonight, his voice morphing into a cry for help before being swallowed by a low growling, then silence...

Just like the growling I could hear behind me now as I walked swiftly down the paved road sending the echo of the soles of my shoes through the night, before it turned into a gravel lane, the fragments of stones crunching under my feet, then thinning into a ribbon-like path covered by dry, whispering leaves when it entered the perfect darkness under the first trees.

Breathe and think now, I ordered myself, the low growling vanishing as I neared the tall fence buzzing with its electric charge, running like blood through its netting. It even looked like human veins, I realized as the electricity seemed to flood it intermittently as if following the beats of an invisible heart, on and off, on and off... making it look sentient, intelligent, hesitating... As if it could not decide if it should keep the growling things hiding in the dark around me out, or maybe keep some others in...

I shuddered when I heard a branch snap somewhere nearby, not sure on which side of the fence, remembering the growls I had heard on the phone. I had to find my way beyond that fence somehow, and then the institute, try to help Nathan...

No one knew where it stood exactly, Nathan had never told me its precise location, or what exactly they were working on. The only thing I had gathered was that neither the police nor the local authorities knew, their only duty was to keep the residents away, and not ask questions.

I looked around, hoping not to come across a police patrol or something worse, but I was alone; the faint moonlight and the reddish, flickering glow of the fence showed no one as far as I could see. So I kept on walking, stumbling along the forest path running parallel to the fence.

My worst suspicions were confirmed when after a mile or so I came to an open gate-- something was very wrong here, surely it should not be open. It looked like a gaping, yawning mouth in the flickering, living mesh of the fence. The omnipresent growling seemed to intensify as I stood there, trying to discern something, anything beyond that fence...

Straining my eyes for a long while, I finally caught a glimpse of a white wall as a sudden gust of wind appeared out of nowhere, shifting the clouds across the moon, as well as the branches of the thickly-grown trees.

Shrouded in the night, trees and the unsettling growling, a large building lay sprawling ahead of me; it could only be the research facility I was looking for.

Struggling against my instincts, my whole being telling me to turn back and run, I took the first tentative step towards it, half expecting the gate to shut suddenly, to squash me before I would realize what was happening... But it did not move, only the wind and the growling grew louder gradually as I made my way towards Nathan.

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This story was written for Imagine this... Writing workshop, prompt 44.