The Dark Muse: A Collection of Short Stories

Reflections

It was a bad day for a funeral. The sky was heavy with clouds. A steady drizzle had continued since early morning. It leached the colors out of the town, as if the rain washed them away, down into the sewers and the soil, leaving only gray.

Aisling walked past the cemetery on her way home from school. She was holding a red umbrella that matched her red rain boots. She was lost in thought, twirling a strand of her long blond hair around her finger. But when she reached the cemetery, she paused outside of the entrance, looking through the wrought-iron fence with a gloomy frown.

Despite the weather, a cluster of black umbrellas stood stubbornly around the coffin. The mourners huddled together, closer for the chill and their sorrow. They held candles, but occasionally the wind pushed the rain sideways, dousing the little flames into wisps of smoke. Death doesn't wait for good weather, so neither can grief.

Aisling heard about this most recent death on a news broadcast yesterday. They hadn't released names right away. When they mentioned Cooper's General Store, she immediately thought of William King, who often worked there after school. She'd see him there when she had to pick up ingredients her mother had forgotten. Aisling was always eager to do this, as it meant a visit to the little store with its white brick facade and green awning and little bell that tinkled pleasantly when the door opened. She even began to hope that her mother would forget some crucial part of that night's dinner so she would have an excuse to ride her bike into town. It wasn't until many months had passed that she realized it was Will, smiling at her from behind the counter, that made up the pleasure of these outings. But it wasn't Will who was killed. It was Billy Cooper. Aisling had been relieved, and then immediately felt guilty.

Billy was kind and reliable. His wife was pregnant with their second child. He wouldn't take risks. He wasn't like the other victims: the group of boys who got drunk on whiskey in the town square and taunted the Nightmares until they appeared, or old Henry Bell who fell asleep on a park bench and didn't wake up until it was too late, or Andrew Mills who angrily defied his parents and the curfew, or little Poppy Hill who got lost, and her parents who tried to find her.

But it didn't matter. It didn't matter that Billy was inside his home with his pregnant wife asleep upstairs. It didn't matter that they had obeyed the curfew. They had only forgotten to close the window — it had been left open just a crack. Now Billy was being buried in the cemetery, just like all the others. Because he, too, had died of a heart attack.

They had all been scared to death.

Aisling recognized Billy's wife among the mourners, one hand on her growing belly and the other wrapped around her daughter's little fingers. Mrs. Cooper held an umbrella over all three of them. Mr. Cooper was there, too, and Billy's younger brother, Scott, and many close friends. Aisling imagined that their grief had brought the rain, shrouding the entire town in mourning. She had been wrong. It was a perfect day for a funeral.

Aisling wished that Billy hadn't been killed. Of course her heart ached for his family, but more importantly — she turned her head to look in the dejected faces of the people passing by — now that there had been another Nightmare attack, it would start all over again.

She remembered when Poppy and her family had been found dead. It was three years ago, when Aisling was twelve. That was when the restrictions had really increased. She could no longer go outside at night to catch fireflies with her brother or find shapes in the stars. She could only watch from her closed window. She would try to count the number of fireflies in the yard, ignoring the faint outlines of her room in the window's reflections. She watched until one night she saw a Nightmare. It slunk out of the shadows, moving stealthily. It was sniffing along the ground, trying to catch the scent of prey. The moonlight revealed its ink-black skin, which shifted as if alive. Aisling could not look away. Then, the Nightmare raised its head and looked back at her. Its mouth opened, grotesquely large and red. Two round, white eyes met her own. Aisling squeezed her eyes shut and screamed and screamed. Her parents comforted her, promising that she was safe behind the walls of their home. Aisling never watched from her window again. After that, she tried to stay awake all night, fearing that the Nightmares would come, but eventually exhaustion always overtook her. She did have nightmares for many months: nightmares about monsters with gaping red mouths and dripping skin.