Night Reigns

The sirens screamed. Wailing peals sliced into the night air and silenced the crickets. About the town walls, which form a protective perimeter around the entire settlement, there was an incessant scurrying of men who clambered over platforms and walkways and raced from post to post, delivering arms, wooden planks, munitions, messages, and all manners of things that would help them stay the menace beyond the walls for the night. Meanwhile the wind lapped at my hair and I decided to go for a stroll.

         Why the sirens sound each night, I don’t know. It succeeds merely in waking the children so that a chorus of mothers are heard hushing and shushing. I’m convinced it attracts more of the creatures from afar, as well. Nevertheless, the town officials insist the sirens sound when the first beasts blot the horizon, as regular an occurrence as the sounding of a grandfather clock at midnight. Every night they come from the shallows and ditches and burrows in the wasteland beyond the walls. All that separates the civilian population, including myself, from that horde of ravenous beasts beyond is a thick line of brick, mortar, and the foolhardy men of the town Watch.

         I never have the privilege of being asleep at that time, and thus, despite my civilian status, my insatiable curiosity finds me on one of the many improvised wooden platforms along the height of the wall, watching those things advance toward the town like billowing factory smoke. I stand with my scrawny elbows on the ledge of the walkway as fear-furrowed faces rush to and fro about me. They’re either too busy or too terrified to order me out of their way.

         Tonight, as with every night, the sirens were eventually silenced. Electric lamps, which dot the perimeter of the wall, bloomed with yellow light. They formed a cordon around the town like the magic circle witches would use to protect themselves from what they summoned. The air was thrumming with shouts and howls and cries and the sound of footsteps on the walkways as the creature's crashed upon the walls like an immense ocean wave. There was one of the senior watchmen up on the platform, eyes scanning, always scanning, bellowing commands at intervals to the juniors with their blue armbands – ‘Eyes left! There’s one digging!’

         At the senior’s command, three young men promptly appeared below at the foot of the ladder propped against the walkway. In their trembling hands was a plank approximately ten metres in length which they lifted up to three other pairs of hands above. The next three men then fumbled with the oblong object, guided by the senior, and thrust it down toward the errant beast burrowing at the foot of the wall. ‘He’s not taking. Try again,’ commanded the silver-haired senior, prodding the creature below with more and more force, more and more subdued desperation. Eventually the creature desisted from its attempts at digging beneath the wall. It lifted its grizzly head, snarled at the four men above, and crouched on its mangy haunches.

         Usually the watchmen are quick enough to either relinquish the expedient plank or pull it back up, but the supernatural speed of those monsters coupled with the human tendency toward shell shock under strain took its effect on this particular night. The creature below snapped at the plank and clutched it with its powerful canines, and, before the lagging man above could have the sense to let go, the creature jerked its monstrous head backward and pulled him through ten metres of air into the dust. A veil of jet surged into the spot into which he’d fallen, and the sound of rending flesh was mingled with the repeated cries of ‘Oh God, Oh God!’

         To escape the macabre scene I took off in the eastern direction, minimising my interference by keeping as large a radius as possible around the frantic watchmen. Along the next section of the wall I could swear the beasts were howling more loudly, snarling with greater malevolence. I could feel a tremolo along my spine as the demonic chorus reached its crescendo, and I hastened my pace.

Along the next section a boy who’d barely spent eighteen years on this earth was crouching on the platform, wide-eyed, breathing in spasms, vision fixed on something imperceptible. A senior watchman was helping matters by howling at the boy, waving around his baton and beating the lad around the shoulders with the full impetuosity of rage. I stopped to watch the one-way altercation, but the senior noticed my intrigue. Wishing to spare myself a similar treatment, I checked the adjacent ladder for an occupant and quickly disembarked the walkway. The senior was still watching me as I slinked off.

         On the ground below I continued to follow the length of the wall. Along the promenade, which is sheltered by brick and mortar to one side and the wooden constructions above, men were busy bringing planks to where they were needed above. At frighteningly short intervals I heard the repeated report, ‘Burrower at the next section!’

         Not that it’s the burrowers who pose the only threat to the watchmen. Often one of the beasts boasts its deviousness and attempts to climb the wall, using the gaps in the brick and mortar as ledges for its ascent. – ‘Climber right! Beat him down!’ – and if several attempts at knocking the threat back down with planks and batons fail, that’s when the marksman is summoned, and the crack of the rifle is soon heard echoing from one end of the town to the other.

         On this particular night, with its curiously persistent wind, a tidal wave of blue armbands surged into one spot of the wall, where, as I gathered from the snatches of dialogue amidst the confusion, the beasts were forming their own wave of terror on the opposite side, perpetually climbing onto one another until they were a black pool of ooze pressed against the far side of the wall, threatening to overcome its height. As several ambitious creatures leapt up from this black battlement and made their attempts at defiling the sanctity of town, the rifles sang in series, pounding the air with repeated bursts, desperately forcing the creatures back with flurries of lead. The watchmen are loath to waste ammunition when there is so little left, but this time it was close. Nevertheless, there was a hearty cheer as the beasts gave up their siege and sought some other weakness in the wall.

         But the victory was short lived. Soon the swathes of blue armbands dispersed into other sections, inundated with threats of being overrun. A little earlier than usual I retired away from the hive of activity and found a dead tree in the middle of the plains, which lie between the town and the wall. The branches of the tree were dry and cracked, yet I was struck with the heady aroma of resin, as if the tree held on dearly to some semblance of life. I sat beneath the whistling branches and watched the specks of human on the wall afar intermingle until they were a mesmerising kaleidoscope of movement. I watched the electric lamps blaze on in the darkness, watched the brief illumination of distant figures moving along the walkways. That’s when my gaze shifted above.

         The paltry light of the electric lamps scarcely eclipsed the brilliance above. Splashed into the sapphire sky was the galactic spill of the universe, cradled by the ethereal arms of the galaxy. I became more and more transfixed by it, so much so that the shouting and the growls and hisses in the distance began to dissipate, and for a while it was as if I was a part of that celestial tapestry; I was the moon with its wistful eyes fixed on the heavens above; I was the horizon with its casual suggestion of infinity; I was the trees and the dust and the bugs, all of those things which are not a subset of the accident of humanity.

         I noticed a shooting star darting across the cosmos, and in that split second I was a passenger on that fast-moving speck of light, a refugee away from the hell of the walls and the town and the death that hangs just above us in the night. But then a harried shout followed by threatening ululation at the wall snapped me back to the steady wind, to the relentless activity of the watchmen, to the knots of black bodies bounding in the darkness, their sinuous snouts and legs glinting in the moonlight. All I could do was wait for the sun to approach and banish the nightmares.

         Eventually the horizon did indeed thankfully bloom with the orange hue of dawn. The cries and the shouts diminished as the creatures retreated from the light. The watchmen’s movements slowed down as their exhaustion caught up with them, and most were sitting on the walkways, brooding, while others were wearily clearing away the debris, though they were brooding also. All at once the tension in my body relaxed, and the thoughts of sirens, blood and fear dissolved into the morning. Another night survived.

         But for how long? As each night dawns and sets, the danger grows stronger, the creatures come closer, and the casualties thin out our numbers till there’ll soon be no one left. Before long, the old men like me will be drafted to the walls, brandishing our walking canes, defending lives whose clocks have already struck the midnight hour in advance. Such is human optimism. We would rather die than yield so easily to darkness. I know that, soon, once the sirens sound a final time, those agents of darkness beyond will overcome our resilience, and I will lay on the dust in the throes of my death and look up into that jewel of a night sky. Then those calm and soothing arms of the galaxy will scoop me up and show me, as I've often wished before, the secret of the peppered stars, the reason our defiance was worthy, why our stand against evil wasn't merely for survival.