The sirens begin to scream, the sound sharp as lightning in the December air.
Wincing, we look up in unison, as though belonging to one body. Though it is long past dusk, the park is thick with revelers on the brink of celebrating the holidays. Full of now-frozen figures that stare up blankly at the sound in weary, ubiquitous understanding. After several heartbeats, it rouses us. Unified, we begin to move, quickly, but no longer with the rushed, desperate panic that marked the first few months. Most return to their own cars, locking the doors and raising the windows as they settle in for a long night. Emergency kits, freshly stocked and well within reach, innocently await their use. Not all of us are so lucky. A dozen tight figures head to the nearest house, and we walk intimately, the way a family does in unfamiliar space. The owners – an elderly couple none of us know – guide us in with familiar resignation from the hollow space of the already open door.
All the while, the night continues screaming, as though in pain.
We enter like guests for a wake. A procession of thin shuffling shadows, each as uncertain as the next. With slightly shaking fingers calmed only somewhat by practice, we close all the doors in the house and pull shut the windows. Lights and the reassuring hum of appliances shut off sharply with a heaviness that presses against our skin. Checking and double-checking and triple-checking that all the locks are good and tight. Guarding the house from the traitorous breath outside that presses up against tempered glass. Once we are finished, we gather in the living room, where there is the most space to sit together comfortably, and where we can keep a watchful eye on each other. All the lights have been shut off, and we stare at the mere suggestions of faces in the dark. All throughout the city, families and strangers like us do the same.
Then we wait.
Wait, as the shriek of sirens and the sound of the world outside begins to fade away scratchily like a radio losing connection, only to be replaced by the strange, otherworldly sounds that we all now recognize. Though even now, we still do not fully understand them, only know what they mean.
We huddle, a singular mass like children in the cold, as weightless shadows drop their tendrils slowly over the house, and as the air drags long nails against exterior walls. They sink down noiselessly from the sky, heavy with stars that burn like watching eyes. Hungry, searching, and as mindless as locusts, they arrive with no more fanfare than the whisper of chill air that rustles the still-open curtains in forgotten rooms. We can feel them more than we can see them, groping their way blindly through the world like bad dreams, up and down the empty street.
Wherever they go, the living things vanish. Eaten up by the air itself in the span of a single breath, as though they had simply been thought out of existence. Closing our eyes, we listen, visualizing the silent rippling in the air that is not just the heat, and try not to think about the bodiless silhouettes undulating like ribbons that are no longer just a simple trick of the light.
Somewhere close and far away, an impromptu chorus of screams tears through the silence, only to be cut off just as suddenly. Wide eyes find one another in the dimness, knowing that the sun will rise unmoved tomorrow over an empty house. The folly of an overlooked, open window, and the terror of liquid darkness that pours in like nightmares. Even after all this time, we still know them only by the emptiness they leave in their path. The same way one can only know a body against the evening by the way it erases the stars, or a shadow by the cold mockery of shape it paints on the ground.
After almost two hours, we feel the thick shadows rise at last, dissatisfied and hungry again. Human warmth crawls back into the house, shy as a secret lover. It is several uncountable minutes before the sirens that mark the end return, mournful and keening. Soon, they too fade, and silence settles as slowly as a lake disturbed. Outside, doors open cautiously, and human-shaped shadows shuffle warily back into glassy night. The intimacy of strangers fades, not forgotten, but stored.
Peace has returned, though the thought of holiday festivities has been all but abandoned. In the tense, held-breath silence of the living room, we look at each other, still afraid to voice the thing we heard, almost ignored in the last few minutes before the sirens returned. Afraid that if we spoke it, it would be real, and not just something to be forgotten with the rising sun.
The unwelcome insistence of something at the door, quiet, then, as though we had not wanted to hear it at all, the click of an unlocking door, and the slow turning of a doorknob.
.
