“I didn’t ask for this. Maybe there’s a way I could get better,” Jennifer’s voice said.
“You hid in my trunk,” Amber said.
Her third stab hit something, but it felt like it glanced off of an arm or leg. No real damage was done.
“You were probably waiting until sunset so you could attack me again,” Amber said.
There was a gasp in response to her fourth strike.
Jennifer’s voice gurgled. “I’m not evil. I’m just so… hungry.”
It was easy to believe. The hunger was clear in the tone of her voice.
Amber imagined the lustful embrace that Jennifer would pull her into. They would be joined in the most intimate way—Jennifer’s mouth with Amber’s blood. For the last moments of Amber’s natural life, they would be one entity, sharing the same spark.
It was a beautiful idea.
Amber realized that her fingers had nearly gone limp. The stake was hanging from her hands, ready to fall. There was a tapping sound in the air.
“You’re trying to hypnotize me with that tapping,” Amber said.
She pulled back the stake again and drove it into the darkness, feeling for the body there since she didn’t dare look. As powerful as the tapping was, the eyes would captivate her in an instant if she allowed herself to look.
Finally, with her eighth or ninth blow, the screeching started. She hit something vital and the monster with Jennifer’s voice thrashed and quivered on the point of her stake.
Amber allowed herself to look.
One of the eyes was punctured. It still had a spark, but the swirling colors were spilling out from the membrane, leaking onto the trunk’s carpet. The other eye was a swirling galaxy. If the monster hadn’t been so injured and panicked, it might have still mesmerized Amber with that spiraling glow.
But the eye wasn’t focused on Amber. It was darting around, trying to find some way to escape.
Amber could see it clearly. One of the arms was broken. There as a gash in the thing’s chest, and, of course, one deflated eye.
She felt pity and decided to end its existence as quickly as possible.
The thing was dragged forward as she pulled back the stake. It shook and danced in the fading sunlight.
Raising the stake in two hands above her head, she drove it down with a grunt and pierced the thing’s good eye.
For a fraction of a second, it looked like Jennifer again.
Amber remembered her friend dressed in a wedding gown as Aaron smushed cake into her face. She remembered the first dance as bride and groom and the way everyone had clapped and laughed as Aaron tripped over his own feet. She had only known Jennifer a few months, but they had become good friends—the kind of friendship that might last a lifetime.
“However short that turns out to be,” Amber whispered.
She watched as the monster began to liquify.
“Young lady?” a voice called from the porch.
Amber held the stake at her side as she leaned to peer around the open trunk lid. The man was standing in the doorway, pushing open the screen door to address her.
“Your room is ready,” he called.
“I’ll be right there.”
“Something wrong with your car?”
“I’ll be right there.”
Amber took her time going over the vehicle, poking her stake into every dark corner to make sure that it didn’t harbor any other hitchhikers. When she was finished, she pulled out her phone and called Ricky. She didn’t tell him the former identity of the monster that she had found in her trunk. She only told him that it was one of them, and then asked him to be careful.
Ricky reiterated what he had said before, “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
Then, he added something new. “I suspect I’ll die here, too, but not anytime soon.”
After they hung up, Amber rolled her bag towards the door and found the man standing at the foot of the stairs.
“I would offer to take that for you, but it looks heavy, and I’m too lazy,” he said. It was clearly a joke that he had repeated many times.
His eyes landed on the giant bag of sunflower seeds she was carrying and then the stake she had tucked under her arm.
“You a birder?”
“Pardon?”
“The seeds. I thought maybe you were a bird watcher.”
“Sure,” Amber said. She followed him up the stairs.
The room was small and cozy. Amber checked under the bed and in the dresser before she put down piles of seeds on the windowsill and just inside the threshold of the door.
She slept right through until dawn.
Ike Hamill
November 2019
Topsham, Maine
About Until Dawn
The characters in this story have already faced death and lived to talk about it. Amber stared down a monster in Until the Sun Goes Down, Liz and Alan survived the Migrators, and Ricky was the teenage magician who summoned Accidental Evil. All three of those stories take place in roughly the same imaginary location, so I wanted to bring those characters together.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how the memory of some trauma fades. These characters don’t appear tortured by their past. They’re not paralyzed by fear, or forever ruined by the experiences that brought them so close to disaster. That’s not the case for all of us. Sometimes our decisions are shaped for years (or generations) as we float and bob in the ripples of past pain. Other times, it seems we’re able to successfully move on pretty quickly. I wonder what makes the difference.
As always, if you enjoy my books I hope you’ll tell a friend. Nothing helps a book spread faster than a personal recommendation. Let me know what you think of Until Dawn, or any of my novels. I’m waiting to hear from you.
All my best,
Ike
Until the Sun Goes Down
No good deed goes unpunished. It was so hot out—I thought I should check in on my neighbor. I should have never looked in the cellar. There were no spiders down
