Prologue

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

~ Dr. Samuel Johnson

50 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, February 5, 1992,

I write this as a sort of last will and testimony. To all those who follow after me; be they curious about what happened in Midnight Falls, or those who may have survived and want revenge. What I did had to be done. That godforsaken nightmare and the fiendish creatures that called it home. They, who had for centuries feasted upon humanity and consumed hundreds of untold lives, had to be purged from this world.

Those creatures were not human, though they walked and talked like people. They had lives and jobs, homes, cars, and church socials, but they were not human. They were demons and Midnight Falls was where the Devil set them loose.

I did what I had to do six years ago, and I don’t regret it. However, there is not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t worry that if such a town as that one could exist, then how probable is it that there could be more of them out there? Small out-of-the-way towns like that are hard to find yet run almost self-sufficiently and can exist nearly anywhere. If that is true, then I and the rest of the world are in much deeper shit than I thought.

I have reason to think this is not so. If it were, then someone would have noticed. Someone would have slipped up and the secret would have gotten out. No, I believe that Midnight Falls was the only place that they could have existed, and if there are other such communities, then they must be in deep dark rural areas, like the unincorporated areas in the far north of states like Maine and Oregon. Someplace where there are few people and few threats.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Midnight Falls was a trapped community that was soon to be discovered, had it not been for what I did that night. That night is, I guess the whole reason I am writing this, what I am hoping to pass on to you, the reader, so that what I did is not forgotten and what evil the world was freed of. The horror of that night still haunts my sleep and there has not been a single night since then that I have not awoken screaming in a cold sweat. Even on the nights that I drink myself into a blackened stupor, the nightmares still come to me and play out their horrors on the inside of my eyelids.

Their voices ring in my ears; the screams and cries of those as they were torn apart. The howls of the creatures as they burned in the church fire, I hear them even when the moon doesn’t shine. Those howls, those damned howls are why I sit here now in this old hunting cabin in the middle of this frozen wasteland writing this. Here where it is colder than a witch’s tit, why did I believe they wouldn’t follow?

I have seen them, the prints, I saw them last night, and that forced me to realize that I couldn’t put this off any longer. They are out there in that white hell, hungry and waiting. They have come for me, the survivors of Midnight Falls. They bare their fangs, knowing that soon they will have their revenge, on the one who killed their kin and destroyed their lair.

It started last week; that is when I first began to suspect they were close. This is not the first time they have caught up to me. It has been nearly six years since I have been on the run, hiding from them. At first, I thought that I had gotten away, but it was not nine months later before I saw the footprints. When I saw those tracks, I knew that they had all not perished. I knew that a few of them had escaped, but I had no idea how many of them had eluded the destruction of their town.

The prints had appeared in the field behind my cousin’s house. He had mentioned them one day after coming in from an early morning of hunting for turkeys. Turkeys are early risers and had themselves a regular Butterball gala out in his field. In fact, those birds were only the reason he owned the field. Brent was no great shakes at farming, and could never grow anything more than weeds.

“The oddest tracks I have ever seen,” Brent told me, wiping his brow. ”I have seen coyote and dog tracks but those were way too big. They looked for all the world like wolf tracks, but that dang sucker would have been the size of a bear to make those.” I had to look at the tracks myself, which I did. I waited until the sun was fully up before I did and I made sure I had a loaded Remington seven hundred in my hands when I went out. I crouched in the tall grass to see the tracks clearly. Sure enough, there were at least three deep prints in the drying mud. Whatever had made them had been big, but something else I saw that Brent overlooked. To make those prints, the creature would have to have weighed a great deal to leave them that deep. Something large and heavily muscled had come into the field and stood to watch the house.

I stood there for what seemed like hours, alternating from looking at those tracks to scanning the woods. I knew that as I watched the trees and scrub that

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 05.11.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-6005-9

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
To those who love to read.