The Dark Watchers
by Nik Xandir Wolf
"Once, on a white barren spur, he saw a black figure for a moment; but he looked quickly away, for it was one of the dark watchers. No one knew who the watchers were, nor where they lived, but it was better to ignore them and never to show interest in them."
- John Steinbeck, Flight
“Did you see them?” I said, staring into the cracked screen of my iPhone.
“See who?” my ex-wife said.
“The Dark Watchers. It was them. I finally believe my mom.”
“It’s night and you’re trapped in the mountains, your mind is playing tricks,” she said.
I looked around, surrounded by thick moss and dense ferns, and redwoods towering over, hiding me, sheltering me. My ex-wife was right; when you were in the woods, in the dark, even the most absurd fairy tales seemed not just plausible—they became real.
The moonlight slicing through the branches made the low mist glow like a breathing enchantment just off this abandoned stretch of Highway 1 in Big Sur.
“My therapist from when I was a kid would have called them a projection.” I laughed. It seemed impossible to me that I was ever anywhere but here. With the sound of foghorns playing in the distance over the soft crashing waves. My reality warped by solitude, fatigue, and blood loss.
“Maybe they represent something to you. Like death,” she said. “You were always obsessed with death.”
“It’s hard not to think about death when you’re dying,” I said. I pulled my hand away from the wound on my side, and it was oily with dark blood. The bullet had gone clean through. I thought about when I’d spread Mom’s ashes out here all those years ago.
***
Two days ago I slept on my little sailboat, Orielle, in the B dock in Moss Landing. I was wide awake with the early morning sound of seals and seagulls, and the low thunder of commercial fishing vessels starting. In the distance, the soft hum of twin foghorns groaned at even intervals, marking the two rock jetties at the entrance to the marina. A cold, exhausted feeling trickled up my legs. I stepped off my boat and checked the time on my watch. It was 5:15 a.m. I took a quick look out at the cold blue of the Pacific stretching out ahead, the U shape of the Monterey Bay just visible in the pink light creeping over the mountains to the east, and started walking.
I hadn’t slept well with my jittery nerves and strung-out tension regarding the meeting I had that morning. My whole life to this point rested on this one thing. I needed access to a bigger ship, the Maître D. Without it, my last fraying thread in life would snap, and I was sure I didn’t have the guts or the stamina to start over again with a new idea. I was thirty-five and had nearly killed myself with stress, prescription drugs and sleep disorders keeping pace with corporate America's toxic sales culture that pushes humans to the brink of psychotic breaks and beyond in the name of squeezing a penny of profit from their employees. So I quit to do what I wanted with my life.
I quit to become a writer. I would rather die dwelling in the dangers of action sports reporting-on my own terms-than go groveling back to the corporate swine at Big Lizard Insurance. The only thing I missed about my old life in Monterey was my daughter, Olive. My ex-wife, Evelyn, either allowed it or forgot I had access to it, but I tuned in every night to watch the little angel sleep through the monitor app. I also cried—dry heaving sobs that soaked my chest in real pain—that I couldn’t be there every night to put her to bed. She was eleven months old now, and I’d been gone for half of it. I had missed her first steps.
I stepped into the Moss Landing Café right at 5:30 a.m. and started toward the counter when one of them grabbed my arm. It was busy inside with fishermen and boat dwellers getting coffee and three-dollar plates of pancakes, so they had blended in.
“Nick, sit. We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
It was Marco Tallini, the owner of the Maître D, and his savagely obese partner, Rocky—last name I didn’t know. Marco was lean, dark, with black-and-grey, deeply receding hair and thick eyebrows. He had good genes that, at forty-nine, offered him a youthful frame and still-boyish good looks.
Rocky motioned to sit down, removing my ability to decide for myself. Seeing the two guys here gave me Goodfellas flashbacks and sent a spike of fear into my belly. “We have coffee for you,” he said, his voice quick, but deep and resonant.
It didn’t matter how scared I was of the guys, or their reputation around here, I needed a larger boat, and they were the only ones offering. My Catalina 22’ didn’t pass Coast Guard inspection and was really just a day sailer anyway, without the bathroom and storage for overnight travel on the sea. Plus it had no radio or GPS. Or lights. I was dead if I tried to go down the Big Sur coast in that thing.
I sat next to Rocky and across from Marco, who slid a mug over and filled it from a carafe of steaming coffee. “Rocky and I have decided to accept your offer,” he said.
I wondered if I appeared as confused as I felt. I’d finally—after nearly a decade of writing classes, an MFA and three unsold novels—landed the biggest story of my career. It was for Outside Magazine. A five-thousand-word feature at a dollar a word, finding hidden barrels that nobody had ever surfed on the untouched miles of cliff-drop coastline down Big Sur. It was dangerous, but it was my big break. If the story got some traction and national attention, it would be that much harder for editors to reject my current novel, though if I knew anything about the corporate machine of big publishing it was that they were very good at rejecting writers like me.
I’d been shooting my mouth off about selling the story every night at the Undertow—gangsters, drug runners, and psychologically unstable boat dwellers had called Moss Landing their home for the better part of a century, and the Undertow was their bar. And the bartender, Maggie Chavez, took it upon herself to put the word out to help me.
Everyone with a boat in Moss Landing drank there, and she knew them all by name. At
first, I was greeted by laughing and pointing from the corners of the room when I came in at noon each day to start drinking. It made sense; the cost of gas for most of these big fishing trawlers would run ten or twenty grand to get down to San Simeon and back. And the sailboat captains wanted a thousand a day. I thought I was going to have to steal a boat, but then she had come through with a lead. She told me she found a boat, but to be careful because Marco had spent some time up at San Quentin. All I had to do was meet them here, Sunday at 5:30 a.m. sharp.
“I’m sorry?” I said. My heart fluttered in my chest, and my instincts were telling me to bail.
“What, am I not enunciate clearly? You’re the writer, right? You have to go surf a few waves down the coast, take some pictures. We also have business down the coast. We can use an extra deckhand. It’s win-win.” Marco’s protuberant black eyes glared hard, bored into me, and shook my confidence down to the studs. “We go down that way all the time, we can show you the beaches you can only get to by boat.”
I felt sick, and the hot coffee made it worse. “What kind of business?”
I heard a seat adjust behind me and turned just enough to see a third guy, Tony, I believe, pivoted in his seat and leaning over so he could listen in on the conversation.
“The business,” Marco said, leaning closer, “is none of your goddamn business.” He leaned back, looked around, and laughed lightly, as if to settle the tension out. It didn’t help. “But if you have to know, it is a simple pickup. We are loading up some imported product and bringing it to port.”
“What if,” I said, “I already found other arrangements?”
All three laughed, and Rocky clubbed me on the back with his fat hand, nearly knocking the wind out of me. “Listen, guy,” Rocky said, “you need a boat, we need another deckhand. It’s a deal nobody else is going to give you in a million years. Say yes, say no. But if you say no, you just better watch your fucking ass.” They laughed hard again, and I caught another club on the back.
“You look so scared. Christ, Rocky is fucking with you,” Marco said, smiling wide. Then he leaned in again. “I’m sure you’ve heard that I spent time in the pen. People talk. You know what I did? Involuntary manslaughter. A bar fight. When I was twenty-two years old up in Oakland. It’s ancient history.” Marco stood. “We’re honest businessmen picking up some fresh langostino from Mexico. All legal and imported here at Moss Landing. You see all the Coast Guard and Department of Fish and Game around. Nothing goes on here anymore. It isn’t like it used to be. You think about it, and you let me know. We set out Friday.”
I moved to stand, and Rocky pushed me back down and leaned in. “That means we’ll see you Friday. Four a.m., C dock. We know where you live.” He smiled, and the three of them stood and left the restaurant. I sat there and watched them leave, my stomach knots starting to unravel slightly. I took a sip of the coffee; it was cool now. I drank it down anyway and tried to steady my nerves.
***
“You’re not hangin’ overboard chucking stones yet. You must have been out on the boats a few times,” Marco said, taking a seat near me at the rear of the ship while Rocky, at the helm, kept us full speed up and down the massive ten-foot seas. The whole bay was a blanket of fog, and I kept having a flash of terror that we might hit another boat. Or worse, get T-boned by a bigger ship.
“Can he see where we’re going?” I asked.
“He’s got the GPS on. He’s got this. You good, kid?”
“I’m fine,” I said, though I was thoroughly nauseous and felt like if I moved too quickly, I might puke. I wasn’t seasick. Seasick was a fate so close to death, you wished it would just come and finish you. “I worked on the fishing boats in undergrad at Cal State Monterey Bay. Paid my tuition in cash each year.”
“I like that. Some initiative. Most of those college boys have soft hands. You know. Pencil pusher hands. Figured you for one of them when I heard you were a writer.”
“Hell, my dad is a carpenter,” I said. Though my father owned a small general contracting firm, I didn’t think it was necessary to elaborate. With the Moss Landing boating community, the more blue-collar I appeared, the better. “If it wasn’t the boats, it was swinging hammers at construction sites all over the Bay Area.”
“A college boy who can work with his hands. But I bet you went through all those jobs thinking you were smarter than that. Am I right? Like you knew it was temporary.”
I had thought exactly that, and the fact that this man saw right through me like this was both unnerving and comforting. I didn’t have to pretend. Also, he wasn’t exactly as he appeared either. He was more insightful and self-aware than I had given him credit. “I just knew it wasn’t for me. The same way anyone knows anything in life.”
“You were too good for that kind of work, is that it?”
“That—that’s not it at all,” I said, stuttering on my words.
“I’m just fucking with you, kid. I have two sons a little younger than you. Neither one wants do this type of work.”
I nodded, wondering how old his kids were. I was always judged as being in my late twenties, since I could barely grow facial hair and had somewhat of a baby face that was a mismatch for my six-two, two-hundred size. My old boss at Big Lizard called me Baby Huey, and I had wanted to beat the shit out of him with his own hands every time he did. Or maybe Marco thought I was younger because I was chasing dreams. “I liked construction okay. And I like being out on the water, that’s why I love to surf even though I’m not the best. I just knew, since I was a kid really, that I wanted to write.”
“How the hell does a kid know something like that?”
“I don’t know. But it’s like how you said, but not quite. Like I did go through life and my jobs knowing it wasn’t for me, sure, but also, I felt like a spy. Like I was supposed to go through all of this shit so that I could catalog it. Write about it. Make sense of it at some point in the future.”
“That’s what you were thinking while you were gutting a thousand salmon?”
“Yeah. I mean, some of the time.”
“But was there like one thing, one big moment where you knew that you were going to do it? Spend your life on it no matter what?”
“My mom used to do some writing. She would send off stories to literary magazines and get rejections back. She liked to write when she was cleaned up. Maybe seeing her do it was that one thing. I don’t know for sure.” I always felt guilty bringing up my mom’s addiction. It felt like a betrayal to her memory. But there was no way to glorify heroin addiction. Even though it started with prescribed Oxy. It had turned her into a living, breathing zombie, capable of anything.
“But there’s no money in it, right? Like a bestseller is like winning the lottery, it seems to me.”
“Yeah, you’re not wrong. Hell, I’ve been writing for damn near ten years, and this is the first paying gig I’ve gotten.”
“Hard way to make a living, kid.”
“What about you? Is being a fishing boat captain your dream?”
Marco let that statement settle in; he looked out at the sea, the fog so thick, our voices were muted by it. Everything felt soft and fake, like a stage.
“I always wanted to be—nah. You know what. It doesn’t fucking matter what I wanted to be, because there are dreams, and there is reality. No offense to you, but ninety-nine percent of the world has to wake up and realize there is work to be done, a family to be fed, and find a steady paycheck.”
“I quit my job to do this,” I said, but all I could think about now was Olive’s tiny, beautiful face and shock of black hair in the monitor app. I would make it. I would be the one percent that never gave up on that dream. “I have a daughter.”
“Don’t worry, kid. There are easier ways to make a living than gutting fish and swinging hammers. This writing shit doesn’t work out, you come to work for me. Import, export. It’s so much easier than doing all that work. You just drive the goddamn boat around. The open sea and your own goddamn schedule. Especially when the fish is frozen. It’s a great fucking living.”
I didn’t respond, though if I did, I would have told him being out here wasn’t bad at all. In fact, if I could shake this nausea away, it was a pretty damn good day. I couldn’t wait to dig into the first surf spot. Get some photography, use the small drone I brought. It was an easy assignment now that I had a boat and a captain that knew what the hell he was doing. Now all I had to do was pray there were some decent waves to surf and shoot. This time of year in the fall, there were usually consistent swells.
Marco stood. “We’re going straight through to our meeting around Lucia Lodge. Then we’ll head back up the coast and let you get your surfing footage or whatever. We’ll just need your help with loading the langostinos.”
“And we can hit the spots on the map I gave you?” I had sent Marco a list of pins of all the beaches along the coast that looked approachable from the sea; I figured we could scout them and only stop at a few of the best ones.
“Oh yeah. We’ll check your spots. Don’t you worry. Just don’t forget to change our names in your little story.”
I nodded, knowing that I would have, but also thinking if this were a legitimate operation, wouldn’t he want the exposure? Free advertising?
***
It was close to 7:00 p.m. when Rocky finally started to power down the motors. It was still bright and clear now, though the sun was dazzling us low on the horizon to the west with orange and blue and red shimmering off the scalloped surface. I could just see it out ahead, but there it was. We were finally approaching another boat after fifteen hours getting tossed around by the great Pacific Ocean with nothing but cliffs on the starboard, and open sea on the port. We had pulled into a little alcove and were so close to the shore, I could hear the waves crashing.
When we approached the boat, Rocky slowed to a stop and kept the engine idling. Marco threw the bumpers over the side in case we touched the other ship. The other boat was bigger and a lot nicer. It was a small pleasure yacht with long, sleek tinted windows and a pearl-white hull. I could just make out the figures on the other ship; there were three of them. Marco stepped beside me at the rear of the ship.
“All right, kid. Anything goes wrong, hit the deck and let Rocky handle the dirty business. He was holding a leather shoulder bag by the handle that he slipped over his neck so it hung at his side.
“I thought I was going to load langostinos?”
“You are, but you’re going to wait for my all clear. Then you can come and take the boxes
and load them into the big refrigerator below.” He pulled a snub-nosed revolver from the bag, checked the bullets, then slid it into the small of his back, covering it with his Pebble Beach windbreaker.
My pulse kicked so hard, the rush of blood in my ears was louder than the diesel engine. We pulled alongside the other ship; the two captains backed them up, rear to rear, so Marco and I faced the three people that I had seen from a distance. As we neared, their faces became clearer and clearer.
Two women stood at the helm; tall, professional, emotionless behind dark sunglasses. They had on slightly different versions of the same upscale yacht wear. A tall, Eastern European–looking blonde with wide shoulders and a thick neck. And a Latina with her arms crossed in a blue blazer and hair bobbed short with bangs falling in her eyes.
“These two run the show up from Mexico. Keep an eye out,” Marco said.
Our boats got close, and just before they bumped, Marco sprang forward, gently guiding the two rear platforms so they rested against the bumpers, and looped our ships together.
“Drop anchor,” the Latina said. I wasn’t sure who was controlling the ship, because I couldn’t see the captain up on the next level at the helm. “Come aboard, Marco. Let’s have a drink.”
***
“You having fun yet, writer boy?” Rocky said. We were sitting in the cockpit at the rear of the ship, waiting for Marco’s signal. It actually made sense why he wanted me when I thought about Rocky’s sheer girth. The guy was far too large to do any moving of boxes. They needed a younger back for this shit.
“I like being on boats. What’s keeping them so long?” I asked. I kept waiting for gunfire
to break out, since deals like this always seemed to go bad in the movies. But that’s movie magic for you. In real life, deals like this probably went off without a hitch the vast majority of the time. Assuming we weren’t just buying langostinos based on the fact that Marco had brought a goddamn gun with him. And these women didn’t look like your typical seafood purveyors.
“He’s just checking them out. If there are too many dead ones, it lowers the price. Just get ready to earn your keep. They’re coming.”
As if on cue, Marco emerged from a rear cabin door, smiling wide, and motioned me on board. I followed him through the fiberglass palace and down into the cooler in the cabin. I kept my focus and stayed professional by going straight over and picking up four boxes marked langostino, straightening, and walking back out the way I had come. It took me twenty trips to remove the full load, and I was tired and sweating by the end. On my last trip, the tall blonde asked me if I wanted a beer and to relax a minute. Her voice was a deep baritone. I politely declined and picked up the last stack of langostinos and exited the ship. Marco said some parting words and followed closely behind me.
Once we stepped back onto our ship, he untied us.
“Not as easy as you thought it would be, right? That’s a lot of seafood.”
“Christ. I haven’t carried that many fish since I was twenty-two.”
“You did good. Let’s go get you some waves, huh?”
I nodded and continued down below with the final load. I opened the big refrigerator door and walked them inside, then dropped them down to the floor. When I did, the wet bottom of the middle box split open, and a plastic bag bulged out that didn’t look like any langostino. I tugged at the bag, and the box split more, and a vacuum-sealed baggie the size of a fist came through that was full of little blue pills marked M30. I knew what they were.
They were fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that had been slipped into my mom's heroin. The drug that had killed my mom. I fucking hated, hated this drug. I shoved the bag back inside, and I stood, feeling faint when I did. I put my hand over my thundering heart. I slowly backed up, trying to think through my options. Trying to understand if this was how Marco really made his money or if this was a big misunderstanding. Maybe he didn’t know what was in there, and he was just the delivery person. One who didn’t ask questions. But I doubted it, and I wanted off this ship.
Now.
I took another step back and expected to hit the inside of the cold door, but it was already open, and I fell. But instead of landing hard on my ass, I was snatched from the air by shockingly strong hands. It was Rocky breathing heavily and holding me firmly around my chest.
“You okay, writer boy?” he said, standing me up and spinning me around with incredible strength. “You don’t look so good.” He slapped my face with his massive hand, and it stung.
“I—I’m good. Just got a little dizzy from all the lifting.”
He laughed. “Sure, writer boy. You need to get out from behind that computer more. Stay here.” Rocky nudged me aside and went into the refrigerator, shuffled some boxes around, and stepped out. He closed the refrigerator door, placing a thick padlock on it.
“Let’s go topside.”
I stayed at the rear of the ship while Rocky went back up to the helm, and Marco met him up there. The other ship was already almost gone from view. Rocky and Marco started the Maître D and huddled close, talking low about something that I figured had to do with me and the fact that Rocky was suspicious as fuck after our little encounter down below. It didn’t matter; I could find a way back without them, and I wasn’t going to let that fat asshole decide my fate. I was here to surf anyway.
I slipped below and put on my wetsuit and booties as quickly as I could, tucking my cell phone inside a waterproof pocket. I took my shortboard from its case and tucked it under my arm.
When I got topside, Rocky and Marco were still arguing. I jumped straight off the back, got my chest on the board, and started to paddle hard for the shore. I could hear Rocky shouting from the boat. “Get the fuck back here, writer boy!”
Despite not being in the greatest box-lifting shape, I did have surfing shoulders, and I could paddle hard and fast. By the time Rocky got a hold of Marco’s gun, or perhaps his own, I was already fifty yards off. Standing on a moving boat, trying to hit a moving target on the ocean surface at fifty yards was impossible. Unless you got really fucking lucky. So the first two shots missed by a lot, but then the sadistic fuck got lucky and tagged me right in the side. I screamed and looked back. I could barely see them in the fading evening light, but I was sure he was smiling.
I belly rode a wave into shore and ditched my board. There were too many exposed rocks for them to run the ship onto the shore, so if they were coming for me, someone, meaning Marco, would have to swim for it.
I ran hard even though it felt like a red-hot spear was lodged in my side. I pushed through the sand and all the way to where the cliff started. I sat there a moment to catch my breath. I checked the gunshot, and it had gone clean through. I ripped the neoprene from my left arm and shoved it into my wetsuit to keep pressure on both sides of the wound and close the holes and stem the blood loss.
I had done some bouldering and rock climbing in undergrad. I needed distance from these assholes, and I needed help, so I started up the cliff. One hand placement here, and a foot placement there. While blood leaked from my body. I was lucky, since it was only about two hundred feet up to the road from here, and it was over a thousand in some parts of Big Sur.
I got to the top, exhausted and faint, and I rolled over on my back to look the way I had come. The ship was still there in the little bay with its lights on. With the road close to the cliff line, I wondered why there were no cars, but then I remembered the mudslide. The only way in or out of this place was on foot or helicopter. I thought about whether Marco would come for me or not. He liked me. But that was before Rocky shot me. He probably thought he could flip me, make me a regular part of their crew. I was broke, desperate; a writer. But now I was shot, and if I made it to a hospital, it would get reported. They needed me dead and buried at sea.
It was dark now, and I wondered if they would wait until morning with the clouds blocking out the moonlight. There was no way to be sure, but I was so tired, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I got up and walked stiffly for a few hundred yards and collapsed under a redwood tree. My eyes fluttered shut.
***
I was in and out of sleep and hallucinating. Or at least I thought I was hallucinating because at one point, a mountain lion as big as a Shetland pony came prowling out from the dense forest across the street. I knew mountain lions were common in these mountains, but I’d never even heard of one this big. He stopped and watched me, pacing back and forth, lapping at a pool of water in a deep tire mark in the mud.
Then, later, when he was still there, watching, waiting, perched low with his tail back, the low rumble of foghorns sounded off. Only this time, they weren’t in the distance. There were right here next to me. Inside of me. I closed my eyes hard, and when I opened them, three massive black figures as big as oak trees rose from the shadows behind the mountain lion.
Faceless, eyes like starbursts in the darkness of their cloaked heads. Their mouths opened, white light spilling from them; a deep foghorn sounded off, and it was so loud, it felt like my chest would burst. The mountain lion ran into the underbrush, and when I looked up, the Dark Watchers were gone. Blended back into the shadows of the tall, thick redwoods. The clouds disappeared, and the forest came alive in the dim glow of the moon and stars.
***
“Your mom believed in the Watchers, right?” my ex-wife said from somewhere inside the cracked, black screen of my cell phone. “And she died young.”
“They always were just old Native folklore to me. I know Steinbeck wrote about them. But Mom, when she was back from rehab, she would come down to Big Sur and leave them gifts. Baskets full of flowers, stuff like that. She liked to write about them like she knew them. She used to say they only revealed themselves to certain people, special people. Sometimes hundreds of years apart. I spread her ashes down here.”
“I—how did she die again?”
“Jesus, we were married for three years.” Before you asked me to leave.
“You never talked about it like that. Like how it happened.”
“Would you?” I sighed and lifted my head to check the cliff’s edge, still nobody. Maybe Marco had decided I wasn’t worth it. Or figured I was as good as dead. “Some fiend she owed money slipped a lethal dose of Fentanyl into her syringe up in Chinatown, in Salinas. She had just gone through rehab and was helping with the community gardens there.”
“And that’s why you started drinking? Her death stuck inside you?”
With my ex, it always came back to my drinking. I pushed hard against my wound to stanch the bleeding and sobbed softly.
“Christ, Evelyn, I didn’t start drinking at eight. And everyone has a goddamn vice.”
“I don’t understand why you won’t give it up to get her back. Whisky doesn’t even seem to make you happy. You cry when you black out.”
“Bullshit. I feel better inside—I like the way the whisky works through my body like a
poison. I like feeling close to death.”
“You like being haunted by it.”
“Maybe. Some people try and forget death is coming for them, I used it for motivation. Three books with the same sick feeling in my guts that I will die, and no one will ever read them or even know I tried. That my existence won’t have mattered.”
“I think, beyond that, you’re afraid you’ll die alone like your mom.”
I sobbed into my hands. “I am alone! Look around!” I spat and lifted my hand to look at the wound again. If the bullet had clipped my intestines, I was going to die of sepsis before I could walk another mile. “Nobody gave a shit when my mom died. Just another junkie off the streets to them with nothing to her name. Not a cent. Only thing she had was a letter for me.”
“What did the letter say?”
“That she loved me. People make mistakes but society doesn't forgive them even if they change. And to spread her ashes down here.”
“Did you leave your daughter a letter?”
“I did not. Probably so the universe would make sure I came back.”
“If you don’t get up now, your daughter will never even know you existed, and nobody will ever read your stories. Is that what you want?”
“No. God no. I want to live. I have to live.”
“To see us again?”
“Of course to see you again. I have too much to do, everything I have put off my entire goddamn life. I can’t die. Not before. Not like this. Goddamnit!”
Just then, I heard a gunshot in the distance and saw a spark where a bullet ricocheted off the road beside me. I grabbed my cell phone and rolled behind the trunk of the redwood. Marco was coming to make sure I was dead.
I pushed my broken phone into my wetsuit pocket. Not like there was reception out here even if it did work. The fact, though, that I could really hear her voice meant I had lost too much blood. I stood and began to run, feeling a stiffness in my legs and feeling the sloshing around of hot blood inside my wetsuit. I held as much pressure on my side as I could, and it now felt hard and numb where the bullet had gone through.
I followed the tree line along the road, wishing for a car. But since the mudslide a month earlier, this whole section had been carved out of existence. No cars would be coming. I ran north toward Big Sur. There were people there. I could get medical help. Maybe. It was my only chance.
It hurt to run. Marco had made it up the cliff, and I could see his light, boyish build running toward me. He was much faster than me and was gaining on me on this stretch of shiny, wet road. His Pebble Beach windbreaker shimmered in the moonlight. It was bright now. And cold, but the wind felt good on my hot face. The wetsuit was filling with sweat and hot blood. I tried to run faster and heard another gunshot. A searing pain ripped through my right shoulder; I fell hard and spun onto my back to face the bastard.
“You fuck,” Marco said. He was in good shape, but he was panting for breath. “You fucking make me scale a goddamn cliff and run you down in the street? Christ, kid. I liked you. I’m so sorry. It wasn’t meant to go down like this.”
He leveled the gun at my head.
“Wait,” I said.
I looked across the road again, and there he was. That impossibly large mountain lion pacing just inside the tree line. He crouched low, moving closer, about to pounce.
“You never finished the story,” I said, and coughed hard, wiping from my face blood from the impact with the street. “What you wanted to do when you were a kid.”
He laughed. “Yeah. You’re right. Fuck it. I wanted to be a pro surfer. You happy? I was pretty good at it too. Why do you think I agreed to take you? Shit, I was going to bring you in and help you make the real money. Fuck!” He cocked the hammer.
My chest felt heavy now, like an elephant was sitting on it. I struggled to breathe. “My dad told me to get a real job instead of writing. I guess he was right.”
“My dad beat the shit out of me when I told him I wanted to surf. You, well, never really know. Maybe all that shit you wrote in the past will become something once you disappear. At least that thought will give you something nice to dream about, huh? Good night, kid, I—”
Marco never finished his sentence, because the mountain lion, which I had thought might have been part of my hallucinations, leapt from the undergrowth and tackled Marco, sinking his huge fangs into the side of Marco’s head. Marco managed to fire another shot before the sound of teeth ripping through flesh silenced Marco’s screams. The mountain lion dragged the mangled corpse across the road and into the trees.
I stood and limped north, holding the wound on my side and shoulder, toward Big Sur. There were people out here. Campgrounds. Mansions down driveways. The Esalen Institute was only a few miles north. All I had to do to see my little girl again was stay conscious and keep walking.
The distant sound of the foghorns grew louder again with each step. I kept walking. My chest heavy again, full, about to explode, and around me, in all directions, dark figures rose from the trees. Eyes like starbursts, mouths gaping open, light spilling into the road, the asphalt rippling and trees shaking around me.
I kept walking, and a Watcher rose in front of me in the street.
I knew I was dying, and it felt different than I had imagined. I wasn’t afraid of it. But there
were two thoughts that kept circling my fading consciousness like water down a drain.
My daughter.
My words.
My daughter.
My words.
Then another thought. My mom’s letter. Her fixation on the Dark Watchers. Was it possible she knew I would need her here, on this day, seventeen years later? Her ashes summoning this thing in front of me. To save me? Was this all a dream? A hallucination?
I kept walking.
The foghorns guiding me. Protecting me.
Singing me home.
My daughter.
I had to see my daughter again.
When I approached the Dark figure in the street, a light breeze blew a swirl of fog away, and the night cleared. The creature was gone. And ahead, only a few hundred yards, was a small inn with the lights on.
When I reached the door, I turned around, and the forest grew still and quiet. I shivered and pushed the door open.
Nik Xandir Wolf’s work has been published in multiple magazines and journals. His debut novel, Shadow Valley, was released in November 2022. He lives in Monterey, California, where he surfs regularly.
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