Hiding in the Light

The lights flickered the way they always do during the storm on the colonies, and I’m cowering in the one small space where the lights don’t flicker, not even in this rain. Every year this storm comes. It is always starts on the exact same day each year, and always lasts exactly eighty-four hours. I’ve been told the rains of the storm aren’t quite like the rains back on Earth, but having been born on the voyage to get here, I wouldn’t know.

Our parents were sent after contact was reestablished with the Cygnus-8 colony. Contact with the original settlers stopped twenty-three years ago. Communication stopped just out of the blue, and a recovery team was sent to find out what happened. It took fourteen months for the recovery team to make it to the Cygnus-8 colony. What the recovery team discovered confounded to no end. Except for wear and tear consistent with environmental conditions, the colony was in pristine condition… there just wasn’t anyone there. The entire colony population of two hundred and forty-two people was just gone. There were no bodies. There were no signs of struggle. Most concerning was that there was no sign of evacuation. All of the escape and transport ships were accounted for. The colonists had just up and vanished.

The recovery team spent a terrestrial year observing the planet, largely from orbit, in an attempt to determine if there was any unforeseen danger. During that time the team went over personal logs and files they had managed to recover from the colony computers. Many of the files were lost due to power outages, but what there was gave little to no indication of any hostile or environmental threats. Eventually the recovery team sent back a recommendation that the colony be reestablished, and the process to recolonize Cygnus-8 began.

Because the original colony had remained standing in such good shape, there was very little that was required in order to reestablish the colony. Minor repairs were made, structures were reinforced, and before many of the second wave of colonists knew it, the Cygnus-8 colony was functionally running once again.

The first time the second colony experienced the storm was only a few months after reestablishing a Terran presence. The colonists were confused at the sudden weather event, but we were not ill prepared. The storm raged over the colony for three and a half days. The lights flickering uncontrollably the entire time. The rain that buffeted the structures was mostly water, but there was something else in it that caused electromagnetic disruptions. After observing the storm for a few years it was determined that this is what caused the fluctuations in the power, causing the lights to flicker. This same substance also made the rain dangerous to be under. A Terran exposed to the rain of the storm would suffer horrendous seizures, and nobody who had been caught in the rain survived.

As the years past the colonists became more and more accustom to the strange, and punctual, storm. It became a common annual occurrence, like celebrating someone’s birthday or the second founding of the colony. The colony grew, both as a function of people having children, but also because more colonists migrated over from Earth. By the time I was eight the colony’s population was well over two thousand, and still it grew.

When I was nine we had our first case of seers. All of them were children who were born during the storm. At first there were only two, but their numbers steadily grew as the years went on. The seers were children that saw something in the flickering lights during the storm. It was difficult for them to describe what they saw given their young age, but it was clear that they were terrified. As their linguistic skills developed, so did their ability to describe what they saw. Whenever the lights flickered off, they would see malformed creatures wandering about. The descriptions that the seers provided were often grotesque. Some were bulbous and gnarled, others sinuous and tall. All the creatures seemed to be predatory, and they would often feast upon the weaker of their numbers.

Seers were given sedatives during the storm. They were told that the drugs were to help them from experiencing their hallucinations, but the truth is that they were given the sedatives to help keep the other children… and some of the adults, calm. Eventually one of the earliest seers began to express herself with art. She would work clay and paper mache at first, and some of her artistic products caused quite the stir. She ended up being placed in isolation from the general public with a regular psychological evaluation. Her name was Genevieve.

It was Genevieve’s second year of this isolation when very specific rumors started spreading around the colony. The rumors were about her art, specifically the charcoal drawings she had been producing. The rumors were that the grotesque creatures were clothed in tatters, tatters that looked suspiciously like what the earlier colonists wore. Colonists with and without children alike were displeased with this rumor, but they were enraged when apparent copies of Genevieve’s drawings made their way through the colony. The image in question was a disgusting creature with bulging, spider like, eyes, hooved feet, claws like curved knives, a long jagged maw, and a shirt with a nametag that clearly read, “Doctor Rose McFeally.”

Doctor Rose McFeally was one of the original colonists of the first Cygnus-8 colony, and many of the colonists took this as some kind of twisted mockery of the original colonists. What nobody seemed to pay any attention to was the fact that neither Rose, nor any of the other original colonists, were taught to the children. The only way Genevieve could have known would have been to access a restricted file that only a few of the current colonists retained access to aside from seeing it when they signed up to resettle Cygnus-8.

The uproar from Genevieve’s leaked drawings brought out some of the worst in the colony. There were some who wanted Genevieve, and the rest of the seers, to be sent to Earth for a more thorough psychological evaluation and treatment. A few of the angrier voices suggested we leave the seers out in the rain during the next storm and let nature take care of them. This suggestion caused an abundance of controversy and suspicion when, during the next storm, Genevieve was found outside in the rain, continuing to seize long after she had died.

People wanted to know how it was that Genevieve had gotten out of her isolation, much less outside. The colony went into lockdown during the storm, and it was supposed to be impossible to get outside while the rains were falling. There was an intense investigation into the matter, and those who had called for the seers to be left to the rains were suspected by all the colony. There were repeated calls for those individuals to be hung or shot during an investigation that turned up disturbingly little. It was no small miracle that those individuals survived until the following storm. Until this storm.

This storm began like all the other’s I had experienced. A warning siren signaled that the storm was approaching a full six hours before it arrived. Everyone was within the shelter of the colony four hours before the storm arrived. We waited as usual, and as the rain began to resound off the colony the lights started flickering.

And then we saw them.

Creatures, malformed and mutilated, appeared every time the flickering lights dimmed. There were creatures that the seers had described, creatures that the seers had drawn, and they were terrifying. At first these creatures seemed confused, as though they hadn’t expected us to see them. Their flickering actions and motions that indicated confusion soon gave way to something far more sinister as the creatures began to roar. It was bizarre to hear these roar, so clear, and yet they were cut off and reestablished each time the lights flickered back on and off.

Then the killing started.

Whenever the lights flickered off, these monstrous organisms were not only visible and audible… they were tangible. These demons began grabbing colonists left and right, with claws, jaws, tendrils, anything that could be used to grasp hapless prey. And any prey that was grabbed by them disappeared with the creatures when the lights flickered back on.

Within the first half an hour most of the colonists were gone. Maybe one in ten still existed in the colony, and those numbers continued to dwindle. The roars of those monsters still echo throughout the colony, echoing and flickering with the lights. Every once in a while I still hear a scream, but those are coming farther and farther apart. I continue to sit here, in the one small place where the darkness during the storm doesn’t touch… terrified and hoping that I can keep hiding in the light.