Creatures of the Night

Sleep and I have never been friends. One might even call us nemeses.

As a child, resting fitfully, mind always, already, racing, chasing every stray thought, I found myself fascinated by the night. By the moonlight filtering in through half-closed blinds. By everything that was, or could be, happening beneath that big and empty and tomb-quiet sky.

Sleepovers during my pre- and mid-teenage years inevitably ended with my friends and I sneaking out and wandering through our stilled town. Not doing anything, looking for anything in particular, simply walking. Trespassing occasionally, certainly, but not maliciously. That was never the point. This was freedom for freedom’s sake.

My twenties were an almost complete inversion, my sleepless nights filled with work, with obligation. Keeping open a Blockbuster until two a.m. or sitting at a chiming computer in a darkened office until midnight, until breakfast, running tech support for countries more suited to my nocturnal habits than my own. There were countless other jobs, too, temp work, overnight inventories, some ending later, some earlier. A local diner became a second home for myself and my nighthawk friends; we were on a first-name basis with the host and the waitresses, and served ourselves (and the occasional other customer) coffee and counter pastries. For a decade, I watched more sunrises than Must-See TV.

But then age and marriage and suburbia—not to mention a vested professional interest in keeping up with television in a timely manner, and, perhaps more importantly, medications specifically designed to quiet my restless mind—and suddenly all those big and empty and tomb-quiet streets started to feel a little off.

My home in Albuquerque is at the literal edge of the desert. If you were to look at a map, my neighborhood is a little protuberance bumping up into a seemingly endless expanse (depending on how zoomed in or out you are) of beige-brown. There is nothing to the west save scrub and sand for twenty miles at least, until you hit the Pueblo of Laguna. As a result, the nights are darker out here—so much darker than they ever were in New Jersey, in that part of the Garden State caught eternally in the creeping everlight of Manhattan.

Far from a city that doesn’t sleep, Albuquerque—or, at least, my part of it—is practically comatose after eight p.m. Bats occasionally haunt the skies, while coyotes perched upon the mesa sing a somber serenade. Streetlights cast almost perfect cones of illumination, the sodium bulbs carving out just enough light to prove their existence, but no more. Taking out the trash is like walking into the poster for The Exorcist.

But that’s what horror is, right? Everything’s always the same, safe—until it isn’t. What you’re used to gets turned around and suddenly even minor concerns seem monumental, and monsters … well, they seem all the more monstrous.

Within these pages, you’ll find various explorations of that idea. The normal turned strange and the strange made normal. Recurring motifs—diners and doppelgangers and dead sisters, old gods and creatures of the night coming to help and hurt in equal measure—abound and then aberrate. The same, until they aren’t.

And through it all, facing down the demons of the dark, are the ones not being paid nearly enough to be there. The ones, like me, and maybe like you, called to by the night and coopted by commerce, scrambling for every dollar and every cent, no matter the real cost. The ones well-acquainted with all the misery, and all the mystery, that the graveyard shift can bring.

Eirik Gumeny,
September 30, 2023