Night beasts, her mother called them. They came in threes, stalking her, always on a full-moon night, creeping through Sarah's century-old Victorian house on the coast of Maine. Sarah knew these creatures wanted to slice her into bits with their sharp teeth, eat her flesh, and drink her blood.

Her mother Ethel, a died-in-the-wool Pentecostal, did nothing to dispel these beliefs. "Demons are everywhere, darling," Ethel never tired of reminding Sarah over breakfast, lunch, and dinner, "and the Devil rules this dark planet. Just keep holda the Lord and you'll be fine." Ethel was a tall, plain woman, who used no make-up, did her hair up in a bun, and wore gray dresses that reached to her ankles.

At the encouragement of her pastor, Ethel began reading demon stories to Sarah when Sarah was five: these were generally stories of possessions or hauntings, some actually documented, that the mother used to reinforce the existence of evil. When Sarah reached her eighth birthday, she couldn't go to sleep without a baby light, heard constant rustling in her bedroom closet, and often woke screaming.

By the time she was ten, Sarah learned that the full-moon signaled horror. Sometimes the night beasts waited in the closet, panting in low rhythms, and came slinking out when Sarah and Ethel were in bed. Twice, alone in her room, hiding under her covers, Sarah heard the things scratching across the floor of the attic over her room. Sarah told her mother the next morning that she wanted a room in the basement. Her mother refused.

"Devil's in the attic, sweetheart, that's all it is," Ethel warned her at breakfast the next day between mouthfuls of French toast and readings from the Bible. "Just cling to Jesus, honey, and everything will be all right. Old Slue Foot can't touch you." At ten, Sarah was sick and tired of hearing about Jesus and figured her mother was bonkers. The kids at school thought her mom was a witch. Sarah's father had left with another woman when Sarah was five. No wonder, Sarah said to herself.

As she grew, Sarah never really saw the night beasts but knew of their existence. She could smell them. Jesus or no Jesus, these huge wolfish things were real and praying to an invisible Savior made no difference. As she grew older, on full-moon nights, Sarah felt their dark furry presence saturating her soul with sweet sickly wetness. She knew what the things looked like: in her mind's eye, she saw them as large, snarling wolfish hounds with long sharp teeth and red piercing eyes. They reminded her of the Death Hounds from the cartoon Beast People that she had watched as a six-year old child.

During her teen years, as Sarah took an interest in boys, the visitations of the night beasts became less frequent, but when they occurred they were terrifying as ever. On these nights—every third full moon?—the dark figures prowled the big house, moaning and growling, searching for the adolescent girl who was left in charge of the mansion while her mother went to a weekend church revival. At these times, the moon blood-red, the devil as real as the old oak tree that grew in front of the old house, Sarah would run screaming from room to room, hiding in closets, under beds, in the bathroom, anywhere the night beasts would not be. Always, wherever she was in the house, she could smell their blood and wet animal fur.

On the night of her senior prom, full blood-red moon overhead, ocean winds howling her name and battering her house, and her mother gone to the neighborhood church, the night beasts came. Lying on the sofa in her family room, Sarah had been watching Highlander reruns on television while waiting for her date when she smelled the old familiar flesh and blood. Sticky sweet. The light of the lamp next to the TV flickered, and she knew the things had arrived. Frozen to the couch, heart pounding, terrified, Sarah listened intently for the next hour, horror building like pressure in a cooker.

At five minutes until nine, realizing her date would never come, she heard a loud thump-thump-thump against the front door, knew one of the things was throwing itself against the door from the outside; she thought she heard another one patting across the roof; and she knew she heard the third moaning from the second or third floor. It was a waking nightmare.

At this moment, for the first time in her life, Sarah heard a still small voice telling her to pray, but she dismissed the impression as ridiculous. She would not pray. That's what Ethel did. Instead, the girl sat frozen to the couch, unable to concentrate upon the images on the screen, and waited. She knew she was going to die.

Suddenly, her head exploding in a painful burst of light. Sarah stood in front of the TV and tried again and again to scream, able only to loudly whisper for help, certain that the night beasts would slice, dice, and eat her, that her mom would come home to find her scattered around the house in bloody bits, and ran to the basement of the house. There, in what her mother referred to as the worm hole—the cellar was earthen, a kind of grave—she knew they would never come, for her mother had planted a cross in the soil of the cellar. When she came home at three o'clock in the morning, Ethel found Sarah huddled and shivering in a corner, out of her rational mind, muttering the Lord's Prayer backwards.

In the following week, exactly one month before high school graduation, Sarah left her mother, hitch-hiked to Las Vegas where she attended the community college, dabbled in witchcraft, and danced in nude bars. As a dancer, she became a sensation and made more than enough to pay for her education ten times over. Dancing naked, occasionally performing vile acts in front of gawking men, was a blast. Sarah knew she had found her calling.

Things got better for Sarah. After she received her masters in psychology from UNLV and while she was still dancing, Sarah was approached one afternoon outside the Hungry Flesh night club, located in industrial Las Vegas, by one-eyed agent Tom Grifter. Twitching nervously, Tom claimed to have connections with Dark Angel Enterprises and offered to make Sarah a porn star. Reassured by the wink from Tom's good eye, she went to the man's office in Henderson the next day and, after watching one of Tom's favorite films, signed on the dotted line. In a month's time, she found herself spreading her legs and cheeks for skin magazines and doing adult films. It was the high point of her existence to be filmed while three men had sex with her, first separately, then simultaneously. The intense pleasure and pain momentarily canceled Sarah's dark past.

Partly out of guilt but mostly out of defiance, she wrote to her mother that she had discovered a profession—"I'm a nude stripper, ma," she had written, "and I love it"—and asserted that she wanted to make her name on the screen. She sent Ethel one of her films, knowing her mother would watch, cringe, then drop to her knees and pray for her daughter's soul. In fact, Ethel promptly wrote back, warning her daughter against the devil's wiles, suggesting Sarah was walking the highway into Hell.

"The devil's like the jack of spades," Ethel wrote, "and you never know where and when he's going to turn up. Just keep ahold of Jesus."

Sarah felt irritated by Ethel's reference to the Lord, but decided not to respond. She didn't need to: her overnight popularity in adult film pushed her further into the dark world of pornography, where she made her name as well as an income that allowed her to buy a sports car, purchase the most expensive and sexiest clothes available, and start up her own dance club.

When she was twenty-eight, alone in her west Las Vegas apartment late one night and drinking coffee straight black to stay awake through Scream II, the night beasts returned with the fury of Macbeth's witches. As the set flickered, the table lamp dimmed, and a window shattered inside the apartment, she felt their darkness, a bloody ooze dripping into her soul. Then came an explosive headache that began as a dull sensation at the base of her skull, worked its way into excruciating pain, and culminated with an internal burst of light, reminiscent of nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site. When the pain fled, her mind swimming in dark muck, Sarah felt she had jumped into a darker dimension.

Struggling to maintain sanity, trying not to believe that the beasts had returned, she looked at the Bible resting open on the coffee table—in response to recent panic attacks, she had begun reading her Bible when she was home alone—and jumped from the couch. Trying to steady herself, she strolled out onto her patio, heard a low moaning howl from somewhere nearby, and glanced overhead. The moon, she noted, was dripping blood into the dark blue night sky. It was the most terrifying moment of her life. At that moment, she smelled the flesh and blood, heard her front door slam and another window break, heard the low rhythmic panting very, very near, and knew the night beasts were here. Fearing for her life, Sarah jumped over the iron railing surrounding her balcony and landed in a bush two stories below. She did not stop running until she reached the 24 hour Safeway six blocks away.

When Sarah returned to her apartment after three days of prowling the streets and dropping by the houses of friends from the club, she made an appointment with a therapist that several girls at work had recommended. After months of intense therapy and a brief stay in a mental hospital, and upon the encouragement of her doctor Lucius Malone, Sarah decided to leave Las Vegas and head for the northwest, where she hoped she would find a new life, one that would resemble life in Maine.

"You need to return to your childhood," the thin, graying, quivering, and effeminate Lucius had told her during one session. "You need to go back to the beginning and start over, honey child. You need to meet your inner child."

On June seventh, 1996, having sold her own club, Sarah packed her belongings in a u-haul and, alone in her cherry-red Dodge pickup, took two and a half days to drive to Point Luce, a small sleepy town situated in a cove on the Pacific coast one hundred and seventeen miles north of Seattle. She would find her inner child.

The area was beautifully green, the town surrounded by huge mountains and lush forests. Frequent rains kept the land smelling fresh. The only thing about Point Luce that Sarah did not like was the dark fog that apparently hung over the Point nine months of the year. In spite of this and at the first opportunity, Sarah put some money down on a large Victorian-style house that sat on the hill overlooking the small town.

Settling into her new community, Sarah made friends easily, attended a Four-Square church, worked as a part-time accountant and attended the local college to complete her masters. Weeks passed and nothing broke her rhythm. Months passed, and she remained stable. But after half a year, they returned. Suddenly, like a thief in the night, as Sarah sat alone in her house, listening to the rain and watching an old Bela Lugosi movie on her VCR, the night beasts were back, this time throwing themselves through the upstairs windows with such shattering fury that Sarah wondered if God—or the Devil—were punishing her. The stench of blood and flesh thick as oil, her head pounding in pain, Sarah remembered the bargain God had struck with the Devil in the Book of Job and wondered if she had come under divine judgment.

Following the explosion of light, sensing the beasts were slinking down the stairs, Sarah opened her Bible. She kept the Bible always on the coffee table in the family room so that she could consult it and pray aloud when watching a horror movie. Her hands shaking, she opened the book to the 23rd Psalm, which she read aloud over and over until she felt a cool breeze blowing over the landscape of her soul, heard the soothing sound of running water, and knew the beasts had fled. At that point, she felt assured of the presence of something far greater than herself.

A week later she visited the office of Dr. Harvey Mellon, an obese psychologist who also taught an evening seminar entitled: Psychology and the Occult: Does the Devil Really Exist? Sarah was taking Mellon's seminar towards completion of her masters degree.

It was ten o'clock at night, winds howling briskly outside. Sarah rested her head back in the soft recliner in the darkened office, trying to pay attention to Dr. Mellon, watched the branches of the trees just outside the window dance in the wind.

"Heck, Sarah," wheezed Mellon who wore a blue and yellow Hawaiian print shirt that was one or two sizes too small and whose last button was undone. Sarah couldn't take her eye off the man's protruding belly button. "Don't worry your little self about those old superstitions. Devils. Angels. Ghosts. That's all nonsense. Fuck ‘em. What you see," Mellon asserted, whacking the desk in front of him with a meaty hand, "is all there is. Ain't nothin' more. You die, it's lights out, sweetheart, and then fade, fade, fade into sweet oblivion. It's the old dance of death, sweetie pie."

Sarah cringed and wondered if the devil could assume the form of a four hundred and fifty pound therapist. Doesn't this man believe in anything beyond his own disgusting appetites, she asked herself, suddenly remembering her mother's injunctions to hang on to Jesus. She did not like this man, sensed he was hollow as a drum.

Sarah could read the man's intentions. She knew that as he listened while he slurped coffee and ate a piece of rhubarb pie, the odious man was put out that his best student had requested therapy; yet Sarah knew as well that Dr. Mellon hoped to lure this woman, whom he had seen many times on film, into the sack with him for hours of dirty sex.

"Last time the night beasts came, I read the Bible and made them go away," Sarah muttered, slightly shivering, realizing that Mellon was paying little attention.

As Mellon stifled a huge yawn, Sarah could see bits of rhubarb in the man's mouth. Sarah thought to herself that, as a dancer, she would not have danced for this man for five hundred dollars.

"Used the old damn Bible, huh?" Mellon pronounced it "babel."

"Yes," said Sarah, "and it worked like a charm. The things left."

"Y'know, I was raised a Southern Baptist myself, my daddy a goddamn hollerin' Baptist preacher, but I don't put much credence in that crap." Mellon was still chewing his pie and, it seemed in the gathering darkness of the office, maliciously squinting at Sarah. "Heaven, hell, God, Jesus K-rist, the good ole devil hisself, hell, honey, that's crapeedoodle right outa a child's book of rhymes."

"That crap?" Sarah sat upright, dumbfounded that a therapist would discredit the one thing that had worked in keeping her psychosis at bay. "Did you say that crap?"

"Ah did indeed, little lady, Ah did indeed," responded the obese man, burping, then lifting another huge piece of rhubarb pie into his gaping mouth. Sarah could barely make out the huge man in the darkness.

Wrapped in gloom, Sarah thought about Mellon's last remark. Though depressed, anxious, even fearful, Sarah could bear no more. Nothing, she thought to herself, is worth this; I can learn more from a TV talk show.

"Lemme talk about the damned Bible, little woman," Mellon began, but before he could go on, Sarah had risen abruptly from her chair and began walking to the door.

"Hey, Puss in Boots," Mellon barked, crumbs tumbling out of his mouth and onto his shirt, "I ain't through."

"No," countered Sarah, "but I am." With this Sarah opened the door, stepped into the night, and slammed the door shut. Dr. Harvey Mellon, she decided, could go straight to hell.

Driving home late at night, Sarah realized that she was on her own. Having walked out of Mellon's office, she knew she'd have to drop his class and temporarily kiss her masters degree goodbye. She'd have to find something else to fill the terrifying emptiness that, in her quiet moments, had grown inside her during the past week.

To stave off anxiety as she drove the dark coastal highway, Sarah turned on her radio to KOND. Twenty-four hours a day, KOND played hard, driving rock, the kind Sarah liked—"Devil music," Ethel had told her years and years ago. "Me, I listen to gospel."—and as she drove she imagined herself dancing nude on the stage in Vegas. She was wondering if she should have stayed in Vegas when, through the swirling fog in front of her, her headlights shone on something huge, furry and bloody. It was lying in the middle of the road. Wanting to speed on, feeling the hair on her head stand on end, Sarah heard a voice commanding her to stop and slowed down.

As she slowly drove past, Sarah saw that the thing was a dog, or a wolf, the biggest she had ever seen. A hound from the pit of hell was the thought that flickered through her mind. The pool of blood around the body told Sarah that the thing must be dead.

Stunned, even numbed by fear, she pulled her pickup over to the side of the road, stopped, opened the door, and slowly stepped onto the highway. She wasn't sure what she was doing. Maybe she was going to pull the beast off the road, as her father would have done years ago. Maybe she was going for a closer look.

As Sarah stood looking down at the dead thing, its mouth partly open, and noticed its teeth were huge and sharp, she breathed deeply and looked up at the night sky as if seeking an explanation. Through the rapidly thickening fog, she saw a full moon whose bloody hue blended with the swirling fog.

Sarah froze. Suddenly, she knew the night beasts were here on this highway. She heard a low howling from the forest next to the road and sensed something moving toward her. Her heart skipped several beats. She felt the pain building in the back of her head, knew her brain was going to explode in a flash of white light and dropped to her knees on the lonely highway. Holding her head in both hands, trying to scream, she found she couldn't.

Suddenly, as expected, she saw in her mind's eye a tremendous explosion of light, felt the pain receding, knew she had stepped into a different dimension, stood, and opened her eyes.

She was still standing in the middle of the ocean highway. The fog was thickening, the night growing colder, the stench of flesh and blood thick around her. Panicked, suffocating, she looked down the highway, saw the beast standing, its head down, its red eyes ablaze, snarling, moving towards her. She knew instinctively that the other two stood behind her. She knew she was dead.

Her body ice cold, she dropped to her knees, lifted her arms to the night sky and shrieked, "Oh, God, God, God, someone, anyone, help me, help me, help me!! Help me, help me, help me, please!" She knew the things would be on her, their bloody stench settling about her like a cloak, preparing to tear her into a thousand edible pieces.

She thought of her mother, wished she were back home, and whimpered, "Oh, God, God, God, I am so afraid. I am so afraid. I don't want to die like this. Please, please, please help me. Please, please forgive me. Please, please deliver me." Sarah saw the abyss that Dr. Mellon had told his students await us all, focused her energy on the memory of her and her mother kneeling and praying in the old Pentecostal church, and experienced another more glorious burst of light, saw creation spoken into existence, saw the Savior standing in the middle of the softly exploding light that filled the entire universe; she gasped as the endless blue skies and green fields of heaven opened before her, and knew, for the first time in her life, that she knelt in the presence of the Creator.

As she knelt, eyes closed for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, soaking in the vision, Sarah realized she was still alive. She had been spared, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the night bandits would never bother her again. She could feel the hand of God upon her.

She opened her eyes, looked at the full moon through the dissipating fog, and felt unafraid. In the distance, she could hear singing, and her mind brought forth an image of a host of angels. Surrounded by eternal life, she was kneeling in the middle of the high way, and knew she could carry on.

Running her fingers through her hair, she rose shakily, turned, and walked back to her idling pickup. She felt like she was floating. When she opened the door and climbed behind the wheel, she thought of her mother, whom she had resented for many years. Her mother, she suddenly realized, was her best friend. Maybe her only true friend. Surely, her mother prayed for her every night. Yes, mother, Sarah thought to herself as she released the emergency brake, took the vehicle out of neutral and into first, it is a dark world. But I'm going to be fine. Moving the truck out onto the abandoned highway and stepping on the gas pedal, she flipped the radio to a gospel station, heard someone singing Amazing Grace and felt the cool winds of paradise move over her.

When Sarah got home, she would call her mother. Ethel would be glad to hear from her.

About the Author:

Rich Logsdon is a college English professor living in Las Vegas, the city of his dreams. Author of numerous publications on and off the net, Rich enjoys writing dark fiction, going to movies with his wife, and coaching soccer in his spare time.