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“So what does this friend of yours need?” I asked.
Jim glanced quickly around to make sure we weren’t being observed.
“He’s got a daughter who’s living in New York who’s fallen in with a pretty bizarre crowd.”
“City or State” I asked.
Jim looked puzzled.
“Eh?” he said, then his face brightened. “Oh! City.”
“What kind of bizarre crowd?”
He looked around again, then answered.
“Vampires.”
I blinked at him.
“Pardon me,” I said. “I thought you said ‘vampires’.”
He nodded.
“I did.”
“So do I need to stock up on wooden stakes and crosses and garlic?” I asked, a wry grin scowling across my face. Jim chuckled and waved a hand idly in the air.
“No, no,” he said. “This is a group of people, most of them in their twenties or early thirties, who practice vampirism. They dress in black and hang out at night in a townhouse—I’ll give you all the information on the address and floorplans and so on—and they either have their teeth capped to make them like fangs, and they get girls to let them bite their necks and drink their blood.”
“So where do I come in?” I asked.
She dropped at my voice, and I had time to curse myself while I made a light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.
“I can’t find Boris nor any of the servants,” I said.
“I know,” she answered faintly, “Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I did not remember when I sent you for him just now.”
“But he can’t get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and—are you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I was only half awake.”
“Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for letting you stay here all this time.”
“I have had a long nap,” I laughed, “so sound that I did not know whether I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the old spinet? You must have played very softly.”
I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably and said in her natural voice: “Alec, I tripped on that wolf’s head, and I think my ankle is sprained. Please call Marie and then go home.”
I did as she bade me and left her there when the maid came in.
Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition; yet he was the darling of his father, who never showed any symptoms of affection to Matilda.
Manfred had contracted a marriage for his son with the Marquis of Vicenza’s daughter, Isabella; and she had already been delivered by her guardians into the hands of Manfred, that he might celebrate the wedding as soon as Conrad’s infirm state of health would permit.
Manfred’s impatience for this ceremonial was remarked by his family and neighbours. The former, indeed, apprehending the severity of their Prince’s disposition, did not dare to utter their surmises on this precipitation.
Hippolita, his wife, an amiable lady, did sometimes venture to represent the danger of marrying their only son so early, considering his great youth, and greater infirmities; but she never received any other answer than reflections on her own sterility, who had given him but one heir. His tenants and subjects were less cautious in their discourses.
They attributed this hasty wedding to the Prince’s dread of seeing accomplished an ancient prophecy, which was said to have pronounced that the castle and lordship of Otranto “should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.”
It was difficult to make any sense of this prophecy; and still less easy to conceive what it had to do with the marriage in question. Yet these mysteries, or contradictions, did not make the populace adhere the less to their opinion.
“Asgard and Vanaheim,” Prospero scanned the map. “By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous.”
Conan grinned savagely, involuntarily touching the scars on his dark face. “You had known otherwise, had you spent your youth on the northern frontiers of Cimmeria! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest of Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the borders.”
“What manner of men are these northern folk?” asked Prospero.
“Tall and fair and blue-eyed. Their god is Ymir, the frost-giant, and each tribe has its own king. They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.”
“Then I think you are like them,” laughed Prospero. “You laugh greatly, drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal dirges.”
“Perhaps it’s the land they live in,” answered the king. “A gloomier land never was—all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys.”
“Little wonder men grow moody there,” quoth Prospero with a shrug of his shoulders, thinking of the smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers of Poitain, Aquilonia’s southernmost province.
“They have no hope here or hereafter,” answered Conan. “Their gods are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead. Mitra! The ways of the Aesir were more to my liking.”
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake’s start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination; though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and geology.
His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11–18 with Pabodie and five others—marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great pressure-ridges in the ice—had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum.
These markings, however, were of very primitive life-forms involving no great paradox except that any life-forms should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the good sense of Lake’s demand for an interlude in our time-saving programme—an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of the expedition’s mechanical apparatus.
I did not, in the end, veto the plan; though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party despite Lake’s plea for my geological advice.
While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the eastward shift.
In preparation for this transfer one of the planes had begun to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait temporarily.
I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death.
It must have been a little after three o’clock in the afternoon that it happened—the afternoon of June 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through—all those weird and terrifying experiences—should have been encompassed within so short a span as three brief months.
Rather might I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time—things that no other mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains.
Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed forever beyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fate has borne me and where my doom is sealed. I am here and here must remain.
Late that October night, the station was showing vampire movies, three in a row, starting with the original “Nosferatu” and Max Shrek creeping across the screen in silent, yet comical, horror. Both boys snorted with derision each time he appeared and threw cheese balls at the television set. Finally, the movie was over and the host appeared.
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“Good ev-en-ing,” he said, in a voice that could only be described as broadcast Romanian. “Tonight’s second film is ‘Dracula’, the classic motion picture produced in 1931 and starring the one and only Bela Lugosi as the Count himself. Mwa-hah-hah-hah.”
“This is lame,” Danny said, digging deep into a bag of a bag of barbecue potato chips. “Black and white. Again.”
Mike shook his head. “No way, man. This one’s cool. I saw it before. That dude, Lugosi, is the coolest. I mean, they didn’t even have special effects but they made him look awesome creepy. Like there’s this one scene where he’s just standing there, staring, and all they did was shine two little flashlights on his eyes to make them glow. You’ll see.”
Five minutes later, both boys were silent, the only sound the munching of snacks and an occasional belch. They watched the entire film, unconsciously holding their breath as Dracula fed on Mina and was stalked by Harker and Dr. van Helsing. Finally, when the movie finished, the host came back on the screen, dressed in a black cape with streaks of red dripping from each corner of his mouth.
The visitor from space had first come in the fall of 1956. Her home planet had a need that only a certain type of young Earth males could provide. All those years earlier, she first appeared in the Johnsonville High School cafeteria as a substitute teacher. This subterfuge allowed her and the rest of her kind to accomplish their mission. It was now seventeen years later, the fall of 1973, and much had changed in the world of humans. Hair and clothing styles were radically different. Gone were the buzz cuts and the slicked-back pompadores. No more bobby socks or poodle skirts could be seen either. Now, the boys wore long hair, flowered shirts, and flared jeans, and the girls’ skirts were short enough to be considered obscene back in 1956, not to mention their halter tops with no bras.
Although she was somewhat surprised by the change, she agreed wholeheartedly with it as it allowed her to appear even more enticing. Unlike the world around her, she hadn’t aged one minute since her previous visit and was still as attractive as ever. She had, however, changed her appearance, this time appearing as a pretty blonde. With the new fashions, she could reveal more of her finest attributes, which would be certain to attract more males quickly. However, she had a particular type of male in mind.
Their transport ship was hit. Grievously. An explosion ruptured it, then a second. It happened so fast, all Corporal Hutchins saw was bright white, then darkness…
When he came to, he was prostrate on the deck, facing a blue sky the hue of McLean’s Lake on a summer morning. Cotton ball clouds hung irregularly, and he was struck at how peaceful the scene appeared, how serene. He knew something was wrong, but wondered why he didn’t feel any pain.
As a child, when he’d smashed his toe on a rock, the knowledge it would hurt unfolded in his brain before the actual pain flowed up the nervous system to prove that intuition true. Perhaps this pain was like that, the awareness coming before the actual feeling. And, perhaps, the greater the magnitude of the expected agony, the longer the nerves would take to relay that information, sort of like putting off telling a buddy’s wife he’d been shot to hell by the Japanese and there wasn’t enough left of him to ship back stateside.
A buzzing like angry wasps zipped past, its droning first distant, then near, then distant again. That memory of McLean’s Lake wasn’t so peaceful anymore. The decking beneath him pitched. As he went sliding, sliding down, he remembered how .20 mm cannon fire caused that insectoid noise as the bullets flew past.
Time sped up, and the pain he’d been waiting for reached his brain full-throttle. Hutchins screamed, and the blue sky turned black, and merciful unconsciousness washed over it all.
Ken Hawkins assumed the phlebotomists would like to take advantage of the spooky Halloween theme, being a blood bank and everything. Ken was always up for a good gag and figured the place would be decorated like a graveyard, and all the techs would be dressed like vampires.
That Halloween night, as he approached the front door of the blood bank, he was not disappointed. Fake spiderwebs adorned the entrance, and the window was blacked out, so you couldn’t see inside. As he turned the doorknob and stepped onto a mat inside the entryway, he heard a mournful howl and someone saying, “Enter at your own risk.” Ken knew that was a prerecorded chip thing that activated when his weight pressed down on the mat. “Nice touch,” he thought.
They had even tricked out the fluorescent overhead lights, so most of them were out, and the few that remained flickered like those in every bad horror movie he had ever seen. Always safety conscious, he wondered about the potential tripping hazards of such poor and strobe-like lighting but supposed that was not his problem. As Ken cautiously approached the receptionist’s desk, he saw a woman he didn’t recognize from previous visits. Typically, a sweet, older, probably retired woman was at the receptionist station, but this woman was much younger. She was dressed all in black; her face was ghostly white with some sort of pancake makeup. Dark circles surrounded her eyes, and fake blood dripped from the corner of her mouth.
She smiled sheepishly and said, “Can I bite you? I mean, can I help you?”
All people who sat within the Palm Grove were hushed, watching Bimi Tal. Fat hands fanning powdered breasts; silk handkerchiefs wiping ox necks; sweat beneath armpits. Still heat. Far away thunder. The stars going by.
Music swelled. Beneath its discord sounded a steady drumming rhythm. The arms of Bimi Tal waved about her head. She shouted for joy of life.
The pale eyes of Dirk, basking in mystery, gleamed into fire, blazed up in fury and hate undying! His dry lips opened. I saw his teeth.
. . .Through the breast-high grasses surge on the two marching men. Their boots sough in the muck. (Softly strums the bass viol.) Something waiting in the marshes! Something with golden eyes and swaying head. Hark! The rattle! Beware, for death is in the path!. . .
And, long before he understood what this sound was, it had stirred in him the centers of pity and alarm. He listened intently, though at first in vain, for the running blood beat all its drums too noisily in his ears. Did it come, he wondered, from the lake, or from the woods?…
Then, suddenly, with a rush and a flutter of the heart, he knew that it was close beside him in the tent; and, when he turned over for a better hearing, it focused itself unmistakably not two feet away. It was a sound of weeping; Défago upon his bed of branches was sobbing in the darkness as though his heart would break, the blankets evidently stuffed against his mouth to stifle it.
And his first feeling, before he could think or reflect, was the rush of a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous—and so vain! Tears—in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? He thought of a little child crying in mid-Atlantic…. Then, of course, with fuller realization, and the memory of what had gone before, came the descent of the terror upon him, and his blood ran cold.
“Défago,” he whispered quickly, “what’s the matter?” He tried to make his voice very gentle. “Are you in pain—unhappy—?” There was no reply, but the sounds ceased abruptly. He stretched his hand out and touched him. The body did not stir.
“Let’s rip it up! Go-go have a go-go time on a go-go Saturday night, baby! I’m going to rock it up! I’m going to rip it up! I’m going to shake it up!”
The shadow hovered above Richard. He felt his freezing cold sweats turned to warmth, and the shadow whispered, “Be not afraid, child, I will lead you to the promised land.”
Richard bowed his head and said, “Thank you, sweet Jesus!”
Reverend Snow screeched:
“Go-go have a go-go time on a go-go Saturday night, baby! I’m going to rock it up! I’m going to rip it up! I’m going to shake it up!”
A chorus of amens sounded off, and the ghostly flock rose from the pews.
Quietly, Snow said, “God knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, and yes, men lures women, children, and the sick to their tyranny,” he lifted a finger and pointed it straight at Little Richard. He held up his left hand, palm out to reveal a large blinking Eye.
“He is a part of this tyranny! He is misleading our youth! He is taking them straight to Hell!”
The Eye cackled.
On arriving home, my in-laws had opened the cans and found that they had a problem. Over the intervening years, the cans had corroded and begun to leak. Water, containing minerals from the dirt, as well as chemicals from fertilizers and plant food, had gotten onto the bills and stained them considerably. In this condition, they could not possibly have been circulated without arousing a lot of questions that would be hard to answer.
The solution was to literally launder the money—to soak it in a mixture of bleach and mild detergent to try to get as much of the stains out as possible. This succeeded in getting most of the stains out, but it also took out some of the dyes in the ink, and left the bills looking strange and discolored. Passing them in stores would still raise some eyebrows.
I rested the barrel of the rifle on the hood of the car and peered through the scope, adjusting the focus so I could see everything. The driver’s side door opened, and a man dropped down to the ground. He had a bullet-shaped head, covered with a thick fuzz of dark hair. He was in his mid-thirties, and was definitely not Shaheen. Just a driver.
I moved the scope back to the cab of the truck. As I did, the passenger opened the far door and hopped down. He was shielded from me by the body of the truck, but the quick glimpse I had caught as he climbed out revealed the grizzled pompadour of Henry Shaheen.
A couple of the men who had been milling around on the pier walked over, and Shaheen reached out to shake the hand of the older of the two. A sharklike grin creased his face, and his eyes glinted under his horn-rimmed glasses. I was sure this was Shaheen. There was no point waiting.
I centered the crosshairs on Shaheen’s temple. There was no breeze. I eased off the safety and took in a soft breath. They couldn’t have possibly heard me from this far away, but I was quiet anyway.
In the dead of the night. An hour before dawn. The phone.
Suddenly demanding immediate attention.
Insisting.
“Yes.”
The voice was quiet. Measured. Unhurried. Almost a whisper. But there was something in the voice—something dark and lurking. Something deadly. Something incredibly deadly.
“Listen, Smitty. You got to stop him. Now—tonight! Before it’s too late. Jesus Christ, this is crazy. Fucking crazy!”
“Stop who?”
“Vinny. He’s gone nuts. Ever since that cop arrested his brother and sent him up to prison, he’s gone off his rocker. Got just enough alcohol in him to go nuts. He’s gone. Said he’s gonna make that fucking cop pay. Make ’em all pay for screwing his brother over. Stop him, Smitty. Stop him before it’s too late!”
“Where?”
“Cop lives on Melrose. That’s all I know. But Smitty… listen. Vince says he’s going to kill the cop’s family first. One by one and make the cop watch. Took a friggin’ axe with him. He’s gonna chop ’em all to pieces, for Chrissakes! I’m tellin’ ya, Vince has flat gone off the deep end!”
Click. The phone went dead.
Nothing happened that made me do it. Nothing triggered it. I wasn’t even having a particularly difficult day. I was just sitting, watching a man and a woman with seven teeth between them argue about dodgy texts one of them found on the other’s phone. The presenter said, “Find out the lie detector results after the break,” and I realized I didn’t give a fuck. Not only did I not give a fuck about who was lying, but it also dawned on me that I didn’t give a fuck about anything. I’d had the idea at the back of my head for months now—years even. Constantly looming over everything I did. Always on the horizon. So I thought, Why not now?
I walked through the hallway towards the kitchen. On the way, I thought to myself how it was a shame that I’d never get around to putting up some wallpaper or any pictures. At least I’d made things easier for whoever was assigned this flat after me. I have terrible taste in wallpaper anyway. This flat always deserved better.
I lingered a moment in the kitchen, looking at the sink. The ever-present tower of unwashed dishes caught the light in a way that made it oddly beautiful. Something about it, next to the nearly empty, two-year-old bottle of supermarket-brand washing-up liquid, filled me with such sadness I had to look away, and I headed through the utility room door.
Switching the light on, I looked around the utility room. The bitter smell of varnish lingered in the air. Piles of random bits of whatever-the-fuck lay everywhere. It’s amazing when you think about it—how much stuff just accumulates. I didn’t know if it was just me, but I felt all I had done in my life was accumulate stuff.
“Remember me?” she asked. “Because I sure as shit remember you.”
It didn’t come back to me right away, but her face was familiar. Then it came back to me.
A few months ago, I had been hired to take out a man named Henry Shaheen. He was a human trafficker who provided girls ranging from toddlers to teenagers for the Arabian sex-slave market. The father of one of his victims wanted him taken out, and hired me to do it. I had intercepted him at a container port in Boston as he was preparing to transfer a truckload of girls onto a freighter bound for the Middle East. I had taken out Shaheen at the scene, but the men with him had gotten away with the truck.
I followed them up into southern New Hampshire, where they had driven down a wood road to eliminate the girls. In the back of the truck with the girls was a young woman who had acted as Shaheen’s groomer, luring the girls in and pretending to be one of them in order to keep them calm until the ship left port.
When I killed the men who had been driving the truck, she acted like she was grateful to me for saving her, and had almost convinced me that she would get them to safety. I was almost back on the road when I realized that she had known too much about the truck to not be in on the job, so I had gone back and found her about to kill the girls in the back of the truck. I had shot her in the wrist of her gun hand with a high-explosive round and then run her over with the truck.
It was the unmistakable sound of a small animal’s limbs breaking through the crest of fresh-fallen snow. Then I saw the shape of it just outside the semicircle of the lantern’s light and it looked to be a small dog or half-grown wolf. Blacker than the night it was and it darted from a hedgerow of dormant bushes to a wood pile. Against the backdrop of snow, which had a nightly, bluish tinge, the canine showed up rather well and I saw that it had a great, bushy tail. I then realized that my uninvited visitor was a fox.
I reached up for the burning lantern and held it up high before me. Peculiar, I thought, that the fox would run toward me rather than away. As the light hit its eyes, they glowed red as twin embers. Hoping for a better look, I eased forward a step with the lantern.
The black fox uttered a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a low yelp. A chill ran up my spine. My first reaction was to promptly straighten my posture and stand steadfast. Even then as the fox ran off, it seemed to have a firm grasp on me, for I could not move for at least a half minute’s time I am sure of it.
As the fox disappeared, I lit my pipe for a second time as it had gone out. As I stood there in the cold darkness, savoring the pipe smoke, staring out into the blackness of the night, it occurred to me how rare it was for one to see a black fox. I did not recall ever hearing of anyone else seeing one.
Nick Palatino snorted a fine line of coke. Snagged one of ten active burner phones—and punched speed dial to ring his favorite Vegas hooker: “St. Suzie’s signed me to a five year deal. I’m gonna coach men’s hoops and change the team name to Alien Nation. How’s your sweet ass feel about movin’ to New York City?”
Buck naked on the sofa, nipples suddenly taut, Diane Walsh purred. “How much green they giving you?”
“Roughly $20 million—if I last five years—which I doubt will happen. But the budget for my staff is also highly lucrative.”
“About $5 million then for the upcoming season. You gonna make my sweet ass rich if I make the move Nick?”
Palatino popped the cork on a bottle of Booker’s bourbon. Poured four fingers over ice. “Beyond your wildest dreams Diane—if you meet my demands and follow my instructions without fail.”
Diane turned to hooking her second year in law school after turning 24. Then switched to part-time classes so she could excel at both. Now four years later? She felt ready to tackle the Multi State Bar Exam—and would test this July. Private practice beckoned: truly special clients with special needs. Special people with proven talents like Nick Palatino. “Does this mean you’re finally ready to unveil The Charity Stripers? I got good news this morning Nick—our Trademark application has been approved.”
“I did it alone,” he said. “I did it because I hate you—I hate all your kind. I was kicked out of your shipyard at Santa Monica. I was locked out of California. I am an I. W. W. I became a German agent—not because I love them, for I hate them too—but because I wanted to injure Americans, whom I hated more. I threw the wireless apparatus overboard. I destroyed the chronometer and the sextant. I devised a scheme for varying the compass to suit my wishes. I told Wilson that I had seen the girl talking with von Schoenvorts, and I made the poor egg think he had seen her doing the same thing. I am sorry—sorry that my plans failed. I hate you.”
He didn’t die for a half-hour after that; nor did he speak again—aloud; but just a few seconds before he went to meet his Maker, his lips moved in a faint whisper; and as I leaned closer to catch his words, what do you suppose I heard? “Now—I—lay me—down—to—sleep” That was all; Benson was dead. We threw his body overboard.
The wind of that night brought on some pretty rough weather with a lot of black clouds which persisted for several days. We didn’t know what course we had been holding, and there was no way of finding out, as we could no longer trust the compass, not knowing what Benson had done to it.
Dear Rob,
By now your memories should be returning. I know you won’t be feeling guilty but, if there are any lingering human conscience-like reflexes, please know that I have done this—gladly! Enthusiastically even!—of my own free will.
We have been friends since you turned six years old. Our family was assigned to watch after you and help you awaken when you entered puberty. Unfortunately, your mother felt something was wrong with you when you lashed out at those bullies when we were nine (you were fucking brutal man, it was awesome!). She had a priest perform an exorcism on you. You’ve been pretty meek and mild ever since then.
The problem was that you didn’t have a demon in you. You are actually the Great Prince of Hell, Orobas born in human form now that the end-times have begun.
O’Leary’s bar smelled of piss and vomit. I stood in the doorway, tried to revoke the smell from my nostrils.
I used to frequent this joint a few years ago, before Ginger’s death. I drank pretty hard back then. I would wake up at five in the morning, have a few glasses of Hamilton’s bourbon. On the way to work I’d have a splash of gin. For lunch, I always had a few beers with my partner Kitna. Get home and wind down with a few more beers and catch a game on TV before getting into bed with Ginger. That’s how my day went.
I don’t drink anymore. Not after Ginger died.
Most men, after their wives met their end, started dinking more. At least the ones I know. Not me. It sobered me up good. Real good. Of course the men I usually deal with are turds anyway. The kind of scum you read in the paper they were fried in the electric chair, or given the more humane lethal injection, and you wouldn’t even care they died.
At least I can say I never mourned them. Never really cared for anyone else but Ginger.
Ginger was a good girl until she met me. I know the papers have said other things. I don’t care. I’m not talking about social niceties in western civilization. I’m talking about a lovely, nice person, who almost always helped others, even if they weren’t friends or family. I know that she sold herself on occasion. She had to do what she had to do. That’s how we met. I enjoyed her on occasion as well, but it was always gentle, even when it was rough.
To battle this problem of cheating on Samantha, he drank quite a bit, which always loosened his lips on the matter, and resulted in Darren bedding whatever female was available in the bar. The first year, he was very suspicious of everything, human, nonhuman, animal, and even cigarette machines, he thought they were Samantha spying on him. As a matter of fact, in a state of drunkenness, Darren once took his S&W snub-nose .38 and assassinated a small black cat.
The once prosperous city, a testament to man’s creativity and design ingenuity, now lay in ruins, a twisted decaying maze of crumbling buildings and pitted streets that formerly overflowed with prosperity. The previously awe-inspiring skyline was now nothing more than a stark black painting in silhouette on the canvas depicting the smoldering crimson sky. This devastating backdrop served as a haunting reminder of the pure horror that had befallen this once monumental metropolis.
The foul air was redolent with the stench of decay. The only sounds one could hear echoing through the desolate streets and alleyways were the howling of the stagnant wind blowing through the ruined streets and the distant moans and cries of the remaining savages as they preyed upon each other, struggling for survival in this pure Darwinian world, exploding with insanity. In this post-apocalyptic dung heap, where even former predators now lived in fear, where rats and other scavengers thrived on the corpses stacked high in the streets, a veritable wasteland, any sort of hope for civilization was a faded memory, replaced by a desperate struggle for survival. This was a world that had long since forgotten the meaning of peace, love, and caring and had traded for kill or be killed.
Amid the chaos and destruction, three Godless souls could count themselves among those who endured. They were survivors of the holocaust that had wiped out most of the population of the world. They banded together as like minds, albeit minds of the twisted variety. The only reason they still existed was because the three were probably the most vile, soulless people remaining on Earth.
I sat down in the driver’s seat and slid the key into the ignition. I left the door open. The man in the store straightened up a little in the doorway. I started the car, pulled my left foot inside the door and floored the accelerator, cranking the wheel as far to the left as it would go, spinning the car around in a sharp left turn, dust and grit spraying out from beneath the sheets. The force of the turn slammed the door shut next to me as I came out of the turn and headed for the highway.
As I ran onto the road and the tires took hold, I shot into the westbound lane, cutting off a stake-bed truck that was coming in from the west. As I squealed tires into my lane and the tires took hold, I could hear a squeal of tires from the truck and a flood of curses from the driver. Straightening out, I caught a glimpse of the man in black standing in the doorway, a machine pistol clutched in his hands. That lasted just a second, as the truck was between me and the front of Drury’s Country Store.
He yelled something in Spanish, and as I came out from behind the truck, I saw him raise the gun and get ready to fire.
There was no doctor at the camp. There had been a delay before, stupefied, he thought to let them know he had been bit. And then—more agony; agony piled upon agony.
Not concealing their doubts as to their chances of saving his arm or him, they had slapped the rough tourniquet upon his arm, and had twisted down upon the stick until he moaned, unwillingly, in pain. Then they had dipped one of the big hunting knives into boiling water, and had cut his arm at the bite marks—gashing it across, with great, free-handed strokes, then back again at right angles; squeezing the cuts to make him lose the poisoned blood.
Then they had cauterized the wound. Sick, half afaint, to Coulter it seemed that they were deliberately thinking up additional tortures. The white-hot iron that seared his flesh, tormenting the agonized ends of nerves that already had borne past the breaking point, was the final, exquisite touch of agony.
Coulter was one of those men who bear pain—even a slight pain—with difficulty. Even the sight of blood made him faint. This was horrible beyond anything he had ever dreamed. The physical racking; the feel of the steel blade cutting through his own flesh and sinew, down to the bone, made him bite his lips till they spurted blood, in the effort to keep from screaming aloud.
Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he heard a familiar voice saying crossly, yet anxiously, “What on earth are you doing out there, Bunting? Come in—do! You’ll catch your death of cold! I don’t want to have you ill on my hands as well as everything else!” Mrs. Bunting rarely uttered so many words at once nowadays.
He walked in through the front door of his cheerless house. “I went out to get a paper,” he said sullenly.
After all, he was master. He had as much right to spend the money as she had; for the matter of that the money on which they were now both living had been lent, nay, pressed on him—not on Ellen—by that decent young chap, Joe Chandler. And he, Bunting, had done all he could; he had pawned everything he could pawn, while Ellen, so he resentfully noticed, still wore her wedding ring.
He stepped past her heavily, and though she said nothing, he knew she grudged him his coming joy. Then, full of rage with her and contempt for himself, and giving himself the luxury of a mild, a very mild, oath—Ellen had very early made it clear she would have no swearing in her presence—he lit the hall gas full-flare.
“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”—The Nemedian Chronicles
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aërial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
“Well, let us say for the moment that it was not a dream exactly, but a hallucination.
“Whichever it was, in any case it haunted me; for months, I think, it was never quite out of my mind, but lingered somewhere in the dusk of consciousness, sometimes sleeping quietly, so to speak, but sometimes stirring in its sleep. It was no good my telling myself that I was disquieting myself in vain, for it was as if something had actually entered into my very soul, as if some seed of horror had been planted there. And as the weeks went on the seed began to sprout, so that I could no longer even tell myself that that vision had been a moment’s disorderment only. I can’t say that it actually affected my health. I did not, as far as I know, sleep or eat insufficiently, but morning after morning I used to wake, not gradually and through pleasant dozings into full consciousness, but with absolute suddenness, and find myself plunged in an abyss of despair.
“Often too, eating or drinking, I used to pause and wonder if it was worth while.
“Eventually, I told two people about my trouble, hoping that perhaps the mere communication would help matters, hoping also, but very distantly, that though I could not believe at present that digestion or the obscurities of the nervous system were at fault, a doctor by some simple dose might convince me of it. In other words I told my wife, who laughed at me, and my doctor, who laughed also, and assured me that my health was quite unnecessarily robust.
That was another reason Sonia was the artist; she always thought of things like this. Arthur covered their garage floor with a plastic tarp and suspended a quart can of white paint on a rope from the ceiling, hanging about six inches directly over the black square he had painted. Again, at Sonia’s suggestion, he offset the can somewhat from the center of the square.
Now, it was time for Sonia to take over. She held the can away from the square while Arthur first drilled a small hole in the bottom of the can. Then, as Sonia covered the hole with her finger, he drilled another hole in the top of the can, allowing a thin stream of paint to begin flowing once Sonia removed her finger from the bottom. Sonia took careful aim and sent the can slowly flying in an arc over the tarp and black square. They watched in amazement as the swirling paint created geometric results on the black canvas below.
That was two years earlier and one of the last few pieces she had made before… before the unimaginable tragedy. Arthur had been away on business for a few days when that low-life bastard had broken into their home, raped and beaten his precious Sonia to death, then robbed their home of whatever he could find. They were not wealthy by any means, but they had a few nice things of value. The murderer had even taken a few of Sonia’s works of Art.
“What the Hell are funeral urns doing in the back of our SUV?”
“Good question, Anson. What are funeral urns doing in the back of our SUV … that you bought and supposedly checked out, and which was such an amazing deal?”
“Hold on now, Gina. You can’t go blaming me for this. It was obviously some slight oversight on the part of Fred’s Auction. I had nothing to do with it. It’s not my fault.”
“Of course, it’s not your fault. It’s never your fault. It wasn’t your fault when you bought that car with the dead skunk in the trunk, either, was it? That dead skunk made the car unfit for human habitation. That was another great deal, as I recall. Now we have dead people in the back of our SUV.”
“Wait a minute, Gina. They ain’t exactly dead people. They are dead people’s ashes. That is, assuming the urns are actually full. Check to see if they are full.”
“What? I’m not checking for any such thing. First, you know how I hate anything to do with death, dead people, or dead things in general. Secondly, you bought this death mobile, this hearse, you come over here and check it out your own damn self. I don’t want no part of this disgusting business.”
“Fine, fine, fine. Let me look at these.” Anson lifted the lid on the first urn and saw it was full of ashes. He didn’t bother with the second urn; he just lifted it to see if it had any significant weight. “Yep. They are both filled with ashes.”
Deborah Oakdale woke in her bed in a panic, her vivid dream burnt into her waking memory. A dream of being caught in a grave as mangled, dirtied and bloodied arms reached out to her; a dream she’d been having often lately. She peeled her sweat soaked nightgown from her chest, swung her legs to the side of the bed, and sat there as she rested her head in her damp, trembling hands.
Deborah ‘s parents owned Oakdale Cemetery and it was here Debbie had grown up. But, even through all the funerals in the fields, wakes in the chapel, and corpses in the preparation room, never once had she been scared of the bodies. Sure, she hated them for what they’d done to her life. They’d made her a social pariah at times and at others kept her away from fun to deal with the family business of death, but she had never been scared before. But when that grave opened up and she fell in, she felt like she was being pulled in, like the old dead in the east field knew she hated them, and they hated her in return. Like, they wanted her to feel the way they felt, nothing and to be nothing. Years she had helped her mother and father transport the bodies, passed bodies while they played in the old parsonage, but now, the thought of seeing one again felt like it would be the end. She felt like she was running and to put herself within their grasp again would give up the game. Give up her ghost, to theirs.
Here in Acme City the noise can be unbearable.
For Willie, the sound of buses and trains are nothing in comparison to the noise his neighbor makes. The constant construction, the cars stuck in traffic on the overpass just outside his apartment building can be hard on one’s ears, often drowning out the television, radio. Over the last year Willie Coyote was okay with it. He learned for the most part to tune it out. Even if it was hard for Willie to concentrate on his writing.
But that neighbor and his loud jazz playing at two in the morning, the hammering and sawing. Willie hated it, but there was the one thing he heard, even in his sleep, that Willie hated more than anything was the honking.
Willie often found himself sitting at his desk stuck for a word and he would hear “Beep-beep!”
It was more than he could bear.
She had been walking ceaselessly on the Camino Real, the day stretching past the road under her feet. The sky was a clear, bright, blue that promised to cover her for as long as she walked. Sounds came and went as she focused on different groups of scrub brush and rocks. She was tired but in a distracted sort of way. Her chest, right above her left breast ached. She stared at her Doc Martins as she walked down the cobblestones connecting the Spanish Missions of California. Rhythmically the cobblestones asked her who she was, and where she was going. She didn’t know.
“Where does this road lead?” she asked, matching the rhythm. “What cities lie ahead?”
“None,” answered the stones. “Only the Missions lie on this road.”
She rubbed at the pain in her chest. It felt like there was something inside of her, something hard and hot. A small sob escaped her lips but she looked down at her feet, and kept walking.
When she next looked up, she saw a Mission in the closing distance. The sounds of the wilderness stopped as she stepped through the gate of the outer wall. The sun shone down upon the courtyard from an interminable mid-day point. The shadows were small and weak, barely daring to step beyond their roots. She turned to the left and entered the main building.
“I see those dog-faced assholes now,” Miriam screamed as he looked through the periscope and shifted into fifth gear. The tank kicked up a cloud of dust, burying the skeletal dune buggy baring down on it quickly. The desert sun was high in the sky burning, a hole in old Earth’s atmosphere. We were being chased by The State’s Imperial police and they were looking to throw Miriam and me in the underground slammer for selling black market oxygen.
Hey, wherever there’s a buck to be made, Miriam and me will sell the nipples off a dead bitch’s tits.
“Hey Rat,” Miriam called out to me. “Those dickweeds are closing in on us!”
“Go into sixth gear and hit the hyperspeed button,” I said. I spun around in my chair, flicked on the necessary switches on the tanks motherboard. The tank wheezed and jittered. The wheels rolled over branches, bushes, a hillside, finally crushing a small house by the sea. We were ready to jump head first in the polluted waters off the coast of Maine when the tank sputtered, choked, died on the shore of rolling waves.
He hated Mrs. Critsch, who would come in constantly complaining about pain and picking up enough pain meds to take down a thoroughbred; and some wine to chase it. Every week it was a new pain and a new prescription. Never once a nice word; never once a hello.
He hated little Toby Walsh, who would spend way too long looking at the fashion magazines while slowly squeezing the front of his pants. When the eleven-year-old was done sexually exploring himself, he would linger around the candy until he thought no one was looking so he could pop a few pieces in his pocket and run out.
There was Father Jessup, the priest that would lounge by the counter, disturbingly sucking on his Icee’s straw while watching that slut, Katie Carlson play pinball.
There was handyman Ted Kline, who was always out to seduce a wife while their husbands were at work, with his tan skin and premeditated lingering glare.
Ted’s current conquest was Mrs. Hathaway, the only real estate agent in the area, there to take advantage of people’s misfortunes as their houses were closed in upon by the bank.
Speaking of banks he hated Paul Theurber, who was always too on top of the rent, as though it was going into his own pocket. He’d always show up a day early with a warning.
He hated them all. The population of Richfield was about one hundred and fifty, and Lonny knew each and every one of them; and knew, in detail, how much and why he hated each and every one of them.
“Fuck you,” Brian said under his breath as he slapped his palm against his forehead, killing the mosquito that had just bit him. “Mother fucking skeeters. You may have tasted my blood bitch, but you’re dead now!” The afternoon was turning into evening and all the bugs were coming out to play.
Brian sat outside of the service station he worked at, waiting for his shift to end. A fucking dead-end job in a fucking dead-end shithole, off a fucking nearly forgotten highway, in the middle of the fucking California desert.
People think of California in all sorts of ways. Stereotypes about hippies, liberals, homosexuals, and other “fruits and nuts” of the counter-culture; or Silicon Valley tech geeks; or Hollywood greed and glamour; or endless summer days and beaches filled with beautiful people. The truth is that the majority of the central part of the state is like something out of a David Lynch film—a really boring David Lynch film.
On the first morning of Mr. Sleuth’s stay in the Buntings’ house, while Mrs. Bunting was out buying things for him, the new lodger had turned most of the pictures and photographs hanging in his sitting-room with their faces to the wall!
But this queer action on Mr. Sleuth’s part had not surprised Mrs. Bunting as much as it might have done; it recalled an incident of her long-past youth—something that had happened a matter of twenty years ago, at a time when Mrs. Bunting, then the still youthful Ellen Cottrell, had been maid to an old lady.
The old lady had a favorite nephew, a bright, jolly young gentleman who had been learning to paint animals in Paris; and it was he who had had the impudence, early one summer morning, to turn to the wall six beautiful engravings of paintings done by the famous Mr. Landseer!
The old lady thought the world of those pictures, but her nephew, as only excuse for the extraordinary thing he had done, had observed that “they put his eye out.”
I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting. Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the French quality of taste; taste reigned supreme, self-controlled, dignified and reticent.
To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse, a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy hand had struck across the church, at the serene peace of those clear voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.
“Your excellency, ” The old advisor spoke up again, walking toward Gorah. His guards reacted quickly, drawing their swords. The old advisor laughed faintly. “Perhaps we should use this moment to look for Queen Farah, have her abdicate the crown?”
Gorah rose the throne, chuckled. He waved his left hand, and the guards sheathed their weapons. He held the crown in his right hand, twirling it on his fingers. Goarah took a few steps and was face to face with the old advisor. He placed the crown on the old man’s head. The old advisor flinched, then a forced smile appeared on his thin lips.
“Is… this what your old heart desires? Don’t speak. I know what you desire… Then you shall have it.”
“Your Excellency… I don’t know what to say…” The old advisor croaked.
“No need to say anything. The crown, the land, the people are yours.” Goarah waved his right hand. The guard closest to the old advisor unsheathed his sword and swung fiercely, the blade severed the old man’s head from his neck. It rolled a few inches and stopped at my feet. The shock and horror was etched on his face. Those lifeless black eyes stared at me. I felt a shiver rise up in me.
Gorah laughed as he bent down. He removed the crown from the old advisor’s severed head. He glared at the crown before stepping toward me. “I think… you should have this,” he offered to me. “From slave girl to… Queen. Does that not appease you?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Power? Does it not… excite you?” Gorah sniffed my neck.
“Slave girl,” Queen Farah levied her voice over the clearing of the dishes from the royal table. “How long have you been in my royal keep?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question. I dare not raise my voice above a whisper nor any lower than a breath. “Only a fortnight, my Queen.” If I spoke any louder, Farah would be insulted, any lower and she would mistake me for one of her many wives.
“Come here,” she demanded. I paced myself toward her. “Stop!” She screamed. “No further,” her voice trembled. “You look like a girl who has haunted my nightmares. Would you press a blade to your Queen’s throat?”
“No, my Queen. I haven’t a murdering bone in my body.” I said calmly.
He had expected to have fallen by now. Part of him wanted to but his feet kept trudging through the snow. The cold had stopped bothering him and all he wanted was to sleep but some stubborn, thoughtless, and uncaring sense of survival kept him walking southeast across the arctic wasteland.
His sword hung reassuringly on his back. The furs he wore sheltered his body from the sharp bite of the cold. Only his face was unprotected and this he covered from his nose down with a strip of blanket. His large pack was lighter now that his tinder and food were almost depleted. He was starting to feel as empty as his meager supplies.
As Jimmy and I laid in bed I asked him about the things he was saying with the older kids. “So, that stuff at school?” I asked. “You didn’t really mean what you said about not believing?”
“I meant it,” he answered.
The moment he said it I heard the clicking and creaking of the radiator come on, blowing warm air from the living room into our room via the duct. The warm air was calming.
“How could any of it be real? And, the older boys all say it’s made up. I mean, If it was real wouldn’t they have stories to tell. Like Jacob Conners, he sure isn’t a good kid. I saw him smoking behind the Lewis’s grain silo.”
“But, mom says it’s real?” I argued.
“And she’s a liar too, just like all the other parents.”
The clacking grew louder from the vent at the floor in the far wall.
Jimmy talked on as his voice grew more defiant, “Plus, how could a person keep an eye on us all the time? It’s stupid.”
“Magic?” I suggested.
He answered, “Magic isn’t real and Black Pete isn’t real. Watch, I’ll prove it. Fuck shit fuck fuck crap”.
I was stunned by his language.
I heard a hard knock from the far wall. I looked at the vent. Inside it was dark except for two round reflections.
“Black Pete is here,” I whispered.
Jimmy ordered me to shut up.
“There. There is the vent,” I continued.
There was a pause and then Jimmy said, “I don’t see anything.”
But I did. They had vanished, but I was sure that those two round reflections were there.
That night, after hearing a long muffled, yet obviously heated conversation between our parents downstairs, the door to our room opened and there, in the beam of hall light stood our mother. She came into the room and closed the door behind her. There we were, Jimmy and I tucked in bed as my mother took a seat at the other side of the room, the light of the moon beaming through the window creating a lake of moonlight between her in the chair and us in our beds. It seemed like an ocean away, but still not far enough. I could see the seering moonlit look of disappointment in her face.
In the dark she spoke. “I have had enough of your attitude Jimmy and both of you always fighting.” It was about to come, the worst punishment ever, and this time, not just for Jimmy, but for me too. But, it didn’t come. “You two are not in trouble. You have created your own trouble. Christmas is fifty-five days away. You have fifty-five days exactly to sharpen up and prove that you are going to be good little boys or else.”
She was calm, too calm. I was terrified. Everyone in Winterthistle knew of Father Christmas and we also knew of his servants, the creatures and characters that traveled with him at Christmastime. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “or else” but I knew it was scary, too scary to even want to know about, at least too scary for me to want to know, but not for Jimmy.
“Why,” Jimmy’s voice trembled, “What will happen?”
“Old Man Whipper will come for you,” she said.
“Male… how do you know it was male?” Kent asked.
James had had enough. “Fuck man, you’re asking me about bat dick. I don’t fucking know!” James’s face was turning beat read as he went on without a breath, “I dont fucking know what a bat dick looks like, Kent. Some weird flap thing?! I don’t know! But, I do know what a bat vagina doesn’t look like, and what it doesn’t look like is a goddamn bat dick! The fucking monster is a boy and it wants to fucking eat you you fucking child!”
“Well, Sorry man. You’re the one who brought up that it was a boy.”
“So we could fucking hunt it more effectively you dumb mother fucker!”
“Jesus, calm down.”
It was in the third century of my exile into the virtual world assigned to me when I encountered the Lunch Lady.
My spinal fluid (the real meatspace stuff) was being harvested to add a choice “seasoning” to the food of our ultra-dimensional overlords. It turns out that I am part of the 3% of the humans that have rarified spinal fluid… I’m finally part of the elite! Yay!
They gave me a choice “life” to live while they milked me. It was part adventure story, part erotic thriller, and part music video. So it was a surprise when my living room turned into a high school cafeteria serving area.
“You are late again little Jimmy,” said a woman’s pinched mouth while her pinched eyes accused me. “No sloppy joe for you today. Just this pistol.”
I looked down and saw my small, child-hands holding some sort of ray gun.
“Now,” she said looking invitingly, “Make sure you eat all the food on your plate.”
I was suddenly and extremely hungry for whatever came out of that barrel. I just knew it would be the tastiest of treats. I put the barrel of the strange gun in my mouth, winked at the lunch lady, and pulled the trigger.
My meatspace eyes opened. I was in some sort of encounter suit with tubes and cables. I looked up and saw that the biological computer my suit was hooked up to was dead. It smelled like a rotting frog I found once.
I clumsily got myself out of the suit (it was going to take a while to get my strength and coordination back) and looked around.
Everything was broken and deserted and insectoid scientists, still wearing their chitinous lab coats, were dead around me.
What the fuck had happened?
Instinctively he lept back as the librarian dropped from the ceiling landing on the ground with a cracking sound as her nobbed, blackened knees knocked together.
She looked confused. Her body looked like a corpse wearing a coat, both of which had been hung on a rack.
She started to walk forward, her face still confused, but her black reflective eyes looking right at him. Her eyes almost appeared to plead with him to help her, but her teeth and jaws were grinding back and forth. Her veins bulged as she walked toward him, her once freckled white skin tainted by and engulfed in veins that flushed from red to black. She was silent other than the grinding of her teeth and the cracking of her bones.
He started to move back in a panic. The librarian struggled toward him, as if half of her body wanted to move one way and the other half wanted to move another. Johnny wanted to believe that the woman was in there somewhere, struggling to gain control , but he couldn’t believe that. Her look of confusion had been replaced with a look of terrifying joy, a twisted grimace of happiness; happiness that she was going to eat him.
Johnny’s vision was like the contrast-gray of a television as the power shuts down. He stumbled back landing on his ass and hands, the stinging pain giving him a burst of adrenaline. As the world returned to his mind’s broadcast he quickly remembered his situation. Scared shitless on the floor of the library bathroom. His eyes darted to the shadow behind the door. There was nothing there.
The flickering lights created long shadows along the hall. Johnny’s fear caused a stark vignette, zeroing in his sight to the corner where he had seen the reflective eyes.
He slowly scooted back, back the way he came, back toward the exit sign.
The hall was silenced under a heavy weight. The only sounds were the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the white noise of the room. But in it, in the silent din he could hear scratching. He looked to another corner and quickly found his focus pulled back to where he saw the eyes. But the scratching, the scratching was closer now. He looked to the now closed bathroom door. He saw nothing as his focus darted between shadow pockets and the black shadow where the initial sighting occurred.
Would he make it if he ran?
Pain. He knew nothing but pain. Until he opened his eyes. At that point he also knew confusion.
He was on his back, spread-eagled, with each limb tied firmly to stakes in the ground. It was a hot summer day and he could see the leaves of the corn stalks swaying around and above him.
His entire body ached as if someone had punctured him thousands of times with wooden golf-tees. God, he missed playing golf. Maybe after starting the new job out west, he’d be able to afford to play again. He could feel that he was bleeding all over but he couldn’t lift his head up enough to see. He was too weak from loss of blood.
He remembered pulling over on the long and nearly deserted two-lane road as he drove across Iowa to take a piss. He vaguely remembered seeing a strange statue, next to the corn rows, shaped like a rooster with two-heads and four wings. It had strange symbols carved on its chest. Symbols that had made him angry, even though he had no idea what they meant. He remembered pissing on the statue to show his disgust.
He had no recollection of what happened after he finished emptying his bladder but, as he heard the sound of angry clucking, he knew he had made a mistake. A very serious mistake.
