3
“You know, that dog has worms,” Mark said to her, in the car, still looking at the sloping mounds of her breasts through her open shirt. “And you letting him lick your face could put wet puppy spit full of miscroscopic worm larvae on your skin, and from there, they could get inside you. And when they do—”
“Only someone like you could come up with something that disgusting,” Michelle said.
“I want to hear,” Dash said. He drove the Cougar with one hand; he had a cigarette in the other.
“The puppy has roundworms, and maybe tapeworms,” Mark said. “Almost all puppies have them. The puppy will get wormed soon, but right now, the poop inside that little crate probably has tiny strands of spaghetti—that wriggle.”
“God!” Michelle shouted, kicking at the back of his seat. “Stop now. Just stop.”
“I want to hear it,” Dash said. “So what do they do?”
Mark shrugged. “Well, to dogs and cats, a lot, but worming pills will take care of it, most likely. But when they get into people, it’s harder. They make little canals under the skin. They like to go for the eyes.”
“You’re making that up,” Danny said.
“No, for some reason, the roundworms can’t mature into adults in people. So the larvae just make do, and they seem to really like getting the tissue around the eyes.”
“If,” Michelle said, slowly but with her usually dominating force, “you. Do. Not. Shut. Up. Right. Now.”
“1 won’t even go into the tapeworm possibility.”
“Jenny Patterson had tapeworm when she was twelve,” Dash said. “Remember?”
“No,” Mark said. “I didn’t know her back then.”
“She had it, and she lost twenty pounds practically overnight. She was sick for a long time. She said it was pretty nasty.”
“They grow inside you,” Mark said. “They grow as long as they can. They can fill your intestines and just eat at you.”
“1 once saw a dead body that was opened up and it was full of worms,” Dash said. “I almost took a shit when I saw them in her mouth.”
“Shut up!” Michelle shouted; the puppy began whimpering; Dash laughed and accidentally dropped his cigarette; Michelle cried out something that Mark thought was “What,” and that’s when they hit something in the road.
-3. The Deer
1
The car didn’t just hit something in the road.
It slammed into something like a brick wall. The car made a squealing sound, and the sound of glass breaking filled Mark’s ears. He felt the world spin a bit, and his head knocked back into the headrest of his seat. He was thrown against the glove compartment, to the front of the car, almost to the windshield; something flicked against his scalp; Michelle screeched, or else it was the tires screeching; Danny made a noise like he’d had the air knocked out of him. Dash whooped as if he enjoyed the ride; Mark wondered if the puppy was going to be okay.
But it was over in a second.
Mark opened his eyes and saw something dark and liquid covering the windshield.
Not the windshield.
His eyes.
He reached up. “Shit.” He was bleeding. Something had cut his forehead.
Someone touched him on the scalp. “Not much, Marco.” It was Dash. “Just a little blood. It just seems like a lot to you.” Then, “Everybody okay back there?”
No answer.
Whatever they’d hit had darted out in front of the car from the edge of the bundle of trees at a bend in the narrow road. It was dark, but even so, Dash didn’t turn the headlights back on. Perhaps they didn’t even work. Mark wondered if something awful was going to happen now. If one of them was dead. Or if they’d killed an animal. Or if Dash’s parents would ground him and take away all his privileges for the summer and beyond.
Mark wiped his face. It was a lot of blood for a little cut, but he felt the irregular slice at the top of his scalp, and it was, indeed, not much of a wound.
“Lots of bleeding at the scalp level,” Dash said. He took a facial tissue and daubed it on Mark’s forehead. “See? All better. You knocked it on the dashboard.”
“I thought I was dead.”
“Maybe you are,” Dash said. “Maybe we all are. Maybe we’re dead but doomed to stay right here in this wreck and never leave the dark road.”
“Hmm,” Mark said. “I think 1 saw that old Twilight Zone episode.”
From the backseat, Danny gasped, “Oh my god, we hit a deer.”
Michelle shouted out “Fuck!” The word seemed to stretch into an eternity of several seconds.
Outside the car, the world was dark.
For just seconds, they were all silent again. Mark closed his eyes and wished it away. When he opened them again, he was still in the car, feeling bruised, a throbbing at the front of his scalp.
A few seconds, which felt like minutes.
Complete silence.
“Is everybody okay?” Dash asked a second rime, breaking the quiet. He didn’t bother turning around to check. He adjusted the rearview mirror and glanced back.
“I guess I’m ok,” Mark said, although the back of his neck hurt from the way he’d slammed back against the seat. His scalp stung.
“Just a little upside down back here,” Danny said. “More beer, please.”
“I’m fine. The puppy’s fine. As if you care,” Michelle said, coughing. “My arm hurts a little. And ow. My knee.”
Dash began cussing up a storm. When it subsided, he looked at Mark, tapped him on the shoulder and gave a slight squeeze.
“Shit, and I forgot to pay my goddamn insurance this month. I am so screwed.”
2
It wasn’t a deer.
At least as far as they could tell, although Danny insisted it had antlers, and since he was the drunkest of them, he was the least believed.
3
Mark got out last, generally pissed off that they wouldn’t make it to Rachel’s party at all. They were somewhere between school and the Sound, and it was a section of road he couldn’t quite identify. There were no lights in the distance. There was no sound of traffic on some nearby highway. Trees all around, thick with leaves; the moon existed somewhere, but not where Mark stood. It seemed darker than dark.
But Dash had a flashlight and was waving it around the front of the car.
“This car is fucked,” Dash said. He spat out some more choice words, and Mark thought it was a bit like watching a three-year-old have a temper tantrum, the way Dash stomped around in a circle, muttering and shaking his head.
“It is, truly,” Danny said. He hoisted a beer to his lips, and seemed to drink the entire bottle in one gulp. Then he belched.
The damage to the Cougar was extensive. The front end had completely smashed inward, practically wrapped around the engine; the front axle was bent; and Danny made a joke that it was a miracle none of them was hurt. “Even the puppy,” Danny said. “Man, that was a hell of a deer.”
“I didn’t see a deer,” Michelle said. She had put the puppy on a short leash and walked around the front of the car. “1 saw some people. A few of them.”
In the flashlight’s beam, she looked like a doll that had been through a windstorm. Pale white, her shirt half unbuttoned, her hair a mess. For a second, Mark thought her lip was cut, but it was just an odd shadow.
“Well, they’d be lying here,” Danny began, but Michelle gave him a harsh look that shut him up fast.
“I saw these people. I didn’t see their faces or anything. I just saw a group of them. Maybe three. Maybe more.” She had begun crying a little, only not so much that anyone could notice. When the moon came out from behind a cloud, beyond the trees, casting the slightest amount of light across the road, Mark noticed.
“Somebody hold me,” she said.
Danny obliged; his arms wrapped around her. “No, babe, it was a deer. I’m sure it was.”
“We killed some people,” Michelle said, but even as she said those words, it didn�
��t sound like she really believed it now, seconds after saying it. “They all had shaved heads. They might’ve been monks or something. I know. It sounds crazy. Maybe it wasn’t people.”
“We’re not far from the old church,” Danny said. “Maybe it was some monks.”
“I didn’t see any monks,” Mark said.
“Monks, skinheads,” Michelle said with a bit of venom in her voice. “I saw faces. And maybe one of them had antlers on.” Then she laughed. “Oh, my god, it sounds ridiculous. I’ve had two beers exactly and 1 sound ridiculous.” She looked at Mark and Danny. “You would’ve seen it if it were people, wouldn’t you?”
“Anders?” Mark grinned.
“What?” Dash let out a huge laugh, like a ballon popping.
“Okay. Something on his head.”
“It was dark,” Mark said.
“Maybe,” Michelle began. Then she seemed to change her thought. “All right. If I had seen them, they’d still be around.”
“Well.” Dash clapped his hands together. “Mystery solved. You got bounced around back there. Maybe it jogged some memory or made you hallucinate.”
“Well, I guess you three have talked me out of my mania,” Michelle said.
“It was pretty dark, ‘chelle, and it happened pretty fast,” Dash said. He shook his head, chuckling. “Antler hats. Pretty good. Skinheads in antler hats.”
Mark looked at Dash, but couldn’t read anything in his face.
4
It was only later, when Dash went to take a leak with Mark, that Dash said, “It was them. The priests of the Nowhere. This is the night.” They stood at the edge of a mossy embankment that encircled what looked like a bog. Thin trees all around. Mark had the uncomfortable feeling that they weren’t alone. He kept looking off in the woods as if he would see Danny or Michelle standing there.
Mark toggled his zipper and let loose a stream onto some twigs.
“This is fun, no?” Dash asked. “We’re going to be part of a ceremony.”
“What are you talking about?” Mark zipped up.
“I guess I didn’t tell you. This is Midsummer’s Night. A sacred night. Remember in the Wacey Crossing story?”
Mark did. There was a Wacey Crossing story about Midsummer’s Night, and how it was the weakest point of darkness in the world, so the Nowhere gods had their moment to come into the world of Man. It was a bit of a shivery tale, and Mark had a few nightmares after reading it. “It was just a story,” Mark said. “You nut.”
“Everything Wacey Crossing wrote was true,” Dash said.
Mark nearly looked at Dash straight on, but didn’t. It looked like Dash was pulling that toothbrush case-that-didn’t-hold-a-toothbrush out of his inside jacket pocket. Mark didn’t want to see the needle come out. Or see Dash use it.
5
Excerpt from “The Night of Changing” by Wacey Crossing from the collection In the Grave of The Devourer & Others published 1882, N.M. Quint & Sons Press, New York, NY. Used here with permission.
… The one called Rowen motioned to Petra, a flourishing movement of hands that reminded me of fish, swimming. Petra left my side, and I was loathe to let drop her hand, for fear, for the terror I had begun to feel in my heart. She was my beloved, and she was too innocent for this night of madness. Her mind would become twisted from their heathen perversions and dark callings. I looked upon her in the shaded and sickly moonlight, upon her luxurious dark hair, her figure so lovely and dress of gossamer. 1 was afraid of what this Unholy Man would do to her, what he might take from her, as he had taken my peace from me.
But it was too late. She had persuaded me to bring her, for she longed to speak again to her father. She had begged me with tears and cries and silence, until finally, weak man that I am, I allowed her to come with me to this ceremony.
Gudrun took her hand, and brought her into the sacred circle, drawing down her cloak, and painting strange figures upon her face and neck.
I did not know what to expect, for although I had been an initiate for nearly a year, I had not borne witness to this highest of their Holy Days, the shortest night of the year at Midsummer. From my studies, I knew that this was the sacred veil that flowed the thinnest between the world of the Nowhere and the world we human beings occupied. The gods were at their most powerless to resist human intervention in their affairs. I was well aware that invocations would be made, that the Names would be said, and the seven words of power would be intoned over the exhumed grave of one of the early Masters.
The bones of the Masters had been given, reliclike, to the handful of followers left in the world—on some distant European shore, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Each bone, whether a toe-bone or knuckle or entire skull, had been held in secret, and buried with one of the followers, and the circles of belief arose around the grave that held the relic
I had known that this particular spot of worship held a rib from an early Master. On the rib were the runes of Boediccaeringon, the last words uttered in a time of famine and torture in the west of the British Isles centuries previous. It was used, they said, to ward off the invasions of Romans and Norsemen. I had never seen this sacred rib, but now Gudrun held it.
In the darkness, I saw only its knifelike appearance, curved slightly at the end.
Then Rowen drew close to her. I saw their shadows nearly touch, and it filled me with both jealousy and dread.
And I knew what he was about. He had lied to me about what this ceremony was—yes, there was truth to his lie. But 1 knew in that instant that 1 would forever regret bringing Petra to this bloodthirsty tribe of worshipers.
He was telling her the Names, and the Names were sacred and known only to the few.
And these were the names of the Gods, the TRUE NAMES, THE NAMES OF TERRIBLE AND SWIFT POWER, THE NAMES THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN REVEALED TO MANKIND!
To know the secret names of the gods, to be able to say them aloud, had been brought by one who had come hack from the dead thousands of years ago. The legend of the Names was that the one who brought them could not get rid of them. They were accursed to the one who knew them, for he could not resist saying them. Could not resist intoning the names of the gods, and this brought terror and panic into the world, and with it, disease and ill-begotten monstrosities. So (he first Masters had found a way to put a lock upon them, so that only part of the Names could be said by one, and the Masters knew the completion of the Names— but no Master knew the entire Name to himself alone. The priests that followed the Masters shared the Names as well, and for each gathering, two priests or priestesses would know the Names, and could perform the ceremony if times were needed to invoke the Wrath of Gods. The flesh of the one who heard the Names could not resist saying them, for the sounds went wormlike not into the brain, but into the lips and the throat, and remained there until the point of Death.
Only in the last throes of Death would they emerge.
1 knew then to what end they used my beloved Petra.
God have mercy on my soul that 1 had ever taken the woman I loved into their corrupt circle! Petra had been living within a world of despair since her dear father had died so horribly! Had I but known the lengths she would go to in order to reach him, in order to be with him again!
She herself took the sharpened bone and thrust it into her breast, and as she died, I heard her utter some insane language, a string of vowels and consonants that made no earthly sense. She fell; the others held me back, though 1 fought them dearly to get to her.
Rowen crouched down, a lion over its kill, and leaned into her ear to whisper something.
I struggled free and escaped my captors. I fled deep into the bogs and woods, ran from the terror and the evil of it all. The visions of what I’d seen in the dark, of the dancing and singing of the priests and their minions, their shadows against the darker shadows of night, and within their circle, Petra, dying—and with her last breath, the demonic language!
At my apartment on Broad Street, I locked the door, and shuttered
the window from the night. 1 lit candle after candle and lamp after lamp, to bring the brilliance of day into the late hours.
I heard a rapping at my door at nearly three in the morning.
She had found me. She had returned to me.
How could I resist her? She was my heart. She was my soul.
For her, I snuffed the candles and turned down the lamps.
I let the Nowhere into my room. My soul.
Petra found me before the morning had come.
And she showed me the true visage of a god whose true name should have been destroyed millenia ago, in the ancient tongue of the Chaldeans and Babylonians, a savage, devouring god whose hunger for children and the innocent is never-ending… .
4. Shelter
1
They found nothing in the ditch on the side of the road— neither any people nor deer dying in the woods.
“Whatever it was, it was big and strong.”
“Brilliant deduction,” Michelle said.
“A bear, maybe,” Dash said.
“We got bears out here?” Danny asked.
Michelle flipped out her cell phone. The green light came up, and she began punching in numbers. “You have triple A, Dash?”
“No.”
“Who you callin’?” Mark asked.
Michelle turned her back to them.
Then she said, “Rachel? It’s ‘chelle. Listen, Dash wrecked his car out—no, we’re okay. Oh my god, I know,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper as she said stuff that Mark was sure had to do with what geeks they were and how she’d been stuck riding with them because Danny was too drunk to drive. Then her voice returned to normal. “No, no idea. We’re not far from some farmhouse. And a graveyard. Yep. We have a special gift for you. I’m not telling. Can you send your brother out to Route—Rachel? Rach? You’re breaking up. Damn it,” Michelle said, slapping her phone shut. She spun around. “You guys have a cell phone?”
“I’m technologically challenged at the moment,” Dash shrugged, and went to grab a beer from the back of the car. When he got there, scrambling around the backseat, he shouted, “Jesus, Danny, did you drink two six packs?”
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