If I just get to Danny’s jacket, Mark thinks. The lighter.
“Please,” Michelle is whimpering. “Dash, please. Don’t hurt me. Please. Oh god. Please.” Her “please” becomes the sound of bleating, and in a horrible way it’s funny, it sounds like a joke, but Mark knows it’s not.
Why doesn’t she try to run? Is it blocking her way? Mark estimates that he can get to the doorway, to where Danny’s body rests. He can grab the jacket and thrust his hand into the pockets. He can get the lighter, flick it up, and scare it away.
Scare that creature away.
“Oh, Michelle, baby,” it says. “I want to love you so badly. I want you to be my girl, don’t you know that?”
“Please,” she says such an awful tone that tears come to Mark’s eyes even as he takes a step toward the opposite comer of the room.
“Take my hand, Michelle, don’t be afraid,” it says. “I want to love all of you in every way.”
The sound changes—it feels like an alarm has gone off somewhere. A sound like hissing and spitting and the crack of a whip.
“No!” Michelle screams, “Oh my god, oh my god, god, god, god, god!” Her screams turn into giggles and jets of laughter. Mark races to Danny’s body, pushing through the wetness, tearing the jacket from what remains of him, sifting quickly through the pockets until he finds something cylindrical and hard.
The lighter.
Hang on, Michelle.
The sounds are wet and bubbling. Michelle is moaning, as if she has been swiftly gagged.
Mark turns, flicking the lighter. It doesn’t light.
Flick! Again no light. then it catches. A small flame erupts from the lighter. He cups it in his hand, a yellow and rosy glow around his palm. He calls out to it, but the noise—the splattering noise and that whining—has begun again.
Mark brings the flame up to see—
Shadows cast against the old bare wall of the room.
He sees what looks like the spread wings of a shiny beetle and long white and pink worms—or slender tentacles—moving between Dash’s body, which floats barely a foot in the air— holding Michelle—caressing her—she struggles against it—the worms inside her mouth, her nose, tearing her shirt off, scraping at her skin until it is flaps hanging down—the wormy tendrils shooting and pulsing from Dash’s mouth and eyes and ears— his ribcage opens like two doors creaking apart—and long feathery whips emerge and stroke her skin—Mark feels frozen in terror—the worms are wriggling, but they are from Dash’s ribcage—boring out from them, and feathery, barnacle-like fans—moving swiftly, tickling her breasts and sides—and her eyes are wild and the worm-appendages of the thing reach into her ears—and they are—
Mark shouts, “I have light! You have no power in the light!” He waves the flame around, his arm outstretched, his body taut. “I’ll set you on fire.”
He moves over to Dash, what Dash has become, to the beetle-like wings, four of them, spread wide, with a layer of nearly transparent wings in between. Bone in one hand, lighter in the other, the flame shooting up high. He tries to read the bone, but he can’t—not while Michelle is still…
But he tries—the symbols on the bone seem different from before. They seem to have smudged or moved around, and he can’t quite see them for the flickering light.
With the light, he can see the markings—the sores and pustules along Dash’s spine. Dash turns for a moment, his face covered with many small black eyes, and he says, his words rapid-fire and ripe with excitement, “The light has no power over me, Mark. Not once the incarnation has happened. All the world is white light. Once in the flesh, I’m indestructible. Unless you know the words. But you don’t, do you? You will never know them. You will never read the bone, will you? How can you? Only the priests who have studied for decades can remember them, can speak them.” And then the creature turns about to Michelle’s beatific and glowing form, the blood shining along her body, and begins devouring her like a spider feeding upon a wriggly fly caught in its web. “Oh, so delicious, such a de-leecious treat,” Dash says, his mouth foaming with white and red. Then, his opening body, like a mouth, covers her, like a Venus flytrap, like a devourer.
Shivering, Mark moves toward him and thrusts the flame against his neck, but the worms shoot out from beneath the wings and tear the lighter from his fingers.
The creature turns—its face bubbling with sores, its eyes blinking in unison. It regards Mark with some interest.
The wings close, and it floats inches downward until it touches the floor.
Then, with the dark that encircles the small yellow flame like a cloak, it shoots tendrils around Mark’s ribs. He presses against them, but he can’t pull free. It lifts him up, and he feels the invasive, parasitic wormy fingers moving against the holes in his ears, pressing onto his lips, forcing them open. Lower, his navel is stretching as the worms push inward. Wave after wave of nausea hits him.
The slick, wet tendrils pry the sacred bone from his fingers. What feel like bundles of worms thrust down the back of his throat. He feels the sharp jab against his stomach—
the bone—
Going into him.
Dash’s voice, nearly sweet, whispering along with the dreadful humming of the wings as they move rapidly, “1 won’t let you hurt for long, Marco. 1 want you and me to be together. We can do anything now. Anything. And we’ll bring the Nowhere into daylight. We’ll tear The Veil.”
2
Dying? Blood is pouring from his stomach and legs.
Dash, in the dark, seeming human, seeming not to have a thousand wormy tentacle arms and barnacle feathers, lifts up Mark. Lifts him with two arms. Broken bones shift; freezing pain. No screams left in him. Mark is sure now that he screamed the whole time the creature was slaughtering Michelle.
Through the narrow hall. Smell of fresh air. Outside again. Sky is clear. Moonlight, very little, but enough.
Dash strips off Mark’s shirt, and with his fingernails scratches markings on his chest and stomach. “You can be like this, too. Just like we said. We never have to be apart. We can be in the Nowhere.”
“No.” Mark tries to lift his head, but can’t. “Please, 1 need help, Dash.”
“The words,” Dash says. “Just remember them. Your body will die soon.” He lets out what can only be a sigh of contentment. “None of this has to change who we are. This is just the god thing. It’s what gods have to do. Look, Mark, 1 know things now. I gained knowledge. Yeah, it hurts some, and part of me feels bad, but when it takes me over, man, you have got to experience this. It’s like …. like fucking life. Like there’s no darkness at all. There’s a whole other world you can see when you’re like this. You can see things without your eyes. You have feelers. You have these parts of you that can stretch out and find things without even opening your eyes. And them? Michelle and Danny? Shit, they’re in another place. Death isn’t bad for them. They’re the food of the gods, that’s all. They’re chow. Gods eat life. That’s how it goes. The god of grass eats grass and the god of the flesh eats flesh. You can’t have life without this. It’s something we’ve all gotten away from, but the worshipers, the priests of the Nowhere, they’ve known. They’ve kept the ritual. They’ve put themselves at one with the gods to do this. We are anointed ones, we are gods in flesh. You can’t be afraid. You can’t look at this with the same eyes you had before, not once it’s happened. It’s stupid and human of you to do it. When you die, you’re not going over there. You’re going to come back here. Do you know what the gods are? Do you? Do you?”
A hiss that might’ve been contempt came from Mark’s lips as he looks up at the dark figure.
“The gods are creatures, just like us, but they don’t have boundaries. They reshape themselves at will. They let their hunger loose. Their lusts. Their wants. We think things happen because we do them or there are natural laws, but Marco, there aren’t natural laws—the gods make things happen, they make it all go. But their names are power. 1 have the power. It’s within me,�
� Dash says, passion swelling in his voice. “1 can be anything, Marco. Anything.”
3
Mark, in the muddy grass, at the edge of the grave. He looks up at what once had been Dash.
What is still Dash.
The moonlight is soft around his face. Dash has a beautiful face. Dash has an ugly face.
Michelle. Danny. Gone. In less than an hour.
It still looks enough like Dash, with his hair, stringy from rain, matted with mud. His longish jaw and his eyes that seemed to shine even in the absence of light. Just two eyes. Two human eyes. No thousand eyes of some monster. Darkness around his lips. Blood?
“You’re dying,” Dash says. “Don’t be afraid of it. Just say the name. Just say it, Marco.”
“Mmm,” Mark says. “Nuh. No.”
“We never have to live anywhere but in the Nowhere again. Not ever.”
“You’re dead.” Mark isn’t sure if Dash can even hear him. Mark feels so weak, with his life draining from him.
“The name,” Dash says. “Remember? You say it as you die. The first pan. 1 say the other half of the name after you breathe your last. I know all their names now, Marco. I know each of the gods, and their wonderful hungers and the way they look—I can see them all around us. We are their children. I have them incarnate within me, too. I can be a thousand different things. I can be a hornet or dragon, Marco. I can bring up a wind or burn with fire. I can see clearly, more clearly than I could in daylight, see with more than just these useless eyes. 1 can smell my sight, I can feel sight. You will, too!
“We can go to Rachel’s party. We don’t have to miss it. We can bring her the puppy. I’m not going to hurt the puppy. It’s not like that. What’s inside me now, it has meaning. It doesn’t want puppies and turtles and goats and chickens. It wants more than that. Everyone will be there. Everyone from our class. And we’ll show them that we’re not just there for their pecking order and social put-downs. We’ll be there to show them the faces of the gods. We could even bring some more of them back, if we’re careful with their bodies. We could make all of us live forever, if you really want. I mean, yeah, it’s too late for Michelle and Danny, but I let it out too much. I hadn’t learned how to pull back on the reins yet. But I think I understand now.
“And the Nowhere is with us. They think I’m a messiah. They’ll know you as my lieutenant. We’ll change everything. Everything in one night if we have to. We’ll pull back The Veil. You and me, both. After you say the name. And then you’ll be here again. We can fly now. We can swim under water for hours. We can turn to liquid or move within the bark of a tree. We can become the darkness. Or light. And it’ll be you and me. Brothers. In the Nowhere. We’ll be gods here, Marco. We’ll do things we couldn’t have imagined before. Before it was just a game. Now it’s real, and we’re real, and the others, the people in the world, your mother and father and mine and the teachers at the Gardner School, they’re the unreal ones. We can go on to Rachel’s next. Just the name. Let me whisper it to you.”
Mark closes his eyes.
Soft rain Ming. Just drips of it. On his face. Cooling tain.
The feeling of Dash’s wet slippery hand touching Mark’s face.
“The name,” Dash says, as gentle as the rain. “Just say it for me. I love you so much. Just say it.” Dash may have tears in his eyes, or perhaps it is the raindrops tailing gently on Mark’s face.
He opens his eyes. The shadow of Dash’s face is all he sees. The smell of his breath—the same stink of the dead body, its flesh torn open.
Mark mutters something.
“Marco?”
Mark says it as loud as he can. It comes out a whisper. “You. Not my brother. 1 don’t love you. I don’t want to be with you after I die … far away from you.”
All his energy in those words. He feels smug. Numb and smug. A worm of pain somewhere in his gut, but otherwise, he’s ready to go. In the arms of Death.
Mark wants to close himself up.
To die without remembering the name.
To die without Dash’s whisper against his ear.
The image of Michelle’s face, covered with tears. Michelle, who was beautiful and wonderful, only Mark couldn’t see it because he’d let Dash infect him all those years. Michelle, who was not stupid. Michelle, who was not trashy and snotty all at once. She was a beautiful human being, a shining human being, who had deserved more than eighteen lousy years on this earth. She had deserved a life after high school, a life after college. She might’ve become something magnificent if she’d had the chance.
He loves her right then. That night. That moment of dread, of fear. He knows what love is. It isn’t sex and longing and a feeling. It isn’t the empty thing he had thought, of wants and needs and kindness. It is deeper than anything he thought before—deeper than all the philosophies that Dash had spouted, the empty words, the babblings of Wacey Crossing, it is richer than any of that. It is the understanding that in the extreme of life, all of them are connected somehow. All of them are within the same skin. That is love. That is what love is. Not what Dash had sold him on. Not this … darkness , . . this death god. Danny and Michelle, swept from the earth as if they didn’t matter. He had loved them, just because he had understood how he was brother to both of them. In that awful moment. He is connected to them by the invisible cord of humanity, a cord he has never felt tugging at him before, but now it is all he feels.
Dash has trampled all that with his magic and words and runes. Stupid figures scratched on bones and somewhere in his mind. Words from some best-forgotten tongue. A tongue no doubt cut out by invaders and new religions that supplanted the darker ones, the ones that burnt children alive and devoured the innocent, and no matter what Dash said about cults and religions, they were more advanced than what was worshipped in the Nowhere.
The people of the Nowhere. Insane people who believed they were priests and worshipers, but they were merely spreaders of filth. They were like worms and flies themselves—traveling to shit and making a home within it. Dash had become some not-dead creature that fed on human flesh and had no conscience, followed by disgusting people within a perverse tradition, a twisting of the universal laws of brotherhood and sisterhood by which they were connected to all human beings, and by the ultimate law of life, to which every creature of flesh, every stalk of grass, was bound.
Dash had his high IQ twisted into triviality, into a monster’s basic needs of hunger and domination. That was all. It wasn’t God, or even god.
It was idiotic and yes, evil, Mark thinks, Evil, as he fights for air—a heavy weight of something upon his chest, as if stones are being piled upon him. Evil. Nasty. Stupid. With the mind of Death, and nothing more.
Dash is holding him now, cradling him, mouth to ear, practically kissing his ear as he begins to whisper something that Mark can’t quite make out.
Dying. Please take me, God. Take me now. Break me out of life. Crush my spirit and body and slam me into another place. Or just cut off whatever it is that life is within me. Keep me from the Nowhere.
But even as he dies, Mark, without wanting to, without desiring this, parts his lips.
No! something within him fights against it. Don’t say it. Don’t say the names!
But his flesh is at war with his heart, and he realizes that Dash’s remark had been true: The flesh remembers the names. Mark utters the names. The unspeakable names of the gods of the Nowhere, of The Veil. Like the worst profanity coming from his tongue-Permission to be called back.
He cannot remember the words that would stop this.
Only the names that would begin it.
His life slips away, just as if it were dropping into a pool. A rock in water, hitting the surface and slipping down into the murky depths. He’s angry as he goes down to a place where the lights dim and flash and dim.
The lights are nearly out.
He can’t even sense that he is breathing, or that Dash holds him now. Dash, singing some painful song in an unknown tongue a
s if he’d been singing it his whole life.
Mark has a sense of the others that are there—the priests and believers of the Nowhere. Standing in a circle around them both.
The part of Mark that still has a speck of thought and life feels terror and calm all at once, knowing that after he goes, that thing that Dash has become will hold him in his arms and intone the other part of the names, the response—the litany— until Mark’s eyes, once again, open.
PART THREE: THE PARTY
1
An hour or so later, several miles away, a girl of nineteen, her arms around a boy of roughly the same age, says, “Oh my god.”
The lights in the house go out suddenly.
The boy kisses her again, his breath all beer. “Rachel, you know what? I hope we spend every night together this summer. Our last summer together.”
“Damn, I’m not even sure where the fuse box is,” the girl says, pushing her boyfriend away.
“It’s a brown-out.”
“It’s just a black-out.”
“Lights!” someone shouts, laughing. “Somebody hit the lights!”
“What happened to the music?”
“Party must be over. Nice hint, Rachel!”
“Yeah, you want us to leave, you can just ask us.”
“It must be the storm,” somebody says, a drunken slur to his voice.
“Looks like somebody forgot to pay the bill.”
“It must’ve been the storm.”
“Yeah, or maybe a burglar.”
“I love it in the dark. There’s more to kiss.”
“Perv!”
“Got a flashlight?”
“In my car. I’ll get it.”
“Jesus, it’s nearly two. I better get home.”
“We’ve got candles down in the basement, and some under the sink in the kitchen,” Rachel says.
“Get your hands off me, Josh. And go get me some more beer.”
“Somebody’s knocking at the door. Somebody get it.”
“No, something at the window. That a seagull? What the hell is that?”
Four Dark Nights Page 27
