Nightmare Magazine Issue 4

by Matt Williamson

  “Who do you think buys this crap?” I karate-kicked the troll in the side, not disrupting its course in the slightest, though its eyes flickered redly.

  “Nobody,” TK said.

  “I don’t know,” Molly said. “I think it’s cool.”

  “Molly thinks it’s cool!” Doria minced about, affecting the guise of a connoisseur. “It’s so . . . so relevant, so . . .”

  “It’s absolutely relevant,” I said. “The things going on today, the ancient magical shit that’s reappearing . . . like these sculptures, the beast. And the new stuff. The white buses, the people with machines inside them. The fucking mind control exerted by Chairman Channel Twenty-five. It’s all starting to come at once. Witches, mad science, stupid magic. All the things that were going to happen, that might have happened, are being crammed into our days. A sort of pre-apocalyptic meltdown. And it’s going to get weirder before it’s through.”

  They gaped at me, waiting for a punch line.

  “It’s still crap, though,” I said. “We don’t have to deal with it any different from anything else.”

  I set down my forty, unsheathed the hunting knife I kept strapped to my calf and began hacking at the troll, slicing thick shavings from its bulging forehead, stabbing it until its eyes ceased to glow. The clerk yelled at us from the doorway. I started toward him, but James caught me from behind and wrestled me back.

  “Jesus! You’re a fucking wildman!” TK said as we piled into the car.

  “Did you see the guy’s face?” said Doria. “He was tripping!”

  I was breathing fast, light-headed, but I got the engine going and jammed it; we sprayed gravel past the front of the store and fishtailed onto the highway.

  “We should get off this road,” James said.

  I slowed, braked, and made a U-turn.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

  “I left my forty back there,” I told him.

  Molly rested her head on my shoulder and sang a la-la-la song.

  “Fucking wildman!” said TK happily.

  “You can consider it a lesson,” I said to James.

  “What’re you talking about?” he asked. “What kind of lesson?”

  “A lesson in risk management,” I said. “And in beer conservation.”

  A couple of hours after I had climbed onto the rock, I began to feel a vibration at my back—barely detectable, at first, and erratic, growing stronger and steadier. I thought it was the beating of my heart and ignored it; but then it stopped, starting up again a few minutes later, stronger this time, and occurring at such lengthy intervals I knew it could be no heart. I laid my head against the rock and listened. At length I managed to separate a faint thudding noise from the crunch of the waves.

  The beast was trying to break free—that much was clear—and it was making headway, for I had never heard that noise before. I wanted to be far from Droughans Beach should it succeed. But as I thought how to organize our flight, how to weld my drugged friends into an efficient force, I began to feel a kinship with the thing, a shared sense of purpose. We both hated the world and its people. Each morning they choked down another dose of everything’s-fine or whatever bland preachment they had been induced to swallow, and went forth to mindfucking jobs where they would make a paper sandwich of some poor bastard’s blood and bones; to fitness clubs where they believed they could perfect the unperfectable; to movies that persuaded them this death-in-life was preferable to an existence in which they dared to confront the truth of the human condition; and all the while a horrid tide was rising higher and higher, until one day they would look out their windows to find streets choked with red water and corpses, and, mistaking the sight for normalcy, for another cold-meat Sunday with the living-room dead, they would open their doors and drown.

  Here now was the antidote to all that.

  I had an epiphany—I pictured the beast sated with killing, the whole world in its belly, falling asleep on the sand, going into labor and dying mid-birth, assaulted by giants come down from the hills where they had been hiding to rip the fetus out and lock it away in its prison rock, and I saw the process of civilization beginning again, the good and bad of it, leading ultimately to a moment such as this. I understood it was my duty to assist in the delivery of the new cycle on this primordial beach with magical light streaming up from the tide pool and no one to witness. I inched my way along the rock, stopping now and then to listen. The thudding grew louder and at last I found the crack the beast had made. It ran straight up the face—I could not see its end or judge how deep it went. I unsheathed my knife and reached with it into the crack, pried with the tip, with the edge, digging crumbles of stone from around a harder object. I was at it for the longest time. Someone called my name, but I continued to pry and dig.

  “Hey! What you doing?” Molly flung her arms about my neck from behind; when I offered no response, she said, “TK wanted me to go down on him.”

  I felt a flicker of annoyance. “Did you?”

  “No! I’m being more . . . like what you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  I withdrew the knife, reached into the crack with my hand and touched something colder than the surrounding stone. A metal projection, I thought. Part of a bulky mechanism.

  “To respect myself,” Molly said. “I was trying to be more self-respectful. TK really wanted it, so I came to find you. So he’d leave me alone.” She turned my face toward hers and kissed me. “Let’s go up on the cliff again.”

  In the moonlight, her pupils were enormous and her expression flowed from seductive to deranged to stunned, reflecting the action of the drugs she had ingested.

  “Later.” I reinserted the knife into the crack and pried at the metal, felt it shift the slightest bit.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listen,” I told her.

  She cocked an ear and said, “Listen to what?”

  “Try to tune out the sound of the waves. You can hear it.”

  She listened more attentively. “I think . . . maybe I hear something.”

  I encouraged her to put hear ear to the crack.

  Again she listened. “I think . . . Yeah. It’s kind of a . . . a . . .”

  “A thudding.”

  “Yeah! I hear it!” She looked at me in alarm. “What the fuck?”

  “It’s trying to get out,” I said.

  She was bewildered for a second or two, then her eyes widened. “The beast, you mean? That can’t be . . .”

  A rending noise broke from the crack and I pulled her back, edged away along the face of the rock, for now that my part in things was done, I was afraid to see the issue of my labor. Despite all I felt about the world and its worth, I feared for my life and for Molly’s. And TK’s. He strolled into view, doubtless looking for Molly, and stood by the tide pool, staring down into the glowing water. He appeared to be picking his nose.

  The thudding grew louder, more insistent, and, as if in sympathy with such relentlessness, a wave detonated against the seaward end of the rock, showering us with spray. Molly’s shriek must have outvoiced the rush of water, for TK glanced toward us, and it was at that moment the beast broke free. I had expected a gush of blackness, the wall to shatter, slabs of stone to rain down, but all I saw was a dark shape eeling from the crack. It seemed a pipe had broken within the rock and was leaking oil. Yet as it continued to pour out, the beast gathered its substance into a more fearsome formlessness. It was fluid, it was living smoke, it was power adapted to the black medium in which it had been steeped. It boiled up into a cloud three times our height, and then condensed into a shape no bigger than a man’s. It seemed to turn to Molly and me, though it did not truly turn—it rearranged its parts, moving its front to its back and hanging a face on its inky turbulence, a parody of rage with shadowy fangs and eyes emerging from a storm-cloud chaos . . . then it went flowing over the broken ground toward TK. I sprang after it, shouting a warning, but I was a foot short, a split-second late. By t
he time I dropped to my knees beside him, the beast had condensed a portion of its substance into an edge and sliced him across the throat. He lay with his head in the water, his blood roiling out in a cloud that crimsoned the light cast by the submerged lamp.

  Grief, fear, and urgency were mixed in me. The beast had merged with the night. I could no longer see it, though I felt its presence along my spine. I shouted at Molly to stay where she was and jogged down the beach, peering left and right. The tide pool dwindled to an eerie chute of red light. The rock became a shadow and the giant’s jawbone was lost to sight. After I had gone, I’d estimate, a quarter-mile, I regretted having left Molly alone, but I decided to keep searching a while longer, and shortly afterward I spotted two figures lying together in the sand. Not sleeping, though. One waved an arm, as if describing the wide arc of his existence. It had to be James. Though restrained in my presence, whenever he thought himself unobserved he was given to dramatic gesture.

  I broke into a run and James came to his knees, wearing a look of terror. He must have misapprehended my intentions—I cried out, seeking to reassure him. Doria, too, got to her knees and screamed as the beast, materializing from the dark, flowed over them, a furious smoke that hid them from view. I flung myself atop it, stabbing and slashing with the knife, but it was impervious to my attack, and, when it had done with them, it flung me aside as if I were nothing and dissipated on the night wind, leaving behind a bloody human wreckage. I did not linger over their bodies—they each bore a dozen wounds that might alone have been fatal, cruel gouges made by teeth hardened from the beast’s all but immaterial flesh, and I had no time to mourn. My mind was a flurry of red and black, a confusion of dim urges and fears, but I knew where the beast had gone. Molly. She would, I realized, have stayed by the rock for some minutes, but then, overcome by fright, she would have headed for the stairs leading up from the beach.

  I ran, unmindful of my safety. She was all I had left, all that remained of my shabby kingdom, and I ran myself breathless in hopes of saving her. I felt the beast’s sides heave, panting in its self-made shadow, and knew it to be near. She had started to climb the second tier of steps when I caught up to her. Seeing me, she sagged against the railing and said in a helpless voice, “Oh, no.”

  “It’ll be all right if you don’t run,” I told her.

  She said something I didn’t catch and then, “God! This isn’t happening.”

  I eased close, not wanting to alarm her with a sudden move, realizing I must be a sight, covered in blood, and that she, like James and Doria, may have misinterpreted my appearance.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said.

  “I saw you,” she said. “What you did to TK . . .”

  “You can hardly see at all, you took so much acid and speed,” I said. “What you saw was me trying to protect TK. It was the beast killed him. But you’re going to be all right. It’s grateful to me for releasing it. At least it hasn’t tried to kill me yet. As long as it knows you’re with me, it won’t hurt you.”

  A flicker of belief showed in her face, but only a flicker.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Please don’t run! I understand you’re scared, but you don’t have to be scared of me.”

  “Okay.”

  I noticed a tension in her body and said, “Don’t!”

  She sprang up the steps.

  This time I made no attempt to intervene.

  I ran down the stair and out onto the beach, howling in grief and rage. I held my arms up to the jolly moon balanced on the peak of the prison rock, begging for blood to rain down and for everything to cease. I flung the knife into the ocean and fell on the sand and there I remained until the gulls made their first circling flights. When the sky had gone the deep holy blue of pre-dawn, I went to the edge of the water and washed myself clean. I was almost empty, without purpose or direction. And then, glancing inland, I saw the beast gather itself into the form of giant and go striding off over the hills, toward the mountains beyond. I was disappointed—I had hoped for the destruction of cities. The mountains were a place of rest, a country for old men. Yet I had no choice but to follow.

  It’s hard to be hopeful these days. I cling to life like an ant to a leaf blown along a storm drain, watching the world rip itself apart. I am old now, not so old as the decrepit old man we met on the beach that night, but old enough to value certain things I once perceived as foolish and unworthy. I don’t go out much, don’t have many friends. I live in a small mountain town with my family. My wife, a magical creature, though she would strenuously deny it . . . Each morning she walks out the door and vanishes. What she does with her days, I have no idea, but when she returns home of an evening, she brings with her otherworldly scents and I will discover scraps of paper in her purse on which are written the fragments of wicked spells. She hisses when I make love to her, she grunts in a language unknown to me and sometimes locks her teeth in the meat of my shoulder.

  I edit the town’s weekly paper, which I also founded. Each week I write a column citing some symptom of our cultural decay that is a predictor of doom and madness, columns that cause great amusement among my readership. They email excerpts to friends in other towns and label me an eccentric, though lately, since I have won several regional prizes for journalism, they have been more respectful. Despite this, I know the prizes are awarded for my idiosyncratic style, that hardly anyone listens to me, that few believe in beasts, in apocalypse—they believe, instead, that they will pass through the black wall toward which we are all speeding, that it is permeable and may even form the gateway to a better life. Thus the paper no longer interests me, and for some time now I have devoted the bulk of my energies to my son, a sturdy eleven-year-old.

  I don’t entirely understand what the cycle of giants and children and beasts means in the scheme of things, but I suspect that my son will understand. Whereas my father’s training was haphazard, born of his intemperate nature, mine is carefully thought-out, scrupulously planned. I beat my son, I lock him away, I control his reading, I keep him friendless, but all apportioned so that these torments have formed a bond between us. I have told him that it is done to strengthen him, and he has accepted the pain as part of a crucial teaching. Day by day he grows more stoic, more malleable, and I expect soon there will be no need for discipline. I have promised to give him a woman when he is twelve and he exerts himself toward that goal. I have promised other enticements as well, criminal pleasures such as may be enjoyed in the adjoining towns. Perhaps when he is a man, he will strike me down, but he will have a sound reason for doing so and not strike prematurely, as did I. In all ways, he will act with a greater circumspection.

  I tell him that the beast he frees will be more powerful than mine, that it will achieve terrible things, wonderful things. He is intrigued by the possibility, but not quite certain I have told him the truth. Last week, we were eating sundaes at the new Baskin-Robbins over in Ridgeview, a hangout for junior high kids similar to those whom I have prepared him to dominate, and he asked for the hundredth time, at least, if I thought the beast was real.

  “Of course it was real,” I said.

  “Do you think it was real like, you know, different from you? Separate? Or do you think it just worked your arms and legs and made you do things?”

  “In here . . .” I tapped my chest. “I know it was separate. Not that it makes a difference.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  “Somewhere around. Taking a nap in the woods, maybe. Snoring and all covered with gray hair like your old man. It’s retired. Once a beast leaves you, it’s done its duty.”

  We had placemats that depicted, against a blue background, cartoon butterflies hovering around a banana split, and my son began jabbing out the butterflies’ startled round eyes with a ball-point pen. “I don’t ever want my beast to leave,” he said moodily.

  “It’s bound to leave eventually. But if you keep up the good work . . .”

  “I will!”

  �
��. . . It’ll be with you a long time.”

  The waitress, a pretty brunette with tattooed bracelets on her wrists, refilled my coffee. He stared at her and once she was back behind the counter, I asked, “Do you like that one?”

  He nodded, embarrassed. “Uh-huh!”

  “Tattoos are a clear signal.” I ruffled his hair, sparking a grin. “You’ve got a good eye.”

  We ate for a time, not saying much, and then he asked me to tell him about the man I’d met on the beach after my friends died.

  “You don’t need to hear that again,” I said, but I was pleased, because that part of my story went to the core of my teaching.

  “Come on, Dad!”

  “Okay.” I slurped my coffee. “I was at the water’s edge, I’d just finished washing off the blood when this man, a big man, came along the beach. He had a fancy fishing pole and big tackle box. He was planning to do some surf casting, I guess. He stopped beside me and stared. And then he said, ‘That’s a lot of blood on you, son.’

  “‘Where you see blood?’ I asked.

  “‘All in your hair. On the side there.’

  “I touched my hair and my fingers came away gooey with blood. I knew right away I had to kill him. If I didn’t, he’d call the cops. But the beast was gone, I’d thrown away my knife, and the man was immense. I was scared, I wasn’t sure I had the strength or the will to do it. And then he asked whose blood it was, and I replied, ‘It’s mine.’ I wasn’t trying to lie my way out of trouble. The blood belonged to people like me, people the man wouldn’t spit on if they were dying of thirst, and I was speaking for them. I wasn’t telling a lie. That made me strong. I took him down and kicked him in the head until his skull broke. I had his brains on my shoes. I puked all over myself after, but I did what I had to.”

  He dribbled hot fudge onto his cream with the edge of his spoon. “I sorta don’t get it.”

  “You get the important parts,” I said. “What’s that I say when you don’t get all of something and you need to think about it more?”

  He sat up smartly, like a little soldier, and said, “Consider it a lesson!”