by A. L. Mengel
Ned walked into the room.
“Who is it?” Ned asked, rising from where he was leaning on the bathroom counter, getting closer to Martin and trying to peer over his shoulder. Martin waved his hand over his shoulder, trying to brush Ned away. “Your breath stinks!” he said.
“Who is it?” Ned asked again, more persistently.
“You see Good Morning Miami last week?” he asked, turning his head to look at Ned, peering over his reading glasses. Ned shook his head.
“Well,” Martin continued and fidgeted. “This here is Claire Winchester.” He nodded over to the body.
“No shit!” Rickson exclaimed, looking over at the body, noticing the limbs splayed in all different directions. Her pale white corpse sat on the commode as if she were taking a crap, her head thrown back, her brown hair mussed and sticky with blood. Her legs were spread wide and in two different directions, and there were blood stains all over her fancy grey skirt and coat.
Martin shook his head. “Why would this bitch want to take her life? I know she was at the top of her career. It just doesn’t make sense, at least on the forefront.”
“Where’s the note?”
“Not located yet,” Martin replied. Then he shot his glance over at Ned. “And I know what you’re thinking – but all my years as a homicide detective tells me that this is a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“But we don’t know that,” Ned said. “We have to consider all the angles.”
Martin walked back over to the body, leaning over it, lowering his face close to Claire’s. He carefully inspected the wound. The mouth was ripped apart, the edges of the face hanging in shreds; the blood was still dripping down into a small pool beneath the commode. “Let’s bag her and get her down,” Martin said, his white gloved hand brushing some hair away that was covering her eyes.
“Oh shit!” Martin exclaimed, stepping back and almost falling backwards. “Holy shit look at this Ned! I ain’t seen anything like this before!”
Claire’s left eye was gone, and when the hair was moved from her face, they could see the right eye was hanging out of its socket. But it wasn’t the right eye that Martin fell backwards in disgust over. It was the left eye. Or lack thereof.
The left socket was drenched in bright red blood, still oozing from the pink fleshy socket, and small shreds of flesh hung from the socket as the blood periodically oozed down the cheek.
“What the hell -?” Ned said, leaning in closer.
“Now what did this to her?” Martin asked. He summoned for the photographer to take additional photographs.
“What a minute, Marty,” Ned said, moving in closer to the face. “Look there,” he said, pointing to the left eye. “See the movement in there?”
“Let me see,” Martin said, moving in closer to look.
Amidst the flesh of the eye, the mounds of tissue and rivers of blood, there was something small and white and tubular that was moving – pulsating. The two men dabbled over what it could be, but both agreed that it did not appear to be part of Claire Winchester.
“Do you think its post mortem muscle spasms?”
“Those ain’t no muscle spasms!” Martin exclaimed, turning to face Ned. Martin’s eyes were as wide as plates. “There’s some little fuckers moving around in her eye sockets!”
“What are you talking about?” Ned asked, moving in closer to where Martin was crouching over the body. Ned steadied himself, looking down and noticing that his foot was directly in the middle of Lake Claire.
Martin fished through his pocket. “What the heck did I do with my pen?”
Ned handed Martin a pen.
“Now lookie here,” Martin said, taking the pen close to Claire’s eye socket; he drew it close to where the corner of Claire’s eye once met the top of her nose, and he took the point of the pen and touched one of the white tubes. It moved upwards into the top of her eye socket. “See!” Martin exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell you?! Look at that – the fucker went right up into her!”
Ned moved closer, hovering over Martin, and looked for himself. Martin was right. The worm – or whatever it was – disappeared under the top of the skull inside Claire’s eye socket the moment Martin disturbed it with his pen.
“What we have here is some pretty fast fuckin’ decomposition,” Martin said, standing up and brushing off his pants. Ned stood with him.
“No way,” Ned said, shaking his head. “She’s not decomposed at all.” He touched her face with his hand, almost caressing her cheek as if he was her lover. “Rigor mortis hasn’t even set in. She just died.”
“So what are you telling me? She was walking around full of worms?”
“I don’t know, Marty. I just plain don’t know.”
The two men walked down the hallway of Claire’s condo, to the front living room, and Marty plopped down on the sofa. “Let’s get her out of here,” he said, reaching in his breast pocket for a cigarette.
But Ned didn’t respond. He was craning his head back towards the bathroom, listening. “You hear that?” he asked.
Marty paused and sat still on the sofa. Yes he heard. Something was moving back there.
Rickson crept around the corner. “Don’t move,” He quietly drew his weapon. “I think someone may have been here listening the entire time.”
Movement was coming from the bathroom which the men could tell for sure. A rustling. A scraping.
Dragging of feet.
Ned crept up against the living room wall, peering over the edge and looking down the dark hallway. The golden hue of the light emanated from the bathroom at the end of the hall, and he saw a shadow. He turned around to look at Ned. “There’s someone in the bathroom!” he whispered.
Marty rose to his feet without making a sound. He managed to lightly creep over behind Ned, with a lightness on his feet not expected from a man of his girth – but rather of a dancer or ballerina – and he drew his pistol as well. “Wait until he comes out,” he whispered to Ned, his lips not far from Ned’s ear.
Ned didn’t move – he stood still as a stone statue, weapon cocked and ready, pointed down the hall – his eyes fixated on the moving shadow in the center of the box of light on the floor. Was he waiting for them to strike?
They waited for minutes until the minutes seemed like hours, all the while listening to the shadowy figure moving about the bathroom; Ned’s eyes remained fixated on the light on the floor in front of the bathroom, unsure of whether to charge down the hallway or pull back and wait for him to come out.
And then the figure crashed out into the hallway, so fast that it collapsed into the opposite wall so hard that it fell through.
Ned and Marty took that as their cue and stormed down the hall, pistols aimed at the figure. But they stopped a few feet short of the damage.
It was Claire.
She struggled back to her feet, blood dripping from her injuries, running down her face and head in bright red lines creating a roadmap effect.
She screamed and lunged toward the two men.
Ned and Marty retreated to the living room and kept their guns pointed at Claire. She turned to face them, the daylight filtering in from the living room highlighting the hanging flesh from her face.
She stopped for a moment at the threshold of the living room, and a deep, chesty groan emitted from her throat. “Look at her!” Ned called, not moving his pistol. Marty looked and grimaced. What they had seen in the bathroom was true. A small white worm crawled right out of her bloody socket and made its way through the blood down her left cheek.
Claire’s groan got louder and she lunged forward again, met by a barrage of bullets. Deep and throaty, she uttered one intelligible word: “Tramos…”
She came to rest in a pool of fresh blood from fresh wounds on her formerly white living room carpet.
The condo became eerily silent once Claire stopped moving. Marty broke the silence. “What the fuck was that? And what is Tramos?” he asked, panting and gasping for breath. Both men paced back and
forth around the room, alternatively looking each other in the eyes and at Claire’s bloodied and mangled body.
The silence was broken by the wail of a siren, and not before long, there were several officers at the door, carrying a black body bag. Ned sat down on the sofa next to Marty as the police officers scoured the condo gathering evidence, and the two men couldn’t take their eyes off the body, even as it was zipped up and hoisted onto a gurney.
“What the fuck were those white worms?” Marty asked, turning to face Ned. “And how the fuck did she survive that bullet wound?! That’s impossible!” He slapped his knee and lit a cigarette. Ned got up and retreated out to the front balcony. He leaned against the railing and looked at the parking lot below, never taking his eyes off of the gurney. Marty joined him shortly thereafter.
Ned’s mouth gaped open as he watched the body being lifted up into the ambulance. Marty looked over at Ned. “What?” he asked. “What do you see?”
Ned pointed and shook his head.
And then Marty’s cigarette fell out of his lips, dropping to the parking lot. He saw the same thing, he and Ned and Rickson all saw what the officers and EMT’s seemed to have been missing.
Movement inside the body bag.
*~*~*
PART TWO
THE ATTACK OF THE WHITE WORMS
CHAPTER TWELVE
Several fires were set on the same night.
There was an explosion at an office building in Coral Gables; and a stately mansion on Andelusia Avenue in the same town burned to its cinder and stucco shell. Then, just before dawn, there was another explosion at the newest nightclub in Miami Beach. The fire at the nightclub ignited just before closing time, but the club was still packed with people.
But, for some reason, nobody seemed to notice what was happening – the fires, the chaos, the trouble. For no one knew if what was reported on the nightly news was really taking place, or just hearsay.
*~*~*
Nobody knows when the first white worm was seen slithering down the rain soaked streets of Miami. But everyone knows that they were giant, they swallowed people and cars, and buildings, and they starting coming each night.
And nobody knows when the bodies started piling up. But slither, the worms did. And pile up, the bodies did. Towards the hour of sunset, when the light was fading into a fiery orange sky, when the doors of the shops would close and the people would retreat into their houses for the evening, was the hour.
Doors slammed. Blinds were drawn hastily. And the streets would be deserted.
There would be no more traffic. The stop lights would still change, from red, to yellow and then to green…but it did not matter. No one was there to see the lights change. No cars on the road meant no people, and that’s how it would be every night at dusk.
Because at dusk is when they would come.
*~*~*
In Paris in the nineteenth century, Delia Arnette was a shining performer.
Each night, she stole the stage and was the highlight of the show. She arrived in Paris right around the time that Vaudeville made its appearance, in the nineteenth century; she danced in the night clubs and headlined the razzle-dazzle burlesque shows, she proudly wore sequins and fringe, and feather headdresses.
At the conclusion of one particular evening, she marched towards center stage as the thunder of applause and a chorus of cheers rang in her ears. On that particular night, there was one woman, in the back of the theatre, who Delia had noticed just as she was about to exit the stage. She caught just a glimpse of the woman as the lights in front were extinguished. When she got behind the curtain, she peered through the crack, looking into the audience, which was clearing out of the chairs, looking for the woman.
And she did not see the mysterious woman again until much later, later in the night, but it was that woman who had become her maker. And then, centuries later, as her protégé called her in a frantic worry, she knew that she must be there for Darius. For she knew that it was her same fate that he now shares; and that he must not perish. And it was for that reason, that she was committed to him, day or night.
*~*~*
Darius awoke in a cold sweat to the shrill, piercing ring of his cell phone in the silent, dark night. He sat up slowly, and clutched his forehead.
It had to be late.
Who would be calling this late? And then the phone stopped. And Darius flopped back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.
And seconds later, the phone rang again, just as loud against the silence in the room. Darius shot up this time, and swung his legs out from the bed and onto the cold floor. He looked at the clock. Only nine thirty.
“Hello Delia.”
Delia had a touch of concern in her voice. “Darius, I know you were sleeping. But have you watched the news?”
He fished through the covers for the remote and aimed it towards the television. “No, what is going on?”
“Just look at channel 3.”
Darius found the station, and there was a commercial advertising a local restaurant. Shortly after, the news returned, as the anchor was superimposed on a dark, fiery scene. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes,” Delia said. “But it’s not just Antoine’s place. It’s Sacrafice, and there was an explosion in Coral Gables.”
“Oh shit,” Darius said, reaching for a cigarette. “Do you think they found it?”
Delia paused for a moment and Darius held the phone in front of his face for a minute and examined the display. He quickly put it back to his ear. “Delia?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Did they find it?”
“I don’t know, Darius. I just don’t know. What I do know is that they removed a body just recently, and then soon after – boom!”
“Where are you Delia? I need to get dressed. Can I come meet you?”
“Usual spot?”
“Yes.” Darius ended the call, tossed the phone on the bed, and grabbed his jeans. It was going to be a long night. He had to get to Antoine’s. There was too much there that could be exposed.
*~*~*
Darius pressed the ignition button and the engine roared to life. He didn’t bother to check the rearview mirror, because he would have to look at his face. His sunken eyes. The lines down his cheeks. Young mortals weren’t supposed to age this fast, were they?
He tossed the car into drive and pulled away, screeching the tires.
As he drove across the city towards Andelusia Avenue, he remembered the last time that he was at Antoine’s. It was shortly after Darius had arrived in Miami. The time when the darkness and storms remained, swallowed the sun, and seemed to cover the city in an impenetrable shroud of darkness.
I am coming for you.
There was only one face that permeated his thoughts. There was only one, who the last time he saw, was burned to ashes on an altar of stone.
Coming through, waiting for you. Deep in the dirt, under the grass, I lay. I lie and wait, wait for a resurrection. Wait for something that may never come.
Darius slammed on the brakes and nearly missed rear ending a black sedan.
He scanned the area. The darkness prevented him from determining where he was. Darius pulled off to the side and cut the engine. He dropped his forehead to the top of the steering wheel and closed his eyes. “I don’t even know where the fuck I am.”
He sat for a few minutes, and heard the gentle pelt of rain on the roof and against the windows. But he was not alone for long.
“Darius…”
Masculine. It was a sweet, familiar voice. He knew that voice.
Darius turned his head to the left, towards the driver’s window, and couldn’t believe his eyes.
There he was.
The long, dark locks. The warm smile. “Hello, Darius.”
“Antoine?”
Darius squinted and tried to see him through the rain. He looked through the raindrops that streamed down the window, but he knew who it was. Antoine was wearing his signature black
coat and standing out in the rain. The same long locks, the same mulatto skin.
“I know why you run,” Antoine said.
“Antoine is that really you?”
“I need to get to your estate,” Darius said. He shifted in his seat.
“Yes, you do.”
Antoine moved slightly closer to the car, and raised his hand, as if he were about to touch the window. But Darius felt that Antoine was very far away.
“I have been watching you,” Antoine said. “I see you each day. I follow you.”
Darius said nothing.
“I would see you with Claire, and it saddened me, Darius. I see what you have become. Am I to blame?”
Darius slammed his hands against the window. “I did not ask for this! I did not want this!” He hung his head down and felt the warmth of tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Darius, do you remember the night that I plunged the dagger into your heart?”
He nodded.
“And do you think that I should have let you go? That I should have let you stay dead?”
Darius shook his head. “You brought me back because you needed me. Isn’t that what you said?”
“I thought I did. But maybe I just missed you, Darius. And sometimes, I am seeing that we just need to let each other go.”
And that was the end of the vision.
For a few minutes, he waited, listening to the rain against the roof of the car, listening, wishing that Antoine were really there. And then he gathered himself, wiped the tears from his eyes, and continued to his destination.
I see your pain, Darius. I feel you. I remember you. Do you see me remembering you?
After parking, Darius stood on the expansive front porch, staring at the lion crested knocker. He didn’t bother to use the knocker this time. He grabbed the door handle, and tried to turn it.
Locked.
But it didn’t take long. Darius had only been standing on the porch for minutes – maybe even seconds – when he saw a figure through the windows. Behind the shears. A dark shadow approaching the door.
