No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection)

by Digital Fiction

  Each of them had that effect; an easygoing way that disarmed you, no matter how hard you tried to remember to be wary. If I didn’t know better, I might have said they put something in the food or drink.

  We hung around our cars afterwards, just chatting about nothing at all. As they climbed into theirs, Carcosa turned to face me.

  “Do you think they were relieved?” “Sorry?”

  “After all the things they say were done to them, I wonder if they welcomed it…the fire, I mean. Those kids.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and I think he saw it on my face.

  “It was a way out, after all…they just had to let go when the fire and smoke took them.”

  He was voicing what many people thought; Wade had intimated something similar to me before leaving. That didn’t make it any easier to hear, though, because they would’ve welcomed freedom a lot more than death. But then, death is its own kind of release, and I suspected deep down inside that she and Carcosa were probably right on some level. At what point does suffering make you crave for death?

  I don’t think any of us can understand that.

  Carr and I watched them drive away. The sheriff spat when they were out of sight, and the gob landed with a wet splat on the concrete. I suspect he’d been saving it for some time, letting the shit build up in the back of this throat. As for me, I felt the need for a shower in something caustic that would strip the outer two or three layers of skin from my body. Burning my clothes also felt like an option.

  “What now?” Carr asked before hawking again. “Now we keep looking into things.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been going over the files we have and I’ll send more over to you later…what we need is a witness, someone tangible.”

  Only Carr, myself, and Wade knew about that — at least as far as we were aware. Carr said he’d picked them up not long after the fire crews left the scene, when he was hanging back for the medical examiner to finish removing the bodies.

  A collection of tracks had led away from the house. He’d been able to follow them later, when the scene was clear. He was the only one looking; the others were far too taken up with what was in front of them.

  “They turned into prints from bare feet after about a mile,” he said, still chewing on a wad of something he worked up in his mouth. “Found a pair of sneakers in a bush.”

  Someone got away, and they were out there in the desert. God knew where, but Carr was looking.

  “Even if we find them, there’s no guarantee he or she will be able to tell us anything useful.” “True, but that’s not the point.”

  “You think those three would be stupid enough to show up at a place like that?”

  The idea was ludicrous. “Their names might have come up,” I argued. I swallowed what came up in my throat, deciding not to imitate him. “What do you think the chances are?”

  He worked his shoulders, rolling them first forward and then back. “Hard to say; no way of knowing what kind of shape they’re in, but they get worse every day nothing turns up.”

  There was a clock running somewhere, I just didn’t realize how fast its hands were turning.

  Carr left me a box of files to look over for the rest of the day while he drove out into the country to keep looking for our runaway. I offered to go with him, but he declined.

  “You’ve got more of an eye for the paper shit,” he said around his cigarette. “Don’t get me wrong, man, I’m sure you can handle yourself out there, but I work best alone.”

  I wasn’t ready to argue with him, though I didn’t relish looking through a box full of dead ends. As soon as I started reading the files over, a deep sense of frustration started to tie itself together in my chest.

  In theory, I was looking for anything that was missing from our knowledge; something the investigators had overlooked before. I knew I wasn’t going to find it — the act was more to satisfy curiosity and to be absolutely sure.

  By the look of the files, Carr had been working on gathering what he could on King, Qassilda, and Carcosa for quite a while. The notations on the documents also suggested they’d been passed up and down the chain from him to the Bureau, from about the time he’d arrived in town.

  I wasn’t surprised, but it made me wonder how much Wade might be keeping from me. I started to think about how all of this could be off the books. She could square whatever she needed; she’d been in her position long enough to be given wide latitude when it came to the job.

  None of it gave me real pause. I kept reading, burning through a pack of cigarettes I bought from the machine outside. A pain in my neck made me stand and stretch, and then I saw the dog from the night before, one paw held up in mid-step as it caught me looking. I thought maybe it looked thinner than before, if that was possible. Even from where I was, I could see its ribs sticking out along its body.

  I was thinking about trying to leave it some food when my phone buzzed, vibrating itself towards of the bedside table.

  “Carr?”

  “I’ve got him,” he gasped, panting like he’d run a mile or more hard. I heard something shoving in the background.

  “Where are you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You know where my place is?”

  He’d told me before, and I’d written it down on the back of a napkin. I fished it out of my coat pocket and read the slightly smudged ink. “I can find it.”

  “One hour.”

  Carr’s house was rustic; an old wooden bungalow outside of town. When I pulled up, he was leaning on the porch rail, smoking.

  Backlit by a single light, he could’ve come out of a Western or something. He wore an old sheepskin jacket the color of tobacco and milky coffee. I noticed his hand was trembling slightly as he brought his cig up to his mouth.

  “He’s inside,” he said, grinding the half-finished smoke under his heel and lighting another one. “He’s not as bad as I thought he would be, but he’s not great either.”

  “How bad?”

  He lit up and handed me one. “Bad enough, but I got him warm now and some food in him…once he settled down.”

  There were red streaks around his neck where his skin was abraded. “He do that?” “Kicked me in the balls too.” Carr picked at the marks. “Can’t hold it against him.”

  The kid couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

  Wrapped up in a blanket on Carr’s bed, he looked smaller than he was. He had dark hair cut short at the sides, but longer on top, the kind of modern cut kids his age liked to show off. He was good-looking, which was probably why he’d ended up where he did. I was starting to get a feel for the kind of people we were dealing with.

  “We need to get him deposed,” Carr hissed through his teeth.

  “Tall order; he probably needs a shrink to look him over first. Did he say anything when you

  found him?”

  Carr squelched his tongue between his teeth. “Not much that made sense…just to kill him because of what they’d filled him up with. Whatever the fuck that means.”

  “Jesus. Yeah…can we get him out of here?”

  “None of my people can be trusted,” he said as he pulled the door closed. “Just you and me.”

  I should’ve mentioned the team that was supposed to be following me. I wanted to, but even then, something stopped me. Maybe I was trying to keep him out of the loop for his own good; it’s just the sort of bullshit excuse the job can teach you to believe.

  “I’ll pack up at the hotel and meet you on the road out of town. You got anything you need to take with you?”

  Carr shook his head. “Okay then, one hour?” “One hour.”

  The lights wouldn’t turn on in my room; it was my only warning.

  A shape came at me out of the darkness, arms reaching, and it tackled my waist. I pushed into it and we fell into the black, landing hard on the floor. If I’d been able to reach my gun I could’ve ended the fight, but he clawed at my chest and face, struggling for purchase.

  My knee found h
is gut, sinking in just above his groin, but it barely slowed him. A fist cracked into the side of my throat and I gagged, choking for air. I balled my fist and smashed it into his temple, and I felt his head snap sideways. Two of my fingers broke, but I didn’t really notice.

  I turned, movement drifting into the corner of my eye right before everything exploded.

  It’s hard for me to say how long I was out for, but when I forced my gummed-up eyes open, I wasn’t in the hotel. The walls were rough stone, suggesting a cave or underground structure of some kind.

  I was on my side and my hands were bound with zip ties; so tight, I’d lost all feeling in my fingers. I’d been out for a while, I guessed. I could almost feel the skin turning blue. Turning my head, I saw I wasn’t alone.

  A group of men and women stood around me, their faces hidden. Some wore masks, while others wore cauls that shone in the dim light and flapped or fluttered when they breathed. The cauls could’ve been skin or some sort of plastic, I wasn’t sure.

  “He’s awake.”

  I heard the smile behind his caul, the suggestion it threatened more than it promised. “Qassilda?”

  One of them — man or woman, I couldn’t see — moved forward fast and put their foot into my stomach. My vision darkened at the edges, and I spewed up whatever was left from the last twenty-four hours.

  “Get him up.”

  They did just that, not waiting until I’d finished retching. The new speaker might have been King, but I wasn’t really listening.

  They walked me along what I now saw was a cavern; its walls decorated with daubed symbols and designs that made my stomach swim as I look at them. They writhed against the rock in the light, coming together like snakes fucking.

  I wanted to spew again, but didn’t want another kick or punch for my trouble. They didn’t have a problem with me looking around, turning my head this way and that. Their faces were covered, after all, and I wasn’t leaving this place alive.

  There were a dozen, men and women both by their builds. One of the women wore a necklace of scalpels and syringes around her neck. The edges of the blades were flecked with rust — except it wasn’t.

  I knew it wasn’t.

  The glass bodies of the syringes were mostly empty, but a few were filled or half-filled with dark liquid.

  There were four bodies strung up along the wall ahead of us, and they drew my eyes away from the woman. They were barely recognizable as human, though the last one wasn’t so bad. I guessed they’d kept him alive until the end, to send reports to Wade. He was lucky; only a bullet to the head for his trouble.

  I turned back to the woman. The eyes behind her leering mask were cold and dark. She’d killed them.

  One of them tossed something to the ground in front of me; Carr’s jacket, of course. The left sleeve was torn and bloody. It was statement enough about what had happened to him and the kid.

  “No one’s coming for you, but we’ll let you go.” I recognized Carcosa’s voice. “After a fashion, anyway.”

  They pushed me down on my knees and the woman with the dark eyes came in front of me. She slipped a scalpel and syringe from her necklace easily enough; the kind of gesture that spoke to years of practice.

  “We have such things to show you first,” Carcosa told me, and I could hear something else behind his words — a droning coming from somewhere. “Wait.” The woman stopped, and he came to her side. “You think we were doing those things to them for fun?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Nothing like that, Agent Schrader, nothing so base as that.” He touched the woman on the shoulder. “You’ll see…and then you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  She moved closer, blade and needle catching what light there was. Before the point of the syringe touched my neck, the dark of her eyes started to slide and shift, like oil moving on water.

  I just told all of this to Wade.

  “You look like shit,” she’d said when I walked in. Can’t say I would disagree — Schrader would say the same thing if he were here.

  I’m not Schrader, not in the strictest sense. I’m the thing they put inside him once they carved him up and hollowed him out, yet all of this happened to me. His memories are all I have. Until I entered him, I didn’t exist.

  I remember begging before the end, after they showed me what happened to the kid. I remember how his eyes looked like they’d been turned to a dead TV channel. The way he looked at me, or I should say the way the thing inside him looked at Schrader; all full of hunger.

  I’m not strictly a demon, but it’s the closest word you have — and it’s a million miles away from what I really am.

  I am Schrader. More accurately, I am the part of Schrader that exists beneath the surface. All they did in that cave was drag me up, along with something trailing behind.

  They did the same to the kid, and when I opened my eyes for the first time, I recognized a kindred. It smiled as I stood, and I smiled back before I opened its throat with my hands.

  Schrader wasn’t the sacrifice, it was — and I savored its realization as it bled out.

  Carcosa and the others bowed their heads. I ignored them. They’d brought me up for something beneath me, but I was locked in. They’d said and done all the right things. We’re funny about that; like lawyers, we obsess over the fine print.

  I’m not their patron, though, it’s something else.

  Believe me when I say you don’t have a name for it. Truthfully, it doesn’t even notice you exist, and why should it? Nothing else in the universe is aware of mankind.

  What Carcosa and his friends siphon off for their perverse games isn’t noticeable, and it attracts bottom feeders and carrion. The lowest of the low, for who or what else would end up here on this plane of existence?

  Schrader’s memories hold a multitude of sticky fantasies about Wade. Nothing I’ve not seen or felt before a hundred times over. Taking them in again was nothing. Carcosa and his folk drink up shit like that, though, and I gave them the usual demon spiel about how he had such thoughts.

  None of them in that cave truly understand what they’re doing. For them, it’s all about satisfying a need. Shipping kids and unluckies across the border as fuel for the grinder to bring up things like me.

  Sometimes we give them things. Mostly, we do things none of your languages can describe to the innocents they hand over to us. They watch and get off on it, enjoying how we rip their minds apart and reduce them to nothing — much as what happened to Schrader.

  “That’s the last thing you remember?”

  Technically, it’s the first thing I remember, but I nod. It’s what he would do, so it’s what I do.

  There are only a few people in the office at this hour, just her and me alone. Like all paragons of supposed virtue, Schrader felt guilty about his ideas about Wade. I’m not so restrained.

  I don’t think anyone will hear her scream, but I’ll paralyze her vocal chords just to be sure. It’s what I was born to do. I don’t think anyone can say they were born with such clarity.

  Doors

  I left the door unlocked, so perhaps I invited what came. I was working then, but my career had stalled for family. I think that’s something I resented, but I don’t have enough of my sanity left to say for sure.

  Sadly, about the clearest memory I have of that time is the night everything changed. Despite giving up a lot of my career for the sake of family, I was still working too much.

  Don’t know how much — not like it matters anymore. I came home and dropped my keys on the table by the door; I remember the rattle they made in the small metal dish my wife had bought. The door closed behind me, but I didn’t lock it.

  There was no reason to — and no reason not to. Nothing special behind it, I just didn’t. I’m not sure if I was a forgetful husband.

  I can’t see my wife’s face clearly anymore. Her eyes, nose, and mouth are wiped over; smudges over a canvass in my memory. Her hair stands out — coppery and healthy, spilling over he
r shoulders and framing her non-face.

  She moves her head as if speaking.

  “Good, busy, but good.” She’d asked me how my day was. “How is she today?”

  Slight movement of the head; inclining to one side where it bobs, before she straightens and looks at me with eyes I can’t see.

  “Okay, I’ll go up and say goodnight.”

  Turning means I can’t see her head moving anymore; can’t see if she’s speaking. The words are somewhere, but I don’t know where to look or even if I want to.

  Rachel is under her covers when I open the door, reading but not really. She’s waiting, like most nights. She has a hard time sleeping if I’m not back on time. She’s quite serious for someone her age.

  The book’s out of her hands as soon as I am inside the room, forgotten on the covers around her legs.

  I see her face clearly, unlike my wife’s.

  “Dad,” she says and smiles up at me, but there’s something underneath it. I can see it. Her eyes follow me as I sit on the edge of her bed.

  If I was looking, I might have seen more. I ask her what’s wrong.

  “I can’t sleep, even with the light.” Rachel leans closer, cupping a hand around her mouth. “Can you look under my bed, please-please-please?” Her usual rapid fire demand.

  I did. I looked under the bed because it was the sort of ritual we did, more for Rachel’s amusement than anything else. We both knew I would never find anything.

  I saw her, another Rachel under the bed, staring back at me, eyes wide and shaking despite the sweat beading her face.

  “Daddy.”

  Her voice is somewhere between a whisper and a hiss, so I have to duck my head under the bed to listen. I think I thought I was dreaming.

  “Daddy, there’s someone on my bed.”

  Something brushes against the hand still on the covers. It’s wet and warm and sticky, but somehow brittle underneath. A wash of hot air stirs my hair.