Jeremy Loudon took shelter under an overhang in the architecture near the loading dock and stood motionless, his eyes concealed behind the dark sunglasses.
Freezing, Lenny hunkered down, his coat wrapped tightly around him and his chin tucked to chest to ward off the icy rain. Several moments passed, and then, the same Jeep Cherokee outfitted as a police car that had responded to his call, rolled down the delivery road and came to a stop near the loading dock. Upon seeing this, Loudon moved to a door next to the large solid grate covering the loading area, and unlocked it. He then hopped down from the dock and approached the Jeep.
The driver’s side door opened and Officer Meadows emerged. He and Loudon acknowledged each other with quick glances then together walked to the back of the vehicle. Meadows opened the rear door, swung it open wide.
Something fell out and dangled there. Lenny wiped rain from his eyes. A body lying on its back had been stuffed into the rear compartment, and the head had flopped out. It hung there lifelessly, the face exposed, eyes open, mouth frozen in what appeared to have been a screech of horror at the moment of death, and dried blood staining his cheeks but slowly dissolving in the rain.
It was Gus Gauvin, a bruised and blackened bullet hole clearly visible in the center of his forehead.
The two men pulled the body none-too-gently from the Jeep. Blood, clumps of hair and brain tissue dropped free from the back of his head and splashed on the pavement as they carried it up a series of steps and through the door of the store.
Though horrified, Lenny stayed put even when they emerged from the building. Meadows began to speak, but Lenny had never heard anything quite like it. Even at a distance of perhaps thirty feet, coupled with the din from the rain, he could make out a deep, guttural, inhuman sound; more clicking, growling and choking noises than actual language. Jeremy Loudon responded with much the same and motioned to the Jeep. It was then that Lenny realized there was someone else in the vehicle. The silhouette of a human being was clearly visible in the passenger seat.
Officer Meadows choked out more sounds and casually brushed a strand of hair from the side of his face that had been plastered down by the rain.
Only it wasn’t hair.
It moved and whipped about of its own volition, a black and moist vine several inches in length protruding directly from his scalp. He reached for it again, but the hideous snakelike tendril refused to cooperate, lashing about as if searching for something.
Unable to believe what he was seeing, Lenny continued to stare, eyes unblinking even in the downpour as he struggled to process what was playing out before him. Without realizing it, he’d begun to inch away from the things, and as he did so, he lost his balance and fell back into a large puddle with a resounding splash.
The creatures turned, heads snapping toward the source of the sound.
Loudon yanked his sunglasses free.
His eyes…they weren’t human.
The pupils were dark and horribly distorted—long, narrow and vertical—nearly reptilian, and stretched the entire curvature of his eyeballs, while the irises possessed a jaundiced, yellow tint.
The diseased eyes moved, locked on him.
Lenny scurried to his feet, planning to bolt back down the alley, but a man he didn’t recognize stood at the far end, blocking his escape. He stumbled about indecisively. He was cornered, trapped.
As he turned toward the others, Loudon closed on him. Deciding to take his chances with the man blocking the alley, Lenny tried to run, but an impossibly strong hand clamped onto his wrist and yanked him back.
By the time it registered that he’d been thrown, had left his feet and was literally in midair, he’d already smashed into the side of the Jeep. He collapsed to the pavement with a grunt. Pain shot through his kneecaps and across his palms as the skin was scraped away, and his shoulder and neck throbbed, his ears ringing from the impact with the Jeep. Head spinning and body aching, he managed to get back to his feet, but Meadows stepped forward and slammed a nightstick across his face with such force it felt like he’d swung it clear through to the back of his head.
A bright burst of light exploded before him, followed by excruciating pain, and as he fell, Lenny caught a glimpse of something that looked exactly like Gus Gauvin sitting in the Jeep, its face gleefully pressed against the blurred windshield.
And as Lenny’s mind splintered to pieces, darkness swallowed him whole.
* * * *
She stood near the door of the dingy old motel room, watching him.
“Am I awake?” he asked, his mouth dry, throat sore.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He remained sitting at the foot of the bed. He’d aged, but she looked just as she had all those years before. “I remember this room,” he said, looking around listlessly.
“What do you remember most?”
“Making love. Here, in this bed.”
“Is that what we were doing?”
“Wasn’t it?”
Sheena smiled so quickly he nearly missed it.
“I remember you on top of me,” he continued. “How you’d hold my wrists with your hands and pin my arms to the mattress as if you were afraid I might get away. I remember the feel of your tongue in my mouth, the look in your eyes when I was inside you, the little mewling sounds you made and the way you trembled when you came. And I remember...”
“What?”
“Fearing you.”
“Why fear?”
“I was afraid you’d get in my way.”
“There are consequences, Lenny, to everything we say and do. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right? Our sins impact not just ourselves, but others.”
“Sins,” he scoffed.
“Isn’t it ironic that those who believe in sin the least are almost always those who sin the most?” She toyed with the curtain on the window facing the street. “Do you have any idea what you did to me? Even now, all these years later, do you have a clue?”
“Sheena I’m sorry, and I want your forgiveness. But you’re not innocent in all this either. You tried to punish me and all you accomplished was tearing us both to pieces. You destroyed us both.”
“You’re so dramatic. You always were.”
“And you weren’t?”
“I was a human being. Not a disposable memory, not a character in some movie or play running through your head, not a ghost.”
“It was never about you. I cared about you—I did—but I couldn’t let myself love you. Not then.”
“I would’ve championed you.”
“You would’ve stopped me. You wanted a different life.”
“I wanted you.”
“Why? You wanted a husband, children and a traditional life. I couldn’t give you those things.”
“My love and support could’ve helped you.” She pulled the curtain back enough to see out to the dusty road beyond. “But you refused to see that. You might’ve wanted somewhere deep down to love me, but you couldn’t even love yourself. You had to go it alone. Only you weren’t alone. You brought all our rotting bones along with you. Your life was pointless and empty, and so was mine. It didn’t have to be that way. You could’ve been with me.”
“There are days I wish I had been.”
She watched the road, offering nothing more.
“You had an abortion,” he asked, voice shaking, “in your twenties?”
“I had an abortion at twenty.”
He clenched shut his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Sheena. I…” Something tickled the side of his nose. He touched his face, suspecting tears, but his fingers came back dark crimson. “I’m bleeding,” he said, tracing the trickle of blood to his eyes. “It’s…black.”
“You’re dying.”
“God help me.”
“Your gods are false.”
The flow increased, running in rivulets down his face, staining him like war paint. “Can you help me?”
“All your idols turn to sand.” She released the
curtain and looked back at him, her face dark. “Sand, Lenny. Nothing can change this. Betrayal is eternal.”
“Those…things…they’re coming, aren’t they.”
“No,” she said, reaching for the door. “They’re already here.”
* * * *
He had the sensation of floating or being carried, but without the luxury of sight or sound, his whereabouts and situation remained a mystery. Thoughts and visions blinked in his mind, familiar voices merged with distant screams and the laughter of human beings masquerading as devils set to the chorus of waves lapping shoreline and the hum of night winds blowing in off the ocean.
But like candlelight extinguished with the exhale of a single breath, it was gone in an instant, replaced by new sensations of wetness on his face and the taste of blood on his lips. Lenny could also feel something beneath him—he was lying on something soft—and could hear vague sounds of things breathing and milling about nearby.
Pain seeped back into his consciousness. Terror came with it.
Lenny opened his eyes. He screamed but managed only a choking sound, and as he attempted movement realized he was being held in place, pinned flat on his back in the center of a bed. Numerous faces surrounded him. Some familiar, some not, they stood gazing down at him with consternation, their strange yellow and black eyes the only indication that his captors were not wholly human. To his left was the one that looked like Jeremy Loudon, and next to him stood those that looked like Meadows, Alec Kinney and his secretary.
Lenny’s temples throbbed, his body shook and his stomach churned. He feared he might vomit or pass out, and tried again to thrash his way loose, but he had virtually no strength. Panic rose even as he realized they’d taken him back to the cottage, to the bedroom upstairs, to this horrible place of death and deception, rituals and nightmares.
Those at the foot of the bed parted and made an opening, while others carefully sat him up enough so he could see the mirror over the bureau just a few feet away. Lenny looked into his own eyes. The blow from the nightstick had caused a bloody gash on his forehead, resulting in crimson smears across his otherwise haggard face. He looked to the others as if to be sure they were really there. They were. Gathered around him, their lizard eyes watched with cold indifference.
* * * *
The structure was once a bar. It burned down more than a year before and has sat condemned ever since. The motel clerk told him this when he and Sheena checked in earlier that morning. One cannot help but notice it, directly across from the motel, its blackened and destroyed ruins perched atop sand dunes, the paved driveway leading from the road to its burned-out doorstep cracked and overgrown with weeds. Why the town has yet to demolish this monstrosity is something of a mystery, but even as the sun sets, slipping beneath the horizon with its enigmatic beauty, the ruins stand out against a backdrop of dying light. As if sketched from shadows growing directly out of the sand, the remains of the structure reach toward the night skies and remind Lenny of some dead thing left to rot, its bones hollowed out and its insides scorched, eaten away like viscera left for predators and exposed to the elements. It is strangely fitting for him to imagine this husk of a building as having once been a living entity, since it represents the perfect metaphor. What was once alive and vibrant is now forever lost, burned to its core, exteriors stripped away so that only memories of what had once been—or might have been—survive.
But he doesn’t know this yet. In fact, he has no idea. For now the ruins are simply a place to escape to while he thinks about Sheena and their earlier argument. He walks along the driveway and steps over what’s left of what was once the front wall, only then realizing he left the room in such a hurry that he’s still barefoot and wearing only his jeans and a sweatshirt.
Could she really be pregnant? Will she tell him now even if she is? Will he do the right thing either way? Lenny wanders deeper into the building and lights a cigarette. He’s not even sure what the right thing is.
It’s quiet. The only sounds are those of nearby waves gently reaching shore. A breeze blows in off the ocean and filters through the ruins, bringing fresh air that smells like the sea. It is neither warm nor particularly cold this night, and there is virtually no traffic on the dead-end road. After all, there’s little reason for anyone to come here, especially off-season. There’s the dilapidated motel, a stretch of beach, and a few miles further down, a seedy diner with an ocean-view. He and Sheena are the only people staying at the motel; his car—or rather his mother’s car, which he has borrowed for this getaway—sits alone in the small parking lot.
From his elevated position on the dunes he can see the entire motel. The light in their room has been switched off. He wonders if Sheena has decided to go to sleep. He checks his watch, peering closely at the face and straining to see the position of the hands in the darkness. It’s a little after eight o’clock. He flicks his cigarette away and decides to return to the room, when he sees the outline of someone leaving the parking lot, crossing the street and beginning an ascent up the dunes.
“Sheena,” he says as she comes into view. “What are you doing?”
“I want to go swimming,” she tells him.
Wrapped in a dark blanket, she looks like a restless barefoot monk wandering the sands. The only clues to her true identity are her bright eyes and a wisp of red hair peeking out from beneath the hood she’s fashioned with one end of the blanket.
“It’s not warm enough. The water’s probably really cold.”
“Are you afraid something might happen to me?” She giggles uncontrollably.
He looks in her eyes. She’s stoned. “What are you on?”
“I had a couple of the beers you brought and I took a hit of mescaline,” she says, laughing like it’s the most hysterical thing she’s ever heard. “You had two, wasn’t one for me?”
“Come on.” He reaches for her. “Let’s go back inside and talk.”
“Nothing to talk about. None of it means anything, right?”
“I need to know if—”
“You don’t need to know anything.” She moves past him, deeper into the ruins. “I’m going down to the beach, you coming?”
“It’s too dangerous down there. It’s dark and—”
“Oh lighten up.” The blanket ripples in the breeze.
“What’s under the blanket, Sheena?”
She smiles. “Me.”
“Whatever,” he sighs. “You want to run around out here naked, fine, knock yourself out. I’m going back inside.”
“This is our last night.”
He stops, stares at her.
“Together,” she clarifies. “After tonight it’s done.”
He feels his head slowly nod, as if without his consent.
Sheena shrugs the blanket off. It falls to the ground at her feet. In shadow and modest moonlight she looks ethereal, a doe-eyed wraith with cream-colored skin and fiery hair sent to intoxicate him, to capture him, or perhaps to finally set him free. Or maybe just then it isn’t about him at all. Maybe it never was. Maybe she frees herself in that moment. He cannot be entirely sure.
With a defiant grin and another burst of laughter, she runs off through the ruins toward the other side of the dunes and the ocean waiting below.
Lenny grabs the blanket and follows, screaming her name.
* * * *
While the others held him still, the woman slowly peeled the white gloves off and let them fall to the floor. Though her hands retained fundamental human characteristics they more closely resembled talons. The flesh was a gray color, similar to sharkskin, slathered with some sort of mucus and covered with a vast network of translucent worm-like veins. She stepped closer. The scarf was still around her neck. Something writhed about beneath it. Hyperventilating, Lenny watched as she ran her spider-leg fingers across his face and gathered blood from his wound, leaving the muck from her flesh in its place. Lenny’s body began to convulse and buck. The others held him tight, keeping him upright so he could see the
mirror and the strange symbols the woman was painting across it in his blood.
He wanted to scream for them to stop, to get off him—he didn’t want them touching him—he wanted them to get away from him and stop this…but he could only form the words in his mind; any attempt to verbalize them resulted in a gagging sound from deep within his throat.
The garments each had used until then to conceal their changing bodies fell away. All were suspended in bizarre in-between states, freak hybrids caught between what they had pretended to be and what they truly were. Lenny could hear things moving, slithering about the floor and slapping the walls, wet sounds of things breaking free, transforming and reconfiguring. His captors began to chant in their guttural tongue, clicking noises and grunts set to a consistent cadence. They watched the mirror with their hideous eyes and made Lenny do the same, one of them clutching his head, slimy fingers wrapped around his chin and holding it in place. And when he tried to close his eyes more clawed hands found his face, cupping it and forcing his eyes open until he could do nothing but watch the mirror and his own terrified reflection staring back at him helplessly. The beings were so close now he could feel their breath on him, hot and fetid as it brushed across his face, invading his nostrils and open mouth, coating the roof of his mouth with their disgusting stench.
And just beyond their terrible noises, his own frantic breath and the rapid thud pounding his chest, Lenny heard something else…something that sounded curiously like wind approaching from a vast distance. He felt it wash over him and move through the room…a hot, dry, desert wind.
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