She relented and kissed his cheek. “You’re jumpy. Is everything all right?”
“Sure, sure. I saw a couple of the choir kids flashing gang signs and thought one of the little jerks was sneaking up on me to go for my wallet.”
Thankfully, she accepted this and held his hand as they walked to her car.
A storm rolled in. He and Wanda sat on her back porch, which commanded a view of the distant Black Hills. Clouds swallowed the mountains. A damp breeze fluttered the cocktail napkins under their half-empty Corona bottles, rattled the burnt yellow leaves of the maple tree branches overhead. “Oh, my,” Wanda said. “There goes the drought.” “We better hurry and clear the table.” Pershing estimated at the rate the front was coming they’d be slammed inside of five minutes. He helped her grab the dishes and table settings. Between trips the breeze stiffened dramatically. Leaves tore from the maple, from trees in neighboring yards, went swirling in small Technicolor cyclones. He dashed in with the salad bowl as the vanguard of rain pelted the deck. Lightning flared somewhere over the Waddell Valley; the boom came eight seconds later. The next thunderclap was five seconds. They stood in her window, watching the show until he snapped out his daze and suggested they retreat to the middle of the living room to be safe.
They cuddled on the sofa, half watching the news while the lights flickered. Wind roared around the house and shook its frame as if a freight train slammed along tracks within spitting distance of the window, or a passenger jet winding its turbines for takeoff. The weather signaled a change in their static routine of the past week. Each knew without saying it that Pershing would return to the Broadsword in the morning, and their relationship would revert to its more nebulous aspect. Pershing also understood from her melancholy glance, the measured casualness in her acceptance, that matters between them would remain undefined, that a line had been crossed.
He thought about this in the deepest, blackest hours of night while they lay in bed, she lying gently snoring, her arm draped across his chest. How much easier his life would be if his mock comment to Elgin and Mel proved true—that Wanda was a lunatic; a split personality type who was behind the stalking incidents. God, I miss you, Ethel.
“Houston, we have a problem,” Mel said. He’d brought ham sandwiches and coffee to Pershing’s apartment for an early supper. He was rattled. “I checked around. Not just you hearing things. Odd, odd stuff going on, man.”
Pershing didn’t want to hear, not after the normalcy of staying with Wanda. And the dreams. . . . “You don’t say.” He really wished Mel wouldn’t.
“The cops have been by a couple of times. Turns out other tenants have seen that chick prowling the halls, trying doorknobs. There’s a strange dude, as well—dresses in a robe, like a priest. Betsy Tremblay says the pair knocked on her door one night. The man asked if he could borrow a cup of sugar. Betsy was watching them through the peephole—she says the lady snickered and the man grinned and shushed her by putting his finger over his lips. Scared the hell out of Betsy; she told them to scram and called the cops.”
“A cup of sugar,” Pershing said. He glanced out at the clouds. It was raining.
“Yeah, the old meet-your-cute-neighbor standby. Then I was talking to Fred Nilson; he’s pissed because somebody below him is talking all night. ‘Whispering,’ he said. Only problem is, the apartment below his belongs to a guy named Brad Cox. Cox is overseas. His kids come by every few days to water the plants and feed the guppies. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, something peculiar is going on around here. Doncha feel better?”
“I never thought I was insane.”
Mel chuckled uneasily. “I was chatting with Gina about the whole thing, and she said she’d heard someone singing while she was in the bath. It came up through the vent. Another time, somebody giggled in the closet while she dressed. She screamed and threw her shoe. This was broad daylight, mind you—no one in there, of course.”
“Why would there be?”
“Right. Gina thought she was imagining things; she didn’t want to tell me in case I decided she was a nut. Makes me wonder how many other people are having these . . . experiences and just keeping it to themselves.”
The thought should have given Pershing comfort, but it didn’t. His feelings of dread only intensified. I’m almost seventy, damn it. I’ve lived in the woods, surrounded by grizzlies and wolves; spent months hiking the ass end of nowhere with a compass and an entrenchment spade. What the hell do I have to be scared of after all that? And the little voice in the back of his mind was quick to supply Sly’s answer from the nightmare, Oh, you know. He said, “Food for thought. I guess the police will sort through it.”
“Sure they will. Maybe if somebody gets their throat slashed, or is beaten to death in a home invasion. Otherwise, I bet they just write us off as a bunch of kooks and go back to staking out the doughnut shop. Looks like a police convention some mornings at Gina’s store.”
“Wanda wants me to move in with her. I mean, I think she does.”
“That’s a sign. You should get while the getting’s good.”
They finished the sandwiches and the beer. Mel left to meet Gina when she got home from work. Pershing shut the door and slipped the bolt. The story about the strange couple had gotten to him. He needed a stiff drink.
The lights blinked rapidly and failed. The room darkened to a cloudy twilight and the windows became opaque smudges. Sounds of rain and wind dwindled and ceased. “Gracious, I thought he’d never leave.” Terry Walker peeked at him from the upper jamb of the bedroom door, attached by unknown means, neck extended with a contortionist’s ease so his body remained obscured. His face was very white. He slurred as if he hadn’t used his vocal chords in a while, as if he spoke through a mouthful of mush. Then Pershing saw why. Black yolks of blood spooled from his lips in strands and splattered on the carpet. “Hello, Percy.”
“You’re alive,” Pershing said, amazed at the calmness of his own voice. Meanwhile, his brain churned with full-blown panic, reminding him he was talking to an apparition or an imposter.
“So it seems.” Terry was unchanged from youth—clean-shaven, red hair curling below his ears, and impressive mutton chop sideburns in the style that had been vogue during the ’70s.
“It was you in the vents?” Then, as an afterthought, “How could you terrorize my family?”
“I got bored waiting all week for you to come back. Don’t be mad—none of them ever cared for you anyway. Who knows—perhaps we’ll get a chance to visit each and every one; make them understand what a special person you are.” Terry grinned an unpleasant, puckered grin and dropped to the floor, limber as an eel. He dressed in a cassock the color of blackened rust.
“Holy crap. You look like you’ve come from a black mass.” He chuckled nervously, skating along the fine line of hysteria. There was something wrong with his friend’s appearance—his fingers and wrists had too many joints and his neck was slightly overlong by a vertebra or two. This wasn’t quite the Terry Walker he knew, and yet, to some degree it was, and thus intensified Pershing’s fear, his sense of utter dislocation from reality. “Why are you here? Why have you come back?” he said, and regretted it when Terry’s smile bloomed with Satanic joy.
“Surveying.”
“Surveying?” Pershing felt a new appreciation for the depths of meaning in that word, the inherent coldness. Surveying preceded the destruction of one order to make way for another, stronger, more adaptable order.
“What else would I do? A man’s got to have a niche in the universe.”
“Who are you working for?” Oh Lord, let it be the FBI, Homeland Security, anybody. Still trying for levity, he said, “Fairly sure I paid my taxes, and I don’t subscribe to American Jihadist. You’re not here to ship me to Guantánamo, or wherever, are you? Trust me, I don’t know jack squat about anything.”
“There’s a migration in progress. A diaspora, if you will. It’s been going on . . . well, when numbers grow to a certain proportion, they
lose relevance. We creep like mold.” Terry’s grin showed that the inside of his mouth was composed of blackened ridges, and indeed toothless. His tongue pulsed; a sundew expanding and contracting in its puddle of gore. “Don’t worry, though, Earthman. We come in peace.” He laughed and his timbre ascended to the sickly sweet tones of a demented child. “Besides, we’re happy to live in the cracks; your sun is too bright for now. Maybe after it burns down a bit . . . ”
The bathroom door creaked open and the woman in the black dress emerged. She said, “Hullo there, love. I’m Gloria. A pleasure to meet you.” Her flesh glowed like milk in a glass, like the sugar bowl in his visions. To Terry, she said, “He’s older than I thought.”
“But younger than he appears.” Terry studied Pershing, his eyes inscrutable. “City life hasn’t softened you, has it, pal?” He nodded at the woman. “I’m going to take him. It’s my turn to choose.”
“Okay, dear.” The woman leaned her hip against the counter. She appeared exquisitely bored. “At least there’ll be screaming.”
“Isn’t there always?”
Pershing said, “Terry . . . I’m sorry. There was a massive search. I spent two weeks scouring the hills. Two hundred men and dogs. You should’ve seen it.” The secret wound opened in him and all the buried guilt and shame spilled forth. “Man, I wanted to save you. It destroyed me.”
“You think I’m a ghost? That’s depressingly provincial of you, friend.”
“I don’t know what to think. Maybe I’m not even awake.” He was nearly in tears.
“Rest assured, you will soon make amazing discoveries,” Terry said. “Your mind will shatter if we aren’t careful. In any event, I haven’t come to exact vengeance upon you for abandoning me in the mountains.”
The woman smirked. “He’ll wish you were here for that, won’t he?”
“Damn you, you’re not my friend,” Pershing said. “And lady, you aren’t Gloria, whoever she was—poor girl’s probably on a milk carton. You wear faces so we will understand, so you can blend in, isn’t that right? Who are you people, really?”
“Who are you people?” Gloria mimicked. “The Children of Old Leech. Your betters.”
“Us?” Terry said. “Why, we’re kin. Older and wiser, of course. Our tastes are more refined. We prefer the dark, but you will too. I promise.” He moved to a shelf of Pershing’s keepsakes—snapshots from the field, family photos in silver frames, and odd pieces of bric-a-brac—and picked up Ethel’s rosary and rattled it. “As I recall, you weren’t a man of any particular faith. I don’t blame you, really. The New Testament God is so nebulous, so much of the ether. You’ll find my civilization’s gods to be quite tangible. One of them, a minor deity, dwells in this very system in the caverns of an outer moon. Spiritual life is infinitely more satisfying when you can meet the great ones, touch them, and, if you’re fortunate, be touched. . . . ”
Pershing decided to go through the woman and get a knife from the butcher block. He didn’t relish the notion of punching a girl, but Terry was bigger than him, had played safety for his high school football team. He gathered himself to move—
Gloria said, “Percy, want me to show you something? You should see what Terry saw . . . when you left him alone with us.” She bowed her neck and cupped her face. There came the cracking as of an eggshell; blood oozed through her fingers as she lifted the hemisphere of her face away from its bed. It made a viscid, sucking sound; the sound of bones scraping together through jelly. Something writhed in the hollow. While Pershing was transfixed in sublime horror, Terry slid over and patted his shoulder.
“She’s got a cruel sense of humor. Maybe you better not watch the rest.” He smiled paternally and raised what appeared to be a bouquet of mushrooms, except these were crystalline and twinkled like Christmas lights.
Violet fire lashed Pershing.
In UFO abduction stories, hapless victims are usually paralyzed and then sucked up in a beam of bright light. Pershing was taken through a hole in the subbasement foundation into darkness so thick and sticky it flowed across his skin. They did use tools on him, and, as the woman predicted, he screamed, although not much came through his lips, which had been sealed with epoxy. An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy coomb of an alien realm. Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered, chuckling and sighing, in appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball. He couldn’t discern their forms, only the luminescent faces, their plastic, drooling joy. We love you, Percy, the Terry-creature whispered right before he rammed a needle into Pershing’s left eye.
His captors dug in his brain for memories and made him relive them. The one they enjoyed best was the day of Pershing’s greatest anguish: When Terry hadn’t returned to their impromptu campsite after ten minutes, Pershing went looking for him. The rain slashed through the woods, accompanied by gusts that snapped the foliage, caused treetops to clash. He tramped around the spring and saw Terry’s hat pinned and flapping in some bushes. Pershing began to panic. Night came early in the mountains, and if sundown found him alone and isolated . . . Now he was drenched as well. Hypothermia was a real danger. He caught movement from the corner of his eye. A figure walked across a small clearing a few yards away and vanished into the underbrush. Pershing’s heart thrilled and he shouted Terry’s name, actually took several steps toward the clearing, then stopped. What if it wasn’t his friend? The gait had seemed wrong. Cripes, what if, what if? What if someone truly was stalking them? Farfetched; the stuff of latenight fright movies. But the primeval ruled in this place. His senses were tuned to a much older frequency than he’d ever encountered. The ape in him, the lizard, hissed warnings until his hackles rose. He lifted a stone from the muck and hefted it, and moved forward.
He tracked a set of muddy footprints into a narrow ravine. Rock outcroppings and brush interlaced to give the ravine a roof. Toadstools and fungi grew in clusters among beds of moss and mold. Water dripped steadily and formed shallow pools of primordial slime. There was Terry’s jacket in a wad; and ten yards further in, his pants and shirt hanging from a dead tree that had uprooted and tumbled down into the gulley. A left hiking shoe had been dropped nearby. The trail ended in a jumble of rocks piled some four or five yards high. A stream, orange and alkaline, dribbled over shale and granite. There was something about this wall of stone that accentuated his fear; this was a timeless grotto, and it radiated an ineffable aura of wickedness, of malign sentience. Pershing stood there in its presence, feeling like a Neanderthal with a torch in hand, trembling at the threshold of the lair of a nameless beast.
Two figures in filthy robes stood over a third, mostly naked man, his body caked in mud and leaves. The moment elongated, stretched from its bloom in September 1973 across three and a half decades, embedded like a cyst in Pershing’s brain. The strangers grasped Terry’s ankles with hands so pale they shone in the gloom. They wore deep cowls that hid their faces . . . yet, in Pershing’s nightmares, that inner darkness squirmed with vile intent.
The robed figures regarded him; one crooked a long, oddly jointed finger and beckoned him. Then the strangers laughed—that sickening, diabolic laughter of a man mimicking a child—and dragged Terry away. Terry lay supine, eyes open, mouth slack, head softly bumping over the slimy rocks, arms trailing, limp, an inverted Jesus hauled toward his gruesome fate. They walked into the shadows, through a sudden fissure in the rocks, and were gone forever.
The one that imitated Terry released him from the rack and carried him, drifting with the ungainly coordination of a punctured float, through a stygian wasteland. This one murmured to him in the fashion of a physician, a historian, a tour guide, the histories and customs of its race. His captor tittered, hideously amused at Pershing’s perception of having been cast into a subterranean hell.
Pershing imagined passing over a colossal reef of flesh and bone, its coils and ridges populated by incalculable numbers of horridly intelligent beings that had flown from their original planets, long since gone cold and dead, and spread implacably across the infinite cosmos. This people traveled in a cloud of seeping darkness. Their living darkness was a cancerous thing, a mindless, organic suspension fluid that protected them from the noxious light of foreign stars and magnified their psychic screams of murder and lust. It was their oxygen and their blood. They suckled upon it, and in turn, it fed upon them.
We eat our children, Terry had said. Immortals have no need for offspring. We’re gourmands, you see; and we do love our sport. We devour the children of every sentient race we metastasize to . . . we’ve quite enjoyed our visit here. The amenities are exquisite.
He also learned their true forms, while humanoid, were soft and wet and squirming. The human physiognomies they preferred for brief field excursions were organic shells grown in vats, exoskeletons that served as temporary camouflage and insulation from the hostile environments of terrestrial worlds. In their own starless demesne they hopped and crawled and slithered as was traditional.
Without warning, he was dropped from a great height into a body of water that bore him to its surface and buoyed him with its density, its syrupy thickness. He was overcome with the searing stench of rot and sewage. From above, someone grasped his hair and dragged him to an invisible shore.
There came a long, blind crawl through what felt like a tunnel of raw meat, an endless loop of intestine that squeezed him along its tract. He went forward, chivvied by unseen devils who whispered obscenities in his ear and caressed him with pincers and stinging tendrils, who dripped acid on the back of his neck and laughed as he screamed and thrashed in the amniotic soup, the quaking entrails. Eventually, a light appeared and he wormed his way to it, gibbering mindless prayers to whatever gods might be interested.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 20
