Nightjack

by Tom Piccirilli

  “Yes, that’s it, Jack,” she said with the huskiness of an impassioned lover. She kneeled before him and panted. “Give it to me, baby.”

  “No,” Pace said, louder. He might only be the In-between man but he had made his own oaths. Even if he wasn’t here tomorrow—even if some new aspect of Pacella arose in the night—his promises mattered. They had weight. They held power that would continue on without him.

  Jack roared and grabbed Pia by the hair and pulled her closer. She crawled on her knees, sobbing but with her mouth curved in a smile. She pressed her face into Jack’s crotch, the way the prostitutes in Whitechapel had more than a century ago. The things you could do to a woman when you had the time and the proper tools, and this one was even willing. Jack felt a twinge of real adoration for her within his consuming hate.

  “Don’t do this,” Pace said, but his voice was the voice of another man. Maybe Pacella, maybe another him—all the other hims that hadn’t turned up yet, hadn’t gotten their chance in the flesh. “Don’t let Nightjack out.”

  His mind chimed with names. Nipple Jones. Where had he heard that before? Freddie “Double Tap” Freeman. Caramel Skankie. Katie. Duchess Crotch Stink.

  Katie. Katie, that was it.

  He said Pia’s sister’s name as gently as he could. “Katie.”

  “You know you want me,” Pia said. “You know you’ve always wanted to drive it in. To feel my blood beneath your touch. To flay me and fuck me to death.”

  The blade froze at her throat.

  “I’d like to talk to you, Katie.”

  The dead will follow.

  We are the vessels. We are the conduits. We are the possessed.

  “Katie, please talk to me.”

  Pace felt an odd surge of confidence because Jack, like all men, wanted to extend the moment, prolong the climax. Jack’s eyes rolled up in his head and his giggle echoed in the cavern, back thousands of years through time.

  Pia’s sister, with the same heart-shaped face, the same warm pale-eyed stare that made you want to curl up beside her, was down on her knees before him. She looked up and said, “It’s my fault. She wants to be like me. She wants to be dead, murdered by someone she loves.”

  “How do we save her?” he asked.

  “You can’t, you can only give her what she wants. You have to kill her.”

  “I promised that I...would...save her.”

  Jack’s cackle grew louder, the blade starting to move, a fraction of an inch closer, cutting Pia’s cheek, and a spurt of blood arched over the knife handle to splash on the back of Pace’s hand.

  Pia didn’t really want Jack to kill her anyway. She wanted her father to do it.

  Pace shouted, “Faust! Where the fuck are you! I need help!”

  Fighting himself—battling Jack—Pace managed to turn his chin aside and focus on the dim stone recesses of the cave. He pressed his affliction forward into the darkness until the man came dancing out of the shadows.

  Pia’s father spun and did the bump, then slowly came to a stop beside her. Beneath his maroon suit jacket he had the piano wire tied around his waist.

  She said, “Daddy—”

  “Shh, baby, don’t you worry about anything. I’m here now, I’ll take care of you.”

  “Yes, Daddy, please...finish it...”

  He undid the piano wire and slipped it over her neck and pulled it tight from behind. Pia’s face lit with a smile so incandescent that Pace had to narrow his eyes to slits.

  Jack wanted more blood. He always did, it was his natural state of being. He drew out all kinds of surgeon’s tools from his little black bag. He wanted to make this last a long while, really get in there and start snipping away, pull out bones and sacs and tissue, but leave the heart beating.

  Pia was choking to death, her face turning an awful indigo as her father continued to tighten the wire. The blood vessels in her eyes were purple and ready to burst. Jack thought it was a waste, having the girl die this way, but he didn’t really mind. He could have just as much fun afterward with the body, scooping and flinging.

  With the details so lovely and vivid in his mind, Jack stepped away to relish them, hugging himself. Pace felt a little stronger and managed to work the tip of the Trident with its Bowie style blade between the wire and Pia’s throat. It was sharp enough to cut through damn near anything.

  The wire snapped from around her neck. Pia’s father dropped away with an expression of indignation. Jack turned back and wore the same shocked expression, like he’d made a foolish mistake and couldn’t believe he’d done so. He licked his lips and cocked his head in a rage, the way your father did when you didn’t put out the trash.

  Pia took a deep breath and fell into Pace’s arms, sobbing against his chest.

  She went completely slack and they both dropped to the dirt. Her father and sister wandered around for another moment, confused and at a loss, their chins slack and hands open. They brushed against Pace and he shuddered at their touch, his flesh going cold where they passed through him. Pia’s eyes were black and lidless like a shark’s and then he saw them become beautiful and blue and wet and pained again. He held her and felt the human heat of her body against him, warming him.

  With the quiet strength and mewling of a lover in need, she kissed him. Pace held the kiss, their tongues touching coyly, almost shyly, afraid of the intention or where it might lead.

  Then he began to draw from her the venom, the poisons, toxins, repressions, and subjugations. The children started dancing with Pia’s father. They welcomed her sister, calling her Nipple Jones, Siobhan, Yokahama Yolanda, Pookie. If Pia was going to have a chance, it had to be this way.

  She tried to break their kiss and struggled to get free of him, but he held on, drinking her in deeper and deeper. She squealed beneath his lips and scratched at his chest until it was finally over.

  Then she slapped him so hard that he tasted blood.

  “I didn’t want an exorcism,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “You had no right!”

  “I told you I would save you.”

  “God damn you,” she moaned, and then went slack in his arms and began to sob.

  As he kneeled there with her, hushing and patting her back, blood on his tongue, he watched a shadow thrash along one of the alcove walls. It squirmed beneath flame. As Pace kissed Pia’s brow he held up his fist.

  He opened his hand and read the message there, and realized then that in the end maybe he would have to kill somebody after all.

  thirty-one

  He pulled her to her feet and gently began to press her away.

  “No,” she said. “I want to stay with you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to be alone for this. As alone as I can be.”

  “For what? What are you doing?”

  “Completing a very vicious circle. Stay here if you want and wait for me, but don’t follow.”

  He could tell she wanted to argue, to continue the fight she’d been fighting all her life, but there was no reason for it now. She seemed stunned as she turned and didn’t find her father behind her.

  She wiped the back of her hand across her dripping nose and said, “All right.”

  Pace spun toward the alcove where one of the ancient lamps threw light against the dark rock mottled with minerals. He followed the shadows, like the contours of a nightmare, through the small stone rooms until they led him to Faust.

  “There you are,” he said.

  Faust was crouched before the burner. “The old gods die, and new ones are built on the bones of them,” he intoned, repeating what he’d said the first time they’d come through the cavern. “The same as men.”

  “What did you do in the world, Faust?” Pace asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it.”

  “That hurts too much.”

  “Try.”

  Faust looked at the friezes as if trying to spo
t himself in their scenery and stories. Himself or someone like him. “I was an insurance salesman. Yes, I believe that’s it. I sold insurance and enjoyed helping those hurt in accidents, providing comfort for the downtrodden. I went to houses and they gave me money and I protected them from termites, floods, earthquakes, and other acts of God. That’s what I did, I’m pretty sure of it. Almost certain, in fact. Yes, that was it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Pace said.

  “Why? Why do you say that, Will?”

  “What kind of man were you, Faust? Do you remember?”

  “I told you—”

  “What’s the long green spinach?”

  “I don’t know. And I’m a little offended you aren’t taking my word for it.”

  “Why are staring into the lamp?”

  “Because. Well, maybe you’ve heard this already, but you see, my wife, she died in a restaurant fire—”

  “No,” Pace said. “That wasn’t your wife. What did you do before?”

  “Stop asking me that.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Is it?”

  “What did you do on Park Avenue? The Gold Mile?”

  “Stop hammering at me, Will. It’s very rude. Yes, very rude, coarse, and disrespectful of you. Let’s have no more of that.”

  “Philly’s Main Line. Malibu. Beverly Hills. You said you did a lot of work in L.A. What did you do?”

  The storm swept down over the mountain, beating against the earth so that, in the underworld, the force of heaven rang like a death knell. Pace felt the atmosphere changing. Faust’s beard and hair danced in the air. Pace felt a powerful draw at his back and realized it was the knife being pulled as if by a magnetic wave. He wondered if lightning were striking directly over the cave, if the heroon, the tomb itself, was calling down the gods.

  “I remember now!” Faust screamed. “The long green spinach. That’s big money. I got paid the big green!”

  “For what?” Pace asked.

  He looked to his left and saw Rimmon, governor of the first order of seraphim, angel of lightning and fire, whose sword set fire to the bush that brought clarity to Moses, who must have written with a fiery finger across Pace’s palm. He opened his fist. There was no paper in his hand, the note was cut directly on his calloused flesh in a shaky scrawl that extended across each of his fingers:

  Faust is the torcher. You’re the one who gave him the scar on his forehead. Murder him.

  “For setting fires,” Faust said. The scar was as red as the womb. “And you, you son of a bitch, I remember now, you, you stabbed me in the head!” he shouted, and hurled the burning lamp oil at Pace’s face.

  Pace managed to duck and get the knife out of its sheath and up in front of his face to take most of the flaming oil. The rest splashed across the back of his hand and swept against his chest, instantly burning through his shirt and chewing into his flesh, scorching the thick scar tissue.

  He cried out in agony and threw himself down on the cave floor, tearing at his blazing shirt, rolling.

  There are no coincidences. The world will only have so much to do with you before it starts repeating incidents. We live to repeat the past. We wouldn’t know how to move forward even if we could.

  Always on fire, always rolling.

  His mind rang with Jane’s name though he didn’t call out for her. The skin of his face tightened and dust circled him, sweeping along as he thrashed.

  He remembered the night of the restaurant fire, how Pacella’s hand shot forward and brushed against some silverware lying in the busser tub.

  His hand was open and a steak knife leapt into it. The mad rush of gratitude for the blade and to the blade.

  Pacella went after the torcher. There had been a great sense of speed and capability as he was ferried by the crowd in his head, people appearing around him and pressing him onward. Pacella had lunged and the guy sidestepped but not fast enough. Pacella had felt the blade scrape bone.

  He had stabbed Faust in the forehead.

  You went mad by fractions. The scream was still there rebounding inside his skull. It had been joined by many other voices also shrieking.

  You went mad by trying to decide your next step.

  You went mad with the wonder of Why.

  Pace opened his mouth and a hundred tongues fell out. Disgusted, Faust drew away from them as they crept across the cave floor toward him.

  The fire was out but Pace’s skin still hissed and bubbled, the centuries-old dust clinging to his wounds, the popping blisters turning it to mud. Pace dove at Faust’s legs and knocked him down.

  He dragged himself forward until he had the knife at Faust’s throat.

  Jack moaned through clenched teeth, wanting to feast on cooked entrails. Frying them in the same way the Greeks did before their oracles, to learn their fortunes.

  Pace’s mouth watered so badly that he had to spit several times before he could speak.

  Faust screamed, “Just do it. Kill me.”

  “No...I want answers.”

  “That’s not how Jack plays!”

  “I’m not Jack. Tell me...what happened.”

  “I don’t remember! Finish me. I can’t take it anymore!”

  “I told you, nobody’s going to die.”

  “You...you son of a bitch, you stuck a knife in my head! I killed your wife!”

  Pace gasped, fighting back the pain. His flesh sang in agony. “That was Jane Pacella. She wasn’t my wife.” Pace gritted his teeth. These would be his scars, and nobody else’s. Nobody else’s, until the next guy got them. “Talk to me.”

  Faust swallowed and gagged as the stink of Pace’s steaming flesh streamed into his nostrils. The torcher inside him came out and spoke quickly in a monotone, as if reciting. The words had gone around inside his head for so long, trapped there circling, that he knew them by rote.

  “The consigliere got in touch with me about burning down Emilio’s. It was easy money, a simple job. Restaurants always are. The fire marshals can’t bitch about arson if you blow the gas main. The trick is to not go up with the place. The building was supposed to be empty. But there were still people there, in the back, scurrying like rats in the kitchen. I should’ve walked away from the job, but it was already inside me...the need to let the fire out, get it? The flames had already been stoked. I had to go through with it. I didn’t even carry a gun. I just walked in and socked the help still in the kitchen. I’d never even punched anybody before. I knocked them down and tied them up. It was the fire’s fault. It’s always the fire’s fault.”

  The muscles in Faust’s face twitched but the voice was calm and level and barren. “I never killed anybody before in my life. Never even thought of it. I’m not like that. They don’t pay extra for that. But they were there...these people, these two Mexicans and the Greek girl, they were right there on the floor, and the more the fire spread, the more I wanted to watch somebody burn. I spritzed the accelerant around, watched them jump around. I was going to start tossing the kitchen staff in when your wife ran out covered in flame. It was beautiful.”

  “Faust—”

  “Do it, Will. Do it with the knife or I swear I’ll burn you again. I won’t stop until I burn you alive. Our father who art inferno!”

  Pace eased his own forehead against Faust’s.

  The scar pulsed, excited, and beat to its own rhythm. Pace felt all the struggling aspects, facets, beings, and beliefs in there, so much like his own. Faust’s mouth opened and he let out a keening wail. His fists came up and he beat weakly at Pace’s stomach and chest, the scorched blackened skin coming off in strips, until finally Pace moved his mouth over Faust’s scar and licked at it, savoring the different histories like seasoning.

  “Don’t do that!” Faust screamed. “It’s mine!”

  “No, it’s not,” Pace said. “I gave it to you. It’s mine. I gave you my affliction.”

  He pressed his lips to Faust’s damage, feeling the pressure inside. Faust’s alternates slipped ou
t from beneath the ruined brain tissue and slid over Pace’s teeth. Faust strained and went into a seizure and finally relaxed in Pace’s arms.

  Pace could taste the answers to his questions about what happened after that day at Emilio’s.

  Faust with a head wound, a four-inch-deep incision in his temporal lobe. Stumbling through the city at night as his personality leaked out behind him, step by step. He’d been paid twelve grand in cash for the restaurant torch job. The money was still on him, in his coat pockets, but he no longer knew what it meant or how to use it. Under six different names he had bank accounts in twenty cities across America, totaling four million bucks. The long green, the big spinach. But he couldn’t remember any of the names, and now he had a head full of different people.

  Faust had wandered the streets of New York until he passed out from exhaustion. He lived in the alleyways eating scraps out of garbage cans for months, with twelve thousand bucks on him, until he was rolled by a couple of upscale teenagers from the suburbs who liked to come into the city to beat the crap out of the homeless. He managed to survive while the people in his head tried to scratch their way out.

  Eventually he got on the nerves of the corner grocery store owner who felt Faust’s presence in the alley outside was driving off business. The cops rounded him up along with a dozen meth-fiends and schizophrenic homeless folks. They all took a van ride up to Garden Falls and wound up in group therapy together.

  A year later he was the last one left from his original cluster of city jetsam. Sitting in his chair waiting for something to happen when Pace voluntarily committed himself and took the seat between Faust and Pia, across from Hayden, and said, “Hello, does Dr. Brandt stick needles in your necks too?”

  thirty-two

  Pace carried Faust back to the tomb, where Pia lay nearly unconscious draped over the polished stone.