“A name from a dead boy’s grave,” he said. “I am the Angel of the Desolation, and I don’t hear you because you are already dead.” The man standing over her was shoveling dirt across her face, and she could barely breathe anyway because of the way he’d tried to strangle her until she’d begun to black out.
Please let me wake up, please don’t let this happen.
She tried to move, but her hands were numb and tied behind her back, her feet were similarly tied.
“Please,” she whispered. Alison turned her head to the left, trying to look away and keep the dirt from getting in her eyes.
What she saw there made her open her mouth to scream.
A skull lay on its side, facing her. It was yellowed and cracked almost down the middle, with dried leathery skin attached around the scalp, a few hairs sprouting there.
The skull crawled with large red ants.
Fire ants like a lava river flowing into the eye sockets.
Flowing toward her.
She felt the first sting on her neck, a bite really, from the ants and she shut her eyes, hoping it would block them all out, but she remembered her mother telling her not to run barefoot in the yard in summer because of the fire ants. “Honey,” her mother said, “they sting worse than a bee and it’s usually more them one doing the stinging.” Above her she heard the whispering, whatifwhatifwhatifwhatif, and she remembered.
2
(I’m a teenager, wearing jeans, wearing a white blouse and my gold chain) coming home from a boring Fourth of July town picnic, having hoped to see Peter, but catching no sight of him whatsoever. Then, seeing Charlie at the dinner table, another shocker, and that wild look on his face, as if he was scared in a strange way just like Peter. She wondered what the hell was going on. “What are you doing here?” she asked him, and her mother (oh God, Mom, I forgot all about you, I couldn’t remember what you looked like, you’re so beautiful) said, “That’s no way to talk to a friend, Alison. Charlie’s just been entertaining us with stories about the championship game last year against Grove High. Fascinating.”
“What’s going on?” Alison asked Charlie directly.
“I wanted to apologize for what I did before.”
“Isn’t that gentlemanly?” her mother said. Her mother wore one of Alison’s own skirts and a sea-blue blouse that showed off her breasts nicely. She’s flirting with him, Alison marveled.
“I was really ‘faced. I mean, drunk,” Charlie grinned, and Alison was having trouble reading any of this. She looked from Charlie to her mother and then back.
Harv sat at one end of the table, and Ed Junior next to him. I’ve missed you guys, Alison thought as she watched herself take a place, uncomfortably, next to Charlie at the table.
“Hey, Al,” Harv began.
“Alison,” her mother corrected, obviously annoyed.
“Alison, what do you think of going to one of the car auctions in LA—see if I can pick up a Porsche or something. I was thinking maybe after the Fourth we could drive into Hollywood and look into them.”
“That would be great,” Alison said, but was still watching her mother and Charlie, who were smiling at each other. Jesus, he’s acting like Eddie Haskell on Leave It To Beaver.
Ed Junior said, “Scissors rock paper?”
“Maybe later,” Alison said.
Her mother smiled knives. “You’ve been out letting that boy finger you?”
Alison wasn’t sure she’d heard it right. “Mom?”
“Dear?” Her mother said.
“What if she did?” Harv muttered. “Jeez, Mom, like no one’s ever done it to you, huh? We all know you been getting plenty down at the police station, like we all don’t have eyes.”
Charlie laughed. But no one else was laughing.
“What if I do?” her mother huffed.
Ed Junior said, “What if what if what if what if.”
Alison looked from face to face. “What the hell—”
“Your mom said it was okay that I peed on the porch,” Charlie whispered to her, reaching up to stroke her hair. Alison pulled away from his touch.
“Boys will be boys.” Her mother smiled. She set her glass of wine down and began coughing. “Went—down—the—wrong,” her mother said between coughs.
“You like it when boys touch you? Huh, Alison?” Charlie asked. “What the hell is going on here? Harv, what is it with everybody?” Alison stood up so fast her chair fell down behind her.
“Oh,” her mother said, still hacking away. “Just look what a mess—”
Alison didn’t scream until Harv’s hand fell off into his soup, and what had pushed its way out of the exposed bone of his wrist, like a crocus coming up through hard winter earth, dripped an almost clear, yellowish fluid. Skin began unraveling from her mother’s face as she kept on coughing, and with each cough, another layer of skin, but no blood, just skin upon skin. Harv said, “What if you get bit by like a dog or something, or even eat something kind of gross not knowing that it’s there.” He looked down at his soup. “Say, in your clam chowder, and it gets into you and takes you over, you know, cell by cell, I mean, what if that goes down?”
Ed Junior chanted, “What if what if what if.”
Charlie’s arm snaked around Alison’s waist, holding her tighter than she thought any boy could. “Lookit,” he said in a voice that sounded less like Charlie Urquart’s than some animal’s. “Watch how they come through, the demons, man, they just eat at all the soft parts, just like when you unscrew an Oreo, you know, Alison Cunt? You eat the hard part last, but the soft parts—look how your brother’s shedding his skin, like a snake, ain’t it cool, huh? Tell me that’s not totally cool.”
But Alison was feeling sick, and she wondered if it were a bad dream, so she looked up at the wall behind the dinner table, the high yellow wall right behind her mother. She heard Charlie’s voice like a gnat in her ear. “She’s gonna pop, Al, I’ve seen this before, she’s gonna pop like a zit. It happens, babe, it happens when the cooties can’t quite absorb the body right. Here we go, it’s a shooter, man, ten-nine-eight-seven—”
Alison was fading, and her eyesight darkened and all she saw was yellow wall, and then something bright red sprayed across it, and Charlie shouted, “Yee-hah! Just like a cherry tomato, thar she blows!”
And then in darkness, she heard the whatifwhatifwhatif, but it was the whispering of the dark wings, fluttering, moths brushing their dust along her face, and a dog over her, and she was screaming in the dark again, and something touched her, at the center of her body, and it wasn’t the boy she was in love with.
“Don’t ever take me back there,” she whispered to the darkness. “Peter, don’t ever, ever, ever...”
She awoke one day, over a year later, and the first thing she said to Peter was, “Promise me. Never. Never go back there. Never take me back.”
But one day a man who called himself the Angel of the Desolation would take her back, and she would awaken to
3
Soft earth raining down on her. Rain like rose petals on her skin. Rose petals on her skin. A hand, above her, wiping away the dirt around her mouth and eyes. A sound like an animal snarling. Above her, what? She couldn’t see clearly, but it was a girl, a girl just like she’d been, and for a moment she thought that it was her teen self burying her adult self. Above her, the girl? creature? monster? growling at something, long strands of hair almost reaching her face. The small hand, smelling of cold and rose petals, spread a cool taste of water across her lips. Good. Thirsty.
And then the thing above her moved away, and another face looked down at her.
Angel of the Desolation. He held a piece of paper over her face, showing her. But she could not read it—what did it say? And then she saw for a moment: it was a human face. Skinned back. A mask. And the Angel brought it down and set it over her own face.
She smelled his foul breath and felt the press of his lips against her own, through the mask. Crimson ants kissed her along her arms
and legs, along her ribs, her chin, her ear, her scalp, her eyelids, and as their liquid fire burned through her skin, she saw the patterns emerging, the wallpaper of existence scraped back and beneath it a blood-red insect whose feelers brushed her face, it pincers opening to her skin, her eyes seeing red red red.
And then a distant light, like a glowworm measuring inches across a fiery red rose petal, moving closer, closer, to the center of the flower.
Hurts, Peter, it hurts like—
4
“Friend,” the Angel of the Desolation said, reaching inside the front pocket of his sweatshirt.
He leaned against his shovel as he withdrew a pasty-gray lump that looked like a dried sweet potato. The Juicer’s hand. He brought it up to his nose, sniffing its gnarled fingertips, kissed it, scratched his chin with it thoughtfully, took a quick lick on the back of the hand and nibbled on the corkscrew fingernails that had grown long again. He pressed it back in his pocket.
He tried not to look at the woman because she had said something from that dead boy’s life, Than, and Than was buried, too, somewhere around here. There was only the Angel of the Desolation, Nathaniel, and there was Lamia, his mistress. But the woman disturbed him, for he remembered her clearly from before. She’s one of them. He had shaken her own memory back into her, the memory of her crime, her bloodguilt, but along with the remembering, he’d seen that teenaged boy in her eyes.
Fat pig boy.
She was ordinary. What power would this weak vessel have over him? Why did she show him the fat pig boy in her eyes? The boy was dead, long live the Angel!
“Friend,” he repeated. The word she’d used.
Alison was not his friend. She was a friend of the fat pig boy. The Angel of the Desolation would scorch her with his divine breath; he would grasp her in his talons, this woman Alison and the other sinners and take them to the highest peak and smash them open on the boulders below.
Friend.
“My friends,” he said, squatting down suddenly beside the woman. She’d passed out, her eyes were swollen shut. But her very skin seemed to be alive and crawling. The fire ants. He picked one from her chin—lifted it up by its pincers. He laughed as it tried to bite him. He brought the insect up to his face, getting a closer look. Its blood-red body was translucent. He felt he could see its insides working. The ant’s abdomen was bloated. Nathaniel let the ant run up onto his right thumbnail while he brought his left thumb up to it and popped the ant’s abdomen into the back of his throat.
It tasted like honey, and he grabbed a few more ants and drank their juices.
“My friends,” he said, slurping back their small, drained bodies.
Their honey painted his tongue amber.
5
Between the fire ants and having buried the woman halfway in the ditch at the entrance to the cave, and also her weakness (because sinners were always weak, particularly in the face of Judgment and Damnation, which went hand-in-hand), Nathaniel knew she would be no trouble. Her face was red and swollen from bites, and possibly her arm and legs, too, but finally he’d had to start stomping on the fire ants, smashing the shovel down on a thick trail of them, cutting off their route back to their nest. When he was satisfied that Alison was still breathing, he went on with his business.
First, he gathered up the human skulls from his collection.
6
The Angel of the Desolation began his trek back down into the canyon, because, truly, to get to Hell you may not need a detailed map, but you’ve got to at least have some road signs. He would post those signs.
He dragged the sack behind him in the dirt, reaching in for the first skull when he was at the entrance to the cave. The skulls seemed smaller than the people they’d belonged to.
These are my friends, the welcoming committee for the big homecoming.
The skull said, “They’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when they come, when they come.” Nathaniel opened his eyes. The skull had said nothing. It was Her power, growing. Growing because they were on their way: the one who tried to stop Her, his goddess; the unfaithful servant who had betrayed Her; and the witch who had created Her and now wished only to destroy Her.
“All my good old friends,” he giggled, dropping another skull along the narrow path up to the cave.
7
Alison, in pain (perhaps I’m dying) thought she heard a baby crying, but the yellow glow was getting closer, and the red ants tickled her forehead.
The crying sound changed into a shrieking howl.
8
Down a corridor of the caverns, beneath a low rock ceiling, a creature drank from a pool of water. When it was satisfied, it grabbed a pale lizard that rested, too, by the pool. The lizard was unaware that it was being stalked, for the creature that grabbed it had no scent beyond the scent of the sandstone and crystal and dust of the cave.
Then the creature let out a mournful howl.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Stella and Nessie
1
Nessie Wilcox slammed the phone down, and the whole contraption went sprawling onto the kitchen floor. Damn that Mr. Chandler for not being there to answer the phone, now that Queenie’d gotten herself in such a tizzy wanting to go up into the mountains tonight.
Gretchen, her Scottie, snapped at her heels like she knew something was up; her boarders, Cleo and that masher Mr. Evans, whispered together whenever Nessie came in the living room because of the strange alliance they’d noticed already between her and Queenie. What would they do if Nessie told them she was cured of lung cancer by Queenie herself, that Queenie was a drug addict who had been raped by her devil-worshipping brother who had given her not just a daughter, but a possessed daughter who was out for blood? Let the old farts gossip that we’re just two senile old bitches who race each other on the front porch rockers all night long. Let ‘em think we’re going up to the desert to die and feed the vultures.
“You seem to be full of beans today,” her ex-husband, Cove Wilcox, said as he came in the front door, free-as-you-please. “I heard you and the Queen Mother into the wee hours, but it was your voice booming into my bedroom window.”
“Old man,” Nessie said as she crossed to the staircase, “you’re not staying for dinner, and I won’t have you taking any more of my Pepperidge Farm Distinctive Champagne Assortment cookies now that I know you found my hiding place in the cabinets, you common thief, and if you don’t walk right back out that door this minute I’ll make you fix the garbage disposal because of all those eggshells—” But before she was finished, Cove had turned around and was gone again, the front door swinging shut behind him.
It’s Queenie’s got me this nervous. Nessie took the steps two at a time, and then paused on the landing.
I feel like I’m twenty.
The weight of the cancer was gone. Only a smidgeon of her arthritis remained, and she felt like she had boundless energy.
Lord, I do owe Queenie the world at this point, if not for a miracle, then for making me think I got a miracle put over on me.
2
“I’m already too late,” Stella said as she hurriedly tossed her last bottle of pills into her enormous purse. “She’ll have them with her, I can feel it. Out there.” She nodded to the dark window. “What time is it?”
“Almost five, can’t we wait ‘til tomorrow, or at least after supper?”
“Five-six-seven,” Stella counted the hours. “He may already be there. I am such a vain, selfish woman. Oh, why couldn’t I see what she had planned? Why didn’t I know?”
“Queenie, what in heaven’s name are you babbling about?” Stella plopped on the edge of the bed, feeling nearly exhausted. “She wants it back, what they took. Each one of them is a piece of her puzzle.”
3
“What the heck’s a Lamia?”
They were in the station wagon, heading out on the flatland desert that would shortly leap into mountains. The sky was indigo, stars flickering across the sky as if God hadn’t paid his bill to th
e electric company.
Nessie drove (“Because it’s my car, unless you’ve forgotten.”). Nessie assumed that whatever waited for Queenie up in the high desert, in those hills, would only keep them occupied for a few hours and then they would just turn the car around and go home. Her heart had been heavy when she tied Gretchen, her Scottie, up in the kitchen and told one of her boarders to only let the dog off the leash when she and Queenie had gotten the wagon going; but then when they came to the first stoplight, there was Gretchen in the rearview mirror, trotting down the road after them. So now Gretchen lay sleeping between the two women. Ordinarily, Gretchen would beg to be put up against one of the windows; Nessie would crack it slightly so that a breeze would come in, and Gretchen would press her cold, wet nose against the breeze and roll her eyes up in some semblance of canine nirvana. But Gretchen sensed the foreboding, and she pressed her head up against Queenie’s lap as if trying to comfort and calm her.
“You hear me, Queenie? What’s this ‘Lamia’ business?”
“It’s the only name I have for the demon, for the essence of whatever came through my brother to me. It must have been wonderful in the dark ages to be able to give names to evil, because once you have named something you can separate yourself from it,” Stella said. “What have the years given me? Good Lord, they’ve stripped me of sense, and they’ve weakened my heart. Why am I not wise? Why am I not an old wise woman? If one must live long, why must it be in pain?”
Stella’s voice was a monotone like rain splashing on the windshield with the wipers going. “I never told you the rest, about how I tried to cure my daughter. I never told you about after she was born, what I tried to do to her. What I did to her.”
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 62
