by Abe Moss
“They’re not dead.”
Maria gasped. She straightened, hands over her heart. She eyed the rear corner of the room, impossibly black. Something stood inside the darkness there, veiled behind an unnaturally thick curtain of shadow. A dark cloud. It breathed from the corner, tickled the air with its oil-black wisps. And something else inhabited that darkness, watching her from within it. An invisible figure. Its voice—a woman’s voice—traveled out from its hiding place, touching Maria’s ears with its sickly-yet-seductive tone.
“They’re only sleeping.”
“Who are you?” Maria asked, her throat dry with fear.
She skirted the edge of the bed slowly, feet sliding, facing the throbbing dark at the back of the room. Whatever form stood inside it, whatever eyes watched from within, she sensed them smile with knowledge, tracing Maria’s every move, following her through the gloom as she made her way carefully toward the motel door.
The dark exhaled.
“Why weren’t you affected?” the voice asked. “You should be sleeping like them.”
As the hairs raised along her arms, the back of her neck, and the muscles in her legs cried for escape, Maria turned and fled. She darted onto the walkway. Mind scattered, she ran to the next room, where the arguing couple were lodged, and pounded on the door.
“Help!” she screamed. “Please!”
From the open doorway of her family’s room, a woman stepped out, dressed in black. The source of the shadowy voice. In the moonlight, Maria recognized her immediately. Beautiful and not of this world. The woman lifted her hand, something held in it, and she grinned.
“Mind if I borrow this?” she asked, and tilted Maria’s phone back and forth playfully.
The neighboring couple wasn’t answering. Maria turned and chased after her brother instead, or where she’d last seen him. She ran toward the corner of the building, feet slapping the cement.
She turned the corner and was faced with the immediate, barren desert behind it—that desert which circled the town like a fist, crushing them with its sprawling endlessness. The moon shined its all-knowing gaze upon her, a hulking orb of cruel magic in the black sky. She froze in its spotlight. She peered across the desert, across its sandy flesh bathed in bright moonlight. Among the dead shadows, one in particular caught her eye. A small figure shuffled across the hungry landscape—one bare foot at a time.
“Michael!” she screamed.
She ran several paces toward him until something else drew her attention. Sprouting between those faraway, innocuous desert shadows there stood another. A cloaked figure. Tall and narrow. Shimmery, mirage-like. Waiting. Michael journeyed toward it, blind with sleep. Petrified, caught in a dream-web, Maria watched as the figure drew down its hood, revealing a young woman’s face underneath. The woman smiled, showing all her pretty teeth to the pale moonlight, and opened her arms to the small, hypnotized boy. To Maria’s horror, Michael opened his arms to her as well.
“You weren’t meant to see this.”
Maria shrieked. She staggered sideways, away from the lips against her ear. The other woman stood there, lips parted in an amused smile. Then she looked into the distance, toward Michael, and laughed wildly.
“Wave goodbye, Maria!’” The woman lifted her hand and waved mockingly in her brother’s direction. “Go ahead!’”
Looking toward them, Maria’s stomach flipped. That tilting sensation slipped around her again, like she had no footing, as if the world was sliding out from beneath her feet.
In the distance, the second woman cradled Michael in her arms—
A dream. A nightmare. Truly. A terribly real and unstoppable nightmare.
—and their dark shapes drifted higher and higher above the tilting earth.
Maria flinched as something touched her collarbone. Suddenly the woman was standing directly beside her again. A flowery scent wafted over her, and something… spicier, underneath…
“Ah,” the woman said. Maria felt the leather necklace—she forgot she was wearing it yet again—pull taut against the back of her neck. “Cheap shaman tricks.”
Maria recoiled as the woman attempted to remove it.
“Don’t touch me!”
The woman seized Maria’s hair by the roots, tugged her head back at an angle. Maria cried out.
“Yes, that’s it…” the woman said.
In an instant, she pulled the necklace up over Maria’s face. Once it was off, she released her. Maria stumbled back. With the necklace dangling from her fist, the woman uttered a strange sound, a word Maria didn’t understand. Foreign.
“That’s better,” the woman said.
Maria stepped back. The dirt was rough under her bare feet. She stole a glance in her brother’s direction, which now happened to be someplace high in the sky, soaring into the deep, dark nothing. She’d lost sight of him now. Gone.
The woman stepped toward her and Maria bolted. She fled back toward the motel, the windows dark in each of its rooms. She opened her mouth to scream but had no voice. She felt her throat—bare, now the necklace was gone—and even as her quickened feet slapped the earth, her panting made no audible noise. Her voice was vanished, stolen from her.
In the absence of her own breath, she heard another’s. Behind her. A low pant. She heard a creature’s feet in the dirt, claws scraping, nearly upon her. The motel was just out of reach. Somehow she knew even if she had a voice to scream with, no one would hear her. They were all asleep. A deep sleep. A cursed sleep.
The panting changed, the scraping claws in the dirt left the ground, and suddenly the air was knocked from her lungs. An immense weight thrust against her and she fell. She landed on her shoulder. The panting beast moved over her, on top of her. A wolf. Its matted fur was wiry against her skin. Its cloying breath, full of death, puffed into her nostrils as it lowered its fanged maw to her throat. She opened her mouth in a wide, pleading, soundless scream. She pushed against it, tried to shove it off, but was too weak. Its jaws opened over her throat, pressed just enough to pin her there, holding her head to the ground. From its wheezing dog’s breath, a human voice spoke. The woman’s voice.
“Be still…”
With a single, terrible jerk the wolf could tear her throat out, she knew. She cried helplessly in its grip. In the midst of the panic seeping through her every thought, she remembered her grandmother’s story, and she remembered Michael’s story. Voices in the desert.
Now this was her story, she supposed.
The woman spoke a final time, and her words were again those which Maria didn’t understand. More sounds than words. A tune to them. An incantation.
As the wolf’s breath warmed her skin, she stared into the sky above its furred head—huge and dark and full of things better seen through a telescope—and the blackness there crept into her vision until she faded completely.
✽ ✽ ✽
Wind tussled her hair. She cracked opened her eyes. Consciousness was neither here nor there, but her vision was restored for a moment, whether her mind could make any sense of what it saw or not.
The stars were above them. Around them. There was nothing beneath them.
Like a light at the end of a dark tunnel, the moon called to them, drew them in on its currents. A magnetism. Calming and seductive. In the arms of a lovely creature—a minion of the night and the moon Herself—Maria turned her head to see the moon, bright and huge and full of want. Hungry. So hungry…
And it wanted her…
CHAPTER FIVE
LABORS OF THE MOON
An aching in her joints stirred her. Which joints, she couldn’t tell. All of them. The ground was hard and cold beneath her body. She lay on her side, her hands bound together behind her back. A thick chain. She blinked her eyes, only barely surfaced from the pulling waves of sleep, and could hardly see a thing. Not only was it dim, wherever she was, but her vision was dulled. Details failed her. Though her body ached, and her muscles throbbed, she could do little else but lie where she was…<
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A shout. A cry. Somewhere close. A young boy.
“Michael?” she asked weakly. Her voice seemed to have been restored.
It was just so dim. A small, warm light. A torch on the wall. She blinked again. They were cave walls. The ground she lay on was mere stone.
Her brother’s voice continued to cry out. A soft moan.
“Michael?” she asked a little louder.
There was movement across the room. A large, cloth drape moved aside as a figure stepped out from a concealed area of the cave. A woman. Maria held her breath at the sight of her. Unnaturally beautiful—the same woman as before. She was naked now, head to toe. Her bare body glowed in the soft firelight. Maria watched as she busied herself back and forth across the chamber.
It was a small cave, but full. Shelf after shelf, cluttered with jars and tinctures and other oddities. And books. So many books, all worn with age. More of them stacked on the floor in every corner. Numerous half-melted, unlit candles wherever there was space for them. Strange plants spilled out from baskets and hung from the walls like garland. Various tapestries of different shapes and sizes and designs hung across those same walls, their illustrations telling stories Maria was in no state of mind to decipher.
And other things… hung from the walls…
Maria’s eyes widened as quickly as her stomach churned.
Human heads hung from the walls. Some fresher than others. Most of them old and withered, deflated. Mouths stuffed with crunchy herbs not unlike the ones which filled the baskets and dangled between the shelves. Men’s heads. Women’s heads. Children’s heads. Some of them were decayed enough that they were nearly skulls. Others, however… with quite a bit of meat left on their bones…
Still lying on her side, too afraid to move, Maria focused on the naked woman. On a table against the far wall, the woman added various things to a large bowl. She grabbed jars from the shelves, plucked one of this, one of that, dropping the ingredients inside. She paused, her back to the room. She scratched the top of her head, thinking. To Maria’s quickening pulse, she casually removed a portion of her own scalp, her fingers wound up inside the hair. She dropped it wetly on the floor at her feet without a second thought.
She continued moving about the room, and each time it seemed as though she might look in Maria’s direction, Maria closed her eyes secretively. Maria opened them again, watched in fascinated terror. She was repulsed and yet she needed to see. The woman scratched her scalp compulsively, agitatedly, removing more and more bloody scraps of it until she was only left with a patch of long hair hanging from the back of her neck. Her body transformed as well. Her breasts appeared to be growing larger. They drooped further down her chest. Her hips widened, so gradual as to be imperceptible in the moment, but after several minutes there was no doubt at all. If Maria had closed her eyes all this time, and opened them only now, she’d have thought someone had traded places with the youthful woman from before. Her body was stretching in seemingly every direction, until she no longer resembled her previous self at all.
Maria startled as something scraped the floor beside her. She glanced in its direction, holding still as possible. She lifted her head slightly, craned her head to see. There was someone else there with her. Someone sharing space with her all this time.
They moved again, their own chains scraping the cave floor, and Maria couldn’t help it. She bolted upright. She scooted back from them, whoever it was, until the chains on her wrists pulled taut against the metal plate which was set securely into the cave wall at their backs.
She gasped.
A naked man leaned toward her, chained only arm’s length away. He blinked his sorry eyes desperately. He moaned, and Maria saw his mouth was sewn shut. The fiber, weaved through his soft, pink lips, pulled sharply as he whined, and fresh blood oozed gently down his chin. Maria trembled at the sight. He fidgeted, pushing himself up against the wall for support, and she saw that his legs were missing below their knees. Hacked away. Dark, decaying stumps in their place. He leaned closer, chains clinking as they reached their limit. Maria screamed.
The creature across the cave—it wasn’t a woman anymore, but something else entirely—turned toward the sound of her scream and a perverse, blood-chilling grin grew upon its flattened face. Its naked body jiggled and shuddered as it came toward her. It reached its clawed hands out, bending down as it approached, and Maria shrieked louder still. Her throat hurt with the sound.
Before she felt the creature’s hands upon her face, her vision faded a second time and those lapping waves of sleep swallowed her up again.
✽ ✽ ✽
Sometime later—it was impossible to know how long—she woke again. She opened her eyes, the dim view blurring in and out of focus. Before she recognized or remembered anything from before, she was hit with an almost-subconscious sensation of hope. A hope that she was about to wake up someplace different. Her family’s motel room, for instance. Her waking mind couldn’t yet recall where she’d been last, and yet the horrors she saw there carried a strong afterburn.
As the low-lit room sharpened, and the cold of the stone beneath her chilled body worked its way through her, she started to remember. Once those images, those memories, greeted her mind’s eye, they poured upon her like a bucket of ice water.
She jerked upright, rattling the chains on her wrists. Her chest hammered. Beside her, the naked man with no legs lay back against the cave wall, eyes closed. There was blood, old and new, dried and wet, all over the floor where he sat. They’d done it to him there, she thought. Right there, where he lay chained. Cut his legs from him, in what she couldn’t help imagining in the most violent of ways. Her eyes darted uncontrollably around the cave in search of them, the legs, as though they might be casually propped somewhere. Were they displayed with the severed heads on the walls? Did they lay on the table across the room, in the bowl where the woman—
As her fretting eyes moved over the room, she noticed something new. Something which hadn’t been there previously, constructed while she slept…
It hung from the ceiling by a rope in the center of the cave. Turning slowly. The warm torchlight revealed it clearly enough. It was immediately apparent to her, its being there, but what it was exactly took a moment longer to tell, not because it was difficult to see, or because the light wasn’t bright enough, or because it was in any way foggy or obscured to her. She knew immediately what she saw and at the same time knew nothing about it.
She willed herself not to understand it because it was too dreadful to acknowledge.
“Oh… god…” she muttered, as a trembling chill wrenched her.
Stripped naked, strung upside-down from his ankles in the middle of the cave, Michael twirled slowly back and forth in the firelight, arms dangling beneath him. The large bowl that had once been on the table was now on the floor, catching what dripped from his dangling fingers. Dripping from his slick, wetted hair. Dark blood. He wore a mask of it. A mask which ended sharply in the middle of his throat, where a nasty gash was drawn.
Michael was bled dry.
She couldn’t take a full breath—just quick, shallow gasps. Inviting any more air into her lungs wouldn’t leave room for the sickness brewing in her belly, and one or the other would have to make way. She peered disbelievingly around the cave, at all the dead things on its walls, on the shelves, in the jars. Her eyes wandered to the naked man chained next to her. Roused by her stirring, he looked back.
She couldn’t help it then. She moaned. She watched her brother’s twirling corpse, the hollows of his eyes full of congealing blood. She’d heard his cries, she thought. The first time she awoke. He’d been alive then. And now…
A nightmare. An awfully vivid nightmare. The worst of my life…
Was he awake when it happened, she wondered? Had he hung there from the rope around his ankles, the blood rushing to his head, with his unconscious sister in sight as they’d done this to him? Had he cried for her then?
She bawled
and there was no controlling it. Noisy and pained. Animal-like. She’d draw their attention, she thought, but the fear of that did little to silence her. She was already here. They had her, would have her, just as they had Michael. She gasped for air, head back against the rough stone. The naked man shuffled next to her, leaning toward her with his sewn lips. She could just make out his face through her tears. Was it sympathy in his eyes? Though they shared the same predicament, he currently had much more to worry about, clearly.
Across the cave, someone pulled the brown cloth aside, only slightly. A figure stood in the dark behind it. Maria could just make out its ugly face, watching. The creature smiled, turning Maria’s blood to ice water in her veins. It stepped into the cave. Its body was oiled head to toe, flabby rolls of skin glistening. Its breasts hung toward its midriff, swaying as it stepped toward the middle of the room, toward Michael’s body. Goosebumps coursed across Maria’s body as she watched. The creature stood behind her brother, peeking out as if they were playing a game. It ducked behind him again, only to peek out on the other side, grinning that sickening, ghastly grin from one side of its face to the other.
“Hello…” It spoke with the ragged, raspy voice of an old woman. An ancient woman. It—or she—ducked behind Michael’s body once more. She made a humming sound, darkly playful. She reappeared on the other side once more, mouth agape, as though treating Maria to an unsettling game of peekaboo. “Aren’t you a pretty thing…”
Maria wanted to ask it things, all of the pitifully predictable questions one in her situation might ask. Who it was. What it was. What did it want from her? Why was it doing this? Instead she could say nothing. Do nothing. The thick, heavy chains around her wrists were heavier than ever now.
“You know him?” the creature asked, a bubbling in the back of her throat. She poked Michael’s side. She jabbed him hard, sending his body swaying slightly on the rope.
