“What? Do you know ’em?”
“No.”
“Well, ain’t you never raised hell, before? I thought you were cool.”
That hits him like a fist to the gut. He tries to hide it but his eyes give him away. He thought he was cool, too. For a while there he was feeling like a kid again, just one of the guys.
“We ain’t gonna hurt nothin’,” I say. “Just peek in their liquor cabinet and take some for the road. You never done that?”
He has. But not in a long time.
I can feel it in my bones, smell it on his breath. He hesitates, temptation gnawing a hole so big in his gut you could drive a truck through it.
He smiles. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”
Release. It’s like that moment you stand up after drinking when it all hits you at once coupled with the tingling opening salvo of a full-force orgasm. The headache vanishes in an orgiastic rush, with even the itch banished to the back of my skull for another hour or so. If he goes through with this, I’ll be good till sundown tomorrow. If not, I’ve got a few hours’ reprieve to figure out my next move and find my next victim.
But this guy’s gonna go through with it. I can tell. I can always tell.
But that ain’t the worst of it, not for him.
This poor son of a bitch has no idea what he’s walking into. You see, there are a couple of things I haven’t told you yet. Firstly, I know exactly where we’re going and I know who lives in that house. I smell ’em every time I end up here. Secondly, I didn’t end up in this town by accident. Not this time. And lastly, we’re not going there for booze. We’re going there for peace.
Who lives in that house?
UHF and the FM Girl.
That’s what we called them anyway, in Midian, behind their back. Their names are Humphrey B and Sylvia, but the first time you see them you can’t think of them as anything but UHF and the FM Girl. UHF is a tall guy, six feet at the shoulder, with an old nineteen-inch black-and-white CRT television for a head. There’s all this sinewy muscle wrapped around cables running up from his chest and neck into the TV, but the back of the set is blown out, like it was hollowed from the inside by a shotgun blast—jagged plastic surrounding a seven-inch hole. Inside there’s nothing, nothing at all. But the TV screen is always lit, a disembodied head in fuzzy black and white, ever floating, reacting, just as you’d expect his head to react.
The FM Girl is different. She’s lithe, willowy, easily five foot nothing, her skin wrinkled and desiccated, like she was mummified, her eyes and mouth sewn shut with ratty black thread. While she can’t speak, she’s always broadcasting her thoughts, and if you’ve got a radio nearby tuned to the right station—89.7! The screaming sounds of hell!—you can hear her just fine. So she carries around an old beat-up hand-cranked emergency radio that she’ll wind to life if she ever has anything to say.
They’re a fine couple, as married as us monsters can be. FM Girl needs flesh to feed; UHF just needs to watch. He can go a little longer than she can, but neither can go more than a year or two without a good, honest-to-God murder. I’ve been keeping track of them for a spell. They’ve been picking off truckers over the years, catching them overnight, murdering them in their cabs before driving their trucks off into oblivion. But it’s been a while. And they must be getting hungry.
So I’m bringing takeout.
The windows of the house are blacked out for obvious reasons, but Bill doesn’t notice. It’s a run-down, single-story ranch-style affair with peeling blue paint and the rusted-out frame of a midseventies Oldsmobile oxidizing into nothingness out front. It is, as far as Panhandle homes go, entirely ordinary.
We slip in through the back door into a hallway that splits off to the living room and the kitchen. I point to Bill and then the kitchen, then myself and the living room. He enters the kitchen completely unaware that there’s an open door to the cellar in there and that under this house there be monsters.
They hear him come in. He’s about as silent as a raccoon in a trash can.
A pale blue light creeps up the stairs, but Bill’s too busy picking through the cabinets to see it.
Behind him, not six feet away, is the FM Girl, her husband standing silently, ominously, behind her. Watching. The kitchen fills with the blue light of his flickering set and Bill turns slowly around.
His eyes go wide with fear. He’s paralyzed, unable to process what he’s seeing.
The FM Girl reaches up to her sewn-shut mouth and yanks at the thread, pulling it out in one slow, deliberate motion. Then her cheek splits, splaying her ear to ear, rows of needle-teeth glistening in slobber as her massive jaw unhinges. Her mouth is so wide it looks as if it could swallow Bill’s head whole.
Behind her, UHF’s head vanishes from inside the set, his display showing his view of his wife and her soon-to-be meal.
The FM Girl reaches down and cranks her radio, winding it up furiously. It crackles to life, thick static shrieking murderous thoughts along with the phrase “Wrong house, motherfucker.”
My machete cuts her in half from behind before UHF can speak up to warn her, his flickering screen showing every horrible second of his wife’s demise. Her body topples to the floor with two wet slaps.
I dive in like a rabid beast, razor claws rending her flesh into fistfuls of meat that I greedily shove into my mouth. Blood coats me in seconds, the floor growing slick with it.
I look up at UHF and smile. He’s feeding. He’s feeding watching his own wife devoured handful by delicious handful. He feels awful about it, can’t decide whether to run for safety or stay a few seconds longer to taste the end of the love of his life. The thrill of his sin is the cream gravy on the chicken fried steak of my meal.
“You should go, Humphrey,” I say through a mouthful of his wife.
His head reappears on the screen and his voice crackles through his tinny mono speaker. “Are you going to kill me next?”
“Do I have to?”
He shakes his head back and forth, the television remaining perfectly still. “No.”
“Then go. Run. Before I change my mind.”
He thinks for a second, knowing he should probably fight, should stay and defend the last remains of his beloved Sylvia. But he doesn’t. He runs.
And I turn back to my meal, savoring every last bit of murderous sin that remains of the FM Girl.
Bill is slumped on the floor, staring at me slack-jawed, eyes as wide, unblinking.
So I turn to him. “You’re not going to say a word about this, are you Bill?”
He shakes his head, terrified, a few seconds shy of pissing himself right there on the floor.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of here.”
He stands up and scampers out the door without looking back. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if he tells anyone. Who’s going to believe him? He walked out of a bar drunk with a stranger and the next time anyone sees it, this house is going to be on fire. Telling stories about monsters in the basement will get him branded either a crackpot or an arsonist.
He’ll choose neither. He’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to forget what he saw tonight and maybe, just maybe, he’ll stop trying to live in the past.
I don’t have anything against humans, really. I don’t ever make anyone do anything they don’t want to do in the first place. Not really. I just give them a nudge. The interesting thing about doing this is seeing what comes after. My gift to them is they get to find out who they really are, deep down. And what they do with that knowledge defines them from that point on. Some folks can’t handle the memories of their night with me, but others come out all right on the other side. They make peace with themselves. They become better people. But it’s their choice. Everything is their choice.
So in case you were wondering, that’s how I sleep at night.
And I’m going to be sleeping a lot better now knowing I won’t have to be that guy for quite some time, that I won’t wake up with an itch in my head that turns into a rumble that
turns into a scream. All my drinking I can do for myself now, all my sins will be my own. At least for a while.
But now that my head’s clear and I’ve got the taste of monster on my tongue, I’m wondering. Just how much more time can I buy myself if I run ole Humphrey down as well? I think I might do just that. He smells delicious.
THE DEVIL UNTIL THE CREDITS ROLL
Weston Ochse
(Written while deployed to Afghanistan)
The silence was extraordinary as I stared into the darkness, waiting, knowing it would come for us. Like a nightmare scrambling across the desert floor, it would seethe into our midst. One or more of us would die tonight. I knew this better than the others. This was the second time I’d come to the monster. After the first time, I’d promised myself I’d never do it again and not just because the monster said the next time I’d die. There was something about the unworldly creature that brought out the primordial within me, cellular memories that evoked things in the darkness that needed to stay outside the fire, creatures whose existence preceded the idea of evil but nonetheless influenced humanity’s idea of it.
“And you’re sure it’s up there?” Watson’s dark shape next to me whispered. The sound of his boots scooting on the grit sliced at the Afghanistan night.
I tried to control my breathing. Each sound was like a rifle shot to my nerves. The monster would come when it wanted, but Watson couldn’t wait. We were all Special Forces, but Watson had also been a Ranger, deploying six times in support of the advanced infantry force, and he was incapable of acknowledging that there was something he couldn’t defeat with technique, courage, and steel. So he kept scanning the cave entrance with his night-vision, even though he’d been told the monster wouldn’t show up in them.
To be honest, none of them really believed in the existence of monsters. I could tell they were reconciled that the entire mission was a lark and we’d be drinking scotch back on FOB Salerno in six hours. But I knew better and I felt more than a little guilt in bringing these five men to this otherwise nondescript cave in the Tora Bora Mountains.
The butt of Wisnewski’s HK416 scraped the ground ever so slightly as he shifted, causing me to spin to the sound.
“This is bullshit,” the big Polack grumbled.
“Keep your game face on,” I ordered, my voice barely audible. I understood their doubt. I’d had it on my first mission to the cave three years ago. We’d been attacked and forced into the mountains, where a man pulling mules carrying scrap metal told us a terrified story of a creature living in the mountains who killed Taliban. What the old Khyber Pass peddler couldn’t have known was the creature killed everyone. The Taliban were just its most recent victims.
I willed the silence to descend once again. The only way I’d hear it coming would be if everyone would shut the fuck up.
But Wisnewski wanted to be heard and simpered, “I still say this is bullshit.”
Segrest shifted slightly on the other side of him.
Beside him sat Perez and then Dobler, the Agency man we’d picked up from the slick ten klicks north. The newcomer had made a career studying the Nightbreed. The incident in Midian hadn’t gone unnoticed and eventually an analyst buried in the labyrinth of cubicles in America’s secret palace latched on to it. Since then, Dobler had been peeling back the onion, trying to determine everything he could about the mysterious group. So this opportunity wasn’t something he could pass up, especially when my after-action report hit his desk last year.
FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO—SOJTF DETACHMENT
SPECIAL OPERATIONS JOINT TASK FORCE—AFGHANISTAN:
AFTER ACTION REPORT FOR MISSION 32-0073-12
EXSUM: ODA 32 ENCOUNTERED RESISTANCE ALONG ROUTE YELLOW OF COMPANY-SIZED ELEMENT OF INS. DISENGAGED PRIOR TO CONTACTING OVERWHELMING FORCE. UNABLE TO MAKE ALTERNATE ROUTES. E&E TOOK ODA 32 ALONG TORA BORA BACKBONE WHERE ADDITIONAL HOSTILITIES OCCURRED, INVOLVING NON-COMBATANT CREATURE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN. MEDIVAC REMOVED THREE AC KIA, ONE KIA AND ONE AC WIA. MSG JOHN HERSHEY GILLAM, ODA 32, SOJTF-A, SOLE SURVIVOR.
AAR 32-0073-12 IS CLASSIFIED XX XX X XXX.
NON-COMBATANT CREATURE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN.
After both the debriefer and I had signed nondisclosure agreements, three Army colonels and a Navy SEAL lieutenant commander at Camp Integrity had argued for hours about the after-action report, finally settling on that term. They’d tried MONSTER, BOOGYMAN, FIEND, DEVIL, even dallying with UNIDENTIFIED CREATURE. They’d finally settled on NCCOUO, afraid that any other reference might bring undue attention to what otherwise had been a disastrous mission.
“Disastrous.”
That was a word to describe it, I supposed.
In the end, I’d been forced to fight for my life, my thumbs pressing through the pupils of my best friend’s eyes as the Non-Combatant Creature of Unknown Origin laughed and giggled and danced, using the entrails of my other two soldiers as party favors for his own celebration. Ben had almost strangled me before I was finally able to kill him. I’d pressed so hard I’d bruised the soft parts of my hand between thumb and forefinger, beating it against Ben’s ocular bone as my digits sought to clear a deep enough path so I could skull-fuck him. There were times when I could hear the sound of my penis moving in and out of his head with sickening clarity.
That hadn’t made it into the report. But I had tried to explain things. I’d tried to tell them what had really happened, but the psychologists got involved and began making excuses for me that I never could have made on my own. So I let them. I got some R&R and blew off some steam. Then I came back, ready to become who I once was until Dobler contacted me and had to remind me of who I’d been.
I stilled my mind. I closed my eyes and heightened my hearing. I felt it.
Any moment now.
My eyes shot open as a feeling descended upon me. A fear, born when the earth was young, enveloped me in a hollow grasp. I breathed but my breath went nowhere, sucked into the void growing inside of me.
Perez began to weep.
I wanted to do the same, but choked back my emotion.
“You come again,” said a voice as close to my ear as the French hooker had been in Morocco when I was on R&R.
I dared not look. I didn’t have to. A misshapen face materialized next to me, lingering like the smoke from a cigar before it dissolved.
Watson began to giggle. The slap of flesh on flesh came faster and faster as he unmistakably masturbated in the dark, his grunts of pleasure coming with metronomic frequency.
“We have a mission.” My throaty rasp was calmer than I believed it could be.
“Children playing at war. Finger guns. Bang. Bang,” the monster said, words surging in disjointed whispers.
Segrest whimpered. “Wha-at is ggg-going on, momma?”
I’d told them not to show fear. I’d explained how the monster fed on it. They hadn’t listened.
Segrest screamed.
I rolled over and placed a hand over his mouth. I watched the starlight reflect in his feverish and darting eyes. “STFU, soldier.” I glared at him, trying to explain with a look that Segrest needed to shut up to save himself, but he was staring at something not there.
The monster sighed. “You bring children to me.”
My eyes watered as emotions seeped past, memories of my youngest sister dead in a post-prom car accident, my old friend Baker gut-shot and dying in my arms, the crying of my own sons on the telephone after my wife had stolen them away to some Montana farm, and Ben screaming at me to stop.
“We are all children to you, Rook,” I managed to say, biting back the memories the monster sucked free.
Umbra, penumbra, and antumbra, the three distinct parts of shadow, coalesced into a dark figure sitting next to me. A single horn rose from its head like a rhinoceros’s. I knew better than to look directly at the monster, instead keeping it in my peripheral vision.
“One of you will die tonight,” it said.
“Then take me, but first let me tell you why I came.�
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I felt it regarding me. I was almost positive it couldn’t read my mind, but I hid the truth behind memories, knowing it would relish these first.
“Tell me what it is that makes you want to die.”
I paused, knowing that everything hinged on my next words. Then I said it, the culmination of too many ideas and my own desire to finally discover the truth. “We’ve found another of you and we want you to kill it.”
The words had the desired effect.
Within minutes the monster had gathered us in his cave. Lined up as though we were the guests of honor at an execution, we were pitiful representations of humanity. I was the least affected. Still, I trembled a little, knowing that things could get much worse, and absolutely understanding that no one would be able to stop the runaway train called Rook if we let him get going.
Watson still pulled at himself, his face cut into a permanent leer.
Wisnewski’s eyes fluttered, caught in the memories of a deed he hadn’t told anyone about, telling us the tale over and over in a dead man’s monotone. “And I took her face in my hand and held it before I shoved it into the dirt and then I ripped free her clothes and then I…”
Segrest shook, urine blackening his pants, the stench the only recognizable aroma in the monster’s lair besides dead and rotting flesh.
Perez gripped his crucifix in his right hand so tightly his skin bled. He recited “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s in barely audible whispers, interspersing them with profanity and explicit descriptions of what he wanted to do with the holy mother, each utterance making him speak faster, trying to rid himself of the monster’s terrible influence.
Dobler’s reaction was the opposite of everyone else’s. His face was fat with anger, red cheeks, creased forehead, and rippling sneer. Hatred bled from his eyes as his hands clenched over and over, invisibly strangling infants, the weak, and the infirm.
What I could see of the oval-shaped cave was lit by a small lantern that sat on a slat of wood balanced across several smaller rocks. From the ceiling hung several hundred heads, each one another version of the previous one—black hair, Caucasian features, head scarf, and an oval gash of terror for a mouth. Several Afghan rugs lay on the floor, creating a livable space. Their rich reds and blues made the room less a cave and more a parlor. A stack of pillows rested against one wall, and it was upon these Rook now reclined. The only piece of clothing he wore was a kilt, tartaned in red and blues. His body was long and well muscled. If a man hadn’t seen his head, they might mistake him for tall lean human. But the horn atop his overly large and misshapen skull relegated him past the category of circus freak, firmly into the encyclopedia of monsters. Then there was the color of his skin. A dead color. The unmistakable gray of a cadaver.
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