A part of me wanted to ask if she wasn’t really just talking about herself, but I knew it was too callous to mention aloud.
She heard me anyway, and said, “Maybe you’re right. But I know he’s stuck down there, some reason. Thinks something inside me, in my head, holds the key.”
Again I couldn’t deny how strange it was she hadn’t gone mad, lost her grip on reality to the point where her neatly evolved social wiring and moral arbitrations had disintegrated into cosmic mush. I knew she loved me. Didn’t know how she could, or why she wanted to. A part of her feared me, and what I was or might become, just as much.
“You ever kill anybody, Eustace?”
I blinked in surprise at the question. “No, Ma.” But I’ve sure wanted to.
She heard that. She turned in her chair, turned her distant, unfocused gaze to my face. “Me too,” she whispered. “But I ran away instead.”
“Really?”
She nodded slowly.
I squinted at the dark corner of her mind I’d never been able to read. “Was it the right thing?”
She shrugged. “Don’t think it would’ve made things any different than they turned out.”
The door swung open and a stocky, middle-aged man in a dark blue police uniform walked in. His white hair was buzzed short, and his cool blue eyes peered casually into the room behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses held together in several places with thin pieces of duct tape. A piece of gum that stank of nicotine popped between his teeth as he chewed. He clutched a manila file folder under his right arm.
Ma froze like a pea stalk in April, mind blank. The emptiness inside me when her thoughts withdrew was always unsettling. It meant something was wrong.
The old man’s chewing paused. His eyes widened for a split second before they narrowed, darting back and forth as his gaze lingered on Ma’s face. His eyes licked to me, then back to her. “Do I know you kids?”
I shook my head. “Don’t think so, sir.” I glanced at Ma. She was gone all right, eyelids drooped, barely blinking.
“Take a seat, son.”
I rolled my eyes where the officer couldn’t see and repositioned Ma’s chair so she sat side by side with me. The officer pulled up another chair across from us and crossed his ankle over his knee.
“You the investigator?” I asked.
“Sheriff, son. Name’s Roy Cummings. You can call me Sheriff Cummings.” His bucktooth grin looked more like a grimace, and the yellow tobacco stains on his teeth didn’t make him look any more appealing. He extended a hand to me and I shook it to be polite. He held my hand a little longer than comfortable and grumbled, “Rough hands. Must be a farmer’s kid.”
“I was raised on a corn field, sure enough.”
He let go and just stared at me a while. Without even looking at the file in his lap, he asked, “Eustace Kelly?”
I clenched my jaw, but nodded.
“Your folks down in Karns have been worried sick about you. They say you ran away two weeks ago.”
“They ain’t my folks. And I’m eighteen—I can go where I want to.”
The sheriff sighed and leaned back in his chair. “They treat you poorly?”
I shook my head. “They’s good to me, sir.”
“You eloping?”
My cheeks burned as I glanced at Ma. I’d taken her hand without realizing, and I didn’t want to let go. “No sir. She’s… she’s my sister.”
He nodded slowly. “If I didn’t know my biology, I’d say you two looked like identical twins.” He leaned forward just a little and opened the folder, thumbing through papers. I didn’t know what the file was, but I suspected it contained some details on our stay overnight here at the hospital. “How’d you end up in here with those cuts, and her without a stitch of clothing?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’d like to hear it.” This was stupid. I shouldn’t even be sitting here having this conversation with anybody.
“What’s her name?”
“Uh…” I blinked, realizing for the first time that I had never known Ma’s name. I wondered if she knew her name either, anymore. Not that I would want to give the sheriff her real name anyway.
The hesitation wasn’t missed. Sheriff Cummings looked up. “I’m sorry, say again?”
“He don’t know my name,” Ma mumbled.
The sheriff laughed. “So the girl speaks after all? Guess she ain’t mute and dumb.”
I jumped to my feet, ready to smack the condescending leer from the man’s face when Ma pulled back on the hand she still held. Reluctantly I sank back into my seat, glaring at him instead. “You here to help us, sir?” I asked as politely and bluntly as I could.
“I want to. Problem is, you don’t have a sister, Eustace. Not that anybody knows of. And if I can’t figure out who your girlfriend is, I’m gonna have to take her into custody until somebody claims her.”
“What if nobody claims her?”
“And why would nobody claim her?”
“He found me in the mine,” said Ma.
I looked at her, eyes wide.
“My name… it’s Cassie-Jo Lyons. You know me, don’t you, Roy?”
Sheriff Cummings stared at her a moment. He looked about ready to laugh again, but he frowned and leaned in closer to us, took off his glasses. “You ain’t Cassie-Jo. It’s not possible.”
“I ain’t dead.” She reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding mine and squeezed his shoulder. I sensed her fighting to break free of the inhibiting ethereal chaos in her head that no machine on earth could detect. “Look at me real close. I know I ain’t right in the head no more, and I don’t look right neither. But you gotta listen. This here is my son.”
Sheriff Cummings uttered a nervous, high-pitched laugh, then coughed. She wasn’t just telling him, I knew. She was showing him, opening up his mind and letting a little bit of that chaos bleed through so he’d have no more doubts.
“I know you feel bad about me, Sheriff Cummings. You know something’s down in my papa’s old mine. Something dangerous. If you want to put things right, you gotta let us go, and you can’t let my papa know I got out.”
***
In the morning, she smelled like that cheap no-name motel soap they give you for free. The whole world pretty much stank, but nothing on her ever did.
My foster mother wouldn’t be able to make it into Thistleville until today, so she’d booked a room for this girl and me at the only halfway decent motel in town and told me to stay put until she got there. Our room had two beds, but Ma—Cassie-Jo—let me curl up next to her to sleep, she under the covers and me above them. She wore scrubs and underwear the hospital had been kind enough to let her keep, and I wore a pair of old shorts with a shirt from my backpack that hadn’t been ripped to shreds. Since my one pair of jeans was still soaked in slime, I’d be wearing my pajamas till I washed them.
It had been a long time since I’d been close enough to see Ma’s dreams. Though she kept still, her dreams were rough, full of longing, guilt, and confusion about the deformed thing she’d just given birth to and left to be consumed by the Elder Thing. I was the one who abandoned the two-part body, but even the unconscious recesses of her brain didn’t think to blame me. After all, she’d tried to gouge it out of her own womb to hasten its entry and perhaps even its demise, hoping to spare it the fate that forty-three others had already endured.
She didn’t tell me how Sheriff Cummings knew her or what he’d done to wrong her in the past. She didn’t tell me about her parents, about her papa. All she’d said was, “Don’t go digging up skeletons in the backyard, Eustace. It’ll drive you mad.” The summer’s heat began to creep in through the window along with morning’s first light. At least the wimpy little AC unit in the room worked. She faced me, form coiled in a tight fetal position with her knees squeezed up nearly to her chin, hand curled against my chest. Don’t know if the hand was there to reassure me she hadn’t gone missing in the night, or to keep a little space betwe
en us.
I watched her breathing, struck once more at how beautiful and vulnerable she looked. She had the softest snore I’d ever heard. Ma’s psyche exuded nothing but sweetness and sorrow. She still hurt real bad. She still wasn’t sure she had much to survive for. But there wasn’t a bitter cell in her body. Compassion that I’d never known before, her own compassion, burned within me. I knew that as long as I lived, no wolves or fallen fiends from unknown stars would ever hurt her again. I just wished I knew how to heal her and make her happy. Maybe I’d have to start with me.
Ma’s dream twisted, and I heard a strange voice call to her in a language I didn’t know that felt as old as darkness. The Elder Thing. He wanted her to return to the mine. She jerked her eyes open and clutched her stomach, body rigid, mouth agape as she sucked in strained, wheezy gasps.
I flipped on the nightstand lamp beside her and took her by the shoulders. “It’s changing me,” she huffed.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” She writhed and her gasps turned to sobs.
“How bad does it hurt?” She said nothing, just clenched her eyes shut.
“Do you want me to take you back to the hospital?”
She huffed, “Don’t think they can… help… help me.”
I scooped her up into my arms, took a seat on the edge of the bed, and cradled her head against my shoulder.
“I don’t know what it wants. I’m so tired of… of… Why won’t it just let me die?”
She settled down after a while, and I felt sick inside. All that nonsense I’d thought about keeping her safe from Pa, and I didn’t know how the hell to keep him out of her head.
Ma’s crazy smile appeared, though it looked a little more genuine this time. “It’s the bones,” she said. “He can’t change our bones. They’re solid. We’re… we’re too tough inside.” She laughed at her own metaphor.
“Ain’t he got bones too?”
“Yeah, something like bones. That’s why I can’t change him neither.”
I picked up her left wrist and took a closer look at the cuff. It was a simple cylinder clamped flush against her skin, with thick rims and a texture more like polished stone than metal. It resembled the same material as the sleek pod he slept in when he wasn’t hungry. The nearly invisible black symbols felt as dark as they looked. Some kind of energy exuded from it. Buzzing through her. Buzzing through me. This was the thing that connected us. And this thing was messing with her metabolism. It had frozen her in time, in a way, or in age. I swore in shock. “Ma, did he put this on you?” The answer I craved lay in that part of her mind that was blocked to me.
Her lip twitched the smile away. She sat up and brought her cuffed wrist closer to her face, trying to focus her eyes on it. “No,” she whispered.
“Where’d you get this? Did your papa find it?”
She shook her head, refusing to answer.
“This is what the Elder Thing wants, Ma. I’ll bet its been keeping him alive for millions of years, and he needs it to… to get out of there, er… I don’t know what.”
She lifted her gaze to my face, brows furrowed, eyes wide. “What’re you thinking about, Eustace?”
“He ain’t getting it back. Or you neither.” It’d been a long time since my voice had cracked at anything this way. I brushed her curtain of blonde hair out of her sweaty face to make eye contact easier. “I could try to break that thing off you. I don’t know what’ll happen, but…”
“I’ll die.” Despite the distance in her words I knew she was certain of the outcome.
I swallowed and said, “I don’t want you to suffer no more. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”
Her unfocused eyes searched my face, and I looked away. I was so afraid she’d see my dread of losing her and ask me to return her to the mine. Maybe I was selfish, but I couldn’t bear the thought of her screams, or the details of her pain echoing in my mind. We were quiet a long time. “I didn’t know you was seeing everything that happened to me,” she said. “That’s why I sent you to live with people, so you wouldn’t have to see so much. I’m so sorry, baby.”
I shook my head. “None of this is your fault. He’s got no right to hurt you. You understand?” I took a deep breath and blew out slowly, stoking my fingers through her hair.
“I only feel the change when I get too far away, or when I use my thoughts to hurt him,” she said. “It don’t happen if I stay with him, if I don’t use the… the dark noisy stuff.”
“You did something to him the other night so we could escape, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Trembling, she extended her arm bearing the cuff to me. “I don’t want to go back, and I don’t want it to change me. Help me get it off?”
I nodded and took the hand in both of mine.
She squeezed my shoulder with her other hand and I looked into her eyes once more. “I think I’ve been keeping him in there somehow,” she said. “If you try to break this thing off me and something goes wrong—if it kills me to take it off—he might get out and hurt people.”
I believed her. Maybe I was about to kill my mother and set this monster loose on this world, a world that wasn’t fully mine, either. The weight of what I was about to do—and what could not then be undone—sank my facade of apathy and pride to the pit of my stomach. The fiend would kill me if it could, and I’d have to face him alone, without Ma’s voice or her protection. I’d have to find a way to get him before he got me.
“I love you, baby. Know that I’ll always love you.” She kissed my cheek, then squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for pain.
I took another deep breath and closed my eyes, sending a tendril of my thoughts into her arm. I wrapped my will around and through that strange cuff to try and discern it, disrupt it, break the constant connection I’d always had to my Ma’s mind. It had melded to her flesh, to her life-force. I pried at it, wedging the power of my own life-force in between and making the connection weaker.
The peculiar elements in the cuff hummed, provoking the things that lay deep and dormant within me beyond my human nature. A chill rippled across my skin and a wave of nausea squeezed bile into my throat, but I held back the molt. How long I could keep it back, I didn’t know. The cosmic energy I diverted from the transformation was strong, ripping into me like a raging river current while it bled away from her.
Ma shrieked. I pulled her head to my shoulder, cupping my hand over her mouth to muffle her cry. She struggled in my arms. I reached into her mind and found this wasn’t an ordinary pain I could simply numb away. This strange energy I tore at had become so intrinsic to Ma’s existence I’d have to permanently muddle up her thoughts to stop it, or else cut her off and watch her shrivel in agony.
The voice of the Elder Thing called. He may not have known laughter like I did, but I sensed his twisted mirth and felt him reach across my mother’s life force directly to me. He was helping me wrench the life out of her, and promised he would do the same to me. He would regain all that he had lost, he said, and would repair the damage to his broken vessel and broken body with an infusion of my hybrid essence to rise once more to rule the stars. My blood would run black with his curse, he swore, and my resistance to the change would make it thick and sweet enough to rejoin him fully with that force from which his unfortunate fall to our Earth had severed him. His hold on my will was fierce, draining me of my grip on the world like a spider draining a fly of its innards.
I thrust Ma from my arms and fell out of the chair, scrambling as far away from her as I possibly could to drive the Elder Thing’s voice from my being. The connection broke, and I lay on my stomach, dry-heaving. The chill in my flesh wouldn’t leave. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself not to lose control of the terrible thing that slept inside me. I didn’t molt, but it took a long moment to calm myself and return to equilibrium.
What a fool I was. That cuff turned its host into an energy conduit, one limited just enough so that it wouldn’t drive her insane. He could only l
eech so much from a crushed mind, and nothing from a dead one. A living mind, however, would continue to feed him a little at a time. Even then it might not be enough to nurse himself back to health. For that, he’d created his bastard offspring, hybrids with an augmented tolerance and connection to cosmic power.
But Ma had been more than a host to a cosmic parasite. She’d been a shield, standing between my natural energy and the thing that wanted to suck my living aura dry to give itself a kind of transfusion so it could regenerate. And now, because I’d wedged my thoughts right into his soul-sucking cuff, he’d managed to draw enough energy through me to break through some ethereal barrier that would have starved him dry if he’d left the mine. How had such a creature managed to injure himself so badly, let alone survive by hibernating millions of years since that coal bed was laid down, waiting for the perfect host to come along? And who or what had trapped him behind a cosmic forcefield? He hadn’t siphoned enough energy from me to regenerate, though, and I knew with deepest horror that he was coming for us to finish the process. For me.
“I f—feel it too,” Ma stuttered. She lay curled on her side where I’d dropped her, body shaking uncontrollably like she had just emerged from an unexpected plunge into an icy lake.
Shit. I wanted to leave town, lead the alien away into the hills and then hightail it outside his range again. But the further we got from the alien pod, the more violent Ma’s “changing” attacks would become. “We have to… warn people…” I gasped and forced myself to my feet, then pulled Ma up after me.
***
I stumbled down the road ahead of an impending rainstorm, clenching Ma’s hand in mine. The sky was half thick with clouds, allowing scattered rays of light through here and there. The temperature of the air had cooled, muggy though it was. When we reached the police station, I burst straight into reception. Sheriff Cummings knew something about the thing in the mine, and as much as I disliked him, he had the authority to immediately evacuate the town before that thing came round the mountain. I knew Ma was scared about what I was up to, but I assured her I wasn’t going to look into anybody’s mind without asking and she made no protest.
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