Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror)
Page 26
The screaming pain in his calves was intense.
The talons had gone in deep. He wasn’t sure how much blood he’d lost.
He dug his other hand into the dirt. Hurt like razors.
He groped in the dirt, and tugged himself back. Maybe a quarter inch. Glanced in the darkness. Manzanilla. Rocks. Car. He dragged himself further. Toward the spear. Toward the obsidian arrowhead.
He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw the makeshift spear lying just out of his grasp.
Scratch was chewing on his left leg, but if he tried—if he took all he had—he could get the spear. Something was drawing him down into a dark maelstrom in his head, but he dragged himself forward.
Touched the edge of the spear. His hand went around it. He drew it back, and sat up.
He thought he saw the look on Scratch’s face, as the turquoise eyes stared at him.
He brought the spear down into Scratch’s jaw, and then pulled hard on it until he heard a crack. At first, he thought the spear had broken, but it was the creature’s lower jaw that fell sideways, hanging by a small bit of gristle.
Then, he drew the spear out, putting his hand close to where the obsidian was wrapped around the base.
He plunged the arrowhead into the space beneath Scratch’s breast bone.
Scratch’s claws curled around his fingers.
“You can’t kill me,” Scratch said with Tammy’s voice, but it was funny sounding as its dangling jaw wagged. “You know that. You know all about me, don’t you? Give yourself to Xipe Totec! Heroes must be sacrificed.”
But, in fact, just as Josh had suspected, the mummy had some kind of moist pulpy material within its ribcage: a beating heart, perhaps not like a human heart, but a heart nonetheless.
And the obsidian went into it.
The claws let go of his wrist.
He drew the arrowhead up.
At its tip, a mass of bloody tissue.
The great Flayer of Men lay still at his bloody legs.
At some point, Josh passed out.
When he awoke, someone was pouring cool water over him.
Josh opened his eyes.
Early daylight.
A large, thickset man with a day’s growth of beard sat beside him. In his hand, a large bottle of water.
“Ely?”
Josh glanced around. Ely was carefully lifting him up to get in the truck with him. “Hello, kid. I was pretty sure you were a goner.”
“My legs…”
“Yeah, I saw ‘em. Torn up real bad. Mountain lion?”
Josh didn’t respond.
“You’re some kind of superman, kid. Lost a lot of blood. I saw you just crawling by the road there. Let’s get you over to the hospital. They can patch you up. I suck at it. Look, don’t talk. We’ll get there soon enough. Can you hang on?”
Josh nodded. He took the bottle from Ely’s hand and drank from it.
He felt the rumble of the truck start up.
“You kill the lion?” Ely asked.
“What?”
“The mountain lion. The one that attacked you. You kill it?”
“Not sure,” Josh said. “I hurt it. I know that.”
“Well, that’s something,” Ely said, and then got the truck in gear and pulled back out on the highway. “It’s something to put a hurt back on a beast like that. When you’re all better, I want you to tell me everything you didn’t tell me before, okay?”
* * *
All this happened in the late 1970s, before the new highway came in, before I moved permanently to Naga, Arizona, and before I began to understand my place in the world.
My name is Joshua, and I’ve grown to love this desert.
I went back, after I’d plunged the razor-sharp obsidian in that monster’s heart.
After my legs healed up. After some time had passed and I could face it again.
I wanted to examine it before destroying it.
In size, it was four feet four inches tall, and while I didn’t weigh it, I can guess it was bout sixty pounds. The gauze on its body—what keep its bones wrapped—was not what I had expected. I had assumed it was some kind of cloth, but, instead, it was fine, thin layers of human skin, torn into strips, wrapped around the bone of the creature.
I held up one of its claws. Each talon was its own blade, and was razor-sharp.
I plucked the turquoise from its eyes, because I’d been reading about rituals by then.
It could be blinded. It could be incapacitated.
The more I looked at it, the more I began to feel for it. What is it in human life that does it? That holds a monster in its arms and feels something like kinship—an instinct to care and protect? A demon, sleeping, in my arms, seemed vulnerable and in need, to me.
I placed it inside leatherbound box that was lined with stone, closing it up inside it, its coffin. If no one fed it again, if no one let it out, surely, it could just sleep forever.
And in sleeping, what damage could this thing do?
One night, troubled by fears, I went out to the furthest mesa, and buried Scratch deep, the way I’d bury something toxic, something that no man should ever touch, ever know.
But the cities and towns are growing. They’re taking over parts of the desert that had once been vast wastelands, miles of nothing.
Now, years later, suburban homes are being built on the mesa, and the bulldozers dig down deep and carve out swimming pools. Scorpions swarm as they’re sent from their nests. Rattlesnakes are killed by workmen who find them under nearly every rock.
I didn’t mark the place where I buried Scratch. I didn’t put a flag over it so I could find it.
I buried that little unspeakable mystery to end it, to forget it, put the demon somewhere it would never be found.
But I was wrong. Everything can be found. All it takes is time.
They’re digging all over that mesa. They’ll bring him out. Maybe they already have.
A man and woman went missing a week ago. Their car was smashed up on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. There was blood everywhere inside the car.
The Flayer of Men will dance again, though. I'm certain of that. Someone will feed it, probably by accident. Someone will think it's cool when they find it, and the poor son-of-a-bitch won't know what hit him.
Maybe the couple in the car already fed him. Maybe they already woke him up.
It's been hot and dry for a hell of a long time, but I suspect a rainstorm’s on the way.
The dreams have come back, too.
The ones at the pyramid.
I close my eyes and I can see the little bastard plain as day.
He's beginning to look more and more like me.
Scratch and me -- we're connected by blood.
His voice, growing louder in my dreams:
Dance and be reborn in blood and life, from your dark sleep!
Be sure to pick up other novels by Douglas Clegg, including The Hour Before Dark, Afterlife, The Children’s Hour and more.
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Publication Information
Published by Alkemara Press, in an arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2004, 2006 Douglas Clegg
Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Alkemara Press
Cover images courtesy of iStockphoto.com, used with permission. Skull image Copyright © 2011 Cliff Wassmann
Desert highway image Copyright © Giorgio Fochesato
About the Author
Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of more than 25 books, including Afterlife, The Children’s Hour, Naomi, The Hour Before Dark, Breeder, The Harrow Series, The Criminally Insane Series, Purity and many others.
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Table of Contents
Coming of Age
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Author Note
Purity
Prologue
Part One: Summer Begins
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Two: The Last of Summer
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Epilogue: Belief
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The Words
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One: The End Is Like This
Two: Before the Night
Three: The Night Begins
Four: The Deer
Five: Shelter
Six: The Church
Seven: The Ending, In Darkness
Eight: The Party
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The Attraction
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Author's Note
The Attraction
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