Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. "You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You'll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you're up there, and you can share them with the rest of the class if you don't get eaten before nightfall."
The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MRE's. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. "Jamal Quinlan," he said. "I'm from Detroit."
"John Dalton. I'm the sheriff around here."
It was the first time I'd said my own name in five months.
It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn't sure what it felt like.
Maybe it felt like turning a page.
...
The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying yes would mean more questions, so I said, "No, sir. I don't."
The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.
The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn't pay them any mind.
I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.
Things are getting better now. It's quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I've got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler's trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun—the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium— those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes—if he'd never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and if he'd never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?
But there's no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those maybe's and what if's.
So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they'll be back to the way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he'll be somewhere else, in a place where he won't do the things he's doing now. He might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won't be much different with me.
Maybe I'll have a new house by then. Maybe I'll take off work early on Friday and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six packs into it. Maybe I'll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone who can do that.
To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.
That would be just fine.
Adam Niswander
Adam Niswander is the author of the Lovecraftian novels The Charm (Integra, 1993) and The Serpent Slayers (Integra, 1994), the first two of a series of novels set in the Southwest. The third and fourth novels of the series, The Hound Hunters and The War of the Whisperers, appeared in 2008 and 2009 from Hippocampus Press. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
am terribly confused.
I am not the adventurous type, if you know what I mean.
I like things to be a little dull, as a matter of fact.
Yesterday, my life was normal and perhaps a bit predictable, and I was happy. My wife loved me, my children looked up to me, I had a good job, and all the people we knew seemed to like me—to like us. The bills were paid on time, the house was a real home, and the biggest uncertainty in my life was not knowing if my wife would choose to prepare pork chops or spaghetti for our supper.
Then, this morning, while waiting for the bus, I happened to look down and saw a little metal disk on the curb. You wouldn't think something as silly as a hunk of cheap pot-metal could mess up your life, would you?
It didn't look like anything all that unusual to me at the time. It was just a disk of white metal with an engraved sort of tentacled—something surrounding a big red eye in the middle. I picked it up, looked at it, and figured my son, Arnie, would find it interesting. I put it in my pocket and promptly forgot about it.
When I arrived at the office, I grabbed a cup of coffee in the lobby kiosk and took the elevator to the eighth floor. I went straight to my desk, settled in, and began to begin work on a proposal that is due by the end of the week. The client is important, representing a big percentage of our total business.
I had been sitting there only minutes when, without warning, I felt a terrible stabbing pain on my right thigh. It was excruciating . . . as if something had taken a bite out of me, or some giant insect had stabbed me with a stinger. I jumped up and slapped at the spot, hopping around, but the pain did not abate. It burned.
And it began to spread.
And I fell to the floor.
I was yelling by now.
Several of my co-workers came to see what all the ruckus was about. Despite my obvious suffering, no one could see anything wrong. Whatever was attacking me was covered by my clothing, and my flailing gyrations kept everyone at least an arm's length away. The pain was like a palpable thing, like a flame that crawled up my leg leaving agony in its path.
And it seemed there was nothing I could do about it, no way I could alleviate it.
Bob Shaw had knelt by me and was trying to ask me what was wrong.
"What is it, Thompson?"
And I felt . . . well, some . . . weird . . . thing. Even through the pain, my right leg suddenly didn't feel like a leg at all, really. It felt kind of . . . well, boneless. And as I clutched at it through my trouser leg, my fingers didn't find anything solid. I moved my left hand down to my knee, but I didn't feel a knee. It felt the same as the upper part of my leg, and curiously not solid. And the feeling was crawling up and down my leg simultaneously. It scared the crap out of me!
If I had been yelling in pain before, now I was screaming in terror. I looked down and discovered my shoe had come off. My sock was still on, but the foot inside it was horribly shapeless—and by now my entire right leg was curved in a very unnatural way.
My co-workers had pulled back away from me.
I heard Bob Shaw on the phone. "No, I don't know what's wrong with him," he shouted, "but send an ambulance right away. The man is dying!"
But the pain was not through with me yet. It spread across my groin, scalding like acid. I can't even begin to describe my horror as it passed through my genitalia and then into my left leg, once again racing down and feeling as if it was burning my bones away.
I could not stop screaming.
The speed with which it spread through me seemed to be increasing. In moments, my left leg, like my right, was strangely limp, and I found I could no longer hold myself upright. I flopped backward just as the pain and burning began to climb up my spine.
I began to be racked by spasms that set my legs thrashing about, but they no longer bore much resemblance to legs. They rippled and squirmed, they seemed to slither across the floor. My right sock had now slipped completely o
ff and the obscenely pink flesh it had revealed did not resemble a foot. There were no signs of toes or nails, or ankles and soles, only a featureless fleshy tube tapering gracelessly to a rounded tip. Worse, it had begun to itch mercilessly.
By now, the siren could be heard on the street below and the screech of tires braking on asphalt. I hoped the paramedics would hurry.
My co-workers, my office-mates, had backed as far away as they could, and panic spread among them.
"Oh God! Look! His skin is writhing."
"What's happening to him?"
"It's like his bones are melting!"
"Do you think it could be catching?"
That last question sent some of them fleeing to the elevators and the rest strained to back yet further away.
I wanted to sit up and gain control of myself, but I could not. The strange tide of transformation continued unabated and the pain seemed to be increasing. I fear my yelling had degenerated into bursts of sound that hardly resembled anything human. I was exhausted, my throat raw from screaming at the top of my voice. My cries now were more a harsh bleating and moaning.
Strangely, no matter how my body was being changed, I could feel my heart steadily beating. It was a hypnotic rhythm that was at once petrifying and weirdly reassuring.
The feeling of something coursing through me had now reached my neck and shoulders, and spread rapidly into my arms. I was still thrashing about, but it was as if I had been trapped inside my head and was being forced to watch as everything about me—everything that went into my concept of me—was irrevocably changed.
Then, suddenly—mercifully—the pain stopped.
And I looked over to see my left hand, which had been flailing uncontrollably, and saw no hand at all. My eyes grew wider as I stared in terror. It looked as if some giant pink worm was crawling out of my coat-sleeve.
There was a commotion over by the door and three paramedics came bustling through, pushing people aside. Two maneuvered a gurney and the third carried the medical bag. But even as they approached, I felt/heard/guessed the final transformation occur. My head sank back squishily and I knew that my skull had just gone the way of the rest of the bones in my body.
As the lead medic knelt by me, I attempted to speak and tell him I was in no pain. I could not lift my head, yet I still was under the delusion that I would be able to communicate. I was wrong. What issued from my mouth was a gelatinous baritone belch, accompanied by a horrible stench.
I think I was as shocked as the medic.
Certainly his face revealed his disgust. "What the hell is this?" he asked angrily.
Shaw stepped up and stared at me with consternation. He cleared his throat and, after a few false starts, he managed to say,"Until a few minutes ago, he was our co-worker, Mr. David Thompson. This is his desk. He was sitting there working quite normally before whatever . . . happened . . . began . . . er . . . happening."
"Are you telling me this is a human being?" asked the medic.
"Yes, as far as I know," said Shaw.
Had I been able to control my movements, I would have embraced him then and there. I was filled with gratitude. I tried to lift my arms and found that it did set the worms into motion. The pink protrubances seemed to leap up from the floor like writhing tentacles, but I had no control.
The medic jumped back, a look of fear on his face. Shaw and everyone else backed further away as well.
I tried again to speak, but this time all I managed was a noisy exhalation of noxious gases.
I then discovered that it was very difficult to get a breath. It was as if some giant was sitting on my chest. I gasped.
The medic approached again. Tentatively, he reached out to me, trying to take my wrist, but I really no longer had one. He stopped that movement, and then placed a stethoscope on my chest. He face relaxed a little when he heard my heart beat.
"What happened?" he asked aloud.
Shaw shrugged. "I don't know. He was working at his desk and then cried out, as if in pain. He fell to the floor and began to writhe about, and, over the course of several minutes, he seemed to collapse in upon himself. We tried to help him at first, but the changes were dramatic, startling, and frightening. His thrashing about became dangerous and we all had to pull back. That's when I called for you."
"We'll take him in," said the medic. He gestured to his companions. "Load him on the stretcher."
What happened next might have been funny had it not been so macabre.
The two other medics collapsed the gurney, placed it by me, and moved to lift me onto it. They each took an arm—or what used to be an arm—and pulled, but the transformed limbs just seemed to stretch impossibly and the bulk of my body lay where it had been.
The lead medic moved in to help. They folded my long tubular limbs atop my body. The three of them got their arms under my torso and what had been my hips, and tried to lift me up.
I guess it was like trying to move a puddle of Jello with toothpicks. They tried several times before realizing it wouldn't work.
Finally, they simply rolled me over the edge and up onto the stretcher, rearranging my limbs as best they could and using my clothing as a sort of sling.
Mercifully, they threw a sheet over me as they rushed the gurney to the elevator, to the ground floor, the waiting ambulance, and, at last, to the local hospital with sirens screaming.
t has been some hours now. They checked me in, put me in a private room, and left me here. I wish I could say I lost consciousness, but I did not.
The strangest thing was that my mind remained my own. No matter how traumatized I had been, the cessation of pain brought a kind of detachment, almost as if I was floating above myself. I did not understand my transformation, but I then became curious.
If I had no skull, what was protecting my brain? What remained of my face was pressed into the bed with some amount of my own flabby body forcing it into the padding, yet I had a sense that I was unharmed. If I had no ribs surrounding it, how did my heart continue to beat? Yet it did, with a strangely reassuring regularity.
I concentrated on moving one of my limbs—what had been my right arm. It twitched.
I focussed my thoughts on reaching up to touch my face. The appendage hesitantly squirmed toward my eye.
I knew an illogical sense of jubilation. For the first time since the onset of the pain, I began to sense that I might have some minute, fragmentary, miniscule, bit of control over something.
Ever so slowly, painstakingly, I guided my right arm. When it finally, tentatively, brushed my face, I discovered two things.
First, that I could still feel things with the limb, changed though it might be. In fact, the sensation of touch seemed to have been enhanced—as if the entire limb had the sensitivity of a fingertip.
Second, what had been my skull was not completely gone. A hard but malleable kind of gristle formed a protective cage around my poor human brain, a cartilaginous cranium, and some kind of similar ridges protected my eyes.
My mouth, however, had been transformed into a lipless, toothless maw that seemed to exude a viscous liquid. My nose was simply gone—not even nostril slits remained.
But I was still breathing . . . in some way.
That was when I began to hear the Bronx-cheer buzzing again, and realized it sounded from what had once been my neck. I focussed on moving the arm again and managed to brush it over a place where ripples of flesh seemed to rise up when I exhaled and draw down when I inhaled.
Sudden realization swept over me. Gills? Great God, I had gills!
bustling sound came from the doorway and a white smocked male figure entered the room, closely followed by two nurses.
He stopped when he reached the foot of the bed and looked at the chart. "This is supposed to be a David Thompson," he said sarcastically. He threw back the sheet in front of him, exposing my midsection and upper thigh. "This is not a human. Is this a hoax?"
I felt his hands move over what had been my hip and over what used to be
my thigh.
"Wait!" he said suddenly. "What's this?"
I felt him squeeze the skin of my former thigh together and felt an uncharacteristic lump under the skin.
"I bet I can get this without even requiring a local," he muttered to himself. He looked around and took a scalpel from a tray, then made a sudden quick, small incision. I felt a bit of pressure and then something seemed to pop. I can't describe it any other way. It actually clattered on the tray.
"Some sort of round metal object," he observed, picking it up carefully. "It's about the same size as a bottle cap." He turned to the second nurse. "Suture that incision closed. I'm going to look at this through the lab microscope."
Black Wings - Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Page 41