by Clive Barker
He stood up.
The creature had leapt on to the top of his car. Its head was thrown back in a kind of ecstasy, its erection plainer than ever, the eye in its huge head glinting. With a final swoop to its voice, which took the whistle out of human hearing, it bent upon the car, smashing the windshield and curling its mouthed hands upon the roof. It then proceeded to tear the steel back like so much paper, its body twitching with glee, its head jerking about. Once the roof was torn up, it leapt on to the highway and threw the metal into the air. It turned in the sky and smashed down on the desert floor. Davidson briefly wondered what he could possibly put on the insurance form. Now the creature was tearing the vehicle apart. The doors were scattered. The engine was ripped out. The wheels slashed and wrenched off the axles. To Davidson's nostrils there drifted the unmistakable stench of gasoline. No sooner had he registered the smell than a shard of metal glanced against another and the creature and the car were sheathed in a billowing column of fire, blackening into smoke as it balled over the highway.
The thing did not call out: or if it did its agonies were beyond hearing. It staggered out of the inferno with its flesh on fire, every inch of its body alight; its arms flailed wildly in a vain attempt to douse the fire, and it began to run off down the highway, fleeing from the source of its agony towards the mountains. Flames sprouted off its back and the air was tinged with the smell of its cooking flesh.
It didn't fall, however, though the fire must have been devouring it. The run went on and on, until the heat dissolved the highway into the blue distance, and it was gone.
Davidson sank down on to his knees. The shit on his legs was already dry in the heat. The car continued to burn. The music had gone entirely, as had the procession.
It was the sun that drove him from the sand back towards his gutted car.
He was blank-eyed when the next vehicle along the highway stopped to pick him up.
Sheriff Josh Packard stared in disbelief at the claw prints on the ground at his feet. They were etched in slowly solidifying fat, the liquid flesh of the monster that had run through the main street (the only street) of Welcome minutes ago. It had then collapsed, breathing its last breath, and died in a writhing ball three trucks' length from the bank. The normal business of Welcome, the trading, the debating, the how do you do's, had halted. One or two nauseous individuals had been received into the lobby of the Hotel while the smell of fricasseed flesh thickened the good desert air of the town.
The stench was something between over-cooked fish and an exhumation, and it offended Packard. This was his town, overlooked by him, protected by him. The intrusion of this fireball was not looked upon kindly. Packard took out his gun and began to walk towards the corpse. The flames were all but out now, having eaten the best of their meal. Even so destroyed by fire, it was a sizeable bulk. What might once have been its limbs were gathered around what might have been its head. The rest was beyond recognition. All in all, Packard was glad of that small mercy. But even in the charnel-house confusion of rendered flesh and blackened bone he could make out enough inhuman forms to quicken his pulse.
This was a monster: no doubt of it.
A creature from earth: out of earth, indeed. Up from the underworld and on its way to the great bowl for a night of celebration. Once every generation or so, his father had told him, the desert spat out its demons and let them loose awhile. Being a child who thought for himself Packard had never believed the shit his father talked but was this not such a demon?
Whatever mischance had brought this burning monstrosity into his town to die, there was pleasure for Packard in the proof of their vulnerability. His father had never mentioned that possibility.
Half-smiling at the thought of mastering such foulness, Packard stepped up to the smoking corpse and kicked it. The crowd, still lingering in the safety of the doorways, cooed with admiration at his bravery. The half-smile spread across his face. That kick alone would be worth a night of drinks, perhaps even a woman.
The thing was belly up. With the dispassionate gaze of a professional demon-kicker, Packard scrutinized the tangle of limbs across the head. It was quite dead, that was obvious. He sheathed his gun and bent towards the corpse. "Get a camera out here, Jebediah," he said, impressing even himself.
His deputy ran off towards the office.
"What we need," he said, “is a picture of this here beauty."
Packard went down on his haunches and reached across to the blackened limbs of the thing. His gloves would be ruined, but it was worth the inconvenience for the good this gesture would be doing for his public image. He could almost feel the admiring looks as he touched the flesh, and began to shake a limb loose from the head of the monster. The fire had welded the parts together, and he had to wrench the limb free. But it came, with a jellied sound, revealing the heat-withered eye on the face beneath.
He dropped the limb back where it had come with a look of disgust.
A beat.
Then the demon's arm was snaking up – suddenly – too suddenly for Packard to move, and in a moment sublime with terror the Sheriff saw the mouth open in the palm of its forefoot and close again around his own hand. Whimpering he lost balance and sat in the fat, pulling away from the mouth, as his glove was chewed through, and the teeth connected with his hand, clipping off his fingers as the rasping maw drew digits, blood and stumps further into its gut.
Packard's bottom slid in the mess under him and he squirmed, howling now, to loose himself. It still had life in it, this thing from the underworld. Packard bellowed for mercy as he staggered to his feet, dragging the sordid bulk of the thing up off the ground as he did so.
A shot sounded, close to Packard's ear. Fluids, blood and pus spattered him as the limb was blown to smithereens at the shoulder, and the mouth loosed its grip on Packard. The wasted mass of devouring muscle fell to the ground, and Packard's hand, or what was left of it, was in the open air again. There were no fingers remaining on his right hand, and barely half a thumb; the shattered bone of his digits jutted awkwardly from a partially chewed palm.
Eleanor Kooker dropped the barrel of the shotgun she had just fired, and grunted with satisfaction. "Your hand's gone," she said, with brutal simplicity.
Monsters, Packard remembered his father telling him, never die. He'd remembered too late, and now he'd sacrificed his hand, his drinking, sexing hand. A wave of nostalgia for lost years with those fingers washed over him, while dots burst into darkness before his eyes. The last thing he saw as a dead faint carried him to the ground was his dutiful deputy raising a camera to record the whole scene.
The shack at the back of the house was Lucy's refuge and always had been. When Eugene came back drunk from Welcome, or a sudden fury took him because the stew was cold, Lucy retired into the shack where she could weep in peace. There was no pity to be had in Lucy's life. None from Eugene certainly, and precious little time to pity herself.
Today, the old source of irritation had got Eugene into a rage: The child.
The nurtured and carefully cultivated child of their love; named after the brother of Moses, Aaron, which meant 'exalted one'. A sweet boy. The prettiest boy in the whole territory; five years old and already as charming and polite as any East Coast Momma could wish to raise.
Aaron.
Lucy's pride and joy, a child fit to blow bubbles in a picture book, fit to dance, fit to charm the Devil himself. That was Eugene's objection.
"That flicking child's no more a boy than you are," he said to Lucy. "He's not even a half-boy. He's only fit for putting in fancy shoes and selling perfume. Or a preacher, he's fit for a preacher."
He pointed a nail-bitten, crook-thumbed hand at the boy.
"You're a shame to your father."
Aaron met his father's stare.
"You hear me, boy?"
Eugene looked away. The boy's big eyes made him sick to his stomach, more like a dog's eyes than anything human. "I want him out of this house."
"What's he done?
"
"He doesn't need to do a thing. It's sufficient he's the way he is. They laugh at me, you know that? They laugh at me because of him."
"Nobody laughs at you, Eugene."
"Oh yes -”
"Not for the boy's sake."
"Huh?"
"If they laugh, they don't laugh at the boy. They laugh at you."
"Shut your mouth."
"They know what you are, Eugene. They see you clear, clear as I see you."
"I tell you, woman -”
"Sick as a dog in the street, talking about what you've seen and what you're scared of-”
He struck her as he had many times before. The blow drew blood, as similar blows had for five years, but though she reeled, her first thoughts were for the boy.
"Aaron," she said through the tears the pain had brought. "Come with me."
"You let the bastard alone." Eugene was trembling.
"Aaron."
The child stood between father and mother, not knowing which to obey. The look of confusion on his face brought Lucy's tears more copiously.
"Mama," said the child, very quietly. There was a grave look in his eyes, that went beyond confusion. Before Lucy could find a way to cool the situation, Eugene had hold of the boy by his hair and was dragging him closer. "You listen to your father, boy."
"Yes -”
"Yes, sir, we say to our father, don't we? We say, yes, sir."
Aaron's face was thrust into the stinking crotch of his father's jeans.
"Yes, sir."
"He stays with me, woman. You're not taking him out into that fucking shack one more time. He stays with his father."
The skirmish was lost and Lucy knew it. If she pressed the point any further, she only put the child at further risk. "If you harm him -”
"I'm his father, woman," Eugene grinned. "What, do you think I'd hurt my own flesh and blood?" The boy was locked to his father's hips in a position that was scarcely short of obscene. But Lucy knew her husband: and he was dose to an outburst that would be uncontrollable. She no longer cared for herself- she'd had her joys – but the boy was so vulnerable.
"Get out of our sight, woman, why don't you? The boy and I want to be alone, don't we?"
Eugene dragged Aaron's face from his crotch and sneered down at his pale face.
"Don't we?"
"Yes, Papa."
"Yes, Papa. Oh yes indeed, Papa."
Lucy left the house and retired into the cool darkness of the shack, where she prayed for Aaron, named after the brother of Moses. Aaron, whose name meant 'exalted one'; she wondered how long he could survive the brutalities the future would provide.
The boy was stripped now. He stood white in front of his father. He wasn't afraid. The whipping that would be meted out to him would pain him, but this was not true fear.
"You're sickly, lad," said Eugene, running a huge hand over his son's abdomen. "Weak and sickly like a runty hog. If I was a farmer, and you were a hog, boy, you know what I'd do?"
Again, he took the boy by the hair. The other hand, between the legs.
"You know what I'd do, boy?"
"No, Papa. What would you do?"
The scored hand slid up over Aaron's body while his father made a slitting sound.
"Why, I'd cut you up and feed you to the rest of the litter. Nothing a hog likes better to eat, than hog-meat. How'd you like that?"
"No, Papa."
"You wouldn't like that?"
"No thank you, Papa."
Eugene's face hardened.
"Well I'd like to see that, Aaron. I'd like to see what you'd do if I was to open you up and have a look inside you." There was a new violence in his father's games, which Aaron couldn't understand: new threats, new intimacy. Uncomfortable as he was the boy knew the real fear was felt not by him but by his father; fear was Eugene's birthright, just as it was Aaron's to watch, and wait, and suffer, until the moment came. He knew (without understanding how or why), that he would be an instrument in the destruction of his father. Maybe more than an instrument.
Anger erupted in Eugene. He stared at the boy, his brown fists clenched so tight that the knuckles burned white. The boy was his ruin, somehow; he'd killed the good life they'd lived before he was born, as surely as if he'd shot his parents dead. Scarcely thinking of what he was doing, Eugene's hands closed around the back of the boy's frail neck. Aaron made no sound.
"I could kill you boy."
"Yes, sir."
"What do you say to that?"
"Nothing, sir."
"You should say thank you, sir."
"Why?"
"Why, boy? "Cause this life's not worth what a hog can shit, and I'd be doing you a loving service, as a father should a son."
"Yes, sir."
In the shack behind the house Lucy had stopped crying. There was no purpose in it; and besides, something in the sky she could see through the holes in the roof had brought memories to her that wiped the tears away. A certain sky: pure blue, sheeny-clear. Eugene wouldn't harm the boy. He wouldn't dare, ever dare, harm that child. He knew what the boy was, though he'd never admit to it.
She remembered the day, six years ago now, when the sky had been sheened like today, and the air had been livid with the heat. Eugene and she had been just about as hot as the air, they hadn't taken their eyes off each other all day. He was stronger then: in his prime. A soaring, splendid man, his body made heavy with work, and his legs so hard they felt like rock when she ran her hands over them. She had been quite a looker herself; the best damn backside in Welcome, firm and downy; a divide so softly haired Eugene couldn't keep from kissing her, even there, in the secret place. He'd pleasure her all day and all night sometimes; in the house they were building, or out on the sand in the late afternoon. The desert made a fine bed, and they could lie uninterrupted beneath the wide sky. That day six years ago the sky had darkened too soon; long before night was due. It had seemed to blacken in a moment, and the lovers were suddenly cold in their hurried nakedness. She had seen, over his shoulder, the shapes the sky had taken: the vast and monumental creatures that were watching them. He, in his passion, still worked at her, thrust to his root and out the length again as he knew she delighted in 'til a hand the colour of beets and the size of a man pinched his neck, and plucked him out of his wife's lap. She watched him lifted into the sky like a squirming jack-rabbit, spitting from two mouths, North and South, as he finished his thrusts on the air. Then his eyes opened for a moment, and he saw his wife twenty feet below him, still bare, still spread butterfly wide, with monsters on every side. Casually, without malice, they threw him away, out of their ring of admiration, and out of her sight.
She remembered so well the hour that followed, the embraces of the monsters. Not foul in any way, not gross or harmful, never less than loving. Even the machineries of reproduction that they pierced her with, one after the other, were not painful, though some were as large as Eugene's fisted arm, and hard as bone. How many of those strangers took her that afternoon – three, four, five? Mingling their semen in her body, fondly teasing joy from her with their patient thrusts. When they went away, and her skin was touched with sunlight again, she felt, though on reflection it seemed shameful, a loss; as though the zenith of her life was passed, and the rest of her days would be a cold ride down to death.
She had got up at last, and walked over to where Eugene was lying unconscious on the sand, one of his legs broken by the fall. She had kissed him, and then squatted to pass water. She hoped, and hope it was, that there would be fruit from the seed of that day's love, and it would be a keepsake of her joy.
In the house Eugene struck the boy. Aaron's nose bled, but he made no sound.
"Speak, boy."
"What shall I say?"
"Am I your father or not?"
"Yes, father."
"Liar!"
He struck again, without warning; this time the blow carried Aaron to the floor. As his small, uncalloused palms flattened against the kitchen ti
les to raise himself he felt something through the floor. There was a music in the ground.
"Liar!" his father was saying still.
There would be more blows to come, the boy thought, more pain, more blood. But it was bearable; and the music was a promise, after a long wait, of an end to blows once and for all.
Davidson staggered into the main street of Welcome. It was the middle of the afternoon, he guessed (his watch had stopped, perhaps out of sympathy), but the town appeared to be empty, until his eye alighted on the dark, smoking mound in the middle of the street, a hundred yards from where he stood.
If such a thing had been possible, his blood would have run cold at the sight.
He recognized what that bundle of burned flesh had been, despite the distance, and his head spun with horror. It had all been real after all. He stumbled on a couple more steps, fighting the dizziness and losing, until he felt himself supported by strong arms, and heard, through a fuzz of head-noises, reassuring words being spoken to him. They made no sense, but at least they were soft and human: he could give up any pretence to consciousness. He fainted, but it seemed there was only a moment of respite before the world came back into view again, as odious as ever. He had been carried inside and was lying on an uncomfortable sofa, a woman's face, that of Eleanor Kooker, staring down at him. She beamed as he came round.
"The man'll survive," she said, her voice like cabbage going through a grater.
She leaned further forward.
"You seen the thing, did you?"
Davidson nodded.
"Better give us the low-down."
A glass was thrust into his hand and Eleanor filled it generously with whisky.
"Drink," she demanded, “then tell us what you got to tell -”
He downed the whisky in two, and the glass was immediately refilled. He drank the second glass more slowly, and began to feel better.
The room was filled with people: it was as though all of Welcome was pressing into the Kooker front parlour. Quite an audience: but then it was quite a tale. Loosened by the whisky, he began to tell it as best he could, without embellishment, just letting the words com e. In return Eleanor described the circumstances of Sheriff Packard's 'accident' with the body of the car-wrecker. Packard was in the room, looking the worse for consoling whiskies and pain killers, his mutilated hand bound up so well it looked more like a club than a limb.