by Gene Lazuta
Even worse, what was he going to do when he got to the jail and the thing wasn’t there? “Ooops! My mistake. Excuse me while I call the happy house and see if they’ve got a shuttle bus running this late in the day.”
What was he going to do?
What the hell has happening?
Ahead, the jailhouse looked like the one in the old Andy Griffith show, except that instead of Floyd’s barbershop next door, there was a Laundromat. The two absurdly antique parking meters out front were leaning at odd angles, broken since nobody ever used them because parking up the street was free. And overhead, the town’s only traffic signal was still stuck on yellow, as it had been for two days without anyone really noticing.
Conway saw all these things in careful detail, all at once and distinct. It was as if, subconsciously, he had made the decision to study his old world and imprint its specifics on his mind because, as his grandmother’s voice was saying in his head, “Whatever makes a man scream like that’ll change your world too, sonny-boy. You’re gonna be a different man…and it’s gonna be a different town.”
He burst into the jail and searched for the lights.
Later, he would swear that it came with a noise—a foom!—that sucked the air right out of his lungs. He felt certain that someone had just hit him in the stomach with a battering ram.
Cooper was still running behind him, not yet there to see…
Which would soon cause them both some problems.
But Conway wasn’t thinking about that.
He wasn’t thinking at all…
He was stunned.
And it was in that instant that his eyes locked with those of the thing Cheryl Lockner had become.
She was inside the cell and Conway saw her through a tangle of chipped, yellow-painted steel bars that had been bent into a hole big enough to drive a car though. She was crouched over the body of her husband, naked, her hair hanging over her face and her arms working as she did something—he could see the muscles corded in her neck squirm beneath her skin as she worked. When her head snapped up in the light, her eyes were blackly luminescent, freezing him in his spot and making his skin crawl as Cooper ran right into him from behind. As he struggled to keep his view clear, Cheryl Lockner pulled a squirming, bloody snake out of the wound she had gouged into her dead husband’s back and tied it around her waist, making the sky explode and the stars fall.
Pop-pop!
Pop!
Went three fluorescent tubes overhead, and Conway glanced up just in time to see a flood of falling glass and glowing retinal residue sparkle down at him as a dark, flapping shape fluttered around the last fixture.
Pop!
“Jesus!”
More glittering snow.
And Conway fired his gun in the dark.
The explosion was deep and concussive. Its flash seared his optic nerve and left it vibrating with vivid blue images long after the bullet ricocheted off concrete twice, shattering something…God knew what.
“Get outta my way!” an angry voice hissed hotly into his left ear as rough hands pushed him, and his gun, to one side.
He could hear Cooper’s inept steps in the dark. He could also hear the slapping of bare flesh on linoleum as…
The force of the blow was incredible. It slammed him straight on, and even more stars sparkled in his eyes.
A light came on somewhere…on his desk…it was Cooper…Cooper with a light…standing over his desk and holding a glowing gooseneck lamp that made the room perform a weirdly improvised series of dips and curves while something strong disappeared through the door.
“Hey!” the detective shouted, dropping the lamp. “Hey you, stop!”
The sheriff hit the floor.
He didn’t see it, Conway thought from where he sat, his back propped against the open door, his face pointed into the yawning darkness of the cell in which Emil Lockner lay so still.
Detective Cooper had been fumbling around, and he didn’t see the blood smeared around her lips, and the lumps dripping down her chin as she raised her head up from where she was hunched and snarled, or grinned, or both, savage, triumphant, insane beyond the description or capability of rational thought. He didn’t see the snake—at first a snake—but that was only sheriff’s mind trying to identify the unknown with something familiar because it wasn’t really a snake, it was skin: a length of bloody flesh peeled right off her husband’s back. She picked it up and tied it around her waist and Cooper was fumbling around and that thing with its leathery wings was flying up at the lights and breaking the tubes and…
God!
She tied it around herself…
And she changed!
Goddamn it, he’d seen it!
It wasn’t a story…
It wasn’t a legend.
It wasn’t, as the detective had said it was, “the product of sick minds, deluding themselves into believing that some ancient magic actually works, here, in this day and age of microwaves and AIDS.”
It was real!
Cheryl Lockner tied that belt around herself, and in that split second before a tiny, hairy demon with human eyes and wings like a bat smashed the life out of four fluorescent tubes set into a ceiling almost twenty feet over the floor, Sheriff H.W. Conway—fifty-two years old, rational, reasonable, level-headed protector of the laws that balance society’s protection with the freedom of the individual—saw a woman’s face change.
It wasn’t like in the movies. No fangs growing up from her lower jaw, or hair sprouting, or nose turning into a little black button. No pointy ears or whiskers. No, it wasn’t like in the movies. It was like in hell. It was a turning completely animal, completely wild, of denying the humanity that had made her familiar, and expelling it, right then, before his eyes.
She’s had an orgasm.
He’d seen it happen.
She’d tied the belt around herself and, in that very instant, her body shuddered, the muscles around her eyes flickered uncontrollably, and in a lurching, bucking movement she’d snarled and twisted, slavering like a beast…
He could have sworn that he’d seen something behind her as she ground her pelvis and growled out the death of her humanity. In that instant before the lights when out, he could have sworn that he’d seen something there, something invisible with its hands on her hips, pushing her, pushing…pushing, invisible, but there.
He could have sworn.
But then there wasn’t any light, and she bounded through the dark as Conway fired at where she had been—not at her, but at the invisible thing—and she hit him so hard that he was amazed that he was still awake…if he in fact was still awake. And then it was completely dark until Cooper turned on the light and chased her.
Was he crazy?
Yes!
He realized suddenly, in a burst of insight that he didn’t really want. The son of a bitch was nuts! He’d have to be to go charging off into the night chasing what Cheryl Lockner was now.
But he hadn’t seen it!
He hadn’t seen the change!
God help him.
And then something moved, and every nerve in Conway’s body tingled.
Slowly he lifted his face to the ceiling and saw it: darkly hanging upside down with its head twisted back so that its tiny black eyes were pointed his way.
It stopped his breath, and very nearly his heart. It seemed to contort reality itself so that the bruise it created in the air extended all the way down and swept him away, making him a part of the madness, making him responsible for the madness—as if nothing would be wrong if it weren’t for his presence to see it.
Slowly, Conway lifted his gun and perched the tiny, blurred spot of darkness directly over the tip of his .45’s barrel. He still wasn’t breathing, but his heart had picked up a little steam, sounding like a bed sheet being rhythmically torn, a foot at a time, right between his ears. He thought about what would happen when he pulled the trigger…about the flash, and the noise, about the bullet ripping into the face of that awfu
l, impossible creature, and in something that was very much like despair, he let his finger relax on the trigger.
He couldn’t do it.
He didn’t want to do it
He didn’t want to give that obscenity the legitimacy of death by being responsible for its wounds. He didn’t want its body lying at his feet, bleeding green goo or whatever onto his floor and leaving a stain that others could see, even if, like in the movies, the creature should fizzle, or smoke, or disintegrate into a pile of ashes or dust. He didn’t want there to be any proof. He didn’t want there to be any evidence. He just wanted it to go away. He wanted Cheryl Lockner and this fucking thing on the ceiling to get the hell out of his world, so that he could just go back to what he had known before.
Or try to go back…
Though he knew that that was crazy.
“Go back to hell!” he hissed.
And the thing on the ceiling spread its wings and fluttered to the ground.
But it didn’t land.
Something else did.
And that something was a woman.
It was at that very instant that a profound and substantive change occurred in Sheriff Conway. It was a positively inevitable thing, really. Being confronted with what he was seeing, his mind, and the personality that dangled so precariously from the safety line of sanity provided by the store of familiar objects and natural laws that he called reality, could literally choose one of two mutually exclusive courses.
One was to give up and shut down; to just roll over in that great basket-weaving field in the sky where mental daisies blew and the world spun along its buttercup path a zillion miles away. It was to make “Fuck it! I thought I knew, but I guess that I was wrong, so if you need me I’ll be in the bar with Napoleon…where’s my hat?” your answer to the world’s trickiest questions. And it was tempting.
The other was a simple, “Wow!”
No judgments, arguments, or stiff-upper-lip-certain impossibilities. No more, “That can’t be,” or, “There must be a logical explanation.”
Just, “Wow: there are more things in this world than are known to the careful observer, and buddy, that ain’t you. So sit back, shut up, and watch the show. Look out, ego, here we go…”
And in his mind, Conway did one world-class, gold-medal-winning swan dive of a Wow! that reached right down to his shoes and pulled his crumbling psyche up by the laces. It was an act of utter acquiescence, a recognition of possibility, a desperate “rope-a-dope” crouch that protected his chin and left his eyes wide open to see…
A beautiful blond girl with bare feet and a flowing white gown simply float the last few feet from the air and settle gently on the floor next to his desk.
In her eyes was the essence of the expression he’d seen on Cheryl Lockner’s face, condensing into a single, focused glare of sensuous desire. Her entire being radiated a voluptuous, nearly ridiculous need that was so physical in its power that Conway found himself responding despite his fear, confusion, revulsion and Wow! Almost instantly he achieved an aching erection, and his knees went weak. He could feel the muscles in his back and legs twitching beneath his skin, working independently and starting the back-and-forth motion that would thrust his pelvis should this woman give him even the slightest opportunity.
He wanted her…
Or, more accurately, his body wanted her.
As if it were trapped in a machine over which it had lost all control, his mind seemed to watch from the cockpit behind his eyes as his limbs jerked him up off the floor and into an absurd, knock-kneed peacock shudder that carried him inexorably toward the woman in white…the glorious, promising creature with the fire in her breast and blackness in her eyes who held out her long arms to welcome him to her, into her, into…
“Demon!” he cried, his own arms lifted, elbows stiff. “I know thee, Satan!”
For Satan was the word he knew…
“What the fuck is happening?” a voice inside his head screamed, while another voice, equally strange, though unarguably his own, used his mouth to pronounce, “To hell with thee, bitch! Whore! Slut!”
His body quivered and rocked. A wave of coldness washed up from the floor and killed his erection flat. A weird, sickening sensation of threat seemed to bleed outward, starting in the very center of his chest as a sharp, needling pain and ending at the extremity of his flesh as a blanketing electric prickle that all but crackled in the dark.
The source of all his fear stood before him in the midst of hideous flux. Responding to his words—if his words they were—the woman in white reacted with an exaggerated look of rage that began as a simple change in her expression, but that ended as a metamorphosis of her very being.
Those black eyes that, until this instant, had been pulling him forward suddenly spewed fire in a flash that exploded outward in a blood-red sparkle, obscuring her face for an instant that ended with a new and sinister rearrangement of the classically European, human beauty that had called so eloquently for the sheriff’s body.
In quick succession, he saw a dog’s snarling lip, a cat’s eye, a tiger’s teeth, a reptile’s tongue, a diabolical line of gleaming horns, and a flash of bitter silver as a claw slashed from nowhere, all in a swirling hail of impressions that made his head reel and his mind scream for some familiar patch of ground upon which to land.
This was madness.
It was hell.
It was all…so…wonderful!
His erection was back, as was the woman in white, a raging gleam in her eye and an expression of unabashed lust on her face.
“Herr Kunneval!” a voice mocked from above, taunting, insinuating, hinting at deep knowledge that dwarfed any human’s most sincere attempt at deception. “The lady is for thee! Take her!”
“No!” Conway whispered, shaking his head in revulsion at even the suggestion, and noticing for the first time that the area of the woman’s white gown over her crotch was stained a deep and spreading crimson.
“Take her!” the voice repeated.
And the sheriff forced his eyes from the woman, whose figure was now wavering, hovering over the floor, arms outstretched, flesh gaping in running ribbons of raw, steaming cuts that had begun to resemble individual, naked slits.
“Sweet God!” he gurgled.
“Take her!” the voice demanded.
“NO!” the sheriff roared, and suddenly both doors on the front of the jail blew open and the speaker was there, standing in the night beyond the…the…thing, where it hung over the floor, little more than a smear of flowing white.
The speaker was in the doorway.
And he had, more or less, the attitude of a man.
But he was more.
As Emil had described him, the Man in the Woods stood with upraised arms, his face nearly hidden beneath his hair and beard, his own robes rippling in the swirling wind and blowing snow, his eyes aflame. There seemed to be a light radiating out from his body, creating a shimmering pool of silver that boiled with snowy specks. Outside that pool, eyes sparkling and bodies black in flat silhouette, stood a ring of the creature’s followers.
Conway fell to his knees before it. There just wasn’t any question but that was what he was supposed to do. In the face of such a wonder as this, there was nothing for a mere mortal but supplication, worship, and awe.
When it spoke again, Conway realized that the words were German. He also realized, although he could not have explained how, that they were not for him.
“Come!” it pronounced, almost regretfully. “He’s their dog!”
In response, an immediate rush of wings clustered within the blurred patch that was the blond woman burst angrily up in a swirl until Conway was sure that the thing would hurl some nameless monster his way to avenge his rebuke. How many humans had denied the advances of this beast? And how many who had, had lived?
As he watched, the distorted creature’s form coagulated back into the bat-winged thing that had borne Cheryl Lockner down from the sky, clattering and flapping its
way twice around the room before dipping into a graceful arc that led through the door and up, into the night.
Conway was trembling, and something was very wrong with his eyes: they weren’t connected to his brain anymore. He was seeing things, but they weren’t registering any impression. His head felt empty.
The Man in the Woods said, “Until tomorrow, Herr Kunneval…”
Kunneval was Conway’s family name. His great-great-grandfather had brought it over from Europe with him nearly a hundred years before. The sheriff hadn’t heard it since he was a child.
And then two things happened that, in concert as they were, combined to destroy Conway’s equilibrium, resulting in the most violent, gut-wrenching gush of vomit he had ever experienced.
The first was that the Man in the Woods expanded, fast, his body filling the doorway and drawing back in a rush that made the sheriff’s head swim.
And the second, happening almost at the exact same time, was that a thick, dripping darkness swallowed everything.
For a split second before he bent his head and spilled his guts, Conway saw the moon overhead become a single, open eye, surrounded by a silhouette that defined a being so vast that it could have easily held the Earth in its hand. It filled the sky, overhung the world. And dwarfed the planet. It was immense, towering, and black. The moon was its eye, and the sky its skin, and everyone and everything that had ever been or would ever be, all taken together, would combine as a speck of dust before it…
It was that big.
It was unbound.
It was a god.
And in an instant it sent a physical wave of darkness down from above that dripped over the outside of the building like a rain of ink, puddling on the station house floor, dribbling over streetlamps, and replacing all sight with a perfect void into which Conway sent the sounds of his stomach’s revolt…