by Gene Lazuta
No, not entered.
Was pulled into her.
The sensation was sickening and fierce. Lips closed around his penis, and immediately a sucking sound, louder than those Norris had heard before, and even more insistent, began lapping as a pressure like a vacuum drew him inside. The force of it was agonizing, and for an irrational instant, Norris feared that Woodie’s entire body would be crushed through the opening of the woman’s vagina, folding in on itself and following the bruised head of his erection like a rat into a snake’s patient jaws.
Woodie went limp as the sucking grew louder.
And images swirled through Norris’ mind, stunning him with indecipherable eddies of confused hallucination, and dancing, damaged-nerve sparkles. Time seemed to peel away before his eyes, and somewhere in the incredible, volcanic distance of an eon’s breath, he thought that he might have glimpsed the very edge of a place where that monstrous thing that hovered with the moon in its eye sat behind a veil of rolling storm clouds, on a throne made of stars, smiling as it held the world in one hand and Norris’ heart—a hundred million miles across and pumping in explosive bursts of dry thunder—in the other. As he watched, the wondrous, black thing, all size and silhouette, turned its one, pale grey eye his way and nodded its towering head and…
Woodie’s orgasm tore up through his body, locking every muscle from his jaw to his heel and staggering Norris’ thoughts into a spinning, insane vortex of pleasure.
The woman raked one clawed hand down Woodie’s face…
And then there was a beautiful white sun shining in a pale blue sky, over trees that were frosted with a glaze of gleaming ice. A hand was holding something small and hard just overhead, and a plume of frozen breath rose from the bottom of the viewer’s vision, right from where frozen breath is supposed to rise when the eyes with which a person is seeing are where they are supposed to be.
Norris blinked, shook his head once, and felt his knees go weak beneath him. His mouth was hanging open, so he closed it. His spine was stiff, so he loosened it. Warm tears were running down his face, and they felt so good that he did nothing to stop them. Inside his head there was total silence—not so much as a single thought or distinct impression. He was stunned and empty. His vision was over. And as he lowered his arm and glanced around himself in his little snow-covered glade, he didn’t even react to the things he found lying in the snow. He just ran his eyes over them once, collected his bearings, aimed himself directly into the woods, and started walking…
Right over the churned, bloody snow that encircled him.
Right over the gnarled remains of a tweed jacket.
Right over the Korean War-vintage Colt .45 automatic, lying in a pool of dark brown, half-frozen mud, gleaming in the sun and pocked with a pair of deep gouges in its steel—gouges that looked very much like the impressions of some large animal’s teeth.
26.
“H.W.? Jesus! What the fuck, Sheriff? Come on, anybody! I got fucking lightning bolts down here!” the walkie-talkie dangling from Sheriff Conway’s belt buzzed as Conway dropped to his knees and then over on his side in the snow, clutching his groin and grimacing as his face turned first red and then a frightening shade of blue.
“H.W.?” the voice intoned desperately. “This is unit one, I mean…Oh, fuck it! This is Buddy, Sheriff. I got trouble here with that ranger and I’m gonna grease ‘im if you don’t’ say otherwise. You read that? I’m gonna grease his ass! Count o’ three. One…”
Detective Cooper watched Conway gasping for breath as his radio squawked in the mud. But there was a weirdly insignificant cast to his impressions that he couldn’t explain, preventing anything he saw or heard from making any real impact on him just now. The only thing that he felt was truly important at that moment was the sensation of strength surging up from his gut and invigorating his entire body.
“Two. I ain’t shittin’, goddamn it! Come in, Sheriff, ‘cause I swear this fucker’s dead meat otherwise!”
“Nnnn…” was the only sound Conway was apparently capable of producing, and he did it through clenched teeth while forcing his right hand to leave his injured testicles and move, ever so slightly toward his belt.
The trees are so crystal clear! Cooper thought, moving his eyes across the vista of the Valley below, and then back up, toward where there was still screaming in the motel’s parking lot. So perfectly beautiful! It’s like I’m seeing them for the first time! Like they’re new…or I’m new, and all this was just waiting for me!
As he watched, a loud roar erupted into a physical projectile that surged up from the parking lot’s horizon in the shape of a man. As if he had been launched from a catapult, the deputy, whose face Cooper could not see because of all the blood covering it, climbed into the air in an almost lazy arc, his arms and legs twisting slowly and his cry of fear pitifully thin compared to the wild-animal roar that accompanied it. He seemed to hang, suspended in powder blue for a surprisingly long time before his descent turned him completely over and he crashed into a very tall, almost naked white ash tree. He hit about three-quarters of the way up the trunk, headfirst, producing a terrible clunk! that echoed over the Valley an instant before his limp body’s slide began tearing branches that snapped and broke like bones until he stopped, entangled upside down and dripping about thirty feet from the ground.
Amazing! Cooper thought. Really remarkable!
“Three!” the walkie-talkie announced. “Okay, he’s history.”
“Don’t!” Conway hoarsely barked, bringing his radio to his lips in a jerking rush that banged his front teeth with its plastic top. “Leave him be! Read it? Leave him be!”
“Sheriff?” the deputy named Buddy said, his voice gasping desperately up from the cheap little speaker. “You oughta see this shit! I mean, goddamn and Christ Almighty!”
“Leave him be,” the sheriff said again, relief softening his shoulders as he worked his knees back under him. “Leave him be…leave him…”
He’s a wreck, Cooper thought, shaking his head. He was standing only about ten feet from the older man, with his hands on his hips and his eyes slightly squinted because the sunlight was just so goddamn bright at this spot that it made him want to turn his head away.
“Leave him…” Conway whispered again, as if his mind were unable to form any other sentence…
And then, in a rush that Cooper had not expected him capable of performing, the sheriff’s left hand, the one still on his balls, moved to his holster, drew his weapon, pulled it up, and held it there as the end of the thing disappeared behind a flash so bright that at first the detective thought it was just its silent blaze that had knocked him back.
“Uggggg!” his lungs made him say as all the air in them rushed up through his throat.
Then the gunshot flash changed into a thunderous report that masked the detective’s cries as he landed hard on his tailbone, bashed his head against something that was really fucking remarkably hard, and slid—his arms and legs flapping like rubber flippers—down the bouncing, sharp and slick side of the Retreat.
27.
The shot had to be a good one because Conway knew he wasn’t going to get another try. One and out! he thought, hardly able to move because of the pain tracking his nerves outward from his groin. His heart was hammering, and a funny, acrid taste like sour lemon seemed to be boiling up his throat and out his nose.
One and out.
Ka-blam!
His .45 roared at the end of his arm, which had magically appeared just where his brain had wanted it to be. The recoil almost knocked him over. But it looked like the bullet had knocked the detective right out of his shoes.
“Yeah!” he wheezed, realizing that the front of his mouth felt funny, and then saying, “Ouch!” loudly when his probing tongue found a place where his right front tooth had been before he had knocked it out with his walkie-talkie.
It was then that he realized that he had spoken into the radio…was still speaking, as it turned out, saying, “Leave h
im be,” over and over again.
He made himself stop.
Two minutes later he climbed painfully to his feet, staggered a little, said, “I’m comin’ down,” to the guy on the walkie-talkie, and moved toward where he had seen Cooper’s body tumble, intent on finishing the job he should have done back at the cemetery, but hadn’t because…
“I’m just too fucking softhearted,” he whispered, his balls throbbing like blips on a radar screen. “But not no more. No-sir…not one fuckin’ bit more!”
28.
The pain was fabulous, and for long moments it completely stymied Cooper’s ability to think coherently. Lying in a heap at the bottom of the hill down which he had just slid without, amazingly—perhaps even impossibly—breaking any bones, waves of agony swelled up from the spot on his left shoulder where the sheriff’s bullet had hit.
Fucker was aiming for my heart! he thought.
And then…
He growled, low, and under his breath, rumbling his chest and shuddering his throat.
And that scared him even more than the idea of having just been shot.
Bob growled like that, he thought, excitedly pulling himself up the side of a bent tree and using it as support until his wobbly legs seemed ready to hold his weight. When they dragged him out of that room where Woodie had died, he puked his guts, looked me right in the eye, and growled like an animal, like he’d rip out my throat if I got close enough. Not too close. Close enough. It was only a second or two that he did it, but God, he did it, and I did too! What the fuck’s going on with me?
His shirt was sticky, wet, and, in the frigid air, kind of stiff. His entire left side, from his hip to his neck, was ablaze with aching tendrils of fire. And his belly…
Felt great.
He frowned, and poked himself through his shirt, right where he knew the worst of his bite, and consequently, the worst of his wolfsbane scars were hidden. The sensation that he created was intensely pleasant…
He swallowed.
And saw the light.
It was falling from the sky in a single, silver shaft, pale, eerie, almost invisible. But with his eyes so sensitive—When did they get like that? he thought—he could make it out, pointing directly to a spot in the trees that looked to be about a hundred yards ahead.
Without thinking any more, since it was just confusing him anyway, he moved to follow the light, pleasantly surprised to find that his legs felt strong and his steps were sure.
When he found the clearing, he burst out of the trees without ceremony, startling the two men standing off to his left so badly that one of them—the one not holding the walkie-talkie—jumped at least two feet straight up in the air before spinning to swing his rifle around in front and aiming it right at the detective’s gut.
Cooper raised his hands, simultaneously fighting down the urge to charge the man and bite him with his teeth.
“Jesus!” the man with the rifle said, smiling stupidly and lowering his weapon. “It’s that city fella. You tryin’ to get yourself killed or what?”
The second man didn’t even turn around. He just stood there, displaying his back, watching something in the clearing and speaking into the radio. “I ain’t shittin’, Sheriff. There’s real lightning bolts down here.”
When Cooper moved his eyes from the rifle, he saw what the man was watching, and he also froze in his place.
Robert Norris was standing in the center of the clearing, holding something over his head, with his extended right arm stiff at the elbow. The sunbeam Cooper had seen from above fell from the sky and hit whatever it was Norris was holding, bounced off it, and proceeded, as if purified into a single laser beam, straight into the man’s left eye. The beam looked white-hot and swirled with sparkling aerials that entwined it like smoke. Flashes occasionally erupted form Norris’ palm, cracking outward and decaying in the air silently as twisting, multi-branched webs that glowed a vivid white…as if reality were actually a movie, and the film was splitting apart so that the projection bulb could briefly shine through. From his open mouth, an eerie, golden glow radiated brightly, as if the entire inside of his head were filled with light.
His whole body was rigid. His left arm hung limply at his side. And his face gleamed with reflected light from the beam shining into his eye.
“What’ya think of that?” the man with the rifle said, cocking his head.
“It ain’t natural. We oughta blow him away for it,” the man whose back was turned said into his walkie-talkie.
Cooper was about to speak when a voice shouted, “Freeze!” from behind him.
He turned, saw Sheriff Conway aiming his Colt at his face from less than twenty feet away, and without thinking, dropped to the ground.
The sheriff’s gun fired and the deputy with the rifle flew back in a flurry of waving arms and goofy “Wa? Wa?” sounds. The second deputy, finally roused from his meditations, spun uselessly and threw his radio straight up in the air while he swung his own rifle up and fired in response, blasting the tree next to which Sheriff Conway was positioned in his straight-armed, two-handed firing crouch.
Cooper rolled, bobbed up once, and then dove for the tree line, a puff of snow and mud splattering nearby as the sheriff, apparently oblivious to the near miss his deputy had sent his way, tracked the detective’s intended escape route and sent first one shot and then two more in pursuit.
Cooper made it to the trees unscathed, drew his own weapon, raised it, and was about to fire…
When an arm came down gently on his wrist, making him look up fearfully…directly into the blazing red eyes of an old man, with a flowing white beard and tiny bones tangled in his hair, who said,“Not that way, my son. Thus is not the way of the Wild.”
And then the man was gone, and Cooper’s gun was lying in the snow, unfired. He stared at it for a moment, and the words racing through his head took on a jumbled, useless quality that disgusted him.
So he ignored the words…
And took off the tweed jacket the sheriff had made him wear, back at the jailhouse, a thousand years ago.
There was a hole in its left breast side, charred a little and positioned at the very center of a thick, bloody stain that soaked through its worn material and was already turning brown at the edges. Taking the coat off seemed to take a long time, and Cooper experienced a sensation like removing a very heavy object that he had been carrying on his back forever without even realizing it was there. His body seemed suddenly buoyant, and his spirits lifted.
But a darkness was hanging over his him as he examined himself.
Out there, in the clearing, he heard footsteps, first moving together, off to his right and far away, and then, as if the two men had met, made their plans, and accepted their individual responsibilities, moving apart, one to the left, one farther right.
But he didn’t care.
The Man in the Woods, he thought, shaking his head and running his tongue along his teeth, which felt funny in his head.
They seemed so sharp, and so…sensitive. That was the only word for it. Running his tongue along them created a sensation… as if they weren’t just enamel anymore, but had nerves in their flesh, as well as at their center. Unwillingly he imagined what it would feel like to bite something now, to feel the spongy texture of meat covering every inch of his teeth, to feel the moist juices of meat glazing every part of his long, sharp teeth as they penetrated deep into…
He pressed his jaws together and frowned.
I’ve seen the fucking Man in the Woods! he thought, lifting his eyes and glancing around himself. I’ve seen the creatures—the werewolves that hick Conway warned me about. I’ve seen magic, right before my eyes, and I still don’t believe it. I’ve been bitten, burned, shot, and chased, and I still don’t believe it!
He put his finger through the hole in the fabric of his coat and wiggled it.
I can’t believe it!
He finally looked at his naked chest.
I won’t believe it!
; A weak whimper escaped his trembling lips when he saw what he looked like without the coat. He had suspected that something was happening to him, but he hadn’t allowed himself to think about it…
It’s impossible! that civilized part of him down deep in his soul shrieked as some even deeper part, some part that seemed to stretch back and embrace the irrational like salvation, nodded its invisible assent in a silent I told you so. But you never listen to me, because you and your wires, beeps and buttons know everything there is to know, and the old ways are all wrong and naïve.
He didn’t know which was worse, the bite or the bullet wound, so he started with the bullet and groaned.
It was right there—the end of it. The little black spot of a .45 caliber automatic slug, dark, dull, and bloody, was protruding from a terribly swollen mound of scarred flesh that was an intense shade of purple, splattered with blood, and just a couple of inches from where his chin ended when he looked down and to the left.
Impossible.
It hadn’t gone in! The goddamn bullet hadn’t gone in. It had hit him straight and dead to rights, broken a bunch of blood vessels, knocked him on his ass and then down a hill, blown all the wind from his lungs, and nearly broken his collarbone—judging by the ache in his back—but it hadn’t penetrated his body. His skin had stopped it. It hurt like hell, but his skin—just his skin—had stopped a bullet from damaging his insides.
Impossible.
His eyes moved from the bullet to the mess of tissue that flowered over his stomach, lower chest, and down, God knew how far, into his pants.
The woman had bitten him, and the remnants of her teeth were still there, like four little black spiders nestled in the center of their deadly, spreading web. Sheriff Conway had thrown some kind of magic potion made from wolfsbane on him, and his skin had bubbled when it touched him, and those marks were still there, dark and splashed. But it was the color and texture of his skin that were so appalling, for in every spot the scar tissue was, the flesh had turned into a deep, angry blister. It looked as if some soft, fleshy sea creature, like a starfish filled with curdled milk and possessing twenty or thirty feelers, had adhered itself to his flesh. He could almost see through the skin on the surface of this awful development, and inside, just barely visible, he saw something that made his heart turn to ice…