Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  Hairs.

  They were there.

  He took his right index finger—knowing what would happen when he did it, and just how it would feel—and pushed the nail through the center of the blister, closing his eyes and experiencing the pleasure and power of an orgasm. Warm fluid was running down his legs. And when he opened his eyes, a large flap of dead skin was peeled back over one of the puncture wounds near his navel, revealing a tuft of dark, wet hair spreading out from the hole.

  “Impossible,” he whispered, hopelessly.

  And even while he said it, he knew it was a lie.

  “It would have been better for us all had I killed you over the Vyrmin’s grave,” a voice said, and Cooper looked up from his wound to find the barrel of Conway’s Colt a scant inch from his nose.

  “Why is this happening to me?” he asked, moving his eyes along the sheriff’s arm and settling his gaze on the man’s face.

  It was a horrible face, he decided in that instant. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed it before, but there was something about the arrangement of the thing, the way the features were constructed, its lack of any real hair, the beady, listless eyes and flat, obscene mouth, that made him both angry and hungry at the same time.

  Hungry.

  “Do it,” he whispered, lowering his head. “I don’t want to be what I apparently am. Just do it and save me from myself.”

  “Well spoken,” the sheriff said…

  And then he fired.

  But by the time the gun exploded through the forest air, the sheriff’s aim had been ruined, and Cooper watched in stunned amazement as a creature, even more remarkable than the ones he had seen in the parking lot, materialized from the trees and pounced, saving his life.

  It was a vital, powerful animal, unlike those still howling overhead, in that it was silent, and so much faster than the others that it was blinding. It swooped up from the bush in a blurred streak, and the next thing Cooper knew, it had the sheriff’s gun hand in its mouth and was raising itself to its full height, which lifted Conway off his feet by one arm as the Colt, which had its barrel protruding about an inch from one side of the monster’s jaws, flashed making the beast appear as if it were spitting fire.

  Conway screamed as the animal flipped its head and sent him tumbling in a rag-doll flop over its shoulder and into the trees to disappear beneath a crackle of branches and a cascade of powdery snow. In an instant, the beast turned its attention to the deputy who had come up behind Cooper with the intent of offering the sheriff covering fire. He was standing near the edge of the clearing, starry-eyed and dumb, his rifle lying at his feet and his face sheet-white. He would have offered no resistance, had he had the opportunity, which he didn’t, because, the beast, all nine feet of it, covered the distance between the two of them in three quick steps and tore off the deputy’s head in a single motion that happened so fast that the man never had the chance to scream. All the detective saw was a spray of pink out of the corner of his eye, and then it was over.

  Almost.

  Cooper was trembling, and the front of his trousers was wet. He didn’t know if that was from the fluid he had released when he’d broken his blister, or from urinating when his bladder let go—which he though it had, about forty seconds ago. And he didn’t care. Moving his entire body to face the towering thing that had just saved his life—with the probably intent of making him lunch now that the smoke was clearing—he looked up into the things face…and felt the earth shudder beneath his feet.

  “I don’t believe it!” he meant to scream, but his voice was weak, and the words were barely audible.

  Around him there were other things approaching, rustling brush and closing in, but he didn’t pay any attention to whatever they were at all. He just went right on staring into the savage, primitive face of something so big, and so perfectly awful, that, even when a voice said, “So you don’t want to be what you are?” he didn’t respond, but went right on staring, and shaking his head, “No, no, no!”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see what we can do to change your mind,” the voice continued, and still Cooper wouldn’t’ acknowledge it.

  Slowly, he turned his face from the creature that had just killed the deputy, and found himself staring right into a hairy stomach, rising and falling at his eye level. Moving his gaze up, he found two breasts the size of medicine balls, also covered with fur, and above these, a face similar to the one of his savior, but female, and grinning. It was this face, with its animal’s eyes and wild mane of black, tangled hair, and pointed ears, that had spoken to him. And in awe he watched as the thing revealed teeth as big as steak knives, and flicked out its arm, slamming the back of its hand into the side of his face and snapping his head around. His body flew, right into the arms of the first creature he’d seen…

  The one with the bloody jaws.

  And the length of sharpened bone in its hand.

  The one with the dirty blond hair…

  And the single, glaring eye.

  Then then he was out.

  FIVE

  29.

  Norris walked through the woods like a zombie, but despite his external appearance of oblivion, his senses were working hard, and he was acutely aware of everything he encountered. Not much of it made any sense, but he was beyond trying to impose his own conceptions of order on things. He was only concerned with finding the “Holy Ground,” because that was where Mr. Green had said they were going…although he couldn’t place the instant that he had heard the old man use the term. There were a lot of things he just seemed to know without having any reason to know them. And where and what the Holy Ground was seemed to be one of those things. He thought that perhaps he had always known…or maybe…

  No.

  There was a time when it had happened.

  But when was it?

  The night Woodie lost his eye in that car wreck that killed Dad and changed the rest of our lives, he thought, stopping to wipe the sweat off his forehead with the back of a trembling hand.

  “Oh, Christ,” he whispered, not knowing why. “Something about that just isn’t right.”

  Blinking, he glanced around and tried to get an idea of exactly where he was in the woods. He knew he’d been moving pretty fast for at least an hour, and if he hadn’t allowed himself to get completely zoned-out while doing it, he should have been heading due north, which would put him roughly two miles from the Killibrook River, which at this section of its run was really more like the Killibrook Creek.

  I’ve got to cross the river, he thought, sighing and starting out again, crunching snow underfoot and feeling a strange sensation—like eyes at his back—following him through the stillness. The woods felt funny here, and he’d picked it up right away. Things were wrong with them, and he’d been noticing what those things were all along, but he hadn’t been allowing his mind to dwell on them.

  The plants didn’t look right.

  And the trees were weird.

  “The Holy Ground,” he said aloud, just to hear the confirmation of his own voice.

  And Woodie’s eye pulsated in his pocket.

  The Holy Ground was the Indian burial grounds…it had to be. About four miles past the river and to the west was a clearing that bore no trees or bushes. It was roughly circular in shape and dipped down, like a bowl, in the center. Some folks said that it was the crater from a meteor that had hit the earth millions of years ago, but there wasn’t any scientific evidence to prove it. All that was there was a circle in the woods, two or three hundred yards across and scooped out to a depth of about thirty feet in the center so that when it really rained like hell, the thing would eventually start filling up. It didn’t happen often, but it happened—no doubt about it.

  The story went that the Native Americans used to bury their magic dead down there when the bowl was full of rainwater. They’d float them out in a canoe, weigh them down, and dumped them over the side. Only the medicine men went that way, it was said. Only the medicine men and the Tataw
ambie, or spirit bodies. Those were the crazies, which was a rough, white-man translation if there ever was one. The Tatawambie were people who had committed murder—and that was one big deal in the Indian tribes indigenous to Ohio then. They didn’t go for that…at all.

  Of course, most of what Norris knew of the Indian burial grounds was gleaned from stories the old guys told around the barbershop and general store when he was a kid. Looking the area up in the library while he was in college years later, he had discovered that most history books didn’t even mention the place. And those that did simply referred to it as a local curiosity with many unsubstantiated legends attributed to it. Whether it was actually even a burial ground, or just a hole, no one had ever really proved.

  It just was…whatever it was.

  At the river, he hesitated and studied the sky. Blinking, he decided that, according to the sun, it was at least five o’clock in the afternoon. Evening was coming on, and before he knew it, darkness would fall.

  He turned around.

  Behind him there was nothing but miles of trees and snow. In the distance was the imposing slope of the Retreat. And atop that, Harpersville, or at least the very edge of it. Between here and there, something was moving…and he could feel it.

  He’d always believed in his ability to read the woods. It was something he had been able to do since he was a kid. All he needed was a little quiet and he could touch the forest with his heart.

  Trying to explain something like that was a pretty tall order for a kid, especially when the kid’s dad was somebody like Dr. Datch, who was constantly scribbling things in a black book that supposedly had “you” inside it. So Norris had never bothered to tell anyone, not even Woodie. It had remained his private secret—just between him and God. Which was kind of who he felt he was talking to when he did it anyway. Maybe some people prayed. But Norris just stood quiet in the woods and felt the perfection of the entire system…and that feeling of perfection, he sensed, was the closest he’d ever come to knowing God. Which for him, was plenty close enough.

  But this time he didn’t feel God when he studied the trees. This time he broke off even trying seconds after he started and pulled Woodie’s eye out of his pocket as if he intended to throw it away. He glared at it, and a veil seemed to flutter over his mind, somewhere near the back of his skull.

  He’d seen things the last time…

  Brushing snow off a nearby rock, he laid the eye atop it and brought his rifle’s butt down with a harsh snap that cracked the eye and sent pieces of it flying in a spray. Stooping, he probed through the splinters until he settled on one, smoky-grey object, no larger than a microchip that he held between his thumb and index finger, gingerly turning it over and over again with somber interest.

  “Proof,” he whispered, rolling the stone and feeling its smooth edges on his skin. “It’s really there.”

  Why did it excite him so? Why did he suddenly feel relieved to see it, as if he had feared that his visions had in fact been delusions, and not the truth of what had happened to his brother? Given the implication of what he had seen, wouldn’t it have been better if he was just out of his mind, and this threat was therefore limited to just himself, and no one else? Wouldn’t it have been the altruistic thing: wishing the agonies of insanity for oneself in an attempt to spare one’s friends and loved ones from sharing the horrors of those lunatic visions? Shouldn’t he hope that it was all a lie, and none of it was true?

  “Yes,” he thought. “I should hope that. But I don’t. I want it to be true.”

  And, with his honest feelings thus spoken, he lifted the stone, this time only to the level of his forehead, aimed it at the sun, and waited for…

  * * *

  This transition wasn’t nearly so hard to take as the first, probably because he knew it was coming. One minute he was standing by the river in the frozen woods, and the next he was driving a car along a very dark road in the middle of what looked like a blizzard, which the weatherman, who was on the radio at that moment, was saying would get much worse.

  Woodie shouldn’t have been driving, that much was obvious almost instantly. His head was lolling on his neck and the car was drifting perilously toward the road’s shoulder and back. He was stoned on his ass again, and Norris wondered what part of his brother’s life he was seeing this time. It had to be after the episode in the Institute of Metaphysical Research, and before his death in the Lexington Motel, which, according to Cooper’s description of events, was a period of just three days. He was about to turn around in the dark and try to gather up enough of Woodie’s memories to pinpoint their location when his field of vision swayed giddily and the person in the passenger’s seat of the car swung into view.

  She’d changed quite a bit since the first time he’d seen her, through his brother’s memories, about a month ago. Then she had been frail, thin, and sickly. But now she was better. Her contact with a human—specifically Woodie—had apparently done wonders for her constitution, because her skin tone was healthy, and her eyes sparkled with energy and intelligence. Even her tattered white robes looked better. And her hair was superb—like sunlight made solid.

  But Norris couldn’t’ stand it anymore. In one abrupt jerk he moved his attention away from the window of his brother’s eye and studied the memories he found, nestled in the darkness of Woodies’ skull, which were distorted, confused, and nearly indecipherable, probably because of all the drugs he had ingested…

  Which was one of the things Norris saw:

  Woodie was on a bed—the same bed over which he and the demon had made their union—and, as a group of very rough, very strong hands held him down, other hands were forcing great quantities of peyote, raw and juicy, into his mouth.

  “Not so much!” Woodie was screaming in his mind, writhing on the bed and doing his best to choke the stuff back up. “Never so much!”

  But no matter what he did, there was more coming. And all the while the Lady of the Night—nude, and very human now—straddled him and rode his bucking body, screaming out as she achieved orgasm after orgasm.

  The people feeding him the peyote were eating too, off in the shadows…but it wasn’t a plant they were consuming. Gagging and retching, they were pushing lumps of something that dripped in oily streaks into their mouths. Some were able to swallow on the first or second try, while others didn’t seem able to keep whatever it was that looked so juicy and red down before their fourth or fifth attempt.

  As bad as all that peyote was, Woodie sensed that he was lucky that they were saving the dripping red stuff for themselves, and that somehow, he was getting the better end of the bargain…

  At least for now.

  Then he was crawling over concrete, on his hands and knees.

  Then he was lying on a bed, staring at a perfectly normal white plaster ceiling over which a tiny black spider moved from right to left.

  Then he was trying to talk Mike Cooper into doing something that Cooper didn’t really want to do, because Mr. Green said that it was important that Cooper get involved with whatever it was they were trying to achieve, which was the salvation of the planet by the genocide, or controlled slaughter, of the Flock…which meant mankind…

  And then he was driving a car again.

  And then they were digging up a grave…and that’s where Norris’ attention settled and he allowed Woodie’s memories to unfold from there:

  * * *

  At the instant Galltar hurled the young sexton into the empty grave, the stain on the land was broken, and a new and powerful force surged up from the earth to invigorate the descendants of the First Father. They tore off their clothes, and Woodie looked up to see that they were already changing in ways that seemed to take them back in time, and down the evolutionary scale, closer to what their ancestors must have looked like when the First Father, clothed in animal skins and carrying a sharpened bone, found the moonstone and let the genie out of the bottle with his mind.

  “Only you can break the charm!” had been th
eir urgent, insistent refrain. “We’ll go down to Harpersville and prepare everything. We’ll cultivate the people, find the grave, see if there are any Dogs with teeth in the area, and make all ready for your arrival. But it must be you. Only the stone will allow us to move the bones.

  “And we must move the bones!”

  Move the bones!

  The words echoed in his head.

  So much peyote.

  Move the bones!

  At first he didn’t think it would work. Mr. Green disappeared immediately after Woodie and the Lady of the Night were first joined, and eventually he and she had driven down to Harpersville to work the “powerful magic needed to reclaim the Holy Ground.”

  Maybe it was all that peyote…Woodie wasn’t sure just how much dope he’d taken into his system over the past few days, but he was sure it was a lot. He even had vague memories of people making him eat the stuff…and of other people, his friends, eating horrible things…but none of that sat right in his head.

  He wasn’t sure about anything.

  His brain was just so fuzzy, and there were so many little voices, as he had taken to calling them, although a more accurate word might have been “urges,” tugging at him from deep inside that he really didn’t trust himself anymore. There were things he wanted to do—awful things that beckoned to him from the recesses of his being—and mostly they were centered around the woman, the demon, his Lady of the Night.

  So, on the way down to Harpersville, he drove—which he shouldn’t have—and he didn’t know how they arrived alive, especially with the woman doing the things she did in the car with her hands and tongue.

  Then there was that business in the street near the city jail when the lights went out, but he attributed that to the dope again.