And once all the meat is gone, and every last limb is severed and all that remains is the split-open shell of the screamer, he reaches in and peels away a thin layer of soul. It glimmers, glows, and sparkles, shimmering for its first few moments in the light. Then, and only then, do the screamers finally stop screaming. Their souls swell, no longer trapped inside a mortal shell, filling out, drawing their first real breath of freedom.
Then The Butcher throws a meaty fat thumb over his shoulder, pointing toward a simple cinder-block passage in the back of the slaughterhouse. “What’s down there?” they ask.
“Peace,” he says quietly, his voice deep, resonant, like a father speaking to his child.
“What’s it like?” they always want to know.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never been there. I’m just the butcher.” Then he bellows to the foreman, “Next!” as the liberated soul wanders confused off toward the passage.
The flesh, it hungers. It thirsts. It fucks. The flesh is where the fear is. There is no soul that grows hungry or tired or scared. Only flesh does that. And the flesh is not the soul. But it’s easy to forget that, to think the soul wants to feed and fuck and fall asleep. What the soul wants is bigger than that, simpler than that. The soul only wants peace. And there is no peace for the flesh. No respite. It eats, it sleeps, it cums, and then it starts the cycle all over again. It’s why the screamers offer so much. They think The Butcher meat and bone, just like them.
They don’t understand The Butcher. Not until the end.
I Am the Night You Never Speak Of
Author’s note: The following story was originally published in Midian Unmade, a Clive Barker–approved short story collection set in his Nightbreed universe (based upon his novella Cabal) after the fall of Midian. This story takes place there.
It’s banging in my skull again. The hunger. It starts as an itch on the other side of the bone, behind the earlobe, just where I can hear it. Scritch, scritch, scritch it goes in the night. I don’t notice it when it’s just a tickle. I’ve trained myself not to. But when it’s a scratch, I know I’m in for it. I know that it will get so bad it’ll curl my fingers, curl my toes, paint my knuckles white, and choke my fingertips red. It’ll arch my back and make me want to bite my own tongue clean off. I’ll start beating a balled fist against my skull, want to drive a knife or a screwdriver or a power drill—whatever I have on hand—right into the spot to scratch it.
But that’s just how it starts. And it only gets worse from there. Next comes the pounding, a screaming headache like a hangover from three solid days of tequila and nothing else. My brain throbs against a skull full of exposed nerves and I want to tear my skin off my arms just to feel something else for a change. I want to pull out my hair in clumps, bits of flesh dangling from the ends, rip my ears off both at the same time. But that won’t help. That won’t be but a distraction, a momentary dalliance from the scratching and the pounding and the bleating of my hunger.
I have to feed. To eat. To devour whole the dark of night. Its sins. Its memories. I have to feast upon the guilt and glee of a hundred carnal pleasures, to drink and fuck and finger and sink low into a junkie sleep rich in the glow of a peaceful head and the taste of cock and quim and filth on my mouth.
Not that I love that shit. I hate it. It’s fucking cotton candy for the soul. A second on the lips, a flash on the tongue, and then vapor—an unsatisfied memory of a moment you can’t ever get back. You need more. You gotta have more. That’s where it started, for me at least. And it never ends. It never ever ends.
I don’t eat people, not like the others. Some of the others, at least. I eat the sin. The act. I dine off the moment that the soul crosses the line from one side of morality to the other. But it ain’t like you think. A sin ain’t found in the lines of a book. It’s found in the heart, the soul. A sin is found in shame. Or in that dark enjoyment of something made better because you think it’s wrong. That’s where I eat; that’s where I live. That’s where I come for you.
Getting people to sin is easy. Everyone wants to be around me. I’m fucking beautiful. Not hot. Not sexy. Beautiful. They can’t take their eyes off me. You. You would fuck me. That’s how beautiful I am. I haven’t even told you if I’m a man or a woman yet, and I don’t know if you’re gay, straight, or married. But you’d fuck me. You know you would. You’re starting to picture me now, see my features through the fog, feel the tickle in your groin as you rub your thighs together hoping no one else in the room notices how hot you’re getting. That’s how fucking beautiful I am. And that face you’re seeing. That’s what I look like. That’s what I always look like.
And everyone sees me different. Everyone but the monsters. To them I always look the same.
In Midian they called me Bacchus, the god of lust and ritual madness, of ecstasy and wine and all the filthy fine fucking things folks love. Most thought I might actually be him, or at least the inspiration for the story. But I ain’t him and he ain’t me. I ain’t half that old. It’s just a name, good as any other. But now, now that they know me, now that the walls have come down and so many truths have been revealed, they don’t speak that name in jest. They don’t think about me that way anymore. Now I’m something else. Now that word has a whole new meaning.
Now they know that I eat sin and a monster ain’t nothing but.
People think of psychopaths and equate them to monsters. They think of the cruel, emotionless detachment and see the awful things they’ve done and scream A MONSTER! A MONSTER! But that’s no monster. A psychopath is just a thing that’s broken. They’re not men; they’re animals—devolved brains that have ceased feeling and turned to instinct. Animals, those are the only things that will do something cruel without remorse. They’ll bite their best friend for a morsel and never give it a second thought. You can smack ’em upside the head and they’ll come back to you—if you’ve broken them right. That’s no monster. Monsters know. Monsters feel. They know exactly what the fuck they’re doing; they know the things they do are wrong but savor it anyway. Every. Delicious. Moment.
Until you’ve watched a monster eat a man, head and all, tear out its entrails, and dance beneath the moon with a delighted blood-smeared smile, you don’t know. You can’t know. They love it. They love the shit out of it. That’s a monster. And that shit gets me harder than anything. A monster, a good and proper monster, will sate my hunger for a decade or two. I’ll gut ’em like they would a human and gobble up every sinful morsel; I’ll crack their bones and drink the marrow. Once I ate one so foul that I didn’t get hungry for another thirty-four years. But that time I got lucky. A beast like that is craftier and more cunning than anything you’ve ever known. To get one like that you’ve got to catch ’em at their weakest. At their hungriest. When their insides pound as hard as mine do now.
But I ain’t seen a monster like that for a very long time. Not since Midian. Not since the walls came down and we scattered to the winds. Midian was good to me. I could watch and wait and learn the routines of the worst of us. Then when the hunger or boredom got to be too much for them, I’d follow them out, wait for them to break the law. And then I would break it myself. Had to do that only a few times. The rest of the time I could live in peace. Quiet. The demons screaming in my head sated for years. I could read, have real conversations in which I didn’t have to pretend so much, maybe even watch a little TV. I never had to drink, to feast, to find myself throwing up in some back alley, needle in my arm, unshaven junkie on my cock working for his fix. Not unless I wanted to. Those were good days. But they’re gone now.
So I have to fill the new ones. I have to feed. I have to gorge on whatever weak-ass human sin I can find, which means most of the time I have to make my own. It’s awful. A single night of human debauchery is like a thimbleful of water after three days in the desert. It’ll stop the pounding, all right; it’ll stop the itch. But it’ll only buy me a few hours of peace, a few hours of quiet, a few hours without the walls of my sanity tumbli
ng down. Just enough to sleep. But most days it’s the itch that wakes me up.
So my life is a constant party. A night train of debauchery with no stops until dawn. Booze. Sex. Drugs. Gambling. Theft. Violence. Whatever your kick—your real kick—I aim to supply it. To be that silent dream drifting into the bar to grab you by the short and curlies and tug you into a smoky backroom corner to finish you off in the dirtiest, filthiest, most perverse way you can imagine. But don’t get too excited. I ain’t your fucking fantasy. No. That would be too easy. I don’t get off being everything you wish I was.
Who the fuck am I?
I am the night you never speak of. The porn you jerk off to but could never tell anyone about. The tryst when your wife is out of town. The drunken night after five years sober that leaves you lying in a pile of your AA anniversary chips. I am the memory that makes you cringe in the shower, the lie that ruins your marriage, the truth that makes you put a gun in your mouth after midnight when no one is awake to take your calls. I am the dark deed that hollows you out and leaves you like a husk to be filled with booze or sex or love or excess or consumerism or religion or fitness or parenthood—whatever your vice may be. That’s who the fuck I am.
And tonight my head is pounding again. The sun is setting and I’m running out of smokes. It’s time to hit the town. It’s time to eat. It’s time to ruin someone’s life.
I’m staying in a shithole motel in a know-nothing town that is the pimple on the ass end of Texas. I’ve just finished a long run in Vegas—which I can only handle for so long. There’s no night in Vegas, not inside the city limits. Not where the hunting and feeding happens. It’s all lights and noise and six-dollar steaks, all day, every day, in a way that it eventually makes the sunlight feel wrong. It flips the whole world on its head. I lived underground beneath the dirt and graves for ages, and even I can’t handle Vegas for longer than a month or so.
I hitched my way as a lot lizard, blowing truckers in their cabs, feeding off the really dark shit they daydream about on the long hauls. It’s not that I’m poor. Cars can be tracked. There are always people looking. Monsters looking. And I don’t like anyone to see me coming. Or going. It’s why I’m still here after all this time. Remember what I said about clever monsters? I was being humble.
So here I am in some shit-smear Panhandle town with my head on its way to making me cry out loud and I’m dying for a smoke.
I’m thinking there might be a bar nearby. I’ve been to this town before. That’s why I hate it so much. I always forget its name. It’s something stupid like Oatmeal or Friday or Happy or Paris—you know, one of those cute co-opted bullshit names Texas loves. But I think there’s a bar, and I think it should be open, so I hoof it across the dusty, yellow-grassed plains to cut an hour or so off my walk.
And I’m right. There’s a bar. And it’s open. More or less.
It’s one of those concrete box buildings that just looks wrong all by its lonesome. Sharp angles, whitewashed cinder-block walls, a sign hand-painted by someone with aspirations of leaving this town but lacking the talent to actually do so, a big black metal door and no windows to spoil the neon-drenched insides. It’s got one of those stupid lighted arrow signs out front with slotted letters falling off that no one gives enough of a shit about to straighten after a storm. Why bother? I wonder. It’s not like you could miss this pathetic structure along the road with nothing but telephone poles and a gravel parking lot to keep it company. But there it is, inviting you in for cheap beer and friday night pool tournaments.
It’s Tuesday. But thankfully there are half a dozen cars and trucks in the lot. Probably the only alcohol for fifty miles.
The inside smells like stale smoke and dirty mop water. It’s exactly as I remember it. Cement floor covered by a stained, tattered rug—the thin, rough kind you find in cheap strip center offices. It’s lit almost entirely by neon advertising, some corners brightened by beers that haven’t been available for decades. It’s not so much a bar as a coffin where a lonely few escape their somehow even worse lives.
I smell the guy right away. I can taste his longing on the tip of my tongue, the want lingering at the bottom of his heart, buried under ten years of single-position Saturday-night sex. He wants a turn. He’s waiting for it. The rest of the bar is slim pickings. You’d think that everyone could be broken by something, could be lured away with just the right offer, but I’m telling you now, that ain’t the case. Some people want for things they’ll never allow themselves to have.
But this guy, this guy has it bad. He’s a stained T-shirt barely squeezed over a spare tire, with salt and pepper stubble sprawling across two different chins. He’s daydreaming over his beer, thoughts lingering over freshly dusted memories some fifteen years old. This guy’s special. Sure he’d love a roll in the hay—a good, righteous fuck or even a quick handy out back. But that wouldn’t even register. That’d be the pitiful highlight of his fucking year, and he might go so far as to tell his wife about it just to piss her right the hell off.
No, this guy is looking for something else, a different brand of vodka altogether.
I sit two stools down and don’t make eye contact. That’s the key. People get suspicious when they get everything they want without having to work for it. So I make him work for it. He nurses his bottle of beer for a while, checking me out in the mirror hanging on the wall behind the bar, mindlessly picking at the label.
I wonder for a second what I look like to him. I never get to know. I get an inkling, a few of the details—young, old, black, white, male, female—that kind of stuff. And I know that only because I know what they want. But I never see myself, not as they see me. I know he thinks I’m a man, I know I’m in my twenties. But I know shit else. Hair color, eye color, beard or clean-shaven. None of it. I look across the counter at the mirror and see nothing but the monster, a withered old husk, partied out like a drooping, wrinkled party balloon. It’s a good thing no one ever sees my eyes, my real eyes, bloodshot and yellow with a thousand-yard stare that’d just downright chill you to the bone.
“Can I get a pack of smokes?” I ask the frumpy, dumpy white-trash owner of this fine establishment. She nods and tosses me a pack from behind the counter. “My brand,” I say with a smile. At this point, they’re all my brand. I light up, the smoke only the faintest relief against the din in my skull. But I draw in a drag like it’s fine wine, smiling and letting it roll over me. Headache or no, the show must go on, or else the headache will just get worse. And it will get worse. So I’m all about the show now.
In the mirror I see a flash of razor teeth.
I hate seeing myself in the mirror.
“You still play?” he asks, drifting back in from out of his daydream.
“What?” I ask.
“You still play?”
“Ball?”
“Yeah, ball.”
“How’d you know?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“The way you carry yourself. A guy who plays ball, if he’s the real deal, if he gives himself to it, it gives him a walk.”
“My posture gave me away?”
“Yeah. I’m guessing . . . running back?”
“Tight end. You?”
“Quarterback. Up through college.” He lifts the sleeve from his bicep, revealing the number 27 in big block letters and local high school colors. “Till I blew out my knee.”
“Who’d you play for?” I ask, the lilt of my voice showing genuine interest.
Bam. He’s on the hook and moving two stools down to sit beside me. He wants it bad. I can taste his thoughts, the stench of his desire reeking like a bloated corpse. Middle age is making him weary, sad, putting the creak in his bones and a layer of fat on his belly. He wants to be young again, but even I can’t do that. So he talks about it. And he talks about it. And beer after beer he keeps talking about it, reliving every glorious moment.
His name is Bill.
It’s an hour in and he’s recapping the final quarter of the big state c
hampionship. I know when he’s lying, but I don’t mention it. The embellishments are the only thing making the story listenable. Otherwise it’s the standard claptrap that I try to choke down with as much alcohol as I can stomach, half a pack of smokes, and the hope that this headache will soon be gone. Every once in a while I break in to tell my own lies, stories I’ve lifted from a hundred other guys just like him, details that sound right because they actually happened to someone else.
But none of this is going to chase away the hunger. It’s all just foreplay. I gotta get this guy out of the bar so we can get down to business.
“Man,” I say before killing the last few swigs of a beer, “I wish I weren’t so far from home. I could really go for a round of shooting right now.”
“Shooting?” he asks.
“Yeah. Me and the boys like to go out after a game, get completely wrecked, then line up our bottles and shoot shit until we pass out. All this talk about playing has me wanting to shoot.”
“I got a couple shotguns in the truck. Maybe fifty, sixty rounds.”
“Bullshit,” I say, pretending that I haven’t been smelling the gunpowder on him for the last hour.
“Ain’t no lie. You wanna shoot?”
“Yeah, I wanna shoot.” I look up at the bartender. “How much for the rest of that bottle of whiskey?”
Bartender shakes her head. “I can’t let you walk out with anything open. Not so much as a beer.”
“Then how much for an unopened bottle?”
“Ain’t got a license to sell you that, neither.”
We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories Page 13