What happened in Palmetto, back when you were all young and innocent.
That night, Peter turned on the microcassette recorder and began:
“It’s in all of us. I’m sure of it. Delusions, waking dreams, hallucinations, and some that are very real. Our nightmares are flesh; our flesh is nightmare; she is coming again. We all feel her, still with us, her howling madness, the taste of her, and now, just as we knew it would happen, she’s calling again in her own way, calling and drawing us back.
“And we have what she wants.”
THEN
PALMETTO CALIFORNIA, TWENTY YEARS BEFORE
PART THREE
THE SOURCE
CHAPTER SIX
When It First Arrived
1
It came to the high desert of California at the onset of summer with the dying of the dried-blossom Joshua trees, with the deflowering of the desert, in the form of a man. He had once been called Michael Southey, although he hadn’t used that name for ten years, not since he’d caught it at his father’s tent revival in some desert shit dust town. It had been passed to Michael by a little girl whose mother claimed she was possessed by demons, a child who swore with such passion, screamed the vilest obscenities, barked like a dog, even tried to bite, and from whose very fingertips fire spat. In those days, Michael believed that a nest of demons inhabited the girl. It was the late 1960s, and he knew that devil worshippers were everywhere: in the growing hippie communes and the LSD psychedelic culture. It was the Devil’s time. He was sure. He had laid his hands on the girl to cast out her demons, and cast them out he did.
When Jesus cast out demons, he sent them into swine and sent the swine to their deaths.
But the demons Michael Southey cast from this girl came into himself: she bit him on the arm as he laid the flat of his palm against her forehead.
He became the vessel.
Michael Southey learned that what had gotten inside him was a glimpse of the Eternal. He thirsted for the knowledge God had bestowed upon him. As it took hold and became part of him, he acquired a new name through its baptism.
He called himself The Juicer.
The man stood five foot, eight inches and wore a smile across his face that was madness itself. His eyes were yellow with disease; a brownish, scaly crust had already begun to seal them half-shut around the lids. His face was the color of summer squash, and seemed to have dried out as much from lack of spirit as from the desert air which he had been living in for the past six months. When he smiled, he didn’t seem to have any lips at all, just deep red gums engulfing gray teeth. He wore the clothes he’d torn from his fourth victim—torn those clothes off with his bare hands while the terrified man stood paralyzed with fear. Stood there, waiting for what was to come. What he knew would be his destiny.
‘Cause I’m a fucking celebrity, the man on the highway giggled to himself. And that dumb ass bastard was just waiting for me to give him The Squeeze.
His clothes were filthy. They’d been that way since the day he’d taken them, almost a year and a half ago. But the man with the gap-toothed grin loved the smell of them: those folks he’d squeezed like an orange, their pungent odor when they brushed against his shirt, against the crotch of his pants.
Dried blood caked the shirt until it had gone from a pale lavender to a brown, blotchy shade.
His slacks, once a bleached-khaki color, now were tie-dyed with blood and yellow urine stains. Sometimes the material chafed him down around his crotch; a rash had spread out along his legs from his testicles down.
It made him feel more alive than he’d felt in years.
He scratched his balls just thinking about that warm, itchy feeling. He remembered the woman’s face from last winter, after he had pulled her out of the hot tub, when she realized who he was.
I’m The Juicer, bitch, and God has sent me to squeeze his harvest, the grapes of wrath, bitch, make wine out of human blood and turn flesh into bread, for this is your body and your blood which is given for me, eat, drink, and be merry, bitch, we gonna make juice of you, we gonna make the freshest fucking blood juice and then I’m gonna sit down and have a pitcher of fresh-squeezed bitch!
The woman looked like she was about to scream, so he grabbed her by the lips and stretched them across her face. She still screamed, but it sounded funny. He even laughed when he tore her lower lip right off.
And then he Juiced her.
He liked that part best.
He was damn strong. The strength of God pulsed through his veins. God was in him, and the Holy Ghost, too, and no man alive could stop him. Her eyes were the best part, the way they kept watching even after all the blood had been hosed out of her, her baby blues turning to pink when the end came. Juicy bitch, she was.
But then, after her, the last one, God had done what He always did: He left The Juicer to his own devices, to let the demons eat away at him from the inside.
That’s just the way inspiration works, the Breath of God gets in you for a time and then blows out your ass like a Santa Ana wind. My Daddy told me there’d be times when God would leave, but not to feel beat, oh, no, ‘cause God abideth in the Soul of Man even when he sleeps, yes-sir-ee. When Daddy healed the sinners, he gave’em God in a hand slap, a squeeze on the shoulder, and they came from their wastelands to Daddy’s tent for that squeeze. But even then God could be cruel, leaving Daddy to die in a drunk tank. But Daddy’s soul flew on, he got Juiced by the Holy Ghost and got drunk by his Heavenly Maker. So the Piece of God that passeth understanding, that one Piece that gets in me and gives me the power to Juice, it comes and goes. When it goes, oh, Lordy, when it goes it don’t leave nothing behind.
So he’d spent the rest of the winter and spring hibernating here in the desert canyons, eating jackrabbit and rattler. He didn’t Juice them, because it wasn’t time. God had not come back into him. Even Jesus had his time without God in the wilderness, tempted by the Devil, and The Juicer was beyond that, because he knew that God and the Devil were two sides of the same coin, the greater your torment and suffering, the finer the redemption, and The Juicer’s demons helped send souls onto God, and now God lay sleeping. The Juicer accepted this, but prayed nightly for God to shoot back into his veins.
He was walking along the highway at four in the morning. The One Who Called Him Home, the Chosen Vessel of God, led him in this hour of darkness, called him back in these empty days. He hadn’t seen the child since the first time it was sent into him, since the first day he’d truly accepted God in his life, the Dark God who willed him to Juice.
And the girl. Her face would be different now.
She would be older.
But there was still a squeeze or two left in him, God willing, before he would return the gift she’d given him.
The Holy Motherfucking Gift.
The Juicer could feel the Piece of God throbbing in his groin, and the need to Juice boiling inside him. Oh, road, take me to a sinner’s home that I might Juice, and send her soul to the Lord Almighty who is above and below, that she might be saved from eternal fucking damnation, and that I might take on her sins, the Sins of the World, that through her Juice I might do the Lord’s work and turn her blood to wine and break this her body and eat it for this is the bread of the covenant!
He glanced at the green sign at the highway’s edge.
“NARANJA CANYON” had been crossed out with spray paint.
Written in its place: “NITRO.”
Beneath this, “PALMETTO, ¾ mile.”
And there was God, like cocaine up his nostrils until he could feel the blood trickling down through his nose; he poked his tongue out of his mouth and slathered it on his upper lip to catch God’s blood as it dripped down.
God said to him, Juicer, my man, you will find a shitload of sinners in there, just waiting for redemption. Send ‘em to Heaven, baby, and take on their sins. Your God is a jealous God, Juicer, and a thirsty one, too, so let’s get the vineyard pouring, ‘cause this is the vineyard for fresh-squeezed souls.
A musky, sexual scent mixed with dust came to him.
He glanced over in the direction of the scent—shadows of trailers out along a yellow mesa, backed by rocks formed from ancient volcanoes. The canyon was sketched in purple and red. Sharp dawn sunlight slashed an arrow between the trailers, and God illuminated his work for him.
The Juicer, feeling the Word of God blocking his sinuses, turned off onto the gravel road toward the canyon.
He knew that this would be the last day of his life in the flesh.
Ah, he thought, the freedom of having no skin, no jail of bones, only the wind across the filth of life, and the sweet fire of darkness exploding across the desolation!
2
From the summit of the Naranja Pass, the road descended, briefly and sharply, into an area that could not properly be called a valley. It was more of a bowl with a crack in its side. This was the Rattlesnake Wash, which ran between the two sections of Palmetto: the town itself going northwest on Highway 4, and Naranja Canyon, or Nitro as it was more popularly known, which sat upon the edge of the crack. Before 1953 there was nothing here other than the Boniface Ranch and Well, but beginning in the fifties, a man named Gib Urquart begat a vision which begat a tract housing development which, ultimately, begat a town and several fast-food joints along the section of the highway known as The Strip. Urquart had a dream, then, that this would be a commuter town, for those who worked down in the Springs, or over in San Berdoo, and briefly, the dream had flared, and then, like all misbegotten dreams, died, leaving these houses peppered across the high desert, having created a town that was dying before it could even be born.
There was an old man who slept, as often as not, at the edge of the Wash, within the circular pipe that was thrust beneath the cracked and potholed highway as it crossed over this point. He had a blanket and a pillow and an old gas lantern. He was not exactly homeless, for he had a ramshackle spread up in the hills beyond town, but he was what you might call crazy, and what he might himself call “afeared.” His name was Lucas Boniface, and his grandfather had officially settled this area in the way back, but few people in town knew him by his real name, he was mainly called Bonyface, or sometimes simply The Bone, and he had adapted quite well to this moniker.
And as Bonyface lay there, dreaming his scorpion dreams, as the sun’s first light cut through the purple dark, he sensed it, for he had, as they say, the nose for it, and felt something churning in his gut that made him wish he’d never been born.
As he awoke, he said to the tabby cat that slept beside him, “They always come back, Isaac.”
He looked out of the hole, into the wine-dark light of morning, and saw the high, yellow wall of the big house that was called Garden of Eden to the right, and the trumpet flowers that grew from snaking vines over its edge; he heard the bees, too, for the Beekeeper still lived there and had boxes of them in the garden of the great house. And the damn roses, the beloved and accursed roses, their brambles clinging to the walls of the house, like in Sleeping Beauty, ready to scratch the eyes out of anyone who dared enter that castle. Every morning when the old man awoken he looked at the yellow wall, its snaky roses along its top, and cursed the name of the Beekeeper and all who had taken the land from his own family.
But this morning, he cursed no one, and held his breath. He took a sofa cushion that someone had dumped by the highway, and covered his ears with it so he could block out the annoying buzzing of the bees. “Demons,” he muttered. “Lord of the flies come back, dammit.”
The sun would come up in a coppery blast shortly, but for now, the landscape was almost lunar, veiled in a purple-blue, with a thin, white spear of sunlight thrusting out from the eastern mountains.
To the inhabitants of the town called Palmetto, this time of the morning, before seven, before the rush of the day, before the heat became unbearable, was a soft time, a lazy waking hour of coolness and taking a moment to reflect and plan and to look at the beauty of the purple and blue and yellow desert. The morning temperature could almost be described as a goosebump chill; before the sun was completely up, the heat would bleach bones through skin. This was the desert, as summer approached, as spring died. This was pre-dawn.
Some called it the Magic Hour.
3
But the man who called himself The Juicer, moving on up the road, did not notice the dawn or the encroaching light, nor was he aware of the man who tried to go back to sleep beneath the curve in the road.
Something called to him, like a longing, like an ache.
Like home.
He could smell it through the air. When he heard the truck approach, he moved quickly to hide so he wouldn’t be seen from the road.
The driver of the truck was a woman. He took a deep breath of air and held it within his lungs: barely a woman. A girl, really.
And it was time to do the ultimate Juicing.
4
Wendy Swan had beautiful red hair down to her shoulders. She wore a tee shirt and jeans and a scarf around her neck as if to offset her casual appearance. She parked her truck alongside the highway, in front of the big house. A jet-black pit bull sat up in the truck bed, tethered with a chain. She got out of the truck, and walked over to the gate of the house. She looked as if she were about to beat on the door, for she raised her fists up and then let them fall to her sides again. If you were watching her, you would think that there was something within those walls surrounding that house that this girl wanted badly.
You could smell her, though, if your senses were strong enough, if you were The Juicer, and you were sniffing for just this one girl, how pretty she was, how something within you knew her scent, had it almost genetically inside you, her chemistry somehow mixed with your own, how you knew that she had brought you to this desolate landscape, called you in some inexplicable way.
And somehow, she knew you would come to this place at this time, and the final juicing of the flesh harvest would begin.
If you were watching her, you would notice that she turned her head to the left, as if she could sense you were there.
The girl looked at the man who had come from the road.
A stranger.
The feeble light of dawn cast a cold streak of pink down the side of his face.
At first she thought she knew him, and was about to say something. Before she could, he grabbed her around the shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream, but he covered her lips with the palm of his hand. What she saw of him was a face that looked as if half of it had been burned, the other half mildly deformed like wax left too long in the sun. There were things moving on his face, things that reminded her of worms caught on hooks, but it was too dark, and he was moving his face rapidly from side to side so it blurred. Pain, too, along her ribs and back, and she thought she heard something snap. He began squeezing her so tight that she felt like she was going to burst at any minute, and she wondered, as she grew faint and could no longer struggle, why no one was coming out to help her.
5
“For you,” The Juicer slobbered into her ear, his tongue mopping across her cheek, “for you, I give my—”
The Juicer opened his mouth impossibly wide, and the girl thought she saw something else down there, in his throat, something moving swiftly up to his mouth.
Something that burned.
The last thing she heard was the pit bull in the truck, snapping and snarling, breaking free of its chain.
A word, too, and she wondered if it were the voice of Death, for she was fairly sure that she was dying now, but thankfully the pain had stopped and she was numb.
The voice, familiar and tickling, whispered her name.
The old warmth spread through her, and she was no longer afraid.
The house called the Garden of Eden was of Moorish design, with its high walls making all but its fake minarets invisible to the outside world. It was built in the 1920s, and then restored again in the 1950s when the current owner bo
ught it. But now, more than two decades after restoration, its beauty was fading, and it had more the look of a prison than a mansion. The garden had overtaken the yard, the roses had clutched the walls for so long that they were less wall than vine and thorn. The Beekeeper was up early, at six, withdrawing the thin drawers of the boxed hive and pouring the honey into a gallon jar. The Beekeeper, for that was the only name that the kids in town knew for the house’s owner, wore a pith helmet with long white netting around it and thick leather gloves, while carrying no other special equipment. White slacks and boots, all protective from stings, gave the Beekeeper a certain anonymity in the community—some said the Beekeeper never ate anything other than honey. Some said the Beekeeper’s face was swollen and deformed from too many stings. Some kids thought it was like the Invisible Man, with nothing beneath the pure-white clothes—even some of the grownups in town had never seen an inch of the Beekeeper’s skin. The bees flourished in the air; but the Beekeeper ignored them, and went about the morning’s business.
By the time the sun had risen, the Beekeeper noticed something lying by the road, beyond the thin iron gate in the wall.
Saw something else, there, too. Lying on the edge of the highway.
It was a girl’s scarf, red, damp, torn.
Beside it, a human hand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dog Days
1
News item from the Palmetto Tribune
KILLER IDENTIFIED: “TELLTALE TEETH”
The man known to most of Southern California as “The Juicer” because of his bizarre habit of crushing his victims to death was positively identified yesterday as the victim of a wild animal attack on Highway 4.
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 34