Peter shook his head. “I just think Wendy lived in a lot of pain.”
The carnivorous smile faded, and something warm and compassionate overcame the old lady’s face. “I suppose you’re right, young man, I suppose you’re right. You must think me a monster say this about my own daughter, and that would also be the truth. Only a monster could breed a monster.” She turned quickly and began walking away from him.
“I want to talk to you,” he called after her.
She stopped. “You would be wiser to get in your car and drive home and help your mother and father pack and leave this place, but if you decide to stay...”
“I don’t even know what you mean.”
“I mean,” the woman said, turning to face him again, “if you decide to stay, then I insist you come to my house. I can answer the questions you must have. But not here. Not by her grave.”
“Who are you?’
“There’s my home.” She pointed her cane toward the Rattlesnake Wash. The high yellow walls of the Garden of Eden. “I’m the Beekeeper. Isn’t that what you children call me?”
But Peter barely heard her words, for suddenly he felt a pain in his gut and a fever storm in his head, like the buzzing of thousands of flies, and his knees gave out. He remembered falling to the ground, and the light of day extinguishing all around him. Then he was no longer in the graveyard with the woman, but raising a knife up and bringing it down into his father’s left eye, only something pushed against the knife as it hit the skull, and the skin began to slough from his father’s face. Something emerged from beneath it.
Wendy stood behind him in this dream—for he knew he was dreaming, knew that he was still in a graveyard with a woman who claimed to be Wendy’s mother—he even had glimpses of the older woman helping him to her car, glimpses of a large gate opening to reveal a garden of many colors and the sound of bees—but Wendy was there in the waking dream, whispering that she would call him soon.
13
Beneath the grave, liquid forming liquid, Wendy felt the pleasure of movement in the confined space and wriggled through the abandoned bones and the seared flesh, and then the effort was tiring and all movement ceased, but the rejuvenating cells formed around her, taking over the surrounding thin wood, infiltrating each splinter; each fragment, until the wood and she and the bones and ash and the microscopic insects crawling across all of it became her.
14
Peter Chandler opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling divided with thick, dark wooden beams.
The Garden of Eden. She’s brought me back.
Stella’s steel-gray hair and face were noticeably unmade-up, unbrushed, ungroomed—rumpled like the bed of a restless sleeper; Her eyes, as large and round as they were, seemed to recede into the skin around them.
“I know you want to leave,” she said, “but could you sit with me a bit?”
“I should get going.”
“Oh. I see. You’re feeling better?”
He nodded.
“Well, if you’re all right.”
“Tell me more about her.”
“My daughter? All right. Do you know that she possesses demons? Not possessed by them, but possesses. And you’ve been infected,” Stella said. She patted a cool hand towel across his forehead, and watched his eyelids flutter and close again.
“What time is it?” he asked, looking about the strange room. The light was dim, and he heard the beehive hum of an air conditioner. Stickiness of sweat around his neck and shoulders.
“Eight fifteen,” Stella said as she tipped his head up so he could drink some water. “She already has you. You walk in a dream. You don’t even remember coming through my garden? Riding in my car? No. You were somewhere else, weren’t you?”
“I need to get home.” He tried to rise, but needle-prick pain jabbed at him all along his spine, and he lay back down.
“I don’t keep much food in the house, but I think I’ve got something in the fridge—you must be very hungry.”
“No.” He bit his lower lip, and then nodded. “You said...I’m infected. By what?”
“Her. Wendy. I could feel it when I saw you there. I’ve seen it before, and to be honest, I’m surprised this town isn’t completely infested. I’m not sure what she’s waiting for. I only know so much about the turning, only what I’ve seen before. And I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to stop her.”
“But she’s dead,” Peter whispered. “I was there.”
“What she has,” Stella said as if she were alone in the room and talking to the walls, “cannot die.”
And then she began telling him as much as she knew about her daughter.
15
Wendy tastes the seepage of night as it pours into the restless anthill above her, and her senses sharpen as activity in the nest grows with the dark. The ants tickle across the wood, and down inside it, for they are attracted to her odor. Sensations like violin strings plucked by delicate hands course through her as she reaches for them and they, for her. They are caught in the amber of her skin, and she holds on, absorbing their energy, their small lives, breathing them in through her heaving thighs. Life. Tastes sweet to her, tastes like pure oxygen and orange blossoms, and as her breathing epidermis digests the insects, with their small puffs of vital smoke, her addiction grows stronger. Come, her body shivers, and the ground around her moves; beneath her, the shockwaves of her turnin’, move like an underground current, and there will be human beings who believe there is an earthquake, when it is just her vibrations. She sends them without even being aware, for she has no knowledge of her own consciousness. She has a drive that must be fulfilled, and so she waits for the coming of the brilliant color of life to pass through her and ease her torment. Her vibrations continue, and the tiny insects are absorbed, and a call is sent through the earth, an irresistible call.
16
Stella set her face in a grim mask as she recounted her story. “About her birth I remember very little. It was not painful, or else I don’t remember any pain. She seemed quite ordinary, in fact, and I was surprised, considering my anxiety. I had considered abortion—no moral dilemma there, you see, because I knew this child was cursed. But the most awful instinct imaginable arose in me, a disgusting reaction of chemicals and hormones and twisted nature.
“I believe it’s called the maternal instinct. Months passed, and I moved to this house. The town was different then. Almost no one lived up here. The Urquarts had their ranch, and I had a lunatic ex-husband who would bother me at times, and some squatters living on the other side of the Wash where the trailers now sit. But it was an exquisite wasteland, and I was left fairly alone. I could dose myself up with killers—my painkillers and tranquilizers and booze—hoping that it would so misshape the child growing within me that there would be no hope of its survival outside the womb.
“When the day came, I decided that since I could not kill the child myself, I would have to set up a circumstance in which we both would die. I drove out to the caves in No Man’s Land and crawled back as far as I could go into a particularly narrow cavern until I found a room of sorts. It had a small entrance—which I could barely squeeze through. I took some stones and piled them up, as if it were the most natural thing to do in the world. There was still some light that came through, but I assumed I would die in childbirth. She was born live. I lived on lizards and large roaches, sometimes a bat if I was lucky enough to catch one. I was an animal. Truly. In my hallucinations, I believed I was eating the most elegant dinners.
“And my baby, my Wendy, began to seem beautiful to me, as she nursed, taking, not mother’s milk from my breast, but blood.
“A few days after she started nursing, a vagrant heard my baby’s weak cries, and we were rescued. I was so weak from loss of blood that I could not resist being taken from what I had once hoped would be my tomb. Oh, yes, I tried murdering her a few times; but each time I did, there was some awful feeling—call it life, call it mothering—that kept me from accomplishing the deed
.
“And the worst of it was: she was pretty and good and didn’t seem like a demon at all.
“But I saw through that, I knew what she was, that she could be nothing else but the Lamia, the descendant of her bloodline, passed from the ancient world down through the possessed and the possessing, until finally she was born through me.
“Her eyes, you see, were glittering dark stones. They were her legacy. She was born with an outer eye, like a skin, that covers her real eyes. It is always through the eyes that we see to the soul, Peter, and her soul was all of darkness.
“You may think I hallucinated it all.
“But it was passed to me, got into my blood, and took me over for a time, too. In a strange way, Wendy saved me. Wendy was my scapegoat, for it was in her forming body within mine that the demon went, inhabiting the child, so that when she was born, it left my body completely. It is a parasite, and it will be attracted to whatever it can survive best within.
“And then I did something for which I cannot forgive myself, even when I think of what evil lay dormant within her then.
“I kept her locked away, in the cellar, like she was some animal. In darkness. I fed her, I brought her out occasionally, I was hoping, I suppose, that she would die.
“But she thrived. She thrived.
“And I knew then, I knew that she would avenge herself one day. But it is beyond that.
“Something I don’t understand.
“There’s something she wants this town for, something I’m afraid that is far beyond merely getting back at me.
“She needed her own physical death to begin the process, and I know that something will come out of that grave. And I intend to be ready for it.”
17
“I don’t believe you,” Peter said when Stella Swan finished the story.
Stella reached into her purse and extracted a bottle of pills. She opened it and popped a couple of them, dry, into her mouth.
“You think,” she said, “I’m a hopeless, middle-aged, drug-addicted witch who, because of guilt over the way she’s treated her only daughter, has fabricated this tale which absolves her of all guilt, of her wondrous mothering. But Peter, you feel it, you have it. It’s almost a disease, you know, and some people don’t live through it. Most people. Some do, and they exhibit the classic signs of possession. Still others simply go insane. My brother Rudy told me of a man who had begun eating his own flesh because he wanted to rid himself of the demon. Wendy is not dead, I assure you, and this entire town, I’m afraid, is doomed. And…” She swallowed a few more pills. “It’s all my doing.”
“I don’t believe in demons,” Peter said.
“Well, then,” Stella said, leaning back on the couch, “that’s all the worse for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Legend of Deadrats
1
This happened the night Charlie Urquart murdered his parents: He wanted to cry out, not in fear, but in revulsion, as if it had finally sunk into him exactly what he had been touching all this time. What was taking him to that blind spot called the Big O. Not a girl with red hair and curved hips, but the thing he glimpsed in the dark, the thing that had recoiled from his match. The match burned his skin because he hadn’t put it out; he’d forgotten about the flame burning. The skin of the creature—for he could think of no other name for it—Jesus, it’s got no name, nobody’s ever seen something like this—the skin was glowing, Jesus, glowing like it was radioactive, flickering on and off like a firefly, but glowing only in the dark. Its mouth, dripping, its breasts, not Wendy.
The creature hadn’t even slapped the match from his fingers. It didn’t mind being seen. The Deadrats side of Charlie couldn’t even understand why it stayed still, watching him. As fascinated with his reaction as he himself was repulsed by the sight.
“Don’t be scared, my Deadrats.” It was Wendy’s voice, and then the match burned the tips of his fingers, and when he lit another one, it was just Wendy standing before him. He passed the flame close to her face, and touched her skin with his other hand. Her skin was cold and rough. “I’m shedding.”
In his fingers, bits of sloughed flesh, dry and flaky.
“It doesn’t really hurt,” she said.
“What I saw.”
“It’s an illusion of the dark.”
“No. I saw.”
“Do you believe everything you see?”
“What—what about now? How do I know this...” He touched the side of her face, expecting warmth. It wasn’t even cold, her skin, it was like touching a piece of paper.
“I have never lied to you, Charlie. Never.”
“How do I know?”
“I told you from the first, what I wanted.” Her voice faltered, and he saw a look of pain in her face for a moment, a cloud passing over.
“It hurts you, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” She sounded ashamed.
“Why not stop it?”
From the chill darkness, she said, “It’s not something I have control over. Once it’s started...Have you ever been sick?”
Charlie didn’t answer.
“I’ve been sick since the day I was born and the only thing that helps me is like a drug. When I don’t have it, I’m close to dying. I mean that my skin tightens, hardens. I want to—just end. End. And then, there’s this stuff. The dog, remember the dog? It had something in its blood, something that had been passed to it, something that has a will beyond human understanding. I can smell that kind of blood anywhere. And I drank the blood. As have you. All of you.”
“But it’s not a drug.”
“No. Something far older than herbs and medicines. Something that once flourished, Charlie, on the savannahs where mankind first walked erect. A vital fluid, Charlie, a liquid of the gods. In ancient legend, surely you’ve heard of hybrids of man and beast, of demons that transform, of gods that turn into swans to mate with mortal women. This is the water of change.”
“But I saw the demon.”
“You saw what your mind can live with. It’s all any of your kind sees. Until they change.”
“Will I change?”
“You already have,” she whispered, and then left him in the dark.
This happened the night he murdered his family.
2
The nights he could take.
The days were nothing but excruciating agony.
Separation from her, from his beloved Wendy, was terror.
The days from June to July had passed like kidney stones for Charlie Urquart, although his turning had happened so quickly he was barely aware of it. Something about having murdered his parents had helped push him further over the edge until he couldn’t even identify Charlie within himself, but only felt Deadrats there, out of its braincave, making the decisions, living on instinct. His father kept giving him marching orders, but Deadrats ignored his father, and using his claws, wrote Wendy’s name over and over again across living-room walls. He laughed at inner jokes, and spoke with his father and mother whenever they asked questions. But Deadrats was in total control.
Still, he felt lonely. And the meat from his parents’ bodies could only go so far.
He tried calling Alison, hoping she would pick up the phone—How delicious would that little piece be? Deadrats thought. All that pretty hair and those tits and the way her legs were swollen with blood. What a dainty dish that one would provide!
Alison never answered his call.
In the night, he leapt from the second-story window and bounded across the back acreage, down into the arroyo, out into the caverns to meet his mistress. She made him watch her with the other boy.
He hated the other boy now. Hated like only Deadrats could hate: there was hunger in that hatred.
Peter Chandler, my next dinner.
Wendy made him watch while they mated. That was the worst humiliation for Deadrats, to know that he wasn’t good enough for her. To know that he wasn’t the One.
“I can do it,” he begged w
hen the other boy had gone, and Deadrats could crawl out from the shadows of a cave, a bat or ground squirrel in his jaws, dropped for her, just for her. “I want to. I need you to take me there. My head hurts so fucking much!”
But she was a bitch goddess to the extreme. She made him see things, she spun his mind with fire and fury, she made him want to go howl in the night and taste the FRESH MEAT of town. ALL THAT FRESH MEAT.
He wanted it.
“How long?” he moaned, the blood of animals on his lips. “How much longer?”
She gave no answer—her silence banged in his head like pots and pans falling in a steel kitchen. GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD! He raced the night, naked, blood on his face, out along the dark mesas, to return to the house that had begun to stink of rotting meat. Rolled-up newspapers covered the front porch, and the light bulbs were beginning to go out.
Then he didn’t hear from her for days. When he tired of waiting, he called his buddies Billy and Terry over to the house for a pool party to end all pool parties. “July Fourth,” he told them on the phone, imitating Charlie Urquart’s voice—Deadrats was so good at sounding like that kid it astounded him—“Bring a friend if you want, sure,” he said.
Then Deadrats drew out some of his father’s hunting traps from the attic—the old bear trap would work nicely, he thought—and got them ready for his friends.
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 57