Let this be the switch. Let her turn it on. “Let it go,” he whispered, looking up to Stella, whose eyes were closed. Good, he thought, keep your eyes closed and let it go, turn up the volume, don’t keep it on low, let it out.
He heard another bullet rip through the air, and it was meant for Nessie, but she ducked and rolled on the ground, dropping Gretchen. The dog went charging for Deadrats, and he pointed it at the approaching dog when suddenly Diego saw a chance. He remembered Stella’s hysteria in the car and that feeling—as if by touching her, he was touching a live wire—and he knew he had to push that button. “DO IT! DO IT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WOMAN, JUST—” And before the final shout was out of his mouth, he saw the white-blue sparks of electricity playing along the edges of Stella’s fingers. He thought, at first, it was a hallucination from his own pain; later, no one could convince him it was anything less than a miracle.
Deadrats cried out, “Aw, shit!” Turning his attention to her, he aimed the gun for her midsection, but the dog was at his feet now tugging at his pants leg. He was trying to kick the thing off him and aim for the old woman at the same time. Nessie was up, too, and threw a rock at him, missed, so he turned the gun on her and fired, and this time hit her. Deadrats turned the gun on Stella and cocked the trigger back, but Diego managed to crawl on his belly toward Deadrats, who then turned the gun on him and shot him in the shoulder. Diego saw a white flash across his vision, like a neutron bomb going off, and then he looked up.
“Don’t do it,” he said to what he hoped was some semblance of Charlie Urquart behind this face curled in a foaming snarl.
Deadrats had the gun pointed at Stella. “Have to kill you guys a little faster than I thought.” His thumb pulled back on the trigger.
Click.
Diego thought: Thank you, Nessie, for only having four bullets in your father’s gun.
And then Stella reached over, barely even touching the young man, and he shrieked like he was being burned alive. Diego heard the popping and sputtering of a live wire.
10
Charlie
After the smell of seared flesh had stung his nostrils, Charlie came to, looking down at the gun in his hand. The last sparks of electric fire played out along his fingertips, which Stella had held for the barest moment. His hand was blackened from fire.
Charlie thought he saw some animal run out from his pants leg and scurry off, burning, into the underbrush, but it might have been a waking dream.
But Deadrats had finally deserted him completely, and he was left with the shame and the self-hatred as he had been when he was a boy. “NO!” His shout echoed through the canyon. He shoved Stella out of the way and ran up the narrow trail toward the old caves.
He was going to find Wendy and destroy her for what she had done to his life, for what she made him do to others.
11
Stella
“I can heal you.” Stella knelt down beside Diego and ran her hands along his shoulders.
“I think Nessie needs you more. I’m okay for now.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Diego. I can only heal things. I can’t raise the dead.”
Diego heard Gretchen whining near where Nessie had fallen. “Are you scared?” he asked.
“Not for the first time. But also, for the first time, I’ll do like Nessie told us. I’ll eat my fear. If Peter and Alison are in there, I helped put them there. And my daughter. There’s something I’ve got that even she’s scared of. I don’t think it’s the healing, but I think it may be the source of where the healing gift comes from.” She felt the warmth of her electric field pass from her hands through Diego’s shoulder, and he watched the healing process speed up, the wound drying, the new skin growing over it.
“Now, let’s look at that knee,” she said.
12
Charlie
Charlie saw something in the shadows after he crawled through the entrance to the mine. There, by the phosphorescent rock...he could smell the festering-wound odor of the demon—stronger even than it had been when they’d passed through the town.
A human figure, a girl, in silhouette.
“Wendy,” he said.
The girl made a lowing noise and pushed herself up against the rock wall.
She’s scared of me.
He sniffed the air, and he didn’t smell the demon from her.
Just filth.
He took a step toward her and almost tripped over some object.
He looked down for a second. He could barely make out what it was: a flashlight. Peter’s. Charlie bent down and picked it up. Still squatting, he shined it over at the shadow girl.
She was naked, but stood there with no shame. He thought for a moment that it was Wendy, but there was something different about her. This girl had long, reddish-brown hair, and the pale skin that Wendy had, but her face was arranged slightly differently, and she was a little shorter than Wendy Swan had been. “You’re the one I saw out there, at the house,” he said. “In the garden. You took the knife, didn’t you? Knife?”
“Nyeii—” She tried to imitate the word.
But then, after the flashlight’s beam had hit her, she shrieked as if she were burned by it. She tried to brush it off her face and neck, and, failing to do that, stooped over and sprinted through a low opening farther up the path. The mine itself had changed since he’d been there—it had been the cave-in that had done it, because the mines that had been dug into the three hearts of the cave had become narrow, and only the one that the girl had ran off into was large enough to walk down. He would have to crawl through the others.
He went in the direction she’d taken.
Charlie thought he had lost the girl, and realized she’d led him into a poorly lit area. He was about to turn and go back when suddenly an arm shot out and grabbed him. It was the girl—she had blended like a chameleon into the side of the cave.
She sat him down, signaling with her hands for him to keep silent by covering her mouth and motioning to him. Then she brought out what looked like a rotted jewelry box. She lifted the lid, holding up what he took to be an earring. She passed it to him and he set it on his knee. Then she drew out something in her hand as if it were a small bird that she had to be gentle with. She passed it into his hands, which he cupped beneath hers.
When Charlie looked down at what she had given him, he said, “How did you get this?” It was his watch.
She didn’t seem to understand his words.
“My father gave this to me. It’s old.” There was something about this girl that seemed familiar, beyond her resemblance to Wendy Swan. She reminded him a little of his mother, and the memory frightened him.
And then she brought another object from the box.
In her hand she held the athame.
He shined the flashlight’s beam across the dagger’s hilt. The word “lamia” gleamed there.
“Careful,” he said.
She brought the edge of the knife’s blade to his outstretched palm.
The ceremonial knife that might be the only weapon against the demon.
The girl handed him the dagger. She murmured an unintelligible sound.
“It was you in the garden,” Charlie said, “and you played in the car with the bones and the watch. If you could only speak.”
Something startled the girl. She leapt up and ran farther down into the darkness. He thought that it had been his voice, but then he heard the scraping against the rocks, and turned to see something that should’ve stopped his heart, but damn it, I’m still alive, my heart’s still beating, and now I’ve got to make up for my miserable life.
13
Peter
“Don’t resist the turning,” Joe Chandler said as he comforted his son, wiping his sticky hand across his forehead, “my baby, my child.” Than had dragged him down the passage, through a corridor smeared with the yellow light as if by a mad child in a playroom, and then down a shaft into a cavern strung with stalactites.
He’s not real
ly your father, you heard what happened to your father. The demon in you killed him. This is the work of Wendy. This is a phantom, a dream. He shook his head. I bet, Peter, you could just reach up with your hands and stick your fingers in her eyes. He tried to muster the strength it would take to do it, but he could barely move his arm, let alone lift it. He tried curling his hand into a fist, but his fingers weren’t even working right. Other faces, hovering above him, and he recognized Alison’s father, his big, jowly face nodding in a series of silent burps, but not a word. Just a hissing sound like thousands of leaking balloons, all floating and bobbing above him.
And there, among all the faces, he thought he saw Wendy Swan. She was more beautiful than ever, and she smiled as if they had a secret between them.
He watched as her eyes seemed to draw apart from their eyelids, across the whites, and then the whites themselves pulling back like a curtain, the way he had seen the inner eyelids of cats draw back, until he saw something even his mind could not comprehend—it was like a light that gave off no light, a cold shininess, a brilliant darkness, her eyes. “You will become as one of the gods,” she said, and her voice had lost none of its delicacy, its soft intonation, its seduction. She had remained young, in this cave, and she had waited just for him. And then he saw he was mistaken: it was just the eyeless face of a girl watching him, not Wendy at all, but someone he had never known from a dead town.
His father grinned toothlessly, lips drawing back over milky, drippy gums. “We all like it here,” Joe Chandler said. “We’re all part of her, we’ve all been absorbed. It’s heaven.”
And then, of all the horrifying things that had happened in Peter Chandler’s brief existence, as far as he was concerned the worst thing of all happened when he looked up into those empty holes where his father’s eyes should’ve been.
They got to him. He just wanted it all to be over. He wanted to be nothingness.
He lay there, shivering with fever, weeping as if he would never stop while phantoms of townspeople he hadn’t even known cooed and gasped all around.
To his left, Than Campusky: his sweatshirt hood once again drawn over his head. “Turning is good,” Than said, his hands gesticulating wildly about the small crowd. “These never turned, they never became. They were only good for absorption. The juice was in them, and it harvested their souls, their personalities, their lives. But you, Peter, you are one of the chosen few. Your will has been strong, but now you do not need to resist anymore. You have been called, and you have come to back to us.”
His father combed his gummy fingers through his sweat-soaked scalp. “I am so proud of you, Peter, so very, very proud.”
14
Stella
Stella had healed Diego too well: he told her he felt like he was fifty, and wouldn’t it be great if she could bottle what she had in her, but she knew differently. They got up to the cave and, after a good twenty minutes of pushing and pulling, got inside.
“Bright as day,” Stella gasped.
Diego was about to touch the rock walls with the glowing, but Stella grabbed him by the wrist. “It’s residue,” she warned him. “It might still be able to infect.”
As if he’d been about to stick his hand into acid, Diego dropped his arms to his sides. “Guess I won’t touch anything if I can help it.”
“Curious.” Stella crouched down as the cave narrowed. She began sniffing the cave. “I can smell her. She has a strong smell here, although I would never have recognized it before. I would know that odor anywhere. I thought she would be gone. Oh God, I don’t think I can...”
Diego put his hand beneath her elbow in support. “We have to.”
“It’s a human smell.” Stella turned her face against Diego’s shoulder. “It’s not just the demon here, it’s her human self, too. My baby.”
“And in here, too,” Diego whispered, “the others.”
Stella didn’t tell him what she thought, because she was sure he wouldn’t care, this man. This man who wanted to witness some mystic experience, or a vision of the eternal. What he would get would be a flesh-eating demon that illuminated nothing while it bled them all.
What she did not tell him was: she felt a drain. Like a power surge and then a break.
Whatever healing power she had was losing strength.
It had been the only weapon she’d thought there was left.
The closer she got to Wendy, the weaker she became.
And one other thing I can’t tell you, Diego.
I smell something other than my daughter here.
I smell death like I’ve never smelled it before.
Like a charnel house.
15
Charlie
There, among the glowing rocks, something dark moved, and Charlie hit it with a flashlight beam to see it better.
“Charlie.” The voice. Wendy’s. Struggling to form the sound of the name.
In the light, he saw it was her. Only different. Her face seemed pinched and too unmoving, her hair wild, her body like a photograph. Her eyes were the twin obsidians he had seen so many years before, her real eyes, demon eyes. And she still was beautiful, her breasts were full and round, her lips accommodating, her legs long and well-formed. He saw scars running the length of her body, and as he got closer, trembling in his shoes, he realized they weren’t scars at all.
“Come,” she rasped, and he noticed that her lips were not moving.
She moved her right hand, and in that action, he heard a tearing. Then he saw how she’d been put together, like a patchwork, her skin divided and sewn together as if by some demented seamstress. Her face, her wrists, her breasts, all had the seams showing where the skin had been torn and then re-stitched. She did not sit there like a queen on a throne, but like a snake lounging by its pool. As her skin slipped like silk from her wrist and off her breasts, she shivered, and her face began sliding down from her forehead. As it went, another pulsating skin revealed itself, glowing, not with the sickly yellow of the demon disease, but with milky liquid.
He did not want to scream, he had taught himself not to scream over scary things, but this...the word that came to his mind: unspeakable, and the scream escaped from between his lips before his mind knew madness.
16
Stella
“It was Charlie,” Stella gasped. “My God, she has him.”
“I can’t tell which direction,” Diego said.
“This way.” Stella pointed down one of the narrow corridors, following what she knew was whatever her daughter had become.
17
Peter
A howl crept up the back of Peter’s throat until he could no longer keep his mouth shut, and he let it escape. He couldn’t believe it came from him as he listened to the last of its echo through the mine. He felt a tightness around his face, and along his arms and back, and then he rubbed his body against the rough stone floor. He felt a tremendous itching, as of ants biting him everywhere, and he began rubbing his skin harder and harder against the rocks, rolling around while the creatures stood back. Something like a scarf brushed across his lips, and he found the energy that he had lacked only moments before to reach up and wipe it from his face.
When he did, he looked at his fingers and saw not only a thin layer of skin peeling back from them as if his fingers were breaking free of a glove, but also the scarf that had brushed his face flaking into a million motes of dust in his hand.
But before it did, he saw that it was a perfect epidermal layer of skin from his face. “What’s happening to me?” he whispered, watching the dust that had been his flesh float lazily through the glowing air.
“Turning,” Than said. “You will shed first the outer skin, layer by layer as if the finest razor is shaving it away, until you are pared down to muscle and fat and tissue and blood and bone. And then the demon will resurrect from your corrupted flesh. And you will become as a god, Peter, and drink life as one of us, and we will spread like blood across the land.”
Peter inhaled t
he acrid scent of necrotic tissue, and realized it was his own skin, rotting, and yet rejuvenating as it died. “Oh God, help me.”
Peter’s father dribbled cool foam across his lips as he spoke. “Remember that trash friend of yours? The boy who killed his dog? He became a dog, too, remember? It’s because on the inside he already was a dog, and so it just came out through his skin.”
“Just look at yourself, Peter,” Than gloated. “Just look. What you really are inside is gonna come out. Do you know what you look like on the inside? This is what I looked like on the inside, Peter, and you, friend, how you will look interests me a great deal.”
From somewhere nearby, Peter heard a slow, steady drip of water.
Jesus, is that my blood?
“Does it hurt?” asked Than Campusky, Angel of the Desolation, as he bent down close to Peter. “It does, doesn’t it? Oh, very good, I watch pain, for she is there, in pain, Lamia, Lamia, come into him.” Than brought his face down to Peter’s, and Peter saw the holes and scars like acne pockmarks along his cheeks and across his chin. The rotting stink of his breath formed a mist in the air, a steam from Than’s gut rose up, a curious heat. Than brought his lips down to Peter’s cheek and kissed him. “Tell me, friend, about your pain. Is it not like small, dull knives sawing slowly and unceasingly across nerve endings until they splinter and small hooks fly up their wires to your brain, to your stomach, to your balls and dig deep, deep, deep until there’s pain upon blessed pain, hint upon hurt, sore rubbing sore rubbing sore? Until pain, friend, becomes an end in itself, a friction between flesh and bone, a boil that swells around a barb that one longs to draw in and out and swirl for that...” Than gasped as if feeling the most exquisite pleasure. “That one moment of explosion.”
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 69