My father is dead, all these people are dead, even Than probably is, too, so maybe this is an hallucination, but jeez, is it like Dad said? You believe something you can’t see, boy? You believe in Santa Claus? You believe in the boogeyman? In demons and demon fire and demon juice and girls with stone eyes and boys who turn, turn, turn?
And in spite of the intense shooting pains that seemed to follow the course of Than Campusky’s sadistic description, Peter thought: Yeah. I do believe in what you can’t see. Like love. Like brotherhood. Like good triumphant, like hope. My will has been strong. My will is strong, I am my will. I will resist. I will fight. I will not, and he had to resist giving in to the humor of despair, fall apart.
And then he heard it, and it sounded like hope.
A woman moaned from somewhere nearby, not a word, but the sound was so distinctly human and helpless when compared with those of the people surrounding him, that he knew.
Alison. You’re alive.
18
Alison
Someone stood over her, but she barely felt the presence for the pain was so intense—it was as if she were on fire and the fuel was in her bone marrow.
Alison was able to open her eyes and see a girl with beautiful shiny eyes, her face so close Alison felt she could feel the girl’s breath. Alison had only ever seen Wendy Swan two, perhaps three times in her life, but she was sure this was her, although there was something different about her. She was young, she looked like a teenager with her pale white complexion and perfect skin. The girl said, “Freh.”
The girl held a large leaf in her hand, and wiped it across Alison’s lips. Droplets of water from the leaf tasted rusty and cold and delicious.
Alison suddenly was more terrified by the lack of pain than the pain itself. She was numb, and she thought, I must be going into shock, I must be dying now. Gradually, she felt the needles-and-pins of feeling coming into her arms and legs.
The girl crawled back a few feet and grabbed something. She scootched back with a dead lizard dangling from between her teeth like a cat holding a mouse.
Again, the trembling of the earth, and the whispering sounds, whatifwhatifwhatif. The girl dropped the lizard on Alison’s neck, and turned to shoo away whatever creatures were coming forward.
The girl returned her attentions to Alison, looking at her face in a kind of awe as if it were different from any face she’d seen before.
And then, when she touched Alison’s wet face, an electrical shock shot through Alison like she was being poked at with a live wire, sputtering sparks across her vision until she finally had to pass out. Just before she lost consciousness, Alison thought it was no longer a teenaged girl near her, but a creature that had great leathery wings and eyes like burning candles.
19
Charlie
As the skin of Wendy’s face slipped down her neck, Charlie saw what she had become. He remembered the pale lizards of the caves. This face was like that, pumping with milky fluid beneath its transparent skin, almost Wendy’s face. Almost. Its cheekbones perfectly formed along canine jaws, the shape of its eyes, the curve of the smile. The hair growing wild from the scalp, but more like a mane of a wild animal than of a human being. Scales down her muscular arms; and she was growing larger, her neck lengthening.
Showing her true form.
“My God,” Charlie said. Wings grew from her shoulders, and something burst out from her back—a long, swaying whip of a tail—a stinger at its tip. Like a scorpion. No, it’s a waking dream. You’re back in the dream again. Wake up! Wake up!
What she looked like—
A dragon.
“You stare?” the thing said, but its jaws did not move—instead, he saw its gullet moving as if it were swallowing something in a gentle peristaltic action. The sound of its voice came from there, below its chin. Eyes staring at him, shiny black stones. Its form elongated like a lizard’s, and he could see her internal organs through the skin. Across her waist, a sheet of skin remained. As he watched it, it began wriggling. She noticed him watching. He could feel her inside his head, picking through his thoughts. She brought her hand down and brushed through the sheet—and a good part of it came off in her hand and crawled along her fingers.
Ants. Fire ants. Scorpions, too.
He felt something brush by his ankle. He looked down, shining the flashlight.
It was his father’s face, lying in the dirt, staring up at him. The face moved by its scalp, which crawled with hair feelers to his shoe, leaving a trail of liquid yellow. “That’s one, now, son, you hear me? That’s one, and I want you to be a good boy, do we understand each other?”
Charlie tried to kick the thing off him, but his father’s face opened its obscene mouth and clamped its teeth into Charlie’s left leg just below the calf.
The Lamia crawled toward him as he tried to pull the face off of his ankle, and even though he had dropped the flashlight, Charlie could see through the dark and the pain to her jaws, which were open and dripping with digestive juices. The voice in her gullet said, “My lover, my Deadrats, your seed so sweet,” and Charlie was blacking out, his vision becoming smaller and smaller as whorls of darkness surrounded him, and as he did, something fell from his face onto the ground in front of him, and the crazy thought went through him on his way to his braincave: Shit, it’s my lips, my lips are dropping, I lost my lips...
“Come to me, my love,” she said, and he felt warm saliva hit the side of his face and burn like acid. He was sure she would bite a chunk of his face off next, but instead she pressed her lips against the edge of his scalp. He knew it would be something worse than merely being devoured by this demon. He tried to fight her, but he was weak, and the more he kicked at the thing attached to his leg and tried to shove her away from his face, the more he broke through her, into a clear jelly, a wall of jelly surrounding him, and it was her body.
She was in the process of absorbing him.
He felt the sting of her juices working against his flesh and bone.
He brought the athame up and jabbed it into her throat, hacking away into the jelly. Go to Hell. Go to Hell. Go to fucking Hell.
20
But nothing happened.
We were wrong, you hear that, Peter? Ain’t no weapon. Maybe on flesh, maybe if it really was still Wendy in human skin, but you can’t fucking send a demon to Hell, to darkness eternal, ‘cause it’s already there! It would be like sending a dog home and thinking it was punishment! WE WERE WRONG!
And then he knew, in his last moments of life, why the Lamia needed to infect human beings, what she had been preparing for by spreading her demon juice through the town those many years ago.
Like passing resistance to allergies from a nursing mother to her baby, through milk, the demon spread itself through blood to prepare the flesh...her heart. We did the worst thing, the Awful Thing, Than lied, he lied, and it’s too late, and we can’t be saved, no one can... Charlie Urquart’s thought processes cut off as her skin absorbed his scalp, then the melting skull, to get to his succulent brain.
And finally, a bit of heart that had been so long denied this creature returned home.
21
Stella and Diego
“Listen,” Diego said as he entered the chamber of the cave. He smoothed the air with his hands as if trying to isolate the noise. “Whispering. Must be bats.”
Stella prayed quietly to herself. She must not tell him how her body felt like it was barely holding itself together. I am too old for this. I should’ve died already.
Stella followed behind, keeping her hand to Diego’s shoulder as if to let go of it would mean falling off the edge of a cliff.
They both heard it, barely audible. Whatifwhatifwhatif.
Stella let out a shriek, and then covered her own mouth. “I stepped on something,” she whispered. “It moved.”
Diego directed the flashlight beam downward and scanned it across an enormous cavern, and a garden of sorts, white and yellow roses growing alongside indigo
pools. And among the roses, other things were planted.
Human beings lying in heaps together. “From town?” Diego asked.
Stella was shivering so badly she could not speak. She’d stepped on a boy whose face she vaguely remembered as the local paperboy from years before. His face had felt like jelly. He looked up at her, his eyes blinking over and over again. She was sure his lips moved. The imprint of her shoe was still on his nose and cheek.
Stella finally whispered, “I’ve seen all of them. There’s Trudy Virtue over there.”
She pointed to a large woman lying in the dirt, her eyes open and fluttering.
whatifwhatifwhatif
“Are they dead?” Stella asked.
Diego walked among the roses and bundles of human flesh like he was wading through a river. “I don’t know. Look—their eyes. Some are open, and there’s movement, and some are closed.”
“Moving,” Stella said.
A shadowy movement at the far end of the cavern caught Diego’s eye; he flashed his light toward it.
The man standing there looked like a living corpse. “This is my Garden of Eden, which has been untended too long,” he said. “Welcome, one and all.”
Stella noticed that Peter Chandler was there, too, only he was partially buried in the dirt, and his face was blank, as if he had seen or felt something so terrifying that his mind had leaked from him as a survival mechanism. If I can just get to him. Touch him. To bring him back from turning.
She tried to remember how Diego had driven the power into her fingertips outside when she’d cast Deadrats out of Charlie. But she trembled, feeling the power flickering as if she were no longer a generator, or even an Electrolux, but just an old sixty-watt bulb that had been in the socket too long. It’s the field, the electromagnetic field between us, when we get close to each other, we both weaken.
At least, I hope she’s weakening. I hope to hell she doesn’t draw strength from my weakness.
22
Alison
Alison awoke to find herself in the underground hall, pressed against other bodies, all of which seemed to be breathing. Although she was too distant to see Stella and Diego as they stepped through the cavern, she thought she heard the sound of Peter’s voice, and it chilled her.
He was howling.
The girl still crouched over her, and put her fingers to her lips.
Alison experienced a strange sensation: her limbs still felt heavy, and there were shooting pains along her ribcage.
23
Stella
“I am Nathaniel, Angel of the Desolation,” the man said as Diego approached him.
In the light, crawling laboriously behind Than, were small creatures.
“Demons,” Stella said.
“Children!” Than raged. “Her children!”
They resembled small, hairless kittens, their eyes large and charcoal-black, and they moved on their bellies in a rippling, coiling motion like worms. Something about their faces remained undeveloped, as if they were almost formed—as if some sculptor had yet to put the finishing touches to them.
Than nodded, waving his hands out to reveal more of the creatures pouting from the walls. “She is the great goddess, she contains multitudes within her. She only needed to mate at the fertile time, just before the death of the human flesh. Welcome to her nest.” The wriggling creatures whispered among themselves, whatijwhatifwhatifwhatif, it was the sound of their developing hearts beating like wings against a cage.
24
Peter
Lightning across black eyes, searing heart of yellow green flame, see it, see it, SEE THE PARASITE EATING DEMON CELLS, PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LAMIA, HER NEST, HER CHILDREN, A TOWN FOR FOOD, A PERFECT PLACE TO SETTLE DOWN, PALMETTO HAS RIPE FLESH AND NO ONE CARES FOR IT, SCORPION WITH ITS YOUNG ON ITS BACK CRAWLING, Peter felt the turning pain like branding irons sizzling, tickling his belly, his chest, ripping flesh like jelly with pincers.
25
Than Campusky watched Peter writhe on the ground. “The father was one of us, Peter. You, I, or Charlie. We were the seeds in her garden. And only one mistake, only one freak. And the rest, these beautiful children. See how they grow.”
“But they’re freaks,” Stella said, her demeanor changing from one of fear to one of anger and authority. “My daughter is the mother of...of...”
“Demons?” Than giggled. “Like you?”
“No, I’ll never believe that. Part of her was human.”
“Was? She lives still, here, she is mother of us all.”
“She can’t be,” Peter said. “The demon was in her. It destroys flesh.”
Than said, “It loves the flesh, Peter, it caresses the flesh. Look,” and Than pulled the hood of his sweatshirt down and showed Diego where his scalp had been opened up and bored into. “Still in me, giving me pleasure, so much pleasure, Peter, and in you, too, and in Alison. Demon juice. Even Charlie tasted it before he was absorbed. He died in love, drunk and in love. The wine of the gods.”
Stella said, “And Alison—what have you done to her?”
“YOU GODDAMN BITCH!” Than spat, his rage turning his skin yellow. “YOU SHOULD DIE FOR YOUR UNNATURAL CRIMES! AND PETER, YOU BETRAYED ME, YOU LEFT ME TO DIE, AND NOW YOU COME BACK, ALL OF YOU, AND WE ARE ONE FLESH! I SHOULD LET ALISON DIE THE MOST PAINFUL DEATH AND LET YOU WATCH!” Then his voice quieted. “But she is being harvested. Lamia needs her, needs you, too, Peter, for the harvest.”
Diego asked, “Are you harvesting blood?”
Than shook his head. “You are mistaken. I myself have developed a taste for blood, but Lamia’s children are in the blood. Passed through the blood.”
“Then what does Alison have?”
“She is turning, and turning successfully, and so is my friend Peter. Lamia’s children need her cells, because as you see, for all their beauty, they do not live long, my little ones, they feed.” He pointed to one of the things as it attached its lips to the forehead of Alison’s brother Harv. “They regenerate the skin and the blood of the dead, but they can’t live off their own creations, just as you could not live long on your own vomit.”
“You said there was a freak here,” Diego said, feeling bold. Than hissed, “Stupid monkey child, immune to Lamia, she is a mutation. Her brothers and sisters will not even drink her blood. She will die like any mortal. She has nothing but weakness.”
And another child stepped out from the dark of the cave, but this was a human child standing about five feet, four inches tall, with a sallow complexion and long red hair. She scurried over and crouched down beside Than, who petted the top of her head. “Too much of Charlie, I’m afraid. See her eyes, how they are ordinary and human.”
“She looks the way my daughter did,” Stella said, “once upon a time.” Stella watched the girl leapfrog across the garden of bodies, to where Peter writhed in his turning agony.
“She is useless,” Than growled. “She is a different...frequency...”
The girl crouched beside Peter and looked at the others as if she wanted them to explain why this man writhed so in the dust.
26
Peter
He was only dimly aware of the animal bent over him, but he smelled his flesh where her touch burned him.
My will to resist, the thought seemed to come from nowhere, and with it a strength.
27
Something moved through one of the tunnels into the cavern, into the smear of yellow light, and as it came, it said, “Mother, you’ve come to me.”
28
She was beautiful. Her skin shone like porcelain, her hair was radiant, her eyes the darkest stone. A smile played at the edge of her lips. “Life tastes so beautiful,” Wendy said. She wore a dress of human skin, faces all strung together, their lips and eyes sewn shut. “Charlie Urquart had a vibrant will, a pulse that burned when you tasted it. His life has rejuvenated my flesh. He took good care of my heart.”
“I see through you,” Diego said.
“Stupid old man. O
f course you do. I am everything you’ve dreamed of knowing. I am your Mystery.”
“You’re something that lives beneath rocks,” Diego spat. “You hide in darkness because the light will show you for what you are. You’re not even a demon, are you? You’re some throwback, an intermediate stage in our evolution. Our flesh is stronger than yours, it lives beyond your short life.”
“I am your life, dying man. I eat your life and turn it into something beautiful.”
“No, you’re just a snake, a worm, a crawling stomach with eyes and a mouth, and reproductive organs. You absorb, but you don’t generate.”
“Come here and I will show you what I can do.”
“All right,” Diego grabbed Stella’s hand.
“Please,” Stella whispered, “it’s gone. The healing. All I feel is some wavelength passing through me, like static, with no signal.”
29
Peter found his strength and began to rise. Only later would he realize what had cured him, what had stopped the turning.
30
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 70