Stella let go of Diego’s hand as she stepped so close to her daughter that she could almost touch her.
31
Than ran over and grabbed Alison by the wrist. He shouted, “Lamia, absorb this one. She is turning, she will give you the strength.”
Wendy Swan, or what had rejuvenated the skin and hair and bones of Wendy Swan from the energies of the dead, glanced over at her Desolation Angel and the girl he held.
And in that moment, Stella grabbed Wendy’s wrist.
32
Peter lunged for Than, knocking him onto the ground. Alison stepped back; hands from the earth grabbed her ankles and began pulling her down; she lost her balance and fell into the open arms of her dead brother, Ed Junior, who whispered in her ear, “what if what if what if what if.”
33
The Lamia’s true form reasserted itself through the skin and dress of Wendy Swan. Milky fluid pumped through the open wounds of its transparent skin.
“You think you can heal me, Mother?” She writhed beneath Stella’s grasp.
The older woman had the sensation of holding a live eel in her hands.
The demon was wild, it was made up of all things it had once been.
Diego reached forward and grasped Stella’s free hand, and the feeling was passed to him: Lamia was fluid from steamy swamps, trapped in fossils a million years before, released in an upheaval of the earth, moving through a soup of organisms, from the simplest to the most complex, but always remaining in the dark, beneath rocks, in the shade, always feeding from the dying, trying to reproduce, to spray itself into anything that would bear fruit, until finally a depraved animal walking on two feet learned to pass Lamia, to cultivate and worship Lamia, to call it god, then demon, when it was some parasitic cells combining and recombining to imitate the life it took.
And something even deeper buried in its makeup, a spark of life that was almost identifiable, and Diego’s only word for it was spirit, or, perhaps, illumination. He let go of Stella’s hand when it got too hot.
34
“You gonna kill me again?” Than spat at Peter.
Peter slammed him against a rock. “Don’t you ever touch Alison.”
“Know what time it is?” Than asked, wiping the blood from his lips. “Time to die.” He swung out at Peter, catching him behind the left ear with his fist, and then getting him in a headlock. Peter struggled in the iron grip. “I’m gonna juice you, Peter, it’s what I’ve dreamed of doing. I’ve juiced a lot of people, but I bet your blood’s gonna be sweet. You ever taste blood, Pete? It’s so sweet, it’s so sweet.”
And just when Peter Chandler thought he was going to feel the blood burst like a zit out of the back of his head, Campusky started screeching at the top of his lungs.
35
Stella said, “You’re terrified of me, aren’t you? It was what had gotten into my blood that kept your flesh alive.”
“I stopped needing your sustenance years ago. At the first death. And I know how you lose your energy when we’re together. You – existing, being alive -- has given me strength.”
“And now I will come to you, my baby,” Stella moved closer, almost touching the thing that was quickly losing all its human characteristics. “Absorb me, Wendy.” Stella pressed herself into the digesting skin of the Lamia.
She felt the sting of digestive juices as the jelly of skin folded around her forearm.
36
Than Campusky let go of Peter, and stopped screaming as a flame shot out of his mouth.
Peter watched as Than’s body began burning. Red and yellow fires burned along his scalp like a halo; and then his skin blackened.
He didn’t understand until he saw Wendy Swan’s daughter standing over Than with a dagger in her hands and a wild look on her face.
The athame—the girl had it. She dropped it at his feet. He heard Alison cussing, and got up to go help her.
But above all this shouting and screaming, he heard a remembered voice.
Wendy Swan cried out to him, “Peter, you are always here with me. We are joined forever.”
37
Diego cried out, “NO!” He tried to pull Stella back, but it was too late, the absorption had begun.
Stella, hiding the pain she was just beginning to feel, gasped, “Do you feel it yet, Wendy?”
The creature eyed her suspiciously. “I feel nothing.”
Stella had a grin of triumph. She mouthed the words, Get out, get them out, to Diego, who still tried to draw her from the demon. She dies with me.
Then Diego felt it from her.
And knew that the demon had been correct in its assessment. I feel nothing, it had said.
Diego had felt it, too, touching Stella. The nothing of that electrical wavelength, the static, the emptiness.
Like the meeting of matter and antimatter; his thoughts raced ahead of his actions. He wanted to thank Stella for what she was doing, but he knew I had to get the others out of the cavern, out of the mine, and they had no time.
Matter can never combine with antimatter. Where they coexist, there is nothing, there can be nothing.
As the demon, halfway through its absorption of Stella, began to feel its own mortality, it sent vibrations through the cave that spread like water, and the earth began trembling violently.
“Peter,” Stella gasped, as if inside his head.
38
Peter
Wendy stood before him, young and beautiful. Her hips beckoned; her eyes flashed; her red hair flickered with some electrical energy. No one else seemed to be there; a yellow smoke surrounded them. She was naked, and beautiful, and covered with blood as if someone had sliced razors along her lovely, pale skin.
“Please, Peter,” she said, tears in her eyes, “I need it back. It’s the only thing that will release me from this...this torment.”
His body betrayed him; he felt an erection straining against his pants; he felt, again, like a sixteen year old, horny; lusting, longing, wanting to be wrapped in those arms, wanting to enfold himself into her angel’s wings, to feel that warmth and the surge of power.
And then he felt the call, her call, and he knew that he would be turning, he would become the creature the demon blood had destined him to be.
“Peter,” she said.
It’s a waking dream. She’s a monster. She’s fucking with my mind.
39
Waking dream
He pressed his talons—for he had turned, and he was like her, demon, and whether it was a waking dream or reality, he knew his fate was sealed—he pressed the sharp nails into the flesh, just where his heart would be—
And withdrew a beating fragment—she had been there all along, within him, in this dream, her heart buried in his body like a seed planted in a garden.
The blood as it dripped on the heart seemed to fill its crevices, and the heart began to grow, and beat, until it was like a small red bird, a dove soaked in blood, cupped in his hand.
“It’s mine,” she said, her breath warm on his face as she reached her hand out for the red dove. “The sacrament of the sacred heart.”
He lifted the bird up to her, and held it, felt its beating in his hand. He knelt down with the bird in the one hand, an offering. “Peter, you shall be my lover,” Wendy said. “I have loved you all these years. I have given you my heart. Bring it to me. Join with me.”
Kneeling, he saw the torn skin beneath her breast.
The flesh nest where the red bird would be caged.
He felt in the dirt.
He found what he needed.
Something like a beast seemed to beat against his head, from within his own skull, a wild animal trying to take him over.
As he passed her the red dove, her hands encircling it, he found the blade, the athame, and he prayed and believed in its power like he never had before, remembering Charlie and Than and Alison and Sloan, the way they had been, and their families for all the pain, it was worse not having them, the childhoods that had been st
olen by this creature.
Even the true Wendy he remembered, and how her life had been taken over by this monster.
She’s weak now, while she’s absorbing me. Stella’s voice came into his head.
Do it. I’ve weakened her. I’ve broken through her power. Now is the moment.
The dream burst apart, and the world of the cave was half-dream, half-real... Peter brought the blade up against Wendy’s hands, against the red dove, the beating heart forming even as the trace of flame grew from its center with the knife digging into it.
To send it back home.
To send it to Hell.
And as the red dove burst into a shower of sparks, and Wendy’s eyes melted from human to dark stone, he heard the silence within him, the silence of his own mind, and there was no beast there, no other voice, no call.
The cave began to shake violently, rocks falling from the cavern ceiling. Peter’s one thought now was: Alison.
Peter ran along the trembling rock floor, and through the billowing smoke, he found Alison entangled in the grip of the demon larvae.
He lifted Alison up in his arms, pulling her free of the grasping phantoms that were dying even as they were born.
EPILOGUE
1
Peter Chandler/Confessions
Diego escaped, as did Alison and I, and Wendy’s daughter, too, running faster than the wind out of the mine. We were met by Gretchen, barking and leaping, leaving her dead mistress’s body briefly.
The old El Corazon mine fell again—one of its many cave-ins since it was first created. Perhaps it was nature, or perhaps it was the Lamia, but it came down in dust and smoke and ash. It was a tomb now, for what Wendy had become, the creature known to us as the Lamia, the stealer of children and the drinker of blood by legend; or a synthesis of one species with another, perhaps of this world, perhaps of another. But it seemed to me then that it was Wendy and Stella, and Charlie and Kevin Sloan and Than Campusky and all our parents, all there, within that geologic monument, an entire town’s energy unleashed for the purpose of changing one form of life into another. A spawning ground of some infinite creature. And, like all creatures, its will was to breed, to find a way to survive in a hostile environment, to go forth and multiply. Later, Diego would tell me that when the Lamia had absorbed Stella, the demon and the healer, coming together as one body, had been enough to destroy it. Or perhaps my waking dream of destroying that part of her heart that I had taken from her—perhaps that had stopped the demon. The vibrations were from that, although we would hear on the news that an earthquake was reported up in Twenty-nine Palms that morning.
But I believe it was Wendy’s heart that destroyed the monster. A heart we all carried with us for all those years.
The mine burned by some internal fuel.
It was like fireworks.
It went up like the Fourth of July.
Morning. We came out into the warm desert sun, not knowing until then that the night had passed. Survivors of the infinite, of the unknowable. Of demons. Of shadows. Of our own youth, we had survived, Alison and I, through the terror and memory and lies, somehow we had stopped the beast. And the world had continued revolving.
“The athame,” I said, “it’s in there. What if one of...those...offspring...survive.”
Diego managed a smile and said, “Ah, that is the big What-If, Peter. Perhaps we will be fighting all over again one day. But now, it’s time to rest.”
And it was: I felt as if I might die from exhaustion at any moment, as if in sending what Wendy had become to Hell had taken all but the last drop of life from me. Alison slept in my arms, in the station wagon, the windows down, and a gentle breeze from the hills. I did not sleep—I watched the mine, afraid that it had all been a hallucination, that in fact the progeny would come crawling through the cracks in the hill, and with them, their mother, stronger, her voice calling us to come to her now, come and be part of her...
Diego sat up, too, on a pile of rocks near the car. He wiped his brow with a cloth, and watched the mine. His eyes didn’t seem to register fear, only a kind of amazement. I had not liked this man before, I had not thought he was anything other than a grave robber. I knew differently now. I asked him, “So did you find it? The illumination you were looking for?”
The old man shrugged his shoulders and looked at me like I was still too young to know. “We never find what we look for, Peter. That would mean death. The journey never ends. But I found something more important. I found a reason to believe. I had almost lost that. I almost lost it.”
“Me, too,” I said, cradling Alison, closing my eyes, finding something within me, another voice, not Wendy’s, not even mine, but a voice that was there all the time, a voice that has no name, but calls us to our fate, our journey.
Perhaps that area of the high desert, what has been named Boniface Well, Palmetto, Naranja Canyon, and Nitro will always remain a blank spot on the map, a place for refuse, a place to be avoided by human beings. A place that will always be No Man’s Land. We’ve got the whole human race rushing to make toxic waste dumps for its mistakes, for the things that men have created that have gotten a little too out of control. Nobody wants toxic waste in their backyard, and so places like Palmetto and its hills become ideal dumping grounds.
No energy is wasted. This is true. Maybe absorbed, but never wasted. What had been in Wendy Swan, and The Juicer, and who knows how many tormented souls before that, what we called the Lamia, was toxic waste, perhaps fallout from the beginning of the Earth’s history, something that could not be destroyed, could not be undone, the exhaust from some primordial fuel, but fuel for very human evil, for vengeance and murder and hatred and cruelty. It was a vital fluid that could sweep through the blood and take it over, but in its exhaust lay a deadly poison. If we became monstrous beasts, it was because we humans have beasts in us just waiting for release, waiting to break through the bars of our soul-cages. And the demon disease was stronger in us than in others, as was our ability to resist. Can the fires of Hell really burn out such poison?
Another Big What-If: What if she is still in us? In Alison, in me. Stella healed Charlie, too, and his dark side came out through his skin again. When will the call come again? When will that splinter that’s gotten under our skins work its way to our hearts? Have we defeated the dragon only to take its place? Or is it sleeping there in our cells, waiting for the password that will awaken it and open its prison?
Stella’s last words: “She dies with me.”
She dies with me.
Did she at last find the cage within herself to lock the demon in, to make it go down whatever dark and mysterious road her consciousness took as it left her body? Could she draw the Lamia out of this earthly sphere and take it to whatever idiot wavelength exists beyond the material world we know?
I hope.
I guess that’s the best I can do. And I hope that they had the strength to keep the demon caged on the journey. No, that I don’t hope. That I know. Whatever world exists beyond this one, whatever frequencies our souls will ride when our flesh dies, that world must be one of justice and mercy and redemption, it must be a finer place for all those who, in the name of friendship and love and what is right, are used so cruelly by the toxic waste of this landscape. No energy is wasted, Charlie and Stella, so I know you’ve tamed that beast in the cage. Than and Sloan, my friends. And even Wendy, and perhaps even that sliver of humanity in her, together, perhaps, where the mother and child are not made strangers by the vulnerability of flesh and damaged spirit.
I once had a friend who asked me to kill him, and I once betrayed a friend, I once murdered my father. It seems to me that I have never had a friend but that I somehow let him down. Once Kevin Sloan asked me: “Who weeps?”
And I will finally confess that I do, and I would hazard a guess that there is not one person who enters the wasteland and does not.
Alison wonders about Hell, wonders about Wendy and Stella and the others who went ahead of them. But i
t seems to both of us that Charlie and Wendy and Stella may already have lived in Hell before they left this world, that if there is an afterlife, then it has to be one of peace for those who have been so tormented.
We covered the small space at the El Corazon’s entrance with rocks to help discourage those who will come later. Gaps, too, all around the mine—we filled them with stones, patched them with pebbles. Perhaps we’ll come back with cement and seal it further. But the creatures are not in the cave, they are in the world, in us, but we will seal this place like a holy tomb. We covered Nessie’s body with a blanket, and will have to deal with the authorities sometime this evening.
There is another world out there, what some people call the real world, but which enough of us know is not real enough.
And then there’s Wendy’s daughter.
2
“It’s done,” Peter says as he places the last stone at the entrance to the cave, but he wonders if it will ever be done. It has been a long and arduous task, but Alison has matched him rock for rock, and it is still daylight. There are thin fumes escaping from the cracks between the rocks.
“All those years, she waited,” Alison had said when she had rolled the first stone in front of the cave. “Maybe we’re only buying time, but we might be able to make it longer this time if we do it right. If there’s a chance something is still in there...”
And now, six hours later, there are only small cracks through the rocks. The cave entrance is filled.
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 71