She glanced at the edge of the roof, and said, “What did you mean they’ll get stronger as the night goes on?”
His thumb worked gently against the back of her hand. It felt good, though she hadn’t even seen him move. He said, “They’re coming out of hibernation. They’re nowhere close to the speed or aggression they’ll be once they’re fully awake.”
He smiled. “If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s beautiful. The raw power. The frenzy. They’re like piranha, only they can chase you on land.”
His smile widened.
Brooke nodded, numbly. Her elbow was killing her and she tried to straighten her arm but it wouldn’t. She did her best not to hear him because his morbid fascination with the vampires unsettled her.
She said, “I think I broke one of my toes kicking one of them.”
He laughed quietly and it was disturbing, too, because the beasts on the ground went very quiet and very still.
Out there somewhere coyotes sang.
The wind sifted sand.
Feet shuffled, quietly.
Her heart refused to settle to its normal pace.
Brooke said, “I have to get out of here. We have to find my daughter.”
“What did Dorothy tell you?” he said again.
“You don’t want to know and you wouldn’t believe me, just like I didn’t believe her.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he said. “I’ve seen more than you’ve seen.” His fingers stroked the crucifix and Brooke looked away. It was easier to see the rim and the road they came down from here, easier to see Angel’s Explorer on the rooftop a quarter mile away.
The monsters didn’t make a sound. She hoped they’d left, for just a second, noticing the wind and how cold the night was getting, but then she thought that if they left it was to go to the carousel because they smelled Angel’s blood and that made her want to cry all over, and she was just about out of tears, or thought she was.
The man who had saved her pulled his hands from hers and said, “Did she tell you how she’s going to defeat them?”
Brooke nodded.
“She’s going to use the carousel.”
“How?” he said, his hand at her face now, him leaning a little closer and she was too weary to pull away and too needy for another human’s touch, stranger or not.
His fingers were hot, almost feverish, like his voice. He said again, “How?”
“I don’t know. I’m having a hard time,” she said, “with everything.”
He brushed her hair from her neck, cupped the base of her skull. The crucifix winked again. Brooke tried to look away from it but his hand felt good, and she felt like she could go to sleep, and the whole valley had suddenly become so peaceful that the prior hour’s events seemed as if a dream.
She closed her eyes.
She felt his breath against her cheek, the moonlight bathing them, the hot pant of his breath again, down her cheek, at her neck.
Awareness rattled her. One second the gooseflesh, the next a scream forming on her lips, doing her best to break a seduction, and a trust newly formed, or still forming, as she slammed her hands against his chest, trying to drive him back, off her. But he barely budged, and if anything, her pushing him away seemed to draw them closer, or only to reveal his aggression.
The bones in his chest felt like they gave beneath her palms, like they were hollow, and her fingers brushed the crucifix, and she saw his whole life story in the blink of an eye, and she became part of it as his teeth broke the skin at her neck.
*****
In the church, Natalie had her left arm buried in the creature’s gullet. She wanted some type of peace to descend over her if death was to come for her, and she thought it had, because Peter sat in the pews with his arms draped over the row in front of him, watching sadly, offering no assistance.
The sister tried to break free but Natalie had the girl’s hair entwined in her fingers, and she balled her other hand, inside the vampire’s mouth and pushed it like a rock into the canyon of her throat.
The girl’s eyes grew wide. She had no purchase with which to press away. The pitchfork buried in her shoulder dug into Natalie’s chest as she suffocated her, or thought she was.
A few dark moments seemed to stretch out into hours, her skin clammy and her whole body shaking, her thinking that if this didn’t work then she’d never be able to put distance between them, or even remove her arm and hand, without the sister breaking her flesh.
The bloody rivulets on her cheeks cooled, hardened.
Peter stood and moved out of her line of sight, disappearing bit by bit past the girl’s head, her shoulder, her torso, until Natalie couldn’t see where he went or what he was doing.
The sister had seemed to lose steam, her movements smaller, less forceful, and Natalie was so hopeful that if the girl only proved to be resting it would devastate the child because she couldn’t hold out for much longer.
Her energy had ebbed off to the point of non-existence.
And there were still the others out there in the night.
How many? She wondered. A whole town full?
Yes, of course, a hundred, or two, or three hundred.
Peter’s bare feet, blackened by dust and grime, appeared by her face.
She held tight to the girl who was barely more than dead weight now, and whispered, “Help me.”
The first spider crawled from the sister’s hairline and onto her forehead. She blinked, tried to whip her head to dislodge it, but Natalie had a firm grip. Then other spiders beat a path from her hairline, across the pale and chalky cheeks, covering her eyes and nose. Several disappeared into her nostrils and Natalie screamed, tried to remove her arm, as their legs tickled her wrist inside the girl’s throat.
Peter squatted next to them. He whispered, “Let them get inside her.”
Natalie nodded, trying to remove her limb from the abomination and the sister growing more agitated as Natalie’s arm slid out a little and the arachnids slipped in and blackened her teeth, more up her nose, a swarming mass of them mounted on her shoulders.
Natalie closed her eyes and twisted the sister to the right by her hair while at the same time pulling her other hand out with all the force she could muster.
Her arm broke free with a horrible popping sound, wet and grated with a dozen thin scrapes.
She shivered, slid back on the floor to the altar and placed her back to the platform two feet off the sanctuary floor. The sister gnashed her teeth, coughed out a handful of spiders but those on her shoulders rushed up her neck, over the line of her jaw and into her mouth.
Peter placed his elbows on his knees and watched.
They bit, inside her mouth, down in the depths of the girl’s throat, in the cavern of her empty stomach. Their poison oozed from her pores, pinprick holes growing larger, wider, as it ate at the flesh like acid. The sister rolled over and smashed herself against the hardwood floor in desperation and agony, screaming, and Natalie feared that her screams would draw the others in. But she couldn’t hear if they were drawing closer over the sound of the girl dying again.
Natalie, disgusted and terrified, and not wanting to watch anymore, part of her still thinking that this thing had once been just a normal girl, slid across the floor past her and beneath the pew, arm extended, fingers groping until they hit the shard of pitchfork handle. With it in hand, she slid back out into the open and pushed herself to her feet.
Peter watched her.
She ignored him, stooped near where the girl lay squirming on her stomach, and with both hands, drove the stake through the girl’s back.
The sister exhaled a long breath that took nearly a minute to expire, her spread-eagle with the stake lodged an inch to the right of her spine.
Natalie slipped back, her hair glued to her scalp with sweat.
She threw up, shivering, wiping at her mouth.
When she looked up, Peter was sitting on the floor next to her, Indian-style. She didn’t possess the energy to d
o anything, not even ask him what he was or what they should do next. All her attention, what little of it she still possessed, was focused like a pinpoint on listening to any sounds outside the church’s double doors.
She expected the mindless clawing of more beasts. She expected their hunger to be expressed in soul-shriveling screams, muffled by the thick wood, but too close for comfort.
Peter said, “I like you.”
She turned her head, tried to acknowledge him, but he was too freaky, too out there. And yet, up close now, she could see the sadness and loneliness in his black-pit eyes, the horrible frown working at his mouth, the defeat in the slump of his shoulders.
She wanted to ask him what he’d lost when the vampire came and made a banquet of Gossamer to whet his appetite. But Peter’s—I like you—rang softly in her head, echoing and echoing, softer and softer, working its way down into her, slowly, the child realizing that she had an ally and to question why or how would only deliver her to more despair and more time wasted. And if it hadn’t been for him and his creepy pets, the lot of them scurrying now from the body and around where Peter sat, hunched, looking at the floor, she would have surely died a horrible death and awoken to an inconceivable new life.
She whispered, yet her voice seemed extremely loud in the church, “Thank you for helping me.”
“You’re brave,” he said, nodded once, then again. “Most people aren’t.”
Natalie shifted her feet and leaned harder into the altar’s edge.
She said, “I need to get out of here.”
“I’ll help you,” Peter said.
Natalie swallowed, so thirsty, so shaken. “Why?”
“Because,” he said, “this is no place for the living.”
She wiped her eyes. “My mom is out there somewhere, and Angel.”
Peter’s eyes darkened further, and his frown deepened. He said, “Dorothy…”
“She was right all along,” Natalie said. “We need to find her.”
He nodded again, said, “I know where she is.”
She looked from him to the spiders, her mind wandering over dozens of questions, and she said, “Can you see what they see?”
The air in the church grew cloying. She touched the streaks to her face, the slight scratches to her forearm, and said, “Am I going to become one of them?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said quietly.
Natalie sighed. “I want to kill him, the one who did all of this.”
“That’s what Dorothy wants too,” he said.
“Can you take me to her?”
“There’s only one way, but you might not like it.”
He was playing hell with her imagination, but luckily she barely had the energy to let it get out of control. She needed water and she needed food, and sleep, and peace. But those things would have to wait, she wouldn’t find them in Gossamer.
She licked dry lips. “Can we hide until daylight?”
“They’ll find us long before then,” Peter said. “They won’t bother me, but you—”
“Okay,” Natalie said, shaking her head. “Okay, then do whatever you have to do and take me to Dorothy so we can help each other fix all this.”
“So brave,” Peter said.
She expected him to try and touch her, on the shoulder, or to stroke her cheek, and she didn’t want him to because she didn’t want to know what his touch felt like. She couldn’t trust him completely, but was left with no other option if she wanted to survive and see her mother again, to taste fresh air and sunlight again, to win against forces of darkness she had always deeply suspected only lived inside people.
She said, “What is your story?”
Fearful of what little time they had left, yet feeling as if she needed to learn his history, the importance he played in her final moments, she watched his sad and terrible visage, determined to not give up, or move on, until he answered her. And she could see by the confusion generated in his slack, black eyes that he had trouble forming where to start, or simply how to.
At last, breathlessly, he said, “I have no story.”
“Everything that exists has a story.”
“Not me.”
“Yes,” she said, “you do.”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me.” And she nearly reached out to touch his shoulder to bond, or because she was grateful that in all this madness, she’d found someone to help her. True, someone who looked like the Devil’s offspring, but who she suspected was especially loyal and sensitive.
It made her want to cry, knowing what I had said about the boy, and how I feared for him, even more than I did the whole godawful town, possibly more than I cared for myself.
Natalie said, “Your story matters. I want you to tell me.”
“There isn’t much,” he whispered.
“Please,” she said, “tell me.”
He shook his head.
Natalie sighed.
The spiders all turned toward the doors of the church and Natalie’s heart slammed awkwardly in her chest, as if her tumble with the young, dead girls had twisted its position to such an angle that every breath pained her and every beat felt extremely violent.
“Okay,” Natalie said. “I know we don’t have much time before they come. Take me to her. If we can beat this asshole then tomorrow is going to be a lot brighter and a lot more meaningful.”
Peter stood, and as he did, he offered her his hand, blushing slightly. Natalie hesitated but a moment and then slid her palm into his, her fingers tightening around the edges, and his tightening as well as he pulled her up. They held hands for a second and as much as she feared touching him earlier, now she didn’t want to let go.
But his grip slackened. He turned away and whispered, “Follow me.”
The spiders followed him to the doors. Natalie did as well, her bones aching, her muscles exhausted, her face and forearm sore and her terrified that she was infected with the curse that had laid ruin to the town.
She thought, There’s nothing I can do about it if I am. And I have to act right now, while there’s still time.
She approached Peter and the spiders covering the floor parted, making way, or simply moving to avoid being trampled.
Walking hurt nearly as much as thinking and hoping. She stopped next to him, listening intensely and hearing nothing that suggested what waited outside.
Peter said, “Are you ready?”
Natalie swallowed again, nodded, said, “As ready as I can be.”
Peter opened the door on the right, in front of her, blocking her vision of what was right in front of him, but she could see the stars over his head and the moon fat and orange and low over the rim to the north; and she heard what at first she thought the wind rushing toward them, but discovered a second later as Peter moved out and down the steps, was not wind at all.
*****
On the roof of a dilapidating house Brooke’s change from who she was, to who she was becoming, happened quickly. Julian still held her in his arms, she could still feel his breath against her neck, and she shivered at the sight of her blood on his teeth as he raised his face to hers.
His history had come in a flash, outside her, but as he took some of her blood and gave her some of his own, his history became part of her, as ingrained as the memories of her human life, which to her surprise and horror, still remained.
And Julian’s memories—though so softened by time they seemed like wisps of thought that belonged to someone else—were beautiful and horrific. She felt like a ship without a rudder, bobbing in a vast and dark sea, tasting salt on her lips from his resurrection on the Californian coast.
He’d been a deck hand, not a particularly good one, and their vessel had run into a patch of fog along the coast. What they assumed to be the lighthouse blinked, pale, on the starboard side, and the captain, a merciless and reckless man, pushed on, determined to bring the ship in at three knots, the wind rising from the west filling their sails. He’d said to others, and
they to him, no one really hearing or believing, “We should be a long way from shore…”
A moment later they ran aground. Men spilled across the deck, screaming as the light they’d thought the light house grew large over the port side, and waves slammed the hold, their crests breaking against the hull.
Julian grabbed blindly, catching himself on boom of the headsail as the fog thickened and the ship rocked hard, spilling men over the side and into the cold night water.
The others onboard screamed, and he thought it was for their lost comrades or their own lives until he looked up and witnessed the men flying through the fog, a dozen of them, naked as the day they were born.
They landed on the bow, hideous demons with mouth’s full of shark teeth, their bodies lean and ghastly. They seized the nearest men who clung to the ship railing and tore holes in their necks with those teeth.
The waves whipped, gales driving the ship further to sea or closer to land, Julian couldn’t tell. All he knew was that they hadn’t run aground like they suspected, and all he’d left to work on the ship—his wife and daughter, the banal hobbies he possessed—would never be his to enjoy again.
The captain yelled. He fired his pistol into the closest, a boy really, with pale blond hair. The bullet caught him in the collarbone, blood and bone jetting behind him, but he rushed forward, unphased.
The others with him spread the width of the deck and some of Julian’s crew jumped overboard, choosing the water and darkness over that which came aboard.
Julian, after pissing his pants, couldn’t move. He’d never been brave and the last moments of his life were not about to change his pessimistic view of himself or the world. They, all of them, did not have to do anything horrible for Fate to visit them with such atrocities. This was life. It had no meaning and no point other than the slow, definite destruction of everything that walked, swam, or flew.
An old man, his hair wet from the spray of sea and stringy and clinging to his head, turned his inhuman eyes toward Julian while his kind dined on the Captain and those who still remained aboard. This one, Julian thought, was their leader, and why not, all pack animals have a leader. He held a hand up between them, sputtering. He cried to a god he didn’t believe in to save him as the old man leaned forward, grabbed his wrist and jerked him to his chest. He prayed death would come quickly, painlessly, but it didn’t.
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