Chad struggled to find a distinction. "No more Vegas?"
"No more Vegas."
"And these old god guys, they're, like, evil, right?"
"Good and evil are mortal constraints. The old gods are beyond morality."
"Uh . . . right. So, I guess what I'm trying to ask is, if these god dudes are so powerful and so unconstrained, then how do we know they'll carry out their end of the deal?"
"They will."
"But how do you know for sure?"
Her voice dropped to a rough whisper.
"Because I know."
Chad hardly felt reassured.
Tammy could sense his doubt. She had little patience for unbelievers. Her abridged Necronomicon had a brief chapter on cult maintenance. It laid out a simple and effective method of dealing with skeptical followers.
It is inevitable that any cult will eventually find itself beset by the occasional disciple of questionable faith. These lost children should be herded gently back into unswerving loyalty. If this does not work, experience tells us that while a loyal follower is preferred over a dead follower, a dead follower is preferred over a skeptic. One bad apple spoils the bunch. Using a lost soul in a ritual sacrifice, particularly one involving the rest of the cult, can not only squeeze one last drop of usefulness out of a discarded member, but can also serve to bring about a unity to your happy family and dissuade any more skeptics from emerging.
It was good advice, but she couldn't afford to sacrifice Chad. Not yet. He was her only follower. And, though she was slow to admit it, she'd actually grown a little fond of him. He was handy to have around at times, and she was saving his death for a special occasion.
She was left with only one other alternative. She swallowed her revulsion and put forth the soft smile she saved for these moments.
"Baby, come here."
She patted the spot beside her on the bed. He hesitated. She crossed and uncrossed her legs to help him along. When that didn't work, she ran her fingers along the inside of her thigh. That did the trick. He sat beside her, and she took his jolted hand.
"I'm sorry, baby. Did I hurt you?"
"It's okay."
"I shouldn't have done that." She gently kissed his fingertips, one by one. "Do you forgive me?"
He stuck out his lower lip and kicked his heel against the bed. "I don't know. Maybe." He still refused to look at her.
She leaned close to his ear and called upon the sultry voice she'd honed through hours of practice. "C'mon, Chad. Don't be mad."
His head slowly turned toward her until their faces were inches apart. She pulled back just a little. "Let me worry about the details. That's my job."
She could almost hear every drop of saliva evaporate in his mouth. "But what's my job?" he asked dryly.
"Your job is to keep me happy."
He swallowed a deep gulp of air and opened his mouth to say something else. Tammy put a finger to his parted lips.
"Can you do that, Chad? Can you keep me happy? Because if I'm happy, then you'll be happy." She suppressed a gag. "Very, very happy."
If she could kiss him, he would be hers again. But her father had strict rules about things that were allowed in her bedroom. Making out was not on that list, and she didn't take needless chances.
Chad's hormonally deluged mind struggled to form a single, cohesive thought. Tammy gave him the time he needed to extract one. Finally, he made eye contact, and from there, his gaze rolled down to her lips, then chest, then all the other good parts along the way to her toes.
"Okay, but I don't like it when you call me stupid."
"Of course. I shouldn't have done that. I won't do it again."
Chad grinned stupidly, confirming he was hers again.
Her bedroom door opened, and her father poked his head in the room just long enough to tell her it was half past nine. No boys after nine-thirty. It was another of her dad's dumb rules. She could hang out with Chad late at night, just as long as it wasn't in her bedroom. Never mind that it was the one place in the world they'd never do any of the things her dad objected to, and never mind that out of the house, she and Chad had screwed around plenty of times. Parental rules had little to do with logic. They were just regulations they'd had to suffer through when they were kids and now had to inflict on their own offspring. Existence was merely an endless rotation. A led to B led to C all the way to Z which looped back to A. The world was a bad TV show stuck in reruns and in desperate need of cancellation. Which was why she was so looking forward to ending it.
Chad gathered up his books and homework, and she walked him to his motorcycle.
"Hey, how come you never use any of your magic stuff on your parents?" he asked as he climbed on the bike.
She almost called him stupid again but bit her lip.
"Because that magic stuff isn't as easy as I make it look."
"Yeah, but I bet you could do that mind-control thing on them real easy. Just to get them off your back." He wiggled his fingers at her and made a serious face.
His ignorance was almost cute in a ridiculous sort of way. For one moment, she forgot how much he annoyed her.
He started the engine. "So you wanna do sumthin' tomorrow?"
In Chad's lexicon, "Sumthin'" translated into hanging around somewhere for an hour or so before finding a place to screw. He was due for a maintenance jump anyway.
"How about tonight?"
"What about your dad?"
"He won't care." She chuckled. "Just as long as we're not in my room." She hopped on the bike behind him, wrapping her arms low around his waist, resting her chin on his shoulder and breathing on his ear.
"Can't we put off the apocalypse until after graduation?"
"Chad."
"Alright, alright." He revved the engine. "I was just askin'."
Rockwood General Supply was a combination grocery, feed store, and used-car lot. Like much of the architecture of the town, the building was without any attempts at decoration. Its name was painted on each of the white walls in stenciled black letters. The used-car inventory consisted of three battered pickup trucks in various states of disrepair and a Volvo on cinderblocks that nonetheless "ran like a dream" according to a cardboard sign under the windshield wipers. Broken-down cars aside, the store was well stocked. Duke was able to find most of the things on Earl's list. Not that there was much hard-to-find stuff on it. Most of it was pretty basic.
There was magic in the mundane. Hector had once told him that a practitioner with three yards of duct tape, a PEZ dispenser, a CD player, and a pair of oversized clown shoes was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. Duke never really understood how that worked, considering the Roman Empire had already fallen long before any of those items were available. But magic was never bothered by paradoxes like that. Supposedly, the average bathroom had all the necessary bits and pieces to resurrect the dead or exorcise an evil spirit. Of course, one needed an impressive level of talent to pull off something like that. Which was why most practitioners made it easier on themselves by throwing in weird doodles painted in blood, waving around exotic props, and chanting in an excessively dramatic fashion. The way Hector had put it, the forces invisible generally like a good show.
Duke prowled the aisles twice. He was still missing a couple of items when he went to the register.
"Evening, son," the short old woman replied. "Find everything alright?"
He checked his list. "I need candles."
"We got some back thataway."
"They're white. I need blue."
"Don't think we got any of those." She turned toward the back of the building and shouted. "Hey, Bill! Bill! Goddamn it, Bill, you lazy son of a bitch!"
The door in the back marked "Employees Only" opened a crack. Nobody came out, but a voice emerged.
"Yeah? What?"
"We got any candles?"
"Aisle six!"
"Those are white! This feller wants blue!"
"Blue? What for?"
The r
egister lady shook her head. "Ain't none of our business! Just go check if we got any!"
"We don't got any!" Bill's voice yelled back immediately.
"Did'ja check?"
"I said, we ain't got any, Mary!"
"Did'ja check?"
"Hell's bells, Mary! I know what we got back here!"
"Just check already, you worthless . . . "
"Alright, alright! I'm checking!"
"You better really check!" Mary growled. "I'll know if you don't!"
The door slammed shut.
Mary began ringing Duke up. "Sorry 'bout that, son."
"S'alright."
The cash register was an antique. It clanged and clicked with each push of the keys.
"Hey, Duke!"
Tammy bounced through the store's front doors, followed by a woman he guessed to be her mother. She skipped by his side.
"Hey," he mumbled back.
"What'cha doin'?"
"Shopping."
"Cool."
Bill's door opened. "Ain't got no blue candles back here!"
"You sure?" Mary asked.
"Yeah!"
She shrugged at Duke. "Sorry, son."
"That's okay. No big deal." He ran his finger down to the next item on his list. They probably wouldn't have it, but in a town like Rockwood there was no way of knowing unless you asked.
"Got any powdered raven's eye?"
"Might. Let me check. Hey, Bill! Bill, you no-good bastard!"
The door opened a crack again, and Bill and Mary spent a minute shouting at one another before he agreed to go and check. While they did, Duke went down the aisles to retrieve some white candles and a can of blue spray paint. Tammy tagged along.
"So what'cha gonna do with all that stuff," she asked.
"Cast a magic spell."
"Really? Like a love spell or something?"
"Don't know."
Tammy's mother called her away, much to Duke's relief. He'd always made fun of Earl for complaining about the attentions of nubile young girls. Now he finally understood Earl's dilemma. The human portion of Duke's soul didn't want to take unnecessary advantage of Tammy. The raging beast simmering just below the surface had no such constraints. It saw Tammy as a potential and all-too-willing mate. The beast threw pornographic flashes across his consciousness. He pushed them back.
"Is this enough, son?"
"Huh?"
Mary shook a plastic bag with a few ounces of dried raven's eye. "Is this enough? It's all we got."
"Uh. Yeah. That'll do."
"Anything else?"
"Got any belladonna?"
Bill, who now stood beside Mary, was a short, stocky man who looked as if his skin had been left to tan in the desert sun for the last four hundred years. "Don't think we got any."
Mary jabbed an elbow in his ribs. "Why don't you go check?"
" 'Cuz I'm pretty sure we don't got any."
"Well, why don't you make sure?"
He shot her a hard glare. She shot back a harder glare. Bill withered and shuffled into the back room, mumbling.
While Duke and Mary waited for his return, Tammy and her mother went about their shopping. Duke tried not to watch Tammy as she bent to retrieve Liquid-Plumr or stretched on her tiptoes to reach the canned goods on the really high shelves. He couldn't help himself. The beast grew stronger as the moon grew fuller. By the month's end, he doubted he could resist her. Hopefully, she'd be bored with him by then. Or his business with the diner would be done, and he'd leave Rockwood and temptation behind.
If not . . .
Well, if not, then it was only a matter of time.
Tammy caught him staring at her. She smiled in a way that was both full of girlish innocence and seductive allure. Mary caught him staring, too, and shook her head in a most disapproving fashion. Bill was too busy staring himself to catch anyone else.
He tore his eyes from Tammy's jeans just long enough to toss a paper bag on the counter. "Belladonna. Anything else you wantin' there, son?"
"No. That's it."
Duke paid the bill, dipping deep into his nearly empty pockets. Freeing Earl's girlfriend was draining their limited resources. Duke hoped she was worth it. Cathy was bound to find out what an asshole Earl was. If she could see the positive traits buried beneath his avalanche of character flaws, then they might stand a chance. If she didn't, and Duke didn't reckon she would, she'd take off. Earl would take it hard. The poor bastard had it bad for the girl. If things went south, he'd be a real son of a bitch for the next couple of months. Duke wasn't looking forward to it.
In the parking lot, Marshall Kopp's cruiser pulled up. The sheriff rolled down his window and stuck out his head. "Mornin', Duke."
"Sheriff."
"How are things at the diner?"
"Gettin' worse."
"I was afraid of that. I been pretty busy myself, lately. Rained horny toads over at the trailer park, and I found Curtis Mayfair running 'round last night, covered in green sludge, rambling about alien abductions. And the shrieking yucca at Lover's Grove has stopped screaming and started laughing. That ain't never a good sign. Sumthin's brewing. Sumthin' bad." The sheriff ducked his head in the cruiser just long enough to take a drink of soda.
"I've been checking all the cult hot spots: Sander's Mill, the old Robertson place, Canin Field. Every place that's lonely and deserted that a bunch might be able to get together and practice black magic."
"Any luck?"
"None so far. My guess is they know we're lookin' for 'em and are keepin' a low profile. But it's only a matter of time before they slip up. And you know what they say, it's always the last place you look."
"Yup." Duke tossed his sack of magical supplies in his pickup's cab. He climbed in after it.
"See ya' 'round, Duke."
The cruiser took off.
Duke started the truck. He glanced back at the store. Tammy waved from the doors and blew him a kiss. He caught her scent lingering in the breeze. She smelled good. Young, eager, and fertile. A perfect mate. Every muscle in his body tightened. The steering wheel bent in his grip. The impression of his large hands was left in the imitation leather.
"Goddamn."
Drawing on his dwindling reserves of self-control, he fled from Rockwood General Supply and Auto Sales at a leisurely forty miles per hour.
Reality is like a fruitcake; Pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface. Ancient things, older than time itself, smothered beneath the crushing interdimensional weight of what mortals, in their limited understanding, would call existence. These are the dark things: forgotten shadows of what once was but no longer is, malign dreams of what might have been yet should never be, and twisted phantoms of entities that never truly lived but nonetheless cannot die. Most horrible of these nightmares, if such a value could truly be measured, are the old gods. Locked away in the deepest, darkest pit like the hideous, redheaded stepchild of Creation shoved to the back of the cosmic closet to be ignored.
Some things refuse to be ignored.
To mix metaphors, the closet door in Gil's All Night Diner opened just a crack, and a nasty walnut slipped through. A nasty, rotten walnut eager to chip the tooth of all that was good and decent.
At the moment, Loretta was blissfully unaware of this fact. Just as she was unaware of the spectral terrier sitting in the corner of the kitchen, watching her clean the grill.
Napoleon did not fully understand his current state of existence. He only knew that most people could not see him anymore. He vaguely remembered chasing a jackrabbit across a street and getting squashed by a pickup. He remembered floating over the flattened body of a dog that looked very much like him, but obviously couldn't be. Then there was the light. It called to him in a chorus of playful barks and howls. The glorious scent of raw hamburger and sausage drew him closer. His canine mind knew that on the other side of that light was a paradise of unending mountains of liver-flavored treats and things in constant
need of being peed on and slow rabbits. Though not too slow. He drifted into the light, but something made him stop. The jackrabbit that had led him to his untimely demise sat by the road. A rabbit was a rabbit, and Napoleon decided that this one was not getting away so easily. He descended to earth, and the light disappeared. He didn't notice.
He caught his quarry though he quickly discovered there wasn't much his immaterial body could do to it. Still, it had been a good chase, and that was enough.
Loretta scraped at a stubborn greasy blob with a spatula. Grunting, she shifted her immense weight from one side to another. Her ample butt shook as she chipped away at her chore, one stubborn, brown fleck at a time.
Napoleon studied the trembling rear end. Cheeks tightened and unclenched rhythmically, much like a pair of sumo wrestlers struggling beneath a cotton tarp. The dance stopped just long enough for Loretta to wipe the sweat from her face and take a long drink from the soda beside her. Then it was back to work.
Napoleon could have watched her for hours. Since dying, he'd become something of a people watcher. They were fascinating creatures, and he had yet to understand much of anything they did, except for eating, mating, and relieving themselves. And even the way they did that last thing was odd. But not understanding humans made them all the more interesting. Of course, there were other interesting things besides people. Slimy, green tentacles slithering from beneath refrigerators for example.
The dog jumped to alert and bounded between the thing under the refrigerator and Loretta. He growled as the tentacles slipped forward. When that didn't work, he barked furiously in an effort to show he meant business and to alert her to the danger reaching for her ankles.
She just ignored him.
Finally, he snapped at the end of a tentacle. He didn't expect to actually bite it and was pleasantly surprised when his teeth connected.
Dogs, even ghostly ones, understood very little of the true workings of the universe. Less than even human beings, if such a thing can be possible. Napoleon didn't know that the thing under the refrigerator existed in a cross-dimensional state, simultaneously dwelling across two dozen or so planes of existence. And that one of those planes happened to be the ectoplasmic sphere, thus allowing ghosts to interact with the thing. He only knew that he could bite this, and so he bit harder. He sank his teeth in the squishy flesh. It tasted horrible, but it'd been a long time since he'd tasted anything, so he relished it.
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