Bethany's Sin

by Robert R. McCammon

  “You look tired,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “A young man needs his rest.”

  “Young? No, I’m not so young anymore,” he told her. The glass felt deliciously cool in his hand. “I worked at the landfill today. Do you know where that is?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s way out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. I hate that place. As barren as the damn moon…and hot as hell…”

  “I don’t believe I’d like to see it,” Mrs. Bartlett said.

  “No, you wouldn’t.” He sipped at the tea. It was very sweet. “But I’m getting paid to haul myself out there, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.”

  She smiled sympathetically.

  “Must’ve been over a hundred out there today,” he said. “And the ground’s beginning to crack, like some sort of dried-up riverbed.” He drank again. Almost too sweet for him. “It’s good,” he told her. “Thanks for bringing it.”

  “I hoped you’d like it. Most of my visitors do.”

  He nodded, drank. Sweet over bitter.

  “Summers are always fierce in Bethany’s Sin,” the woman said. “I can’t bear to go out in the midday sun myself. They say the sun brings up all the wrinkles.”

  He grunted, touched the cold glass to his forehead. “Then I’d better not look in a mirror,” he said. “I’d look like I was eighty years old.”

  “Everything’ll be fine in the morning, after a good night’s sleep.”

  “I suppose it will be. It’ll have to be.”

  She watched him drink. “I’ll let you get your rest now,” she said, and moved toward the door. “We’ll have pancakes for breakfast.”

  “That’ll be great.”

  “Good night.” She closed the door behind her, and he heard her slowly descending the staircase. In the bowels of the house another door closed. He finished the tea, touched the cool glass to both sides of his face, and then walked across the room to turn the lock in the door. When he’d switched off the ceiling light and taken off his jeans again, he lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. It was too hot, and he kicked away the sheet; the faint stirrings of breeze played across him like supple, mercurial fingers. There was a bitterish aftertaste in his mouth, and he swallowed a couple of times to get rid of it. What kind of tea had that been? Sassafras. He could still smell it in the room. His mind began to drift; sleep seemed closer, like a beautiful woman in night black robes. When he closed his eyes he had the sensation of slowly tumbling head over heels down a chill passage way. A sensation, he realized, not unlike being drunk. But different, too. Jesus, he told himself, I’m tired! Need to sleep, need to rest, just let every damned thing go. Forget about that damned hot sun, forget about the landfill, forget about Wysinger’s bellyaching voice. That’s right. Yes. Forget. Let sleep come. He waited for what seemed like a long time, but still he clung to that nebulous ledge between sleep and awakening. From some distant place he heard the first few lines of a song he’d been working on for several weeks: I’ll fade away into the night/I’ll be long gone before twilight/And I won’t hear if you call my name/There’s nothing but the road to blame. So much for that. Through the curtains of his eyelids Neely saw what looked like figures standing amid the darkness of his room. Standing in silence. Watching. Waiting. They had burning blue eyes like the eyes of that thing he’d seen on the highway, and he wanted his mind to sheer away from those terrible thoughts but his brain refused to obey his commands: the things with burning eyes stepped nearer his bed. Then began to fade, very slowly, until they had disappeared again into blackness. The memory of that night on the highway set in motion the churning wheels of fear in his stomach. He’d had the truck window replaced, but every morning those long rents in the metal greeted him like the nagging remnants of nightmares. If it weren’t for those marks he would’ve shrugged off that incident as a prime example of the DTs. But he couldn’t, and though he’d driven back along the King’s Bridge Road to the Cock’s Crow a few times since then, he’d never talked about that night, and he always took care to leave when someone else was driving toward Bethany’s Sin.

  Now he was falling. Falling into a corridor at the far end of which was a black abyss. Falling rapidly. Tumbling head over heels. Brackish, bitterish taste in his mouth. Sassafras tea? Or something else? Was Mrs. Bartlett—dear old Mrs. Bartlett, so much like his own mother before she’d started drinking so bad—spiking the tea? Trying to get him drunk? Preying on his weakness? Have to scold her about that. No fair.

  The sudden, sharp sound of metal against metal came to him, and he knew he was still awake. It was difficult to open his eyes; he finally opened them to slits, and he could feel the light sheen of sweat covering his body from the heat that seemed to have filled the room like a living thing. What moved? he wondered. What moved? That noise again. A quiet noise. Barely audible.

  The lock.

  He turned his head with an effort and stared through the darkness at the door. Though he couldn’t see it, he realized the lock was turning. Someone on the other side had a key.

  Neely tried to lift himself up on his elbows but only half-succeeded. His head seemed heavy, his neck barely able to hold its weight. He stared at that door, his mouth slack and hanging open.

  There was a quiet click! and he knew the lock had been turned. He tried to call out and couldn’t find his voice. Drugged, he realized. Mrs. Bartlett’s drugged me with something! The door began to come open; a sliver of white light from the hallway entered first, growing larger and longer and brighter, falling across the bed and blinding Neely where he lay. Until, when the door was finally open, the light stung his eyes with pure pain.

  And three figures were silhouetted there, two standing in front, one behind. “He’s ready,” someone said; Neely heard two voices at the same time, one overlapping the other. One in English—Mrs. Bartlett’s voice—and one in a hoarse, guttural language he had never heard before. That second voice, the more powerful, filled him with a dread that ate at the linings of his guts. The figures slipped through the doorway and neared him. Stood over his bed. Silent.

  But now he could see their eyes in the dark blanks of their faces.

  Three pairs of eyes. All unblinking. All shimmering with electric blue flame that seemed to blaze out for him. He tried to crawl away, couldn’t make his muscles respond; the windows were open: he could scream and someone would hear. When he tried to scream he heard himself whine instead. Those eyes moved, examining his naked body. A hand reached down; Evan saw a bracelet of an animal claws on the wrist. The fingers traced the length of his penis. He tried to cringe from them, couldn’t. Another hand came down, and the cool-fleshed fingers swirled in circles across his stomach. The Bartlett-thing stepped back toward the door and closed it.

  Neely’s heart hammered. He could hear the things breathing in the darkness, like the steady action of a bellows. Hands touched chest and arm and thigh and throat; he smelled female musk, heavy and demanding, filling the room with sexual need. Fingers at his penis, stroking the flesh. Beneath those burning, haunting eyes he knew the mouths were open, taut with fired lust. One of the forms sat on the bed beside him, bent forward, and licked at his testicles. Another one crossed to the opposite side of the bed and crawled toward him, gripped at his shoulders, bit lightly at his chest, then harder with mounting desire.

  Turning his head with an effort that brought the sweat up in beads on his face, Neely saw the eyes of the Bartlett-thing, still standing beside the closed door. She was grinning.

  And to his own horror he felt his body begin to respond to the caresses of the two women around the bed. It excited them even more, and they jealously shoved for position near his sexual organ. A mouth gripped him, claw-nailed hands stroked his thighs from hips to knees, leaving rising welts. Physical need shook him, setting his nerves afire. His testicles ached for release. And then he was aware that one of them, the woman-thing with the animal-claw bracelet, was standing up, slowly taking off the coarse-clothed gown she wore. Even in the darkness h
e could see the smoothness of her stomach, her firm, tight thighs, the triangle of dark hair between them. The fever boiled in his brain, and now he had only one need and one desire in the world. She sensed it, and moved with maddening slowness. Then the other woman-thing backed away from the bed and disrobed; he could feel the mingled heat of their bodies, and he didn’t care that those hideous eyes watched him almost incuriously, didn’t care that these things were nightmare visions, didn’t care didn’t care didn’t…

  The one with the bracelet caressed his body like the searing touch of fire. Thick dark hair hung down over her shoulders, and he could smell a wild forest-smell in it. She mounted him, her legs pressed tight against his body. Moved forward, guiding him in with her hand. Urgently. She gasped softly and began to move, slowly at first, then with increasing passion. Her nails gouged his shoulders, and her unblinking eyes stared into his face with eerie unconcern. Neely grasped her arms, felt smooth, firm flesh; he lifted himself up and she ground down on him at the same time, mixing his pleasure with pain. In another moment he exploded inside her, with a half-human whine that he hardly recognized as his own voice. Her wetness engulfed him, throbbing against him with a strength that wouldn’t let him free. She ground down on him again, locking him inside her with her legs. Orgasm ripped him like lightning, and still she moved atop him, her grasp milking him dry. As she trembled violently in the throes of her own orgasm, Neely played his fingers along her shoulders and then dropped them to her nipples.

  One of them was hard and taut. The other was missing.

  And Neely realized, with a new surge of confusion and fear, that this woman had only one breast. The right one was gone, and his lingers felt the hard ridges of a star shaped scar in its place.

  The woman released him and silently climbed off his body. Before she slipped back into her gown, Neely saw jewels of sweat and semen suspended in the fine down between her thighs.

  At the door the Bartlett-thing hadn’t moved. Her eyes, fiery blue, burned through his skull.

  They waited for him to regain his strength. His body felt drained, and in his hand there was the memory of that strange and vivid scar.

  And then the second woman came for him. She was lithe and blond, and her mouth and fingers played games with his body until once again he was erect and throbbing. She descended onto Neely with feverish intensity, biting at his shoulders and throat, her hips battering him. And seconds before another orgasm shivered through him, he realized this woman also lacked a right breast, because he could feel the scar pressed tight to his own chest. She lay atop him for a moment, breathing harshly, and then her weight was gone. Neely, his body aching and exhausted, saw the three women standing over his bed, staring down at him as if examining an insignificant curiosity.

  “He’ll sleep now.” Two voices speaking. One Mrs. Bartlett’s, one that guttural, foreign voice that made Neely’s flesh crawl. The Bartlett-thing’s hand came from the darkness, stroked his fevered forehead. And then the women slipped through the door like the rustle of cloth, into the blinding white light of the hallway. The door closed behind them; a key was turned. Footsteps on the staircase. Another door closed in the depths of the house. Then nothing but silence.

  And abruptly the mountainous black wave of sleep reared up for Neely, crashing over him with the urgent touch of a lover, scorching and soothing him. Taking him down and down and down, deeper deeper deeper…

  19

  * * *

  Things

  Unearthed

  BEHIND A LAYER of clouds the color of corpse flesh, the sun burned, scorching the earth, browning grasses and bowing trees, searing away shade and lying like a fiery weight across Neely Ames’s shoulders.

  The stench of the landfill had risen up around him, enfolding him in a sickly-sweet grip. It was a wide, barren plain of dirt heaped with garbage of every description, the large mounds breeding black flies that circled hungrily around Neely’s head, darting in to taste the trickles that ran down his face and arms, finding the salt taste good, circling again. Far across the landfill there were several trash fires, and from them an acrid, grayish smoke had wafted with the stagnant breeze, clinging to Neely’s work clothes and making his eyes tear beneath his glasses. When he walked, his boots stirred up clouds of dust, and he stepped carefully over widening cracks in the ground, like the remnants of sudden earthquakes. God only knew how many tons of garbage lay buried beneath the ground; now it seemed to be shifting, the layers and layers of filth expanding under the fierce summer sun. At one place he could stand and peer down almost six feet at an incredible morass of rotting garbage, old bottles, baby diapers, even discarded clothes and shoes. Beneath the landfill’s surface was a hideous muck emitting a stench that turned Neely’s stomach inside out. Passing a mound of pasteboard boxes and glittering glass shards, he heard a high squealing from a nest of rats; he’d seen them before, usually in the early morning when it was a fraction cooler, dark shapes scurrying from garbage mound to mound in search of scraps of food. He hated this place because it was as filthy and vile as Bethany’s Sin was beautiful and spotless.

  And now he carried a plastic garbage bag with a half decapitated gray cat in it. He’d shoveled it up from where it had been stuck to 219; a truck had probably barreled right over the thing during the night, and the driver in his high cab had felt only the slightest jarring of a tire. The carcass had already been bloated by the time he’d gotten to it in mid-afternoon, and of course the flies had gathered in sheets. As he walked on, taking the garbage bag to a trash mound deeper within the landfill, his boot crunched through weakened earth and plunged ankle-deep. Neely cursed and staggered forward a few feet before he could regain his balance. Through the thin pall of smoke he could see cracks zigzagging crazily across the plain; he envisioned holes opening at his feet and sucking him quicksandlike down into the mire of accumulated garbage, where he would die choking on the refuse of Bethany’s Sin. He quickly shrugged the image off and tossed the plastic bag on the trash mound; rats squealed and ran. The stench here was infernal because here was where he dumped the carcasses of animals—dogs, cats, squirrels, once even a good-sized bobcat—struck down by cars either on 219 or in the village itself. It was a grisly job, but he’d signed on to do it and that was that. As Wysinger had reminded him several times.

  He took a handkerchief from his back pocket to clean his glasses of specks of ash. Wisps of smoke swirled around him; he could taste it at the back of his throat. Bitter. Like the aftertaste of Mrs. Bartlett’s tea. He suddenly shivered, though the sun was burning his face. Something began to surge in his memory—dark shapes standing over him, eyes like pools of bluish flame, hands reaching for him from the blackness—and then it slipped away before he could grasp it. All day something strange had been haunting him, shadowy images that flashed through his mind and then vanished, and though he was left with a feeling of dread, there was also a…yes, a feeling of strong sexual desire. He couldn’t remember dreaming; in fact, it seemed that the world had gone dark after Mrs. Bartlett had left his room. He’d probably just rolled over and fallen asleep like a dead man until dawn. But when he’d awakened, his body had ached, and he’d thought for just a moment that the lingering aroma of female musk lay on his bed. No, no. Only wishful thinking.

  But one thing did bother him. While he was showering he’d noticed scratches on his thighs. He’d tried to think where he could have been scratched. Possibly, when he was sawing that dead tree to pieces, the limbs had scraped across his legs without his realizing it. But funny he hadn’t noticed those scratches earlier…

  He put his glasses back on, his eyes stinging from the smoke, and started walking across the landfill toward his pickup truck. He stopped to peer into that hole his boot had made. Jesus Christ! he thought. This whole damned place is slowly caving in. No telling how many years the locals have been using it as a dump; no telling how many tons of garbage lay underneath there. He kicked at the dirt; it was bone-dry and loose, and the hole widened.


  And within it something glittered.

  Neely bent down, peered in, brushed dirt and filth away. A tiny squarish object, silverish. Other things, yellow white. He picked one up and looked at it closely for a moment, trying to decide what it was.

  Abruptly, he stood up, found a stick lying nearby, and probed the hole. Dirt cascaded down the sides in sheets. Flies circled him, greedy for what he might uncover. But there was nothing; only dirt and clots of filth and garbage. He threw the stick aside, wiped his hand on his trouser leg, and looked again at the object he held.

  He knew what it was, and seeing it made his heart hammer in his chest. What the hell was it doing out here, in the garbage dump? Unless…Jesus, no! He wrapped it in his handkerchief, bent down and looked for the others. He found two more, and then he stepped back from that hole and walked quickly to his truck.

  On McClain Terrace, Evan stood up from his typewriter and stretched. He’d finished about a third of the new short story he was working on, and he needed a break. Beside the typewriter there was a half-cup of tepid black coffee and a couple of chewed pencils; he took the cup, went upstairs to the kitchen, rinsed it out in the sink, and put a pot of water on the stove to boil. As the ring heated he thought about what was ahead for him: soon, he knew, he’d have to find within himself the guts to start a novel. It would be about the war, about the scarred and maimed veterans who came home and found that they’d only left one battleground for another. And here, in this broader, fiercer battleground, there was no recognizing friend from enemy until it was too late. Here the enemy wore many faces: the VA doctor explaining how in time the scars would fade; the psychiatrist with an ill-fitting toupee who said you must not blame anyone, not yourself, not those who sent you to fight, not anyone; the smiling employment agency lady who said sorry, we don’t have anything for you today; people like Harlin who fell upon you and leeched your blood as a transfusion for their own tormented, decaying souls.