“I still want to touch you,” he tells it, helplessly. “Even now.”
“Me too.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, Sean—how do I know anything? I just do. Everything Simon knew, most of what you know...what Arjit knew, and Sam-I-Am. And Ric.”
“So that was you, then? The dream?”
It shapes that easy, white-toothed SoCal smile. “Who else?”
On the port boat, someone raises an Armalite’s massive barrel, bracing it against their shoulder: The Bad Idea’s off-limits now, apparently, not worth salvaging. Infected, possibly infectious. And they’ll get the contract fee either way, Sean can only think, so long as what’s left of the Phoenix goes down with the rest.
“Too late,” the thing confirms, stepping closer. “But...I really do want you to come with me, Sean. I want you. I think...I kinda want to be you...”
(oh)
(oh God, me too)
...is what Sean replies, in that last second before the rocket ignites. Or maybe he only thinks he does.
The explosion cracks the deck in half; the prow goes up, stern down, Titanic in reverse. And as they fall together Sean grabs his long-drowned demon lover by both elbows—its arms come up like a toddler, like a trap. It latches on.
Together, they step down, holding fast, joined at the lips. Until the trash-strewn waters close, kiss-warm and -soft, over both their heads.
*
Falling and falling and falling, forever, with nothing left to break against. With no hope of an impact, an ending.
Sean and the thing—heavier than it looked, by far—rode cold currents torn from the ocean’s floor, winding upwards to capture the Knot’s turnover, its increasingly brisk gyre. They nudged past confused sharks, kicked aside scraps of Ric, barely escaped being grazed or brained by various pressure-driven trawler-bits. They sank through fathoms, sharing air, light and air narrowing together in one last spasm—then winking out, the same way each synapse inside Sean’s brain had already begun to flare and crisp and die, like bone-jarred fireflies.
Thinking: I’ll be him, I guess, or he’ll be me; close enough. Too close for even him to tell. So it’ll be as though one of us survives, anyhow...
...as his grip kept on steadily tightening, pulling it ever-closer, bruising it ‘til the skin-suit folded back and all he held were Simon Grinnage’s bones, before heaving to enwrap him once more...smothering him in a heat that was fever and spice and slime alike, pulsing organs fluttering like mouths against every part of him as its spiny heart suckered fast to his breastbone, eating its way inside...the mere unfiltered scent of it enough to make his own blood boil in his hemorrhaging eyes, his gouting ears screech like dolphins before they popped and his trouser-caught cock to finally explode, perhaps even literally...
Praying, all the while: Don’t let me go, please. Never let me go. Don’t let me drown.
(I don’t want to drown, not now)
(not like this)
(not)
(without you)
Down there, in the deep and dark, where everything blended with everything else. Down where trash became treasure, and vice versa. Where flesh was eaten, over and over again, in endless communion; where prey and predator alike became bone, fossil, sand. Where currents bore him away in every direction at once, hoping against hope that nothing was ever lost, only changed. That the ocean, though a cornucopia of miracles and horrors—like death, like love—
(for all that it had a floor, one which he might never reach)
—might yet prove to have no real bottom.
a strange form of life
Laird Barron
Wind screamed along the rooftops of the prison, scattering night birds and bats.
Station 3 lay near the edge of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The prison was huge and decrepit. Built in the 1930s, allegedly atop Indian burial grounds, there’d been murders and fires, rapes and riots, and haunting aplenty, so much so that even the diocese loathed sending in clergy to take confessions or spread the faith. The aura of corruption emanating from the prison’s very walls was too much and the word from Rome was fuck it, more or less.
Now, despite the state’s perennial problem with overcrowding at correctional facilities, the vast rusting blight sat mostly uninhabited, a high plains Alcatraz. Two hundred inmates and a skeleton crew of guards and support staff called a wing of the prison and the surrounding miles of prairie home. Scuttlebutt had it that come next year’s election the complex would be bulldozed and the land sectioned into commercial office space, staff and occupants displaced to the Devil knew where. The Devil. Everyone at Station 3 thought about Old Poger quite often, for one reason or another.
The guard and the convict went into a remote section, long shut down and abandoned, and fucked, exactly as they had done twice a week for the past three months since the convict transferred in from Walla Walla. Usually they rendezvoused in the library after hours, or the machine shop. Tonight, the convict had insisted on more privacy, claimed he had something important to share. The guard humored the lad; he didn’t have much else to do.
Here the darkness was almost complete except for the distant glow of a lamp at the intersection. Water dripped from corroded pipes that carried the moans of the wind. Rats scuttled among fallen masonry. A heavy odor of dankness and rot clung to concrete and stone and the impression was that the lovers had strayed from the workings of man into a deep cavern of the earth.
The convict gripped the bars of the defunct block gate, his stance wide. The old guard thrust so forcefully the convict’s forehead bounced against the steel. The convict always chatted while the guard worked, though his nervousness seemed acute. The kid was in the middle of narrating the story of his life, the chapter about how he almost got away.
“We took down the bank at the end of the shift, y’know. Coulda made a clean getaway, except for some cops who ran along the sidewalk after us. Russ crashed the car in a field. I think one of the pigs shot our tire. We booked outta the car, every man for himself. I stuffed money into my pockets and down my pants and beat feet.”
The guard rolled his eyes and snorted. His breathing was heavy as a horse that’d been flogged down the home stretch; sparks whirled as his brain began to ignite. He gripped the convict’s hips and made a final, agonized lunge and had a vision of the con’s head getting wedged between the bars. That would be tricky to explain to the other screws, although Whitey and Reggie would just laugh. The guard wiped himself and zipped his fly. He slumped against the arch of the tunnel and lighted a cigarette. The sharp flame spun shadows across the walls, momentarily revealing blocks of satanic graffiti and water stains curdled with mold. Then he flipped the lighter shut and brought back the dark. He smoked, free hand resting on his gut that sagged over his belt like a cannonball. Twenty-seven years on the job had given him a drinking problem, a bad back, flat feet, flattened nose, three missing teeth, and contempt for humanity, himself included. Nonetheless, as he gasped for air to smoke his cigarette, another vice picked up in the line of duty, a sense of grudging affection for the convict mellowed his habitual resentment toward the universe.
The kid became quiet, sort of hanging with his arms stuck through the bars, pants around his ankles. He wasn’t really a kid, probably in his late twenties, the bloom off the rose and all that, but still taut and smooth and irrepressible. His skin gleamed in the darkness. The silence didn’t last. Without glancing backward, he said, “I hauled ass through the field and come to a bumpy old road. Getting set to cross it when a car rolls by. Real slow. Cruisin’ like a shark. Dunno why, but something was off about it. Spooked me bad. I had a premonition. An omen. Whatever you wanna call it. Goose run over my grave.”
“Fix your britches and I’ll give you a smoke,” the guard said.
The convict pulled up his pants. He accepted a cigarette and let it dangle from the corner of his mouth, striking a pose like a tough from Westside Story. He smirked and winked until the guard’s composure crack
ed and he chuckled. The convict said, “Then the dude riding shotgun looked back at me. I was so freaked, man. I ran into the tall grass and hid for like six hours. Damned dogs found me. I got a scar from the hole the fucker tore in my belly.”
“A guy spots you in the ditch and that scares you?”
“I was already scared. That made it worse. That was the icing, chief.”
“You lost me.”
“It was dark as a well digger’s asshole. No way he could see me hidin’ in the Tooley weeds.”
“But he did. Looked right at you.”
“Like he could see in the dark. Stared into my soul.”
Wind moaned somewhere deeper in the tunnel. The guard was surprised to feel the hairs on his arm prickle. He imagined the kid crouched in that country ditch, body hidden, face camouflaged in dirt and grease, behind a lattice of grass and leaves. Then the car, long and sleek, dome light on so the driver and passenger were illuminated like figures in a shadowbox. The figures were wrong, though. Too large for the compartment, oversized and vaguely monstrous as caricatures in a fairytale book, or misshapen puppets in some horror show. He took another drag and expelled the bad spirits to float among their fellows in the gallery beyond the wall of bars.
“That’s not all, neither. There’s more,” the convict said.
Of course there was more. The guard frowned. Instinct warned him to make the kid shut his trap. Some things weren’t meant to be spoken aloud and the pucker of his balls suggested that this was such a one. Any inclination to heed this primal instinct had been burned out by his recent exertions and he simply glanced into the metaphorical abyss and took another long drag on the cigarette. “Tell, it punk.”
The convict pouted. “Hey. I’m no punk. I ain’t no bitch.”
“Sorry,” the guard said. And he was sorry; a little. It felt like the first crack in the back of a shelf of Antarctic ice.
“Be nice to me. Be nice to me, man.”
“See, there’s your problem. Appealing to the Man. He’s not nice. Shut up or I’ll beat you with my Billy club.”
“What, again? But, fine. I’m not gonna tell you why I was scared shitless. You blew it. Blew your chance.”
“Blew my chance? Like you can stop your gob for five seconds. I hang around long enough, I’ll hear all about your tale of woe from the cradle onward, want to or not.”
“No, you blew it and it was a good story, too.”
“Come on, kid. I’ve been on the job since Hoover was trying on his mama’s heels. I heard every story there is.” The guard was conflicted. Part of him really wanted to hear that story the way one is compelled peel the scab from an itchy wound. The other part of him knew better. “Want another cig? Don’t be mad. I brought you some coffee, too. Two baggies of Colombian dark.” Coffee was the gold standard in prison. He took the younger man’s hand in his own scarred paw. He kissed the convict’s fingers and sighed. “Go ahead. What else happened? You figure out who those guys in the car were?”
The convict sulked for several moments. He relented and let the guard give him another cigarette. He smoked, and in the black and blue haze he seemed far too young and fragile for this prison. “They were demons. The Great Dark’s bootlickin’ servants on the loose in the world. My uncle was a minister. He showed us how to recognize ‘em when we were kids. Ain’t hard if you got the knack. The flesh of humanity don’t fit quite right.”
“You bring the hellfire and the brimstone, huh, boy? Doesn’t seem Christian, knocking off banks, blasting women and children and folks.” The guard smiled bitterly. Oh, how they all gave it up for the Lord once that steel gate clanged shut. Practicing their choirboy arpeggios for the day they’d sing before a parole board.
“My uncle was a minister. Mom and Pop weren’t anything special. Went to church on Easter for the potluck. And I never shot anybody. That was Russ smoked the girl in the bank. He’s a stone-cold motherfucker.”
“You find Jesus here in the pen? Get right with the Sky Warden?”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Don’t believe in God. Don’t. Believe. In. God. Demons, though. Demons you can get behind as a concept.”
“Every culture’s got its demons,” the convict said. “Monsters don’t need no brand of religion to do what they do. Christians believe in possession. Indians got skin walkers. People from other places call ‘em whatever, but I expect they’re all the same.”
“Well, hell, that makes sense,” the guard said. “Good for you, sonny. You’ve got depth. A country philosopher. Too bad you never blasted anybody, though. Kinda turned me on when I thought you was dangerous. A young Charlie Bronson. Mm, mm, mm.” He extended his hand through the gloom and pinched the convict’s baby-smooth cheek. “Enjoy it while it lasts. I was a lean mean screwing machine in my heyday. The spitting image of Lee Van Cleef is what all the girlies said.”
“You look mean enough.”
“I am mean enough.”
“And you got his beady eyes.”
“But not the fame, money, or cars to go along with them, more is the pity.”
“You got the big ol’ ring of keys, though. Man with the keys got everything.”
The guard didn’t answer. He squinted and cocked his head, sure he’d heard something down the ruined tunnel; a noise, distinct from the wind, that lasted only a moment, then subsided, and mutated in his consciousness, echoed there just as an aftershock of brilliance imprints upon the inner eyelid. He unholstered the heavy Maglite and clicked the rubber toggle. The bulb brightened and died. Click, click, click.
There were rats in the walls; armies of them. Legions of cockroaches, too. The guard didn’t think rats accounted for the new sound. Gone now, lost in the regular creaks and groans and whistles. He should’ve been gone by now too; gone from the prison, retired, sipping rum and coke on a beach while the steel drums played. He’d come to the profession late and now he had a sneaking hunch it was too late. That thought usually visited him for an instant upon waking prior to his morning shift, weighing upon his chest, a succubus straight from images of hell in a medieval tapestry. But it was here now, wasn’t it? He glanced toward the intersection where the far off light dimmed slightly.
“Lemme ask you something,” the convict said.
“All right.”
“I can’t stay here.”
“That a question?” The guard tried smacking the Maglite with his cupped palm. Nothing and more nothing. He whistled through his teeth just as his father had done when nervous. Whistling past the graveyard, the old-timers called it.
“No, man. What I mean is, I can’t stay here at the Station no more. I ain’t safe.”
“Who is?”
“I been thinking of making a run at the wall.” The convict wiggled two fingers, pantomiming legs on the move.
Me too, the guard thought, and chuckled to mask a sob. He said, “Dawson’s boys will cut you down before you get ten yards. They enjoy snuffing cons. A few years ago, some of them, the real twisted fellers, ran a game. A con on the cons, you’d say. They’d pretend to be on the take, conspire with the desperate cons about breaking out for a little payoff. Agreed to look the other way when the cons snuck by with their knotted bed sheets, or what-have-you. Then, when the poor suckers made a move…Pow! A thirty-ought-six hollow point through the back of the skull and the Dobermans ripping apart the carcass. Bastards would sit around and laugh their asses off. Word got around, so there haven’t been any turkey shoots lately. Don’t think about it. I like you, boy.”
“You got it right; nobody’s safe in the Station. Bad juju, chief. Peeps are getting’ weird. Fucked in the brain. They was actin’ the same way in Walla Walla. The shit is spreading. Now it’s here. It’s among us.”
The guard nodded, one eye still focused on the shadows. It wasn’t the entire staff…nonetheless, some of the screws were behaving oddly. Odder than usual, at least. Secret conversations held in whispers and knowing smirks, the humming of off-key ditties, the cracking of knuc
kles. He’d seen Big Dan twitching like a headless chicken in the locker room that very afternoon. Three or four seconds of Grand Mal action. Big Dan snapped out of it and smiled a creepy, evil smile and went down to the yard and beat the Harris brothers to a pulp over a trifle. And yesterday, Harley Koschek had walked right into the cafeteria wall, full speed, and busted his nose. The crazy sonofabitch had tilted his head back and gulped all the gushing blood. Nobody said anything, not a fucking thing, and so the guard had concentrated upon his ham on rye and chewed and thought dark thoughts.
The convict kept talking, naturally. “Maybe something in the water. Man, I read about a radioactive cloud movin’ underground from Hanford toward the Columbia. One teaspoon of that shit will light up the river and kill a half million whitebread assholes in the ‘burbs.”
“We’re upstream. Snug as bugs in a rug.”
“I know. What I’m sayin’ is, people are off their feed. Last few nights, those Mexicans in the next cell been whisperin’. Don’t make no kinda sense, neither. Sergeant Sheckley come down and visited them. Psss, psss, psss! Just whisperin’. Afterward, he stood by my door for ten minutes. Didn’t say nothin’. Stared at me and smiled. Man, last time I saw a grin like that it was cut into a pumpkin.”
“Maybe he’s one of those demons your uncle told you about.”
“Somethin’ was livin’ in Sheckley’s eyes. Not him, though. He was long gone.”
“This was the second part of your story, huh? You bring me here to make a dire prediction? The Aztec Calendar roll over a year early? Tonight is the last night on Earth? Mankind going out with a whimper?”
“There’s a whatchamacallit…an eclipse…”
Abominations of Desire Page 31