CHAPTER 19

 

The rain came in the evening, cold and violent and staccato. Officer Polhaus’s call came soon thereafter, curt and quick and staccato—ending in a “Get over here, now.” Then Simon was walking in the rain. And then the faces appeared, eyeless from shadows and featureless from the constant, wet spray.

And then the pain.

The wet crunch of knuckles is internal. The October rain swallows the sound of the car door slamming and Simon’s choked-back responses.

“Where is it?” asks a voice like a cement mixer.

The second slam of the car door elicits less pops from Simon’s ruined left hand, like bubble wrap that’s almost used up but you look for those last few snaps. Another wet crunch and moan in the nauseous vacuum of space.

There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand, Jane. I named them as they broke.

Proximal phalanx.

Middle phalanx.

Distal phalanx.

“You don’t start talking, cocksucker, and we’re going to crunch you down to screams and piss.”

Metacarpals.

Trapezium.

Trapezoid.

The man with the cement truck voice grabs Simon’s left wrist and squeezes. Simon moans. Frustrated, the man squeezes harder, but Simon’s response is only marginally louder.

Capitate.

Hamate.

Scaphoid.

Simon never saw them coming. Faces in the rain. Something hit him in the back of the head and his glasses fell away and the world became a blur through his one good eye. Rain-blank faces and empty coats out of the night.

Meet Club Wendigo, Jane.

Four of them.

“The question, Meeks: where is the hammer?”

Lunate.

Triquetral.

Pisiform.

I could include the sesamoid bones, Jane. They broke, but they’re really just small, ossified nodes embedded in the tendons. Just glorified nodes.

“Afraid—I don’t have it—with me,” Simon says into the cement sidewalk, wondering how close he is to a skeleton friend.

One of them drops Polaroid pictures on the wet ground, in front of Simon’s face. Each one depicts a human body, killed in various ways. Bad ways.

“See that, Meeks,” says another voice, not the cement truck mixer. “We did all these. I snap a pic each time. I carry them with me to show fucks like you. Truth to tell, I take them ’cause they get me off later. But if they scare some sense into you, put the ‘fuck’ in ‘do not fuck with us,’ then that just sweetens the pot. Now, answer the question.”

It starts in the back of Simon’s throat—a painful hiccup. And it spreads to his lungs, to his shoulders, his stomach, his face. Simon laughs. It hurts his hand, but he laughs. It hurts so bad he vomits, but then he starts laughing again. He is going to die, but he laughs and the Corbies laugh with him.

“They had us at hello,” cackle the wraith crows.

Simon howls at the thought of it—showing him pictures of cadavers.

Seen worse, Jane: faces of soup swimming in buckshot, bodies so bloated soft with decay the meat comes off the bone easier than pulled pork.

“Might as well terrify an accountant by throwing saved receipts at him,” laugh the Corbies.

Simon is going to die and he keeps laughing.

“What the fuck’s so funny?” says the cement mixer voice.

Simon points to a picture. “Time of death, less than an hour prior to photo.” Simon points to the next picture and the next one. “Dead at least forty-eight hours. Dead twelve to eighteen hours. Dead three or four hours. But this one . . . this one is difficult, because of the burns, you see. Did he die in the fire? I have to ask myself: Is there soot in the air passages? If no, then I have to ask myself: Is there carbon monoxide in the blood?”

The cement mixer kicks Simon in the stomach.

“If no,” Simon wheezes, “do burns on the body have the inflamed edge of a vital reaction?”

The cement truck man curses, steps back, winds up, and kicks. A rib snaps in Simon’s chest. He can’t breath. But the words bleed through the coughs and wheezes.

“If no . . . then do injuries . . . show signs—signs of underlying . . . bleeding? Yes indicates that . . . the victim may have been dead . . . when the fire started . . . which suggests arson to conceal homicide.”

Cement truck does not kick again, only sighs. The other voice chimes in: “This town is full of crazy fucks. Lenny, get the camera.” One of Lenny’s shoes squeaks, the filthy water sucking in and out of a hole in its sole. Simon stops laughing, caught in a monomaniacal fascination of implied metaphors.

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you,” screech the Corbies.

Over his head, something clicks, a gun or a knife.

A pregnant pause, of the eight-months-along-and-showing variety, in the hammer rain.

The moment breaks at a “Pst!” that somehow sounds over the storm, coming from a nearby alley mouth. From the ground, through one blurry eye, Simon spies an indistinct figure—the shadows seem to leak out of the alley, drawn to him by some super-weird anti-blackhole gravity.

My shadow, Jane.

The fourth man, not Lenny, nor the cement truck, nor the voice with the pretty, pretty Polaroid pictures, advances toward the alleyway. The shadowed stranger backs up, down the alley’s throat.

“Check it out, Mike,” says the Polaroid picture man.

The shadowed figure backs farther into the belly of the alley, which ends in a T-intersection with another wall. He backs deeper into darkness, rounds the corner, and ducks to the left of the intersection.

Mike’s shoes do not squeak, just clap wet pavement in pursuit, into alley mouth, down throat, and into the dark belly. At the T-intersection, Mike looks uneasily to the left and shrugs.

“I’m not seeing any—”

Dark blur of speed—something—fast—from the right. It slams into Mike’s back—hard—propelling him left.

Out of sight.

Another pregnant pause, this one only five months knocked-up. It’s that silence after a big dog growls, before the bite.

“Mike?” calls out cement truck.

“Michael?” calls out Polaroid man.

Nothing.

A scream ruptures the cold, wet membrane of quiet. The scream comes in staccato bursts, like the rain. Motion. Simon, sees three sets of legs splashing down the alley mouth, tumbling down the throat after their fellow into the blackness of the belly. Then the screams multiply, layer, and crosshatch into one another, mate with one another and give birth to whole new nanosecond generations of cries. A hard wind scatters the Polaroids and the screams. Neighborhood dogs bark—first one, then another and another. The yelps radiate and spread into howls.

Simon picks up his glasses. The screams and howls echo around him as he runs, staggeringly, his world punctuated by the pain in his left hand and ribs.

 

* * * * *

 

The rain had died out by the time Simon got to Oak Woods Cemetery—not all that far from where he had told Mama Bone-digger where to find her Henry’s buried treasure.

“What the hell happened to you?” asks Polhaus when he sees Simon, beaten, wet, his left arm in a makeshift sling.

Simon tells him.

“Shit,” replies Polhaus. “Okay, we get you to a doctor and we tell Nyx and the others what went down. The Sanctuary needs to know if things are getting more dangerous. But first, you okay?”

Simon takes a moment to process the concern, then nods.

“Let’s get this done first then. Don’t know if it’s connected to Jane Doe, but it’s weird. A friend gave me a heads-up on it, so it’s all ours, until it becomes someone else’s problem in the morning.”

They walk through a squishy landscape, all puddles and mud. Polhaus clicks on a flashlight. Simon does the same. The old cop shows the young forensic pathologist the first of the defiled graves.

All those open graves, wet like fresh wounds, Jane. Like fresh Y-incisions.

“Soil’s torn away. Dug with haste. Frantic,” Simon says. He cradles the flashlight with his left arm while pulling out his flask and drinking the last bits of absinthe.

The Corbies stir.

“Got scratch marks on the stones, like nails,” says Polhaus.

Simon feels the marks with his right hand. “No practical purpose. They were made after the digging. In frustration.”

Polhaus helps Simon into the grave.

“Coffin torn open,” says Simon. “Cadaver pulled out.” The body is old, shriveled, mostly gone. “This is really a job for a forensic anthropologist, a bone detective. I am more of a flesh detective, a guts detective.”

“Body’s old, but the crime’s fresh,” says Polhaus. “Just give me your opinions, Meeks. What’s your prognosis?”

“I think he is dead.”

“Funny.”

Torn, dry meat. Jerky. The decayed clothing on the abdomen is shredded open, the desiccated belly torn.

“Something tried to eat the cadaver,” says Simon.

“That’s what I thought,” says Polhaus.

“The other graves are like this?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Four.”

“The bodies—are all of them chewed on?”

“Yes.”

“But not finished.”

“No. What’s your thought?”

“Four graves. That is a lot of digging, a lot of work. Whatever did this did not get the results it wanted, so it moved on. It hoped to get better results on the next grave, and then the next. But all that digging and all that work still left it without desired results. It’s enough to cause a great deal of frustration.” Simon points to the scratches on the tombstone.

“You think there was a group doing this?” asks Polhaus with a grunt, as he helps Simon out of the wet grave.

“No. I think just one.”

“Why’s that?”

Simon shrugs.

Because the Corbies said so. But I did not know how to tell him that. Eh, Jane?

Near the graves, the duo finds puddles of vomit, stews of withered bits of flesh, shreds of clothing, and the faint residue of embalming chemicals.

“Little wet to say, but the tracks look all screwed up over there,” says Polhaus. “Like it was dragging something.”

“Yes.”

“But all the bodies are in their graves.”

“None of them would be that heavy.”

“So, what are we saying?” says Polhaus. “It had some other victims? It brought them through here for some freaky purpose? Maybe digging up the graves was just part of some queer ritual. . . .”

Simon looks around, through his cracked lenses, through absinthe-green eyes, through the thousand-thousand eyes of the murder in his head.

“No,” says Simon. “We’re operating under a conceptual fallacy.”

“How so?”

“None of you has said it—the word—during our talks about Apex Consumers, Club Wendigo, and the rest. But it’s there, in the pauses. You give each other looks. And then Gregory Mitchell is dead, fingers bitten off. Now this. We’re here because the cadavers are partially eaten.”

“Yeah,” says Polhaus. “Maybe.”

“Cannibalism?”

“I guess we’ve been thinking it. Nasty word.”

“Yes. It represents the grossest violation of etiquette a host can commit on his guest.”

Officer Polhaus squints at Simon. “The things in your head scare me.”

“You’re breathing heavy. Your face is red. Your pulse is elevated. You are more excited than I’ve ever seen you.”

“My pulse?”

“You think we are close to seeing something. Something unnamed. The thing you and the Sanctuary want a glimpse of. Something from the dark.”

Polhaus’s head tilts, letting him see Simon in a different way. “Fair enough. For a lack of a better word, let’s just say ‘monster.’”

“Right,” says Simon. “We are out here, in the cemetery, looking for a monster, a man-eater, something formidable, ghastly, and frightening.” He shakes his head. “That’s where we falter. That’s the fallacy.”

“What?”

“We should not be looking for a predator in its prime. What came here was a deviation.”

“Deviation?”

“Yes,” says Simon, the Corbies whispering in his ears. “If we suppose there are some kind of man-eaters, human or inhuman, we can assume they do not feed off of cadavers harvested from a cemetery. This does not happen every night.”

“No,” says Polhaus. “Far as I know, this doesn’t go on. We’d notice all the holes in the ground.”

“Then they—the predators—regularly feed off of the living or at least get their dead fresher.”

“You’re getting a lot of mileage out of an ever-expanding hypothetical.”

“You do not see stories of these eaten people on the ten o’clock news, do you?”

“No.”

“So we can suppose our hypothetical monsters get away with it. You said it yourself—that all of us are in out of our depth when it comes to the dark.”

“You pay attention to what I say?”

Simon ignores the sarcastic prod and continues: “The only reason we found this evidence so easily is that we are looking for a deviation of the monster, an anomaly. People irrationally fear getting bit by a bat. But the only time bats are clumsy enough to come in contact with a human, and bite, is when they are sick.”

Polhaus chuckles.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Polhuas says. “Never heard you talk this much before, except when you gave witness at the Sanctuary . . . and at the Twiss trial. Go on.”

“There are coyotes in the city. Not just strays, but a sizable breeding population.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“They are the only large-sized predatory mammal that has increased its numbers since humans came through this area. Large predators, but they are invisible. You don’t see them, even as road kill. They are clever and stealthy. They learn to eat what’s available. In the suburbs, they hunt in packs and eat the surplus deer. In the city they eat trash and squirrels and rats. Native Americans called them ‘ghosts of the prairie.’ You don’t see one except by chance or injury or illness.”

“So you think a coyote’s been doing all this?” says Polhaus with another chuckle.

“Have you ever been to the Field Museum, Officer Polhaus?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you seen the two stuffed lions? The Man-eaters of Tsavo?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Two male lions, man-eaters. They killed over one hundred and forty men before they were shot.”

“No shit?”

“What caused these particular lions to be such formidable predators? But that very question sent them down the wrong investigative path. They were looking for the reason why these lions were more powerful—the fact that they ate humans makes them, in our minds, more frightening and thus more powerful. That is, in fact, an egotistical error. The lions were not more potent predators; they were handicapped. A recent examination of the skulls determined that the lions suffered from a gum disease. Eating tough game was too painful. Humans are softer, easier to chew.”

“We’ve got a handicapped monster.” Polhaus chews the words, tickled by the concept.

“A deviant,” says Simon. “The only bats or coyotes we catch are sick.”

“Sick critter can’t catch anyone too lively, so he comes here, digs up the corpses. Chows down. Gets sick on old jerky and formaldehyde, and pukes up. Repeat.”

“Yes.”

“If the hypothetical is true.”

“Yes. It would be a mistake to latch on to any preconceptions this early.”

The two wander—the old cop, the young pathologist. Simon sees a statue, an angel. The wormwood twists his brain and she is Jane. Simon reaches out a hand to touch the angel’s face when something swipes his legs out from under him.

Simon falls.

His leg throbs with lacerations.

Simon scrambles backward on all fours.

It looks like a man, but it is gaping at Simon with a mouth open too wide, and then the mouth opens wider still, a mouth full of long, predatory teeth, overcrowded with teeth and teeth and teeth. The probing tongue feels the place, in the sod, where Simon had been a second ago. The thing’s skin is chalk white. Black eyes, doll’s eyes, staring with empty want.

Had I screamed into those eyes, Jane, I would have heard an echo.

The doll-eyed thing bites into the sod where Simon had been, spits out the earthy mouthful. Then it looks up and moans pleadingly.

I wish I could forget that moan, Jane.

White hands end in ivory claws. Those ivory claws dig into the wet earth, and the creature crawls toward Simon. No legs. It crawls on powerful arms, scuttles like a pale lobster, dragging his body behind.

Moans.

It is hungry.

It is Hunger.

The world stops with the explosion of the gunshot. The exit wound pulps the pasty creature’s head. It slumps to the ground, twitching. Still.

Simon crawls to his feet, with one good hand. Polhaus lowers his gun.

“What was that?” asks the fat man.

“I think it is a handicapped monster,” answers the scarecrow.

Stillness.

Polhaus slumps down on his expansive rump, sitting with Simon in the mud. “Oh, God . . . oh, God . . . oh, God . . . God . . .” Simon watches and wonders if this is a prelude to another broken doll, another Mr. Knock, or any of the other souls crippled by exposure to the dark.

The laughter catches Simon off guard. Polhaus tries to choke it down, stuff it back with a meaty knuckle, but he erupts, belly shaking. The full laughter builds up and up, and he’s bouncing up to his feet, bouncing up and down in childlike victory.

“Take that, fuckers!” he screams, flicking off the darkness above, like a jolly lightning rod.

“Oh, God! Thank you, Simon!”

The hug catches Simon off guard more than the laughter had. The crushing embrace lifts Simon clean off the ground; he is smothered in all that is Officer John Polhaus. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to escape, nothing for Simon to do but listen to the whispered confessional in his ear:

“I’m sorry, Simon. For—you know, treating you like shit. I just thought you . . . you were creepy and that you were part of the weirdness going on in the city. I mean, I knew Jane when she was alive, and I thought you were one of . . . well. Almost forty years! I’ve been holding on to all this. I saw my first weirdness early on. That’s why I’m a career beat. I tried to make noise, but I learned better fast. A number of CPD see it. You make noise and get thrown in the loony bin, or you go after it and die—or worse—or you let it slide. Survive. Do what you can, when you can. I’ve been sliding so long. The fuckers! It all made me feel so . . . powerless, so emasculated.”

John lets go of Simon, the younger man almost falling back to the ground.

“But not tonight!” yells John, both arms raised. “We got to fight back. We got to get one of them. Feels good. So good. I don’t care what happens after. You hear me!” The old cop’s voice echoes through the cemetery.

The silence, after the echo, lingers for a bit. Polhaus fishes in a pocket.

“You’re a good friend, Simon.”

“Er . . . thank you.”

“I got something for you.”

“You what?”

“Not flowers or nothing. But before her cadaver disappeared and everyone went forgetful, I did some snooping around the case. Like I said, I knew her from the Sanctuary, from before. She helped me with—well, anyway, I kept tabs.”

John pulls out a slip of paper.

“That fingerprint you lifted hit. Hector Gomez.”

Hector Gomez: the Hanging Man. Jack of diamonds.

John hands the slip of paper to Simon.

“Here. This is the name and contact info of a source of mine. Ziggy will know where Hector is. Just, don’t go it alone. Won’t go into all the gory details now, but Hector is a monster. You got friends to help you. Just thought you should know about it, is all.”

“Thank you . . . John.”

They both look at the creature at their feet.

“What now?” they both ask in unison.

 

* * * * *

 

“When the pain comes, squeeze this,” says Nyx.

Simon squeezes Bob.

The dildo, not the hammer.

He recalls the first time he met this beguiling girl with purple lips.

“You can make some noise, you know,” she says. “I won’t think you’re any less manly or anything.

“I have a high pain threshold.”

“Oh.”

“I have trouble expressing anger. I suffered night terrors as a child.”

“Oh?”

“Those three things are physiologically connected.”

“Oh,” Nyx says, carefully splinting Simon’s fingers and wrapping his left hand. “You really should go to a hospital.”

“I will,” Simon says, squeezing Bob.

She’d met Simon at the tattoo shop. He’d tried to tell her the story of everything that had gone on at the cemetery and before, but could not get a word in as she pulled him inside, got him dry, cleaned and bandaged his clawed leg. When she got to his hand, he finally told her about his beating, the cemetery, and the thing wrapped in a tarp in his trunk.

Nyx leans in closer, working on Simon’s hand. Their eyes catch. And hold. For a beat.

“You and the Sanctuary,” says Simon. “You really do enjoy the company of misfits.”

“I like flaws,” says Nyx. “I like wrinkled clothes and tattered jackets and raggedy friends. The only problem with falling in love with people’s flaws, with seeing the exquisitely awkward, late-blooming grace of the misfit, is the frustration caused when they don’t see it in themselves, don’t believe you when you point it out. But, all in all, I still love those pretty flaws, those deviations from symmetry.”

Simon smiles, blinking behind cracked lenses.

“I’m sorry,” says Nyx. “That sounds awfully contrived, doesn’t it? You should see my horrible poetry.”

“I liked it.”

Nyx grins back.

“Your father wasn’t really an incubus, was he?” says Simon.

“There are worse things than not knowing your father.”

Nyx smiles sadly as she continues working on Simon’s hand, saying, “The Inquisition said that God gives demons permission to wander the earth. The more we offend God, the more permission they have to torment us. The incubus often prey on women during holy feasts, to offend God. But those feast days were taken from pagan feast days. They correspond with full moons, and any cop can tell you that all the crazies and predators come out to play during a full moon.”

Nyx finishes with Simon’s hand.

“They say that an incubus doesn’t have a physical body, but can manifest by gathering earthly particles or dust. They just come out of nowhere.”

Nyx leans in close, cleaning a scrape Simon did not even realize was on his forehead.

“An incubus doesn’t have real eyes; they see spiritually, the better to find you. An incubus doesn’t have real ears; they hear thoughts, the better to catch you. An incubus doesn’t have a real mouth, but they can form an artificial tongue, teeth, and lips . . . the better to seduce you.”

Nyx applies peroxide to the scrape and Simon flinches slightly.

“Squeeze Bob if you need to,” she says. “In Germany, if a mother gripped a horse collar to ease the pain of childbirth, it was said the child would become something called an alp. It entered the victim through the mouth with its long tongue or in the form of mist or as a snake.”

Nyx finishes with the scrape on Simon’s face, but she does not move away. Her face remains close to his, a single tear stained with mascara running down her cheek.

“Villagers used to burn the babies out in the yard. They’d look for little batwings or black eyes or little tails on their little bodies. Sometimes . . . sometimes I wonder if my mother ever wished she lived in a simpler time, when those kinds of reminders could go up in smoke. I never knew my father. The cops never found a name to give to my mom.”

“Some mythologies are more horrifying, but more livable,” Simon says.

Nyx is momentarily lost in the understanding of his malachite eyes.

“Yeah, ” she says at last. “I built a whole life and identity around this particular one.”

“Strange world,” says Simon. “When the monsters you create turn out to be real.”

Nyx nods. “Sometimes,” she says, “I stand in front of a mirror and try to stretch the batwings and wag the tail I know must be there. Then the pain comes and what can you do but squeeze?”

Simon gently brushes the dark-stained tear from Nyx’s face, caresses her cheek, his thumb brushing her lower lip. Those purple lips part with a breath. “Sorry,” he says, “I’m very tactile. Just wanted to know what that shade of purple feels like.”

Nyx’s eyes flutter and she smiles and leans in closer.

“Nyx. . . ?”

“Don’t say another word, you silly boy. I’ve wanted to kiss you since we hid in the closet.”

They’re close enough that he feels the breath of each word on his face, and then she dives in the rest of the way, and Simon tastes those purple lips for a sweet moment . . . before he jumps out of the chair, flinging Bob across the room.

“I—I,” he sputters. “I—I can’t . . . sorry, but . . . I . . . thank you?”

Simon Meeks flees the scene.

Nyx watches from the shop window.

“Shoot,” she says, giving a devastating pout to no one in particular.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 20

 

“Hello?”

“Sorry . . . sorry . . . I’m sorry . . .”

“Clara? Is that you?”

“It looks so good. I . . . I can’t. I’m sorry, Nyx.”

“Clara, what’s wrong?”

“Special delivery. Oh, why’d I have to open it? I . . . think I knew what it was. I think—oh, God. I think I could smell it. I—”

“Clara, slow down what’s—?”

“I’m falling off the wagon! I think I’m going to eat it. It’s so red, Nyx. It’s so very, very red.”

“Clara, listen to me. Do not—”

“I think I knew who sent it, too. It’s redder even. Dripping. I can’t—oh, Nyx. I think I’m going to eat it . . . I can’t—”

“Clara, listen to my voice. You don’t have to do this alone. I’m coming over. Do not do anything until I get there. Clara? Clara!”

 

* * * * *

 

Simon drinks the green.

Then he looks at Jane—her lovely arm and lovely head—preserved as best he knows how, in the refrigeration unit he had installed in his basement.

“This is romance, right?”

She does not answer.

He understands.

More absinthe and the Corbies are ready. One handed. Simon could do this one handed.

“With one arm tied behind my back,” he says.

Boys always want to impress girls. Eh, Jane?

Simon takes his scalpel and looks down at the chalk-white monster. No legs. Grubby clothes. Dog tags. Doll’s eyes. And teeth and teeth and teeth.

“What pumpkin did you hatch out of?” Simon says.

He cuts.

 

* * * * *

 

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

 

* * * * *

 

“He’s dead,” Nyx says. There is moaning and a radio commercial in the background.

“What,” says Simon, over the phone.

Her voice wavers. “Officer Polhaus.”

“John?”

Simon slumps to the basement floor. He’d told Polhaus everything he’d discovered in the Dead Water. The creature on his table had a name: Billy Reinard. Billy was a war vet, a war hero—lost both legs—chair bound—down and out. Billy frequented a shelter and soup kitchen at a local Catholic church. The priest there, Father Gary, was always so nice. Billy liked Father Gary. But Billy had a confession to give Simon, in the Dead Water: he had stolen from Father Gary. “Didn’t mean any harm,” he said. He was just so sick of the same soup, the same sandwiches served at the shelter. Father Gary left his office and there, on his desk, was his lunch. “Just a bite, mind you. I took just a bite.” The rare meat in that sandwich was the sweetest thing Billy had ever tasted; it gave him the purest joy he’d felt in years. Every day, if he could manage, he stole a strip of the red, red meat that Father Gary always had in his personal lunch. “Just a taste, mind you.” It was so good.

But then the dreams started. Horrible dreams—eating friend and enemy alike on the battlefield. Eating nuns and priests served raw and dripping, at the soup kitchen. Eating everything he had lost or wanted: his legs, money, women, a sports car. Eating it all a bite at a time and swallowing the sun as a chaser. By the end of the week, Billy woke from his nightmares, in a familiar alley, a dripping trail of innards leading from his mouth to the torn-open belly of a friend he bummed smokes off of.

After that, there was little left of Billy but the Hunger.

As it turned out, Father Gary had been in trouble not so long ago. “He’s known to harbor the occasional illegal alien,” Polhaus had said on the phone. “Got in trouble from time to time, but was always seen as meaning well. Only ever got a slap on the wrist. Oh Christ!”

“What?” Simon had asked.

“Aliens and homeless. They’re both bodies that no one misses. Easy meat.”

The last Simon knew, Polhaus had gone to the church to check it out, maybe talk with Father Gary.

“What happened?” Simon asks Nyx when he snaps out of the reverie.

“I don’t know, exactly,” says Nyx. Simon can hear the tears she’s holding back. “The details are sketchy. Nothing on the news except that something violent happened at the church. No comments other than he’s dead.”

More moaning in the background.

“We have other problems,” says Nyx. “Clara is . . . not well.”

“. . . sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry. I want to apologize . . . I want to take it back . . .” says a voice cutting into the phone, a voice sounding something like Clara’s.

“Meet me at the body shop,” Nyx sighs.

 

* * * * *

 

“I want to apologize . . . I’m sorry . . .” says Clara from the tattoo chair. She looks into her hands. “Oh . . . I miss my hair.” It had been coming out, in handfuls, since the car trip over.

With a neutral face, Simon examines Clara. Her skin is pale, not quite chalk white. Her once-blue eyes are black holes swimming in a shrinking field of white. Her teeth are falling out. Simon can make out tiny white points protruding from the gums where the tooth had been, and—”

Clara makes a noise in the back of her throat.

“Simon, be nimble,” mutter the Corbies. “Simon, be quick!”

Simon pulls his hand back an instant before Clara’s mouth snaps shut.

“Oh . . . sorry. I’m sorry Simon. I didn’t mean to—sorry . . . sorry . . . I’m so very sorry . . .”

“It’s okay, Clara. It’ll be okay.”

My bedside manner is no good, Jane. Not with the living.

“It’s like what we found at the cemetery,” Simon whispers to Nyx. “I think it happens in stages, like a sickness. The nightmares first, and then . . .”

Clara squeezes Bob. It does not help.

“What should we do?” Nyx asks.

“I’m not sure,” whispers Simon. “If it progresses further, we might have to restrain her.”

Nyx glances at the stained bandages on his hand. “I thought you were getting that hand looked at.”

“I will.”

Nyx shakes her head and turns to the woman in the chair. “Clara, listen to me. I know it feels bad now, but we’re going to get to the bottom of this. Promise.”

“Thank you, Nyx. I . . . wish—I’m sorry for causing trouble. I—I wish I could take it back.”

“We need to regroup,” says Nyx. “But not everyone’s answering my calls. I’ll take Clara and go round up some of the others. I need you to go get Zack. He’s probably on his computer. And—wait. Clara, what did you do to Bob?”

“Sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”

 

* * * * *

 

Samantha taught aura reading and meditative defenses against psychic vampirism on Tuesdays. She did not know any defenses against the teeth that cracked open her skull or the tongue that cleaned her brainpan white.

They will never find her body.

 

* * * * *

 

Jolly Roger does not move.

Byron bobs his head, nervously plucks his feathers and caws at his master.

“The mimes become its food!” shrieks the corvid.

Jolly Roger does not move.

Ignoring ancient pacts and disobeying older laws, the carrion bird refuses to eat what is left of his master.

 

* * * * *

 

“Subject: Zack,” Simon says.

Zack sits at his computer desk.

The lock on the door had been easy for Simon to open. The smell had made finding Zack easier. He had defecated in his pants, several times over.

“Subject is dehydrated and malnourished to an improbable degree.”

The snap of blue gloves and Simon examines the bites along the arms.

“Subject gnawed on his own arms.”

On the computer screen, blinking with promises and testimonials, is the Apex Consumers home page: Take a bigger bite out of life!

 

* * * * *

 

Kenny slides behind a dumpster—dirty, knees scraped, body bruised. He knows he’s going to die. The woman from the special chat line whispers through his cell phone that he won’t and then she moans and then she says, “Oh, Kenny. You’re turning me on so bad . . .”

“Candy, I’m scared. What do I do now?” he says, feeling the pounding in his chest.

“You’re doing all right, baby. You’re doing so good. Now just move a little to the right . . .”

Kenny slides to the right, behind the dumpster and against a brick wall.

“Oh! Mmmmmm,” says Candy. “Oh, that’s perfect . . . oh, God. Yes. Mmmmm. Just hold that position for me baby. Just a little longer . . . and be very quiet.”

Scraping steps.

Snuffling and sniffing.

The steps move away.

“That’s good, Kenny. That’s so goooooooooood. I’m getting wet. Just stay where you are for a little longer. And you can make noise now, if you want.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” gasps Kenny. “I’m dead. So dead.”

“No, lover. You make it out okay. Some of the others won’t be so lucky, though. Poor Zack. And be careful of Clara. She will either kill some of your friends . . . or maybe she’ll save them.”

Silence, then Candy’s breaths come quicker and quicker, turn into panting.

“Kenny? Are . . . you ready—oh—when I say ‘go’ . . . you run, to the right . . . and then you run as fast as you can . . . until you get to the Sanctuary. Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Now! Oh! Do it now!”

Kenny runs.

“Yes . . . mmm . . . yes!” screams Candy.

Kenny turns right.

“Oh, yeah. Right there,” moans Candy. “That’s it, baby. Keep doing it. Run harder. Harder, harder! Yes! Almost there. Oh, God. Yes . . . yes . . . yes!”

 

* * * * *

 

“I apologize . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to,” says the muffled voice of Clara, from inside the trunk of Nyx’s car.

“We know, Clara,” says Nyx as she stands in the old church parking lot, examining the wounded boy’s bleeding arm. His name is Jordan, one of the newer Sanctuary members. Nyx doesn’t even warn him about the pain before she applies the stitches.

“We’re dropping like flies,” she mutters.

Finally everyone gets into their vehicles, grateful for the distance from Clara’s drone of apologies. Only Nyx and Simon, sitting in Nyx’s car, hear the apologies finally fade, only to be replaced by growls and scratching.

“As you can see, a lot of us didn’t show,” says Nyx. She notices Simon looking at the blood on her shirt. “Little Robin, she’s such a good girl. One of those, huh, one of those things came and—well, good thing Robin’s damned skilled at hide ’n’ seek. That gave me enough time to kill it before it could get her.”

Simon has heard snatches of other, similar horror stories from many in the parking lot. The worst of the tales remain unsaid.

A sudden shout draws their attention.

“I’m cumming, I’m cumming!” yells Kenny as he rams against Nyx’s car. He thuds against the passenger side door in a gasping heap, the worse for wear. When Simon rolls down the window, Kenny holds up his sweaty cell phone. “She . . . she wanted . . . to talk . . . to you,” he says, handing the phone to Simon.

“Hello?” says Simon.

“Oh my. You have a handsome voice.”

“Who is this?”

“I’m Candy. You can call me Mother, if you’d like, you naughty little boy.”

“Why would I—?”

“I’ll be seeing you very soon, Simon.”

The line silences. Simon sees the flash in his mind, in the memory of the static and the signal, the scalpel-scrawled words on his wall: The Mother.

Candy: the Mother. Queen of diamonds.

“This is all pretty bad,” Nyx says as Simon drops the phone out the window, onto Kenny’s lap. “But we actually have contingencies for this sort of thing.” Her purple lips are curled and bleak. “Procedures. A safe house in Silver Lake, Wisconsin. Everyone thought we were being too paranoid. Ha.”

Simon nods, trying to ignore the Corbie song in his head.

Nyx gives a signal and all the cars rumble to life.

“You’re coming, Simon. Right?”

He shakes his head.

“Simon, you—”

“I have things to do.”

Just perhaps, Nyx, clever girl, catches a hint of obsession in his green eyes—the mad Corbies—the wormwood limbs poking through. Wordlessly she watches Simon get out of the car, give up his seat to Kenny. And then she leads the caravan away.

All the while the Corbie song continues in Simon’s head. They’d been singing it all day, counting down. Nearly finished.

“. . . one fell off and now it’s dead. Two little monkeys jumping on a bed; one fell off and now it’s dead . . .”

And then there was Simon.

 

 



INTERLUDE:

Fixed

 

 

Don’t have no ghost stories, Joe, not like this place. But pour me another drink and I’ll tell you something.

The animal clinic I work at—as shelters go, it’s a pretty good place to be if you’re a dog. It’s in an upscale neighborhood, gets good funding. I mean, we have a frickin’ masseuse and a no-kill policy. Most we do with a stray is wash it, neuter it, and give it some decent meals. The dogs don’t bite much; I think they know they’re getting the good treatment.

Well, it wasn’t a dark and stormy night, but almost a year ago, all the dogs lose it. I mean freak, all barking at once. I’m trying to calm the pooches down when I hear a scream. I think it sounds like Jerry, one of the young vets. I start running.

I find Jerry, in the vet room, pale as a sheet and shivering. The window in the room is busted out, shards of glass peppering the bushes outside. I figure Jerry’s in shock. He doesn’t look like he’s in pain, just vaguely embarrassed, cupping his crotch with his hands, a liquid seeping through the fingers, pitter-pattering on the tile floor. Blood.

I’m yelling his name, but Jerry doesn’t answer, just stares at his tray of instruments like they’re the tabernacle. Sure enough, among the neatly arrayed cutting instruments, are two naked testicles, staring back from the steel tray.

I get him on the table. As I try and stop the bleeding, I shout for help. But between shouts I can hear Jerry kind of whispering. Over and over again, he whispers, “Rude . . . said it was rude . . . very, very rude . . . rude . . .”

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

 

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.