Authors: Christopher Ransom
But no, there was no one in the room with them.
Spiders in the thick of his hair. Tingling.
His tongue felt dead.
Sheila held the phone to her cheek. She listened. He did not see her fingers push the buttons to dial. She nodded a few times, glanced at him with another of her weird smiles, and set the phone back on its cradle.
‘There’s no one home,’ she said. ‘I guess we’re stuck here for a while.’
Pete nodded, thinking, I know you’re lying. He wanted to get up and run but he couldn’t. He could move his feet, his legs and arms, turn his head. But his will was gone. She had done something inside his mind. The willpower to take action had been snipped like a piece of string, and Sheila was the scissors.
‘I’m going to take a shower, Pete,’ she said.
He nodded. He began to hum.
A long time later, she reappeared. He was still staring at the blank TV screen when she stepped in front of it. She was naked. There were scars up and down her torso, her belly, around her thighs. Long sleek scars like burn marks, or lashes from a whip. Her breasts were small, flat, oddly muscular. Her pubic region was a small riot of jungle. Her hips were bruised purple and yellow. She stood before him dripping wet from her shower and he could not look up into her eyes. He knew that if he looked at her face, he would see that it had changed. He could feel that her smile was gone. He could feel her bared teeth. One of her fingernails had crusts of red near the cuticle.
‘Oh, Pete,’ she said. ‘Poor Pete.’
She walked behind him, into the kitchenette. A drawer opened. Utensils clinked. She walked back into the living room and in her left hand was a dull steel butter knife. She shook the handle so that the flat blade slapped against her thigh, pat pat pat, over and over. It’s just a butter knife, he thought. Literally the thing you use to spread butter across a roll. She can’t possibly think she’s going to get anywhere with that.
Pete giggled a little and leaned forward to sit up. When he did, a cold belt of force tightened against his chest and slammed him back into the couch cushions. The force was so distinct, he looked down to see the strap, but there was nothing there around his dress shirt.
His hands were on his thighs. ‘What are you doing?’ he tried to say.
Sheila’s mouth did not open as he distinctly heard the words, ‘We’re going to experience murder now. Together. Wait until you try this. You’ve never felt anything like it. Are you ready?’
‘No,’ Pete Sampson said, hearing his own yes echoed back at him.
‘Good. That echo you hear? That’s me inside your head. I’m going to bring you into me now, and I will be inside of you. It’s called sympathetic murder. Have you ever heard of that, Pete?’
‘No.’
‘It’s really magical,’ Sheila said, and still he could not look up at her. He could see her naked body. Her scar tissue. The flat seam of her belly button. ‘This way, the chosen and the devourer get to share each other’s experience, in effect erasing the whole concept of murder completely. There is no suffering. My will is your will. Your will is mine. I’m sort of controlling the whole show now, but you get to come along for the ride, and you will attain immortality within my temple.’
Pete was aware of hot tears streaming down his cheeks. They tickled and he wished he could wipe them away.
‘All right,’ the woman said. ‘Here we go.’
Inside of Pete, something pulled hard, and he felt himself yanked from the couch, above the floor, flying like a child who has been grabbed by a very angry father, and he was slamming into the woman without resistance or impact. His vision went blurry pink and flesh-toned, with veins of red like closing your eyes to look at the sun, and then he was looking back down at himself on the couch. There was Pete Sampson, sitting on the couch in the hotel room, looking up with stark terror in his eyes. His cheeks were wet. His pants were wet around the crotch. His fingers were clenched around his work slacks. His mouth was open, saliva dripping down his chin. He looked like a patient in a hospital, one who had suffered a severe stroke.
Inside her, here in the other one, his perception of himself was sustained but only dimly. He felt enveloped in something stronger, feminine, fiercely on edge. A woman re-conceptualized as a razor blade, or maybe a starving alley cat. Seething hatred boiled in her blood, his blood. Dark, horrifying memories flash-flooded in and out of his mind, blinding him to the hotel room for seconds at a time: a bloodstained bedroom floor, a little girl’s bed, black candles lighted and melting in every direction, a leather belt stripping itself from a pair of dirty brown work pants, black symbols smeared across the walls, on his skin, her skin, the little girl’s skin, a mother watching with black eyes…
The young man on the couch started to scream and the female fury controlling Pete locked his every muscle with her own and together they sprang forward, straddling the young man on the couch. He bucked and thrashed. Her thighs were shower wet astride him and the butter knife slipped in her fist. He felt her fingers aching with tension. She used him to bring it down with terrible force. The dull rounded tip stabbed into the neck four times before the skin broke. The side of her hand stuffed itself into his mouth and he felt her hand going into his mouth even as he brought the knife down again into the soft hollow of the young man’s throat. Bite marks. First on his hand, which was her hand in his mouth, then on the young man’s ears from her teeth. The pain was exquisite and immeasurable. It was a fire and a rage, hot agony, a self-demolition.
Pete Sampson stopped screaming. He collapsed inside the woman, his spirit shriveling as he ceased struggling and became a hanged but not yet dead man inside the closet of the woman killing him.
The knife went up and down more than seventy times, but the last thirty or forty slashes were Sheila’s and Sheila’s alone and Pete Sampson did not feel them.
He turned away inside her, into darkness, receding from the windows of her eyes and the light of the hotel room down into a hall of many rooms, through a door, inside an empty bedroom with nothing on the floor, and he knew the other rooms were also occupied and he was not alone.
When she finished, out of breath, she felt clean again. She felt safe, protected, and as comfortably sated as a serpent who has ingested meal enough to last three months.
She walked into the bathroom, to look at herself in the mirror. Dots and splashes of blood speckled and striped her naked form, but she hardly noticed these. She was staring into the eyes, her own dark eyes, looking for him. She knew he was in there somewhere, probably cowering in shock. She leaned closer to the mirror, inspecting her dilated pupils. The circles of green around them had taken on a filigree of gold.
He had been a sweet boy, Pete Sampson. She would never forget him. He would always be with her, inside of her, a forever friend who had come to her aid in a time of need with his sympathy. He would follow her everywhere, experience all she experienced, and grow old with her. A loving companion and kindred soul, like the other twenty-seven she had swallowed.
‘Don’t worry, Pete. I’ll take good care of you.’
The mirror blurred and darkened around her beautiful countenance, but Sheila held her own gaze, and that of the others, as long as possible, until the Residence Inn and Hotel Room was but a memory.
Then she was looking into a different mirror, a smaller oval mirror on a stand. The stand was perched on a glass top, one lined with bottles of perfume at its bottom and a cash register to one side. She was not standing in a bathroom, but behind a glass display counter. Bright lights overhead, plastic mannequins arranged across the gleaming white floor in front of her. A cacophony of female voices and the soft, insinuating drone of muzak filled the air.
‘She’s not even listening,’ someone said. ‘What is she staring at in that mirror?’
Sheila blinked, realizing she was at work, in Nordstrom Rack. Worse, she was no longer twenty-seven and in her prime, at the peak of her powers. Within seconds the face in the mirror aged (fifteen? eighteen?) too many years, and Sheila was forced to look away, to a pair of impatient old women standing just a few feet away. One was staring at her, drumming her red nails on the glass.
‘Excuse me, ma’am? Can I have some service down here? Isn’t there someone who can help me?’
Sheila turned on her high heels and click-clocked to the woman. That the woman was hideously aged beyond Sheila’s years did not alleviate the drill of rage that shot forth inside her upon hearing herself referred to as ‘ma’am’. But then, when was the last time any of these old goats called her ‘miss’?
Sheila located a mood mask somewhere below the gift packs of perfume and skin toner and anti-aging creams and pasted it across her lips, transforming a snarl into a bright smile.
‘I can help you, dear,’ she said. ‘What are we shopping for today?’
The old goat began to babble and Sheila was grateful for the Reliving with Pete Sampson. It had lasted longer than any she had been able to achieve in the past six months, but it was getting harder to stay there, in touch with her collection of the devoured. Which could only mean one thing.
She was going to have to find some sympathy again.
Soon.
The sun arced across the cloudless sky and swung the shade of one particularly large maple tree in North Boulder Park around like the minute hand on a giant watch with a face of lush green grass. The sun crawled over his sneakers, up his legs and shirt, until it reached his pale cheeks and fluttering eyelids and sprung fresh dew sweat from his brow, making him dizzy with heat and dehydration. He sat up, blinking until the blinding brightness receded and the park was revealed.
Only a couple kids remained on the playground, near the swings and the teeter-totters, their parents cleaning up after the birthday party that had thronged the clubhouse earlier. Behind him, the riotous game of flag football had ended and now there were only a few college-aged guys sitting around a red cooler, sipping beers. There had been a man with a pair of black Labradors, but that Frisbee-playing trio was gone too. The diminished numbers left him uneasy, but it was still daylight and he didn’t think The Nocturnals would risk coming for him out here, not while there were at least a few regular people in the area.
He counted himself lucky he hadn’t slept all day under this tree, waking after darkfall. The bike was laid over in the grass beside him, the heavy chain tangled in the spokes to serve as an alarm should someone try to steal it.
Adam reached into the plastic grocery sack and took out another bottle of water and drank half its contents in one go. He caught his breath, finished it, and put the bottle with the rest of the trash: two empty potato chips bags, the wrapper to a ham and swiss sandwich, three granola bar wrappers, and two banana peels. All that was left were the two apples, the can of beef stew he was saving for dinner, a bottle of macadamia nuts, and the last bottle of water. He removed these and shoved them in his backpack.
Stealing his meals had been easier than he imagined. After so much desperation, he kicked himself for not heading directly to the nearest grocery store weeks or months ago. There wasn’t any secret to it. He didn’t cram things into his pack when no one was looking, scurrying out the back in a terrified dash. He’d simply ridden by the giant Safeway store on 28th Street, taken one look inside at all the people going in and out, the few employees working, let alone paying attention, while half the people in the store used the new self-checkout lanes, and the strategy became clear.
He found a discarded receipt in one of the carts at the front of the store, took a plastic bag from one of the checkout lanes, then wandered the aisles, adding foods that would travel well to his bag. On his way out, he kept the receipt displayed for anyone watching him. The bike was chained to a parking sign ten feet from the door and within seconds he was cruising across the parking lot, then behind two strip malls, back into a neighborhood of apartment buildings, vanishing into the town.
He’d taken to riding at night, sleeping here and at other parks during the days, near groups of people. It seemed to be working. He had not been chased in three days.
Adam got to his feet and stretched, then pulled on his backpack. After disposing of his trash, he walked his bike down the center of the big park, loosening his legs. He passed two small baseball diamonds where some kids were warming up for Little League, though it must have been practice because they weren’t wearing jerseys and there were hardly any parents in the risers. The sight of baseball mitts and bats and chalked baselines failed to stir any longing in him. To Adam the boys looked to be engaged in a stupid, meaningless game. He resented the way they chattered and chased after the baseballs their studly-dudley coach was plinking at them, clueless to the ugliness and danger lurking behind the curtain of this sunny play land.
Adam didn’t care about sports, unless riding bikes was a sport, in which case he cared about that a lot. Teamwork, the coach shouted at them. Teamwork! A bike wasn’t a team, it was for him, a team of one, and it was survival, and that was fine because a team couldn’t save you from anything that happened off the field. A team wasn’t going to be there in the middle of the night when the ghastly things came to drink your blood.
But where the hell was he going?
A goal or plan of some kind seemed to have seized him during the delirium of his binge eating. Something to do with a theory about Boulder and all the changes he kept noticing. Like the big Safeway store, which was twice the size of any grocery store he remembered, and nicer, with wooden floors in the produce section, and two whole aisles dedicated to health-food items (none of which had looked remotely tasty to him). The self-checkout lanes were another weird development. He hadn’t even known what he was looking at until he saw the other customers swiping their credit cards in the machines and heard the robotic female voice walking them through each step, telling them to ‘PUT THE SCANNED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA’ and ‘PLEASE CONTINUE SCANNING YOUR ITEMS’ and ‘PLEASE SELECT YOUR METHOD OF PAYMENT’.
That had been a shock, almost like he had stepped into one of those movies about the future. Except, Adam knew this wasn’t the future, because in those movies, and in his
Questar
magazine, there were always flying cars and the people wore clothes made of tinfoil and there were robots and aliens everywhere. The fancy grocery store and the new houses and the other things that seemed out of place weren’t like that. A lot of the cars looked newer than he remembered, but they weren’t spaceships.
He was pretty sure he had lived here, before the thing that messed up his memory came along and changed him. And he was still a kid, so whatever happened, it couldn’t have been that long ago. Who does a kid live with? His family.
What happened to his parents? Somebody had to be responsible for bringing him into this world. But when he searched his mind and heart for them, there was only a cold emptiness. If he’d had a family at one time, shouldn’t he miss them? Or, if they were bad people, the kind you’re better off running away from, wouldn’t you feel sad about that?
Angry? Hurt? Confused?
He was nearing the south end of the park, where a large triangular flower bed stood in one corner, made of stacked railroad ties, containing at least a hundred or more yellow and orange flowers. Those looked familiar, as did the small brown apartment building at the end of the park, and the huge drooping trees lining the other corner. Weeping willows, they were called.
He stopped in his tracks.
He was only a couple hundred feet from the end of the park, but something was standing in the shade of two massive willow trees. A big brown truck with a dirty white camper shell on the back, parked horizontally, one whole flank facing him. The camper windows were dark, either from tinting or lack of sunlight, though he thought he could detect curtains behind one of them.
The sight of the truck and that camper shell made the hair at the back of his neck come alive. He knew it from somewhere. A quiver of fear slid down his gullet, twisting through him until his entire body felt numb, stuck.
No, it can’t be. They’re not human, so they can’t drive. It’s just a truck sitting by the park. Some family passing through town on a vacation. That’s all it is.
But he didn’t believe this.
The truck should have been obvious sooner, but it was so brown and dirty and close to the apartment building and the trees, it was almost hiding in plain sight, like whoever owned the truck had chosen that precise spot because they knew it would be camouflaged.
Nothing had happened yet, and no one had come for him in the park, so maybe they weren’t even in there. Maybe the camper shell was empty. The truck might belong to someone else. Part of him wanted to walk right up to it, to have himself a good look just to prove there was nothing to be afraid of. If something happened, he could scream for help, or ride away. If nothing happened, he might learn something by peering inside.
He might remember something that would later save his life.
Adam continued walking his bike toward the truck, veering slightly left, angling ahead of its front end. If he could read the license plate, memorize it, that could be useful. That would mean going to the police or a private detective at least, but he might need the police sooner or later.
He was perhaps fifty feet away when he realized no one was using this end of the park. No couples sitting on a blanket, no kids playing, not even a student reading a book. It was probably crazy to think such a thing was possible, but right now it felt like the truck and its big fiberglass camper shell were giving off a dark energy, dangerous vibes, a sense of wrongness that repelled people who probably hadn’t even noticed it here. It was just part of the background, something you subconsciously avoid, like the mouth of a dark alleyway in a crime-infested city.
Thirty feet away. Adam slowed.
He could feel the rotten spirit within it now, like toxins in the air, nausea building inside him. He could almost see the cramped, cluttered seats and the tiny table inside piled with trash, the shabby brown curtains hanging limply over the grease-smudged windows, and it would never be bright and fresh in there, no matter where it was parked, no matter how much sunlight shined upon it. The smell. Inside, the camper smelled like dirty socks and raw onions, and something else, something wet and muddy but not dirt, like the blood you find in the bottom of a foam tray of spoiled hamburger. The scent of animals left on the highway, baking in the sun, the organs rotting until the gases burst through the skin.
Twenty feet away.
The tires were huge but worn down, the hood split at one corner like a busted lip. A thick white antenna reached up from the right side like a crooked branch of bone, a dirty tennis ball stuck to the top.
It wasn’t a camper. It was a den, the den of animals pretending to be human. Ghastly things lived in there, this was their home, and they used it to roam around in search of children, boys like him, or maybe
only
him, and when they couldn’t find him, they killed other people and took cups filled with blood inside and drank them like milkshakes, spilling it on themselves, eating peeled patches of human skin, wallowing in flesh the way most families would consume a fried chicken dinner.
Adam was shivering in the sunlight on a day that had to be at least seventy-five degrees. He stopped, but he could not tear his eyes away from the truck.
Somewhere inside, maybe up high in the top bunk overhanging the truck’s cabin, nestled deep under blankets that hadn’t been washed in years, burrowed between pillows grimed with sweat and blood and saliva and sex messes, something monstrous was dozing. Sleeping away the day. Rebuilding itself and digesting its last meal in deep slumber, building up stores of energy for tonight’s hunt.
‘Like me,’ Adam whispered.
That’s how he knew, because what had he done today?
Travelled. Fed. Found a patch of shade.
And slept.
The things inside the camper were keeping the same schedule. He’d lost them at the house because they stayed behind to feed. Eventually they’d followed him here, or felt his presence in the vicinity, but were too tired to track him further. They’d come as close as they were able, going by sense or smell or some kind of intuition (an intuition not so different from the bizarre trance that gripped him now), and when they couldn’t go another step, they collapsed with exhaustion.
And if this were true, if he could sense them from out here, then it must also be true they could sense
him
from in there. The presence of so many people might have spared him from their attack, but each step closer to their hideaway was one step closer to rousing them with his presence.
But he’d come this far. He had to know. He might never get so close again.
He took a step, then another, bringing the rest of the chipped chrome bumper into view. FORD, the grill said. The other headlight was broken, its steel cone and smashed bulb visible behind jagged glass teeth. But the license plate was bent, curled at one corner and nearly torn off, probably from the same accident that had mangled the bumper and hood.
One more step, two at most, and he would see it.
Hurry, they’re going to wake up any moment now.
He took three quick steps and it was there, the green Colorado plate with its mountain-shaped background and white lettering.
MP-3515.
Say it, say it three times in your mind, so you don’t forget.
MP-3515. MP-3515. MP-3515.
Got it. Now get the hell out of here.
Adam shuddered, forcing himself to look away. All at once he felt insane for coming so close, and he wanted to hop on his bike and ride like a demon.
But he couldn’t. It was almost like he was inside the camper with them, tiptoeing over the trash and junk on the floor, and any sudden movement or the slightest crinkle of paper would snap them awake. Somehow they had found themselves in a fragile peace, a time out from the hunt due to their mutual need for sleep. If he bolted now, he might sever the connection too abruptly, like tearing the bandage off one of his scraped knees before the scab had time to heal.
He didn’t run. He walked until he was out of the shade, back into the harsh glare of sunlight, and then casually lifted one leg over the bike and kicked himself along the grass, afraid to pedal.
He thought of looking back one final time, but somehow even that small gesture seemed it would doom him. They would slither down from their filthy bunk, rip open the camper’s back door and come bounding after him like a pair of man-eating lions. Drag him back to their lair. The blood-soaked interior of the camper would be the last thing he ever saw.
When his bike rolled onto clean sidewalk, he began to pedal, dipping through the crosswalk, watching for oncoming cars. He bunny-hopped the next curb, found his stride, and passed a hospital’s emergency room entrance. Three blocks later, when he finally looked back, the brown Ford truck was nowhere to be seen.
Only the mountains watched over him, and this place he once called home.