Nocturnal: A Novel

Hillary’s lip curled into a sneer. “Firstborn has decided to grace us with his presence. Now we may begin.”

Down on the ship, masked men moved the boy with no tongue. They rolled him to the center of the smashed deck and rested his dolly against the mast of skulls. The mast’s combination of burning torches and blazing, naked electric lights cast harsh, flickering shadows on his terrified face.

Less than an hour ago, that boy had been in the white dungeon with Aggie.

“Hillary, what happens to him now?”

She smiled. “Now the children come out to play.”

Halfway between the mast and the prow, a hatch wiggled. A black-gloved, white-sleeved arm pushed it open.

Two little kids climbed out.

Hillary let out a breathy awwww, then slapped Aggie’s leg. “They are so cute!”

Just kids. A boy and a girl, maybe three or four years old. They wore filthy, secondhand pajamas. The boy was white and blond. He could have been any of the rich little brats from the Marina part of town. His shirt had the faded remains of a San Francisco 49ers pattern. The girl had darker skin and red hair. Her pajamas were blue with a flopping, almost-off iron-on of Barney.

Even from his perch over a hundred feet away, he could see that both of them held something metallic in each tiny, dirty little hand. They moved a few feet from the hatch. As they did, the lights played off the metal enough for Aggie to realize what it was they carried.

Each of them held a fork and a knife.

More kids crawled out, but these weren’t even remotely human. One looked like a wrinkled yellow bat. Another had a bumpy shell, with fingers as long as its whole arm and a huge, hard, long thumb that formed something like a crab claw. Still another resembled a little white-furred, red-eyed gorilla. That one wore a Sesame Street T-shirt and red flannel pajama bottoms.

These creatures waited with the blond boy and the red-haired girl. More creatures came out behind them, but Aggie had to look away — he’d seen enough.

Two white-robed masked men walked toward the boy with no tongue. They undid his restraints. He fell forward. A masked man knelt and tapped the boy on the shoulder, then pointed to the right side of the ship, the side facing Aggie. The boy looked that way. Aggie saw the object of attention: a ladder leading down into the trenches.

The masked men hurried their dolly to another hatch halfway between the mast and Mommy’s cabin. They lowered the dolly, crawled inside and pulled the hatch shut behind them.

The boy with no tongue stood up. Aggie saw muscles under those pajamas. The teenager looked around, clearly stunned by the cavern’s breadth and strangeness — then his eyes fell upon the small monsters.

From inside Mommy’s cabin, the hidden trumpeter played a long, single note.

The boy with no tongue ran for the ladder. He grabbed it and scrambled down, athletic and graceful if a bit sluggish. He hit the bottom and sprinted down a maze trench.

The crowd suddenly cheered, a sound just like every sporting event Aggie had ever seen.

Like a pack of tiny wolves, the children rushed to the side of the deck. Tumbling, little-kid running carried them forward, pajama-clad feet zip-zipping across the dirty wood. They didn’t bother with the ladder — they just leaped, dropping fifteen feet down to the uneven trench floors below. Some landed gracefully. Others hit hard in a clumsy mess of arms and legs. The children screamed and laughed, stepping over each other to chase after the boy with no tongue.

Hillary giggled an old woman’s giggle. She clapped her hands. “So cute!”

The teenager sprinted through the trenches. He banked left and right, without pattern or thought, sometimes turning a corner so fast his momentum would slam him into a wall. Pieces of rock and dirt fell wherever he hit. A trail of dust followed behind him, almost as if he were smoldering. Sometimes the trench walls obscured any sight of him, and sometimes Aggie could see all of the terrified boy.

The chasing children split up and rushed down different trenches, little feet pounding away in pursuit.

Hillary pointed toward the one with the long fingers and the pointy thumb. “Crabapple Bob is my favorite,” she said. “He’s a nice boy. I hope he gets the groom.” She sounded like any old aunt or grandmother watching kids run and play, like this was nothing more than an Easter egg hunt and she was rooting for her favorite to find a hidden chocolate bunny.

The teenager turned down a trench that led straight toward Aggie’s spot. Aggie saw the look of panic on the kid’s face, the wide-eyed stare, the open mouth, the blood-streaked chin, the snot hanging from his nose and trailing across his cheek. And from this angle, Aggie saw the little blond boy with the faded 49ers shirt coming down an intersecting trench from the left.

The little boy turned the corner to block the teenager’s path, then raised his fork and knife. The crowd cheered in excitement. The teenager didn’t slow a bit — he kicked out with all the strength of a muscular, nearly full-grown man. His foot smashed into the little boy’s face, throwing his tiny body backward and into a trench wall. Blood instantly poured from the kid’s mouth.

The crowd booed.

“Aww, that’s too bad,” Hillary said. “I like little Amil.”

The teenager’s running kick had thrown him off balance. He stumbled, then fell to his knees, hands skidding across the rock-strewn path. From behind him came the bat-thing and the nightmarish Crabapple Bob.

Hillary clapped. “Go, Bob!”

The teenager scrambled to his feet. Blood poured from his left knee. He hopped in a mad lurch that threatened to spill him to the ground again.

Kids closed in from trenches on the left and on the right. A mass of shapes and colors, the glint of forks and knives reflecting the flickering torchlight, the happy squeals of children at play. The gorilla boy came from the left, running fast on all fours to pass the others. At an intersection, he shot out and tackled the hopping teenage boy. Together they tumbled into a trench wall, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt.

Crabapple Bob and the bat-thing dove on the pile. The teenager punched and kicked. The little monsters stabbed. The rest of the children poured in, burying the teenager beneath a pile of twisted, tiny bodies. Forks and knives rose up and down, up and down, flashing clean at first, then trailing arcs of blood.

Aggie watched. That could have easily been him down there. “Why?” he croaked from a dry throat. “Why would you do this?”

“Well, they have to learn how to hunt, don’t they? They have to get the taste.”

Aggie saw the little red-haired girl dart out of the swarm. She held a bloody, severed hand. She ran away from the pack, giggling and gnawing on the thumb like a kid working a caramel apple.

“They’re eating him!” Aggie said, managing to yell without yelling, to pack all his panic and horror into a hissing whisper.

Down in the trenches, body parts came loose. A curl of intestine flipped up, arced wetly, then fell on top of something that looked like a blue-furred wolf boy wearing a Hannah Montana sweatshirt. Blood spread across the trench floor, turning it into red mud. The giggling kids tore at the body, played in the blood-mud like any child in any sandbox anywhere in the world.

Hillary sighed. “They always get so dirty.”

A swarm of masked men, hundreds of them, ran through the trenches and closed in on the kids, white robes swishing with each step. Some of them carried hacksaws. They rushed to the mass of bloody-muddy children, pulled them off and held them up while little hands and feet kicked in protest. Aggie had a brief glimpse of the teenager’s body — pajamas soaked head to toe in blood, right shoulder ripped open, left foot gone, intestine strings spread about and trampled flat into the dirt.

The masked men went to work with the hacksaws.

Aggie felt eyes upon him. He turned his head to the right, as little as possible, and looked out of the corner of his eye — the man with the snake hair was staring right at him.

A tap on his shoulder, Hillary’s mouth near his ear. “Follow me. They have smelled something on you. Keep your eyes toward the ground and make no noise, or you will wind up as the next groom.”