Pershing didn't find the story amusing this time. The laughter sounded canned and made him consider the artificiality of the entire situation, man's supposed mastery of nature and darkness. Beyond this feeble bubble of light yawned a chasm. He'd drunk more than his share these past few days; had helped himself to Wanda's Valium. None of these measures did the trick of allowing him to forget where he'd gone or what he'd seen; it hadn't convinced him that his worst memories were the products of nightmare. Wanda's touch repulsed him, confined him. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide beneath the covers until everything bad went away.
It grew chilly and the bonfire died to coals. The others drifted off to sleep. The cabin had two bedrooms — Elgin claimed one, and as the other married couple, Mel and Gina were awarded the second. Pershing and Wanda settled for an air mattress near the fireplace. When the last of the beer was gone, he extricated himself from her and rose to stretch. 'I'm going inside,' he said. She smiled and said she'd be along soon. She wanted to watch the stars a bit longer.
Pershing stripped to his boxers and lay on the air mattress. He pulled the blanket to his chin and stared blankly at the rafters. His skin was clammy and it itched fiercely. Sharp, throbbing pains radiated from his knees and shoulders. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He remembered the day he'd talked to Mark Ordbecker, the incredible heat, young Eric's terrified expression as he skulked behind his father. Little pitchers and big ears. The boy heard the voices crooning from below, hadn't he?
A purple ring of light flickered on the rough-hewn beam directly overhead. It pulsed and blurred with each thud of his heart. The ring shivered like water and changed. His face was damp, but not from tears, not from sweat. He felt his knuckle joints split, the skin and meat popping and peeling like an overripe banana. What had Terry said about eating the young and immortality?
A mental switch clicked and he smiled at the memory of creeping into Eric's room and plucking him from his bed; later, the child's hands fluttering, nerveless, the approving croaks and cries of his new kin. He shuddered in ecstasy and burst crude seams in a dozen places. He threw off the blanket and stood, swaying, drunk with revelation. His flesh was a chrysalis, leaking gore.
Terry and Gloria watched him from the doorways of the bedrooms — naked and ghostly, and smiling like devils. Behind them, the rooms were silent. He looked at their bodies, contemptuous that anyone could be fooled for two seconds by these distorted forms, or by his own.
Then he was outside under the cold, cold stars.
Wanda huddled in her shawl, wan and small in the firelight. Finally she noticed him, tilting her head so she could meet his eyes. 'Sweetie, are you waiting for me?' She gave him a concerned smile. The recent days of worry and doubt had deepened the lines of her brow.
He regarded her from the shadows, speechless as his mouth filled with blood. He touched his face, probing a moist delineation just beneath the hairline; a fissure, a fleshy zipper. Near his elbow, Terry said, 'The first time, it's easier if you just snatch it off.'
Pershing gripped a flap of skin. He swept his hand down and ripped away all the frailties of humanity.
Usurped
William Browning Spencer
William Browning Spencer is the author of the innovative Lovecraftian novel
They were driving back from El Paso, where they had been visiting Meta's parents, when Brad saw something shimmering on the road, a heat mirage or, perhaps, some internal aberration, those writhing, silver amoebae that were the harbingers of one of his murderous migraines.
Meta had insisted that they turn the air off and roll the windows down. 'I love this desert air,' she had said, inhaling dramatically.
'Nothing like the smell of diesel fumes at dusk,' Brad had responded, only he hadn't. He was thirty-six years old, and he had been married for almost half his life, and he loved his wife, loved her enthusiasm for the flawed world, and understood how easily, how unthinkingly, he could curdle her good mood with his reflexive cynicism. Besides, the trucks that had heaved by earlier were gone, as was their stink, and the two-lane highway he presently followed was devoid of all vehicles and had been ever since he'd abandoned the more straightforward eastbound path.
Having satisfied himself that the cloud was illusion, a trick of nature or his mind, he no longer saw it. Such is the power of reason.
And then, like that, the wasps filled the cab. Incredibly, amid the pandemonium and his panic, he knew them instantly for what they were, saw one, red-black and vile, arc its abdomen and plunge its stinger into his bare forearm, a revolting, indelible mental snapshot. A whirring of wings, wind buffeting his ears, thwack of bodies, one crawling on his neck, another igniting his cheek with bright pain, and Meta shrieking — and he made a sound of his own, an
He blinked and a hundred thousand stars regarded him. He lay on his back, unable to summon full consciousness, resistant to what its return might mean. Breathing was not easy; the air was full of razors. He rolled onto his side, slowly. Mesquite and cacti and unruly juniper threw tortured shadows across a flat, moonlit expanse that stretched toward distant mountains.
He raised himself on his elbows; a knife-thrust of pain took his breath away, and he was still, waiting, as a deer might freeze at the sound of a predator. He slid his right hand under his T-shirt, and he found the source of the pain, more than he wanted to find, ragged bloody flesh and the broken spike of a rib.
He stood and might have thought to rejoice that he had no greater injuries, that he had, miraculously, survived the wreck, but he couldn't imagine more pain; he had a plenitude of pain, a surfeit. Meta might say —
He saw the Ranger then, lying on its side, the passenger door gone and the windshield gone, a bright spume of pebbled glass vomited into the sand in front of its sprung hood. 'Meta!' he shouted. 'Meta!'
He limped toward the vehicle. There was something wrong with his left knee, too, as though his knee cap had been replaced with a water-filled balloon.
She wasn't in the Ranger, wasn't under it either.
Moonlight painted everything in pale silver, revealing detail in every shadow, a hallucinatory world, too precisely rendered to be real. Brad moved in slow, widening circles, calling her name. Finally, he turned toward the road, approaching a thick-trunked live oak, solitary and massive, its thousand gnarled branches festooned with small, glittering leaves. The tree, he saw, had claimed the passenger door, which lay, like a fallen warrior's shield, close to the oak's gashed trunk.
Maybe he would discover her on the other side of that thick trunk, her body hidden in some declivity, invisible until you stumbled on its very edge.
But there was no hollow to hide her body, nothing. And after he had climbed to the road, looked up and down it, and crossed to gaze at another stark vista that revealed no trace of her, he accepted what he'd already known. She wasn't here. He would have known if she were nearby — because he was connected to her, more than ever
