their daddy?'
None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading uncertain glances.
Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. 'You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You'll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you're up there, and you can share them with the rest of the class if you don't get eaten before nightfall.'
The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MRE's. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. 'Jamal Quinlan,' he said. 'I'm from Detroit.'
'John Dalton. I'm the sheriff around here.'
It was the first time I'd said my own name in five months.
It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn't sure what it felt like.
Maybe it felt like turning a page.
…
The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying yes would mean more questions, so I said, 'No, sir. I don't.'
The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.
The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn't pay them any mind.
I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.
Things are getting better now. It's quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I've got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler's trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun — the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium — those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes — if he'd never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and if he'd never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?
But there's no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those maybe's and what if's.
So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they'll be back to the way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he'll be somewhere else, in a place where he won't do the things he's doing now. He might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won't be much different with me.
Maybe I'll have a new house by then. Maybe I'll take off work early on Friday and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six packs into it. Maybe I'll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone who can do that.
To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.
That would be just fine.
An Eldritch Matter
Adam Niswander
Adam Niswander is the author of the Lovecraftian novels
I am terribly confused.
I am not the adventurous type, if you know what I mean.
I like things to be a little dull, as a matter of fact.
Yesterday, my life was normal and perhaps a bit predictable, and I was happy. My wife loved me, my children looked up to me, I had a good job, and all the people we knew seemed to like me — to like us. The bills were paid on time, the house was a real home, and the biggest uncertainty in my life was not knowing if my wife would choose to prepare pork chops or spaghetti for our supper.
Then, this morning, while waiting for the bus, I happened to look down and saw a little metal disk on the curb. You wouldn't think something as silly as a hunk of cheap pot-metal could mess up your life, would you?
It didn't look like anything all that unusual to me at the time. It was just a disk of white metal with an engraved sort of tentacled — something surrounding a big red eye in the middle. I picked it up, looked at it, and figured my son, Arnie, would find it interesting. I put it in my pocket and promptly forgot about it.
When I arrived at the office, I grabbed a cup of coffee in the lobby kiosk and took the elevator to the eighth floor. I went straight to my desk, settled in, and began to begin work on a proposal that is due by the end of the week. The client is important, representing a big percentage of our total business.
I had been sitting there only minutes when, without warning, I felt a terrible stabbing pain on my right thigh. It was excruciating. as if something had taken a bite out of me, or some giant insect had stabbed me with a stinger. I jumped up and slapped at the spot, hopping around, but the pain did not abate. It burned.
And it began to spread.
And I fell to the floor.
I was yelling by now.
Several of my co-workers came to see what all the ruckus was about. Despite my obvious suffering, no one could see anything wrong. Whatever was attacking me was covered by my clothing, and my flailing gyrations kept everyone at least an arm's length away. The pain was like a palpable thing, like a flame that crawled up my leg leaving agony in its path.
And it seemed there was nothing I could do about it, no way I could alleviate it.
Bob Shaw had knelt by me and was trying to ask me what was wrong.
'What is it, Thompson?'
And I felt. well, some. weird. thing. Even through the pain, my right leg suddenly didn't feel like a leg at all, really. It felt kind of. well, boneless. And as I clutched at it through my trouser leg, my fingers didn't find anything solid. I moved my left hand down to my knee, but I didn't feel a knee. It felt the same as the upper part of my leg, and curiously not solid. And the feeling was crawling up and down my leg simultaneously. It scared the crap out of me!
If I had been yelling in pain before, now I was screaming in terror. I looked down and discovered my shoe had come off. My sock was still on, but the foot inside it was horribly shapeless — and by now my entire right leg was curved in a very unnatural way.
My co-workers had pulled back away from me.
I heard Bob Shaw on the phone. 'No, I don't know what's wrong with him,' he shouted, 'but send an ambulance right away. The man is dying!'
