Forever Never Ends (23 page)

Tah-mah-raaa tah-mah-raaa tah-mah-raaa
.

She looked around, confused. Maybe this was how brain tumors progressed, the obscene mutated cells manipulating the healthy cells, multiplying and altering, squeezing out the host cells in their drive to spread. Maybe the thing inside her head was even programmed to know that it was killing its host, but could no more turn away from its silent mission than a hungry mosquito could ignore warm flesh and blood.

No. She was fit and healthy, in the prime of life. Such a thing could never happen to her. She would rather believe—

Shu-shaaa

—that she was nuts, losing it, having a nervous breakdown.

But, in her heart of hearts, she couldn’t buy that, either. Hearing imaginary voices was one thing. She was quite sure this voice was real.

And she knew now from where it was speaking.

The mountain called to her again. She put the Toyota in gear and headed for the gravel road that her instincts told her climbed the spine of Bear Claw.

***

Jimmy wanted the last time with Peggy to be special, but it was hard to get intimate with that moron Howard watching. The bills rustled in his shirt pocket and that made him feel a little better. The bed squeaked as Howard and Peggy went at it. Jimmy put on his boots, anxious to leave the room. He was no saint, but there were some things that turned even
his
stomach.

He opened the hollow door and an old one-eyed bastard in a faded military uniform stood there, his ear cupped to the door. One-Eye was grinning like a possum in a dumpster. Jimmy pushed him backward and closed the door, shutting off the sound of Peggy’s sex factory.

"Who the hell are
you
?" Jimmy said.

The old man licked his lips. "Just a concerned neighbor, is all. Thought there might be trouble over here."

"Ain't no trouble and ain't nobody else's business."

"Old Sylvester might think otherwise, don't you reckon?" The old fart squinted past Jimmy with his good eye as if trying to see through the door. "Seeing as how you fellows is over here taking turns with his wife."

Jimmy grabbed One-Eye by the throat. The knot of the man's Adam's apple pumped feverishly under Jimmy’s palm.

"And how's he going to find out?" Jimmy pulled the pale face next to his own. He could smell the old soldier's rotten gums, the stench blowing from his mouth like a graveyard wind.

"Hold on, hold on. I ain't no squealer," the man wheezed. "Just want my piece of the pie, is all."

Jimmy relaxed his grip on the man's throat. His fingers had made red prints in the flesh.

"Costs fifty bucks, old man. More for extras." He looked dubiously at One-Eye's wrinkled and pallid face. "And there ain't no guarantees, in case you don't, uh . . . come through."

"Fifty bucks," One-Eye yelped. "She been giving it to me for free."

Howard must have heard them arguing, because the bed stopped squeaking. Or else he had finally clocked out.

"Who's that, Jimmy?" Howard shouted from inside the room.

"Oh God, not
Sylvester
,
" Peggy said.

"No, it ain't Sylvester,” Jimmy hollered back over his shoulder through the door. “Just another customer, Peg. Get on with it, now."

My first try at flesh peddling ain't going as smooth as I'd hoped. And if Peggy's turned to this old geezer for companionship, then I must not have been keeping her satisfied. My feelings would be hurt, if I had any.

But he might be able to turn the situation around yet. Maybe One-Eye still had enough of his government pension check left to at least sniff Jimmy's product. It was a classic case of supply and demand, and demand seemed to be high at the moment. And the supply wasn't going anywhere.

He opened his mouth to tell the old fart the new facts of life, but his mouth kept dropping, his jaw nearly hinging down to his chest. Because of what he saw coming up the hall behind One-Eye.

Sylvester had come home, or at least,
part
of Sylvester. Sylvester approached the back bedroom with stinging green eyes and ripe skin and arms stretched outward like a junkie sleepwalker. His mouth dripped with amber sap and opened to show the wiggling little fibers inside. His outstretched fingers hooked like crabapple sticks. He looked hungry and horny and happy and pissed off and long buried all at the same time.

One-Eye turned at the marshy sound of Sylvester's footsteps, right into the creature’s—
zombie
, Jimmy's mind screamed, taking its first small swan dive into madness—widespread arms.

One-Eye didn't even have time to register the horror and cry for mercy before Sylvester was upon him, embracing the frail, bone-covered parchment of the man’s skin and lowering his mouth to One-Eye's thin, cracked lips.

Jimmy backed against the bedroom door, the only action he could inspire his lost muscles to produce. The Sylvester-zombie—
zombie
, the word flashed across the impossible gaps in his brain—slopped its mushy mouth across One-Eye's face, sucking and blowing.

The old soldier's eye widened and swiveled in its socket, looking for a Grim Reaper or an escort to hell or maybe just a last earthly image to take to the grave—a light bulb or a paneling nail or a velvet Elvis painting—something sane and common to comfort him in the eternity of death.

Except when Sylvester-zombie released One-Eye, the wrinkly bastard slumped to the floor, dead and smiling. Dead and
happy
about it. Dead and still flicking his rheumy blank eye at the world. Dead and back again, as if to prove, especially for Jimmy's benefit, that the good times kept right on rolling.

Jimmy's mind collapsed like a wet house of shoe boxes, crawled into itself and curled into a fetal position as the Sylvester-zombie—
zombie
, his last thought,
will I be a zombie, too?
—gave him the soul kiss, the magic, the glory and the power and the slippery tendril of its tongue as they shared a deep cosmic breath of stardust and stumpwater.

***

Peggy looked over at the nightstand, at the money stacked between the overflowing ashtray and the dusty alarm clock. That was plenty enough payoff. She could worry about her own needs later, after she took care of the kids. They could have a square meal tonight for a change.

Howard rolled off the mattress and the bed almost sprang up like a trampoline from the load reduction. She watched him wrestle his legs into his underwear, then bend over to get his pants. "How did you like it, handsome?"

She could get the hang of this line of work. Lying was just another part of the job. Hell, this wasn’t much of a stretch from her usual day.

Howard nodded and grunted.

"You let me know when you want a second helping," she said. This was no worse than playing Sleeping Beauty.

But there was no magic, no redemption. All she had was emptiness.

And fifty bucks. Don’t forget the fifty bucks
.

She reached for a cigarette and lit it as she looked at the clock. Little Mack would be home in about fifteen minutes and Junior might be home in an hour, if he bothered to make it home before dinner. Junior was becoming as unpredictable as the man he'd been named after.

"My kids will be home soon, Howard. Maybe you'd better just hit the road. But you come on back sometime, when you have the money," she said, running her tongue over her lips. She winked at him and he almost blushed. He was getting excited again.

"But not right
now
. You’re broke." She laughed and pulled the sheet over her body. She didn't feel tired, but she wanted to straighten up the trailer before Little Mack got home.

She would wash the dishes and pretend that everything was normal. Maybe even mop the kitchen. A regular housewife.

Howard nodded dumbly. "You're purty," he said, putting on his pants. He draped his shirt over his shoulder and headed for the door.

"Glad you think so, big man. Tell Jimmy to get his scrawny hind end back here on your way out, will you?" She stubbed out her smoke and the ashtray spilled over. Brown tarry butts rolled off the night stand to the vinyl flooring.

She locked her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling, at the little swirls she had studied while the men sampled the goods. She had seen faces up there and wondered if she would see them now. The door opened and Howard grunted again. She looked at the doorway, expecting to see Jimmy's scraggly grin.

Instead, she saw her husband of twelve years standing there like a sick stranger. Howard screamed in a girlish voice, fell, and crawled on his hands and knees down the hallway, the sleeve of his shirt caught on his foot and trailing behind him. Sylvester stepped past him toward Peggy, but something was wrong. His eyes were like radioactive marbles. Sylvester had changed, turned like a sweet potato that had fallen behind the stove and gone rotten.

Her mind was a Popsicle, cold and sweet and hard, as she watched her husband slog to the bed and stand over her with his ragged jack-o’-lantern smile and his moist, impossible flesh, as he slid onto the bed with a noise like sixty pounds of earthworms. Sylvester pulled the blanket away and she crossed her arms over her breasts, feeling shy in the face of this insane homecoming. He touched her bare thigh and his finger was slick with pulpy rot. The jack-o’-lantern gaped and she thought he was trying to speak, to perhaps whisper her name or tell her that she looked good enough to eat.

Then she saw that Sylvester had no tongue, only wiggly things that flickered out in the direction of her face. She smelled her husband as his swamp gas fog overwhelmed her and then she was in the grasp and surrendered without a fight because it was her husband, after all, and this was his rightful place between her legs and she embraced his neck and pulled his impossible swollen head to her lips because she was staring deeply into his eyes and seeing the Magic Land and she was Frenching him with a fierce desperation because she wanted to feel the Magic and
shu-shaaa
throbbed in time to her last heartbeat as the cosmos puked magic into her throat and she at last became Sleeping Beauty again, this time forever.

She had never felt so loved.

***

Little Mack was scared.

He heard the noises in the trailer and didn't want to go inside, even though the door was open. The truck with the big tires wasn't here, so maybe that mean, skinny man wasn't with his Mommy. But
somebody
was in there. And it sounded like a whole
lot
of somebodies.

He ducked down by the steps and looked into the living room. He couldn't see because his eyes were full of sun. But he heard people moaning like the ghosts did in those scary movies that Junior made him watch when Mommy was out late at night. Or else when she and Daddy went to bed early and Junior turned the television up real loud.

He wished, wished, wished Daddy was home, but Daddy didn't come home much these days. Little Mack thought it might have something to do with the skinny man. Little Mack didn't like the skinny man, even though the man fluffed Mack's hair and gave him a nickel once. Mack didn't like him because he smelled like those green pellets that the janitor put on the floor when some kid threw up at school.

He didn't see the skinny man and he didn't see Mommy, but he heard people moving around in the back of the trailer. He almost yelled for Mommy but all of a sudden he was afraid, because he saw the one-eyed old man from next door who looked like he was two hundred years old, except right now he looked like he was
four
hundred, because his skin was the color of art paste and something that looked like rubber cement poured out of his nose and mouth.

And the eye that didn't have a patch moved funny, like it couldn't see anything but still wanted to
look
.

The old man tried to stand, but his legs didn't work right. He rolled over on the floor and he must have seen Little Mack, because he smiled real funny. Smiling like he had a secret. A bad secret.

Little Mack turned and ran, hoping that his Mommy wasn't in there with that bad man, that she wasn't part of the secret. He ran into the woods where he always hid, ducking under the blackberry briars and clamping his hands over his ears because he didn't want to hear the scary things that were in his head. He was afraid that the dark might get here before the scary things left.

He hoped Daddy would come home soon and make everything all right again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Tamara turned up the old dirt road and started to climb the winding grade. The Toyota's engine whined in protest as she downshifted. The steep slopes of Bear Claw rose before her, taunting her, solid and ancient. The car juddered as it fought over the ruts and granite humps.

This was the mountain in her dream. And she trusted her dream. If she didn't trust her dream, something bad might happen. Or something bad might happen no matter what she did.

The Gloomies are up there somewhere
,
not in my head this time. They're real. They're here.

She considered turning back, running away from the thing that had haunted her for the past few days, the feelings that had gripped her heart, the unease that lingered in the base of her skull like a hibernating snake. But she knew these Gloomies were different. They wouldn't let her hide. They had secret spy lights.

They wouldn't be satisfied until they had her. And she wouldn't be satisfied until she had faced the enemy.

Because, in the dream, it had taken her family.

The Gloomies had already taken her father.

No way in hell would she lose anyone else.

***

Chester leaned against a locust tree and waited for DeWalt to catch up. DeWalt was slowing him down plenty, even more than the age and arthritis and fear that had leadened his legs. Twenty years ago, Chester would have covered twice as much territory in the last hour. But, twenty years ago, he hadn't been looking for neon-eyed freaks or strange green lights.

He glanced up at the treetops as he fumbled for a refresher hunk of Beechnut. The trees looked like October witches, with long arms and sharp elbows and dark skirts. He could hear himself wheezing through his nose. He was glad he had never taken up smoking. Maybe that was what was causing his Yankee sidekick's ass dragging.