I said, “You oughta listen to him, Dandy,” without knowing quite why I said it, except that voice at the back of my head wanted to warn him, and sounded sad about it. But he didn’t hear me, ‘cause somebody else was saying, “Hey, you’re a poet and don’t know it,” and another guy was finishing it up with “His feet do, they’re Longfellows.”
Then we got called up to fight, and for a few weeks there wasn’t any joking except the gallows humor that kept us sane. Danny was with us that whole stretch, always muttering warnings that nobody took seriously ‘til another one of the guys, Reckless Rick, got himself drowned when there was no water for miles from where we were. Then Dandy found the one pretty girl on the war front, and came back to the camp to die the next morning. Me and Danny stood over his body awhile, counting the bite marks, all small and perfectly round, like vampire leeches had fastened onto him. I counted more than a hundred, and finally said, “What did that to him?” to Danny.
He shrugged and said somethin’ in Korean, a word I couldn’t say back. “An avenger of women wronged. Like a banshee, except they suck a guy dry like a vampire. They lure men in by offering to suck, um.” He trailed off, looking uncomfortable. “You probably don’t want to look at his Johnson, if you know what I mean.”
I hadn’t wanted to in the first place, but Danny walked away an’ curiosity just about killed this cat. I took a look down Dandy Andy’s shorts.
Danny was right. I hadn’t wanted to. Pale an’ sick, I staggered off to throw up, and every damned one of us in the unit listened hard to Danny’s warnings after that. I wrote letters to Annie where I told her about the strange things in the night, an’ then I tore ‘em up and wrote new ones not mentioning it. I hated to think she might be doing the same thing at home, picking and choosing what to tell me so I wouldn’t worry, but she’d had enough heartbreak with her daddy in the institution. I didn’t want to add to it.
It musta been around Christmas when Danny came out from behind the lines again and shook me awake one night. Didn’t say a word, just knelt there with a hand over my mouth and a finger to his lips, waiting for my eyes to get less round and my heart to stop pounding so hard before he let me go and put his mouth next to my ear. “I need help, Muldoon. There’s something out there I can’t handle and you were the first one to believe me about the demons, so I’ve got to ask your help.”
The sky was ink black beyond his head, a sliver of moon over on the horizon but not a single star shining through, though the cold said it had ta be clear. “This something I’m gonna get kicked outta the Army for?”
He sat up far enough ta flash me a grin. “Only if you get caught AWOL. No, I can cover for you. Come on. No guns. Too loud.”
I rolled outta my blankets and onto my feet, leavin’ the duty weapon behind and collecting a couple knives instead. My pack was only inches away, so I grabbed it too, figuring we’d get some use out of the rations if we were gonna be up all night. Danny slipped through the other sleeping soldiers like they weren’t even there, an’ I tried not to kick anybody hard enough to wake ‘em up as I followed him.
There wasn’t much distance between camp and cold raw wilderness. I looked up again, tryin’ to orient myself by the stars, but I still couldn’t see ‘em. Once we were well outta camp I stopped to take a better look, then exhaled a steamy breath into cold air. “Danny, where’re the stars?”
“That’s what I need you for.”
“To bring the stars back?”
“To kill the demon that’s hiding them.”
“Dan, there ain’t—there ain’t no such thing as demons.” I stuttered halfway through ‘cause I was thinkin’ of Dandy Andy and all of a sudden wasn’t so sure of myself. “What kinda demon?”
“It’s called—” He looked at me and sighed. “Never mind, you couldn’t say it anyway. A sky demon. It wants to eat the stars, and it starts by trying to make people forget them. It hides them under a blanket of its hair. Once they’re hidden, once people begin to forget, the smallest stars become vulnerable, and—”
“Stars are giant gas balls in the sky, Dan. You can’t eat ‘em.”
“Yeah? Can you not hide them in a clear night sky, either?”
I said a word my Ma didn’t think I should know and rubbed my eyes, hoping I’d see stars again when I was done. But I knew I wouldn’t, and I was right. “Sure, buddy. How do we kill a sky demon that eats stars?”
“Cut off its head so the stars can fly back out.”
“I shoulda guessed.”
Dan looked surprised and I muttered, “I was joking, Danny. That was a joke. All right, how do we find this thing?”
He switched on a flashlight. “Like this.”
Seemed like the whole world lit up, compared to the darkness of a starless night. I reared back, squinting. “Damn, that’s bright.”
“It has to be to make it think it’s a star to eat.”
I s’posed he had a point. We huddled together, back to back, waiting in the cold night air. When I got tired of counting the breaths I could see, I said, “Why me?”
“Because you didn’t go out after the crying demon, and because you listened when I told Dandy Andy to watch himself. And your eyes are grey.”
“What’s that gotta do with it?”
“Silver eyes see ghosts.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, a’course. Forgot about that. What the hell, Danny.”
I felt him shrug. “It’s what my mother used to say. I don’t know if it’s a Korean superstition or if it was just her own because her grandfather had silver eyes. But it can’t hurt to have silver eyes along with me on this.”
“There can’t be a lotta folks in Korea with grey eyes.”
“There aren’t. Now shut up. The demon is attracted to light, not noise.”
I shut up, then swung my pack around to dig out some rations, and pulled them and a flashlight out of the bag. “Hungry? Hell, I got a flashlight in here too. Should I turn it on?”
“Starving,” Danny hissed, “but look. Slowly.”
Just like that, I wasn’t hungry anymore. My skin got cold, not from nerves and not from the air being freezing, but more like a warning of something creepy going on. I peered over Danny’s shoulder.
For a second I thought hell, if that was a demon, I was all right with letting her do what she wanted. She was maybe five feet tall and Korean, ‘cept her skin was white as starlight. Her lips were blood red and her eyes were black as raven wings. Her hair was amazing, black as her eyes and dancing with a life of its own, rising up toward the sky until I couldn’t see what was hair and what was sky. Hiding the stars in a blanket of hair, Danny’d said, an’ I didn’t know how she was doing it but that’s what was going on. She was wearing a midnight blue high-collared robe with sleeves so long they trailed on the ground without leaving any kind of marks. It was wrapped around her torso by black ribbon that sparkled with starlight. In that first moment of looking at her, she was the most perfectly beautiful thing I’d ever seen, like some kinda living sculpture.
‘least she was until she focused on the flashlight, and her mouth opened wide enough to be bigger than her face an’ to show off a bottomless pit of stars an’ gleaming razor teeth. Danny yelled and threw the flashlight to one side. The demon rushed it, swallowed it down, an’ just as fast spat it out again. It hit the ground with another thud, an’ back-lit the demon as she spun toward us with rage pulling her already-stretched features even further outta place.
Way at the back of my mind, that voice I was getting kinda used to said I don’t remember this. That was it, nothing more, and hell if I knew how it was supposed to remember what I was only just now doing, but I had my pick of worrying about that or worrying about the black-eyed beauty who was gonna gobble us up along with the stars. I decided on her, an’ the voice got quiet again.