It rose upon its hind legs, and though its face remained that of a beast, its eyes were those of a man. “This is for you,” it said, and pointed toward the writhing mass. “Take it, and come to me.”
The Nebraskan knelt and plucked one of the worms from the reeking spew. It was pale, streaked, and splotched with scarlet, and woke in him a longing never felt before. In his mouth, it brought peace, health, love, and hunger for something he could not name.
Old Hop Thacker’s voice floated across infinite distance: “Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what ’tis, young feller.”
Another worm and another, and each as good as the last.
“We will teach you,” the worms said, speaking from his own mouth. “Have we not come from the stars? Your own desire for them has wakened, Man of Earth.”
Hop Thacker’s voice: “Grave worms, do you see?”
“Come to me.”
The Nebraskan took the key from the drawer. It was only necessary to open the nearest tomb. The jackal pointed to the lock.
“If it’s hungered, it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight or die.”
The end of the key scraped across the door, seeking the keyhole.
“Come to me, Man of Earth. Come quickly.”
Sarah’s voice had joined the old man’s, their words mingled and confused. She screamed, and the painted figures faded from the door of the tomb.
The key turned. Thacker stepped from the tomb. Behind him his father shouted, “Joe, boy! Joe!” And struck him with his cane. Blood streamed from Thacker’s torn scalp, but he did not look around.
“Fight him, young feller! You got to fight him!”
Someone switched on the light. The Nebraskan backed toward the bed.
“Pa, DON’T!” Sarah had the huge butcher knife. She lifted it higher than her father’s head and brought it down. He caught her wrist, revealing a long raking cut down his back as he spun about. The knife, and Sarah, fell to the floor.
The Nebraskan grabbed Thacker’s arm. “What is this!”
“It is love,” Thacker told him. “That is your word, Man of Earth. It is love.” No tongue showed between his parted lips; worms writhed there instead, and among the worms gleamed stars.
With all his strength, the Nebraskan drove his right fist into those lips. Thacker’s head was slammed back by the blow; pain shot along the Nebraskan’s arm. He swung again, with his left this time, and his wrist was caught as Sarah’s had been. He tried to back away; struggled to pull free. The high old-fashioned bed blocked his legs at the knees.
Thacker bent above him, his torn lips parted and bleeding, his eyes filled with such pain as the Nebraskan had never seen. The jackal spoke: “Open to me.”
“Yes,” the Nebraskan told it. “Yes, I will.” He had never known before that he possessed a soul, but he felt it rush into his throat.
Thacker’s eyes rolled upward. His mouth gaped, disclosing for an instant the slime-sheathed, tentacled thing within. Half falling, half rolling, he slumped upon the bed.
For a second that felt much longer, Thacker’s father stood over him with trembling hands. A step backward, and the older Mr. Thacker fell as well-fell horribly and awkwardly, his head striking the floor with a distinct crack. “Grandpa!” Sarah knelt beside him.
The Nebraskan rose. The worn brown handle of the butcher knife protruded from Thacker’s back. A little blood, less than the Nebraskan would have expected, trickled down the smooth old wood to form a crimson pool on the sheet.
“Help me with him, Mr. Cooper. He’s got to go to bed.” The Nebraskan nodded and lifted the only living Mr. Thacker onto his feet. “How do you feel?”
“Shaky,” the old man admitted. “Real shaky.”
The Nebraskan put the old man’s right arm about his own neck and picked him up. “I can carry him,” he said. “You’ll have to show me his bedroom.”
“Most times Joe was just like always.” The old man’s voice was a whisper, as faint and far as it had been in the dream-city of the dead. “That’s what you got to understand. Near all the time, an’ when-when he did, they was dead, do you see? Dead or near to it. Didn’t do a lot of harm.”
The Nebraskan nodded.
Sarah, in a threadbare white nightgown that might have been her mother’s once, was already in the hall, stumbling and racked with sobs.
“Then you come. An’ Joe, he made us. Said I had to keep on talkin’ an’ she had to ask you fer supper.”
“You told me that story to warn me,” the Nebraskan said. The old man nodded feebly as they entered his bedroom . “I thought I was bein’ slick. It was true, though, ’cept ’twasn’t Cooper, nor Creech neither.”
“I understand,” the Nebraskan said. He laid the old man on his bed and pulled up a blanket.
“I kilt him didn’t I? I kilt my boy Joe.”
“It wasn’t you, Grandpa.” Sarah had found a man’s bandana, no doubt in one of her grandfather’s drawers; she blew her nose into it. “That’s what they’ll say.”
The Nebraskan turned on his heel. “We’ve got to find that thing and kill it. I should have done that first.” Before he had completed the thought, he was hurrying back toward the room that had been his.
He rolled Thacker over as far as the knife handle permitted and lifted his legs onto the bed. Thacker’s jaw hung slack; his tongue and palate were thinly coated with a clear glutinous gel that carried a faint smell of ammonia; otherwise his mouth was perfectly normal.
“It’s a spirit,” Sarah told the Nebraskan from the doorway. “It’ll go into Grandpa now, ’cause he killed it. That’s what he always said.”
The Nebraskan straightened up, turning to face her. “It’s a living creature, something like a cuttlefish, and it came here from—” He waved the thought aside. “It doesn’t really matter. It landed in North Africa, or at least I think it must have, and if I’m right, it was eaten by a jackal. They’ll eat just about anything, from what I’ve read. It survived inside the jackal as a sort of intestinal parasite. Long ago, it transmitted itself to a man, somehow.”
Sarah was looking down at her father, no longer listening. “He’s restin’ now, Mr. Cooper. He shot the old soul-sucker in the woods one day. That’s what Grandpa tells, and he hasn’t had no rest since, but he’s peaceful now. I was only eight or ’bout that, and for a long time Grandpa was ’fraid he’d get me, only he never did.” With both her thumbs, she drew down the lids of the dead man’s eyes.
“Either it’s crawled away—” the Nebraskan began.
Abruptly, Sarah dropped to her knees beside her dead parent and kissed him.
When at last the Nebraskan backed out of the room, the dead man and the living woman remained locked in that kiss, her face ecstatic, her fingers tangled in the dead man’s hair. Two full days later, after the Nebraskan had crossed the Mississippi, he still saw that kiss in shadows beside the road.
∇
To Live and Die in Arkham
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Arkham. A nice upscale college town. Just the right shops and bars and restaurants, grills, and cafes, if you have Money—a name helps too. If you don’t, there’s the other side of town—the side always twitching with things from the inside of Midnight. The city fathers and the police call it, The Downside. Drugs, and cheap street whores workin’ the dreamless corners by pool halls and gin joints and open sewers the city fathers call abandoned buildings where the homeless hide and hungry eyes that will take your cigarettes and your wallet and your watch and your life if you can’t walk fast enough or if you’re a plain John Q. Citizen who is not supposed to be roamin’ the cold blocks. That’s the side Albert Bergin had come to. He needed something done and this was the place to find fixers and doers of just about anything, if you have the money or the juice. $200 just for the name and directions to the door. Like anyone needs them, you just follow the rot. But Professor Bergin wasn’t looking for some tail or blow… He had a task that needed to be performed, he called it an old score, and for that he needed someone who knew The Game and how it’s played on The Bottom.