Unwanted
The road was a view into hell. That’s what Harvey Bennett thought as he carried himself forward, one slow, weary step at a time. The soles of his shoes crunched through the sun-bleached scree that made up the shoulder, on and on, an endless, irregular beat. This is hell.
There was nothing here but two lanes of cracked blacktop running on into eternity, baking beneath the desert sun. The world was dead, washed out, the color of old bone. Rocks jutted here and there, nasty little protrusions as yellow as a smoker’s teeth. Heat shimmer on the horizon turned the landscape into an impossible sight. It cut off the bottom of the distant mountains; to Harvey’s straining eyes, they appeared to be floating.
Christ, it’s hot.
Beside him, his wife, Deanna—or Dee, to most everyone—did her level best to make sure Harvey couldn’t forget she was there, or that all this was somehow his fault.
“You said there was nothing wrong with the car. You said everything was fine.”
“Everything was fine, Dee. I changed the oil. I checked the coolant. I checked the brakes. Hell, I even checked the goddamn power steering fluid, if it makes any difference.”
“Well you must have missed something.”
“Or maybe it’s one-hundred and fucking-fifteen degrees outside, and mankind is not meant to exist in such a hellish place. You ever think of that? Shit happens, Dee. And in my experience, it happens at the worst possible times.”
Dee gave him a sidelong look. Her blonde hair was white in the sun, so bright it was hard to look at. Her face and shoulders were already turning red from the heat. “Could have paid someone to look at it. Could have just hired a mechanic.”
Harvey scowled. Damn you, woman. She knew that wasn’t in the cards. Not anymore.
Aside from what little had come with them in the car, everything Harvey and Dee owned was packed into a woefully small storage container on its way east. There wasn’t much. A few bad investments on the tail end of an unsustainable lifestyle saw to that. This meant no more California. No more condo in the hills, no beach home. No lavish existence to distract them from one another.
They took the only car they still owned, packed it full of what they could and started east, bound for lands distant—and cheaper. The money Harvey had left would only take them so far, and he wanted to maximize the amount those dwindling dollars could buy. He might be able to do that in the Midwest, or the Carolinas maybe with a little luck. But not California.
No, California was a dead end. The only thing left to do was leave it behind.
They hadn’t made it far, though. The car saw to that. The desert saw to that. Dead in the water in this godawful sun, no signal, no help. And now they were walking, hoping to reach a gas station the signs said was a few miles up the way. But who knew how accurate those signs were? There was no telling how long they had been there; the desert aged everything it touched. That gas station could be long gone by now, melted right into the goddamn ground for all Harvey knew. And he couldn’t blame it, really. No one should be out here. This place was death.
“You sure we’re going the right way?” Dee asked. She mopped her forehead with the back of her hand and shielded her eyes against the sun.
“We’re going the way the car was going,” Harvey said.
“It’s just, I don’t see anything, Harvey.”
“You wanna go back the way we came? Get another look at everything we passed getting here?”
Dee huffed. There wasn’t shit back the way they came, not for miles and miles. They’d both wondered at the stark emptiness of the world, how shocking it was to see such endless nothing. No one lived here, no one wanted to be here. And after fifty-seven years in California—or fifty-two for Dee—that was a revelation in and of itself.
“I don’t see anything,” Dee said. “That’s all I’m saying. There was supposed to be a gas station, but…”
“And you probably won’t see it,” Harvey said. “Not in this heat. You see that shimmer?” He pointed with one sunburned hand. “You can’t trust your eyes out here.”
“Thanks, Professor.”
Harvey didn’t see her roll her eyes, but by God, he felt it.
They kept walking.
#
Somehow they made it to sundown. The glare abated, and with it a little of the heat. What remained of the day’s oppressive ferocity burned at their back, a red smear at the edge of a darkening world. The first stars were beginning to shine overhead, cold, distant things. Harvey envied them.
There was no gas station.
There was something else, though: litter on the side of the road. There was no reason he should have stopped here in particular, not after everything he’d seen. There had been no shortage of trash along the way: cans, bottles and food wrappers. Humanity just couldn’t help itself. It had to have the last word, even in a place it could make no claim to. A place it didn’t want.
Harvey bent down, straining from the effort. Sweat dripped from his face and dotted the dust at his feet. “Dee, look at this.” There was a woman’s high-heeled shoe in his hands.
She looked, then offered him a sneer for his trouble. “You would find something like that, wouldn’t you?”
He thrust the shoe toward her. “No, I mean really look.”
Dee sighed as she did it, but she indulged him. And she must have seen what Harvey saw, because her face took on a thoughtful cast.
They’d seen this shoe before. Dee had a pair just like it. That’s what Harvey was telling himself, anyway: she had a pair like this, though he couldn’t shake the nagging certainty that this was one of them. That a cast-off bit of trash on the side of this lonely desert highway had belonged to his wife. He didn’t know why he should think that—shit, what were the odds? Just a shade under impossible—but the conviction remained. It settled in his gut, heavier than it should have been. It wasn’t a nice feeling, but the memories it stirred up were worse.
Their marriage had been on the rocks for a while. Since the baby, really. That was a bad chapter in their life they had never managed to come back from. Sure, they’d tried, at least for a while—sometimes together, more often on their own. That’s where those shoes came in.
Harvey remembered all too well what she looked like in those racy black pumps, dotted across the toe with sequins or rhinestones or whatever the fuck people called them. Bedroom shoes, that’s what they were in Harvey’s mind. That’s what they were for, and boy did Dee know it.
Christ, she’d looked good in those shoes. Back when she was lean and beautiful, young and full of that particular sort of spite that was ready to burn baby burn. There was a time when he’d been the focus of her attention, all those years ago. It felt like a past life now, a life lived by someone else. A life before these particular shoes. Before they lost the baby and that rift between them opened like a great, hungry mouth. A mouth that ate and ate and ate, and so they’d just gone on shoveling the shit right into it, keeping it fed so it wouldn’t turn on them. So they wouldn’t have to see what was down there at the bottom.
But damn she looked good in those shoes, Harvey thought. Everyone else thought so, too. Strangers and swingers, bars and clubs and hotel rooms; she had never been short on eyes eager to drink her in.
“Dee, you didn’t pack those shoes, did you? Didn’t bring them along in the car?”
His wife looked at him like he’d sprouted a boil in the center of his forehead, but Harvey barely noticed. He was thinking of the luggage rack on top of the car, thinking something might have come loose. A pair of shoes, maybe. Something Dee claimed to have hung up a long time ago, but maybe things like that don’t just stop. There’s that mouth, after all. That hunger that eats and eats…
“What the fuck are you going on about, Harvey?”
No, he thought. Even if this shoe did fall out of the luggage somehow, it would have been behind them on the road, not in front of them. And they were still going east. That bloody red light at their backs said so, a universal sign more trustworthy than any rusted plate of metal advertising a gas station they’d never reach.
No, he assured himself. It just wasn’t possible. But the feeling persisted.
“That isn’t mine, Harvey. I know your mind isn’t what it used to be, but don’t even tell me you think that’s mine. Because I just won’t believe it.”
Harvey held the shoe out to her once more, his voice plaintive. “It’s your size.”
“You would know that, wouldn’t you? Goddamn pervert.” But her eyes were on the shoe, and in those eyes Harvey saw doubt, nagging, chewing, eating. The same doubt that was tugging at his gut, stirring up shit that should have been put to bed a long time ago. Dee slapped the shoe out of his hand. “Get that filthy thing away from me!”
Harvey watched it clatter to the crumbled shoulder, back where he’d found it. But his thoughts didn’t go with it to the cooling desert earth. No, they stayed right where they were.
“What’s gotten into you, bringing all that up now? Like we don’t have enough to worry about already?” Dee put her hands on her hips, demanding an answer. But Harvey didn’t have one. He just kept on looking at that shoe, chewing his way through everything they’d done for the past few decades to convince themselves they were happy, that they could come back from it somehow. That the baby hadn’t mattered all that much to begin with.
“We’re gonna die out here, and you wanna drag skeletons out of the closet?” Dee shook her head, a bitter smile coming in to mask some of that doubt she was feeling. It was something she was good at, a maneuver she’d had plenty of opportunity to practice. “Are we gonna repent for our sins? Is that it, Harvey? Well go on, be my guest. But don’t act like you didn’t play your part. Don’t you dare! Not when I know I could open up your phone right now and find a road map of your sins. I bet those conversations have gone awfully quiet lately though, haven’t they, Harvey? Not many young girls come calling an old man when his money dries up.”
Harvey tasted bitter words on his tongue, an argument begging to be let out. He wanted to say that no one had come looking for her, either. Not since the years and the wine had taken their toll. But what was the point? They both knew it. They knew what they were. Harvey was nothing to look at himself: a man going fat in the middle, his face soft, his hair thin. He could already feel his scalp peeling from the sun.
“What a pair we are,” he said in place of the argument, the same one they’d had time and time again. “What a pair.” It was a mantra, the last few decades of their marriage summed up as succinctly as it ever would be.
But Dee was no longer listening. She looked past him, into the darkening sprawl of desert. “There’s something out there.”
“What?”
“Look there.” Dee pointed and Harvey turned, following the path of her sunburned finger into the gloom.
The stars were brighter now, brilliant, frigid points far removed from the light of human civilization. But the world beneath them was growing darker by the minute, and in that darkness they saw a distant fire. Something small, flickering—but controlled. A campfire.
“Maybe they can help,” Dee said.
Harvey, who tended to disagree with his wife on principle, hoped she was right.
He spared one last look for that too-familiar shoe along the side of the road, thinking he’d seen it move from the corner of his eye. But no, it was just some kind of worm—a dark, bloated thing that wriggled about the heel. Its body glistened in the dying light, strangely well-fed for such a dry and desolate place.
Apparently something could survive out here after all.
#
With the sun gone, the heat left the world as surely as if it had never been there at all. The darkness laid bare the duality of the desert, revealing it for what it was: a world of impossible extremes, harsh beyond expectation. This was no place for life to endure, no place for mankind, in particular. And yet that fire flickered in the distance.
“What is that?” Dee said, pointing toward the side of the road as if the gesture were really necessary. Harvey’s eyes were drawn there naturally. In the dark, the candles were impossible to miss.
“Jesus…”
Leading away from the side of the road was a procession of countless little shrines—collections of stuff that Harvey associated most with the locations of fatal traffic accidents. But these would have looked at home on gravesites as well, or perhaps in the homes of the overly sentimental—or overly religious. Here were framed photographs, religious icons, flowers, toys, candles in tall glass jars—the kind that always had one religious figure or another printed on the front, looking appropriately sorrowful. They flickered like tiny, glowing islands in the dark, one after another, a parade of grief that marched into the endless night.
The distance made it hard to know for sure, but from where Harvey and Dee stood, those markers appeared to lead straight out to that campfire in the distance. And why not? There was nowhere else to go.
Harvey started in that direction, stepping off the road and onto the trail marked out before them without a word. Dee, too, said nothing. Not until they’d gone a ways into the desert, and she’d had time to inspect the little shrines they passed on the way.
“Are you seeing this, Harvey?” she said. “They’re children. Most of these, they’re…”
One after the other, the memorials went on and on. Many of them—too many, considering the implications—ensconced the photo of a child. The ages varied. Sex, race, even the year they must have been born and died, all of that varied from one to the next with no obvious regard to order. Some of the photos were indeed quite old, faded beyond recognition. The oldest of them must have been well over a hundred years old. Antiques. But here they were, left out in this blasted desert, and someone was tending to them. Someone who had a mind to remember these children—whatever it was that might have happened to them.
Harvey walked on, Dee a few steps behind him. He wondered at how strange this all was, how random it appeared. How completely and utterly unexpected. But the more he saw the more it occurred to him that there was nothing random about it. This was a serious undertaking, it was deliberate. Someone had gone through a lot of trouble to maintain all this, and now here was Harvey, leading his wife into the desert to--
To what, exactly? He imagined a church out there in the dark, some rundown old mission maybe. It was an image plucked from a movie for sure, more impulse than honest thought. But it felt right, at least for a moment. Until he realized that wasn’t right at all. He rejected the thought of that church before it was even fully formed, realizing there was something deeper here, a wrongness he’d felt more than seen. Churches, after all, were Christian things. Familiar things. And nothing about this was familiar.
The trinkets, the candles, the religious icons Harvey had taken for granted—all of them were alien. Harvey expected to see crosses, he expected pictures of Jesus, of Mary, of one dour saint or another. Because that’s who left things like this, wasn’t it? Harvey thought he knew the sorts of people who bought candles like that, what they believed. But if the images on those candles were saints, they were no saints Harvey had ever seen. These were strange figures, dark and hooded, impossible to identify even without the desert dust baked onto the glass. And there were no crosses. No, these were symbols Harvey had never seen before.
Before Harvey could mention any of this, Dee’s scream ripped through the silent desert night.
“Oh my God!” she cried. “Harvey, look! They’re covered in… Jesus, are those worms?” She was hopping from foot to foot as if a mouse had run between her feet—or she’d stepped in something nasty.
Harvey looked down, his eyes once more moving to the memorials beside the trail. And sure enough, Dee was right. There were things wriggling about the various objects left here: fat, dark things that, yes, must have indeed been some kind of worms. They might have been blue or gray—it was impossible to tell by candlelight—and the largest of them were at least four inches long. They squirmed around the candles, climbed over the picture frames. They left greasy, wet smears on everything they touched. Others lay dead, shriveled by the desert sun. They littered the trail like dead leaves, beaten into the dust by the passage of countless feet.
Dee made all the appropriate noises as she struggled to find someplace clean to step. Harvey turned his eyes further up the trail. The fire loomed brighter now.
They were close.
#
“Hello!” Harvey called, as they at last reached their destination. “Is anyone there?”
The fire blazed, impossibly bright in this dark, isolated wilderness. Harvey raised a hand to shield his eyes against it, turning his head from side to side. A collection of low dwellings gathered around the central fire: camper trailers, RVs, a mobile home, tents and other ramshackle shelters. This was no pop-up campsite; it had clearly been here for a while. Dust covered the windows, settled on the roofs. Such a place might have been abandoned, left behind and long forgotten. But there was the fire, recently lit and tended. And there were those little shrines along the trail with their burning candles.
Someone was here. But where were they?
“Hello?” Dee tried her luck. “Our car broke down on the road. We could sure use some help.” Only the fire answered, crackling as it burned, contained in a charred ring of desert stones.
“Come on. Let’s take a look around.”
The fire did wonders to dispel the night chill as Harvey and Dee split up to inspect the campsite. They knocked on doors, peered through windows. They went around each of the dwellings, hunting for any sign of life. But all was quiet, the desert as still and lifeless as ever. The fire crackled on. So far, it was all they had to show for their efforts.
Dee kept at her shouting and her door knocking, but Harvey returned to the fire pit, staring into the hungry blaze and wondering who had been feeding it. The heat lulled his senses, reminding him of every ounce of weariness he’d gathered over the course of the day. He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to sleep, even if he had to do it right here, sandwiched between the cold ground and the warm fire. He might have even been able to overlook the dead worms that littered the ground, here as well as along the trail with its countless little shrines. But he never got that far, never even shut his eyes; a figure at the edge of camp snapped him to attention like an electric shock.
“Hey!” he called, straining his tired eyes against the glare, stepping around the fire to get a better look. But the figure was gone, blended once more into the darkness. “Hey, wait!”
Harvey turned to look about the camp, realizing he no longer heard his wife—her knocking and shouting had abated while he’d allowed his mind to wander. There was no sign of her now. He looked back toward the edge of camp, where just moments ago he’d seen that figure. “Dee?” he called. “Dee, are you out there?”
Shit, he couldn’t see a thing out there! The firelight spoiled his eyes, and the stars seemed darker now—more distant than ever. Harvey debated a moment, then grabbed a bit of scrap wood from a nearby barrel. He wound one end with a bit of cloth he found on the ground, then plunged it into the fire, turning it into a makeshift torch. It wouldn’t burn for long, but it was better than nothing. With this in hand he crossed to the edge of camp, stepping between the ramshackle dwellings and into the deeper dark beyond. The figure he’d seen was like a ghost, there and gone in an instant. But it couldn’t have gone far.
“Hello!” Harvey called, sweeping the desert night with his torch. He stepped into the path he cut through the dark, the flickering torch leading the way. The dark closed greedily behind him, nipping at his heels.
Dee, he thought, was that really you?
In the desert ahead he expected to see only what he’d seen before: that endless, awful expanse of bone-colored rock and dust; Dee would be easy enough to spot on open ground, so long as she didn’t get too far ahead. Dee…or whoever it was he’d seen by the fire. But instead of empty desert Harvey was met by a towering wall of dark stone. It ran on and on to his left and right. It might have been endless, might have gone on forever for all he knew. His light showed him precious little, and even that might have been too much; the wall appeared to move in the guttering light. The sight of it made him queasy.
There was no sign of Dee, or anyone else for that matter. But there was an opening in the wall just ahead, a jagged little cut that must have led into a narrow canyon. Harvey made for it, increasingly sure now that Dee hadn’t come this way. He’d followed someone else out here, into the dark. But he kept on anyway, unwilling to turn back. He was driven by some irresistible urge to see, to know. Because that figure he’d seen by the fire…
No, that was just a trick of the light. It couldn’t be real. Even here, in this world which had suddenly gone mad, some things were just too dreadful to believe.
The light showed the way, and Harvey followed it into the mouth of the canyon.
The walls closed in around him in an instant, shutting out the wider world. They pressed close, rose high overhead in dizzying, irregular towers. The light of his torch cast insane shadows that cavorted where they would, catching on corners, climbing into cracks. There were no stars here, not anymore. The rock devoured them all. Harvey tried to speak, but managed nothing but a wheeze. His lips were dry, his voice gone.
Still he moved forward, sweeping the torch ahead of him. The worms were here, as well. They wriggled out of the walls, crunching under the soles of his shoes as Harvey passed. Most were dead, but some were still alive. And some of these were substantially larger than the ones he’d seen before—better fed, perhaps. But what was there to eat out here in this wasteland? Harvey tried not to look at his grotesque company, tried to keep his eyes straight ahead. But he couldn’t. There were fresh horrors to see. He was among the dead now.
Harvey dropped the torch. It fell at his feet as he stumbled backward with a gasp. The flame guttered and nearly went out in the dust, but it stayed lit just the same. It had to. Harvey needed to see what he’d found.
Empty sockets leered back at him from crevices in the rock, dead faces wasted and dried by the desert air. Some were fresh, others were ancient—faces out of time, faces from a different age—but they were all dead, lifeless, grinning things. Their bones were blackened. And the worms…
God, they were everywhere! Crawling, eating, sucking at those dry bones. They wriggled out of eye sockets, filled the cavities of hollow ribs. They pulsed with a fluid life all their own—life, where there should have been only death.
And there was more.
Harvey fell on his hands and knees in the dust, grabbing for the handle of his torch as he heard movement overhead. He jerked to his feet, spinning around to light the way, to see what he no longer wanted to see.
A figure appeared overhead. It crawled out of a grotto in the rock, followed closely by another, and another. They blotted out the night sky, peering down at him from where they’d nestled in the rock, dreaming whatever dark dreams such things may have. Harvey lifted his torch, screaming already, though he hadn’t even seen the worst of it. Their bodies were hidden in ragged robes, their heads hooded. But the light showed their faces—not really faces at all but hungry pits, oozing spittle. Worms fell free of these hooded things, landing with a wet splat on the ground. They twisted about Harvey’s feet, tied up in knots, coiled like spilled guts. Some fell upon his shoulder, heavier than they should have been for such small things, and cold—colder than death.
Harvey ran.
#
“Dee! Dee!” Harvey’s voice was nothing to the desert air. He tried to scream; it was all he could think to do under the circumstances. Scream, and run. But the running took care of itself. His legs pumped with more power than he’d felt in decades—more life. Fear brought to his flesh and blood more vigor than any number of lifeless fucks, attention bought and paid for from desperate college girls. Fear told him he was alive. And fear told him he wanted to stay that way.
“Dee!” A little better this time, a little louder. But there was no one to greet him as he stumbled back into that rundown camp—neither his wife, nor those freaks he’d seen out there in the dark. The campfire still burned, but its light revealed nothing but dusty campers.
There was no sign of Dee.
Harvey fell to his hands and knees in the dust beside the fire. Jagged stones dug into his palms, but he hardly felt any pain. His lungs were burning. He had lost his torch somewhere along the way, but it hardly mattered now. He didn’t want to see anymore.
He opened his mouth to call for Dee, to tell her they were leaving, goddammit. But a sound caught his voice in his throat, snagged it right there and held onto it. It wasn’t his wife. Hell, it wasn’t even those things he’d seen out there in the dark. This was a mundane sound–something he might have heard hundreds of times in his life. A sound that, more than any one thing, by its absence defined the rift that grew in his marriage.
It was the sound of a baby crying.
Harvey followed the sound to a dust-stricken single-wide trailer—the largest of the rundown shelters. His legs carried him there without being told. It was primal instinct all over again, not fear this time but something adjacent. He opened the rickety door and stepped inside.
The air hit him first: hot, stagnant. The kind of air that’s hard to breathe. This was a place that had been shut up for some time, left to rot in the desert heat. But the impression faded just as quickly as it came. No, Harvey thought—this wasn’t desert air at all. It was like he’d stepped into a different place entirely.
A different time.
Dee sat with her back to the door, in a chair Harvey knew, in a room he knew. It was a place from a past life: the nursery they had built for their baby. The baby that had, through no fault of its own, poisoned their marriage. The baby Harvey and Dee had, in their own separate ways, been running from ever since. The room hit Harvey like a punch in the gut.
He’d never wanted to see this place again. He’d had it stripped down to the walls, hadn’t even done the work himself. How could he? That would have taken time—time he and Dee would have had to spend mourning the baby that never was—their daughter, their little girl. Neither of them could bear the thought of it.
And so they never mourned, never faced the truth—the room and what it meant. They drank and fought and shopped and fucked until the part of them that might have felt something—that should have felt something—was dead and gone.
Or so they thought.
But here it was, after all these years. The room and everything that came with it. Everything they had been running from.
“Harvey,” Dee said. “Look.”
He didn’t want to. Didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see. But he saw it all just the same. The pastel colors, the crib, all those hopes and dreams sunk into this room they built and then unceremoniously destroyed. And the baby…
Harvey couldn’t see it, not from where he stood by the door. Dee sat with her back to him, but she was turned in such a way that there was no mistaking what she held in her arms. It was in her posture, the pose and the care she took with that precious thing in her arms. Despite her faults—despite what they had both become since that day—there was never a doubt in Harvey’s mind that Dee would have made an excellent mother.
And now…
Harvey stepped forward, though whether it was fear or wonder that moved him now he couldn’t say. But either way he stepped with the greatest of care, measuring his steps so he wouldn’t make a sound.
“I finally got her to quiet down,” Dee said, her voice quiet, warmed through with affection Harvey hadn’t heard in years. “She was crying something fierce when you went away.”
Harvey rounded the back of the chair. The world slowed, seemed to hang in the balance. His every move threatened to push it over the edge. He felt drunk in the worst possible way—like the world was fragile, made of glass and much too thin, and he’d lost all control of himself. One wrong move and he’d fall through. Everything would shatter.
“Look.”
He did, God help him, and what he saw swaddled there in Dee’s lap might have been a doll. That would have been merciful. But this thing wasn’t a doll, though the face that peered up at him from that nest of blankets in Dee’s lap certainly resembled a doll’s face—a pale visage like cracked porcelain, styled to mimic an infant’s chubby features. But those were no doll’s eyes in that varnished cherub’s face. Black pits stared up at Harvey, empty, soulless wells that leaked oily, black ichor in a mockery of tears. Its mouth opened, revealing a twisting knot of worms. The thing cooed and the worms tumbled free of its open mouth, writhing with such force that the porcelain mask the thing boasted for a face split along its cracks.
Behind that mask was only wet, pulsing darkness.
Harvey fell backward, landing hard on his outstretched hands. He felt desert air at his back—dry and dusty. He smelled smoke from the fire outside. He gasped and got a lungful of stagnant air—shut-in air, like the inside of the trailer should have been all along.
The nursery was gone. Dee sat in a folding chair, facing a ratty old crib that was so busted up it might have been unwanted trash picked up along the side of the highway. The room presented nothing but dust and decay. This was no fit place for habitation—no place for a child. But Dee went on holding that bundle as if the thing that squirmed and wailed in her lap was her own.
A wonderful mother, indeed.
Harvey called out to her. He tried to get back on his feet, to put a stop to all this. But a hand on his shoulder pushed him back down. He wasn’t surprised to see one of those awful hooded figures standing behind him. The shadows hid the face beneath that rotten hood, but Harvey knew what stared back at him. He could feel its gaze. It was disease, it was rot. It was death and grief and bitter, endless mourning and a thousand other things that no one wanted. It was a black, teeming pit that pulled and sucked, that would drag the heart down until there was no light.
It was an abyss.
Beneath that hood, Harvey saw something familiar—something he knew all too well. He saw himself. He saw a dead child, a dead marriage. He saw an ounce of misery that might have grown into something else, given time and attention; misery that might have healed but instead metastasized into something else. Something worse. Something hungry.
Harvey thought of the memorials that led them here, the pictures, the candles—shrines to all those black, bitter emotions. Emotions no one wanted, emotions that so often were exiled, thrown away like so much trash along the side of the road. But those shrines meant those emotions were attached to faces, lives, memories—and they had to go somewhere. What better place for exile than this miserable, barren place?
It was a place for lost, hungry things. A place for ghosts.
The hand on Harvey’s shoulder was cold as death. It was heavy, impossible to get out from under. And there were more now, figures standing just outside the door. Harvey tried to scream, but the breath was snatched from his lungs. It left him empty, but the pain was still there, growing, blooming. And so very, very cold.
Dee, Harvey said—tried to say. But he had no voice. His lips were dry, his lungs empty. There was nothing in him now but the cold. Stop. Please stop.
But the sounds grew louder. The baby cooed, its brittle voice swelling into a cry of frustration and hunger. Dee did what she could to comfort it, shushing that little bundle of horror. But the thing in her lap did only what it knew how to do—what all babies did. It fed. And Dee, good mother that she was, did her job and fed the thing. Harvey could hear it. Stunned, silent, incapable of even doing as little as finding his feet, he could do nothing but hear it. The baby’s hungry cries, Dee’s whispered assurances—and then her screams—as that thing in her lap crawled its way to her throat and latched onto her flesh with a mouth made of hundreds of writhing, black worms.
It took what it needed, what nature demanded of it.
There were no more screams after that.
#
The sun burned Harvey’s eyes. He raised one hand against it; his other hand cradled something heavy against his chest. The road opened before him, two lanes of weary blacktop baking in the desert sun. Harvey could feel the heat coming up from the ground. It was like standing in an oven. The sensation was familiar. He’d walked this road before, just…
When was that, exactly? He was having a hard time remembering. But he knew the way, he knew the road—this miserable, heat-blasted hellscape. And that was his car just ahead, pulled off onto the shoulder, gleaming like white fire in the sun. It was just where he left it. But he hadn’t been alone, had he? A thought stirred, something deep and murky. Something dredged up from where it lay hidden. And a feeling spread with it, something cold in Harvey’s chest. Something heavy, lonely. Like a hole in his heart.
Dee, he thought. He felt his gut turn over. And then he looked down.
The baby stared up at him from where it lay, cradled against Harvey’s chest. There was a moment of horror, an instant of blood-chilling revulsion that came from somewhere else—a dream, perhaps. Because certainly Harvey could never fear this bundle of joy in his arms, his precious little girl. She stared up at him with those pretty blue eyes; naturally, she favored her mother. What a pair they made.
“Are you hungry?” Harvey asked. The baby cooed, squirming in her swaddling clothes.
Of course she was hungry. Harvey looked to his free hand, at the wounds that had only just begun to close: tooth marks, sucked clean of blood. He put his wrist to his daughter’s mouth.
She was always hungry.
There was nothing here but two lanes of cracked blacktop running on into eternity, baking beneath the desert sun. The world was dead, washed out, the color of old bone. Rocks jutted here and there, nasty little protrusions as yellow as a smoker’s teeth. Heat shimmer on the horizon turned the landscape into an impossible sight. It cut off the bottom of the distant mountains; to Harvey’s straining eyes, they appeared to be floating.
Christ, it’s hot.
Beside him, his wife, Deanna—or Dee, to most everyone—did her level best to make sure Harvey couldn’t forget she was there, or that all this was somehow his fault.
“You said there was nothing wrong with the car. You said everything was fine.”
“Everything was fine, Dee. I changed the oil. I checked the coolant. I checked the brakes. Hell, I even checked the goddamn power steering fluid, if it makes any difference.”
“Well you must have missed something.”
“Or maybe it’s one-hundred and fucking-fifteen degrees outside, and mankind is not meant to exist in such a hellish place. You ever think of that? Shit happens, Dee. And in my experience, it happens at the worst possible times.”
Dee gave him a sidelong look. Her blonde hair was white in the sun, so bright it was hard to look at. Her face and shoulders were already turning red from the heat. “Could have paid someone to look at it. Could have just hired a mechanic.”
Harvey scowled. Damn you, woman. She knew that wasn’t in the cards. Not anymore.
Aside from what little had come with them in the car, everything Harvey and Dee owned was packed into a woefully small storage container on its way east. There wasn’t much. A few bad investments on the tail end of an unsustainable lifestyle saw to that. This meant no more California. No more condo in the hills, no beach home. No lavish existence to distract them from one another.
They took the only car they still owned, packed it full of what they could and started east, bound for lands distant—and cheaper. The money Harvey had left would only take them so far, and he wanted to maximize the amount those dwindling dollars could buy. He might be able to do that in the Midwest, or the Carolinas maybe with a little luck. But not California.
No, California was a dead end. The only thing left to do was leave it behind.
They hadn’t made it far, though. The car saw to that. The desert saw to that. Dead in the water in this godawful sun, no signal, no help. And now they were walking, hoping to reach a gas station the signs said was a few miles up the way. But who knew how accurate those signs were? There was no telling how long they had been there; the desert aged everything it touched. That gas station could be long gone by now, melted right into the goddamn ground for all Harvey knew. And he couldn’t blame it, really. No one should be out here. This place was death.
“You sure we’re going the right way?” Dee asked. She mopped her forehead with the back of her hand and shielded her eyes against the sun.
“We’re going the way the car was going,” Harvey said.
“It’s just, I don’t see anything, Harvey.”
“You wanna go back the way we came? Get another look at everything we passed getting here?”
Dee huffed. There wasn’t shit back the way they came, not for miles and miles. They’d both wondered at the stark emptiness of the world, how shocking it was to see such endless nothing. No one lived here, no one wanted to be here. And after fifty-seven years in California—or fifty-two for Dee—that was a revelation in and of itself.
“I don’t see anything,” Dee said. “That’s all I’m saying. There was supposed to be a gas station, but…”
“And you probably won’t see it,” Harvey said. “Not in this heat. You see that shimmer?” He pointed with one sunburned hand. “You can’t trust your eyes out here.”
“Thanks, Professor.”
Harvey didn’t see her roll her eyes, but by God, he felt it.
They kept walking.
#
Somehow they made it to sundown. The glare abated, and with it a little of the heat. What remained of the day’s oppressive ferocity burned at their back, a red smear at the edge of a darkening world. The first stars were beginning to shine overhead, cold, distant things. Harvey envied them.
There was no gas station.
There was something else, though: litter on the side of the road. There was no reason he should have stopped here in particular, not after everything he’d seen. There had been no shortage of trash along the way: cans, bottles and food wrappers. Humanity just couldn’t help itself. It had to have the last word, even in a place it could make no claim to. A place it didn’t want.
Harvey bent down, straining from the effort. Sweat dripped from his face and dotted the dust at his feet. “Dee, look at this.” There was a woman’s high-heeled shoe in his hands.
She looked, then offered him a sneer for his trouble. “You would find something like that, wouldn’t you?”
He thrust the shoe toward her. “No, I mean really look.”
Dee sighed as she did it, but she indulged him. And she must have seen what Harvey saw, because her face took on a thoughtful cast.
They’d seen this shoe before. Dee had a pair just like it. That’s what Harvey was telling himself, anyway: she had a pair like this, though he couldn’t shake the nagging certainty that this was one of them. That a cast-off bit of trash on the side of this lonely desert highway had belonged to his wife. He didn’t know why he should think that—shit, what were the odds? Just a shade under impossible—but the conviction remained. It settled in his gut, heavier than it should have been. It wasn’t a nice feeling, but the memories it stirred up were worse.
Their marriage had been on the rocks for a while. Since the baby, really. That was a bad chapter in their life they had never managed to come back from. Sure, they’d tried, at least for a while—sometimes together, more often on their own. That’s where those shoes came in.
Harvey remembered all too well what she looked like in those racy black pumps, dotted across the toe with sequins or rhinestones or whatever the fuck people called them. Bedroom shoes, that’s what they were in Harvey’s mind. That’s what they were for, and boy did Dee know it.
Christ, she’d looked good in those shoes. Back when she was lean and beautiful, young and full of that particular sort of spite that was ready to burn baby burn. There was a time when he’d been the focus of her attention, all those years ago. It felt like a past life now, a life lived by someone else. A life before these particular shoes. Before they lost the baby and that rift between them opened like a great, hungry mouth. A mouth that ate and ate and ate, and so they’d just gone on shoveling the shit right into it, keeping it fed so it wouldn’t turn on them. So they wouldn’t have to see what was down there at the bottom.
But damn she looked good in those shoes, Harvey thought. Everyone else thought so, too. Strangers and swingers, bars and clubs and hotel rooms; she had never been short on eyes eager to drink her in.
“Dee, you didn’t pack those shoes, did you? Didn’t bring them along in the car?”
His wife looked at him like he’d sprouted a boil in the center of his forehead, but Harvey barely noticed. He was thinking of the luggage rack on top of the car, thinking something might have come loose. A pair of shoes, maybe. Something Dee claimed to have hung up a long time ago, but maybe things like that don’t just stop. There’s that mouth, after all. That hunger that eats and eats…
“What the fuck are you going on about, Harvey?”
No, he thought. Even if this shoe did fall out of the luggage somehow, it would have been behind them on the road, not in front of them. And they were still going east. That bloody red light at their backs said so, a universal sign more trustworthy than any rusted plate of metal advertising a gas station they’d never reach.
No, he assured himself. It just wasn’t possible. But the feeling persisted.
“That isn’t mine, Harvey. I know your mind isn’t what it used to be, but don’t even tell me you think that’s mine. Because I just won’t believe it.”
Harvey held the shoe out to her once more, his voice plaintive. “It’s your size.”
“You would know that, wouldn’t you? Goddamn pervert.” But her eyes were on the shoe, and in those eyes Harvey saw doubt, nagging, chewing, eating. The same doubt that was tugging at his gut, stirring up shit that should have been put to bed a long time ago. Dee slapped the shoe out of his hand. “Get that filthy thing away from me!”
Harvey watched it clatter to the crumbled shoulder, back where he’d found it. But his thoughts didn’t go with it to the cooling desert earth. No, they stayed right where they were.
“What’s gotten into you, bringing all that up now? Like we don’t have enough to worry about already?” Dee put her hands on her hips, demanding an answer. But Harvey didn’t have one. He just kept on looking at that shoe, chewing his way through everything they’d done for the past few decades to convince themselves they were happy, that they could come back from it somehow. That the baby hadn’t mattered all that much to begin with.
“We’re gonna die out here, and you wanna drag skeletons out of the closet?” Dee shook her head, a bitter smile coming in to mask some of that doubt she was feeling. It was something she was good at, a maneuver she’d had plenty of opportunity to practice. “Are we gonna repent for our sins? Is that it, Harvey? Well go on, be my guest. But don’t act like you didn’t play your part. Don’t you dare! Not when I know I could open up your phone right now and find a road map of your sins. I bet those conversations have gone awfully quiet lately though, haven’t they, Harvey? Not many young girls come calling an old man when his money dries up.”
Harvey tasted bitter words on his tongue, an argument begging to be let out. He wanted to say that no one had come looking for her, either. Not since the years and the wine had taken their toll. But what was the point? They both knew it. They knew what they were. Harvey was nothing to look at himself: a man going fat in the middle, his face soft, his hair thin. He could already feel his scalp peeling from the sun.
“What a pair we are,” he said in place of the argument, the same one they’d had time and time again. “What a pair.” It was a mantra, the last few decades of their marriage summed up as succinctly as it ever would be.
But Dee was no longer listening. She looked past him, into the darkening sprawl of desert. “There’s something out there.”
“What?”
“Look there.” Dee pointed and Harvey turned, following the path of her sunburned finger into the gloom.
The stars were brighter now, brilliant, frigid points far removed from the light of human civilization. But the world beneath them was growing darker by the minute, and in that darkness they saw a distant fire. Something small, flickering—but controlled. A campfire.
“Maybe they can help,” Dee said.
Harvey, who tended to disagree with his wife on principle, hoped she was right.
He spared one last look for that too-familiar shoe along the side of the road, thinking he’d seen it move from the corner of his eye. But no, it was just some kind of worm—a dark, bloated thing that wriggled about the heel. Its body glistened in the dying light, strangely well-fed for such a dry and desolate place.
Apparently something could survive out here after all.
#
With the sun gone, the heat left the world as surely as if it had never been there at all. The darkness laid bare the duality of the desert, revealing it for what it was: a world of impossible extremes, harsh beyond expectation. This was no place for life to endure, no place for mankind, in particular. And yet that fire flickered in the distance.
“What is that?” Dee said, pointing toward the side of the road as if the gesture were really necessary. Harvey’s eyes were drawn there naturally. In the dark, the candles were impossible to miss.
“Jesus…”
Leading away from the side of the road was a procession of countless little shrines—collections of stuff that Harvey associated most with the locations of fatal traffic accidents. But these would have looked at home on gravesites as well, or perhaps in the homes of the overly sentimental—or overly religious. Here were framed photographs, religious icons, flowers, toys, candles in tall glass jars—the kind that always had one religious figure or another printed on the front, looking appropriately sorrowful. They flickered like tiny, glowing islands in the dark, one after another, a parade of grief that marched into the endless night.
The distance made it hard to know for sure, but from where Harvey and Dee stood, those markers appeared to lead straight out to that campfire in the distance. And why not? There was nowhere else to go.
Harvey started in that direction, stepping off the road and onto the trail marked out before them without a word. Dee, too, said nothing. Not until they’d gone a ways into the desert, and she’d had time to inspect the little shrines they passed on the way.
“Are you seeing this, Harvey?” she said. “They’re children. Most of these, they’re…”
One after the other, the memorials went on and on. Many of them—too many, considering the implications—ensconced the photo of a child. The ages varied. Sex, race, even the year they must have been born and died, all of that varied from one to the next with no obvious regard to order. Some of the photos were indeed quite old, faded beyond recognition. The oldest of them must have been well over a hundred years old. Antiques. But here they were, left out in this blasted desert, and someone was tending to them. Someone who had a mind to remember these children—whatever it was that might have happened to them.
Harvey walked on, Dee a few steps behind him. He wondered at how strange this all was, how random it appeared. How completely and utterly unexpected. But the more he saw the more it occurred to him that there was nothing random about it. This was a serious undertaking, it was deliberate. Someone had gone through a lot of trouble to maintain all this, and now here was Harvey, leading his wife into the desert to--
To what, exactly? He imagined a church out there in the dark, some rundown old mission maybe. It was an image plucked from a movie for sure, more impulse than honest thought. But it felt right, at least for a moment. Until he realized that wasn’t right at all. He rejected the thought of that church before it was even fully formed, realizing there was something deeper here, a wrongness he’d felt more than seen. Churches, after all, were Christian things. Familiar things. And nothing about this was familiar.
The trinkets, the candles, the religious icons Harvey had taken for granted—all of them were alien. Harvey expected to see crosses, he expected pictures of Jesus, of Mary, of one dour saint or another. Because that’s who left things like this, wasn’t it? Harvey thought he knew the sorts of people who bought candles like that, what they believed. But if the images on those candles were saints, they were no saints Harvey had ever seen. These were strange figures, dark and hooded, impossible to identify even without the desert dust baked onto the glass. And there were no crosses. No, these were symbols Harvey had never seen before.
Before Harvey could mention any of this, Dee’s scream ripped through the silent desert night.
“Oh my God!” she cried. “Harvey, look! They’re covered in… Jesus, are those worms?” She was hopping from foot to foot as if a mouse had run between her feet—or she’d stepped in something nasty.
Harvey looked down, his eyes once more moving to the memorials beside the trail. And sure enough, Dee was right. There were things wriggling about the various objects left here: fat, dark things that, yes, must have indeed been some kind of worms. They might have been blue or gray—it was impossible to tell by candlelight—and the largest of them were at least four inches long. They squirmed around the candles, climbed over the picture frames. They left greasy, wet smears on everything they touched. Others lay dead, shriveled by the desert sun. They littered the trail like dead leaves, beaten into the dust by the passage of countless feet.
Dee made all the appropriate noises as she struggled to find someplace clean to step. Harvey turned his eyes further up the trail. The fire loomed brighter now.
They were close.
#
“Hello!” Harvey called, as they at last reached their destination. “Is anyone there?”
The fire blazed, impossibly bright in this dark, isolated wilderness. Harvey raised a hand to shield his eyes against it, turning his head from side to side. A collection of low dwellings gathered around the central fire: camper trailers, RVs, a mobile home, tents and other ramshackle shelters. This was no pop-up campsite; it had clearly been here for a while. Dust covered the windows, settled on the roofs. Such a place might have been abandoned, left behind and long forgotten. But there was the fire, recently lit and tended. And there were those little shrines along the trail with their burning candles.
Someone was here. But where were they?
“Hello?” Dee tried her luck. “Our car broke down on the road. We could sure use some help.” Only the fire answered, crackling as it burned, contained in a charred ring of desert stones.
“Come on. Let’s take a look around.”
The fire did wonders to dispel the night chill as Harvey and Dee split up to inspect the campsite. They knocked on doors, peered through windows. They went around each of the dwellings, hunting for any sign of life. But all was quiet, the desert as still and lifeless as ever. The fire crackled on. So far, it was all they had to show for their efforts.
Dee kept at her shouting and her door knocking, but Harvey returned to the fire pit, staring into the hungry blaze and wondering who had been feeding it. The heat lulled his senses, reminding him of every ounce of weariness he’d gathered over the course of the day. He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to sleep, even if he had to do it right here, sandwiched between the cold ground and the warm fire. He might have even been able to overlook the dead worms that littered the ground, here as well as along the trail with its countless little shrines. But he never got that far, never even shut his eyes; a figure at the edge of camp snapped him to attention like an electric shock.
“Hey!” he called, straining his tired eyes against the glare, stepping around the fire to get a better look. But the figure was gone, blended once more into the darkness. “Hey, wait!”
Harvey turned to look about the camp, realizing he no longer heard his wife—her knocking and shouting had abated while he’d allowed his mind to wander. There was no sign of her now. He looked back toward the edge of camp, where just moments ago he’d seen that figure. “Dee?” he called. “Dee, are you out there?”
Shit, he couldn’t see a thing out there! The firelight spoiled his eyes, and the stars seemed darker now—more distant than ever. Harvey debated a moment, then grabbed a bit of scrap wood from a nearby barrel. He wound one end with a bit of cloth he found on the ground, then plunged it into the fire, turning it into a makeshift torch. It wouldn’t burn for long, but it was better than nothing. With this in hand he crossed to the edge of camp, stepping between the ramshackle dwellings and into the deeper dark beyond. The figure he’d seen was like a ghost, there and gone in an instant. But it couldn’t have gone far.
“Hello!” Harvey called, sweeping the desert night with his torch. He stepped into the path he cut through the dark, the flickering torch leading the way. The dark closed greedily behind him, nipping at his heels.
Dee, he thought, was that really you?
In the desert ahead he expected to see only what he’d seen before: that endless, awful expanse of bone-colored rock and dust; Dee would be easy enough to spot on open ground, so long as she didn’t get too far ahead. Dee…or whoever it was he’d seen by the fire. But instead of empty desert Harvey was met by a towering wall of dark stone. It ran on and on to his left and right. It might have been endless, might have gone on forever for all he knew. His light showed him precious little, and even that might have been too much; the wall appeared to move in the guttering light. The sight of it made him queasy.
There was no sign of Dee, or anyone else for that matter. But there was an opening in the wall just ahead, a jagged little cut that must have led into a narrow canyon. Harvey made for it, increasingly sure now that Dee hadn’t come this way. He’d followed someone else out here, into the dark. But he kept on anyway, unwilling to turn back. He was driven by some irresistible urge to see, to know. Because that figure he’d seen by the fire…
No, that was just a trick of the light. It couldn’t be real. Even here, in this world which had suddenly gone mad, some things were just too dreadful to believe.
The light showed the way, and Harvey followed it into the mouth of the canyon.
The walls closed in around him in an instant, shutting out the wider world. They pressed close, rose high overhead in dizzying, irregular towers. The light of his torch cast insane shadows that cavorted where they would, catching on corners, climbing into cracks. There were no stars here, not anymore. The rock devoured them all. Harvey tried to speak, but managed nothing but a wheeze. His lips were dry, his voice gone.
Still he moved forward, sweeping the torch ahead of him. The worms were here, as well. They wriggled out of the walls, crunching under the soles of his shoes as Harvey passed. Most were dead, but some were still alive. And some of these were substantially larger than the ones he’d seen before—better fed, perhaps. But what was there to eat out here in this wasteland? Harvey tried not to look at his grotesque company, tried to keep his eyes straight ahead. But he couldn’t. There were fresh horrors to see. He was among the dead now.
Harvey dropped the torch. It fell at his feet as he stumbled backward with a gasp. The flame guttered and nearly went out in the dust, but it stayed lit just the same. It had to. Harvey needed to see what he’d found.
Empty sockets leered back at him from crevices in the rock, dead faces wasted and dried by the desert air. Some were fresh, others were ancient—faces out of time, faces from a different age—but they were all dead, lifeless, grinning things. Their bones were blackened. And the worms…
God, they were everywhere! Crawling, eating, sucking at those dry bones. They wriggled out of eye sockets, filled the cavities of hollow ribs. They pulsed with a fluid life all their own—life, where there should have been only death.
And there was more.
Harvey fell on his hands and knees in the dust, grabbing for the handle of his torch as he heard movement overhead. He jerked to his feet, spinning around to light the way, to see what he no longer wanted to see.
A figure appeared overhead. It crawled out of a grotto in the rock, followed closely by another, and another. They blotted out the night sky, peering down at him from where they’d nestled in the rock, dreaming whatever dark dreams such things may have. Harvey lifted his torch, screaming already, though he hadn’t even seen the worst of it. Their bodies were hidden in ragged robes, their heads hooded. But the light showed their faces—not really faces at all but hungry pits, oozing spittle. Worms fell free of these hooded things, landing with a wet splat on the ground. They twisted about Harvey’s feet, tied up in knots, coiled like spilled guts. Some fell upon his shoulder, heavier than they should have been for such small things, and cold—colder than death.
Harvey ran.
#
“Dee! Dee!” Harvey’s voice was nothing to the desert air. He tried to scream; it was all he could think to do under the circumstances. Scream, and run. But the running took care of itself. His legs pumped with more power than he’d felt in decades—more life. Fear brought to his flesh and blood more vigor than any number of lifeless fucks, attention bought and paid for from desperate college girls. Fear told him he was alive. And fear told him he wanted to stay that way.
“Dee!” A little better this time, a little louder. But there was no one to greet him as he stumbled back into that rundown camp—neither his wife, nor those freaks he’d seen out there in the dark. The campfire still burned, but its light revealed nothing but dusty campers.
There was no sign of Dee.
Harvey fell to his hands and knees in the dust beside the fire. Jagged stones dug into his palms, but he hardly felt any pain. His lungs were burning. He had lost his torch somewhere along the way, but it hardly mattered now. He didn’t want to see anymore.
He opened his mouth to call for Dee, to tell her they were leaving, goddammit. But a sound caught his voice in his throat, snagged it right there and held onto it. It wasn’t his wife. Hell, it wasn’t even those things he’d seen out there in the dark. This was a mundane sound–something he might have heard hundreds of times in his life. A sound that, more than any one thing, by its absence defined the rift that grew in his marriage.
It was the sound of a baby crying.
Harvey followed the sound to a dust-stricken single-wide trailer—the largest of the rundown shelters. His legs carried him there without being told. It was primal instinct all over again, not fear this time but something adjacent. He opened the rickety door and stepped inside.
The air hit him first: hot, stagnant. The kind of air that’s hard to breathe. This was a place that had been shut up for some time, left to rot in the desert heat. But the impression faded just as quickly as it came. No, Harvey thought—this wasn’t desert air at all. It was like he’d stepped into a different place entirely.
A different time.
Dee sat with her back to the door, in a chair Harvey knew, in a room he knew. It was a place from a past life: the nursery they had built for their baby. The baby that had, through no fault of its own, poisoned their marriage. The baby Harvey and Dee had, in their own separate ways, been running from ever since. The room hit Harvey like a punch in the gut.
He’d never wanted to see this place again. He’d had it stripped down to the walls, hadn’t even done the work himself. How could he? That would have taken time—time he and Dee would have had to spend mourning the baby that never was—their daughter, their little girl. Neither of them could bear the thought of it.
And so they never mourned, never faced the truth—the room and what it meant. They drank and fought and shopped and fucked until the part of them that might have felt something—that should have felt something—was dead and gone.
Or so they thought.
But here it was, after all these years. The room and everything that came with it. Everything they had been running from.
“Harvey,” Dee said. “Look.”
He didn’t want to. Didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see. But he saw it all just the same. The pastel colors, the crib, all those hopes and dreams sunk into this room they built and then unceremoniously destroyed. And the baby…
Harvey couldn’t see it, not from where he stood by the door. Dee sat with her back to him, but she was turned in such a way that there was no mistaking what she held in her arms. It was in her posture, the pose and the care she took with that precious thing in her arms. Despite her faults—despite what they had both become since that day—there was never a doubt in Harvey’s mind that Dee would have made an excellent mother.
And now…
Harvey stepped forward, though whether it was fear or wonder that moved him now he couldn’t say. But either way he stepped with the greatest of care, measuring his steps so he wouldn’t make a sound.
“I finally got her to quiet down,” Dee said, her voice quiet, warmed through with affection Harvey hadn’t heard in years. “She was crying something fierce when you went away.”
Harvey rounded the back of the chair. The world slowed, seemed to hang in the balance. His every move threatened to push it over the edge. He felt drunk in the worst possible way—like the world was fragile, made of glass and much too thin, and he’d lost all control of himself. One wrong move and he’d fall through. Everything would shatter.
“Look.”
He did, God help him, and what he saw swaddled there in Dee’s lap might have been a doll. That would have been merciful. But this thing wasn’t a doll, though the face that peered up at him from that nest of blankets in Dee’s lap certainly resembled a doll’s face—a pale visage like cracked porcelain, styled to mimic an infant’s chubby features. But those were no doll’s eyes in that varnished cherub’s face. Black pits stared up at Harvey, empty, soulless wells that leaked oily, black ichor in a mockery of tears. Its mouth opened, revealing a twisting knot of worms. The thing cooed and the worms tumbled free of its open mouth, writhing with such force that the porcelain mask the thing boasted for a face split along its cracks.
Behind that mask was only wet, pulsing darkness.
Harvey fell backward, landing hard on his outstretched hands. He felt desert air at his back—dry and dusty. He smelled smoke from the fire outside. He gasped and got a lungful of stagnant air—shut-in air, like the inside of the trailer should have been all along.
The nursery was gone. Dee sat in a folding chair, facing a ratty old crib that was so busted up it might have been unwanted trash picked up along the side of the highway. The room presented nothing but dust and decay. This was no fit place for habitation—no place for a child. But Dee went on holding that bundle as if the thing that squirmed and wailed in her lap was her own.
A wonderful mother, indeed.
Harvey called out to her. He tried to get back on his feet, to put a stop to all this. But a hand on his shoulder pushed him back down. He wasn’t surprised to see one of those awful hooded figures standing behind him. The shadows hid the face beneath that rotten hood, but Harvey knew what stared back at him. He could feel its gaze. It was disease, it was rot. It was death and grief and bitter, endless mourning and a thousand other things that no one wanted. It was a black, teeming pit that pulled and sucked, that would drag the heart down until there was no light.
It was an abyss.
Beneath that hood, Harvey saw something familiar—something he knew all too well. He saw himself. He saw a dead child, a dead marriage. He saw an ounce of misery that might have grown into something else, given time and attention; misery that might have healed but instead metastasized into something else. Something worse. Something hungry.
Harvey thought of the memorials that led them here, the pictures, the candles—shrines to all those black, bitter emotions. Emotions no one wanted, emotions that so often were exiled, thrown away like so much trash along the side of the road. But those shrines meant those emotions were attached to faces, lives, memories—and they had to go somewhere. What better place for exile than this miserable, barren place?
It was a place for lost, hungry things. A place for ghosts.
The hand on Harvey’s shoulder was cold as death. It was heavy, impossible to get out from under. And there were more now, figures standing just outside the door. Harvey tried to scream, but the breath was snatched from his lungs. It left him empty, but the pain was still there, growing, blooming. And so very, very cold.
Dee, Harvey said—tried to say. But he had no voice. His lips were dry, his lungs empty. There was nothing in him now but the cold. Stop. Please stop.
But the sounds grew louder. The baby cooed, its brittle voice swelling into a cry of frustration and hunger. Dee did what she could to comfort it, shushing that little bundle of horror. But the thing in her lap did only what it knew how to do—what all babies did. It fed. And Dee, good mother that she was, did her job and fed the thing. Harvey could hear it. Stunned, silent, incapable of even doing as little as finding his feet, he could do nothing but hear it. The baby’s hungry cries, Dee’s whispered assurances—and then her screams—as that thing in her lap crawled its way to her throat and latched onto her flesh with a mouth made of hundreds of writhing, black worms.
It took what it needed, what nature demanded of it.
There were no more screams after that.
#
The sun burned Harvey’s eyes. He raised one hand against it; his other hand cradled something heavy against his chest. The road opened before him, two lanes of weary blacktop baking in the desert sun. Harvey could feel the heat coming up from the ground. It was like standing in an oven. The sensation was familiar. He’d walked this road before, just…
When was that, exactly? He was having a hard time remembering. But he knew the way, he knew the road—this miserable, heat-blasted hellscape. And that was his car just ahead, pulled off onto the shoulder, gleaming like white fire in the sun. It was just where he left it. But he hadn’t been alone, had he? A thought stirred, something deep and murky. Something dredged up from where it lay hidden. And a feeling spread with it, something cold in Harvey’s chest. Something heavy, lonely. Like a hole in his heart.
Dee, he thought. He felt his gut turn over. And then he looked down.
The baby stared up at him from where it lay, cradled against Harvey’s chest. There was a moment of horror, an instant of blood-chilling revulsion that came from somewhere else—a dream, perhaps. Because certainly Harvey could never fear this bundle of joy in his arms, his precious little girl. She stared up at him with those pretty blue eyes; naturally, she favored her mother. What a pair they made.
“Are you hungry?” Harvey asked. The baby cooed, squirming in her swaddling clothes.
Of course she was hungry. Harvey looked to his free hand, at the wounds that had only just begun to close: tooth marks, sucked clean of blood. He put his wrist to his daughter’s mouth.
She was always hungry.