Nocturnes

  But this was cancer, and different forms of cancer. How could they be linked to one man?

  There was something terribly wrong. He had to talk to Lopez. He was about to get his coat when he heard someone enter Reception and close the door. There was the sound of the lock being engaged. He walked out to the receptionist’s desk.

  “Sorry,” he began. “I’m—”

  Buddy Carson had wiped most of Lloyd Hopkins’s blood from his face, but it still streaked his nose and forehead. His lips were drawn back from his mouth, and Bradley could see what looked like oil caked at the corners.

  Buddy’s right hand swept across from left to right, knocking Greg Bradley back into his office. The pointed toe of a cowboy boot struck the doctor in the left kidney, and then Buddy Carson was sitting on his chest, his knees pinning his quarry’s arms to the floor.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” he said, “but Buddy ain’t got time for your shit.”

  He held a glass jar in his left hand. Using his thumb and forefinger, he unscrewed the lid. Something black inside the jar twisted in response to the action.

  Buddy shifted his position, now using his shins on the doctor’s arms while his knees gripped his head. He leaned over, then pressed the open end of the jar against Bradley’s left ear.

  Like a slug, the black tumor began to slide across the glass toward its host.

  The day crawled by. Lopez got tied up with a domestic dispute, eventually hauling in the husband to give him time to cool off in a cell. There were couples in the town who seemed to spend most of their married lives first beating up on each other, then breaking up with each other, before finally getting back together in time to start the whole cycle once more. Charges were often threatened but rarely pressed, and Lopez had forced himself not to become clinically depressed by the number of women who stayed in, or returned to, abusive relationships despite every effort to help them. He knew it wasn’t that simple, and he had heard all the complex psychological arguments about the nature of such relationships, but that still didn’t stop him from wanting to take a length of rubber hose to some of the men and to shake some sense into the women.

  The guy currently languishing in a cell had not come to his attention before. According to his wife, he had lost his job a couple of months earlier and begun drinking more than usual. Money was tight and bills were going unpaid. What began as an attempt to have a reasoned discussion had escalated into shouting and then, briefly, violence. A neighbor called the police, and now the husband was in a cell and Lopez had left another message on Amy Weiss’s phone asking her to try to schedule an appointment with the wife.

  Lopez called Greg Bradley’s office, but got the machine. He tried the doctor’s cell, but got a “powered off” message. Finally, he made a call to Greg’s house and, when there was no reply, got Lana over at Reed’s and asked her if she knew where he was. She told him that she’d left him at the office, and filled him in some on the morning’s events without mentioning the names of those involved, but she couldn’t talk for long. Already there were people starting to arrive, and Lopez could hear Eddy Reed shouting in the background. Lopez let her go.

  He checked his watch. Lloyd Hopkins was late. He’d promised to return early to help out with the parking at Reed’s. Again Lopez was forced to call both his cell and his home, but got no reply from either.

  “Doesn’t anybody answer the damn phone anymore?” he asked nobody in particular. The only people within earshot were Barker and Ellie. They just exchanged looks and returned to their business with renewed vigor. Lopez asked Ellie to head over to Reed’s until Lloyd made an appearance, then left Barker at the station while he took a ride over to Greg Bradley’s office.

  The door was unlocked.

  He stepped inside and saw the papers on the floor, and the cracked glass in the office door where Greg’s body had struck it. He drew his gun and advanced toward the room. It was empty, but there was a dark stain on the carpet. He checked the other rooms and found them empty. He had just picked up his handset to call Barker back at the station when he heard a sound from the closet at the end of the hallway. Its doors were chained and locked.

  Lopez ran to it. Someone was trying to speak, but the words were indistinct.

  “Greg?”

  The voice spoke again.

  “I’ll have you out of there in a second,” he said.

  He took his baton, twisted it against the chain, then pulled. The handle on the closet popped out of the wood, releasing the door. It shot open and what was left of Greg Bradley tumbled out onto the floor. His face was entirely black, and his eyes were hidden beneath his swollen flesh. Most of his hair had fallen out, and what remained were gray strands, stuck to the lesions that had opened in his scalp. Lopez turned away, feeling himself start to retch at the smell.

  “Uh-ee,” said Bradley.

  “I can’t—”

  Bradley’s hand tried to grip at Lopez’s shirt, but it had no strength.

  “Uh-ee,” repeated Bradley. “Uh-ee sick.”

  His consciousness was failing, the black things eating away at him, consuming him by turning his own body against him. He could not remember his own name, or where he was. He was lost in the growing darkness, and he would never be found again. All that was left was pain, and the memory of the man who had brought it.

  And then even that was gone.

  Lopez eased Bradley’s body slowly to the floor.

  Uh-ee.

  Buddy.

  At that moment, Buddy Carson was standing in the shadows at the back of Eddy Reed’s bar. The place was filling up nicely, with more cars arriving every minute. A small, lithe female cop was helping to direct the new arrivals into the parking lot. Buddy waited patiently. He knew his chance would come, and it did.

  A fat woman in a Nissan, three of her howling brood crammed into the backseat, tried to buck the one-way system in the lot in order to grab a parking space close to the bar’s back door. Unfortunately, she reckoned without a big Explorer, which was next in line for the space and which pipped the Nissan. There was some shouting, which confirmed Buddy’s view that the neighborliness in this town was only skin-deep, before the Nissan backed away, glancing against someone’s Lexus and setting off the alarm. The couple who owned the Lexus had not yet made it to the bar, and the sound of the alarm brought them scurrying back. It also brought the cop, who had to skirt the Dumpsters behind which Buddy lay.

  He grabbed her quickly and without fuss, then left her bleeding amidst the trash.

  Five minutes later, he was heading for the bar.

  The call about Lloyd Hopkins came just seconds after Lopez finished up with Barker. He had given the young part-timer a description of Buddy Carson and told him to alert the state police. He was trying to raise Ellie when Barker came back to him on the radio. He sounded on the verge on tears.

  “Chief, it’s Lloyd,” he said. “A couple of kids think they’ve found his body behind the old Metzger’s Bowl. His car’s there too. They say he’s been beat on pretty bad. What do you want me to do?”

  Jesus, not Lloyd. Lopez felt a wrenching in his gut.

  “Who are the kids?”

  “Ben Ryder and the Capoore girl.”

  Pat Capoore’s daughter, the girl from the motel: she knew Lloyd Hopkins by sight.

  “I’m heading out there,” he told Barker. “Get back on to the troopers again. Tell them we have one officer dead, and the suspect is Carson, Buddy Carson.”

  Lopez didn’t know for sure that Carson was responsible for Lloyd Hopkins’s death, but he was the best suspect. Nobody local would ever even raise a voice to Lloyd Hopkins.

  “And Chris,” he added, “you tell them to use extreme caution. Tell them not to even touch this guy. I think there’s something wrong with him. He may be contagious, you understand?”

  He was about to hit the lights and speed to Metzger’s, but paused before activating the siren. First Link Frazier was diagnosed with cancer, then Greg Bradley’s receptionist had
alerted him to two further possible cases. Now Greg was dead, his face a mess of tumors, and Lloyd Hopkins’s body was lying in the deserted lot of an abandoned bowling alley, beaten and maybe diseased. But cancer wasn’t contagious. It didn’t work that way.

  He tried raising Ellie again, but with no success. Instead, he took out his cell and called Reed’s. Eddy picked up on the third ring.

  “Reed’s. How can I help you?”

  “Eddy, it’s Jim Lopez. Do me a favor. Look out into the lot, see if you can’t spot Ellie Winters.”

  He could hear voices in the background, and laughter. Music was playing.

  “Hang on, Chief,” said Reed.

  The phone was put down, and in that instant Lopez made his decision. Minutes went by before the phone was picked up again, but by the time Eddy came back on the line Lopez was in sight of the bar.

  “No, I don’t see her anywhere. Her car’s outside, but—”

  Eddy Reed paused.

  “Hold on, there’s something happening,” he said.

  Then the music died, and Lopez heard somebody start to scream.

  Buddy had been preparing himself all day, working on the poison within him until it was distilled to its purest essence. He could feel it responding to his thoughts, readying itself for what lay ahead. The fluid with which he had blinded Lloyd Hopkins was waste matter and nothing more. He had kept back the real stuff, so that when he touched the first woman over by the ladies’ room, the release of energy rocked him on his heels. He could almost see the black fluid seeping through his pores and entering the base of her skull. He felt light-headed, and giddy with power, even as the woman’s skin puckered and blackened before him. She spun toward him, her fingers reaching back to try to find the source of the pain, but Buddy was already moving. He touched a fat man on the hand, and a waitress on the shoulder blade. Her tray fell to the floor, the glasses upon it shattering.

  Then a woman screamed. Buddy thought it might be the bitch at the toilets, but in fact it was one of her companions, responding to the sight of the creeping tumor colonizing her friend’s face. Buddy felt somebody reach for him, the man’s hand closing firmly on his shoulder. Without looking, Buddy slapped back at his face and felt the surge again as the transfer occurred. He was making for the far corner of the bar, where a familiar blond-haired woman was talking to a man in a gray suit. He had spotted the cop’s girlfriend as soon as he entered the bar. He liked the idea of taking her while the venom was still so strong in him. He stretched out his arms in a crucifixion pose, his fingers trailing behind him, brushing against skin, cloth, hair as he began moving like a dark messiah through the crowd, quickly losing count of those whom he touched.

  For a moment, he found himself in a clear space. He drew a deep breath, his eyes briefly closing, and felt the worm un-coiling deep within his bowels. He released the breath and opened his eyes.

  The bullet hit him in the right shoulder, spinning him into the bar. He saw the female cop in the side entrance hallway, cold air entering through the open door behind her. Her hair was matted with blood and rivulets of red ran down the side of her face. She was almost slumped against the doorjamb, weakened by her injuries and exhausted by the effort it had taken her to get to the bar. Buddy reached under his shirt for the gun he had taken from Lloyd Hopkins as Ellie tried to clear her vision for a second shot. There was no pain from the wound, but the arm of Buddy’s shirt was soaked in a black, viscous fluid. People were shouting and screaming, trying to put as much space between him and them as possible. Most of them were already on the ground, or seeking cover behind tables and flimsy chairs.

  Buddy felt his body changing. It was as though he were being stretched to bursting by some unseen force. He looked at his hands and saw his pores widening, expanding in size until his skin appeared to be pocked with half-inch-wide holes. They spat black fluid, like miniature volcanoes erupting. He felt more of them appear on his face, and liquid pressure building behind his eyes, increasing the bulge in his sockets and distorting his eyesight. The great worm writhed in his belly, and he felt it shoot tendrils through his system, causing him to spasm in agony. His clothing started to tear as dark nodes pressed upward, bursting through the denim and twisting in the air like newborn eels in clear water.

  Buddy’s hand found the gun and drew it from his belt. The muzzle of the cop’s pistol wavered, then fell as Ellie lost consciousness, her body sliding down the jamb. Buddy aimed, following her progress down. He saw her as a vague blue blur, almost lost amid the blackness encroaching upon his vision. He could kill her now, or use her to relieve some of the great force that threatened to overwhelm him. Buddy dropped the gun and advanced on the prone cop.

  Something tore a hole in the center of his being. A black spray erupted from his chest, dousing the tables and the floor. Buddy was propelled forward, tripping over Ellie’s body as his hands scrabbled at the walls to prevent himself from falling. He opened his mouth to scream, aware of the massive shock that his system had endured. There was a great wound in his chest. He touched his fingers to it and thought that he saw at last the black worm, twisting and biting in the corrupted remains of his flesh. Its movements appeared frenzied and tormented, as though it sensed Buddy’s end was near and was now intent upon chewing its way out of its host’s system before it collapsed entirely.

  He turned to see Lopez standing at the bar, the stock of the big shotgun firm against his shoulder. Buddy’s mouth was filled with fluid. It coursed down from the corners of his mouth as he spoke, turning his chin dark and losing itself in the hole in his chest. His vision left him, and he felt a great absence within as the link between the worm and himself was abruptly severed.

  “No cure,” said Buddy.

  He was smiling in his final agonies, his mouth a mass of yellow and black like the half-chewed remains of wasps.

  “No cure for cancer.”

  Buddy raised his gun blindly, and Lopez blew the top of his head off.

  VI

  By the time the state police arrived, Buddy Carson’s remains had turned to a dark, clotted mass on the floor of Reed’s bar, with only his clothes, his boots, and his white straw hat to indicate that this had once been the form of a man.

  The snows came the next day, and piles of earth later marred the whiteness of the town cemetery as the bodies were buried. More would follow, as Buddy Carson’s victims succumbed to the disease with which he had infected them. Some died quickly, others dragged on for weeks. Nobody lasted longer than a month.

  Reed’s bar closed. So did the Easton Motel, as Jed followed his son, Phil, into the ground. People left for new places and the town began to decay, as surely as if Buddy had found a way to taint its buildings and corrode its streets. It was the beginning of the end for Easton. Even Lopez left: he followed the trail of pain and death back to Colorado, and drank a beer with Jerry Schneider, who told him of what he had seen at the Benson farm. He traveled through Wyoming and Idaho, and ended up in Nebraska before the trail ran dry. He returned to New Hampshire and settled down with Elaine Olssen near Nashua, but he never forgot Buddy Carson.

  He never forgot the cancer cowboy.

  In a desert in western Nevada, a man dressed in cheap denim opens his eyes. He is lying on the sand, and though the sun beats down upon him, his skin has not burned. He cannot remember his name or how he came to be here. He knows only that he is in pain and he needs to reach out to someone.

  The man rises to his feet, the lizard skin cowboy boots strangely familiar upon his feet, and heads for the highway.

  Mr. Pettinger's Dæmon

  The bishop was a skeletal man, with long, unwrinkled fingers and raised dark veins that ran across his pale skin like tree roots over snowy ground. His head was very bald, tapering to a point at the top of his skull, and his face was either scrupulously clean-shaven or quite without natural hair of any kind. He was dressed entirely in purples and crimsons, apart from the white collar that rested at his neck like a displaced halo. When he stood to g
reet me, deep reds flowing from the pale sharpness of his head, I was struck by his resemblance to a bloody dagger.

  I watched as the fingers of his left hand curled slowly and carefully around the bowl of his pipe, while his right hand gently tamped tobacco into the hollow. There was something almost spiderlike about the way those fingers moved. I decided that I didn’t like the bishop’s fingers, but then, I didn’t like the bishop.

  We sat at opposite sides of the marble fireplace in his library, the flames in its grate the only source of illumination in the great room until the bishop struck the match in his hand and applied it to his pipe. The action seemed to deepen the sockets of his eyes and gave a yellow aspect to his pupils. I observed him draw upon the stem until I could abide the sucking of his lips no longer, then turned my attention to the volumes upon his shelves. I wondered how many of them the bishop had read. He seemed to me to be the kind of man who distrusted books, wary of the seeds of sedition and independent thought that they might sow in minds less disciplined than his own.

  “How have you been, Mr. Pettinger?” the bishop asked, when his pipe was lighted to his satisfaction.

  I thanked him for his concern and assured him that I was feeling much better. I still had some trouble with my nerves, and at night I twisted in my sleep to the sounds of shelling and the scurrying of rats in the trenches, but there was little point in telling that to the man before me. There were others who had returned in a far worse state of disintegration than I, their bodies ruined, their minds shattered like dropped crystal. Somehow, I had managed to retain all my limbs and a little of my sanity. I liked to think that it was God who protected me through it all, even when it appeared that He had turned His back upon us and left us to our fate, although sometimes, in my darkest moments, I believed that He had deserted me long ago, if He ever existed at all.