Nocturnal: A Novel

  More candles, more light.

  That tarp was moving. Not just the end, oh no oh dear Jesus the whole thing was moving what the fuck is underneath that thing it can’t be alive it just can’t because it’s so big as big as an elephant. What is it what is it?

  The squeaking of wheels. A dolly, the kind movers use, rolled in through the narrow door, pushed by a white-robed man. And strapped to that dolly …

  The boy with no tongue.

  The light of at least a hundred candles flickered off the blond-haired boy’s blood-covered mouth, his jaw, his neck, his shirt. He cried with big, heaving sobs that shook his thick chest. The boy … he had a boner? Even from up here, the boy’s erection was clearly visible under his pajamas.

  The masked men gathered at the tarp, ruffling it, preparing to remove it. The flapping of the giant cloth sent waves of that smell shooting up to Aggie’s nose. He had to blink away the lust, had to press his face between the cold iron bars beneath him, had to fight the pure heat that roiled through his body.

  “You do what I say,” Hillary whispered in his ear, “or it will be you that experiences Mommy’s love.”

  The harpsichord’s plinking tones filled the air.

  The masked men yanked the tarp away.

  Aggie reared back. His stomach churned, tried to push his last meal up into his throat.

  Bloated, huge, a mass of white flesh like a giant scoop of lard held together with pockmarked skin. Were those legs? They were, so fat they looked like giant gray-white sausages with tiny feet, too-small doll parts affixed to the corpulent body that spilled out under them, around them. And above the legs, a bubble of a belly arcing close to the ceiling, a belly that seemed almost translucent, that twitched and wiggled every time the body moved.

  If there was a head and arms, they were hidden somewhere behind the fat.

  The feet kicked uselessly, like those of a new baby trying out its new muscles.

  Aggie had been told not to make any noise. He opened his mouth and clamped his teeth on the iron bar below him. The metal felt cold on his lips. He tasted rust. His jaws squeezed harder and harder, until he heard his right molar crack. The pain felt like a burning nail driven into his jaw, but it cleared his mind a little bit — it stopped him from screaming.

  White-robed men circled the thing. Aggie realized that it was lying on a thick table … no, on a cart, with black car tires mounted at the corners. The kicking feet hung suspended over one end. Six masked men moved near those feet, three at each corner. They reached underneath and came out with big T-bars that they slid into rusty fixtures mounted on the cart. The men leaned back hard and started to pull. More white-robed men squeezed in between the wall and the back of the cart. They pushed with all their combined weight.

  The cart rolled slowly, the old-wood floor groaning beneath the tires. The masked men slowly turned the cart, moving it away from the wall until the end with the feet faced the strapped-up boy with no tongue.

  The harpsichord played louder.

  The white-robed men in the room started to sway and moan in unison.

  Aggie felt a piece of tooth floating in his mouth. He swallowed it.

  He saw the body in profile — a giant slug made of human flesh. Now he saw the arms, at least the right one, endless waves of fat so thick he couldn’t make out the forearm from the upper arm.

  “Venez à moi, mon amoureux,” said a deep, resonant voice that rang with erotic promise.

  The voice had come from the body on the cart.

  Aggie looked left, beyond the bell curve of the bloated belly and elephantine chest. He saw the head and knew this was the Mommy that Hillary had brought him to see.

  Aggie James started to whine.

  Hillary flicked him on the ear. Hard. The stinging pain again helped him hold on to some semblance of sanity.

  Her head. Oh good God, her head was inside some kind of box, a metal, leather and wood box affixed to the cart. Bloated shoulder meat swelled up and around the rig. She was so morbidly obese that without it Aggie knew her own fat would engulf her head and suffocate her. A few stringy, brown strands of hair clung to a head wrinkled with deep rolls.

  “Venez à moi, mon amoureux,” Mommy said.

  The light of a hundred candles played off of her white skin. Not pale, but actually white, like a grub dug up from the dirt, a grub that had never felt the heat of the sun.

  There seemed to be a glow from within her swollen stomach. Aggie realized he could see through her belly, just a little bit, the translucent skin and tangle of veins pink-backlit by dancing candle flames on the other side.

  Inside that belly, he saw something moving. Several somethings.

  Fetuses.

  A dozen? Two dozen? Some twitched, some kicked, but most didn’t move at all; they were just still, black dots inside that horrific parody of a fleshy water balloon.

  A white-robed man walked to the boy’s dolly. He tilted it back, then moved the boy toward Mommy’s legs.

  The boy started to scream.

  “Mon chéri,” Mommy said.

  A baby slid from between her legs in a splash of fluid. It wedged between the wet fat of her thighs. Bile filled Aggie’s mouth. He forced himself to swallow it down lest it spray out and land on the white-robed men below. The baby didn’t move. Its tan skin contrasted with her gray-white flesh. A masked man rushed in and pulled the still fetus out from between her tree-trunk-sized legs.

  The blond boy’s screaming changed to rapid-fire syllables — he was begging, but had no tongue to form the words. The masked man behind the dolly reached around and stuffed a rag in the boy’s mouth, muffling the sounds.

  The masked man then pulled down the boy’s pajama pants. He tilted the dolly back again and rolled it between Mommy’s legs.

  Aggie felt Hillary’s hand on the back of his neck. Strong, ready to snap his spine if he got noisy. The message was clear … you ain’t seen nothing yet, and when you do, keep your fucking mouth shut.

  “Now,” Hillary hissed, “Marie Latreille takes a husband.”

  The white-robed men moaned louder, the harpsichord played faster.

  Mommy’s head thrashed inside its metal-and-wood box. “Mon chéri,” she said.

  Her stubby legs reached out, wrapped around the back of the dolly and pulled the boy into her. Her fat surrounded him — he looked like he was standing in waist-deep curdled milk.

  The boy with no tongue lurched against the ropes holding him fast to the dolly. His struggles did no good.

  “Mon chéri! Mon chéri!”

  Hillary’s hand tightened on Aggie’s neck. She leaned forward, inadvertently pushing his head into the rusty iron bars. He reached back and spasmodically pulled at her dress.

  She relaxed the grip, but didn’t let go. “Tonight, the king will come to her,” she whispered. “We will be saved.”

  Mommy’s legs contracted over and over, pulling the boy into her, making the dolly rattle. Her obscene mass jiggled in time.

  The smell. That smell that made Aggie so hot, so hard, it cranked up to a new level, filling the room, filling his head. Aggie twitched once, then came in his pajamas.

  The boy’s scream changed, briefly, from one of terror to one of horrified ecstasy.

  The harpsichord music stopped.

  Aggie blinked. The heat dissipated from his head, his body. He pushed his face away from the iron bars. He couldn’t look at the scene anymore, not for another second. He turned and put his lips to Hillary’s ear.

  “I’ll do whatever you say, anything, don’t let that happen to me, please!”

  Hillary turned to face him. She smiled, the candlelight from below gleaming off what yellow teeth remained. She held his face, fingertips gently stroking his cheeks. She leaned in. “It is not over for him. You have one more thing to see. Now, Mommy’s husband will do the Groom’s Walk.”

  The Groom’s Walk

  Hillary told Aggie to get up. He did so, carefully, lest his feet slip through the bars and t
hat thing below know he was there. She guided him back out the way they had come. As they exited, Aggie heard the hum of machinery, then a distant, heavy click. One last peek down through the bars showed a strong light coming through the door to Mommy’s room. Fully lit, Aggie saw wooden floors and walls that were black with age.

  Hillary pushed Aggie through more narrow tunnels until they reached thin well-worn stone steps that led up. After forty or fifty steps, the path leveled out into yet another confined tunnel — but this one led to an open space. In that space, the flicker of torches.

  Hillary stopped him just before the opening. She reached into a hole in the dirt wall and pulled out a filthy, gray felt poncho with a hood. She put it on him as if he were a three-year-old. The fabric reeked of mildew and of strange, sour body odors. She reached into the hole again and pulled out a moth-eaten, moldy plaid sleeping bag. She wrapped this around his shoulders, obscuring his shape. Even at his worst moments as a human, sleeping in gutters filled with dirty rainwater, going weeks without bathing, pissing on himself, maybe even shitting himself, he’d never smelled this bad.

  She led him out on a flat ledge made of rocks, old timbers, what looked like a dented highway sign, and other pieces of societal refuse. Before him sprawled a huge, oblong space maybe three hundred feet long by two hundred feet wide. The ledge ran all the way around, a path four or five feet wide that dropped off into the open space thirty feet below. Seats of all kinds lined the ledge: folding metal chairs, plastic chairs, benches, logs, barrels, buckets — hundreds of them, all near the edge so people could sit and look down to the cavern floor. Behind those seats, running along the back of the ledge, he saw many dark spaces — tunnels that led deeper into whatever hell he found himself in. A curved, uneven ceiling of dirt and rocks arced above.

  Hillary led him to the edge and made him sit on the old highway sign. His feet dangled in open air.

  Down below and to his left, at one end of the oblong cavern, he saw the wreck of a huge wooden sailing ship, the kind he’d seen in those pirate movies. The ship’s bottom sat on a little plateau of sorts that held it aloft from the cavern floor. The long, wooden prow pointed to the other end of the oblong space, while the rear of the ship seemed to be buried in the cavern’s wall.

  Aggie had never seen anything that seemed so out of place. The ship’s deck looked uneven, but was mostly intact. Some of the chewed-up railing still lined the edges. He saw hatches in the deck, hatches that appeared to be well used, as if they still led down to areas below. A mast reached up from the ship’s center — a mast made of human skulls. The top of the mast was at Aggie’s eye level, thirty feet above the deck, topped by a crossbeam that turned it into a giant T. A combination of burning torches and blazing, mismatched electrical lights clustered at each end of the crossbeam, illuminating the deck below.

  At the back of the ship, where steps should have led to a higher rear deck, the wreck merged into the cavern wall as if excavators hadn’t quite finished the job. A door at the deck’s back end looked like it would have led under that hidden, second deck. Through that door, Aggie saw a glimpse of something white and sluglike.

  Mommy.

  Aggie put it all together. Mommy lived in the captain’s cabin of an old wooden sailing ship. Hillary’s people had put in jail-cell bars and metal grates in the ceiling of that cabin, so that people could look down at Mommy. But how could a big ship like that get underground? Just where the hell was he?

  He saw that the cavern floor wasn’t solid. The sides of the mound holding the ship aloft sloped down to a series of dirt trenches that wound in every direction, running all the way to the end of the cavern and also stretching from side to side. The trenches twisted and intersected. They looked to be about ten feet deep, varying from maybe five to eight feet wide. From his spot high up on the ledge, Aggie could see into most of the trenches near him. He couldn’t see into the ones on the far side unless they pointed right at his position.

  He realized what the trenches were: a maze. He shuddered, imagined wandering through those spaces, wondered what might chase him.

  A flash of gold caught his eye. On the ledge directly above Mommy’s cabin, he saw a golden throne padded with red velvet cushions. Everything in this cavern looked dirty, used, rejected and beat-up, but not the golden throne. It radiated an aura of importance.

  “Hillary, what is this place?”

  “The arena,” she said. “It is very important to us.”

  She patted him on the back as if they were old buddies, as if they were two kids sitting on a bridge during some idyllic summer afternoon. “Now you will see why you must help me.”

  Like she needed to show him anything more? “I’ll do whatever you say. I swear to God. I just need to get out of here.”

  Hillary patted him again. “Just watch.”

  Movement from the captain’s cabin door drew his attention. Masked men wheeled out the boy with no tongue, still strapped to his dolly. His pajama bottoms had been pulled back up. The thin fabric clung to him, matted down by Mommy’s wetness.

  Another masked man walked out of Mommy’s cabin. His white, red-eyed mask had exaggerated cheekbones decorated with red spirals. In his hands he held a trumpet.

  “Now, the call,” Hillary said.

  The masked man lifted the trumpet and blew a long, low note. When he stopped, the note echoed briefly, the tone slapping back and forth from cavern walls made of dirt and rock and brick.

  In the shadowy tunnels that opened onto the ledge, Aggie saw movement. People filtered out and started sitting in the seats. No, not people … creatures. Some wore heavy blankets draped over their heads and bodies, but far more wore normal clothes — jeans or shorts or sweatpants, T-shirts, sweat-tops, dresses, tattered suit jackets. The various pieces of clothing covered so many shapes, horrific shapes. He saw skin of all colors, the gloss of fur, the gleam of hard shells, the winking of oozing wetness.

  “Yes,” Hillary said. “Everyone comes. Oh, look” — she pointed across the arena to the far side — “I see Sly and Pierre. They are the ones that brought you in. Isn’t that nice?”

  On the opposite side of the oblong ledge, two hundred feet away, Aggie saw a thick man with a face like a snake. Next to him, a taller man with a dog-face. Behind them, someone so big the size seemed incomprehensible. And between these three, a tiny form hidden inside a blanket.

  Aggie felt the presence of people on either side. He slowly turned to his right. Not ten feet away sat a stubby, bleach-white man with snakelike hair that seemed to wave of its own accord. The man turned toward Aggie, but Aggie looked away quick and pulled his blanket up higher to hide his face. He couldn’t stop himself from a peek to the left — only five feet away, something that looked like a man-sized cockroach.

  Hillary nudged Aggie. “Best if you look straight ahead,” she said quietly.

  Aggie did just that.

  The trumpet player blew a three-note blast, then walked back into the cabin. Everyone on the ledge stood and looked to Aggie’s left, to the golden throne.

  From the shadows behind that throne, figures emerged. The first wore a brown trench coat. He had a massively oversized head with an even more oversized forehead, the skin there gnarled and wrinkly. He stood on the throne’s right side. A woman walked out to stand on the throne’s left. She had long, glossy-black hair that spilled over both shoulders. Even from this far away Aggie could see that she was beautiful. She wore knee-high rubber boots, shiny pants and a cut-off Oakland Raiders sweatshirt that revealed a flat stomach. Something dangled from each hip … were those coiled chains? A tattered brown blanket hung down her back, secured by a white rope around her neck.

  “Bonehead and Sparky,” Hillary said. “They are Firstborn’s guards.” Her tone had changed. She no longer sounded happy — she sounded disgusted, bitter. “And here he comes, our beloved leader.”

  A tall man walked out of the shadows. He wore a long, black fur cloak clasped at the neck with something that gleamed li
ke silver. Aggie saw blue jeans tucked into black combat boots, a black gun holster strapped to each thigh. The creature wore no shirt — short black fur covered a six-pack and a lean, defined physique. When he moved, his muscles twitched like those of a panther. The face looked vaguely catlike, with long, slanted eyes and green irises, a slightly extended mouth and large ears that angled back against the blocky head. He moved to the front of the throne, every motion smooth and easy.

  He sat.

  Hillary’s lip curled into a sneer. “Firstborn has decided to grace us with his presence. Now we may begin.”

  Down on the ship, masked men moved the boy with no tongue. They rolled him to the center of the smashed deck and rested his dolly against the mast of skulls. The mast’s combination of burning torches and blazing, naked electric lights cast harsh, flickering shadows on his terrified face.

  Less than an hour ago, that boy had been in the white dungeon with Aggie.

  “Hillary, what happens to him now?”

  She smiled. “Now the children come out to play.”

  Halfway between the mast and the prow, a hatch wiggled. A black-gloved, white-sleeved arm pushed it open.

  Two little kids climbed out.

  Hillary let out a breathy awwww, then slapped Aggie’s leg. “They are so cute!”

  Just kids. A boy and a girl, maybe three or four years old. They wore filthy, secondhand pajamas. The boy was white and blond. He could have been any of the rich little brats from the Marina part of town. His shirt had the faded remains of a San Francisco 49ers pattern. The girl had darker skin and red hair. Her pajamas were blue with a flopping, almost-off iron-on of Barney.

  Even from his perch over a hundred feet away, he could see that both of them held something metallic in each tiny, dirty little hand. They moved a few feet from the hatch. As they did, the lights played off the metal enough for Aggie to realize what it was they carried.

  Each of them held a fork and a knife.

  More kids crawled out, but these weren’t even remotely human. One looked like a wrinkled yellow bat. Another had a bumpy shell, with fingers as long as its whole arm and a huge, hard, long thumb that formed something like a crab claw. Still another resembled a little white-furred, red-eyed gorilla. That one wore a Sesame Street T-shirt and red flannel pajama bottoms.