The Mouth of the Dark Page 13

  “You don’t understand,” Nicola said. “Emory—”

  Before she could finish whatever she intended to say, Trevor – the eyeless doorman – came running toward them, weaving between tables and people with a speed that belied his sightlessness.

  “Madame!” he called out, his voice strained.

  Ivory turned toward him as he approached. She frowned at first, as if irritated by this new interruption, but when she saw the look of sheer terror on his face, she became concerned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Trevor stopped when he reached her, and it took him a moment to catch his breath.

  Too many damn cigarettes, Mother said.

  When Trevor could speak again, his words burst out in explosive gasps.

  “It’s him! He’s coming!”

  “Who?” Ivory demanded.

  Trevor fixed his shadow-filled eye sockets on her.

  “The Harvest Man.”

  * * *

  Jayce looked at Nicola.

  “I thought you said he was an urban legend.”

  She looked confused – and more than a little worried.

  “He is. At least, that’s what I thought.”

  The people at the tables around them had been watching Jayce fight Ohio Pig with varying degrees of amusement and irritation. But now they began exchanging whispers and fearful looks. Several rose from their seats and began heading for the exit.

  Ivory snapped at Trevor. “Don’t be foolish! That’s not possible!”

  “I know what I smelled,” Trevor said, unaffected by his employer’s anger. “Cold moonlight, overturned soil, and rotting leaves.” He then turned to Jayce. “It’s what I smelled on you too. You have his stink on you.”

  Jayce had no idea what the man was talking about, but then he remembered the voice he’d heard behind Emory’s apartment building, its single whispered word: Soon.

  Jayce had smelled something there similar to what Trevor described. He’d also smelled it that day when he was thirteen and something had confronted him in the mall restroom. Had that something been the Harvest Man? And if so, what did the bastard want from him?

  Before any of them could say more, shrieks arose from the far side of the club, near the elevator. People abandoned their tables and fled in panic, knocking over chairs and each other in their mad rush to escape. There were too many people in the way, and Jayce couldn’t see what they were running from, but if Trevor was right, the Harvest Man – a being so monstrous that it terrified the jaded patrons of Crimson Splendor, men and women who lived in Shadow and had been transformed by it – was coming. Jayce supposed he should have been frightened as well, but he was too numbed by Emory’s death to feel anything.

  Ohio Pig had been quiet for the last several moments, but he spoke now, thrashing in Theron’s arms as he did.

  “Let me go! I don’t want anything to do with that creepy fucker!”

  “Some Van Helsing,” Nicola muttered.

  “Madame?” Theron said.

  “Release him,” she said.

  Theron and his brother exchanged dubious looks. But Theron did as Ivory commanded and removed his hands from Ohio Pig. The Pig shot the guard a dark look, and Jayce thought the Pig was going to turn around and attack him, but he didn’t. Instead, he turned toward Jayce.

  “I’ll see you later, asshole. Assuming you survive, that is.”

  And then the Pig turned and ran like hell, and Jayce lost sight of him in the burgeoning chaos.

  Ivory turned to the twins.

  “Go see what’s happening,” she ordered.

  The twins lowered their heads, neither willing to meet her gaze.

  “Now,” she added.

  Reluctantly, the twins started making their way toward the disturbance. They had to fight through fleeing patrons, and sometimes they were forced to knock someone aside or clout them on the jaw to get them out of their path. Jayce remembered something then. Ivory had referred to them as the Therons – plural. Did that mean something?

  Jayce became aware of Nicola tugging on his arm.

  “We should go,” she said. Her grip was tight on his arm, and her voice held a note of fear. During their short acquaintance, he hadn’t known her to be afraid of anything Shadow had to offer. Seeing her frightened drove home how serious the situation was.

  But it didn’t matter if the Harvest Man was real and was the most dangerous thing in the Cannery, a giant shark in a tank filled with sharp-toothed guppies. He couldn’t leave, not without Emory – or at least her head.

  Without saying anything to Nicola, he pulled free of her grip and rushed back to the table where they had been sitting when the Pig showed up. Like the twins, he had to battle the fleeing crowd to reach the table. He assumed they were heading for a back set of stairs or maybe a fire exit of some kind.

  “Get the fuck out of my way!” Jayce shouted, but no one paid him any attention. He shoved, elbowed, shouldered, hit, and kicked his way back to the table, but aside from overturned glasses, it was empty. Then he remembered: Emory’s head had fallen to the floor. He looked down, saw the bloodstained canvas bag the Pig had carried the head in, but there was no sign of the head itself. A horrible image flashed into his mind then – Emory’s head being kicked around on the floor like some kind of grisly soccer ball as people fled from the Harvest Man. He imagined his daughter’s features being pulped as dozens of feet struck her face, one after another. When the panic subsided, would there be anything left of her head, or would it be nothing more than scattered fragments of flesh, bone, hair, and brain tissue?

  He stood at the table and looked around, trying to catch sight of Emory’s head. As he did, he saw – on the far side of the room – a slender figure wearing only a pair of ragged jeans following in the wake of the fleeing crowd. The crimson lighting was too dim for Jayce to make out many details, but even from this distance he could feel the power emanating from the man, like rolling waves of thunder preceding a violent storm. The man moved with a slow, measured stride, so slow, in fact, that he almost seemed to be moving out of sync with normal time. It appeared at first as if the man was going to do nothing more than walk, but then his mouth – which looked wrong, even from this distance – yawned open, and a dark cloud emerged, expanding as it moved toward the club’s fleeing patrons. The darkness engulfed a dozen of those at the rear of the crowd, and then the screaming began. These weren’t screams of physical pain, although the agony in them was raw and piercing. These screams came from a place far deeper. It was as if their souls were being eaten away, dissolved by some kind of spiritual acid. A combination of smells filled the air, the autumn leaves and fresh soil that he was familiar with, along with the new smells of ashes and old rot. The dark cloud lingered for several moments and then retreated. Instead of dissipating, though, it flowed back into the mouth of its creator, as if the man were inhaling it back inside him. The men and women who’d been enveloped in the cloud no longer ran. They stood motionless now, their bodies blackened figures that held their shape for a handful of seconds before collapsing into small piles of dark residue.

  They’ve been harvested, Mother said.

  That word – harvested – hit Jayce like a gut punch, but what really got to him was a sense that he’d seen something like this before. Something to do with Emory in a basement.…

  During all the chaos, the singer – if that’s what she could be called – sat on the stage, oblivious to what was happening, continuing to produce her strange inhuman sounds. The Harvest Man turned in her direction and, although he’d been moving slowly up to this point, he suddenly picked up speed, seeming to move forward in a series of fast-paced jump cuts, like a sped-up film, and within an instant he stood at the edge of the stage. At first the singer seemed unaware of his presence. The crone didn’t look at him, and her body language continued to be relaxed. But after a moment her
voice faltered, and then cut out altogether. She rolled forward and curled into a ball, as if lying this way would somehow protect her, or perhaps she was merely demonstrating silent acceptance of her fate. The Harvest Man exhaled a cloud of darkness onto her, and when he inhaled it, nothing remained of her except a mound of black dust shaped like the singer. An instant later, the mound lost cohesion and became a formless lump.

  “Jayce!”

  Nicola was at his side once more. She grabbed his hand and tried to pull him away from the table, but he resisted.

  “I can’t leave without Emory,” he said, not taking his gaze from the Harvest Man, who’d turned away from the stage and was once again pursuing what remained of the crowd.

  The Harvest Man breathed darkness – out, then in – and another handful of people were reduced to nothing. The creature – because despite his name, he was only a man in the most general sense of the word – had come close enough now that Jayce could clearly make out his features. His skin looked crimson, of course, because of the lights, but Jayce knew it was really a mottled gray, like a lizard’s. He was bald, bare-chested, and barefooted, the only clothes he wore an old pair of faded jeans, torn at the knees, cuffs ragged. His hands were twisted claws, the nails long and black, almost talons. His fingers curled and uncurled slowly as he walked, almost as if the action were somehow part of how he achieved locomotion. Jayce found this detail creepy as hell, but nowhere near as creepy as the creature’s mouth. It was a circle of ringed flesh, like a lamprey’s, and filled with several rows of tiny needle-like teeth.

  The Harvest Man’s eyes were glossy black orbs, like polished obsidian, and they never blinked. The sight of those eyes sent Jayce’s head spinning. He felt as if the world tilted far to the right, and he was viewing everything from a wrong angle. He heard the sound of a bathroom stall lock clicking open of its own accord, followed by the slow metal creak of the door opening. He saw a face peering down at him, like a skull covered by tight, dry gray skin. And those eyes.… They’d been the ones that he was looking at now. Overlarge and bulging, black as the deepest recesses of the earth and cold as the airless void of space. He felt more memories threatening to rise from the muck of his subconscious, where he’d kept them locked away for so long. They crowded at the barrier hiding them from his full awareness, pushing and pounding, determined to break through once and for all. He sensed what those memories would reveal: what had happened to him between the time the Harvest Man had confronted him in the restroom and when he’d finally made it home, hours later. That missing time was the central mystery of his life, and he was closer to knowing the truth of what had happened during that time than he’d ever been before. The memories were there, knocking at the door of his conscious mind. All he would have to do was let them in.

  He almost did it, but in the end he was too frightened by what he might discover, so he let the door remain closed. Besides, he had more important things to worry about right now – like surviving the next few minutes.

  Despite their initial misgivings about confronting the Harvest Man, the twins – the Therons – moved toward him without hesitation, large hands balled into fists, ready to inflict serious damage. The Harvest Man appeared unaware of their approach. His attention had been caught by an obese naked man shackled to a brick wall close to the stage. The man was covered with glistening black leeches, huge swollen things a foot long. Jayce didn’t know if the man was a patron, some sort of entertainment, a decoration, or some combination of the three. He struggled to pull free of the shackles as the Harvest Man came toward him, but they were too tight and all he could do was thrash uselessly, dislodging several of the overfed leeches, which fell to the concrete floor and hit it with wet smacking sounds. The man shook his head back and forth rapidly, saying, “No, no, no,” over and over. The Harvest Man stopped in front of the leech lover and leaned close to the man, his nostrils flaring, as if drinking in his scent. He then pulled back and exhaled a dark cloud onto the man. The man shrieked as the darkness engulfed him, but his cry lasted only a few seconds, and when the Harvest Man inhaled the cloud once again, nothing remained of the naked man except an ashen replica of his body – including the leeches that had been affixed to it – which quickly collapsed into dust. The shackles fell loose and struck the wall with soft clanging sounds.

  The Harvest Man was still facing the wall when the twins reached him. The first Theron who got there grabbed hold of the Harvest Man’s right shoulder and spun him around. Theron drew back his fist, preparing to hit the Harvest Man in the face. But before he could strike, the Harvest Man made a coughing sound and a small cloud chuffed out of his mouth to enclose Theron’s head. Theron screamed for a half second, and then the Harvest Man inhaled the cloud back in. Theron’s body remained unchanged below the neck, but his head had become black ash. When it flaked away, it didn’t leave behind a bleeding stump. Instead, the top of the neck was covered with smooth, unmarked flesh, as if the head hadn’t been destroyed so much as unmade. Now that his head was gone, Theron’s body fell limp. But before it could strike the floor, his sibling rushed forward, tears streaming down his cheeks, and caught Theron’s body. The brother – was he really also called Theron? – cradled his dead sibling in his arms and wept, his body racked with great heaving sobs.

  The Harvest Man didn’t bother exhaling a death cloud upon the second Theron. Perhaps he needed to recharge between exhalations, like a boiler that’s released some of its steam and needs time to build up more. Whatever the case, the Harvest Man swung his claw-like hand in a swift vicious arc, and those sharp black nails sliced through this Theron’s throat with ease, almost as if, for the Harvest Man, flesh wasn’t any more substantial than air. Blood sprayed from the wound, splattering the Harvest Man’s face and chest. The strike had been so deep that it nearly severed the second Theron’s head, and the blow so strong that it knocked him – along with his brother’s headless body – to the floor. He lay there, body twitching, gurgling noises bubbling up from his ravaged throat as he tried to breathe. The Harvest Man gazed down upon the twins – one dead, the other rapidly becoming so – for a moment before raising his head and turning his soulless black eyes toward Jayce.

  The Harvest Man started forward again, moving in a rapid series of jump cuts. It was difficult to tell given the bizarre way the creature moved, but Jayce thought his body was absorbing Theron’s blood, pulling it inward through his mottled gray skin until it was gone.

  Looks like he has more than one way of harvesting, Mother said.

  Instead of reacting with horror upon witnessing the twins die, Ivory grew furious. Before either Jayce or Nicola could stop her, she walked toward the Harvest Man, moving with sharp, angry motions. The Harvest Man showed no reaction as she approached, didn’t even turn to face her, and Jayce wondered if the monster was even aware of her.

  “This is my club!” Ivory said. “I don’t give a shit who or what you are or how much power you possess. You can’t just come in here and—”

  That’s as far as she got before the Harvest Man’s head swiveled in her direction, his circular mouth opened wide, and he expelled a mass of darkness at her. Ivory didn’t cry out in fear, nor did she raise her arms in front of her face to protect herself. She didn’t even take a reflexive step backward. She simply stood there, defiant, as the cloud enveloped her. Jayce expected her to scream then, as all of the others who’d been reduced to ash by the Harvest Man had. But Ivory was silent. Jayce saw why when, a moment later, the Harvest Man inhaled the cloud once again, and Ivory still stood there, whole and unharmed. Seeing this, the Harvest Man cocked his head slightly, as if puzzled. It was the most human gesture Jayce had seen him make so far, but it only served to bring his monstrousness into sharper relief.

  “You can’t harm me like that,” Ivory said. “I haven’t survived two centuries without learning a few tricks on my own. Now, I demand that you leave this place immediately and never return.”

 
Her voice was strong and commanding. If she was afraid of the Harvest Man, even a little, she was doing a damn good job of concealing it.

  Jayce wondered if the woman might actually pull it off, if the Harvest Man would do as she demanded, turn and walk away. He stood motionless as he regarded her, ebon eyes alien and unreadable, lamprey mouth puckered like an oversized anus. Then, without any warning, the Harvest Man did his jump-cut thing until he was standing almost nose to nose with Ivory. She looked startled, but she held her ground, and her stubborn pride proved to be her undoing. The Harvest Man jammed his clawed hands into the soft meat of her abdomen and blood gushed forth, splashing onto the Harvest Man and spilling onto the floor. Ivory gasped and her eyes went wide. She grabbed hold of the Harvest Man’s wrists, as if she intended to try pulling his talons out of her, but all she did was hold on to them. The Harvest Man then lifted her into the air until her feet dangled several inches above the floor. Blood ran down her legs, dripped from her feet, and despite the agony she had to be suffering, she still didn’t scream. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her body began twitching, as if her entire nervous system was shorting out. Then, with a pair of swift, savage motions, the Harvest Man swept his hands outward, eviscerating her. She fell to the floor amidst a shower of blood and shredded organs, and she did not rise again. Whatever strange abilities she might’ve possessed, they hadn’t been enough to save her.

  There’s more than one way to skin a cat, Mother said.

  The Harvest Man started walking toward Jayce and Nicola, blood-covered claws clenching and unclenching. When the Harvest Man was within ten feet of Jayce, Nicola screamed in his ear. “We’ve got to go – now!” She yanked on his arm so hard that a bolt of pain lanced through his shoulder and he stumbled backward several feet. He might’ve allowed Nicola to continue pulling him away, but he saw the Harvest Man stop, turn to his left, bend down, and reach for something on the floor. When the creature straightened once more, Jayce saw that the object he had picked up and was now examining like a curious artifact was Emory’s head – or at least what was left of it after having been kicked around by the Crimson Splendor’s patrons in their frenzied rush to escape.