The Mouth of the Dark Read online

  * * *

  Jayce gave Ohio Pig one of his work cards with both his office and cell number on it. The man left after that, and Jayce spent a few minutes cleaning up Emory’s bedroom. He got a plastic trash bag from beneath the kitchen sink and put the remains of the Pink Devil in it. The creature’s carcass was now dry and light as dehydrated coral, but he still didn’t like touching the pieces of it. He tied the bag closed, then removed the comforter and sheet from the bed. He was relieved to see that the mattress itself was unstained. The bedding – and, for that matter, he himself – had caught the Pink Devil’s blood. He wadded the bedclothes into a ball and held them against his chest to hide the bloodstains on his shirt. He carried the trash bag holding the Pink Devil’s desiccated corpse in his left hand and walked through the apartment and out the patio door. He engaged the lock, closed the door behind him, and walked across the patio to the gate he’d left open. He didn’t close it, still wanting to avoid making the hinges creak and alerting someone to his presence. As he headed down the rear sidewalk, he felt numb, detached from reality – which, considering what he’d experienced inside his daughter’s apartment, only made sense. He’d left normal reality behind when he’d stepped into the CrazyQwik last night, and he was beginning to wonder if he’d ever find his way back to it.

  As difficult as it was to believe that a thing like the Pink Devil could exist, he had an even more difficult time imagining Emory using it. It wasn’t the idea of her getting off with it that bothered him. Well, not too much. It was how violent and dangerous the Pink Devil was. Had Emory been unaware of the risk of using the device, or had she been turned on by it? Had she enjoyed the thrill of knowing that the machine-creature might well kill her even as it pleasured her? An image came unbidden to his mind: Emory, naked, riding the Pink Devil which had formed a multipronged member and thrust it deep inside her, other extrusions stretched upward and wrapped around her throat, choking her forcefully as she came. He had vowed to accept the woman his daughter had become, but could he accept – let alone understand – a woman who enjoyed such dark pleasures? And could that woman accept him in return?

  A sudden rustling of leaves broke him out of his thoughts and he glanced to his left. The row of scraggly trees that formed an ineffective boundary between Emory’s building and the next were no longer quite so scraggly. Not only that, but there seemed to be more trees than before. The trunks and limbs were thicker, although their bark appeared unhealthy, dry and cracked, mottled with greenish-gray mold. The branches held more leaves than before, but instead of being green, they were autumnal browns, yellows, and reds. And although there was still plenty of light left, the trees were draped in shadow so dark and thick it was difficult to say where one ended and the other began. A slight breeze passed through the trees, stirring the branches and breaking off several leaves, which drifted to the ground. One landed next to the sidewalk where Jayce stood, and he knelt down, put Emory’s bedclothes and the trash bag on the concrete, and picked up the leaf. It was brown and felt real enough. He held it to his nose and inhaled. It smelled like an autumn leaf should – earthy and with a hint of sweet decay. The smell reminded him of something, but he couldn’t—

  —and then it came to him. He’d smelled the same odor when he’d been thirteen and the man…no, the thing with the gray feet had appeared. The realization brought fear, but with it came a great weariness. He’d been through so much since coming to Springhill Apartments, and he didn’t think he could take any more right more.

  Please, he thought. Not now.

  The leaves grew still, and despite the apartment complex being located in the Cannery, Jayce heard no sounds of traffic. It was as if the entire world had paused to consider his silent plea.

  A swift breeze came up out of nowhere, plucked the leaf from his hand and bore it away. The breeze rushed past his ears, and he thought he heard a single whispered word.

  Soon.

  When he looked to the trees again, he saw they had returned to the way they’d been before. Thin, spindly branched things with almost no leaves. The shadow that had cloaked them was gone as well, and Jayce wasn’t sorry in the slightest to see it go. He released a long, shuddering sigh, bent down to retrieve the soiled bedding and the trash bag containing the Pink Devil’s remains, and continued walking to his car.

  * * *

  Ten o’clock that night, Jayce drove through the streets of the Cannery.

  He didn’t know how the district had gotten its name. There’d never been an actual canning company in Oakmont as far as he knew. He figured it was some kind of nickname, the origin of which had been long forgotten. It was one of the most run-down sections of the city, with abandoned and boarded-up businesses and empty warehouses. There were people on the streets, most of them keeping to the shadows. Only the prostitutes – male, female, shemale, and whatever variation or combination you desired – ventured into the streetlights’ bright wash, the better to display their wares. The streets had more potholes than asphalt, and the billboards displayed only ragged scraps of old advertisements so weathered and faded that it was impossible to guess what they’d once been trying to sell. Traffic here was light, a mix of old rust buckets that looked as if they’d fall apart any second and newer vehicles, only a few years old at most. Suburbanites came to the Cannery to purchase the dark delights they couldn’t get in their own neighborhoods, and because there was minimal police presence there. Maybe the cops kept a low profile. Maybe they were paid good money to stay away. Maybe they just didn’t give a damn. Or maybe they were simply too smart to go there.

  Jayce hadn’t been to the Cannery much before last night. Even when he was a kid, it had a reputation as a bad place, like a wound that refuses to heal, festering year after year. His mother had constantly warned him against going to the Cannery, underscoring her words with lurid phrases like Not unless you want to end up with your privates cut off and shoved down your throat or Not unless you want to be hogtied and ass-raped with a nail-studded baseball bat.

  Now that he was older than she’d been when she’d spoken those words, he found them not only batshit-crazy but almost comical. Where the hell had she come up with that stuff? More to the point, what made her think it was appropriate to tell a kid that kind of shit? But then again, he’d stayed away from the Cannery most of his life, so he supposed her warnings had worked. Until last night, that is.

  He had a difficult time finding the address Nicola had written down on the back of her card. He drove up and down the streets in the area, unable to find Mercantile Drive, let alone the specific address. He might’ve thought that Nicola had written down a fake address, except the GPS on his phone claimed the street existed. But when he tried to follow his GPS app’s directions, he ended up at a different place each time. The first was a vacant lot that held a small homeless camp – patched-up tents, sleeping bags spread out on the ground, fires burning in a couple metal drums, bundled-up people standing around, looking at him with suspicion in their heavy-lidded gazes. He’d pulled up to the curb, lowered his window, and asked the nearest person – who was swaddled in so many layers of cloth that his or her gender was impossible to identify – if this was Mercantile Drive. The person had turned to him, the eyes the only part of his/her face visible between winter hat and wool scarf. Eyes that were large and white as cue balls.

  Jayce hit the gas and got out of there. He didn’t look in his rearview mirror, but he could feel those eyes watching him depart.

  The next attempt brought him to a small park with rusty playground equipment and a basketball court. There were no people in the park, but the playground equipment – swings, slide, merry-go-round, and the basketball hoops and backboards – was covered with the black shapes of what Jayce at first took to be birds. But then he noticed they had tails, long curving things like a monkey’s. Their eyes reflected the light from his headlights as he approached, making it seem as if they glowed with an internal fire. The cre
atures, whatever they were, continued to look at him as he drove past, not stirring from their perches, just watching him, seemingly unafraid and only mildly interested.

  His third attempt proved to be the charm. The GPS led him to Mercantile Drive and a two-story brick building with 1407 painted in large white numbers above the entrance. An African-American man stood in front, smoking a cigarette and looking bored. There was no place to park in front of the building, so Jayce continued until he saw a lopsided sign with red letters that said PARKING: $5.00. He pulled into the lot, expecting there to be someone at the entrance to take his money, but there was no one. The lot was full and cramped, and he drove slowly as he searched for a space. He had no trouble seeing. The lot was lit by buzzing fluorescent lights that glowed so brightly he wouldn’t have been surprised if they overloaded and shattered.

  As he drove, he was struck by the odd variety of vehicles. Roughly half were normal cars, vans, and SUVs – some so new they looked fresh off the lot, others so old they looked held together by duct tape and wishful thinking. But the other half were…different. They weren’t any make or model that Jayce recognized, and some were patchwork things, put together from mismatched pieces of vehicles, colors and styles clashing. The lines and angles were wrong on some of the vehicles, making them look like an M.C. Escher illusion, and it hurt his eyes to look at them too long. Some of the chassis appeared to have been made from something other than metal. One looked like it was covered with a fine layer of fur, while another was covered in a glossy black material that reminded him of a beetle’s shell. Parked in one spot was a vehicle that resembled a railway handcar, the kind of thing powered by two people pumping the handles up and down. It appeared to be made of brightly colored ceramic, however, and the wheels – grooved to fit onto rails – looked like they’d been fashioned from gold.

  He found a space between a silver Lexus sedan and an old-fashioned race car – low to the ground, body made of sturdy metal, wheels jutting out from the sides, ridiculously small windshield, the number 28 painted on the side. As he’d driven through the lot he’d kept an eye out for Ohio Pig’s pickup, but he’d seen no sign of the lunatic’s vehicle. He was relieved. He’d already had enough encounters with that bastard in one day to last him the rest of his life.

  He undid his seatbelt, turned off the ignition, removed the keys, and slipped them into his pants pocket. But instead of getting out of his car, he remained seated. It wasn’t 11:00 yet, and he still had some time before he was to meet Nicola.

  Fuck Nicola! Mother snapped. You are in an extremely bad place, and you need to get the hell out before it’s too late.

  “It’s already too late,” he said. He had the Eye, and he’d seen – and remembered – too much in the last twenty-four hours.

  You forgot bad things before, and you’ll forget them again. It won’t take long, a few days at most. Then your life will be back to normal. All you need to do is start your car, back out of this space, drive away, and never look back.

  If it was true, if he really could forget, it was tempting. His mother had always impressed upon him one thing, repeating it so often over the years as he was growing up that he’d come to think of it as Valerie’s First Law: the world is a dangerous place. Since becoming an adult he’d done his best not to let her paranoid philosophy ruin his life. But before setting foot in the CrazyQwik last night, he’d only thought he’d understood how dangerous the world was. But since starting his search for Emory, he’d realized that he didn’t know shit about the world and the things that crawled through its darker places. He was in way over his head, and if he didn’t want to drown, he should head home, stop at a liquor store on the way, buy a big bottle of Jack, lock the door once he was inside his apartment, and drink until he passed out. With any luck, when he woke the next day, all of this would seem like nothing more than a nightmare. But doing that would mean abandoning Emory. Could he give up on finding his daughter to save his own skin – and perhaps more importantly, his sanity? Could he fail her one more time?

  This is a matter for the police, Mother said.

  “Fuck the police. I’m her father.”

  He got out of the car and started walking.

  * * *

  The night air was chilly, but not so much that his leather jacket couldn’t fend off the worst of the cold. He walked toward the building with 1407 painted above a pair of wooden doors with vertical brass handles. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now he could see that all the windows were painted black. As he approached, he saw a group of four people coming from the opposite direction. The man Jayce assumed was working the door didn’t bother to glance at them. From the way the quartet walked close to one another, Jayce assumed they were together, but they appeared to have nothing in common. Two male, two female. One of the males looked to be in his nineties – a wrinkled bag of flesh draped over a stooped skeleton. The other male was in his late teens to early twenties, at least based on his boyish face. He was so grotesquely obese that his features seemed in danger of sinking into his puffy face and being lost forever. The first woman was a petite, middle-aged blonde wearing running clothes, complete with a paper number 28 affixed to her back, as if she’d just finished a marathon. She smiled broadly and exuded an aura of positivity and high energy. The last of the four was a young girl, around seven, Jayce guessed. She wore a hospital gown, had sunken cheeks, and hollows for eyes. She didn’t have any hair, the top of her head smooth and so shiny he wondered if she polished it.

  The quartet entered the building without the doorman – if indeed that’s what he was – so much as glancing in their direction. Jayce decided he was probably just hanging around on the street, passing the time while he waited for someone. But as Jayce walked toward the entrance, the man turned to him and held up his hand for him to stop.

  There was nothing specific to suggest the man was watching the entrance. The building had no sign to indicate it was a nightclub, hotel, or apartment building, and the man had no uniform. He wore a brown bomber jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots.

  “Hold up there, brother.”

  Jayce stopped three feet away from the man. His first instinct was to tell him to fuck off, but then he noticed the man’s eyes, or rather, lack thereof. His eye sockets were empty, the skin around them smooth as a baby’s. Jayce couldn’t tell if the man had been born like this or if he’d lost his eyes somewhere along the way. If the latter, he’d had an excellent surgeon. There was absolutely no scarring.

  He held the cigarette to his lips, and after he inhaled, smoke curled forth from his eye sockets, making it look as if his brain was smoldering. Jayce couldn’t help staring at the tendrils of smoke coiling upward from the man’s head. The effect was startling, yes, but also hypnotic in its own way.

  Now that Jayce was close to the man, he could see that the rest of his skin was in far worse condition than that in his eye sockets. He had blotchy patches on his face and hands. Flecks of dead skin covered the patches, and as the man moved they sloughed off and floated in the air around him for several seconds before drifting down to the sidewalk. Jayce wasn’t certain, but he thought he heard soft high-pitched sounds, as if the skin flakes screamed on the way down.

  The man scowled then.

  “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

  “Uh…nothing. Sorry.”

  The man hrumpfed but otherwise said nothing. He took another drag on his cigarette and fresh smoke drifted from his eye sockets.

  “I’m supposed to meet someone here.” Jayce took his wallet out of his back pocket, removed Nicola’s card, and started to hand it to the man, but then he stopped, feeling like an idiot.

  The man reached out and took the card before Jayce could put it away. He held it up to his nose, sniffed it, and then gently touched the tip of his tongue to one corner. After a moment, the man nodded and handed Nicola’s card back to Jayce. Bits of skin clung to the card, and Jayce hesitated be
fore taking it.

  Don’t touch that! Mother said. Whatever he has might be contagious!

  Jayce ignored her and returned the card to his wallet, after giving it a quick shake first. Now the man held the cigarette in his mouth, and smoke continued to curl from his eye sockets. The smoke smelled like the stink wafting from an overflowing sewer, and the odor turned Jayce’s stomach. After what had happened at Emory’s apartment, he hadn’t any appetite, so he’d skipped dinner. Now he was glad, because if he’d had anything in his stomach, it would’ve come rushing up now.

  “So?” Jayce asked, taking a couple steps back to get away from the stench of the man’s smoke. “Can I go in?”

  The man frowned as if he were deeply considering the matter. While he did so, another man came walking down the sidewalk toward the building. It was the green-gloved man that Jayce had seen at the Thai restaurant that afternoon, the one he’d come to think of as the Napkin Eater. The man still carried his metal case, and he walked at a brisk pace, like he had important places to go and even more important people to see. The doorman didn’t glance in the man’s direction, but his nostrils widened as he drew in a deep breath of air, giving Jayce the impression that the man was checking the Napkin Eater’s scent. The Napkin Eater saw Jayce looking at him, and he smiled, raised one of his rubber-gloved hands in a wave of acknowledgement, and then entered the building.

  A moment later, the doorman said, “Sorry. I can’t let you in.”

  “Why not?” Jayce snapped, starting to get angry.

  The man’s face wrinkled in mild disgust, causing a number of skin flakes to break away and float in the air around his head.

  “You smell funny.”

  Jayce stared at the man in disbelief.

  “Are you kidding me? How can you smell anything other than that cigarette of yours? It stinks like it’s packed with shit instead of tobacco.”

  “That’s because it is,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Feces collected from the bowels of dying accident victims, to be specific. I’ll admit it’s an acquired taste, but the buzz is amazing.” He removed the cigarette from his mouth and held it out to Jayce.