John Connolly - Nocturnes

The cowboy stood, took a bright blue rag from his pocket, and wiped his hands clean.

“I appreciate your help,” said Link.

He stretched out his hand in thanks. “The name’s Link Frazier.”

The cowboy looked at Link’s outstretched palm the way a child molester might respond to an unexpected flash of young thigh in a playground. He finished cleaning his hands, put the rag back in his pocket, then shook Link’s hand in return. Link felt an unpleasant sensation, as if there were bugs crawling on his skin. He tried to hide it, but he felt sure that the cowboy had seen the change in his expression.

“Buddy Carson,” said the cowboy.

He had noticed Link’s response. Buddy was finely attuned to the rhythms of other people’s bodies. It made him good at what he did.

“It was my pleasure,” said Buddy, as the cells in Link’s body started to metastasize and his liver began to rot.

He tipped the fingers of his right hand to his hat, gave Link a little salute, and headed back to his car.

Later that day, Buddy picked up a waitress in a bar over by Danbury. She was fortyish and overweight. Nobody would have called her good-looking, but Buddy worked her pretty well and by the end of a night’s drinking he had convinced her that they were kindred spirits: two lonely but decent people who’d taken some knocks in life, but who had somehow managed to pull through. They went back to her place, a neat little two-bedroom duplex that smelled faintly of musty clothing, and Buddy rattled her bed and her bones. She told Buddy that it had been a long time, that it was just what she needed. She moaned beneath him, and he closed his eyes as he moved upon her.

It was easier when he could get inside people, when he could touch the interior of their mouths with his finger, maybe cut them slightly with a nail. Open wounds were good too, and even a kiss, if he could force the lips apart and get a bite in, but sex was best of all. With sex, it worked faster, so that he could stay and watch with little risk to himself.

The second time, the tone of her sounds changed. She asked him to stop. She said there was something wrong. Buddy didn’t stop. Once it started, it couldn’t be held back. That was the way of it. When he finished, she was already breathing more shallowly, and some of the flesh had receded from her face. Her fingers were like talons gripping the sheets, and her back arched with pain. She couldn’t speak.

There was some blood now. That was good. It was red, but soon it would turn to black.

Buddy sat back on the sheets and lit himself a cigarette.

It was slowly getting worse.

There was a time when once a week would have been enough to ease the pain, but no longer. Now, once daily permitted him to rest for a time, but only for a couple of blessed hours. If he managed to corrupt more than one, the hours without agony increased exponentially, but the risk was that folk would notice, so multiple victims were rarely an option for him.

That morning’s troubles were a sign that the thing inside him was becoming harder to control, and to sate. The black blood began to appear while he was making water. Pretty soon he was coughing it up, soaking the towels. He was only just recovering when the fat maid entered the room. He wondered if she would tell anyone about it, and felt certain that she would. He got a sense of her as he held her, his skin working against hers, the rottenness within him seeking purchase in the new host.

He would have to move on soon, but he was so weak.

There was another option, of course, but it represented an enormous gamble. He had been turning it over in his mind for some time, calculating the odds, assessing the risks. Now, with his own pain increasing and the presence of the black fluid in his urine, the prospect was growing more and more enticing. If one offered temporary ease, he reasoned, and two doubled the time he could sleep, what would happen if he took on more, many more? He thought about the family in Colorado: after them, the pain was gone for days, and even when it returned it was diminished considerably, so that taking the waitress had been more out of desire than out of necessity. What might happen if he corrupted a town, a city? Weeks, perhaps months of respite might ensue. Maybe he could even rid himself of it entirely. The possibility of an extended peace dangled invitingly within his grasp.

This was a small community. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be hard to reach out to enough people, but when he had taken a walk the day before he saw something that caused him to reconsider his options. He spent the rest of the day thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons and trying to work out how best it might be done.

That morning, with the black blood pooling in the bowl, he reached a decision. He would make a stand here, in Easton, then head north and find somewhere quiet to rest for the winter, maybe forever. His eyes were closing: touching the maid had clouded the pain enough to enable him to sleep. He put the chain on the motel room door, then stretched out on the bed and began to dream.

The cowboy’s name was not Buddy Carson.

The cowboy didn’t have a name, not now. There might have been one a long time ago, but if there was, then it had been lost to him for many years. His new life began on the day he awoke in the middle of the Nevada desert wearing ragged clothes and with tumors on his skin. He had no memory of any existence before that. His insides felt as though they were being slowly roasted, and when he squeezed his hands to his stomach to try to ease the pain, black blood shot from beneath his nails.

At last, he found the strength to rise. He made his way to the highway and thumbed a ride from a garage mechanic who was hauling a red Dodge Charger over to a dealer in Reno. The mechanic had spent months restoring the Dodge in his spare time and now figured that he was about to make a good profit by selling it.

The cowboy felt the growing pain in his insides ease the moment his hand accidentally brushed the mechanic’s hand. Most of the tumors were hidden beneath his clothes, but after he touched the mechanic he could see the one that peeped out from under the cuff of his shirtsleeve begin to fade. Within seconds, it was entirely gone.

The cowboy touched the driver again.

“Hey, the fuck are you doing, man?” said the mechanic. “Keep your hands away from me, you fucking faggot.”

He started to pull over. There were no other cars visible on the highway.

“Get out,” he said. “Get the fuck out of my-”

The cowboy grasped the mechanic’s right arm, then clasped his left hand around the man’s throat. He squeezed. A trickle of blood appeared in the mechanic’s nostril, then dripped down over his lips and chin. The force of the flow began to increase, and the color of the blood began to darken until it turned a deep black. As the cowboy watched, the skin around the mechanic’s eyes began to tighten. His skin grew waxy, and his cheekbones grew sharp in his face.

And for the first time, the cowboy had an image of something inside of himself, like a great black worm that had found purchase within him. It lay in his bowels, feeding off him, slowly turning his cells to black, simultaneously destroying all that was human about him while keeping him alive, pumping its unknown poisons into his system. If it had a consciousness, then it was beyond the cowboy’s capacity to understand. All he knew was that it had chosen him as its host, and if he did not do what it wanted, then it would destroy him.

The cowboy howled, and his fingers broke through the mechanic’s neck and into his flesh. He felt a pressure building in his arm, and then his fingers straightened convulsively as the poison erupted through the pores of his skin. The sockets of the mechanic’s eyes flooded with darkness. He stopped struggling, even as the cowboy’s own pain faded, and then was gone.