Scott Sigler - Nocturnal - A Novel

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 that 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.