Midnight Grinding (11 page)

***

Nate Wilson struggled from the clutches of that ghastly dreamscape, realizing that the grist of his nightmare had actually taken place several hours earlier. He hadn’t intended on sleeping a wink that night. Since shortly after the hour of ten, when the windows of the house had grown dark, Nate had sat in the loft of the barn, gun in hand, watching, waiting for the first sign of that bristly little monster to emerge from the encompassing thicket. He knew that eventually its awful hunger would overcome its fear and it would inch its way across the yard in search of an easy entrance.

A full moon was out, splashing pale light upon the immediate expanse of the Wilson property. Nate quickly dismissed the moonlit patches; it was the dense shadows in between that worried him. From his vantage point he had a good chance of spotting the thing. If an elongated shadow started through the grass below, he could easily dispatch it with one well-placed shot.

Or so he had intended, before falling asleep. He was fully awake now, his mind alert and instantly suspicious.
Better safe than sorry
, he told himself. Nate left his nocturnal perch and climbed down the rungs of the hayloft ladder. After all, this wasn’t exactly some chicken-hungry fox he was lying in wait for.

Moving swiftly, he left the barn and crossed the moonlit yard. He stopped at the long-handled pump near the back porch, set his gun aside, and cranked himself a dipperful of cold well water. Soon, he was stepping through the back door. His brother Johnny was fast asleep on the kitchen table, his breathing heavy and his slumber restless. The flashlight sat on the woodstove where Nate had left it. He now took it and started down the inner hallway. He flashed the light toward the front bedroom, but made no move toward it. The door was locked, the ugly tangle of blood-soaked bedsheets left untouched since Doc Hampton’s confused departure. Tomorrow the county sheriff would be out to investigate the incident, but that was unimportant to Nate at the moment.

A faint noise from behind the adjacent door set his nerves on edge. He turned the knob quietly and stepped inside, sweeping the walls with the beam of the hand-held light.

He had insisted that his mother sleep in the boys’ room that night. She had agreed passively and he had tucked her in, concerned with her listless mood and the glassy look in her eyes. Pap’s death had broken the old woman’s spirit, causing her to withdraw somewhere into her mind, away from the surroundings that might remind her of her husband and set the horror into motion once again.

Nate walked quietly to the bed and directed the light on the fluffy goosedown pillow at the headboard. “Ma?” he whispered. His mother’s pale face stared, wide-eyed and unseeing, up at him, the muscles of her shallow cheeks twitching grotesquely. “Ma, are you all right?” Fear crept into the young man. Was she having a fit or was she in the throes of a stroke, a delayed reaction to the strain she had been subjected to earlier?

Nate’s fear changed into the wild thrill of unrestrained terror when he shined his light further downward. The bedsheets were saturated with fresh blood, the lumpy folds shuddering and shaking rhythmically. Whatever it was that moved beneath the gory bed linen, it was not the body of his dear, sweet mother. Swiftly and without hesitation, Nate grabbed the edge of the sheet and pulled it aside.

He recoiled a few feet, the light shimmying wildly in his hand. He wanted to scream. Dear Lord in heaven, he wanted to scream with all the abandon of a madman, but he couldn’t. He could only stand there and gawk, repulsed and frightfully fascinated at the sight his eyes were taking in.

Somehow the cursed thing had found its way back into the house. Exactly how was beside the point. All Nate knew was that it was here, in front of him now, and it had gotten hold of Ma. Why she had not screamed in agony like Pap had was beyond him. Perhaps it had been her state of grief and numbing shock that had kept her from crying out. It didn’t really matter now. She was far beyond help.

Ma’s body was
gone
. The spiny parasite had consumed her completely, clear up to the wrinkled neck, which it now sucked and chewed at with relentless fervor. Ma’s face stared blankly up at her son, the jaw working, as if trying to utter some meaningful words of parting wisdom that would make her hideous death a fraction more tolerable. But no words rose from her open mouth…only a wet gurgle and a ghastly bubble of bloody spittle. A perfectly-formed bubble that abruptly burst when, with a great shuddering gulp, the toothy maw of the worm engulfed her head completely.

Nate stared at the thing and it stared back with tiny, coal-black eyes. Its prickly body squirmed, bloated to twice its normal size. Instinctively, he brought his right hand up, but it was empty. Suddenly, he remembered the awful thirst that had gripped him during his walk across the back yard. He ran into the hallway, screaming. “Johnny…the shotgun! I left it out by the pump! Get it…quick!”

He heard a frantic scramble, the slap of the back door, and soon Johnny was bolting down the hallway, shotgun in hand. “What’s wrong?” he demanded breathlessly. “What happened?”

The awful look in Nate’s eyes scared Johnny half to death. “It got Ma!” Nate sobbed, strangling on those dreadful words. “The ugly thing got her!” He traded his flashlight for the shotgun and turned toward the bedroom, every nerve in his body alive and on fire. Snapping back the twin hammers, he stepped back into the dark room. Johnny followed and directed the light of the flashlight upon the bloody bed. Nate braced himself, peering down the joined barrels of the antique twelve gauge.

The bed was empty. The petite woman who had raised them from infants to hardworking men was completely gone. But, worse still, so was the devil that had devoured her.

“Where is it?” cried Johnny. “Nate…
where is it?
Did it get out the window like last time?” They both looked to the room’s single window. It was closed and latched from the inside. An awful feeling gripped them both. The thing…the caterpillar-like parasite with the ceaseless hunger…was still in there somewhere!

They stood stone still for a moment, but no sound alerted them to its whereabouts. No dry rasping of long needles grating one against the other, no gnashing of razor sharp teeth. Only silence and the ragged labor of their own breathing.

“Let’s get outta here,” said Nate, grabbing his brother by the arm.

“What’re we gonna do?” Johnny moaned as Nate herded him into the hallway, then shut the door behind them, locking it and taking the key.

His brother’s eyes were wild. “We’re gonna burn that sucker out, that’s what we’re gonna do!”

Johnny was in no position to argue. Meekly, he joined his sibling in an act that some would have termed as pure madness. They first went to the tool shed and, toting two five-gallon cans of gasoline, returned to the log house they had lived in since birth. With a desperation that was almost wanton in its execution, the two splashed the outer walls with the flammable liquid, soaking the ancient logs. Nate dug a book of matches from his trouser pocket and, igniting the whole thing, pitched it at the dry brush near the eastern wall.

By the time Nate and Johnny reached the peach orchard opposite their bedroom window, the old house was wreathed in flame. Nate checked the loads in his shotgun and waited for the fire to get good and hot. It didn’t take long. The hewn logs and chinking in between burnt like dry tinder and, before five minutes had passed, the structure was totally engulfed.

Nate took a firm grip on the gun. His attention was glued to that bedroom window, for that was where the horrid thing would attempt to escape. The inner walls of the cabin had ignited now. As the heat rose in intensity, the windows began to expand and explode like brittle gunshots. The bedroom window was the third to go.

He raised his shotgun, ready to let loose. The ruptured window stared at him like the empty eye socket of some fiery skull, but nothing moved along its sill except tongues of flame.

“Johnny,” he called to his brother behind him. “Do you see it anywhere?”

No reply. Only the crackling of the fire and the crash of timbers giving way.

Nate was reluctant to turn away from the window, but he did so anyway. “Johnny?”

His brother was nowhere to be seen. Nate stared hard into the pitch blackness, his eyes more accustomed to the brilliance of flame than the inky depth of shadow. It was noise that alerted him…a soft rustle of wet grass. His eyes focused on motion at the base of a tree.

“Johnny…is that you?” He walked a few steps closer.

Yes, it was Johnny. His younger brother lay on the dewy ground, his arms flailing frantically, his legs performing a bizarre dance of torment. The flickering glow from the house reached midway into the orchard, shedding light upon the gruesome spectacle at Nate’s feet.

The thing had somehow escaped the fiery barricade, unnoticed, and had crept up behind them, catching Johnny by surprise. It had a hold of his brother’s head and was at work with the zealous craving it had exhibited at the expense of his ma and pa. Nate raised the shotgun and pointed it at the pulsating column of the critter’s expanding body.

If Johnny wasn’t already dead, he would be soon. There was nothing Nate could do for his brother…nothing but avenge his horrible demise. And Nate intended to take care of that right then and there.

The young farmer’s eyes shone with a strange emotion that was a mixture of pleasure and agony, of elation and self-destructive rage. He brought the muzzles of the shotgun flush against the bulbous head of the wretched thing and smiled. “I got you now, you filthy little bastard!”

As Nate was about to exact his revenge, he heard a rustling in the leafy branches above his head. But there was no wind that night.

Before he could pull the trigger, they began falling out of the trees.

DUST DEVILS

Have you ever seen a dust devil? You know, those spontaneously-generated mini-twisters that you see every now and then. They aren’t all that common, but they do materialize occasionally under the right conditions.

The idea for this story evolved one day when I spotted one making its way across my neighbor’s yard…heading straight for his black lab. The dog rose to its feet and barked at the approaching cyclone of dead leaves, dust and debris. Right when it seemed on the verge of colliding with the dog, it abruptly changed its course and retreated. Almost as if by some conscious intelligence. I thought to myself, if one of these pockets of random wind currents could react out of fear and apprehension, couldn’t it display other emotions…perhaps passion and love? Or something much stronger?

The bruises were not so much painful as they were downright ugly. Stan had put them there when he discovered the green and gold cheerleader uniform hanging from the knob of her closet door.

“What do you wanna be? A slut or something?” her stepfather had bellowed in one of his drunken rages, which had seemed to grow in frequency since the death of her mother.

“Do you want them boys looking up your skirt whenever you do those somersaults and splits? Do you, huh? Cause you’re a filthy, little tramp if you do. That’s all cheerleaders are anyway, you know. Just slutty teases, wagging their pretty asses in your face, getting a man all worked up for nothing!”

She had opened her mouth to object and he had lit into her like a wildcat. Before she had made the safety of her bedroom, he had put a half dozen good-sized bruises on her arms and legs and given her one hell of a black eye. She had awakened that Tuesday morning hoping, praying, that it wouldn’t look as bad as she suspected it would…but, of course, it did. She had stayed home from school that day, from the try-outs she had looked forward to for nearly three weeks. Tomorrow the swelling would be down, reduced to an ugly yellow-brown patch around her left eye, and she would sadly return the cheerleader outfit to Mrs. Petty, the girls cheerleading coach. She knew when she did, she would receive that awful look of pity—a look she had grown to hate like a poison.

Becky Mae Jessup spent the day in her cramped room at the rear of the house trailer. She lay in bed, watching the soaps on her black and white portable. A beautiful socialite was on the screen, downing martinis and Valium, crying her eyes out because her executive husband was across town bedding his boss’s wife.

“What do you know about being lonely?” she spat at the actress. “
Truly
lonely?” The thought almost angered her to tears. Loneliness was a sixteen-year-old girl in west El Paso whose heart soared whenever a boy
—any
boy
—
smiled her way or just said “Hi.”

Loneliness was crying yourself to sleep, thinking of the pretty clothes you would never own and the exotic places you could never hope to see.

She glanced over at her open closet door at the poster that hung inside, a poster of one the hottest pop singers around. He smiled at her with those perfect, white teeth and she smiled back with teeth that were not so perfect or so white. Stan didn’t know that she had it. If he had, he would have pitched a fit. “You ain’t old enough to be thinking of such things,” he constantly told her. “Next thing I know you’ll be knocked-up or have AIDS or one of them damned venereal diseases!”

She always ignored his senseless ravings, though, seeing past his grumbling guidance to the hypocrisy underneath. For a man who seemed so all-fired concerned with his stepdaughter’s moral upbringing. Stan Jessup had no qualms whatsoever about the raunchy centerfolds that papered the walls of his own room or the women he sometimes brought home from the Diamondback Saloon.
Loose women,
her mother used to call them with dismay,
common whores
. Some nights Becky Mae had to bury her head in her pillow to drown out the sounds of dirty laughter and the jouncing of bedsprings.

She grew weary of the endless scandals of daytime TV and went outside, stopping by the fridge for a soda. Becky Mae sat there on the rickety wooden steps of the weathered trailer, staring at the drab surroundings she had known for six years. Her mother had married Stan Jessup in ’83, a few years after her real father had died in an oil rig explosion. Stan hadn’t seemed like such a bad fellow until her mother died of lung cancer in the spring of ’85. Then he had ruled over her with an iron fist, and that fist hurt, both physically and mentally.

The trailer park on the far reaches of the West Texas highway was owned by Connie Ketchum, a bird-like woman with brilliant red hair. She lived in the little adobe bungalow that doubled as the main office with her seven-year-old son, Tony. Mrs. Ketchum had run the park alone since her husband went out for a pack of Camels one morning and never came back. That had been five years ago.

Mrs. Ketchum was pruning the cactus around her patio when an unpleasant memory came to Becky Mae. She had been twelve then, right after her mother had come home from the hospital that last time. Mrs. Ketchum’s face had been deadly serious. “Becky Mae,” she had said, “does your stepdaddy ever touch you…in a
wrong way?”
Becky Mae hadn’t known what she was referring to and told her so. The woman’s face had blushed as red as her firebrand hair. “Never mind, dear,” she had muttered, dismissing it as quickly as she had brought it up. “Just forget I ever mentioned it.”

But she couldn’t forget. And now, four years later, she knew exactly what Mrs. Ketchum had been getting at. Becky Mae had become slowly aware of Stan’s growing attention toward her in the past few months. A couple of nights ago he had reached across the table for the salt shaker and deliberately brushed her breast, chuckling at her sudden embarrassment. She was also aware of how his eyes followed her around the trailer when she wore a halter top and cutoffs in the summer.

A low whistling roused her from her place on the steps and she walked around back. At first she could see nothing but the back lot, littered with trash and the rusty junkers her stepdad tinkered with on his time off. There was the railroad tracks and, beyond that, the distant expanse of scrubby Mexican desert. The landscape appeared as desolate and lonely as she felt at the moment. The tears threatened to come then, but held off when the whistling sound grew louder, closer.

She could see it now, floating in from the west. A little whirlwind, a mini-twister, a
dust devil
as her mother called them. What was it her bedridden mother had warned her about dust devils?
Don’t you ever go near one, girl,
she had said, cigarette jutting from between lips swollen by chemotherapy.
And for God’s sake don’t ever walk into the middle of one! Take it from me, they’ll take a hold of you and tear your soul right out. It’s true! I read it in the
National Enquirer.

She had never believed her, but now, watching the dusty funnel drift lazily toward her, bouncing over the steel rails and cross-ties into the backyard, Becky Mae almost could. She set her soda on the seat of a busted lawn chair and found herself walking directly into its weaving path.

The tears were flowing freely now.
Well, let’s just see if it is true then,
she thought.
If it is, I don’t care. Let it take my soul. Maybe I’ll end up in a better place than the one I’m in right now.

Slowly, erratically, the dust devil skimmed across the earth, drawing small pebbles and surface dust into its centrifuge. A mesquite branch was snapped off its bush, caught up in the swirling packet of air, then discarded. Becky Mae continued forward. Ten feet stretched between them, then only five. Before she could give her actions a second thought, she closed her eyes and stepped into the center of the sand spout.

Surprisingly enough, there was no great force that tore at her, no turbulent howling within. Only a strange calm, as the eye of a hurricane might be. She kept her eyes screwed tightly shut so as not to get dust in them and simply stood there. The twister did not move beyond her, but stood stationary, cradling her within its hollow.

Abruptly, a strong feeling gripped the teenager. It was as if
—
yes, there was
—
a
presence
of some sort there with her…inside the heart of the dust devil. A very lonely presence, one that ached for companionship. A decidedly
male
presence.

You’re just imagining things,
she told herself. But, on second thought, she didn’t think so. The air currents swirled tenderly around her and, as she relaxed and let her troubles vanish, she strangely felt as though her clothing had suddenly slipped away.

Tiny breezes like gentle hands caressed her bare skin, running masterfully along her small breasts, the flat of her stomach, the flare of her hips. An electric thrill traveled through her, from the base of her spine to the top of her head.
Is this how it feels to make love?
she wondered.

Then there was a pressure on her lips, a soft meshing of warm air against flesh…a spectral kiss from whatever haunted the spiral of dust.
Becky Mae
, a voice said as if coming from some great distance.

“Yes,” she gasped. “That’s my name…what’s yours?”

Silence. Then the voice came again, but different this time. Distinctly familiar and edged in anger.
Becky Mae…where the hell are you, girl?

Startled, she backed out of the center of the little whirlwind, tripping and landing hard on her backside on the barren earth. The dust devil hovered there for a moment longer, then retreated back in the direction from which it came.

Stan Jessup, dressed in greasy coveralls and toting a lunch box, rounded the corner of the trailer and glared at his stepdaughter hatefully. “What in tarnation are you doing down there?”

Becky Mae felt panic grip her, but when she looked down, she found her clothing to be intact. “Nothing. Just sitting here.”

“Well, you ain’t gonna have no butt left to sit on if you don’t get on up right quick,” Stan warned. “Now, get on in the kitchen and put some supper on the table before I give you an instant replay of last night.”

She did as he said. Before following him up the steps, she cast her eyes back across the broken horizon with its endless miles of buttes and sagebrush.
Nothing but an old dust devil, that’s all
, she thought in disappointment.
Just a daydream
. But, somehow, she could not convince herself that what had happened that afternoon had been a trick of the mind, rather than something intimate and true.

***

Becky Mae’s one and only boyfriend had been Todd Lewis, but their relationship had been short-lived, spanning all of thirty seconds. The senior had showed up at the trailer to take her to the double-feature at the Skyline Drive-In, but Stan had chased him off with a shotgun. Her stepfather had blown out the taillights of the boy’s Mustang before he could make the safety of the main highway. Since that incident, no guy in his right mind came near Becky Mae Jessup, no matter how cute she was.

Now she awaited a boyfriend of a different kind, one that she could only hear in her mind, that she could only feel in the currents of the wind. She awaited him that Friday evening as she had for the past two days, sitting on the hood of an old Plymouth Duster in the backyard. For two days she had watched the dusty desert along the Texas-Mexico border for a fleeting sign of the dust devil. Each evening after school she had stared across the sun-baked wilderness until darkness descended, leaving her depressed and disappointed once again.

This evening a new emotion joined the others. Fear sat heavy in her heart, not over the absence of the sand spout, but because of her stepfather. Mrs. Ketchum’s cryptic words of four years ago came back to haunt her and she had a dreadful feeling that tonight would be the night that Stan would make his lurid move. Tonight he would finally try to touch her in that
wrong way
, or perhaps attempt something much worse.

She knew that it was so, the way he had acted over breakfast that morning, the way he had looked her square in the eyes over french toast and coffee. It was nearly six o’clock now. He had already clocked out from the garage and was on his way home. After supper, he would have a few shots of Wild Turkey to gather his nerve and then force his filthy self upon her. The thought of him close to her made her cringe in revulsion. Stan was a wiry man, but strong, and she was afraid that whatever he had in mind that night would take place, no matter how violently she struggled.