He blinked his eyes and the apparition was gone.
He pulled himself to his feet using the bed and a wave of dizziness hit him, laid him flat, and he fell back, gasping and panting and senseless. Blackness came at him from every direction and he passed out cold.
13
He came awake to the unpleasant sensation that a mouth was sucking on the end of his finger, pulling on it the way a newborn puppy will pull on its mother’s teat with immense, hungering suction. He let out a cry and sat up. The cabin was pitch-dark.
The lantern had gone out.
There was nothing at his finger. Nothing at all. A nightmare.
Breathing fast, he checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was nearly three a.m., which meant he’d been sleeping for at least two or three hours. Could the batteries in the lantern have died out in that time? Or had something else happened? Something he did not want to consider?
If there were dreams, he could not—or would not—remember them.
He laid there, his head pounding slightly, and he was glad he could not see the wallpaper. The sheets felt pretty much just like sheets and the coverlet like a coverlet. He ran his fingers over the latter… it was sticky. As he pulled his hand away, tiny threads of something like webs were stuck to his fingertips like spiders had been at work since he fell asleep. Just the feel of them, clinging and oddly warm, made a moan come up out of his throat.
Not webs, not webs, he told himself. Hairs. Fine hairs.
He brushed them away.
He had a plan now: he was going to go see Arturo.
Piss on it all. And while he was there he was going to tell him the air was bad on the Addams. That’s what he was going to do and nothing could stop him. That’s what it all had to be: the air or lack of the same. Maybe some kind of gases. That would explain the hallucinations, the dizziness, the passing out. Hell, it was the strand that could connect it all and put it in some kind of perspective.
Dummy. You should have thought of this before.
He sat up and his head started spinning right away. But he refused to lie back down. It was dark in the room, so very dark. He reached in his pocket and found his cigarettes, his Zippo. He fired one up and the pungent smell of smoke seemed to clear his head. He was rooted to the here and now, at any rate.
As he pulled off his cigarette, he was aware of the dankness of the air and the fact that his heart was racing wildly like it wanted to gallop right out of his chest. Leaving the cigarette in his mouth, he scratched at his bare arms. They were itchy, terribly itchy… but as he touched them, he became aware that they were covered in a fine down of silky hairs. He scratched them away frantically. They clung to his fingers: intricate, lacey webs. But what was worse, is that there were tiny things crawling in them.
Charlie screamed and fell out of bed.
He scrambled over to the desk and found his flashlight. He clicked it on and turned on the lantern. It worked fine. It was just shut off. That’s all it was. He didn’t remember shutting it off, but he must have. Maybe it had some kind of energy-saving device on it that turned it off automatically. Maybe. Possibly. He really couldn’t imagine someone coming in here and turning it off for him. If Arturo really had goons aboard, they must have known Charlie was armed.
Creak, creak, creak.
It came from behind him, bringing a cool sweat to his face that tasted like sea brine on his lips. He knew he had to turn around and face his fears, but he could not bring himself to. Maybe if he just ignored it, it would go away. Things had reached the stage now where either he curled-up in the corner and screamed his mind away or he took some action and looked whatever the hell this was dead in the face.
There was no choice.
Charlie was a particular type of man and he responded true to form. He reached into his duffel and pulled out the .45. Because in his narrow world, this was how you handled threats. You drilled rounds into them and let them bleed out. Then you got on with your fucking life.
He spun around with the Smith .45.
What he saw was an ethereal, filmy shape in the rocking chair. It did not move. It was hunched over, grotesque like some living sack. Without hesitation, he put two slugs into it. It was like shooting a patch of mist, of course. He put two very neat holes through the back of the chair but he did not disturb the nebulous shape that sat in it. Was it his imagination or did he hear something like a low, pained mewling of a newborn kitten? It was there and then it was gone, almost like it was echoing off into the distance.
There was no shape in the chair.
In fact, there was nothing but Charlie himself standing there, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat, his eyes bulging from their sockets and his lips trembling as if they were trying to find words that would never come. His hand was shaking so badly he thought he might drop the gun so he set it on the desk.
His hand kept itching, a constant burning, tingling, tickling sensation that was enough to drive him mad. He held it up to the lantern and it was so swollen he could not move his fingers. It seemed as if something was moving beneath the makeshift bandages.
He saw the can of beer sitting there.
He reached out and grabbed it. It was warm and foamy but there was alcohol in it and that’s what he wanted, what he craved, what he had to have. He finished the can, gulping tepid beer down his throat. Right away, something inside him eased. His nerves seemed to relax. Everything went loose and limp.
He heard the scratching from inside the wall again.
Beads of sweat ran down his face.
The scratching got louder.
Swallowing, fumbling for the gun on the desk, he looked over at the wall. The wallpaper split open. It looked like the vaginal slit of a woman. A clear and viscid slime began to bubble out and run like tears. In it were dozens of tiny transparent things like fetal termites. They oozed down the wall, creeping out of the slime.
It’s not there. You are not seeing it.
The insects continued to flow from the gashed wallpaper, a pool of them spreading over the floor. He would drown in it. Yes, the placental discharge would fill his mouth, then his lungs.
The lantern flickered and went out.
No, no, no, not in the dark, not in the dark.
Something touched his cheek like a wisp of hair. And in the darkness around him, things were moving, he could sense them, hear the creeping sounds of their legs on the walls. Yes, even on the floor, a skittering of leggy things. He scrambled to his feet, trying to orientate himself in the seething, living blackness. A net of hairs fell over his face. He clawed them away. He tripped over his feet in his panic and fell against the wall. Just a wall… yet, it was also covered in those filament-fine hairs.
He blinked his eyes and the light was back. He knew that somehow it had never been out in the first place.
He giggled deep in his throat at the absurdity of such a thing, light being dark and dark being light. Then he giggled at the absurdity of himself: tough guy morphed into frightened little boy. Hee, hee, hee.
His wounded hand was pulsing like a heart, throbbing and pumping. As he looked at it, it seemed to inflate like it was being filled with air or rising like bread dough. A strangled shriek breaking loose in his throat, he tore the bandages free because he had to see, he had to look at it.
Yes, it was horribly distended; the fingers like sausages, the hand itself like a fleshy, puffy catcher’s mitt. It was warm and pulsing to the touch and he snatched his fingers away out of sheer revulsion. The skin was purple and contused, hot and bubble gum pink, the fingernails blackening like those of a corpse.