No, no, no, that droning, wavering squeal…it could not be a voice. He was coming apart. His mind was failing. None of it was real. He heard maniacal laughter, the sound of sanity purging itself: his own. Running back out in the street, he was absorbed by the bustling crowds that carried horrible effigies of Gothra high above them. Faces were twisted masks. The stars blinked on and off like cheap bulbs in the sky. He could smell rotting hay and blood, manure and black earth. Voices jibbered and screamed and shrilled around him. Now the festival was reaching manic, hysterical heights as what he had been feeling for hours took hold of them, too, carrying them forward like a dark river seeking the sea.
“It is time,” a voice said at his ear. “Time to meet The Preacher.”
It was Squinny Ceecaw, yet it was not her at all. The voice was too mature, all velvet and spun silk, the sort of whispering smoothness one would acquaint with experience and sensuality. Certainly, this wasn’t the kid, not Squinny. But it looked like Squinny and as her hand clasped his own, he was certain that it was. Her nearness wedged a seam of pure terror through him. He wanted to throw her off and run. But he didn’t; he marched, he melded into the procession that carried pumpkins and flickering candles. It was happening, really happening. Festival was about to reach its terrible climax. The very thing he had anticipated and feared, was about to be realized.
Now no one was singing or crying out. They marched in orderly rows. Many carried pumpkins, but many carried other things—briskets of raw beef, pork loins, shanks of lambs, other primal cuts; dead animals such as rabbits and possum and coyote. Two boys led a massive hog on a rope. Some carried bags of what smelled like rotting vegetable matter.
All of it was so strange and alien, yet so uncomfortably familiar.
Moss knew many things at that moment and knew nothing at all. He walked with Squinny, his mind cluttered, his thoughts muddled. The town was a trap. He knew that much. It had been a trap meant to ensnare him from the moment he arrived and he had stepped willingly into it this afternoon. Possum Crawl owned him now. Festival owned him. Squinny owned him. The people that walked with him owned him. He belonged to them and he belonged to this night and the malevolent rituals that were about to take place. But mostly, oh yes, mostly he belonged to Gothra and the rising storm of anti-human evil he/she/it represented. Now he would become meat and now his mind would be laid bare.
They marched out to a secret grotto beyond the limits of Possum Crawl and up a trail into the high country until the face of the mountain was right before them. And even this opened for them. They passed through a gigantic cave-mouth and into the mountain itself.
Moss began to tremble, because he knew, he knew: the mountain was hollow. Hadn’t it been this that he was trying to remember when he’d first drove into town? The mountain is hollow, the mountain is hollow. Yes, it was really just a sheath of rock and within, oh God yes, within…a high, craggy pyramidal structure of pale blue stone. It rose hundreds of feet above him, illuminated by its own pale, eerie lambency. Its surface was not smooth, but corrugated and carven with esoteric and blasphemous symbols, bas-reliefs of ancient words in some indecipherable language. The pyramid itself was old, old, seemingly fossilized by the passage of eons.
Now the procession moved inside and Moss heard what he knew he would hear—the wet, slobbering noises, the rustlings, the busy sounds of multiple legs, the chitterings and squealings, and, yes, rising above it all, that immense omnipotent buzzing, the unearthly droning of the great insect itself.
The pyramid was just as hollow as the mountain, its sloping walls honeycombed with chambers, many of which were sealed with mud caps. The women of Possum Crawl had gathered here. They accepted the gifts the men brought. No longer were they women as such, but hairless, pallid things that cared for the white, squirming grubs of the immense gelatinous insect, the Mother of Many Faces, the all-in-one, the progenitor that all in Possum Crawl worshipped for she brought life, she nurtured it, and filled the earth with crawling things and the skies with her primordial swarm.
Vermicular shapes squirmed at his feet, crawling about on their hands and knees, moving with a disturbing boneless sort of locomotion like human inchworms. He saw contorted faces and glistening eyes like frog spawn staring up at him. They touched him with flaccid, fungous hands.
And now Moss could see her—within the limits of the third dimension—surrounded by a veritable mountain of yeasty gray eggs that glistened wetly from her multiple ovipositors. She was a titanic, bloated white monstrosity, an elemental abomination that sutured time-space with her passing and whose origins were in some deranged cosm where the stars burned black. Her membranous wings spread like kites filling with wind, her thousand legs scraping together, her bulging compound eyes looking down at the offerings laid before her.
Her nest.
Yes, the Earth was her nest.
By then, Moss was on his knees, his sanity gone to a warm mush in his head. He had seen her before and she had erased his memories. Now he understood. He shivered there in her shadow. Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. Oh God, he had not stolen Ginny away from them after she was indoctrinated into the fertility cult of the Mother of Many Faces. No, no, she had escaped them and they called out to him, stealing his mind, and he had brought Ginny back to them. Yes, in the back of the car, tied and gagged, he had returned their acolyte to the hollow mountain.
But she was not what the Great Insect wanted.
No, Moss was spared, his memories subverted, his will possessed, so that he might bring that which the Mother Insect demanded, the expiation she hungered for.
And now his shaking hands were opening the silver case, fumbling at the locks, working the catches, and then it was in his hands, the reeking mass of meat in the shape of a shriveled infant. The fruit of his marital congress with Ginny. The offering the Great Insect anticipated from the beginning.
It was accepted and found pleasing by her servitors.
Then Moss waited there, his mind gone, his eyes glazed with terror, his stomach pulsing with revulsion. Squinny stepped before him and said, “Your place has always been here. Your destiny is to be meat because all meat has its purpose and all flesh is to be consumed.”
The Preacher.
He did not fight when the yellow-eyed image of the girl came for him, the avatar of the Mother of Many Faces, when her barbed tongue took his eyes so that he would not look upon the holy rite of birth, the spawning and renewal. He did not even cry out when she jabbed her stinger up between his legs and into his body cavity. He squirmed, he writhed, but no more. Then gray waves of lethargy washed through him and there was only acceptance. He was tucked, not unlovingly, into one of the cell-shaped chambers and sealed in there as food. A flaccid, dreaming, unfeeling mass, he did not even flinch when the eggs began to hatch and the wriggling young of the Great Insect began to feed.
The Old Man Down the Road
Arinn Dembo
The night before they left for Tennessee, they slept in a double bed on Striver’s Row. Traffic slashed through the autumn rain below as they wrestled in the sheets, chasing away anxiety with love-making. James drifted off with sweat drying on his belly, his lover’s breath blowing warm on his shoulder.
Hours later he woke alone in the cold bed, his bare feet curled back to find shins that weren’t there. For a panic-stricken, half-asleep moment he found himself thinking he’s gone.
He sat up, white sheets pooling over dark thighs, and saw Tommy standing by the window. The rippling sodium light flowed down his pale skin like molten copper.