Shores of the Marrow Read online

“Faster,” a man husked. “Faster, faster, faster!”

  Robert swallowed hard, and somehow managed to turn his ethereal form so that he could observe from the couple from one side. He didn’t really want to see—he felt like a voyeur—but Robert knew that he had to see.

  His eyes fell on the swell of the woman’s stomach, but thankfully their genitals were mashed together, sparing him that sight at least. He saw the roundness of her breasts, surprisingly full despite her thin frame, sweat beading on the top, her nipples, rosy and pink, standing erect. The man reached behind her, and his hands, hairy, just like his calves and shins, gripped her buttocks, grinding her body onto his.

  A sob escaped him then, and the rhythmic coitus suddenly stopped.

  “Did you hear that?” the man whispered.

  “No,” the woman replied flatly. “Keep going.”

  “I heard something,” the man raised his head, and Robert felt his entire being flush with anger.

  It was Landon; it was Landon fucking Underhill, his one-time boss back when he worked at Audex Accounting.

  He was sweating, and his mouth, nearly hidden in his thick, brown beard, was closed tightly.

  “No, seriously, I heard—”

  The woman turned then, and her eyes fell directly on Robert. His heart, previously thumping away in his chest, stopped beating altogether.

  It wasn’t Wendy.

  It was her body; Lord knows he had spent more than enough time with that body, especially in their earlier years, but it wasn’t her face.

  Robert felt like he was going to be sick.

  The face that stared back at him had huge, black orbs for eyes, their protuberance so pronounced that they seemed lidless. She had no nose; in its place was a hole in the center of her face. Air puffed in and out of that bastardized orifice, and Robert realized with growing horror that what he had mistaken as manifestations of heightened ecstasy was simply air chuffing in and out of the hole like an unbridled steam engine.

  Maggots writhed in and out of the rotting flesh on her face, making tracks not unlike stitches inserted by an amateur surgeon.

  It was Jacky Sommers, the golden-haired beauty from the Harlop Estate, the one who so long ago he had had a tryst with in the mud.

  “What are you doing here?” the rotting corpse hissed. The sound was whistly and horrible, coming not just from behind the lipless mouth, but from the hole that was her nose, and the tear in her cheek. “You shouldn’t be here!”

  Robert tried to back out of the dream, to direct his body, his mind, elsewhere, but found that he could not.

  When the woman placed her bony fingers on the mattress and slipped off Landon, who was grinning now, a thin line in his beard that spread from ear to ear, Robert tried to scream, but once again found himself unable.

  Jacky started to slide toward him on all fours, her breasts now blue and veiny and sagging nearly to the floor.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said again in that horrible voice.

  She was nearly upon him now. With every inch that she crawled forward, the flesh on her arms seemed to decay by a week, a month, a year, the skin taking on first bluish then green then black hues.

  It fell away in putrid clumps.

  Someone—Landon—was laughing, a horrible, deep rumbling sound that made Robert’s head pulse and blurred his vision.

  And then Jacky was directly in front of him, reeking of rot and decay.

  It was only then that Robert realized that he had a body in this dream world—his body—and he was completely naked.

  But like before, it felt like an organic shell, simply a vessel for his mind, and whatever connection had once bound the two had been broken, snapped and tossed aside like kindling.

  He couldn’t move, couldn’t even raise a finger let alone back away.

  The woman, the beast, the abomination reared back and pushed her horrible breasts into his face.

  He gagged, but like most of his visceral functions, he was unable to even vomit.

  A horrible, snaked tongue flicked out of her lipless mouth in a strangely provocative gesture and he was disgusted to discover that he felt a familiar tightening between his legs.

  The thing that had once been Jacky Sommers leaned back and her bony, skeletal hand snaked out and squeezed the meat between his legs.

  “No,” he moaned, surprised that he could actually get the word out.

  “Oh, yes, Robert Watts. Oh, yes,” the thing hissed.

  And then it was on top of him, straddling his lower body as it had done with Landon seconds ago.

  Robert wanted nothing more than to be out of there, to be free of this horrible nightmare, irrespective of whatever hints or clues that it was trying to tell, but the traction in this reality was simply too strong.

  The second he entered Jacky’s corpse, he felt his loins tighten and a familiar tingling sensation build in his scrotum.

  Robert ejaculated immediately, and even though it was horrible—the sight, the smell, the simple idea—the pleasure was immense, and a long, rolling moan exited his mouth.

  For a brief second, his eyes closed.

  A waft of putrefaction hit him in the face, and he opened them again.

  The beast, Jacky Sommers, or Wendy, or whatever it was, was gone. In its place was Shelly, her belly huge and round and distended.

  She was on her back and appeared to be sleeping, and Robert, confused, glanced down at his own body, fearing that he would still be naked, his prick covered in decomposing flesh.

  But he wasn’t naked; he was wearing shorts.

  What’s happening to me? His mind wailed. What’s happening?

  His eyes flicked to Shelly’s belly again, and for a moment he saw movement within. At first, it was simple, indistinct pressure, but as the shadow traveled across her belly, within her belly, Robert realized that it had acquired a form he recognized.

  The object moved back and forth as if the fetus were waving, and then it stopped in the center.

  It started to push, and to Robert’s horror, he made out three distinct impressions.

  Talons.

  Talons that matched the marks on his leg, the ones had been seared into his flesh when Leland, his father, had touched him.

  And then Shelly screamed.

  Robert tried to cover his ears, to block out her wails, but his body failed to comply. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

  The sound was all around him, in him.

  And there was something else, too. The laughter, laughter that he had first mistaken as Landon’s, had returned.

  Only it wasn’t Landon’s.

  It was Leland’s.

  “The baby’s coming, Robert,” a male voice echoed in his head, cutting through the high-pitch drone of Shelly’s agonized cries. “The baby’s coming very soon, and when it does, we’re going to be a family again.”

  Chapter 17

  Cal stared down at his friend’s feverish, clenched body, as Robert’s eyes rolled back in his head.

  “Should we wake him?” he asked quietly.

  Chloe Black, who had since rid herself of the cloak and thus the moniker of the same name, shook her head.

  “No,” she said in her gravely voice. “He needs to sleep. Please, just let him sleep.”

  Cal continued to watch his friend, trying desperately, and failing to understand what he must be going through. Sure, Cal had a tortured past, but nothing like Robert’s.

  Robert had lost his wife, his daughter. He had stared into the eyes of pure evil, faced his very own soul.

  He had found another woman, and lost her too.

  And now this.

  His unborn daughter taken from him, reduced to a pawn in Satan’s mad game.

  Robert’s cheek twitched and Cal resisted the urge to wrap his arms around him, to hold him tight, as he had once done with Hank Harper.

  “What—” he cleared his throat. “What’s happening to him?”

  “He’s had a break… his mind has shattered, and it�
�s trying to heal itself.”

  Chloe’s answer had been so quick, and sounded so clinical, that it drew his gaze.

  He found it difficult to look directly at the woman, and it wasn’t only because her face looked like the whipped hide of a rented mule. It was something else, there was something secretive buried in that scarred face.

  And he was sick of secrets.

  Secrets—Rob’s and Sean’s, Shelly’s—were what led them to this place, to this time.

  “How can you know?”

  Chloe looked away and Cal followed her gaze toward the water overlooking the embankment. It was much like the way he envisioned the Marrow, all frothing and churning, a torrid mix of dissension and confusion.

  Only it wasn’t the Marrow. It was either the New York Harbor or the Atlantic Ocean, or something else entirely.

  They had walked so far, for so long, first in the tunnels leading away from Sacred Heart Orphanage, and then along the rocky terrain, and eventually leading to this beach, that he wasn’t completely sure where he was anymore.

  “I know,” Chloe began slowly. “Because I saw it happen to someone before.”

  Cal’s gaze moved to the back of her head, to the scared ribbons that made up her scalp.

  Her life had been torn to pieces as well; quite literally. Her family was destroyed, both of her sons entwined in a death match of the sort that he could have never imagined before all of this had started.

  Aiden stepped forward and asked the question that was bouncing around in Cal’s brain.

  “Who? Who did this happen to before?”

  Chloe hesitated, and when Cal reached out and brushed the back of her arm, she recoiled.

  “Leland,” she said flatly. “It happened to Leland.”

  Cal froze, and he heard either Agent Cherry or Detective Hugh exhale loudly behind him.

  Leland? This happened to Leland?

  An image of the thing that had pulled itself out of the portal in Sean’s chest, a massive, winged thing with iron hooves flashed in his mind and he involuntarily shuddered.

  It was hard for Cal to imagine Leland as anything remotely human, let alone something that resembled, either in form or spirit, his friend who lay collapsed on the ground by his feet.

  The sound of a buzzing telephone broke the uncomfortable silence, and Cal finally pulled his eyes away from Chloe and the water.

  Agent Cherry, his face a mess of bruises and dark smudges, pulled a phone from his pocket. The man’s lips were dry, and Cal knew what he was even though they had yet to share more than a dozen words.

  He could see it in his face.

  He was an addict, and the man was hurting for his next fix. If Cal had been forced to guess, he would have picked alcohol as his drug of choice.

  Cherry’s eyes dropped to the phone, and then, seeing a number he recognized, he cleared his throat and answered.

  “Agent Cherry.”

  There was a short pause, during which his gaze lifted. All five sets of eyes were on him, but he seemed unfazed by this.

  “Yes. There has been a… some sort of…”

  Agent Cherry paused to listen.

  “Yes, of course. I understand.”

  He pulled the phone away from his ear, a queer expression on his face. Instead of putting it back into his pocket, he held it out to Chloe.

  “It’s FBI Director Ames, and he wants to speak to you.”

  Cal was initially taken aback by this, but then he remembered something that Chloe had said in the car, back when he had known her only as the Cloak.

  There are people in high places that know about this… that might be able to help.

  The woman’s small, scarred hand reached out and took the phone, and then she turned her back to them.

  “Yes?” There was a pause, and then Chloe said, “Yes, but we need helicopter evac.”

  And then she went silent.

  Cal waited for almost a minute, before Chloe pulled the phone from her head and hung up without uttering another word.

  She handed it back to Agent Cherry.

  Then, for what felt like the hundredth time, Chloe turned to stare at the water. Cal felt another pang of sadness for the disfigured woman.

  “Brett and Hugh, you have other business to attend to, I believe?”

  Cal drew a sharp breath and his eyebrows knitted.

  “What? You can’t leave us—”

  Chloe silenced him by raising a finger.

  “Brett…”

  The man closed his sunken eyes and became so still that Cal thought that he had fallen asleep standing up. Hugh, a confused expression on his young face, reached out to touch the other man, but before his fingers brushed his arm, Brett’s lids opened.

  “Yes; we need to go.” He turned to Hugh, who was staring at him expectantly. “I need your help, Hugh. FBI Director Ames has asked if you would come with me.”

  Hugh’s light-colored eyebrows lifted.

  “Where?” he asked in a small voice.

  Cal observed the scene with incredulity. To his knowledge, the men had only just met and yet Hugh already seemed subservient to him, FBI Agent or not. Back in the orphanage, Cal had seen the way that Hugh looked at the other, older detective, the one who had been killed by Bella and sent to the Marrow.

  Hugh looked up to the man. And now that he was gone… well, Hugh was left wanting.

  Cal didn’t blame him. The same thing had happened when he had first fled Mooreshead, after Hank…

  He pushed the thoughts from his mind.

  “We’re going south,” Brett replied with a sigh. “There is something that I need to finish. Something evil, something that took my… my partner, Kendra.” He lowered his voice an octave. “My Ken-Ken.”

  The name sounded strangely familiar to Cal, but he couldn’t place it. It seemed to him that there were fibers in this world—tiny, invisible threads—that connected everything back to the Marrow.

  And for all he knew, to other worlds as well.

  It was all connected… at was all a story to tell.

  His story.

  “Okay,” was Hugh’s only response.

  The two men then turned to Cal and Chloe, and then to Aiden, who hung respectively four or five feet behind them at all times.

  “We will return—before this is all over, Hugh and I will come back and help finish this… finish this thing,” Brett promised.

  Despite the man’s obvious problems—alcohol, he’s an alcoholic—for some reason Cal knew that this was a promise that would only be broken if his quiddity was sent to the Marrow.

  “You can’t—we need—I—ahhh,” Cal stammered. It was a lost cause. These men were off to fulfill another duty, another story. He shook his head in disgust, displeasure, anguish.

  “We’ll be back,” Brett repeated, and with a final nod to Aiden, they turned on their heels and started away.

  South…

  South seemed a far way to go. Too far, maybe.

  Cal watched them leave, his head low, his shoulders slumped.

  “It’s time,” Chloe whispered from behind him.

  Cal replied without turning, his eyes still focused on the two men’s fading silhouettes.

  “Time for what?”

  Her answer chilled his blood, bringing back a flood of memories from his teenage years, memories that he had locked away.

  “Time to see the Curator, Cal.”

  Chapter 18

  “We need to keep moving,” Chloe said.

  Cal grunted, and adjusted his grip on the pieces of driftwood that he and Agent Cherry had fashioned into a makeshift travois before the man had left. The four of them, including Aiden, were making their way down the beach, putting as much distance between them and the orphanage as possible.

  But it was slow going. The sand was heavy and wet, and Cal was struggling to pull Robert’s body, despite the changes that his own had undergone over the past few months.

  The Curator.

  His initial response had be
en one of shock, then disbelief crept in.

  It couldn’t be the same man. It couldn’t be… what was his name? Stuart? Steven? Seth?

  Yes, that was it, Seth.

  He saw a flash of long blond hair, of the California accent, if he could place it as such. An idea of California, anyway.

  Seth Parsons.

  No, it couldn’t be that man, the same man in the library. The one with the strange book.

  His book, full of strange architectural drawings of tunnels and tanks and other things that he had no business knowing let alone reproducing.

  Cal shook his head and strode forward.

  That was a dream, a drug-induced hallucination. Nothing more.

  “How much farther?” he asked as he stared at the expanse of gray beach. Only Chloe seemed to know exactly where they were going, and even that had come into doubt after the third or fourth hour of trudging in the sand.

  Night had descended on them like a cloud of bats, and now they only had stars to illuminate their way. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed that the orphanage had long melted into the dark horizon. Even the giant whirlwind spire of light and fury that had extended to the heavens was no longer visible.

  “Can we stop?” he offered when there was no response to his initial query.

  His hands were blistered, and his legs were numb from walking for so long—walking and pulling… and pulling and walking.

  His feet were a mess, his running shoes sloppy from the wet sand.

  Cal briefly wondered if trench foot was possible in less than one day. If it was, he had, of that he was certain.

  To his surprise, Chloe stopped cold in front of him, and he nearly rammed into her from behind.

  “We can stay here for the night,” she said softly.

  Cal looked around. The beach seemed endless, extending forever in both directions. As he stared, the clouds that cloaked the moon moved on to other business, providing them with some much-needed illumination. The blue light reflected off the body of water, which had since calmed almost to the point of ice.

  But beneath the surface, it was anything but still; it teemed with life. Phosphorescent jellyfish drifted toward the surface in a hypnotic, neon dance, before plunging back down into the depths. Schools of herring formed distinct, direct paths like the ocean’s very own blood vessels. In the distance, Cal heard the splash of what might have been a whale’s great tail slapping at the otherwise unbroken demeanor.