The Whistlers

Chapter 3: The Skull of Doom, Part 3

EPISODE in HOUSTON, TEXAS

March, 1992

Cigarette smoke drifts out of an alley between two derelict buildings. A beam from a street light falls upon the legs of two men as they lean against the weathered brick. They shift position as they speak, and occasionally the light falls on an inch-wide crack in the wooden panel covering a basement window just below them.

The smoker stands fully as he makes a point and steps into the light. His companion moves with him, nodding consistently, stopping only when the speaker takes a drag. Both men wear well-used military-style jackets that could have come from the same surplus store. The smoker wears an improvised hat made of some stretchy fabric. The other wears a grey sock cap.

From somewhere comes a sound that could have been a human voice. The speaker falls silent and both men look about. In thirty seconds they hear another. It is the moan of a woman, possibly in the throes of s****l ecstasy.

The next sound they hear is anguished. It comes from under the building beside them. Is a woman giving birth?

The taller man pitches his cigarette and crouches to peek through the slit in the boarded window. He cranes so as not to block the beam that lets him see with a single eye. As it falls into the basement, the beam broadens and reveals an incomprehensible series of images.

A monstrous creature shifts its bone-pale form across the six-foot-long, two-inch-wide band of light that falls upon the grimy floor. It swells and contracts like a vast being breathing. Its body appears to be segmented, making it seem like a twelve-foot maggot. Yet it is coated with appendages in static motion like the wings of a cluster of bees mobbing a wasp. The man recoils. Then he hears the sob again, followed by a muffled screech. He presses back.

The torso of the unnatural creature shifts slowly, drawing more of itself across the light. Its limbs quiver about its core as if struggling to keep itself warm or holding in its own guts. Then the form squirms again, bringing its upper quarters past the light. It has a woman's head. It looks as if she is being swallowed alive, feet first, by a gigantic wormlike creature that holds her up to her neck.

Her face comes into view, eyes slitted with pain, dark hair spread over her tan forehead. She twists her jaw free and cuts loose with a heart-rending squall. Then another of the ropy appendages snakes over her and holds her head still, muffling her mouth. It moves absently, as if its owner is half-asleep. Her next moan comes through her nostrils.

As the mass enfolding her shifts its position, the mysterious limbs are suddenly clear: They are human arms, as skeletal as those of concentration-camp survivors. The woman is wreathed in them and flanked by a number of unclothed human torsos. It's as if a mob of albino children have drawn around her, their reedy arms wreathing her like a cocoon. Those limbs and their overlapping pale torsos have been what gave the impression of a single giant being. Their mass - and their extreme emaciation - has been what made them so hard to distinguish.

The man in the alley calls his friend to look. By the time he takes his perch, a pair of men's heads have drawn into the light close to the woman's, first one, then another, below each shoulder. They are the heads of old men, with chicken-necks, gaunt jowls, balding pates, and cloth bands across their eyes. More heads like them appear around the woman in virtually all positions: at her waist, by her knees... They appear to be grinning slightly, and the teeth they show are worn and decayed. Their expressions are unfathomable except as indications of ecstatic fulfillment, even consummation.

The second man stands back in shock, and the first returns. By then, the woman's face passes under the beam, wrenched in agony. Something is being done to her out of sight, and this has to be the reason the mass continually shifts: to allow access to her lower quarters. The woman frees her head and gives forth a screech that penetrates the alley.

The smoker pounds on the boards. He pushes his fingers into the crack through which he has been peering and tugs on the panel. His companion turns as if to call for help.

He hears an abrupt sound like a boot stomping into slush. He looks around in time to see his friend fall limply down onto his own knees as if his body has forgotten how to hold itself. Then it lapses back onto a quickly growing pool of blood.

The smoker leaps to his feet and looks at something before him. Something invisibly fast lashes horizontally toward him. His throat explodes, and he drops like his companion.

****

EPISODE in the CATTARAUGUS CREEK VALLEY

July, 2006

SPRINGVILLE, NY

1

Four people pile out of a navy-blue Subaru wagon on a clear summer twilight. The driver is a middle-sized, athletic-looking Anglo man of about fifty in a hiking shirt and jeans. The front passenger is a petite, attractive Asian-looking woman with shoulder-length dark hair. Two people in their early twenties step out of the back, laughing and conversing in French. One is a tall, slender man with light complexion and dark hair and eyes, handsome enough to be a model. The impeccably groomed blonde beside him wears jeans and a light sweater. The four file into a liquor store in the center of a small strip mall on the eastern side of a well-traveled highway.

"No way! Velvet Devil!" the driver proclaims, hauling up a bottle. He turns and shows the woman beside him the distinct three-pointed form on its label. "A little poke of the pitchfork? A little dab of the Devil? A little tap of the trident?"

"I will have one glass," she says with a French accent.

"That could be handy. Maybe I can indulge."

They join the young French couple at the register, each with two bottles. The driver raises his eyebrows, and the girl smiles. "We just don't want to run out," says the youth, dragging his syllables in a way that reveals that English was not his first language.

The driver holds up his card as if to cover all the purchases, but the pair wave him away. "We're good," the youth says.

Outside, all four stop to look at the western horizon. The young man hoots appreciatively.

Above, the sky is clear and nearly afternoon-blue. A bank of clouds meets the earth where the sun sets over the inky-pine valley that falls below them, and there things are different.

The smoky span that hugs the horizon gives the impression of a bird with spread wings, readying to soar from the thorny tree line. Cloud-forms above it suggest a beaked head, looking left and just above where its breast would be. The dropping sun would be its heart, and all near it is most joyous red-gold. The lower edges of the figurative wings that span the ridge are tinged with tangerine at the center, and the hue migrates symmetrically north and south through all the fiery shades into smudgy vermilion, magenta, and even lavender. It is a striking scene, seeming to promise mystery and adventure in the midnight-green declivity.

"That's where we're heading," calls the driver as they step toward the car. He notices the two young people bearing their bottles like twin babes-in-arms, lifts his own, and looks to the dark-haired woman. "You are going to be driving."