Midnight Grinding Read online

  “Delcambre was a particularly curious individual,” Rob began, imparting the information he had gathered over sixteen years of working at the Atlanta hospital. “His thirst for knowledge began during his medical education. Dissecting cadavers and examining the workings of the internal organs was only his first taste of hands-on research. Once he began practicing and had established a respected position on the staff here, he set up shop…in the basement.”

  Startled, Arthur stepped back a few paces. He had scrubbed away the coating of dust and spiderwebs from a five-gallon jar and found himself staring face-to-face with a severed human head.

  “I’m not saying old Delcambre was a grave-robber,” continued Rob. “No, he had plenty of opportunities to collect his specimens right here in the hospital. Of course, they were taken quietly and with discretion. No one on the staff really knew what he was up to. I’m sure that the administrators of this institution would have been shocked if they’d known precisely what was taking place down here.”

  Brandon passed a shelf of baby food jars. Each held paper thin slices of pale, bloodless tissue.

  No need to worry. A third-degree burn, but not very serious at all.

  “They said the old man did all types of weird experiments in this laboratory—gene-splicing, genetic mutation, tampering with growth and sexual glands in test animals, which created horrid monstrosities that Delcambre had to destroy immediately. There were even stories of him trying a little cloning. But it never quite worked out.”

  Goosebumps prickled Brandon’s flesh. Everywhere he turned there were tiny, unfocused eyes peering at him from cloudy jars and vials. It was like looking past the thick spectacles of the man in the photograph and finding cold, dead fish eyes staring back at you. Not the warm, compassionate eyes of a man of healing, but the hard, expressionless orbs of an unbalanced fiend, brilliant in one way, but long past the bounds of madness in another.

  Then Brandon Doyle turned around and knew that his suspicions were correct. He stared at the thing in the quart jar and held his breath.

  You’ve got to help him! He’s my baby! My only son!

  It sort of looked like an aborted fetus. Sort of. There were differences. Horrible differences. Like the way the tiny body was twisted and gnarled, as if in terrible pain. Like the way the thing’s skin was blistered and peeling, as if someone had immersed it in boiling water after its forced birthing. Like the way the oversized head was thrown back, the smooth toothless mouth stretched wide in a silent scream of gut-wrenching agony.

  Brandon turned away, but not before his eyes locked with those of the horrible infant.

  Dead blue eyes swam in cloudy, yellow liquid.

  Just hold still now, son, and we’ll fix you right up.

  “That’s really sick, man!” piped Arthur’s voice over his shoulder. With a snort of disgust, the writer turned away and, heading back to the makeshift office, began to rummage through the file cabinet.

  When Rob and his brother-in-law were about ready to leave, they found Brandon staring at the blankness of a cinderblock wall, his eyes averted from the jars that lined the dusty shelves. His face was pale, his eyes distant and glazed, like someone reliving a childhood dream. Or, perhaps, a nightmare.

  “Brandon?” said Rob, “are you alright?” Concerned, he laid a hand upon his colleague’s shoulder.

  Brandon flinched at his friend’s touch. He regarded Rob, his eyes suddenly clear and alert again. “Yes…I’m okay. Just got a little spooked, that’s all.”

  Arthur laughed nervously. “Welcome to the club.” He held up a manila envelope packed with yellowed papers. “At least I got what I came for. Hell, I might end up doing a series of books on this Delcambre guy.”

  “Just don’t mention who gave you the lowdown,” said Rob. “Delcambre might not have given a damn about ethics, but I certainly don’t like having mine questioned.”

  During the elevator ride up, Brandon absently rubbed the place where the anesthesiologist had touched him moments before.

  “Didn’t mean to hurt you,” Rob said apologetically.

  “That’s okay.” He pulled down the collar of his greens to reveal the ugly patch of scar tissue that lay across his left shoulder. “It’s always been a little tender.”

  Arthur grimaced. “When did that happen?”

  Brandon shrugged. “When I was a little kid. I don’t remember much about it. I was only a few years old at the time.”

  “Bad burn, huh?”

  See, Brandon, nothing to worry about. Only a little dead skin…

  He swallowed dryly and pulled his collar back in place. “Yes.”

  The elevator lurched with a dizzying motion as it reached the first floor. Just before the doors slid open, Brandon Doyle caught his distorted reflection in the polished metal.

  And stared into swimming blue eyes.

  CONSUMPTION

  For a kid, exploring the Tennessee backwoods is like stepping into another world. It can be lush, green, and beautiful. It can also be isolated, shadowy, and slightly unsettling. I remember when I was a boy, my cousins and I would wander through the dense woods behind their house. The wilderness seemed to stretch for miles and miles.

  One creepy thing about the woods, though…much of the ground is covered by a dense carpet of wild ivy, sometimes a good foot or two deep. You never know what might lurk underneath: could be possums or weasels, could be snakes. But, of course, being boys we blundered through blindly, oblivious to the danger. I remember once, following a romp in the forest, I came home and felt something thrashing and wiggling in the leg of my jeans. A second later a black centipede nearly eight inches long crawled out! Just goes to show you what might be lurking beneath the underbrush.

  Pap Wilson brought something home with him after a journey into the backwoods. Something much worse than a pesky ol’ centipede…

  Pap Wilson was returning home from a tedious day of digging ginseng down yonder in a backwoods hollow. His spirits were high and his sack held a good eighty dollars worth of the medicinal root. He was only a hoot and a holler away from the old log cabin his grandfather had built shortly after the Civil War, when his foot sank through the dense carpeting of wild kudzu and into what he first thought to be a sinkhole hidden from sight.

  “Confound it all!” said the old man as a sudden jolt of pain shot up the length of his right leg. When he attempted to pull his boot from the opening in the round, a sensation of prickly discomfort gripped him, as if his foot had fallen asleep. However, his injury proved to be much more serious than that. Red-hot needles of agony stitched his flesh in a dozen places, causing him to moan aloud.

  Pap, you damned fool! he told himself. You’ve done gone and put your foot into a nest of copperheads!

  But snakes were far from being the source of his discomfort.

  With a curse and mighty heave, Pap extracted his leg from the knee-deep kudzu and landed hard on his backside in the thicket. For a moment, all he could do was sit there and stare dumbly at his foot. Something had a hold of Pap Wilson. Something he had never seen the likes of during his seventy-odd years in the hills and hollows of Tennessee.

  Tiny black eyes glared up at him, burning with an emotion that could only be described as intense hunger. What it appeared to be was a very large and stubby caterpillar, the wooly kind that built great transparent nests in the boughs of blooming dogwoods in the heart of springtime. But several disturbing differences separated that creature from any insect that Pap had ever encountered. A thick coat of bristles covered the cylindrical body of the ugly thing. The old man poked at its back with the end of his walking stick. The cane emerged covered with long quills, five to seven inches in length, each as sharp and barbed as the end as a fish hook.

  As the pain grew increasingly worse, Pap’s attention was reluctantly drawn to the bloody, black maw that encircled his lower leg. It worked ravenously, awful sounds of sucking and tearing rising from deep within its gullet. The teeth were triangular ivory razors. The thing mo
ved along flesh and bone in an odd circular motion, performing irreparable damage, funneling the chewed tissue and gristle into the dark tunnel of its throat. In sudden horror, Pap realized that the mouth had traveled upward a few inches, totally engulfing the swell of his ankle.

  The thing was eating him!

  Pap Wilson had always been a proud man. He forever balked at help offered by neighbors or kin, and staunchly refused any consideration lest acceptance be interpreted as a weakness on his part. But that evening, deep in that wooded hollow, he screamed long and loud for his life and prayed to the good Lord that someone would hear his frantic cries.

  Someone did. Nate and Johnny, the old man’s strapping sons, were in the barn unharnessing a pair of sway-backed mules. Their upper bodies were tanned and slick with sweat, for they had spent all day plowing the hillside acreage that bore their meager crop each year. The two brothers looked at one another. “That sounded like Pap,” said Nate.

  They ran out of the barn and down the slope of the hollow. They found their father lying in a tangle of briers and bramble, trembling in a palsy of torment, his life’s blood flowing freely now.

  “Good God Almighty!” gasped Johnny, the younger of the two.

  The boys stared in disbelief at the thing that pulsated along Pap’s right shin. Nate crouched and curiously extended his hand toward it.

  “Don’t touch it, son!” warned Pap through clenched teeth. “The critter’s got barbs as sharp as a porcupine’s.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “Don’t rightly know. Put my foot in a sinkhole under the kudzu and the thing latched onto me with a vengeance.” Pap shuddered with another spasm, each more painful than the last. “Well, don’t just stand there a-gawking like a couple of idiots…get me on up to the house!”

  Fashioning their brawny arms into a makeshift chair, they carried their papa up the steep embankment to the ancient log house. “Ma!” they yelled as they approached the back porch. “Come on out here quick! Pap’s been bad hurt!”

  Mable Wilson rushed out of the kitchen door, drying her hands on her apron. “Lord have mercy!” she cried. “What’s happened to him?” At first, all she could see was her husband’s britches leg saturated with fresh blood.

  Then she saw the parasite and nearly screamed.

  Pap reached out and took her hand firmly. “Now, don’t you go getting hysterical on me, old woman,” he said evenly, trying to inject an element of calm into his faltering voice. “Ya’ll just get me inside and we’ll see about getting this ugly cuss off’n me.”

  By the time they carried Pap to his chair at the head of the kitchen table, the creature had crept to the bulge of the old man’s knee. They tried two things, neither of which showed any positive results. First they tried pouring hot water on the thing. Mable had a kettle of water boiling on the woodstove, knowing that her husband enjoyed a mug of tar black coffee after his forays in the forest. Carefully, she tipped the kettle over the writhing body of jagged bristles. All in the room were silent, watching in nervous anticipation. Mable and the boys prepared themselves for the shrieking and thrashing of the scalded critter as it dropped away and the grisly sight of Pap’s leg, flesh and bone whittled away to a point like a lead pencil. But the boiling water had no effect. If anything, it only riled the creature. It continued its gnashing and gnawing with renewed vigor.

  Next, Nate took a carving knife from the kitchen pantry. Careful not to ensnare his hand in the quills, he jabbed at the thing’s body, intending to skewer it. But, still, their good intentions proved futile. The knife’s edge continuously struck a network of hard, interlinked scales, comparable to the chain mail of a knight’s armor.

  “Try its head,” suggested Johnny.

  He did. After chiseling for a few moments, the point of the blade broke off with a snap. “No good,” sighed Nate. “The blamed thing is as hard as a tortoise shell.”

  “What’re we gonna do now?” asked Johnny. He noticed the thing was halfway up his father’s thigh and, amazingly enough, its toothy maw was expanding in width, accommodating the circumference of the morsel it was devouring.

  Pap had no more answers. He merely sat there trembling, tears of rage and agony rolling down his leathery cheeks. Mable saw her responsibility and took control. “Carry your papa into the bedroom and make him comfortable.” She followed them to the front room that she and her spouse had shared for over fifty years. After Pap had been laid gently on the big feather bed, Mable led her sons out into the hallway. “Nate…you’ve got the keys to your papa’s truck, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now, listen to me, both of you,” she said, trying to calm herself. “I want you to drive to town and fetch Doc Hampton. Bring him back here as fast as you can.”

  “But that thing on Pap…” Nate began to protest. “As fast as it’s going…won’t be nothing left of him by the time we get back.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense!” balked Mable, although her skepticism was half-hearted with dread. “Now get going. And put on a shirt, the both of you. I don’t want you roaring into town looking like a couple of naked savages on a rampage, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” They dressed hurriedl, and soon the old pickup was heading down the dirt road for town.

  “Mable?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she went in to see what Pap wanted.

  “Mable?” Pap muttered weakly. His face, once ruddy with good health, now stared up at her as pale as baking flour. “Mable…I want you to do me a favor.”

  “Of course,” she said, but there was wariness in her tone.

  “I want you to fetch that old shotgun of mine from outta the hall closet and load it for me.”

  “Whatever for?” Mable exclaimed. Her mind raced, revealing reasons and quickly discarding them. She had a cold fear that she knew exactly why Pap wanted the gun.

  The elderly man avoided looking her in the eyes. “The pain, Mable…oh, dear Lord in heaven, it hurts!” His white-knuckled hands clutched at the mattress, the nails digging deeper into the bedcovers. “Mable, darling…I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”

  Mable Wilson removed her apron and tenderly wiped the sweat from his pasty brow.

  She was a God-fearing, church-going woman and, at that moment, knew she must draw on her faith to get them both through this terrible ordeal. “I’ll not let you die, Pap Wilson,” she declared, her own tears spilling freely. “Not by your hand or by this…this monster that’s got hold of you!”

  “So you refuse to help me?” Once again he was the rawboned mountain man, fearful of nothing and full of piss and vinegar; the man she had wed the summer of her eighteenth year. “Well, if that be the case, then just get the hell outta here! Get out and lock the door behind you! And no matter how badly I scream, woman, don’t come in…do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He stared down reluctantly at the quilled parasite. The thing was at the joint of his crotch and thigh now, blood pouring in torrents, more blood than he had seen in an entire lifetime of hardship. The appetite was what mortified him. Could the thing eat and eat and never gorge itself to capacity? Was its devilish hunger eternal? And who would it start on next, once it had its fill of him?

  Mable obeyed her husband’s demands. Swiftly, she closed the door behind her, locked it shut with the skeleton key. She stood at the front door screen and watched the evening bleed into twilight. She prayed softly, trying hard to ignore the awful noises of feeding that sounded from the next room.

  In the course of a lifetime one rarely endures the kind of living nightmare that befell the Wilson clan that dreadful day in the wooded hills of East Tennessee. A nightmare so horrendous that it crumbles the very foundation of daylit reality, then pursues the tortured mind relentlessly into the realm of troubled sleep afterwards.

  ***

  When Nate and Johnny returned with Louis Hampton M.D. in tow, darkness had fallen. They found their mother sitting in her rocker on the
front porch, her face buried mournfully in wrinkled hands, her frail body racked with the force of her sobbing. “It was horrible!” she told them. “The screaming…I’ve never, in all my born days, heard such awful sounds as those that came from that room. Oh, your poor papa…how he must have suffered. And, Lord forgive me, I did nothing. I sat right here until the screaming finally stopped.”

  Nate left Johnny to look after Ma. Then, accompanied by Doc Hampton, he entered the house. Living so far back in the sticks, the Wilson household, like most of their backwoods neighbors’, existed without benefit of telephone or electricity. In pitch darkness, Nate fished in the hall closet, found the old Parker twelve-gauge, and loaded it. Then, flashlight in hand, they unlocked the door and burst in.

  The pale beam was directed at the brass-framed bed, as were the twin muzzles of the scattergun. But there was nothing to fire at. The big feather bed was empty.

  Nate and Doc stepped closer and examined the spot where Pap Wilson had once lain in agony. The sheets were twisted and soaked through with blood. The only lingering remains of poor Pap appeared in ragged tatters of clothing and the upper plate of his mail-order dentures lying near a chewed and discarded pillow. As for the parasitic worm, the only traces of its horrid existence were a few barbed quills protruding from the mattress ticking.

  Where is it? Nate’s mind raced in panic. The beam of the flashlight followed a long smudge of fresh blood, like the slimy residue of a slug’s trail, crossing the hardwood floor toward the open window. Nate caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye, but too late. He whirled and fired just as the thing disappeared over the sill and into the outer darkness, leaving only a smear of fresh gore and needles along the ledge…a taunting reminder of the horrible act committed therein.

  ***

  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.