I AM THE NIGHT YOU NEVER SPEAK OF

C. Robert Cargill

It’s banging in my skull again. The hunger. It starts as an itch on the other side of the bone, behind the earlobe, just where I can hear it. Scritch, scritch, scritch it goes in the night. I don’t notice it when it’s just a tickle. I’ve trained myself not to. But when it’s a scratch, I know I’m in for it. I know that it will get so bad it’ll curl my fingers, curl my toes, paint my knuckles white and choke my fingertips red. It’ll arch my back and make me want to bite my own tongue clean off. I’ll start beating a balled fist against my skull, want to drive a knife or a screwdriver or a power drill—whatever I have on hand—right into the spot to scratch it.

But that’s just how it starts. And it only gets worse from there. Next comes the pounding, a screaming headache like a hangover from three solid days of tequila and nothing else. My brain throbs against a skull full of exposed nerves and I want to tear my skin off my arms just to feel something else for a change. I want to pull out my hair in clumps, bits of flesh dangling from the ends, rip my ears off both at the same time. But that won’t help. That won’t be but a distraction, a momentary dalliance from the scratching and the pounding and the bleating of my hunger.

I have to feed. To eat. To devour whole the dark of night. Its sins. Its memories. I have to feast upon the guilt and glee of a hundred carnal pleasures, to drink and fuck and finger and sink low into a junkie sleep rich in the glow of a peaceful head and the taste of cock and quim and filth on my mouth.

Not that I love that shit. I hate it. It’s fucking cotton candy for the soul. A second on the lips, a flash on the tongue, and then vapor—an unsatisfied memory of a moment you can’t ever get back. You need more. You gotta have more. That’s where it started, for me at least. And it never ends. It never, ever, ends.

I don’t eat people, not like the others. Some of the others at least. I eat the sin. The act. I dine off the moment that the soul crosses the line from one side of morality to the other. But it ain’t like you think. A sin ain’t found in the lines of a book. It’s found in the heart, the soul. A sin is found in shame. Or in that dark enjoyment of something made better because you think it’s wrong. That’s where I eat; that’s where I live. That’s where I come for you.

Getting people to sin is easy. Everyone wants to be around me. I’m fucking beautiful. Not hot. Not sexy. Beautiful. They can’t take their eyes off me. You. You would fuck me. That’s how beautiful I am. I haven’t even told you if I’m a man or a woman yet, and I don’t know if you’re gay, straight, or married. But you’d fuck me. You know you would. You’re starting to picture me now, see my features through the fog, feel the tickle in your groin as you rub your thighs together hoping no one else in the room notices how hot you’re getting. That’s how fucking beautiful I am. And that face you’re seeing. That’s what I look like. That’s what I always look like.

And everyone sees me different. Everyone but the monsters. To them I always look the same.

In Midian they called me Bacchus, the god of lust and ritual madness, of ecstasy and wine and all the filthy fine fucking things folks love. Most thought I might actually be him, or at least the inspiration for the story. But I ain’t him and he ain’t me. I ain’t half that old. It’s just a name, good as any other. But now, now that they know me, now that the walls have come down and so many truths have been revealed, they don’t speak that name in jest. They don’t think about me that way anymore. Now I’m something else. Now that word has a whole new meaning.

Now they know that I eat sin and a monster ain’t nothing but.

People think of psychopaths and equate them to monsters. They think of the cruel emotionless detachment and see the awful things they’ve done and scream A MONSTER! A MONSTER! But that’s no monster. A psychopath is just a thing that’s broken. They’re not men; they’re animals—devolved brains that have ceased feeling and turned to instinct. Animals, those are the only things that will do something cruel without remorse. They’ll bite their best friend for a morsel and never give it a second thought. You can smack ’em upside the head and they’ll come back to you—if you’ve broken them right. That’s no monster. Monsters know. Monsters feel. They know exactly what the fuck they’re doing; they know the things they do are wrong but savor it anyway. Every. Delicious. Moment.

Until you’ve watched a monster eat a man, head and all, tear out its entrails, and dance beneath the moon with a delighted blood-smeared smile, you don’t know. You can’t know. They love it. They love the shit out of it. That’s a monster. And that shit gets me harder than anything. A monster, a good and proper monster, will sate my hunger for a decade or two. I’ll gut ’em like they would a human and gobble up every sinful morsel; I’ll crack their bones and drink the marrow. Once I ate one so foul that I didn’t get hungry for another thirty-four years. But that time I got lucky. A beast like that is craftier and more cunning than anything you’ve ever known. To get one like that you’ve got to catch ’em at their weakest. At their hungriest. When their insides pound as hard as mine do now.

But I ain’t seen a monster like that for a very long time. Not since Midian. Not since the walls came down and we scattered to the winds. Midian was good to me. I could watch and wait and learn the routines of the worst of us. Then, when the hunger or boredom got to be too much for them, I’d follow them out, wait for them to break the law. And then I would break it myself. Only had to do that a few times. The rest of the time I could live in peace. Quiet. The demons screaming in my head sated for years. I could read, have real conversations in which I didn’t have to pretend so much, maybe even watch a little TV. I never had to drink, to feast, to find myself throwing up in some back alley, needle in my arm, unshaven junkie on my cock working for his fix. Not unless I wanted to. Those were good days. But they’re gone now.

So I have to fill the new ones. I have to feed. I have to gorge on whatever weak-ass human sin I can find, which means most of the time I have to make my own. It’s awful. A single night of human debauchery is like a thimbleful of water after three days in the desert. It’ll stop the pounding all right; it’ll stop the itch. But it’ll only buy me a few hours of peace, a few hours of quiet, a few hours without the walls of my sanity tumbling down. Just enough to sleep. But most days it’s the itch that wakes me up.

So my life is a constant party. A night train of debauchery with no stops until dawn. Booze. Sex. Drugs. Gambling. Theft. Violence. Whatever your kick—your real kick—I aim to supply it. To be that silent dream drifting into the bar to grab you by the short and curlies and tug you into a smoky backroom corner to finish you off in the dirtiest, filthiest, most perverse way you can imagine. But don’t get too excited. I ain’t your fucking fantasy. No. That would be too easy. I don’t get off being everything you wish I was.

Who the fuck am I?

I am the night you never speak of. The porn you jerk off to but could never tell anyone about. The tryst when your wife is out of town. The drunken night after five years sober that leaves you lying in a pile of your AA anniversary chips. I am the memory that makes you cringe in the shower, the lie that ruins your marriage, the truth that makes you put a gun in your mouth after midnight when no one is awake to take your calls. I am the dark deed that hollows you out and leaves you like a husk to be filled with booze or sex or love or excess or consumerism or religion or fitness or parenthood—whatever your vice may be. That’s who the fuck I am.

And tonight, my head is pounding again. The sun is setting and I’m running out of smokes. It’s time to hit the town. It’s time to eat. It’s time to ruin someone’s life.

I’m staying in a shithole motel in a know-nothing town that is the pimple on the ass end of Texas. I’ve just finished a long run in Vegas—which I can only handle for so long. There’s no night in Vegas, not inside the city limits. Not where the hunting and feeding happens. It’s all lights and noise and six-dollar steaks, all day, every day, in a way that it eventually makes the sunlight feel wrong. It flips the whole world on its head. I lived underground beneath the dirt and graves for ages, and even I can’t handle Vegas for longer than a month or so.

I hitched my way as lot lizard, blowing truckers in their cabs, feeding off the really dark shit they daydream about on the long hauls. It’s not that I’m poor. Cars can be tracked. There are always people looking. Monsters looking. And I don’t like anyone to see me coming. Or going. It’s why I’m still here after all this time. Remember what I said about clever monsters? I was being humble.

So here I am in some shitsmear Panhandle town with my head on its way to making me cry out loud and I’m dying for a smoke.

I’m thinking there might be a bar nearby. I’ve been to this town before. That’s why I hate it so much. I always forget its name. It’s something stupid like Oatmeal or Friday or Happy or Paris—you know, one of those cute coopted bullshit names Texas loves. But I think there’s a bar, and I think it should be open, so I hoof it across the dusty, yellow-grassed plains to cut an hour or so off of my walk.

And I’m right. There’s a bar. And it’s open. More or less.

It’s one of those concrete box buildings that just looks wrong all by its lonesome. Sharp angles, whitewashed cinder-block walls, a sign hand-painted by someone with aspirations of leaving this town but lacking the talent to actually do so, a big black metal door and no windows to spoil the neon drenched insides. It’s got one of those stupid lighted arrow signs out front with slotted letters falling off that no one gives enough of a shit about to straighten after a storm. Why bother, I wonder. It’s not like you could miss this pathetic structure along the road with nothing but telephone poles and a gravel parking lot to keep it company. But there it is, inviting you in for CHEAP BEER and FRIDAY NIGHT POOL TOURNAMENTS.

It’s Tuesday. But thankfully there are a half dozen cars and trucks in the lot. Probably the only alcohol for fifty miles.

The inside smells like stale smoke and dirty mop water. It’s exactly as I remember it. Cement floor covered by a stained tattered rug—the thin, rough kind you find in cheap strip center offices. It’s lit almost entirely by neon advertising, some corners brightened by beers that haven’t been available for decades. It’s not so much a bar as a coffin where a lonely few escape their somehow even worse lives.

I smell the guy right away. I can taste his longing on the tip of my tongue, the want lingering at the bottom of his heart, buried under ten years of single-position Saturday night sex. He wants a turn. He’s waiting for it. The rest of the bar is slim pickings. You’d think that everyone could be broken by something, could be lured away with just the right offer, but I’m telling you now, that ain’t the case. Some people want for things they’ll never allow themselves to have.

But this guy, this guy has it bad. He’s a stained T-shirt barely squeezed over a spare tire; salt and pepper stubble sprawling across two different chins. He’s daydreaming over his beer, thoughts lingering over freshly dusted memories some fifteen years old. This guy’s special. Sure he’d love a roll in the hay—a good, righteous fuck or even a quick handy out back. But that wouldn’t even register. That’d be the pitiful highlight of his fucking year and he might go so far as tell his wife about it just to piss her right the hell off.

No, this guy is looking for something else, a different brand of vodka altogether.

I sit two stools down and don’t make eye contact. That’s the key. People get suspicious when they get everything they want without having to work for it. So I make him work for it. He nurses his bottle of beer for a while, checking me out in the mirror hanging on the wall behind the bar, mindlessly picking at the label.

I wonder for a second what I look like to him. I never get to know. I get an inkling, a few of the details—young, old, black, white, male, female—that kind of stuff. And I only know that because I know what they want. But I never see myself, not as they see me. I know he thinks I’m a man, I know I’m in my twenties. But I know shit else. Hair color, eye color, beard or clean shaven. None of it. I look across the counter at the mirror and see nothing but the monster, a withered old husk, partied out like a drooping, wrinkled party balloon. It’s a good thing no one ever sees my eyes, my real eyes, bloodshot and yellow with a thousand-yard stare that’d just downright chill you to the bone.

“Can I get a pack of smokes?” I ask the frumpy, dumpy white-trash owner of this fine establishment. She nods and tosses me a pack from behind the counter. “My brand,” I say with a smile. At this point, they’re all my brand. I light up, the smoke only the faintest relief against the din in my skull. But I draw in a drag like it’s fine wine, smiling and letting it roll over me. Headache or no, the show must go on, or else the headache will just get worse. And it will get worse. So I’m all about the show now.

In the mirror I see a flash of razor teeth.

I hate seeing myself in the mirror.

“You still play?” he asks, drifting back in from out of his daydream.

“What?” I ask.

“You still play?”

“Ball?”

“Yeah, ball.”

“How’d you know?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“The way you carry yourself. A guy who plays ball, if he’s the real deal, if he gives himself to it, it gives him a walk.”

“My posture gave me away?”

“Yeah. I’m guessing … running back?”

“Tight end. You?”

“Quarterback. Up through college.” He lifts the sleeve from his biceps, revealing the number 27 in big block letters and local high-school colors. “Till I blew out my knee.”

“Who’d you play for?” I ask, the lilt of my voice showing genuine interest.

Bam. He’s on the hook and moving two stools down to sit beside me. He wants it bad. I can taste his thoughts, the stench of his desire reeking like a bloated corpse. Middle age is making him weary, sad, putting the creak in his bones and a layer of fat on his belly. He wants to be young again, but even I can’t do that. So he talks about it. And he talks about it. And beer after beer he keeps talking about it, reliving every glorious moment.

His name is Bill.

It’s an hour in and he’s recapping the final quarter of the big state championship. I know when he’s lying, but I don’t mention it. The embellishments are the only thing making the story listenable. Otherwise it’s the standard claptrap that I try to choke down with as much alcohol as I can stomach, half a pack of smokes, and the hope that this headache will soon be gone. Every once in a while I break in to tell my own lies, stories I’ve lifted from a hundred other guys just like him, details that sound right because they actually happened to someone else.

But none of this is going to chase away the hunger. It’s all just foreplay. I gotta get this guy out of the bar so we can get down to business.

“Man,” I say before killing the last few swigs of a beer. “I wish I weren’t so far from home. I could really go for a round of shooting right now.”

“Shooting?” he asks.

“Yeah. Me and the boys like to go out after a game, get completely wrecked then line up our bottles and shoot shit until we pass out. All this talk about playing has me wanting to shoot.”

“I got a couple shotguns in the truck. Maybe fifty, sixty rounds.”

“Bullshit,” I say, pretending that I haven’t been smelling the gunpowder on him for the last hour.

“Ain’t no lie. You wanna shoot?”

“Yeah I wanna shoot.” I look up at the bartender. “How much for the rest of that bottle of whiskey?”

Bartender shakes her head. “I can’t let you walk out with anything open. Not so much as a beer.”

“Then how much for an unopened bottle?”

“Ain’t got a license to sell you that, neither.”

Bill waves a fat finger at me. “Let’s do a few shots now and it’ll hit us just in time to shoot. Trust me. I do this all the time.”

He was right. He does. The whiskey hits us just as we’ve lined up trash on a fence out in some disused field miles away. He’s a good shot. I pretend not to be half bad. Truth is that I’ve spent an untold number of drunken nights getting hillbillies and rednecks to shoot at things that shouldn’t be shot at. It’s not all about college girls, struggling ex-addicts, and cheating husbands. I gotta dig deep to keep on keepin’ on. Some nights it’s getting spanked by a priest, others it’s getting someone to cheat at cards, and yeah, others still are spent shooting cans out in the sticks, talking a drunk idiot into going down on his drunker sister or … putting some buckshot in his asshole neighbor.

So yeah, I’ve done this once or twice.

We shoot until we’ve almost run through his ammo. I get pretty close most of the time, but as the shells start running thin, I start nailing my shots one after another after another.

“Damn, son,” he says. “You’re getting’ the hang of it.”

“I’m getting sober is what I’m getting.”

“Young man like you can hold his liquor. I’m drunk as hell.”

“Well I ain’t anymore. Let’s go get some more to drink.”

He looks at his watch. “Bar’s closed. Missed it by ten minutes.”

I make a pained face and look up at the wide dark sea of stars above. We really are out in the middle of nowhere. “There’s a house along the road about a mile back. What do you say we raid their liquor cabinet?” I shoot him a playful smile, but cock my brows just so to tell him I’m serious.

“That’s breaking and entering.”

“Yeah.”

“No way,” he says.

“What? Do you know ’em?”

“No.”

“Well, ain’t you never raised hell, before? I thought you were cool.”

That hits him like a fist to the gut. He tries to hide it but his eyes give him away. He thought he was cool, too. For a while there he was feeling like a kid again, just one of the guys.

“We ain’t gonna hurt nothin’,” I say. “Just peek in their liquor cabinet and take some for the road. You never done that?”

He has. But not in a long time.

I can feel it in my bones, smell it on his breath. He hesitates, temptation gnawing a hole so big in his gut you could drive a truck through it.

He smiles. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

Release. It’s like that moment you stand up after drinking when it all hits you at once coupled with the tingling opening salvo of a full-force orgasm. The headache vanishes in an orgiastic rush, with even the itch banished to the back of my skull for another hour or so. If he goes through with this, I’ll be good till sundown tomorrow. If not, I’ve got a few hours’ reprieve to figure out my next move and find my next victim.

But this guy’s gonna go through with it. I can tell. I can always tell.

But that ain’t the worst of it, not for him.

This poor son of a bitch has no idea what he’s walking into. You see, there are a couple of things I haven’t told you yet. Firstly, I know exactly where we’re going and I know who lives in that house. I smell ’em every time I end up here. Secondly, I didn’t end up in this town by accident. Not this time. And lastly, we’re not going there for booze. We’re going there for peace.

Who lives in that house?

UHF and the FM Girl.

That’s what we called them anyway, in Midian, behind their back. Their names are Humphrey B and Sylvia, but the first time you see them you can’t think of them as anything but UHF and the FM Girl. UHF is a tall guy, six feet at the shoulder, with an old nineteen-inch black-and-white CRT television for a head. There’s all this sinewy muscle wrapped around cables running up from his chest and neck into the TV, but the back of the set is blown out, like it was hollowed from the inside by a shotgun blast—jagged plastic surrounding a seven-inch hole. Inside there’s nothing, nothing at all. But the TV screen is always lit, a disembodied head in fuzzy black and white, ever floating, reacting, just as you’d expect his head to react.

The FM Girl is different. She’s lithe, willowy, easily five foot nothing, her skin wrinkled and desiccated, like she was mummified, her eyes and mouth sewn shut with ratty black thread. While she can’t speak, she’s always broadcasting her thoughts, and if you’ve got a radio nearby tuned to the right station—89.7! The screaming sounds of hell!—you can hear her just fine. So she carries around an old beat-up hand-cranked emergency radio that she’ll wind to life if she ever has anything to say.

They’re a fine couple, as married as us monsters can be. FM Girl needs flesh to feed; UHF just needs to watch. He can go a little longer than she can, but neither can go more than a year or two without a good, honest-to-God murder. I’ve been keeping track of them for a spell. They’ve been picking off truckers over the years, catching them overnight, murdering them in their cabs before driving their trucks off into oblivion. But it’s been a while. And they must be getting hungry.

So I’m bringing takeout.

The windows of the house are blacked out for obvious reasons, but Bill doesn’t notice. It’s a run-down, single-story ranch-style affair with peeling blue paint and the rusted-out frame of a midseventies Oldsmobile oxidizing into nothingness out front. It is, as far as Panhandle homes go, entirely ordinary.

We slip in through the back door into a hallway that splits off to the living room and the kitchen. I point to Bill and then the kitchen, then myself and the living room. He enters the kitchen completely unaware that there’s an open door to the cellar in there and that under this house there be monsters.

They hear him come in. He’s about as silent as a raccoon in a trash can.

A pale blue light creeps up the stairs, but Bill’s too busy picking through the cabinets to see it.

Behind him, not six feet away, is the FM Girl, her husband standing silently, ominously, behind her. Watching. The kitchen fills with the blue light of his flickering set and Bill turns slowly around.

His eyes go wide with fear. He’s paralyzed, unable to process what he’s seeing.

The FM Girl reaches up to her sewn-shut mouth and yanks at the thread, pulling it out in one slow, deliberate motion. Then her cheek splits, splaying her ear to ear, rows of needle-teeth glistening in slobber as her massive jaw unhinges. Her mouth is so wide it looks as if it could swallow Bill’s head whole.

Behind her, UHF’s head vanishes from inside the set, his display showing his view of his wife and her soon-to-be meal.

The FM Girl reaches down and cranks her radio, winding it up furiously. It crackles to life, thick static shrieking murderous thoughts along with the phrase “Wrong house, motherfucker.”

My machete cuts her in half from behind before UHF can speak up to warn her, his flickering screen showing every horrible second of his wife’s demise. Her body topples to the floor with two wet slaps.

I dive in like a rabid beast, razor claws rending her flesh into fistfuls of meat that I greedily shove into my mouth. Blood coats me in seconds, the floor growing slick with it.

I look up at UHF and smile. He’s feeding. He’s feeding watching his own wife devoured handful by delicious handful. He feels awful about it, can’t decide whether to run for safety or stay a few seconds longer to taste the end of the love of his life. The thrill of his sin is the cream gravy on the chicken fried steak of my meal.

“You should go, Humphrey,” I say through a mouthful of his wife.

His head reappears on the screen and his voice crackles through his tinny mono speaker. “Are you going to kill me next?”

“Do I have to?”

He shakes his head back and forth, the television remaining perfectly still. “No.”

“Then go. Run. Before I change my mind.”

He thinks for a second, knowing he should probably fight, should stay and defend the last remains of his beloved Sylvia. But he doesn’t. He runs.

And I turn back to my meal, savoring every last bit of murderous sin that remains of the FM Girl.

Bill is slumped on the floor, staring at me slack-jawed, eyes as wide, unblinking.

So I turn to him. “You’re not going to say a word about this, are you Bill?”

He shakes his head, terrified, a few seconds shy of pissing himself right there on the floor.

“Good. Now get the fuck out of here.”

He stands up and scampers out the door without looking back. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if he tells anyone. Who’s going to believe him? He walked out of a bar drunk with a stranger and the next time anyone sees it, this house is going to be on fire. Telling stories about monsters in the basement will get him branded either a crackpot or an arsonist.

He’ll choose neither. He’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to forget what he saw tonight and maybe, just maybe, he’ll stop trying to live in the past.

I don’t have anything against humans, really. I don’t ever make anyone do anything they don’t want to do in the first place. Not really. I just give them a nudge. The interesting thing about doing this is seeing what comes after. My gift to them is they get to find out who they really are, deep down. And what they do with that knowledge defines them from that point on. Some folks can’t handle the memories of their night with me, but others come out all right on the other side. They make peace with themselves. They become better people. But it’s their choice. Everything is their choice.

So in case you were wondering, that’s how I sleep at night.

And I’m going to be sleeping a lot better now knowing I won’t have to be that guy for quite some time, that I won’t wake up with an itch in my head that turns into a rumble that turns into a scream. All my drinking I can do for myself now, all my sins will be my own. At least for a while.

But now that my head’s clear and I’ve got the taste of monster on my tongue, I’m wondering. Just how much more time can I buy myself if I run ole Humphrey down as well? I think I might do just that. He smells delicious.