So sit back and enjoy Steve Niles at his scariest best in these stories of evil streets, things in the night, and Cal McDonald.

Savage Membrane

1

It was the night after Halloween. I had vague memories of crashing a costume party with a couple of ghouls I know. I started drinking. After that I draw a blank, but I’m sure there was trouble—there always is. Besides, I could feel a hell of a fat lip throbbing and my hands were cut and bruised with the unmistakable indentations of human teeth across my knuckles. I’d hit somebody and somebody had hit back. That didn’t bother me so much. I was always hitting and getting hit. What I found disturbing was my empty shoulder holster. My .38 was gone.

I was face-down in my apartment, experimenting with the adhesive properties of vomit to hardwood floors, when, of course, the phone rang. It sounded like a hammer against a steel barrel inside my skull. I groaned and peeled my head from the floorboards. My stomach lurched. It didn’t like the idea of being moved very much but the phone was ringing incessantly. It was six at night so I had to get up anyway, but I didn’t like being nagged. Wiping my face with one hand, I snatched the receiver violently from the cradle, choking the brain-rattling ring in half.

“McDonald Investigations. What d’you want?” I barked. My voice was gravel and phlegm.

The voice on the other end blurted, “Cal. I got something down here you might want to see.”

It was Blout. Jefferson Blout is a big, bad-ass cop from the precinct I worked in for all of a year. That is, before I was asked to leave as a result of a drug test. Evidently traces of alcohol, marijuana, and crank were found in my blood. Traces, hell! At that time I was practically sweating the stuff. They didn’t need to check my blood, they could’ve just sucked on my arm.

Blout stuck by me when everyone else on the force turned their backs. He knew why I did all the drugs, and why I still do sometimes. He knows what these eyes see. Christ. Believe me, if every time you turned around some fucked-up monster was coming down on you, you’d stay wasted too.

You see, I have this knack. Call it power, talent, what you like. I call it a curse. A fucking pain in the ass.

It’s like this. Some people attract love or money and some—I think I’m one of the few—attract the bizarre. Always have, ever since I was an eight-year-old kid living in the ’burbs. That’s when I found my first corpse.

I’d been tooling around the woods, playing with sticks and crap, when I came over an embankment near the creek that ran parallel with my house. There it was, tucked in the mud and leaves like a big, naked pea pod. I saw its feet first, then the torso. And that was all, because that’s all there was. It was headless.