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Morning, Noon, and Night Billy was walking in the woods
just before noon, throwing his large-blade pocketknife at the ground, sticking
it through leaves. He liked the woods, and since his father liked to drink all
day Saturday at the Dew Drop Inn, there really wasn’t much to do at home since
his father had hocked the TV set for beer money and Billy’s mother was dead. The fall woods smelled good
though, and Billy pulled his knife from the ground and took out a handkerchief
and rubbed the blade clean of dirt and told himself he would oil it when he got
home. He folded it up and put it in his pocket and put his handkerchief back. He walked till he came to the
huge oak he thought of as his tree. He had read a story about Robin Hood once,
and in the story Robin and his men met under a big oak tree in Sherwood Forest,
and sometimes he liked to pretend he was Robin Hood. The tree was easy to climb,
too, with a limb you jumped up and grabbed, and then well-spaced limbs that
went up amongst easy-to-climb boughs. He had once jumped from near the
top of the oak to the sweetgum tree next to it, and had climbed down from
there, so he liked to go up the oak and down the sweetgum when he came to the
woods. The sweetgum wasn’t as easy to climb up, but for some reason, it was
easy to climb down. Billy was thinking about that
when he heard something in the woods. He went toward a cluster of brush and
looked through it and saw a deer running right toward him. The deer was
probably a good hundred yards away, in a lightning-burnt-out clearing, and it
was running fast and frantic. It dodged to the left, and then to the right, and
then it stumbled, and the air around the deer seemed to wobble, and there was a
man running alongside the deer, just as fast as the deer ran. He hadn’t been
there one minute before, and then the air had wavered and he had appeared. He
had been invisible. The man grabbed the deer by the neck and brought it down
and clenched it tight, as if in a grappling choke. Billy let out a gasp as the man’s
mouth came down on the deer’s neck; it went way wide, and Billy could see rows
of needle-like teeth biting into the deer. Without meaning to, Billy let out
another gasp and backed up, and through the brush he could see that the man had
heard him. The man shifted his eyes without letting his mouth slip off the
deer, and Billy could hear the man sucking at the deer’s throat. He could see
blood seeping out onto the deer’s neck and onto the ground. The man ripped the deer’s throat
out with a jerk of his head. He stood up and wiped his bloody mouth on a plaid
shirt sleeve, moved his head from side to side like a cobra watching its prey. Billy ran to the oak and jumped
up and grabbed the limb and climbed fast. He could hear the man stomping
through the brush, and when Billy looked down, the man was already under the
tree. He couldn’t believe how fast the man could run. The man looked up, moved his head
around to find a spot through the limbs and dying brown and gold leaves, find a
spot where he could get a good look at Billy. “Reckon you seen what I did to
that deer, didn’t you?” the man said, his words a little muffled due to the
mouthful of teeth. Since the man’s face and shirt
were covered in blood, Billy felt this wasn’t a question that needed answering.
As he watched, the man flexed his lips and wriggled his jaw and the teeth in
his mouth disappeared inside his gums, and all that could be seen now was a top
and bottom row of normal teeth. “You ain’t
got no cause to be scared none,” the man said. “Why don’t you come down so you
and me can talk.” Billy didn’t budge. “You know,” said the man, “I can
come up there after you.” Billy thought: Well come on,
and I’ll jump to the sweetgum and hit the ground and be gone. Then he
thought about how fast he had seen the man running. First
he was invisible, and then he was running. Billy decided he wouldn’t have much
chance of outrunning him. “I could fix it so you could do
the same thing I can,” the man said. “You come down and I’ll show you.” Billy didn’t offer to come down. “Well, I can fix you the same.
You know, so you can be invisible or run real fast.” “I don’t want to run no deer down
in the woods and bite its neck and suck its blood.” “It’s messy, I admit. But one
thing happens when you get the change, you don’t care much for grilled steak
and taters. You like it raw and you like it wet, and you like to take it down
alive. It tastes better than you could ever imagine.” “I’ll just have to imagine,”
Billy said. The man looked up and smiled. His
mouth was coated in gore, and it made Billy sick to look at him. “I don’t want no one tellin’ about me,” the man said. “What can I do?” “I ain’t
gonna say nothin’,” Billy
said. “’sides, who’s gonna believe me?” The man nodded. “You got you a
point there, but the thing is, I can’t take no chances. If you’re deader than
last Christmas, I ain’t got to worry about you sayin’ a thing.” “So you was lyin’ when you said you’d show
me how to do what you do?” “Reckon I was. But I could still
show you. I don’t have to kill you.” “I don’t trust you,” Billy said. “I wouldn’t trust me neither, but
I don’t know you got no choice.” “I’m up in this here tree, and
you’re down there standin’ on the ground.” “There’s an old sayin’ about how some fellas would rather climb a tree and
tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. That could be me. But
if I have to come up there after you, you can count on bein’
dead. Ain’t nobody gonna
find you when I get through. I can suck out your blood and insides and suck
until your bones turn to liquid, suck until your teeth turns the same and your
skin shrivels up and there ain’t no more left than
enough to fold up like a handkerchief and put in my pocket. Then, when I get
the sniffles, I’ll blow my nose on you.” “You want me, you got to climb up
after me.” “I might just do that, but you
know, I don’t have to. I’m special. You ain’t
special, but I am. My daddy, he always told me I wasn’t worth the gun powder to
blow me up, but he was wrong. I got me some abilities. I don’t know how I come
by them, but I found I had them — morning, noon, and night. I can turn
invisible when the sun breaks day. I can be like that all mornin’
long, and then just before noon it starts to go away. But I can run fast then,
and I can keep right on doin’ that for a long time,
and then when it gets night, I can jump like a kangaroo. Higher than a
kangaroo. It comes night, I don’t have to climb up there. I can jump up there
and get you. I can do other things too.” “Jump?” “Oh yeah. Way high.” “How come you’re so special?”
Billy asked. “How come you got these powers and I ain’t
and nobody else ain’t?” “I was born with them but didn’t
know about them. They kicked in when I was twenty-five. I’m thirty now. I’ve
got so I know how they work. When they first kicked in, I didn’t know what to
think. Early in the morning, I turned invisible. I got used to that, I tried stealin’ things, but the things I touched weren’t
invisible, and folks would see them move, and I had drop them and run. So I made me a little money doin’
magic acts. Goin’ invisible, and then walkin’ around
and movin’ things. But I had to do it in the mornin’. Come noon, or thereabouts, my speed come on me
then, and it overlapped with the invisibility for a few minutes, and then what
I could do was run real fast. I’d snatch purses, and
there weren’t no one could catch me. I can run faster than that deer, for
instance. I can outrun one of them African cats, them spotted ones. I ain’t tried it, but I know I can. When I’m like this, ain’t nobody can catch me that’s on the ground.” “On the ground?” Billy said. The man looked up. “You caught
that, huh? Yeah, I climb up there I lose my runnin’
powers ’cause I ain’t in
touch with the ground. And I get weak. Real weak. At least during the time the runnin’ is on me. So climbin’ a tree, it’s a bother. But way I figure it, it don’t matter. You got to come down eventually, and when it
comes night, runnin’ power goes away ’til the next
day. Then I got the jumpin’ power and such.” “What about all them teeth?”
Billy asked. The man wiggled his mouth and
popped his jaw and spread his lips way too wide and tapped his now-needle teeth
with the tip of a finger. “They’re real strong, and they got hollows in them so
I can suck blood. I can kill with them. I can eat with them. And if I got the time I can do what I said before, suck you flat and small.” Another moving of the jaw and the
teeth shrunk and disappeared inside his mouth. Billy wondered where the teeth
went. Were they inside his head? How the hell could anyone do that? “I got my powers,
I got the teeth. I can will them at any time. Ain’t
no time of day they won’t work. And the thing I found, I crave blood. Lots of it. It’s a need that
kicked in when the powers did. One time, I went without blood, and I didn’t
have no powers durin’ that time. The powers feed off
blood. You see, like I told you, I’m special. I was born this way. I don’t know
how. My father and mother weren’t this way. But I am. It’s a gift. Maybe from
the devil. Maybe from some other god than the one Christians worship. Maybe
it’s what they call DNA, and mine, for whatever reason, is all messed up. It don’t matter. I am what I am, and you are who you are, my
nighttime snack.” “You’re just tellin’
me the same stuff over again.” “It’s a way to fill the time,”
the man said. Billy sat up in the tree and
watched the man, who ran out of talking and went to sit in the shade under the
sweetgum. The day eased along, and Billy found that he was nodding. He startled
awake a couple of times, grabbed at limbs and saved himself from falling. The
second time he did that, he noticed it had just turned night. The dark had
slipped in quick like a snake, all soft and shadowy and with a rising partial
moon seemingly dropping down to nest in the trees. The man was no longer under the
sweetgum. He was standing under the oak, looking up, showing his teeth in the
moonlight; the silver gleam of the light on the round spittle pops on his teeth
looked like miniature pearls. Without seeming to flex, the man
leaped and was halfway up the tree. Billy turned and fled along a limb, swung
to another, and was about to leap from the oak to the sweetgum when the man
laid a hand on his shoulder and spun him. Somehow Billy managed not to fall off
the limb, but it didn’t matter much. The man had hold of him, and now they were
facing one another. The man’s teeth were wet and shiny in the moonlight and his
breath was as putrid as a sewer. “I think,” said the man, “I’m
what some people call vampires. I don’t know what I am, but the blood you got
in your body, I can hear it. I can hear it runnin’
through your veins. I can hear your heart beatin’
like a tom-tom.” The man was playing with him.
Billy realized that and let his hand slip to his pocket and brought out his
knife and flicked the blade open with a twist of his wrist and brought it up
under the arm the man was using to grasp him by the neck. He brought the blade
into the man’s armpit as hard as he could, and when he felt it go in, deep, he
twisted. A stream of blood, dark as oil, spurted out of the armpit, and the man
made a noise like someone swallowing a rock. The grip on Billy’s throat went
limp and the man grabbed at a limb with his good arm, but the blood poured out
of the wound so fast it was as if the man were an open oil can turned upside down. The man’s head dipped, and then,
without so much as a grunt, he fell from the tree, bounced against a limb, and
smacked the ground right on top of his head. His neck twisted and there was a
noise like a dog biting into a chicken bone. The man sort of stood on his bent
neck for a moment, and then his legs lowered to the ground slowly, and he
rolled over on his side. For a long moment Billy just
looked at the unmoving man. Finally, he took out his handkerchief and wiped the
knife clean as possible. He dropped the cloth from the tree
and it floated down and landed on the man like a leaf. Billy folded up his knife and
slipped it back in his pocket. He didn’t want to go down the oak. He didn’t
want to be near the strange man, dead or not. He climbed along the oak, made
the transition to the sweetgum, and climbed down from there. Looking back, he saw the man was
still lying on the ground, not moving. Billy bolted for home. When Billy got home his father’s
car was still gone and the house was dark and empty. Billy thought about what
had happened and realized he had killed a man. He didn’t know how to feel about
it. Was it really a man? Certainly it was
self-defense. Billy unlocked the house and went
in and locked the door back. He walked around nervously for a while, going from
room to room. He sat in the dark and waited on his father, but he didn’t show.
He was probably good and drunk now, and the only way he was coming home was if
someone brought him, or he came home with the woman he had been seeing. The one
with the tall hairdo. Billy finally got up and went in
the kitchen and looked at the time. Ten p.m. He opened the refrigerator and got
out the milk and poured a glass and got two slices of almost-stale bread and
lathered them with mayonnaise and made a sandwich of that. He ended up eating
two of the sandwiches and drinking another glass of milk. He sat in the kitchen for a long
time and waited, but his father didn’t come home. If he did, Billy thought he
might get a beating out of the arrival, and that wasn’t good. But tonight the
whole idea of a beating from a drunk father was a better thing to think about
than the needle-toothed man who could turn invisible in the mornings, run fast
at noon, and jump high at night. But his old man didn’t arrive.
Billy went to his bedroom and made sure the window was locked. The curtains
were pulled shut. He went to bed. For a long time he
couldn’t sleep. He kept playing the events of the day over and over in his
mind, seeing the man waver in the air and then running alongside the deer. He
remembered how fast he ran, the story he told, and then he remembered him
jumping high and how it had felt when he shoved the sharp knife into the man’s
armpit. Eventually he drifted off. Once during
the night he thought he heard his father come in, but
now he was too deep down in the well of sleep to be certain,
and didn’t move. At least not right away. But he heard something crash,
and he got up and got his flashlight from the bedside drawer and went out in
the hall. The front door was wide open, and his father was lying on the floor
where he had passed out. Billy went over and tried to wake
him, but he didn’t wake. He turned on the light, but it didn’t come on. Billy
stepped out on the porch with the flashlight and looked left, then looked
right. He thought he saw something move around the edge of the house, but it
was a fleeting glimpse and could have been most anything. He noticed that the
wires that connected from the electric post to the box on the side of the house
were snapped off. He thought maybe a limb had broken off a tree and fallen on
it, but he couldn’t see a limb. He could see his father’s car in the drive. He
had been stupid and driven home drunk without the lady with the tall hair. Billy heard a noise somewhere,
something breaking, but it was faint and unrecognizable. He listened for a moment but he didn’t hear anything else, determined it was
nothing. Maybe an animal, moving around the edge of the house, knocking over
one of the old outside flowerpots his mother had had, now empty of flowers, but
still stuffed with dirt. He decided he’d get a pillow and
blanket for his father and leave him right there on the floor. He closed and
locked the door, and when he turned, he slipped and fell. He got up and felt
something on his hands. He shined the flashlight on his left hand. It was
covered in something wet and dark and sticky. Blood. Billy kneeled down by his father
and looked closely and saw that his throat was ripped. He hadn’t noticed it
before, the way he had been laying, but now he saw it. “Oh, my,” Billy said. “Daddy.” Flashing the light around, Billy
looked to see if he might see the needle-toothed man, but there was nothing. He
didn’t know how the needle-toothed man had survived, but Billy knew then that
he had. Billy wanted him then. He wanted to stick him with a knife again. He
got a large butcher knife from the rack beside the sink and went through the
house carefully, and ended up in his bedroom. He saw
something lying on the bed. Something small and square. He went over to look at
it, holding the knife at ready in one hand, the flashlight in the other. It was his handkerchief. The one
he had used in the woods to clean his knife. And now he realized something. The
curtains were pulled back and the window had been broken out and lifted up.
That had been the noise he heard when he was on the porch. The needle-toothed
man must have caught his father as he came in, and then he had torn out the
electrical wires and knocked out the window to the bedroom. Billy had felt brave before with
the knife, and mad from what had happened to his father, but now he felt a lot
less brave, and the open window looked like a hatch through which he could leap
and escape. He darted for it, but a shadow moved, and the shadow got hold of
him, and the shadow was large and flickering, like a bat. The next thing Billy
knew he was pushed back on the bed and the shadow was holding him down. The
shadow had some shape, and in a moment it had more
shape. The moonlight from the window was in the room and he could see that the
shadow was no longer a shadow at all, but the needle-toothed man, and that his
neck was so badly busted from the fall his head lay on his chest like a growth.
The needle-toothed man was showing all his teeth and his eyes were wet and
flashing, and he was stripped of all clothing, naked as a jaybird, and there
were bones sticking through his chest and abdomen. The teeth in the twisted head
smiled wide. The man said, “And after midnight, I can turn to shadows and flow
across the earth with the wind, and if I get dead, and I been dead before,
several times, I don’t stay that way. I come back, and I can always find my
killer. So, I’m back, and I’ve found you.” Billy tried to move, tried to
stab the man with his butcher knife, but the needle-toothed man had hold of his
hand and his grip was strong. Then the man jutted forward, and
the crooked, hanging head snapped at Billy’s jugular. Billy felt warm and wet,
as if he were falling down quickly and sadly into a deep, dark grotto with no
bottom. But before he was gone, he could hear the man with the needle teeth
sucking at him, sucking like a pig at a trough, sucking out everything he was
or might ever have been, sucking it out of him with those needle-sharp teeth. "Morning, Noon, and Night"
was originally published in the Lansdale short-story collection By Bizarre
Hands Rides Again (Morning Star). It was later included in Bleeding Shadows, published
by Subterranean Press. "Morning, Noon, and Night" © 2010 By Bizarre
Hands, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Flow back by here next Thursday
for another piece of totally free mojo storytelling! |
