Free Honey is Sweeter than Blood by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

killed me too!”
    “Diane, let me help you…”
    “Go away! You don’t understand!”
    “Yes I do…”
    “Go away, go away, go away, go away!” Diane tore up the mound and flung herself like a sacrifice across the circular altar table atop it, arms and legs spread.  
    Good God, thought Jen, almost terrified of her friend, even as she went up the small hill after her.  It was late afternoon and the air was dark with the threat of rain and no one knew she was alone here with Diane.  
    Diane’s head lifted, her round face glistening with tears but she was grinning and an ant crawled across her forehead.  “Shhh,” she grinned, “can you hear it ? Can you feel it? The throb?”
    “Diane…”
    “They’re alive .  It isn’t dead.  It was just an outgrowth of them but they’re still there.  Can you hear them? They never stop…it’s just that the storms bring it closer to our senses.  The storm locked them here.  I’ve tapped into it.  I want more.”
    Rain started falling, big hard pellets of it.  As Diane stood the sky rumbled and Jen withdrew a step.  Eyes locked on Jen’s, Diane pulled away the elastic band that restrained her once short hair, now falling darkly to her shoulders, and then undid the buttons of her blouse.  
    “Want to watch?”
    “I’m going for help, Diane…you need help.” Jen was so afraid of her friend now she almost hated her.  
    “Go away.  Leave me alone.  You don’t feel them…”
    “I’ll be back, Diane.  Don’t make me bring people here and embarrass you.  I mean it…”
    Thunder boomed far away, rolled heavily toward them like a surf.  Diane shrugged off her blouse; it slithered down her body to pool at her ankles.  Rain splashed her bare shoulders as she reached around behind to unhook her bra.  “You’re the one embarrassed, Jen, not me.”
    Jen whirled to run, slipped, slid down the mound on her rear, smudging blackened mushrooms on the way.  She was crying now.  She hit the paved path and ran…
    Once she stopped to glance back.  Just once, before she raced to her parked car and downtown to the police station.  The mound was distant, but there were no trees close by it and it loomed distinct.  And there on the pedestal tree trunk stood Diane—fully, whitely naked, almost phosphorescent in the wet dark, her pubic hair like a blotch of deep shade…a living monument, legs together and arms upraised to the heavy lowering sky…
    The bolt that killed Diane had rattled the police station’s windows with its force, Jen would realize later.  
    *     *     *
    Even years later Jen would stop at the base of the mound with her daughter in a stroller, and on occasion go so far as to climb the hill to stand and close her eyes, and gingerly feel for what Diane had said to have felt of the power rooted there, the passion impressed on the spot.  And she did come to feel something etched there, she believed in time.  
    Loneliness, she felt.  And sadness.

Scorpion Face
    If John could see his own alternate self, on that other plane of existence in which it resides, he might name that being Scorpion Face.
    This creature, smaller than John by a foot and greatly bent in addition to that, has a pale bald head twice the size of John’s and a face that shades into obsidian black.  These chitinous features look mechanical but are organic; two matching rows of articulated arms with a tail-like limb at the bottom which uncoils seemingly upon its own will to flick at the air.  Sloughing gauzy membranes like cobwebs cover its long bony hands and the back of its head in place of hair.  It wears shabby black clothes—much too small even for its tiny frame—like a tuxedo with a long forked tail.  Whenever it ventures out it wears an immense top hat.  It never goes outdoors when it goes out, however, as there is no outdoors in its dimension…only endless labyrinths, tunnels, dust-choked attics upon attics, web-cloaked basements and sub-basements.
    John