“Good,” he said bitterly. “I always wanted to be famous.”

“My network … we’ll hire you the best lawyers, the best doctors,” said Yuki. “We can protect you.”

He said nothing. His eyes were still closed and he might have been asleep except for the occasional twitch of his lips.

“Mr. Fayne?”

“I did it, you know,” he said.

“Did …?”

“I killed those girls,” said Fayne. “All of them.”

She said nothing.

“I didn’t remember it before, because it happened during my blackouts. Do … you know about the blackouts?”

“I heard you say something. Is that what happens?” she asked. “You … black out?”

“Yes. Michael Fayne goes away. He isn’t there when it happens. He doesn’t understand what happens. He’s afraid of what happens.”

“I —”

“But I’m not.”

Yuki frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“No,” said Fayne in a voice that was strangely calm and unusually deep. It had been like that for a few minutes earlier, when Yuki was watching through the spy cam. “They don’t understand either. Not the cops, not the doctors, not that idiot Luther Swann. They don’t understand because they can’t understand.”

“I want to understand,” Yuki insisted. She touched his arm, making sure that her body hid the action from Riddle, who leaned against the wall pretending to be casual.

Fayne chuckled. It was an ugly sound. “You only think you do … but you don’t. I can smell how much you don’t. I can taste it in the air. I can hear your heart beating. You really don’t want to understand.”

“Yes,” she insisted, though her trembling voice betrayed her.

“Not even Michael Fayne understands it.”

“But … you’re Michael Fayne,” she said, suddenly wondering if the police had arrested the wrong man.

The man on the bed laughed again. Louder this time.

“Is everything all right?” asked Riddle, starting to come off the wall.

“Yes,” said Yuki quickly, waving him back, “it’s okay. Everything’s fine.”

Riddle scowled, but he stayed where he was. “You behave yourself, Mr. Fayne. Nobody wants any more trouble today.”

The patient said, “Mr. Fayne isn’t here.”

“Whatever,” Riddle said under his breath.

Yuki leaned forward another few inches. “What does that mean? Aren’t you Michael Fayne?”

The man’s mouth curled into a tight-lipped smile. “Not anymore.”

Yuki felt her heart pounding harder. “Then … who is it I’m speaking with?”

The man on the bed opened his eyes. They were no longer white with brown irises. They were no longer brick-redbrick red. Now they were totally black. Bottomless, endless black.

Yuki gasped.

The tight lips relaxed as the smile grew and grew, revealing his teeth.

His …

… teeth.

“God!” cried Yuki.

Riddle started away from the wall.

“What … what are you?” she cried.

The man on the bed spoke in a voice that was entirely unlike Michael Fayne’s. It was entirely unlike anything Yuki had ever heard.

It was entirely unlike anything human.

“I don’t know,” said the voice. “Shall we find out together?”

Riddle made it only halfway to the bed before the thing that had been Michael Fayne tore both hands loose from the restraints.

Yuki Nitobe screamed.

Riddle screamed.

So did the thing that swarmed off the bed and attacked them.

"HEARTSICK"

Scott Nicholson

Never trust a goddamned Injun.

Artus Matheson couldn’t make that declaration to the church folk down at Barkersville Baptist, because they proclaimed God loved every color in the rainbow. Like Artus would believe a crock of mule squat such as that. Why, the Mathesons, like most of the Great Smoky Mountain families, had never held slaves. And it wasn’t just because they were too poor, or didn’t trust outsiders.

And, hell, blacks had even come to the mountains to hide out when they ran away from the plantations on the Coastal Plain. There was even a Mulatto Mountain in Pickett County, where they settled and more or less lived out their days in peace and freedom, as much as anybody could when jobs were scarce and land was the only thing a man could stand on.

But, goddamn, the Injuns.

Never mind that they’d been here first, squatting on those granite ridges and hunting beneath the hardwoods in the silent and golden autumns. The college professors claimed the Injuns didn’t even live here year round, because the Cherokee had enough sense to head for the flatlands when the first frost hit.

But professors also claimed that buffalo had once roamed these hills, and that good white hunters like Daniel Boone had followed the herds up here and turned them into steaks and skins. Made it sound like Boone did a bad thing. They even called him “the original tourist.” Goddamn professors were about as bad as the Injuns when it came to bitching.

Artus squinted out the window. It was dusk, and he could barely make out the barn on the next farm across the black stretch of pasture. He figured the cows were safe, because he hadn’t heard any reports of dead cows, except the one that sorry old Sonny Absher had poached and foisted off as the work of a heart-stealer.

But the heart-stealers apparently had easier meat.

He shouldn’t have paid a visit to the McFall barn. That was a nosy thing to do, even if he hadn’t seen Delphus McFall in a solid week. But he chalked it off to being a good neighbor, checking up on things.

He’d found the victims in the barn, scattered around in the horse stalls and pig pens like a pack of drugged mules. They had been pale in the lantern light, and it had taken a few seconds for his mind to make sense of what his eyes had seen. They lay on their backs and sides, a couple of them snuffling and moaning, with bloody bandages on their throats.

But the worst horror was in the corn crib, where three men were strung up into a sitting position, their scarred and ragged arms tied above them with a coarse rope. But one of them wasn’t tied. No, this one had long, raven-black hair that swayed in greasy tangles as its head worked at the neck of one of the men. It was clearly an Injun, right down to the rough brown skin of those hands that clutched like a butcher making bacon.

The Injun was bent low over one of them, so busy that he didn’t notice Artus at first. And then Artus banged the lantern into a locust post, and the Injun lifted its face from its work. Blood trickled from that dark, twisted-up mouth and two long teeth flashed, and the man’s neck showed a wide red grin that was in the wrong place.

Artus had run back to the house so fast his boots barely touched the ground. All he could think was that the Injun had been tending those blood-stained scarecrows. Like livestock.

And if that goddamn Injun had his way, Artus and his wife Betty Ann were next on the menu.

“You see anything?” Betty Ann asked, and he hated the tremble in her voice. She’d been crocheting a little cap for their granddaughter, but it was busy work and she was making a real mess of it.

“Nah,” Artus said. “Maybe he won’t come tonight.”

“What if he ain’t the only one?”

Artus had considered that, which was why he’d left a loaded double-barreled shotgun propped by the back door. Most of the Injuns had left the area, and the professors made a big deal out of the Trail of Tears, as if anybody was going to cry over a few thousand Cherokee falling down dead. Hell, they’d been dying by the wagonload anyway, and there wasn’t enough room for everybody, plain and simple.

But what if it wasn’t just Injuns that turned into heart-stealers?

The television was on in the corner, the sound low. They had a wire antenna on top of the house and only got two channels, three if the wind and clouds were right, but Artus figured the same stories were on every channel anyway, even for those rich Florida idiots in town who had one of them silver dishes with four hundred channels.

The talking heads with their New York accents droned on and on in their big words, and it had been going on for days. At first it was just one of those little stories, some guy with a weird infection that they liked to scare everybody with so they’d sell their stocks, or buy their stocks, or whatever the hell the point of scaring people was. Artus had never had any stock except livestock, and with the FDA regulations and the taxes and the high cost of gas to drive them to stockyard in Wilkesboro, he’d whittled his herd down to the few he needed to keep his own freezer packed.

“The news said there was more of them,” Artus said. “But that’s off in the big city. It’s always worse in the city.”

“It don’t make no sense, what they’re saying.” She hooked and tucked a length of yellow yarn, and Artus hoped little JoJo never had to wear that cap, because it had holes big enough to let a hummingbird through. Betty Ann wasn’t much with her hands.

“Goddamn professors is the problem,” Artus said. “Coming on with all these theories when they don’t know mule squat from blackberry cobbler.”

“I heard one of them say it’s an outbreak of some kind,” she said. She’d been watching the news nearly nonstop, but Artus could only stomach so much. He’d stayed busy around the farm, mending fence posts and getting ready for fall harvest. Pumpkins and feed corn were getting ready, and the last of the beans and tomatoes needed to be canned, if Betty Ann could get off her easy chair long enough to boil some water. And potatoes, they laid right there under the ground waiting to be buried, shooting off new roots and getting soft. If he didn’t get them in the root cellar soon, they’d be eating nothing but cabbage all winter.

“Well, if it’s an outbreak, the best place to be is right here,” Artus said.

“Maybe we ought to check on the Greenes.”