The Dump

For Ted Klein 

 

Me, I like it here just fine. Dont see no call for me to move on. Dumps been my home nigh on twenty years, and I dont think no high-falutin city sanitation law should make me have to pack up and move on. If Im gonna work here, I ought to be able to live here. 

Me and Otto . . . where is that sucker anyway? I let him wander about some on Sundays. Rest of the time I keep him chained inside the hut there, out of sight. Wouldnt want him bitin folks. 

Well, as I was sayin, the dumps my home. Best damn home I ever had. Im not a college man, but I got some education. I read a lot. Ought to look inside that shack and see my bookshelves. I may be a dump-yard supervisor, but Im no fool. 

Besides, theres more to this dump than meets the eye. 

Scuse me. Otto! Otto. Here, boy. Dadburn his hide, hes gotten bad about not comin when I call. 

Now, I was sayin about the dump. Theres more here than meets the eye. You ever thought about all that garbage, boy? They bring anything and everything here, and I doze her under. Theres animal bodiesthats one of the things that interests old Ottopaint cans, all manner of chemical containers, lumber, straw, brush, you name it. I doze all that stuff under and it heats up. Why, if you could put a thermometer under that earth, check the heat that stuff puts out while its breakin down and turnin to compost, it would be up there, boy, way up there. Sometimes over a hundred degrees. Ive plowed that stuff open and seen the steam flow out of there like a cloud. Could feel the heat of it. It was like bein in one of them fancy baths. Saunas, they call em. Hot, boy, real hot. 

Now you think about it. All that heat. All those chemicals and dead bodies and such. Makes an awful mess, a weird blend of natures refuse. Real weird. And with all that incubatin heat . . . Well, you consider it. 

Ill tell you somethin I aint told nobody else. Somethin that happened to me a couple years ago. 

One night me and Pearly, that was a friend of mine, and we called him that on account of he had the whitest teeth you ever seen. Darn things looked pointed they were so white... Lets see, now where was I? Oh, yeah, yeah, me and Pearly. Well, we were sittin around out here one night shootin the breeze, you know, sharin a pint. Pearly, he used to come around from time to time and wed always split a bottle. He used to be a legit, old-time hobo. Rode the rails all over this country. Why, I reckon he was goin on seventy years if not better, but he acted twenty years younger. 

Hed come around and wed talk and sit and snort and roll us some of that Prince Albert, which wed smoke. We had some good laughs, we did, and I miss old Pearly sometimes. 

So that night we let the bottle leak out pretty good, and Pearly, hes tellin me about this time down in Texas in a boxcar with a river trash whore, and he stops in midsentence, right at the good part, and says: "You hear that?" 

I said, "I dont hear nothin. Go on with your story." 

He nodded and told the tale, and I laughed, and he laughed. He could laugh better at his own stories and jokes than anyone Id ever seen. 

After a bit Pearly gets up and walks out beyond the firelight to relieve himself, you know. And he comes back right quick, zippin his fly, and walkin as fast as them old stiff legs of his will take him. 

"Theres somethin out there," he says. 

"Sure," I say. "Armadillos, coons, possums, maybe a stray dog." 

"No," he says. "Something else." 

"Awww." 

"I been a lot of places, boy," he sayshe always called me boy on account of I was twenty years younger than he was"and Im used to hearin critters walk about. That dont sound like no damn possum or stray dog to me. Somethin bigger." 

I start to tell him that hes full of it, you knowand then I hear it too. And a stench like you wouldnt believe floats into camp here. A stench like a grave opened on a decomposin body, one full of maggots and the smell of earth and death. It was so strong I got a little sick, what with all the rotgut in me. 

Pearly says, "You hear it?" 

And I did. It was the sound of somethin heavy, crunchin down that garbage out there, movin closer and closer to the camp, like it was afeared of the fire, you know. 

I got the heebie-jeebies, and I went into the hut there and got my double-barrel. When I came out Pearly had pulled a little old thirty-two Colt out of his waistband and a brand from the fire, and he was headin out there in the dark. 

"Wait a minute," I called. 

"You just stay put, boy. Ill see to this, and Ill see that whatever it is gets a hole in it. Maybe six." 

So I waited. The wind picked up and that horrible stench drifted in again, very strong this time. Strong enough so I puked up that hooch Id drunk. And then suddenly from the dark, while Im leanin over throwin my guts out on the ground, I hear a shot. Another one. Another. 

I got up and started callin for Pearly. 

"Stay the hell where you are," he called. "Im comin back." Another shot, and then Pearly seemed to fold out of the darkness and come into the light of the fire. 

"What is it, Pearly?" I said. "What is it?" 

Pearlys face was as white as his teeth. He shook his head. "Aint never seen nothin like it . . . Listen, boy, we got to get the hell out of Dodge. That sucker, its" He let his voice trail off, and he looked toward the darkness beyond the firelight. 

"Come on, Pearly, what is it?" 

"I tell you, I dont know. I couldnt see real good with that there firebrand, and it went out before too long. I heard it down there crunchin around, over there by that big hill of garbage." 

I nodded. That was a pile Id had heaped up with dirt for a long time. I intended to break it open next time I dozed, push some new stuff in with it. 

"Itit was comin out of that pile," Pearly said. "It was wrigglin like a great gray worm, but . . . there were legs all over it. Fuzzy legs. And the bodyit was jelly-like. Lumber, fence wire, and all manner of crap was stickin out of it, stickin out of it like it belonged there, just as natural as a shell on a turtles back or the whiskers on a cougars face. It had a mouth, a big mouth, like a railway tunnel, and what looked like teeth . . . But the brand went out then. I fired some shots. It was still wrigglin out of that garbage heap. It was too dark to stay there"

He cut in midsentence. The smell was strong now, solid as a wall of bricks. 

"Its movin into camp," I said. 

"Mustve come from all that garbage," Pearly said. "Mustve been born in all that heat and slime." 

"Or come up from the center of the earth," I said, though I figured Pearly was a mite near closer to right.

Pearly put some fresh loads in his revolver. "This is all I got," he said. 

"I want to see it eat buckshot," I said. 

Then we heard it. Very loud, crunchin down those mounds of garbage like they was peanut hulls. And then there was silence. 

Pearly, he moved back a few steps from the double-barrel toward the shack. I aimed the double-barrel toward the dark. 

Silence went on for a while. Why, you couldve heard yourself blink. But I wasnt blinkin. I was a-watchin out for that critter. 

Then I heard itbut it was behind me! I turned just in time to see a fuzzy-like tentacle slither out from behind the shack and grab old Pearly. He screamed, and the gun fell out of his hand. And from the shadows a head showed. A huge, wormlike head with slitted eyes and a mouth large enough to swallow a man. Which is what it did. Pearly didnt make that thing two gulps. Wasnt nothin left of him but a scrap of flesh hangin on the things teeth. 

I emptied a load of buckshot in it, slammed the gun open and loaded her again. By that time it was gone. I could hear it crashin off in the dark. 

I got the keys to the dozer and walked around back of the shack on tiptoe. It didnt come out of the dark after me. I cranked the dozer, turned on the spotlights, and went out there after it. 

It didnt take long to find it. It was movin across the dump like a snake, slitherin and a-loopin as fast as it could gowhich wasnt too fast right then. It had a lump in its belly, an undigested lump . . . Poor old Pearly! 

I ran it down, pinned it to the chain-link fence on the far side of the dump, and used my dozer blade to mash it up against it. I was just fixin to gun the motor and cut that suckers head off when I changed my mind. 

Its head was stickin up over the blade, those slitted eyes lookin at me. . . and there, buried in that wormlike face, was the face of a puppy. You get a lot of them here. Well, it was alive now. Head was still mashed in like it was the first time I saw it, but it was movin. The head was wrigglin right there in the center of that worms head. 

I took a chance and backed off from that thing. I dropped to the ground and didnt move. I flashed the lights over it. 

Pearly was seepin out of that thing. I dont know how else to describe it, but he seemed to be driftin out of that jelly-like hide; and when his face and body were halfway out of it, he stopped movin and just hung there. I realized somethin then. It was not only created by the garbage and the heatit lived off of it, and whatever became its food became a part of it. That puppy and old Pearly were now a part of it. 

Now dont misunderstand me. Pearly, he didnt know nothin about it. He was alive, in a fashion, he moved and squirmed, but like that puppy, he no longer thought. He was just a hair on that things body. Same as the lumber and wire and such that stuck out of it. 

And the beastwell, it wasnt too hard to tame. I named it Otto. It aint no trouble at all. Gettin so it dont come when I call, but thats on account of I aint had nothin to reward it with, until you showed up. Before that, I had to kind of help it root dead critters out of the heaps . . . Sit down! Ive got Pearlys thirty-two here, and if you move Ill plug you. 

Oh, here comes Otto now. 

When your calendar reads Thursday, January 09, run your tail back this way for another tale of Mojo madness, courtesy of champion Joe R. Lansdale! 

"The Dump" originally appeared in Rod Serlings Twilight Zone Magazine. It later appeared in Bestsellers Guaranteed, a collection published by Ace. "The Dump" © 1981 Joe R. Lansdale. All Rights Reserved. 

Ralph was dreaming of  Kathleen again. She was standing on the edge of the pool he was building for Jerry Meuse on Coldwater Canyon, looking into the water saying: "It's milk, Ralph!"

Ralph's partner, Vincent, surveyed the chaos of the study.

The bedroom was uninhabitable, so the next night he made up a bed for himself on the sofa. The aftershocks had continued through the day--the seismologists up at Cal Tech were predicting they'd go on for several weeks after a quake of that magnitude--but in the brightness and warmth of the day the tremors hadn't bothered him. Once darkness fell however, he began to feel jittery. Sleep did not come easily. Twice he woke from a light doze thinking he felt plaster dust on his face.

He called Kathleen from Vince's place, to tell her the news. She said that she was sorry, but then, they'd said that to each other countless times and not really meant it. Before the conversation ended, he asked if she was planning to come back out to California anytime soon. She told him no.

Without really thinking about what he was doing, he got up and started to walk. The thought of searching for Duffy was only a vague notion in the back of his head, but the further he got from his house, the more focused that ambition came. If he could just find his dog, it would be a sign that that life was not beyond reclamation. he would rebuild it with stronger foundations.