They by J. F. Gonzalez Page A

of them admiring. The tattoos were Japanese in style, artfully rendered, the bottom designs black tribal, the flourishes a vast array of blending images that melted into one another. To Frank, the designs were reflections of who he was, his experiences, his moods. He had been getting tattooed since he was twenty-one, but had not gotten seriously into it until after he became sober. He found that he enjoyed the sting of the tattoo needle better than the syringe.
    In time, the tattooing filled that void left from his addiction.
    “Rose Tattoos does mine,” the bartender said. He turned his arms toward Frank, showing off a large portrait of a woman, an evil looking alien, and a mythical figure slumped against a tree. They were striking. “They just did a skull on the back of my left shoulder.”
    “Hurts like a bitch, don’t it?” Frank asked, grinning.
    “You bet!” The bartender said. “You ever had your back done?”
    “I’m having a back piece done now.”
    “Your whole back?”
    “My whole back.”
    “Wow!” The bartender raised his eyebrows in amazement.
    A young couple dressed in flannel shirts and blue jeans took a pair of seats at the opposite end of the bar. The bartender turned his attention to them and Frank took another sip of his coke.
    He’d started out the evening aimlessly, driving the Saturn around the city, letting his mind wander with whatever thoughts he might have and come home. But he found himself driving down the strip, and when he passed Larabee he thought about Harry’s. He pulled into the parking lot down the street and entered without a moment’s hesitation. And he’d been sitting at the bar drinking cokes and thinking ever since.
    He supposed the whole thing had started two years ago with the dreams.
    In the beginning they’d been mere haunting images that remained in his mind long after work. He used several of the images in short stories that he sold to magazines. But then they began getting worse. He began having dreams about normal looking people hanging out with him, treating him very friendly, almost as if he were family. And then just as he would begin to ease into the relationships they would change suddenly into hideous monsters. They would become beast-like, resembling various creatures; sometimes bearing the large bulbous eyes of a fly; other times the trunk and tusks of an elephant; other times the flat snout and tusks of a wild boar. Sometimes they would turn into combinations of all three, their various identities meshing together, merging from one to the other, then swimming back to human form, all the while voices rose in his mind, singing, droning voices intermingling with the harsh chants of what sounded like praying.
    He woke up screaming the first time the dreams became so vivid. Brandy had to wake him up before he realized he was screaming in his sleep, clawing the air in front of him. He’d collapsed in her arms, out of breath, his heart racing with fright. At first he thought it was an LSD flashback. It was much easier to blame such a horrifying nightmare on the indulgences of his youth.
    Without realizing he was doing it, he wrote a novel about the dream, using the images as a metaphor for the monsters that are inside some people. His agent sold it first trip out. It had been his first horror novel in seven years. It was called Those Inside .
    It became the best received of all of his works, with the exception of the first book of the science fiction trilogy that had come out the year before. Frank Black had carved a reputation for himself in the world of science fiction, and despite the two horror novels he had published during that time— Conversion , which was a vampire novel, and In the Cellar —he was still typecast as a science fiction author. Even when he got back into publishing again, his first sale was a science fiction novel. He’d always liked horror stories, but had never been inspired to write them. His science fiction stories were weird