“Oh fuck, no.” Hap is pulling his hair out, running to Otis’s side as the big man struggles to get up. He immediately falls over Hap, nearly driving both of them to the gravel. Otis straightens himself up, taking a hobbled step toward the Caddie. Hap slings his arm around Otis’s waist. The killer is so slick with blood that he nearly slips away from him.
“Couldn’ even get the totem, couldja? Gonna have to drive now, gonna have to thumb the holes.” Otis drools as he speaks. Hap half drags the limping goon into the backseat of the Caddie, and fuck it if he gets blood everywhere. Mrs. Lorice is screaming from inside the house. It sounds like she’s talking to somebody, probably the cops. She’s begging for help. Fuck.
Hap remembers Otis’s insult and runs below Tiff’s window. Tripping on the totem in the grass, he falls, hurting his own ribs. He grabs the ugly, damned thing and runs, wheezing, back to the car.
“Hospitals are where we die,” Otis gurgles. “Cemetery man’ll do um good.”
“Not Cidalia?” Hap would much rather bring him to the old woman, but she’s blind, shit.
“Hah, she no witch; he half a one at least.”
Otis spits repeatedly onto the floor of his backseat. Hap brings the Caddie’s engine to life, making thick tires grind away a sea of pebbles. Before them, the shirtless killer has curled into a bloody ball of torn, twitching flesh. Together boy and killer escape into the summer twilight, leaving both good and bad men dead and bleeding behind them.
Chapter 17: The Brain Fungus
The man lives in a church, tucked away into a backroom the size of a closet; the place is really only one large chamber full of pews and a pocket of confessional booths. One door behind the stage, as Hap likes to think of the podium and Jesus on a cross, leads to a janitor’s closet. The other goes to Mr. Hanson’s room. The double doors are wide open, and candles are scattered among the pews. Hap never would have guessed that Mr. Hanson was actually a priest, but there’s no way the guy is Catholic. Hap is surprised the freak doesn’t actually live underground.
During the fifteen-minute drive from Coventry to Scituate, the still-conscious Otis begins to tear up his own clothing to tie greasy rags to his wounds. The one along his chest and collar seems to be the worst; Otis mutters that the blade touched bone, but it’s the slashes along his neck that won’t stop bleeding.
“Otis…Otis has been stabbed, hey!” Hap smacks his hands against the door to Mr. Hanson’s room, hoping Otis was right about the man not being out back in his graveyard, dancing and piping all through the night for his mad rites.
“Otis has been stabbed before! He can hold on!” comes a reply before Mr. Hanson, clothed in sweat pants and sporting glasses, opens the door, scowls at Hap, and pushes past him. “Where is he, Mad Arab? Come on now; drag him out. I’ll pull some stitching thread from the curtains.”
Hap sprints down the aisle, realizing that Hanson hasn’t followed him outside to help carry Otis, who’s lost enough blood at this point to have a proper excuse for being crazy. With much cursing and growling from Otis, Hap gets him into the church, sweating so profusely that if it weren’t for the chill in the air making his perspiration run cold, he’d collapse from exhaustion. Mr. Hanson kneels down in the middle of the aisle; a messy clump of string, a stack of towels, tape, and a faintly gleaming needle in his hand. He’s thrown a black sheet up over Jesus on the cross. Maybe Mr. Hanson is a little bit Christian after all.
Otis starts slipping in and out of consciousness. “Can I turn the lights on? Are there lights?” Hap asks, staring at the bulbs along the ceiling. More shadows than illumination pour from the eerily flickering candles scattered around the room. One sliver of burning is behind Mr. Hanson, but no way he can even get a good look at Otis’s wounds. The priest jabs his needle in, sifting the curled-up thread through Otis’s skin as Hap’s opinion shifts to being thankful that the lighting is dim.
The process takes a good thirty minutes, as Mr. Hanson takes care of Otis’s chest and neck. Hap asks if anything else needs to be done, but all he gets back is, “Maybe bleeding inside, maybe not. I’m not a doctor. I’m an artist of faith.” Hanson grins at Hap as he says that. Hap wonders just how many visitors this lonesome graveyard church gets, especially with the bigger, better church in the center of town only two little blocks away. “I leave my stitching’s all over the wood. Floating in the reservoir and sucked into the dam. Little reminders of what’s waiting for all of us.”
“Between you and this guy….” Hap gestures to Otis, who’s blinking now but still seems to be out of it. “You talk like I’m supposed to actually understand what you’re saying.”
“You will wish you did. If only we could understand these forces, these living things right below, above and between. If you worship what you do not understand, you won’t be disappointed, let me tell you.”
Hap stares at the black sheet covering Jesus. The figure beneath that sheet could be anything. Masks conceal all.
Finally, Mr. Hanson mutters, “He’ll live,” and wipes his brow, trailing Otis’s blood across his face. “Now, we bring him into the earth. Help me carry him.” Otis’s wounds are bandaged, the knife wound having severed what looks to be the tattoo of some kind of eel or weird fish wrapping around his torso.
“Underground?” Hap’s not sure he heard correctly. “Can’t he rest up here? Or I could bring him home to—”
“It’s not about resting.” Mr. Hanson sneers with a face so squinted Hap feels like he’s being chewed out by an impatient professor because he didn’t do his homework. “It’s a rite. I will do my charms so nothing will spread to his mind. We will both shed our skin and dance and sing to the crawling—”
Hap stops Mr. Hanson’s babble before it can really begin by waving his hand at him. “Stop, stop it. How about you help me carry him to the car?” Hap doesn’t like how he sounds, as if he’s about to totally lose it.
“He wants it. I give it.” Mr. Hanson cradles Otis’s head, and the killer moans and mutters something about cats.
“I’m going to get him home…home to his cats, so he can sleep and hopefully, you know, not die,” Hap says, not wanting to imagine continuing on all alone without Otis.
“No right, not right.” Mr. Hanson giggles, letting Otis’s head fall to the floor. “Proud mockery of his father. His body will heal, but his mind will be taken. You don’t do this, you will have chaos instead of a knife by your side.”
“I’m not going into that pit out back. He’s in no condition to crawl down there,” Hap says.
“Don’t make my efforts here be a waste of thread.” From the tone of Mr. Hanson’s voice, he doesn’t seem to really care about Otis.
“We’re not going down there into the dirt.” Hap kneels by Otis’s side and swoons, feeling the weariness from a shitty night’s sleep and a long day’s delirium. “Come on, buddy, can you walk at all?” he asks Otis, concerned about accidentally tearing his stitches.
“Chaos then, I salute it.” Mr. Hanson kneels on the opposite side of Otis and whispers down to him, “Do you? Orphan?”
“Let tha’ pipes fuckin’ play. I see it in the field already, stealing the starlight to paint its door. Shack’s behind me. Thank ya.”
Whatever Otis is saying gets Mr. Hanson to grab his arm and nod to Hap, ready to toss him out of the church. Together, silent, they both carry Otis to the Caddie, and all the while, Hap can’t stop shivering.
“I’ll leave a memorial for you both, burning and floating in the reservoir. Something to remember you by.”
Mr. Hanson’s face is grim through the Caddie’s window. Hap again takes control of the car that’s twice as wide as anything he’s ever driven, and it’s no wonder Otis drove like a mad man.
Back at Otis’s home, Hap struggles to walk him inside. The wounded murderer mumbles something about “sleep” and “bed.” Two cats mull about their feet with affection and what Hap would
like to think of as concern. That’s when he remembers the woman in the bathroom.
“Did you find some hope? How high do your spirits soar?” Augustine taunts, giggling to herself.
Otis’s bedroom is a teenage boy’s den, complete with a water damaged The Empire Strikes Back poster against a wall. There’s a fat TV attached to what Hap recognizes as vintage Nintendo SNES that has a stack of games piled on top of it. There’s even a telescope, small and cheap, propped against the room’s one window.
“Did you look into the well? Did you make a wish and pray to your forgotten, sleeping gods?” Augustine screeches.
Hap leans Otis down onto his twin bed, over Spider Man sheets and pillowcases. He heads to the kitchen, gets him a coffee mug of water, and is relieved when Otis manages to guzzle down some of it.
“How about whiskey? Get whiskey. The bottle. Gotta clean, didn’ clean me.” Otis spits some of the water onto his floor as he pushes Hap toward the door. That’s right, infection—Hanson didn’t seem to do anything about it. Otis’s wounds are already dressed, fuck.
A voice flutters from the bathroom, calling softly, “Either one of you want to get sucked? Come on. Let me see you. Let me comfort you. I can be your whore. I can ease your broken hearts. You got me; you might as well use me. I won’t bite.”
Hap can’t imagine someone sick and dumb enough to give into her. They’d deserve to have their dick bitten off. What the hell are they going to do with her now? That totem, too. Otis hasn’t even looked at it.
Before getting the booze, Hap looks down at his hands and how sticky the blood trailing along his wrist is. He rushes to the sink, thankful, at least, that none of the red stuff is his. He then finds the sole bottle of booze easily enough. After that, it’s a struggle, shifting through the garage—hell, finding the garage’s light switch—before looking for duct tape. He walks past a big first aid box about a dozen times before realizing what it is. It’s mostly full of Band-Aids, but there’s antiseptic, gauze, and thick pads that’ll work with duct tape. Otis is probably too out of it to inspect the totem but screw him. Hap retrieves it from the Caddie’s back seat; maybe he can get some kind of answer on it before the night is through.
Hap notices his camera in the passenger seat and inspects it, only to discover that the lens cracked during his scramble along the roof. It still turns on, at least. He gently places the camera down and steadies himself by holding onto the steering wheel with one hand. He takes a deep breath before screaming out as much of his frustration as he can.
“It’s nothing to do with the Moon Shack,” Otis says of the totem, staring at the whiskey with longing; he’s too tired to get out of bed and take it from Hap, who stands just far enough away.
“But what is it?” Hap holds the totem up. Otis needs rest, but Hap’s answers come first.
“Totem, like ya say. We may have an invisible ally in the Miskatonic. Why he gives a soon-to-be-missing girl a totem be a mystery to join the rest.” Hap throws the damned thing on the floor, and he would never look at it again if he’s so lucky. The man, Woodbury, he was already waiting outside Tiff’s. The cult’s organized; they managed to figure out the likely places Hap would go. Woodbury broke in, killed Snack when he saw Hap at the front door. But why?
Otis is all too happy to spare the whiskey while Hap washes away the ugly, red-and-black stitched oozing gashes that have already started bleeding through Hanson’s bandages. The most he’s ever done for somebody is put a Band-Aid on his little sister’s foot. Now he’s playing nurse. When the blood is out of sight, Augustine starts wailing about how they should hear her singing voice, so Hap shuts the bedroom door. He hears the cork popping on the whiskey bottle behind him.
“Could blame ya, but I won. One less of ‘em. Two total, since me an you met. One for lova’, one for motha.’ Have a drink; we’re livin’; workin’, inchin’ along, yeah?” Otis takes a swig, and Hap remembers the last time he drank right from a bottle. He feels nauseous from the memory alone. One of the cats begins mewing at the bedroom door.
“Little fella don’ need to see this. You, me, drink,” Otis says before Hap can let the beast in.
“I’m not a drinker. I’ll puke on your rug,” Hap tells him. Otis is a trooper. How many holes were slashed into him?
“Ya can only drink and upchuck so many times ‘fore you’re a pro…trust me.” So Hap rips a shot and nearly pukes. Otis follows except he swishes around that burning shot like mouthwash. “Good enough,” Otis says, propping the whiskey on a stand by his bed, closing his eyes. “Let light go. Morning, we start over.”
Hap hopes that doesn’t mean they have another day like this, but what else could there even be? What more must they do to bring Tiff closer?
Augustine is singing something nonsensical in a whiney, high-pitched voice. “Something else. Something else,” she keeps repeating in her lyrics, reminding Hap of the sexless monster Otis babbled about, The Else that lives in the Shack. The cats linger by the bathroom door as if intrigued by the song.
Hap manages to find a few old clothes that sort of fit him in Otis’s dresser beneath the TV. The weirdly orange T-shirt is too small, and the jeans are too long, but they’re both clean. When Hap lies on the couch, and the cats curl across his chest, he finds sleep anyway amongst the melody of their purring. The sounds of Jerry’s skewered, crying body resurface, and Hap’s tears mesh with soft, feline fur.
***
Hap awakens with a throb from his bruised head. One of Otis’s cats is on his chest, and the morning is freshly born, fading from the dark blue of night into sunrise. The thing in the bathroom is silent. Otis needs sleep and rest; he lost too much blood the night before. They are going to need food. Hap’s stomach is so tight it hurts. He’ll have to go back to Cidalia’s.
Hap heads outside and stops when he’s behind the wheel of the Caddie once more. The interior is like the bloody socket of a recently pulled tooth. Passing through town in this would be stupid, and Mrs. Lorice probably called the cops if they didn’t kill her. There’s a chance Hap is wanted now. She never saw Otis. Her husband is dead, along with a half-naked stranger outside, and her dog has been butchered and half eaten, while the boy who used to date her daughter who mysteriously disappeared is now missing himself. Yes, even if the Moon Shack’s corruption extends beyond the point of reason, there is once again a good chance he is wanted by sane and insane cops alike.
He uses some rags from the garage to wipe down the interior of the Caddie, taking Otis’s Boston Red Sox hat off the dash and placing it snugly upon his own head. It smells like aged sweat, but it’ll do.
Driving through Scituate, Hap decides against going to see Cidalia. How much food could she make anyhow? Woodbury was watching Tiff’s house because they knew about Hap. It seems like a massive leap, but maybe they figured he would run somewhere that would welcome him. Otis still isn’t a suspect, but Hap, remembering what Jerry’s hospitality got him, drives until he comes to the convenience store at a big Cumberland Farms gas station. He’s about to use his credit card his mom pays the bills for to buy a heap of sandwiches before he realizes it could be traced. There are probably cameras outside, too, making sure nobody messes with the gas pumps. He has about eighty bucks in tip money he neglected to put into his bank account. What the hell is he going to do?
Hap scans a stack of newspapers by a bathroom but finds nothing mentioning the previous night’s killings. Nobody’s going to start noticing an Indian boy just yet. It occurs to Hap that this doesn’t bode well for Mrs. Lorice’s vitality. He returns to Otis’s shack. As he walks through the front door, he hears Augustine singing while Otis is moaning in pain.
Hap creeps into Otis’s room, where he’s mumbling rhythmically in his sleep, repeating the same syllables of every incomprehensible word Augustine chants from the bathroom. It’s as if Augustine really is some kind of witch, but that can’t be. He can’t start playing with super
stitious ideas—not now, not when he’s all alone.
Hap tries unsuccessfully to rouse Otis. His forehead is covered in rain droplets of sweat. His bandages have oozed through. Could it be tetanus? Woodbury’s knife could have been rusty, or Mr. Hanson’s needle could have been covered in all manner of graveyard muck. Fuck. Hap runs into the kitchen and gets a glass of water. He feebly tries splashing it around Otis’s lips, pouring some of it on his forehead, but there’s no response.
Infection. Otis needs to be in a hospital. His surely unwashed bed probably got him sick. Hospitals won’t work, right? Rhode Island General is less than half a mile away from the Miskatonic. No, no, people overcome infection without doctors, right? Antibiotics, fuck. Hap needs to go out again. He remembers a CVS next to a soccer field across from that Cindy’s Diner of alluring neon.
Making the trip through Scituate once more, Hap is wary of cameras as he walks to the pharmacy at the back of the store. When he asks for antibiotics, the pretty woman behind the counter, who’s probably right out of grad school, gives him a frown. She then explains what somebody should’ve mentioned to Hap at some point in his sixteen years of schooling. If he wants antibiotics, he’ll need a fucking doctor’s prescription. He asks, “Is there anything like antibiotics? My friend doesn’t have healthcare.” He uses the worst lie he could ever think of, and the pharmacist tells him to fuck off in the nicest way possible. She talks to him like he isn’t the sort of person to engage in kidnappings and befriend a lunatic who has since saved his life twice. That’s what Otis has done, crazy or not. He’s saved Hap’s goddamned life, and now, Hap is too stupid to figure out something that’ll return the favor.
There’s got to be some method, some modern trick to help Otis. There is that library right next to the graveyard and Mr. Hanson’s house and church. Even in college, Hap avoided the library at all costs, but when your phone’s busted and there’s nobody around to lend you their laptop….
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