“Shhhh. Nothing. I’m just talking, that’s all. Just talking to you. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Ummm — ” Timothy said, and made other small sounds of protest in the back of his throat as Johnny Lee soothed them away with shushes and soft kisses.
Little fucking faggot, Johnny Lee kept thinking, and smiling to no one.
“Hang on,” Timothy said, pulling away.
“Am I going too fast for you?” Johnny Lee said, his voice a low sly murmur.
“No, I just — no. It’s not that.” Timothy smiled his slow shy smile and brushed his straight soft hair out of his eyes, the same gesture that drew Johnny Lee’s attention back at the bar. “I’ve got something for you.”
“I bet you do.”
“Ha!” Timothy turned and ran like a child on Christmas morning, and Johnny Lee followed him into the kitchen. Off in the distance, he could hear a train go by somewhere, hear cars pass and see headlights throw long ghost trails on the ceiling, the world going about its business and leaving them alone.
They were in the kitchen now, and Timothy opened the refrigerator and let cool air spill into the room. He rummaged for a moment and then triumphantly held up an amber bottle.
“It’s mead,” he said, in answer to unspoken question. “It’s like a honey wine. I made it myself. Want some?”
Johnny Lee let out one sharp breath as a laugh. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”
Timothy reached up into high cupboards for glasses as Johnny Lee pulled a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches out of his bag. He could feel the weight of the knife at the bottom of his bag, the sharpness of its edge untested but known as his fingers brushed past it. He folded the book of matches back, trapped a matchhead against the striking surface and pulled fast, pop and flare.
Timothy turned and his smile fled. “You can’t smoke that in here,” he said.
Johnny Lee had the flame almost to the cigarette in his mouth. He froze. “You’re kidding,” he said, but he shook the match out, a lanky, lazy gesture. “Will you be in trouble with your parents if I do?” he said, smiling. He slid the matches into his pocket.
“Huh? No. I mean, yeah, a little. I just don’t like it, is all.”
When I open this boy up, Johnny Lee thought, and he’s just steaming meat cooling down to nothing on sticky sheets, I’m going to have that cigarette and blow smoke right in his sightless face. But he just smiled and said, “No problem.”
Timothy brushed past, closer than he needed to, and he poured them two glasses. Johnny Lee took his, raised it in silent toast, and took a drink.
“Good?”
“Yeah,” Johnny Lee said, “yeah, it is,” and a few sips later, finished it.
Timothy finished his, and looked up at Johnny Lee and smiled shyly. “Do you want to see my room?” He sounded like a little kid who brought a friend home after school.
Johnny Lee smiled even wider. “I,” he said with mock gravity, “would love to see your room.” He could taste that cigarette already.
Timothy took him by the hand and led him to the stairs. “Watch that first step,” he said, and giggled. Johnny Lee was laughing with him and didn’t really even know why. He felt light-headed, almost giddy. He could feel his palm growing slick with sweat in Timothy’s hand.
“I feel — ” he said, only half-aware he was speaking out loud.
“You feel what?”
“Kind of strange,” he admitted. The air seemed thinner here, the walls closer together. He shifted his bag uncomfortably on his shoulder. Come on, he thought. Keep it together. You can’t get it going on if you don’t keep it together. Timothy’s hand closed tighter and tighter around his.
Johnny Lee lost his grip on his bag and it slid from his shoulder. He grabbed for it, missed, and it hit the step and rolled down, step by step, and he could hear it thumping and sliding, but never heard it hit bottom.
He turned, and the house was darker than he remembered, and he couldn’t see the foot of the stairs.
“My bag — ”
“I’ll get it later,” Timothy promised.
“I don’t — okay,” Johnny Lee said. He tried looking up past Timothy, into the dark. “I feel really strange,” he said again. “That drink — ”
“Just mead.”
“— Something in the drink.”
“No. It’s just this house.”
“The house?”
“We’re nearly there.”
The walls felt coffin-close, brushing his arms on either side. He reached out for something else to hold on to, found a banister railing, old and splintery and rattling loose against the wall. It was better than nothing.
“How much farther — ?”
“Nearly there.”
He kept following, not really remembering where they were going or why. He couldn’t keep a thought straight in his head. It was getting harder and harder to lift each foot high enough to reach the next step.
He looked back, tried again to see to the foot of the stairs, filled his head with vertigo. Felt lost and weightless and turned back to Timothy, no longer able to tell if they were headed upstairs or down.
“I gotta stop,” he said, and he sank sideways to the floor, sitting down as best he could between skintight walls. “What’s going on? Where are we?”
“I told you. It’s this house.”
“I don’t understand.” Johnny Lee leaned his head against the wall. It felt cool and clammy against his cheek.
“So what was in your bag?”
“What?”
“What did you have in your bag for me? A gun? A knife? What?”
“What?” Johnny Lee turned toward the voice in the dark. “Nothing, I didn’t — what do you mean?”
“Yeah, I thought so. It’s okay.” Timothy squeezed his hand. “I know the way you were looking at me. I read the papers. They’re looking for you, you know.”
“— The police?”
“What? No,” Timothy laughed. “No, not the police.” He squeezed Johnny Lee’s hand again and then let go.
“Where are you going — don’t leave. Don’t leave me here.” Johnny Lee tried to get to his feet and couldn’t.
“It’s all right. I’m not going anywhere.”
Johnny Lee heard him doing something.
Tapping. Just tapping his fingers on the walls.
“Come out,” Timothy said. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
“What are you doing?”
“Come out, Mr. Splitfoot,” Timothy said. “Come out, Razortouch and Hookwyrm.”
The air seemed to freeze around the shape of these words. Johnny Lee felt like he couldn’t draw another breath.
“Come, Skitterkin, come, Snaptooth. Come out, Bleeding Tommy.”
“What are you — who the fuck are you talking to?”
“Shhhh. Shh shh.” Timothy crouched down next to Johnny Lee and took a handful of his hair and pulled it back. “Shh. I have to call them all by name, in the right order, or it won’t work.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Johnny Lee said, struggling for breath.
“Well, I guess you’d know, wouldn’t you?” Timothy let him go and patted him on the head. Started up the tapping again, right next to Johnny Lee’s ear.
“Come, Shiverhands and Spiderfingers. Come out, Bone Preacher and Dire Bride. Come, Skinless Jack.”
He kept going. Johnny Lee wasn’t listening anymore. He was listening to something else —
Something shifting, coming loose, behind the walls. Something moving unseen. He could feel the world and sky below them, spinning on uncaring, while this house followed its own rules and things came unstuck.
He could hear sounds that he somehow suddenly knew, with perfect clarity, were rooms scraping and shifting into place like tumblers in a lock. The inside of the house opening up into somewhere else.
And he could hear other sounds in the walls. Wet, dragging sounds, and muffled whispers. A music box grinding tunelessly backward and fo
rward. Something rattling to get free like a moth trapped in a light fixture. Something dripping. Something hissing. All of it closer as Timothy kept tap tap tapping and whispering names.
Anyone else in Johnny Lee’s place might have gone just a little crazy. Not real, he thought fiercely. This isn’t happening. Somewhere in the back of his head he wondered how many of the dozen boys had thought that.
They weren’t alone. The darkness was like a solid thing now, everywhere close, his eyes filled thick with it, but he could feel the pressure and presences, crowding him even tighter against the walls.
Something giggled. Something else shushed it. Tiny furred and barbed hands reached out and brushed his face, his arms.
“Stop it,” Johnny Lee said, and his voice wouldn’t raise above a whisper. “Stop it. Get off me.”
“This the one?”
The voice was close, too close, and it was deep and relaxed, comfortable in its power.
“This is him,” Timothy said.
Johnny Lee was shaking. Shaking his head no.
“Let’s have a look at him, then,” the voice said.
Something came even closer, and Johnny Lee could see, now, that it was opening its mouth, something in its mouth glowing with murky green chemical light; closer now, and he could see that the glowing thing in its toothless mouth was a single huge bulging eye, its cracked lips peeling back like eyelids, its own eyelids stitched shut with heavy black cord over empty eye sockets.
The eye looked at him, deeper and deeper than he’d ever been seen before, and the cold light and vision burned into him like needles. He pressed himself whimpering as flat against the wall as he could, but he felt naked, turned inside out.
Another face appeared in the gloomy light, another face pressed in close and prying. This new face was lined and dry and ancient, lines pulled tight into a permanent scowl, bones tied here and there in a shock of white hair.
“He doesn’t look like much,” the new face said, and it was the strong lazy voice.
“It’s him, I’m telling you,” Timothy said again. “The papers say he’s killed nine people.”
“Hmmm. That true, boy? Don’t lie, now, or I’ll make you eat your own tongue.”
Every instinct, every impulse, told him to lie, say they had the wrong man, but — “Twelve,” he said. “Twelve people.”
The single huge eye closed, and everything was dark again.
“Hmmm,” the old voice said again. “Twelve, now. That’s not bad. That’s a respectable start.”
“What — ” Maybe the sheltering dark gave him comfort, maybe he was just too afraid not to be strong, but whatever the reason, Johnny Lee found his voice again. “What the fuck is going on? Who are you people?”
More giggling.
The old voice said, “He wants to know who we are, Timothy.”
“That’s fair,” Timothy said, “Isn’t it?”
Little hands were pulling at him. A small rough voice down near his waist said, “Matches. He has matches. I can smell them on him.”
“Do you, now? Well, then. Take a look at us, if you want. Timothy’s right. It is only fair.”
Don’t, his mind was screaming as his fingers fumbled for the match. Don’t look.
But with shaking hands, he tried to light a match, failed, then lit the next.
His eyes had only a moment to learn light again, and he stared wide as the match burned down to his fingers:
The ancient man wore a priest’s collar and held a leather-bound book tight to his chest, and bones hung like wind chimes from his neck and wrists and waist —
The headless girl in her torn white wedding dress, the skin beneath torn as well, and shifting faces peering out through ragged gaps, and the twitching way she moved just like a bird —
The impossibly tall and whip-thin boy, too many staring black eyes and spiderweb hair, his arms folded like a praying mantis and his too-many fingers constantly moving and moving —
Something that wouldn’t hold still. Something wet and raw and red. Something shining like a beetle. Other smaller things winding in and out between them like cats circling underfoot.
And then finally, the match went out.
“Well?” the Bone Preacher asked impatiently. “Do you know us?”
Johnny Lee opened his mouth and it didn’t work. He could feel his lips trace a “no” shape, but there was no breath behind it.
Another voice — a woman, or something like one — said, “You’re wasting our time, Timothy.”
One of the giggling, skittering things near his legs said, “He doesn’t know who we are.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Timothy said firmly. “Maybe he doesn’t know who he is, either.”
“I’m — ” Johnny Lee managed to get out. “My — my name is — ”
“Your name,” the Bone Preacher said, his breath hot in Johnny Lee’s face, “is Johnny Lee Edwards. You’re the bastard whelp of Molly Elaine Edwards and her husband’s best friend, Jack Williams.”
Johnny Lee’s eyes stared wide at nothing. “How do you know that?”
“It’s all right here,” the Bone Preacher said, solidly tapping his leather volume. “Right here in the good book.”
“— The Bible? What does that have to do with — ”
The book struck the side of his head so hard it was like daylight.
“Shut your mouth, boy, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Bone Preacher drawled, and Johnny Lee could barely hear him over the rush of blood in his head. “Have you ever even read the Bible? Every last tedious little thou shalt not and who begat whom? How can you sit there and call it a good book? My book has a name for everything and everyone. We know exactly who you are. We just don’t know what you are.”
“I know what you are,” Timothy whispered, his arm around Johnny Lee’s shoulder. “The papers say you’re a monster. An inhuman monster. That’s right, isn’t it?”
In the dark, the shuffling and skittering noises stopped as they waited for his answer.
“No, I don’t — I .... ” Johnny Lee stopped and really thought about it. “But — sometimes — ”
There had been so many things he had done and felt absolutely nothing. No sense of connection, of commonality.
“I know you are,” Timothy whispered. “I can tell. I have the Sight. That’s how I knew. How I knew how to let them in.”
“— Yeah,” Johnny Lee said. “Sometimes I think I am.”
“Well, now,” the Bone Preacher said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Snaptooth, if you would, please?”
Hands and talons pulled at Johnny Lee’s shirt and pulled it apart, stitches flying and buttons rattling to the floor like teeth. Johnny Lee cried out like a child and dropped the matches he hadn’t known he was still holding.
Something grabbed them, lit one, shook it out, and laughing delightedly, lit another. And another.
Johnny Lee saw it coming closer, like a series of snapshots —
Something all teeth, at all angles. Not a single recognizable feature, just jaw after jaw working and grinding and opening and closing. A snuffling sound, like a dog’s breath. Closer, and he could feel that breath like steam against his chest.
Then slowly, thoughtfully, it bit a piece out of his chest while Timothy and the monsters held his arms cruciform, and finally he screamed.
It chewed his skin carefully, blood spilling out between its exposed teeth. Johnny Lee’s breath came in short gasps.
“Oh, don’t whine so,” the woman’s voice said again, as the last match went out. “It was only a taste.”
“Well?” the Bone Preacher asked impatiently.
“Wait,” Snaptooth said in a dozen voices. It swallowed.
“Well?” the Bone Preacher asked.
“No monster,” the voices said. “Just meat.”
Across the tight space, the huge green eye snapped open again. But this time its light fell on Timothy.
The Bone Preacher reached Timoth
y in two great strides and picked him up by his shirtfront. “You’ve fucked up for the last time, boy.”
“I’m sorry! I was so sure this time!”
“You were sure last time, and the time before that, and the time before that — ” The Bone Preacher shook him like a rag doll. “When will you learn, boy? There are no monsters in your world. It’s not time for us yet. You are wasting our time.”
“There are! There are monsters!” Timothy said, crying. “I see them everywhere!”
“Then why can’t you bring us one? You were wrong about your father. You were wrong about your mother. The children who beat you at school were just children after all, weren’t they? Weren’t they?”
“I’m sorry! I said I’m sorry, please! Next time I’ll — ”
The Bone Preacher shook him again, and then dropped him to the floor.
“Next time? Next time?” He turned away, a disgusted look on his face. “Next time, you’d better be right.
“And as for you,” he said, turning back to Johnny Lee, “you’re nothing. Just another man hurting other men. Did you really think you were something special? There are millions of you. You’re no use to me at all.”
“Does that mean — you’re going to let me go?”
Everything laughed. Johnny Lee didn’t think the sound would ever stop.
“You’re really not one of us,” the Bone Preacher said. “Or you’d know. We never let anyone go.”
The Dire Bride’s arms opened wide as unseen arms pushed him forward. The faces under her skin spoke to him soothingly.
“It’s all right,” they told him. “It doesn’t hurt for long.” Her arms closed around him. “Not for long,” they whispered.
That would have been the last time Timothy ever saw Johnny Lee. It would have been, if this were a story. Things end neatly in stories. But this is the world; world without end, and he would see Johnny Lee at least once more.
Months had passed, and Timothy’s new boyfriend was sleeping fitfully upstairs. Things had already started to go wrong between them, one too many arguments and one too many cold nights spent angrily on opposite sides of the bed, and Timothy had started to suspect, started to look at him with doubt and with the Sight. Wondered if it was time to call them out again. This time. This time for sure.
Slices Page 17