For once, I was grateful for Ed’s Felix Unger tendencies. In my own garage, I usually had to dig around for ten minutes to find the tools I needed, but Ed kept everything neatly organized. I had no problem picking out an ax, a crowbar and a hammer. I didn’t know exactly what I would need, but I wanted to be prepared, and I quickly carried all three back out.
She was coming.
She was already walking around the side of the garage. This close, her face not in shadow but illuminated by the full glow of the porchlight, I could see those enormous hairy eyebrows over her still-sleepy eyes, those strange protruding lumps on her skin. She hadn’t been smiling before, but she was smiling now with those stained rectangular teeth, a loose casual grin akin to the amiable nonchalance of her walk, and it was all I could do to force myself to drop the crowbar and hammer and grip the ax with both hands.
I’m not a hardass. I’ve never been in the military, and I’d certainly never killed anyone before. But I felt no qualms as I lifted the ax and swung it at that impossibly deformed head. She—it—saw me but made no effort to stop or run or move out of the way, and I hate to admit it but I felt a sort of grim satisfaction as the blade chopped through cheek and nose and embedded itself in skull. This is for Ed, I thought. This is for Judy.
I’d been half-afraid that she would keep walking, that nothing would be able to stop her, but she crumpled on the spot, nearly pulling me down with her until, at the last second, the ax blade was freed from her skull with a sickening squeak of bone. There was no blood, no slime, no liquid of any kind that spilled from the gaping wound, and I waited there for a moment but she didn’t move.
Now 1 was in a hard spot. In movies, this was where the hero walks away while, behind his back, the supposedly dead monster gets up and comes back to life. I didn’t want to make that mistake, but 1 didn’t have the stomach for chopping her up.
What were my choices, though? I could reach down and see if 1 could feel a pulse or a breath to see if she was still alive—but maybe she’d never had a pulse, maybe she’d never been alive, and maybe that was when she would suddenly grab my hand and pull me on top of her.
I stood there for a moment, then stepped back and gathered up my courage and prodded her with the blunt edge of the ax blade. No movement, no reaction. Still, I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t spring up and attack, and though the fire was gone from my belly and I no longer had any desire for violence, I picked up the ax and chopped off her head. It wasn’t just one whack, like you see in the movies. My first swing went halfway through, exposing corded muscle and a segment of white spine. No blood still, but at least the interior of the neck looked the way it was supposed to. I pulled the ax out and up, did it again, and this time it went nearly all the way through. There was only a little bit of flattened skin at the bottom that was connecting the head to the body, but one more chop took care of that, and I used the ax to push the head away.
I picked up the crowbar and the hammer. It was time to put an end to all this.
I hurried next door. On the other side of the professor’s house, I saw darkness moving over the roof and walls of Tony and Helen’s place. It looked at first like it was being engulfed by some sort of monstrous shadow, but when I got closer I saw that it was a tidal wave of black bugs that were swarming over their home. Whatever it was, I was certain that it was connected to the shrine, and the sight of it spurred me onward, made me run faster. Or as fast as I could while carrying the tools. This time, I didn’t care if I bumped into objects on the way, and I dashed through the side yard, not slowing down when I reached the back. I slammed into a unseen tree stump, nearly tripped over a hose and a rake, but I stumbled and stabilized and kept going.
Lights in the professor’s house were on, I noticed. I thought of that transparent woman strolling through those filthy rooms, and the image of it chilled me to the bone. For the first time that evening, I saw this as though it was happening to someone else. I was in a fucking horror movie. I’d just been lurching from one thing to another since the Pittman kid (what the hell was his name?) first ran up to me on the street, but now I realized how much had happened, the extent of the power I was up against. I pushed the thought away, not wanting to be intimidated by what I was about to face.
I reached the shrine.
It looked even spookier to me than before, but I didn’t give myself time to think about it. I dropped the ax, shifted the hammer to my left hand and swung the crowbar with my right. The adobe was already old and crumbling, and my blow chipped off a large piece at the top. There was a shape carved into that rounded section of the shrine, a strange-looking spiral, and the second that it was cut in half by my crowbar, I thought I felt and heard a deep rumble, almost like a sonic boom, but maybe it was just my imagination.
That was it, though.
I guess I’d expected some sort of… defense. I thought the shrine or whatever sentient power lurked within the black space of that deep alcove might make an effort to protect itself. But nothing tried to stop me as I went at it with both hands, crowbar in the right, hammer in the left. I felt like John Henry or something, a superhuman man, and the shrine broke into pieces before my furious onslaught, chipping away bit by bit until only the alcove itself was left standing. I kicked away the photos and the fingernails and the petition and tried to tear apart the rounded alcove, but that thing was tough. It was not adobe like the rest of the shrine, but it was not metal or wood or cement, either. I couldn’t tell what it was made of. All I knew was that my blows were having little or no effect on it, and 1 was feeling increasingly uneasy standing in front of that black open space.
I dropped the hammer and moved around behind the alcove, stepping over the rotted boards of the collapsed playhouse and balancing on a cobweb-covered log that had rolled off the woodpile some time ago. The alcove was black in back, too, only there were symbols written on it. Symbols and what looked like words in a foreign alphabet. They were almost as dark as the dome-like structure itself, and 1 probably wouldn’t have noticed them if they hadn’t reflected the moonlight. I wondered if they were written in blood.
I remembered what had happened when I broke off that symbol at the top of the shrine, and whether that sonic boom was in my imagination or not, I had no other ideas or plans, and 1 used the crowbar to start chipping away at the squiggly characters. This worked better. The metal crowbar smashed into and smudged a strange triangle-looking symbol, and all of a sudden a crack appeared in the top of the alcove. I hit one of those foreign words, and a piece of its backing flaked off, spiraling to the ground. I smelled shit and rotten eggs, and I thought that this was the alcove’s defense mechanism. Like a skunk, it was trying to chase me away with foul odors, and that made me work even harder. I started wailing on that sucker, and was rewarded with almost immediate results. With each letter or symbol that splintered off or was scraped away, the alcove seemed to weaken and buckle until finally it collapsed in on itself with a noise that sounded more like the scream of a woman than the crack-clunk-thump of shattered stone hitting the ground.
1 leaped out of the way, the log rolling beneath my feet, and stumbled through the rotten wood of the playhouse until I was once again in front of the structure. Or what used to be the structure. There was nothing left but what looked like a pile of jagged black rocks. In the rubble, I saw what appeared to be a burnt Barbie on top of a wiggly slice of cheesecake. I don’t know if it was alive, but it was moving, twisting around in slow motion like it was doing tai chi, making a sound like a rusty hinge. I couldn’t see any eyes, couldn’t see any facial features, but 1 could tell that it was looking up at me, and that gave me the eeriest feeling I’d ever had. I shivered. The doll smiled at me, and in the moonlight I saw one bright white tooth.
I batted that fucker to Kingdom Come. The crowbar hit its midsection, and it flew apart, body cracking in half, legs breaking against black stone rubble, arms shattering into pieces, split head flying off into the dark. The cheesecake beneath it splattered everywhichway
, and left in the center, on a small piece of crust, was a nasty black beetle with furiously snapping pincers. I smashed it with the crowbar, then smeared its guts around to make sure it was gone for good.
I looked down at my feet. The photos and fingernails had scattered, but the petition, oddly enough, had been blown back onto the little flat slab of adobe that used to stick out in front of the alcove and was now the only thing left standing. I raised my crowbar high and brought it down on that small slab, grateful to see it shatter.
The shrine was gone.
“Take that,” I said.
I was out of breath and breathing like a mother, but I backtracked up the path and walked up the steps into the house, just to make sure it was all over. I wasn’t afraid anymore, in fact I half-expected to find the transparent woman dead and dissolved, but she was in that first filthy bedroom and very much alive, and she attacked me the instant I stepped through the doorway. She was wearing the bloody nightgown that had been thrown over the chair, and she jumped me, knocking me to the ground. The light was on, so 1 could see her clearly, and she wasn’t wielding any type of weapon, so I instinctively let go of the crowbar and reached up to grab her wrist.
Big mistake.
She was off me and rolling, surprisingly fast for someone so large. She grabbed the crowbar off the floor and ran with it to the bed, moving expertly around all the books and newspapers and magazines on the stained carpet. She turned around and swung, the crowbar whistling as it cut through the air, and I could see that she was crying. Her tears were invisible on that transparent skin, but the redness of her eyes and the quivering of her lips gave it away.
“Which one are you?” she demanded.
I shook my head.
“Which one are you?”
“I’m Gil Marotta,” 1 said.
She backed around the bed until she was in the corner, sobbing, feebly swinging the crowbar, holding it in both hands. I could have rushed her and taken it from her. I could have killed her. But I decided to leave her alone and call the cops when I got home.
I turned to go, and a book hit me in the back of the head. A big book. It knocked me forward, stunned me, and another one followed immediately after, this one hitting at an angle and drawing blood. I whirled around, arms up to protect myself, ready to fend off another book or even a full-frontal assault if I had to, but she wasn’t throwing books at me anymore and she wasn’t rushing me with the crowbar. Instead, she’d fallen forward onto the bed, the crowbar on the mattress next to her but no longer in her hands. I ran forward, grabbed it, backed away.
She lay there unmoving.
Was she dead? I didn’t know. I didn’t think so, but I was not about to check.
I kept backing up, moving slowly so I didn’t trip over any of the crap she’d left on the floor of that pigsty.
Power had a cost, and while I would never know for sure, I was willing to bet that was what had happened to her, that was why she had become transparent. Whether she provided the shrine with its power and was drained of it herself, or whether she had worshiped at that black empty space and a sacrifice had been demanded of her, the two were connected.
She moaned, lifted her head, looked at me.
1 left the room, walked onto the porch, walked down the steps. It was over, it was finished. I’d call the cops from home, I decided, let them take care of her.
1 felt exhausted, as though my body had been put through a wringer, but 1 thought about Lynn and Frank and smiled to myself. At least they were safe, at least they were all right.
I trudged across the circle to my house.
And my family.
PYRE
by Christopher Golden
1
On the morning Samantha Finnin’s father was buried, she had no tears to cry. Though she would never have admitted it, especially to her mother, Samantha had not wept for her father at all. She felt as though she ought to, but there was a pain in her chest, a kind of cotton thickness in her throat, that seemed to prevent it. Her eyes burned, but she figured that was lack of sleep rather than grief. Somewhere, buried down inside her, she knew there must be sorrow, even despair, but in the days since the early morning call from her mother that announced her father’s death, she had felt only anger and bitterness and resentment.
The limo rolled down Concord Street at the sluggish pace that was traditional for funeral processions. Samantha did not turn around, but she knew that if she had she would have seen that all the cars had their headlights on. The world seemed to have slowed down around them, this somber parade of mourners gathered to remember a man they all had loved in spite of himself.
It was the first week of May and the morning had brought crisp, crystal blue skies and a soft breeze that rustled the leaves on the trees with that sort of hush that whispered the secrets of angels. The air was redolent with the scent of blossoming flowers and the rich earth odors of fresh-cut grass. But in the limousine Samantha felt like a prisoner, deprived of all that. The tinted windows cast a pall upon the sky when she gazed out from within, and the atmosphere inside that vehicle was laden with the trace smells of the cologne and perfume and hairspray of mourners who had ridden in it before them. - Or maybe that’s just Mom and David.
Samantha frowned and glanced over at the others riding in the limousine with her. Her mother, Tricia, had divorced her father more than a decade before. As far as Samantha was concerned, it was the best thing that had ever happened to the woman. Mom had found herself then, and five years later had met David Rusticio, who owned his own construction company north of Boston. Though ten years older than Tricia’s fifty-one, David was in many ways not quite as “old” as his wife. Samantha got along with her stepfather fairly well, but she had been in college by the time her mother married him, and so the truth was they did not know one another that well. She certainly had never considered him her father. Some might have suggested that was because her biological father had still been alive, but that wasn’t it. Carl Finnin had never been much of a father to her either.
And now he was dead.
Samantha tried to hold her breath for a while, but eventually she surrendered and reached out to hit the button that operated the window. It retracted into the door with an electric whine and the spring breeze rushed into the back seat, whipping her long white-blond hair around her head and across her face.
“Samantha!” her mother said quickly. “Please, honey, close that.”
With a frown, Samantha gazed back at her. “1 need some fresh air, Mom.”
Tricia reached both hands up to her tightly coiffed hair, done very early that morning at Salon Trebbiano in Andover. Peter Trebbiano had gone in at seven a.m. to prepare her for her ex-husband’s funeral mass. He had been doing Tricia’s hair for as long as Samantha could remember.
“Samantha,” her mother said sternly. There was a look on the woman’s face that made her feel ten years old again. “I know how hard this must be for you, honey, but let’s try to keep our composure for a little longer.”
She spoke so sweetly Samantha did not have the heart to utter any of the responses that came into her head. Not the one that included an indictment involving her mother’s concern being more about her hair than about composure, nor the simple query as to why they ought to keep their composure in the first place. Her father was dead. Was anyone going to care if she lost it, went absolutely bugfuck out of her mind, dropped down on her knees screaming to God for an explanation, or better yet an apology?
Not that she would, mind you. Hell, she couldn’t even cry.
It hurt, that part. More than anything else, in fact. Samantha knew she ought to cry and the truth of it was, deny it as she might, she wanted to cry. She simply could not summon the moisture to her eyes. Partially, she thought, because she had not been with her father when he died. Yes, she had visited him in the hospital during his chemotherapy and yes, she had seen the husk of him, the hollow shell of him, at the wake just last night, but the two things seemed somehow unrelat
ed without her having witnessed the moment in between when her father—smiling, flirtatious, self-deprecating Carl Finnin—had become a corpse.
It was partially that which kept her from crying.
But, far more than that, it was that her father had been capable of being an utter and complete asshole, an immature son of a bitch with no apparent recognition of the ways in which his behavior had wounded and scarred his only daughter.
“Sam,” her stepfather said kindly, cautiously, as the limo rolled painfully slow through the streets of Boxford.
“Samantha, what is wrong with you?” her mother snapped, ignoring David as though unaware of him.
With her eyes closed, Samantha let the breeze wash over her face, whipping her hair back. She breathed deeply of the spring air and felt the warmth of the sun on her face. When she let her eyes flicker open, she saw the gates of Ashgrove Cemetery ahead. Reluctantly, she turned from the open window and sat back against the leather upholstery.
“I’m twenty-three years old, Mom,” Samantha said without even looking at Tricia. “Please don’t talk to me like I’m a child. Not today.”
At length she turned to find her mother staring at her. She was still a beautiful woman and in some way that made the dampness of her eyes that much worse. They were rimmed with moisture and shot through with red; even after all the shit he had put her through and the years that had passed, she had still loved her ex-husband. The breeze through the open window ruffled her hair.
Samantha reached out and clasped her mother’s hand in her own, even as the limousine came to a halt behind the hearse that held her father’s coffin and a dozen or more extravagant floral arrangements.
“You were always the strong one,” Tricia said, lips pressed together.
It wasn’t strength, of course, but how could Samantha explain it to her mother? Even after all that Carl Finnin had done to her—the philandering, the boozing, the financial mess that had cost her their house—she could still cry for him.
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