by Ed Kurtz
“What do you need me to do?”
Gwynplaine sneered wickedly.
“Butcher it.”
***
Amanda blew hard through her nostrils, ejecting thick ropes of mucus onto the floor in front of her. It was no good; she could hardly breathe at all. Knowing it would infuriate Walt when he saw it, she reached up and tore the tape from her mouth anyway. Her skin prickled and stung.
If there was anything to keep her from snapping completely, it was the knowledge that Margaret never woke up. Amanda waited for a bone chilling shriek of agony, but it never came. She heard the wet, crunching noises of a body being ripped apart, just below her at the bottom of the attic stairs. Walt would murmur (oh God oh Jesus) and that unnatural monster would cruelly respond (yes oh yesss give me a taste Walt put it to my lips the meat). All the while, whack after sickening whack, Margaret came apart and Walt fed her to the creature, piece by piece.
Amanda had nothing apart from sheer willpower to prevent herself from vomiting. Instead she cried. It was something real, it was necessary and natural, and she could focus completely on that and nothing else.
Still the nauseating thump of some cutting implement meeting flesh and bone, splitting it and separating it from the whole, went on. Still the monster moaned in ecstasy while Walt whined and muttered. He was in a sort of agony, but Amanda could not reconcile that with the cruel, heartless Walt who stole Margaret’s blood all those weeks and kept them both captive in the attic. Nor could she reconcile the Walt who lived in the cottage on the outskirts of town with the man she had dated for the preceding three years. That Walt was a gentle man who never raised his voice or grew especially angry, much less resorted to any sort of violence. He was eccentric, to be sure, but in an endearing, and even sexy, way. The quiet, introspective bookworm whose mind was apt to wander over any number of esoteric literary subjects, regardless if he was talking to her or just idly rambling. The man she loved more than anybody else in her history.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
“Oh my God,” she heard him moan.
Somehow, she couldn’t make herself believe that this was entirely his fault. It was that thing, that monster growing in the attic, through paneling and past the hallway ceiling below. The thing Walt had started called Gwynplaine, whatever that meant. Its name, she supposed. As if it deserved one.
She was not exactly inclined to believe in anything like mind control, despite the desperate fears she’d expressed to Nora. But then Nora was wrong, it wasn’t worms at all. It really was a monster. And if Amanda could believe in monsters, then the door stood wide open. Maybe it was a ghost returning from the Great Beyond, or an alien life form from millions of light-years away. Maybe it was a demon from Hell.
But then, Amanda didn’t believe in hell. Not even now.
She couldn’t afford to.
Thump. Thump.
Something went splat. Walt groaned plaintively. He sounded as though he might be crying. Which was met with throaty laughter from the monster. From Gwynplaine.
“Give it to me!” came the gravely, androgynous voice.
Amanda shuddered.
This was it. Margaret was dead; there was no question about it. Now she had only herself to consider.
She had to find a way out.
***
The rug Walt laid down in the hall did little to prevent the spatter he’d hoped to control. Blood coated the walls, dripping down in thick crimson rivulets from the broad splotches that spotted the hallway. He, too, was covered in gore; he now wished he’d had a smock and some goggles before he began the impossibly repugnant work of dismembering a living human being. His shoulders ached from the strain of chopping with the cleaver. It was made for splitting bones, though certainly not of the human variety. Nevertheless, it did the job. Margaret was reduced to shiny red slabs of meat, all but the organs, hands, feet and head. Her abominable, still staring head.
Walt reached over, suppressing a gag, and pressed her eyelids shut with the tips of his fingers. Something warm splattered against the back of his neck and he flinched, drawing back and looking up.
It was only Gwynplaine. A very messy eater, that thing. Like a fussy baby. It was drooling blood all over the place as it rent Margaret’s raw flesh apart with its teeth.
Walt scooted backward, crab-like, toward the kitchen.
Gwynplaine growled, its mouth full of dripping, blood-raw meat.
“Thtay,” it said. Stay.
Walt’s face screwed up into a horrified sort of pout. He could barely stand looking at it anymore, at least for the time being. It held the huge slab with both hands and sucked the warm fluid from it. This was the sizeable chunk Walt carved from Margaret’s left thigh. Gwynplaine had already eaten the right one.
“I can’t,” he complained.
“Not…done…yet,” it said between slurps and nibbles.
He slid up the wall, not trusting his knees to support him on the way to standing. Almost involuntarily, he looked at the repulsive mound of butchered human flesh on the area rug beneath him. He immediately squeezed his eyes shut and muttered, “Oh, God.”
“No God.” Gwynplaine said. “Only meat. Now. I must grow.”
Walt turned his head away. Away from the grisly sight of what he had done, away from the smell of human gore in his nose and the taste in his mouth. He retched, unable to hold it back any longer. He sprinted through the kitchen toward the double sink. He made it, but barely.
Gwynplaine laughed uproariously while Walt vomited.
The chilling laughter, however, was abruptly cut short by the loud bang in the attic, like something very heavy had been dropped from a great height. A bowling ball or a barbell. Neither of which Walt owned.
It was Amanda.
Spitting a mouthful of chunky saliva into the sink, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and made his way back to the attic stairs.
24
Holding the shackle steady with one hand, Amanda pried at the clevis in the pin with the other. The tips of her fingers turned white as she dug them into the bent piece of metal, but it was to no avail. It didn’t budge. Still she kept at it, digging at it in what she knew was a futile attempt to free herself. Her forefinger slipped, but she held tight. This turned out to be a poor choice—her fingernail caught the end of the clevis when the finger continued to slide, ripping half of the nail off completely.
She yelped as her cuticle welled with blood. It hurt like hell, a hot and stinging pain, but she wasn’t about to give up. She popped the bleeding finger into her mouth and sucked at it while maneuvering her ankle around in the shackle. There just wasn’t any way out of it.
Keeping the seeping finger in her mouth, she struggled upward to a standing position. Her knees almost buckled and her head felt light. She gave the steel cord a yank, pulled it taut. A few tiny splinters broke away from the support beam where it chafed.
She gave another, harder yank. And then another. More splinters came off. She could still hear Walt crying and arguing with the creature, but she did her best to ignore it. Instead she focused her attention on the beam. One more yank, good and hard, and then she’d try scraping the cord back and forth to whittle the wood away. She hoped the roof didn’t cave in if she was successful. At least, not on top of her.
Amanda took two steps closer to the beam to provide a length of slack. Then she kicked her leg away from it.
She heard the snap first; a crack, like a stalk of celery pulled apart. Then she felt the burning agony in her ankle. She went down, crashed against the beams and landed face first in pink insulation. Something off to her left smashed against the paneling. Something tall and black. A candlestick, maybe. She let out a pained whine.
When she bent at the waist and craned her neck, she could see what became of the ankle. The foot was perpendicular with the leg, jutting out to the right at a ninety-degree angle. The bones had snapped right in half, fibula and tibia both.
She tried to scream, but nothing came out.
And then came the pounding footsteps below.
Walt was coming to investigate.
***
He swept up the cleaver on his way, failing to register how sticky the handle was. Everything was sticky that way now. Margaret’s blood was everywhere. So much of it, it would never come out. Walt would have to burn the house to the ground to get rid of that much blood.
Skidding over a broad slick on the hardwood floor, he regained his traction on the area rug, leaping over a glistening mound of human meat. He rounded the drop-down steps to their front and scrambled up. Above and behind him, Gwynplaine hissed and tittered.
Popping up through the attic door like a prairie dog, he narrowed his eyes. He scanned the gray shadows, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, looking for Amanda. His heart thudded in his chest. He climbed all the way up and crouched, ready for anything, the bloody cleaver gleaming in his hand.
He saw her, finally, sprawled out over the beams. She was surrounded by a cushion of fiberglass insulation., her face twisted miserably. Walt paced cautiously closer.
Baring his teeth he hissed when he saw the ankle, twisted so badly it had to be broken. Already it was turning dark purple at the joint. Her foot was bent at an impossible angle.
“Shit,” he said.
“Help me,” Amanda whispered.
“What did you do?”
“It hurts!”
“Jesus, Amanda…”
She braced herself with her palms and hoisted her torso up so that she could look at Walt.
“Help me, goddamnit!”
He hemmed and hawed, made an O with his mouth, and then scurried to her side.
“What can I do?”
“Get the shackle off!”
Walt frowned.
“I can’t do that, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. She could not believe that.
“Why the hell not? Just take it off!”
“You’ll run away.”
“On this?” She jabbed a finger toward her mangled ankle.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded. It couldn’t be denied—she wasn’t going to run anywhere.
“Hold on,” he said, displaying his palms. “I’ve got to get some pliers.”
“Hurry!”
“I will! I’ll be right back.”
She moaned in pain and let herself sink back down to the floor. Walt danced over the beams and insulated panels toward the door in the floor. He disappeared in seconds. Amanda groaned, squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. White sparks flickered in front of her face for a minute, and then gradually dissolved. When her vision was clear again, she found herself staring at a curious object, something she could not have even wished for in her wildest fantasy.
A wooden-handled meat cleaver, covered in blood, sat inches from her face.
25
The pliers had to be somewhere, only Walt was not sure exactly where that might be. Despite the fact that he’d moved into the house months ago, he never got around to unpacking everything. Just the essentials. Loads of knick-knacks, the unnecessary flotsam and jetsam accumulated over the course of a man’s life, remained stored in taped cardboard boxes. Many of these boxes were still stacked in the dining room, whereas others had been shoved into closets. Any one of them could contain his pliers. There was no telling which.
He found himself standing with knees bent and arms akimbo, whipping his head left and right, wondering where to begin looking. Tool kit, tool kit…where’s the tool kit? He had his hammer, the selfsame hammer with which he pummeled Gwynplaine and locked the clevis in place on Amanda’s shackle. That must have come from the tool kit. So where was the rest?
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to picture the kit in his mind. He remembered where the hammer fit into it, right on top, but he had no recollection of unpacking it. Perhaps the hammer had already been unpacked. Perhaps it had never been in the red toolbox at all.
“Waaaalt,” Gwynplaine called from the hallway, all sing-songy and creepily seductive. “I’m…not…done.”
“Just a minute,” he called back. “I’ve got to think.”
Needle-nose pliers, with red rubber handles. Walt knew he had them.
But where?
Why couldn’t he remember?
Pinching the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb, he strained to place it, certain that he must have taken it out, used it. All those repairs. The baseboards and the roof, and…
The roof.
The attic.
“Fuck,” Walt said.
***
It was the quickest of motions. Her arm shot out, her fingers curled around the wood handle. It was tacky with blood. She then retracted the arm, sliding the cleaver beneath her, between her breasts.
And she waited.
***
Walt sped back through the kitchen and into the hallway. He leapt over Margaret’s grisly remains and landed on the attic stairs’ penultimate step. Gwynplaine gnarled.
“Leave her!”
Walt ignored the creature. Of course it would want him to let Amanda suffer. Suffering was all it knew. It thrived on the agony of others, Walt’s included. He had been willing to facilitate its ghastly needs thus far, but allowing harm to come to Amanda was too much. Regardless of the torment he’d put her through in the past several weeks, he still loved her. And the woman he loved was presently languishing in excruciating pain.
He bounded up the steps and hopped up into the attic. Amanda lay on her stomach, her contorted ankle darker than before. She was motionless. Walt let out a gasp.
“Amanda?”
No response came. He paused, conflicted between rushing to find the tool kit and checking on Amanda. He made a quick scan in the dim gray light of the attic and, not seeing the toolbox, decided on the latter. He scrabbled over to her side, crouching down and gently setting a hand on the back of her hot, damp neck.
“Sweetheart? Are you—?”
Okay? Alive? He didn’t have the opportunity to decide which adjective to employ. In that instant, Amanda turned on her side and unleashed a banshee scream. Walt’s eyes popped and he started to back away, the hand on her neck flying up and away from her. He only caught the quicksilver gleam of the cleaver when it was already slicing through his index finger. When the middle finger joined it on the floor and the blood started spurting out of the two ragged stumps, he shrieked.
Amanda lurched forward on her stomach and swung the cleaver again. Walt dropped onto his back, narrowly missing the blade as it passed a half inch from his neck. Before she could swipe at him again, he quickly skittered backward, putting as much distance between himself and Amanda as possible.
“I’ll kill you!” she screamed. “I’m gonna kill you!”
“Jesus!” he wailed. He planted his hands behind him for support, and then screamed. Pain shot up his arm, filled his shoulder and neck and head.
He fell back and slammed his head against a support beam, the one Margaret had been chained to.
There was an audible thump, and then he was silent and still.
Amanda growled, swinging the cleaver. Walt didn’t react. She threw her arm back over her head and hurled the blade at him. It only clanged against the beam and landed in his lap.
“Oh, shit,” she whimpered.
In the span of a second, her rage turned to despair. She might have killed Walt after all, but with him out of reach and no means to get the shackle off, there was no hope for escape anymore.
She pounded her fist against one of the beams underneath her and burst into tears.
“You rotten son of a bitch,” she sobbed. “You can’t even die right.”
26
Gravel sprayed out from beneath the skidding tires when Sarah hit the brakes. She’d gone too far down Highway 5 and missed the turn-off. It would have been nice if the web mapping site mentioned how obscured it was—there was nothing but trees out there and she never even saw the street she was supposed to turn left onto. It
was downright primeval.
Jerking the stick into reverse, she backed up to the opposite side of the road heading southbound. She slammed it into drive and was about to hit the accelerator when she saw the possum in the middle of the lane in front of her. It was a fat, mangy creature with splotches of yellowish white fur and beady, too-far-apart eyes that shimmered in the glow of the headlights.
“Ugly cuss,” she said.
She revved the engine, hoping to scare the possum off. But it didn’t budge. She revved it again, and this time the animal bunched up its back and growled, baring its fangs.
“I don’t have time for this.”
The sun was on the verge of setting, a phenomenon that seemed to come quicker in the dark of the old growth forest. Plus, she’d already gotten herself mixed up once, and that was with light. There were no streetlights out there, no houses or apartment buildings, or even a mobile home. Once it got dark, it was going to be dark.
Sarah tapped the pedal, lurching the car forward a couple of feet. The possum backed up, but remained in the road. Twice more they repeated the dance, and still it refused to get out of the way. It just snarled and growled.
Probably rabid, Sarah thought. A mad possum. Ought to be put out of its misery.
“But not by me,” she said aloud. It was nasty, the possum, but she couldn’t bring herself to harm it.
Instead, she turned the wheel and slowly pulled over to the left lane. The animal stayed where it was, watching her as she rolled past it. When she was clear, she sped up and took the hidden road on the right. She was now less than a mile from Walt’s front door.
***
The brakes screeched as the truck came to an abrupt halt. He thought it was a dog at first, and he wasn’t about to run down some poor pooch. But now he could see it was only a damn possum. The disgusting thing wasn’t anything more than a giant rat.
He punched it. His truck sped from zero at six feet away from the possum to forty-five on top of it. With a soul-rending squeal and a loud pop, the mammal split apart beneath the weight of his right front tire.
King grinned as his truck sped down the road, leaving a thin red smear in its wake.