His eyes went in and out of focus as he took a few deep breaths. His lungs actually hurt—and he wondered if some bones had been crushed. What is she? A fuckin’ bear? Jesus H, what the hell kind of bitch is she?
Finally he sat up. The pain in his back and side was intense, and he had to hold his left side with both his hands, feeling around for the origin of the pain.
He heard a noise beyond the open door, and he
glanced into the hall. Besides her sister’s bedroom, there was a small room with the washer and dryer in it, as well as a sink. On the floor were stacks of dirty clothes.
Lizzie was there, and she had her mother slung over her back. Her mother was moaning, and it wasn’t the kind of moan that made Bert feel any safer.
Lizzie switched on the laundry room light, and dropped her mother onto the pile of the clothes.
Then she glanced over at him.
She pointed her finger at him.
You.
He saw the knife in her hand.
Adrenaline shot through him, and he pushed himself up from the bed, but immediately fell to the floor in pain. He cried out, “For the love of God! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HELP!” He kicked his legs out as she walked over to him. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, PSYCHO BITCH! GET THE FUCK AWAY!”
She got down on her knees, and combed her fingers through his hair. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry.”
She brought the knife up and showed it to him. His eyes went wide, and he whispered, “Please don’t hurt me. Please. I can get you help. I can get you whatever you want. Whatever you need.”
7
Lizzie Pond brought the knife just beneath his chin and made a quick incision to his throat. He grabbed her by the wrist, but that just made it worse as she cut into him, tearing at his Adam’s apple and the surrounding area until she’d cleaned it all out.
And then she went to make the other incisions on his body so that she could pull the bones out from the meat of his flesh.
In another place in her mind, she and her father were in the killing room, and there was a big piggy lying there.
“We have to debone this one completely,” her father said.
“Won’t it hurt him?” she asked.
“Ah,” her father said. “Piggies like to get slaughtered.”
He passed her a knife and she approached the piggy with it. “You pull the bones out, one by one,” her father told her.
As Lizzie did it, cutting messily into the piggy, he guided her hand in finding all the sweet spots.
8
After she was all done, Lizzie dragged the piggy’s bones and set them all in a pile near the skin and the meat.
“Time to clean up,” her father told her, although he wasn’t there with her anymore. Just in her head.
She stepped out into the hallway, taking off her clothes as she went. Completely naked, she walked upstairs to the bathroom. Went in, turned on the shower, glanced at herself in the mirror.
Red girl, she thought. Red girl with the pretty eyes. Hello.
Then, she pulled back the shower curtain, and got under the hot spray of water and washed the filth of the meat off her body and listened to what the voices were telling her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
The dog pound wasn’t in the village precisely, but out in the unincorporated area near the dump. It consisted of a U-shaped, one-story cinder block mess, with a fenced in courtyard behind it. The dogcatcher, who also operated the bulldozer out on the dump piles, was a guy of sixty-two named Benny Marais. He had just gotten a call from a woman who claimed she’d be in to get the litter of kittens that had been found up at the old Harrow property two weeks before. “I’ll take good care of them,” the woman said. “My last three cats died this past year. I could use some kittens.”
But she hadn’t come to get them, and it was time to put them down. “I don’t operate a damn cat charity,” Benny said to his assistant, Dory Crampton. “I’m sorry for the kitties, and it’s a damn shame, but there’s not much to be done.”
He went out to gather the four little kittens in the cages off the main office, but when he got there, all the cages were open and the animals gone.
“What the hell?” he said, and then checked the chain-link runs in the courtyard—they too were empty.
Some delinquent had opened all the cages sometime during the day. “Dory!” he called to the back.
Moments later, a chunky, disheveled seventeen-year-old girl, her hair cut moppet short, her overhauls slung a bit low, with a baggy white T-shirt covering most of her frame, came out from the employee bathroom, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. “Yeah?”
“You know anything about this?”
Dory Crampton glanced around at the dog runs. “Wow.”
Benny glanced back into the dump dunes that rose and fell behind the pound. Not a sign of the animals.
“The great escape,” Dory said. Her cigarette toggled up and down as if she were laughing a little.
“What you just say?”
She drew the cig from her lips. “I just can’t believe they let themselves out. Must be some nut somewhere.”
Benny felt his blood pressure shoot up. It had happened at least once before—a group of kids or idiots had let the animals out once, and he wasn’t sure but that Dory had something to do with it. “Well,” he said and went to bum a cigarette off her. “I guess we gotta get the truck and go round ‘em up.”
Dory put her hands on her hips and gave him the look he considered a little too insolent. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with this, Mr. Marais. I can practically read your mind.”
She drew her pack of Camels out, and offered him one. As she lit his cigarette, she said in that flat almost country way she had, “Them dogs done gone for good, you ask me. I think half of ‘em knew their time was just about up.” She looked at his face and squinted, cocking her head to the side as if trying to make out something. “That a mole on your face?” she asked, and then reached over to touch the protruding bump on Benny’s cheek, near his left ear. “Oh, hell,” she said, grinning. “It’s a tick.”
Benny swatted at her hand, and cursed and stomped a little as he plucked the offending bug from where it had nearly taken root in his skin. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, and grabbed Dory’s lighter, flicked it up, sparked a little flame, and pressed it onto the round fat slightly bloated tick. “Goddamn dogs!” he shouted as he dropped the burning tick down on the pavement, and then stepped down hard on it to rub it out of existence.
2
Jack Templeton knew he had only a day or two left.
It was either today or wait ‘til the spring, and even that might not be ‘til May, and with the way the damn thing cracked on him the previous year, it might be half the summer before it got fixed and filled.
He took a sip of his Johnny Walker Red. Practically a ritual after a good work day. After the commute. After the train and the walk home and the feeling that the tie around his neck was a dead animal.
Just a sip of Scotch, and then the tie came off, the jacket, and the starched white shirt.
And it was on to paradise: the pool. He loved his swimming pool. He had worked his whole life so he could afford a place and put in a lap pool so he wouldn’t have to drive an hour to a gym. So he could have it right there, all to himself.
But it was getting too cold. Some years, he had to close it down earlier—by mid-September. The weather had been fairly moderate for the fall, and even now, in October, it hadn’t quite gotten so chilly that he couldn’t stand getting in.
He stripped off his work clothes on the back patio, and got in naked. The fence in back gave him privacy. He loved being naked in his backyard and just swinging around free and easy. It was like paradise sometimes, and once winter had come on full force he wouldn’t get a chance to do it again until late April, and only then if the ice had melted.
He needed that pool. It gave him solace from the world. It made him forget bad thing
s and the people he had to screw over continually just to keep his business running.
Oh, that pool, it was the pool of his dreams and every time he got in, the temperature was perfect—so close to body temperature that it was like not being in water at all, but on a current of air as he did his fifty daily laps with some sadness, knowing that he’d have to cover the pool over for winter and drive to Poughkeepsie three days a week just to get some swimming in.
He leaned over the edge of the pool, slipping his legs in. A big smile spread across his face. Then he slid down, all the way in, and stood up so that the water came just above his navel. He set his swimming goggles in place, then dipped beneath the water. The pool was always such a relief that he often began dreaming as soon as he was submerged—he’d fantasize about traveling around the world, about beautiful women with enormous breasts, about swimming in the ocean or one of the Great Lakes— an endless beautiful swim.
But as he went under and pushed himself off from the back wall of the lap pool, he felt as if he were not alone in the pool.
As if there were others there. It was an irrational, stupid feeling, so he tried to shrug it off. He began his crawl, his head cocked to one side and then, after a stroke or so, the other.
But he still had that feeling. Not that there were people around the pool. But that beneath him, in that warm water, there were others, and that the pool was not a fairly shallow lap pool, but was instead a deep lake, and he was nearly sure that if he touched down for a second that his toes would graze reeds and water grasses.
And again, that feeling that there were others there, swimming beneath him. Creatures that were nearly human.
Nice imagination, Jack, he thought. Some beautiful mermaid underwater touching you all over.
It was as if someone were touching his thighs and the tips of his toes. And then, he felt that tingling in his penis that just made him feel stronger than strong whenever it happened. Despite his self-professed good looks and winning ways, Jack didn’t get laid much anymore. He lived for that tingle. The tingle was everything to him on some lonely, horny evenings of porn DVDs and Pete’s Wicked Ale. Some nights he couldn’t even get himself excited watching the gorgeous and lascivious women of porn do unto others as they had done unto themselves. His God-given right to pop a boner had begun to diminish, and he wondered if he just needed some new sexual thrill to get it back—or if it was just the way things went when you lived alone and didn’t make friends with women very easily.
But in the pool, that potent feeling came on strong, and he was happy he’d resisted slipping into his Speedos in favor of complete balls-out naked.
Ah, it was like a warm tongue down there.
The water.
The way it moved against him.
He could nearly imagine a long-haired beauty tasting him.
Yet he knew he was just imagining it, so he tried to focus on his breathing and his form. Roll and stretch, reach, stretch, kick. In seconds, he was able to put aside the notion that there were others swimming beneath him in some underwater deep.
Yet he still felt like the Rock of Gibraltar where it counted.
As he came up to the end of his first lap, tilting his head to the side to breathe, something thick and hairy touched his lips.
Startled, he stopped and stood up, drawing his swimming goggles from his face.
A dead rat floated near him.
And then he saw several of them, all at one end of the pool—and not just four or five. He counted nearly twenty dead rats floating around him at the far end of the lap pool.
Disgusted, and nearly on the edge of being sick, he got out of the pool fast, and stood there wondering whether to call the animal control center, or go next door where the teenager lived who kept a python as a pet—and fed it rats—and kick his ass all the way to the pool and make him clean it up.
Normally Jack Templeton wasn’t a violent guy, and maybe it was because he’d had two sips of Scotch instead of one; or maybe it was because he’d been warned by the vice-president of his department that he needed to clean up his act at the office; or maybe it was because that pool was his holy place and some stupid teenage boy who was dumb enough to keep an enormous snake in his home— with stupid parents, to boot—had allowed an invasion.
Or maybe it was something else. Even Jack had felt the change when he’d first gotten into the water. It was as if the water had gotten into him. As if his ears got a little waterlogged and his mouth had taken some of it in.
But anger didn’t cover what he was feeling.
He felt an enormous rage, and given how he usually never got angry, even he was amazed by what he felt as he went through the back gate to the neighbor’s house.
The garage door was up, and he went around to it. The kid was there—a dumpy and sloppy kid with a black T-shirt and hair that was too long for his round face and a little smelly because he must not wash much. Jack snarled, “Miss any rats lately?”
And then, Jack felt an impulse within him. It was almost as if he had not even come up from the pool, but was still underwater, and he was fighting for breath as he stood there in front of the teen.
The impulse was to kill the kid.
It was more than impulse, actually.
It was compulsion.
He raised his fist and brought it down on the top of the kid’s head before the kid even knew what was coming.
Jack Templeton, naked and more erect than he’d ever felt in his life, began slamming his clenched fists into the kid every which way, and when the sloppy kid fell to the floor, covering his face with his hands, Jack began kicking him and only stopped when he saw the really beautiful woman lying in the big terrarium at the back of the garage.
He knew it was insane that a woman so beautiful could even fit into that terrarium, and he knew on some level that still remained rational within him that this might in fact be the big python that the sloppy kid raised and fed rats to, but Jack couldn’t shake the image: She was there, circling around a long stick. Her breasts peach-colored and plump, her hips small but perfect as she arched her back toward him, and though there was the trace of a slithery snaky tongue coming from between her bee-stung red lips, it didn’t bother him one bit.
He knew that she was there, waiting for him.
He knew that he would rescue her from this enormous terrarium, and they would make love like no man and no woman had ever made love before in all creation.
He would be Adam to her Eve, and if somewhere in there he felt the stirrings of a serpent, he’d accept whatever fate awaited him. His penis was his king now, and the garage itself seemed to fade away around him as he felt that he was in an enormous bedchamber, and the naked beauty lay there on the covers, her fingers lazily moving toward her epicenter with an effortless motion.
He went to her, and lifted the lid of the cage. She embraced him even while he embraced her.
3
Sam Pratt looked up from the garage floor, feeling weak and sick from being beaten up, and watched as the naked guy who lived next door began wrapping Sam’s pet python all along his body and kissing it over and over again on the lips. It looked like the guy was humping his snake.
4
The beautiful pale woman pressed her lips against Jack Templeton’s mouth, and parted them using the longest tongue he’d ever felt in a chick. It got him so hard he felt he wouldn’t be able to control himself.
Then she seemed to reach down to cup his balls in her hand and then squeeze them, at first lightly, and then so hard it nearly hurt. It got him all the more excited, and he played with her breasts and felt down her body to draw her legs apart, only her torso seemed to go on forever.
As he looked down at her, he saw that she was, after all, a mermaid, just as he had imagined there were mermaids in the world, and somehow she was able to stand on dry land as they embraced.
She started kissing him so deeply again that he felt it was like she had put her mouth completely within his, and her tongue extended farther
down his throat, into his esophagus. Though he could barely breathe, he let the passion take him over, and they both fell to the cold garage floor, entwined about one another.
She tightened her grip on his balls and he felt that sexual pressure mounting within him—
And he knew at any moment—
Any moment—
It was building—
He was going to let it go.
He would break free and give her his great gift of seed.
He held his breath, waiting for the moment.
Waiting.
Holding.
And then Jack Templeton passed out, unable to breathe, the pain at his mouth and neck and balls too much to take.
Something between his legs burst like a tick, and he was afraid to look down and see what the beautiful mermaid had done to him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
From The Gospel According to Luke, Being the Private Diary of Me So You Better Not Open This If You Know What’s What:
Certainly, when I came back to Watch Point at the age of twenty-six, it seemed the same place I had last seen at fifteen while visiting my aunt Danni. I had only one piece of luggage, an old suitcase that had been my dad’s, and it was mainly filled with enough clothes to get me through three days before doing laundry. Also, tucked into it was my laptop, so that I could write the Great American Novel while not preparing lesson plans for my work as the new eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher at a high school one town over from Watch Point, New York.
Rewinding a little: more about me. I was born in the hills of North Carolina, and as a result, was sure I’d become the next Thomas Wolfe, as if one wasn’t enough.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 11