He shot the gun, and the bullet got her in the jaw. But just after he shot, the gun became too cold in his hand, and he had to drop it. Looking up at the Mitchell girl, her jaw waggled and drooped as if the bullet had just knocked it out of joint. No blood came down, and the girl glared at him, but didn’t seem worse for it.
Make it quick, Army. You’re old, but you’re not weak.
He ran for the open doorway, and would’ve made it if Sebastien Pharand hadn’t reached out, leaping from a crawling position, and caught his ankle in his hands.
Army fell, and felt enormous pain in his spine and a burning in his left ankle. When he looked down at his feet, Pharand and Baer were twisting his ankles. He heard the pop that he dreaded, as his feet seemed to break like twigs. He felt ice there, and saw the frost that crawled up his body. He lay back and looked into the room of the people hanging from the meat-hooks, and among them, he saw a little boy and he wasn’t sure but that he’d seen that boy many times before. Kid’s from Prague or something. Seen him on his bike, riding around. Sweet kid. Sweet kid.
The kid had some kind of messed-up skull in his hands and although the kid seemed to be talking to him, Army began to feel as if the kid were talking to the skull.
8
Dory Crampton awoke in a smelly bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the posts. Her clothes had been ripped from her, and there was a tight cloth across her mouth. It smelled like a filthy toilet.
A man with straw-like hair and a pockmarked face who looked middle-aged and undernourished stood at the bedside. He wore a long white shirt with red stripes, and she noticed that he was naked from the waist down. Worse, he seemed aroused.
She kicked her legs to loosen the restraints, but they only seemed to tighten.
He had what looked to her like a small tube of glue in his right hand. He leaned over her, his breath smelling like he’d been gargling with shit, and said, “We have to make sure you don’t see any of it, Mrs. Fly. The glory of the Beyond is too much for you. The sight of its triple phallus is enough to kill even the most jaded slut, and although I find its face so handsome, I’m afraid Mrs. Fly never seems to agree with me. This is just to make sure that you don’t see the Great One when He comes to give you His seed. Don’t be afraid. You’re the chosen among all women, Mrs. Fly. Among all Mrs. Flies. You are going to be mother to radiance.”
Then he brought up the tube of glue, and pressed a little onto her left eyelid. Dory moved her head rapidly, side to side, so that the glue would come out, but some of it went down into her eye and burned. More than anything she’d seen all day, this terrified her because she knew that no one was ever going to find her. No one was going to rescue her.
“Don’t look at your husband like that. I love you. I really do. I wouldn’t be able to put you through this if I didn’t have complete and utter love. You are so wonderful for being the vessel for the Great One, Mrs. Fly. You are beloved of all who exist here. Your hole is the doorway from that world to this, and your child, born from a divine union, will have eternal life in this realm. Your hole with its arches and its door pressed backward will be the entry for the most magnificent, the most radiant of...”
He droned on and on. His words seemed to run together and had a nearly hypnotic effect upon her. Dory glanced to the left and the right to try to see what there might be in the room to help her, but the place was mostly bare. A table by a shuttered window.
She glanced over to the doorway.
A little boy who she had seen once in the newspapers but had forgotten, stood there. The same one she had seen when she entered the house. Arnie Pierson. The dead boy who had been found eviscerated at Harrow in the summer, just a few days after he’d died.
The dead boy with the tiny knifepoints in his gums in place of teeth, and that hollow look to his eyes as if he were always hungry.
She watched him reach to his chest and peel back the layers of flesh. Something black and shiny and coated with a gummy liquid that dripped to the floor began emerging from the little boy’s open chest.
Mr. Spider had just managed to get the glue on her left eyelid, and then he reached down and shut it.
With only the vision in her right eye, she couldn’t quite see what had come out of Arnie Pierson’s body, but she heard it. It was a humming and buzzing sound like a swarm of bees, and then a gloppy thump-thump on the floor. A squishy sliding along as it moved toward the bed where she lay.
The buzzing grew louder, and Mr. Spider pressed the glue onto her right eyelid. She blinked to try to let her tears wash the glue away, but he reached up with his fingers and closed her eyelids shut. Though she tried to force her eyelids open, within a few seconds, she could not see more than shadows and light through them, and mainly she saw the edges of her eyelashes.
She had a sense of a warm red glow beyond her eyelids. A slick wet thing slapped down on her left ankle, and she felt its weight as the bed creaked beneath it.
It began slobbering, this thing that moved up to her knees, gently trying to part them.
“Oh, you should see this, Mrs. Fly, why it loves you. I think you’re the most beautiful Mrs. Fly it’s ever seen. It’s growing so large now, it’s going to be able to fill every part of you, Mrs. Fly, and it will hook itself from one phallus to another through your body for you to become the vessel. Oh, you must be very, very special, Mrs. Fly, for it to want you this much. Its excitement is extraordinary.” Mr. Spider’s voice began to go up an octave, and he sounded like an excitable little child. “Do not be afraid of the tentacles.
They’re just to hold you and keep you steady while it vibrates through you. They may seem sticky and hot, but they won’t scald your skin, and it doesn’t hurt very long, and once you get beyond the pain of the way it pierces, I think you’ll quite enjoy the ride, Mrs. Fly, as other Mrs. Flies have done before you.”
Dory Crampton, unable to see, unable to scream, swallowed bile in the back of her throat as she felt the faintest of pinpricks along her inner thigh, and she felt welts forming where the thing touched her.
Please just let me die. Let me die. God, let me die right now. Don’t make me go through this. Don’t make it happen to me. Make it be somebody else. Don’t make it be me. Make me be back at the dog pound with Benny Marais, not with this thing. This thing.
The unseen creature moved slowly, as if it had to undulate along her flesh to get anywhere.
Please, take my mind away. Make me insane now. I don’t want to come back from this. I want this to be the exit from the world. I don’t want this to be.
And then Dory Crampton got her wish.
The human mind is frail in even the best circumstances, but being faced with the terror of physical horror, or knowing that the body will be taken and destroyed while the consciousness will have to continue for a time, can send anyone into madness. But what Dory’s mind did—besides pushing her into the world of dream instead of reality—was awaken a part of her brain she didn’t even know existed before. It was as if something went crack inside her, and suddenly, she saw an intense blue-white light within the darkness of her mind. She saw the dog pound that she herself had been living in as she grew to womanhood—that she had a special ability that might be of some help to her. Within her mind’s shadows, it came by way of Benny Marais’s head, which just appeared, chopped under the chin as it had been at the Boswells’ house in the village, with a bit of spinal column pushed out from the meat near the cut. He had that goofy grin, and he floated there in the dog pound of her mind with all the howling animals in their cages, and said, “You know, there’s a reason you’re not dead yet, Dory. We all are, but you’re not. Why would that be?”
Dory, as mute in the dream as she was in real life (and don’t you think about those thousand little prickly feelers that are mooing in strangle circles around your hips right now, and that feeling that something is drooling all over your stomach because, Dory, that’s going to pull you right out of your head and put you smack dab in your physical body and that�
�ll really fuck you up), shook her head and shrugged as only someone living in her mind could.
“Maybe it’s because you are one of the few that Harrow’s afraid of. You know it has to be afraid of someone, Dory. Why do you think it let you through its doors? Do you know how few people can get in here? Perfectly nice people have been trying, but they usually get axed or gutted before they get their hands on the front door. You don’t see them yet, but there’s even an Alice and a Ronnie here, too. Even another kid—not Tooth-boy out there with his rat face and chest of miracles—but another kid who has something in him, too, that the house has been so afraid of. Name of Kazi. Funny name for a funny kid, but you knew that, in this brain pound we’re in, somehow, you knew that. Because what’s inside you—the thing the house is afraid of—wasn’t scheduled to make an appearance until you had some traumatic accident. They figured—they being those beings in this hell-hole—that if they gobbled you up first, you’d never be able to gobble them down a few years down the road. Same with those others—that Alice thinks she’s psychic, but she’s not even as psychic as that wunderkind Kazi. Only, the house got him before he could grow up and get down with the whole psychic shit and maybe take this house out once and for all and lock down the pathway.”
The whole time Benny Marais spoke, Dory tried to ignore a tickling feeling at her buttocks and some thick, warm wet prong of some kind that moved along her earlobe. The buzzing seemed to be about twenty miles away, but she knew that it was probably just all around her as she lay in that bed.
I’m not going back to that bed, she thought, and her thoughts became words as she spoke to Benny.
“You have to, I’m sorry to say. But I’m not here just to blow smoke up your ass, although someone might end up doing that tonight. Dory, I’m not even Benny Marais. I’m that part of you that just got woken up. And I want you to fight. I don’t want you insane. That won’t help you. Even insanity has reality in it, and you’ll never get out of here if you don’t get back to your body and fight like a bitch from hell. I can’t even tell you how to fight. And I can’t even give you some magic power to fight. All I can tell you is, Harrow ain’t happy. This place is scared of you. And of the others here. Harrow wants you to go into your happy place in your mind so that you won’t turn around and bitch-slap it to kingdom come. You and these others are the only thing keeping the doorway to the ancient sorcery blocked.”
I don’t believe you. I don’t believe in this. I think this is my insanity talking, Dory thought.
“Which is more insane? Trapped inside a dark dog pound in your mind with the severed head of your boss— or strapped jaybird naked to a bed while an unspeakable horror with three or more dicks tries to open you up?” Benny asked.
Dory felt like grinning. It sounded like just the kind of language Benny would use. How the hell do I fight this? My eyes are glued shut. My wrists and ankles are tied. I have a gag over my mouth. What can I do? I mean, do I get a magic sword or something?
“I don’t have the answers. I’m just part of why that little boy with the teeth like knives is so damn hungry for you, sweetie. There’s the horny squid from hell crawling up to your snatch, and you don’t have time to sit here and talk to me about it. Understood?”
And then she was sane again. More than sane. She was in her body, feeling all the terrible wet fingers of the thing on her, the thing that was going to rape her if she didn’t figure out a way to get out of this.
Tied to the bed.
Creaky bed.
The creature now sat over her, its tongues licking near her breasts.
The fucker’s heavy.
Okay. Okay. Out of distressed-damsel mode. Into kick “an in the nuts mode, even if monster boy has twelve balls.
Dory took a couple of deep breaths. She drew her wrists up so that the restraints were taut; she spread her legs wide, despite the fear and revulsion she felt, just so her ankles would also pull tight at the restraints.
Then she swung her buttocks a little to the left.
Tiny damp feelers with feathery edges that seemed to be dripping some kind of goo on her that ran all over her ass like little bugs.
Then she swung to the right.
Again she felt the undulating movements of the creature upon her, and suction cups at the end of what she could only assume were tentacles.
Benny Marais, you better not have been lying to me.
She swung again, back and forth, and the creature clung to her with a thousand feelers.
Mr. Spider kept jabbering away about “glorious light,” and “magnificent love” and “midwifing the infinite,” and she thought she heard the metallic clanking of the little boy with the knifepoint teeth in the doorway.
But she tensed her muscles and then swung again to the left, and this time the bed tipped.
Over, come on, son of a bitch. Over. Tip the hell over!
And that’s when Dory felt a shift in the fabric of reality. Even in the blindness of her glued eyelids, she thought she saw a yellow light like a brilliant sunrise.
Remembering the words from her mind: What’s inside you—the thing the house is afraid of—wasn’t scheduled to make an appearance until you had some traumatic accident. They figured—they being those beings in this hellhole—that if they gobbled you up first, you’d never be able to gobble them down a few years down the road.
In that split-second shift, when the bed tipped up with her swinging off it, and when she heard those words again and saw the golden light—
She felt it.
It was like a biting in her brain. Something bit down, and it hurt in her head, but she knew that it was what the severed head of Benny Marais had been telling her.
Traumatic accident. This is it.
She smelled something she hadn’t caught a whiff of since she’d been three or four, and a memory came with the smell: of being a little girl taking her mother’s hand as they walked along the street, and having that smell, then, too. Like something on the wind that had an element of something she had never before smelled, as a girl, or since—until now. It was neither sweet nor sour, but did have a bitter edge to it. Even as a girl, it had caused her nose to bleed a little.
This time, it caused her nose to bleed a lot.
Trauma. Bite in the brain. This is it.
As the golden light in the darkness of her mind shattered, the bed tipped all the way over. She and the mucky creature that had crawled up her naked body to force itself into her went over onto the floor.
Half a second later, she heard a strange splat against one of the walls.
One of her wrist restraints had torn as the post went, and she quickly went to untie the other one.
The creature buzzed and hummed, and sounded angry to her. Mr. Spider starting cussing, and the Tooth-boy, as Benny Marais had called him, began grinding his teeth into a series of high pitched squeals.
She still couldn’t open her eyes, but she felt along her ankles and undid the restraints there. She crawled off a ways, trying to feel her way to the door. She rubbed her eyes over and over again to try to wear down the glue, but it was doing no good.
“You fucking little bitch, Mrs. Fly. You think you’re too good to put out for our friends from the other side, do you? Do you?” Mr. Spider began ranting. “You think you’re not good enough for bringing forth the children of miracles? Your pussy is beautiful, but that doesn’t mean you’re beautiful on the inside, does it? Well, we’re just going to have to make it hard on you. Very hard. I suppose it’s going to hurt this time. I was hoping you’d take it easy. But no, you have to listen to your imaginary voices in your head, don’t you? You believe you have some special calling, some insane ability that makes you attractive to us here. Well, the only attractive thing about you, little miss, is your ability to provide a mass of eggs so that the seed of radiance can take hold inside you. You’re not even good enough to have the name Mrs. Fly. You’re Mrs. Flyshit, in my opinion, little miss.”
The buzzing and humming seemed t
o follow her, and she wiped at her eyes, tears pressing out from them. Please help me. Somebody help me. I can’t do this on my own. If I have some power, keep me safe. Keep me safe.
“He told you we’re going to gobble you up? Well, that’s just right, little miss,” Mr. Spider said. “We’re going to chew you up and spit you out and you’re gonna love every minute of it. You don t have anything this house wants, believe you me, other than the mass of eggs inside that womb of yours. And it better be a womb with a view, little miss, because our friend is very, very horny at the moment and has a lot of sprayin’ to do.”
Dory hated girls that cried over anything, but she couldn’t help it. As she wiped her eyes, trying to peel back the glue that had nearly sealed her eyelids, she could not stop weeping. She felt like that little girl, holding her mother’s hand again,” and that unusual bitter smell was in the air. And tears flowed.
But as she sobbed, now in a corner, balled up to protect herself, she began to see a little from her left eyelid.
The tears.
Between wiping at her eyes and crying, the glue had unsealed a little. Taking her sharpest fingernail, she put it between the lids of her left eye and further separated it. She had her left eye open.
It was enough.
9
Ronnie felt exhausted after she finished chopping up the last of the thing that had not been her sister Lizzie but had been a perfect imitation of her. Blood soaked her clothes and her face, and she clung to the hatchet like it was an amulet protecting her in all things.
Ronnie felt as if she had changed in the past several hours, from everything she had seen in the village until now.
She felt like a warrior, and even her arms felt muscled and tight. She glanced back at the corpse of the Lizzie thing. When she’d split it open, it had been nearly hollow inside. It reminded her of a cicada she’d seen cut open once—where it was all black and ridged on the inside, but nearly hollow. This thing was like that, too—it was an exoskeleton, with no interior, although a black bile like substance oozed from what had been the Lizzie-thing’s head.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 29