She did not know where she was going, she just wanted to get outside, even though moments earlier she had just wanted to get inside. It seemed that anywhere besides wherever she was would be the only safe place to be. She was just going to run out, screaming into the night, trying to outrun what could only be some horrific nightmare.
Then reality snapped painfully back into focus.
She heard her son's voice call out from behind her, "Mommy! WAIT!"
She stopped so hard in her tracks that she fell to the floor when the pain from her foot tore up her leg, ruining her balance. Her head bounced painfully off the hardwood floor so hard that she thought she was going to be knocked unconscious, but her vision cleared a second later and there she saw her precious little boy, Bradley, standing right there in the hall, right by the stairs where she had just come from. He was shaking and crying.
"BRADLEY! Oh thank God!" She managed to push herself up onto her good foot and leaned against the wall as she hopped over toward her son, he ran to her and wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his head in her stomach, he was weeping and trembling there in her arms as she held him, momentarily oblivious to her physical and mental condition.
"Oh my baby!" Charlene said to her child as she ran her hand through his ruffled hair, "I was so scared that I lost you!"
"Oh, Mommy!" he hollered back through a face full of tears, "I was scared! Something really bad happened and we've been running and hiding all night. There's monsters..."
"We?" Charlene said, suddenly aware that there might be hope for both her children, "You mean your sister and you?"
"Yes, Alyssa kept me safe when everything went bad. I think it got everyone, even Bethie and Daddy and..."
"Baby, listen to me," She gripped Bradley's shoulders and looked him square in the eye, trying to appear much stronger than she actually felt, "I'm here now, Mommy's going to keep you safe, okay?"
"Okay, but I'm so sca..."
"Shush, it's okay, Sweetie. I got you and I will get you out of here, but we need to get your sister, okay?"
Bradley was too terrified to say anything, he just nodded his head and kept sobbing.
Charlene was wondering why the terrible mass of horrid flesh she had seen below did not just burst up through the floor or squirm its way up the stairs and take them. Perhaps it was busy with whatever in God’s name it was doing with Dennis and Charlie.
Again, questions that could be pondered later.
"Honey, I need you to tell me where Alyssa is so we can get her and we can all get out of this place!" She pleaded.
Bradley lifted his trembling arm and pointed up to the stairs that led up to the next two floors. He wiped tears from his face and said, "Sh...she...she's up st..stairs. In the closet in one of those rooms."
"On the second floor, where you guys usually sleep?"
"Uh-huh."
"Which room, Sweetie?"
Bradley could barely speak in his condition. As would be expected of anyone, especially a child, who had seen what he must have seen, he was completely hysterical and every time he tried to form a word he simply broke down in tears.
Charlene handled this gut wrenching image of her traumatized little boy much like she had been handling the excruciating pain caused by her right foot, with all its tiny little bones, being impaled with the claw end of that hammer. In any other situation the state of her poor little baby would have driven her over the edge, but due to these outlandish circumstances it did exactly the opposite, it brought her back from the edge. Moments ago she had fallen face first into the mouth of madness, howling like a lunatic while she had been scrambling for the front door, but now she was focused, centered. Her children were her anchor to sanity right now and she was going to save them.
"Bradley," she said to her son as she caressed both of her son's cheeks in her hands, "Look at me, Sweetie. I know you're scared, so am I, more than I have ever been in my whole life, but I'm here with you okay?"
Bradley nodded.
"Now the only thing that you need to know right now is that Mommy loves you and I'm not going to let anything get you, okay?"
"Okay," the terrified child managed to say in his bravest voice possible.
"Good," Charlene told him and moved her hands to grip him firmly on the shoulders, "Now I know this is asking a lot, Baby Boy, but I need you to be brave for me, and more important than that, you need to be brave for your big sister, okay?"
Bradley stiffened his lower lip and nodded.
"Now we need to go upstairs and get Alyssa and we need to do it as quickly as we can so the three of us can get out of here and be safe."
Bradley shuddered a bit then said, "I know where Alyssa is. She's in the middle room, the one with the big closet. We were both hiding there, we heard you scream so I came down, she was too scared but I promised I would come back for her!" Charlene could see that he was trying so hard not to break into another waterfall of tears.
Charlene hugged the boy close and cried, "You're so brave, Bradley. Now let's go get your sister from that closet and get the fuck out of here!"
Charlene and Bradley quickly made their way up the flight of stairs which led to the second main floor of the ranch house. Each step brought another cry of pain from Charlene, but no amount of pain was going to stop her now.
Two floors down, in the basement, she still heard sounds of wood breaking and of Charlie screaming. She still had no idea what was happening to him and she did not plan on finding out.
She heard the same strange moaning sound again, the same sound she had heard earlier when she first ran from this very same house down toward Clarence's cottage. The whole house seemed to shake along with the moaning sound that echoed through the huge house.
They made it to the next floor and made a beeline for the middle bedroom door, there were three bedrooms on this floor and Charlene felt lucky that her daughter was held up in the one closest to the stairs, the less walking the better, she would be lucky to even keep her right foot if she even survived this fucking nightmare.
She threw the door open and burst her way inside,
Alyssa was standing right there in the middle of the room, tears running down her terror stricken face as she held her arms outstretched toward her mother.
"Mommy!" The scared little girl cried out.
"Oh, my baby!" Charlene answered as she swooped her little girl up in her arms, she could feel Bradley latched onto her side as she picked up Alyssa, "Mommy's here, Baby! I'm going to get you out of..."
"Wait, Mommy!" Alyssa blurted out so sharply that Charlene let out a startled cry and dropped Alyssa to her feet on the floor.
"Shit, I'm sorry Alyssa, we need to...
"I said wait!" Alyssa stomped her left foot on the floor as she shouted the last word.
"Alyssa, I know you've been through a lot but we need to go..."
"I saw something, Mommy!" The eleven year old girl had a terrible fury in her eyes, "Something really, really bad!"
"I know, honey! We'll talk about it later when..."
"I saw Daddy doing gross things with Aunt Paula under the stairs in the basement."
That screaming came from there, Charlene thought for a second before she re-focused on getting her children to safety. She reached for Alyssa but the child had stepped back from her grasp.
"It was so bad, Mommy," Alyssa’s voice had suddenly taken on a cold flatness that caused Charlene's soul to chill, "Now Daddy's screaming, he'll scream forever, Mommy."
"Alliss..." She was immediately cut off.
"He's going to just scream and scream and scream and scream. But I had to see what Daddy did with Aunt Paula and it was so gross!"
My poor baby is so traumatized that she lost her mind, Charlene thought, I don't care what it takes to fix her, I'll do it just as soon as we get the hell off this fucking ranch!
Alyssa screamed out in a shrill and piercing voice, "I SAW IT!" Her hands covered her eyes. She began rubbing her fingers on her eyes as though sh
e was trying to clean some dirt or gunk from the sockets.
"It okay," Charlene was trying to sound calm but the urgency of the situation made it extremely difficult. "We can talk about it later but right now we need to..."
"I saw it, Mommy."
Blood began running down Alyssa’s face, at first Charlene was flabbergasted since she could not tell where it was coming from. A second later she realized that Alyssa’s fingers were digging into her eye sockets so deeply that dark red blood was now pouring forth.
Charlene fell to her knees and lunged at Alyssa, clutching both of her daughter's arms in her hands while she screamed, "Oh God no! Baby! Stop! Please!"
Alyssa began screaming. It was a terrible, melancholy scream that emitted from the child as she plunged her tiny fingers into her eye sockets and twisted her wrists around in a motion that caused the skin around her eyes to tear apart, pouring torrents of blood down the screaming child's face.
This whole time Charlene tried with all her might to pull her daughter's hands away and restrain her from this sudden bout of self-mutilation, but it was as if the young girl's arms were powered by some immense strength that even an adrenaline charged mother trying to save her poor little child could not match. So all she could do was watch as her oldest child, eleven year old Alyssa, tore her own eyes out from her skull, the skin stretched and tore, making a ripping sound very similar to what could be heard in the stairwell down in the basement.
The whole time the child was screaming in terror and pain. Her eye balls were pulled from her head, leaving a long string of veins and connecting tissue protruding from her bloody, empty sockets.
Her screams began to change. They went from painful screams of fear to a soft laughter, the voice became very deep, and nothing like what an eleven year old girl should sound like. It sounded like her daughter was laughing through a throat filled with wet mud.
Alyssa made a quick jerking motion with each hand and tore the eyeballs completely free from the connecting veins. She held the two eyeballs out toward her mother and her laughing became much more high pitched and hysterical.
Charlene had her own scream trying to pry its way out of her mouth, however, complete shock mixed with the life shattering grief of witnessing her sweet little baby girl tear her own eyes out caused the scream to catch in her throat. She just opened and closed her mouth about six times, unable to scream like she needed to.
"NO!!! Not her! NOT MY BAAAABBYYY!!!!"
"It's okay, Mommy," Alyssa spoke in that otherworldly voice, "I'll never have to see that again." Alyssa laughed as she clenched her fists tightly around each eyeball, making a vile popping sound and causing thick, gooey fluid to strain out from between her tiny fingers.
At the exact same instant her daughter's bursting eyeballs made that sickening popping sound, Charlene saw what appeared to be a cluster of large worms poking out through the those two tiny pits of blackness that seconds ago were her daughter's eye sockets. They crudely wriggled their way out of the bloody sockets like maggots bursting forth from a dead mouse, there were at least six of them coming out from each eye. Suddenly, once the squirming tendrils seemed to crest out of her eye sockets, they burst out like a dozen vipers striking then waved through the air inches from Charlene's face.
They were not worms, she thought, they’re tentacles, just like the ones downstairs, only smaller. Whatever they were, they began to morph and wriggle, expanding and pulsating as they started growing. In fact, Alyssa’s whole face was growing. Her skull seemed to be expanding and retracting while the skin on her face rippled and moved as though it were hot wax trying to fit a mold.
“BRADLEY!” she screamed as she spun around and saw that her son was gone, then a second later she realized that she could hear him screaming out in the hallway, but she couldn't see him.
A groping tentacle wrapped around her neck from behind her and spun her around, the tentacle was at least the girth of a large snake now, and felt just as strong as it closed on her throat and lifted her off ground with such brutal force that the back of her skull left a rather impressive hole in the stucco ceiling. She felt herself about to fade from consciousness for second or two, her vision blurred as she hung there in the air by her neck unable to breathe or get blood flow to her brain. Just as her lights were about to go out, she was dropped to the floor.
Charlene landed directly on her injured foot, sending sickening hot spears of pain up her leg, but she did not cry out in pain, her mind was far too crippled from grief after watching her lovely, innocent Alyssa come to her current, horrid state. In fact, Charlene was unable to make sounds besides a desperate little cry as she scooted her way backwards toward the doorway that lead into the hallway where she could hear Bradley screaming for her to help.
Finally, the lump in her throat cleared and she managed to squeak out a tear-filled mutter, "Alyssa..."
But the thing that was standing in front of her now was no longer recognizable as her daughter. The tentacles that had squirmed from her head each began to open up on the tips. Small holes opened and constricted then opened again much wider. The holes formed little circular mouths and every one of them was filled with row after row of circular, razor sharp teeth.
Alyssa’s legs seemed to have morphed together and formed one single giant appendage that stretched out behind her until her lower half resembled the body of a giant, pulsating worm. Then four jointed legs, like a spider's legs, shiny and black and pointed on the ends, suddenly burst from each side of her worm-like lower body and bent at the joints halfway up each leg before lifting the creature up in a devilishly predatory stance. A long segmented tail burst out from the rear and curled up behind her like a scorpion, it even had what looked like a giant stinger poking out of its tip. As it curled up over the fiend’s head, venom began to drip down from the tip of the stinger, leaving little rising columns of smoke where it started to burn through the carpeted floor.
Alyssa's skin was pulsating and rippling as if there hundreds of insects were swarming beneath it trying to get out. She had the same grey, vein streaked color as the Clarence and Bethie things and she had to have grown at least three feet taller from her waist to her head.
She held her arms straight out at Charlene and let out a piercing shriek so high pitched that the windows in the room behind her shattered and Charlene thought her ear drums had surely ruptured. She let out another cry and cupped her hands over her ears. The entire world was ringing in her ears. When she pulled her hands back she saw that there was a trace of blood on her left palm. When she looked up she witnessed what used to be her little girl bearing down on her. With what at first looked like tentacles, but now would again be more accurately described as twelve blood thirsty parasitic worms, six from each eye socket, wriggling obscenely through the air around Charlene's face.
Now Charlene screamed, louder and more desperately than she ever had in her life.
She spun around and clawed at the ground as she forced herself to her feet and out the door as quickly as her painfully mangled body would allow her. She flew through the doorway and into the hall so quickly that she crashed violently into the wall right past it and bounced sideways, sprawling out into the hallway.
Bradley was not in front of her, she looked behind her and saw that he was not in the hallway at all. To her right in the room she had just flung herself from, the Alyssa thing was trying to squeeze its way through the door but had by now grown in size to the point where it could not seem to get its shoulders through the door frame, and had mutated in such a manner that it was not able to twist its body around to the proper angle to shimmy through.
Despite the plethora of horrific mutations, the absolutely most gut wrenching sight for Charlene was her daughter's face. Besides the torn eye sockets and the blood that was coating her face from where she tore her eyes from her skull, and her pale greyish complexion, it remained the same as it was before she had changed once that obscene rippling ceased for a moment. The skin on her daughter's face was n
ow that greyish pale look with a few black veins branching out up her neck, but the features were the same as her sweet little Alyssa. Charlene wished that her face had changed completely like Bethie's had, that would have been much, much easier.
She heard Bradley scream from up ahead of her. She looked that direction and saw that he was poking his head out from the neighboring bedroom. He was waving his arms desperately at his mother, "Mommy! I'm here! Come on! She's going to get you!"
Charlene found her footing and lunged at her boy, the pain from her foot was as excruciating as ever, but she no longer gave a flying fuck. She grabbed her son's arm and pulled him along with her down the hall.
Bradley was clearly in shock. His face had a vacant look seen in the faces of children who had lived through terrible wars and seen atrocities done to their loved ones that would have broken even the toughest of grownups were they forced to witness.
Charlene was back on autopilot.
Of course she still kept telling herself in her head that the only way this was happening was that she was most certainly dreaming. Perhaps only the most fantastical parts. Maybe she really did get in a horrible crash up there on the pass and now she was in a coma in a hospital bed and her children were both perfectly safe, sleeping soundly back in the real world.
But a much deeper voice, a voice that sounded much more grounded in reality, was telling her that she knew that was bullshit.
Bradley kept his mother's hand in such a death grip that when they reached the stairs and Charlene quickly made her way down, Bradley lost his footing but still held on to her hand, she was so focused on them making it down the stairs that she was able to hold on to his hand and swing him up over to her, narrowly avoiding sending her son tumbling down the stairs.
In the brief second it took for the two of them to get back their bearings and regain their footing, they both heard the sound of wood and drywall busting apart and crumbling. The sound of Alyssa breaking through the door jam.
Becoming the Gateway Page 17