by Harvey Click
It took her a moment to realize that the hairbrush she had used last night was missing. Someone or something had taken it.
She hurried out of the room, shut the door behind her, and set down the suitcase at the top of the stairs. In the bathroom she used the fork tines to pull open the shower curtain, but there was nothing hiding in the tub.
Her dread mounted as she eased open the door to Billy’s bedroom. She jabbed the fork into the two large heaps of dirty clothes on the floor, and then she jabbed beneath the bed several times before kneeling to look.
The closet door was already partially open. Standing back as far as the fork would reach, she used the tines to pull it open the rest of the way. The closet was jammed full of hanging clothes and piles of more clothes on the floor, and she realized she was letting out little shouts and exclamations as she poked her fork into them.
It seemed that finding nothing should make her feel more comfortable, but it didn’t. She still believed that somewhere the thing was hiding in the house. The chills running up her spine told her so.
She pawed through the bags and boxes on the closet shelf, hoping to find a gun, and then looked through Billy’s dresser drawers. He had always owned guns, so probably somebody had stolen them. But Billy wasn’t the sort of guy you’d want to steal guns from, unless you knew for certain he wasn’t going to be around to stop you.
She carried her suitcase downstairs and out to her car. Her flashlight was in the kitchen, and as she went to get it she noticed the chair propped against the doorknob of her parents’ bedroom. One more room to search, but it could wait. For some reason she wasn’t ready to go in there yet.
The bag of food shouldn’t be left to rot on the table, so she stepped out the back door and carried it to the old well that her parents had always used as a refuse pit. But it was full now, and the dirt that covered it had sunk considerably, leaving a deep weedy dimple that most likely would collapse like a sinkhole if anyone tried to walk over it.
She stepped around it and eventually found a newer pit dug behind the old shed that once had been a smokehouse. She threw the bag of trash on top of the rancid mess already decomposing in the hole.
The sun felt good, even if it was too hot, and she was in no hurry to return to the house. Not far from the shed was the dirt lane that ran between the fields all the way back to the hilly woods at the rear of the property, and she could see from the tire tracks through the weeds that Billy had been driving his truck down the lane pretty often. If he really did have a cooking shed it would most likely be hidden back in the woods, and that would explain the tire tracks. If Police Chief Dilkens was right, then that was where she would find Billy’s remains, beneath a pile of incinerated wood.
It made no sense to go home without finding out the truth for herself. But it was a long lane, much of it steeply uphill once it got past the fields. The property was nearly two hundred acres, most of it too hilly to be usable as farmland, and the woods in back where Billy’s shed would be hidden stretched all the way east to Sam Ebbing’s property line.
The smart way to get back there—and to make a quick getaway if necessary—would be to drive, but the lane was rutted and when she walked a little way down it she saw that the deeper ruts were still soft from yesterday’s downpour. Her Toyota probably rode high enough to clear the ruts but it didn’t have four-wheel drive, and she didn’t want to get stuck halfway up the lane.
By tomorrow the mud should be dry, but she didn’t intend to hang around here another day. Maybe she could use the old tractor in the barn, providing it still worked and was filled with gas and she could find the key, but all three of those possibilities seemed unlikely.
If she had to search on foot she would need to put on better shoes than these moccasin slippers, and she would also need to build up some serious nerve. She didn’t like the idea of being back in that wilderness without a quick means of escape. What if that thing—or maybe something even worse—attacked her?
She was still musing on the problem as she returned to the house, her moccasins leaving dirt prints on the kitchen floor. She locked the back door and steeled her nerves to search the last room of the house, her parents’ bedroom. But when she stepped into the dining room she saw something that took her breath away.
The dining room chair was no longer propped against the bedroom doorknob.
The chair now sat squarely on the floor beside the bedroom door. Someone had moved it. Someone who was now probably in the bedroom.
She sank into one of the chairs beside the dining room table, the pitchfork trembling as she clutched it in both hands across her lap. Her hands were shaking and her knees too. The muscles in her legs felt like water, and she didn’t believe she would be able to stand up without falling.
She couldn’t remember if she had locked the front door after taking her suitcase to the car—maybe someone had gotten in that way. She knew she had left the back door unlocked while she was outside, and someone could have crept in without her noticing while she was looking at the lane.
What if it was Billy? Maybe he had returned; maybe he was sick or wounded and needed to lie down on the nearest bed. But that made no sense. Her parents’ bed was heaped with coats and boxes and an old TV set. If Billy was that sick, he would have collapsed on the sofa instead of going in there.
But it could be Billy.
She sat there for a minute or more before she could make her voice work. “Billy?” she said. “Billy, are you in there?”
Her voice sounded weak, and nobody answered it.
“Billy?” she called again, louder this time. “Billy, it’s Amy. Are you in there?”
No answer. Maybe he was unconscious, maybe even dying. It would be criminal to leave without looking.
She forced herself to her feet, her knees trembling and the pitchfork shaking in her hands. As she touched the doorknob she realized she was hyperventilating, and she forced herself to take several slow, deep breaths before she turned the knob and pulled the door open.
The boxes, coats, and TV set were no longer heaped on the bed. Now somebody was lying on the bed, completely covered with a blanket. It seemed to be a tall man, at least as tall as Billy, and she could tell by the shape of the blanket that he was lying on his side with his back to her. Whoever it was, he was alive—she saw the blanket rise and fall as he breathed.
“Billy?” she said quietly. “Billy, are you hurt?”
The person in the bed didn’t answer, and she asked the question again as she crept a few steps into the room, the pitchfork shaking but ready to stab. There was the smell of spoiled cabbage in the air.
She stood there for some while, softly calling Billy’s name and hearing only hoarse breathing as an answer. There was a faint gurgling with each exhalation, as if the person was wounded or very ill.
“Billy? Are you sick?” she asked.
She reached out with the fork, carefully snagged the top of the blanket with one of the tines, and then suddenly yanked it off the bed.
It was a man, but not Billy. He was tall, very skinny, and naked. His skin was paper white with spidery blue veins visible beneath it, and his whole emaciated body from the top of his head all the way down his skeletal back and bony legs was covered with sparse, thin strands of white hair about two or three inches long. The one visible ear was twice as big as normal and came to a sharp point at the top.
The man kept lying there, hoarsely breathing and gurgling as if he hadn’t noticed that the blanket had been snatched away. Amy began to back slowly out of the room, her fork held in both hands ready to strike.
She had made it almost to the doorway when suddenly, as quickly as a coiled snake springs, the man rolled over in bed and sat up. His face was human and not human. The bone-white skin was deeply wrinkled and, like the rest of his body, covered with thin strands of white hair. His wide mouth gaped wetly open like a senile old man’s, and a tumorous-looking gray tongue snaked out to lick long yellow teeth that seemed to be filed to sharp
points.
Worst of all were his eyes, tiny black pupils like deep punctures in irises red as blood. As they stared at her without blinking, she realized that tears were trickling out of the corners and wetting the hair on his face. She noticed he was doing something with his right hand, and looked down to see the long yellow nails of his skinny white fingers scratching a distended scrotum that stretched halfway down his thin legs to his bony knees.
Then he raised both hands and placed them together in front of his torso as if he was praying. In a voice hoarse and gurgling, he said, “Behold!”
He slowly pulled his hands apart, and between the palms a ball of thick black fog appeared and grew larger as he moved his hands farther apart. Suddenly he threw his arms wide open, and the black fog filled the room. The sunlight through the curtains was blotted out, and Amy could barely see the bed and the grotesque man sitting on it.
But she could see other things, things that weren’t actually in the room or at least shouldn’t be. It was as if a room from another world was transposed over her parent’s bedroom. The other room seemed to be a stone cavern, and she could feel its damp chill and smell the odors of mold and rotting flesh.
The other room was squirming with horrid creatures, some of them perched like gargoyles in cavities and alcoves in the stone wall, some hanging upside-down from stalactites like monstrous bats, some walking or slithering legless on the floor. Some looked like the thing she had seen in the closet last night, and some looked far worse.
One creature was human, or seemed to be. It was a naked woman lying on her back chained to a flat rock. Some of the hellish ogres were jabbing her bleeding flesh with short spears, and Amy could hear the woman’s cries not with her ears but as painful throbbing noises deep in her brain.
The man on the bed slowly brought his hands back together, and as he did so the black fog shrank until it was again a small ball that disappeared as he placed his palms together as if praying. Sunlight through the curtains lit the room again, and Amy saw tears flowing from the man’s red eyes.
“Beware and be gone!” he said hoarsely.
Amy backed out of the room, then turned and ran to the front door. Still clutching the fork in one hand, she fumbled for what seemed a long time with the lock of the front door, but at last she got it open.
As she backed out of the driveway, all the windows in the house looked intensely dark, as if the black fog now filled the whole house.
Chapter 5
When Amy reached the end of Ebbing Road she turned right instead of left. Left would take her back to Blackwood, and she didn’t want to go back there, not even to drive through it. Right would take her, after about twenty-five miles of pitted road, to a tiny town called Clarkton. When she got there she would use her GPS to find a route back to Columbus that didn’t go anywhere near Blackwood.
Her hands were still shaking and she was driving badly, veering more than once off the crumbling berm. She was too shaky and exhausted for the long drive home and would have to find a motel somewhere, preferably somewhere far from Blackwood.
She wondered if Police Chief Dilkens had planted the crying man in Billy’s house to frighten her out of town. He had scarcely looked human with his strange ears and red eyes and the hairs all over his body, but maybe he was the town freak, some deformed old man whom they had bribed with a bottle of whiskey to hang out at Billy’s house just in case she came around again.
That didn’t explain the trick with the black fog when he pulled his hands apart, and it didn’t explain the nightmare she had glimpsed through the fog. But there was only one explanation for that: the horrors of this place were pushing her close to a nervous breakdown. Her shaking hands were just one more piece of evidence.
An old tractor was lumbering toward her, its huge wheels taking up more than half the narrow road, and her car lost its footing and nearly slid into the weedy ditch as she swerved to avoid it.
I’m going nuts, she thought. I’m too nuts to drive.
A mile or so before Clarkton she saw a weathered billboard advertising vacation cabins one half mile from Ash Lake, reasonable rates, inquire at Slim’s Grocery. The grocery wasn’t hard to find since the town had only one street. It was a very small store with a skinny man behind the counter who grinned toothlessly at her when she asked him about a cabin.
“You alone?” he asked, scratching his chin through a long gray beard.
“No. My husband will be joining me later,” she said.
He glanced at her left hand, which had no wedding ring, and grinned and scratched his chin some more. “One bedroom or two?” he asked.
“One.”
“I can give you a real nice one at the end of the row,” he said. “It’s got a bathroom with a hot shower and a kitchen with a ‘frigerator and stove, everything you need for a good time ‘cept the good-looking man and the cold beer, and I sell that right here. The beer I mean.”
“Is it air conditioned?”
“Nope, but there’s screens in the windas,” he said. “My cabins is so comfortable nobody ever wants to leave, but if you don’t get the key back here by noon you’re gonna have to pay for an extra day.”
While she filled out the paperwork he said, “You gonna want to rent a boat?”
“Not right now, thank you.”
“Well, ya can’t catch no fish without a boat. My brother Smiley rents ‘em out right on the lake, and I can guarantee you his boats don’t leak. Here’s his card.”
“Thank you.” She slipped the card into her purse.
“You need any bait or tackle, Shorty’s Tackle and Bait is right there across the street.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Is Shorty your brother too?”
“He’s one of ‘em.”
“Can I see the cabin before I pay for it?” she asked.
“You pay for it and then you can go have a look at it, and if you ain’t happy with it you got half an hour to come back here and get a refund.”
“How long does it take to get there and back?” she asked.
“’Bout half an hour if ya hurry.”
“Is there a place to eat around here?” she asked.
“There’s Chubby’s Bar and Grill right down the street, best damn fried baloney sandwiches this side of heaven.”
“Is Chubby your brother too?” she asked.
“He’s one of ‘em.”
“Maybe I’ll just pick up something here,” she said.
She bought some lunch meat after checking the expiration date, some bread, cheese, mustard, potato chips, coffee, tomatoes and lettuce (“Picked fresh in my sister’s garden this morning”), and some disposable tableware. There were a few bottles of cheap white wine in the cooler beside the beer. She brought a bottle of cold Chablis to the counter and then decided to go back and get another, just in case.
As she was putting her groceries in the car, she noticed the sign on the store across the street: SHORTY’S TACKLE BAIT GUNS AMMO.
Guns.
The bearded man behind the counter looked a lot like Slim except shorter. “What’s your cheapest twelve-gauge?” she asked.
Shorty lifted a Mossberg pump off the wall and said, “This ain’t never been used, hardly. I sold it brand new to Ed Harley just last fall and then he dropped dead this very spring. There was some terrible talk ‘bout the circumstances.”
She filled out the paperwork for her background check, and while Shorty was phoning it in she looked around the shop. For some reason a pair of Bushnell binoculars caught her attention, even though she had no need for binoculars.
She paid for the gun and a box of shells. There was no box for the Mossberg, but this town didn’t seem like the sort of place where anybody would get upset seeing her carry a shotgun across the street to her car.
She followed the directions Slim had given her and soon found herself driving through a forest on a very rough narrow road. There were five cabins set thirty feet or more off the road and spread out a bit with enough space bet
ween them for plenty of weeds and a tree or two. Hers was at the end of the row with nothing but forest on one side.
The cabin was stifling and smelled like cat pee, so she opened the few windows as she inspected the rooms. The biggest one served as both living room and kitchenette with a worn-out sofa in the front half and a sink, stove, refrigerator, and a small wobbly table with two wobbly chairs in the back half. Luckily there was a coffee maker, though the carafe was chipped and stained. The bedroom barely had enough room for the bed and a small bureau. The mattress was saggy, but the sheets looked clean and fortunately there were two small screened windows to allow some draft.
Before fetching her suitcase and the groceries, she brought in the Mossberg, loaded the magazine, and felt considerably better as soon as she pumped one shell into the chamber. She fixed herself a sandwich with plenty of fresh lettuce on top, sliced one of the tomatoes with her pocket knife, and carried the plate and her potato chips to the bird-shit-spattered picnic table out back.
Amy had seen a car in front of only one of the cabins, the one at the far end of the row, and a family was preparing their supper behind it. The man was cooking wieners on a small charcoal grill while his wife was opening a great number of jars and cans and plastic containers on the table while constantly yelling at her five children, who were racing around quarreling and yelling even louder than their mother. Though the man was skinny, the children were fat and the mother was fatter still, and Amy wondered how all of them could fit in their small cabin.
The birds sounded cheerful, but she could scarcely hear them through the yelling. Though the family annoyed her, she was grateful that they were there. Even this distance from Blackwood, she didn’t feel safe.
By the time she was done eating, the mosquitoes were coming out of the woods. She went inside, doused herself with mosquito repellent, opened one of the bottles of wine, and brought it out to the table with a foam cup. The family was eating now, but the mother and children were just as noisy as before. Every once in a while the man would say, “Shut up, for Christ’s sake!” but nobody did.