The closet had been hot and stifling, but now that they were in the hallway, the heat, accosting him with undulating waves of hot air, was nearly unbearable.
They ran, and Oxford realized that they were now three: Jared, himself, and someone or something else. They ran away from the winding dual staircases, driving deeper into the recesses of Mrs. Wharfburn’s Estate. It was all he could do to resist the urge to look down into the foyer, to once again experience the horror that just simply could not be true—could not be real. Just seeing it once more, just viewing the absolute absurdity, the impossibility, would ease his mind—would reaffirm that this was all just a dream. Or a trip. A nasty, nasty trip.
Trip… my drugs.
The thought rang through his head like a flashlight piercing a moonless night.
My drugs!
Oxford dug his heels in and was nearly pulled onto his face by his brother’s hand that still gripped his coat. He caught himself, rooted his feet again, and brought the blade of his hand down across the front of his jacket, slicing Jared’s hand away.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jared shouted.
Then something hit Oxford in the back and he flew forward, narrowly missing his brother as he careened onto the hardwood. The image of the green-and-pink-striped beast flashed in his mind, and he opened his mouth wide in a silent scream.
“Fuck!”
Someone swore—someone who wasn’t his brother.
Sweat beaded on Oxford’s forehead, and he felt his diaphragm relax, his lungs finally filling with air—it wasn’t the abomination in the foyer.
“Oxford! What the fuck? Get up!”
The man, who Oxford now saw was tall and lean, grunted as he pulled himself to his feet.
“I need to go back,” Oxford huffed, rolling onto his stomach and then pressing himself to his feet.
He didn’t wait for a response, but instead turned with surprising speed and took two large bounds back the way they had come, back to the closet where he had felt the leather case fall and hit his knee.
Fingertips brushed the lining of his coat, but Oxford took another step and they fell away without finding purchase.
Come
He needed his drugs; he needed his H.
Cooooooooooome.
6.
No One Came Running as Alice thought they might have. In fact, after her scream died, the bathroom, and indeed the entire morgue of a house, went back to being eerily quiet. Her eyes, blurring in and out of focus, remained trained on the woman who lay in the tub. She was at least seventy years old, probably older, dressed in a neat blue dress. Her silver hair was still mostly tucked into a tight bun with only a small patch hanging out where her head rested against the back of the tub. Even if her lips hadn’t been blue and her face completely flaccid, Alice would have known she was dead based on the awkward way one wrist and an ankle hung out the edge of the tub.
It was Mama.
Alice felt like crying, which was odd given the fact she had never met the woman. It was all just so sad; the baby in the many layers, the young girl hopped up on—she glanced at the bottle in her hand—clonazepam, the almost catatonic wife, and the poor, handsome man, this Cody, wondering where his mother had gone.
Well, here she is.
Alice glanced at the woman in the tub again for a moment, and this time she did cry; not a wail, but a few silent tears that streaked down her frozen cheeks.
Fuck.
She breathed deeply and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then she closed the shower curtain, but not before grabbing the last pill from the edge of the tub. She took another deep breath, then put the pill on her tongue and swallowed.
Trying not to look in the direction of the dead woman in the tub, she quickly peed and then, with the drugs taking hold, she made her way back downstairs, slowly, one foot in front of the other.
Despite her scream, the scene downstairs remained unchanged, except that the young girl still clutched in Cody’s arms had finally stopped crying. Only when Alice was within a few feet of Cody did he turn from the window.
“What happened?” he asked, his tone so flat that she wondered if he would have reacted even if she told him the truth.
“Nothing,” she whispered.
Alice followed his gaze and stared out the window, her mind going blank. When she made up her mind to leave, it took considerable effort to peel her eyes away from the moonlight that reflected off the snow.
“I have to go,” she said softly.
When he didn’t answer, she thought maybe he hadn’t heard.
“I have to—”
He turned to her then, his eyes wild.
“Come.”
Alice took a step back, wishing she had stopped at two pills.
“What?”
“Come back. Don’t leave us here.”
Cody’s eyes had returned to normal: pale blue—sad.
Alice took another step away, confused, and stared at him for a moment.
“I will send the sheriff,” she said at last.
Her gaze fell on the girl on the couch, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out the container of pills. Following a split second of indignation, she opened it and pulled out two tabs and handed them to Cody. It was the least she could do.
“Only a half,” she instructed, purposefully not indicating for whom the dose was intended.
Then Alice walked briskly toward the entrance, put her outerwear back on, and left Mama Lawrence’s house without another word.
7.
It Only Dawned On Deputy Coggins that he had dropped his shotgun after one of the men, the skinny one that looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month, had unbelievably run back toward the thing—Sheriff Drew—with the greasy, glistening green flesh.
“In here,” the other man hissed, and Coggins followed him into a room roughly halfway down the long hallway. His mind was numb. It didn’t make sense that he had run into the house instead of back out into the cold—Come—but he had. It didn’t make sense that there was a hulking figure in the foyer of Mrs. Wharfburn’s house devouring—Jesus fucking Christ, swallowing—the man with the limp and the bloody forehead. Least of all, it didn’t make sense that the thing was—had been—Sheriff Drew. Sure, its face was stretched and torn at the corners of its mouth like a Muppet, and the pink skin was mostly ragged around the jaw and neck as if the thing had just ripped someone’s—Sheriff Drew’s—face off and wore it as its own, but it had been the sheriff; of that, even under these extreme circumstances, he was strangely certain. Bile rose in Coggins’ throat and he swallowed repeatedly, trying to reject his body’s attempts to empty itself again—he was already hollow.
“In here,” the man whispered again, and suddenly they were inside a large, well-lit bathroom. Too well lit, in fact, and Coggins’ eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the bright interior. It dawned on him that the house didn’t have power, and it took him a moment to realize that the moon was shining directly into the bathroom window like a giant celestial flashlight.
Deputy Coggins caught his reflection in the mirror and the sight startled him. He was pale and wet, the melted ice and snow having since mixed with beads of sweat that had formed inside the hot, dank interior of Mrs. Wharfburn’s Estate. There was a spray of dried blood from the dog that ran from his left temple to the outer corner of his lips, and he looked as if he had seen a ghost—and maybe, just maybe, he had.
Coggins had come all this way—driving in the ridiculous storm, wading through waist-high snow in snowshoes—to find Sheriff Drew, and now that he had found him, he wished to Christ that he hadn’t.
“What the fuck was that?” the man across from him suddenly shouted shrilly.
Coggins debated telling the man to be quiet, to not say a word, but then he remembered how the sheriff—the thing—hadn’t noticed him enter the room until his vomit had splashed off its leg. He also recalled the fat ears, so swollen and green that there was not a pinprick or even a hope of an ear hole.
<
br /> The fucking thing can’t hear.
The man who stood before him didn’t look too much unlike his own reflection: pale and scared. Even his chin and jacket, like Coggins’, were covered in drying vomit.
“What the fuck was that?” the man repeated. His eyes were wild and he was borderline hysterical. “Was it—was it—was it eating—?”
Coggins raised a hand, cursing himself again for having dropped the shotgun.
“Calm down,” he whispered.
“It was! It was eating the man, wasn’t it? Fucking eatin—”
The deputy took a step forward and repeated himself, louder this time, but the man ignored him.
“What the fuck is going on? How could it be—?” the man’s eyes bulged. “How could it be eating the man alive?”
Tears were streaming down his cheeks and his face was turning a deep purple.
“Calm the fuck down,” Coggins said forcefully, taking another large step forward.
Jared swallowed hard, but this time he took heed. As Coggins watched, the man began breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth—the classic move to avoid hyperventilating. When he spoke again, his voice was still shrill, but he had managed to regain enough control to temper the volume.
“What is that thing?”
Coggins’ hand instinctively dropped to his hip and grasped the butt of his pistol. But any comfort that the weight offered vanished when he thought of the green stripes peeking through the pink flesh, so hard and shiny, like a husk, and he was left wondering if his bullets would actually penetrate the beast. Then he saw Sheriff Drew’s demented face and wondered if he could actually do it; if he could actually shoot his boss—his friend—despite the abomination he had become. Sheriff Drew’s eyes, despite being larger than normal, the irises thickened and elongated at the tops and bottoms, were his eyes. And despite the fact that his mouth—Jesus, his mouth was the worst part, so impossibly wide—was split at the corners almost to his ears, they were his nose and his mouth.
“I don’t know,” Coggins lied. “I don’t know what it is. But it doesn’t matter—”
“We need to get my brother and then get the fuck out of here.”
The man’s eyes were wild again, whites showing on either sides of his pupils.
Brother?
Then he remembered the man he had fallen over in the hallway. That guy had been even skinnier than the one that stood before him now; just as scared and wild-eyed, perhaps even more so, and rail thin.
Deputy Coggins slowly shook his head, his wits returning. With the hand not holding his gun, he unzipped his jacket.
“No way,” he said. “We continue down the hall and see if we can get out the back way.”
The man’s face twisted; clearly, no matter how frightened or disturbed he was by what he had seen, it was not enough for him to abandon his kin.
“Listen,” the deputy continued, “we can come back for your brother. But there is no way that we are going back toward—”
—Sheriff Dana Drew.
“—that thing.”
Now it was the other man’s turn to shake his head.
“We have to get my brother first.”
Coggins swore under his breath. He had to give the man credit; even with him holding his pistol—drawn from its holster now—this man was defiant. He paused for a moment and listened. The house was eerily quiet, and he could thankfully no longer make out the disgusting slurping, suckling sound.
“What’s your name?” he asked, changing tactics.
The man’s eyebrows scrunched.
“Jared,” he said in a small voice.
“Good. My name is Deputy Bradley Coggins.”
Something changed in the man’s face then, as if his resolve or reluctance, or maybe both, finally left him. Maybe it had been Deputy Coggins’ authoritative approach, or maybe it was something else; it was is if this Jared had been in control for some time, not out of desire but out of necessity, and now that Coggins was here it was a weight off his shoulders. A big weight. A fucking meteor-sized weight.
“We should go deeper into the house, see if we can find another way out. Then we can think about getting your brother.”
Coggins saw an image of the man with the busted knee hurling himself through the snow with no concern for the cold or his own wellbeing, and he wondered if Jared’s brother hadn’t fallen under the same spell.
As if on cue, he heard the voice in his head again, the airy, wind-like whisper that sounded mysteriously like “Come”.
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, “I’m fucking here. I came.”
Remembering that Jared was still standing in front of him, he looked up in time to catch the last trace of a furrowed brow and sidelong glance.
“What about that?” the man asked, indicating the gun that Coggins now held in his left hand.
Coggins looked down at the piece, and despite the comforting weight, it looked pitifully small. The thing’s green—skin? Scales? Armor?—patches had been so hard and shiny that they had seemed iridescent. Again he wondered if this nine millimeter would even make a dent; Coggins didn’t know, so he said as much.
“That… that thing looked pretty hard. Now the shotgun...” Coggins let the words and thought trail off. Problem was, he didn’t have the shotgun, because he had dropped the shotgun.
“I won’t leave him,” Jared said suddenly,
Deputy Coggins stared at the man’s sunken eyes. When Jared didn’t waver, he relented and nodded. Relinquished control or not, this man would not budge on this.
We’ll get your brother, he thought, if that thing doesn’t get him first.
8.
It’s The Day After Christmas.
The thought flew through Oxford’s head like a clumsy, low-flying seagull.
It’s the day after Christmas, and I have yet to unwrap all of my presents.
Who cares? thought another part of him. The only gift that mattered was there, right in front of him, lying on the floor just inside the closet, lonely and ashamed. Like a starving man lunging for the last morsel of bread, Oxford leapt at the case and picked it up, caressing it once before tucking it safely back into the front of his coat. Despite the heat, he zipped his inner jacket all the way up to his neck, leaving the outer layer unbuttoned.
No way I’m going to drop you again.
Oxford exited the closet and made his way into the hallway. He had only taken two steps in the direction his brother and the other man had fled before he heard it: a deep, bass-like rumble coming from just below where he stood. Oxford slowly turned on his heels, and now that he had his drugs again, his mind was free to remember.
Please, no, was all he could think as his gaze unwittingly lowered.
The green and pink beast was still downstairs in the foyer, but this time it looked more green than pink. The naked man was almost completely gone now; all that remained were his shins and the bottoms of two dirty feet protruding from the thing’s mouth, somehow stacked on top of one another. The thing moved its head slightly, tilting it forward and then snapping it back a quarter of an inch, and to Oxford’s horror the feet hanging out from the gaping hole receded a few inches. It was at that moment that he realized that the thing was staring at him; those large, bloated eyes were trained on him. Yet despite their bulge, they seemed almost human.
Oxford, unable to look away, stared into those dark eyes.
“Why?”
He shuddered. The eyes were green, warped, and swollen, but oddly familiar.
“Why, Oxford?”
They were his mother’s eyes.
“Why did you let me down again, Oxford? We did everything for you.”
Despite the sweat dripping down his forehead, he froze, and even his breathing stopped; had it been possible for him to force his heart to stop beating, he would have done it.
“Oxforrrrd. Oxxxxfoooooooorrrrrrrd.”
As he watched, the thing hitched again, but this time the man did not move further into the
beast’s mouth; instead, Oxford saw movement in the thing’s horribly distended and now almost completely green belly. The impression of a hand, like an overripe fetus pressing from inside its mother’s womb, became visible. Then, as that depression faded, another hand appeared. A face came into view next, just the outline of a round head at first, then a nose pressed out from beneath the thick green scales. The head rotated and Oxford made out deep indentations where its eyes were. A mouth. He saw a mouth spread wide in a gigantic ‘o’ shape, and Oxford pissed himself.
The rumbling returned, and it took Oxford another minute of paralysis before he finally figured out what the sound was: the thing was laughing. The fucking thing was laughing at him.
Come
The word echoed in his head, loud and clear.
Something broke inside Oxford and he started to cry.
Mama! Mama, I’m so sorry.
Oxford peeled his eyes from the abomination and ran, hot urine tracing lines down the inside of both his legs.
Chapter Eight
H
1.
After The Strange Woman with the black hair left—and admittedly even when she had still been there—Cody’s mind was a soupy, muddled mess. Everything was just so confusing, and the cold and dark only added to his numbness. Had his brothers been here? He supposed they had been, they had to have been; it was Christmas, after all, and they had all decided to head north to find a quiet place to mourn the passing of their father. They had been here, but where had they gone?
How long has it been since I’ve had something to drink?
His thoughts jumped around erratically, unable to focus on any one idea. At times, it felt as if there was someone else in his head, guiding him, telling him what to think.
Twenty-four hours? Seventy-two hours?
It was impossible to know—time, like the air and snow, had frozen.
Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3) Page 20