‘Down the hall on your left,’ he said, pointing the way. He looked at the clock, looked at himself. ‘I’m gonna put on some pants.’
His alarm was sounding by the time he got back to his room upstairs. Ben threw on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, came back down again, and got the coffee going. He was padding around the kitchen in his moccasins when the plumbing rattled in the old lathe and plaster walls. Abe returned from the bathroom, her nose and cheeks still flushed from the chill outside. She looked much relieved.
‘A thousand thanks, sir. That coffee smells wonderful.’
‘Care for a cup?’
‘I should get out of your hair. You have war soon.’
How the hell did I let myself get talked into that, anyway? he thought, taking two heavy white mugs down from the cupboard. ‘Sun’s not up for an hour. And I made a whole pot.’
‘In that case, yes, pretty please.’
‘How do you like it?’
She took a seat at the kitchen table, stripping off the fleece earband she’d worn on the way in. ‘Strong and black. Just like my fiancé.’
‘You’re engaged.’ Ben filled her cup on the table in front of her, ignoring a quick but undeniable flutter of disappointment.
‘Ha – not really. I was just curious to see how you reacted. Although I did used to be married.’ She took her first careful sip of coffee, sighed in approval, then warmed her hands around the thick ceramic. ‘It didn’t last.’
‘You either, huh?’ Ben raised his own mug in solidarity. ‘What was his problem?’
‘Nothing. He was pretty great, actually. It was me who couldn’t grow up.’
‘You either, huh?’
‘By the way, did you know that there are about a dozen fairly hardcore-looking cats circling around your porch out there?’
He took a quick peek out the window. Still too dark to see much, but he knew they’d be there. ‘One of these days they’ll finally get in the house while I’m sleeping,’ he said. ‘Back in a minute. Help yourself to more coffee.’
He excused himself down the back stairway, where he kept a fifty-pound bag of dry Purina, then went out to throw some food in the pan. He noted a paper-thin shard of ice floating in the old ice cream bucket he used as a water dish and wondered if the first hard frost of the season had finally arrived during the night. He could smell wood smoke, saw a flicker of pale orange out in the trees. First Floor IT had managed to keep the fire going, at least. Ben imagined they’d needed it.
He came back inside, rubbing his hands together, and found Anabeth right where he’d left her, sitting at the table with her coffee.
She was paging through the Wasserman scrapbook.
‘Oh,’ he said, louder than he’d intended, stepping over too quickly. ‘That’s—’
‘None of my damned business.’ She lifted her hands away from the book as if it had squirmed. ‘I’m so sorry. Way too nosy. Character flaw.’
‘No big deal.’ He collected the book from the table just the same – closed it, banded it, tossed it on the counter behind him. ‘Just a bunch of old news.’
‘Sure. I have plenty of that myself.’
He joined her at the table. They exchanged high-level overviews on marriage break-ups: hers (inevitable, best for everybody), and his (devastatingly painful, financially apocalyptic); about places they’d worked previously (her, all over; him, nowhere special); about outside interests (Abe: meeting new people, reading old books. Ben: building guitars, thinking about building guitars). They didn’t get especially deep or private, not at half-past six in the morning, but he did enjoy chitchatting with her, maybe more than he’d enjoyed talking to anyone in recent memory. Before he knew it, the window over the sink faded in with a dim view of the sheltered belt in the first light of dawn.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘time to get my battle face on. Thanks again for the java, this was nice. I love your place out here. See you in the trenches?’
He rose with her. ‘Guess I should tag along before I lose my ambition.’
She looked him up and down, appraising the red checkered flannel and faded denim he’d dressed himself in. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’
‘And a jacket.’ He nodded toward his Carhartt as he stooped to pull on his boots. ‘What’s wrong? Too fancy?’
‘You don’t have, like, a hunting coat? Something that says stealth?’
Ben didn’t hunt. He’d never possessed an interest. He kept an old shotgun in the back stairway, but that was mostly for scaring off coyotes; they came up to eat out of the cat pan sometimes, particularly when the cats were around to sweeten the deal. ‘I guess I must be more of an indoors kid at heart.’
She chuckled, shaking her head. ‘Your ass is so grass. Come on, then – I’ll try to watch your six. No promises.’
He deposited their empty mugs in the sink and followed her out the door. A cold, sunny morning awaited them, everything tipped in frost, ropes of mist still hanging near the ground. On their way across the porch, Abe reached down and – to his utter amazement – casually tousled the chin of the one-eyed feral tom by the food pan as if he were a lazy house cat. Ben had tried to touch that cat once and it almost ripped his face off.
They heard the sound of distant laughter then, followed by shouting. Followed by a sudden eruption of semi-automatic, air-powered gunfire out in the trees: thocka-thocka-thocka.
‘I guess the revolution started without us,’ Ben said.
Abe laughed. ‘Sounds like it. We’d better hurry.’
Had we? Ben thought, then straightened with alarm as the mechanical clack of paintball guns ceased abruptly, and the sound of laughter turned to screams.
NINE
For the rest of his life, Ben Middleton would cope with recurring nightmares about the next ten minutes. Although even as those minutes unfolded – seemingly an hour at a time – he couldn’t quite seem to convince himself that he wasn’t dreaming already. Because nothing about what he saw, as he and Anabeth crashed into the clearing at a dead sprint, stood to any kind of waking reason he’d experienced in his time on earth thus far.
Amidst the jackstraw rubble of the ruined campsite stood a hulking, man-shaped thing. The unclothed figure had no face. No genitals. No immediately distinguishing features at all, except for its undeniable stench, which Ben picked up on the breeze even at fifty paces. It was the smell of an open sewer pipe, of week-old garbage, the sulfurous tinge of freshly struck matches.
The smell of corruption.
Presently, this interloper was encircled by a clutch of camo-clad, twenty-something network administrators with GoPro cameras strapped to their heads, all of them screaming, shooting at the thing with paintballs. One of them – Gordon Frerking, Ben guessed by his shape – waved a stick of flaming wood from the campfire.
Ben almost laughed, finally understanding that he was the victim of the most elaborate prank he’d ever seen: this character who called himself ‘Reuben Wasserman’ was actually some old college buddy to one of these idiots. They’d called him in as payback for the time Ben had taped down all the hook buttons on their desk phones at work.
A bit of quick visual math revealed that somebody was missing from the group, which meant that one of them – probably Jeeter, Ben surmised, judging by the remaining sizes and shapes of the battle-armored silhouettes now putting on a show for him – was zipped inside a rubber monster suit. (A rubber monster suit that smelled like it had been dipped in shit, but a rubber monster suit nonetheless. Where on earth had they gotten such a thing?) In that passing, too-brief moment, he actually felt better than he had all week.
But then he noticed the way the paint splotches began to shift across the thing’s dull, clay-colored surface, the various colors blending together in a hypnotic swirl. The effect was otherworldly. Vaguely … celestial. Like nothing you could rent from a costume shop.
Ben stood there, transfixed by this strange aurora glissading across the thing’s broad back. He found that he couldn’t look
away. Could not, in fact, seem to muster the will to try.
Little by little he became aware of somebody screaming his name from the fuzzy periphery. Only then did he manage to wrench his gaze toward all the shouting. In doing so, Ben finally pinpointed the whereabouts of their missing group member. It was the first time he noticed Ajeet Mallipudi’s motionless body in the grass at the thing’s feet.
Jeeter. His heart skipped a beat. Then he finally understood.
This wasn’t a joke. The guys weren’t playing a game.
Reuben Wasserman was no imposter. He wasn’t crazy, either.
His golem was real.
And it had finally arrived.
The creature turned slowly toward Ben, as if sensing his presence. Ben felt his blood run cold. The swirling colors disappeared instantly, as if the thing had sucked them up through its … skin? Meanwhile, two eerie green slots appeared in the creature’s crude, blank face.
Now it had eyes. When those eyes fixated on Ben, he felt it like an impact. All the strength ran out of his legs, and he stood like a prey animal, frozen in place. He couldn’t make himself move.
The creature charged.
Beside him, Abe shrieked at the top of her lungs. Ben glanced and saw her moving past him, toward the creature, armed with a rock the size of her fist. Without thinking he intercepted her, shoving her out of the way just as she hurled the stone, pushing her as far out of the creature’s path as he could. Abe tripped and fell. Her rock sailed ineffectually over the onrushing monstrosity, skittering away somewhere in the trees.
The creature kept coming, straight toward Ben alone. The impact of its loping footfalls shook leaves from the nearest trees. Ben could feel the ground trembling beneath his feet as the creature cut the distance between them in half. He could hear his compatriots from First Floor IT screaming something at him, saw them waving their arms wildly. It took him a precious, costly moment before he finally understood that they were begging him to run.
He pulled himself together and complied, turning and sprinting back the way he and Abe had come. He thought of the twelve-gauge in the back stairway. Had he ever remembered to pick up a new box of shells for winter? He could feel the impact tremors growing in amplitude behind him and wondered if he’d even make it in time. Ben dared not look behind him: he could smell Wasserman’s creature gaining ground.
Amidst the terrified shouts from the others, his mind became a clanging foundry of protests: This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. This is not true. An actual monster had not slept in the dirt for a century and a half, then followed Bloody Bill’s bloodline all the way here.
And yet it was inside this single, soul-chilling realization that Ben found the strength to ignore his burning lungs and run faster. He stopped asking questions. Stopped hearing the terrified shouts now receding into the background. In that moment, he even stopped worrying for poor Jeeter.
From that point on, even as the ground trembled at his heels, Ben could think only of a family tree, hand-marked on parchment, with a single name missing from the list. The next name after Ben’s in Bloody Bill’s lineage:
Charley.
TEN
Ben hit the back door amidst a spreading pool of shadow. Something in that beat of sudden silence – a momentary, breathless gap in which the thunderous sound of the creature’s pursuit disappeared, replaced by the rustle of dry leaves in the breeze – told him what he could have lived happily not knowing, if perhaps not lived for very long. Wasserman’s creature had closed the final distance between them by launching itself into the air. Ben looked up at the hulking silhouette plummeting toward him from above, blotting out the low morning sun. The puddle of shadow around his feet grew rapidly larger. It seemed to generate its own magnetic hum.
He yanked open the screen door and shoved into the cramped back stairway by the skin of his ass, throwing the heavier inner door closed again behind him. The earth beyond seemed to shatter, rattling the whole house with the force of an impact somewhere between crashing jetliner and fallen asteroid.
Ben snatched the Mossberg from its perch across the coat hooks. Had he kept the gun loaded? Did the red dot mean the safety was off or on? He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t think. Sheer panic blotted higher thought, leaving only opposing base instincts: fight or flight.
Easy answer.
He only wished he hadn’t paused to grab some ammo first. No sooner did his hand close over the crisp, waxy new box of shells on the corner shelf than both the outer doors and their frames exploded inward, driving him against the far wall, strafing him with broken glass, twisted aluminum, and jagged splinters of broken lumber. A piece of something banged off his forehead, setting off sparks in his brain, creating a hot numb place above his right eye. Which now had blood running into it.
He wiped with his forearm and kicked with his boots and plowed mindlessly through the debris, bolting up the four steps leading into the kitchen, perhaps two steps ahead of what sounded like a thrashing Clydesdale trapped in a coat closet behind him. He made the kitchen level just as an even louder crack of wood splintered directly over his shoulder, prickling his skin from the base of his spine to the top of his scalp. He spun toward what was coming, unable to help himself …
… just in time to witness the creaky old steps collapsing beneath the weight of Wasserman’s creature.
Ben found himself looking down into the thing’s grim blank of a face – close enough to see fragments of twigs and flecks of leaves embedded in the clay. Those false, eerie green eyes never wavered from their target even as the creature plunged out of sight, dragged by its own mass down through the short box of stairs into the cellar below.
Ben’s legs tingled. His knees loosened. Holy shit, what a break, he thought, even as a more forceful voice in his head screamed: Move, dummy!
He raced to the sink, dumping the box of shells in with the dirty coffee mugs. Shaking with fear and adrenaline, he fumbled a shell at a time into the pump gun’s magazine tube, shoving them home with his thumb, one after another. The shells he dropped all hit the kitchen floor and rolled in the same direction, following the almost-imperceptible kilter of the old house.
The next moment brought an ear-splitting, mind-erasing clap of thunder as the kitchen floor … erupted. Up came the creature in a cloud of dust and grit like a warhead from an underground silo, pinpointing the general region of the floor the rolling shells had crossed as they piled up against the far baseboard.
Water sprayed. Chairs overturned. The solid oak kitchen table slid toward him like an oversized shuffleboard puck on stilts, slamming Ben back against the counter behind him. He stood frozen, pinned just below the hips, disoriented by sensory overload. Again the voice in his head shouted at him to move.
But he could only watch, paralyzed, as the creature pulled itself the rest of the way up through the jagged hole in the floor. What rough beast, Ben thought crazily, snippets of some long-forgotten high school poetry assignment sparking through his short-circuiting mind, its hour come round at last. Broken floor joists poked up and out of the hole like fractured ribs. Severed piping spouted water in an arterial gush. Even amidst the destruction, the creature’s unearthly green eyes achieved target lock once again.
And now it stood, drawing itself up to its massive full height, facing Ben across the kitchen table. The ambient temperature in the kitchen seemed to drop ten degrees. The smell of rotting sewage smeared away the lingering aroma of freshly brewed coffee.
The creature moved its arm. Ben heard an airy whickering sound followed by a hollow, quivering thonk an inch from his head.
An arrow – an arrow? – had lodged itself in the cupboard door so close to his face that the clay-caked fletching tickled his ear.
He racked the twelve-gauge (this thing has arrows?) and fired from the hip (does it have any more??), blowing a divot the size of a soccer ball in the thing’s midsection. The creature looked down at itself.
Ben pumped and fired again, pumped and fired
again, the roar of the shotgun deafening in the close quarters of the kitchen. Each direct hit dug a new chunk from the creature, lacing the air with the sharp tang of burnt powder.
But the cumulative effect seemed negligible. It was like shooting a riverbank: visible damage, easily absorbed. And with each blast, the creature’s eyes seemed to illuminate, pulsing a bright, eldritch green. The divots filled in and smoothed themselves over almost as fast as Ben could make new ones.
It’s fixing itself, he thought, snugging the buttstock against his shoulder, pumping and firing until the trigger went click. He went for the head. For those eyes.
On the last round he managed to fire before the shotgun went dead in his hands, the creature spun away as if slapped. When it turned back to face him again, the eyes were gone.
Ben’s spirits soared with triumph. Yes! The thing’s blank face was now a ragged crater. A punch-hole in a mud pie. Gotcha, you reeking freak. Still pinned against the counter, he suppressed the urge to blow across the barrel of the Mossberg like a movie cowboy as he waited for the creature to fall. You don’t mess with First Floor IT.
But the creature remained standing. While Ben watched, this last gaping wound filled itself in like all the others. The blank face resumed its shape. A pair of slits opened in the reforming clay like new wounds. The green eyes resurfaced …
… and found him again.
You gotta be kidding, Ben thought, adrenaline giving way to uprising doom as the creature moved its arm once more, this time in a whip-like gesture – a man flicking water from his fingertips. Ben ducked and covered instinctively, feeling the peppery sting of number four buckshot pellets puncturing the tough canvas of his work jacket, burrowing like red-hot insects through soft flannel and into the skin of his arm, his shoulder, his upper back and neck.
Feeling trickles of new blood down his ribs, he ditched the twelve-gauge and dropped down low and shoved the massive old table toward the creature like a battering shield. The creature raised one blocky arm and pulverized the table to kindling, but Ben was already in full retreat, pounding out through the same door he and Anabeth had used not ten minutes prior to this. He felt a jaw-rattling thud as a splintered table leg sank into the door frame beside him like a heavy spear.
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