When he was done taking snapshots of four model-quality girls—the Watersford Academy didn’t seem to permit ugly girls anywhere near their hallowed halls—he moved over and flashed his best smile at Beth. “Ready to head over to the cinema?”
Erika smiled at him with such intensity that he forgot all about Beth until she spoke again. Even thinking about the girl would be illegal when Rob turned eighteen, but until then, he could have a party. He could think of a lot worse ways to spend his time than wrestling with her.
“Are you listening to me, Rob?” Beth’s voice sounded more amused than annoyed, but there was an edge.
“Hunh?” He looked at her where she was standing, her hands on her hips. “Oh. Sorry. Must have zoned.”
“Yeah. Right.” She rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling. “I said let’s go. I have to be back here in two hours.”
“Oh, well it shouldn’t take that long.”
Beth moved closer, shaking her head slightly. “I know, dippy. I was thinking you might like a behind-the-scenes tour.”
Erika laughed while Rob actually blushed. He liked her laugh. It was confident and sultry. “Well, hell, why don’t we get on our way?”
Beth put her arm around his, and started tugging. Erika looked at him and mouthed the words “Catch you later.”
He hoped so. He really, really hoped so. He was about to have a make out session with Beth Chambers, who was, frankly, very good at the fine art of necking, but all he could think about was the idea of meeting up with Erika somewhere for a little up close and personal fun time.
Later that night, he got his wish in a way he never expected.
In the meantime, he drove Beth to the cinema, denying any attraction to Erika the entire time. To prove his point, he took several more pictures of Beth when they got there, enjoying the show she gave him the entire time. Had she actually shown anymore flesh, he could have sold the pictures to Penthouse.
She walked him through each room of the haunted house they’d built, and he had to admit he was wowed. The money to actually buy or build all of the props came from private donations, which translated into the pockets of the parents who could afford the tuition into Watersford for their kids in the first place. There were a few exceptions but Rob would have bet his left testicle that most of the stuff there was of the caliber found in professional haunted houses.
“I gotta say, I’m impressed.” He meant the words, but added a little emphasis to make her feel good about it. She smiled and walked toward the back of the cinema, where the stairs led up to the projection booths that hadn’t shown a movie in over five years.
“You have to come up here to see the really good stuff. This is where we’re hiding the final surprise until the end of the night on Halloween.”
He nodded and licked his lips. No one had ever put anything in the projection booth before, but he’d heard a few of the guys at school talk about how it was just about the perfect place for a serious grope and fondle session. His heart beat faster in anticipation. She had said she had two hours, after all. Maybe she had something special planned.
He followed Beth into the projection room, which had long since been cleared of all of the equipment and left empty. The room was dark, but there was a single lamp that she turned on. The lamp was on the floor and she made a show of getting down on all fours for him before reaching out to turn the switch. No fool, he took full advantage and enjoyed her performance. He was so busy watching the way her ass moved under her skirt that he forgot all about everything else in the room.
That changed quickly once the light spilled through the enclosed space. It was hard to miss the wet, bloody mass that loomed against one wall, taller than he was and as wide as a small car. Thick ropes of bloodied, raw flesh drew away from the central cocoon-like shape, stretched out to touch the walls where they adhered as if glued. Darker red viscera dripped from the anchoring strands, wetly dripping down in a thin rain of blood. The central growth was ribboned with veins and arteries that pumped steadily, pulsing to a rhythm that was off-kilter and not quite as steady as the beating of a regular heart.
“Shit!” Rob stepped back, his eyes wide in his head. Any thought of how nicely Beth bent over was erased by the thing in front of her. There was a small part of his brain that wondered why the monstrosity didn’t reek of decay, but in comparison to the revulsion he felt, the curiosity was minor. “What the hell is that thing?” His voice shook and went up half an octave as he studied it.
Beth laughed lightly as she stood up, wiping the dust from her knees. “That’s the centerpiece. Isn’t it sweet?”
Rob looked away from the thing long enough to see the amusement on Beth’s face. “Sweet isn’t really the word I was thinking of. Sick, disgusting, putrid, those all work better.”
“Yeah, like I said. Sweet.”
“So, what’s it supposed to be?”
“A giant spider egg. At the very end, when everyone’s in the theater, it hatches.”
“What comes out?”
“Duh.” She rolled her eyes. “Giant spiders?”
He nodded, still repulsed. “If they look half as freaky as this thing, you’ll give someone a heart attack.”
Beth grinned again, nodding. “That’s pretty much the idea.”
He lifted his camera and took several pictures from different angles, impressed by the realism. Disgusted, but impressed. Halloween was about scary stuff? Yep. This should be a doozy.
He was almost ready to ask more questions when Beth pulled a fast one and started unbuttoning her white school blouse, revealing more of her chest than he’d imagined he would see. She was a year younger than him, but decidedly well-endowed. He managed not to drool, but it wasn’t easy.
Beth let her blouse fall to the ground and moved in like a shark on fresh prey. Rob didn’t complain in the least, and even if he’d wanted to, his mouth was busy wrestling with her tongue and lips a second after that. He’d wanted to ask her something, but whatever it was, it could wait. His hands moved over her hips and butt and rather quickly scuttled up to her bra, trying to figure out the best way to achieve easy access.
His hand finally managed to slip into the cup of her bra and run across her bare flesh, the contact so divine he thought his hand would catch fire. Beth’s pelvis ground slowly against his groin, and he moaned into her mouth as one of her long legs lifted and ran slowly up his left leg. When it seemed that the only thing between them was his jeans and the underwear under her skirt, he felt her foot run from the middle of the back of his thigh down to the back of his knee. Her hand touched his crotch and his erection practically leapt at the contact.
That was when she hooked her foot hard against the crook of his knee and he felt his leg buckle under him. He started to make a sound of protest when her teeth suddenly gnashed down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood. The pain was a solar flare, and distracted him long enough for her to push him hard.
Rob stumbled backward and fell, fully expecting to hit the bare concrete floor. It didn’t happen. Instead he landed against the throbbing thing against the wall. She’d managed to maneuver him in a half-circle while he was distracted and pushed him against the thing that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the academy’s Halloween party.
“Owww! Thyit, Bet! Wha tha fug is wong with you?” Or, translated from mangled tongue: Oww! Shit, Beth! What the fuck is wrong with you? “You bit my tongue!”
Beth looked at him, her eyes smoldering with lust. The blood from his mouth gave her smile a darker crimson appearance than usual. “Nothing personal, Robbie. It’s just that she needs to feed.”
Who needs to feed? He blinked, the pain in his mouth almost forgotten as he turned to see what Beth was talking about, his throat tightening and his heartbeat doubling in tempo. The thing he was leaning against shifted, almost knocking him away from his perch against it. He wished he could find the strength to move faster, but all of the energy seemed to have leeched out his body around the same time he realize
d that something within what was supposed to be a prop was alive and eager to know him better.
Rob forced his hands against the slick, warm surface of the chrysalis, pushing with all the strength he could muster. The room, lit only by a bare 75-watt bulb, seemed too bright and the taste of his own blood in his mouth was almost enough to make him gag. His hands managed not to slip and he pushed hard, managing at last to get his balance back and to push off from the pulsing mass that had just recently become the scariest shape he’d ever seen.
Rob pivoted on one shaky foot and faced the thing, nearly mesmerized by the glistening surface the color of freshly torn flesh. He started to step back and knew in an instant that he’d made a mistake. Beth hit him hard, her full body weight in the push that sent him face forward toward the massive thing that shivered as if eagerly awaiting his touch. His mind was lost in exactly two thoughts: first, I think it’s going to eat me, God help me! And also, Damn, I really thought I was gonna score with Beth.
An opening formed in front of him, nearly splitting the mass in half as it blossomed into a dark pit that reeked worse than the corpse he’d filmed last summer, the one that had been out in the woods for almost two weeks before they found it. He opened his mouth to scream and the sound was cut off before it could truly begin as a powerful, withered hand slapped itself across his lips, splitting them with the brutal strength that the nearly skeletal, spidery fingers possessed.
“Shhhh, child.” The voice was as withered as the hand it used on his mouth. Dry and ancient, but powerful. “I have need of you, but I promise I won’t make you suffer.”
Behind him, he heard Beth panting, a surprisingly erotic sound, not unlike the noises she’d made when they were dry humping against each other at her party only a few nights earlier. He tried to turn his head, to get one last look at the girl who’d betrayed him, but the grip that held his mouth closed forced him to face into the darkness that drew him closer.
Almost more than anything else, he wished he could look at Beth one last time, look at the face of a pretty girl who had betrayed him, because damned near anything was better than looking into the face in that darkness. The eyes that stared into his own burned with a lust that made his own desires from a few minutes ago pale in comparison. And oh, how he wished that the thing in front of him was not real.
Thin, hard lips parted into a grin and he saw the teeth of a monster as they suddenly lunged forward, catching his left cheek between them as they snapped together with enough force to break through skin and bone alike.
Part of him was grateful for the darkness that hid the creature from him as he was drawn into the protective shell around the withered, demonic thing. Most of him was busy lamenting that the voice of the creature had lied. The creature made him suffer. But even only a few feet away, on the other side of the heavy, fleshy womb he found himself in, Beth heard nothing.
Beth merely watched as the struggles started and then faded down to the usual pulsing of her new master’s heart. She licked her lips, tasting Rob’s blood as it was wiped on her tongue. Beth got herself redressed, taking her time. Most of what had been Rob Harris had stopped struggling by the time she left. But somewhere within the thing she walked away from, what remained was still trying to scream.
VI
Alan Treacher sat in the small holding cell, his face pale and shaky, his hair a mess, and his clothes even worse. Mostly the man just sat on his cot and rocked himself back and forth, staring at the wall.
If he was expecting sympathy from Craig Gallagher, he was wasting his time. Craig was done sympathizing. Either Treacher was a liar in desperate need of a cover story or he had gone completely out of his head. Oh, there was a small voice in the back of Craig’s skull that said the story needed to be researched, but it was tiny, really. Downright miniscule.
There was no way in Hell that the three sons of Hattie the witch were real and planning to resurrect their mother. Far more likely that Treacher—a man Craig knew dabbled more than a little with psychotropic drugs—was trying to cover up that he’d managed to lose or sell evidence in an ongoing crime investigation, or he’d lost his marbles, maybe because of grief over the death of Douglas Habersham.
He leaned back in his seat and looked at the man’s rocking form, reflecting on what he’d been rambling earlier.
He read the transcript he’d just finished typing, mouthing the words as he read them.
Treacher had confessed to nothing but being a semi-willing pawn in a mystery that allegedly wasn’t going to be solved with pleasant results.
Craig had asked him what he knew about the paperwork. Alan had responded. “The documents, the historical papers were taken by the Pumpkin Man. I know that sounds crazy, Craig, but it’s true. The children of Alvina Bathory, the woman Douglas Habersham called Hattie, are alive and well and intend to bring her back to life.”
“My ass.” It wasn’t exactly a fair response, maybe, but it’s what came to mind. Treacher looked like he’d been slapped across the face. Craig didn’t care. He’d had enough of the man out in the woods of the Hollow. He didn’t much feel in the mood for listening to ravings when he was still looking for six missing teenagers. “I can have Doc Harris here and taking blood for drug screenings in around ten minutes, Alan, so cut the crap and tell me what’s really going on.”
“What I just told you is the truth, Craig! I saw one of them. I saw Mister Sticks, the Pumpkin Man, and he told me everything.” The sad part was he didn’t think the man was kidding. Treacher really did believe what he was saying.
“Well, I can see how you might have run across a scarecrow here or there, but I don’t really think you’ve been talking with a figment of the town’s imagination.”
“A ‘figment of the town’s imagination’ didn’t give me the papers.”
“No. I gave you the papers, because I thought you were a professional and that I could trust you.” He shook his head, his face registering his disgust at the wild-eyed man in front of him. “I thought I was dealing with a rational man, not a loser so desperate to get away with theft that he’d make up a dozen stories to cover his ass.”
“I told you, the witch’s son gave them to me.” Treacher was whining. He hated to hear a grown man whine.
“Yeah, and there’s not the smallest chance you just changed your mind and picked them up from where you’d hidden them.” He rubbed his fingers over his temples, in an attempt to massage away the headache he had building.
“Craig, why would I make up something like this?”
“I don’t know, Alan.” He heard the frustration in his own voice and figured he was about two minutes from walking into the jail cell and cracking his nightstick across Treacher’s thick skull. Not really the way he was supposed to think, but he was rapidly losing all pretenses of patience. “Look, why don’t we concentrate on something else, like where you hid the kids away.”
Alan made a rude noise and stood up, his pinched face looking exasperated and his demeanor saying he wanted to swing at Craig almost as much as Craig wanted to swing at him. “I told you, damn it, I don’t know about any missing kids.”
“And you didn’t know where the papers had gone to, and you were just sitting at home when they vanished. Enough already, Alan. Give me some answers and I won’t have to throw the book at you. Keep yanking my chain and I’ll make sure I get you on every charge I can think of and make up more of them if I have to.”
“The one they call the Pumpkin Man, it was him. He’s the one that told me everything.”
“Shit. Okay, Alan. Fine. Why would he suddenly tell you everything about what he and his brothers are doing to bring their mother back to life? Answer me that. Why would a monster from a fairy tale tell you everything about what it wants to do to this town instead of just killing you?” He ran his fingers across his scalp and the thin, crew cut hair there. “Answer me that at least.”
Alan Treacher’s calm, soft answer scared him. The words were barely above a whisper, and they unsettled h
im on many, many levels. “He said he wants someone to take notes, for posterity.” Alan looked at him and blinked slowly. “I think he wants someone to get his perspective on what happens when his mother comes back from the grave.”
VII
Josh Kinder came back from the long series of tests at the hospital at a little after sunset. His day had been spent with a small army of doctors poking and prodding the tender spots on his body where his skin was discolored. They probably would have kept finding new tests to do if his odd spots hadn’t changed color to match the rest of his skin.
The doctors could tell Josh and his folks what wasn’t wrong, but they had no idea worth noting about what had caused the strange outbreak. The skin had started off red and was irritated in ways that made no sense at all. It wasn’t an allergic reaction: as far as the doctors could tell there wasn’t a whole lot in the world that Josh was allergic to in the first place. Though the skin looked raw and seeped a little at first, it didn’t seem to have been abraded or burned. In fact, Josh was almost certain if they could have actually still seen the strange patches of skin, they would have taken more biopsies. Biopsies were, apparently, needed to test for every imaginable type of cancer and maybe a few hundred other diseases, at least judging by the number of small scrapes they’d taken along the red marks.
Hell, if they could have found the spots where they’d gotten their ‘little scrapings’ of flesh in the first place—said scraping actually hurting a lot more than the raw marks had—they probably would have continued anyway. But along with his skin’s ability to change color of its own volition, apparently it healed very fast. There was no evidence even of the spots where the doctors had been grating flesh throughout the day. And he could see by the way a couple of them looked at him that they wanted to take samples to check on that too. His father nearly blew a gasket when they said they wanted to keep him overnight and had finally put his foot down. If they couldn’t see a problem, they could do the tests on themselves, thanks anyway.
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