by Ronald Malfi
The right side of Gracie Street sloped down toward the Narrows. Ricky peered out the passenger window and down at the silvery concourse of water that snaked through the valley, and he marveled silently at how high the water had risen. With another storm on the horizon, he wondered just how much Stillwater could take.
It’s like fucking Armageddon, he thought, chuckling.
Ahead of him, the Civic’s taillights swerved right, leaving smeary black skids on the pavement in the wake of their sudden movement. For one second, Ricky thought Donald Larrabee was about to drive his goddamn car down the embankment and into the Narrows. But then Larrabee overcorrected and swerved left.
At this point, it was clear that Larrabee was no longer in control of the vehicle. Ricky eased down on the Camaro’s brakes, leaving a nice distance between the two of them, and he eventually came to a full stop just as Larrabee plowed the Civic off the road and straight into a tree.
Ricky stared at the scene, dumbstruck. On the radio, a Metallica song came on. Ricky quickly switched it off, popped open the driver’s door, and climbed out of the Camaro.
The air smelled of gasoline and scorched rubber. Steam billowed out from beneath the Civic’s hood, which, from where Ricky stood, appeared to be wedged against the trunk of a thick spruce. The taillights looked like beacons on a sinking ship.
Ricky flicked his cigarette into the woods and slowly approached the wreck. By no means did this let Larrabee off the hook—not in Ricky’s book—but the suddenness of the whole thing had shuffled the world into a sort of replay mode in which Ricky kept seeing the car swerve and strike the tree over and over again. Trying to catch up to reality was like trying to run through a pool of syrup.
When he reached the rear of the car, Ricky knocked one fist against the Civic’s trunk. He knocked again as he approached the driver’s side of the vehicle, this time on the driver’s side window. The windows were fogged up with condensation and it was difficult to see inside. From what Ricky could make out, it looked like the airbag had been deployed.
A shape moved from within. Ricky hopped back a few steps, suddenly aware of the slimy sheen of sweat that coated his forehead and the palms of his hands. The driver’s door cracked open and Donald Larrabee fell out. Larrabee’s skin was the color of ancient parchment and there was a lightning-bolt gash vertically bisecting his forehead. He crawled, trembling, on his hands and knees away from the car. Through the open door, Ricky could see that the airbag had indeed been activated and that fine, white powder—or possibly smoke—clouded up the whole interior.
Larrabee crawled to Ricky and looked up. There was dislocation and confusion in his eyes. There was something else in there, as well.
Fear, Ricky thought, recognizing it instantly. Absolute fear.
“What…the fuck…was that?” Donald Larrabee gasped as blood drooled out of his mouth.
“A car accident, you shit heel,” Ricky said…but then he froze as he looked past Larrabee and out onto the road. Something pale and vaguely humanoid stood there, watching him. When it began to creep forward and Ricky registered the unnatural way with which it walked, a cold dread closed around his heart. When moonlight struck the side of the figure’s face and he saw that it was, in fact, a young boy, the realization only heightened his fear. He turned and ran for all he was worth back to the Camaro.
He never paused to look back over his shoulder, even when Donald Larrabee began screaming.
Ricky dove into the Camaro, slammed the door, and cranked the ignition until the engine roared. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and spun the wheel while slamming the accelerator. The car lurched dizzyingly backward until Ricky jammed on the brakes with both feet.
Only then did he pause to glance up at the rearview mirror.
What little he saw would haunt him till his dying day: the pale-skinned child atop Donald Larrabee’s writhing form, pinning him down, down, with brute and unnatural strength, a gout of steaming liquid belching forth from the child’s face and splattering against the back of Larrabee’s head—
Ricky Codger had seen enough. He slammed the car back into Drive, jumped on the accelerator, and got the hell out of Dodge.
3
As a strong wind blew hard against the house, old Godfrey Hogarth awoke from some disremembered nightmare that had left him covered in perspiration. He crept slowly out of bed, his heart racing and his skin seeming to tingle. Around him, the house creaked and moaned in the wind, and it was like walking through the belly of an old whaling ship. Hogarth went directly to the bathroom and, without turning on the light, pulled on the faucet. Beneath a cool stream, he washed first his hands then his face and, lastly, the nape of his neck. He remained standing there at the sink in the dark, the water still running, for some time; time enough for his heartbeat to regain its regular syncopation and for his nerves to calm.
Before going back to bed, he paused before the tiny octagonal window in the hall that looked out upon the cold blue curl of asphalt that was Trestle Road. In the moonlight, the asphalt looked like polished steel.
Something’s fixing to happen, sure as I’m standing here breathing, he thought then, feeling the creeps overtake him all over again. He was an old man and possessed an intuition about certain things, much as infants know when they’re hungry and mothers know how to provide the milk. Something bad.
Like an electrical current, it radiated through the marrow of his bones.
4
His mother’s pointy foot poked him awake. Dwight stirred and blinked open his eyes. He’d fallen asleep again in front of the television in the living room—some black-and-white horror movie playing on the public access channel out of Pittsburgh—and was temporarily disoriented. His mother’s tired face hung above him like the disapproving face of God.
“Trash needs to go out to the curb,” Patti said around the cigarette jutting from between her lips. “Your father’s probably gonna forget when he gets home. I’m going to bed.”
If he even makes it home tonight at all, Dwight thought, already scrambling to his feet while pawing the sleep from his eyes. There had been more than enough instances—where Delmo Dandridge, after a night of getting shit-faced down at Crossroads, had either fallen asleep in his car in the tavern’s parking lot (or on the side of the road) or been hauled into jail—for there to be more than an ounce of truth to Dwight’s musing. He shut the TV off and headed down the hall where his sneakers sat in a heap beside the front door, while his mother climbed the creaking stairs to go to bed. Gideon, the German shepherd, lifted his head up off his paws. The dog had been snoozing in the foyer and he looked now at Dwight with the sleepy disorientation Dwight himself had felt just a minute earlier when his mother’s toes had jabbed at his ribs.
“Good boy,” Dwight told the dog. Gideon rested his head back down on his front paws and narrowed his eyes to slits.
The house was cold and he assumed it was even colder outside, so he snagged a sweatshirt with a John Deere logo on it from the hall closet and tugged it on over his head before he stepped out onto the front porch.
Outside, the night was absolute. Insects and frogs exchanged heated dialogue in the long grass and the three-quarters moon looked sharp enough to cleave a wound in the sky. The trash cans were at the side of the house, and Dwight hurried down the porch steps now, not pausing to look around and survey the rest of the property. It was the same way he went down into the basement to retrieve tools for his old man when Delmo got what he called the “fixin’ bug”—a quick dash down the stairs, grab the item, and a quick dash back up. Slam the door, too, for good measure. (It was always on these dashes back up the stairs that he swore he heard a second pair of feet hurrying up right behind him, moving at the same speed as he was but just a half-second off.) Taking out the trash was no different…particularly since he’d been hearing someone moving around outside the house at night.
Those noises outside his window began roughly around the time the hairless boy’s body was found along the bank
s of Wills Creek. It might have been a week earlier, though he couldn’t remember exactly…though after the boy’s body was discovered, he recalled thinking about those noises he’d been hearing and wondering if whatever had gotten the hairless boy had also spent the previous week lurking outside the Dandridge house. Or…worse yet…he had wondered if those noises had been the boy himself. Had he been lost? Searching for help? He quickly realized it couldn’t have been the boy since the noises continued after the boy’s body was found. The boy was dead; the noises were made by someone or something else.
At the side of the house, Dwight found the two metal trash cans overflowing with bags of refuse. He tried to drag them both along at the same time but they were too heavy. Instead, he grabbed the handle of one in both hands and, sliding backward through the muddy lawn, pulled the first can around the side of the house and out to the curb. It was on his return trip back for the second can that he heard the noise.
Dwight’s feet skidded to a halt in the dirt. He jerked his head to the right, where overgrown foliage and bamboo stalks rose up over a rusted and bent chain-link fence like aboriginal spears. Suddenly, he was aware that his mouth had gone dry.
“Is someone there?” he croaked. The words practically stuck to the roof of his mouth like peanut butter. “Dad? You back there?” It wasn’t unusual for someone to drive Delmo home when he’d had too much to drink, and he often passed out in the yard until morning came to sober him up…
The foliage rustled but no answer came.
Dwight thought of Miss Sleet’s classroom, now with those two empty desks—Matthew’s and Billy Leary’s—as incontrovertible as craters made from bombs dropped from a great height. It was the loudest silence Dwight Dandridge had ever heard in his life.
He thought he saw some of the bamboo shoots separate.
His compulsion was to run back into the house and forget the other trash can. But then he thought of his father’s wrath when he sobered up the following afternoon and found the second trash can still overflowing against the side of the house, and for whatever ill-defined reason, Dwight found himself even more terrified of that scenario. So he dashed quickly back around the side of the house, grabbed the second trash can by the handle with both hands, and hurriedly hauled it across the lawn to the curb, too. When he’d finished, breathing heavily and prickling with perspiration under the John Deere sweatshirt, he staggered a few steps backward toward the front of the house, his eyes still trained on the bamboo shoots and the rustling, heavy foliage. There was definitely something back there.
He reached down and pried one of the walkway flagstones up out of the dirt. The thing was heavier than it looked and as cold as a thick sheet of ice. Like a discus thrower, Dwight heaved the large flagstone over the fence and into the bushes. The bushes rattled and some of the bamboo shoots bent out at awkward angles. There came a resounding thong! as the stone struck one of the galvanized fenceposts.
Frozen with fear, Dwight waited for whatever was back there to spring out and charge him.
But nothing happened. And when he regained mobility a moment later, he ran back into the house, certain that he heard footsteps chasing after him as he sprinted up the porch steps.
5
Some noise woke Bob Leary from a fitful sleep on the living room couch. He roused with a series of meek little grunts, already muttering nonsense to himself, as he swung one leg over the couch and knocked it against the coffee table. Empty cans of Coors Light and a carton of partially eaten Chinese food slid off the table and onto the floor. All around him, the house stank and the smell of it infiltrated his dreams.
Sitting up, he blinked wearily as his eyes became acclimated to the lightlessness of the house. Outside, the wind blew hard and unforgiving through the old trees, a sound like creaking floorboards. Was that the sound that had awakened him?
He staggered to his feet and wended across the darkened living room to the front door. He opened the door and peered out. The wind whooped down and gathered up the dead leaves in the yard into miniature tornadoes. Whistling sounds emanated from the cavernous hollows of the rusted automobiles up on blocks at the side of the house. In a hoarse voice, Bob Leary shouted his son’s name out into the freezing darkness. Then, shivering, he went back inside, bolting the door behind him.
Billy was a good kid, though maybe a little slow. Bob had known that since Billy’s birth—that writhing, pink, hairless, squealing little contraption that had been wrenched from Lorraine Leary’s womb via Caesarian. Their only child, the kid had blinked his gummy eyes up at Bob and had worked its toothless mouth as if desperate to speak but unable to form words. Sounds came from the infant child, but they weren’t the sounds of a living creature. Rather, they were the sounds of Bob Leary’s life being changed for good and permanent, because the eyes that looked up at him had been trusting and needful, and what are you supposed to do with that? And when Lorraine died a few years back from the Big C, it was just the two of them—Bob and his squinty-eyed, puffy-faced son. The Leary men. It was—
A low groan emanated throughout the house, causing Bob Leary to pause in his tracks. This time it wasn’t the wind; this had been the noise of an animal, surely. It was in the house.
He kept a revolver in the kitchen cabinet. He retrieved it, clicking on all the lights in the house as he went. Then he went down the hall, systematically checking the bedrooms, the revolver shaking in his unsteady hands. “Is that you, Billy-boy?” he called as he stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom. The room was silent and undisturbed. Bob Leary’s voice echoed off the walls, and if he had closed his eyes, he would have easily imagined himself shouting into an empty bank vault or some underground cavern. “You come home, son?”
No answer.
Back in the living room, he went to the sliding-glass doors that looked out onto the back deck and, beyond that, the dense forest. He finagled the light switch beside the door but the bulb outside did not come on, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d changed the bulb. Beyond the property, tall black trees swayed in the wind.
They’re calling for another storm, he thought, and that means another flood. That damn kid better get his ass on home before the waters rise up again, so help him…
Again, that low guttural moaning sound. This time, it came from directly behind him. Bob jumped and spun around, clutching the revolver in both hands while surveying the living room. The sound was not unlike a raccoon. He’d spent his entire life in the hills of western Maryland and knew the sounds animals made when they were frightened, trapped, or angry.
He heard a scraping noise and flung his eyes toward the stone hearth in time to see a cloud of soot drop down into the fireplace. When he rubbed the back of one hand along his forehead, he realized he was sweating. He laughed nervously, though he did not lower the gun. Goddamn animals were always getting caught in the chimney. Just last winter, he had a goddamn squirrel drop down into the fireplace and tear pell-mell around the living room before Billy got the front door open and Bob was able to chase the little fucker out of the house with a couch cushion.
There was a flashlight on the mantel. He crept over to the hearth, his footfalls silent on the carpeted floor, and snatched it up. He clicked it on and saw that it held a strong and steady beam. He eased himself down on his knees in front of the fireplace, the gun in one hand now, the flashlight in the other. There would be no chasing any oversized rodents around his living room this evening; if he got a bead on the fucker, he’d pull the revolver’s trigger and blow it to pieces.
He swiped aside the chain-link curtain just as a second plume of soot rained down from the chimney. Bob could taste the soot at the back of his throat. It made his eyes water. Crouching forward, he propped one shoulder on the ledge of the fireplace then scooted himself up so that his head was inside the hearth. He brought the revolver and the flashlight up beside his head as he peered up the pitch-black channel. The revolver shook. The flashlight beam swung along the brick wall of the fireplace’s interior
then angled straight up through the open flue.
Bob blinked.
What in the—
A jumble of wiry, black fur vibrated within the beam of the flashlight, no more than four or five feet above Bob’s head. It took him a second or two to realize what it was he was looking at—bats that’s bats Jesus fuck that’s bats up there—but when he did, he felt his heart stutter in his chest. Rabies! screamed his next immediate thought.
Just as he began to inch his retreat back out of the fireplace, the bats began to flap their wings, causing great roiling clouds of soot to rain down on Bob Leary’s face. He sputtered and coughed, swiping absently at his eyes with the back of the hand that held the flashlight. When he blinked his eyes back open and repositioned the beam back up into the flue, he found his son’s slack face staring back down at him. The skin fish-belly white, the eyelids purple and swollen shut, Billy Leary hung upside down in the flue, his body wreathed in bats.
Bob felt his bowels loosen.
And just as he opened his mouth to scream, young Billy’s eyes flipped open.
Chapter Thirteen
1
It had been Brandy’s intention to stand watch throughout the night, yet despite her terror, the long and lumbering hours had ultimately conquered her and put her down. She awoke hours later, in the stillness of a Wednesday morning that already promised rain, asleep in the wicker loveseat on the back porch.
The first thing she realized was that she was freezing—her teeth chattered, the sound not unlike someone tap-dancing across her skull, and the exposed flesh of her arms and legs was broken out into hard little knobs of gooseflesh. Stupidly, she’d fallen asleep out here in nothing more than her nightshirt and panties. It was a wonder she hadn’t frozen to death in the night.