by Tim Curran
Kitty fell back, fear punching into her, but did not go down. Her eyes were showing her things and her lips were mouthing, no, no, no, and her mind seemed to close up like a hothouse flower. Because what she saw…it was far worse than anything she could have imagined.
There was not a body under the sheet, there were only parts of a body.
A left leg, a right arm, a head. Placed in sequence as if they were awaiting to be sewn to the torso whenever it arrived. The limbs were corpse-limbs, not doll or dummy parts. They were covered in a seamed gray flesh that had torn open in spots, revealing bones and metal armatures. The elbow was fitted with a plastic swivel, as was the knee.
And they should have been dead, but like the head, they were alive.
The leg was jumping and kicking, the arm thrashing and the hand slapping the filthy mattress beneath. The head was whipping from side to side on the pillow. It was Gloria’s head…or had been. Her wheat-colored locks were splayed over the sheets, her jaw hinged, her left eye missing and her right fitted with a glass ball onto which a tiny pinprick pupil had been painted. Part dummy and part corpse and all lunacy.
Kitty saw it all, felt a scream empty itself from her mouth, but it was not a scream, not really. More of a wracked, broken sobbing that rattled up the chimney of her throat, taking everything with it but the instinct to survive.
The head rolled and fixed her with that one lurid ping-pong ball eye. The waxen, lumpy face grinned at her. “Look upon me, sister,” the voice said that was not a voice really, but an airless whistling noise, wind blown through a pipe. “Look upon me, look upon me, look upon me…”
And then those hinged jaws fell wide open and a piercing shriek came out that scraped up Kitty’s spine like a knife blade.
She turned and the door slammed shut.
The .32 was in her hand. She jerked the trigger, bullets punching straight through the cheap-paneled door and Ronny cried out. She thought she heard him fall out there. The door was not locked and she went right through it, tripping over his collapsed form and scrambling free.
All of the doll and puppet parts and bodies were in motion on their strings, swinging and shuddering. The jaws of puppet and vent dolls were opening and closing, glass eyes rolling in sockets.
Kitty heard a sliding, dragging sound.
Something was coming down the hallway: slap, drag, slap, drag.
She tensed, her hand shaking as it gripped the .32. The inside of her mouth felt like it had been oiled with cooking spray and maybe that was the taste and texture of overwhelming horror.
Something came out of the darkness and it looked like a swollen gray sack inching its way toward her. But it was no sack. It was Gloria’s torso. Its remaining hand would slap the floor, pulling it forward and then repeating the process, the right leg dragging behind it like a vestigial limb.
Piggy was sitting in the hallway, cross-legged. He was grinning as he always grinned, shadows coveting that abominable doll’s face, his eyes bright and yellow and glittering like moonlight on wet pavement.
“You have to understand things, Kitty, because you do want that…don’t you?”
And then he was telling her things, as she wildly debated whether to shoot the dummy or its master or the dragging carcass. He was telling her about graves and tombs, about little boys rotting away in satiny caskets. About their brothers stealing their corpses, taking them into high, secret rooms and using techniques cribbed from moldering notebooks. Fitting little boy corpses with special puppet mechanisms, swivels and pivots and hinges. Stripping away dead flesh and replacing it with wax and plastic artifices. Saying words over those dead little puppet boys and hoping, hoping the words would bring their brothers back to them…and how they did. How they brought something back, but how it was not the soul of a dead little boy, but something else entirely. Something that had been scratching at ethereal barriers for eons, something with hunger, something looking for a home and a body to steal…
But Kitty would not listen.
She put three more bullets into Ronny and he stopped moving. She put one through Piggy’s chest, but it caused him no inconvenience.
“You don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, now do you?”
And Kitty ran down the hallway away from him, into another room. Because in a room there would be a window you could jump out of. But in that room, the window was boarded and the door slammed shut behind her. There were candles glowing in there, too. And what they revealed was a tiny casket, the sort you might fit a doll into.
And Kitty wasn’t really surprised by that point when the lid swung open and a little girl dummy sat up in there like a Jack-in-the-Box. The little girl was Ronny’s two-year old sister and her face was smooth as porcelain, flaking away to bone in spots and dotted with black mold. It had no eyes. The hinged jaw snapped open and closed and a demented, reedy little girl voice said: “Baby doll, baby doll, baby doll, baby doll, baby doll…”
It kept repeating this, fleshless arms held out, blackened fingers splayed. It wanted to be scooped up and held.
Kitty supposed she might have screamed.
The candles went out and she emptied her .32 into the darkness, at those places in the room where she could hear something small and rat-like scurrying, crawling, sliding along like a slug. And then teeth bit into her ankle. She cried out and took hold of that hideous little corpse-doll, feeling the flesh coming off in her fingers like sloughed snakeskin. But she held on, yanking its body away and hearing a rending, wet snap, realizing that the head was still biting her. Still hanging on with those little needling milk-teeth and that she had cast the body against the wall, where it had shattered…but refused to die. Screaming then, Kitty pounded that little head with her fists until it began to come apart, until only the jaws held. Then they fell away, clattering like wind-up chattery teeth in the darkness.
Above, in what must have been the attic, there was a rumbling noise. The ceiling shook, dislodging a rain of plaster and dust. Something was up there and it was angry.
Kitty found the door, the little corpse-doll’s remains still clawing away in there, looking for something to hold and lead to those teeth.
Kitty found the knob and fell out into the dimly-lit corridor.
16
The sane thing to do would have been to escape, if escape was even possible by that point.
But Kitty was not leaving.
Despite all the other horrors she had drunk deep of this night, Kitty could only see Gloria. What was left of her. What they had done to her. She would never know the torment Gloria had endured in her final hours and she did not want to know, but she was going to put things right.
Somehow, she had to.
She remembered what Eddie Bose had written:
…burn the McBanes out. Burn that house and let the fire destroy everything inside. It will be a cleansing and a welcome relief for Ronny McBane who has suffered for his sins again and again. A purging. But whatever you do, stay out of the attic. Don’t go up there like I did. Don’t make that fatal mistake.
The attic.
That was the key. That was the beating black heart of this nightmare and this is where she was going to go because this is where the puppeteer was that Bose had mentioned. That was where he must have gone that night that Ronny found him and brought him home. What was up there was the very thing he dared not speak of.
But Kitty had no weapons.
The .32 was empty.
She was going to go up there anyway.
Whatever the attic held, whatever noxious and cancerous spirit brooded in darkness up there like a fatal egg coming to term, she was going to it now. She would face it and she would not fear it. Ronny McBane and Piggy and, yes, even the horrid little Baby Doll were connected to the thing that waited above. Like mittens connected to sleeves by strings, like hands fused to wrists by bones, like souls knitted to flesh by ethereal filaments, they were but appendages of a greater, more colossal and unspeakable horror.
&nbs
p; Find it. Run it to ground.
All she had for weapons was her anger, her rage…and her bare hands.
Kitty held her hands out before her, fingers splayed like the tines of divining rods, feeling for those threads and finding them. The puppeteer was near. Hiding and skulking, she could feel him or her or it. Sense their unease. Their fear.
Those drifting strands of webs were everywhere in the moonlight seeping in from high windows. Kitty reached out, knotting them in her fists like reigns and leads, pulling herself along. Following those strands and cords to where they might take her. They were guide-ropes in her hands, skeins of worn yarn leading back to a nightmare quilt that had been knitted so long ago. The quilt that was a puppeteer, a witch and a soul-eater, the sort of thing that suffocated children, a plague-blanket, a winding sheet forever adrift in search of bones and meat and biology.
Where? Where?
Kitty kept going, her eyes lit like green gemstones, a burning core of energy blazing in her belly. She felt the threads, traced them with her fingertips. They jumped and arced like sensitive nerve ganglia as she neared the brain itself. The threads were growing thick as tree roots in her hands now. They felt moist and fleshy and vital. And Kitty followed them, her own moon-struck shadow like a stalking cat moving along the facade of dirty brick and lathing showing through the rotted wallpaper of the McBane house.
The corridor angled to the right and the webs grew thicker here. Just ahead, a door opened momentarily and she saw something distorted, something patchwork, something hideous like a face woven from damp wicker staring out at her.
Then it disappeared and the door slammed shut.
I’ve got you now. You can’t hide.
The door itself was hanging by one hinge and she pushed it aside, tearing through webs strung tighter than cotton candy, clawing through the spun insulation of dead spiders and into the narrow stairwell itself.
She had not dropped the threads.
She still clutched them tightly and now they were agitated, leaping in her fingers like live high-tension wires, snapping and jumping, slithering like the tentacles of something that ate ships in misty, lost seas. Now she dug out her flashlight and exposed the inner viscera of the stairwell. But it was no stairwell as such with dusty joists and warped water-stained ceilings…it was a casket. The walls were made of quilted satin that was badly discolored and bleached, grayed and mildewed. Ropes and nets of spiderwebs dangled overhead, great winding plaits of them set with the mummified bodies of puppets and deadwood vent dolls. The stairs were covered in what seemed millions if not billions of dried insect carapaces heaped like barnacles on a ghost ship.
Kitty’s mouth was dry, her heart was pounding. She started up the steps, dead insects crunching beneath her boots like October leaves. The flashlight shook in her fist.
Keep going, you have to keep going.
She breathed in revulsion and exhaled resilience. Her heart was strong and her soul was rigid. But she was scared. The fear was thick and white, knotted in her belly, spreading out and coiling around her chest in thick bands. She could scarcely draw a breath. But this was to be expected, she knew, for fear and dread and irrational terror was the language of this house and the thing that brooded in the attic. She couldn’t give in to it. Those myriad shrunken, embalmed figures dangling in the webs…their sightless eyes watched her like the eyes in antique paintings in old farmhouses. Their driftwood and winter-dead limbs brushed against the top of her head. Their agonized mouths seemed to scream her name.
Overhead, dangling and swaying from the roof of the stairwell, there were limbs now. Not doll limbs, but dozens and dozens of blue and black corpse limbs…arms and legs, sometimes just hands and feet…all hanging from the webwork above like sausages in a butcher’s window. They were putrescent and bloated, shuddering with the action of pupa and larva within and speckled with millions of buzzing meatflies.
More games. Just games. Hallucinations. Images projected into your mind. Ignore them.
Kitty went up through them, all that cold, crawling beef brushing her face and head, cold fingers trailing across the nape of her neck. They were a forest and as she pushed through their marble masses, they began to swing and slap into each other, casting creeping and morbid shadows all around her. Feet that walked into space and great hands that clutched.
Then Kitty was beyond them and into the attic above which was spun and wreathed and roped together by cobwebs. It was the lair of a funnel web spider decorated with more puppet parts and doll heads which whispered to her. Like the ones downstairs, these were living disembodied things with wiggling fingers and mouths that made mewling, wet sounds.
Right away, the temperature dropped.
Kitty saw her breath and felt ice on her face. The threads in her hand were greasy and coiling, set with pink-mouthed suckers that tickled her palms. Yes, she had arrived. A numbness spread from her fingertips to her elbows and then subsided, leaving a maddening tingling just beneath her skin.
The webs moved around her, brushing her face and slithering over her back and climbing her legs and by the time she realized what was happening, they owned her. A webby mesh covered her face and she clawed it free just in time to see the haunter of the attic in all its multiform madness.
She screamed. Screamed like she had never screamed before, or, maybe had never allowed herself to. It came up from her guts and echoed out of her anguished soul with volume.
An abomination came down the network from its high roost.
It came to embrace her.
It was a carcass riven with worms, then a thousand spiders mating and then something like a man vomiting a green-flecked infant from his mouth that sprouted a dozen bulb-headed, malformed fetuses.
Kitty saw what looked like an immense, bloated fetal spider propelling itself towards her on a dozen wooden puppet legs, its underbelly hung with milk-swollen pink teats. It was hairless and cream-white, bulbous and distorted, great holes eaten through it in which vermiform parasites squirmed and coiled. Rising up from what might have been deemed the forward thorax was the upper body of a woman whose head was hung with draping cobweb locks, the face beneath set with bulging eyes of black glass and a suckering oval mouth. It was not one thing, but many things—animal flesh married to doll parts and human anatomy—stitched up into a common whole and the intricate suturing was like lacework spread out in loops and whorls.
Beyond screaming by that point, Kitty had dropped to her knees with absolutely no memory of doing so. Her heart was pounding so hard that it was like a drum beating at her temples. The level of blood in her body seemed to fall down into her feet and everything above that point went weak and tottering in the presence of the thing that was poised to press its blubbery white lips to her throat and suck away her life.
Oh God, oh dear God, not like this, I don’t want to die like this.
But she was going to die and she knew it. She was going to die shrieking away her mind as Gloria did and she was powerless now to stop it. This horror would pull her apart and hang her cooling remains in its web…if it didn’t decide to add them to its own heaving mass, that was. And the only possible compensation for any of it was that she knew, she knew what this thing was or, and better, who it was.
Dorian McBane.
This was the deranged apex witch that had started the entire ball rolling by abusing her children in the first place which led to the murder of Freddy and Molly which led to Ronny’s dementia and paranoia which led him to finding that awful notebook which led to the resurrection, more or less, of his brother and sister as corpse-puppets possessed of malignant minds from beyond time and space which led to them reanimating their wicked mother as this chimeric, grotesque monstrosity…which, essentially, was her true self externalized.
As that wailing, enraged face came to kiss her life away, Kitty saw that its body was shivering, rolling like jelly, dozens of blisters bulging from the flesh and popping to reveal baby doll faces which were grim caricatures of the children sh
e had murdered. Pale, agonized faces, embryonic yet identifiable. The heads lashed from side to side, mouths opening with a strident mewling like the hungry cries of newborn rats.
With each generated head, the Dorian thing itself squealed with pain.
Up close, Kitty could see that while its face was bone-white and fleshy, it seemed to be composed of bloody filaments of tissue in constant flux, oozing and puffing out, deflating and reconfiguring itself in some vain attempt to be anything but what it was.
I’m sorry, Gloria. I fucked up. I tried, but I fucked up—
That’s when the cannon boomed.
The sound of it in the vault-like attic was so deafening that Kitty cried out and covered her ears.
Dorian’s face imploded like a can crushed in a fist, from jawline to forehead just a wriggling mass of bloody strings sinking into a craterous ruin. Wailing louder than ever, she scurried back up the web.
Kitty saw Danny Paul Regis standing there.
His tough demeanor was shaken, his face strained and his eyes delirious with fear. But he did not hesitate. He carried a twelve-gauge pump loaded with flechette rounds that were essentially razored bits of steel that pulverized their target on contact. He fired four rounds into Dorian and she literally exploded in a wailing mass of tissue and bone, trembling armature, hinges and swivels that filled the web and continued to move and shake.
He dragged Kitty down the stairs and into the corridor and that’s when Piggy attacked.
17
He hit Regis with incredible force, the shotgun flying from his hands and tumbling down the stairs as he himself was slammed into the wall, right next to the gutshot body of his brother. Piggy’s jaws clamped around his ankle and bit down with a moist snapping of bone.
Kitty saw it happen.
She fell, panting and staring and oddly numb. She did not think anything or feel anything. All that was gone. Fear was a memory and now she was insane, too, so the playing field was leveled. Snakes do not fear other snakes.