by Brian Hodge
At that moment the moonlight again disappeared. But it was no matter—the interior light would come on when she opened the door. She got the key in the lock, turned it, heard a click, pulled at the door.
No interior light.
There was a stink in the car so horrible that it knocked her head back, made her gag. It was like pressing your face into the underarm of a corpse. She looked down into the dark beneath the glove compartment. There was a thickness there, very still. Maybe the thing had died.
Holding her breath, she moved toward the open door. She rolled down the driver’s window, then reached inside and lowered the one behind it.
She got into the driver’s seat, reached over and opened the window opposite. Fresh air came in. This was better, she was going to be able to handle it. She put the key in the ignition, stretched her foot out to the gas pedal.
A black arm snaked up the dash. At the end of it she thought she could see a narrow hand.
Then the moonlight returned and she saw that the hand was to all appearances human. Before she could so much as cry out in amazement the fingers spread and the black, claw-like nails dug into the thick plastic dashboard, cutting it as if it was modeling clay.
Another hand came creeping up her inner thigh. It was cool and damp, its palm as soft as deerskin. Razor nails tickled her flesh.
She kicked, momentarily popping her right leg loose. The response was a flash of purple light, a spangle of pleasure.
Her skin crawled, she was almost drowned in a wave of the warmest, sweetest, most delicious sensations, wonderful little tickling penetrations that went deeper in her than she’d thought delight could reach.
The hands got their grip on the dash, the arms rippled with muscular contractions. Under her feet there commenced a flopping and heaving so great that the car began to shake.
The moonlight disappeared.
With all her might she smashed her foot down into the muscular, writhing mass. Again she kicked, again and again.
A third hand shot out, barely visible in the gloom. She heard its claws sink into the back of the front seat with a popping rip of leatherette.
She wanted to close her thighs, but the claw tips pressed into the tender inner flesh.
Some deep instinct she knew nothing about sent a rush of white-hot adrenaline into her blood. Her muscles turned to steel, she reared back on the seat. The three hands all detached themselves from their various moorings and came clawing toward her at once.
With a great boneless flopping and writhing, two of the hands grasped for purchase, one clawing the ceiling and ripping it down, the other popping holes right through the metal door.
She was so stunned by the violence, by the bizarre ugliness of what she was witnessing, that she lost consciousness in the middle of lunging back away from the thing between her legs. This caused her to fall limp, and the sweeping, grasping hands clutched air barely an inch from her neck.
The impact of falling against the ground brought her back to consciousness just as a fleshy coil poured out the door. She pushed away from the car, leaped up and started running blind, her arms windmilling before her.
She blundered into brush, into trees, arms flailing. As she skittered away, pushing herself with her heels, her whole being contracted into a dot of savage terror. Ellen Maas wasn’t there anymore, she had been torn from her moorings. An animal was all that remained, a terrified animal.
2
Into her view there came the vague image of two rough old boots, two jeans-clad legs.
“Ellen! Hey, Ellen!” Brian jumped away from her panicked flailing. “Hey, it’s me!”
His truck was idling at the roadside, the door open, the lighted cab glowing. She was beyond the reach of words. She choked and gagged and clawed the air. He tried to stop her, but she yanked away from him.
She could see nothing, but the slithering sounds in the woods behind her held a terrible meaning. Close beside Brian she could discern movement. Her impulse was to jerk away, but when she did he tried to hold her more tightly. “Take it easy,” he said.
Then the moon came out.
Two hands were quivering, fully extended, not a foot from Brian’s head.
She swallowed, gasped.
“Ellen, it’s gonna be OK.”
The arms undulated, stretching. The hands came closer.
“Brian!”
The claws extended. To get away she threw herself backward—but he grabbed her, clutched her to him. The claws now vibrated an inch from his head. “Take it easy,” he repeated, his voice shaking. She could see that the flesh of the arms was pulsating, getting thinner and longer, the fingers wriggling, now questing, now a mere breath away.
In another instant they would tear his head from his body.
She pummeled his leathery chest and bellowed, desperate at her own incoherence.
His response was to press her against him harder. “It’s all right, baby, you’re fine now, you’re fine.”
The pulsation of the arms was getting faster. They were getting thinner and thinner, jerking spasmodically. He reached back, absently brushed his head as if he thought a bug had landed there. But his strong left arm held her tight.
Other parts of the thing were swarming out the windows of the car.
No matter how hard she tried, she remained unable to control her own screaming. All she could think of was being touched again by those fingers.
Brian had come out here largely to stop her from getting hurt or getting in trouble. Now she was having a breakdown right in his arms. He thought she was going to shatter his eardrums.
All of a sudden she gave him a vicious knee to the groin. He jackknifed, gurgling with agony as she wrenched herself free of him. Digging with her heels, sliding down the path on her back, she dragged herself toward the road.
Fortunately, she hadn’t incapacitated him, and he was able to rise almost at once. As he did so something slapped the side of his head. It hit him hard enough to jar his vision. He turned toward it.
The four strangest, most lethal claws he’d ever seen were spread out in front of his face, trembling in the moonlight.
For a long second his mind was totally blank. Then he saw details: an ordinary palm. The claws had been carefully sharpened. He could see the serrations left by the fingernail file. This terrible hand was manicured.
On the finger pads were prints; the hand was so close that he could see even this tiny detail.
Another joined it. As he pulled back, the two of them closed just in front of his face with a sound like springing rat traps. Then he saw what looked like stiff cables in the moonlight, leading back from the hands all the way to Ellen’s car. More writhing arms were pouring from every window.
A slight movement in the brush drew his attention to the fact that another of the appendages was snaking along the ground off to his right. Then he saw a fourth, this one looking like a black fire hose reaching into the trees above the car.
A deep, visceral shock went through his body.
He thought: my shotgun, my shotgun is in my truck.
He ran so fast he caught up with Ellen, who was just clambering into the cab. He could see the barrel of the shotgun, blue in the dim light. Throwing himself past her, he dove in, grabbed the weapon.
With one hand he pushed her down. “I’m gonna shoot!” She cringed as he braced the gun against the steering wheel and pulled the trigger. The gun spat blue fire. Ellen screamed. Again he fired, and again, the thunderous reports blasting away her cries.
Then there was silence.
With a thud one of the hands dropped onto the hood. The diameter of the arm was now no thicker than that of a rope, and it seemed almost devoid of strength, able only to flop weakly forward. But then it contracted, and the claw-like nails slid right through the steel hood. Instantly the arm went tight and the truck lurched. It began to be dragged toward the deep woods, like a fish on the hook.
Then the moonlight went yet again, and they could see nothing outsi
de but dead, inky blackness.
The truck lurched and shook, being dragged farther into the woods.
He turned the key, listened to the engine cough, cough again, die. Again he turned the key. The truck jerked forward, stopped. Again and again he tried the key.
Finally the engine struggled to life.
He threw the transmission into reverse, started to let out the clutch. The engine roared, the truck pitched, the tires whined in the damp, loose soil. A stink of hot tires filled the cab. Oil pressure and water temperature began to rise toward the red lines.
When another of the hands flopped against her window, Ellen practically leaped into his lap. The claws tapped furiously against the glass.
The truck engine was powerful, but the gauges were climbing steadily and it was only a matter of time before a gasket or a tire blew.
Mound Road was just a short distance behind them.
Something shook the truck as if it was a toy. Brian jammed on the gas and the engine’s whine rose to a shriek, the tires wailed.
Despite all this effort the truck lurched forward, moving deeper yet into the woods.
The hand must still be embedded like a hook in the hood, reeling the truck in. Brian threw the gearbox into first and smashed the accelerator to the floor. The truck shot forward much faster than the hand had been dragging it. In the glow of the headlights Brian could see the arm, which had been wire-tight, flopping in helpless tangles across the hood.
He threw the door open, leaped into the tangle and grabbed for the hand. The extreme stretch of the arm had caused it to lose its strength. Under him, however, the coils pulsated and wriggled. They were warm, getting hot, getting rapidly thicker. Faster they pulsed, faster and faster.
By the time he had grabbed the hand at its wrist, it could resist. As he tugged it toward the windshield, away from the hole it had made, the muscles pulsed. The arm was now the thickness of a bicycle tire. Under his fingers the flesh of the thing bubbled like a thick, hot liquid.
From the woods came a flicker of purple light. He was surprised to feel deep, warm stirrings come up from the depths of him.
While he paused, confused by this unexpected sensation, the coils surged faster, getting thicker and thicker.
Then Ellen appeared, also yanking the hand. It came out of the hood with a clanging screech, the claws doubling up on themselves so fast they made a sound like the crack of a whip.
“Drive,” she bellowed, “for the love of God, drive!”
He threw himself back into the cab, ground the gears, backed out onto Mound Road.
They were free. “Thank God,” Ellen whispered. “Oh, thank God.”
He went bolt upright, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Jesus,” Ellen said.
Stretching off into the distance was a line of cars, all heading toward the judge’s house. Against the sharp spikes of the pines that blocked the view of the house from here could be seen a constant flashing of purple light.
Every car was filled with people—men, women, children.
Worse, he knew them, they were familiar faces. “It’s Will Torrance—hey, Will!”
“Don’t stop, Brian!”
Brian hardly heard her. He put on the brake, staring in amazement at his fellow townspeople. “Look, there’s Mike Mills, Betty’s boy, and his wife’s with him! And the Robertsons and old Mr. Hanford—”
“Brian, get us out of here!”
With a hissing sound, a great shape slid out of the nearby woods, flowing toward them like a massive snake. Before he could react, pale purple light flashed right in his face. Reflected in the rearview mirror, it emanated from the headlights of a car behind him. He recognized this vehicle, low, mean, red. A terrific wave of pleasure hit him. He felt himself spring erect, found his eyes glaring hungrily into the reflection.
It was all he could do to shove the mirror out of adjustment. That broke the spell.
He returned to his senses. “Ellen, open the glove compartment, get out the shells. Can you handle a shotgun?”
“Not yet.”
“Then be real careful, please. Put a couple of shells into the breach, lean out the window and fire. But don’t look into that friggin’ light!”
“I know about the light.”
She was clumsy with the shells, she dropped two or three of them, but finally got some loaded. The Viper was right on their tail. A floodlight was filling the cab with purple iridescence.
It was the light of heaven. He began to go weak. The truck’s speed dropped as he unconsciously lifted his foot.
A roar followed and the cab went dark. Ellen screamed, threw herself back from the window, tossed the smoking shotgun to the floor.
Instantly the pleasure ceased, and Brian felt a brief, black sense of loss. Ellen pitched back against the seat.
“Ellen?”
She did not answer.
3
He turned onto Kelly Farm Road, drove hard for five minutes. He had only one thought: the worst thing in the world was somewhere in these woods, and Loi was alone.
When Loi saw the way the truck was racing up the drive she came onto the porch, then hurried toward the driveway. He jammed on the brakes. “We gotta get inside,” he yelled.
Loi reacted instantly, pulling Ellen’s door open. “Oh, Brian, look at her legs!”
“Get her into the light!”
They took her onto the porch. Loi pulled away torn cloth. The lower part of Ellen’s pants legs were shredded. For a moment Brian thought he’d accidentally shot her. Then he saw the pattern of the injuries—dozens of puckered, red dots, each leaking blood and pus.
“What is this, Brian?”
As best he could, he swallowed his terror. He peered out into the dark.
“Pour water on her head,” young Chris yelled, seeing that they were supporting her and assuming that she’d fainted.
“Get inside at once,” Loi told the child, “at once!”
Astonished at sweet Aunt Loi’s change of voice, the boy retreated.
With Loi’s help Brian walked Ellen into the living room. He shut and locked the front door. “Loi, the windows.”
“What?”
“Lock them!”
His tone of voice caused an automatic response: she raced through the trailer doing as he asked. Then she returned to the room. “Tell me the problem.”
“Something’s out there,” Ellen breathed. “Something—”
“It’s beyond belief,” Brian said.
“What is?”
“You don’t want to know,” Ellen said.
Brian remembered those hands, the pared nails.
“Well, we have to see to you,” Loi told Ellen. “That’s the first thing.” She went into the bathroom and returned with alcohol and cotton pads. “Boys,” she said, “go in your room.” She looked at Ellen. “You will suffer, I’m sorry.”
She poured alcohol over a pad and began methodically washing the injuries. To Ellen it felt as if her skin was being rubbed with a hot iron. To prevent a scream she bit her lip.
Brian was looking out the living room window, his hands cupped around his eyes. He was watching for any kind of unusual movement. The driveway seemed empty, but he didn’t believe it, not for a moment.
“Brian,” Loi said. “Call the state police.”
He obeyed instantly, realizing that he should have done it before, even from the truck. He dialed, listened to the familiar clicks—and got nothing.
Again he dialed, hoping that he’d done something wrong.
The phone was stone dead. He held the receiver out, stared at it.
There was a plan at work, a strategy. Whatever was out there, it could not only act, it could think ahead, it could be cunning.
He had to get the shotgun out of the truck. And now he also had to use the cellular phone to call for help. With a quick, nervous motion he stepped onto the porch.
There wasn’t a sound, not a cricket, not a grasshopper or a frog. It was like be
ing in a cave lit by the moon.
The ten feet to the truck seemed a very long way. From the darkness around the side of the trailer he heard a distinct whisper, almost a word, but not one he could understand. For a moment more he listened. Nothing. It could have been a raccoon snorting at him, but he didn’t think so. He moved closer to the truck.
When the whisper came again he whirled. There was something out by the ruins of the old house.
He went quickly to the truck, got in, opened the glove compartment and dug out the box of shells, loaded it with the five that were left.
When he turned around he was horrified to see Loi corning across the driveway. “Go back in!”
“No.”
“Go back in the house, run!”
She came up to the truck. “Give me the shotgun.” She held out her hands. He gave her the gun and she took a position in the middle of the drive, sporting the gun across her chest. “Now make your call.” Her voice was trembling.
Brian turned on the ignition and started the phone. He waited, but no dial tone came. Finally he turned off the truck.
“It didn’t work either?”
“No.”
She was staring out into the dark. He followed her eyes and was appalled to see a thick, black hose of a thing lying across the drive thirty feet behind the truck.
“It is like a snake,” she said, “it hides in its stillness.”
He ran into the trailer. Loi came rolling after him across the driveway, wielding the shotgun.
“It’s unwise to run from a snake, husband.” She leaned the gun against the wall near the door and pulled up a dining chair, seating herself across from Ellen, who was nursing her legs, tears of pain in her eyes.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Ellen said. Her voice was a moan.
“Ellen, it’s in the driveway.” Brian touched her cheek, full of compassion for her.
Loi folded her arms. “Brian Kelly, you will tell me all that has happened since you left.”
“All right! I’ll be very specific, but I warn you, Loi, this ain’t gonna help your sleep!” He described what he had seen.