by Curran, Tim
13
When Tommy Kastle pulled his Dodge Ram into the Barron driveway, Mitch felt something grow inside him, spread out in his belly and take hold of him like it never wanted to let him go. He could have labeled it as fear or unease or a real ugly case of the whammy-jammies, but the truth was, although he felt it just fine, he could not necessarily put a name to it. Just a nasty sensation like needles growing in his guts that told him that not only would the worst things happen now, they would happen with a frightening regularity. And you had to be ready.
“You okay, Mitch?” Tommy said.
Mitch just nodded. “We better go in.”
On the porch, at the door, he hesitated again, picturing the most awful scenarios that waited him inside: Lily dead and Lily dismembered, white-faced horrors perhaps feeding upon her. All of it only grew worse when he tried the door and found it unlocked.
Then he threw it open and Tommy was right behind him and the silence greeted them, a heavy and almost unnatural silence. But maybe it was just his nerves because Lily was sitting on the sofa, waiting.
“Did you find her?” she asked.
Mitch shook his head. “Checked the mall and the usual locations, but I didn’t see her. But you know how those kids are. Always on the go.”
Lily just blinked at the information. “I don’t like her out in that storm, Mitch. It’ll be dark in a couple hours.”
The idea of that chilled Mitch, too. Was Lily hinting at something or was she just being her normal paranoid self?
Tommy looked from Mitch to Lily and then back again. Mitch couldn’t read his mind, but he could almost guess what he was thinking. Jesus H. Christ, you sure this lady is Lily? Looks like something thrown together out of twine and pipe cleaners. And her eyes, Mitch…you noticed her eyes? They’re just vacant. They look, but they don’t see. Just as empty and sterile as the eyes in old paintings that follow you around the room. Mitch was figuring it was something like that. Outside, he’d been the one who was tense, but in here it was Tommy. He looked nervous and ansy like some kid hauled before the principal for peeking into the girl’s showers.
Mitch said, “I got pretty much sidetracked. Had an accident.”
Something moved in her eyes then. “Accident?”
“Yeah, not me exactly. But some crazy kid piledrived the Jeep out on The Strip. It was parked at the time.”
Lily nodded, losing interest.
“Did anybody stop by?” Mitch asked, still standing there next to Tommy like he was at somebody else’s house, waiting to be invited to sit down.
Lily just shook her head. “No one…just the mailman, whasisface.”
Sure. Craig Ohlen. Goddamn nosy gasbag. Mitch was willing to bet that he’d went out of his way to talk to Lily, to gauge the level of her dementia that the neighbors had no doubt faithfully reported to him. Yep, she’s nuts, Craig would say, flakier than dry skin. Better hide the knives, ‘cause I’m getting the feeling she’ll be following her nutso sister.
“Mitch?” Lily said.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to go out again. I want you to find her before dark, do you understand? You have to. The phone’s out and the TV and radio are down—”
“Just the storm,” Tommy offered.
“—and I think there’s something that’s going to happen. Something real bad and I don’t want Chrissy out in the streets when it hits. Go to the police and check Heather and Lisa’s houses. Maybe she’s over there.”
“Okay, I will,” he said. “But just try to relax.”
“I can’t relax. I’m afraid to relax.”
“Just try and take it easy. You know what the doctor said, don’t get yourself worked up. Everything will be fine.”
“Just find her.”
“Sure.”
“Promise me that you’ll find her.”
“I’ll do my best.”
14
Inside Edward Stokley’s guts there was a furnace blazing.
It boiled white-hot where his stomach should have been, making things bubble and liquefy and go to rivers of molten flesh. The heat rose up into his chest, became a smoldering dust of ashes that filled his lungs until he could only gasp, could not seem to speak. It was like trying to draw a clear and crisp breath from the mouth of a foundry oven.
“Eddie?” Dave Rose said to him. “Eddie? Are you all right?”
Stokley nodded that he was, though he certainly was not.
They were standing in front of their patrol car on Pennacott Lane, just off Main downtown Witcham, at the outer edges of Bethany. The University was only three blocks away with its cheerful and synthetic gaggle of coffee shops and salons and snack bars, but here on Pennacott you would not have guessed it. For if Upper Main Street and the sprawl of the University were shiny new pennies, then Pennacott was a tarnished dime worn by many hands and plucked from a gutter. Pennacott was a dirty and decaying run of old company houses, garbage-strewn vacant lots, and late Victorian tenements that had been thrown up to lodge the massive influx of immigrant workers—mostly Poles, Irish and French—that had come to work in the mills and factories of Bethany and Crandon…at the time, separate entities that would, by the time of the First World War, be absorbed bodily into the swelling anatomy of Witcham. At one time, the squalor—which had been known locally as Guttertown or The Narrows—had extended to Main and beyond, for Witcham was essentially composed of five industrial enclaves, but by the 1950’s, North-Central University had absorbed much of that old territory of rooming houses, saloons, and brothels. And the Uptown Mall had taken the rest. Gone were the smelly community wells that had once spread outbreaks of cholera and typhus, the rows of high narrow warehouses and the Chicago-Northwestern train yards, the stables and stockyards whose drainage turned the Black River red and stinking at high summer. Gone too, were the linen mills and ironworks that stamped out everything from sewer lids to sections of railroad tracks, and whose high, filthy stacks belched out black clouds of smoke twenty-four/seven that settled back over the area like coal dust.
So now there was just Pennacott Lane which had been withered down through the years to a mere four blocks of dirty brick tenements and factory houses, many condemned and many more boarded-up and slouching on weedy lawns or behind rusty wrought-iron fences. Pennacott had once been the very heart of Guttertown, crowded and noisy, but now it was nearly deserted. You would no longer see the flapping, overloaded clotheslines strung building to building in such profusion that sometimes the sky seemed barely visible or the gangs of children chasing balls up the wooden walks, the street cars and bustling traffic of wagons and carts, the crowds of workmen lingering outside taverns and lunch counters. And you would not hear the scream of foundry whistles marking shift-change or the smattering of European dialects and sub-dialects echoing in the streets. And you would not smell the crowding, the horseshit, the reek of the mills themselves.
Pennacott was but a tombstone to that colorful, desperate past, a rawboned cadaver seeking a shallow grave to while away eternity. But, sometimes, if you closed your eyes and opened your mind, you could still feel and hear the echoes of those ghosts, the impressions they had left and the memories bleeding from dirty brick and cracked foundation like tired blood from narrow arteries.
Stokley stood there amongst those haunted streets, knowing that even now the city fathers had their eyes on the final remnants of Guttertown and how they would finally raze it, brooming away the nasty residue of Witcham’s seedy proletariat past and the poor that squatted there…many of whom were direct descendants of those long-gone laborers.
Just as he was.
He swallowed down some rain, hoped it would cool the firestorm in his belly that had absolutely nothing to do with what this place had been or what it was now, but a most disturbing feeling that told him today was going to be a very bad day for him indeed. He’d felt it all morning and most of the afternoon, of course. Had woken up at six that morning, a full thirty minutes before the alarm clock chimed, sweati
ng and trembling, his eyes peeled white in his strained face, a terrible knowledge of impending doom laying over him just as heavy and eternal as six feet of graveyard earth. The rain had been tapping against the windows and he had felt it inside, too, flooding him.
“What?” his wife had said, suspecting the steak and lasagna from the night before, but then looking into her husband’s blanched face and knowing better. “Eddie? Eddie? What is it?”
He told her in an airless squeak that it was a dream, just some crazy inside-out dream about his dead brother and a cat they’d had. He wasn’t even sure why that lie had leaped onto his tongue so completely unbidden. But he wasn’t awake yet and his subconscious—which was full to brimming as any man’s with half-truths, un-truths, and complete fabrications—was still open, the lid askew, and this was the pearl it had vomited onto his tongue.
At his side, rain running down his face like teardrops, Dave Rose said again, “You okay, Eddie? Look like you seen your own ghost.”
Stokley could have laughed at that one.
Lots of cops on the Witcham force could have. Not Dave Rose, though. Dave Rose had just come in yesterday night after two weeks of vacation and he had missed all the fun. He only knew the clipped versions of the explosion at the Fort Providence base and the flooding and the bodies over in River Town, all those awful, dark matters that hid in the cracks between those incidents. Unlike him, Stokley had seen ghosts. He’d seen several. He’d seen dead people walking and it was this knowledge that had settled into his guts like a tumor, eating and eating. But Dave Rose had not seen any of that. Yet.
But soon, soon…
“I’m all right,” Stokley said and, God, did that sound hollow or what? Like having your hand crushed to pulp in a vise and saying it was just a scratch, get me a Band-Aid, will ya?
Maybe all of it was laying on him. Those things with the white faces he’d seen yesterday disappearing beneath the dirty waters of Bethany and that awful certainty he’d woken with this morning. The certainty that told him, sorry, Eddie, really and truly sorry, old shoe, but today is the last one for you. No more Australian-rules football on ESPN or late-night lasagna and steak parties. It all winds down today and in this place where your Irish grandfather came a-squatting, pockets empty and eyes bright, from that slum in Londonderry.
“Full circle,” Stokley said. “Full circle.”
Rose looked at him and then just looked away. “Listen, we gonna answer this call or do we stand here and get soaked?”
The rain kept falling, trying desperately to wash that pile of dirty tenement clean, but failing miserably. The tenement—some three stories of filthy brick with a mangled, rusting fire escape clinging to its side like the abandoned web of a spider—was high and shadowy in the grainy light of this rainy day. Shadows pooled at its windows and crawled over its roofs. Water spilled from a rainspout into the alley.
“Let’s go,” Stokley said, feeling that windy noose that had dogged him all day finally dropping over his throat and tightening.
They stepped into the tenement and right away that stink of age and generations past fell over them…mildew and rotting plaster and garbage. This mixed with more recent odors of cat piss and seeping damp. There were three kids waiting for them. Two girls and a boy. The oldest couldn’t have been more than six or seven, the youngest still in diapers. They were smelly, thin, and unwashed.
“You kids the ones that called?”
The two girls would not speak, but the boy nodded and mumbled something. Stokley and Rose surrounded them, pegging them with questions and getting answers that made little sense. The girls were crying. The youngest had an overflowing diaper on. It had not been changed in days.
“Tell us what happened,” Stokley said.
The boy tried to, but he was having trouble. There was despair and pain that had no business in a kid his age. But it was there, especially in his eyes that were looms that could spin tales of desperation and ugliness without his mouth ever opening.
Stokley listened patiently as the boy tried to get it out, but it took time. It was not easy. The bigness of his dread would barely fit up the channel of his throat. Stokley heard something of the sort he knew he would hear. When he had arrived and looked up at the place his heart had hammered almost painfully, but now it had settled into a dull and disquieting rhythm. Even with what he heard, it did not so much as hitch.
The boy told him that his mother had been up in her room for three days and that she would not come out. She had in fact locked the door. He had been caring for his sisters and it was only yesterday that he had heard her moving around in there again.
“It smells funny from her room,” the boy said. “And she makes me go get her things.”
What kind of things? Stokley asked him and the kid said his mother had started whispering through the door that she wanted dead things. She said there were plenty of dead things floating around in the streets and that he was to bring them home. He brought her a dead cat, a dead cocker spaniel, and three dead rats. She told him to leave those things at the door and to not look when she opened it. The kid had not. He had never looked, even though a smell of warm, rotting things had wafted out. The kid said he thought she was eating those carcasses, that he heard her slurping and chewing on them. And then this morning, when she’d reached out to take a swollen rat corpse, he had dared to look. He said she was sick because her arm was bumpy and white and there were little things crawling on it.
“Davey,” Stokley said to Rose, “get these kids out of here. Get on the horn with Child Protective Services. Go, move, now!”
When Rose had ushered them out the door, a wild look in his eyes, Stokley had started up those creaking, ancient stairs. The banister rail was oily and smoothed by generations of grimy working hands. What struck him the strongest was the sheer silence of that building. He wondered vaguely if anyone even lived there besides the woman and her kids. The silence was so pronounced it reminded him of walking through a funeral home, seeing all the display rooms with their comfortable furniture awaiting grieving bodies. It was much like that.
Too quiet, like they said in the old movies.
Up Stokley went until he hit the third floor, his guts continuing to boil and froth in his belly. Even had he not known the number of the flat, his nose would have led him there. The stench wafting out the half-opened door was sickening. A raw stink of things slimy and putrid that had slipped out of waterlogged graves.
Stokley slipped his 9mm Beretta out of its holster and clicked it off safety. The gun had always made him feel strong and somehow invincible. But today, it felt entirely useless like a handful of peas he was going to toss at a hungry giant.
What’s waiting for you in there, Eddie, has crossed the barrier. It has crawled like a living, seething pestilence from the other side. Bullets will not stay it, will not put it back down again. It has risen and it is wise and evil.
Stokley saw old furniture with gaping holes, missing cushions, and stacks of books in place of chair legs. The wallpaper was yellowed and curling, fifty years out of date. Water dripped from the cracked plaster of the ceiling. Garbage was strewn everywhere with the remains of meals on dirty plates. Heaps of musty laundry fought for space with broken toys. There was a TV with a shattered picture tube.
“Mrs. Holmes,” Stokley heard his voice call out. “I’m Stokley of the police. We have your kids. I think you better come out and answer a few questions.”
There was only silence from beyond a soiled bedroom door for maybe thirty seconds and then a meaty, wet sound like bones being pulled from boiled chicken. Stokley knew then it was the sound of her moving. There was a creak as of bedsprings, then a sticky, slopping sound that must have been feet crossing the room.
Something thudded against the door. Something else dripped. And then a voice like mud spilled into a bucket: “You go away and bring my children back, you hear? You bring them back or I’ll come and get them…”
It was a threat and he took it as the sa
me. The door began to open and something like a hand hooked around its edge…only it was gnarled and spidery, fleshed in a skin that was a translucent white like ectoplasm and pebbly, set with contusions and festering sores.
Stokley felt his heart drop away into some sucking, black hole within him as she shambled out of the coveting shadows, flyblown and crawling with worms.
Thing was, he had seen her before.
As a child, he remembered her. She was the witch from his nightmares. A pallid haunter of the dark with a crooked back and a mop of graying, oily hair. Her belly was filled with child-meat and her teeth had been sharpened on child-bones. She lived in moldering closets and dank cellars, always creeping forth when lights went out and the sound of his parents footfalls vanished down the hallway. She was here, reaching out for him with fingers like threshing hooks and an oval, drooping mouth filled with roofing nails.
Stokley stepped back, a very real terror blossoming in his belly like night-blooming orchids opening in a crypt. It was the sort of terror that made him feel loose inside like maybe he was unraveling.
Mrs. Holmes, or the thing she now was, shambled forth with a slushy, rubbery sound and Stokley noticed that she was leaving dark tracks in her wake, that bits of her soles were stuck in those prints. She brought a nauseous flyblown odor with her, the stink of what she was and what she had been chewing on in that moist, dark tomb of hers. She wore a dirty shift that might have been a slip or a nightdress at one time, but now was just as soiled as a painter’s dropcloth…stained with whorls and blotches of brown and gray fluids. Her flesh was baggy as if it was blown up from the bones beneath by gas. It looked viscid, spongy like some sort of cemetery fungi that had erupted from a buried box. There were tumorous-looking graying boils set in it and as she came forth, they popped like soap bubbles, black fluid leaking from them with a stink of rotting fish.
“Stay back,” Stokley told her, knowing how impotent that was, and wondering what might have happened here if he had just did as she asked. If he had brought her children back. Would she have stayed in that room? Would she have been content to eat the carrion they brought and leave them unmolested? Was it possible that, in that reeking hide, there still burned a flame of motherhood? That she had woken from death as something malignant, yes, but also something with the ingrained and instinctual need to protect her young?