by Tim Curran
“One time at Bear Lake,” Liss said, “a painted turtle brushed against my sister’s leg when she was swimming and she screamed.”
This time it was Hopper’s turn: “Shut the fuck up.”
They stood there, watching that water like maybe they were expecting to see a dorsal fin emerge. The surface was greasy-looking and steaming like the seam of fat over a kettle of chicken soup. The lights would not penetrate it anymore than five or six inches. It was just a drainage of dirty water, sewage, debris, and numerous dead things. That was offensive enough on its own, but there were other things in it and they all knew it.
“I’m not seeing anything,” Hopper said, whispered actually, like something down there might hear him and decide to prove him wrong.
The lights moved about, the beams filled with an opaque mist, reflecting off that oily surface. Each of them was feeling something now. Not just the possibility that something was near, but the certainty of it. Hopper himself was feeling like every muscle in his body was tensing, every nerve end jangling with a sudden eruption of electricity. He was pretty much numb from the waist down from being in that cold water, but he felt suddenly warm all over. The rain fell on his beret, dripped off the rim and ran down his face like tears. But even with that, he could feel himself begin to sweat.
“Maybe we should get out of the water for a bit,” he said. “Take a break.”
“Yeah,” Liss said, caught up in it, too, now.
Torrio nodded, but never spoke. There was a ripple in the water just ahead of him as if something large had just passed beneath the surface. It could have been a big carp out feeding, but nobody thought that for a moment.
Hopper played his light on the houses nearest them. Some were two-story jobs. At least, they could go upstairs and get out of the water for a bit. It was better than this, anyway. He chose one at random.
“Come on,” he said.
The other two fell in behind him. They moved as quickly as they could towards the house, water splashing around them. The house came out of the rain and mist slowly, a tall narrow structure that looked impossibly dark and forbidding. But a haunted house beat the stinking, flooded streets any day.
There was a splash behind them.
They whirled around.
“What was that?” Torrio said.
They were a good thirty feet from the house. If there was anything in the water with them and it didn’t want them getting inside, it had plenty of time to show itself.
Hopper was not only warm now, but shivering at the same time. It felt like somebody had tied his guts into a square knot. He felt his breath in his lungs, the water running down his face. A cold chill swept up his back and he felt a sharp pain in his bowels like he might shit himself.
Something splashed off to the left and the water roiled.
“Hopper…” Torrio began.
They were shining their lights in every which direction, the beams filled with raindrops and fingers of mist.
“Shit,” Torrio said, taking a few splashing steps back.
“What?”
“I saw something…something just under the water over there. Something white.”
He pointed his light in that direction, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. The beam flickered with the shaking of his hand.
And Liss cried out. “Ouch. Shit. Something…I think something bit me.”
Oh, Jesus, not good, not good at all, Hopper was thinking. It was like crossing a tributary of the Amazon or something, piranhas circling them, coming in for the kill. He wondered if they could smell blood…whatever was out there.
“All right,” he said, “let’s get to that fucking house. Now.”
They started to move, going as fast as they could and the water was sloshing around them, waves cast in every direction. But they all knew that it wasn’t just their movement stirring up the water, it was something else.
The house was closer.
But not close enough.
Something bumped into Hopper’s leg and he let out a little muted cry, but nobody paid attention. What was going to happen, he knew, was going to happen very soon now. And before they reached the house. Right then he started doing something he hadn’t done in years: he began to pray.
“Hurry up!” Torrio said, taking the lead. “They’re in the water! Something’s in the fucking water with us!”
They charged forward and then Liss made a strange almost yelping sound like he’d been punched in the stomach. They turned and put their lights on him. He was just standing there, his face contorted with horror. Something hit him from below and he went one way and then it hit him again, and he went the other way. And then he screamed into the night and fell backwards, going completely under. He fought to the surface, choking and gasping, and then he went under again.
Neither Hopper or Torrio moved.
They both knew that Liss needed help, but they honestly didn’t know how to help him. They felt powerless. Just locked down with abject terror. And maybe Hopper’s comparison of shipwrecked sailors was right on the money…for what did you do and what could you really do when the sharks took the first member of your party?
Liss came to the surface again and there was blood streaming down his face. And there was no doubt as to why: a great strip of flesh had been ripped from his left eye socket to his lip and it hung there in a grisly flap. Water was spraying around as he thrashed this way and that and nobody could tell what was going on. He called out their names, spitting water and blood. Then he turned around, trying to pull something off his back and they saw.
They saw what had him.
At first Hopper thought, crazily, that there was a baby on his back and then maybe a dwarf. But it was neither. It was roughly the shape of an infant, but bloated to twice the size. Just a fish belly-white thing that was lumpy and grotesque, set with a series of irregular fleshly mounds like great tumors rising from its back and erupting from its bulbous head. Liss went down on his knees in the water and the thing clung to him like some monstrous, evil twin growing out of his back. But it wasn’t growing out of him, it was clinging to him with claws that were sunk in his back.
“Oh my God,” Torrio said.
And that summed it up, more or less. They had the lights right on it and it didn’t seem to care for that much. Its face was a semi-human distortion, bulb-shaped and made out of a white, oozing flesh that looked like it had been worked from clay. One side sliding down in the process so that the right side of its face rode up much higher than the left. Its left eye was little more than a slit webbed shut by filaments of skin; its right huge and black and shining. Its mouth drawn downward like a rut.
It looked right at them with a mindless hatred, its rubbery lips drawn away from nubby teeth. It made a low mewling sound.
Torrio couldn’t take it.
He opened up on it. Rounds drilled into Liss and the thing, scattering bits of them into the water. Liss went under, taking that horror with him. Liss did not come back up, but the thing did. A great section of its cranium had been blasted away, something with the texture and color of dirty motor oil running down its face.
It was enough.
Hopper put a few rounds in its direction and then stumbled blindly through the water to the house, Torrio just ahead of him. Their lights were flickering and spearing about, casting fantastic shadows around them in the screaming darkness. The front door was open, banging against the wall.
Torrio led the way in. The house was set above the level of the street, so the water was only up to their knees by that point.
“Find the stairs,” Hopper said.
Torrio did and they made for them. Weighted down in wet fatigues and raingear and equipment, they felt like they each weighed roughly five-hundred pounds.
Behind them, there was more splashing.
They put their lights back there and saw maybe a dozen white, mounded bodies moving through the water in their direction. Torrio squeezed off a few rounds, but the things kept comin
g, pushing slowly through the water in a tide of white clumped flesh. They were crawling like babies, nearly underwater, making for the stairs like lungfish coming out of the water to lay their eggs.
Torrio and Hopper pulled themselves up the stairs. Had they been dry, they could have raced up them. But as it was, they struggled up them like old men, each step a chore. At the top, winded and dripping, they put the lights on the water below.
Yes, the things were still coming.
They both saw them. Like horribly mutated fetuses, the things began dragged themselves up out of that dirty water. Each of them had the general form of a human infant, but exaggerated to a shocking extreme. White-fleshed and bulging with morbid cancerous-looking growths. Some had faces and some had none, just wide oval mouths that were more like those of lampreys than human beings. Some had two eyes and some had only one, others had eyes opening in their chests and bellies and even in the palms of their hands. Some had huge, spidery limbs on one side and withered sticks on the other. Others had too many arms or no arms at all. And quite a few had limbs that were more like writhing tentacles than anything else.
But what Hopper saw that disturbed him more than anything else, was that quite a few were joined together at the head and the hip or shoulder like Siamese twins. And some had more than one head, sometimes just a bulb growing from a shoulder like something that wanted to be a head.
No, they were not human. But jellyfish and embryonic squids that were pretending to be human.
“God, hurry,” Torrio said. “Hurry.”
Together, they stumbled down the hall, hearing the slushy, wet sounds of those things climbing the stairs.
27
“That thing was eating Liss,” Torrio said.
He hadn’t said a word in some time and this is how he broached the silence. Hopper didn’t bother commenting on it. They were safe for the moment. The things had been climbing the stairs for some time, but now it was quiet out there so they must have retreated.
“It was eating him,” Torrio said.
“Yeah, no shit.”
They were sitting in a room, the door locked to what might lay in wait outside. It was the bedroom of some boy, probably, who had seriously been into airplanes and space exploration. Plastic fighters and spacecraft hung from the ceiling on threads. There were posters of the moon and Mars on the walls. Even the bedspread featured rockets and stars and satellites whizzing about. Torrio was laying on it, his equipment tossed to the floor.
Hopper sat on the edge of the bed. “What the fuck is going on in this city?” he said. “What the hell is this all about?”
“The dead are rising, man, just like in those movies.”
“And those things downstairs?”
Torrio took his time in answering that one. Finally, he said, “Freak babies.”
“Freak babies?”
“Yeah, man, sure. You’ve seen ‘em. They used to have ‘em at sideshows and shit. Dead babies in jars. Things that died at birth. You know, things with two heads or too many eyes, three arms. You know.”
Hopper was going to tell him that was ridiculous. What possible chain of events could have put freak babies from sideshow jars into the water out there? And, better, what made them alive? What turned something that was essentially pitiable into a monster?
“Listen,” Torrio said.
There was movement out in the hallway.
A dragging noise.
Then a dripping sound like water was running from something.
Neither of them dared to even breathe.
More sounds now, gathering outside the door. Hopper heard a drawn-out phlegmy sound that might have been breathing. Something sniffed along the bottom of the door and then there was the sound of dozens of fingers scraping.
“They won’t get in,” Torrio said, breathing heavily.
But Hopper was not so sure. The door was only a cheap panel job. It couldn’t take too much. And those fetal nightmares out there were throwing everything they had at it. Pounding and scratching and tearing at it. The door was rattling uneasily in its frame. If it came open…
Well, Hopper did not want to think what it might be like to be buried in a sea of those things, drowning beneath those scraping fingers and sucking mouths.
No, no, no.
He went over to the window. The garage roof was just below them. They could drop onto it and get back into the water, try another house maybe. He undid the latch and was surprised when it slid up as if greased.
“Come on,” he said.
Torrio didn’t argue.
Hopper went first, leaping onto the roof seven feet below. He hit hard, but the roof was flat so he didn’t roll off. Torrio followed.
“Now what?”
Hopper scanned the water. It looked okay. “Back in,” he said.
They lowered themselves into the drink and felt that chill water consume them again. The pervasive stench of it was sickening. Just rot and things they didn’t want to know about. They started moving down an alley, their hearts in their throats, shining their lights about. The rain had slowed to a trickle. The clouds thinned enough so that moonlight actually made it through, illuminating the sunken, surreal world around them.
“Wait,” Torrio said.
Somebody was standing at the end of the alley where it opened into the street.
Just a figure that looked to be cut from the darkest vellum, almost like a cardboard cut-out. Had they seen it in a yard, they might have thought it was a statue. Except this statue had two eyes that shined yellow in the wan moonlight.
“Fuck this,” Torrio said.
He took aim on it and fired a couple three-round bursts at it from his M-16. The bullets kicked up the water around it and made it jerk with the impact of the ones that hit, but nothing more.
It just stood there, watching them.
Hopper felt something coming from this one that was beyond anything they’d felt before: just an absolute, seething evil that sucked his breath away. He grabbed Torrio by the arm and led him away between two houses. Whatever it was, he did not want to come face to face with it.
He found another open door and they went in, crouching in the knee-deep water, just breathing and waiting and hoping to dear God that the creature did not follow them. Outside, it was dead quiet. Nothing but the rain, an occasional breeze along the roof. There was a narrow stairway on the other side of the room. There must have been a window at the top for it was lit by yellow moonlight.
“Should we go up?” Torrio whispered.
Hopper didn’t answer.
Something moved up there. There was a rustling, dragging sound as something came towards the top of the stairs. They had their flashlights off. The moonlight was enough. Whatever was up there must have known they were there, because it kept coming and finally, they could see it.
Not it exactly, but the shadow it threw against the stairway wall.
Something hunched-over and inhuman, a single arm extended before it, the hand more like a tree branch than a hand. Enlarged and deformed, the fingers splayed out like crooked twigs, impossibly long and wiry.
Hopper thought: Good God…what’s that coming down the stairs?
But he didn’t want to find out what could throw a shadow like that, what could move with that undulant, worming motion. Torrio and he splashed back out into the streets and behind them, a dry and crumbling voice called out to them. What it was saying, they did not know.
Out in the water.
Hopper was out of his mind. He didn’t know where to go, where to hide. Another house? Take their chances out in the open? The two of them just stood there in the flooded street and waited and waited.
“Hopper?”
There was a splash and Torrio was gone. Nothing but ripples where he had been standing. He did not come back up. Hopper could barely catch his breath. He stood there, turning around in circles, filled with white fear. Hot urine coursed down his leg.
“Desecrator,” a voice said.
Ho
pper turned and looked at the form standing behind him. A tall, dark man with eyes that burned like yellow lamps. He was dressed in a flowing leathery shift like a shroud. His face was an atrocity. He looked like a mummy from a carnival sideshow, pitted and hollowed and riddled with holes. His face was honeycombed…and out of those chambers beetles were coming and going…along with rivers of black water.
Hopper let out a little cry and the rifle fell from his hands.
He did not know who this man was, only that he was a simmering malignance that would pollute and devour anything that got too close. He felt the man’s mind touch his own and his thoughts went to ash.
Oh, please, dear God…don’t touch me…
The beetles were everywhere, pouring out of the man in a swarm, moving through the water in clustered islands, crawling up Hopper’s legs, clustering on his raincoat like barnacles. Flying and swimming and enveloping.
And the man himself, that terrible dark man…you could not see him anymore. He was just a crawling, creeping mass of insects in the rough shape of a man. Infested.
Hopper screamed.
And then he was drowning.
Drowning in a rising sea of biting, nipping beetles. They covered his face and hands and slipped under his clothes, went for his eyes and the soft bulge of his throat.
But they didn’t get into his mouth until he opened it in a wide, wet scream.
Which echoed out raw and painful as he slipped beneath the waters. But the dark man would not let him go. He yanked Hopper up, held him there, brought his own hideous face in closer. He opened his mouth and there were squirming things inside. Things like dozens of bloated red tongues. But they weren’t tongues…just huge, slick carrion worms. They snaked out of his mouth and right past Hopper’s lips, sliding over his tongue and filling his throat.
Infested by worms and beetles, Hopper sank beneath the water.
“Desecrator,” said the dark man, melting away into the shadows.
28
Once upon a time, there was a clown named Grimshanks and he was a real jolly sort. He entertained at kid’s parties and local carnivals, was a real hoot at fund-raisers and private hoo-hahs. He was known as Koo-Koo the Clown and Boo-Boo and Laughing Lester, in fact a wide variety of harmless, fuzzy and cozy names, but to himself, when he looked at himself in the mirror with the whiteface on, he was Grimshanks, always Grimshanks. And it didn’t matter that his real name was Edward Shears or that he was an accountant by day?or had been, until those bloodsuckers at Stenig and Weinberg let him go…downsizing, they said. No, that was just stupid ephemeral stuff just like the rest of the world and none of it really mattered.