by Tim Curran
Yeah, it sounded good. But he just couldn’t swallow it.
What then?
Was he ready to believe in things that Lily Barron believed in? That dead people had come back from the grave? Man, that was loony, that was damaged, that was seriously fucked-up. Deke was sixteen and, though he would never have admitted it openly, there was plenty in the world he did not know about. But one thing he knew is that the dead were dead. Them waking up and walking around was entertaining as all hell, made for fun movies and fun books, but there was no truth to it. Zombies were bullshit. Even he knew that. The dead did not come back. The idea of it was not only scary, but repulsive.
But what if they had come back?
What if Lily Barron wasn’t so crazy after all?
Deke did not like to be thinking these things as he sat there by the light of candles in the dead of night, but…what if? About all he knew about resurrection was shit from church about Jesus and Lazarus and all that and he had never paid much attention. Other than that, just movies and books.
Last year in Mr. Firringo’s class, American Lit, they’d all been given an American author to research. Deke got Poe. Poe had a thing about premature burials and people coming back from the dead. Poe’s stories “Morella” and “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” of course, all concerned themselves with women returning from the tomb. Poe’s characters were always melancholy, morbid types, given to high drama and emotional outbursts, unnamed nervous maladies and fainting spells.
Somebody always fainted in a Poe story, it seemed, or had a nervous breakdown. But the idea of someone returning from the dead in such brooding, atmospheric tales didn’t seem so far-fetched and particularly since Poe’s characters were pretty much nuts anyway.
But that was the nineteenth century.
Nobody bought shit like that anymore.
Thinking these things and refusing to give them credence even as part of him, deep inside, was creeping closer to believe, he kept thinking about Nicky and Hillside Cemetery getting washed out. His thoughts moved so quickly and took so many erratic hairpin turns in his brain, Deke was not even aware of what was growing inside of him. That nervousness was increasing geometrically until it felt like there was a solid ball of writhing worms in his stomach, one that was expanding and expanding. Jesus.
Chrissy…where the hell are you? Where the hell is anybody?
God, no phone, no TV, no cell, no internet. This was fucking barbaric, this was the Middle Ages again, a world lit only by fire. Just the storm outside and that damn rain and the silence inside, huge and malefic and evolving.
Nothing else.
Nothing else but that muffled knocking sound from upstairs.
32
Wanda Sepperley was really something to watch.
You could hear all those crazy stories as Mitch had, listen to the neighbors swap tales of her, see the old ladies congregating over there on Thursday nights like hens mulling for a rooster, but until you really saw her in action…well, you just couldn’t appreciate it.
When Tommy and Mitch had gotten there, she had been waiting once again, knowing somehow that they would come.
Mitch hadn’t wasted any time: “Do you know where Chrissy is?”
Wanda, knowing she had been visited now as a friend and as a seer, nodded her head, kept nodding it, but she answered no questions. It was not her way. These things took time, took space, took maybe eternities and entire worlds to perform. A simple question? Maybe. But to divine and know and feel these unknowable truths took energy and electricity of the sort that only arced in the lower, pulsing regions of the soul almighty. But how could she explain these things to Mitch Barron and his friend, Mister Tommy? Better explain a summer’s starry night to a blind man or the smell of a crisp Autumn afternoon to someone without a nose. Because next to Wanda, these two men, though righteous of deed and caring of heart, were blind and deaf and could not smell turpentine if it was poured under their nostrils.
So Wanda seized up and shook, but it was no seizure, but maybe an intimate mating of rapture and dream. She became a dusty, stiff thing, a dummy worked by wires in a glass carnival coffin. She shook and trembled and mumbled nonsensical things and what she was doing was driving out the here and the now, letting the forever and the tomorrow fill her like a corked bottle. It was not easy to open up her mind and especially at her age, to fill it with a mesh of spider web, hoping to catch dragonflies and wasps and sewing needles and glittering green night-moths in her net, catch them and slit them open, drain their ruby juice and let it tell her things.
No, not easy, but she would do it. For it was a gift passed down her bloodline and although the ashes of her heart were cool, there was still a vibrant heat to be found beneath.
“Chrissy…” she said after a time, tasting the secret bitter marrow of prophecy on her tongue. “Chrissy…yes, I would know that child. She walks tall and proud, doesn’t she? Crusted with vanity and salted with an immature selfishness, just another child stuffing its pockets with candy…yet, Chrissy walks true and there is a sweetness and a purity in her that would be death to those who would seek to corrupt or harm her. But where is she? In the night and the dampness…her road will be a long one, but you’ll see her again, Mitch, for even now she comes back to you, one step at a time. Be patient and watchful, you’ll be with her again.”
Mitch just stood there, feeling…what? Foolish and silly listening to these things, but yet deep down inside he believed. He did not know how Wanda Sepperley could know these things, but know them she did.
Tommy lit a cigarette and his hand trembled. “See, isn’t that what I told you? She’ll be fine.”
“Fine and right,” Wanda said, a dew of perspiration beading her forehead.
“Sure,” Mitch said. “Sure.”
But it was all crazy wasn’t it? Like going to a sideshow or a fair and having one of those old-time booth witches read your future. Drop in your coin and read the card while the old hag nodded and cackled happily away. It was like that in many ways and in others, it was worlds beyond.
“A mad stew of shit?” Wanda said then. “Is that what you’re thinking, Mitch Barron? Ha! You wouldn’t be the first to laugh in the beginning and weep at the end. Trust, Mitch, just trust what your heart tells you to be true.”
Tommy didn’t have anything to say to any of it.
He looked…worn, tired, as if it had been he that had just read the future, reached out and took hold of those filaments of possibility and fate and followed them to their source, revealing their mysteries.
“But you came for more than that, now didn’t you?”
God, she was good. She really was.
Wanda was old and bloodless and dusty like something stored in an attic trunk, but, dear Christ, she was sighted. And next to her, he was absolutely blind, like an infant just learning to open his eyes, seeing things but not knowing what they were. And what was it like to have a mind like hers? What was that like when your mind was like some line you could cast about in any direction, into the now and the past and the future? A mind that you could toss into the wind like a kite, let it fly and soar and view things from far above? A mind that could look through shaded windows and drift over high rooftops and creep through attic damps? It could pass through walls and minds and follow overgrown paths and sniff like a dog, never losing the scent, but always following it home in the end.
“We came to ask…about a bus,” Tommy told her. “We heard it on the police scanner. There’s a schoolbus of kids lost out there.”
“And you’d like to lead those stray lambs home, would you?”
Tommy shrugged. “Somebody’s got to. People in this town, they’re hiding. They’re all just hiding. I’m not about to hide.”
“Then go in my kitchen yonder,” Wanda said, “bring me that bowl of yellow eggs, a plate, and a bowl. And don’t argue about it.”
Tommy didn’t argue.
He came back with a wooden bowl of eggs, a plate, and a bow
l. He set them on the table before Wanda and she just kept nodding her head, her face sallow in the candlelight.
She cracked an egg onto the plate and stirred the yolk with her fingertip. “Something bad there…hah! Feel the cold and the death on my fingertips!” She dumped that yolk into the bowl and cracked another onto the plate. “So much rot there! What a delight! Then and now, such amusement!”
Mitch and Tommy watched her go through five eggs like that, talking to herself, cocking her head and listening as if the yolks were speaking to her, sometimes rubbing a bit of slimy albumen between her thumb and forefinger. Sometimes she would laugh and sometimes frown. Sometimes she’d gasp and other times she’d simply shake her head.
And then she started to talk as she rummaged through yolks, telling them that she was not mad, but was practicing an old world science pretty much forgotten by the folks of today. “Was not the egg the symbol of life that had hatched the world?” she put to them. “Was it not the emblem of fertility and harvest? Could not the power of the egg increase the yield of the crops and make barren women fruitful? Of course it could, you silly men! Shows what you know and what you don’t! Mix corn with egg…yes, corn has substance and egg has meat! Yes, yes, yes! Spill an egg and divine your future! Mix an egg white with your husband’s blood and slurp it down, hence, you will conceive a house filled with laughing children! Surely! Now pierce the eggshell on Halloween night and pour the white into a glass of water and those twisting, slimy shapes will tell you things! Eat an egg before bed and you will dream of a week hence! Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Pour the yolk on a wound, say the words, and cast the shell in moonlight…you shall be cured!”
They were both smoking now.
Wanda took a sixth egg and handled it expertly. She spun it on the table and pressed it to her left eye, smiling all the while. Then carefully as a master chef, she cracked it into the plate and there was a threading of blood in it. Tensing, swallowing something down, she dipped her fingers into the cold tissue, wrapped loops of albumen around her fingers and held the dripping ooze up for all to see. She peered through it at the burning candle, then dropped it back down, piercing the yolk with the nail of her thumb. The yolk ran yellow and thick, but seamed with blood.
“Not much time now,” she said to those dumbfounded faces. “Those children are thinning in number…you must go to them now.”
“But where are they?” Tommy asked.
So she told them.
Mitch felt elated at hearing where they were. Now here was something positive they could do. It beat the hell out of sitting around wondering when those things might show. Yes, it felt very good. Right to his core it felt good…and then, just as suddenly, something else replaced it. Something that made him feel terrified. It opened up in his belly and filled him with a chill fluid. He knew something then, something he could not possibly know. “Lily…I…I can’t leave Lily alone, not with the girls…”
Wanda ran her fingers through the yolk one last time. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mitch, I really am sorry…”
But Mitch was already running out the door.
“Go with him,” Wanda told Tommy. “Now comes the darkness…”
33
Knocking?
Is that what he was hearing? A knocking in that empty house?
Yes, knocking. And hearing it, recognizing it, Deke wondered just how long he’d been hearing it. He’d been lost on his private fantasy train, but he was certain that he’d been hearing that sound for some time. Maybe that’s why his skin was crawling and his guts were bunching up…physical reactions to that sound. That awful drumming sound.
He sat up in his chair.
Knock, knock, knock.
He knew what he was thinking some time before he’d allowed himself to acknowledge it. The knocking. His room was next to Nicky’s and sometimes in the night they would knock out Morse Code to one another. But that didn’t mean anything. Not really.
Deke got up, wondering if he was really going to go up there. If he dared go up there. Because there was no getting around one thing: the knocking was directly overhead and the only room overhead was Nicky’s.
Deke walked over to the stairs with his flashlight. He didn’t really believe his brother was up there, but somebody was. As he stood at the bottom of the steps, his heart pounding with a low and muted sound, he heard the knocking again. And then something more. The creaking of bedsprings. He knew that creak very well. It was from Nicky’s bed. Deke had not heard it in a year and a half, but he recognized it instantly for what it was. Somebody had been lying in Nicky’s bed. Somebody had been lying there, knocking lightly on the wall and now…now they were getting up.
Deke’s throat was so dry he could not swallow.
He knew he could not just go up there and meet whatever it was with just a flashlight in hand. There was a shotgun in the basement, but he had no idea where the shells were. He had to think. He didn’t have the time. Whoever was up there was walking across Nicky’s floor, perhaps moving to the doorway even now.
“C’mon, asshole,” Deke said under his breath. “A weapon…something…”
Then he knew. The fireplace tools. Blackened and heavy, drop-forged iron. He took up a poker and had visions of dad stirring the coals in the fireplace so that Nicky and he could roast marshmallows.
Drawing in a sharp breath, he started up the steps.
This was as bad as it could get. There was no doubt of that. He could feel the weight of his body as he mounted each stair, the very pressure of his being. The air seemed hot or electrical around him like it was filled with some stored potential energy that was crackling and about to be discharged.
At the top, his heart nearly stopped.
He heard a shrill, mewling sound and it filled his blood with ice crystals. But it was only Mr. Cheese. Deke put the flashlight on him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Mr. Cheese squinted at the light, wagged the stump of his tail. He was home after all. Always had been. And hear he was, sitting outside the door to Nicky’s room, meowing away.
He’s waiting to be let in, Deke. Old Mr. Cheese is waiting for what’s behind that door to let him in as it always did in the old days…except these aren’t the old days and what’s behind that door is not Nicky. It’s something else now. Something without a soul, something that crawled from a grave.
Mr. Cheese brushed up against his legs and Deke badly wanted to give him a kick, but he didn’t have the heart, he just didn’t have the heart to hurt that poor?
Knock, knock, knock.
From behind the door now. From Behind Nicky’s door. The sound of knuckles wrapping and there was no way in hell anyone but the two of them knew what that meant. Nobody but Nicky, or something pretending to be Nicky, could know the enormity of what that sound did to Deke. How it shattered him inside and made a scream claw dryly in his throat, made him want to drop to the floor and maybe pull himself into a corner where he could weep and suck his thumb with childish abandon.
He pulled air into his lungs. “Nicky?” he said. “Is that you, Nicky?”
Whoever was behind that door made no sound…no sound but sort of a dripping. But Deke knew they were there, he could sense their physical presence, feel it crawling into him like worms into bad meat, staying there and breeding. Whoever waited behind that wooden panel was wet and dripping and stank like carrion pulled from a drainage ditch.
“Okay,” Deke said. “Come on out then.”
The door swung open and Nicky stepped out, small and hunched-over, his burial suit hanging in tatters, just a gassy-smelling corpse that might have been fished from the bottom of a mossy well. Most of his face had rotted down to the bone, but where the flesh had once been, now there was a gray covering of mold. One eye socket was empty, the other set with a staring huge eyeball that was oily and black.
Deke gasped and stepped back.
Mr. Cheese laid his ears back against his skull, hissed, and ran down the steps.
Nicky smiled and most of his t
eeth were missing. “Hello, Deke, hello, big brother, I come back for you,” he said, speaking with a childlike voice, but one that had been freed of that little boy lisp that made it hard for him to pronounce the “R” sound. Yes, it sounded somewhat like the voice of a little boy, though damaged and moist, but there was a maturity to it now that was not just old, it was ancient. “You know what I did, Deke? Do you know what I did?”
“Nicky, oh God, no…”
“I came home and waited outside for mom and dad,” the thing said. “Yes, Deke, I waited outside. When dad came out to lock the garage, I was waiting for him. I put my teeth in his throat and I drank his blood and when mom came looking for him, I told her what it was like in hell. I told her what they did to her sweet little boy in hell. And then I killed her, Deke. I killed her and ate her guts and when I was done, I fucked her corpse?”
No this was not Nicky.
Deke was still frightened, but the anger he felt at the obscenities spewing from that thing’s mouth turned something black and bitter inside him. Without thinking, he swung the poker at the Nicky-thing. Swung it hard and overhand like he was trying to pound in a railroad spike. The poker came down before Nicky could react. It came down right on the crown of his head and split it wide open, driving that pestilence right to his knees. He sat there on the floor, holding his head which was wide open from nasal cavity to crown, black silt and slime and tangles of worms spilling out.
And the insane thing was, Nicky laughed.
And laughed.
And laughed.
There was no humor in it, of course. It was a scratching, metallic sound, vile and mocking. The laughter of the damned. The laughter that might drift up through a hole in the roof of hell. And Deke, half out of his mind with the sound of it, kept swinging and swinging and the Nicky-thing did not fight back. It just laughed as that poker came down, smashing its skull and snapping its bones, ripping and pulverizing it until it was just a mass of writhing carrion…flesh and muscle and skeleton that moved on the floor, dismembered and fragmented. But all through it, that skull laughed and laughed.