Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  There was more. Much more. Wallach must’ve been having some kind of a party, Wertzel thought bitterly. Maybe he thought there was safety in numbers. A pair of voices warbled and whooped in screeching, agonized harmony. Stupid goddam kid. I tried to warn him…

  The screaming stopped, abruptly.

  And the feeding sounds began.

  Wertzel cupped his hands over his ears, clammy shields against the horror. A blood-red ocean roared and surged inside his head. It was better, but it was not enough. He wanted to hum something, set up a monochromatic drone that would amplify itself against the confines of his skull, drown out the cracking and smacking and slurping from below. He didn’t dare. The tiniest sound might be enough to attract them. Even his breathing was carefully modulated for silence.

  It went on for five minutes that seemed very much like forever.

  Jake Wertzel was a squat, stocky man in his late thirties: barrel chest, paunch beneath it, massive arms to either side. Twenty years on the loading docks will do it to you. His features were pinched and unlovely; his hairline had receded all the way to the back of his head, crowning him with a bald plateau that shimmered in the light from the bare bulb in the ceiling. He looked like a man who had known much hardship, very little happiness. He looked exactly like what he was.

  He wished to God that he were not so horribly alone.

  He remembered the dogs. Fleetingly, absurdly, he wished that they were still alive, wagging their tails or lapping at his cheeks or humping his knees with witless abandon. He had picked them up at the Humane Society three weeks before, anticipating the holiday rush: a pair of big, stupid, ungainly mutts that he named Haystacks and Calhoon. Wertzel had done his human best to remain detached from them, knowing what fate had in store. But three weeks is a long time: more than enough time to grow fond of them, their brainless devotion. More than enough time to make him miss them now.

  At 10:45, the absolute latest that he could wait, Wertzel gave the last supper to Haystacks and Calhoon. The Purina Dog Chow was laced with enough sedatives to knock out an army: he wanted to make sure that they felt no pain. Fifteen minutes later, they were down for the count.

  Wertzel had dragged them out into the hallway, gutted them, drawn a huge cross on the door with their blood, and left them on the matt: paws up, tongues lolling.

  Then he had gone back into the apartment, locked and bolted and nailed the door shut, boarded it up with heavy planks he had taken from skids at the loading dock, pushed the chest of drawers in front of it, and moved to the chair in the middle of the room.

  To wait. And hope.

  It was now twenty after twelve. The witching hour had struck.

  And they had come.

  “Oh, God,” he moaned, and was startled by how loudly the words boomed in his ears. His hands jerked away from the sides of his head, and he realized that the downstairs had gone almost completely silent. There was a faint, airy sound that might have been the hissing of the pipes. Somehow, he didn’t believe it.

  Why me? he thought. Why here? Why now? Last year, the worst of it had gone down in Chelsea and the Village. The year before that… the first year… had laid waste to much of the Upper East Side. If there was a pattern there, Wertzel couldn’t see it; but he’d hoped that the horror would focus itself uptown again, give him enough time to save up enough money to maybe get the hell out of New York before the fall.

  As if there were anywhere safe to go.

  Most of all, he wished that things would revert to the way they used to be. He wished for the sound of chil-di(-n’s voices, giddy with laughter and hoarse with demands. He wished for cheesy plastic masks, eye-holes sliced in ratty sheets, prosthetic warts and theatrical blood.

  He longed for the days when it was easy to pretend that the whole thing was just a joke.

  Gone now, his mind whispered silent. All gone. All gone…

  They were coming up the stairs.

  Wertzel felt his bowels tighten like a hangman’s knot. Ice water drained down his spine and gathered in the pit of his stomach. His scrotum constricted like a slug under a magnifying glass, and hot moisture like acid seeped into his eyes from the unlimited slope of his forehead.

  They were coming up the stairs. He didn’t know what they were, what they looked like, how they moved. He didn’t want to know. They made sounds that his ears rejected as unreal, though his heart and soul knew better. They skittered and slithered and fluttered and muttered and howled like brain-damaged hyenas from Hell. One of them made a noise like a spoons-player in a jug band; it moved along the stairway wall with incredible speed, blasted down the hall toward him, clattered across the length of the door in a split-second, raced halfway up to the fourth floor, and came all the way back before the others reached the third floor landing.

  One of them made the walls shake as it approached.

  I will not move, he urged himself with a silent, sickly whining voice. I will not scream. I will not lose control. He prayed that the sacrifice would work. Rumor had it that blood offerings had been known to, on occasion.

  Wertzel found himself wishing, suddenly, that he’d sacrificed a child instead: supposedly, they worked the best. But killing the dogs had been bad enough.

  At the time.

  They were coming down the hall. They were coming to his door. The books and knickknacks that had threatened to tumble now made good of their promise, slamming and shattering against the floor, filling the room with gunshot echoes that ricocheted off the walls. The heavy chest of drawers rocked back and forth on its heels like a Bozo punching bag. The kitchen cupboard flew open; plates and saucers and glasses and cups exploded into the sink like a string of firecrackers.

  Wertzel screamed and pissed himself. He couldn’t help it. The crotch of his Lee jeans ballooned with moisture, and wet sticky tendrils crept down his thighs, while his mouth flew open and all the terror in his heart flew up, up and out in a torrential spasm.

  “NO PLEASE GOD NO PLEASE NO OH GOD PLEASE DON’T KILL ME! I… I…”

  In the bathroom, behind the boarded-up door, the toilet flushed.

  “…I… I…”

  A light came on in the sealed closet. There was the

  sound of rending fabric.

  "…I…"

  Something scratched against the window, screeched, and flapped its leathery wings.

  “I GAVE YOU A SACRIFICE!” he bellowed. “I CAVE YOU A SACRIFICE. PLEASE DON’T KILL ME, OH GOD PLEASE I’LL DO ANYTHING YOU WANT…”

  Silence.

  Jake Wertzel fell back in his seat, breath catching in his throat. The room had stopped shaking. Nothing moved. Nothing fell.

  Silence from the bathroom.

  Silence from the closet.

  Silence from the windows.

  Silence in the hall.

  Wertzel held his breath for a good thirty seconds, not daring to believe.

  Silence.

  Slowly, then, he let out one long shuddering exhalation. The muscles in his face twitched; the corners of his mouth arced tentatively upward in a smile. He let the useless .45 dangle by one finger like an ornament on an artificial tree.

  Then he started to cry.

  And God, did it ever feel good to cry, to let out all the pent-up emotion, to bask and wallow in the fact that he was alive! he was alive! and no sound remained to haunt him but the manic intermingling of his own tears and laughter, punctuated by the steady…

  (Drip. Drip. Drip.)

  Of what? He laughed and cried some more. It could have been swollen teardrops, landing at his feet. It could have been the piss, still dribbling down his legs. Lord knew he had dropped enough fluids in the last few minutes to account for any amount of…

  (Drip. Drip. Drip.)

  It was coming from above him.

  He opened his eyes.

  The room was turning red.

  (Drip. Drip. Drip.)

  He looked up.

  There was a quarter-inch of blood at the bottom of the light bulb in the cent
er of the ceiling, directly above his head. He looked up just in time to watch a tiny blue spark catch off the filament, just before the bulb blew up, showering him with blood and broken glass.

  And total darkness.

  Wertzel shrieked and hit the floor on his hands and knees. The glass bit through his clothes, his skin, sinking into the meat and lodging there like bee-stingers. He yowled aqd rolled over. His back erupted with pain.

  The toilet flushed.

  Light winked on under the closet door.

  Something dragged its talons along the window-glass outside.

  And the spitfire staccato of the wall-climbing thing burst out from the hole in the wall behind the oven, the hole he had forgotten to patch, the hole that now allowed it entrance. Like a methedrine freak with a pair of spoons, it clattered and streaked toward him so fast that he barely had time to aim the .45 in the direction of the sound and fire.

  In the muzzle-flash, he could see the scuttling crabthing turn inside-out and spray all over the kitchenette. Then it was dark again, totally dark. Spots danced in front of his eyes. His ears were filled with the hiss of melting metal as the crabthing’s guts ate holes in the oven, the Frigidaire …

  No.

  Not total darkness.

  In the fireplace, something was moving. He could see it through the cracks between the boards, red and yellow and orange like flame. But brighter. More solid.

  And moving.

  A pair of tiny flaming hands pried their way between the boards. The wood crackled and blackened and parted at their touch. A tiny head poked through the opening.

  It stared at him.

  And suddenly Wertzel knew why there would be no more plastic masks, no tattered sheets with holes for the eyes, no warts and scars and blood from the lab. Suddenly, he knew why they had come.

  They had been watching, and waiting, for a long long time. They had watched the Church march arrogantly across the face of the earth, twisting the old pagan holidays to suit it, stripping and homogenizing away all meaning, then positing nonsense in its place.

  And though centuries passed like seconds to them, it still dragged on too long. Where the Great Dark Ones had once strode the earth, there now stood Kolchak, the Night Stalker and Caspar, the Friendly Ghost. They had seen the shitty movies. They had read the shitty books. They had seen themselves turned into limp-wristed Bela Lugosis and carrot-headed James Arnesses, heard too many bad actors get the spells all wrong and conjure up demons that couldn’t scare the fleas off a pink-nosed bunny.

  Worst of all, they had seen All Hallow’s Eve transformed into a ritual for posturing, preening babies; had seen their glorious faces mocked and strung up in too many dime store windows. For far too long.

  But that was over.

  Wertzel understood it all, staring into those coal-black, ageless eyes.

  He understood perfectly.

  He started to scream.

  Then the windows imploded, and the front door flew apart like a matchstick house in a hurricane’s hands, and the Old Ones slithered and stalked and soared into Jake Wertzel’s third floor walkup apartment in beautiful Godless Midtown Manhattan.

  After a while, the screaming stopped.

  And the feeding sounds began.

  Halloween. It ain’t just kid stuff.

  Any more.

  11

  SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

  Lee Cave had been at work since seven ayem, as usual: sittin’ on his duff in the freight elevator, waiting for something to happen. The day offered up predictable pockets of activity—sweaty homeboys with crates and boxes, props and promo-pieces heading up to Tower Records’ storage—but the rest of the time, his job was simply to be there in case something happened.

  In the yawning space between, he kept his brain busy: with the endlessly changing cast of characters visible through his hallway-wide window on the world, with the Daily News or the Post, and the occasional paperback book. This week’s entry—he read real slow—was another one of those Ruth Montgomery things that his daughter Bobbi kept handing off to him (enlightening him, she liked to think; barely eighteen years old, born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, and she already knew all the answers to the secrets of the universe).

  Strangers Among Us, this one was called, and it was all about spirits from the other side that were poppin’ in and takin’ over the bodies of people who had pretty much let their own spirits fizzle out. Walk-ins, Ruth Montgomery called them, and supposedly they were friendly spirits (sorta like Casper, he chuckled to himself) that were here to help us usher in the New Age, keep us from blowin’ the titties right off of the world.

  All kidding aside, he thought that walk-ins were a pretty far-fetched idea, though he could not swear with any certainty that he didn’t believe it—some. Lee Cave was born and raised Baptist back in the twenties in Bayou St. John, which was pretty built up now but at the time was a heavily wooded area in the Lakeside section of New Orleans. Lots of voodoo, lot of gris-gris mojo. Hell, his own great-gran’mama, a big woman with a face like a raisin at midnight and the clearest eyes he ever saw, was a real live Mambo-Bokour, a voodoo priestess straight from Africa. And much as his own mama hated it, Lee grew up with an ear in either world, hearing all manner of things: how you could hurt an enemy by putting his name in a dead bird’s mouth and letting the bird dry up, how you could inflict a slow and painful death on a man by burying his picture face-down and burning a black candle over it, then waiting for the image to fade away. About how if you said your prayers in the dark they went to the devil, and not to God.

  About how ghosts could linger on, hungering for believers, and how dreams carried messages from the gods…

  Lee shuddered. Aw, hell. Piss on Ruth Montgomery. Gimme the willies. Most of the people he’d met who’d let their spark go out were still walking around without one; meanwhile, the world’s poor sagging titties looked closer to blowin’ off every time he turned around. And though he was by nature an optimistic man, most of what he’d seen from disembodied spirits weren’t nothin’ to cheer about.

  A buzzer rang. He turned to look.

  The ninth floor.

  Speak of the devil, he thought.

  Not a joke. All at once, it was back in his head: the sound, the smell, the sight, the stories. It set his own personal alarm system off; his nerves began to jangle.

  “Aw, hell,” he muttered.

  The buzzer rang again.

  Lee Cave was a man who had learned to trust his feelings. Often enough it had made more sense than anything else. People lied; his own mind lied; the official so-called “facts” were lies a good bit more often than not. But his feelings were cleaner, more straight to the point.

  His feeling was that this was not bound to be good.

  “Just a matter of time,” he muttered. “Damn…”; a heavy sigh, as he hoisted up out of his seat, slid the doors shut, set the box in motion. He felt the elevator, rising. And his spirits, sinking.

  All the way up, he tried to wipe the pictures from his mind… truth be told, there’d hardly been a day since they found that boy that he hadn’t been tryin’ to wipe the pictures from his mind. Why today should be any different was a question not even worth askin’.

  Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that today, far from wiping the pictures, would ask him to conjure them back up again. And when he saw the girl who had summoned him, he knew it for a fact.

  Because it was the l’il blonde from the restaurant— Sunshine, he had called her, and, Lord, had it ever been the truth—only she didn’t look quite so sunshiny today. Her hair was black as the ace of spades, for one thing, and when she tried to smile just now, there was no light behind it. What he saw instead were the storm clouds behind a set of sunken eyes, the skin beneath them fretful and taut, their bright blue made hazy by lack of sleep… and something else. She looked haunted. Worse.

  She looked ridden.

  More booger-bears, creeping back from the shadows: ghosts and dreams and messages from gods. The
gods could do so many things: they could give you life, they could tell you to throw it away. They could come to you in your sleep and ride you like the wind. One god might favor a particular person. One god might even kill the favorite of another.

  And a ghost might choose to linger, to attract enough power to become a loa, a spirit. And that spirit, gaining power, might wish to become a god itself.

  If it could hang around long enough…

  Beside him the girl shuddered, an involuntary tremor. He looked at her, and for the barest moment she met his gaze. It was painful to behold. When she looked away, it was almost a relief.

  Except that the damage was already done.

  Contact had been made.

  And the floodgates pried opened…

  * * *

  The first thing, always, that came to mind—before the smell, before the sight—was the sound of buzzing flies. Surprisingly loud, enthusiastic even. Buzzing. Echoing down the elevator shaft.

  He had noticed it on Friday, the seventeenth of July. His hearing wasn’t so good, and hadn’t been for a while; but when several messengers in a row pointed it out, it singled itself out from the rest of the noise and annoyed him the rest of the day. At six, he went home. End of story.

  Until Monday, when the flies were in the elevator shaft.

  Not too many, at first, and sluggish as hell; of course, it was only the fourth day in a row that had temperatures up at the top of the nineties. He swatted at them when they lighted, and cursed them when they fell; but he was basically too miserable to give them much thought.

  Until Tuesday, when it began to really cut through.

  He’d had a little trouble explaining that to the cops, but the answer was as simple as it was pathetic. Fact was, the city garbage strike was in its third week by that point. Leave it to New York sanitation to wait for the dog days. A good, sound strategy—they made their point—but pretty damn unpleasant for the man on the street. From Lee’s > point of view, it was hard to tell one kind of rot from another.