He dropped his foot....
And slipped.
His arms windmilled faster than a hummingbird's wings, his body reeled as he tried to withstand the terrible force of gravity that wanted to catch him, to throw him to the ground. Ox tried to overcome the terrible pull, but knew he could not; knew that he was going to fall the terrible half a foot to the ground. He would not suffer long, the tiny part of his brain that remained calm and lucid was saying. He would only fall for a fraction of an instant, and all would be well.
But the rest of Ox's brain was screaming as his foot lost traction.
Now his other foot was slipping, too: he was free-falling.
Falling.
Falling.
That small part of his brain that had counseled against panic was now asking what was happening. Surely he should have touched down on the cool tile floor by now. Surely he couldn't still be falling.
Ox managed to look down. He saw the tile rushing up at him. He saw the highest row of dry goods whip past eye-level. He had to be done. The fall had to be over.
But it wasn't. He kept falling. Impossibly, eternally. He looked down again. Still saw the tile speeding up to meet him, saw the very air that surrounded him rushing past with gale force.
Ox fell. And fell. And fell.
Then he felt his foot touch the ground. At long last, after what seemed like minutes, his foot touched solid earth. But it was not the gentle touch of a six-inch drop. Rather, he felt his ankle shatter as though he had pitched himself to the ground from the highest floor of a skyscraper. He had a split-second to open his mouth in a round "O" of surprise and pain as his ankle compressed, then pushed up through his leg, shattering his tibia and fibula into a thousand thousand small pieces, jagged bone rushing up and pulverizing his femur, his pelvis.
His other foot hit ground, and the process repeated.
He felt his lower extremities driven up like bullets from a gun, bone from his ankles rushing up to fill his body cavities, shredding his guts and tearing through intestines, kidneys, stomach like shrapnel from a cannon.
Ox tried to scream, but his diaphragm was in tatters inside him, and drawing breath was impossible.
The air shot from his lungs, exploding out of his nose in a bloody mist that removed the lining from his sinuses, literally turning him inside out in a blur of mucus and pain.
Then the shredded bones that had once held him aloft reached up, past his intestines, past his stomach. They rent their way through his heart, and blood ceased its pumping instantly.
Ox had a final lingering moment before his oxygen-deprived brain turned off to think of his mother.
Then all was black.
***
SEVENTEEN
***
Lenore moved from her kitchen into the hall for the thousandth time. She couldn't stop. Every time she thought about ceasing her movement, another thud would sound from somewhere else in the house and she would have to go and investigate.
She knew she should leave; should get out, but each time she had moved to the door, she found herself back in the house again, as though she had descended into a fugue state and sleepwalked back to the depths of her domicile.
She had tried to call the police once, had tried to reach out for help through the telephone, but when she went to dial all she got was a strange, high-pitched tone and the realization that if she was talking on the phone that meant that at least one hand was occupied. And that was one hand less than she felt she would need to fight off whoever - or whatever - was in her house with her.
She looked down suddenly as she realized she was holding something.
It was a piece of paper. Dark writing filled its space, the same word written over and over again.
FeAR
Lenore shivered. She didn't remember writing that. Remembered precious little of the last few hours, in fact. It was all a nightmare blur of movement from one room to the next in an endless circuit that never comforted her, but only heightened the feeling of terror that now threatened to overwhelm her.
She felt like she was there again. The place it had happened.
The parking lot.
She squinted and suddenly the lighting in her house changed. It was no longer the cool, sterile light of the neon bulbs she had installed, but was now the flickering yellow of a parking lot lamp, making everything around her appear sickly and jaundiced.
The paper dropped from her nerveless fingers.
What the hell is going on? she wondered, but the words were not angry, or even defiant. Just frightened. Terrified, in fact.
She at last felt whatever chains had bound her to this place during the last hours shatter, and hurried to the front door, intent on leaving. The door had a small window inset at eye level so she could see outside in the event of a knock at the door.
She couldn't see anything out there.
Not her porch, not the street.
Nothing. Just a pale, uniform gray that bespoke the presence of a thick fog. She knew that running into such weather could result in her getting lost within inches of her home, but she didn't care. She had to get out.
She ran to the door, sparing a quick look at the security device next to it. The LED still glowed green. "No intrusions detected."
Then a muffled thud sounded.
She turned, feeling the world dilate around her as though she had stepped into a hole in time-space that would elongate this instant in this place into an eternity of suffering and despair.
She turned, feeling an icy hand grip her heart and begin constricting it.
She turned, and couldn't breathe.
Then she found her breath. She inhaled deeply, then screamed louder than she ever had before, loud enough that she could feel the insides of her throat slough of in an instant under the pressure.
Because he was there.
He was just as he had been, those years ago. Still, impossibly, the same. Mid-thirties, with a face that would have been handsome had it not been so obviously cruel. His eyes were dark pits to Hell under the bushy brows that were now drawn together in a nasty leer.
"Hey, beautiful baby," said the man, and licked his lips.
Lenore shook her head in disbelief. How could this be happening? He was in jail. He couldn't have gotten out, and even if he had, he could not have found her. It was impossible.
As she shook her head, she saw something from the corner of her eye: her hair. It had been drawn back in a severe bun when she got home. She knew it was because that was how she always wore it now. But somehow it was down, hanging loosely around her shoulders, falling in a low sweep of loose, beautiful curls.
Feeling cold, she looked down at herself. Like her hair, her clothing had changed. Gone were the gray skirt and blouse, and her formless gray sweater had also disappeared. Instead, she was now wearing a short skirt that had been cut to show off her legs to maximum effect, and a brightly-colored tank top that dipped low enough that little was left to the imagination.
She started shaking. Her hair, her clothes...even her shoes, which were now spike heels. They had all changed to what she had worn on that night, so many years before, when she had last faced the maniac who even now was walking toward her.
"Beautiful," he said, and licked his lips with a tongue that was dark and scabbed as though leprous. He pulled out a knife, a long, wickedly gleaming blade that she knew could cut through nearly anything.
He rushed at her, his hands outstretched, fingers clutching spasmodically, grasping at her.
Lenore turned to flee, but found the door locked. Triple-locked, in fact, and there was no time to unlock it before the man would be upon her. Indeed, even as she realized that fact, the thug slammed into her from behind, his heavy, hot mass driving her into the wooden door. She hit her face on the door and saw stars, her vision temporarily going black at the edges before she regained her senses. She put one foot up on the wall in front of her and used it to push back, throwing both herself and the thug off-balance.
They fell to the ground in a tumbling pile of thrashing legs. Lenore was on her feet first, having been ready for the sudden movement, but she could see that the man would follow suit in an instant. Again, she had no time to unlock the door and escape into the street, so she took the only avenue left to her.
With a scream of fear and despair long-buried but now somehow resurfacing, Lenore turned and ran deeper into her house, a madman close behind her.
***
EIGHTEEN
***
Jason stood in the doorway to his house, trying one last time to reach someone on his cell phone. He had tried to call the mayor of Rising, Doc Peabody, Hatty's house, and a few others. All had yielded the same result: no dial tone, no ringing, just that loud screeching.
Finally he put the phone away, and grabbed one of the walkie-talkies he kept in the house for emergencies. "This is Sheriff Meeks of Rising," he said on one of the channels. "Anyone on the horn tonight?"
No answer. He tried several other channels as well, but all yielded the same result: nothing but white noise.
On the last attempt, one of those strange, ghostly shadows whipped by him. As it did, the screeching sound that had been his only response on the walkie-talkie increased, startling him. Between the shadow's sudden appearance and the increased noise, he almost dropped the walkie-talkie. But then the shadow passed, and the white noise returned to its previous level.
He put the walkie-talkie away, tacitly admitting defeat, at least inasmuch as trying to reach anyone this way was concerned.
Slowly, however, he became aware of a new sound. Thin, ghostly, it took him a moment to realize where it was coming from and what it was. The sound wafted up from the town below, a shrill chorus that almost rattled his teeth in spite of its low volume. He couldn't place the noise at first, then slowly became aware of what it was, and felt his skin crawl.
Screaming. It was screaming. The entire town was screaming.
This, he realized on some subconscious level, was what an entire town sounded like when it was being murdered.
He acted instinctively, rushing into his house and grabbing his service Beretta from the desk where he kept it, then getting into his truck and peeling away down his loose-gravel driveway. The sound of the gravel under his tires usually yielded a sense of comfort and nostalgia: the sound of coming home and going to work, the sound of a well-ordered world with, thankfully, no more surprises left.
Today, however, on this day of macabre surprises, the noise gave no comfort. Instead the sound was grim and gruesome. It sounded like the crunching of small bones.
Jason sped toward the town, toward the wall of death-sounds that was growing still louder as he approached its source. He could barely see anything through the fog, strange shapes loomed everywhere around, ghost shapes with horns and weird eyes, strange and insubstantial.
The sounds continued, drowning him in a tide of horror and noise, making it impossible for him to think, to concentrate, to...
"Shit!" He screamed and cranked the wheel to one side as a new shape emerged from the white fog. He could tell in an instant that this was a different kind of thing than the specters that had surrounded him in the mist: this was something tangible, something real. It was a human, a fellow traveler in this wasteland of whiteness.
He almost hit the person, but barely managed to avoid the passerby. He screeched to a halt, opened his door, and leaned out.
The person was Lenore. She hadn't even noticed how close to death she had come at his hands, running in a blank terror, already disappearing into the mist.
Jason felt a strange mix of terror and relief. The relief was because this was the first time he was seeing someone real in hours. The terror was because she was so quickly disappearing in the mist, threatening to leave him alone again, rendering him once more solitary in this fearful place of screaming and shadow.
He ran after her without thinking, keeping her barely in his view, shouting her name as they ran through the mist. She didn't respond, just kept running, and when he at last caught up to her and reached out and grabbed her arm, she resisted violently, screaming a banshee wail of terror and battering at him with closed fists.
"Lenore, Lenore!" he yelled. "It's me, it's Sheriff Meeks!"
She opened her eyes wide in sudden comprehension and he saw recognition dawn in her visage. Then her eyes widened still further and she pointed behind him. "Look out!" she screamed.
Jason whipped around and saw what she had been afraid of: a stranger, a man that he had never seen before, running after her - after them both - with a wicked grin and a huge, drawn knife.
Jason had only a microsecond to react. He drew his gun, the first time he had done so in the line of duty, the first time he had drawn a weapon with the intent to use it since that night, since the night he had lost his family, lost his life. "Stop," he shouted in a calm, low tone to the man.
The man did not listen or did not hear. "Stop!" Jason shouted louder, but the thug only had eyes for Lenore.
Jason pulled the trigger. Once, twice, a quick double-tap that he knew would be a death sentence at this range.
The man went down, falling into a soft cushion of mist and disappearing into the fog that swirled around them and pooled at their feet like thin white mud.
Jason turned back to Lenore. The teacher's eyes were still wide, in shock. He had barely a moment to register the fact that she was no longer dressed in her habitual gray outfit. Her almost nun-like clothing had been replaced by an outfit that would have been suitable to a teenager or a young woman who was going out dancing or to sow a little good-natured destruction in the big city.
She was, he realized, not beautiful as he had previously thought. Lenore was, in fact, utterly stunning.
Before he could completely process that, however, she collapsed into his arms with a sob. "What's going on, Lenore?" he asked gently, and stroked her hair. The movement was reflexive, the motion of a family man who had had his share of experience comforting someone in a loving manner. But even as he did it, he realized how close she was, how she felt against him.
He pushed away those thoughts, trying to keep focused on what was going on around them. "What happened?" he asked. "Who was that man?"
"I...I don't know," answered Lenore. But Jason had been a cop for too long to accept that answer. He could tell from her tone and from the way she turned her head as she spoke that she was lying. Lenore knew that man.
He drew the obvious, unfortunate conclusion from her outfit. Surprising, but he had seen far stranger in his years as a police officer. "He was with you?" Jason asked in a low, calm tone.
The violence of Lenore's response surprised him, and probably surprised her as well. "No!" she shouted vehemently, pushing him away as though it had been him who had chased her with a drawn knife. She stared at him dazedly, as though through a veil of shock that prevented her from fully processing what had happened. "I was alone. In my house. Just looked up, and there he was. Out of nowhere." She repeated that last in a low, horrified tone. "Out of nowhere."
"And then?" Jason said encouragingly.
"Ran," she answered. "Ran into the house, deep into the house. Ran for hours, it seemed like hours, it could have been hours, couldn't it?"
The shock he had seen in her eyes was now covering her entirely, rendering her almost catatonic as she whispered "hours" over and over. Jason shook her gently, trying to keep her stable and with him mentally. "It's okay," he whispered. "It's okay now, he's gone, I got him."
At this, Lenore drew suddenly back to reality, looking at him with eyes that were crystalline and clear in their understanding. "He's not gone," she said.
"He is," said Jason. "Believe me, he is."
"Not gone," she said stubbornly.
Jason sighed. Might as well do this now, he thought.
"Come on," he said, and took her to where the body lay. He could see it only as a dark outline in the mist, unmoving. Dead.
At first Lenore didn't want to come, but
he had to check and he didn't want to leave her alone in the fog where she would run off and get lost or worse, so he half-dragged her with him. They came to the body, and Jason waved the fog away like smoke, clearing a thin layer and revealing...
"Holy shit," he whispered, and felt his knees go weak.
It was no thug there on the ground, no potential rapist with a knife.
It was someone he recognized from visits to the high school for career day, from time at the football games, from seeing around town.
It was Sarah West. The cheerleader was laying where the thug had been only a moment before. No bullet wounds, thank God, he did not know what he would have done had it turned out that he had shot an innocent child, but there was no disputing the fact that the girl was very dead. Her sightless eyes stared up at him, shrunken back in a face that was blue and swollen.
He saw a dark stain around her, and thought at first that it was blood, then realized that it was simply the sidewalk, but somehow it was saturated with water all around her.
He touched her neck, feeling without hope for a pulse. As he had expected, there was nothing. But he did not expect her to be dripping wet. He touched her, and her clothing squished, water-saturated. When he touched her throat, her mouth drooped slackly, and water poured out. She was completely full of water, inside and out.
"Is she..." began Lenore in a hitching voice.
"Dead," Jason said dazedly. "Drowned, it looks like."
"That's impossible," said Lenore. "Sarah wouldn't have gone anywhere she could have drowned. She was terrified of the water." The teacher gulped, then added, "And the nearest place she could have drowned is the lake, ten miles away."
Jason nodded. "I know," he said. "But that doesn't change the fact that she's drowned." He paused, then realized something. Something that frightened him more than anything else had on this strange night: "It's quiet," he whispered.
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