by Rob Zombie
“Pleasant dreams,” said Megan.
Fuck you, too, thought Heidi.
Lacy followed her out. “Sweets,” she said. “I’m sorry if Megan upset you. She is a little… adamant about things sometimes. And she can be a little intense.”
“And a little wasted,” shouted Sonny from within the room, humorous again. Whatever had been off about the mood of the room had broken now. Had she just imagined it? Or had something shifted there? Had something odd happened?
“It’s nothing to worry about,” said Lacy. “Don’t pay any attention to what Megan says if it bothers you.”
Heidi pressed her hand to her forehead. “No, no, I’m fine,” she said. “I just need to get a decent night’s sleep. Haven’t had one in a few days for some reason, and I’ve got a couple of crazy days ahead of me.”
“Yes,” said Lacy. “I’m sure you do.” Her tone was a little odd, too, thought Heidi, but maybe it was just a result of the drinking, or of Heidi herself being a little rattled. Lacy’s expression was polite but otherwise unreadable. “Good night, then.”
“Good night,” said Heidi.
Half smiling, Lacy slowly closed the door, leaving Heidi alone in the hall. Alone, she slowly let out her breath. What the fuck? she wondered.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The handle of the door was sticky. Maybe she’d touched it when her hands were dirty or something. She wiped it off with the corner of her shirt and opened the door. She went in, her head reeling a little, and stumbled into the bathroom. Steve was nowhere to be seen. Probably curled up and sleeping already, she thought, or sulking and mad at her for leaving him.
She switched on the portable television on the counter. She turned the tub faucet, the water hot enough that the room began to fill with steam.
On the television was a black-and-white film, the tube of the TV casting it slightly blue. Two people danced around an arena. The image was far from crisp and kept fuzzing out. Heidi reached for it, and when her hand got close the image became sharper, the man becoming Fred Astaire, the woman Ginger Rogers. She drew her hand back and the image went fuzzy again, making it hard to tell who was who. Ah well, she thought, maybe once she was in the bath it’d come in clear. Usually it worked that way.
She poured herself a glass of wine and set it on the sink next to the TV, then carefully tied up her hair, watching herself in the mirror as she did so. Tough day, she thought. And yesterday, too. But now she could just relax, wind down. The day was over.
She turned off the tap and then slipped out of her clothes. She took one last moment to position the TV and then took her wineglass and climbed into the water. Wow, it was really hot. For a moment she just stood in it, letting her legs get used to it, and then she slowly eased her way in.
She lay in the water, the steam rising up around her. Yes, now that she was in the bath the portable TV was doing better. Picture wasn’t perfect, but she could make out who was who at least. She watched Fred and Ginger twirl their way around the dance floor. Beyond, she could see the open bathroom door leading out into her dark apartment. She should have closed that, she realized, to keep the heat in, and to keep Steve out. Not that he was likely to come in anyway, considering how asleep he must have been when she came in.
She watched the movie for a while, sipping the wine, but then the dance number ended and the sound wasn’t quite loud enough for her to follow the dialogue. It took too much attention. She took a washcloth and dropped it into the water near her belly, watched it slowly grow sodden and begin to sink. When it had taken on the heat of the water, she wrung it out and draped it over her face. Ah, it felt good. Finally she could relax.
Across the room, something changed. Heidi, washcloth still draped over her face, remained oblivious, unaware. At first it was only a change in light, a strange thickening of the darkness somewhere within the frame of the door. And then the bathroom itself started to feel cut off from the rest of the world, the sounds of the outside world—the wind outside, the settling of the house, the noise of the landlady and her sisters still laughing downstairs—were simply gone. Heidi didn’t notice. Steve was awake and in the kitchen now, scratching at the outside door and whimpering, but Heidi couldn’t hear him. She continued to hear from the TV the sound of Fred and Ginger continuing to chat, filling time before their next dance number. But if she’d taken the washcloth off her face, she would have seen that the images on the screen were no longer the same.
Instead of the two dancers, the TV depicted a strange hovel-like structure surrounded by woods. In front of it was a roaring bonfire, around which danced a ring of women who one by one stripped off their clothing until they were dancing naked. Their bodies were covered with symbols, written on their flesh in paint or blood, and they cavorted around and finally fell into one another’s arms and began to rub themselves and writhe in the dirt, attempting to couple with the ground or with each other. One of them came too close to the fire and her hair caught flame and she ran howling and mad and foaming at the mouth around the hovel until that, too, caught flame. She fell on the ground and came up again with her hair burned away and the fire extinguished and her scalp blistered and smoking, a crazed ecstatic smile on her face. The hovel was soon roaring with flame and from it stumbled a figure whose body seemed made strictly of fire and who stood there in the door of the hovel, calmly burning, in the shape of a man but larger than a man should be. The women around the fire stopped dancing and prostrated themselves before the blazing figure, crying out something that could not be heard as Fred and Ginger’s voices talked calmly on.
And then the darkness in the bathroom doorway solidified, slowly coming into sharper and sharper focus. At first it was a kind of black smoke that billowed around itself and then it gathered and whitened and grew pale. It slowed and solidified and became flesh, and became a woman. And then became Margaret Morgan.
She was stark naked. Her skin was pale, unnaturally so, and crusted over, as if it were flaking and rotting away. She stood completely still, her posture stiff and unnatural, as if possessed. She stared into the room, her gaze wandering slowly here and there before coming to settle on Heidi in her bath.
Her lips parted to show her teeth. She lifted her arms and the skin at her joints cracked and began to seep a white liquid, a pus or ichor of some kind. Her lips were moving, as if reciting something, but no noise came out of them. She stayed there, swaying slightly, eyes on Heidi, but did not move forward.
Suddenly there was movement behind her and a small hand snaked its way along her thigh and up onto her belly. A body followed it, belonging to a small humanoid creature with a sickly swollen head and huge bulbous red eyes. It was deformed and almost fetus-like, but nearly three feet tall, much too big to be a fetus. And though it clung to Margaret Morgan’s leg, it moved with an awareness and intelligence that Margaret’s body did not seem to have. It, too, turned its eyes on Heidi in the bath and watched her carefully and attentively, licking its lips.
The creature pushed Morgan forward and she moved jerkily into the room. Slowly and silently, she approached the side of the tub. Soundlessly, she lifted her leg and stepped into the water. Heidi, behind her washcloth, neither heard nor felt her. The creature lifted the other foot and stepped in, standing now between Heidi’s legs, and then she began to crouch, bringing herself lower and lower, somehow still managing not to touch Heidi despite the lack of space. It was as if the tub was much deeper for her than for Heidi. She folded in on herself, hunched, and descended until she had vanished under the water’s surface. She was gone. From the doorway the creature watched, smiled.
She lay there, the steam rising around her, listening to the slow drip of the tap into the bathwater. On the television, the static stopped, to be replaced again by images of an iron mask, clearer this time. It was being affixed over someone’s head, a woman’s, and was like a kind of cage. The woman’s eyes darted back and forth as strong hands held her in place and forced the mask around her face. She was screaming. You co
uld tell by the way her throat kept clenching and releasing, but her mouth was invisible within the metal mask.
A hand holding a spike moved forward into the shot. It brought it up to rest just above the hole in the mask for the right eye, and then held it there, just millimeters away from the eye itself. The eye below it darted back and forth, desperate to get away. But suddenly a mallet came down hard and drove the spike in. The eye burst in a spurt of jelly. The mallet struck again and the jelly was followed by a slow puddling of the socket with blood.
A moment later the hand appeared with another spike and brought it to rest just above the other eye.
On the wall high above the tub a drop of blood formed, seemingly out of nowhere. Slowly it began to slide down the wall, becoming a streak of blood and growing larger and wetter the farther it traveled. A foot or two from the tub itself it suddenly thickened, becoming a dense mixture of not only blood but ground organs and flesh, a sort of slurry of bloody flux and disjecta. The stream of bloody goo slid farther down to slop into the tub, where it slowly began to spread through the water. It curled and wound its way through the liquid almost like the tentacle of an octopus feeling its way tentatively forward. It touched Heidi’s leg and looped carefully around it, then wound past it to curl slowly around her body, crissing and crossing on itself until slowly the water became nothing but a murky red stew. Heidi, washcloth still over her face, half sleeping, noticed nothing.
The television burst into static again, silent this time, and then an image formed, this time of a woman in a tub. The tub seemed identical to the one Heidi was in, and the woman in it had a washcloth draped over her face, and the water, too, wasn’t water but a slurry of blood and flesh. But the arms were too drawn and skeletal to be Heidi’s arms.
Very slowly the woman lifted the washcloth off her face and revealed herself to be Margaret Morgan.
She seemed to be looking out of the TV screen and at Heidi in the actual tub, and then, on the screen, bubbles started to plop up through the bloody water, as if it had started to boil. Slowly, something began to rise between Margaret Morgan’s legs, but only gradually did it become clear that it was the misshapen head of the small creature with bulbous red eyes that, a moment before, when she had stood in the doorway, had been gripping her leg. It opened its mouth and smiled, bloody water running off its head and plopping grotesquely back into the tub.
Then, very slowly, both Morgan and the misshapen creature slid lower in the tub and disappeared beneath the water.
And then suddenly the TV switched itself off.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The bathroom was silent except for the noise of Heidi’s breathing. She lay in the tub, soaking, trying to relax.
After a moment she sighed. Her hand fumbled blindly for the glass of wine balanced on the edge of the tub, without finding it. She groped again, but the wineglass didn’t seem to be there. Maybe she’d put it on the floor.
She reached up and pulled the washcloth off her face. She was already half turning and reaching to search for the wineglass when she stopped, seeing the water gone murky and bloodred all around her. What the fuck? she thought, and then thought she must be hallucinating. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the tub was still brimming with blood.
She scrambled back, the bloody water sloshing all around her and slopping over the sides and onto the floor. She was trying to get her feet under herself to get out of the tub but they kept slipping, the blood spattering her face and hair.
She opened her mouth and let out a piercing scream, but as she did something erupted out of the bloody water, spattering blood everywhere. It was, impossibly, another woman, somehow in the tub at the same time as she. But something was wrong with her, her arms bone thin and seemingly bloodless beneath the skin, her eyes darting madly about in the sockets. Heidi scrambled back, trying to sit up, trying to get out, but the woman was already upon her, grabbing Heidi by the throat and beginning to squeeze.
Heidi felt her body tense, felt the woman’s thumbs digging into her neck, cutting off her windpipe. She kicked and thrashed, trying to break the woman’s grip, bloody water sloshing up and over the sides and going everywhere. Bloody water was in her mouth and eyes. She tried to scratch out the madwoman’s eyes, but the woman hissed and turned her head and she couldn’t quite get to them. Heidi beat on her arms, then tried to pry her fingers away, but they wouldn’t come loose.
Her vision was beginning to blur. Oh God, she thought, I’m going to die. And then the woman came closer and hissed again, smiling this time, bloody water dripping from her mouth.
Heidi made a last effort and turned her body hard, dragging on the woman’s arms at the same time. With a bang, the woman’s head crashed into the wall, cracking the tile, but the movement made Heidi slide lower in the tub, the water lapping against her chin now.
The woman’s grip loosened a little and Heidi gasped in some air. Before the woman could recover, Heidi did it again, as hard as she could this time, and this time the woman’s head struck violently enough to leave a splash of black blood on the wall. She gave a hideous unearthly scream, and a thick black liquid began to spew out of her mouth, getting in Heidi’s eyes, blinding her. She struggled to break the woman’s grip, but still she wouldn’t let go, and instead bore down hard, making Heidi slip even lower in the tub, forcing her head underwater, knocking it repeatedly against the tub’s porcelain bottom. Heidi struggled, tried desperately to break the woman’s grip, tried to get her head up and above the water, but the woman held on, bore down even harder. Heidi could hear her continuing to scream, the sound muffled beneath the water but still audible. She opened her eyes and tried to see, but could make out nothing beyond the redness of the bloody water.
And then, suddenly, the screaming stopped and the pressure eased. She shot up from the water, still struggling, still fighting to break free, and gasping for breath. She braced herself for another attack, her fists cocked.
But somehow the woman was no longer there. Heidi’s gaze darted around, her heart pounding rapidly, coughing up the water that had gotten into her lungs. The water was no longer bloody. It seemed completely normal. What the fuck had happened? The fluid that had splashed all over was normal water as well, nothing unusual about it, and the woman simply wasn’t there. The tile splash guard above the tub was uncracked, no sign of blood anywhere. The TV channel was back to normal, showing the same Fred Astaire movie, and reception was perfect now.
Had she imagined it all? Dreamt it? But then why did her throat hurt? Was it simply that she’d swallowed water? No, she could still feel the woman’s thumbs on her throat, was sure that if she got up and looked in the mirror she’d see the bruises they had left.
But if it had been real, wouldn’t Steve have been in here barking his head off? Come to think of it, where was Steve? Why hadn’t he come when she’d been splashing and gasping for air?
Her head was still spinning and she was still out of breath, adrenaline coursing through her body. She tried to stand up and leave the tub but she was too dizzy and had to sit back down again, splashing back into what little water was left in the tub. She gathered her knees to her chest and leaned against the wall, shaking, trying and failing to make sense of what might have just happened.
Chapter Thirty
After a while, she’d gathered herself enough that she could drain the tub and climb out. Dazed and still shaken, she stumbled from the bathroom to collapse facedown on the fainting couch. She lay there for a few moments, catching her breath, and then lifted her head and crawled toward the phone sitting on the table just beside the couch. Trembling, she picked up the receiver.
But who could she call? Herman maybe? His wife would be pissed if she called in the middle of the night but Herman would do his best to help her—he’d done that before. Her dealer? He’d be glad to hear from her, but his idea of helping her would probably be fronting her some product and gear, just to get her going with him again. No, that was out. Whitey? He’d probabl
y come and sit with her awhile, but that’d be using him in a way that she didn’t feel comfortable with. The police? What would she tell them? I’ve been attacked in my own bathroom, by some sort of corpse thing, nearly drowned, but there’s absolutely no evidence. They’d think she was crazy. Maybe she was.
She should just throw on a robe and go down and knock on Lacy’s door, she told herself. She could make up some story to tell Lacy and Lacy would probably let her crash on her couch. As long as she wasn’t alone, she’d be okay, even if Lacy and her sisters had ended up freaking her out as bad as anyone.
But she usually wasn’t alone, she told herself. Usually, she had Steve.
Where the fuck was Steve, anyway?
“Steve?” she called. “Steve?” She whistled, but he didn’t come. She put the phone down and stumbled into the kitchen, looking for him. He wasn’t there, but the floor was dotted with bloody paw prints. And she was only now realizing she hadn’t seen them when she’d come back from Lacy’s—had she been that drunk? She’d assumed he’d been asleep but she hadn’t even checked. What kind of dog owner was she?
The paw prints mostly milled around near the door, and the door was splintered where Steve had been scraping at it. One set of bloody tracks, though, led away from the door and through the living room, toward the bedroom.
No, a part of her cautioned herself. Don’t go in there. Whatever is in there, it’s not something that you want to see. But another part of her, a stronger part, was too concerned about her dog, too curious to know what had happened to be able to hold back.
Near the bedroom door there was a slick patch of blood, as if something had died there. She stepped over it with her bare feet, trying not to slip on the blood, and went in.
There was something in the bed, a shape there. She called out her dog’s name, but he still didn’t answer. Slowly, she approached the bed, tried to see what was in it, but whatever it was it was completely covered by the blankets, was impossible to see.