by Tim Curran
But she could see nothing, just a whisper of shadow that melted into the hedges and was consumed by itself.
“You should try to close your eyes for awhile,” she told Rhonda, looking away from the window only a moment. But when she turned back, she saw a spiraling shape rise up from the water. It stood there, staring up at the house with reflective eyes, something made of rags and leaves and draping shrouds. Then it sank back into the water.
Lily made a sound in her throat and turned from the window and smiled at Rhonda. “Close your eyes,” she said.
She went down the hallway to the bathroom, smelling the stagnancy of the sewers beneath Witcham right away. The toilet was filled with black water and sludge which had backed-up, spattered the back of the white tank with oily droplets. Wrinkling her nose, Lily tried the taps. They made a belching sound and spewed a thin trickle of dirty water and then a clump of something. There was a distant bubbling sound coming up from the drain.
Lily listened to it, then put her ear down there to see if she could hear what it was.
The pipes gurgled and oozed and stank of ancient mossy cesspools, but nothing more.
Lily left the bathroom and went down into the cellar, past the junk room and playroom, into the washroom. She lit a candle and looked into the stationary tub. There were about three or four inches of that black, sewer-smelling mud in there, the candlelight reflecting off its greasy surface.
Behind her, there was a bubbling at the floor drain.
She went over there, a stench of rotting leaves and backed-up sewer lines wafting up at her. It reminded her of flooded cellars and black wells.
There was a foaming sucking sound, bubbles popping from it like somebody was down there breathing or blowing air. And then something else, something clotted and thick but sounding very much like laughter, laughter born in lungs clogged with mud. Bubbling and gurgling. The laughter faded away and more of the black, silty water was vomited from the pipes.
And the voice that came next was very clear, dirty and watery, but clear: “Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us. We’re all down here waiting for you…you don’t have to be afraid…just take my hand…”
And then from the drain, more black water bubbling up with a regurgitating sound like an old man’s belly. Lily gasped, sensed movement in those choked, seething pipes. She saw something obscenely white and fleshy coming out of the drain, something that wriggled fatly like a grotesque worm birthing itself from a slimy egg sack. It came out of that blackness, white and swollen and investigative, followed by another and another.
Fingers.
Then an entire hand, bloated and fish-belly white, set with puckered sores and contusions, something like larva squirming beneath the skin. The fingers reached out, splayed as thick as sausages, the nails gray and ragged. On the third finger, there was a high school class ring squeezing it tight like a tourniquet.
Lily felt a horror build in her, a disgust, an absolute revulsion.
Marlene had a ring like that.
The hand kept reaching, coming up farther out of the drain, slimed with silt and dirt. It came up as far as the forearm…and the wrist had been sutured, as if it had been slit open. Perhaps by a paring knife. The fingers brushed Lily’s toe and she recoiled, the feeling of that flesh like the cold guts of a fish. She let out a cry and grabbed a broom leaning nearby. Without thinking she swung it at the hand and swung it again. The impacts were wet and gelatinous as if she were striking a raw slab of liver. With each impact, black juice oozed from the hand. Finally it retreated, exploding in a spray of that inky juice. Bits of white flesh floated in it.
Something rolled across the floor…Marlene’s high school ring.
Uttering a scream, Lily ran up the stairs and slammed the cellar door shut behind her. She leaned against it, breathing hard.
Rhonda was standing in the hallway. “Are you all right?”
Lily swallowed. “A spider…a spider scared me.”
She followed Rhonda back into the living room and Rhonda sat back in her chair, drawing her legs up to her chest. She watched Lily, but did not say anything.
“There’s no reason to be afraid,” Lily said under her breath.
Rhonda said, “What?”
“Nothing. Close your eyes.”
Sucking in a deep breath, Lily went to the front door and unlocked it. She stood there, leaning up against it, filled with conflicting emotions.
“You can’t go outside,” Rhonda told her.
“Close your eyes,” Lily said.
Then she stepped out into the chill drizzle, feeling the individual drops breaking against her face. She walked out into the yard, wet leaves brushing her ankles, then her calves. She stepped off the curb and into the swirling water. As she got near where she knew the sewer lid to be, the water came up above her knees, cold and numbing. The water pooled and sluiced and flowed, gaining momentum, rising and rising. Something brushed her leg and something splashed behind her.
“Marlene,” she said.
In the house, Rhonda watched her from the window, wondering what it was all about but thinking maybe she would be better off not knowing. Lily just stood out there in the falling rain, the water coursing around her, whirlpooling. Dressed in her white nightgown, she looked like a vampire woman from an old movie.
“What’s going on?” Rita suddenly said.
Rhonda turned from the window. “I don’t know…I don’t know.”
Lily could feel the water, cool yet warming, filled with leaves and branches and unseen things, rubbery things and sliding things. And from between her legs, just breaking the surface, she saw a face…or something like a face. It could have been Marlene. It was corpse-white and blurred, huge peeled black eyes staring up at her with a barely-concealed hunger. Slimy fingers gripped her ankles and that mouth, blown open wide and blubbery, formed itself into a grin.
“No,” Lily said. “Oh dear God…not like this…”
Inside the house, Rhonda turned back to the window, but Lily was gone. Just that slopping sea of water and discharge, leaves and drifting things. A great ripple expanded out from where Lily had been standing.
She watched the rain come down, bleaching the color from the world. Then she quickly closed the curtains.
30
If Witcham had been flooding that afternoon, now it was flooded.
Maybe Crandon wasn’t as bad as River Town or Bethany Square, but it was gaining, oh yes, it was certainly gaining. Chrissy and Lisa Bell were making their way through the outer reaches of Crandon and the water was up to their waists, sometimes deeper. Leaves were carried over its surface along with debris and garbage of every kind. They moved up streets and down avenues, past empty shops and deserted houses and submerged cars, knowing that if this had been normal, dry Crandon, then they could have made Kneale Street in twenty or thirty minutes, but with the way things were going, it might take hours.
A tree went drifting by and Chrissy pulled Lisa out of its path.
“Oh God,” Lisa said, “what was that?”
“A tree,” Chrissy said.
“We’re going to drown out here, I know we’re going to drown out here and I’ll never get to make out my senior will.”
Chrissy maybe wanted to remark on the absolute absurdity of that statement, but she didn’t bother. That was just Lisa. She was a walking panic attack. You had to forgive her her excesses. Her world was small and tight and scary on a good day, let alone this madness.
“We’ll get out, it’ll just take time.”
Lisa made sobbing sounds in her throat, but she didn’t start crying. She held it in and Chrissy knew it took great effort on her part.
Arm in arm, they splashed forward into the wetness and darkness.
There was no life anywhere. Buildings rose up dark and silent around them like gravestones and coffins, the corpses of cars and trucks huddled beneath them, webbed in shadow. If there was anyone out there, Chrissy had seen no sign. As they plodded along,
she was struck by the feeling that they were the last two people on earth. That this deluge had swallowed them all and what she was seeing nowthe flooding, the devastationwas all there was, nothing else. The rain fell and the swelling river continued to expand, drowning the city inch by inch.
“Heather’s dead,” Lisa said, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Yes,” Chrissy said.
And how did you take that in without screaming? Just today it had been business pretty much as usual, except for the rising water, and now it was this. Perpetual darkness broken only by an occasional struggling ray of moonlight, the ever-present rain and wet dog stink of the city…and Heather was dead. Neck broken or head split open, dead was dead. Yes, just today it had been the three of them as usual, Heather, Chrissy, and Lisa. And now that was gone forever, it was just wiped right
What the hell was that?
Both Chrissy and Lisa were stopped now, out front of a maternity shop, the windows reflecting the world darkly.
“What was that?” Lisa asked.
But Chrissy didn’t know.
She thought it sounded like something in the alley across the street, but she couldn’t be sure. She pulled Lisa closer up against the building until they were veiled in shadow. Whatever was over there, splashing away like a fish rising and descending, was not good. She instinctively knew that.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lisa said.
“Sshh!”
Across the street now, Chrissy could see weird, murky forms moving against the facades of buildings. They looked like people, but there was something there she did not like. Three of them had come up from the water now and here came a fourth. They waded along moving up the street, making hissing and gibbering noises that might have been speech. They were towing something behind them and Chrissy knew it was a body.
That was bad, of course. But what made her go cold right to her marrow was that she could not honestly say that those people were individuals. They almost seemed to be connected with the fourth being a child or dwarf, all wired together from a single skein of flesh.
What the hell did that mean?
“What?” Lisa said.
But Chrissy would not let her see.
Could not let her see.
She took hold of her, pressing Lisa’s head against her shoulder, hugging her like a child and Lisa did not seem to mind.
Those people over there climbed a set of steps out of the water and into a building, dragging that body behind them. There was no doubt, then…all of them were parts of a single whole. Paper dolls.
Then there was silence for a moment or two.
Rainwater dripped from the overhang above, running down Chrissy’s face. A light wind blew and the water roiled and snaked with unseen currents. Then from that darkened building across the way, chewing sounds. Meaty tearing and crunching sounds like a dog gnawing on a bone in the darkness.
Chrissy held Lisa even tighter to her.
31
In Witcham that night there were things that were simply unsettling and those that were disturbing. When Deke Ericksen finally made it home that night after haunting the flooded streets looking for Chrissy, he found the house quite empty. No mom, no dad. Even old Mr. Cheese, their tomcat, was gone.
And that was all very disturbing.
Mr. Cheesea massive tiger-striped tom with huge paws and a head about the size of a footballhad shown up on Halloween night five years previous, bedraggled and missing his left ear, and had been the family pet ever since. That old cat rarely went out even on warm, dry nights, let alone rainy ones.
Standing there in the living room, feeling that something had changed for the worse, Deke stripped out of his wet things, doing his best not to panic. Mom and dad must have gone somewhere, he figured. Maybe across the street to the Stern’s or the Green’s down the block. That had to be the answer to the whole thing. And if they had, there would be a note somewhere.
You know better, man. Much better. There’s no note, no nothing, and you know it. They never go out this late and if they did, they wouldn’t have taken Mr. Cheese with them.
He did not honestly know for sure that the cat was missing, yet he was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Cheese was awake at all hours, the first to greet anyone that came through the door, always scrounging for food. But tonight, when Deke stepped through the door, there was only that hushed sound like the house was holding its breath and the darkness, of course.
Power was out now. Using his flashlight, he got some candles going until the house looked a bit less threatening. But even with the light, it was just too silent. Unnaturally silent. Houses were like networks and when you’d lived in one long enough, you got to know every wire and every connection. How they buzzed when people were about and how they hummed with a dead silence when they were empty. And right now, it seemed, the house was humming with emptiness. It was a lonesome sound that Deke could only hear in his head, yet it was loud, very loud, so loud that it made him feel tense, uneasy. There was a quality to that humming that he had never heard before. There was a sharpness, a shrillness to it that made him feel very nervous. No, his mom and dad were not home. Their room was downstairs and he’d already checked it, just like he’d checked the kitchen and dining room and dad’s little den, traipsing water through the house as he did so.
They were gone.
Unless they were down in the basement or upstairs.
Starting to breathe heavily like the air was slowly being drawn from the house, Deke went to the basement door. Opened it, panned his flashlight around. That nervous feeling was settling into him now with teeth. Slowly then, he went down the stairs, wondering if maybe he’d find them down there, cold and hacked, their blood pooling around them. A year or so before Nicky’s death, dad had installed fluorescent lights down there. Deke was glad the power was out. Those fluorescents would have made all that blood look purple.
Deke found nothing. No bodies, no blood.
The junk room was empty. The workroom empty. The utility room, with the washer and dryer and the dusty bowed shelves where mom stored her canned pickles, was likewise empty. No sound down there but the water that was beginning to trickle in through cracks in the cement walls.
Deke went back upstairs.
Okay, they weren’t down in the basement and they weren’t up here. Neither was Mr. Cheese. That only left the upstairs. The only things up there were Deke’s room, the spare bedroom, the bathroom…and Nicky’s room. They wouldn’t be up there. No reason for them to be.
Still feeling nervous, but exhausted from fighting through the flooded streets for hours, Deke dropped into his dad’s recliner, watching the burning candles and the greasy, flickering shadows they threw against the walls. He was thinking about Chrissy, about mom and dad, but mostly about Mr. Cheese. Funny stupid old cat. Where the hell had he gotten off to? Deke could remember that Halloween night the cat had first shown up. Nicky and he had just gotten back from trick-or-treating and the cat had been on the porch. Nicky, being Nicky and a friend to all animals, had invited the cat in even though Deke told him not to. God, Mr. Cheese had been an ugly cat. Half a tail, one ear missing, patches of fur gone from territorial battles with other toms. Just a big, brutish, nasty looking animal with a set of balls so big he walked bowlegged. Deke didn’t like him and he figured mom and dad would like him even less. And that much was true. Mom thought he might have rabies and dad said he was just a dirty old alley cat, probably full of lice and mites and God only knew what.
But Nicky attached himself to the cat instantly.
He fell in love and the boy’s instincts had been right: despite Mr. Cheese’s appearance, he was friendly and mellow, a real big baby. After a visit to the vet’s and a couple good baths, he was actually presentable. Of course, there was no getting around his appearance which was like some ex-fighter that had spent simply too many years in the ring. Nicky named him Mr. Cheese and that old tom insinuated himself into their lives and their hearts.
; They put an ad in the paper about the cat, but nobody ever called to claim him. The only identification he had was a very worn red collar with a silver tag that said “HOOTERS” on it. Dad had laughed about that and mom had only rolled her eyes. Deke hadn’t really got it at the time, not until later when he learned that Hooters was a bar waitressed by attractive young women with tight t-shirts and impressive bosoms. So the tag really was kind of funny. Mr. Cheese apparently had something of a seedy, unspoken past as a tough white trash sort of cat.
Nicky just loved Mr. Cheese.
And for weeks and weeks after Nicky’s death, Mr. Cheese would wait for hours in his perch at the living room window waiting for Nicky to come home as he always had. Mom shut Nicky’s door after the funeral and to this day, she was the only one who went in there. But Mr. Cheese did not forget Nicky. He would sit outside that door meowing to be let in until somebody chased him away.
Deke figured the only way to know for sure if Mr. Cheese was home was to open a can of tuna with the electric can opener. That always brought him running. Unfortunately, there was no electricity. So much for the acid test.
Thinking about Mr. Cheese made him think about Nicky, of course, and that brought him back to Lily Barron, Chrissy’s mom. Her and her stories of dead people living below. Even now, Deke could not be sure what he heard at the Barron house today. It had sounded almost like Lily had been talking to someone in the bathroom. That some gurgling voice had been answering her. But, Christ, that was ridiculous.
It was your imagination. Had to be. She got you all worked up with those crazy stories of dead people talking to her from drainpipes. Your mind did the rest. She was just talking to herself.