by Tim Curran
“Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!” the clown called after them. “I smell the blood of an Englishman! Be he ‘live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread! Hee, hee! Ho, ho! Ha, ha!”
His voice and ensuing laughter echoed through the building, screeching and perverse. They could hear him coming up the stairs now, the water squishing from his big floppy shoes. More water running from his suit and the holes in his hide. He pushed a wave of warmth before him that was sickening like spoiled pork.
“Tara? Where is my Tara?” he called after them. “I love Tara my little pussy, her snatch is so warm! And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm! So I’ll not fuck her or suck out her guts! But pussy and I, very gently we shall play!”
Tara just went hysterical at the sound of that voice echoing and echoing. She began to slam herself against the upstairs walls, screaming and spitting and clawing out at anyone who dared touch her. “Why doesn’t he stop? Why doesn’t he stop?” she sobbed and cried. “Why the hell doesn’t he stop?”
They took hold of her and dragged her down the hallway and into some kind of storage room they found. There was another entrance on the other side. Chuck locked the door, precious good that would do them. The other door was open and they fell through it and right away a flashlight beam struck them dead in the faces.
“Hey, you guys,” a kid’s voice said to them. “That clown’s going to kill you! If you don’t want to die, you better come with me…”
“Where?” Brian said in a squeaking voice.
“Hurry!” the kid said. “The lady’ll help us! She’ll take care of us!”
They heard the clown bashing his way through the door, happily singing “Higglety Pigglety, my black hen.” They needed no further coaxing. There was nothing worse than the clown and the degenerate things he would do to them if he got those pulpy white hands on them. Death was one thing, but there were worse things than just dying. Things your soul would simply not survive.
So they ran after the kid, wondering vaguely where it was he might be taking them.
4
When Miriam Blake was just a kidand being that she was pushing eighty, that was back in the lower Paleolithicshe’d gone to the Holy Covenant Catholic girl’s school over in East Genessee about three blocks from the brewery where her father worked and the linen shop where her mother sewed curtains. The school was run by a befuddled, much put upon priest named Father Dobson, who was known as “Dobby” to just about everyone. Dobby was a little round man with a brilliant shock of white hair. The girls all loved him because he was sweet and patient and didn’t seem capable of raising his voice. Which was in great contrast to the Sisters of Holy Covenant who were loud and bossy and bitter, quick with the paddle and not above foul language when they wanted to make their point. It was rumored that they rode broomsticks to mass and stirred cauldrons of bat’s wing and dead man’s eyeballs in their spare time. Miriam’s mother had gone to Holy Covenant and one time Miriam had heard her mother tell her father, “Oh, poor old Dobby, Sister Margaret and the other witches are still showing him where to squat and what to wipe.”
Old Dobbywho had dropped dead of a heart attack on Christmas Eve of 1942 while saying midnight massseemed happiest in the chapel where he was in charge and not in the school itself where he felt like a sacrificial lamb. The chapel was a high white-washed church that had been well over a hundred years old by the time Miriam attended services there. It was connected to the school by a narrow tunnel in the back. Inside, it smelled of age and old books, polished wood and dust. The belfry was filled with bats and when the wind blew, the entire building would creak and groan. Dobby ran choir practice on Wednesday and Friday nights. And after the latter, he would gather up the girls, shut the lights off and tell ghost stories. The chapel was, of course, very atmospheric in the darkness…creaking and shifting, old timbers groaning and shadows flitting about.
Friday nights were always Miriam’s favorite time of the week when old Dobby would do his damnedest to scare the girls half to death. While they held onto each other, he’d tell them one gruesome horror story after the other. They’d hear about the foolish girl who wept in a country churchyard by night because her sisters were all married and she was not. Then one night, the corpse of a man murdered on his wedding night swept her onto a skeleton horse and took her off to the land of the dead to be his bride. They’d hear about the woman who was possessed by a demon and ate her own children and the madman who buried girls alive. A perennial favorite was the one about the guy who’d had a growth removed from his belly and kept the growth in a jar of alcohol in the cellar where it was warm and moist, not realizing the growth was actually part of his twin brother who had died in the womb. Down there in the darkness, his brother grew and burst from the jar, a creeping thing that “looked like a fungus pretending to be a boy,” as Dobby put it. They’d get real quiet and real tense over this one. Dobby would say that the thing was down in the chapel cellar, right NOW. Which worked perfectly because the chapel cellar was cobwebbed and drippy and dark.
“It’s coming, girls…can you hear it coming?” Dobby would say. “It’s on the second stair, crawling its way up. The third stair and fourth stair. Can you hear the squishing sounds its feet make? Its fingernails dragging over the stair post? It’s dirty and smelling and dripping with goo. There are worms living in it and it has no eyes. It’s at the top of the stairs, girls…can you smell it? Can you hear it breathing? CAN YOU? It’s coming now, dragging its way up the aisle. I can heart it whispering your names…Lisa, Mary Jo, Doris, Kathleen…dear God, which of you will it take down into the rotting tunnels beneath the cellar? Which one? Which one? Can you smell its foul breath and feel its cold fingers at your throat…don’t scream, don’t even breathe or it will hear you…it wants…it wants…it WANTS YOU, MIRIAM!”
At which point, all the girls would scream bloody murder. Some of the girls would come away from these Friday night spook sessions scared out of their wits, many would have nightmares. But as much as the Sisters chastised old Dobby, he would not relent. Maybe the school was their’s, but the chapel, the choir, and the ghost stories were his and his alone. The girls needed a bit of wicked fun, he would say. A good scare does wonders to strengthen the heart. The sisters could never talk him out of this and Dobby scared the shit out of girls at Holy Covenant for upwards of sixty years and it was his talent for horror stories that filled the choir to bursting, not the love of singing hymns.
This is what Miriam was thinking about as she held court in her living room by candlelight. The night was dark and wet outside, filled with awful shapes that knocked on people’s doors…and inside, only slightly less spooky. For the candles flickered and the shadows jumped and Miriam almost felt like she was back in the chapel of Holy Covenant, could feel old Dobby sitting nearby.
“There’s danger out there, I’m saying, danger like none have ever seen before,” she told her captive audience of Margaret Boyne, her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the school superintendent. “It happened not an hour before you came. There I was minding my own business and there came a knock on the door. Oh, I knew it was trouble straight off. For who knocks on doors in the dead of effing night but the sort of things you would never want to invite in? It scared the flipping beejeesus right out of me. But did I answer that door? I did not. But I did go and look, God have mercy, but I did. I crept up there slick as a cat on a rat and peaked through the side panel window…and do you know what I saw?”
Russel just stared with wide eyes like a little boy on Halloween night and Margaret crossed herself, something she was doing a lot of this night. Lou Darin just sat there with his arms crossed, looking stubborn.
Miriam stroked the twelve-gauge shotgun on her lap. “Well, I’ll tell you. There was a man standing out there or what I thought was a man. But wet and dirty, stuck with leaves and clots of mud like he’d just crawled out of a ditch. He was all twisted up like maybe his back was broke, long hair falling over his face, things crawling o
n him. He stood there knocking. Very patient, in no hurry at all. Then he looked down and saw me and…I think he smiled at me, grinned, something. But it wasn’t a smile you expect to see this side of the grave and don’t you effing dare humor me with that smirk of yours, Lou Darin. For I saw it! It was a dead thing and that face hanging like rags…it was dead, a walking corpse.”
Lou Darin was still not convinced. First it was Mitch Barron and his Saturday night spook stories and now it was Miriam, of all people. Lou was willing to admit that there was some awful business out there, but the living dead? No, that was not reasonable or sane.
“We have some individuals out there driven mad,” he said. “Gangs of crazies looting and robbing and probably murdering. That’s all it is.”
“Well, Mr. Doubting Thomas, you are just the pick of the litter, aren’t you?” Miriam chuckled. But if there was any humor in her, you would not have known it. Her wrinkled old lady mouth was hooked into a permanent sneer like maybe she’d suffered a pinpoint stroke and couldn’t work the muscles loose. “You were with Russel and Margaret, weren’t you? You saw those children coming out of the water same as they did…how do you explain that?”
Lou Darin just shrugged. “Kids,” was all he would say.
But it was pretty hollow and they all knew it.
For Russel and Margaret’s version was a little different. They’d been coming out of the Boyne house when they saw those “kids” and Russel said they were both falling apart, the skin just hanging off of them. They were both carrying things that they were chewing on. Neither Russel or Margaret could say what the one thing was, but the other was certainly a dead cat.
“It was gnawing on the thing,” Russel reiterated. “It was squatting there in the street, all that water rushing around it. I think…I think it was a boy. It had ripped that cat’s belly clean open and it was stuffing its face in there, chewing. I saw it.”
“Of course you did, dear,” Miriam said. “The dead are walking, they’re climbing up out of their graves and they hate the living. They will murder us and make us like them. They will eat us and lick our bones.”
Lou Darin was very uncomfortable with all this. He thought himself quite reasonable. And reasonable people did not believe in ghosts and dead men walking. That was the realm of superstition and folktale. And those things were not part of who and what Lou Darin was.
“We just better stay here and wait this out,” Russel said. “When morning comes, we’ll be able to figure things out.”
“The sunlight will drive them back into their holes,” Margaret said.
“We can only hope, we can only hope,” Miriam told them, though she did not sound at all convinced. “This is the doing of those eggheads up to Fort Providence. Make no mistake about that. Genetic engineering and cloning and God only knows what. Maybe it’s that and maybe Hell has opened its gates.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said.
“Is it, Mr. High and Mighty? Is it really? Are we back to that again, hmm? Well, then, since you’re so brave and rational, why don’t you go out there? The rest of us will stay here and rattle our gourds and conjure our spirits…you go out there and see for yourself.”
“I’m not about to go out there.”
“Any why not? There’s nothing to fear.”
They all looked over to the door that Miriam, ever resourceful, had secured with a couple boards laid across it and bracketed just like in an old-time frontier cabin. Course, she had to do that because she had blown the lock off with her shotgun. Nobody was mentioning that or the ugly black eye that Rita Zirblanski had given her. Better off to pretend otherwise.
“Well?” Miriam said. “Go ahead, Mr. Hot-Diggety-Dog.”
Lou was in a spot here and he knew it. You could only espouse theories so long before somebody wanted some proof, some evidence, and now they were expecting him to provide it.
“I’m not going out into the storm and catch my death while I wait for the zombies to show up,” he told them, trying to sound logical. “I’m a little too old for that nonsense and so are all of you.”
Which made Miriam chuckle. “Scared, eh? Well, rightly so, I’m thinking. There’s death out there and things walking that have been beyond the veil and have returned again. So it’s okay to cower with your yellow tail between your legs, Mr. Lou Darin. Nobody will slight you for common sense.”
Lou reddened, but could not bring himself to say anything.
“Listen to me,” Miriam said to one and all. “We can hope that day does come and hope that the National Guard will get us out, but we should be thinking also that those things might not happen. That what’s happened here might have gone beyond Witcham now.”
“Oh God…the whole Midwest?” Margaret said.
“Maybe the country,” her son added.
“Exactly.” Miriam nodded her head. “We’ll never know what sort of devilish horrors those eggheads were up to out at Providence. Opening doors that were meant to remain closed, letting things crawl through that should never have moved amongst men and women. But these things have happened before. The door of hell has opened a crack from time to time and we shouldn’t any of us be surprised.”
Lou Darin was having to clench his jaws shut not to say anything.
But Miriam saw him. “No matter, Mr. School Superintendent. No matter at all. For that door creaks open from time to time, only now those idiots have swung it wide. What I tell you now, my mother told me on her death-bed. During the First World Warwhich was just called the Great War before WWII showed upover in East Genessee on Flank Street, there lived a tailor named Robert Hultz. He was a German immigrant and my mother grew up not three doors down the block from the Hultz tailor shop. Now, Hultz, seeing the devastation his own countrymen were causing Europe, sent his only son off to war. Conrad Hultz, my mother said, was a fine young man who tooled around on a motorcycle and was engaged to a pretty flower shop girl named Rose Kline. She promised to wait for him, but he never did come back. Poor Conrad died in France in 1918 during what they called the Battle of the Argonne. Back then, bodies were not returned to family and Conrad was buried on a French hillside with hundreds of others.
“Now all of this was bad enough on Mr. and Mrs. Hultzshe would die not three years later from an embolism and her husband would hang on another tenbut it was absolute and utter devastation for poor Rose. She rented an upstairs room from a family named Connor across the way. Well, Rose began to get a bit soft upstairs. People would run into her on the street and she would speak in great length of poor Conrad…as if he was still alive. Telling them about the fine picnic she and Conrad had had down at Millbury Park by the river or the plans for their wedding and honeymoon. A real effing tragedy, I’m thinking. Well, now here’s where things go from bad to worse. The Connor’s started becoming a bit concerned for Rose would sit up in that room of hers talking to people that were not there until all hours of the night and often just sit staring at a candle in her more lucid moments, wishing and wishing for her lost love to come back to her.
“Maybe she wished too godblasted hard for the Connors started telling the neighbors how they heard someone pacing up in the attic, saw a white face peering in through the windows, had found bouquets of dead flowers outside Rose’s room. Awful things like that. One night, well past midnight, there was a phone call at the Connor house. Mr. Connor worked for the railroad and was on call, so he was one of the few back then with a private line. Well, the phone rings and he answers it, thinking it’s the Chicago North-Western calling him in, but it’s not. Just a weird, windy sort of voice that he knew was Conrad’s, he claimed. It said to tell Rose that he was coming home. That the war was over. That was all. But enough to scare the Connor family half out of their wits. Well, it wasn’t long before people were no longer laughing off Mr. Connor’s story, for quite a few had seen a young, ghostly, quite pale man walking up the streets. One claimed that much of his head was missing, as was his left arm.
“And Rose? S
he carried on night after night, speaking with someone in her room and Mr. Connor had gone up there one night at wit’s end and he heard another voice answering her. Yes, the same voice from the phone. It sounded windy and distant, clogged up with something like somebody speaking through a mouth filled with blood. And the smell coming from under that door…flyblown and dirty. Well, it got so Rose had this nocturnal visitor just about every night. And that girl, who had yet to see twenty-one, had white streaks in her hair. She was completely mad. During the day, she would start at just about any noise and begin to panic when the sun went down. And how does this quaint little story end? With Rose screaming one night towards morning. They found her in there, ragged and bloody, her eyes wide and her mouth hooked into a scream. There was black dirt on her and graveworms as if something dead had lain atop her. And I’m guessing that something was Conrad Hultz who had finally bedded his fiancé, something rotting and revolting and full of maggots with half its head shot off, something that made love to Rose and chewed on her as it did so.
“Well, a fine horror story, eh? I thought as much and I asked my Aunt Lydia about it. She looked like she was going to have a stroke. Her face went all gray and tight. It was true, she said, all of it. For Conrad had come back to claim his bride. Maybe all that wishing Rose had done by candlelight had kicked open the door of hell just wide enough for him to crawl through and, Lydia said, maybe it wasn’t Conrad at all, but just something pretending to be him. The sort of things that are out in the streets now. Who can say? Who can really say? But this much is true: The Connor’s moved out of that house and never came back. There were things they saw and things they heard which were even worse, local gossip had it. Nobody would live in that house after that. All sorts of wild tales about unwholesome smells and things whispering in the walls by night. An infestation of flies and worms that could not be put down.