by Tim Curran
“You don’t like the drink and food what is offered, young man?” she said, her voice scraping and dusty. “You do not like the meat and blood offered? The meat is high and gamy and pleasing to them what favors it…”
Mrs. Crowley plucked a finger from one of the trays, held it out to him in her own scabby hand. Yellow mucus-like strings of drool hung from her lips. Carefully, with a tongue that was split open with cracks and spotted like that of a hound, she licked the ants from it and then popped the finger in her mouth. With a crunching, pulping side-to-side motion of her jaws, she ate it.
“The meat is good,” she said, a strip of skin caught in the corner of her lips. “Long have I dreamed of the meat and marrow and organ stuffs. Long have I wished for the time of the feeding and the filling. Bad little boys and bad little girls! Ah, sweet gravies and blood soups, bone meal and meaty stews, fleshy joints and well-marbled cuts ready for the spicing!”
Chuck didn’t know exactly how he kept from swooning, from folding up and going quietly mad. He was cold and hot and shaking. Droplets of sweat the size of BB’s rolled down his face.
Nigel was nibbling on a bone, possibly an ulna or a tibia, working his oily black tongue into one shattered end and sucking out the salty globs of marrow. Eyeless and infested with crawling things, he was happily lost in his own macabre little world.
Chuck jumped to his feet.
“Oh, ho, ho!” said Mrs. Crowley, her insect-ravaged face covered in a fine fuzz like that of a sporing penicillin mold. “Will the brave boy run off? Aye, is that what he would do? Well, go, Chucky-fucky! Run and run and run! Abandon your friends to my cauldron and my oven! We thank thee for the offerings made! For the juicy hearts we would eat raw and the stomachs we would boil to soup and the soft, butter petals of fine young brains we would nibble! In your name, Chucky-fucky, we give praise and thanks!”
The other children, again, did not notice a thing, even though Chuck screamed their names again and again.
“Shut up with yer mouth, boy!” Mrs. Crowley said, rising from her seat, bent and broken, bones thrusting from her hide. As she grinned, the threadbare gray skin of her face split open, hung in loops and threads. She reached out to Chuck with her yellowed, arthritic claws. The fingernails were splintered and filthy, dirt packed up underneath them. “You’ll not break my spell, you insufferable little shit! Not now! Not now! They are happy! Your friends are happy and content and we shall leave them that way, eh? Happy little lambs hanging from my beams, fattened and smoked and salted! Aye, deboned and stewed and sliced thin!”
Chuck stumbled through the shadows to the door, his head filled with a wild roaring sound. He could hear the gentle snoring of the other kids now and as he fumbled at the lock, something like a sliver of ice punched through his heart because he knew what awaited them. He knew there would be cages where they would be fattened like turtles in swill barrels. That they would be dressed out and cooked up in a big, greasy black pot.
And he was abandoning them.
Mrs. Crowley was advancing on him, flyblown and stinking, shuffling along in her ragged dress with the aid of a cane carved from a hickory stick. “Nibble, nibble, like a mouse,” she said, cackling. “Nibble, nibble like a mouse!” Her head was cocked to one side, the flesh yellow and pebbly and oddly reptilian like that of chickens. Her neck was a withered stump, her face toothy and red-eyed like some garish Halloween decoration you taped up in a window when the nights began to grow long and cold.
“Go ahead and run, you little pussy! Run away, run away, run away all!” she screamed after him. “You think I’m just some dead thing which thought to move? Wrong, you are, sweet young master! I’ve inherited this bag of bones as I’ve inherited a dozen others! And when this hide falls to worm and ruin, I’ll slide below into those dark spaces and low places and brood over my eggs! But I’ll be born again, I’ll rise quick one last time twenty year or fifty year from now with a new skin and I’ll get you! I always get all the bad little boys! I’ll slip into your room by the yon dead of the moon when you’re old and wheezing and I’ll chew your throat out and make merry with the soft and slimy and chewy things in your belly”
The door opened and Chuck stumbled out into the corridor.
Yellow witch fingers crept around the edge of the door. “Nibble, nibble like a mouse,” said the old hag herself. “Nibble, nibble…”
Then the door slammed shut.
And Chuck ran.
16
As they cruised Upper Main, Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine that woke up in the morgue? Sure as shit. Stanny McCoy. Guy liked to drink. I mean he really liked to drink, Mitch. Been in and out of detox, couldn’t hold a job. He was one of those guys you see pedaling around town on an old bike with a basket full of cans he dug out of dumpsters and ditches. They’d throw his ass in detox over at St. Mary’s. A month later, they’d spring him and he’d be back on his favorite barstool, pissed to the gourd. Well, one day he passes out over in Chatterly Park, middle of a January night. Ten below or some shit. Some Public Works guy plowing snow the next morning sees Stanny leaning up against a tree, frozen right to it. Well, cops and ambulance guys declare him dead. They had to use a salamander heater to peel him off that tree because he was iced right to it. Anyway, they find Stanny a drawer all his own over to the county meat locker. Fifteen hours later, he comes around. Scared the shit right out of the guy pulling the graveyard shift, Stanny moaning and scraping around in the icebox.”
“He live?” Mitch asked.
“Sure as shit. Spent like two weeks in St. Mary’s, recovering. Lost a couple toes, nothing else. They said it was the booze that kept him alive. The booze and the cold lowered his body temperature, made him sort of hibernate. Then he thawed and woke up. You know what my mom said to him?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘Well, Stanny, I hope you see the evils of liquor now, I hope this changes things for you.’ And Stanny says, ‘Oh yuh, oh yuh, that’s for sure. From now on, I only drink inside.’ And that’s the God’s honest truth, Mitch.”
Mitch stared out the windshield, seeing too many shadows prancing about out there. “And is there a point to that story, Tommy? A…whaddyacallit…moral?”
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Stanny was right. Fuck this noise, let’s go get drunk.”
“I wish I could.”
“You got a plan, Mitch? Any kind of plan?” Tommy asked him. “I mean, even if you don’t have a clue, you could pretend otherwise…just for my sake.”
A plan.
Yes, what exactly was the plan?
Mitch didn’t know. This was probably some wild goose chase perpetuated by the visions of some crazy old lady that saw prophecy in egg yolks and chicken guts. But it was all he had and a starving man will gladly eat crumbs. He looked at the dash and the glowing green display of the digital clock told him it was almost three a.m. That meant roughly another four hours of darkness this time of year. And with the rain and mist and gloom, probably more like five. For even today at noon, it was so gray out it had looked like twilight.
Lots of darkness and then only scant light.
He didn’t know what to do. He could only follow Wanda Sepperly’s vague directions as to where Chrissy might be. Thing was, Upper Main was nearly two miles long and with two feet of water in the streets that was steadily rising, it seemed like forever. Main was dead. Being that the University was just off of it, Main was thronged with bars and clubs and what have you. It was busy day and night with student trade and traffic. But tonight it was pretty much deserted. They’d seen a few cars, some people on the streets from time to time, but they hadn’t slowed down enough to stop and chat. The way they were moving…or not moving, just sort of shambling around or standing dead still made Mitch pretty sure that they probably weren’t people at all.
He loved Chrissy.
God knew he loved her.
But it was all eating at him and he began to feel claustrophobic and the need to flee Witch
am became very strong. It wouldn’t be too difficult, he figured, to talk Tommy into driving them out of town and to the National Guard camp everyone had been talking about. If the highway was still passable, they could have been out of the Black River Valley in an hour.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
He’d sooner have stuck a gun in his mouth and jerked the trigger. Because that would have been far less painful than leaving his daughter, his daughter, to the horrors of Witcham and hoping she would make it out on her own.
But how long could they keep looking?
How long before the stress and bullshit, the horror and madness and, yes, lack of sleep, would nail shut the coffins of their brains? Because it was coming and he knew it. His limbs felt heavy and his eyes gritty. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate and when he did, his mind was filled with reaching shadows.
He wondered how long before he gave in. How long would he stay in Witcham? Until it was so utterly swamped that he would have to climb up on the roof? And if he stayed, did not give upand he knew he would never do thatwhat then? What would the future hold? The storm system would pass, probably within a few days or a week at the outside. Would Tommy finally abandon him and would he be alone and insane, just waiting and waiting for a knock at the door that would never, ever come?
Don’t you dare give in, he told himself. You can’t afford to. You have to find her and there really is no other choice. You lost Lily…but you won’t lose Chrissy. You will NOT lose Chrissy.
And if he waited long enough, maybe that knock would come. Tomorrow night or the night after, only it wouldn’t be Chrissy, but maybe Lily. Lily dripping wet and bloodless, eyes sunken in, a cadaverous grin on her features. Stinking not of that lilac body scrub she used, but of damp graves and damp earth.
And what would that be like?
Dear God above, what would that be like?
I left her alone and went over to see Wanda, he thought. I left her alone even though I knew she wasn’t right in the head, that something had gone bad in her, something had poisoned her right to the core. I left her alone and maybe I knew it deep down that it was wrong, that I was inviting disaster.
But I did it anyway.
Right away, though, a voice said in his mind, Don’t be too hard on yourself, Mitch. That’s just grief and guilt talking and you can’t afford those things right now. Yeah, maybe in retrospect leaving Lily alone was not such a hot idea. But even had you been there, you could have only watched her so much. Sooner or later you would have dozed or went to use the head and she would have slipped away because what’s happening in this town is far beyond you. Whatever it is, it brought about the terror and death and grief it feeds on. A self-perpetuating atrocity. Maybe Wanda’s right just like those others have been saying and it all started out at Fort Providence. That was the seed, but it’s gone far beyond that now and it isn’t something as simple as dead people rising. They’re rising because the Army maybe stupidly kicked open some door to hell that should have forever remained shut, but now whatever has come through is holding that door wide and it’s just beyond the Army and the President of the United States to slam it shut. Maybe there’s a logic here, a rationale, and maybe this whole thing is part of some goddamned cycle and if so, it’ll play itself out.
And, boy, Mitch was liking that, if not necessarily believing it.
Tensing inside, energy long absent filling him, he said, “We’re going to find Chrissy.”
“Of course we are,” Tommy said.
“I mean it. We’re gonna find her.”
“What’s our plan?”
“Just drive,” Mitch told him. “I don’t know how and I sure as hell don’t know why, but when we get close I’ll know it.”
“We’ll just keep driving then,” Tommy said.
17
Shortly after Oates and Neiderhauser made the second floor, one of the dead ones walked out of a doorway like maybe it had been waiting for them all along. It had been a man once, you could see that in the jumping beams of the flashlights taped to their rifle barrels. Other than that, you couldn’t say much. It was pasty and flaking, looked like it had been slapped together out of papier-mache and poorly at that, its face pulpy and distorted, a gray jelly hanging from its mouth.
“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.
“Listen, Mr. Zombie,” Oates said, “why don’t you just go on back to whatever you were doing and we’ll kindly pretend we didn’t see your ugly ass. Hmm? What say?”
The dead guy said something, but with all that jelly bubbling from his mouth, it was really hard to say what. He held his hands out to them like he was in search of a dance partner, but you wouldn’t have wanted to hold those hands…they were white and puffy like they were made of bread dough, squishy and boneless.
“Neiderhumper,” Oates said, “I’m guessing this civilian is definitely unfriendly. Do you copy that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Feel free to terminate his ass. You hear that, Mr. Zombie? Consider yourself terminated.”
The dead guy understood that much.
He made a growling sound in his throat and stepped forward, ready to give or to take. He opened his mouth with a wet, sticky sound and his lips parted, but were still connected by strings of flesh. His teeth were bared and ready to bite.
Neiderhauser opened up on him.
The first rounds chewed into him with little effect except to spray a lot of tissue against the wall. Then Neiderhauser compensated and brought his M-16 up, blasting that face right off the bone beneath, including the thing’s eyes. Mutilated and blind, it flayed out with its hands. Oates stepped out of its way and watched as it drunkenly passed him and found the stairs, tumbling right down them with a squishing sound. Below, you could hear it slamming into the walls looking for something to kill.
Oates was far enough gone by this point that he started chuckling. “Well, wasn’t that a trip?” he said.
Neiderhauser giggled.
Oates was losing it and he knew it and maybe he had lost it completely after his brush with the little dead girl downstairs. But he wasn’t so far gone that he wasn’t noticing a few things. That little girl had been possessed by something, was the very incarnation of evil, in his humble opinion, but Mr. Zombie just seemed to be some crazy, violent shithead. No cunning, no tricks up his sleeve, just something that walked that shouldn’t that was probably just as confused as they were as to why he was walking around at all. And this gave Oates some pause, made him think that some of these things were just crazy and others were very smart.
And was that good or bad?
What do you make of that, Angela? These dead ones are just like their living counterparts. Some of ‘em are just violent kill-happy freakos and others are cunning. What do you make of that, Angela dear-heart?
He followed Neiderhauser down the corridor, both tense as they passed too many closed doors, any one of which might contain the sort of surprise that would turn your hair white. Then, through an open doorway, they saw a dead woman lying on a mattress.
“Dead,” was Neiderhauser’s assessment.
“You sure, son? I’m thinking mouth-to-mouth might revive her.”
Neidehauser giggled again.
Because it was funny, see? All this was so goddamned roaring funny that if you started laughing, you just might never stop. The woman in question was sprawled on a ratty mattress, bloated up with gas, her skin gone a spotty grayish-green, her eyes little more than black holes sunk in her face. There were flies all over her, buzzing away happily.
“Hey, Elvira,” Oates said. “Any chance you might want to pull the train with me and my stupid friend here?”
She just lay there, decomposing, wearing veils of flies that buzzed so loudly you could barely hear yourself think. The very fact that Oates and Neiderhauser could stand there like that, with that repulsive, hot stink and the feasting corpse-flies, was a good indication that their minds had now slid somewhere south of the valley of shadow of death and the
y were fearing no evil.
“Hey, Sarge,” Neiderhauser said. “Lookit, will ya? She’s fucking naked, man! Fucking naked! There’s flies crawling out of her cootch! Ha, ha, you see that! Fucking flies, man!”
Oates thought that was pretty amusing, too. “Hey, Mrs. Brown,” he sang, “you’ve got a fucking ugly daughter.”
They both broke up over that one. Oates was wracking his brain, trying to remember who sang that song. Was that Herman’s Hermits or Paul Revere and the Raiders? Jesus, Oates just couldn’t remember. But he knew he had owned the 45 back in the days of his carefree youth. Back before he’d become a soldier and then a National Guard den mother.
“Neiderhauser, I’m thinking our girl here is having one of those not-so fresh days, you copy on that?”
“I copy. I’ve smelled some gnarly pussy in my time, Sarge, but this bitch needs to Fabreeze her gee-gee or soak it in Palmolive or something.”
Oates laughed, realizing that was exactly the sort of thing he might say. So he liked it. He liked this “new” Neiderhauser. This boy was a man now. He’d popped his cherry and dipped his wick and he was going to be okay.
Oates kicked the mattress and the dead woman jiggled like about a hundred-and-fifty pounds of green Jello that just hadn’t set right. A mist of flies rose from her. “Ooo-la-la,” he said, “wake up, Little Susie…”
Which wasn’t the sort of thing you really wanted to be saying to dead people in Witcham these days. You were just asking for trouble. And Oates learned that quick enough when a wave of motion passed through the dead woman and she opened her bleary, yellow eyes.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said with a voice that was watery and thick like oatmeal dumped into a bowl. “Lookee, lookee, lookee! Well, it’s your lucky day, boys, because Long Tall Sally is open for business and I do mean open!”
Neiderhauser wasn’t a tough guy soldier any more. No, he was a little boy in a dark bed cowering from the shadow of a tree limb the moon had thrown against his wall. He took two stumbling steps back and fell on his ass, a choking sound coming from his throat.