by Tim Curran
He threw his handful of salt at her.
And she screamed. Screamed with rage and agony and bitterness. The salt spattered in her face and it was like throwing hot grease at her. It actually sizzled as it struck her, plumes of smoke and steam rising as her features literally dissolved. She thrashed back and forth, her hands going to her face and when she yanked them away like she’d placed them against a hot stove lid, strings of tissue came away with them. She was howling like a dying animal now, loud and raw and bestial-sounding. A roaring. Chuck threw more salt and she fell to her knees, twisting and writhing, the salt eating into her like acid. Her head struck the floor and burst open with a slop of something like black oatmeal. She screamed and hissed, but you could barely hear it above the sizzling, burning sound of her flesh. Steam blew from her mouth and smoke funneled from her body, filling the kitchen with a gagging, repulsive odor of seared meat. She thumped up and down on the floor, her flesh bubbling and popping and spattering, going brown, then black, and flaking away. The suturing at her wrists popped open. As she struggled, she sprayed black blood in every direction. Then her chest burst open and a nest of wriggling red worms pushed out, steaming and dying.
Chuck went over there and dumped the rest of the salt over her.
Everything curled and blackened and fell apart. Whatever the thing had been, it now looked like something you might have dragged from a fire pit: just cinders and carbonized flesh, the worms twisting like black superheated wires. Her jaw fell open and then there was nothing but the sizzling and steaming.
Chuck threw up.
The sight, the smell, the feel of it all was too much. He turned and vomited into the sink. And then he ran. Ran right out the front door and into the rain. Anything, to get away from that smell and that sight.
21
“Stop,” Mitch said, the words falling out of his mouth before he even thought of speaking. It was automatic. It was knee-jerk. He swallowed. “Pull over.”
Tommy pulled his truck to the curb. “What is it?” he said.
“If I told you, would you believe me?”
Tommy just looked at him in the dimness of the cab. “After what we’ve been through, I’m thinking I would.”
Mitch sighed, rubbed his tired eyes. “This sounds fucking nutty…but I got this feeling. This feeling I can’t shake.”
“I had a cousin like that,” Tommy said.
“I’m serious,” Mitch told him. “All day long…I can’t explain it…but I’ve been having funny feelings. Before I hooked up with you over to Sadler Brothers? I was cruising around, checking the flooding out, and I had this feeling inside, this sense like the shit was about to hit the fan. And that feeling was right. Ever since, I been getting some kind of intuition on things.”
“You and Mother Sepperly.”
“She’s got something and you know it.”
“Yeah I know it, only it scares the shit out of me, that stuff. Knowing things you can’t know. It just ain’t right.” Tommy stared off through the windshield. The rain looked like teardrops streaking down it. “Maybe that’s why she sent us out here. Maybe she knew that if you got out here, those feelings of yours would lead us where we needed to go.”
Mitch shrugged. “And maybe I need some sleep.”
“Which?”
“C’mon,” Mitch told him. “Let’s find out.”
They stepped out into the wet darkness, the water nearly up to their knees. Tommy’s Dodge Ram was set high, but it was only a matter of time now until it was of no use. Soon, only boats would be able to ply the streets of Witcham. And still the rain fell and fell unceasingly. They were about three blocks from the University now, right on the edge of Bethany and Pennacott Lane or Guttertown as it had been known many years before. It was a very desolate spot. What cars there were were abandoned at the curbs, some right out in the streets. The buildings around them were pitch black and empty, lots of old warehouses and freight depots.
“You picked a real nice spot here,” Tommy said, panning his flashlight around, his four-ten balanced atop the shoulders of his raincoat.
“I didn’t pick it,” Mitch explained. “It picked me. Let’s just look around. If the feeling fades, we’ll just go.”
They moved down the street, guns in hand, searching around with their lights. The rain fell and the sky boiled black overhead. A slight wind blew, rattling rusted sheet metal siding on some of the warehouses. They cut between two buildings for no other reason than because Mitch thought it felt right. There was an empty parking lot that had become a wading pool and beyond it, a huge gray structure, three-story, that looked ominous. It seemed even bigger in their minds, monolithic and almost frightening. Like it had been erected as a warning.
Mitch kept staring at it.
Tommy just shook his head. “Oh, come on, Mitch, not that fucking place.”
“I can’t help it.”
And he couldn’t. Maybe those feelings hadn’t been much more than hunches before, but now they were growing strong and resolute. He could no longer just shrug them off. Driving up the street, it had started in his guts, the sort of excited, exhilarated feeling like you got when you opened your income tax return or a really sexy woman flirted with you. It was like that. Adrenaline like a kid might feel looking at a pile of presents on his birthday. But with Mitch it was something else. Anxious, needling foreboding. It started in his belly and within seconds it had all of him and would not let go.
And that old building?
He felt like a needle on a compass being pointed to magnetic north. He could turn away, and he had, but it drew him right back. The certainty was overwhelming. Looking at itsome kind of factory, he was thinkinghe knew that there was revelation in that place. Maybe Chrissy wasn’t there, but it was important that he go in there.
But Tommy did not like it. “You know what that place is?”
Mitch just shook his head.
“That’s Hoblich and Sons,” Tommy explained. “A mannequin factory.”
Mitch was going to say, so what? They make dummies for store windows. But then he started thinking what it might be like in such a place. All those human-sized dolls standing around. And with what haunted the streets of Witcham, it was probably only one step up from the county morgue.
“I’ll hold your hand,” Mitch promised him.
“Oh, you think you’re funny,” Tommy said. The idea of going into that place was really eating him. “I don’t like them goddamn mannequins. I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t help it. They freak me out. Have ever since I was a kid.”
“Christ, you worked in a mortuary once, remember?”
Tommy sighed. “Yeah, and do you remember where I worked in high school?”
“Montgomery Wards. So what?”
Tommy swallowed and swallowed again. “They had this warehouse over in Bethany. Jesus. They’d send me over to pick things up in a van. Well, sometimes I had to go down into the basement.”
“And?”
“And, shit, it was creepy down there…all dark and weird and cobwebbed. A big, shadowy kind of place, you know? Stank to high heaven and you’d find rat droppings in the corners and hear things scratching around down there. One light bulb down there hanging on a string from the ceiling. There were mannequins everywhere…men, women, little kids. Boxes of parts. That light would cast all these creeping mannequin shadows on the walls. If you bumped that light bulb with a box or something, and I did it plenty of times, all those crazy mannequin shadows would start moving and dancing all around you. I think…oh man, this sounds bad…but I think if that light would have gone, I would have lost my mind.”
Mitch looked at him, rain running down his face.
It took a lot for a guy like Tommy to admit such things. It was hard on him to confess that there were really things that disturbed him, things like mannequins. That he would do so, was a sign of trust.
“We won’t be in there long,” Mitch told him. “And don’t feel goofy about it. I was scared of puppets
when I was a kid and maybe I still am. When Chrissy…when Chrissy was little, she had this clown puppet with a battery in it. You know, or maybe you don’t, how those batteries just wear down on battery-operated toys? Well, sometimes they get weird and start talking by themselves. I go into her room one night to check her and down in her toybox, down at the bottom, that stupid clown puppet starts talking in this draggy, deep voice: ‘I want you to play with me,’ it says. Well, maybe it sounds like nothing now, but that night? All alone? Christ, I almost came out of my fucking skin.”
Tommy laughed. “Yeah, I guess we all got bullshit like that inside of us.”
Mitch edged into the parking lot, casting ripples before him. As he neared the factory, there was a prickling in his belly. This wasn’t excitement or even apprehension, this was more along the lines of terror. Like sneaking up to a casket in the dead of night, so you could reach out and swing up the lid, see what was waiting inside for you.
There was a sudden splashing.
Mitch and Tommy froze up. They had their guns and they had salt in their pockets. They figured they were ready.
“What the hell?” Tommy said.
A lone figure came around the side of the warehouse, running full out…or as full out as you could in two feet of standing water. A man. He charged out, falling flat on his face, swearing and shaking himself off, looking behind him and then getting up again, making for the front of Holbich and Sons. Right away, Mitch knew this was an ordinary person, just like he knew something was hunting him.
And then it showed itself.
Mitch made a gasping sound because he did not know what he was seeing. The thing was just too far off for them to illuminate it much with their lights. They were seeing it only by the pale light of the moon that broke a few fingers through from time to time.
“C’mon,” he told Tommy.
They raced across the inundated parking lot just as the guy made the front door, began pulling on it wildly, trying to get it open. The thing started scrambling in his direction and scrambling was very apt. Because this thing did not walk or run or even hobble, it skittered along on all fours like a monkey or maybe a spider. The guy saw it coming, then he saw the flashlight beams and Mitch and Tommy coming to his aid.
“Watch out!” he said. “There’s a thing…it’s a…”
There he broke off like his imagination had failed him in describing what exactly was after him. Mitch and Tommy got between him and the thing, put their lights on it. The blinding light in its face stopped it cold.
“Jesus,” Tommy said.
And that pretty much was what Mitch was going to say.
The creature was manlike in that it had four limbs, but those limbs were far out of proportion to its body, long and sinewy like the legs of some insect. It was hairless and glistening with rain, just dead white and blotchy, its torso covered with a fine cobwebbed growth. It rose up on those two hind limbs and its arms were long and apish, the left at least a foot longer than the right and covered in fleshy knobs. The right side of its face was human or nearly, but the left was horribly distorted like the skin there had melted and ran, covering the eye and twisting the nose and drawing the edge of its mouth up in a crooked grin. That single eye appraised them with a flat hatred. It opened its mouth and it had fine, needle-like teeth.
“What the hell is that?” Tommy said.
“You tell me,” the guy said.
Mitch was staring at it, mildly repulsed, trying to figure out what it was or what nature had intended it to be. It was not just some walking corpse, though in many ways it resembled one, even the rancid stench wafting off it. But this was more than that, absolutely freakish and imperfect, something meant to be a man, but missing the mark by about a mile. It didn’t seem to have a neck. Its head seemed to grow right out of its upper chest.
It gnashed those teeth and made a low growling sound in its throat.
Mitch dropped his flashlight and put both hands on his Remington auto-loader. The thing made a grating, breathing sound, tensing for attack and Mitch felt his balls try to sneak up inside his belly. The leg muscles flexed and it moved. Mitch opened up on it, blowing a hole in its belly and knocking it flat into a tangle of spidery, twitching legs. It squirmed and howled and thrashed about, trying to right itself, the whole time great gouts of black blood gushed from its wound with a funny smell like spilled bleach.
“Give it another one,” the guy said.
Mitch did, punching a hole in its chest. It rose up and shook itself and then went down dead. The stink of that black stuff diffusing into the water around it was simply disgusting. Not so much bleach now, but mud and quarry slime.
Then they put their lights on it, trying to make sense of its obscene anatomy which was obviously neither this nor that. It seemed to be dissolving in the water, its skin coming off in globs that floated around it.
“Look at that, will ya?” the guy said.
Mitch was looking, all right. Just below its navel, below the hole he had put in it, there was a bulging mass like the mother of tumors. It was white like the creature itself, but blushed with pink. And there was no mistaking what it was…a face. This nightmare had a face and part of a bulbous head growing out of its belly like some kind of freak birth. That face was covered in a fine membrane of skin, plaited in those weblike growths, but you could see the suggestion of a mouth, a nose, the hollows of eyes, but unformed and embryonic. Right above that parasitic growth, the creature was laid open. Inside, it was just as pale as it was outside, but there was a suggestion of something pink in there.
“Christ, Mitch, it’s like a sideshow thing, you know?” Tommy said. “Something they keep in one of those jars. A bucket birth.”
The guy with them nodded, wiping rain from his face. “And…holy shit…look! It don’t have no, no…you know…no genitals.”
And it didn’t.
It was as smooth as a Ken doll down there, the flesh white and puckered, but not so much as a suggestion of anything you might consider a penis or a vagina. Nothing. Tommy was appalled, but fascinated at the same time. He crept forward and kicked it. His boot sank right into it with a mucky sound. He yanked his foot back with an awful suctioning sound and the thing moved a bit, enough so that the pink thing in its belly fell out…a human arm, spindly and wrinkled, the arm of a child, but an arm no less. It did not have fingernails and the fingers themselves were webbed together with skin.
Everyone turned away.
Tommy tried the door and it was locked. He blew it open with his four-ten. Then he turned to the guy with him, who was tall and well-built, hard-looking.
“Name’s Tommy Kastle,” he said. “And this is Mitch Barron.”
The guy nodded. “Nice to meet you both and thanks, man. That fucker would’ve had me you hadn’t shown up. Oh, by the way, I’m Harry Teal. And you boys ain’t gonna believe this and you probably won’t like it, but I just escaped from Slayhoke…”
22
And high above Witcham, overlooking Bethany from atop Crooked Hill, Bleeding Heart Orphanage stood tall and sepulchral like a pine box set on end. It held darkness in its belly and exhaled a stale breath of age and woodrot. Where once there had been the not-unpleasant odors of children and chalkdust, polished mahogany and the starched habits of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, now there was the stink of dust and plaster rot, crumbling brick and the creeping damp. The high rotting belfry was home to bats and pigeons, the walls tunneled by rats. The walks were overgrown and covered in yellow leaves, the high, narrow windows boarded and sightless. Within those bowing walls, only ghosts and shades walked, memories drifting down the uneven floors, forever silent.
But now, after two decades of stillness, there was movement.
With little warning, shapes and half-seen figures bled from the walls and slid from beneath stairwells. There was a slithering and a rustle of black crepe and gray cerements. Ivory faces peered from distorted pockets of darkness and pale hands whispered over banisters, vapid and obsidian ey
es leered and did not blink, mouths grinned but not smile. Gaunt figures brushed past broken windows, trailing cobweb and plumes of dust. There were knockings and scratchings, the echo of scraping laughter and dead voices. Hollow winds blew down the chimneys and hallways, forever moaning and mourning. Shadows moved and wavered and hissed, cold fingers beckoned and clawed from cellar damps.
The dead were active.
And Witcham belonged to them.
23
Just inside the front entrance of Holbich and Sons, Harry Teal said, “Listen, guys, I ain’t saying I’ve been a good boy or anything. And I ain’t saying they were wrong in locking me way. But if you’re thinking I’m going to cause you trouble or jump you from behind, you got it all wrong. Yeah, I escaped from Slayhoke, but if you would’ve seen what I saw, well you would’ve escaped, too.”
Tommy looked at Mitch. “What did you see?”
Harry shrugged. “Well, I guess after that thing out there, you might just believe me.”
“Maybe,” Mitch said.
So Harry Teal, who was pulling a nickel in a maximum security prison for grand theft auto, started talking, spilling out the dirty details of his life. What he’d done in Milwaukee that had earned him a spot at Slayhoke and how he’d come to work in the mortuary and what had happened yesterday morning when they started moving the stiffs from the old prison graveyard.
By the time he was done, he was shaking and having trouble breathing.
Harry was a tall, muscular guy, who had survived the inner city streets and life in a state hellhole, but to see him there, telling his horror story, he looked like maybe he was finally broken. That finally something had come along that was nasty enough to kick his legs out from under him.