Grimm Reapings

by R. Patrick Gates

  The clown's nose began to glow with an eerie, inner light.

  Chalice burst into laughter.

  The clown staggered as if her laughter were blows to its body. He quickly recovered, though. His hand, big and rubbery but strong, still held hers and it now squeezed like a vise. Chalice cried out in pain as several of her fingers snapped, but her cry was cut off by the clown mercifully punching her rapidly in the face three times, knocking her out.

  Steve Nailer stood over Chalice's body and flexed his hand, wincing. It throbbed painfully from the blows he'd had to deliver. "That wasn't her worst fucking fear," he muttered. "Nobody laughs at their worst fear. Unless they're fucking crazy, and this one's not crazy." He kicked Chalice's limp body. "And I know crazy." He laughed loud but short as he winced again at the pain in his swelling knuckles.

  "I shouldn't have to be working this hard."

  Virginya was startled when her mother entered the house a few moments after her. Stella let the door slam, which sounded like thunder to Virginya's ears, but which, thankfully, died quickly in the muting atmosphere of the big house.

  "Shhh! " she admonished her mother and whispered, "We've got to find Chalice and her boyfriend and get them out of here." She stopped and concentrated for a moment. Something was wrong. Now that she was in the same house with the witch, so close she could physically run into her at any moment, she sensed a barrier between her mind and the witch's. She no longer had the witch's thoughts or recent actions clearly in her head. She had no idea where Aunt Chalice might be, either, or if anything had happened to her.

  It became quickly apparent that her newfound ability to share the witch's powers also meant she shared the problems the witch was having. Fortunately it didn't affect her as strongly as it did the witch and she sensed that the thing blocking her from the witch was the growing presence of the boy to whom the witch's body belonged. In place of the witch, she could now sense him, gathering strength, growing in power, readying himself for another attack on the witch's psyche.

  Good.

  She hoped he kept her busy long enough for her and Stella to find Chalice and Jackie and get the heck out of there.

  This place was creepy.

  "Mom, go to the top of the stairs and have a peek, but be careful and don't go any further. If you see Chalice, grab her, and we'll get outta here. I'll check the rooms down here," Ginny told her mother.

  "You mean Ida?" her mother said, smiling.

  Ginny sighed. "Yeah. Whatever."

  "Okay, darling." Stella Hoar amiably crossed the white marble lobby floor and started up the stairs.

  Virginya tried the first two doors to the right of the entrance, but they were locked. She crossed the white marble floor to the wooden counter and went behind it. She opened the door there marked OFFICE. The room was in shadow, but she could tell it was empty. She was closing the door, about to try the other one marked CREMATORIUM (she had no idea what that word meant or even how to say it), when she heard her mother speak from the top of the stairs, but she wasn't talking to Ginny or Aunt Chalice.

  "Oh, hello! Can you tell me where my sister, Ida, is?"

  The next moment, she groaned loudly and came crashing backward, head over heels, down the stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom. Ginny rushed across the lobby to her mother's crumpled body.

  "Mom?" she said, her voice shaky. Stella didn't answer. Ginny's mother would never speak to her again. The butcher knife jammed up to its hilt in her chest had seen to that.

  Dazed, feeling as though every muscle and joint in her body had suddenly rusted, slowing her movements, Virginya turned and looked up the stairs. A chubby, teenage girl with an extraordinarily angelic face stood there, a stain of fresh blood sprayed across the front of her gray sweatshirt.

  "Yum! Yum! Eat 'em up!" the angelic teen said to Ginny and rubbed her tummy. She started down.

  Ginny leaped over her dead mother and ran down the hallway beyond, unmindful of the hot tears burning her eyes.

  Back in the lobby, Debbie reached the bottom of the stairs, straddled Stella's corpse with a foot on either side, and bent over to grasp the knife handle and yank it free. It wouldn't budge. She renewed her grip and tried again. Stuck. She worked the knife back and forth, not minding the sound of metal grinding against bone and squishing through flesh, and pulled it free after a few moments but remained bent, watching bubbles of blood foam from the dead woman's mouth.

  She stood and gingerly touched her tongue to the bloody blade. She made a "not bad" face-eyebrows raised, bottom lip and chin jutting out-and licked the blade clean.

  "Here I come, ready or not!" she called down the hall. Carrying the knife, she followed her voice.

  Jackie let Chalice lead the way, glad now that she had come. It was amazing that she could remember where Jen's room was after being there just once. Now that he thought of it, he didn't remember Jen showing them her room over Thanksgiving weekend because it had still been under renovation. Neither did he recall Chalice spending any time alone with Jen, so when had she gotten to see his sister's bedroom? In fact, he had gotten the distinct feeling that weekend that Jen hadn't cared much for Chalice, her look, or her fake name and had avoided her.

  Jackie gasped and yanked his hand free of the suddenly ancient one that now held his.

  "Welcome back, dearie. Long time no see." Eleanor Grimm, in all her naked, flesh-charred glory, just as he remembered dreaming of her countless times, stood in front of him.

  Jackie staggered back. The witch cackled ... and disappeared in a rapidly dissipating cloud of smoke. He was alone in the hallway, his heart hammering in his chest, his knees liquid with fear.

  Chalice was gone.

  "Oh, fuck!" he whispered.

  "Wanna?" came a high-pitched, Betty-Boopish cutesy voice.

  He turned. Behind him stood Snow White, a perfect human replica of the famous Disney cartoon character, looking exactly the same as she had when she'd first appeared to him in this house thirteen years ago.

  "What have you done with my sister and her husband, and everyone else, you bitch! "

  Snow White laughed and the door to Jackie's right swung open. Wary of the apparition before him, Jackie glanced quickly through the open door. It was a bathroom.

  Snow White remained where she was, still smiling.

  Jackie looked again into the bathroom. There was someone in the tub, getting out. Jackie glanced back at Snow White. She was staring into the bathroom also. Jackie followed her gaze. The person in the tub was nearly out, swinging his legs over the side and standing. Jackie realized it was Jeremy, his sister's husband. Jackie took a step toward him but immediately stopped. The Jeremy before him now was not the Jeremy Jackie remembered-it was Jeremy after the witch had gotten through with him.

  He was a -horror to look at-his skin boiled red, his features blackened and fried, his hair melted into rubbery, frizzled strands that streaked his burnt face. Yet, Jeremy's fricasseed appearance was not the most surprising thing. In his hand, Jeremy Watson held a live turkey by the neck, squeezing it just enough to keep the bird from squawking. He suddenly grabbed it with both hands and held it up, exposing a raging, though crispy, erect penis.

  "I love fuckin' turkey! "Jeremy crowed and proceeded to copulate with the holiday bird while it bellowed out a horrible squawking-gobble-gobble sound upon being impaled.

  Surprisingly, Jackie couldn't help but laugh at the apparition.

  "Stuff like that scared me when I was six," he said to Snow White.

  Her smile faded and she morphed into Eleanor Grimm again, unburned now and dressed in her habitual long flowing black dress.

  "So, you're a big brave boy now, right?" she said, smirking at him and freezing him motionless with her sudden presence. He didn't like the way she said that, nor the sound of footsteps now behind him.

  He turned slowly and words exploded from him in a reflexive gasp: "Holy fucking shit!"

  Ten-year-old Margaret Eames stood a few feet away. Naked, blood-spat
tered, a ghost from the past resurrected to mess with his mind. He had to remember: It's just an illusion. But that was hard when Margaret removed the top of her shaved skull to reveal her brain foul with squirming maggots. She inverted the top piece of her skull, and held it in her hands in front of her like a bowl. She bent her head and shook it, causing a torrent of maggots fat with her gray matter to cascade out of her head and into the skull-bowl, filling it. She straightened, took a writhing maggot from the bone bowl, and popped it in her mouth. It crunched between her teeth and a spurt of green and white goo squirted from between her lips and dribbled down her chin.

  She held the treats up for Jackie. "Want one?" she asked, her smile putrid with larvae guts.

  Jackie shook his head and almost laughed at this apparition, too.

  He wasn't scared!

  Grossed out, yes, but no more so than when watching an episode of FearFactor. No, this wasn't scary, this was just gross.

  Could it be that the witch had lost her touch? he wondered.

  He didn't get the chance to pursue the train of thought any further. His brother Steve came up behind him, raised a garden shovel, and swung it like a baseball bat into the back ofJackie's head.

  Virginya ran into the kitchen and looked around for a place to hide. She spied the pantry and ducked in after opening the inside screen door in hopes of fooling her pursuer into thinking she had gone outside.

  It didn't work.

  A moment after Ginny had hidden in the cool, fruitysmelling shadows of the pantry, the angelic-faced teen found her. She stood in the pantry doorway, with the knife that had murdered Ginny's mother in hand, ready to mix Ginny's blood with the fresh blood from Stella Hoar that the girl had not completely lapped off the blade. Ginny sensed the witch's controlling hand strong in the girl, but it wasn't a forced control; it was more like cooperation. This girl's every move wasn't being controlled by the witch. This girl chose to be bad. The girl liked doing whatever the witch, in the form of Jackie's brother, told her to do. The girl liked being evil and doing evil things.

  In a moment of extreme clarity, Ginny saw inside the girl and became one with her. It was a mistake. The sense of satisfaction the teen felt at having murdered Ginny's mother brought grief and rage. A strange thing happened; in the rage, Ginny found an immense power, stronger and fiercer than anything she'd ever felt before. Like a magnifying glass narrowing a ray of sunlight into a burning beam, she focused this fierce power of her mind on the girl and commanded.

  The angelic girl smiled and looked Ginny in the eye. She held Ginny's gaze and turned the knife on herself. Carefully, she placed the tip of the blade against the middle of her throat. Still moving slowly, pushing firmly but in no hurry, the girl inserted the knife into her own throat. Blood spurted from around the blade as it cut into the outer layers of skin and kept going. As soon as Ginny saw the blood, she cringed and changed her mind, suddenly horrified at what she was doing. She commanded the girl to stop, but it was too late; she wouldn't heed Ginny's frantic thoughts. A moment later blood came from the girl's mouth and nose, and still she pushed the steel in. Never losing her smile, she stared into Virginya's commanding eyes and toppled like a falling tree to the pantry floor.

  Ginny slumped against the cabinets and burst into tears, trembling violently from the incredible intensity of the power she had just used. It left her shaken. The horror of the past ten minutes of her lifewitnessing her mother's murder and now avenging it so horribly-was not at all assuaged by the little satisfaction she felt from her revenge. What she had done had been too much like something the witch would have done.... She tried not to think of that, of any of it. She just had to find Aunt Chalice and get out of there.

  Straightening, she put one hand up like a blinder to block the sight of the bloody teen on the floor and sidled past the corpse and out of the pantry. She ran across the kitchen and back down the hallway to the front lobby. Nearing it, she heard heavy footsteps on the lobby stairs ahead, where her mother lay. She ducked into the living room on the right and peered round the corner, watching wide-eyed as the teenage boy the witch possessed came into view at the bottom of the stairs. He stood there, regarding Stella Hoar's corpse, and smacked his lips exaggeratedly.

  "Looks like my fallen angel has been busy." The witch-boy looked around and into the hallway. Ginny pulled back just in time.

  "Where the hell is she now?" The boy's voice had changed, turning sour and whiney. "Son of a bitch," he grunted a moment later, out of breath. Ginny dared to look again. The witch-boy was struggling with Stella's body, trying to pull it away from the stairs. He got it a few feet and rolled it over against the wall.

  "I'll clean you later, my little fishy," he said and followed with a faint song: "And they swam and they swam right over the dam."

  He returned to the stairs and began pulling heavily on something Ginny couldn't see, while under his breath singing, "Boom, boom, diddem daddem wottam choo! " With a loud grunt and yank, the thing came rumbling down the stairs and the witch-boy barely had time to jump out of the way before the body of Chalice's boyfriend flopped to the white marble floor in a sprawling pile of arms and legs.

  Is he dead? Ginny wondered, looking at his closed eyes. No, his lids were moving and she could sense he was alive, but hurt. Badly. Ginny flinched as the witch-boy grabbed one of Jackie's legs and dragged him across the lobby floor and out of sight. A moment later she heard a door open followed by a heavy thump-thump-thump similar to the sound she'd just heard when the boy had pulled Jackie's body down the stairs. Ginny guessed the witch-boy was taking Jackie into the basement, to the place with the weird name on the door: Crematorium. Ginny waited a long time and was wondering if the witch-boy was coming back when she heard muffled steps ascending the stairs. A moment later she heard the crematorium door open and footsteps in the lobby. Still out of Ginny's line of vision, the witch-boy called out loudly:

  "Angel! Where are you, my pet? Bring the girl and come join the fun."

  Ginny listened to the witch-boy listening for his helper and held her breath. Would he sense her death? she wondered.

  "So hard to get good help these days." The witchboy clucked, tsk-tsk-tsking loudly.

  No! Good!

  He came into view briefly as he ran up the stairs, and his footsteps faded quickly above her. Ginny ran to the lobby and glanced cautiously around the hallway door frame and up the stairs. The coast was clear for the time being. She bit her lip, trying to decide what to do. It seemed logical that if the witch had taken Jackie through the door marked CREMATORIUM, Aunt Chalice must be in there, too.

  She crossed the lobby floor quickly, opened the door with the strange word on it, and went down the narrow stairway inside.

  Detective Joe Kennison thought instinct was the most important tool a detective had. Stuck in a quiet town and teased nightly by TV shows in which his job was glamorized as exciting and dangerous, he could afford to think so. He had long ago resolved himself to the fact that his best chance at seeing a really good case in the shit-kicking little town of Northwood had come his way about thirteen years too soon, back when he was only ten. He had lived in New Hampshire then and hadn't known about the Grimm Memorials murders until he got a job on the Northwood police force. The chances of a case like that happening again in Northwood had to be astronomical, but, amazingly, something very similar seemed to be going on again in the area. Maybe a copycat.

  Joe reviewed the call he'd taken from the Sunderland Police Department. Diane Nailer, the woman who had been kidnapped by Eleanor Grimm thirteen years ago, had been murdered along with at least two others, and their mutilated bodies found in Mrs. Nailer's house in Sunderland. Jackie Nailer, her son, was currently the prime suspect, and it was believed he was on his way to his sister's house, the old Grimm Memorials place, to kill her, too.

  The kid must have snapped, Joe thought, speeding along Route 116, his lights flashing. Being the only cop on duty-of a force of three-for the holiday in the small town, Joe knew he wasn
't supposed to leave the station and go out on calls. Procedure was that he call the state police in Hadley thirty miles away, but Joe wasn't about to let them have a nugget like this. This was just like a TV show.

  "I'll call the staties," Joe muttered as he turned right onto Dorsey Lane, "when I'm good and ready."

  Another unwelcome visitor.

  The police-at least this was to be expected sooner or later.

  Steve Nailer stood over the unconscious body of his brother's girlfriend, his head tilted to the right, eyes staring into space, unseeing of their immediate surroundings, focused elsewhere.

  She feels the Machine shift, reach out, swallow the approaching policeman's mind, leaving her free for more important things.

  Steve smiled and nodded and let out a long sigh of relief. He went back to the task of dragging Chalice's body down to the crematorium.

  In the back of her mind, she worries if she can keep yet another rat dancing to her piper's tune without her instrument failing... .

  "What the hell?"Joe Kennison stepped on the brake and stared at the wall of vegetation facing him. He leaned over the steering wheel to look at the roadhe was about fifty yards into the woods at the end of Dorsey Lane-but the road was gone, suddenly swallowed by the forest.

  He got out of the car, barely acknowledging the squirrels rustling in the bushes to his near left, and regarded the incredible wall of wilderness in front of him. It was unnatural, but it was there. It was the damnedest thing and there was no way around it. He knew Dorsey Lane Extension as the other way to the Grimm place, but looking back the way he'd come along the narrow twisting road, it was going to be a bitch to drive it all the way back in reverse because there wasn't enough room to turn around.