by Ed Kurtz
Lisa stood at the foot of the bed, her feet engulfed in a sea of Harold’s soiled laundry. She held her hands together, palms out and fingers straight, with a battery-powered drill resting on top as if she had no idea what it was. Leon watched her, straining his neck to see, and considered that she very possibly didn’t know what it was. So he explained.
“Use it like a gun, Lisa—squeeze the trigger with your finger and the drill bit goes round.”
She did as he bade, curling her right hand around the grip and pressing down on the plastic trigger, and indeed the long, steel bit whirred as it rapidly spun around. She made a little circle of her mouth, indicating a degree of amusement with the device.
“Good, that’s good,” Leon encouraged her.
The presence in his head seemed to scream for release, pushing harder than ever at the interior wall of his skull.
Lisa said, “Huh.”
Before bidding his disciples to bind him, Leon had taken a tube of lipstick from Lisa’s purse and used it to smear a thick red X over his right eye. Now, as Lisa alternately squeezed and released the power drill’s trigger, he directed her unsteady attention toward the X.
“Right in the center, where the lines meet,” he said slowly and deliberately. “Drill until you cut through the bone.”
Once again the drill whirred as Lisa clumsily stepped forward, sleepwalking around the bed to Leon’s side. Leon clamped his teeth and seethed, “Do it.”
He shut his eyes and felt his back leap when the pointed end of the drill bit met the flesh of his brow. Stay steady now, he told himself, tensing from the biting pain. The tendril squirmed in the corner of his eye.
The drill spun rapidly, cutting the skin away in a second before it reached bone. Instantly the hot scent of bonedust filled his nostrils, a distressing odor reminiscent of the dentist’s chair. Except this scent came not from his teeth, but his skull, which spit up a cloud of white-gray motes compounded by a hot, red mist.
Leon squealed with agony.
His eye trembled, filling with moisture to fend off the skull-borne detritus that rained down into it. The fungus—the hitchhiker in his head—shifted and pulsed, pushing the rigid stalk further through the eye socket. The stalk became fatter at the base, and the more it extended, the more it pressed against the eye until everything Leon saw through it looked like the reflection in a funhouse mirror.
The whirling, silvery steel bit whined and Lisa bucked as it penetrated bone and meninges, at last reaching the soft, hidden tissue inside.
“Stop,” Leon croaked. “STOP!”
Lisa released the trigger, but remained frozen thereafter. The bit remained in Leon’s forehead, the tip burrowed half a centimeter into his frontal cortex.
The entire room flashed white, as though lightning had struck from the ceiling. Leon knew there was no light, not really, that it was only the invasion of the sharp metal biting into his brain.
In his haste to conduct the procedure, he’d forgotten to school Lisa on the reverse switch on the drill. Panic welled up in his chest; his shoulders quivered.
“The switch,” he muttered. “On the side, the switch. Flip it, goddamnit. Flip the switch.”
Lisa moved the switch to the reverse position with her thumb.
“Squeeze the trigger and pull it out,” Leon groaned through clenched teeth.
Again the drill screamed. Lisa yanked it out. The world erupted with a hundred thousand Fourth of July fireworks shows. For a moment, Leon felt relatively certain that both his eyes had burst. He smelled motor oil. Or was it apples? Green apples, slightly overripe.
He heard a short, breathy laugh and realized it was him.
The hole in his forehead spit a stream of fluid. Blood, maybe. Leon hoped it was only blood.
And somewhere, farther off, he still heard the high-pitched whine of the drill.
“Get rid of it,” he gasped.
As his vision gradually returned, however blurry and devoid of any specific colors, he made out the shape of Lisa, tossing the power drill onto the floor. Probably she broke it. Leon did not care. He was done with it, now.
He turned his head and felt movement in the new cavity above his eye.
“Bring them,” he told Lisa. “Bring everyone. It’s time.”
26
The house was vacant upon her arrival, absent anyone apart from the body in the armchair. She started at the grisly sight of it, though she was not particularly surprised. If Leon had been here—and by the looks of things, including the wide open front door, he had—a corpse in the living room was far from unexpected at this point in the game. Ami pinched her nose shut against the odor of its rot and drew near for a closer look.
Though she had never laid eyes on the man, she assumed it was Leon’s father. He’d so freely admitted how much he hated his dad at lunch that day. Ami shivered, reflecting on how long ago it seemed. In reality, it had been mere days. Days since she’d taken a chance on the shy, lonely guy on the bench by the lake. Days since their adventure with an abused dog, since Leon impressed her with his compassion. Since he went from her newfound friend to a terrifying enemy.
Since he took Ami’s sister and turned her brain to pulp.
Ami moved through the house, cautiously going from room to room, checking for signs of life—for survivors. Mostly she found only filth and clutter. In the master bedroom, she found a broken power drill on the floor by the doorway. Its green plastic case was spattered with blood and bits of gray tissue. She had not checked the body in the living room for signs of trauma, but she now wondered if this was how Leon’s father met his end. A drill to the back of the head. Goodnight, daddy.
Then she saw the blood on the bedsheets, and the linen restraints dangling menacingly from the posts. The pillowcases, already yellow with sweat stains, were freckled with red and green splotches.
Green?
Those spots were opaque and watery, like the juice from a crushed vegetable. Ami wrinkled her nose and went back down the hall to the front of the house.
In the kitchen she found another open door, this one leading out to the garage. Warily, she peeked in at the musty, gray area, lit dimly by the flickering fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling.
The garage was a shambles. Shelves were overturned, boxes crushed under the weight of shattered terrariums, soil and broken glass carpeted the floor. Ami jumped at the sight of an enormous, hairy spider inches from her feet and let out a tiny yelp. Closer inspection revealed the spider to be dead. Not just dead—but with an appalling fungal growth sprouting from its head, all knotty green buds and twisted fibrous strands.
“The hell?”
She loathed the idea of getting any closer to the thing than she needed to, but the growth from the creature’s dead husk seemed too important to ignore. Clearly Leon had trashed the place before his recent departure, but why? Ami reckoned it had something to do with the spider…or the shiny black scorpion, similarly afflicted and just as dead, a few feet away. Or the thick, gnarled millipede poking out of a mound of dark brown soil at the foot of the worktable, its head split open by its own peculiar protuberance.
Suddenly she felt her gorge rise in her throat and her mind burst with panic. She did not have the slightest clue as to what infected all these bugs—and ultimately killed them, by all appearances—but her instinct urged her to get as far away from them as possible, lest she get infected, herself.
Infected by the green, fungal stalks that destroyed Leon’s bugs.
“Green,” Ami muttered as she hurried back through the house. “What’s going on, Leon?”
She sprinted into the living room from the kitchen and, having momentarily forgotten about the pale cadaver there, gasped anew upon seeing it.
And in her terror, she froze up long enough to observe the upturned toolbox on the dirty carpet, and an assortment of old, rusty tools spilled out among the sundry debris. Among them was a claw hammer, its head brown with rust and the rubber on its handle cracked and peeling.
A weapon, she thought as she bent over to pick the hammer up. I might need that, where I’m going…
“Where am I going?” she asked herself aloud.
She pondered the question as she marched out of the house, hammer in hand, to her car on the street out front. She got into the driver’s seat, set the hammer on the passenger seat, and jammed the key into the ignition as she ran over every and any place Leon might go.
All she could think of was the office. That, and the lake behind it, where she and Leon found poor old Bess.
“Bess,” she whispered as she shifted into drive.
With nothing better to go on, Ami hit the gas and drove to work.
27
Bess hopped on her one good forepaw and gave a low bray. Behind her, four dark shapes shambled over the dead leaves and crunchy twigs and knurly roots that tripped her every so often as she hobbled along. Three more marched ahead of her, among them her erstwhile master. Twice she tried to lie down on the path and rest her aching paw, but in both instances one of the imposing shapes kicked her in the side or on the rump, forcing her to continue. So she limped along, ever ahead of the frightening figures in her wake, emitting the occasional whine from the pain.
Otherwise, only the shuffling of fourteen feet—seventeen, including hers—through the crispy underbrush punctuated the stillness of the night.
She walked on and on, stumbling frequently, pausing to investigate curious odors only to be nudged forward by unseen feet and knees. Then, the unimaginable happened. The people stopped, bivouacking at a broad clearing in the wood.
Her old house. Dane’s house.
The one who beat her. Burned her. Starved her.
The one she thought Leon had saved her from. But now he was dragging her right back. It didn’t make sense. And Bess was terrified.
One of the moonlit figures in front raised its arm and pointed to the house. Instantly the rest of them swarmed it, waddling in and around it, some returning with rusty red canisters and others carrying out bits of broken furniture.
In moments a soft orange glow grew out of the overgrown shrubs and dry, dead grass that bordered the bad old house. Soon after that, the whole place was swept over with hungry flames.
Most of the arsonists backed away, instinctually avoiding the menacing heat. One of them, however, erupted in flames, its clothing burning up like paper and its hair melting down to the scalp in an instant. This one did nothing to prevent its own ghastly demise—it neither flailed nor screamed, as any creature of sound mind would do. More horrible to Bess than the immolation of a living person was its complete indifference to the circumstances. The figure merely stood beside the house, its arms dangling limply at its sides, and burned.
The remaining six hung back, safely distant from the inferno, and watched in silence. When the flaming figure by the house finally collapsed to the ground in a smoldering heap, someone delivered a sound kick to Bess’s hip.
She brayed again and struggled on.
28
Odd, how normal it suddenly felt. The cool wind on her face through the crack in the window, the car radio softly murmuring, the fumbling through assorted junk in the glove box, looking for her access badge. It could have been any morning on any weekday, on her way to the office.
Though it wasn’t morning. It was ten o’clock at night. And nothing about Ami’s arrival at the Thompson & Associates building was remotely normal.
She waved the badge over the reader at the employee parking lot’s entrance, but the tiny light that usually flashed green turned red instead. The white and orange striped security arm remained firmly in place. No access.
She muttered a string of curse words as she threw the car into reverse and backed into a spot in visitor’s parking. Had it been a normal morning, she would have assumed that something was wrong with the badge reader, and her first stop would be the security desk to complain about it to Trey.
Of course, it was only due to the late hour. And Trey was locked up in a padded cell someplace, supposedly suffering from an extreme case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Ami knew the reality. Trey didn’t have PTSD. He had PLWD: Post Leon Weissmann Disorder. Even thinking his name made her wince.
She jammed the gearshift into park, yanked her keys out of the ignition slot and dipped her hand back into the glove box. She withdrew a mini flashlight, one of those just-in-case items she’d never had the opportunity to use, and got out of the car with the flash in one hand and the hammer in the other. A light breeze picked up, prickling her skin and raising gooseflesh. She gently nudged the car door shut with her hip and made her way across the lot, past the unyielding security arm and down the incline toward the lake.
The breeze calmed as she reached the bench on the grass, though she felt just as chilled as ever. Above her loomed the glaring, jaundiced-yellow light of the last overhead lamp in the parking lot. Its opaque plastic encasement was black at the center, the result of an ever-growing mound of insect carcasses. Beyond that point—around the opening in the iron fence and down to the foot worn path around the lake—lay nothing but near total darkness.
Ami tightened her hands around the flashlight and hammer at her sides and set off into it.
29
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” Leon hissed.
The black cavity of Union Mill Elementary yawned before him, his voice echoing into the dank ruins. Something fluttered in the pitch—a night bird taking flight from the unwelcome intruders. Leon stretched his arms out and flapped them in imitation of the bird.
“Fly, fly, fly,” he whispered. “No birds in the cathedral.”
“Nuh-nahbuhrds,” Lisa blabbered behind him.
Leon grinned and twisted to look at her, squinting his good eye to make out her shape, backlit by the sickly-yellow crescent moon.
“That’s right,” he said, shuffling up to her. “They’re not allowed. Only us. This is our holy ground, isn’t it?”
Lisa opened her mouth, but only a gooey rope of saliva came dribbling out. Leon leaned in close, close enough for his horn to brush against her forehead. She did not react to the sensation.
He pressed his lips against hers, smearing her drool over both of their mouths. The horn quivered, its roots shifting over the membranous surface of Leon’s brain. He could feel the florets pulsing around the circumference of the dime sized hole in his brow. It tingled, though not unpleasantly.
The horn—as Leon had come to think of it—began worming its way out of his head within moments of his trephination. At first it filled up the hole, at which point Leon assumed it was merely fluids welling up, a natural outcome given the circumstances. By the time he and his entourage were on the road, however, he was quickly dispelled of such illusions, for the fungus that had grown large enough to engender such terrible pain when his skull was complete was only too eager to escape now that egress had been provided to it. The bumpy florets blossomed first, followed in short order by the pulsating excrescence at the center of the soft, spongy mass. It pushed its way out, like an infant reptile from the egg, bringing glorious relief to Leon superior to any orgasm he’d ever experienced. Upon reaching his erstwhile workplace, the protuberance had already evolved to a state quite similar to what he’d seen on the Brazilian carpenter ant, at the end of his last lifetime. Gray and sinewy, a hundred million microscopic veins threaded together into a taut, curved horn. Before abandoning the Zimmermans’ minivan for their trek through the woods, he took a moment to admire the growth in the rearview mirror.
Leon thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Lisa moaned softly as Leon pulled away from their slobbery kiss. Kirk stood just behind her, slightly slumped so that his prodigious belly obscured most of his pelvic area. His mouth, too, hung open, and his gaze shot off into the dark void of the faceless school. Nothing about his drooping, jowly face registered awareness that his wife had gone up in flames less than half an hour earlier, burning to death in full view of eve
ryone present. Kirk had watched it, he saw Morgan simply standing there until the flames melted the muscles and tendons necessary to keep her erect. But only the dog expressed any apprehension over the gruesome spectacle. Kirk hadn’t given it a thought. He was much too stupid now.
Fat and stupid, Leon thought with a smirk on his sallow face. Aloud, he said, “The dog’s better than you.”
Kirk let his tongue roll past his flabby lips and said, “Mugh.”
“Right,” Leon said.
His horn twitched, pushing out a little further still. Leon’s right eye rolled back, exposing the bloodshot sclera, and he shuddered with an open-mouthed smile on his face. He then spun on his heel, turning to face the gaping hole in the front of the school, and headed for the damp darkness within.
“Come now,” he called out as he vanished into the black ruins. “Come along.”
The remaining five of his catechized devotees lurched forth, scuffing over broken beer bottles and crushed aluminum cans as they, too, were swallowed by the jagged, chasmal mouth. All that remained of Union Mill’s frontal edifice.
Bess dug into the dirt at her feet and yawped low.
“Bess!” Leon bellowed from the shadows. “Come!”
With her head hung low as though her neck was broken, Bess rose and limped after her master.
Leon stepped cautiously over the trash left by countless cavorting kids, careful to not trip over whatever fallen chunks of the crumbled walls or blackened beams that the fire left in its destructive wake, all those years ago. Before long, his vision—impaired as it was—adjusted to the dark; his pupils dilated and he could make out ambiguous shapes in the silvery moonlight that crept in through the building’s countless pockmarks and cavities. It shot through in lambent shafts, most of them incandescent spaghetti strings though a few were wide and luminous. The light was sparse, but enough for Leon to take in his surroundings: the scattered, shattered floor tiles, the exposed rafters and rust-orange ducts, stacked plastic chairs and broken bits of pressed wood school desks. The main office was off to the west (all windows smashed, the door off its hinges), an ominous stairwell cluttered with junk and garbage and debris to the north. The east side led to the cafeteria, a dirt-caked marquee board beside the two swinging doors announcing m atlo f and gr enbe ns, the last item on the lunch menu before the school burned. Light fixtures dangled precariously from decayed wires. Swastikas and pentagrams and crude representations of genitalia were spraypainted on nearly every available surface. One particularly puzzling bit of graffito spelled out help me in blood-red capital letters.