by Martin Mundt
“Uh, Chief Philby,” Little Timmy said as he took another step back from the building.
The Chief pulled his head back out. “What is it, Little Timmy?” he said. “You got something to say, then say it. And just what the heck are you standing all the hecking way back there for?”
“Because that place gives me the willies,” said Little Timmy.
The Chief shook his head. “’The willies’ is for story-worlds, Little Timmy, not for the real world. In the real world, places is just places, like any other places. Now, what did you want to say to me?”
Little Timmy pointed at the words carved into the doggy-door.
PLEASE SLIDE BODIES THROUGH DOOR.
Chief Philby read the sign, sighed, and shook his head slowly. “Ain’t it occurred to you,” he said to Little Timmy, “that I ain’t no body?”
Little Timmy just shrugged.
The Chief shook his head one more time and started to crawl through the doggy-door, yelling ‘He-llooo! He-llooo! Anybody in here?” all the way, until the soles of his police shoes disappeared into the inside darkness, and the door swung closed behind him.
Little Timmy got that crawly feeling again, a tens-of-thousands-of-army-ants crawly feeling, and, a minute later, he heard Chief Philby scream; then he heard a gunshot, then two more, then more screams, then… nothing.
“Chief Philby?” Little Timmy called from his spot well back from the false door.
Nothing.
Little Timmy got on his bike and pedaled away from von Neumann’s just as fast as he could. He was sure, absolutely sure, that the silence was chasing him.
One of the boarded-up windows on Mr. Abrams’ house had been ripped open, the plywood panel lying in the grass, bent nails sticking up like crooked fingers disappearing beneath the grainy ripples on the surface of a plywood lake. The window itself had been broken.
Mr. Abrams screamed from inside, screamed and screamed and screamed, until, quite suddenly, he stopped.
A black hearse was parked at the curb, its black rear door wide open.
Little Timmy pedaled as hard as he could all the way home, dodging into alleys and behind bushes to avoid the hearses which were speeding all over town. They suddenly seemed to be everywhere, quiet, fast, purposeful, quartering Hopkins street by street. Little Timmy pedaled as fast as he could, took as straight a route as he could, but the silence still got home ahead of him.
The front door was open, the screen door ripped off its hinges and lying on the lawn.
Little Timmy hid in the bushes across the street for an hour and did nothing but watch and listen. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t hear anything. The street – everything – was still, quiet. Dead still and dead quiet.
Little Timmy crossed the street and snuck inside his own house.
“Mom?” he said, very quietly, standing in the front hall. “Dad?” He should be there; he didn’t go to the K-Mart until after noon.
No answer. Just silence.
He went straight into the kitchen.
It was empty, but the back door was hanging wide open.
He thought he heard a sound upstairs, and he went to the bottom of the stairway.
“Mom?” he said again.
Still no answer.
He went upstairs and saw nothing. The door to his parents’ room was ajar, but he wasn’t allowed to go inside. Ever.
“Mom?” he said, standing outside the door.
Nothing. He thought about going inside, despite the rules, but decided against.
He went to his own room on the third floor instead, and he found that his bed had been overturned, and his closet had been opened and emptied, and everything that had been inside thrown outside.
He got the crawly feeling. He turned around, but there was nothing, just the open door to his room and the empty hallway beyond. Only the crawly feeling didn’t go away.
He heard the window open behind him. Slowly, in jerks, wood creaking against wood. The window, he knew, was painted shut. He had never been able to open it more than a few inches, but now the wood kept creaking and jerking, further open, further open.
The creaking stopped, and Little Timmy knew that the window had to be open wide, wide enough for a body to be passed through. He heard a scrabbling sound, like long hard fingernails climbing over the windowsill. Climbing fast.
He ran, straight into the hallway. He pulled the bedroom door shut behind him, and he ran towards the stairs. The bedroom door was flung open behind him, and the scrabbling sound followed him like a dog on a wooden floor, fast, then faster. He didn’t look back. He piled down the stairs, taking them three at a time, and then he hesitated on the second-floor landing. He heard the scraping sounds in the third-floor hallway, coming closer. He had maybe five seconds.
He remembered the pile of books and newspapers at the front door of von Neumann’s. Information on everybody in Hopkins; information on who everybody was and where they all were, where they could all be found. His own room had already been searched, and Little Timmy knew he wasn’t ever supposed to go into his parents’ room, but now he went, because it was the one place in the house that he shouldn’t be.
He slid through the slightly open door, left it open behind him, and hid behind it, peeping through the seam below a hinge to watch the hallway. He tried to stop breathing, to make himself as quiet as everything else around him. He listened.
The scrabbling sound rushed down the stairs and stopped at the landing. The sound moved down the hall, getting slowly closer, click-click, click-click, like a Geiger counter just barely detecting something in a late-night movie. Then it stopped again, for what seemed like an hour.
Little Timmy saw, through the crack in the door, a jumble of shadows on the wall opposite the bedroom, maybe the legs of a giant spider, maybe mechanical arms, maybe tentacles. He couldn’t tell for sure; he didn’t want to tell for sure.
Then the shadows backed away and disappeared, and the clicking sound sped up and went back to the stairs, and down the first floor, and then Little Timmy couldn’t hear the sound any more, and then everything was quiet, and Little Timmy breathed again.
Mrs. Orton was in her house, right where she always was, right where anybody looking for her would expect to find her. And so Mrs. Orton was visited, found, comforted, waked, mourned, processed, recorded, and her ecologically friendly remains used to top off the hearse’s tank. Cheap, green and renewable, just like Mrs. Johanna Nutley had been right before her, and just like Mr. and Mrs. Titus and Fiona Osborne would be right after her.
“Mom?” whispered Little Timmy as he stuck his head into the bathroom attached to his parents’ bedroom.
No answer.
The bathroom was sprayed with blood, floor, walls, ceiling, toilet, mirror, bathmat sodden, bathtub streaked red towards the drain, as if a fire hydrant of blood had been opened in the room. There was makeup next to the sink, a hairbrush, his mother’s wedding ring set in a small dish to the left of the faucet, all splattered with blood.
But no body.
Little Timmy ran, out of the bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs, straight into the living room, where his Dad spent all his time when he was home, where his Dad always was, where his Dad should be, because his Dad would know what to do, if anyone did, because he had to know, because someone did.
Little Timmy saw the wall above the TV set splashed with a sunburst pattern of blood, like a flag, the screen of the TV broken and dripping red, a bloody can of Budweiser on its side, where it had gurgled itself empty onto the carpet.
But no Dad. No body. No bodies. No parents. Not alive. Not dead. Just blood. Gallons of blood.
Little Timmy’s heart pounded, his own blood threatening to split open his skin from the pressure. He ran again, out of the living room, out the front door, out of the house, and he jumped on his bike and pedaled, trying to head for someplace in town he had never gone before, someplace everybody knew he would never go.
Little Timmy hid in the cemetery all d
ay long, surrounded by opened graves and silence rising like mist from the holes; he hid in the branches of a tree, obscured by leaves.
He didn’t know how many times he saw black hearses glide down Ivy Street, past the open gates of the cemetery, at first one at a time, then in twos, then threes, but none of them stopped or came through the gate. Little Timmy didn’t move. He hid until the sun went down.
He wasn’t supposed to be out alone after dark. His mother didn’t allow it, but he figured it was OK today. Little Timmy also decided, sitting on his tree branch, that today was a very good day for him to leave town by himself for the first time. He figured that, today, he was on his own.
“OK, gotta have a plan,” said Andy Zambrano. He was cold. He was huddled on the floor of the walk-in freezer in the back of the Iowa House’s kitchen.
The heavy freezer door shivered, pounded from outside by something, something dark and shadowy, something with tentacles, something that had come skittering and slithering through Andy’s front door this morning. This morning that had started like every other morning, with Andy serving up the same donuts and coffee to the same regulars as every other day of the week. Except this morning there was the black-tentacled thing, and then blood and screaming from the regulars, and then Andy had run, and he had slammed the freezer door shut on Jimmy Whalen’s fingertips, Jimmy who had been running right behind him, and he had listened to Jimmy screaming for him to open the door, godDAM it, OPEN THE DOOR, ANDY, FOR GODSAKE OPEN THE… And then Jimmy had just started screaming without words, just screaming, and then nothing, until the pounding started.
“OK, a plan,” said Andy to himself for the hundredth time, since, in his panic, he had forgotten the shotgun, which was now next to his desk, on the other side of the freezer door. “So what’s my plan?”
The door got pounded. The door shivered. The wall around the doorframe cracked.
“My plan,” said Andy, “is to get my ass raptured the hell out of this goddamed freezer by the Lord Jesus H. Christ Himself, because beyond that I got nothing. Not a thing…”
The door shivered under another blow. The cracks widened. The door lurched inward.
“… but it’s better than my first plan though, ain’t it, oh, hell, yeah, better than waiting for the freezer door to get ripped off and the Angel of Goddamned Death to come for me while I’m surrounded by nothing but frozen peas and french fries. Oh, hell, yeah. Better than that. Rapture me, Lord, rapture me now.”
The door got pounded again, got thrown off one of its hinges, swung open halfway into the freezer.
“Now or never, Lord, it’s now or never!” Andy yelled, and he started throwing frozen peas at the Angel of Goddamned Death as it swarmed through the door at him, all tentacles and talons and black dread; chucking peas if only to give the Lord a few more seconds to miracle him out of the freezer, because everybody knew that the Lord helped those who helped themselves.
Except in this case.
Little Timmy watched the highway. The highway was the town line. This side was Hopkins. The other side wasn’t. On that side, the phone books and maps and Chamber of Commerce fact-book and high school yearbooks didn’t apply. Little Timmy didn’t belong on that side. All he had to do was cross the street.
Little Timmy stared at the road from his hiding place in the culvert. The world was dark. The world was quiet. He hadn’t seen or heard any hearses in hours, or any people, or anything at all. He figured maybe they were all gone – hearses and people. He had spent the last hour sitting on his bike, hunched over, ready to pedal up the short grassy slope to the highway and across. He was sure that the other side would be safe. The only reason that he hadn’t gone yet was because he was scared. Just plain scared.
He inhaled a big breath.
“Now or never,” he whispered, and he pushed off, standing on the pedals to get the bike going uphill, the sound of his heart pounding inside his own head so hard that it drowned out everything else around him. He was so focused on the road directly ahead of him that he forgot to check to his left and right. He didn’t see any lights because the hearses had no lights, and he didn’t hear the faint whine of engines until the last second. He turned his head, eyes wide.
The bumper caught him just before he reached the centerline of the highway, knocking him into the air and back the way he had come. He cartwheeled and fell rolling down the highway embankment, back towards Hopkins. The hearse stopped, as did the two dozen or more others driving in single-file behind it. The lead hearse’s rear door opened.
Little Timmy groaned. He pushed himself to his hands and knees. He heard a slithering and skittering sound on the pavement above him. He raised his head and saw moving shadows darker than the nighttime darkness, long sinuous shadows twined together like a bundle of pythons, rushing towards him like the mutant result of a chaotic biomechanical crossbreeding experiment between snakes and Japanese welding robots. The coils were black articulated hoses, three of them knotted and tangled together, each three inches in diameter, fifteen or twenty feet long and tipped with a hypodermic needle six inches long.
Little Timmy tried to crawl away, but the black hoses were too fast, and they wrapped themselves around his arms and legs until he was barely visible between the contracting coils, which quickly squeezed him into stillness. The needles stuck themselves into his body, one in his forehead, one in his chest, and one in his stomach.
The hoses began to flex like muscles, and Little Timmy’s body made squelching and squishing sounds inside the kneading tubes. Then, almost immediately, blood began to gush from their other ends, as strong as firehoses, until Little Timmy stopped squirming, stopped screaming, just stopped altogether. The process didn’t take long. Little Timmy was, after all, little, and he didn’t have a lot of blood to drain, and when he was dry, he was carried into the back of the hearse, where he was waked, mourned, processed, recorded, and his ecologically friendly remains used to top off the hearse’s tank, all automatically. Cheap, green and renewable. Seventy-five miles to the corpse, just like everyone else in Hopkins.
The lead hearse swelled with darkness, as if it had grown fat with night, its edges becoming indistinct, making it impossible to see where the hearse ended and the darkness began. The hearse radiated blackness, bled, melted, and flowed from one shape into two, and then there was another hearse, black, indistinguishable from the original.
Both had their rear doors open, and both doors closed simultaneously. Thirty-two hearses had stopped for Little Timmy, but thirty-three started their journey again, gliding down the highway, one by one passing a sign that read: Byron, Iowa, 23 miles. Population: 1732.
The Willies
he kids found a severed hand, just a hand, in the weeds near the overpass on Hintz Road. All five of them, Brad and Terry and Sean and Heather and Little Timmy, surrounded the hand and watched, waiting to see if it would twitch or crawl away.
Severed hands did those kinds of things, and worse, in movies and TV, but none of the kids were sure that either the movies or TV could really be trusted to know about the behavior of actual severed hands.
Brad, the leader, gripped his baseball bat in both hands, just in case. Brad decided that Little Timmy should be the one to touch it. Everyone else thought Little Timmy was a fine choice as well. Little Timmy himself didn’t say anything.
Little Timmy’s role in the group was to do all the things that nobody else wanted to do, but which clearly had to be done, like touching severed hands.
“Go on, Little Timmy, touch it,” said Brad, poking Little Timmy in the small of the back with the bat. “When are you ever gonna get another chance to touch some guy’s hand, huh?”
Little Timmy looked dubious, but he didn’t dispute Brad’s logic. He took one prodded step forward, no further than the tip of the bat, as if it were an electrical cord, and if he lost contact, he would unplug himself. He stared at the hand, nestled in weeds.
He hated being called “Little” Timmy, of course. Who wouldn’t? But what
could he do about it? He was little, the smallest by far, smaller even than Heather. He was weakest. He was slowest. He was least coordinated. He was always picked last.
He counted himself lucky that the other kids let him hang around the group at all. He had evolved, through the suppression of his gag reflex and his ick response and all the rest of his normal instincts of self-preservation, into the group’s ten-foot pole, their rubber gloves, their pooper scooper.
If something squeamish or gross or smelly or sticky needed touching or tasting or smelling, then Little Timmy was your man. If a place were dark or rickety or forbidden or precarious, then Little Timmy was your lab rat.
Timmy always told himself it could be worse. He could be Creepy Larry. No one liked Creepy Larry. Creepy Larry didn’t have any friends at all. He built models of spaceships, the Space Shuttle, the Enterprise, Apollo 13, but he glued dolls’ heads onto them where the cockpits should have gone, and then he whispered to them.
No one knew what he whispered, or if the heads whispered back. No one wanted to know, really. Brad hadn’t even made Little Timmy go talk to Creepy Larry. Yet.
All in all, Timmy figured he could do a lot worse than being the designated guinea pig for the group. That’s how he got the honor of touching the severed hand. That’s why he didn’t argue.
That’s why he took two more steps into the weeds, squatted, and checked for snakes and spiders. That’s why he held his breath and picked up the hand, cold as a rock with fingers. That’s why he stared at the sawed-through flesh and bone. That’s why he thought, was sure, swore on a stack of Bibles he was so sure, that the severed hand squirmed in his own hand.