by Tim Curran
The pains were cutting him open inside. He was starving to death. He needed the meat. He needed to stuff himself with it. Already he was getting weak. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was imagining things…or maybe he wasn’t imagining them at all.
Listen.
What?
Ssshh…here in the house.
Yes, now he could hear it. There was somebody in the house. They were in the kitchen…but why would they be in the house at all? He had no family and no friends.
He stood there, leaning against the window frame. His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. He felt giddy and confused from the lack of meat. His thoughts were scattered in his head. He could not make sense of anything.
From the kitchen, he could clearly hear a sort of rattling, gargling breathing.
It sounds like…it sounds like—
But he would not allow himself to finish that thought. Even in his current befuddled state of mind, he knew it was crazy. There were some things that could be and others that could never be. But the breathing did not stop. In fact, if anything, it grew much louder.
You should go see what it is.
Which was the logical thing to do, but he was incapable. His body was fixed rigidly to the window frame, his eyes wide and shining. It felt like a nail had been hammered into his heart, others hammered into his body, fixing him there, attaching him to the wall like a picture frame. Now he heard another sound…a sort of chopping noise. Yes, it was a knife against a cutting board, slicing back and forth as if trimming the fat from a roast. Slish-slash-slash. It was the most threatening thing he had ever heard.
Trying to swallow and finding it impossible, he walked to the archway and peered into the kitchen. What he saw made his heart seize in his chest momentarily. His entire body shook. As sickening waves of nausea rolled through him, he had a mad desire to drop to his knees and vomit.
There was a woman standing before the counter in a shapeless gray dress. She was a large woman like his Aunt Selma, a bulbous slug of a woman, someone for whom the word rotund had been invented. The seams of her dress were strained by the mountainous bulk of flab beneath. He was certain that under it, the flesh would be soft, white, and blobby like the dough that bursts from a tube of biscuits when you press a fork to the seam. Her face was yellow and sagging, her mouth puckered as if she did not have her teeth in.
She was not moving.
Not doing anything.
Just breathing. She had a carving knife in her hand and on the counter was the cutting board…and meat. Yes, a great slab of it, pink and glistening. The woman whom he knew was his Aunt Selma had been cutting it up into slices like slab bacon. Oh, dear God, the smell of it! The odors of the meat filled him, making his stomach growl uncontrollably. Drool ran from his mouth as his eyes watched the meat. It was so rare, so juicy. He needed to fill his mouth with it.
But this is insane! he warned himself. She can’t be here! She’s been dead seventeen years!
That didn’t seem to matter, however. All that mattered was the meat. Those sweet and salty strips of it that he had to get into his mouth. He needed to shove them in there, pack his cheeks with them, then slowly suction off the drippings until the world stopped whirling about in his head and dead women were back in their graves and things finally made sense again.
The woman still had not moved. He noticed that while she was heavy and round, she was not very tall. Not more than five feet. Had she always been that short?
“Selma?” he heard his voice say. “Selma, is that you?”
Now her eyes opened. Black, black eyes that burned hot and could see right through him. How well he remembered those eyes and, oh how he feared them. When she looked at him it was as if she could see right inside his head and knew everything about him, all those secret things he feared others would learn. He stared, and she stared. For one disturbing moment, he saw not his long-dead aunt but a hulking gray monstrosity that watched him with a single bleary ophidian eye.
Then it was Aunt Selma again.
Now her lips parted with a sticky sound. “Come here,” she said, and her voice had an unpleasant gurgling intonation to it. “The others have meat and you have none. But I have some for you. I’ll give it to you, but first you must be taught a terrible lesson. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
His electric stove had now clearly become a gas range. The flame rising from the ring was high and blue. His aunt held the tines of a fork into it.
“Come here,” she said. “Come and get what you deserve.”
“Oh, no, please not that—”
“Now, Ronny! Now!”
He knew better than to be defiant. It would only make things worse. He stepped over to the stove and began to unzip his pants. He stared at the meat as the pain came and Aunt Selma giggled.
12
As Lara chewed the meat, she listened to Billy screaming upstairs. There was a time when it would have sent her flying up there to tend to his every want and need. A time when the sound of his squealing voice either filled her with love or annoyed the hell out of her (particularly when she managed to fall asleep).
Now…now she thought little of it.
It was kind of a nice sound if you listened to it the right way with part of your brain that you didn’t normally use. An old part, she thought then. A forgotten part. Why she thought this she did not know, only that it seemed right.
The meat.
She studied it in her hands. It was bloody and pink and so amazingly tender. Succulent. Yes, that was the word. The meat had freed her in ways she could never have conceived of. She had not consciously realized that she had been a prisoner before, but she was. Trapped. Incarcerated. Caged. But she was caged no more. The things that had bothered her before—like her husband Joe, for example—were of little concern now. He would be home tonight, and he would want his dinner. But he would get no dinner because she had thrown it out.
And he certainly wouldn’t get any of her meat.
He would demand, and she would deny.
But he’ll get angry, real angry, an old weak little voice in her head warned her. And when he gets like that, he’ll take it out on you.
But Lara knew and understood things now that the old Lara had not known about or dared guess at. Joe would come home and he would find a scrap of meat on the table sitting on a plate. And Joe, being Joe, would eat it as he thought about what his supper would be and his anger turned to rage when he realized there would be none.
That was how Lara would trap him.
With the meat.
She would own him and break him with it and by the time she was done with him, his supper would be the least of his fucking worries.
As she thought about this, Lara chewed her meat faster because it was the very thing that calmed her and put her life in perspective. Without it, she knew, awful things would come to be. Things beyond name.
“The most horrible things you can imagine,” a voice said. A sweet, beautiful, angelic sort of voice. The sort of voice that should sing in heavenly choirs, it occurred to Lara.
She turned and there was a boy standing there. He was maybe five or six years old, a beautiful child with golden hair and sparkling blue eyes. And she knew without a doubt it was Billy. It was impossible because Billy was an infant, yet there he was.
“C’mere, Mama,” he said. “I’ve got a secret to tell you.”
13
Anna Lee Posey stood out on her back porch, arthritic, confused, and more than a little frightened. She was in her mind and yet not in her mind. In her body, yet not in control of it. There was another, a dark other, a sinister and twisted skulking thing that had taken over now. It owned her. It used her. It made her limbs move and her heart beat and her mind think. It was cunning and it was cruel.
It did what it wanted to.
And she was just a passenger.
No, no, no, you fool old woman, she heard her own
voice say somewhere in the murky depths of her mind. Don’t you see the truth of what’s happening here? Don’t you get it? You have dementia, Alzheimer’s, all those terrible things. This is what it’s like! This is its true nature!
Yes, yes, of course.
She had been forgetful and absentminded for years. Always grasping for the right word in conversation and invariably saying the wrong one. Forgetting people’s names. Doing the same thing twice and sometimes three times. Walking into rooms without knowing why.
Now it had all come full circle.
All those doctors with their testing and symptoms, blather about memory loss and competency—they never dared guess at the truth. They never dared imagine what it was like to be trapped in a failing body with a mind that was going to ruin. They could never conceive of the abject horror of such an existence.
But Anna Lee could.
She was living it.
She knew now what really happened when your mind went, and it was nothing like medical science imagined. What really happened was that your mind grew weak and soft as putty…and then, when you lost control, the Other took over. She didn’t know who it was or what it was, but she was certain everyone had this Other living inside them, biding their time. When your mind grew weak, you could no longer fight it or keep it down. So, it rose up, a malefic anti-you. It did awful things with your body and said terrible things with your mouth. The result was always the same: you were locked down in a dementia ward so you wouldn’t harm yourself or others. You were to be pitied. Poor old Mrs. So-and-So, her mind finally went. The truth was, Anna Lee knew, that you were in reality possessed…forced to be a spectator in your own body and your own mind while the Other paraded around in your skin like a crazy person, fouling themselves and exposing themselves, saying insane things and living out long-gone yellowed memories.
Anna Lee had long suspected the existence of the Other.
She had never totally trusted the images of herself she saw in mirrors. She always suspicioned that it was not her image at all, but that of something evil and parasitical inside her. And once, when she was a girl of nine, she had seen her reflection in a deep pool at Otter Creek and that reflection had winked at her.
The meat had made the Other stronger than it should have been, practically omnipotent. As it weakened her and made her mind spin endlessly in confusion, it strengthened the Other. Now it no longer had to hide inside hernow it was her…
She felt her body jerk the way a train does when it leaves the station. She was moving. Her body walked out into the backyard. Giggling under its breath, the Other went over to one of her flowerbeds and began stomping her aster and periwinkle.
No! No! she cried from inside her head, from the dark room up there she was locked away in.
The Other giggled with her voice and, picking up a pair of gardening shears, decapitated her sunflowers as it stomped her daylilies.
Anna Lee sobbed and squealed, but no one heard her. No one could hear her.
On the ground, there was a multicolored carpet of petals and stems. Happy with what it had done, the Other squatted and pissed all over the remains of the flowers. Then it stood, urine running down the inside of one leg. Grinning, its teeth yellow and crooked, it looked around the yard. “Come here, my children! Come, my kitty cats!” it called out in a hoarse, rasping voice. “Kitties! Kitties! Come for dinner! KEEEEEEDYYY CAAAATS!”
Inside, Anna Lee wept.
Oh, dear sweet God, the Other was going to do awful things to her sweet little kitties, her babies and mousers and chubby little tabbies. It would hurt them. It would do horrible, unthinkable things!
“Come, my kitties!” it brayed. “Then we will eat! We will all eat and grow fat and happy!”
The old frail woman stood amongst the stomped flowers and cackled maniacally. She reached into a pocket of her apron and pulled out a bloody, warm chunk of meat, chewing it with rising satisfaction.
And behind the wide, sparkling black eyes, Anna Lee Posey began to scream.
14
Suddenly, it happened.
As Bria made her way from Mr. Hammerberg’s house and his tales of falling meat (there was one for the books), the old nabe of Birch Street exploded into life.
And the strange thing was, she could feel it before it even happened. Like static electricity building before a good storm, it was in the air. It stopped her dead there on the sidewalk.
The hairs at the nape of her neck stood on end. She felt a weird exhilaration or agitation running through her as if she had been guzzling one energy drink after another and was amped on too much caffeine. She paused, looking from house to house as her belly flipped and flopped and her heart pounded.
That’s when it happened.
Up and down Birch Street, doors opened and people stepped out on porches. Those that Bria saw up close—Donny Falconi, his wife, and kids—looked decidedly unhealthy. Their faces were pale and blotchy, hands trembling as they lifted them to block the brightness of the sun. They looked like cave dwellers forced into the daylight or convicts released from solitary.
As Bria stood there watching, it seemed that it took most of them a minute or two to acclimate themselves to a sunny July day. Then all down the block, they swung into action. They pulled their green plastic Newton-issue waste containers out to the curb. For the longest time, it seemed you could hear nothing but the squeaking of wheels. Back into their houses they went, only to return scant seconds later dragging white Hefty kitchen bags out to the cans.
Everyone was doing it.
It was as if they were obeying some unspoken summoning, some secret directive that demanded they get rid of all their garbage at the same time. It was crazy.
None of them paid the slightest mind to Bria. They did not even look at her. She was a shadow, a non-entity. She watched the proceedings first with amusement (this was insane, yes, but it was unbearably comic somehow) and then with rising dread because they were all on the same wavelength and that scared the hell out of her.
Nobody’ll buy this, she thought. Even if I get a video of this, they’ll probably laugh.
And why not?
From a distance, it was funny…but at ground zero it was nightmarish. Like watching all the anthills in a field yield their flying queens at the same time. That was fine for bugs, but people didn’t act that way. This was like something from a sci-fi flick: groupthink, hive intelligence.
Then it was over.
As quickly as it had begun, it ended. People went back into their houses and doors were firmly shut. Then Bria was alone again, perplexed and more than a little frightened. She looked behind her, back down the sidewalk, and there was Mr. Hammerberg. He was standing beneath a beech tree in his front yard, watching her.
When their eyes met, he nodded knowingly as if to say, See, my dear? The meat rules all…
Bria had to turn away. Inside, she felt sick. Sick as if she might throw up at any moment.
15
Margie Blowers, chewing happily on a shank of the meat and quite literally tripping her brains out, thought she heard something out behind the garage. She cocked her head, gritting her teeth. There was a time when she welcomed company, but that time was long past. Any visitors that showed now were unwanted. They would come to steal her meat.
“Well, we’ll have to teach them a lesson, won’t we, Bigs?”
Bigsby whimpered a bit, wagging his tail. He kept his distance. She looked down at him, not with the overwhelming love she had once felt, but with a predatory leer that made the little dog tremble. He was but another scavenger she could not trust.
He did not stray far for she was the one that fed him. Or, at least, she had been. It had been some twenty-four hours now since Margie had first tasted the meat and well over that since the dog had been fed.
Still, Bigsby looked hopeful.
Margie heard the sound again and grabbed a hoe that was leaning up against the fence. Quietly, she sidled along the ga
rage and stepped out into the alley. There was nothing. Just a loose rain gutter tapping against the garage eave.
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
Relieved, she went back into the yard, humming under her breath. This was her domain. She ruled here. All would be well as long as no one tried to get her meat. Even in her present state of mind where rational thinking was at a low ebb, she knew the meat meant survival. Without it, there would be hunger and something possibly far worse than hunger.
Wait!
What was that sound?
The dog, that damned mutt, was eating the meat! The parasite! The rat! The scavenger!
“GET AWAY FROM IT!” Margie shrieked, flecks of white foam on her lips. “GET AWAY FROM MY FUCKING MEAT!”
She moved very fast then in defense of what was hers. Much faster than Bigsby expected. He had never seen the woman move like this, crossing the yard in great leaping bounds. He dropped the meat, hungrily chewing away at what he had stolen. He barely dodged the hoe that was thrown at him. It clattered against the back door.
Bigsby yelped and tried to run past Margie, but she seized him by the throat with crushing strength. He was no longer Mr. Bigs or Bigsby Boy or Little Biggie or Mama’s Little Poochie Pie. He was now a scavenging beast. She tossed him fifteen feet in the air and he came down hard, squealing as he was impaled on the wrought-iron fence spikes. He twisted and fought, squealing as gouts of blood ran down the uprights. His white coat—so lovingly shampooed and combed by Margie in better days—was a gore-stained mess.
Margie watched him die as she finished her meat.
She licked her lips and then her fingers. Grinning happily and possibly a little maniacally, she began to giggle. Then she laughed loudly, uncontrollably.
Why, she’d never imagined in all her born days that an impaled dog could be so damned funny. So she laughed with a high, brittle sort of sound, while inside, she wept.
16
As the meat dwindled and ran out—something which had to happen, Emma Falconi knew, with herself, Donny, and the kids eating it—things began to happen, terrible things, the very things that had terrified her for many years now.