by Tim Curran
She closed the lid.
They’re all probably watching you.
“Fuck ’em all,” she said under her breath.
She walked over to Mr. Bagmore’s bin. Yup. Full of food. On top was some raw chicken and a couple shanks of frozen salmon that were defrosting quickly now. She went over to Lara Stromm’s. Same thing. Full of food and condiments. Insane. It was all absolutely insane.
It was Friday.
No garbage pickup until Tuesday. In this heat, it would smell like a death camp on Birch Street within twenty-four hours.
And she had the worst feeling the smell would not only be coming from the food but the neighborhood itself and those that inhabited it.
18
By suppertime that day, the Other had gathered up four of the kitties and baited the others as Anna Lee Posey went insane with horror inside her own skull. She was unable to stop the monstrosity that possessed her, owned her, and made her move. She could do nothing but sit inside the diseased, pulsating heart of her being and watch as it went about with its nefarious plans.
Sometimes she prayed for death and sometimes some last struggling vein of strength rose up inside her to fight. It never lasted long and the Other seemed to find it amusing. Silly old bitch, what can you do to stop me? You’re my plaything. I’ve gotten your flowers and I’ll get your cats…and then…and THEN…
But Anna Lee did not want to know what happened then; what was happening now was bad enough. At night, when her body laid down to sleep—because, yes, it and what occupied it certainly needed rest—the Other would whisper inside her skull of the horrible things it would make her do, the crimes it would commit, the pain it would bring into the world.
But they’ll stop you! The police will stop you! They’ll shoot you down or put you in jail!
The Other giggled at the very idea. Inside her mind, it leered at her with the glass eyes of a doll.
You silly, silly, stupid fucking cow. They’ll never expect it was us. No, we are a harmless old woman who can barely get out of bed let alone commit murder. Don’t you see that? We have the perfect alibi. You’ll see. You’ll see how right I am. And you’ll be there when I do the most horrible things. You’ll feel it, witness it, experience every bit of it. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it!
Anna Lee knew the Other was right. Whatever the Other was (and she could not begin to guess), it had eaten her up. It was a witch in a storybook that cooked children in a greasy black pot. It enjoyed every last bite of her and it was not yet done feasting. Her dismay, her horror, her fear were sweetmeats to it and it hungered for them.
Stick with me, kid, the Other said, and I’ll take you places and show you the most perfectly awful things. Together, you and I.
And what remained of Anna Lee’s mind floated on upstream.
19
Jeff Baker’s nose did the work. That was the thing about the meat: you could smell it. Once you had tasted it, you could smell it wherever it was hidden. You could even smell it inside people, sniff it out when they had eaten it. It was on their breath and exuding from their pores—sweet, salty, and unbearably savory.
She thought I wouldn’t find it. The stupid fucking twat. She had no business hiding it. Now it’s mine and when I finish eating it, why I just might eat her, too.
But she was sneaky, that was for sure.
Sneaky the way only a woman could be sneaky.
He had not tasted the meat in over twenty-four hours now. He had been in unbelievable agony. The meat was an addiction and once you had it, you needed to keep having it or you would become like Jeff: a hollow-eyed, trembling wraith of a man. The meat jacked your metabolism in ways the medical establishment would have found frightening. Since originally eating it and then being deprived of it, Jeff had dropped seventeen pounds from his already lean frame. He was a mad thing that skittered about on all fours, tortured by the most terrible hallucinations.
Now he was in the downstairs bathroom of their McMansion (which, one of his neighbors had once not-so lovingly described as the freak love child of a Victorian raped by a California beach house). He had found the meat. It was under the bathroom sink. He pawed away a pile of towels and discovered a blood-stained shoebox. Ha! The meat. He fumbled the cover free and stuffed first one bleeding shank into his mouth followed by another and it was like the lights were turned on for the first time in many hours. Oh yes. He was no longer shaking or doubled-over with abdominal pains. There were no squigglies crawling down the walls and no roaches crawling over his skin.
As he reached for a third piece, there was an explosion in his head and he hit the floor, stunned, dazed, the delicious meat still hanging from his mouth.
“IT IS NOT YOURS AND YOU WILL NOT TOUCH IT!” a voice shrieked. “NEVER, EVER TOUCH IT!”
The voice belonged to Jenna, his wife. It was she who had hidden the meat and she who defended her larder now. She had hit him with a frying pan, which might have been comical in some Li’l Abner sort of way if it wasn’t for her appearance—a hunched-over troll, naked and smeared with dirt and grime. There were cobwebs in her tangled hair from where she had been hiding behind the furnace in the basement and streaks of black soot on her face.
Once, she had been a petite, attractive woman who was fastidious about her appearance; now she was a skulking, snarling human rat.
The bitch, the filthy fucking bitch! Jeff thought dreamily as he lay sprawled on the floor, blood running from his scalp. I’ll kill her for this! I’ll catch her and beat her down! I’ll take the meat not just from her hands but from her stomach!
She took the box of meat and plucked the half-chewed hunk from his mouth. Making a hissing sound in her throat, she nibbled carefully on the latter. Though the nature of the meat demanded gluttony, she ate sparingly. Even the politics of the meat could not change this. She had eaten sparingly her entire life to keep in shape and this carried over.
She prodded Jeff with a finger…
20
Are you dead? Eh? Are you dead? You will NOT get my meat! I will kill you first! I will bite great steaming, hot-blooded chunks from you! I will chop you and cut you and slit you open! But you will NOT have my meat, my lover, my husband, you crawling, thieving little monster! You will NOT have what is mine! I will open you up and yank your entrails out and strangle you in their cold loops! I will drag your butchered carcass through the streets! I will spear your head atop my fence pole for all to see what HAPPENS to those who try to steal from ME!
21
Jeff heard her leave the room and he forced himself to move. He got up on his knees, still feeling woozy, but not as bad as he had felt an hour ago. The crown of his head was throbbing. He placed a hand up there and came away with blood on his fingers. He licked them.
Yes, he could even taste the meat in his own blood.
So, think, think of how delicious her blood will be, he thought then. She who has been feeding on the meat hourly since it fell. She’ll be saturated with the taste of it. Think!
It was this more than anything else that got him moving again. But he practiced stealth. He crept out of the bathroom, taking a pair of scissors with him that he found under the sink. Now he was armed and ready, now he would get what belonged rightly to him.
Listen.
Yes, yes! She was in the living room. He could hear her in there, chewing and slurping. Fucking pig. She had not heard him; she was too transfixed with the eating of the meat and the taste of it which could launch your mind into the black whirling constellations of unknown spheres.
He crept into the living room.
There she was, right over by the rocking chair. Her back was to him. He had her now. Jeff knew the nature of what she was experiencing at that moment. He knew she was light years distant and he was certain that even if he screamed her name, she would not have heard him.
Here I come, you filthy, greedy fucking pig…
He swallowed. The scissors were in his hand
. Outside, birds called and insects buzzed, but he did not hear them. In fact, all he heard was the sound of Jenna chewing and swallowing, humming mindlessly in her throat. Yes, closer like this, he could hear her ragged breathing and the pumping of her heart. But, and more importantly, he could smell the meat inside her, great bloody fragments and bits of it in her stomach and caught in her esophagus.
Now he had her.
Now he would—
When he was almost upon her, she turned and flashed him an evil, predatory grin of pink-stained teeth. Her eyes glistened like wet steel. He saw this and then the frying pan came at him again. He blocked it with his left forearm, crying out as the bones in his wrist snapped. At the same moment Jenna swung the pan, he slashed with the scissors, catching her in the corner of her mouth and slitting it open to her left ear.
As he fell away, she screamed and scuttled across the floor. She hid behind the sofa, and he retreated behind his recliner.
The box of meat was there by the rocker.
It was waiting to be taken.
He eyed it, pressing his broken wrist to his belly, and Jenna eyed it, one hand pressed to her bleeding, slit mouth.
Each waited for the other to make a move.
22
“Johnny…are you hungry? Are you, Johnny? Are you?” the voice said in the darkness and Johnny Spriks attempted a response, but nothing came out but a sibilant rush of air. “Johnny…Johnny…wouldn’t you like something to eat? Johnny…Johnny…JOHNNEEEEEEEEE….”
His thoughts were scattered, falling apart, mixing together until nothing really made sense. Nothing at all.
He was tied up. He knew that much. Kalen had let him taste the meat yesterday. She had fed it to him, letting him know it, his mind skyrocketing from his head. And then…what happened then?
But he couldn’t remember.
It was all lost in a fog. He tried to move, but he couldn’t. There was only the darkness and the feeling that things were crawling over him with tiny, sticky feet. Flies. Yes, they were flies. He could feel them buzzing around his ears and investigating his nostrils. They tickled his lips.
Think! Think!
He began to see vague images in his mind. Kalen…Kalen feeding him. He had gone right out of his head and then…think!…yes, yes, he had gotten very, very groggy. Why was that? He felt the same way he did when he first went on Lunesta for his insomnia.
I’ve given you a little something, Johnny.
I’ve given you a little something in your meat.
That was it then. She had given him a mega-dose of Lunesta in the meat and that had put his lights out. And she had brought him here, wherever here was.
As he opened his mouth to ask her for help, there was an explosion of agony inside him. It was hunger as he’d never known hunger before. He felt stabbing pains from the pit of his belly right up into his chest. He clenched his teeth and shook, finally crying out.
Then they were gone.
Bathed in sweat, he fought against what held him, ropes or cords, God knows what. She had doped him and tied him up, dragged him in here. That had to be it. But where was here? Wait. What was that smell? Shoe polish. That’s what it was: shoe polish. That meant his polish kit was nearby. He was in the closet. She had locked him in the closet.
“Kalen!” he called out. “Let me the hell out of here! Goddammit, Kalen, I’m not fooling around!”
He could hear her out there, whispering. But who was she talking to? There couldn’t have been another involved in this, could there? She kept right on whispering and Johnny was certain he heard another voice answering her. A male voice. What the hell? In his mind, he visualized another out there with her, a tall thin man with bushy hair and a beard. That’s what he saw. Then the image was momentarily replaced by something awful, a shapeless, embryonic thing. It was on top of her, moving up and down.
“And that’s how we’ll start,” it said to her. “House to house to house until we have it all.”
“I knew…I knew, Abe,” she breathed heavily. “I knew you’d come back for me…”
The image faded, but Johnny did not doubt the reality of it. He began to shout and thrash and throw himself about, all of which was punctuated by the perfectly obscene sounds of his wife’s orgasms…and the repulsive slobbering of the thing that rode her.
23
Sometime after returning from her alarming inspection of the trash bins on Birch Street, Bria sat down at the kitchen table and waited. She waited for Alice because enough was surely enough. She was going to ask questions and she wanted answers. And she wasn’t about to listen to any bullshit or double-talk. She wanted to hear the truth. Hell, she needed to.
At least, this was her intention.
After an hour or so had passed and Mother Alice still had not shown and Sady was apparently nowhere to be found, Bria decided that if she wanted answers, she’d probably have to make like a dog and fetch them on her own.
The first thing, she decided, was to find a key to the basement door. She looked in all the ordinary places but found nothing.
And this is what brought her down the steps to the basement, a hammer in her hands: frustration. She’d had enough. Her plan was born of desperation. It was decidedly reckless and rash.
If Alice comes home and catches you trying to bash the doorknob off, she’s going to have a cow and you know it.
But Bria was beyond caring about things like that.
All that mattered now was what was happening to the old nabe and, in particular, her mother. She had the strongest feeling that, whatever it was, it was tied up with what was locked in the cellar.
She stood there with the hammer in her hand, her heart pounding because she knew that what she was about to do was wrong and that once she did it, there would be no going back. There was something behind the door Alice did not want her to see and whether it was something utterly ridiculous or terrible in nature, she did not know. But her curiosity could not leave the idea of it alone.
As she hesitated there uncertainly, a strange sort of tension began to build in the back of her skull. Not a headache exactly…but more like a mounting pressure as if her brain was being slowly squeezed in a vise.
The desire to get into the cellar was suddenly more powerful than ever. And as she denied herself the same, an insistent pulsing tapped at her temples.
I don’t want to know what’s in there, she thought. I really don’t because it’s going to be bad.
As she attempted to step away from the door, she actually stepped closer. She could smell something fetid seeping out from beneath it—a dark odor of death. It was unpleasantly strong for a few moments and then it was gone.
As apprehension began to overwhelm her, she thought, whatever’s in there, it’s dead. You sure you want to know what it is?
Suddenly, what she began to fear most was not so much what was behind the door, but what Mother Alice would do if she caught her down there. She’d allowed it once, but Bria had seen the look in her eyes—flat, dead, and soulless like a snake—and she honestly believed at that moment Alice was utterly mad and would hurt her if she caught her nosing into her private affairs.
The very idea of being discovered filled Bria with a strange primal terror. If she had heard Alice coming into the house, she thought she might’ve screamed.
So maybe you ought to get out of here before she does come back, eh?
Which was exactly what she was going to do but she hesitated. And she hesitated because she was positive she had heard something move behind the door. It had been a slight sound, barely even there, but she knew she heard it. A sort of dragging noise as if something heavy had slid a few inches over the floor.
And that’s when it came to her that while she was listening on this side of the door, something else was listening on the other side.
That’s crazy. What you smelled was dead and dead things don’t move.
No, but the things that feed on them do.
> It was an awful thing to think, but it stayed in her thoughts. That terrible magnetism took hold of her again. It wanted her to see what was in the cellar. But that was the last thing she really wanted and particularly after she heard something else, a wet, very wet noise that reminded her of a dog licking a meaty bone.
She was frozen into inaction for a moment or two, then her voice said automatically: “Is someone in there? Alice…Mother, is that you?”
There was silence for a time that seemed impossibly drawn out. Then a voice, slushy and mucid, said, I’m not Alice. Bria let out a cry and ran up the steps. It wasn’t until she was out of that damn house and in the streaming sunlight of the backyard that she realized she had not heard the voice with her ears, but only in her mind.
Had it been real?
Standing out there, she just wasn’t sure.
24
Long after the dog stopped quaking in its death throes, Margie Blowers sat there watching it, knowing it had once been important to her but unable to remember its name. She watched its blood drying in the sun. A white and fluffy creature whose fur was now stained red and pink. It was torn open like a plush bunny, its stuffing hanging out in coils and clock springs.
“Poor Bigsby,” a voice said.
Margie turned quickly, a savage gleam in her eye. Her daughter Polly was standing there, fresh from college, and suddenly something inside of her melted. In the glow of love for her daughter, the meat nearly lost possession of her. This was Polly. This was her all. This was her everything. Her own life was boring and small-minded on a good day and a heap of shit on a bad one. She lived vicariously through Polly. She made sure Polly always had the things she never did, whether that was being a Girl Scout or having a car when she was a teenager, spring break trips to Florida or a college education. As Polly was nourished, so was she; as Polly grew, so did she; and as Polly blossomed, part of her flowered with her.