by Tim Curran
And when it was over, his semen drying ice-cold on her ass, she dragged herself over to the closet. She could hear Johnny in there, whimpering.
“If you’re good,” she whispered through the door, “I’ll let you out. Then the three of us will sit down at the table I’ve prepared…”
Behind her, covering her neck with gentle kisses, Abe began to make the most horrible grunting sounds.
5
After she slept for a few more hours, Bria didn’t feel too bad. At least she could stand up without feeling like she was going to keel over. Though she hated the idea of having to unlock the door and possibly face Alice, she did just that. She stood under the shower until the hot water invigorated her, waking her mind up.
The idea of eating anything was repugnant. Whatever sort of bug she had picked up just wasn’t having it.
Because if there was food, you would eat. You would not purposely starve yourself.
Trembling, Bria leaned against the wall so she did not fall over. Bad thoughts filled her head, bad thoughts and bad memories. She needed to purge them before they gained traction. Bad thoughts were for Bad Girls and you sealed them in a box; you never let them out. This way, they did not exist.
Teachings from the Dark Castle.
Do you…can you remember the Dark, Dark Castle? Can you? Will you?
But she could not. The voice in her head filled her with panic, but quickly enough, it passed. And when it passed, it was gone.
After a few moments, she felt better.
Freshly showered and dressed, she went downstairs and Alice was thankfully nowhere to be found. That was a plus. A big plus as far as she was concerned. They hadn’t had a real confrontation since her arrival and Bria knew she was certainly not up to it today.
Regardless of how she felt, she knew she had to get out of the house.
She stepped out into the day and the heat nearly made her stomach come right up the back of her throat. God, it was oppressive. There was no breeze. The air was sodden and heavy. As sweat broke out on her face, she longed to be back in the central air.
“Disgusting, isn’t it?” a voice said, a voice she knew all too well. One that was sweet yet foul with associations.
Sady was sitting on the porch swing. There was black goo on her mouth and down her chin, a few stains of it on her shirt. Whatever she had eaten, she had devoured it like a hog.
Bria felt herself getting angry. She had always been too permissive of her sister. “Clean yourself up. How can you sit there like that with food all over you? If Alice sees you, she’ll fucking flip. What’s wrong with you?”
Sady giggled. “I don’t know…what’s wrong with you?”
Bria tried to control herself. This was what Sady was like as a childdefiant, confrontational, always trying to push your buttons and get a rise out of you. A silly little brat, plain and simple.
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Sady giggled again. “No, and there’s nothing wrong with the neighborhood since you got home.”
Bria thought: Is she…is she trying to blame this mess on me? Is she saying it’s my fault?
“What did you do, Bree? Oh, whatever did you do?” asked Sady, and was it Bria’s imagination or did her voice have a grunting quality to it like a swine?
Walk away, she told herself. Just walk away. Don’t pick a fight with her. She’s obsessive and you know it. This could go on forever.
Now Sady was sobbing. Tears were running down her cheeks and as she tried to speak, all that came out was a whimpering.
Bria sighed. “What’s wrong?”
“You know,” Sady said in a broken voice. “You know very well.”
Bria found herself moving down the steps and out to the sidewalk. Anything to be away from Sady. There were times when she felt sorry for her and there were other times when she simply could not tolerate her.
She’s up to something. Just ignore her until she gets bored and moves onto something else.
Yes, yes, that was it.
Baiting me. She’s always baiting me. Trying to get me to say bad things or admit to things.
“Not this time.”
All her life, regardless of her trouble, Bria had always relied on simple exercise to get her through and she relied on it today. As she walked—shuffling really because her stomach wouldn’t allow much more—she decided that today was her last day on Birch Street. She had the keys to Aiden’s little place and she was going to use them. No more Sady and no more Alice. It was getting to be too much.
But for now, there was the neighborhood to deal with. As she moved down the sidewalk, she began to see the decline she had seen earlier from her window. But whereas that had been subjective to a certain extent, this was wholly objective.
The nabe was degenerating.
There was no other word that seemed to fit. Sweating, sick to her stomach, her mouth filled with sweet saliva as if she might vomit at any moment, Bria leaned up against a beech tree and took it all in. The McMansions and sprawl-marts, once so clean and shiny like new pennies, were now grimy, windows streaked with dirt, patterns of black mold growing along their eaves. Shingles had been stripped from their roofs and were blown in yards like the scales of dragons. But it wasn’t just them. The older ranch houses and salt boxes were in a state of decay, too. There was actually a hole in the roof of Mr. Hammerberg’s house and Mr. Bagmore’s fence was falling over, the uprights like teeth rotten with decay.
She was seeing it everywhere.
And as she stood there, she wondered if it was the flu bug or whatever she had. She wondered if she was still in bed dreaming all this or simply hallucinating it.
Can’t be, just can’t be this bad. It’s…it’s Saturday. I came home on Thursday and everything was neat and trim and obsessively well-cared for.
How could this happen in only a few days?
How was it possible?
She knew it wasn’t. That was the scary thing. That’s what made fear trickle through her. The nabe looked as if it had been deserted for years. The hedges were bushy and untrimmed, fences snarled with creepers, birdbaths overturned, decorative ponds filled with black standing water, driveways blown with leaves and fallen branches. The houses were dirty and sagging, trellises rotting, windows broken, the once-green lawns not only overgrown but patchy with wild grasses and yellow devil’s rings from grub damage. This could not happen in a few days and, conceivably, it could never happen at all on Birch Street where everyone was house proud and lawn proud, where appearances were of the utmost importance.
It wasn’t just the people who were going bad, but the whole damn neighborhood.
6
There was meat in the house, Mr. Hammerberg knew, but he was not allowed to eat it. It was hidden. He had been starving for well over twenty-four hours now. The perfectly insane thing was that he had dropped over twenty pounds. That wasn’t possible. He had weighed himself Thursday morning and he had been at his usual 220. Now he was at 196. That just wasn’t possible. Not in so short of a time.
But I haven’t had any meat.
And that was the cause of it. He could eat nothing else now, and the only thing he could eat had been denied him.
“Dad? What do you think you’re doing?” a voice said from the living room.
Mr. Hammerberg had the phone in his hand, the landline. He was shaking and sweating, confused yet clear-headed for the first time since he had tasted the meat. He knew things now and yet he didn’t know anything at all.
The sound of Joey’s voice made his heart pound because he knew, he knew that—
Joey is dead. Joey died in the war.
And it had seemed so perfectly acceptable when he had first shown up on Thursday, but now, without the meat to cloud his thoughts and fill his mind with brilliant impossibilities, the reality of Joey being back was not only horrible but positively fucking blasphemous.
“What are you doing?” the voice asked aga
in.
Nothing, Mr. Hammerberg wanted to say. Nothing at all. I wasn’t going to do anything with the phone. I wasn’t going to call the police and tell them I was going mad or that my son dead nearly twenty-five years has come home from the war. I wasn’t going to tell them that or that you, flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, are an inhuman monster from hell.
“Dad, you better come in here.”
Oh God, that voice, that scratching, grinding, raw-throated voice. It made him think of shades slipping from graves and dead, soulless things that waited in cellars and attics and crouched under stairways. Things with blazing eyes and scabby faces and rotting black teeth.
“Come in here, Dad. I need to talk to you,” the voice said, dead yet droning, buzzing like the inside of a beehive.
Don’t do it. You must resist him.
“Dad. Now.”
Mr. Hammerberg felt loose from head to toe, made of some gauzy material that was steadily unraveling. The sound of that buzzing, insectile voice made him want to scream. In fact, he even tried but nothing came out but a hot rush of air that made his head spin, made him want to pitch sickly to the floor.
The voice, still calm, still terrible, its tone fricative and unnerving, said, “Get in here now, Dad.”
Mr. Hammerberg flinched at the sound of it. It was the way you talked to a dog, authoritative and firm, but not the way you spoke to an equal.
He found himself walking into the living room, all sense of disobedience drained right out of him, squeezed from him like water from a sponge.
Remember, he may look like your son but he is a corpse. A walking corpse. Something cunning and far worse than a corpse.
Mr. Hammerberg stepped into the living room and there was Joey sitting on a stool in the corner like some mischievous schoolboy being punished. As he approached him, Joey turned and looked at him. His eyes gleamed with a sly, eldritch intelligence.
“Do the right thing, Dad. Always do the right thing.”
Joey’s face was pallid, the flesh like old yellowed wax, shiny and synthetic-looking. His eyes were set in red-rimmed hollows. The crown of his skull was held together by crude, intersecting lines of suturing, one of which ran down his forehead to his left eye.
Helicopter crash, a voice taunted in Mr. Hammerberg’s head. Battle of Khafki, 1991. His body was crushed, his split head open like a gourd—
“I want you to listen to me, Dad,” the flat, dead voice intoned. “I want you to hear me. You will not use the phone. In fact, nobody on Birch Street will be using phones anymore. We…I won’t allow interference. Not now.”
And there was his slip. He said we. As in us, as in the terrible collective of minds that were behind all this. When he said that, pictures appeared briefly in Mr. Hammerberg’s mind—shrieking, howling storm winds cycling out of some impossible vortex of blackness. Then it was gone, if it was ever there in the first place.
Joey stared out the window at the old neighborhood which was his territory, his hop-yard, his spawning grounds. This is what he did all day long, watch and watch and watch. He had been a kind, sweet kid before the Army got hold of him and wasted him in that damn war. All sweetness and purity. Now he was like a can of fresh cream that had been poured out and filled with grave matter and the runoff from a sewer. That’s what he was like inside. Watching and thinking, spinning a web of meat addiction and counting his flies, sucking them dry drop by drop, his malefic mind engineering tragedy and horror and living nightmare.
Mr. Hammerberg knew this. Before, when he was filled with the sweet dreams of the meat, he did not question these things because he was part of it. But now he did and that put him in terrible danger.
Joey was watching something out there. Watching it the way a cat will watch a bird through a window, his lips curling away from his teeth.
It was Bria, Bria Candliss.
“There’s one yet who has not tasted the meat,” Joey said, his voice cracking dryly like that of a mummy that had spoken for the first time in 3000 years. “We must bring her in and make her part of what we are. Her more than the others.”
“Why?” Mr. Hammerberg asked. “What’s so special about her?”
Joey ignored the question. “She must taste the meat or this isn’t going to work. You see that, don’t you. Dad?”
“Yes.”
He saw it all right. She was the last vein in the neighborhood with fresh red blood in it and Joey wanted to drink her dry. She had to be brought in and broken like the others. Broken like Mr. Hammerberg himself. Her will had to be stripped away and replaced with the addiction. Because when the end came, she must be like the others.
Except she’s not like the others.
No. Yes. Maybe.
She had a special place in all this, only he was not certain what it was. Only that when he was near her, he could feel the power coming off her.
The idea haunted him, even though he could not conceptualize it. He wanted to help her, but he didn’t dare. He was part of something impossibly dark, and it would never let him go any more than the hunger would truly leave him. And as he thought this, it took hold of him, biting into him with the teeth of a jaguar. He shook and cried out. The agony brought him back into the fold. It felt as if his intestines were being pulled out of his ass one coil at a time.
“Ask for forgiveness,” Joey said.
And despite himself, feeling the filth of his soul bubbling to the surface and drowning him, Mr. Hammerberg did just that.
7
Without the meat, there was the agony of starvation. Without the meat, there was horror. And without the meat, there was the sense that reality, as such, was coming apart. That it had worn thin like a well- trodden rug. That the glue that held it together had eroded and its foundation was crumbling and cracking open. And if you dared look through those cracks as Tony Geroy had, you would see beyond the frayed and fractured edge of the known universe into a multi-dimensional hell where a vast malignancy waited on the other side.
Tony’s mind was gone.
What he had seen since the hunger set in had most thoroughly stripped his gears. His mind was a sucking black hole draining into a cosmic sewer at the center of time and space. Physically, he had been remade, broken and wasted by the ravages of starvation. He was an emaciated zombie that crawled about the immense depths of the Geroy house, sniffing, searching for the meat and its delicate flavor, needing to break the fast and end the horrific withdrawals that plagued him and punished him.
But he found none.
All he discovered were the cracks in reality from which nameless abominations watched and waited at the center of disorder and chaos. Just one taste of the meat would seal these terrible rents and clear his mind, allow him to think again, to understand, to make sense of the nightmare he was living.
Just one overlooked scrap.
But there isn’t any, he thought. There’s nothing but this house that has burst its seams and expanded exponentially, a maze with no beginning and no end.
The house no longer had doors or windows. There was no exit, no egress. Stairways led up to other stairways and corridors terminated at dead ends or opened into rooms that looked into other rooms and into other rooms and into other rooms to what seemed infinity, like a mirror reflecting another mirror.
And Tony Geroy, the neighborhood’s tie-dyed New Age investment broker whose head had been full of numbers and mind filled with the spiritual well-being of feng shui and pyramid power, was a prisoner within a prison within a prison.
The hunger had stripped him bare.
He could not remember where he was or why he was, let alone who he was.
Huddled in the darkness at the foot of a set of steps he thought might have once led to a place he knew but now led to some trans-galactic gulf of shadows that were as sharp and cutting as glass shards, he tried to think, to remember, to reason.
But there was nothing, nothing but the razor-edged hunger pangs that cut him open i
nside. Just a little meat, a little taste, and everything would come back to him. He would be energized and made whole again, part of the…the…the karmic all.
There is meat, said a voice in his head.
“No,” he whispered. “I’ve looked.”
Oh yes, much meat. An abundance of it. There is a banquet waiting for you. Juicy slabs and spiced cutlets, blood-rich filets and well-marbled shanks. All waiting for you.
“Where?” he demanded, his voice echoing into the vacuum of nothingness around him. “Where?”
In a secret, secret place. If you climb high enough, you’ll find the secret, secret place. But you need to get there before your wife does… You do remember her, don’t you?
Tony shook his head. “I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.” But then, like some clichéd bolt out of the blue, he did remember. Her face was in his mind and her name was on his tongue. “Pammy,” he said.
Yes.
Now climb high, high above and you’ll find the meat. Hurry before there’s nothing left of you.
Salivating, Tony mounted the stairway. He would find the meat. He would eat it. He would stuff himself with it. Then, gluttonous and satisfied, he would understand everything there was to understand.
8