by Tim Curran
From a high attic window, Mother Alice watched the girl who claimed to be her daughter. Such a fine little trick the bitch had played on her. Alice did not understand how she had fooled her, how she had worked her way into the house, but that time was past. Bria, Bria, Bria. She did have a daughter named Bria, but that snotty college girl with her head filled with ideas could not be her.
My Bria was in the hospital. She was so very sick. I think she died. Yes, she must have died.
But Alice knew that wasn’t true because Bria went to college. After everything went to hell, she toddled off to college pretty as you please.
But this can’t be her.
If this was really Bria, Alice knew, then she would act differently. She’d be like me, just like me. She wouldn’t be some haughty, uppity, little bitch who was always wandering around, sticking her nose where it did not belong.
“That Nosey Nora is not my daughter,” she said under her breath.
Alice wasn’t sure who she was, but she knew what she was looking for. She wanted the same thing the others did, the very thing that most (if not all) were running out of now: the meat. Soon, they would come for Alice’s. They would smell it. They would know she had it. They would try to take it.
Bria—Nosey Nora, that’s her name—would bring them here.
Alice studied the neighborhood through the window. By God, it was becoming a cesspool, a third world slum out there. Already the filth of their minds was spilling out, tainting the world of Birch Street, rotting it black like their souls. That was the punishment of the meat—once you tasted it, you could have nothing else. It favored those who hoarded it, those who were prepared.
Alice was prepared.
She spent her life being prepared.
Whether it was paper towels or sticky notes, canned soup or egg noodles or instant potatoes, she kept her stock high, maintaining a running inventory of just about everything. All those foodstuffs were gone now, of course. She had gotten rid of them because the sight and smell of them (even in cans and boxes and sealed bags) made her nauseous. But the meat, well, her inventory was high.
Her husbands—both of whom she had buried, thank you very much—had accused her of being obsessive-compulsive, rigidly organized, and lacking both flexibility and spontaneity. Maybe they were right. Her second husband, old Giggling Roger, Aiden’s dad, had made her read a magazine article once that claimed OCD people stockpiled and organized because they were afraid of losing control. They regimented the mundane details of their lives because everything else was chaotic and uncontrollable.
But I’m still alive, she thought, and they’re dead because they did not plan, they did not foresee.
Alice grinned at the idea and cackled neurotically under her breath. Without hesitation now that Nosey Nora was out of the house, she scampered down to the cellar door and quickly unlocked it.
She closed it behind her, locked it again, and then turned on the light. The smell of the meat was that of carrion, putrescent and unbearably foul. It delighted Alice to no end. Why, it smelled even stronger than yesterday, rich and resplendent and mouth-watering. In the darkness of the cellar, it was marinating in its own juices, flavoring itself with its own brine, the hot juices sinking deeper into the meat.
She kneeled, as if before an altar.
In the light of the single overhead bulb, flies wheeled and buzzed. They crawled over her face and settled into her hair. Alice paid them no mind. The meat was heaped in a steel washtub, mounds and mounds of it riotous with maggots.
Oh, the smell, the delicious smell of it.
It would drive her mad. The rancid fetor hot in her face, she had the most overwhelming desire to masturbate and roll in the meat. But Alice did not believe in masturbation. It showed a lack of self-discipline, a weakness of spirit and body. She didn’t care for it any more than she cared for orgasms. She had never had one. She refused to lose control even during sex.
But here…
Smelling the meat…
The heat running in waves down her body…
This is what it must feel like, she told herself, when you lose control, when you come your fucking brains out—
No, no, she must be disciplined and conserve the meat or she would be no better than the others.
She waved away some flies and snatched a tender, beslimed strip of meat. As she chewed it, it melted in her mouth, pulpous and wormy. Oh, the joy of it! She tried to control her hunger, her yearning, but it was impossible. Tremors rolled through her as if she really were having an orgasm. She stuck her face deep into the grave waste, breathing it in, luxuriating in the feel of the maggots against her lips, shuddering as they tickled her face with their frenzied looping motions. Several slid down her shirt, squirming between her breasts. This made her hips buck and tremble. She sucked several into her mouth. They were sweet and plump, flavored by the meat as a good cut of beef will flavor the noodles it is served with.
A few minutes later, brushing worms from her lips, she laid back on the cool concrete floor and thought about her daughter. Bria had been such a pretty little girl. So smart. So talented. She wore dresses nearly every day. She was perfect in every way.
Then other people got into her life and dirtied her mind and twisted her thoughts. Soon enough she was in high school and she was independent and opinionated and anything you said to her was met with derision, that mocking smile or a not-too casual roll of the eyes. Then she was sick and, oh, she nearly brought the house down with her. Finally, came college and she was gone, gone completely. That girl, that Nosey Nora, is not her at all.
In her terribly warped mind, Alice kept picturing Bria, whom she was certain was an imposter, and she became more and more angry. Who did she think she was to invade this house? How far did she plan on taking this deception? The more Alice thought about it, the angrier she became until in her mind there was an image of that sarcastic, snotty little bitch and Alice saw herself beating her down, smashing and stomping and kicking her, beating her bloody until her bones broke and her skull shattered and her eyeballs rolled over the floor and gray ooze spurted from her fractured head and that mocking, icy smile was forever erased.
Then why don’t you do just that? a voice said to her with a mushy sound as if its mouth was filled with meat. Why don’t you kill the little twat before she totally ruins everything we’ve built up and turns your world completely upside down? Hmm…why don’t you? Because you know that she’s plotting against you with your neighbors, spinning webs of deceit and subterfuge! She’s got her eye on your store of meat and soon, oh yes, very soon now, she’ll come storming in here with a gang of them, hollow-eyed and drooling, and they’ll take what’s yours and feed on it and leave you starving!
You know she will!
You know it!
Alice trembled at the truth of the situation, at the idea of the awful things they would do to her. But I can’t, she thought then. I couldn’t kill her. I can’t do things like that.
There was a peel of laughter that became a hissing noise, and she saw she was not alone. There was someone in the room with her or, better, somethinga gleaming black shape that stared down at her with huge, questioning eyes. Then, as it moved into the light, she saw it was a buzzard, a carrion bird that was nearly as tall as a man. It stood there with oily black wings and jutting plumes of mangy feathers that jumped with mites, a loathsome graveyard thing with a jutting narrow head of red scabrous flesh and a hooked beak made for opening the bellies of corpses. Its eyes were very human, shining with intensity and sentience.
Its beak opened and a loud hissing noise issued forth that sounded like compressed air blown through a pipe. She could smell its breath and it was hot and rancid with what it had been feeding upon.
Alice laid there on the floor, a silent scream at her lips, filling with horror and madness.
The buzzard spread its plumage and she saw eyes, dozens of eyes like ripe, dewy cherries staring at her with absolute malice.<
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I’ll go crazy if it touches me! I’ll go absolutely crazy if it gets any closer and—
But it did not get any closer.
It hissed one last time, and she smelled corpses and roadkill boiling with worms, the moldering satin linings of caskets and yellowed bones stacked in heaps.
Then…it was gone.
There was no buzzard-thing, there was only the most perfect little girl she had ever seen. She was maybe eight-years old, her glossy brown hair done up in ringlets. She was dressed in a darling little party dress of blooming pastel flowers against a robin’s egg blue background with crochet trim at the waist and a huge pink rosette.
That dress, Alice thought. That dress…
She knew that dress. She had bought it for Bria to wear to a third grade Easter play. Same dress. Same white tights. Same pink glittery ballet flats. Same hairdo. Same—
“Hello, Mama,” the girl said in a pristine, sweet voice that Alice had not heard in years. “I’ve come back. I’m the real Brianna.”
Alice’s heart leapt in her chest. It was! It was Brianna! It was her darling little girl come back at last! Tears running down her cheeks, Alice went to her, scooping her up in her arms, taking no notice of the fact that beneath the pretty floral dress, her daughter felt oddly soft and spongy.
“I’m back now, Mama,” Brianna said. “I’m going to help you with the imposter. Together, we’ll do the most terrible things to her…”
9
Nobody was more surprised than Bria when she walked up the path to Lara Stromm’s house and knocked on the door. It was more plain old gumption and swinging balls than she’d shown since she first got home (if you could call the padded room with running water at 2314 Birch Street by such a designation). What inspired her to pay Lara a visit was frustration and desperation that became a slow-simmering anger. That and the fact she was worried about her.
Bria’s stomach still felt like it had been stirred up with a rusty knife, but she simply couldn’t take it anymore.
She needed to talk to someone.
She chose Lara. And even as she knocked, she knew that was probably a mistake.
“Lara,” she called out. “It’s me, it’s Bria. I need to talk to you.”
And please don’t act weird. Don’t come onto me or suggest we lay down together.
The windows were all open.
Bria figured there was no way Lara couldn’t have heard her. The weird thing was that all the shades were drawn. Maybe it was to keep the sunlight and heat out (she remembered Mother Alice doing that when she was a kid before Giggling Roger put in central air), but maybe it was for reasons of a more disquieting nature.
“Lara?”
She saw a shape move before the drapes at the picture window and for a moment she could not breathe because the shape/shadow was horribly distorted…and small.
“I’m coming,” she heard Lara say in a cracking, wizened voice.
Bria’s nervousness did not dissipate. In fact, it spiked. Again, she thought she saw that dwarfish shape move past the living room drapes. It wasn’t Lara; her voice had come from the other end of the house.
Then who? Bria wondered. Who the hell could it be?
Did she have a kid in there? Bria didn’t really think so. And kid had been the farthest thing from her mind when she saw the shape.
Another shape stood before the screen door, only this one was Lara. She stood back in the quiet dimness of the house. “What is it, Bria?” she asked. “I was laying down. I was up all night.”
That aged voice again. Bria couldn’t see her very well, but the voice itself was enough to give you the cold sweats.
It doesn’t sound like her, Bria thought. It sounds like it has been borrowed by someone who doesn’t know how to use it.
Which was absolute paranoid bullshit so she dismissed it from her mind.
“Can I come in?” Bria asked, not really sure if she even wanted to. “Just for a minute? I really need to talk to you.”
“It’s not a good time,” the voice said.
Bria took a step back, more certain than ever that this was not the Lara she knew and loved. There was an odd flatness to her sentences, a lack of rhythm, a coldness behind them Lara would not have been capable of.
It’s not Lara. It can’t be.
If she would only come out of the shadows. If only there was a way to draw her out.
The only thing that stopped Bria from going right in was that she sensed danger in there, danger in the shadows. Something heightened by the smell coming through the screen door which was like that of a subterranean rat warren, a place where scurrying, noisome things lived in their own waste and produced blind progeny that mewled in the darkness.
Bria swallowed. “The neighborhood, Lara. There’s something wrong with it.”
“Is there?”
“Yes. You haven’t noticed?”
“I guess not.”
Bria stood there, shocked. “You didn’t notice garbage rotting at the curbs? That houses are falling apart? Yards overgrown? That people in this neighborhood act like they’re from another fucking planet?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” Same dead, inflectionless voice. It sounded like a recording. A really bad recording.
“Lara…this neighborhood looks like it’s been abandoned for months, or even years. How could that happen within a couple days?”
Lara just shrugged.
“Come out here, I want to talk to you,” Bria said.
“No. You should go now.”
“Please, Lara.”
Lara shook her head. She would not come out into the sunlight. Like a movie vampire, the idea was obviously repugnant to her.
What Bria did then was totally uncharacteristic for her, but she had reached the point where she had to do something, anything. Before Lara could react, she threw open the screen door and seized her by the wrist, yanking her out into the blinding sunlight of the porch.
Lara screamed.
As the rays of the sun hit her, she screamed with a high, agonized sound. If she had looked frightening before, she looked positively awful now. Her eyes still had that sickly yellow cast to them, but now the right looked as big as a golf ball. It bulged grotesquely from its socket which looked red as raw meat, as if it might explode from her face at any moment. There were ulcers eaten into her face. Just beneath the skin, that purple vein tracery was still evident, only more severe, branching like the roots of a tree.
This is what Bria saw in those few seconds as Lara screamed and writhed in the sunlight before pulling herself back into the shadows.
That and the sound of something hitting the porch flooring. And there was no doubt what it was—teeth. Two teeth had fallen from Lara’s gums. They glistened whitely.
“Get away from here,” Lara snarled, covering her face in her hands.
And when Bria didn’t because she was so damn shocked at what she had just seen, that awful smell coming through the screen door suddenly amplified to nauseous levels. There was someone in there, someone moving just behind Lara.
“My mother told you to leave, you little cunt,” an impish, macabre sort of voice said.
Bria needed no more urging. She nearly fell down the steps in her flight to get away from Lara and whatever sort of odious familiar waited inside with her.
10
In the DeYoung house, Aunt Selma said, “She’s out there right now. The one I want.”
On the floor, naked and shivering despite the suffocating heat in the kitchen, Ronald looked up, doe-eyed and desperate for approval. “Who, Selma, who?”
“You know which one I mean. The special one.”
Her voice was like the hiss of hot water in steam pipes.
Yes, Ronald knew who the one was, the special one.
Auntie Selma’s lips shriveled back over her crooked teeth and brown-spotted gums. “Without her being part of what we are, there can be no salvation for the rest of us
. She is more important than any other.”
“Why?”
“She is the one and we want her most of all. That’s why.”
Ronald tried hard to understand, but the hunger shattered his thoughts. It tore up his insides almost constantly now. He was confused and disoriented. His head was so light it could have floated off his shoulder like a balloon.
“Get to your feet, you smelly little pig,” Aunt Selma ordered.
Ronald did so uneasily. He was so woozy he nearly fell over. He had to grip the counter to steady himself.
Aunt Selma watched him with eyes that were evil and ageless, her face deeply seamed yet taut as if it was stretched almost beyond endurance. Her skin was a sallow, jaundiced yellow, her mouth like a ragged gash made by a dull blade. She studied him with eyes that were black and molten.
“Hungry, are you?” she said in that sibilant tone. “Well, imagine, Ronny, imagine what it will be like if there’s no salvation. Imagine how you’ll feel two weeks from now or a month from now without a taste of the meat. Because you won’t die, boy, you’ll never die. You’ll just waste away to skin and bones and still you’ll suffer, suffer, suffer.”
Something inside Ronald squeezed like a fist, his skin tightening over his bones like a corset. The hunger pangs kept coming, piercing and prodding down deep in his belly and lower regions like hot metal needles shoved up between his legs.
“If we make her part of us, there will be no hunger,” Aunt Selma promised him. “Salvation will be ours. The meat will fall from the sky again to satisfy us and make us whole. Do you see?”
Yes, yes, I see, I understand.
“That’s why we must bring her here and place our offerings at her feet.”
Ronald nodded his head vigorously. Yes, yes, it did make sense. It made all the sense in the world. It put everything in perfect perspective for him. It broomed away the dust and cobwebs in his mind and gave his chaotic thoughts a single unified purpose.
“I understand,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
Auntie Selma brought her face in close to his. “This will make me happy. And if I’m happy, you’ll be happy.”