by Tim Curran
Her warm breath in his face was sour like cream that had turned, thickened into rancid curds. But he did not mind this anymore than he minded the rustling sounds that came from beneath her shapeless gray dress or the fact he knew she died seventeen years before.
“I’ll bring her here,” he said.
“That’s a good boy, Ronnie. And good boys get treats.”
She reached down between his legs and gripped his penis, working her hand up and down, up and down, the way she had when he was thirteen. His penis grew instantly hard.
“You like that…don’t you?” Auntie Selma asked, exhaling hot breath into the cup of his ear.
“Yes…yes.”
Despite the raised burns on the shaft (courtesy of a hot fork), it felt wonderful. He gasped and trembled as she worked him faster and faster. When he came, he cried out. Semen juiced over Aunt Selma’s hand and spattered her dress. He sagged against the counter, his entire body limp.
“Next time, you can put it in me just like you used to do,” Aunt Selma told him. “But first, bring me the girl. Let her sanctify us and show us the way.”
Ronald was so thrilled he began to grow hard again. This made Auntie Selma giggle like a little girl. She even pressed a chaste hand over her mouth. It was scaly and yellow like the claw of a turkey buzzard.
“Get her, Ronnie.”
He was so ecstatic at the prospect that he nearly ran out the door naked.
11
By the time Bria made it home, she was dazed and out of sorts, but mostly just afraid. The old nabe felt like a haunted house and she was trapped dead center of it. She collapsed on the lowest step of the porch. Her stomach was rolling worse than ever, cool sweat beading her brow. In her mind, a voice droned on and on about impossible things. Who was that? Who was in the house with Lara? Who was that I saw behind the drapes and who—or what—was standing behind her?
These were the questions that filled Bria’s mind with an impure sort of moonlight in which grinning hobgoblins danced and fey things jumped and pranced.
My mother told you to leave, you little cunt.
There was no doubting what was said or the malice behind the words. It was not the voice of a child exactly, but the rasping, strident tone of an evil elf that snatched children from cribs and fed upon them in secluded midnight groves.
Lara has only one child and it’s Billy.
I know, I know.
Billy is maybe five months old.
Yes, yes, but—
He is not walking and he is not talking as such.
Yes, but—
But even if he was, he would not have such an evil, elfin tone to his voice. And he certainly would not speak to you with such mindless hatred.
No, no he wouldn’t.
Whatever’s in that house with Lara, it’s no child. It may call her ‘mother’ but it’s no more human than a newborn scorpion.
These were the things the voice tormented her with. It refused to give her any ground to come up with rational or reasonable explanations; it had no interest in foolishness like that.
Bria fumbled in her pocket for her cigarettes. After some moments, she managed to get one lit. She took long, slow, even drags off it. She let the nicotine get into her bloodstream and brain. She hoped it would clear her head and help her make sense of things.
It did not.
What about Lara? That voice again.
I just don’t know.
You saw her. You saw how she looked.
Yes.
Christ, Bria, there were holes in her face. Her teeth were falling out. Her eyes were fucked up. She looked like a fallout victim from Hiroshima.
Yes, yes—
She’s decaying. She’s fucking rotting away. And you know why: the meat. The meat that fell from the sky. She ate it like the others ate it.
Bria smoked her cigarette right down to the filter and only stopped there because she burned her fingers. Everything the voice said was true. But where did knowing any of that get her? What could she do about it? Call the police? What crime had really been committed? Everything she could tell them would sound paranoid and conspiratorial to the extreme. And if she called the CDC and told them something like a flesh-eating virus was making the rounds of Birch Street, they wouldn’t take her seriously. They’d want corroboration from the local medical establishment. It would be highly unlikely that they’d take her word for it.
If people are sick, why haven’t they been to their physicians?
Because they don’t want help. Something…something supernatural has control of them. Something that came with the meat or was the meat.
Click.
And that was it, wasn’t it? How did you help those that were comfortable, even pleased, with their own defilement and degradation?
12
The long and short of it, Roger Moody discovered, was that they were trapped. There was no way out. The house had become a prison, an immense and sinister organism, and they were trapped inside its body. It was perfectly insane and he knew it, but there was no other explanation. Somehow, some way, it had come to life.
Maybe before the meat and the ensuing starvation that followed, it would have made no sense. It would have been nonsense and madness, but the meat had its own logic and imparted its own sense of reality unto its followers.
It’s alive, he thought. I can feel the beat of its heart. I can feel its body heat. It lives. It grows.
“Can we get out…can we…get out?” Gail asked again and again. She did not seem to understand what was going on. The hunger had stripped most of her mind away now. At first, she’d been violent, then nearly comatose, now simply confused.
“Maybe,” he told her. “Maybe.”
They were in the spare bedroom downstairs, a room which had once held two very large windows and now had none. By flashlight, Roger explored the walls. The paneling he’d hated for so many years and had been planning on replacing was gone now. It had been replaced by soft pink tissue he now explored with his hands. It was smooth and warm.
I’ll cut through it. I’ll slash it open and crawl through and be free.
There was a certain simplistic logic to his thinking. It was as insane as the house itself, but that did not mean it wasn’t logical.
“Wait here,” he told Gail, who did not even respond. She was curled up in the center of the room, mumbling and shaking.
She’ll wait, he thought. She’ll wait a hundred years if she has to. She’s too petrified to move.
Roger ran out of the room, noticing with a growing dismay that even the floor felt soft. He ignored the breathing pink walls that seemed to be quilted with skin and the sagging ceiling which appeared to be growing hairs.
He found what he wanted in the coat closet near the entry which was now a swelling mound with the arches and whorl of a thumbprint. When he got back, Gail had not moved.
That was fine.
That was okay.
He’d do the moving for her.
The hatchet in his hand, he stumbled over to the wall where he knew for certain the window used to be. Just do it. The house seemed to sigh around him, a massive living thing. He raised the hatchet and with everything he had, he buried it in the wall. The house shuddered immediately. It shifted. The floors rippled. The walls flinched. There was a low agonized moaning that sounded like it echoed up from the basement.
“It’s bleeding,” Gail said and started to titter like a mad woman. “It’s bleeding.”
It was. The gash he’d opened up had revealed striated pink-yellow flesh set with what looked to be purple arteries. Then blood filled it, seeped from it, ran in streams and puddled on the floor.
Roger heard mad laughter of his own in the back of his mind. This could not be, he knew. None of this could be. But he refused to think about it. Because if he did, he would be no better than Gail.
He swung the hatchet again.
And again.
Wit
h each blow, the gash widened and the house moved. It was shivering and that made it hard to stay on his feet. He chopped and chopped and chopped. Blood that was hot, greasy, and fluid like engine oil splattered his face, but he did not stop. The house was groaning, angry, hurting.
Roger, now engulfed in blood, kept swinging the hatchet. He severed one of the purple arteries and blood gushed out of it like water from a fire hydrant. It hit him, flattening him, throwing him on top of Gail. Now the blood was a red torrent that inundated the room. Within seconds, it seemed, it was two or three feet deep, still gushing, still flooding the room in pulsating jets.
He held onto Gail as they were washed out into the hallway. The house felt like it had pulled itself up violently, trying to escape. Roger and Gail were tossed to and fro. Then the house settled down and there was only the moaning, that same pathetic moaning from the basement.
It was mortally wounded.
And more than that, Roger knew, it was dying.
13
“POLLY!” Margie Blowers screamed, her face pressed to the window. “DON’T DO THAT! DON’T YOU DO THAT!”
Dear God, this was Polly. This was her Polly, her perfect little girl, her perfect young woman…but what she was doing, oh dear God, what she was doing out there? Margie felt a deep pain in her guts that doubled her over. The hunger, oh dear God, the hunger’s coming again! It’s trying to own me! To make me part of it! Margie would not have it. The return of Polly had canceled out much of its power and the repellent thing that had taken over dear, sweet, wonderful Polly had nullified what remained.
But now the hunger was back.
It was cutting deep inside her, making Margie bite down on her lower lip until she tasted blood. Sweat that was neither cool nor hot but only foul-smelling rolled in beads down her face. She dropped to her knees, gagging and gasping. Dry heaves swept through her, but, but
But Polly…she must be watched. She’s been taken over, possessed.
Margie didn’t know what it was, not exactly, but it was a vile and pernicious thing, a black malignancy that had taken root in the garden of delight that was her daughter. On her hands and knees, fighting the cutting agony, Margie crawled across the kitchen floor. Polly had disappeared in the night. One moment she was in the living room saying the most awful, perverse things in a mocking voice, then she was gone. Margie could not find her anywhere.
But now she was back.
She was in the backyard. She was on her knees before the mangled carcass of Bigsby. She was licking the dog’s open wounds with an obscene lapping sound.
As Margie crawled out of the door onto the back porch, she cried, “POLLY! NO! PLEASE, NO!”
Polly turned and looked at her mother, her face was red with blood, her teeth pink with it. The blood accentuated the deathly yellow pallor of her skin. It looked like black ink. She made a hissing sound and arched her back like a feline in rut, then she dug her fingers right into the dog, pulling and tearing at things, finally wrenching free a long red strip of meat that she fed into her mouth. She chewed and slurped at it, swallowing it nearly whole the way a snake will swallow a mouse.
Another wave of agony dropped Margie face-first to the porch where she curled up like a fetus, shuddering with agonal convulsions. The thing that had taken over Polly was making her do horrendous things. It was living in her skin, degrading her, defiling her, destroying everything she was and, at the same time, destroying Margie herself because Polly was her work of art and this thing, this entity, this goddamned parasite was pissing all over it.
“Y-y-you get away from her!” Margie managed, though the pain made her eyes roll back white in her head. “Get out of her! Leave her! Get the fuck out of my daughter! Get out of her right now!”
Her teeth bared, meat hanging from her mouth, Polly made a low growling sound like a hound protecting a bone. Her eyes were glistening and there were two or three discolored purple sores on her face that had opened, streaming with pus. There were lines at her eyes and around her mouth as if she was prematurely aging.
Cramped and rendered speechless from the pain, Margie could only make groaning sounds as her mind went around and around. Killing her! It’s killing her! It’s sucking the life from her! It’s feeding on her youth! Turning her into something, something like—
“Like you,” Polly said, gulping down more dog meat. “I’m going to become just like you, and isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that what you always wanted? To create another one of you?”
“NO! NO! I NEVER WANTED THAT!” The words burst out of Margie despite her physical discomfort. “I WANTED YOU TO BE BETTER! MUCH BETTER THAN ME!”
She slid down the steps and got to her knees. Grimacing, she pulled herself up on shaky legs as the pains hit her again and again. She jerked from each one as if she was being punched in the gut repeatedly.
But she would not give in.
Her daughter needed her and they would fight together. Yes, yes, that’s how it would be: they would fight together. As one. But as she shambled over to Polly, Polly turned and her eyes went black like wet quartz, her mouth peeling open, bloody and red-toothed. “AAAAAUUUUGHHHH!” she shrieked and backhanded her mother, dropping her to one knee. Polly advanced again, slapping her, then kicking her in the side.
“MY MEAT!” she squealed, frothing at the mouth. “MY MEAT!”
On the ground, Margie tried to inch forward, but the attack had been devastating. Blood ran from her nose in a red creek and her side hitched with pain as she slowly tried to draw a breath.
“Oh…oh, please, Polly…please…”
But there was no pleasing the demon of wrath that she had become. Polly let go with a resounding, cacophonous scream which was the unearthly, hellish shriek of a baboon being flayed alive. It echoed through the neighborhood, piercing Margie’s eardrums with hypersonic intensity, making her cry out and roll on the ground.
It was a warning cry, a territorial cry, and Margie knew Polly would kill her. If she interfered one more time, her own daughter would tear out her throat and claw the eyes from her head.
She crawled away through the grass, turning in time to see Polly—a grimy, deranged animal—take hold of Bigsby, yanking him off the fence uprights with a sound like the gut sack being yanked from a freshly-killed deer. She lifted the carcass of the Pomeranian high above like some grisly offering to the sun god, then twisted it, squeezing it out like a dish rag. There was a crackling of bones and the popping of ligaments and what liquid blood was left in the pathetic little creature rained down into Polly’s open mouth, splattering her face and shoulders, as she greedily gulped and gulped.
14
Lara Stromm’s blue eyes rolled back in her head as her lover drove into her again and again. The blood boiled beneath her skin as she shuddered and writhed under him. She had been wanting this for so long and now here it was, making her tremble and buck and cry out in a rising, impassioned voice. Her lover continued to ride her, his cock swollen and cold as ice.
“Don’t…stop,” she heard her voice beg. “Please don’t ever stop…”
But her lover obviously had no intention of stopping. He had mounted her and now he owned her, pushing into her faster and faster until she shook with multiple orgasms, crying out, actually squealing with delight, the sound of her own voice making her that much more excited. She could feel the moist sinuous muscles of her lover bunching and releasing, bunching and releasing with each thrust. It was this as much as him being inside her that fed the flames of her hunger. As she came again, she dug her nails into her lover’s back, tearing ruts along his spine until she could feel the wetness of blood. Her lover…her lover…her lover was small on top of her. Yes, she ran her hands up and down his back and he was small…oh dear Christ, like a little boy, just like a little boy…and the realization that her dream was not a dream but a nightmare that she was living made her cry out, trying to throw him off her.
He kept pushing into her.
And despite herself, she came again and again, sickened by her own animal need and somehow, delighted by it. When he finally emptied himself in her, he made a croaking sound like a bullfrog that made her cry out in horror and repulsion. His seed filled her and spilled out. It was like a cold, snotty jelly.
Sobbing, she madly pawed it away from her thighs. Dear God, it burned. Just touching it, scalding her fingers.
Billy, the new Billy, laid there beside her in bed. “I can be everything you want anytime you want,” he told her.
Shaking with revulsion, she looked at him.
He was angelic and obscene, sweet and dirty, a carnal god with the beautiful face of a cherub and the lewd grin of a whore. His blue eyes glistened, his blond hair shimmered with such a shade of gold that it made her heart feel weak in her chest. His penis, still engorged, lay across his legs like a snake waiting to strike. Just the sight of it made her want it again.
This was not Billy; it could not be Billy. This was Pan. This was Faunus. This was a phallic deity, a fertility god, ravenous for her sex, insatiable, his voice like the reedy piping of a flute across a harvest field, making her loins ache with need.
Lying there with his seed drying thickly on her, it was like being in a pig wallow of black mud and stagnant water. She was simultaneously disgusted and excited. She could smell dirty straw, urine, dung and filthy animal cages, her sweat and his, the raw and not unpleasant odor of raw nature simmering in its own primeval juices.
He existed and he did not exist.
She was alone and she would never be alone again.
Up on one elbow, he watched her with the huge unblinking eyes of a toad, watery blue eyes that seemed to palpitate in their dun sockets. Where they had been warm with love before, now they were cold and alien. They wanted and they would get.
Lara was barely conscious of anything but the rapid beat of her heart and the sound of her lover’s blood coursing in his veins, the body heat that came off him in searing waves.