by Tim Curran
Somewhere, what seemed leagues away, a baby cried and cried.
“That’s the one I don’t like,” Billy said. “The one that keeps us apart. Make him stop. Make him be quiet. Make it so he never makes a sound again.”
And though Lara knew there was something criminal and abhorrent about what he wanted, she could not deny him.
Like some grim steel-eyed automaton, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, feeling more of his seed spilling out of her like water from a cup. She would do what he wanted which was the right thing. There was nothing else.
She stepped over the fly-specked corpse of her husband and went to do the bidding of Billy.
15
Bria was in a bad place and she knew it. There was no one, she figured, that would believe her. The thing to do was to get out. Just leave. Right now. She could walk right out of the neighborhood, leg it over to 12th Street, grab a bus and be over at Aiden’s place in half an hour if she started right now.
Whatever this is, she told herself, it’s bigger than anything you can handle. Just get out. Make an anonymous call to the cops if you want, once you’re far away, but get moving.
Finally, something that seemed to make sense. She went inside and quickly packed her lone bag. It didn’t take long. Ten minutes later, she was walking away from 2314 Birch Street and as weird as the old nabe was, she already felt relieved.
She expected someone to stop her, but there was no one around. Not until she reached the very end of the block. And there was Mr. Hammerberg. He was never a pleasant sight on a good day, his complexion pitted and scarred rather like crudely hammered brass, but today he looked especially execrable: pale and drawn, his protruding left eye looking as if it might pop from its socket at any time.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “It’s important.”
Bria was half-tempted to ignore him and walk right on by, but she found that she couldn’t. “I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“Listen,” he said. “There was once a girl who came back to her old neighborhood and discovered she no longer fit in. She was educated and experienced and what she saw she decided was some inexplicable mass delusion, some mass psychosis taking the neighborhood. But she was wrong. Very wrong. The nature of what had happened was far more complex than that, and it had nothing to do with mental illness and everything to do with meat that had fallen from the sky. Meat that, once eaten, owned you and controlled you. Her old neighbors fattened themselves on the meat. They were pigs, gluttons, hogs that once having eaten the meat could not stop eating it until there was no more meat left. And that was part of its power: its hold on you.
“With no more meat, her neighbors starved. They became terrible things whose minds were gone and who were tormented by their own fears and deep-set guilt. There was no escape. They did not realize they existed all their lives for that one terrible moment when they would taste the meat and be changed by it. That was their destiny. To eat the meat and become meat that can be eaten by others, thereby the cycle continues ad infinitum. Just as your destiny, my dear, is to become food for the worms and to provide nutrients that will enrich the soil and make the grass green.”
Bria just stood there, her mouth hanging open. She considered herself a pretty tolerant person, particularly when dealing with delusions of others, but this had gone too far.
Before she could stop herself, she said, “You’re out of your mind.”
He offered her a twisted half-grin. “I wish it was that simple, but it’s not. I think you know that. Down deep, you know very well. Like everything else, this has a beginning. We must celebrate that beginning.” He reached out for her with one bony hand. “Let us celebrate the beginning together so that we can understand the ending and what it means for us.”
“Get away from me,” she said.
“I just want to be the one. That’s all I ask.”
“Get the fuck away from me!”
As he blathered on mindlessly, she walked away and soon enough he was behind her, hidden by bushes and trees, and she could actually smell the real world beyond Birch Street.
And that’s when she saw Mr. DeYoung coming for her.
16
On the eve of destruction and damnation, Mr. Bagmore discovered he had a clear head for the first time in days. He could not honestly account for what had happened since Thursday when he first tasted the meat and promptly lost his mind. For the past thirty hours, he had not had any. The withdrawals (if they could be called anything so prosaic) had nearly broken him.
So, finally, the hunger pains having diminished to a tolerable level, he crawled out of the closet he’d been hiding in. He washed his face repeatedly as if this would cleanse away the madness of the meat. He was stinking and grimy from his ordeal, but the idea of a shower was just too much.
Outside, breathing in air that was not necessarily fresh but better than the fetor of the closet, he began to think, to use his mind. He was no longer being compelled. The spell was broken.
He thought of Bria.
He was not certain why.
She’s in trouble. She’s in terrible trouble.
He had no idea how he knew that or if it was just another delusion gripping him. By that point he’d suffered through many. But whatever it was, it was strong enough to make him walk over to the Candliss house. The sensation that Bria needed him did not diminish, it increased the closer he got.
Alice would not be happy to see him.
But then, she had never been happy to see him. He didn’t care about her. It was Bria that concerned him. She needed help (he thought) and she was going to get it. He owed her father and step-father that much.
He walked up onto the porch and tried the doorbell. He could hear it chiming inside. For the next three or four minutes, he pressed it on and off but there was no reply. No sound of any sort came from inside.
“A fool’s errand,” he told himself without really believing it.
There’s something here, he thought. Something that’s drawing me.
Swallowing, feeling vaguely threatened without knowing why, he opened the screen door. The inside door was open, so he invited himself in. In the past, he knew, the first thing you smelled upon entering the Candliss house was a combined pervasive odor of Pine-Sol, Pledge, and Mr. Clean Summer Citrus. Alice cleaned obsessively (which was how she did most things in her life). What should have been a strong yet fresh smell, equal parts pine forest, lemon orchard, and orange grove, became together a pungent antiseptic odor of industrial cleaners.
Today, however, Mr. Bagmore did not smell this. What he smelled instead was a violent stench of putrefaction, a reek of dead animals melting away into the earth. He was uneasy about looking around, afraid he would find the corpses of either Bria or her mother and perhaps both. Regardless, the smell was overpowering, high and flyblown.
This is something for the police, don’t you think? He did think that, but he also knew he could not just walk away from this. If he did, he’d never be able to look himself in the face again. He made it into the kitchen, noticing with some alarm that there were several dozen flies on the inside of the window. They were well-fed, plump as blackberries, buzzing to get out. There were dead ones on the sill and on the table (something Alice would never have allowed) and a veritable carpet of them on the floor. They crunched under his shoes like dry kernels of corn.
Leaning on the sink, he waved flies from the window and looked outside.
His heart dropped in his chest and despite the chill of the central air, he began to sweat profusely. The neighborhood…oh God, it was a hallucination, it had to be a hallucination. He couldn’t be seeing this.
He blinked.
He turned on the cold water spigot and splashed water in his face, but what he saw out there did not change: the neighborhood was falling apart. Whitewashed houses were gray with age, siding popped loose and dangling. Great holes were punched through roofs. Windows were streaked with grime, some brok
en and others falling out of rotting casements. Yards were overgrown, tree limbs down, saplings and weeds growing from the cracked, frost-heaved sidewalks. Even his own fence was falling and knotted with creepers.
The neighborhood looked as if it had been abandoned a dozen years or more.
Mr. Bagmore kept trying to blink it away, but the physical reality remained.
But he knew it hadn’t looked like that when he came over to Alice’s. There was no way he wouldn’t have noticed. Just no way.
His heart palpitating and skipping beats in his chest, he leaned there, trembling.
Yes, you would have seen it, he told himself, unless you were made not to.
The insane thing was that Alice’s kitchen suddenly looked no better. The cupboards were blackened with ancient filthy handprints, several doors hanging from broken hinges. Even the countertops were thick with patterns of dust.
He heard a sudden thumping sound from below that made him jump. Someone was in the basement. There was a dragging sound from down there as if someone was pulling a heavy piece of furniture across the floor.
You’re supposed to go down there.
That was the thing: he really was supposed to go down there; that was an important element of whatever this was. This entire situation was like a script, and he was an actor. The director had given him his cue, and it was time to make his entrance.
Time for your big scene.
From his first intimation that Bria needed help to the flies in the kitchen to the sounds from the cellar, it was all stage direction. This had been planned out and expertly staged. And if he needed motivation to give the performance of his life, it had been supplied, too. Curiosity.
Because that was the core of this tragedy.
It was the very thing that would drag him below. How many times had he seen such a thing in a scary movie? Characters that put themselves in harm’s way, practicing what could only be called horror movie logic? In other words, a complete lack of common sense in a dangerous situation. And how many times had he rolled his eyes, thinking, Hell, I’d never do that! It’s stupid! I’d never investigate the scratching behind the door at the top of the stairs or the scream in the attic…etc. etc.
But here he was, about to do just that.
It was foolish, but in hindsight, his entire life suddenly looked like a fool’s game, a terrible waste of time and effort. That’s why he was going down there: because he wanted to know, and why the fuck not? Maybe this was how he was supposed to feel. Maybe this was how he was being made to feel by whomever or whatever was behind this little show which was definitely off-Broadway and bit closer to the nether regions.
As he started down the stone steps to the basement door, he thought not of Bria but of Alice herself. A woman he never really thought of as being particularly warm or even human. He saw her in his mind not as the cold, calculating bitch she was but as his mind subjectively pictured her: a twisted, toothy hag with a red-smeared mouth and hands like the hooked talons of a barn owl.
Funny, but he realized at that moment he had always envisioned her as a sort of night hag or a human rodent. That in all the years he had known her and been in this very house, he had never once turned his back on her, as if maybe he was afraid she would spread her leathery wings and sink her sharp little teeth into the nape of his neck.
You didn’t think of her that way. Not really.
But he had. Maybe not in the front of his mind, but in the back where bad dreams, instinctive terrors, and childhood traumas were locked up in well-chained boxes.
Stop it, he told himself in that authoritative voice he often chided himself with when he had said or done something selfish, asinine or petty.
You came here to help Bria and from the smell of this place, she just might need it. Concentrate on that. Sound advice that paled in the murky light of what he felt building as he reached the bottom of the steps, a shaking hand held out to grip the tarnished doorknob.
“Bria?” he called out. “You down here? Alice?”
There was no reply, and he really didn’t expect any. He waited, his heart pumping rapidly in his chest, hand shaking so badly he could not seem to get control over it.
“I’m coming in,” he said, gripping the doorknob, “and you had better know that.”
He had never felt so strong or so weak in his life. He was ready to face what was down there and was utterly petrified of it at the same time.
He heard something behind the door. He could not be sure what.
“Alice?” he said.
This time there was a reply of sorts, something like a voice which was no voice at all but more like the squeal of a cat heard at midnight.
17
When Bria saw Mr. DeYoung coming at her, leaping out of the hedges like some sort of goblin, it wasn’t so much the sight of him that frightened her as much as what he said. Blocking her way with his arms extended in some weird parody of man-to-man coverage, he said, “You have to come with me, Bria. If you don’t, we’ll all starve. We’ll just starve…but we won’t die. That’s why Aunt Selma sent me for you…because we need you, we all really need you…”
As he moved forward, apparently to scoop her up in his arms, she froze with fear. With confusion. With a sense that reality had spun off its axis.
Mr. DeYoung was barefoot, the fly of his jeans wide open so that she could see he wore nothing underneath. His shirt was soiled and unbuttoned. In fact, there were no buttons on it as if he had torn them off in a fit of rage.
“Come with me now,” he implored her. “Please.” His hair was standing up in greasy spikes, his mouth crooked and drooling. Like Lara, there were open sores on his face.
He reached for her and Bria did what came instinctively to all women: she kicked him squarely in the nuts. It should have dropped him. It should have destroyed him and left him curled up on the ground, but it didn’t. Oh, he went down to one knee and scowled with pain, but the fight was hardly out of him.
She tried to make it past him, and he grabbed her ankle with surprising speed and strength. She lost her balance and banged her knee on the sidewalk. Before she could recover, he was all over her. He climbed onto her and forced her down. She squealed and fought, but it only seemed to excite him, and he wrapped himself around her that much tighter.
“GET OFF ME!” she cried. “GET THE FUCK OFFA ME!”
But he was not getting off (at least in the way she wanted). He was writhing atop her with repellent gyrations that made her already queasy, roiling stomach squirt bile up the back of her throat. His hips were pushing against her, and she could feel his erect penis prodding her between the ass cheeks. She was wearing tight bicycle shorts and it was only that thin layer of cotton that kept him from penetrating her.
She jerked and squirmed, scraping her knees and shins on the rough concrete. She threw elbows back, catching him in the neck and the side of the head as a frantic, hysterical voice shrieked in her head, He can’t be hard! I kicked him in the goddamn nuts! He can’t possibly have a hard-on seconds later! But he did. Did he ever.
As she fought, she noticed people standing in yards, watching.
“ISN’T ANYBODY GOING TO HELP ME?” she shouted.
But they weren’t. That was obvious.
His fingers slipped under the waistband of her shorts and began to pull them down violently. His grubby, grasping hand squeezed one exposed ass cheek.
She knew what would come next, and she wasn’t about to allow it.
She twisted at the hip, throwing him off balance momentarily, and brought her elbow back with everything she had, feeling his nose crunch beneath her blow.
He cried out and fell off her.
Bria wriggled away, pulling up her shorts as she got to her feet.
Mr. DeYoung was on his knees, hands pressed to his bleeding nose. “Bria…don’t you see?” he moaned. “You’re more important. You’re the one we must have.”
Bria delivered a kick to his h
ead that missed, connecting with his shoulder and putting him flat on his back. Then she was running, leaving her bag where it lay, instinct carrying her back in the direction of Alice’s house.
“Come back!” she heard Mr. DeYoung cry out to her.
She chanced a look behind her and he was coming after her, running full out.
Panic white-hot in her chest, she saw Anna Lee Posey out in her front yard chopping her prized flowers to bits with hedge shears.
She was grinning.
She pointed the shears at Bria and called out to Mr. DeYoung in a cracked, wizened voice, “Get her! Get her and fix her! Break the little bitch in the way she needs to be broken and then the way is ours!”
Her sanity shattering in her head, Bria ran for home and what waited there.
18
The basement door was open, of course, because it had to be open. Otherwise, this little Grand Guignol melodrama would have ground to a halt. Feeling he was making a terrible mistake, Mr. Bagmore turned the knob and pushed in the door.
His first instinct was to gag because the smell that came rolling out was one of death, of caskets burst open with grave fungi. His second was to run because he knew he was about to encounter something that would put white streaks in his hair and stop his heart dead in his chest. And that something he knew would be Alice—either her decomposing remains or something like Alice that fed on the same.
As he stepped into that hot box of putrefaction, flies brushed his face and his stomach wanted badly to eject from his mouth.
This is it, he thought as his hand fumbled for the light switch he knew was there. Now you’re going to see something that will forever unhinge you. It’s what you wanted, and now you’re going to get it.
In those brief moments before he found the switch, he was certain that something grotesque and unnatural stood before him breathing its foul corpse breath into his face.
Then he clicked the light on.