by Tim Curran
The illumination came from a single bulb on the ceiling that seemed to create more shadows than light. They gathered in the corners and crawled over the walls like thin, starving rats.
He stepped forward, feeling the door—and escape—getting further away all the time…but he had to know, he had to see, he had to satisfy his morbid curiosity. Nothing else seemed to matter. He tried to convince himself that he was doing this strictly for Bria, but he knew it was beyond that now. This was personal. This was to not only find out what was down here and what had drawn him in, but to learn about the meat and what stood behind it.
The farther he went, the stronger was the smell and the thicker the flies. They were in his hair and on his face, tickling his ears and bare forearms as if they were sizing him up for future culinary investigation.
At the very edge of the light, he saw what looked like an ordinary washtub. But what was in it was hardly ordinary. Meat. A good quantity of it, but rotten and fly-specked, foaming with maggots.
He stepped back, disgusted, horrified…yet tantalized. The addiction for the meat created an obscene desire in him to eat it, to feel coffin worms looping fatly against his tongue.
That’s when something came creeping out of the darkness like a spider from a funnel web.
Mr. Bagmore uttered a cry and took a stumbling step back. It was a naked thing with the puckered white flesh of a waterlogged corpse. Clawing hands scrabbled over the floor and a face draped with oily, matted locks of hair like seaweed appraised him coldly, its teeth chattering like pegs.
“The meat,” it said in the time-ravaged voice of a beldame. “You’ve come for the meat!”
Oh, dear Christ.
He recognized the voice. Maybe it was dried out and fragmented, but he knew it, all right. This thing was Alice. The hair fell away from her face and he saw it was pocked with gaping, ulcerous sores. He thought he saw plump larva wriggling in them.
Alice, deranged and turned into a ghoul, ignored him and went right to the wash tub. Cackling and gnashing her teeth, she began to shove handfuls of the greening meat into her slobbering mouth, grunting happily. Gray slime ran down her chin and maggots fell from her lips like wiggling grains of rice.
Mr. Bagmore screamed, his mind sucking into a black chasm in his skull. Behind him, he heard laughter that was cold and metallic like the blades of knives scraped together. He swung around, his eyes darting from his head.
A little girl was standing there.
He shook his head from side to side. “No…no, no…”
He had seen her before, but not for many years. It was Bria at seven or eight years old, all dolled up in a floral print Easter dress with white tights and sparkling ballet shoes. Her hair was a mass of chestnut ringlets.
“Hello, Mr. Bagmore,” she said.
He could not respond because it felt like there was a thick clot of expanding sludge in his throat.
Bria stepped forward lightly, her hands held out to him. There were holes in them and he could see the fine yellow bones within.
“The meat,” Alice said behind him, ravenous with delight. “The meat…”
Full in the light, he saw Bria’s hair was alive with green worms, her pretty dress torn and stained with blood, her face gray and sunken. Her eyes were moist purple welts and her lips had shriveled away from sharp, doglike teeth. Saliva dribbled from her mouth.
“Guess what, Mr. Bagmore? I’ve got a secret,” she said, and her voice seemed to drop an octave or two until it was grinding and dry. Her breath blew hot and acrid in his face like sulfur and hot iron. “You wanna know what it is? Do you? Do you? Well, look!”
And, by God, he didn’t, but he had no real choice. There were options. Of course, there were options, but what came next happened so fast that there was no time to exercise them.
The Bria thing let out a scream that rose in pitch until it was not a scream at all but the shrilling squawk of some nightmare bird. It punched into him with such force and violence that he barely stayed on his feet. Her face split open with a sound like faux leather fabric cracking and tearing. She seemed to fragment in a whirling storm of debris, strips and ribbons of her flapping about like a mummy in a cyclone or a little girl who’d just gone through a paper shredder.
Before he could even attempt to wrap his brain around that, he saw a black form emerge from the chaos in a storm of leathery wings and night-black glossy feathers. It came with the hot slaughterhouse stench of spilled viscera and human waste, a cycling storm of droning flies and reverberating shrieks. An immense beak pecked out at him. It was covered in a thin layer of red, scalded-looking flesh, its tip was yellow bone that was curved and deadly as a billhook.
Mr. Bagmore screamed.
Under the circumstances, there was little else he could do as huge talons tore into him and that beak pecked and impaled him, yanking out pink entrails and fatty globs of organ as blood burst from him in gouts and geysers and he shuddered there on the floor in an oily pool of his own anatomical waste. The last thing he saw was that misshapen noxious raptor as it hovered over him, his meat hanging from its beak, its scabrous yellow-gray head and lidless eyes watching him with rapt fascination. Then it hissed at him and pecked his eyes out, yanking them free. They swung from its beak by the optic nerves, bumping together like balls in a Newton’s Cradle.
19
The meat, oh praise its name, was an old friend that called to him in a warm, comfortable voice and promised him easy living and carefree days and not a worry in this world or the next. Jeff Baker not only smelled it and tasted it on his tongue and shuddered as his belly cried out for it, he welcomed it into his life, knowing it had remade him (as it could very well remake the world), and he took a certain dark, mindless joy from the fact.
The meat was upstairs.
First, the woman had hidden it beneath the bathroom sink and now she had it upstairs where she thought he would never find it or her. That’s how stupid she was.
Last night, they had fought for it.
She had hit him on the head and sprained his wrist, and he had slashed her mouth open. But that had only been the beginning. They clashed again and again. She had battered him with her fry pan, and he had cut and stabbed her.
Now he was hurting, but the pain was secondary compared with the pain of hunger that owned him and tortured him.
The meat.
The meat.
Dear God, the meat.
He thought of its rich, bloody flavor, its saltiness and spice. The way it made him feel inside and out. Without it, he was cold and alone; with it, warm and happy. He wanted to hold it in his hands and press it to his lips. He wanted to tear it apart with his teeth and swallow it and fill himself with it. The woman had been eating the meat and eating it well. She left tiny scraps about the house to tantalize him and drive him mad. She also left steaming heaps of her scat in obscure locations—under the kitchen table, at the foot of the stairs, beneath the baby grand piano, in the corner behind the TV—and he always found them. He could smell the meat in it. Sometimes, he pawed through it to find any undigested bits. Mostly, all he found were white, spaghetti-like roundworms crawling in it.
She was upstairs now, probably bleeding out, and that was a good thing. It would be that much easier to take her meat if she could not fight back. She thought he would not be able to track her, but she was wrong.
The meat was his friend.
It told him where it was.
Up here, up here, it whispered in his mind. You know you want me, and this is where I am! Hurry! She’s weak from the loss of blood! She’s not awake! Come and get me and fill yourself with me! Then you’ll be strong! Then you can crush her because you must crush her!
He wanted to do that very much.
He no longer remembered that Jenna was his wife. He only knew she had made him suffer. When he got her meat, he would make her pay for that. She was an insect.
This was the only image of her he retained
—that she was a buzzing, overfed fat little fly. Vermin, nothing but vermin: engorged, greedy, and gluttonous.
And I’ll get you.
I’ll crush you.
I’ll squeeze the guts out of you.
As he crept up the stairs following her blood spoor, he thought of bug hunting. He seemed to recall a movie where people were hunting a white-headed fly. But when they found it, they smashed it with a brick. He wasn’t sure why. But now that he thought of it, he knew that was exactly what he would do with the woman.
When she begged for mercy, he’d crush her head with a brick. It made sense. It really made sense. That’s what he liked about the meat: it put everything into perspective. It brought order and purpose.
As he climbed up the steps on all fours like a hunting animal (tiger, he was really digging the idea of himself as a tiger), memories assailed him, memories of his old life where he had a catty wife named Jenna who had a body that made him feel alive, really alive, in bed and a mouth that spewed acid that ate away a little more of him every day. Back then, all he cared about was his golf game and his candy apple red MX-5 Miata in the garage and his wife not finding out he was screwing his nineteen-year-old office assistant. As long as Jenna got her vegan ice cream and her spa treatments, she was happy. She ate artisan donuts in the morning and vegan ice cream in the evening. She maxed out credit cards and gave Jeff unbelievable blowjobs when he started ranting on about it. On the weekends, they went to restaurants they couldn’t afford and made vodka slushies in the Nutribullet, took vacations every winter to Cozumel and generally avoided facing the fact that they were living far above their means. It was easier that way.
Jeff remembered it all, and then it was gone.
Thank God.
Now there was only the simplicity of the meat, and what more did you really need?
20
As Bria dashed away from Mr. DeYoung and the eyes of that crazy senile bitch, Anna Lee Posey, her stomach went crazy in her belly. It was as if the nausea she’d known that morning came back, only worse, punching into her and making her feel like her guts had not only gone to sauce, but a particularly green and frothing sauce. The world spun and her knees went to liquid rubber, and then she spilled into the grass.
Not now, not now, oh Christ, not now…
But it was now. There was no avoiding it. The world was spinning rapidly on its axis and her guts were wriggling up the back of her throat like a caterpillar. What happened next was a given: on all fours, she threw up. The vomit came out of her in a rushing foam of bile. It was like the old days, the days tucked into the box that she must forget.
No, it’s not like that at all!
I eat! I eat all the time!
But as she ran trembling hands over her willow-thin arms, she could not remember when.
After that, there were dry heaves that doubled her over. She tried to pull herself up when they’d passed, but it was no good.
Behind her, she could hear Mr. DeYoung coming.
You’re more important. You’re the one we must have.
Crazy, crazy. He was crazy. They were all crazy. Everyone in the neighborhood was fucking crazy.
Mr. DeYoung was closer now.
And a voice in her head told her, He’s got you this time. He won’t bother talking to you. He’ll beat you down and probably rape you. Because they’re both forms of domination the strong subjugate the weak with. He’ll rape you and Anna Lee will probably watch. She might just clap when you start screaming and offer a little geriatric jump for joy when he shoots his seed all over you.
The world stopped moving and her head cleared slightly. The world of Birch Street still seemed topsy-turvy, but then it had been that way for some time now and she really wasn’t that surprised.
She got up onto her knees, clutching her belly that was still roiling with nausea.
And here was Mr. DeYoung.
He stumbled along and stopped not five feet away, breathing hard. Barefoot, shirt open, his eyes like shiny vinyl, he gritted his teeth and uttered the most perfectly horrible growling noise. The sores on his face seemed to have opened wider and pinkish fluid was running from them. But worse, oh yes, far worse than that was that his dick was poking out of his open fly and it was hard as a leather punch, actually throbbing.
And that voice in Bria’s head said, Well, it’s not the biggest you’ve seen, but it’s probably the deadliest trouser snake you’ll ever encounter because it’s the one that will take away your dignity and probably your sanity to boot. Question being: are you going to allow it?
No, she was not.
She got up finally, and Mr. DeYoung allowed it. Maybe it was a game with him. Down in the grass as she was, it would have been easier for him to dive on her and force his business on her…but he didn’t. Maybe there was not enough sport in something like that.
She heard Anna Lee Posey cry out something again. This was a make it or break it moment. She could either fight him and probably lose…or, she could turn his own madness against him and manipulate him with.
But how?
“You have…” he panted, “…you have to come with me. I don’t wanna hurt you, but I will. I’ll fucking hurt you bad if you don’t come with me.”
At that moment, Anna Lee cried out again. She was standing by her fence with her garden shears in her hand. Whatever had happened to her brain, she was now an old animal that wanted to see a good young rape. Each time she called out, Mr. DeYoung flinched.
Obviously, he didn’t like the noise.
Play it good now. Make it believable.
It had never been so important. Sighing, Bria let her body go limp. “Okay…okay…okay. I’ve had enough. I’ll go with you, but you shut that crazy old woman up first.”
Mr. DeYoung looked at her suspiciously as his sores ran and some sort of drainage ran freely from one eye. “You’ll come with?”
“Yes. I can’t run anymore.”
“Good, good, good, Bria,” he said, offering her a hideous grin. It was the grin of a corpse, all gums and teeth. “Aunt Selma will be very happy. She won’t punish me. She’ll give me treats.”
Jesus Christ, what the hell was this about?
Bria licked her lips, tasting vomit. She stepped towards him and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. Anna Lee, as expected, screamed out something else. Bria didn’t hear all of it, but she was pretty sure that the old lady was encouraging Mr. DeYoung to rape his fine young catch in the ass.
“Shut her up! Will you please shut up that old hag?”
Mr. DeYoung was apparently used to following orders from his auntie, so the tone in Bria’s voice got him going. As she watched, he forgot about his victim (why not? she was now his friend) and stormed over to Anna Lee. They exchanged words and then, without hesitation, Anna Lee jabbed him in the ribs with her garden shears. She sank them right into him, and Mr. DeYoung yelped like a kicked dog. He doubled over, his shirt going dark with blood. When Anna Lee tried to stab him again, he punched her square in the face and down she went.
Bria turned and ran.
She made it maybe ten feet before the nausea washed through her in a warm, sickening wave. A gray mist seemed to pass before her eyes. Her knees buckled and she pitched into the grass again.
If he doesn’t bleed to death, he’ll come for you, she thought as she tried to clear her head.
She smelled the grass but could not see it. Everything was gone. Everything. She could no longer see this world. She could feel the grass under her elbows and hands, but it was not there. Everything was gray and indistinct. It was as if she was physically in this world, but her mind was seeing another place out of space and time. Then…then the world swam into view again, only it was even more distorted and lopsided than the world of Birch Street as she had known it that day. The grass was the color of cigar ash and like it, it went to powder under her hands. The trees were gnarled, grotesque things like withered hands reaching from
graves. The houses were gray and rotting, shivering like pudding.
This is a vision, a voice told her. You’re seeing the end result of whatever this is. The synthetic muppie kingdom of Birch Street with its SUVs and McMansions and perfect lawns and swimming pools—this is what it will become. Disease is setting in and this is what it will look like after its dead.
And Bria knew without a doubt that the voice was right. Whatever had taken the neighborhood and turned all the pretty plastic people into monsters, this was the end game.
The decayed world of Birch Street smelled like fireplace soot and wet dog pelts. She tried to blink it away because she had to be delusional or hallucinating. That’s when the smell changed. Now she smelled an acrid, eye-watering stench that was unbearably foul—burning sulfur and pungent yellow urine with a fusty, nasty stink of mildewed animal hides just beneath. It grew stronger and stronger and she felt the dry heaves roll through her again, her abdominal muscles aching from it.
Now, in that awful silence, there came a sound of the dead grass crunching beneath footsteps. The footsteps were coming right at her but she could not see what made them. The world was smoky and leaden, a gray watercolor that was running, dripping around her.
Don’t look, Bria. Whatever you do, don’t look.
But she did look because she found it quite impossible to close her eyes: they were fixed wide. She saw a shape, a bloated form step into view, not walking exactly but hopping. There was no exact frame of reference for what she saw; it was nothing and many things, something cobbled together from the waste buckets of a dissection room: bones and tissue, feathers and snakeskin, animal pelts and frog’s eggs and fish scales, organs and limbs. It was a bulky gas-filled bladder made of the shiny pink nearly-transparent skin of a fetus. Embryonic, unformed, wearing a black cloak-like plumage of oily black feathers. Its head was red and scabby, beaked and set with a single eye in a purple-ringed socket that looked gray and pulpous like a raw oyster.
She saw this within the span of two or three seconds, then it was gone.