by Tim Curran
It was all gone.
And in her head, a thought: I’ve seen it before.
The next thing she knew, she heard a scream which she thought was her own. She was in the grass. No, she was being dragged through the grass. She blinked her eyes. Her body felt cold and numb despite the bright sunshine. She brushed a hand against her face and it came away wet with vomit and blood. Her nose was bleeding. What was going on? Where was she?
Then she saw that Mr. Hammerberg had her by the ankles, and he was dragging her through his yard to his front door. She tried to fight but her body was too numb. Her limbs would not obey. Her head thrashed from side to side but that was about it.
No, no, no, not this, not this…
Mr. Hammerberg smiled down at her. “I’m going to make things better for you, Bria. Better for all of us. It’s what has to happen. We’ve all been waiting for you for so long.”
Before she knew it, he had picked her up and brought her into the house which smelled like the den of a wolf—blood and feces, urine and musk and decaying animal matter.
And a voice said, “That’s good, Dad. Now bring her here. Lay her at my feet.”
21
Don’t give up now! Not when you’re so close! The meat is near! It’s waiting for you! Keep going!
Tony Geroy was collapsed in the upstairs hallway. He was dehydrated, emaciated from starvation. There was only the voice, the voice, the voice always urging him on. But it had to come to an end because he was not strong enough to go on, to keep fighting. He had no energy. For many hours now, he had been crawling along on his belly. He didn’t have anything left.
One more flight of stairs and you’ll be there! Climb! Climb! Climb!
He shook his head. No more, no more. He just couldn’t take anymore. He had been climbing and climbing all day. Up one stairway after another, down one corridor after another, into rooms and alcoves…it went on and on. By this point, he had very little memory of his life before the meat and when he tried to remember, tried to concentrate, there was pain. Not the pain of starvation; that was in his guts. This was in his head, as if the very act of remembering was painful.
Regardless of the excruciating waves of agony, one thing had come out of it: he knew there had only been two stories in this house. But he had climbed a dozen today. What sense did that make?
“None,” he whispered to himself. “Nothing makes sense and it never will again.”
The stairs are down there! Climb them and you’ll find her lair! You’ll find the meat!
He didn’t know where the strength came from, but he began moving down the corridor on his hands and knees. After an interminably long time, he saw the staircase. It was the same staircase he’d seen all day. Yes, same railing, same balusters. He pulled himself up one carpeted step to the next and to the next. He counted seventeen of them before he reached the top and found the landing.
Then he crept into the corridor.
It was the same goddamn corridor!
He fell on the floor, beating his fists for a moment, then just giving up and giving in.
Ah, well, you fucked up, didn’t you?
“I climbed…just like you said, I climbed,” he breathed.
But you didn’t think! You didn’t use your head!
Whatever that was supposed to mean. Yet, of course, he knew it meant something. Then a memory—a perfectly ridiculous memory—came to him. He couldn’t quite place it, but it was there. A video game. Some video game where you climbed flight after flight of stairs that went on into infinity. The only way to break this was by doing the opposite and going down.
Now you’re using the old bean!
Tony made himself move. Not forward down the corridor but back, back to the staircase. Going down was much easier than going up. He rode the stairs down on his bottom like a little kid, and he thought he might have even giggled once or twice. Then he was on the landing and right away he sensed something very, very different about this corridor.
The smell was strange for one thing.
It had a sour, musky smell to it that he couldn’t quite place, and he was certain it was the smell of Pammy. She was the one he had to find. The one who had the meat. For the first time in many days, he felt as if he had a chance. Using the wall, he pulled himself to his feet and stood upright, swaying, his head dizzy.
He moved down the corridor.
He looked in room after room.
There was nothing, nothing. His hopes began to sag and he considered just lying down on the soft carpeting, curling up and going to sleep. But there was another door at the end. The smell was especially strong, almost savage in there. It made him tremble. In the dimness, he saw a form waiting there by the bed.
It was her!
It was the woman!
Breathing in deeply but quietly, he felt his muscles bunching for action. Her back was to him. He’d creep up behind her and jump her, beat her down before she knew what was happening.
One step, two, three or four more and he’d make his move. He could smell the meat. Its scent was rapture. Soon it would be in his belly.
You’re right, Tony! I’m here! Right here!
The woman was there.
He jumped.
He took her down easily, and she seemed to come apart in his hands. She was massless, weightless, empty. In his hands, there was nothing but a dry, flaking skin. With rising horror, he remembered where he’d smelled that musky odor before. It was when he was a little kid and his father had taken him to the zoo, forcing him to go into the reptile house even though he was terrified of snakes—
Behind him, there was a smooth, swishing sound. The skin, scalp of hair intact, slid from his hands. He turned around and faced what had slithered out from under the bed. In that moment of revelation, he saw something that looked much like his wife, Pammy, if she were a snake, an especially large snake.
He saw her glittering green eyes.
Then she struck, her venomous fangs sinking into his throat.
22
All in all, it was a funny day in the nabe. There was most definitely something in the air, something building, something big beyond anything anyone could have imagined. Someone impartial and observant might have concluded that, given the escalation of events and the nearly time-lapse degeneration of the neighborhood, that things were quickly coming to a head, reaching some inevitable critical mass, and they would have been right.
But in the old nabe, there were few that were observant and not a one that was impartial. Whatever was happening, they were part of it as they’d always been part of events on Birch Street. It was just that this time around, things were of a darker variety and there could be no going back.
23
Emma Falconi, who’d been afraid of germs her entire life, was now terrified of her husband. As the call to the meat intensified, leaving her hiding in her bedroom, feeling as if her insides had been yanked out by especially sharp hooks, she listened to Donny calling to her out in the hallway.
“Why don’t you come out here, my love?” he asked in that soggy, sloppy voice that made it sound as if his mouth was full of Jell-O. “The kids are with me. In fact, they’re inside me. They’re part of me, and I’m part of them. And isn’t that the way it should be with a family? Shouldn’t we all be together as one?”
But Emma did not think so. The idea that her kids had been eaten by him should have triggered some maternal instinct of despair and rage, but it did neither. She was far beyond that point. Whatever the meat had done, it had completely reprogrammed her and submerged her in a psychosis of her own phobias.
“I won’t come out.”
“But I have meat,” Donny promised her in his liquid voice. “Oh, so much meat. Roasts and shanks and cutlets. Honey, you want it and I got it, and all you have to do is come out here and get it. No strings attached. That’s how I roll.”
The hunger pains setting in deep and her mind a vortex of thoughts and images m
ixed up with desires and fears and anxieties, what he said sounded reasonable. In fact, he sounded like a salesman and there was something disarming about that. I’ll paint any car for ninety-nine ninety-five. But Donny had always sounded like a salesman. It was his talent, his gift. He could sell anything to anyone at any time, he liked to say, and Emma knew there was truth to this. He had sold himself to her even though she initially had not liked him. She knew from experience that men who were like that on the outside were little boys on the inside, shivering and frightened. Yet…it had worked. He had worn her down and now here she was, in this place, at this time, about to believe him again.
You can’t. He’s a germ. He’s a thing. He’s a spreader of disease.
But the hunger did not understand these things. It wanted meat; meat had been promised. In the final analysis, what more was there? The meat simplified all matters. That was its promise and its curse.
Emma opened the door and Donny surged into the room in a flaccid wave of glittering, brilliant green protoplasm. He was a protozoan and, she decided, a very attractive one. He engulfed her instantly and although there was pain from his digestive juices, there was meat inside of him and she fed upon it even as she was fed upon. A balance was struck as she was dissolved away into a skeleton. It was something she could live with and die with.
She was given meat and, in the end, she became meat. And there was beauty to that, wasn’t there?
24
Donny Falconi lied to his wife, because their youngest, Hannah, had slipped out the bathroom window and gotten away. She went to the first place she knew where she could get help—Anna Lee Posey’s. Hannah liked the old lady because she was like everyone’s gramma and whenever you saw her, she gave you candy.
But today she did not give Hannah candy.
She put her in a cage.
25
But as bad as all that was, the real action was taking place at the house of Mr. DeYoung. Ever since coming back from his abortive effort to get Bria, Ronald had been hiding in his bedroom at the back of the house. He was bleeding good from the stab wound in his side. It still amazed him that Anna Lee Posey could move so quickly for an old woman. He had bandaged his ribs, but he did not know if it would be enough.
What he feared most was not bleeding to death, but the wrath of Aunt Selma.
Suddenly, he heard her screeching voice, “Ronnie…get in here! Get in here now! I want to see you!”
A chill of terror went down his spine.
No, he refused. He would not go into the kitchen where she was waiting. He absolutely refused to. That’s all there was to it. Then he found himself on his feet and they were taking him in there. She had control over him. She was his master and his body did what she demanded.
But I don’t want to go in there! She’ll do…she’ll do terrible things to me! I can’t go in there! Please please oh please don’t make me go in there!
He plodded on down the hallway, through the living room, only stopping when he was at the archway that led into the kitchen.
She was waiting for him in there.
Aunt Selma was grinning the way wolves did in horror movies—all sharp, sparkling teeth. Her eyes were aglow with an arcane, diabolical intelligence, her face yellow and sagging like a rubber mask that was coming loose. He did not want to know what was beneath it.
“I sent you to do something,” she said, and her voice was so dry it was as if her throat was full of sand, “and you failed. When you fail, I get angry. When I get angry, terrible things will happen. Do you know that, Ronnie?”
He cringed. Even the hunger in his gut and the cutting pain in his side were nothing compared to facing her and taking his punishment, which he knew would be bad, bad, bad.
“Come to me,” she said.
And he obeyed. At least, his body did. His mind screamed in his head. It ran and hid. It found a rock and crawled beneath it. But his body walked into the kitchen and stood there, waiting for it, waiting for the pain and humiliation that would come next. There was no way to avoid it.
Aunt Selma waited for him. She made a low hissing in her throat as if the air was bleeding from her. Her eyes gleamed silver and her teeth were long and sharp, so terribly long and sharp. A single droplet of spit hung from one of her canines, then fell. His eyes followed its progress as it spattered against her old dress.
“Good boys get treats, Ronnie,” she told him. “And bad boys get punished. You remember me saying that, don’t you? I told you that time and time again when you were a little boy, and I am telling it to you now as a big, strong grown-up man. You must believe it. You must always believe it.”
He did believe it, or, at least, part of him did.
Big, strong grown-up man.
That’s the part he had trouble swallowing, because if he really was a big, strong grown-up man then he would not be here in this situation. He would not be listening to this demented old bitch. And he surely would not allow her to treat him like a dog, to punish him, reward him, punish him, reward him. He would not shake a paw and roll over—Good dog, good boy, good little fellah. And he would not pee in the house and scratch the furniture and dry hump pant legs—Bad dog, bad little doggie—and get whacked in the nose by a rolled-up newspaper.
He would not be standing here, piss dripping down his leg as he waited for the crazy, frustrated whore-hag to heat a fork over the gas burner until it got red hot so she could brand his dick and his balls. No, sir, he would not be doing any of that. And he sure as hell would not be rooted like a stump, watching with rising perverse excitement as the old cow unzipped her dress and let it fall to the floor as she had when he was thirteen, all those folds of flab and bulging shelves of shivering white meat rolling free in mountainous sick abandon. He would not be watching her crawling across the floor, the pendulous feed sacks of her tits swinging from side to side, her face sloughing free like cobra skin, her eyes shining with evil triumph, her mouth opening and opening like the puckered blowhole of a whale.
This would not be happening at all.
Her pudgy, scurfy fingers would not be pulling his pants down, and her slobbering mouth would not be sucking his cock deep into the chimney of her throat, and he would not be getting hard, so damn hard that it made his head swim with dizziness. And he would not be watching her blubbery lips riding wetly up and down on his shaft, bringing him closer and closer to climax.
And, most definitely, he would not have screamed as her sharp teeth clamped down on his member and sheared it off at the root.
26
When Bria finally came out of it, she was groggy and disoriented. Her eyes were open for some time before she became aware of the fact that she was no longer dreaming. With that realization came panic, because she knew where she was and what was at stake. She remembered Mr. Hammerberg carrying her into the house.
She tried to move, but she was held in place.
Her hands were tied behind her back and her ankles were similarly bound with clothesline. She had been hog-tied and she knew damn well there was no way she was going to worm her way free.
Mr. Hammerberg was sitting at the kitchen table, staring off into space over steepled fingers. He hadn’t noticed she was awake yet.
Calm down, she told herself. If you want to survive this, then you have to calm down and think.
She took a quick inventory of herself.
Her legs were bruised and banged-up, her arms sore from being twisted behind her. Every time she moved even a few inches, she could feel her strained abdominal muscles. The vomiting, particularly the dry heaves, had left her in a very tender state.
At that particular moment, she felt no nausea. It seemed to come without any set pattern.
And always at the worst possible time, she thought.
It was something to consider. That very morning when she had finally convinced herself to get out of the goddamn neighborhood, it had hit her. Then later when she tried to escape from Mr. DeYoung. Interesting.
If it hadn’t been for this mystery illness, she would have kept running until she was free of Birch Street.
What did that mean?
What did it really mean?
That she was being controlled, caged in, manipulated by some unseen puppet master like everyone else in the neighborhood?
Without giving herself away, she cast an eye towards Mr. Hammerberg. He was pale like the others, sores on his face. His eyes were gray and wet. Unlike Lara or Alice, he did not look secretly pleased at what was going on, but absolutely miserable.
That was something.
Bria thought she might be able to do something with that. If she was smart. And very lucky.
These were the things going through her head when something seemed to shift in the house. The atmosphere went from being neutral to positively toxic. The skin along her spine crawled as if a jar of ants had been emptied down her back. A preternatural silence settled in and she could not even hear the clock on the wall ticking.
Then a voice from the living room. “Dad,” it said. “Come in here. Come in here now.”
It was horrible and flat, scratchy like an old record. There had only ever been one person in Mr. Hammerberg’s life that would have addressed him that way, and that person was long dead.
Did I ever tell you how fond Joey was of you?
Oh Christ…oh no. Bria could feel her sanity shifting like the aura of the house itself. It was coming apart, cracking open.
Yes, he liked you very much. I was talking to him the other night, and I mentioned you and he said what a nice girl you were.
This could not be happening. It was what characters in books and movies always said to themselves when faced with the inexplicable. But now, in this womb of madness, she said it to herself as she felt her grip on reality slipping away. She did not know what was in the other room, but it wasn’t Joey. She could not make herself believe in ghosts and walking corpses. This was something else. Something playing a sick, sadistic game on Mr. Hammerberg, tormenting him with his own guilt which must have been limitless.