Bad Girl in the Box

by Tim Curran

  The same thing that was degenerating the neighborhood and the people who lived in it. Something to do with meat falling from the sky.

  Dead? Oh yes, but I still talk to him. Every night we have a chat. It soothes my soul, and it helps him cope in the afterlife.

  Mr. Hammerberg stood up, his face contorted as if he was in great pain. Like an automaton, he stepped mechanically into the living room.

  “Dad, I’m afraid you might be thinking bad things, and you know how that disturbs me,” the voice said.

  “Yes.”

  Now the voice laughed with a bitter, scraping cackle. “Sometimes I get the feeling you don’t want me here.”

  Mr. Hammerberg began to sob. “Please…please just go away.”

  That laughter again. It filled the house, echoing from room to room with a terrible, strident cacophony. Bria was certain she heard not just the laughter of Joey (or the thing that pretended to be him), but the laughter of men, women, even children, rising and falling and fading in the distance.

  A chill consumed her, made her flesh crawl and filled her head with a sound like wind blowing through empty spaces.

  “But I won’t go away,” the voice said. “All these years you’ve wanted me back. You prayed and wished I’d return, and now I have. Here I am. Your son, your Joey. Doesn’t it fill you with love, Dad? Doesn’t it make you want to fall down on your knees and thank the good Lord above? Doesn’t it fill your heart with love, you silly worthless old man?” The laughter again, louder and louder until it sounded like a scream, as if maybe part of the real Joey was in there, screaming in agony. “I didn’t want to go to war, Dad. You knew that! I wanted to go to college! Go to war! It’ll make a man of you! That’s what you said, and I wanted to please you so I did! And guess what, you fucking useless piece of shit? When our chopper went down at Khafki, burning, burning, all those bright-faced wannabe heroes burning alive and calling for their mommies as the cabin filled with stink of their own roasting meat, I thought about you! How you’d fucked me over! You and your fucking patriotic, bugle-blowing, boot-licking bullshit! I thought about you—”

  “You shut up! You shut the fuck up!” Mr. Hammerberg shrieked. “You damn well shut the fuck up!”

  “But I won’t shut up, Dad. Because I’m here to make you suffer. And you will suffer, old man. The same way I suffered at Khafki and the same way mother suffered until she took the pills and ended her miserable fucking life—”

  That ended with a sharp snapping sort of sound, and Bria knew Mr. Hammerberg had just slapped a ghost across the face.

  Then she heard a screeching, unearthly sound that was like no creature she could imagine. Mr. Hammerberg cried out. Things crashed and fell, smashed to bits. Then he came crawling from the living room on his hands and knees. He went right past the wide-eyed form of Bria and to the silverware drawer. He pulled out a large carving knife.

  “I’LL CUT YOU INTO FUCKING PIECES!” he screamed. “I’LL SEND YOU BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM!”

  Whatever horror the Joey-thing had become, he was now just a mockery of the real Joey once again. “But I don’t want to go back there, Dad. Not until the time is right. Not until we all go up into the sky together.”

  The voice was so calm and self-assured that it made Bria’s stomach roll over. Mr. Hammerberg looked at her, aware for the first time that she was awake.

  “Well, you’re one thing they won’t get,” he said. “I won’t let them have you. And without you, they have nothing.”

  He came at her with the knife, and she thought for one mad moment he was going to slit her throat. Instead, he cut her free of the clothesline.

  “Don’t do it, Dad. That will make me angry.”

  Too late; Bria was free.

  Mr. Hammerberg giggled like a lunatic. “Don’t like it much when people don’t obey, do you? Don’t like it when they tell you to piss off…”

  Her legs and arms still numb, Bria made it to the back door and had her hand on the doorknob when she smelled something like buckets of rotting fish guts. She turned once and saw something standing at the kitchen doorway, something that filled it. Something fetal and gray and spined liked a boar. It looked at her with one huge serous eye that wriggled in its socket.

  Then she was out the door, running for her life.

  27

  There were two courses of action for Bria at that moment. Even though her bag (with her phone) was on the sidewalk outside Mr. DeYoung’s house, there was still the landline in Alice’s house. That was a possibility. Another was Alice’s SUV. And yet another was to keep running until she was away from Birch Street. There was a little park called St. Aubin’s that separated Birch from Oak Street. Once there, maybe she’d be free of the madness of the nabe. But if she did that, then what? She had no wallet, no phone, no key to Aiden’s place.

  She ruled that out and went to Alice’s.

  She would call the police, say she was attacked and they’d have to come. Then she could get her bag, and they could get her away from Birch.

  She went in the front door, slamming it shut behind her and locking it. She waited there, scarce seconds, catching her breath and letting her mind calm down.

  Then she went into the living room and without further ado, she screamed. There was someone standing there. Someone she had not seen in a long time, and someone she was not even certain she was seeing now.

  “Hello, Bria,” a husky, ragged, yet certainly female voice said. “Remember me? Your old friend Polly Pukebag?”

  And it was Polly…or something like Polly. Except this Polly was dirty, bloodstained, and grinned with a mouth bursting with crooked yellow teeth. There was black stuff packed between them and her gums, which were on full display, were mottled like those of a dog. The most startling thing were her eyes, they were gray and watery like the guts of a clam, nearly identical to the eye of the thing at Mr. Hammerberg’s. They bulged from gaping, purple-black sockets.

  Bria tried to say something, but her voice was frozen in her throat. Nothing would come out.

  Polly cocked her head. “What’s that, Bria? What did you say? Please speak up, my love.”

  No, this was certainly not Polly.

  There had never been any love between them. Maybe not hate exactly, but more than a little derision.

  Polly had been many things, but she was not a monster. She was not a soulless thing in filthy white shorts and pink tee that looked as if it had been used to wipe out the body cavity of a gutted deer. And she was not a cadaverous nightmare with holes in her face and eyes like a soup of bile.

  “What’s the matter, Bria? Nothing to say? Cat got your fucking tongue?” Polly laughed bitterly at the very idea, as if she’d seen a cat get someone’s tongue once and it was not a sight for the faint of heart. As she laughed, a viscous dark goo ran from the open sores in her face. It was like blood gone rancid and black. “C’mon, Bree, speak. Let’s establish a fucking dialogue here, eh? It’s me…it’s your old pal Polly Pukebag. Now, if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?”

  The sound of her voice made Bria feel cold inside, unbearably cold as if a killing frost had settled in just beneath her skin. Finally, after swallowing five or six times, she said, “Polly.”

  “Atta girl. Sisterhood and all.”

  She stepped forward with an uneasy lurching gait like a yellowed, straw-dry scarecrow that had just pulled itself free of its bracket in a cornfield…or maybe something else that had never walked in a human skin before and was still learning the finer points. She was no longer grinning, not that it mattered. Great sections of her lips and mouth were rotted away, revealing her gums and discolored teeth.

  “I thought we should get together and talk things out like old chums,” she said. “Discuss what is and what can never be. For instance, you’re planning on using the phone to call the police, but you can’t. You’re thinking of running away from all this, but you won’t. And you’re trying hard to convince yourself tha
t I’m a hallucination or a delusion, that I’m not real, but I am. I won’t go away. You better believe that. When I tell you you’re in a place much worse than any you can imagine, you certainly are. And when I say this is the last night of your life, you can be sure that it is.”

  Bria stood there, feeling more hopeless than she ever had in her life. This was what it was like when you breathed your last breath and your heart pumped its last beat. At first, there had been a sort of sickening terror at the sight of Polly. Now there was just hopelessness, helplessness.

  This is it, a voice in Bria’s head told her. This is all there is. It ends here.

  And she believed it because this thing that wore Polly’s skin gave off more than a foulness of open graves, but a violent aura of hate.

  It would kill her.

  But first it would make her bleed and scream.

  This is what made her finally take a doddering step backward. Her survival instinct demanded it. If this monstrosity was going to kill her, then she would make it work for its bread.

  Polly was fast.

  Bria was about two seconds from breaking into a run for the door when Polly vaulted at her and with such speed it was as if gravity had been cancelled out.

  She seized Bria’s wrist with a bloated hand, the knuckles tearing open with suppurating sores. Her grip was powerful, her touch rubbery and unbelievably cold. So cold, it nearly burned.

  “Why so stupid, Bria?” Polly asked, her breath like raw meat. “You were always so smart in school. Why can’t you be smart now when it really counts?”

  Bria said nothing.

  She just hung in Polly’s grip like a limp doll. No fight. No fuss. No nothing.

  “Somehow, I expected more,” Polly said, and she sounded genuinely disappointed. “But since there’s no fight in you, maybe you’re going to do the right thing. All you have to do is taste the meat, and the meat will do the rest. Then you’ll know all there is to know. All I’m asking you to do is have one bite of the most amazing food you’ll ever know. You’ll thank me for it. You really will.”

  Bria still hadn’t spoken.

  Polly chuckled. “I understand your shock and confusion. But once you taste the meat, all those things taken from you will be returned. Things will make sense. The past and the present will be linked. And you will be married to that which wishes you most. You will, I think, remember the promises you made.”

  Polly started dragging her towards the kitchen and (Bria knew) the steps leading down to the basement, because that’s where the meat would be and that’s where Alice would be.

  Part of her wanted to just do it and quit fighting, but another part refused.

  I won’t eat it. I won’t taste it. I refuse to become what she is.

  Polly dragged her into the kitchen, and that’s when Bria came alive. She fought with such a vengeance that Polly was overwhelmed, at least momentarily. Bria punched her in the face and kicked her in the shins and stomped down on her instep.

  It was enough to free her from Polly’s grip.

  There were few weapons at hand so Bria seized the only thing she could find which were the empty glass vats of sugar and flour. She let the first fly and caught Polly right in the face with it, throwing her off balance, and long before she recovered, the flour jar was shattered over her head. What was under her skin was not like ordinary human anatomy, it was simply too soft. Polly’s head caved in and her face split right down the bridge of her nose, more of that black juice spilling free. The impact popped one of her eyes from its socket, and it rolled across the floor like a marble.

  “Tsk, tsk. That won’t save you,” Polly said, curds of black goo bubbling from her ruined skull. She grinned with a distorted, lopsided face. “You’ll eat the meat. You really won’t have a choice. It’s destined.”

  Bria ran from the kitchen, and Alice was standing before the front door. She looked even worse than the last time she saw her. Her face was more than sallow. Like Polly’s, it was riddled with huge open sores that looked like they’d eaten right through to the bone. Her skin had a shiny, blackened purple hue to it.

  “You’re going to make a mess of everything, aren’t you, you little bitch?” she said. “And here we were all counting on you.”

  Bria ran up the stairs and locked herself in her room as reality continued to erode around her. Her phone was in her bag and getting it was out of the question, but there was a landline. She thought for sure Alice would have taken it off the hook below, but she hadn’t.

  Her fingers trembling, Bria punched in 911 and it was answered almost immediately. She couldn’t believe it.

  “911. What is your emergency?”

  Bria, her face wet with tears, almost giggled with joy and madness. “I’ve been attacked. I’m trapped in a house, and I need help right away. I need the police.”

  “We can dispatch a unit to your location immediately,” the voice of Polly Pukebag said. “But wouldn’t it be much easier to just eat the meat?”

  Bria threw the phone. She paced back and forth, certain she was going insane. She was frantic, hysterical. She sobbed and balled her hands into fists. There was no hope, there was no escape.

  And outside the door, Alice and Polly whispered about the beauty of the meat, its taste and texture, its luscious odor, and how it could take you places you had never been before.

  Crouched in the corner, shaking and nearly mad, Bria began to get hungry.

  Chapter Eight

  Whether she was taken through the window or out the door, she could not later say. She only remembered being stolen from her bed on what she judged to be a raft of light. There was a sense of speed, of travel, of long distances journeyed. This was how she arrived at the Dark Castle, which was the lair of witches and crones and mind-eating night-things.

  Her memories of those days were convoluted at best. She remembered the needles that were inserted into her arms, her legs, her throat and back. The gooey jelly they covered her naked body in. The probings and proddings, the surgical knives slicing into her and the awful fluids they pumped down her throat. Swallow, swallow, you must swallow. The voices were ever-present, their owners like ghosts and ghouls shrouded in sheets and masks. She remembered their hands on her and their lights in her eyes. Sleep/wake/sleep. Start again. Cooperate, cooperate. You will be fed one way or the other. Tubes shoved down her throat and up her nose. Straps holding her down. Her screams shattering in her throat long before they reached her lips.

  Who are you?

  What is your name?

  Where are you from?

  When did it all start?

  Why did you let it happen?

  There were questions wrapped in questions, all rubber-banded together in a great ball, and only the witches understood the language they were written in. It was esoteric, secret, mystical.

  Eventually, Bad Girl was introduced to the other girls, all of whom were equally as bad as she. Most knew why they were abducted; a few pretended ignorance of their crimes. They sat around in slippers and gowns, eyeing each other warily with a competitive eye, always on the lookout for a girl who was thinner than they were and therefore, more successful in the act of liberating the beautiful thing that lived inside them.

  How wonderful it all was, how joyous to be trapped in the same animal cage with all the rest, knowing their bruises and contusions, cuts and scrapes and sores. Getting firsthand knowledge of their numerous infections and infirmities and abundant frailties. After a time, you could almost be certain who would pass out or go on a crying jag or try to slash their wrists with a dull plastic knife.

  The witches found it amusing.

  They lorded over all and watched everything.

  Bad Girl was certain they were minions of the Evil Queen because they were so much like her in every waysmiling synthetically and nearly human, but underneath black and tormented and malefic. The witches watched you shower. They stood outside the bathroom as you peed or shit. They watched
you eat and sleep and yawn and scratch yourself. You did as the witches asked or they would make things unpleasant for you. They made the rules, they gave and took away, they dispensed the elixirs of antidepressants.

  The witches made them discuss their anxieties and fears in little groups. Sometimes it worked, other times it was pure chaos. Bad Girl would sit there, empty-eyed and hollow, listening to the girls tell about bingeing and purging, staring hatefully into mirrors, and punishing themselves if they did not lose weight fast enough. None of it applied to her, of course, but she listened and listened because there was little else to do. She did not belong there with those other psychological and physical wrecks, but as yet she had not been able to convince the witches of this.

  She did not feel sorry for the other girls.

  She didn’t feel much of anything by that point, not with all that had happened to her. Now and again, the Evil Queen would stop by to personally assess her punishment. She wanted to see remorse and agony on Bad Girl’s face, a trace of sorrow and perhaps even some penitence, but Bad Girl would not give that black-hearted bitch the satisfaction. When she arrived, Bad Girl would just stare blankly and defiantly at her. She would not even speak to her despite the threats of the witches. She hated the sight of the Queen because it reminded her of Good Boy’s fall from grace and his father’s ultimate undoing.

  The other girls, however, never stopped talking. It was important to them to communicate every last twinge of disquiet within themselves, to illustrate fully the anguish that made up their very beings and colored their morose existences. They talked about hunger, about knives tearing open their stomachs, about standing in front of restaurants or hanging out in cafes just so they could watch others do what they themselves could not. They liked to smell food, to touch it, to carry packets of jelly they dared not eat or to get cream or grease on their hands, so they could experience the tactile sensation of food without the fullness nor the dread of fat which to them was a parasitic mass, anxious to invade their thighs and bellies and asses.