by Tim Curran
That’s the question, isn’t it?
Yes, yes.
Something has been building for days; now it reaches fruition.
I know it. I feel it.
So why don’t you quit wasting time and acclimate yourself. Find out a few things. Because what’s going on right now, as crazy as it seems, is just another part of the madness of the nabe.
She went to the door, deciding to abandon her idea of descending the downspout. She did not need a twisted ankle right now. It was quiet out there, but that did not mean Alice or Polly Pukebag could not be lurking down there. What she needed was a weapon and there was only one that she could think of: her slow pitch bat. It was still in her closet. It was a solid maple Easton. A little top heavy, which was the reason she had never liked it much when she played softball, but that extra weight was just the thing now.
Can you really crack Alice in the face with it?
No, not the real Alice…but what she was now, yes. If it came down to it, most definitely yes.
It was still quiet out there.
Were they playing possum?
Fuck it if they are. I’ve had enough.
She unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway. It was quiet, very quiet. Okay. She walked to the stairway and descended with a light, athletic step. She was tense, very tense, yet she felt very alive, very determined. Whatever had kept her hiding in her room couldn’t hold her any longer. Something in her wanted to fight now. It did not want to be a bystander shuffled from one horror to the next; it wanted to be an active participant.
At the front door, she paused.
The house was still quiet. If Alice or Polly Pukebag were anywhere, it was probably in the basement. Bria did not want to know what they were doing down there in the darkness.
2
Alice was sleeping.
She laid on the cold stone floor amongst the final scraps of meat that fell from the sky. The nightmares that rolled ceaselessly through her brain like fever dreams were certainly no worse than her reality.
As she slept, comatose, smiling, bleary eyes wide open, the entity she knew as Little Bria—the GOOD Bria as opposed to the BAD Bria with her college ways and smart mouth and sassy attitude—squatted over her, studying her with eyes just as pink as those of an albino lab rat. Making a hissing sound, Little Bria began to bite her with tiny needlelike teeth, leaving bleeding wounds in her belly, breasts, and pale thighs.
3
Bria went outside into what seemed like a picture-perfect summer day on Birch Street. The only thing it lacked was people, the sounds of activity, and the smell of summer—flowers and trees budding and green grass. Instead, there was a smell of rot that was gamey and high. Part of that came from the garbage bins, many of which were overturned in the streets now, their contents strewn in every direction, but most of it came from the neighborhood itself that was in an advanced state of decay. The houses on Birch Street were uniformly gray and sagging, weather-beaten and falling apart. They looked like hillbilly shacks now, going to seed. She saw roofs that had caved-in or were peeled free of shingles. Windows broken or missing entirely. Porches collapsed. And the yards…the grass was yellow and dead, the flowers wilted gray. Even the trees were denuded and looked like they were ready to fall.
It was like the vision she had yesterday when Mr. DeYoung had fought with Anna Lee Posey.
But this can’t be, she thought. It just can’t be.
The nabe was a graveyard. And as if to emphasize this, there were buzzards pecking at garbage in the streets, searching for tasty bits of rotting meat. Others perched on rooftops and in dead trees, on fence posts and the hoods of rusting cars and SUVs that sat on flattened tires, looking as if they hadn’t been driven in many long years. And high above in the hazy sky, more buzzards circled the corpse of the neighborhood.
It would take years and years for something like this to happen, Bria thought, standing there, overwhelmed by it all. And it’s happened in just a few days.
The bat securely in hand, she moved up the sidewalk not at a leisurely pace but slowly, casting an eye in all directions, ready for trouble and willing to fight if she had to.
No one stopped her.
The houses of Birch Street were rotting coffins and if anything was alive in them, she saw no evidence of it.
She found her bag right where she had left it. It was untouched by human hands, but the degenerative nature of the nabe had been at it—the bag was canvas and it had blackened with mold. Her clothes inside were likewise rotten. Her books were worm-holed, her body cream solidified, her running shoes falling apart. Her smartphone was useless, the case faded and cracked open by advanced age.
She abandoned it, refusing to think about what any of it meant.
She made it to the end of the block and no one showed or interfered. The neighborhood remained perfectly quiet, perfectly dead, and perfectly foul to the nose. And it was here she stopped, an anxiety that was nearly nameless rising inside her like a gas bubble. 7th Avenue was right in front of her. All she had to do was cross it and Birch Street would be a memory.
But she didn’t cross it.
Because there was nothing on the other side.
4
Roger Moody was certain it was all a dream, and more precisely, a nightmare. The house was rotting around them, and there was no escape. The ceiling was dripping blood, the walls oozing with mephitic drainage. Even the floors were going as soft as the flesh of a dead man. He had used the axe to chop a way out of the flesh tomb, to free them from the living, mutant organism of the house—and that’s when the house screamed and started to bleed.
You hit an artery, a giggling and perfectly demented voice taunted him, and then the house bled to death. Get it? Get it? It bled to death!
And now it’s rotting, and you’re going to rot with it!
He wanted to laugh and maybe he would have until he was as stark mad as the house itself if it wasn’t for the perpetual rapacious hunger that made him ache all over, driving white-hot splinters into his belly.
The hunger would not tolerate such things.
Its business was serious, deadly serious.
Another clod of moist carrion dropped from the ceiling and landed in his lap. He might have heard it if it wasn’t for Gail’s near-constant screaming. She had lost her mind now and was little more than a trembling, wide-eyed wreck. Roger knew his own mind had gone the moment he tasted the meat. He wondered now, as he listened to his wife’s screaming, if he’d ever been sane. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been a delusional, drooling maniac his entire life. And maybe it was the meat that finally made him sane so that he could look not only into others but into his self and see reality for what it really was.
God, that fucking screaming!
Would she ever SHUT…UP?
He glanced over at Gail, wiping a sheen of blood from his face. Her screaming had risen to a new and fevered level. He really couldn’t take it anymore…and then he saw what she was screaming about.
Jesus, what’s that?
From out of the walls, white tube-like forms projected. He blinked his eyes to see if they would go away, because sometimes the bad things did. But not this time. They were squirming and vermiform, glistening white worms longer than his forearm and thicker than his thumb. They had brilliant red mouths filled with chewing, whirring teeth. Dozens of them ate through the flesh walls of the house and dozens more writhed from the meat of the ceiling, corkscrewing and dripping clear ribbons of slime.
Grave worms, Roger thought, a tittering laughter echoing in his head. Of course. It stands to reason. They’ve come to devour the carcass of the house and possibly the world.
Yes, one of nature’s oldest and staunchest of allies that kept the blue world of Earth from becoming a great rotting heap of carrion.
They would strip the house to its bones because that’s what grave worms did. And if anything else happened to be around, why they’d eat that, too.<
br />
Meaning us.
Roger clamped a hand over Gail’s mouth because he needed some quiet, he needed to think. She fought and squirmed much like the worms themselves, but he would not let her go. Right away, the idea of silence was a bad idea because there was no silence…only the chewing sounds of the worms as they ate through the walls, nibbling and sucking and slobbering.
He finally let go of Gail because he could feel them under him, too, moving just beneath the soft tissue of the floor like tendons beneath skin. They would eat that away, too, until there was no floor and Gail and he fell into the basement.
She started screaming again.
The worms were falling around them, wriggling and looping, biting into anything that was near which was the flesh of the house and sometimes each other. They were everywhere, bursting from the walls like wire and dangling from the ceiling like spaghetti. It was like some sort of worm feeding frenzy and Roger knew, as the soft rot of insanity continued to weaken his mind, that this is what it was like ground zero as maggots devoured the carcass of a woodchuck.
He grabbed hold of Gail and dragged her off down the hallway. This was not the place to be. She shrieked and fought, but he pushed her forward none-too gently. There were more and more worms. They were starting to come through the floor of the hallway now. One of them fell from overhead and tangled in Gail’s hair.
Roger seized it immediately and it wriggled in his hands, its flesh greasy with secretions, its scarlet mouth laying his thumb open. He squeezed it to a pink pulp that squirted into his face.
That made Gail quit screaming…completely mad now, she pointed at him and began to giggle. And once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop.
“A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” she cackled. “A-ha-ha-ha-hee-hee-HA-HA-HAAAAAAAA…”
And as she did so and Roger pawed the pink jelly from his face which was abnormally cool as if it had been refrigerated, the worms began to mass.
5
It’s gotta be there! It’s gotta be!
The voice raged in Bria’s head, repeating itself again and again like a child that wanted to be heard.
But it wasn’t.
Across the avenue, there was only a shifting grayness that appeared metallic. It sparkled from time to time as if there were chips of mica in it. She did not know what it meant any more than she understood what any of it meant.
She only knew one thing—she wasn’t going to try her luck by stepping into it. Something about it looked deadly, very deadly.
If you step in there you might drop into some unknown abyss where you might literally fall for an eternity, she thought. Or you might find yourself somewhere much worse than Birch Street.
She stood there, swallowing repeatedly, indecisive and weak in the knee, so frightened she thought she might go right over. The nausea had returned, perhaps triggered by the chaotic insanity she felt on just about every level. She badly needed to throw up.
Do something. Do anything.
Yes, that was it.
She had to see what this was all about. See what the parameters of this latest derangement might be. She moved up the sidewalk on the avenue side, Mr. Hammerberg’s hedges shielding her from the inhuman eyes of what he shared his house with. The neighborhood ended at the alley. On the other side of it, there was only that same shimmering grayness.
Bria stopped, gnawing on her nails, certain she would have a panic attack at best and a complete nervous breakdown at worst.
And a voice behind her said, “There really is nowhere to run to.”
6
Chop, chop, chop.
Kalen Sprik’s arms were red and glistening right up to the elbows, but she continued on with the knife in her hand, gutting and slicing and peeling. Piss ran down her legs and drool ran from her mouth as drops of blood dripped from her elbows.
Chop, chop, chop.
She could hear Abe coming up behind her with that wet, squishing sound. She would not turn because she could not bear to look upon what he had become and maybe what he had always been.
He stood behind her, immense and breathing.
Things fell off him and splatted to the tile floor.
She could smell the stench of him which was warm, simmering putrefaction.
His wet, labored breathing left an oily sheen at the back of her neck.
It was at this moment that she became aware, really aware, of what it was she was doing. She dropped the knife and began to scream, her hands red and glistening with her husband’s blood. Abe took hold of her with huge blubbery hands whose flesh was sharp like shards of glass. She felt his mouth at the back of her neck. He kissed her throat and it was like a dozen bee stingers piercing her.
“You do not deny me”, said his voice which was mushy with ooze.
Kalen cried out from agony and revulsion and sheer madness. She tried to get away, but his fingers were wet and sticky like those of a tree frog. They encircled her throat like vines while his other hand slithered over her shoulder and cupped her breasts like a catcher’s mitt.
Her body jumped with spasms of terror. “I GAVE YOU WHAT YOU WANTED! I GAVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU WANTED!”
But you’re not finished, he breathed with boiling sulfur fumes that singed her ear. You have not offered it to me in a way I find pleasing.
She fought free (or perhaps she was released), scrambling across the kitchen floor on all fours, but frantic and undirected. She slid on the blood and went face-first into it. It was all over her lips. She could taste her husband’s blood which was rich and coppery and perfectly revolting.
Shivering, she tried to wipe it from her face with bloodstained hands.
She sensed Abe moving in her direction the way a bacterium can sense a protozoan moving in to engulf it.
“I GAVE HIM TO YOU! I DID WHAT YOU ASKED! I GAVE HIM AS A SACRIFICE TO YOU!”
Abe clearly wasn’t interested in any of that.
He moved towards her.
He rolled towards her.
He was an immense fungous mass of blubber, pulsating and striated green, leaving a steaming trail of slime in his wake. His face was sunken in a sea of flab, sending out ripples and waves of fat. His eyes were filled with blood, his mouth a huge gash set with broken yellow teeth and licked by a black and rubbery tongue.
This was her lover.
A shapeless protoplasmic hulk composed of the very thing she loathed: fat.
Now that you have tasted, he informed her in a gurgling voice, you shall eat.
She fought but Abe was too powerful. He took hold of her and pressed her face into the carcass of her butchered husband. He scooped out hunks of dripping flesh and shoved them in her face, forcing them into her mouth. She tasted cold meat and blood, felt things like cabbage and custard and soggy bread pushed across her tongue. He disciplined her like a dog that had shit on the carpet, rubbing her face in the mess of her husband.
Then he released her and she fell away, vomiting again and again, finally sobbing and shuddering with madness and horror.
Take up the knife, he ordered her.
Her shaking hands reached for it, gripping its handle that was sticky with drying blood.
And begin again. Offer him to me in a way I will find pleasing. Presentation is everything.
Kalen, her eyes glazed and her mind gone to a soup of rot, began to cut and slice and prepare the offering.
7
“You want me to tell you how this happened,” Mr. Hammerberg managed. “What it’s about and why here and not somewhere else.”
Bria just stared at him, feeling something she did not think she’d ever really felt before in her life: pure, undiluted hatred. Not fear or disgust as when Mr. DeYoung attacked her. That was purely revulsion at its core…this was different. This was bigger. This was everything she had been feeling for days now, all the terror and confusion and mania and uncertainty and flat-out repugnance channeling itself into something white-hot and burning, an emotional
thermonuclear weapon, and she had her finger on the trigger.
She wanted to beat Mr. Hammerberg’s skull in. At that moment, she was perfectly capable of it. She wanted to kill him. Hell, she wanted to kill them all.
“I wish it was as simple as that,” he said, as if he understood what she wanted to do and was not opposed to the idea.
The entire left side of his face was a livid bruise. The rest of it was sallow and ulcerated, a horror to look upon. An especially large fly landed on his cheek, investigating one of the gaping holes in his face. It seemed to belong there. Mr. Hammerberg did not bother shooing it away. He offered Bria a crooked smile. Several teeth were missing.
“Just go away, Mr. Hammerberg,” she said. “I’ve had enough of you. I’ve had enough of all of you.”
He reached out and placed a hand on her arm. His touch was freezing.
“See?” he said to her. “I may walk around, but I’m practically dead.”
She shrugged him off. “If you touch me again, I’ll hit you.”
“I know you will. And I won’t try to stop you.” He looked up into the sky which was as blue as a robin’s egg. “We’re in the final act now. We’re trapped here, the entire neighborhood is trapped here…wherever here is. The entity that runs this show, Bria, does not want outside interference at this juncture. So here we are, in a private place to perform a very private act.”
“What act?”
He kept looking up to the sky. “The final gathering when the eaters of the meat become meat themselves.”
“Who’s the entity?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s some sort of elemental, a nature spirit. That’s terribly vague, but it’s all I have. Elementals, in classical belief, represented air, water, fire, earth, even the sea and storms…this one is aligned with hunger.” He looked down at his own gnarled, arthritic hands. “If hunger has a god, then this creature is it. I don’t know why it is or how it is or truly what it is. But it’s real. It exists. It brings meat as an offering and once you taste it, once it’s in you, it’s like signing a deal with the Devil. It’s the greatest addiction imaginable. And then…then…”