by Tim Curran
“Tell me,” she said.
“Shortly after you taste it, the entity cuts you off. Same way a heroin dealer hooks you—gives you a taste, addicts you, then withholds what you need. And that’s when the truly awful things happen, Bria, during the withdrawals which are not only physically painful, but spiritually as well.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Oh, but I am. As much sense as there can be in a situation like this,” he told her. “You see, during the withdrawals is when you are haunted by yourself. Your suppressed desires, guilt, terror, and trauma come home to roost. Don’t you see? In my case, it’s my son. I’ve spent every single day since he died hating myself and wanting him back, wanting to undo what happened. So, he returned.”
“But it’s not really him,” she said.
“No, it’s the entity, the elemental…or, at least, part of it. We are kept in bondage by the meat and our hunger for it and tortured by those things we wanted which we had no business wanting and those things that scare us and scarred us. Do you see?”
Bria wasn’t sure she saw anything. It was all such madness.
“But this thing…its name…”
He smiled and it was a horrific sight. “The Greeks had a goddess of starvation; her name was Limos. The Romans called her Fames. Maybe it’s her.”
Bria flinched. Limos, Limos, Limos. Yes, she had heard the name before and it was associated with terrible things, things she had locked in the box.
Do you…can you remember the Dark, Dark Castle? Can you? Will you?
“No,” she said under breath, her entire body shaking.
“What do you call it, Bria? How do you address it?” he asked her. “What’s its secret name?”
Things flashed in her mind, memories and traumas that faded away as quickly. She shook her head back and forth until they were gone completely.
Mr. Hammerberg watched her carefully as if he knew things he should not know. “Soon, all will gather in your name. You can try and hide, but I don’t know if it will do any good.”
Bria figured that was enough. She didn’t want to hear any more.
“Come out and show yourself,” Mr. Hammerberg commanded, calling out to the thing that had enslaved him. “Show your true self to us, you coward. Appear! Appear! Let us look at you so we will know you! Appear before us!”
Bria had been backing away from him without realizing it, needing to distance herself from his insanity and whatever might come of it.
Sweat running down his face, Mr. Hammerberg shouted, “COME OUT! YOU OWN US! YOU’VE TRAPPED US! NOW SHOW YOURSELF TO YOUR PLAYTHINGS! COME ALREADY! WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU!”
Bria looked around and around, expecting some cloven-hoofed demon to pop out of the air, but she saw nothing. Nothing at all.
What do you call it, Bria? How do you address it?
“It isn’t going to happen,” she said.
“It already has.”
“No!”
“Yes, dear, yes. You brought it here. Only you know what the endgame is.”
She shook her head slowly, uncomprehendingly. She didn’t understand. It was all madness, nothing but madness.
Mr. Hammerberg looked at her. He was perfectly calm. “The time of gathering is coming. It will call to you. It will demand you become part of it. You are the most important of all. Without you, there is nothing. Face it with an empty belly…”
8
He was right.
It was starting.
High above Birch Street in that cloudless, impossibly blue sky there was a gathering darkness, a sooty, leaden gray mass building and building, gathering form and intent and coming to being like a fetus. The blue of the sky—cerulean, then sapphire—began to lose its brilliance. It began to fade like a week-old bruise, the color leeched from it until it took on the drab, steely gray of lake ice.
And then the sun, so bright, so perfectly yellow and warm, a lemon drop, a shiny new nickel, began to fade, too.
For hours, against the laws of physics, it had maintained its high noon position at mid-sky. This did not change. But its color, its energy, its blinding radiance was sapped away. Slowly, slowly, it began to darken, first to a dirty silver and then to the diseased whiteness of a dead man’s eyeball…
9
Mr. Hammerberg looked up and saw the fading of the sun. To him it was Armageddon, End of Days, the Rapture, the apocalypse. It was the end of the world. He felt it right down into his bones.
His heart drummed in his chest.
His thoughts scrambled.
His flesh contracted.
Everything inside him began to dry up like a puddle. This was death and nonexistence. And as awful as the prospect of the bottomless eternal abyss opening for him was, he almost welcomed it.
The suffering would be over.
The pain at an end.
The horrendous meat-induced perversion of reality would be nullified.
And the subjugation and subversion of his mind and soul would be no more.
He studied the sky with rheumy, pink-veined eyeballs that no longer could blink. The sun, the sun, Jesus, look at the sun! Now a black speckling had appeared on it like acne on a teenager’s face. The speckling spread until there were great blotches of it like black mold. The shadows instantly grew long on Birch Street and the quality of the light became that of twilight.
Here it comes, here it comes, the world made into a graveyard, he thought with little to no melodrama. Good, good, let it come, let it take us. Let it harvest us and sow us to the four winds. Erase us. Let us be no more. Let us be buried deep in the cold and bitter darkness. We ate the meat and have become meat.
Let us now be eaten.
The gray mass in the sky had now formed itself into a gaseous, angry-looking, ever-rotating spiral, around and around and around.
Mr. Hammerberg looked deep into it and began to scream…
10
As Bria ran off, trying to think of some secret covert where she would not be discovered, she saw the spiral forming high above the nabe just as she had seen it last Thursday…or the beginnings of it anyway.
You knew there was something funny about it, she thought. You should have run away then, the moment you recognized it.
The amazing and utterly frightening thing was that she could hear it up there. The sound of the spiral—a disturbingly mechanical sort of sound like the grinding, groaning noise of an old washing machine agitator spinning its final cycle—was echoing off the houses of Birch Street, reverberating down the alleys that cut through the neighborhood and across the avenues that hemmed it in.
Beyond was that shimmering metallic nothingness and nothing, not even sound, could penetrate it. Whatever was thrown at it was thrown back and with volume.
Stunned and helpless, Bria watched as Birch Street was made into a killing jar.
11
The worms.
The worms.
The worms.
Now they riddled the decaying, dead house like maggots fattening themselves on the putrefying, spongy brain of a road-struck dog. They chewed through the walls and ate great dark, blood-dripping cavities in the ceiling. The floor was a squirming carpet of them, forever in motion, fluid and convulsive, slopping against the walls.
Nowhere to go, Roger Moody thought. There’s just nowhere to go.
The worms were flooding the hallway, piling up atop one another, slithering and coiling, mouths forever chewing. They surged forward in bundles and tangled balls, spilling forward by the hundreds and possibly even the thousands.
“HA HA HA!” Gail shrieked with demented laughter, her entire body shuddering with it. “THE WORMS! THE WORMS! THE WORMS ARE EVERYWHERE!”
One of them dropped from the ceiling—or what was left of it—right into her lap, and her scream of insane delight became one of horror and revulsion. She gripped it in her hands, and it corkscrewed like a grass snake as she crushed it to sauce. Rig
ht before it died, its red blossom of a mouth emitted a high-pitched squealing sound. Then several others fell on her. One tangled in her hair, another slid down the back of her shirt, and third fell right into her hands which were gooey and dripping with worm guts. She couldn’t get a grip on it. It was horridly warm and wriggling, pulsing like a vein. It twisted in her fingers, and its fanged mouth latched onto her cheek, biting out a soft and sloughing chunk of flesh. Blood sprayed over her face and she screamed with pain. She tore it in half, worm-jelly squirting over her chest as a half-dozen others dropped onto her, their jaws darting at her eyes. They laid open her cheeks and lips, and then one of them seized her left eyeball and yanked it right out of it socket.
There was nothing Roger could do.
He was under attack himself.
The worms fell on him. They came up out of the decaying floor by the hundreds. They bit and chewed and drilled into him. He fought against them, but it was hopeless. The worms had become an undulant sea, and he was being stripped by their cutting, investigative mouths.
Then there was a rumbling.
A groaning.
The wall fell in and a tidal wave of worms engulfed both him and Gail. They were drowning in worms. They punched in through his eyes, they tunneled into his ears and slid up his ass, and one of them forced itself up the shriveled shaft of his penis. When there were no openings to accommodate them, they made their own, digging into him. Within seconds, he was a writhing mass of red pulp, and then he sank from sight.
Gail reached out of the worm sea with one hand, the flesh of which had been peeled down muscle and sinew and then even this sank away.
The worms fed well.
But they were hardly done.
Birch Street was rotting from the inside out. It was a buffet.
12
Mr. Hammerberg was barely done screaming when Joey appeared.
He couldn’t say that he appeared out of thin air, but then again, he couldn’t say he hadn’t either.
A monster, is what he thought. Not a human being. Just walking carrion.
Joey stood there, a breathing carcass, flies crawling over his ruined, ulcerated face. They formed clouds like cartoon balloons above him. It looked as if his head had been broken into four or five different sections then sewn back together with black catgut. Like water-swollen puzzle pieces, none of it seemed to fit into place properly. The skin of his face was torn open in gaping cavities, shiny yellow bone visible beneath. His grin was like the rictus of a corpse.
“Dad,” he said. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”
Mr. Hammerberg, having been abused and humiliated by this monstrosity for days, stood his ground. He would not run from this thing. To do that would only make it stronger.
“Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” he said. “Go back to Hell. That’s where you belong: rotting in Hell.”
“You’re wrong, Dad. I belong here with you.”
That’s what Joey said, but there was no doubt Mr. Hammerberg standing up to him had weakened him considerably. Putrid slime and gouts of clear mucus ran from the suture lines of his face. His voice was gurgling. Some sort of white goo bubbled in his left eye socket.
He was decomposing.
There was no doubt of it.
Whatever he really was, whether that was the elemental itself or merely a corporeal projection of its mind, he was past his prime. He was ripening with rot. He was quite literally coming apart at the seams.
But just because he was soft and pulpous did not mean he was not dangerous.
He’s come to an end, Mr. Hammerberg thought, but then, so have I.
He stood his ground, waiting for his son, waiting for the atrocity that wore his skin, the revolting, melting, animate heap of medical waste he now was.
Mr. Hammerberg swung at him.
He had not taken a punch at anyone in forty years, but he had not forgotten how. It was a last act of defiance and he knew it. He connected with Joey’s nose and it exploded from the impact, gelatinous tissue spraying into the grass.
It caused Joey no pain; it just made him look more like a walking corpse.
Mr. Hammerberg screamed as Joey took hold of him with gnarled, steaming hands of protoplasm. The bone in his right arm cracked, but not as loudly as his left clavicle. That went with a sharp, snapping sound, and the pain was white hot and electric. He cried out, screeched really, his head whirling, his heart struggling sluggishly in his chest. Joey jabbed fingers into his eyes and they exploded into a snot-like pulp, then he yanked them downward, tearing Mr. Hammerberg’s face off the skull beneath with the most horrendous wet, ripping sound.
After that, Mr. Hammerberg really knew nothing because Joey twisted his head on his neck and his spine popped like a rubber band that had been wound too tightly.
When he hit the ground, Mr. Hammerberg wasn’t exactly dead, but he wasn’t exactly alive either.
13
Billy’s eyes were gleaming, bloodstained glass. They looked right inside of Lara and made her ache. Worse, they made her feel hollow as if there was nothing left inside her, an echoing void that could never be filled.
Her life had been a sordid, ugly affair for many years, but now it was beyond that.
It was a whirlpooling nightmare of disbelief and terror, grief and pain and utter madness. It was the meat. The meat had caused it. Now and again, her mind cleared enough where she knew this to be true. But that was only when the hunger pangs lessened and the addiction pulled back enough for her to think.
The meat giveth, and the meat taketh away.
She was dying, and she knew she was dying. The flies were gathering around her in numbers now as if they knew she would soon be their meat. They had laid their eggs in the gaping sores of her face. Her teeth had mostly fallen out. Her gums were bleeding. Now and again, she would hack out bloody hunks of tissue that were sloughed fragments of her esophagus. They had the consistency of soggy white cheese.
Lara blinked her eyes. She could not see out of the right one now.
Blind, going blind.
It had an unhealthy greenish hue to it, the pupil dilated and fixed on the ceiling. If she pinched the skin of her forearm between forefinger and thumb, she could actually pull sheets of unbroken epidermis free. They scaled away easily like a molt.
In the corner, the flies clustered upon a swollen little form with a shining, pop-eyed blue-black face. Lara did not know what it was, but it had been there for some time and it was beginning to smell most foul.
“Are you ready, Mama?” a voice asked. “It’s almost time now. Time for all of us.”
It was Billy.
Dear, sweet, beautiful Billy summoning her from her thoughts just as he had summoned the sanity from her mind.
Billy.
Billy…
But there was another Lara inside who squated sobbing at the blackened core of her being, unable to stop weeping. Her voice was harsh and strident, and she chanted the same words again and again: “That is not your Billy. Your Billy is dead. You strangled him.”
The voice echoed out and out, finally fading into the distance like a fog horn heard on a dark night.
Lara’s head spun with dizziness, her eyesight blurring. She stared at the swollen, fetid form in the corner, but could make no sense of it. There was a moment of regret, but this passed, too.
Gagging out a globby sputum of blood, she smiled as the music began to play.
14
The thing was, there really was nowhere to hide. Houses, garages, gardening sheds, up on rooftops or huddling under hedges, they would find her. She was certain of it. They were all plugged into the elemental, which gave it dozens of eyes, all looking, all watching, all knowing that Bria was the missing part of the equation.
The time of gathering is coming. It will call to you. It will demand you become part of it.
She cut between two houses, squatting in the shadows of a rosebush. I
t was still not dark out. She had no idea what time it was or if there even was time in this place, wherever Birch Street now was. The sun had darkened overhead, but it had not moved, and it still maintained its twilight-like illumination. And that gathering spiral storm was getting darker and darker. Soon, there would be no sun.
You are the most important of all.
“No, no, no,” she heard her voice say and was frightened at how weak and unsure it sounded. “This is not about me. It can’t be about me…”
Without you, there is nothing.
“Just shut…up!” she cried.
It was ridiculous. It was all completely ridiculous. She was letting Mr. Hammerberg’s crazy talk get to her. She had to think, to reason. None of this had anything to do with her.
You brought it here. Only you know what the endgame is.
Madness, nothing but fucking madness.
I did not bring it here! I had nothing to do with it! Nothing nothing NOTHING! I…I came home because I had to come home because I thought it was time that’s all there was to it just a few weeks with with with the Evil Queen no Alice Alice Alice Mother Alice a few weeks then off to a job and off to school
But try as she might, she could not seem to remember anything but being here on Birch Street. There was nothing else. These past days were a time loop that repeated endlessly in her memory. The job. What was the job? She couldn’t remember that any more than she could recall what she was going back to school for or even what school that might be.
Think, goddammit, think!
Lara. Remember Lara? Yes, when she got to the nabe, Lara was one of the first people she saw. Bria could see her now, the sunglasses, the golden hair, the perfect tan. I’m just back for a couple weeks and then it’s off to a job downstate and back to school in the fall. That was what Bria said to her. But what job and what school? She had known then, but she did not know now. Everything was blank. There was Birch Street and nothing beyond Birch Street and nothing before it.