by Tim Curran
And soon as she sensed that, Bria went down to her knees, and the sickness struck her again. It did more than strike her; it steamrolled her, flattened her, pressed her face into the grass, made her guts contract with dry heaves. Tears ran from her eyes and saliva drooled from her mouth. Her skin felt hot and blistered as if some megawatt sun lamp had been turned on her. Sweat running from her in rivers, she coiled in the grass, feeling the earth beneath, certain she could feel minute vibrations coming from it and, now and again, a lurching that was like the belly of a pregnant woman in her ninth month.
But for all that, for as awful as it indeed was, what seemed worse was that the earth beneath her felt soft, sort of spongy, rather like the flesh of rotting fruit.
But she could make no sense of that because the waves of nausea kept rolling through her, making her buck and squirm. She clenched her teeth and balled her hands into fists. Whatever this was—and she knew very well it had nothing to do with her own biology—it was getting worse, and it was getting worse because what was directing it at her was getting closer, speeding towards Birch Street from whatever impossible galactic dead-end gutter it was spawned from.
Bria rolled in the grass, jerking from each impact of nausea within her. It was more than nausea, more than sickness but a violent assault like someone was kicking the guts out of her.
And it was at that point in her pain and delirium that the light exploded in her head again, the same dirty/sweet/impure light that had been in her mind before when the elemental had been looking for her.
It was looking for her now.
It was not just looking from the cosmic graveyard where it existed, but from every set of eyes in the nabe. And as it looked into her, she found that she could look into it and what she saw was something her brain could not process or readily identify: an immense pulsating nebula in some mathematically impossible dead zone of deepest space…exploding, imploding, closing like a clamshell and opening like an orchid, vomiting out an ebon, spiraling darkness that was blinding in its intensity.
This was it, the elemental—abstract, geometrically complex, infinitely discorporeal, nothing her mind could hope to understand. And then the image changed and she saw a glowing, irradiated orb zooming out of the blackness until it took form before her and was conceptualized by her mind into something tangible: a face, the remains of a face, a skull topped by wind-whipped locks of white hair. It was plastered with a ragged canvas of flesh that was rat-gnawed and worm-holed, the eye sockets filled with a creeping blackness. It had no lower jaw as such, just an overhanging dentition of hooked, sharp teeth. From the crown of the skull to the jaw, it was covered in a fine mesh of cobwebs.
This is it, this is what it looks like!
But, no, she knew that wasn’t true. This was the closest her mind could get to translating what it saw into earthly parameters. This was subjective. This was the image of Death pulled from her subconscious, the way she had always pictured it without knowing it. A fright face from a horror comic, a Halloween mask, a mummy from a crypt, the undead, moldering inhabitant of a secret tomb.
Then a voice that might have been pure fevered imagination on her part spoke in her skull with the squeaky voice of a little boy, You won’t ruin everything! I won’t let you ruin everything! It must be all and everyone! There must totality, there must be completion.
And then she understood. At least, as much as was possible.
Totality. Completion.
All or nothing.
That’s what the entity wanted, that’s why it wanted her to taste the meat and become part of it because in some unknown way, that was part of the equation. To her mind, it was dark alchemy and malevolent cabalism, but there was a logic there, a science, a formula that must not be diverged from or it would never arrive at the needed sum.
The light went out in her head and the first thing she thought was: the gathering. Yes, the time and place of the gathering was near now. Isn’t that what Mr. Hammerberg had said? The final gathering when the eaters of the meat become meat themselves…
The pain and discomfort had passed now.
Bria sat there in the grass, just breathing, just trying to get her mind back on the proper plane. She was sore from the convulsions, aching to her core. She wiped sweat from her face with her hands, wishing for a drink of water so she could wash the vile coppery taste of corruption from her mouth. As she came to herself, her brain kept whirling with thoughts. Only part of the elemental is here. That part came with the weird storm clouds the day you arrived here in the nabe. But it was only a fraction of it, a sliver. Physically, spiritually, psychically…it’s still in the other place, the other dimension, whatever you want to call it. But now the storm is coming again. And from it, the rest of the elemental will be born to commune not only with itself and become whole, but with the eaters of the meat.
She pulled herself to her feet, trying to think of what it was she must do. She was just down from the Hammerberg house, leaning on the broken, rotting remains of the Falconi fence. She saw a girl come running from Anna Lee Posey’s house, disappearing in the gloom. The Falconi house was like a jack-o’-lantern two weeks after Halloween, mold-encrusted, soft and putrid, leaking slime and seeds. It looked as if it might fall into itself at any moment.
But then, every house in the neighborhood was looking like that.
God, the lawn beneath her feet was mushy like there was a layer of moist fungus just beneath it. She picked up her baseball bat, staring up at the weird sun that now wore a sort of blood-red veil over its face. The storm was continuing to build up there, slowly rotating like a spiral galaxy.
“It’s nearly time,” a voice said.
It was the sound of the voice as much as what it came from that made her whirl around. It was a buzzing sort of voice, wavering and strident and inhuman. It made a sort of warm heat open up in her mind.
Joey.
This was Joey Hammerberg.
He was a distorted, broken thing that had been taken apart and then put back together out of sync, a patchwork zombie. His left shoulder was hunched up higher than the right, his chest looking as if it had been crushed, then twisted to the side. His head was bald, held together by intersecting suture lines like Frankenstein’s monster. His skin was an awful yellow-green, shiny and taut on the skull below like some grotesque graft, his mouth a ragged hole, his eyes blanched white and peering from channeled sockets.
“Can you remember the Dark, Dark Castle, Bria?” he asked. “Can you? Will you?”
There was an audible ripping in the back of her head and she began to shake and sob, mumbling incoherent things as hunger pangs tore her belly open from the inside. For a few twisted, deranged moments, yes, yes, she did remember. It was all clear in the whirling, screeching vacuum of her mind and with clarity came a black madness that made her scream. Then it was gone. It had retreated back into the box where the bad things were kept.
Bria went down to one knee and convulsed with dry heaves, finally pulling herself up.
Joey was still talking, telling her things she did not want to know about. As his voice rambled on, a bulging protrusion in his throat bobbed up and down. It looked to be the size of a baseball. There was furry black growth on his neck. Droplets of slime dripped from his face. The left side was punched with holes as if something had been pecking at it. Blast furnace waves of sickening black heat rolled from him.
“The first,” he said again, a yellow foam bubbling over his lacerated lips.
Bria took a step back from him and then another, as much from revulsion as fear. He was a rumbling, worm-riddled zombie, a fetid burning mass of destruction. He would not kill her, she didn’t think. But he would get her down, press her to the grass, and force meat into her mouth because that’s really what this was all about.
The meat.
Tasting it.
Letting it taste you.
Becoming part of it as it became part of you.
Letting it conn
ect things long separated, bringing parts of her together that wanted to remain forever disjointed.
Joey licked his lips with a tongue like a leather strop. “I want,” he said, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, “to be the first, Bria. The first to feed you. The first to let you taste the meat. I have some with me.”
And he did at that.
A foul metallic taste filled Bria’s mouth as he opened his shirt and exposed not only the war-ravaged anatomy of his torso but what lived in it. The suturing of his belly had given way and he unlaced it like a corset. In his abdomen there were no organs as such—Of course not, Bria thought hysterically, they probably went into a fucking jar at Walter Reed or one of those places when he was autopsied—just…meat. A great tumor-like palpitating mass of well-marbled red meat that looked very much like Kobe beef…save that it was not inanimate. No, on the contrary, it was alive, writhing with wriggling, busy life, unwinding and stretching out, reaching out to her in scarlet, blood-speckled hoses like loops of intestine.
It…they wanted her to touch them.
To hold them in her hands.
To let them slide between her fingers like engorged worms.
They wanted her to press them to her breasts.
Slide them against her lips.
Kiss them.
Lick them.
Fondle them.
Stroke them.
And, yes, yes, ultimately open her mouth and let them slide between her lips and mate with her tongue as they vibrated in near-erotic anticipation, awaiting the feel of her teeth biting them, chewing them…
Bria screamed.
Under the circumstances, as her sanity trembled in her skull with flaccid contractions, there was little else to do.
“Now, Bria,” buzzed the voice of Joey, his fly-specked face grinning until it was a massive, drool-dripping maw of yellow, fragmented teeth. “Now you will taste it…you will touch the meat and feel it and know it and bite into it so that you can be made one with all of us and join us in the gathering…”
As Joey stepped forward, Bria felt the bat slide from her fingers as everything inside her went horridly limp. The shadow of Joey enveloped her in a mucid heat and the nest of worming meat in his torso reached out hungrily for her.
19
Jeff Baker studied the smeared blood trail of his wife with swollen eyes. It was amazing that she had so much blood in her. It was everywhere—running down the walls, pooling on the floor, spattered up onto the ceiling.
The sight of it made him giggle…then sob. He giggled because Jenna, oh, fucking stupid little Jenna, thought she was so smart. She’d always thought she was so smart and so much better than everyone else and now… now, in the very grim twilight of her existence, she knew better.
And she knew better because he had schooled her.
Oh, that insufferable, evil little twat, he thought with murderous glee. She broke me in every way she could in our marriage. She used me, she abused me. Enough was never enough because she always wanted something more, her hand was always out, gimme, gimme, gimme!
Yes, this made him giggle because she had manipulated him so effortlessly, so smoothly, and he had never been man enough to call her on it or stand up against her.
But what made him sob, what made the meat-induced lust for her death retreat, was that he could feel her living inside him, filling him the way she had always filled him. He saw her stretched out in her bikini on the white sands of a beach in Cancun, golden and shining with oil. He saw her lying in bed next to him, watching him with those big little girl eyes. And he saw her going limp in his arms, crying and shaking, sobbing out that she had just maxed the Discover card yet again. Oh yes, she had owned him always, and he liked being owned because when she was good, oh she was so unbelievably good, just sweet and wonderful like a pink-frosted slab of birthday cake when you were seven…that taste, the explosion of flavor and sugary substance. That was Jenna. She lived inside his memories and haunted his soul and burned bright like a candle just behind his eyes.
So good and so bad.
Mostly bad. She coveted the meat, and she would not let you have any. Your wrist is nearly broken, your head aching from being hit with a frying pan. You stabbed her and cut her mouth open. She scratched and bit you…and all of it because she would not share the meat.
She was selfish.
She was wicked.
Now she has been punished.
Ah, but none of it seemed to matter, not now that he had the meat. It was his. He owned it and maybe it owned him. He tore a shred of a graying cutlet and gently placed it in his mouth, doing it slowly so he could enjoy every moment, prolonging the pleasure, teasing himself with the wonder of the meat and all that it offered. When it touched his tongue, the chemical fireworks in his brain began, filling his mind with jets of hot light, lifting his spirit into cosmic rapture. The void in his belly was filled, but never satisfied. In fact, the savory taste launched him into new realms of gluttony and voraciousness.
He chewed at first, slowly, then ravenously, stuffing the meat into his mouth until he thought he would choke on it, until the gag reflex pushed it back out.
No matter, no matter.
It lay in his lap, warm and well-chewed. He licked its flavor from his fingertips, tasting not only the meat but his own blood and that of his wife.
As he stared at her remains, he remembered.
Oh yes, and the memory made him even more voracious.
Bitch.
Wicked, wicked bitch.
When he’d gone after her in the bedroom, she’d been lying in wait for him, only he had been too stupid to realize it until he was almost upon her. That’s when she had jumped. Oh, how fast she had been! She snatched the lamp off the bedside table and hit him with it full in the face, stunning him. When he’d gone down, she smashed it over his head, tearing open his scalp and making blood run down his face. When she’d raised it again, he struck out instinctively, balling his fist and punching her between the legs. She cried out and fell over.
Then he had her.
He bashed her continually with his fists, breaking her nose and cracking open the orbit of her left eye. Bleeding and ruined, she begged for mercy, so he jumped up and began kicking her until she lost consciousness. He punched her in the ribs and dislocated her right knee and broke her left arm. And he kept at it until she no longer moved. Only then was he satisfied.
Then he fed on the meat.
And then he’d gone out into the garage for his axe.
Sitting there now, chewing carefully so he did not choke, trying to keep the beast of hunger at bay within him, he stared at her blood, the whorls and splotches of it on the walls. He found that if he stared at it long enough, he began to see words and faces in its patterns. One of Jenna’s legs was on the bed, the blood soaking into the white coverlet. The other was over near the closet with her torso. Her head was in the doorway with her arms. He’d tossed her hands under the bed.
As Jeff chewed the meat, he realized how relaxed he felt. More relaxed than he had felt in days. It was like…like…like the way you felt on a beautiful summer morning as you watched the sun rise with a cup of coffee in your hand. Nice. That was the word for it. Nice. He felt nice inside.
“Nice,” he muttered, licking the crusted blood at his lips. “I am nice. I am a nice person who feels oh-so very nice.”
He liked the idea; it made him feel calm. In fact, sitting there amongst his wife’s butchered remains, he knew that all was right with the world. Things could not possibly have been better.
And then he noticed Jenna’s head was smiling at him.
That’s when things really began to go to shit.
20
As Joey Hammerberg—or the thing that pretended to be him—moved in closer, the revolting meat inside him becoming a vermiform horror, Bria suddenly snapped out of whatever held her, whatever had sapped the strength from her. Maybe it was terror and maybe it was the r
ealization of what was about to happen to her.
She grabbed the bat and jumped to her feet.
As Joey reached out, she swung it and made connection with his hand. She clearly heard the bones of his fingers snap.
Not that it slowed him down.
Leering, oozing, and beginning to rot at an accelerated rate, he shambled forward, his ribs poking from his side, great ulcerous sores opening up his face until it began to look cratered like the surface of the moon.
She swung again, and his left arm gave with a cracking sound. He made a wheezing noise and exhaled a breath of hot, rancid air, but that was about it. The meat in his open belly was clearly aggravated or excited, the hose-like protrusions winding and looping at an accelerated rate like mating snakes.
On he came.
Bria stood there, studying the bloody end of the bat in the sickly yellow light of the midnight sun. Shadows seemed to be crawling all around her in animate, twisted growths.
Joey came at her again and she swung the bat, connecting with his head this time. There was a devastating hollow popping sound, and the sutures that held his cranium together split right open. What happened then was beyond anything she could have imagined.
His skull split open and his face hung in a grisly flap, then he literally came apart in a gas-swollen eruption of putrefaction. He rippled and foamed, bubbled and sizzled like seltzer. His flesh dissolved into a liquid gory mulch, his bones jutting free of the mess in red staffs and arches.
As Bria watched, throwing herself clear of the steaming blood mist that boiled out of him, the remains of Joey Hammerberg became a living cauldron of anatomical waste. The meat exploded out of him in a violent, juicy magma of hunger, the hoses hungrily feeding on him, peeling the skin off his bones and squeezing and sucking the blood and flesh free, rising, expanding, becoming a huge roiling concentration of worming ferocity that quickly abandoned his well-licked, well-pitted, and well-chewed skeleton.