by Tim Curran
Beaten, bloody, confused and out of her mind, Bria did not stop to thinkshe charged. She threw herself at the grotesque little monster with everything she had. Little Bria did not expect it. She let out an insane keening cry as Bria flattened her, knocking her down and climbing atop her. Little Bria hissed with a shrill squeal of hot steam as Bria punched her in the face again and again and again.
Little Bria’s face pulped and split open, black ichor gushing from her mouth. But that was hardly enough. Bria grabbed her by the ears as she squirmed beneath her, slamming her head again and again to the floor until her skull literally came apart in her hands, brain matter and blood and dark, bubbling filth pooling over the floor. Right to the end, Little Bria screamed and clawed, spit and twisted, but it did her no good.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” a voice shouted.
It was Mother Alice. She shambled into the room, a study in rot and ruin. Her body was like a torn canvas sack through which protruded meat and bone, one breast jutting from her ripped shirt, the other flaccid like an empty balloon. She was filthy with blood and dirt, dried marrow and grease, her face torn open with infected sores. As she breathed, it inflated like a plastic bag, slowly deflating as the air wheezed out of it.
She looked from the remains of Little Bria to her daughter with eyes that were like hot bulbs. “NOW YOU’VE TAKEN IT ALL, HAVEN’T YOU? YOU’VE DESTROYED THE LAST THING I COULD HOLD ONTO AND CALL MY OWN!” she screamed. And when Bria just stared up at her with terror and shock, she slapped her across the face. “NOW I HAVE NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING BUT YOU, AND I HATE THE SIGHT OF YOU! YOU EVIL ROTTEN TWISTED LITTLE WITCH!”
Alice’s hand came again, lashing out with speed and fury, slapping Bria across the face two and then three times, making her see stars each time. Bria had no fight left in her. It wasn’t that her battle with Little Bria had taken it all away from her, it was Alice. Mother Alice. At her core, she’d always been terrified of her, afraid to stand up against her. And here she was in the final hour, weak and filled with trembling jelly once again.
“Why don’t you accept what you have wrought?” Mother Alice asked her in a low, reasonable voice. “You brought this on us and now you fight against it? Why don’t you give in? Taste the meat. Fill yourself with it. Become it and the cycle will be complete. That’s all you have to do.”
But Bria shook her head. She pulled away from her mother, or the horrible thing her mother now was. She cowered and it was more than the sight of her or the venom coming out of her mouth, but what she was saying, those awful lies.
You brought it here. Only you know what the endgame is.
Bria let out a shrilling cry. “No, no no! I don’t know anything about it! This has nothing to do with me!”
“It has everything to do with you.”
Bria crawled away. “I don’t want this! I don’t want to be part of what you are! I don’t want that meat!”
Mother Alice stared at her as if it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. She laughed with a grating, strident noise that was chilling to hear. “Oh, you silly, deluded, crazy little bitch. It never ends with you, does it?”
“Please!” Bria begged. “I’ll leave! I’ll go away! I won’t tell anyone! I’ll leave and go to Aiden’s and you’ll never see me again!”
This froze Alice up for several seconds. Then she opened her mouth and roared like a beast. “Aiden? Aiden? How dare you mention that name with what you did! Oh, you drugged-out pathetic little shit, Aiden is dead! You know he’s dead! You drove him to it! He committed suicide because of what you two were doing! Unlike you, he couldn’t live with it!”
Bria fell back against the wall, her eyes glazed, her mouth opening and closing but no words coming out. All her thoughts, fantasies, and repressed memories were whirling around in her head, gaining speed and friction, setting something ablaze in her mind.
“Oh, look at you! Look at the wreck you’ve become! You can’t even face reality! Is that what they did in the hospital? Taught you how to forget, how to numb it all with drugs?” Alice laughed uncontrollably as her daughter trembled and whimpered. “Oh, poor baby! Now the truth is out and you remember! What will you do? Call out for Sady, your imaginary sister from childhood? Is that what? No! You will accept the meat! You must accept it and accept it now!”
Bria continued to cry and shake, all of it too real and yet not real enough. Her head thumped against the wall. Her teeth bit through her lower lip and drew blood. Every inch of her body shuddered as her mind continued to grow into a whirling black storm like the one that hovered over Birch Street.
She began to crawl toward the stairs and Alice did not try to stop her. As she pulled herself up step by step, she could hear her mother’s voice droning on and on. “…wasn’t enough, it was never enough for you! So you starved yourself to the point of death! You vomited everything out of yourself! You emptied yourself until there was nothing but a shell! You carried on with Aiden and that destroyed him just as his death destroyed his father! And then the hospital again and again where they taught you to forget…but I remembered! I always remembered!”
Then the door was closed, and Bria was crawling on her hands and knees across the floor of her bedroom. With a shaking hand, she opened the closet door. Up there, up on top was what she needed. The room moving around her, she found the box on the top shelf pushed in the back where she had hidden it. The box, the box, the box…this is where bad thoughts and bad memories and bad impulses went, here in the box where the bad girl lived and waited. She fumbled the lid off and right away as she saw the notebook with her flowing script she knew, she remembered, she was made whole, the fractured pieces of her psyche coming together as dozens of voices screamed in her head.
And from the box, the voice of Piggy, “Now we can get down to business,” she said.
Bria began to giggle as pink meat juice ran from her pores.
25
Helleye had them.
It had grown to mammoth proportions in the sky, bulging like an egg yolk from the center of the storm’s ever-rotating chaos. It was gigantic and glossy, yellow as leprosy, the sclera threaded with creeping red-black veins, the iris the color of fresh blood, and the pupil a flaring dark star that pulsated like a newborn heart. From a scalded, frayed socket, it stared down at Birch Street and all the ant-like forms that spilled from houseswalking, crawling, limping, dragging themselves forward for the final gathering.
As the nabe softened to rot like the seedy pulp of a Halloween pumpkin two weeks past its prime, the faithful made their way to St. Aubin’s park where they believed meat could be had.
They cared about nothing else.
The meat had remade them, showed them greater glory than they had ever imagined. It was their savior. Their beacon. Their deliverance. Without it, they had begun to rot and fester like the neighborhood itself, tormented by secret desires and fears, anxieties and traumas. But the meat would fix that. They would be reborn by its taste.
So, the survivors made their pilgrimageLara Stromm and Margie Blowers, Mother Alice and Jeff Baker, Debra Standish and Kalen Spriks, even Anna Lee Posey…or what there was left of her. There were others, too, many others, silent meat-eating players in the nabe that had come to commune with their lord, the bloody red shanks of meat that they believed would rain from the sky.
They all shared one thing in common: their minds were just as decayed as their bodies.
26
Bria beat the hordes to the park because it was only right that she be there first to greet the one that had made it all possible. She escaped the mass putrescence that the old nabe had become as it rotted from the inside out, going to mush and mildew, houses collapsing and yards opening like boils, spewing masses of coiling, hungry white grave worms that devoured everything, stripping the neighborhood, rendering it to rungs of bone like a shank of greening meat, a festering sun-washed carcass.
A smell wafted from it, hot and disturbing and unbearably rankt
he fetid stench of carrion becoming one with the soil.
Her mind was sucking into itself like a black hole, swallowing the memories of who she was and who she thought she was, her personality, her subconscious and id and ego and essence, pulling it down into a formless primordial sludge of nothingness, a chaos of ever-rotating blackness and gray mist whose only light was a gigantic yellow eye that had once looked upon her and saved her from herself in her final hour.
Bad Girl and Scary Girl and Good Boy and Sady and Piggy were all just puzzle pieces of the same fragmented psyche that had been shattered like delicate glass in the dirty light of who she was now and who she had been once, the awful things she had done and the terrible things she would yet do.
“I am here,” a voice said behind her, and she remembered the voice speaking at her bedside in the Dark Castle. “You’re going to be hungry now. You’re going to eat. You’re going to fill yourself. I will guide you. I will stand at your side. And when I call you, you will come.”
Bria, her entire body shaking, slowly turned to look upon her savior, her personal demon, the entity, the hunger elemental that had played her so expertly with skeleton fingers. What she saw was a whirring black cloud of flies and shadows and particulate matter that solidified into a grotesque black buzzard that spread greasy dark wings, exposing its soft white underbelly that wriggled with parasites. Its red, fleshless beak snapped at her, saying things in a garbled language that she understood perfectly well, fixing her with its huge single eye which was like some squirming larva eager to slide from its egg case.
She immediately began to cry, then to cackle, part of her wanting to scream and another wanting to cackle hysterically. “I missed you,” she said from the bedlam of her mind. “I thought you’d never come back for me.”
The buzzard made a hissing sound like a vulture, then the cawing of a crow. “I am here. Now you must eat. You must fill yourself with the meat. You must feed on my flesh and my blood and make us one.”
Beset by a crazy, maddening hunger that filled her belly with sharp cutting blades, she came forward, tearing into the entity’s hide with her hands which became claws. The creature was a palpitating mass of meat that welcomed her attentions, tantalizing and seducing her with its delicious, juicy flesh. She tore into the elemental, ripping out shanks and cutlets and bleeding raw handfuls of succulent meat, gobbling and licking, stuffing herself, slobbering and glutting herself with the bountiful feast that was offered. Then the meat was in her and on her, meat juices sweating from her and smeared over her face and body as she kept eating and eating, rolling in the creature’s carcass, sliding through its depths, wearing its hide and drowning in its blood and painting herself with its salty marrow. Finally, ultimately, plucking free its black beating heart, holding the pulsating mass in her hands where it throbbed manically until she brought it to her lips, biting into it, this rarest of all fruits, its sweet blood juices filling her mouth and gushing down her throat as she chewed and gnawed savagely at it until it was no more.
And then
Then the rat-skinned, raw-boned survivors of the nabe had arrived, driven by hunger, starving puppets of Helleye that looked down from above, addicts of the meat. They gathered, squealing and mewling, mouths drooling.
Sady stood there. Sady who was Piggy who was Scary Girl who was just another appendage of the elemental itself. Pink and porcine, swollen from gluttony, her teats bloated with milk, she pointed at Bria and said, “Here she is, the one you want. Now eat her…bones and all…”
They fell on Bria, flies and carrion crows, biting into her, pulling her apart like a soft, well-boiled chicken, dividing her, filling themselves with her as she bucked with orgasm after orgasm, lost in the primal satiety of the meat as she was ripped to pieces and the beautiful white skeleton beneath the skin was finally set free.
Then the ground began to rumble, storm winds shrieking across the park. The worshippers of the meat began to scream with a single shrill, wailing voice as Helleye rotated faster and faster and still faster above them, becoming the sky and the heavens and all eternity, and an immense, unbelievable suction vacuumed eyes from sockets and faces from skulls, sucking muscle and ligament and tendon from bone, organ and tissue and blood in great red spinning clouds that became a cyclonic vortex of anatomy that was drawn up, up, and up into the great leering glare of Helleye which promptly winked closed.
The sky was clear again and below, in the park, heaps of gleaming white bones and nothing else. Nothing but a mystery that could never be explained or even guessed at…not until the meat began to fall again in another place and another time.
About the Author
Tim Curran is the author of Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, Dead Sea Chronicles, Clownflesh, and Biohazard. His short stories have been collected in Bone Marrow Stew and Zombie Pulp. His novellas include The Underdwelling, The Corpse King, Puppet Graveyard, Worm, and Blackout. His fiction has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian. Find him on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/tim.curran.77.