Resurrection (48 page)

“We came to ask…about a bus,” Tommy told her. “We heard it on the police scanner. There’s a schoolbus of kids lost out there.”

“And you’d like to lead those stray lambs home, would you?”

Tommy shrugged. “Somebody’s got to. People in this town, they’re hiding. They’re all just hiding. I’m not about to hide.”

“Then go in my kitchen yonder,” Wanda said, “bring me that bowl of yellow eggs, a plate, and a bowl. And don’t argue about it.”

Tommy didn’t argue.

He came back with a wooden bowl of eggs, a plate, and a bowl. He set them on the table before Wanda and she just kept nodding her head, her face sallow in the candlelight.

She cracked an egg onto the plate and stirred the yolk with her fingertip. “Something bad there…hah! Feel the cold and the death on my fingertips!” She dumped that yolk into the bowl and cracked another onto the plate. “So much rot there! What a delight! Then and now, such amusement!”

Mitch and Tommy watched her go through five eggs like that, talking to herself, cocking her head and listening as if the yolks were speaking to her, sometimes rubbing a bit of slimy albumen between her thumb and forefinger. Sometimes she would laugh and sometimes frown. Sometimes she’d gasp and other times she’d simply shake her head.

And then she started to talk as she rummaged through yolks, telling them that she was not mad, but was practicing an old world science pretty much forgotten by the folks of today. “Was not the egg the symbol of life that had hatched the world?” she put to them. “Was it not the emblem of fertility and harvest? Could not the power of the egg increase the yield of the crops and make barren women fruitful? Of course it could, you silly men! Shows what you know and what you don’t! Mix corn with egg…yes, corn has substance and egg has meat! Yes, yes, yes! Spill an egg and divine your future! Mix an egg white with your husband’s blood and slurp it down, hence, you will conceive a house filled with laughing children! Surely! Now pierce the eggshell on Halloween night and pour the white into a glass of water and those twisting, slimy shapes will tell you things! Eat an egg before bed and you will dream of a week hence! Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Pour the yolk on a wound, say the words, and cast the shell in moonlight…you shall be cured!”

They were both smoking now.

Wanda took a sixth egg and handled it expertly. She spun it on the table and pressed it to her left eye, smiling all the while. Then carefully as a master chef, she cracked it into the plate and there was a threading of blood in it. Tensing, swallowing something down, she dipped her fingers into the cold tissue, wrapped loops of albumen around her fingers and held the dripping ooze up for all to see. She peered through it at the burning candle, then dropped it back down, piercing the yolk with the nail of her thumb. The yolk ran yellow and thick, but seamed with blood.

“Not much time now,” she said to those dumbfounded faces. “Those children are thinning in number…you must go to them
now.”

“But where are they?” Tommy asked.

So she told them.

Mitch felt elated at hearing where they were. Now here was something positive they could do. It beat the hell out of sitting around wondering when those things might show. Yes, it felt very good. Right to his core it felt good…and then, just as suddenly, something else replaced it. Something that made him feel terrified. It opened up in his belly and filled him with a chill fluid. He knew something then, something he could not possibly know. “Lily…I…I can’t leave Lily alone, not with the girls…”

Wanda ran her fingers through the yolk one last time. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mitch, I really am sorry…”

But Mitch was already running out the door.

“Go with him,” Wanda told Tommy. “Now comes the darkness…”

33

Knocking?

Is that what he was hearing? A knocking in that empty house?

Yes, knocking. And hearing it, recognizing it, Deke wondered just how long he’d been hearing it. He’d been lost on his private fantasy train, but he was certain that he’d been hearing that sound for some time. Maybe that’s why his skin was crawling and his guts were bunching up…physical reactions to that sound. That awful drumming sound.

He sat up in his chair.

Knock, knock, knock.

He knew what he was thinking some time before he’d allowed himself to acknowledge it. The knocking. His room was next to Nicky’s and sometimes in the night they would knock out Morse Code to one another. But that didn’t mean anything. Not really.

Deke got up, wondering if he was really going to go up there. If he
dared
go up there. Because there was no getting around one thing: the knocking was directly overhead and the only room overhead was Nicky’s.

Deke walked over to the stairs with his flashlight. He didn’t really believe his brother was up there, but somebody was. As he stood at the bottom of the steps, his heart pounding with a low and muted sound, he heard the knocking again. And then something more. The creaking of bedsprings. He knew that creak very well. It was from Nicky’s bed. Deke had not heard it in a year and a half, but he recognized it instantly for what it was. Somebody had been lying in Nicky’s bed. Somebody had been lying there, knocking lightly on the wall and now…now they were getting up.

Deke’s throat was so dry he could not swallow.

He knew he could not just go up there and meet whatever it was with just a flashlight in hand. There was a shotgun in the basement, but he had no idea where the shells were. He had to think. He didn’t have the time. Whoever was up there was walking across Nicky’s floor, perhaps moving to the doorway even now.

“C’mon, asshole,” Deke said under his breath. “A weapon…something…”

Then he knew. The fireplace tools. Blackened and heavy, drop-forged iron. He took up a poker and had visions of dad stirring the coals in the fireplace so that Nicky and he could roast marshmallows.

Drawing in a sharp breath, he started up the steps.

This was as bad as it could get. There was no doubt of that. He could feel the weight of his body as he mounted each stair, the very pressure of his being. The air seemed hot or electrical around him like it was filled with some stored potential energy that was crackling and about to be discharged.

At the top, his heart nearly stopped.

He heard a shrill, mewling sound and it filled his blood with ice crystals. But it was only Mr. Cheese. Deke put the flashlight on him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Mr. Cheese squinted at the light, wagged the stump of his tail. He was home after all. Always had been. And hear he was, sitting outside the door to Nicky’s room, meowing away.

He’s waiting to be let in, Deke. Old Mr. Cheese is waiting for what’s behind that door to let him in as it always did in the old days…except these aren’t the old days and what’s behind that door is not Nicky. It’s something else now. Something without a soul, something that crawled from a grave.

Mr. Cheese brushed up against his legs and Deke badly wanted to give him a kick, but he didn’t have the heart, he just didn’t have the heart to hurt that poor


Knock, knock, knock.

From behind the door now. From Behind Nicky’s door. The sound of knuckles wrapping and there was no way in hell anyone but the two of them knew what that meant. Nobody but Nicky, or something
pretending
to be Nicky, could know the enormity of what that sound did to Deke. How it shattered him inside and made a scream claw dryly in his throat, made him want to drop to the floor and maybe pull himself into a corner where he could weep and suck his thumb with childish abandon.

He pulled air into his lungs. “Nicky?” he said. “Is that you, Nicky?”

Whoever was behind that door made no sound…no sound but sort of a dripping. But Deke knew they were there, he could sense their physical presence, feel it crawling into him like worms into bad meat, staying there and breeding. Whoever waited behind that wooden panel was wet and dripping and stank like carrion pulled from a drainage ditch.

“Okay,” Deke said. “Come on out then.”

The door swung open and Nicky stepped out, small and hunched-over, his burial suit hanging in tatters, just a gassy-smelling corpse that might have been fished from the bottom of a mossy well. Most of his face had rotted down to the bone, but where the flesh had once been, now there was a gray covering of mold. One eye socket was empty, the other set with a staring huge eyeball that was oily and black.

Deke gasped and stepped back.

Mr. Cheese laid his ears back against his skull, hissed, and ran down the steps.

Nicky smiled and most of his teeth were missing. “Hello, Deke, hello, big brother, I come back for you,” he said, speaking with a childlike voice, but one that had been freed of that little boy lisp that made it hard for him to pronounce the “R” sound. Yes, it sounded somewhat like the voice of a little boy, though damaged and moist, but there was a maturity to it now that was not just old, it was ancient. “You know what I did, Deke? Do you know what I did?”

“Nicky, oh God, no…”

“I came home and waited outside for mom and dad,” the thing said. “Yes, Deke, I waited outside. When dad came out to lock the garage, I was waiting for him. I put my teeth in his throat and I drank his blood and when mom came looking for him, I told her what it was like in hell. I told her what they did to her sweet little boy in hell. And then I killed her, Deke. I killed her and ate her guts and when I was done, I fucked her corpse

”

No this was not Nicky.

Deke was still frightened, but the anger he felt at the obscenities spewing from that thing’s mouth turned something black and bitter inside him. Without thinking, he swung the poker at the Nicky-thing. Swung it hard and overhand like he was trying to pound in a railroad spike. The poker came down before Nicky could react. It came down right on the crown of his head and split it wide open, driving that pestilence right to his knees. He sat there on the floor, holding his head which was wide open from nasal cavity to crown, black silt and slime and tangles of worms spilling out.

And the insane thing was, Nicky laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

There was no humor in it, of course. It was a scratching, metallic sound, vile and mocking. The laughter of the damned. The laughter that might drift up through a hole in the roof of hell. And Deke, half out of his mind with the sound of it, kept swinging and swinging and the Nicky-thing did not fight back. It just laughed as that poker came down, smashing its skull and snapping its bones, ripping and pulverizing it until it was just a mass of writhing carrion…flesh and muscle and skeleton that moved on the floor, dismembered and fragmented. But all through it, that skull laughed and laughed.

Deke just threw the poker and tumbled headlong down the stairs, senseless and mindless, overwhelmed by adult anxieties and childhood terrors. He lay on the floor until reality came swimming back and with it, a stark ugliness that he had never known before or even guessed existed. Everything he’d known, everything he’d held dear had been ripped away now and there was nothing, nothing, nothing.

Upstairs, what was left of Nicky still moved, still laughed, still emoted.

“You can’t run, big brother, and you can’t hide! We’re in the water and in the houses and far down below! Not just here, but everywhere, everywhere! We’re all coming through now and we’re all hungry! Deathless and nighted and born of darkness

”

But that’s all Deke could listen to.

He went over to the cupboard by the fireplace and got the can of fluid dad had started fires with. He sprayed it everywhere and then lit the house up with a candle. Drapes burned. The wood by the fireplace. The carpet. The sofa. It all blazed up and, upstairs, that thing was screaming because it knew what was happening, it knew it would be roasted to ash. It knew the flames would send it back to whatever gutter had birthed it.

The house filling with smoke, Deke grabbed up Mr. Cheese and stumbled out into the rain.

34

By the time they reached the Broad Street Overpass that skirted the very outer edge of Bethany Square, Mitch had woven himself into a cocoon. That’s how it seemed to Tommy and that’s pretty much how it felt to Mitch himself. Suddenly, everything was unreal and out of proportion and he felt numb, frigid and thick and senseless. Like he was wrapped in dirty, spitty silk or maybe drugged. Maybe it was the day. Maybe it was seeing dead people walk and watching some crazy old lady divine things from egg yolks. Yeah, all of that, topped off with Lily being gone and knowing, oh yes,
knowing
that she was gone for good.

“Mitch…listen to me,” Tommy said. “We don’t know anything. We really don’t. Maybe…maybe she…well, I don’t know, but maybe she

”

“Got lost? Went to get a loaf of bread? Forgot to let the neighbor’s fucking cat out?”

Tommy just said, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you don’t know, Tommy, but I know. I know.”

“Because that old witch lady had a vision from stirring runny egg yolks?” Tommy pulled off his cigarette, moving Lily’s big conversion van carefully down the flooding streets, avoiding stalled cars…and anything else that might be out there. “C’mon, old buddy, I bought the show while we were there, but let’s not go ga ga over this shit. There’s no way she could know and…and she never actually
said
something had happened to Lily.”

“She didn’t have to.”