Resurrection (63 page)

It was about this time, as Chuck’s belly filled with white ice, that he noticed something else, too. Mrs. Crowley and Nigel…they were both drooling.

“Aren’t you going to have some cookies, Chuck?” she asked him, wiping her mouth with a hand that was skeletal and yellow-skinned.

“I’m…I’m not hungry.”

“Sure you are,” she said.

Chuck looked at Nigel. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Nigel shook his head. “I’m not hungry. I’ll eat later.”

Mrs. Crowley held out a platter of cookies to Chuck. “Have one,” she said, her face very pallid and fissured like dry bark, her eyes behind those spectacles filling with blood. “It isn’t polite to refuse.”

Chuck slid back in his chair, an inch, maybe two or three. He was terrified now, knowing the secret and wishing he didn’t. All a carefully-constructed ruse to pull them in. That’s all it was. This apartment was nothing but one of those Roach Motels you see on TV where the roaches check in, but they don’t check out.

And Chuck thought:
How did you bake those cookies and heat that cocoa, Mrs. Crowley? I might just be ten-years old and maybe I don’t know everything, but my dad owns lots of rentals and I know a stove needs gas or electricity or even a tank of propane to operate with. There’s not a bunch of hamsters running on a wheel inside it. And there’s no electricity and no gas now, Mrs. Crowley…so how did you make this happen? Am I supposed to believe that you have one of those big black potbellied stoves in the kitchen like Little Red Riding Hood’s gramma? That you feed it sticks and kindling?

“Have a cookie,” she said and it was not an invitation, but an order.

Chuck felt like he might throw up. Because her breath wasn’t sweet like mints or chewing gum, it was repellent and fetid. It smelled like the fumes coming from a dead cat that had exploded with the gases of decomposition. Like she had been chewing on that cat, licking the graying meat from its bones and sucking the spoiled, jellied brains from its skull.

He almost threw-up.

He looked at the others and they saw nothing, were aware of only the fantasy that had been skillfully woven around them. This was reality to them. They looked fat and happy, their eyes dreamy, all slouching sleepily in their chairs.

“Oh, that was good,” he heard Brian say.

Tara made a purring sound like a contented tabby.

Mrs. Crowley was sitting forward in her chair and her dress was ragged and dirty, clots of earth falling from the hem. Her face was ghostly white, the color of a moist, fruiting fungus you might find beneath a rotting log. And like that fungus, it was puckered and pitted, things scurrying just beneath the skin. Her eyes had gone a sickly yellow, threaded with fat red veins, a shiny membrane covering them.

“Have a cookie, you little shit, or I’ll jam it down your fucking throat!” she snarled at him.

“No, no, no,” Chuck said.

The other kids did not even notice what was happening. They looked at each other and laughed, yawned, talked about what they were going to do when they finally got home, never realizing they were fattened flies hanging in the web of a spider and that they would never, ever go home again.

“Have a cookie,” Nigel said.

He sat there with the others, a dead little boy in a black burial suit that had grown dark pockets of mold. His face was shriveled and white, his grinning mouth exposing blackened teeth, his empty eye sockets filled with pale, squirming things.

Chuck looked at the platter Mrs. Crowley had shoved in his face.

There were no cookies on it.

Not a one.

There were only the carapaces of dead insects…slabs of festering, greenish meat boiling with maggots…things like decayed eyes and organs and loops of bowel crusted with spots of mildew. Some mummified fingers. Small black ants crawled over everything, a living carpet of them.

Chuck screamed.

All the platters were filled with carrion and insects.

The other kids smiled happily. Brian said something and a plump maggot wriggled out from between his lips and fell to his lap. He brushed it aside like a stray crumb. Mark took a last swallow of cocoa and it spilled down his chin, except that it was blood, a thick and syrupy blood like that which might leak from the belly of a corpse.

In some back room of his mind, Chuck could hear Grimshanks the clown’s grating voice,
Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

Mrs. Crowley laughed, dumping the platter on Chuck’s lap. He cried out, scattering worms and beetles and rotten meat from his legs.

“You don’t like the drink and food what is offered, young man?” she said, her voice scraping and dusty. “You do not like the meat and blood offered? The meat is high and gamy and pleasing to them what favors it…”

Mrs. Crowley plucked a finger from one of the trays, held it out to him in her own scabby hand. Yellow mucus-like strings of drool hung from her lips. Carefully, with a tongue that was split open with cracks and spotted like that of a hound, she licked the ants from it and then popped the finger in her mouth. With a crunching, pulping side-to-side motion of her jaws, she ate it.

“The meat is good,” she said, a strip of skin caught in the corner of her lips. “Long have I dreamed of the meat and marrow and organ stuffs. Long have I wished for the time of the feeding and the filling. Bad little boys and bad little girls! Ah, sweet gravies and blood soups, bone meal and meaty stews, fleshy joints and well-marbled cuts ready for the spicing!”

Chuck didn’t know exactly how he kept from swooning, from folding up and going quietly mad. He was cold and hot and shaking. Droplets of sweat the size of BB’s rolled down his face.

Nigel was nibbling on a bone, possibly an ulna or a tibia, working his oily black tongue into one shattered end and sucking out the salty globs of marrow. Eyeless and infested with crawling things, he was happily lost in his own macabre little world.

Chuck jumped to his feet.

“Oh, ho, ho!” said Mrs. Crowley, her insect-ravaged face covered in a fine fuzz like that of a sporing penicillin mold. “Will the brave boy run off? Aye, is that what he would do? Well, go, Chucky-fucky! Run and run and run! Abandon your friends to my cauldron and my oven! We thank thee for the offerings made! For the juicy hearts we would eat raw and the stomachs we would boil to soup and the soft, butter petals of fine young brains we would nibble! In your name, Chucky-fucky, we give praise and thanks!”

The other children, again, did not notice a thing, even though Chuck screamed their names again and again.

“Shut up with yer mouth, boy!”
Mrs. Crowley said, rising from her seat, bent and broken, bones thrusting from her hide. As she grinned, the threadbare gray skin of her face split open, hung in loops and threads. She reached out to Chuck with her yellowed, arthritic claws. The fingernails were splintered and filthy, dirt packed up underneath them.
“You’ll not break my spell, you insufferable little shit! Not now! Not now! They are happy! Your friends are happy and content and we shall leave them that way, eh? Happy little lambs hanging from my beams, fattened and smoked and salted! Aye, deboned and stewed and sliced thin!”

Chuck stumbled through the shadows to the door, his head filled with a wild roaring sound. He could hear the gentle snoring of the other kids now and as he fumbled at the lock, something like a sliver of ice punched through his heart because he knew what awaited them. He knew there would be cages where they would be fattened like turtles in swill barrels. That they would be dressed out and cooked up in a big, greasy black pot.

And he was abandoning them.

Mrs. Crowley was advancing on him, flyblown and stinking, shuffling along in her ragged dress with the aid of a cane carved from a hickory stick.
“Nibble, nibble, like a mouse,”
she said, cackling.
“Nibble, nibble like a mouse!”
Her head was cocked to one side, the flesh yellow and pebbly and oddly reptilian like that of chickens. Her neck was a withered stump, her face toothy and red-eyed like some garish Halloween decoration you taped up in a window when the nights began to grow long and cold.

“Go ahead and run, you little pussy! Run away, run away, run away all!”
she screamed after him.
“You think I’m just some dead thing which thought to move? Wrong, you are, sweet young master! I’ve inherited this bag of bones as I’ve inherited a dozen others! And when this hide falls to worm and ruin, I’ll slide below into those dark spaces and low places and brood over my eggs! But I’ll be born again, I’ll rise quick one last time twenty year or fifty year from now with a new skin and I’ll get you! I always get all the bad little boys! I’ll slip into your room by the yon dead of the moon when you’re old and wheezing and I’ll chew your throat out and make merry with the soft and slimy and chewy things in your belly

”

The door opened and Chuck stumbled out into the corridor.

Yellow witch fingers crept around the edge of the door.
“Nibble, nibble like a mouse,”
said the old hag herself.
“Nibble, nibble…”

Then the door slammed shut.

And Chuck ran.

16

As they cruised Upper Main, Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine that woke up in the morgue? Sure as shit. Stanny McCoy. Guy liked to drink. I mean he
really
liked to drink, Mitch. Been in and out of detox, couldn’t hold a job. He was one of those guys you see pedaling around town on an old bike with a basket full of cans he dug out of dumpsters and ditches. They’d throw his ass in detox over at St. Mary’s. A month later, they’d spring him and he’d be back on his favorite barstool, pissed to the gourd. Well, one day he passes out over in Chatterly Park, middle of a January night. Ten below or some shit. Some Public Works guy plowing snow the next morning sees Stanny leaning up against a tree, frozen right to it. Well, cops and ambulance guys declare him dead. They had to use a salamander heater to peel him off that tree because he was iced right to it. Anyway, they find Stanny a drawer all his own over to the county meat locker. Fifteen hours later, he comes around. Scared the shit right out of the guy pulling the graveyard shift, Stanny moaning and scraping around in the icebox.”

“He live?” Mitch asked.

“Sure as shit. Spent like two weeks in St. Mary’s, recovering. Lost a couple toes, nothing else. They said it was the booze that kept him alive. The booze and the cold lowered his body temperature, made him sort of hibernate. Then he thawed and woke up. You know what my mom said to him?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Well, Stanny, I hope you see the evils of liquor now, I hope this changes things for you.’ And Stanny says, ‘Oh yuh, oh yuh, that’s for sure. From now on, I only drink inside.’ And that’s the God’s honest truth, Mitch.”

Mitch stared out the windshield, seeing too many shadows prancing about out there. “And is there a point to that story, Tommy? A…whaddyacallit…moral?”

“Sure,” Tommy said. “Stanny was right. Fuck this noise, let’s go get drunk.”

“I wish I could.”

“You got a plan, Mitch? Any kind of plan?” Tommy asked him. “I mean, even if you don’t have a clue, you could pretend otherwise…just for my sake.”

A plan.

Yes, what exactly was the plan?

Mitch didn’t know. This was probably some wild goose chase perpetuated by the visions of some crazy old lady that saw prophecy in egg yolks and chicken guts. But it was all he had and a starving man will gladly eat crumbs. He looked at the dash and the glowing green display of the digital clock told him it was almost three a.m. That meant roughly another four hours of darkness this time of year. And with the rain and mist and gloom, probably more like five. For even today at noon, it was so gray out it had looked like twilight.

Lots of darkness and then only scant light.

He didn’t know what to do. He could only follow Wanda Sepperly’s vague directions as to where Chrissy might be. Thing was, Upper Main was nearly two miles long and with two feet of water in the streets that was steadily rising, it seemed like forever. Main was dead. Being that the University was just off of it, Main was thronged with bars and clubs and what have you. It was busy day and night with student trade and traffic. But tonight it was pretty much deserted. They’d seen a few cars, some people on the streets from time to time, but they hadn’t slowed down enough to stop and chat. The way they were moving…or not moving, just sort of shambling around or standing dead still made Mitch pretty sure that they probably weren’t people at all.

He loved Chrissy.

God knew he loved her.

But it was all eating at him and he began to feel claustrophobic and the need to flee Witcham became very strong. It wouldn’t be too difficult, he figured, to talk Tommy into driving them out of town and to the National Guard camp everyone had been talking about. If the highway was still passable, they could have been out of the Black River Valley in an hour.

But it wasn’t going to happen.

He’d sooner have stuck a gun in his mouth and jerked the trigger. Because that would have been far less painful than leaving his daughter,
his
daughter, to the horrors of Witcham and hoping she would make it out on her own.

But how long could they keep looking?

How long before the stress and bullshit, the horror and madness and, yes, lack of sleep, would nail shut the coffins of their brains? Because it was coming and he knew it. His limbs felt heavy and his eyes gritty. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate and when he did, his mind was filled with reaching shadows.