Resurrection (68 page)

“I don’t want to, Chuck. I’ve been resurrected and I like it.” She ate another piece of meat with that same chomping, gulping action. “Your father liked men, Chucky. He liked the feel of a cock in his mouth. He liked to put his own up men’s asses. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“Mom…”

“Oh, it’s true, Chuck. I should have known. All the while we were married, he was playing with other men. That explains why he always wanted to fuck me in the ass. I didn’t like it at first. But then later, yes, I liked it. When I was drunk I liked the feel of it. That was why I left, baby. Because your father was a queen and I like the feel of cocks in me. I liked to be fucked by men. Any men. I liked to be fucked by two or three men at the same time. I loved the feel of it.”

Chuck was crying now, tears running down his face.

Mom turned away from her fry pan. “Don’t be so weak, Chuck. Don’t be so fucking weak. You’re like him! You’re like your father! Soft and weak and gutless! I’d hoped there’d be more of me in you! I’d hoped you’d be strong! Strong like me!”

Chuck shook his head. “You weren’t strong! You…you killed yourself!”

Mom stopped, cocked her head to one side. She looked momentarily confused. That single black eye jittered in its socked, pulled in and pushed out, pulsing like a macabre slug. More mucus ran from it. The swollen bulge at her cheek trembled. It split open and a trickle of black blood ran from it. A plump, white worm emerged and dropped free, followed by another and another.

“
Yes, Chuck, I
did
kill myself,” she said, examining the black surgical lacing that held her wrists closed. “Do you know what that was like? The loneliness and hopelessness and stark pain of it all? Alone, alone, alone! Lying on that floor, vomiting my guts out and thinking about my baby boy who did not love me anymore! Who would not even return my calls or send me cards on Mother’s Day!
Do you know what that was like? To die alone, alone, alone?”

“
Come here!”

“No!”

And he wouldn’t so she started coming to him, a green worm slinking from the ruined cavity of her nose. “You do as mother says or I’ll do something awful to you! I’ll call the clown, Chucky-fucky! I’ll call the clown here! Grimshanks will come and, oh, the terrible things he’ll do to you!”

Chuck just stood there, infinitely more disgusted by this thing that pretended to be his mother than he had been by Mrs. Crowley or even that clown. “You’re not my mother,” he said again. He did not say it in a whining, sobbing voice, but in a voice that was strong and sure. “You’re not my mother.”

Mom stopped for a moment. She did not seem to like what was happening here. This was not how it worked. Chuck was supposed to be terrified, on his knees, broken and sobbing. His willpower shattered by the horrors she so freely offered up.

Time for a new tactic. Time for something worse. Time for something that would strip his gears and lay him low.

Mom grinned, dripping and crumbling and raining worms.
“Well, Chucky-fucky! Long time, no see! How did that old witch Mrs. Crowley treat you, eh? Tricks and treats and gobs and goodies?”
The voice was that of the clown now. A sing-song voice of dementia from some slimy gutter in hell.
“And you ran off, ran off, ran off, and left your friends! Tsk! Tsk! Do you know what she’ll do to them? Cut them and carve them and serve them up sweet! Boil their blood to broth and pickle their naughty underparts in dusty jars! Nibble, nibble, like a mouse! Who’s that nibbling at my house? Hee, hee, hee! Oh, they’ll suffer and they’ll whine and they’ll cry boo-hoo! And it’ll all be your fault! YOUR FUCKING FAULT!”

Chuck felt like he was going to fall right over. He felt dizzy and wobbly. No blood in his veins and no air in his lungs. Dear God, it was too much. It was like being back in that flooded street in Bethany with Tara and Brian and Jacob and the others. Once again, he could smell an eternity of circuses and carnivals and county fairs that had been stored up in some musty trunk. The cotton candy and hot dogs and popcorn. Yes, everything sweet and greasy and salty. The stink of elephant shit and hay and garbage. He could hear whistles and sirens and calliope music. It was coming from every direction, overloading his senses. And mom…Jesus, but the mom-thing was even starting to look like the clown. It could not be, but he was seeing it happen before his staring eyes. Green pom poms were erupting from her chest and a bright red ruffled collar thrust out from her throat. Her hands became oversized white gloves, the wrists still sutured.

It was happening.

It was really happening.

“
Yes, they’ll suffer, all your friends will suffer,”
the mom/clown-thing was telling him, her eyes lost in black diamonds, great red painted spheres of rouge appearing at her white, rounded cheeks. Except it wasn’t rouge, but the spilled blood of children.
“But their suffering will be nothing in comparison to YOURS, you drooling, dick-licking, spineless little mama’s boy! Because I’m going to show you what old Grimshanks does with tasty little boys! I’ll show you all the vile, obscene things I make them do! I’ll show you what it’s like to beg for mommy and daddy! I’ll show you what I make them lick and suck and touch! Oh, you won’t be the same when I take your cherry, little boy! You’ll never be the same! You’ll beg me slit your throat just like all the others

”

Chuck knew he was defeated.

He could not fight against this thing. It would have him. It would take him and touch him and destroy him, make him beg for death,
beg
for it. You could not live after what this thing would do to you.

The clown advanced on him and a voice in his head said:
Fight him. It’s all part of the game. The fear, the intimidation. That’s how it starts. And like a bully in the schoolyard, if you give into it, you’re done. When you weaken, it gets stronger. Fight! Fight! Fight! Do something! Anything!

Chuck stumbled into the kitchen, got the table between himself and that evil clown. How could he fight it? How could he honestly fight it? He did not know, but his hand reached out onto the counter by the sink. It found a glass jar filled with sugar and pelted it at the clown’s face. Chuck was a good athlete. Not just an exceptional soccer player, but a Little League pitcher that had, last summer, gotten his team into the state finals. He threw that heavy jar at the clown and it hit him dead center. The clown made a barking sound and fell backward. One of those white hands pressed against his face and blood ran between the fingers.

You hurt it! See? You hurt it!

Chuck did not really believe that he did. At least, not physically. His defiance was what hurt the clown.

The hand pulled away from the face and beneath there was just a black cavity filled with maggots.
“Oh, Chucky-fucky, you ruined my good looks!”

But Chuck was not listening. He threw a can of coffee. A bag of flour. A rolling pin. And then he grabbed a canister of salt. He paused before throwing this. The others items the clown had merely batted from the air, but now he backed away and those clown features began to run like wax. Beneath them was mom. She was shaking her head, that single black eye looking concerned.

“Chuck,” she said. “Baby, put that down…don’t hurt mommy…”

What was happening here? Whatever this thing was, mom or monster or demon clown, it seemed suddenly afraid. Was it just the defiance? The fact that he’d fought back? Or was it what he was holding? The salt? He remembered in history class that when the Romans sacked a city, they would tear it down, salt the earth so nothing would grow…was there an analogy here?

Holding the salt, Chuck stepped forward.

The mom-thing stepped back quickly, bumping into the refrigerator door, pressing herself tight against it with outstretched hands like one of those people that got knives thrown at them.

He popped the lid and grabbed a handful. Yes, fighting back had been the trick. They did not like it when you fought back. They played their games and you were supposed to be paralyzed by fear. But when you fought back, it unsettled them. And especially when you discovered their aversion to salt.

And she screamed. Screamed with rage and agony and bitterness. The salt spattered in her face and it was like throwing hot grease at her. It actually sizzled as it struck her, plumes of smoke and steam rising as her features literally
dissolved.
She thrashed back and forth, her hands going to her face and when she yanked them away like she’d placed them against a hot stove lid, strings of tissue came away with them. She was howling like a dying animal now, loud and raw and bestial-sounding. A roaring. Chuck threw more salt and she fell to her knees, twisting and writhing, the salt eating into her like acid. Her head struck the floor and burst open with a slop of something like black oatmeal. She screamed and hissed, but you could barely hear it above the sizzling, burning sound of her flesh. Steam blew from her mouth and smoke funneled from her body, filling the kitchen with a gagging, repulsive odor of seared meat. She thumped up and down on the floor, her flesh bubbling and popping and spattering, going brown, then black, and flaking away. The suturing at her wrists popped open. As she struggled, she sprayed black blood in every direction. Then her chest burst open and a nest of wriggling red worms pushed out, steaming and dying.

Chuck went over there and dumped the rest of the salt over her.

Everything curled and blackened and fell apart. Whatever the thing had been, it now looked like something you might have dragged from a fire pit: just cinders and carbonized flesh, the worms twisting like black superheated wires. Her jaw fell open and then there was nothing but the sizzling and steaming.

Chuck threw up.

The sight, the smell, the feel of it all was too much. He turned and vomited into the sink. And then he ran. Ran right out the front door and into the rain. Anything, to get away from that smell and that sight.

21

“Stop,” Mitch said, the words falling out of his mouth before he even thought of speaking. It was automatic. It was knee-jerk. He swallowed. “Pull over.”

Mitch sighed, rubbed his tired eyes. “This sounds fucking nutty…but I got this feeling. This feeling I can’t shake.”

“I had a cousin like that,” Tommy said.

“I’m serious,” Mitch told him. “All day long…I can’t explain it…but I’ve been having funny feelings. Before I hooked up with you over to Sadler Brothers? I was cruising around, checking the flooding out, and I had this feeling inside, this sense like the shit was about to hit the fan. And that feeling was right. Ever since, I been getting some kind of intuition on things.”

“You and Mother Sepperly.”

“She’s got something and you know it.”

“Yeah I know it, only it scares the shit out of me, that stuff. Knowing things you can’t know. It just ain’t right.” Tommy stared off through the windshield. The rain looked like teardrops streaking down it. “Maybe that’s why she sent us out here. Maybe she knew that if you got out here, those feelings of yours would lead us where we needed to go.”

They stepped out into the wet darkness, the water nearly up to their knees. Tommy’s Dodge Ram was set high, but it was only a matter of time now until it was of no use. Soon, only boats would be able to ply the streets of Witcham. And still the rain fell and fell unceasingly. They were about three blocks from the University now, right on the edge of Bethany and Pennacott Lane or Guttertown as it had been known many years before. It was a very desolate spot. What cars there were were abandoned at the curbs, some right out in the streets. The buildings around them were pitch black and empty, lots of old warehouses
and freight depots.

“You picked a real nice spot here,” Tommy said, panning his flashlight around, his four-ten balanced atop the shoulders of his raincoat.

“I didn’t pick it,” Mitch explained. “It picked me. Let’s just look around. If the feeling fades, we’ll just go.”

They moved down the street, guns in hand, searching around with their lights. The rain fell and the sky boiled black overhead. A slight wind blew, rattling rusted sheet metal siding on some of the warehouses. They cut between two buildings for no other reason than because Mitch thought it felt right. There was an empty parking lot that had become a wading pool and beyond it, a huge gray structure, three-story, that looked ominous. It seemed even bigger in their minds, monolithic and almost frightening. Like it had been erected as a warning.