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.
