ever had clown fingers up yer cunt and a fat clown thumb up yer ass?”
The hand was fat and fungous, sores and boils set over its back. It jumped up and righted itself like a beetle that was trapped on its back and then it crawled across the floor like some immense white spider going right at Harry and the girls. Then it jumped up in the air, Harry ducking out of its path, and latched right onto Lisa. It ran right up her blouse as she screamed herself numb, pausing only to tweak her breasts.
What it did next, nobody expected.
It went right up to her throat and that made her scream even wilder. She danced around, trying to throw it and that hand skittered right up her chin and wedged itself in her mouth, all four fingers and thumb and those alone were of an incredible girth. Lisa fell to her knees, eyes bulging, chest rapidly rising and falling, trying to suck in some air. And that mucid, carious hand began to corkscrew itself deeper into her mouth, leaving white strings of flesh behind it that flapped around like confetti.
Harry and Chrissy went to her, but there was absolutely nothing they could do. The hand, which didn’t seem to be much smaller than a baseball glove, twisted itself completely into her mouth and you could hear the cracking as her jaw dislocated itself. As it squeezed its way in, black bile and gray jelly squirted from the stump.
Lisa fell over, grasping her throat and convulsing, her face going blue then purple, the eyes glazing over.
“Stop it!” Harry shouted. “Stop this! Stop it right fucking now!”
But Grimshanks just laid there, kicking his crossed leg and licking the stump at his wrists. “I won’t and you can’t make me, jailbird! But go ahead and try!”
“Don’t!” Chrissy told him.
Lisa continued to convulse and you could see her throat enlarge, spread out to incredible dimensions as that hand forced itself down her throat, things bursting and tearing in there and blackening the skin with broken capillaries and blood vessels. More of that bile vomited from her mouth and she was dead, suffocated, but still she moved as that hand forced itself deeper into her. It got into her belly and you could see those fingers unfolding, the skin at her abdomen set with five mounds pushing from the inside as the hand stretched its fingers.
Harry ran right at the clown and Grimshanks leaped up into the air, something almost comical considering its bloated girth. It leaped up and hung suspended there as if by wires, then it zoomed right down on Harry, knocking him flat, and winging through the classroom like a bat.
Harry saw it grab Chrissy and fly right out the door.
“You won’t catch us and you won’t find us,” Grimshanks’ sing-song voice echoed out of nothingness. “We go where the bad boys and bad girls go! The ones no one wants, no one ever wants!”
And he went after them, but it was too late. There was an explosion of glass and the clown flew right out a plate glass window with Chrissy and dissolved into the shadows of the night.
And then Harry was alone, except for the carrion-eaters.
19
That night there were sounds.
There was madness in Witcham, a raw and devastating insanity in the city now. Every nerve and fiber bunched with delirium and morbid psychosis. Like the ruined gutter landscape of a lunatic’s mind, things existed and breathed and walked those flooded streets that could not possibly do so in a sane and ordered world. The graveyards and cellars and shadowy hollows had given up their dead, things were breeding and flowering out there in the wet darkness.
Tonight was bad.
But tomorrow night it would be worse, Wanda Sepperly knew.
For tonight what had poisoned Witcham was just learning to crawl, but tomorrow night it would be walking high and in full bloom. And she was of the mind now that there really wasn’t anything that could stop it. A power, an influence, had been unleashed by people who had no true conception of what they’d been toying with. And like a fire with a good wind behind it, it was now going to burn out of control. And Wanda did not need egg yolks or chicken guts to tell her this. There were certain absolutes that you could feel, smell, and taste.
And the shadow that had taken Witcham was one of those.
She had been dozing off and on the past hour, feeling her age, feeling her brittle bones that would barely support her now and the frailty of the flesh that housed them. She had known for some time now that her days on earth were growing nigh and today and tonight she had burned up a great deal of what life she had left in her. She would not survive this, but maybe, just maybe, she could help a few others to.
It was getting on four a.m. when she heard a knocking at the front door.
She came awake from a shallow sleep in which her mother’s voice warned her of things she could not remember when her eyes flickered open.
The knocking came again. It was frantic.
Wanda tried to wet her lips, but they were as dry as the rest of her anatomy. Nothing in her now but sticks and twigs and desert sand. The knocking came again. There had been fear at first, but not now. She didn’t think those out in the streets could stand at her door with what she burned in her incense pots. The stink was heady and maybe a trifle unpleasant and they could not bear it.
She got to her feet, her old bones creaking, and went to the door with the aid of her cane. Funny how she had not needed it all day long. How the knowledge that her mind and her craft and her special talents being needed had revitalized her, made her feel as hot-blooded and flush as a woman of thirty or forty. But now that had drained away. She hobbled to the door, trying to feel in her mind what might be out there, what had come to call.
And though she was weak and worn, her mind was still an intuitive thing and it could sense no sinister intent out on the porch, nothing that walked that should not.
Sighing, she undid the deadbolt and lock, pulled the door open.
A teenage boy stood there, dripping wet, an overfed tomcat in his arms. “My mom and dad are gone,” he said, falling through the door. “And I can’t find Chrissy.”
Then he hit the floor, going out cold.
The Zirblanski twins came running, looking frightened.
“Help him onto the sofa, girls,” Wanda said, taking the cat from him.
“That’s…that’s Deke Ericksen. He used to be our paper boy,” Rita told her.
Rhonda and Rita wrestled Deke onto the sofa, while he mumbled on about things they could not understand. He was drenched and so was his kitty. Wanda toweled the cat off and it began to purr almost immediately.
“Friendly old mouser, ain’t you?” she said, setting him down.
Over at the door, she stared out into the night. Yes, they were out there and she could feel them. Feel the ancient evil they emanated. For maybe some thought they were just the reanimated dead, but she knew better. She could see the true nature of the malignance that filled them.
Yes, they were out there.
And now she saw them.
The boy, this Deke Ericksen, had brought some with him that had no doubt been following him. One of them was a young girl standing next to an oak in the front yard. She was just a gray, withered form, but Wanda could see her face, pale as marble and the depthless eyes staring out of it.
And out in the streets, another rose from the water, a woman who might have been the girl’s mother. She rose up, water running off of her, seeming to be at once flesh and blood and then something that melted into shadow. Her eyes were huge and black and intense.
Wanda slammed the door shut before one of those shadows drifted in.
20
What Chuck Bittner remembered most was running.
After he’d escaped the witch’s gingerbread cottage?a.k.a. Mrs. Crowley’s apartment of crawling goodies?he
