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.
“Baby,” she said, rasping her breath now, more worms and fluids dropping from her. “Baby…”
“You’re afraid of salt,” he said.
She shook her head, that eye darting about. “No, Chuck, no…”
“You’re afraid of it!”
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.
“Put that down!” mom said, trying to inflate herself again, to gain the upper hand.
But Chuck didn’t.
He threw his handful of salt at her.
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.”
Tommy pulled his truck to the curb. “What is it?” he said.
“If I told you, would you believe me?”
Tommy just looked at him in the dimness of the cab. “After what we’ve been through, I’m thinking I would.”
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.”
Mitch shrugged. “And maybe I need some sleep.”
“Which?”
“C’mon,” Mitch told him. “Let’s find out.”
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.
Mitch kept staring at it.
Tommy just shook his head. “Oh, come on, Mitch, not that fucking place.”
“I can’t help it.”
And he couldn’t. Maybe those feelings hadn’t been much more than hunches before, but now they were growing strong and resolute. He could no longer just shrug them off. Driving up the street, it had started in his guts, the sort of excited, exhilarated feeling like you got when you opened your income tax return or a really sexy woman flirted with you. It was like that. Adrenaline like a kid might feel looking at a pile of presents on his birthday. But with Mitch it was something else. Anxious, needling foreboding. It started in his belly and within seconds it had all of him and would not let go.
And that old building?
