know…no genitals.”
And it didn’t.
It was as smooth as a Ken doll down there, the flesh white and puckered, but not so much as a suggestion of anything you might consider a penis or a vagina. Nothing. Tommy was appalled, but fascinated at the same time. He crept forward and kicked it. His boot sank right into it with a mucky sound. He yanked his foot back with an awful suctioning sound and the thing moved a bit, enough so that the pink thing in its belly fell out…a human arm, spindly and wrinkled, the arm of a child, but an arm no less. It did not have fingernails and the fingers themselves were webbed together with skin.
Everyone turned away.
Tommy tried the door and it was locked. He blew it open with his four-ten. Then he turned to the guy with him, who was tall and well-built, hard-looking.
“Name’s Tommy Kastle,” he said. “And this is Mitch Barron.”
The guy nodded. “Nice to meet you both and thanks, man. That fucker would’ve had me you hadn’t shown up. Oh, by the way, I’m Harry Teal. And you boys ain’t gonna believe this and you probably won’t like it, but I just escaped from Slayhoke…”
22
And high above Witcham, overlooking Bethany from atop Crooked Hill, Bleeding Heart Orphanage stood tall and sepulchral like a pine box set on end. It held darkness in its belly and exhaled a stale breath of age and woodrot. Where once there had been the not-unpleasant odors of children and chalkdust, polished mahogany and the starched habits of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, now there was the stink of dust and plaster rot, crumbling brick and the creeping damp. The high rotting belfry was home to bats and pigeons, the walls tunneled by rats. The walks were overgrown and covered in yellow leaves, the high, narrow windows boarded and sightless. Within those bowing walls, only ghosts and shades walked, memories drifting down the uneven floors, forever silent.
But now, after two decades of stillness, there was movement.
With little warning, shapes and half-seen figures bled from the walls and slid from beneath stairwells. There was a slithering and a rustle of black crepe and gray cerements. Ivory faces peered from distorted pockets of darkness and pale hands whispered over banisters, vapid and obsidian eyes leered and did not blink, mouths grinned but not smile. Gaunt figures brushed past broken windows, trailing cobweb and plumes of dust. There were knockings and scratchings, the echo of scraping laughter and dead voices. Hollow winds blew down the chimneys and hallways, forever moaning and mourning. Shadows moved and wavered and hissed, cold fingers beckoned and clawed from cellar damps.
The dead were active.
And Witcham belonged to them.
23
Just inside the front entrance of Holbich and Sons, Harry Teal said, “Listen, guys, I ain’t saying I’ve been a good boy or anything. And I ain’t saying they were wrong in locking me way. But if you’re thinking I’m going to cause you trouble or jump you from behind, you got it all wrong. Yeah, I escaped from Slayhoke, but if you would’ve seen what I saw, well you would’ve escaped, too.”
Tommy looked at Mitch. “What did you see?”
Harry shrugged. “Well, I guess after that thing out there, you might just believe me.”
“Maybe,” Mitch said.
So Harry Teal, who was pulling a nickel in a maximum security prison for grand theft auto, started talking, spilling out the dirty details of his life. What he’d done in Milwaukee that had earned him a spot at Slayhoke and how he’d come to work in the mortuary and what had happened yesterday morning when they started moving the stiffs from the old prison graveyard.
By the time he was done, he was shaking and having trouble breathing.
Harry was a tall, muscular guy, who had survived the inner city streets and life in a state hellhole, but to see him there, telling his horror story, he looked like maybe he was finally broken. That finally something had come along that was nasty enough to kick his legs out from under him.
“I ain’t bullshitting you guys,” he kept saying. “They came right out of the fucking ground…dead people, some of ‘em not much more than bones and rags. Then, we got out, you know? Me and Jacky and Roland, those guys I told you about. Then…then there was the University and more of those zombies, Christ, eating out of those jars and then…then that goddamn clown…”
Mitch did a double take on that. “Clown?”
But Harry shook his head. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”
“I’m guessing he wasn’t very funny,” Tommy said.
“No.”
“We believe you, Harry. We’ve seen those dead things. They’re all over the city, walking around, coming out of the water,” Mitch said. “But that thing out there…I don’t know what the hell that was supposed to be.”
“Some kind of mutant like in them movies,” Harry speculated. “Shit, I don’t know. But outside the University, well, I saw a man there, a dead guy walking around. I don’t think he had a head.”
“This just keeps on getting better and better.”
Tommy asked him what they were doing at the University, but Harry said he didn’t want to talk about it. Jacky wanted to do something bad, that’s all he would say about it. He’d been through the wringer and they weren’t going to press him.
“Where’s this Jacky at?”
“Dead,” Harry said. “That clown got him.”
“All right,” Mitch told him. “We’re going into this place, because I got a feeling we should. Less said about that, the better. You can take off or come with us. But don’t try anything, because we just aren’t in the mood to play games.”
“I stole cars, man. I never robbed or murdered anyone.”
“Let’s keep it that way,” Tommy said.
Side by side, they moved through the offices of the factory and out onto the floor itself. It looked like any other factory. There was a warehouse, a shipping and receiving depot with piles of wooden pallets, a forklift, and boxes piled high on skids. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then they went out into the manufacturing area, a foot of water over the concrete floor. There was a machine shop that welded together the frameworks for the dummies and huge thermoforming machines that formed the dummies themselves out of plastic.
“You still got that feeling?” Tommy asked.
Mitch just nodded.
It was still strong. He could not exactly explain it or decipher it. It simply hung on and would not let go.
Harry grabbed a length of iron rebar from a table. “Just to defend myself with,” he promised them.
They moved on, flashlight beams winking off machinery and crates, presses and tables and yellow steel hazardous materials cabinets. Mitch had worked in a few factories in his time. They could be boring places or hectic and crowded places, so noisy you couldn’t hear yourself think. But he’d never, ever been in a factory like this where all you could hear was water dripping and all you could see were shadows and looming shapes. It was positively unnerving. The dead could have been hiding in countless places, waiting to spring or clamp waterlogged hands over your mouth.
“Here comes the good part,” Tommy said under his breath.
They came to a long, narrow room with racks to either side of the aisle. And standing in those racks were dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of mannequins. They leaned out against the bars of the rack like they wanted to climb free. Some were armless and all of them were faceless, this being the place where they were given their
