24
In the darkness, they awoke.
And in the darkness, they were aware of death creeping amongst them. They could smell it and feel it and sense it along their spines, but they did not mention the fact. Sometimes when you don’t talk of a thing, the fear of it lessens. Tara, Brian, and Mark woke with dry throats and sick bellies, trying to see in the blackness that was suffocating and absolute. They were huddled together, pressed against one another. Brian tried to stand and hit his head. The ceiling was low. There were walls to either side.
“Where are we?” Tara said, when she summoned the strength.
“I don’t know,” Brian said.
“I think we’re in a box,” Mark said.
And that terrified everyone into silence. It made them think of being buried alive. Would Mrs. Crowley do such a thing? Oh, they no longer labored under the pretense that she was someone’s favorite nanny or loving grandmother. For after Chuck had run off, as they lay there stuffed with sweets, sleepy and sick and lethargic, old Mrs. Crowley had shown herself and, yes, there had been screaming. Much screaming. For she was every witch in every storybook and every horror comic that they had ever seen or heard about. So would she bury them alive? Oh yes, certainly. But only to asphyxiate them very slowly, to let them go soft and decayed, to season their meat so that it might be more tasty.
Tara, who had breathing very hard, suddenly panicked.
She jumped this way and that, slamming into the other two, hitting her head on the low ceiling and bouncing off the walls. Brian and Mark swore at her, shoved her around and she threw herself forward…right into the bars of the cage that hemmed her in. She grasped the rusting iron uprights, screaming and shouting and finally breaking down into sobs.
“I coulda told you that,” Mark said. “I coulda told you we were in a cage.”
But how he knew that, no one asked.
A cage then. The old witch had locked them in a cage just like Hansel and Grethel in that fairy tale and they did not need to be told that it was probably for the same reason. Here they would be kept, fattened like veal until they were plump and juicy for Mrs. Crowley’s table. No, they did not need to be told that, but the very idea sank into each of them, filling them with a darkness that was abyssal and deep and terrible.
“I…I just want to go home,” Tara said.
“Shut up,” Brian told her. “Just shut up.”
She began to sob again, only he couldn’t hear her because he was sobbing himself. They all were. Mark did it so silently that the others did not hear him, they could only feel the shuddering of his body as hot tears spilled down his cheeks.
“When she comes,” he finally said. “We have to rush her. We have to jump on her and beat her to death. We have to, we have to.”
“Can…can you smell that?” Brian said.
And maybe their eyes were no good in that stark night, but their noses were working. Yes, there was a stink of fetid meat and damp cloth and dark, noisome things, but there was another smell, too. The odor of things boiling on a stove pot. Maybe potatoes and carrots, cabbage and onions. Bubbling things, seasoned things. The smell of the witch’s kitchen.
“Oh Christ,” Brian said. “She’s going to cook us.”
Tara squealed: “No, no, no?”
“Oh yes, I will, my dumplings and sweetmeats,” came Mrs. Crowley’s dry and scraping voice. “Cook you I will and serve you up, I shall. Ha! Plucked and slit, cleaned and gutted, salted tripe and spiced lamb and fat belly- meat!”
There was a sudden intrusion of flickering light and they saw she squatted right outside the cage, a candle in her hand, hot wax spilled over the back of her fist. She did not seem to notice. Her face was hanging and flabby, yellowed with age and decomposition, lined and wrinkled and sunk with hollows. Her left eye was narrowed to a slit, a clear slime leaking from it. Her right eye was wide and bulging, pink and moist and lined with red veins. There was no pupil, not even the suggestion of one.
“Now, who will be first?” she asked, pressing a gnarled finger like a skeleton key to her scabrous and seamed lips. “Who will I filet and fry? Whose skull will I empty for my gruel? And whose fat will I raise my muffins with and whose sweet guts will I candy and press into jars?”
They all fought away from the front of the cage, shrieking and mad and just beyond themselves. None of them wanted to be first. None of them wanted to be brought into that sinister kitchen and put on the chopping block, hacked and quartered, slit and bled and stewed. They scrambled to get away from her, but the cage was only so big.
“Enough!” said the old witch, gnashing her blackened teeth. “You will choose now! Choose or you all go into the pot! All of you! I’ll peel your skin and lick out your eyes and chew on your tongues raw! Oh, what a fine time I’ll have…”
There was silence then. No one said a word. They sat there, shocked and stunned, bathed in that guttering candlelight. They did not seem capable of doing what she asked. It was unthinkable, abhorrent.
“Choose…”
Mark started breathing very fast. He took hold of Tara and she took hold of him and he felt the name rising up his throat to his lips, a blank scream echoing through his head. He opened his mouth, said, “Brian…take Brian…”
“Yes,” Tara said.
“No!” Brian shouted. “No! Not me! Not me! Take Tara! Take Mark! He’s fatter, he’ll taste better…oh please don’t take me, don’t take me…”
He was hugging himself, rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet. Just shuddering and crying and out of his mind at the horror of it all.
“You’ll do,” Mrs. Crowley said.
There was the scratch of a key and the cage swung open.
Nobody rushed her. Maybe the plan sounded good when Mark suggested it, but putting it into action was something else again. The witch reached in and grabbed Brian by one ankle, began dragging him out. He tried to fight, but she was too strong. He tried to grip his friends, but they turned away.
And slowly, Brian was pulled out of the cage.
The candle went out.
He screamed for maybe five minutes until there were wet, chopping sounds and then the noises that followed were grotesque and unspeakable.
25
An hour before dawn, the knocking came and went at Miriam Blake’s house on Kneale Street. Throughout the night which was long and shadowy and surreal, her guests?Lou Darin, Margaret Boyne and her son, Russel?had dozed off and on in their chairs, but never for more than twenty or thirty minutes, always waking with terror in their eyes.
And Miriam was there, shotgun on her lap, to say, “Go back to sleep. I’m watching, I’m always watching.”
Miriam had undergone a transformation that night. Somehow, some way, she was different. Maybe it had been Rita Zirblanski’s punch that had rattled something loose or maybe the idea of her oncoming death had given her a peace and a serenity she had not known since childhood. Her radical views had softened. Because ultimately, she knew, none of that mattered anymore. None of it.
