crawling, lunatic shadows, glimpses of places you would not want to go and things you would never want to see.
“So, you’re him, ain’t you?” Miriam said, her hands greasy on the Remington in her fists. “You’re Death… aren’t you?”
“Yes, Death and Life and all that lies before and beyond,” he said.
That voice was still liquid and enchanting, but what it came from was simply hideous.
“You don’t frighten me,” she said to him. “I knew you’d come one night. I’ve lived a long life and the grave doesn’t scare me.”
“Of course not.”
Miriam’s heart was palpitating, her palms sweating so badly that the Remington slid from her hands and thudded uselessly to the floor. Looking on him, she knew her death would be ugly. It would not be quick and it would not be clean. It would be an atrocity. He would squeeze every last drop of human suffering from her and drink of it, grow giddy and drunk at the taste. And when he was done, he would eat her flesh, gnaw her down to the bone.
But he’d get no satisfaction, she decided, because she was old and stringy and tough as a two-dollar steak. And she’d never beg and she’d never scream.
As he glided forward, perhaps expecting this old woman to piss her bloomers and make a run for it, she stepped towards him to meet him. “Got yourself a town, have you? A town all your own, eh, Mr. Death? Turned our Witcham into a great effing boneyard and now you’re here like a fat rat to lord over the refuse pile? Ha! Fool you are and fool you’ve always been! Go ahead, kill and maim and dismember and call your creeping shades from their graves! See what good it does you! Because low or high, rich or poor, they’ve all known the sunshine, they’ve all walked above the earth and known life! Not like a worming, skulking vermin like you! Feeding in coffins and squirming through the muddy earth…”
The dark man stepped forward and something under that gray, mildewed shift of his was moving, undulating. Something that wanted to get out. Something that needed desperately to reveal itself.
“On your knees,” he said.
“Ha! I’ll bow and scrape to no graveworm like you! I’ll not?”
But those eyes would not have this defiance. And the mind that lit them would have even less. Miriam felt something give inside her with a wet snapping and she went down to her knees before him. Her bones were rubber and her muscles flaccid and useless. Her nerves idled with flat indifference and her blood became a cooling tar. There was an eruption of blinding pain in her head and she felt her bladder let go, then her bowels. Her left side went numb. Her eyes exploded with broken blood vessels, purple and livid. A trickle of dark arterial blood ran from her nostrils.
“Now,” said the dark man. “No tortures of the damned, Miriam. I won’t dismember you and eat you. It is you who will feed.”
He held out one white, bloated wrist and slit it open with a hooked thumbnail. Black, foul-smelling blood ran like sap.
“Drink,” he said.
The opened wrist was pressed to her parted lips and that black fluid filled her mouth until she wanted to gag. But there was no gagging, only the choking sounds of her throat swallowing.
“Now bite,” he said.
Her teeth did, sinking into that maggoty flesh and tearing free a moist chunk.
“Swallow,” he said.
And she did, the feel of the rancid flesh sliding down her throat making her stomach roll and her heart seize up, darkness taking her finally, thankfully.
That was how Miriam Blake died.
There was mindless, rabid death like that which had burst into her house. And then there was the kind that Miriam suffered, a violation that was bleak and godless and infinitely foul.
26
Crowded, damp, and dark like being buried in a box.
But maybe worse, maybe like being trapped in a black womb, lodged there like something dead, held fast until worms and rot came. This was how it was for Chrissy. She opened her eyes and felt others around her, some alive and some near-dead and most just simply mad. She was bruised and banged-up, but alive and she planned on staying that way.
She pushed a leg off her lap and elbowed a body from her side. She heard moans and groans, felt a warm wetness as someone bled on her. Wherever she was, it was black as pitch and cramped, confined. The air was heavy and saturated with a clinging damp that was hard to breathe. The floor was dirt, but dry dirt. Wherever she was, it was above the water line. A high place, yet one with a floor of earth.
Now what sense did that make?
What possible sense?
She tried to remember. The University, of course. The bio lab. Lisa and Harry and that asshole Jacky. Oh, God. Lisa was dead and so was the pervert Jacky Kripp. The clown. She remembered the clown. It had taken her. Jesus, it seemed impossible, but the clown had flown away with her.
No, no. That wasn’t it exactly, she told herself. You didn’t fly. It wasn’t like a bird snatched you up, this was more of a drifting. The clown took her and drifted away into the night with her, floating up above the water, floating and floating and floating…
After that, she could not remember.
She must have blacked out.
Well, wherever this awful, smelling pit of bodies was, she had to get out. She hadn’t been dumped here by accident, that was for sure. She was tucked away here with the others for a reason. She knew that much. Maybe they were to be left for days until they starved to death, so they would reawaken like the dead things, be like them, be one with them.
“Where is this place?” she said under her breath.
And a voice said, “I don’t know, but we’re never getting out alive.”
Chrissy felt tears roll from her eyes. This was it then. A pit with no escape. They would languish here until… until maybe that clown or something worse came to get them. It was unthinkable. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She couldn’t accept a death like that. Maybe it was her youth or her ego or just her innate stubborn streak, but she could not accept any of it. Not without a fight.
She was left alive.
Unlike Lisa, she was still alive and if she was still alive, then there was a chance.
She crawled over bodies, not knowing if they were dead or alive. She found a wall of damp, cobwebbed stone. She crawled in the other direction and found a like wall.
“What’re you doing?” a voice asked her.
“Trying to find a way out.”
“There is no way out?”
“Have you tried?” Chrissy said. “Have you even tried?”
Nobody bothered answering her and she did not care. The world was insane or maybe it was just Witcham and what did it really matter? This was the reality of everyone in that stinking pit. Ugly, impossible, but this was it. You could roll up in a corner like a sick dog or you could go out fighting.
And Chrissy already knew what she was going to do.
Whatever had brought all this about had brought hell into the world and now it was time to repay the favor.
