“What’s the matter?” Tommy asked.
He told him.
“Shit,” Tommy said.
They went up the stairs side by side and when they got there, they went right to the master bedroom. Right away, that telltale scent of lilacs became almost overpowering. Beneath it, there was something else, a dankness Mitch was glad he could not smell. What he saw in there?in his bedroom?was much like what they’d seen in that other bedroom yesterday at the Bell house. Someone had been here. Someone had been at Lily’s vanity. They had scattered cosmetics and perfumes and what have you everywhere. Drawers were yanked open, emptied. Silky underthings hanging out like guts. And there was the tube of lilac body lotion. Most of it had been squirted all over the vanity top and then tossed to the floor and stepped on, the remainder seeping into the carpet. Somebody had been using it, though. It had been on their hands when they pressed them against the vanity mirror, leaving creamy prints there.
Mitch felt like he was going to swoon. He steadied himself against the chest of drawers. “She was here. Last night or early this morning.”
Tommy swallowed. “Who?”
“Lily.”
“Mitch, you don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
And he did.
They come back that quickly. They die and rise that quickly.
Tommy was looking at the bed. There was a gray stain on the quilt. Somebody had been laying there, somebody that was wet and dirty.
Sure, Mitch, he thought. She came back here looking for you. She went to her mirror and smashed things around looking for the lotion. When she found it, she smeared it all over her cold white flesh. Perhaps grinning like a skull the whole time. Then she laid in the bed and waited for you. As she had waited for you other nights…
“She was here,” Mitch said. “She might still be. You got that salt on you?”
Tommy pulled the waterproof bag out from under his raincoat.
“All right. If she’s here, let’s find her.”
Tommy didn’t argue.
They went from room to room, looked in closets and behind furniture and under beds. They could not find her. Finally, they opened the cellar door and looked down there into the black rising water. It was at least four feet deep and rising, coming right up to the seventh or eighth step. Cardboard boxes and plastic bottles of detergent bobbed on the surface.
“She’s down there,” Mitch said. “I know she is.”
“In the water?”
“Where else. She’s sleeping on the bottom, waiting for dark to come again.”
“You’re…you’re not going down there, Mitch.”
“No.”
He shut the door and locked it from the outside. If she planned on walking around tonight, he wasn’t going to make it easy on her. Is that what they were all doing, though? he wondered. Laying down beneath the water, sleeping, dormant? And when night came, they’d all rise back up. Five times as many as there were last night.
Christ.
Outside, in the falling rain, Mitch just stood there, making himself breathe in that moist, tainted air. Purging the smell of lilacs from his head. The worse smells coming from the cellar.
“I think we should take a drive out to the Army base like Wanda said,” Tommy suggested.
“All right. But first there’s something we have to do.”
“Which is?”
Mitch looked down the street to where Miriam’s house rose from the pale mist. “There’s someone in that house and I want to know who it is.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because when we left, I left the front door open. Now it’s closed.”
11
Mitch took hold of the door at the Blake house and gave it a pull and it nearly fell on top of him. Only one hinge stopped it from doing so. He set his rifle aside and leaned it up against the frame like it had been when they’d first looked for Miriam and the others. Once he did that, he gathered up his rifle and stood there, thinking. While Tommy and he had been checking out the other houses, somebody had set the door back in place.
“I wonder why,” he said out loud.
“Why what?” Tommy said.
“Why somebody put the door back up.”
Tommy pulled off his baseball cap and shook rain from it. “Why else? They put it up so the light wouldn’t get in. Maybe whoever’s in there, don’t care much for the light.”
Mitch had been thinking the same thing, more or less. When they’d came here before, he’d done little more than stick his head in the door and call out for Miriam. But he had smelled something in there. Death. Not an unusual smell in Witcham these days, but inside a house it was much stronger than out in the flooded streets. It was contained and heightened, purified.
“What you say we go get some pancakes?” Tommy said.
Mitch ignored him and walked through the doorway. It was just a mess in there. Not just the broken furniture he’d seen before and the askew pictures, but things much worse. The carpeting was covered with muddy prints and gray water squished out of it when you walked on it. Miriam’s guncases had been overturned, the doors torn off and weapons scattered about. A mirror was shattered. Everything had been swept off the mantel and crushed underfoot with the remains of the broken window.
“Looks like a really pissed off Avon lady called last night,” Tommy said.
Mitch saw muddy handprints on the walls leading to the kitchen. Most of them were badly smudged, as if especially grimy hands were slapped against the walls and dragged along. Some were very distinct, though. Adults, even children lower down. A few had bits of tissue stuck to them.
Mitch smelled the stink of death and looked at the wreckage, thinking, this would have been us last night. If Wanda hadn’t been burning that shit to keep the dead away, they would have stormed her house and killed us all.
They looked around in the rooms downstairs, saw nothing of much interest. The dead had rampaged through here, but apparently they’d come and gone quickly, left little evidence of their passing.
Mitch walked over to the stairs.
“More stairs,” Tommy said. “This is over, I never climb stairs again in my life.”
Mitch was feeling it the same way he was. Stairs. Stairs always led somewhere bad these days. Whatever was in the house was up there and he could smell it, something just beginning to decay with a sharp green smell. It was up there and he could feel it. It had a heavy, almost ominous physical presence that dried the spit up in his mouth. He tried to tell himself it was just the stairs, the memory of other things they had led to, but he knew better. Something was up there and whatever it was, it had raised the fine hairs at the back of his neck.
He cleared his throat. “Miriam? You up there?”
“She’s dead, Mitch. She ain’t about to answer you even if she’s here.”
Mitch waited a moment. Two, three. He felt a bead of perspiration slide down his spine to his beltline. He was holding onto the Remington so tightly, he thought his fingers would leave grooves in the stock.
“Miriam,” he called out, his voice echoing through the emptiness up there. “We’re here. We’re here to see you.”
Tommy looked at him like he was mad. Looked like he was about to say something smart and cutting. But he didn’t. Because a voice came from up there and the sound of it made them both want to run.
