back together. His eyes were huge and yellow, lacking pupils. And his teeth, like skinning knives.
Albert screamed. “Help me! Help me! Get that fucking thing offa me! Get it offa me! Oh Jesus Christ…”
He was not the sort of guy who would have ever screamed in the normal course of events, but this was certainly not normal. He was thrashing and pulling, that huge, rubbery white hand tightening down like a vise. It would never let go and you could see that. Grimshanks was giggling and squeezing that arm and then the flesh of his hand did not look like flesh, it was not smooth and riddled with dripping sores as before. Now it was lumpy and blistering and bubbling. What had been porous white flesh was now thousands of plump grave maggots, glistening and squirming…they surged right up Albert’s arm in a crawling mass. And then they weren’t maggots, but just a stringy and spreading mat of skin that slowly slid back down Albert’s arm and formed itself into that bulbous, sausage-fingered hand.
Albert was screaming hysterically by then.
Alona took hold of him. “Let him go, you fucking queer boy! Let him fucking go!”
Chrissy grabbed Albert around the waist and pulled with Alona. But it was no good. As she strained and sobbed and wailed, Grimshanks just laughed that much louder.
Finally, Chrissy fell away.
“Motherfucker,” Alona said, falling away, too.
Black juice dripped from Albert’s arm and smoke rose from it. And there was a good reason for that: where that white and worming clown-flesh had touched his own, there was no skin. Just raw quilts of bleeding muscle and straining pink tendon. His arm had been eaten right down to basal anatomy.
And then as Grimshanks cackled with a sound of shattering glass, that hand of his tightened over Albert’s forearm, actually seeming to loop around it in an unbroken ring of white. Then Grimshanks started jerking on Albert’s arm. Each time driving his head into the brick facade of the building. The first two impacts left Albert stunned, the third and fourth, senseless. By the sixth and seventh, there was a bloody stain on the bricks. And Grimshanks kept doing it until Albert’s skull was smashed and his scalp slopped bonelessly like there was nothing but jelly beneath his hair. Then there was a violent, wet snapping noise and Albert fell dead into the grass, rolling away from the window, nothing but a bloody knob of bone left where his arm had been.
Chrissy was the one screaming now.
“Run!” Alona said. “Run like hell!”
The only other person there was Gail and she took hold of Chrissy and pulled her away. The others were all running in every which direction.
Albert’s arm came spinning out of the window, going right over the top of Chrissy’s head and then the clown’s lewd face filled the opening. He was grinning, spatters of dark blood sprinkled over his white flesh. His yellow eyes were huge like harvest moons, tiny red beetles crawling over their surface.
“How about it, Chrissy-pissy?” he groaned. “How about giving a fellah a hand? Huh? Huh? What say?”
And what came out then was not that grotesque hand of his, but a great hooked talon, claws curving downward like the blades of a scythe. Those claws just missed Chrissy’s foot by a few inches, sinking into the earth and digging three-inch deep furrows as they were pulled back to the window.
“Kiss my ass!” Alona told him.
And then she was running with Chrissy and Gail.
Chrissy’s mind was moving in about ten directions at the same time. She was thinking about her mother and Mitch. About Deke. About what she had just seen and what she had lived through thus far. And she was also thinking about the fact that it looked as if Witcham was a lake now and Crooked Hill was an island thrusting from it. And that there probably was no escape.
Alona shouted for them to follow, but Gail pulled Chrissy off in a different direction.
“No!” Chrissy said. “We have to go with her!”
But Gail yanked her into the trees, dragging her into a thicket that was close-pressed and thick with clouds of nipping flies. They fought their way forward, crunching through leaves, stumbling and falling and generally making enough noise to wake the dead…or to alert the already woken dead as to where they were going.
Not good. Not good at all.
Chrissy was as frightened as any that had escaped that cellar, but she knew that they?all of them, in fact? were making terrible mistakes. They should have stayed together and put up a united front, found a way to defend themselves. But instead they’d all scattered to the four winds and that was just plain stupid. Alone or in pairs, Grimshanks could hunt them down and kill them. But all together, they might be too much for him.
So much for reasoning.
Now there was only terror. The terror of the hunted.
The mist was thick, the rain falling gently. Gail led on, moving pretty much in circles. Starting this way, running into thick wet brush, stopping and starting again. It was ridiculous. They came into an opening of sorts and the trees thinned somewhat. Chrissy looked back once and saw Grimshanks. He was climbing down the face of the orphanage. Like some fat white spider, he was crawling down the building from the roof of all places.
Oh, Jesus.
She was trying to remember what she knew of Crooked Hill. There was the orphanage on top, of course, and the ruined church. A little graveyard on the other side. The whole thing circled by a rusty wrought-iron fence. A winding drive that led up there. There were lots of trees that had lost most of their leaves now. That’s what she was seeing as they entered the tangled woods, yellow and orange leaves everywhere, a veritable carpet of them.
“Stop,” Gail said, pulling Chrissy down behind a fallen tree. “We have to think. We can’t let that monster run us like dogs. We have to think.”
Chrissy almost told her it was a little too late for that. “We should have stayed together. Now he can get to us one by one.”
“Well, we can’t let him. We have to do something.”
But what?
Crooked Hill was essentially an island now. And they were trapped on it. They could hide in the woods and play tag with that fucking demonic clown, but sooner or later he would find them. And when he did, when he did…
Chrissy looked around.
Just those stripped trees everywhere. Some had fallen against one another and overhead their branches were woven tightly together. Stumps, logs, piles of leaves. Patches of mist. Water dripping from tree limbs.
A branch snapped in the distance.
“What now?” Chrissy said.
“We…we should move.”
They got up and hopped over the tree. They tried to move soundlessly, placing their feet down carefully, but all those leaves made every step crackle and crunch. They held hands, terrified, exhausted, subsisting on raw adrenaline now. They could hear branches snapping and leaves crunching and they seemed to be coming from every direction.
“He’s coming,” Gail said, her eyes wide and alert like those of a hunted animal.
Chrissy didn’t know.
Yet she did. Maybe it wasn’t Grimshanks looking for her, but somebody definitely was. There were more than one and they were getting closer. There were shapes coming out of the mist, long-armed shapes moving through the trees. Gail looked this way, then that.
Dead, anemic faces were watching them from the foliage. Gail screamed and ran, disappearing into the fog and cover. Chrissy started after her, stopped, looked around and saw nothing. But, oh, they were there, tightening the noose, springing the trap and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
There was a sighing sibilance behind her as something had flown past.
She turned and saw what it was.
Had time to scream as those huge white hands reached out for Gail, seizing her and holding her up in the air by the throat. Gail made a gurgling sound as Grimshanks squeezed her throat and her neck snapped.
“See how pretty the lady is, Chrissy?” the clown said. “See how she dances?” He shook Gail’s corpse around, dancing with it in a circle, pirouetting and dipping and twisting. Blood ran from Gail’s mouth, her head flopped bonelessly on her snapped neck. “See how she likes to dance, Chrissy? You’ll like it, too! Just as they all liked it
