malignancy with hollowed yellow eyes?
Alona grabbed her and pushed her through the first doorway they came to, into a dim, dusty room that was long and narrow like a hospital ward in an old movie. There were boarded windows on the far wall.
Whatever it was, it was upstairs now.
They could hear its shuffling footsteps and they were coming.
Getting closer and closer.
27
Mitch saw it, felt he was being seen.
There was Crooked Hill, as it had always been called, and capping it, the orphanage. Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. A three-story pile of crumbling brick, the sort of grim and harrowing place that etched itself into the mind instantly as a place of ghosts and the restless dead. How could it be anything else? It was built in 19^th century Midwestern Carpenter Gothic style, tall and dark and forbidding, just a crazy-quilt of tall and narrow windows, overhanging eaves, and razorbacked gables. A catacomb of rooms leading into rooms, attics and cellars and crawlspaces and leaning stairways. Its roof was jagged and sharp and rising like mountain peaks in some expressionistic film, each one sharp enough to slit open the belly of the sky. And on them, ancient lightning rods and rusted weathervanes and soot-covered stacked chimneys leaning precariously this way and that. A great and rambling surreal tomb.
What had they been thinking? Mitch thought then and there. What in the name of all that’s holy had they been thinking when they converted that relic into an orphanage? Just the sight of it is enough to inspire nightmares and breathless dreams of haunted houses. What had children thought when they were brought here? Or did they even think? Did the sight of that architectural graveyard simply rip their minds open and make them scream themselves numb?
“Jesus,” Tommy said. “I can almost feel it waiting for us.”
Deke swallowed as they drifted up towards Crooked Hill. “When I was…when I was in Junior High, we came up here on a dare. And you know what? We made it to the front door and they we turned and ran.”
Mitch did not doubt that.
When he was a kid the place had actually been in operation. He’d even known a few kids that had lived there. And although they’d claimed that the place did not bother them, he’d never believed it. For on a clear day, you could see that monstrosity practically from anywhere in the city, a great heap of black bones lording over Witcham itself. And now, right now, he could sense all the nights locked up in the old place, the dismal lives spent in its guts, the horror and despair and godawful loneliness that dripped from the walls like blood.
And as he looked at it, feeling the childhood terror he’d had of the place spreading out in his belly, he felt something else. Something electric and inexplicable.
Chrissy.
Chrissy.
Chrissy.
Chrissy was in there.
“Let’s go get Chrissy,” he said.
“If she’s there,” Tommy said.
“Oh, she’s there, all right. Can’t you feel her?”
Maybe Tommy could and maybe he couldn’t and maybe he had shut down things like feelings because you didn’t want to be emoting in this place. They rowed the boat up to the hill, took hold of a bush and pulled themselves in. When they were all out on the grass, they dragged the boat up in case they needed it later.
Mitch figured they had roughly thirty minutes of daylight left. That wasn’t a lot, but it would have to do. It seemed wrong going into the orphanage in broad daylight, even if that broad daylight happened to be rainy and misting and overcast, the light dull and leaden like it were strained through motheaten cloth. It seemed like you couldn’t go into such a place until after nightfall, like maybe the doors wouldn’t open until the sun had set. Midnight, would have been better. Midnight on an especially dark and wind-blown Halloween night.
But he figured for places like the orphanage, Halloween was every day.
Side by side, they moved up through the trees, not saying a word. There was an old churchyard near to where they were, flanking the ruined hulk of an equally old church. Mitch knew where the orphanage itself was, led them towards it. They stumbled through the moist undergrowth until they came to a road. Its pavement was buckled and frost-heaved, but it beat the shit out of the woods.
The rain started coming down hard again, pelting them and stinging their faces, reducing visibility to just a few yards. They kept moving, drenched and heavy. The ground was a sluicing bog of mud. The dead could have been anywhere in that sodden grayness. Anywhere.
“If I ever get dry again,” Tommy said, water funneling off the brim of his baseball cap, “I mean really fucking dry, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself.”
“Rain, rain, rain,” Deke grumbled.
Mitch would have complained, too, but the way he was looking at it, at least the rain was just water. It could have been that yellow rain that melted people. The road up to the orphanage was a river now. Water was rolling down hill and trying to wash them off their feet.
Squinting in the rain, Mitch said, “A few turns and we’ll be there.”
Tommy opened his mouth to say something and there was a load booming sound, a cracking sound. Gunfire. Something sprayed into the brush just ahead of them. It was muffled by the driving rain, but there was no mistaking it.
“Shotgun,” Tommy said, pushing himself and the others into the ditch at the side of the road. Right into some three feet of standing water.
“You missed,” a voice called from the trees. “You goddamned well missed. What kind of monkey-assed, shit- fucking shooting was that?”
Jesus Christ, Mitch thought, that voice. It was?
“Hubb Sadler,” Tommy said. “That’s Hubb Sadler.”
Of all goddamned things.
“I can’t get a clear shot in this rain, now can I?” Knucker said.
“You better leave the shooting to them what knows how,” Hardy James said.
The three of them began to bicker back and forth until Hubb started to shout at them, calling them a bunch of “silly, useless, dick-happy cock-knockers.” Tommy was chuckling and so was Mitch. Deke was at a loss as to what was so funny about them being shot at by this bunch of nutcases.
“Hey! Hubb Sadler!” Tommy called out. “Lower your goddamn gun! We’re friendly over here.”
A moment of silence punctuated by the pouring rain.
“Who’s that? Who in the name of the fuck-humping Christ is that?”
Tommy identified himself. “I’m with Mitch Barron. We’re coming out. Don’t be peppering our asses or we’ll shoot back.”
“Come out slow, you fucking asshole,” Hubb said.
Tommy laughed. “Same old Hubb.”
Tommy and Mitch led the way forward out of that chilly, flooded ditch and up the road until the figures of several people were visible in the trees. Sure, there they were, the Three Musketeers or The Three Stooges… depending entirely how you looked at it: Hubb Sadler, Hardy James, and old Knucker herself who could drink any living man under the table and had been one mean-assed arm wrestler in her younger days. But they weren’t alone. With them, dressed in yellow rain slickers were a couple others from the store: Hot Tamale and Herb.
“Be careful,” Hot Tamale warned her little group. “They might look alive, but that don’t mean that they are. I say we shoot ‘em to be sure.”
“I say you help feed the third world and go on a diet,” Tommy said.
Hot Tamale took a step forward, very round and very excited. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Mouth. All the fucking people in the world and we got to hook up with a weasel like you.”
