Their footfalls were mucky and moist. Down the hallway they went, slapping the walls, dripping and rotten and infested with vermin.
Chrissy and Alona looked at each other.
Alona shook her head.
Was there room for a glimmer of hope here? Chrissy wasn’t going to let herself believe that. There’s no way in hell those dead things weren’t going to find them. Just no way.
The footsteps were returning now, slow and inexorable. Those things were not slapping the walls now, but just running their hands along them. The noise it made was like wet dishrags dragged over concrete. She could hear them breathing with a sound as if their lungs were filled with sludge.
“Chrissy,” one of them said, a boy apparently, with a hissing sound like air leaking from a tire. “We know you’re here. We can smell you.”
Chrissy felt nettles in her stomach, piercing and sharp. They knew she was hiding. Not that someone was hiding in general but her specifically. What did that mean? Jesus, what did that mean?
“Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy, come out and play,” the voice said.
It was joined by another that came from a mouth filled with vomit: “Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy. We can feel you…we can smell you. Are you playing hide-and-seek? Do you like games?”
Still more voices, all of them thick and oozing and awful, in unison now: “Chrisssssseeeee… Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…”
All of them were the voices of boys, wet and slopping, but boys all the same. What did that mean?
The terror that swept through her and settled into her was solid, physical, palpable. Her heart was hammering and her breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. Her skin felt so tight, she thought she would literally burst open. And inside, it felt like her stomach was pulling up into her chest, making her feel woozy and nauseous like she had when she was little and got car sick. Alona held onto her tightly. She would not let her go. And that was a good thing, because if she had Chrissy would have bolted right out the door and right into the waiting arms of those…monstrosities.
One of them was paused right outside the door, the one with the hissing voice that seemed barely audible above the buzzing of the flies. “Chrissy pissy, you better come out. Grimshanks wants to play with you. He said we have to find you. We’re having a party for you. He wants to do to you what he did to us. Chrissy, tell me where you are.”
Then the vomit-voiced one: “Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy…where is sweet little Chrissy? I can hear your heart beating.”
And then the others in unison again: “Chrissseee…Chrisseee…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…”
She couldn’t take it anymore.
She simply could not.
She’d been through a lot and seen things she even now could not honestly believe, but this was beyond even the horror of that fucking clown. This was beyond anything her mind could contain and accept. Those hideous voices, wavering and eldritch and hissing…it was tearing her apart on the inside. Getting into her head and filling her brain with a suffocating, blind madness. She had to run. She had to do something. Even diving out that window and breaking bones below was better than listening to this insanity.
The door slammed open and hit the wall, chunks of plaster and chips of paint raining to the floor. Chrissy gasped. She could not help herself. She gasped and what was standing in the doorway heard her.
But what was it exactly?
A boy, yes, what had once been a boy. Twelve or thirteen, no more than that at the time of his death. He was naked, his torso dark with filth and dirt, caked leaves and fuzzy growths of some morbid fungi that seemed to flutter as he breathed. His hair was blonde and ratty, hanging over his face in greasy coils. You could not see more than that, because it was covered in hundreds of fat bluebottle flies crowding in to feed on what was beneath. He held his hands out like somebody playing blind man’s bluff, feeling in the air, looking for something to touch.
“I can smell you, Chrissy,” he said in his hissing, windy voice. “Grimshanks says we have to bring you back. Bring you back to play. You’ve been bad and he wants to play with you. It won’t be nice, Chrissy.” He took a few steps into the room, searching with his hands. “It won’t be very nice at all. But you won’t be alone. We’ll be with you. I’ll hold your hand, Chrissy, while he does those terrible things to you. I’ll hold it tight so you won’t be alone. Alone the way we were when he brought us into that cellar and did those awful things to us day after day before he slit our throats and buried us in the dirt.”
Chrissy made another sound and his head craned in her general direction. This was not a gasp, but a whining sound in her throat as she tried to suppress the scream that scratched to get out. But Chrissy knew now. She knew why they were all boys. Why they were naked. Grimshanks’ victims. Yes, these were the boys he had kidnapped and taken down into his basement to torture and violate as he himself was once tortured and violated.
Another boy stepped into the room, equally as filthy and rotting and flyblown. But his lower torso was clean and white. You could plainly see the black and jagged ruts from a knife where he had been disemboweled by the clown. And lower down…nothing. Grimshanks had emasculated him completely.
And now she knew why they weren’t zeroing in on them: they were blind.
All of them were blind as maybe she had suspected all along.
Both of them in the room had no eyes and the other three waiting outside the door had none either. Just black, mutilated pits where their eyes had been. They had not been removed carefully either, but gouged out savagely with something like a butcher knife that opened the sockets in hacked star-like shapes.
This was the one with the voice of vomit: “Chrissy? Quit playing games! You’ll only make him angry!” He sniffed the air with the maggoty channel where his nose had once been. “She’s here…she’s close…I can smell her hot little cunt…”
“Find her…feel her out…she’s here…she’s here…”
The others outside the door were fly-covered, too, just buzzing husks, oozing with slime. They stood out there like Yuletide carolers, their ruined mouths whispering her name again and again: “Chrissseee…Chrissseee… Chrissseee…”
They were all in the room now, moving about with outstretched hands. Flies lit off them and crawled up the walls, buzzed over Chrissy and Alona’s heads. They crawled over their arms and hands. One of them settled onto the tip of Chrissy’s nose, rubbing its forelegs together, seeming to be looking right into her eyes. The tickling of it was maddening.
“Chrissy, we can’t see you,” hissing-voice said. “Grimshanks cut out our eyes so we couldn’t watch what he did to us. He does not like to be watched. But he’ll let you watch when he starts cutting between your legs…”
29
This was the house of the dead.
That’s what the orphanage was.
As soon as Mitch and the others got through the front door and into the lobby, the dead came swarming out to meet them in numbers. The sun was poised to set and this is what brought them out, perhaps.
“Holy cock-knocking Christ,” Hubb said and it began.
The zombies were not stupid. They seemed to understand tactics of a sort. They could have leaped on Mitch and the others when they came through the front door, just took them violently there by surprise. But they did not. They waited until Mitch’s crew got into the lobby and then they came out, catching that little group in a pincer encirclement like soldiers surrounding and containing an enemy unit. They sealed the gaps. Mitch’s crew was right in the middle of a pack of them. They poured out of corridors and rooms, surrounded them, got behind them, too, so there was no escape out the door.
This is how it ended.
At least, the zombies thought so.
They came no closer, but held their ranks, ready to push in and crush the intruders. And what a motley crew they were. Yes, bloated and white and dripping, corpses from rivers and quarry deeps and bogs. Their faces were oozing and soft and pulpy, riven with worms and cloaked in flies. Some had eyes. Some barely had faces. They all
