“Say it.”
She told herself she did not know his name, but she did. Just like she understood that what he was, what lived in his flesh was not the memory of a man, but something else.
“Say it,” the dark man demanded.
Hot Tamale gasped, images and ideas and arcane philosophies raging through her brain in hot bolts as her willpower and individuality went to a white, bubbling sauce.
“You…you are Weerden,” she said almost mechanically. “You are Alardus Weerden and you died in 1627.”
“Yes, until my grave was desecrated.”
One of those bloated ruby-red tentacles had her around the throat now and another kissed her eyes shut and the third forced itself down her throat, expanding like the stinging tendril of a jellyfish until she gagged and asphyxiated and went still, sliding limp and dead into the black waters.
The lantern on the peg went out with a hiss.
34
Something was going on.
Chrissy heard the sound of gunfire and voices and smelled fire. Flashes of light and booming sounds. A stench of death and burning flesh wafted up the stairs. It had been getting dark, but now there was light coming up from below.
She raced over to the stairs and almost made it made it.
Except that Grimshanks came drifting up the stairs to meet her, grinning with those gnarled yellow teeth that pushed past his blubbery lips. His face was white and oily, set with a multitude of tiny scars where he had knitted himself back together again. His eyes were huge, bulging from those black harlequin diamonds that contained them. They were glistening pale eggs set with a tracery of purple veins, eggs that were pulsing and ready to hatch. His orange-and-yellow checked suit was filthy with dried blood and black goo and streaks of grime, bits of things that might have been tissue. The bells twinkled on his cap and tiny red beetles swarmed out of his mouth and skittered over his bloated face.
He held his white puffy hands out to her. “Chrissy-pissy pudding pie! Where do you think you’re going? That’s not for you down there…not for you.”
Chrissy wanted to run, but the strength just bled from her. There was nothing left to run with or fight with. There was only a bitter acceptance of what the clown would do which would be horrible to the extreme. He stared at her with those awful veined, slimy eyes. Tiny pustules were set in them and they began to break open one by one, running with a foul-smelling pus. Yes, he looked at her and in her and she saw graveyards in her mind, gallows…the places Grimshanks knew and knew very well. More, she saw little boys screaming. Little boys chained to cobwebbed basement walls and hanging by hooks, cut and slit and worked by knives. Hanging from ropes and being shoveled into shallow graves.
Yes, those eyes had her and they would not let her go.
They were the eyes of wolves that waited for little girls in dark forests, hungry and malevolent and ruthlessly vulpine. The eyes of wolves that devoured grandmothers and waited in their beds with slavering jaws and perverse dark minds. The eyes of slimy, deranged little men that seduced little boys into fields and lonely thickets with the promise of sweets. And mostly, they were the eyes of something born in the depths of hell. The eyes of a dead and obscene thing that had been born in the drainage and corpse-slime of the grave.
Chrissy opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out.
Grimshanks jetted forward with a blast of fetid, hot wind. He hit her and knocked her onto her back and then he fell on her, his jaws opening wider and wider until they were wide enough, it seemed, to swallow the world. They closed over her throat gently but firmly. Not with enough strength to even break the skin. He picked her up like a wolf picks up a pup and drifted off, bringing her into another dark room and dropping her on the floor.
“Chrissy-pissy, alone at last and with no interruptions,” he said and his breath in her face smelled like tombs.
Stretched out beneath him, her mind swam in and out of focus. She felt those bloated hands running up and down her, walking over her like spiders, pausing to squeeze her breasts and poke at her belly, stroke down between her legs. Several candles set in holders atop a table suddenly lit up, filling the room with a guttering yellow-orange glare. And this is what the clown wanted, not some fumbling violation in the dark, but an illuminated and precise defilement that she would have to look upon as her mind went to a soup of ruin.
He opened her shirt with his fingers and the feel of his flesh against hers is what jerked her fully awake. It was like cold, wet meat, a slime of jelly coming from his fingertips. His face was right above her own, huge and bulbous and grotesque like some fleshy Halloween pumpkin. Up close, she could see not just the pink threading of scars in that porous white flesh, but the numerous tiny holes made by parasites and worms. His entire face, up close like that, was covered in fine, minute webbing of silk like caterpillars or spiders had spun a fine cocoon over it. Things squirmed and wriggled just under the flesh. His tongue came out and it was black and horribly swollen, too fat, it seemed, for his mouth. Her drew it along her neck and its touch burned like lye.
She screamed.
Screamed with everything she had and all that did was made him grin. Make vile secretions run from his face and red beetles run out of his nostrils. Yes, and it made his cock thicken and lengthen under his suit, pressing against her belly.
“You will beg for death, you sweet little cunt,” Grimshanks whispered in her contorted face. “You will beg for old Grimshanks to slit your throat! But he won’t! Not until he’s done! Not until you’ve tasted his seed and felt him pushing inside your hot sweetness and filling your ass, splitting it wide and bloody! You will scream and scream, Chrissy-pissy, just as I screamed when the clowns took me in that cold, dripping cellar! You’ll know what I knew! You’ll know every awful, breathless minute of it! And how you’ll cry for your mommy and daddy, but they can’t help you! They’ll never hear you! Because your mine, every luscious inch of you is mine to toy with and soil and torment! Mine, mine, mine!”
She felt those hands on her, felt his cock against her, the stink and gelid feel of him, the absolute depravity and degeneration of his worm-holed mind, that seething pit of child bones and smoldering innocence where the boogeyman lived and where little boys and girls died a foul, perverted death.
Her shirt open, her breasts laid bare, Grimshanks planted a line of stinging kisses from her sternum to her belly. Each one was a separate agony. And she could just image what it would feel like to have that engorged and rancid penis inside her, how it would burn and tear.
“Now, Chrissy-pissy pudding pie, you’ll taste me before I taste you…”
He rose up before her and she knew he was going to expose himself. Make her touch it and feel it and put it in her mouth, cackling all the while with the sound of screaming children roasted on spits. Those very un-funny distended hands of his worked his cock through the suit and it rose up, filling and swelling, becoming much larger than any such organ had a right to be.
Now he would take it out.
Now he would make her do things.
Make her do things just as he’d made those boys do things.
No, no, it was too much. Simply too much. With every last bit of strength in her, Chrissy let out a piercing scream that could be heard throughout the orphanage.
Grimshanks boomed with fragmented laughter.
Maggots filled his mouth and emerged from holes in his tongue.
His eyes blazed with nefarious, carnal delight.
Here was the violation, the groping and pumping and penetration, the defilement of flesh and soul. The seeding that came before the cutting and the chewing and dismembering. He would make her suck on him and then he would take her sex in his mouth, piercing it with his yellow and decayed teeth, feeling that hot cunt virgin’s blood washing down his throat. And then he would slide into her, pushing deeper and deeper, shooting into her, filling her with acid and worms?
