36
“Hey, Pervo!” Tommy shouted up the narrow attic stairwell. “I’m coming to get your ass!”
Grimshanks was up there hiding and Tommy knew it. He’d hunted and tracked enough game in his time and followed enough blood trails to know that he was getting close. It was nothing you needed to be told. You could feel it. You could sense it with some primal mechanism of the hunt. And right then, Tommy was feeling it right up his spine. In his belly. In his balls.
I got that slimy fuck and he knows it.
Grimshanks must have come in another window after squeezing out the one on the second floor. Tommy had gone up to the third, moving on gut instinct and nothing more. It wasn’t long before he found that smear of black juice on the wall, the drops that led here to the attic stairs. The stench of Grimshanks’ burning flesh was acrid and pungent, nauseating. There was no mistaking the smell of a zombie that had tasted the salt.
Smiling, Tommy mounted the stairs, the shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other.
“Hey, sucknut!” he called out. “What you gonna do when I come for you?”
Nothing but silence.
Tommy was not dismayed, only all the more vigilant. That goddamn clown was up here and the drops of black blood on the steps were evidence of that. Tommy followed them step by step, ready for action. Ready for old Fruitpie to come barreling down at him at any moment.
“Hey, Puddles? Come out and play…”
He made it to the top of the stairs, holding up the lantern, casting a wide swath of light in every direction. Hunched shadows slid around him. The attic was huge and dusty and mildewed-smelling. About what you’d expect. Ancient rafters overhead, shuttered gales on the sloping walls. Crates and boxes and old rolled-up rugs rotting away in the warm darkness. It stank musty up there. Cobwebs were draped above Tommy’s head, lots of rodent droppings everywhere.
A few stray rats skittered away at his approach.
“Hey, fuckface!” Tommy called out. “I’m gonna do to you what you do to kids: I’m gonna fuck you real bad! You hear me? Huh? You hear me, Giggles?”
There was a roaring like that of some primeval beast and something came rushing out of the darkness and hit Tommy. Hit him hard enough to knock him over and almost down the stairs. But he managed to hang onto the 12 gauge. The lantern went sailing. It thudded into a beam and crashed to the floor, shattering, all that lantern fuel spilling out. The fire tasted the old wood and a wall of flame lit up.
No problem seeing now.
Grimshanks was clinging to the rafters above like some grotesque albino spider. He was not even a clown now. He was a great white insect with a dozen legs and a dozen glittering eyes. Venom dripped from his mouth and had it not been for the lantern exploding, he would have dropped right on Tommy.
But he hesitated, not liking fire.
Tommy fired without even taking aim. That was the beauty of a shotgun. The round peppered the clown- thing with rock salt and Grimshanks screamed. Screamed the way he must have screamed when those two pervert clowns, Bobo and Ripples, had taken him in that dank cellar for the first time. For just as he had been violated then, he was violated now.
That scream was hysterical and bleating.
The rocksalt caught him across the chest and burned right into him, creating dozens of separate blackened caverns as it ate through him. He jerked and crisped and fell to the floor trailing plumes of smoke.
Quickly, making some nonsensical gurgling sound, he hobbled away, trying to get out of reach of the flames and Tommy’s gun.
Tommy came right after him, sensing victory.
“Be a good little clown, eh? Just lay there and fucking take it,” Tommy told him.
“Take it? Take it? TAKE IT?” Grimshanks howled. “FROM YOU? FROM
YOU? YOU SILLY SCABBY LITTLE BOY THAT PISSED THE BED UNTIL HE WAS
Tommy shot again.
And again caught the retreating bulk of the clown.
More sputtering as of sizzling bacon fat, more boiling smoke, and more screeching from Grimshanks. But he was not beaten yet. Not just yet.
As Tommy moved in for the kill, a droning black cloud rose from the clown and came squalling in his direction like a typhoon. A black cloud of clicking, snapping, whirring noise. A tornado of flying insects that found and enveloped him, biting and tearing and stinging. In his hair and his face, down his shirt and up his pantlegs.
But Tommy stumbled forward and put another round into the clown.
Grimshanks screamed so loud that dust rained from the rafters overhead. The floor rumbled and the attic shook. A great wind surged, spreading the fire, letting it taste those old rugs and stirring it up into a conflagration.
Grimshanks was dying.
He rose up, burning and steaming, clots of flesh dropping off him, flames erupting from his guts. That last round had ripped the left side of his face away, leaving a smoldering skull in its wake. A single pale and luminous eye darted madly around and then popped like a ripe grape, spewing yellow fluid. Grimshanks was not screaming or threatening now. He was mewling like a cat. He climbed up the walls as the rock salt boiled him from the inside out. He was melting. Literally melting. His flesh oozed and liquefied like hot tallow, streamers and ropes of it hanging from him like wax bubbling from a burning candle. He tried to climb and slid down the wall, a writhing mass of worms and beetles and decay, sizzling and steaming and blackening.
What he had been all those years before, a nonentity named Edward Shears, had been pulled out in bleeding handfuls by those two deviant clowns that had forever blighted him, disemboweled his soul, and gutted his mind of all but an echo of who and what he was. But no matter. Anything that was left faded when he died. What was in him now, cremating and curling up like dead worms, were blasphemous and nameless things that had been waiting long and patient in ethereal mansions of cosmic depravity and anti-human degeneration. And at the moment of his death, Edward’s death, they had come out of crevices and dark spaces and shadowy graves of nonexistence, descending upon him, picking away at his carcass and filling themselves on all that he was and would never be again.
Like emotions, they were hot and cold, passionate and disinterested, predatory and calculating…but one thing they were not was compassionate or remotely human. They took what Grimshanks had been and multiplied it geometrically.
And now, they too, were dying…if things like them could really know death.
Disembodied, noxious spirits that had been born in seething pits of black mud and the screaming wastes of hell. They came as one, they came as a thousand…they were legion. And that’s the same way they left. Vomiting out of the clown’s skull in a pillar of black waste that became decay and then ash and then nothing.
“Here’s what it feels like, you stinking rotten piece of shit!” Tommy said and worked the pump on the 12 gauge and put two more rounds of rock salt into the remains of Grimshanks.
All that was left was a writhing, wormy pool of liquid flesh that bubbled and blistered, tried to fashion itself into hands and faces and forms that quickly melted away and drained off the yellowed skeleton below. It squirmed and flowed and wriggled, then it went up in a blaze of twisting greasy smoke and became a heap of bones blown by charnel ashes.
And that was how Grimshanks died.
