that, yes, Cindy Lee was home. In fact, she was in there lying on the couch, just as naked as naked could get, oiled up, tits glistening, one leg thrown over the back of the couch, busily sliding a finger into herself as she waited wet and ready for a certain postman to come and deliver the mail.
Craig stepped off the porch, keeping his letter bag in front of his crotch because he’d just popped a boner hard and straight as a walking stick. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice that the rain had diminished to a drizzle or that the sky had taken on a weird ochre haze.
He rounded the wild rose bushes on the Court Avenue side of Cindy Lee’s house, studying those windows and hoping for a glimpse of her. When that sparkling yellow rain began to fall, he was caught out in the open. The first drops hit him like scalding water that he recoiled from and the next were like acid.
He dropped his bag almost instantly and looked up in the sky, thinking for one crazy moment that he was being drowned in lemonade.
But that was about all he had time to think, as that most peculiar and very corrosive rain ate holes in his face and hands and he tried to scream as his lips went to sauce. Steaming and making a gurgling sound in his throat, he stumbled over Cindy Lee’s rosebushes and fell dead on the other side. As he did so, one hand that had been covering his face pulled away and dropped to his side. Most of his face came with it. The rain stopped almost as soon as it had started and Craig laid there, his flesh oozing off the bones beneath like hot tallow.
He was the only one on Kneale Street who was caught in it.
Even Arland Mattson had gone in five minutes before it fell.
Given his essential curiosity, Craig died wondering what the hell it was all about. But that was one question he never did get an answer to.
13
When Tommy Kastle pulled his Dodge Ram into the Barron driveway, Mitch felt something grow inside him, spread out in his belly and take hold of him like it never wanted to let him go. He could have labeled it as fear or unease or a real ugly case of the whammy-jammies, but the truth was, although he felt it just fine, he could not necessarily put a name to it. Just a nasty sensation like needles growing in his guts that told him that not only would the worst things happen now, they would happen with a frightening regularity. And you had to be ready.
“You okay, Mitch?” Tommy said.
Mitch just nodded. “We better go in.”
On the porch, at the door, he hesitated again, picturing the most awful scenarios that waited him inside: Lily dead and Lily dismembered, white-faced horrors perhaps feeding upon her. All of it only grew worse when he tried the door and found it unlocked.
Then he threw it open and Tommy was right behind him and the silence greeted them, a heavy and almost unnatural silence. But maybe it was just his nerves because Lily was sitting on the sofa, waiting.
“Did you find her?” she asked.
Mitch shook his head. “Checked the mall and the usual locations, but I didn’t see her. But you know how those kids are. Always on the go.”
Lily just blinked at the information. “I don’t like her out in that storm, Mitch. It’ll be dark in a couple hours.”
The idea of that chilled Mitch, too. Was Lily hinting at something or was she just being her normal paranoid self?
Tommy looked from Mitch to Lily and then back again. Mitch couldn’t read his mind, but he could almost guess what he was thinking. Jesus H. Christ, you sure this lady is Lily? Looks like something thrown together out of twine and pipe cleaners. And her eyes, Mitch…you noticed her eyes? They’re just vacant. They look, but they don’t see. Just as empty and sterile as the eyes in old paintings that follow you around the room. Mitch was figuring it was something like that. Outside, he’d been the one who was tense, but in here it was Tommy. He looked nervous and ansy like some kid hauled before the principal for peeking into the girl’s showers.
Mitch said, “I got pretty much sidetracked. Had an accident.”
Something moved in her eyes then. “Accident?”
“Yeah, not me exactly. But some crazy kid piledrived the Jeep out on The Strip. It was parked at the time.”
Lily nodded, losing interest.
“Did anybody stop by?” Mitch asked, still standing there next to Tommy like he was at somebody else’s house, waiting to be invited to sit down.
Lily just shook her head. “No one…just the mailman, whasisface.”
Sure. Craig Ohlen. Goddamn nosy gasbag. Mitch was willing to bet that he’d went out of his way to talk to Lily, to gauge the level of her dementia that the neighbors had no doubt faithfully reported to him. Yep, she’s nuts, Craig would say, flakier than dry skin. Better hide the knives, ‘cause I’m getting the feeling she’ll be following her nutso sister.
“Mitch?” Lily said.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to go out again. I want you to find her before dark, do you understand? You have to. The phone’s out and the TV and radio are down-”
“Just the storm,” Tommy offered.
“-and I think there’s something that’s going to happen. Something real bad and I don’t want Chrissy out in the streets when it hits. Go to the police and check Heather and Lisa’s houses. Maybe she’s over there.”
“Okay, I will,” he said. “But just try to relax.”
“I can’t relax. I’m afraid to relax.”
“Just try and take it easy. You know what the doctor said, don’t get yourself worked up. Everything will be fine.”
“Just find her.”
“Sure.”
“Promise me that you’ll find her.”
“I’ll do my best.”
14
Inside Edward Stokley’s guts there was a furnace blazing.
It boiled white-hot where his stomach should have been, making things bubble and liquefy and go to rivers of molten flesh. The heat rose up into his chest, became a smoldering dust of ashes that filled his lungs until he could only gasp, could not seem to speak. It was like trying to draw a clear and crisp breath from the mouth of a foundry oven.
“Eddie?” Dave Rose said to him. “Eddie? Are you all right?”
Stokley nodded that he was, though he certainly was not.
They were standing in front of their patrol car on Pennacott Lane, just off Main downtown Witcham, at the outer edges of Bethany. The University was only three blocks away with its cheerful and synthetic gaggle of coffee shops and salons and snack bars, but here on Pennacott you would not have guessed it. For if Upper Main Street and the sprawl of the University were shiny new pennies, then Pennacott was a tarnished dime worn by many hands and plucked from a gutter. Pennacott was a dirty and decaying run of old company houses, garbage-strewn vacant lots, and late Victorian tenements that had been thrown up to lodge the massive influx of immigrant workers-mostly Poles, Irish and French-that had come to work in the mills and factories of Bethany and Crandon…at the time, separate entities that would, by the time of the First World War, be absorbed bodily into the swelling anatomy of Witcham. At one time, the squalor-which had been known locally as Guttertown or The Narrows-had extended to Main and beyond, for Witcham was essentially composed of five industrial enclaves, but by the 1950’s,
