All dressed in their Holy Covenant uniforms and all white-faced with leering eyes of translucent blackness. No pupils, no whites, just that solid blackness. They were all grinning at him, leaves and sticks stuck to them, streaks of dirt on their faces.
“Dave said you should come with us, Pat,” they said in unison. “Dave said you should come so we can play a game together.”
Marcus drew his 9mm pistol. “I know what you are,” he said, trying to get some breath into his lungs. “I know what all of you are. You better get out of my way. If you don’t think I’ll shoot things like you, you’re wrong.”
The girls giggled.
“Get out of my way!”
“We want to play a game with you,” they said.
Behind him, another voice said, “Pssst!”
Marcus wheeled around. Another girl was peering at him from behind a tree. “You’re it!” she said.
Then she disappeared.
Marcus felt the madness open up inside him like a sucking pit that wanted to drown him, body and soul. You’re it? Sure, why not? Of course he was it. It was all a very fucked-up little kid’s game and he was it. Yes, yes, yes.
The walkie-talkie in his left hand crackled and he jumped. “Dispatch!” he said into it, just waiting for those eerie little girl voices to come echoing out of it.
But this time it was someone else: “Pat! Pat! Jesus Christ, help me! Help me!”
In the distance, he heard Rose crying out.
Then Marcus was running. He could hear the girls chasing behind him, wanting to tag him and do other things that his mind would not let him think about. He came out on the road just up from the caretaker’s shack. He saw a couple other girls dragging Rose’s body towards the yawning mouth of a tomb.
“Dave!” he shouted. “Dave!”
This has been arranged and you know it, don’t you, Pat? A trap, just a fucking trap!
But he was done listening to stupid damn voices.
Dave Rose was in trouble.
And those little bitches were going to pay for it.
Marcus ran, gun in one hand and walkie-talkie in the other. He’d had enough of this shit and he was going to take care of business now. Just watch him. Games? He’d show those little cunts some games they’d never, ever heard of. The tomb was cut from gray stone with lots of dead ivy clinging to it. The wrought iron gates were thrown wide. He marched through and saw a set of steps before him. He moved down them, determined and resolute…and promptly slipped and fell, plunging into the water. He came up gasping, the sound of splashing water echoing in the cavernous tomb. The stink in there of submerged dead things going to rot was almost unbearable.
But he saw.
He saw Dave Rose just as dead as dead could be floating in the water. He saw those Catholic schoolgirls standing in the murk, dripping and ghoulish and grinning. A few caskets had been pulled from their berths in the walls. What was in them was floating around. Black liquid running from their mouths, the living dead girls chewed on arms and legs and one coveted a skull with hardly any meat on it. She licked at the hollow eye sockets.
“Very good girls,” a booming voice said from behind Marcus.
He looked up and saw…saw a nun standing at the top of the steps. Her habit was filthy with mud and leaves, slit right open to the waist. Her breasts were huge and pendulant and white as cream, mottled with a stark grayness. And the truly, unbelievably insane part was that they had replicated themselves. There were not just two of those bloated, gray-nippled breasts, but four sets running down to her waist, swinging as she spoke.
Yes, yes, yes, Marcus knew, a nun had disappeared with the girls and, Lord be praised, here she was…in the flesh.
She came down the steps, her skirts flowing around her like sheets in a wind, her breasts swaying and slopping from side to side. She held her hands out and he could see the holes that had been punched through the palms as if by nails. Black juice ran from them. And her face…swollen and set with flies, was a lumpy mass of colorless flesh that seemed to be oozing like melting clay. Her eyes were huge and black and running with a clear jelly.
“Patrick Marcus! The Day of Judgment is at hand and the horn will sound!” she said in a voice that was clotted and thick like somebody vomiting. Her teeth were gunmetal gray and overlapping, terribly sharp as if they’d been filed. They gnashed together. “The fallen angels have gathered in our midst and set loose foul horrors which would eat the righteous body and soul! Oh, the evil that men do, Patrick, the evil that men do!”
Marcus did the only thing he could do.
He fired three rounds into her. One of which exploded one of those breasts, spraying rancid tissue into the water.
Then he screamed.
Above, the tomb door swung shut and there was splashing in the water as the girls inched closer. But in the steaming, foul darkness, he did not go mad. Not until the nun took his face in her hands and forced a cold tongue into his mouth. One that was slimy and cold like a river leech. This is what destroyed his mind.
That and the sounds of the girl suckling those fleshy, distended breasts.
22
Some days just go from bad to worse.
Maybe for awhile they tease you a bit with false hopes or promises, but in the end they invariably head in the same direction: they find the biggest, darkest hole available and they drag you in with them.
That’s pretty much how it was for Mitch.
He wasn’t so much worried about the shit hitting the fan, being that it already had and he was covered from head to toe. No, he was worried that it wouldn’t stop hitting said fan, that he’d never be able to quit bobbing and weaving. What he’d been through over at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus was unquestionably bad. The sort of experience that took your mind and shook it up like a snow globe. Ditto for the dead woman in the drainpipe. But what Tommy and he had gone through over at the Bell house…that was worse. That was ugly and just plain disturbing. There was no doubt that one of those things had been in the house with them-after they were driving away, Tommy had reiterated that it had indeed been a girl he’d seen in the mirror, maybe nine or ten, but as much like a nine or ten year old girl as an A-bomb was like a firecracker-and she had been dogging them, watching them, playing games with them much as any naughty girl might do.
Of course, she was not just a good girl gone bad. She was something dead that walked, but somehow and for some reason they would never know, what she had put them through was probably some debased form of play for her.
At least, that’s what Mitch was thinking. Playing with us, happily fucking with our heads. Maybe getting off on the fear she generated. And if we had hung around long enough, she would have declared herself the winner and tore out our throats.
Maybe he was just overwrought, but then maybe not.
When they reached Lisa Sale’s house over in Elmwood Hills, taking their time so they wouldn’t show up at the door pale and trembling, Lisa’s mom and dad and younger sister were all there. The bad news was that Chrissy and the others were not. The good news was that they had been. That afternoon, maybe about the same time Mitch was watching a dead arm flopping on the floor of Sadler Brother’s, Heather and Lisa and Chrissy had returned. Loaded down from shopping at the West Town Mall, they had played a little Xbox and tried on some new outfits, then they were off again.
Mitch told Mike Sale, Heather’s father, to keep them there when they returned. To hold them at gunpoint if necessary. Mike said he would be glad to. Of course, Mitch could see the look in his eyes, the what’s-the-big-deal? sort of look. So, revving up the old bullshit machine to 75 rpm’s, he explained that Lily was freaking out (she was) and that there was something of a family crisis. Mike Sale bought that okay, though Mitch could see that he wasn’t
