dressed in rotting cerements, her face little more than a skull grown with fine green moss. She reached out and took hold of him, pulling him in close and then her mouth opened in a contorted oval like that of a lamprey and she vomited a stream of black silt into his face, blinding him, making his skin burn like it was rubbed down with lye.
Screaming, he fell back in the water.
And she went with him.
They all did.
Ten minutes later, just silence and dripping in the cellar. That and a few ripples. Heller’s flashlight floated around in a lazy circle, the light gradually dimming.
5
Amongst the wreckage floating along Angel Street, there were dozens of white, nameless things that until quite recently had slept away the ages in jars of serum and formaldehyde. What was in the rain and in the water saturated them, filled them, overflowed them. The things-unpleasant and grotesque to the extreme-bobbed in the waters, puckered and pickled and bleached of color. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: in those dead, dreaming husks, there was activity. Eyes like peeled grapes opened and malformed faces grinned, fingers like scratching sticks reached towards the sky along with other things that were not fingers at all. There was motion and movement and a dread awareness.
And in that shadowy organic soup that flooded River Town, things were born and lived that were never intended to see the light of day.
6
In the thick, listening darkness, Meg waited.
Waited there in the empty house, something unwinding inside her. She felt loose and rubbery, held together by sheer force of will. She was trying to remain calm. Trying to keep herself steady, trying not to panic. But with what she had been through, that was like standing ground zero in a blazing building and trying not to singe your fingers. Her heart was pounding and her nerves were frazzled and there was a curious rushing sound in her head that she figured were her nerves, fully aware and fully electrified like they had never before been in her life.
Alan was gone.
Yes, Alan was gone and she was hiding upstairs in their bedroom with a gas lantern burning on the nightstand. Maybe the light would attract attention, the wrong kind of attention, but she could not bear to be without it. Bear to be alone in the darkness in the great empty house, listening to the rain fall and the water lapping against the walls.
She was petrified.
Just drawn deep into herself now that Alan was gone. Now that Alan had opened the door…and some malefic long-armed shadow had pulled him into the night.
She kept trying to breathe like they’d taught her in birth classes. The baby wasn’t coming yet…thank God… but there were other breathing exercises they’d taught her to stay calm. And she needed to stay calm. She needed to stay calm for baby. Because if she got herself too overwrought, it would effect baby. They were one now and she had to remember that. She had to stay calm, she had to-
Oh dear God, what’s happening here? What’s this all about? What happened to Alan? What was that that grabbed him? What dragged my husband out into the night?
Easy.
She had to take it easy.
She was thinking many bad things now. Not so much thinking them, but feeling them, knowing them to be true. Knowing that there were things out in the water. Awful things. Faceless, hungry nightmares like that crazy shit she read about in those horror paperbacks she could never seem to get enough of.
Meg tensed.
Tensed again.
Downstairs. A noise. No, not just a noise. Not a board creaking or something rattling in the wind. Something far beyond that. This was the sound of invasion: somebody was in the house. Somebody had come in from out there. Somebody that was now standing at the bottom of the stairs, just breathing. But not breathing like they were out of breath, but breathing with a congested sound like an old man with pneumonia. Yes, a clotted, wet breathing.
Meg tried to calm herself.
But it wasn’t working. She tried to tell herself that this individual might have been somebody that had come to rescue her, but she didn’t believe that for a minute. Because whoever had entered her house in the dark of night was not a person, but a thing. Something dirty and dripping and evil.
Oh please, God, make them go away, please make them go away.
But they were not going. They were standing down there. She could hear the water dripping from them. It sounded like blood dripping from a slit artery. Yes, they were standing down there, knowing she was here, just not where exactly. So they were perhaps smelling for her, casting about like a dog for scent.
And now they had it.
They were coming up the stairs. Yes, very slowly and maybe even painfully, dragging their feet from one step up to the next. When they pressed those feet down they made a squishing sound and water ran from them.
Oh yes, closer…and closer still.
Yes, they knew where she was and the trod of those feet was quicker now. Meg could smell her uninvited guest. He or she or it smelled of night and rank earth, rotting things pressed in oblong boxes, cocooned in black soil and rancid silk. Something that had lain in a pool of drainage from a backed-up pipe.
Meg knew she could not scream.
But neither could she move or do anything else. She could only wait as everything inside her withered away and tears rolled silently from her eyes and she held her swollen belly in her hands, praying and praying.
The door began to open.
In the lantern light, she saw a hand grip the edge of the door, spidery fingers slip around it. Gray water ran from them. The hand was white and puffy, the flesh almost transparent and set with a tracery of livid purple veins.
Then a voice, waterlogged and full of slime: “Looks like I got a live one.”
Meg started to scream and she could not seem to stop. At least until that grim form towered over her, dripping foul water, and a terribly moist and flabby hand was pressed over her mouth.
FLOATERS
1
The rain was falling and the dead were rising.
At least, that’s what the crazy bastard on the radio was saying. The guy was calling himself Brother John and inviting everyone to make “offerings of flesh and blood to the Holy Father”…though never saying exactly who that was. Maybe God and maybe the Devil and maybe Dr. Suess for all anyone really knew. People were complaining about old Brother John, but he was broadcasting on a pirate station at odd hours and the FCC were having trouble tracking him. Particularly since his station seemed to be a mobile one.
But what the hell? The city was losing its mind and Brother John was just another symptom.
