coming out of his ass. It was embarrassing. Breeson didn’t figure anyone there hadn’t smelled those vile bean farts Karpinski had launched.
“It’s not natural for a guy to be doing that,” Soper said, maybe louder than he intended.
“Shut the hell up back there!” Rhymes said and this time he wasn’t fooling around.
The hound was acting funny all of sudden. Kleets was having a hell of a time with him. He’d start this way, then that, turn in a circle, stop dead. Right now, his nose was low to the ground and his hackles were raised. He was growling low in his throat. He was scenting something and he wasn’t liking it much.
Breeson just stood there, trying to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He had to lick rain off his lips to get it to work. The air out at the graveyard smelled dank and wet like run-off from a subterranean pipe, but now it seemed to be getting worse. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first, but now he was thinking it smelled oddly organic. Like growing things. A smell that had no business in a chill September boneyard.
A hot, germinating sort of stink.
Like rising yeast and moist fungi and sporing things…
18
“C’mon, boy,” Kleets said. “C’mon.”
The dog started moving again, pushing between two headstones and leading them around the side of a mossy crypt that was so old it seemed to be sinking into the earth. He started acting really funny again. Starting and stopping. Yelping and straining at his leash. Kleets was trying to calm him, but it wasn’t doing much good. Rhymes was on his walkie-talkie, checking in with the other units. His voice had a very somber tone to it that Breeson had never heard before. Like maybe he was expecting something to happen any time now and it wasn’t going to be a good thing. Van Ibes’s voice coming through the handset sounded about the same.
“Something funny going on here,” Soper said.
“Knock it off,” Kerr told him.
“Sure, if you say.”
But Breeson was feeling it, too. He didn’t know if it was this black, wet night in the cemetery or that hound acting all jittery, but he was feeling very tense all of sudden. The flesh at his belly just crawling in waves. He kept looking around like he was expecting to see something horrible come slinking out between the graves, something with yellow eyes and big teeth. He thought if someone would have sneaked up behind him and tapped his shoulder, he would have jumped a foot. The graves. The rain. That clinging mist. Man, it made the cemetery look like a set from an old horror movie. Now and again, he caught sight of one of the other squads, their flashlight beams scanning around, their muffled voices carried by the wind.
Kleets got the hound moving, but the dog fought him all the way.
“See the way he’s acting?” Soper said. “Dogs can sense things we can’t. I had a dog once that?”
“Shut up,” Kerr told him again.
And they were all feeling it, Breeson knew, same thing the hound had been picking up on for some time now. The sense that something was very wrong here. That if the graveyard was a puzzle, that suddenly the pieces were not fitting together so good anymore. The atmosphere seemed swollen with dread.
They moved on, the hound shaking now. The ground was just soft muck and their boots sank right into it. All you could hear was the water dripping and the dog growling and boots being drawn from the mud.
The hound stopped before a flooded grave that sat in a little low dip. The water had spread out and consumed three or four other graves. Looked like a little fish pond, dead leaves floating on its surface. The hound was smelling something there. He sniffed the water and then jumped back like something had nipped at him. He froze up in a straight line, one forepaw extended like a pointer and his tail straight as a poker. A low whining came from his throat. Kleets yanked him away and the dog took off fast, leading them on a merry chase through a series of graves. Then he started to snarl and fight, snapping at the leash, his own tail, and even Kleets. There was a row of hedges before them. High enough so that you could not see over them.
“Hell is wrong with that mutt?” Rhymes wanted to know.
They stood around again, sensing something but not knowing what. Rhymes got on his walkie-talkie and his voice was practically a whisper. Everyone played their lights around. Nothing to see but those high hedges sparkling with raindrops, tombstones and gnarled looking trees.
“We just gonna stand here?”
“Shut the hell up,” Breeson told Soper this time.
They were all listening and listening hard. They were hearing something, but they did not know what: a sodden, slippery sort of sound like wet snakes coiling around each other in a ball. Slithering, undulant. And something beneath it like a muted hissing, the sort of sound a radiator makes as it cools in the summertime.
The dog took off and Kleets with it.
Around the hedgerow they went and so fast that Kleets could barely stay on his feet. Rhymes and the others followed suit, running through that muck and the pools of standing water. Through patches of mist, around burial vaults plastered with wet leaves and…and that was as far as they got.
“Jesus Christ,” Soper said.
They were all seeing it and to a man, they weren’t sure what it was. Not really. For the cemetery before them and as far as their lights could reach was alive. It was growing and pulsing and blooming. Snotty strands of some white morbid fungi were growing right up from the saturated ground in a great webby growth of pale tissue that was moving and coiling, shining like oil. The gravestones and markers and obelisks were consumed by a pulsating, slithering plexus of living material that reached from the ground and right up into the trees. It was threaded from branches to monuments in sheer plaits and heaving tarps. All of it viscidly alive and smelling of putrescence.
The hound took off running in the opposite direction and Kleets did not try to stop him.
“People,” Soper said. “Growing…like people.”
And that’s what it looked like. For sprouting like buds from that network of fungi were dozens and dozens of faces…men, women, children, terribly white and distorted, unformed like the faces of fetuses. Embryonic. Not only that, but winding loops of tissue and things that were trying to become limbs. Breeson saw hands erupting from a womb of fungi. You could see the impressions of fingers pressing against the membranous material and then the skin ruptured like a hymen, the hands bursting free like they had just been born. And not just one hand, but ten and then twenty, many of them blossoming from the same bulb. Hands growing upon hands growing upon hands.
“What…what kind of fucking freakshow is this?” Rhymes wanted to know, his voice filled with desperation and disgust.
The others said nothing. What could be said?
Arms were snaking free, chalky and mottled. Long exaggerated fingers splaying out, webbed together, but wriggling and alive. Solid masses that might have been bodies eventually…some even had the mounds of female breasts. And heads, of course. More all the time. Sometimes singly, but often three or more heads joined together or a single head with more than one face. And in one particularly gruesome instance, there was a rising, knobby pillar set with dozens of screaming faces piled one atop another like carvings on a totem pole, individual faces and faces melting into other faces.
And what was the very worst thing was that this was not some mindless, freakish growth.
For that entire network was getting excited at the arrival of the cops. It was undulating and creeping, spreading out, multiplying. More faces bursting free. More clutching, deformed hands. Things twitching and writhing and emerging. Yes, it was all reacting to their arrival and the faces, though they lacked eyes and had only hollows where eyes might be placed, were looking at them, heads craning on rubbery necks to get a look at them. Faces pushing out of gelatinous masses with horrible juicy sounds, mouths opening and closing like they were trying to breathe.
Soper ran off and Kleets did, too. They all heard them splashing away and who could really blame them? Because this, this was an atrocity. Whatever that oozing, shifting cobweb of flesh really was, there was no getting around what it was trying to be. It must have started germinating far below in those buried coffins, perhaps, filling them with degenerate life, feeding on the raw materials of the bodies down there, absorbing them like colonies of
