waiting and listening and wondering. Rita Zirblanski was sleeping on the couch, oblivious to all. Her sister, Rhonda, lounged in a chair staring intently at a guttering candle. And Lily? Lily waited without knowing exactly what for, but certain that when the time came, when her garden brought forth vibrant and morose flower, that she would know it and recognize it as such. But until then there was the grayness of that sodden night, the exhalation of the diseased wind against the house, and silence that whispered dire things in the back of her mind.
Lily sat up in her rocking chair suddenly. She cocked her head, a thin smile spreading over her lips which were as colorless as her face now.
Rhonda studied her in the shifting orange light. “What…what’s the matter, Mrs. Barron?”
Lily brushed trembling fingers over her face, amazed, it seemed, by the chill of her flesh and its creeping dampness. “I…I thought I heard someone…”
Rhonda sat up. “Outside?”
But Lily shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
Rhonda looked towards the curtained window. “Was it…Mr. Barron?”
Lily shook her head. “I thought…I thought I heard someone call my name.”
Rhonda stared at her, as if maybe seeing her for the first time. Although she had always liked Lily, there were things about her now that were disturbing. She had always been a woman that walked tall and proud and fine, but now she was hunched-over and weak and contaminated like a dirty millpond. No, not physically. Maybe mentally and maybe psychically, but surely spiritually. There was something coming off Lily Barron, a hot and sour smell like rotting flowers or maybe a dank smell of sweating subterranean concrete…regardless, you could only truly smell it with your mind, but the odor was appalling.
Rhonda, like Rita, did not scare easily, but Lily scared her now. Disturbed her, unsettled her.
Lily stood up, cocking her head again like a puppy sensing its master’s approach. “It’s so quiet…I keep thinking somebody’s whispering my name. You’re not doing that are you?” But before Rhonda could answer, Lily just shook her head. “No, it wasn’t you…maybe it was someone else.”
Rhonda wanted to say something but there was nothing to say.
Lily walked to the window and drew the curtains aside, stared out the window, saw her own ghostly reflection, the rushing sea of Crandon beyond. “The water is up by the porch now and it’s still rising. By morning, it’ll climb the steps…and by tomorrow sundown? It’ll be coming into the house, flooding and drowning and washing away everything. Sinking the neighborhood, this house like a ship, pulling it down into weedy, slimy places. It’ll be dark and muddy down there, Rhonda. Things will skitter and things will crawl…but we won’t be alone down there. There’ll be others down there, people we know and people we miss. They’ll hold our hands and tell us things…down below…then we can drift with them in the hollows and sluices and watery places where things float and bob and call us by name…”
Rhonda was staring at her with wide, white eyes now. Those eyes did not blink. “Are…are you okay, Mrs. Barron?”
Lily nodded. “I’m fine. Maybe I’m tired and restless, I don’t know. God, I feel like I’m in a cage in this house, don’t you? I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe I’m dreaming while I’m awake or maybe I just woke up in the middle of a dream.”
She looked out through the rain-spattered panes, saw the crawling shadows out there, the rain stippling the ever expanding dark pools which were swallowing the city. She saw the swirling tides and spinning eddies as the sea of gray water filled the streets and rushed over the lids of sewer gratings. Leaves and sticks floated, unnamable things which were dim and slow-turning. A wedge of moon tried desperately to break the black tapestry of clouds overhead, silvered light reflected off the murky waters. She saw a ripple out there, then another, a suggestion of movement beneath the leaves and silt.
“Is…is something out there?” Rhonda’s voice asked.
But Lily did not answer her.
She heard a splashing, saw waves of dark water crest into the yard, breaking uneasily over the base of the birdfeeder, making her dying beds of cowslip and goldenrod bob and sway like swamp lilies. She sensed, rather than saw, movement out there. Shadows that would not be still, but rose and fell and slithered away, tangling with the shadows of the huge oaks out there. She heard a splashing, dragging sound like someone stepping through the flooded yard, pushing mounds of wet leaves before them.
But she could see nothing, just a whisper of shadow that melted into the hedges and was consumed by itself.
“You should try to close your eyes for awhile,” she told Rhonda, looking away from the window only a moment. But when she turned back, she saw a spiraling shape rise up from the water. It stood there, staring up at the house with reflective eyes, something made of rags and leaves and draping shrouds. Then it sank back into the water.
Lily made a sound in her throat and turned from the window and smiled at Rhonda. “Close your eyes,” she said.
She went down the hallway to the bathroom, smelling the stagnancy of the sewers beneath Witcham right away. The toilet was filled with black water and sludge which had backed-up, spattered the back of the white tank with oily droplets. Wrinkling her nose, Lily tried the taps. They made a belching sound and spewed a thin trickle of dirty water and then a clump of something. There was a distant bubbling sound coming up from the drain.
Lily listened to it, then put her ear down there to see if she could hear what it was.
The pipes gurgled and oozed and stank of ancient mossy cesspools, but nothing more.
Lily left the bathroom and went down into the cellar, past the junk room and playroom, into the washroom. She lit a candle and looked into the stationary tub. There were about three or four inches of that black, sewer- smelling mud in there, the candlelight reflecting off its greasy surface.
Behind her, there was a bubbling at the floor drain.
She went over there, a stench of rotting leaves and backed-up sewer lines wafting up at her. It reminded her of flooded cellars and black wells.
There was a foaming sucking sound, bubbles popping from it like somebody was down there breathing or blowing air. And then something else, something clotted and thick but sounding very much like laughter, laughter born in lungs clogged with mud. Bubbling and gurgling. The laughter faded away and more of the black, silty water was vomited from the pipes.
And the voice that came next was very clear, dirty and watery, but clear: “Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us. We’re all down here waiting for you…you don’t have to be afraid…just take my hand…”
And then from the drain, more black water bubbling up with a regurgitating sound like an old man’s belly. Lily gasped, sensed movement in those choked, seething pipes. She saw something obscenely white and fleshy coming out of the drain, something that wriggled fatly like a grotesque worm birthing itself from a slimy egg sack. It came out of that blackness, white and swollen and investigative, followed by another and another.
Fingers.
Then an entire hand, bloated and fish-belly white, set with puckered sores and contusions, something like larva squirming beneath the skin. The fingers reached out, splayed as thick as sausages, the nails gray and ragged. On the third finger, there was a high school class ring squeezing it tight like a tourniquet.
Lily felt a horror build in her, a disgust, an absolute revulsion.
Marlene had a ring like that.
The hand kept reaching, coming up farther out of the drain, slimed with silt and dirt. It came up as far as the forearm…and the wrist had been sutured, as if it had been slit open. Perhaps by a paring knife. The fingers brushed Lily’s toe and she recoiled, the feeling of that flesh like the cold guts of a fish. She let out a cry and grabbed a broom leaning nearby. Without thinking she swung it at the hand and swung it again. The impacts were wet and gelatinous as if she were striking a raw slab of liver. With each impact, black juice oozed from the hand. Finally it retreated, exploding in a spray of that inky juice. Bits of white flesh floated in it.
Something rolled across the floor…Marlene’s high school ring.
Uttering a scream, Lily ran up the stairs and slammed the cellar door shut behind her. She leaned against it, breathing hard.
Rhonda was standing in the hallway. “Are you all right?”
Lily swallowed. “A spider…a spider scared me.”
