conceive a house filled with laughing children! Surely! Now pierce the eggshell on Halloween night and pour the white into a glass of water and those twisting, slimy shapes will tell you things! Eat an egg before bed and you will dream of a week hence! Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Pour the yolk on a wound, say the words, and cast the shell in moonlight…you shall be cured!”
They were both smoking now.
Wanda took a sixth egg and handled it expertly. She spun it on the table and pressed it to her left eye, smiling all the while. Then carefully as a master chef, she cracked it into the plate and there was a threading of blood in it. Tensing, swallowing something down, she dipped her fingers into the cold tissue, wrapped loops of albumen around her fingers and held the dripping ooze up for all to see. She peered through it at the burning candle, then dropped it back down, piercing the yolk with the nail of her thumb. The yolk ran yellow and thick, but seamed with blood.
“Not much time now,” she said to those dumbfounded faces. “Those children are thinning in number…you must go to them now.”
“But where are they?” Tommy asked.
So she told them.
Mitch felt elated at hearing where they were. Now here was something positive they could do. It beat the hell out of sitting around wondering when those things might show. Yes, it felt very good. Right to his core it felt good…and then, just as suddenly, something else replaced it. Something that made him feel terrified. It opened up in his belly and filled him with a chill fluid. He knew something then, something he could not possibly know. “Lily… I…I can’t leave Lily alone, not with the girls…”
Wanda ran her fingers through the yolk one last time. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mitch, I really am sorry…”
But Mitch was already running out the door.
“Go with him,” Wanda told Tommy. “Now comes the darkness…”
33
Knocking?
Is that what he was hearing? A knocking in that empty house?
Yes, knocking. And hearing it, recognizing it, Deke wondered just how long he’d been hearing it. He’d been lost on his private fantasy train, but he was certain that he’d been hearing that sound for some time. Maybe that’s why his skin was crawling and his guts were bunching up…physical reactions to that sound. That awful drumming sound.
He sat up in his chair.
Knock, knock, knock.
He knew what he was thinking some time before he’d allowed himself to acknowledge it. The knocking. His room was next to Nicky’s and sometimes in the night they would knock out Morse Code to one another. But that didn’t mean anything. Not really.
Deke got up, wondering if he was really going to go up there. If he dared go up there. Because there was no getting around one thing: the knocking was directly overhead and the only room overhead was Nicky’s.
Deke walked over to the stairs with his flashlight. He didn’t really believe his brother was up there, but somebody was. As he stood at the bottom of the steps, his heart pounding with a low and muted sound, he heard the knocking again. And then something more. The creaking of bedsprings. He knew that creak very well. It was from Nicky’s bed. Deke had not heard it in a year and a half, but he recognized it instantly for what it was. Somebody had been lying in Nicky’s bed. Somebody had been lying there, knocking lightly on the wall and now…now they were getting up.
Deke’s throat was so dry he could not swallow.
He knew he could not just go up there and meet whatever it was with just a flashlight in hand. There was a shotgun in the basement, but he had no idea where the shells were. He had to think. He didn’t have the time. Whoever was up there was walking across Nicky’s floor, perhaps moving to the doorway even now.
“C’mon, asshole,” Deke said under his breath. “A weapon…something…”
Then he knew. The fireplace tools. Blackened and heavy, drop-forged iron. He took up a poker and had visions of dad stirring the coals in the fireplace so that Nicky and he could roast marshmallows.
Drawing in a sharp breath, he started up the steps.
This was as bad as it could get. There was no doubt of that. He could feel the weight of his body as he mounted each stair, the very pressure of his being. The air seemed hot or electrical around him like it was filled with some stored potential energy that was crackling and about to be discharged.
At the top, his heart nearly stopped.
He heard a shrill, mewling sound and it filled his blood with ice crystals. But it was only Mr. Cheese. Deke put the flashlight on him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Mr. Cheese squinted at the light, wagged the stump of his tail. He was home after all. Always had been. And hear he was, sitting outside the door to Nicky’s room, meowing away.
He’s waiting to be let in, Deke. Old Mr. Cheese is waiting for what’s behind that door to let him in as it always did in the old days…except these aren’t the old days and what’s behind that door is not Nicky. It’s something else now. Something without a soul, something that crawled from a grave.
Mr. Cheese brushed up against his legs and Deke badly wanted to give him a kick, but he didn’t have the heart, he just didn’t have the heart to hurt that poor?
Knock, knock, knock.
From behind the door now. From Behind Nicky’s door. The sound of knuckles wrapping and there was no way in hell anyone but the two of them knew what that meant. Nobody but Nicky, or something pretending to be Nicky, could know the enormity of what that sound did to Deke. How it shattered him inside and made a scream claw dryly in his throat, made him want to drop to the floor and maybe pull himself into a corner where he could weep and suck his thumb with childish abandon.
He pulled air into his lungs. “Nicky?” he said. “Is that you, Nicky?”
Whoever was behind that door made no sound…no sound but sort of a dripping. But Deke knew they were there, he could sense their physical presence, feel it crawling into him like worms into bad meat, staying there and breeding. Whoever waited behind that wooden panel was wet and dripping and stank like carrion pulled from a drainage ditch.
“Okay,” Deke said. “Come on out then.”
The door swung open and Nicky stepped out, small and hunched-over, his burial suit hanging in tatters, just a gassy-smelling corpse that might have been fished from the bottom of a mossy well. Most of his face had rotted down to the bone, but where the flesh had once been, now there was a gray covering of mold. One eye socket was empty, the other set with a staring huge eyeball that was oily and black.
Deke gasped and stepped back.
Mr. Cheese laid his ears back against his skull, hissed, and ran down the steps.
Nicky smiled and most of his teeth were missing. “Hello, Deke, hello, big brother, I come back for you,” he said, speaking with a childlike voice, but one that had been freed of that little boy lisp that made it hard for him to pronounce the “R” sound. Yes, it sounded somewhat like the voice of a little boy, though damaged and moist, but there was a maturity to it now that was not just old, it was ancient. “You know what I did, Deke? Do you know what I did?”
“Nicky, oh God, no…”
“I came home and waited outside for mom and dad,” the thing said. “Yes, Deke, I waited outside. When dad came out to lock the garage, I was waiting for him. I put my teeth in his throat and I drank his blood and when mom came looking for him, I told her what it was like in hell. I told her what they did to her sweet little boy in hell. And then I killed her, Deke. I killed her and ate her guts and when I was done, I fucked her corpse?”
No this was not Nicky.
Deke was still frightened, but the anger he felt at the obscenities spewing from that thing’s mouth turned
