“Where?” Brian said in a squeaking voice.
“Hurry!” the kid said. “The lady’ll help us! She’ll take care of us!”
They heard the clown bashing his way through the door, happily singing “Higglety Pigglety, my black hen.” They needed no further coaxing. There was nothing worse than the clown and the degenerate things he would do to them if he got those pulpy white hands on them. Death was one thing, but there were worse things than just dying. Things your soul would simply not survive.
So they ran after the kid, wondering vaguely where it was he might be taking them.
4
When Miriam Blake was just a kid?and being that she was pushing eighty, that was back in the lower Paleolithic?she’d gone to the Holy Covenant Catholic girl’s school over in East Genessee about three blocks from the brewery where her father worked and the linen shop where her mother sewed curtains. The school was run by a befuddled, much put upon priest named Father Dobson, who was known as “Dobby” to just about everyone. Dobby was a little round man with a brilliant shock of white hair. The girls all loved him because he was sweet and patient and didn’t seem capable of raising his voice. Which was in great contrast to the Sisters of Holy Covenant who were loud and bossy and bitter, quick with the paddle and not above foul language when they wanted to make their point. It was rumored that they rode broomsticks to mass and stirred cauldrons of bat’s wing and dead man’s eyeballs in their spare time. Miriam’s mother had gone to Holy Covenant and one time Miriam had heard her mother tell her father, “Oh, poor old Dobby, Sister Margaret and the other witches are still showing him where to squat and what to wipe.”
Old Dobby?who had dropped dead of a heart attack on Christmas Eve of 1942 while saying midnight mass? seemed happiest in the chapel where he was in charge and not in the school itself where he felt like a sacrificial lamb. The chapel was a high white-washed church that had been well over a hundred years old by the time Miriam attended services there. It was connected to the school by a narrow tunnel in the back. Inside, it smelled of age and old books, polished wood and dust. The belfry was filled with bats and when the wind blew, the entire building would creak and groan. Dobby ran choir practice on Wednesday and Friday nights. And after the latter, he would gather up the girls, shut the lights off and tell ghost stories. The chapel was, of course, very atmospheric in the darkness…creaking and shifting, old timbers groaning and shadows flitting about.
Friday nights were always Miriam’s favorite time of the week when old Dobby would do his damnedest to scare the girls half to death. While they held onto each other, he’d tell them one gruesome horror story after the other. They’d hear about the foolish girl who wept in a country churchyard by night because her sisters were all married and she was not. Then one night, the corpse of a man murdered on his wedding night swept her onto a skeleton horse and took her off to the land of the dead to be his bride. They’d hear about the woman who was possessed by a demon and ate her own children and the madman who buried girls alive. A perennial favorite was the one about the guy who’d had a growth removed from his belly and kept the growth in a jar of alcohol in the cellar where it was warm and moist, not realizing the growth was actually part of his twin brother who had died in the womb. Down there in the darkness, his brother grew and burst from the jar, a creeping thing that “looked like a fungus pretending to be a boy,” as Dobby put it. They’d get real quiet and real tense over this one. Dobby would say that the thing was down in the chapel cellar, right NOW. Which worked perfectly because the chapel cellar was cobwebbed and drippy and dark.
“It’s coming, girls…can you hear it coming?” Dobby would say. “It’s on the second stair, crawling its way up. The third stair and fourth stair. Can you hear the squishing sounds its feet make? Its fingernails dragging over the stair post? It’s dirty and smelling and dripping with goo. There are worms living in it and it has no eyes. It’s at the top of the stairs, girls…can you smell it? Can you hear it breathing? CAN YOU? It’s coming now, dragging its way up the aisle. I can heart it whispering your names…Lisa, Mary Jo, Doris, Kathleen…dear God, which of you will it take down into the rotting tunnels beneath the cellar? Which one? Which one? Can you smell its foul breath and feel its cold fingers at your throat…don’t scream, don’t even breathe or it will hear you…it wants…it wants…it WANTS YOU, MIRIAM!”
At which point, all the girls would scream bloody murder. Some of the girls would come away from these Friday night spook sessions scared out of their wits, many would have nightmares. But as much as the Sisters chastised old Dobby, he would not relent. Maybe the school was their’s, but the chapel, the choir, and the ghost stories were his and his alone. The girls needed a bit of wicked fun, he would say. A good scare does wonders to strengthen the heart. The sisters could never talk him out of this and Dobby scared the shit out of girls at Holy Covenant for upwards of sixty years and it was his talent for horror stories that filled the choir to bursting, not the love of singing hymns.
This is what Miriam was thinking about as she held court in her living room by candlelight. The night was dark and wet outside, filled with awful shapes that knocked on people’s doors…and inside, only slightly less spooky. For the candles flickered and the shadows jumped and Miriam almost felt like she was back in the chapel of Holy Covenant, could feel old Dobby sitting nearby.
“There’s danger out there, I’m saying, danger like none have ever seen before,” she told her captive audience of Margaret Boyne, her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the school superintendent. “It happened not an hour before you came. There I was minding my own business and there came a knock on the door. Oh, I knew it was trouble straight off. For who knocks on doors in the dead of effing night but the sort of things you would never want to invite in? It scared the flipping beejeesus right out of me. But did I answer that door? I did not. But I did go and look, God have mercy, but I did. I crept up there slick as a cat on a rat and peaked through the side panel window…and do you know what I saw?”
Russel just stared with wide eyes like a little boy on Halloween night and Margaret crossed herself, something she was doing a lot of this night. Lou Darin just sat there with his arms crossed, looking stubborn.
Miriam stroked the twelve-gauge shotgun on her lap. “Well, I’ll tell you. There was a man standing out there or what I thought was a man. But wet and dirty, stuck with leaves and clots of mud like he’d just crawled out of a ditch. He was all twisted up like maybe his back was broke, long hair falling over his face, things crawling on him. He stood there knocking. Very patient, in no hurry at all. Then he looked down and saw me and…I think he smiled at me, grinned, something. But it wasn’t a smile you expect to see this side of the grave and don’t you effing dare humor me with that smirk of yours, Lou Darin. For I saw it! It was a dead thing and that face hanging like rags…it was dead, a walking corpse.”
Lou Darin was still not convinced. First it was Mitch Barron and his Saturday night spook stories and now it was Miriam, of all people. Lou was willing to admit that there was some awful business out there, but the living dead? No, that was not reasonable or sane.
“We have some individuals out there driven mad,” he said. “Gangs of crazies looting and robbing and probably murdering. That’s all it is.”
“Well, Mr. Doubting Thomas, you are just the pick of the litter, aren’t you?” Miriam chuckled. But if there was any humor in her, you would not have known it. Her wrinkled old lady mouth was hooked into a permanent sneer like maybe she’d suffered a pinpoint stroke and couldn’t work the muscles loose. “You were with Russel and Margaret, weren’t you? You saw those children coming out of the water same as they did…how do you explain that?”
Lou Darin just shrugged. “Kids,” was all he would say.
But it was pretty hollow and they all knew it.
For Russel and Margaret’s version was a little different. They’d been coming out of the Boyne house when they saw those “kids” and Russel said they were both falling apart, the skin just hanging off of them. They were both carrying things that they were chewing on. Neither Russel or Margaret could say what the one thing was, but the other was certainly a dead cat.
“It was gnawing on the thing,” Russel reiterated. “It was squatting there in the street, all that water rushing around it. I think…I think it was a boy. It had ripped that cat’s belly clean open and it was stuffing its face in there, chewing. I saw it.”
“Of course you did, dear,” Miriam said. “The dead are walking, they’re climbing up out of their graves and they hate the living. They will murder us and make us like them. They will eat us and lick our bones.”
