corridor, and there was that beaked thing, that . . . whatever it was. It was bigger than before and it was squirming its way out of the night sky like a weasel working its way under a fence. I tried to convince myself it was all in my head, but I wasn’t convinced enough to stop and find out.
I made the bottom of the hill, in sight of the road that turned off to Alma May’s. I don’t know why I felt going there mattered, but it was something I had in my mind. Make it to Alma May’s, and deliver on my agreement, bring her brother into the house. Course, I hadn’t really thought that thing would or could follow us.
It was right then the car engine blew in an explosion that made the hood bunch up from the impact of thrown pistons.
The car died and coasted onto the road that led to Alma May’s house. We could see the house, standing in daylight. But even that light was fading as the night behind us eased on in.
I jerked open the car door, snatched the records off the backseat, and yelled to Tootie to start running. He nabbed his guitar, and a moment later we were both making tracks for Alma May’s.
Looking back, I saw there was a moon back there, and stars too, but mostly there was that thing, full of eyes and covered in sores and tentacles and legs and things I can’t even describe. It was like someone had thrown critters and fish and bugs and beaks and all manner of disease into a bowl and whipped it together with a whipping spoon.
When we got to Alma May’s, I beat on the door. She opened it, showing a face that told me she thought I was knocking too hard, but then she looked over my shoulder and went pale, almost as if her skin was white. She had heard the music, so she could see it too.
Slamming the door behind us, I went straight to the record player. Alma May was asking all kinds of questions, screaming them out. First to me, then to Tootie. I told her to shut up. I jerked one of the records out of its sheath, put it on the turntable, lifted the needle, and—the electricity crackled and it went dark. There was no playing anything on that player. Outside, the world was lit by that bloodred moon.
The door blew open. Tentacles flicked in, knocked over an end table. Some knickknacks fell and busted on the floor. Big as the monster was, it was squeezing through, causing the door frame to crack; the wood breaking sounded like someone cracking whips with both hands.
Me and Alma May, without even thinking about it, backed up. The red shadow, bright as a campfire, fled away from the monster and started flowing across the floor, bugs and worms squirming in it.
But not toward us.
It was running smooth as an oil spill toward the opposite side of the room. I got it then. It didn’t just want through to this side. It wanted to finish off that deal Tootie had made with the record store owner. Tootie had said it all along, but it really hit me then. It didn’t want me and Alma at all.
It had come for Tootie’s soul.
There was a sound so sharp I threw my hands over my ears, and Alma May went to the floor. It was Tootie’s guitar. He had hit it so hard, it sounded electrified. The pulse of that one hard chord made me weak in the knees. It was a hundred times louder than the record. It was beyond belief, and beyond human ability. But it was Tootie.
The red shadow stopped, rolled back like a tongue.
The guitar was going through its paces now. The thing at the doorway recoiled slightly, and then Tootie yelled, “Come get me. Come have me. Leave them alone.”
I looked, and there in the faint glow of the red moonlight through the window, I saw Tootie’s shadow lift that guitar high above his head by the neck, and down it came, smashing hard into the floor with an explosion of wood and a springing of strings.
The bleeding shadow came quickly then. Across the floor and onto Tootie. He screamed. He screamed like someone having the flesh slowly burned off. Then the beast came through the door as if shot out of a cannon.
Tentacles slashed, a million feet scuttled, and those beaks came down, ripping at Tootie like a savage dog tearing apart a rag doll. Blood flew all over the room. It was like a huge strawberry exploded.
Then another thing happened. A blue mist floated up from the floor, from what was left of Tootie, and for just the briefest of moments, I saw Tootie’s face in that blue mist; the face smiled a toothless kind of smile, showing nothing but a dark hole where his mouth was. Then, like someone sniffing steam off soup, the blue mist was sucked into the beaks of that thing, and Tootie and his soul were done with.
The thing turned its head and looked at us. It made a noise like a thousand rocks and broken automobiles tumbling down a cliff made of gravel and glass, and it began to suck back toward the door. It went out with a sound like a wet towel being popped. The bleeding shadow ran across the floor after it, eager to catch up; a lapdog hoping for a treat.
The door slammed as the thing and its shadow went out, and then the air got clean and the room got bright.
I looked where Tootie had been.
Nothing.
Not a bone.
Not a drop of blood.
I raised the window and looked out.
It was morning.
No clouds in the sky.
The sun looked like the sun.
Birds were singing.
The air smelled clean as a newborn’s breath.
I turned back to Alma May. She was slowly getting up from where she had dropped to the floor.
“It just wanted him,” I said, having a whole different kind of feeling about Tootie than I had before. “He gave himself to it. To save you, I think.”
She ran into my arms and I hugged her tight. After a moment, I let go of her. I got the records and put them together. I was going to snap them across my knee. But I never got the chance. They went wet in my hands, came apart, and hit the floor and ran through the floorboards like black water, and that was all she wrote.
HUNGRY HEART
by Simon R. Green
