fell against the wall.
Then the thing that had once been Amanda was upon him, sliding down onto the preacher with a mushy, wet sound. Her liquid flesh flowed over him and the inhuman mouth bent to his face. Nettie heard his muffled cries as he joined his wife in unholy union.
Then Nettie's muscles stirred to life and she pulled herself from her chair. She bolted across the floor, her shoes slipping on the slimy trail that Amanda had left. As she reached the vestry door, the preacher's voice clearly pierced the air in a final litany.
'It burns… it burns,' he whimpered.
Amanda had tilted her soggy head to the ceiling, swamp suds dribbling from her vacuous mouth. ' Shu- shaaahhhh,' the monster sprayed to the heavens before dropping its face once again to the preacher's.
Nettie ran into the unlit sanctuary, banging her knee against the pipe organ. She prayed to the Lord to shine on her from the darkness, this darkness that ruled the earth, that rose in thick fogs around the edges of her mind and threatened to swallow her into the belly of madness.
Because hell had unleashed its demons, the Apocalypse had arrived, and she wondered if she had the faith to stand. For the first time since she had been saved, she wondered if faith alone would be enough.
Robert turned off the television. He couldn't concentrate on the basketball game. He'd put the kids to bed and tucked them in with lies, hoping he'd done a good job of hiding his worry. He walked into the kitchen and stared at the telephone, silently begging it to ring, debating another call to the cops. He looked at the owl clock they’d received as a wedding present, its hands as dusty as their marriage.
It was nearly midnight. He balled his fists and wrestled the urge to punch the refrigerator. He longed to feel the pain flare up his arm and to pull his bloody knuckles from the dented metal, to hammer the idiotic appliance for standing there slick and mute while his wife was missing. He wished he could break himself in half as punishment for driving her away, because he knew it was his fault.
Suppose she’d had enough and couldn’t face another of his temper tantrums? Robert couldn't really blame her. All because his guilt was chewing his intestines from the ass-end up. All because he should have been there for her, should have talked and confessed and opened his heart and asked for the forgiveness he knew she would have granted.
What if the unthinkable happened? That dream of hers, the one she’d tried to tell him about. He’d only half listened while she related it. Something about the mountain eating them all. Maybe it was some kind of prescient view of an accident, maybe she’d driven off the road or fallen in a river or been suffocated or murdered or…
Don't even think about it. But her goddamned Gloomies Forget that clairvoyant crap. Well, if Tamara could see the future, why had she married such a worthless piece of rat baggage?
But she’d been right about her father. And when Kevin broke his hip. If she is dead, and you never got a chance to say you were sorry, then how are you ever going to live with yourself?
He was reconsidering battering the stupid refrigerator because he couldn't reach inside and rip his even stupider heart out, couldn't hold it to the light over the sink as it dripped its cheating blood, couldn't watch it take its last undeserved beats. He couldn't, because of the kids.
'Daddy?'
Robert turned, his fists balled. Ginger rubbed a sleepy eye, clutching a stuffed frog to her chest. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
'What are you doing out of bed, honey?' He relaxed his hands and knelt to her. She looked so much like Tamara.
'Had a bad dream.' She stood there sniffling in her flannel circus pajamas as he hugged her.
'It's okay now. Let me tuck you back in, and you can tell me all about it if you want.'
'I want Mommy.'
'Mommy's still not home, sweetheart. But she will be, soon.'
'Not if the Dirt Mouth eats her.'
'Dirt Mouth?' Robert almost grinned, but his daughter's serious green eyes stopped him.
'The Dirt Mouth in the mountains.' She said it matter-of-factly, as if it were something she had seen in a nature program on television.
'Honey, there's no such thing-'
'Mommy said you have to trust your dreams. Because dreams are nature, and nature never lies. And the Dirt Mouth was in my dreams. And Mommy was on the mountain with it.'
'Dreams are just little tricks the brain plays on us while we're asleep. Games to help pass the night while we’re resting.'
'Where's Mommy, then?'
'Just… out somewhere, honey.'
'Out with the Dirt Mouth. And it’s going to eat the whole mountain, Daddy. It wants to eat everybody and all the trees and things.'
Robert stroked Ginger's hair and held her to his chest. 'It's just a bad dream, honey. Let's get you back to bed, and in the morning you'll see that Mommy will be home and the sun will come up and there won't be any mean old dirt mouths around.'
He lifted her and carried her back to bed.
God, she's growing so fast. Blonde and gorgeous and bright eyed. She's going to be sensitive, just like her mother. She has a wonderful imagination, too.
Just like her mother.
He tucked her under the blankets and kissed her forehead. He couldn't help it. He had to know. Just in case. 'Where was Mommy, honey? In your dream, I mean?'
'On the mountain, with the bad people. The barefooted mountain. Where the Dirt Mouth is, and the green light.'
She yawned, then her tiny eyelashes flickered as her eyelids relaxed.
'Sleep tight, sugar. Daddy will make everything better.'
'‘Kay, Daddy.'
He turned off the light. Her voice came from the darkness.
“Daddy, what’s a shu-shaaa?”
“Shu-shaaa? I don’t know, honey.”
“It’s scary.”
'Don't you worry,' he said to the dark bed. 'Nothing bad can happen to you. Not while I’m around.'
He found that lying was easy, once you got used to it. He started to sing “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and was on the third round of masters and dames when Ginger fell asleep.
He went out on the porch to smoke a cigarette and wait.
Nettie prayed.
She asked the Lord why He had allowed her to trip over that little round headstone that was really only a rock, the marker for an ancient, anonymous grave. She should have seen it gleaming like a white-capped tooth under the grinning curd of the moon. But she had run in a panic, out of the side door of the church into the dark graveyard. And she had been blind with fear.
What purpose could the Lord have in breaking her ankle? And she was scared to call for help, because help might come in the hideous form of the preacher's wife.
Or the preacher himself, standing there in the glow of the vestry lights with his pants around his ankles and his eyes as deep as devil pits. Maybe if she could reach the parsonage, maybe if Sarah were home, maybe if she could crawl…
It was only forty yards. But the pain was a ring of dull fire above her foot and she had to pull herself along by digging her hands into the turf and dragging herself forward a few feet at a time. As she slid, the earth sent its small stones digging into her hip and the grass tugged at her skirt. She was only a dozen yards from the church when she heard the sounds.
At first she thought it was a burst water pipe, or a wet wind cutting through the rags of the treetops. Then she saw them, shadows shuffling out of the forest at the edge of the cemetery. She was about to call out, thinking
