Authors: Jonathan Maberry
There was a looking pause and then, “Bullshit!” he snarled, but there was an ocean of doubt in his trembling voice. “He’s as dead as you are!”
Terry stood there and listened just as naturally as if someone were really speaking. Sarah watched in awed fascination, seeing his expression undergo a series of slow changes: at first his face held a challenging look, then his features went slowly blank as if he was hearing new information that was taking some thought to digest; then it was indignant disbelief that curled his lips to tight thinness; then a slowly dawning look of profound horror; and finally a sad despair that made his fall into sickness. “
No
,” he said, and his voice was a hoarse whisper.
“T-Terry?” Sarah ventured.
“But I’m nothing like that!” he cried, arguing with empty space. “I’m
nothing
like that.” Tears fell coursed down his cheeks. “I
can’t
be like that….”
“Terry, talk to me!” She might as well have been a million miles away.
“It’s not fair,” he mumbled. “Not fair, not fair, not fair…” Each time he repeated it his voice diminished, sounding further and further away as if somehow inside his own head Terry was moving farther away from Sarah, from the room, and from himself. It was utterly chilling to watch.
There was the faint cry of a siren in the distance.
“Not fair, not fair, not—” Abruptly he lifted his bowed head and looked again at the empty wall by the armoire. “What can I do?” A pause. “I don’t
want
to do that. I can keep control of it. I never gave in, you know that. I’m a good person! I’ll never be like
him.
I can stop it!”
Sarah took a small step forward, close enough to touch him if she dared, but she did not. Part of her mind was suddenly screaming at her to run, to get away from Terry before…Before…what? She had no idea what her instincts were trying to tell her, so she slammed the lid down on them. She watched as he reached down and picked up the largest remaining piece of glass from the Warhol lithograph, a triangular spike four inches wide at one end and tapering along eleven inches to a dagger-sharp point. Sarah’s heart seemed to freeze midbeat, but Terry held it between his fingers gingerly, not like a weapon but truly like a mirror, angling it to increase the reflective surface. Just for this moment all he seemed interested in was his reflection—the twisted reflection he apparently saw and she did not. His face was filled with a dreadful fascination, as if he no longer doubted that what he saw was completely real to him and could now, in at least a marginal way, bear to examine it, as if he now understood some of the awful answers.
A chill, like a brief icy breeze, brushed along Sarah’s side, and she turned to look, but the room was still empty, still desolate. Terry turned, too, looking in the same direction as if he, too, had felt the chill; then Sarah felt her stomach turn to ice as he addressed that spot of air from which the coldness seemed to radiate. He no longer addressed the wall by the armoire. “Is it real, then?” he asked with such crippling hurt in his voice that the sound of it broke Sarah’s heart. “Is it true?”
“Oh my God…,” she whispered, and for the first time wondered if what he was seeing was really in the room with them.
“God…no,” he pleaded, letting the glass fall from his hand. “Don’t let it be. Please God, don’t let it be like this!” More tears fell from his blueberry-colored eyes.
Sarah was weeping now, too. She reached out to touch him, but he saw her hand and jerked away from her as if she had come at him with a knife.
“Don’t touch me!” he hissed, falling over onto his hip, scrabbling and crawling desperately away from her. Red blood blossomed from several long gashes that opened as he scrambled away through the jagged litter. “Don’t touch me! Can’t you see?”
His rejection of her stabbed into her with terrible force, producing not more despair but an anger that leapt up from her broken heart and escaped through her mouth.
“Goddamn it, Terry! There’s nothing
to
see!”
“Yes! Look! For Christ’s sake—are you blind?” He held up another piece of glass, turning it to show her.
“No!” she snapped. “No more of that!” She stepped forward and slapped the glass out of his hand, but her angle was bad and immediately she felt a burn across her palm and looked down to see blood flood outward from her palm. She stared at it and then held her hand out angrily to Terry. “Now see, damn it! Do you want to keep this up until we cut ourselves to piece…” Her voice died abruptly in her throat, choked to silence by the look that had appeared suddenly and intensely on Terry’s face as he stared at her welling blood. It was a look of total, naked hunger. A horrible, lustful hunger. He leered at her blood and his mouth began working, lips and jaws moving as if tasting the air, as if tasting her blood.
With a cry of horror, Sarah reeled back, whipping her hand away and hiding it behind her back like a starving child hiding a scrap from a scrounging dog. Terry leaned forward as if to follow her, his weight dropping down onto his palms. When she moved back another step, and then another, he moved forward, walking on knees and hands in a mockery of a dog, and with each step forward his body movement changed, becoming comfortable with the posture, moving with a strange grace that was so much at odds with his naked, bleeding state.
Sarah’s back struck hard against the edge of the door frame. Terry advanced again, then darted forward in a lunge that brought him to within a yard of her. His eyes glared up at her, and in them Sarah saw no trace of Terry. The eyes that looked at her were the hungry eyes of an animal.
The strange wave of coldness that had touched her earlier swept past again, passing between her and Terry. Sarah shivered involuntarily, but Terry turned suddenly, lunging at the cold air as it passed, actually snarling at it and biting the empty air. Sarah wanted to run, to scream—but a stronger urge kept her there, in that room, with Terry. Not this Terry, but the one she loved, however much he might be damaged, might be submerged beneath all of his sickness.
Terry slowly turned back toward her. The muscles in his arms and back began to ripple with an unnatural spasm, and pain danced in Terry’s eyes. He tore at the carpet with his fingernails, and a line of drool slipped from between his lips to hang pendulously below his chin.
Sarah could have run, could have been out the bedroom door, down the steps, gone from the house in seconds. The ambulance wail was closer now and she could run toward it, toward safety, but she stood her ground for love of him. The twisted, snarling knot of muscle and bone that inched toward her had madness in its eyes and enough physical power to easily break her apart. She knew that if he attacked her she could not—and would not—fight him. She held her ground as he stalked to within inches of her, his face wrinkled in a grotesque parody of an animal’s silent scream, like a tiger’s face before it kills, like a wolf as it leaps. Sarah believed it, knew the threat, felt that her life was measured now in seconds. Slowly, slowly, she lowered herself down to her knees in front of him, bending until she sat on her calves, her head level with his, feeling the sharp bit of glass into her knees but not caring, not reacting to that—pain and blood were nothing to her at that moment.
His eyes watched her, alight with hunger. Sarah reached out with her hands and touched both sides of his face. At first he jerked away, growling low in his throat, but she tried again, saying a single word, “No.” Just that one word, said softly.
The places where her palms touched seemed to crackle with energy, though whether it was real or not, she couldn’t tell. She knelt there, touching his face, and said it again, “No.”
The moment was unreal. He was there on all fours, transformed in a broken moment from a gentle man who had held her and loved her to a damaged and incomplete imitation of some predatory thing—a beast of indefinable nature. She was there, kneeling on a glass-strewn and blood-splattered carpet, touching madness and denying its power with a single word. “No.”
He looked at her with the eyes of madness. In the uncertain light by the open bedroom doorway, his eyes no longer seemed blue at all, but appeared to glow with a bizarre red-gold glow. Animal eyes. He turned his face toward her bleeding palm, sniffed at it.
“No, Terry.” He leaned closer toward the flowing blood. An inch away, less. The smell of salt and copper filled his nostrils. Sweat burst from his forehead. He was shaking all over as if he had a raging fever. His tongue wormed from between his lips, reaching, needing, almost touching the blood, almost tasting it.
“NO!”
This time it was Terry himself who said it. Yelled it. Screamed it—and the words were ripped out of him, bellowed with horrible and inhuman force as he reared up and shoved at her, knocking her into the hallway, knocking himself back against the bed.
“NO!”
he screamed again and the red-gold glow of his eyes burned with incandescent fury. Sarah fell heavily, her head rapping hard against the banister. Dazed, she watched as Terry rose up from the floor, first to his knees and then slowly, with terrible struggling jerks and spasms to a crouch, and finally all the way to his full height. Naked, crisscrossed with bleeding slashes, bathed in sweat, he was an awesome sight. Every muscle in his body was locked in battle, one against another, evidence of some titanic internal struggle.
“NO!”
he roared, and he wept, too, his tears burning bright in his eyes. “No, you can’t take that away from me, too! You can’t make me, you bastard! You lose, Griswold, you fucking
lose
!” He laughed with weird triumph, though his laugh became a sob.
He wrenched himself around to face Sarah, his mouth working as he tried to speak, but only choked sounds came out of his constricted throat.
“Sarah!”
was all he could manage, and then he spun around, ran straight across the room, and threw himself headfirst out of the window with Sarah’s horrified, despairing scream following him all the way down to the garden flagstones.
(1)
Diego saw them walking along the back road and cut through the rows of corn to intercept them, pushing his John Deere cap back on his forehead and smiling. “Little dark out here for a stroll, ladies, dontcha think?”
Val shrugged affably. “Taking the shortcut back to the house. How’s the tractor?”
“Axle’s shot, but we’re going to tow it in back to the shed and José and Ty can fix it tomorrow.”
“Okay. I have to go into town for a bit. You guys should knock off for today.”
Diego grinned, his teeth very white against the deep black of his mustache. “Okay, we’ll wrap it up as soon as the tractor’s moved. Besides, it’s Little Halloween and there’s a keg party at the campus. Ty and the others were planning on heading out there.”
“Not you?”
“Too old for that crap. Gonna order a pizza, watch
Dawn of the Dead
on cable, and fall asleep in my La-Z-Boy. At my age that’s partying.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Hey,” he said, “if you two are going to be out prowling around you should take this.” He tugged a Maglite from his back pocket, turned it on, and handed it over.
“We’re just heading back to the house. I need to get my purse and leave a note for Crow in case he comes out, and then we’re taking off. Thanks, Dee.”
He sketched a salute and headed back across the fields to where José and Ty were hooking the tractor up to the tow-rig on Diego’s big Tundra. The moment he was out of sight Connie’s mental focus seemed to snap back on as if someone had thrown a switch. “I know!” she said brightly. “Maybe before we go see Sarah we can bake her a pumpkin pie.” Like most of her recent remarks it was as much of a non sequitur as if she’d suggested they set themselves on fire and jump off the roof. Val was learning to roll with them, but it took effort.
“Sure, honey,” she said, “but let’s do that later. C’mon.”
As they walked the strong white beam of the Maglite picked out their path through the corn on one side and the harvested field on the other, and then caught a splash of dark red as the barn loomed out of the darkness in front of them. In the field they could hear the Tundra’s engine growl to life as Diego and his men began hauling the tractor back to the shed that was down the road from the barn. Val and Connie walked without hurry, and Val figured that if an ambulance was coming to take Terry in to Pinelands, then Sarah would be busy for a while getting him settled. No need to be there for that; it was those long hours of waiting and fretting in the lounge while the doctors ran their tests when Sarah would need allies.
“Maybe we should put together some fruits and things and take a basket,” Connie rattled on and on. “I have a lovely basket in the pantry and we could use some of that ribbon that—”
Then the flash caught something shiny lying in the dirt just outside the barn door and Val bent to pick it up. It was a small diamond-shaped medallion with a length of broken silver chain. Clearly stamped on the front was a six-armed cross painted bright red and set with a tiny caduceus in the center.
“That’s odd…that’s Mark’s MedicAlert necklace,” Connie said with surprise, “for his peanut allergy.”
“I know,” Val said, turning it over to see the warning notice and phone numbers. “He must have dropped it.” She looked around and then skimmed the flashlight beam along the dirt path that led from the barn to the house. A line of footprints, clearly Mark’s smooth-soled Florsheims, was visible heading toward the barn, but no overlapping prints led back. Frowning, Val slowly followed the footprints, and saw a second set of prints—shoes of a different size but still city shoes—also heading toward the barn and these were overlapped by Mark’s. Was he meeting someone there? That seemed very odd. The prints led right up to the door, and the last visible print was cut off by the door that had been pulled almost all the way closed. Obviously Mark had gone into the barn and pulled the door shut behind him.
Connie shifted to stand next to her, her eyes following the same path and the same logic Val had used, and there were twin vertical lines between her brows. “Is Mark in the barn?” she asked, as if that was the strangest thing in the world.
“I think so.” Val took a half-step toward the door, and then paused. Did she really want another screaming match right now? She was shaking her head in answer to her own question when Connie said, “Open the door.”
“If he’s still in there, Conn, then maybe he wants to be alone for a bit. Let’s leave him be.”
It was at that moment that they heard something move inside the barn. It was a soft, shuffling sound—a scrape of a shoe on the hard-packed dirt floor just on the other side of the big plank door. It froze Val in place and she stood staring at the nearly closed door, at the black line of inky darkness between the door and the frame.
Was Mark right there, listening to them? Listening and saying nothing? Standing there in the dark?
She glanced at Connie, who had also heard the sound. Her frown lines had deepened. “Mark…?”
Another sound—a shift again and this time Val was sure that it was the scuff of a shoe on the floor, just on the other side of the door. It had to be Mark, of course, but why was he standing there in the dark? It was so—she fished for the word. Weird. Especially for Mark, who was not the type to be loitering in the darkened barn. Farm-bred or not, Mark was a city boy, and this was just not his sort of thing. It was—prankish; even a little mean. That part—the meanness—that could be Mark, but not prankish.
A third scuff and now there was a second sound. A more organic sound, like a grunt. Not a middle-register grunt of a pig—there were no pigs on the Guthrie farm—but a deeper sound, almost a cough, or maybe a single short snort of laughter.
“Mark?” Connie asked again and started reaching for the door handle, but Val instinctively caught her wrist.
“No,” she said quietly, staring hard at the door, at that vertical line of darkness that showed a total lack of light inside. “Don’t.” She hadn’t liked that grunt, whether it was a cough or a snort, it just didn’t sound
right.
“Let’s go back to the house,” she said. She took Connie’s wrist in her free hand and then took a single backward step, drawing Connie with her. Connie resisted, her gaze lingering for a moment on the door before finally turning around to give Val an uncomprehending stare.
“But—it’s Mark,” she said, giving Val a frowning smile of confusion.
There was a second grunting sound and then a light slapping sound as if someone had placed their open hand flat on the inside of the door. The heavy door trembled and opened maybe half an inch, broadening the line of darkness. Val pulled Connie another step back. This time she was sure she had identified the kind of sound coming from behind that door. It was laughter. It just wasn’t Mark’s.
“Let’s go back to the house,” she whispered harshly. “Now.”
Connie tried to pull away and as she did so she turned toward the door and shouted Mark’s name.
“No!” Val yelled as the door suddenly swung open. She shined her light on the face of the man standing there. It wasn’t Mark.
It was Kenneth Boyd.
(2)
They struggled up the last few feet and collapsed onto the grass that fringed the Passion Pit. The sun was long down and the sky was bright with a billion stars. It was warmer up there and a rowdy gaggle of geese was waddling around the clearing, honking contentedly and poking into the grass for bits of stale hamburger buns and cold french fries. In the trees the last finches of the season were chatting noisily. There were even some elderly fireflies drifting lazily through the air. Newton, lying on his back, recorded these things. “Is this even the same planet?”
Crow shook his head. “Don’t ask me, son, I have long since lost the capacity for rational thought.” Crow struggled to sit up and reached over to pat Newton’s leg. “We’re going to have to talk about this. I mean we’ll have to
think
about it some, and then you and I are going to have to talk about this.”
“Well,” Newton said, “there’s one thing I can tell you now, and that’s you can pretty much go on the assumption that I am somewhat less skeptical about this town’s reputation for being haunted.”
“How much is ‘somewhat’?”
“Like maybe a hundred percent.”
“That’s all?” Crow tried on a smile, but it didn’t fit. Even the muscles of his face hurt from strain. He took a breath, exhaling as he forced himself to sit up, and after a moment stood up, reaching a hand down to haul Newton to his feet. Then he walked over and unlocked his car. He reached in for his cell. “Still no bars. I’ll have to call Val from the road. Come on, cowboy, let’s go.” He lingered by the open door, looking at the black edge of the pitch. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Crow fired up the engine, did a three-point backing turn, and then headed back up the bumpy dirt road, away from Dark Hollow. Neither of them spoke as the car bounced over the ruts, and when Crow reached the crossroads, he turned right toward town. Away from the Guthrie farm.
(3)
Boyd stood there in the doorway, framed by darkness, shadows behind him, his skin gray-white in the glare of Val’s flashlight, grinning at the two women. His eyes were sunken into desiccated sockets, his cheeks gaunt, his nose askew with splinters of cartilage and bone poking through the flesh like cactus needles. But it was his mouth—his awful mouth—that held them in an immobility born of total horror. Boyd’s lips were curled back from his teeth and those rows of teeth, top and bottom, were twisted and elongated, set crookedly in the gray meat of his gums, and each one ended in a wicked point. Those teeth gleamed wet and dark and red in the flash’s light. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the filthy tatters of his suit. He snorted again, a bestial grunt of laughter that caused a bubble of bloody mucus to form between his rows of fangs. It swelled and then burst with an audible
pop
, seeding the air with a mist of blood.
Val was frozen to the spot, unblinking, unable to process what she was seeing, but then Boyd stepped to one side and turned, allowing the light from her flash to slide off him and shine in through the open barn door. He turned his head and held out one hand, gesturing inside like a magician revealing a clever trick. Just inside the door, only a yard beyond where the last of the footprints had ended, was a body slumped in a shattered, rag-doll sprawl, with arms and legs flopped away from the torso, and a head thrown back, mouth wide as if caught in the midst of a great scream, tilting away from the red ruin of a savaged throat.
Connie Guthrie stared past Val, past Boyd, through the open door, and into the wide and sightless eyes of her husband. And screamed.
“MARK!”
That scream—a tearing screech that tore her throat and flecked her lips with her own blood—galvanized both Boyd and Val. With a howl of furious delight he flung himself at Val. The sound of both screams broke her paralysis of shock and she hurled the Maglite at Boyd and threw herself at Connie, knocking her sideways and down so that Boyd’s lunge missed them both. Connie fell hard and Val crashed down onto her and there was a loud
snap!
as Val’s hip landed on Connie’s ribs. Connie’s scream modulated upward into a shriek of agony; Val rolled off her just as Boyd came scrambling off the ground and she tried to dodge the swing of his open hand, but he clipped her as she moved—not a whole-hand blow, just the flats of his fingers, but it was hard enough to send her reeling against the side of the barn. She struck it with her forehead and the pain stabbed through the healing eye socket where Ruger had similarly struck her. Her right eye went black and the other exploded with white light and the whole barnyard spun around her in a sickening reel. She collapsed into an awkward heap as Connie’s screams continued to rip holes in the night.
Because of the blow to her head everything was suddenly muted, and Connie’s screams seemed to be coming from a hundred miles away. Val tried to crawl toward her, but she couldn’t see. She kept blinking, trying to clear her sight. The right eye stayed black and blind, but there were images now in her left one—fuzzy shapes cavorting in the indirect glare from the fallen flashlight. She saw a hulking shape—Boyd, it had to be Boyd—rising to his feet a half-dozen yards away, and he had something in his hands. Something smaller. Connie! Struggling, still screaming, kicking and flailing. Fighting back. Fighting back against Boyd the way Mark had said she hadn’t done against Ruger.
Mark! Oh God!
Darkness wanted to close around her, to smash her into nothingness, but she fought it with a snarl of heartbroken rage, fought it with hate for what this man had done. Val pulled herself to her hands and knees and supported herself on one palm while she reached behind her back and pulled out her father’s big .45 Colt Commander; she sagged back onto her heels, racking the slide with trembling hands. Her one eye was clearer, but it was like looking through oily glass, and as she raised the gun Boyd lunged his mouth toward Connie’s throat. The sound of his teeth tearing through the softness of her skin was lost in the cannon-loud explosion of the gun. The bullet took Boyd in the hip and the heavy slug’s impact spun Boyd around; he lost his grip on Connie. To Val it seemed like he fell to the ground in exaggerated slowness, trailing a thin arc of blood as he collapsed into the dirt.
“Connie!” Val yelled—or tried to, but her voice was a choked whisper of pain.
Boyd had been knocked off balance, down to one knee, but he turned, whipping his white face toward Val, baring those awful teeth that were smeared now with Connie’s blood as well as Mark’s. Val shot him again as he rose and this time the bullet punched through his stomach and burst out the other side. The impact barely made Boyd pause. He flinched, and that was all; then his snarl became a smile as he rose to his feet.
Val’s mouth formed the word
No!
as she fired again, taking Boyd in the meat of his thigh and she could see the pant leg puff and blood and bone splatter against the fence post beyond him, but he kept rising, getting to both feet now and starting to move toward her. She fired again, a chest shot that surely punched a hole through his lung.