She pressed her lips together because she did not dare make a sound, a scream rattling in her throat. The fist pounded on the door again and it felt like the entire house shook with it.
Move!
Sobbing but refusing to give in, she pulled herself to her feet with the aid of the stair railing. She stood there uneasily, her knees feeling weak. Already she could smell the thing that was coming for her—it stank of aged tapestries moldering in dark cabinets and heavy mildewed drapes, worm-eaten and threaded by spiders. An almost sickening, nitrous stench of antiquity that she acquainted with dusty Egyptian tombs.
She scrambled up the stairs and was faced by a long, narrow corridor that moved in either direction. It was set with antique gas jets that threw a guttering, uneven light. As the pounding came again, she tensed, knowing she had to go and get behind one of the many doors she saw. Any of them would do. She needed to shut one and lock it tight and wait in the darkness…and pray.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
It was louder now, more insistent. She could hear the doorknob down there being rattled frantically. Each time the fist hit the door it was like a nail being driven into her. She could nearly feel the pain. It made her stomach tighten like a fist.
She ran to the left, trying door after door and finding them locked one after the other. They could not be forced. She did not really believe there was anything behind them. She threw aside a heavy tapestry at the end and found herself looking at a dusty window. Maybe this was the way out. She rubbed a clean spot in the pane and peered out through the glass. She saw the moon riding high above jagged rooftops, skeletal spires, and reaching chimneys. Far below were narrow, crooked streets cutting between leaning buildings. It seemed that the window she looked out of was a hundred feet above them as if the house itself was suspended in the sky.
There was a rending crash and she knew the door below had come off its hinges and the thing that sought her was now in the house, pushing writhing shadows before it as it came out of the dead of night bringing a smell of dry rot and subterranean vaults.
Soo-Lee ran back down the corridor.
At the top of the stairs she paused, but only momentarily. She could not see the thing down there, but she could hear its clomping painful gait, the sound of one leg dragged behind it. Its stench blighted the house. She saw jagged shadows begin to creep up the steps.
She ran in the other direction, trying doors until she found one that was open. It was a trap and she knew it had to be a trap, but fear pushed her through it. She closed the door as quietly as possible, locking it and stepping away from it into a room that was immense with a king-size Gothic canopy bed set near the far wall, red velour curtains tossed aside from massive carven teak posts.
The bed was baronial and exquisite, a chamber of dreams. It was like something from an Elizabethan novel. Red and black velvet pillows were piled in abundance, the comforter and blankets a deep scarlet. Oh, to sleep in such a bed. To lie in it, to—
Thump, thump, thump.
He was at the door now and Soo-Lee knew there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. She was the fly that had entered the spider’s web out of its own free will. She could not be certain in those last few moments before the door crashed in if any of this had been her own idea. She had been carefully worked and carefully herded, she had not acted but
re
acted and free will did not seem to be part of it.
But there had been no other place to go,
a weak and wounded voice in her mind said.
There had been no choice, no real choice.
Maybe that was true and maybe she just lacked the strength, regardless, as the lock snapped and fell to the floor and the door swung in noiselessly, she knew that such things as choice were concepts she no longer had and would never have again.
The smell of the thing filled the room.
Its crooked shadow snaked over the floor in her direction.
Oh, please…dear God, no…no…
She saw a distorted scarecrow-like figure moving in her direction, a twisted carnal grin on its lips. And as she screamed, hands like pale tarantulas reached out for her.
36
“Sssshhhh,”
a voice that was soft and warm cooed in his ear.
“There’s no need of that now.”
What was left of Creep’s mind heard the voice but rejected it. There was no one. He was alone in the car and a manic fear in his brain assured him that he would always be alone, forever and ever. Yet, he could feel someone next to him, a form, a presence, a physical disruption of the ether around him. He was alone but not alone.
The car was still dripping, still rotting around him. Now it had rolled to a stop right in the middle of the street as if it no longer had the strength or ability to move any farther.
“Who…who’s there?” he heard his own voice speak before he could squelch it.
“It’s only me,”
the voice said.
“Only me and I’m your friend.”
The voice sounded oddly like Ramona’s, but Ramona couldn’t be in the car with him, there was just no way. Though he was woven in a tight little cocoon of terror, Creep knew that he had to prove there was actually someone there. His eyes told him there was not, but his other senses disagreed. He reached out and gasped as he touched something, something he could not see. It hadn’t been awful, just startling, so he reached out again and touched hair, long tresses of hair that slid easily between his fingers. It wasn’t bad. He liked the feel of it. He kept running his fingers through it, noting that while the scalp was not soft it wasn’t quite firm either. It had a rubbery give to it that he did not like, yet his fingers could not stop stroking the luxurious locks.
“You see? I’m nice to touch. I’m nice to feel,”
said the velvety voice that made something in him relax and release tension.
He ran both hands through the hair now. Oh yes, it was silky and fine, long hair that was glossy to the touch. He felt something skitter over the back of his hand. He brushed it aside, but there were others, many others. The scalp seemed infested by them. He should have been horrified, but he was not. He began picking the skittering, leggy things free, grooming the head of hair like an ape plucking nits from the pelt of another ape.
“That feels nice,”
the voice told him.
“You have no idea how long they’ve been nipping at me and burrowing. Pull them all free.”
Yes, that was exactly what he wanted to do. He could conceive of nothing else remotely as satisfying. He plucked the wriggling insects free and flicked them away into the front seat. Sometimes they bit him, but mostly they just wanted to get away. One of them, a very swollen individual, sprouted wings and flew away, momentarily brushing against his nose.
“I’m like you,”
the voice said.
“I’m broken…I am not whole. But together we can be complete.”
Yes, there was a logic in that he could appreciate.
He plucked more of the vermin free, searching through clumps of hair for their hiding places. He could almost sense them before he found them. With deft, practiced fingers, he seized them as they emerged from the scalp and made short work of them. He was not tossing them away now; he was crushing them like squirming little berries, feeling a rising excitement as he squeezed them into pulp, into clots of cold jelly that dripped from his fingers. They did not like to be killed, but he had to kill them because they infested the scalp.
Though he still could not see the mysterious other on the seat next to him, he could hear her cooing her delight. Sometimes her limbs made rustling sounds like tree branches scraping against roofs and sometimes she made low slithering sounds that were disturbing but strangely enticing.
“You’re making me feel so much better,”
the voice said to him, nearly breathless with pleasure. “
When you’re done, I’ll make you feel better. I’ll do things for you, you only dreamed of. You’ll never want another after me. I know things. Secret things. And I want to show them to you. Do you want to learn?”
“Yes,” he muttered. “Oh yes.”
After all the bullshit he’d been through tonight, much of it bad enough to break any man, he was finally catching a break. He had finally found a friend that he could trust and care for that would trust and care for him. She was beautiful. He knew that much. He could only judge by the feel of her hair—ecstasy—and her voice, which was pure desire. He still did not know her name, but that didn’t seem to matter. Such things were trivial. He continued cleaning the vermin from her hair until it seemed there were no more and she made a high, whining sound in her throat like the song of a cicada.
“Feel the seats,”
she said.
“Do you see?”
Creep hadn’t really noticed, but sometime during his grooming of her the car had stopped rotting and stopped spilling blood. Like him, it was whole again. It was solid and safe. The odor was gone, too.
“You helped me and I’m helping you,”
she said, her voice now deliciously throaty and seductive.
“Now you need to relax.”
She pushed him back on the seat and he was only too willing to lie back and let her do things for him now. She grasped his hand with fingers that were very cold and pressed it to her chest. Her skin was very smooth. His hand was between her breasts and he could feel the excited throbbing of her heart.
“I’m alive like you are,”
she said as if there had ever been any doubt.
“Do you want to see me?”
“Yes, yes.”
Straddling him, she took shape there in the backseat and it seemed that long before he actually saw her he was seeing her in his mind. Her hair was long and dark. The moonlight made it gleam. Her face narrow, the cheekbones high, her eye sockets huge and empty. Her lips were full and as she smiled he could see that her teeth were long and sharp like those of a viper and he knew she wanted to impale him with them. No, that wasn’t right, that wasn’t what he had expected at all.
“Get off me,” he said.
“Get the fuck off me!”
Her legs were scissored around his hips and she was not letting go. Her hair was graying now, bunching up on her head like a withered bush. Her face was set with fissures and cracks, the skin flaking away like old wallpaper, falling away and revealing a shriveled visage below that was like a soft, rotten plum. Her breath stank of rotting fruit and cider gone bad as her face moved in closer. His dream lover looked like an old lady three months in the tomb. Her hair was crawling with termites that burrowed into her scalp like the bark of a dead tree. They crawled over her face and winged from her eyes.
“I told you I was broken,”
she said.
“Now you’ll be broken, too…”
Creep let out a cry and fought against the thing holding him down, not knowing if it was real or if any of it was real, only knowing she would do horrendous, unspeakable things to him if he did not stop her now. As insects flew in his face and her breath went to black rot, he tried to throw her and pull her arms from him. One of them had a sort of flesh on it that crumbled under his fingertips and the other was little more than a mechanical armature. And her fingers, as they gripped his throat, were not fingers but the talons of a wild beast.
Pressing herself hard against his groin, her cracked doll face came in close to his own. And though it was a dead thing, an animate mask and little more, the pink tongue that wriggled between the doll lips and sought his own was very much alive.
37
When Chazz broke free of Lady Peg-leg’s grip, he knew he would pay for it. He knew he would not be allowed to simply escape. That wasn’t part of the game and he knew it. He ran away from her, putting on great speed, and then something hit him in the back. It punched into him with the force of a battering ram, throwing him six feet before he went facedown on the ground.
Then he could hear her coming for him.
She moved up the sidewalk with the casual stride of an old woman who is in no hurry and knows she will get where she is going in the end.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap,
went her peg as she closed in on him. He lay there, numb and senseless, his limbs tingling.
What did I tell you about bad boys?
she said inside his head.
What did I tell you?
She tapped her peg on the sidewalk to emphasize this. Though his brain was half in dream, he remembered very well what she had said.
Good boys will be rewarded. Bad boys will be punished.
Yes, that was exactly what she had said and now she was going to punish him.