Looking at Tom Schuler’s house brought back those memories of the old burger joint in Truax, and Eddie shivered behind the squad car’s steering wheel. He hadn’t thought of that old place in years (it couldn’t still be standing on that corner at the edge of town, could it?) and having it resurface in his mind now felt like a bad omen. Still shivering, he popped the door and stepped out into the cool, rainy night.
Trees applauded in the wind. A mist of clouds sailed slowly across the sky, blotting out the early stars. In the woods that surrounded him, he could hear all sorts of noises that let him know that he wasn’t the only living creature out here after all. The thought gave him little comfort. After a moment, he convinced himself it was only the rain and nothing more.
He mounted the creaking porch steps of Tom Schuler’s house and rapped on the front door. Though he couldn’t be certain, he swore he heard his knock echo through the entire house. It was like shouting down into a well or out over the Grand Canyon.
That’s just my nerves.
He knocked again.
“Hey, Tom, you in there? Wake up, bud. It’s Eddie La Pointe.”
Things hidden in the darkness of the woods made whispery noises at him.
Just my stupid imagination,
he told himself again.
Reading too many horror magazines and watching too many bad movies on late night television. This is what you get, you chickenshit.
He couldn’t argue with that logic. It even caused him to chuckle a little, though there was hardly any humor in it.
Eddie pulled his flashlight from his belt and turned it on as he slid away from the door and peered into the nearest window. He pressed both the flashlight and his nose against the windowpane, shielding some of the glare with one cupped hand around his eyes. The beam illuminated only a small bit of Tom’s front parlor—an armchair and the grate over a stone fireplace—but nothing more. He repeated this at several of the other windows too, but from what he could see, nothing appeared to be in any state of disarray.
Out back, he knocked on the back door then took a few steps away from the house so he could shout more audibly to the second-floor windows. His heavy boots sank an inch or two into the mud.
“Hey, Tom! Wake up, will ya?”
His voice shook the night but no lights came on in the upstairs windows. The only response he got was from a clash of thunder.
He could be at Crossroads,
he thought, glancing at his wristwatch. He could drive by the place, see if Tom’s car was in the parking lot…
Eddie keyed up his handheld radio and called into Shirley Bennice in the dispatch office.
“Hey, Eddie,” she said, her usual cheerfulness gone. “You okay out there?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to bother Ben. I know he’s got his hands full tonight.”
“Eddie, what’s going on around here?” There was a desperate, pleading quality to old Shirl’s voice that Eddie didn’t much like to hear. “Ben said Maggie Quedentock killed her husband. Tommy Schuler, too. And now Platt and Haggis are on their way back here with a dead body.”
“Jesus,” Eddie said, not meaning to say it aloud. Thankfully, he hadn’t keyed the radio yet. “Whose body?” he asked into the radio.
“The missing Crawly kid. Can you believe it?”
No. He most certainly could not believe it.
“Swell time for the chief to go on vacation, huh, Shirley-cue?” he said finally into the radio, an attempt at humor. When Shirley didn’t respond, he quickly added, “Let Ben know I checked out Tom Schuler’s place. He ain’t home and his car’s gone, but nothing seems out of the ordinary.” He glanced around the yard to make sure everything was still copacetic.
“You heading on home now?”
“Well, my shift was over an hour ago, but I’ll keep the radio on in case anything else comes up.” His mind was still whirling. He thought,
How can the Crawly boy be dead?
“Have a good one, Eddie. Stay safe.”
“Goodnight, Shirley-cue.”
He clipped the portable radio back onto his belt and was about to do the same with his flashlight when a noise rose up from somewhere in the yard. He turned the flashlight in the approximate direction but saw nothing but an overturned birdbath and the handle of an axe protruding from a tree stump.
Reading those stupid monster magazines, scaring myself half to death so that I’m jumping at every noise, every shadow—
Something moved just beyond the trees at the periphery of his vision. It was a blur beyond the curtain of rain.
Eddie jerked his head in its direction in time to see something recede quickly into the shadows. Over the patter of rain, he heard the crunching of footfalls over dead leaves and fallen branches and tried to convince himself it was just rain or possibly a deer, only a deer.
Fuckin’ whitetail are all over the place this time of year. Open season, halle-fucking-lujah!
But it wasn’t a deer.
Somehow, he knew that.
He swung his flashlight around and let the light play along the stand of trees that rushed up to meet Tom Schuler’s backyard. The light illuminated very little.
His breath clouding the air, Eddie took a step toward the line of trees…then another step, slowly passing the flashlight beam back and forth along the tree trunks like a searchlight in a prison yard. Rainwater spilled over the brim of his hat, down his shoulders and his back. Water drained from an old birdhouse that hung from a nearby tree branch.
A pair of silvery eyes flared up out of the darkness. Eddie’s bowels clenched. Even as he tried to convince himself once again that this was a deer, a fucking whitetail—
all the fuck over the place this time of year, swear to God they are, all the fuck over
—he knew that this was no goddamn deer. To begin with, the eyes were situated right next to each other and faced forward, faced
him.
They were the eyes of a predator, not the eyes of prey.
“If…” he began, attempting to address the owner of those eyes, but he wound up choking on his words.
Just as quickly as they had appeared, those silvery eyes vanished…then reappeared a few yards to the right, shining like dimes through the space between two trees. Eddie tried to swing the flashlight over to it but was too slow. The thing repositioned itself yet again, toying with him it seemed, and the sounds of its footfalls seemed to come from various locations all at once, audible all too clearly over the storm.
“Fuck this,” he muttered, sidestepping around the side of the house yet unable to take his eyes away from the stand of trees.
Something stretched forward out of the tree line, the barest hint of moonlight illuminating what looked like the small, pale arm of a child. The tattered sleeve of a dark-colored flannel shirt hung from the thin white arm in ribbons.
“Who’s that?” he called, his voice a reedy whine. “Who’s there?”
The arm withdrew back into the shadows. He could make out the silhouette of someone back there—slight, narrow, frail, childlike.
“Come out.”
The shape ambled out of the trees. A tattered flannel shirt hung drenched from small shoulders. Eyes like silver discs.
“Jesus,” Eddie breathed.
It was Bob Leary’s kid. Yet it
wasn’t…
The kid took a shuddery, uncertain step toward Eddie and Eddie felt himself flinch. In an unsteady voice, he called out, “That you, Billy? You okay, son?”
The boy did not respond. There was a feral look in the kid’s eyes, which looked unnaturally large. When the Leary kid cocked his head quizzically to one side, the way a curious dog might, Eddie could make out striations along the kid’s scalp where tufts of his dark hair had fallen out.
Billy Leary’s eyes shimmered with an unearthly light.
“Christ…”
Eddie lowered the flashlight, the world spinning out of view. Coldness ran through his veins like arctic wind. To say he made it halfway to his squad car would be an exaggeration; Eddie La Pointe staggered backward a few steps, never taking his eyes off the pale-skinned boy who was not actually a boy at all. When the boy lowered his head and charged at him from the thicket, Eddie turned and started to run. Yet he made it only a few feet before one foot snagged on the exposed root of an oak tree arching out of the earth. He came down hard as stars exploded before his eyes, all his weight driving him down into a puddle of freezing water. His campaign hat flipped backward off his head and disappeared into a whirlwind of sightlessness. He sensed rather than saw the thing as it closed the distance between them, Eddie’s heartbeat rising and his head screaming before any actual sound could manage to escape his throat. When he rolled over on his back, the thing was suddenly upon him, pinning him down to the earth with impossible strength. The face that looked down upon him was not of some snarling beast nor some vaporous phantom, but the soft, white face of a child, only with eyes like glass balls and flesh the color of candlewax. Water traced down the contours of the child’s face, glittering like diamonds and pouring into Eddie’s open mouth and spilling into his eyes. The child’s mouth unhinged, snakelike, revealing a corrugated tubular void of ribbed, quivering flesh. The child’s blackened tongue lashed out.
In a fit of fury, Eddie swung his head to one side just as a belching sound emanated from the boy. A second later, a molten hot gout of fluid spilled onto Eddie’s upper shoulder and bicep.
Eddie screamed and bucked his hips. The Leary boy hung on, his small, bony fingers planted firmly in the flesh of Eddie’s arms. His vision blurry, Eddie turned his head again and managed to make out the hideous white face with its mouth agape and inching closer to his face. Pale foam dripped and sizzled from the open mouth. Eddie screamed and bucked his hips some more, managing to pry his arms up off the ground and roll onto his side. Distantly, he heard a second belching sound and was faintly aware of a thick, warm fluid splattering down the shaft of his right arm.
He rolled onto his stomach, splashing again in the icy water, and shoved himself to his feet. Through his bleary eyes, he could see the squad car only a few yards away, parked at a slant at the front of the house, rain tap-dancing across its hood. He staggered toward it but quickly lost his footing, driving his face down into the cold, hard, compacted mud. He felt his jaw crack. Somewhere behind him, a wicked shriek echoed through the night.
Then came the pain. It came in a hot molten swelling, all along his right fist and arm, straight up to the shoulder and the right pectoral muscle. He made the mistake of glancing at his pained appendage and found that a greenish sludge was oozing down the length of his arm. Where the fingers of his right hand should have protruded up through the muck, there was only the fast-melting sludge of muscle and tissue, along with the startlingly bright nubs of bone. Acid burning through his flesh, Eddie La Pointe howled in pain.
Static buzzed over his radio. He hardly heard it. With his good hand—his left hand—he managed to drag himself a foot or two closer to the squad car before his attacker leaped onto his back, driving him down. He made a pathetic
uff!
sound as the wind was knocked out of him. Uselessly, he tried to claw through the dirt with his right hand only to realize that he no longer
had
a right hand. The pain caused fireworks to explode before his eyes.
The thing on his back emitted another belch. The sound was like a creaking door or an old tractor turning over in cold weather. Again, Eddie screamed. He felt hot sludge spill out across his shoulder blades and down his back, and for the first time he could actually smell the stink of his own burning flesh.
With his left arm—his good arm—he managed to swing an elbow and knock the creature off his back. Ahead of him, the squad car doubled and trembled and looked like something out of a bad 3-D movie. For whatever ridiculous and inexplicable reason, he pictured himself sitting on the edge of his bed earlier that morning, pulling on a pair of gym socks. Fucking gym socks. That was what went through his mind at that moment.
With his one good hand, he managed to hoist himself to his feet and actually happened to propel himself a few more feet toward the squad car before the thing took him back down to the ground. He struck the earth hard, teeth gnashing together in his busted jaw, and rolled over halfway onto his good shoulder. Above him, a whitish blur lashed out and tore into the flesh of his right cheek with fingernails that felt more like claws. His feet kicking, he tried to buck the creature away from him yet again, but he was unable to succeed this time. Through bleary eyes, he saw the channel of its wide mouth zeroing in on him. There was a smell like cleaning products—the fucking Lysol they used on the pews at St. Bernadette’s was the first thing that came to his mind—followed once more by that guttural belching sound. A moment later, Eddie felt hot magma spill out across his face. He screamed and felt it run down his throat, scorching his esophagus and loosening the teeth in his gums.
A moment later, he was dead.
4
On the ride back to her house, Brandy Crawly sat quietly in the passenger seat of Ben’s police car. Ben kept waiting for her to break down and cry but she never did. In studious contemplation, she looked out the passenger window at the flooding streets and the trees that bent in the strong gusts of wind. By the time they arrived in front of her house, the sky was fully dark. Rain fell steadily and the streets were already beginning to flood.