Her father shifted the truck into Park but kept the engine idling. With his window rolled down, he poked an elbow out as he surveyed the darkening landscape below. Cars twinkled like sapphires along Rapunzel and the lampposts along Hamilton blinked on. Her father dug a pack of Marlboros out of the front pocket of his overalls. He shook a cigarette into his mouth then seemed to reflect on something for a second or two before offering Maggie the pack.
She looked at him with stark confusion.
“I know you smoke,” he said, the Marlboro bouncing between his lips.
She felt like she was being set up. “I don’t want one.”
He shook the pack so that the tip of one cigarette poked out from the cellophane. “Go on.” There was an uncomfortable insistence in his voice that made Maggie’s heart beat faster.
Reluctantly, she plucked the cigarette from the pack then stared at it numbly as if she’d never seen one before. Sure, she had smoked plenty of them behind the schoolhouse or down by the Narrows with her friends, but this was something different. This was like being shoved out onto a stage and told to dance because her life depended on it. Just the thought of smoking the cigarette in front of her father made her ill.
Aaron Kilpatrick lit his cigarette with a flashy gold Zippo then extended the flame toward Maggie.
In a tiny voice, she said, “I really don’t want—”
“Smoke it,” he barked, uncompromising.
She poked the cigarette between her lips and inhaled as her father held the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Afraid to inhale in front of him, she just let the thing dangle lifelessly from her mouth.
Her father capped the lighter then tossed it onto the dashboard where it joined a container of Skoal and a scattering of bottle caps. In silence, he smoked and admired the view through the windshield.
After a little while, he said, “Your mother is concerned that you’ve been hanging out with some boys.” The word
boys
caused her to cringe inwardly. “Is that true?” And before she could answer—not that she was quick to answer—he followed up with, “Don’t lie to me, now, Margaret.”
She swallowed foul-tasting spit. “Sometimes me and Susan Winterbarger and Caroline Hunt hang out in the park with some boys from school.”
“Mmm-hmm,” her father hummed, nodded. He was still looking over the hill and down at the town. “What you girls been doin’ with them boys?”
What had she been doing? Images flashed like a filmstrip before her eyes—all the inappropriate things she had done with the boys, Bobby Douglass in particular. She had kissed him on the mouth several times and she had let him touch her chest (even though there wasn’t much there to touch, unlike Suzie Winterbarger, who actually had Once, Bobby had even showed her his
boobs
).
thing
. They had been in the woods behind the elementary school and completely unprovoked Bobby had taken down his pants, revealing a horrific little mushroom that Maggie found at once both ridiculous and terrifying. He’d asked her if she wanted to touch it and she had said no…but there had been a part of her that
had
wanted to touch it. What did it feel like?
But Christ, she couldn’t say these things to her father. She just stared at him, her face slack, the Marlboro pinched between two fingers.
“You been doing things with boys you shouldn’t be?” he rasped through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“No, sir.”
“You been kissin’ up on some boys?”
“No,” she said. Her lower lip trembled and her vision abruptly blurred.
“You been showin’ boys what you got?”
“No…”
One of her father’s big, meaty, workman’s hands shot out and gripped her hard around the forearm, eliciting a weak cry as he dragged her closer to himself across the bench seat.
“What you got to show anyone, huh? What you got?”
“Daddy!” She screamed and closed her eyes and felt his big paws suddenly all over, suddenly everywhere. She bucked and kicked her legs and one of her shins cracked against the underside of the dashboard. She howled and her father cracked her firmly across the face. The smell of his aftershave mingling with the stink of his cigarette smoke caused her throat to burn and her eyes to spill tears.
“What you
got,
Margaret? What you
got
?”
She screamed again…and this time the scream traveled straight through space and time until it finally resonated now in the center of Maggie Quedentock’s head as she sat motionless in the jail cell. The power of that scream caused her eyes to water and her hands to tremble in her lap. She thought she could feel her blood pumping throughout every single vein and artery in her body. In her shoes, her toes felt like cold little marbles.
Across the room, the bundle on the desk moved.
It was
almost
imperceptible and Maggie would have missed it had she not been staring straight at it. She blinked and cleared her vision just in time to see the gray blanket—or whatever was wrapped in the gray blanket—move again. Something was shifting within.
Her eyes shifted to the doorway. Shadows moved back and forth out there and she could still hear people talking in hushed voices. When she looked back at the thing on the desk, she found the shape beneath the blanket sitting upright. A cool sweat prickled Maggie’s scalp. She saw a pale hand slide out from beneath the blanket and felt her heart seize in her chest. The suggestion of a foot pressed against the dark fabric of the blanket.
No—
A section of the blanket fell away. In the half-light, a face was revealed to her. Eyes like simmering white-hot coals and a wide mouth dotted with tiny teeth, the fucking thing actually
grinned
at her.
Maggie tried to scream but could not find her voice.
The thing slipped off the table amid a flutter of blanket and crinkling tarpaulin. She heard its bare feet strike the floor on the other side of the desk. As it scurried across the room in the dark, she could see its childlike form briefly silhouetted as it passed in front of the doorway that led out into the hall.
Then Maggie
did
scream—a throat-cracking, strangled bleat.
The voices out in the hall rose. Both officers filed into the room. One of them—the skinnier of the two—came over to the cell and peered through the bars at her, his sallow face twisted into grim incomprehension.
“What’s—” he began, just as the officer behind him screamed shrilly. He spun around and Maggie rushed against the bars in time to see the larger officer stagger blindly until his back struck one wall. He was covering his face…and there was something
over
his face—a greenish slime in which his fingers sank up to the knuckles. What looked like steam radiated from the ooze and Maggie thought she could hear a faint sizzling sound. A second later, the stink of burning flesh filled her nose.
“Mel?” the skinny officer croaked weakly. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a comical sound.
Maggie heard a woman scream out in the hallway.
The larger officer’s hands then sank
straight through
the mask of slime, impossibly far, and Maggie had time to think,
There is no longer a face behind that stuff; there is no longer a head back there.
The sludge splattered against the wall, bubbling like acid, and the officer’s body—
sans
head—fell forward and slammed lifelessly against the floor. The white nub of the man’s spine protruded from the ragged hole of his neck where the skin still sizzled and melted away.
A small figure darted from behind one desk to another. The skinny officer must have remembered he had a gun at his hip; he dove for it now with one hand and tugged at it, tugged at it, tugged, seemingly unable to recall how to pull it out. Then Maggie heard the snap on the holster give and the officer was just preparing to yank the handgun free when the creature sprang out from the shadows at him. The officer staggered backward and slammed against the bars of Maggie’s cell. The gun clattered to the floor and spun away into the darkness.
Maggie backed up until she struck the far wall of her cell. On the other side of the bars, the officer bucked and cried out and struggled with the creature that was now situated on his chest. An arc of green slim belched out of the creature’s mouth and spattered across the officer’s face. Some stray drops passed through the bars and struck the concrete floor of the cell, where they sizzled like plutonium and left steaming craters in the cement.
The officer’s head narrowed and melted to a mushy pulp beneath the flesh-eating slime. It did not take long for the officer’s body to fold into a heap on the floor, dead.
Maggie shuddered. A piece of her mind seemed to break away at that moment, floating like a raft out across a moonlit sea.
On the other side of the bars, the creature rose. It wasn’t a creature at all. It was a boy; hairless, pale-skinned, bug-eyed…but a boy nonetheless. A
child.
Mine. You’re mine. You came back for me after all, didn’t you? I knew that you would. Somehow, I knew someday that you would. You’ve come back home to your mother.
The boy’s eyes hung on her. She could smell him standing there, a smell like industrial cleaners and detergents.
“I’m sorry,” she said, just barely above a whisper. “Don’t hurt me.”
The child’s eyes hung on her a moment longer. Then he shifted his gaze back down to the cop who lay dead at his feet. The skin on the cop’s face had dissolved into a puddle of bubbling soup that seemed to be eating through the floor. The skull itself melted like wax. Maggie thought she could make out a pair of eye sockets slowly receding into the sizzling liquid. The boy positioned his slender body so that his face hung directly above the mess that had just moments ago been the officer’s head. The boy’s mouth worked itself into an
O
as the skin stretched and elongated to form some sort of tubular appendage. Once the appendage had grown to a length of several impossible inches, like the proboscis of an insect, the boy dipped it into the sludge and proceeded to noisily slurp the mess up.
“Don’t hurt me,” Maggie continued to murmur. It was like a mantra now, a prayer. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
When the child-thing had finished, it stood up off his haunches and regarded Maggie once again through the bars of her cell. As she stared back at him, the tubular appendage retreated toward the child’s face until it changed back into a mouth. It was a boy once again, wide-eyed and innocent, his tight little lips smeared with blood.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
The child-thing’s hands closed around two of the cell’s bars. It slid one pale, splay-toed foot between the bars and into her cell.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
It was thin enough to squeeze through the bars, its body sliding toward her unimpeded. The boy was as insubstantial as smoke.
“Don’t hurt me.” Her voice was a shrill tremolo now as she cowered in one corner of the cell. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
It hurt her.
Chapter Seventeen
1
The streetlights along Belfast Avenue blinked on and off, as if signaling to some spacecraft high above the clouds. Rain slammed the earth, and the windshield wipers of Ben’s squad car could hardly keep up with such ferocity. As he turned into the parking lot of the police station, his concern quickly mounted…though he could not necessarily identify why. Cold, wet, and covered in mud, it had taken him a good half hour to change the tire back on Route 40. On the first attempt, he had the car jacked up and was about to spin the last lug nut off when the jack bent to one side and the car crashed back down to the pavement, the entire undercarriage shuddering. By the time he’d managed to jack the car up again, replace the ruined tire with the spare, and lower it back to the ground, Ben’s clothes were soaked through and his nose was running like a sieve. Then, on the drive back to the station, he’d attempted to use both his cell phone and the police radio again, but each proved useless. The storm wreaked havoc.
He parked right out in front of the station and ran into the building to find the sodium lights in the ceiling fizzing. Likewise, the lights in the dispatch room threatened to blink off and stay that way.
“Shirley?” He poked his head into the dispatch room to find it empty. One of Shirley’s
People
magazines lay flat on the counter.
Back out in the hall, he shouted a “hello.” Aside from the echo, there came no response.
When he entered lockup, the world threatened to break apart all around him. He saw Melvin Haggis’s corpse first. Haggis’s large body was on the floor, straining the blood-drenched fabric of his khaki police uniform. Where his head should have been lay a pulpy, scarlet stew through which Haggis’s lower jawbone protruded like a tree root arching out of a swamp. His hands were melted down to the wrists, where knobby bones jutted from the shredded wounds.
Ben’s gun was out before he moved over to the second corpse, that of Joseph Platt, although he was only able to identify the man because he knew he’d been with Haggis earlier. Platt’s head was gone as well; where it should have been was a sizzling crater in the floor, clogged with blood and hair. Platt’s gun was gone. There were bloody slashes across his pant legs and sleeves. He had one white, rigid hand wrapped around one of the bars of the first cell.