“I’ve got this, too,” she said, showing him the string of black rosary beads she wore around her neck. “They were my grandmother’s. I don’t know if they work or not but I guess it couldn’t hurt.”
He wanted to tell her that he did not believe in vampires—even now, he did not believe in them, or in any other type of monster—but he could not find his voice at that moment. Instead, he just nodded succinctly and readied the shotgun with one arm. With his free hand, he gripped the bracket-shaped doorhandle. He clung to it for seemingly an eternity without breathing.
“You ready?” he whispered eventually.
“I guess so.”
“Okay.”
He shoved the door open.
4
Absolute darkness greeted them. The chemical smell was unbearable, striking Brandy like rancid breath. Warmth surrounded her and, when she looked up, she could make out slivers of sunlight burning through the gaps in the staves at the eastern-facing wall of the silo, all the way up the channel to the top. Both she and Ben took a few steps in. A faint rectangle of light spilled in through the open door and projected onto the opposite wall, framing their distorted shadows. One of her sneakers sank into something.
The sense that they weren’t alone was pervasive and all-encompassing, as if the walls of the structure themselves were alive and dangerous.
“I’m stepping in something,” she whispered very close to Ben’s face.
“So am I.”
Ben clicked on a flashlight and directed the beam at the ground. The entire floor was covered in heaping, reeking mounds of bat shit. She had her right foot in it up to the ankle. A sickly heat puffed up through the collar of her shirt and she held her breath and tried not to think about it. Ben turned the flashlight up toward the ceiling and Brandy snapped her head back to look up…
At first, it seemed there was nothing but shadows up there, darkness swimming across darkness through inky, liquid space. But then she realized it wasn’t darkness at all, but the dark, fur-cloaked, squirming pods of thousands and thousands of tiny bats. It was an entire colony of them, so many that the whole ceiling was completely covered with them, bulging and rippling like a great beating heart. They crawled over each other, clung to each other, writhed like maggots covered in bristling, brown hair. The susurration of their bodies swarming over each other created a sound like the shushing through dead autumn leaves. The sight of them nearly made her gag.
Like the parting of the Red Sea, the bats at the center of the flashlight’s beam began to spread outward, expanding away from the light as if disturbed by it.
What they revealed as they cleared away would haunt Brandy Crawly until her dying day.
5
“Jesus,” Ben breathed.
What had been hidden behind the wall of bats was revealed to him not all at once—for the human brain could not comprehend such madness in one unified punch—but piecemeal, like glimpsing individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which helped prevent his sanity from shattering like a pane of glass.
The hairless boy from Wills Creek hung suspended in the air, his nude body a pallid fetal question mark. He was suspended in what appeared to be an enormous web that stretched across the ceiling of the silo. The web itself looked organic, comprised of living tissue, the spokes of the web made of thick veins and arteries that, even as Ben stared, seemed to pulse with some preternatural blood flow. Something was at the center of the web—or perhaps it was part of the web itself, the way the body of an insect is attached to its wings or a turtle is affixed to its shell—that seemed to alter its physical appearance the longer Ben stared at it. It was vaguely humanoid…but then it resembled a mollusk…and then some tyrannical insect. Something akin to a segmented tail unfurled from the—
(scorpion)
—thing. It was twice as long as a grown man’s arm and concluded in a rough bulb that bristled with spiny, black hairs like porcupine quills. Four distinct hooks protruded from the flattened side of the bulb. As Ben watched, the tail came around and encircled the fetal boy in a mockery of a lover’s embrace. Clear fluid dripped from the four prong-like hooks as they came up to meet the boy’s arched back. Like the teeth of a zipper fitting neatly together, the four hooks inserted themselves into the four puncture marks that ran down the hairless boy’s spine. A moment later, a gush of fluid could be seen pumping through the semitransparent flesh of the thing’s tail.
The hairless boy’s eyes opened. They appeared blind and did not seem to register the flashlight’s beam. As Ben watched, the boy cocked his head at an unnatural angle. The lipless mouth came together to form a crude circle…and then the flesh of his lips stretched to an impossible length until it was less a mouth and more like the tubular proboscis of some bloodsucking insect. The proboscis needled itself into a divot-like opening in the flesh of the mother-creature where it proceeded to pump stark-black fluid into its transparent body.
It was a symbiotic exchange, where the child fed the mother and the mother fed the—
“Run,” Ben said.
6
She burst from the silo and streamed across the muddy field to find daylight cracking the sky. She tried to scream—and perhaps even thought she had—but no sound came out.Yet in her head, she was screaming.
7
Ben aimed the shotgun toward the abomination at the center of the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening. Bats swarmed over the two creatures, which remained locked in their otherworldly symbiosis, filling up the space like darkness in the absence of light. The flashlight dropped and the beam cut off, leaving only the rectangle of pallid predawn light that issued in through the doorway at Ben’s back. Ben fired two, three more shots at the ceiling, the tornado of bats whirring in the muzzle flashes and spiraling like a hurricane down the throat of the silo toward him. Dead ones rained down on him, while others struck his face and shoulders, still partially alive, screeching like tortured cats. He went to fire a fifth round but found the shotgun empty. Stupidly, his mind whirled. Above him, something large was moving through the darkness—had become the darkness—and was descending upon him.
Ben remembered the extra shells in his pockets. He pulled out a handful, losing most of them in his panic, and tried to reload the weapon with hands that shook like seismographs. Bats whipped his face and he threw himself backward, hoping the wall of the silo would catch him. But he was too far away from the wall and he fell backward into a mound of reeking, partially hardened feces.
Something large continued to move down the throat of the silo, its formless bulk temporarily cutting in front of the slivers of daylight that cut through the slats in the wood.
Ben groped blindly at the darkness with both hands, desperate to reload the weapon and continue firing.
It seemed to take him an eternity to realize he had dropped the shotgun.
8
She stopped running by the time she hit Gracie Street. Her lungs burned, as did her eyes, and she collapsed to her knees in the mud by the side of the road where she unleashed a woeful, terrified sob. Her terror was great, but she forced herself to close her eyes and count to ten in an effort to reclaim some semblance of control. It took her to twenty before she began to feel steady again…and to fifty before she was able to open her eyes and stand.
It was her brother she was thinking of, but it was her father who forced her to stay and stand her ground. Unlike him, she would not run away.
She turned and ran back up the hill toward unimaginable horror.
9
Oddly enough, it was the fact that he was thinking of his own father at the same moment that probably saved Ben Journell’s life. He recalled the Zippo he carried in his breast pocket, felt for it…and gripped its solid, heavy, cold frame between two fingers. It ignited on the first spin of the knurled wheel. Dim yellow light illuminated the erratic fluttering of the bats’ membranous wings all around him. He swatted at them and cried out as they battered against him, shrieking in their unnatural, high-octave voices. When he dared glance up, he could make out something pale and formless creeping down the throat of the silo toward him—the extended dual limbs of impossibly long arms and eyes that gleamed briefly like mirrors facing the sun…
The shotgun lay several feet away. The shotgun shells had vanished into the shadows. The hand holding the lighter trembled and the flame threatened to blow out from the air stirred by the wings of the bats.
He thought of his father at that moment, in the weeks before his death when the old man had stood out in the back field of the farmhouse off Sideling Road and had held a conversation with a wife who was no longer there.
His hand still shaking, Ben brought the lighter down to the ground. The flame touched a heap of guano and the guano, rich with nitrogen, ignited instantly. The flames wasted no time spreading across the terrain of feces, the firelight a dazzling yellow-white and reeking. Ben rolled over just as the fire rushed toward him, slamming down onto the ground with a shoulder that immediately thronged with pain. One hand shot blindly out, his numb fingers closing around the butt of the shotgun. He slid it toward himself as flames raced up the dry wood of the silo’s walls, the bat shit providing fuel that bested the sodden state of the wood.
He stood and raced out the open door, the entire floor ablaze while flames crawled up the walls of the silo. Cold, wet air struck him like a wall as he burst through the door and into oncoming dawn. He spun around and grabbed the bracket-shaped handle of the silo’s door. He gave it a tremendous yank and it slid along its rusty runners until it closed. When he let go of the doorhandle, he left a bloody handprint behind.
10
He caught Brandy as she came rushing toward him. Her eyes were fearful but there was a set determination to her jaw. She screamed and struggled to break from his grasp, her eyes locked on the silo. Ben hugged her to his chest, cradling the back of her head with one hand.
“Calm,” he told her. “Calm down. I need your help more than ever right now.”
She broke out in tears and began crying audibly against him. He held her while he watched the flames shoot out from the staves at the base of the silo. Columns of thick, black smoke poured out of rents in wood, and the bats, whipped into frenzy, spiraled out of the open cracks, filling the sky in a black blizzard.
When she pulled her face away from his chest, she looked over toward the burning silo. The rain was reduced to a fine mist now and the fire burned the entire base of the silo so that it looked like a rocket about to blast off into space.
“I didn’t see him in there,” she said in a small voice.
“He wasn’t,” Ben said, knowing she was talking about her brother.
“Do you—” she began, and that was when a low moan escaped the confines of the burning structure. Brandy whimpered softly and clung to Ben, fearful that he might run and leave her there by herself.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her. “I need your help.”
She nodded numbly but she wasn’t looking at him and he didn’t think she truly heard him.
“Brandy! I need you!”
She jerked her head back in his direction. Her eyes were wide, lucid. “Yes. Whatever it is…”
“Unless it dies from smoke inhalation or the fire itself, it’s going to try to get out,” he told her, already digging in his pants pockets for more slugs. “I’m going to keep an eye on the door. I’ll shoot it if it tries to come out. I need you to go to the other side of the silo and make sure it doesn’t get out another way.”
She nodded but he wasn’t sure she was getting it all. He gripped her forearm in one tight fist. “Honey, do you hear what I’m saying?”
She blinked. Rainwater cascaded in torrents down her face. “Yes,” she said. “You want me to go around to the other side in case it tries to escape from there.”
“Very good. Now go!”
She ran, steadier than he would have thought possible at the moment.
Ben turned and crouched in the cold mud, facing the closed door of the silo. The flames had blackened the wood around the base but the storm was keeping it from burning out of control. He proceeded to reload the shotgun, filing the shells systematically into the body of the gun while keeping his eyes trained on the silo’s door. He supposed he had struck it with at least one blast from the shotgun as it descended the throat of the silo, but if it had done any damage, he couldn’t tell.
This is where we die,
he thought with bitter finality.
We die now.
Something slammed against the other side of the silo’s door. Ben could hear it like a cannon blast and he could see the door itself rattle in its frame. Fiery bits of sheathing rained down as a second strike shook the entire structure.
This is where—
And then the silo collapsed.
11
The bottom of the structure gave out first, the old wood—coupled with the guano as an accelerant—consumed by the fire despite the soft patter of rain. The silo appeared to telescope straight down at first, releasing a noxious black cloud from its base that rose up like a death shroud to cover the entire structure. Rows of staves blew outward in a shower of splintered wood, iron rivets, and steel bands. As it did so, great scores of bats burst forth and whirled up into the atmosphere in a dizzying black flurry, their numbers so great they temporarily darkened the sky. Their shrill cries, unified in an orchestra of hackle-raising discord, resonated in Ben’s molars like fingers down a chalkboard.