It was like trying to hang on to a high-pressure hose.
Ivy did not give in.
Even though its bristles cut into her fingers like pins, she increased her hold, gripping different segments. The mucus made her hands slide from segment to segment as the muscles of the worm contracted and relaxed in fluidic waves.
Its tail flailed wildly, knocking things off the counter and she was thrown this way and that by it. Its body curled around her with a crushing embrace, its thorny bristles digging into her skin. Then its head slid free and Geno, through dimming eyes, saw its pulsating length coiling around his wife, the segments fattening with hydrostatic pressure until there was the clear sound of things bursting inside her, ligaments popping and bones dislocating.
A moaning sound in his throat, he reached out one flaccid hand in her direction.
But by then, the worm had already torn off her right arm like a chicken wing with a gristly, grinding noise.
17
Tony stumbled up the steps of Stephani Kutak’s house, breathing hard and reaching for the doorbell.
Doorbell? You’re really going to ring the fucking doorbell?
The absurdity of that nearly made him laugh, but there was nothing very funny about it or anything else. Still, he knew he had no right to barge in without announcing himself, so he rapped his knuckles on the door a few times before letting himself in.
“Steph?” he called out. “Stephani? It’s Tony from next door. Are you there?”
Maybe she was hiding.
Maybe she was freaked out.
She was an attractive woman who lived alone and it would only make sense that she might be a little on edge. The whole damn neighborhood was on edge and with good reason. Tony stood there, dripping muck onto the carpet, wondering how Charise was faring downtown and how she would take the news of Stevie’s death.
Stupid fucking dog. I never liked that dog…not much anyway.
But he wasn’t going to think about Stevie. He refused to go through it all again. His real worry was what had
gotten
Stevie. There were things in the muck and he had a nasty feeling that the worm that had gotten his dog was not one of a kind.
He stepped farther into the house.
In his fantasies, he’d been invited into this house again and again, but it had never once been like this.
“Steph?”
There was only silence…heavy, brooding, and thick with something very much like menace. There was every possibility, of course, that she had escaped when the mud started filling the streets. Yet, for some reason, he just didn’t believe that.
“Steph? Are you here?”
He nearly shouted it and his voice echoed throughout the house, bouncing down hallways and through empty rooms before coming back at him with the tonal quality of a scream. Maybe it wasn’t that bad except in his imagination, but there was a quality to it he didn’t like, one that was quite nearly hysterical.
He reached around on the wall until he found the light switch.
Better. The shadows were swept away. He crossed the living room and turned on the hallway light and that’s when he saw the slimy, muddy trail that led across the floor into the kitchen. Something in him sunk at the sight of it. It didn’t necessarily mean there was a worm in the house. Maybe Steph went out into the muck and tracked it back in herself. Maybe.
He stepped cautiously, very cautiously down the hallway with nothing to defend himself with but the softball bat. He was trying hard not to think about what had torn Stevie apart, how very deadly and relentless it was. How it punched holes in doors and turned wicker hampers to sawdust and drilled right through one silly, harmless dog who, in his last moments, had decided to be a dog and defend his turf and maybe, just maybe, had been defending something of a little more worth.
That goddamn mutt was trying to protect you and you know it. He died trying to kill that fucking worm because in the final analysis, you were his master and he would have done anything for you. That’s loyalty, my friend. Just try and find that in a human being.
Tony wiped his eyes. No more goddamn walks in the park. No more yipping. No more chewing up things. No more accidents. No more anything.
“Dammit, Stevie,” he said under his breath.
The situation was getting the better of him and he had the strongest desire to just sit down on the floor and cry. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, lit it with trembling fingers.
Lookit me, Steph, I’m smoking in your house. What do you think of that, Little Miss Perfect?
He felt almost guilty doing it, knowing how fastidious she was about everything. She kept her little house as perfect as she kept herself. She never invited anyone into it either. She never let any hands but her own touch those things she loved best. That was funny, too. Good-looking woman like that with no men (or women for that matter) in her life. She had a few female friends—Charise had been one of them—but that was it and to call them
friends
was kind of stretching it.
Acquaintances,
Tony thought.
She never had anything in her life but acquaintances.
Maybe she was afraid of sex, afraid of commitment, afraid of relationships in general…and maybe she loved herself so much that the idea of sharing herself with another made her jealous.
Tony pulled off his cigarette, staring at the muddy trail.
The floorboards upstairs creaked momentarily. Houses made noises sometimes, he knew. Nine times out of ten, it was nothing. He went over to the stairs.
“Steph?” he said, his voice echoing and dying.
He heard no more sounds and that’s why he knew he had to go up there, even though the fear rising in his gut warned him against such an idea.
Nobody could really blame you for leaving now. You tried and she’s not here. You really have no right to track this stinking mud all over her house, so go over to the O’Connors’, wait this out with Marv and Fern. Or visit Kathleen and Pat. Go see Geno. He was drinking beer on his porch not that long ago. Don’t just stand here, do something.
But he wasn’t going to go to the O’Connors’ or the Mackenridges’ or the Desjardins’.
He was going upstairs.
As he climbed them, he said, “Hey, Steph, it’s me Tony from next door. There’s some shit going on you have to know about so I’m coming up to tell you about it. If you’re naked…well, that’s a chance I’m willing to take…”
He blabbered on and on, whistling past the graveyard, until he reached the landing above and then his mouth simply closed in midsentence. It closed like a trap. It was like a switch inside of him had been thrown. There was something in the air. Something ominous and nearly overwhelming.
The hallway was dark.
Very dark.
He had to feel along the wall for a light switch and he was almost certain that long before he found it, something would find him…some dark, twisted, elfin shape would come hobbling out of the darkness, reaching out for him with knobby fingers.
Click.
Light. That was better. There were no grinning horrors waiting in the shadows. In fact, there was nothing but an ordinary hallway. There were three doors. The first two were wide open. One was Steph’s bedroom—the garden of delight—and the other a guest room. He was interested in neither. He went over to the closed door. It was the bathroom. He knew that from his one visit two years before when Steph had thrown a birthday party for her sister.
“Steph?” he said, rapping on the door. “You in there?”
He knew somehow she was. It was like all the energies of the house were gathered in this one place, behind the closed door. The last thing he wanted to do was catch a peek of her on the toilet, but if she wasn’t aware he was in the house by now then it meant she was in trouble.
Tightening his grip on the bat, he opened the door and pushed it in.
In that brief moment of darkness while his fingers fumbled for the light switch, he heard a wet, sliding sort of sound he knew was not good. Then the light was on.
“Oh, shit, Steph,” he said, turning away.
But when there was absolutely no response from her, he turned back. She was sitting naked on the toilet, her long legs spread, her back up against the tank, her head slumped forward. Her eyes were open and staring. They looked like green crystalline pools.
“Steph?”
He wanted very badly to think he had merely caught her in mid-dump, but the truth was much worse and he knew it. Black muck had slopped up from the toilet and spilled to the floor. Globs of it had run down the inside of her legs. There was blood on her lips.
She was dead.
There was no doubt about it.
She was dead and he knew it.
Then she started to
move.
Her eyes still wide, green and glassy and unseeing, she wavered from side to side like she might fall right off the pot. And it was as she did so that he heard a moist, tearing sound that was coming from
inside
her. She began to lean forward like she was going to stand up and pitched right over at his feet…a swollen, monstrous worm sliding out of her in all its segmented, blood-slicked, phallic horror.
He stumbled back in the doorway, nearly going down.
The worm had been eating her from the inside out. She was facedown on the floor, the bloody globes of her ass still raised as if in offering to that obscenity.
It raised its head at him, the forward segments pulling back and opening like a pipe to reveal the mouth and its rows of hooked teeth. A slime of blood and mucus rained down to the floor.
It hissed at him.
And Tony ran.
He did not think; he ran. He darted down the hallway and tripped awkwardly down the steps. Then he was at the door, falling out into the night, so devastated by what he had seen that he could not even scream. He didn’t stop moving until he heard something moving through the muck in his direction.
18
I’m coming for you, motherfucker. I’m coming to kill you. I’m going to beat you to death.
Clutching the fireplace poker in her white-knuckled fists, Kathleen stalked the thing that had slid into her house like a vein of shadow. She would find it. She would kill it. Then…then…then…then she would go quietly mad because she wasn’t too far away now. Maybe not in the same house, but definitely living next door.
The trail of muck was easy enough to follow.
If the creature—
snake, had to be a goddamn snake, a fucking python
—was trying to practice stealth, it was failing miserably. It was about as stealthy as a shit-leaking pig. That was the comparison that leaped into her mind and she almost screamed because that’s exactly what Pat would have said.
Don’t you dare fall apart. Not yet.
Trembling, sweating out hot/cold beads of perspiration, she followed the muck trail, turning on lights as she went. The trail led from the bathroom to Jesse’s bedroom. Where was that fucking thing and where was her baby?
She tensed.
She heard a low, rolling rumbling sort of noise just as she had when this whole nightmare started. The house shook. It shook again. The rumbling grew louder. The house moved and she went down on her ass in the muck again as ceiling tiles cracked and jagged rents opened up in the walls. She could hear things falling and crashing downstairs. She was certain one of them was the picture window.
The house is falling down.
She scrambled to her feet in the oily black filth and jogged down the hallway to the stairs. She did not know where she was going. She did not know what she would do when she got there. Her brain was moving, it seemed, in every direction at the same time. And what was behind it, what was fueling it was not the loss of Pat or even that damn snake but something bigger, something vastly more important:
the baby, the baby, the baby…where is the baby?
All she could see was the baby. She was hypercharged with maternal need to protect her child, only she did not know where her child was.
Move! Do something! Do anything, but you must find the baby!
The words made perfect sense, but she did not know what to do. Her animal instinct told her to find that fucking snake and kill it, but her maternal instinct told her all that mattered was finding her child. The rest could be sorted out later.
She had to search the upstairs.
That’s what she had to do.
And this was exactly what she was going to do, but the rumbling started again and this time the house trembled like a dog had seized it and shaken it. She reached for the railing, but lost her grip and went tumbling down the steps,
thud, thud, thud.