“You stupid sonofabitch!” she railed, but not too loudly. “Who the fuck you think you are? You don’t lay a hand on me, you don’t—”
He clamped his hand over her mouth again. “Shut your hole,” he said sternly, his voice hard, trembling with authority. “Someone’s coming.”
Nancy listened, turning her head this way and that. She heard nothing but the wind in the trees overhead. But then… yes, something. In the distance.
Click, click, click.
She narrowed her eyes.
What the hell was that?
It was getting louder, from the direction they’d come from, from the blacked-out section of Cut River… one of them, anyway. She licked her lips, suddenly aware of the cool mist on her skin, the thunder of her heart. She drew in quick, shallow breaths, trying to do this quietly. Quiet mattered now. Mattered more than anything.
Click, click, click.
Very close now.
Nancy was gripping Ben’s arm with everything she had. He was doing the same. Any other time it would have hurt, now it was just a solid, firm pressure that she needed more than anything. She could smell the damp air, cold and gray, smell the thick green odor of the cedars they hid behind. These were physical things. They grounded her.
Click, click, click.
A woman came up the sidewalk, her stride casual, yet… odd.
Just a woman, Nancy knew, that was all… but that shape coming from the darkness… it filled her with a nameless dread, made her flesh crawl in waves… a woman, yes, but not really. More like something ebon and malignant pretending to be a woman.
She kept coming, tall, thin, hair swinging at her shoulders.
She paused at the walk and they both got a good look at her. She was wearing high heels, a purse on her arm. She carried a high, noisome stink of violated crypts about her.
And she was stark naked.
They could hear her breathing. It was a horrible wet sound like water sucked through a hose. Her white, grinning face said all there was to say about the black depths of human madness, of incarnate evil. Her eyes were yellow, gleaming.
Nancy was shaking, willing herself not to scream.
The woman carried a big knife in one hand.
She walked right up onto the porch, went through the open door.
“Helloooo,” she said, “anybody home?”
Dear God, Nancy thought, that voice.
Raw, rasping, and bestial. The snarl of a mad dog contained more humanity. She kept calling out in the house. Sometimes her voice was remotely human, other times more of a barking, growling noise, an enraged wolf attempting speech.
About the time Ben and Nancy were thinking of making a run for it, she reappeared at the door, electric yellow eyes glistening like wet chrome. She scanned the yard, drool foaming from her lips and dropping in clots to her taut, jutting breasts.
“Hide and seek?” she hissed into the night air. “Is that our game… yesss… come out come out wherever you are. I can smell you out there…”
Nancy wasn’t sure what was holding her together by that point.
Maybe it was Ben. Maybe she was just locked-down hard with superstitious, unreasoning fear. She watched the woman step out into the yard. She started in their direction and then abruptly turned, making towards the truck parked in the driveway. She pressed her face up to the windows, leaving a sticky smear when she pulled away. Then she went to the garage, threw open the door and disappeared inside.
“Now,” Ben said under his breath. “Quietly.”
Still holding onto each other, they rose and darted out from behind the cedar bushes. They scampered across the neighboring lawns, staying on the grass to avoid any noise. Three houses down the block, they paused behind another parked pick-up. In the distance, the Bricker’s house looked peaceful. They waited maybe five minutes, but didn’t see the woman again.
It took some time for Nancy to find her voice. For too long she was concerned only with staying alive, living long enough to draw another breath. “Oh my God, Ben, oh Jesus…” her voice trailed off into sobs. “What are we… what can we do?”
“We have to get out of here. This whole town is bad.”
Nancy nodded silently.
They moved off again through dappled shadows.
There were other lit-up houses ahead and they made for them. They didn’t really expect to find people now, but maybe keys to vehicles, weapons to protect themselves with. Something. Anything that could give them an edge of security in this nightmare.
Whether it was safe or not, they kept away from the road and sidewalks, sticking close to the houses, the shrubs, the bushes. Ben knew very well that at any moment white hands might reach out for them, drag them into the forever night, but there was no choice.
They came around the corner of a neat two-story cracker box, saw something dangling from the porch overhang. They both saw it, there was no way not to. No breath left in his lungs to scream, Ben teetered there on rubbery legs, wondered what could possibly top this.
“My God,” Nancy whimpered. “My God…”
The body of a boy was swinging from a rope.
A frayed noose encircled his throat, cutting into the flesh. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, if that. He dangled in the breeze, turning back and forth slowly, his hands knotted into fists.
This was the epitaph of Cut River, the ghastly monument reared in its passing. A young boy hung by the neck.
It couldn’t get worse than this.
That was, until his bloodless face hitched into a sneer, lips hooked into a smile, a chattering death grin.
His body began to dance.
Just a shudder at first, then a more fluid motion, arms and legs flopping limply in some macabre imitation of human locomotion. He was like some gruesome puppet, some marionette dangling by the neck, his limbs flowing as if he were walking on air.
Ben stood there, mesmerized by this latest statement of sheer lunacy.
His brain was filled with a thundering black sound like the flap of huge wings, like birds taking flight in his skull. It was maddening. And all he could think of was that old music video by Herbie Hancock, the one with all the motorized mannequins and automatons mimicking human beings—walking, kicking, turning, gyrating. And that’s what this boy was, some cold, whirring machine mocking a little boy, jaws snapping open and shut, head bobbing, limbs thrashing, a garbled dry croaking erupting from his throat.
Nancy began to shake all over.
She started sobbing, then tittering, then both it seemed.
Ben wanted nothing more than to go quietly mad, but now wasn’t the time.
With tremendous effort, he got his legs moving. He spun his wife around by the shoulders and her face, bathed in the yellow moonlight, was crazed, pulled into some tight crying/laughing mask. It frightened him. Probably worse than anything he’d seen thus far.
She came alive under his grip, fighting him, hitting out, trying to scratch his face. He slapped her and she slumped into his arms. He half-carried, half-dragged her away, wondering how long it could possibly be until that rope around the kid’s neck snapped and he came looking to bite at something other than empty air.
“Gonna be okay,” Ben heard himself whisper to Nancy as she collapsed completely and he scooped her up, carrying her away and across the avenue onto the block with the lights on.
He found a row of high bushes and set her gently down behind them.
He sat beside her, stroking her hair.
She was awake then, sobbing. “It can’t be happening, Ben, can it?” she asked. “I know it can’t, I know I’m crazy. I gotta be. That boy, he’s dead, but he’s still moving and that woman… oh Jesus, Ben, I’m losing my mind…”