“You fucking thing!” she shrieked at it. “You don’t come into my fucking kitchen with your filth and disease!”
The section she gripped seemed to sag and deflate.
The worm had a hydrostatic skeleton pressurized by fluid. The tighter she gripped it, the more the fluid was drained into other segments. But that hardly meant it was going to submit without a fight. Its body began to whip in her hands with violent contractions, the segments oozing out a thick, gelid mucus until she could barely hang on to it. They flattened. They elongated. They swelled with fluid.
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.