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.
The house continued to move.
Everything was in motion. The floor seemed to be rolling beneath her the way they said it did during earthquakes. The lights flickered. They went out, then came back on. The walls were cracking open, coughing out clouds of plaster dust. The dining room ceiling caved in, crashing down onto the antique cherry wood table. It hadn’t been the picture window she heard, but the kitchen window. No matter, the picture window now followed suit. The parquet floor shifted, buckled, the individual blocks pulling apart. The ceiling fan came crashing down.
Then the house began to bleed.
At least, that’s what it looked like. Oceans of dark, bubbling blood oozed up from the cracked, disrupted block floor.
No, not blood… muck.
The same sewer-stinking filth that was in the streets and had vomited from the upstairs bathroom.
My house, my fucking house… it’s coming apart! It’s all coming apart!
Kathleen sobbed. Her body shuddered. Something had let go in her brain now. And even though she was far too gone to realize this, she still felt the sense of loss, the sense that there was a great and jagged division between the here and now and what her life had been only a few hours before.
On her hands and knees she began to crawl as the house moved with occasional tremors around her. She crawled through the muck that bled from the floors, moving from the living room into the trashed dining room and kitchen beyond. Ghost fingers of dread slid along the nape of her neck, trying to warn her away from the muck and what might wait in it, but she was oblivious to just about everything by that point.
Still clutching the fire poker, she stopped.
She cocked her head and listened intently like an animal.
She could hear pieces of the ceiling still dropping. Water running. The muck dripping. But she wasn’t interested in any of that. She was listening for the reptile that had come into her house and taken her life away from her. She would kill it. There was nothing else left in her mind but the desire to kill the thing.