Resurrection (92 page)

The lantern on the peg went out with a hiss.

34

Something was going on.

Chrissy heard the sound of gunfire and voices and smelled fire. Flashes of light and booming sounds. A stench of death and burning flesh wafted up the stairs. It had been getting dark, but now there was light coming up from below.

She raced over to the stairs and almost made it made it.

Except that Grimshanks came drifting up the stairs to meet her, grinning with those gnarled yellow teeth that pushed past his blubbery lips. His face was white and oily, set with a multitude of tiny scars where he had knitted himself back together again. His eyes were huge, bulging from those black harlequin diamonds that contained them. They were glistening pale eggs set with a tracery of purple veins, eggs that were pulsing and ready to hatch. His orange-and-yellow checked suit was filthy with dried blood and black goo and streaks of grime, bits of things that might have been tissue. The bells twinkled on his cap and tiny red beetles swarmed out of his mouth and skittered over his bloated face.

He held his white puffy hands out to her.
“Chrissy-pissy pudding pie! Where do you think you’re going? That’s not for you down there…not for you.”

Chrissy wanted to run, but the strength just bled from her. There was nothing left to run with or fight with. There was only a bitter acceptance of what the clown would do which would be horrible to the extreme. He stared at her with those awful veined, slimy eyes. Tiny pustules were set in them and they began to break open one by one, running
with a foul-smelling
pus.
Yes,
he looked at her and
in
her and she saw graveyards in her mind, gallows…the places Grimshanks knew and knew very well. More, she saw little boys screaming. Little boys chained to cobwebbed basement walls and hanging by hooks, cut and slit and worked by knives. Hanging from ropes and being shoveled into shallow graves.

Yes, those eyes had her and they would not let her go.

They were the eyes of wolves that waited for little girls in dark forests, hungry and malevolent and ruthlessly vulpine. The eyes of wolves that devoured grandmothers and waited in their beds with slavering jaws and perverse dark minds. The eyes of slimy, deranged little men that seduced little boys into fields and lonely thickets with the promise of sweets. And mostly, they were the eyes of something born in the depths of hell. The eyes of a dead and obscene thing that had been born in the drainage and corpse-slime of the grave.

Chrissy opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out.

Grimshanks jetted forward with a blast of fetid, hot wind. He hit her and knocked her onto her back and then he fell on her, his jaws opening wider and wider until they were wide enough, it seemed, to swallow the world. They closed over her throat gently but firmly. Not with enough strength to even break the skin. He picked her up like a wolf picks up a pup and drifted off, bringing her into another dark room and dropping her on the floor.

“Chrissy-pissy, alone at last and with no interruptions,”
he said and his breath in her face smelled like tombs.

Stretched out beneath him, her mind swam in and out of focus. She felt those bloated hands running up and down her, walking over her like spiders, pausing to squeeze her breasts and poke at her belly, stroke down between her legs. Several candles set in holders atop a table suddenly lit up, filling the room with a guttering yellow-orange glare. And this is what the clown wanted, not some fumbling violation in the dark, but an illuminated and precise defilement that she would have to look upon as her mind went to a soup of ruin.

He opened her shirt with his fingers and the feel of his flesh against hers is what jerked her fully awake. It was like cold, wet meat, a slime of jelly coming from his fingertips. His face was right above her own, huge and bulbous and grotesque like some fleshy Halloween pumpkin. Up close, she could see not just the pink threading of scars in that porous white flesh, but the numerous tiny holes made by parasites and worms. His entire face, up close like that, was covered in fine, minute webbing of silk like caterpillars or spiders had spun a fine cocoon over it. Things squirmed and wriggled just under the flesh. His tongue came out and it was black and horribly swollen, too fat, it seemed, for his mouth. Her drew it along her neck and its touch burned like lye.

She screamed.

Screamed with everything she had and all that did was made him grin. Make vile secretions run from his face and red beetles run out of his nostrils. Yes, and it made his cock thicken and lengthen under his suit, pressing against her belly.

“You will beg for death, you sweet little cunt,”
Grimshanks whispered in her contorted face.
“You will beg for old Grimshanks to slit your throat! But he won’t! Not until he’s done! Not until you’ve tasted his seed and felt him pushing inside your hot sweetness and filling your ass, splitting it wide and bloody! You will scream and scream, Chrissy-pissy, just as I screamed when the clowns took me in that cold, dripping cellar! You’ll know what I knew! You’ll know every awful, breathless minute of it! And how you’ll cry for your mommy and daddy, but they can’t help you! They’ll never hear you! Because your mine, every luscious inch of you is mine to toy with and soil and torment! Mine, mine, mine!”

She felt those hands on her, felt his cock against her, the stink and gelid feel of him, the absolute depravity and degeneration of his worm-holed mind, that seething pit of child bones and smoldering innocence where the boogeyman lived and where little boys and girls died a foul, perverted death.

Her shirt open, her breasts laid bare, Grimshanks planted a line of stinging kisses from her sternum to her belly. Each one was a separate agony. And she could just image what it would feel like to have that engorged and rancid penis inside her, how it would burn and tear.

“Now, Chrissy-pissy pudding pie, you’ll taste me before I taste you…”

He rose up before her and she knew he was going to expose himself. Make her touch it and feel it and put it in her mouth, cackling all the while with the sound of screaming children roasted on spits. Those very un-funny distended hands of his worked his cock through the suit and it rose up, filling and swelling, becoming much larger than any such organ had a right to be.

Now he would take it out.

Now he would make her do things.

Make her do things just as he’d made those boys do things.

No, no, it was too much. Simply too much. With every last bit of strength in her, Chrissy let out a piercing scream that could be heard throughout the orphanage.

Grimshanks boomed with fragmented laughter.

Maggots filled his mouth and emerged from holes in his tongue.

His eyes blazed with nefarious, carnal delight.

Here was the violation, the groping and pumping and penetration, the defilement of flesh and soul. The seeding that came before the cutting and the chewing and dismembering. He would make her suck on him and then he would take her sex in his mouth, piercing it with his yellow and decayed teeth, feeling that hot cunt virgin’s blood washing down his throat. And then he would slide into her, pushing deeper and deeper, shooting into her, filling her with acid and worms


“That’s a fucking clown,” a voice said and then.
“It’s got Chrissy!”

Chrissy was certain that her mind had run now like maple sap. For she was hearing the voice of Deke and another voice which sounded suspiciously like that of Tommy Kastle, her stepdad’s old drinking and bowling partner. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

But there they were.

Dressed in wet raincoats, looking haggard and tired and angry, very angry. They stormed into the room and Grimshanks shrank away, because he knew that what was in them was even worse than what had been in the mob that had beaten him earlier that day down into the grass.

Deke was on his knees, holding Chrissy against him.

Tommy stood there with a shotgun in his hands.

Grimshanks looked afraid, trapped, cornered, in dire straits.

“Hello, Pervo,” Tommy said and his voice was flat and deadly. “I heard all about you. Fruitpie the fucking Magician. I bet fruit pies aren’t the only thing that disappear when you’re around, are they? I bet a lot of kids go missing…don’t they, suck-nut?”

Grimshanks hunched over. His hands came up, his face contorted into a mask of raw animal rage, teeth sharp and bared, eyes fixed and hating.
“I’ll tear your guts out, Tommy-boy, and I’ll make your friend eat them! Eat them! DO YOU HEAR ME YOU FUCKING COCKLESS GUTLESS SQUIRT OF SHIT? I’LL MAKE HIM EAT THEMMMMMM

”

He charged at Tommy.

It was a good bluff and pretty damn frightening to see, but Tommy was not impressed. He cracked a little smile and pulled the trigger. Grimshanks took it right in the belly. He did not fold up or go down like the others, he went absolutely manic and demented. He leaped into the air, bounced off the walls. He flew up and attached himself to the ceiling like a spider. He slid down the walls and wormed over the floors, the whole time steam churning from that hole in his guts. He rushed at Tommy and Tommy fired again, this time catching him with a glancing shot that ripped most of the meat from his upper arm, the flesh there singing and blackening.

Finally, Grimshanks let out a freight train wail of noise, howling and shrieking and everyone had to cover their ears. The clown took advantage of that and hit the boards over the windows like a projectile from a cannon. Some of the boards snapped, but others held.

He hit them and went instantly liquid.

He became a blob that ran and gushed and forced its gelatinous mass between the boards and out into the night where he escaped into the wet darkness. But everyone in that room could hear him wailing and screeching. Because for the first time, Grimshanks was really hurt. He was damaged beyond repair and that screaming of his was part agony and part absolute fear.

Deke was rocking Chrissy back and forth in his arms. She was crying and so was he. Tommy brushed them both with his hands, making contact with them.

“Deke, you take care of her,” he said, heading for the door.

“Where you going?”

Tommy looked back at him, grabbing the lantern, and winked. “I’m going to kill me a motherfucking clown.”

35

There wasn’t much time.

It was full dark and the dead were coming.

Where before they had been content to wait just under the water, staring up with hollow eyes at the people on the rooftop, now their patience had worn thin. They were coming up out of the water. Coming in numbers. And by the looks of it, there would be no stopping them.

“Get ready,” Harry told Chuck. “Stand by with that salt.”

“Look how many there are!” Rita Zirblanski said.

Harry almost told her that he would not let them get her…but could he really promise that? Promise anything that seemed so utterly impossible under the circumstances? Wanda and the twins had the lantern up near the chimney. Harry moved around carefully on the wet shingles with their sole flashlight. Everywhere he played the light, nothing but dead and leering faces.

Jesus, they were everywhere.

To all sides of the house, the zombies were gathered. The water came almost up to the lip of the roof itself and it was thick with the living dead. They crowded up to the roof, five and six and sometimes seven deep, looking almost like concert-goers pressed up to the edge of a stage. White arms were resting on the shingles, faces that were distorted peering up at Harry and the others, those eyes filled with an infinite and unholy blackness. Black tears ran from huge, gelatinous eyes; black blood from the corners of grinning mouths. So many of them, so damn many. There wasn’t enough salt to turn back more than ten or fifteen at best and out there…good God, a seething, hungering graveyard of them.

Mr. Cheese, Chuck’s cat, was mewling wildly now.

“Listen!” Chuck said.
“Listen!”

Harry was not listening, though. He was studying the living corpses down below, knowing that essentially only himself and a bag of salt stood in-between them and the people left in his charge. Sure, Chuck would fight hard, but he was just a boy. Just like the Zirblanksi’s were really just kids and Wanda was an old, old lady. No, he was their protector.

And he didn’t stand a chance.

You could have ran. You could have gotten away anytime.

True. True enough. And that was the really crazy, fucked-up part of it all. He, Harry Teal, felon and escaped convict and all-around bad guy, did not
want
to leave. He was a guy who’d ran with a pretty tough cut-throat crew in Milwaukee. He’d boosted cars to order. He made his living in the streets. He’d spent the past five years in a maximum security hellhole. In the streets, he’d beat guys bloody, he’d even shot a guy once. In Slayhoke, he’d busted metal pipes over men’s heads, he’d stabbed them and beaten them nearly to death when they got in his way or gave him trouble or just failed to show him respect. He had become an animal just like all the others animals out in the yard there. He wasn’t the sort of guy who gave a rat’s ass about anyone. With him it had always been one thing, same as any other criminal: greed. He wanted that folding green and God help you if you got in the way of him getting it.