Becoming the Gateway
Page 16
She raised the butcher knife and sank it deep into Bethie's face, just below her left eye. The creature did not even flinch. The knife stayed in its face, with a thick black goo that must have been blood oozing out from where the blade was stuck. It flicked out its long forked tongue once more, only this time more slowly and deliberate, as though it was tasting the air around it, savoring the pain and terror that Charlene was enveloped in. Although now its mouth was shaped more into the snout of an animal, Charlene thought that it looked like it was smiling at her. The creature looked all the more sinister in the bouncing yellow glow of the flashlight, casting macabre shadows across its distorted form.
Charlene had scooted backwards, using both arms and her one undamaged foot to push herself, all the way down the stable hall and back out into the dark night. The hideous monstrosity followed her, its tentacle that was just recently a small child's arm wriggled up to its face and wrapped around the protruding knife handle. It pulled the knife out from its face with a sticky, wet sound. The wound was moving, puckering open and shut like an obscene mouth, sputtering out the black ooze. It let out another roar, this time its call was answered by a shrieking howl that came from back over by Clarence's cottage.
Charlene looked over and saw that another monstrous form was trying to squeeze its way out from the front door and onto the porch. The lights all began flashing on and off again, creating that strobe effect once more, this made it difficult to focus on the thing trying to break its way out from the cottage, but Charlene recognized the face just enough to tell that this was once Clarence Wilkerson. The skin was the same grayish and veiny look as the flesh of the creature from the stables, only it was sicklier and much more bloated looking. The expression on its barely recognizable face was not quite as focused and predatory as young Elizabeth's had become. It was still savage, only more bewildered and mad looking, like a rabid dog. Only its upper torso poked through the front door, it was dragging itself forward with two massive and bloated arms, the right one had something it, it was hard to make out but Charlene thought it looked like crucifix. Its body was so malformed that it simply looked like a giant, quivery mass of gray Jell-O. The massive, bulbous thing was screeching and snarling as it tried to pull its way out of the front door, but the rest of its body, hidden behind it, must have just been too big to fit through.
She forced herself to her feet, sending waves of agony stabbing through her from the smashed and torn foot, she screamed out in pain and terror and began limping away from the Bethie creature and the horrible thing trying to force its way from the cottage as fast as her injured body would allow.
She felt a new hot pain send fire though the skin on her back as something slashed down across the flesh as she fled. She cried out just as a second slash tore across her back. She fell forward but caught herself with her hands, almost losing the flashlight, she glanced back to prepare for the next attack and saw that the Bethie creature had the knife in its tentacle arm, only now it was as if the tentacle had grown around the knife handle, and now it had a sharp steel blade sticking out of the end of the tentacle. It raised the blade tipped appendage high in the air for another slash, but this time Charlene was able to roll to her left in time to dodge it. The creature, still getting used to its new form, lost its footing on the hill and tumbled backwards to the ground. As it twisted around to right itself Charlene heard the sound of wood breaking apart as the door jamb of the cottage broke to pieces and the hulking, blob formed thing caught there began pulling itself out.
Charlene was not going to waste these few seconds she'd been granted by the luck of the creature's stumbling back. She pulled herself upright and began her ascent up the hill again, doing all she could to ignore the grinding pain tearing its way up her leg. The pain in the flesh of her back from the slash wounds was incomparable to that of her hammer smashed foot, but still burned and gushed blood down her back, causing her t-shirt to stick to her skin as the blood soaked through. She was sure that at any second another attack would shred through her flesh, but the attack did not come.
She focused only on making it to the top of the hill, again not concerned with staying on the path as much as getting to the top the quickest way possible, which was of course a straight line. She was surprised at how fast she actually reached the small summit, only then did she dare a glance behind her. Her pursuers had not followed her up the hill.
The Bethie thing was growling up into the night sky as though it was raging at the very stars themselves, its blade tipped tentacle slashing up into the night. The Clarence thing was still pulling itself free from the house, its rear half still to be squeezed though the busted door frame. The section of itself it had freed was a massive, pulsating blob of gray flesh that shrank a bit at the door opening as it worked its way through. It was shimmying its way forth, like someone trying to force huge bag of sludge through a small hole. All the while it was screeching and slobbering like a manic psychotic screaming in tongues while in the throngs of a religious fervor.
There was another loud cracking noise and the entire front end of Clarence's house crumbled and the repulsive mass of pulsating flesh pulled the rest of its disgusting body free of the wreckage of the home he had lived in for nearly five decades. It pulled itself along with its arms, the rest of it was dragged along the dirt behind it. What were once Clarence Wilkerson's legs were now just two dangling limbs that swung from either upper side of its rear end, just flopping in the air like two windsock kites. The house nearly fell completely from its foundation once the creature was free, it had to have been nearly the size of the house cottage itself and seemed to grow even larger as it dragged itself along.
The massive blob creature and the Bethie thing eyed each other and exchanged a few snarls and hisses. For a moment Charlene thought they would attack each other, perhaps she would get lucky and they would just both kill one another. Those hope were quickly dashed, however, when both of them turned their head up in her direction, directly at her, and began moving up the hill.
At the same instant the two monsters that were once part of Charlene's family began moving in her direction, the air around her once again broke out in that maddening cacophony of unintelligible whispering. A thousand voices conspired around her in a soft tone that was much more sadistic and perverse than it was simply quite. She turned and limped as quickly as she could into the orchard, every excruciating step brought her back closer the house, not that she thought it was particularly safe, but it was the best shelter she could find while being perused by the two monstrosities making their way uphill to dispatch her. Truth be told, she was running on a sort of primal instinctive autopilot.
One second to the next.
This second the concern was evading the creatures lumbering their way up the hill and getting into the house, despite her frightening experiences in there earlier, still felt safer than just waiting outside to be torn to pieces by monsters.
If she were to take even a second to stop and consider the details of her current circumstance she would surely lose her mind right there. Right now was not the time to think about things like the fact that the mangled corpse and the heinous nightmare creatures she had encountered were people that, even after her split with Charlie, she had loved and considered family. If she were to really process the fact that sweet, innocent little Elizabeth, who adorably liked to be called Bethie, had been transformed into that disfigured, bloodthirsty, abomination she would more than likely just die there in the grass, her heart and brain unable to process such an outlandish experience, or at the very least collapse in the dirt screaming and wailing as the very core of her being descended into the deepest, blackest oblivion of madness.
Worst of all, she would have to actually admit that there was a very good chance the same, or possibly worse, had happened to the two people in this hard, cold life that actually gave her a reason to wake up in the morning.
“No!” she screamed aloud.
As perplexed and terrified as she was, she had t
he sense to know that if she turned off the autopilot, she would most surely crash and burn.
That voice called out to her again.
The very same voice that had mocked her frightened little boy's plea for salvation when she was running to the rescue of his big sister and him back there on that dirt road leading up to this paradise turned to hell. It called from somewhere nearby, yet she could not pinpoint from where, it was that unnatural, spiteful voice that hissed at her, "Come and save us...save us, Mommy! Come and save us you worthless fucking whore! Come save us so we can take you to Hell with us, Mommy!"
"Fuck you!" She screamed back.
Something close to her, perhaps to her left hiding behind one of the apple trees she was running past, or maybe off to her right pacing her from the cover of the sage brush and tall grass, laughed softly. Then everything went silent.
She hobbled her way past the orchard and into the grassy backyard. She decided that her best path to "safety" was the fastest one, and limped in the direction of the sliding glass door that took her into the ground floor basement. Even with the agonizing protest of her injured, bleeding foot, she made it to the door much faster than she expected.
Autopilot.
She picked up a garden gnome from its guard post protecting Charlotte's azaleas and hurled it at the glass door after she had gone about halfway down the short concrete staircase that led from the backyard into the basement. The tiny statue proved a bigger challenge for Charlene than its appearance let on. Her frantic state of mind and her agonizing physical state resulted in the garden gnome connecting with the wall directly adjacent to the glass door, which in turn caused it to bounce directly back in her direction, barely missing a painful collision with her knee cap, and then shattering to pieces on the concrete steps behind her.
"Ah! Fuck!"
She smacked the glass door with an open hand and yanked on the handle, only to have the door swing open. In most cases this would be the type of situation where Charlene would take a minute to laugh at herself for letting her frustration make her jump to frantic decisions like tossing a garden gnome through a glass door without first checking to see if it was even locked, but tonight was not such an occasion that allowed for such constructive self-criticism. Just as the preoccupation of her senses did not allow her to dwell on subtle observations like how when entering the basement from outside, the scent of cut grass and warm desert air was suddenly replaced with the musty smell of the dusty basement of a large ranch house that was uninhabited all but maybe a few weeks out of the year.
The term "uncomfortable silence" took on a much more severe than usual significance than usual as Charlene painfully limped through the dark basement. Every groan and whimper she let out with each painful half step seemed to reverberate through the silent room, sure to give away her location to whatever sinister thing waited with an itching anticipation to devour her. The fact the she did not hear the malicious snarls and roars of the two abominations behind her left her conflicted on whether to feel slightly relieved or horrifyingly worried.
The flashlight was no longer offering the reassurance it had provided earlier. Charlene had absolutely no desire to see what might be hidden in the shadows. She kept her eye focused solely on what was directly in her path, flinching every time she knocked her foot against a piece of clutter, not so much out of pain but more because every tiny sound threatened to give her location away.
Luckily for her, the staircase was a straight shot about thirty feet from the sliding glass door, a distance she made quickly considering her condition. This condition became agonizingly apparent when she ever so slightly caught bridge of her right foot on the lip of the first stair, connecting in the same place the claw hammer had torn through. A new nauseating wave of agony shook Charlene's sanity to the core.
She bit her lip almost in half trying to hold back her scream of pain, then just collapsed backwards onto the staircase, holding her right leg in the air while tears and snot ran down her sobbing face. She felt her bladder let lose its contents and her first reaction to the warm, damp sensation was not disgust, but more a feeling of wonderment that it had not happened earlier.
She heard a sudden sound of terrible screaming emanating from directly below where she was sprawled out on the staircase. She was suddenly reminded of the phone call that had occurred earlier a few floors directly above her, and a moment later she realized why.
It was Charlie's voice screaming, and the sound was accompanied by that same disgusting ripping sound, which in turn pushed his screams, of what must be the most unimaginable agony, into a high pitched squeal followed by a cross between crying and screaming.
Charlene let out a scream but stifled it almost as soon as it passed her lips. She did not have the luxury of doing the one thing he entire existence was screaming at her to do. That was of course, to let herself lapse into madness and just curl up in a little ball of terrified insanity right there on the stairs and just scream until her lungs were bleeding.
No. Before she let herself go mad and then die, or considering the screams she heard from below her possibly much worse, she had to spend every last second trying only to save the lives of her children.
She sprung up off the stairs and wheeled around like a spinning top and landed perfectly on her good foot. Her adrenaline was providing that much needed psychosomatic anesthetic effect now. She was as focused on making it up these stairs as a mongoose was when squaring off against a king cobra. No time for even the slightest slip up.
Not that she had even the slightest idea exactly where she was going or what to do when she got there. She just knew that directly below her horrible, horrible things were happening and she wanted to be pretty much anywhere besides here on these stairs or outside with the abominations that were after her. She had the sense that the only reason she was still alive was that her antagonists were still getting used to their new forms, just like a newborn deer or bison is clumsy and uncoordinated when it first leaves the womb and tried to walk on the ground for its first time.
She gripped the right railing with the same hand that held her flashlight, the left side had no railing, but she pressed her left hand firmly against the bare wall and lifted herself up the stairs as though the railing on her right and the wall on her left were crutches, keeping her shattered foot levitated behind her. She made good distance, clearing three stairs with each go, and before she knew it she had cleared the entire first flight.
She was making the right turn into the next flight of stairs that would carry her up to the main floor, where she suddenly realized that she should scour the counters for any set of keys that might go to one of the vehicles out front. It was a long shot, but what the fuck else was she supposed to do? She didn't need to just find her kids, she also needed to get them the hell out of here and did not want to chance a run back down the haunted dirt road that brought her here, this time she'd just run the damn goat right over if it sprang out in front of her.
The staircase behind her exploded upward, making a loud cracking sound, like lightning had crashed in the narrow stair hallway, splinters of wood flew into the air and rattled off the walls and ceiling.
A huge mass of tentacles unfolded themselves out into the air and squirmed around like leeches looking for a warm, beating pulse. Charlene had no way of knowing that these were the same wriggling tentacles that had burst through the kitchen window earlier and snatched her ex-husband and former sister in law.
They squirmed around like earth worms that had suddenly found themselves protruding out from the moist soil into empty air.
In fact, they really looked like worms. There were no suction cups like with a squid or octopus, but Charlene somehow knew that they were able to grip just the same. They began swirling in an upward formation that sort of resembled the flowering bud of a spring tulip. As the tentacles swirled around each other a form began to become visible in the spaces between them.
There was somebody inside the squirming mass of tendrils.
His eyes were closed at first, but they slowly opened as though he was waking from a long sleep, they were completely black. A tight smile began forming across the man's face.
As soon as he spoke she realized that it was Dennis, her former brother in law. "Charlene, the kids and I are just so happy you chose to join us tonight."
Charlene screamed and spun around back towards the upstairs, in any other circumstance the pain in her foot would have been unbearable, but now she only half-limped her way up, still heaving herself along the rail and wall with her arms.
Two sounds seemed to echo up from behind her as she ascended the stairs. The wet, splattering sound of those revolting tentacles squirming against each other, and the tortured screams, Charlie's screams, coming from a little farther below.
She made the frantic climb up the next flight in what must have been two seconds flat and quickly spun herself in the direction of the front door, completely oblivious to the plan she had hatched not even two minutes earlier to look for car keys.
That was gone, as were all traces of Charlene's sanity. In her mind, everything...had just...broke...down.
There is only so much the human brain can handle, and much of that is loosely protected by what a person considers to be reality. Charlene's mind had experienced too much just and it began to fizzle out like an old joy buzzer. If there had been anyone to see her in this state they surely would have agreed. The combination of screaming and hyperventilating almost created the illusion of hysterical laughter.