by Edward Lee
And the whole time, Gut knowed full well what it was he was a’lookin’ at. Sure as shit, yes, sir, he was lookin’ smack-dab right down inta hell…
Yeah, he assured himself yet again, but I’m safe in here. They can’t get me in here…
And that’s when he noticed the two figures step out of the shadow by the doorway.
Two Creekers…
They peered crookedly into the cell, inbred red eyes sunk into their bulbed heads. One’s face seemed jawless, the other had no ears and just a pit for a nose.
“You can’t get me in here!” Gut yelled.
The two Creekers tittered and smiled. Then the jawless one advanced, jingling the keys to the cell door.
««—»»
“What’s this?” Phil asked. “This right here?”
“Huh?”
“This tattoo,” Phil said, and pointed. His finger daintily touched her flesh, which felt moist and very soft.
It looked crude, primitive, burned onto the milk-white skin of her upper left arm. Probably homemade, he realized. Did it with ink and needles herself. The tattoo, tiny as it may have been, clearly depicted a horrifying face whose mouth was crammed with jagged teeth. Two stubs modestly sprouted from its head.
Horns, he realized.
“It looks like a demon. Is that what it is, Honey? Is it a demon?”
“Deem-nom,” she attempted. The mispronounced word sounded like a child talking with a sore throat. Her shining hair remained hanging in front of her face; she smelled slightly sweaty. Only a few wedges of blinking light from the road sign seeped into the car. The girl elected not to answer Phil’s question—if she’d understood it at all—but instead slid over right next to him.
The bench seat’s springs groaned as Phil, in reaction, slid away a few inches. “Honey, listen…”
At once her perfect hands touched him, one rubbing his neck, the other sliding to and fro along the inside of his thigh. “Blow job, ya want?” she asked. Then her hand slid directly over his crotch and squeezed.
Ho, lord! Phil thought and immediately jumped in the seat. He took her hand away and placed it in her lap. “Listen, Honey, I just want—”
“Fuck me, ya wanna then, huh?” she presumed. “Everwhat ya want, s’okay,” and then she reopened the satin robe and let it slide off her pretty shoulders. Suddenly Phil was looking right at her perfect bare breasts. Jesus, he thought, and promptly gulped. “No, Honey, that’s not what I want either,” he said and pulled her robe back up over her.
“Oh-uh,” she murmured. Then her head bowed in a pause. “Hit me ya wanna, I guess.”
Phil shook his head. The girl’s plight was just another exercise in despair. She thinks I want to beat her. “Honey, I don’t want to hit you, I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to do anything except talk.”
“Talk?”
“That’s right, I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.”
She peered back at him through her raven hair, as if in complete confusion. “Hit me no?”
“No, Honey, I won’t hit you.” The whole thing was so sad when he contemplated what life must be like for her. Though no deformities were noticeable, she was still one of Natter’s Creeker whores: kink fodder. Probably gets slapped around every night, he realized. Tied up, beaten, you name it. “Lets just talk, okay?”
“Talk I-uh good-no, er no good,” she peeped.
“You talk fine. I can understand you fine.” He wanted to set her at ease; he didn’t want her to be afraid of him, or think he was just another sick redneck slob who wanted to use her. “But first, let’s get all this hair out of your face,” he said calmly, and then he reached across and pushed her hair back.
And nearly shuddered.
Be cool, he ordered himself, and then quelled the urge to recoil. Once he’d pushed her hair back, her deformity was manifest.
At first she seemed to have no face at all; he was looking at her left side, and her face was—
Nothing, he saw. Featureless, No eyes, no mouth, no nose. Just…skin.
Then she turned her head toward him. Jesus, he thought, and it was a dry, inhuman thought. Nature had pushed her face all the way over to the far right side of her skull: tiny mouth, tiny nose, two tiny red eyes all existing in a narrow strip running from her right temple to her chin…
“Ugly me,” she wisped. “I know.”
“No, you’re not, Honey,” he said. “You’re just different.”
“Iffer-dent.”
“Yeah, you’re different, that’s all, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” But these words of consolation were hard to form looking at her. Here was proof of what a monster nature could be. It was difficult for Phil to absorb all at once.
She tied the sash of her robe and quickly brushed her hair back in front of her face.
“What about you wanna talk?” she asked.
Crickets trilled in his ears, backed by the bizarre words he remembered. “I want you to tell me about…Ona,” he said.
Suddenly the silence seemed to ooze from another world. Phil thought he could hear the girl’s heart beating.
“Ona,” she said.
“Tell me about Ona. It’s a demon, isn’t it?”
“Ona,” she repeated. Then her hair-cloaked face turned to him—she seemed about to speak.
Holy—
Phil didn’t have time to complete the thought. Shadows jerked and fluttered, maddeningly fast. At once his door was yanked open; misshaped hands reached in and hauled him out of the car. Can’t get to my piece! he realized; one guy had Phil’s arm twisted behind his back, and another had him in a half-nelson.
Creekers.
Phil’s captors held him up on his feet beside the car. The more Phil struggled, the tighter they gripped him. Two more Creekers pulled the girl out and shoved her forward.
Then another figure advanced, a huge figure…
“Welcome to our world,” a voice intoned. The voice was resonant, heavy as lead. “How do you like it?”
Phil squinted up. Standing before him, tall and still and frightfully gaunt, was Cody Natter.
“Tell these fuckin’ apes to—let me go!” Phil shouted.
“In time. But first, I understand you’ve been making some inquiries about my proud family, hmm?” Natter’s cracked face turned toward the girl. “Tell him, Honey. Tell our friend here about Ona.”
The girl, still backed by two Creekers, shivered in Natter’s presence.
“Go on, Honey—”
Then one of the Creekers put a buck knife in her hand.
“—our friend wants to know.” Natter was staring intently at the girl, his smile like a canyon gouged across his face.
“I-uh-yuh—” the girl muttered.
“Go on.”
“I—”
“Go on.”
Natter held his stare.
The girl raised the knife, croaked, “Ona-prey-bee,” then—
“Noooo!” Phil screamed.
—dragged the knife so deeply across her throat that her head fell back as if hinged. She collapsed to the gravel immediately, blood pouring from the wound freely as water from an open spigot.
“You motherfucker!” Phil exclaimed, wincing at the downward pressure on his neck. “You ugly sick Creeker son of a bitch!”
“Really now,” Natter chuckled. “I should think a police officer would be more politically correct.”
I’m made, Phil realized. “Who fingered me?”
Gravel crunched. Natter laughed softly as another figure stepped out of the bank of shadows.
“Hey, bub.”
It was Sullivan, his beady eyes fixed, his grin cocked.
“How the hell did you get out of jail?” Phil demanded.
Sullivan pinched Phil’s face between his fingers. “Well, see, bub, that no-call order you slapped on me didn’t wash with the public defender. He got it pulled. So I gave Mr. Natter here a call, and we had a nice long talk. And he was kind enough to post my bail.”<
br />
“Natter, you asshole,” Phil said. “Sullivan’s the one who’s been cornering your dust operation.”
“My ‘dust’ operation, oh dear,” Natter replied. The permanent smile seemed to appraise Phil with hilarity. “So you’re the best that Mullins could summon? Such a sad state of affairs for our local law enforcement contingent.”
“And, bub,” Sullivan added, squeezing Phil’s face harder, “I owe you a couple, and I think I’ll pay ya back right now.”
“Don’t be a fucking id—” Sullivan rammed his fist into Phil’s solar plexus. All the breath in his chest exploded out his throat, and his knees gave out.
“Hold him up. Lemme take a few more pops.”
Phil was hanging by his elbows; his two captors hoisted him back up where his face was suddenly on the receiving end—
whap! whap! whap!
—of Sullivan’s fists. Each blow jarred Phil’s brain.
Then he fell to the ground.
His vision wobbled, his head reeled. Spitting blood, he managed to raise himself to hands and knees, and gasp, “You assholes, I’m a fucking cop, you can’t do this to a cop!”
“Oh, but we can, my good constable,” Natter informed him. Then—
crack!
Sullivan kicked Phil square in the chin. Phil’s upper body snapped back, flipping him completely over in the gravel.
“No witnesses, bub,” Sullivan said, wiping his hands.
Phil was close to passing out. He wasn’t seeing stars, he was seeing galaxies. Footsteps scuffed around him in the gravel; chuckles and crisp laughter fluttered like birds. I’m losing it, Phil thought…
The Creekers picked him up and threw him into the car. Sprawled on the front seat, he sidled over, limp. He sensed more than saw Natter’s big warped face leaning over.
“Go home, officer. And don’t come back.”
“Yeah, later, bub,” Sullivan added. “Hope ta run into ya again sometime. Let’s make it soon.”
“But before you leave,” Natter went on, “don’t forget your prize. It’s well earned.”
More shuffling. More chuckles. Then a squeal…
A sudden weight landed on Phil’s back. Someone else had been tossed into the car. The figures were walking away, their laughter fading. Eventually Phil was able to lift himself up. He turned his head, drooling blood, and saw that the other person they’d thrown into the car was Vicki—
Those sons of bitches…
And he could also see that she’d been beaten considerably worse than he had been.
— | — | —
Twenty-Nine
Somehow, Phil managed to drive back to his room; he didn’t know how he was able to do this—instinct, perhaps. He’d practically had to lug Vicki down the hall. Blood dripping from her mouth left a trail along the floor. But—
Aw, no, he thought once he got her inside and had the door locked. His consciousness tripped around in his head like a rummie about to stumble and fall.
Eventually, and before he could tend to Vicki’s wounds, he did indeed fall.
He fell into the cloaks of his past…
He was ten years old again, on the stairs of the House and running for his life. He’d just seen the whore-girl’s big doglike teeth, and that was all he needed to know that this was the last place in the world he should be. His sneakered feet pounded down the stairs, his torn Green Hornet T-shirt hanging in flaps. Then he stopped short—
Halfway down the steps, he saw the figure.
It was a big figure, big as a wall, and it was just standing there, blocking his way out.
It stood in shadow, backlit. He couldn’t see any features, just its shape, and just that it was big.
“Young man,” it said, “curiosity is a commendable trait, but I think you and I have some talking to do.”
Phil ran back up the stairs, his feet pacing with his heart. When he turned back right, he saw the whore-girl standing there cockeyed and grinning, and the fat guy holding Dawnie, and he was grinning, too…
So he turned again.
And raced back up another set of stairs to the next floor.
He was so scared he couldn’t think. All he could reckon was the necessity of getting away from the giant figure on the stairs. And running up those stairs was like running through a swamp, it was so hot and humid.
A window, he thought mindlessly. Find a window and climb out!
Never mind the long drop…
On the next landing, darkness seemed to swallow him. Yes, he was in the guts of the darkness, and its heat seemed to shimmer. Suddenly he was so hot he thought he would pass out, or maybe even die. He shuffled along, frantic, blind, his blood racing through his veins like a siren. Then his hands landed on something—
A doorknob.
He turned it and fell inward…
His breath blurted out as he landed on his belly. The barewood floor felt damp and nearly too hot to touch when he pushed himself up. Threads of sunlight glowed through closed shutters. What…is this? he thought. It was just a room, sure, but—
Something was wrong.
Like the rest of this house, and the people in it, and the things that happened here, there was something wrong with this room. He knew it, he could feel it in its throbbing dark and in the thin white lines of sunlight pouring through the shutters’ seams. He could feel it like breath on his neck.
Then he opened the shutters—
It wasn’t movement that caught his eye. Instead, it was the sensation of sheer bulk, or perhaps it was breath on his neck all along, because when he opened the shutters and let the light blaze in, he knew there was something else alive in the room.
But Phil was too busy screaming to figure out what it was.
The door burst open. Figures clamored in: several of the whore-girls from downstairs, and several other men he hadn’t seen, Creeker men with big melon heads and humped backs and crooked eyes. One of them held Dawnie in front of him, with a big three-fingered hand clamped over her mouth.
Phil crawled to the corner, screaming himself nearly into shock. He was helpless, limp, staring…
Then another figure entered the room—the giant man from the stairs.
His face was hideous in the sunlight. It looked squashed and filled with crevices, with two red Creeker eyes that looked bigger than Phil’s fists.
“So the curious little boy has taken a liking to our sister,” the voice rattled in the dark. “We have many sisters.”
Every red eye in the room, then, turned to the corner opposite Phil. Phil couldn’t scream anymore; he could only shiver, sweat, and stare at the bulkish, glistening thing that sat there on its side…
It sat in the dark, the sunlight streaming in front of it. There was little to describe…but a little was enough.
Long, thin, crippled limbs. A roughened, tubby torso. Two oval holes for eyes, and a giant warped head the size of a feedbag. Its skin—pocked, spotted, and gray, like a slug’s—seemed smeared with some lumpy clear jelly. Shags of ribbony black hair hung in damp ropes nearly to the floor, and when it opened its mouth—a great thin slit a foot long—teeth like rows of carpet blades shimmered.
Ona…
Skeet-inner…
Ona-prey-bee…
In dumb horror, then, Phil realized that he wasn’t hearing the words in his ears. He was hearing them in his head.
A tearing sound, a thin, wispy shriek. One of the Creekers ripped Dawnie’s dirty dress off her body in one stroke and threw it aside.
Onnamann, us-save…
Mannona, come…
The giant man from the stairs stepped forward, the crevices in his squashed face like gouges in clay. His voice rattled:
“We give you this day your daily flesh…”
Dawnie shrieked a final time as she was thrown into the corner with the thing. Suggestions of limbs reached out, hands more like feet, with clusters of foot-long fingers. Dawnie was quickly pulled into the darkness.
Then came a wet gnawing sound
. And then—
thump!
Dawnie was thrown back out onto the floor.
The sunlight blazed. It wasn’t Dawnie anymore, just the vaguely human shape of what was left of her. Radiant wet scarlet limbs askew on the floor. Scalped, faceless now. A tiny wet red body.
Fully and completely skinned.
The giant man’s hand reached out and down like a descending vulture. He hauled Phil up, and then his dark voice grated: “Go now, boy. Run away fast.” The red eyes drilled into Phil’s face. “But we’ll see you again someday.”
««—»»
“Phil? Phil?”
pap-pap-pap
“Phil?”
Repeated slight slaps to the face revived him. His eyes felt glued shut; when he opened them, he actually heard a peeling sound, and then realized that it was blood that had sealed them shut. He looked up at Vicki’s blurred face, which seemed to swim above him. His consciousness corkscrewed.
He muttered one word: “Ona.”
