by Barry Napier
7
He knew it was going to be ugly. Knew that from the sound. Not metal hitting metal. What the metal had hit first.
A silver Audi had jumped the curb directly in front of the home. It slammed into a streetlight, wrapping its grill around the metal post. And caught in the embrace of the twisted metal was the broken body of a young woman, her legs jellied by the impact, her torso twisted into an impossible angle. But the worst part was her face. Her bright, fresh, beautiful face. It wasn’t that it had been mangled. Just the opposite. The accident had left it untouched, and it held frozen her certain knowledge of what was about to happen to her.
Other people were flooding towards the crash site as Matt arrived. He saw horror on their faces. And something else.
Rage.
The driver of the Audi, a portly, middle-aged man in a cheap suit, opened his door and took a single stumbling step out. His head was a mask of blood. Standing more than fifty yards away, Matt could tell that he was trembling.
“Murderer!” shouted a man from the group of people that was approaching the car. The fury in his voice was unmistakable.
The driver looked dreamily in the direction of the voice. When Matt saw just how dazed he was, he reacted without thinking. He raced down the sidewalk, towards the street. By the time Matt reached the Audi, the driver had fallen against the trunk. Blood gushed from his brow. Matt saw the cut along the front of his head and that his right eye was already beginning to swell shut.
“Are you okay?” Matt asked.
“I…,” the man said. He looked around as if he had no idea where he was. His eyes fell on the woman trapped between his car and the streetlight. “Oh my God… did I…?”
Matt didn’t see the first of the approaching mob until it was too late. It was the man who had shouted earlier. He threw a right hook into the driver’s face. The driver shouted and stumbled to the ground.
“This man’s been hurt,” Matt said as calmly as he could. He stepped between the fallen driver and the still-approaching man. Behind him, six others were coming. One of them was carrying a large rock.
“Not hurt enough,” the angry man asked. “Not like that poor girl—”
When the man tried to kick at the driver, Matt blocked it and gave him a hard shove that almost knocked him over.
“It was an accident,” Matt said. “Let the cops—”
The rock whizzed by his head, nearly clipping his right temple. Matt looked up in surprise in time to see the man he had shoved charging at him in a football tackle stance. Matt wasn’t fast enough to block the attack and was driven back against the car. He brought his right elbow down on the man’s back and then threw a series of hard punches to his neck. The man backed away at once with a groan.
Before Matt had time to readjust, another member of the mob sprang at him. It was a fat man with a slow right jab. Matt dodged it easily and then threw his own jab to the fat man’s jaw. The man cried out in girlish surprise and dropped to his knees.
Matt glanced to the driver. He was lying down, staring up into the sky. His eyes seemed impossibly white in the midst of the crimson mask he wore. It was hard to tell because of the blood, but Matt was certain that there were no signs of rot on the man’s face. He then looked out to the mob—which seemed to have doubled in minutes—and saw no traces of it out there, either.
What the hell is this?
The mob surged forward. Matt looked around for any signs of help, but he was apparently going to be handling this alone. His only other option was to retreat back into Steeple Assisted Living, but if he did that, this mob would kill the driver. And if Matt tried taking the driver with him, the mob would easily overtake them.
Matt planted his feet and assumed a boxer’s stance. He waited for the next member of the mob to approach. Two men came at him at once. Matt was able to fire off a right hook that landed awkwardly on one of the men’s shoulders. Then he was caught on both sides and pushed back against the car, where he instantly felt two solid punches land at his side. His ribs groaned and he nearly collapsed. He fought back as well as he could, but he was easily outnumbered. Even if he could get beyond these two, there were more waiting beyond them.
He managed to bring his knee up hard into one of the men’s crotches. He followed this with a flailing punch that caught the other man squarely in the neck. The men stepped back just long enough for Matt to break away from the car. But by the time he was free, someone had pegged him with what he thought was a bottle. It nailed him on the arm in an explosion of glass.
A surge of pain raced up his arm. He stumbled slightly, and then there was another person on him. This time it was a woman. All he saw as he went to the ground was a set of toned legs kicking at him.
Matt tried to get to his feet but was rewarded with only a solid crunching kick to his ribs. He fell back to the ground, and that was when he heard the first police siren in the distance.
The mob scattered as the sirens grew louder. Matt cringed as he tried to get to his feet. When he was to his knees, he looked over at the driver. The wound in his head was still spitting blood in sheets. The man’s eyes were fogging over, and Matt didn’t think he was going to make it.
“Hang in there,” Matt said as the first of the police cars came screeching to a halt a few feet away.
“No,” the driver said. “Oh God… what happened? What did I—?”
The man never finished his question. He died with his jaw partially open, blood trickling out.
8
The cops questioned Matt rigorously, but there wasn’t much he could tell them. The girl was dead, the driver was dead—what else was there to say? He tried to describe a couple of the members of the mob, but Matt got the idea pretty quickly that they didn’t like having their upstanding citizens smeared by a drifter, so he gave that up. There seemed to be some debate about running him into the jail for additional questioning, but they eased up when Sally Jenkins emerged from Steeple Assisted Living and backed his story.
Once they’d let him go, one of the home’s nurses looked over his injuries. There was a cut from the broken bottle and some bruising just about everywhere, but none of his ribs were broken.
Bill and Missy came to see him. Missy looked deeply worried. Matt wondered if it was the accident that was troubling her… or Iris Spencer’s scream.
“I’ve been telling the city to put a stoplight on that corner for years,” Missy said. “All that traffic is an accident waiting to happen.”
Bill shrugged. “I guess it’s not waiting anymore. Not quite sure how you got so banged up when you only arrived after the crash.”
“That was the good citizens of Steeple,” Matt said. “They were going to kill the driver. I couldn’t let them.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Missy said. “That’s another thing I saw in your eyes.”
She stared at him so intently Matt had to turn away for a moment.
“Unless Missy sees any reason to disagree, I’d say you can call it a day,” Bill said finally.
Matt glanced at the clock on the wall. “A day?” he said. “It’s only two thirty.”
“No,” Missy said. “He’s right. Your elbow is cut and your side is all bruised up. You can take the rest of the day. We’ll pay you for a full day. Do you have anywhere to go?”
“A room at the motel.”
“Okay. Go rest up. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Matt left the exam room and headed back down the first-floor hallway towards the large common area. The TV was blaring a game, and two men were playing chess. He looked out to the garden where he had met Iris Spencer and saw she was gone.
Her scream had come seconds before the car had slammed into that young girl. Was it a coincidence? Or were they connected? Had she seen what was about to happen and shrieked at the horror of the onrushing death and her inability to stop it?
Or had her scream actually caused it?
The idea seemed ludicrous. But he hadn’t just heard the sound coming out of her.
He’d felt it. And if he could, who was to say other people couldn’t have, too?
He collected his duffel bag from the employee lounge and headed out to the street. The Audi had been towed and yellow caution tape strung around the wounded base of the streetlight, but no one had bothered to clean up the litter of shattered glass and ruptured metal. Or the bright red stain that spread from sidewalk to asphalt.
But Matt could sense that the blood wasn’t the only thing spreading in Steeple. There was tension in the air all around him. The air was loud with blasts from car horns and curses from pedestrians. One woman sitting on her front porch yelled at Matt as he walked by, insisting that he not “step on my yard and kill those GD bougainvilleas !” Shopkeepers stood in the doorways of their stores, glaring at each passerby as if at a parade of thieves. A skinny kid on a skateboard slalomed down the sidewalk, barely missing the people walking there. Every movement seemed to be a challenge to the world: Think you can take me?
And yet, he hadn’t seen a single trace of the rot that was telltale of Mr. Dark. Was the turmoil that had brought him to Steeple perhaps a whole new sort of evil that he was unfamiliar with?
He needed to find some sort of answers fast. Right now things were just ugly. But he’d already seen how that could boil over into violence, and if the rest of the town was like this street, one spark could turn Steeple into an inferno.
9
He was standing in the forest again, looking out at the white house, its pretty fence, and the surrounding field. He could smell faint woodland rot and pine needles all around him.
He saw the five girls right away. This time they were all standing and looking directly at the house. Their little necks were craned upward, looking at the second-floor window Matt had seen the dark figure in during his previous dream. The girls were holding hands. They looked like paper dolls.
Matt stepped out of the forest and into the field. He walked to the dirt road and crossed it. When he stepped on the road, it felt like rubber beneath his feet. As he got closer to the girls, he could hear them whispering something in unison. It had a rhythm to it, a steady sort of tone. As he crossed to the other side of the road and stepped into the yard, he heard it more clearly.
“They put me in the dark, cold ground. I was still alive but made no sound. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The worms they crawl all about…”
Matt walked slowly towards them, not wanting to alarm them. He also recalled how the last dream had ended, how the girls had somehow become older in a flash and how their faces had become grotesque masks of decay.
He was two feet away from them now. He saw bugs crawling around in one of the girls’ hair. Another’s was tangled in what looked like thick clumps of congealed blood. Guided by the force of the dream, Matt reached out for one of those red shapes that were even now drying in the girl’s soft brown hair.
Before his fingers touched it, the girls stopped their chanting, their hands still interlocked.
Matt looked up to the window, following their glance. The glass shimmered like sun on muddy lake water. Beyond the gleaming of light off its surface, he saw the dark shape of a person. It stepped forward and nearly filled the window as Matt stared.
Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled. Matt looked skyward and saw dark purple clouds rolling forward with hurricane speed.
“Girls,” Matt said, stepping in front of them. “You need to—”
His voice locked in his throat when he saw them. Their eyes were gone, revealing black sockets crusted with blood and gore. Their mouths hung open, and although their lips did not move, they still chanted: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…”
“Girls!”
Matt’s shout brought their chant to a halt. Their mouths still hung open in either shock or demented awe. The girl closest to him produced some sort of deep-throated wail, like the purr of a dying kitten.
The thunderheads rolled overhead. On the other side of the dirt road, the trees swayed violently with a wind that had not yet showed itself. Matt watched this, trying to understand it all, when he heard the girl farthest to his right begin to whisper something. The noise that escaped her slack mouth could barely be considered speaking at all, but it was there—a steady droning noise that seemed to strain her throat.
The girl’s head abruptly leveled down and stared straight at Matt’s face. Her open mouth snapped closed with an audible click and she grinned maliciously at him. She then opened her mouth again, stretching it to an impossible width that would have broken her jaw in the world of the awake.
She belted out a scream that Matt felt vibrating in his skull. He had heard the same scream earlier. It was the same tormented noise that Iris Spencer had released on the veranda overlooking the garden of Steeple Assisted Living.
Behind him, the second-floor window exploded in a rain of glass. Matt wheeled around and looked up. A black substance began to pour over the frame, and as it touched the side of the house, the wood began to splinter, crack, and go soft. A face stared down at him from the broken window, a familiar face that he had seen too many times as of late… the face of Mr. Dark, shimmering and somehow fragmented in the glass.
The moment Matt saw the dark, contorted face leering down at him, a unified shout sounded from the girls.
“Hail!”
Matt turned back to face them. When he did, their little hands were on him, only the delicate skin of little girls was gone. Their grip was now all wrinkles, sores, and bones. They had the hands of old women. They grabbed at him and opened their mouths to bite him. When they did, he saw discolored teeth and rotting gums. The tongue of one girl was a dead slug that lolled from the side of her mouth.
Matt screamed, but it was drowned out by the rolling thunder overhead.
Matt’s scream jolted him awake. He sat up so quickly in bed that the room seemed to spin. Fumbling for the lamp on the bedside table, he flicked it on and breathed heavily as his eyes adjusted to the light.
The thunder from the dream echoed through his head as he sorted through its images. The little girl who had let loose that guttural scream—that was Iris Spencer. It had to be. And Iris had been friends from childhood with Missy Crowder. Would she be another one? A third must be Gloria Clark—another friend old enough to share Missy’s fourth floor.
Matt didn’t get messages in dreams. He also didn’t peer into crystal balls or read tea leaves and chicken entrails. He wasn’t clairvoyant. There was no reason to believe this was anything but an unpleasant nightmare.
Except that it was. He could feel it. A vision.
But of what?
Something had happened to those little girls in that house so many years ago… and someone or something was trying to tell him about it.
There was something in Steeple’s air, something ugly. It was making the people edgy, angry, violent. So far Matt hadn’t been affected—unless this dream was this thing’s effect on him.
Which meant that whatever had happened to those girls so many years ago was directly related to what was happening now.
Matt looked to the bedside clock and saw that it was 3:13 a.m. When he got control of himself, he shut the light and lay in the dark with his thoughts, hoping to fall back asleep. But when four o’clock rolled around and he was still wide-awake, he gave up.
As he waited for sunrise, he sat on the bed with the images of the dream in his head. One thing in particular plagued him: If three of the girls were Iris, Missy, and Gloria, then who were the other two?
10
The motel room didn’t offer any answers to Matt’s questions, so Matt left it as soon as the sky started to lighten. He grabbed a quick breakfast at the diner, then made his way to the home. The receptionist greeted him warmly as he made his way through the double doors and towards the common room. It was early yet, so the common room was relatively quiet. A few residents sipped coffee while watching the news.
He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and found Missy sitting in one of the plu
sh chairs in the large fourth-floor lobby. She was speaking on a cell phone and straightening the plump pillows on the large couch. When Missy saw Matt step off the elevator, she smiled and waved at him.
“How are you this morning?” she asked, ending her call.
“I’m good,” he said, knowing that yesterday’s events were certainly weighing heavily on her as well. “But I need to ask you something, Mrs. Crowder.”
Missy blinked and shook her head slightly, as if she had just zoned out. “I suppose you want to know about Bill, yes?”
He hadn’t suspected there was anything to know about his boss. Matt had known him for only a few hours but realized he was already feeling close to the older man. Had he fallen victim to the violence that seemed to run random over Steeple?
“What about him?” Matt said.
“Poor, poor Bill,” she said. “I’m afraid he has a close friend that was put in the hospital last night. He is wrapping up some errands for the family this morning and will be in late. As for myself, I need to leave very soon. I’ll be riding out to Norfolk to pick up our newest fourth-floor resident from the airport.”
“A friend of yours?” Matt asked.
“The best,” Missy said. “Her name is Ophelia. She’s the last of us. When I built this home, I put four rooms up here, hoping Iris, Gloria, and Ophelia would all end up coming back to Steeple.”
“You’ve given them good reason to,” Matt said, glancing around the palatial room.
“We were always so very close as children, and even through high school. And then we went our separate ways and drifted apart. Oh, there was the usual card on birthdays and anniversaries, occasional drinks if we happened to be passing through each other’s towns. But we were essentially strangers for decades at a time. Now that we’ve cast off all those parts of our lives that were keeping us apart, I thought it would be nice to be together again. Go out the way we came in, I guess you could say.”
“What time do you need to leave?”
