But it was a rumor. That’s all.
“So we go rat hunting,” Texas Slim said. “We go out at night and I don’t like it. We have to hide from night things. Lots of night things in Morgantown, you know. As luck would have it, we find rats. Hard not to. But they’re in packs, so we lay low. Finally we see one big ugly thing about the size of a pig. It’s chewing on a corpse, gnawing on an arm like a chicken leg. Never seen anything like it before. Big, like I say. All kind of gray and wrinkly, no hair just a lot of black bristles like a hog. It saw us right away, made a squealing sound like a mama boar. Ray put the flashlight beam right in its face and…ho, Jesus and his holy mother, it sure was ugly. Hairless and flabby, big slobbering mouth dripping juice and black eyes, real black shiny eyes. Had a nub growing out of the side of its neck like a second head that never took.
“Ray…oh hell, he was crazy, crazy. He ran right out there, hooting and hollering while I was filling my pants. He had a. 45 and he pumped three rounds into that ugly mother-raper. The rat made a squealing sort of noise and came right at Ray, took him down right in front of my eyes. Poor Ray. It took him right by the face and started chewing and slurping. That’s when I saw that there were a dozen rat pups clinging to its back, all kind of bald and wormy-looking, all of them screeching with those little pink sucker mouths. I ran. Last thing I heard of old Ray Dong, the best Chinese man I ever knew, was the crunching sound when mama rat bit through his skull.”
There was silence for a moment after that one. Then I said, “And what was the point of that story?”
“Just passing time.”
Goddamn Texas. He never quit. We had enough troubles without him giving us worse nightmares than we already had. I knew about the rats. So did the others…we just didn’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about them was all. I could have told him about the rat that Sean, Specs, and I saw in the Cleveland sewers, but I didn’t like to think about it.
Janie wasn’t much on horror stories and especially since these days most of them were true. She just sat there staring at Texas Slim and I was feeling the heat coming off her, knowing she was about to read him out.
But she never did.
For down below, out there in the world of crawling shadows, there came a sound which sealed her lips.
12
It was a great resounding roaring/howling sound.
It rose up and up until it took on the shrill baying of an air raid siren and I could feel it thrumming through my bones and scraping right up my spine. The windows practically rattled. It was hollow and primeval in tone. We had all heard things at night before, but never anything like this. It stirred some instinctual terror in us. At least it did in me.
Janie was gripping my arm so hard her nails actually broke the skin.
When it had echoed away finally into the night, Carl swallowed and said, “What in the hell was that?”
But there were no answers. I was picturing some mammoth horror rising from the ooze of a Mesozoic swamp and howling at the misty moon high above.
Nobody said anything for a moment or two.
We were all waiting for someone else to break the silence, but no one did. And the reason for that was very simple: we were waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for something else to happen, for that howling to rip open the night again. Only this time it would be a little bit closer.
I opened my mouth to say something ridiculous and reassuring, but I never got that far. For there was a thud. A sudden, immense thud that shook the whole building. It came again. And then again. Plaster fell from the walls, dust trickled from the ceiling. Downstairs somewhere, something crashed, something else made a high-pitched splintering sound. There was lots of noise suddenly down there: things falling and banging and then only silence.
Everyone waited quietly after that.
But whatever it was, it never came back.
But, then, neither did Gremlin.
“Should we go look for him?” Janie said after a long time. “I mean, all of us?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s too dangerous out there. We’ll have a look in the morning.”
“He’ll probably be dead by then.”
“He’s probably already dead, darling,” Texas Slim said.
There was no more to be said on the subject. I set up watches for the night and that was it. The others got what sleep they could, trying not to think about what had been rooting around downstairs.
My dreams were far from pleasant. They started out with nightmares about being stalked through a wrecked city by some kind of horrible beast I could not see and ended with a real doozy about Youngstown. I dreamed the city split wide open like a rotting pumpkin and millions of hungry graveyard rats began pouring out.
13
Morning.
Just after first light, I got them moving. We ate something quick out of our packs and went downstairs. Soon as we made the lobby, we stopped dead.
“Will you look at this,” Carl said.
The lobby had been ransacked.
All that racket from the night before, the banging and crashing, well here was its source. Plaster was gouged right down to the lathes, holes punched in the walls, doors torn off hinges. Everything was broken and shattered. And for about six or seven feet up the stairs, the railing balusters had been smashed like somebody had taken an axe after them. A goddamn big axe.
“What happened here?” Janie dearly wanted to know.
But I had no idea. Something had come into the building last night, that same thing that had been howling, and it went on a real bender down here. But what that might be I could not even guess.
“Look,” Carl said.
The front door was missing. Texas Slim found it outside, cast into the street. Its surface was cut with triple ruts like it had been worked with a scythe. A sturdy, century-old hardwood door…it must have taken something damn nasty with big claws to do work like that.
“Fucking monster,” Carl said.
“Guess I’d be inclined to agree with you,” Texas Slim said, though it was obvious he didn’t care for the idea.
We stood around in silence and I knew I had to get them going, get them doing something constructive before the significance of this made them want to hide under the beds. And I was just about to do that when somebody walked up.
“About time you people got up.”
Gremlin was standing there.
His olive drab fatigue coat was dusty, a ribbon of cobwebs hanging from one sleeve, but other than that he looked no worse for wear…that is, if you discounted his bruised face, split lip, and blackened eye.
Nobody said a word for a moment.
I went over to him. “Where the hell have you been?”
Gremlin offered me a grin that was downright creepy. “That’s some nice welcome,” he said. “I was hiding out. Some kind of thing down here last night. I hid out in an old coal bin in the basement.”
For some crazy reason, I just did not believe him. His eyes were glazed, shell-shocked almost. And that grin…it was dopey and strange, seemed to be saying, I know something you don’t, oh yes.
“We figured you were dead,” Carl said. “Too bad.”
I said, “Did you see what did this?”
“No, I heard it, but I wasn’t getting close enough for a look. Fucking thing was sniffing around…I think it was looking for me.”
Janie, who was usually the most sympathetic person in the world, did not say a word.
I was getting a bad feeling, but I couldn’t be sure what it meant.
If the others had misgivings about Gremlin’s story, they tried to hide it, but not Texas Slim.
He stood there looking at the destruction, the. 50 cal. Eagle in his hand. I was watching him. Watching him real close because I knew two things about Texas: he was fucking weird and he had a very good head on his shoulders. So I watched him run it all through his brain, see what he came up with. Texas stood there, holding his gun and wrinkling his brow as he did when he was vexed. Then slowly, he turned his gaze on Gremlin. Kept it there.