"Open your eyes," he said.
Julie did.
He was at her house before six the next morning, moving up the alley cautiously and into the yard outside her window. He hadn't slept all night. His eyes felt dry and hot.
Julie was on her bed exactly as he'd placed her. He looked at her a moment, his heartbeat slow and heavy. Then he raked a nail across the screen. "Julie," he said.
She murmured indistinctly and turned onto her side. She faced him now.
"Julie."
Her eyes fluttered open. She stared at him dazedly.
"Who's that?" she asked.
"Eddy. Let me in."
"Eddy?"
Suddenly, she caught her breath and shrank back and he knew that she remembered.
"Let me in or you're in trouble," he muttered. He could feel his legs begin to shake.
Julie lay motionless a few seconds, eyes fixed on his. Then she pushed to her feet and weaved unsteadily toward the door. Eddy turned for the alley. He strode down it nervously and started up the porch steps as she came outside.
"What do you want?" she whispered. She looked exciting, half asleep, her clothes and hair all mussed. "Inside," he said.
Julie stiffened. "No."
"All right, come on," he said, taking her hand roughly. "We'll talk in my car."
She walked with him to the car and, as he slid in beside her, he saw that she was shivering.
"I'll turn on the heater," he said. It sounded stupidly inane. He was here to threaten her, not comfort. Angrily, he started the engine and drove away from the curb.
"Where are we going?" Julie asked.
He didn't know at first. Then, suddenly, he thought of the place outside of town where dating students always parked. It would be deserted at this hour. Eddy felt a swollen tingling in his body and he pressed down on the accelerator. Sixteen minutes later, the car was standing in the silent woods. A pale mist hung across the ground and seemed to lap at the doors.
Julie wasn't shivering now; the inside of the car was hot.
"What is it?" she asked, faintly.
Impulsively, Eddy reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out the photographs. He threw them on her lap.
Julie didn't make a sound. She just stared down at the photographs with frozen eyes, her fingers twitching as she held them.
"Just in case you're thinking of calling the police," Eddy faltered. He clenched his teeth. Tell her! he thought savagery. In a dull, harsh voice, he told her everything he'd done the night before. Julie's face grew pale and rigid as she listened. Her hands pressed tautly at each other. Outside, the mist appeared to rise around the windows like a chalky fluid. It surrounded them.
"You want money?" Julie whispered.
"Take off your clothes," he said. It wasn't his voice, it occurred to him. The sound of it was too malignant, too inhuman.
Then Julie whimpered and Eddy felt a surge of blinding fury boil upward in him. He jerked his hand back, saw it flail out in a blur of movement, heard the sound of it striking her on the mouth, felt the sting across his knuckles.
"Take them off!" His voice was deafening in the stifling closeness of the car. Eddy blinked and gasped for breath. He stared dizzily at Julie as, sobbing, she began to take her clothes off. There was a thread of blood trickling from a corner of her mouth. No, don't, he heard a voice beg in his mind. Don't do this. It faded quickly as he reached for her with alien hands.
When he got home at ten that morning there was blood and skin under his nails. The sight of it made him violently ill. He lay trembling on his bed, lips quivering, eyes staring at the ceiling. I'm through, he thought. He had the photographs. He didn't have to see her any more. It would destroy him if he saw her any more. Already, his brain felt like rotting sponge, so bloated with corruption that the pressure of his skull caused endless overflow into his thoughts. Trying to sleep, he thought, instead, about the bruises on her lovely body, the ragged scratches, and the bite marks. He heard her screaming in his mind.
He would not see her any more.
December
Julie opened her eyes and saw tiny falling shadows on the wall. She turned her head and looked out through the window. It was beginning to snow. The whiteness of it reminded her of the morning Eddy had first shown her the photographs.
The photographs. That was what had woken her. She closed her eyes and concentrated. They were burning. She could see the prints and negatives scattered on the bottom of a large enamel pan — the kind used for developing film. Bright flames crackled on them and enamel was smudging.
Julie held her breath. She pushed her mental gaze further — to scan the room that was lit by the flaming enamel pan — until it came to rest upon the broken thing that dangled and swayed, suspended from the closet hook.
She sighed. It hadn't lasted very long. That was the trouble with a mind like Eddy's. The very weakness which made it vulnerable to her soon broke it down. Julie opened her eyes, her ugly child's face puckered in a smile. Well, there were others.
She stretched her scrawny body languidly. Posing at the window, the drugged Coke, the motel photographs — these were getting dull by how although that place in the woods was wonderful. Especially in the early morning with the mist outside, the car like an oven. That she'd keep for a while; and the violence of course. The rest would have to go. She'd think of something better next time.
Philip Harrison had never noticed the girl in his Physics class until that day —
THE THANG
Robert R. McCammon
It was nothing like what he'd expected. No skulls on the waifs, no dried bats, no shrunken heads. Not even any of those glass vials with smoke bubbling out of them, which is what he'd looked forward to seeing. It was just a little room that looked like a grocery store, with faded green linoleum tiles on the floor and a ceiling fan that groaned as it turned. Needs oil, he thought. Ceiling fan'll burn itself up without oil. Heating and cooling was his business, and right now he was sweating under the collar and there were wet rings beneath his arms. I've come over seven hundred miles to a grocery store with a creaking fan, he thought. God Almighty, what a fool I am!
"Help ya?" There was a young black man behind the counter. He wore dark glasses with white music notes on the frames, and his hair was cropped short and dyed with blue lightning bolts. He had a razor blade hanging from his left earlobe.
"No. Just looking," Dave Neilson said, in his flat Oklahoman accent. The dude behind the counter went back to reading his copy of Interview magazine. Dave wandered among the shelves, his heart pounding. He had never in his life felt so far from home. He picked up a bottle full of red, oily liquid: King John's Blood, the label said. Near it were bags full of white dirt that bore the labels Aunt Esther's Graveyard Dirt This Is The Real Stuff.
I'll bet it is, Dave thought. If that was graveyard dirt, his pecker was as big as Moby Dick. And that, of course, was the crux of the problem.
He'd never been to New Orleans before. Had never been to Louisiana, even. Of that he was glad; the wet August heat down here was enough to roast toadfrogs. But he liked the French Quarter all right, with its racy nightclubs and strippers who watched themselves in full-length mirrors. A man could get in trouble down here, if he had the right equipment. If he had the devil-may-care attitude. If he dared.
"Anythin' you lookin' for in particular, cousin?" the young black man inquired, staring at him over a photograph of Cornelia Guest.