You said there was a common thread to all this. You said it right from the first. Are you prepared to follow that thread even if it means looking at something that might tear your mind out like moist roots from soil? Are you willing to do that and accept the fact that even if you walk away from all this you can never be the same person again? Bascomb told you to walk away. Maybe it’s time to do that.
But no.
That would mean walking away from Gloria and her love for her sister could not allow that. If there was a thread, she would follow it. And when she reached the end, she would snip it.
Once again, as the alcohol and booze began to make her limbs slow and her mind slower, she laid all the evidence out and tried to make sense of it. This is what she came up with: Bascomb was crazy, Danny Paul Regis was spouting hearsay and local gossip, and Ronny McBane was very possibly a dangerous lunatic that had killed Gloria.
Kitty thought these things, arranging them carefully, sorting them out in her mind, smoothing out the rough edges. And it was as she did so that a fear of her own began to creep in that she was utterly wrong. That she was over-rationalizing things and that, in this case, could prove to be very dangerous.
All her life she had not shrunk from anything.
She faced all problems and challenges head on. Even though she knew that this was the point in a horror movie where you hoped the heroine would have sense enough to leave well enough alone, she wasn’t about to do that. She didn’t believe in witchcraft or ghosts, but there was definitely a common thread here as she had thought all along. Rational thinking aside, when you laid it all out end to end starting with what happened in Ronny McBane’s childhood and the unnatural dummy with the most disturbing of names and ending with the fire at the Bamboo Lounge, then the evidence was more than a little damning. Possibly circumstantial, but it was there. And the only way to prove or disprove it was to follow the thread to its source.
This is what Kitty thought as she drifted off on that night of revelations.
11
She came awake just after three with a sense of invasion. Her eyes blinked and then blinked again and she had the most unnerving sensation that they had been open for some time, perhaps peering around the room and watching the play of shadows along the walls as her mind continued to drift along in dream. Her lips felt dry. She licked them with a tongue that felt thick and ungainly. She could see the digital clock. The numbers flickered from 3:02 to 3:03.
She felt paralyzed.
It was the vodka and the Valiums. They always said not to mix them and she rarely did except on those nights when her mind would not shut down and her body remained tense from the day.
The sense of invasion did not lessen, it deepened.
There was a foul odor in the room that she associated with dankness, with subterranean crypts, with corpse-orchids rotting in mortuaries. It was a high, sweet smell and it did not belong in that room in the dead of night.
She tried to move, to reach over to the lamp and turn the light on, but her arms were leaden. Just the effort of lifting even one of them two or three inches left her feeling exhausted.
Listen.
Terror began to expand in her throat and she could not swallow it back down. It filled her chest with icy needles, traced its way down her spine like cold fingertips. The shadows seemed to shift and rustle about her. She heard them make slithering sounds. Something was in the room with her and she could hear it breathing with a low, rasping sound. It knew she was aware of its presence. She was certain of it. It was there, hiding in the darkness like some malignant little goblin waiting to jump out at her and press its mold-smelling mouth to her lips. It was there and it wanted her to find it.
And then she did.
With a tremor of fear that seemed to drain the blood from her vitals, she saw it. It was not in the room at all. It was outside the window. The curtains were parted and she could see Piggy floating out there like a wraith, staring in at her with a malevolent and hungry gaze. His dummy legs and dummy arms were spread out like a high diver dropping from the sky, like some engorged human fly buzzing at the window pane. He moved up and down as he floated as if he was hooked to wires being gently manipulated by a puppeteer.
The window began to slide open.
Oh no, oh no, you’re dreaming. You’re just dreaming.
He came drifting through the window, light as a column of gas, and she heard the subtle click, clack as his little, shiny black shoes touched the floor and bore his weight. He stood at the end of the bed, his puppet face pale as funeral lilies, his hinged jaw opening and closing. His eyes were huge, bloated white like boiled eggs. And his voice, when it came was scratching and dry: “I’ve come as I said I’d come, Kitty. I’ve come to show you tricks. I’ve come to perform for you. I’ve come to eat your pretty pussy.”
Kitty thought she screamed.
Her mouth opened and a dark silence blew out of her but it only echoed in the depths of her skull. Piggy was rising up like a patch of mist. He was drifting above her, arms spread out. She could smell a vaporous stench of dank rot coming off of him. It was chill like the breath of a freezer. She could see his dummy hands, impossibly white, the nails blackened and splintered like they had been clawing at the lids of caskets. In her head there was a thick liquid humming and she could hear his squeaking voice just beneath it telling her in grisly detail what he was going to do to her and what he had done to her sister.
She tried to scream again but all that came out was that same airless sibilance blowing past her lips.
Her limbs would not move.
Her body was heavy, rubbery, immobile.
He came down upon her and she could feel the grave-cold of his hollow weight. Her nightgown was stripped away from her bare thighs but not by anything as crude as searching fingers but by something like a hot wind. There was nothing beneath the nightgown. She had slept naked like that since a teenager, enjoying the freedom from confining underthings.
Piggy buried his face between her thighs and his wooden mouth was like thawing meat, his teeth needlelike as they were dragged over her vulva like the claws of a cat. He began to suck and chew on her, piercing into her soft tissues and laying her open. His tongue was a sliver of ice as it penetrated her, lapping and licking deep inside her as the mouth sucked and slurped, filling itself with her blood that steamed in his glacial aura. The agony was unbelievable, exploding in her head in white bolts but still she could not move and she knew it was more than Valiums and vodka by that point.
She was pinned down and made weak by the force of Piggy’s mind.
Lapping like a kitten with a bowl of milk, he rose up again and came down upon her, his puppet face smeared with her vaginal blood, his breath like exhumed coffins. He made obscene, almost animal-like grunting and groaning sounds as he entered her with a member that felt refrigerated, swollen and probing. It was long and burning cold like an icicle had been shoved up her.
“You have such a sweet, sweet pretty pussy,” he whispered into her face with that vile, mossy breath as he came and then came again, filling her with a cold sap, what seemed gallons of it that filled her and overflowed her channel, flowing over her thighs and seeping into the mattress in a bubbling, snotty goo. “Next time I’ll show you another trick and I’ll fill another hole…”