Dorian McBane.
This was the deranged apex witch that had started the entire ball rolling by abusing her children in the first place which led to the murder of Freddy and Molly which led to Ronny’s dementia and paranoia which led him to finding that awful notebook which led to the resurrection, more or less, of his brother and sister as corpse-puppets possessed of malignant minds from beyond time and space which led to them reanimating their wicked mother as this chimeric, grotesque monstrosity… which, essentially, was her true self externalized.
As that wailing, enraged face came to kiss her life away, Kitty saw that its body was shivering, rolling like jelly, dozens of blisters bulging from the flesh and popping to reveal baby doll faces which were grim caricatures of the children she had murdered. Pale, agonized faces, embryonic yet identifiable. The heads lashed from side to side, mouths opening with a strident mewling like the hungry cries of newborn rats.
With each generated head, the Dorian thing itself squealed with pain.
Up close, Kitty could see that while its face was bone-white and fleshy, it seemed to be composed of bloody filaments of tissue in constant flux, oozing and puffing out, deflating and reconfiguring itself in some vain attempt to be anything but what it was.
I’m sorry, Gloria. I fucked up. I tried, but I fucked up—
That’s when the cannon boomed.
The sound of it in the vault-like attic was so deafening that Kitty cried out and covered her ears.
Dorian’s face imploded like a can crushed in a fist, from jawline to forehead just a wriggling mass of bloody strings sinking into a craterous ruin. Wailing louder than ever, she scurried back up the web.
Kitty saw Danny Paul Regis standing there.
His tough demeanor was shaken, his face strained and his eyes delirious with fear. But he did not hesitate. He carried a twelve-gauge pump loaded with flechette rounds that were essentially razored bits of steel that pulverized their target on contact. He fired four rounds into Dorian and she literally exploded in a wailing mass of tissue and bone, trembling armature, hinges and swivels that filled the web and continued to move and shake.
He dragged Kitty down the stairs and into the corridor and that’s when Piggy attacked.
17
He hit Regis with incredible force, the shotgun flying from his hands and tumbling down the stairs as he himself was slammed into the wall, right next to the gutshot body of his brother. Piggy’s jaws clamped around his ankle and bit down with a moist snapping of bone.
Kitty saw it happen.
She fell, panting and staring and oddly numb. She did not think anything or feel anything. All that was gone. Fear was a memory and now she was insane, too, so the playing field was leveled. Snakes do not fear other snakes.
Piggy.
Fucking Piggy.
No more pretense of a dummy, he came walking down the hallway toward her. And what a walk: stiff-legged, shaking, clownish. Kitty lay there, hearing the dummy coming, click-clack, click-clack. He brought the black stink of rifled coffins and open graves, a miasmic stench of buried things roiling with worms. When he was close, very close, so close she could see that the face was not painted on, but maybe rubber or leathery flesh or both, Piggy smiled, lips pulling away from yellowed teeth. Biting teeth.
“Kitty, Kitty, Kitty,” he called out in a dust-dry, cracking voice. “You made my plans go all shitty. So now I’m going to rape you just a little bitty. I’m going to bite your titties and then I’ll chew on your slitty. That’s what I’m going to do to my pretty little Kitty.”
The dummy reached down for her with those skeletonized fingers, the eyes blazing with a cold intelligence that was bitter and noxious. “You killed little Baby Doll. You killed little Baby Doll and she’d waited so long, long, long to be born… just as we all waited so long…”
And then Kitty came up with a scream, flattening the dummy, feeling it under her, writhing and flopping, clawing and snapping its jaws. But she was too smart for it, far too smart and that evil voice did everything it could to terrify her. It became the voice of her dead mother and then Gloria, then a sniffling baby and a slithering thing and a cackling witch and a slobbering rabid dog. Its face became the faces of corpses, of child-eating things and breathing things from closets, it took on a goatish visage and then it was just Piggy. Piggy, eyes yellow and baleful, fighting and screeching and trying to bite her, but she was too strong.
Taking the dummy by the ankles, Kitty swung it into the wall.
And then again and again and again.
Most of its face was shattered by then, its hinged lower jaw hanging by a thread of wire. Kitty dragged it down the steps and into the sitting room. And this is when the thing that occupied the corpse-dummy began to roar and thrash. And that’s how Kitty knew it was afraid.
Really afraid.
Because there was one thing it feared more than anything else and that was being expelled back into the formless, drifting blackness it had come from. That’s why she dumped it in the trunk and snapped the lid shut, set the locks.
It was trapped and it knew it.
Kitty dragged the trunk out the door, thinking of the darkest, deepest, coldest place she could deposit it. She helped Regis out to his car and put the dummy’s trunk in the back. Before she left, she made sure the house was burning bright.
In the backseat, the dummy shrieked and clawed inside the trunk.
“What’re you going to do with it?” Regis asked, pulling out a cigarette, each bump the car went over making him grimace.
“I want to put it somewhere very dark. Where that thing can be alone with itself for an eternity,” Kitty said.
Regis smiled. “I know of a flooded quarry out in the middle of nowhere. About two-hundred feet deep if it’s an inch.”
“Your leg?”
“Can wait. First things first.”
Kitty drove out of the city. She did not think she would smile again for some time to come, but inside, where it mattered, she was grinning with immense satisfaction. Gloria was at peace now.
About the Author
Tim Curran is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, Skull Moon, The Devil Next Door, Biohazard, and Hive 2. His most recent books have been Graveworm, the short story collections Bone Marrow Stew and Zombie Pulp, and the novellas The Corpse King, Fear Me, and The Underdwelling. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Flesh Feast, Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and, Vile Things. Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com.
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