I took a moment to steel my stomach and my nerves, then turned the knob and kicked the door in, flashlight held up, the knife held low. The door swung in and crashed off the wall inside. A wave of putrefaction roiled out from the room into the hallway. Whoever, whatever was in there, it was extremely dead.
Moris Falkovich – I presumed it was Moris – hung motionless from the exposed rafters of his attic bedroom: a large space with a huge bed in the center, a door leading off to some smaller room on my right. His face was swollen, a livid, eyeless lumpy sack close to bursting with old blood. Empty orbital sockets stared straight at the entryway, boring into me. A thin whine was growing in my ears, a chorus of tiny drills that grew louder and more insistent over seconds of time. Then I saw her, smelled her. Another hanging, another death.
My mother.
No. No! I locked my teeth and focused on the real, the man. Moris was small and thin, with a deeply recessed chin and a hairy, bony pigeon chest. His mouth was open. It was full of black things, crawling. My vision cut, chopped, blurred: I saw my mother hanging in his place, her dress limp, her blue eyes bloodshot and bulging.
My teeth creaked. I stumbled back against the wall, hands burning inside my gloves. They itched like they were covered in dirt and slime, blood, fluids. Dirty dirty dirty.
“Why weren’t you there, Alexi?” The body’s stiff, slug-thick lips twisted. The tongue moved, rasping each word into the echoing darkness of the attic, and in the torch beam, I saw a convulsive ripple pass through its limbs.
“No.” I stepped back, behind the threshold, slapping at the wall to find the light switch. “This is a trap.”
“You weren’t there, Alexi.” It spoke in her voice now, breathy and fragile, ripping it from my memory. “Why did you leave me here with him?”
I strained against the illusion, popping my teeth. The taste of blood flooded my mouth. My fingers hit something small and hard. They were shaking so bad that I slipped across the light switch before I caught it and flipped it up. Light flooded the room – and a cloud of black motes, finer than flies but larger than dust – burst from the hanged man’s mouth and flew straight at my face as two shambling figures lurched from the unnaturally thick shadows and began to limp towards me.
I threw the knife up as the cloud swarmed me and staggered forwards, trying to break through the cloud and away. Pinhead-sized bugs landed on my exposed skin and began to drill and dig, shrieking like rusty machinery. I covered my face with my arms and tripped into the dresser beside the bed, spinning crazily, and burst through the door in the bedroom into an ensuite bathroom, clawing and scraping at my cheeks and scalp. The knife drew cold lines through my own flesh: it was all that kept the black screeching motes from boring in all the way.
The bugs fled from the touch of the blade with the deafening flicker of metallic wings, coming back to jab at my eyes, my nose, my lips. The things were gathering at my mouth, trying to prise it open. Clawing and fighting the urge to cry out, I hit something at knee-height, tumbled, and fell heavily into a bathtub. A flailing hand struck something. The faucet?
I fumbled for it again, blind, flesh burning as things began to wriggle under the skin of my scalp. A flood of water struck me in the face, washing away blood and a crowd of screaming, furious insects. The water turned hot, and the wail built to an ear-shattering pitch as they pulled themselves free from my head and withdrew like angry hornets.
The stench of a slaughterhouse broke through the rushing water: the reek of rotten meat and the clinging odor of chlorine mingled into a violet smell so powerful that my vision pulsed with the color, nauseating and unnatural and dead. Sputtering, I forced my eyes open and flushed them with hot water, turning blindly towards the door on instinct. Through the fog and mist, a pig’s head swam into view. It was slack-jawed and flopped weirdly to one side, the liquefying remains of its eyes streaked down its sagging, rotten jowls. The head was roughly stitched to the swollen, mutilated corpse of a child rendered sexless by a thick line of stitches from collarbone to crotch. A wave of toxic air blew into the bathroom in its wake.
Jesus fucking Christ. I retched, choking on bile and pressing back against the wall as lizard brain took the wheel. In one smooth motion, I pulled the pistol from my sopping jacket, aimed, and plugged three rounds into the nightmare before it reached the tub. It careened into the bathroom sink, scattering toiletries and chintzy statuettes to the floor. Bottles and cans rolled towards the bathtub, drowned out by the bark of the silenced rounds as I fired two more shots through the spray. Gelatinous, rotten blood blew backwards from the corpse, splattering the wall and a second ghoul crowding in behind it, this one with the head of a goat. The second dead child reached for me with skeletal hands turned to claws as it tripped over its brother and righted itself on the way forward.
The cloud of insects was still in here. They swarmed for the splattered mess on the mirror, congregating on it like wasps on honey as Goathead swiped at me through the water. The claws missed my groin by an inch as I scrambled to one side and emptied the clip point-blank into its skull. Six bullets were enough to blow it back and put it down, thrashing and jerking on the floor, but it they didn’t kill it. Tumorous masses bubbled up from the entry and exit wounds. They fleshed out and then erupted into more black bugs.
They were some kind of Morphorde. DOGs, demons. Shit. Shit shit shit, I’d used the gun!
Pighead was struggling to sit up as I dropped the pistol and got out of the bath, went to the window and smashed it with the end of my knife, shattering it and admitted a blast of cold, sweet air. The sound drew the attention of the DOG-bugs. They broke away from their meal with an angry screech, a dark arrow of spined bodies that flew at my face through the cooling water.
I swept off the counter beside me and threw whatever came to hand, cursing myself all the while. I’d forgotten that DOGs were vulnerable to eggs. EGGS. I’d forgotten to bring the one stupid thing that would save my life, and it was going to be my last and only mistake.
Chapter 24
The enlarged swarm passed around everything hurled and sprayed at it. Soap, shampoo, a can of hairspray. I picked up a featureless brown bottle and pulled the cork out, intending to throw it and whatever was inside of it. A sharp green odor cut through the putrefaction of the air, and the swarm turned away with a scream of fury, wings slicing at the skin of my guarding forearm as they curved around and then started back towards me.
It was peppermint oil. I swigged a mouthful of it and spat it as a mist as the spear of bodies closed in a second time. The DOGs screeched like a rusty drill burrowing through sheet metal. The flock symmetry of the swarm dissolved as tiny bodies tumbled against my face like gravel and bounced lifelessly to the floor. The stuff burned my nose and eyes, but I spat again, sputtering and coughing, and sure enough, they continued to fall. The bugs whirled in the air like sparrows and blew through the en suite door, fleeing to the fetid safety of the bedroom.
Pighead took me at waist height, charging like a bull. It slammed into me with heedless strength, bouncing me off the wall. Black peg teeth sunk into my belly and gripped skin, worrying at me while I stabbed down at its head. The knife punched its rot-softened skull like soggy cardboard. It didn’t slow in the slightest, squealing and thrashing until I poured the oil into the wounds. The teeth released as the dead thing reeled away. Its entire head collapsed into reeking black sludge.
I shoved it away and it toppled backwards, limbs jerking as nameless slime oozed across the floor. The smell burned the air and dulled the light and I threw up, right there on the spot. There was nothing in my stomach but acid and peppermint oil, and it burned my already-inflamed mouth like fire. Through a film of tears, I saw Goathead trying to get to its feet. The bullets had blown its head back, exposing the severed human neck underneath, but it hadn’t killed it.