More of them now.
The fast ones had come over the hill first. The young and fit ones, the middle-aged people lagging behind. But now they were all coming down the hill.
Louis put forth a burst of speed, coming around one of those sharp corners and sprinting through shadows thrown by a row of buildings. He darted down an alley, came out the other side and jogged down an avenue, cutting through yards and the parking lot of a gas station. He paused, trying to catch his breath. He could still hear them.
He ran down a narrow side street until he linked up with Providence, which itself ran south to north right through the middle of town. He crossed the Providence Street Bridge which spanned the Green River and the sounds of his pursuers faded into the distance. He kept going, trying to put as much distance between himself and them as possible. If he followed Providence Street for about six or seven blocks, 7th Avenue would cut across it and then it was just a short hop to Rush Street. If he wanted to do that, of course. And he was thinking he did. Because he knew that neighborhood and though people were crazy there, too, he knew where quite a few of them kept the keys to their cars.
Providence was one of those streets that was partially commercial and partially residential. You’d pass two blocks of private homes, hit a couple bars, maybe a furniture outlet or a truck depot, pass some more houses and there was a beer distributor and a little hole in the wall hamburger stand or a fried chicken joint. Lots of little shops and taverns, their storefronts changing all the time as an archery supplier went out and an upholstery place came in. Lots of the storekeepers lived right above their businesses as their parents and grandparents had.
Louis had grown up just off Providence on Middleton Street. Though his parents were long gone as were most of his relatives, the house he grew up in still stood, though the second story had been taken off following a fire fifteen years before. But he had grown up on south Providence Street and he knew every nook and cranny, every courtyard and cul-de-sac. Every old empty shed and tucked away warehouse. When he was a kid there’d been a big red barn on the corner of 5th Avenue and Providence with a large fenced in yard where they used to play. Years ago it had been a livery stable, but that was long before his time as were the old street cars that used to run up and down Providence. The tracks were still there, he was told, under the present street, along with the remains of the brick road that had housed them.
He came to 4th Avenue and collapsed under a row of spreading oak trees, just panting and gasping. He knew these trees. As a kid he’d climbed them. You could shimmy out onto the branches that overhung Providence and watch cars and trucks pass beneath you. He knew his initials and those of his friends were still carved up there on the tree above him. Just down the block was the Sloden Mortuary, a looming gray concrete edifice flanking the town cemetery, and across the street from that there was a creamery on the corner—Fretzen Brothers—and lots of old houses pressed in tightly together.
Sure, it hadn’t really changed much.
Except they weren’t really houses anymore, just block upon block of cages. Each one filled with one or more slavering things that used to be human. In fact
They were coming.
It didn’t seem possible, but they were. He started to wonder if they were not only a pack in appearance, but in reality. If maybe, somehow, they had his scent or were going to run him to ground. He’d taken a pretty circuitous route and still they’d found him, casting around for his scent like true dogs.
Louis didn’t think he could run anymore.
They were still a long way off. He looked up at the moonlight dappled tree above him. It rose a good thirty feet above Providence, if not forty. Looking around, he checked the trunk which was so wide that two men could not have put their arms around it. Some of the old footholds had been broken off by storms or children. But there was enough there. He reached up and grabbed a limb above his head, getting his foot on one of the old knobs. He started up, straining and cursing under his breath. Definitely feeling his age. His foot slipped once and he dangled there by the limb, but finally he pulled himself up, breaking spiderwebs with his face. Stout limbs came out from the trunk like spokes. He ducked under some and climbed up others until he was a good fifteen feet up. He sat on a branch and hugged the trunk and just waited, sweat dripping off the end of his nose.
He could hear them.
When he caught his breath, he climbed higher like a frightened monkey.
They were getting closer…
62
When Macy came to, maybe an hour or two later, she was suspended in midair about three feet off the blackened carpet of the altar. Her wrists were noosed with hemp ropes that were tied off above. She was hanging there, the ropes cutting into her flesh like hot wires, seeming to wind tighter and tighter, cutting off her circulation. Her arms felt numb, but her shoulders—which were bearing the brunt of her weight—were burning with a dull, constant throbbing.
But the pain seemed distant.
She was in a den of them.
They were everywhere, huddled in the smoky darkness, moving about like primordial shadows in the tenebrous haze. The only lights burning were from candles that threw a flickering, uneven illumination that reflected off clouds of slow-moving smoke in the air. They had built a fire using sticks and pews shattered to kindling. About a dozen of them were huddled around it, men, women, a couple dirty naked children. An old woman, also naked, with terrible pendulous breasts pocked with sores was tossing leaves or herbs into the fire, chanting something beneath her breath.
Macy could not hear what it was.
But the others answered her with harsh, throaty groans that did not sound human at all, more like the low rumbling growl of wolves or dogs. Now and again, one of the children would make a yipping sound that reminded her of hyenas fighting over a carcass.
The smoke burned her eyes, a greasy film lay over her bare flesh. She could just make out things scattered over the floor that looked like bones and hides, maybe a few jawless skulls lying about. She could not see them clearly, but she could smell them. Smell the death on them, smell the tallow and blood of the skins.
Her first instinct was to shout, to twist and fight against the ropes, to scream for help. But she’d already done that and knew very well the futility of such things. Sometimes, sometimes when you were laid out as meat in the cave of a bear it was better not to draw attention to yourself.
She saw that three other women and one man were roped together at the foot of the altar. One of the women was looking up at her with shocked, fearful eyes. And that meant she was not like them, not an animal. Normal. Macy felt pity for her, but there was nothing to be done.
This was no longer a church, Macy saw. It was no sanctified place but the rotting, filthy den of depraved things like troglodytes, cave-dwellars and man-eaters, walking pestilence from a forgotten age.
And realizing this, realizing that these people were not just crazy, not just a bunch of lunatics out on a binge, but primeval and animalistic things, a flesh and blood regression of the species, she was terrified. For a darkness had taken the world and those that hunted it did not seek the light, they were content to scratch in the shadows of reason. The church was a cave, a warren, a lair now. Those things out there were not men and women any longer, they were just… animals. God was not here. This was not his house. This was a place of pagan evils now. The corpse-woman on the cross was evidence of that. And Macy did not doubt that with regression, with the reaffirmation of race memory, that this place was thick with primordial spirits, with long forgotten dark gods of fertility and sacrifice. And maybe, just maybe, if she shut her mind down and let it hum along at its lowest level she might see them: creeping, shaggy things from the misty past that demanded burnt offerings, demanded the flesh and blood of the faithful, expiation in its purest form: Give unto me your firstborn for I would find the child pleasing.