Blood.
Everywhere. Walls, floor, window, closet doors.
There was even a spattering of drops on the white ceiling. They looked brown, almost black, in the yellowish light.
Kyle’s mouth dropped open. Brady’s opened as well, closed, opened, closed. Finally he squeaked out a faint, “Holy shit.” He started to step into the room, but Kyle caught his arm in a vice-like grip that approximated a dead-man’s grasp.
“No,” he whispered hoarsely, as if the inside of his throat had been sliced away and then scabbed and scarred and distorted, and he would have to learn to talk all over again. “Don’t.”
“But we gotta…”
“We gotta get someone. This ain’t play. This is real,” Kyle said.
For once Brady didn’t argue, didn’t try to have the last word. He nodded. But instead of retreating down the hall, he took a long step…inside the room.
He turned the penlight to the windows. No light penetrated from the cars on the freeway only a mile or so away. No lights penetrated from the houses that dotted the valley floor. The window was painted over with crusted blood, all except for a corner of the farthest pane. There, the night lights glimmered faintly through a jagged break that might have been made by a small rock or a carelessly tossed elm branch…or a balled-up fist.
Brady dropped the beam to scan the floor beneath the break. A few shards of glass glinted back at him but nothing more. He could see no pieces large enough to fill in the hole in the pane. He moved one step closer to the glass, then turned enough to play the light on the walls. Great swathes of dark stuff spattered the smooth surfaces. They weren’t regular-no letters in blood or anything like that. Just spurts of dripping stuff.
He backed away, swallowing. Kyle wanted to call out something to remind Brady that they were going to get out of there, but before he found his voice, Brady took one step too many. His shoulder bumped the closet door. Something inside shifted with a hideous thump and the door swung open, knocking Brady to his knees just as something heavy and huge and matted and stinking struck him.
Kyle screamed as the thing erupted from the closet and enveloped his friend. Part of him wanted to run shrieking down the hall, but most of him found himself rushing forward, screaming anyway but at least trying to help Brady. Kyle slammed his fists at the unyielding shape. Underneath its monstrous bulk, he could hear Brady’s helpless whimpering-so unlike Brady, so chilling that this time nine-year-old Kyle did wet his brand-new black-and-silver cowboy suit. He felt the sudden warmness on his legs and smelled the stench of ammonia, but neither sensation penetrated his terror.
He wrenched his six-shooters from their holsters and smashed them butt-end first against the thing that was pinning Brady to the floor, again, again, again. His exposed wrist passed by the thing’s shadowed shoulders, and suddenly there was a sharpness and a bright pain and a liquid warmth that smelled coppery and thick.
Kyle screamed, his voice already hoarse but now re-animated by pain as well as fear. He dropped his six-shooters, not hearing as they thumped against the thing and fell softly to the crusted carpet. He didn’t hear Brady’s whimpering die away to hitching sobs, then to nothing more than painful breathing and unconsciousness. He only knew that if he didn’t get out now now now he would never get out at all.
7
The front door was latched but not bolted. That saved Kyle’s sanity, perhaps his life.
With fingers that felt as thick and cold as frozen hot dogs fresh from the freezer, he fumbled with the pin in the center of the round knob. Two, three, four times he tried to swivel it just so. Finally, he succeeded.
The knob turned, the door swung open without so much as a creeeeak, and Kyle stumbled into the cold night. He grabbed his wrist with his good hand and stumbled down the sidewalk, blinded by tears and terror, faster and faster until he ran full-tilt into the front fender of the Lincoln. He bounced like a rag-doll, striking his shoulders and head on the rock-hard soil of the weed-choked front yard.
For a long while, he lay there, staring at the stars that whirled faster than stars had any right to. Finally, he remembered.
Brady.
He struggled to his feet, his good hand still clasped around his sliced wrist. His fingers felt stiff, as if the clotting blood had married flesh to flesh and his two arms were now one. He stumbled down Oleander, so light-headed with shock that the incline of the asphalt was enough to threaten to topple his precarious balance. He should have run for one of the porch lights on either side but he didn’t. He simply staggered down the center of the street, a small figure in silver and black that nearly disappeared into the night.
He might have run to the end of Oleander, he might have run until a careless driver crashed into him and killed him, he might have done a number of things. But what actually happened was that he slipped on a discarded candy wrapper, a bit of cellophane innocuous by itself but just enough to twist his right foot and throw him onto the asphalt. He yelped as he went down, crying out again when his cheek struck rough pavement.
Instantly-or years later, he didn’t know which-someone was pulling at him. He cringed away, trying to huddle into a corner of a darkness that wanted to consume him.
“Who is it?” one voice said.
“He’s hurt,” another said.
And then there was a babble of voices calling out and hands plucking at him and cold things pressing against his cheek and his wrist, and after a long while, red lights flashing, flashing through the darkness and a deep voice speaking to him.
“What happened?”
“His name is Kyle, Kyle Jantzen,” a shrill voice piped.
“What happened, Kyle?” This time the deep voice penetrated far enough to touch something quiescent and waiting in Kyle. He looked up, blinked.
“Brady,” Kyle finally said.
“He must mean Brady Wilton. He was out with the Wilton kid,” the shrill voice said. “I saw ‘em together not twenty minutes ago.”
“What about Brady?” The deep voice continued uninterrupted, as if the shrill voice had not spoken at all.
“Dead!” Kyle squealed without thinking. He felt his own life withdraw as he uttered the dreadful word.
“Where? Come on, Kyle, where?”
The boy looked around long enough to understand that he was lying on a thick pad, probably from someone’s chaise lounge. He was in the middle of a front yard perhaps three-fourths of the way up Oleander. He raised a shaking hand and pointed one finger at the dark outline at the top of the hill.
“There.”
8
The police found Brady only a few minutes later.
In spite of their fears, after what the Jantzen kid had cried out, he wasn’t dead. But then he wasn’t exactly alive either.
A short hospital stay would probably be enough for Kyle, already safely in the back of a County Hospital ambulance waiting for his father to arrive when the police entered the back bedroom at 1066 Oleander. It would take a longer stay-a much longer stay-to do the other boy any good.
He wasn’t hurt physically. Not much, anyway. A man’s mutilated body had toppled onto him and bruised his shoulder and his hip. But the carpet had cushioned most of the weight. If he was hurt much, it didn’t show. But when the police pulled the body away, he was staring straight ahead, as if he were examining on a microscopic level the shard of blood-encrusted glass still embedded six inches deep in the corpse’s throat, not three inches from the boy’s own throat but miraculously (it seemed then) not touching him.