Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Looking not offended in the slightest — looking relieved, in fact — Tonya held out the broom. Melissa took it and handed it to Kat.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Kat asked. “Ride it?”

Rideout smiled, briefly showing the stained and eroded pegs of his teeth. “You’ll know when the time comes, if you’ve ever had a bat or raccoon in the room with you. Just remember: first the bristles. Then the stick.”

“To finish it off, I suppose. Then you put it in the specimen bottle.”

“As you say.”

“So you can put it on a shelf somewhere with the rest of your dead gods, I suppose.”

He smiled without humor. “Hand the spray-can to Mr. Jensen, please.”

Kat did so. Melissa asked, “What do I do?”

“Watch. And pray, if you know how. On my behalf, as well as Mr. Newsome’s. For my heart to be strong.”

Kat, who saw a fake heart attack coming, said nothing. She simply moved away from the bed, holding the handle of the broom in both hands. Rideout sat down beside Newsome with a grimace. His knees popped like pistol-shots. “You, Mr. Jensen.”

“Yes?”

“You’ll have time — it will be stunned — but be quick, just the same. As quick as you were on the football field, all right?”

“You want me to Mace it?”

Rideout once more flashed his brief smile, but now there was sweat on his brow as well as his client’s. “It’s not Mace — that is illegal where I come from — but that’s the idea, yes. Now I’d like silence, please.”

“Wait a minute.” Kat propped the broom against the bed and ran her hands first up Rideout’s left arm, then his right. She felt only plain cotton cloth and the man’s scrawny flesh beneath.

“Nothing up my sleeve, Miss Kat, I promise you.”

“Hurry up ,” Newsome said. “This is bad. It always is, but the goddam stormy weather makes it worse.”

“Hush,” Rideout said. “All of you, hush.”

They hushed. Rideout closed his eyes. His lips moved silently. Twenty seconds ticked past on Kat’s watch, then thirty. Her hands were damp with perspiration. She wiped them one at a time on her sweater, then took hold of the broom again. We look like people gathered at a deathbed , she thought.

Outside, the wind howled along the gutters.

Rideout said, “For Jesus’ sake I pray,” then opened his eyes and leaned close to Newsome.

“God, there is an evil outsider in this man. An outsider feeding on his flesh and bones. Help me cast it out, as Your Son cast out the demons from the possessed man of the Gadarenes. Help me speak to the little green god of agony inside Andrew Newsome in your own voice of command.”

He leaned closer. He curled the long fingers of one arthritis-swollen hand around the base of Newsome’s throat, as if he intended to strangle him. He leaned closer still, and inserted the first two fingers of his other hand into the billionaire’s mouth. He curled them, and pulled down the jaw.

“Come out,” he said. He had spoken of command, but his voice was soft. Silky. Almost cajoling. It made the skin on Kat’s back and arms prickle. “Come out in the name of Jesus. Come out in the names of all the saints and martyrs. Come out in the name of God, who gave you leave to enter and now commands you to leave. Come out into the light. Leave off your meal and come out.”

There was nothing. He began again.

“Come out in the name of Jesus. Come out in the names of the saints and martyrs.” His hand flexed slightly, and Newsome’s breath began to rasp. “No, don’t go deeper. You can’t hide, thing of darkness. Come out into the light. Jesus commands you. The saints and martyrs command you. God commands you to leave your meal and come out.”

A cold hand gripped Kat’s upper arm and she almost screamed. It was Melissa. Her eyes were huge. Her mouth hung open. In Kat’s ear, the housekeeper’s whisper was as harsh as bristles. “ Look .”

A bulge like a goiter had appeared in Newsome’s throat just above Rideout’s loosely grasping hand. It began to move slowly mouthward. Kat had never seen anything like it in her life.

“That’s right,” Rideout almost crooned. His face was streaming with sweat; the collar of his shirt had gone limp and dark. “Come out. Come out into the light. You’ve done your feeding, thing of darkness.”

The wind rose to a scream. Rain that was now half-sleet blasted the windows like shrapnel. The lights flickered and the house creaked.

“The God that let you in commands you to leave. Jesus commands you to leave. All the saints and martyrs—”

He let go of Newsome’s mouth, pulling his hand back the way a man does when he’s touched something hot. But Newsome’s mouth stayed open. More: it began to widen, first into a gape and then into a soundless howl. His eyes rolled back in his head and his feet began to jitter. His urine let go and the sheet over his crotch went as dark as Rideout’s collar.

“Stop,” Kat said, starting forward. “He’s having a seizure. You have to st—”

Jensen yanked her back. She turned to him and saw his normally ruddy face had gone as pale as a linen napkin.

Newsome’s jaw had dropped all the way to his breastbone. The lower half of his face disappeared into a mighty yawn. Kat heard temporomandibular tendons creak as knee-tendons did during strenuous physical therapy: a sound like dirty hinges. The lights in the room stuttered off, on, off, then on again.

“Come out!” Rideout shouted. “Come out!”

In the darkness behind Newsome’s teeth, a bladderlike thing rose like water in a plugged drain. It was pulsing. There was a rending, splintering crash and the window across the room shattered. Coffee cups fell to the floor and broke. Suddenly there was a branch in the room with them. The lights went out. The generator started up again. No burp this time but a steady roar. When the lights came back, Rideout was lying on the bed with Newsome, his arms flung out and his face planted on the wet patch in the sheet. Something was oozing from Newsome’s gaping mouth, his teeth dragging grooves in its shapeless body, which was stippled with stubby green spikelets.

Not a tennis ball , Kat thought. More like one of those Kooshes the kids play with .

Tonya saw it and fled back down the hall with her head hunched forward, her hands locked at the nape of her neck, and her forearms over her ears.

The green thing tumbled onto Newsome’s chest.

“ Spray it !” Kat screamed at Jensen. “ Spray it before it can get away !” Yes. Then they would put it in the specimen bottle and screw the lid down tight. Very tight.

Jensen’s eyes were huge and glassy. He looked like a sleepwalker. Wind blew through the room. It swirled his hair. A picture fell from the wall. Jensen pistoned out the hand holding the can of pepper spray and triggered the plastic nub. There was a hiss, then he leaped to his feet, screaming. He tried to turn, probably to flee after Tonya, but stumbled and fell to his knees. Although Kat felt too dumbfounded to move — to even stir a hand — part of her brain must still have been working, because she knew what had happened. He had gotten the can turned around. Instead of pepper-spraying the thing that was now oozing through the unconscious Reverend Rideout’s hair, Jensen had sprayed himself.

“ Don’t let it get me !” Jensen shrieked. He began to crawl blindly away from the bed. “ I can’t see, don’t let it get me !”

The wind gusted. Dead leaves lifted from the tree-branch that had come through the window and swirled around the room. The green thing dropped from the nape of Rideout’s creased and sunburned neck onto the floor. Feeling like a woman underwater, Kat swiped at it with the bristle end of the broom. She missed. The thing disappeared under the bed, not rolling but slithering.