Tim Curran - Resurrection

Then Grimshanks dove on him and held him in those doughy white hands, hugging him while Jacob steamed and his flesh sputtered. “Do you wanna watch, Chucky-fucky? Do you? Do you, huh?” And then that fissured white face grinned and the tongue came out, black and glistening like a fattened jungle snake. It rolled out of the mouth six, seven inches and kept coming, licking Jacob’s face. And the effect of that was like a knife, for Jacob’s burning face split right open as the tongue slavered him, one of his eyes melting right out of its socket and sliding down his cheek.

Jacob was liquefying.

Maybe the clown’s tongue was sharp as a knife, but its saliva was horribly corrosive and Jacob’s face went to hot tallow that slid from the skull in hot runnels. Then the clown reeled in its tongue and its head suddenly jerked up in the air four feet, swaying from a long, trunk-like neck in imitation of a Jack-in-the-box. The head giggled and darted at the others, trying to take a bite from them.

Shouting and shrieking, the kids stumbled along through the water.

And it was Brian that found deliverance.

An open window.

He went through first and Tara followed, Chuck pushing Mark in behind them. Then he went through, landing in stinking water on the other side. Mark and Chuck both grabbed the sill and forced it down, but it had expanded from moisture and they could only close it just over half way. There was still a ten-inch gap and the clown started to squeeze through right away. There was no possible way he could fit being so round and puffy, but he kept pushing, bulging through the opening like a bubble of white rubber.

But by then the others were gone.

They were in some kind of office building. Struggling through nearly four feet of water, they felt along the walls in the corridor, finding one locked door after another. The moon had slid into the clouds again and the blackness was absolute. Then they found a lobby and a set of stairs. They fought their way up, amazed at how free they felt out of the water. But they were still heavy and wet, though they didn’t seem to notice.

“Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!” the clown called after them. “I smell the blood of an Englishman! Be he ‘live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread! Hee, hee! Ho, ho! Ha, ha!”

His voice and ensuing laughter echoed through the building, screeching and perverse. They could hear him coming up the stairs now, the water squishing from his big floppy shoes. More water running from his suit and the holes in his hide. He pushed a wave of warmth before him that was sickening like spoiled pork.

“Tara? Where is my Tara?” he called after them. “I love Tara my little pussy, her snatch is so warm! And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm! So I’ll not fuck her or suck out her guts! But pussy and I, very gently we shall play!”

Tara just went hysterical at the sound of that voice echoing and echoing. She began to slam herself against the upstairs walls, screaming and spitting and clawing out at anyone who dared touch her. “Why doesn’t he stop? Why doesn’t he stop?” she sobbed and cried. “Why the hell doesn’t he stop?”

They took hold of her and dragged her down the hallway and into some kind of storage room they found. There was another entrance on the other side. Chuck locked the door, precious good that would do them. The other door was open and they fell through it and right away a flashlight beam struck them dead in the faces.

“Hey, you guys,” a kid’s voice said to them. “That clown’s going to kill you! If you don’t want to die, you better come with me…”

“Where?” Brian said in a squeaking voice.

“Hurry!” the kid said. “The lady’ll help us! She’ll take care of us!”

They heard the clown bashing his way through the door, happily singing “Higglety Pigglety, my black hen.” They needed no further coaxing. There was nothing worse than the clown and the degenerate things he would do to them if he got those pulpy white hands on them. Death was one thing, but there were worse things than just dying. Things your soul would simply not survive.

So they ran after the kid, wondering vaguely where it was he might be taking them.

When Miriam Blake was just a kid?and being that she was pushing eighty, that was back in the lower Paleolithic?she’d gone to the Holy Covenant Catholic girl’s school over in East Genessee about three blocks from the brewery where her father worked and the linen shop where her mother sewed curtains. The school was run by a befuddled, much put upon priest named Father Dobson, who was known as “Dobby” to just about everyone. Dobby was a little round man with a brilliant shock of white hair. The girls all loved him because he was sweet and patient and didn’t seem capable of raising his voice. Which was in great contrast to the Sisters of Holy Covenant who were loud and bossy and bitter, quick with the paddle and not above foul language when they wanted to make their point. It was rumored that they rode broomsticks to mass and stirred cauldrons of bat’s wing and dead man’s eyeballs in their spare time. Miriam’s mother had gone to Holy Covenant and one time Miriam had heard her mother tell her father, “Oh, poor old Dobby, Sister Margaret and the other witches are still showing him where to squat and what to wipe.”

Old Dobby?who had dropped dead of a heart attack on Christmas Eve of 1942 while saying midnight mass?seemed happiest in the chapel where he was in charge and not in the school itself where he felt like a sacrificial lamb. The chapel was a high white-washed church that had been well over a hundred years old by the time Miriam attended services there. It was connected to the school by a narrow tunnel in the back. Inside, it smelled of age and old books, polished wood and dust. The belfry was filled with bats and when the wind blew, the entire building would creak and groan. Dobby ran choir practice on Wednesday and Friday nights. And after the latter, he would gather up the girls, shut the lights off and tell ghost stories. The chapel was, of course, very atmospheric in the darkness…creaking and shifting, old timbers groaning and shadows flitting about.

Friday nights were always Miriam’s favorite time of the week when old Dobby would do his damnedest to scare the girls half to death. While they held onto each other, he’d tell them one gruesome horror story after the other. They’d hear about the foolish girl who wept in a country churchyard by night because her sisters were all married and she was not. Then one night, the corpse of a man murdered on his wedding night swept her onto a skeleton horse and took her off to the land of the dead to be his bride. They’d hear about the woman who was possessed by a demon and ate her own children and the madman who buried girls alive. A perennial favorite was the one about the guy who’d had a growth removed from his belly and kept the growth in a jar of alcohol in the cellar where it was warm and moist, not realizing the growth was actually part of his twin brother who had died in the womb. Down there in the darkness, his brother grew and burst from the jar, a creeping thing that “looked like a fungus pretending to be a boy,” as Dobby put it. They’d get real quiet and real tense over this one. Dobby would say that the thing was down in the chapel cellar, right NOW. Which worked perfectly because the chapel cellar was cobwebbed and drippy and dark.

“It’s coming, girls…can you hear it coming?” Dobby would say. “It’s on the second stair, crawling its way up. The third stair and fourth stair. Can you hear the squishing sounds its feet make? Its fingernails dragging over the stair post? It’s dirty and smelling and dripping with goo. There are worms living in it and it has no eyes. It’s at the top of the stairs, girls…can you smell it? Can you hear it breathing? CAN YOU? It’s coming now, dragging its way up the aisle. I can heart it whispering your names…Lisa, Mary Jo, Doris, Kathleen…dear God, which of you will it take down into the rotting tunnels beneath the cellar? Which one? Which one? Can you smell its foul breath and feel its cold fingers at your throat…don’t scream, don’t even breathe or it will hear you…it wants…it wants…it WANTS YOU, MIRIAM!”