Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

His home was right in the middle of a long block of houses full of kids — and in summer, when grandchildren inevitably came to visit, there were even more kids.

Matt just hoped that that part of summer vacation was done…but would Shinichi and Misao let the youngsters go home? Matt had no idea. And, if they went home, would they keep spreading the disease in their own hometowns? Where did it stop?

Driving down his block, though, Matt saw nothing hideous. There were kids playing out on the front lawns, or the sidewalks, crouching over marbles, hanging out in the trees. There was no single overt thing that he could put his finger on that was weird.

He was still uneasy. But he’d reached his house now, the one with a grand old oak tree shading the porch, so he had to get out. He coasted to a stop just under the tree and parked by the sidewalk. He grabbed a large laundry bag from the backseat. He’d been accumulating dirty clothes for a couple of weeks at the boardinghouse and it hadn’t seemed fair to ask Mrs. Flowers to wash them.

As he got out of the car, pulling the bag out with him, he was just in time to hear the birdsong stop.

For a moment after it did, he wondered what was wrong. He knew that something was missing, cut short. It made the air heavier. It even seemed to change the smell of the grass.

Then he realized. Every bird, including the raucous crows that lived in the oak trees, had gone silent.

All at once.

Matt felt a twisting in his belly as he looked up and around. There were two kids in the oak tree right beside his car. His mind was still stubbornly trying to hang on to: Children. Playing. Okay. His body was smarter. His hand was already in his pocket, pulling out a pad of Post-it Notes: the flimsy bits of paper that usually stopped evil magic cold.

Matt hoped Meredith would remember to ask Isobel’s mother for more amulets.

He was running low, and…

…and there were two kids playing in the old oak tree. Except they weren’t. They were staring at him. One boy was hanging upside down by his knees and the other was gobbling something…out of a garbage bag.

The hanging kid was staring at him with strangely acute eyes. “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be dead?” he asked.

And now the head of the gobbling boy came up, thick bright red all around his mouth. Bright red — blood. And…whatever was in the garbage bag was moving. Kicking. Thrashing weakly. Trying to get away.

A wave of nausea washed over Matt. Acid hit his throat. He was going to puke.

The gobbling kid was staring at him with stony black-as-a-pit eyes. The hanging kid was smiling.

Then, as if stirred by a hot breath of wind, Matt felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It wasn’t just the birds that had gone quiet. Everything had. No child’s voice was raised in argument or song or speech.

He whirled around and saw why. They were staring at him. Every single kid on the block was silently watching him. Then, with a chilling precision, as he turned back to look at the boys in the tree, all the others came toward him.

Except they weren’t walking.

They were creeping. Lizard-fashion. That’s why some of them had seemed to be playing with marbles on the sidewalk. They were all moving in the same way, bellies close to the ground, elbows up, hands like forepaws, knees splaying to the side.

Now he could taste bile. He looked the other way down the street and found another group creeping. Grinning unnatural grins. It was as if someone was pulling their cheeks from behind them, pulling them hard, so that their grins almost broke their faces in half.

Matt noticed something else. Suddenly they’d stopped, and while he stared at them, they stayed still. Perfectly still, staring back at him. But when he looked away, he saw the creeping figures out of the corner of his eye.

He didn’t have enough Post-it Notes for all of them.

You can’t run away from this. It sounded like an outside voice in his head.

Telepathy. But maybe that was because Matt’s head had turned into a roiling red cloud, floating upward.

Fortunately, his body heard it and suddenly he was up on the back of his car, and had grabbed the hanging kid. For a moment he had a helpless impulse to let go of the boy. The kid still stared at him but with eerie, uncanny eyes that were half rolled back in his head. Instead of dropping him, Matt slapped a Post-It Note on the boy’s forehead, swinging him at the same time to sit on the back of the car.

A pause and then wailing. The kid must be fourteen at least, but about thirty seconds after the Ban Against Evil (pocket-size) was smacked on him he was sobbing real kid sobs.

As one, the crawling kids let out a hiss. It was like a giant steam engine.

Hsssssssssssssssssssssss.

They began to breathe in and out very fast, as if working up to some new state.

Their creeping slowed to a crawl. But they were breathing so hard Matt could see their sides hollow and fill.

As Matt turned to look at one group of them, they froze, except for the unnatural breathing. But he could feel the ones behind him getting closer.

By now Matt’s heart was pounding in his ears. He could fight a group of thembut not with a group on his back. Some of them looked only ten or eleven. Some looked almost his age. Some were girls, for God’s sake. Matt remembered what possessed girls had done the last time he’d met them and felt violent revulsion.

But he knew that looking up at the gobbling kid was going to make him sicker. He could hear smacking, chewing sounds — and he could hear a thin little whistle of helpless pain and weak struggling against the bag.

He whirled quickly again, to keep off the other side of crawlers, and then made himself look up. With a quiet crackle, the garbage bag fell away when he grabbed it but the kid held on to what was inOh my God. He’s eating a baby! A baby! AHe yanked the kid out of the tree and his hand automatically slapped a Post-It onto the boy’s back. And then — then, thank God, he saw the fur. It wasn’t a baby. It was too small to be a baby, even a newborn. But it was eaten.

The kid raised his bloody face to Matt’s, and Matt saw that it was Cole Reece, Cole who was only thirteen and lived right next door. Matt hadn’t even recognized him before.

Cole’s mouth was wide open in horror now, and his eyes were bulging out of his head with terror and sorrow, and tears and snot were streaming down his face.

“He made me eat Toby,” he started in a whisper that became a scream. “He made me eat my guinea pig! He made me — why why why did he do that? I ATE TOBY!”

He threw up all over Matt’s shoes. Blood-red vomit.

Merciful death for the animal. Quick, Matt thought. But this was the hardest thing he’d ever tried to do. How to do it — a hard stomp on the creature’s head? He couldn’t. He had to try something else first.

Matt peeled off a Post-It Note and put it, trying not to look, on the fur. And just like that it was over. The guinea pig went slack. The spell had undone whatever had been keeping it alive up to this point.

There was blood and puke on Matt’s hands, but he made himself turn to Cole.

Cole had his eyes shut tight and little choking sounds came from him.

Something in Matt snapped.

“You want some of this?” he shouted, holding out the Post-it pad as if it were the revolver he’d left with Mrs. Flowers. He whirled again, shouting, “You want some?

How about you? You, Josh?” He was recognizing faces now. “You, Madison? How

’bout you, Bryn? Bring it on! You all bring it on! BRING IT—” Something touched his shoulder. He spun, Post-it Note ready. Then he stopped short and relief bubbled up in him like Evian water at some fancy restaurant. He was staring right into the face of Dr. Alpert, Fell’s Church’s own country doctor. She had her SUV parked beside his car, in the middle of the street. Behind her, protecting her back, was Tyrone, who was going to be next year’s quarterback at Robert E. Lee High. His sister, a sophomore-to-be, was trying to get out of the SUV too, but she stopped when Tyrone saw her.