The Fall of Never(133)

That instant, they both heard something that sounded like an aluminum baseball bat slamming against the hood of a car, followed by a spray of pale green tiles from inside the shower stall. The tiles shot like boomerangs across the bathroom and shattered against the opposite wall. One of the tiles caught Carlos in the forehead, gouging him, and he howled and stumbled backward. Following the spray of tiles, a rusted water pipe was forced through the wall of the shower stall, jutting like a displaced rib, and sent an explosion of water shooting across the bathroom.

“God!” Josh shouted, arms up in front of his face. He leaned into the room and clutched the collar of Carlos’s shirt, gave him a steady jerk toward the bathroom door. The doctor’s legs seemed to come out from under him, sending his body crashing against the partially-opened bathroom door. “Come on! Move it or lose it, Doc!”

Carlos stumbled into the hallway and toppled to the floor. In his amazement, he felt a laugh tickle his throat. Laugh now and the world thinks I’m crazy! It was all he could do to keep it at bay.

Josh tore down the hall and flung open Nellie’s bedroom door. But didn’t go inside. Instead, he just remained standing there, staring into the bedroom, the greasy hair forced back off his face by a potent wind. His shirt and pants rippled in the wind. He looked like a skydiver.

“What?” Carlos shouted. “What is it?”

Josh didn’t answer. Once his wits were about him, Josh darted into the bedroom against the wind. Carlos hopped to his feet and took off for the bedroom. He hit the door and was greeted by a cyclone. Inside the bedroom, the plastic had been yanked from the window. Some force beyond nature had forced the outside wind to amplify itself and remain in a steady whirlwind at the center of Nellie’s bedroom. In it swirled dust and old balls of tissues and bits of plaster from the walls.

Josh was at Nellie’s bedside, shouting at her to calm it down, calm it down, goddamn it, Nellie, calm it down. But Nellie wouldn’t calm anything; the old woman was no longer with them. Josh was right, Carlos thought then: Nellie Worthridge was someplace else. Her mind was someplace else. All that was here in this room with them was her lifeless body.

Let’s not forget the tornado, Carlos thought wildly. Sweet Lord, if I make it through this sane, I’ll owe You a lot!

“Can you stand it?”

It took Carlos a moment to realize Josh was shouting at him. “What?”

“Being in here,” Josh yelled back. “Can you stand it?”

Surprisingly, he found that he could. Either the electromagnetic sensation had worn off considerably…or he’d just grown accustomed to it.

He gave Josh the thumbs-up. “I’m okay!” He rushed toward the window and tried to tape the plastic sheet back in place. “Is she out of it?”

“Gone!” Josh yelled.

“Is there any way you’ll know when she…when she finds your friend Kelly?”

“I have no idea, Doc,” Josh said. And after several moments, he could only repeat it: “I have no idea.”





Chapter Twenty-Seven


Kelly walked through the front door of the gingerbread house.

The enormous shape tangled in vines and hanging from the rafters was another body. She edged slowly around it, her eyes wide and reluctant to look away. A hand, fingers frozen with rigor mortis: a perpetual claw. Beneath the body on the floor was a pool of black blood. As she moved beyond it, she accidentally bumped up against it and cried out in fright. Set in motion, the hanging corpse slowly rotated until the strained and lifeless face of DeVonn Rotley turned to face her, the large man’s eyes ruptured from his skull, his mouth impossibly wide. She screamed again, her own voice echoing back at her, reverberating inside her head. And faintly, beyond that: Simon’s dry laughter.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to back away from the hanging corpse. Keep it together, Kelly, keep it together, girl. You’re stronger than this. You can beat this. You can overcome. And she could, she knew she could—she just had to regain control of her own mind…seek out that alien hand and break its grip…

Backing up, she slammed into something large and gangly and screamed again. Behind her, whatever she’d struck toppled to the floor with a sound very much like a tumble of pumpkins falling down a flight of stairs. And she didn’t need to see it to know this was another dead body, another of Simon’s victims—

—No, she heard Simon say from all around her, I can’t take all the credit. It was your brain, after all.

She shook her head, sobbing freely now. This isn’t happening. This can’t be real. Why can’t I wake up from this nightmare?

The corpse she’d sent in a heap to the floor reached out for her and grabbed her ankle. Too shocked to make a sound, she could only stand there as an icy tract of horror exploded up from her leg and dispelled through the whole of her body. She felt her heart falter in her chest. Throwing herself back and pulling her foot free, she sent herself sprawling to the hardwood floor, nearly face to face with the living corpse—

But it wasn’t alive at all. It hadn’t even grabbed her; she’d just stepped into its hand, and—

And she recognized the face. It was pale, almost bleached-looking, with cobweb hair and small, beady eyes…and then she saw the corpse’s neck: a wildflower sprouting the crooked and busted handles of two-dozen plastic forks, flowering with congealed blood and pasty sinew…a dark pit near the jugular, the carotid…