The Narrows(108)

There was a single wooden door at the base of the silo that slid open on an old, rusted track. The door was bound shut by a length of chain and a padlock, much like the door on the old plastics factory. Looking at it, Ben guessed that door hadn’t been open for the better part of a decade. When they approached it, Ben handed the shotgun over to Brandy—“Be careful,” he warned—then clipped the chain with the bolt cutters. The rusty chain fell away from the doorhandle and coiled at Ben’s feet like a cobra. He set the bolt cutters against the side of the structure then took the shotgun from Brandy.

“I’ve got this, too,” she said, showing him the string of black rosary beads she wore around her neck. “They were my grandmother’s. I don’t know if they work or not but I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

He wanted to tell her that he did not believe in vampires—even now, he did not believe in them, or in any other type of monster—but he could not find his voice at that moment. Instead, he just nodded succinctly and readied the shotgun with one arm. With his free hand, he gripped the bracket-shaped doorhandle. He clung to it for seemingly an eternity without breathing.

“You ready?” he whispered eventually.

“I guess so.”

“Okay.”

He shoved the door open.

4



Absolute darkness greeted them. The chemical smell was unbearable, striking Brandy like rancid breath. Warmth surrounded her and, when she looked up, she could make out slivers of sunlight burning through the gaps in the staves at the eastern-facing wall of the silo, all the way up the channel to the top. Both she and Ben took a few steps in. A faint rectangle of light spilled in through the open door and projected onto the opposite wall, framing their distorted shadows. One of her sneakers sank into something.

The sense that they weren’t alone was pervasive and all-encompassing, as if the walls of the structure themselves were alive and dangerous.

“I’m stepping in something,” she whispered very close to Ben’s face.

“So am I.”

Ben clicked on a flashlight and directed the beam at the ground. The entire floor was covered in heaping, reeking mounds of bat shit. She had her right foot in it up to the ankle. A sickly heat puffed up through the collar of her shirt and she held her breath and tried not to think about it. Ben turned the flashlight up toward the ceiling and Brandy snapped her head back to look up…

At first, it seemed there was nothing but shadows up there, darkness swimming across darkness through inky, liquid space. But then she realized it wasn’t darkness at all, but the dark, fur-cloaked, squirming pods of thousands and thousands of tiny bats. It was an entire colony of them, so many that the whole ceiling was completely covered with them, bulging and rippling like a great beating heart. They crawled over each other, clung to each other, writhed like maggots covered in bristling, brown hair. The susurration of their bodies swarming over each other created a sound like the shushing through dead autumn leaves. The sight of them nearly made her gag.

Like the parting of the Red Sea, the bats at the center of the flashlight’s beam began to spread outward, expanding away from the light as if disturbed by it.

What they revealed as they cleared away would haunt Brandy Crawly until her dying day.



5



“Jesus,” Ben breathed.

What had been hidden behind the wall of bats was revealed to him not all at once—for the human brain could not comprehend such madness in one unified punch—but piecemeal, like glimpsing individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which helped prevent his sanity from shattering like a pane of glass.

The hairless boy from Wills Creek hung suspended in the air, his nude body a pallid fetal question mark. He was suspended in what appeared to be an enormous web that stretched across the ceiling of the silo. The web itself looked organic, comprised of living tissue, the spokes of the web made of thick veins and arteries that, even as Ben stared, seemed to pulse with some preternatural blood flow. Something was at the center of the web—or perhaps it was part of the web itself, the way the body of an insect is attached to its wings or a turtle is affixed to its shell—that seemed to alter its physical appearance the longer Ben stared at it. It was vaguely humanoid…but then it resembled a mollusk…and then some tyrannical insect. Something akin to a segmented tail unfurled from the—

(scorpion)

—thing. It was twice as long as a grown man’s arm and concluded in a rough bulb that bristled with spiny, black hairs like porcupine quills. Four distinct hooks protruded from the flattened side of the bulb. As Ben watched, the tail came around and encircled the fetal boy in a mockery of a lover’s embrace. Clear fluid dripped from the four prong-like hooks as they came up to meet the boy’s arched back. Like the teeth of a zipper fitting neatly together, the four hooks inserted themselves into the four puncture marks that ran down the hairless boy’s spine. A moment later, a gush of fluid could be seen pumping through the semitransparent flesh of the thing’s tail.

The hairless boy’s eyes opened. They appeared blind and did not seem to register the flashlight’s beam. As Ben watched, the boy cocked his head at an unnatural angle. The lipless mouth came together to form a crude circle…and then the flesh of his lips stretched to an impossible length until it was less a mouth and more like the tubular proboscis of some bloodsucking insect. The proboscis needled itself into a divot-like opening in the flesh of the mother-creature where it proceeded to pump stark-black fluid into its transparent body.