The Narrows(111)

With his boot, Ben kicked away planks of wood and bits of ancient, twisted metal. A hollow opened up beneath the boards. Something was writhing within. Ben crouched and stared down at it, the gun shaking in his right hand. His breath whistled in and out of his throat and sweat stung his eyes.

A segmented tail retreated beneath the heap of smoldering wood through a crack in one of the boards. It left a trail of snotty fluid on the boards that glistened like semen.

A few feet away, one of the boards rose up and separated itself from the rest of the wreckage. A pale and impossibly long arm extended out from beneath it, stretched halfway to the muddy earth that was just out of its reach. Whatever the creature was, it was seeking solace on solid ground. A second arm appeared…and then the creature itself extended out from beneath the smoldering planks of wood.

The thing possessed only the most rudimentary humanlike appearance, in that it appeared to have a central trunk from which limbs diverged. Its head suggested some strange mutation between plant and insect, though there were really no specific details to identify it as such. The longer Ben looked at it, the more formless and indecipherable it became. At one point, he believed he was looking at a gigantic insect crawling out of a hole in the ground. At another point, he swore the thing was amphibian in nature, almost toad-like. Yet again, it also appeared to resemble a hybrid between a human being and some alien species of vegetation. It dragged its organic web behind it like a paratrooper dragging a deployed chute through unwieldy terrain. The tendrils that connected the web to the creature pulsed with lifeblood—or some otherworldly variation thereof—and the web itself, like a glistening sphere of bonelike spokes, appeared to deflate until it more closely resembled a wind sock on an eerily calm day.

Ben approached it, the shotgun up and the butt pressed against his right shoulder. The thing dragged itself out from beneath the wreckage and was in the mud now, the soft rain pelting its formless, colorless hide. The segmented tail carved a muddy swath in the ground as it pulled it up underneath its body. Ben saw the four hooks suppurating like infected sores, bleeding milky fluid onto the ground.

Ben stepped down off the ruined planking, his boots sinking in the mud. He took a few steps toward the creature as it clawed its way along the earth. It had a destination in mind—Ben could tell by its determination and from the direction it was heading, which was clear across the field toward the dip beyond the trees that was a tributary of Wills Creek. The creek itself was flooded now, and water simmered at the cusp of the wooded embankment, black as night itself.

I can’t let it reach the water. That’s how it got here and that’s how it wants to leave. I won’t let it leave. I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.

Ben leveled the shotgun at it. The creature must have sensed its impending doom, for it paused in its campaign and leaned to one side. For a brief moment, Ben saw it how it really was—bulbous, inhuman eyes, a nasal cavity like that of a human corpse whose nose has been eaten away, semitransparent skin through which its network of internal organs could be glimpsed pumping and throbbing and dilating and expanding and retracting. Where its mouth should have been there was a small and reddened anus-like cleft.

You’re a vampire after all, Ben thought. Only you can’t drink our blood or eat our flesh. You use that tail to poison us and turn us into monsters that do your killing and eating for you. Then we return to your lair and regurgitate all of it back into you. And in return, you pump your poison back into us so that we can continue doing your bidding. It was a hideous, gruesome, synergistic dance.

And then it was his father.

Ben exhaled a shuddery breath. His lower lip quivered. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face and stung his eyes.

“Dad…”

The old man smiled wearily up at him, his moist eyes socketed in a seamed and unshaven face. Bill Journell’s mouth moved, and although no words came out, Ben was certain he heard the man speak in his head, a chorus of whispering voices that said a million things at once.

So that’s how you do it, Ben thought, fighting back tears. You reflect our own thoughts back at us…show us the people we most want to see. That’s why you go after the children first—they believe what they’re seeing to be real.

“You’re not my father,” Ben told it.

He pulled the shotgun’s trigger.

What sprayed out was not so much blood as it was a pale-green sludge. It oozed like molasses from the gaping wound that most closely approximated the creature’s neck. It writhed and squealed, though Ben could see no orifice through which such a sound could emanate. Its segmented tail whipped furiously along the ground, cleaving through the mud in a horrid mockery of a snow angel. Once again, as it died, Ben could only see it in pieces instead of one complete whole: the papery, transparent skin; the network of veins just beneath the flesh, congealing with green mucus; the snakelike appendages of its limbs; the crimped and segmented tail with its quadruple hooks and black hairs sprouting like poison-tipped porcupine quills…

It was still shuddering when Brandy came up beside him. She looked down at it and a soft moan escaped her. Ben thought he heard her say “Daddy.” Then she picked up one of the loose boards that was shaped serendipitously like a wooden stake and held it reverently against her chest before handing it over to Ben. “Please,” she said.

He said, “What?”

“Stake it through the heart. I…I just can’t…”