The Narrows(63)
She took an instinctive step back into the house.
Her husband leveled the shotgun at her. “Don’t you move.”
She froze.
“I bust my ass at that f*ckin’ factory while you sit home, and what do I get for all my trouble? A cheatin’ goddamn whore of a wife and a friend who sticks a knife in my back. A so-called friend who sticks it wherever he wants.”
She wanted to tell him he’d misunderstood the situation. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t how he thought it was and that there was nothing—no feelings at all—between her and Tom Schuler.
Tom Schuler is dead, said the head-voice. Tom Schuler is—
A slight shape materialized out of the darkness behind Evan. Maggie’s heart seized. The shape shuffled its small feet through the dirt, its body pale and exposed and seeming to glow in the moonlight that still spilled over the peaks of the mountain that bordered Stillwater to the west. Maggie shook and found herself powerless to move. Evan caught her gaze and spun quickly around, the barrel of the shotgun swiveling away from her and over to the frail shape shambling out of the shadows. Even from such a distance, Maggie could hear the shotgun begin to quake in her husband’s unsteady hands. Then he lowered the shotgun and muttered, “What the hell is this?”
It was the boy. His pale skin bluish in the cool predawn, his knobby little knees practically buckling beneath him, he managed yet another step closer to Evan. He wore no clothes, and his abdomen and hips appeared to be dappled with something that could have been—
(blood)
—dried mud. His eyes wandered, like great roving searchlights, beneath a perfectly smooth, white brow. The boy’s scalp was not completely hairless—strands of tawny gossamer sprang out in sparse patches. He was a boy, but not wholly…more like the skin left behind after a reptile molts.
“Who’re you?” Evan barked at the boy. “What are you doing here?” And then he actually laughed, possibly at the child’s nudity and overall awkwardness.
The boy took another awkward step closer to Evan. Maggie watched, unable to move, unable to scream.
“You hurt?” Evan asked.
The boy staggered right up to the side of the Volkswagen and gazed up at Evan. When he turned his thin little body just the slightest bit, Maggie could make out a quartet of what looked to be tiny puncture wounds moving vertically down the center of the boy’s back.
Evan extended one leg and thumped the boy’s chest with his boot heel. The boy rocked unsteadily but his large, black eyes never left Evan.
“Hey,” Evan said to the boy. “I’m talking to you.”
Maggie saw it begin in the boy’s pale and narrow chest—a gathering of essence, followed by a fullness, a welling, in the breast. Something akin to a bubble of air seemed to rise up through the boy’s chest where it fattened the stovepipe of his thin, white neck, bulging it out like the throat of a bullfrog. The boy’s lips formed a perfect O just as his large eyes rolled back into his head like those of a great white shark preparing to strike. The boy’s cheeks quivered as—
(oh god something is going to come out something is about to burst right out of that)
—Evan scooted backward on the hood of the Volkswagen.
“Hey,” Evan said. His voice quavered then broke like glass in the night.
A gout of greenish fluid burst from the boy’s mouth. It arced through the air like a party streamer toward Evan’s face. Evan bucked his hips and jerked his head back but he wasn’t quick enough—the liquid pattered across the upper portion of his face.
Evan cursed and backed up till his spine struck the Volkswagen’s windshield. His boots scrambled blindly for purchase on the sloping hood of the car while he pawed frantically at his eyes with one hand. The shotgun’s muzzle waved like a white flag back and forth, back and forth. The boy leaned against the hood of the car just as his small and inadequate chest swelled once more. His neck fattened, engorged with the greenish, snot-like substance, and his head tipped back slightly on its thin stalk of a neck.
A second ribbon squirted from the boy’s mouth, splashing against the side of Evan’s face while droplets pattered down into Evan’s lap and along the hood of the car. Again, Evan cried out…and now Maggie thought she could see steam or smoke rising from the snot-like sludge stuck to her husband’s face. Evan screamed and rolled off the hood of the car and, a second later, Maggie also screamed as the shotgun exploded and fire belched from the muzzle. In the sudden flare of firelight, the boy’s profile flashed into quick relief—his pale, almost hairless body and indistinct features reminiscent of the blind creatures that live deep underground or on the floor of the deepest oceans.
Again, Maggie saw the barrel of the shotgun wave back and forth in the air. One of Evan’s boots kicked out from behind the car.
“Evan!” she screamed, suddenly finding her voice.
Evan sprang up from behind the other side of the car, his face a mask of steaming, disintegrating tissue. Somehow he managed a strangled noise that sounded as if he were trying to mimic birdcalls; the sound still hung in the air as a section of his skull slid away in a bloody mudslide, taking the gelatinous white orb of one eyeball with it.
Evan threw himself over the hood of the car. Scrambling like a cat looking for purchase, he bucked and kicked and groped blindly at the windshield wipers. His fingernails sounded like creaking hinges as they scraped down the hull of the Volkswagen’s hood. Bits of Evan’s face puddled in the windshield-wiper well.