The Narrows(93)

The thing on his back emitted another belch. The sound was like a creaking door or an old tractor turning over in cold weather. Again, Eddie screamed. He felt hot sludge spill out across his shoulder blades and down his back, and for the first time he could actually smell the stink of his own burning flesh.

With his left arm—his good arm—he managed to swing an elbow and knock the creature off his back. Ahead of him, the squad car doubled and trembled and looked like something out of a bad 3-D movie. For whatever ridiculous and inexplicable reason, he pictured himself sitting on the edge of his bed earlier that morning, pulling on a pair of gym socks. Fucking gym socks. That was what went through his mind at that moment.

With his one good hand, he managed to hoist himself to his feet and actually happened to propel himself a few more feet toward the squad car before the thing took him back down to the ground. He struck the earth hard, teeth gnashing together in his busted jaw, and rolled over halfway onto his good shoulder. Above him, a whitish blur lashed out and tore into the flesh of his right cheek with fingernails that felt more like claws. His feet kicking, he tried to buck the creature away from him yet again, but he was unable to succeed this time. Through bleary eyes, he saw the channel of its wide mouth zeroing in on him. There was a smell like cleaning products—the f*cking Lysol they used on the pews at St. Bernadette’s was the first thing that came to his mind—followed once more by that guttural belching sound. A moment later, Eddie felt hot magma spill out across his face. He screamed and felt it run down his throat, scorching his esophagus and loosening the teeth in his gums.

A moment later, he was dead.



4



On the ride back to her house, Brandy Crawly sat quietly in the passenger seat of Ben’s police car. Ben kept waiting for her to break down and cry but she never did. In studious contemplation, she looked out the passenger window at the flooding streets and the trees that bent in the strong gusts of wind. By the time they arrived in front of her house, the sky was fully dark. Rain fell steadily and the streets were already beginning to flood.

When he put the car in Park and shut the engine down, Brandy offered him a small thank you.

“I’ll need to go in and tell your mom,” he told her.

She nodded then looked through the rain-speckled windshield of the police car and up toward her house. Only a single light was on in one of the downstairs windows.

“Can I ask you one thing?” Ben asked.

She looked at him again. In the rain-shadowed moonlight, her face was a glowing patchwork of pale light and deep, lightless grooves. “Yeah,” she said.

“How did you…you know where to look for him?”

“The bats,” she said. “The bats go wherever he goes. I mean, I think so, anyway.”

Brandy Crawly’s eyes seemed to briefly lose focus. Then she blinked and looked back up at the house again. “He’s been staying in the garage the whole time. He’ll probably come back tonight. I’ll be waiting.” Almost as an afterthought, she said, “He can still be saved. You just have to kill the head vampire.”

It was surreal, all of it. Was he dreaming? Surely none of this was actually happening.

As she looked back at him, she suddenly looked much older than her sixteen years. “You have to kill the head vampire, Ben.”

Before he knew what he was doing, he nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered to her. “Okay.”

Wendy Crawly began yelling the second Ben and Brandy walked through the front door, exclaiming how worried she’d been and where the hell had she been all day, anyway? But when Wendy turned the corner and saw Ben standing in the foyer, she went immediately quiet. Before Ben could say a word, Brandy ran to her mother and, as if by maternal instinct alone, her mother’s arms sprang open to receive her. They embraced for what seemed like an eternity, and Ben thought he could actually see some heavy load transfer back and forth between mother and daughter via some indescribable parent-child osmosis.

“We found your boy, Wendy,” Ben said, taking a step toward them. He didn’t have to say the dreaded word and Wendy did not need him to say it. She had known, it seemed, the second she turned down the hallway and saw Ben standing there, dripping rain on the oriental runner.

Wendy closed her eyes and just nodded, over and over, like someone being prodded with a jolt of electricity. Then she buckled and folded to the floor, crying out. Brandy held her mother’s head against her stomach and let her tears fall in her hair. But her eyes, dark and pleading yet viciously intense, remained on Ben. It was as though she was swearing him to some blood oath.





Chapter Sixteen


1


Back in the car, Ben drove a block or so down the street from the Crawly house before he pulled over onto the shoulder, put the car into Park, and paused to catch his breath. His eyes burned and his face radiated heat. When he looked down, he saw that his hands were trembling. He was not a religious man or a superstitious man, but at that very moment, Ben Journell believed the world to be on the verge of ending. Or maybe it was just Stillwater that was ending. Maybe this was how small towns died. It starts slowly enough, with factories closing up and people relocating to different parts of the country in search of jobs. Houses go dark and street corners go empty. Before long, whole stretches of highway have been evacuated as if some great plague had come and swept through the countryside. Faces vanished. People dematerialized into nothingness, into vapor. The great American dreamer has awakened. Wasn’t that what was going on now? Was this no different than the spoils of some great plague?