The Narrows(97)

“Mel?” the skinny officer croaked weakly. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a comical sound.

Maggie heard a woman scream out in the hallway.

The larger officer’s hands then sank straight through the mask of slime, impossibly far, and Maggie had time to think, There is no longer a face behind that stuff; there is no longer a head back there.

The sludge splattered against the wall, bubbling like acid, and the officer’s body—sans head—fell forward and slammed lifelessly against the floor. The white nub of the man’s spine protruded from the ragged hole of his neck where the skin still sizzled and melted away.

A small figure darted from behind one desk to another. The skinny officer must have remembered he had a gun at his hip; he dove for it now with one hand and tugged at it, tugged at it, tugged, seemingly unable to recall how to pull it out. Then Maggie heard the snap on the holster give and the officer was just preparing to yank the handgun free when the creature sprang out from the shadows at him. The officer staggered backward and slammed against the bars of Maggie’s cell. The gun clattered to the floor and spun away into the darkness.

Maggie backed up until she struck the far wall of her cell. On the other side of the bars, the officer bucked and cried out and struggled with the creature that was now situated on his chest. An arc of green slim belched out of the creature’s mouth and spattered across the officer’s face. Some stray drops passed through the bars and struck the concrete floor of the cell, where they sizzled like plutonium and left steaming craters in the cement.

The officer’s head narrowed and melted to a mushy pulp beneath the flesh-eating slime. It did not take long for the officer’s body to fold into a heap on the floor, dead.

Maggie shuddered. A piece of her mind seemed to break away at that moment, floating like a raft out across a moonlit sea.

On the other side of the bars, the creature rose. It wasn’t a creature at all. It was a boy; hairless, pale-skinned, bug-eyed…but a boy nonetheless. A child.

Mine. You’re mine. You came back for me after all, didn’t you? I knew that you would. Somehow, I knew someday that you would. You’ve come back home to your mother.

The boy’s eyes hung on her. She could smell him standing there, a smell like industrial cleaners and detergents.

“I’m sorry,” she said, just barely above a whisper. “Don’t hurt me.”

The child’s eyes hung on her a moment longer. Then he shifted his gaze back down to the cop who lay dead at his feet. The skin on the cop’s face had dissolved into a puddle of bubbling soup that seemed to be eating through the floor. The skull itself melted like wax. Maggie thought she could make out a pair of eye sockets slowly receding into the sizzling liquid. The boy positioned his slender body so that his face hung directly above the mess that had just moments ago been the officer’s head. The boy’s mouth worked itself into an O as the skin stretched and elongated to form some sort of tubular appendage. Once the appendage had grown to a length of several impossible inches, like the proboscis of an insect, the boy dipped it into the sludge and proceeded to noisily slurp the mess up.

“Don’t hurt me,” Maggie continued to murmur. It was like a mantra now, a prayer. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

When the child-thing had finished, it stood up off his haunches and regarded Maggie once again through the bars of her cell. As she stared back at him, the tubular appendage retreated toward the child’s face until it changed back into a mouth. It was a boy once again, wide-eyed and innocent, his tight little lips smeared with blood.

“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

The child-thing’s hands closed around two of the cell’s bars. It slid one pale, splay-toed foot between the bars and into her cell.

“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

It was thin enough to squeeze through the bars, its body sliding toward her unimpeded. The boy was as insubstantial as smoke.

“Don’t hurt me.” Her voice was a shrill tremolo now as she cowered in one corner of the cell. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

It hurt her.





Chapter Seventeen


1


The streetlights along Belfast Avenue blinked on and off, as if signaling to some spacecraft high above the clouds. Rain slammed the earth, and the windshield wipers of Ben’s squad car could hardly keep up with such ferocity. As he turned into the parking lot of the police station, his concern quickly mounted…though he could not necessarily identify why. Cold, wet, and covered in mud, it had taken him a good half hour to change the tire back on Route 40. On the first attempt, he had the car jacked up and was about to spin the last lug nut off when the jack bent to one side and the car crashed back down to the pavement, the entire undercarriage shuddering. By the time he’d managed to jack the car up again, replace the ruined tire with the spare, and lower it back to the ground, Ben’s clothes were soaked through and his nose was running like a sieve. Then, on the drive back to the station, he’d attempted to use both his cell phone and the police radio again, but each proved useless. The storm wreaked havoc.

He parked right out in front of the station and ran into the building to find the sodium lights in the ceiling fizzing. Likewise, the lights in the dispatch room threatened to blink off and stay that way.