Nightcrawlers

24

“Well, as you can imagine, we kids were getting pretty randy at the idea of this monster in our midst. We wanted to see it. We just had to see it.”

“So you went up to the house,” Kenney said, knowing that was exactly what he and his friends would have done.

Godfrey looked pale, worn out. “Yes. Yes, we did.”

Kenney sat there, letting the sheriff build up the strength to tell him this part, to gather the necessary momentum. He knew he didn’t want to hear this any more than he wanted to hear the rest, but Godfrey was going to tell him and probably because he had no choice.

The sheriff licked his lips, his face tight and colorless. He looked to be on the verge of confessing great and terrible things. “Yeah, we went up there. Me and Johnny Proctor, my partner in crime. We were young and stupid, Lou, but not so stupid that we were going to go up there at night… no, I don’t think we had the balls for that. We hiked up there, midafternoon, hid out in the bushes and just watched that house. It was a warm September afternoon… Labor Day, I think… but we were shaking, just scared shitless, trying to build up the nerve to sneak up to the house and have ourselves a peek. I’m guessing we would never have gotten the nerve on our own, but fate took care of that for us. We saw Genevieve Crossen come out on the porch. She just stood there. We thought maybe she knew we were there or something. I wanted to run, but Johnny said no, just wait. Christ, you should have seen that woman. She’d always been the sort to have her hair done just so, a nice dress on… well, that had gone south. She was dressed in some old stained and wrinkled frumpy housecoat. It looked like a potato sack. Her hair was sticking up and, even from that distance, I could see her eyes, damn, wide and staring and fathomless like sinkholes dropped in her face. Even from across the yard I could see there was nothing left there, Genevieve Crossen was mad… or had been driven mad. She stood there for maybe five minutes, not moving, then she stepped off the porch, went around the house and off down the trail behind that led out to the creek.

“Johnny said that was it, that was our chance. It was a ten-minute walk back to the creek, so we had ourselves twenty minutes or more to do what had to be done. And honestly? I didn’t want any part of it. The air was hot and sour-smelling around the Crossen place and it made something inside me shrivel. But Johnny didn’t give two shits about that, he pushed me out into the side yard and we slid up close to the house. We waited there, breathing hard. Then we went up to the porch. And the crazy thing was, although we’d only come to peek in a window, we were now going to go inside and we had decided that without so much as a word.

“The porch. I remember the boards creaking… I can hear them even now, those planks settling under our weight. There was mud and dirt on the porch itself and all over the door… like someone had been walking around out in the swampy lowlands and had brought it back with them on their hands and feet. The Crossen place wasn’t some ramshackle old farmhouse that you see around these parts, it was a clean and trim two-story, real nice. Genevieve was just as particular about its appearance as she had been about her daughter. That dirt all over everything… well, it wasn’t right and I knew it wasn’t right. Something about it scared me, disturbed me. I know we were both thinking that it wasn’t from any swamp or bog. No, it was dirt Pearl had dragged back from the graveyard with her.

“So we both stood there, afraid deep down, shivering on that warm day and wanting so bad to run off, but not daring to. We’d sworn an oath of sorts as boys will do and we couldn’t go back on that. Johnny took hold of the doorknob and it was open. He looked at me and pushed the door open and it creaked like it hadn’t tasted oil in twenty years. A sharp, grinding sort of creak that went right up our spines. The sound of it made something in me shake itself like a wet dog. Maybe it wasn’t as loud as we imagined, but it was certainly loud enough to announce our arrival. If anyone was there, they knew we were coming.

“Inside, there was just silence, a heavy sort of silence that made the breath in your lungs sound very loud. And there was a stink in the house… a hot and black smell, a rotten stink of bones and worms and bad meat. Nothing living could smell like that and if it did… well, it would be bad. Real bad. And all I could think about was what Barney Hoke had told us, what he’d seen looking into his car. The memory of that dried up the spit in my mouth. Because I didn’t know if I was really up to it, I didn’t know if I could look at something like that and not lose my mind. I kept picturing Pearl coming up from the cellar, horrible and twisted and grinning like one of them zombies in Tomb of Terror or one of them other horror books we read back then.”

Godfrey paused there, sounding almost breathless. His mind was taking him back to 1956 and it was like yesterday, all too clear and lucid in his mind. He was experiencing it all, feeling it all, throwing open doors in the back of his mind he hadn’t dared open in fifty-odd years.

Kenney lit a cigarette, waited. He felt like a swimmer with a concrete cinderblock chained to his ankle… no matter how hard he kicked, he could not break the surface, could not find the light and air and sanity again. Forever he would drift in the murk. That’s what coming here had done to him. It had robbed him of something vital he would never again find.

Godfrey said, “We heard a sound, me and Johnny. A creaking floorboard up over our heads, a sort of shifting or dragging sound. We knew that we were not alone then… someone was with us and I had the crazy, unshakable feeling that they knew we were there, that they were waiting for us above. Together, Johnny and I went up the stairs to the second floor, side by side, wired together and inseparable. Maybe it was just all the negative energy in that place arcing and snapping, maybe it had magnetized us together. Regardless, we got up there and looked down the hallway, struck—at least I was—by a sense of, I don’t know, a sort of a neutrality, if that makes any sense. What we had heard wasn’t there. There was no one on the second floor but us. Then Johnny elbowed me and I saw, God, I saw, all right.”

“What did you see?” Kenney said, tense himself by that point.

“Dirty tracks, old dirty tracks on the floor and they led down the hallway, led to a set of narrow steps at the end. Those steps led up to the attic and that’s when we realized that Genevieve was keeping her dead daughter up in the attic. The passageway going up there was narrow, we had to go up one at a time. Johnny led. We had no weapons except for my pocketknife and a stick Johnny had picked up in the yard. He was carrying it like a club. Quietly as we could, we went up those steps to a closed door at the top. The steps themselves were just filthy from dirty, bare feet.

“Going up there took everything I had. I was sweating and shaking, trying to swallow down something like a scream knotted up in my throat. There were dirty handprints all over the door and we started to hear sounds from behind it… like the sliding of bare feet, the subtle creak of a floorboard. Like something in there, something was trying real hard to be quiet. The smell was enough to pull your guts up and out… sickening, gassy, decayed. I’ll tell you right now that I was scared shitless and the memory still scares me shitless. Johnny reached out and turned the doorknob and as he did, we heard something come drifting out from the other side… a high, hoarse giggling. A cackling like that of some old storybook crone with a dark, terrible secret she wanted to share. It was bad. I think I might have whimpered, I don’t know, but that sort of laughter… it was just horrible, wizened and deranged. Maybe Pearl had been eleven years old when she died, but what had gotten inside her down in the grave, it was old… ancient, insane. Evil, maybe.

“God knows that ragged, hysterical laughter had put ice in my blood. A puppet would laugh like that, Lou, about the time it woke up and realized it was alive. It should have been enough to set us running, but Johnny wouldn’t have it. It wasn’t enough. He was white and sweaty, eyes wide and wet, but still it wasn’t enough. He had to see. So he kicked that door open and a blast of reeking, humid air hit us like something rolling from a slaughterhouse or an open grave. It was black in there, just a little bit of light coming in through a boarded-up window near the roof peak. I… I can’t be sure now. I was so scared. It felt like I was filled with electricity. I wanted to throw up and scream and laugh and just fall down and cry. Maybe all at the same time.

“As I said, it was awful dark in there and it just stank bad like spoiled pork and wet earth. I heard a dragging, metallic sound and I realized it was the sound of chains. And then that giggling again… girlish, yet profane, obscene. I knew whatever was up there was even then slinking out of the shadows to meet us. Just as I knew we were going to see something that would turn our hair white, something that had crawled out of a grave, black and stinking and wormy. If it was Pearl… then death and resurrection had yanked her mind out by its dirty roots. That’s when it spoke to us. And I can’t be really sure if I actually heard it or it was in my mind, but I can remember what it said: “C’mon, Johnny… c’mon, Matty… I’ve got something I want you to see, something I want you to touch, to feel…”

“And then? Well, she stepped out of the shadows, got as close as she could with that chain around her ankle. I’m pretty sure I screamed. She stood there, hunched over and dwarfish, like a living skeleton in a fancy dress that was just filthy and flyblown. And that face… leering and wicked, like something sunk in a pond, worked by leeches and tunneled by worms, white and puckered with a gray, grinning mouth full of narrow, overlapping teeth that were brown and black like she’d been chewing tobacco and graveyard soil. She held her arms out to us and the flesh hung off her fingers in loops. And when she spoke, her voice was clotted with earth, “There’s a place for you below, a nice place for good little boys…”

“Well, we ran. We fell down the stairs or maybe we didn’t, all I know is that suddenly we were in that hallway below and I was certain she would come drifting down at us in a patch of fog like a vampire in an old movie. But she didn’t. We could hear her up there, pulling on her chain, grunting and shrieking and laughing. But that was all we heard. We ran out of there and I don’t think we stopped running until we made Haymarket.”

Godfrey was real quiet after that, panting and mopping sweat from his brow with a hankie, just staring out the window of his cruiser, off through the headstones maybe to where Pearl Crossen was buried. After a time, he said, “I can’t be sure even now how much of that really happened. I was scared, Lou. God, I’ve never been that scared since. We never told a soul about that, at least I didn’t. Johnny’s family moved down to Chicago not a year later and I’ve never seen him since.”

Kenney let himself breathe. It was quite a story. “Okay, but that’s not all. Something… I mean, something had to be done about that situation.”

Godfrey nodded. “There’s not much else, but I’ll tell you. This is what my uncle Tommy told me two years before he died. My old man refused to ever speak of those days. He took them to his grave with him. About a month later, everyone had had enough. Uncle Tommy, my old man, and two other deputies went out to the Crossen place. Tommy said it smelled out there, just as I remembered. The long grass in the front yard, he said, was full of bones… not human, mind you, but animal—dogs and woodchucks, skunks and weasels and bobcats. It was horrible. All that roadkill Pearl had been dragging home, I guess. Genevieve saw them out there and came out onto the porch with her husband’s old .30-30 and put it right on the trespassers in her yard. They told her to lower that goddamn rifle and she said she would do no such thing, but they had better get off her property before she ventilated their asses for ’em. Tommy said Genevieve looked like hell, dirty and stinking, hair all wild and eyes wide and bloodshot. Tommy claimed he saw something peeking through the shuttered attic window.

“‘What you got up there, Mrs. Crossen?’ he says to her. ‘What you got inside that house?’

“‘Wouldn’t you like to know, Tommy Godfrey,’ she says back at him. ‘What I got I ain’t sharing with nobody. You get your own.’

“Now it was my old man’s turn: ‘You got Pearl in there, Genevieve?’

“‘You never goddamn mind!’

“‘Dammit, Genevieve,’ my old man says, ‘Pearl’s dead, you gotta know she’s dead.’

“At that, Genevieve just laughed. ‘So you say, so you say. But you don’t know, you don’t know anything. I knew’d it were my baby when she wandered into the yard. And since she come back… it’s never been so good.’

“Tommy said he knew then, as maybe he’d been suspecting all along, that Genevieve didn’t really have Pearl in there. You see, what it was was one of them things from the ruined village, one of them from below. A young one, a female. It wandered into the yard as Genevieve said and Genevieve, just plain out of her head, adopted the thing. Cared for that little horror. Loved it and dressed it up like Pearl. But, dear God, it wasn’t Pearl, it wasn’t even human.”

“What did they do?” Kenney asked.

“Nothing they could do. They left. Maybe they could have gotten a warrant, said Genevieve was crazy or something. She surely was. Regardless, they just got the hell out of there, weren’t sure what to do. But then something happened that brought it all to a head.”

“What’s that?”

“A child disappeared. A kid named Ralph Blodden. I knew him. His old man ran the Exxon station in Haymarket. Ralph disappeared one night and the facts are pretty tangled up, but I’m guessing he wandered out after dark and went missing. Two days later he still hadn’t shown. What I tell you now is from my uncle Tommy. He got it from Willy Chalmers, who used to run an apple orchard outside Haymarket. Willy told my uncle this story when he was dying of cancer, figured he had nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Wanted it off his soul, I guess.

“What happened was, people were pretty much up at arms about the Blodden kid gone missing and it didn’t take much of a leap on their part to tie it up with Genevieve and Pearl. So they went out there one night with guns and cans of gas and dogs. I think you know what happened next. They found the Blodden kid in a shed behind the house, just hanging there, seasoning up, I guess. Willy said he was getting pretty ripe… whether Pearl killed the kid or Genevieve did, figuring she had to provide for that ghoul she thought was her daughter, nobody knew and nobody gave a shit.”

No, Kenney figured, I bet they didn’t. I’ll just bet they didn’t.

Not that he blamed them for what he knew was coming next. Something had to be done and the law was pretty much useless, so Willy Chalmers and the boys—probably liquored up to give themselves the sort of steel that would be needed—did the job themselves. A small town and its horrendous secrets. You just never knew, never suspected the sort of things crawling under its surface. And most towns had secrets, Kenney knew, dark, awful truths kept buried so the townsfolk themselves could sleep at night.

Godfrey sighed. “Genevieve came out on the porch and Pearl came with her. Willy didn’t describe exactly how the girl looked, only to say that she was full of worms, crawling with bugs and her eyes… that’s what had stayed with him all those years… eyes shining yellow and behind them, something terrible. Genevieve told the child to get inside. The men were crazy and she knew it. Guns started going off. Willy said he didn’t know who fired first, but Pearl took two or three rounds and Genevieve took a few more. A shotgun blast tore her belly open. Pearl… that thing… dragged her mother into the house and the men started dousing the house with gasoline. It was an old place and it went up pretty quick. Willy told Tommy that his last sight of Pearl and Genevieve was when the house was engulfed by flames. Through the blazing doorway, Pearl was holding Genevieve’s corpse, screaming and cackling and shouting out awful things and then the roof came down on them and that was it. They burned up with the house.”