The Brain Eaters

Chapter 21

Dena drove away from the Biotron plant with a feeling of relief. There was something about an empty office building that gave her the creeps. Ghosts seemed to lurk in the shadowy corners and behind the empty desks. Ghosts of the people who spent so much of their lives there.

She pulled to a stop in front of her own little house and sat for a moment looking at it. The house looked lonely. Dena exhaled sharply through her teeth and told herself to stop personalizing buildings. She had enough to occupy her mind without cluttering it up with silly fantasies.

She got out of the car, walked up the short path to the front door, and let herself in. Although she had been away only three days, the house seemed to Dena to have a musty, uncared-for feel to it. A fine layer of dust covered the polished hardwood surfaces. A spider had begun a web at the edge of the mantel. She let it be.

Moving with a practiced efficiency, she packed a large suitcase with clothes and enough personal articles to sustain her for a couple of weeks. She tried to think of it as going on a vacation trip, but she could not rid herself of the unsettling thought that she would never return to this little house.

As she went through the door, Dena could not resist turning for a last look. The place held no really powerful memories for her. She had lived there for two years in relative comfort but without any sense of fulfillment. There had been a few good times, but there had been loneliness, too.

She closed the door decisively behind her, locked it, and walked briskly back to the car. How silly, she told herself. I’ll probably be back there in a few days dusting off the furniture and wondering what all the fuss was about. She keyed Corey’s engine to life and pulled away down the quiet, elm-shaded street.

The clock in the dashboard told her that only twenty minutes had passed since she left Corey at Biotron. He would not yet have had time to learn anything from Dr. Kitzmiller. She was not eager to sit outside the gate and wait for any length of time. Not under the cold eyes of the security guard.

For a moment she considered going back to the little house to wait there but rejected the notion almost immediately. Then it occurred to her she was only a mile or so away from Carol Denker’s house. She could kill a few minutes by stopping in to see how Carol was feeling.

Dena had already turned up the short street that led to the Denkers’ place when she remembered the circumstances under which she had last seen Carol. The brief flulike symptoms that kept her home from work, the headache when she came back. Maybe going out to see Carol now was a bad idea.

Dena was disgusted with herself. She was falling victim to the paranoia that had people locking their doors against neighbors and refusing to answer their telephones for fear they could catch something over the wire. Carol was her friend. Besides, if anything were wrong, she could simply turn around and drive back to meet Corey.

Like most of the houses in the small town of Wheeler, the one where the Denkers lived was more than sixty years old. It was a boxy two-story frame building with a wide front porch and a brick fireplace chimney running up one wall. It was too big for the family of Carol, her husband, and two small children. However, the rent was half of what they would have to pay in Milwaukee, where Ken was working for his doctorate at the university. So Ken commuted back and forth from Wheeler while Carol worked at Biotron.

The street was quiet under its heavy green canopy of shade trees. Nothing unusual about that. All the streets in Wheeler were quiet, all the time. Dena was a little surprised to see Ken’s pickup in the driveway. He would normally be at school now. In the garage she could see the Ford that Carol drove. Something wrong?

Stop being silly.

She parked in the street and started toward the big house. A tricycle was overturned in the walk at the foot of the porch steps. It must belong to one of the Denker children. The boy. He was five, wasn’t he? And the girl was what? Two? Close enough. Now, what were their names? Oh, what did it matter? Dena was not there to have a conversation with the children.

She had not really been social friends of the Denkers; her contact with Carol was almost entirely at the office. Their friendship was based on their mutual profession and shoptalk. Dena had been invited out there for dinner a couple of times. She had reciprocated, but that was it. She knew Ken as a quiet, pleasant man who looked something like a scholarly Robert Redford, but she had never talked with him about anything serious. The kids were always clean and well behaved. Thinking about it as she approached their house, Dena was surprised at how little she really knew these people.

Actually, Dena would not have minded seeing more of Carol’s kids. She liked children and once in a while regretted not having any of her own.

She climbed to the porch and rang the bell, then waited nervously for someone to come.

Silence.

The window shades were pulled down behind the lacy living-room curtains, so she could not see inside. That was another odd thing. Shades were not drawn at that time of day. Dena felt a tiny prickle of apprehension.

To satisfy herself that she had really tried, Dena gave the bell key another jab. When there was still no response, she turned with relief and started off the porch.

A scream.

Dena froze, her foot on the top step. Unmistakably, it had been a scream. Thin, high-pitched, and terrified. And it came from inside the Denkers’ house.

Again.

A child’s scream of eye-popping terror.

Get out of here, Dena’s good sense told her. You don’t know what might be happening in there. Anyway, it’s none of your business. It might be just one of the kids getting spanked.

And yet she did not move to leave.

“Help me! Helllp!”

That was not a kid getting spanked. That was a kid in deadly fear.

Now she could not go. A human being needed help. Dena looked quickly at the neighboring house, separated from the Denkers’ by a wide yard. Nothing doing there. She turned toward the house across the street. Quiet and lifeless. From the urgency in the little voice calling for help, Dena feared she might be too late if she ran to one of the houses to try to get somebody.

She turned and walked slowly back across the porch. Her movements were stiff and wooden, as in a dream. But this was no dream, the sick dread in the pit of her stomach reminded her. She walked across the thick welcome mat to the heavy front door. She tried the old ornate doorknob. It was cold against the flesh of her palm.

The knob turned.

The door opened.

The hallway was dim, even with the light that came in through the open door and the fan-shaped window above it. Dena left the door open and moved cautiously into the living room. The furniture was contemporary in light wood and fabrics, contrasting with the house, which was dark wood and gloomy wallpaper.

There was light in the living room, but the angle of illumination was wrong, throwing shadows crazily where no shadows should be. Dena looked around and saw why. A floor lamp had been knocked over, the shade tilted so its light shined upward from the floor.

A fight? An intruder? What am I doing here?

“Help me!”

The cry came from upstairs, muffled but unmistakable. Dena started for the stairway.

As she stepped through the archway from the living room, she stopped, sucking in her breath. At the bottom of the stairs Ken Denker sat on the floor with his back against the wall. His fine blond hair was tangled. His glasses hung drunkenly from one ear. From his stomach protruded the black wooden handle of a butcher knife.

Dena put a hand to her mouth to keep from crying out. Her stomach contracted. From upstairs came the scream again and a thumping sound. The children must be locked in up there, she thought, and started up the stairs.

There was no light on the second floor other than what filtered past the window blinds. Dena did not take the time to search for a switch but continued in the direction of the child’s cries. She made her way cautiously down the dim hallway; then suddenly she stopped.

Someone was there.

A shadowy figure stood motionless ahead of her, outside a closed door. The paneling of the door was splintered and slick. Blood dripped from the hands of the standing figure. Fat red pustules broke out on the face as Dena watched. The face was contorted and swollen with the boils but still recognizable. Carol Denker.

Dena turned and started back for the stairs. Helping a child out of a room where he was trapped was one thing, but facing this wild wreck of a woman was something else. Bravery and cowardice were meaningless terms. Dena had only one thought — get the hell out of there.

She was not quick enough. Carol exploded away from the battered door and came at her like something out of a nightmare, her mouth gaping, uttering an incoherent growl. Dena stretched out for the railing at the top of the stairs, but she was hit in the back and knocked staggering against the far wall. She bounced off and hit the floor. Fireflies danced in the darkness before her eyes.

When her vision cleared, she saw Carol coming at her, hands extended, fingers bent into claws. Saliva oozed from her mouth and hung in a swaying, silvery thread from her chin as she advanced.

“No!” Dena cried. “Carol, don’t! It’s Dena!”

No flicker of comprehension showed on the mad face coming toward her.

Painfully, Dena pushed herself to her feet, back against the plaster wall. One elbow tingled where she had scraped it in her fall. She put out her hands defensively, knowing as she did so how impotent she was against the maniacal strength of the woman.

Carol was close enough for Dena to hear her wheezing breath and smell the stink of her sweat. Then a dark shape rose behind her in the stairwell. Dena stretched to look over the woman’s shoulder and was shocked to see Ken Denker coming up behind her.

The knife was still buried in Ken’s stomach. The front of his pants was glistening dark with blood. He walked unsteadily toward his wife, who was still reaching out for Dena.

“Carol!” Ken’s voice had a gargling sound as blood welled up in his throat.

In some recess of the woman’s tortured mind, the voice registered. Carol Denker turned away from Dena to face her husband. He took a lurching step toward her and grunted with the effort.

Carol suddenly clapped both hands to her head and screamed. The nails dug into her flesh and tore it away in bloody strips. Her cry was a banshee wail like nothing that should come from a human throat. Still screaming, she lunged at the stumbling, oncoming figure of her husband.

They came together with a thud. Carol’s body drove the knife still deeper into the man’s stomach. With their arms about each other in a bloody last embrace, they lurched together to the top of the stairs. Then, in grotesque slow motion, they toppled over and fell bumping and crashing down the uncarpeted steps to the hardwood floor in the hallway below.

For a long moment Dena continued to stand where she was, her back pressed against the wall. There was no sound from downstairs, only the whimpering of a child behind the door that had been battered by the mad mother.

When she got her breathing and heartbeat under control, Dena went to the stairs and slowly descended, one cautious step at a time. Ken and Carol Denker lay together in a tangle of limbs at the bottom. Mercifully, Carol’s face was turned away, hiding the ugly broken pustules. She might have been in repose, were it not for the unnatural angle at which her head lay on one shoulder.

Ken Denker’s eyes were open and unblinking. He seemed to look off to the corner of the ceiling and beyond. One arm lay over his wife’s back in a last cold caress.

Dena hurried back up the stairs. It took her several minutes to tear the broken paneling loose so she could reach in and open the bedroom door. Inside she found the children. They were huddled on the bed, the little girl crouched behind her brother. Tears rolled from the girl’s eyes; the boy stared. His narrow chest heaved with strangled sobs.

“It’s all right,” Dena said, keeping her voice soft. “Don’t be afraid of me.”

The children edged back away from her on the bed as she approached.

“I won’t hurt you.”

“Mommy will,” the boy said. “She hurt Daddy.”

“It’s all over now. Come, I’ll take you out of here.”

“She was trying to hurt us, too,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t let her in.”

Moving slowly as though approaching frightened wild animals, Dena reached out to the children. Cautiously, they let her take their hands. The boy looked around with frightened eyes as she led them into the hall. The little girl continued to cry without making a sound.

Dena led them to the back stairs and down to the kitchen.

“Where’s my mommy and daddy?” the boy said, looking around.

Dena’s throat closed, and she could not answer him. She led the two children out the back door and around to the front of the house. The boy kept looking back toward the blank windows and the open front door of his home. The little girl looked at nothing.

The commotion had finally roused a neighbor, a stout, gray-haired woman wearing an apron.

“What’s happened?” she said, her mouth tight with fear.

“Can you take the children?” Dena asked.

“Yes, of course. Where are the parents?”

“They’re inside.” Dena looked quickly down at the boy, who was watching her. “Please call the sheriff.”

“The sheriff? But what —?”

“Please.” Dena cut her off.

The woman looked down from the children to the open door, then back at Dena. She nodded her understanding. “Come along, kiddies,” she said. “I have some cookies over at my house. I think they’re still warm.”

Dena looked her thanks at the woman and hurried out to the car. She started it up and drove wildly back toward the Biotron facility. She wanted nothing so much at that moment as to be in the arms of Corey Macklin.