Lake was listening the night his baby sister was being made. They thought he was asleep, but he could hear them doing it. He heard the names Pa called Mama, words that he wasn’t quite sure what they meant at the time. He could hear Pa screaming. They both were making scary, ugly sounds. He didn’t even know people could make sounds like that. He lied there awake in his bed, pushing hard against his thing with his hands, trying to keep it down, but it just wouldn’t go. Other than that, he tried to stay as still as he could, listening, watching.
That was the first night Lake saw the snakes in the walls. Swimming and slithering, in and out. He was so scared, he didn’t know what to do. Pa would’ve whooped him good if he had seen all them tears rolling down his face. His eyes were stinging something fierce, and his throat was so filled with snot that he thought he might choke, but he didn’t move. If he moved, those snakes might see him. If they saw him, they might get him.
After that, when he’d be listening in on Mama’s bridge club talking about which of the menfolk from town had been out to see "it”, seemed Mama didn’t want to talk much about it anymore. They had been meeting at the Laughinghouse home every Thursday for as far back as Lake could remember and he’d have had the belt taken to his butt for sure if they ever knew he was spying on them.
From what he could tell, they didn’t really play bridge that often. They’d lay the cards out in case Pa came home, but mostly they just told tales about the house on Cutter Lane and “that thing” that was supposed to live in the cellar. Spitting twice at every mention. Lake had never seen women spit so much. Not to mention that these were women who prided themselves on being ladies. He figured it must have been another Churcher thing Mrs. Darvy or Mrs. Orr coaxed his mother into.
They belonged to the Church of the White Elephant now and they were always trying to get Mama to go to a service, just to see. She seemed real interested at first, but Pa was against it. He didn’t like the way they knocked on the doors of folks, bothering them around suppertime. And Lake had heard him say that he sure as hell wasn’t worshipping no damned elephant.
Mrs. Orr said they didn’t worship the Elephant, but that it showed them things. It showed them how to keep their feet on the path of righteousness and how important it was to stay away, to keep others away from things like that house of ill repute.
The kids at Lake’s school told tales about the house, too, though not with as much certainty, whispering the word “whorehouse” like it meant haunted or cursed. But Lake knew there were more secret reasons the adults wanted them to stay away from that place, reasons that had to do with her, the one Mama’s bridge club was always talking about. The one they called Pussyface (spit twice).
It was said that she used to be part of the freak show in the Wandering World Carnival, and came to live there in Hatry when the carnival split up. Lake had vague memories of the strange circus of the funeral procession, that spring morning the carnies had returned the body of Mathias Wandering to Hatry. He was only three at the time and if there were freaks of any sort, he could not remember them. They must have been in cages or had their deformities hidden. He remembered many people in heavily hooded robes. He saw solemn acrobats and sorrowful clowns. He had seen the White Elephant that day. And he remembered the White Elephant seeing him.
The carnival ended its tour in the town where Mathias Wandering began it. Many of the carnies took up residence there and soon became pillars of the community. Sarnhim Godwell, later the Reverend Godwell, bought the old town hall and turned it into the Church, claiming he had learned the Truth. Him and his group were hard working and well respected, promised to build a new schoolhouse and swayed many of Hatry’s townsfolk to their way of thinking.
But some of the other carnies weren’t as welcome. No one wanted uglies and retards as neighbors. Those that, after significant ridicule, eventually followed Madame Lareux, the fortune teller, to the outskirts of town, came to settle into the house on Cutter Lane. They said she took in the clowns and the freaks, that she took “her” in, that thing. Seems Madame Lareux pitied her for her strange face, and because the carnies just kept her in a cage, like any of the other animals, with only hay to sleep on.
Lake got the feeling that his Mama’s friends thought that even that was too good for her. And Mama used to curse her just as much, spitting right along with them. After that night in his room, though, the night he heard them, the night he saw the snakes, everything changed. Lake knew the ladies must’ve started suspecting something wasn’t right as Mama got quieter and quieter about it over the next few meetings. The other ladies would give a few spits, but it wouldn’t be long before Mama would seem to want to change the subject.
They didn’t say nothing about it at first, but he heard them whispering to each other when Mama would go get drinks from the kitchen. Lake couldn’t hear most of what they said, but what he did hear hinted that his Pa was one of the men who had been out to see “it”. Maybe more than once. Lake didn’t like them talking that way. He wanted to tell them that they were wrong, that his Pa wouldn’t do that to Mama. But he didn’t. He swallowed his anger down and kept his mouth shut.
The next Thursday they didn’t come over. Or the next. Mrs. Darvy and Mrs. Orr, came by early in the next week to fetch some things they had left at the house. Lake’s mother sent him to his room, but he just went around the corner and listened. He heard his Mama ask why they hadn’t been by. They said things were different now, said that she was different, that her eyes were changing. She asked them what in Sam Hill they were talking about, but that was all they would say. They gathered their things and they left. Just before the screen door slammed behind them, he heard Mrs. Darvy whisper to his mother that she would pray for her.
It wasn’t long after that Mama found out she was pregnant. She’d been getting sick in the mornings and he’d taken to fixing up his own lunches for school. He was starting to get real worried about her, but he was glad to hear old Doc Framhein say that it was just her being with child that was the cause of it. "Must’ve been quite a spring" he’d laughed. “Women all over town are knocked up!”
Mama wasn’t so happy about it, though. She cried and cried when he gave her the news. It didn’t seem to affect Pa at all, not in a good or a bad way. He just kind of smiled this smug, half-flat smile, like it wasn’t even news to him.
He started working late at the steel mill and it got to where they hardly saw him anymore. He was gone when his son got up for school and Lake was in bed by the time he got home. That isn’t to say he was asleep. He heard his father stumbling in several times, knocking things over, singing and humming these little songs. Lake had only ever heard him like that when he was drunk, so he assumed that’s what he was.
After a while Lake felt like he was the only person who lived there. Pa weren’t never home and Mama didn’t seem to care much about anything. She seemed so lost in thought all the time. She stopped asking him about school or what his grades were. He’d try to talk to her, but he could tell she wasn’t really listening. Made him kind of sad, but he never told her. Then she took to looking at the walls. She brought down the pictures and the mirrors off them so they were just bare. Sometimes she’d pick a wall and just sit and stare at it for hours. Not doing nothing. Just staring. Like she was watching something out the window.
He’d get up in the mornings, go through the day at school, come home, and she’d still be sitting there in the same spot. Like she hadn’t moved an inch all day long. When she was in that way, he could walk right up to her and she wouldn’t even notice him, until he was close enough to touch her. Lake thought he might try to get a jump out of her a couple of times, but she always turned her head and her eyes to him so slow. Except the once when he asked her if she was watching for the wallsnakes. She turned on him quick that time.
"What’d you say, boy? What’d you say? What do you mean 'wallsnakes’, boy? Answer me!“
He fessed up to how he’d seen them in his room, that night as he was listening to her and Pa. How they moved in and out of the walls, but there weren’t no holes. How he’d just layed there, too scared to move. She looked at him like he was puking on her. Then a queer thing happened. Her gums started to bleed. Lake watched a little red trickle crawl down his mother’s tooth and drip onto her bottom lip. She covered her mouth and headed for the washroom, yelling at him to go outside. He followed her, trying to ask her what was wrong.
"Damnit, boy, I done told you to go out and play, now git!”
He went out and sat on the front porch for a while and just got to thinking. Thinking about what all had been going on, what was wrong with Mama? About the strange way his folks both were in. Wondering why exactly it was that Mama’s bridge club didn’t come around anymore. Turning over and over in his head all the stories he’d heard them tell about. All the talk about the shunned house on Cutter lane. The evil “it” that lived there, in the cellar. Wondering just how bad of a whoopin’ he’d get if he went out there to see about the way things really were. Pa used to say that sometimes a man has to do things for himself, else they won’t get done. Mama told him to go out. He hopped on his bike and was riding down June Street before he’d even really made up his mind.
Lake wasn’t quite sure where Cutter Lane was at exactly or if he’d know 'the house’ when he saw it. When he was little, his Grandpa spoke of it having been carved from a single, giant tree. The tree that gave this town its name. Lake had never believed him, but they were good stories. He careened his bicycle up this street and down that one until it seemed he wasn’t even in town anymore. He started passing tarpaper shacks and rotted, old, grey barns and the scruffed faces of folks he’d never seen in town, not even at Horlocker’s General. In dirt yards, he saw kids playing that weren’t much younger than him. But none of them went to his school, which was still the only school house until Oatsfield.
The sky smelled pregnant with rain. A stale, smoky scent that curled into his nose, weaving itself between peppery tendrils of violets and witch grass. He was starting to feel awful lost and was having thoughts about maybe turning back, not being real sure that he even wanted to find the place.
Pa says it goes that way, sometimes. That you can’t ever seem to find what you’re looking for until you give up looking. Then it’ll find you, just like that rickety, old signpost found his boy. It was all full of little holes, like somebody had been shooting it through with buckshot. Lake saw the worms when he got closer though. Inching over it, eating at it, making their homes in the thing. He watched them for a bit, but they kind of turned his stomach.
He looked around and thought to himself “Last chance to turn back. You can still make it home in plenty of time for supper.” But, he hadn’t paid much mind to the way he had taken to get there and figured Mama probably wasn’t cooking nothing anyhow. So, off he pedaled over the little wooden bridge that marked the beginning of forbidden Cutter Lane.
It started as a decently smooth road, but it crumbled slowly into gravel, then into a wide dirt path, broken up here and there by outstretching roots. The down hills were a lot more fun than the up hills, and the worst part of the road was so bumpy and full of ruts that it made him even more queasy. When, after about a good half hour or more’s ride, He finally stopped to rest, his legs were all wobbly and he could barely stand. His guts were still shaking and he thought he might throw up. He rested for a minute or two, choking dusty air into his parched lungs. Thinking how he hadn’t even seen a shack for miles, wishing he had brought some water, wondering if he’d come all this way for nothing.
For the first time he took in a real look at his surroundings, more than just a skimming glance looking for the house. That’s when he noticed that something was wrong with the trees. They weren’t like the sort of regular trees he was used to seeing around Hatry. They were thicker, more bent. All crooked and full of knots. They weren’t spaced right, either. They were too close together, like they were crowding each other for room. Some of them even seemed to be growing through each other. Maybe that was why, despite their size, they looked so gray and unhealthy. He found no shame in his being somewhat afraid of them. They looked as if at any second they would just uproot themselves and come shambling after him, reaching for him with their clawed, twisted branches.
Lake heard a rumbling noise echoing through the woods, like his fears coming to life. It started closing in on him, but coming from up ahead, slowly mixing itself with the sounds of crunching gravel and of metal grinding against metal. He saw Mr. Orr’s car come over the crest of the hill, barreling down towards him. He barely had time to get out of the way before the car rattled right on past. Mr. Orr had nearly hit him, but he didn’t even slow down. If he saw Lake at all, he wasn’t about to admit it.
Lake watched his car disappear over the top of another hill, back towards town, wondering what purpose would’ve brought pious Mr. Orr out this way if it wasn’t the same as his. His throat was gritty and dry, but his faith was revived. He walked his bike hard up the hill from the direction Mr. Orr’s car had come, feeling a tad more confident that he didn’t have a whole lot farther to go. As he walked over the crest of the hill, the forest ended abruptly in a wall of trees grown twisted around each other. Beyond them laid a great, round holler with a steaming valley of grayed grass and yellowed ground in its belly. He looked toward the center of that valley and knew instantly that he had found what he’d come to see.
His grandpa had told all kinds of tales about the way this town started, about the Hate Tree, in the years before he died. Huge, ugly thing, he said. All sickly black-green, warted and wet. Soft, he said. Told Lake how the settlers of this town hated it. Wanted it burned or chopped down, but no one would. Stayed as far away from it as they could feel safe. How they were afraid of it. Built the town around it like they were trying to imprison it. And how, a not long after Lake was born, somebody had carved a house out of it, only no one knew who. Grandpa said that most folks in town assumed it must’ve been them carnival people what done it, since Madame Lareux came to live there and run it as a business. For some reason, no one questioned her claim to it.
He had been to that carnival once, he’d told Lake. Had his fortune read by the old gypsy herself. He didn’t care for Madame Lareux at all. He’d hinted that she told him some awful things. Strange, dark times coming, she said. Ruined his whole night. Couldn’t even enjoy the rest of the carnival, ended up leaving with his head full of vicious portents. So, he said, it didn’t surprise him at all that she was keeping a monster underneath that evil old tree. That house on Cutter Lane.
Lake stared at it, cradled down there alone in the heart of the valley, its limbs and branches drooping around it like diseased tentacles. Watching it writhe in the wind below him, he could barely believe he was really there. Not a kid in school had even lied about being this near to it before. Boosted his courage to think that he was the first. He knew he had to find a way to get close enough to it as to where he could investigate without being seen.
He walked his bike, off the road, through the woods along the ridge, until he could see the back of the house. He parked it at the top of the hill, thinking a kid’s bike might look suspicious laying around out there. Supposed he’d have a better chance on foot.
Down into the valley Lake ran, trying to find what cover he could. There wasn’t much, a few tall, scraggly pie weeds here and there. He was lucky, he figured. No one was out on the grounds and he had a moment to take in the towering reality of this dreamy town legend. And as he came to stand next to the trunken wall of its base, he felt himself gasp. Seeing it that close up he knew, all the tales he’d heard must be true. And none of them were enough to describe the way his every sense marveled, riddled by the monstrous abnormality.
His fingers reached out for it, wanting to touch its smooth, fleshy bark and he wondered whether they would find anything, but air, dispersing the mirage altogether. That was not the case. It was soft, giving like a sponge under his fingertips. Lukewarm, sticky and wet. A strong rotten cherry sort of smell misted out from where he’d touched it, stinging his nose a bit. He took a couple steps back, and wiped his hand on his dungarees. He looked overhead at the thick, slithery tangle of branches, looming, dancing above him, dwarfing him. Too dizzying to look at for long.
He brought his eyes down, steadied himself and walked to his left, along the house’s backside, exploring its deeply ridged, rooty exterior. He thought he’d try peeping into a couple of windows, but they were all higher than he could get to. He knew he’d slip and bust his butt if he attempted to climb. If he got hurt, the jig would be up. All his chances of seeing her would be blown.
He was beginning to think he didn’t have much of a chance, anyway. Weren’t like he could just waltz right inside. He started walking back toward the other side, examining the house, considering his options, deciding that he didn’t have many. He had almost made it back around to the front of the house when, at last, he saw a glimmer of hope.
Up ahead of him. A hole. A small cavern, nestled in the “Y” of two large roots. Lake was sure he could fit through it, if he was willing to risk those few extra steps that would lead him into plain view of anyone at the house’s front. He leaned forward, trying to look down into it without being seen. It seemed to have a real faint light deep inside and odd sounds echoed from way down. Groans and grunts and sloppings like pigs, mostly. Couple voices, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
It didn’t matter. They were all being drowned out by that same kind of awful rumbling he’d heard when Mr. Orr’s car had come up over the hill at him. And he saw a car coming down Cutter Lane, into the valley. But it wasn’t Mr. Orr’s. It was Pa’s. Coming his way quick. He saw the doorway closing on his opportunity. He scrambled around to the hole, stuck his feet down in it and lowered himself in on his belly until only his eyes were above ground. He saw Pa pull up and slam the car door as he got out, seconds after Lake was in the pit. He started heading for the front of the house, but something made him pause. Lake thought Pa might know he was there somehow and was stopping to look for him. He didn’t stick around to find out. He released his grip, flipped over and slid down into that grimy tunnel. Away from his Pa and the daylight.
He was stopped at the bottom by an earthen wall with a wide-bladed fan set into it. A cellar wall, he told himself. The cavern was tall enough for him to stand down there, almost straight. When he did, he could see what was on the other side of that wall, in between the three blades of that slow turning fan.
The room was crowded with men. Most of them were only half dressed, their backs to him. Lake saw a few faces and some of them he recognized. He knew there was a woman in there somewhere, but, at first, he could barely see her at all. A swash of unhaired flesh here, a long, reddish curl where her head must be. He started wondering if he was in the right part of the basement. Then he heard one of the men say it.
“You fucking, pussyfaced whore!” After that he spit twice, on her Lake thought, but he couldn’t be sure. The men all looked dirty, slimy with sweat. From their mouths spewed horrible, nasty words. Some of them screamed like they hated her, like at any moment they might kill her. But others muttered words quietly, under their breath, that sounded like prayers.
The numbers of men were slowly getting smaller and he could see them taking their turns with her. He could see more of her. His thing started growing in his pants again, making him have to push it down against the wall. Lake couldn’t understand why his Mama and her friends hated this lady so much. Aside from what she was letting happen to her, he didn’t see anything so strange or horrible about her. He had seen naked women before. He remembered taking baths with Ma when he was younger and he’d sneaked a look or two at the playing cards Pa had brought back from overseas.
Then there was Carissa Darvy, Mrs. Darvy’s daughter. The only girl in the sixth grade with breasts. She picked on Lake all the time and he used to think she hated him. Until she took off her shirt one time when they were walking home alone through the woods. She asked him if he wanted to touch them. Of course, he did, but he got scared and ran, afraid she’d see how hard his thing was and laugh at him.
But this lady wasn’t laughing. She just kept rocking back and forth. One man would put seed in her, leave, and another would step right in to take his place. It reminded Lake of something he’d heard when they used to go to the old church, about how it’s better to drop your seed into a whore, than to let it spill on the ground.
He did notice something was strange about her skin, but he couldn’t tell exactly what it was. Like it was smoother than other women’s, or something. Even through the purples, greens and yellows of her bruises, her skin seemed, somehow, unnatural. She seemed too delicate to be taking the pounding she was receiving, to be able to handle the doll-like way she was being tossed around. A couple of times he heard cracking, like bones breaking, but if they were hers, she never let on. Even when they kind of crumpled her and he could see broken parts poking under her skin, she just kept bucking and rocking right up until the last set of men had their way with her.
The last one to spill his seed was the one in her mouth. Lake was sorry to have seen him so clearly. The man layed his hand on her face as he pulled his spent penis from her. He raised her head to look at him and, for the first time, Lake realized that she was missing her nose. The man looked down into her eyes for a long moment before shoving her by her head, toppling her off her hands and knees. She landed hard on the clay with a heavy, wet thud.
Lake still hadn’t gotten a good look at her face. Her long, wet curls were covering her features. Her hair was like strands of tightly coiled copper, contrasting, so vividly, with her ash pink skin. She looked as though she’d never seen the sun. He wondered how long she had been in this basement. Did she ever go outside? Or even upstairs? And who catered to her? The only furnishings in the bare walled room were a pile of hay and a bowl of water in the far corner, from what he could see. Didn’t anyone care about her? Would no friend or kin ever come to take her from this place?
He heard the men climb stairs he could not see as he watched her lie there, limp, unmoving. Watching her bruises shift and crawl over her body, before fading completely. Watching, in awe as her ribs unstuck themselves from her skin, fit themselves back into place.
She just laid there, shivering, lolling her head back and forth, making pitiful sobbing sounds. Lake thought she was crying. As her hair started to fall away from her face, he didn’t think that anymore. What he saw made him take in a quick breath of muddy air and his skin break out in a shudder of horripilation.
She didn’t have a nose. In its place were puffy folds of pink, glistening flesh. They trailed down to what might have been her mouth, but was really just a toothless hole, gummily sucking at the air from between her flabby, vertical lips. And the longer he listened to the noises she made, the less they sounded like sobs of despair. Instead, there seemed to be a gurgling laughter filling the room with its awful, jellied slopping.
Suddenly, she was up on her hands and knees again, as if she had been pulled up by some invisible hand. And for the first time, Lake saw 'it’ walk. Or crawl really. But, the way she moved, as though there were strings attached to her, leading her to her bed of hay like a marionette. Her head swayed with her movements, like it wasn’t quite fastened right to the rest of her.
His initial thoughts that she looked like a regular person had been wrong. He began to wonder if she was just deformed, or if she was human at all. He was sensing things about her, vague things he couldn’t account for. His head started feeling sort of light and dizzy. His stomach was suddenly going weak and his mouth was filling with saliva. His erection was long gone and his nuts crawled up inside of him to hide. He could feel the vomit boiling in his belly and he knew that at any second, his cover would be blown. He started feeling very unsafe, found himself wishing he had never come here.
And then she made a noise. From those strange, alien, yet unbearably familiar lips came a sound that was horrible and wet. Like the last thought of the drowned, that last, choking cry for help. The one that steals the final breath. It was that sound that bent Lake and loosened the contents of his stomach, splattering them onto the filth crusted floor. He stood quickly, peering through the fan to see if she had noticed.
She was looking at him. And, at last, he saw her eyes. Her terrible, beautiful eyes. Fool’s gold, reflected in the sun, with the pupils of a goat. Bringing images, hollow, consumptive visions of the awful rot, to flood and flash through his mind like memories. But they weren’t his memories.
He saw a city. A dark, stifling city, who’s only light seethed from some mottled, indefinite point. Hideous things moved slowly through the streets. No faces. No eyes. And the buildings were alive. Towers, writhing into the sour, yellowed-black sky, with walls of snakes and slugs and worms. Octopus things pushed their tentacles into one another’s flesh and lapped up and wallowed about in flowing streams of the city’s rancid, golden blood.
Lake saw her there. Convulsing amidst a thousand eels, biting at her, swimming into her filthy, slime-ridden anus. He saw vile grotesque things enter her vagina, leave dry, flaky seeds into the clusters of gelatinous, fatty eggs inside her. He saw wretched, malformed children, some with a blasphemous, ugly resemblance to human babies, born from the hole in the monster’s face. They mewled to her to suckle them. And when she ignored them in her bliss, some slithered, flopped and hobbled into the streets. Hoping for a bit of mother’s ink from a large breasted, gray squid. Others sucked up whatever mucus they could from the serpents that fathered them. And others still, slipped through the cracks, buried alive in a mass of wriggling worms, with only slime to breathe. While she went on bathing in the spastic pleasure of breeding, without a moment to pause.
Lake couldn’t break his eyes from her stare. And he could feel his eyes beginning to die. His soul felt yellow and sick. The visions of the city began to subside, fading in the patches of black moving before his deadening sight. Lake thought he was going blind. All he could see was black. But the black moved on and behind it was her face. The fan moved slowly.
She looked at him from just the other side of it then. She was laughing at him. He knew he couldn’t have imagined what a smile looked like on those lips until he saw it. He could see deep into her repugnant throat as her laughter spread those lips apart. White, frothy goo of the seeds of men dripped from her mouth like drool.
He could smell her putrid, sweet breath, feel it’s gelatin heat coating his face, thickening the trailing sweat. The skin of his cheeks and forehead started itching, like tiny bugs were crawling beneath it.
The blade of the fan sliced through her breath, cooling his face sticky, blocking his vision. When it passed, her back was to him. As she crawled in her puppeteered way toward the opposite wall, back to her bed of hay, he could see her true vagina. His stomach churned painfully. From its lipless sides protruded six miniature, trunk-like tubes ending in puckered, sucking mouths, with long, silvery needled tongues, darting out like those of lizards or snakes, licking at her dripping holes.
She faced the wall opposite Lake and sat on her ankles, her hands still on the ground, like an animal. She just stayed there for a while, staring at the wall, the way Mama does. For a long moment he watched her, waiting to see if she would move. The same fan blades must have passed him three times each, and still she didn’t budge. Lake stood there, coming out of a fog in his brain, like he’d only just woken up. As the next blade came down between the strange woman and himself, he decided it was time to go.
He had begun to climb back out of the hole, when he heard a noise severe and repulsive. The kind Grandpa would have said could “blight a crop, lame your best dog, and turn the milk quick and sure as it curdled your blood”. Revolting and wet, like music made of slime, it called from lips Lake knew belonged to her.
His blood thinned and paled, like diarrhea in his veins, as his widened eyes turned back to see. A strange pumpkin glow filtered throughout the room. The air changed, thickened, stagnated, choking the fan to a halt. Souring, with cloying scents of foul cherries and bitter, rotting licorice. Lake heard tiny chatterings of whiny, tittered laughter when he saw the first one. Just a small stretch of black, like a dark worm unearthing itself in the rain. As he saw it again and again, swimming through the wall as if it were congealed ditchwater, he felt like his guts were being burned away.
It looped and curled like a serpent. And it was something like a serpent, something like a fish, mostly like a bad dream. It appeared to have a slippery, segmented shell like a millipede, or a pill bug. That was the first one. The others followed quickly. The worms with starfished mouths, the eels, the squids. The tentacled snakes, the plump, fat-mouthed tubes of veiny, festering flesh, puking ribbons of pus on one another, slickening their whole rippling mass in globs of inky slime. In seconds, the wall was a writhing jumble of oily, shimmering, soft-bodied horror. Chattering their awful, cacophonous laughter, worse than if a thousand cicadas had been shoved, living, into his ears.
Through the slow quagmire of these wretched beasts came two cloven hooves with thin ankles covered in strands of snowy white. Breasts covered in fine, pale hairs that seemed untouched by the grime. They emerged from the walldwellers’ corruption holding hands with one another. Their identical bodies so well formed, their wispy white hairs made them look so soft, inviting. But their heads were long and strange with lush, full lips at the ends of their goatish muzzles. The twins had “her” eyes, yet they looked somehow more correct on these weird women.
They knelt at her sides, running their delicate, long fingered hands down the length of her body, petting her like a dog. They leaned close to her face and she whispered damp things into their lopping ears. They looked to the fan, through it, at Lake. They stood and began walking toward him quickly, too quickly, threatening. Their shivering faces lacked any sort of human expression, only the blind, awful stare of mad, idiot goats.
He turned, starting quickly up the mucky tunnel wall, slipping, scrambling, pissing. He kicked the wall beneath the fan and it gave under his foot like jelly. He clawed into the earth, trying to escape whatever fate these things had in mind for him. He kept sliding down, he couldn’t get out. He couldn’t make it back up. His ankle, something bit his ankle, tunneling in, trying to slice into the bone. Lake looked to his feet. Hundreds of hissing, chattering mouths and orifices, raspy little teeth clinching, in slug-like, greasy blacks and jaundiced deathly grays, crawling, slithering over each other, reaching for him. He kicked and clawed, barely choking out blubbery screams.
Somehow Lake made it out of that tunnel. Somehow he made it back to his bike, and was turning down June Street before he realized he was out of that hole at all. Maybe only then because of the quarter-sized dollops of rain that had begun smacking him in the face.
He was afraid to look around. He just kept riding, hoping not to see one more horrible thing. He tried not to pay attention to how strangely the lightning bugs moved through that early evening. Their witch-fires shaking, jiggling. Laughing at him. The whole world seemed to be mocking his sense of what once had been real. He just wanted to get home. He wanted to tell his Mama about all the things he saw, to tell her that her and her friends were right about that lady. That she was awful and ugly and evil, just like they said.
But he couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell anybody. He wasn’t supposed to know. He had no business being out there, doing what he did, or seeing what he saw. He’d be picking his own switch for sure.
Pa was home when he got there. Mama was lying on the couch crying and he was kneeling beside her. Lake thought he was comforting her, or trying to cheer her up. He started to walk over and ask what was wrong, why Mama had her hands over her face. But Pa wasn’t trying to make her feel better, at least, not the way he used to. Lake didn’t know his father could pronounce the foreign oddities that chanted from his lips. It sounded like he was praying.
They didn’t seem to notice that he had come home and Lake decided it best not to draw attention to himself. He didn’t place it immediately, but when he got up to his room, he could tell that something was different. The bed. His bed had been moved to the very center of the room. He never asked them why.
That night, he sat awake in that bed, staring, wearily watching the walls. Listening intently to his mother’s muffled sobs from the next room and to his Pa’s steady chanting in time with the creaking of their bedsprings. Shadows played on the walls. Many times he turned quickly on phantom snakes or faint sounds in the room as he absent-mindedly scratched at the ring of raised bumps on his ankle. But they were only ghosts in his mind.
As he began to nod off, slowly dipping in and out of consciousness, a movement outside the window snared his attention. The moon was a good three quarters full. He wished it hadn’t been so bright. He wished he’d never seen what he had. They were walking through his yard, about twenty feet from his house. That vile, freakish whore was being walked through his yard by her goat women.
Pussyface crawled naked on her hands and knees through the wet grass, pausing every few feet to dig a small hole, put her face to it, and fill it back in. Not once did she look up, but the eyes of the goats that walked upright beside her never left him. They stared their blank, emotionless stares as the moonlight danced and shimmered on their rich, golden eyes. He watched them as they passed, but he never left his bed. It was quiet in his parents room after that. He sat awake listening until long after the sun came up.
Lake doesn’t sleep much anymore. Mama doesn’t either, since Pa left. Just up and left, didn’t take his clothes or nothing. Mama found a note on the table and Lake saw that she figured from it, he wasn’t coming back. She didn’t want to show it to him, but he found it, later, in a drawer. Lake thought, maybe it’d say something in it about where his Pa had gone or why he left. He was wrong. What it said was this:
The air is getting thick
The walls are getting thin
Save your spit, woman
It ain’t no use
The note wasn’t signed, but it was definitely his father’s writing. They haven’t talked much about him since then. Mama’s still losing her teeth. She doesn’t have many left, but Lake tells her she still looks beautiful. She doesn’t look in the mirror much. Mostly she just stares at the wall, like she’s waiting for something.
She doesn’t know about the weird way her nose is growing a slow dent or how her top lip has taken to curling up in the middle. But Lake is a good son and won’t tell her. She has enough to worry about these days, with the baby and all. His little sister, Julie, was born in a delicate condition. Dr. Framhein said that she was lucky to be alive and that Mama should be grateful. And Mama is. She suckles her all day long, sitting there, just staring at the wall.
Julie has a broken, choppy cry, but Mama doesn’t notice. She just coos her, stroking the pale webbing of fine hairs that cover her tiny body. Lake doesn’t say how Julie’s odd, yellowish eyes make him feel sad and sickly or the way Mama’s own eyes are clouding. He can’t tell her how his baby sister bares certain, small resemblances to the strange women he saw with that pussyfaced whore in the house on Cutter Lane. He never told her how he saw Pa there that day, how he was the last to leave. And maybe he never will. They just don’t talk about it.