Carrion Comfort (115 page)

Culley’s bland face briefly took on the expression of a disappointed child, his fingers unclasped behind her, and he staggered back, clutching at the frame of the parlor doorway as if the floor had suddenly become vertical. With a pressure that knotted his huge biceps and splintered wood, he resisted the invisible force that had been pulling him back into the parlor and began climbing that imaginary wall, taking a heavy step in Natalie’s direction, his right arm extended as if seeking a handhold on her body.

Natalie braced her arm on Marvin’s suddenly sagging shoulder and fired twice more; the first bullet going through Culley’s palm into his belly, the second plucking off the lobe of his left ear as smoothly as if in a magic trick.

Natalie realized that she was sobbing and screaming, “Fall down! Fall down!” He did not fall but grasped the door frame again and slowly lowered himself to a sitting position, his descent perfectly choreographed with Marvin’s slow-motion slump. The knife clattered to the floor. Natalie caught the young black man’s head before his face struck polished wood; laid him near Catfish’s feet, and whirled upright, swinging the pistol in short arcs to cover the dining room door and the short hall to the kitchen door.

Nothing.

Still sobbing, gulping for air, Natalie started up the long staircase. She slapped at a light switch. The crystal chandelier overhanging the hall stayed dark and the landing at the head of the stairs remained a mass of shadows. Five steps up and she could make out the green glow oozing from under the door to Melanie Fuller’s bedroom.

Natalie realized that her sobs had turned into small whimpering noises. She silenced them. Three steps from the top, she paused and unhooked her web belt, slinging the pouches of C-4 over her left arm with the mechanical timer face up, its dial set to thirty seconds. A flick of the arming lever would activate it. She glanced at her EEG-monitor. The green active light still blinked; the trigger jack was still connected to the C-4 detonator. She paused another twenty seconds to let the old woman make her move if she was going to.

Silence.

Natalie peered at the landing. A single cane-seated Bentwood chair was placed to the left of the door to Melanie’s bedroom. Natalie knew immediately and with irrational certainty that this is where Mr. Thorne had sat guard through long years of nightly vigils. She could not see around the corner down the dark hall that led left off the landing to the back of the house.

Natalie heard a noise below and jerked around, seeing only the three bodies on the floor. Culley had slumped forward, his forehead making a soft noise as it contacted the polished wood.

Natalie swung back, raised the Colt, and stepped onto the landing. She expected the rush from the dark hallway, was braced for it, and almost fired the pistol into the deeper darkness there even when none came.

The hallway was empty; the doors closed.

Natalie turned back to Melanie’s bedroom door, finger taut on the trigger, left arm half extended with the heavy belt of C-4. Somewhere downstairs a clock ticked.

Perhaps it was a noise that alerted her, perhaps a slight current of air against her cheek, but some subliminal clue caused her to look upward at that instant, upward toward the ten-foot-high ceiling lost in shadows and to the darker square there— a small trapdoor to the attic— open, framing the tensed, poised body ready to drop and the six-year-old’s insanely grinning face and the hands turned to claws and the fingers turned to talons catching the green glow on sharpened steel.

Natalie fired the pistol upward even as she tried to leap aside, but Justin dropped with a loud hiss, the bullet struck only wood, and his steel claws raked her right arm, ripping the Colt from her grasp.

She staggered backward, lifting her left arm with the C-4 belt as a shield. Every Halloween when she was a little girl, Natalie had gone to the corner five-and-dime to buy “witch’s claws,” wax fingertips sporting three-inch painted wax nails. Justin was wearing ten of these. But the wax fingertips were steel and the nails were three-inch scalpel blades. Unbidden, there came the image of Culley or one of Melanie’s other surrogates fashioning the steel thimbles, filling them with molten lead, and watching as the child plunged his fingers into them, waiting for the lead to cool and harden.

Justin leaped toward her. Natalie backed against the wall and instinctively kept her left arm raised. Justin’s claws sank deep into the web belt, eight stilettos slashing through canvas, plastic liner, and the C-4
plastique
itself. Natalie gritted her teeth as at least two of the blades punctured the flesh of her forearm.

With an inhuman hiss of triumph, Justin ripped the belt of explosives from Natalie’s grasp and flung it over the railing. Natalie heard the dull thump from the hall below as twelve pounds of inert explosive landed heavily. She glanced at the floor, found the Colt lying between two uprights of the banister. She took half a step toward it but froze when Justin jumped first and sent the pistol spinning over the edge with a quick kick of one of his blue Keds.

Natalie feinted left and jumped right, trying to reach the stairway. Justin leaped to intercept her, forcing her back, but not before Natalie caught a glimpse of Culley pulling himself up the stairs, his massive body filling the stairway. He was a third of the way up. He had left a trail.

Natalie turned to run down the short hallway and stopped, sure that this is what the old woman had planned. God alone knew what waited for her in those dark rooms.

Justin moved quickly toward her, his fingertips a blur. Natalie completed her own turn in a single motion, bringing the Bentwood chair up with her bloodied right hand. One of the legs caught Justin in the mouth, knocking teeth loose, but the boy did not hesitate a second, advancing like the demon-possessed thing he was, hands flailing. The blades raked at the chair legs, ripped away the cane seat. Justin crouched and came in low, lunging for Natalie’s legs and thighs, seeking the femoral artery. She thrust downward with the chair, seeking to pin him to the floor.

He was too fast. The scalpel-sharp claws missed her thighs by inches and he danced back before she could pin him. He feinted right, lunged left, slashed upward, danced back, lunged again. The soles of his Keds made soft squeaking sounds on the hardwood floor.

Natalie blocked each attack, but already her lacerated arms ached from fatigue. A puncture wound on her left arm felt as if it had been gored to the bone. With each attack she gave ground until now her back was against the door to Melanie Fuller’s bedroom. Even with no time to think, a part of her mind insisted on generating an instant’s graphic image of the door snapping open, of her falling back into waiting, flailing arms, into grasping hands and clacking teeth . . .

The door remained closed.

Justin crouched and ran at her, accepting the punishment of chair legs smashing into his chest and throat, swinging his arms wide in an attempt to get the blades into her hands, arms, or breast. His arms were inches too short to make the blows connect.

Justin sank his talons into the wood frame of the chair seat and tugged, pulled again, attempting to tear the Bentwood away from her or break it in half. Splinters flew, but the frame held.

Somewhere behind the wall of wild panic in her, a calm circle of Natalie’s mind was trying to send her a message. She could almost hear it expressed in Saul’s dry, almost pedantic voice: It’s using a child’s body, Natalie, a six-year-old’s reach and mass. Melanie’s advantage is in fear and fury. Your advantage is in size and weight, leverage and mass. Don’t waste it.

Justin made a sound like a steam kettle overflowing and rushed her again, scrabbling forward, low to the floor. Natalie could see the top of Culley’s bald head just appearing above the edge of the landing.

She met Justin’s rush, extending the chair with both arms, putting her weight into it, pushing hard and stepping into the shove. The splintered chair legs caught him on either side of his throat and torso, slamming him back into the polished railing. The old wood of the banister creaked but did not come close to breaking.

Lithe as a mink, quick as a steel-clawed cat, Justin leaped up onto the five-inch-wide railing, caught his balance in a second, and prepared to leap
down
at her. With no hesitation whatsoever, Natalie took a broad sidestep forward, gripped the chair like a Louisville Slugger, and followed through with a full-bodied swing that batted Justin off the railing like some flesh and blood wiffle ball.

A single scream issued from the throats of Justin, Culley, and uncounted voices behind Melanie’s closed door, but the child-thing was not done.

Arching in midair, hair flying, Justin grabbed at the massive chandelier that hung six feet out and just below the level of the landing. Steel talons closed on the iron chain, Justin’s legs crashed into crystal prisms, creating a musical chaos, and a second later he was clambering up onto the chandelier itself, balancing fifteen feet above the floor.

Natalie lowered the chair as she watched in disbelief. Culley’s hand came to the top step and he continued to pull himself up. Justin’s round face stretched into a terrible mockery of a grin as he swung the chandelier back and forth, his left arm extended, talons reaching for the railing that came closer at each swing.

In its day— at least a century earlier— the chandelier restraints could have held ten times Justin’s added weight without complaint. The iron chain and iron anchor bolts still could. But the nine-inch wooden beam in which the hardware had been sunk had suffered more than a hundred years of South Carolina moisture and insects and benign neglect.

Natalie watched as Justin dropped out of sight, the chandelier disappeared, and a five-foot section of ceiling plaster, electric wiring, iron bolts, and rotted wood followed. The noise of the impact was impressive. Shards of shattered crystal struck the walls like grenade fragments.

Natalie wanted to go down to get the gun and the C-4 but knew immediately that they were buried by the mess filling the hall below.

Where were the police? What kind of neighborhood is this?
Natalie remembered that many of the nearby houses had been dark the previous evenings, the neighbors away or very old. Her entry had been loud and dramatic enough for her, but it was possible that no one had yet noticed the car and figured out where the noise had come from. The car would be all but invisible from the street behind Melanie’s brick walls. Two of the four shots she had fired should have been loud enough to be heard, but the heavy tropical foliage on the block muffled and distorted sounds. Perhaps it was just that no one wanted to get involved. She looked at her bloodied wristwatch. Less than three minutes had passed from the time she had come through the front door.

Oh, God,
thought Natalie.

Culley pulled himself onto the landing, his pale, idiot gaze rising to meet Natalie’s.

Weeping soundlessly, Natalie swung the chair at his head— once, twice, a third time. One of the chair legs snapped and ricocheted off the wall. Culley’s chin banged on wood as his bulk slid five steps back.

Natalie watched as his bloody face came up, his arms and legs twitched, and he began moving upward again.

She swung around and battered the chair against the heavy door. “God
damn
you, Melanie Fuller!” she screamed at the top of her voice. After the fourth blow, the Bentwood chair came apart in her hands.

And the door swung inward. It had not been locked.

The windows of the room were shuttered and shaded, allowing little of the predawn gray to enter. Oscilloscopes and other life-support equipment painted the occupants with pale electronic light. Nurse Oldsmith, Dr. Hartman, and Nancy Warden— Justin’s mother— stood between Natalie and the bed. All three of them wore soiled white garments and identical expressions— expressions that Natalie had seen only in film documentaries of death camp survivors staring out through barbed wire at the arriving armies—round-eyed, slack-jawed, disbelieving.

Behind this last defensive line were the huge bed and its occupant. The bed was canopied with lace gauze, the view into it further distorted by the clear plastic of an oxygen tent, but Natalie could easily make out the wizened figure lost in the bedclothes; the wrinkled, distorted face and staring eye, the age-mottled curve of skull still fringed with thinning blue hair, and the skeletal right arm lying outside the covers, bony fingers clutching spasmodically at the sheets and quilt. The old woman was writhing feebly in the bed, reinforcing Natalie’s earlier image of a sour-skinned sea creature dumped out of its element.

Natalie glanced around quickly, making sure that no one was behind the door or coming in from the hallway. To her right was an ancient dresser with a stained mirror. A comb and brush were set out carefully on a yellowed doily. Tufts of blue hair clung to the bristles. To Natalie’s left, a clutter of food trays lay on the floor amid teacups, dirty dishes, soiled linen heaped in stacks three feet high, the tall wardrobe with doors open and clothing tumbled into the bottom of it, medical instruments lying around in the filth, and four long oxygen tanks propped on two-wheeled carts. The seals on two of the tanks were unbroken, suggesting they were the fresh replacements for the ones now bleeding air into the old woman’s plastic tent. The stench in the room was beyond Natalie’s experience. She heard a slight noise and glanced left to see two rats poking through the clutter of dirty dishes and sour linen. The rodents acted oblivious to the people, as if no human beings had been living here. Natalie realized that this had been the truth of the matter.

The three ambulatory corpses moved their mouths in perfect unison. “Go away,” they said in a petulant child’s whine. “I don’t want to play anymore.” The old woman’s face, warped and elongated by the crinkled lens of the clear plastic oxygen tent, moved back and forth as the toothless mouth made wet smacking sounds.

The three catspaws raised their right hands in perfect unison. The short scalpels caught the green light from the monitor screen.
Only three of them
? thought Natalie. She felt there should be more, but she was too tired and too scared and hurting too much to figure it out. Later.