Malevolent (33 page)

He suddenly became aware of an insistent dial tone and traced it to the house phone dangling at the end of its cord. He picked it up and cradled it.

“Now you’re thinking,” his wife said.

“Does she have a cell phone with her?” he asked.

“Yes. But she left it on overnight and forgot to recharge it.” Laney smiled as she said this.

So did Matthew. “Good,” he mumbled, taking teetering steps toward the kitchen.

“Sure, hon, why don’t you just chase her down that way. Then she can come around through the dining room doorway like a Keystone Kops routine, slip out the front door and tell the world.” Her tone making it apparent that he’d lost all of the admiration she’d shown him these last few moments.

He stopped to consider. It was taking him longer than usual to process information on account of his raging headache. But eventually he smiled while delicately reaching into his breast pocket and withdrawing a key. “Remember this? She won’t be leaving by way of the front door.”

Laney nodded. “Not bad.” Sounding impressed once more. But then she pointed to the front of the apartment and said, “What about those?”

The French doors stood wide open to the balcony, encouraging a slight breeze. Moving as quickly as his lacerated head would allow, he shut them and shot the bolts. It wouldn’t hold her forever, but it would slow her down and muffle her screams. He’d be right behind her.

Matthew steadied himself against the bright couch to make the room stop spinning. He enjoyed seeing four bloody spots drip from his face to form a Rorschach pattern on that bright, geometric pattern.

“Enough of this horseshit,” he said, rubbing the blood splotches deeper into the couch fabric.

The bitch was about to pay big time.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Melinda sucked in her breath behind him as Tim pulled on the closet door handle. It screeched open and she waited, as he did, for something to spring out at them. Nothing did. In fact, the calico tabby nesting in the dirty laundry on the floor looked quite content to remain where it was. It was the only cat he’d seen today that looked like it wasn’t trying to eat him. No wonder. The kitty was actually pudgy, if not downright fat. Well-fed and placid was how it struck Tim as he watched it watching Tim with lazy interest.

The reason for the calico’s unconcern was quite apparent. Its predatory instinct had been dulled by an overabundance of food source.

Tim backed away, shut the door calmly and puked on his shoes. He could hear Melinda’s breath rasping behind him, her only reaction to what she too had seen, so she was handling it better than he. Tim knew that, at random future moments with the lights out, he’d see the female cat, her belly pockmarked with teats, gnawing on the bloody kitten head sticking out of her mouth. He’d see the three tiny, picked-clean skeletons discarded like chicken bones at a picnic. He’d hear the crunching sounds as her teeth worked on…

He threw up again, but by now it consisted of little more than saliva strings. To counterbalance the suddenly spinning room, he plopped himself on the bed and gasped, “Jesus, we’ve got to get out of here.”

Got to get out. But it felt so good to close his eyes and not have to face teeth and claws. They were safe here, stashed away from all but one of the demon house cats, and that one wasn’t particularly hungry.

He felt a tugging sensation and opened one tired eye.

“Get up,” Melinda ordered, and he could tell that she’d fought off the shock of whatever it was they’d seen under the bedcovers. Maybe that’s how they had to survive this thing, one being strong while the other locked up with fear.

He stood as commanded and watched Melinda strip the bed. She handed the bedspread to Dolly and placed the top sheet, like a shroud, over the dazed but standing Germaine. The fitted sheet she tossed at Tim.

“Everyone, cover up tight,” she directed. She helped the sisters wrap themselves up like holy women at the foot of the Cross and motioned for Tim to do the same. On him, the effect would be more like David Duke at a Klan rally.

“What are you going to do?” he asked as she stood there without protection, her torn ankle dripping blood onto a braided rug.

“Don’t worry about me. I move better without anything.”

He smiled a sad smile. “Me too,” he said. Remembering how Griffin had called him self-absorbed, he wished his plump buddy could see him now. He tossed the sheet back at Melinda. “You take it. I’ll just tangle up and fall. Besides, I’ve got to be able to see clearly. We’ve got a long, treacherous walk ahead of us.”

Melinda opened her mouth to argue, but she must have seen the look in his eyes. “Okay,” she said quietly, and let him wrap her up tightly. Comically tight, under any other circumstance.

“This isn’t right,” Germaine said weakly. “Vincent isn’t going to like this.”

Vincent also wouldn’t like it when he visited the preacher man later that day, Tim thought, but kept it to himself. “Dolly, take hold of my hips like I’m a choo-choo train.”

“I’m not going,” Germaine said, louder this time.

Tim said, “Melinda, pull up the rear. Make sure Germaine is between you and Dolly.”

“Can we eat when we get there?” Dolly asked.

“Cheeseburgers till you shit pure beef,” Tim replied. “Are we all ready?” When a scratching came at the closed bedroom door he lost whatever degree of confidence he might have had. His throat dry and sore, he said, “All right, here we go.”

The first thing he did was kick a clear path down the hall. There’d been two feline sentries posted outside the bedroom door and both were caught off-guard by the sudden appearance of the swaddled humans. They loped crazily down the hall, squawking in pain and warning the others.

The way looked temporarily clear to the front of the house.

“Go,” Tim snapped. As he clasped Dolly’s pudgy fingers to his hips, some reckless instinct made him shout, “
Whoo, whoo
,” in a passable imitation of a steam-train whistle.

Dolly giggled, but it was a restrained sound, more like she was humoring him.

They hadn’t looked for shoes for the sisters, not that anyone could be blamed for not poking around in that horror house bedroom closet. Tim and Melinda managed to lug the women over the broken glass in the hallway without being attacked. At the foot of the staircase, the little train took a turn and proceeded into the living room.

The staircase
. Such a natural site for launching an attack by air and yet he’d forgotten to be on the lookout. The diving shape resembled a flying squirrel with teeth.

Germaine shrieked, and the third car in the train crumpled to the ground, a writhing heap that nearly brought the rest of the train down with her. Dolly yipped in panic and Tim watched the storm erupt on Germaine’s head as the frenzied, wailing cat tried to claw its way to the meat beneath the bedspread veil.

Melinda grabbed the animal and deep red gouges blossomed on both momentarily exposed forearms for her efforts. The cat used the top of Germaine’s head as a launching pad to spring straight for Melinda’s face.

She covered up in time, but the cat clung to her arms and made a strange, chittering sound as it tried to burrow between Melinda’s fingers to make a meal of her nose.

Tim grabbed the first object he saw, a fat Cleveland telephone directory on a phone stand. He whumped the cat as hard as he could with it, and watched it fall heavily to the ground. It landed on its back, its paws skittering in the air for traction like a dog dreaming of car chases. Finally, it found its feet and slunk from the scene of the crime.

“Come on,” Tim said. “Keep going, everyone.”

“Can’t.” Now it was Dolly, breathing heavily and holding up their progress. “Not going without Momma.”

She pointed to the stiff corpse in the La-Z-Boy while her sister screeched and dug at the top of her bedsheet-covered head for fangs that were no longer a threat.

Tim faced the badly scratched Melinda and said as loudly as he could to be heard over the pandemonium, “You take Germaine. I’ve got Dolly.”

He almost dropped the phonebook, but thought better of it as three of the snarling beasties faced them in butt-wobbling hunters’ crouches. He caught them by surprise—even surprised himself—by charging them first. Swinging the heavy book, he scattered them like bowling pins. His feet snarled up in wet newspaper sheets the Marberry women had scattered to soak up cat urine. When he raced back he found only two women waiting, hugging each other and looking like Muslim schoolgirls.

“Where’s Dolly?”

But he found her while the question was still on his tongue. She was visiting the rotting remains of her mother, just starting to lean in while two cats fought near the corpse’s shoulders.

He grabbed the confused woman, yanked her away and bullied the derailed train forward again. She screamed and wiggled in his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go.

“Vincent won’t let us,” Germaine wailed.

If there was a hell, this was it. A new set of needle teeth sank into Tim’s calf but he barely noticed. He could feel a trickle of cooler air from the open front door, but yet another underfed cat stood in his way.

It bared its yellow fangs and Tim did the same. He growled, a Darwinian response. The cat’s snarl turned to a screech of indignation and it squeezed out the door a step ahead of the four mangled humans.

They literally fell to the stoop and rolled into the overgrown lawn, three women tightly swathed in bedcovers and a wild-eyed, bleeding, sweating man who looked older than his years.

Tim jumped to his feet and slammed the front door shut. Then, like Melinda, he scurried in protective circles over the other two, looking for the cats who’d escaped the horror house with them. Snarling, spitting, yowling, pouncing cats.

He saw several slinking through the tall grass, but all were traveling in the right direction: away from them. One looked over its shoulder as it hunted easier food, its face saying,
Truce? Nothing personal.

Melinda put a bloody arm under each of the sisters and tugged them to their feet. Hugging both sobbing women tightly, she turned to Tim and said, “Help me get them to the Charger. I’ll drive them to the hospital. With the women safely ensconced in the car and Melinda behind the wheel, he said, “Get to the hospital.” Then he surprised himself and kissed the policewoman.

Melinda studied him with what looked like a mix of churning emotions. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got something to take care of.”

He didn’t give her time to argue. He dashed away and only slowed long enough to leaf through the telephone directory he’d still forgotten to put down. When he found and read what he wanted, he tossed the book and picked up his footspeed again.

Chapter Fifty-Six

It had all made awful sense to Patty as soon as Matthew Porter wrapped his MP3 headphone cord around her throat. This was how that girl had died three nights previously—the mailman did it.

As her lungs fought for air, she could feel her consciousness returning, letting her almost coolly examine her situation like an impartial observer. This disconnected part of her felt as though she’d come to the point in her life most worth examining—that all of her experiences preceding this moment had played out to prepare her for this, and what remained was this hushed tableau upon which everything else pivoted.

That’s the part of her that noticed the lamp, so now she was alone in the kitchen, grasping a cast iron skillet in both hands like it was a baseball bat. She was breathing heavily and trying to tone it down so she didn’t miss his moment of attack. She stood so that she had peripheral vision into both open doorways. She’d have little time to react if he charged at her from one way while her head was turned the other.

She heard him mumbling something, talking to himself again. She strained to hear.

“What do you suggest?”

Then more back and forth, with no one. Remembering how her mailman’s attention had kept wavering to a position over her right shoulder, Patty shivered. It shouldn’t have surprised her, though. It wasn’t like she was under the impression that she was dealing with a stable personality here.

Floorboards creaked. She tightened her grip on the skillet handle as she heard him weaving across the bare hardwood floor. Music blared from a car stereo barely twenty feet beyond the balcony—so close, and yet so far. She listened until her head hurt.

More mumbling, like he was working it out with himself that if he went one way she’d go the other. Now what? Patty loosened her grip on the skillet just long enough to flex her stiff fingers and wipe sweat on her shorts. Then she regripped and rested the heavy weapon on one shoulder.

She’d thought she’d heard someone knocking on the front door some time ago, while she was otherwise occupied. Might have just been her mind throwing her hope where none existed. She could hear nothing that sounded like help now.

Floorboards squeaked. Her legs tensed. No more mumbling sounds from out there. She risked a quick glance toward the dining nook wall where the telephone would be cradled, then resisted the temptation. She’d have to come right up to the doorway, reach into that next room and pick up the phone. He’d hear her and know exactly what she was up to. Besides, help would take at least ten minutes to arrive. She had the sinking sensation the issue would be decided long before then.