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dim gray fog the color of burned charcoal lifted up from the damp ground, from underneath a twisted stand of pine trees, like ghosts rising from a vine-overgrown mausoleum. Slowly, it drifted on a howling banshee wind, blowing across the warm blacktop of State Route 173 in dark billowy clouds like the rolling front of a groundlocked summer thunderstorm. The crackerbox house was enveloped in a cocoon of pale slow moving blankness, becoming ever more isolated, till even the stars overhead flickered out and died.
Norman took another long drink of flat stale water. He swished it around in a mouth coated in white paste that tasted like half-dry Elmer’s glue. The water was refreshing and wonderful. Wonderful in the same gut-wrenching, guilty, semi-relieving way that seeing a loved one pass away after a long bitter struggle with terminal brain cancer was wonderful. It was exactly what he needed.
He thought about offering some to Paulson. He even held the glass up in front of Paulson’s lifeless eyes, moving it back and fourth in a lazy figure eight. Paulson seemed to drool a little more, but it could have been a trick of the dim light. Stepping back, Norman’s drawn face surveyed Paulson. The big man had aged, his dark hair bleaching out to a luminous white, his eyes forever locked on some horrible sight just out of the reach of regular vision. Every hour, his lips would quiver and a low moan would escape him, a mewling whine, like a newborn kitten. Paulson’s mind was a deep vessel, hollow and empty.
Norman ground his teeth. He slid his lower jaw against the top, feeling a long dry days worth of grit grind against the enamel. He ran his tongue gingerly against a fresh second row of teeth that had grown up shark-like just behind the first. The new additions were jagged and sharp. It felt like a double row of broken razors had been jammed individually into his moist palette. It was ten-thirty.
Inside, the phone was ringing.
“Hurm,” Paulson said. The big man trembled all over, quivering and shaking like a monumental gelatinous mold. Something crawled beneath his flesh, squirming in time with the jangling phone.
Polished hardwood floorboards vibrated in time with the ringing, carrying it outward in circular shock waves of sound. Blue-white window panes pressed outward, pushing with a desperate heavy breathing against hastily painted brown trim, the rusty carpenter’s nails rattling nearly loose. Rain gutters, heavy with a seasons worth of dirt and compost, echoed the Ring, Ring, Ring in a circular roller coaster loop around the house.
Norman took three quick steps forward, pressed into motion by the impatient sub-conscious need to hurry to the phone. His hand froze on the doorknob.
Ring. Ring.
“Hwwaaa,” Paulson groaned, his face swelling a choking blue-black. “Fooonne.”
Norman scratched at his face. His skin had faded to a translucent milky white. Almost transparent, dark circles showed through his skull where his new eyes were beginning to grow in. He tried to think. There was a swirling black void in his memory from which only fragments of ideas escaped. In the rapidly fading light of early evening, he had made two phone calls.
Paulson sat in his favorite rocking chair like a festering boil. The big man’s mind was gone, captured and eaten whole by the large beige box in the kitchen. The refrigerator still sat there, humming soft otherworldly music to itself and churning out waves of frozen comfort. Paulson’s childlike gaze and constantly drooling mouth was evidence that he had reached one person, at least. Another face reached out to him through the dark place in his brain.
A young face. Sandy blond slicked back with greasy oil. Red and black checkered flannel shirt. Faded dungarees with one knee torn out. A belt buckle the size of Texas with the name BEN in three-inch tall bronze lettering.
“Ben,” Norman remembered at last.
Ring.
Sounding like tearing Velcro, Norman’s first new eye opened in his forehead. When the second eye opened his new brain, the one that had slowly grown into the fissures and crevasses of the old one, Norman knew he was trapped. His new face smiled a shark grin full of razor teeth. His new eyes looked around. Cold and shiny black, they had the feeling and warmth of a crab’s eyes on the stalk. A prisoner in his own skull, Norman experienced double vision vertigo, the porch spinning in two directions at once. He tried to double over and vomit. A serpentine voice in the back of his mind, reminded him it wasn’t his body any more. Norman’s body didn’t respond.
His body went inside and answered the phone.
“Ben,” he heard himself say. “You have to come over. I’ve got something wonderful to show you. It’s in the freezer.” |
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