***
A short while later with his lungs burning and his heart desperately struggling to find a human pace, he entered a clearing. He whipped around as he hadn’t allowed himself to do during his flight from the strange and terrifying things which had chased him. Both hands clutched the flashlight like he was trying to strangle the life out of it and they shook fiercely as he trained the device around him in an urgent arc. There was no sign of his pursuers.
His legs became like trunks of trees, rooted and unwilling to move as his body screamed for rest. His mind was another story, however.
His mind spun like a rotating steel cage filled with thousands of plastic bingo balls all bouncing off each other and creating a tumultuous but ultimately meaningless noise. No single thought would sit still long enough to be addressed and mastered with any kind of attempt at rationality. He was eventually able to gather his senses and move slowly into the clearing.
Soon his flashlight landed on the corner of something. When he began exploring it with the light he discovered it was an immense three-story brick mansion. He periodically checked his surroundings for the strange patchwork devil girls while searching out the exterior of the building. All the windows on the first floor as well as the front door were bricked off by gray cinder blocks. He was halfway around when he heard what sounded like the muffled scream of a woman come from the inside of the mansion. It was Sarah.
He ran around the structure, frantically searching for some way into it but there was nothing on the front. On the backside he discovered a large crack that he thought he might be able to squeeze through. He felt around the edges of the crack with his finger and shined the flashlight inside but was unable to see much. From some distance away in the woods he heard the little childish laughter of those demonic things, though he did not think they were close enough to see him. Then again, what did he know?
He began pressing himself though the crack. It was not an easy fit but he managed to shimmy through it after a minute or so of effort. His chest and back hurt after he was through to the other side but he tried to pay them no mind so he could concentrate on finding Sarah. He also briefly wondered if this was where Frank had gone. No, not gone, but was taken, he corrected himself.
He played the light in his hand slowly and methodically around the room, trying to ascertain the nature of his surroundings. The place appeared to be just as old and rundown on the inside as it was on the outside. The wallpaper was peeling away in many places, revealing cracked plaster beneath it and sometime beneath that he could see wooden slats suffering from black mold and rot. He knew he shouldn’t spend too much time in there breathing the filthy air, but he needed to find Sarah first.
His heart skipped a beat when the flashlight beam fell across the desiccated remains of a person laying half on the floor and half against a wall. The body looked to have been dead for quite some time. It was not skeletal as of yet but the dried and broken flesh which still clung to the bones was in an advanced state of decay. The skull was turned upward with its jaw open in a soundless scream while its empty eye sockets looked at some point on the ceiling.
The clothes on the body were mostly a shambles, shredded to tatters at points. Mike took a step closer to the body and saw that the flesh was missing and bone was exposed beneath the places where the clothing had been torn away. He could see hundred if not thousands of pockmarks in the bone and he thought he knew what had made them. He recalled the rows of needlelike black teeth in the wide mouths of the nightmare patchwork girls from the forest.
The one piece of clothing the corpse wore which remained mostly intact was a leather apron which bore pockets around the middle filled with little tools of various kinds, none of which he recognized. They reminded him of sewing needles. He wondered, Was this their maker?
When he inspected the wall by the head of the corpse he noticed scratch marks, as if the person had been clawing at it while he, or perhaps she, died. Mike shuddered at the thought of being overrun by those little monsters and being gnawed on by them to death.
He turned away from investigating the dead so he might search for the living. He found a door leading out of the room and into a hallway. It was empty.
“Hello? Sarah?”
“Mike!” Her response came from above sounding shrill and desperate. He flashed the light to his right and discovered a staircase which he bounded up without thought.
He called her name again, and again she responded. He was beginning to get a better sense for where she was. She was somewhere on the second floor and close by at that. After two more calls and responses he came to a closed door in the second floor hallway. He tried to turn the door but it was locked. He didn’t bother trying again.
He stood back from the door and rained down kicks upon it until it flew inward on its hinges and slammed against an interior wall. Mike dashed into the room.
It was some kind of work room with a long table covered in patches of white cloth and tools and what appeared to be a large black chunk of coal or some other black substance. Mike didn’t know nor did he care what the stuff was, but he was overwhelmed with a sense of dread just looking at it. He turned away. All he wanted was to find Sarah and get out, and as luck would have it she was in the room too.
She was crouched and huddled against a corner of the room, facing the corner like a naughty child under discipline. Her hands covered her ears and she rocked back and forth, crying. He took a step toward her and heard the sound just in time.
It began as a soft hissing noise but soon developed into a larger version, lustful and hungry. Mike ducked, turned, and backed into the room at the same time. He located the source of the eager sound and it took the wind out of him. It was Frank but not as he had been. Both cheeks had been slit to make his mouth wider and the normal teeth had been replaced by the same black needles Mike had seen in the mouths of the things that had attacked them in the forest. His eyes too were now obsidian black like theirs had been. His skin, while not white cloth like theirs, was as pale as milk.
Frank lunged for him.
Mike stepped backward quickly, his hand flailing along the table searching for anything at all to use as a weapon against Frank. His fingers found a wooden handle and wrapped around it, regardless of what it might be attached to. Mike brought it around in a defensive arc and right before it crashed into Frank’s face, he saw that it was a rusty metal single-hand sledge hammer.
The steel connected with Frank’s face and tore flesh and smashed teeth. Blood and black fangs sprayed out of Frank’s mouth but this did not deter him. He shook his head as if shaking off a minor dizziness, and then his eyes reacquired Mike.
Mike saw that Frank’s face was now a tortured mess. The hammer blow had destroyed his cheek and disconnected the left side of his jaw. Nevertheless that mouth hung open hungrily. Mike could tell he was about to make another lunge. Not wanting to give him the chance Mike stepped forward and brought the business end of the hammer down on the top of Frank’s skull as hard as he could. This produced a sickening crunch and Frank collapsed to the floor like a garbage bag full of raw meat.
Mike took a step back and just stared at the felled man for a few moments. Frank was dead; there was no two ways about it. One of his fingers twitched once but that was all there was to indicate the life was sapping out of his body.
He looked at the hammer clutched in his white-knuckled fist, raising it up to his face to inspect it. It was covered in blood and there was a small patch of Frank’s hair sticking to it. Sickened he threw the tool away like it was ridden with the plague. The object hit the floor and blood splattered outward, but he was done thinking about it as he turned back to the huddled form of Sarah.
He came up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. She was trembling powerfully and he wondered if she was going into shock, but he needed to get through to her and get out of there. He helped her stand and turned her around.
Her wide brown eyes were streaming tears and her lower lip quivered a
s she sucked in ragged breaths. She glanced down at the fallen form of her brother and then shot a look back at Mike. Her eyes were wild and showed no understanding of what had just happened in the room while she had been off in her own little world.
“He’s dead,” Mike said with as much care as he could, but he also let his voice remain firm. “We have to get out of here as fast as we can or we’re going to be dead too.”
Her face was a blank slate. He didn’t think she had understood a word he’d said and was about to repeat himself when she nodded her comprehension. He took her by the hand and led her back out into the hallway and toward the stairs. He was about to take his first step down when he heard that hissing noise again, which was followed by the sound of children’s laughter, only this time he could tell it was not just a handful of them. He and Sarah turned slowly and looked back down the hallway. All of the doors had opened and a large number of the patchwork nightmare girls packed the space wall to wall. He didn’t bother to count but he saw that there were probably more than fifty of them. There were even a handful actual people, men and women, who had been changed like Frank, perhaps other travelers who strayed into these unfortunate woods.
Mike let out a curse and darted down the stairs towing Sarah behind him. They reached the bottom of the stairs and ran into the room which Mike had entered earlier from the outside through the large crack in the wall. He got busy shoving Sarah through the crack. He noted with relief that she had a much easier time fitting through than he had. It was his turn next.
He pressed and pushed himself through the crack slowly yet desperately. He was just slipping out when he felt a sharp pain in his left hand. He screamed in agony yet continued to wiggle through the crack. When he was on the other side he looked at his hand and saw a small chunk was missing and blood dripped from the hot wound. When he looked at the crack he saw one of the little patchwork nightmares standing in the gap, blood dripping down its chin as it chewed on the small piece of his hand.
Rage clouded his mind and he stepped forward and kicked the little monster in the face. He felt its teeth crack and break under the impact of his leather boot, which brought a short-lived sense of satisfaction to him. Soon, however, that one was replaced by another hissing cloth creature and it bared its angry black smile at him.
“Run,” he yelled at Sarah, but when he turned he saw she had already had that idea. She was becoming smaller and smaller in his vision and so he ran after her. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the ravenous monsters were pouring out of the crack in the wall.
He couldn’t allow himself to think about all of them chasing after him or he would falter and fall prey to them so he pushed his body as hard as it would go. He focused on Sarah whom he could see up ahead of him and he was catching up to her stride by stride. It would only be a few moments more before he was able to move up alongside of her. He only hoped he could help her to move faster because she would need…
Out of the woods four more of them pounced and they all landed on Sarah, taking her down in a shrieking tangle. He reached them in two heartbeats and kicked one of them off of her but the others had already gone to work on her, biting and tearing. She was gone before he could do anything else. The only thing left for Mike to do was to run.
He could hear them behind him, though he dared not look back. He was too focused on the burn of the run in his lungs and leg muscles. He was beginning to feel dizzy too; the small wound on his left hand ached with a ferocious intensity.
He was out of the clearing and into the woods again. All around him he could hear the echoes of children’s laughter. It sounded like there were hundreds of them out there, though he couldn’t see any of them. He could still hear the group of them behind him chasing, though. They didn’t seem to be gaining on him, however, which was a relief.
He felt dizzy, though, he noted, now somewhat absently. Dizzy. Dizzy.
Despite all this he ran as fast as he could. He ran his heart out.