You wanted to get in touch with “the inner reform school girl,” her mind recalled. How’s it feel?
Nancy took a long, frozen look at the remains, saw the black-and-white-striped, sleeveless top and the ripped jeans shorts they wore. In the mélange that once formed a head, a white banana clip lay cracked in a clot of hair, dotted with blood. Nancy’s body tensed, then went limp in Skip’s grip and he had to fight to keep her standing.
Cindi.
“No,” Nancy croaked, her face contorting into a pallid expression of fear and hopelessness. She felt the knots that anchored her to reality slipping, threatening to set her mind adrift, and she asked the question that went through Skip’s head as well, “Why?”
***
Robby didn’t know why he recorded their movements through the corn. At first, he’d held the Sony camcorder on his shoulder because the higher angle provided better light. Later, he’d done it simply because it gave him something to do. He was chilled to the bone and, even though he hated to admit it, he was scared.
Danny called back to him.
“What was that?” Robby asked.
“I see something up ahead.”
Robby’s grip on the camcorder tightened at the word choice. Something, Danny said. Not someone. He fumbled with the Sony’s viewfinder. Danny’s back glowed in the spotlight, but the rest of the screen was a gray blur. He stopped and tilted his head away from the camera, looked directly into the mist with eyes unfiltered. But Robby couldn’t see what Danny saw. He could only see the fog.
“Danny, I don’t –”
“Hey!” Danny took off running and was swallowed by the thick haze.
Robby hesitated. He wanted to find shelter back in the shed, wait for dawn. In daylight, thoughts of crows that now had a taste for human flesh, of spirits and Indian curses, would be ridiculous, laughable. In the darkness and fog, however, the thoughts seemed all too possible.
All those damn stories have you scared of your own shadow. Yes, the crows attacking was weird, but it was probably some kind of rabies or fever that drove them to it. Nothing supernatural at work here. Nothing. There’s no fucking corn spirit. You’re gonna find everyone and get back home, and, come tomorrow, you’ll have one hell of a story of your own to tell the guys at the station. It’ll be a classic, right up there with the Andrews twins and Russell Veal.
Robby wished he were at the fire station now, drinking coffee, relaying the day’s events from the safety of memory. He stood and listened to the deafening silence, the camcorder tilted on his shoulder. It was like being buried alive. He could almost feel the fog push in on him, urging him to chase after Danny, wanting him to –
Danny’s voice wafted from the void. “Gimme the fuckin’ knife.”
Oh, my God! Robby’s mind cried out. He’s found the killer! The guy who hung up Dale Brightman is out there in this soup with Danny and you’re standing here like a fucking four-year-old afraid of the thing in his closet! What kind of a friend are you, anyway?
Robby prepared himself. He’d run into the fog, come to Danny’s aid, and take away the killer’s knife. He’d be a Goddamn hero and then there would be nothing to fear. Nothing to fear. Nothing.
He ran.
Through the Sony’s eyepiece, two silhouettes came into view; Robby recognized Danny’s large physique, but it took him a minute to place the smaller, frailer figure. It was Mick Slatton without his Coke-bottle glasses, and in the grainy black and white monitor, it looked as if he’d bathed in Hershey’s syrup. It also looked as if he’d just pulled a large hunting knife from Danny’s chest.
Robby froze up, dislocated from the scene that played out before him, searching for an explanation for what he’d witnessed, a trick of the light, of the fog. Deidra said Mick had a knife. That was true, but she also said she’d seen a corn spirit. She’d been in shock. How was Robby supposed to know she’d been telling the truth?
Danny dropped to his knees, shook his head to and fro. His lips hung open, promised words, but delivered only blood. Mick sliced through the fog and the knife found Danny’s throat. Gore leapt from the gash as Danny fell onto his side.
Mick’s face appeared nothing short of triumphant.
The icy grip of paralysis shattered, allowing Robby’s legs to bolt into a drunken, staggering run. “Jesus Christ!”
Mick covered his eyes with one glossy hand. “I got him!” he sang into the splash of camcorder light. “I got Williamson!”
Blood deserted Robby’s face like water down a drain, left him a horrid albino-white. When he reached Danny’s side, Robby saw almost immediately that his friend was dead. The left and right carotid arteries had been severed, Danny’s strong heart pumping the life right out of his body.
“Robby?” Mick’s voice echoed from a cave. “I thought you were Sheriff Carter or Mr. Cupello. They said ...”
The rest was lost to Robby’s ears. Denial, or perhaps his medical programming, prompted him to drop the camcorder and rip off his own shirt. Robby tore the fabric into ribbons, wadded it against Danny’s chest and neck. He checked for a pulse, found none, and began chest compressions, but, after a few futile minutes, Robby stopped and wept.
“Why are you getting this upset about him?” Mick’s puzzled voice still held more than a touch of glee. “I thought you said you’d just let him die.”
Robby’s head jerked up, his eyes angry slits, his fingers curling into fists.
“Besides,” Mick squinted, tried to bring Robby’s expression into focus. “They told me it was all right to kill him.”
Robby punched Mick square in the face with enough force to knock him to the ground.
***
“Why’d you do that?”
The voice was Cindi’s, but not Cindi’s; a crackling gargle.
Nancy’s head snapped up, her mind filled with irrational hope. She’s not dead! I hurt her, but I didn’t kill her. We’ll make a stretcher for her like we did for Sean and she’ll be fine. Sure, she’ll be pissed off, but she –
The optimism died in her eyes when she saw what had spoken.
Cindi’s body stirred; she pushed up onto her hands and knees. Her face no longer resembled anything human. It was a plastic Halloween mask someone had stepped on, crumpled and cracked.
“Come on.” Skip pulled Nancy backward, a disturbing familiarity in his voice, as if he’d seen this kind of thing every day and it no longer shocked him.
“Danny says ‘Hello,’” the Cindi-thing cooed, and then, worst of all, it grinned. “He’s dead, you know. Dead and rotting.”
“Shut up.” Nancy’s voice had gone as pale as her cheeks, robbing it of any authority.
Cindi lifted a hand to her clotted hair and tossed it back over her shoulder, a piece of her scalp came up as she did so. “He came to me when you wouldn’t fuck him. Did he ever tell you that?”
“Shut up.”
“He came to me and I sucked his cock better than you and I let him stick it in me, and he came and he came and he came.”
“Shut up,” Nancy kept saying, “shut up, shut up, shut up!”
She broke free of Skip’s grip and picked up a nearby rock, only half the size of the boulder she’d used to smash in Cindi’s skull. She clasped it in one hand, lobbed it at the smiling corpse that now tried to stand.
The creature snatched the stone from the air; its hideous grin widened. “That a girl!”
A fresh barrage of sobs bombarded Nancy. This wasn’t happening. None of this was possible, none of it. Skip ran to her, tugged on her arm, tried to drag her away from the smiling dead thing. She stopped fighting him and allowed herself to be whisked away.
“Murderers go to Hell, Nancy,” the broken Halloween mask said. “We’ll keep a place warm for you down there, me and Danny.”
Then, just before the swelling mist devoured it, the corpse disgorged something dark, the shadow of a shadow; it moved sinuously into the corn and was gone. Nancy thought she saw the body fall, become inert, but she wasn’t sure
, and there was no way she was going to go back and check.
***
Robby checked again for signs of life. His movements were slow, dreamlike, and it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, this was all some nightmare; a horrible, fever-driven hallucination. How else could he explain it?
Danny was not only dead, but cold to the touch.
See, Robby told himself as he took his hand away. It would take a few hours for a body to get cold. Even in this God awful chill, it wouldn’t happen immediately. This has to be some terrible dream. What the hell did I eat before bed to invent this shit anyway?
Robby stared up at Mick as if he were a stranger. The camcorder lamp lit a small, bright circle on his chest, a glowing hole where his heart should’ve been. He still held the bloody knife in his hand and something repulsive blazed in his squinted eyes.
What the hell have you done? sat in Robby’s mouth, waiting to be spoken.
Instead, Mick told him, “Sheriff Carter and Mr. Cupello will be back in a minute. They’ll have everyone with them and they’ll explain.”
“Explain what?”
“That they had orders, that Skip was a killer and they were going to shoot him on sight.”
Robby reached over, grabbed Mick by his neck, and pulled his face to within inches of Danny’s. “Get a good look!”
Danny’s open eyes gazed up into the churning mist with great fascination. Blood ran cold from the corners of his mouth, staining his lips, forming a wide clown smile.
“Can you see now?”
Mick winced; the unpleasant look faded from his eyes, replaced by a bizarre kind of lost terror. His lips puckered and he whined, “Yes.”
“Who is it then?”
“It was Skip.”
“Who is it now?”
“Danny!” Mick shuddered in Robby’s grasp. He dropped the knife, brought his hands up to his face, and screamed into them.
“Where’d you get the fuckin’ knife?”
Mick continued to sob and Robby tightened his grip.
“Where?”
“It’s Danny’s!” Mick coughed through his tears, then added, “Part of the game!”
At the sound of Mick’s bawling, Robby let go and stepped away; he ran his hands through his own hair. He was shirtless and drenched in sweat, but only vaguely aware of the cold. His nose ran and he wiped it with the back of his numb hand. He heard not a breath of wind, not a chirp of insect, no noise at all to distract his mind; left alone with the realization that two of his best friends were dead, another of his friends was a murderer, and they still had miles to go.
Worse still, Robby could not shake the feeling that all of this, from Sean’s “accident” to Danny’s death, was somehow being ... engineered. It was as if something wanted them to be isolated out here in the fog, as if something wanted them –
“Robby.”
At the sound of his name, Robby turned back to Mick, saw the boy still sobbing into the dirt. And Danny was –
“Robby.”
Danny was dead.
“Did you hear that?” Robby asked.
Mick turned his face to him, tears clearing paths through the blood and grime of his cheeks. “Hear what?”
“Somebody just said my name.” Robby spun around in a circle, stared into the dark, misty columns of corn. “Who’s there?”
The haze offered no reply.
Mick chuckled, his breath sputtering out in white puffs like automobile exhaust. “Now we’re both going crazy.”
Then Robby heard the rustle of something moving through the corn. The sound seemed distant at first, then very close. “Tell me you hear that,” he said. “Please, tell me you hear it.”
Mick stood, his face a medley of sadness and stark terror. “I hear it.”
Whatever was out there was now no more than a few rows away and the ground beneath their feet shook with its footfalls. At any moment, Robby expected it to move from the mist to stand right in front of them, some gigantic unholy terror, and he thought his heart might detonate in his chest at the sight of it.
“We should go.” Mick fell back. He’d picked the knife up again without realizing it, held it out toward the noise. “We should go now.”
Robby nodded, scanning the fog. It knows your name, his mind told him. It said your name! His whole body shuddered and he took several clumsy steps back, nearly tripping over the camcorder. The light, he realized. The light’s leading it right to us. He picked up the Sony and shut it down. The lamp faded, darkness swirling in from every direction.
After a moment, the sound seemed to move away from them, back into the blind depths of the cornfield. Robby offered no sigh of relief, however. He continued to back into the dark mist, afraid to turn on the spotlight, afraid it would turn and come back at them. In fact, that seemed likely.
Robby looked back over his shoulder, saw a silhouette in the haze a few feet behind him. He took another tipsy step back, placed a hand on the shape’s shoulder and uttered a stern whisper. “Let’s go, Mick.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Mick told him.
The voice sounded distant and Robby felt coils knot in his gut. He turned to look at the dark splotch of shadow that stood behind him. “Mick?” he asked. “Where are you?”
“Over here.”
Robby’s hand instantly recoiled. His head whipped to the left and he turned on the camcorder spotlight with fumbling hands. Its round, glowing eye caught sight of Mick. The boy stood about two yards away. His form was hazy in the churning fog, but he was there ... way over there.
The light turned before Robby realized it, turned toward the shadow he’d been touching. And then he heard a voice. Danny’s voice. Clotted and rasping, but Danny’s voice just the same.
“Hey, Robby,” it croaked.
“No,” Robby moaned back. He halted the arc of the spotlight. It wasn’t Danny standing there. Danny was dead. And if it wasn’t Danny, Robby had no interest in seeing what it really was. “Oh, Jesus ...”
“Got a candy bar?” the shadow asked in Danny’s wet voice. “One of the ones you take from Tony’s when you think nobody can see?”
Behind Robby, Mick screamed; they were high screams, screams that tore and frayed before they ended. As loud as they were, however, Robby could still hear Danny’s gargling speech.
“Whatcha screamin’ for Mickey? Oh, yeah ... you fuckin’ killed me. Don’t sweat it. Accidents happen, don’t they? Like Skip knockin’ over your books. Oh, hey ... what’ll happen when Skip comes for you now? I’m not gonna be there anymore, am I? You’re just shit outta luck little man.”
Robby forced his feet to move, forced them backward into the mist. He held the light low, not wanting to even catch a glimpse of the thing in front of him, not knowing if his mind could hold itself together if it saw what was there to be seen.
“Will Sheriff Carter think this was an accident, Mick? Gosh, I don’t know.” The shadow moved forward in a jerky fashion, as if it were the world’s largest marionette. “They’ll probably put you in jail, huh? Lots of Skip Williamsons in jail, Mickey. And they’ll just love you. You’ll have ’em lined up around the cell block waiting to stick it up your tight little ass.”
As the reality of his situation hit him, Mick’s screams suddenly wilted into whimpers. He sounded like a dog just struck by a rolled up newspaper.
“Hell, Sheriff Carter might even stand around and watch. He loves it up the ass. Just ask Robby there. He’ll tell you. The sheriff likes it way up in there.”
Robby reached for the sniveling form behind him, caught Mick by the arm and pulled hard, using unknown strength to keep his voice level. “We’re outta here.”
Mick offered no resistance. He fell back to Robby’s side and, a moment later, they both ran. From somewhere in the gray nothingness of mist behind them, they could hear the shadowy thing laughing at their retreat – a ghastly cackle, full of joy and pain, the sound a witch might make as she burned.
***
Deidra?
??s eyes jerked open and she straightened beneath the canvas blanket. She’d had the sensation of falling into a pit. Something had been below her, laughing, waiting down in the darkness to receive her flesh. She’d felt cold metal at her throat, the blade of the knife she’d seen in Mick’s hand, and she wanted to scream. Her eyes were now open, but she saw nothing of her surroundings and feared her dream wasn’t over. She feared something would surface from this sea of ink at any moment and try to pull her under. It would put the knife to her throat and slice –
Paul’s voice in her ear, “It’s okay, babe. I’m right here.”
She’d dozed off. How could she even think of closing her eyes after what she’d seen? That thing was out there. As crazy as it sounded, she knew it to be true.
Deidra lifted her hand in the darkness, found Paul’s face and felt its contours beneath the bristly growth of his dawning beard. He was really there. She felt the heat of his chest and the comforting weight of his arms around her. Somehow, she felt protected. Secure. Deidra then felt the cold piece of metal from her dream, realized it was the charm that hung from Paul’s neck, the separated twin of her own, and she relaxed a bit.
She wriggled her body against his for warmth. “Nancy and the others?”
“Not yet.” She could feel his head tilt, feel his loving gaze fall to her. “You okay?”
“No.”
He chuckled a bit at that. “Me neither.”
“What time is it?”
She felt him shrug in the darkness. “Nine. Ten, maybe.”
“People will have made it home by now.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll tell their parents ... call 911.”
“They will.”
“When do you think they’ll come?”
“I don’t know,” he told her patiently.
She understood she sounded like a child with all her questions. “I’m sorry. I know you’re as much –”
“As much in the dark as you are?”
Deidra managed a chuckle herself. “Exactly.”
And then they were no longer in the dark; a faint light bled into the dimness. Deidra’s eyes shot to the doorway, saw its outline glow brightly on the opposite wall.