“John, did I hear you say you thought she looked like Amber?”
“Yeah.”
“John, Amber’s almost as tall as me. Blond hair, kind of top-heavy, right?”
“Yeah, cute as hell. I mean—”
“And you think Shelly looks like her? The girl sitting upstairs?”
“Yeah.” John turned to face me, already getting it.
“John, Shelly is short. Short with dark hair. Blue eyes.”
—They haunt minds—
John sighed, plucked out his cigarette and flung it to the floor. “Fuck.”
We turned toward the stairs, took a step up, and froze. Shelly was there, sitting halfway up the stairs, one arm curled around Molly’s neck. Innocent, wary eyes. Playing the part.
I stepped slowly onto the third stair, said, “Tell me something, Miss, uh, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your last name—”
“Shelly is fine.”
“Yeah, remind me anyway. I hate forgetting things.”
“Morris.”
I took another step toward her.
“That’s what I thought.”
Another step. I heard John step up behind me.
“So,” I said, “whose house is this?”
“What?”
“The sign out front says Morrison. Morris-son. Not Morris. Now would you describe your own appearance for me?”
“I don’t—”
“You see, because John and I have this thing where we’re both seeing completely different versions of you. Now, John has eyesight problems because of his constant masturbation, but I don’t think—”
She burst into snakes.
That’s right. Her body sort of spilled out of itself, falling into a dark, writhing puddle on the ground. It was a tangle of long, black serpents, rolling over each other and down the steps. We kicked at them as they slithered past, John warding them off with the torch.
Some, I saw, had patches of color on their scales, like flesh or the flowered pattern of Shelly’s dress. I caught a glimpse of one snake with a writhing human eyeball still embedded in its side, the iris powder blue.
Molly jumped back and barked—a little too late, I thought—and made a show of snapping at one of the snakes as it wound its way down the stairs. She bounded to the top of the stairs and disappeared through the doorway. We kicked through the slithering things and stomped up after the dog, just as the stairwell door banged shut on its own.
I reached for the knob. At the same moment it began to melt and transform, turning pink and finally taking the shape of a flaccid penis. It flopped softly against the door, like a man was cramming it through the knob hole from the other side.
I turned back to John and said, “That door cannot be opened.”
We stumbled back down the stairs, John jumping the last five, shoes smacking on the concrete. The snakes fled from the firelight and disappeared under shelves and between cardboard boxes.
That’s when the basement started filling with shit.
The brown sludge oozed up from the floor drain, an unmistakable stench rising above it. I looked around for a window we could crawl out of, found none. The sewage bloomed out from the center of the floor, swirling around the soles of my shoes.
John shouted, “There!”
I whipped my head in his direction, saw him grab a little plastic crate from a shelf and set it on the floor. He climbed up on it, then just stood there with the muck rising below. Finally he looked at me and said, “What are you doing? Go find us a way outta here!”
I was ankle-deep now in a pool that was disturbingly warm. I sloshed around, looking above me until I found the large, square duct feeding into the first floor from the furnace. The return air vent. I went to a pegboard on the wall and grabbed a foot-long screwdriver. I jabbed it into the crease between the metal of the duct and the floor, prying down the apparatus with a squeal of pulled nails.
I finally got a hold on the edge of the metal duct and felt it cut into my fingers. I pulled it down to reveal the dark living room above me, blocked by a metal grid. I jumped and knocked the grate aside with my hands. I leapt again and grabbed floor with both hands, feeling carpet under my fingers. With a series of frantic, awkward movements I managed to pull my limbs up until I could roll over on the floor of the living room.
I looked back at the square hole and saw a flicker of flame emerge, followed by the torch and then John’s hand. In a few seconds we were both standing in the living room, glancing around, breathing heavily.
Nothing.
A low, pulsing sound emerged from the air around us. A laugh. A dry, humorless cough of a noise, as if the house itself was expelling the air with giant lungs of wood and plaster.
John said, “Asshole.”
“John, I’m changing my cell number tomorrow. And I’m not giving you the new one. Now let’s get this over with.”
We both knew the drill. We had to draw the thing out somehow. John handed me his lighter.
“You light some candles. I’ll go stand in the shower naked.”
Molly followed me as I went back to where we left the boom box and the other supplies. I lit a few candles around the house—just enough to make it spooky. John showered, I found another bathroom and washed the sludge off my shoes and feet.
“Oh, no!” I heard John shout over the running water. “It’s dark in here and here I am in the shower! Alone! I’m so naked and vulnerable!”
Out of things to do, I walked around for a bit and eventually found a bedroom. I glanced at my watch, sighed, then lay down over the covers. It was almost four in the morning.
This could go on for hours, or days. Time. That’s all they have. I heard Molly plop down on the floor below. I reached down to pet her and she licked my hand the way dogs do. I wondered why in the world they felt the need to do that. I’ve often thought about trying it the next time somebody got their fingers close to my mouth, like at the dentist.
John came back twenty minutes later, wearing what must have been the smallest towel he could find. He lowered his voice. “I think I saw a hatch for an attic earlier. I’m gonna see if there’s room to crawl around up there, see if maybe there’s a big scary-looking footlocker it can pop out of or somethin’.”
I nodded. John raised his voice theatrically and said, “Oh, no. We are trapped here all alone. I will go see if I can find help.”
“Yes,” I answered, loudly. “Perhaps we should split up.”
John left the room. I tried to relax, hoping even to doze off. Ghosts love to sneak up on you when you’re sleeping. I scratched Molly’s head and—
SLEEP. LICKING. A soft splashing sound from another room. I dreamed I saw a shadow peel itself off the far wall and float toward me. Most of my dreams are like that, always based on something that really happened.
My eyes snapped open, my right arm still hanging over the edge of the mattress, the rough tongue still flapping away at my ring finger. How long had I been out? Thirty seconds? Two hours?
I sat up, trying to adjust to the darkness. A faint glow pulsed from the hall where the nearest candle burned away in the bathroom.
I quietly stepped off the foot of the bed and headed across the room into the hallway. Down the hall now, toward the sound and the light. I ran my hand along the textured plaster of the wall until I reached the bathroom, the source of the gentle splashing. Not splashing. Slurping. I peered in.
Molly, drinking from the toilet. She turned to look at me with an almost catlike “can I help you?” stare. I thought absently that she was drinking the poowater with the same mouth she used to lick my hand. . . .
If she’s in here, then that wasn’t her by the bed.
I picked the candle off the counter and headed back to the bedroom. I stepped in, the candle casting an uneven halo of light around me, rustling the shadows aside. I moved toward the bed and saw . . .
Meat. Dozens of the wrapped and now partially unwrapped hunks from the freezer, laying neatly on the floor next to the bed in an almost ceremonial fashion, the objects arranged in the rough shape of a man.
I moved the light toward the head area, where I found a frozen turkey still in the Butterball wrapper. Under it, wedged between turkey and torso, was the disembodied deer tongue, flapping around of its own accord.
Hmmmm. That was different.
I jumped back as the turkey, the tongue, and a slab of ribs levitated off the floor.
The man-shaped arrangement of meat rose up, as if functioning as one body. It pushed itself up on two arms made of game hens and country bacon, planting two hands with sausage-link fingers on the floor. The phrase “sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist” suddenly flew through my mind. Finally it stood fully upright, looking like the mascot for a butcher shop whose profits went entirely to support the owner’s acid habit.
“John! We got, uh, something here.”
It was about seven feet tall, its turkey head swiveling side to side to survey the room, the tongue swaying uselessly below. It extended a sausage to me.
“You.”
It was an accusation. Had we dealt with this thing before? I didn’t remember it, but I was bad with faces.
“You have tormented me six times. Now prepare to meat your doom!”
I have no way of knowing that it actually said “meat” instead of “meet” but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. I ran.
“John! John! We got a Situation Fifty-three here!”
The thing gave chase, its shaved-ham feet slapping the floor behind me. My candle went out. I tossed it aside. I saw a closed door to my right, so I skidded to a stop, threw it open, and flung myself in.
Linen shelves smacked me in the face and I fell back out of the closet, dazed. The meat man wrapped its cold links around my neck and lifted me up. It pinned me against the wall.
“You disappoint me. All those times we have dueled. In the desert. In the city. You thought you had vanquished me in Venice, didn’t you?”
I was so impressed by this thing’s ability to articulate words using that flapping deer tongue and a frozen turkey that I almost lost track of what it was saying.