Creekers (67 page)

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going in now.”

Lightly but quickly, he crept around to the front and mounted the wood steps to the porch. All the windows were vaguely dark, but he detected the faintest fluttering orange light from within.
Candles and oil lamps,
he realized.
No electricity.
“Anything that moves,” he whispered to Vicki, “shoot it.”

Shotgun at the ready, he stepped to face the front door, then paused. The strange brass knocker—a blank face bereft of features save for eyes—stared back at him. He remembered it, from all those years ago. A face from his past, beckoning him now. But there was another face from his past, too, wasn’t there? Natter’s face—

And that was one face Phil couldn’t wait to have in his sights.

The door stood slightly ajar, and it creaked appropriately when he pushed it open and aimed the Remington. Several candles flickered; it took Phil a moment for his eyes to adjust, then another moment to digest what he was seeing…

“Good God,” he murmured.

There were indeed Creekers waiting for them. Several waited right here in the foyer. But none of them were armed.

And none of them were alive.

Five or six of them lay in a heap on the threadbare carpet which was now just a sponge of wet blood. Knives lay on the floor too, having recently fallen from limp hands. Their swollen heads hung off their necks at impossible angles to show grisly gashes cut deep across their throats…

They all killed themselves,
Phil realized.

Vicki gasped behind him. Phil stepped in. He spotted more bodies lying in the halls to either side, all pale in death, all throat-cut.
What in God’s name…
Each room off the hallways, too, were now death chambers. And when he’d finished checking all of the rooms on the first floor, he realized there must be over thirty dead Creekers total. All suicides.

It was hard to fathom so many dead bodies at once. Phil felt winded, and Vicki looked like she was about to pass out. “Come on, we gotta check the next floor,” he said.

The stairs were a slow waterfall of blood, and once they got to the second-floor landing, they saw more piles of bodies, more slashed throats, more dead-staring crimson eyes and twisted death-grins. “Why are they doing this?” he muttered to himself.

“I told you, they’ll do anything for Cody,” Vicki whispered. “Suicide is the ultimate homage to their god…”

He stood in ragged shock in the hall. More candles flickered about the heaps of disfigured and swollenheaded bodies.
Homage?
Phil thought. More like madness, sheer and total madness.

“Mannona!” a voice shrieked. A figure wheeled out of the dark, a Creeker. Phil brought the shotgun to bear and fired. Half of the Creeker’s head flew away in chunks. “Onnamann!” shouted another flawed voice, and then another Creeker, with a bivalved head, limped quickly out of the flickering darkness. Phil fired again. The report caught the inbred square in the chest and carried him halfway down the hall. Then—

Holy shit!

Every door in the hall flew open, and a legion of Creekers converged on them. Vicki fired ineptly behind him, screaming, as Phil emptied the shotgun into the approaching mass. Bodies fell only to be replaced by more. Then Phil whipped out his two pistols, pinpointing and dropping targets one after another in a hail of concussion and muzzleflash. He managed to reload twice in the melee, firing repeatedly, the guns bucking in his hands, and more inbreds fell like hinged ducks in a shooting gallery. When he was done, a lone overalled Creeker with a cleft face grinned at him, raised his arms, and said, “Mannona!”

Then he lunged.

Phil’s final shot caught the marauder in the eye and dropped him.

Gunsmoke filled the hall like tear gas. Now a deadfall of bodies lay at his feet.
I just killed twenty or thirty people,
he realized, but by now the shock had worn away, to be replaced by some stoical kind of complacency. None of the Creekers had been armed, yet they’d attacked anyway. Again, it didn’t make sense. They’d willingly, even gleefully, lunged to their deaths.

More proof of Natter’s evil.

“Where is he?” he asked, tasting cordite. “Where’s Natter? He’s upstairs, isn’t he?”

Vicki, blood-spattered and gore-flecked, nodded. “In the upper room,” she said.

Natter had gone to all this trouble to get him here, and had sacrificed all these people, but—Why? Phil asked himself. He had to know now, no matter what the risk. He reached into his pocket for more bullets but found none. He didn’t even care. He took Vicki’s hand, stepping over bodies, and made for the next flight of steps.

Then, not in his ears but in his head, Natter’s voice grated like stones.

Yes! Up here, little boy…

The narrow stairs creaked underfoot. The heat grew stifling, but Phil was oblivious. He felt oblivious to everything now, to blood, to violence, to killing. He was cauterized, immune. He didn’t know what he was walking into, and he didn’t care.

The memories hovered. He walked directly to the door at the end of the cramped hallway. Opened it. Stepped in.

Only moonlight lit the room, from the open shutters. Four black corners and a block of tinseled light.

I told you we’d see you again someday,
he heard in his head.

Phil glanced at each of the room’s stygian corners.

Yes, little boy, we’ve been waiting…

“Where’s Susan!” he erupted. “If she’s dead, I burn this whole place to the ground and all you ugly fuckers with it!”

This invective was answered with a low chuckle.
Not many of us left to burn, hmm? You’re quite handy with a gun.

“You killed those people, Natter!” Phil railed. “You
ordered
them to kill themselves! You sent them to their deaths.”

No, rather, I sent them to paradise. The time has come; we’ve all suffered long enough. They are in paradise now, which is where they deserve to be. Tonight our travails are at an end. Tonight our curse is lifted. Tonight we start anew.

The darkness, now, seemed to coagulate; Phil felt he was standing in a grotto with the moon, like a spotlight, casting an aura about him.

Welcome home,
the voice croaked.

“This is a hell house, it isn’t my home.”

Oh, but it is. We’ve waited a long time for your return.

“What do you want?”

You.

“But you had me earlier in the parking lot at the club. Why didn’t you take me then?”

Because there were still a few things you needed to remember, weren’t there? Hmm?

The dream,
he realized.
The final part of my childhood memory.
He gazed cockeyed into the dark.
The last piece of the puzzle. “
You
can’t know when and what I’m going to dream,” he protested.

I know lots of things about you, Phil.

Because I’m your father.

“Bullshit.”

Think about it, son.

He did then. The darkness focused. Orphaned as an infant. Raised by an “aunt.” Could it be possible?

“But I’m not a Creeker,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m—”

You’re what?

Phil’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

You’re perfect.

“We’re
both
perfect, Phil.”

But it wasn’t Natter who’d said it. He recognized the voice at once.

“Susan?” he said, squinting.

Moving very slowly, Susan emerged from the dark. But she was fully dressed, smiling softly.

Unhurt.

“I thought—”

“That they were torturing me, raping me, killing me?” she finished. “If you didn’t think I was in danger, then you never would’ve come.”

A trick, he realized.
All this time she’s been one of them.

“And, of course,” she added, “that wouldn’t be any way for them to treat your sister.”

My…sister?

“You should have read those books a little more closely, Phil,” she said. “We’re both Creekers, but we’re perfect. It took a long time for our father to breed us. Trial and error, for ages.”

Then Phil thought back to the books about inbreeding.

The more intensively inbred the community, the more astronomical the chances of an undefected birth.
One chance in thousands,
he remembered.
And Susan and I are it.

“We’re living proof, aren’t we?” Susan said. “No red eyes, no black hair, no physical deformities. We’re the offspring the Creekers have been trying to produce for a hundred years. But—” She took another step closer. “Too bad for me I was born a woman. The progenitor has to be male.”