The Vile Village (3 page)

“Still ticking, huh, mister?” Undertaker said with a laugh, slapping the unconscious Stone on the shoulder. He turned to the
left and did a similar test to the dog, which lay there equally limp. The now of a dog being the most sensitive spot by far
on its body, the pitbull suddenly opened both eyes and somehow found the energy to snap up hard at whatever was fucking with
its snout. Then it collapsed back again, as Undertaker Hanson nearly fell backward from the sudden “attack.”

“Damn thing has some spunk in it, I’ll tell you that, Undertaker said with a harsh laugh as he rose slowly to both feet and
dusted himself off.

“Chester said we should strip ’em,” Ponzo said, looking over accusingly at his brother.

“Did not, did not,” Chester screamed back, nearly letting the be fall over in his anger.

“Oh, shut up, you moron,” Undertaker snapped, suddenly pulling a long piece of hickory from his sleeve and whop-ping the lad
right on the top of his bald head. The youth’s eyes rolled around in his face like rotted fruits in a slot machine—and he
shut up.

“I tol’ you once, I tol’ you a thousand times,” Undertaker said sternly. “If they’s dead, you can strip ’em. ’Cause the dead
don’t need what they got. But if they’s living, then you gotta treat ’em like a man. Otherwise you’ll go to hell.”

“But how can you treat a dog like a man?” Chester asked dumbly, his lower jaw hanging open.

“How can one of my own kin have no brain at all?” Undertaker asked with an exasperated roar as he stared at the youngest of
his sons—to his thinking the worst of the lot. “Now come on,” he said sharply. “Take ’em up to the attic, get Katie and LuAnn
to get set up, and then get your damn asses down here, ’cause we got coffins to build—goddamn coffins to build. It’s honey
time. It’s raining corpses.”

M
artin Stone floated between life and death. It was a strange sensation, sort of like being a child floating in a bathtub,
or on a rubber mattress at the beach—when there had been such things—bobbing up and down in the waves. He Boated between this
world and something else. Something he couldn’t see clearly but could feel, feel pulling him with a magnetic intensity, as
if it wanted him real bad.

When he floated back to this world—to the earth world, the world of solid things that lived and breathed—he felt pain, such
intense pain as he had never experienced before. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He had hardly enough rationality
left in his fevered brain to think it all through. He was just an animal in this world, burning up with tongues of fire coursing
through every cell. He had been hurt, whoever “he” was. Hurt real bad.

When he drifted back to the other world—through a tunnel of diamonds all rippling blue and white like they were made of star
material—things were more insubstantial. There were beings there—strange beings, both frightening and beautiful-all of them
hard to see, as if he were looking through an unfathomably deep, shadow-filled ocean. They floated in the luminescent haze
that surrounded them. And they were calling to him. Calling for him to join them: “Stone, Martin Stone. Life is no longer
for you. This is your new state. Come… come… come!

“Martin Stone, it is so beautiful here. Do not resist. Death is…love.”

Then there were other voices around him pulling him back from the insubstantial world. But these were not so angelic, and
seductive. They were yelling at him. Harsh lights suddenly filled his eyes, and he felt his physical being being moved around,
shifted, things poked into it and put on it. Though, again, just who or what that body was, was quite beyond him. His was
a primal existence. He was a primitive being in a sea of pain who had intelligence but no past—and no future.

Then he felt himself leaving his body again and shooting through the ceiling of the room he was in. He seemed to turn to some
kind of dust that could pass through solid material, could fly right into the heavens like something sucked up in a tornado.
Then he was staring down at himself from far up. It was as if he were a hundred miles above his burned, blistered body. And
when he saw the damaged flesh—and the canine lying on a bed next to it in similarly fucked-up fashion—suddenly he knew who
he was, and that, in fact, although it would be nice to rest for the next billion, trillion years and hang out with the spirit
mists that flew around him, he just had too much to do at this exact moment, though he would be glad to say hello to anyone’s
relatives back on earth.

But the ethereal shapes of indeterminate species had other ideas. Cloaked in a gray mist, they reached for him with arms that
rippled with smoke, fingers that clutched with currents of dark electricity, trying to bring him down, trying to drag him
off into the goddamn clouds somewhere, like a fucking street mugging in heaven.

Stone had learned to kick ass on earth, and he was damned if he wasn’t going to go out without a good fight—even in heaven
or hell. He started clawing and punching his way back through the crowds of the dead. And though it was slow going, he almost
began making some headway when suddenly he saw a sight that froze him in his tracks, made his heart—what there was left of
it—seem to harden like setting concrete in his chest.

His mother and father—only both were dead, the way they had been when he’d last seen them. His father, all blue in the face
and his once crystal eyes flat and dead like balls of mud. His mother was horrible. She had been raped and mutilated in her
last moments, and it was as if the crime had just happened and the blood still oozed from her ripped flesh, the hair tom from
her skull in bloody clumps.

Both of them reached for him as if welcoming him home after a long vaction.

“Oh, Martin, Martin, you’ve come,” his dead mother said. She came toward him with bleeding fingers outstretched, scraping
at him, while his father walked stiff-legged like something from a bad B movie. Stone stood mesmerized, not able to move an
inch from the limbo zone he was in. Yet somehow he knew that if they touched him or grabbed him, he would be dead. Would be
like
them
. And Martin Stone didn’t want to be dead. Didn’t want to be like that.

He pushed with all the willpower of his still living spirit, which dangled on the scales as Undertaker’s daughters gave Stone’s
body this pill and that ointment, this antirad liquid, that rubdown with cold mud to bring down his body temperature, which
rose to 108° at times. Somehow he broke through the ranks of the dead, sending dark spirits flying like rotting tenpins. He
dove from the throbbing black cloud he was in—down, down—as if diving toward the bottom of a swimming pool where a precious
jewel lay, the jewel of his body, of himself. The electric hands reached out for him with dark currents, and slime-coated
ectoplasmic flesh. But they couldn’t reach. And he disappeared back down toward the living, the real, the substantial.

A screaming chorus of anger went up as he slipped from their fingers, as his soul escaped from their dark land. They reached
after him, sending out wispy talons, but these merely evaporated in the air like smoke from a cigarette. For he was gone—heading
down like a meteor, out of their grasp, their influence. For now.

Stone felt himself shooting through a tube. He was in the Bobsled at Coney Island. It was great. He twisted and turned as
bands of light spun in concentric circles of Day-Glo color around him, as if he were inside a barber’s pole. And his father
was sitting next to him. His father, the Major, had brought little Martin to New York City—and the world-famous amusement
park at Coney Island. And it was so much fun. But now Martin was going faster, too fast, and he reached out for support against
the sides of the car. But there was nothing there—only air. And then he was falling terribly fast.

There were sounds above him, and he opened his eyes fractionally, which let in a fire of light that seemed to pierce every
optic nerve. Huge, blubbery lips were moving above, but they were speaking in slow motion and he couldn’t understand a damn
thing they were saying. Then he saw the fat face attached to the lips. Jowled and with shining bald head, Undertaker stared
down at him. And Martin Stone knew without question that he had died and gone to hell. And that the devil had hair-loss problems
too.

A
tongue was in his eye. It was long and it was wet. And it stroked at his face over and over, like a piece of wet sandpaper
trying to plane down his nose and cheeks to the bone. There was the overpowering scent of dog and alcohol and numerous or
strong-smelling substances. He felt like he was drowning.

Martin Stone opened one eye to see an immense furred face about one inch from his own. Its right eye was focused intently
on his own partially opened eyelids, and it let out a squeal that quickly grew to a shrill and deafening intensity. And Stone
knew he was alive—if only because it hurt his ears so much. He reached out with one arm to swat the animal away and realized
at the same instant that it was Excaliber, and that he couldn’t move a muscle. It felt like his hands were tied down. Stone
knew something else, too—that his entire body felt like it had been through an oven, a meat-grinding and tenderizing session,
used as a soccer ball in a grudge match and worse.

“Hey, get away from there,” a voice suddenly called out, and Stone saw the dog turn and then a hand pushing it down off the
bed he lay tied down on.

“You’re awake,” the same soft voice asked. Stone saw another half-focused shape right above him. Only this face wasn’t bald
or fairy at all. It was beautiful. “That dog been messin’ with you since it woke up yesterday morning,” the flush-cheeked,
blond-haired female said with a little snort of derisive laughter. “How you feelin’, mister?” she asked with a smile. Slowly
Stone’s eyes were coming into focus, and the more he saw, the more he felt like living. He dimly remembered some battle he
had had with gray, amorphous things. But as he had returned to the world of the living and the memory was of the dead, it
quickly faded from his skull, popping like a bubble even as he reached with his mind to contain it.

“Tara said you was goin’ to die,” she said, reaching down and stroking his forehead with a cool, wet cloth. It felt good.
“But I said no—this man’s got guts inside that burned body. I tell you—”

“What—what do you mean, burned?” Stone asked with puffed lips, which trembled as he spoke. Nothing on him felt like it was
in very good shape.

“Pa thinks it was the rains that came by five days ago. Burned you and your damn dog, I’ll tell you that. You should see yourself,
mister—maybe you shouldn’t.” She giggled. “You got bumps and sores and boils and all kinds of nasty things all over yourself.
I been working on you with my own hands.” She held up two small, but strong-looking, hands, callused fingers used to working,
and hard. “Undertaker let me stay up here with you once he saw you had a real chance, which was mighty nice of him, all things
considered—I mean, since it’s peak coffin season right now.”

Stone’s mind reeled with questions that just gave him a jarring headache as little armies of mental porcupines paraded around
in a gallop through his brain.

“Am I going—goin’ to make it?” Stone managed to stutter out. If he had such a wall-to-wall carpeting of ugly bumps and couldn’t
move a muscle, it seemed like a logical question.

“Pa—Undertaker—thinks so. And damned if he ain’t the most smart doctor type in these parts. Not a real doctor, of course,”
she said with a shy smile, which Stone managed to return with his own. She couldn’t have been over eighteen or nineteen years
old but was in the full bloom of womanhood. Long reddish-blond hair flowed down each shoulder like little waterfalls of fire,
and the blush on her cheeks was like the pink tips of a freshly bloomed mountain rose. Her lips were moist, and Stone felt
an insane desire to reach up and kiss them hard. Her face was like a mirror for her inner feelings—her very soul reflected
in those twinkling eyes, in her constantly changing expression. Somehow, in a world of death, she was incredibly, wonderfully
alive.

“Why can’t I move?” Stone asked, trying to raise his hand to scratch something that itched fiercely on his stomach.

“Pa’s treatment, mister,” the farmgirl went on. “Got so many burns all over your skin, it’s all red and tight and dry. We
been treating it with all kinds of mud baths that Pa mixed up from his secret recipes. Won’t even tell
us
what they is. But he said if you moved at all, it would break the skin, rupture it, so’s we got you all tied down, mister.
Sorry about that. You do look funny, though. Tied down like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. And all naked the way
you are—and all covered with white mud with ground-up junk and herbs in it. You look a little like”—she put her hand over
her mouth, trying not to laugh, for it was surely impolite to laugh at the radioactively impaired—“an ice-cream cone with
sprinkles all over it.” She couldn’t contain it, and a series of girlish giggles escaped from around her hand.

Stone somehow managed to crane his neck just a little, just enough to see how completely and horribly ridiculous he looked.
Like a mud-caked slug all tied down at arms and legs with leather thongs. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The sheer
conflict of the two emotions sent his mind reeling again, and he fell back down the black pit into which many tumble but from
which few emerge.

W
hen next he awoke, the very first thing Stone did was try his arms, which he found to his intense happiness were no longer
strapped down. Though he was still naked and on the bed with a thick white goo over every square inch of him, like the Pillsbury
Doughboy saturated with icing. It felt sticky and quite wretched, but figuring that these people knew what the hell they were
doing or he wouldn’t even still be around, Stone didn’t try to start madly wiping it off with the sheets that lay sweat-soaked
beneath him.