Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick

Author:Douglas F. Warrick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2013-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

Rattenkönig

SHE SAT INDIAN–STYLE BEFORE THEM in the Sudden Room. Her face ached. She’d been sitting there with her shoulders slumped and her neck craned, chewing on the insides of her cheeks. She could feel the rough nasty texture of the unsanded, unpainted planks in the floor through her jeans. It smelled like age and dampness in here, and with each breath, some paranoid part of her brain screamed out that she was probably inhaling a floating miasma of old wallpaper and crumbling plaster and prehistoric mold, a chemical buffet. She didn’t want to be here, but she knew that if she left, she would just want to come back. Nothing in the Sudden Room was comfortable.

The Sudden Room. Oh, the bastard Sudden Room, the nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up and from which some part of her, the self–pitying masochist recently awoke, never wanted to. It had existed in the corner of her eye, a cancer of the periphery, a door at the end of a hallway that didn’t exist. For years, she passed it and never saw it. For years, she stumbled like a sleepwalker from her bed to the bathroom, tracing the wall of the second–floor corridor with her fingers, and still she never noticed the branching hallway, or the door at the end. But once she saw it, like an optical illusion, like a filmic continuity error, she couldn’t unsee it. It was always there, the door to the Sudden Room. As were the things that lived inside.

She couldn’t figure them out. She wanted to know them, to understand them, to catalogue them and toss them behind a partition in her brain where she filed the vast and forgettable species of stimuli called “normal.” But they weren’t normal. They were shaped like people, but they stared at her through eyelids fused shut, their skin thin and jaundiced and divided into uneven puzzle–pieces by a lattice of thick black veins. They sniffed the air, ticking and twitching and shivering the same way she’d seen tiny dogs shiver in the arms of women blonder and more successful than her. They were hairless, or were almost so, and their not–quite–hairlessness (patches of thin white wires that seemed to quiver like insect antennae) was worse than pure baldness. They opened their mouths and made thin, wordless, bubbling noises, and even when their mouths were closed, their long sharp teeth hung over their chins like stalactites, rotten, yellow at the ends and black at the roots, the teeth of tigers in the mouths of meth addicts. And all of them were fused together, a shared carcinoma of a body from which jutted their terrible hungry heads and twitching toes and waving, spasmodic arms.

God, she wanted a cigarette.

They couldn’t touch her. Not if she sat far enough away. The far wall, framed by the sliver of light from the hallway beyond the door, consisted entirely of them. From floor to ceiling, a wall of flesh. There were twenty–six of them that she

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