They dragged them back into the crawl space, and Jimmy drove a strong twig through the hasp of the broken lock to hold it shut.
They stood in the rain again, soaked and bloody. "We'll have to get rid of the bodies eventually," Jimmy said. "I'm not going to jail for this if I can help it."
"The next trailer?" Mark asked.
"Yes. They would be the logical ones for the McDougalls to attack first."
They went across, and this time their nostrils picked up the telltale odor of rot even in the dooryard. Not even the steady autumn rain could lay it.
The name below the doorbell was Evans. Jimmy nodded. Yes, the husband's name was David Evans. He worked in the auto department of Grant's in Gates Falls. He had treated him a couple years ago. A cyst, or something.
This time the bell worked, but there was no response. They found Mrs Evans in bed, white and still, and dispatched her. The white sheets were drenched. The two children were in a single bedroom, both dressed in pajamas. Jimmy used his stethoscope and found nothing. The stakes did their work, and now he found using them little different from using a scalpel or a bone-saw. Even horror had its limits.
Mark found David Evans, hidden away in the unfinished storage space over their small garage. He was dressed in neat mechanic's greens and his mouth was crusted with blood that had dried in two streams from the corners of his mouth. Perhaps his children's blood.
"Let's put them all up here," Jimmy said.
They did, checking the road carefully for cars before carrying each sheet-wrapped body across the space between the house and garage. When the town hall noon whistle went off, sending its shriek up to the gray, membranous sky, they both jumped and then looked at each other sheepishly.
Mark looked at his red-gloved hands with loathing. "Can we use the shower?" he asked Jimmy. "I feel...you know..."
"Yes," Jimmy said. "I want to call Ben, anyway. We--" He snapped his fingers. "The phone's out at your house. Christ, why didn't I think of that? As soon as we clean up, we'd better go back."
They went inside, and Jimmy sat down in one of the living room chairs and closed his eyes. Soon he heard Mark running water in the bathroom.
On the darkened screen of his eyes he saw Randy McDougall twisting and writhing on the wet leaves, saw the stake falling, saw his stomach swell with gas--
He opened his eyes.
This trailer was in nicer condition than the McDougalls', neater. He had never known Mrs Evans, but it seemed she must have taken pride in her home. There was a neat pile of the dead children's toys in a small storage room, a room that had probably been called the laundry room in the mobile home dealer's original brochure. Poor kids, he hoped they'd enjoyed the toys while there had still been bright days and sunshine to enjoy them in, before they arrived at their final quarters--the shoddy upstairs of a half-finished second-story garage. There was a tricycle, several large trucks and a play gas station, one of those caterpillars on wheels (there must have been some dandy fights over that!), a toy pool table--
Blue chalk.
Three shaded lights in a row.
Men walking around the green table under the bright lights, cueing up, brushing the grains of blue chalk off their fingertips--
"That's it!" he shouted, sitting bolt upright in the chair, and Mark came running, half undressed for the shower, to see what the matter was.
In this section, Jimmy enters Eva's basement to confirm that Barlow is hiding there. In the novel, he opens the cellar door and steps down, and, as the published text says, "the screams began." In the original manuscript, this part is exactly the same, but the reason the screams begin is completely different:
Jimmy told himself he would only go to the foot of the stairs; he could use his lighter and see if the pool table was still there. He went down slowly, using the railing, breathing through his mouth to cut the smell. At the bottom, he flicked the wheel of the Zippo and the lighter flamed. He saw the pool table.
And he saw the rats.
The cellar was full of them. Every inch of floor space and shelf space was covered by the squirming bodies. They had tumbled whole rows of Eva's carefully-made preserves on the floor and they had smashed, leaving rich, splattered deposits of food. They were not eating now; they had been waiting for him...or for someone. Sarlinov's daytime guards. And at the flash of light, they attacked, wave after wave of them.
He screamed a warning to Mark and then turned to go back up the steps. A half-dozen huge dump rats that had been crouched on the small utility shelf hung over the steps threw themselves at his face, biting and clawing for purchase. He dropped the lighter and screamed again, this time not in warning but in pain and terror.
Rats crawled across his shoes and swarmed up his legs toward his waist, their sharp teeth and claws sinking through the cloth of his trousers and into flesh.
He staggered up two steps, beating at them with his hands. One of them snuffled through his hair and peered over Jimmy's forehead and into his eyes; the nose wriggled, and the rodent teeth flashed as he slashed at Jimmy's eyes.
Jimmy felt a great, flaring pain. He struck the rat away. His right foot slipped through the hole between two of the unbacked stairs and he fell forward, sealing his doom. Pain bloomed and he heard the muffled snap as his right ankle twisted, then broke.
I've had it, he thought. But like this...oh, God!
"Mark, run!" he screamed. "Get Ben! Get--"
A rat squirmed into his mouth, back feet digging at his chin. He bit at it, tore at it, and the rat squealed and writhed. The fetid taste of it filled his mouth. He ripped it away, beat more of them off, and began to crawl up the stairs.
Mark went to the door and saw something coming painfully up the steps on its hands and knees. It was brown and writhing with feet and tails and eyes. He saw a flash of something that looked like Jimmy's shirt.
He went down two steps and held out his hand. A rat jumped on it and crawled up his arm like lightning, black eyes glaring. He struck it off.
The brown, writhing thing heaved itself to its feet and Mark screamed and put his hands to his temples. Jimmy Cody's face was shredding before his eyes. One eye socket was dark and lightless; a rat was spread-eagled across his left cheek, chewing at his ear. They were crawling in and out of his shirt and now two brown rivers of them were moving up to where Mark stood. In a moment they would be on him.
"Get Ben!" the brown, writhing thing that had been James Cody, M.D., screamed. "Run! Run! R--"
He swayed, threw out his arms, and fell backward into the stairwell with a final, despairing scream.
The rats that had been coming for Mark paused and looked around, sitting up on their haunches and looking down, their paws held out in front of them--as if in applause.
Mark hesitated just a moment, swaying, unable to look away.
The thing that had fallen at the foot of the stairs twisted, writhed, screamed, tried to rise again, fell back, was dreadfully silent.
He could hear cloth being ripped and torn.
The rats began scurrying up toward him, their bodies plump and horribly well-fed. Not dump rats any longer. Graveyard rats.
When the first one reached him, he kicked out, smashing its head, sending it flying. Then he turned, walked up the two steps to the kitchen, and closed the door firmly.
In this scene, Ben and Mark have to chase away the rats before getting Barlow; flit guns and jugs of holy water help them.
They walked slowly through the hissing rain toward the porch. Rats carpeted the steps. They squeaked and thumped on the boards. A line of them were perched up on the red porch railings, like spectators at a racetrack.
"Be gone in the name of God," Ben said conversationally, and pumped the handle of the flit gun. A thin spray, nearly invisible in the rain, clouded toward the rats on the steps. The effect was immediate and amazing. The rats squealed and writhed and scampered upward, some of them twisting and biting at their own flanks, as if suddenly infested with hungry fleas.
"I
t works," he said. "Go back and get one stake and the hammer."
Mark ran back to the car. Ben started up the porch steps. After two more squirts, all the rats broke ranks and fled. Some jumped over the railing and were gone; most streamed back inside.
Mark ran up the steps to where Ben stood. He had unbuttoned his shirt and tucked the stake and the hammer inside, against his skin. His face was pallid, and a hectic blotch of red stood out on each cheek like a fever-sign.
The kitchen was overrun with them. They crawled across Eva Miller's neat red-and-white checked oilcloth with their tails dragging; sat upon the shelves, hissing and squeaking; scampered across the burners of the big electric stove. The sink was full of them, a writhing, twisting mass.
"They're--" Ben began, and a rat leaped onto his head, twisting and biting. He staggered, and all the rats surged forward eagerly.
Mark screamed and pumped his flit-gun at Ben's head. The aerosolsized drops of water were cool and soothing; the rat fell, twisting, to the floor and ran off, squealing.
"I'm so scared," Mark said, shuddering.
"You better be. Where's that flashlight?"
"At the...bottom of the cellar stairs. I dropped it when Jimmy..."
"Okay." They stood at the mouth of the cellar. A steady, eager rustling noise came up from the darkness below, and a tenebrous squeaking and squealing, as if from the throat of a catacomb.
"Oh Ben, do we have to?" the boy groaned.
Ben said: "Did Christ have to walk to Calvary?"
They started down.
Ben thought: I'm going to my death. The thought came easily and naturally, and there was no regret in it. Any fine emotion such as regret was buried beneath a vast white glacier of fear. He had felt like this once before, when he and a friend had split a tab of acid. You entered a strange jungle world where you suddenly found you did not want to go; a jungle inhabited by exotic beasts. You were no longer in control of you, not for a while. The colors and sounds and images formed whether you wanted them to or not. Filled with an alien presence, you were driven on wings of fear, higher and higher, willy-nilly, never knowing when the overwhelming question might be presented to you for half-mad inspection.
Let be be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Who said that? Matt? When? Matt was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. I wouldn't look at that, if I were you. The driver of the truck that had squashed Miranda's head to a bloody pumpkin had said that. Perhaps he was dead, too. And he might be dead soon himself. And the might part of it seemed very weak indeed. Again he thought: I'm going to my death.
They reached the bottom, and the rats closed in. They stood back to back, working the flit guns. The rats drew back, then broke in confusion. Ben saw the flashlight and picked it up. The glass lens had cracked, but the bulb was intact. He turned it on and flashed it around. It caught the pool table first, mummified in plastic, and then a dark, huddled shape lying on the concrete floor in a puddle of something that might have been oil.
"Stay here," he said, and walked carefully over and flashed a light down on what remained of Jimmy Cody after a thousand rats had finished with him.
I wouldn't look at that, if I were you.
"Oh, Jimmy," he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat.
There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took one of them and threw it over Jimmy's body. Dark flowers blossomed on it.
The rats were creeping in again. He sprayed them wildly, running at them, and they squealed and fled from him.
"Don't do that!" Mark called, frightened. "Half of it's gone already!"
Ben stopped, trembling. He flashed the light around; nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. No room behind the furnace.
"Where is he?" he muttered.
Shelves, preserves smashed on the floor, a Welsh dresser against the far wall--
He swung the flashlight back and focused on it.
The rats had retreated to their thickest concentration there; they crawled over it and around it in profusion, their small buckshot eyes casting back the light with a reddish sheen.
"That wasn't here before," he said. "Let's move it."
They walked across to it, and this time it took both of them spraying before the rats split their ranks and moved away in two wings. Yet they would not go far, although several of them had gone into twisting, snarling convulsions from the spray that had fallen on them. The stairs leading up to the kitchen were blocked, Ben saw with cold horror; choked with rats. If the flit guns ran dry--
They couldn't push it and still hold on to their hand-sprayers. "Hell with that," Ben said. "Let's tip it over."
They both grabbed the back with one hand.
"Now," Ben grunted, and they threw their shoulders into it. The Welsh dresser went over with a bonelike rattle and crash as Eva Miller's long-ago wedding china shattered inside. The rats hurried forward, squeaking, and they drove them back again.
There was a small door, chest-high, set into the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. A new Yale padlock secured the hasp.
"Give me the hammer," Ben said, and Mark handed it over. His eyes were rolling and jerking in an effort to follow the steady encroachment of the rats.
Two hard swings at the lock convinced him that it wasn't going to give. "Jesus," he muttered softly. Frustration welled up bitterly in his throat. He held up the flit gun and looked at it. Three-quarters empty. There were two nearly-full cans of holy water out in Jimmy Cody's car, but it could have been a million miles away. To be balked like this--
No. He would bite through the wood with his teeth, if he had to.
He shone the flashlight around, and its beam fell on a neat Peg-Board hung with tools to the right of the stairs. Hung on two steel pegs was an ax with a rubber cover masking its blade.
He started across to it, and the rats closed in.
"For the love of Jesus!" he cried at them, and it seemed they flinched. He made it to the Peg-Board, took the ax down, and turned back. The rats had closed the path behind him, a solid sea of them. Mark stood backed up against the door to the root cellar, the flit gun held tightly in both hands.
Ben steeled himself and started back, kicking the rats out of the way, spraying them when he had to. They squeaked and chittered and bit. One ran up inside the cuff of his pants and bit his ankle through the sock. He kicked it loose violently and it flew through the air, twisting and still biting, now at nothingness.
"Keep them away from me," he said to Mark, and slipped the rubber envelope off the blade. It glittered wickedly even in the dim light. Without thinking, he held the ax head up to the height of his forehead, offering it to something he could not see. "Be my strength," he said, and there was nothing corny to the words, and also nothing prayerlike or petitioning or fainting. The words came out as a simple command, and to Mark, the rats seemed to shrink back for a moment, as if in horror.
The ax blade glimmered with a tracery of that eldritch fairy-light that Ben had seen before at Green's Mortuary and in the cellar beneath the Marsten House. At the same time, power seemed to streak down the wooden handle to where his hands clasped it. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the blade, and a sense of curious sureness gripped him, the feeling of a man who has bet on a fighter who has his opponent staggering and clinching in the third round. For the first time in two weeks, he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows.
Power, humming up his arms like volts.
The blade glowed brighter.
"Do it," Mark said. "Quick! Please!" He dropped his empty flit gun to the floor and the glass barrel shattered. He took Ben's and began to spray again.
Ben Mears spread his feet, slung the ax back, and brought it down in a flashing arc that left an afterimage on the eye, like a time exposure. The blade bit wood with a booming, portentous sound and sunk to the
haft. Splinters flew.
The rest of this section reads almost identical to the published novel.
In this section, the last of the deleted scenes of the published novel, they stake Barlow. In the original manuscript, they take Sarlinov's coffin outside and let the sun do the work:
They let it go together, and Sarlinov's coffin settled to the wet autumn earth. They looked at each other over it.
"Now?" Mark said. He walked around, and they stood side by side, in front of the coffin's locks and seals.
"Yes," Ben said.
They bent together, and the locks split as they touched them, making a sound like thin, snapping clapboards. They lifted.
Sarlinov was a young man now, his hair black and vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life; the cheeks were as ruddy as wine. His teeth curved over his full lips, white with streaks of strong yellow, like ivory.
"He--" Mark began, and never finished.
The light struck him.
The eyes flew open, the lids rising like frightened window shades, and the chest hitched and air was suddenly pulled in with a terrible, windy inhalation that was nearly a scream. The mouth opened, revealing all the teeth and the tongue writhing among them like a red animal caught in a cage of snakes.
The shriek that erupted with the ebb of breath was awful, piercing, never to be forgotten--nailed to the brain in a sonic pattern of hellishness. The body writhed in the coffin like a stabbed fish. The teeth champed at the lips, the hands reached up blindly to hide the light, clawed the skin into bloody chevrons.
Then, dissolution.
It came in the space of two seconds, too fast to ever be fully believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares, with awful stop-motion slowness.
The skin yellowed, coarsened, blistered, cracked like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like a drift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and fell inward. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing into an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails blackened and fell off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull; the pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broomsticks. For a moment a hideously animated scarecrow writhed before them. The fleshless skull whipped from side to side; the nude jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal cords to power it. The skeletal fingers rose and clicked in a marionette dance of repulsion.