Page 5

She tilted her head and crossed her arms. “You don’t have time for us anymore, Mama.”

“Course I do, sweetheart.” Sobs cut up my words. I wanted to comfort her, but she was just another hallucination.

Annie extended her arm and pointed a finger in my direction. She tugged Aaron to his feet. Their skin and muscle sizzled. Then it melted from their small skeletal frames.

My muscles locked. I opened my mouth to scream. No sound came out.

Their skeletons flaked into dust and evaporated into a gray mist. The vapor gusted through me as if a vacuum inhaled it from behind.

All the sounds of summer exploded at once. Chills invaded, reached into my bones. I covered my ears and turned my head to follow the mist.

A fully mutated aphid crouched six feet away. Its wide body and enlarged back forced it to hump over. The insect-like mouth wormed out. A stylet protruded from a sheath. The mouth clicked. Black fluid leaked out.

Pinpricked pupils dotted its all white eyes. Eyes that measured me in the same manner I measured it. Muscles and blood rippled under green see-through skin. Scraps of a receding hair line and beard outlined its bulbous head.

No, it couldn’t be. A heart and arrow tattoo seemed to pump over cartilage and veins on its chest. It was Stan. Flirty fucking Stan who lived two houses down.

It shifted on its double-jointed legs and inched forward. Fuck. The fucking pistol was in the greenhouse. The scissors I used to cut spinach weighed down my hand.

The pool sat a knife’s throw to my left. Was it a good time to test Joel’s water theory? A pitch fork stuck out of the compost pile on my right.

Stay alive.

I whipped the scissors at the aphid. Leapt for the pitch fork. Pinned the handle between my ribs and upper arm. Then I turned to face it.

It plunged into the fork with mouthparts snapping. Hooks for hands clawed at my face and missed me by millimeters. The thing continued attacking as if it didn’t feel the tongs impaling its chest and the scissors lodged in its neck.

My pulse raced. I held it squirming at a distance as it robbed my courage. It weighed at least a hundred pounds more than me and struck with the speed of a rattler. I needed skill over strength.

Can we swim today?

I aimed the fork at the pool. It shoved back and redirected with a swinish force. We were three feet from the water’s edge. Might as well have been three miles.

A claw flew out. Brushed my hair. Missed my head. I squeezed the fork’s handle. Wrenched it from the aphid’s chest and raised it over my shoulder.

My heart raced. Black innards dripped from the fork’s tongs next to my face. I swung the handle downward, smacking the point that thrust from its gaping maw.

The mouth went limp with a squeal. I hit it again. Exhaustion stole my balance. The aphid hit the ground and so did I. I kicked it in the torso and it rolled over the edge of the pool.

A pincer shot up and closed around my ankle. I scraped my nails along the concrete edge. My fingers lost purchase. A huge breath filled my lungs and I went underwater.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

Stephen King, It

The noon sun lit up the water with crystal clarity. The aphid sank and pulled me with it. I bent my waist and pried the claw on my ankle. It clamped harder.

Pressure pounded my chest. The aphid body had zero buoyancy, a fucking anchor attached to my leg. It didn’t struggle. Didn’t pull. Just simply sank.

Panic set in. The need to gasp set my lungs on fire. What was I thinking using the pool as a means to escape that thing?

The aphid’s skin pulsed in a pearlescent glimmer. A kaleidoscope of formations came and went, morphing its body. For a few precious seconds, I was captivated by the transformation. Tumors emerged, fungus-like, bubbling on its back and arms. Beads of air clouded the water and clung to my hair floating around me. It was dissolving.

I kicked with my legs and worked at the claw with my hand. Tiny hairs, like razor-sharp spines, bit my palm.

Then the hook went limp, releasing me. The abomination that was my neighbor drifted away, sinking, eyes open and staring. I swam like hell and didn’t look back until the front door was barricaded behind me with extra boards and more nails than it needed.

Joel found me that night slouched at the kitchen island, still in my clothes, which were dry and stiff. Clunk-clunk-clunk filled the room as his gear hit the floor. I slipped my shredded palm under the counter when he approached.

He glanced at the reinforced front door then turned hawk eyes on me. “Evie?”