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“Spam size.”
“Say what?”
“About as big as a Spam loaf fresh from the can.”
“I won’t be eating any more Spam.”
“There’s another one two steps down.”
“Yeah, on the left. We better move around it as far on the right as we can get.”
“Let’s go back and get torches.”
“We’ve got plenty of light.”
“No, no. To burn the suckers.”
“Just stay focused. Find Ernie. Get him out of here.”
The first chamber in the cellar, the mechanical room, contained the gas furnace and water softener and electrical panels. It was the kind of room that was atmospheric and creepy, but it wasn’t the kind of room where someone died horribly. However, it very much reminded Rebecca of the kind of room that comesjust beforethe room in which someone dies horribly.
On the concrete floor, eight globs of quivering matter like those on the stairs lay in a line leading to the door of one of the three big larders stocked with food for the end of the world. The largest mass, approximately the size of a two-pound container of tofu, crawled laboriously at the head of the procession. Those that seemed to be in a pilgrimage behind it were mostly a third to half the leader’s size, although a few were hardly more than dribbles.
In yet another moment of enlightenment, though a minor one compared to those that had come before it, Rebecca said, “They’re molts,” and she halted.
“Molts?” Bobby asked as he came to a stop behind her. “What are molts?”
“Whatever passed through here was molting. This stuff dropped off as it moved along.”
Spencer raised the rolling pin. Evidently, one of those series of images by which artists make sense of the world passed through his mind and led him by visual associations to a conclusion. “So the thing is big.”
“Bigger than the pieces that fell off it, but not necessarily big big,” Rebecca said.
“Oh, it’ll be big big, all right. It’ll be huge. Massive. Let’s not fool ourselves.”
Bobby agreed with Spencer. “It was something big enough to lift Ernie out of the window seat and carry him down here.”
“I have a déjà vu feeling,” Rebecca said. “As if we’ve been in situations like this before. With crawling things like these.”
The three amigos stood at the end of the procession of creeping molts, staring at the closed door toward which those lowly entities were making their way, no doubt with the intention of being absorbed by the primary mass from which they’d sloughed off. This might have been a tender and touching moment if the molts had been lost puppies seeking their mother, but they were not puppies, and the scene was weird, disturbing, and somewhat nauseating.
Considering the three Armageddon storage rooms, Rebecca thought that Ernie could be behind the steel door to the left or the steel door to the right, rather than behind the center door toward which the molts were crawling. However, neither stories nor the real world worked that way, and you always had to open the door that you most dreaded opening.
“Let’s do it,” she said, moving around the excruciatingly slow molts and stepping to the door.
Spencer suggested they merely knock and see what happened.
From her experiences being Heather Ashmont, Rebecca knew that if a hulking monster waited in the room beyond the door, it would not reveal itself prematurely by issuing an invitation or saying,Nobody here but us chickens. Therefore, she didn’t embarrass her amigo by commenting on his suggestion. She gripped the handle and took a deep breath and opened the door.
The lights came on automatically. Rebecca stepped across the threshold.
Ernie was lying face up on the butcher-block top of the table-high island of drawers, under a ceiling ventilation grille. His face still bore the blush of rouge and the light coat of lipstick that Rebecca had applied to make him appear not dead before they wheeled him out of the hospital. Without a porkpie hat and sunglasses, he wouldn’t fool anyone—he looked like a corpse on a catafalque. He wasn’t breathing. Rebecca lifted his arm and swung it back and forth, and it moved freely; rigor mortis had not set in, as it should have done. By now, if he were deceased, an unpleasant odor should have been emanating from him, but he had no odor at all. He was not dead. However, when she took his wrist and felt for a pulse, she didn’t find one.
No monster hulked in the walkaround between the center island and the walls of shelved five-gallon cans of dried food. Whatever grotesque creature lifted Ernie out of the window seat and brought him to this room had performed the task required of it and moved on with no apparent consideration for the trembling molts that yearned so poignantly to be rejoined with their mothermass. As it was for children in dysfunctional human families, so it seemed to be for the sloughed-away offspring of monsters.
“Let’s get Ernie out of here,” Rebecca said, “before something comes back for him.”
They slid and pulled Ernie into a sitting position, with his legs dangling over the edge of the butcher’s block.