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The House on Brady Drive

In the company of her amigos, Rebecca stood in a condition of alarm and keen dismay before the window seat. Ernie Hernishen wasn’t lying under the lid. Neither was anyone else named Ernie nor any other person whose surname was Hernishen. Nothing lay within that space except the blankets with which Bobby and Spencer had fashioned bedding for their friend.

Whether Ernie was comatose, in suspended animation, or dead, it was unthinkable that they could have lost him. However, unthinkable was not a synonym for impossible . They had to face the fact that, in less than fourteen hours, Ernie had gone missing. Of course he might be in the house, reanimated, making a ham sandwich or writing yet another song to irritate his mother.

With Britta at the college, busily shaping young students into psychopaths, there was less risk that someone would walk in on them. Nevertheless, they felt compelled to search the premises as quickly as possible.

Although the task could have been completed faster if they had split up, they stayed together. None of them needed to vocalize what they all were thinking: Somewhere in the house, they might encounter Wayne Louis Hornfly, and if not him perhaps an even more unsettling presence, in which case there ought to be some safety in numbers.

After they found no one on the second floor or the first, the cellar waited. Bobby used a kitchen switch to turn on the light in advance and opened the door and saw what lay on the landing and said, “What’s this crap?”

The meatloaf-size mass wasn’t actually crap, and in fact it looked more disgusting than feces. Mottled dark brown-green-yellow, pulsing like living gelatin, pocked by what appeared to be weeping sores, the thing sported an irregular pattern of pale two-inch-long quivering tendrils reminiscent of the stamen-capped pistils in the center of certain flowers, though (let us be clear) it was neither sweet-smelling nor pleasing to the eye as flowers traditionally are.

Rebecca and Spencer crowded the doorway with Bobby to have a look at what repulsed him. They were no less repulsed, mystified, and fearful than their amigo.

“It’s moving,” Spencer said. “Isn’t it moving?”

Rebecca said, “Slow as a snail.”

“So it’s alive?” Spencer asked.

Bobby said, “If that’s life, it’s not life as we know it.”

“What in God’s name is it?” Spencer asked in a voice trembling with trepidation.

Rebecca declared, “God had nothing to do with this.”

Spencer said, “What does it want, where is it going, what does it mean?”

Bobby responded, “Aren’t those the same questions we all have about our existence?”

Rebecca knew what he meant. “So maybe it is life as we know it, sort of.”

“We don’t absolutely have to search the cellar,” Spencer said.

“Oh, yes we do,” Rebecca disagreed.

Bobby said, “For Ernie. To find Ernie.”

“Maybe he won’t be down there,” Spencer said.

“Oh, he’ll be down there,” Bobby said.

Rebecca said, “Something took him down there.”

“How can you be sure?” Spencer asked.

Rebecca said, “A scene like this was in every script I was sent and turned down after Shriek Hard, Shriek Harder .”

Bobby said, “Spencer, what is that?”

“A weapon. A rolling pin. It was on the counter.”

Rebecca said, “Are you serious?”

“Hey, we don’t have a gun. At least this is something ,” Spencer said defensively.

Perhaps already you can see what was meant earlier about how annoying a lot of dialogue tags can be in a long conversation of short statements, when it doesn’t much matter who said what. This distraction cannot be allowed to continue, and an effort will be made henceforth to minimize the tags.

Summoning her inner Heather Ashmont, Rebecca said, “Follow me.”

“Don’t step on that thing.”

“Why would I step on it?”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“I don’t like having it behind us.”

“Relax. It’s too slow to make a move.”

“Maybe it’s faking slow.”

“It’s not faking. It’s a kind of slug thing.”

“Maybe it has wings.”

“Did you see wings?”

“What the hell is that ?”

“What is what?”

“Ahead there. Crawling up the wall.”

“Another one. Smaller.”

“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 comes just before the 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 mother mass. 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.

“I’ve got this,” Bobby said, and he pulled his amigo into a fireman’s carry.

By the time the amigos returned to the mechanical room, the molts had veered toward the door on the left. Maybe something waited behind it, or maybe their desire for a reunion would go unrequited. Despite the potential for a dramatic and touching resolution to the quest of the molts, Rebecca wasn’t emotionally involved enough to tarry in anticipation of it.

Following Bobby and his burden, Spencer suddenly stopped and turned and looked at the molts. “Yes! I’ve painted things like this. They’re in some of my works. I’ve never known what they are. No one has known what they are. I still don’t know what the hell they are, but I’ve painted them. I’ve painted them!”

Spencer was so ecstatic to have discovered the source of his inspiration that he glowed like an excited child thrilled to have walked into a surprise birthday party.

Rebecca was loath to put out the flame of Spencer’s delight, but she slapped him on the back to hurry him along. “Move, move, move. Get your ass in gear, Picasso.”

Cellars were among the worst places to linger when an eleven-fingered psychopath in a mask might be nearby, and especially when you knew that a molting slime creature of unknown provenance was lurking behind one door or another, and not with benign intent. Rebecca was dismayed that so many people saw threats where none existed, especially when propagandized to fear them, yet failed to see a true disaster even as it avalanched toward them. But she was amazed that Spencer, considering his baleful life experiences, would tarry in a cellar, goggling at the molts when the thing from which they had sloughed might at any moment erupt from the shadows, seize him, infuse him with its fiercely potent gastric acid, and dissolve him into itself in mere seconds—assuming that was how the thing worked. But here he stood, delaying, transfixed. Artists.

As a heavy door swung open behind them with a rasping of steel hinges, she clapped Spencer hard upside the head and cried, “Go, go!”

Throughout the foregoing, Bobby had kept moving. Blessed—or perhaps cursed—with the fertile imagination of a novelist, he had been sufficiently terrified to have already made it nearly to the top of the stairs in spite of his burden.

Spencer clambered after him, and Rebecca followed. They burst into the kitchen as if flung out of an alternate universe by a force that only a physicist of vast knowledge would understand. Rebecca slammed the cellar door, and Spencer snared a sturdy chair from the breakfast table, and Rebecca jammed it under the knob to brace the door shut, as if there might be even a remote chance that would work.