A Horror Serial

Chapter Nine, by Theresa Crater

Jimmy gaped at the voice that came from the—but what was this being standing before him? It sounded like his grandmother, but she had died. He’d gone to the funeral, listened to Preacher’s words. He’d seen the men from the church take their turn shoveling the red dirt over her pine box. He could still hear the thud of soil on wood.

“Child, come. Don’t you know me?” His grandmother’s voice emanated from a very tall, slender and angular woman dressed all in black.

Something stirred in Jimmy, some knowledge beating like the wings of a moth trying to come into his mind. “No,” he shouted, trying to force it back down.

But his brother had no such reservations, at least about the tall woman’s invitation. Rady pushed by Jimmy in the dark, moving with frightening speed, steady on his feet, his crippled leg seeming to support him now. Rady growled low in his throat, then a wet, tearing sound reached Jimmy. The copper smell of blood. And something darker and more fetid.

Preacher’s voice rose above the abominable feast in a parody of rapture, “Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.”

Jimmy’s stomach roiled and he turned away. He groped blindly, finding the wall, then the front door. He wanted to run, to take off down the dirt road and never turn back. To forget whatever it was that was coming alive in his mind.

“Yes, son, that’s right.” His grandmother’s voice was intimate, encouraging. Then she keened with the pain.

“Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you,” Preacher crooned.

“No,” Jimmy screamed. “No.” He must escape this blasphemy. He threw open the door. The light from the full moon fell in a swath across the living room.

“James.” It was the voice of his grandfather. That voice he knew better than to disobey. He turned and what he saw, his mind refused.

The woman stood, arms out. Coils of grey intestines fell from her opened abdomen where Rady knelt, sucking the blood like a babe at his mother’s breast. His face was suffused with light.

But something was happening to the woman. He refused to call her his grandmother. She should be dying, yet inside her open body something moved, twisted and pushed up her spine. Her eyes changed from brown to gold. A terrible radiance lit her face.

Outside the wind had picked up and it blew through the opened door in a roar, ripping the curtains from their rods, strewing dried leaves across the rug.

“Do you remember, James?” His grandfather pointed a long finger at him. “Do you remember who you are?”

A jag of lightening shattered the old tree in the front yard and the house shook with the thunder clap that came almost simultaneously.

Preacher threw back his head, his face distorted, the veins of his neck standing out like ropes. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

“No,” Jimmy shouted. But he knew it was too late.

Something massive shifted behind him, moving its slow thighs. Its breath was as heavy as a bull’s. Its shadow blotted out the moonlight. Smoke rose from the thin carpet where the creature strode toward the tableau of mother and child.

“Son,” the creature called down to Rady.

His brother looked up, his face dripping red with blood, a rope of gut slung over his shoulder. He smiled, a terrible knowledge lighting his eyes.

The woman straightened with a groan and wings, enormous gossamer moth wings, burst from her shoulders. She threw back her head and laughed.

“No,” Jimmy screamed again and thrust his hands in front of him, trying to push it all away. But he knew it was futile. He knew he could not escape.

The terrible knowledge burst through the final resistance in his mind. He remembered.
He knew who he was.