Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,24

in a high, petulant voice. He couldn’t have been any older than nine or ten. “Who’re you?”

“Why didn’t you answer the door?”

“I ain’t gotta. This is my house.”

“Why’d you attack me?” Noah asked.

“You broke in!”

“The door was unlocked.”

“So what. It’s my house. You can’t just come in.”

“We didn’t mean to scare you,” Steve said, “but we’ve had an accident, a car accident. We need to use your phone to call the police.”

“Don’t got no phone,” the boy said smugly.

“You don’t have one?” Steve said suspiciously.

“Nope.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Pa’s coming back right now, and you’re gonna be in deep shit.”

Steve glanced at Noah, who shrugged.

“Keep an eye on him,” Steve said. “I’ll keep looking upstairs.”

“Get outta my house!” The kid leapt at Steve, grabbing his red pullover and tugging, as if trying to tear it.

Noah tossed aside the hockey stick and wrapped the boy in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his side and lifting him free. “I got him!” he grunted. “But hurry up, I can’t hold him forever.”

Steve dashed back up the stairs.

The kid kicked and squirmed and shook his head so violently his mask flew off.

“Stop it, you little shit!” Noah said. “What’s your problem? We’ll be out of here in a minute.”

“Get out now!”

“Give it a rest.”

Sharp teeth sunk into Noah’s right hand, in the fleshy valley between thumb and index finger. He cried out and released the kid, who quickly seized the hockey stick and swung it. Noah absorbed the blow again with his left side and grabbed the blade end of the stick with his good hand. They tugged the stick back and forth before Noah lost his grip and let go.

The kid, off-balance, stumbled backward and collided with an old cast iron radiator that was leaning against the wall, the plumbing disconnecting from the floor pipes. He fell to his back. The radiator rocked precariously forward.

Noah shouted, “Watch out!”

The boy’s angry eyes bulged and he raised his arms in a futile effort moments before the radiator toppled over and crushed his skull. The sound was brittle and wet at the same time, like bones snapping underwater. Then thick crimson blood seeped out from beneath the radiator’s finned columns in a rapidly spreading pool.

Steve was just exiting the kid’s barebones bedroom, about to move on to the next room along the hallway, when Noah began shouting.

Swearing in frustration—how hard was it to restrain a ten year old?—he returned downstairs to the dining room.

He froze in shock at the scene awaiting him.

Noah stood in front of a cast iron radiator, which lay on its side. The kid’s pelvis and legs stuck out from beneath it, making Steve think of a bug that had been squashed beneath a fly swatter: plump middle part flattened to a gooey pulp, legs spreading out from the remains all akimbo. Noah turned his head toward Steve, slowly, almost as if he were in a trance. His eyes were dark and unfocused. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything.

Steve rushed to the radiator and hooked his hands beneath it.

“Help me!” he said.

“He’s dead,” Noah rasped softly.

“Help me!”

“I heard him die. I heard him.”

With a loud bellow Steve lifted the radiator. The thing must have weighed a good two hundred pounds. It strained his shoulders and back. He got it to knee level and feared he was going to drop it back on the boy when Noah moved next to him and helped lift.

They got it upright. Steve steadied it with his hands until it stopped rocking on its scrolled feet. Then he looked down at the boy—or what remained of the boy.

He swallowed back a jet of vile. He thought he’d seen it all in gross anatomy, but this took the cake. The kid’s jaw and mouth were strangely undamaged, but his forehead was split open like a broken eggshell, revealing a flattened mess of loose blood, brain tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid. The left eyeball lay in a lumpy red bed a few inches from where it should have been. Tuffs of dark hair protruded from flaps of skin that were no longer attached to the skull.

Steve turned away without checking for signs of life. Noah had been right.

The kid was about as dead as you could get.

CHAPTER 6

“No tears please, it’s a waste of good suffering.”

Hellraiser (1987)

Mandy stared at the glowing fireball that had once been the BMW, trying to think of anything except Jeff—Jeff lying two feet away from her, silent and unmoving and maybe paralyzed. Seeing him