Free The Dead Parade by James Roy Daley Page B

thing.
     
     
    PART THREE:
    BECOMING THE BEAST
     
    37
     
    James knocked two times, waited a few seconds and was about to knock again when he sensed déjà vu. He felt like he had done this before, and he had… at Johnny’s house. But this time things were different. For one, James didn’t look fresh; he looked haggard and beaten, like he had strolled through a war zone on the way over. And James didn’t feel the way he had this morning, numb. He felt energized, almost exhilarated.
    As he waited, he noticed that Sue’s lawn needed to be cut and her shrubs needed to be groomed. He wondered if the backyard was loaded with junk. It probably was. Instead of knocking a third time James opened the door and stepped inside.
    “ Hello?”
    The house seemed to be deserted; he could hear flies buzzing and smell rotting meat. As he walked through the door he eyed the floor and the walls the same way Johnny had earlier. But there was nothing here this time, he hoped. And the house wasn’t cold; the August sun had turned the place into an oven.
    He walked through a near-empty living room and entered the kitchen. He found the refrigerator door wide open. On the counter he could see unwashed dishes piled next to a basket of bananas, which had melted into rot and decay. On the floor several bags of garbage had been stacked into a heap. A dead cat lay facing the corner. Dishes on the dinner table sat together with a stack of unopened mail. Flies crawled on top of everything.
    He closed the refrigerator door, which was a big mistake. The flies became airborne and circled the room annoyingly. There must have been a thousand of them.
    James walked down a hall and entered a bedroom. The room was completely empty.
    Then he entered a bathroom and relieved himself. After washing his hands and face he checked another bedroom. The room had wall-to-wall furniture, reminiscent of Johnny’s backyard. He wondered why, and then it came to him: Johnny didn’t want to give the creature a place to hide. And either did Sue.
    Shaking his head, James entered another bedroom.
    He found Sue dead, as he knew she would be. The bullet had entered the temple on her right side and circled endlessly, never finding its way out. He wondered how it felt to have a bullet doing donuts inside your head as blood squirted into the air; he wondered how long she managed to keep on living.
    James rubbed his eyes. Of course, Sue’s handgun was missing; Johnny had taken it. And the shotgun was nowhere in sight.
    But James knew where to look; he had known all along.
    It was time to check the basement.
     
     
    38
     
    James slid a hand along a dirty wall and found a light switch. After a single bulb came to life he walked down an old wooden staircase, eying the ridged shadows that cut the rooms into sections. Even with the light on the basement was dark. It was also damp and gloomy. The walls were an off yellow color. The ceiling was oppressively low, home to a long metal heating duct that weaved its way through the center of the room. As James followed the duct his stomach began to turn. The basement smelled like a nasty synthetic grade of cheese that had gone bad.
    At the far side of the room was a door.
    James approached it covering his mouth.
    He clicked another switch and the glow of sixty-watts blanketed the room. He saw a workbench and some tools, a desk and a bookshelf, a small beer fridge and something that ran shivers up his spine. He stood very still, looking at three bodies lying next to each other on the floor. Each body was covered with a dirty a white sheet.
    James couldn’t pull his eyes away. The sheets were game-show mystery boxes, the answers to all his questions.
    He lifted the first sheet and found Sue’s sixty-year-old father.
    The man had not been shot, but attacked. Half his face was missing. His skin color had changed from a warm coffee tan to a hard moldy black. His single eye was swollen and closed. His lips had been torn off. His mouth