Free Worm by Tim Curran Page B

was. It was like all the energies of the house were gathered in this one place, behind the closed door. The last thing he wanted to do was catch a peek of her on the toilet, but if she wasn’t aware he was in the house by now then it meant she was in trouble.
    Tightening his grip on the bat, he opened the door and pushed it in.
    In that brief moment of darkness while his fingers fumbled for the light switch, he heard a wet, sliding sort of sound he knew was not good. Then the light was on.
    “Oh, shit, Steph,” he said, turning away.
    But when there was absolutely no response from her, he turned back. She was sitting naked on the toilet, her long legs spread, her back up against the tank, her head slumped forward. Her eyes were open and staring. They looked like green crystalline pools.
    “Steph?”
    He wanted very badly to think he had merely caught her in mid-dump, but the truth was much worse and he knew it. Black muck had slopped up from the toilet and spilled to the floor. Globs of it had run down the inside of her legs. There was blood on her lips.
    She was dead.
    There was no doubt about it.
    She was dead and he knew it.
    Then she started to move.
    Her eyes still wide, green and glassy and unseeing, she wavered from side to side like she might fall right off the pot. And it was as she did so that he heard a moist, tearing sound that was coming from inside her. She began to lean forward like she was going to stand up and pitched right over at his feet…a swollen, monstrous worm sliding out of her in all its segmented, blood-slicked, phallic horror.
    He stumbled back in the doorway, nearly going down.
    The worm had been eating her from the inside out. She was facedown on the floor, the bloody globes of her ass still raised as if in offering to that obscenity.
    It raised its head at him, the forward segments pulling back and opening like a pipe to reveal the mouth and its rows of hooked teeth. A slime of blood and mucus rained down to the floor.
    It hissed at him.
    And Tony ran.
    He did not think; he ran. He darted down the hallway and tripped awkwardly down the steps. Then he was at the door, falling out into the night, so devastated by what he had seen that he could not even scream. He didn’t stop moving until he heard something moving through the muck in his direction.

 
     
     
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    I’m coming for you, motherfucker. I’m coming to kill you. I’m going to beat you to death.
    Clutching the fireplace poker in her white-knuckled fists, Kathleen stalked the thing that had slid into her house like a vein of shadow. She would find it. She would kill it. Then…then…then…then she would go quietly mad because she wasn’t too far away now. Maybe not in the same house, but definitely living next door.
    The trail of muck was easy enough to follow.
    If the creature— snake, had to be a goddamn snake, a fucking python —was trying to practice stealth, it was failing miserably. It was about as stealthy as a shit-leaking pig. That was the comparison that leaped into her mind and she almost screamed because that’s exactly what Pat would have said.
    Don’t you dare fall apart. Not yet.
    Trembling, sweating out hot/cold beads of perspiration, she followed the muck trail, turning on lights as she went. The trail led from the bathroom to Jesse’s bedroom. Where was that fucking thing and where was her baby?
    She tensed.
    She heard a low, rolling rumbling sort of noise just as she had when this whole nightmare started. The house shook. It shook again. The rumbling grew louder. The house moved and she went down on her ass in the muck again as ceiling tiles cracked and jagged rents opened up in the walls. She could hear things falling and crashing downstairs. She was certain one of them was the picture window.
    The house is falling down.
    She scrambled to her feet in the oily black filth and jogged down the hallway to the stairs. She did not know where she was going. She did not know what