“What…what is that?” Richard finally said.

  “A Teddy bear.” Holly grinned, lips shriveling away from puckered and discolored gums that were speckled like a dog’s tongue. “It’s something for our babies, Richard. Of a likeness unto them. Blood calls to blood as a brother knows a brother.”

  Richard was speechless.

  There was no doubt that his own wife, or what she had become, filled him with an almost primal disgust these days. But this toy, this perversion of a Teddy bear…it was hard to truly say what it was meant to represent. Surely not a bear or any earthly mammal. When he saw it sitting there on the nightstand, he thought some horrible little pygmy had crawled into the room. It was maybe twelve or fourteen inches high, legs crossed and three-fingered hands nested at its pendulous belly, looking, if anything, like a cross between a toad and a particularly degenerate-looking piglet with a scaly, ratlike tail. It had reticulated and beaded flesh covered in patchy, irregular tufts of greasy gray fur that looked bristled. From its broad, almost simian head there hung a plaited net of grayish hair that tangled down to its sloping shoulders and over its stark, anemic face in oily strands.

  “It’s…awful,” he said, without even meaning to do so.

  And it was, dear God, but it was.

  Its skin was oddly flabby and loose, hanging in folds and pockets. And that face…like some starved and wizened baboon, wrinkled and aged, its pushed-in snout grinning with a mouthful of interlocked yellow teeth that were narrow as pegs and looked disturbingly sharp. Richard could imagine that mouth and those teeth tearing great bloody chunks out of you while those black eyes looked on with a deadly, sterile fascination.

  “Why, it’s merely a harmless toy,” the hag said.

  This was not a fucking toy.

  This was not a teddy bear.

  This was like some monstrous hybrid between a deranged, mutant ape and an African fetish doll. It was meant to inspire fear and loathing. He could see little cameos of himself reflected in its eyes as he approached it, feeling something unwind in his belly.

  “It has a name, Richard…would you like to know it?”

  He shook his head. No, he did not want to know that. Names implied personality and personality implied a soul and this thing could have neither. It was corrupt and profane.

  Pigwicken.

  Its name is Pigwicken.

  Say it’s name, Richard. Say it aloud.

  The words were said in his mind. The hag never opened her mouth. With the words came dominance and he could not refuse. “Pigwicken,” he said, the very name on his tongue sickening him. “Pigwicken.”

  The thing moved…shuddered, only momentarily but Richard saw it. And not only did it shudder but it made a sound quite like a low squealing.

  Dear God, it’s fucking alive…that little horror is actually alive.

  The hag grinned at him, enjoying his discomfort a little too much.

  This was the familiar that Alizon Clove called up for Jane Penden. The filthy thing was here. Now. Four hundred years later.

  It took everything he had not to knock that smirk off the hag’s face. And she saw it, too. She saw what burned in him and she actually flinched, looking uncertain as if maybe she had gone too far, pushed him past the point of no return.

  “Where did you get it?” he said. “Where did you get that ugly fucking horror?”

  Holly sneered at him, drool glistening at her mouth. “Does it frighten you, Richard? Do you worry what it might be and what it might do? That, maybe, one dark night, you might find it cuddled up in bed with you?”

  And that was exactly what worried him.

  He had thought that very thing and Holly had liberated it from his mind. A game. It was all a game, he realized. For a moment there he’d been caught somewhere between pissing his pants out of sheer terror and jumping on the hag, wrapping his hands around her throat and squeezing until all the black shit came squirting out of her ears.

  He thought: Playing you, Richard. It’s all about playing you. Knocking you down to some infantile, subservient level where you will do what you are told and you will not dare question this monstrosity that is possessing your wife. It’s all about dominance.

  Remember that.

  “You plan on keeping that heap of shit in my house?”

  The hag smiled, those rotting teeth on full display. “Yes, I do and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Not if you value the life of your little wifey.”

  Richard took a step closer to the bed, got in so close to the hag that he could smell the rifled graves on her breath. “You’re weak. You’re frightened,” he said. “Without her and without me, you’re nothing and you know it.”

  “My babies are getting angry, Richard,” the hag told him. “Every time you make them angry, they make your sweet little Holly suffer for it. Each time you disobey, they bite her…from inside.”

  He backed away because he realized that he honestly had no choice. Holly would be kept alive at least until the babies were born. Or until whatever was in her was born. Until then, the hag needed them both. But after that? After that?

  Richard figured he knew what would come after that.

  At the doorway, he stopped and turned. “I don’t pretend to know what you’re up to and I’ll probably never know…or want to. But, understand this, you crazy fucking bitch. As my wife suffers, so will you. If you hurt her, nothing in heaven or hell will save you…or your crawling brood.”

  The hag just stared at him, eyes full of acid.

  “One of these days, we’re going to have a talk,” he said. “All about some fucked-up inbred witch named Alizon Clove. And how she came to an end and how she’s going to come to an end again.”

  10

  Later, he wondered if there had been any real point to his bravado.

  For honestly, he was scared.

  Scared of the hag and scared of what was inside Holly. He was scared of a lot of things. And he was willing to bet the hag knew it. That she was feeding off it as her kind probably always did. But as scared as he was, he meant what he’d said. If that bitch hurt Holly, then she was going to suffer.

  For hours after that little exchange, he sat in his easy chair downstairs, smoking and thinking, feeling roughly like a rat running the maze and fearing there really was no way out of this Medieval bullshit. Jesus, he was thirty-five years old, an account rep for a veneer and siding firm. He lived in an ordinary Wisconsin town in a terribly run-of-the-mill and conservative neighborhood. He bowled. He liked the Green Bay Packers and takeout pizza. He collected football cards from the 1950s and ’60s. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to him was when he won $1,500 on a scratch-off ticket. He was so terribly boring and terribly average, he routinely made census-takers yawn. The bottom line here was that he had no business dealing with witches and possession and evil imps from hell.

  He simply had no business in any of this.

  They had picked the wrong guy here. He didn’t even like horror movies, let alone living in one.

  Thinking these things and knowing what was upstairs, he tried to put it into perspective. Any sort of perspective. Even one that was lopsided as all hell. What was he really looking at here? What was he really thinking this was about?

  Alizon Clove, a voice in his head told him. That’s what you think this is about. Some crazy old witch from across the pond that’s been dead over four centuries. Somehow, some way, through some totally fucked-up and convoluted sense of logic, she has taken possession of your wife. And she has done so because she plans on doing what she set out to do back in the sixteenth century: bringing to term the offspring of Old Jack Hobb. But instead of seeding Jane Penden, she has seeded Holly.

  Of course, that’s exactly what he was thinking. To the letter. He hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, but it had been gathering wool in his head ever since he read all the historical accounts of the Essex Witch. So there it was, laid out before him. Now what? He sat there, smoking and waiting for the laughter to come. Because it was really ridiculous, wasn’t it? Shit, it was the sort of thinking they committed people for.

  Ten minutes later, the laughter still had not come.

  As much as he hated the idea, he did believe it. And he had reached the point now where he could not possibly talk himself out of it. Maybe it was all the crap he’d been through. Maybe it had softened the soil of his mind so that just about anything would take root now.

  You can fight against this, Richard, that voice said to him, but in the end, you’ll only be hurting yourself. Self-denial will only make this all harder. If you accept it, maybe you can bring this to an end.

  Sure, sure. And maybe believing bullshit like that would drive him just a little crazier than he already was. He tried approaching it one last time from the seat of reason. Maybe Holly wasn’t possessed. Maybe she was just crazy…but that could not explain the telekinesis, those revolting odors, the physical changes she was suffering. Holly was someone or something else. She didn’t seem capable of even pretending anymore.

  That was it then.

  The only explanation was a supernatural one, or at least the sort of phenomena you would call supernatural. That’s where Richard was. He felt the last shreds of doubt fading from him, felt the cloying darkness of total superstitious belief. It was not a good feeling. It made him feel depressed and bleak and just utterly hopeless. But even so, he was not willing to throw reason and sanity completely to the wind. There was still a candle burning in his mind and its light was logic. Regardless of how deranged this all was, Richard was foolish enough to believe that even things like demonic possession had to follow some thread of logic. He just couldn’t believe Holly had been selected at random.

  But, dammit, there just wasn’t a connection.

  Richard’s people were all Dutch and Scandinavian. Holly’s were French and German. There was no connection to England or Essex that he knew of. Yet, there had to be. Somehow, there was a system at work here, a system with rules same as any other. He might not see it, but in his heart he knew it was there.

  It had been quiet upstairs for some time now.

  Not so much as a creak of the bed.

  Maybe it was time for an acid test before he threw reason completely away.

  He finished his cigarette and crept quietly up the stairs. The sun had not set all the way yet, but the light was fading fast. At the top of the stairs, he heard the wind pick up outside and rattle a few loose roofing tiles. The elm in the backyard creaked like a rusty hinge.

  Silence.

  Holly was not talking to “baby” or to herself for that matter. Richard wondered if maybe she was listening for him, playing one of her little games. And his rational self told him to call Dr. Frazer and drag her over here right now so she could see what Holly had become.

  Richard moved soundlessly up the hallway. He stopped before the door and listened. And right away it came over him, that nameless terror. It oozed from his pores like sour sweat.

  He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it very gently, opening the door a few inches. Holly was lying facedown, her breathing ragged but deep. She was sleeping. It stank in there as it always stank these days and there was a weird, subtle charge in the air like the aftermath of violence. He waited for the hag to roll over and offer him her toothy, demented grin.

  But she did not move.

  Pigwicken was there, of course. Sitting on the nightstand, staring at him, its grin huge and lunatic like that of some morbid ape. He wanted to smash it. To knock it to the floor and stomp the stuffing out of it…only he was afraid of what might run out.

  There was something innately perverse about it, something that got down into his guts and scratched inside his skull. Maybe the way it stared or the way it grinned or maybe just the menace that bled from it like poison. It inspired a bone-deep revulsion like an especially large and bloated spider. What made it worse is that he knew what it was. Not a stuffed toy, but an imp, a familiar, and probably the source of the hag’s power.

  He got up close to it.

  His heart was hammering, his nerve endings jangling. There wasn’t enough spit to wet his mouth. It kept looking at him with those huge and mirrored black eyes, grinning with its many teeth. It was aware of his presence and he knew it, just daring him to make a move against it. And for a second there, sweat beading his brow, he thought the fucking thing was breathing. His own breath coming fast, Richard jabbed it with his finger, expecting it to squeak. But it made no sound. But he pulled his finger back quickly with a silent cry because…well, because the thing was soft. Soft and yielding. Not soft as in plush, but soft as in alive. There was no denying the hideous vitality of the thing…or its warmth. Because it was warm. Warm like a woman’s thigh is warm. Warm like a puppy’s belly or a baby’s head. A living warmth, a fleshy and animate warmth.

  He could not pull himself away from it.

  He crouched there, sickened by the feel of the thing, the oily heat coming off it. And, yes, the sight of it. Because up close like this, he could see its patchy fur was slimed with something like jelly that had dried in snotty tangles, as if it had been pulled from a filthy Dumpster or recently crawled free of a placenta. He could smell a gamey wet-dog odor coming off it, but not like the smell of a living dog but a rain-soaked dog carcass. Its eyes looked at him and its teeth looked like maybe they wanted to part, like maybe Pigwicken wanted to open his mouth and unroll his tongue and lick his face. What’s the matter, Richard? Do I scare you? Do I make you remember creeping things from childhood nightmares? Things that lurked in your closet and scratched down in the cellar? it seemed to say to him. You think I’m alive and maybe I am. Maybe one dark and moonless night you’ll find out just how alive I am when I slither into bed next to you and sink my teeth into your balls. Maybe I’ll move right now…maybe I’ll open my mouth and give you a good-night kiss and you’ll feel my tongue in your mouth, only it won’t feel like a tongue but like you’re French-kissing a jellyfish. Lots of maybes, Richard. Maybe you better stop worrying about what I am and start worrying about what I’m here to do, what my purpose is.

  Richard fell away, gasping for breath, going down on all fours, needing to feel the physical contact of the floor because he could feel his own world fragmenting and dissolving around him.

  Behind him, he could hear the imp breathing.

  He made it out into the hallway, but he did not stand or even crouch. He slid on his belly down the stairs and huddled down there in the gathering darkness, literally out of his mind.

  It took him nearly an hour to come back to himself.

  When he did, he screamed silently into his fist.

  11

  The next morning, he met Maitland for coffee.

  “Well?”

  Maitland looked at him for a moment after he’d sat down. “Well, I did what you asked. I parked down the street and you were right. Not fifteen minutes after you left, this old bag shows up. No car, no taxi…she just comes walking up the sidewalk. She went right past me and turned into your walk. Up the porch and in.”

  Richard found himself smiling. Not out of any true joy, but because, in a way, this was substantiation. No, Maitland wouldn’t see it that way and no one else would either. But to Richard? Yes, substantiation, proof he wasn’t mad. “Tell me about her.”

  Maitland just shrugged, said there wasn’t much to tell. At 8:50 A.M. the old bat had gone into his house and at 11:55 A.M. she had left. Maitland hadn’t hung around the rest of the day, so he couldn’t say if Mrs. Crouch ever came again or not. “She was just some old lady, Richard. Kind of an odd bird, but just an old lady, I guess.”

  “What do you mean? How was she odd?”

  “Well, this is going to sound funny…or in light of that other stuff you told me, probably not funny at all.” Maitland cleared his throat, sipped his coffee. “Like I said, she was just this old lady. You wouldn’t have thought twice about her if you passed her on the street, but if you watched her come and go like I did…well, you sort of noticed a few things.”

  Richard was waiting; he wanted to hear this.

  “I’ve been watching people for years, Richard. Gets so you can almost tell how old someone is by their walk. Kids have a kind of bouncy, springy step to them. People in their twenties and thirties still have some of that energy, but their stride is more conservative. And when they hit middle age, they slow down. They’re not in much of a hurry anymore. And elderly people? Most of ’em walk real slow, you know? Like maybe they’re afraid they’re going to trip and break something that won’t heal again.”

  “What’s your point, Mike?”

  “My point is that this Mrs. Crouch walked fast and strong and sure for an old lady with white hair and more wrinkles than my bed.”

  Maitland said that struck him as funny. She was awful spry for an old lady. So spry, in fact, that at first he thought maybe she was some young woman made up as an old lady.

  “Just funny is all,” he said. “Now I’m not saying there’s anything, you know, supernatural about it.”

  “No, of course not. Anything else funny?”

  Maitland shook his head. “Not really…I mean, not unless you think it’s funny for an old lady to be a headbanger.”

  “A headbanger?”

  “Yeah, you know, heavy metal. Ozzy and Judas Priest and Metallica, that kind of thing. See, I was sitting down the street, maybe two houses down from yours, right? Bam, at five to twelve the old lady comes down your porch to the sidewalk, stands there like she’s lost for a minute or two…then, then she turns her head real slow and looks over at where I’m parked. Shit, Richard, it was like she was looking at me, right at me. Gave me the fucking willies the look I saw on her face, made me shiver. Then she smiles and raises up her left hand before her face and gives me that fork-fingered sign the headbangers use at concerts. You know? With the first and pinkie finger raised and the thumb holding down the other two?”

 

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