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“What…what is wrong with him?” Natasha was in hysterics now, the tears finally finding release through her confusion. “He’s dying, Kenny…do something.”

Thaddeus thrashed along the driveway at their feet, rolling and clawing at his skin, roaring in pain.

Kenneth took one look at the raccoon-face left by Natasha’s smeared make-up and knew there was only one thing to do.

“Run like hell.”

With his hand clenched tight around the girl’s wrist he bolted across the overgrown lawn and up the rickety steps of the porch into the shadows waiting beyond the Carr house’s door. The stampede of motors still echoed through the ancient trees of the hollow. Thaddeus’s howl of agony rose to a crescendo as he fought against the changes taking place through his body. Behind them, reality had flip-flopped into a nightmare. And inside the house…

Inside, there was a new noise.

It sounded like a hundred small dogs’ nails tapping along wooden floors; a sound like a thousand large tarantulas scuttling in every dark corner. They were not alone.

What the hell is that, Kenneth thought as he fumbled through the darkness.

Dusk was upon them and what rays were left of the sun’s slumber seeped into the dark room between rotten boards criss-crossing the windows. A flurry of dust motes scattered here and there through the beams dampening any visibility the sparse light could bring. The interior of the main room reeked of mold and stagnant ruin, the floorboards creaking and moaning beneath their feet with each blind step. Kenneth could imagine the entire floor giving way at any moment and swallowing both of them whole.

Outside, the sounds of the engines stopped. Doors slammed. Voices spoke in a chorus, unintelligible by the distance.

They had to move—fast.

“Tommy,” Kenneth called out into the inky black. “If you’re in here, man, you’d better motivate. We’ve got company.”

Natasha took this as her cue to help, to latch onto the idea that the two of them weren’t completely alone. She called out to Tommy between sobs, “Tommy…Tommy…Tommy.” Perhaps louder than she needed to.

The scuttling sound stopped, replaced by the groaning of metal hinges.

THUD! A hefty wooden door slammed somewhere nearby. The dust motes changed course in the fading light, the air disturbed. Heavy, gurgling breaths seeped through the dark from somewhere near the middle of the room. They crept closer and closer, getting louder and louder.

Kenneth’s hand bumped into something and he yanked his arm back with a gasp. In the shock of the moment he lost his grip on Natasha’s wrist and fumbled around. After realizing that whatever he’d found didn’t strike back at him, he reached out again. The object was smooth, rounded, standing about shoulder-high. He frantically ran his hand down its length and found a hand-rail.

Stairs…

The voices outside had become a single entity, chanting something in a garbled tongue Kenneth couldn’t decipher. Time for caution was over. He stepped out, foot pushing blindly, and found the first step. Then the second.

Natasha let out a muffled grunt. Kenneth reached back into the darkness and swiped for her arm again. His fingers touched skin and he gripped it tight. “Come on. Quick, upstairs.”

He pulled at Natasha’s arm and was thankful that she had finally got a hold on herself. She’d stopped calling out for Tommy and had stopped fighting against his tug. As he bolted up the stairs as quickly as the darkness safely allowed, he was surprised to find Natasha apparently right in step behind him. No fumbling, no dragging—no resistance.

After one bend in the stairway leading across a small landing, the direction turned. The steps ended and the banisters stopped. He guessed that they’d made it to the second level of the Carr house.

Have to find someplace to hide…find a way to bolt ourselves in, keep quiet. “Hurry, let’s find a room up here and stay low.”

“No place left to hide, Kenny boy.” The voice was thick and grating, like sandpaper being ground down a chalkboard. “We’re home now…join us.” It was punctuated with a throaty laugh—an unmistakable laugh.

Kenneth pulled his hand away from the wrist. Something wet sloughed away from the limb with his grip, like a damp paper towel warmed with hot water. He shook it off in disgust, his fingers left sticky and hot. The realization of the situation made his stomach drop. His breath lodged in the back of his throat.
With his breath held, his options exhausted, he stormed off into the darkness.

With each blind step, each bump of his elbows and hands into a wall or doorway, Kenneth could feel Tommy—or whatever Tommy had become—closing in on him from behind.

Thaddeus forced himself to his hands and knees and watched as his face dripped to the ground. Patches of his long beard mingled with blood and froth as it spattered to the dirt and gravel. Letting that damnable hunger fester weakened his will, but the Elder probing at the back of his head was what let out the beast.

The townies swarmed the front yard before him. They chanted and it reverberated inside his mind like a chorus of angry hornets. The repeated hymn praising the Elder, older than the stars that now danced above them in the night sky, was maddening. It was powerful, the horrid dialect flowing from a hundred tainted lips calling out to their god.

And it only made the hunger worse.

The monster that lay dormant inside Thaddeus—hidden inside all of them—rose to its clawed feet. He brought his hands out before him and found they were now gray and gnarled, clawed digits dripping with the bloody remnants of sloughing humanity. Only a fraction of his mind still belonged to him. The rest belonged solely to the beast.

One foot lurched forward, then another. No—goddamn you, he thought. Fight it! Thaddeus fought to resist but he was urged forward through the throngs of people by something more powerful than himself. His could smell the fresh meat inside the Carr house, his senses homing in on it like a shark. His tongue swirled within his trembling maw, grazing along rows of malformed teeth, sharp and serrated like the stalagmites and stalactites within the cavernous chambers of the forgotten mine running just underfoot.

The cavern where the Elder resided alongside his Children. The mine shaft that had set forth the ruin of Blackwood Falls so many years ago now beckoned him home.

Thaddeus’s feet lumbered up the steps of the porch, the weight of his new massive form threatening to break the ancient wood with each step. The same porch he’d been made to drag countless loners across, an endless number of lost souls in the wrong place at the wrong time. Food for the Elder and his damned offspring, scraps for Thaddeus and the townsfolk—his minions. No more, no more… He had to make it right; had to end this half-century nightmare.

He saw clearly through the dark now, the world before him a swirling mixture of greens and yellows and black, his vision changing along with the transformation. Just inside the door he watched as the Children swarmed around a kicking girl. One had its slimy claw clenched tight around her mouth, covering half of her head in the process. Another restrained her arms; two more, her legs. It was the female he’d tried to warn earlier at the van, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. The fiendish Children made no attempt to escape through the hanging front door, their father’s voice leading them like dogs at the ends of a mental leash. But Thaddeus could sense the hunger in their eyes, the same hunger that gnawed at his own gut.

“Bring her to me,” the Elder’s voice whispered through his mind. “And she will bear us more Children.”

The monstrosities surrounding the girl drug her towards the opened trap-door set into the main room’s floor. He knew how this went. If it was a female offering and no food was immediately necessary, then they were mates. Incubators. They would drag her down into the cavern beneath Carr’s house, down through the narrow black mine shaft and to their father. And then she’d suffer the same fate as Carr’s wife and daughter, of the waitress that even now carried but one of the beast’s spawn, of most women that had once lived in Blackwood Falls—the same fate Thaddeus’s own wife had suffered.

It wasn’t pretty watching a slimy, half-man, half-beast rip through a woman’s stomach, turning her entire lower abdomen and groin into a spraying geyser of intestines and blood. But the Elder had told them all it was necessary the night the miners released Him—to procreate, to continue, and to survive. Eternal life.

And at what cost.

Thaddeus knew he could not resist the Elder’s pull enough to fight the Children off, to save the girl outright. She was doomed and he was helpless. But if he could just get back to the van those kids had parked in the driveway, fight off the hunger and the Elder’s demands long enough… It had to work.

Thaddeus willed his arm out against the door frame, forced himself away from the house. The Elder still called to his children, called out for the girl, but the change in focus left Thaddeus a small amount of free will. The lumbering beast took advantage and began clawing against the posts of the porch, fighting against his own body, wrenching himself back towards the van.

The other townsfolk still stood motionless around the yard, hypnotized by their own chants, empowering their master. Thaddeus would save them all, save himself, save the rest of the world the awful knowledge of what they’d let loose in that mine.

Kenneth winced as the talons sank into his shoulders on either side. Tommy laughed in his ear, that horrible wet laughter. Powerful arms stopped him in his tracks. He reached out and grasped the second floor’s banister he’d been using as a blind guide, but found himself being manhandled by his best friend.

“Shame we never got to curl Natasha’s toes,” Tommy said, something wet bubbling within his throat filtering his voice into a growl. “Hot little number. But she’s the Elder’s bitch now.”

Kenneth was spun around and lifted off his feet, the piercing talons sinking in around each bicep. The fresh placement of pain was exquisite, making his head swirl. Faint moonlight pierced the darkness through the second-story window to their right, slivers of a mirror ball, and faintly illuminated Tommy’s face and torso.

A warm wetness flooded the crotch of Kenneth’s jeans and ran down his leg.

Half of Tommy’s face had peeled down and hung flapping below his jaw, thick ropey strands still connecting it to the newly-exposed face like Elmer’s glue. His eyes were liquid black like a shark rising through the deep towards a hapless seal. A contorted maw filled with razor-sharp points stretched from ear-to-ear across the width of his head like a nightmare toad. Shredded remnants of his shirt dangled from his shoulders and chest, and below that gray mottled hide bulged and bubbled. The beast emerging from within his friend reminded him of the gargoyles that stood along the arches of the museum they’d went to on a field trip together back in middle school.

On Tommy’s arm, he could make out a large circular wound fizzed and frothed like an Alka-Seltzer dropped into a glass of tomato juice—a deep bite mark.

“I—I think you’re sick, man,” Kenneth forced out through the pain welling up from beneath his ribs. His arms were pinned hard against his chest by Tommy’s clawed hands, the pressure increasing like a vice around him. It was getting harder to breath. He had to act fast.

“Oh, I feel just fine,” Tommy said. “But I’ll feel even better once I get something in my stomach. So fucking hungry…” The large toad mouth spread open impossibly wide, the gullet behind like a sealed tomb. The other half of his faced slid down the side of his head, dangled at his collarbone, and flopped back and forth like a hairy slab of bloody red steak.

“I’ve got to ask,” Kenneth said, trying to keep the thing’s attention, buy more time. The talons tightened. His chest felt ready to cave in. “Does…umph…does your dick fall off…with the rest of…your skin?”

The beast that had once been Tommy roared into his face, the damp breath so forceful that it rustled his hair, the grating sound deafening.

That pissed it off… Somewhere in there is Tommy’s personality. I know Tommy’s buttons. Maybe if I pissed it off enough…

The thing cocked its dripping jaws to the side and began to lower Kenneth’s head toward the fanged abyss of its mouth.

Kenneth struggled again, feeble arms straining in van. There had to be something; had to be a way out of this. He looked around, panic creeping up his spine, hoping to spot something in dark he could make use of. His fingers stretched out below his clamped arms, the digits of his left hand grazing against the second floor banister. With being lifted off the ground, the top railing was about knee-high now. Just high enough to wrap his legs around. Maybe…

Think fast, think fast…