Chapter 24

My first thought was that there was a person trapped on the other side of the door. A small white hand touched the pane, moving through the earth as if it were water. It slid along the surface of the glass and it had dirt under its tiny fingernails and I heard myself say, very quietly, "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"Sam?" said Mom. "What's wrong?"

The hand reached the edge of the doorframe. It scrabbled briefly, silently. Dirt filled in the spaces left behind it, and then it began to move downward, toward the latch.

The underground children.I don't know if I said it out loud. I only know that I lunged across the room, tripping and scrambling over the broken furniture, and flung myself at the door, hitting the lock a bare instant before the hand reached it.

I clung to the handle, gasping for breath, lending my weight to hold it closed. The flashlight got wedged between my boob and my arm and shone on the dirt. The hand plucked at the handle and I felt a shudder through the latch.

"Sam…?"

"Something," I gasped. "Out there. Wants in."

In the flashlight beam, the white hand was joined by another. They closed delicately over the door handle and pulled. The door shifted a quarter inch, the length of the latch, and I threw all my weight against it in a panic.

"Check the windows," ordered Gail. Thank god, someone else was taking charge. I heard Phil sprinting to make sure the front door was locked.

Dirt shifted sideways. More of the arms came into view, and then a soft, ribbed body like a giant grub, and then one of the underground children pressed its face against the glass next to mine.

"Oh god," Mom said behind me. "Oh god."

Its head was shaped like a monstrous fetus, the skull squared off, eyes set far down on the sides. White skin covered everything, transparent enough to make out dark shapes underneath. It turned its head so that an eye faced me and I watched the edge of the flashlight catch it and the misshapen blue bruise beneath suddenly shrank as the pupil contracted beneath the skin.

We stared at each other, my great-grandfather's other child and I, and my mind was empty of everything but horror.

One of the little white hands drifted away from the latch and ran across the door next to my face. I heard the faintest squeak of flesh dragging across glass.

"There's one at the kitchen window," Mom said hoarsely. I heard her limping across the floor, and the snap of the window latch. I turned my head just in time to see another one squirming through the dirt on the other side of the door. Its body rubbed against the glass, thick and segmented like a beetle grub. I watched the ripples pass through the segments as it wriggled forward. Maggots move the same way, but they aren't the size of my torso.

"What the hell are they?" yelled Mom from the kitchen.

It reached the other half of the glass door. Dirty nails picked at the screen, the metal mesh digging into the thing's fingertips, but it showed no sign of pain.

"Elgar's other kids. The underground children." I could feel a high, hysterical laugh in my throat. "Oh god, Mom, they're our aunts and uncles."

"What?"

My great-aunt or whatever it was got through a bit of screen and pried it back. The weight of the dirt held the bulk of the screen in place, but it got one hand underneath. Its arm seemed to have no joints and hardly any bones.

"We have a problem!" yelled Phil from the direction of the front door.

I tore my eyes away from the underground children and waved the flashlight beam toward him.

We did indeed have a problem. The front door was wide open and dirt had poured in through it. Phil was trying to dig it out of the way so that he could get the door closed but for every handful he scooped away, another rained down.

"Shit! Shit, shit, shit!" I ran toward him just as a dainty white hand came around the side of the doorframe above his head.

"Phil! Get down!"

Perhaps he'd learned his lesson about not listening to me when I said, "Run!" He flung himself backward, hitting the wall.

The white hand felt up and down the frame. Small, pudgy fingers opened and closed over the doorjamb, then reached farther into the room, grasping at the air. Finding nothing, it withdrew.

Before I could even start to feel relief, dirt clods began to shift and a blunt white head surfaced like a seal breaking through water.

"Gail!" I yelled. "Gail, do something!"

I heard pounding footsteps behind me. The underground child looked around, its skinned-over eyes studying the space before it. It had a tiny toothless mouth, barely an inch wide, and as we watched, its mouth opened and it made a small, mewling cry, like a newborn kitten.

"What do you expect me to do?" snapped Gail. "I've never seen one of these things either!" But she stepped forward anyway, bottle of weed killer at the ready.

A second underground child popped up beside the first and looked back and forth curiously. The first one turned its head sideways to look at Gail through one wide-set eye.

"Go back, unclean things," Gail said. "Go back to the grave. Go back to the earth. O you wardens of the sky, protect us—"

The first underground child launched itself at her.

Gail threw an arm in front of her face and it hit her forearm, hands clutching at her wrist and shoulder. Phil jumped up, grabbing for the thing's body. His fingers sank into it as if he were grabbing wet clay, and it made a tiny sound of distress, then lowered its mouth with surprising speed and latched onto Gail's arm.

"Aaaaafuck!" Gail yelled, and sprayed it full in the face with the weed killer.

It dropped. Phil kicked it like a flabby football and it hit the wall and slid down, leaving a dark, oily smear. Its arms ratcheted for a moment, then fell limp. In the glaring yellow beam of the flashlight, Gail's arm had bloomed black with blood.

The second child lifted its head, small mouth working. It wiggled down the mound of dirt toward the body of the first one.

"Gail," said Phil. "Gail, how bad did it get you?"

"No idea," she said, clutching her arm against her stomach. "Feels like it tore a whole chunk out."

As if to illustrate this point, the underground child had reached the dead one. As I watched, it opened its mouth and set it against the dead one's skin. Despite the seeming lack of teeth, it bit down, then pulled back, leaving a neat circular scoop taken out of the corpse, as precise and bloodless as a melon baller.

"I'm gonna be sick," said Phil.

The child swallowed, its whole body wiggling with a peristaltic motion, and made a happy mew, a small kitten discovering tasty food. It took another bite.

More arms appeared in the doorway.

"I think we should go upstairs," I said. "And put as many doors between us and these things as we can."

"I agree," said Phil.

"Motion carries," said Gail, the three of us backing toward the stairs as more heads crested from the dirt.

I looked around for Mom and found her already hobbling toward us. I got an arm under her shoulder and half-dragged her to the steps. They weren't wide enough for two of us to go up, so she went first, with Phil grabbing her arm to help pull her up.

I shot a last look at the doorway. There were four underground children feeding on the dead one, and another coming through the door, mouth working as it tasted the air.

I went up the stairs backward, flashlight beam still fixed on the bottom. Would they follow? Maybe the dead one would keep them distracted long enough for us to barricade ourselves in a bedroom. I wasn't actually sure what we'd do after that, but at the moment, barricades seemed like a really good idea. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Phil had gotten Mom to the top and was sweeping his flashlight beam back and forth.

I was halfway up when the first underground child crawled into the beam of light. It tilted its head from side to side, skinned-over eyes contracting, and then put its hand on the first step.