Black Mouth

by Ronald Malfi

Genres: Ghost; Horror; Thrillers

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Stephen King's IT, a group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerizing odyssey of terror.



An atmospheric, haunting page-turner, full of memorable characters and sublime terror, from the author of Come with Me



For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He's haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother's life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.



Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago—the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.

Release date: July 19, 2022

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER ONE 

DETOX BOOGIE1

One week after our mother committed suicide, my brother Dennis was taken into police custody while walking along the shoulder of a winding mountain highway wearing nothing but a pair of saggy white briefs and what I can only assume to be an empty expression on his face. He had made it six miles out of town, which meant he’d been walking for hours beneath the blazing summer sun. When the police found him, he was dehydrated. His face was lobster-red and glistening, his chest and shoulders blistered with sunburn, and the hairless bulge of his belly, which drooped over the frayed waistband of his underwear, was jeweled with sweat. He must have looked like some ripened tropical fruit, freshly washed. The only exception was his feet, which were bare and powdered in road dust. With each step he took, he stamped asterisks of blood onto the pavement.

I learned all of this—about Dennis walking along the highway in his underwear as well as our mother’s suicide—from a police detective out of Sutton’s Quay, West Virginia, who had somehow managed to track down my cell phone number and dropped me a line. Admittedly, the timing wasn’t great. I was fresh out of rehab, a condition of my continued employment with the Ohio foundry where I had worked for the past six years. I was operating a crane transporting a steel casting ladle of molten metal when the ladle adjustment failed. No one was injured, but the damage was considerable (as was the cost of cleanup and repairs), and that section of the foundry had to be shut down for a number of days. Len Pruder, my shift supervisor, pulled me into his office on the day it happened. He was a squat, potato-shaped fellow with bad hair plugs. He stuck his face in mine, so close that the tip of his nose grazed my lips, causing me to draw back.

“You’re drunk, Jamie,” Len said, nostrils flaring. His swollen red eyes ticked back and forth as he studied my face. “You goddamn son of a bitch, you stink like a brewery. You’re lucky you didn’t kill someone. Pack up your shit and get the hell out.”

So I packed up my shit and got the hell out. Two days later, however, I received a phone call from the floor manager, an ex-Marine named Yaeger, who invited me to a meeting. I agreed, then immediately felt ambushed when I showed up: Yaeger, Len, and some well-groomed people in suits all sat on one side of the large wooden table in the foundry’s break room, patiently awaiting my arrival. The people in suits were lawyers, I soon realized, once they started popping the brass clasps on their briefcases. When one of the suits asked me if I’d been drunk while operating the crane—“inebriated” was the word he used—I said I had probably been hung over, since I’d spent quite a few hours at Donovan’s Pub the night before, but that I didn’t think I’d still been drunk. When one of the suits asked if I frequently came to work hung over, I said no, not really, although maybe sometimes. Truth was, I was sitting there right in front of them with a bellyful of lead and a hangover that felt like someone was using a tack hammer to the back of my eyeballs. Because, hell, when you get fired from your job, you go out and get shitfaced, right? Anyway, I must have sounded reliable, or at least genuine, because the suits nodded at my response and seemed content. Yaeger, still sporting a military crew cut that made it look like someone had taken a push mower to the top of his head, actually grinned. Only Len Pruder, seated directly opposite me at that creaky wooden table in the foundry’s break room, scowled. His face had gone the color of a pomegranate, and his jowls quivered.

“This isn’t the first time,” Len spoke up. He looked on the verge of having a stroke, and there was a vein as thick as a McDonald’s drinking straw pulsing on the side of his head. “This guy’s a liability. He’s gonna wind up killing himself or someone else. Sometimes he doesn’t even come in for days at a time, and we gotta scramble the schedule to get someone else on the floor to cover—”

Yaeger raised a hand and Len Pruder went quiet. The lawyers at the end of the table looked nervous and uncomfortable.

As it turned out, the steel casting ladle hadn’t undergone a safety inspection in over three years. I guess a more industrious guy could have flipped the script and walked out of that meeting with a sizeable cash settlement, but I was happy to leave with my job reinstated.

“One condition,” Yaeger said, drumming a set of boltlike fingers along the scuffed wooden surface of the table. “You gotta do a stint in rehab, Jamie.”

“I don’t have the money for something like that,” I said.

“It’s covered under your health insurance. Drinking and getting fucked up—it’s considered a disease nowadays. Like cancer.”

I watched the suits bristle collectively at this, but they did not interject.

“Anyway, it’s company policy,” Yaeger went on. “No way around it, if you wanna stay on the floor.”

“You’ll need to attend regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, too, Mr. Warren,” said one of the suits as he thumbed through a stapled packet of papers.

“How often is regular?” I asked.

“Daily, at the very least.” The guy had a pinched, birdlike face, and an Adam’s apple like a desk call bell. “Company policy stipulates ninety meetings in ninety days.”

“That sounds like a lot. People really go every day?”

“More, if they need to.”

“My insurance pay for that, too?”

“Those are free,” Yaeger told me. “Been to a few myself.”

I thought about it for maybe three seconds.

“All right,” I said, because I needed this job. “Sounds fair.”

Len Pruder looked like he wanted to launch himself across the tabletop and choke me out.

A few days later, I went into rehab. It was a twenty-eight-day program, the shortest one they offered, and the woman I spoke with over the phone assured me that I was very lucky. “There’s usually a very long waiting list to get in,” she said.

“I didn’t realize these places were so exclusive. Should I rent a tux?”

The woman on the phone did not find me funny.

I expected an institutional setting, one with stark white walls, crisp bed sheets, and caretakers wearing hospital scrubs. In reality, what I got was more like a VFW hall partitioned into various rooms, every wall paneled in imitation wood, and not a stitch of carpeting in the place. There were crucifixes and inspirational phrases in picture frames on nearly every wall, and a small janitorial closet that doubled as a chapel, where you could pray to a plaster bust of the Virgin Mary or grab a push broom and sweep the floors, depending on your mood. Upon my arrival, I filled out some paperwork then was taken to a room by a middle-aged woman with brash streaks of gray in her hair and blackheads nestled in the corners of her nose. A half-dozen cots were lined up here in military fashion. The whole place was characterless, except for the acoustical ceiling tiles, which were decorated with the swirling yellows, oranges, and browns of water damage.

The first couple of days were fine—I ate my meals, watched television or read books, played board games or ping pong with my fellow inmates in a drab, wood-paneled recreation room that stank of cigarette smoke and the headier, semisweet fragrance of ass crack. There were five other men in the place, each one battling their own personal demons—arms blackened with collapsed veins; mouths empty of teeth; body odor as acrid as volcanic spume. One fellow, thin as a rail spike, walked around with a perpetual smile on his face while his squinty little eyes dribbled a never-ending supply of tears. He would ghost from room to room like that, his expression never changing. I began to think of him as the Weeping Walker, although I never said this to his face. In fact, I steered clear of him altogether. So did everyone else. He was too creepy to engage with, so everyone just left him alone. The Weeping Walker didn’t seem to mind; he just kept on weeping and walking.

Nights were restless, but that was nothing new to me. I’d never been what you might call a good sleeper, although the nightmares that had haunted me in my youth had, over time, retreated somewhat to the shady corners of my subconscious. I would lie there at night, listening to the orchestration of snores and farts from the other guys in the room, unable to fall asleep. But it was nothing I couldn’t handle, if it meant saving my job.

But then something changed. I began to notice the mesh wiring over all the windows—and not just notice it, but to obsessover it. I was suddenly, mercilessly, reminded of a place where I’d spent nearly a year of my youth—an empty place full of black circles, circles, circles. My skin grew itchy and felt too small. Claustrophobia tightened its muscular coils about my body. I imagined blood on the soles of my feet, and drying in russet streaks along my pant legs. Those restless nights turned into marathons of insomnia while my head filled with nonspecific terrors. I stared at the moonlit ceiling tiles (patterned with the shadows of wire mesh) with eyes that blazed like headlamps. Those swirling water stains conspired, in my mounting paranoia, to heckle and terrorize me as they began to slither across the ceiling. I became convinced that something had insinuated itself beneath my cot, slotted there like a peg in a hole, where it lay in total darkness lightly plucking at the grid of bedsprings in the cot’s metal frame. After several nights of this, I got rid of the frame and slept with my mattress on the floor.

Some change was taking place inside me. I grew irritable, unsettled, twitchy. I found I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking. I felt both loose and tightly wound at the same time. I stopped eating. I screamed at the woman with the streaks of gray in her hair. Terrified of the dark, I slept only in the daytime, discarding even my mattress now and opting to sleep directly on the floor, which felt cool against my steaming flesh. The headache that was gradually boiling inside the crock pot of my skull was a constant, never-ending torture; I frequently sobbed with the heels of my hands pressed into my eye sockets for fear the expanding force of that headache might jettison my eyeballs from my skull. I vomited so regularly and with such intensity that my stomach felt like a balloon someone had pumped full of hot gas. Pissing myself became my favorite hobby.

At some point, I was removed from the general population and relocated to a room no larger than a broom closet. An aging hippie with a long gray ponytail and an REO Speedwagon T-shirt tossed my duffel bag onto a fresh cot. I stared at the cot with renewed horror. Only when the hippie clapped his hands—a sound very much like the pop of a starting pistol in that suffocating little room—did I look away from the cot and over at him. The hippie leaned toward me, gazing straight into my eyes. Was this lunatic trying to hypnotize me or just peer deep into my soul? I recoiled from him, my stinking, sweat-dampened shirt sliding along the wall until I found myself trapped in a corner.

“Boy, you’re riding the ride now,” said the hippie. His teeth were tombstones.

That first night in my new room—what felt to me, in my unhinged state, like solitary confinement, or maybe even a coffin—I heard a different sound coming from beneath my cot. Not the muted thwang! of those plucking bedsprings, but the wet thhhk-thhhk sound of an infant’s mouth suckling at its mother’s breast. This image—of a child breastfeeding—appeared at the center of my head with such inexorable force and unshakable clarity that it carved through the pulsing fog of my headache with all the authority of a lighthouse beacon.

Gathering what strength I had left in my shaky, foul-smelling, unreliable body, I rolled off the cot and backed away to the far side of the room. (Given the size of the room, this meant I was only about six feet from the cot.) There was a single window in the room, a high and narrow rectangle of glass through which a channel of sodium light bisected the darkness and painted a distorted orange panel on the floor. A part of that orange panel bled beneath the cot, and I could discern, with a deepening sense of dread, that there was movement down there—a shape alive. I could still hear the noise, too: thhhk-thhhk-thhhk.

Until now, and despite the discomfort I had felt in this place as my body detoxed, it had never occurred to me to leave. I was here under my own volition; if I wanted to pack up and get the fuck out, there was no one who would stop me. Now, however, hearing that suckling sound and seeing that indistinct movement beneath the cot, the urge to flee was all-encompassing. Had I trusted myself to get as far as the front door without collapsing from a combination of exhaustion and terror, I might have done just that. But I didn’t.

Instead, I took a step toward the cot. I was hoping my approach would silence that suckling sound, the way crickets go quiet when you draw near. But that wet and greedy sucking did not stop. And with it arrived the vague whiff of smoke. I took another step. Then another. A knot formed in my throat as my shins came to rest against the cot’s metal frame.

A figure wrapped in a swirling black cloak materialized in the darkness beside me. A voice in my ear, whispering straight through to the epicenter of my soul: Do you want to see a magic trick?

“No,” I said aloud, but I reached down and gripped the mattress with both hands anyway. No dramatic flourish, no sense of showmanship—I simply yanked the flimsy mattress off the frame and tossed it to the floor, where it raised a cloud of dust into the chute of orange light spilling through the window.

There was a woman lying on the floor beneath the lattice of bedsprings, an infant clutched to her breast. She cradled the child’s pale, sloping head while it fed. The thhhk-thhhk-thhhk sound of its feeding rivaled the whoosh of blood funneling through my ears, my hammering heartbeat, the reedy hiss of air whistling up through the pinhole of my throat.

Quick as a snake strike, the woman reached out and grasped me around one ankle with fingers that felt like bone.

Stricken blind by terror, I was dragged down into the darkness.

2

My mother killed herself in the master bedroom of the farmhouse where Dennis and I grew up. She had drawn the bedroom curtains, switched on the bedside lamp that was electrically powered but fashioned to look like an antique flat-wick kerosene lantern, smoked a joint, and then ingested an entire bottle of prescription pain pills. Police found her supine on the bed, one eye closed, one leg dangling off the mattress so that her toes just barely grazed the dusty wooden floorboards. She’d already been dead for a week, and the summer heat had sped up her decomposition. The bedroom was dizzy with flies.

As for what specific ailment those pain pills had been prescribed, it was up for speculation. On the infrequent occasions my mother and I came within orbit of each other, she would complain about her diabetes, her arthritis, persistent migraines, unmanageable acid reflux, temporomandibular joint dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome, vertigo, chronic insomnia, double vision, and all variety of bodily aches and pains. She also had lung cancer (according to the autopsy report), although I assume she didn’t know this because it had never come up during one of her pity-seeking diatribes.

At the time of her death, I hadn’t seen my mother or my brother Dennis in over four years, and I hadn’t been back to that farmhouse since I was a teenager. There was a period when, on a whim, my mom had purchased an old Airstream caravan—one of those things that resembled a giant metal thermos on wheels—and she and Dennis would periodically travel around the country together like a couple of reprobates. At some point on their journey, they would detour to whatever neck of the woods I was holed up in at the time, and I’d spend the obligatory afternoon subjected to my mother’s myriad complaints about her failing health while she inhaled an entire pack of Pall Malls and sipped cheap vodka from a paper cup. Dennis would show me photos of their road trip on his iPad, the screen gummy with fingerprints, always sitting too close to me, the heat that radiated from his meaty forearm dampening my shirtsleeve. These visits usually took place in a park or RV recreation area (neutral ground), some barbecue carryout containers spread out on an old bed sheet in the grass, bottlenose flies dive-bombing the potato salad and getting snared in the quagmire of gluey barbecue sauces. At the conclusion of each of these visits, Mom would give me one of her perfunctory little hugs, and then Dennis would gather me up in his big arms, squeezing my guts while yanking me clear off the ground. Yet like all of my mother’s capricious endeavors, these cross-country road trips were short-lived. (I think the Airstream was ultimately repossessed, too.)

The Sutton’s Quay police detective who informed me of my mother’s death was named Aiello, and he spoke in that familiar thick-throated drawl I had grown up to know as Appalachian English. He told me about Dennis shuffling half-naked along the shoulder of the highway, too, and how he had personally responded to the call because he was already in the area. Sure enough, there was Dennis, pink and shiny in the sun, doing the Frankenstein’s monster shamble down the highway. Detective Aiello had gotten out of his car and approached Dennis, attempted to engage the peculiar fellow in conversation. But Dennis hadn’t responded to the detective or even acknowledged that Aiello was standing there at all; Dennis had simply continued his laborious, barefooted trek along the gritty shoulder of the highway as if under a hypnotist’s spell.

Detective Aiello, whose law enforcement career spanned eleven years (although his transfer to the Sutton’s Quay Police Department had been fairly recent), had the good sense to realize there was something decidedly off about my brother, even without taking into consideration the fact that he was trudging along the road half-naked in the middle of the day. So instead of attempting to slap a pair of silver bracelets on my brother and muscle him into a police car, which would have been a chore, Detective Aiello radioed dispatch for assistance then proceeded to walk with Dennis for about a quarter of a mile. It was hot as hell, but Aiello figured he could use the exercise.

Just as Aiello heard sirens coming over the hill, Dennis stopped walking. He blinked his small gray eyes, and for the first time since Aiello had joined him on his journey, winced from the sizzling glare of the midday sun. It was as though he had just been roused from a deep sleep. He turned to Aiello, some semblance of clarity filtering back into his small and somewhat childlike eyes. Some of the moisture on my brother’s face, Aiello suddenly realized, was tears.

Dennis said something, which Detective Aiello could not readily make sense of. He asked Dennis to repeat himself, and Dennis obliged.

“She. Is now. Dead,” said Dennis.

This statement, delivered in my brother’s odd and halting pattern of speech, made Detective Aiello uncomfortable. My brother looked like the dude from that Steinbeck novel who accidentally killed a puppy, and his whole lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home affectation didn’t help matters any. When police backup arrived on the scene, the officers wanted to wrangle my brother into the back seat of their cruiser, but Detective Aiello didn’t think that would go over so well. Instead, Aiello got a blanket from the trunk of the cruiser, draped it over my brother’s broad, sunburned shoulders, and agreed to walk all the way back to the farmhouse with him. Hours later, when Dennis and Detective Aiello finally arrived back at the farmhouse, my mother’s body had already been discovered, and cops were taking photos of her desiccated corpse.

“Where’s my brother now?” I asked the detective. I was on my cell phone in my car, a 1972 puke-green Ford Maverick with vinyl bench seats and a St. Christopher medallion superglued to the dash. It was early evening and I had the windows down, but the air was stagnant and the interior of the Mav felt like the inside of a kiln. I was in the parking lot of the First United Methodist Church on Mill Street in downtown Akron, where I’d been coming for the past week to attend AA meetings. I’d been back to work at the foundry for a week now, too, operating once again under the contemptuous scrutiny of Len Pruder.

“Well, you see, that’s sort of been an issue,” Detective Aiello said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Warren, it took us a couple of days to track you down, and we didn’t have nobody else to call locally, so—”

“Where is he?”

“He’s here. At the station.”

I cleared my throat and said, “My brother has been staying at the police station?”

“He’s fine, Mr. Warren. We had a medic come in, give him a once over. He was dehydrated and there were some abrasions on the bottoms of his feet from walking all that way barefoot, but he was otherwise okay. Thing is, we didn’t know what to do with him, where to take him. We didn’t think he should go back to the house on his own, given his…well…”

“No,” I agreed.

“I was gonna put in a call to the state, see if they’d come and get him, but then I was able to track you down. Figured it’d be better to have you involved instead.”

My head was swimming.

“Anyway, your brother is fine, Mr. Warren. He even seems to like it here. And there’s always someone around to keep him company. It’s just that we didn’t know what else to do.”

“Is he there now? Can I talk to him?”

“Sure. Hold on a sec.”

Then there was Dennis’s breathy salutation in my ear on the other end of the line, the familiar halting speech pattern, the edge of urgency at the back of his throat.

“I saw her, Jamie,” Dennis proclaimed. “She is now dead.”

I closed my eyes. My body trembled like something hooked up to jumper cables. “What about you, buddy? Are you okay?”

“She. Is now. Dead.”

“All right, buddy. All right.”

There was a jostling, then Detective Aiello was back on the line. Somewhere in the background, I could hear my brother’s high-pitched keening—something like a laugh or a sob or some nonspecific outburst of noise.

“If you do the quick and dirty math, given the coroner’s estimated time of death for your mother, Mr. Warren, you’ll see that your brother had been living in the house with her for about a week or so after she’d passed.”

“A week?” My brother had been living in that house with our mother’s corpse for a week? I opened my mouth to say something but then shut it again. I didn’t know what to make of this information. It was disturbing, even for Dennis.

“But again, Mr. Warren, he’s fine. Your brother. Like nothing ever happened. Everyone at the station has really taken a shine to him, too. Only…”

“Only what?”

“You’ll have to come out here, Mr. Warren,” Detective Aiello said. “You’ll have to come and get him. As soon as you can.”

She. Is now. Dead.

You’ll have to come.

Black Mouth had finally caught up with me.

3

It wasn’t that I had been spontaneously stricken blind by the sight of the woman nursing the baby beneath my cot, or the very real sensation of her bony fingers closing around my ankle; it was that I’d been overcome by what is known in the business as the Detox Boogie. In other words, I’d suffered a seizure as a result of acute alcohol withdrawal. When I came to, I was sprawled out on the floor of my tiny room, the undersea glow of early morning light leaking through the room’s solitary window. The crotch of my pants was damp and the room reeked of ammonia.

I was shaking, my body simultaneously hot and cold. When I rolled my head to one side, a dagger-like pain speared down my neck and detonated across my shoulders.

The mattress was still on the floor where I’d tossed it the night before. There was nothing beneath the cot’s frame but scuffed linoleum tiles and dust bunnies.

Peripheral movement caused my head to turn—painfully. The Weeping Walker stood in the doorway, his messy pink eyes leaking tributaries of saline, the edges of his sharp, cadaverous grin expanding beyond the confines of his face.

“Get somebody,” I groaned. My voice sounded like the squalling of a rusty hinge.

The Weeping Walker floated away. Moments later, the gray-streaked woman (her name was Deena) and the aging hippie (his name was Fred) filed into the room. Deena helped me sit up and gave me water from a plastic bottle, which I chugged until it was empty without coming up for air. Fred only folded his arms, leaned against the wall, and nodded his head. The look of satisfaction on his face struck me. It was as if he’d been somehow complicit in what had happened to me in the night, and the outcome brought him great pleasure.

“All part of the ride, my brother,” he said, and pumped one fist in the air in solidarity. “Welcome back to the Land of the Living.”

That was how my twenty-eight days in rehab turned into sixty. I was there when my fellow inmates departed and a new collection of wild-eyed, trembling degenerates took their place. (Only the Weeping Walker remained, and since no one seemed to acknowledge him, I began to wonder if he actually existed or if he was something altogether fashioned from my own imagination.)

I had my cell phone with me the whole time I was in that place, but I never once made a phone call. Nor did I receive any (except for the periodic phone scams, where a robotic female voice who addressed me as Barbara urgently wished to discuss my student loan debt). There was no one in my life to call, no one sitting in a house or an apartment or in a car or on a bus or a plane who cared about what was happening to me. I had no real friends, just coworkers from the foundry who were good for a few beers after work, but I had managed to alienate many of them over the years. I’d wrecked too many cars, gotten into too many fistfights at the local watering holes, blacked out in too many back alleys. My absences from work caused them undue hardship, and they began to distance themselves from me after a while. There were the occasional women in my life, each one too transitory to be called a girlfriend. One woman, whose name I’ll respectfully leave out of this sad dissertation, had been special. For a brief period, we’d even lived together. But I had done everything within my power to fuck up that relationship, too.

Sixty days turned into ninety.

“It’s like the aperture of the world’s growing wider,” Fred said one afternoon as we sat playing checkers in the rec room. “You start seeing all your past transgressions under that wider lens and it bugs you out, man. But don’t let it get you down. Because, see, that’s someone else’s life. You’re a new man now, amigo.”

The idea that I was glimpsing past transgressions resonated with me. Most disconcerting was the inexplicable impression of finger marks in the flesh around my ankle where the woman beneath the cot had grabbed me. Everything else could be written off as a detox-induced hallucination, but this was the one thing I couldn’t reconcile with myself.

When I left that place, Deena gave me a hug and said she was proud of me. Fred presented me a handmade hemp bracelet and another fist pump in the air, which I returned this time. The Weeping Walker, somehow still haunting the dimly lit rooms and wood-paneled corridors of that facility, peered out at me from behind one of the wire-mesh windows as I stood on the sidewalk, a grinning ghoul who may or may not actually exist.

Some alcoholics describe coming into sobriety as a metamorphosis. Others have said it is closer to a molting, where they’ve shucked off their old skins and exist now, wet and radiant and alive, in new ones.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was filling empty spaces.

4

Ipromised Detective Aiello that I would head out for West Virginia first thing in the morning—a promise that felt like a lie even as I said it—then I disconnected the call. Across the parking lot, a group of people stood outside the rectory doors of the First United Methodist Church, most of them smoking cigarettes. Emily Pearson was among them, checking something on her cell phone. I watched them until my wristwatch said it was seven o’clock, and they began to file one by one into the rectory’s basement for our nightly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Ninety-six days sober—but, as the saying goes, who’s counting?

Five minutes later, I was speeding toward my apartment, a bottle of Ketel One wrapped in brown paper on the seat beside me.

I saw her, Jamie. She is now dead.

At the time, I just assumed Dennis had been talking about our mother.

I was wrong.