Carrie stood up. “Then what’s inside… ?” She let the words trail off as she lifted the lid. “Oh, shit.”
She tilted the casserole, showing it to everyone around the table.
It was lamb, all right.
The head of a lamb.
Eyes and wool and mud and teeth and all.
Raw and bloody, sinews and gristle showing where it had recently been hacked from a carcass, it was surrounded by uncooked, unwashed vegetables. Half a dozen slug-eaten carrots and some unshelled peas with a handful of green, moldy potatoes were all swilling about in several inches of pink, scummy, cold water.
“Horrid and ugly,” said Sly Romero, his voice hardly even a whisper.
“Yeah,” agreed Jim Hilton.
Lulled by the comfortable cottage and the chintzy cheeriness of Mercy Oliphaunt, he was slow to react to the revelation of the bizarre meal and was still sitting when the elderly lady came back into the room.
“Apples are still a’growing,” she crowed in her high, quavery voice. Then something flashed in her hand, and she was trying to get close to Heather—close enough to hack her neck with a bone-handled, serrated carving knife.
The girl screamed and ducked away to her left, falling off her chair. Sly also screamed, thin and piercing, like a stallion at the gelding. He tried to stand up to go to Heather’s aid, but slipped and fell over backward, banging his head on the polished wooden floor.
Both Carrie and Kyle had hung their coats out in the hall, her Smith & Wesson .22 and his .32-caliber Mondadori automatic in the pockets.
Jim was the only one armed, the powerful Ruger revolver on his right hip. But he was taken by surprise, stunned by the sudden violence of the attack on his daughter.
Mercy Oliphaunt was yelping with crazed laughter, with the terrifying echo of a rabid coyote, her staring eyes like glazed pinwheels, flailing with the knife at the young girl who’d managed to scramble her way out of reach beneath the table.
“Little piggies come to fucking supper!” Realizing that she couldn’t get at the girl, the old woman turned toward her paralyzed father. “Cook the fattest piggy first,” she whooped, her voice triumphant, and her whole body suddenly infused with a wild energy.
Finally the ice melted from Jim’s brain and muscles, and he reacted. He reached up with a serving spoon in his left hand to parry the vicious knife in a flurry of sparks, simultaneously sliding out of his seat, right hand clawing for the heavy .44.
The neat little dining room was brimming over with panic, everyone trying to do what seemed best.
From under the table, Heather was watching for the button boots, aiming to keep the width of the table between herself and the homicidal crone.
Sly was kicking his feet in the air like an overturned beetle, great gobbets of tears coursing down his chubby cheeks as he struggled to regain his balance.
Carrie threw the casserole at Mercy Oliphaunt, and the severed head of the lamb hit the woman a glancing blow on the shoulder, the greasy, bloodied water staining her blouse.
Kyle Lynch had grabbed up a pair of knives from the table and was beginning to move cautiously around toward their attacker.
But Miss Oliphaunt seemed totally oblivious to any threat toward herself, laughing and sawing at the air with the glittering blade while Jim tried to fend her off and pull the stubborn Ruger from its holster.
“Fuck off,” he snarled, feeling like someone trapped in the nightmare where a nameless, shapeless creature pursues you along an endless corridor. And your feet are snared in molasses as it comes closer and closer, until you run out of corridor.
“Join all my little children,” she said, her voice now shockingly calm and reasonable.
The gun felt heavier than he remembered as it finally came free. Thirty-five ounces, six-inch barrel. Six rounds of .44 full metal jacket. Full-length ejector shroud, cushioned grips with walnut inserts.
Facts. Cold facts.
Not like a genteel schoolteacher with mad eyes, attacking you with a carving knife in the middle of her own dining room.
Think about that, and you found yourself wandering along the meandering path toward insanity.