Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig

something— anything —but his words come out a breathless squeak. Then, from behind the giant, a voice.
    “Hey, skunk-ape.”
    The beast wheels.
    Cason catches sight of Frank standing there, facing down the monster. Frank lobs something—the brown bag—toward the giant.
    The giant, reflexively, catches it.
    The bomb goes off.

 
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Monster Mash
     
    N UMB, WEARY, EYES red, ears buzzing.
    A little while later, after Cason makes sure he’s not dead, Frank says the show-and-tell must continue.
    They leave the hallway where the walls are cratered (in Cason-sized cavities) and worse, peppered with bits of black ichor and stuck fur and splinters of—Cason blinks, sees that it’s wood. Sees that the splinters are in his hands, too. His foot nudges something: a tiny wooden doll head. Before he can look too long, Frank is pulling him upstairs.
    The smell is strong up here. Coppery, greasy. Wild, too—gamey, untamed. They pass by a bathroom which is covered in mold—not black mold or pink mold like you’d find in a shower, but green fuzzy mold. The kind you find on an old loaf of bread. Cason staggers through the tour, not sure what he’s supposed to see or why he’s even here at all. His body hurts. Like he’s been hit by a garbage truck, then thrown into the back of said garbage truck, then crushed and pulped with the rest of the waste.
    They pass a bedroom. Just a mat on the floor and some pillows. It’s like a greenhouse in there—not just because of the heat, but because the room is all tables and potted plants. Most of them huge. Red roses, red not like blood but like globs of bright paint on dark stems. Plants with leaves like floppy elephant ears. Ivy and clematis vines climbing well beyond their latticework mooring and up the walls and to the ceiling and into the vents.
    And still Frank waves Cason on.
    To the attic. No steps for the attic—just a pull-down ladder. Cason grits his teeth as he climbs, trying not to drive the splinters further into his palms. He uses his wrists to stabilize and hauls his body up into the dark space.
    The smell. This is the dark heart of the awful smell. It hits Cason the way the monster-man hit him—his stomach shudders and he wonders if he’s going to throw up.
    Click. Darkness banished by a bare bulb hanging from a brown wire.
    Cason throws up. Head turned aside. Eyes closed because he doesn’t want to see.
    Frank just nods. “I figured you’d wanna see that.”
     
     
    F LASHES OF THE attic: blood and bones and pelts and child’s toys piled in heaping, steaming mounds; abattoir, slaughterhouse, feeding ground, bear cave .
    Cason sits in the beast-man’s kitchen, picking splinters from his hands with his teeth. It’s hard work, because his hands are slick with his blood—and the blood of the beast-man who disintegrated before his eyes in an exhalation of fur and red mist.
    He spits each splinter onto the dirty tablecloth. Trying not to throw up each time he does it. But it gives him something to do. Something to think about other than—
    Well.
    Frank steps into the kitchen, his freakish near-lipless grin calling to mind a cackling skeleton one might put outside the house for Halloween.
    He tosses something onto the table:
    A charred wooden head of a little girl doll. Yarn hair. Triangle eyes and smiling mouth forming the face, with no nose to speak of. The doll head hits the table, rolls to the edge, then goes over onto the floor.
    “I have no idea what the fuck is going on,” Cason says. He bites on another splinter, spits it onto the table. Still dozens more to go. “Time to start telling. The showing part is over. Because, I have to tell you, Frank, whatever you just showed me didn’t help me understand the situation any better, you feel me?”
    Frank chuckles. “Ehhh-yeah, now that I think about it, I guess maybe that didn’t really answer all your questions.”
    “It didn’t answer any of them. And now I’ve got about a hundred