Do Not Enter, Part 3
“Found it, didja?”
The ruined, raking voice jarred her and she yelped. She spun, but couldn’t see anyone. A wheezed whistle of laughter broke into a hacking cough, and she followed it with her eyes.
Next to the garbage bin. A homeless man, dirt-smudged so opaque his skin color seemed like barbecue ash. Matted hair clumped in ropey tangles and webbed like cocoons, his scalp flaked in oily yellow floes working their way up the gray and filth-colored hanks of hair. The mass on his head poured down the sides of a cracked, reddened face to join a bushel of tufts like a series of steel wool pads laced over his chin and across his mouth. Tiny things seemed to move there, or perhaps droplets of spit and old food clung like fleas. His red-veined jaundiced eyes, glossy and cataract-glazed, ran thick, milky globs when he blinked. His eyelashes were crusted with something greenish-yellow. The face sank into a webbed network of leathery skin, the eyebrows the same uniform steel-wool color. Dirt caked under and around his fingernails in black lines. His clothes and shoes blended with his overall hue as if coated by some particulate dust.
“Excuse … me?”
The vagrant smiled, a shriveled line sliced across his face and revealed the pallor of his mouth, bluish tongue working like a fat worm in white, foamy spit, a couple of gray-green teeth wobbled in pink-white gums turning the color of the ocean on a stormy afternoon, and something under his shirt seemed to shift, an unwholesome and unnatural movement. Like something fed on his flesh without his knowledge under it.
Rose shuddered. “I-I’m sorry, I just needed to get some air, I didn’t mean to–”
“Ya found it, didn’cha? The sssssshhhhhaaaaaaaffffft.”
He tipped his head back and bulged his eyes while he hissed the word, and it slid like a cold slug down Rose’s spine, setting her hair on end, and a shiver raced up her back.
“I-I think I’d better–”
“Best beware, missssssssy!” the old man lisped, like a serpent in human form, “beware the sssssshhhhhaaaaaaaffffft! It’s a doorway to Hell! Old man knew it! Old man Crawford, he knew it! Tried to hide it! Tried to keep people from knowin’ about it! But I knew!”
Rose’s brow furrowed. She tried to step back but her butt pressed against her car’s fender. “I-I’m sorry, mister, really, I-I need to–”
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Good continuation bud! I really liked it. The old dude really freaked me out big time! Grotesquely described!
Thanks, bud! I’m glad you enjoyed it! It was a LOT of fun to write.