Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  He stepped back a pace and looked through the gold wedding-band monocle again.

  There it was again, big as life, and solid.

  The doorframe was the green of grass, of frogs and avocados.

  Three-oh-six. It was happening again. The door in the wall. He got a mental flash of himself craning to look upward through his father’s windshield at the motel room door over his head, the door that disappeared, the door he never told his father about, with its 306 in gold lettering.

  Three-oh-six.

  But this one wasn’t a motel room door. Looked like it belonged to an old house. He stepped close and put his hand against it. Instead of the cold block wall, he pressed his palm to wood, rough and jagged with paint, as warm as if the sun were hitting it from the other side. The doorknob throbbed in his hand, hot but not painfully so, invitingly, radiating from within like the hood of a car on a sunny day.

  He turned the knob. The latch disengaged with a click.

  Wayne threw a glance over his shoulder. Leon was still asleep. Probably a sleeping pill—his father was given to using medication like Benadryl and Tylenol PM to knock himself out when he was having a bad night. And this definitely qualified as a “bad night.”

  Opening the door, he wasn’t sure what he would find on the other side … but it sure wasn’t his own house.

  Dark and deep, the Victorian at 1168 Underwood Road gaped before him. All he could see was a blotch of the floor and a bit of the wall, illuminated by a weak, aquatic light from above. He was looking at the second-floor landing, from the perspective of the doorway leading up to the cupola.

  Hunger still gnawed at his insides. Maybe …

  Wayne glanced at his father again. He didn’t know what was going on, but if he’d been given some strange superpower by being bitten by a snake, he ought to take advantage of it and duck into the house for a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. And with great power comes great responsibility, you know, so he’d grab Leon a couple of his energy bars while he was in there.

  Madness, said some rational voice deep in the back of his mind, less in words than in pure, essential feeling. This is madness.

  Hmm. No, he mused, peering through the wedding band. No, this is a dream. That’s exactly what this is. Light coming in under the hospital suite door glinted on its gold surface. He let it drop to his chest, hanging from the necklace. I’m still lying in my bed over there, sleeping and dreaming, and this is a dream.

  The door remained, still open, still revealing the interior of the Victorian. Well, I guess if this is a dream, I might as well dream on.

  Steeling himself, Wayne stepped into the darkened house.

  It eased shut behind him. Click.

  * * *

  Wayne’s heart leapt and he spun around, but the door was still there. He tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.

  Relieved, he looked around the landing. Something was subtly off about the house, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He reached behind his back to pinch his gown shut and made his way down the stairs.

  The foyer was quiet. A little table stood against the banister at the bottom, and on it was a black rotary telephone, something Wayne had only seen in old movies. Why did Dad buy an old telephone?

  As he thought about it, he realized what was different about the house.

  The walls were supposed to be blue, dusky raincloud-blue. Instead, they were green, the pale fifties-green of spearmint gum and the floors at his old school in Chicago, the green that belonged with salmon-pink on the flank of a Cadillac convertible parked at a drive-in movie.

  Wayne picked up the receiver and put it against his ear. No dial tone.

  He stuck his finger in the rotary dial and turned it. The earpiece made a subtle tikkatikkatikkatik sound, but nothing else happened. Listening to the faint rattling, his eyes wandered over to the left and he noticed the front door was a different color. Wayne hung up the phone and went over to check it out, his bare feet padding on the soft, intricate runner carpet. The front door was white, the bottom chewed up by time and neglect, the paint coming off to uncover rusty metal. A placard in the middle said WOMEN.

  A restroom door? Wayne’s hand found his face and he rubbed his forehead in confusion.

  Too strange. Time to get to the kitchen, get what he came for, and get back to the hospital. He would talk to Leon when he woke up later, and see what was going on, but for right now he just wanted to get something to eat and get off of his increasingly tender foot. Steaming along on this dream-logic train, Wayne limped down the dark hallway and hooked right into the kitchen, stopping short.

  Pale, dirty light filtered in through the window over the sink, like sunbeams coming through the scummy surface of a pond. This sickly glow drew the contours and corners of a black kitchen—black walls, black ceiling, the stove was black, the paint bubbling and peeling. He touched the stove, and his fingertip came away with a paste of damp soot.

  One winter when he was in second grade, maybe, Wayne caught chicken pox and had to stay with his Aunt Marcelina. She’d turned on the stove to boil water for a cup of hot chocolate, but it had been the wrong eye, searing the painted tin eye-cover on top of it. The foul smell of burnt paint had hung in the air for weeks, like a curse on Marcelina’s apartment.

  This same acrid stink now lingered in the black kitchen.

  Wayne opened a few cabinets, searching for his cereal. Nothing in them except for canned food with old-looking labels and brand names he didn’t recognize, many of them with dented sides. The cabinet where they kept the drinking glasses had a box of cherry Pop-Tarts and a box of Life, but he didn’t like cherry and had never tried Life, so he left them alone.

  “What is goin’ on, man?” he asked the strange kitchen.

  The floor creaked in the living room, the slow tectonic croak of a ship’s deck.

  Wayne’s head snapped up and he fled to the other side of the table, which was not their small round wooden table, but a large Formica oval with metal trim, like something out of a diner. It was thick, and bulky, and felt protective.

  “Who’s there?”

  No answer. His heart fluttered in his chest.

  “Pete?” he asked the darkness. “Zat you?”

  Waiting for a voice, Wayne stood behind the table for a long minute. None came. He opened the silverware drawer, found hand-towels, opened another drawer, found a jumble of random utensils. No weapons to be had.

  Weak ocean-floor sunlight whispered into the living room as well, bandaged by the sheer white curtains. The suggestion of a brown sofa lurked next to the rumor of a coffee table resembling a pirate’s chest.

  Wayne chewed his cheek, eyeing a weird wooden TV with a rabbit-ear antenna and a bulging gray screen, accompanied by a panel of numbered dials. Creepy wood-framed pictures lined the walls: praying children with bulbous Casper heads and shiny blond hair, painted on black velvet.

  He leaned over and was reaching for the television’s power button when something inhaled behind him, a ragged wet grarararararuhh that made him think of engines and dragons.

  Ice raced down his legs and arms, his mouth falling open in terror.

  Behind him, a mass of greasy, rumpled hair was wedged into the back corner where the watery sunlight faded into shadow. Green owl-eyes opened in a massive head that brushed the ceiling like a grown man in a child’s playhouse.

  Rarararararuhhh …

  The beast leaned away from the wall, reaching for Wayne with orangutan arms and too many fingers, smelling of filth, of old blood, of death.

  The boy ran.

  Leading out of the kitchen and out of the house, the back door was metallic gray, patchy with rust. A sign near the top said NO ADMITTANCE—EMPLOYEES ONLY! He shoved it open, running through it into what should have been the backyard, but instead was a dark indoor space, swampy with the stink of old motor oil.

  Turning to face the monster, Wayne found only a blank wall of corrugated aluminum.

  He was alone.

  Tears
made cold tracks down his cheeks. He ground them away with a wrist and sank to his hands and knees, shaking and nauseous. The constricting bandage around his swelling leg was killing him and his left foot buzzed with pins and needles.

  Chains rattled on the other side of the wall. Wayne stood up.

  Sun-bleached kart bodies rusted quietly in the shadows, strewn with broken engine parts. Signs made out of plywood and sheet metal leaned against the wall in piles. The first one was a menacing cartoon of a clown. VISIT HOOT’S FUNHOUSE! GET LOST IN OUR HALL OF MIRRORS! The back door of the strange green version of his house had brought him to what appeared to be some kind of mechanic’s garage, the cement floor dark and greasy under his bare feet.

  A huge roll-up garage door dominated one wall. Moonlight slipped underneath the bottom panel.

  Another sign, this one as big as a barn door, welcomed him to Weaver’s Wonderland, and beside that was painted a picture of a mom and a dad walking into an amusement park, a little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders.

  The clanking of chains and muffled growling echoed from a black doorway. “Grrnngh!” growled something from the other room. “Hhhngh—thp thp thp puh, puh—HELP!”

  Goosebumps prickled Wayne’s skin. He peeked inside.

  Planter hooks had been screwed into the wall by the door, stuck through the links of three chains. One of them lay useless underneath, but the other two ran across the room to ceiling pulleys.

  Two men hung upside-down from them, a black guy and a white guy, both of them naked except for their skivvies.

  The one in the thong was squirming and undulating furiously, jerking on the chains binding his hands to the floor. A cloth gag dangled around his neck. “Jesus Lord help me, get me the hell out of here,” he pleaded, and noticed Wayne peering through the doorway. “Oh God, oh God, get me down, get me outta here, you gotta get me out of here, please.”

  Wayne ventured into the room. ARE YOU TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL? asked the coyote on the sign. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “I been kidnapped, this man has kidnapped me, I don’t know if he put something in my drink, or put something in my steak, but he knocked my ass out and when I woke up I was chained up in here and right now I need you to go over there and unhook me so I can get down and I need you to do it right now. Right now right now right now.”

  Taking hold of the chain, Wayne tried to pull the man up to give himself enough slack to pull the hook out of the link, but he was just too heavy. The gritty floor bit into the sensitive sole of his left foot.

  “I can’t do it.” Panic overtook him and he started weeping again, his throat burning. “I got bit by a snake on my foot and I’m so tired. I been in the hospital—”

  “Honey, what’s your name?” asked the man.

  “Wayne.”

  “Mine is Jo-elle. Okay, Wayne baby, Wayne, take the chain in both your hands. See how the hook curves?” The chain had been pulled down onto the point of a hook on the floor. “I want you to take the chain in both hands and push it off the hook. Can you do that?”

  Bracing himself, Wayne got under the chain and pushed. Jo-elle’s weight made it seem impossible at first, but when he put his hands close to the hook and pushed as hard as he could, throwing his whole body into a series of shoves, the link began to scrape free.

  The sleepy growl of a four-stroke motor grew outside the building, reminding Wayne of the golf carts the security guys drove at the mall back in Chicago.

  Jo-elle shook with fear. “Oh Jesus, hurry up, he’s back, God almighty, he’s back.”

  Shove, shove, shove. Almost there. Wayne renewed his grip on the chain and ignored the tingling-prickling in his swollen leg. The filthy floor caked dried motor-oil between his toes. Tink! The chain slipped free and whipped through the pulley like slurping spaghetti, making a loud clatter. Jo-elle fell on his head, swearing in pain.

  Outside, the golf cart engine shut off.

  Jo-elle scrambled to his feet, freeing his cuffs from the hook screwed into the cement and wriggling out of the chain wrapped around his ankles. “We got to go, we got to go.”

  “What about the other guy?” Wayne asked, pointing at the man still chained to the ceiling. His bruised back was to them.

  “He’s dead, baby, there ain’t nothin’ we can do.” Jo-elle took off into the other room, staggering in circles and looking around wildly. “How did you get in here? Where did you come from?”

  Wayne held up his mother’s wedding band. “You’re gonna laugh at me, but I think I made a door. Or maybe I found one.”

  “You made—what?” Jo-elle winced in confusion. “You made a door? How do you ‘make’ a door?” He waved off the coming explanation. “Just show me the way out so we can get—”

  “But there’s a monster—”

  “What?”

  Keys jingling in the workshop. Door unlocking.

  “A monster in my house—” Wayne began to say, and recoiled as Jo-elle lunged for him, grabbed him by the head, and gazed into his face.

  “We got to go. We got to go now.”

  The door in the workshop opened, and someone thumped across the oily floor in boots, tossing a keychain full of keys on the worktable. Hollow thunk of some sort of plastic container. Gas can? The rattle of chains.

  A raspy voice. “Hey, how’d you get down?”

  Jo-elle ran over and slammed the door, swearing under his breath, bracing himself against it. The handle rattled.

  “There ain’t no way out of there, pizza-man,” said the killer’s muffled voice. “You might as well come on out. I’d lock you in there and let you starve, but I kinda need to bleed you like your buddy in here.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “Nothin’ personal, you know. It’s my job. Well, part of it. Blood-collecting. The people I work for, they need it for the garden. Always blood for the garden.”

  Boots scuffing on cement: the man walked away. The bump and clatter of tools being rummaged through, assembled. “It never ends, it never ends.”

  “You ain’t got to do this, Red,” said Jo-elle.

  “Sure I do.” The killer paused. “You know what? Call me the Serpent. That’s what the papers back in New York used to call me. I like it. My friends called me Snake when I was little, but ‘Serpent’ sounds so … I dunno, Biblical, doesn’t it? Man, it just rolls off the tongue.”

  Everything went quiet.

  Hiss, a burst of noise came out of the door-crack as the Serpent spat through, his lips against the jamb.

  Jo-elle twitched, almost losing his leverage on the door. “You let me out, and I ain’t tell nobody, man,” he said. “I swear. You let me go and it’ll be like this never happened. We both go our own way and it’s all good.”

  The Serpent laughed. “Fat chance, homo. You’ve seen my face. Not gonna happen.”

  “Homo—?” Jo-elle’s face darkened. “You mean…?”

  “Oh hell naw. I don’t swing that way, pizza-man. You kidding me? I mean, yeah, I done some things I ain’t proud of to put food on the table, but deep down I’m as straight as a…” The killer drummed fingers on the door. “Help me out here, what’s something really straight? You know, other than ‘not you.’”

  “An arrow? I don’t—”

  “Be original!”

  Something pistoned hard against the door, BANG!, and Jo-elle jumped away. “Ow!”

  A nail protruded from the door’s surface, dripping blood.

  Taking advantage of the moment, the Serpent kicked the door so hard one of the plywood signs fell over. The sign behind it was a painting of a sweating glass of lemonade.

  WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, GIVE EM BACK—OURS IS BETTER!

  Wayne pressed the gold ring to his eye.

  Adapt and overcome.

  Nothing about Jo-elle’s end of the room was special, but when he turned to the back wall, there it was again, the doorway back to the green house with the burned kitchen. Be bigger. Be stronger. He was going to have to brave that strange dark place with its giant hairy
creature. It’s got to be better than this Serpent person. I know he’s going to kill me, but I don’t know what the monster wants.

  “The evil you know” versus “the evil you don’t.” Adapt and overcome.

  Summoning up all the courage he could find, his body cold and trembling in deepest terror, Wayne opened the strange door. Beyond, the hollow Victorian promised nothing but darkness and silence.

  “The hell—?” Jo-elle was staring at him.

  BANG! Another nail shot through the door, appearing between his fingers as if by magic. He snatched his hand away, cursing. The Serpent gave the door another kick and it flew open, squealing.

  Scooping up the boy, Jo-elle fled through the door into the Victorian. Wayne got a quick glimpse of a shock of the killer’s red hair, beady eyes, a scrawny throat, and then the door slammed shut behind them, plunging them into blue-green twilight.

  The afterimage of the killer’s face resonated in Wayne’s mental eye. Seemed so familiar. Where had he seen that face before?

  Jo-elle breathed, “Where are we…?”

  They were back in the burned kitchen. Wayne pressed against the man’s clammy side, ignoring his sweatiness and the fact all he wore was a pair of bikini underwear. Jo-elle was solidly built—if a little soft around the midsection—and that was all that mattered. “It’s supposed to be my house,” he explained in a pained whisper, “but for some reason it’s painted green instead of blue. And … and there’s some kind of monster in here.”

  Peeling him off, Jo-elle squinted at Wayne. “A monster?”

  “It’s big and hairy. It’s like … I guess it’s like a Bigfoot.”

  “You got a Sasquatch. In your house.”

  “I’m not sure this is my house.” Wayne pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh, or it’s going to hear us and come after us.”

  “It is, or it isn’t. How can it be your house and not be your house?” Jo-elle blinked in recognition. “Wait. Wait. I know this house. I’ve sat at this table before. This is Annie Martine’s house. She used to babysit me and my brother when I was a little boy like you.”