Dad leaned close to Vincent Perrelli, still working the knife side to side and twisting it about, ripping and tearing the older man’s innards.
“Welcome to life, asshole,” Dad said, let go, and we all watched the silver-haired man slide to the floor, coming to rest in a sitting position, back against the wall like a petulant child. His breath slowed, his eyes glazed over, and the rise and fall of the chest ceased, then he was still.
3.
Having already freed me, Dad was kneeling to cut the fishing line from around Mom’s wrists and ankles, me in the kitchen looking for a knife or scissors to do the same for Jim and Sarah, when I heard a sound like rustling leaves or the whisper of distant voices. I turned, and the Collector was standing, riddled with holes in his coat and redness seeping from those holes like piping sprung leaks, but standing.
I watched the rising shadow moving silently towards Dad, tried to shout a warning, but my voice caught in fear at this phantom that wouldn’t die. This thing of shadows and night with the hat of darkness and the coat like wings, scooped up a mug from the kitchen counter that separated me from him and, still unseen by Dad, inched closer.
Finally I found my voice and called out “Dad!” but the Collector was already swinging and Dad was turning, turning into the swing. The mug struck his temple, shattered in ceramic chunks, and Dad fell to the ground.
The Collector turned to me. Shambled towards me, even shambling, legs carrying him weakly, still moving like smoke, a mist rolling over the earth.
The front door was past him. I couldn’t go that way.
I turned around towards the rear of the kitchen, the door there leading to the backyard. I ran across the kitchen and out the back door.
Running, I realized I’d never been out here before, never had an occasion to. There were weeds and where the weeds didn’t cover, barren dirt ground and rocks like the lifeless landscape of another planet. I remembered Dad saying something about a pool when we first moved here, and how he’d fix it up for the summer and have it filled and we could swim in our very first pool.
A hole loomed before me like a large quarry.
I skid to a stop. My foot slid on loose pebbles. A monster weed that I swore intentionally reached out and snagged me sent me sprawling. The hole in the earth yawned open as I tumbled towards it. A cavernous mouth waiting to swallow a tasty morsel. I rolled. My feet went over the edge. I grabbed at the ground rolling away from me. My chin hit the rim of the hole and I bit my tongue, tasted blood.
Dangling over the edge there, I looked down. Ten feet below, the sloped concrete siding of the dry, empty pool bottomed out in jagged chunks of rock and more concrete.
Facing forward again, I was afforded a ground-level view of the backyard, and the Collector coming down the porch, shambling, rocking, unsteady, but still flowing as if smoke, blowing like vapors. The phantom of the night drifting my way.
I tried to pull myself up. Tried for purchase with my feet on the sloped concrete wall. Thought about dropping down, taking my chance with a broken leg or ankle. Tried pulling myself up again and seeing the Collector so close now, too close, there was nowhere to go. He had me and he was going to collect.
Beyond him a demon spilled out of the house and into the night. Wild matted hair covered it and clumps of it were coated red. Eyes glowed green with the moonlight. Fangs long and pointed were bright in an open maw and tendrils of spittle stretched from gum to gum. A one-eared demon, bloodied, snarling, dashed across the barren backyard as if the fires of hell itself spurred it forward.
The Collector right there, right in front of me, towered over me, and I stared between his legs even as he reached down for me. Watching this beast, this white-furred beast, this bloody monstrosity, running, and the spittle flying from its clacking jaws.
The Collector’s scarlet-stained fingers reached for me, then paused, hearing the approach from behind him. Turning, he saw the demon bearing down on him, and the hellhound leapt, flying through the air between them, colliding with the Collector, the man-shadow, the thing of the night. Opening his arms as if to embrace the demon dog, the force of the impact carried them both over me, down into the hole below, the rocks and jagged protrusions at the bottom of the pit.
The sound of bodies breaking was loud in the otherwise quiet night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1.
There was a gathering of parents and police and lots of vehicles with sirens that filled the night with flashes of blue and red. The neighbors stood outside up and down the street to watch and I was reminded of the masses gathered on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks. We told Dad and the other parents and police gathered everything, just as we had planned on. Or damn near everything.
There were some things Jim, Tara, Sarah and I kept to ourselves even then.
Like a little mossy pond out in the woods.
But most everything else we went over. The old Buick and the Outsiders’ Club; the things we’d done from finding the money to stoning Sheriff Glover when he pulled his gun on us; the incident in the Haunted House with his son and his son’s friends; the events on Lookout Mountain and hiding the money up there; and concluding with the arrival of Mr. Perrelli and his claim to the money and his promise of escalation and the shoot-out at my house.
One other exception that wasn’t talked about, or at least that I didn’t hear anything about, was Tara. She was found in the upstairs master bedroom by my dad, alive and seemingly unhurt. She’d been tied to the bed, my dad told the police, and he had tried looking her over as best he could for any serious injuries, without crossing any lines of propriety.
She spent nearly three hours up there alone with the Collector, and she was the only one not to say a single word during our retelling of events to the police and our parents. She merely stared at the walls, or down at something in her hands or lap that none of the rest of us could see, and the vacancy in her eyes frightened me.
Her dad, tall and imposing in his ranger uniform, put an arm around her shoulders and led her away. I watched her climb into the jeep and her dad start the vehicle and they drove off and out of sight.
Of course, to corroborate our stories the police looked for the Buick, and they looked for the money, and there was a long search for Bobby Templeton that never brought about any leads. These details we didn’t expand upon. We just shrugged our shoulders like everyone else, chalking it up to the mystery of things.
Obviously, the natural conclusion, the ending that found its way into the newspapers and the local television station’s evening news, was that Vincent Perrelli or the man who’d called himself the Collector had found the money and relocated it. Or maybe found some of it but not all, and probably had done the same to Bobby Templeton, finding him and relocating him, catching the poor kid alone sometime during the day and maybe tried to extract information from the boy.
The newspapers speculated on the Buick, the money inside it, and the body in the trunk. Many a journalist pored over Vincent Perrelli’s criminal past, looking for missing associates who’d perhaps wronged him, attempted to rip him off. There were many candidates in such a man’s life, and no one could ever pin down a prime suspect. Tracking down the owner of the old Buick proved likewise fruitless, as the Buick itself was gone, and no one had previously written down its plate number.
All of this seemed to me very appropriate, very natural. Easy answers were for movies and comic books, not real life. Real life is far more unsettling, and only seldom provides us the answers we seek.
I remember watching the police and coroner dragging the body of the Collector out of the concrete pit of the dried and empty swimming pool. His head had been bust like a melon. Mom tried to shield me from the sight but I saw him pulled out and loaded into a black bag almost the color of his hat and coat.
The hat had fallen off when Bandit had jumped on the Collector and pushed him into the empty pool. As the zipper of the body bag was pulled up, I saw his pale and nondescript face for the first tim
e. It was a face I thought I’d never forget, so plain and ordinary and not at all what I thought evil would look like. Yet today I find it very difficult to pull up from my memory the details of him. The lines and contours of his countenance seem lost, like maybe it could be any face at all, or none that I’d ever seen.
I do remember thinking, as the bag zippered the Collector out of sight, leaving only the shape of him there under the plastic, that there’d been the slightest of twitches on that drab and boring face. Then he was gone, loaded into an ambulance and, like Tara, rolling away into the night.
Bandit broke two legs and suffered the smallest of hairline fractures to the spine as a result of his headlong plunge into the empty pool. He was a one-eared gimp of a dog for the rest of his life, which ended at the ripe old age of his fifteenth year. I buried him under the apple tree in the year before I left home for college. I still go there sometimes, since I own the place, and sit there on the small brick wall under the trees. Under the bright light of the desert sun, I remember him in my bed at night, curled against me, his heartbeat and mine indistinguishable at times.
I watched Mom and Dad grow old and Sarah get married. I went to school in Phoenix so I was never far away. On visits on holidays and every other weekend or so, I still threw down with my dad in the garage, working the punching bag and sparring. He made a pretty good sparring partner all the way to his sixty-fifth year, when a heart attack took him in the night and Mom’s phone call woke me up in the dorm.
Mom died a year after that.
They were both fighters, Dad of the physical sort when necessary, Mom’s strength from the heart, but they were a team, and I think when Dad went the fight went out of Mom. Sarah and I buried them side by side in a small plot at the local cemetery. Everything was left to us and I don’t think we’ll ever sell that house.
The school year following that summer in Payne with the short-lived Outsiders’ Club, I didn’t see much of either Jim or Tara. We’d see each other over the heads of other students in the crowded halls once in a while. Occasionally we’d have classes together. We’d nod and sometimes wave. But we never hung out together again, and I think that was for the best.
With distance and time, I think things get easier. Pain is never forgotten, especially of the sort that was bestowed upon us that summer and that we bestowed upon ourselves. But with distance and time, all things become bearable.
Last I read, Jim did indeed follow his dad’s advice. He ran for sheriff of Payne straight out of college. Won by a landslide. Every time I visit the old house, I pick up a copy of the local paper, and see his name somewhere in the Crime section, talking about statistics, doling out safety advice for residents, and maybe a photo of him in uniform posing with school children.
As far as I know he’s the only person who knows where the remaining two million dollars is located. Sometimes, I wonder what’s become of it. Then, knowing if my old friend has retrieved it over the years it’s been put to good use, my curiosity quickly ebbs.
I met Tara once more, years later, after college, after Mom and Dad had passed, and I was a man out on my own trying to find the ways of things. I was walking down the streets of a business district in Phoenix and I saw this beautiful woman with swirls and spirals of brown hair like galaxies, and she walked with this gait that made her skirt twirl in the cutest of ways.
She saw me coming and I saw her and we stopped there on the sidewalk and after the longest time we smiled and shook hands. I noticed the ring on her finger. She introduced me to her daughter standing shyly beside her, holding her mommy’s leg for comfort and safety. I smiled at the little girl and gave her a little wave.
“Hi,” I said, looking back at the mom.
“Hi,” she said right back.
I like to think her hand lingered on mine before we let go and kept walking our separate ways. I didn’t look back, and knowing her for that brief time in that short summer, I don’t think she did either.
That time in my life was so short and yet, as I get older I find myself thinking back to it more and more often, almost to the exclusion of all other things. All the other decades of my life seem to fall by the wayside in the wake of that summer of the Outsiders’ Club. I remember the words the Collector spoke, and I’m worried by the sense they make to me now.
This is the night. These are the times.
There seems a dark wisdom in there, his grim poetry, and I want to find it. Then knowing I will, eventually, I’m afraid of it, afraid of that knowledge.
I also think of what my dad said as he buried the knife into Mr. Perrelli’s gut, in reply to Mr. Perrelli’s protestations that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be, his life draining out of him, it wasn’t right.
Welcome to life, asshole.
There seems wisdom in that too.
About love and hope and good things, I’m not so sure I know much about, or ever did. This saddens me, because I know that in the years of the flow of my life, there have been good things. I just can’t seem to hold onto them. Then I remember there once was a boy saved by a dog.
And, for a moment, there is peace.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, and Richard Matheson, for the decades of stories that have led me to this moment. I hope my work can bring others a fraction of the enjoyment yours brought me.
A special thank you to Dean Koontz, for much appreciated advice and insight.
And an extra special thanks to Kathryn Cheshire, for taking a chance on an unknown writer.
About the Author
Raised on Marvel comics, horror fiction, The Twilight Zone, and other genre entertainment unsuitable for an impressionable young mind, Seth C. Adams knew he wanted to tell stories at a young age. With a Bachelor’s in anthropology from the University of California, Riverside, and completing his Master’s in North American History at Arizona State University, as an adult he’s learned that real life is indeed often stranger–and more frightening–than fiction. He currently splits his time between California and Arizona, and is always working on, or thinking about, his next story.
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If You Go Down to the Woods Page 27