9 Tales Told in the Dark 11

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  And here in the back bedroom I also find a maw, stretching the length of the room as if a wall was torn out to reveal not the backyard and the equipment shed beyond, but darkness. The bedroom's two walls on either side slant inward toward it, as if it were a black hole frozen in the act of sucking the room into itself.

  I step closer, squint inside. Nothing I can see, and I'm glad for that.

  Maybe everyone with this kind of baggage has the temptation to embrace it, to lean on it like a crutch, to retreat into it and use it as an excuse for everything. When I shut up the house and began my wait I wondered, during the hours without music or any sound save the occasional barking dog or motorcycle rumbling up the lane, if I would find the ugliness somehow...attractive.

  Could this place become something like, God forbid, a second womb? Some people love their issues, and some dysfunctional people love their dysfunctions. They wear it like a badge; they're proud of their pain and poison. Myself too at times, I suppose.

  Well I needn't have worried. I cannot open my eyes without disgust. I'm repulsed and I'm ashamed. The air even smells now, as if a dog had done its business somewhere in the house. I'm starting to miss when it was just the paint fumes.

  A thought occurs to me--it's not spreading to the outside, is it? Am I giving the world a new plague that'll infect the lane, then the neighborhood, then all of Erlanger and then....

  I have to get out. Now.

  ###

  In the central chamber of Kurelek's maze lies a rat, curled up and exhausted. He said it represented his soul, more or less, darting through after chamber to chamber and nightmare after nightmare searching for a way out, any way out, and finding none.

  There is no exit from the maze.

  Maybe we can all relate to some extent. The hurts, the shame and the scars, spawn this freak-show inside your head and you are the rat, doomed to suffer and rage because there are wounds that even time doesn't heal.

  But I've played a trick on my maze. I've drawn it all out and now everything's sticking to the walls instead of my soul. The house is the maze now--and it has a front door that can't be erased or sealed off.

  I retrieve my jeans, shirt, vest, white socks and tennis shoes and suitcase from the closet. The shaving things and toothbrush I leave in the bathroom. There are still three and a half water bottles in the refrigerator and I want to guzzle one down, not the careful sips I'd been taking since I stacked in thirty of them, but then I remember what the kitchen's turned into and I shudder, this whole place is poisoned, I'm drowning in madness and have to escape.

  I run around the house with a candle, blowing out all the others: the two in the back bedroom, the three in the dining room and three more in the living room. I've forgotten I can switch on the overheads, or maybe I'm just scared to see these horrors in full light.

  I'm all dressed, crossing the dining room with my suitcase in my right hand and the last burning candle in my left, when I hear the raucous voices outside again. Then someone bangs on the door.

  Oh, great! I'd forgotten all about those creeps. They're laughing--do they ever stop laughing? While I'm thinking this, something like a battering-ram hits the door and it trembles. The second blow crashes the door open and silhouettes stagger in, two, three, four of them. Drunk?

  No daylight brightens the living room--it's nighttime of course. One of the intruders has a flashlight and shines it around. It finds me and stings my eyes. I stand frozen--I must look just like that deer in the headlights--and the men erupt in slurred shouts and curses. Then I see that one of them carries something else metallic.

  I don't want to drop the candle so I set it on a pedestal beside me, then dart into the hall minus my suitcase. My breath comes in short gasps and I wonder how they like that smell.

  Is that gun really loaded--

  BANG!

  I jump. After an eternity of quiet, it's like a blow to the face. More shouts and then a clunking sound, as if someone's knocked over a piece of furniture.

  I'm really sweating now. I've read about this kind of thing in Los Angeles and the big cities, someone turns down a wrong alley and gets blown away by gang members but Erlanger hasn't grown big enough for that, then another bang and they storm into the hallway. By that time I've reached the back bedroom.

  Normally this would be a dead end, game over, but that was before the haunts in my head emerged to reshape the place. I take a deep breath of stench, cough, gag, and plunge into the black-hole maw.

  It's too dark to see, and I have no candle. I grope my way along walls of plaster and bare wood. The closed-in tunnel magnifies the sound of my breath going in and out, winding around a bend, then up a slight grade, then down again and veering left. The creeps chasing me never shut up, and their voices don't fade--have they followed me in? I shout for them to turn around before they lose their way, and get an Eff-you for my trouble.

  My eyes adjust enough to see that the tunnel narrows and widens, the ceiling high in some places, nearly scraping my head in others. Once I have to get down and crawl on hands and knees to get through. It never goes too far upward or down, but it winds and twists all over the place. Staggering through a crooked doorway like a doorframe leaning to the left, I find a spacious chamber like those in Kurelek's head, and I see that this place has more sights to show me.

  I'd been dwelling on the old hurts as if I'd only received them, never inflicted them. There's a grand mural stretching across a wall and over the ceiling to cover the other wall as well, maybe ten feet in length. I recognize the scene: my fourth-grade classroom after we'd moved to Cincinnati. A boy sits scrunched down in his chair with arms folded, biting his lip, tears welling in his eyes. Everyone in the class is staring at him with wicked, self-satisfied grins.

  The boy is not me. I'm sitting up straight and proud near the back, reading aloud from a sheet of paper. I'd scribbled a fictional account about kicking his butt, calling him by name, when in reality I would never have had the guts to try such a thing. Everyone whooped and laughed and loved it.

  Unbelievably the substitute teacher sits at her desk and never interrupts, never says "that's enough," never tells me to shut up and how would I like it if someone did that to me? And that's the craziest part of all; it had been done to me. I knew what it was like to be publicly humiliated, and yet I did it myself without a second thought. It just doesn't make any sense.

  The voices chatter and bray somewhere behind me. For an anguished moment, the humiliation scene stinging my heart, I consider stopping and waiting for them with head hung, saying go ahead, do whatever you want, I deserve it; but I keep going.

  Willing my legs to pump from chamber to chamber, I see other sights but avert my eyes from them, don't see if they were spawned from wounds received or given. I'm lost. The maze has gotten the better of me after all. But after a few moments it dawns on me that I don't feel lost. I know where to turn right or dart left, take a stairway up through this Bosch-funhouse, trying to keep my breathing shallow in the thick air. My heart leaps. Of course I know where to go! Haven't I lived with these all my life? I know my own maze. Like geese flying south, I'm guided by instinct. I plunge ahead with a renewed burst of speed, thinking of fresh air and wide open spaces.

  The yells of my pursuers echo somewhere behind or ahead of me now, I'm not sure, but they no longer concern me. The voices have died down and lost their insolence. I hear a cry of unmistakable fear, then a yell for help. They're finally grasping their circumstances.

  Right turn at the bank of teletypes, down a ramp, then left at a white metal ship's doorway with SC1 stenciled in black on it, then through a carpeted room littered with real estate documents and crimson demons splashed on the walls, there's a bend, a short flight of wooden stairs like flattened-out logs--a new smell, smoke, reaches my nostrils--and I step into the living room with the three FAMILY mannequins standing in their circle.

  The dining room is bright with flames, the living room hazy with blue smoke. My Navy training kicks in and I drop do
wn on my haunches. The candle--was that it? I left one candle burning, and those idiots managed to knock it over!

  The door stands ajar, hanging crookedly from the upper hinge. Dropping on all fours and scuttling toward it, I notice that the fire is nicely devouring the Museum of Hopelessness, the LOVE exhibit wreathed in flames and no longer recognizable, THE FUTURE turning black, popping and sputtering. My suitcase, clothes and I-Pod are gone, but I don't think of this. Neither do I think of what I've done to the homestead where I spent so much of my boyhood, where Gram baked pumpkin pies and coffee cake, where we all used to feast at the dining room table on Thanksgiving turkey with sweet potatoes and green beans from Gramp's field out back. Would they understand? Those exhibits...I shudder and push them from my mind. Surely my grandparents would understand.

  The heat stings my face. The fire is spreading and I'm still too far from the door. The edge of the living room carpet is smoldering now. I suck in a lungful of smoky air, spring to my feet and blow past the three statues, glass crunching under my tennis shoes. Before I reach the door I feel a cool breeze on my face. I laugh and bound through the door, across the yard and under its maples, there are even fireflies out tonight like Twin and I used to catch, I laugh as I run through their swarms of blinking yellow Christmas lights.

  I run a circuit around the place, past the boarded-up living room and back bedroom windows, through the backyard. Everything looks...normal. No sign of expanded walls or tunnels, no spreading of a plague. Somehow it was all confined to the house.

  I give a whoop and dash around the garage, up the driveway past the old tin mailbox and hit the lane, my shoes slapping the pavement, the dark houses sleeping on either side of me, one after another sliding by. I reach the intersection and turn down the state route, I'm going full tilt but my lungs don't ache, I don't gasp for breath.

  I glance back once to see the flames, bright yellow in the darkness, flickering through the distant kitchen window. I run the hundred-yard dash past the club where I used to see rock bands from Cincinnati, up the road where I drove Siss's old red Buick Starfire, and still I keep going. I could run all the way back to California, the weight lifted, my memories clean, my old sins and the sins of others going up in flames, all burned up and the ashes scattered to the wind and I can't believe I'm free, I'm really free....

  THE END

  LONG TIME IN COMING by Shawn P. Madison

  Gillis Wenneman felt the old rickety bus begin to slow down and he tensed on the cracked, green vinyl bench. This was it, his stop. In mere moments, the faded yellow school bus would screech to a clumsy halt just in front of his mailbox like it had been doing for years. Fat old Martha Gingham would groan at him as he walked down the few stairs and hit the grass at the edge of Route-28, then gun the old engine and lurch the lumbering beast back up the hill toward the center of Wests Mill.

  Today was the day, he was nervous as hell but he knew that it would work. It just had to. Gillis lightly rubbed the tender skin around the black eye he had received just three days ago from Mike Oberndorf and the rest of his lackeys. His ribs still hurt from the beating he had sustained yesterday. It was getting worse as summer approached. Gillis knew that his summer vacation would be a terrifying experience if he allowed this to continue.

  Ever since he had begun junior high in August, that shithead Oberndorf had been knocking him around. It had started out as harmless teasing but, for some reason, Oberndorf had taken to kicking his ass very seriously. Every day, it seemed, the group of five or so older boys were waiting for him across the road from his bus-stop and, with viciousness in their eyes, the terror would begin.

  It had to stop. It had to stop today. It had to stop now. Gillis steeled himself, took a deep breath and walked down the aisle toward the front of the bus. “Wish me luck, Martha,” he mumbled to the fat old woman in the driver’s seat as he put his head down and stepped off the bus.

  They were there, oh God, seven of them today. Gillis didn’t look up to face them but he could see their legs as he made his way toward the driveway of his family’s old farmhouse. The Wenneman’s had been living in Wests Mill, North Carolina for years, at least two-hundred, maybe more. The family had once been high-rollers in nearby Franklin, the closest thing that passed for a city this side of the Tennessee border. Now, they were just poor farming folk, like everyone else living off of Route-28.

  The boys didn’t cross the street immediately, they never did. As usual, they waited for Martha’s bus to crest the hill and disappear before they crossed the road to begin their fun. Gillis could feel his heart racing, pounding in his chest. He was sure it would work, absolutely certain of it. If it didn’t...he didn’t even want to think about the consequences.

  He had put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that his plan would be successful. He hated these boys, hated them more than anything else in the world. He hated what they did to him, the pain they caused him and the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to stand up to them. They not only hurt him physically but they were hurting him mentally. Gillis was only fourteen years old but he knew enough to realize that he was beginning to go crazy. If he was to have any chance at a normal childhood, a normal life here in Wests Mill, he had to stop this insanity and stop it cold. There was no other way. None but this...it would work, it had to.

  The boys approached. He had to fight down the urge to run, to flee up the driveway and try to make the house before they caught him. But it was too far and they were much faster. This he knew, had found out the hard way. His plan was different, he would lead them down into the woods, into places they weren’t familiar with, to places he knew like the back of his hand. Far down into the family farm, deep into the wooded areas of the land, down to the old timers. Then he would see if his plan would succeed.

  But he had to make it that far first. He had to time it just right, he had to be perfect. Mike Oberndorf reached him first and grabbed his shirt roughly.

  “Where do you think you’re going, sissy-boy?” Oberndorf said through a crooked grin and the other boys laughed. There was an electric current in the air, a feel of something bad about to happen. It was so thick, Gillis felt that he could reach out and grab it. The others had to feel it too, but they were probably feeding off it, using it to fuel their ugly desires.

  “You didn’t think we were just going to let you walk on home, did you?” Marty Kaiser sneered and kicked Gillis roughly in the left shin.

  Gillis let out a squeal and the others moved a step closer, anticipating the pain that was about to be unleashed. Their grins were terrifying, Gillis found himself beginning to shiver as he saw the lust for blood and pain in the eyes of the seven boys surrounding him. They towered over him, the tallest by more than a foot. Gillis had always been small, too small for his size, most said. These boys were older, stronger and knew that he was easy prey for their evil intentions. If he let this go on, he would surely end up dead one day, he just knew it.

  This was it, it would be today, just like he planned. He finally came to the realization that he could actually pull this off. He hadn’t known it until this very moment but he was going to do this thing and it would all be over, finally and eternally over.

  Then it started. Jerry Bruckheimer punched him brutally in the stomach and Kelly Stein slapped him viciously across the face. Gillis began to cry but his tears only served to drive the boys into a frenzy. They were shouting at him now, calling him names as fists landed on his head and back and chest. Another kick to his left shin sent him stumbling to the dirt and grass along Route-28 and he worried that he would not be able to run. His entire plan depended on his ability to run and run fast. He had been running every day after his beatings in the woods behind the old farm house. He had run so long and so hard that he was sure he could lead them right to where he needed them to come without getting caught first.

  One boy’s fist caught him underneath the chin and he went down hard to the dirt. He was bleeding from his mouth and the cut above his left eye had reopened
but otherwise he wasn’t hurt too badly. His shin was sore but he could learn to ignore that through the hatred that boiled within him at that moment.

  While the group of boys laughed and pointed to him squirming on the ground, Gillis reached into his pocket and felt the cold weight of the jagged brown rock he had found months ago. This rock had started him thinking, had been instrumental in his devising of the plan he now intended to launch into action.

  Mike Oberndorf was their leader, of that there was no doubt. Hit him with the rock and it would begin. It was now or never.

  Gillis made it shakily to his feet and turned to face them. The boys’ laughing turned to startled and confused expressions as they saw him smiling through bloody teeth. Gillis spit at them, reaching two of the seven boys with his bloody saliva, then reared back and launched the rock with all his might at Mike Oberndorf’s face.

  In disbelief, the boys stood and watched as the rock smacked into Oberndorf’s nose and right cheek, ripping a bloody gash into the soft skin there and forcing a burst of blood from the flattened nose. Gillis felt his heart skip a beat and then he was off. He exploded into the woods, his shin complaining to him with agony all the way. He could hear them behind him as they made chase.

  Curses and threats assailed his ears as he whisked himself through the trail in the woods that only he knew existed. It was his trail, it wasn’t worn, it wasn’t visible, it existed in his mind and he was very familiar with it.

  Even so, the boys made good speed. With anger and hatred in their voices, they gave chase and steadily gained on Gillis and his smaller legs.