Fear Club- A Confession

by Damian Stephens

  I realized that she was basically re-living whatever trauma Mike had forced upon her, right in front of me. My only interest was in escaping at that moment. I continued to pray secretly for Steve to get the hell back—

  “Whatever it was,” she said, “I killed it.”

  I started. “You—killed it?” I said stupidly. “What do you mean?”

  “It sounded like...like...” she struggled to get it out. Tears were bursting out of her eyes. She turned and looked at me, and my heart sank; I’d never seen anything so pitiful before. “It sounded like a little girl, Charley. It sounded like a little girl.” She broke down completely. “But I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see. Just blood. Just blood all over me. Afterward.”

  Julie collapsed into me, sobbing uncontrollably. I admit I had no practice with this sort of thing. Patting her on the head seemed stupid, not quite enough. But trying to make out with her would be seriously crossing the line, obviously. I felt miserably inadequate, and opted to simply freeze while she got it out of her system.

  Thankfully, Julie broke free of me moments later. “I’m sorry,” she said, opening the glovebox and grabbing a handful of old Taco Bell napkins. She blew her nose. “Oh, Jesus. Christ. I’m sorry. Please don’t—um—”

  “Don’t—ah—don’t worry. Seriously,” I said, relief washing over me, despite the extremely disturbing burden I now carried with knowledge of her Ordeal. “Not a soul.”

  She blew her nose again and looked over at me.

  Then she laughed.

  “What?” I said, taken aback. “What the fuck?” “You’ve got snot, all over your jacket,” she said, laughing. “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry, Charley.” She reached over with some of the napkins and succeeded in smearing them over the mess. “Oh, shit. Man.”

  “Just—” I took the napkins. “Let me. Don’t worry about it.”

  A scuffling sound from the side of Pete’s house alerted us to someone’s presence. Steve emerged from the shadows, grinning from ear to ear. He beckoned us over with one hand, then took a drag off of what was obviously a very fat marijuana cigarette, smoke billowing out of his nostrils into the early morning air.

  Pete Jarry’s den was exactly what I suspected it would be: a pothead paradise. Besides having no discernible flat surfaces other than the floor, walls, and ceiling, the most prominent sources of illumination came from an ancient stereo receiver and fat, multicolored candles in holders located variously throughout the room.

  He lived in the basement of his parents’ house, accessed by way of an external set of doors and a set of stone steps located around back. Access to the house itself lay at the other end of the rather large room, up a flight of wooden stairs.

  “We’re lucky,” Steve said as he led us around. “He just got back thirty minutes ago.”

  “Where was he?” I asked.

  “Doing drug dealer stuff, of course!” Steve hissed.

  Pete was smiling gratuitously, gazing at us from his position in an oversized red-and-white bean bag chair. An enormous glass bong sat poised between his legs. “I’m glad you guys came,” Pete said, once we had all assembled. “I was really starting to wonder if Halloween was just going to, like, you know, end.”

  I smiled at him. Pete was a good guy, as far as I knew, even if he did seem a little (as he would put it) far out.

  “You really don’t mind if we crash here?” Steve asked, idly flipping through the pages of a record catalog.

  Pete was hitting the bong for all he was worth, but managed to shake his head. “No, dude,” he breathed hesitantly, smoke trickling out of his nose and mouth. “Totally cool. Good to see you again, Charley. You’ll have to tell me how it went.”

  I looked back and forth between Julie and Steve in bewilderment. Julie grinned at the druggie timeslip; Steve just shrugged. Blowing out the remainder of the smoke, Pete angled the bong toward Julie. “Who are you, again?”

  Julie shook her head politely. “No, thanks. Julie.Evergreen.”

  He nodded. “Smoke?” He angled the bong toward me.

  “I’m good, thanks,” I said. “Hey, didn’t you have something you were trying to tell me the other day?”

  Pete shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “Did I?” He thought for a moment. “Oh, right! That Voynich shit—wasn’t that from Stek?”

  Julie peered at me, silently mouthing, Voynich shit?

  “It’s somewhere around here—” He cut himself off, waving with one hand and lifting his lighter with the other.

  I figured we’d try to make use of our time while Pete oriented his present self with his past. “Do you have a TV set? With a VCR?” I asked.

  Pete was hitting the bong again, apparently having already forgotten his task. “Sure thing, dude. Over there, behind the altar.”

  The “altar” was apparently an octagonal table placed almost centrally in the room. Upon it, reverently disposed, stood a miniature replica of an Easter Island head, carved out of dark, heavy wood. Some cheap-looking trinkets and little metal amulets surrounded it. Barely visible behind drapery decked out in Tibetan senzar characters was an old TV set framed in a great wooden box.

  I grabbed the video camera bag and made my way over to it. “Does this thing work?” I asked.

  Pete nodded.

  “Oh, shit, I’ve gotta see this!” Steve said, suddenly interested. Julie had joined me over by the TV, and we were both attempting to figure out how to connect the various wires to the video camera. “What’d you guys film?” Pete asked from behind me. “Did you guys make, like, a horror movie or something? That would be awesome.”

  “You’re not worried that he’s going to snitch?” Julie whispered to me as we tried to separate out the various connecting wires.

  I glanced back behind me. Pete was leaning back in his bean bag chair, eyes closed.

  “I’m not worried,” I said. “Steve, does this thing go here?” I indicated one of the wires.

  Steve grinned and proceeded to connect the device up to the TV set without another word. I turned the knob in front to “ON,” and gradually the “Channel 3” white noise appeared on the screen.

  “Rewind it,” I said. “I want to see whatever they shot from the beginning.”

  Grainy, poorly shot, poorly lit, and utterly amazing: these words best describe the strangely magnificent video that the impulsive, chaotic neutral Steve Chernowski thieved from the wreckage of those Four Horsemen of Golem Creek’s mundane apocalypse—may the gods of rock ’n’ roll have mercy on their souls.

  “I want to see it again,” Julie said. Pete Jarry was out like a light, and there didn’t appear to be any movement or hint of interruption from any other part of the household. So we re-watched it— all twenty-seven minutes of it, and were not less astounded after reviewing the material.

  First, the typical blackness and banging around you get from someone trying to get a video camera focused and recording. Voices from offcamera: “Is it going? Is it going?” All that stuff.

  The strangeness, however, begins almost immediately: someone is training the camera on what at first glance appears to be a puddle of water in near-darkness with some light glinting off of it. A voice: “Are you getting it?” An affirmative grunt. “Make sure you get the edges. Swing around so we get the whole thing.”

  It’s then that you realize the shimmering puddle is vertical—it’s not a puddle on the ground. The camera moves to reveal in a swathe of dim light what appears to be an underground cavern, or a basement filled with all sorts of rubble—broken chairs and what look to be shattered mirrors, perhaps the remains of a table and some shelves. Then it’s back to the shimmering puddle, where it steadies.

  “Okay,” a voice says off-camera. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  A dark-clad figure emerges from the right and stands before the puddle. From the general appearance, although you don’t see
his face, it appears to be one of the four monster hunters. “Now?” he says.

  “Go for it,” the off-camera voice says. And then the figure steps into the puddle and disappears. As if predicting the disbelief of whomever might be watching in the future, the cameraman subsequently approaches one edge of the puddle and proceeds to walk around it, revealing that the puddle possesses no depth at all—it looks exactly the same from behind as it does in front.

  Next, filmed from one edge of the puddle, we watch what is now obviously the second of the monster hunters walk into the puddle. He steps toward it, steps into it, then also disappears into it, just like a magician’s trick—except infinitely better.

  Finally, a third guy goes in. The cameraman then speaks: “Here goes nothing.” He approaches the puddle and, from the perspective of the camera itself, we step through...

  ...into a completely different environment. It’s another underground room, but this one is immaculately clean. The other three are there, happily chatting with each other. They break into applause when the cameraman comes through.

  “Who’s got the beer?” the cameraman says mockingly.

  Another voice: “Let’s head up.”

  We follow them up a dark flight of stairs and through a heavy-looking door, into what appears to be an abandoned storage shed. Moonlight shines into the room from a couple of grimy, barred windows set high up near the ceiling. Someone undoes a chain and padlock from another door, this one of corrugated tin, at the other end of the room. The whole group exits into a forest at this point, and the camera blacks out for a moment.

  Steve paused the video.

  “That’s got to be the tin shed on Old Man Plunkett’s land, on the far side of Chicken Hill,” Steve said.

  “Might as well be,” I said. “No one I know has ever been in there. Plus, they get to the wishing well right after this.”

  “Doesn’t Max Plunkett basically wait outside his house with a gun every night?” Julie said. “I heard that’s how Chris Baxter actually got that bullet wound.”

  Chris Baxter was a local kid who apparently got drunk one night and ran through Max Plunkett’s land on a dare. The story varied: either Max Plunkett shot him, or he shot himself in his stupor, and blamed it on Max Plunkett.

  “Maybe they know him? Max Plunkett, I mean,” I suggested.

  Steve re-started the video. There it was again: shaky camera trudging through woods—and then the revelation. One of the creatures from the wishing well, loping through the forest by moonlight. The scene was quite terrifying; the cameraman and his three cohorts understandably stayed back quite a ways.

  The creature disappears briefly, and the next thing we know, we’re watching through the windshield of a car.

  “—can’t believe we lost it!” one of the guys is saying. “What’s that up ahead?”

  They were clearly near Amanda Whitfield’s at this point. And suddenly we see it: the batwinged creature descending from dark sky onto the Whitfield residence roof. Excited clamor of voices— the car stops, and the four get out. You can’t make out much from this point until they clamber over a fence and the cameraman pauses briefly to take a shot of the creature flying off toward a patch of forest. Screams erupt, and the camera swings over to take in the Travolta werewolf pulling his dance moves.

  “Goddamn it! Did you get that?” we hear offcamera. This part was obviously when they were right next to us. The familiar shouts and encouragements of the monster hunters follows, over screaming and blaring party music. Then blackness, one final scene indicating the bat-winged creature evading the camera’s viewpoint.

  Thankfully, the cameraman seemed so intent on keeping the monsters in sight, he never caught any of us on video.

  “So, what this means is—” I started.

  “They weren’t following the werewolf,” Julie finished. “It was that other thing. Charley, was that what you—”

  “Yes,” I said. Steve let out a low whistle. “It was. So that was it. They were following something else, like the thing I saw in the Murk, and they happened upon the thing at the party. What kind of a fucking coincidence is that?”

  “It’s not coincidence,” Steve said. “No way. Too weird.”

  “No, it’s not a coincidence. We still have that journal to account for. We don’t know what that key unlocks. And this—” I said, rummaging through the backpack. “This other notebook.”

  Steve was unhooking the video camera from the TV set. I flipped open the journal and riffled through it: entries written in pen, dated. Sketches—it looked like maps, blueprints.

  Julie gazed at it over my shoulder. “We should probably get out of here before Pete wakes up,” she said. “We can stash this stuff.”

  “Stash it here,” Steve said.

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t look like he cleans up very often,” Julie said. “We can probably put it over there.” She indicated a half-open closet next to the TV set. Old board games and clothes spilled out onto the shag carpet.

  “Plus, he may not even remember us coming over,” Steve said.

  I wasn’t too sure about it, but I didn’t quite know what else to suggest. We couldn’t fit it all behind the brick at Maple Ridge. This place was about as random as we could hope for.

  “Can we get back in?” I asked. “I mean, whenever we need to?”

  “Sure,” Steve said. He pulled a house key out of his pocket and waved it at me.

  “Did you steal that?” I said.

  “Sure,” Steve answered. “Gotta have insurance.”

  I frowned at him.

  “What?” he said. “It was just sitting there!” “But where do we go from here?” Julie asked. “I already told you guys,” Steve said. “We’re going to Mike’s. We’re gonna go kill that fucker—or at least see if we can get him to fess up to something.”

  I glanced over at Julie and shrugged. “Nothing to lose?” I said.

  “I’m fucking exhausted,” she said.

  “It’s all right, Jules,” Steve said. “You’re just the wheel-man. Charley and I will go rough him up. You’re good for that, right, Charley?”

  “I don’t think I will ever sleep again,” I said. “And you’re obviously high.”

  Steve saluted. “Yep,” he said.

  I grabbed the stuff to bury in the back of Pete’s closet.

  “I’ll go start the car,” Julie said, getting up. That’s when we all noticed that Pete was gone.

  “A fucking SPY !” Steve shouted.

  “Keep your voice down!” I whispered harshly. “I can’t believe that a guy with grass that good could be so bad!” Steve continued.

  The bong rested, looking somehow pleasantly stoned, against the altar. Other than that very slight change, it appeared as if Pete had simply vanished into thin air.

  “That guy had to move lightning fast and with complete silence for us to have missed him,” Julie said.

  Steve was nodding vigorously. “That’s in their training, Jules!” He started opening up drawers and checking under the mattress.

  “Steve, what the fuck are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

  “He’s checking for weed,” Julie said.

  “Crime of opportunity!” Steve said as he riffled through a fat dictionary on a shelf, presumably checking for a false center. “Except, it’s not really a crime, because he’s a spy!”

  “Well, hurry up, man,” I said. “Let’s just get the hell out.”

  A bumping sound, coming from the door at the other end of the basement, the one leading up into the house proper, stopped everyone in their tracks.

  “Shit!” Julie whispered.

  All three of us scrabbled toward the basement stairs. Steve’s foot caught in a pile of afghans. A stack of High Times magazines and, oddly, Nasco Scientific catalogs sp
ewed forth from under them. I grabbed his arm, trying desperately to help him back up—

  “You guys don’t want tacos?”

  We froze. It was, of course, Pete. We turned our heads collectively. He was wearing a bright pink bathrobe over pajamas and holding an enormous plate of what appeared to be the finest collection of Mexican viands the world had ever seen.

  He sat back down in his bean bag chair and set the plate on the floor in front of him.

  “Help yourself,” he said, taking a bite out of a crunchy taco. “Oh, and that video you guys were watching?” he continued, chewing loudly. “I know those dudes. I’ve smoked those guys out.”

  We descended like vultures on the tacos— but this food was no carrion. Absorbing, delicious, exquisite; all these things I knew no longer as adjectives, but rather as facts in a universe of Pete Jarry’s invention.

  Relief, a dastardly mirage, smiled, shook my hand, and promptly returned me to our quest.

  “You saw what we saw?” I asked. Steve reclined with a glass bottle of Coke from a small refrigerator hidden elsewhere in the contours of the room, a look of satisfaction tinged with longing on his face. Julie appeared moderately peaceful for the first time all night.

  Pete nodded. “Yup. My brother brought them by.” He thought for a moment. “Booker and Staley. I forgot the other two guys’ names.”

  “Your brother? Stek?” I said. His brother was rumored to be going insane by the majority of Honorius High. He worked at one of the FazMarts in town, and had apparently either seen or been pursued by a demonic creature one night several months ago. This notion had blossomed into more insidious reports concerning Stek’s circumstantial involvement in a number of other grisly events. Rumor spread like quicksilver, and was just as impossible to hammer down into facts, but everyone had an opinion on him.

  I decided to dive in. “You know that what Stek saw—”

  “Was real. Sure,” Pete finished. “But everyone else thinks—”

  “Hey, man, Stek couldn’t ever hurt anyone,” Pete explained. “He couldn’t ever have done all that crazy shit. I love him, but I gotta admit the dude’s pretty boring, for the most part. When he told me about seeing monsters, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah, bro! Now we’re gettin’ somewhere!’”