“And the guys from the video?” I asked. “Totally legit,” Pete said. “That video’s not as interesting as some of the other ones.”
Steve and Julie both sat up straight. I fumbled for words.
“You’re saying there’s more?” Steve said. “Oh, hell, yeah,” Pete said. “I mean, I don’t know if it all takes place in Golem Creek, but—”
“Where the hell are those guys from?” Julie asked, exasperated.
Pete thought for a moment. “I think they said ‘Tulsa’? Something like that.”
“Where the fuck is ‘Tulsa’?” Steve asked. Suddenly, his face lit up. “Did they mean Tesla? They’re robot creations of Nikola Tesla!”
Pete smiled broadly. “Probably, dude.”
“You did see them step through that portal, right?” I asked.
Pete nodded. “That’s some incredible shit,” he commented.
“But did they ever say where it was?” Julie asked.
Pete retreated into his typical pothead moment of reverie. “Chicken Hill, right?” he said.
Steve nodded. “Bingo,” he said.
“But that’s really a portal to another world,” I said, the sense of sheer amazement at the situation returning once again.
“We don’t know if it’s to another world,” Julie said. “I mean, what if it’s just to another part of this world? Like South America, or something.”
“I mean, shit,” Steve said, “if monsters and stuff exist, why the hell not a portal? I mean, where are they all coming from, anyway?”
“Tulsa, I guess,” Julie said.
Pete looked suddenly concerned. “Is that just another word for hell, maybe? Do you think those guys are demons? And they call their hell-world ‘Tulsa’?” He shuddered. “I can’t believe I smoked those guys out.”
I tried to reassure him. “I don’t think those guys are demons, Pete. After all, they were chasing monsters, right?”
Pete’s look of worried concern vanished. “Right,” he said slowly, smiling again. “Right.”
Despite the lingering clouds of pot smoke in the air, I was starting to feel anxious again about the entire situation. Had Molly made it home all right? What was Mike Flowers planning next? And should we wait for him to contact us?
I also realized that the “guys from the video” were all probably dead—maybe one or two in critical condition at Golem Creek General Hospital— and that a “wolfman” breaking all the rules of horror-movie conduct was presumably still on the loose.
I was at least pleased that Pete hadn’t asked us where we got the video itself—
“Those guys are all dead, you know,” Steve said.
I breathed out heavily and glared at Steve. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “What?”
“Aren’t we all?” Pete said. He grabbed the last of the tacos from the plate and took a large bite. “Mm.” He suddenly stopped chewing. “Oh, man. Seriously?”
We all sat silently for a moment.
“I totally forgot to put the hot sauce on these. Oh, man.” He chewed some more, solemnly. “All those packets, too.”
We realized quickly that having a drug dealer for an ally was quite possibly the greatest boon to come our way since—well, since surviving the Ordeals, I guess. If you wanted information about the underworld—literal or otherwise—you needed to know the Hermes, the messenger god, who was constantly dealing with it.
I asked if it would be all right if we stashed some of our things in his closet, and Pete just nodded, smiling. “Dig,” he said.
Pete suggested we contact Stek directly if we wanted to know more about “monsters.” He jotted down Stek’s address on a stray rolling paper, then shifted his attention to the stereo.
“You guys ever listen to Rainbows are Free?” he said. “Dude made me a tape.”
After that, he seemed quite content to fall asleep and leave us to see ourselves out.
We decided by unanimous vote to head back to the Brake Street house and face Mike directly, rather than waiting.
The sun had supposedly risen, although you couldn’t tell. Dark clouds massed above, sealing us in. It was like Halloween night was not being allowed to end.
We pulled up to the curb a block away from the Brake Street house, per our usual convention. “We just go in,” I said. “We knock. We go in.
We sit down and try to have a civil conversation with him.”
“And if he freaks out?” Steve asked. “We deal with it,” I said. “Or run.”
“‘Or run,’” Julie repeated. “I’ll remember that one. Best advice ever.”
“Or die,” Steve said.
“Yeah,” Julie said. “But how?”
I opened the car door. “Why don’t you guys just wait here?” I said. “If I’m not back in five minutes—”
“Hell, no,” Steve said. “Right behind you.”
Julie got out of the car as well. We proceeded to unfold our total lack of plan—to alleviate our anxiety, if nothing else.
And I suppose our plan “worked,” in a sense, since Michael Flowers was nowhere to be found.
The door was unlocked. When I stepped in, half expecting to be axe-murdered on sight, I initially breathed a sigh of relief at the room’s occupancy level: zero. But then a newer, more profound concern overtook me: where was everything?
In the center of the room sat the box I had handed Mike, its lid open. But other than that, and some scraps of papers and posters left on the walls, the entirety of the room was empty.
“Woah,” Steve was the first to announce. “Okay.
I didn’t expect this.”
Julie approached the box and peered cautiously down into it. “You think he was really that pissed?” she said. “He just fucking packed up and left?”
I didn’t quite know what to make of the situation. Geared up for a fight, I suddenly found myself more tired and confused than ever. “I really, honestly didn’t expect this,” I said. “An argument, some yelling, possibly. Not eviction!”
“Wait a minute,” Julie said, leaning closer to the box. “Let’s just look at this. There’s got to be a reason this box is still here.”
Steve and I both approached the box and peered inside. “False bottom,” Steve said. “You got that stuff out of a false bottom? Clever.”
“Oh,” I said. That sinking feeling again. “Oh, my God.” Two precisely delineated bas-reliefs, fitted for two very precise items: one spot for a palmsized book, the other for an intricately carved skeleton key...
Julie figured it out instantly. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Steve, no. No. He did not get those things out of the false bottom.” Steve raised his eyebrows and took a step back.
“Huh,” he said. “Well.”
Suddenly, the evening’s events began to make sense. A book and a key—fake ones on top, real ones on bottom... I guess if you knew what you were supposed to be looking for, you’d assume that the first book and key you found in the box were the very things you needed—and you’d be wrong.
“Holy shit,” Julie said. “Do you realize what you did, Charley?”
“Yes, Julie,” I said, trying to roll some of the tension out of my neck. “I can quite clearly see that I fucked up.”
“No offense, but that’s exactly right,” Julie said. “Because think of it: if you hadn’t taken the book and the key out, he might not have known to check for a false bottom in the box.”
Steve immediately started laughing. “Ha, ha! Now yuh done it, Charley-boy!”
I was too tired to punch him. Not that it would have done any good. It had been proven physically impossible to shut Steve Chernowski the fuck up.
“But, then, what were we reading in the journal?” I said.
“Who the hell knows?” Julie said. “Maybe a spell of some sort? Touch the key, read the book, and you
suddenly end up in a sort of alternate universe where werewolves in fucking John Travolta getups are killing people?”
I slumped down to the floor, leaning my back against the wall. “I want to go home,” I said. “I need to sleep.”
“Or Mike, for whatever reason, can’t get to the damn box himself,” Julie continued, speculating. “So he sends someone else to go get it for him. And he knows that there’s probably a protection spell on the thing! But whoever first opens the box gets hit with it, leaving him to run off with the real stuff...”
“So he knew I was going to open it,” I said. Julie nodded. “A set-up,” she said.
And now it did make sense: seeing Mike the night before the Ordeal...his expert assumption that I would feel slightly offended by the whole mess, and want to keep some of the spoils for myself...allowing me plenty of unobserved time to do so...
Once again, I began to wonder if all of the Ordeals were fakes, intended to weave one gigantic illusion over the few people Mike thought capable of actually getting the box for him. But he had to choose the right person—one who would do the work, but whom he could not trust entirely, that he could trust just enough...
“Steve,” I said. “What would you have done if you’d been the one to go down into the Murk and get the box?”
He thought for a moment. “Probably left it down there,” he said. “Literally bring him back a couple of quarters, then come back later myself and get it. Bring it to a pawn shop if it didn’t have a gold bar in it.” He paused again. “Or just bust it over the head of the monster, maybe, if I thought I could get away with it.”
“Right,” I said. “Julie. What about you?”
I could tell that Julie was getting where I was going with this. She sighed. “I would have given the whole thing to him, unopened,” she said. “I wouldn’t even have wanted to open it.”
I nodded. “So it’s official,” I said. “We’re not the ‘Fear Club.’ We’re the goddamned Fool Club! We’re just a bunch of fucking tools that Mike Flowers knows exactly how to use.”
Steve, miraculously, didn’t laugh. He stalked over to the small window at the back of the room that looked out onto the grove of ash trees surrounding the property, dark grey in the drizzling morning light.
Julie touched the box gingerly. “But he didn’t get away with everything,” she said.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall. “How do you mean?” I asked.
“Magic,” she said. “It’s real. Monsters! All fucking real. We know that!”
“Do we, though?” I said. “Where are we right now? We were all in the same wing of the hospital the night that Mike died—what do you remember after that?”
Golem Creek General Hospital was small, so far as city hospitals go, but fully outfitted and functional. I was there for pneumonia, and half out of my wits. Steve was in the next room over, recovering from one of his usual exploits: he had ridden a dirt bike quite literally off a small cliff, and had casts on one leg and one arm. Julie was there visiting Steve, and sat reading quietly beside his bed while his pain meds kicked in. Michael Flowers was fitted out in one of the larger rooms located directly across the hall.
He was dying. He had been admitted earlier that night, in critical condition. A deep stab wound had punctured several abdominal organs. After hours of surgery, his system had gone septic, and he had been carted to that room, just across the hall, comatose. Where was his family? They were getting ready to pull the plug. But he was alone at that moment.
“You remember, don’t you?” I said. “That weird purple light, radiating out of Mike’s room and into ours? And suddenly I’m perfectly okay. Steve, you got up out of bed, insisting that Julie help you, and the only reason you couldn’t walk perfectly was because of the cast on your leg. Nothing broken. We all walked out into the hallway. We all walked into Mike’s room—”
“And then we woke up the next morning,” Julie said. “Steve was already arguing with the doctors when I woke up on that little couch in his room.” “That light,” Steve said, turning around. “It was like he was that light. Remember? He was just
dissolving into it. A cloud of purple light.” “Guys,” I said. “What if everything we saw last night didn’t even happen?”
The usual exuberant dismissal from Steve was not forthcoming. Miracles upon miracles.
“One way to find out,” Julie said. “We’ve got to go. Back to Amanda’s. Back to the Murk.” She got up and brushed herself off. “Stupid box,” she said, gazing down at it.
“No shit,” Steve said, striding over to it. “Stupid little fucking box.”
He kicked it. The room exploded.
part two
THE MURK
LOCATION: CJ’s, a bar way out in Bumfuck, Egypt (i.e., past Jenks). Discovered while trying to overcome boredom. Staley said he wanted to actually do something the other night that didn’t involve comic books or weed. We took the red jeep, since the previous night had the Pontiac nearly fucked. First flight of hell-hounds? Piece of piss. Although narrowly missed getting our asses chewed by those sonsabitches.
So Booker has to take a piss—this is at CJ’s— and he’s so fucking wasted he somehow wanders into the owner’s office and out a back door. He sees something going on out there—some dude dressed all in black, and another guy, and he thinks it’s probably a drug deal or some weirdo sex thing he doesn’t want to get involved in, so he turns tail and runs. But he runs the wrong fucking way!
We’re cracking up at this point, when he’s telling us this. He says he still needs to take a piss, but now he’s out in the fucking woods and he’s all turned around. So he whips it out and takes a piss, and while he’s doing that, his eyes adjust to the darkness, and he sees something out there, a little farther out in the woods.
Booker’s got no fucking sense, so he just wanders out there, and whaddaya know? It’s ruins, basically. Looks like a house that burned down. And he’s like: “Is this that fucking Devil House? Oh, man!” He finds what looks like a chimney and a few of the remaining wall supports. He can’t barely see much of anything, so he finally tries to find his way back to CJ’s.
Somehow, he walks in the front door of CJ’s, and the rest of us look up and we’re like, “Where the fuck you been?” He orders another beer, the dumb bastard, and he tells us his story.
So we pay up and we tip that hot-ass waitress probably fifty percent. Then we head out to the car and wait for the assholes outside the bar to shut up and go home. Then we all follow Booker’s lead out back, but this time we’ve got flashlights and rope and combat knives, and we make sure Fitz has the camera. Because, basically, we’re figuring that we’re going to run into some shit back there, you know?
It takes us about ten minutes to find the place and another fifteen before I nearly break my leg falling through an overgrown hole in the floor. Booker drags me back out, and we’re shining our flashlights down there—there’s all sorts of shit down there, but it looks like someone locked up a fucking gorilla in a hotel room. Staley’s already rigging up one of the ropes to some steel dowel rods, and Fitz gets the video camera recording.
Once we’re all down there, we figure this must be the old Murdock House, because it’s even got the magic circle still on the ground, and still smells like something burned. So I guess that question’s answered, at least. But there’s no skeleton, or anything, so either we weren’t the first to come down here after it happened or Murdock somehow escaped without the Devil getting him. At least not that night.
And Staley’s like: “Dudes! Check this shit out!” Because there’s a sort of false door, and I don’t know how the hell he found it, but back behind this one part of the wall we find a little room, also kind of fucked up. And that’s where the portal was—
Pete Jarry rubbed his eyes. It was about onethirty in the afternoon, by the clock, but down here in the den you couldn’t t
ell time worth shit. He’d gotten up maybe half an hour ago, and the first thing he did, after starting the coffee, was drag all that stuff out of the closet and spread it out in front of him.
He was reading the spiral-bound notebook, starting from the beginning.
He started skimming the contents, page by page. They had a numbering system that looked like some kind of date, but he couldn’t be sure. 160696.2302: Sketch of portal. 230696.0011: Map of one relevant area of “Tulsa” (not to scale). 230696. Supp.: Second encounter with the “hell-hounds.”
Many pages later (221196.2202):
Totally stuffed! Smoked a joint with Pete tonight. Everything cool until we tried to find something to listen to. Staley alternately happy and sad. The Sex Pistols. Happy. The Bee-Gees? Sad. Booker being a jackass puts on “Stayin’ Alive” and Pete goes into some sort of weird trance.
Pete stopped reading for a moment. Did he remember that?
Anyway, we ended up leaving because none of us could get him out of it. At least we managed to score a decent dinner before the big hunt.
231196.0311: Complete waste of fucking time when it came to the hunt. One good thing came out of it, though: when we got back to Pete’s, Stek was there and we had a chance to talk to him again. Got the Lovecraft book from him, Bloodcurdling Tales. He said: “Look more closely at the underlined parts. And check out the inside back cover.” So when we got back to Booker’s mom’s house, Staley and Booker started on it.
Too bad there’s no turkey here, I’m fucking starving.
This was followed by what appeared to be a grocery list of some sort—tortilla chips, queso, PIZZA, QT hot dogs, BEER, etc. The next page had a dark stain on it, with a sketch of something labeled “phaser gun” and a big X scrawled through most of it.
Then, occupying the center of an otherwise blank page, Pete saw this:
SUIQT OLAHQ.
(Just a reminder.)
jfaetbi cilwboq
ylu juqs aus lus efq ebtos!
Fear Club- A Confession Page 7