Providence Place

by Matthew Tait

  None of that was apparent now as the dark outline of their director moved forward, his twin light assault – one of camera and one of torch – revealing walls caked in grime and garlanded with graffiti. No children’s scribblings, either. No, this was the artistry of squatters and miscreants. A side wall on their left (no doubt once home to book posters) was now a repository for various kinds of etched depravity … lewd words and even lewder representations of crude acts performed by the naked human anatomy. There were cocks spurting juice and entering holes; cocks being stroked and manhandled by horned things with tails and teeth. An abundance of different-sized breasts fought for attention with long-legged women performing cunnilingus on each other. Buttocks, vaginas, and even bestiality – seemingly no part of the room had escaped the onslaught.

  ‘Disgusting,’ Carolina muttered from behind. Like Jason before her in the chapel, she spoke around a finger-pinched nose. The library’s reek (like stale piss and other fluids), could almost be read like dust-particles through their flashlights’ beams. ‘I don’t suppose any of you thought to bring a weapon of some kind? Dillion …’

  But Carolina got no further. Rooted to the spot, she stared at the center of the room with avid wonder. Alyssa stared, too. So did Jeff and Jason, both of whom were huddled against the door. Dillion (perhaps with Carolina’s question beating a rhythmic tattoo through his head) tip-toed lightly toward their next find, his iPhone trained in a specialized slant as though he were framing the shot with his fingers.

  Many chairs, unquestionably man-made circles of them, radiated out from the room’s heart like a drawn pictograph. And sitting on the chairs were different-sized mannequins and dolls. While some were child-sized (Alyssa recognized a uniformed papier-mâché creation pilfered directly from the foyer of the admin building), others were fully dressed adults fresh from a showroom floor. The closest was a male mannequin sporting a bowler hat, black business attire, and a face smeared with so much white greasepaint his countenance appeared grotesque in the wan light.

  Grinning at the group, he seemed to be saving the core enthusiasm of his smile for Alyssa only.

  Next to him, a pudgy girl wearing a nothing but a see-through bodice canted her head severely toward the middle of the circle … toward the real human being who stood within the ring of chairs as though extolling lessons to its audience of mannequins.

  No way. Ah-ah. Can’t be real. For one thing, it looks like a fucking scarecrow.

  Then why was it moving?

  Propelled by fascination more than anything else, Alyssa moved closer, shining her torch directly on the apparition and trying to get a foothold on its particulars. Like many of the other mannequins, it bore some kind of strange hat, the front of which obscured a flat face devoid of features. Its movements, languid and furtive, were centered on its arms. Suddenly, fight or flight seemed a real possibility, and Alyssa was about to succumb to one of them when Dillion shouted something incoherent.

  Then, in a quieter tone just above a whisper, ‘I think it’s just … more rodents.’

  As if in response the scarecrow shape twisted abruptly, its misshapen anatomy coming apart in an orgy of flying forms. Within the melee, Alyssa bore witness to beady eyes and thrusting whiskers; she glimpsed a gross accumulation of moving body parts that dived, scattered, and finally fell to the floor in a hot rain of jostling limbs and fur.

  Mice! Her mind screamed in numb, dumb wonder. It’s a goddamn infestation – the kind of plague one would see on a farm.

  Freaked by the collective light, hundreds of mice swarmed out of the body of the mannequin like coordinated birds in flight. No longer supported by their multitude, the scarecrow form began to unravel, its checkered shirt and denim trousers caving in a timely precision. And as the exterior dissolved, so too did its inner framework – a seething archipelago of fiberglass, plastic, and mouse droppings.

  Just wait for it, she thought. Any second now –

  Carolina, her voice bouncing off the walls and amplified by the lack of objects, screamed. Knocking a mannequin off its perch, she straddled a chair and proceeded to climb it, barely avoiding the horde as it dove forward around the legs of the chair. Some, enraptured by the movement, scuttled up the chair, covering every niche as though the ground itself were moving. Which it appeared to be doing.

  ‘Enough of this shit,’ she heard Dillion say. Apparently satisfied with his existing footage, he’d pocketed his iPhone. ‘Everyone – get to the next room.’

  Needing no persuasion, Alyssa backtracked. Jeff and Jason did the same. Carolina remained anchored to her seat, gripping the headrest and staring down at the floor as though she were adrift on a sea of lava. Building into a sprint, Alyssa felt a hollow crunch as one of the rodents beneath her sneakers succumbed to its weight. Then another. And yet one more. By the time she’d reached the exit, at least a dozen of them had perished beneath her soles.

  Even more little deaths added to a place that stank of it.

  Completely bereft of chairs and mannequins (wholly lacking anything substantial beside a singular fan), the next classroom did contain a working lightbulb. Enough for the group to make out no graffiti or obscene images decorated the walls. The same effect Alyssa had experienced stepping into the library (traversing worlds), was here applied again. Though its effect was even more startling. For reasons unknown, the architect – or architects – of the mannequin circle had found the children’s library vastly more appealing for their debauchery. As if the lingering residue of innocence there had caused them to call it home.

  ‘What do we do now?’ said Jason. Up until this moment the man had appeared stoic, almost indifferent to the atmosphere pervading the library. Now he paced, pulling anxiously at the bottom of his tie. ‘There are people here, in the school. Bums and degenerates probably. Did you see all that hoodoo on the walls? Like something from another century. And the dolls? What was that? They’re hiding, in the building. Waiting. And now they know we are, too. They’ll come –’

  ‘Quiet,’ the walrus said. She’d been the last to arrive, reaching the next classroom a full three minutes after the others had made their exit. Though it had taken Carolina some time and courage to step off her chair, her initial revulsion and response to the plague had apparently vanished. ‘We don’t know anyone else is here in the building with us. Whoever made that room is probably long gone by now.’

  Jeff had found the floor, his back leaning against a bare wall; his forearms placed on his knees. Pointing a finger at Carolina, he said, ‘Yes! The mice confirm that, don’t they? They’ve been allowed to breed in the school for God knows how long because there’s nobody else around to disturb them. And there’s dust everywhere, we all saw it.’

  Outside in the hallway, the steady click of paws had receded. Retreating also was the powerful smell, having been replaced by a more mundane species of decay.

  Dillion said, ‘Turn off your beams. We don’t need them in here.’

  Alyssa obliged, frowning. She looked down at Jeff. ‘Why are you so keen to stay all of a sudden? That room might be long abandoned, but it’s obvious others could still be hanging around.’

  ‘That’s not what he meant,’ Carolina said. ‘He just means we’re safe here for the time being. Isn’t that right?’

  In reply, Jeff nodded slowly.

  Jason had stopped his pacing, and now stood staring at the western wall as if the mannequins on the other side were only seconds away from breaking through. ‘I just don’t know. Things suddenly feel wrong. Tell me you all don’t feel it, too? That scarecrow teacher thing, what was it for? And the mice, where’s the source of their food coming from?’

  ‘Teenagers,’ Alyssa said flatly. ‘Bored teenagers dressing up big dollies and spray-painting the walls with filth. Probably making a death metal film-clip for all we know. Christ knows it’s the perfect place for it.’

  But Jason wasn’t convinced. Taking his eyes off the wall, he sauntered up to Alyssa and peered at her indignantly. ‘Perhaps
you should go back in there, then, rummage around a little more and find out?’

  Alyssa could only stare at him.

  ‘Didn’t think so,’ Jason said. He was shaking his head. ‘Anyone else here volunteering to go back in and have a look-see?’

  ‘No one’s going back in,’ Dillion said. ‘I’ve got what I need. Carolina, what’s in the next room?’

  Standing frozen and hypnotized by the hallway, Carolina snapped back into the present. She looked at Dillion tiredly. ‘Computers, if I remember correctly.’

  Camera rolling again, Dillion trained its small screen over the white walls and pockmarked carpet. For a moment, he lingered on the room’s solitary light source: a naked bulb whose dirty inner casing was encrusted with moths.

  ‘Then let’s go. We still have a ton of ground to cover.’

  A return to the hallway, and a return to absolute darkness. Though beveled windows grazed the entire northern flank of the building, Alyssa could discern nothing through their glass except the purple gauze of full night. Walking beside Dillion this time, she could feel the presage of the children’s library behind them like a living vice, beckoning her to look around … to glance back just once and make sure nothing was following them. But she resisted the impulse. When you deprived the dark of your attention, it gave you none in return. At least, a part of her insisted this was so.

  Bullshit. That’s just a childhood fancy and you know it. Whatever force was in there, it’s only letting you go now because it wants to meet you up close and personal later. When your little group arrives at the theater, for instance. A girl holding a noose is calling you home …

  Alyssa suddenly felt her body give way to a shudder which almost sent her sprawling. Though she had managed to avoid (thus far) unreserved panic, the sensation itself hovered over the outer fringes of her awareness.

  ‘Alyssa? Are you okay up there?’

  It was Jason’s voice, an anchor keeping her temporarily grounded. Somehow, he’d perceived her discomfort.

  ‘Just dandy,’ she shot back. ‘Look, we’re here already.’

  Footsteps echoed along the hallway, five separate pairs of shoes coming to rest before yet another darkened doorway. Adjacent to them sat a broad column of evenly spaced lockers – wooden cubes whose numbers formed an intricate gridding. Dillion, infusing them with the light of his camera, revealed portions that still contained objects inside: there were hessian school bags and used cans of tuna. Broken crayons and pencil cases fought for space alongside dirty, blue baseball caps. On the lower ends, Alyssa spied sticky-taped nametags bearing the scrawl of children who would, in all probability, have children of their own by now.

  ‘Creepy,’ Dillion muttered. Predictably, his camera loitered on the individual names, giving an audience to objects that had sat in darkness now for over two decades.

  Jeff said, ‘It’s like a shipwreck. That’s what I keep thinking of. Like any second now a slow-moving fish is going to move through one of our beams.’

  ‘Did you catch that, Dillion?’ With thoughts of the theater passing, Alyssa could feel a modicum of her old self (and something akin to calm) returning. ‘I think you should hand over narration duties to Jeff here. What do you say, Jeff? Think you can keep up that kind of shtick?’

  Ignoring the gibe completely, Dillion moved his camera away from the lockers and shone it into the first stages of the computer room. With the contents inside slowly revealed, Jeff’s metaphor of a shipwreck gained sudden, shocking weight. The computers, all of which were archaic models of a bygone era, were caked in so much grime they appeared coarse with it. At least a dozen in all, their flat grey cathode screens stared at the newcomers like portals into some strange nowhere.

  About to proceed in, Alyssa caught Dillion by the arm. ‘We don’t have to go in there, do we? I mean … look. It’s all here right in front of us. I say we make for the library’s exit as quickly as possible. Just get on with things, you know?’

  Their guide frowned, seeming to weigh the pros and cons of her statement as if deciphering the words of a child. Seemingly on the verge of protest, Dillion abruptly succumbed and sagged in relief.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘We came here for the film. There might be a story in the library, but it’s not one pertinent to my players.’

  Another rejoinder was forming on Alyssa’s lips, this one begging release. Players. The word smacked of a kind of bleak deceptiveness on their director’s part. Was this all they were to him? Actors on a stage to be paraded around? Never mind the story of Providence Place was a very real one, and the gathered motley crew here were very real people. Feeding the thought, Alyssa was suddenly bombarded with an avid recollection of every director and producer she had ever worked with: from those who wanted nothing more than to see her tits on camera; to that even viler breed who desired to see her writhing on a dressing room floor for favors bestowed. They were all alike, it seemed. Vultures who preyed on the unsuspecting for personal gain.

  As if echoing her sentiments, Carolina said, ‘We’re not actors, Dillion. And this isn’t a damn set.’

  Embarrassed, Dillion brandished his camera at them. ‘I know that. And it’s not what I meant. It’s your stories that are important here, of course. If we don’t get a move on something could happen before they’re told.’

  This seemed to be the spur to get walking once again, Alyssa now taking up the vanguard. With each successive classroom drifting into view, the group continued on, navigating a linoleum floor strewn with waterlogged books swollen to the size of dictionaries. Moments later the end of the corridor came into focus.

  Quickening her pace at the sight of it, Alyssa was halted once more when Dillion called out from behind.

  ‘Wait,’ he said to them. ‘I need a few shots of the fiction section first.’

  Now close enough to reach out and touch the exit, Alyssa could only frown at the doorway. Although nothing was visible on the other side, there was an obvious change of color through the steel-mesh window: a reddish opaque light signaling freedom on the other side.

  Turning around she saw Dillion had already disappeared.

  Again they were in luck: when Dillon flicked the wall switch this time, five separate banks of lights slowly phased into existence. Having been neglected for so long, it was as if the bulbs here were tricked into doing their own handiwork. Perhaps (somewhat expectedly) one of the banks remained stuttering, its caustic wattage giving off a jaundiced strobe effect.

  Suddenly feels as if we’re in a fucking video game, Alyssa thought, following Dillion into the library with unhurried steps. Inside, Jeff stood rooted to the spot, staring at the walls once again with his own special brand of dumb wonder. Jason, hands stuffed deeply within the pocket-creases of his overcoat, was eyeing an ancient and yellowed registration desk.

  ‘Oh, shit. Look at this.’

  Though Dillion’s voice was soft, the silence of the library augmented it. Positioned in the center aisle, he was treading softly amidst a small flotilla of reading desks. To his left and right, various shelves containing a moldering array of paperback books were lined up in serried ranks.

  Whatever had claimed his attention lay embedded in the floor.

  Walking over, Alyssa saw it before she could ask the question: a snail’s trail of brown spillage like chocolate milk. Except this wasn’t chocolate milk, of course. Browned and mottled with age, an unmistakable emission of blood led a path toward the family of reading desks. It was here (the spot Dillion now occupied), where whatever had produced the trail had come to its final resting place, the slick lines coagulating into one fecund mass.

  Whatever died here, died violently.

  ‘Could’ve been an animal,’ Jason ventured. ‘You know … a sacrifice or something.’

  No one replied. Dillion (bearing an uncanny resemblance to forensics) traced his camera over the width of the killing floor, muttering unintelligible narration in the process. Only now did Alyssa notice other matter was collect
ed in the center maelstrom: an assortment of bones and their inner marrow.

  ‘This,’ said Jeff, ‘is no sacrifice. I have a friend who has spent a lifetime working in crime-scene cleaning. And this … this looks like something, or someone, was dragged through here kicking and screaming. And then tortured and murdered at the end of it all.’

  ‘And you know this because of secondhand accounts from a friend?’ Carolina asked.

  Jeff shook his head. ‘Just look at it closely and tell me what you see?’

  But Alyssa wanted to look no longer. Because it was all too easy to envisage Jeff’s scenario. Beginning at the registration desk, a human being had been collared, possibly stabbed. Then (screaming and clawing at their assailant), the individual had been lugged through the center aisle of the library, trailing their innards and life-stuff behind them. Pulled by something or someone far more powerful than itself … then finally butchered on the carpet, the killer not resting until the meat was fully dismembered.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Jason. ‘Where’s the body now?’

  Jeff’s riposte was cat-quick and full of scorn. ‘How the hell should I know? It could be one of those mannequins in the children’s library for all we know.’

  Now that was a thought Alyssa wouldn’t contemplate. Shaking subtly, she reached into her jeans and pulled out her Lucky Strikes. Though Dillion shot her a disapproving glace she dutifully ignored the film-maker, holding a cigarette up to her face and lighting it with a jittering flame. She said, ‘Let’s just get the fuck out of here, what do you say?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Dillion said. ‘I need to see if there’s anything else in here.’