by Matthew Tait
(Maddox, dear God, is it really Maddox all grown up?)
the man did nothing but observe its rotating hindquarters. Then, with a noise of disgust, he flung it over his shoulder. It travelled in an overarching tailspin and landed among the abundant refuse. He turned back toward them.
‘Look at you all,’ said the vagrant. ‘Don’t you make a sight.’
‘You knew I would be coming back?’ Carolina asked.
The big man nodded slowly. ‘Same as me, you see. After a while I didn’t know where else to go. I never belonged out there in the real world. Up until the time you arrived just now, I had no idea it would be you. Then I saw you. And I knew.’
He paused, seemed to weigh this insight as if it held great fundamental truths. ‘And I knew,’ he repeated.
Somehow Dillion had secured both mother and son in the same shot, and for that brief moment, it was perfect. Jeff, Alyssa, and Jason had faded to mere foreground actors; their stage presence no more tangible than the extras an audience sees but fails to register. The smoke continued to drift over, carrying with it soot-stained paper like black confetti, wafting around the actors as though manhandled by an unseen stage hand.
There.
This is what Dillion had tried and failed to bottle properly so far tonight: pure production value. Nothing had been quite as good as this; not even the dead woman on the riser, locked in her rigor-mortis scream. This was the porn of desolation but latticed with human emotion and given wings to fly. Whatever came next had to be –
‘I knew you’d return, Momma,’ said Maddox. He raised the weapon again. ‘And now it’s time for us to go home. It’s what they want, you see.’
Dillion’s still frame shattered; only to be replaced by the stark relief of reality: five strangers in a dungeon lair.
Arms open, Carolina took another step toward her son. ‘What do you mean, Maddox?’ she asked. ‘Who are they?’
‘I think you know, Momma,’ Maddox said. ‘Some nights when it’s hard to sleep I can see them, moving over the school. Sometimes they talk to me, tell me what a good boy I’ve been for coming home. But it’s not enough, you see. They want more. They want to us to really come home.’
Despite Maddox’s sudden proclamation, his gun lay inert. As the idiot insanity of the moment came to pass, Dillion’s intellect tried to process and package it all up:
Maddox as a young boy put forth for adoption and moving in with a foster family; Maddox eventually finding out, when coming of age, the true name of his birth mother, and in all probability not being surprised by the story surrounding her. Because Maddox was no ordinary child. If Carolina’s story were to be fully believed, this vagrant standing in front of them was no doubt fitted with emotions and memories pertaining to another world … to an unseen world – one where appetites and different states of being reigned supreme. The child, never feeling like it had belonged anywhere, had come back to its spawning ground as a young man; back to the place called Providence Place. And here he had waited, biding his time.
‘Let’s talk about this,’ Carolina said, moving closer. She seemed stupefied, as if she’d just caught Dillion’s internal revelations. ‘I know we can talk about this.’
‘Why’d you give me up, Momma?’ said Maddox. He’s close to crying, Dillion thought. ‘Is it because you hate who I am? Is it because you hate what I am? I couldn’t help being born, Momma. Any more than you could help what happened that morning when you went swimming in the pool.’
A sound on Dillion’s immediate left. Jeff. He’d almost forgotten the man … almost forgotten about his gun. The silhouettes of Jason and Alyssa were retreating. But he couldn’t do the same, could he? Not now. Not when he finally had his money shot. Just a few more seconds and –
‘I see things when I’m in the world, Momma. Horrible things. People are like meat, and I want to hurt them so bad. They tell me to hurt them. But not here. At least here it’s quiet.’
In her right hand, Carolina now grasped one ample bosom. Her left made headway toward her son. She said, ‘I’m so sorry I left, Maddox. But I couldn’t provide you with a happy life. People have always been mean to me, so very mean. Even meaner after you were born. I know what it feels like … to not belong.’
Some of what Carolina said must have gotten through … at least a little. The rifle came down, and grown-up Maddox stared at his mother with the kind of look only an orphan could yield: confusion, abandonment, and unadulterated love all rolled into one.
Then the countenance cleared, and Carolina’s son raised his shotgun for the final time.
Nine
Jeff looked on in muted horror as Carolina’s torso blossomed black, then red, the interior of her guts spilling out. Only a foot or so from the blast, she was promptly flung backward, Jeff sidestepping her large frame at the last moment. Panicked, Alyssa and Jason bolted, their flashlight crossbeams like spotlights aimed at the sky. Before Jeff could do the same, he chanced a momentary look down at Carolina’s body, its slumped contours already evincing lifelessness.
Her dead eyes stared past him.
Jeff ran.
He ran past the end of the bus, past the flaming barrels and decrepit possessions of a vagrant who’d claimed to be Carolina’s son and the spawn of a school. Past the shattered remains of what had once been baseball practice nets, their chain-link trusses red with rust. He ran past small buildings he could not remember standing during the time he had worked here. He ran past rows of dumpsters. He ran past more gym equipment and even more lockers. He ran until a tangible stitch developed in his side. Finally he entered a hallway of a building, another narrow nerve center for a bank of classrooms. Reaching down, he felt for the familiar protuberance of his pistol … and wasn’t surprised to find it missing.
‘Fucker,’ he whispered. Having also pocketed his flashlight, there was nothing to see here but the ashen outline of wall-mounted lockers, the vague impression of classroom doors.
Motherfucking gun must have sprung out during the sprint. Only way to retrieve it is to retrace your steps.
But there was no way he was doing that. It would be like trying to locate a diamond in the rough, a needle in a freaking haystack. And a murdering son of a whore was now on the loose. A murderer who was not above matricide, of all things.
You really believe that was her son? More than likely that was a collective insanity …
Watching the exchange, this had been Jeff’s overriding thought: that everything leading up to their encounter by the school bus – the tales told, the desolate atmosphere in which they had been told – had all coalesced into a strange species of communal hysteria. One where their stories were made manifest. The vagrant had been nothing more than just that: a vagrant. Carolina had somehow misread his words, appropriated them to her own twisted mythology.
And now she’s dead.
Despite looking into her vacant eyes and ruined stomach, this was the one thing Jeff had trouble processing. Everything about this night had reeked of fiction – everything from Dillion filming proceedings like a carrion bird to each part of Providence Place that was comparable to the set of a movie. That Carolina Gates lay cooling was something his conscious mind struggled to grasp. Any second now, Dillion would enter this dark hallway accompanied by the others. Each of them would be grinning. We got you a good one, didn’t we, Jeff? That was some awesome footage of you running away …
Knowing the gun was gone did not waylay the prying of his fingers: they continued to scratch the lining of his trench coat as if by touch alone they could summon it. His other hand had found his completely useless cell phone. The phone was his secret shame because his pensioner’s salary made no room for monetary credit on what was a pre-paid device. Mainly he carried the damn thing around for show because everybody else had one. Oftentimes in company he would peer at it, pretending to be on social media when all the while –
Emergency numbers are free. How did your old man’s head brain fart that fact?
A floo
d of relief pouring over him, Jeff pulled the cell phone out, almost spilling it twice in his excitement. Thumbing the side button, he breathed heavily while waiting for the familiar blue screen to light up, for the blessed bars to phase into existence …
There was nothing. He kept pressing, shaking the plastic as if motion alone could awaken the battery. He swore again, something far cruder than fucker, the kind of curse his long dead mother would have berated him for, and that was when he heard the child’s laughter from further down the hallway.
Now his breathing stopped entirely. When the sound came again, a flush of pure apprehension flooded his system.
The laughter of a young girl.
It drifted over again, and this time there was no mistaking it: laughter, almost mocking in the particulars. And not the kind of mirth one would attribute to wry amusement or fun. There was a devilish lilt, as if the girl was scornful of Jeff’s predicament.
As if the girl was no younger than a teen.
Ten
Jason’s sprint from the school bus also contained many obstacles, all of them like points in a maze leading back to one final destination. During the initial few seconds after Carolina fell backward he remembered Alyssa running by his side … but then she too disappeared when another shot erupted, jack-knifing away to the left like a sprung rabbit. At first his course had been a reverse trajectory of the route they had taken to reach the rear of Providence Place (he distinctly remembered bypassing the swing set in front of the theater), but then everything had dovetailed into a mish-mash of unrecognizable forms, all of them holding the stark attributes a dream, the school only a flying facsimile of a true one.
The church had always been his destination.
Seeing it bleed out of the shadows he should have been surprised … but of course he wasn’t. This was the final terminus all along, the endpoint he had never truly left; a physical and figurative altar calling him back for almost two decades. Only slowing down as he reached the front façade, Jason almost collapsed to the cement with a feeling that had nothing to do with exhaustion. This was more akin to doom; a fatalistic sense of defeat and the ultimate despair.
Did you ever think you could leave? Kristin said in his ear. That Providence Place would just let you walk out now after everything you’ve seen?
No, he supposed he hadn’t. Before leaving to meet the others tonight he recalled going through a series of rituals that had, in their uncanny way, resembled an altar boy’s mass preparations. He remembered cleaning out his food pantry and disposing what was left in there; he remembered scrubbing down the floors tiles, walls, and finally the kitchen area as if arranging for some kind of inspection or –
Arranging things with the sure knowledge you would never return.
Dear God was that what he’d been doing? Making his little apartment suitable for whoever had to follow in his wake? It’s what people often did before taking their leave on a long vacation.
Or what they did before leaving the world altogether.
Get out now, Jason. Your Honda is just behind you through the front gates, sitting patiently all this time. Just get out now and don’t look back.
Yes, he thought he could do that. But first he would call for assistance. Carolina was dead. And the others … where were they now? Had the vagrant found them also, hunted them down in the same manner he did those obscene animals who scoured this land?
Not taking his eyes from the church for even a second, Jason reached down to feel the familiar bulge of his phone. It was there and accounted for, thank God. He should have taken it out sooner, should have called the police in the art rooms when –
‘Jason.’
He froze. From the entrance of the gloomy interior, a voice had called to him. A voice almost certainly not that of Dillion or the others.
‘Jason,’ it repeated.
Though the voice had an authoritative air, it also came equipped with kindness. Its pitch seemed to demand submission, but it was peppered with enough gentility one felt themselves powerless against it. Because kindness was a rare attribute these days. Teachers certainly didn’t carry it, and neither did parents.
But there was another commanding figure who did.
He carried around kindness like a cape, this figure, coming to provide help just when you needed it, offering to soothe worried nerves armed only with the sound of his voice.
And the word of his God.
Phone completely forgotten now, Jason watched in hapless fasciation as Father Parrington strode out of the darkness to greet him.
Eleven
Alyssa tripped upon seeing the swing-set, her whole body sprawling in a loose knot at the base of the closest one. Pain, sharp and smelling of wood chippings, crawled up her buttocks and midsection before settling into her wrists. Having used them to cushion her fall, dark scratches of blood were already materializing where splinters had broken through. For a full minute she simply lay there, inert, gritting her teeth against the pain … though her ears remained pricked for the sound of pursuit. Trying to pin down coherent thought was waylaid by the impossible reality she had returned to the theater. Returned, despite the fact Alyssa had been running in the opposite direction from the man with the shotgun.
Returned? You’ve been unceremoniously dumped at its fucking feet.
Alyssa laughed into the woodchips, hands held out before her like claws. About three feet away stood the small dark silhouette of her backpack, jettisoned sometime during freefall and landing only a short distance away. Of course, there was nothing inside that could offer her any kind of comfort … or be used as any kind of weapon against what she knew was coming.
From the doorway came the sound of hinges, squeaking on ancient brackets as the door itself swung open. Inside appeared a shaft of yellow light, weak at first but gaining strength with every inch the door opened. Pushing herself up by the elbows, Alyssa managed to leverage her body into a sitting position – then gradually stood up, kicking away shards of wood-chipping as if they were fattened leeches attached to her skin. She stared at the door, trying to muster the impetus to retreat.
Of which there is still time. A final showdown with Sadie Whitmore does not have to play out. Surely that’s the kind of thing reserved for the screen? In real life, the heroine slinks back to the shadows to tend their wounds – with no begrudging audience to demand something more satisfying for the climax.
But who was she kidding here? Alyssa had been devoted to the theater, first acting in stage plays, then giving her greatest performance yet as the girl trapped in a closet and forced to endure the frightful antics of a vengeful ghost. Which meant there was no escaping where her final scenes would play out … even if the director was no longer around to shoot them. Time and time again a narrative was given its overriding symmetry by coming full circle, to the place where everything had begun. It was, as some often said in the business, the nature of any three act chronicle.
Bypassing her backpack without picking it up, Alyssa walked back into the theater of Providence Place.
Twelve
Dillion Cook was lost.
How such a thing could happen – becoming lost in a place he had committed to memory – somehow defied logic. But lost he had become. Though everything was recognizable (classrooms, hallways, and courtyards), none of it was. Somehow another school had slipped over the veneer of this one, transforming Providence Place into an underworld labyrinth choking with horrors.
Horrors only visible through the plate-glass screen of his iPhone.
Every now and then his naked eye would alight on something – the crooked shadow of a man’s crouched form, the sharp angle of a child’s blazer - but the illusion would quickly evaporate, nothing firm in its place except the ruin of another deserted corridor. His camera, however, teemed with another world slowly coming to life, of people and creatures that had, up until now, been the sole domain of confessions by a battered and beleaguered cast.
His cast.
And just where were
they now? Where were his actors when he needed them the most? Cowards, every last one of them. Running away at the first sign of real trouble.
(did Carolina really get shot or did I imagine that?)
and deserting their director. They didn’t seem to understand making a film, any kind of film, was war. And what came with war? Casualties.
For a while Dillion had wandered, shouting out their names until his throat was hoarse. And during this time he never stopped filming, brandishing his smartphone around at the unseen world like a talisman. When the phone itself had begun showcasing things he could not perceive, Dillion had taken this as a sign from up high to keep moving and recording, actors be damned.
If Providence Place wants a witness, a scribe, then I will happily oblige.
The horrors were subtle to begin with – more dog-like creatures flitting through the viewfinder before Dillion could focus on them properly – then they evolved into something much grander: shining orbs moving with the lazy grace of a cloud and containing a peristaltic white so bright it was like looking into the nucleus of a star. From those orbs, bodies had sprouted. Malformed physiques with arms, legs, and grotesque heads contained within the framework of a writhing torso. When moving, they scuttled, darting over the concrete in the obscene manner of crabs. Though seemingly aware of Dillion’s presence as he walked, they paid him no mind, moving quickly from one building to the next as though anxious to be joined to some unseen queen. At any other time such sights would have been a cause for alarm, but Dillion was too enamored by the spectacle to feel any fear. This kind of spectral activity wasn’t merely going to make his film a success, it also had the potential to change the world. Because an unseen world was everywhere, and Dillion Cook could be the architect of its disclosure.
But only if I can find a way out …
The more he walked, the more he failed to recognize what had come before. Familiar buildings had given way to archaic stone edifices whose blackened and bricked façades were creeping with trailing plants. Corridors had been replaced by pathways resembling the subsections of a graveyard. In the classrooms, moldering chairs and desks were being submitted to further dissolution, every inch of their bodies encased in a lime fungus which continued to grow the more it devoured.