The Smashed Man of Dread End

by J. W. Ocker

  “Should we get help from Fern?” asked Crystal. “I don’t like her, but she’s the only adult here who knows about the Smashed Man.”

  “That woman doesn’t know anything,” said Radiah. “Her and her stupid Neighbors or whatever have known about the Smashed Man for a long time, and they haven’t done a single thing about him. She might as well be purple eyed like the rest of the adults. Plus, she’s just mean.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” asked Crystal.

  Noe thought for a moment before replying. “Then you won’t have to worry about my sleepwalking letting him out anymore.”

  Sixteen

  Noe stood in the kitchen of the new house. That’s what she still called it. The new house. Not the house or her house. Not even the red house. It was the new house. Everything was new. She had only been living here for about a month, but in that month everything had changed. The people in her life were completely different. What she saw outside her window was completely different. What she felt inside was completely different. The nature of the universe itself was completely different. And all she’d done was move from one house to another.

  Behind Noe was a square of darkness, in front of her a rectangle of darkness. The darkness behind her was the window. Pitch-black like the glass was painted over. Midnight, according to the glowing numerals on her phone. That was the part that should have been scary, that square of darkness. The woods. The night. The outside. All the things Len—and any other child with any sense—would be scared of. But instead, it was the black rectangle in front of her that was scary to Noe. The basement door. The basement door that she was about to open.

  But for the first time, she felt a good kind of scared again. The exhilarated kind of scared. The type of scared that you know you’ll be better for when it’s over. You just have to get through that type of scared, and your life gets better. Most important, she was about to do something. To take control of something in her life. She couldn’t control where she went when she sleepwalked. She couldn’t fight her night terrors. It all made her feel so helpless. But soon she was going to walk right downstairs and fight the monster in the basement. Or at least try to.

  Noe pulled her phone from her pocket and hit the chat icon. The app opened, and she selected the group chat option. Ready, she tapped, the word popping up in the message screen beside her avatar, a picture of the new house. Her avatar was usually a Great Dane, the exact dog she was hoping to get at this new house with its big backyard before her priorities changed. She’d replaced her avatar for tonight.

  A trio of dots danced in the message screen beside Radiah’s blue house, telling her Radiah was responding. We’re both here popped up. The “both” was Radiah and Ruthy. They were going to do this together, even though Ruthy had argued with them about it. It would have been nice to have one more basement in play, but no way were they going to put Ruthy in danger by herself. It was easy to arrange. Ruthy slept over at Radiah’s house regularly.

  No dots danced after that. When the time in the corner of her phone changed to 12:03, Noe typed, Crystal? Normally, three minutes late wouldn’t be worrisome, but tonight would require precision.

  It wasn’t until 12:05 that dots started dancing by the avatar of the yellow house, Crystal’s house. Here. Sorry. It was followed by a toilet emoji.

  Noe typed, Me first. Then R&R. Then C. Handoff word is OUT.

  OK, said the blue house.

  OK, said the yellow house.

  OK, she typed back.

  Texting wasn’t ideal. Not for this kind of situation. Noe had wanted to do a group video chat, but the signal in their basements wasn’t great, and it might be too loud. They couldn’t risk waking up their parents.

  Noe touched the back pocket of her jeans and felt the tall lump from the vial of darkwash. She had already made sure that Len’s door was shut and that the baby gate was locked. She had even tied the sash of her robe around the baby gate latch to make double sure it was secure. She couldn’t have Len interrupt her any more than Mom and Dad. She typed the word OUT into the message field of the app but didn’t hit send. She opened the black door, took a deep breath, and descended into the basement.

  The space below her new house never seemed to be any different. Only the rise and fall of the piles of laundry in the baskets in front of the washer and dryer signaled the changing of time down here. Noe suddenly felt as if she were on an alien world. The hard-packed dirt under her sneakers was virgin soil. The rock walls surrounding her were unexplored ruins. She walked gingerly around the furnace and water heater, alien artifacts on this distant planet.

  She stopped about ten feet from the giant crack—a crack not just in the wall, but in the substance of the universe, in the happiness of her life. She planted herself in front of the crack, but as far back as she could be, her back against the water heater like it was a jet pack ready to rocket her through two floors and into the night sky if she needed to escape.

  The Smashed Man started oozing.

  Even though she had seen it happen three times now, she couldn’t get used it. The impossibility of something fitting through that crack. The slowness of it. The silence of it. The exacting loop of it all. The horrid expression on his face when it tipped up. Here we are again, he seemed to say to her. But this time, I’ll get all the way out. Get my flat arms around you. I’ll escape the wall, but you will not escape me. The Smashed Man flowed toward her like it was the first time he had ever done so, that terrible smile on his face like he knew he would eventually get her, even if it took years.

  And Noe stood there. Like she’d given up. Like she was rooting for him. Like freeing the Smashed Man was why she had moved to this house in the first place.

  But it was hard. She had to fight the impulse to run across the basement. To run up the stairs. To run to Len’s bedroom and dive into her bed and cradle her little sister like she was one of Len’s stuffed animals. She wanted to run out the front door into the neighborhood, screaming her lungs into her throat. She wanted out of this house. Out of this neighborhood. Out of this town.

  But she stood here, her back to the water heater, and faced the Smashed Man.

  His face turned up, and she stood there.

  His arms freed themselves from the wall, and she stood there.

  He reached out to grab her, every minute moving a fraction of an inch closer, and she stood there.

  When the only parts of the Smashed Man still in the wall were the parts of his legs below the knees, when he was almost completely inside her basement, her house, her world, Noe ran. She didn’t look back at the Smashed Man. Just ran. Ran until dirt turned to wooden steps turned to vinyl floor. She shut the door and hit send on her phone.

  OUT

  Radiah and Ruthy sat at the kitchen table in Radiah’s house. Radiah stared at the dark phone on the table. Ruthy was cutting out a construction-paper Smashed Man. She had a small stack of gray sheets in front of her, held down by a pair of worn purple and red crayons. Behind Radiah, a door was half ajar, showing the hint of carpeted steps angling downward.

  Radiah’s basement door was between the kitchen and the family room. Radiah hated to even cross the border it marked between the two rooms, much less go down the stairs. She looked at Ruthy, who was lost in the slide of her scissors across the gray paper, and wondered again if she should have made the six-year-old stay at home instead of involving her in this crazy, desperate plan. But that could have led to bigger trouble. Radiah could imagine Ruthy sneaking down to her basement by herself to help the rest of the Dread Enders. Radiah couldn’t have risked that, so she was keeping Ruthy close tonight, even if she had to sit here and watch her make those stupid paper Smashed Men all night.

  They were both silent, although unlike Noe in her house, they didn’t have a reason to be. Radiah’s parents slept to the noise of a giant box fan, even in winter. It sounded like a helicopter. Radiah could have invited the circus over and her parents wouldn’t have known.

  The phone on the ta
ble buzzed loudly and the screen lit up in glaring digital brightness in the dim kitchen. Radiah jumped and Ruthy dropped the scissors onto the table. A single word stood out in all caps beside the avatar of a red house: OUT. Radiah felt like she was going to puke.

  Ruthy seemed less affected. She grabbed Radiah’s phone and typed OK, then jumped to her feet, her half-finished Smashed Man fluttering slowly to the ground. Radiah barely had time to pick up the phone before Ruthy grabbed her hand and led her toward the basement.

  At the door, Radiah took the lead. She wasn’t going to let a six-year-old outbrave her, nor was she going to let the newcomer to the neighborhood do it either. Not to mention that for the plan to work, it was important that they get downstairs as fast as possible, now that they had the message from Noe.

  Radiah and Ruthy thumped down the carpeted steps to the basement. The room looked like it hadn’t been decorated since the previous millennium. The floor was a thick green carpet that could swallow a person’s foot to the ankle. The walls were covered in dark fake-wood paneling that was stained two feet from the floor by some distant flood that had happened before Radiah was born. At one time, judging from the covered pool table and the couch in its center and the large CD player, the basement had been a fun room to hang out in. These days, it was storage. The couch and the pool table and the floor were piled high with cardboard boxes and stacks of magazines and various pieces of past lives lived. The entire basement was one big history lesson.

  But the girls weren’t paying attention to the room. Their eyes were drawn as if attached by threads to a single spot on the wall behind the couch. A two-foot-wide section of paneling was missing, exposing bare concrete behind it. In the concrete was a vertical fracture that stretched from ceiling to floor. The long crack had been there for Radiah’s entire life. Her mother and father had never brought it up. Probably didn’t notice it.

  Within ten seconds of them looking at the crack, the Smashed Man started oozing. He came out sideways, since the crack was almost a straight line up and down. They watched the thin blade of his body split the air, emerging so slowly it was as if he wasn’t moving at all.

  Time felt different in front of the Smashed Man. Radiah thought that terror clouded her sense of time, but if what Fern had said was true, it might be actual physics. Noe and Crystal could be waiting by their basement doors for seconds while she and Ruthy experienced the Smashed Man’s slow squeeze through the wall over hours or days or years. None of the Dread Enders had ever timed it before. None of the Dread Enders had ever had a reason to.

  His head lifted sideways, his face leering at the two girls as if he was happy to see them, happy to terrify them. By the time he was halfway out, he had twisted his body so that his upper half was parallel to the floor. The whole thing was a scene Radiah knew too well. It played for her every night in nightmares in the attic. Like an old, traumatic memory relived over and over again, inescapable.

  Radiah gripped her phone with the cracked case in one hand and Ruthy’s tiny, soft hand in the other. The younger girl looked mesmerized, like a mouse in front of a cobra. If Radiah didn’t make her leave, she might stay until the monster freed itself from the wall.

  And it was getting close to doing exactly that.

  “We should go now, right?” said Ruthy, shaking her friend’s hand but not able to tear her eyes away from the horrible spectacle of the flat monster coming out of the wall. The Dread Enders had decided that each girl was to wait until the Smashed Man was freed to midcalf before fleeing their basements.

  “Not yet,” said Radiah, not taking her eyes off the fiend. She wanted to one-up Noe.

  “But he’s almost to his ankles!” said Ruthy.

  “Hold on,” said Radiah, priming her body for action.

  When he was only three inches from leaving the wall, Radiah shouted, “Now!” and pulled Ruthy hard toward the stairs. She was halfway up when she turned to see that Ruthy, even though she had followed along, was still staring back at the Smashed Man over her shoulder, which slowed her down, even as Radiah tugged at her hand.

  “Look away from him, Ruthy! Go faster!” That snapped the younger girl out of it. Ruthy looked up at Radiah, and the two continued up the stairs to the kitchen. Radiah slammed the door, and they both dropped to the floor, their backs against the door as if they were afraid the Smashed Man would try to break it down. They were sweating and breathing hard. They had definitely made enough noise to have woken Radiah’s parents if it weren’t for the box fan.

  Radiah hit three letters into her phone with a trembling finger and hit the send button.

  OUT

  Crystal stood in the hallway, where the door to the basement loomed. It looked like all the other doors in the hallway, warm brown wood with a shiny brass knob. She chewed on the nail of her index finger. She didn’t want to go down there. Even if there had been no such thing as the Smashed Man, she still wouldn’t have wanted to go down there. That was where the schoolroom was. Her isolated little schoolroom. It might not be so bad, had her mom not set it up to look like a real schoolroom. Like it was a parody of one. On the walls there was a map of Europe and a poster of the periodic table and a photo of the cathedral-like interior of the Trinity College library in Ireland. In the corner was a whiteboard on wheels, and against a wall was a shelf with all her schoolbooks on it. Worse, in the center of the room was a lonely little wooden desk for her.

  Being homeschooled embarrassed her. And not just because Radiah and Ruthy and Erica made fun of her sometimes. That was fine. They would also say that they were jealous that she didn’t have to walk to school in winter, that it only took her three hours to get through her lessons, that she was done with school a good month before any of them and didn’t have to go back until a month later.

  But homeschooling was lonely, especially with Brett gone. And she was sick of that basement . . . and its monster.

  Even though the Smashed Man only came out at night, she always looked for him during class, waiting for him to emerge from the crack in the old plaster that wended around the map of Europe. She took so many bathroom breaks upstairs that her mother once took her to the doctor to see if she had diabetes.

  Crystal’s phone shook and lit up in her hand. For a few seconds she hoped that the message on the screen was Noe or Radiah calling off the plan. Her heart sank when she saw that it was the handoff word from Radiah. It was Crystal’s turn. She typed OK into the messaging screen.

  Crystal opened the door and gazed down into the darkness. The light switch was at the base of the steps. She had to walk in the dark before she could get to the light. She took the steps down carefully, but when she hit the bottom, her hand scrabbled across the wall frantically until it found the switch. She hit it hard. Her pathetic little classroom appeared before her.

  She hadn’t been down in the basement since the end of the school year. She walked to the desk in the center of the room. Had it been a desk in a real school, its underside would have been carved with an alphabet soup of initials and names—everyone who had used it before her. But under this desk, there was only one name: Brett Fenwick.

  Brett was high school age by the time Crystal started homeschool. And he really hated homeschool. Crystal didn’t know if he had always hated it or only as he got older or if it was just the Smashed Man he hated. She remembered him fighting with her mom a lot, though. Crystal had asked him once if he had seen the Smashed Man, but he acted like he didn’t know what she was talking about. Radiah thought it was because he had gotten too old and had forgotten about it. He must have forgotten about it. He wouldn’t have gone off to college across the country and left her here to face the Smashed Man alone.

  The telltale shimmering of the Smashed Man started under the map of Europe, in line with the boot of Italy. The shimmering turned into a shape as the Smashed Man slid smoothly out, like she envisioned him doing every day during class, behind where her mother stood when she was teaching. It was horrible. She chewed on her index finger. Wished
she was with Ruthy and Radiah. Wished she was with Noe. Wished she was with Erica. Wished she was with Brett. The monster’s head was out now, and just as it started turning up to face her, she realized she couldn’t look at its face. The bruises and the lacerations, the broken teeth, the purple eyes.

  Crystal turned and ran up the stairs, closing the door to the basement behind her. She leaned against it and started to cry. Because she was scared. Because she had failed at her task. Even though six-year-old Ruthy could do it. Even though the new girl who had only lived in the neighborhood a month could do it. As she cried, she watched the time on her phone. She had only been down in the basement for a few minutes, not near long enough to draw the Smashed Man out as far as the other girls, so she sat in the hall and waited. Waited until it had been about the same length of time as between the time signatures on Noe’s and Radiah’s texts before she typed three letters into her phone and hit send.

  OUT

  Noe stared at her phone, waiting for the next message. She yawned hard enough to pop her jaw. Her phone and the microwave across the kitchen agreed that it was almost five in the morning, although the dark window above the sink stayed neutral on the matter. The Dread Enders had been taking turns teasing out the Smashed Man for five hours. That meant Noe, Radiah and Ruthy, and Crystal had each been down in their basements four different times that night, four different cycles of the Smashed Man being drawn from four different basement walls. The first cycle had lasted about an hour, so twenty minutes per basement, although the timing was never exact. Whether that was due to the Dread Enders or the Smashed Man, Noe wasn’t sure. As the night wore on, the Smashed Man definitely took longer to unspool. Hopefully that meant he was weakening. Like she believed he would. Like Erica had believed.

  Noe wondered if everybody was as beat as she was. This was one of the many parts of the plan that she was worried about, that someone would fall asleep. She looked at the dark window again. It would be sunrise soon. Hers would be the last basement foray of the night, for any of the Dread Enders.