The Smashed Man of Dread End

by J. W. Ocker

  “Mrs. Washington,” said Mom.

  “Right, her. She told us that the neighborhood does one every season to clean up all the forest bits that fall into our lawns. The family that lived in this house before us used to host it. That’s what that big ring of rocks out back is for. She asked if we wanted to keep the tradition going, and I said that we’d do it. Sounds like fun, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Noe.

  “At night?” asked Len.

  “You’ll like it. You’ll see,” said Dad. “Now let’s all get back to bed. Unlike you two, Mom and I don’t get to sleep in during the summer.”

  “Can Len sleep in bed with me?”

  “Sure,” said Mom. “You want to do that, Len?”

  “Yeah!” said Len in the same tone of excitement she used when she was given candy or iPad time.

  She jumped into Len’s bed with her mongoose, and they snuggled into the pillows and blankets together. Noe stroked her little sister’s hair until Len fell asleep. By habit, she reached for the scrunchie in her drawer, but then realized it didn’t matter anymore.

  She hadn’t done much that day. Napped and waited until the windows darkened. Waited for the Smashed Man to come out. “Maybe he’s still in your house,” Ruthy had said. In one way, Noe did wish that was true. She hoped he was back in the basement wall or outside the universe or wherever he was from. That the Smashed Man wasn’t free. That even though he had left the crack, he still had to start over again like when you lose all your lives in a video game. That would make her so happy. It would make the Smashed Man not a threat anymore. Just a loop. Like a ghost walking the same old hallway in the same old castle every night. Noe even fantasized about selling tickets to the kids at school to see him slow-jack-in-the-box his way out, and then make everybody leave, and like a magic trick, return to see him back where he started.

  But when she went down that night, he didn’t unspool from the crack. It was just an empty crevice in a creepy basement. Like the first time she had seen it. Before her entire life had changed.

  But lying there with Len, she realized that just because the Smashed Man had escaped, just because the plan hadn’t worked, that didn’t change one very important thing. She couldn’t let the Smashed Man get Len.

  She needed to talk to Fern. She would go to the white house first thing tomorrow.

  If she didn’t get smothered in the night.

  Twenty

  Noe woke up only slightly smothered. Len had rolled over onto her at some point, so she had a three-year-old on her stomach and a mongoose in her face. She gently extricated herself from her two bedfellows and jumped in the shower. She spent most of the time in there scrubbing extra hard at her darkened hand, but the remnants of the darkwash stayed. She threw on some clothes, grabbed Erica’s diary—which the girls had let her hold on to for the time being so that she could study it—and headed out to see a woman in an invisible house.

  She looked around the neighborhood to make sure nobody was out, walked up to the door beside the Nonatuke, and knocked hard.

  No answer. She knocked again and then tried to look like she was just hanging out instead of waiting for an invisible door to open, in case anybody on the block happened to peek out their window. Finally she heard a voice on the other side of the door. “Go away, girl.”

  “I let the Smashed Man out,” Noe said softly.

  The door opened. Fern’s hair was messy, and she was wearing a red bathrobe that matched her eyeglasses. “You did what?”

  “The Smashed Man escaped from my basement. Can I come inside? It looks like I’m talking to an imaginary friend.” Fern didn’t move, so neither did Noe. Finally Fern retreated back into the house, leaving the front door open. Noe followed her.

  Inside it smelled bad. Like sweaty meat. And the mess seemed to have multiplied. Every horizontal surface was being used as a table for clutter, and the laundry piles on the floor were growing like Fern was watering them. She seemed to be taking her dissatisfaction with being here out on the house itself.

  Fern leaned on her crutch with one hand and cleared a place on the couch with the other. “Sit,” she said, nodding at it before disappearing into the kitchen. She returned with a pot of tea and a single elephant cup on a tray, balanced in one hand just like last time. She set the tray on a box and sat down, laying her crutch on the floor. After pouring herself some chai, she leaned back. Noe eyed the cup, remembering the sweet, spicy tea and wishing for some. Even if it was served in a disgusting place like this. Fern saw Noe’s look and lowered her cup with a sigh. “Go get yourself a cup, I guess. But be careful with it.”

  Noe tried not to look too eager as she got up and walked into the kitchen. It was as much of a mess as the rest of the house, but it wasn’t hard to find one of the elephant teacups in the sink. There was no reason the woman couldn’t have brought out two cups herself. Noe washed it out and then walked slowly back into the room. As she poured herself some chai, Fern asked, “Why can you see past the Nonatuke?”

  The question surprised Noe enough that she answered honestly. “I have parasomnia.”

  Fern’s eyebrows almost jumped out of the frames of her large red-tinted glasses. “I assume you sleepwalk. Do you have sleep paralysis? Do you talk in your sleep?”

  “I sleepwalk and I have night terrors. That’s it. That’s enough. I hate it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it ruins my life,” said Noe. That was all the explanation she was going to give this woman.

  “Do you know what the word ‘parasomnia’ means?”

  “Weird sleep.”

  “No, that’s ignorant. ‘Para’ doesn’t mean weird. It means ‘beyond.’ You have an ability that goes beyond sleep.”

  “It’s not an ability. And it’s the reason the Smashed Man is out right now.” And then Noe talked. She told the surly stranger every detail. Len’s sleepwalking. Erica’s diary full of unreadable miscolored darkwash she’d found behind the dryer. The purple snake in her dreams. The plan. The pilfered vial of darkwash. She felt exhausted by the time she was finished, and she had gone through three cups of chai.

  Fern hadn’t gotten through one. She stared into her teacup the entire time, like she was looking for a message in it. When Noe was done, Fern didn’t look up. Didn’t say anything. She waited a few seconds to make sure Noe wasn’t going to say anything else, and then said, “You’re a foolish girl.”

  “You’re a jerk adult.”

  Fern’s face froze, and she barely moved her lips as she said, “Yes, but only one of us let a monster into our world.”

  Noe dropped her head and sank deeper into the couch.

  “You haven’t seen the Smashed Man since he escaped?” asked Fern.

  “No. I mean, it’s only been one night since he got out, but none of us saw him last night. Do you think he’s . . . gone for good?”

  Fern scratched at her ear and stared into her tea, still waiting for that message. Finally she shook her head. “No. The Smashed Man will try to leave the neighborhood. That’s definite. He probably tried last night, in fact. But the Amberonks will keep him here.”

  “The protection sigils? That’s what they’re for?”

  “They form a border around this neighborhood. For this specific reason. He might be free from the space between here and the stuck place, but he’s still trapped here.”

  A thought entered Noe’s head. A disgusting, despicable thought. Fern read it immediately somehow. “Don’t think that you can remove the Amberonks, girl. You only know about two of them, but they’re in dozens of places, layered so that you’d have to remove half a dozen or so to make a single gap in the border. Even if you could figure out how to remove them.” She nodded her head at Noe’s discolored hand. “We can’t let the Smashed Man into the world. We can’t let him be somebody else’s problem.”

  Noe looked down at her empty teacup. “I know, I know. But what about us? What about the people who live here? What do we do?”

  “I
don’t know.” Fern thought for a few seconds. “Tell me again about touching the Smashed Man with the darkwash.”

  “It didn’t hurt like when I touched him with my bare hand. I guess the darkwash protected me. I just felt stupid doing it. Like I was doing it wrong. I wanted it to feel like I was attacking him, not painting him.”

  “And this plan was based on a snake that turned into an Elberex in this girl Erica’s dream?”

  “And the snake in mine. Except they were two different snakes.”

  “Two different snakes.” Fern pondered the phrase in silence. Noe took the opportunity to pour more chai, but the teapot was empty.

  “Can the Neighbors help?” asked Noe.

  “No.” Fern abruptly dropped her teacup on the tray with a loud clank. “Unfortunately for me, I think the answer to the Smashed Man is going to come from you.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve already messed up once trying to get rid of him.”

  “The Neighbors don’t know much about the stuck places, but how do you think we know what we know?”

  Noe shrugged her shoulders.

  “Think about it with more than your shoulders, girl. We can’t sense them. Science books don’t talk about them. It’s not on the internet. How do you think the Neighbors know what we know?”

  “Shrug,” said Noe.

  Fern lifted her glasses and rubbed one of her eyes. “There’s one body of knowledge that we can all access: our bodies. Every single one of us is a library. The human body has about a hundred trillion cells. Each cell contains one point five gigabytes of information. That means you, Noelle Wiley, represent a hundred and fifty trillion gigs of information. You are a walking internet.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Of course it does. We’re made of ancient stuff. The subatomic particles of our bodies have been around since the universe began. But aside from the cosmic stuff, your body knows a lot. How to pump blood, how to digest food, how to keep us alive. Cells know how to replicate, your immune system, how to repel sickness. We have instincts for avoiding danger. We didn’t need to learn any of that, because it was already there.”

  “You mean we can trust our guts?” That was a phrase she’d heard Mom say once. At the time, Noe had just thought it was a disgusting phrase. Like cul-de-sac.

  “Quite literally. Because the materials we are made of have always been around in one form or another, at the center of stars, in comets, in the dirt we walk on, as part of past civilizations, and they are constantly gathering information. So there’s a lot of information to be had, if we know how to access it.” For a moment, Fern sounded more awestruck than grumpy. “And that’s how we learned about stuck places and what the sigils are, and what they do—or, at least, what two of them do. All that knowledge came from inside somebody. Cell knowledge, we call it. That’s why you and that other girl were so confident about using the Elberex on the Smashed Man. You knew it in your guts.”

  “But we were both wrong,” said Noe.

  “You only had some of the information you needed. You can put a bunch of facts together and still come to the wrong conclusion. Accessing cell knowledge is difficult and not at all reliable. That’s why the Neighbors are so ignorant.”

  “You think the answer to defeating the Smashed Man is . . . inside me?”

  “Maybe. I think your snake dreams were you accessing that cell knowledge. I think your parasomnia helps you access it. Or maybe the knowledge caused the parasomnia. Either way, you need to go deeper.” Fern put her teacup down and stared at the ceiling. After a few seconds of silence, she sighed. “I can show you how to go deeper. But only because it could be valuable for the Neighbors. Don’t think for a second that I’m getting involved for any other reason.”

  She grabbed her crutch and levered herself out of the camp chair with it. She waded through the detritus covering the floor to a corner of the room. She pushed a pile of empty boxes out of the way with her free hand, smashing a pair of beakers in the process. It sounded to Noe like when she had smashed the vial of darkwash against the water heater.

  Noe didn’t question her. She put down her empty teacup and followed Fern to the corner. Noe would try anything to get rid of the Smashed Man. Especially now that she had unleashed it on the neighborhood.

  “Sit here in the corner. Face the wall.”

  Noe gingerly moved some of the splinters of glass out of the way and sat cross-legged, facing the corner.

  “Close your eyes and think about the Elberex. Think about the Smashed Man. Think about the purple snake from your nightmares. Keep your eyes shut. Don’t think about little girl things. Focus.” Noe settled deeper into the dirty carpet and squeezed her eyelids shut. “I’m going to give you something to repeat. A mantra to help you focus. Om.”

  “Um,” tried Noe.

  “No, no. Om. O-m. Rhymes with ‘home.’ But I want you to say it like this . . .” Fern drew the syllable out for five seconds, like she was humming it.

  “Is om one of the sigils?”

  “No. It’s Hindu. A mystical syllable. Some say it’s the sound that started the universe. And that’s what you’re trying to access. Ancient knowledge. Sun heart knowledge. Cell knowledge. Gut knowledge. It will help you focus if you repeat it over and over. If you do it right, you won’t even know you’re saying it.”

  Noe started repeating it. It felt silly. “Is this meditating?” she asked so that she could take a break from the mantra.

  “Similar.”

  Noe heard the clank of Fern’s crutch moving away, heard her sorting carelessly through a pile of things, heard some of those things breaking, heard her say something angry that she couldn’t make out, and then Noe heard her breathing behind her and the loud ticking of what sounded like a clock. “I’ve placed a metronome on the floor behind you. Do you know what a metronome is?” Noe shook her head. “It’s a device for keeping time. Musicians use it. Hypnotists use it. Time your oms with the rhythm of the clicks. Think about the purple snake.”

  She imagined the Neighbors sitting cross-legged in a room with their eyes closed, singing “om” over and over again, trying to learn the secrets of all the universes whizzing past them. No wonder they didn’t know much. Still, she repeated the mantra. And repeated the mantra. And repeated the mantra. “I don’t think this is . . . ,” started Noe, but Fern shushed her.

  “No talking. Only om.”

  Noe started again. She concentrated on the snake and the Elberex. The crack in her basement wall. She couldn’t bring herself to focus on the Smashed Man himself, though. While she thought about those things, she chanted. Eventually, after what seemed like a long time, as the metronome clicked away behind her, it became relaxing, and she felt herself loosen, like she was becoming untethered from herself, a kite on a broken string.

  And then she felt a night terror coming on. The meditation must have relaxed her into falling asleep. She was in a dark space, floating, surrounded by the purple snake. The eyeless creature was swimming in a big loop around her. Slowly, like it was gradually freezing in place. Eventually it broke the loop and headed right for her in that same slow motion. Like it was taking hours.

  Suddenly, she felt hot, very hot, uncomfortably hot. That had never happened in her nightmare before. Soon the purple snake started jerking in the hot, dark space as it floated toward her. The jerking turned into longer motions as the snake twisted back on itself, its head touching its tail to form the two loops of an Elberex. The purple Elberex hardened in front of her. That was the only way she could describe it. The Elberex now looked more like an inanimate object than a snake, but it floated slowly toward her in space like the snake had. As the sigil came closer, the heat increased. And right when she thought the sigil would sear itself painfully into her face, she was back behind her eyelids. Back in the corner. Back in the white house. She could hear the metronome clicking away.

  “I fell asleep,” she said, stretching her arms and arching her back.

  “No, you didn’t,” s
aid Fern. She seemed far away.

  “What happened, then?”

  “I would say that you have a natural talent for accessing cell knowledge,” said Fern. “Makes sense that it would be easier for a sleepwalker.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Two hours,” said Fern.

  Noe pulled herself quickly to her feet, upsetting a small metal box on the floor with a strip of metal on it that swung back and forth like an upside-down pendulum. That must have been the metronome. “That’s not true.” She slid her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the time. It had been two hours.

  Fern was sitting in the camp chair. She had changed from her red robe to jeans and a green-and-blue paisley blouse. She held a sandwich in one hand, leafy green lettuce and red tomatoes peeking out from around rye bread, and she was flipping through Erica’s diary with the other. Noe didn’t like seeing Fern holding the book, much less reading it. Even though what Erica had written wasn’t that private. Even though it was important information Fern needed to see. “What did your cells tell you?” Fern asked.

  “I don’t know, but I had the same nightmare—the purple snake. Although the nightmare went longer this time. More happened. The snake turned into an Elberex, like Erica said. But it wasn’t made of darkwash. It was purple. And it was solid, like metal or stone.”

  “Solid? Anything else different?”

  Noe tried to imagine herself back in the dark space. “Right before the snake turned into the Elberex, everything got hot. Like really hot. I thought the Elberex was going to burn me.”

  Suddenly Fern dropped her sandwich onto the nearest stack of books, along with Erica’s diary. She got up with her crutch and started rooting in the piles of clothes around her. “Where’s my duffel bag? Do you see it? It’s black with red straps . . . oh, there it is.”

  “What do you need a duffel bag for?”

  “To pack it for a trip. What do you do with duffel bags?”

  “Where are you going? What about the meditation? What about the Smashed Man?”