The Smashed Man of Dread End

by J. W. Ocker

  She had invited Ruthy to stay over tonight. She had almost invited everyone to stay over, after they had spent a couple of hours playing video games. But for some reason, Radiah hadn’t asked everybody. Only Ruthy. But Ruthy had said no. Radiah understood why. Ruthy’s first good night’s rest in her entire life should be in her own bed in her own house.

  And that decided it for her. Radiah shut the closet door and got into the freshly made bed, pulling the clean sheets up around her neck and breathing in their fabric softener scent. She looked at one of the pictures framed on the wall. A large panther on a rock that she had drawn after reading The Jungle Book. She hadn’t liked the book that much, but she had loved Bagheera. Radiah got back up, sat down at her desk, grabbed a pencil and paper, and started drawing. Drawing like she hadn’t drawn in a long while. Drawing with purpose. With passion. Drawing something flat and awful sliding out of a basement wall. Drawing until she had exhausted herself and returned to bed, instantly falling asleep as soon as she hit those clean-laundry sheets.

  Tonight was the first night Ruthy felt good about going to bed. Normally, going to bed meant nighttime, and nighttime meant that below, the Smashed Man was waiting in the cracks of her basement.

  But now it was out of her basement. Out of her house. And the Amberonks painted on her house were keeping it from coming back inside. Her house was finally safe. Even if the neighborhood wasn’t.

  It felt so good to live in a safe house that she had turned down Radiah’s offer to stay over at her house. Ruthy felt bad about that, but she wanted to stay in her house tonight. In her bed. With nothing in the cracks of her basement.

  Ruthy even went to bed early, before it was nighttime, without waiting for her dad to tell her to.

  But before she jumped into bed, she had something important to do.

  She twirled around the room like a mad dancer, her fingers lobster pincers. She grabbed up paper monsters from the floor, from the dresser, from the top of the toy box. She was a giant monster seizing the residents of a terrified city. She ripped them down from where they were taped to the walls, to the doors, to the bed—the quick, sharp snap of breaking adhesive their short-lived screams of fright.

  As she grabbed each gray, flat monster, she crumbled it into a ball and threw it in a wild arc toward a small teal trash can with a white pony on it that sat in the corner of her room. The construction paper balls missed the trash can more often than they landed inside, but that was fine. It gave her the chance to throw the monsters away again.

  Eventually she tired of her revenge. She didn’t trash all of the Smashed Men, but she got most of them. The trash can was overflowing with wads of dull paper. She picked one of the remaining uncrumpled paper monsters and taped it to the headboard of her bed, above where her head would be if she lay down. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, put on her pajamas, and vaulted onto the bed, which had always been a few inches too tall for her to get into easily. She grabbed the covers in one hand and her penguin in the other and then coiled herself up into a cozy ball.

  At the first stillness of her limbs, she fell asleep.

  Noe decided to sleep without tying herself to her bedpost. She had done it before, but it was out of apathy. Tonight would be different. She would fully experience the joys of rolling over in bed. She still went through the rest of her nightly rituals, though. She checked on Len, who was asleep in bed with both hands wrapped around a sloth. She checked the baby gate to make sure it was locked shut and then tied with her purple sash. She still didn’t want Len wandering around in her sleep. It was dangerous even without a monster in the basement. She spent her usual twenty minutes on her laptop, looking for any scrap of information about the Smashed Man or stuck places or the Neighbors. Nothing, as usual.

  The night was hot, and she had opened her window hoping to coax into her room a stray breeze lost from some cooler climate. It wasn’t working very well. Noe closed her laptop, which was putting out even more heat, and set it back on the desk, placing it right on top of the black scrunchie that would normally be around her wrist and the bedpost. She reached into the space between her bed and the wall and pulled out Erica’s diary. Even though it seemed they had protected themselves from the Smashed Man for the foreseeable future—as long as they didn’t go outside at night—that didn’t mean everything was fine. They would still have to deal with the Smashed Man at some point.

  She scoured the pages of Erica’s diary for the hundredth time, looking for some clue that she had missed. Something that explained why Erica’s plan hadn’t worked. Why her own plan hadn’t worked. That would explain the images in her meditation session.

  She could try meditating. See if it worked when she was by herself. She didn’t have a metronome, but the meditation word was easy enough. Except that the last thing she wanted was her parents or Len to walk in on her cross-legged in a corner, humming strange sounds. Not that they hadn’t seen more embarrassing things from her when she sleepwalked.

  A noise came from her window. A scratching at the edge of the forest. An animal. A fox or a fisher or maybe a deer. She’d been hearing noises outside her window ever since they moved next to this forest, but she hadn’t worried too much about them, because whatever was making those noises was far below her second-story window. She was as safe from those noises right now as she was from great white sharks out in the ocean.

  But now the sound could be from the Smashed Man. Did he walk? Float? Did he slither through the leaves like a snake? The noise sounded like slithering. Loud slithering. Like a very big snake. The image of the Smashed Man slithering up the side of the house and into her open window popped into her head. A chill spread across her skin, not at all like the cool breeze she wanted.

  Even though the Amberonk on that side of the house protected her, Noe still got up and shut the window.

  Back in bed, another image jumped into her brain, this one of her sleepwalking downstairs and out the front door, only to run into the Smashed Man rearing up from the ground in front of her.

  She lifted her laptop, retrieved the scrunchie, and tied her wrist to the bedpost.

  Len lay in bed with her eyes closed and the blanket covering most of her face, waiting for Noe to check on her like she did every night. Noe always did the same thing. She fussed with the baby gate and then peeked into Len’s room. Len would watch her while she was in the hallway, but then quickly shut her eyes when Noe looked in.

  Tonight she was holding Slothie. Len could feel his soft fur against her face and see the dark dots of his eyes and nose in the light from her unicorn lamp. Choosing Slothie had been a hard decision. She had thought about Aardie, her aardvark, or Cappie, her capybara, but she’d realized it had been a long time since she’d slept with Slothie and she needed to be fair, even though Noe told her all the time that life wasn’t fair. Len was still willing to give life the benefit of the doubt. So she had plucked the tree mammal from her pile of animal friends in the corner of her bed and held on to it while she pretended to be asleep for Noe.

  Noe had been acting strange since they moved to the new house. But that made sense to Len. This house was strange. The whole neighborhood was strange. At first she thought it was the werewolves in the basement. Noe was definitely terrified of the basement. So was Len. Back at their old house, Len had thought werewolves were everywhere. In her closet. Under her bed. Outside the windows. But in this house, it was definitely in the basement.

  Werewolves in the basement. Len gripped Slothie tighter and fell immediately to sleep.

  Crystal lay in her bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling and crying softly. Even though she was safe at home, a set of Amberonks surrounding her house, the Smashed Man was still out there, roaming the neighborhood. And it was her fault. She had let her friends down. Worse, she had put them all in danger.

  Noe’s plan had sounded solid. It was the type of plan Erica would have approved of. It technically was Erica’s plan. But Crystal couldn’t do her part.

  S
he couldn’t stand there in her basement, in her schoolroom, and face him, making him come out of the wall until the last possible second. Instead, after that first time when she had barely stayed long enough for him to get just his head out of the wall, she had not gone down at all. She had stayed upstairs and faked it with text messages. That meant she had given the Smashed Man rest periods throughout the night. She hadn’t merely ruined Noe’s plan. She had sabotaged it.

  And now the Smashed Man was free.

  None of the other Dread Enders had a problem with their part in the plan. Noe, who was brand-new to the horrors of Totter Court, did it. Radiah did it. Even Ruthy did it, although Radiah was by her side. Except that the way Radiah told it, Ruthy was the braver one that night. She was certainly braver than Crystal had been.

  Everything was okay for the time being, but they couldn’t hide from the Smashed Man forever. Crystal cried until she fell asleep.

  The Smashed Man slid silently out from the back of the refrigerator, his flat body upright and clinging to the wall like a tapestry. He followed the wall around the corner, never losing contact, until he reached the staircase. At the foot of the staircase, he bent over from the top of his head, forming an arch and lowering his head and arms onto the steps. He slithered up the stairs like a flat snake, and as quick as one. At the top of the stairs, he rose upward to his full height and walked down the middle of the hall, slow and uncertain, like a three-dimensional person walks underwater.

  His gait was actually less a walk and more a wobble, his legs and torso wavering with the repeated impacts of each fall of his flat feet on the carpet. He held his arms out in front of him, rippling in the air, a nightmare walking through physics that didn’t make sense. But this wasn’t a nightmare. This was the real hallway of a real house in the real world.

  Grayish rags wrapped around the arms and legs of the Smashed Man, and the psychotic glee on his face was unchanging. He continued down the darkened hallway until he reached a closed door. He stopped and wavered for a moment, seeming to detect something on the other side of it. He again bent into an arch like an inchworm, feeding the top of his body under the crack beneath the door and sliding through.

  On the other side of the door, he stood up. His two-dimensional head twisted on his two-dimensional neck as he surveyed the darkened room. Finally he stepped back against the wall, sliding across it and behind a dresser. Staying close to the wall, he slid out again until he was behind a headboard. From there, the Smashed Man slid feetfirst under the bed until he reached the other end. He slowly unfurled himself.

  A girl nestled in the covers and pillows.

  He floated the top of his body across the girl until his hideous face was inches above hers. She opened her eyes. She didn’t scream, didn’t move.

  The Smashed Man dropped down on top of her in the darkness.

  Twenty-Three

  Noe awoke with a numb arm and a backache. Like every morning. Without opening her eyes, she reached up with her working hand and untied the black scrunchie shackling her to the bedpost. The arm dropped to her side and she lay there waiting for the million-sharp-teeth pain of all the blood flowing back into it. When it did, she bit her lip until it subsided. She opened her eyes, registering things slowly. Daylight through the windows. Her closet door open. Len’s stuffed Komodo dragon on the floor. Her phone beaming 100% charged from its dock, and the time: 8:07 a.m. All the usual things about her room in the morning. Except that something seemed off.

  She got up and wiggled into a T-shirt and jeans. She ran her tongue over her teeth and weighed whether she needed to brush or not. She needed to but decided on not.

  She walked into the hallway and saw that the baby gate was open, the robe sash lying on the floor. She looked into her sister’s room, but it was a plush zoo without its sticky, tiny zookeeper.

  She walked down the hall to her parents’ room. The door was open, the bed unmade. And then Noe realized why things didn’t seem usual. It was quiet. Len should be running around talking loudly to her animals. Her parents should be getting ready for work. The smell of breakfast should be greeting her. There should be some activity in the house at this time in the morning. It felt like the time she had gotten up and ready for school only to learn that it had been canceled because of snow and everyone was still in bed.

  As she started down the stairs, she saw that the front door was also open. That plus the quiet made her wonder if she was experiencing a night terror. If so, she’d walk out that door to see . . . something scary. It could be anything. The Smashed Man had a lot to contend with in her nightmares. But if she was this self-aware, it couldn’t be a night terror. Still, it felt as if she was moving slowly, like the air had turned to cotton around her, like she would never make it through that front door.

  But then something came through from the outside.

  Mom and Len.

  Mom was disheveled, like she had just gotten out of bed. Her robe was wrapped around her and she was wearing slippers. Len was still in her pajamas and hugging a sloth to her chest. Mom saw Noe on the stairs but didn’t say anything to her. “Len, go sit down in the kitchen, and I’ll pour you some cereal.” After throwing a quick look at Noe, Len obeyed.

  “What’s wrong? Where’s Dad?” asked Noe.

  “He’s across the street. Something happened last night.”

  Noe’s heart dropped so hard she thumped to a seated position on the stairs. “What happened?”

  “One of the girls in the neighborhood won’t wake up. They’re taking her to the hospital.” Mom bit at one of her knuckles in a way that Noe had never seen her do before.

  Noe sat there stunned, and didn’t follow Mom into the kitchen for breakfast. Instead, she walked slowly outside, still feeling like she was wrapped in cotton. Outside, she saw a commotion of ambulances and police cars and people across the street in front of Ruthy’s and Radiah’s houses. She could see the Amberonk on Radiah’s door. It was still there. So was the one on Ruthy’s. The sigil was supposed to protect them all in the night.

  Noe saw Dad with a small knot of people by one of the ambulances. The only other person she recognized was Mrs. Washington. Noe wavered between running across the road and waiting for Dad to come back. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, Dad left the group and slowly returned to the house. He looked haggard, his hair sticking up in the back and his clothes looking like he’d thrown on the first things his hands had touched in the dirty clothes bin. He saw Noe and gave her a weak smile.

  “Who is it?” Noe asked when he had gotten close enough.

  “The Larson girl. Ruthy.”

  If her heart had dropped before, this felt like a punch in the space where it had been. Her eyes filled and she gazed around at the blurring neighborhood, half expecting Crystal and Radiah to be standing in the middle of the street with angry looks of blame on their faces.

  Noe knew where she needed to go, but she wasn’t ready yet. She went back inside and shambled upstairs. She brushed her teeth for a very long time. She changed into a different T-shirt and a different pair of jeans. She checked behind her bed to make sure Erica’s diary was still there. She moved the Komodo dragon back to Len’s room. She picked up the robe sash from the hallway floor and put it in her room. She tried new search terms online to see if anybody had ever posted anything similar to their situation—“mysterious coma” was one term, “Eye of Horus” was another—but didn’t find any relevant results.

  She didn’t message Radiah or Crystal. Didn’t receive any from them, either. After putting off leaving for too long, she walked out the back door, across the yard, and into Old Man Woods like an exorcised ghost.

  Radiah and Crystal were already at Rune Rock. Both perched atop it, holding each other. Their faces were swollen and blotchy.

  “What happened?” was all that Noe could manage as she stood at the base of the rock and looked up at them.

  “The Amberonks didn’t work,” said Radiah, her eyes almost flashing through tears. “Just li
ke your plan didn’t work. Just like Erica’s plan didn’t work. I’m sick of plans. We knew how to deal with the Smashed Man. We were dealing with the Smashed Man. We were fine.”

  “We weren’t fine,” said Crystal.

  “Okay. We weren’t fine, but we were surviving until the day we would be fine,” said Radiah. “Now we’ve lost both Erica and . . .” A huge sobbed leaped from her chest and choked off her sentence.

  “The Amberonks must work,” said Noe.

  “Because your gut told you they did?” said Radiah, shaking her head.

  “What happened to Ruthy . . . that means the Smashed Man is still in the neighborhood. So Fern was right about him being trapped. That means the Amberonks work. And we know the Nonatuke works. You guys can’t see the white house. The sigils work.” She ignored the pestering voice in her head that wanted to bring up the two times the Elberex hadn’t worked. “Did one of the Amberonks get rubbed off Ruthy’s house?”

  Crystal shook her head. “They were all there. Radiah and I checked.”

  “Where did they find her?”

  “In her bed,” said Radiah. She slumped on the top of the rock, as if that one outburst of anger was all she could manage. When Noe saw that, she almost starting crying again. She knew what Ruthy meant to Radiah. It would be like her losing Len. Noe turned her head to the side to hide her watery eyes, looking intently into Old Man Woods, at the green boughs, the gray rocks, the brown stream, the silver streaks of birch. Was the Smashed Man out there right now, hiding somewhere?

  “What do we do?” asked Crystal. She was also looking away from the other girls, so it seemed like she was asking the forest.

  “Something. We have to do something,” said Noe, even though a big part of her felt as if she had lost the standing now to suggest that they do anything. “For our own safety. To get back at him for what he did to Ruthy. Because doing nothing now makes no sense.” Her head dropped. She wasn’t even sure if she was convincing herself.