by J. W. Ocker
Finally Noe dived through the door, pulling Ben behind her, who happened to look over his shoulder as they crossed the threshold. He screamed when he finally saw the Smashed Man bearing down on them. Radiah slammed the door shut.
“Girls, take it easy on that door!” Noe heard Dad yell from outside.
Crystal had already grabbed the bucket of darkwash hidden in the cabinet and was now standing against the back wall of the kitchen. Radiah dipped her brush into Crystal’s bucket before rushing over to the half-open basement door. Noe, who according to the plan was supposed to join Radiah, instead pulled the screaming boy through the kitchen and into the living room. She pushed Ben onto the couch and said, “Don’t move and don’t make a sound or that monster will get you.” Ben whimpered into silence.
Noe made it back to the kitchen just as a flat head slipped beneath the door beside where Crystal was standing. Radiah was nowhere to be seen. Crystal was pushing back against the wall so hard it seemed like she was trying to phase through it and escape the house.
The flat head bent up and leered at them. Noe wanted to kick it in the face. But she knew what touching the Smashed Man would do to her. Plus it wasn’t time for attacking.
“Get ready, Crystal,” said Noe. Crystal nodded and adjusted the bucket and paintbrush in her hands.
Noe looked over at the basement door. It was wide open now. Although Noe couldn’t see Radiah, she knew that her friend was hiding on the other side of the door, keeping it open and herself out of sight of the Smashed Man. Not because she was scared, although she probably was, but because it was her job. Noe moved over so that her back was in front of the open basement door and she was facing the Smashed Man.
He oozed quickly under the screen door and stood up in the kitchen, undulating and wavering and staring right at Noe, who didn’t move.
Crystal quickly painted an Amberonk on the back kitchen wall. The Smashed Man turned his flat head toward her, but his body stayed framed up to Noe. Crystal lifted the bucket of darkwash threateningly and backed away toward the living room, getting ready, if she had to, to dash in there to grab Ben and continue running around the loop of the first floor and out the front door, where the Smashed Man couldn’t follow because of the Amberonk on the front of the house. He was now trapped in Noe’s house, whether he realized it or not. He turned back to Noe.
Noe slowly backed toward the stairs. The Smashed Man came toward her. The second she was sure he was committed, Noe turned around and ran down the steps.
The Smashed Man followed her down.
Radiah slammed the basement door shut, a paintbrush in her hand and a dripping Amberonk painted on the door.
The Smashed Man was trapped in the basement.
With Noe.
This was how the whole thing had started for her. The basement, an impossible monster, and her. This was also where it was going to end. Where it was always going to end, whether through her sleepwalking down here, or this way, as part of a desperate plan.
The usual oppressiveness of the thick walls and dim air and dirt floor of the basement was almost comforting to her now. She could imagine Erica sitting on the dryer, writing in her diary, getting ready to face the Smashed Man. Noe drew strength from that image, felt less alone. She was determined to do what Erica hadn’t been able to do, even though she had tried: to protect her friends from the monster permanently.
Noe wasn’t scared right now. Any type of scared. She circled around to put the water heater between her and the Smashed Man. And then she realized that she wasn’t the only one trapped in the basement with the Smashed Man.
“Len!” she screamed.
Len was standing in the corner, a stuffed anaconda wrapped around her neck like a scarf, swaying with her eyes closed.
She was sleepwalking.
Len must have fallen asleep upstairs. Now Noe was scared. The worst kind of scared. The scared-for-somebody-you-love kind of scared. “Len!” Noe screamed again, running over to her sister and shaking her. It didn’t do anything. She pushed Len deeper into the corner, watching the Smashed Man slither down the steps on his stomach, his head up the entire time and focused on the sisters.
The Smashed Man rose slowly from the ground until he was standing in the dimness. He didn’t need to move so slow, Noe knew. He hadn’t been slow since he escaped the crack into their world. He was enjoying her terror. The Smashed Man took a few wobbly steps across the hard-packed dirt. His grin, bright against his darkwashed countenance, almost ripped his face in two. There was no way she could race past him and get back up the stairs to safety, even without Len. He was too fast and would grab her easily.
Noe stepped forward, keeping herself between the flat monster and her sister.
She waited for him to come closer.
Waited for him to get so close that she could see the texture in his shining purple irises.
And finally, and for not the first time since she had moved to Dread End, she was within breathing distance of the Smashed Man.
She let him reach out, started to feel electric tingles as his flat fingers neared her skin.
And then she lifted her fist.
Wrapped around it was the leather cord that had been around her neck all night. It held the solid Elberex tight against the flat of her fist like a set of brass knuckles.
She hit him right across the eyes as hard as she could. It was violent. It was satisfying. It felt far from silly. It felt like what needed to be done. What Erica had been so close to figuring out.
The Smashed Man staggered backward, and for only the second time, she saw the Smashed Man’s expression change. It wrinkled into surprise and pain, the leer completely gone. Instead of the Elberex being painted on his forehead like the last time, the Elberex was branded around his eyes like she had held the sigil in the bonfire for hours. She smelled burning chemicals. The shimmering purple was gone, like his eyes had been smashed inward. All that was above his cruelly gaping mouth was the black double shape of the Elberex’s mark, smoke wafting from it like a wet coal.
Noe felt a pain in her hand, and she looked down and saw smoke rising from the Elberex and felt it burning through the leather cord. She flung it from her hand to the dirt. The Smashed Man tried to step forward toward Noe, but bent over instead, like she had hit him in the gut. He started levitating into the air. Halfway between the dirt and the rafters, he continued to bend, until he twisted in the middle and crossed over himself, like the snake in her nightmares, his face ending up at his feet. He was floating in the basement in the shape of the Elberex, a Möbius strip turning in on himself, and then, like the Elberex in her meditation dream, he was continuing to turn in on himself, spinning faster and faster in that shape, through the twin loops like he was on a roller-coaster track.
Noe stumbled back to Len and pushed her to the floor, shielding her with her body. The air was buzzing and strange and she thought for sure the Smashed Man was about to explode and bring the whole house down on top of them. Noe heard a painful rip and a horrible scream, and she couldn’t help but glance up. She saw the Smashed Man Elberex coming apart, dissolving into particles, like the centrifugal force of his twisting was ripping him in pieces. Noe’s head felt like it was being crushed by a dozen hands. A sound like a hard wind moved through the basement.
And then everything stilled.
Noe took her hands from around her sister and looked at the basement. The Smashed Man was gone, like he had been torn right out of the universe, out of existence, out of their lives. Everything was silent except for a slight hum in her ears.
The atmosphere in the basement had changed. Like the house had been moved a few altitudes higher, or scrubbed clean by ozone and electricity. Noe looked down and saw her sister waking up. She looked at the other side of the basement and saw Crystal and Radiah on the stairs looking dazed, like they had been the ones sleepwalking.
“Did you see that?” asked Noe.
Radiah nodded.
“Is he gone?” asked Crystal.<
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“Noe? Len? Where are you guys?” Mom came down the steps. “What’s going on here? Mrs. Washington’s grandson just came outside crying about a monster. What did you girls tell him? And why are you down here?”
Noe dropped her arms, exhausted. The hum in her ears had stopped, and she was happy to hear a normal voice and a normal question that meant the world was normal again. Happy to see Mom’s deep green eyes. She hugged Len to her chest, who was rubbing at her eyes dazedly and mumbling, “Werewolves. Werewolves.”
“That’s right, Len. Werewolves. The boy couldn’t handle the werewolves.” Noe turned to Mom. “Len was sleepwalking. But she’s all right now.”
Thirty-Two
The hospital didn’t seem like a place to get better. It seemed like a place to disappear. The walls were white and beige, and the hallways seemed to go on forever past identical-looking rooms with identical-looking beds inside. The three girls had walked those never-ending halls to a small waiting room with small brown couches, where they sat, waiting.
The girls didn’t speak. It didn’t seem like a place to speak. Crystal was staring at a painting of a nun with large eyes that hung on the wall. Radiah was tugging on the witch stone around her neck and focusing on the open door. She had a plastic grocery bag on her lap that was bulging with sharp corners. Noe reached up and felt the comforting shape of the Elberex through her shirt. It hung on a black metal chain around her neck. The three girls looked like they were lined up outside the principal’s office, except every once in a while, Crystal’s lips stretched like she was fighting back a smile. She was unfamiliar with what it was like to sit outside a principal’s office.
After what seemed like half of their lives, a nurse leaned into the doorway of the waiting room. She was dressed in loose green scrubs and wore glasses with matching green frames. She motioned at the girls with two fingers, and the girls got up and followed her. They walked down another white-and-beige hall full of identical rooms with identical beds.
The nurse stopped at one of the doors, which was open, although a curtain blocked their view inside. She stuck her head in past the curtain. “You’ve got visitors,” she sang, and then turned and winked at the girls before wandering off down the other side of the everlasting hallway.
Radiah led the way into the room, lifting the curtain uncertainly.
Ruthy had always looked tiny, but the giant hospital bed she was sitting in made her look infinitesimal. A tray beside her was full of empty Jell-O cups, and a TV on the wall blared toy commercials. Her blond hair looked greasy, and she had a red pimple on her cheek.
“Ruthy!” screamed Radiah, and like the word was a starting whistle at a race, all three girls ran at the little girl until the four were a jostling mass of hugs and falling Jell-O cups and giggling and bed squeaks and crying. Noe lost herself in the moment, only remembering after it was over that these were all girls she had only met a couple of months ago.
“We’re so glad you’re okay!” said Radiah.
“We were so worried,” said Crystal.
“Look, we brought you something.” Radiah reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a thick stack of colorful construction paper wrapped in plastic, a new box of crayons, and a pair of scissors that still had the tag on it.
Ruthy’s forehead crinkled. “You don’t like it when I make the Smashed Man.”
Radiah’s smile almost jumped off her face. “You don’t need to make the Smashed Man anymore. You can make anything you want.” Radiah looked at Noe and Crystal. They nodded her on, matching smiles on their faces. “He’s gone . . .” Radiah’s voice hitched before she got out the last word. “Forever.”
Ruthy’s eyes widened and she looked at each girl in turn, as if testing the idea on their faces, looking for the first change in their smiles, the first “Just kidding!” from their lips. “What? How?”
They told Ruthy the whole story, each telling a part until another couldn’t hold it in any longer and interrupted. Ruthy held both her hands in the air above the stack of construction paper, as if trying to manage the story with her hands. “You did it? You beat him?”
“Thanks to Noe,” said Radiah, elbowing Noe in the side.
“It was my fault that he was out in the first place,” said Noe, looking at Ruthy. “My fault you’re even in here. Do you remember what happened that night?”
Ruthy shook her head. “I remember seeing him above me. And then nightmares. Lots of nightmares. White faces with dark eyes. An orange sky. I feel like I’ve been away a long time.”
Noe almost jumped when Ruthy mentioned the faces. She tried to hide her surprise by saying, “Do the doctors have any idea what happened to you?”
Ruthy shrugged. “I don’t know. They just tell me that I’m doing good.” She opened and closed the scissors in front of her a few times. “Am I awake because the Smashed Man is gone?”
The other three girls looked at each other like they were dreading the question. “We don’t know,” said Radiah.
“Does that mean Erica’s all right?” That was the question they were actually dreading.
Crystal and Radiah looked at each other, both trying to hold back powerful emotions. They had already had this conversation and had convinced Radiah’s mom to call Erica’s, hoping for good news. “No,” said Radiah.
“What’s that?” Noe pointed to a mark on the pale skin above Ruthy’s elbow. It was pink and looked like a vertical line with another line twisting around it, like the silhouette of a vine around a pole.
“I don’t know,” said Ruthy, shifting her arm so that she could see the mark. “I hadn’t noticed it before.”
Noe kept staring at it. “I don’t think Ruthy’s awake because we got rid of the Smashed Man.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Crystal.
“Because we’ve seen that sigil before,” said Noe.
“It’s the eckolong,” said Fern. “It can heal, although under what conditions we still don’t quite know. It was a guess using it on that little girl in the coma.”
Fern and Noe were once more in the living room of the white house, drinking tea out of elephant cups. Noe was almost . . . almost . . . starting to enjoy these moments in this secret hideout with this grouchy woman on the edge of a universe that boggled her mind. But it was mostly the tea.
“A guess or an experiment?” Noe asked.
“Is there a difference?”
“Have you ever used the sigil before?”
“No. We’ve known about the sigil itself, but I only learned what it could do when I met with the Neighbors. Another member had discovered its purpose. But making it solid really increased the power of its properties. Pulled that little girl right out of her coma as soon as I touched her with it.”
“So this can help Erica?”
Fern took a long sip of her tea, long enough to drink what was in that cup three times over. “We already tried it on the girl in Texas. It didn’t work.”
Noe felt her belly drop. She had kind of expected that answer.
“How are those two girls doing with that book?” Fern asked.
Fern wanted the girls to record everything about the Smashed Man and what had happened over the past couple of months in their own words. The Dread Enders had nominated Crystal to do it, since she had already started with her yellow notebook. Radiah was doing illustrations for it.
“I think they’re almost done.”
“Are you still meditating?”
“Yes.” Noe had found a great place to meditate—her basement. She had no reason to fear the place now, and the noise of the washer and dryer relaxed her and covered up her oms. “I haven’t seen anything new.”
“There are other reasons to meditate. I bet you haven’t had any parasomnia episodes since you started.”
Noe looked at her in surprise. Fern was right. She hadn’t sleepwalked or had any nightmares in a while. “It made them go away?”
“I don’t know about that. But it at least channels them in some
way. You, like all children, have a sensitivity to stuck places. And you happen to be more sensitive than most. That girl in Texas was too. I don’t think it was any coincidence you both lived in the same house.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you were drawn here. Pulled to a neighborhood where a place got stuck and the barrier between them thinned.” Noe remembered that she had been the one who had found the house. “But you’ll need to be careful.”
“Why?” asked Noe, confused because with the Smashed Man gone, it was finally the time to not be careful.
“You never asked me what the Neighbors call the Smashed Man.”
“You had your own name for him?”
“Long before you girls did.”
That surprised her, although it shouldn’t have. “What was it?”
“Matt.”
Noe waited for Fern to laugh. She didn’t. “Is that a joke? Like flat as a door mat?”
“Nooo.” Fern drew out the word. “That’s his name. Matthew Impey. He was a Neighbor.”
Noe had never considered the Smashed Man a person before, even though he looked like one. The idea horrified her more than the Smashed Man being an interdimensional monster. “What happened to him?” She almost didn’t want to know.
“He fell through a weak spot where the stuck place touched our own. We think it’s happened before, elsewhere. Sometimes people disappear and are never found. Maybe they fall through the universe. Into the space between stuck places. It should kill them, and probably does more often than not, but sometimes it . . . changes them. Turns them into creatures of torment and rage and violence.”
“There’s more than one Smashed Man?”
Fern nodded, adjusting her red glasses. “I’m not trying to scare you. Well, I am, but for good reason. I’m bringing it up because Matthew Impey was special. Extremely sensitive to stuck places. He’s the one who discovered the darkwash. He also did the foundational work on the sigils.”
“I thought you said the sigils have always been around. Like in Egypt.” Noe grabbed at the Elberex hanging around her neck.