by Jeff Long
Around nine or so, the first Concerned Parent came up. Every year there were Concerned Parents. They always parked at the far end of the lot, where their embarrassed sons and daughters consigned them. Every year they would approach about this time wondering where their Johnny or Corey was. As if he was a babysitter.
“You haven’t seen a girl about this tall, have you?” the mom asked him. “She has blond hair and glasses. It’s been almost an hour.”
“She’d be inside,” Robbins said, hitching a thumb at the hell entrance. “No one’s come out yet. What the young people do is circle around in there. They’re supposed to go straight through and come out. But they get all caught up.”
A caterwauling shriek overrode the Rolling Stones. The mom jerked. Nice legs. No wedding ring. Robbins shook his head and chuckled. “They just love the fear.”
A boy roared. It was a lion’s roar of outrage and pain. Not bad, kid. It died away.
“Good lord,” the mom said.
“Kids,” said Robbins.
But she was staring past him, over his shoulder. “Sally?” she said.
Robbins turned.
A girl was standing there, clothes ripped, face slack, drenched in “blood.” She didn’t answer. Her thousand-mile stare didn’t even see them.
Damn it, thought Robbins. Didn’t I tell Ted and them, no paint? And no goddamn rough stuff. This was the problem with relatives. Upside, they worked for free. Downside, you couldn’t fire them. Now he was looking at a bill for new clothes. And Sally here wasn’t exactly dressed in Wal-Mart blue-light specials.
“Sally?” the mom repeated.
The girl collapsed in a heap.
“Jennifer!” Dave yelled again.
The Schwinn was lying at his feet. Her pumpkin bucket rested in a ball of orange light on the mat of leaves. Around and around, Dave turned. Where to begin? Moon shadows striped the forest floor. Crevices gaped like open mouths among the boulders. Not a soul in sight. And his cell phone was on the fritz.
“Jennifer!” This couldn’t be happening. Any instant she would come bounding from the trees with a “boo” on her lips. But as the woods squeaked and scratched their branches and the seconds became minutes, Dave finally broke the peace and started hollering for help.
Spiderman One: “Nan?”
The boys entered the house tentatively, flashlights slashing at the darkness. There was no furniture. It stunk. Even to their boy nostrils, the place was a violation.
Spiderman Two: “What is that?”
Spiderman One: “Shit. Dog poop.”
Jason: “That’s not dog shit. It’s human.”
Spiderman Two: “On the carpet?”
There were piles of it all over the place. It shocked them. They were ready for bodies, eyeballs, skulls, or bat wings, the stuff of witches. But this house wasn’t so different from their houses, and the women had used it like a way station. Like an animal den.
Spiderman One: “We don’t belong in here.”
Spiderman Two: “What about Nan?”
Jason: “Take a look in here, you guys.”
It was the master bedroom, no bed, no bureau, no mirror. A fire ring set in the middle of the floor had burned right through the Berber carpet. The ceiling was black with smudge.
Spiderman One: “Are those bones?”
Like little twigs. Skulls like strawberries. The boys clustered.
Spiderman Two: “Squirrels.”
Jason: “Or mice.”
Spiderman One: “Cool.”
Spiderman Two: “Where’s Nan?”
Spiderman One: “Quit messing with us, Nan.”
They found a briefcase lying on the kitchen floor. Among the papers was a real estate contract with the signature pages flagged.
Spiderman One: “What’s that stink?”
Jason: “It’s coming from the oven.” The cold oven.
Spiderman Two: “Don’t open it, dude.”
Jason: “Voilà!”
Spiderman One: “What is that?”
Spiderman Two: “Meat.”
Spiderman One: “Meat?”
Jason: “Old meat. It’s all gray. There must be a hundred pounds in there.”
Spiderman Two: “Maybe they got a deer.”
Jason: “There’s no deer around here.”
Spiderman One: “Is that a fingernail?”
Jason: “No way.”
Spiderman Two: “Don’t touch it, numb nuts. Great, now you dropped it.”
They stared at the thing lying on the floor.
Spiderman One: “A hand? Someone’s hand?”
The oven door gaped at them.
Spiderman Two: “That’s a person in there.”
Spiderman One: “I’m leaving.”
Spiderman Two: “What about Nan?”
Spiderman One: “Let the cops find her.”
Jason: “We can’t. They’ll bust us.”
A noise came from the open basement door. The smell of raw earth poured up from below. “Nan?” Another noise.
Spiderman One: “She’s down there.”
Spiderman Two: “I’m not going down there.”
Spiderman One: “We have to.”
They armed themselves with pieces of sharp bone or lumber torn from the walls for firewood. Down they went.
Their lights played over mounds of dirt. Mountains of it.
Spiderman Two: “Prairie dogs? In their basement?”
Jason: “It’s a cemetery, stupid. They’re serial killers.”
Now it made sense. Ghoulish sense. They relaxed.
Spiderman One: “Silence of the Lambs.”
Spiderman Two: “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Jason: “The Devil’s Rejects.”
Spiderman One: “Uh-oh.”
Jason: “Now what?”
They gathered at the edge of a hole in the back corner. Here was the source of all the dirt. The tunnel snaked down and under the concrete footer and far beyond the reach of their lights.
Spiderman Two: “Nan?”
The hole yawned.
Spiderman One: “Did you hear that?”
Dirt shifted in the corner, hissing faintly.
Jason: “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Their lights slapped at the concrete walls. The stairs suddenly looked so far away.
Jason: “Run.”
“Sam?” Rebecca spoke it from the bedroom doorway. Sam’s bed was empty, though.
“No playing, Sam.”
But Sam didn’t play like this. Plus, she had a fever. Something was going around at school, and they’d finished their trick-or-treating early. Rebecca dropped to her knees and looked under the bed. Toys and a book. Madeline. The little Disney night-light blushed in the corner. That useless thing.
“Okay, Sam, you can come out now.” She threw open the closet door. In her haste, she almost missed the hole under a pile of clothes. The floor-boards had been pushed loose.
“Jake!” she screamed.
He came running, bare feet, bare chest, clutching the big Mag light like a club. He took one look at the hole and, like a bull, ripped more floor-boards loose. It scared her even more. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer. “Sam,” he yelled into the hole.
“What is it?”
“I think I know,” he said.
Rebecca stepped back, frightened by his strength, frightened by his certainty.
He jumped in, just like they say, with both feet. She peered through the lip of broken boards, and her husband was plowing at the foundation wall, tearing away cinder blocks. It was like watching him demolish their world.
“Jake?”
He didn’t look up. He didn’t say good-bye. Why should he? He just went right through the wall, from the inside of their safety and boundary to the outside.
Rebecca spun and darted to the window. Like a madman, or a were-wolf in a movie, in his pajama bottoms, nothing else, he raced through the moonlight toward the cliffs above the river
. The porous white cliffs. Riddled with lairs.
She tried not to read into what he’d just said. I think I know. But now she thought she knew, too. Which couldn’t be. Jake had told Sam there were no more monsters. He’d promised her with a pinkie shake.
No, it had to be something else. Rebecca defied the evidence. She deliberately ignored the torn-up flooring and the hole leading to another hole to the holes in the cliff. Sam was sleepwalking, that was all. She had wandered off in a dream. Jake would find her. He knew all her hiding places.
But then the moon shadows came alive out there. They boiled up. The oak and the thorn brush and the toolshed suddenly vomited up a whole yard full of animal motion. Watching through the window, Rebecca almost screamed a warning. But the glass stopped her, that’s what she would tell herself later. The impenetrable glass.
She was shocked by how quickly Jake went down. He took a few swings at the pale, moonlit things. He kicked. She heard his faint bellow. Then he disappeared under a small mountain of jackal frenzy.
Rebecca quit watching. She slid from the window. She clutched Sam’s fallen pillow and breathed her baby’s smell. Sam. Sam. Sam.
Later she would replace her cowardice with something stronger. Not tonight, though. Not this endless night.
What they found inside the reverend’s hell house put to shame his little skits and interactive parables. The adults lay slaughtered and left behind, unwanted. To their credit, several of the football players had ganged together and made a sort of last stand. They were the easiest to identify because of the remnants of their letter jackets.
All the other children had been taken.
Hour after hour, they had come and paid in dollars for a taste of hell.
Then hell had come to get a taste of them.
ARTIFACTS
TUCSON, AZ—DAILY POLICE REPORT—10/31
8
THE MORNING AFTER
No parent slept that awful night. Those without televisions got the news from frantic relatives or from school districts on red alert. Police cars threaded the neighborhoods. Helicopters drifted overhead with spotlights filleting the alleys and overpasses. National Guardsmen appeared on lawns in pieces of uniform. In dozens of cities, trigger-happy citizens gunned down unfortunate burglars, vandals, graffiti artists, and pizza-delivery people.
At two in the morning, the president declared a state of national emergency. By dawn the nation’s highways were empty. School and work were canceled. For some reason, despite the fact that the dangers were subterranean in origin, air traffic was shut down, too. Americans turned on their NPR or FOX or Good Morning America or Yahoo. Like intelligence analysts, they called each other to discuss every new blog, interview, factoid, theory, or video clip.
The U.S. had taken the brunt of the attack. Yes, northern Mexico was reporting an incident near the American border, quaintly linked in their media to the Day of the Dead. And yes, a portion of southern Canada had been struck as well. But clearly America had been ground zero. Her children had been stolen. Anyone defending them had been killed.
The figures varied wildly. Some reports suggested thousands of victims. More thoughtful commentators cautioned that the figure might be as low as several hundred or less. Even if it were several dozen, the terror would be the same. On our soil, in our homes, in our modern times, a monstrosity from long ago had once again trespassed against us.
“For those of you just joining us…”
“…numbers continue to be revised. Reports are coming in from across the country. The official count keeps creeping up, Jim. Upward of twelve thousand…”
“White House press secretary Arthur Young has revised initial estimates of last night’s toll—downward—to seventy-three missing and one hundred thirteen dead. He has assured us that fewer than five cities were affected, not the scores of cities that were reported in early reports. Those numbers could change. Meanwhile he is urging calm.”
“And this just in. Los Angeles is reporting widespread rioting and looting. The governor is rushing in troops…”
“We will continue to bring you live, uninterrupted coverage of this…”
No one knew quite what to call the event. Each television anchor played off his or her own pet word or phrase. Midnight Raid. Halloween Invasion. Blitzkrieg. Not Since Pearl Harbor. Since 9/11. Vendetta. War of the Worlds. Slaughter of the Innocents. Was it an act of terror? An act of war? No one knew.
There was no question who the enemy was. Somehow the demon horde had resurrected itself. After eons of subjection, of slavery and night terror and serving as herds of sun-fed meat, mankind thought it had rid itself of hell. Now hell yawned at the foot of everyone’s basement stairs.
No matter where people turned this day, horrific images and unedited footage that would normally never make it past the network censors awaited them.
“Please be advised that the following is not appropriate for children…”
“If your children are watching, please…”
“What you’re about to see is unsuitable for children…”
Children. It was all about the children. That much was clear.
Certain footage kept replaying. The images began to take on a fame of their own. The Eugene Sighting. The Witches’ Parlor. The Flayed Man. Hell House. Rebecca. Over and over again.
An ATM camera showed ghosts, white ghosts, moving very fast. Slowed down and computer enhanced, the ghosts became four hominids running down Main Street in Eugene, Oregon. The camera’s time signature read 18:22. That would be Pacific time. The creatures were brazen. At that hour it had barely been dark in Oregon.
Yellow police tape girdled a house on the outer edge of an Atlanta subdivision. Cops mingled with black-clad SWAT commandos and National Guardsmen in old desert camouflage. A reporter was addressing the camera. Four Atlanta youths had last been seen approaching this residence last night while making their Halloween rounds. The telephoto zooms in on a Spiderman mask and a flashlight near the front door.
“According to neighbors, three homeless females were living in the vacated property. And, Monica, we’re being told that a tunnel has been found in the basement.”
Suddenly gunshots ring out. Everyone panics. The camera tilts at crazy angles. Men yell in the distance. “Take him down, take that fucker down. Get his gun.”
The camera swings around to a bunch of cops pinning a man to the sidewalk. They don’t want to punch or Taser him with all the cameras around.
Dressed in pajama shorts, the gunman keeps struggling and shouting. “Billy? Let me up, you sorry bastards. My son’s in there. I’m going after him. Billy? I’m coming for you, son.”
People mill around outside a police station. In another setting, on another morning, they might be zombies left over from Halloween. Their hair is a mess. Eyes are red and puffy. They shuffle about, crowding a bulletin board with photos and notes.
A woman glimpses the camera. She peels away from the rear of the crowd and approaches with a snapshot held in front of her. “Have you seen my son?” She says his name. “If anyone has seen him, please, please call. We let him go out with his friends last night. He asked and we let him. We let him.”
More parents catch sight of the camera. A collective lightbulb goes on. Snapshots outstretched, they mob the screen.
Amateur video footage shows two joggers standing in Central Park among a stand of trees and massive boulders. It’s chilly. They have lollipop-red cheeks. Frost blows from their mouths.
“Yeah, we take this loop most mornings. And you know, you find stuff at that hour, freaky stuff left over from the night before. But never anything like this.”
The second jogger crowds into the camera. “At first we didn’t even know what it was. I mean, we knew something organic, like off an animal. But who’d guess it was human.”
The camera pans from the path to the boulders. An orange plastic pumpkin lies sideways on the mat of leaves. A child’s Schwinn bike. The camera wobbles. Leaves crunch. The view goes
in and out of focus as we approach.
The woods look hostile, its boulders glassy with ice. It looks almost like Christmas in here. Long pink ropes loop between the trees. Blue and gray viscera dangle from the boughs.
“Oh yeah, now I see it,” says the camera guy. “Like he exploded. Wild. Is that the dude’s kidney up there?”
The joggers come up. “Only in New York, man.”
A woman’s face fills the screen. Her beauty is startling in its purity. You cannot take your eyes from her. She could be a Viking queen with her blond hair loosely braided.
“Your daughter and husband went missing last night, Ms. Coltrane?”
“My daughter, yes.”
“And not your husband?”
“He is dead, not missing. I saw that much. They will find him downriver, I am sure.”
Silence, then, “Can you tell us what you saw?”
The woman looks at us. The television screen practically vibrates with raw emotion. This is almost too painful to watch. The widow and bereaved mother will break down now. She will weep or curse or collapse. Instead she speaks, simply. “I saw a man lose to wild animals.”
A single tear runs down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe it away. Her dignity breaks your heart. Her eerie strength might come from shock or insanity, and yet those green eyes are so crystal clear. The night has given birth to something extraordinary here, you can sense it.
“I know this is difficult for you, Ms. Coltrane.”
“Rebecca,” she says.
The interviewer is emboldened. “Rebecca, do you ever expect to see your daughter again?”
Rebecca does not pause. She knows her heart. “God is keeping her safe for me. I will find her and bring her back to the light.”