by Ryan Notch
The moon shone white off of those pale bones, but there was no need to make a pretense at stealth. It was still dark enough to hide practically in plain site. He only hoped that nobody was hidden and waiting for him nearby. This very darkness cost him precious moments finding the new corpse. Finally discovering it on the other end of the pile, he tried not to think about what he was doing as he grabbed it. Thought he could avoid looking directly at the body, but was wrong.
A boy, probably. About the same age as Spencer. He had dreaded the thought of mutilating the body to complete the plan, of smashing the face to a pulp with a rock. But to his further horror he saw he didn’t need to. The face was gone, as were some of the other soft tissues. In the moonlight it looked very much as if they had been torn off, or even chewed off. Was this done in Smiling Jack’s lab? It didn’t look like the clean cut of a scalpel.
Something half eats these kids even before the Rejected Things get their taste, he thought with a shiver. For some reason it made him think of the fairy tale of the gingerbread house, but there was not time to dwell on it. He picked the body up as best he could under the arms, ready to drag it away.
Got to hurry, got to get out of here before…
But it was already too late.
They had already come from the forest, were already moving towards the bone pile. They could see him, he knew they could. Even in the dark it would be impossible for them not to by now. At least twenty of them, shambling towards him in some form or another. They didn’t have him surrounded yet, he could still run for it, but he couldn’t take the body with him. He felt like he was trapped even if he wasn’t. He had to convince them to let him take the body this one time.
As they closed in and he began to speak, some small part of his mind tried to tell him that he was just jumping off a cliff to escape from a tiger. But his reason was gone, panic had a hold of him.
“Wait a minute,” he said to none of them and all of them as they formed a circle. “Just wait, I need just this one. If you let me have just this one I promise I won’t take anymore. Really I promise.”
Most advanced slowly, but all advanced. Boldest of all was the one he had seen earlier, the older kid with the bad leg. He frowned down upon Spencer with a bully’s glare. All in a flash Spencer realized why he looked familiar. It was Marcus, the oldest kid from Spencer’s original group. He wanted to say something but was speechless with the surprise of recognition. He felt a moments twinge of relief, and was entirely unprepared for the backhand strike that caught him across the face and sent him sprawling.
On instinct he rolled to his feet while still moving, seeing from the corner of his eye the brief surge of the crowd towards him. He tried to look everywhere at once while at the same time maneuvering out of reach of the large Marcus-creature that still advanced on him. Spencer pulled the fork from his waistband, brandishing it as a knife. The bully paused at this, but did not stop. Only advancing more cautiously on Spencer.
Spencer made a stab at the bully, but it was ill timed and barely scratched at him. The bully used his longer reach to counter with a blow to Spencer’s face. One which he partially blocked with his left hand, getting knocked back but careful not to fall. Sensing his back was almost to the wall of creatures behind him, he quickly followed it up by dodging to the right.
The bully spun to follow him and stumbled on his bad leg, not quite falling. Spencer didn’t need to think about it, it was only instinct to spring upon this obvious weakness. He moved around to his right again, sidestepping crablike. Marcus couldn’t keep up and Spencer was behind him in a flash, kicking at the back of the knee on the good leg just as the bully was twisting it to follow Spencer. The other leg couldn’t hold his weight and he went down with a yelp of pain.
Spencer hesitated. It was less than a second, but it seemed as if in that moment everything slowed down and he could think with crystal clarity. This guy was down, attacking him now just wasn’t right.
It’s not honorable, he thought. But the moment he thought the word, it just seemed so childish.
He stabbed down with the fork, into the small of the once-kid now-creature’s back. It cried out in pain, but even under Spencer’s weight the fork only dug in a tiny bit. Not enough to kill even with a thousand hits. Only enough to make the thing mad.
The bully started to get up and Spencer got ready to stab again, but he didn’t get the chance. Something knocked him aside and he found himself amidst a crush of bodies, things pressing in on him that were terrible and unnatural to the touch.
When he fought free he saw that the crowd had surged in on the fallen monster. They had pounced on his weakness and now were tearing him apart, eating him alive. His screams were muffled, but still terrible to hear.
Spencer saw he was being ignored and grabbed his original prize under the corpse’s limp dead arms again, making his way towards the forest as best he could. The sounds of unbearable pain and panic following him.
That night was the longest of his life. He dragged the body through the woods, knowing by the distant and not so distant sounds that he was being followed in the dark. The burden under his arms was heavy from the start, and grew heavier by the minute. He wanted to stop and rest but knew he couldn’t. He pushed himself in a mad rush, far beyond the point of exhaustion.
Navigation was easy, since he continually stayed within visual distance of the edge of the forest. He went south around the curve of it, then east until he was directly south of the shops. Having reached his goal he did the thing he had been dreading almost as much as the mutilation of the body he had been spared. He traded clothes with the corpse. He was tempted to just through away the corpses bloody clothes, which got even more gore on them as he undressed the body. But nights in Nowhere Blvd. were still cold, and he didn’t intend to freeze. So suppressing his revulsion he put the dead boy’s clothes on himself and his on the dead boy.
He then dragged the body to the edge of the woods, confident that it was close enough to town that the Rejects wouldn’t follow. In fact he was pretty sure they had stopped following him a while ago. He made his way across the short jaunt north to the candy store. He could have climbed to a high spot and tried to pierce the dark with his telescope to see if patrols were nearby, but didn’t think he had the time and instead made the calculated gamble that someone would be in the area. Moving quickly but quietly, forcing his footsteps to be silent as he’d learned in his candy stealing days. Peeking around each corner, making sure not to be spotted until he was ready.
Finally he reached the candy store. He hesitated, trying to think if there was any other way. If he’d overlooked any obvious holes in the plan.
It was now or never.
Spencer opened the door, hard and fast. The bell above the door rang out loud and clear, squeezing a cold claw of fear and anticipation around his stomach. He slammed the door and opened it again and again, ringing the bell as loud as he could. Then he let it fall silent and listened.
Tap tap, tap tap.
They heard him all right. Now for another gamble, he had to run for it and hope they saw him, but not soon enough to catch him. He ran south, trying to make as much noise as possible. The ploy was almost the end of him. As he passed the last building on the edge of town he just missed running headfirst into a second Hollow Man who was rounding the corner at the same time. He’d been so intent on making noise that he hadn’t heard the thing. It reached for him with reflexes that fortunately weren’t as fast as Smiling Jack’s and he shot right by it.
It was on Spencer’s heels as he headed for the forest, and another one a ways behind it. His first thought was that it was too late, they’d run him down and tear him to shreds long before he reached the forest. Only they weren’t gaining, they were even falling a bit behind. He’d just assumed the Hollow Men could outpace him like Mr. Buttons, but their awkward gait was actually a little slower.
Of course, they didn’t ever seem to get tired and he was already exhausted. His breath came in tearing r
asps from his throat and spots were forming around the edges of his vision. He pushed himself as best he could, but knew he was faltering. He stumbled and almost fell.
Just a little farther, he half thought and half prayed. Just a little.
He looked back and saw the gap he had created between them was closing. He looked for the body ahead, knowing he had to run right past it. He saw the place where he had left it but…
But something was moving.
The body?
No, it was the Rejected. They had been following him after all, and had found the body. He was headed right for them.
There was no guarantee the Hollow Men wouldn’t follow him right into the forest if he changed direction now. He had to try something so desperate and stupid that for a strange moment he was almost sure it would work, perhaps if only because he was too far beyond exhaustion to think about what would happen if it didn’t.
So instead of changing course, he charged right into the midst of the Rejected. He dodged the first one, but crashed directly into another one knocking them both to the ground. He was up and moving again in a flash, feeling talons brush the back of his leg as he jumped away. The Hollow Man behind him, heedless of the living obstacles, tried the same maneuver.
It wasn’t so lucky though. Its long legs were tripped up and it went sprawling amidst the Rejected. Spencer didn’t wait to find out what happened next but kept running until he could not longer see them. He climbed a tree and listened. He heard cries of pain and grunts and noises like that of an animal. It went on for a while, and he could even make out by the sounds when the second Hollow Man caught up and joined the fray. After what seemed like a long time he could hear nothing more.
He waited a long time for sounds of someone looking for him. He tried to stay awake but in his terrible fatigue he kept dozing off. Finally when he saw the first light of dawn he forced himself to climb down from the branches he was hiding in and sneak back to the scene of the battle. There were a tangle of bodies such that he couldn’t be sure who had won at first. Four Rejected lay full of stab wounds and bruised limbs. The two Hollow Men also lay motionless, leaking fluids that in the dim light could have been either blood or oil.
He was surprised, he didn’t think anything could kill one of Smiling Jack’s creations. Even if it had taken four of the Rejected to bring down two of them. And there lying amidst the carnage was his horrible treasure. The corpse of a boy wearing Spencer’s own clothes. He grabbed it by the shoulders and dragged it out into the open, about halfway to the town.
And then he walked away, deep deep into the forest as far as his tired legs would take him. He buried himself with leaves and lay with his eyes open, trying to stay alert for anyone that would sneak up on him as he fell into a rough slumber.
The next day that was it. The patrols had stopped. They had, obviously, found the body and mistaken it for Spencer, assuming he had been killed and mutilated by the Rejected. He knew his old life was well and truly over. He was safe from them forever, but only if they never ever saw him again. No more was he a creature of the town, now he was a creature of the forest. He would live amongst the Rejected but he would never, he told himself, become one of them.
It was two weeks of living off candy before he made his first trip to the bone yard to feed.
* * *
Much of his time living in the Rejected Woods was a blur. Survival was a day to day struggle, but one was much like another. He sought at all times to avoid the Rejected, save those times he had to scrounge for his share of the meat. In the year he lived amongst them he was caught by an aggressive one exactly nine times. Five of them he managed to outrun or otherwise evade. Two he managed to fight off in vicious, dirty matches. And two he was forced to kill with a short spear he’d made from a broken leg bone he’d found in the bone pile. Both times he ate of them until he had his fill.
He never tried to speak to the Rejected. It wasn’t that he didn’t think they could speak or understand him. He’d heard them some whisper and some gibber and some crying with loneliness in the night (especially the new ones). And it wasn’t just that he knew now how friendship could make you weak. It was that deep down he felt that if he ever talked to them, he would become one somehow. Become a monster like them. And maybe they thought the same, since every time he thought he heard them talking to each other, they would stop when he drew near.
Spencer didn’t give up spying on the people of Nowhere Blvd. He could watch them through the telescope from the woods without a chance of being spotted. It was the only way to pass the time, since the underground forest was nothing like real forests. It held none of the wonder or surprise or wildlife (besides the very rare insect). Just grayish brown trees circling the town from one end to another.
It was in watching the town and its inhabitants that he learned why the Rejected never left the forest. It wasn’t Smiling Jack they feared (at least not just him). Spencer discovered that Mr. Buttons wasn’t fed by Jack like everyone else, it fed off of the Rejected themselves. The teddy bear made regular hunting trips into the woods to catch one and devour them. Spencer knew that avoiding Mr. Buttons was more a matter of luck than skill, everyone knew bears could climb trees and he sure as fuck couldn’t outrun it. Still, when he saw Mr. Buttons heading for one part of the woods, he ran for another.
In his year in the woods his one preoccupation was in finding a way out of Nowhere Blvd. At the edge of the forest all the way around was an un-climbable rock wall, curving up to become part of the sky.
With two exceptions.
The first was obvious, the river which fed Jack’s Lake. The flow was gentle and he thought maybe he could swim beneath it until he came to an opening on the other side. He tried it one day, counting how many second he could hold his breath then swimming half that distance in the dark before swimming back. After that he spent weeks practicing holding his breath until he could last for almost 150 seconds count. He swam hard in the water and counted a hundred before turning back. He ran out of breath just before making it back, inhaling cool water which burned like fire in his chest. Just as he thought he would die he saw light and swam up to shore, coughing and throwing up and trying to stay conscious. After that he was haunted by the idea that the escape might be just 140 seconds in, if only he would go all the way. But he never tried again, knowing he might not be able to make himself turn back in time.
The second exception was a tunnel. It wasn’t until he’d been exploring several months before he found it, owing to the twin facts that it was behind boulders and under a pile of old leaves. He wouldn’t have found it at all if he hadn’t noticed while looking close one day that there was writing on the rocks. It looked like the old cave man paintings they had pictures of at the museum. In the primitive picture something was bursting from the ground. It looked like it was maybe a giant stick bug, but it was simple enough to where it could even have been a picture of Smiling Jack. The faded inks made it hard to make out the rest, but it looked like there were other things left behind under the ground. Things whose shapes were hard to make out, but seemed to stare malevolently from the rock painting.
The tunnel was pitch dark and Spencer had no source of light. Near as he had been able to tell, there wasn’t a source of fire or light in all of Nowhere Blvd. And he hadn’t bothered to try and make fire like the Indians with two sticks because fire would only attract enemies. One top of that, the temperature was constant all year round. It got chilly at night, but never freezing. He was used to navigating in the dark though. Even if he hadn’t been, nothing would have kept him from trying the cave.
The first part of it went down at an angle, encouragingly under the rock wall itself. It was small, but not so small he couldn’t crawl on his hands and knees. He went with his pack tied to a rope around his ankle. By this point he was wearing yet another pair of clothes taken from another body, the knees of which were being ruined pretty quick on the sharp rocks of the floor. After what seemed like a long time, but may only have be
en a few minutes, he came to a large cave and was able to stand up.
“HEY” he yelled, to gauge the echo in the darkness. He couldn’t be sure but the place seemed pretty big. With the exception of the cave leading to a dead end, this was the worst case scenario. Getting lost forever in here would be all too easy, and a terrible lonely way to die. But the ideas of starving to death and dying alone didn’t scare him like they used to, so he put his hand against the left wall and started walking.
He walked slow and careful, more so after hitting his head on a sharp stalactite hard enough to draw blood. The dark in here was far beyond even the exaggerated dark of Nowhere Blvd, though he’d known in advance what it would be like. Once upon a time the William’s family had gone on the tour of Carlsbad caverns, where the lights had been turned out briefly to show everyone what true cave dark was like. Then as now it seemed as if the dark was tangible somehow, you could almost feel it on your skin. And yet he had assumed that he would somehow sense it when a wall was right in front of his face, and had found out the hard way that without sight his other senses were pretty much worthless as well. After only a few minutes the darkness was maddening, suffocating, making him wonder how long he could go on in it.
It wasn’t really a question though, because the answer was obvious. He only had a couple days of water in a canteen stolen from the toy store. He wouldn’t last much beyond the end of that. Thinking about this he walked a little ways further, then stopped, because he did sense something. He didn’t know how knew it, but he knew.
Knew that he was not alone in the dark.
He was sure he hadn’t heard them before, but once he stopped moving and making noise, there was no doubt. And it was definitely a them. They moved quietly, no louder in his ears than his own heartbeat. But in the silence of the cave it was enough to be sure, and nothing moved that quiet unless it was sneaking…stalking. A sound akin to footsteps, though what forms those feet carried he couldn’t imagine. He could smell them too. He’d been so sure the cave would be empty that he hadn’t even thought about the smell. It wasn’t the smell of dry rock dust like it should be. It was a scent he didn’t remember ever smelling, but was familiar all the same. All of a sudden he was very, very afraid. And the fear of them was somehow familiar as well.