by Ryan Notch
He heard a sucking sound, then a kind of plop. It was the sound of Mr. Buttons pulling the bucket from its head. Spencer had hoped it wouldn’t be able to, that the claws would slip off the bucket the same way they had slipped on the doorknob in the closet. He regretted not covering the outside with cooking grease, a move which he thought might jeopardize his ability to hold it and the knife.
He listened carefully for the sound of claws clicking towards him over Suzie’s hardwood floor. Soon his night vision adjusted enough so that he could see the light faintly glinting off the pieces of broken glass stuck to Mr. Buttons head. He saw the impression of moving shadows as Mr. Buttons reached up his arms to wipe away the sticky sharp goo from its button eyes. Eyes that were facing the window.
Facing away from Spencer.
Spencer moved fast. Maybe under better circumstances Mr. Buttons would have been able to hear the two whisper quiet footsteps and the leap. Maybe.
But the beast didn’t hear them. Didn’t hear as Spencer flew through the air, both hands clenched on the knife raised above his head. The next sound either of them heard was that of a terrible ripping as Spencer rammed the knife into the base of Mr. Buttons’ neck. Holding onto it with his full weight and tearing it all the way down Mr. Buttons’ back, opening the beast from stem to stern.
Why Mr. Buttons didn’t scream then, Spencer didn’t know. He didn’t know why there were no cries of rage as he reached into Mr. Buttons’ insides and began tearing out whatever he could get his hands on. Clump after clump of bloody stuffing he ripped out, while Mr. Buttons just stood there twitching and trying weakly to reach around behind itself. The claws were as sharp as ever, but Spencer made no effort to dodge away this time. He knew bears couldn’t reach their backs.
It took a while to finish the job. Spencer kept yanking out what passed for Mr. Buttons’ guts long after it had collapsed to the floor. By the time Mr. Buttons stopped twitching the floor was covered with wet balls of bloody cotton and gristle. The remains of Mr. Buttons were half collapsed in on themselves, the soft brown fur almost hollowed out by Spencer’s efforts. Whatever blood alchemy had created Mr. Buttons and sustained it Spencer couldn’t guess. He’d always half-expected to find a kid inside, the starting point for so many of Smiling Jack’s creations.
Spencer looked into the dead black button eyes of the thing. He had an idea.
* * *
The Hollow Men stood watching as Mr. Buttons came walking through the door of the Great Closet. Their machined eyes held no expression, but if anything could be read by the tilt of their heads it might have been expectation. Or perhaps even confusion. Mr. Buttons certainly didn’t look itself today. A little shorter, a little less filled out. The backpack it wore only partially covered the large vertical gash running along the once-great beast’s spine. Its walk was unsteady, the bears balance precarious as it took the heavy object from the backpack and left it inside the Great Closet before carefully shutting the door.
If they were at all suspicious of him, Spencer couldn’t tell it from the limited view offered by two eyeholes he cut in the back of Mr. Buttons throat. He tried his best to maintain his balance as he walked past the Hollow Men down the long hallway. It wasn’t easy with the blood soaked fur squishing under his feet. The furry cottony “skin” itched so bad it could have been used as a torture device. It was as hot inside Mr. Buttons as it would have been in a real bear. He hadn’t cut a separate air hole and breathing was becoming difficult, like when he used to try and hide under the covers from the boogie man. The only good thing about the situation was that the inside of the bear suit was almost entirely without scent, something he doubted would be true of a normal corpse if you decided to wear it out for a walk. Just the same, Spencer was worried he would pass out before he made it out of sight of the Hollow Men, who were luckily the only guards in the long hallway.
As Spencer reached the end of the hallway (the Hollow Men luckily not following), he paused for a moment at the door. He was afraid when he opened it that Jack might be standing there, smiling down in the rays of sunlight beaming down from the high windows. He’d actually been expecting Jack when coming out of the closet itself, or perhaps Nanny Gurdy entertaining a room full of new children. He knew the disguise was pretty poor, and had only a very slight chance of fooling Smiling Jack. Still, some chance was better than none and he’d noticed long ago that the Hollow Men seemed incapable of complex thought.
Spencer opened the door to find no one, not on the landing or anywhere in the entrance hall that he could see. Then made his way carefully down the stairs, holding onto the rail for balance. He thought about searching the house now, finding Suzie and making a run for it. Only if he ran into Smiling Jack before he was ready, it would all be for nothing. He had to take the chance of waiting.
Without glancing back he went out the door, squinting in the bright sunlight that proved once again that Nowhere Blvd. was not on the same day night cycle. He headed east, towards Mr. Buttons’ tree house. It was a long walk in the growing heat of the suit and he began to feel himself getting dizzy, mentally weighing the odds of getting caught if he took it off now. The tree house itself didn’t have any means for human entrance, having neither a rope ladder or stairs. Mr. Buttons had simply climbed the tree with his claws. So instead he walked past it to his true destination, the Rejected Woods.
Not for the first time, he kept feeling someone might grab him from behind as he walked. He couldn’t turn his head far enough to see behind him, and had no peripheral vision through the eye holes. But the walk to the woods went without incident, and soon he was inside their protective cover. It didn’t take long at all to get far enough in to be completely cut off from the mansions view. He began stripping off the bear suit as fast as he could, breathing a great gasp of air as he pulled his face free of it.
It didn’t come off easy, kept sticking and sucking at him. Like trying to peel off wet jeans, but worse. In fact, to his horror he couldn’t get his right hand out at all. He pulled hard, yanking with increasing panic. He even went so far as to pull the suit inside out for better leverage on it. But it wouldn’t budge, and yanking it hurt. It was like the paw had grown into his own flesh, and one wouldn’t come off without the other. He worked at it for several minutes, even trying to work the knife blade in there. But the process proved to painful to continue. Finally he had no choice but to compromise, cutting the suit around the area where it was stuck to his arm. It left him looking like a boy with a bears arm. He looked down at his new hand/paw, wiggling his new claws. It cost him about as much dexterity as a pair of heavy gloves, but at least it was a weapon he couldn’t drop. His left hand could still hold the hunting knife after all.
Spencer headed north. Given the weight of the gas can on his pack, he regretted that his plan involved more than a little backtracking. What was worse was that he couldn’t be sure how much time he had to get all the preparations done. The first time he’d come to Nowhere Blvd. it was about the same real world time as it was now. At the time there’d been at least eight hours of daylight left in Nowhere Blvd. Going along that theory, he’d have about eight hours of daylight again. Except he wasn’t at all sure that Nowhere Blvd. moved on a 24 hour clock. He hadn’t had a watch when he’d come over and never stumbled upon one in the old scavenging missions. His internal clock could read the day/night cycles of the place almost perfectly, but that depended on having seen the beginning or end of that day/night. Because the sun in Nowhere Blvd. stayed in the same place all day, you couldn’t figure it out if you showed up somewhere in the middle.
The thought of it made him nervous. If he couldn’t be in position by sunset he had a much smaller chance of getting to Suzie in time. Jack tended to do his lab work early in the night, doing God knows what else the rest of the time. Running would sap Spencer’s energy, but should he try anyway? He was working blind here.
Well not entirely, he thought.
As he marched he began to realize that he had in a short time
forgot a lot about Nowhere Blvd. It was a surprise, he hadn’t thought he could have forgot any details even he tried. Yet now he remembered how you could tell the time here by subtle temperature variations. Unlike in the real world, it didn’t get cooler towards sunset. Without the sun hitting at an angle, it got hotter and hotter the whole day, and colder and colder the whole night. He tried to remember what other details he had forgot. He reminded himself of the ways to tell if you were in danger. The tap tap of the Hollow Men patrolling in the streets, the clop clop of Smiling Jack’s black shoes, the shifting of dead leaves and the smell as a Rejected Thing was stalking you. And the sound Mr. Buttons made…well the thought of that brought a smile to his face.
He settled on a fast march, estimating by the heat he had at least a few hours before dusk. The bright light after the dark night of the real world gave him the curious feeling that he’d just woken up, that the real world had all been a dream. The smells of the forest, the crunch of sticks beneath his feet, it was all so much more familiar than his room back in his parents house.
The whole thing really would have been a very pleasant homecoming, if not for the overwhelming fear of being murdered.
He tried to plan what he would do if a Rejected Thing came after him. He realized he’d also forgotten his fear of them, his longtime neighbors. But he was no longer sick from the soars and weakness that came from malnutrition, and a steel hunting knife was a lot more deadly than a sharp piece of bone. To his surprise he realized there wasn’t a single one he could think of who could survive a fight with him now, and he was pretty sure he knew them all. Of course if things went poorly a few hours from now, a single one of them wouldn’t be his problem.
Spencer walked a horseshoe path around the north end of the forest. Snacking on an energy bar from his backpack, the hill and mansion always at his left just a little ways out of view. Finally arriving near Nanny’s bone pile just as the sun began to darken. He sensed the presence of Rejected Things nearby, caught a few shadowy glimpses in the distance. A few wasn’t enough for what he had in mind though. He needed to see all of them, and the only time that happened was during a feeding.
The feedings didn’t happen every night. But over time he’d noticed that the bodies of the failed experiments tended to remain in Nanny Gurdy’s basement for a couple days or so before being dragged in their half devoured state to the bone pile behind the tall hedges. Which meant he was going to have to go to one of the few places in Nowhere Blvd. he never had. As dusk fell there was no need to wait for dark. Nanny would be at the long cabin saying goodnight to the latest group of “recruits.” The comfy house at the edge of the woods would be abandoned for a little while.
At least theoretically, he thought with some trepidation. He could never be entirely sure what it was in Nanny’s basement that gnawed at the bodies before delivering them to the starving masses. The answer seemed fairly obvious after a while, horrible as it was to contemplate. But on the other hand, maybe there was a completely separate monster living in her basement.
Moving around the hedge to within view of the house he felt very exposed. Walking crouched down in stealth seemed silly given the sun still shining down on him. But it would be all too easy for someone to be standing inside that kitchen looking out at him, the glare preventing him from seeing he was walking into a trap. Having no option for stealth, he decided on speed instead and made a dead run to the trapdoors outside the kitchen that lead into the cellar.
Not surprisingly they were locked. But the wood of the doors was anything but new, making it easy to pry the lock out with the hunting knife. The doors came open revealing a short flight of stairs leading down into the darkness. He wished that his night vision goggles hadn’t broke, and wished even more fervently that he’d been able to get his hands on a gun.
He had at least one advantage though, that being the powerful flashlight he’d brought. Even better he was still able to hold it in his right hand, despite the loss of dexterity in the paw that now lived on top of it. Flashlight in right and knife in left, he used his old stealth to silently move down the stairs. Silent not because he had any illusions of surprise at this point, but so that he could hear anything else moving.
What he saw in the basement couldn’t have been more horrific if it had been designed that way. Dirty meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. Saws along the walls with bits of dried blood and hair on them. Dirt floors and wooden tables with nicks taken out of them from ax blades and machetes. A thick smell of sweat and mold and coppery blood. He’d hoped to never see anything like this, and yet had always suspected he would end up somewhere exactly like this. It was terrible to look at, and he wanted to leave right away.
Except it wasn’t nearly as frightening as it should have been. He’d expected he’d be shaking with fear, yet the beam from his flashlight held steady. He breath came not in rasps of terror but steady, alert yet controlled. He wondered at himself, was he so jaded?
Am I incapable of being afraid now? Of being horrified, he wondered. Except that I was damn near shaking in my boots when Mr. Buttons walked out of that wardrobe just an hour ago…
No, it wasn’t him. It was the place. When you really looked at it, there was an unkempt feeling to it. Trash in the corners, dirty clothes lying about. Not an evil mastermind at work here, just a dirty room. Not a place of terror, but a place of shame.
It was the opposite of the laboratory that haunted his dreams. All the pain and suffering was over by the time the children got here. The things that were done in this basement only hurt the one doing them.
Still, there was the body on the table. A baby black girl no older than four. It was easy enough to sling her naked and mangled corpse over his shoulder and head back the way he had come, closing the doors behind him to hide Nanny’s secret from the light of day. Involuntarily his mouth watered at the smell of the corpse, reminding him of many other meals he’d had in the woods.
God help me, he thought.
Spencer left the body at the edge of the bone pile as the last rays of the sun faded to black and the giant moon began to glow in place, knowing they watched hungrily from the woods. He walked back around the giant hedge and stood just on the other side, waiting for the sound of them.
He didn’t have to wait long. If you didn’t know already what Rejected Things sounded like as they moved, you’d never be able to guess what it was just by listening. Slithering and hopping and crawling and dragging all mixed together into one mass, the very antithesis of music. He steeled his nerves and his stomach and turned the corner, walking towards the mass in a way he hoped looked not threatening but definitely not afraid. Weakness was death with them, a lesson Spencer had learned well at this exact spot long ago.
It was an unprecedented event to the whole of them, a form coming back from the house while they were feeding. A few fled, a few became hostile. Most milled somewhere in-between, afraid to lose their food and not knowing how to react. Spencer was sickened by the look of them, these sad monsters and freaks and remnants of children. Ruined beyond all redemption. What had become numb in him while living amongst them was once again raw to the sight of their freakish forms.
He carried the flashlight in his right hand, currently turned off. The knife in a sheath on his left, un-drawn. If one of them charged he planned to blind then stab it. Bloodshed wasn’t what he wanted here, but the loss of a few wouldn’t matter. And more meat would only ensure a more captive audience. He stopped before them and held up his left hand in a gesture he’d always made in his mind when he thought about this moment.
“Listen to me,” he said. Surprised to the point of shock at the sound of his own voice. A voice which he hadn’t heard in over a year. One which wavered with unsteadiness from disuse and didn’t sound like he remembered it.
“Listen to me,” he said again. “Remember me. The boy who lived amongst you. The one who fought and fed with you. I was one of you, one of The Rejected. I am one of you…”
The admission caugh
t him by surprise. He’d hadn’t meant to say it. Hadn’t even thought it consciously before. But he couldn’t deny it. He realized now the truth of it, of what he had become. What they were on the outside, he was on the inside. He paused for a moment, shook to the core by the truth of it. Here, before them, he finally felt at home.
“You thought they killed me,” he continued in a stronger voice now. “But I escaped. You thought I was dead by the hand of Smiling Jack or Mr. Buttons. But Mr. Buttons is dead by MY hand. And I wear his claws!”
With this he passed the flashlight into his left hand and held the paw above him, shining the light upon it. A shuddering gasp rose up from the mob, rising even to a wail from some.
He lowered his hand after a few seconds and brought the light up under his face, as if to tell a ghost story.
“I earned my freedom with the kind of courage that comes from knowing you’ve got nothing left to lose. Tonight when you see a light in the sky it will be your only chance to take the town. Fight as one and there will be nothing left that can beat you. Hide now and you’ll cower in the dirt forever.”
With that he turned off the light and backed away, not willing to turn his back on them until he got past the tall hedge and began to make his way south east. He thought of a night a long time ago when he had tried to warn another group of children then ended up walking away alone. There was every possibility that these ones also would not listen to him, and instead would believe whatever was easiest. But it didn’t matter, they would make a good distraction rampaging around the town, but not a vital one. The real showstopper was sloshing around in the plastic gas can strapped to his backpack.
Tonight, he thought. Spencer Williams is coming home to Nowhere Blvd. And I’m bringing all hell with me.
* * *
Spencer’s emotions while he cut across the town were complex. A smoldering rage burned inside him, one that had been there a long time without his being fully aware of it. Walking away from his speech he felt like he could tear the whole place apart with his bare hands. He had to remind himself that getting caught by the Hollow Men out here would still probably mean death. He had to force himself to be afraid, to remember to listen for them.