The Book of Bad Things

by Dan Poblocki

  Maybe if the pendant had belonged to them. Maybe if it had once protected any of them from danger. But that was the thing about objects — and people, for that matter — it takes time and effort to forge a relationship, to create experiences that become memories, for those memories to sink in, become lessons. To understand the lessons and use them to make choices. It was the choice that saves you. Or destroys you. Of course the pendant wouldn’t work. Their present had only been a piece of junk.

  The four dead bodies rose from the makeshift floor, focusing their milky gazes on the four young, living people who cowered away from them.

  Even though the beast was distracted, shifting in the garbage behind them seemingly entranced by its gift, Cassidy cringed, not wanting to be so close to it. But she stood her ground. So the pendant wouldn’t neutralize the vortex, but it might buy them some time. “When I say go,” Cassidy whispered to the group, “we run. As fast as we can back up the slope. We’re faster than these freaks.”

  “Unless the dog is waiting for us,” said Hal, gazing past the dead toward the dark opening above them. “Up there.”

  “And what about the rest of it?” Joey asked. “We’ll never be able to leave this place. The beast is still alive. The vortex, or whatever this place is, remains the same and so does the curse.”

  “Joey’s right,” Ping nodded. She wiped at her eyes. “We can’t leave. It’s our … our duty to stay.”

  Cassidy turned to find Ursula’s corpse staring at her. The dead woman moved her mouth, making wet, smacking sounds as if she were trying to speak. Cassidy figured she was merely chewing on her tongue. There were no words left in the thing’s empty head. The woman’s lifeless eyes, sunken in her skull, were so different from the shimmering orbs that Cassidy had encountered in her dream and at the library. Ursula’s ghost — her soul, what was left of the real Ursula Chambers — had led her here. Come in, she’d said. Why would the spirit have singled out Cassidy, to invite her inside the house when she’d demanded that so many others stay away?

  A seal of protection. To stop the beast, close the vortex.

  The star pendant had meant nothing to Cassidy, but she’d been carrying something else that did. An object that, for the past few years, she’d had with her at all times, rarely letting it out of her sight, an object that she’d often placed under her pillow to protect her from panic, from anxiety, from nightmares.

  The four dead folk stepped forward, swinging out their arms wildly, forcing the group backward, toward the hidden coils of the beast.

  A true seal of protection. Cassidy had it tucked under her arm, pressed against her ribcage, next to her heart. The Book of Bad Things.

  “JOEY, HAL, DON’T TAKE your eyes off these guys,” Cassidy said, stepping away from her dead neighbors and toward the place where the beast had shifted down into the debris. “Ping, hold up the flashlight for me. I have an idea.”

  The others listened, trusting her, even if they didn’t understand. Joey swatted at the air between himself and the dead with his stick. Beside him, Hal dug up a wooden table leg from the junk heap. He jabbed it at the skinny brown thing that had once been Aidan Chambers. The corpse grabbed at the leg with such ferocity, Hal yelped, nearly falling backward. He jabbed at Aidan again, this time pounding him directly in the chest. Old bones snapped, echoing like felled branches breaking during a hike through the woods.

  Cassidy led Ping several feet away to a safer distance. “What are you doing?” Ping whispered, reluctant, panicked. Cassidy took the notebook from under her arm and opened to the first page. “Hold up the light,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Ping glanced at the book, an understanding sparking in her eyes. Quickly, she pointed the flashlight, keeping her hand steady, the beam making the bone-white pages glow like a flare. Cassidy began to read the words she’d written, her voice steady, strong. “Cassidy’s Book of Bad Things, Entry Number One: Intruders.”

  The flashlight flickered. The air in the cavern pulsed. Cassidy felt a pressure in her skull, and her vision was squeezed into a point. “I was home alone, tossing and turning on the couch, when I heard someone at the door.” The world was tiny and Cassidy was enormous, like Alice in Wonderland, drinking the tonic, eating the cakes. The beast had invaded her head. It did not like what she was doing. Cassidy clung to the thought that she must continue, no matter what it tried to make her see or hear or feel. She shook away the disconcerting sensation of shrinking, of growing, of her skin squeezing at her like sausage casing, instead focusing on her words, finding her voice again, calling out, louder this time. “He rattled the knob, testing to see if it was unlocked. And I knew right then that I was in trouble.”

  The beast called back — NO! NO! NO! — its hum and growl nearly drowning out Cassidy’s recitation. But she kept her eyes on the page, feeling a tiny bit of comfort that Ping stood beside her. Behind her, the boys were shouting at the dead to stay away. She kept on reading the first entry, her words telling the tale of Lou and Naomi, and meeting Mr. Stanton. The story didn’t feel like a story as it escaped her lips, but instead like a prayer.

  The bowl-like floor of the cavern trembled, the garbage shifting like sand. A coil of wide black spine erupted out from the debris several steps ahead of her. Cassidy gasped for breath, squashing the impulse to shout out, to turn and run. The thing was rising, filled with shuddering rage, whipping its body through the space, flinging its treasures every which way. A brown leather boot flew toward the girls, smashing Ping’s shoulder. The flashlight flew from her grasp, landing with a crunch a few feet from where Joey was tussling with Mrs. Moriarty. Both girls whirled toward the lost light.

  Ping and Joey both went for the flashlight. He grabbed it first, holding it up to Ping, not noticing that Mrs. Moriarty had dragged herself to within biting distance of his ankle. Ping leapt over Joey and landed on the dead woman, grinding her knees into the corpse’s back. “Go!” she shouted at him. “I’ve got this.”

  Scrambling to his feet, Joey grunted and then shouted out to Cassidy, “Keep reading!” He panted as he sidled up beside her, taking Ping’s place, shining the light at the notebook.

  Cassidy refused to lose focus. She turned the page and started on the second entry.

  STOP! STOP NOW!

  Since Joey’s flashlight was directed at the notebook, the group could not see very far outside of its reach. Still, from her peripheral vision, Cassidy knew that the black snake-thing had fully risen from its hiding place. It had no beginning and no end, no head, no tail, but instead was an endless loop of iridescently dark flesh. Its body was pulled in on itself like a spring, ready to explode outward to careen into all of them with the force of a racing train. Cassidy read faster, faster. She turned another page, began the next entry.

  Then, something strange happened — something even stranger than everything that had already happened. The coils of snake, roiling with fury, slowly rose out of the crater, fully hovering in the space above the garbage. Its mass was the size of a whale. Cassidy didn’t allow herself to look at it directly.

  NOOO!! its voice called out, echoing with an unbelieving fury that, somehow, by some strange magic, it had been separated from its beloved cache of trash and treasure. A few bits of junk rose up with the beast, as if the thing were trying to pull close whatever it could.

  “Keep reading!” Joey shouted.

  Cassidy blinked and found the page again. She shouted her words over the thing’s raucous din, the shaking of the pit, the objects lifting and falling to the ground, smashing and crashing, breaking against one another.

  The beast ascended, its body compressing, its coils tightening so that it took the shape of a small planet. A moon. An orb. Soon, the thing seemed unable to move at all but only screamed wordlessly at the girl who had come to destroy it.

  Cassidy could feel its pain, its rage, its terror. She felt exhausted, the words blurring on the page, but she read on.

  Around the black beast, a blue fire appeared. Quickly, the orb
was engulfed. The beast’s skin puckered, searing in the flame. It seemed to shrink, pressing into a smaller shape as if by a garbage truck’s trash compactor. Or a black hole. Panicked, the dying thing released a new sound, a new voice, different from its approximation of human language. Something that Cassidy would not have been able to describe if someone were to ask later. All she knew was that the beast was speaking its own language, a counter spell. The flame began to diminish, and the beast emitted a wail, a growl, a belch, a shriek, all combining into a deafening din that Cassidy understood to be a hoot of triumph.

  The orb began to grow again.

  PING AND HAL HOWLED, and Cassidy and Joey turned to find that the dead neighbors, though bloodied and battered, had managed to advance on the two, knocking them to the ground, disarming them. Joey’s sharp stick and Hal’s table leg lay nearby. Owen Chase scrambled toward Ping, his mouth open, leaking a dark liquid. Old Aidan had fallen farther back, seemingly unable to move. But Millie Moriarty and Ursula walked, hunched over, in the direction of Hal, reaching for him like a pair of hungry elderly friends out to lunch at a Chinese buffet.

  Joey shoved the flashlight into Cassidy’s hand, then dashed toward the fray. Cassidy started to follow, but Joey called over his shoulder, “Stay! Finish this!”

  The blue light behind her illuminated much of the dark space now. Cassidy watched Joey kick Owen Chase to the ground, stomping on his grasping fingers. He handed Ping the stick, helped her stand, and together they beat back Millie and Ursula.

  But as the beast continued to whisper its ancient words, its own eldritch prayer, the blue light began to fade. Cassidy turned back to the black orb, the blue flame now a thin coat of color, quickly dimming. The work she had done, the reading, her words, was being neutralized by the beast. She stepped closer, struggling to shine the flashlight on her page. She called out more of what she’d written, the collection of memories and beliefs. Words poured from her mouth, making her throat raw. Her energy fed the fire like oxygen and it began to consume the monster once more. But the beast countered, yowling its own selfish thoughts, radiating its pitiful sensations of loneliness, obsession, anger.

  How was one girl, not yet thirteen years old, supposed to defeat something of such incredible power?

  For a moment, Cassidy felt as though she almost understood why the beast needed what it needed, why it did what it had done, what it continued to do. She had experienced similar wild desires. But she’d controlled the desires, channeled the thoughts into the words she’d written in the book. She clutched the cardboard cover, which had grown slick and damp with her sweat.

  She felt the beast rummaging around in her head, picking through her memories, searching for weakness, for fear. What it didn’t seem to understand was that the notebook and her pen had protected her from the darkness that lived inside her. For this reason, the book had always been the most important thing. Or had it?

  Cassidy briefly wondered if she’d treated the book like the beast had treated its hoard.

  Bring it back to me….

  “I have to let it go,” Cassidy whispered to herself.

  She stepped forward. The black orb was almost directly over her now. The blue flame was like ice. Its freezing energy billowed out, blowing her hair back from her forehead. She shivered as cold penetrated her core. The beast’s voice was an anguished cry now, begging her to stay away. Cassidy tucked the flashlight under her arm. Staring up into the blinding blue, she gripped her notebook between her fingers. Her seal of protection.

  “Here,” Cassidy called out. “Another present. You’re gonna love it.” For a moment, the beast quieted, then, as if understanding what kind of gift this small girl was presenting, it screeched, the noise of it nearly knocking Cassidy off her feet. She dug her sneakers into the shifting pit, steadied her arm, then drew the book back behind her head. Ripping her hand forward, she felt the object slip from her fingers, and for a moment, she wondered if she’d made a mistake, letting go of the thing that had kept her safe for so long. But as it careened across the short distance and connected with the blue blaze and the dark entity trapped within, Cassidy felt a sudden freedom. A lightness.

  Peace.

  The flames flashed white. Cassidy was lifted into the air and thrown backward. She landed on her spine, on something sharp; a burst of pain briefly detonated in her tailbone. She barely registered the feeling.

  From her spot in the hollow, she had the perfect view for what came next.

  The black orb telescoped inward, the blue flame grew outward, and with a small pop and a sigh, the space over the pit of garbage went blank. The air grew still, and other than the ringing in her ears, the world was uncannily, eerily silent.

  THIS PEACE LASTED ONLY a moment. The sound that Cassidy had expected earlier, when she’d tossed the star-shaped pendant at the beast, finally came. A great cracking sound rang out, as though the unseen stone over their heads had split, and the ground shook.

  The flashlight now lay several feet from Cassidy. The blur of the explosion hung in the center of her vision, but she managed to reach out for the light. Joey and Hal and Ping struggled to stand. The dead lay all around them, finally unmoving, lifeless. Cassidy rolled over onto her hands and knees, and as another quake shook the cavern, she called out, “You guys okay?”

  “I think so,” said Joey. He waved his weapon — the stick he’d snatched up from the driveway — at the corpses at his feet. “They all just dropped.”

  “Yeah, right when you threw the book at the creature,” said Ping. “You broke the curse, Cassidy!”

  Another trembling rattled the cave. Far off, something large crashed to the floor, causing the debris beneath their feet to move.

  “How about we congratulate one another later,” said Hal, “after we get the heck out of this place?”

  Cassidy ran to the group, throwing her arms wide, encompassing all of them. She didn’t care what Hal thought. They had to celebrate this moment, if only for a moment. To her surprise, each of them hugged her back. Together they stood, a circle of warmth in this place of chill darkness.

  She glanced down at the faces of her fallen neighbors, who now looked even paler than before. Ursula lay in her velvet burgundy funeral gown, her eyes finally closed. “We can’t just leave them here.”

  “We can’t carry them,” Hal said.

  Another rumble. Another crash.

  “He’s right,” Ping said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But how do we get back out?” Joey asked, glancing up the slope toward the spot where they’d come in. The trash had shifted, covering up the tunnel entrance.

  “It’s up there somewhere,” said Cassidy.

  The group moved purposefully up the hill, but slid several feet down when tremors rocked the room and trash loosened beneath them. The quakes were coming more and more frequently. If the vortex had created this space, now that it was shuttered, the ceiling might not hold much longer. Around the spot where they thought they’d entered, they tossed away the garbage — bags, clothes, buckets of dried paint, board games, a smashed television set. But every time they picked up an object to move it out of the way, something else moved into its place.

  A colossal crash shook the ground at the bottom of the hill. Cassidy swung the flashlight to find a massive chunk of earth had dropped, and a cloud of dust and dirt was swirling their way. “What are we going to do?” she asked, having lost all the power that her voice had contained only minutes earlier.

  No one answered.

  And then, of course, the flashlight blinked out.

  PING SQUEALED, CLUTCHING AT Cassidy’s hand. Cassidy squeezed back.

  “Stupid battery!” Joey said in the pitch darkness.

  “We’re dead,” Hal added.

  “No,” said Cassidy. “We’re not. We stay calm. We do what we need to do.” The night that Lou had broken into her apartment flashed into her mind. She’d never thought she would make it away from him. And afterward, she’d never tho
ught she’d escape her fear. But she did survive. And she did escape. It had taken effort, but then again, the truly important things always did. “Get down. Dig. Dig!”

  The group worked. Sounds of debris being tossed echoed all around. Long seconds passed. Another distant crash. Dirt rained down. Cassidy braced herself, immediately feeling ridiculous, as if tightening her muscles would protect her from a three-ton boulder dropping from above.

  “Did someone say something?” Joey asked, a disembodied voice in the dark.

  “I heard someone whisper,” Ping said from somewhere nearby.

  “What was it?” Hal asked.

  But Joey didn’t have time to answer. Another voice came from somewhere beneath the layer of debris. Here, it whispered. This was followed by a dog’s muffled bark.

  Blind, Cassidy leaned toward the spot where the sounds had come.

  “Is it another trap?” This was Ping.

  “No,” Cassidy said, reaching into the pile of junk, pulling it away, feeling for the ledge and the passage from which they’d earlier tumbled. “It’s Ursula. And Lucky. They’re trying to help.”

  They crawled then stood and stumbled through the blackened, garbage-strewn tunnel, talking constantly to one another — Here, Here, Here, Here — so they wouldn’t become separated. Cassidy reached out every few feet, feeling for Ping’s shoulder. Behind her, she felt Joey do the same. They moved quickly, the ground trembling, great pounding sounds of collapsing rock echoing up the passage from behind them. Once they reached the section of the path that was free from the beast’s “collection,” they began to run, feeling for the walls that narrowed with every step, every turn.

  Continuing the ascent blindly, Cassidy wondered if this might all be a dream, for certainly it had all the hallmarks. Maybe, in a moment or two, she’d wake up in Tony’s bed, or for that matter, on the small couch in her mother’s apartment, her heart racing, sweat on her brow. But she wasn’t dreaming, she soon discovered. A dim light appeared up ahead. They all cried out, in relief, in pain, in shock, as they tumbled from the crevice onto the trash-strewn floor of the Chambers house basement.