by Harper Lin
At the other end of the bunker, I heard a door open. Looking around, I saw a strange ladder that led up to what must have been an attic at one time. Without giving Bea a chance to say anything, I dashed up the rickety old ladder, hoping it wouldn’t wait until I was at the very top to give way.
“Cath!” Bea hissed.
“Get help,” I mouthed then disappeared into the blackened ceiling.
Not the First
No sooner had I pulled my feet up into the black darkness of the attic than I heard the clump-clump-clump of heavy work boots on the floor. Whoever it was stomped through the house but didn’t make his way to the kitchen.
I pulled myself into a small dark corner, tucking my legs underneath me while I squinted, letting my eyes get used to the darkness.
There was very little space for me to stand up. The highest height I could reach was on my knees with my back hunched over. There were small pockets of light where the floor of the attic had broken. They looked like small suns in the vast blackness but gave me enough light to see that I could, if I were careful, inch my way from one end of the complex to the other. It was one long space between the ceiling of the rooms below and the roof above my head.
Two long beams ran the length of the place. They were about the width of railroad ties but not nearly as thick or sturdy. Moving in slow motion, I placed one hand on the beam and tested its strength. It seemed solid enough at this point, so I carefully leaned all my weight on it before swinging my knee on board. Holding my breath, I listened for any groans or snaps from the wood, indicating it wasn’t going to hold me up. There was nothing.
So, with cold sweat still rolling down the center of my back and under my arms, now spreading to my forehead, I inched my way to an opening in what was my floor but the Clares’ ceiling.
What I saw below was disgusting. It was as if they lived in a shanty. There were sleeping bags on the floor. More than two, so I wasn’t sure how many people actually lived here, but suddenly, I was afraid for Bea, who was hopefully making her way back to the car without anyone noticing her.
Dishes crusted over with barnacles of dried food were also on the floor and stacked on TV trays. Melted candles of various colors and sizes were standing in plates and on the wooden floor itself. But the most disturbing thing was the symbols and letters spray-painted on the walls and floor.
We weren’t just looking at a pentagram that some high school kid scribbled out in an attempt to be edgy and gothic. This was a mega-pentagram with symbols and notations only someone like Aunt Astrid would know. The only reason I recognized it was because I had seen it in one of my aunt’s books. One that was written in a language I couldn’t read with instructions I couldn’t follow and pictures I couldn’t even look at without getting the heebie-jeebies.
This was hardcore black magic. Chaos magic.
“Where’s the water?” The heavy-sounding voice startled me out of my thoughts, and I was sure I gasped so loud they heard me. I don’t know how long I held my breath and listened. If the Clares had heard me, they didn’t let on.
“Where’s the water?” he said again. It was Otto Clare, the older man. He was the one stomping around.
“It’s in the pitcher,” the younger Clare said. He walked past the hole in the ceiling but didn’t look up. He had a tattoo snaking its way up the back of his neck. I could see from the T-shirt he was wearing that his muscular arms were also covered in ink. Designs of devils and monsters and flames writhed every time his muscles flexed.
I wondered why he wasn’t cold. The temperature had dropped, and even though it should be hotter in the darkness of the attic, I was freezing.
Otto Clare walked somewhere else in the room, and I heard him pick something up. A second later, the sound of water splattering on the floor came up to me. I wondered if he had drunk some or poured it on his head or chest or just dumped it on the floor. Truthfully, I thought that was probably how they bathed. Looking at what they lived in, I would guess Civil War–era soldiers in the field had better hygiene.
Another car was approaching. From the direction of the long gravel trail Bea and I had seen, I could hear a car with a souped-up exhaust system that made it grumble at stoplights and roar through yellow lights, making a person’s chest vibrate deep inside.
“He’s early,” Otto Clare said to his younger, tattooed offspring. “Go tell him to wait.”
Early? I wondered. Early for what? What were they doing?
It didn’t take long for me to talk myself into inching a little deeper inside the house. I wanted to see who was driving that noisy car. What was he there for, and what did he want with the Clares?
There was no mention of Bea, and so far, I was sure they hadn’t noticed the kittens were missing. While I was up in the attic, I heard a scurrying to my left. The corners in between the rafters and along the floor were blacker than black. Squinting didn’t do my any good, so I gave a telepathic shout.
“Hey little one! Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on down there?”
The tiniest mouse appeared as just a fuzzy ball not far from my hand. I could see his silhouette against the fingers of light that reached delicately into the attic.
“Men in and out. Growing sad plants.”
“Are there any other animals in cages or hiding like you?”
“All dead. You can’t hide like me. You’ll be dead, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything that’s living gets eaten from the inside out.”
“By what?”
“Sometimes by themselves. Sometimes by the other thing.”
The front door slammed, and the tattooed Clare came stomping in with another man behind him. The mouse quickly jumped back into the shadows and disappeared. I gripped the beam I was on and listened.
“You’re early. It’s not ready,” Otto Clare grumbled.
“Well, let’s hurry it up. It’s bad enough I have to drive all the way out here twice a month.”
Otto Clare didn’t answer, and I couldn’t see exactly what was happening. But the man’s response gave me a pretty clear indication.
“Okay. Take your time. I’m not in any real hurry. I’ll wait outside.”
The door slammed again.
I heard Otto Clare walking to another room and followed him as best I could. A quarter-sized hole in the floor shined up at me. I leaned down and saw what the man was there to get.
Sitting on an old bureau was a scale, some plates, several bags of different-colored pills, white powder, and a plastic trashcan filled to the top with marijuana.
After all this, these guys are drug dealers? I was fascinated and terrified all at once. With slow, deliberate movements, Otto Clare measured out pills and powder and strong-smelling buds of the dried plant and put them in separate bags. I started to wonder how everything fit together.
Archie Jones started it all with his suicide. But Jake did say they found traces of horse tranquilizers in his system. I bet, if tested, some of that powder would turn out to be that stuff. If Archie stumbled across this place, that would have been all the reason they needed to make sure he didn’t talk.
But what about the Rotmirage? Where did that thing fit in?
Suddenly, the tattooed Clare walked in and stood next to his father.
“Do you smell that?”
I froze. I had forgotten all about Aunt Astrid’s smell spell. Here I was, as fragrant as a rose in early morning, plopped in the middle of a burnt-out domicile that reeked of smoke and rot.
“What?”
Tattooed Clare sniffed the air.
“Smells like a funeral parlor.”
Ouch! Unnecessary. Really.
However much that comment might have hurt my feelings, it meant something more to Otto Clare. He stopped what he was doing and looked at his son. Then he sniffed the air. I couldn’t see his face and didn’t dare lean down any further. But I could see his hands flying back and fort
h over the bureau, and they started to tremble.
“That’s not a good sign.”
“What should we do?”
“Give Rank his stuff. Get our money. We’ll deal with it once he’s gone.”
The sound of boots and a slamming screen door had become familiar. I needed to look in the other rooms, but in order to do that, I would have to find my way across some of the insulation. There was no telling how weak or rotten the wood had become. Not to mention spiders. So far I had been able to push the fact out of focus that they probably surrounded me and that at any second one might just crawl in my hair. But if I was going to do this, I was going to have to face my fear—arachnophobia.
Again, I focused on the situation at hand. Was I really going to be scared of these eight-legged creatures when there were literal murdering drug dealers just a few feet from me? I was trespassing on their property. Technically, they had the right to kill me. Plus, I’d seen the drugs. I knew what they were doing. Was a spider really scarier? That depended on the size. Everyone knew that.
I took a deep breath and held it. With bravery I was scraping up from the soles of my feet, I carefully turned myself toward what would be the back of the house and to the left of the gravel driveway that was outside. There was a hole the size of my fist that was between the support beam I had been utilizing this whole time and a smaller beam that showed through worn-out layers of insulation. I stretched a trembling hand out and felt the wood, pushing on it slightly to see if there was any cracking sound or rotten feeling to it. All I felt were the petrified remains of what that mouse left behind and a layer of dust so thick my hands were sure to be nearly black with filth.
Contorting my body as though I were playing a game of Twister, I leaned over the hole and carefully looked in. I gasped. The walls were covered in more spray paint. This time, it was the image of the Rotmirage that stared back at me. Even in plain black paint against what had once been a room with white walls and a wooden floor, the image was terrifying. The blank, two-dimensional eyes stared at me from the wall. Without realizing it, I leaned back out of its view just in case. Mystic symbols that should never see the light of day were broadcast across the walls and floor.
In the middle of the room, stuffed into several large garbage bags, was money. If I had to guess, I would have said there was over a million dollars in cash just sitting there in the middle of this broken-down room, with nothing but a painted image of the Rotmirage to watch over it.
The rumble of the car the dude named Rank drove started up again. With all that noise to cover my movements, I shifted my body and maneuvered my way to a second, larger hole that was about the size of my head. I was about to peek down when I heard Otto Clare start to yell.
“Leland!” he screamed. His voice shook the whole place. Within seconds, the rumbling engine began to recede as it obviously drove back down the gravel road it originally travelled. “Leland! They’re gone!”
The thought hit me across the chest, knocking out my breath. He was talking about the kittens. But how had he gotten to that room without my hearing him? I didn’t hear Otto Clare take a single step. Yet his voice was coming from that part of the complex. Quickly, I scurried to what seemed to be the darkest corner of the attic. I flattened myself down between the support beam and a reinforcement beam, pulling a small tuft of insulation up for additional camouflage.
The idea of one of the Clares making his way up that old ladder, their head swiveling from side to side as they scanned the attic for signs of an intruder, terrified me. Drug dealers were known to kill without mercy. Demonic, Rotmirage-worshipping drug dealers were probably a tad worse.
Leland came running back in from outside. I heard his heavy boots and the screen door slam.
“You didn’t lock the cages,” the old man hissed.
“I did. You were right here when I did it.”
“Well, obviously, you didn’t do it right. It isn’t like when we had the horses. It could use those for months.”
Someone shuffled their feet and paced nervously.
“I’ll go out and get another one. There are plenty of alley cats. Stray dogs. I could even steal one from a fenced-in yard if I have to,” Leland muttered.
Hearing him say he’d just collect some stray cats made my blood boil but filled me with sadness. Of course, I thought of my Treacle. Those poor kittens we had taken out of here. How many more had died in the meantime, before Tamara had her terrifying experience and Archie Jones was murdered? That was probably where the soul parasites came from. Aunt Astrid had said they thrived in massive graves. With all these acres of land, the Clares could have dumped the bodies anywhere or everywhere.
“And your bones might join them.” Was that my thought or something else in my head? I peeked up, but still no one was looking at me from the steps. Looking to my right, I saw no grotesque, milky eyes staring at me from a head that was up through one of the many holes. I was alone.
I began to wonder what time it was. It had to be getting darker outside. Did Bea make it back to the car, or did the woods turn her around so she was still out there wandering and looking for the car? Did she still have the kittens, or did they scratch their way away from her, trust in humans completely shattered and gone?
And if Bea hadn’t gotten away, if she didn’t go to get help, how long would I last up here before they would find me? How long was I going to be able to stay hidden? Would I ever see Tom again? Would I ever see Blake again?
Now why in the world would I be thinking about him at a time like this? It was ridiculous. Some might say it bordered on a sickness or something. Tom was the one who was handsome and funny and bought wonderful presents and, most importantly, understood what I was. What I am. And I wanted to see him again.
“There ain’t no time for all that. Tomorrow, you’ll get me some replacements. But tonight, you know what needs to be done.” Otto Clare’s voice sounded almost relieved at whatever cryptic message he was conveying.
“No, Dad. I can get another animal. It won’t take me any time at all. Just don’t call it yet and…”
“Don’t call it?” Otto Clare laughed sadistically. “Let you get away with neglecting your duties? Now, son, you know I can’t do that. Look what happened to your older brother when I let him off the hook. You want to take that risk?”
Leland didn’t make a sound.
“You remember what he looked like after that? We had to keep him chained up in the barn until the whole thing was over. Buried him next to your mom in the family plot. You remember?”
“Dad, let me go get another one. Please.”
This wasn’t just a family drug business. There was something frightfully oppressive working on this family. I had to get out of here. I had to get back to Bea and Aunt Astrid and Tom and tell them they needed to sweep this whole area. There were bodies here, and I’d bet my last dollar there was more than one restless soul among them. But all I could do now was wait.
“Sorry, son. Sometimes we have to learn the hard way.” Otto Clare began to mumble something. His voice moved from the back of the house to the front, almost directly beneath me. Leland’s footsteps followed. Funny how again I didn’t hear the old man’s footsteps. That was just plain weird.
Otto Clare’s voice wove together a string of words that to the untrained ear sounded like mad babblings. A person with Tourette syndrome might sound like this.
But I knew what he was doing. I had seen my aunt slip into spell-recitation mode a hundred times. He was calling something. I knew what that was, too.
Slowly, I crawled out from my hiding place and tenderly inched my way to the room I thought the Clares were in. They were in what was the front room by the door.
Otto Clare’s voice was low and scratchy and menacing. His son paced back and forth nervously. It was as if he was waiting for his father to stop what he was doing and show some compassion. But it didn’t happen.
I couldn’t imagine what Leland was thinking. My own mother dove right int
o the path of a monster to save me. Here Otto Clare was, practically feeding his son to one. I was witnessing abuse, and no matter how big and scary Leland Clare was, he was still this man’s son. My heart ached a little for him.
But quickly enough, I heard that sound. That familiar sound that made my skin itch to tear itself from my bones and get away. The sound that made my heart thud in my chest even though all my insides felt as if they had sunk to my feet. The sweat on my body became a sheet of ice.
“Let me in,” it cried in that singsongy voice. “Let me in.”
With more stealth than I knew I was capable of, I shifted over and balanced on two beams so I could look outside in the direction I thought the Rotmirage was coming from. Once again, its body was all hunched over as it dug at the foundation of the building. Why did it do that? Why didn’t it just climb through the open window, as I did? What was the purpose of burrowing and clawing at the foundation?
As it scratched at the ground, it kicked the dirt up behind it, as a dog might. It was feverishly digging and making horrible grunting noises before it would stop and move a few feet farther down the base of the house and start again. In between, it would sing, “Let me in, let me in.”
Finally, it slipped out of view, and I went back to where the Clares were waiting. But when I looked down the hole, I saw them standing there. Otto Clare was all swollen up with contempt as he stared at his son. Leland looked past his father toward the door, ready to take his punishment.
The Rotmirage suddenly appeared. First it was a gnarly arm that shot straight up through the floor. Except it wasn’t the actual floor. It pushed its way through the delicate membrane that separated this dimension from another one. That would explain why there was dead silence when Bea and I had gone to explore County Line Road 63. My gosh. What was all this?
The hideous creature strained and struggled as it pulled itself up. The boney hoof clomped on the floor, but I really couldn’t tell if that was a real sound or just in my head. What I was seeing, I was sure no one was supposed to see. When Aunt Astrid slipped into other dimensions, it was seamless, and she disturbed nothing. The Rotmirage treated the delicate layers as it did the rough ground outside. It tore through them, ripping and scratching away at the astral fiber like a child ripping open a present. There was no regard for the order of things.