“You might be right. Hell, you usually are. But if this will make them feel better, then what’s the harm?”
Dierdra grimaces.
Viktor hugs her. Kisses her ear. Rubs her back. “Let’s just try it their way for a couple days. Please. I promise not to be an asshole again for at least a few days.”
Dierdra pulls herself away.
Viktor holds her hand. “I love you.”
“I love you.” Dierdra smiles. she sighs with resignation. “Okay, let’s help them hunt their monsters.”
* * *
The Svoboda house is not an armory.
Caleb sits on the basement stairs. Jack, Viktor, and Elie rummage through the dusty, cluttered area for implements of self-defense. A crowbar makes its way onto a long workbench. A claw hammer follows. A hand-held propane torch. A pair of long-bladed hedge trimmers that look like giant scissors. Another baseball bat. An old axe.
Elie coughs. Sneezes. He blows a mote of dust up from one of the corners of the concrete basement. “Shit.” He wipes his nose. “I’m gonna die down here.” He coughs again. “My family hunted Nazis and I’m gonna be killed by poor housekeeping.”
Jack lets out a holler from the other side of the room. “Oh yeah. I call the chainsaw.” He lifts a big Husqvarna tree-killer. “This thing is awesome. Took down that big old sonuvabitch Spruce before we built me a clubhouse in the backyard. Remember, Dad? Badass.”
Viktor plucks the chainsaw from Jack’s grip. “That was fun. But you’ll chop more than bad guys if you use this in the house. Ninety-three-point-six-CCs of angry steel teeth will tear this damn place down. If Godzilla attacks, then it’s all yours.”
Viktor puts the heavy machine down on the table and looks at the haphazard assortment of weaponry. He scratches his cheek. Grumbles.
Elie says, “Don’t you have a gun?”
“Don’t like em,” Viktor says. “Don’t want one in the house. Kids. But there’s your shotgun. Jack’s been good with the bat. I guess I’ll use the crowbar if it comes to that. Maybe the axe. Not like we’re fighting North Korea or anything. I think this is fine.” He puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder and looks to Caleb. “You guys want to help me work on the Charger while it’s still light out?”
Both boys roll their eyes. Obviously we do.
* * *
Catarina and Dierdra sit in the living room. Each cradle a cup of coffee spiked with a dash of Jameson. The television’s on, but muted. Catarina’s homework lies open in front of her.
“We were talking about how cute it is when you play ‘war,’” Catarina says.
Caleb ignores her. “We’re gonna work on the Charger, Mom.”
“You can do that—” Dierdra sips her Irish coffee “—But, Zarifa called. She and some of your classmates are going to the park. She’s going to stop by and see if you want to go.”
Caleb smiles a big, stupid grin. The memory of the dead face disappears.
“He can’t walk by himself,” Jack says.
Dierdra nods. “Zarifa’s Dad, Benham, is on his way over with her now. He’s going to walk them both to the park. It’s okay. He won’t be by himself.”
There’s a knock at the door.
Jack shakes his head. Slow. He doesn’t like this idea one bit.
Viktor looks to Elie. The older men approve. It’s still light out. Neither thinks anything will happen.
In Jack’s mind, worst-case scenarios play like bloody horror movies.
Viktor taps Jack on the arm. “Your brother will be fine. We can’t act like prisoners.” Then he kneels. Puts himself at eye-level with Caleb. “You’ve got your phone?”
Caleb nods.
“If anything scary happens, you run like the wind?”
Caleb nods.
“You call the house when you get there and when you’re leaving?”
Caleb nods.
“All right.” Viktor ruffles Caleb’s hair. “Have fun.”
Caleb pops open the kitchen door. He heads out to the street.
Jack grabs his arm from behind. “Hang on. Don’t tell Mom or Dad about this.” He puts a small switchblade knife in his little brother’s hand. It’s black. On one side is a silver button. Jack points to it. “Hit that, the blade comes out. When you’re done, fold it back into the handle. Don’t stick yourself with it.”
Caleb’s mouth drops open in awe. This is a Big Guy thing. His little heart swells with an indisputable feeling of worthiness. He hugs Jack. Stuffs the knife into one of the big leg pockets on his cargo pants. Then walks to Zarifa.
* * *
September air swirls over Caleb’s hoodie as they travel to Dyker Beach Park. He and Zarifa don’t say much to the other. They jaunt in tandem. Zarifa skips at a few points. They race down certain blocks. Sometimes Caleb wins. Sometimes Zarifa wins.
Benham watches it all with a smile. He carries an Arabic newspaper that Caleb can’t read. Mr. Dajani doesn’t speak much English, and when he does ask a question, it comes out a little broken. Caleb wonders if that’s the real reason for the man’s quietness: Some kind of embarrassment.
They enter the park. A dozen children run in an intense game of tag. Benham says something to Zarifa that Caleb can’t understand. Then he makes his way toward a bench.
“He’s gonna read the paper,” Zarifa says. She joins Caleb.
Caleb shrugs.
Both children insert themselves into the fray. They’re greeted with laughs and cheerful faces. Nobody mentions The Boner Incident.
After ninety minutes of tag, Red Rover and Frisbee, Johnny—the unofficial leader of the class—decides they should play hide and seek near the thick wall of trees in the park’s center. Everyone agrees.
Who cares if there isn’t much daylight left?
Benham gives Caleb a little wave. He watches the boy charge off with the others. He checks his watch. Hopes the little Svoboda will come right back. Not realizing that the kids are playing hide and seek. That can take a long time.
Benham doesn’t even know what the game is. The way he grew up in Afghanistan didn’t allow for playing like that.
Now he can’t find either of the children in his care.
The trees’ shadows grow long.
The sun sits on the horizon like a scoop of orange ice cream.
And Caleb is certain he’s found the best hiding spot in the entire park. He isn’t gonna be found. No way no how.
Twenty minutes pass, proving that point.
The sky becomes a stain of dark blue ink.
Caleb stays hidden for about thirty minutes—a record, he thinks—down inside a shallow trough beneath a thick bush. Probably carved out by animals. The foliage above provides the best kind of natural cover.
There were a couple times where the young Svoboda was certain he was going to be found. Dark figures of his friends passed mere feet in front of him. He could see them scanning the spot where he waited. But he held his breath and flattened himself out. After a minute or two, the shapes left.
Caleb’s just about the cleverest boy in Brooklyn. Yes, sir. Don’t you forget it.
A shape returns.
Caleb ducks down. He curls into a fetal position. Tries to make himself a ball.
Maybe he’s the last person to be found. That’d be a treat. Or maybe he’d never be found. That would be the real treat. It would mean he wins.
He keeps still, but the figure doesn’t move. A minute ticks by. And this jerk still hasn’t moved. If Caleb is going to be found, so be it, but enough of this. What’s the deal?
Caleb hears the shape wheeze.
It’s not like breathing. It’s like air is being forced out of the lungs.
The frenzied rat of panic scratches at the walls of Caleb’s brain.
His phone rings.
The dark shape jerks at the sound and moves closer.
Caleb looks at the phone. It’s his house number. His folks are calling to get him home. Great.
Caleb realizes he’s lost the game. He mutters a
few curses.
The twisted face of Johnny pushes its way through the branches above.
Caleb drops the phone.
Red drips in globs onto Caleb’s cargo pants. He doesn’t scream. He lashes out like a trapped animal. His fist impacts with his classmate’s contorted face.
Caleb hears a snap.
More red falls.
Caleb jumps to the side. Out of the reach of Johnny and out of the bush.
Johnny turns toward him. His jaw hangs limp and broken. Caleb starts to apologize. “I’m sorry—” He stops when he sees that Johnny’s feet aren’t touching the ground.
Panic breaks into full terror.
Dead face. Dead face. Dead face, runs through Caleb’s mind.
He trips and falls. Scuttles away on his ass. He feels for the switchblade Jack gave him. He lifts the knife. Presses the small button with his thumb. The blade pops out and cuts Caleb’s cheek. He winces, feeling both a small trickle of blood and a pang of stupidity.
Caleb stands. He holds the sharp weapon out. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong. But leave me alone, okay? Just go. Go. Leave me alone.” Like he’s talking to a misbehaving dog.
The Johnny-thing follows Caleb.
Caleb pleads. “I’ll go get an adult if you’re hurt, but leave me alone.” He starts to cry. He doesn’t understand what’s going on.
The body of his friend rises higher off the ground.
The Johnny-thing dives at him.
Caleb feels a hammer blow to his chest. He catches staccato glimpses of dark trees as he tumbles.
Johnny’s eyes roll. His head lists from side to side. Caleb tries to push Johnny off, but he can’t find the strength. His free hand touches something thick and slimy behind Johnny’s head. He can feel the muscles pulse under its disgusting, gelatinous skin.
Maybe some kind of snake or worm bit his classmate. Maybe this thing that had attached itself to his pal was making all of these crazy things happen.
Caleb starts carving into it with the switchblade. He’s going to free Johnny from it.
Johnny’s labored wheezing becomes an inhuman scream. Wet, thick gore coats Caleb’s hands and makes them slippery. Johnny’s eyes burn. Malicious.
Caleb doesn’t see the tubular thing when it snaps and pulls away.
Johnny’s body goes slack.
Caleb squeezes out from underneath his former classmate. His heart rumbles in his chest. He blinks hard and stares at his hands through tears. They’re covered in an oily black substance that stinks like rotten meat.
He looks around. He can see people rush toward him. They must have heard the fight. The woods in the park are thick, but not thick enough to hide a tussle of this magnitude.
The thing he hacked at writhes in the leaves. It lashes back and forth like a downed electrical wire. Caleb watches the worm monster shudder and puke out more fetid gore. It’s big. Longer than anything he’s ever seen on the Discovery Channel.
He hears it shriek. Or thinks he does, anyway. His head throbs with the noise. Some kind of horrible cerebral static. Pain pumps in his brain. He cries more. Throws the knife away.
The creature retreats into the dirt. Down.
Caleb kneels near Johnny. The other boy isn’t moving. Caleb prods the black chunk of worm still attached to the base of his classmate’s neck. It wriggles. He jumps back. It’s jaw chews a little.
“Johnny,” Caleb screams. Tears stream down his cheeks.
He can’t stand. He can’t think. He can’t function.
His twelve-year-old mind hopes that Johnny will shake it off. He wants his friend to get up and thank him for fighting off the worm-thing. He can’t accept that Johnny’s dead.
“Help,” Caleb howls. “Help. Something attacked Johnny. Someone help.”
He crawls to his cell phone and dials home.
Jack answers. “What the hell, dude? Where are you?”
Caleb sobs. “I know where the monsters come from.” He loses his grip on the phone. It clatters to the side.
Jack’s voice falls away with it.
Chapter 8: Esse est percipi
(To be is to be perceived)
Jack gets to Caleb first. He grabs his sobbing brother. Tries to console the boy. But there isn’t much use.
A crowd gathers around. Along with confounded paramedics.
Benham looks so distraught people wonder if his own son had been killed.
Caleb tells the story over and over. Tells the cops how something dark and long and strong had come out of the ground and attacked his friend and made him do terrible things. Things no kid should ever be able to do.
He tells the NYPD sergeant that he didn’t mean to hurt Johnny. He thought he was helping by getting rid of that nasty thing on Johnny’s neck.
He tells the EMTs he was okay. Just bruises. Little cuts.
He tells the doctors at the hospital, Yeah, Johnny came after him.
Adults with degrees nod and murmur and Jack comes close to slugging one doc who insinuates that Caleb had really wanted to kill Johnny.
Caleb shakes his head. Tells the story again.
After days of prodding and questioning, the police clear Caleb. Zarifa serves as a character witness. Caleb’s classmates and teachers back up what she’s got to say. Caleb would never do anything violent to anyone.
He’s a goddamn angel.
The police don’t care much about that. They care more about the coroner’s report. It shows that Johnny’s wounds weren’t caused by Caleb or the illegal knife.
The report says that Johnny died from a scissoring of the spinal cord at the base of the skull. Where that weird, horrible worm latched on. After the autopsy and toxicology test, officials find that a peculiar kind of poison or toxic fluid that they can’t identify had been pumped into the boy. His nerves were fried by the substance.
The report says it looks “like something crawled into the boy’s head and had a panic attack. There is violence done to the inside of the skull.”
The damage Johnny’s body sustained in the fight with Caleb was post mortem.
So, Caleb’s cleared. But he’s also forced to spend the next month seeing a state-mandated therapist.
Nobody enjoys the experience. Caleb gets so angry at the therapist’s refusal to believe his story, and so bored by the procedure, that he gives up and tells the shrink what the shrink wants to hear. He bullshits his way off the couch and back home to a warm meal.
The shrink with a wall full of diplomas says, “You’re a very young man who just went through a very serious ordeal. How are you feeling about that?”
Caleb pretends to seriously consider the question. “I think it’s hit me in ways I don’t even understand yet. Watching someone die—especially for a person my age—isn’t easy. Or normal.”
“Are you worried that you might be burying some of your emotions to make the situation easier to deal with?”
“It’s not that I’m worried... It’s that I know I’m burying some shit so I don’t have to deal with it directly.”
The shrink nods. “That’s interesting, Caleb. You seem to be much more in tune with yourself than most people your age. You’re even more in tune than a lot of my patients who are much, much older.”
Caleb smiles. Lies. “Well, being able to talk to a professional has helped me tremendously.”
Caleb maintains his smile. Thinks, Just let me go home, this is stupid.
Weeks drone on. Nothing happens. No faces appear in the windows. No shapes. Whatever had been hunting the family seems to have stopped.
In slow, stuttering starts and stops, Caleb feels like a boy of twelve again. Jack keeps an eye on him. Patrick visits to play video games. And, most importantly, Zarifa becomes a fixture at the house. She’s there for homework. She’s there for dinner.
More than a month after the horror, Caleb wonders if he has a Catarina.
Though he’ll never brave enough to put that thought into words.
Mind and life go back to
normal.
Just in time for Halloween.
Chapter 9: Spooky Action At a Distance
October Thirty-first.
Samhain.
Halloween.
In the Stygian blackness, the strings shake.
Let there be Nightmares.
Chapter 10: The Soundtrack to Insanity
Caleb decides to be Albert Einstein for Halloween.
His parents prep him in their bedroom.
Dierdra douses his hair with baby powder to give it a grey tinge. She digs up some of her dad’s sweaters for Caleb to wear. Viktor threatens to affix gross facial shavings to the boy for a “more authentic” mustache, but relents in the end.
Jack watches the costume come together with his arms crossed. He’s in jeans and cowboy boots and a brown rawhide jacket. “You know he, like, married his own cousin, right? Left his first wife to shamalamadingdong his cousin.” He nods like a talk show host who’s really, really listening.
Caleb turns his head to Jack. He purses his lips in frustration. Almost knocks off the fake moustache that his mother worked so hard to attach. “Stuff it, Jack.”
Dierdra pulls Caleb’s chin back toward her so she can make the fake facial hair stay. She eyeballs Jack. “Where’s your costume, wise guy?”
Jack holds up a finger. “Ah.” He pulls out a blue-white nametag sticker. He peels the wax-paper back off. Slaps it onto the front of his brown rawhide jacket. It reads: HELLO my name is THE MAN WITH NO NAME. He points to himself. Smug as hell. He waits for either his parents or Caleb to get the joke.
He gives up a heartbeat later. “It’s a Clint Eastwood thing. Y’know, all the Sergio Leone movies? The ‘Dollars Trilogy’—The Good the Bad and the Ugly, For a Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars? Clint plays The Man With—”
“Oh, no, we get it,” Viktor says. He throws up his hand. Stop. “It’s very clever.” A wry smile crosses his lips as he and Dierdra share an unspoken joke.
Jack shoves his hands in his pockets. He mutters under his breath. “Well...screw you guys.”
“You need a hat, Cowboy. Hang on.” Viktor saunters into the master bedroom. He returns with a light brown Stetson in his hands. It’s got a wide brim. He hands it to Jack. “Hopefully that smartass brain of yours hasn’t made your head so big it doesn’t fit.”
Emergence Page 6