by Ian Rogers
“What kind of pies do you have?”
“Apple, blueberry, strawberry-rhubarb, peach, and pumpkin.”
“One of each,” he said without smiling. “Please.”
Nothing surprises me at this point, Rachel thought on her way back to the kitchen.
But she was wrong. After she brought out the pies, Henry surveyed each one, picked up his fork, and began to eat. Rachel couldn’t watch any longer. Henry was sick, this whole thing was sick, and she didn’t want to look at it anymore. She felt like she was participating in an execution. She wished she hadn’t taken Josie’s shift.
She was turning away when Henry said, “This is a good place.”
“What?”
“The Crescent Diner. This is a good place. Good food, good service. I like it.”
Rachel stared at him.
“I’m fit to burst,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish these.”
She looked down and saw that he had taken a single bite out of each piece of pie.
“There was a guy from around these parts, name of Mundy or Mindy, I can’t remember which. He wrote a book about bad places.”
“A food critic?” Rachel asked.
“Something like that,” Henry said dismissively. “He had a word for these bad places. He called them ‘pressure points.’ I knew a girl once who called them something else. A much more appropriate word, in my opinion.” He paused in remembrance, or maybe for effect. “She called them ‘tornadoes.’
“Do you read?” he asked suddenly.
Rachel shook her head. “Only the expiry dates on the milk cartons at the Food Mart,” she said, and Henry laughed.
“Can I get my bill?”
Rachel took her order pad out of the pouch on the front of her uniform. She flipped through the sheets on which she had scribbled Henry’s orders throughout the day. She couldn’t remember the last time she had to add so many numbers. Finally she scribbled a total at the bottom of the page and plunked it down on the table.
Henry reached into his houndstooth jacket and produced a thick wad of bills bound with a rubber band. He paid the bill and then placed the still-considerable stack of cash on the table. He smoothed it out and placed the origami cow on top of it.
“That’s for you,” he said.
And then without another word, he stood up, ignoring Rachel’s stunned expression, and left the diner.
Rachel turned around in time to see the door swing shut. She heard the sound of Henry’s shoes on the crushed gravel in the parking lot, and a second later she saw him pass in front of the side window on his way around to the back of the diner.
The next time she saw him he was on page four of the Sutter County Register.
IV
There are haunted places in the world. Dark places. Shunned places. Forgotten places. All existing in reality and every bit as tangible and accessible as the house next door. Sometimes it is the house next door.
But hauntings aren’t restricted to houses. There are also haunted apartments and haunted trailers, haunted farms and haunted restaurants, haunted churches and haunted schools, and, on Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto, there is even a haunted fish-processing plant.
In the unexpunged edition of The North American Guide to Haunted Architectural Structures and Supernatural Pressure Points (Horsehead Press, 1949), paranormal researcher Dale Mundy declared that the most haunted building south of the Mason-Dixon Line was not a house but a cabin. Cabin D, to be exact, at the Crescent Moon Motel in Tennessee.
According to Mundy, no one who stayed in Cabin D—the Crescent Moon’s honeymoon suite—lived to see morning. The cabin had been built away from the others in a clearing in the woods, the thought being that seclusion equalled romance. Mundy didn’t mention exactly how many newlyweds had died in Cabin D, but he soliloquized on vast numbers of young lovers who never even had the chance to consummate their wedding vows. Eventually the owner stopped renting it out, and then, in October of 1923, a hurricane dubbed “The Southern Banshee” tore through Sutter County and reduced every cabin at the Crescent Moon to splinters. Every one except Cabin D.
Some people in Sutter County said the destruction of the Crescent Moon cabins was a blessing; others went one further and called it “nature’s exorcism.” The following summer, the land was bought by a developer and a motel was put up in the cabins’ place—not directly on the site of the demolished cabins but closer to the highway. The new owner was never told about the existence of Cabin D because the old owner wasn’t around to tell them. The Southern Banshee had exorcised him, as well.
The new motel opened in the fall and Cabin D was left to rot quietly in the woods. It had always been a dark place, a shunned place, and now it became a forgotten place.
Occasionally it reminded the world of its existence. Hobos and transients in search of shelter from Tennessee’s brutal thunderstorms sometimes came upon the lone cabin in the woods. Most of them were struck dead before they could get within ten feet of the front door. A few made it inside, but as the saying goes at the roach motel, They check in, but they don’t check out.
Despite the lofty theories of pundits like Dale Mundy, Cabin D was not hungry for blood, or souls, or Hostess Twinkies. It simply didn’t like visitors. It had stood in the woods beyond the Crescent Moon Motel for over eighty years, and, like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it might stand for eighty more.
But some people—those who had not forgotten about Cabin D—decided they couldn’t take that chance.
V
When he reached the edge of the parking lot, Henry kicked off his shoes and continued on barefoot. The grass was cool and damp under his feet. It was incredibly refreshing, and it took his mind off the gargantuan meal he had just eaten . . . and the cancer that was eating him.
It also took his mind off the thing that was waiting for him in the woods. The thing that had been masquerading as a dilapidated cabin for the last eighty years.
Cabin D hadn’t killed anyone in seven years—not since a seventeen-year-old runaway named Justin Dugby came upon the cabin one rainy night—but the group Henry worked for decided enough was enough. It was time to take Cabin D out of the game.
Except we can’t do that without taking one of ourselves out of the game.
Henry recalled something one of his science teachers had said, about how energy could neither be created nor destroyed. The poisonous cloud that Cabin D had existed within all these years operated under a similar principle. It could not be destroyed, as such, but the malefic energy that thrummed through its walls could be negated.
Travis had given him the means to do that very thing. A small post-hypnotic trigger that—if it worked—would snuff out both the cabin’s influence and Henry’s life. A fair trade, he thought. The authorities would find his body, eventually, and he’d be written off as just another dead vagrant. He wasn’t carrying any identification, not that it would have mattered anyway. He had been legally dead since he joined the group eleven years earlier.
Passing through the grass and into the dense woods, Henry could feel the pressure building up around him. His ears felt stuffed with invisible cotton. The sound of his footsteps seemed distant, not his own. As he pressed on, the pressure continued to build until he thought his head might explode. Cabin D didn’t like visitors. Travis had shown him a satellite photograph of the woods behind the Crescent Diner, pointing out a number of black dots in the clearing where Cabin D stood.
Birds, Travis had said with a dark grin. Makes you kind of glad there are no commercial flight routes that cross over it, huh?
That was part of the reason Henry had volunteered to take out Cabin D. Yes, the cabin was mostly cut off from the world, and yes, more people died each year from lightning strikes and shark attacks, but those were natural occurrences. There was nothing natural about Cabin D. And things could change very quickly. Cabin D wasn’t sitting on prime real estate now, but who could say what would happen ten, fifteen,
or fifty years from now? The possibilities were as endless as they were disturbing.
The last few weeks leading up to his departure, Travis had started calling Henry “The Amazing Psychic Suicide Bomber.” Henry didn’t mind. At least Travis was still talking to him. By that time, most of the others in the group were ignoring him completely. In their minds he was already dead. He was like a ghost walking among them. They knew what he was planning to do and they were afraid for him.
And now here it was.
Henry stepped out between two hoary oaks and into a sea of tall grass that wavered gently in the night wind. Cabin D stood about forty feet away.
The wind picked up and the cabin seemed to creak scornfully.
Henry cleared his throat and spoke in a loud, carrying voice.
“Think of this as the return of the Southern Banshee. Back to finish the job.”
He felt the pressure around his body intensify, like he was being squeezed within a giant invisible fist. Cabin D didn’t like visitors in general, and it absolutely hated him. Henry could feel it. That was his freak, his wild talent, the thing his mother had called his “little extra.” It had allowed him to converse with the dead, to read portents in broken glass and animal bones, and now it was the thing keeping him from dropping dead like the birds or any of the unfortunate souls who had travelled into Cabin D’s noxious orbit.
Henry bore these intangible touchings as he waded through the tall grass toward the cabin. He went up the short flight of steps to the front door. He raised his hand and saw the veins sticking out on his arms like bas-relief. He opened the door—it wasn’t locked—and stepped inside.
The air was dry and still. Galaxies of dust motes revolved slowly in the moonlight that filtered in through the windows. Henry realized with a kind of dim awe that he was the first person to step inside Cabin D in over eighty years.
There was still furniture in the cabin: an old horsehair sofa, two puke-green easy chairs, and a wooden coffee table that had been warped so badly by eighty years of moisture that it now resembled some strange piece of modern art. Hanging over the sofa was a painting of a summer landscape that was so sun-faded it could have now passed as a winter scene.
Stepping further into the room, Henry felt the pressure around him turn up a notch. Invisible fingers scrutinized the rondure of his skull like the shell of a hardboiled egg. He went into the bedroom.
The bed was neatly made, though the sheets lay in their own funky miasma of mildew. He went back out into the main room and sat down on the sofa, sending up a cloud of dust that caused him to cough loudly. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
All alone in the honeymoon suite, he thought. It doesn’t get much lower than this. He felt the Cabin probing his eyesockets, his ears, the smooth trunk of his neck, looking for leverage, access.
In his mind he pictured the trigger. Except it didn’t look like a trigger; it looked like a metal ring. He felt the pressure increase again, the hands scampering frantically over his body, patting him down, looking desperately for some way in. The ring was attached to something. In his mind Henry raised an invisible hand and slipped a finger through the ring. He let out a deep sigh and flexed his mind.
Henry slumped down on the couch, a small thread of blood trickling out of his nostril. He wondered dimly if it worked. His eyes flicked to the window as a cluster of shingles fell off the roof and landed in the tall grass. A crack appeared in the front door with a loud splintering sound. A floorboard snapped upward like a drawbridge. There was a low groaning sound that might have been the cabin settling. To Henry it was sound of something dying. He smiled and closed his eyes.
WINTER HAMMOCK
November 29
The power went off today. Which means my days of writing on the laptop are officially numbered. The battery will die, and there’s no way in hell I’m going back across the bridge for another one. Not with those things wandering around.
I found this ledger in a desk, and it’ll do the job fine. The job of what? I don’t know. Writing my story, I guess. Isn’t that what the guy in my position is supposed to do? Leave some sort of record behind about how things used to be before they got fucked up royally. So the people who come after can learn from our mistakes. It sounds like a good theory, except I’m not so sure there’s going to be any “people after.” Not now. Maybe not ever.
But I have lots of time. Oodles of time! Not much food, not much water, but time coming out of my ears! Time to kill, you could say. And I guess there’s no harm in writing a few things down. For posterity, right? Ha-ha!
I’m not going to rewrite everything I put on the laptop. Writing this down is like reliving the past, and I just can’t do it. Living through it once is bad enough. So you’ll have to excuse me if I break into the program-already-in-progress. I’ll give you a few highlights.
My name is Reggie Norris, formerly of 425 West Hill Street, Oakridge, Washington, currently of . . . I don’t know. It’s a warehouse on the dark side of the moon—by which I mean the far side of town, near the coast. That’s all I can really say. I don’t even know what they ship or receive at this place. Except for a few crates, the warehouse was empty when I got here.
Most of the Oakridgers worked at the factories and plants on the other side of the Town Bridge. I’d been trying to get on with one of them, but apparently you needed to be related to someone who already works here or know the secret handshake just to get an interview. I didn’t want to work in a factory, driving a forklift or unpacking crates of computer parts, but I didn’t have much of a choice.
I came here to go to school, and dropped out before my first year was up. I wasn’t a party guy, and I didn’t fall in love; I just didn’t have what it took to make the grades. It happens, I guess. My parents didn’t disown me, but they didn’t want me to come home. I made my bed and I’d have to sleep in it, were my father’s words. So I got a job at Radio Shack. Some life, huh?
It’s funny. Trying to justify my existence as a drop-out while the world slides slowly into hell.
November 30
I worked the evening shift with a guy named Barney Tobermeier. Barney was a townie. He was fifty-four and lived in a trailer with a sign over the door that said CASA BARNEY. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he couldn’t see beyond his next paycheque or his next hangover. Mostly we goofed off. The nights were dead, except for the odd yuppie looking for fuses or a coaxial cable or a cell phone charger. We talked a lot. Barney liked to say he was wise in what he called “real-life truths.” These were secret (and usually useless) tidbits of information that the public wasn’t privy to. Things like which reality TV shows were actually scripted and which were real; which music albums contained secret lyrics when played backwards; and of course, which girls in town were worth a lay and which he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
It was all pretty dumb shit, and even if I wasn’t smart enough to stay in college, I was smart enough to know that much. I was smart enough to leave town, too. When the news started to get bad. When it started to get weird. Really weird.
Hold on, I want to check something.
(later)
I was working on the night things went strange. Barney and I were swapping blonde jokes and listening to a college radio station out of Olympia. They had a decent Saturday night jazz show, and one of the deejays was a Wolfman Jack wannabe whose voice was still breaking. It was pretty funny stuff, though we didn’t do much laughing that night.
Thelonius Monk was tickling his way through “Straight, No Chaser” when the broadcast was interrupted by the host’s quavering voice. “We apologize for the interruption, but we have important news that affects everybody in Olympia. We have just received a report that several streets have become overrun with snakes!”
“Snakes?” Barney said. “Are those kids toking?”
I turned up the volume.
“Police and emergency crews are on the scene, but we have yet to receive any information
on the origin of the snakes or if anyone has been injured. One listener who called this station sad he saw thousands—I repeat—thousands of snakes coming out of sewer grates along Center Street.We will be interrupting the program periodically to bring you further updates.”
Thelonius Monk came back on. Barney and I exchanged puzzled looks.
“Snakes?” he said again. “What the Christ does that mean?”
“I haven’t a clue,” I said.
“It’s gotta be a joke, right? College kids playing a prank?”
I shrugged.
We closed up and left in Barney’s rattletrap K-car. We had the radio on and were awaiting “further updates.” Barney got anxious and started running the dial across the band, trying to pick up another station. We got some tunes, but no news. When he pulled up to my apartment on Oak Hill, Barney found a raspy woman speaking in a frantic voice.
“This is Lois Davies with a special report. Police are advising citizens to stay indoors after hundreds of snakes were reported coming out of the sewers and drains in Seattle, Spokane, Olympia, and Yakima. A city official has described this event as ‘a scourge of biblical proportions,’ and said they are doing everything in their power to contain and investigate this emergency.”
Barney turned to me and said: “What do they mean ‘biblical proportions’?”
I shook my head, but I was thinking about the final book of the Old Testament. Revelation. The end of the world.
Barney had paled considerably. He waved a hand that was not completely steady in a dismissive gesture. “I heard this same shit back in the seventies when I was working for Public Works in New York. Only then it was alligators! It’s a humbug. Snakes can’t live in sewers. Only rats. And they don’t hardly ever come out into the open.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t sure of anything. Not in a world where tabloid newspapers regularly printed headlines like FACE OF SATAN SEEN IN TORNADO and LIZARD BOY CAUGHT IN FLORIDA SWAMP. I usually didn’t give those stories a second glance. I figured they were all lies—or “humbugs,” to use Barney’s word. But now I didn’t know what to think. All I knew was that I was scared.