What's it waiting for, Sarah thought. Turn into something skinny, slide out the window and finish me. Only then did she remember that it could not. As she had seen, The Eaton couldn't change its shape. It could only project a different body in the mind of a witness. The wretched thing could no more squeeze through one of those skinny windows than could a black bear. It was trapped. Like her.
But then it grinned again, that hideous, toothless smile, and disappeared from view. What returned was a leathery, human skull. It seemed to look out from the window, turning its head, hanging there a moment, as if in a macabre puppet show. Sarah watched in horror as its puppeteer flung it from the window, right at her, missing her head by inches and hitting a cave wall. She turned her light toward it on the ground, only to see a second skull and spinal column be thrown and crash beside it. The train car was full of skeletons, she realized. And then, more distressingly, it knows my light's going to go out. It wants to surround me with horror. Even if it can't reach me, it wants me to starve and die in the darkness, covered in the rotted corpses of its long-dead enemies. Oh, Christ. This is it.
Sarah glanced at the phone display once more. 2%. What was that, ten minutes? Maybe five? She arced the beam from side to side, desperate for something she may have overlooked. Could she climb over the train car to reach the tunnel again? No, because part of the train car was still wedged in the tunnel, and it was too tight a fit. Had the train done enough damage to the rocks blocking the other side? Not that she could see. Could she move the boulder which had once sealed The Eaton's prison? No, because if The Eaton with its superior strength had clawed at it and tried to budge it for centuries, it was no match for her.
As another pile of bones was thrown from the train car, Sarah walked over to inspect the claw marks on the boulder again. She really hadn't noticed them the first time. None of them had. So what if they hadn't been there for centuries? What if they were new?
Then, she gasped, figuring it out, and directed her beam upward, trying to ignore the strange rattling and crunching sounds from behind her. Sure enough, there was room on top of the seven foot boulder, opening into a cavernous space beyond. The creature had climbed over the boulder when it had escaped to kill Kedzie. Which means it must lead to an exit. It probably always did. The hotel builders used the natural cave tunnels to bring in supplies, and had blocked this tunnel inadvertently when moving the boulder to one side; it was the only place the large rock could have been pushed to. But could she climb over the boulder herself?
She turned around, looking for a step-stool-sized rock to boost herself up on, and screamed. One of the leathery skeletons had assembled itself from its pieces on the ground and was standing upright, hands casually on its hip bones, looking right at her. It took a rattling step toward her, and Sarah jumped back, preparing to defend herself, before remembering that this could not be The Eaton. This had to be a projection, like the piranha-filled water, and so could not touch or harm her. The creature was still trapped—she could see it. It was trying to scare her, perhaps stop her. But she would not be distracted.
Sarah found a suitable rock, disabled the flashlight to preserve battery life, and with nothing but the dim ambient light from the smartphone's small display, rolled the small but heavy rock a few feet into position. When the creature realized what she was doing, it began to thrash around inside the car, trying to break the wood paneling by the windows to create a larger opening for itself. Sarah pretended not to notice, as she knew the task would be impossible when the light died, and she may only have minutes, maybe even seconds, to climb over the barrier. Another skull crashed against the rock beside her, thrown by The Eaton, and a bone fragment pierced her cheek, causing her to bleed. The bones were not illusions. But as long as the creature's aim was poor, she believed she could make it.
She had to put the phone in her pocket to make the attempt, blocking all light. She needed to push hard from her feet, grab onto the top of the boulder with both hands, and by some miracle find the strength to pull her body straight up over jagged rock in complete darkness. Her first attempt was a failure.
“Sarah, please,” said a soft voice from behind her in the dark. It sounded like Sam. “Please stop. I'm hurt. Wait for me.” But she knew damned well it wasn't Sam, and the rage she felt at hearing the creature mimic Sam's voice was enough to make her second attempt successful.
Atop the boulder, still in the darkness, she flung her feet to what she assumed was the other side, the freedom side, and dropped down. It felt, sounded, and smelled the same as the side she had come from, and she was momentarily convinced that she had gone nowhere. But after retrieving the phone from her pocket, and activating the flashlight app for the last time, she could see she had made it. The cave opened up here, and Sarah could more clearly see where the cave network must continue on. She could smell, and faintly hear, the underground streams which might have carved some of this out many eons ago. And, Sarah almost cried when she turned to her left and saw the dirty stone path, leading blessedly upward, wheelbarrow tracks etched into the rock floor as proof of the hotel crew's long-forgotten use, a path which the creature must have used just hours earlier. A way out.
“Sarah!” cried Sam's voice, sounding more distant now. “Where are you? Don't leave me! For God's sake, Sarah!”
Sarah glanced at the phone's screen. 1% now. It would shut itself off at any moment.
Still breathless from climbing over the boulder, her entire body aching, she raced with the best of her ability up the embankment, again holding the phone out before her like a shield and trying to avoid anything that might trip her up. At one point, the path forked, but having no time to carefully weigh her options, she instinctively chose the turn that seemed to take her furthest from The Eaton.
Sarah had nearly made it to the end of the path when the smartphone died, turning into a useless rectangle in her hand. She stopped in the blackness, terrified only for a moment, then got down on her hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way, feeling around with her fingers for clues of the cave floor's shape. A spider web brushed against her face and tangled in her hair, but she stayed silent. At any moment, she was certain a claw would grab her ankle, yanking and dragging her down back into the pit. She began to hallucinate, her mind creating specks of red and yellow light across what would be her field of vision, but she knew they weren’t real, as they didn’t move when she turned her head. Just as she was certain the road went on forever, she crawled directly into a rock wall at the end of the path.
Sarah tried to stand, but hit her head on something hard. Crouching back down, she cautiously explored the surface above her with her fingers, and determined it was some sort of wooden structure, perhaps something of a cellar door, parallel to the ground and about three feet above it. She tried to budge it with her hands, but she had no leverage. Finally, she turned to lay on the ground, and pushed upward on the door with her feet. That did it, and the door began to hinge upward in the blackness, showering Sarah's eyes and mouth with dirt. With one forceful shove, the invisible door opened far enough on its hinge that it locked into position, and Sarah was able to stand, climbing out of the horizontal opening and onto another cave floor. This time, however, she was able to detect a hint of ambient light, and knew she had made it to a cave near the surface.
Everything inside Sarah demanded that she run toward the light at once, and she almost did, but became convinced that the creature might still be pursuing her. In a darkness that remained close to absolute, she fumbled to close the hidden cellar door as it had been. She felt around for some sort of latch, and found none. There were, however, quite a few small boulders and what she believed to be heavy concrete blocks. Methodically, she moved every rock she could atop the square wooden door, and over a dozen of the heavy blocks as well, until her energy gave out with a desperate, tortured gasp, and she knew she could do no more. If the creature was strong enough to get through that, then she wouldn't stand a chance anyway.
&n
bsp; Shuddering with pain and exhaustion, Sarah found her way through the cave to the light. It was a cool, dark night in Eaton Rapids, but the glow of distant sodium streetlamps had found their way to her. She stepped over a heavy chain and a sign reading “DANGER—KEEP OUT,” and was shocked to find herself under a bridge near the old Horner Mill, more than a half mile from the depot she had entered. The cave had become a tunnel, and had led her to an old water wheel which, perhaps a century ago, had helped power the grist mill whose smokestack still stood, iconic and proud, overlooking the once-famous Saratoga of the West. When she at last laid eyes on this familiar sight, and all the freedom that it implied, she burst into sobs.
epilogue
Sarah Davidson had walked just a couple hundred yards along M-99 before a passing patrol car picked her up. Covered in an unsettling mix of fresh and dried blood, she was driven to the Eaton Rapids Medical Center and admitted immediately. Night shift nurses stripped her of Sam’s tattered shirt, bathed her, replaced her makeshift breast bandage with something sterile, and dressed her in a fresh medical gown.
At just before 2:00 a.m., Detective Lt. Peter Letterby arrived to take Sarah’s statement from her hospital bed. Sarah reported that her purse and identification could be found in the lobby of the old Eaton Rapids Depot, and in the next room, they would find “pieces” of her best friend Kedzie Duffield. She was unwilling or unable to go into much detail, and the on-call physician kicked out the detective after several minutes, insisting that his patient get some rest. As the detective was leaving, Sarah called out that he should prevent responding officers from exploring the secret hotel beneath the depot, as the monster within would “know their nightmares.”
The attending physician stopped the detective in the hallway, and opined that Sarah was in a state of shock. She had not only suffered severe trauma, but also seemed to have a high blood alcohol level. “I’m not saying she’s lying,” the doctor explained, “but it seems clear that she is quite confused. She may be having a sort of psychotic break.” Lt. Letterby nodded, and made a note of this in his pad, but still felt obligated to call for an immediate investigation.
Within the hour, two officers had arrived at the old depot, found both Sarah’s identification and Kedzie’s barbaric murder as described, and called in the remainder of Eaton Rapids’ on-duty night staff for assistance. Several officers braved the exposed stairs down to the elevator room, finding Janet’s broken body as well, but as the only elevator car had been destroyed, they had no way of discovering the hotel itself. That would have to wait for the next day, perhaps even the next week, for a team of excavators and specialists. “You couldn’t pay me to go down there,” remarked an uneasy officer to another.
At 4:30 a.m., Lt. Letterby returned to the medical center, with the intent on prying more answers out of the patient. This time, he was refused admittance altogether, and the physician put a handwritten “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door to Sarah’s private room. Sadly, Sarah was indeed disturbed, and often, by the physician himself, and the nurses, the orderlies, and even a lost patient who had wandered from his bed and entered her room by mistake. Each time a face appeared by her bedside, whether it was new or familiar, Sarah’s heart rate shot up, and she broke into a cold sweat, certain that this time, the person would be a fake, and their skin would melt from their body, revealing the oily, toothless grin of The Eaton. “This is going to happen,” it would say, and it would have her. It was only a matter of time.
Yet the creature didn’t come, at least not this night, and soon Sarah could see the first hint of daylight streaming into her room. She had been up for twenty-four hours, and she could feel her body giving in to the inevitable. For the first time it what felt like weeks, Sarah allowed herself, cautiously, to fall asleep.
*
Ten miles to the west, the early morning sun signaled the start of prep time at Jessica’s, the coffee and bake shop which now occupied the former Michigan Central Depot in Charlotte. Several restaurants and ice cream parlors had operated out of the old depot since its decommissioning, including a small but well-reviewed Italian restaurant which had closed over financial troubles just two years prior. The new owner, Zeke Cartwright, had named the coffee shop after his daughter, who had gone missing ten years ago at the age of twenty-two. She had fallen into a bad crowd, and Zeke never knew if she had been killed, or overdosed somewhere, or just fell off the grid for a time, with the chance of someday returning to him. He felt by naming the old depot “Jessica’s” he was sending a karmic message to the universe, and to her directly, wherever she may be, that her destination still awaited, and that returning home would always be within her reach.
As sometimes happened in the mornings, the circuit breaker flipped the kitchen panel off when the ovens and the old espresso machine were heating at the same time. Zeke knew one day he’d have to get an electrician to place that machine on its own circuit. But as it only happened in those early hours, never when customers were present, the minor nuisance had become part of the morning routine.
This time, when Zeke walked into the back room, he heard a knocking from the wall behind some ancient shelves beside the breaker. His first thought was some sort of plumbing problem, and he looked up and down the wall to assess which pipes and junctions might conceivably run back there. Finding no obvious candidates, he moved some boxes off of the shelf and listened closer to the brick. The knocking seemed deliberate, a repeating pattern of three knocks followed by a pause, in the manner of a persistent salesman knocking at a front door. The sound was coming from somewhere beyond the wall.
“Hello?” Zeke called into the bricks. The knocking grew louder, and expanded to groups of five knocks instead of three. Whoever was pounding had heard and acknowledged his call.
Zeke took a step back and examined the old shelving unit. He had always thought of it as built into the wall, but saw now that it was detached. He reasoned it had likely never had been moved, at least since this had still been a depot, as it had unbroken lines of dust and grime in common with the wall and floor. It was therefore impossible for someone to actually be behind it, but Zeke felt an overwhelming urge to investigate anyway. He moved the heaviest boxes off the shelves, then heaved and pulled the entire wooden structure at an angle into the room, allowing several feet of clearance for him to examine the bare surface.
At first, this newly-exposed section of brick seemed just as impenetrable as the rest of the room. But as he peered closer, he could see that the sides of the shelving unit had covered up a conspicuous seam in the brickwork, forming a six-by-six-foot square. Zeke tried pushing on the sides and corners of this square, expecting something to give and push forward into a secret area, but when he hit a specific brick, the door shifted and hinged back toward him instead, opening into the storeroom, dragging against the stone floor. He helped the door open a full ninety degrees, and it locked in its new position with an audible click.
Through the doorway, Zeke was shocked to discover not just a small hidden closet, which itself would have been a miraculous find, but a full wooden staircase descending at least a dozen steps.
“Jesus,” Zeke whispered.
The pounding came again, louder than before. It was clear now that the sound was coming from behind a second door somewhere at the bottom of these stairs.
Zeke fumbled for a flashlight from one of the storeroom shelves, switched it on, and descended into the opening. When he reached the bottom step, he was in an empty cellar of perhaps one hundred square feet. It had higher ceilings than he would have expected from a cellar, and the room itself seemed to serve no purpose besides highlighting the large, wide wooden door before him. He approached this door, examined its composition, and removed its large iron latch. Zeke took a breath, believing himself prepared for anything, and opened the door.
He had not been prepared to see Jessica.
She stared at him, unblinking even with the harsh flashlight beam on her face.
“Dad
dy?”
She looked not a day older than he had remembered, even wearing the white cotton dress he had last seen her in all those years ago. But it was undoubtedly his daughter. He knew every inch of her face, and every detail was perfect. Was it an angel? A dream? He leapt forward and embraced her, tears splashing against his cheeks, his whole body trembling against hers. She held him, too, her arms wrapping around his back. She felt as solid as he remembered…perhaps even more so.
Zeke had his eyes closed for several seconds, but eventually allowed them to open, and while still embracing his daughter, he used the flashlight in his right hand to pan the cavernous space behind her. There was some sort of unfinished rail track here, with a large platform to the left of it, upon which was what looked like visitor seating and even, it seemed, a sort of unfinished ticket booth.
Had Charlotte once had a subway?
It didn’t matter.
He stepped back from the embrace, looking with love and bewilderment at his long-lost little girl. Seeing her father’s tears, she placed her left hand against his cheek. He was vaguely aware of the sharpness of her fingernails.
“It’s a miracle,” Zeke cried. “How is this possible?”
Jessica gave her father a sympathetic smile.
“Oh, you sad little man,” she said. “It’s not.” And in an instant, the talon was through his neck.
author’s note
The first seven chapters of The Eaton, along with the plot outline and character summaries, were completed in 2009. Alas, I could never seem to find the time to work further on the novel, and it was shelved for a rainy day. In late 2014, I willed myself to revisit the story, and finished the first full draft in Google Docs on an iPad with a Logitech Keyboard Folio, just a few paragraphs at a time, whenever a free moment could be found.
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