The Deadenders

by Bruce Jones

  “It wanted to know, Rich! Which one of us did it! I was so scared! It would have killed me if I hadn’t told it something! It would have eaten me! Maybe eaten my kids too! I-I tried to bargain with the thing! Reason with it! It wanted a name! I…oh God, forgive me Rich…”

  “Scroogie—“

  “—I sent it to you!”

  Richard froze.

  He knew a wave of terror so visceral that he saw himself actually passing out from it, falling from the bed—falling lazily to the bedroom carpet as if in a dream—and was amazed to find he hadn’t, that he was still sitting there in bed clutching the phone instead, every inch of his skin clammy and vibrating. Like that time at Aunt Thelma’s when the family was staying over at Christmas and everybody got the flu and got chills and fever and then the vomiting began all over the house and he, Rich, was the last to get it, he stood around and watched the others get sick one by one but he was the last and by the time he did Mom was already feeling better and the others were laughing there in the underwear and pajamas on Christmas eve and he started to laugh too but then the chills hit him hit him hard and the fever and the rising rush of nausea and—

  “Rich, are you there? Did you hear me? It’s got your name! You gotta get outta the house, Rich! You and Allie both! Get outta the house now!! It’s coming to you! Rich, it’s—“

  The line went dead.

  * * *

  Dead.

  As in: no dial tone. As in: maybe no power.

  Richard sat there on the edge of the bed with the lifeless lifeline in his hand, suddenly unable to get the recurring scene from a movie out of his strangely ringing skull; that scene in Jaws when the shark attacks Quint’s little fishing boat at night—bang-banging at the hull until water squirts through the boards—and the cabin goes abruptly dark and Roy Scheider says: “He ate the light.”

  Okay.

  Okay, calm down.

  That’s what you just advised Scroogie, right? Scroogie. Who was anything but calm tonight and maybe anything but rational after another of his nightmares—okay, another of all their nightmares.

  Richard reached over at the dim outline of nightstand phone and, after a couple of rattling misses, found the hook and hung it up. Then he reached further, fumbled around for the Chinese lamp, found and pulled the switch. Dead.

  Okay.

  Okay, stay calm. Do not panic.

  The power is out, that’s all.

  The wind had been kicking up before they went to bed, even Allie had commented on it--not unusual in gusty old Kansas for the wind to kick up and the power to be knocked out for a few hours. Kansas knew its way around wind and tornados as well as California knew its way around earthquakes.

  The thing to do was stay calm, chill out.

  I believe that’s been abundantly established, his inner mind told him patiently

  …stay calm and find Allie’s cell phone (why the hell had he so stubbornly refused moving into the 21st Century and buying a cellular of his own?) and make some calls. Wake Allie and ask her where her purse was, get her cell phone from her purse and make some calls to—

  --to who?

  The cops? Maybe…

  Maser?

  Maybe. Or maybe he should call Shivers first, since Pete lived the closest to Scroogie; he’d be able to get over there the quickest to help out. If Scroogie really was in trouble, which Richard wasn’t at all sure was the case. Scared to be sure, but not really in trouble. Drunk out of his mind, more likely…

  Richard turned the other way on the bed until he was facing the gentle rise of his wife’s pale back. He found himself absently envying her for being asleep through all this. Envious but also a little guilty about waking her over something that—while perhaps not completely explainable—was certainly not life threatening. Couldn’t be.

  Still.

  Scroogie had sounded so unnerved. So…fearful.

  No, let’s face it: Scroogie was terrified. He’d emanated fear through the receiver. So infectiously, in fact, that Richard had nearly caught it himself. Nearly.

  He reached over now to shake Allie gently—but hesitated. His moist palm hovered above the ivory curve of her shoulder. Surely, if Scroogie was in trouble from fever dreams, his own wife Sally was right there beside him, right?

  Richard retracted his hand from his sleeping wife.

  He sat there staring at her dim outline. Knowing the real reason he didn’t want to wake his trusting wife.

  She’d want to know who was calling in the middle of the night. And that would lead to telling her about the shared nightmares. And that might lead to calling Maser. Which might lead to all his lies to her about the cancer. And from that to a lot of complicated and possibly hurtful explaining.

  …get out of the house!...

  He grunted refusal.

  He wouldn’t do it.

  Not because an old friend has a bad dream in the middle of the night.

  Or because of something else, some stupid horror movie the Deadenders had probably seen together some long ago night at the Jawhawk or Grand. Some dumb Corman flick whipped together for snuggling teenagers that had scared the pea-wadding out of him and his friends--scared them so badly they’d consciously, or otherwise, blanked the damn thing from their collective minds all these years.

  Until now.

  The more he thought about it, the more it began to make perfect sense.

  Of course. A childhood movie. A shared experience between four impressionable boys. Shared and uniformly traumatized and pushed from their independent minds afterward never to be mentioned again. Pushed from their independent minds but not from their collective subconscious.

  And here it was back to haunt them thirty years or so later.

  And it was all patently ridiculous!

  Hell, all he had to do was remember the name of the silly damn movie and the whole thing would probably go away! He’d get together with the others tomorrow night over dinner or cards and tell them and they’d all have a good laugh over it. Some stupid movie they saw as kids.

  Yeah, that was the thing to do. Have some beers with the guys and a few nostalgic yucks. Things would look a whole lot different in the morning—a whole lot clearer once the silly damn electricity came back on. Which it would now, any minute. Just like always. Just like every time there was a good rain or wind. Thing to do meanwhile was lay back and get some sleep and let the Topeka Power and Light do its job.

  His bare feet were growing chill even on the bedroom carpet, thanks to Allie’s insistence on cranking up the air-conditioning during the summer.

  Damn air conditioning was freezing in here tonight.

  …is that really it, ole Richeroo? Or is something else giving you the chills?...

  Was it?

  He thought about it lying there beside his wife’s shallow breathing.

  He didn’t believe in infantile demon dog creatures, he knew that. Even if Scroogie did. No matter how real they looked in nightmares.

  Yet he was afraid.

  He could feel it.

  Of what? Death? Yes. Real death. Not by an imaginary dream monster stinking of the grave, but from that dark specter even more grim than death itself, than the cancer so recently knocking at his door. The fear of failure.

  And he knew that this was the truth, and the realization made him all the more fearful.

  Dying is one thing. Dying a failure...that’s quite another.

  “Yeah, well fuck that too,” he said, abruptly angry, not caring if he woke Allie or not, just suddenly very angry and tired of all of it, mostly of beating himself up. Fuck it..

  Maybe his had not been a perfect life, far from it, but then whose was? He’d done the best he could within his limitations. Okay, he wasn’t to be remembered as a great writer, but how many writers are? The odds were astronomically against it.

  And he’d always tried to be a good person, an honorable one, damned if he hadn’t! He’d tried to follow the rules of life his parents had laid before him. That he ha
dn’t lived up to their far stretching shadows was perhaps not entirely his fault—they were, after all, of a different age, a simpler time. A harder way of life, true, but at least they knew the ground rules between the sexes, at least a terrible economic depression and a worse war had kept them occupied with things other than their own egocentric needs, and the self-absorbed acquisitive nature of his generation.

  Maybe that’s what he’d been running from down in the basement a moment ago: his own childish fear and disappointment in himself.

  The idea made him vaguely angry. He was too near the end to waste precious time regretting past mistakes. He was a human being, goddamnit—fallible. And so were his parents. They may have looked like perfect icons in his youthful eyes, but their generation was no less filled with failings and pitfalls than his own, just another kind.

  He pushed up from the bed thinking, screw Scroogie and screw the Enders and screw their stupid childhood movie monster…that little shot of rum waiting in the kitchen pantry was sounding better and better. He slapped his thigh on rising, tasting vindication. Almost immediately the sound was answered by a thumping noise from below.

  Richard stood perfectly still.

  His straining ears were dead sure someone had just entered the house.

  As his rational mind was just as sure how unlikely that was. This was Topeka, not LA. They were safe here, in a “good” neighborhood. A neighborhood nearly as crime-free as when he was a child. It was the wind.

  Another dull thump.

  Just the wind. Forget the pantry and get back in bed.

  But two thumps. He had to investigate that, didn’t he?

  Even if it were nothing he should take a look, just to be safe. Isn’t that what his dad would have done? Beside he’d never get to sleep now if he didn’t. Not after Scroogie’s ridiculous damn phone call. And not until he’d satisfied himself all the downstairs doors were safely locked.

  He started padding toward the hall again.

  As if to confirm his suspicions and calm his racing mind, he felt the house’s familiar creak under a buffet of wind. He nodded at the darkness. Probably a storm brewing. Hadn’t the weatherman mentioned a possibility of that? He was pretty sure he had.

  Another sound now, and a familiar one: the downstairs back door off the kitchen, the screen one, caught in the gusts, slapping in its frame. …whup…whup-whup…whup… that would go right on banging until he shut and locked it. So quit screwing around, jerk-off, before you talk yourself into being scared again—just down there and go lock the damn thing. Hey--you know you really want that rum and Coke, right?

  The long upstairs hall and ghostly glow of balustrade and staircase were dimmer than last night, either from a power outage affecting streetlamps or the moon obscured by an approaching bank of storm clouds.

  He was halfway down the stairs, trying to decide between a short one or a tall one, when the smell hit him.

  He stopped so fast on the carpeted stairs he actually skidded barefoot to the edge and slipped off--“Shit!”

  --caught himself on the banister by one arm, banged his left knee into the hard oak railing and hung there like a drunken gibbon before getting his balance. Good. Very good; who needs cancer with slew-foot Denning around? He pulled himself back up by his hands on the banister rail and stood there getting his breath a moment, listening to the door banging below. …whup…whup…whup-whup…

  Richard started down again, glancing at the rectangular pattern of luminous panes floating in blackness from the shadowed dining room. Fingers of tree limbs bent and leaned past them in lazy rhythm with the wind. The ugly smell had intensified. Definitely the familiar odor of damp earth and decay, stronger now, filling the house. He couldn’t remember if he’d locked the other downstairs doors tonight.

  The banging from the kitchen grew at once louder and more muffled. Then he realized it wasn’t a banging. It was something else.

  Richard cocked his head, listened.

  Not a banging noise at all. A sort of…dragging sound.

  Like something being pulled across the floor…no, not pulled…like something dragging itself across the downstairs floor…shuffling. Something heavy and unsteady on its feet…

  …whump…whump-whump…whump…

  …dragging itself across the kitchen floor from the open kitchen door. Toward the arched hallway entrance. Bringing with it forest smells of dank hummus and freshly turned earth and decay. A steady sound. A purposeful sound.

  get the gun!

  But, of course, he had no gun.

  He’d thought about getting one out in LA a million times, but they weren’t so easy to come by out there and he’d never pursued it actively. Here in Kansas it would have been fairly simple to acquire a firearm. Only he hadn’t done that either.

  a weapon of some sort, then! a knife!

  But here? The only knives were in the kitchen, including the few capable of doing any damage. And to get to the kitchen’s butcher block holder where the big blades hung out he’d have to traverse the dark alley of hallway first. Eventually coming face to face with whatever was coming the other way.

  --or maybe not.

  Maybe the kitchen knives weren’t in the kitchen anymore. Maybe they were in the hands of the thing dragging itself across the floor toward the hallway even now…maybe in the hallway…soon to be at the bottom of the staircase thirteen steps below. There was a rectangle of cold light there. It came reflected from one of the living room windows, settling itself right there at the base of the staircase. Whatever was coming down the hall would eventually step into that elongated square of light. Become visible. The kind of visible that drove some men mad, perhaps.

  Richard heard a small whine there on the stairs, realized after a moment it was coming from his own throat.

  Some small part of him wanted to linger, silent and still like that, to hold tight and wait to see what emerged from the black hallway into the little wedge of light. The way some people slow down and crane to see the mangled agony of a car wreck. Some larger—perhaps smarter--part of him began backing mechanically up the stairs again to the friendly landing…backing slowly, one carefully, quietly placed foot behind the other, like a movie scene run backwards, right hand gripping the wooden rail blindly, sliding up easily under a film of sweat, eyes riveted to the hall carpet, to that luminous patch of light at the base of the stairs.

  Richard saw motion there now. Blinking the sweat from poached egg eyes as he ascended step by fevered step, he detected a blur of movement, an inky shape beginning to detach itself from the hallway shadows…an amorphous hood of black bulging inexorably into the cold wedge of light. The smell was like acid in his nostrils.

  He glimpsed a hill of matted hair…

  Turned and ran. Praying not to scream.

  Ran as fast as his calcified legs would carry him back up the stairs, not bothering now to mask his noise.

  Something below—no longer shuffling—followed. Faster still.

  TWELVE

  “Richard--?”

  …shit. What time was it…?

  “Richard? Honey? Wake-up!”

  …I’m awake, I’m awake, already! Stop that!

  “Richard? Goddamnit, open your eyes!”

  My eyes are opened!

  …wait a second, maybe they’re not…

  “Richard I swear to God—don’t you die on me!”

  “Allie--?”

  “Oh, Christ, oh Christ!” She sat back on the bed, a big relief on her still sleep-softened face. He could see that now that his eyes were really open.

  “What is it? Why the hell were you shaking me like tha—“

  Looking around now. Oops. Not the bed after all. The bedroom floor. No…not the bedroom, the—

  “I thought you were dead, for godsake! Or at least unconscious! You had me scared to fucking death!”

  Not like Allie to curse like that. Must be something pretty important…

  “What in the name of hell are you doing down here?” />
  Down here, down here…what was he doing down here…where was down here…?

  Checkers. Black checker pattern on a hard yellow floor. Linoleum. The kitchen. It must have chased him into the kitchen. Somehow.

  Richard tried to sit up. Found he could not.

  Allie was right there, pushing away from where she sat against the floor-level cabinets and taking his arm. “Here, let me help. Dear God, you smell like a distillery!”

  Did he? “Do I? Why’s that--?”

  She had him up now, mostly. One of his arms across her sagging shoulders. He was heavy. Heavier than usual, and yes, drunk. Maybe sobering now a little, but he’d definitely been at the old—

  “Why’s that?” Allie caustic with mild impatience muted only by concern, free hand reaching to the counter top, grabbing the bottle (the empty bottle) of Mt. Gay Rum and thrusting it in his face. Really in his face, so the cold glass touched the tip of his warm nose.

  “Hey, hey—“

  “Hey, yourself! What on earth are you doing falling down drunk at one in the morning? Richard, what’s going on?”

  Good question, that. Well, dear, it’s like this: there’s this monster you see, sort of like a dog and sort of like something you see on late night TV, and it’s been after me of late. After the other Enders too, I’m afraid. And not, I fear, because it thinks we need a fifth hand at poker. More in the nature of a digestive thing, a carnivorous thing. Dropped by earlier this evening, in fact, from its burrow out there in the woods, out there past the old north pasture, y’know? No, of course you don’t know, you didn’t grow up here. Anyway…

  “Richard, are you listening to me?”

  “I am.”

  “Then will you kindly explain?”

  “I will.”

  Anyway, the funny part—I know you’re waiting for the funny part—the funny part is that all this time I’ve been dreading telling you about the cancer. Thinking, what could be worse than that? What on God’s green earth could be worse than my imminent death? Well, uh…I think we got something worse here. Dear.

  “—and you can start by explaining that!”