Hinnom Magazine Issue 003

by C. P. Dunphey

  No sound came from the riding mower. Adam checked the neighboring yard again. The old man and riding mower zigzagged over the grass—but silence reigned.

  “Hey!”

  Adam’s whole body jerked like a marionette under a novice’s control.

  “Jesus! You scared the crap out of me,” he muttered, trying to shake off his disquiet.

  Carson had paled. “Come in here, slow poke. You gotta see this.”

  Adam looked around the interior. “Oh my lord. It’s hideous.”

  Carson gave him a look. “Shut up! This is my parents’ house.”

  “Was your parents’ house, you mean?”

  “No, look. The furniture, the paintings, the TV set—it’s all the same!”

  Adam scanned the room again. A black leather loveseat with yellow foam bursting from both cushions hunched in one corner like a giant beetle someone had stepped on. Paintings, one of a leopard and another of a gnarled tree in winter, hung on dark wood paneling. Small flowerpots hung from ceiling hooks in prisons of macramé. A woefully outdated television sat atop a rolling TV stand, sporting an old-fashioned rabbit-ears antenna and a bowtie of tinfoil.

  “So your folks let whoever bought the house keep some of the stuff they didn’t want.”

  Carson had moved to the foot of the stairs. He gripped the banister and gazed up at the second-story landing.

  “I wouldn’t go up there without asking the current owner first.”

  Carson didn’t reply. He ascended the stairs two at a time.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Adam called. “If someone calls the police—”

  “I want to see my old room!” His stout companion’s voice floated down the stairs from complete darkness. Adam half-expected to see the lingering grin of the Cheshire Cat.

  He stood at the bottom of the flight of stairs frozen in indecision. The front door still stood open, inviting escape. This put him at ease. Had the door closed behind them, he felt sure claustrophobia would force him out onto the walk.

  “It’s still the same!” Carson called, exuberant. “Quit being such a pansy and get your ass up here! I have a Joe Montana rookie card—somewhere! And a complete set of Star Wars action figures!”

  Intrigued, Adam followed Carson’s voice up a creaking flight of narrow stairs. A dim light shone from a room halfway down the hall. The floorboards squeaked as Adam made his way to Carson’s old room.

  “It’s all still here! I can’t believe it!” Carson held something out to him. Adam took it and his breath caught in his throat.

  “You had the blue Snaggletooth figure? This was a Sears exclusive or something wasn’t it? This is worth a bunch of money now.”

  The toy felt greasy to the touch. Adam handed it back, wiped his fingers on his shirt, and gazed around the room. A poster of Daisy Duke hung on the closet door. Someone had oiled her skin to make it shimmer. Adam watched Carson pick up one figure after another, reliving memories.

  Adam wandered over to a shelf. A trophy for a softball tournament stood nearest him. The faceplate read, “3rd Place, 1980 Summer Tourney.” From the days when you didn’t get a trophy just for participating, Adam thought. Movement caught his eye.

  A square ant farm sat on the shelf next to the softball trophy. Adam leaned toward the wood-framed formicary, eyes narrowed. Living ants moved within.

  Perplexed, Adam tried to collect his thoughts. What didn’t make any sense was finding Carson’s childhood possessions intact in a house he’d moved away from more than two decades prior. The ant farm might belong to the current occupant, in which case the living ants were normal.

  He turned. “Dude, did you have an ant farm?”

  “Huh?” Carson had been reaching under his bed for something when Adam spoke. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Because it’s still here. And the ants are still alive.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Carson stood and stepped toward the shelf.

  No, he’d been wrong. The ants had curled up and died long ago. Adam blinked and the ants returned to life, scurrying in their tunnels. Adam felt his chest tighten.

  “They shouldn’t be here.” Carson’s words stilled the ants again. In fact, the square glass walls and everything they contained faded from view.

  Adam reached out but his fingers found only air. “What the hell?”

  “It’s like a hallucination or something,” Carson said.

  “I don’t think your old toys should be here either.” Adam gazed past his companion, who turned to look at his mattress. The action figures on it began to fade. So did the bed itself.

  “Why’d you have to say that?” Carson moaned. “You ruined it for me!”

  Adam didn’t know what to say in response.

  “I gotta . . .” Carson didn’t finish. Instead, he turned and bolted from the room.

  Adam followed a split second later. Carson had thundered to the end of the hall leading to the stairs at a full run. Adam opened his mouth to call out when Carson threw up his arms and dropped.

  Adam gaped. His companion hadn’t tumbled down the stairs. Instead, he’d simply plunged through the floor, as if he’d fallen through a hole. Adam felt a giddy wave of vertigo envelop him. He looked up, pinpointed the rope pull for the attic stairs and lunged for it.

  As his hands clasped the rope, the entire floor dropped away beneath him. Adam pedaled his legs and hauled himself onto the attic steps. They were little more than wooden ladder slats. He looked down from his dizzying, isolated perch. Everything on the second level had collapsed onto the first, as if a garbage truck had purged its contents in the middle of a rummage sale. Adam squinted, searching for Carson. Had he survived the fall?

  The attic ladder creaked and Adam scurried up into the relative safety of the structure’s highest level. Here the wooden beams arched over him like the skeleton of a fossilized whale and faded away into the darkness. Except, he realized, it wasn’t completely dark.

  Something glowed at the far end of the room.

  Orbs, like Christmas lights burning low, shone. Adam crept forward, giving his eyes time to adjust. He counted four large orbs and six smaller orbs. They looked like pairs of eyes. The idea froze his movement. He peered into the darkness. One pair of glowing orbs blinked, then another.

  Adam made out their forms then. A cluster of figures, vaguely mammalian, huddled together in the high branches.

  No, they couldn’t be branches. Adam felt as if his perception had become fluid, ever changing. Even dream-like. A family of—what, exactly? Apes? Lemurs?—gazed at him, each with varying degrees of curiosity, suspicion, and alarm. Adam felt an icy serpent of fear coiling around his chest. Don’t think, just act! This mental alarm overrode another, more dangerous, thought forming in his mind. Self-preservation instinct seized control.

  Adam vaulted to the hole in the attic floor and swung from the ladder of steps. He summoned his memory of the nearest window. To his surprise, the window seemed closer than he’d expected. Pleased, Adam hurled himself toward the sill and caught onto the ledge with his arms. He scrambled against the floorless wall and lifted one leg and then the other until he balanced with his legs draped over the sill. He refused to acknowledge the jumbled rubble beneath him inside the house. Nor did he risk a glance at the attic—or forest canopy—for that’s what it now seemed to resemble. He pushed the thought away.

  You’re just high, he told himself. That has to be what’s happening. Carson slipped you something in the car as a nasty joke and now you’re having a bad trip, that’s all. The house isn’t melting and there aren’t spectral monkeys. Now get back in the house before you fall and hurt yourself.

  Adam was about to follow his brain’s advice when a blue pickup truck rounded the street corner, hopped the curb, and rolled to a stop below his perch. He stared at the new arrival in frank astonishment. From his precarious vantage point, Adam could see only part of the driver, but he saw enough that a wave of recognition and relief swept over him. The work-hardened hand holding
the steering wheel was liver-spotted and gnarled but still looked like it could hoist a hay bale or carry a newborn calf. The blue and black flannel shirt covered a muscular arm that Adam knew would be ‘farmer tan’ white starting midway up the bicep. In the shadows of the cab, he could see blue jeans and the brim of a green cap emblazoned with the logo of a seed company. Adam could not see the face beneath the cap brim, but he knew it would be an amalgamation of John Wayne and Richard Nixon.

  His grandfather had arrived just in time.

  The pickup’s bed was bursting with loose straw. The jarring groan of collapsing timbers thrust slivers of panic into Adam’s spine. He pushed off and plummeted toward the truck, pinwheeling for a heart stopping moment before landing flat on his back in the straw. The pickup began to move, leaving the collapsing house behind them. Except the house was no longer collapsing; it wasn’t there at all.

  Mystified, Adam peered over the edge of the truck bed as his grandfather drove through town. He saw the mobile home he’d known as a child. Then he blinked and saw nothing but a vacant, weed-infested lot. Next came a row of storage units, but as Adam watched they faded and his favorite childhood haunt, the Frosty Treat, took its place. An older woman with hair piled high in a 60’s beehive strolled out from the entrance.

  Two blocks farther north a blue and white water tower loomed. Children scampered antlike around its base. As Adam watched, the tower faded. Instead, a covered wagon squeaked along rutted tracks, its driver holding the reins in one hand and mopping his brow with his free sleeve. Then, snow. White powder covered the landscape. Awestruck, Adam counted better than a dozen wooly mammoths laboring through the snow. They seemed unaware of the clan of fur-clad hunters awaiting them over the next ridge, stone-tipped spears at the ready.

  Adam closed his eyes, overwhelmed. He felt weightless, neither hot nor cold. Despite his recent exertions, he didn’t feel short of breath. Silence reigned. Adam kept still as a baby resting in the womb—or a cadaver decaying in a grave. An indeterminate amount of time passed.

  A sudden cessation of motion caused him to roll forward in the truck’s bed. Adam sat up and opened his eyes. Through the pickup’s back window, he caught his grandfather’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Deep creases but full of kindness and good humor surrounded them. Adam tried to speak but couldn’t find the words.

  His grandfather had driven him to the edge of town. He pointed his weathered left hand out the window at something on the road ahead. Adam stood for a better look.

  Carson’s nondescript car came into focus, tires exposed to the sky, two of them still spinning. Greasy smoke curled in tendrils from the engine block. A twisted shard of metal that Adam thought might be the hood lay in the opposite ditch.

  Adam shuddered. The shudder became a convulsion. When the feeling had departed, the truck had as well.

  Adam found himself kneeling in the middle of the road. His clothing hung from his arms and legs in tatters. The skin on his left thigh and arm looked like bloody raw hamburger. He tried to move his right arm and a clammy wave of nausea slapped him into submission. The ball of the joint appeared to be three or four inches farther forward than it should have been. Adam feared choking on the copper-flavored liquid that poured down his throat. With each labored breath sharp pain lanced through his ribs and into his lungs. He looked down to make sure one of the mammoth-hunters’ spears wasn’t lodged in his chest.

  A hand ruffled his hair and then rested atop his head, like a priest offering a blessing. The pain diminished considerably. His grandfather’s touch held him in stasis. Adam thought he understood the full significance of his grandfather’s presence. It was, he realized, the same reason the house had appeared just as Carson remembered it.

  The upturned wheels of the totaled car had only just stopped spinning. The curling smoke now billowed. The accident, Adam realized, had just happened. The tang of burnt rubber mixed with the thick acrid odor of burning oil. Everything that had just transpired in town had been . . . what, exactly?

  Carson was, as far as he knew, still in town, buried beneath his belongings, or perhaps buried beneath his own memories, for even memories carried weight. He scanned the wreckage and his stomach lurched; a prone shape lay beneath a yellow tarp in the vehicle’s shadow. Though a gust of wind rippled the edge of the cloth, the figure beneath it did not move. A measure of understanding came to him.

  Adam realized that without his grandfather’s arrival and intervention, he might have remained stranded back in town, in the impossible version of Springdale that existed only in his memory. All those layers, fading in and out of existence, as if all time existed in that one place. Each filmy layer fought for pre-eminence as the various former occupants remembered the area as it had been when they’d lived there.

  Adam came to the realization and acceptance of it almost concurrently. His grandfather had died eight years prior. Yet here he stood, helping Adam find the inner strength to cope with the pain. No. That wasn’t true; his grandfather somehow helped block the pain, staving it off until help arrived.

  The keening wail of a siren came at last. Adam watched the ambulance approach, growing from a small white speck into a monolith that filled his entire field of vision. It circled, four-way lights flashing, and eased to a stop creating a protective barrier between him and oncoming traffic. His grandfather removed his hand and crackling bolts of agony surged through Adam’s entire body, seemingly wanting to make up for lost time. He nearly blacked out as the paramedics hurried toward him.

  “Sir, are you having trouble breathing?” The driver, a skinny guy with freckles, crouched beside him. Adam nodded. The man began efforts to curtail the bleeding while the other paramedic—a short woman who’d tied her black hair back in a no-nonsense ponytail—returned to the ambulance. Adam wondered what she would bring with her when she returned. Another question pressed itself into his thoughts: Where had his grandfather gone? He looked past the kneeling paramedic and found the old man.

  He had relocated to a fenced-in field across the road from the accident. Beyond the fence posts and strands of barbed wire, a herd of Holstein cattle grazed. Adam’s grandfather had been a dairy farmer for most of his life. The black and white cattle seemed to sense the ghostly figure, but instead of stampeding away, they began ambling toward him.

  The female paramedic returned carrying what appeared to be a big plastic neck brace. She also had something that looked like it might be for his shoulder.

  “. . . pain in your chest?”

  Adam realized he had missed most of the red-haired paramedic’s question but got the gist of it. He used his bleeding left arm to point out two separate parts of his rib cage. The man nodded.

  “There’s a good chance you have internal bleeding. We’re going to immobilize your neck as a precaution and get you onto a stretcher as quickly as possible. Then we’ll drive to the Emergency entrance at Dayton County Hospital. Springdale’s clinic doesn’t have the equipment needed.”

  Adam watched the cattle milling around his grandfather, surrounding him. He appeared to scratch the head of one and pat the flank of another. The cattle lowed. Adam found the sound soothing. He closed his eyes, and considered the countless acts of kindness he’d received from his grandfather over the years. He treasured the silly stories, the hayrides, Slinky races down the basement steps, and the butterscotch candies secretly bestowed before supper like contraband. As a child, he’d never stopped to appreciate all the meals freely given, never considered the sacrifices made to ensure he received birthday and Christmas gifts, even in the leanest of years. Naiveté had permitted him to accept these blessings as a matter of course. Why had he never thought to thank the old man?

  Adam opened his eyes and propped himself up with his elbows.

  His grandfather had vanished. Only the cattle remained. Adam strained and squinted, hoping for one more glimpse of the kindly old man.

  The woman spoke. “Take it easy; once we get you stabilized, we can be in Dayton less than thirty mi
nutes. You’ll make a full recovery, I promise.”

  Fresh tears pricked his eyes and spilled down Adam’s cheeks. He’d missed his chance. His grandfather had interceded on his behalf and brought him back from the brink. With his fate no longer in question, the spectral image had dissolved from view.

  “I’m not dying today.” Adam took a ragged breath and smiled, exposing blood-smeared teeth. “When my time does come, though, I hope I can find my way back here.”

  He saw the paramedics exchange a mystified glance as they secured him to the stretcher. They lifted him then, and Adam felt a brief sensation of weightlessness. He fluttered a hand in the direction of the lingering cattle.

  “I need to come back, thank him face to face. I owe him at least that much.”

  Adrian Ludens is the author of Ant Farm Necropolis (A Murder of Storytellers LLC), and is a member of the Horror Writers Association with Active status. Recent and favorite publication appearances include DOA 3 (Blood Bound Books), HWA Poetry Showcase IV, Blood in the Rain 3 (Cwtch Press) and Zippered Flesh 3 (Smart Rhino Publications). Adrian is a radio announcer and a fan of hockey, reading and writing horror fiction, swimming, and exploring abandoned buildings. Visit him at http://www.adrianludens.com.

  JENNIFER BRINGS IT TO WORK

  By Jack Lothian

  Monday

  Jennifer brings it to work. She is twenty minutes late and has missed the morning meeting, a meeting at which our manager shared his concerns over the sales report we’re due to deliver to head office at the end of the week. The word ‘downsizing’ was used along with ‘redundancies.’ He encouraged us to make a final push in these remaining days, to try and turn things around before it’s too late. He is tired and the circles beneath his eyes tell of late nights crunching figures, juggling numbers, trying to find a safe passage through this oncoming financial storm.