Lurk

by Adam Vine

  Why yes, kiddos. Oh-yes-indeedy. I need to make this sumbitch hurt bad. I need to give them what They want. That way, I won’t be moving into Their house as the asshole new guy. I want a room with a view.

  So I need to give them the best show they ever saw. I’m going to drink turpentine. Diluted into a half gallon of bottom-shelf whisky, it won’t taste so bad. I’m gonna puke my guts out. I mean, really puke ‘em out. Old Magic Scudds is gonna puke himself so hard, his narcissistic qualities will eject themselves to evaporate yonder across that there parlor floor. Who am I kidding? The floor in this place is dirt.

  One more show, kiddies. Uno mas. Down the hatch it goes, where will he end up? Only the Union knows.

  I take a sip of this fine, poisonous beverage and it doesn’t taste so bad. Mostly like whiskey, only a little like paint thinner. A little more burn than I’m used to, but ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. Reckon I’ll get through half the jug before They arrive. I opened a hole. Sweet Christ, I opened a hole. And there ain’t no closin’ it, no sir. Not now. Not ever.

  Yeesh, that aftertaste burns. I chase it down with another swig.

  ***

  When I opened my eyes, I was finally Drew again. I was crawling through a dark hallway towards a door made of light. At the end, there were voices speaking together in prayer. The doors were ornate, all hand-carved wood showing motifs of angels and demons, like the doors of the Santa Cruz Mission.

  I slithered into the great hall of a stone chapel, decorated by high cobwebs and endless murals of gloom. A single stained glass window showing an image of a man being buried alive under the staggered, conical towers of a Slavic church cast a quincunx of slime-colored light over the heads of the congregation.

  Their eyes were turned forward, toward the altar, where there was a casket. The lid was open, but I couldn’t see who was inside. Father White presided over the funeral. “The Living give us strength,” Father White said.

  The congregation responded, “There is strength in their memories.”

  I crept up to the last row of pews, where I saw Dutch Evans with his feet kicked up over the back of the pew in front of him. His eyes bulged out of his head like that scene in the Schwarzenegger film Total Recall, where Arnie and the bad guy, Cohagen, are exposed to the atmosphere of Mars without helmets. A purple rope burn coiled around the skin of Dutch’s neck where the noose had finished him. He didn’t notice me.

  “We belong to the soil,” Father White said.

  The congregation responded, “We are all broken pieces.”

  As I began to walk slowly up the aisle, I saw that Father White was dead. I looked around and saw the congregation was, too. Bodies in various stages of decay lined both sides of the church, heads bowed firmly in the rotted, termite-eaten pews. All of them were there.

  A few rows up was Agatha Hawthorne, forlornly fanning her face to keep cool, though her cheeks were pale as the cracked porcelain basin where she used to wash up before a recital, and the temperature in the church was below freezing.

  The corpses didn’t notice me, so I edged closer to the front. I had a powerful urge to see who was in the coffin.

  A few rows ahead of Agatha sat the dismembered bodies of Irish Bill and Chinese Lee, both shredded to pieces by rock shrapnel, only identifiable from their wounds.

  “We pray that the Hole shall make this Union stronger.”

  “The image is the tapestry of our suffering.”

  In the second pew from the front, sat Benjamin Sykes the first, the broken half of a whiskey bottle still plunged into his neck. A cascade of old blood darkened the left side of his waistcoat, making it appear two-toned. The sleeves of his collared shirt were rolled up, and his fists rested on his knees. He was sitting unnaturally straight, like he was actively thinking about his posture.

  “Those of us so doomed to suffer, pray that in falling, we shall also rise.”

  “Blessed are the broken pieces.”

  Ahead of him, in the very front row, sat Annabelle Leigh and Scudds Gurney. Annabelle was dead again, the mortal wound in her skull gaping at me as I approached her slowly from the rear. Her hands were clasped in front of her chest, her eyes closed tight in a pious fervor. Scudds was grinning blankly at the altar, mirror teeth, flashbulb eyes, and all.

  “The broken pieces belong in the soil.”

  “Not to be mended, but bonded, until there is Union.”

  I suddenly felt the extreme chill of the air. I looked down and saw that I was naked, my elbows, knees and stomach covered in mud from crawling towards the chapel door.

  “We will never be remembered.”

  “We will never be remembered. Amen.”

  The church fell silent. They all looked to where I was standing front and center of the main aisle, at the foot of the altar. The blank holes of their eyes fixed on me, and They waited patiently.

  “Will you join us in our bereavement?” Father White said, beckoning towards the casket. They knew I was coming. But Freddy Kreuger’s dream claws can still cut the wakeful. What would I do if this was a horror movie? I thought.

  In the horror movies, the hallucinations are never technically real life, but they always have consequences – often physical – in the waking world.

  I considered that if I didn’t agree, the Union might never let me wake up. I was in Their world, playing by Their rules. I didn’t know what those rules were, but if I had any hope of beating Them, let alone surviving, it wouldn’t be by cowardly forfeiting the game.

  I nodded, and forced myself to walk up the shallow stone stairs to the altar. The first thing I saw was her shoes, lime green Nike Frees coming apart at the soles. Next were her legs in a pair of form-fitting Lycra running shorts. Her hands were folded on top of her stomach, below the print on her tank top, which read, Santa Cruz University Women’s Track & Field, number 07. Her eyes were closed and her lips slightly parted. Her hair was in a braid, the way she always wore it before a race. The almond skin of her cheeks and neck, which I’d admired since the day I met her, were pale as blue glass.

  She wasn’t Bea anymore, only Bea’s shell, base matter, the crumpled paper left on the floor after you unwrapped your Christmas presents and took them away.

  I cupped one hand over her cheek. She was so cold. Bea opened her eyes.

  “Drew,” Bea said, in a voice low and dry as air passing through dead branches. “Look what you did.” Her hands snapped to my shoulders, pulling me down into the coffin. I tried to pull away, but her grip was unbreakable. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID, DREW!” Bea screamed. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID! LOOK WHAT YOU DID!”

  Her mouth gaped, her teeth and tongue replaced by an infinite blackness. The mouth widened. I could hear the tendons in her jaw snap to accommodate the stretching, then the other bones in her face, the blackness expanding until it consumed her head, her coffin, all. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!” Bea’s corpse screamed. “LOOK! WHAT! YOU! DID!”

  I tried to run, but I couldn’t break free. Bea pulled me down, and the Hole devoured me.

  ***

  My favorite horror movies have always been the ones where evil wins. Exhibit A is my favorite movie of all time, The Shining. In Kubrick’s version of The Shining, which differs significantly from the book, Danny and Wendy are forced to flee the Overlook Hotel without destroying the evil force lurking in its halls. Anyone with the power of the shining who visits the hotel in the future will only relive the tragedy and try to murder their family, like Jack Torrance and Delbert Grady did.

  It isn’t a story where everyone dies, but it is a story where the monster isn't vanquished. The world isn’t made a better place by Wendy and Danny escaping. They only survive because the groundskeeper, Dick Halloran, sacrifices himself to save them, and the implication given as they drive away through the accumulating snowdrifts on Dick’s snowmobile is that the tragedy will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

  Contrast this with my least favorite horror story of all time, Dracula. It's a great story, and its villain is one
of the most tragic characters ever created, as was the Romanian prince of legendary cruelty who inspired him, Vlad Tepes III. But, despite being a great yarn, Dracula isn’t scary. Never, for one second, do we believe Jonathan Harker is going to die, or that the story will conclude in any way other than a wooden stake being driven through the vampire’s heart. It’s creepy, and at times thrilling, but the stakes (sorry) are too low. Count Dracula is destined to lose the struggle of good and evil from the very moment he appears to greet Harker at the front doors of his castle.

  Evil only truly scares us when it’s likely that we can’t win.

  This was the revelation I almost had when I was descending the stairs to the garage before my initiation into the Union. I thought hard about the rules horror movie monsters play by, and how similar my situation with Bea’s stalker and the potter’s field under Sunny Hill was to stories about vengeful ghosts, poltergeists, and cursed household objects which held gateways for evil demons. I couldn’t dismiss the feeling that whatever the supernatural force was that was pulling me down, further and further into this hole, was bound by certain rules.

  Every monster has a weakness. Dracula has wooden stakes driven directly through the heart. Zombies have a bullet to the brain, or just a good pair of running shoes. Pennywise the Clown has Beverly’s slingshot. The Overlook Hotel (book version, not the film) has fire. The ghouls from the Evil Dead movies have the Necronomicon.

  Sometimes it’s tricky, and the monster’s weakness isn’t a weakness at all, only a clause in their existential contract that says, “If you help me, I won’t kill you, or eat your soul, or continue haunting you, or whatever.” Haunted house stories almost always follow this rule.

  I thought that would be my best bet in solving the mystery of the ghosts beneath Sunny Hill. Whatever the Hole was, whatever the Union was, They wanted my help. They needed something from my friends and me; our happiness, maybe, or even our sorrow or pain.

  Andy had murdered his roommates in an attempt to give the Union what They wanted, but for some reason, he hadn’t succeeded. The Union had contacted him, like it had contacted Benny DeLucio, while they were living at Sunny Hill. But the Union didn’t want their names back. They didn’t want to be remembered, and that led to the second epiphany I had about the evil force lurking under Sunny Hill.

  What they wanted were memories. The Hole was Their conduit into our world; how They contacted us, the living broken pieces, but also how They reaped and absorbed our memories once we were dead. The Union was unionizing so They could remember what it meant to be alive. The lives They'd lived had been awful, but even the worst sadness was better than being dead. It's funny how I never realized that when I wanted to kill myself.

  ***

  I knew where I was the moment I saw the shoddy clapboards and bottle-covered dirt floor. I was back in Scudds’ Gurney’s shack on Sunny Hill, before there was a Sunny Hill. Only I wasn’t him anymore, I was myself. I was Drew. My body was too fat to fit in the hole Scudds had dug, so I laid awkwardly, sagging over the top of it like a flimsy bridge. I scrambled to my knees, rubbing the sleep from my eyes with the muddy backs of my wrists.

  The words Bury Me Here were written on the south wall of the little one-room shack, next to the only window. It was pitch-dark outside. If it had been day, the view would have been familiar: a stand of redwoods on a grassy knoll, rolling gently down to the sea. The only objects in the shack, other than the empty liquor bottles on the floor, were a rickety wood table and Doctor Midnight’s Magic Mirror Box, covered by a heavy black cloth where it leaned against the far back wall.

  When I reached to touch it, Scudds’ disembodied voice said, “Hands off the merchandise, bucko. That goddamned hoax factory puts food on my table. You break it, you buy it. Then I’m gonna swallow your soul.” He cackled. “Ho-hehehehe. Nah, I’m jokin’. You can smash that thing to pieces and use it to make modern art for all I care. I don’t give a rat’s pink butt cheeks about that thing.”

  I was in my body. There was soil under my feet. I was wearing the clothes I’d walked down to the garage in, what felt like hours ago. I was really here, this was real life, but I was suffering some kind of audio-visual hallucination. Hallucinations, specifically the hearing of disembodied voices, are one of the first major signs of schizophrenia. That’s what it is, Drew. You’re crazy.

  “Are you here, Scudds? In this room?” I said.

  “Am I here in this room?” Scudds considered the question. “No, Drew-buddy. No, I’m not. None of us are. We’re down there, in the soil. But I wanted to talk to you ‘bout a few things, so here I is.”

  “About what?”

  “About what we’re gonna do to solve your problem.”

  “I don’t have a problem,” I said.

  “Drew-buddy, you got more problems than a blind retard with cancer in his asshole. And that ain’t even the start of it.”

  “Can you please stop calling me that?”

  “Callin you what? Drew-buddy? You don’t like it? Shit, it’s just a nickname. Everyone down here got one. I’m Doctor Midnight the Magic Mirror Man. We didn’t know it bothered you so much. We can always come up with something else.”

  I looked around. I was still alone in the shack.

  “Who’s we?” I said.

  A thousand voices responded simultaneously, “We who will never be remembered.”

  I scratched my belly and adjusted my glasses. “Are you guys… the Union?”

  Scudds chuckled. “Sure.”

  “So it’s you, Scudds, Annabelle Leigh, and Dutch Evans?”

  “The whole gang. We’re all here,” Scudds said.

  “And the ones from 1993?”

  “’93, ’95, ’98, 2004, 2007, even one from 2010, though he’s a little early. We’re all down here, buddy, just havin’ a grand old time.”

  “What about Mr. DeLucio?”

  Scudds paused. “The Piano Man will be here soon.”

  “So, what do you want from me? What do I have to do?”

  Scudds chuckled. “First thing’s first, you need to wakey-wakey.”

  I am awake, I thought, but I’m having a mental breakdown. All the stress finally made me snap. None of this is even happening. But my eyes and ears are trapped in this delusion, making me think it’s real.

  “I’m not awake now?” I said carefully.

  “Hmm,” Scudds considered it. “Not quite. This is what we like to call a bubble. Sort of like when you go swimmin' in a lake. You the swimmin' type, bud?”

  I shook my head.

  Scudds sounded sad. “Aw, that’s a shame. It’s the kitty’s titties,” his voice jeered. “Sometimes, if you’re swimming in a lake and you dive too deep and start to run out of air, you can bite the bubbles rising from the bottom to refresh your air supply. Only, it’s not always air rising in those bubbles. Sometimes it’s gas, let out from a corpse decaying in the silt. Those ones can make you a bit… loopy. Ho he he he.”

  A light turned on upstairs as someone walked into the kitchen. Echoes of footsteps and voices flooded down through the ceiling boards, shadows sliding through the stripes of light and falling motes of dust. It was Bea and Jay. I could see them, though I knew that somehow, they couldn’t see me. Jay leaned on the real Sunny Hill’s breakfast bar, pouring a vodka tonic. He sliced a piece of lemon with his pocketknife and dropped it in. Then he pulled Bea close to him and started sucking on her neck.

  Scudds giggled and said, “Honey, I’m home.”

  Scudds Gurney’s shack was only one story. It didn’t have an upstairs. I was still in the basement under Sunny Hill. All of this was an illusion.

  Upstairs, Jay asked Bea, “You want a maintenance drink, babe?”

  “Oh God,” Bea said. “I don think I can drink amynore. Actually… fuggit. Less keep thizz party goin’. Woo!”

  “What’s your poison? We’ve got vodka and vodka with tonic water.”

  “Wharrever yer havin’.”

  “A kiss it is.” Jay pulled Bea
close and kissed her.

  Bea started biting his bottom lip. Her hand slid down the front of his corduroys and started jacking him off. My vision went red.

  “Drew? Buddy? Ya in there?” Scudds said. “Focus on the task at hand. Not her hand, yours.”

  I looked down. My fingers were brushing the rusted twin handles of the long-bladed tree shears Jay and I had used to massacre the orchard when I first moved in. They were leaning against the wall. I closed my fingers around the grips, felt their weight. The shears were heavier than I remembered,but the rust and chipped paint were the same.

  I shook my head and said, “No.”

  Scudds sounded mad. “No motherfucking what, kid?”

  Bea took Jay out of his pants and got on her knees. She spat and wrapped her lips around him, then started giving him the kind of blowjob I’ve only dreamed about after watching a twenty-hour porn marathon. When he reached down to stop her, she grabbed his hand and put it behind his back. The scars on my forearms hurt like they were new.

  “Nobody’s awake,” Bea said through a mouthful of Jay’s dick.

  “Wh-wh-why are you showing me this?” I said.

  But I already knew. He wants me to murder them, I thought. Like Andy murdered his friends. Not just Bea and Jay, but all of them: Carter, Natalia, and Sam, too. To take revenge for their betrayals, their jokes, for making me feel like a worthless loser. To give their memories to the Hole. Wait. Is that what the Union wants? Or what I want?

  I dropped the shears and said more firmly, “No. Let me go home.”

  Consternation riddled Scudds’ voice. “Drew. Bud. Buddy. You are home.”

  I hung my head and cried. Scudds continued, sounding tired. “The truth is, this bullshit charade has been goin’ on far too long. We want to rest, relax. We just want to enjoy the sunshine, like everyone else. The good news is, this house has produced many a good fruit: parties, good times, memories full of fun and happiness. Some bad ones, too, but that’s par for the course. You’ve always felt there was something special about this place. I did, too. There’s a certain… gravity to it.”