The Wash

by Cary Christopher

  Anderson looked back. This time when he turned around, Ruth could see the whites all the way around his pupils. His voice cracked and he started to whine. It was high-pitched, like the sound of a crying animal. He started violently shaking the door frame.

  Ruth gripped the shotgun, took a step back and pointed it toward the door.

  “Phillip Anderson! I’m going to pull this trigger if you don’t stop that!”

  Anderson stopped momentarily. He turned around to look behind him. The shape in the darkness was about eight feet high now but less defined in the failing light. Even so, it seemed to be leaning toward the house. Anderson turned around again, lowered his shoulder and rammed himself into the door. It moved violently but held shut.

  “You have to let me in!” he screamed. “Now! Now! I have to get in now!”

  Ruth looked back out at the field and this time she was certain she saw tendrils, like the delicate curls on a bean plant, working their way along the snow, reaching toward Anderson. She shifted the shotgun to her right hand, quickly undid the deadbolt with her left and swung the door open. Anderson practically fell into the little hallway as Ruth watched the shadowy tendrils pause five or six yards from the steps. They pulled back and dissolved into nothing as she closed the door.

  “Oh God. Thank you,” Anderson lay on the floor in a ball.

  Ruth took the other end of the shotgun back in her hand, pointed it down at Anderson and nudged him with her foot.

  “Get in the kitchen.”

  Anderson pulled himself up on all fours and crawled.

  She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and kept the shotgun trained on Anderson who sat with his back against the sink. He was calm again with his head back and eyes closed. Outside, Ruth could hear the wind howling.

  “Thank you, again.”

  “You’re welcome,” she replied. She chambered a shell so he could hear that she meant business, “You so much as move funny and you won’t be so thankful.”

  “I’m not moving anywhere now. It’s the first time I’ve felt safe in years.”

  “Why is that?”

  “This house is protected,” he replied. Color was beginning to come back into his cheeks. “Nothing can touch me in here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That thing outside. It can’t cross your threshold. Your house is a haven. A safe place. It was built for just this purpose. The rest of the world may fall to the minions of hell but this house will be safe. Always.”

  Ruth tightened her grip on the shotgun, “What are you talking about?”

  Anderson smiled at her. There was no malice in his expression, only relief, calm and peace, “The foundation of this house holds one of the seven sacred stones given to Joseph Smith himself. The very walls are blessed.”

  Ruth’s eyes gave away her surprise.

  “You know about the stones?” Anderson asked.

  She kept the shotgun trained on him and didn’t answer.

  “There are a lot of people looking for you,” she said. “A lot of people who want to know about what happened with your family.”

  “My family? My family is gone.”

  “Did you kill them?” asked Ruth.

  “No. They each chose their own path and left me. I watched them leave.”

  “Your family was murdered in your home not five hundred yards from here,” Ruth replied. “People are looking for you because they’re assuming you did it.”

  Anderson calmly shook his head. He picked up a hand, ran it over his long hair to pull it out of his face and raised his stubbled chin to looked right into Ruth’s eyes.

  “Those bodies are not my family.”

  XVIII

  As soon as Robert climbed into the truck, he could tell J.B. was practically bursting at the seams to talk about what he’d learned. The normally cool persona was gone and sitting next to Robert was a bundle of nervous tics and fidgeting.

  “So, are you waiting for me to ask or are you going to tell me what Ouray told you?”

  J.B. looked over at him excitedly as the truck bumped down the road and past Old Ogden Cemetery.

  “Ever hear of Izpuzteque?” he asked.

  “What is an ‘Iz-pooz-tay-kay’?”

  “Not a what. A who. Izpuzteque is a demon. I thought you may have heard of him since he’s Mexican. He shows up in other cultures also. In Mayan culture he was Zotzilaha Chimalman. The Aztecs called him Xolotl and no matter what culture you’re reading about him in, they all think he was a complete bastard.”

  Robert chuckled.

  “Ouray called me back and left me a message that what I was looking for had to do with Izpuzteque,” J.B. continued. “So I went digging through my books. Sure enough, I started finding stories about him. The thing is, each culture paints him a little bit differently. The common thread is he’s an outcast of sorts. In Aztec culture he’s called the ‘God of Monstrosities’. He creates legions to help him take over the land from the Aztec’s gods of light. The Mayans put him in a cave and said he looked like a bat, which is probably fitting since a lot of early cultures believed that people came from underground originally…”

  Robert stopped him, “Whoa, man. Slow down. So what does Izpuzteque have to do with our stone?”

  J.B. pulled the truck onto the highway.

  “I’m getting to that. So in the Mayan culture, he’s this bat thing but he wants out. He wants out bad. So he’s constantly scheming to bring darkness to the outside world where he can live. Just like in the Aztec version though, he gets overthrown. Which brings us to Mexico.”

  “Where he’s called Izpuzteque,” Robert finished.

  “Exactly. In Mexico the shit hits the fan again but this time, the legends are all blended in with Christian religion because of the Spanish influence. So instead of being a god of some sort, he’s one of Satan’s minions, a demon who likes to corrupt humans and use them to convince others to do the devil’s work. There’s even mention of him needing to be born from a human woman in order to be able to walk in both worlds.”

  “Nice,” Robert nodded. “So you followed the story of this demon from South America and this has to do with our stone in what way?”

  “Well, remember how I said a lot of old cultures believed men came from underground? A lot of those cultures worshiped stones. They would have sacred ones that meant different things. I think our stone is one of those.”

  “And…?” Robert prodded.

  “And if we follow the myths from the Mayan to the Aztec and even into Mexican culture, Izpuzteque is always trying to get into our world and in each legend there are mentions of sacred stones. I think it’s what Izpuzteque needs to get into our world.”

  The two rode in silence while J.B. pulled the truck around the back of the bar and cut the engine.

  “J.B.,” Robert said. “You realize that we found a stone that leaks water and while that is very, very strange and definitely opens me up to some alternative theories on what’s happening here, none of us has seen anything remotely resembling a demon.”

  J.B. climbed out of the truck and swung the door shut.

  “I saw him,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. Last night, I dreamed about him but it was more than a dream. It was totally real. I could feel the ground beneath my feet, smell the air, everything. I was there.”

  Robert fumbled with his keys and opened the door to the kitchen.

  “So while I stayed here and cleaned up, you were dreaming about demons who you now think are real.”

  “First off, don’t even try to just dismiss this out of hand,” J.B. called after him.

  “They’re myths,” Robert yelled over his shoulder as he unlocked the front door. “You read a bunch of stuff about them and you had a dream. No more, no less.”

  “Myths are not just fictional stories to be enjoyed and forgotten,” insisted J.B. “Carl Jung states that myth is the natural intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious thought.
It’s what we use to explain what our minds can’t grasp. Myths are based in reality.”

  Robert pulled a Corona out of the cooler and sighed, “And Freud thought myth was nothing but a transitional phase toward a scientific concept of reality… which actually is what Jung was theorizing in his own way. They aren’t saying myths are real, they’re saying myths substitute for what is real until we figure out what’s really going on.”

  J.B. parked himself on a stool facing Robert.

  “Give me one of those.”

  Robert pulled another beer out, cracked open the bottle and handed it to J.B. He took a big swig from it and put it down between them.

  “Okay, bitch,” he said staring at Robert, “It’s been a long while since we did this but I’m going to warn you now, don’t go throwing Freud around at me unless you’re prepared to get your ass handed to you.”

  Robert laughed. He hadn’t seen J.B. this animated in years. It reminded him of the days when they would sit across a table at their favorite club and argue, citing one reference after another until eventually one of them would come up short. The loser always had to pay the tab and back in those days, the score was split almost evenly.

  He took a drink of his own beer and smiling ear to ear said, “Bring it.”

  “Lucien Lévy-Bruhl… does that name ring a bell at all because if it doesn’t then you’ve already lost this argument,” started J.B.

  Robert rolled his eyes, “Some bullshit about blurring the lines of myth and reality if I remember right.”

  J.B. laughed, “You’re screwed. Lévy-Bruhl was a French anthropologist. His main focus was always primitive peoples and one of his greatest observations was that primitive peoples don’t differentiate between myth and reality. Like the Australian Aborigines. Dreamtime is reality. It’s just a time before the present. It’s all real to them.”

  “But that doesn’t make it actually real,” Robert replied.

  “No, but I’m laying a foundation for you.”

  “Okay,” Robert replied, “But before you get any further, Émile Durkheim. Also a Frenchman, but a sociologist. According to Durkheim the key function of myth was simply to conform the behavior of the individual to the group. It was part morality tale and part fear mongering to get people to behave and stop fucking goats unless…”

  “Unless the group wanted to fuck goats,” finished J.B. nodding. “Very nice red herring there. While I agree that myth helps bind groups and societies together, I still submit to you that myths are based in reality and cannot be dismissed easily and I’m going to lay your argument to waste with Adolf Bastian.”

  Robert took a drink from his beer, put the bottle down between them and trying to look as unshaken as possible said, “Who is Adolf Bastian?”

  “Adolf Bastian was a physicist and ethnologist… an overachiever if you will. His theory, which is widely accepted, is there are two components of myth: Elementary Thought and People’s Thought.

  “Elementary Thought is the key here. It’s the thing that ties all of our cultures and societies together. Elementary Thought is a set of myth patterns that appear in every single culture in every continent around the entire world. If you look at myths that originated in China or Japan and compare them to myths that originated in North America or amongst the Aborigines, they all have the same set of myth patterns. It’s hardwired into our heads and it’s not because our brains need something to come up with to explain the sun, the moon and what rainbows are made of. It’s because deep down in there, those patterns represent something that’s real; something that can’t be dismissed despite years of evolution and generation after generation of breeding.

  “The most obvious examples are flood myths,” J.B. was on a roll now. “You’ve got Noah from the Old Testament. The whole story takes place during the dawn of the world as seen by the writers who are undoubtedly from Africa and The Middle East, but in Mexico, instead of Noah, you have Neta and Nena. They make a boat out of a hollowed out tree when God tells them he’s going to flood the world. They survive the flood, beach their tree on a mountain top and find all the animals are up there already, safe from the waters.

  “Then in Peru, there’s another flood story. This time God speaks to the man through his llama. The llama tells the man to go to a high mountain to escape the flood and when they get up there they find all the animals already there. The flood comes and the man is saved.”

  Robert nodded, “I get that and I’ve read enough about it to know that every culture has a flood myth because every culture experienced flooding.”

  “But then why the catastrophic flood myth?” asked J.B. “Why are all the animals always saved and why the similarity in names?”

  Robert shook his head dismissively, “Maybe they were passed along from one tribe to another. It’s not important. What’s important is there’s a reason cultures have flood myths… because they experienced floods.”

  “Argh!” J.B. cried out, rolling his eyes. “It’s not just floods. There are plenty of other similarities too in things like creation myths and the concept of sin and forgiveness. You ever hear of the Yoruba in Africa. They have a five day week and they rest on the fifth day. You know why? Because they believe God created the world in four days and rested on the fifth. Sound familiar?”

  Robert nodded, “Sure it does but it doesn’t mean myths are real. Besides, I still don’t understand what this demon has to do with our stone or even why a stone from South America would end up in this shithole town.”

  J.B. stood up. He grabbed his beer, took two huge gulps from it and began pacing. Finally he stopped and looked up at Robert.

  “I’m not sure about the ‘how’ part. I don’t know if the stone was brought up here by someone else or if they were planted here and found or what. The fact is, somehow it made its way to Ogden Wash and when it did, Izpuzteque followed it. Then about a hundred and fifty years ago, he tried to break through again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Old Ogden Wash,” replied J.B.

  “Old Ogden Wash?” Robert laughed. “How do you know about Old Ogden Wash?”

  “I got curious after the Randall’s comment last week. I asked around and Andi told me. Said when she was little, kids used to hike out to it.”

  “Look,” Robert began, “I’ve been entertained by all this to say the least but now you’re definitely off the deep end. Old Ogden Wash was hit with a sickness. From what Ruth’s told me it was some sort of contagious fever.”

  “That’s almost right. Except it wasn’t a fever. It was Izpuzteque. He was trying to break through again and this time, Ogden Wash was targeted because the stone was there. James Ogden must have beaten him somehow and he must have known the stone was valuable or was a key. That’s why he hid it in the wall of the house. Old Ogden Wash was left to rot, not because it was the place where people got sick, but because it was a cursed place.”

  Robert laughed, “Okay, who decides where they live is a ‘cursed place’ and then moves less than five fucking miles away to build again?”

  “Look, at the very least, hear me out about last night. It goes beyond just having that dream.”

  “Okay.”

  “So last night I get home and as I’m going inside, I see this kid in my yard.”

  “A kid?” asked Robert.

  “Yeah, a kid and not just any kid. One of the Anderson girls.”

  Robert did a double take, “You saw one of the Anderson girls last night? What time was it?”

  J.B. shook his head, “I don’t remember. It was right as I pulled up so around 11:30 or so maybe. Anyway, I’m at my door and there’s this kid and she’s just on the edge of where the security light is shining. I can’t quite make her out but she’s probably eight or nine and she’s got blonde hair. She’s standing out there in the snow with no shoes on and a cotton nightgown. So I tried to get her to take a blanket but she just stared at me. She wouldn’t take anything and that’s when I noticed the coyote with her.”

&nb
sp; Robert rolled his eyes, “This has to be a dream. She had a coyote with her?”

  “Yeah and it was no hallucination. The damn thing snarled at me and everything. It was pissed off and you and I both know coyotes don’t act like that.”

  “So it was trained or something?”

  “Must have been,” J.B. continued. “Anyway, they wouldn’t take the blanket and I got pissed off and left them in the snow. When I looked back out they were gone and when I say gone, I mean completely gone. There was no trace of them at all. I wasn’t sleeping yet mind you. I didn’t go to sleep for hours afterward because I got Ouray’s message and started combing through books.”

  J.B. started pacing, “So later on, I dreamed I was in this cave and I saw the demon. He had his back to me and he couldn’t see me but he was talking to someone. As I’m looking, I finally see who. One was a coyote and the other was a dwarf. The dwarf kept flickering, like it was a dwarf most of the time but occasionally it would become something else for just a moment.

  “It took me a while to place it but when it was flickering, it was becoming the Anderson girl, but it couldn’t hold the image. It kept trying but it never lasted more than an instant.”

  “When did you go to bed?” he asked.

  “Sometime around dawn,” J.B. replied.

  “They’d have been dead by then,” Robert said.

  “Maybe whatever it was couldn’t look like her if she wasn’t alive,” said J.B. “So you’re coming around, huh?”

  Robert shook his head, “No. I still think this is all a bad dream.”

  “Well, let me tell you something else. In the dream, the two were talking to the demon and they were pissed off that they were being held back. The coyote did all the talking. It really wanted to get at someone but the demon wouldn’t let him. He kept saying it wasn’t in the rules. In my culture, the coyote is a trickster. He manipulates others to get his way. He’s smart but he’ll often fall in with the wrong crowd in order to get something he wants. I’m pretty sure he wanted to kill me last night in my yard but he wasn’t allowed to.”