The men gripped tight their chains, wheeling around so Wilton could switch on the power.
The sheriff flipped the switch on the junction box and the whole worksite lit up like a circus. Strings of lights—many of the bulbs shattered or burnt out—blazed to life, and the generator started chugging like the engine of a tractor trailer. The entrance to the mine shaft glowed like a beckoning streetlamp on a pitch-black street—two strings of lights leading in from opposite sides. The three men walked steadily toward it, dragging Jason along by his chains.
“No! No!” it wailed. “Not back in! Not back in!” The thing within Jason snarled and snapped, eyes wide and unblinking, but each man kept up his end of the chain. They’d done this more times than they’d like to count, and this was by far one of the angriest spirits. It grabbed the chain Wilton held, but Wilton didn’t budge. It tried to levitate off the ground again, head held high to the heavens, letting out an unearthly howl, but the men just yanked it back down. “Not the pit! Not back in the pit!” it screamed.
But they were unfazed.
The men knew that Hell wasn’t down that shaft; they didn’t believe in Hell anymore. What was down there was worse. They’d seen it before, faced it before, closed it before, but not a bit of that made them any less scared. There was so much pain down there, so much despair. It was palpable. It pulsed and spat and became physical. Most of the time only Jason could see or hear or feel these things, but down there, anyone could.
No, it wasn’t Hell. But it might as well have been.
They dragged Jason onto the massive elevator, once meant to take dozens of miners down at a time, holding the thing dead center. Wilton grabbed the control box with one hand and pressed the large green button. The elevator stuttered to life, descending slowly, groaning, whining, and clanking its way toward the bottom.
“I’ll kill him!” yelled the thing inside of Jason. “And then I’ll take each of you one by one!” He started punching himself in the face.
“The power of Christ compels you to stop!” shouted Father Paddock.
The thing writhed inside of Jason, losing its grip on him. “No!”
Wilton counted silently to himself. “Just a few more seconds. Just a fewwwww . . . more . . . seconds.”
Even the air down here was offended by the living. It didn’t want them there. It was oppressive, choking, spiteful. The sounds of tortured souls drifted up from the depths of the mine. The whole place was alive with the dead.
It knew what was coming. Everyone knew what was coming.
The elevator jerked to a stop with a raucous clangor and the men all lurched together at once, dragging the thing down deep into the dug-out passage. It grew colder and colder the deeper they went—unnaturally cold, the sweat on their brows freezing in place, rapidly dusting their faces with frost.
“Last chance!” shouted whatever was in Jason. “Last chance! You don’t have to do this part!”
“We can do this part just fine,” said Wilton.
“I don’t think you can. You’re weak! WEAK! Can’t do it.”
“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” began Father Paddock.
“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” repeated Wilton and Milo.
“‘I will fear no evil,’” continued the priest, “‘for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’”
“‘I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,’” the two repeated in unison.
Jason quivered, writhing against the chains harder than before.
“Just keep repeating the prayer,” said Father Paddock. “We’ll get through thi—”
And then came the worst part.
Down here, close to the breach, the spirits were far more powerful; down here, the darkness choked the light. They were better able to endure the harshness of the priest’s aura on the other side of everything. And here, they were able to try to possess the men; to inflict upon them the very worst memories that made up these spirits—the things that made them truly, deeply, profoundly angry at the world.
Father Paddock gripped tight the chain and the entire world slipped away, the color bleeding out, the fog melting. Trapped. Weight crushing his back. Arm pinched off, turning black. Hungry. So hungry. And thirsty. Parched, throat cracking, stomach convulsing. Alone. So alone. No one returning shouts anymore. The stench of death coming through the rocks. Father Paddock tried to move beneath several hundred tons of rock and soil, but he couldn’t budge. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” he repeated, “‘I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’”
Wilton stood before his father, his father’s belt in his hand. “Is that the belt you choose?” asked his father. “Yes, sir,” he replied. Why did he say that? That’s not the belt he chose. This wasn’t his father. This was Old Man McCreary. But younger. That boy wasn’t a kid. It was Sylvester McCreary. This wasn’t Wilton’s memory at all. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” he repeated. Old Man McCreary took the belt and Wilton bent over, pulling down his own pants. “This’ll teach you to stay out of my liquor cabinet,” said the Elder McCreary. “This isn’t mine,” repeated Wilton, and the thick leather strap beat his bare ass. “This isn’t mine. This isn’t mine. This isn’t . . . ‘I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’”
Milo stood in the center of the house, the wind howling outside, a loose shutter banging. He took a few steps forward to a cabinet, unlocking it, pulling out a rifle. He recognized the rifle. He’d seen it before. Handled it before. The weight of it felt familiar. Then he walked slowly toward a first-floor bedroom, silently turning the doorknob. “Why was this house so familiar? Why did it—oh, no.” He walked into the room, two little boys sleeping on separate beds. “No, no, no.” He raised the rifle. BANG! BANGBANG! Three shots, and the two children were gone.
“Mommy!” yelled a girl. “Mommmmmmyyyyy! What was that?”
He could hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet running across the creaky wooden floor.
“Mommy?”
He turned and fired the rifle again.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” He’d been here before; was the first on the scene. He knew what this all looked like from the other side of it. Knew what happened next. Milo did not want to see this part.
He crept slowly across the floor, passing the tiny little clump of bloody bedclothes, and sat down in a chair in the center of the room. He was Mrs. Marszalek. This was one week after the mine. After her husband hadn’t come back. After the possessed in town ran amok, taking as many of the living back with them as they could. She could live without Adam; couldn’t bear to have her children endure another night in which the nightmares walked the earth; couldn’t bear living in the city where Hell kept vomiting up the dead. So she did something about it.
He could taste the metal in his mouth. Could feel the smooth wood of the gun as his hand slipped across it to the trigger. “No, No, No. I can’t. I just can’t. Don’t pull the—”
The men snapped out of it. They had reached the end of the excavation, the farthest point from which any survivors had been dug up. Had the company dug any farther, the whole mine would have come down on them, so beyond the rubble-strewn wall ahead was the resting place of 184 men and women, none of whom would ever see the surface again.
And in front of it was a swirling, indescribable mass of clawed hands tearing at the seams of reality, climbing over one another trying desperately to push out through a pinprick in the fabric of space. The air vibrated, thrumming with malevolence, hundreds of terrified voices howling obscenities.
Milo dropped the chain. Father Paddock and Wilton snapped out of it, chasing the ghosts from the inside of their heads.
“Milo!” shouted Wilton. “Pick up the goddamned chain!”
Milo leaned his head bac
k, held out his arms, and howled as he levitated a foot off the ground.
“Christ!” yelled Wilton.
“We can only exorcise one at a time, Wilt,” shouted Father Paddock over the howling and tortured screams of the dead.
“I know!”
“Make the damn call, Wilt!”
“Jason! We start with Jason!”
Wilton pulled out a hunting knife, its blade razor sharp, its hilt a cross, and every inch of it having been submerged in holy water.
“In the name of the Lord God,” yelled Father Paddock over the cacophony of the dead, “I command you to leave this body, and go back whence you came, closing the door behind you!”
“No!” shrieked the thing, its black eyes crying tears of blood.
Wilton slashed at Jason’s bandaged arm, cutting a razor-thin gash across it.
“Fuck you!” the thing howled as it rocketed out of Jason’s body, cast headlong into the breach.
The men both dropped their chains, jumping back from the epicenter of undulating mass.
Father Paddock raised his cross and began the first few syllables of a prayer. Jason reeled, trying to regain his bearings, stumbling away from the mass.
“Milo!” Wilton shouted.
Milo looked down and shook his head. “I’m not going back.”
“Yes you are, you bastard!”
“If I go, he goes!”
“That’s not the deal.” Wilton steadied himself, ready to slash Milo somewhere they could patch up easily enough.
But Milo kept shaking his head. “I go, he goes.” Then Milo stuck his hands into his stomach, piercing the skin, and grabbing hold of his rib cage. “I go, he goes!” Then the thing yanked with both hands, tearing the rib cage in two, Milo’s chest exploding, organs spilling out.
Milo hit the ground, dead.
Father Paddock rushed forward, sprinkling holy water on the screaming mass of clawed hands and horror. “In the name of the Lord God, shut! This! Door!”
And then the whole world fell quiet.
The earth no longer quivered, the air no longer held an unnatural chill, and the fog was falling and breaking away.
The tear in the veil between the living and the dead had been stitched shut. And what once was four men was now only three. All of whom stared at each other silently, hearts broken.
Jesse stood behind the bar, pouring drinks for everyone. A beer for the priest, a double vodka soda with lime for the sheriff, and a tall glass of whiskey for the drunk to drown out the voices. The bar was quiet, a pained vigil for the freshly dead.
Jason tried not to think about what his brother would look like—what he might sound like—the next time he saw him, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. The worst part of his brother being gone wasn’t that he would never see him again; it was that he would see him constantly, no doubt until the day he died. He drank, and he drank hard, and slowly but surely the voices faded away.
Father Paddock was angry. Angry at himself. Angry at the dead. Angry for not leaving. Angry at the sheriff for dragging him into this time after time after time. But most of all, he was just angry at God for making the whole damned thing. There had to be a reason for it all, something that made everything he’d seen make sense. He wanted to pray that there were answers, pray for guidance, but deep down, he knew God wasn’t listening. Not really.
Wilton stared out the window, nursing his drink faster than usual, his thoughts on all those he’d lost. The department was him and him alone now. There were no deputies left. They were gone, all of them. The ones that didn’t leave after the first night, he’d gotten killed on nights just like it. He was the law without a force in a town without much left living. He had become sheriff to the dead. He could go at any moment, but where would that leave everyone else?
The priest glanced up from his beer and looked the sheriff dead in the eye. “So is that it?”
“No,” said Wilton. “That’s not it. Not yet.”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“How much longer until we’re all down there? There’s just no point.”
“Of course there’s a point. What happens when that thing tears open and there’s no one here to close it? What happens if it tears open and spills out into the whole world? Someone has to be here. We have to be here.”
“But how many more times can we do this?” asked the priest.
“One more night,” said the sheriff.
“It’s always just one more night.”
We Are Where the Nightmares Go
Everyone knows the story of the little girl who fell down the rabbit hole and of the children who walked through the wardrobe and of the little girl who was scooped up by the tornado and of the little boy who found the book that never ended and of the little girl who said the right words on the other side of the mirror and of the little girl who unlocked the bricked-up door in the cellar and of the little boy who had such wonderful dreams night after night. But those are the children who came back. No one talks about the other children, the children who walk through basement doors and rabbit holes never to return, or the ones who are never quite the same again once they do. The things that happen to those children are not so magical, not so delightful. Their adventures are not the things of pageant retellings and matinees. Rather, they are the things we try not to think of, the things instead we dream about when we would rather be dreaming of something else.
This is the story of just such a child, a child who awoke to find herself stiff as a board, unable to so much as move a muscle, so stiff in fact that she was able to wriggle her soul free and loose it out into the night. And as that child stepped from her body and onto the floor, she saw the faintest hint of light leaking out from beneath her bed, a light that spilled across the hardwood like errant moonbeams, beckoning her to peer into the dark, past the curtain of cascading bedspread and the clutter of discarded toys. There, as she knelt, she spied a door in the wall beneath the bed frame: a door that had not been there before—just large enough for a small child to squeeze through—a door no adult could fit through, which was fine, as no adult in their right mind would ever believe in such a thing. But this little girl did believe in such things and this little girl was just small enough to fit through it and this little girl could find no reason not to investigate where the light leaking out from the space between the door and the floor was coming from.
The light beyond the door was blinding against the midnight black, but warm, inviting. And as she squeezed her way through the tiny portal, every inch of her body scraping against the wood on its way past, she felt as if she were getting safer, inch by inch. Though the room behind her was her own and she knew it like she knew her own freckles, it was dark and the place beyond the door was bright. She imagined for a moment that when her eyes adjusted she would find herself on some white-sand beach, crystal-blue waters lapping against the shore, palm trees stretching toward the sky, the smell of salt and sea foam on the air.
But when her body was through and her eyes adjusted and the light seemed to dim all on its own, she found that it was hardly that—in fact, it wasn’t like that at all. There were no beaches; there was no sun. There was only shadow and moonlight, ruin and terror.
The land was broken, overgrown—thick, ancient, gnarly trees surrounded by scrub and sharp yellow grass. Buildings with shattered windows, towering hospitals next to shut-up factories next to abandoned playgrounds peppered with gravel and disused equipment. The land was a ghost town built by recession and fear, lit only by the full moon and a handful of flickering streetlamps; a tattered city, damned and forgotten.
At once she knew she had stumbled into a place of which she wanted no part, but when she turned to go back through the door, it was gone. It had become nothing but a crumbling brick wall climbing to the heavens, no door or even window in sight. Wherever she was, she was stuck, with no way to go but forward.
Before her was a shattered cobbles
tone path, dead grass between each stone, weeds sprouting from the cracks. And along the sides ran a chain-link fence, clipped and torn, jagged and rusty. The little girl made her way down that path, eager to find her way home, unsure which way it was. And that’s when she saw it.
The Thing on the Other Side of the Door.
At first he looked as if he were none but shadow, like a thing backlit on all sides, but as the light trickled in over his skin, the shape became a form and the form became a face and the face took its place atop arms and legs and a concave chest. It moved like a thing with all the life sucked out, left to dance at the end of a marionette’s strings. He was a man without muscle, an atrophied mess of bone and skin withering beneath tatters of rotten soiled cloth. He wore a steel-wool beard beneath lifeless blue eyes, his skin gaunt, dripping over bone, sagging at the joints, ravaged by time but never the sun. His gaze seemed to focus on nothing at all, as if he was staring at something else even when he was looking right at you, his eyes having seen horrors, such horrors—things that could be witnessed but never explained. And behind those eyes the little girl could sense a terrible thing lurking, a thing she could not begin to fathom. It was a hate so foul, an anger so unrelenting, a desire so unquenchable, that it prickled her skin as he drew closer; it was a thing, such an awful thing, that she prayed silently she might never come to understand it.
He smiled through thin pale lips and pristine pearly teeth. “Hello, child,” he said. “How is it that you came to be lost?”
When he spoke, he did so through the hiss of an old record, his voice like a recording played on a phonograph with a dirty needle and blown-out speakers. ChchchchchchchchcPOPchchchchchchchchchchchcHISSSSSSSchchchchchchPOPchchchchchchchchchchchcHISSSSSSS.
“How do you know that I’m lost?” she asked, her eyes narrow, her hands on her hips.
“Because no one stays here who doesn’t have to. You are a child in a land of lost children, wandering aimlessly, looking for a door you have no idea how to find.”
We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories Page 4