by J L Aarne
“He can see us, why doesn’t he look? Hey, we know you can see us!”
“That’s Silas. Hey, Silas, why won’t he look at us?”
“Make them go away,” Wyatt said quietly to Silas.
Silas smiled a little and shrugged. “Why don’t you tell them to go away?”
“Because they’re not real,” Wyatt hissed.
“We are too real!” one of the tiny voices piped up.
Wyatt glanced instinctively in that direction and caught sight of a little troupe of creatures, the tallest one less than three inches high, scurrying along the shadows of the gutter behind him and Silas.
Even as he denied their existence, he remembered playing with creatures exactly like them as a child in his aunt’s front yard. Not at night, he wasn’t allowed out after full dark; he had seen them only for a little while at dusk. For a few minutes, when there was no sun in the sky. When the light was purple and pink and made everything seem like it was glowing. For a few minutes, he had played with them in the shadows and he still remembered.
He also remembered when he had stopped.
“I don’t believe in fairies,” Wyatt muttered.
“Yeah, well, Peter Pan, they’re not fairies,” Silas said. One of them had grabbed onto the hem of his coat and climbed up until Silas put down his hand for it. He lifted the small creature toward Wyatt. “This is Louie-Louie. Mostly we just call him Louie the one time, though.”
Close up, Louie resembled a strange, magical cross between a bundle of sticks, a gerbil and a fat-cheeked little child. He wore a shabby red coat that looked like it had been made from paper softened by a million crumplings, and a hat that had once been the thumb of a brown knitted glove.
“Why Louie-Louie?” Wyatt asked before he remembered he didn’t believe in them, whatever they were.
“The song, I think. He likes it,” Silas said. He put Louie on his shoulder. “They’re gnomes, not fairies. But you knew that once, didn’t you?”
Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Miss Tallulah used to talk to Carl a lot,” Louie said in a soft, solemn voice. “Then she’d leave milk and honey outside. Except in summer because it curdled.”
Wyatt glanced at Silas. “I thought they weren’t fairies.”
“Guess she didn’t know that,” Louie said, ignoring the way Wyatt continued to pointedly ignore him. Him and the line of others still trotting gamely along behind them in the gutter.
Wyatt stared down at his feet as he walked, trying to recall if he’d ever seen his aunt holding conversations with things that weren’t there. Things that were there but were too small and timid to be seen. He thought he could picture her in the kitchen doing the dishes and putting away the leftovers from supper and sometimes she had talked to herself. Or had she? She’d had long conversations with Benson and Hedges and hadn’t seemed to mind that the cats did not contribute much.
Except the little thing, Louie, would have him believe that Aunt Tallie had been talking to gnomes.
Or it was a false memory. A memory created by his desire to remember it.
It felt like a real memory though. He could smell the lemon dishwashing soap and the warm, spiced meat smell of meatloaf. Aunt Tallie wasn’t a very good cook, but little Wyatt didn’t know that yet. She made the best SpaghettiOs (which he had called piskettyOs) and always put meatballs in them. SpaghettiOs at home never had meatballs.
As the implications of this memory sank in, Wyatt slowed to a stop. He heard Silas stop a few feet ahead and walk back to him, but he wasn’t paying attention to Silas anymore, or the gnome perched on his shoulder. He was remembering all the times he’d been told he was crazy or delusional or just a big fat liar with a vivid imagination. He was remembering his entire life and all the people in it, the way they looked at him, the way they smiled to themselves, they way they avoided him. Aunt Tallulah had never defended him, not really. She would tell Kat to knock it off if her teasing persisted too long, but Kat had almost never been meaning to him that way, not even when they were children. Aunt Tallie had listened to him and hardly ever reminded him that his stories about what he’d seen were make-believe, but when he was older, Wyatt had always assumed she had been humoring him.
“She could see you,” Wyatt said.
He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, but a couple of the gnomes that had been following along with them stepped into his line of sight and peered up at him. One wore a green hat and the other a blue one, and staring blankly down at them, all Wyatt could think was that somewhere out there in the city there were a lot of gloves missing thumbs.
“Aunt Tallie wasn’t a night person,” Wyatt said, turning his gaze up to Silas, pleading with him to explain it in a way that didn’t make Wyatt feel like he had been lied to and made a fool of by one of his favorite people in the world. “She was… She was like me, she—Oh.”
“She didn’t go out much after dark, did she?” Silas said. “She kept a light on in the hallway, probably one in the bathroom, too.”
“There was a nightlight in her room. It was shaped like a rainbow, like the kind they put in kids’ bedrooms,” Wyatt said faintly. “But she… she wasn’t like me. Not like… I mean, she isn’t. She’s not afraid of things like me, not even the dark. She… she’s always so happy. She can’t be like me.”
“It goes in bloodlines,” Silas said.
Wyatt felt his eyes tearing up and hated it. He already felt stupid beyond belief and now he was about to humiliate himself further by bursting into tears again right there on the sidewalk surrounded by gnomes. “Why didn’t she say something?” he asked.
He knew even as the question was uttered that Silas wouldn’t have a good answer. No reason he could come up with would erase all the years Wyatt had spent alone questioning his sanity.
“She probably thought it would go away or you’d figure out how to handle yourself,” Silas said.
“How to fake it, you mean,” Wyatt said. He could hear the tears wanting to enter his voice and make it crack and shake and he swallowed them down with a rising burst of anger. “I didn’t have to be alone though, don’t you understand that? If she was like me, I could have… It could have been different.”
“You could have thought you were crazy together,” Silas said. He wasn’t trying to be mean, only to make Wyatt see it wasn’t quite the betrayal he was making it out to be.
Wyatt stared at him and Silas looked away.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Wyatt said.
Silas didn’t have a reply to that.
Wyatt finally dropped his gaze back to the pavement between his feet to find that the two gnomes had become five. He stepped over them and walked by Silas down the sidewalk.
“Come on then, this walk thing was your idea,” he said.
Silas followed him until Wyatt got over his anger enough that he remembered to be afraid again and fell back to walk with him. It wasn’t Silas he was mad at. He didn’t really know who he was mad at. He thought he was probably just mad at the whole world in general for being so fucked up and at life for being so abysmally unfair.
“You all right?” Silas asked him eventually.
“No,” Wyatt said.
“You’ll be all right,” Silas decided.
Wyatt started to speak but he was interrupted by an awful, loud bellowing howl. It came from down the street that intersected on the right with the one they were walking along. He yelped and stumbled into Silas. His left foot slipped off the sidewalk into the gutter, nearly making him a mass murderer.
The bellowing came again, closer, and Wyatt grabbed Silas’s arm. Silas thought he was trying to steady himself and reached to help, but Wyatt slipped out of his grasp and got behind him instead. Around his feet, the gnomes scurried and dodged to avoid being trampled to death.
“What the hell is that?” Wyatt whispered behind Silas’s shoulder.
Silas backed up slowly, crowding Wyatt back with him until they were sta
nding by the wall of the nearest building. There he could see in all four directions of the intersection and keep them both concealed from danger.
The bellowing had faded, but it was followed by crashing and clattering like something massive was rolling large boulders ahead of it as it barreled down the street. Silas drew his gun from his coat and held it down by his side.
Wyatt pushed the button on the base of his tiny flashlight and it clicked to life. The beam landed on one of the gnomes and it cried out in pain before Wyatt realized and pointed it away.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry. I didn’t… mean to. Are you okay? Silas is that… thing okay?”
“That’s Bob,” Silas muttered. “He’ll be fine. Won’t you Bob?”
Bob gave Silas the finger before running off to find his friends.
The crashing and terrible bellowing howls ceased. They listened and there came a sound like hooves clopping at a steady walk on hard ground, and deep-chested heavy breathing.
“Silas, I think—”
Silas twisted around toward him and put a hand over Wyatt’s mouth. He didn’t say anything, but he shook his head and waited for Wyatt to nod that he understood and would be quiet. Silas’s caution meant that it was probably something that was going to try to kill them.
When the creature walked out into the middle of the intersection and looked around, Silas recognized it and relaxed, letting out his breath in a relieved sigh. He patted Wyatt once reassuringly, stepped down from the sidewalk and started toward it.
“Herschel?”
The giant minotaur turned his head at the sound of his name, saw Silas approaching and began making that skin-crawling, ear-splitting howling sound again. Wyatt watched from the relative safety of his place on the sidewalk and realized that the sound was Herschel the minotaur weeping. There were trails of tears running down his bovine face, soaking his fur, and bloody chunks of flesh still dangling from the tips of his horns.
“What happened, Herschel?” Silas asked.
“It’s Ned,” Herschel sobbed. “Ned wasn’t Ned, Silas. He wasn’t. He looked like Ned and he talked like Ned, but he wasn’t Ned. It’s hard to… to explain. He even… smelled like Ned, but he didn’t taste like him.”
Herschel burst into noisy tears again and Silas let him cry without saying anything for a while. Finally, as Herschel quieted once more, he bluntly asked, “Herschel, did you kill Ned?”
“No!” Herschel shook his head and Silas took a step back from his enormous, sharp horns. “It wasn’t Ned, Silas. I swear. It couldn’t be. He… When I bit him, he started screaming. Screaming and trying to get away. And he tasted bad… Sour. Wrong.”
A strange look passed over Silas’s face and it took Wyatt a moment to recognize it as fear because he hadn’t ever seen Silas afraid. “Show me,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Herschel asked, wiping at his face with his arm. “It’s not Ned, I told you—”
“The thing you killed that isn’t Ned then. Take me to it. I need to see it,” Silas said.
Herschel hesitated. “Silas, I had to do it. I—”
“It’s okay, I get it,” Silas said. He reached out and patted Herschel’s arm. “I still need to see it.”
“Well… all right,” Herschel said. “I can’t look at it though, I just can’t. I don’t know what that thing is, but if it’s not Ned then Ned’s dead, isn’t he?”
And if it is Ned, Ned is also still very dead, Wyatt thought.
“Let’s just go have a look, all right, Herschel?” Silas said.
“I’ll take you there, but I don’t want to look, Silas. I can’t do it, I just… I won’t,” Herschel said.
“Fair enough,” Silas said. “Lead the way.”
He started walking up the street down which Herschel had come stampeding minutes before and Herschel went with him. Silas made a beckoning gesture at Wyatt with his fingers for Wyatt to come along. Wyatt stood rooted to the spot (a spot that was feeling safer by the moment) and shook his head no. Silas raised his eyebrows, did the “come hither” thing with his fingers again and said, “Come on.”
The wordless implication was, Come on or I’m leaving you here in the dark with the gnomes and a tiny flashlight to defend yourself with.
Wyatt hurried to catch up with them.
They walked for about a mile. Herschel led them to a park, one that Wyatt was familiar with because it was close to his apartment and he had to drive by it on his way to Kat’s house or the supermarket. He couldn’t recall ever stopping there to walk the paths or sit and watch people, but he had always thought it looked like a nice place. A nice place with plenty of shadows to stay far away from once it got dark.
“We’re going in there?” Wyatt asked Silas even as they started down a trail that cut through the middle of the park. “Silas, it’s really dark here. Look at all the trees and shrub… things.”
“It’s fine,” Silas said. “I’ll protect you.”
“That’s sweet, but it really isn’t helping right now,” Wyatt muttered.
Silas smiled faintly. “There’s also Herschel.”
“So?”
“So, he’s about nine feet tall—probably ten if you count the horns—so anything that’s going to mess with us is going to be bigger than Herschel.”
“That is really not helping right now.”
“There aren’t a lot of things in these parts bigger than Herschel.”
“Oh.”
Silas’s smile widened. “There you go. Feel better now?”
“No,” Wyatt said. Honestly, he felt a bit queasy.
“It’s right up there,” Herschel said, gesturing to a copse of trees up ahead.
“Ned is?” Silas asked.
“It’s not Ned,” Herschel wailed, coming to a stop in the path.
The gnomes that had followed them stopped as Herschel did, discussed the situation briefly and split to go around the distraught minotaur.
“Not Ned then,” Silas said. “You left him up there in those trees?”
“Yes.”
Silas nodded and continued down the path. Wyatt hurried to catch up to him, but Silas was taller than he was, his legs longer, and he didn’t wait for him. Wyatt took his little flashlight out and turned it on. This time he was careful not to point it at the ground, but the gnomes had been left far behind out of danger with Herschel.
All except for Louie.
“Silas, where are we going?” Louie asked.
Silas had forgotten Louie was still there riding along on his shoulder. “What are you—?” He frowned at the gnome clinging to the collar of his coat. “We’re going to look at the body.”
“But why are we going to look at the body?” Wyatt called as he jogged along behind them.
“It’s what we do,” Silas called back.
Wyatt made a low wordless sound of annoyance in the back of his throat and muttered, “This is absolutely not what I do.”
And yet he was doing it. He was running toward the danger. There were a hundred reasons why that was a bad idea, but Wyatt wasn’t listening to the voice of reason in his mind that liked to pipe up and start listing them whenever he thought about doing such things. Instead, irrationally, he followed Silas toward the looming, dark, terrifying trees, knowing full well that there was no way anything good could ever come of it.
He would have to bring this up with Dr. Graham on his next visit for sure. He would have to leave out the body in the trees, the gnomes and the crying minotaur, but he genuinely wanted to know her opinion about his recent recklessness because he really hadn’t been himself much since he’d met Silas.
“Oh, holy shit, what is that?” Wyatt nearly stepped into the soupy and shredded entrails of what he could only assume were the remains of Not Ned and hastily backed up before he could get any of it on his shoes. “Oh, wow. Oh, my god. Silas, Silas, look at it. It’s…”
“Why does it look like that?” Louie asked.
He leaned over, holding onto Silas’s coat
like a tiny mountain climber, and peered down at the body. Herschel and Not Ned had started their ill-fated tryst beyond the glow of the lights in the park, but the body was exposed to the bright moonlight in vivid, gruesome detail. There was a hole ripped through Not Ned’s chest where Herschel had gored him that looked big enough for Wyatt to climb in one side and out the other. Not Ned might not have been Ned, but he sure did look a lot like Ned the one time Wyatt had met him. Except for the being maimed and dead part. They had expected him to be dead though, so he didn’t know what Louie was talking about.
Wyatt put a hand to his nose trying to block out the stench. “God, it smells. Jesus, we have to call someone. The cops or… well, I don’t know who, but someone. Don’t we?”
“No,” Silas said.
He crouched beside the body and lifted Not Ned’s head, turned it, and let it fall back to the grass. He ran his fingers along the mouth of the enormous wound that tore through Not Ned’s back and exited through his chest. There were ribs poking from the hole and when Silas put his fingers against the tip of one and wiggled it, Wyatt felt his stomach heave.
“I think I should go back to… ah… I’ll just go wait with Herschel,” he said, backing up.
Silas put a hand up and waved him forward. “Come here and look at this. You’ll want to see this.”
“I’m almost one hundred percent sure you are wrong about that,” Wyatt said faintly, but he went.
He needed to have a conversation with Dr. Graham as soon as possible.
He stood behind Silas and looked down at the body again and he still didn’t see anything special about it. It was a dead guy. A naked dead guy in a park. There was a hole as big around as a dinner plate in his chest that had nearly ripped him in half, but other than that, there wasn’t anything special about it.
“If I throw up on him—or you—it’s your fault,” Wyatt said.
“You’re not going to throw up,” Silas said. He took a loose flap of skin hanging like old wallpaper from Not Ned’s arm and lifted it. It made a sickening wet sound like peeling Velcro as it tore.
Wyatt tasted bile on the back of his tongue and his mouth began to water. “No, I really am going to throw up.”