by Sergio Gomez
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you,” Cassandra grinned.
With her free hand, Cassandra grabbed the front of her shirt and then sliced through it with the knife. As she did this, the other girls grabbed at the ripping material and pulled it off.
More laughing.
Megan screamed and cried and squirmed. But bound up the way she was, she was at their mercy.
Cassandra reached into the bag she had brought with her and pulled out a rag. She crumpled it up into a ball and then stuffed it in Megan’s mouth. To the girls she said, “That should shut her up.”
After a few seconds of muffled, futile screaming Megan gave up.
“What next?” Lisa said.
“Hold your horses, will you?” Cassandra hissed.
She dug through her bag again and pulled out an old, leather-bound book. Cassandra opened it, and from where she was Megan could see there was no title or author on the cover, only a single pentagram that had a slight shine of gold to it—a trick of the light or an amazing feat considering the book looked like it was one good fall from turning to dust.
Cassandra cleared her throat and read from the book. “The spawn of evil will rise to the Earth in a dark place between the light. Like this tunnel—”
She pointed this out with a giggle, that the other girls echoed.
Cassandra skimmed through the page until she found a fun line. “The spawn of evil is attracted to the blood of a young pig or a virgin girl. We’ve got both covered here.”
The girls erupted in laughter.
Once they’d settled down, Cassandra held the knife out toward Darcy and said, “Darce, why don’t you do the honors?”
“Me?” Darcy hesitated.
“Yeah, you brought the piggy to us, after all.”
“Um, okay,” Darcy took the knife and looked down at it. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Cut her open, duh.”
Darcy regarded the knife again, then Megan. Her screams had started up again, and Darcy was grateful that Cassandra had stuffed her mouth because she was loud even with the rag in.
“Come on, unless you want to pass it off to one of the others.” Cassandra turned up an eyebrow at her.
Darcy knew what that look meant, and knew what Cassandra was suggesting. She had to cut Megan unless she wanted to drop down a spot on the totem pole.
“Okay, I’ll do it.” She gulped, then nodded.
“It’s just for fun,” Cassandra reminded.
Darcy pointed the knife over Megan’s chest, which made the girl’s eyes bulge out in terror. She started to squirm, harder this time. Cassandra pinned her shoulders down, so she couldn’t move, and the other girls followed, putting their hands all over her.
“Go on, do it,” Cassandra commanded.
Darcy swiped the blade between Megan’s bosom in one quick motion. The girl let out another scream, this one guttural and with a giant sob at the end.
The guilt stung Darcy, and she wanted to apologize. But she knew she couldn’t. It would make her look weak in front of the others.
Cassandra threw her head back and laughed, watching the blood ooze out of Megan’s chest. It hadn’t been a very deep cut, but there was enough blood to have ran down into her bra and turn it red.
Cassandra opened the book back up, turning the pages and scanning them for the next interesting passage. “Purity traded for purity…Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
“So when are we going to see this spawn of evil?” Hannah asked, somewhat impatiently.
“I don’t know,” Cassandra said, shooting her an icy glare that made her flinch.
She turned the pages faster now, feeling the other girls losing interest in this the longer it took her to find something.
“Okay, here we go,” Cassandra said, “draw the symbol with the blood on the floor or on the wall while holding the Tome of Evil.”
“Looks like it’s drying up, though,” Lisa pointed out.
“You’re right,” Cassandra replied. “Gonna have to make a new cut, I guess.”
Megan squirmed, and tried to kick, but Hannah and Lisa jumped on her to keep her still again. Meanwhile, Darcy handed the knife over to Cassandra.
Cassandra swiped the knife across Megan’s chest, making a new wound next to the first one. This one was worse, and deeper. The blood gushed out.
Megan felt her head start to get light. She wanted to roll over on her stomach. Maybe that would make the dizziness stop. Only, she couldn’t move. The girls’ holds were firm.
Cassandra dug her fingers into both cuts, fiddling her fingers into them like she was reaching into a penny pouch for coins.
The pain spread in Megan’s chest as Cassandra’s skinny fingers opened up the wounds further. She arched her back and screamed, pleading to be let go, but with the rag muffling her words the sound that came out was: “LEHMEHGO, LEHMEHGO, LEHMEGO!”
This only made it more amusing for the girls, only made them laugh harder. Enjoy it more.
The fun was back.
“So then, Cassandra drew the symbol on the wall while holding the Tome of Evil. Word is someone from the park management tried to wash it off, but the stain stayed.”
“How come we didn’t see it then?” Gina asked. “You or me or Jack.”
“Because, Homeschool. The stain is covered up by the graffiti on the wall.”
Gina looked over in the general direction of where she knew the tunnel would be, as if she could see it from here.
“What happened to Megan?” Victor asked.
“The other girls left her there. She bled out and died in the tunnel,” Tommy said.
“Must’ve taken awhile,” Victor added. “Death from blood loss takes a long time.”
“You think it’s her spirit that’s guiding us back here?” Twist asked.
Tommy shook his head. “No, I think what’s guiding us back to the tunnel is something evil. Something born from that ritual.”
“But her blood was a part of the ritual,” Victor said.
Tommy gave him a dumbfounded look, unsure if the kid was pulling his leg or being a pain in the ass on accident. “Yeah, Vic.”
“We know,” Twist said.
“I’m just saying. So this…this…spawn of evil, if it’s real—”
“It is,” Gina said.
“Okay, okay. So this spawn of evil, it’s like her spawn because it came from her blood.”
“What difference does it make?” Twist said.
“It doesn’t, I guess. I’m just trying to get the story straight in my head.”
“Let me ask a real question,” Gina said, shooting Vic an icy glance. “What the heck does what happened back then have to do with us?”
“Good question, Homeschool,” Tommy said, then turned to the rest of the group. “I’m thinking we’re meant to bring it to life, and then destroy it.”
“Why us?”
Tommy shrugged. “We’re all here right now because we want to be. I could’ve stayed at Lou’s hitting baseballs, but I chose to come when Gina and Jack came to me. Something compelled the toymaker in your neighborhood to make that dummy, right?”
They nodded.
Tommy went on.
“Exactly. We’re all tied together somehow. All tied to the evil the wannabe-witch girls tried summoning by playing that trick on Megan Hamilton twenty years ago.”
“Not sure how wannabe they were if they actually got it summoned,” Victor chimed in.
The other children sat in silence. Everyone trying to think of a way to contradict the punching bag of the group, but they couldn’t. He was right.
What the girls had done—regardless of their intention—had worked to summon an evil into their world.
“They could only bring it so far, though,” Twist said, putting the pieces together in his mind.
“And now it’s stuck,” Gina added.
“Right,” Tommy said. “Stuck in a world between ours and some sort of spirit world.”
The words
sounded like bullshit coming out of his lips, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was making him want to go into the tunnel. Explaining that would have sounded like bullshit, too. And yet, here he was.
“It doesn’t make sense, though, we’ve all lived here all our lives—” Gina stopped herself short when she realized what she was saying.
Like cats that had just seen a ball bounce by them, their heads swiveled around to look at Jack.
“Except you.” Victor said.
Jack coughed, and fidgeted in his seat. “This is my fault?”
“No one’s at fault here, City Boy,” Gina promised him.
“Pfft, I’m saying he is,” Vic said.
“Shut up, Vic,” Tommy said, even he was starting to lose his cool. To Jack he said, “I think the five of us are meant to bring this evil to Earth, so we can defeat it.”
Vic gulped, and didn’t do as Tommy suggested. Instead, he blurted out, “Or maybe…the evil is meant to get us.”
They had all been thinking it, but Victor was the kind of person who pointed out the obvious.
The kids went silent again.
They were here already, unable to turn back because of some guiding force urging them on. One way or another, they would have to see this through.
Chapter 7
Tommy stopped, and behind him so did the rest of the gang. They all kicked their legs to balance on their bikes, and stared into the tunnel.
The pouch of darkness in contrast with the afternoon light was more insidious than ever before. Tommy had gone through there plenty of times when at Myers Park, but never with this feeling in his gut.
He knew the others felt it, too.
There was something in there, something waiting for them, trying to claw out of wherever it was trapped and come into their world.
“What do you think is going to happen?” Victor asked them.
No one took their eyes off the tunnel when they spoke.
“Not, sure, Slick,” Tommy was first.
“Hope we don’t get hit with some force—like electricity or something.” Jack said.
“Or worse,” Twist spoke up, “maybe Vic’s mom will come out in her underwear.”
They all burst out laughing, even Vic.
The joke was funnier from the nerves, in the same way the darkness of the tunnel was darker in contrast with the light.
Their laughter settled down.
“We can’t turn back, huh?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know, can you?” Gina said.
Jack thought about turning his bike around and just going home. Crawling into bed and throwing the covers over his head and playing Gameboy all day. Maybe go out for pizza with his dad later tonight.
But that was as far as he got in turning back around, because something inside of him compelled him to stay.
The guiding force.
For some reason, all five of them were meant to do this.
Whatever “this” was, they would find out when they got into the tunnel.
“That’s what I thought,” Gina said.
“You guys are all feeling it, too, right?” Victor asked.
“Yeah,” Twist said, “like we’re parts of toys in a factory. And we’re on a conveyer belt, heading on a path and we can’t do anything about it. That what you mean?”
“Holy shit, Twist. That’s the best way to describe it,” Tommy said, surprised that Twist had put into words exactly what he was feeling.
The sun hid behind a curtain of thick clouds, enshrouding the teens in a dark gray shadow.
A minute later, the sun popped back up, but by then it felt like an entire day had gone by.
Gina cleared her throat. “So, Tommy, you going in first?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said, “I guess.”
“When?” It was Vic who asked.
Tommy gulped. “Now.”
He hit the gas on his motorbike and rode forward. Behind him, the others followed.
It took two decades, but the conditions to summon a spawn of evil onto Earth were finally met.
The symbol of evil drawn in the blood of a virgin (Megan Hamilton’s blood).
Darkness.
A soul with a torturous home (Oliver Harper).
A soul constantly rejected (Victor Tanner).
A soul with too much burden (Gina Bobkin).
A soul to bring them all together (Tommy Marino).
A vessel born from misery (Raymond Gibson’s dummy).
And finally, a soul that bridged worlds.
Jack Roberts.
The pieces of the spell fell into place, forcing the human world to collide with another world. The world where evil came from.
Jack stepped into the tunnel with the other kids, and it happened. The evil crossed the boundary into the living world, invisible to the kids because it existed in a plane of reality they couldn’t perceive.
The spirit seeped into the dummy like an invisible gas being vacuumed up.
But the timing wasn’t right. It had to wait. Wait, for the perfect opportunity to take over its new vessel.
The dummy was still where Jack and Gina had left it.
“What the HECK!” Victor nearly jumped off his bike. That glimpse they caught of the doll yesterday hadn’t been enough to see just how realistic the details of the toy were.
“Calm down,” Twist said, hopping off his bike.
The dummy stared back at them from the shadows, its eyes somehow both lifeless, yet alive. Shiny, yet dead. Looking at them, and yet, looking at nothing.
“You guys still feel it?” Jack asked. He got off his bike too and went to stand next to Oliver.
The sensation that they were being guided by an unseen force, was gone.
The other kids followed and soon they were standing in a haphazard line, staring at the dummy resting against the wall.
“Maybe it was all bullshit,” Gina said.
Oliver nodded. He didn’t feel anything, either. “I…I don’t really feel anything. You, Tommy?”
“Nope.” Tommy glanced over at Jack. “City Boy?”
Jack shook his head.
“Vic, you neither?”
Vic shook his head. “More stories from you, huh, Tommy? Just like that one about Jack’s dad’s house?”
Tommy tightened his lips until they were a thin line on his face. None of the others came to his aid, or felt much like ragging on Vic.
He’s right, Tommy thought. There was nothing to that story of the quasi-witch girls raising some sort of evil from the other side. It was just a tunnel in the middle of Myers Park, underneath the underpass that cars rode over all sorts of hours as people commuted to and from work and school. Nothing special down here. No extra presence, no paranormal activity.
There was no way for him, or the others for that matter, to have known the truth in that moment.
“Kind of a letdown,” Gina said, saying what they all were thinking.
It’d been the moment that she’d felt the spark between her and Tommy being isolated from the rest of the group, she supposed. Nothing more, nothing less. No spirit looming in over their shoulder, setting the mood and controlling them in some subconscious way.
“So, now what?” Victor said.
“Arcades?” Twist suggested.
“I do owe my little sister a trip,” Gina said. And, to her surprise it came out cheery. The idea wouldn’t have been so attractive if it weren’t for the relief she felt at there being no evil entity here for them to battle.
“Jack, Tommy, you guys down for the arcades?” Twist asked.
Jack and Tommy were still staring at the dummy, but as they answered they peeled their eyes from it.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tommy said.
“I am,” Jack said. “What’re we going to do about the dummy, though?”
“What do you mean?” Gina said. “We’ll give it back to Mr. Gibson.”
“Fix it back up on your bike the way you did when you guys brought it here,” Twist suggested.
“And let’s get out of here,” Victor said, “Evil spirit slumbering in here or not, this place is weird. I don’t like how that skeleton is looking at me.”
Gina brushed past him, and rolled her eyes. For now, it seemed that everything was back to normal.
She lifted the dummy up, wondering how it was possible that it felt even heavier than before, and then walked past the group to Jack’s bike.
“You guys just gonna stand there and watch me do this, or are you going to get ready to go to the arcades?”
The boys scattered toward their bikes like balls being broken up on a pool table. They headed any random way, so long as they were moving lest they be chumped by a girl again.
“Jeez, Louise,” Gina said, fixing Lucas’ legs through the handlebars.
She fixed the dummy’s legs until they felt secured, but that didn’t matter much. This time there was no chance the dummy would fall, because he needed to hitch this ride back.
Back home. Back to Father.
Chapter 8
The children had brought Lucas back to him half an hour ago. He’d felt different when he took him from the blond boy’s hands and took him inside the house.
Heavier, but not in a metaphysical sense. Like there was something inside of the dummy that hadn’t been there before.
Raymond sat him in the recliner and stared at him. His index finger and thumb on his chin, wondering what was next.
Nothing seemed to be happening, but Raymond continued to stare at the dummy.
There was a life inside this dummy. He’d felt it before, but it was even stronger now. And it wasn’t a life like the kind he thought he’d seen in Buddy Killian’s performances, this was a real life. A real soul in the dummy.
In his son.
So why wouldn’t he move? Why wouldn’t he do anything unless there was a hand stuck in his back?
“What do I have to do to get you to be real? Sacrifice a darn chicken?” Raymond asked in frustration.
“No need for that, Father,” Lucas said.
Raymond took a step backward in surprise, the back of his thigh crashing against the coffee table. The remote tipped off the surface, bounced off the carpet, and onto the hardwood floor. Its back piece went flying across the living room.