by Shining in the Dark- Celebrating 20 Years of Lilja's Library (retail) (epub)
Another light came on with the same bang, this one much closer to them, also pointed up at the ceiling. All was quiet but for the steady flap, flap, flap rustling coming from above.
What is it? one side of his mind questioned in a panicky, terrified voice.
Run! the other side commanded in a strange tone very similar to the first.
His better judgement almost won out: he almost pushed the other two ahead, saying Go! Hurry! But he was eleven, and his curiosity got the better of him.
He looked up. They all looked up.
That was when the moths attacked.
Johnny screamed, his eyes opening wide, as he watched the small flying insects descend. There were hundreds, no, thousands of them, battering the air with their soft, paper-thin wings. In droves they came down from the high ceiling, the beating of their million wings drowned out only by the sound of his friends’ screams. The only distinct words came from his left, from Chip, screaming at them to run, you guys, run!
For a moment, Johnny couldn’t. Couldn’t tear his staring, frightened eyes from the gigantic flapping gray mass above him. Couldn’t stop looking up, waiting for them to reach him, waiting to see what would happen…
Then Chip was yanking on the sleeve of his shirt, and he turned away from the moths. Chip and Bobby’s faces were white, almost sickly in this artificial light. They both looked terrified.
“The door!” Chip screamed, and a moth flew into the side of his face. Chip slapped at it, squashing it against his skin. “Oh, gross!” Bobby said, and for a second, Johnny could only look at his friend, unable to take his eyes off the icky, brown-red splotch left on his cheek. Then, more moths came, pounding at him like hundreds of small missiles. Johnny lowered his head and put his arms over it to shield himself, screamed and began running back toward the door.
More lights came on, dotting the hallway like the running lights at a movie theater, only brighter. Moths poured down upon him, slamming into his body and bounding off. The feeling like he was going to puke was even stronger now. Tilting his head up a little, Johnny could see the door up ahead, the one they had stepped through only a few short minutes before. He reached out one small hand and moths tried to light on it, flapping away when they realized his hand was a moving target.
Praying that it wasn’t locked, Johnny grabbed out at the doorknob, turning.
It was locked.
“Oh shit!” he cried out, and Chip collided with him. Through his old Sharks T-shirt, Johnny could feel about a dozen moth-bodies crunching in between his back and Chip’s stomach. Now, he finally did throw up, feeling his lunch of hot dogs and beans flow freely from his stomach and land in a steaming heap on the floor near the door. Johnny suddenly felt horribly weak.
“The … stairs, John,” he heard Chip say from behind him. It sounded like Chip was having trouble keeping lunch down, too. “Up there!” Johnny glanced around and saw them—rotted, burned stairs leading up into darkness. A spooky black room scattered with decrepit furniture stood between he and the stairs, but it didn’t look all that large to Johnny and he hoped against hope that there wasn’t anything hiding in there.
“I don’t want to go up there!” Bobby wailed. Johnny turned and saw Bobby slapping away teeming swarms of moths. “It’s dark up there!”
Chip yelled back, “Right, they won’t follow us! They only come when there’s light!”
Drawn to the flame, Johnny thought, oh God we shoulda known.
Johnny lurched ahead, careful to step over his own puke, and made his way to the stairwell. The stairs—thirty or so in all—didn’t look very safe, like they would collapse if even one of them climbed up, let alone three.
“Go, Johnny!” Chip screamed from behind.
“What if they fall?” Johnny screamed back.
“They won’t fall!” Chip said, pushing Johnny roughly upward. “Go!”
Gulping, Johnny grabbed the banister, feeling some of the char giving way under his hand. He pushed up with his foot, leaping up two stairs at a time, only looking up. They’re gonna break he thought, fear pounding his heart faster and faster, oh God, they’re gonna break.
Then, he was at the top of the stairs, standing in a new hallway that was thankfully unlit. He turned back and looked down at his friends. Chip pounded up the blackened stairs, taking them like Johnny had, two at a time. Bobby brought up the rear, clutching onto the banister with both hands and looking down, coming up slowly.
Chip made it to the top, leaping from the stairs and putting his arms out so he didn’t bang into the wall on the other side. Johnny looked down, sweat standing out on his face.
“Come on, Bobby!” he whisper-screamed. He’d seen enough cartoons to know that if you yelled real loud in some places, everything came crashing down.
“It’s gonna break,” he heard Bobby whine from halfway up, and he was about to say No it ain’t, when he heard something crack.
“That’s the railing,” Chip whispered at him, shocked. “Oh my God, the railing’s gonna break off!”
“Let go of the railing, Bobby!” Johnny called down. Bobby turned to face his friends, letting go of the railing. “Why?” he called up.
Just then, the railing creaked more, and whatever nails had held the burnt length of wood in place gave way. The nails screeched, and the railing tilted outward, holding for a second, then breaking off and crashing to the floor below.
“Bobby!” Johnny screamed. Too late to play it safe now. Bobby was staring down at the floor where the railing had landed. “Bobby!” he screamed again, louder. “Run, now!”
Another creak echoed in the darkness. From the lit hallway came the ever-present sounds of the kamikaze moths flapping their wings.
Bobby took one nervous step upward, placing a delicate foot on the stair above the one he was standing on. He hitched in a breath, but Johnny looked closer at Bobby’s down-turned face and guessed it might have been a sob. It looked like Bobby was crying.
Oh, jeez, Johnny thought, and the stairs creaked again, louder this time. Instead of forcing Bobby up faster, the noise seemed to have frozen him in place.
“Hurry!” Chip yelled, and Bobby looked up.
“I can’t,” Bobby moaned, and the loudest creak yet bounced off the walls of the small, furniture-strewn room.
“Oh little boys, fresh little boys!” a voice—LaRue’s—boomed, seeming to come from everywhere. It had a tinny sound like the loudspeakers at school, Johnny thought, cringing.
“You think you’ve won the race?
My little pets are hungry
and all they’ve got’s a taste!”
LaRue’s rhyme ended in a long, sinister cackle, accompanied by the same loud slamming sound they’d heard in the bottom hallway. Almost immediately, a huge, humming fluorescent popped on just above the doorway where Johnny and Chip now stood.
“Oh God,” Johnny said, his brain a Tilt-a-Whirl of fear. Without thinking, he leapt from the doorway, pounding down the stairs. Bobby, who looked more scared than ever, shrieked girlishly when Johnny grabbed him by the wrist and yanked him upward. A furtive glance behind him showed Johnny what he already knew: some of the moths were leaving the hallway and swarming toward the new light source at the top of the dark, dark room. His blood thumping thickly in his veins, Johnny glanced back at the stairs, and tripped, falling on his belly, his head banging against one of the top stairs. Bobby, still continuing on Johnny’s momentum, took the remaining stairs quickly. Johnny slowly got to his knees and palms, shaking his head. He could already feel a bump forming there. Carefully, he got to his feet, and took one step up.
The stairway let out one alarmingly loud creak, and Johnny’s blood froze. He felt a tremor beneath him, and all of a sudden, the top of the stairs sunk downward. Johnny canted to the right, holding out his arms to maintain his balance. Ahead of him, his friends were yelling at him to run. Behind him, the sound of the horrible, oncoming moths got louder. Johnny didn’t hear much of either. His eyes and mind were focused
down to the floor below, where the creaking, cracking stairs were about to fall, carrying a small heap of boy with them.
Down I go, he thought, and then the first of the moths flew into him, slapping against the back of his neck and fluttering in his hair.
The reality of the moths awoke him from the dark fantasy of falling. He glanced up, saw the sloping steps detached from the doorway up there, and nearly panicked. I can’t get there, he thought, and a moth flapped into his ear, creating a horrid, squelchy rustling noise that seemed to take over his brain.
Johnny screamed, pushing up on his higher leg and forcing his other leg to follow. One, two, three running steps, and right before he slammed his foot down on the first of the falling stairs, he pushed off and found himself flying.
For a second, everything else stopped. All the panic in his brain, all the moth-noise in his ear, all the acrid, vomity taste in his mouth went away, and he was airborne, he was free. The feeling ended abruptly as he landed in the doorway, crouching and rolling against the wall facing the opening. His knee connected with the broken-off jut of the top stair and he cried out.
Hurriedly, Johnny dug his finger in his ear, poking at the moth lodged in there, and killing it instantly. He scraped out the bloody remains, feeling queasy again, and wiped his finger on the leg of his jeans.
“Are you okay?” Bobby asked almost reverently, bending down and putting a hand on Johnny’s shoulder.
“Fine,” Johnny managed, his mind becoming full with the thought of the moths again. He opened his eyes and turned his head around. Here they came, teeming toward the light and the boys who sat under it. “Go, go!” he yelled, trying to stand. Putting pressure on the hurt knee caused his leg to buckle, and he would have fallen if Chip hadn’t grabbed him and hoisted him into a standing position.
“Where to?” Chip asked, and Johnny squinted down the new corridor they stood in. A stray moth flickered into view and he batted it away from his field of vision. A series of doors dotted the hallway on both sides, and any of them looked as good as any other. A frozen moment passed, but then he remembered something his Dad had done a couple years ago, trying to pick out a vacation spot. Dad had spread out a map on the dining room table, closed his eyes, and plunked his index finger down. They ended up going to Disneyworld, so that seemed, to Johnny at least, a good method of picking things.
He closed his eyes, hearing the rush of the oncoming moths, and pointed. “There!” he said, and opened his eyes. Chip began moving—and moving Johnny, too—before Johnny even opened his eyes to know which one he picked. Bobby ran ahead and stopped at the door the second from the back on the left-hand side.
“Please don’t be locked,” Johnny heard Bobby moan, unable to see him clearly because his and Chip’s shadows obscured Bobby in black. Chip rushed him along, and when they were in front of the door, Bobby turned the knob. The door was unlocked.
“Thank you God,” Johnny said, moving his arm from around Chip’s shoulders and following Bobby into the mine-dark room. Chip followed behind quickly and slammed the door behind them. Johnny heard the sickening sound of a dozen or so moths battering against the hard wood on the other side of the door.
“Now what?” Bobby asked.
“Now what what?” Johnny asked back, spread-eagled against the door in case the moths found some way to push their way in.
“What do we do now?”
“I don’t know!” The panic was coming back. Johnny thought he had never wanted his mother more. How easy it would be to just cry now, just sit down in this dark room and curl up into a ball and just cry.
No! he thought. It’s just a house, there’s gotta be a way out!
“Maybe there’s a door on the other side of the room!” Chip said in a scared, trembly voice. Johnny couldn’t see anything, but he felt Chip getting ready to run.
“No, man, don’t!” Johnny spat, putting his arm out to hold his friend in place. “We don’t know what’s in the room!”
A few seconds ticked by. Johnny’s mind raced.
“We can’t just stay here!” Chip shouted, breaking away from Johnny.
“No!” Johnny called out, hearing Bobby echo him close by. “Chip, stop!”
Johnny heard his footsteps beating against the floor, but didn’t know which direction they were going. In this total blackness, sounds were funny. The running steps could be going anywhere, any direction.
Then, just as they had started, they just as quickly stopped. Johnny heard Chip mutter some sound—“Ooof!”—and there was a noise of somebody running into something.
He ran into the far wall, Johnny thought, now feeling cold pressed against the door. That’s all. But he didn’t believe it.
Almost immediately following the collision sound, Johnny heard another: the clear, definite sound of something heavy being slid on a track. Like the back porch door at home, he thought. But why…?
The sliding-door sound stopped, and very, very faintly, Johnny thought he could hear somebody breathing.
LaRue! Oh my God he’s in here with us!
Then, another sliding-door sound, faster this time, and another, and another. Now, the light sound of breathing was heavier, as if someone—LaRue—were exerting himself.
“What’s going on?” Bobby moaned. He had moved closer to Johnny and now he grabbed his arm. “Johnny, what’s happening?”
Suddenly, in the center of the room, a light came on. Johnny shielded his now dilated eyes, then slowly opened them.
“Oh,” he said in a very small voice. “Oh my God.”
The sliding sounds really had been sliding glass doors, set in what looked like heavy metal frames, just like the one at home. There were four of them, crossing the length of the room on a door-track set into the wood of the floor. About a foot behind the glass, what looked like wall crisscrossed with planks of plywood had been constructed. Between the glass and the wood was Chip, illuminated by hanging ceiling-lights, lying on the ground.
“What…?” Bobby asked. Johnny ignored him.
“Chip, wake up!” he screamed. “He’s got you trapped, you gotta wake up! You—”
Then, the mellifluous, taunting voice of Etienne LaRue filled the room, shocking Johnny’s words out of him.
“So far from home, you came for chills
a little scare’s what brought you here
But now, my boys, just watch and learn
this small experiment in fear.”
At the words, Chip began to stir. Johnny’s voice found him again and he called out to his friend. “Chip, get up, you’ve gotta get outta there!”
“What?” Chip asked from behind the glass, pulling himself to a sitting position and rubbing the front of his head. His voice was muffled, sounding far-off and unreal.
“Get out of there!” Johnny said, breaking from the door and running over to the glass. Then, for a second, the room was in darkness again. Johnny stopped, and the light came back on. He stood for a second between door and glass, and it happened again, faster this time. The lights flicked off, then on. Faster: off, on, off on, off on, off on.
Strobe lights? Johnny thought, thinking back to the ones his school used when the fifth graders did Pirates of Penzance last year. What…?
He looked up at the lights, trying to focus. A small trapdoor opened in the ceiling, in between two of the lights. A pair of swift hands came into view holding a large canvas bag. The hands let the bag drop, and it landed next to Chip with a floomph sound.
Then, Johnny realized. He saw.
From the bag, a lone moth twittered out. Soon, a second followed, then a third, then a dozen. Chip, who seemed to still be coming back to himself, stared at the bag in horror. More moths flew up and out toward the strobe lights. Chip leapt up from the floor and began to scream. Johnny ran up to the glass and put his palms on the cool surface of one of the doors, trying to move it either way. It was impossible; the doors were too heavy.
Another canvas bag dropped from the ceiling, and more moths swarmed
out. In the flickering, disorienting light, the moths seemed to be jerking back and forth instead of flying. Chip ran back and forth, screaming, seeming to be pantomiming in quick-flash statue-poses. Johnny banged on the glass. “Let him out! Please let him out!”
The haunting, disembodied voice of LaRue spoke up.
“My pets are hungry, can’t you see
it’s really very funny
’cause when they’re through with a Chip or two
they might make room for Johnny!”
Johnny screamed, pounding his fists against the glass. Another bag flooomphed down, and more moths burred out. The glass enclosure now teemed with moths, their brown-gray bodies flickering together madly in the off/on light. Johnny watched Chip scream again, and a moth flew into his mouth. Chip’s scream abruptly ended, followed by a harsh gagging sound.
“No, no!” Johnny screamed, trying desperately to budge the doors, his hands squeaking across the glass surface. In upsetting, nightmarish slow motion, Chip fell to the floor, the strobes flickering over his body. He gagged again and the moth that had flown into his mouth came tumbling wetly out. In one of the swift bursts of blue-white light, Johnny saw a congregation of moths zoom toward Chip’s face from the most recently opened bag.
Don’t scream, Chip, Johnny thought, don’t open your mouth!
But Chip did scream; he probably couldn’t help it. He stood, throwing up his arms to shield his eyes, but his gaping, yelling mouth was left exposed. The moths zeroed in on their target, like a group of fighter planes in formation, and half a dozen moths slammed into Chip’s mouth.
Again, Chip’s screams stopped. His small hand pressed flat against the surface of the glass and his knees seemed to go weak. The upper half of his body stooped, and now he looked like Old Mrs. Engle who lived down the street, who was eighty-five and walked hunched over all the time. Without thinking, Johnny put his hand on his side of the glass, mirroring Chip’s. Moths buzzed around his head like an angry gray-black cloud, shifting and moving like something large and solid. Chip’s eyes bugged out, his other shaky hand going to his throat, clutching it.