Shining in the Dark

by Shining in the Dark- Celebrating 20 Years of Lilja's Library (retail) (epub)

  He can’t breathe, Johnny thought. Weakly, he banged on the glass with the fist not held up against Chip’s. “Let him out,” he gasped, but there was no strength in it.

  Another small swarm of moths flew at Chip’s face, and Johnny watched in horror as two of them lodged themselves up Chip’s nostrils. Chip let go of the glass, staggering blindly to the center of the glass-and-wood enclosure. His other hand flew up to his throat now, but he didn’t clutch with this one. He clawed.

  “Oh God,” Johnny said, putting his other palm flat against the glass. Chip dug his fingernails into his throat, drawing four tracks of instantly seeping red. He clawed again, this time with both hands, tearing his neck apart. Johnny watched his wide, staring eyes in the strobe, and they glowed like alien-eyes, moist and pleading.

  Chip fell to the wooden floor with a thump, and that somehow scared Johnny most of all. A sack of potatoes made that type of thumping sound. What did that make Chip now?

  He was aware of wetness on his cheeks, but he didn’t care. Chip lay on the floor, convulsing. Some type of fluid was leaking out of his mouth, and that was something Johnny just couldn’t watch. He felt sick to his stomach, and scared, and tired, and he just wanted to get out of there.

  He turned from the glass cage. “Bobby!” he called. The lights still flickering showed no one at the door. Panicked again, Johnny called out his name again, louder: “BOBBY!”

  The room fell silent. Now, he heard a low, pained sobbing off to one dark corner. He sprinted across the room that way, and saw Bobby there, huddled up into himself, crying.

  “Bobby we have to go,” Johnny said, wiping his own tears away.

  “Did you see what they did?” Bobby asked, pointing at the cage.

  For a second, memory tried to crowd Johnny’s mind. Yes, of course he saw what they did. But he couldn’t let that get to him now. He shook his head and said, “Yeah, but if we stay here, they’ll do it to us, too.”

  Bobby was silent for a second, then his eyes closed tight and he started screaming.

  I can’t talk him out, Johnny thought, and grabbed his arm as he had on the stairs. Hoisting him up, Johnny caught a grip on Bobby’s shirt and dragged him toward the door they’d come through.

  Don’t be locked, please don’t be locked, his mind whispered. It was becoming a mantra, and for a moment, Johnny didn’t know how he wanted his prayers answered. When he tried the knob, the door opened easily, and he shoved the still-screaming Bobby into the hallway. He took one look back in the room. Under the flickering lights, the moths were lighting on Chip’s body, creating a moth-covered lump that might once have been a boy.

  “Jeez, Chip,” he said, then forced himself to turn and leave the room. The door he slammed behind him sounded like finality. Chip was dead. Jesus God, Chip was dead.

  The hallway was dark. At some point during their time in the room, LaRue had shut off the light at the front of the hallway. Johnny looked nervously in that direction, then looked back to survey the mirror rows of doors just barely visible in the hallway.

  “Come on,” he said to Bobby, whose screams were trickling off now.

  “Where?” Bobby wailed.

  Johnny’s mind tangled. He had no idea how to answer that question.

  They stood in the dark, both trembling, unselfconsciously holding each other. Johnny had stopped crying, finally succeeding in his efforts to block Chip’s death out of his head, if only for a short time. Bobby was in bad shape though. Johnny had heard on a show once that it was pretty easy to have a break-down. They showed pictures of a girl in a hospital flipping out, screaming, crying and not being able to stop. What if that was happening with Bobby? What if he was having a break-down? How could you stop something like that?

  We gotta get outta here, he thought feverishly. He tentatively let go of Bobby and stepped to the door behind his friend.

  “Oh what fun!” the sudden, terrible voice of Etienne LaRue called out from his hidden speakers.

  “Oh what fun is to be had

  behind that door, there’s nothing bad

  open it, you might be free

  or end up like Chip, try it and see!”

  Johnny’s hand hovered over the brass doorknob. He had to be honest with himself; he was not all that anxious to try it and see.

  Wheeling around, he found another door and touched the surface. LaRue spoke up again, and this time his voice had a dangerous edge of dark hilarity. Like he was going to bust a gut laughing but for bad, bad reasons.

  “Door number two,

  just right for you

  open it up and walk right through.”

  Johnny closed his eyes. Frustration as well as dread and panic had begun to fill him. Which door? Which way?

  He touched another.

  “Come on in

  no need to fear

  there’s nothing bad

  to be had in here.”

  Another.

  “That’s right, John

  that’s the door

  go right through

  see what’s in store!”

  “Shut up!” Johnny screamed upward. Tears flew from his eyes, but instead of indicating sadness or pain, they were tears of anger. “Shut the fuck up!”

  He’d never said that word aloud before. It was powerful, liberating. Bobby, who had stopped crying when Johnny began to scream, just stared at him. Johnny grabbed him by the arm again (starting to feel like Bobby’s keeper—which, in a way, he had become) and hauled him to the door at the very end of

  the hall.

  “Ah, the door at the end,” LaRue’s voice called. Johnny ignored it.

  “What a nice place to stop!”

  “Shut up,” Johnny mumbled, reaching out and grabbing the doorknob.

  “But if I were you,” LaRue went on. Johnny flung the door open. Inside, nothing but blackness.

  “Come on,” he told Bobby, stepping through the door, holding onto Bobby’s arm.

  “I’d watch out for the drop.”

  And suddenly he was falling, plunging down in darkness, and Bobby was beside him, also falling, and they were both screaming, and then they reached the bottom, hitting some solid ground, and Johnny kept screaming but horribly, terribly, Bobby had stopped.

  * * *

  Dark again, and pain. For a moment, Johnny could only lay there, still screaming, on whatever cold surface he had landed, stunned and scared and hurting. After his head had cleared from the horror of falling in the dark, his screams began to taper off and he was able to sit.

  “Bobby?” he asked the room. Nothing. Then, with more panic in his voice, “Bobby?” Still nothing. Images filled his mind: Bobby landing on his head, blood oozing from his ears in lazy rivers, or maybe landing on his chest, sending shards of ribs through insides, or…

  Stop it! he thought harshly. Nothing like that happened. He heard his heart beat once in his ears, and the return thought came. Yet.

  “Bobby!” he cried, and his voice sounded somehow hollow and echoic, like that travel guide sounded the year Dad took them all to Howe Caverns in New York. Where were they?

  In a basement, you doof, his mind answered. You fell, remember?

  “Oh yeah,” he whispered to himself distractedly, and then another sound came to him. Was it breathing? Bobby, maybe? Johnny cocked his head in the dark room. The sound was light, rapid, barely audible, but it was there. Smiling grimly, Johnny stood, then immediately fell back to the ground. Pain shot through his leg like a bullet. Tears stood out suddenly in his eyes. Had he broken something when he hit ground? Was that possible?

  “No,” he moaned. “God, no.”

  There was no way to know for sure until he tried to stand again. His leg hurt a lot less when he was sitting, so maybe there was some hope. Tentatively, he moved one arm over to the left side of his body, next to the hurt leg. The ground beneath his hands was cold, hard … and somehow yielding. He arched his hands, moving them up on their points like weird, five-legged animals. His fingernails s
unk down, just a little. Dirt? Johnny thought. Why would there be dirt down here? He shook his head, deciding he wouldn’t know unless a light came on. Bending the knee of his other leg and pushing up with his palms on the ground, Johnny managed to get into a low crouching position. The pain in his left leg flared, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. Not a break, then, maybe only a light sprain. Very slowly, he moved to stand, and the pain bit in a little more, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He imagined the large bones in his leg snapping and breaking through the skin,

  sending gushers of blood…

  “Stop it!” he whisper-barked. He stood still for a second, listening with his eyes closed for the sound of breathing again, as if closing his eyes would help him to hear better. His heartbeat dominated his hearing, and following closely, the sound of moths fluttering their wings in the inky black. A shudder wracked through him as he suppressed the memory of Chip, clutching the side of the glass, choking to death. He was about to yell at himself to stop it, louder this time, when a light came on.

  Through the lids of his eyes, Johnny saw nothing but a vague yellow and the white under-images that always zipped around when his eyes were closed. He was scared of that light. When lights came on in this crazyhouse, bad stuff always followed. Still, he could hear the moths flapping swifter now, and it he had to run, or beat them off, he’d need to see them. Plus, there was still Bobby to worry about, Bobby who he could hear breathing but who wouldn’t answer when he called.

  Slowly, Johnny let the bottom part of his eyelids flutter open. More light filtered in, temporarily hurting his eyes. He brought up a hand to shield them, and opened his eyes further. He was looking right at the light—it was a sunlamp like Mom had in the greenhouse in their backyard—and the moths battering themselves against the high-intensity bulbs crazily. There weren’t a lot yet, and Johnny some relief in his heart. He removed his hand from his eyes and turned to the right, looking for Bobby. Instead, he came face-to-face with a gray, rotting human skull perched atop some large stick. Moths crawled in the eye sockets and out the nose-hole like contented bees in a nest. The lower half of the skull’s jaw had fallen off at some point, and the top half jutted out in a type on angry sneer. John stared at it for a full thirty seconds, unable to breathe, to speak, to scream. Then, a moth flew out and landed on Johnny’s face.

  Hysterics gripped him and he turned to run, his eyes involuntarily squeezing shut and his arms flailing wildly. He crashed into something and his eyes flew open at once, just in time to see another skewered skull topple from its resting place and shatter noisily on the cold cellar ground. For a second, Johnny stopped screaming, unable to believe that he had just seen what he did. When he tried to start again, his frozen mind allowing at least that, what came out was a series of horse, choking gasps. Johnny turned. He saw four more of the skulls on sticks, set into the earth of a small basement garden. A rotting clump of tomatoes stood pungently next to a large stone wall that served as the back end of the garden. Moths permeated the air but did not fill it; they didn’t seem as much of a threat down here as they had upstairs. The skulls, though, staring out at him with idiot eyes, and he saw for the first time that all of them were small. Were they all the skulls of children?

  Below him and to the left, he heard a low, groggy moaning and he leaped up, terrified. It’s one of the kids’ ghosts, he thought. Forget the moths, it’s the ghosts that are going to kill me, kill me because I’m alive and they’re dead. This thought shot through his head in under a second, and when he did look back, albeit involuntarily, he saw it was a kid. The kid was not dead, though. It was Bobby, lying on the hard-packed ground of the garden, writhing in the dirt and finally coming to.

  “Bobby?” he asked momentarily able to ignore the macabre garden around him. “Bobby, you awake?”

  His friend, who had landed splayed out on his back on the hard-packed earth, rolled over a little, squeezing his eyes closed even more.

  “Bobby, please,” Johnny pleaded, wondering if maybe Bobby wasn’t in a coma or something like they went into on TV. Christ, what would he do then? He touched a toe to Bobby’s side and nudged him. “Come on, Bob.”

  Johnny leaned down, keeping his mind on Bobby only, grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a brief shake. He was about to tell him to wake up again when Bobby’s eyes flew open, blazing blue and staring.

  “Jesus, Bobby, I thought you were in a c—” he began, but then Bobby began screaming. His eyes went even wider, and he raised an arm to point at something behind Johnny. Johnny whirled around and again saw one of the skulls, appearing to look down at them from its perch with wide, uncaring eyes. For a moment, Johnny wanted to scream with Bobby, scream his head off again at this horror show turned reality … but then the moment passed. Johnny knew he was still scared, still terrified, but for right now at least, he felt he could handle a bunch of skulls. They’d seen one coming into Scary World, right? They weren’t anything but parts of people, and they couldn’t hurt you.

  Unless their ghosts… his mind began fervently, and he surprised himself by shutting that voice down. But this isn’t their ghosts, he combated, smiling grimly. It’s just a bunch of dumb skulls.

  He turned back, and grabbed Bobby by the shoulders. His friend’s horrified, contorted face made Johnny want to burst into tears, but he held them back.

  “Bobby, listen to me,” he said in a firm, almost grownup voice. Bobby went on wailing, turning slightly and pointing at the other skulls standing on their stalks around them. “It’s just a bunch of skulls, Bobby.” That only seemed to make Bobby scream louder. Desperation clouded Johnny’s brain. He wanted to get out of here more than anything, but he refused to do it without Bobby. His friend wasn’t going to end up like those kids who had been reduced to skulls in some moldy basement. Or like Chip. Jesus.

  Johnny moved himself into a standing position, his leg still crying out in pain but not exactly screaming. He bent, getting Bobby under the armpits, and lifted him up off the ground. He had never been much stronger than Bobby physically, but his adrenaline was pumping furiously now. Still keeping Bobby off the ground, he ran forward and pushed his friend against the stone wall near at the end of the garden. Bobby stopped screaming immediately.

  “Are you done?” Johnny yelled at him. Bobby, whose face looked even more scared now than it had when he had first glimpsed the skulls, nodded. His face scrunched up as if he were going to cry. Johnny understood how he felt, but couldn’t allow it.

  “Bobby, we need to get out of here. Do you understand that?” Bobby nodded again. “Okay, good. ’Cause that guy that brought us here is going to keep doing stuff to us until we get out. We can’t let it get to us, okay?”

  He watched a single tear fall from one of Bobby’s eyes. In a very small voice, Bobby said, “But what about Chip?”

  Johnny’s heart did a weird little flip-flop. Mustering all the strength he could, wanting again to cry himself, he said, “Chip is dead, Bobby. But if we keep thinking about that, LaRue is going to win and kill us, too. We can’t let him.”

  As if on cue, a booming voice oozing with chilling dark humor spoke from somewhere up above:

  “Welcome young boys,

  I hope you like my collection of friends

  up on those spikes

  You’ll never escape

  no matter what you do

  and soon your heads

  will be here, too.”

  Bobby’s eyes had been growing wider and wider, and now he hitched in a breath to scream. Johnny clamped a hand over his mouth and muffled it just before it came.

  “Don’t you get it?” Johnny asked harshly. “That’s what he wants! He wants us to go crazy so it’ll be easier to … to kill us!”

  Bobby’s eyes were still wide, but the yelling behind Johnny’s hand had stopped. Slowly, Johnny lowered his hand and looked his friend in the eyes. “We have to stick together, Bobby.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Bobby said in a quavering, small voic
e.

  “I don’t either, man. We’re gonna get out of here.”

  Bobby asked, “Do you promise?” Something inside Johnny clicked over when Bobby asked it. Do I promise? That was a question you asked a grownup. I can’t promise stuff like that, I’m only a kid.

  Then he thought of the somehow adult voice he had summoned when he pushed Bobby against the wall. How he’d been able to block out the memory of Chip’s death, and rationalize the skulls with himself. What if he was an adult now? What did that mean?

  “Yes,” Johnny said after a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, I promise.”

  “Thank you,” Bobby said, and Johnny wanted to cry all over again.

  He looked around the room a minute or so later. The skulls had lost their effect. Johnny supposed you could get used to anything if you put your mind to it. Walking over to one of them, slapping moths out of his way, Johnny thought there was something weird about the stakes that held them in place.

  Not stakes, he thought, coming closer. Tools.

  He touched one of them. It shifted slightly in the dirt, and Johnny thought for a second that it was going to topple. When it didn’t, Johnny breathed a brief sigh of relief. Steeling himself, he reached forward, and put his hands on either side of the rotting skull.

  “What are you doing?” Bobby barked from behind him, startling him. His hands jumped up and he almost dropped the skull, but in the end held firm. Moths burst from the head like weird flying brain matter. Revulsion gripped Johnny’s insides and he felt like he would throw up again. For some reason, he could deal with the skulls, but the moths still frightened him. He glanced around and saw that there were more moths here than there had been when the light first came on. A lot more.

  We have to get out of here before something bad happens, he thought. To Bobby he said, “I think these are tools. We might need them.”

  “Ugh,” Bobby said, but didn’t turn away as Johnny removed the skull and placed it carefully on the dirt. With both hands, he gripped the long stick the skull had been on and forcefully wrenched it from the earth below his feet. It came out with surprising ease: a six-pronged rake caked with dirt from the lower part of the handle down.