Beneath the Surface of Things
Kevin Wallis
©2010 Kevin Wallis
Smashwords edition
Published by Bards and Sages Publishing
New Jersey
Edited by: AJ Brown
Project Coordinator: Faith Carroll
Cover Art: John Hornor Jacobs
License Agreement
This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser and should not be copied, transferred, distributed, traded, or sold to third parties without the expressed written permission of the author. Please respect the copyright of the author by not sharing unauthorized copies.
Think about what you know. Everything—family, friends, spouses. The natural laws by which this world is governed. The air you breathe, the water you drink. That which gives you peace, and those in whom you find solace. These things comfort you, envelop you in a blanket of familiarity and the knowledge that everything is how it should be.
Now…look again. How much do you really know? How trustworthy is that man or woman with whom you share your bed? How sure are you that the wisdom you've garnered through a lifetime of routine and habit is the only truth there is? Has your immersion in the mundane prepared you for the possibility that everything you've learned…is wrong?
There are other worlds within our own, fantastic and horrifying realms where vampires hold dominion, Heaven and Hell war in the diner down the street, and that dog who sits nightly at your feet dreams of snacks that taste more human. Open the door to these worlds, and a phantasm might show you the secret to salvation, a corpse lying in the snow may sing a song of redemption, and the monsters of your childhood dreams plot their escape from your imagination…and into your backyard.
Because under the veneer of convention lies the truth. And the truth just might devour those who look beneath the surface of things.
For Sheryl.
This is not a dream come true.
You are my dream come true.
What Lies Beneath
(Table of Contents)
The Taking of Michael McConnolly
Editors Introduction
Picture this:
He looks like any other person: hair a dirty brown, eyes of blue, maybe a Texas Longhorns cap on his head, some shadowed whiskers on his chin. He may even look like the guy next door or that Kiefer Sutherland fellow, but without the intense stare. He sits at a table on the patio of some barbecue joint or coffee house, beverage of choice in front of him (I’m willing to bet it’s the barbecue joint, and the beverage of choice is an ale called Arrogant Bastard, which is somewhat of a contradiction if you know him).
A lady sits across from him: dark-haired, olive-complexioned, eyes a soft brown. They chit and chat about life, the day behind them and the one before them, kids and animals and work and money and probably the Astros. Craig Biggio may come up in the conversation. Yeah, if he were still with the Astros then just maybe …
They look like the average couple in America. And they are. But, then she asks one question, her voice like music to his ears, and the conversation becomes less like the average couple in America and more like two business partners discussing strategy. In this case, they discuss … storylines.
“So, what are you working on?” she asks, sipping her tea (or maybe she likes that Arrogant Bastard as well).
He shakes his head, smiles. There is mischief in the gleam in his eyes, in the upturn of his lips. He ponders for a moment before speaking. Is this something she really wants to hear? Is this something that’s going to make her gawk at him, her eyes wide, jaw open and ask, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
He shrugs and puts his hands out as if he is going to tell about the largest fish ever caught. “There’s this guy and he’s kind of a jerk to his kids and wife and he kicks the crap out of them just because he can. He’s a real douchebag. But, what he doesn’t know is that there is this creature … this thing … watching him from the mirror and …”
And the story, which was nothing more than an idea moments earlier, begins to form as he talks, his voice growing more and more excited. He wipes his lips with one hand. “Hold on, babe,” he says and pulls a notepad from his back pocket and a pen from his shirt. “I need to write this down.”
This is the way it is for Kevin Wallis, the average man with above average dreams; a man who pens his darkness onto paper. Earlier in the day the idea had formed while in the bathroom at his place of employment. He washed his hands and stared at the mirror in front of him. There in the reflective glass, images played out before him of that ass-clown of a man, and Kevin was the one staring out of the glass, watching as the events unfolded in his mind.
Sitting at that table, his wife across from him shaking her head in disbelief as he speaks of horrible things that bounce around in his head, he already has the name of the character, the plotline mapped out, the disturbing scenes in full embrace. All he’s missing now is the computer in front of him so he can write what he thinks, what he feels. And he knows that he will be awake to the wee hours of the morning creating this Frankenstein monster and watching it come to life.
It’s what he does. It’s what all writers do. He takes bits of life—real life—and turns them into works of fiction. You see, I’ve always thought that good fiction—truly good fiction—is grounded in non-fiction, in the reality of the world that surrounds us all. It is this ability to take something as simple as washing your face in the mirror and drawing from the realness of it that helps Kevin Wallis write stories that come to life as you read them. It’s the non-fiction aspect that grabs hold and doesn’t let go.
Does he write flowery prose? No. Thank God. Does he write long, drawn out scenes that go on for days and days (or at least it seems that way)? Again, no. Again, thank God for little wonders. But, does he draw you in with bits of reality and mix it with a lot of “what the hell?” Oh yeah . . . yes, he does.
I’d like to lavish praise on Kevin for putting together a collection of great stories, but I’m not going to. I’ve read every one of the stories in this collection, most of them five or six times and I like almost all of them. Like any reader, there are a couple I didn’t like, but not because they weren’t good, but because of my own personal tastes; however, my like or dislike of a particular piece doesn’t matter. What does matter is this: what do you think? What do you, the readers, think of the stories within the covers of Beneath the Surface of Things? That’s what’s important. So, I’m not going to heap praise on him. Besides, honestly, I think I would be biased by doing so.
What I will say is this: I believe most people will be able to relate to many of the stories on the following pages. In the end, if a reader can relate to a piece, then the writer has done their job.
Remember that guy mentioned earlier? The one with the Arrogant Bastard for a drink and the pretty woman sitting across from him, probably wondering what she got herself into when she married the man with the vivid imagination? Yeah, that guy. The average man with the not so average dreams? Look around you. There is probably a Kevin Wallis near you—you just don’t know it yet. Honestly, there’s nothing average about Kevin and, thankfully, there’s nothing average about Beneath the Surface of Things …
AJ Brown
Redemption Song
The pull of the park was strong. Perry considered fighting it, telling that smelly old playground to just let him be, but his feet were already shuffling across the road and through the squeaky iron entrance.
“Dang gate,” he mumbled. “Oughta close and stay closed.” Toothpick-thin crystals of ice jingled from the fringes of his scraggly beard when he spoke. He tugged his woolen cap down to his eyes and pulled his three coats closed. The string he used in place of buttons was about frayed through, but he managed to keep most of December’s bite at bay. The stink of unwashed skin, however, crept out like the breath of the dying.
Perry reached into a coat pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, habit guiding his thickly mittened hands more than feel. He didn’t look at it though. “Keep lost things lost,” Old Man Gristle said, and Perry believed him. He never looked at it. The paper just hitchhiked around town with him, begged and washed windshields with him from the safety of the coats, or occasionally a knapsack unless he ran out of tape to fix the flimsy parts.
Most of the townsfolk loved the park, especially on a night like this; he and Old Man Gristle always heard people talking about it as the fancy folks walked under the bridge, on their way to wherever fancy folks go. Icicles hung from the venerable oaks, casting prisms of white and gold as they reflected the moonlight. The usually dull orange of the streetlamps bounced off the ice on slides and swings, reminding Perry of playgrounds he’d seen in the catalog pages of his bed sheets.
Perry didn’t see beauty, however. The night’s frost and glow merely awakened something inside him, something growling and frightened. Yet here he was again, covering the same tracks as last night, listening to the same creaky, windblown swings as the night before that. The same trees as last week, the same dang park as last year. Every night, identical—the pull, the fight, the defeat. And Life Before the Bridge whispered indecipherable secrets into his head.
Well, that life was gone. He remembered none of it, wanted none of it. He wasn’t the brightest apple in the barrel, but he knew that he didn’t magically appear under the bridge one day. He understood that he must’ve lived a life before sleeping with the rats and listening to Old Man Gristle’s God-awful snoring all dang night. But a squirrelly, slimy feeling in his chest told him not to question, that he’d forgotten for a reason.
All he wanted now was food. Maybe he’d find some unspoiled berries along the bushes against the rear fence. Or maybe a …
He saw her under the largest oak at the back of the park, propped against the trunk like a sleeping statue, and Perry knew one thing with certainty—she was dead. He didn’t know how he knew this. Maybe it was her stillness, maybe her color, all pale and spotty, like Gristle’s hands when his diabetes got ornery.
Just leave, Perry, he thought. You plus dead woman equals bad news. But his feet betrayed him once more. He was already halfway to her, stumbling and cursing across the slick grass.
Well, maybe she has a purse, some Tic-Tacs or something.
He stopped before the dead woman and smothered a yelp into his beard. She was dead, alright, deader ‘n disco, but … what? You’ve never seen this chick before.
Winter had settled into her thin hair, creating a shining white wig like those men he remembered seeing in history texts about the olden times. Her eyes were closed; her mouth, blue and peeling. Her jogging suit spoke of name-brand knock-offs. Death had colored her skin with a pallid canvas, but blackened spots of frostbite—or was that decay?—dotted her face and exposed hands.
Perry knew he drank too much, probably had something seriously off-kilter in his coconut with all the late-night jaunts to the park, but he knew for danged sure this woman wasn’t sitting under this tree last night.
Ah, screw the pooch. He reached forward, already tasting the granola protein bar she surely had tucked into her jacket, and the dead woman opened her eyes.
Orbs of sunlight-on-glass yellow sliced through the darkness like a pair of monstrous fireflies. Perry jerked his hand away and stood upright, a guilty child caught in his crime. He squinted against the dead woman’s gaze.
Notdeadnotdeadnotdead, he thought.
He opened his mouth, hoping to ask her if she was still in fact deceased, but the woman beat him to it. Her jaws creaked open. No blast of frosted breath exited her gaping mouth, but what did come out froze Perry deeper than the glacial wind.
Down in da meadow in a wittle bitty poo,
Fam fee wittle fishies and a mama fishie too.
Her voice was golden, the song a stark contrast to the grayness of her corpse. The words pried and invaded, each syllable a childish finger reaching into Perry’s secret corners and coaxing forth the past.
“Not your business!” he shouted, but only to keep from crying.
A creaking behind him, and Perry spun around. The middle of three swings glided into the air, as high as Perry’s cap, hesitated for the briefest of moments, then flew backwards in a gleeful arc. Forward again, back, over and over and . . .
“Fim,” said da mama fishie, “fim if you can!”
And dey fam and dey fam all over da dam.
The ebony sky faded to the glorious blue of a clear afternoon, and he was there, watching her swing. Her cherry-red pinkie tails flew back as she shot forward. A light rain fell, the type of spring shower that falls from unseen clouds and leaves rainbows for the children. She giggled as she sang their favorite rainy day song, the one about fishes, and the joy in her laughter held even the birds in silent awe.
Perry tried to gasp, to shout or sob or moan, but his body failed to respond, as if delegating all its strength to the chaos in his head.
In two hours, I’ll be sunburned and she’ll be dead. Got any cutesy sayings for that, Gristle?
He bathed in her splendor, all thoughts of food and bridges and corpses gone. Memories blistered his mind even as the sun darkened his skin.
He could time the seizure to the second. Three … two … the end of his world.
The girl stopped the swing and looked at Perry. Her hands stole to her paling face. Perry tried to close his eyes, to turn away from the evil of that moment, but he languished in the slow-motion sludge of a nightmare.
She stepped off the swing, said, “Daddy?” and collapsed. Her tiny body trembled and writhed and spit splashed from her mouth and her tongue Goddangit her tongue was sliding down her throat and—
He remembered. Life Before the Bridge, Her Death Before His Fall; it all rushed back and smothered him. He smoothed out the crumpled piece of paper—when did I take this out?—but still didn’t look at it. The past monopolized his attention instead.
He had rushed to her side, his brain trying in vain to process what just happened. She thrashed, her arms and legs as rigid as lumber. He remembered thinking she looked like a bass flopping on the bottom of a fishing boat, then shame at allowing that thought to surface through his terror.
He cradled her head in his lap and screamed for help. People jerked cell phones from pockets, and Perry prayed the ambulance would be fast.
It wasn’t fast enough. They loaded her onto the stretcher, her skin already blue, her eyes rolled back, white globes streaked with red.
Her eyes. Beams of light reflected off the raindrops pooling in her eyes until a glorious sunlit yellow remained.
Her golden eyes. That’s what sent me to the bridge.
She died in the neuro ICU that afternoon. The memory brought Perry to his knees.
The paper in his hand suddenly felt as heavy as a gin bottle. He brought it to his lips, kissed it, and smoothed it out.
A photo. She gazed back at him behind a smile that used to turn even the most crotchety stranger’s head. Her eyes, blue, blue, smiled even brighter. She wore her hair in a pony tail—she cried for the pinkie tails but I couldn’t fix ‘em right—that draped over her shoulder in a splash of red.
Lily. My darling Lily.
His life sprinted through his mind. The fights with Maggie after the funeral, the blame, the divorce. His boss’s contrived pity which could never quite overcome the bottom line, the pink slip. Booze, guilt, shame. The landlord’s tears as she handed him the eviction notice. The bridge …
The creaking stopped. The swing was still.
And I fam and I fam right back to da dam.
The dead woman’s eyes were closed, the yellow glow confined behind blue-veined lids. Her skin shone with a ruddy pink unblemished by frost or rot. Her face … those cheekbones so high and sharp. That chin, slight and perfectly rounded. Her full, rosy lips. And that hair, still coated in ice, but with brilliant red locks peeking through.
Perry looked at the wrinkled photo once more. Lily, four-years-old and untouched by the world’s devilry. His head swiveled back and forth, from red-haired beauty in the picture to red-haired beauty by the tree.
“Are you telling me you’re OK? That this is who you are now, wherever you are?”
The dead woman didn’t answer, but Perry made it true in his head. He saw a woman asleep, at peace with God’s decisions for her.
I can live with that.
He sat next to her and leaned against the tree. The wind picked up, piercing them both with its daggers of ice. His tears had frozen on his cheeks, forming stalactites that brushed the frost in his whiskers.
He reached for her hand. It was cold, but he didn’t care. So was he. He couldn’t recall ever being so dang cold in all his life. He wished he had a fourth coat and considered stealing one from Old Man Gristle, but that would mean leaving his little girl. He felt the numbness creeping in anyway, and smiled. The cold couldn’t hurt him anymore. It couldn’t touch what counted.
Perry closed his eyes, saw a million shades of golden yellow, and sang about fish.
***
In the Liquid Imagination office at zoetrope.com, my writing buddies and I used to hold weekly flash fiction contests. This story was based on a prompt given during one of those contests. It’s perhaps my favorite story, the one I’m most proud of, so I granted it the top spot in this book.
The Taking of Michael McConnolly
Think about the last time you saw someone laughing on TV. I mean a full, Moe-slapping-Curly howl. Now mute the sound and look again.
Looks like he’s crying, doesn’t it? Maybe screaming?
This is the last image I have of Michael McConnolly before he was taken. I see his face, his mouth wide open in a Stooges-worthy guffaw, but the sound’s off, like my brain doesn’t want me to remember my friend with such filth pouring out of him. Firelight kisses his face, casting shadows that belong in silent black and white films. He laughs, but his laughter holds no more joy than a drowning man’s plea for air, a burning man’s final gasp.
Such things shouldn’t happen on a camping trip. Camping is gritty, sure, but familial. It’s where you go to bond and rejoin. Where you wake to the smells of smoldering kindling and lingering sirloin, not to the memory of your buddy losing his mind.
It started with the wooden box. The fucking Geocache.
* * *
“That’s it? That’s a Geocache? Are you fucking kidding me?” Mark said. Despite the cool afternoon air, our hike had produced a sheen of perspiration across his brow. He wiped it away and spat phlegm, the remnants from a night of hard smoking, into a pile of leaves, narrowly missing my hiking boot. I pushed him, but succeeded only in moving myself backward several steps. Mark had me by seven inches and fifty pounds, despite my three year advantage. Little brother, my ass.
Brother Number Three (the eldest should always be referred to as Brother Number One, Brent would tell you) spat on my other boot and said, “We follow multibillion-dollar satellite technology for an hour through the woods to find . . .” He gestured at his feet.
“A piece of fucking Tupperware,” Brody said, “and a dollar-store necklace.” Sweat gleamed over dozens of tattoos on his meaty arms.
Mark checked his phone-cum-GPS-cum-supercomputer again. “This is the only Geocache in this park, guys. Take it or leave it.”
Mike McConnolly knelt down and picked up the necklace from the small box. “First of all, Tupperware’s plastic, and this box is wooden, so you’re a fucking moron. Second, check this out.” Zeke stepped in front of Brody and snatched the necklace. I looked over his shoulder.
Despite its obvious cheapness, it still managed to reflect the sunlight in a manner that at least hinted at beauty. The clasp threatened to disintegrate with the next strong breeze, and a circular, featureless medallion hung from the center of the chain. Streaks of mud and a patch of furry green mold coated the small medal.
“I’m hungry,” Zeke said. He tossed the necklace back into the box. “Screw Mr. Geocache.”
Dan laughed. “What’d you expect? That’s the game. You follow the GPS to the ‘cache and see what people’ve left inside. Why don’t you leave something valuable so the next group of chumps doesn’t feel as retarded as we do?”
“Good idea,” Zeke said, unzipping his cargoes. “I gotta piss anyway.”
Ten fists slammed into Zeke. He laughed and zipped back up.
“Seriously, I’m hungry. Let’s go back to camp.”
“I’m taking it for my kid,” Mike said.
“You’re giving Mikey Jr. a necklace?” I said. “Wanna find another box and see if it has a matching dress?”
“Fuck you,” he said. He placed the chain around his neck. “I can clean this up, engrave a cross on it or something. He’ll love it.”
“Do what you want, but Zeke’s about to fucking eat it if we don’t head back to camp,” Mark said.
We placed the box back under the raised tree root where we found it and covered it with some dirt to hide it from the next so-called Geocachers.
Stupid game, I thought, and fell into step behind my two brothers. The rest of the guys were laughing up ahead.
Everyone except Mike. He walked alone, staring at the necklace, cleaning the medallion with his spit and fingers.
* * *
The moaning wail of the ivory horn cut through the cooling twilight air. I checked my horseshoe toss in mid-swing and looked towards the sound. Mike had his mouth to the horn, creating the mournful bellow we’d come to associate with a ready dinner. The horn was carved into a long, curved bone shape, the type a Viking might’ve used to signal the start of some grand pillaging. I’d bought it at a recent Renaissance Festival and, figuring the guys would get a kick out of it, packed it for the trip.
The horn blast was all that had come out of Mike’s mouth since the Geocache expedition.
I tossed my horseshoe and laughed as it clanged around the stake for a game-winning ringer. I high-fived Brody, flipped off Zeke and Dan, and headed towards the campfire for some McConnolly ribeye.
“Damn, what’s that, five games to none?” Brody asked. “That’s a first-class reaming where I come from.”
“Your mom’s a first-class—” Zeke started, but a Brody headlock silenced him. Birds scattered as the two gorillas crashed to the forest floor and went at it.
“It’s getting cold,” Mike yelled. “Hurry the fuck up.”
“What’s with him?” Dan asked me.
“I dunno,” I said. “He’s been in a mood since our hike. Maybe he misses his kid. As long as the steaks are bloody, I’m just gonna let it slide.”
Mark and Brent jogged over, exhausted from two hours of trying to free a tree-trapped frisbee with a rock tied to a string. Geniuses, my brothers.
The seven of us grabbed our food, a few beers, and sat down for what would be our last supper together.
The dinner began as campfire meals should. It was midweek of the campground’s off-season, and the sole Ranger on duty had told us we had the small State Park to ourselves, so we let our voices ring without fear of awakening any sleeping neighbors. We clowned each other, laughed until tears flowed. We kept our mugs full of Mark’s home-brewed IPA, straight from the keg in the trunk of his SUV. We howled as Zeke ran into the woods to puke up his first round of beers, then walked straight back to the keg without a word. We flirted around politics and the inevitable drunken shouts that would surely follow. I drifted into the background as the conversation turned to guns—the rest of the guys discussed the newest magazine loaders and grip extensions and concealment holsters the way some men talk about the nickel defense or twin-cam engines. Offering some keen insight into the inner workings of my paintball gun would probably get my ass kicked, so I lay back and silently relished in the company.
Mike, however, didn’t speak, never laughed. We tried to include him, complimented his cooking, threw the type of good-natured barbs his way that normally would’ve resulted in a classic McConnolly comeback, or at least an emphatic “Fuck you.” But he only nodded absently and fingered the necklace that would trigger the end of our merry gang a few hours later.
That end began with four words from Mike.
“We’re not the ones.”
“He speaks,” said Zeke. “The silent chef speaks.”
“Shut up,” I said. “What’s up, Mike?”
He raised his eyes to me. “We’re not the ones.” He grasped the medallion hanging from his neck with white-knuckled fervor. “We weren’t supposed to have this.”
“It’s public property,” Brent said. “You had every right to take it. That’s how Geoca—”
“I know how it fucking works. This wasn’t meant for us. We’re not the ones. It knows we took it.”
Mike’s fists clenched around the medallion. I looked at the guys, hoping to see the telltale grins that would signify that this was all a big joke, that Mike was yanking our cranks and I was the only one with a black tendril of dread constricting my chest. Firelight rippled across the countless skulls and breasts tattooed on Brody’s arms. Zeke opened his mouth, closed it. Mark stared into his mug. Somewhere, a raccoon chittered. Nobody so much as smirked.
Mike laughed then, that cackle that has melted into my brain. Zeke and Brody started to chuckle along, but the sound died as soon as it left their mouths, drowned beneath the depraved noises spewing from McConnolly. My brothers and I looked at one another and shrugged. Mark had known Mike the longest, counted him as another brother alongside myself and Brent, and shades of concern meshed with the spastic shadows the fire cast across his face.
That laugh held no humor, no goodwill. It was the sound of exhaustion, the final exclamations of a man who has fought a silent battle and lost. Mike had given up. I understand that now. The necklace had won.
He stood, still cackling, his eyes wide, his mouth wider. Tears glistened on his cheeks. He stepped over the flames, pushed his way past the rest of us, and ducked inside his tent. From inside, his laughter chilled the already frigid night.
His hands had never left the necklace.
* * *
As a kid, Michael McConnolly once rode an elephant at the circus. That may seem trite in the midst of a tale such as this, but as Brent and Mark rattled the earth with ear-shattering snores beside me—I wouldn’t be surprised if they had placed a bet on who could disrupt my sleep the most—I found myself thinking of this. He first told me of his elephant adventure as he and Mark lay sprawled across my college apartment’s floor after a Pearl Jam concert many years ago. The story had struck us just as the night’s beer consumption reached that critical point when perfectly timed gas and the lamest of jokes can double you over. And his elephant story—I even got a certificate!—damn near killed us. With the remnants of our cigarettes’ smoky trails hovering above us, we laughed until the alcohol clubbed us into the sleep of the drunk.
I tried to hear that laugh again—Mike’s natural, easygoing chortle. But my mind couldn’t find the tears of mirth that coated his face that night. All I heard was that other laugh, the one he had taken to his tent. My brain turned off the sound—protecting me, I guess, from what was to come—and I finally drifted into a restless sleep convinced he had been sobbing instead.
Sometime later—seconds, minutes at the most—I awoke to Zeke’s voice. “Mike’s gone.”
I first thought he said “Light’s on,” like some drill sergeant who’d lost the stomach for any stereotypical Hollywood screaming.
“He’s gone, man. Get up.” Zeke walked out.
Hearing him that time, I rubbed sleep from my eyes and kicked my sleeping brothers. Their snores morphed into angry, lionish growls, but they sat up with a few more well-aimed shots of my foot.
“How you guys ever got laid, much less married, with noises like that, I’ll never know.” Blank looks met my quip, so I said, “Mike’s gone. Zeke sounds worried. We better see what’s up.”
Five minutes later, with coats and boots clumsily donned and bladders hurriedly emptied, the six of us—my brothers and I, Zeke, Brody and Dan—stood by Mike’s empty tent. Zeke handed me the note he’d found taped to the outside of his own tent when he’d come outside to take a leak a few minutes before waking up the rest of us.
Something saw us take the amulet and it's pissed.
You don't piss off things like this.
It was written almost illegibly, a vast contrast from Mike’s usual neat, almost girlish script. A few inches down, he had scribbled some more, repeating his lunatic message from the campfire.
We’re not the ones. It doesn’t belong to us.
“Amulet?” Dan asked after I read the note aloud. “He probably doesn’t even know what an amulet is.”
“So where’d he go?” Brent asked. More than anyone, he seemed annoyed at the interruption of his beauty sleep.
The cry of the ivory horn answered him. It howled through the trees from the east side of the woods like a grief-stricken mourner. Our heads whipped towards the sound, then to the branch from which we’d hung it earlier. The branch was empty.
“Why’d he take the horn?” Brody asked.
“To call us for help,” Mark said. “He knows something we don’t.”
“Listen to it.” I silenced my friends with my hands and traced the direction of the horn call. “It’s coming from the direction of the Geocache box. Maybe Mike’s putting the necklace back.”
We snatched flashlights, donned headlamps. Mark grabbed his GPS-equipped phone, and we took off through the forest. The beams spasmed ahead of us like strobe lights. I remember thinking that I was glad none of us had epilepsy, lest we start seizing from the light show. If I had known of the bloodshed to come, I would’ve saved my thoughts for something other than whimsical wandering.
We reached the clearing where we had first found the Geocache in what seemed like seconds, although the hike earlier that day dictated that we must have been running for at least ten minutes. Except for the small-as-a-jockey but strong-as-a-racehorse Dan, none of us were exactly Olympians anymore—weekend warriors and beer-league softballers at best—so several more moments passed before we caught our wind enough to look around. Our breath fired into the cold air in visible puffs of exhaustion.
Zeke spoke first. “Blood.”
Even in the darkness, I saw that he was right. It spattered the ground at our feet, dotting dead leaves, streaking fallen tree trunks. Our lights illuminated crimson until it glowed against the backdrop of the woods. Under the raised tree root where we had first uncovered the Geocache, the wooden box lay smashed into countless shards that looked like teeth floating in a puddle of bloody rainwater. The necklace was nowhere to be seen.
Mark put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed until I had to bite my lip to stifle a grunt of pain. “What the fuck, Mike?” he said, more to himself than to me. “What the fuck?”
I shone a light upon my little brother’s face, an act that would’ve earned me a blindside backhand under normal circumstances, but the pale shock I saw there assured me his thoughts were miles from my flashlight beam. I followed his gaze.
The carnage wasn’t confined to the area near the Geocache box. No, a war had erupted in the forest. Our lights shone off trees shattered mid-trunk, great furrows ripped into the earth, and blood painting it all like a living fungus.
“Something tore this place apart,” Brent said.
My eyes refused to stray from the unfathomable amounts of blood splashed across the land before me. “Goddamn, Mike, I hope you at least held your own,” I whispered.
A scream ripped my attention from the battle site. It came from above, from the left, the right. It suffused me, burrowed into my skin and brain and fear until I knew but two simple facts. The scream was Mike’s, and it rattled with pain.
Someone spoke. It could’ve been any of them. “Guns.”
We rushed back to camp. Glock .40 cals and Ruger 9mm’s and Springfield Armory XD subcompacts—I understood none of their high-tech babble, but the clack of a fully loaded magazine slamming home, well, that I understood. I picked up a hatchet from the stack of firewood and tried to look like I belonged in this army.
Mike’s wail pounded the air again, panicked, wrought with agony. He was a tough man, old Irish tough; I’d witnessed him come out on top in more than a few bar fights. But this shriek had stripped away all the bravado and reduced his voice to that of a child facing the monster under his bed for the first time.
“Where the fuck is he?” I asked.
Brent slid a cartridge into his Glock’s handle and said, “Do we stick together or split up?” His face was steel.
“I think we’re armed enough to split up,” Brody said. He pointed to me and my brothers. “You three take that way, we’ll go this way.” He dictated directions.
I turned to gauge my brothers’ opinions, but Mark was already sprinting back into the woods, his pistol swinging at his side. It looked natural, organic, an extension of his flesh and bone. Brent and I followed him, our headlamps keeping him in sight, leaving Brody, Zeke and Dan behind.
We plunged into the woods. The sounds of nature at midnight vanished beneath our gasping breath, the furious crunching of our boots over dead leaves and branches. It was like hurtling through a vacuum, a tunnel devoid of any sensation not linked to adrenaline and fear. Even the beams from our lights were flat, illuminating so little that our faces slammed into the ground more than once as conniving roots grabbed at our ankles. Only when my hand wiped blood from my eyes did I realize that branches had been whipping across my face.
I stopped in a clearing, bent over gasping, and cursed the pack of American Spirits I’d inhaled the previous night. “Hold up, guys,” I said. “Let’s figure out where we . . .”
I was alone.
“Mark! Brent!” Only my echo answered. I hadn’t seen them turn, never saw their lights change course, but they must have lost me during our mindless dash through the forest. Some battleplan.
The scream again, Mike’s scream, and this time he spoke.
“It has teeth! It hurts! It has so many teeth!”
My heart seized, that part of me apparently epileptic after all, but I ran towards my friend’s voice. The hatchet in my sweat-greased hand felt ridiculous, tiny.
The shriek came from towards the lake, and as I neared it, I regained some semblance of my bearings. I wasn’t as far from our camp as I had assumed. Lights flashed in the distance, cresting the hill that led to the lakeshore, perhaps thirty yards away.
I shone my light up the hill in time to see the silhouettes of my brothers reach the top, pause, their handguns close to their chests and aimed down the other side like federal agents busting into a crackhouse.
I should’ve studied that image, captured it, burned it into my psyche for the beautiful sight it was. Here were my brothers, fighting against an unseen enemy only hinted at in the sick minds of horror writers, their only concern the imagined hell their buddy was enduring, any fear they felt for themselves merely an irritating prick against their steel resolve. Armed but blind, terrified but loyal to a fault.
If I had known I would never see them again I could’ve . . . what? There was nothing I could do, and I didn’t know. You never know things like that.
Their silhouetted forms vanished down the lake side of the hill. I charged after them. I scrambled to the top of the hill, flashed my light towards the lake, and saw . . .
. . . moonlight sparkling off the crystalline lake, a postcard moment in the midst of a nightmare. Crickets chirped their mating songs. An owl hooted from above. My breath sounded like the roar of a tsunami in my head. But my brothers were gone. I listened for their voices, for sounds of a skirmish. I scanned the landscape for flashes of their headlamps. Nothing.
Panic gripped me. Tears rolled unchecked. I sprinted along the lakeside, searching for their lights or guns or strips of their clothes—hell, for strips of their flesh—but they were gone.
They had never even fired a shot.
Mike’s voice pierced the night, blanketing me as if part of the cool Texas air. The anguish stripped me bare, laid what courage I had left at my feet to be trampled on by whatever haunted these woods. No pleas for help, just a single, ripping wail.
Movement from the lake caught my eye. It darted around my vision, dancing, never settling into my direct line of sight. Shapes, seemingly immune to the moon’s weak glow or my own light’s luminescence. A flurry of spastic activity, covering the entirety of the lake’s surface, like bats that have somehow lost their corporeal forms and now hover between this world and another, blacker one. I couldn’t make out anything distinct, but I saw, I saw, wings. And somewhere in the midst of the chaos over the lake, a hand. A human hand, curled into a fist, pounding, fighting.
Leaves crunched from the treeline. I leapt backward and scanned the area, praying to see Brent and Mark walking towards me, carrying Mike in their arms. Instead . . .
I glimpsed it for maybe half a second, just as the trees closed around its gargantuan form as it retreated into the dense woods. I first thought it was Brody, maybe Zeke. They were large men, but the thing I saw striding into the forest dwarfed them. Its body (that’s only its leg, my mind wailed, only one leg!), black, shining like the carapace of some nightmarish insect, vanished into the dark. Only the rippling of the leaves in its wake testified to its presence.
My bladder emptied; warmth coated my thighs. The dungeon of my mind, where some semblance of coherence still dominated, told me that Mark and Brent would’ve been proud to see that display of bravery, but I brushed aside those thoughts lest my brothers’ memory bring me irrevocably to my knees.
They were dead. The things I’d seen—unnameable flutterings over the lake, the abomination lumbering into the woods—confirmed it. I couldn’t let them die for nothing.
Everything happened quickly after that. It’s a blur in my brain, a dreamscape that demands acceptance but can’t quite break through the wall of reality my mind has erected to keep it out.
Running back up the hill, I fought through my terror and regained a modicum of clear thought. The guys. I had to find the rest of the guys, if any of them were alive to find. I spun three-sixty, again, then found my bearings and raced towards the campsite.
Our site was empty when I arrived, save for a band of raccoons sniffing at our cooler. I threw my hatchet at them, wanting to kill something, anything, and cackled like a madman as they scurried away. I retrieved my useless weapon, swore I’d study every aspect of gun warfare I could find if I made it out of this forest alive, and saw Brody emerge from the trees.
He carried a body. Dan’s arms hung loose, his head arched back and swaying in rhythm with Brody’s staggering steps.
I rushed over and helped Brody lower Dan’s slight frame to the ground. Blood coated Brody’s tattooed arms, slicing across skulls and flames to add a dimension of horror to what I had previously considered works of art. His face was passionless, blank.
Dan’s face was gone. A pulpy red glob of flesh oozed in its place. The whiteness of his skull shone through the shreddings of his face.
“We got separated,” Brody whispered. His voice rasped like a man dying of emphysema. “I found him . . .” He said no more. I didn’t need him to.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
He ignored the question. “Where’re your brothers?”
I couldn’t speak. My tears spoke for me.
The horn blasted us from our numbness, that stupid fucking horn. Brody jumped up, pulled his Ruger from his waistband, and crashed into the woods once more, back towards the site of the Geocache from where the sound bellowed.
I began to follow, but stopped.
A crash from behind, twigs shattering beneath a stampede of footsteps. I turned, blind, visions of phantasmic bats and insectoid leviathans in my head, and swung my hatchet. There was no thump, no resistance, as the blade slid into Zeke’s belly. I could’ve been carving cake with a Ginsu. He dropped to his knees, his head down, mercifully down. If he had looked me in the eye, if I had seen the accusations lurking there, I think I would’ve screamed and never stopped.
Fear is a funny thing. It paralyzes, sure, but it stops time as it does. I might’ve sat there for seconds, maybe hours, as Zeke lay dying in my arms. Blood spurted from his abdomen in never-ending waves. I think I tried to staunch the flow with my shirt, or my hands. I can’t remember. He didn’t moan, didn’t writhe, didn’t utter a final cryptic message that would end this nightmare like in the movies. He simply lay in my lap and bled.
Gunshots cracked in the distance, bracketed by Brody’s screams. He didn’t sound wounded; he sounded pissed, his howls punctuated by an animalistic “Motherfucker!”
I lay Zeke on the ground. Blood saturated the earth around him.
He wasn’t dead, but I had killed him nonetheless. Gasps wracked his body. He shivered, whether in pain or from the cold I didn’t know. I couldn’t leave him, couldn’t let him die in eons of agony. But Brody needed me. I had to fight, not out of some suicidal notion of nobility, but for no other reason than because it’s what men do. Because my brothers had fought.
I walked to Mark’s truck and dug through the scattered camping paraphernalia, hoping to find a gun they’d left behind. When I grasped a familiar stock, relief and disgust battled inside me. Pistols were foreign to me, but years of dove hunting with my grandfather had given me at least a working knowledge around a loaded 12-gauge.
I walked back to Zeke and shot him in the head.
Don’t judge me. He was in hell. I sent him elsewhere.
I don’t recall my flight back to the Geocache site. I was weary to my smallest bone, my slightest muscle, sick of running and screams and death. My mind had shut down and refused to acknowledge what was happening to my tidy little world of barbecues and ballgames.
I think I was quite insane by then.
More gunshots. Brody’s defiant screams became miserable squeals. What sounded like an enormous tree crashed to the earth. I flew to the cursed clearing where our nightmare had begun, my feet leading the way without help from my crumbling brain. Just get to Brody, I thought. Just help Brody, and find Mike.
I did find Brody. Most of him. His body sat perched amongst the limbs of an enormous oak tree that towered over the hollow where the metal box had been buried. His legs, spread-eagled in an obscene display of forced flexibility, straddled branches on either side of the trunk. His arms did the same, each elbow crooked over a branch, the forearms dangling like an abandoned marionette's. Most of his clothes had been ripped apart. Thick coats of blood slathered the exposed skin. The top of his head, from the upper jaw to the crown of his skull, was missing.
Imagine. You’re alone now. Your gang of seven now a party of one. Your friend hangs half-headless before you. What would you feel?
Me, I felt nothing. I know now I had expected this, to find Brody as dead as Zeke and Dan and my brothers. And probably Mike. But I felt absolutely nothing anymore, nothing but an utter numbness.
Movement from the trees. I extinguished my light and ducked into the shadows.
I don’t think humans have the capacity to accept such things as that which lumbered into the clearing, such blasphemies against what’s ingrained in our petty minds. It was mostly shadow, flickering in and out of clarity as if shielded by some semi-translucent cloth. I craned my neck to see its apex, but its blackness dissolved into the natural shadows of the treetops. I again got the vague sensation of something insectile, yet what sort of insect spouts hair from between the cracks of its exoskeleton? My eyes strained, idiotically demanded to see the thing in all its deranged glory, but only maddening bits of its form appeared in brief, mind-shattering spurts.
I cannot describe it further. To do so would have me swallowing the barrel of this shotgun I now cradle, and my fight is not yet done, I’m afraid. But what the thing did next, that I saw clearly.
It carried the top of Brody’s head in its … claw? Talon? My friend’s wide, terror-laced eyes swung not ten feet from where I crouched. The thing lifted the skull, higher, higher, out of sight, up to what I assumed was its head. Seconds later, the arm lowered. Even in the darkness, Brody’s now clean skull shone a gleaming white. My mind tried to force its unwanted wisdom into my consciousness—visions of the beast ripping off Brody’s flesh with countless yellowed teeth, licking out his brain with a tongue the size of my arm—but I refused to entertain such horrors. It dropped the skull to the ground, directly under the root from where we had first uncovered the goddamned box.
From somewhere, another appendage maybe, perhaps another fucking dimension for all I know, the necklace appeared, looking as tiny in the thing’s grip as an inch of string in one of my own pathetic hands. The thing lowered, without the sensation of bending, and placed the necklace, the fucking amulet, inside the hollow of Brody’s cranium. The beast moved gently, with an almost reverent respect, and nudged the skull and its contents back underneath the upraised root.
Brody hated the Geocache game. I can almost laugh—almost—to imagine what he’d say if he knew he was now the game itself.
When the beast rose, I braced myself to run. Where, I didn’t know. But smoke-blackened lungs or not, I was prepared to haul almighty ass to the North fucking Pole if I had to. But when the thing opened its mouth and screamed, I curled into a fetal ball and slammed my hands over my ears.
It screamed in the voice of Michael McConnolly. It screamed my name. I was running before I realized I had abandoned my curled-up station of exhausted terror.
So . . . here I sit. In my tent, the shotgun nestled in my arms.
I searched everywhere for car keys. I had carpooled with Brent, and I knew he always kept his keys with him, so any hope of driving to safety in his car was foolish. I dug through suitcases, glove compartments, through the dirt around the still smoldering ashes of our fire, until panic of horrors unseen drove me into the laughable safety of my tent.
I’m not alone though. The mangled bodies of Zeke and Dan are with me. Zeke was a bitch to drag. I’m grateful, though, that I don’t have to stare at the remains of my brothers. I refuse to remember them as corpses.
You’re probably wondering where the Park Ranger was during the fight, if you can call such a one-sided slaughter a fight. He must’ve heard Brody’s gunshots, right? Well, I’m wondering the same thing, and all I can say is to abandon the thought. The Ranger is no doubt as dead as the rest of my crew. That thing in the woods would never play favorites, even to someone not directly involved in this war.
So I sit, and seethe, and wonder why. Why? What sort of foul grip did that amulet gain on Mike’s decent soul? He said it wasn’t meant for us, and the beast had placed it back in its new, grisly container with something akin to worship. So what manner of black soul is destined to find it?
I couldn’t give a flying fuck.
I think the thing is afraid to leave the amulet. Maybe it’s forbidden to leave it. But Mike’s voice still rings out sporadically, calling for me, always calling for me. The beast is persistent; something tells me time doesn’t play much of a hindering role in such a demon’s existence. It knows it left one of us alive, and that, I fear, is unacceptable.
Did it lure us to our deaths with Mike’s voice all along? Jesus God, what if the goddamn thing is Mike?
A new sound, new but familiar. My ivory horn bellows like the dawn of an apocalypse. I had forgotten about the horn, but I suppose that answers my question. It’s been deceiving us all along, summoning us into its grasp under the guise of a friend calling for help.
I cannot run, dare not leave the tent. I could risk it, sprint across two miles of unlit forest roads until I reach the park’s entrance, but I can’t seem to make my legs obey that command. And besides, I’m not willing to put my forbidden-to-leave-the-amulet theory to the test. So I’ll wait until the sun rises and make my break. Hopefully I will come up with something to tell the cops that won’t result in a lifetime behind bars for yours truly.
Strength. Courage. I search for it among my terror, but all I find are falling tears and dripping snot. There is a rage though, a fury colder than the air around me, sitting just under my fear and begging to be released. That I can use. Madness is stronger than courage.
My brothers’ faces haunt me. I hear their children, my nieces and nephews, asking me why I came home without their daddies. I think of their wives, imagine their questions. Our parents, forever seeing the faces of their lost sons when they look at me. They will want answers, demand to know how I survived. And what do I tell them? That I huddled like a baby inside my tent while their killer beckoned me forth for one last stand?
No.
My brothers, all six of them, went down swinging. I’ll do the same.
The horn still bellows. The shotgun feels light and ready in my hands. It’s useless, I know, a joke, but think about it for a second and tell me . . .
What would you do?
My younger brother and his friends have gone on an annual men-only camping trip the weekend before Thanksgiving for years. Last year, my older brother and I were invited to join them. I'm not sure why it took so long for the invite, but I digress. I started to write this story in my notebook the first night around the fire, but I must have ingested a few too many of my brother Matt's home-brewed IPA because I couldn’t read a damn word the next morning. Eventually, though, I came up with this story as a way to memorialize the Wallis trio’s first camping trip together.
I wanted to add a Lovecraftian feel to it, as well—I’m a huge fan—but attempting to imitate a master such as H.P. Lovecraft is a habit that will only elevate his status while depressing my own.
I tried to keep the campsite events and character personages as accurate as possible, but I did have to change the names, albeit slightly, to avoid the inevitable fistfights over who said or did what. And though nobody actually died, there’s always next year.
Flesh for the Forest
Dr. Zelkins sighed and wiped away another relentless barrage of sweat from his face. The moisture returned before he drew his next breath, but it was the constant doubts of his assistant that frayed his nerves to shreds.
“Brent, I’ve explained this to you a million times,” Zelkins said.
Brent walked a few paces from his boss to hand a cup of water to one of the dozens of laborers picking through the flora and digging into the moist earth of the rainforest floor. “And I believed you for the first several thousand or so,” he said. “But come on, Dr. Z, think one more time about what we’re doing here.”
“We’re archaeologists. We’re searching for evidence.”
“Of Amazons. In the Peruvian rainforest.”
“Near the Amazon River, Brent. Why do you think Orellana named it that? He saw them here as early as the sixteenth century.”
Brent handed Dr. Zelkins a dry cloth and a rag saturated with insect repellant. Zelkins wiped his face with the former, then generously applied the latter to his exposed skin. “That was according to Orellana’s journals,” Brent continued. “But who knows what nonsense he fabricated to impress the Spaniards, not to mention the King? All the early explorers embellished. Marco Polo wrote of meeting devils and beastmen, for God’s sake.”
Dr. Zelkins was silent for a moment, then spoke in a whisper. “I believe him.” He rose, grabbed a machete discarded by an exhausted assistant, and joined his men in the field. Brent followed.
Zelkins knelt next to a pit recently dug by his laborers and examined its contents. Nothing. Soil-turned-mud by the equator’s breath-robbing humidity. A howler monkey’s maniacal screech ripped the air. A flurry of macaws burst from a Capirona tree, a rainbow of brilliant feathers against the dark backdrop of the forest’s canopy. It reminded Zelkins that the rainforest was more than eternal sweat and billions of orifice-seeking bugs; beauty still reigned here.
He stood and looked eastward. Through a line of openings in the forest’s understory, he could see the upslope of what he and his men simply referred to as The Hill. Its shadow merged with the sun-choked forest floor. Zelkins glanced up and searched for a hint of sunlight strong enough to break through the canopy’s density. Again, nothing. No reaffirming beam of light; only the faint glow of day trickling through like a reluctant trespasser. He considered moving the search to the forest’s outskirts, but the thin canopy there allowed for intense sunlight and the impassable, head-high foliage consistent with the layman’s conception of rainforests.
Realizing Brent hadn’t left, Zelkins sighed again.
The young assistant spoke gently, as if explaining a punishment to a child. “Even if they existed, we’re 8000 miles from where the Amazons are thought to have lived. You’ve been there. You’ve searched the banks of the Thermodon, you’ve crawled through the ruins of Themiskyra, through nearly all of Turkey, on your hands and knees. And all that evidence was inconclusive at best. Hilltop ruins and vulva-shaped rock carvings? The Romans could’ve done that for fun!” Brent ran a hand through his hair and seemed to struggle with his next words. “I humored you at first, coming here. But our grant money’s running out, and enough’s en—”
“Then go!” Zelkins’ cheeks turned a violent red beneath his salt-and-pepper beard. “Why can you not see it? Empires travel. Did the Romans stay in Rome? No, they expanded throughout the world, into Africa, further even. So why not the Amazons? Why discard Orellana so readily?”