HIDDEN SPRINGS

1

After the rain, when jagged green ravines crisscrossed with rotting wood thundered with the muddy runoff, bloated carcasses of cattle choked Mist River. Pronged legs rolled, swollen and bobbing. A greasy slick on the bodies glinted in the dull light of the overcast afternoon.

           
Denny Holmes watched the river while he ate his lunch. He sat in the shelter of some trees and bushes forming a semi-circle around a bench facing the river. It was his favorite place to mull, when at work. No one really knew where Denny went on his break. Denny saw to that. If he thought anyone was watching on the way to his spot, he wouldn’t duck down under the secret branch, looking both ways like Clark Kent in front of a phone booth first, until he was reasonably certain the coast was clear. Mulling his upcoming duties with one ear on an approaching conversation (girls—students—no one from the Science Department requiring a certain technician on his break for dumping purposes) and jabbed a straw into a juice box, draining it in a few gulps till the sides of the box sucked in and the straw started to slurp.

           
Denny froze. The sound of the slurp would call attention to his location. He listened for the talking young women to pass by. They had stopped. He could see them out of the corners of his eyes about ten feet away. They were looking at the river.

            
 “That is so disgusting,” he heard one of them say. The other one said something else he couldn’t understand. Then they walked off.

           
Denny supposed they could have been talking about him, and would have thought so, except that he had seen through the cracks in the branches that the two young women were talking about the dead livestock in the flooded river. And there it was. Just as he was about to get up and head back to the coal mines. Right there on his arm. Biggest flea he ever saw in his life. This is the granddaddy of them all, Denny thought. Oh my sweet lord. This right here is a keeper.

           
Heart racing, and with one fluid motion, Denny retrieved the Ziploc in which he had packed his tuna sandwich the night before and held it open over the huge flea where it was stretched out, placid on his forearm. He shook his arm and didn’t merely see, but heard it fall into the bag where there were bits of tuna and some seeds from his bread. The flea dwarfed the seeds. Denny sealed the baggie, tossed it into his crumpled brown paper lunch sack, then hustled back to work, pausing under the fresh damp underbrush before revealing his secret exit.

           
Home at Whale Harbor several days later with a drill in his hand, he took the key

from the side of the handle and loosened the chuck to change the bit. Denny lived by himself. His parents left him the house.

           
At first he had given the flea a terrarium. It was the one where he had kept two turtles, over the years, a tarantula, countless frogs and a cricket named Pete. Denny found broken glass on the floor in the more or less spare room in the basement where he kept the flea. It took him awhile, but eventually he found the flea itself. It had been hiding behind an old unused dresser. After that, Denny took everything out and let the flea keep the room. This was to ensure that he could always see it. When he found it behind the dresser, the thing had tried to bite him. It was as big as a hamster, then. The thing had outgrown the terrarium in three days.

           
On the other side of the wall, the flea was crawling toward him. Denny could hear the increasingly audible, distinctive sound of the thing as it dragged its bulk in grotesque bursts of its long legs flailing on the floor. A curious sound, like a scratching hum, also came from where Denny supposed the flea’s mouth must be. Its short front legs worked devilishly, reminding Denny of the wringing hands of a schemer. He felt revulsion and a strange fascination to see the flea’s dirty blood churning in its semi-translucent bulk.

           
The sudden whine of the drill sent the flea hopping around in the room.

           
Denny raised his voice in the crawl space on the other side of the wall. “It’s okay, it’s all right, you sickening giant monster bug. I just want to help you. I want to watch you eat.” Denny couldn’t help but smile for a while as he thought about that. He was aware of it. The awareness that he was doing what he was doing amused him in particular. But did nothing to stop him.

           
“I almost wish I had another one like you, so you could be friends together. Would you like that?” He started up the jigsaw now and began his cuts for a small rectangular hole. In the room—there was only one door, no windows, not counting the one he was making now—sounds of the thing hopping madly about compounded the jigsaw’s blaring grind.

           
“Maybe you could make a family,” Denny yelled. “I can see a whole bunch of you in there. What are you, anyway? I wonder. Maybe you’re a girl. Are you carrying any eggs?”

           
He finished his last cut, careful to pull the plywood rectangle back in with him.

           
There was a moment of quiet. Then the thing suddenly jumped up, jabbing in a leg and flailing around like a cook with a spoon in a bowl. It was only for a moment. The thing couldn’t hold its own weight up with one leg in the window like that for long. But it was enough.

           
“Are you hungry? Hungry, girl? Hungry?” Denny was aware that he was chattering. Beads of sweat, collected in a matter of seconds, were dripping from his brow. The thing’s leg was bigger now than it was just a few hours ago. “Don’t worry, you freak. Hang on, you sickening monster. Daddy’ll find ya somethin’.”

2           

            
“Just like your goddam dad!” Julie yelled up the stairs so Bret would hear it loud and clear in the loft. Bret was sitting on the clothes-strewn bench next to the bed under the window. The bench that he and his father had made. It was just a crappy old bench but they had made it together. He heard her loud and clear.

           
His goddam dad was a part-time short order cook at Wok This Whey on account for the last year and a half he was also an ex-con. Never should have happened. Ten years mandatory. If Bret wanted to waste his weekends blowing his money in town instead of gearing down on his homework, maybe he could wind up wearing a nice little hat like that in his forties, too.

           
“I’m sorry,” Julie called out. “It’s true that you’re a lot like him. He used to have a lot of great qualities. He still does.” Bret noticed his mom didn’t voice the good stuff with quite as much forcefulness as she had the bad. She never acted like that about anybody else. He was seventeen now, and he promised himself he would be more careful than they had been. He would exercise good judgment. He would never act the way his parents did.               

            
 “Listen,” she said, “I’m going over to the market for a few things. I’ll be right back. Is there anything you want me to pick up?”

           
Long pause.

           
Then the voice carefully enunciated to carry out of the loft: “No.”

           
“All right. See you in a little bit.”

            
 “Okay.”

           
Bret heard the door shut. The engine started up. Grind of gravel. He got up.

            
The lights of the car were receding. Bret looked at the loft bed he got half the month and tried not to wonder if his mom and her sort of halfway boyfriend ever spent any time there.

           
Someone was coming down the winding zig-zags and switchbacks to Whale Harbor Road. Bret watched, waiting to see if when the car came under the light at the stop it was his friend Nick on his way over. The car did not have far to go before it came into the light of the lamp. It was a green Plymouth Valiant.

           
“Dad,” Bret said aloud on recognizing his father’s beat-up old clunker from half a mile away. A second later he said it again as he saw the car slowly move through the lamp light and straight through the stop sign.

           
“Dad!”

           
The car veered sickeningly off and plowed through a section of fence before bottoming out nose-first in a gully.

           
Bret grabbed his keys and hustled down to his Quadrunner ATV as fast as he possibly could. The twenty seconds it took him to cross the blacktop to the broken tracts between his mom’s house and the light about a half a mile east seemed to take forever. “The moors,” they all three used to call it, long before his mom ever bought a place out here on her own. Bret bounced crouching on the Quadrunner over the hard, uneven turf. There had seemed no point going the long way around by the road when he could simply cut straight across. The four-wheeler was taking a whalloping, though. The modified headlight Bret mounted dove up and down faster than Norman Bates’ knife.

           
Tim Mayer was out cold on the dash. His right arm was stretched out to the far corner of the dashboard; the waist section of his seat belt held him, but the chest-strap did not keep him from falling over sideways to the right, which was how the car had landed in the ditch.

           
It wasn’t that Bret didn’t know any better. He’d seen enough TV to know you never move anybody after an accident. Nor was it the knowledge that if his dad was seriously injured he would have to get helicoptered out, and that if he lived to see the bills he would wish that he hadn’t. At first it was because he forgot these things. He was on the verge of trying to pull his dad out of the car when he heard strange sounds nearby.

           
Near the horizon, the early night sky shone an otherworldly blue, against which Bret saw indistinctly silhouetted some strange shape as it rose up, like a fish with legs. The thing rose up, then suddenly disappeared. It almost looked like it jumped.

           
“Dad!” Bret said, shaking his father by the shoulder. “Dad!”

3           

           
It knows I’m on the other side, Denny thought. That sudden scrambling sound means it heard me.

           
The three pairs of legs that pulled the compressed articulated plating of the semi-opaque body scraped against the concrete floor in flurries of motion. A chittering sound came from the thing’s mouth.

           
Denny lifted the pin and slid the door to the little window aside, reached down to the large canvas bag filled with something at his feet, hefted it up and dumped the contents in one fluid motion. Thunk, went the contents onto the floor. The sound was mingled with a simultaneous yelp.

           
Denny shut the window just enough to allow him a clear line of sight.

           
The thing did not spring upon the dog immediately. For what seemed a long time it lay on its side apparently regarding the dog with caution, and perhaps stealth. Duct tape bound the dog’s mouth. It was whining now.

           
“Turk,” Denny said, his face grinning in the little window. He had heard his neighbor often enough. Frequently he had woken up to the annoying sound of her strident cries for the dog. More than once he’d found dog shit right on his property and he did not own a dog. Besides, fucking thing was old anyway.

           
“Turk!” It sounded strange, the sound of that name coming from him and not from his neighbor, Julie.  

           
Suddenly the dog struggled to free itself from the duct tape wrapped around its legs. There was nothing else in the room. Only the golden retriever and the gargantuan insect. The thing flailed its way to the dog as it chittered.

           
The wide-eyed dog’s mind seemed to snap with fear as something long and sharp from the thing’s approaching mouth audibly tore into the retriever’s neck and furiously sucked and slobbered up the blood.

           
Denny eased the window shut, sank the pin, grabbed the empty canvas bag and tiptoed crouching out of the crawl space, upstairs and into the dim pre-dawn light and brazen clamor of the gulls.

           
A hundred yards away someone was jogging. Denny recognized the jogger as his nearest neighbor. He went straight to his garage and pulled a garbage bin full of recycling to the road, squaring it in place as Julie came within earshot. A thin sheen of sweat seemed to have developed from this effort.

           
“Have you seen my dog around this morning?” she said, hands on hips and with a worried look.

           
“No, I haven’t.” That he might have seemed somewhat out of sorts was not altogether unusual. The recycling bin was heavy and smelled a little ripe.

           
“He’s been getting out and chasing those darn rabbits,” Julie resumed her jogging pace. “Thanks anyway.”

            
“Okay,” Denny called out. “Good luck.”

           
Cries of “Turk! Turk!” drowned in the pounding surf.

           
Denny thought he had sounded quite concerned. He went back inside.

*     *     *

                        

A few days later he was taking a sip of coffee when the phone rang.

           
“Hello?” Denny said, picking up after three rings.

           
He put his coffee down, grabbed a pen from a cup and reached around for a piece of paper.

           
“Yes,” he said. “All right.” Denny wasn’t writing anything. “Okay then. All right. Good-bye.” Denny clicked off his phone and set it down. Then he drained his cup, put it in the sink, placed the brown paper bag with his lunch on a shelf inside the refrigerator and went down the steps from the kitchen into the basement, leaving the door open for the added light.

         
Yellowy bulbs muffled by tapestries of cobwebs blanketed with dust silhouetted large furtive shapes. The spiders of the basement audibly repositioning themselves in their cotton candy webs were disturbed routinely and almost seemed to consider Denny, who scuttled in sometimes with meat, the great chief of their kind.                 

         
Denny hitched his body sideways along the crawl space between the concrete wall and the spacers until he came to the sliding window of which he was so fond. Pulling the neck of his shirt over his nose and mouth he squinted into the room, hanging back outside in a wary crouch.

         
One of the bulbs inside was still working. The light thus cheaply afforded was dim, but still Denny could clearly see the body. Rather, what was left of it. The monster had fed on Turk till his sides caved in like a juice box.

         
The experience of feeding on the dog had exhibited an immediate effect upon the giant flea. Its ordinarily dirty-looking blood, which had always hitched along in an ungainly and irregular manner now sped fluidly. Its attitude had also changed. Discontent seemed conveyed by its vocalizations. For once, though, Denny noticed that he wasn’t hearing any of those.

         
“Hey,” Denny said, aware of his voice disturbing the silence of the room. He had intended to share with his incarcerated friend the great news of no work for the next two days at least, and almost did say, “You in there?” but caught himself as his eyes scanned on a hole in the far right corner.

         
Probably he had walked right past the beast. Denny chanced a quick peek and made certain that the flea was out of the room.

         
It was.

          
All of its bouncing around must have loosened the plywood wall on the far left side, Denny thought. Once it got its legs in, it just pried and chipped and wedged itself right through.

His opinion of how exactly the thing was growing differed daily, almost hourly. Was it freed by the river flooding? Had it been affected by farm soil filled with weird chemicals and fertilizers? Was it a case of a mutation with a freakish growth hormone somehow activated? How much bigger could it possibly grow? Would it still act exactly like a flea, only bigger? Last he saw, it was almost as big as he was. Supposedly, from what he looked up in his parents’ old encyclopedia set, a flea his size would have a vertical jump of two hundred and fifty feet, and a horizontal leap capability of a whopping four hundred and fifty feet.

         
When he found it, he also found that the damn thing was tougher than it looked. Denny Holmes was not one of the world’s great gun aces but he’d plinked enough bottles with his old single bolt .22 to hit the thing from twelve feet away–a darkish spot where he supposed its nervous system must be. The bullet left a mark on the semi-translucent shell near where he had aimed. That was about it. Unless, Denny thought, in the intervening seconds it was recovering from the shot it took, for it was several moments before the thing launched itself straight through the sliding glass doors.

         
A banshee wind howled through the shattered doors, bearing the attendant sounds of the ocean. Wind-wild curtains flapped. It was as though a giant slingshot had been pulled.

         
Somewhere in the back of his mind Denny knew he couldn’t sleep at night with that thing hopping around. He wished it would accidentally jump in the ocean so a nice big shark would get it, but in the meantime he should probably try to shoot it again. It wouldn’t do to have the thing show up somewhere in his house unexpectedly when it got cold and hungry. Yet there was also the nagging tug of: You don’t want to get in any kind of trouble. Nobody has to know that you fed it.

           
He followed the thing outside, empty .22 shell discarded, one new one loaded.

           
The question was, where did it go?

           
East, toward the bluffs, perhaps to Oceanside Health Center? Nice thing for someone there to wake up to. North? It would have to go over or around the property, and maybe it did. There wasn’t much back there, though. His was the last ocean-front residence. But Denny had a hunch the thing went south. It was sandy in that direction, dotted with scrubby clumps of bush, riddled with soft cracks and gullies thick with swaying dune grass almost like a dirty giant carpet. All the houses were ahead.

         
Someone was booking on a four-wheeler.

         
The handful of bullets in Denny’s jeans jangled awkwardly as he maneuvered over the terrain. Haphazard thoughts bounced similarly in his mind. The mental image of the mess from the broken sliding glass doors, memories of how he had seen the thing feed.

           
Denny topped a rise and saw in the dim light afforded by the nearby corner lamp post a car crashed in a ditch. One person was helping another from the car.

            
 “Over here!” one of them yelled. Younger voice. That jogger’s kid. “Watch out!”

           
The thing stumbled out of the brush.

           
The six-foot flea teetered on its long back legs in the dim lamp light and the glare of the four-wheeler’s headlight, a hideous nightmare delicately poised, then sprang in a panic-producing arc perhaps twenty yards toward Tim and Bret. The man and his son yelled as they stumbled to the ATV. The thing flopped on the car not far behind them in a loud heap, landing like a body at the bottom of a four-story window.  The impact did not seem to faze it.

          
 Denny let the monster have it, unloading the full force of his .22 shell screaming, “Diiiiieee!” He threw back the bolt, chucked the empty smoking shell, dug into his pocket, grabbed one of the bullets there, put a new one in the chamber, slid the bolt forward, twisted the handle cocked and again screamed, “Diiiieeee!”

           
Tim and Bret were on the four-wheeler now, Tim in front, Bret with his knees jutting crazily out at the sides like a grasshopper. The Quadrunner’s headlight caught the surreal scene of the monster flopping around in the sandy slope of the gully.

            
 “Go!” Denny said with a wave of his rifle as he reloaded on the move toward the mutually recognizable shelter of Julie’s house. The Quadrunner dove up and down the harsh terrain.

           
Tim and Bret pulled ahead of Denny and punched it the last several yards to the blacktop, roostertailing with a little brodie on the other side in the soft scrub before the clean gravel of the wide drive to Julie’s front door. Bret hopped off before the four-wheeler had stopped and raced into the house. Tim looked back and saw Denny fire off another shot from a crouch scuttling crab-like down the drive.

         
“What the hell is that thing?” Tim said as they hustled to the open door.

         
“I don’t know!” Denny said.

         
Tim shut the door behind Denny. They went over to the window. “Thanks for helping back there. I’m Tim Mayer.”

         
“Denny—Holmes.”

         
“Bret’s getting the .357 Magnum. Lucky thing you had your .22 with you.”

         
Bret came over with the gun. It was big and gleamed. “This is Denny,” Tim said.

         
“I know, Dad. He lives right down there.”

         
Tim took the pistol. “Where is it?”

         
“It’s somewhere over there, I think,” Denny said.

         
“So how did you wind up chasing that thing with that .22 there?”

         
“It broke a couple sliding glass doors at my house. So I grabbed this. I’ve hit it a few times. Somehow it knocked your car into the ditch I guess, right?”

         
Down the road off to the right some lights were coming.

         
“That’s Mom,” Bret said.

         
“You know what it looks like,” Tim said, “is a giant fucking flea.” He took the gun with him downstairs, peering cautiously with it around corners until he reached a side yard on the south end of the house where he could see Julie as she pulled in.

         
He saw her turn off Steve Miller in the middle of flying like an eagle and reach for a bag on the passenger seat. The cab light came on.

            

“Julie,” Tim hissed from the shadows.

           
 “Who is that?” Julie had a hand up to shield the glare of the porch light as she peered. She saw Tim against a corner of the house.

“Holy shit,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Get over here, quick!”

“Is that my gun?”

“Listen. There’s some weird animal or something right out there.”

“Where’s Bret?”

“He’s inside. He’s fine. Your neighbor’s inside, too.”

“Who?”

           
“Said his name was Denny. Bret knows him. From right over there. He says he shot the thing a couple times with a .22.”

           
“What kind of an animal is it?”

            
 “I really don’t know. You wouldn’t believe it. I don’t know what it is. It looks like a giant fucking flea.”

Julie gave him a look.

“Don’t give me that look. I’m dead serious. We’ve got to get back inside.”

            
“So what are you doing here with my Magnum?” She held out her hand. Tim gave her back her gun.

“I was coming over to pick up Bret tonight, remember? I had a small accident.”

“Oh, that’s right! What? When?”

“Right over there. The car’s in a ditch.”

           
“Are you okay?”

           
“Bret pulled me out of the ditch, and then that thing suddenly showed up. Plus your neighbor. We just now had to haul ass to get in the house and saw you show up.”

           
They went around the house into the living room, where Bret and Denny were waiting for them, standing around uncertain and uncomfortable. As soon as they stepped inside, Julie exclaimed, “Oh my god!” Through the sliding glass doors everyone saw as the thing stood up in the trash and balanced on its back legs.

             
“Watch out,” Denny said, cold sweat in his voice. “It’s going to jump.”

           
Suddenly the sound of broken glass. The sliding doors were demolished.

           
The thing was in the room. In the ungainly semi-translucent body could be seen mottled clumps pushed in irregular bursts through its digestive system. Parts that seemed to comprise a sort of face and mouth quivered hideously as the nightmare thing chittered. Julie whipped out her fully-loaded .357 Magnum, assumed a slight crouch with one hand bracing the other at the wrist, and emptied her weapon . . .

For e-book: 

http://www.amazon.com/HIDDEN-SPRINGS-ebook/dp/B0050D2UGO

In the print book, 

HIDDEN SPRINGS 

precedes THE MESMERIZER:
http://www.amazon.com/Mesmerizer-Stewart-Kirby/dp/1477577270/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378244360&sr=1-2

THE MESMERIZER - ONE

Would you be disturbed to learn that the pages you now read were penned by the moldering hand of a buried man from within his own grave? Would a reanimated corpse hiding outside a house with a plan in the dark serve to unsettle, or perhaps defy all belief?

            What if I told you that: the worm which fed on the large carcass of a creature inadvertently exposed to high levels of contamination from an ancient toxic source beyond modern comprehension–that: having squirmed across wet carpet, under a sliding glass door and onto a sidewalk where it was nabbed and gulped by a bird–that: flew off, eventually landing in discomfort on the soft grassy mound of a fairly fresh grave–that: there the writhing, undying burden in the bird’s belly burst–that: the contaminated worm, which squirmed down through the mound, through a fissure in the softened casket, then poured itself into the cracked skull of the occupant, and that skull being mine?

            Perhaps had I taken the dark journey less recently–perhaps had the circumstances of my unjust demise cried less loudly for, if not revenge, then justice at least–perhaps then I would not be here to pen these mute pages with my rotting body. The grave gift I was given came as strangely and as unexpected when I returned as it did when I departed.

            The contaminated worm, you see, lodging in my rotting brain, gave me the means by which to know the course of its journey resulting in my decomposed fingers slowly scraping in the cold and the dark at the wet, mud-claimed casket’s lid.

            My name was Will Todd. I lived in a town called Fernden. Murder.

            I have to pause a moment.

            You know that space in the back of your leg behind your knee? A big fast millipede wriggled out of mine just now, right out of the tear in my pants leg. I’m sure there are lots of delightful little creatures feeding on my flesh just now. I can’t feel them, though. I hardly even know they’re there. Even when living there were always all kinds of tiny invisible bugs and things feeding all over me. I just didn’t notice.

            I didn’t have to say all that just now. I could’ve talked about my murder. I told you about the millipede the way that I did partly because I want you to understand. I want to feel as though you are here with me, alive. Mostly though, not to forget what I need to do while I’m here, I want to remind myself I’m dead. When I was alive, I always wanted to be reminded of that.

            I could’ve talked about my murder, I said. No, I could not. Not in a way that you would have understood. You see, I tried talking. That doesn’t work. But I can hold a pen. And I managed to get some paper. I don’t eat, breathe or sleep. So, I want to record my experience. This is where I will plot.

            I had a love. Her name was Mary Annette.

            I said “you see” before. But I don’t. Not with the eyes that I had when alive. The world appears in my mind darkly now. Shadowy figures shuffle. Were I to stand in front of a mirror, I doubt not I would perceive my reflection as clearly there as I see my decaying flesh push this pen across this page. I don’t fly. I can’t walk through walls. I’m not a ghost. I pass the night in this pit, my own open grave.

           Digging my way up and out had not been easy. In Fernden, the cemetery extends across the side of a forest hill which overlooks the town from the southeast end. I used to play here when I was a kid. In fact I even applied as groundskeeper here once, but didn’t get the job. I started my own landscaping business. Plus I cut wood.

            My girlfriend, Mary Annette–fiancee, really–was–is–a checker at Viscount Discount. She was twenty-eight when I died, and I was thirty-five. She’ll be turning twenty-nine this year. Probably stay that age forever. I couldn’t help myself. I had to see her.

            When I crawled out of my grave, I was aware of things falling off of me–aware in a manner which I cannot call hearing precisely, but then again, how sound traveled as vibrations into my ear when I was alive was always a mystery to me, too. I crawled out, dropping sloppy clumps, and looked around.

            Below me, the cemetery spread forward and laterally in tiered rows with a narrow road for passing cars to wind around. Beyond the headstones and crypts a spiked iron gate ran along the north and west street-sides. Roughly diagonal to the bulk of town as the crow flies my Mary Annette rented a nice apartment, and at good rent considering the picturesque Victorian architecture for which the town is justly noted.

            The hour seemed late. Snagging some roses from a vase I hopped the big gate–or rather attempted to. I caught my pants leg at the top on the tip of one of the spears. Doing that stretched my baggy dead man’s pants so tight for a second that mud and rocks, mostly, clattered down on the sidewalk a good bit below so loudly that, in frustration at botching my attempt at stealth, I groaned. I don’t know, what with all the gases of putrefaction built up inside my rotting carcass, my cadaverous innards quivered, suddenly and spasmodically heaving up my gullet and shooting out my wide dead mouth a huge wad of worms and bugs that squiggled in a puddle of guts. Desperate not to get caught, I stumbled across the road.

            In the relative safety of a tree trimmed into the shape of a big bell I hunkered down and brushed myself off as best I could while keeping an eye out, so to speak.

            I’ll tell you right now I had no trouble walking without so much as the dragging of a leg, or lolling of the head. I completely blended in, at that hour, looking I suppose a little tired, maybe. All of this of course just in passing. Up close, anyone looking at my eyes would probably see a problem, and even further away than that there would have to be the smell.

            But what did I care? All I wanted now was my revenge. Revenge on Randall Manson, the coward, the sickening coward, my murderer–that, and to somehow simply see my dear sweet Mary Annette one last time. To let her know how much I loved her, and love her, and always will. Mary Annette–sweet, sweet Mary Annette. They could try to do to me whatever they wanted. I wouldn’t care if I did get caught. But I want that Randall Manson dead, dead by my hand and him knowing it’s me when I murder his worthless damned ass right the hell back.

            So I marched myself on down the street, encountering no one, arriving at the nice apartment I found for Mary Annette myself, and marveling at every nuance of the night. But then I saw that she was gone. Her car was gone. The chimes she had hung from a hook under her little upstairs balcony were gone.

            Even though I knew that she was gone, I eased my way beneath her bedroom window, to try to peer in, just to be sure. It was a bedroom still, but the things weren’t hers. Someone, however, was sitting up in bed. I guess my scratching around outside must have woke him up. And I guess from his perspective, my reanimated corpse’s head slowly rose in the moonlight over the sill, then descended. He had the strangest look on his face.

            Anyway, I went to a newspaper box on Main Street and saw on the front page that the date was the first of May.

            “That means I’ve been dead exactly a month,” I said to myself. “Where can my Mary Annette be?” Into the garbage can went the flowers I still carried. Wilted.

            When I stumbled blindly to my house, my old house, not daring to imagine what I’d do when I got there, my heart sank. It, too, was now someone else’s space.

            My fixer car, however, was tucked away behind my old shed. I have no idea why. Someone may have said they’d come get it and just hadn’t gotten around to it. I wouldn’t be surprised. Whatever the reason, I took a look inside and found this bound notebook in the glove compartment. Completely unused. Not one word written on a single page. Somebody gave it to me for a present and I put it in the car somehow out of convenience at the time. But now it was as though I had gotten it and left it for myself just because of this. And I even left myself a pen.

            Then on the corner of Sycamore and Ash I saw something that made my jaw drop. My Mary Annette, getting into her Celica, with–there could be no mistake–Randall Manson. That sickening coward I’m going to kill. And she called him Randy.

            You haven’t lived till you’ve died.

            The wheels of what I will call my mind spun the gears of my giant revenge machine all that night sitting upright in my grave. As dawn neared I decided to creep around the crypts in hopes of forcing a door. I would have stayed in my own grave if I could, but the pile from the freshly upturned mound would call attention to a mindful eye that something was amiss. So I patted down the dirt as best I could, sort of sad at seeing my dead limbs doing this. Somehow images of Mother and the horrified expression she would have to know this would one day happen to her baby appeared before me. I would have cried, if I could, but for fear of merely excreting maggots.

            A gray tattered mist hung among the tombs. To my left below sat a large crypt notable for its intricate if crumbling masonry. Pen and paper in pocket, I strode over.

            “Anybody home?” I thought, peering through a small iron-barred window. “What have we here? A rusty lock. And look over here, an iron bar lying perfectly for me to do this–”

            Here I twisted the lock off with a snap that actually took the hinge. Gathering up debris, I shoved open the creaking door, hauled my carcass in and shut it.

            I sat there in that crypt listening to the sounds of the morning. Birds, mostly. A screen door or two. The slam of the door of the idling truck of someone with a long commute. It occurred to me that, what with the May heat, not too bad yet but not getting any colder, the crypt might almost have an oven-like effect, inviting unwanted attention from passersby with the smell of death warmed over. If I had to play dead, I supposed, anyone who nosed me out would figure it was vandals that moved me. But I really didn’t want to have to endure being handled and redeposited. What if they put me in something I couldn’t get out of?

            I looked around behind me. MANSON, said the family name. I had stumbled upon the Manson family crypt!

            The joy I felt on realizing the sheer fun now at my disposal sent a shiver of glee quivering through my rotting body sufficient to loose galvanized crawlies skittering to the corners.

            A slab centered at the far end in a recess of the wall presented possibilities. Yet when I slid the concrete slab I found not a body as I expected within, but a dark aperture. Upon closer inspection, I saw rungs descending down a wall into an interior crypt. I climbed down.

            The room was good-sized, but appeared a little smaller than it was due to the numerous boxes and crates stacked along the walls. The toxic worm fermenting in my skull’s slush wriggled. This, I surmised, must have been a bomb shelter. Private, but big enough to hold a sizeable portion of the community at the time it was built. The owner of the house, probably tired of the proximity to the graveyard and its advancing needs, must have sold his property to the city.

            So now the shelter is under that slab, possibly completely forgotten. But no matter. Because it’s all mine now. Everything in it. And that’s just for starters. Compensatory damages from Randall Manson and his dead family are going to be extremely stiff.

2

LETTER FROM CLAIRE VOYANT TO LINDSAY HEARST

May 8

Dear Lindsay,

            Congratulations on the job! That is so exciting. I want to hear all about it. I wish we didn’t have so many of our local businesses getting steadily snapped up by big chains. What they really do is drag the area down. You remember from your visit they had just put in that supermarket? There’s a chain video store over there now, too. As we talked about before, less competition means less quality and less responsibility. There used to be a great grocery store over there. I knew the couple who owned and ran it for years. Now if you have any problems, there’s no one you can talk to. The inexperienced workers hired on the cheap are rude, and barely any of the money even stays in the area. If I didn’t love the redwoods so much I’d have to move to Wales myself. By the way, I love the pictures you took in the bookstore there–and I’m touched to hear their occult section doesn’t compare to mine.

            Which reminds me. There’s a strange character who’s been coming in to the shop the last few days. He dresses entirely in black with a black hat and even black gloves. His head and face are wrapped with white gauze bandages entirely, except for a slim slit each for his mouth and nose. His eyes he keeps covered at all times with dark sunglasses. Stranger still, he’s mute. I’ve heard him grunt several times effectively enough–otherwise, when he has anything to ask of me, he does so by the use of the writing implements that he carries. He came in looking for something in the occult section, come to think of it. But since then he’s proven most interested in hypnotism, and has purchased almost every volume I have on the subject. Every time he pays it’s always with flat, crisp twenty dollar bills that smell like mothballs.

            But Lindsay, the worst and strangest part is the awful way he smells. You would not believe it. I have to go around opening all of the windows as politely as possible, turn on the fans and light some incense every time he comes in. He’s obviously been in some sort of accident. He may be a burn victim, or have some sort of disease. Which (I hate to say it) but I hope is not contagious.

            Help!

            In any event, Cyrus just finished up with seventh grade. It’s still hard for me to believe I’m the mother of a teenager! Did I tell you I’ll be setting up a booth at the carnival in July? I’m thinking I’d really like to not haul my entire back room over to Fernden Fields to go in a tent for two weeks, so I suppose I’ll just go with a little tarot and palmistry. No voodoo, though. That’s what the mysterious stranger was looking for in Occult, I just remembered. Books on voodoo dolls. Isn’t that weird?

3

CYRUS VOYANT’S JOURNAL

May 30

            Me, Shayne, Wes and Tanner went out to do some Ouija in the woods today. I brought my tape recorder and turned it on when we talked. I’m writing down everything we said that I got on tape and only saying who said it and describing other stuff when I have to, just like Mr. Brenner said in class.

            “Is it on?” That was Shayne. We’ve been best friends since third grade.

            “Yeah,” I said, “it’s on. Too bad we won’t be able to see ourselves in these bitchin’ black hooded sweatshirt dealies.”

            “So what are we going to ask it?” said Wes.

            “Ask it how I can get Felicity to do a sleepover at my house,” said Tanner.

            “You don’t ask it,” Shayne said. “You use it to contact the dead.”

            “Then ask the dead or whatever what all the winning Lottery numbers will be,” said Wes. We all agreed.

            “This looks like a good spot,” I said.

            At this point the tape gets hard to hear while it gets jostled on the way from the trail in the forest to where I pointed. We came to a mossy tree that must have fallen down a long time ago. I liked the way the other trees arched over. Close by, a trail leading to a deeper part looked like the tangled entrance to a crumbling castle overrun with vines. The Ouija board was in my pack. I got it out.

            Shayne said, “It’s overcast. Better not rain.”

            “Let’s break out the goodies,” said Tanner. Somebody said, “Let’s do it.” (I can’t tell who. I mean I would, but I can barely hear it at all.) Anyway, between all of us we had a giant Hershey bar, four Cokes, two Reese’s, one Cheetos and some Chicken in a Biscuits in a Ziploc.

            “My mom would kill me if she saw what I was eating,” I said.

            “So what are we going to ask?” said Wes. “Maybe what’s the meaning of life?”

            “Ask what it’s like to be dead,” said Tanner.

            I said the next thing: “I want to know if Carrie likes me.”

            “That’s stupid,” Shayne said, and he only said that because he just started liking her recently himself because he knows I do. But I wish he wouldn’t. I didn’t say so because that was when we saw someone standing in the trail.

            Dressed all in black as he was, with a black wide-brimmed hat tipped down so we couldn’t see his face, and standing in the dark entrance to the deeper part of the forest, we hadn’t seen him at all. Now that he was standing in the trail, he tipped his hat slowly up by raising his head and revealing a bandaged face and sunglasses. With piston-like jabs of a black-gloved finger, he pointed at either our food or my Ouija board.

            “You want my Ouija board?” I said. He shook his head and made a sort of grunting noise through his bandages.

            “I think he wants to use it,” said Shayne. This time the bandaged face nodded. He came over, slowly. I could tell he was trying not to scare us. It looked to me like he had some sort of sensitivity to sunlight condition or maybe was a burn victim.

            “You guys.” Even though it was the sort of thing that should have been said as a warning under the breath, Wes said it plain enough to come through loud and clear. I wasn’t afraid, though. I let him take the planchette to point exactly at the letters, numbers or words Yes, No and Good Bye arching on the board underneath. He could have just used his finger, but it’s more fun with the heart-shaped plastic thing with the little window for seeing what’s underneath. We all leaned over as the planchette in his black gloved hand moved, and said each letter aloud and the subsequent words they formed.

            “You–have–a–tape–recorder.”

            “Yes,” I replied.

            He spelled, “I–will–buy–it.”

            “How much?” I said, exchanging glances with my friends. They all know I’ve got way better ones at home. I only brought my cruddy one because I thought it might rain.

            He reached into a pocket and held up a twenty.

            “Sure!” I said. “Just let me keep this one tape. I have some blank ones here you can have for free.” I could see them in my open backpack wrapped neatly in a bag.

            “What do you need a tape recorder for?” said Tanner.

            Me and Shayne groaned.

            Tanner goes, “What? I’m not rude, I’m just curious.” But it didn’t matter. Behind his big dark glasses the bandaged man must have been staring at the bag that the blank tapes were in. He pointed at the logo on the side:

Claire Voyant’s

Used Books

Palmistry, Tarot, Astrology

And More

           

            “It’s my mom’s store,” I said. I remember this was when he handed me my twenty. “Just right in town.” The address was on the bag, too, only smaller.

            Tanner moaned. “What’s that smell?”

            Well, although the tape keeps running, those are the last words on it. After a few minutes it just runs out. It’s a good thing I had it on in the first place, because the funny thing is, after we stopped talking, I really don’t remember much of anything. Anyway, I’m glad that guy bought my tape recorder. I wish I could remember where I spent that twenty, but trying to kind of gives me a headache.

4

WILL TODD’s JOURNAL–  continued.

            One thing I did not want, for a plethora of reasons any one of which sufficient, was to raise the slab covering access to my new digs right when someone was standing outside looking at the broken lock–or perhaps inside even, checking to see what more is amiss, and happen then to see me rising from this crypt. Still bound to the clock, I would need to be aware of the hours to carry out my plot.

            I found a watch on a chain in a jewelry box. The hands were stopped at the twelve. I wound the watch to see if it worked; it did; and as the watch wound down, I read up. This went on repeatedly. I wanted to keep myself in the habit of remembering time. When I finished my books, I had an epiphany: I needed subjects on whom to practice. With this realization came a dry gurgle drifting through the tomb like the creeping claws of a sour mist. Yet in order to practice hypnotizing the living to do my bidding, I would need to be able to speak. True, I was closer now to approximating spoken language than when I first rose from my grave. My practice had improved; most of the bugs were out. But the prospect was dubious at best.

            Crawling out of the crypt, I found peering around that the hour was around noon. Voices floating nearby manifested themselves as children emerging from the far rock wall. Four young lads just outside the cemetery were walking the road up the hill. Incredibly, as if by order, one of them had a tape recorder in hand. I let them pass a bit, then followed.

            I spied them in the woods soon after, when lo, the four had in their midst a Ouija board. With this I made them know I wanted to buy the recorder, learning in the process that one of the kids is the son of the woman from the book store. I had lulled them into a false sense of security. Though the stench of my decay threatened to prove unnecessarily distracting, the most important factor in my favor was sheer impressionability of children.

            In attempting to loosen the bandages around my mouth in order to pull in a sufficient quantity of air, which bringing down my arms in a forceful bellows-like motion would help me simulate speech, my shades accidentally fell off.

            Now, it may well be that, as the first human being to ever literally return from death, what I impart on those who see the impossibility of my reanimation is a sort of shock-induced paralysis. Then again, perhaps the worm pumped with strange toxin beyond human ken and housed in the porous pudding rotting in my skull magnifies my will to control, and does so in some simple way which the human species as yet cannot fathom.   

            A radiance issued from my sockets. I found I did not need to speak. The primary source of communication between human beings is, after all, nonverbal. Immediately realizing they were under my spell, I communicated to the son of the book store woman, “Give me back my money.” He did. I pocketed my stolen twenty. Out of curiosity I asked why he so desperately needed the tape still in my recorder.

            “I wanted to tape record what we said hiking around messing with my Ouija board,” came the words from his own animated husk in a calm, relaxed manner.

            “Why?” I demanded with my mind.

            “To learn how to write better,” he said aloud. “It’s an exercise we learned in English class. I still keep my journal.”

            “Why the Ouija board?”

            “My mom gave it to me. It’s the first day of summer vacation. We wanted to ask questions.”

            “Ask who?”

            “The dead.”

            “All right. Go ahead.” The kid kind of faltered. Even in a trance. This I had to hear.

            “I want to know if Carrie likes me.”

            I told him no. It went against my better judgment to give him back the tape recorder. There was nothing to be gained by my not having it. What if my newfound powers didn’t work every time? I might need to fall back on my original plan of playing audio instructions with someone else’s voice and dangling the watch to facilitate my bidding. I therefore asked if any of them had another recorder. The same one said he did. I told him he was free to continue with his writing exercise, but that none of them would remember anything of our encounter. Most importantly, so that I would not have to go to the trouble of finding anyone to do my bidding again, I told the son of the book store owner, “You alone will return here at this time one week from today. You will all wake up and leave one minute after I go.”

            Taking my time, I re-wrapped my bandages with my shades back on so that they would not fall off accidentally again. Then I returned to the trail from which I had emerged, where, hiding in the darkness, I watched the four of them blink their way to consciousness and quietly depart.

5

JAY ISAAC’S JOURNAL (transcribed from audio recording)

            Now? Okay.

            Oh hey, I’m um, Jay Isaac. Right now I’m like all in this crypt with this candle, and I’ve got a tape recorder and this really trippy dude here who totally found me in the forest outside Fernden living in my tree waiting to see the Dead.

            So I’m like in there taking a little nap all cozy and everything, and I wake up hearing weird noises or something and I poke my head out of my tree–it’s this really cool old hollow tree I go to when I hear the Dead might be coming through–and there’s this like really dark dude dressed all in black with this big honkin’-on black hat–which, even though it’s June, we have had a lot of rain–and then there’s these kids, four of them I guess, not much younger than me, and they were just standing there looking at him, all together in the woods.

            It got kind of boring. I didn’t stare the whole time, mostly because I try to follow the ol’ golden rule, but also on account my feet had fallen asleep and were totally killing me after I moved and they started waking up. When I looked again, the dark dude was like fitting his hat all back on his head or something, and the kids still stood all zombied out while he actually came right over toward me.

            Oh man, I totally ducked back inside quiet as a little mouse. I knew he was just a few feet away. After a bit I could hear from sticks cracking that the kids were taking off down the hill or whatever, going the totally other direction anyway, but I never did hear the dude move off. Then in the doorway of my tree, he suddenly appeared.

            I go, “Holy shit! You just scared the crap out of me! Hey peace man! Take the tree, it’s all yours!” He sort of like fumbled with his sunglasses, except he’s also got these bandages that held them on so tight, but then he dropped this tape recorder and a bag of tapes all ka-ploop, and so while he was trying to deal with that, I slipped out the side, see? But it was cool. I didn’t think he could catch me if I had to like really split. Although now that I think about it, it would have way sucked if he had some kind of gun or something and totally wanted to kill me. Whoa.

            So anyway I go, “Dude, what’s up with you?” And then I’m all like, I’ll distract him, see? You gotta know how to control people a little bit sometimes in the certain situation. So I’m like all, “Dude, what’s with the bandages? Shouldn’t you be in a hospital or something?” I could tell he was trying to say something. And I was all, “It’s okay dude, take a breather. I was just chillin’ in a tree, no harm done, it’s okay, it’s all right.”

            That seemed to calm him down. Then he let up on the shady shades that just would not come off, and did a total double-fake, going instead for the pen and paper he had in a hidden pocket. And he writes on it, “I’ll pay you to buy bug spray and Lysol for me.”

            I go, “Dude, gainful employ! That would be way cool. Every little bit helps the cause. Yeah, I’ll help you get your stuff, no problem.” So he sent me on my mission, see, ‘cause he couldn’t really actually stroll in the ol’ Viscount Discount for his goodies on account I guess he’s not really a people person.

            So I’m all at the store and I see the manager, stately and plump as the veritable Viscount himself, and he’s all, “What? You’re not out front?” He always hassles me a little for hangin’ out and settin’ out the ol’ hat. But it’s cool. So I go, “No, not today. Just here for a few simple grocery items, sir.”

            And then I’m all at the counter, like a good little customer consumer waiting to pay, except I’m like looking at the cashier to see her name tag, which said that her name was Sharon and she was happy to serve me.

            Then I asked–and this was part of my mission–I go, “So Sharon, does Mary Annette work here or what?” And she goes, “Oh yeah, she still works here, only not so much on account she only works part-time now.” Then she looked all sly. Like she knows something, but wants not to say, see?

            So now I’m back here. With my buddy. Who wanted me to tell the tale and save it for prosperity. Just me and my new bro all camped out here. Just like Huck and Jim, talkin’ ‘bout man’s inhumanity to man. It sucks, bro. Big-time.

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