The gathering dark, p.16
The Gathering Dark, page 16
“Maybe that’s how it feeds,” I said at last. Besides, she and Gabe knew as well as I did, it didn’t mean a good goddamn whether we deserved it or not. There was no scale of justice in life.
Slowly, Sarah rose to her feet and gestured us inside. As we headed deeper into the house, past the cheerfully painted kitchen with its kitschy rooster salt and pepper shakers, past the overstuffed corduroy couch in the living room, I couldn’t shake the feeling her mom wouldn’t be coming home tonight. And all those houses down the street, they’d be empty too. No people, just lights blazing and TVs turned to static snow.
Shards of glass littered the hallway rug. On the wall, the mirror’s frame gaped dumbly.
“I broke all the mirrors before you came.” Sarah’s fingers traced restlessly over the electrical tape wound around her baseball bat’s handle. “The last one, the one in my bedroom, he was so close.”
We went from room to room, peering under the beds and in the corners, hunting for shadows the way children would. As I brushed aside the dresses in her mom’s closet, I half expected a pale face to emerge from between the layers of cotton and nylon—rheumy blue eyes and a fox’s sly smile, one finger to his lips to shush the words that welled on my tongue, the other hand reaching downward.
At last, we came to her bedroom. Her mirror was cratered inward like a shrieking mouth, a needle-toothed maw of shards surrounding the black plastic beneath. I touched the jagged edges, not hard enough to cut myself, just to feel the promise of a bite. The surface was tacky to the touch, and when I pulled my hand away, my palm came back glistening red.
“Marlow.” Sarah swore under her breath. “There’s a first aid kit in the bathroom—”
“It’s not mine.” I rubbed the blood between my fingers. Still warm to the touch. “Your stepdad, you say he was close when you broke it?”
She shivered, her jaw cinching tight. “Close enough, I thought he was going to come through.”
My gaze lowered to the bat clenched in her white-knuckled fist. A dark stain dripped down the barrel. “I’ve got an idea.”
The earthly remains of Black Rapids Amusement Park rotted just off the I-75, a moss-choked warren of rusty roller coasters and water slides. It’d been closed five years now, and in that time, alligators and wild hogs had reclaimed the place.
It wasn’t what happened to me in their restroom that did Black Rapids in, wasn’t the recession, or the salmonella outbreak that put a horde of tourists in the hospital. Apparently, on one of the water slides, there’d been an open section before a corkscrew turn, and a thirteen-year-old boy had hit the slide’s top just right. His head came clean off, rolled down with all the rest. That was the killing blow.
The slide was gone now, but the demolition crew had done a half-assed job and left the stairs used to reach it, just going up to a platform that led nowhere. Rumor around town was that on Halloween night, if you managed to sneak inside the park and not become gator food in the process, that slide would be there again—coiled like an entrail along the water park’s southern flank. And if you rode it down, it’d take you straight to Hell.
October was still months away, so I wasn’t surprised when my flashlight beam skated across the platform but no slide. Rainwater filled the cement-lined pool the slide would’ve emptied into. As we passed, I eyed the reflections our lights made in the stagnant water, waiting for the glowing beams to unspool into a nest of blond hair, a reaching hand, fingers like pale grubs. Instead the black surface glistened undisturbed, clotted with algae and lily pads.
My stomach knotted with tension, and each time I swallowed, it felt like there were loose teeth lodged in my throat. To keep my hands free, I clipped my old GI flashlight onto my jacket’s breast pocket. It’d been a three-dollar thrift find, but its beam was stronger than any other light I’d got. I felt better with the crowbar in both hands.
“Are you sure it’s even still here?” Sarah asked, flexing her fingers anxiously around her bat’s handle.
“Yeah, it’s here.” I tore my gaze away from the water, turned back ahead. Gabe kept at my side like a shadow, weaponless except for a flashlight of his own. Our hollow footsteps were accompanied by the hum of mosquitos and the low scritch-scratch of animals creeping through the swampish overgrowth. The air was so heavy with the humidity of an approaching storm that the night actually seemed to have a physical weight to it, like the sky was boring down on us.
What I didn’t tell Gabe or Sarah was that I’d been coming here ever since I got it in my mind to off myself. I didn’t want to do the deed, but I wouldn’t mind if an alligator snared me in a death roll or some slapdash structure came crashing down on my head. And yeah, maybe deep down I thought one of these days, I’d come across the guy, that he’d be waiting for me under the canopy of Spanish moss curtaining the merry-go-round or sitting with his stringy Levi’s dangling in the brackish water, looking like no time had passed at all. He’d rise and come to me, offering me a fox’s smile and sun-crinkled eyes. He’d hold out his hand, and I would take it.
Past the water park area, the amusement park welcomed us. A wooden roller coaster rising like a rib cage, the moss-tumored faces of the merry-go-round horses, hot dog stands and cart rides left to rot.
Gabe was panting so heavily, he had to stop and take a rest, just sit for a minute or two on one of the benches to regain his breath. He pushed his bangs out of his eyes and sloughed off an entire fistful of hair with it. He gazed down at the black clump, his mouth slack.
“I kept looking at my reflection in the water,” he said as if that explained it all, his dazed eyes slowly lifting to me. There were a couple dark specks on his lips, dirt or maybe blood. His face was even thinner, as if he’d dropped another five pounds on the drive over.
I wanted to kiss him deep enough to reach his cancer and chew it out of him, starting with his lungs then moving on to his lymph nodes. I’d swallow the tumors down a bloody gobbet at a time, because I fucking deserved it, and I hated myself, and I was just so tired. I was so tired of feeling this way.
“Marlow,” Sarah whispered, sinking her nails into my arm. I followed her gaze across the midway, to the live oaks lined down the sidewalk like a funeral procession, their gnarled branches draped in mossy veils.
A man in a shabby three-piece suit stepped slowly from the darkness, salt-and-pepper hair oiled back, his face—his face gleamed at us, perfectly blank and reflective, capturing our flashlights’ beams and turning them back on us.
A mirror.
He had his belt folded in his hand. He struck it against his palm with a sharp crack. That sound told you all you needed to know, that when it hit you, it was gonna hurt like hell.
“Come on, let’s go.” I helped Gabe to his feet, testing his shoulder beneath my palm—so bony, as if there were just a scapula and joint under his cotton T-shirt sleeve, already sun-bleached and defleshed. And I shivered.
We hurried down the sidewalk, not at the run I would’ve liked, because Gabe wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the way he was coughing and wheezing. When I glanced over my shoulder, the mirror-stepfather was walking slowly after us, still testing his belt in his palm.
Past the merry-go-round, the fun house loomed against the cloud-burdened sky. Its plyboard clown-head entrance yawned in a silent scream, candy-red lips gnawed on by termites and one lightbulb eye ruptured inward. When the ride was in motion, there’d be a moving tunnel past the clown mouth, slowly rotating so you’d have to shuffle along, back arched and head bowed. The tunnel stood at a standstill now, but it stretched on for longer than it should’ve, and with each step I took I felt as though I were shrinking down.
I felt so small.
Deeper in, used condoms were plastered to the floorboards like scraps of dead skin, and Gabe’s flashlight beam revealed crumpled beer cans and uncapped syringes. I edged around him as we reached the end of the hall. Gripping the crowbar in both hands, I shouldered past the rubber streamers that formed the fun house’s dangling entrails, and entered the mirror maze.
“Gabe, maybe you ought to wait for us out here,” I said, but when I glanced back, he was holding a lead pipe he’d retrieved from the wreckage.
“What’s the worst that can happen to me?” A thin laugh escaped his lips. “Cancer?”
I couldn’t argue with that.
We continued deeper into the maze, in a single-file procession. Farther in, the air grew thick and stifling, and our footsteps were joined by the faint clang of a carnival jingle.
Maybe it would’ve been better to run, to allow Bloody Mary or whatever the hell this thing was to hunt us down one by one and hurt us the only way she knew how. We could become an urban legend, a cautionary tale. That was how all the movies went: It was the expected outcome. Everybody loved a good victim.
In the corner of my eye, a shadow oozed across a mirror. Swiveling around, I drove the hooked end of the crowbar into the pane, splitting my reflection down the middle and sending shards of glass cascading down. Behind it, there was another crooked corridor lined with even more mirrors. Turned toward me, they all presented the same reflection—my own features peering back, teeth bared and eyes flaring.
At the sight of my face, something broke inside me and my fear blazed into rage so incandescent, I thought it would tear me open from the chest down, spill out all that hatred in a steaming puddle.
“Screw you,” I screamed, slamming the crowbar into the next frame. The glass only spiderwebbed this time, but I kept at it. “Screw you. Screw you!”
On the fourth blow, when the mirror did shatter, it revealed a hallway just as narrow and convoluted as the first, stretching off endlessly into the darkness. My face confronted me from a hundred different mirrors now, some staring back with the same wild-eyed terror, others frozen in agony or laughing hysterically, features twisted into a grotesque caricature of my own. The longer I looked at the reflections, the more I could feel my own face straining, my muscles struggling to mimic their distorted features.
I swung the crowbar again and again in a blind panic, my ears filled with the icy snap of breaking glass and, from a distance, shrieking laughter. Sometime after the tenth or fifteenth blow, I realized Sarah and Gabe weren’t behind me, and I was alone with just my Rothco flashlight to peel back the darkness.
As the next mirror shattered beneath my crowbar, the fragments collapsed in a pile at my feet. Past the shard-toothed pane, he stood on the other side.
Quilted brown jacket, paint-speckled pants. Tufts of yellow hair peeked out from under his trucker’s cap, the kind of unnatural shade you knew came from a bottle, and so thick and glossy, it almost looked plasticky. Like a wig, maybe. Or a scalp from one of his conquests.
His moist blue eyes met mine, and he smiled. What big teeth.
For years I had imagined what I could have done differently. What I should have done. The things I should’ve said, and the actions I could’ve taken. But what it always came back to was that there was nothing that would’ve made a difference, that it felt inevitable, as if he’d been waiting in that restroom all afternoon for me. It had felt predestined.
Tonight it felt the same way. He had been so big, but so was I now, and I could face him.
As the man took a step toward me, I swung the crowbar. His shoulder gave way, and the wet squelch of tearing flesh filled my ears. Crimson-stained cotton coated the crowbar’s pronged end when I wrenched it free of him. A dark, glistening stream of blood gushed down his quilted jacket. It was as if the scent and sound had awoken something inside me, something that’d been incubating all this time, growing teeth, because I slammed the crowbar down again and again.
“You like this, don’t you?” I screamed as his hand cracked with the brittle snap of broken glass. When the crowbar’s hook caught on his mouth, his teeth scattered to the dust-caked floor, as jagged and metallic as mirror shards. “It feels good. You like this.”
I brought the crowbar down once more, aiming to cave his skull in, but he had vanished into the darkness. I was standing alone in a scatter of gore-stained glass, the crowbar’s tip buried in the floor and my mouth as dry as bone. Blood oozed down my face in hot strands, and when I raked my hair back, my fingertips found even more repulsive souvenirs. Deeper into the mirror maze, Sarah called out to me: “Marlow, where are you?”
A shadow rippled over the mirrors, fleeing toward the sound of her voice. In its wake, it left a trail of bloody handprints across the metallic surface, ruby droplets welling from thin air as if the glass itself had sweated them.
“It’s coming straight toward you, Sarah!” I shouted, racing after the mirror-presence. At the crossroad between two of the narrow mirror-lined passages, I nearly rammed into Gabe.
“That blood—” he began, but I shook my head, just kept running. He followed after, and then we turned another sharp corner, and there Sarah was, bringing the baseball bat down on a man in a three-piece suit, with a mirror where a face ought to have been. Under her onslaught, the presence tried to jump to the next closest pane—dissolving into a smear of blood and shadow—but when it did, Gabe and I were there to greet it.
A spurt of blood gushed from the mirror as it shattered beneath Gabe’s lead pipe. Using the crowbar, I pried the rest of the glass free, exposing a pulsing mat of flesh. No. Not just heaving flesh. I’d seen the same gristly clump in the photos Gabe had shown us, his lungs on glossy X-ray paper.
It was a tumor.
It took all three of us to wrench the throbbing, shapeless mass from the mirror’s metal frame, digging in with our fingers when the pipe and baseball bat were useless, crushing the soft tissue to blood and pulp in our hands.
The creature didn’t scream—it didn’t make a sound at all—but I could tell we were hurting it. And I wanted to. I wanted to pour all my pain and hatred into its flesh until it knew what it was like to despise yourself. With each sopping chunk my crowbar tore free, the creature’s writhing grew weaker and weaker, until at last its body went still.
Standing over what was left, I let the crowbar slip from my fingers, clatter to the floor. The three of us looked at each other, our faces hazed by the flash of sheet lightning that shone in through the rotten ceiling. Didn’t know who was the first one to laugh, only that the laughter came over us all at once, until it bowed me over breathless and brought tears to my eyes.
As we hugged and knocked shoulders, I realized I’d never felt so alive. And deep down, I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to hurt anymore.
We made a pact that night. If Sarah’s stepdad ever returned from Kentucky, we’d be there, waiting. If one day my monster rode up in his shiny red truck, there’d be three pairs of hands to wield the crowbar. And when the time came for Gabe, Sarah and I would break the mirrors one by one, draw the curtains tight, and turn off all the lights—until there were no more reflections, only the three of us and the encroaching dark.
Truth or Dare
by Alex Brown
TRUTH I’M ONLY TELLING YOU THIS SO YOU DON‘T MAKE THE same mistake I did.
This isn’t even about the tunnels. Not really. It’s more about what happened in them. What I did. What he did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before I go any further, it’s important for you to know that no matter what some logical, boring person will try to tell you, the tunnels are real. The stories kids used to tell on the playground—hushed and hurried and secret—are true. The tunnels exist. Just like you and me.
The story goes like this:
A very long time ago, two people walked into the tunnels.
Only one walked out.
No one knows what really happened between them. Or what became of the one who was left behind. Depending on who you ask, the forgotten one wandered around the tunnels until they died. Probably starvation. Or lack of water. Or they walked into or off of something they had no business walking into or off of.
What we do know is this: The tunnels appear when there’s a choice to be made. And that choice comes with a price. Something—or someone—has to be left behind.
I think you’re smart enough to see where this is going. But before we get there, I should set the scene.
Sometime in the past, life went like this:
I met Dillon. Dillon met me.
I liked Dillon. Dillon liked me.
Or, at least, I thought he did.
I asked if he wanted to go on a date.
And he said: “Possibly.”
I didn’t think possibly was even an option. It seemed like a yes-or-no kind of thing for me.
And that was how we existed, Dillon and me. Drifting around each other like ships that had been tethered together in haste, because it was better than being alone. Both lost at sea, pulling the other in the opposite direction, going around and around in circles with no sign of land in sight.
Until the tunnels.
It was Dillon’s fault. He asked the question. Forced me to make a choice.
He shouldn’t have done that. He turned to me, taking my hand in his, raising it to his lips but lowering it before he kissed it (he would never kiss me, even though I wanted him to), and said, “I’m going away to college soon. Will you wait for me?”
And then the tunnels appeared.
I should have answered his question then and there. Instead I nodded toward the entrance and said, “I dare you to go into the tunnels with me.”
He smiled and tossed his head back, laughing that laugh of his that I loved. Or thought I loved. And that, as someone once said, was all she wrote.
Well. It wasn’t all I wrote. Or said. Or have left to say.
I know this is going to sound even more impossible, but we’d found the entrance to the tunnels once before. On the night I’d asked him out. The night he said possibly, and then—after he insisted that pineapple was a topping that deserved to be on a pizza—followed it up with we’re better as friends, even though he was the one who started flirting with me. He was the one who made me feel wanted, when the only thing I’d ever known before was wanting someone.
