Earthly Powers: The Adventure Begins

by DC Alexander

  She told Carl her boy that went missing was six years old, almost seven. He was riding a bicycle just like he did every day but he didn’t come in with the rest of them yesterday evening, he’d been missing about fifteen hours. She already checked and he wasn’t with the parents, they hadn’t seen him.

  I didn’t know anything about this and nothing popped up so I had to go over there. Carl and I loaded up and drove over there and it took about a minute to get there. We parked on the little concrete driveway, got out and went up to the house. The kids were all over the porch. There were bicycles and toys all over the yard, the fence was in good shape and the weeds been cut.

  Amanda met me at the door “Rosalee, thank god! I looked everywhere, all the other kids been out lookin, can you find him?”

  “I don’t have no idea, Amanda, I’m in the dark about this. Where’s the last place anybody seen him?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you” she come down in the yard and headed down the street “I called the law. They won’t do anything till he’s been missin for 24 hours, and he aint my child and the parents aint doin anything.” She was moving right along, she was in pretty good shape for somebody disabled. Just to let her know I was keeping up, I asked “Amanda, what’s his name? Was there anybody with him yesterday?”

  “His name is Edward, we all call him Eddy, Fast Eddy. He never slows down. That boy is into everything, but he aint mean, he’s a sweet boy. He aint doin all that burnin and tearin stuff up these other hellions do.” She was about out of breath but she kept going. “All the kids were playin and keeping an eye on each other, he was with them one minute and gone the next. Nobody in particular was watching him, they all watch each other. Nobody noticed anything.”

  We came up to where the road went over a drainage ditch with a big concrete culvert.

  Amanda said “This is the last place anybody seen him, he was down in the ditch playin at catchin crawfish. We looked in that pipe, it’s full of trash but I been back as far as I could get hollerin and he aint answered, he aint in there. We walked out the ditch both ways, that’s our footprints. They aint no sign of him anywhere, somebody must of took him off, can you do somethin?” She was a strong woman but she was badly shaken. She had dark circles under her eyes and looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She was shaking and wringing her hands and she couldn’t stand still. She went down in the ditch and up to the culvert and leaned over looking in it, holding on to the culvert for support.

  The mud around the ditch was churned up in both directions as far as I could see. There wouldn’t be any tracking here unless we could get a dog or Dirt could help. I wasn’t getting the impressions I usually got. One end of the ditch ran into a group of trees, the other ended at some old buildings where wastewater runoff pipes ran into it. None of the pipes were big enough for somebody to get inside.

  “He was riding a bike? Where is his bicycle?”

  “Yeah, but they aint no sign of it, or of him, he just gone, that baby gone, we got to find him!” She went down to her knees in the muck all of a sudden, just collapsed like her strings were cut loose, she was crying, heartbroken.

  I didn’t have a clue what to do next but I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing, every second the boy was gone something bad might be happening to him. I just wasn’t going to accept that he was permanently gone, there had to be something I could do.

  I kicked off my flip flips and asked Dirt for some help. Dirt showed me holding my hand out like a dowsing rod so I did it. I closed my eyes and tried not to think, just feeling, where is the boy, which way would be best to look? I got just a nudge, it wasn’t much, might be me hoping but it was all I had to go with; I turned toward what I could feel and tilted my hand so I could feel with my palm. This didn’t use Dirt. It was the way I used to find things. It bothered me, I should be able to sense what had happened here but it was blank; why couldn’t I sense the history here?

  Dirt bitched about vacancies. It had nothing to do with a hotel, there were blank spots that denied all natural law, they were wrong. They interfered with knowing what happened to the boy.

  I felt something different one way I pointed my palm so I turned where it was the strongest and moved that way. My eyes closed, I moved slow and careful. I didn’t want to fall down or get cut or stuck with something. The ditch was a dumping ground and sharp stuff accumulated in it. My feet were getting wet. There were all kinds of shit in there to get cut on, there were holes. It was muddy and slick and warm. There were probably snakes but hopefully all the activity and people moving around had ran them off.

  I got the feeling. There was definitely something helping guide me now. If I relaxed and didn’t think too much about it, my feet went where they didn’t slide. I walked slow and steady but I wasn’t staggering or slipping. I saw everything but my eyes were closed, it was all very clear but different than looking with my eyes. It wasn’t seeing so much as surround feeling, I knew where everything was and how it would act when I stepped. I could feel things buried under the muck, there were some interestin things and it was hard not to get involved looking at all that. There was one really shiny, bright hot feeling thing that pulled on me but I didn’t get sidetracked. I stayed with looking for the boy.

  I came up to where the trees were and walked up a little slope right into them. They were sickly and I needed to fix that but not right now. The trees were happy I was there, they made it easy to walk on in, there wasn’t any scratching or bending or bein careful, limbs seemed to move out of the way for me.

  I heard/felt/saw the people who were following me falling behind, they couldn’t keep up. They were getting scratched and caught on briers and slipping around. There wasn’t any need for them to have all that trouble and get all scratched up and muddy. Soon as that thought crossed my mind they had it easier. They still had to work at it but the place wasn’t holding them back.

  I was on a roll. I got partial images of the bicycle in these trees. There was something, maybe somebody, with him or on him or carrying him and or the bicycle. I got glimpses of the bike but not so much the boy. I couldn’t see what moved them. It was an empty spot in the pictures, but it snagged my attention, it was important. ‘Bad/ empty/ wrong.’ My buddy Dirt chimed in. Dirt didn’t like whatever it was and had experience with it. Dirt was blind where this sort of thing was concerned and could only perceive them indirectly.

  I came out of the trees. There were some houses and a creek and a paved road. I got to the edge of the pavement and the feeling got blurry and I lost it. I knew which way he was heading so I kept on across the road into a yard. There were remnants of a fence, it was rusty and had fallen. Weeds grew high as my head, I couldn’t see much past them, but the feeling came back strong and I could feel the track again. I saw the bicycle drag up the steps, it caught a second then flew in through the door.

  The old house had burned a long time ago. It was a two story but there wasn’t much of the top floor left. The porch was concrete. Most of the roof was long gone. The steps were red bricks, some of the bricks were missing, leaving sharp edged, dangerous holes in the edge of the steps.

  Where the front door used to be the frame was still standing in part of the wall. The hinge side of the door was hanging there, some of it had burned and it looked like the rest was about to fall off. It was gloomy inside, hard to see, shaded by remnants of the house.

  I looked inside. Some of the floor was left, there were holes in it and I’d have to be careful not to fall in. Amanda came up beside me, more people were with her, and she asked “Is he in there? Did you find something?” She went through the door hole without waiting for an answer. People spread out looking in the yard and a couple more went inside, we had gathered a crowd.

  “Amanda, hold up, we don’t want to break a leg here, be careful. I got a feelin he come here, I gotta look around and see.”

  She shrieked “Oh dear god, here is his bike, he was here! Somebody took him. They aint no way he just left his bike here. EDDY, answer m
e, where are you?”

  “Yeah, he came through here. Hold up and let’s not kill ourselves. Has anybody got a light?” Of course nobody had a flashlight; it was up in the middle of the day. A cluster of ten or fifteen people gathered up, moving stuff and looking for the boy. I was hoping the rest of the house wouldn’t fall on us and kill us all. It groaned and made settling noises, pieces of old sheetrock fell, dust swirled in the beams of sunlight that dappled the remnants of the floor. One of the kids had a little LED light on a keychain and I saw it when he looked under the old fell down floor. He said “Hey, there’s some blocks and shit over here, some steps, hey, there’s a cellar!” He moved to the back of the house and I hurried to catch up with him. Concrete steps ran down into a dark hole. The daylight went about halfway down the steps. Slime coated the bottom end where mold had grown and block walls came up to floor lever. The kid went down the steps and I followed him. He stopped and gagged and said “Jesus Christ, I smelled some bad shit before but this is somethin else, let me by!” he gagged as he staggered back up holding his hand over his mouth. The smell hit me about then, I lost the scorn I felt for his temerity. It was death and rot and old black septic tank water, burned wood and mold, puke and feces and rotted food. It was thick and had texture, it coated my eyeballs and nose and inside my mouth. I had tears in my eyes and my stomach was heaving. My mouth watered like I was fixing to puke and I spat repeatedly, I was just a regular water faucet.

  Amanda grabbed the light from the boy and come on down. We stood together, she had trouble not puking but she didn’t slow down. I couldn’t let her down there by herself so I went with her.

  I didn’t feel good about Eddy. There couldn’t be anything but bad there the way it smelled. I wasn’t going to speculate about what we were about to find. I refused to think about it. Somebody hollered down “I’m gone go get the law, yall hold up!” I might have held up but Amanda never even thought about it. If that boy had a chance we couldn’t wait for the law; it would take them forever to get here if they would even come out.

  Down at the bottom was a landing, a small area with a concrete floor covered with leaves and rotted stuff and parts of the burned house, it was wet and nasty. There were old boards and pieces of plywood with nails stickin out just ready to get somebody’s foot. Wood leaned against walls with nails in it. The trash was hard to get past, overhead was concrete and we were in a tunnel into the dark. A wall with a door hole to another room we could sense more than see. The little light was almost more trouble than it was worth. It was pitch dark in the next room. The people up top were trying to come down. A couple of them stood on the stairs where the stink wasn’t as bad, they wanted to help but the smell and the dark was holding them back. I told them “Yall just wait there, this place is full of nails and shit. If somebody could get us a light it would help a lot.”

  Me and Amanda made it to the doorway and looked through the door hole. There was a large room with big heaps of stuff, maybe old furniture, scattered around. We shined the little light and spotted a hide-a-bed couch opened up and a couple chairs, a broke table over by the wall and another doorway. The heaps looked like clothes and shit piled up waist high. The smell was all around us, a stench that made it hard to breath, old rotten blood and death like we were up inside the guts of a dead thing on the side of the road.

  Amanda had the light and it bounced all over the place, taking a step in there without being able to see begged to get something stuck in a foot or worse. I grabbed her hand to help steady the light and she was falling down with the shakes.

  “Here, let me have that light, you get behind me and just hold on to me so we can look on that bed thing” she grabbed me round the waist and we shuffled over to the bed slow, pushing the sharp pieces of boards out of the way. Somebody hollered from the stairs “We got a light, you need it?” and I saw the beam of light coming through the doorway. I shouted back “Yes, thank god, bring it down and we’ll meet you!”

  We went back and met the man with the light, he said “My god, what is that smell, that’s awful.” He pushed in front of us, Amanda said “We need to look in that next room, there’s a lot of stuff in there.”

  I said “Amanda, you go on back up there, me and this man will go in here and look, you’re about to fall out and we can’t look and carry you. I promise, we’ll find him if he’s here.” I hollered up the stairs, “Yall give her a hand, she needs to get out of here” ready hands came down and helped her up. She didn’t want to go but there was no fight left in her.

  The man with the light said “I’m William, you’re Rosalee, right? Let’s do this before I have to give it up. I can’t take much more of this stink, we need gas masks” He carefully didn’t say anything about the reek of death. The chance the boy lived in this was vanishingly small. We moved into the other room shining the light on the floor. Broken glass mixed in with the other trash, jars and jugs and light bulbs and plates. There were pieces of wood all over, most of them broken. I tried to pick up a piece of two by two about as long as I am tall to help me walk and to beat snakes and rats off, really just to have something in my hands to make me feel better. I wished I had brought my pistol, it would be a comfort. Note to self: don’t leave the house without the pistol any more.

  The stick didn’t want to turn loose but William grabbed it and stepped on it, it broke and left me a piece about two feet long with a wicked sharp point. It was better than nothing.

  We got in there and he shined the light around on all the piles of stuff and we were walking on more that wasn’t piled up as deep and high.

  He said “Somebody brought this stuff down here. There might be somebody livin here but I don’t know how they make it with the smell. Maybe they died and that’s what the stink is.”

  We made our way to the bed and the heap of stuff on it, I took my stick and poked and dragged stuff off. It was all sticking together, damp and rotten and tearin in chunks, then a little arm showed in the light. Willie leaned in and grabbed the arm and pulled and the boy come out from under the heap, he was limp as a dishrag and his head flopped back and his neck was tore up and bloody. He had cuts and bites all over him.

  William said quietly “Oh my god, he’s dead. Here, take this and I’ll tote him out” he handed me the light and moved in to get a better hold on the small, forlorn body, moving slow and gentle.

  I held the light while Willie dragged Eddy the rest of the way out. As Eddy came out we saw the bones under where the boy had been. There were leg bones and arm bones. Black rotted meat on the bones came off in pieces. William heaved several times, he finally turned aside and puked but he never jostled the boy. He got him out and cradled him to his chest, stink and blood and shit all over. We turned to go out of there and the light hit a leg poking out of the mess on the bed. It was a little bigger that Eddy’s leg, it was thin, just skin and bones, but it wasn’t rotted. I said “Wait! There’s somebody else there!” and caught hold of it and pulled. It was stiff and cold. “William, they’s another one here, he’s probably dead. Let me try to get it out where we can see it before we leave. Whatever doin this might still be down here, I want to look and then we get out. “

  William said “This boy don’t weigh nothin, if there’s two I’ll carry them both. But if that one’s dead I want to just get out of here, they might can save the boy, he’s still a little warm.”

  I grabbed the leg and heaved on it, ready to get the hell out of here before whatever lived here showed up. The body come on out, it stiff and curled up so it kinda scooted out on its back.

  I shined the light on the head and thought it was a skull. Little stringy black pieces of tissue held the protruding jaw on it, I said “whoa baby! Look at that mothafucka there, the teeth in that mothafucka give a shark a nightmare! That aint no human! I don’t know what it is but I know a human when I see it and that aint one!”

  There was no hair on it and it was naked. The neck was about the size of my wrist, little and stringy and knotty with muscle. The arms a
nd legs were just sticks. There wasn’t any fat on it anywhere. Fresh blood covered its mouth and face, black in the flashlight. The face didn’t have lips on it, just those teeth below a part of a nose. It was male but its dick was little and shriveled up. It looked like it had starved to death, there was no meat on its chest and its belly was sunk down to its backbone and its pelvis stuck out, I could see the joints plainly.

  William stepped back and said “What the fuck is that! Come on and let’s go, they might be a live one down here.” I don’t blame him, that thing looked like two nightmares bred and got rid of it because it was so bad. It was obviously dead, but it been eatin something bloody before it died. Maybe it bit that boy and then died, I hope they aint another one doing this shit. I shined the light around to make sure there wasn’t anything creepin up on us, when I turned to follow William out it had its eyes open and it was lookin at me. The eyes were black and shiny from lid to lid and there was nothing at all in there but hunger and need.

  It began to uncurl slowly with those eyes locked on me. That mouth opened wide and showed its gaping maw, it would fit a football in there. The tongue was in the middle of the mouth hole standing erect, it looked like a brown worm the size of my pinkie finger.

  It breathed in slow like it smelled me. It liked it, that nasty looking tongue stood out more.

  I shoved the light at William and said “hold on to this for me” he moved Eddy so he was holding the light and Eddy and could shine it steady on that thing.

  It quivered in a big yawn and stretched, it was moving easier and faster. I leaned over it and drove the sharp end of my stick down in the middle of its chest, it hit the bone and stopped, and the thing spread its mouth out wide and grabbed my arm and said “huhhhhhh.’ it sprayed stuff out its mouth, I hoped it was just slobber but it was probably something worse. I needed a tetanus shot from the smell already, I’d need a rabies treatment after that if I ever got out of there.