Historically, the Tormented were as old as the town itself. Call them the first rebellious teens in that area. The Tormented were a group of adolescents, between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, who broke off from the adult, church-centered society to found their own little cult. From everything Karen had heard, they’d been a peaceful lot. Their premise seemed to be that, rather than acting as slavehands on their parents’ farms and being expected to follow their rules, why not work for themselves and make their own rules. Karen suspected that sex was somewhere at the center of it.
The adults claimed they were decimating the innocence of their children. They ordered the youths to stop practicing but it didn’t work. Eventually, the members of the congregation decided the Tormented needed to be scared back into their senses. The adult church corralled the townspeople and stormed Black Hill, where the Tormented called home. The adults went about setting several fires, hoping the Tormented would come down from the hill and repent. Like any stubborn, rebellious teenagers, they stayed put, headed for martyrdom. The fires raged to the top of the hill but the Tormented didn’t go away. Over the years, they continued to grow. And more teenagers turned up missing. After seeing Jordan that night and hearing the things she said, Karen believed every word of it.
Of course, that was only one of the legends...
It wasn’t even that night in particular as much as the things that happened after.
Maybe what happened to Jordan hadn’t been worse than death, but it seemed that way to Karen. As Jordan’s wounds mended, her hair growing back, something inside of her seemed to be dying. Her eyes grew listless and vacant. Her skin became not just pale but nearly gray—ashen. And then, one day, she was gone. No one knew where she went but, Karen knew, everyone knew where she went. She was a Tormented now, no longer alive, no longer really human.
That was when Karen got really scared. She felt hunted. One of her friends was now missing from the circle. Would she be next? Whatever the Tormented were, however many good intentions they’d had, they were something different now, something akin to vampires. Vampires that, more than blood, wanted innocence and sacrifice. Karen had seen the type of kids that disappeared from the high school. It wasn’t the oversexed football players and cheerleaders. It wasn’t the boisterous class clown or the hoody girl who was rumored to sleep with the teachers. No. It was the shy ones. The wallflowers. The ones who went unnoticed and probably turned up at church on Sunday for lack of anything better to do. In short, it was people like Karen.
There were times she went to bed at night and swore she heard someone else’s breath in the room with her. Out the window, she saw flashes of white, someone’s face. She answered telephone calls with no one on the other line. Three or four of them a day.
On the night she left the Point, she woke up with one of them in her bed. She remembered him as the boy with the scar over his left eye and, amidst his pallid skin, those dancing orange eyes. She woke up because she was choking. The boy’s hand crushed her windpipe and she had the panicked feeling that this was it. Images of Jordan skipped across her head, giving her an angry strength. Somehow she managed to pry the boy’s hand from her neck. She had a large butcher knife in the nightstand she had started keeping there for safety. If she could just get to that. Her hand reached out. She made eye contact with the boy. His eyes were deep, the orange rimmed with black, but she didn’t think they looked soulless.
“I know what you are!” she spat at him. “You took Jordan. You took Jordan! You took Jordan!”
Her hand clasped around the handle of the knife.
“We need you,” the boy said.
Karen quickly brought the knife through the air and rammed it into the boy’s side, ripping downward. He moaned and rolled off the bed. Karen kept the knife in front of her until the boy was out the window.
Karen took the keys to her parents’ car and drove it until it ran out of gas. She never called back home. Tried not to think of it ever again. There were nights when she missed her family. Anger usually dismissed that feeling—how could they possibly keep her there if they knew what was going on? Sixteen and alone, she stripped in clubs until she turned eighteen. The especially seedy places didn’t care how fake the ID was. Once she was eighteen, life got a little bit easier. She was able to get her GED and start college with no questions asked. Now she was almost thirty and headed back to every childhood fear she’d ever had.
She turned the radio on and up, driving the programmed route until fatigue overwhelmed her. She pulled off into a rest stop and convinced herself Dan was in no immediate danger. She convinced herself the whole situation was, maybe, just a coincidence. Crazily, exhausted, she convinced herself Dan had somehow found out about her secret childhood home, found out she wasn’t from Idleville, a small town outside Richmond, Indiana, and had concocted this whole thing to show her she couldn’t keep secrets from him. She convinced herself to sleep.
She woke up at dawn and stepped out of the car. After a good stretch, she went in search of the coffee machines, pushing the ‘Extra Strong’ button and waiting eagerly for the small paper cup to fill up.
She got back into the car, a sheen of sweat already covering her. The sweat would be with her all day, slowly oozing out. Karen cursed the car’s aging air conditioner. Resting the coffee on the dash, she pulled the map onto her lap and dug in the console for a pack of Camel Lights that had been there for about six months. It was half empty. A little more than one cigarette a month wasn’t too bad, she figured. She lit it with the car lighter and breathed in the stale smoke. Her muscles relaxed a little bit. Thank God for tobacco, she thought.
Studying the map, she thought maybe, in the previous night’s fatigue, she had missed some other way. No. Nothing new. Nothing quicker. Frustrated, she crumpled up the map and tossed it in the passenger side floorboard.
And what if she just turned around? She almost had herself convinced she would simply run into Dan when she got back to the apartment. By that time she would be too embarrassed to tell him about her excursion. He would interrogate her. He loved to interrogate her. Sometimes she thought maybe that was the reason she was fucking Keith on the side, to see if she could still pass Dan’s interrogations. If she let him beat her down mentally, then the last shreds of what they had, whatever it was, were gone. If she did find him down here and something had happened to him, she would tell him what she’d been doing and put the decision in his hands.
If you both come back.
There are some things worse than death.
But she didn’t want to think about that.
There was something inside of her telling her maybe this didn’t even really have anything to do with Dan. Like maybe she wasn’t going down there out of any concern for him as much as the fulfillment of some sense of duty. It may have seemed self-involved but, ever since Jordan’s disappearance, Karen felt like she had been chosen for something. She shuddered at the thought of what that thing might be.
Tossing her cigarette out the window, she lit up another one and forced the thoughts out of her head. The trees stormed by the window. The road thrummed beneath the car. Karen stared blankly ahead.
In a couple of hours the coffee was long empty and the highway was way behind her. She turned onto a state route and stayed with that for a while, winding and twisting for miles, the summer foliage threatening to take over the road, the bugs hitting the windshield like soupy rain. The turnoff was around here somewhere. She almost thought she’d missed it until she saw a green sign, the gray-white reflective letters reading: GLOWERS POINT 5. Almost there. Just stay on this road.
Where are you, Dan? she thought. And then, Let’s get this the hell over with. Whatever it is.
She couldn’t help but speed, the feeling in her veins a collision of excitement and dread. She reached for the pack of cigarettes and lit another one, not even remembering tossing the last one out the window. The car had reached 80 by the time she saw the yellow and black sign indicating a sharp right turn.
Shit, she thought, and nearly slammed on the brakes. She managed to take the turn more gracefully than she would have thought, the finesse of her youth, the ability to take these back country woods turns half-drunk with nothing but a learner’s permit in her pocket, coming back to her.
Karen pictured Dan’s car going off the road. Only he said he’d passed a sign saying he was in Glowers Point. So it had to be after that. Immediately after that. Not that it mattered, she would be able to cover just about every road in the Point in a few hours. And then she saw the sign, hanging upside down from the two iron poles. She pulled the car over to the right.
The road she was on was the one veering up and to the right, into the hills. This was the road that could take her into town. To the left, the road forked. This road was gravel, weeds sprouting up here and there. This was the road that would take her down into the Point proper. If she followed that road, it wouldn’t be long until she ran into the small trailer park by the river where she had lived out her first sixteen years. She walked over to the other side of the road, tossing her cigarette away, and stood where the asphalt became stone. She tried to figure out how many seconds it had been from the time Dan said he saw the sign for Glowers Point and the moment the signal ended. She looked for some sense of trauma amidst the shrubs and undergrowth by the side of the road. Something roughly the size of a car.
She took a deep breath. Out here, she couldn’t smell anything but the woods.
Karen had come all this way and only had an inkling as to what the hell she expected to find. The car idled behind her. That was how hopeless it all felt, she hadn’t even bothered shutting off the engine. She sighed deeply and put her hands on her hips. Did she even want to find him?
But he’s not what this is about.
This was about her. She realized that. If something happened to Dan, then so be it. He was a grown man. If he was dead, then she would have to deal with that. If something else happened to him (something worse than death) then he would have to rely on some other source of help. The best thing she could do would be to get back in her car, drive back up north, and let Keith fuck her until Glowers Point was just a fading memory. She wasn’t responsible for Dan. He didn’t even know of her association with this place. He came in without me, she thought, let him get out without me.
Taking a final cursory survey, she turned to go back to the car.
Wait.
She saw something. Didn’t she? Sure. That little blotch of white way off to her right—in the midst of all that green. Instead of heading back to the car, she took a couple steps to her right, one foot on the road, one foot on the wild grass descending down to the creek bed, getting wilder as it went.
She turned and put both feet on the grass, the woods in front of her. The wind picked up, blowing up under her shirt like a cold hand, coaxing her deeper into the woods, down into that nearly dry creek bed.
What the fuck are you doing? an inner voice screamed at her. You’re Karen Bruckner. You’re twenty-eight years old. You’re from Idleville, Indiana. You’re not sixteen. It was all behind you. Leave it there.
They took Jordan. They sent me screaming from my home. They took Jordan. They took Jordan and dragged her into something that was worse than death.
She found herself scrambling down the slope and stupidly thinking, Dan wears a lot of white.
Thunder rumbled and Karen looked up to see dense black clouds rolling over the top of the hill. The white thing moved. Did it move? Wasn’t it over there just a second ago?
The thunder hollered through the hills, blowing through Karen’s skull. She had forgotten the intensity of it. The rain started heavy, soaking her hair and clothes.
“Dan!” she shouted. “Dan! Are you down there?”
Not about Dan.
She couldn’t see the white thing at all anymore and it was getting very dark, like going from noon to dusk in under a minute. Karen stood in the creek bed, water up to her ankles, smelling the clean ozone.
There are some things worse than death.
She saw the white thing (worse than death) and it looked like it was running. Without hesitation, she took off running after it, the rain and the water at her feet making her feel like she was running through a dream.
“Dan!” she called, trying to cover up what she was doing with some type of semi-rational pretense. She couldn’t really admit to herself she had come back to the Point to stalk down all the nightmares of her childhood, but that was exactly what she was doing. Karen had been strong. The fear had broken her down. It had broken down all of her friends. After Jordan’s disappearance, the fear became real. There is nothing horror movie about real fear. The talk of finishing up high school and running off to the same Ivy League college vanished. They were broken. They were afraid.
That feeling came back to Karen. That feeling of lying in bed every night, a butcher knife in the nightstand beside her. And most nights she would wake up, one of an eventual many, and feel that blade at her throat. Always, always the feeling of someone just outside her window, or just outside her door, or just beside the bed. Sometimes she woke up because she felt a cold hand, sometimes at her throat, sometimes on her cheek, sometimes running slowly up her inner thigh. Was that what they wanted? Her fucking virginity? Sorry guys, she thought, I gave that away to the first fat fuck to give me a job. And that was when she had felt the fear the most. When she had left the Point and was all alone, doing things she never would have done otherwise. Things she did solely in extremis, to stay alive another day, another week. That’s when she hated that place the most. That’s when she blamed the Tormented the most. When she was doing things she never would have done otherwise.
Karen struggled to the further bank of the creek, regaining her footing, and continued after the thing in white. Rain and darkness separated them. Karen’s breaths became wet and ragged. A scream of thunder. A flash of lightning and everything lit up for only a second. But a second was long enough to recognize the face of the figure as it turned to look behind it.
It was Jordan.
That’s impossible.
But hadn’t everything else seemed impossible, too? Why, at this point, should she question anything? How could she question anything?
Another belt of thunder. Another flashbulb of lightning and Jordan was gone. The thing in white had vanished.
Karen kept running.
A few more yards and she came upon the place where she had lost track of Jordan. She stopped, standing there in a sort of bemused stupor. She ran a hand through her hair, holding it out from her scalp and feeling it smack wetly down on the back of her neck. To her right, from the creek, she heard a sucking sound.
Here, the creek widened in a circular pool nearly twice its usual width. Instinctively, she knew what she had to do.
That’s great. Come all the way out here to drown yourself in a fucking creek.
Jordan had vanished. Karen realized part of her problem when she was sixteen was she had never really questioned where Jordan had gone to that first time. Now, here she was, faced with that dilemma again. Only, this time, she wouldn’t pacify herself with answers and legends and fear. Sometimes you had to do stuff you were afraid of. She realized that now.
She looked up at the sky and wondered, for just a moment, if there was a God up there. She laughed crazily. If there was, he has to be the sickest son of a bitch in the universe, she thought. She looked at the spiraling whirlpool and, without another second’s hesitation, dived in.
She half expected the water to be freezing, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even the texture of water. It was somehow lighter than water, silkier. Being surrounded by it, she thought of amniotic fluid, like she was in the womb. Ridiculous, of course. Time got messed up while she was in there. It felt like it came and went within seconds but when she emerged at the end of it, on the other side, she had the feeling weeks, possibly years had passed, or reversed. Yes, that was it. She was sixteen again, or felt like it, walking slowly toward the black maw of her fe
ar.
She opened her eyes and looked at her new surroundings. It was nighttime but Karen didn’t think it seemed like real nighttime. It was like what she imagined a movie set would look like if the director called for darkness. She realized it was a full moon. The sky overhead was totally clear and starless, void of anything except the moon’s alien surface, reflecting back a cold light.
The trees here were squat and without leaves and yet the air on her skin didn’t feel like winter air. It was chilly, but there was an underlying balm she found comforting. Was she still in Glowers Point? Was she still even alive? There was something of an afterlife in this new landscape. Some ethereal quality. A certain level of unreality.
She captured a scent of earth, good clean dirt, rising up from the ground. There was another scent there. The smell of a smoldering fire, after the fire and smoke and coals are gone and the only thing left, like a memory, is its odor.
She should have been afraid. She had been terrified just a few moments ago, her feet on familiar ground. Now she was surrounded by something she was totally unfamiliar with and the fear had vanished. In front of her, close and looming, was what looked like a church.
The Church of the Earth, of course, she thought. The Tormented’s place of worship. How was it still standing? She thought for sure she remembered hearing about how it had been burnt to the ground. Nevertheless, there it was, right in front of her, majestic in its lopsided decay.
The windows were gone. The wooden slats of the exterior were shiny burnt black and brittle-looking. The steeple truncated two-thirds of the way up. She wondered what type of symbol had adorned the top of it. Maybe it had been a cross. From everything she’d heard it didn’t sound like the Tormented had developed a religion in any way similar to Christianity. The doorway was one of those enormous, arching, double-door affairs. The doors were gone, some of the heavy stones used to make the arch had fallen away as well. The whole structure seemed to somehow lean toward her, like the front of it was sinking into the earth. This gave the entranceway the appearance of being like the opening to a grave, leading down into the earth. She would be going in there. There was no other choice.
Sunruined: Horror Stories Page 4
