by Dia Reeves
“The children are in the family room.” Grandma’s voice, soothing, concerned. “What’s wrong?”
Mrs. Benson burst into the room and snatched Nora up and kissed her upturned face.
“Mom,” Nora complained struggling to get away, but Mrs. Benson held on tight.
“Sara, what’s happened?” Grandma asked.
“Haven’t you seen the news?” Mrs. Benson’s teary eyes regarded us all, especially me. She held an arm out to me and I let her hug me too, so as not to be rude. “Our children, they’re so lucky. The others...” Her words trailed off into tears.
Pop turned on the news and there was the roller rink, looming behind a solemn faced reporter. Behind the reporter were dozens of paramedics from as far away as Bantam County, wheeling stretchers out of the rink. The bodies in the stretchers were very small and covered with bloody white sheets.
“...as several unknown gunmen entered the building and opened fire. We are unsure of the number of deaths, but, unlike Abernathy Hardware, many of the victims were children, frequent visitors of the roller rink...”
“Abernathy Hardware?” Grandma had her hand pressed to her stomach, as though she were sick.
We listened horrified as the reporter told us that unknown gunmen had also shot up the bookstore, the gas station and the drug store. Mr. Simmons, Chuck Abernathy, Mr. Abrams—they were all dead.
“Nobody knows why these shootings happened,” the reporter continued. “Police are still questioning witnesses and say that if anyone has any knowledge of what happened, if anyone saw anything or knows who committed the shootings to please contact the police station.”
My parents grabbed me and hugged me, grateful they hadn’t lost me. I was grateful I hadn’t lost me. But that night, all I could think about were those kids who’d died—those kids I’d been skating with. I had the knowledge that reporter had been asking for; I knew who had caused those deaths, but I hadn’t warned anybody. It had been a close call just getting me and Nora out, but I hadn’t even tried to warn anyone else.
I hadn’t even tried.
I couldn’t go to the police; they wouldn’t believe in my Rag Man any more than my parents and Nora had. So what could I do?
It was still on my mind the following day, when my parents and I went to the movie theater around the block from Grandma’s. I could tell Ma was worried about being out with those gunmen still on the loose, but she wasn’t nervous enough to break tradition and stay home with Grandma. We always went to the movies on Christmas Eve.
Ma and I were looking for good seats. She looked on edge, clutching her purse and my hand and staring into people’s faces like she was trying to memorize them. That’s when I saw him again—the Rag Man.
I froze where I stood, watching him, my heart thudding in my throat.
He was only a few rows up from where Ma and I were standing, drifting back and forth along the rows of the half-lit theater.
“There he is again.”
Ma looked at me, distracted. “Who?”
He was pulling down seats and wringing his bloody rag into them. He didn’t do it to every seat; he passed over several seats at a time, but he wrung his rag into most of them. He was working his way upward, toward the exits.
She pulled down the seat and I saw something dark and wet staining the green cushion.
Ma started to sit in the Rag Man’s blood.
“No!” I pulled on her so hard she stumbled against me and stepped on my toes. I pulled her out into the aisle.
“Jonah.” Ma looked scandalized.
So did some of the people sitting nearby, probably thinking about how loud and bratty I was being and hoping I wouldn’t sit by them.
I envied them suddenly, that their only fear was of being annoyed. If only they knew...
I had to tell them. I had to. They were corpses, unless I did something.
But they wouldn’t believe me; I knew they wouldn’t. They’d just laugh at me, and I would have embarrassed myself and Ma for no reason.
Meantime, Ma was hissing at me. “I can’t believe the way you’re behaving.”
“But the Rag Man—”
“Be quiet. I am not Nora. I have no interest in these games of yours.”
“But—”
“That’s it; we’re leaving.” Ma hustled me out into the lobby where we ran into Pop, standing impatiently in the snack line. Ma grabbed his arm. “John, we’re leaving.”
He blinked. “Leaving? Why? What?”
“Jonah...has a bad feeling about being here,” Ma said, surprising me. “And so do I.”
Pop picked me up and carried me out of the theater. Ma was holding Pop’s arm and watching me strangely. They were quiet, thoughtful.
Finally, Ma asked, “Why were you so sure that something bad would happen back there?”
“It was the Rag Man,” I said, my cheek pressed against the top of Pop’s head. I didn’t really fit into Pop’s arms anymore, but somehow I didn’t feel awkward. “I saw him wringing blood into the chairs. You almost sat in one.”
“This Rag Man,” Pop said, hesitantly. “What does he look like?”
“A bum.”
“Can you remember something more concrete, like his hair color, how tall he was? We could go to the police—”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not a bum. That’s just what he looks like. I think he’s the devil.” I started to cry.
My folks were silent the rest of the way home, but I could feel how much they wanted to say. To me, about me. I shouldn’t have cried. Maybe they would have been more willing to believe me if I could have kept it together the way I had in the theater. Maybe if I had been more convincing they’d still be...
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
They carried me upstairs and put me to bed, like I was a baby. But I didn’t mind. Ma pulled the covers up to my chin. “Tomorrow’s Christmas,” she said, patting my stomach through the covers. “Try to remember that if you should have bad thoughts. Everything will be better in the morning, clearer, after you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
I did have a good night’s sleep, glad that my parents didn’t think I was a nut job. But when I awoke, things weren’t better.
When I came downstairs on Christmas morning, all happy and ready to rip into my presents, I saw Ma and Pop and Grandma sitting in the family room watching the news. A reporter, a different one, was standing in front of the theater.
I leaned against the arm of Pop’s chair, watching his face anxiously. “What happened?”
Pop looked at me, pale. “Almost three hundred people died last night...at the movies.”
I almost couldn’t hear the rest of what he said over the sound of my heart pounding in my ears.
“Someone poisoned the butter they pour on the popcorn, and everyone who had popcorn the last night is dead this morning.”
“John!” Grandma turned off the television. “Don’t say such things in front of him; he’s just a boy.”
“But he knew.” Ma reached over from her place on the couch and pulled me into her lap. “Sweetie, how did you know?”
“I told you. It was the Rag Man. He’s evil.” I could see they still didn’t believe me about the Rag Man, but they believed something.
During Christmas dinner, everybody was subdued, sitting like strangers in our best Christmas clothes, the feast spread before us fragrant and steaming, but there was a difference.
The Christmas carols that normally poured from the radio on the sideboard had been replaced by news reports, and not just from Raynard. The stories seeped from the speakers like poison gas: hospital bombings, fires in courthouses, random shootings, people being stoned to death in the street. These stories from all over the country, all day long.
“Why don’t the police do something?” Ma had said at one point, re-filling her wine glass with a shaking hand.
“Weren’t you listening?” Mrs. Benson said, on the edge of p
anic. “It was the police who set fire to the courthouse up in Dallas! You can’t trust anybody. Everybody’s gone crazy!”
Nora and I looked at each other, and what I saw in her face scared me more than the stonings and shootings on the radio. Nothing scared Nora. Nothing. But she was scared now.
We all were.
Outside the dining room windows came the sound of sirens, people congregating in the street, crying, wondering aloud what the hell was going on. Everything had become unsettled.
Finally, Pop had enough of us staring out the window and staring into space as we tried to absorb the horrors spouting from the radio. He got up and turned it off, and then went to the window to pull the curtain when, suddenly, a sensation rippled through the air.
A sensation like when you’re on a plane and your ears squeeze together and you have to swallow to make them pop. But it was worse than that, more intense. A sensation that swallowing wouldn’t make go away.
I finally had to put my hands over my ears, feeling as though my ear drums were about to explode. And I wasn’t the only one. Mrs. Benson clapped her hands over her ears, screaming, but not before I saw a line of blood trickle from one of them. That’s why when the windows exploded all over the house, the sound was muffled, as though I were listening from two blocks down the street.
That painful pressure was gone from the air, but Mrs. Benson was still screaming, staring behind me, horrified. I turned just in time to see Pop falling backward. He was probably dead before he hit the floor, but I didn’t know that at the time.
I jumped out of my chair. “Pop!”
“Jonah, sit down.” Grandma, who was sitting next to me, put a restraining hand on my shoulder as Ma rushed to Pop, and knelt beside him, heedless of the broken glass crunched beneath her knees. She touched the blood on his face, the glass in his cheeks, his eyes, his throat. Huge chunks of glass as big as my hand.
Ma started making these weird noises in her throat. “John? Johnny?”
“What’s wrong with Mr. Wakefield?” Nora demanded, bossy as ever, but she was holding her mother’s hand so tightly her nails were white.
No one had an answer for her.
Grandma spoke up. “Ellen?”
Ma didn’t answer. She was holding Pop’s hand to her chest and calling his name.
“Ellen.” Grandma’s hand was tight on my shoulder, painful. “There were sirens earlier. Perhaps you should go out and flag one down—”
Ma looked up then, her eyes wide and wild. “You want me to go out there? And get shot? Or blown up?”
“My son needs medical attention. Someone has to go.”
But no one went.
Ma started to answer, but her words were drowned out by the sound of metal breaking and grinding together. We all looked out the window, and everything had changed. Everything.
A thick red stain was bleeding across the sky, dyeing the clouds, dimming the weak winter sun. I immediately thought of the Rag Man’s bloody rag, the bulls-eye he had created around the buildings downtown.
All the red beamed down on us like the laser beam of a rifle, targeting us.
But that wasn’t the worst. The sounds that had drawn our eyes to the window had ceased, and in the street was the flattened wreck of what had once been an automobile. And on top of the wreck stood...
How to describe it?
The only things I could make out clearly were its scales, which were huge and appeared reddish, although that may just have been a reflection of the sky. The scales clicked together and made an unpleasant chittering sound.
It stepped off the car, what was left of it, and onto the road leaving huge dents in the asphalt.
The thing swiveled its—head?—straight toward us. Toward Pop and Ma.
I blinked and suddenly it was framed in the window and then it was in the room, overwhelming the space with a deep organic stench, like a heart or a spleen that had been left to decay in the dark.
The room was dead quiet as it bent over Pop’s prone body, seeming to sniff at him, at the blood drying on his face. Then its head, the swiveling thing, opened wide as a tunnel and swallowed Pop’s body.
Then another head whipped around toward Ma, hovering over the blood on her skin. Pop’s blood.
She got up to run, but the second head opened and snatched her off her feet. She went in head first. Her legs jerked and one of her shoes fell off, and then she was gone, vanished into the creature’s vast body.
“Stop that!” Nora had jumped up and as I watched, she hurled a gravy boat at the monster. The red and white china shattered against the monster’s scales—which were actually gray and not red at all—coating them with giblet gravy.
“Get out of here! This is our place!” Nora’s eyes were bright with tears and anger and she was so fierce and beautiful, and despite all that I’d seen, my only thought at that moment was of how much I loved her.
She snatched up a carving knife and hurled it at the monster. “This is our place!”
The knife sank into one of the creature’s heads, hilt deep. Nora screamed, triumphant, and looked for something else to throw.
But then the thing was no longer by the window. It was on the dinner table and we all scrambled away as it buckled and then collapsed under the monster’s weight. It blocked the light from the chandelier and its shadow fell on all of us.
“No!” Mrs. Benson screamed, seeing what was about to happen before I did.
The thing reached out with some thick scaly appendage and snatched Nora from her mother’s grasp, ripping Mrs. Benson’s arms from her body in the process. And then it was back at the window, framed in the window, and Nora’s fists were beating against those hard scales...
...and then they were gone.
I remember what happened in that dining room very clearly, even though it lasted only seconds, maybe a minute at the most, but what I remember most clearly is that I’d just sat there. Through it all, I’d sat there. Some thing straight out of Creepshow fell from the sky, ate my parents, ripped off Mrs. Benson’s arms, and kidnapped my best friend.
And I’d just sat there.
“Let’s get out of here, Jonah.” It was Grandma. Grandma. I clutched her around the waist and looked up at her to convince myself she was really there because even though I was squeezing her tight enough to cut off her circulation, I couldn’t feel her. I had gone numb. I couldn’t feel anything.
She put her arm around me and led me toward the kitchen.
“What about Ma and Pop?” I asked, just as calmly as if they were in the next room playing cards. “And Mrs. Benson.” She was lying in a pool of blood, her arms here and there on the floor—I nearly tripped on one of them.
“Don’t worry your head about them. I’ll take care of them.”
She took me down into the cellar. She would have to take me everywhere from now on because I was never letting her go.
I looked at her face. It was calm and blissful and looked nothing like the way I felt. “I don’t understand what’s happening, Grandma.”
She sighed as she bent over—awkwardly with me clutching her—and picked up a huge rusty old can.
“It’s the Last Days. I never thought it would happen in my time. But here it is.”
“What’s that? Like Armageddon?”
She shook her head. “It’s the time before Armageddon. A final chance.”
“A chance for what?” I asked as we went back upstairs to the family room. Through the broken windows, I saw people out in the street running around, crying, tearing at their clothes, screaming.
“It’s a chance to choose.” Grandma took a long match from the box on the mantle. “God will watch how His people react to this onslaught, see how strong their faith really is. Last Days gives us all a chance to choose, really choose: God or Satan.”
“I choose God,” I said really fast, just in case God was listening.
Grandma turned to me and smiled. “So do I.” She unscrewed the cap on the can and upturned it over herself.
The air was suddenly heavy with smell of gasoline. It splashed coldly over my hands were I was holding on to her.
“What are you doing?”
Instead of answering, she lit the match and touched it to the front of her dress.
The fire was quick and hot, bluish as it licked over her body and over my hands, eating into my skin. The pain was galvanizing. I let go of Grandma screaming, careening around the room waving my arms, fanning the flames. Finally, I plunged my hands into the fish tank, crying out because the pleasure of the cold water was almost as painful as the flames had been.
I looked at Grandma, standing in the middle of the family room in her best Sunday dress, gray hair in a smooth bun at the nape of her neck, still smiling as the flames engulfed her completely.
She held out her arms to me, the sleeves of her dress falling in fiery swatches to the floor. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, nearly shouting over the sound of her burning flesh. “Fire purifies. Fire will carry us into His arms.”
There have been times, many times, when I wished I’d gone to her the way she wanted me to, but as I stood there, watching the ghastly sight of her speaking to me as her lips blackened and curled away from her teeth.
Before I knew it I was running, disappearing into the bloodstain that was now the world. Running into chaos.
So many things were on fire—houses, cars, trees. The streets full of wild-eyed people trying to flee to God knows where.
People like me.
I had no idea where I was going. I only knew I had to get away. I knew there had to be a spot, just one little corner where no one was dying or screaming or on fire. I was freezing as I ran through the red glacial darkness, dizzy from the throbbing pain in my hands. They were twisted and unrecognizable, seeping some clear fluid that stained the front of my sweater.
As I cut across to Arbor Lane, I saw Nora’s next door neighbors, the Williams’ gathered out on their lawn. Mr. Williams appeared to either be baptizing or drowning one of his daughters in a small blue wading pool.
I ran up Center Street on the way downtown and saw a crowd of people pushing and shoving to get into a church. As I skirted the crowd I heard a woman scream, “You’re not even a Methodist, Anna! Go to your own damn church!”
