Fear Club- A Confession

by Damian Stephens

  I could sense the capital “M” on the word. Given that most of this conversation was obviously occurring in my head, that wasn’t too odd.

  I opened my eyes.

  The hospital. Day. Morning. I took a breath.

  By the gods, I could breathe.

  My fever had apparently broken. I gazed about the hospital room and pulled myself to a sitting position. Was that energy I felt? It seemed like an old friend, long unseen, suddenly returning from some strange vacation in the wilderness...

  “I see you’re feeling better?” the nurse walked in. Lissa, that was her name. “You want to try eating something?”

  Yes, I would like to, I thought I said. “Yes, I would like to,” I repeated in the real world.

  “Good for you!” she smiled. Nurse Lissa—ah, what a glorious lady to meet the day with! Those lovely blonde curls snaking all round and about her smile!

  “I’d like to—” I said. This was unpracticed. My throat was clear, my lungs functional. I started again. “May I take a walk?” I asked. Did I have to ask permission?

  Lissa laughed. Lovely! “Let’s take it one step at a time, Charley, okay?” She was fluffing up the pillows behind me. She smiled, bubbling like orange soda. “First I’ll get you some breakfast. Then I’ll call your mother, and we can all talk to Dr. Berenger.”

  I smiled back at her. Yes, nice, thank you. “Yes, nice, thank you,” I said.

  Lissa bounced out of the room.

  I leaned over to my side and gazed out the window. The sun shone, but the wind was clearly blowing. Tree branches and leaves fluttered. I could sense that it was cold. After Christmas? Yes.

  Something was sticking into my side. I reached under myself and brought forth a plain Bic pen, ballpoint. Cheap. I gazed at it for a moment.

  Someone in the next room was arguing.

  “...so fucking broken then how do you explain this?”

  I heard a thump, and a few gasps.

  “Because I don’t feel a goddamned thing. So get this fucker off of me—”

  “Steve, please!” A girl’s voice. “Your dad’s on his way.”

  Steve snorted. “Like that’s going to help.” “Steve, listen,” another voice, slightly older, very irritated. “We’re going to do another X-ray, okay? If it’s fixed, then it’s fixed, right? So please just sit down until your dad gets here—”

  “Snickers,” Steve said.

  “What?” the other voice responded.

  “Get me a Snickers bar and I’ll sit the fuck down,” he said.

  There was some scuffling, apparently in acquiescence to his request, then the voices died down to mumbling, of which I could make out only every few words.

  I held up the pen against a backdrop of trees blowing in the wind outside.

  I’m going to use this to write Molly a letter. “I’m going to use this to write Molly a letter,” I said aloud, and closed my eyes, feeling marvelous.

  “Amazing, Charley,” my mother said as she drove me home later that day. “That immune system of yours! Just like your dad’s. You know he had meningitis really bad when he was a kid?”

  I nodded. I knew the story. Truly, it must be my incredible genetic lineage that resulted in such a miraculous healing.

  And I really couldn’t explain why I felt so phenomenally good—well enough, even, to begin to dread having to return to school after winter break. “Too bad about that Flowers kid,” she continued. “We’ll have to go to his funeral, you know.

  Dad’s got connections to that family at work.”

  I nodded. Poor kid. I guess. Didn’t really know him all that well, since he didn’t go to public school with the rest of us. Home-schooled, private tutors— it was a big house, I was sure his family could afford it.

  I felt as if I should say something, especially since my mother seemed so chatty. “Yeah,” I finally said. “Uh—did you hear what happened to him?” My mother winced. “Nasty stuff,” she said. “Some crazy person stabbed him! Can you believe it?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” she answered. “Crazy people do crazy things.”

  I gazed out the window at the minimal afternoon traffic. We were passing Maple Ridge Elementary. “Did they catch the guy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No, I guess. Probably would have heard about it. Which means: you’re not going anywhere after dark!”

  “Did he get stabbed at night?” I asked.

  My mother thought for a moment. “Fine,” she said. “I don’t know. So just don’t go anywhere. At least not without somebody else with you. Please?”

  I nodded. My thoughts had already returned to the letter I intended to write for Molly.

  Later that night, having assured my mother that I still felt perfectly fine (although I could most certainly do with another few days off of school), I started to do just that, but nothing came out right. I mean literally.

  As I attempted to formulate the words “My dearest Molly,” this is what took shape:

  Jy pbtobqs Jliiy.

  “What in the world?” I said aloud. I tried it again—with the same result. I shook the pen a few times, and tried a third time—yet again, the insufferable jumble of nonsense. I tried something different, and very carefully wrote “What the fuck?”

  Wets seb cuah?

  Indeed, that was the question. As I constructed each of the letters that I intended to write, the pen seemed to somehow metamorphose them into alternate versions. I tried a few more statements:

  Qetii F aljmtob sebb sl t qujjbo’q pty?

  (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?)

  F’ii sthb t aebbqbruodbo tkp cofbq.

  (I’ll take a cheeseburger and fries.)

  Dobbsfkdq, Aetoibq!

  (Greetings, Charles!)

  The last one stopped me cold. I had seen it before. I glared at it in the dim yellow light from my nightstand.

  Dobbsfkdq, Aetoibq!

  “Greetings, Charles,” I said aloud. I shifted my gaze to the window near the bed. A horned moon rose over Chicken Hill, outlining the scraggly black branches of trees shorn of their leaves. Greetings, Charles...

  Suddenly, it hit me. I knew what to do.

  “I know what to do!” I exclaimed aloud, and wrote out the entire alphabet in a neat grid on the sheet of paper.

  There, before me, lay the answer, the key—or, rather, the key word. It was so simple, I laughed aloud. “Trap!” I read in place of the letters A, B, C, D. A substitution code—I remembered it from algebra class, when Mr. Gurdjian tried and failed repeatedly to impress us with the great value of modular arithmetic and some of the other basics of number theory.

  “You just choose a word—any word—and write it down under the first set of letters in the alphabet,” he told us in that nuanced monotone of his. He had been teaching high school for long enough that the robot had taken over a good part of his human essence. “Ideally, choose a word with no repeating letters, to make it easier. Then just fill in the remaining letters of the alphabet underneath the usual alphabet, in their usual order, without repeating any of the letters from your key word.”

  A substitution code! Wonderful!

  The only thing I couldn’t explain was how—and perhaps more importantly why—this goddamned pen was doing it all by itself. Where had the damned thing come from?

  The strange, dark figure from my eerie dream of the night before returned as I slept.

  “You’ll need more than wit to resolve this,” it said in fluttering moonlight and silvery shadow. “There are more stakes than you realize.”

  My frustration and anxiety revealed themselves in a burst of pale, thirsty light.

  “I’m doing my best to help you,” it responded. “But your story keeps splitting.”

  A question mark, like a smoke ring,
rose into the sky and dissipated.

  “Never mind,” the figure seemed to expand and contract, as if taking a deep breath or sighing. “At any rate, when you go to the funeral, pay attention to the girl with the purple flower on her dress.”

  An image of a purple rose bloomed in the darkness, radiating with dark light, then faded again.

  The funeral was peculiar, to say the least.

  Apparently, owing to differences of opinion on the part of his parents (who sat on opposite sides of the room during the service—a tale in itself, I felt sure), Michael Flowers was to be buried with little ceremony. Instead, an extremely weird and (as far as I could tell) utterly unsuitable eulogy was recited in the viewing room at the funeral home by a wild-eyed old man with a tendency to mumble. I had never seen him before.

  “We are gathered here today” —his choice of which words to emphasize were odd and somewhat off-putting— “to remind you that the world, as we know it, often fails us, often rewards those who deserve no reward. Can you imagine listening to the radio and assuming that what it told you held true, always? I, myself, considered Michael Flowers an exceptional, a truly good person.”

  I couldn’t be the only person having the realization that this man was insane. I glanced about the room. The breath caught in my throat as my dream of a few days ago suddenly came fully into memory once again. A dark-haired girl stood nearly in shadow at the back of the room by a young man who appeared to be roughly my own age. That was...Steve, wasn’t it? Right. Steve Chernowski. He was famous for having served nearly two full years’ worth of detentions, and even more famous for rarely committing the same infraction twice in order to land himself there.

  But what blew my mind was the flower she wore on the lapel of her jacket. A purple rose, identical to the one from my dream...

  “Now,” the old man continued his convoluted drivel. “It is those whom we speak about in memory that live on in our memories. To those ones, I say, we must attend, always. It is to them that we must sacrifice some of the present for the sake of our own little futures.”

  He stepped down from the podium and headed directly for the hall leading to the reception room. In the silence following his self-dismissal, I thought I could even hear him pouring himself a drink. No one clapped, of course. No one even moved for several minutes, until the funeral director himself seemed obliged to step up and direct the action elsewhere.

  I felt a compulsion, an urge, unstoppable, to get up and run to those two at the back of the room. I was barely able to resist sprinting over to them, and instead stood up rapidly as everyone else began making their way—with painful slowness—to the reception area.

  “I’ll be right—uh, I’ll be right back,” I said to my mother, seated beside me, nearly tripping over myself to get away. What had possessed me? I heard my father make some comment—“Where’s he running off to?”—before almost knocking over an elderly woman wearing an incredibly elaborate wig of bright red hair.

  “Pardon!” I said loudly. She frowned. “Sorry, really—”

  As the small crowd of people filtered toward the reception area, I headed the opposite direction. When I looked up from my brief entanglement, I noticed that Steve Chernowski and the purple-rose girl were already heading out.

  “Wait!” I yelled. Several people glared at me. I finally made my way to the doors at the front of the building and burst through them, terrified that my quarry had evaporated, that my chance at understanding what in the world was going on would evaporate like so much smoke, like an illusionist’s rabbit in a hat, like—

  “Dude!” It was Steve Chernowski. “Chill!”

  He stepped out of a cloud of smoke in a little alcove outside the building, to the left of the entranceway. The girl was behind him. The smoke was from two cigarettes she held in one black-gloved hand.

  She offered one of them to Steve. “Thanks, Jules,” he said. “You think this is the guy?”

  I stood there, more than perplexed.

  “Yep,” she said, taking a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaling. “That’s him.”

  “We have to do what?”

  I felt like a rat between two housecats; they didn’t need me for food, but goddamn was I fun. “Grave. Three nights from now. Meet.” It was Steve saying this, sitting in the front seat of Julie’s Honda. “Capiche?”

  I nodded. “Okay, good,” I said. “Because I thought for a moment there you were telling me that I had to sneak into Golem Creek Cemetery in the middle of the night to watch someone rise from the dead.”

  Steve laughed. “I like him!” he said to Julie, who was intent on the road. “Clever, smart. Let’s keep him.”

  “Look, Charley, I’m sorry if this seems inconvenient for you,” Julie said, turning into the parking lot of a FazMart. “But do you realize the inconceivability of the dreams we both had being random events?”

  She parked and nodded at Steve, who hopped out of the car as if he knew what to do. Then she turned to look at me.

  “What happened at the hospital was effectively a miracle,” she continued. “And me, you, and—for the love of God—Steve Chernowski are somehow a key part of it. We need to go to the graveyard and we have to make sure that Mike Flowers gets out of that coffin, alive and well.” She paused for a moment. “At least alive, if not exactly well,” she said.

  “Forgive me if I seem to have reacted incongruously,” I said. “I’m new to necromancy.”

  Julie turned to watch Steve heading back to the car. “Fancy words, kid,” she said. “Just fucking be there.”

  “Fine,” I responded. “Fine! Okay?” Steve got back in the car.

  “What’d I miss?” he asked, tossing Julie a pack of Marlboros.

  “Charley’s in,” she said.

  “Aw, Julie!” Steve said. “Did you promise to make out with him afterward? She’s a fucking liar, Charley. She’s been promising me that for years.”

  Julie was shaking her head as she unwrapped the cigarette package.

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “Can you drop me off at Maple Ridge?” I realized how stupid it sounded the minute I said it, and Steve didn’t fail to laugh. “Whatever you want,” Julie said, depressing

  the car lighter and turning on the car.

  I just needed a place to think, and Maple Ridge was the most peaceful I knew of.

  They dropped me off without another word. Here I was, sixteen years old, and the most extraordinary thing I had done so far was win second place in the state science fair. Second place! (That bastard with the four-year study had bested me.)

  The offer to do something that basically made me quake in fear to think about was somehow... comforting. Years and years of reading nothing but science fiction and fantasy novels made it easier for me to cope with at least the possibility of the idea that someone could return from the dead.

  Some little kids played soccer a distance away, at the far edge of the big lawn behind Maple Ridge. I eyed the area briefly to ensure that nobody was watching me, and slipped behind the dumpsters to check my old hiding spot behind the false brick.

  Neatly folded, just behind the brick and in front of a little baggie of Micro Machines, was a sheet of typing paper, apparently with writing on it.

  I withdrew the sheet in terror—who else knew about the false brick?

  Charley, man, hey, I know this is weird, it read in an unknown, but somewhat artistic, hand. Didn’t mean to compromise your stash, dude, but apparently this is the “only way” to get this to you...

  What in the world?

  Anyway: check it out. The weird letters on the back of this page? Yeah, you need those. I try to get it to you after English, but you get real caught up in this mess right at that point.

  I noticed the unusual tense change of the message.

  (That’s a shit-ton of time from now!) I guess it’s in code so that only you can read
it, just in case, so, like in Mission: Impossible, burn it once you’ve figured it out. Wish I could be more help! Peace.

  The note was signed “Pete” with a flourish that included the anarchist “A” symbol and a stylized “t” that looked like a joint on a roach clip.

  I took one look at the encoded message on the back of the page, replaced the false brick, and sprinted home.

  “Greetings, Charles!” I read aloud in the confines of my room. “When you can read this, be sure to get the key on the other side of this message. P.S.: Sorry for the black eye!”

  I slumped down in my desk chair. All of the excitement I had been feeling while decoding the message vanished.

  I turned the page over and re-read the weird scrawl from “Pete.” There was supposed to be a “key” in this? And what black eye, again? Not to mention: who the hell was “Pete”?

  I set the page down on my desk. Then I started pacing the room.

  I try to get it to you after English, but...

  This was a message from the future? Someone was knocking at my door.

  “Charley?” It was my mother. “Hey, Charley, is everything all right?”

  My parents had gotten back from the funeral. I scrambled to get the message shoved into a desk drawer, then went over and opened the door. “Yeah, fine,” I said. My face was obviously

  flushed. “I just—yeah, I just didn’t—”

  “Hey, do you think you’re getting sick again?” my mother asked. She put the cool palm of her hand on my forehead. “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “Naw, mom, I’m fine, I think.” I was fumbling for words. This wasn’t helping my case.

  She let her hand drop. “You know, I guess that was a pretty awful thing,” she said. “The Flowers kid, you know.”

  I retreated back into my room and sat down on the edge of my bed. “Yeah,” I said, quickly taking advantage of my way out. “Definitely.” I hung my head.

  “If you want to talk about it—” she started. “Naw, I’m good, I’m good,” I said, looking up