by Brian Harmon
It was a corn creep.
And where there was one, there was a pack.
He did the only thing he could do: He ran.
Chapter Fourteen
This didn’t make sense. There were no corn creeps in Creek Bend. The corn creeps were from another world. He would have to be in a place where this world and theirs collided. A crack. A fissure.
But there were no fissures in Creek Bend. Isabelle would’ve known if there were. She would’ve told him.
Unless he wasn’t in Creek Bend anymore.
But where else would he be?
He couldn’t think about that right now. It didn’t matter how he was here or why. What mattered was that he could hear them behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw them. At least five, probably many more, moving fast, closing in.
He’d forgotten how fast they were. They were long-legged creatures. He’d never outrun them.
He tried to remember what he knew about these things. They only hunted during the day. For some reason they vanished at night. And only the females hunted. The males were…well, Karen would say they were just males. They only cared about eating and mating. But there was something else about them, something useful…
They were on his left and right, too. He was surrounded. It wouldn’t be long before they ran him down and feasted on his raw flesh.
He remembered now. They were extremely opportunistic predators. They always went after the easiest prey, even if it was one of their own. If he could badly wound even one of them, making it an easier target than him, the others would turn on it. They’d turn cannibal.
But knowing that wasn’t going to help him. He had no weapon, no way to wound one of them.
A long, green hand shot out of the corn and snatched at him. He cried out and dodged it with about the same level of grace and bravado as he’d witnessed from the Creek Bend High cheerleading squad when a spider dropped onto their lunch table.
He didn’t have time to care. He had to run. They were closing in.
Then he tripped. Something caught his foot. He fell. He rolled across the hard ground.
He curled himself up into a ball as they gathered around him and closed his eyes against the agonizing fate that cruel destiny had brought him to.
It was over now. There was no escape. He was doomed.
And yet…
In the darkness behind his own eyelids, there was no sound of approaching horrors, only the gentle chirping of crickets and a strange, nearby drone of traffic.
Enter the dark, said a strangely small voice somewhere in that eerie quietness. It came from somewhere inside his own head, and there was something oddly familiar about it.
He opened his eyes.
There were no corn creeps. There wasn’t even any corn.
He was still in Creek Bend, although he wasn’t entirely sure where in Creek Bend.
He sat up and looked around. He could see the river from here. And he could hear the highway. But this wasn’t somewhere he’d ever been before.
His cell phone rang. It was Isabelle.
“Welcome back from freak town,” she told him.
He rubbed his aching head and blinked up at the clear sky. “What the hell just happened?”
“As far as I could tell, you went totally bugshit crazy for a while and went for a walk in a Twilight Zone version of Wonderland.”
That sounded like an accurate description. “Where am I?”
“You’ve got to be somewhere in Creek Bend. There wasn’t enough time for you to get too far.”
He rose to his feet and took a closer look at the surrounding buildings. He was behind them, he realized. There were no roads on this side. That’s why he didn’t recognize them. It wasn’t a place he’d never been so much as an angle from which he’d never seen it.
He tried to remember what happened. It wasn’t easy. His head was pounding.
They were at the gallery. Karen was acting strange. He was worried about her. He was still worried about her. But them something happened. No… Someone.
Steampunk Monk! He was what happened. That squirt bottle. That foul-smelling liquid.
“Now it’s coming back,” said Isabelle. “Can you piece the rest of it together?”
He remembered hallucinating that the paintings had come to life. The pond, the beach, the meadow, the forest. Even the train. He remembered that one now, a small painting of a derelict engine from a head-on point-of-view, as if it had been painted while standing on the track directly in front of it.
He’d liked that one. It was cool. Until it tried to run him down…
That liquid must’ve been some sort of powerful hallucinogen. He looked down at his shirt. He could still see the wet spot. He lifted the collar and sniffed it.
“Don’t breathe more of it!” snapped Isabelle.
“Right. Sorry.”
“Jeez.”
It had smelled faintly pungent, and of some kind of alcohol. Fortunately, the smell didn’t send him back into nightmare wonderland. Whatever key ingredient caused the hallucinations must’ve already evaporated.
It was hard to believe that it was all only in his mind. At first, the paintings only seemed to come to life. But then he got lost in the illusions. They began to take up his entire perspective. He became trapped in them, or so it seemed at the time. Confused and afraid, he’d fled the gallery. By the time he saw the large oil painting of the frozen field by the door, the hallucination had grown so strong that he truly believed he was trapped in that frozen place, about to freeze to death.
He must’ve seen it on his way out the door. In fact, that door he’d tried so desperately to reach must’ve been the gallery entrance. That industrial labyrinth was those gears outside the doors, magnified inside his head to apocalyptic proportions.
After that, though… He supposed the river of bubbling sludge and the wall of scrap metal were just the river and the retaining wall…but how did he end up in the cornfield? Where did those corn creeps come from? It didn’t even make sense, now that he thought about it. It was only early June. The corn wouldn’t be tall enough to hide corn creeps for weeks.
Had the illusions sunk so far into his mind that he merely reproduced that terrifying experience from his own memories?
There was probably no way to ever know for sure.
“What happened to Karen? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. You left her at the gallery. I called her and let her know I was watching you.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Still a little spacy, but better than she was. I think you scared her out of it a little when you ran out of there.”
Eric winced at the thought. “Did I make a scene?”
“Well, Bree thinks you have some kind of weird post-traumatic stress disorder thing now.”
“Fantastic.”
“But you didn’t break anything, so congratulations on that.”
“Thank God,” he exclaimed, remembering the insane prices on some of those paintings.
“I know, right?”
He turned in a circle, trying to gain his bearings. He should still be on the east side of the river, but did he follow it north or south? “I’ve got to get back there. Tell her not to go anywhere.”
“Don’t worry. I’m taking care of her.”
“Thanks. Does she know I’m all right now?”
“I texted her that you’ve left wonderland and started making sense again.”
“Good.” He switched the phone to his other ear and examined his hand. “Any idea how I did this?” The cut wasn’t frightfully deep. He didn’t think he needed stitches, but neither was it a mere scrape. He probably should at least put a bandage on it. It was still bleeding.
“None. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He hadn’t expected her to know. The whole ordeal was probably as confusing for her as it was for him.
“It should heal up in no time.”
“It should,” agreed Eric. Although he wasn’t en
tirely sure. Last July, when he traveled to Illinois, he discovered that he had the curious ability to heal from wounds like this much faster than a normal person. Painful bite marks he’d received from a pack of angry imps had healed in only a few hours as much as most people healed in two days.
But then this past April he’d been stung by some kind of alien jellyfish thing and the local medium had sliced his hand to bleed out the toxin. For some reason, that injury hadn’t healed nearly as fast.
“I’m sure that had something to do with the weird circumstances,” Isabelle assured him, although she didn’t sound as confident as she usually did. “It was some pretty strong poison. I mean, you would’ve died if it hadn’t been for that ghost possessing your body.”
“Yeah. You’re probably right. What about that voice I heard?”
“Voice?”
“The one that told me to go into the dark.”
“Oh… Yeah… I’m guessing that was just your drugged brain playing tricks on you again.”
“I don’t think it was.” Everything had felt real while he was under the influence of Steampunk Monk’s freaky squirt bottle, but that voice had been even more real.
And why had it seemed so familiar? Where had he heard that voice before?
“I didn’t actually hear it,” said Isabelle. “I just kind of read your mind that you heard it. So I don’t know what it sounded like. Like I said, it was probably just another illusion.”
Eric walked down to the river’s edge and looked around. He could see one of the city’s bridges far to the left. If he was right, he was now on the other side of Main Street, probably somewhere behind the old waterworks building.
Maybe going under the bridge was what triggered that cave hallucination.
What had he looked like while in the throes of those illusions? Had he just been running from invisible things? Did he scream? Did anybody see him? That would be so embarrassing…
“I’m sure nobody saw you.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“Yes I am.”
Eric heard the beep of his call waiting.
“That’ll be Karen,” said Isabelle, and immediately disconnected.
Eric knew very well that it was Karen. He was surprised it took her this long. He accepted the call and, without waiting for her to speak, said, “I’m fine now.”
“What happened?” she asked. She sounded strange. Like she was sleepy.
“Oh, you know. Just your typical psychotic episode. Nothing to worry about.”
“Oh. Okay… Um… Can you tell me how it happened? Isabelle didn’t really explain it. You kind of just ran away.”
“I’m pretty sure I was just drugged by that steampunk monk we saw earlier today.”
“The weirdo in the red coat?”
“Even weirder than you think. He turned up at the gallery and shot me with a squirt bottle.”
“Just a squirt bottle?” she asked. “Not even, like, a blow dart or something?”
“That might’ve been a little less embarrassing.”
“Not many people get to say they were shot with a blow dart,” she agreed.
“Exactly.”
“People use squirt bottles on naughty cats.”
“Not dignified at all.”
Karen giggled. “Kitties.”
Eric frowned. “How’re you feeling?”
“Still loopy. And I still have a pretty bad headache. It’s hard to think straight. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Well just don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Take your time. Isabelle called Diane. She’s coming to pick me up.” Diane Shucker was one of Karen’s closest friends. She was one of the few people who knew all about Eric’s weird adventures.
“That’s good. I don’t want you driving.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“I know it’s supposed to annoy me when you call me that, but I can’t lie. I kind of like it.”
“That’s because you’re kind of a pervy old man.”
“Ah. That’s why.” He smiled. At least she hadn’t lost her wit. She kind of sounded like she did when she stayed up way too late.
“What did he have in it?” she asked.
He blinked. “What?”
“The squirt bottle. What was in it?”
“Hell if I know. Some kind of crazy psycho juice. Funky smelling stuff. Real foul.”
“What was he doing at the gallery?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll bet it has something to do with what happened in ’sixty-two.”
She fell quiet for a moment. Either she was considering the steampunk monk’s role in all of this or she was distracted by something shiny. At this point, it wasn’t entirely clear which was more likely.
He began walking toward the bridge. After a moment, he caught sight of the waterworks building, confirming that he was just north of the Main Street bridge, as he suspected. That meant that these buildings nearest him were the police station and city hall. Which was the perfect place to be stumbling around under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs…
(He was going to get arrested one of these days. He was sure of it.)
He set off toward the bridge and the Aberration station on the other side, hoping he didn’t run into anyone who might’ve seen him coming the other way.
“Do you think Steampunk Monk is an agent?” asked Karen.
“Too early to tell for sure.” He had a tendency to blame the nameless organization every time he encountered a mysterious stranger with terrible powers, but they weren’t always involved. Sometimes the crazy guy with the supernatural powers was working solo. “Whoever he is, I think he has a shard of Aiden Chadwick’s looking glass.”
“Really?” This seemed to perk her up. “It wasn’t the same shard, was it?”
“No. It was different. I’m sure of it.”
“That’s a relief.”
It was. He would’ve hated to even consider the possibility that the steampunk monk might’ve found Aiden and stolen the shard. He wouldn’t have given up such a treasure easily, given that it was likely the key to solving the mystery he’d dedicated his life to. It probably would’ve meant he was dead. But the shard that was fixed to those spectacles was a completely different shape. It was triangular. Aiden’s was diamond-shaped.
“Is it weird that Aiden keeps popping up?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.” He thought it was probably more likely that he, Aiden and Hector were all from Creek Bend.
“I never even got to meet Aiden.”
“What?”
“I never got to meet Aiden,” she repeated. “You found him. Had an adventure with him. Then he just zooms off on his motorcycle and disappears again.”
“Sorry.” Was he just slow, or was she bouncing around a lot in this conversation?
“Where are you now?”
“I’m heading south along the riverbank. There’s a walking path down here.” The river was on his right. On his left was a stone retaining wall. The path itself was taking him downhill, so that the retaining wall was growing taller as he walked. When it was about eight feet high, and the grassy lawn on the other side was completely out of sight, he discovered an arched opening and a heavy, steel gate just inside.
The gate had been secured by a chain until recently, but now it hung open, the chain dangling from the bars. The lock had been smashed. Clearly, whoever was here last didn’t have a key.
The meaning of the scene slowly sank in. “Aw crap…”
“What?”
Enter the darkness…
He turned and scanned the area around him. He wished this was just an eerie coincidence, but he’d stopped believing in those a while ago. Maybe on an ordinary day a coincidence might just be a coincidence, but not on a weird day. That he should happen upon a spooky, unlocked tunnel just minutes after hearing a mysterious voice tell him to enter the darkness… It was the kind of thing he’d learned not
to ignore.
But he didn’t like it.
“Eric?”
“I’m here.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m going to have to let you go. I have to go inside a spooky hole now.”
“Um…I know I’m not the most clear-headed person right now, but that sounds like a really bad idea.”
“I know.”
“You wait. Paul said he’ll be here as soon as he can gather up his tools. I guess he’s just finishing up work for the day.”
So that’s why it took so long for her to call him. She was calling in reinforcements. She always did that. When she became too concerned about him she’d call his big brother to come and help him out.
Although Paul usually wasn’t all that much help.
“You stay where you are,” he told her. “Wait for Diane.”
“Damn straight I’m staying here. I’m not going in a spooky hole. I went in the cool, deserted rec center and that turned out to be freaking terrifying. God, I’m going to see that thing’s wiener in my nightmares tonight. I just know it.”
“Fair enough. I’ll call you when I come back out.”
“Just wait for Paul!”
“Paul can catch up to me. I have to check this out.”
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
“You know I won’t.”
“You know I know no such thing.”
Eric had to let that one replay in his head for a second. It was quite a mouthful. “Right. Well, I’m going to lose my signal in a second, so I’m hanging up. Isabelle will be in touch if I need you.”
“Why don’t you just wait for Paul?”
“You know it never turns out well if I procrastinate.”
“That never stopped you from putting off mowing the lawn.”
“I’ve never almost been eaten while mowing the lawn.”
Karen growled. “Stubborn!”
“Goodbye.”
“Be careful!”
“Always,” he replied, then disconnected the call and looked down at the screen. “You ready?”
I AM
He peered into the darkness beyond the rusty gate. That made one of them.
