by Brian Harmon
Something about the window?
He turned and scanned the other walls, but he didn’t see anything else.
“What’re you doing now?” asked Jay.
But Eric ignored him. There was a shovel hanging on the wall, obscuring some of the wood. He took it down and found what he was looking for. The letters “H” and “C” were carved there. Above these letters was a horizontal line and below them was an arrow pointing down.
HC.
Hector Conant.
Following the arrow, he looked down at the floor and realized that there was something there, too. He moved aside a bag of fertilizer and uncovered a large “X” scratched into the concrete.
X marks the spot.
Jay watched him, confused. “Do you do stuff like this everywhere you go?”
Still ignoring him, he turned and looked at the arrows again. From the proper vantage point…
He stood on the X and looked out the window. From here, he could see the back door of the bungalow. If he held his fingers up to those arrows and followed them to where they converged, they were pointing at a random point in the grass some distance in front of the porch steps.
Did he bury the next letter in the yard?
That didn’t seem right.
He thought about it for a moment. Hector was twelve. He wouldn’t have been fully grown yet. Eric was short, but he was taller than most twelve-year-olds, meaning that if he had this right, he was going to need to be looking at those arrows from a slightly lower vantage point.
But where, exactly?
He looked at the initials again. He looked at the line drawn above the initials. That was the final clue. That was likely eye level.
Eric hunched down to the proper level and tried again.
This time, the arrows converged on the porch.
“Gotcha!” he sighed.
Jay leaned over and looked out the window, still confused. “What?”
“Come on.”
“Where’re we going now?”
Eric left the shed and hurried toward the bungalow. He was impressed. Not only had Hector actually escaped that situation, he’d also managed to leave him a clever puzzle pointing to the location of the next letter. He was turning out to be an incredibly resourceful kid.
(Meanwhile, most of his students, though older than him by two to six years, lacked the resourcefulness to find three sources for their research papers that didn’t include a children’s book, Wikipedia or an episode of Supernatural.)
He ran up to the back porch, but didn’t take the stairs. Instead, he knelt down and peered through the lattice.
It was there, all the way back by the foundation, half-buried in five and a half decades of dirt.
A liquor bottle sealed with wax.
He must’ve reached under the lattice and tossed it.
“What’re you doing?”
Eric examined the porch. He wasn’t going to be able to reach it without taking the lattice down. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t too polite to vandalize property owned by an evil, nameless organization.
He got a grip on it and yanked, ripping it away from the porch and opening up a hole big enough for him to crawl through.
As he tossed the broken lattice aside, however, he heard something break inside the house.
Jay heard it, too. Their eyes met, mirror images of the panic they both felt.
Someone was home.
Jay withdrew the gun.
Eric raised up and peered over the porch at the back door.
It was mostly glass. He could see someone moving around inside.
“We need to get out of here,” said Jay.
“Not without that next letter,” said Eric.
Jay didn’t get a chance to argue whether it was worth it. At that moment, something monstrous came crashing through the door.
Chapter Forty-Five
The creature charged across the porch and plowed straight through the railing, forcing Eric to dive out of the way.
At first glance, he thought the thing was some kind of centaur. It had a long, beast-like lower body with four legs and an upper torso with two arms and a round head. But as he rolled away from it and rose to his knees, he saw that it was neither half-horse nor half-man. It was much smaller than a horse, for starters. More like a large goat. It didn’t have hooves, but rather strange, monkey-like feet and a thick, muscular tail that beat the ground behind it with bone-shattering force. Its upper body was the size of a child, but with big, powerful arms and huge, bony fists. It had no hair and its face looked like some kind of bald rodent, with huge, protruding front teeth, tiny, black eyes and almost no visible nose.
It was also female, if its flat, flopping breasts were any indication.
This was almost certainly a part of Mistress Janet’s bizarre collection of alien monsters. But what was it doing here, of all places?
But now that he was thinking about it, didn’t she say something about coming back here to give him a present? Was this what she was talking about? This was the nasty little surprise she wanted him to find when he found his way out of the basement?
It made sense, really. It was no different than opening those cell doors while he was in the middle of the hallway, just to see him use his “powers.” She probably hoped to stick around and watch him kill the thing.
Instead, she must’ve locked the thing in the house in hopes that he’d find an excuse to come back.
She was seriously starting to piss him off.
The monster turned toward him and hissed.
His thoughts snapped back to the task before him. He rose to his feet and began backing away, but there was nowhere to go. And he certainly wasn’t going to be able to outrun it.
Three shots rang out. The creature jerked and turned away from him, revealing three bloody holes between its shoulder blades.
Jay stood on the other side of it, his gun in his hands, staring back at the beast. The terror on his face was unmistakable and unsurprising, given that the thing shouldn’t still be alive. A human would’ve dropped dead with three bullet wounds into the back of the chest cavity, but this thing didn’t appear to be slowing down at all. It pounded the ground with its tail, let out a piercing shriek and then charged him.
He staggered backward and emptied the rest of his weapon into the creature’s chest, but it was no use. It was on him in an instant, seizing him with those powerful, bony hands. He barely had time to cry out before those razor-sharp teeth sank into his neck.
Panicking, Eric snatched up a broken piece of the railing and hit the creature as hard as he could. The effort was just enough to get the beast’s attention. It turned and snarled at him.
At this point, some of his senses returned to him and he dropped the board.
But it was too late to run away.
The monster rose to its full height and turned to face him, its chest full of oozing bullet holes, Jay’s blood dripping from its snout.
“Aw hell…”
The monster’s strange, monkey feet pawed at the ground as it prepared to charge him.
Thinking fast, Eric bolted toward the house and launched himself headfirst into the hole he’d made in the porch lattice.
The monster was far too big to fit in that hole as it was, but neither was it giving up without a fight. It dropped onto its knees and began to crawl in after him, pushing itself with its monkey feet and clawing at the dirt with its bony hands.
Eric wormed his way deeper under the porch, army crawling on his forearms, forcing himself all the way back to the bungalow’s foundation, cursing the whole way.
He didn’t think it was possible, but inch by inch the monster drew closer, its bony hands clawing at the dirt, its gore-covered face screeching at him.
He could hear its tail pounding against the earth behind it.
This was one of those bad situations he was always getting himself into.
He reached the wall and turned himself, flattening himself against the concrete. He was
out of room, and yet the monster was still coming. It was almost on him and he had nowhere left to go.
Then his elbow struck something. He heard glass clink against concrete.
Hector’s letter.
The bottle.
He snatched it up, smashed it against the foundation and then turned and thrust the broken end into the monster’s face, plunging it deep into its eye.
The monster shrieked in pain. It thrashed. It clawed at its face.
Eric turned himself so that his shoulders were against the wall and drew his knees up to his chest. Then he thrust both his feet out and kicked at the end of the bottle. He missed. All he did was kick the beast in its protruding teeth, further enraging it. One bony hand clamped down on his ankle.
He cried out, frustrated and terrified as it began dragging him toward it. He only had one more chance at this. He aimed carefully with his free foot and kicked. This time, his aim was true. He struck the lip of the bottle squarely, driving the glass all the way into the monster’s brain.
Finally, it went limp.
His heart pounding, Eric yanked his foot free, plucked the letter out of the broken shards of glass and began the awkward task of crawling back out from under the porch.
He had to kick out a new hole to leave, since the monster’s huge butt was blocking the first one.
Finally free, he stood up, dusted himself off and then hurried over to check on Jay.
He was dead.
Well…for now, anyway.
He checked for a pulse. Not to make sure he was dead. That was fairly obvious. There was a nasty gash tore out of his neck and a vast amount of blood soaking into the grass beneath him. And his eyes were open, blank and glazed. But Jay had been dead twice before already today, and he was hoping that maybe there was a flutter of a pulse to indicate that he might be on his way back soon.
There wasn’t.
What the hell was he supposed to do now?
He couldn’t just leave him here. He was going to be waking up in a little while. (He hoped…)
And who knew what other surprises might be waiting around here.
He looked down at Hector’s letter. Then he looked at the broken back door and shattered railing. He glanced over at the tool shed where Hector once waited to be tortured and killed. He looked at the dead monster’s repulsive ass sticking out from under the porch. And then he looked back down at Jay’s lifeless body again.
I GUESS ALL YOU CAN DO IS WAIT FOR HIM TO WAKE UP?
“I guess.” But how long would it take? Minutes? Hours? He couldn’t remember how much time passed between the times when he saw him alive and dead. At most it couldn’t have been much more than an hour or two. Right?
He sighed and sat down on the porch steps. With no idea what else to do, he unrolled Hector’s letter and began to read.
Chapter Forty-Six
I don’t know how long I sat there in that empty shed, waiting on the men in the gray suits. It felt like hours.
I did as my dream showed me and I dropped all of my letters out the window. Most of the pages dropped straight down and scattered on the ground behind the bush. One page fluttered off and landed on the grass, where it threatened to blow away in the breeze.
I don’t understand why I was supposed to do that. Did you get them, I wonder? Did they somehow find their way to you? Because it seems to me that the only ones who might find them are the men in the gray suits.
Did you get any of them?
Do you even exist? Or have you been just a figment of my imagination this whole time?
No. I can’t start doubting myself now. I have work to do.
I was sitting against the back wall when someone opened the padlock on the door. I watched it swing open. I saw the silhouette that appeared there.
It was the fat one.
I scrambled to my feet and pressed my back against the wall, ready to defend myself. But I was hardly a dangerous, cornered animal. I’m pretty sure that I would’ve thrown up if I hadn’t skipped breakfast, and I think it showed.
He stood there in the open doorway for a moment, staring at me, taking me in.
I stared back at him, willing myself to not look afraid, although inside I was practically sobbing. I couldn’t stop thinking about the dead woman’s terrible screaming and bloody eyes.
He was going to do that to me, too. I was sure of it.
When he finally spoke, he said, “You don’t look like much.”
I had no idea what that meant, so I continued to keep quiet. I was afraid my voice would reveal how terrified I was.
“My partner thinks you’ve been causing trouble,” he said. “He says you’ve been sneaking around, spying on us.”
I kept my mouth shut.
It didn’t intimidate him at all. He just smiled at me. “You see, he has this…talent. He’s in tune with the energy of the world around him. It’s like a sixth sense, almost.”
He took a step into the shed. He didn’t bother closing the door behind him. He didn’t have to. There was no way I was going to escape around his huge girth.
“It’s a very handy talent. He can sense when something’s changed in his environment. Pretty cool, right?”
He waited for a response, but I didn’t give it to him. I kept quiet. I didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing how much he frightened me.
“You see, the world is full of energy. All kinds of energy. And everything that happens in the world disrupts those energies in some small way or another. He can feel those disruptions.” He bent over a little, leaning closer to me. “For example, he says that you are having a particularly peculiar effect on the energy around you.” His evil smile widened a little. “That means he can feel when you’re near. Whether it’s snooping around that car of his or poking around the activity center. Or hiding in that old wardrobe in the basement.”
I was so stupid.
They knew I was there all along.
He stood up straight again. “He didn’t realize it was you, at first. He’d never felt anything like it before. It confused him. He thought it had something to do with this town, some sort of interference. It wasn’t until he felt you hiding in the basement that he realized there was an actual person behind it and started piecing it all together. He almost confronted you there, but that witch started messing with his mind, trying to protect you for some reason.”
Suddenly, I remembered the way that woman’s mouth was moving when the tall man started walking toward the closet, as if she were muttering something. Was she casting a spell to shield me? Was she really protecting me, even though she didn’t even know me?
“He started thinking it was just her, trying to confuse him. But then after she was dead, you were still there. By then, he’d decided to let you go. He wanted to see what you did next. He was curious.” He nodded his chubby head. “You don’t disappoint. We knew you wouldn’t go to the police. They’d never believe you. We figured you’d keep snooping around, instead. But we never dreamed you’d steal the book.” He pointed a chubby finger at me. “That was ballsy.”
I tried my best to look confused about that last part. Book? What book? I don’t know of any book. But I didn’t dare speak. Somehow, I knew my voice would give me away. I wasn’t sure it would’ve worked anyway. I might have just squeaked at him.
He gave a big, dramatic sigh. “I’m impressed. I really am. But the thing is, I’m going to need that book back.”
I gave him my best “I’m not following you” face, but he didn’t seem convinced. I didn’t blame him. I’m sure my eyes told the truth. This man was terrifying me.
He smiled again. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. It was an evil smile. “Where is it, son?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. The words came out evenly. It was like when I was talking to Sherry. Almost as if someone else were speaking them for me.
That smile didn’t falter at all. If anything, it widened a little. “You don’t have to tell me. If I’m going t
o be honest, I kind of prefer it if you don’t. It’s more fun that way. For me, anyway. Not so much for you.”
My heart was pounding. I felt sick to my stomach. I’ve never been that terrified in my life. Inside, I was screaming. I wanted to do what he said because I didn’t want him to do to me what he did to Zachery and that woman. I didn’t want him to make me understand him. I didn’t want him to hurt me. I’d give him whatever he wanted if he just didn’t hurt me.
But what he wanted was the book.
And the book is mine.
I told him to go fuck himself.
He gave me his biggest smile yet. He was going to enjoy this, that smile said. A lot.
He moved toward me.
I lunged forward and threw my best punch at his thick gut. I hoped to knock the wind out of him and buy myself a few more seconds, maybe even a chance to escape. But he easily deflected my punch and countered. He struck me in the chest, knocking me back against the wall. Then his fat hand was clamped down on my throat.
I have to admit, he was surprisingly fast for a fat man.
He grinned at me. “I don’t think we understand each other,” he said.
I shook my head. I tried to tell him I didn’t want to understand, but I couldn’t speak. He was choking me. All I could do was stare back at him. I looked into his eyes and suddenly I couldn’t look away. They seemed surprisingly soft. Evil men shouldn’t have eyes that soft. Evil men should have evil eyes. These almost looked like the eyes of a kindly grandfather.
But I didn’t have time to contemplate the fat man’s eyes.
That’s when the pain began.
It started in my head, behind my eyeballs, a piercing, agonizing pain, like an ice cream headache, only a thousand times worse. Then it began to spread. It felt like molten lead snaking through my brain, burning a path that stretched into my jaws and then my ears. Fire ran down my neck, deep into my chest. It was like white-hot blades sliding between my ribs, carving into my heart and lungs, setting them ablaze.
