* * *
Dark memories that Marty had submerged in the depths of his mind swam their way back to the surface. He saw a younger version of himself standing with his mother in his parents’ bedroom. Daylight poured in through the mauve curtains. On the wall, a cuckoo clock noisily announced that it was ten o’clock in the morning. Little Marty watched the cuckoo bird sliding in and out of its house as his mother desperately searched his father’s drawers.
“What are you doing, Mom?”
“I have to know…” was all she said.
But he knew what she was talking about. She had to know what was making the bad smell come from Daddy’s basement.
She found what she was looking for, a key on a chain with a rabbit’s foot. In the den, she crept past his father, who was snoring heavily on the couch. Since he’d lost his job several months ago, he slept till the late afternoon. Not even Mom’s vacuuming could wake him up.
Marty followed his mother as she hurried to the kitchen and unlocked the basement door. When she opened it, a horrid smell rose from below that made both of them wince.
“It stinks down there, Mom.”
“Stay here,” she whispered, and then walked quietly down the stairs.
Unable to control his curiosity, Little Marty followed her.
* * *
Adult Marty now tested the first wooden step and then the second. The basement’s staircase groaned beneath his weight but held to the walls with relentless rusty nails. The pocked plaster walls created a narrow passage the first several feet, then the left wall gave way to open space. It was that stretch of blackness that scared him most. Marty made his way down until he reached the last step before the drop off. He had the sudden fear that hands were going to grab his legs and pull him into the darkness. He crouched and swished his flashlight beam around. The stone floor was about six feet down. He jumped and landed awkwardly, falling forward on his hands and knees. The flashlight rolled away and went out.
The darkness of the basement seemed to stretch on forever. The only light came from the top of the stairs. It barely lit up the wall beside him. He stared at the pitch blackness to his left, afraid of what might be waiting for him beyond. He felt around the stone floor until he found his flashlight. He shook it a few times and the light came back on.
The beam only lit up a few feet at a time. Mostly empty floor covered in filth and ghostly foot impressions of explorers who had come here before him. He found more cigarette butts and beer cans. The walls were made of gray cinderblocks. Cobwebs clung to the corners and dangled from the ceiling. It looked as if the spiders had abandoned this place too, having learned that any other house was a better place to hang their webs and wait for prey. A rotten workbench with a damp, moldy sheen was still mounted to one wall, the tools all removed. Marty flinched. He was breaking Daddy’s rule. He shouldn’t be here. He was going to be punished. His eyes went to the peg where his father’s belt used to hang. The peg was empty. His body reflexively anticipated the lashes he would receive.
The underbelly of the house still smelled, but not as bad as the day he and his mother mistakenly entered this forbidden place. That was where Vernon had carved up all the deer and wild boar he’d brought home after his hunting trips. He’d butchered the meat on a big table and then stuffed the ground-up parts into sausage tubes. Sometimes he’d go on a drinking binge and leave an animal carcass sitting on the table for days. Mom had constantly complained about the stink that drifted up into the house. She had gone to great extremes to mask the rotting smell. She’d deodorized every room with bowls of vinegar and sprayed the kitchen with pine-scented aerosols. But the bad smell kept getting worse, and Mom had finally reached her breaking point.
In a memory that filled Marty with a cold chill, he could see his younger self and his mom exploring Vernon Weaver’s secret lair. He had been a packrat, and in those days the room was cluttered with all the junk Mom wouldn’t let him keep upstairs―tacky furniture, camping and fishing gear. A moose head he’d purchased at a garage sale, mounted over a duct-taped couch. The wall over his workbench was completely covered in tools. His butcher table was stained red with a couple of knives and a bloody handsaw sitting on top of it.
As Marty and his mother moved toward the darkest part of the basement, the stench down here became unbearable.
At the center, a cinderblock divider separated the basement into two chambers. His mother stepped through an opening into that other room, switched on a light, and screamed. When Marty ran to his mother, he saw it. A sculpture made from madness towered above them. The human tree. Its trunk was made of female torsos stacked one atop the other, held together by baling wire. At the bottom of the trunk, human legs spanned its base like roots. At the top, a dozen severed arms stretched out like branches. The flesh had been carved with intricate designs. The trunk had breasts, navels, tattoos and piercings. In some places the flesh had bloated, in other places rotted and withered against ribcages. The heads of the six teenage girls had been mounted in a ring that wrapped around the tree, their jaws wired open in primal screams.
Marty’s mother wailed and fell to the floor in hysterics. Little Marty grabbed her arm and begged her to go. Then he heard a noise behind them. Daddy stood at the bottom of the staircase, holding a butcher knife.
Chapter 23
Spattered with his mother’s blood, young Marty had narrowly escaped to the Buckners’ house next door and they had called 911. When police stormed the house, they found a blood-soaked Vernon Weaver sitting on the couch, watching TV and drinking a beer.
The media nicknamed him “The Death Sculptor”. He had been the one abducting college girls in four Oregon counties. When Marty and his mother were away, Vernon had brought the girls down to the basement, dismembered them, and then reassembled their parts into what he passionately told the court was his greatest creation. He was convicted to several lifetimes in prison. His father behind bars was the only reason Marty had the courage to explore the basement for the first time since The Bad Thing happened.
He heard a dry, papery sound in the darkness ahead. His flashlight caught something white moving past the jagged opening in the cinderblocks. Was someone down here? Had he spooked a homeless person who had turned this hellhole into a shelter?
Marty’s footsteps echoed off the walls as he approached the second chamber. He stepped through the open doorway, panned his light from left to right. This section was empty too. Except for the old well at the back, there was no place to hide. Marty eased towards the circular stone hole. As a boy he’d been afraid of that well. It had been here when they moved in, a permanent fixture from the 1930s. His father joked that the well led straight down to hell.
Marty peered into it. Five feet down was stagnant black water covered with a layer of scum.
Another sound behind him. He whirled with the flashlight. The beam lit up a woman’s ghost.
It took Marty a moment to comprehend what he was seeing. Her face and chest were riddled with stab wounds, her clothes stained with blood. One of her eye sockets was an empty crater. The other eye looked at him with terror.
He felt overwhelmed with emotions—shock, horror, grief. “Oh God…M-Mom?”
She stared a moment, then her eye filled with recognition. “Marty?”
“It’s me, Mom…” He tried to hug her, but his arms passed through her.
“Marty, sweetie.” She cried as she examined the paper that formed his face. “What happened to you?”
He shook his head, not knowing where to start. He couldn’t believe that he was actually seeing her. “Have you been down here this whole time?”
She nodded. “He imprisoned me here.”
“Who?” he asked, but then suddenly knew by her expression. “Dad?”
She nodded. “As long as he’s alive, I can’t leave.”
“But he’s in prison.”
“Only his body. They can’t lock away his mind.”
Marty tried to make sense of what she was sayin
g.
“Your father visits me when he sleeps,” she explained. “His dreams are like doorways.”
“How?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know but he keeps coming back. He punishes me endlessly.”
Marty paced. He never expected to find his mother trapped down here. Seeing all her mortal wounds, how badly his father had disfigured her, brought up all the rage Marty had tried to submerge as a child. “I’ll kill that bastard!”
“No, stay away from him. He’s too powerful in the other world.”
“What other world?”
“He calls it ‘Telluria. The dominion where dark artists meet.’ Your father brings them here sometimes, the artists. Makes me watch them do hideous acts. ”
“Then I’ll wait for them to return.”
“No, you must go,” she warned.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“It’s too dangerous for you to stay.”
Behind him the water in the well bubbled.
His mother backed away. “Son, leave now. Hurry.”
A choir of tortured voices cried out from the hole. Black oily water rose and poured over the edge.
Marty backed away.
The water spread, moving towards his feet. It oozed up the walls.
At the well, several arms broke the surface. Pale hands gripped the edges of the stone circle. The human tree pulled itself up from the muck, its flesh covered in sludge.
Marty stood frozen as the thing rose to the ceiling. All the arm branches clawed at the air with animated movements. In its fleshy trunk, a half-dozen heads moved their jaws up and down, gibbering.
Where the water spread up the walls, doorways opened to another realm. From beyond, the soul snatchers screeched.
The human tree leapt onto the stone floor with a wet, squishing sound, and its many centipede legs slapped the floor as the monstrosity moved towards him.
“Run, Mom!” Marty tried to grab her arm but his hand passed through her. She dashed ahead of him, into the darkness.
Behind him the tree swiped claws across his back.
He bolted through the jagged doorway to the first room and reached the broken staircase. He looked around for his mother. She remained at the center of the basement, the black water pooling around her. She sobbed. “I can’t go with you. Go, Marty!”
The water spread fast as the overflowing well flooded the basement. More portals opened in the ooze that covered the walls.
“Martyyyy…” Cerulean’s voice called from another realm. “We’re coming for youuuuu…”
It was then that Marty saw his old friend in the flesh as it drifted towards one of the portals. The demon’s body and head defied understanding. It had slimy skin like a bottom-feeder fish, with gills across its chest. The face was a pool of eels swimming in black oil. Then the face split and a mouth with a thousand needle-like teeth opened vertically, like a Venus flytrap. From its body, dark tentacles shot through the wall’s portal, slithered along the ceiling and swam across the water like snakes.
Marty turned for the broken staircase. He leapt up and gripped the bottom stair. Below him the water rose. The tentacles whipped through the air, wrapped around his ankles. He kicked at them. It took all his strength not to be pulled into the water. With his flashlight, he hammered the feelers until they slipped loose from his legs.
Behind him the human tree howled with the voices of shattered souls, reached for him with its many arms. He had pulled himself halfway up the stairs when the tree creature rammed into the staircase. Its arms clawed at his feet, tore his jeans. Faces covered in slime twisted. The lost souls of the girls murdered by his father pleaded for Marty to save them. And then the skin at the trunk split and gave birth to Tara’s bloody face. She looked at him with white, grub-worm eyes.
“You belong with us, Stalker Boy.”
Marty kicked at the tree’s hands as he backed up the stairs. He reached the kitchen and pushed the basement door closed. Nails scraped the other side. He held the door shut with his back as he caught his breath. The clawing hands finally retreated. He thought he’d escaped them, but then heard more shrieks in the den.
The walls and cabinets in the kitchen began to crack. Marty got to his feet and ran for the back door. As he passed by the den, he saw the dark-stained walls had opened and more hideous creatures were coming from that other world.
He raced outside. The sky had changed. Turned charcoal gray. The white boards on his house blackened. The shrubs and trees in the backyard wilted. Grass turned brown.
“Oh God…” Marty stumbled. He had to get to his car. Get far away from here.
What sounded like hellhounds growled from his house.
As he ran, he looked over his shoulder. A pack of four-legged phantasms charged out the back door. Marty circled his car and climbed inside. He slammed the door just in time.
The black mist of their bodies turned solid as the hounds barked at his windows. One creature jumped on the hood, growling at the windshield. Their hides were covered in long porcupine quills. Their faces split open like flowers with needle teeth. Their thorny tails hammered the car.
Marty fumbled to get his keys out of his pocket. They fell on the floor. As he felt the carpet around his feet, glistening mouths pressed against his windows. The passenger window cracked.
He found the key ring. Jammed the car key into the ignition. The Monte Carlo growled like a beast. He slammed his foot on the gas and sped in reverse down the driveway.
The creature on the hood fell off and rolled. The other hellhounds chased his car. Marty spun the wheel, backing into a thicket of shrubs, slammed the car into drive, and shot forward down the street on screeching tires.
The hellhounds chased him a couple blocks. He watched them in his rearview mirror as they finally came to a stop, barking at the top of a hill.
As he drove pell-mell through the neighborhood, all the houses became charred as if burning from within. Front doors opened and ungodly things shrieked from inside. In each of the doorways, he saw shadowy figures wielding sharp tools. The soul snatchers had found him, and now his world was melting away, becoming Cerulean’s world.
Chapter 24
The sky and buildings had changed back to normal by the time Marty got to the center of town. The cancer that was eating away Riverdale had not yet reached the campus. He took refuge in the only place he thought might be safe. To him, the gardens of St. Germaine were the most sacred place on earth. It was where he had fallen in love with Jennifer Dalton. Marty prayed that Cerulean’s dominion only stretched so far and that this was God’s territory.
Marty hid inside the greenhouse, but stayed close to a window. The afternoon sky remained blue. The old limestone buildings held their gray pallor. The chapel bells tolled like any other day. He seemed safe for now, but how long would it be before this world melted away completely and there was nowhere left to hide?
He shuddered at the thought of his mother imprisoned in that basement, forced to watch whatever nightly atrocities his father committed.
“I have to do something.” Marty couldn’t leave her there. She deserved a better afterlife, if that were possible for a soul as shattered as hers. Even in death Marty wanted to believe that some form of heaven existed. He remembered Skylar’s spirit had floated upward towards a peaceful light. Marty so desperately wanted to ascend to that place and take his mother with him.
Saving her was his purpose for staying behind, he realized, not vengeance.
Killing all those people had been Cerulean’s doing.
Marty felt a strong conviction to fulfill his higher purpose. He got an idea, but he needed help to pull it off. He called the one person he could trust.
Jennifer answered after the first ring. “Who is this?” She sounded like she had been crying. “Why are you calling from Marty’s phone?”
“It’s me, Marty.”
“No, it can’t…Marty’s dead.” She sniffed.
“What do you mean?” he asked
, wondering how she knew.
“It’s all over the news. Marty’s body was found in the lake. He’s gone.” She cried some more and he was shocked to hear how much she cared. When she composed herself, she asked again, “Who is this?”
“Jennifer, this is going to sound strange, but I need you to believe me. I’m dead, but my spirit is still here.”
“Is this some kind of sick prank?”
“Jen, I’m telling the truth. Please, believe me, it’s Shakespeare.” When he heard only tears and sniffing on the other end, he said, “Did you find the poem I slipped under your door?”
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