The Influence

by Bentley Little

  But sleep she did, eventually, and she dreamed that all of her friends and family were planning a surprise birthday party for her. Only…when she walked into the room and they jumped out and yelled “Surprise!”, they were standing behind a black birthday cake with black candles, and the smoke from the candles coalesced above their heads into the shape of a terrible horned demon.

  FIFTEEN

  Dylan didn’t remember Mr. Noodle.

  Darla ate dinner silently as Tom and Dylan talked enthusiastically about who they thought would be in the playoffs this year. She felt sad. When he was younger, she and her son had done everything together: making beds, making lunch, dusting the furniture, reading books, playing games. She’d been there for every moment of his life, had suffered through Teletubbies and Barney, had sung along with Sesame Street songs and laughed with him at the slapstick antics of his favorite character, Mr. Noodle, on Elmo’s World. Today, she’d discovered that he didn’t even remember Mr. Noodle. It had come up casually in a conversation, and when he’d stared at her blankly after she’d made the reference, Darla realized for the first time that all of those special moments they’d shared, all of those memories she thought they’d been building, were completely one-sided. She had memories. He didn’t. And she had never felt so depressed in her life.

  Still, she looked at him across the table and realized how lucky she was, how lucky she and Tom both were. They had a great kid, a wonderful family, and God had blessed them. It was churlish of her to worry about and obsess over such a small and ultimately insignificant matter as Mr. Noodle. But finding out that he’d forgotten about the Elmo’s World character was symptomatic of a larger realization: Dylan was growing up.

  Darla experienced a profound sense of loss. They’d done so many things together, but there were so many things they hadn’t done, things he was too old to do now, and she wished that every year of his childhood could last five years so they would have time to do it all.

  Now that he was ten, he was moving away from her emotionally, toward Tom, and while that was the way it should be, she still didn’t have to like it.

  In fact, there were a lot of things she didn’t like.

  She’d found herself distracted lately. Yesterday, for example, she was pretty sure Lita had stopped by to see her, but when she tried to recall the visit, nothing came to mind. She could not for the life of her remember why Lita had come over or what they had talked about or how long she had stayed.

  Something was wrong. Something had been wrong for awhile now. Things had not been right since…

  She didn’t want to think about it.

  Except she could think of almost nothing else.

  Darla had never been religious, but she was seriously considering going to Father Ramos’ church. He seemed like a good man, a nice man, and from what everyone said, he had a handle on what was going on here. Maybe he could explain to her what was happening.

  Explain what was happening?

  That wasn’t really why she was thinking of going to church, was it?

  No.

  She’d had the fear of God put into her.

  She’d heard that phrase all her life—the fear of God—but until now had not really known what it meant. The New Year’s party had changed that, and everything that had happened since was just further confirmation. Like the Wizard of Oz, God was great and terrible, and those who incurred His wrath, as they all had, were doomed to suffer His punishments.

  Tom and Dylan were laughing at some sports joke, and she smiled with them, though she had no idea what was so funny. She felt sad again, looking at her boy, the fear abating for a moment. Everything seemed to be falling apart, and she wished it was six years ago and Dylan was four, and that damn New Year’s Eve party had never happened.

  ****

  Weekends were boring.

  Dylan would have preferred to attend school seven days a week. It was a long bus ride to Willcox, but it was worth it because other kids were there. He had friends at school, other boys he could play with. Here at home, he was pretty much stuck with his parents, and while he loved them and all, they weren’t that much fun to hang around, and he usually spent a lot of time by himself.

  There were other kids in Magdalena and the surrounding area, but not that many and none his own age.

  Often, when he tired of playing computer games and his dad was too busy to throw the ball around and there was nothing worthwhile on TV and he wasn’t in the mood to watch a DVD, Dylan ended up hiking by himself near the M mountain. He didn’t know if the mountain had a real name, but that was what the people in town called it, and he had actually gone up to the M before and walked around the giant letter. He’d even sat in the middle of it. From down by his house, the M looked like it was made of white powder, like the stuff they used to mark off a football field or draw the lines between bases, but when you got up close, it was actually made up of boulders painted white and arranged in the shape of the letter.

  The trails on the mountain branched off in seemingly infinite directions, and he wasn’t sure if some of them were animal paths or if they were all manmade. Sometimes he saw other people hiking, couples mostly, adults, but he liked it better when he was by himself and there was no one else in sight.

  Like today.

  Dylan walked up a narrow switchback trail he’d never been on before. There were hoofprints on the hardpacked dirt, though no shoeprints other than his own, as far as he could tell. He should have brought some bottled water—his mom was always on him about that—but the day was pretty cool and he didn’t plan to be gone that long.

  From up ahead, behind a large outcropping of rock that looked almost like a miniature castle, Dylan heard what sounded like two kids talking. One of them laughed at something the other one said, and Dylan’s heart sped up with what could have been excitement, could have been apprehension. For this had the potential to go either way. The kids might be happy to have someone new to play with and welcome him to their hideout, or they might resent the fact that he’d discovered their secret spot and start throwing rocks at him.

  He approached cautiously, not sure whether to announce his presence.

  The boulders that made up the outcropping were larger than they’d appeared from further back, and he could see spaces between them that looked almost like passageways. Cool, he thought.

  “Hey!” Dylan called out. “Is anyone there?”

  He knew there was, and figured he could judge by the response he received whether he should continue on. But the kids ignored him, kept talking and laughing amongst themselves, and he realized that he could not make out a single word they were saying. That was odd. This close, he should have been able to hear them more clearly, and he wondered if the reason neither of them had responded to his shout out was because they couldn’t hear him. Sound did strange things when you were up here.

  The path ended at the edge of the outcropping, and he stood next to a pillar-like boulder, yelling into the space between it and the cliffside. “Hello!”

  The other kids did not respond, although they both burst out laughing before continuing with their conversation. They were messing with him, Dylan thought, and the idea so annoyed him that he picked up a couple of pebbles from the ground and slid between the rocks as quietly as he could, intending to scare those brats within an inch of their lives. If he’d had the ability to do a deep voice, he would have pretended to be an adult, but since that option was out, he thought he’d throw the pebbles up at the cliff, above where they were, and fool them into thinking there was an avalanche.

  It was a good plan, and he stopped, peeked out from between the boulders at a flat open space surrounded by tall rock, and saw—

  —no one.

  The kids were laughing. He could hear their voices coming from the small area directly in front of him, but there was no sign of anyone around. He stepped out, looked in each direction, thinking that his ears had been playing tricks on him, that maybe they’d detected his presence and were
hiding between other boulders, waiting to jump out at him. But, no, despite the voices, he was the only one here.

  Except…

  Except at the other end of the flat space there were two mounds of mud, each about two feet high.

  That was weird, he thought. How could there be mud here? It hadn’t rained recently, and there were no ponds or streams nearby.

  The mound on the right shifted, a section of mud sliding off to reveal what appeared to be the decaying body of a bobcat beneath. The dead animal’s blackened mouth opened and closed, and Dylan saw that the movement matched the nonsensical words spoken by one of the voices.

  Mud fell from the mound on the left, exposing a dead bird encased in the center of the wet dirt, and the bird’s rotted head jiggled up and down in time to the second voice’s responding laughter.

  He’d been confused when he’d stepped out from between the rocks, but now he was confused and scared. Swiveling around, intending to retreat and run back the way he’d come, Dylan was confronted by a pack of small creatures hopping out from the passageway through which he’d arrived. They resembled tiny kangaroos more than anything else, tiny kangaroos with rat faces and lizard skin, and they screamed angrily at him in high-pitched voices far too loud for their size.

  Behind him, the animal corpses in melting mud laughed uproariously.

  Dylan started to cry. He still had the pebbles in his hand, and he threw them one-by-one at the small creatures hopping toward him, but he missed every time, and one of the little monsters jumped directly in front of him, screeching. Even through his tears, he could see the look of hatred on the tiny rat face, see the sharp thin fangs in the wide-open mouth. Sobbing in fear and frustration, he called out “Mom!” at the top of his lungs.

  It was an instinctive reaction, a plea for help that had no hope of being answered. His mom was not here, and she would not be able to hear him from this far away. No one in town could hear him, and he suddenly realized that he could die up here and it would be weeks before anyone found his body.

  Turning, he ran across the open area, between the laughing mounds of mud, and attempted to climb the boulders at the opposite end. The rocks were high with no footholds, and he scrambled in vain, trying to get up and out. There were no other paths save the one that had led him here, and his attempts to climb grew more frantic as he heard the approaching screams of those hopping creatures.

  “Mom!” he cried again.

  One of them leaped onto his back, claws digging into his skin and holding on. The pain was unbearable and overwhelming, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It felt as though he was being cut with razors, and he flailed about, hitting at his back, trying to get it off, lurching from side to side, screaming so loudly that his throat burned.

  Someone somewhere was calling his name, but he couldn’t focus on that because more of those hopping monsters were jumping onto him, and he instinctively turned around, shoving his back against the boulder, trying to squish them, trying to kill them, trying to get them off, but they held on and dug in, slicing open his flesh, and he saw more of them coming, hopping happily across the open space toward him, fangs bared.

  One of them either bit or clawed open his right ankle, and he collapsed on the ground, that leg no longer able to support him.

  He knew he was going to die. He was still screaming from the pain, still crying from the fear, but inside himself, beneath it all, was a strange stillness that allowed him for his last few moments of life to see everything as though it was happening to someone else. He heard his name called again and knew this time that it came from the rotted bobcat encased in mud.

  Next to it, in the other mound of mud, the corpse of the bird laughed like a boy.

  And then there was nothing but pain.

  SIXTEEN

  Jill poured herself a cup of green tea, popped in an old Tori Amos CD, took out a pencil and opened up her sketchbook.

  She hadn’t felt much like painting since meeting Ross, although she did not think the two had anything to do with each other; the timing was completely coincidental as far as she was concerned. She’d continued to sketch, however, and she paused for a moment to glance over her recent work, frowning as she turned the pages. Now that she looked at them, the subjects of her drawings were all sort of…gruesome.

  There was a detailed rendering of an eviscerated lizard she had found on her doorstep; a depiction of a dead child inspired by a recent news story; a close-up of a bloody eyeball; several examples of grotesquely deformed genitalia, and a fantastical landscape populated by hairy monsters recalled from childhood nightmares.

  Unusual, to say the least, but Jill had never been one to censor or second guess herself, and, turning to a blank page, she started to sketch something new. An instinctive artist, she liked to draw whatever came to her, without thinking about it or planning it out, and this time she found herself penciling in a dark room filled with cobwebs and farming implements. She worked from the outside in, the opposite of her usual method, sketching the room, its walls and roof, leaving an empty white space at the center. Whatever was supposed to fill that hole was the focal point of the drawing, was the reason she had started the sketch, but now that she was here, she was afraid to continue on. She had no idea what she would draw if she kept going, but she was afraid to find out, and she quickly flipped the page, starting instead on a purposefully benign picture: the mountains visible through the window behind her house.

  The CD ended, and for several seconds the house was silent save for the scratching of her pencil on paper. Then, from the kitchen, came the familiar sound of paws padding across linoleum, accompanied by the equally familiar jangle of dogtag on collar.

  “Puka?” Jill said. She stopped drawing, put down her pad and pencil, and hurried out to the kitchen.

  Where the back door was open.

  And Puka, her golden retriever, was walking in a circle in the middle of the floor.

  She almost didn’t recognize him. Most of his fur had fallen out, and what remained were spiky tufts. One of his eyes had been burned out of his head, leaving only a blackened cauterized socket, and the other rolled around uncontrollably, while, beneath it, bone showed through an exposed nasal cavity.

  “Puka!” she cried, rushing to the dog and falling to her knees next to him. How had this happened? And when? She hadn’t seen her missing pet since he’d swooped in and taken the crow that had crashed into her window, but he’d looked fine then. Had some psycho been torturing him? Had he been involved in a series of unique and unfortunate accidents?

  She tried to hug him, but he backed away from her, growled, then sped out the door.

  How the dog could see with one eye gone and the other rolling around randomly in its socket she had no idea, but he did not bump into the cupboard or the wall, and he sped surefootedly through the brush away from the house as she frantically called his name. “Puka! Puka!”

  She almost called someone—Ross was the first person she thought about, interestingly—but the dog was already out of sight, and no one would be able to find him and bring him back. There were tears in her eyes as she realized that this might be the last time she ever saw Puka. In the shape he was in, the odds that he would be able to survive on his own in the wild were virtually nil.

  How did he get to be in the shape he was in? she wondered. What had happened to him?

  And how had he gotten into the house? That door had been closed and locked since yesterday afternoon. If she hadn’t opened it, who had?

  Jill suddenly wished she had called someone. What if the same sicko who’d tortured Puka had brought him back home and purposely placed him in the kitchen?

  Even if it were possible, she was sure the person wasn’t in the house. She’d walked past every room, and she would have seen him or heard him. Still, just in case, she took a cleaver from the knife rack and opened every closet and cupboard in the house, even those too small for someone to hide inside. As she’d known, the rooms were all empty, there was
no one there, and she locked the doors, taking a moment to peek out each of the windows to make sure she saw no one unfamiliar anywhere near the house. Most of her neighbors were out, but Shan Cooper was home—she saw his battered El Camino in the carport—and she gave him a quick call to find out if he’d seen anything unusual. He hadn’t (he sounded as though he’d either just woken up or was drunk), but she warned him that there was a possible dognapper in the area and told him to keep his eyes open.

  Shan had several bulldogs that he let run wild, and he was outraged at the prospect. “I see anyone I don’t know, I’ll shoot the bastard’s balls off. That’ll show ’em.”

  “It’s probably not anything,” she said, trying to calm him down.

  “I’ll shoot ’em!”

  It might have been a mistake to call Shan—she wouldn’t be surprised to hear the echoing reports of his shotgun throughout the afternoon as he blasted away at shadows and imaginary sightings—but at least she felt a little less alone. Jill walked back to where she’d left her pad and pencil, planning to continue where she’d left off. But she couldn’t get back into a landscape mode, and when she flipped the page and looked again at her first drawing, she didn’t like the empty space in the center of the picture.

  Putting the sketchpad away, she decided to start work early today. She logged onto the telemarketing command center, signed in, called up the script and first list of numbers to dial, clipped on her headset and got down to business.

  But in her mind she kept seeing the nearly bald Puka, one eye gone, one eye wild, walking around in a circle in the center of the kitchen, and as she tried to convince people to protect their identities and buy credit card insurance she felt cold.

  ****

  Ross arrived at Jill’s house over twenty minutes late.