Altar

by Philip Fracassi

  Sarah, in a rage, stuck her finger in Ted’s face, said something, then stormed away from Abby and the boys. Going for help? Gary thought, hoped. Abby watched Sarah leaving, a glimmer of concern on her face, followed quickly by a frown, a widening of her eyes. Ted’s hand was on her hip, another, like a striking snake, went to her chest. Ted was saying something to her and she paled...

  The other kid, the big fat kid, looked around, as if making sure no one was paying too much attention to them. Abby took a step backward toward the boy’s locker room. The kids in the small water park area were laughing, running, their mothers transfixed by their activities, not seeing what was happening behind them.

  Gary felt a spasm wrack his body when Ted grabbed his sister’s arm, hard enough for Abby to wince, to spit something at him, her face filled with fury and hate. Ted pushed her back through the locker room door. She disappeared and the big fat kid followed. The door smoothly settled shut.

  Sam was suddenly standing next to Gary, and Gary noticed his small hands were clenched into fists, and, despite the horror of the situation, felt a surge of affection for his old friend.

  “What should we do?” Sam said, his voice shaky. Gary tilted his head toward the sky. Far off in the distance, dark gray clouds were pushing their way toward them. It was strange, Gary mused, that the day would be turning, quite suddenly, into a storm.

  “It’s okay,” he heard himself saying quietly, calmly. He touched Sam’s arm lightly. “I’ll check.”

  Sam nodded, but stayed tight with anticipation, wired with a young boy’s fear of violence.

  Gary walked toward the locker room, not caring about the day’s dimming sun.

  Tyler felt something rising from underneath the water to meet him.

  It pushed him upward—a firm, rising pressure.

  He stopped kicking, lifted his head from the water, turned in time to see a bubble break the surface. A bubble as big as a beach ball. It swelled and burst, spraying him in the face with water. He saw that another boy, a much older boy, was also looking at where the bubble had surfaced and popped. Their eyes met for a moment, neither of them smiling.

  The air became pungent. A sour waft of something earthy filled Tyler’s nostrils, as if the pool had passed gas and he was the lucky recipient of its foul discharge.

  He shook his head with surprise and disgust, as if the smell were a mosquito that had flown up his nose and settled.

  Curious as to what could have caused such a thing, he pushed his head under the water and opened his eyes.

  Gary pushed open the door of the locker room. As he turned toward the bathrooms, two kids—one younger, one a little older, likely brothers—walked past him quickly, saying nothing but obviously hurried.

  Otherwise the bathroom appeared empty.

  Gary heard the showers going, just a little bit further back into the locker room area, even heard the low mumbling of voices, as if two adults were discussing a baseball game or the stock market while drying themselves with colorful beach towels.

  There was a loud bang followed by a grunt Gary recognized as coming from his sister. He walked toward the sound, past the urinals on his right, the sinks with the scratched metal plates that served as mirrors on his left. To the stalls.

  He saw the fat kid standing in front of a stall, his hands limp at his sides. He spun on Gary, his cow eyes screwing to find purchase on how to deal with the tiny intruder.

  Behind the fat kid Gary saw two sets of bare feet under the stall door. There was another bang —someone had hit one of the walls hard enough to shake the entire row of connected metal stalls.

  The fat kid looked behind him, toward the stall, then back at Gary.

  “Fuck off,” he said lightly, in a toneless, high-pitched voice.

  “Abby?” Gary said.

  The shuffling feet within the stall stopped. Gary realized, with some surprise, that he was crying.

  There was a loud, muffled sound from inside the stall. Then a loud thump and the walls shook once more.

  “I’m going to tell!” he yelled suddenly, spitting out the words, bracing himself to attack, or flee.

  Someone mumbled something through the closed door, and the big fat kid took a bored, lumbering step toward Gary.

  He fled.

  Martha woke from a dream. She had been running... somewhere. Toward something. Dan was there. They were young, happy. He said something to her while they ran and although he was smiling it seemed to her a strained smile.

  The children, he said, save them. She tried to see where they were running but could see nothing because it was dark, so dark. You always hated the children, he said. Martha started to say something back, but then Dan was gone, pulled away from her. She started to laugh at the whole thing so preposterous when something reached out from the dark and grabbed her, something slick, wet and firm with taut muscle, rough skin. It sprang at her...

  She jerked awake, raindrops hitting her legs, her stomach, spotting the wide dark lenses of her sunglasses with small wet dots. The dots made her think insanely of stars. Were there stars in the dark she had been running through? She didn’t think so.

  A young boy could be heard yelling over the din of the people around her. One of the lifeguards was blowing his whistle.

  Gary ran outside and through his tears and panic he was shocked at how gray everything was. And it was—yes—it was raining. Only lightly, but he saw the spots dotting the white concrete, slowly filling in the lighter color with the quick-spreading dark wet acne of rain drops.

  He didn’t think to look for Martha, but ran to the first person he could see who symbolized authority – represented safety, normalcy, help.

  He ran to the lifeguard.

  “Please!” he yelled up at the guard, a skinny white man with short-cropped, frizzy yellow hair and a deep tan. The guard looked down at Gary over the edge of his platform, his large hazel eyes seeming almost predatory, as if he were ready to pounce from his perch rather than help.

  Gary took a step backward.

  “What’s up, little man?” the lifeguard said.

  Gary pointed to the locker room door. He smelled something funny, but didn’t have time to process the cause. “My sister,” he said, talking loudly over the screams, loud screams, of children. “They took her in there and now they’re hurting her!”

  The lifeguard looked from Gary to the locker room door. Gary looked with him and saw a very normal-looking man walk out, holding his son’s hand. They seemed happy, laughing about something. There didn’t seem to be violence from where they had come from, there didn’t seem to be horror on the other side of that door.

  “Your sister’s in the boy’s locker room, huh?” the lifeguard said, a small smile creeping onto his lips. “That isn’t allowed, is it?”

  Gary looked up at the guard, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. What was happening here? Why wasn’t this man leaping down and running into the locker room to help his sister? He pointed with accusation.

  “They’re hurting her, god damn it!”

  The lifeguard’s smile vanished, replaced by a flash of anger and then, perhaps, uncertainty. His eyes flicked to the door again.

  “Well, I can’t leave my post,” he said stubbornly, but his eyes now lingered on the door, the concern more apparent.

  “Please!” Gary wailed, beside himself with terror, his feet dancing up and down in frustration. Other people were watching him now, a few kids holding frozen drinks had stopped to check out the kid making a scene. “He was hitting her!”

  At those words the lifeguard’s amusement disappeared completely. He looked from the locker room to Gary. His eyes brewed like the storm clouds that were filling the sky above him. He shook his finger at Gary, angry now.

  “Are you shitting me? No lies now, kid,” he said. Gary shook his head, crying in relief and frustration and guilt. He had no more words, he just whimpered and pointed and prayed it wasn’t too late.

  The lifeguard nodded and stood up decis
ively. He put the whistle hanging around his neck to his lips and blew, loudly, twice. A signal, Gary realized through the haze of his distress.

  He was so relieved he didn’t notice that the lifeguard hadn’t leapt down, hadn’t run to the locker room to save his sister.

  He had also not heard the lifeguard speak, so great was the distraction of his sister’s danger. He never heard the words “Sweet Jesus” come out of the lifeguard’s mouth, right before the world opened and hell broke free.

  Under the water, young Tyler saw something his brain simply could not process.

  There was a hole. A hole in the bottom of the pool. And now, now that he saw it, he noticed a long, jagged black cracks running from each side of the hole, like thin tentacles, racing to the far-off pool edges.

  As he stared at the hole, currently no bigger than a softball, it fell inward upon itself, widening its mouth to over a foot across. Tyler could actually feel the suction of the water as it raced downward... downward to where? he thought.

  With his arms and legs he pushed back from the ever-widening darkness, but not so far that he couldn’t see, and not so far that he would miss whatever was going to happen next.

  Martha sat upright when she heard the whistle blow. Once. Twice. Quick, staccato bursts. She took off her sunglasses, looked toward the sound.

  My god, she thought, when did it get so dark? She looked up and saw the gray, ominous storm clouds above, resurfacing the sky. A cumulonimbus cloud city, as if seen from the bow of an approaching ship, she thought, a fragment from a story she read long ago, in a different life. She shook when she heard a low, deep rumbling coming from the clouds... thunder?

  She rose to her feet, suddenly anxious, suddenly wary. She searched and spotted the young lifeguard who had blown his whistle. She waited to see if he was going to dive into the pool, save someone.

  Gary, she thought with a stabbing panic. She took two steps but then saw Gary standing under a different lifeguard stand—a small frail boy looking up at the blond lifeguard who wasn’t looking back at him. Gary was crying, she saw that. Had he fallen? No, he was scared. Terrified. A mother knows.

  Abby. She tensed again. What the hell was going on? The lifeguard was staring at the pool, his eyes wide in shock. She looked at the water, expecting to see a floating body, a cloud of blood, something horrible, something to give her nightmares.

  “Gary,” she said out loud to no one. “Abby,” she said as weakly, as inconsequentially.

  She saw that a few of the children were screaming, splashing away from... something. Something in the middle of the pool, she couldn’t see. Other parents were yelling now, waving for their kids. Another lifeguard, this one much closer to her, blew her whistle and yelled something, the panic obvious.

  Martha watched with wonder, stupefied, senseless. The children in the water were flowing in a circle, their arms thrown out toward their screaming parents, flailing to swim to the edges of the pool.

  How are they moving like that? she thought. A few adults were running and then—at that moment—instinct took over, and she darted toward her son, not noticing when she knocked down another woman who was kneeling and tugging at her hair, not hearing the new screams, the screams of terror that were replacing the sounds of life like a spreading fungus, like the way the clouds had stretched across the once-sapphire sky, a gray-fisted storm consuming the sun.

  Gary turned toward the water, saw only twisted shapes of peach and brown stuck within a smeared pallet of blue. The world was blurred with his tears.

  Tyler was spinning now, dizzily so, along with eight or nine other kids. A couple of them, he noticed as he spiraled around, were laughing. He tried to turn his body away from the whirlpool as the water drained, but was suddenly jerked backward, as if a giant invisible hand had grabbed him around the mid-section and tugged.

  His body twisted and he was underwater. He clamped his mouth shut, saving breath. There was a chaos of limbs and bodies. He noticed with no sense of wonder or shame that one boy’s suit had come off, the bright yellow cloth sucked down into the hole like the last inch of spaghetti when you sucked it into your mouth, something he used to do as a game when his parents took him to the Olive Garden on the occasional Saturday night.

  The swirling current held him tight as he circled and he couldn’t breathe but was holding his breath okay, for now. He saw the water wasn’t all that blue anymore, not by the hole, not by the funnel. It was dirtier, like parts of what was below were mixing with the water. He saw a large boy, likely trying to impress his friends, actually swim toward the hole. He was within a foot when he went head-first into it as if yanked on a rope. The suction was tremendous but it abated as the boy’s large body got wedged in the gash, his legs kicking, his torso beyond sight. Blood spat upward from the jagged edges of the hole, mixing with water and dirt as the boy thrashed wildly, as if he were being eaten alive by something down below.

  Tyler, feeling the pull of the current lessening, ripped off one of the blue wings keeping him afloat, then the other. He let them go, watched them swirl away, then kicked as hard as he could for the surface.

  He broke free and the world exploded into his senses. Rain poured from the dark sky and it seemed the air itself was screaming, the cries of kids and parents reaching a crescendo of terror. As he gulped in oxygen he saw kneeling bodies lining the pool, arms reaching inward. One lifeguard dove into the water, began swimming toward them.

  Tyler began kicking for the edge, hoping the body of the boy jammed into the crevice would hold a few moments longer.

  Gary heard laughter behind him. He turned and saw Ted and the fat kid leaving the locker room. They were alone. Ted was tying the string of his suit, a giant smile on his face. Both of them walked to the edge of the pool and looked in. Ted, not realizing who Gary was in relation to the violence of what he had just done, nodded toward him.

  “The fuck’s going on?” Ted said.

  Gary looked at the swirling water, then at the two kids. The big fat kid with the cow eyes looked nervous now as he stared at the siphoning water. No, he looks scared, Gary thought. Scared enough to shit himself.

  “Not sure, you should check it out,” he replied evenly, raising his voice over the screaming of children and the parents ringing the pool, some of whom had dove in, frantic to reach their own. “Unless you’re scared,” he said.

  Ted looked stunned for a moment, then laughed loudly. But the big dumb kid backed away, his eyes never leaving the dark funnel of water in the middle of the pool. Without a word, he turned and walked. After a few steps, he was running.

  “Pussy!” Ted roared after him, then took a step toward Gary, meeting his eyes. His smile was gone, and for a moment Gary thought he was going to say something to him. But then he just smiled that dangerous smile, and jumped in. Gary watched calmly as Ted waded deeper into the pool, then began swimming hurriedly toward the center.

  The wind was picking up, whipping Gary’s hair. The rain fell harder. Thunder rumbled overhead, high above in the pulsing deep of the gray heartless sky.

  Gary heard the locker room door open and close behind him. He did not turn around.

  Tyler swam harder than he’d ever swam in his life. The effort seemed impossible. He reached for the edge, now only a few feet away. The pull at his legs was strong once more, and he felt as if he were kicking in thick, heavy syrup. It had nearly exhausted him. He looked up, panting, saw a man he didn’t recognize. A stranger. The man was wearing sunglasses with yellow-tinted lenses. He was bearded and had a large, black head of hair streaked with gray. He was holding a hand toward Tyler.

  “C’mon kid!” the stranger yelled. “Grab my hand!” Tyler lifted an arm out of the water, reaching.

  Behind him came a sound like a crack of thunder followed by a whoosh sound, as if all the life and energy around him had been snatched away by God's hand. The world went mute.

  Tyler spun around one last time, hoping to see a glimpse of his mother’s red suit, her face...


  He didn’t see her, he couldn’t see anything but water and terror and chaos. He tried to scream but water filled his lungs and he was sucked backward and down.

  The hole had opened.

  Gary watched blankly as the funnel in the pool fell open into a black abyss. He saw the willowy underwater forms of two kids get simultaneously sucked through the dark drain of the whirlpool and disappear. He looked up at the lifeguard, who stood rigid, motionless, his mouth slack and open.

  What had only moments ago been slowly drawing children toward it, creating a whirlpool effect, had torn completely open, like someone had punched a hole in a bag of grain, emptying its contents in one great vacuous, volcanic downward expulsion.

  Gary could only look on in numb horror as a pretty blonde girl held tightly to the buoy-lined dividing rope. The rope—as old as the pool itself, Gary imagined—frayed, then snapped. The pretty girl yelled something to someone, a last torrent of words he could not hear, as she and the end of the rope vanished. The rest of the long rope quickly followed, the buoys slipping down into the funnel like a long centipede burrowing with naked speed through a hole into the earth.

  The air filled with the smell of thick, rancid sulfur, and Gary could not turn away as several more bodies struggling in the swirling water were simply sucked away. Down, down into nothing.

  The waterline was getting noticeably lower. The opening was now the size of a small car. Gary heard horrible cries from around him and someone knocked him down. He hit his head on a step of the hard white metal pole that held the lifeguard stand aloft and a flash-bulb popped like a pistol-shot in his brain.

  Lying on the ground, he forced his eyes open. Blood from the cut in his forehead slid into one of his eyes, turning the world a blurry crimson as he tried to blink it away.