Red Circus: A Dark Collection

by John L. Campbell

  Moody Field was even better, and as with most fun (interpret as dangerous) places, my older brother introduced me to it. Steven was fifteen, and the closest thing to a God that I knew. I would have done anything for him, and on those infrequent occasions when he permitted me to tag along, I was his faithful servant and sidekick. In return for this unwavering worship, he showed me places like Moody Field, a WWII era military airfield that had been long abandoned to the weeds. There were sagging buildings and rickety stairways, rusting Army trucks, and enough broken glass and sharp pieces of metal to make life interesting.

  Steven always found the best places because he had a mini-bike, and could extend his range far behind my bicycle-bound limits. I’m sure he explored places he never told me about, but I couldn’t tell you if this was because he didn’t want a nine-year-old hanging around him, or if he was worried about how much trouble he’d get in if our parents found out he’d taken me with him. Some of both, I’m sure. Sometimes I know he refused me just because he could. Steven was my hero, but he could also be cruel, and frequently was.

  But he did show me the kennel.

  I wish every day that he hadn’t.

  It was a Friday, and I was just getting home from school. As I coasted my bike into our driveway my thoughts were on my friend Ray. Tomorrow the two of us would go to our usual Saturday movie, and I would spend the night at his house. We would play ping pong and shoot our BB guns and harass his two sisters. A pretty standard weekend. My sister Karen was already home when I got there, and Steven was nowhere in sight.

  “Mom and Dad are bowling tonight,” she announced, sitting at the kitchen table with one of her school books. She was thirteen and unquestionably the smartest of us kids.

  “I know.” I pulled an Orange Crush from the fridge. “It’s Friday.”

  “Dad called and said they’re going out to dinner after, so they won’t be home until late.”

  I popped the bottle cap. “Who’s making dinner?”

  “I am. Pork chops.”

  “Bleech! Why don’t you make hamburgers instead?”

  “Because mom put out pork chops for us, that’s why.”

  The kitchen door banged open and my brother walked in, an Army backpack with a couple of schoolbooks in it slung on his back. “Karen,” he grunted, then elbowed me in the chest as he walked past. “Lizard.”

  Karen yelled after him as he disappeared into the living room. “Mom and Dad are bowling and I’m in charge!”

  A single laugh came from the other room. It always shocked me that our folks put Karen in charge, since she was not the oldest. At nine, the hierarchy of age is cut in stone and is not something to trifle with. As an adult, grasping the concepts of trustworthiness and responsibility, it was the obvious choice. Not that it mattered much. Steven did as he pleased when they weren’t home.

  “Do your homework.”

  “I don’t have any,” I lied, and wandered into the living room. I could hear Steven moving around in his room down the hall, and the sounds of Cheech and Chong came from behind his door. I knocked and patiently waited for permission to enter. Barging into your fifteen-year-old brother’s room was also verboten, and with no adults in the house, potentially life-ending.

  “Enter, you sniveling creature.”

  As I entered I did my best impression of a knuckle-dragging hunchback, snorting and blinking one eye. I dropped into a ragged green armchair that Steven had garbage-picked somewhere, and our parents had for some reason let him keep. He switched off the tape.

  “C’mon, Steven, let me hear it.”

  “No way. As soon as you hear it you’ll squeal to Mom and Dad that Steven let you hear this tape with all these bad words on it.”

  “I promise I won’t squeal.”

  “You’ll squeal like a sow.”

  “Uh-uh!”

  “Shut up and forget it.” He pulled the tape and dropped it into a dresser drawer. “What are you doing today?”

  My pulse jumped. I could smell a potential invitation. Whatever my schedule might have been, it was suddenly clear. “Nothing.” I tried to sound casual. “What’re you doing?”

  “I found this really cool place behind Fenton. It’s an abandoned kennel. Want to check it out?”

  I hesitated. Fenton was the high school, and that meant high school boys. Ray and I had been chased by some high school boys a couple of weeks ago, and I got nervous. Steven saw it and made a disgusted face. “School’s out, stupid. No one’s around, and besides, the kennel is on the other side of the tracks with a fence around it.”

  I didn’t think he would let any high school boys beat me up. And turning him down was never really an option. It would most certainly close the door to future offers. I agreed to go.

  It took only twenty minutes to get there. We cut across the big field next to our house – the one I was a year away from inheriting in terms of summer mowing – and climbed the embankment of the I-83 bridge. As we walked underneath we could see traffic down the long concrete slope to our right, an unforgiving high speed flow should we lose our footing. We startled a few pigeons, and they flapped out to a safer point near the center of the bridge. Traffic above and below filled the place with a hollow humming.

  Then it was down the other side and a short trek along Irving Park Road. We waited for a break in traffic before sprinting across, and we kept running until we got to the convenience store, the place where Dad always bought liquor and cigarettes. Steven told me to wait outside while he ran in. When he came out he had a can of Orange Crush for me and a Coke for him. It didn’t occur to me to ask whether he had bought them or not.

  Two blocks further brought us to a dirt side road with high weeds on either side. We walked beside a high wooden fence that had been painted red at one time, and then into a short gravel driveway that led to the kennel office. The place had an abandoned look – not simply vacated, but deserted. That empty, forgotten feeling buildings get all by themselves when they’ve been unoccupied and untended for a long time. Steven led the way through a gate along one side, and suddenly we were no longer in comfortable old Bensenville. This was a world of overgrown wooden structures, empty dog runs, and silence.

  I could see tracks in a patch of dried mud near the gate, left by Steven’s mini bike. “When did you find this place?”

  “Last weekend. Me and Tony Keller came out here to goof around. There’s a really cool pond in back.” Steven set off through the weeds, angling towards the main building. The now-pink paint was peeling, and sunflowers had grown high against the walls. Steven carefully climbed through a broken window, and I followed him.

  Inside it was damp and smelled faintly of wet dog. The floor was curling beige linoleum, and the plaster ceiling had broken away in places to reveal rotting studs. It looked like the kennel had been abandoned for centuries. There were some empty beer bottles in a corner, cigarette butts, and someone had spray painted JOE + MONICA in green on one wall. We stepped into a hallway that ran the length of the building and walked up to the front office. Something chittered in a room behind us, and I grabbed the back of Steven’s shirt, looking back.

  “Probably rats,” he said, pushing my hand away.

  “You mean it?” My voice shook. I had never actually seen a rat, but I was sure they were quite capable of killing a nine-year-old boy.

  “Nah, it’s just a bird or something.”

  Steven said it, so it must be true, and I relaxed. The front office still had a wooden counter, and a pair of broken wooden chairs leaned in a corner of the waiting area. The front picture window was an empty space framed with jagged teeth of dirty glass, the rest scattered across the floor, and it looked out onto the gravel drive. Steven said to stay low so no one saw us. The fear of being caught only added to the excitement, and I obediently crouched and ducked behind the counter. There on a low shelf I found a stained, white plastic dog collar, the kind with cheap rhinestones that I always associated with poodles. Like Lady, the ancient, hateful little crea
ture my grandmother doted on.

  I held it up to show Steven. “Treasure!”

  He looked at me and grinned. “The ghost of that dog is probably still here, creeping from room to room, looking for its master.”

  I got the chills and tossed the collar away, loving the feeling of being scared, but only because my big brother was with me. We went back into the building, poking through small rooms filled with trash, not finding anything really interesting. Steven pushed open a creaking door and revealed a long room with a concrete floor, lined with chain-link cages. Moss was growing out of a drain near the center of the room, and a cracked green garden hose was coiled on a hook near the closest cage. Sunlight entered the kennel in slashes through broken windows, striping the interior with light and shadow.

  We walked down the aisle, kicking at the chain link, then went out into the back yard through one of those split doors Mister Ed was always poking his head through. Only the bottom was missing on this one, the top still closed and latched. Standing outside in the sunshine, I heard the chittering behind us again. I turned to look into the building, but it was too dark in there. Steven was already trudging through the high weeds, ad I hurried to catch up.

  The pond he had told me about was near the back of the yard by the fence. I could just see the top of the railroad tracks on their raised grade on the other side. Fenton was beyond that, out of view, and I suddenly felt stupid for having been afraid of the high school boys. I looked at the water, which was oily and ringed with algae and smelled like a sewer. Floating in it near the far bank was a huge rusty boiler, a frayed rope tethering it to a doghouse in the high weeds to keep it from floating away.

  “Watch this.” Steven trotted around to the boiler and I followed slowly, wary of slipping into the reeking mud around the edges. He held the boiler with both hands and leaped out onto it in a straddle. It bobbed and tilted in the water. “Push me off.”

  I still wasn’t getting near the edge, so I looked through the weeds until I found a long stick, then used it to shove at the boiler. Rocking, the big cylinder drifted away from the bank, while Steven held the tether rope in a coil, paying it out slowly. It took only a minute for Steven’s makeshift boat to reach the center of the pond. He rolled the boiler from one side to the other, keeping his feet out of the water, pretending to lose his balance and laughing.

  “I want to do it!” I yelled.

  “No way. It’s too dangerous.”

  “C’mon, I want to try.”

  “Uh-uh.” He puffed up his cheeks. “You’re too fat! You’ll sink it and get sucked under and drown!”

  “I’m not too fat!” I picked up a rusty beer can and threw it at him, but the can fell short. Steven laughed and made piggish grunting noises. I threw another can and it bounced off the boiler.

  Steven laughed harder. “You can’t touch me, cause you’re a fat, bloated lizard lying in the sun!”

  My face flushed, I searched the weeds and came up with a golf ball-sized stone. “You’re a lizard!” I threw it and missed his head by only an inch or so.

  “Hey! You almost hit me! Knock it off!”

  The fact that I had scared him for a change had me going, and I searched the weeds for something else to throw. After a minute I found a real prize, a cheap, rusty steak knife with a rotting wooden handle. I waved it at him.

  “Don’t even think about throwing that, fatty.”

  Part of me wanted to, but my imagination saw me throwing it like a circus performer and burying it in his head, killing him instantly like on TV. Instead I marched to the dog house and used it to start sawing at the boiler’s tether rope.

  “Stop it!” Steven started reeling himself in with the rope. “I’m going to beat the crap out of you!”

  The rope parted, and Steven almost lost his balance when it went slack. The cut end slipped through the oily water as he pulled it in. “I’m going to throw this back to you,” he said, coiling the wet rope, his voice calm, “and you’re going to tie it back on the dog house.”

  “No I’m not!” I threw the steak knife into the water and stomped around the edge of the pond.

  “Come back here, goddamit!”

  I looked back and saw the boiler had drifted back to the center. Steven was trying to paddle with his hands, but each time he leaned down the boiler tilted at a crazy angle and he had to sit back up straight to keep from getting dumped in.

  “I’m never taking you anywhere with me again!”

  “So what!” I shouted, feeling tears on my face. Why did it always have to be like this? One minute we were friends, and the next he was treating me like garbage. It always happened! I vowed to tell Mom that he made me go to the kennel and called me names and I had to cross Irving Park by myself and then he would get the belt.

  I was almost to the gate along the side of the building when I heard a car pull into the gravel drive out front. I darted back around and into the kennel, moving quickly through the chain link cages, into the central hallway, then stood quietly, my heart hammering. Steven was still shouting out back, and I wanted to yell for him to be quiet or we would get caught, but that wasn’t smart. I waited for an adult to walk straight in and grab me by the arm and take me to the police for trespassing.

  Then I heard the car back out. It had only been turning around. I stayed frozen for a full minute, waiting until I was sure it was gone, then let out my breath and walked cautiously towards the front office.

  The chittering noise came again, this time from a doorway up on the right. Steven wasn’t here to tell me it was only a bird, and I went cold. I stood there in the hall, watching the doorway, afraid to move, waiting for a rat to come running out.

  What came out was worse.

  He jumped from the doorway and crouched in the hall seven or eight feet ahead of me. He was completely naked and dirty, skin stretched tight over his ribs, long, matted gray hair hanging limp about his face. His sinewy arms were covered in open sores and what looked like clumps of moss, and his long fingers, curled into claws, were tipped with broken nails. His eyes were black, lifeless.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he whispered.

  Then he lunged.

  I screamed and fell backwards, tripping over my own feet. “Steven!” I scrambled away, but he was on me in an instant, raking his dirty nails down my jeans, tearing the denim and the skin underneath. His mouth made a sticky, sucking noise as he caught my flailing left arm and pulled it to his face.

  “Steven help me!”

  He bit down, and blood sprayed across my clothes. The pain hit and I babbled, fighting to pull away, kicking at his chest and beating the side of his head with my free hand. He ignored the blows, grinned around a mouthful of bloody arm and grunted, reaching a filthy claw towards my face.

  I screamed so hard I felt something let go in my throat, and I dug my fingers into one of his eyes. He howled and released my arm, clapping his palms to his face. In a second I was on my feet, running for the window, my arm leaving a sweep of red drops on the linoleum. I scrambled through the window, not caring how the broken glass in the frame cut into my knees, nor how a piece of metal pierced my left buttock when I landed in the high weeds outside, and then I was running for the gate in the high fence, crying, trying to choke out my brother’s name, knowing I would be snatched up in a second and then I would die. I crashed through the gate and into the gravel drive.

  Hands caught my shoulders and spun me around.

  “No!” I swung, caught him in the eye, and he swore and shook me.

  “What the hell is going on?” Steven demanded, still shaking one shoulder but now rubbing at his eye. “What are you screaming…you’re bleeding!”

  “A man…a man!” I cried harder and pulled away, backing into the gravel drive. Steven followed, caught my arm and stopped me, made me stand still as he looked at my arm. I didn’t even notice he was completely wet and stank of pond.

  “God, what bit you?”

  I couldn’t catch my breath. “A man…he bi
t me…and…and s-s-said he…w-w-was going to….to k-k-kill me!” The tears were flowing, my chest was heaving, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the fence.

  And then the voice came to us from just the other side of those peeling, sun-dried pink boards, rasping and demented. “I’ll get you, fat little liiiiiizard…. I’ll come for you.”

  Then something big and black sailed over the fence, landing with a metal crash on the gravel in front of us, making us leap back to avoid being hit. It was wet and rusty and covered in pond scum and had a piece of frayed rope attached to it. A boiler.

  Then we were both running, and didn’t stop until we reached our house.

  Later, huddled in Steven’s room while Karen tried to call our parents at the bowling alley, Steven said, “Tell them it was a dog. Just a dog. If you tell them it was something else they’ll think you’re crazy. Tell them it was a dog.”

  I did, but I doubt they believed me, and I know the doctor could tell it wasn’t a dog bit, but I stuck to my story about a stray. I had to tell them about the kennel, and got grounded for it. Steven got the belt. They called the police, but no one ever found the dog that bit me, and I got to go through the entire rabies injection series.

  Years later, long after I had moved away and had a family of my own, I was back in town for a funeral. After the services, Steven drove me around to reminisce, and we cruised slowly past the kennel. Or at least where it had been. I rubbed my arm where the scar still faintly showed. There was now a parking lot there. Steven said that shortly after I went off to college, the kennel was torn down and condos were built on the site. But in the period of a year, there had been several unsolved murders there…apparently quite savage...and they were eventually torn down and paved over.