by Jeremy Bates
Darla began running through a mental list of her friends—and realized she didn’t even know who her friends were anymore. They would have to take sides, wouldn’t they? How many would choose her over Mark? Likely not many. It didn’t matter that Mark was a cheating slime ball. He’d been the extrovert in their relationship, she the introvert. He had an easy way with people she didn’t. He’d come out of this scandal unscathed, while she would end up ostracized, an outcast in the very town where she had grown up.
Suzy, she thought. Yes, Suzy. She was single, had just been through a brutal divorce herself. She would sympathize with Darla’s predicament. She’d make some strong coffee, they’d sit down, she’d listen to Darla bawl, she wouldn’t judge or take sides.
Suzy lived ten minutes away in Sagamore Hills. It would be fastest to travel north on Riverview Road, then east along West Highland. But Darla decided to detour through Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It would give her a bit more time to get herself together.
She crossed over the Cuyahoga River, then turned left onto Stanford Road. Soon the trees of the national park closed around her—oak, ash, maple, walnut, hickory—and she began to feel calmer. Nature had a way of doing that to her, as she suppose it did for most people. Also, she enjoyed the isolation the park offered, the idea of being on her own. She felt free. And now I am free, she thought defiantly. Mark’s gone, out of my life. And maybe that’s for the best. Better to find out about his cheating ways now than later on. I’m still young, only twenty-six. I’ll meet someone new, start over again…
Darla had been so preoccupied with her new-life fantasy she didn’t realize it was nearly dark. That was the thing with October in Ohio: you had day, and you had night, and you had about ten minutes of dusk in between.
She clicked on her headlights—and in the rearview mirror noticed a car behind her do the same. She’d had no idea anyone had even been there.
The car seemed to be accelerating toward her. Darla watched it approach, waiting for it to overtake her. It didn’t. Instead it came right up behind her and sat on her tail.
What was the idiot thinking?
Darla was about to pull over to the shoulder, to give the car more room to pass her on the narrow two-lane road, when it rammed her back bumper. She cried out in surprise. The car rammed her again, harder. The steering wheel jerked dangerously in her hands.
The lunatic was trying to run her off the road!
Was he drunk? On drugs?
Heart racing, Darla stomped on the gas, pushing the speedometer needle past fifty, past sixty. The car stuck behind her as the road angled upward steeply. Then the car rammed her once more. This time it remained glued to her ass, pushing her. She had to fight the steering wheel to keep it straight, and just as she thought she was going to lose control, the vehicle fell back.
Darla cried out in triumph a moment before the road disappeared in front of her—and she realized her mistake. This stretch of Stanford Road was nicknamed The End of the World because the hill culminated in a brief summit that dropped off sharply on the other side, creating the temporary illusion that you were driving off a cliff—or the end of the world.
Darla had breasted the summit at eighty miles an hour and shot clear into the air.
When the Golf crashed violently back to earth, the front bumper tore free in a fiery display of sparks. The vehicle wrenched to the left, plowed through the smaller shrubbery lining the verge, into the forest, and struck the trunk of a large tree, coming to an abrupt, bone-crushing halt.
With the human sacrifice now at hand, the organist began to play deep, furious chords, while the gong-ringer struck the instrument with the heavy mallet rhythmically, continually. The nun handed the high priest the ceremonial sword. He held it aloft with both hands and recited Lovecraft in a loud, commanding voice, “Oh, friend and companion of the night, thou who rejoiceth in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals—Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon—look favorably on our sacrifice and win forgiveness for me and for all those for whom I have offered it. Tuere nos, Domine Satanus!”
“Shield us, Lord Satan!” the assemblage cried.
“Protege nos, Domine Satanus!” he shouted.
“Protect us, Lord Satan!”
“Shemhamforash!”
“Hail Satan! Hail Satan! Hail Satan!”
The high priest sank the sword into the woman’s belly.
Mark’s infidelity, detouring through Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the maniac in the car behind her—these were the first thoughts Darla had entertained, or at least the first ones she could recall, since the crash. But with each passing second she felt herself becoming more lucid, more self-aware. It was as if she’d been in a black abyss deep underwater, and now she was floating upward toward the surface, to the world of the senses. Indeed, she could hear voices, she could smell some kind of incense, she could feel…oh God, the pain! Her body throbbed, nowhere and everywhere at once. Still, she held onto the pain, she wouldn’t let it go, because where there was pain there was consciousness.
The surface drifted closer. She could almost reach out and touch it.
Darla’s eyes cracked open. She made out several men hovering over her, their faces lost in the shadows of their cowls.
A fireball exploded in her abdomen, far worse than the pain that had lured her from the void, and with wide, glassy eyes she saw that the blade of a sword protruded from her navel, blood pooling around the wound, coloring the surrounding flesh a blackish red.
She screamed.
CHAPTER 1
“Groovy!”
Evil Dead II (1987)
The headlights punched ghostly tunnels through the shifting fog. Birch stripped bare of their fiery Autumn colors and towering evergreens lined the margins of the two-lane rural road. A cold rind of moon hung high in the starless sky, glowing bluish-white behind a raft of eastward-drifting clouds.
Steve slipped on his reading glasses, which he kept on a cord around his neck, and squinted at the roadmap he’d taken from the BMW’s glove compartment. “We’re on Stanford Road, right?” he said.
“Yup,” Jeff said, one hand gripping the leather steering wheel casually. He was eyeing the rearview mirror, either making sure their friends were still following behind them in the other car, or admiring his reflection.
Steve wouldn’t be surprised if it were the latter. Jeff was about as vain as you could get. And Steve supposed he had the right to be. Not only was he tall, bronzed, and blond, he was also athletic, successful, and charismatic—the proverbial stud every guy wanted to be, and every girl wanted to date.
Steve himself wasn’t bad looking. He kept in shape, had neat brown hair, intelligent brown eyes, and a friendly manner that girls found attractive. However, whenever he was hanging out with Jeff he couldn’t help but feel more unremarkable than remarkable, intimidated even.
“I don’t see this End of World road anywhere,” Steve said, pushing the glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“No duh, genius,” Jeff said. “The End of the World’s a nickname.”
“For Stanford Road?”
“Yup,” Jeff said.
“Why’s it called The End of the World?” Mandy asked from the backseat. “Does it just end?”
“I’m not walking anywhere,” Jenny said. She was seated next to Mandy.
“Will you two give it a rest?” Jeff said, annoyed. “I have everything planned, all right?”
Mandy stuck her head up between the seats to study the map herself. Her wavy red hair smelled of strawberries and brushed Steve’s forearm. “Hey, the road does just end,” she said. “What gives, Jeff? Can you tell us what we’re doing out here already?”
“Sit your ass down, Mandy,” he told her. “I can’t see out the back.”
“Noah’s still behind you, don’t worry.”
“Sit down!”
“Jeez,” she said, and flopped back down
. She mumbled something to Jenny, and they giggled. They’d been doing that all car trip: mumbling and giggling with each other, like they were schoolgirls. Steve found it hard to comprehend how they could be so comfortable with one another, considering they had met for the first time only a few hours before.
Jeff glared at them in the rearview mirror, but said conversationally to Steve: “You know, legend has it that cutthroats and thieves hang out along this road and rob anyone driving through.”
“That’s bull,” Mandy said. “How do you rob someone in a car?”
“With a giant magnet,” Jenny said, pulling her blonde hair into a ponytail, which she secured with an elastic band. “It drags the car right off the road, like in the cartoons. Pow!”
“Right, just like that,” Jeff said. “And you’re in med school?”
“So how?” Mandy asked.
“Because the road doesn’t just end,” Jeff told them. “Part of it was closed down, yeah. But you can still go around the barricade and drive on the closed-down part. You have to go super slow though because it’s really narrow and twisting. That’s how the cutthroats get you. They just slip out of the woods and—” He hit the brakes. Inertia slammed everyone forward against their seatbelts. Mandy and Jenny yelped.
Laughing, Jeff accelerated. Behind them, Noah blared his horn.
“God, Jeff!” Mandy said. “You’re such a dick!”
“A small dick I’ve heard,” Jenny added, and the two of them broke into more giggles.
Jeff scowled. “A small dick, huh?” he said. “You’ve never had any complaints, have you, babe?”
Mandy rolled her eyes.
“Well?” he demanded.
“No, hon,” she said. “No complaints.”
Mandy turned her attention to the haunting black forest whisking past outside her window. It really did look like the type of woods that would be home to a ruthless band of cutthroats. The shadowed maple and oak and elm had already shed all of their foliage, leaving their spindly branches denuded and shivering in the soughing wind. They stood interwoven with the larger pine, spruce, and cedar, the great needle-covered boughs sprouting from the trunks like dark wings, masking whatever may lay behind.
What if Jeff was telling the truth? Mandy wondered. What if when they eventually got to this closed-off road and had to slow down a deranged man—worse, a pack of deranged men—swarmed the car, dragged her out by the hair, and slit her throat?
What if—
No. Mandy banished the “what ifs” from her mind. There were no cutthroats living in the forest. She was safe. They were all safe. Jeff was full of it. Not only that, he was full of himself too. You’ve never had any complaints, have you, babe? Who said stuff like that? The answer, of course, was Jeff. His ego was so big it couldn’t see its shoes on a cloudy day.
Mandy and Jeff had been at a party a short time back, a “model party,” or at least that’s what everybody called it. It had been hosted by Smirnoff vodka. The models had been hired for the glam factor. There were no Christy Brinkleys or Brook Shields in attendance. The models all hailed from the no-name talent agencies that dotted the backstreets of New York City. They were the D-list hired out for photo shoots in obscure magazines or low-budget cable TV commercials. Not that you’d know this by talking to them. Everyone Mandy had mingled with had a tale about brushing shoulders with Burt Reynolds or Christian Slater—and missing out on their big break by inches because of some unfortunate reason or another.
Anyway, they did have their looks going for them. Mandy knew she was attractive. She’d been told this her entire life. People often said she resembled a red-haired Michelle Pfeiffer, even though Mandy thought her eyes were a little too close together, her nose a bit too pointy. Yet the no-name models made her feel positively average. They were all taller than her, had the flawless, thin bodies of fourteen-year-old boys, although with breasts, and most importantly, they knew how to flaunt their sex appeal.
At the end of the evening, while waiting for a cab, Jeff, tipsy, had said, “Did you see that guy? The one with the long hair?”
“They all had long hair,” Mandy told him.
“White shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest.”
Mandy had seen him. He’d been gorgeous. “What about him?”
“You think he was good looking?”
“Ha! You’re jealous,” she said.
“Hardly. But I’ll tell you this much. He’s probably the first guy I’ve ever seen who’s better looking than me.”
Mandy stared at Jeff, thinking he must be kidding. He wasn’t. Up until that point in his twenty-six years of existence, Jeff had seriously considered himself to be the best looking man on the planet.
Mandy blinked now, and instead of the trees and the blackness beyond the car window, she saw her glass-caught reflection. It was vaguely visible, transparent, ghostlike. It gave her a case of the creeps.
Shivering, she faced forward again. No one had spoken since Jeff had challenged her to find fault with his love-making.
Mandy didn’t like prolonged silences, they made her uneasy, and she said, “Complaints, huh?” She wrapped a lock of her hair around a finger. “Do we have time? This could take a while.”
“Name one,” Jeff said.
She leaned close to Jenny—who she’d been happy to discover shortly after they met shared a similar goofy sense of humor—and whispered: “He has a hairy butt.”
“Grody!” Jenny whispered back.
“And he likes to be spanked—it’s like spanking a monkey!”
They broke up in laughter, and when Mandy’s eyes met Jeff’s in the rearview mirror, she stuck out her tongue at him.
“Real mature, Amanda,” he muttered.
“Whatever,” she said, and continued laughing.
Jeff clenched the steering wheel tighter. Mandy could be a real pain in the ass sometimes. He wondered why he put up with her. He was a securities trader clearing a hundred grand a year, for Christ’s sake. He could have any woman he wanted. Didn’t she realize that?
He needed someone smarter, someone more on his level, someone, well, like Jenny. She wasn’t only a long-legged blonde bombshell; she was a medical school student to boot. He visualized the two of them on paper: Wall Street Trader and Cardiovascular Surgeon. It was certainly more impressive than Wall Street Trader and Makeup Artist. And was that all Mandy was going to aspire to in life? Really, how much difference was there between a makeup artist and a carny face painter? He chuckled to himself, considered mentioning this comparison out loud, but decided not to sink to her childish level.
Jeff focused on the road ahead. The occluding fog was as thick as pea soup, as his grandmother had been fond of saying, and he needed to pay attention. Last thing he wanted was to run into a deer or a bear. The 1987 BMW M5 was less than a month old, in pristine condition, and he would like to keep it that way. Did he need the car? No. He took cabs to work every day and rarely left the city. Same went for the prewar Tribeca co-op he’d been renting since last July. It was far too big for just him, he rarely set foot in the two spare bedrooms, but they were good to have to show off when people came over. Success, he had learned, was more than earning a six-figure salary. It was cultivating an image that people envied and respected.
And Mandy wasn’t jiving with that image, was she? They’d been together for four years now, and she was still as clueless to business and politics and world events as when he’d met her. What was it she’d said to Congressman Franzen the other week while he’d been discussing with Jeff the recent armistice reached in the Iran-Iraq war? Why don’t they call it the Middle West? Good God, she was becoming an embarrassment.
Jeff’s thoughts turned to Jenny again. He visualized her wearing a white doctor’s coat, a stethoscope around her neck, and nothing else. What a fantasy that would be! Of course, that’s all it was: a fantasy. Steve was his good friend. He wasn’t about to hijack his girlfriend, even though he was sure he could if he wanted to. No, there were plenty of
other smart, successful women out there.
Through the mist, a bridge appeared ahead of them.
“Hell yeah!” Jeff cried out. “There she is!” He crunched onto the gravel shoulder just before the bridge and killed the engine.
“What’s going on?” Steve asked, looking up from the map and removing his glasses.
“Crybaby bridge!” Jeff announced.
“Are you for real?” Steve said.
“Crybaby bridge?” Mandy said, poking her head up between the seats once more. “Why have I heard of that?”
“It’s an urban legend,” Steve told her. “A baby gets thrown off a bridge, it dies, you can hear its ghost crying in the middle of the night. Crybaby bridges are all over the country.”
“Yeah, but this one’s different,” Jeff said.
Steve looked at him. “How so?”
He grinned wickedly. “’Cause this crybaby’s genuinely haunted.”
Steve undid his seatbelt, stuffed the map back into the glove compartment, and got out of the car. The night air was cool and fresh and damp, the way it is after a storm. It accentuated the raw scent of pine and hemlock. Fog swirled around his legs, sinuous, amorphous, reminding him of the dry ice used in horror movies to turn a mundane graveyard into a hellish nightmare crammed full of the shuffling dead. He titled his head, looking up. Directly above the bridge the canopy had receded to reveal a patch of black sky framing a full moon.
Steve howled. It was a mournful, lupine sound, the effect of which turned out to be surprisingly eerie and realistic.
“Nice one, Wolfman!” Jeff said, tossing his head back and joining in gleefully.
“Boys will be boys,” Jenny said, sighing with put-upon melodrama.
Mandy said, “You know they’re going to be trying to scare us all night?”
“Let them,” Jenny said. “I can handle a werewolf, or vampire. I have a black belt in judo.”
Steve’s lungs faltered. His howl cracked. He looked at Jenny and said, “You have a black belt in judo?”
