by Simon Curtis
It feels like I’ve been hit in the chest, with no air to breathe even if I could inhale.
With trembling legs I stand and find the courage to look directly at them, though they both refuse to look at me.
But there’s nothing to say.
I back up from the table and, without thinking, open the screen door and walk out into the late-springtime evening.
Then I run.
• • •
The throbbing in my head dulls as the adrenaline pushes me up the hill toward Blackburn Park. I’m running and I can’t stop, can’t give my mind a moment to think about what just happened. I push and push and push. Finally I reach the top and violently inhale.
I’m panting and out of breath and completely unsure of what to do next. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh or scream. So many emotions are swirling in my head. Too many. The reality hasn’t even begun to hit me yet.
Where am I supposed to go? What am I going to do?
Bile rises in my throat. My feet are on autopilot and take me toward my spot, to the bench under the flagpole. I need to sit down before I pass out again.
But someone is already there.
No one ever comes up to the park, no one I know at least, but in the pink light of the sunset the silhouette looks familiar. “Jonathan?” I manage to catch my breath on the walk over.
Jonathan turns and looks back to me. He has tears streaming down his face.
Instantly, my worries seem less substantial.
“She’s gone, Isaak. She’s gone.”
I sit on the table and take his hand in mine. I never would’ve done something like that before, but stupid pretenses fade away in the wake of tragedy. He squeezes my hand and grips it with everything he has, then looks me in the eyes. His are bloodshot and his face, crumpled. Tears fill my eyes as I wait for him to speak again, but he doesn’t have to. I know what happened.
“She’s dead.” He barely gets the words out before he collapses into me, sobbing.
Jonathan, for all of his strength and eagerness to prove it, has a mother who is fighting leukemia.
Had a mother who was fighting leukemia.
I hold him as he sobs. He cries and cries and his body shakes. His hands dig deep into my back, he clings so hard.
When he finally stops, he lets go of me and quietly apologizes.
We sit next to each other, hand in hand, and watch as the setting sun bathes the entire valley before us in a golden orangey pink. Almost like clockwork, the cicadas end their day-long, droning cacophony. We take in the endless trees, the never-ending hills, the infinite sky, all of it.
It’s almost like standing at the edge of the ocean.
• • •
When I start back down the hill toward the house, it’s already nighttime. Stars litter the sky, and the moon is heavy and large in the distance.
I didn’t say anything to Jonathan about what brought me to the park. That I’ve been kicked out of my own house, that I don’t know what to do and have nowhere to go. He needed me too much tonight. After all, what’s worse: losing one parent who truly loved you or losing two who don’t even want you?
I’ve almost forgotten the throb of my headache until I see my house, my former house, perched up among the trees on Sand Street. The living room lights are on. They’re still awake.
I sneak up to the porch, the first of the year’s fireflies blinking in and out of existence around me, and hear a voice from the kitchen. I duck down and, ashamed at feeling like a trespasser in my own home, I listen.
“I don’t care about the money. The checks stop coming after he graduates next month anyway.”
Silence.
“No, we’re not going to wait for someone. We’ve already kicked him out. He’s gone.”
She’s on the phone.
“He’s an abomination is what he is, and he is not staying here any longer. You people knew exactly what was going on and you still . . . No, sir, there’s no need to . . . Now you just wait a minute! We’ve raised him since he was two days old and we’ve done a damn good job of it. We always knew something was wrong with him, but you didn’t tell us he was . . . Well, I don’t know what he is! Now he’s gone, and if you really were all that concerned for him you shouldn’t have given him up in the first place!”
She slams the phone back into the receiver and stomps out of the kitchen.
My mind races.
Gave me up?
My head hurts so bad that my vision blurs. I have to get up to my room and just lie down, sleep this off. Sleep off the entire nightmare if I can. They’re usually asleep by now. If I could get to my bed, I know they wouldn’t notice just one more night.
My fingers jiggle the metal handle on the screen door, but it’s locked.
Another twist of the knife.
I get up and creep around the side of the house, down the little slope to where the garage connects to the basement in the back.
A flicker of movement catches my eye in the trees across the way.
Just across the road behind the house is a little trail that makes its way up into the woods and into the caves. Memories come flooding into me of my childhood, playing in the mouth of the cave, convincing myself that the reason I wouldn’t go all the way in was because I wasn’t allowed and was afraid of getting caught. A little boy would never admit that he was just too scared of the giant, gaping maw in the earth to venture in. It was like a dark, ancient, abandoned cathedral, and something about the unending stream of cold air pouring out into the woods always seemed to frighten me.
I saw something now though, in the trees by the trail. Probably just a fox, or a homeless traveler, who sometimes hop off the myriad trains that come to a crawl through the town at night and make their way into the caves to find shelter.
I make my way down around the garage and up the other side of the house to where several small windows peer into the basement, right at ground level. I kneel down in the chalky white gravel of the driveway and brace my weight up against the window, trying to slide the rusty frame up.
Eventually, it gives.
I slide feetfirst into the basement, lowering myself down as best I can.
I drop to the floor, dust off my jeans, and come face-to-face with my father. Well, the man who used to be my father.
I can barely make out his face in the darkness, but the bright moon coming in through the windows and the tiny red glow of his cigarette reveal a tired man, exhausted to the very core.
I don’t know whether to speak or to run.
“I’m sorry, Isaak. I told her to leave the door unlocked, but . . .” He doesn’t finish the statement.
I watch him take a long drag from his smoke, the little red ember flaring up in the darkness. He hasn’t smoked in the house since I was a little boy. Hasn’t smoked at all in years that I could remember.
“I never meant for it to be like this. For things to turn out this way.”
I can smell the alcohol now.
“It was never enough, just us. Just me.”
His eyes seem to glaze over, lost in his own thoughts.
“She wanted a baby, needed it, and I couldn’t give that to her. I’d never prayed for anything, but you don’t know how hard I prayed then, for her to get what she wanted, for us to be fixed, be happy again.”
I can hear his voice trembling in the darkness.
“They went unanswered . . . all of them. All those years wasted just praying.”
Stillness.
“So we made a deal with the devil, and we got ourselves a baby.”
He cracks. One single sob. I’ve never before seen him shed so much as a single tear.
“You’re a good kid. You don’t deserve this. But we don’t know . . . and I can’t tell her . . .” He swallows. “I’m so sorry, Isaak, but you can’t stay here.”
He composes himself and wipes his face clean.
“You can sleep in your room tonight, but you have to leave by morning.”
I take a ste
p toward the stairs.
“Don’t let her see you.”
Reeling with questions I can’t ask and a pain slowly eating me from the inside out, I make my way up the staircase and leave the crumpled man I used to call Father sitting in the dark, the glow of a cigarette in hand and empty bottle of whiskey at his feet as he tries in vain to stifle his tears.
• • •
I lie in my bed, tossing and turning. The moonlight streaming into my room is so bright it makes the walls glow blue. My head throbs and pulses. I am in agony.
It has to be close to midnight when I start to hear it.
Whispers, murmurs, and little buzzes seem to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. They are trickling in at the moment, but I know it won’t be long until the cracks shatter open and they consume me.
This all has to end.
I force my eyes shut, lost in the maelstrom in my head. The waves of pain are so intense that they rock me into nausea. Whispers become shouts, the buzzing growing into a droning howl within. I hope that as long as I keep my eyes closed it will all go away soon.
Eventually I begin to succumb, and drift into the most restless sleep of my life.
• • •
I don’t know how long I’ve slept, but something wakes me with a start. I’m instantly alert, holding the stillness of the entire night within my breath.
I hear the floorboards creak down the hall toward my room.
Someone is in the house.
My heart pounds. I don’t know whether to jump out the window, or to lie as still as possible. A primal, human instinct tells me I’m in danger.
The footsteps draw closer.
Creak.
Creak.
I draw the blanket up over my head and press myself into the mattress as much as I can, a toddler’s maneuver to make himself invisible. If I could laugh at myself for being so stupid I would, but I’m paralyzed with fear.
The metal of the doorknob clicks. My breath feels hot under the covers, reflecting back toward my face, and my heart is about to beat itself out of my chest.
Silence.
And silence still. Someone is standing in my room and watching me. I know it.
My panic mounts. I can’t just lie here. It might be stupid, but I have to do something.
I jump up and rush toward the middle of the room, blankets and all, trying to tackle the intruder. With a muffled grunt, I’m briskly, deftly, thrown back onto the bed, tangled in my sheets, and pinned.
Two legs, strong and muscular, hold me firmly in place. Two solid arms hold my own. I am a helpless sack, subdued with barely any effort whatsoever.
I’ve never seen, much less been attacked by, someone so incredibly strong.
Wrapped in my blanket and completely bound, I know I’m about to be killed.
Slowly, my captor pulls the blanket down over my face.
The image before me is not what I expect.
A young woman—a girl just a few years older than me—straddles me. Boyishly short platinum-blond hair falls flat across her forehead. A pert mouth and big, wide gray eyes give her the appearance of a pixie. Her black cargo pants and form-fitting black track jacket, the clench of her jaw, and the look of pure fire within her demeanor indicate that this particular pixie can kick some serious ass. I know she could snap me in two with a mere flick of the wrist.
I have no idea how such a small form holds so much power, but here she is, this tiny girl on top of me, holding my life in her hands.
She claps a hand over my mouth before I can scream.
“I know you’re frightened, and I’m sorry for coming to you like this,” she whispers, “but there are people, very bad people, coming to get you tonight. To kill you. I refuse to let that happen.”
I stop my attempts to escape and lock eyes with her. The liquid pools of slate, glowing faintly in the blue moonlight, are sincere. She’s telling the truth . . . or some version of it, at least.
“Come with me if you want to live.” She pushes off the bed with such ease it’s like she floats, then holds her hand out to help me up. “Put your shoes on. You don’t need anything else.”
I stumble as I look for my hoodie from earlier, my head still reeling from pain and confusion.
“Now!”
The ferocity in her whisper is enough to get me moving. My shoes and hoodie are on in an instant, and then I’m standing in the hallway with the girl, all but silent.
She puts a hand on my chest, holding me back a pace as she leads me down the hall. My vision still blurs, and the pain in my head has gotten so bad that I almost can’t bear it.
At the end of the hallway we step into the living room, and I catch the silhouette of a man, a big man, passing by the curtained windows.
They’re already here.
In an instant she has me down the basement stairs. We reach the door that leads into the garage and try to open it silently, but the rusted metal creaks a bit.
As we tear through the garage and out into the moonlight, I silently thank my father for always leaving the door open after running contraband whiskey bottles to the dumpster late at night.
We dart across the driveway, over the road, into the trees, and start up the tiny, overgrown path. She thrusts me into the thicket at the edge of the woods, crouches down with me, and turns to observe the house in the dark.
We’re surrounded by poison ivy—I’d recognize it anywhere—but before I can open my mouth to say something, I see them.
People dressed in solid black seem to materialize out of the night and surround the house. They crawl over the roof, sneak into the windows, and make their way around the back to the garage. Masks cover their faces and they all have guns. Big guns.
A light goes on in a bedroom—their bedroom—and almost as soon as it comes, it goes out with a crash and a blood-curdling scream. The sound is muffled not even a second later, and the night is quiet once more.
They’re dead.
The knowledge barely sinks in before the girl pulls me up. The men are circling now, and one has spotted footprints leading into the woods. Leading to us.
“Run.”
We turn and flee up the path behind us. Branches whip our faces, and the ground is littered with football-size chunks of limestone, but neither get in our way. We run.
The sky is clear and bright with stars, and shadows play all across the ground as we charge through the brush—tumbling over rocks, kicking up the white dust of the trail, trying to escape.
Then I see it. The mouth of the cave. A monolithic chamber of limestone gleaming white in the moonlight, hidden behind the house for so many years. It terrified and mesmerized me throughout my entire childhood, and now a nameless girl leads me into it, away from something that scares me so much more.
We climb over the boulders at the entrance and run down the slope of rocks until we hit cold, white sand. I stop to marvel at having not tumbled down the rocky slope just before a loud, whizzing ping ricochets off the ceiling above me.
“Hurry!” she yells.
They’re shooting at us, and not with regular bullets.
We run to where the moonlight ends in the main space of the cave. Only jet-black emptiness is before us. She takes hold of my hand and barrels into the dark just as the sound of dozens of feet begin to echo at the entrance.
“Trust me,” she whispers.
With my left hand firmly grasped in hers, she takes off into the nothingness just as fast as when I could see. I stumble and trip to keep up with her, yet somehow she is navigating us through the dark with perfect ease.
We run for what feels like an eternity. I know that if I stop, even for a moment, the pain throbbing in my head will take me down and leave me vomiting on the cavern floor. Adrenaline surges me forward. The sand turns to rock once again and slopes upward, while the sound of feet closing in on us still echoes behind. We push up the slope, and I see moonlight coming in again.
The exit is just above us, a tiny manhole about eight feet
off the ground.
We are trapped. There is no way to scale the wall and no way to reach the exit so high above us without a foothold.
The echoes come closer. We are about to run out of time.
In a blink the girl leaps straight from the rocky floor to the exit. She throws her legs out of the hole and then slings her torso back down toward me.
“Grab hold.”
She offers her hands to me and I grasp them. Without a hint of strain, she lifts me up and out.
I tumble over her into the moonlight, down about fifteen feet from an embankment overlooking Osage Street. I clamber down the rocky slope as quickly as I can without falling face-first.
My feet catch hold on the flat pavement of the road as I look up toward the top of the cliff and see the flagpole. We’d been chased through the hillside below Blackburn Park. I never even knew the cave went that far.
A train’s horn peals in the distance, like a ghost howling in the night. It sounds like a death knell.
I turn and for a moment I panic, not sure where the girl has gone. My eyes scour the cliffside and the trees.
“Come on!” She tears across Osage and begins to race down Third Street.
The horn rings through the night once more, closer now.
“We probably have less than a minute before the vehicles arrive,” she says while we run. “We have to get to the tracks.”
We pass another intersection when headlights swing around the corner behind us, and the engines of two black SUVs roar down the street.
“Faster!”
I push myself harder than I thought physically possible. My legs flash beneath me, and my mind peels away everything but the instinct of Left, right, left. . . .
We cross St. Louis Street. The tracks are now just half a block in front of us, cutting over the road, east to west, as we run southward.
The approaching train rings out once more. It is close now.
The vehicles barrel down the street toward us, closing in.
Left, right, left, right, left . . .
A white-hot flash of pain shoots into the back of my neck as my legs give out. The motion in my body dissipates, leaving so abruptly it’s like I never knew how to walk in the first place. I feel my knees take the brunt of the blow as they hit the pavement, and my face takes the remainder. As my skin slides away, tearing against the rough, dirty pavement, and my lifeless bones press into the ground, I hear the girl shout.
