The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  “Don’t we need a compass?” Chicken George asked.

  “We don’t need one.” Frank Just Frank shone the light on the map and traced several roads. “All we have to do is walk straight across the desert and bisect these three roads here. When we see a windmill, which isn’t on the map but should be here,” he said, placing his finger in a spot seemingly in the middle of nowhere, “we’ll be almost there.”

  “How do you know so much?” Em asked.

  “Boy Scouts. I used to love maps until I quit.”

  “What made you quit?” Bach asked.

  Frank Just Frank was silent for a while, but finally answered. “I couldn’t make those fake Indian belts.”

  “Yeah, and the scout leader liked to give out special merit badges,” Flipper Gordon snickered, but no one joined him.

  Auntie Em and Bach exchanged a look, but said nothing.

  They headed out. Auntie Em and Frank Just Frank took the front, with the rest falling in line behind them. Thus began a stumbling, tripping affair through the desert. They soon discovered that although the ground might look flat, it rolled across hidden slopes and holes just large enough to capture and twist a foot. By the time they took their first rest at the first road, Chicken George was limping from a lightly sprained ankle and Bach was limping from being stuck in the leg by a yucca plant. Flipper Gordon had let his imagination run raw and was seeing giant tarantulas hiding in every dark shadow. It became apparent that their earlier estimation of the time it would take to get there had been highly optimistic. Still, no one wanted to quit yet.

  After a ten minute break for water, they took off again.

  By the time they reached the third road, Frank Just Frank snapped off the light and held up a hand for them to stop. The dirt road was higher than the surrounding desert.

  “Get down,” he said, flattening his face against the dirt slope.

  Then the night got brighter as headlights fired down the road. Soon they could hear the low rumble of an engine as a vehicle began to creep towards them. The suspension squeaked roughly as the tires crunched across the gravel.

  When it had been out of sight and earshot for roughly ten minutes, Frank Just Frank lifted his head. The quarter moon caught his grin. “That was a close one.”

  “Who was it? Are they after the bones too?” Flipper Gordon asked.

  “Probably drug dealers. My grandpa says they’re thick as cockroaches on the border.” Chicken George stood and stared worriedly at the road.

  Frank Just Frank shook his head. “I don’t know who they are, but it can’t be good for us, whoever they are. Let’s just stay away from them.” He got up on one knee and checked both directions. “Come on.” He took off across the road.

  Soon the others joined him on the far side, where they sat panting more from fear than exertion. They’d never been out alone at this time of night. More importantly, they’d never been this close to the border at night. Each of their families had warned them that they could get stolen by Mexicans if they strayed too close, so the border, although an invisible line in the sand, took on a ponderous psychological weight.

  Above them the Milky Way spread out in a spiral of hot white lights. Away from the city and in the middle of the night it was breathtaking. Here, as they lay on their backs on the way to offer salvation to a pile of old bones, the idea that the Milky Way was a pathway to the afterlife didn’t seem so fabulous. Away from the conveniences of culture and the technology of society, it seemed like it might be real.

  Each of the kids secretly hoped it was so.

  Each of the kids also secretly hoped their plan wouldn’t work.

  “MR. GORDON,” THE judge began. “Your wife claims that reconciliation attempts have been fruitless. She asserts that you’ve done nothing that the court has asked of you, nor have you sought counseling on your own. Is this true?”

  Sam Gordon nodded.

  His lawyer added, “If it pleases the court, please record that my client nodded in the affirmative.”

  “Not so easy,” the Judge said. He leaned onto his bench. “Mr. Gordon, your wife claims that you haven’t been home for any extended period of time in the last three years. She says you’ve been spending all your time, especially time you should have been working, in a desert down in Cochise County. Tell me, sir, just for my edification, what is it down there that makes you want to throw away a life with a woman who still clearly loves you?”

  Sam Gordon was silent for a long time. Then he murmured something even his own lawyer couldn’t understand.

  “You’re going to have to repeat that for the record,” his lawyer said softly.

  “My friends,” Sam whispered.

  “Ah yes. Emory Lowenstien, Frank Warfle, Sebastian Johns, and Henry Scoggins. Are these the friends you’re talking about?”

  “Yes. They need me.”

  “They need you.” The half smile on the judge’s face faded as he glanced towards Sam’s wife. When he returned his gaze to Sam Gordon, he said with all seriousness, “If I felt that you would benefit from counseling during these proceedings, I would order it forthwith, Mr. Gordon. But your wife, I think, has been through enough and, in my legal opinion, she has the right to move on and find someone without the ghosts you have haunting you.”

  Sam Gordon murmured something unintelligible. When his lawyer pressed him to speak up, he said, “They’re not ghosts.”

  “Well, if they are not ghosts, Mr. Gordon, then please tell the court where Ms. Lowenstein, Mr. Warfle, Mr. Johns and Mr. Scoggins are living, because as of the night of July 27, 1977, they were never seen again.”

  A SOUND EASED itself into their consciousness. It was a wheezing sort of grind, as if an axe murderer were sharpening the working edge of his namesake.

  Finally it was Bach who whispered, “What is that?”

  “It’s the windmill,” Frank Just Frank said. “Right where we thought it was.”

  “Then we’re almost there.” Em squinted at the watch on her wrist. Mickey’s little hand was on four and his big hand was on six. “We’re never going to make it back in time.”

  “Can’t worry about that now. Come on.” Frank Just Frank consulted the map in Bach’s hands for a moment with the flashlight, then pushed himself to his feet and began to trudge into the darkness.

  The other four groaned as they got up and followed.

  It took another half an hour, but Auntie Em was the one who found it. They stared at the mound for a good while, each of them knowing that beneath the thin layer of dirt that the college kids had thrown over it were real bones. People bones.

  “There’s no time like the present, I suppose.” Frank Just Frank guided Chicken George and Flipper Gordon to where they should begin digging. “Be careful with those. We don’t want to damage the bones.”

  Everyone looked at Frank Just Frank as if he were Solomon, then went about their business. While Chicken George and Flipper Gordon dug, Em got on her hands and knees and helped scoop away the soil. Bach stood ready with the bag.

  SAM HAD PURCHASED the property right out of college. The economy was down and there weren’t too many people who wanted a piece of desert scrub; still it cost him enough to set him back a dozen years. But he didn’t mind. It was something that he’d had to do.

  The first few years he’d owned it, he’d gone back to the RV every chance he’d gotten. Like when he was little: climb in the RV, sometimes sit behind the wheel, and sometimes lay on one of the benches. All the while, he’d whisper for his friends. He’d call their names. He’d even replay the things they said, in the hopes that it would be a sort of conversational beacon for their way back. He listened desperately for a response, only none ever came. In the moment they’d disappeared, they were irrevocably gone, as though some divine hand had come down, scooped them from the board of life, and tossed them into an intergalactic hole.

  As the years progressed, he began to go less and less. From twenty times a year, to ten, to four, finally, he was only goi
ng twice a year – once on New Year’s Day and once on the anniversary of the event.

  By the time he turned thirty, he was a successful businessman in Phoenix. He’d married a woman he’d met at the checkout line at the supermarket. For a while she filled the hole in his soul, replacing what he could never have with flesh-and-blood love. But despite his wishes, it wasn’t enough. The cancer of not being chosen continued to grow inside. He found himself getting up in the middle of the night and staring at the Milky Way, wondering where they were, what they were doing, and why he’d never been allowed to join them.

  He started spending more and more time back at the property, driving the three hours from Phoenix down to Cochise County to be near the RV… just in case.

  He divorced three years later. His wife had held on longer than she should.

  THE BONES WERE like nothing they’d ever expected. All the bones on television and in comic books had been white and clean. These bones were brown, with hard gray skin and tendons clinging to them.

  “It looks mummified,” Bach whispered.

  Everyone nodded, in awe of the remains.

  “I bet it’s from the heat,” Auntie Em observed.

  Suddenly light snapped on behind them. They all turned and saw headlights drawing near, a jeep bouncing slowly across the scrub.

  Frank Just Frank fell to his knees and began to grab the bones, shoving them one after the other into Bach’s bag. Many of them still clung together, and these he forced through the small round opening. Gone was the desire to be careful.

  “Is it the police?” Chicken George asked, on the verge of tears.

  Em shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not the police,” Frank Just Frank said with certainty. When all eyes were on him, he held out a brick wrapped in cloth.

  “What is it?” Flipper Gordon asked.

  Em groaned. “They’re drug dealers.”

  “Oh, shit, shit, shit.” Bach began to shake, almost dropping the bag.

  Frank Just Frank closed the bag and pointed in the direction of the windmill. “Go there. The sound of the sails turning turning will keep you from being heard. ” He spied the setting moon. “When you get there, make your way to the right of the moon by four fingers. I’ll find you.”

  “But what about you?” Em asked.

  “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  The others took off with only Em hesitating a moment.

  Frank Just Frank reached one last time into the hole and brought out a package. He gripped the hard white brick in his hand and squared his shoulders.

  SAM WAS THIRTY-FIVE when he drew up plans for a steel building to protect the site. When he was thirty-eight, he took out a home equity line of credit and directed the building of it. Looking like a steel barn from the outside, the roof opened on hydraulics so that, sitting behind the wheel of the RV, he’d be able to see as much of the sky as he thought he needed.

  During all this while, he’d been studying Yolkai Nalin. Edward Curtis seemed to be the foremost scholar on the subject, even though the data was recorded in 1907. He’d had words from Curtis’s text painted on the underside of the roof so that when the doors were closed, he could always read them and remember.

  “She is the Goddess of Death and the after-life, for she controls all souls that pass on to the future world. The road to this afterworld is supposed to cross her shoulders and is symbolized by the Milky Way, a trail made by the departing spirits. The Apache will not utter the name of a deceased person, because they say the dead have gone on to Yolkai Nalin and are her people. If they talked of them it might anger her, and when their death ensues she might refuse them admittance to the eternal paradise.”

  He’d had an old woman of the White Mountain Apaches make him a robe covered in white stone beads from the White Mountains. He was terribly afraid that he might have been angering the goddess all this time, and if he wasn’t able to find a way to get his friends to return, that the goddess might keep him from joining them in the afterlife.

  FRANK CAUGHT UP with them just as he said he would.

  His story went like this

  When they’d gotten to within shouting distance, he’d yelled to the men in the vehicle to stop. There were three of them. Frank told them that he wasn’t alone. That there were two others in the darkness with rifles. He would have run right away, but he was trying to let enough time pass so that the others could get farther away. He commanded the three to stand in front of the headlights so that he could see them. They wore Vietnam service jackets, had long hair, and looked as deadly as a trio of switchblades. Finally, Frank hurled the brick onto the hood of the RV. It bounced once, then sprung open, dusting the windshield in a fine white powder. Then Frank ran. When they’d turned to watch the drugs hit the windshield, they’d been forced to stare into the headlights, night blinding them for a few moments. Still, one of them began firing blindly. But it was an easy task to get away from them. After a few more shots, they were more intent on seeing what they could recover of the brick and going into the hole for the other three Frank had left there than chasing a lone boy.

  All three of the other boys and Em looked upon him as the hero he was.

  Frank Just Frank was just concerned about getting back. “We have got to stay off the roads in case they come looking for us,” he said.

  By the time they got home it was nine in the morning and everyone’s grandparents, and Em’s parents, had already been in long conversations. They’d hid the bones beneath the RV. Frank Just Frank told them that they had to meet him back at the RV at one the next morning, when they’d use the bones to summon Yolkai Nalinand, hopefully, send the soul of the dead person on to the afterlife. Everyone was too tired to argue and dreading their impending punishments.

  SAM SPENT THREE summers learning the Athabaskan, or Na-Dene languages of the Apache. He was even able to learn the subtle differences in Western, Jacarilla and Mescallero Apache. He used these as he created his own prayers in what he called the Four Stations of the Milky Way, which he’d arranged in each of the four corners of the RV. Each one was a shrine to one of his lost friends, pieced together over the years from talking to their parents and grandparents, and in some cases, stealing.

  Auntie Em’s was the most complete, because her parents, when they’d moved away to join the Peace Corps, had abandoned most of their things in the house. Not only did the shrine have toys, dolls, a journal, her toothbrush, jewelry and several Nancy Drew mystery novels, but it also held, as its centrepiece, a child-sized store mannequin clothed in a dress, over blue jeans, with feet encased in Keds sneakers. The mannequin’s head had been replaced with an expensive recreation, commissioned from a sculptor out of Albuquerque. The likeness was breathtaking, as were the likenesses in all the other shrines.

  Every night he’d stop at each of these and speak words in all three languages. First he’d ask Yolkai Nalin for their return. Then he’d apologize for speaking their names and bothering the goddess. Then he’d ask for the goddess’s forgiveness, explaining that it was his love for his friends that had forced him to transgress.

  Finally, with no response to any of his supplications, he’d sit in the RV and, using a remote control, make the doors open to the bright swirl of the Milky Way. Sitting behind the wheel, he’d drive drunk night after night. With a bottle of mescal in one hand and the wheel in the other, he’d sing songs, replay conversations and cry over boob sweat as he drove the wide open sky. Had he been on a road, he would have hit someone, or possibly killed himself. But the highway in the sky was free of such things and try as he might, he never hit a thing.

  THE NEXT NIGHT Flipper Gordon’s grandparents watched him like a hawk. His grandfather screwed his window in place. Then his grandmother slept in the easy chair. Flipper had sat on his bed with his clothes on as the hours had ticked by. When one o’clock hit, he’d been mad with anticipation and had almost burst out of his room and ran out the front door.

  But it was like his gran
dmother had known.

  “Don’t you dare come out of that room, young man. The last thing your mother needs is for something bad to happen to you.”

  Unspoken in those words was the fact that his father had died three years before in Vietnam and his mother was having a hard enough time dealing with that loss.

  When the clock hit three, Flipper removed his clothes, climbed under the covers and fell asleep, wondering what mad adventures the others had gotten themselves into, and whether or not their idea of repatriating the soul to heaven had worked.

  At seven he was jostled awake.

  “Where are they?” his grandfather asked, fuming.

  At first he played dumb, pretending that he had no idea, but Em’s mother showed up in the living room with tears pouring down her puffy, red face and Flipper couldn’t find it in him to lie to her. So he told them that the plan had been to meet back at the RV at one in the morning.

  “But no one was there,” Em’s mother said. “No one was anywhere. They’re all gone. All of them. Except you.”

  His grandmother shuffled Em’s mother out and began to make a succession of phone calls.

  Flipper wanted nothing more than to go out and see the RV, but it would be three days before he was allowed to go, and then only because he was with the Cochise County Sheriff and his deputies. Before they went there, they traveled to where they’d found the bones. Flipper related how they’d found the bones and the strange bricks. Then he relayed the story Frank Just Frank had told them. When he’d finished, they exchanged knowing glances that left little doubt in Flipper’s mind that something terrible might have happened. In fact, he had begun to wonder if maybe they hadn’t been taken by the drug dealers right up until the point when he saw the RV.

  Bones had been lashed to the front bumper. The fan blades that had been rusted to a stop in the shape of a cross had become a cross of bone. The skull was mounted on the hood. Everywhere, bones had been lashed to the RV, until there were no more places to lash them. There are 206 bones in the human body, including 120 bones in the arms and legs, 26 vertebrae and 24 ribs. All of these had been used to transform the RV from a rusted skeleton into something that could make a mortician shudder.