August's Eyes

by Glenn Rolfe

  “I brought you a little company.”

  She looked down at the unmoving body. It was a man. He was older, also familiar, and badly beaten. His face was a collage of deep purple bruises. His ruined nose aimed the wrong way. Dried blood was cemented to the side of his face.

  Sarah swallowed hard.

  Oh God, she wanted to scream for John. To tell him they could work out all this bullshit. That he was the most important person in her life, that—

  “And one more,” the big man said, carrying someone in over his shoulder and tossing them next to her like a sack of potatoes.

  Sarah sucked the air between her teeth.

  Pat.

  His face was bruised, one of his eyes swollen, his lip cracked and caked with a little blood.

  Bastards.

  “You kids behave, or I’ll have to come back and punish ya.” The kidnapping piece of shit chuckled at himself and closed the door, leaving them bound and blind. The sound of the pounding rain was maddening enough to make her tremble.

  * * *

  The rain was a blessing. Alvin didn’t mind getting wet while he worked. And he had two graves to dig. Llewellyn’s little spooky boy hadn’t come back yet, and that was probably for the best. Llewellyn had assured Alvin if the boy interfered in any way, he would be reprimanded and reintroduced to the old ways. Alvin didn’t know the depths of his cousin’s depravity, but he’d heard enough to know the unpleasantness would be far from simply getting the belt or a backhand.

  He grabbed a small aluminum ladder along with his best shovel and walked across the yard and through the trees over to the cemetery. The job would be so much quicker with the backhoe, but the less attention he drew to himself from any lookie-loo passing by the better. The rain would make the ground softer. Digging the grave by hand would be a lot of work, but nothing worthwhile ever came easy. That’s what Aunt Loretta used to say.

  He stopped before the graves, set side by side, and stared at the markers of Loretta and Llewellyn Caswell.

  He dropped the ladder, broke the earth with his favorite spade, then with the rain pelting down and the wind swirling around him, Alvin began the arduous task.

  * * *

  By the time he’d dug down to Llewellyn’s coffin, the night had fallen around him. The rain continued but at a softer pitter-patter. He set up the ladder and climbed from the hole, a member of the undead lurching out from the grave like in them old Romero flicks. The thought brought a grin to his face.

  Night had come down hard, and he needed light. Alvin also wanted to call the police station and let them know he was working out here. They knew his job entailed some night digs and he liked to give them a head’s up when he worked in the later hours so that they didn’t stop by and bother him, thinking he was some sort of modern-day grave robber.

  In the house, sopping wet and dripping all the way across the living room, he placed the call, telling them it was a last-minute service requested by an out-of-town family with old ties to Spears Corner. With the police taken care of, Alvin gobbled down a sandwich and finished a Coors Light, grabbed his Coleman lantern, and headed back out to the cemetery to unbury his aunt.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Come with me,” Johnny pleaded.

  One Eye averted his eye and shook his head.

  “Okay, but I understand.” Johnny got up to leave, but turned back. “I never got your name.”

  “Henry,” he said. “Henry Bixby.”

  Johnny reached out a hand and the boys shook. Henry cracked a smile.

  “Good to know you, Henry.”

  “You too.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take Johnny long before he found just who he was looking for.

  Standing against the wrought-iron fence, staring over toward the lit-up farmhouse, August waited.

  “You actually showed up,” he said.

  “So, what should I call you?” Johnny asked. “August or Ethan?”

  “That one’s easy, Johnny,” he said, his wicked eyes locking on to Johnny’s. “Ethan died the day you left him with that monster.”

  “I know.” Johnny dipped his head and kicked at the ground.

  “Oh, you know?” August said, his voice quiet yet brimming with venom. “You know?”

  Johnny raised his chin to see August approaching him, his dark shadow crawling with insects. He took a step back, unsure of what August was capable of.

  “You left me…with him!” August pointed toward the farmhouse.

  “I’m sorry,” John said.

  “Oh yeah, I see that. I see how sorry you are. Out here with the rest of us now, aren’t you? Well, you’ve finally showed some real courage, Johnny. Bravo.”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I freaked out.”

  “You let it happen. This is all. Your. Fault.”

  “I know.”

  “Stop saying that!” August said.

  Johnny bit his lip.

  “Because you have no idea what I went through.”

  Johnny stayed quiet. August was right. After all this time, the boy deserved to let him have it.

  “Do you want to know?” August said, coming within feet of him, his insect-filled shadow trailing close behind. “You want to hear about what he did to the boy you left behind?”

  Johnny couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what Ethan had been through and he didn’t want to know.

  “He took me…he took me to a motel. He took me there and he made me take my clothes off. He watched me. He tied my hands to his bedpost….”

  Johnny didn’t need to know this. He clenched his eyes shut tight, grinding his teeth.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” August said. “Is this too hard for you? Is this too much for you to take?”

  “Please, Ethan,” John said. “I said I was sorry.”

  “Shut up!” August said as he rushed forward and shoved Johnny to the ground. “Ethan’s dead. He’s dead!”

  Johnny broke. Crying from the bottom of his wounded soul. It was true. All of it. He’d abandoned Ethan with a child-molesting serial killer rapist. Caswell did all those awful things to him because Johnny left him. And he kept it to himself all these years. If he had just told someone, anyone, maybe he could have saved the boy.

  “He raped me that night. Over and over again.” August’s voice came out in a cracked whisper. “Then he choked me until I thought I was going to die. And when I was able to breathe, and thought that I’d made it through…. Then, then he did it all over again.”

  John couldn’t speak.

  “The next day, when he wrapped his hands around my throat for the last time, I wanted it. I wanted…to die.”

  August lowered himself to the ground, curling up in his shadow of writhing critters. They surrounded him, enfolded him, like an army of bite-sized guardians.

  “Why did you leave me?”

  The voice was no longer that of the spine-tingling malevolent thing from Graveyard Land – it was Ethan’s. The way he sounded before.

  “I don’t know…. I was just a stupid, scared-shitless kid,” Johnny said.

  “So was I,” he said.

  The silence grew arms and legs adorned with wounds and scars, holding both imminent doom and salvation. It fell upon them like the fog of Graveyard Land.

  “You have to give yourself to him,” August said.

  The bugs had covered every inch of August’s flesh, and as they began to disperse, sliding away in one flawlessly fluid motion, like melting snow, they revealed the kid Johnny once knew. No longer the macabre character he’d seen in his dreams all these weeks. It was Ethan Ripley sitting beside him.

  “The only way to save your wife and your friend is to surrender to the Ghoul.”

  “Please, I can’t,” Johnny pleaded. “I can’t do that.”

  “He sent me aft
er you, because you’re the last one – the one that got away.”

  “No, there’s got to be something else we can do.”

  Ethan shook his head and said, “He says this is the only way.”

  “What if….” Johnny wanted to argue, but it wasn’t up to him. He didn’t make the rules here, but…. “What if you and I go together?”

  “What?” Ethan looked wounded.

  “No, hear me out. We go and take him on—”

  Ethan scooted away from him, shaking his head. “No, he’s too strong.”

  “There’s got to be a way to stop…” Johnny looked around, gesticulating at the dream world surrounding them. “…all of this. This isn’t a good place.”

  “But it’s his. You don’t know what he can do.”

  All this time and Caswell still scared them to death. Even Ethan, who had seemed so in control and so intimidating as August, but it was just a façade. Underneath it all, he was still the frightened, awkward kid Johnny took pity on back in 1994.

  “You’ve been here much longer than I have,” Johnny said, tempering his tone, trying to get through to him. “If he created this place, then there has to be a way to destroy it. One Eye, I mean Henry, didn’t think it was possible. What about you? Honestly, in your heart and soul, what do you think?”

  Ethan tucked his knees to his chin.

  “You must have at least considered the idea before, right?” Johnny asked.

  “I…” Ethan tried. “If we knew how he made it, then…maybe we could undo it, but I don’t know what he did or how he did it.”

  “What if I think I do?” Johnny asked.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Sarah couldn’t let these motherfuckers win, even if one of them wasn’t quite normal. She thought of his eyes…the empty holes. There was no denying that it was the creepy kid from John’s dreams. How didn’t matter right now. The strange boy and the big goon stood between them and escape. She’d read about monsters far worse. Last fall, she picked up a book by Jack Ketchum that made it impossible to go to sleep or be home alone at night for weeks after she finished it. A woman in a cabin in Maine got taken by savages that lived in a nearby cave. They eviscerated all her friends. It was hands down the scariest thing she ever read.

  Now, it was her and Pat’s asses on the line and there was no way she was surrendering to whatever sick plans their kidnappers had plotted out.

  She began working her wrists and hands, trying to get out of the duct tape. She needed to find something in this shed to help cut it. She’d caught glimpses of the interior when the boy without eyes was here. There was a high workbench behind her and to her left. She thought she’d seen tool handles lined up over that way too. There was no telling when either of their captors would be back, so she would have to work fast. They may only get one shot.

  She sat up, blind in the complete darkness, and put her weight on her knuckles, raising her rump and scooting toward where the bench and handles had been, tracing her fingers over anything she found. There was dirt and debris, cobwebs – which reminded her of the creepy kid kissing the spider onto her cheek. There had been so many, where had they gone? Or were they ever really here? She shivered and kept searching. Her legs bumped against the man she didn’t know. She hadn’t heard a thing from him – no movement, no breathing. Sarah was certain he was dead – an unsettling thought, but a motivator if ever there was one.

  Her back found the corner of the bench, then her elbow smacked into something that clattered to the floor.

  She felt a surge of hope as she wrapped her fingers around the wooden handle and pulled it through her hands, only to find it was a fucking broom.

  “Fuck,” she muttered.

  Stay positive. Stay focused.

  The next end she found caused her heartbeat to quicken. Her hands clutched onto the blade of an ax. With her hands bound, it took a little more concentration and effort to get the ax into position so she could use it. After standing its handle up so that she could get a good angle to rub the tape against it, Sarah managed three strokes before the tool fell again. She took two slow, deep breaths through her nose, remembering her lessons from her virtual yoga guru, Adrienne, and got the tool set up again. This time she managed almost ten strokes before it fell over. A sudden scuffle in the room startled her. Coming from her right – Pat. She couldn’t communicate yet with her mouth still taped, so she didn’t waste time trying, she just went back to working her bindings against the blade.

  She was sweating up a storm; the muscles in her shoulders, triceps, forearms, and wrists burned with every move. Finally, Sarah felt the tape give way.

  Adrenaline surged. Reaching up, she clawed the tape from her mouth until she was able to pull it away and cast it aside.

  “Pat?” she asked, moving toward him.

  Feeling around, she found him and picked at the tape covering his mouth.

  As it came free, she heard him mumbling and trying to spit.

  ”What is it?” she asked.

  She touched his lips and felt the cloth. She pulled the fabric free and listened to him take in some deep breaths of his own.

  “Pat,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he finally said. “Well, my arm is really freaking sore and my leg is messed up, but I’m still here, so that’s good, right?”

  “Yes, who’s with you?”

  “Mr. Fuller,” he said. After a moment of quiet, he said, “That fucker killed him.”

  “Hold on,” she said. On her hands and knees, she found the ax and used it to saw at the tape around her ankles. Once she was completely free, she moved to get Pat out of his bindings.

  “Are you all right?” Pat asked.

  “I’ll survive,” she said.

  “They took us to get to John,” he said.

  “Why? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know if you’d believe me if I told you. It’s kind of weird.”

  She thought of John’s dream creep who spat spiders. Gliding into the shed and getting close enough to prove he was fucking real.

  “Trust me, I’ve already been introduced to weird. What do you know?”

  A light sparked to life between them.

  “I knew there was something good about being a smoker,” Pat said, holding up a lighter.

  She could have kissed the smile on his face. She went to work freeing his ankles instead.

  “I can get that,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “About Mr. Fuller.”

  “I didn’t know him that well, or for that long really, but he didn’t deserve this.”

  Sarah placed a hand on his shoulder. “We need to be ready when they come back.”

  “They?” he asked.

  “Yeah, the guy that brought you in here and the…I don’t know the other one.”

  “I didn’t see anyone else,” Pat said.

  “You were going to say something about things being weird, well, I saw a tall kid with…without eyes…I don’t how or what or—”

  “August,” Pat said.

  “Wait, what? How do you know about him?”

  “John told me about his dreams.” He let the lighter’s flame die. “Sorry,” he said. “It was burning my thumb.”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Sarah, I think John’s dreams have everything to do with this.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “I don’t think we can worry about that. Whatever it is, some kind of old magic or whatever, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen August. I’ve been seeing him for the last week or two.”

  “Don’t tell me you and John are sharing dreams. What is this, like Freddy Krueger or something?”

  “No, August isn’t the boogeyman,” Pat said, “but I think he’s working for one. These guys are involved with a dead seri
al killer named Llewellyn Caswell.”

  “Caswell,” she said. “That’s the guy that did this to you.”

  “He’s Llewellyn’s cousin.”

  Pat told her about killer Caswell’s taste in victims, his trip home to Maine, the kidnapping in Spears Corner, and his arrest upon his return to Wisconsin.

  “So, John saw this Llewellyn guy take Ethan Ripley?”

  “He didn’t say it, but, yeah, I think so.”

  “That’s the secret,” she said. “That’s what the dreams have all been about. Oh my God. How did he not tell me?”

  “Honestly,” Pat said, “I don’t think John remembered.”

  Pat brought the lighter to life.

  “We’ve got to be ready when that guy comes back.” She picked up the ax. “We have to hit whoever comes through that door with everything we’ve got.”

  Pat nodded.

  “And then we find John and figure out a way to put an end to this.”

  “I hope he’s okay,” Pat said. “We kind of said some shitty things to each other before I left.”

  “Yeah.” Sarah remembered her own parting words with John, his admission of infidelity. She wiped a tear trying to squeeze its way out. “Our last conversation wasn’t so sweet, either.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  A vehicle crawled past the cemetery gates as he climbed from the hole. Relieved that it wasn’t a cop, Alvin was nonetheless ready to meet whoever it was closer to the entrance should they stop. Telling people you were digging a hole for a fresh one was a lot easier if they didn’t look down and catch you with a coffin, let alone two.

  The car moved along. He watched the red taillights get devoured by the night.

  He’d yet to pry either coffin open; he wanted to leave some of the fun for when the pretty lady arrived. Most people had never seen a dead body and even fewer got to see the desiccated bones and decades of rot and ruin delivered upon the deceased.

  He grabbed the lantern and headed back to the shed.

  A wild electricity surged through his veins. Before today, it had been more than twenty-five years since Alvin had instilled the kind of fear in another person that he saw in the boy’s eyes. Sure, he’d made people uncomfortable his entire life, but there truly was something that cranked things up another level when the person across from you thought their life was in your hands. The desperation, the pleading, the slow collapse of hope. There was nothing like it. And his cousin Llewellyn had pushed that intimidation and power play beyond anything Alvin had ever fantasized.