by Keith Knapp
Now the shaking got really bad.
There was a slam from the front as the dog-things tried to smash through. Jody let out a small sigh of relief—that’s right, she had locked it, she had some time.
Hopping back to her feet, Jody found her shaking had miraculously disappeared. Survival instinct had kicked in, a wonderful thing with added adrenaline and focus—fight or flight. It didn’t stop her insides from feeling like a roller coaster, though—she had a feeling nothing would ever be able to stop her stomach from churning the way it was right now— but her hands were stable enough to be able to slip back through the bars. Her pinky entered the keyhole.
Another bump at the door followed by a crack. The wood was rupturing, she could hear it, almost feel it as if it were happening to her and not the door. Her finger fumbled around and found the jack again. She shoved it up to the latch and pushed with all her pinky-might. The latch squeaked in its housing and she felt it begin to give.
But the front door gave first with one final smack from the dog-things. Fragments of wood and what sounded like part of the shoddy metal chain fell to the ground in a clatter.
“That did it,” she heard a man say.
Jody froze. Unless the dog-things had the ability to speak, there was a man out there. One of the loonies from the hotel. Or maybe it was the bug-man—he could certainly talk. Feet shuffled across the floor.
“We should search the back.” A second voice. A woman. It sounded like-
“Mom?” Jody asked herself.
“We will,” said the man.
The second voice, the one that sounded a lot like her mother, spoke up again. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “But let’s hurry it up. This place gives me the willies.”
“MOM!” Jody screamed.
* * *
Sophia couldn’t get through the room fast enough. She dropped Roscoe’s leash the second she heard her daughter cry out for her, but he stayed at her side and ran along with her to the door on the other side of the room. She twisted the knob and pushed, but a chain-link kept it closed.
“Jody?!”
“Mom! It’s locked! You have to-”
Sophia didn’t need to be told what to do. She punched at the door with her shoulder, and snap!, there went the chain. Daylight broke through the now open doorway and into the hall of cells. Her elbow banged against the doorjamb, but the lightning bolt of pain that shot up and down her arm didn’t register—every fiber of her being was focused on her daughter. Pain did not exist.
“JODY?!”
Her daughter’s arms stuck out through the bars. “Mom!” she screamed. “Mom, over here!”
Skidding to a stop in front of Jody’s cell, Sophia grabbed her daughter by the hands and pulled her close. They hugged tightly, the metal between them nothing more than a minor annoyance.
“Jody, oh my God, you’re okay, I thought I’d never see you again.” Sophia was crying, her words barely intelligible. “What are you doing in there?”
Jody’s fingers wrapped themselves up in her mother’s shirt. “Oh mom there were these things outside these dogs but they weren’t dogs and they chased me and then the cell locked behind me and I couldn’t get out and oh thank God you found me ‘cause I didn’t know what I was gonna do.”
Roscoe stuck his nose in as far as it would go through the bars (which wasn’t very far) and gave Jody a good sniff. Then he pulled out his snout, sniffed Sophia and licked her jeans.
“Mom, get me outta here. You have to get me outta here.”
“I will, baby, I will.” Sophia’s voice was a whisper. Yes, she had found Jody—but part of her was wishing she hadn’t. If they were all dead then so was Jody.
Mike and the others entered the hallway and stood a few feet away, letting the two have their reunion.
“Keys,” said Brett. “We need keys.” He looked around the floor of the hallway as if a set of keys might magically appear. His gaze finally fell upon the skeletal remains of the other prisoner and he let out a little shriek. He fell back behind Rachel and said, “I don’t like this place, either.”
Mike turned and headed back into the office. “I’ll check out front,” he said, and was gone.
“Jody, honey, look at me. We’ll have you out of there in just a sec,” Sophia said.
“Mom, I was so scared.”
“Me, too.”
* * *
A cursory examination of the front office resulted in no found keys. The bullet holes behind the sheriff’s desk troubled Mike—and why shouldn’t they? Something bad had happened here long before they arrived. The wood surrounding the little circles (he counted, there were twelve of them) were rotted and smoothed over; they weren’t fresh.
It would make sense that any keys would not have been left out in the open. They would’ve been hidden. In westerns, such keys always seemed to be kept in the sheriff’s desk.
Although the desk had been broken in two, both pieces still sat upright.
Sheriff’s office. Top right drawer. Alison’s words, echoing in his brain again.
Moving over to the right half, Mike pulled open the drawer in question and low and behold—sitting next to a rusted deputy’s badge was a ring of keys, any of which looked like they’d fit nicely in the keyhole of a cell door. He pulled them out and twirled them around a finger. They clinked together.
Alison had been right.
* * *
The cell door violently swung open as Sophia yanked it hard and grabbed her daughter in one motion. The door clanged against the bars of the cell and swiveled back toward the mother-daughter reunion. Mike stopped it with a hand as Sophia made it clear that she was never letting go of this particular hug.
“Oh-mom-I-was-so-scared-what-is-this-place?”
“I’m not sure, honey,” Sophia said. “It’s not a good place.”
And then Jody seemed to snap out of it, to wake up—really wake up—like she had just been prodded with a taser. She broke from the hug and her eyes darted left, then right, then all around.
“The Bug Man,” she said.
“What?” Sophia asked.
“The Bug Man,” Jody repeated. “We need to get out of here.”
“Who’s this Bug Man fella?” Rachel asked.
By this point, Mike was already at the door leading back to the sheriff’s office. “Does it matter? We’re leaving. Come on, let’s go.”
* * *
It was agreed that they couldn’t go back the way they had come—weird creepy ladies in gowns were waiting for them in a weird creepy shed that way. They’d head north through the town and hope to find some means of communication or transportation along the way. If not, there had to be another town somewhere, another place they could find to get help. Then again, for all they knew oblivion stood right outside the borders of the town. With dead loves and bug men running around, anything was possible.
They traveled down the empty road. A breeze rolled a tumbleweed past them.
“I’m Brett.”
Jody looked up at him. He was a good six inches taller than her. “Hi,” she said.
He made to put out a hand for a shake, then awkwardly pulled it back and shoved it in a pocket. His face flushed. There was a little crush brewing there.
“I like you hair,” he said.
Jody played with her red locks. “Thanks,” she said, then returned to watching her feet as she walked.
“What’s a bug man?” Brett asked.
“I don’t know,” Jody said. She looked up and saw everyone was listening to her. “It was a man made of bugs, but it was like I was…not awake or something. Like it was a dream, but not really.”
“This town, this whole place, has weird vibes running through it,” Mike said.
“No shit,” Jody said.
They were half a block away from the sheriff’s office when they began to hear the music again. Curious eyes looked around, searching for the source.
It came from somewhere behind them.
Mike closed
his eyes. He had heard this tune before, he knew it as sure as he knew that his sneakers were presently soaked in his own sweat on the inside and Jillian’s blood on the outside. It was the same song he had heard when they entered the town, the one that had flowed out of the saloon like a ripple in still water, then vanished.
It sounded like something from the late seventies.
It came back in a wave.
* * *
Alison hadn’t given Mike a second glance during the few hours a week they spent together in Columbia’s remedial art class. Mike was looking for focus. He wanted to add some meaning to his life. He didn’t find it in art, but he did find it in Alison. She, however, wasn’t there for any grand reason other than that she liked to draw.
Two months into the course, Mike finally got up enough nerve to accidentally bump into her, and they were formally introduced. He apologized by offering to buy her a slice of pizza, or two, or three, or however many she wanted. With his wry grin, he wasn’t hiding the fact that the bump wasn’t so accidental.
They had gone to a pizza place two miles away from the school—one of Alison’s beloved haunts—although Mike couldn’t remember the name of it for the life of him.
There had been a jukebox. She asked him for a quarter which he gladly provided, and he watched her pull away from the table and drop his quarter into the machine.
* * *
“Aerosmith,” Mike said.
Sophia turned to look at him. “What?”
“That’s the song. “You See Me Crying”. Aerosmith,” Mike repeated. “It was one of Alison’s favorites. She was teaching it to me on piano.”
“Who’s Alison?” Sophia asked.
“My dead wife,” Mike said as he scanned the block behind them, his eyes finally resting on the building where he’d first heard the music. He didn’t want to go back, but the way he saw it he really didn’t have a choice.
The saloon grew bigger as Mike closed in on it, Sophia’s muttered apology barely registering in his brain.
“What’s going on?” Brett whispered to Rachel, feeling that whatever they were now involved in whispering was required.
“I have no idea,” Rachel replied.
Aerosmith’s ballad got louder the closer they got. So did other sounds. People talking, having what sounded like normal every day conversations—no yelling or screaming for their lives in there, that was for sure. Glasses clanked.
Lights were on this time. Fluorescents. Shadows of people milling about ebbed and flowed underneath the swinging doors.
Mike was close enough to see inside now, but he didn’t look. Maybe it would be better to just turn around and run like a fucking ball-buster out of this place. There’d be no harm in that, no one would think him the scaredy-cat. Then he heard a familiar woman’s voice.
Mike placed his fingers on the right saloon door and pushed it open.
The pizza place where Alison and Mike had their first date was alive and well and doing a small amount of business. The fluorescent lights above gave a greenish glow to the two people behind the counter and the handful of customers. Mike only cared about two of the clientele.
Sitting not ten feet away from him was a much younger and healthier version of Mike Randal, and across from him, working on her second slice of New York-style pizza, was the lady that would one day become his wife.
* * *
The pizza was the real New York-style deal: one slice filled your plate and then some, the edges of the crust sliding off one edge, the tip of the slice drooping over the other, grease on all ends. Alison Sullivan curled it up, kept her index finger in the middle for support, and took a healthy bite.
The restaurant wasn’t packed and according to Alison it never was. How it stayed in business was beyond Mike. There were three other customers: an old couple (the man gumming his pizza like an infant) and a teenage boy, maybe five years younger than Mike and Alison, who was enjoying a Street Fighter game nestled in the corner.
Alison finished what she had in her mouth and took a swig of Coke. Her hand barely fit around the glass. A cluster of hair released itself from behind her ear and dropped in front of an eye. She peered at Mike through the strands, and he peered back.
“You don’t seem like the artist type,” she said, breaking the not terribly awkward silence between them.
“I liked to draw as a kid. Figured I still would.”
“But you don’t anymore.”
“That obvious, huh?”
Alison smiled. “You used the past-tense.”
Mike smiled back. “Nothin’ gets by you.”
“Nothing at all,” she said. Her grin got bigger.
Aerosmith ended their ballad, replaced by Janet Jackson.
* * *
Sophia looked over at Mike. He wasn’t crying—she could tell he was the type of guy that wouldn’t cry unless thoroughly provoked—but his eyes were puffy. He was on his way.
“This was our first date,” he said. “God, we’re so young.”
“It’s like the hotel room,” Sophia said with a shake. “Exactly like the hotel room. Except yours is good.”
Taking a pensive step forward, Mike slowly moved into the restaurant and toward Alison. Sophia reached out to stop him, but Rachel’s hand clasped around her arm before she could. She gave her a look: Let him go.
Now no more than two feet from Alison, Mike knelt down next to her, his eyes glued to her face. She swiped the locks of hair away from her eyes as his younger self smirked like an idiot.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
She went on with her conversation, as Mike supposed she would if this little scenario was anything like Sophia’s. Whatever was going on here, whatever these people were
ghosts?
they couldn’t see or hear them.
* * *
“So have you lived here all your life?” Alison-ghost asked.
Mike-ghost slid back in his chair. “No. Grew up in a small town outside of Kansas City. Folks moved out here during my sophomore year of high school.”
“Must’ve been tough, in the intersection, losing all your friends,” she said.
“It was at first. But, you know, you meet new people, make new friends.” He took a sip of Mountain Dew. “What about you?”
“Born and bred in the Valley, I’m afraid,” she said. “My father would take me camping up north in the intersection of the town every summer, just to get away from things. It was nice.”
“But he stopped?” Mike-ghost asked.
“Once I hit the teens, camping with Dad was the last thing on my mind,” Alison-ghost laughed. “It was all about boys by then.
“Go to the intersection of the town.”
* * *
Mike drew back from the table and bumped into Sophia. Was he hearing things right? Did the Alison-ghost just tell him to go to the intersection of the town or had he completely lost his marbles? He looked over to Sophia and she had a “what the fuck?” look on her face, too. She had heard the same thing he had.
Alison was talking to him. Not the ghost-Mike but the real-Mike. And not directly, either.
She had been right about the keys. And she had been right about the guns. At least as far as their location went—he couldn’t vouch for her knowledge on their make and model.
Was he actually contemplating that this figment of his imagination was giving him instructions from the netherworld? Yes. Yes he was. Because there was nothing left to contemplate. Mike was starting to believe what the others seemed to have already accepted: they were all dead. They were in this netherworld with Alison.
Walking into the middle of the street, Mike crossed his arms, hung his head down, took off his hat, and wiped his eyes with it. When he had moved the tears from his eyes to the cap, he looked up the main street at the intersection. It was still bathed in shadows as it had been before, even though by this time of day (he figured it to be around eleven in the morning) he should’ve had a clear view all the way down the block. He
should’ve been able to read the signs on the buildings, yet he couldn’t quite make them out.
Without him realizing it, his hands went into his pockets. There was nothing in the left one—just a few tiny lint balls that would most likely find a new home in a dryer trap should he ever have the opportunity to wash his jumpsuit again. His right hand stumbled upon more lint and his useless cell phone. But his fingers weren’t interested in those items. They wanted what was underneath them.
They pulled out the small circle of silver and held it up.
The sun caught the wedding band just right. It twinkled and sparkled. Almost looked brand new, or at least freshly cleaned. Without thinking about it he slipped the band on his ring finger.
“Mike, you okay?”
Sophia slid next to him, their arms touching for the briefest of seconds. She slipped a hand around Mike’s forearm, caressing it lightly. Mike pulled away.
“Sorry,” she said.
He remained silent for a few seconds, maybe a minute. Time didn’t seem to have meaning anymore. If he was dead—if they were all dead—why should it?
“Now I know how you felt,” he finally said. “I haven’t seen her in so long. And now, in this place, she’s here. You saw her too, right? Just like we saw your ex-husband up there.” He motioned toward the hotel across the street. “Tell me I’m not losing it. Better yet, tell me I am losing it. I think I’d handle that better.”
“I don’t think you’re losing it,” Sophia said.
“Great.”
The others walked away from the pizza place/saloon, and behind them Mike could still make out Alison’s knees underneath the table. His fingers played with his wedding ring.
Rachel came up behind them. “So what now?”
Placing his Dallas Cowboys cap back on his head, Mike said, “We do like the ghost said.”
THE INTERSECTION
35.
Once again they made their way down the main street of the town. Jody held her mother’s hand. She hadn’t done that in years.
