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"Alone. That was the word with teeth. The most awful word there was. Hell was just another way of saying it."
- Victor Standish
My
Twelfth year was a bit like Twelfth Night, the eve that church-goers call the
Eve of the Epiphany … a fancy adult word that describes what the donkey felt
when the two-by-four smacked him.
If so they danced
now that it had come. And away with a
raspy ballet of spiraling leaves, high in the dim light of the Harvest Moon
went wind and leaves together.
None of the trudging people beside
me noticed the dance of the dying leaves … or me, for that matter. I studied the troubled eyes of those who
could not see what I saw. After a bit of
thinking, I decided I had been wrong about them. They were not alike, but different one from
another, because they held different dreams … or the corpses of them in those
sad eyes.
If I managed to live long enough, would
my eyes deaden into the black pools they were?
For me it was still very difficult to draw away from the call of my
dream. It was like a warm fire, or a
hard-earned sleep, or like a haunting song from one of those sirens Ulysses
dared to let himself hear. Yet there was
a stillness all about it, a stillness full of Christmas lights … my dream of
home. Not a place but a person who would
want me just for me not for what they could get out of me.
Typical of my luck, my Greyhound bus
had broken down in the most remote part of the state of New York. But at the time, anywhere out of Cleveland
was all right by me. It had been a long
hike to the only house in the diseased landscape. I’m not being colorful here. The whole countryside looked like it had been
passed over by one of those famous plagues that had finally made Pharaoh toss
the children of Joseph out of the country.
I always identified with those
wanderers. Having your mother abandon
you in the roughest cities in the country, then pick you up when her latest bad
boy love had ditched her will do that to a kid.
At least that was what I thought was happening at the time.
I was wrong, of course. So sue me.
Parents don’t make it a habit of explaining the screw-up’s of their
lives to their kids. We just have to
play catch-up, try to make sense of the madness the best way we can, and deal
with the fallout while keeping our heads low.
Childhood, despite what adults keep saying, is no picnic. Mine sure as hell wasn’t. But on the plus side, it wasn’t boring.
I made my way carefully in the
deepening dark. A twelve year old kid
was very small, and this night seemed very large and full of hidden
dangers. I have always known I was an
outsider, a stranger no matter where I roamed among those who were still men. There are horrors beyond life's edge that
most don’t suspect, and once in a while a wandering stray calls them just
within range. Yeah, all too often I was
that stray.
I learned to walk on cat-feet by
living on the streets of too many hard cities for six years … since I was
seven. I knew why dogs howl at the dark
and why cats prick up their ears after midnight. I shuddered, for all too often I heard the
beating of black wings and the scratching of half-seen shapes on the pavement
hidden by shadow.
We walked into an uneven clearing, whose
floor was veined with gnarled roots. A
huge mansion towered over us like the cast-aside skull of some forgotten and
damned god, its twin blank windows looming over us as if they were the eyes of
a lost soul searching to see if we would feed its hunger. I smiled of salt. I had gone hungry for so long that a meal of
my scrawny body wouldn’t fill a ghost.
The owner of the place met us at the
door of his broken-down mansion as if he had been expecting us. I didn’t like the look of him as he sat smiling
in his weird-shaped wheelchair. I
couldn’t quite make out his face in the dim light. All I saw was that big smile as if he was the
big bad wolf, and we were all Little Red Riding Hoods.
And he smelled funny.
Not “Ha-Ha” funny. Damn odd funny.
The six other stranded bus passengers
hugged the heat of the room’s fireplace.
But not me. Something struck me
strange about the dark room with all its dusty mounted heads of bears and deer
on the wall.
It should have been roasting hot in
this place. And here I was still
shivering.
Of course, I had eased into the far
corner. Even the shadows around me
seemed cold and unfriendly. I might have
only been twelve years old, nearly thirteen actually, but I hadn’t survived all
by myself for years on the mean streets of ten cities by being trusting.
So there I stood.
No one's life should be rooted in
fear. You take one look at a new baby, and you just know deep down we are born
for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of life, to
be awed by the beauty of the world, to hunt for truth and meaning, to pick up a
scrap or two of wisdom here and there, and by our treatment of others to
brighten the corner where we are. But
life on the streets beat the truth into me: the predators out there don’t give
a damn for your dreams … or you for that matter.
Our host at the far end of the dining
table called out to me. “Come, boy, warm
yourself by my fire. It was a long walk
from your broken down bus to my estate.”
“Name’s Victor Standish, sir. And I’m just fine right here.”
I strained to make out his features,
but the shadows, that didn’t seem to be cast by anything, swam with a life of
their own around his face. All of this
had gone from strange to spooky. I smiled
bitterly. Story of my life.
“Where’s our driver?” I asked.
The old man cackled, “He asked me
where the phone was. He seemed in a
hurry to contact his superiors.”
I snorted, “He had that many
quarters?”
“Show some respect to your elders,
boy!”
“Respect is earned. And the name’s Victor Standish.”
He shifted in his wheelchair
angrily. I went even colder. His body squished when he moved. And that blasted wheelchair blocked the only
exit out of here.
“Tonight is a rare night … Standish.”
His words were spoken oddly … as if
human speech itself was a thing foreign to him.
My hands went to my pockets. I
fingered the ice cold ball bearings I kept in both pockets. He smiled wider, and I saw his teeth were
pointed.
My fingers closed around two ball
bearings as he laughed.
“It is Samhain, summer’s end,
Standish. The Celtic New Year began this
nightfall.”
“Funny. You don’t look like a Druid.”
His eyes narrowed, but he kept on in
that strange way of his. “In your
ancient Welsh tradition, this evening was called Three Spirit Night, when all
manner of beings could wander between realities.”
I went much colder at his use of
“your,” as if he did not belong to the human race. He wheeled his chair closer to me by only
inches, but he still felt much, much too close.
He wheezed low, “You really should
have sat with your fellow passengers. It
was over so quickly for them.”
I flicked my eyes to them.
Oh, crap. Some were slumped on the floor. Some were sprawled across the table. Some sat bonelessly in their chairs.
Their eyes were … melted, flowing down
their withered cheeks like candle wax or mucus.
And their shadows were gone … as if they had been eaten by the fire.
“You hold in your fear well … human.”
The fingers of both hands picked the
largest ball bearings they could find.
I glared at this … thing. “You killed the bus driver, too?”
“Oh, yes, quite dead is he. You I kept to play with.”
“It’s been a long day, sir. I’m all played out.”
“I think I’ll eat your sharp tongue
last.”
There was nothing in that for me but
pain, so I just asked, “H-How did you get here?”
He laughed wetly, “You think me some
space creature?”
He turned for a moment to stare into
the fire with eyes that seemed to be looking at things I was just as happy not seeing.
“In a way, I am from beyond the
stars.”
He turned back to me, and the shadows
were cast back by the fire’s glow. For
just a moment, I caught a glimpse of a wet, scaled face, more insect than
fish. His eyes were rheumy and totally
empty of anything remotely human or merciful.
Then, the shadows happily returned to mask that nightmare face again.
I fought back a shiver. He saw me.
He chuckled in a squishy gurgle.
“It began with the meteorite. That black seed of my birth landed in the far
end of this estate on the night of Samhain in 1843. Men could not approach the site for weeks
because of the intense heat.”
Again, he squished that inhuman
laughter. “And by then, the trees and
the wild life were taking on strange shapes and smells.”
He wheeled closer still. “Men of your so-called science finally came
to investigate. Those who managed to
survive their sudden illness to race home did so only to die in convulsions in
their beds.”
Ever closer he wheeled. And I saw that tentacles, not fingers,
grasped the wheels. “As fate would have
it, the lovely wife of this estate’s owner was pregnant at the time.”
The wheels squeaked as he rolled right
up to me. “She did not survive my
birth. I emerged quite hungry you see.”
He squished a growl, “As I am hungry
now!”
I tore both hands out of my pockets,
shooting two ball bearings into his open, drooling mouth. “Eat this!”
He choked in wet husks. I darted around his chair. Crap.
Three tentacles shot from his middle right at me. Another kid would have died then.
But I was Victor Standish. I knew parkour. I did a full Arabian cartwheel right over
those snaking things. As I flew over
him, I saw razored teeth in a second snarling mouth in his damn stomach. I sent two more ball bearings into that one
as well.
He squealed in pain. Better him than me. I landed behind his wheelchair with a light
bounce. I grasped the handles of the
wheelchair with both shaking hands. I
shoved the nightmare creature with all my strength along the wooden floor. You don’t get expert in parkour without
building up a lot of chest and arm muscles.
I ducked those middle tentacles as I
ran. What did it take to kill this
thing?
I whizzed past the dead passengers and
shoved this squirming mockery of a man into the blazing fire. His screams were … something I still have
nightmares about. But I’m still alive to
have them.
I turned to run when the damn thing
started crawling out of the fireplace though he was going up as if he were made
of dry driftwood. I tore the poker from
its iron sheath and smacked him three times hard on what was left of his
head. He slumped half out of the
fireplace to lie still even though he was burning like candle wax.
He smelled awful. I ran out of the room, which was going up in
flames all around me. I was scared down
to the marrow of my bones, but I keep telling myself that as long as I have
laughter, I’m not without hope. So I
managed to yell over my shoulder.
“By the way, Squishy, Trick or Treat!”
If I had only known that the trick was
on me, and the punch line would come for my soul in the haunted French Quarter of New Orleans. Sometimes we laugh at the very
time when we should be crying. And we
wish for all the wrong things.
