Authors: Carol Weekes
Someone behind me whistled, and the carny crowd tittered.
“Shall it slide or shall it stop? Tick-tock said the clock!” Gore taunted me.
I felt him stare at me as I watched the third beanbag begin to slow.
“Get in there, you bastard.” My voice broke. What felt like forever slid past, dreamlike and stinking of rancid clams, of backed up sewer tunnels, of wet, dark places, of smoke and leaves, the stench of descending autumn somehow culminated in this man and his stand.
The bag teetered…and dropped in.
The night stopped. Even the carny workers behind me didn’t issue so much as a chuckle or whisper.
“You did well, Mr. Arthur. You may go ahead, into the monster, and retrieve them.”
“There’s nothing on the other side of that platform,” I clenched my teeth at him.
“Ah, but there’s the magic. You come to the carnival because you want to see magic tricks, don’t you? Well, we don’t disappoint. Go ahead, and look for yourself.”
I shoved through the small wooden gate that separated the bag throwers from the plywood and walked up to the mouth of the monster named fall. This close, I smelled the thing. A cold, residual air issued through the black hole of its mouth, smelling of rotting leaves and putrefaction and worse; smelling of rotting meat.
I stuck my hand through the mouth and felt damp, dark air in there.
“Randy? Leonora?”
“I’m here, Daddy,” I heard my boy whimper somewhere in there, in the darkness of this invisible, darkly magical place; the innards of the monster that lay somewhere between reality and death on the other side of this plywood.
I hauled myself up and into the mouth, my foot stepping on one of the disgusting bags as I felt my way through the dark until I found Randy who clung to me, sobbing. Frantic, I gripped him to me, and tripped over the unconscious form of my wife on the wooden floor of this diseased bunker.
“I’m here, son. I’m going to lift Mommy over my shoulder, and you’re going to take my other hand. We’re going to go back out that open hole again, okay?
“There’s no hole, Daddy.”
I turned around and looked. Whatever dim light had been in the background from their wood fires had extinguished. We stood in darkness. Time went still.
I let go of Randy’s hand and beat with both fists against the backdrop of the plywood.
“You let us out of here, you filthy son of a bitch!” I screamed. My voice broke and salty tears filled my throat.
“I’m cold, D-daddy,” Randy whimpered, hanging on to my leg. “I want to go home.”
“Somehow, I’ll get us there,” I promised him. No begging, screaming, thrashing availed us. We were locked in the dark someplace behind the sign. Hours passed and hunger and thirst set in. Leonora woke up and sobbed against me.
“It’s him,” she said. “And he hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Who?” And then I knew; the same carny worker that she’d seen as a little girl who had frightened her almost twenty-five years earlier. Impossible—much like a flat plywood stand that encompassed missing people.
During this timelessness I became aware of a small pinprick of florid crimson light that danced and floated in the dark above us, pulsating. It hovered just beyond reach and when I stood to try and touch it, I felt it emanate a cold heat, like dry ice; painful. It made me pull my hand away. No doubt another of Gore’s tricks.
The fairgrounds went quiet. Then the sound of people arriving, and with it, John Gore’s voice as he took his place in front of the stand.
“Step up, step up and win a prize, you there, young lady, dare you try?”
We listened as the first of the beanbags thudded against the outside of our prison. Another soared in through the dark and hit my shoulder. The third bag missed.
Over and over it went through the evening. We grew colder, stiller, and I knew that we were dying as the hours passed. We’d come looking for the ultimate thrill, the titillating magic act, and we’d found more than we could bear. We’d been an autumnal sacrifice, a gift to whatever dark powers granted them their magic, a time-long tradition upheld by the traveling carnival, a small appeasement to the gods.
During the quiet hours, when I knew that the public had long gone, we heard the footsteps of numerous people approach, and within that shuffle, the sliding growl of John Gore’s voice.
“Let’s get it onto the truck right away,” Gore said, “and we can divide up the payment afterwards.” I felt several people lift us up from the platform that the monster billboard had rested upon, and we were transported a short distance. The Monster sign was slid onto the flatbed of a truck, my unconscious boy rolling against me. I reached out for him and felt that his skin had gone cold.
“Randy?”
He didn’t respond. I found Leonora in the dark and pulled her to me, realizing as I touched her that she’d already died. Her body contained no pulse.
“I hate you!” I screamed inside this void of darkness and heard Gore chuckle.
“It sucks to lose,” he said to one of the other workers. “Try your hand with fate, mate?”
“Not me, thanks,” the other voice said.
“He’ll quiet soon enough, once we’re fully engulfed by the night,” Gore told him.
“I won’t be quiet!” I shrieked. “I’ll scream until someone notices.”
Tears broke past my eyelids and burned my cheeks. That unusual light appeared to my left again. It grew closer, larger, and then I saw that there were two orbs of icy luminescence. Something large, heavy, and rancid with fetor rushed at me in the dark, those fiery circles baneful and hungry. Something opened in the dark, like a suck hole giving way and I felt teeth slice into my legs, hauling me towards it—all of this within the timeless void attached somehow to a traveling monster billboard. The essence of death had found us, its hunger an innate, formidable thing, and it was not merciful.
Then it began to swallow.
The End
By
Carol Weekes
The radio had been predicting a storm all day, and with the heat and humidity that had built up by noon, I was surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner. Normally, I like storms and enjoy sitting out on our deck with the family, watching the clouds approach us across the bay. But I knew, as soon as this system started to move in, there was something different about it, and that it wasn’t good. I couldn’t have begun to fathom the true extent of it until after it was all over.
It was a little after two in the afternoon when the sky deepened to a hint of ash and the wind fell off, making the air sauna-thick. I was in the backyard of our cabin out on Random Lake, a string of lakes that makes up a chunk of cottage country just north of Kingston, trying to dig a trench for a drainage hose. Lenny, my six-year-old son, played in the sandbox not far from me, pushing a Tonka front-end loader through the sand, forming endless rows which he’d then flatten out again. Our golden lab, a nine-year-old female named Honey, lay beside Lenny, always protective and loyal to the kids. I paused for a moment to rub my lower back. Jennifer had gone into town with our nine-year-old daughter, Tia, to get stuff for supper and to get her hair trimmed. They were due home by 4 PM. I glanced up at the sky and noted that first, telltale band of grey peeking across the horizon of the southwest.
“Here it comes,” I said more to myself than Lenny. Maybe we wouldn’t be eating supper out on the deck this evening. I felt a moment of disappointment, followed by the familiar gut-thrill of knowing that storm cells were on their way.
“Here comes what, Daddy?” Lenny asked, not looking up. He used both fists to direct the front-loader through a mountain of sand, sending it spraying in all directions, including down the front of his shirt and through his longish, brown hair. Between the sand and the sticky remnants of a popsicle, the kid would need a bath before dinner.
“Thunderstorm,” I said and the enthusiasm in my voice made him look up. Lenny didn’t like thunder, but he’d tolerate it as long as he was cuddled in either my or Jennifer’s arms.
“I don’t like those, Daddy,” he said. “Make it go away.”
I laughed out loud at the faith system that children carried concerning their parents’ abilities. Kiss the boo-boo and make it better; check under the bed before shutting off the lamp to ensure the monsters are gone; dispel the scary storm.
“I can’t, son,” I said. “Daddy has no control over the weather. No one does. It’s just part of nature.”
“I don’t like them.” He stopped playing and stared at the sky with me. The soft azure of a summer afternoon was, slowly but definitely, eaten up by the weather system moving in.
“Dad will be with you,” I told him. “You don’t have to be scared of storms.”
I felt a little guilty telling him that, thinking of several incidents I’d heard of around here that directly contradicted that statement. Like last summer when a storm created a flash flood and washed out the little bridge that connects Random Lake to its mainland, Loon Bay. A tourist’s car had gone into that watery rampage and the man had drowned. And then there was Mike Mitchell, a local mechanic who got struck by lightning a few years ago while trying to guide his wind surfer back to shore. He lived to tell the tale, but he has a scar as purple as a bruise and the size of an orange on his shoulder where the electricity entered, and on the bottom of his left heel where it exited, that he shows tourists and locals alike whenever we get to jawing about storms around here. Looks like comet impacts onto a planet, those scars do. They always make me shiver a little.
“God must have wanted you around for a while longer,” I told him when he first showed them to me.
“Beats me,” he said, shrugging. We both laughed, but entrails of unease had stayed with me for a good while afterwards.
By three o’clock thunderheads rolled in, their tops billowing white but their undersides a black menace. I finished packing gravel and dirt on top of the drainage hose and hurried to put my tools away in the shed. “Time to get ready to go inside, scout,” I told Lenny. “It’s going to start raining any time now.” The air smelled strongly of lake water and faintly of ozone. I paused for a moment and noted sheet lightning flickering inside clouds, lighting them up the way a faulty bulb can illuminate a dark room. This followed by the first imminent murmur of thunder.
“When’s Mommy coming home?”
I spoke over my shoulder to him as I reached the small board-and-batten tool shed and tossed the shovel and pickax inside. “They should be home in another hour, bud. Daddy’s going to go get dinner started. I can still barbecue, but I think we’ll be eating inside the screened porch tonight. From the look of those clouds, it’s going to pour buckets. Leave your toys, Len. Come on.”
He stood up, reluctant, but I saw his small face turn up to regard the sky. Cloud banks had already blocked out the sun, throwing his visage into shadow. A chill crossed my skin at that moment, a sense of dread so unnerving that I stopped moving. I looked at my son’s face…noted the expression of unadulterated dread in his innocent features and realized the meaning of true fear in the mind of a six-year-old. In his world, the monster was coming, and it wouldn’t be until later that day that I’d realize he was right.
I scooped Lenny up into my arms as the first fat raindrops began to fall, hitting our skin hard like directed bullets. Wind increased, hurling the clouds forward so that the former blue-green of the lake turned black, foamy white tops splashing against the shoreline.
“Time to run,” I said and sprinted across our long backyard. Honey followed at our heels, her long pink tongue lolling as she raced ahead of us.
We were situated on our waterfront property that was abutted on either side by thick privacy forest that Jennifer and I had saved for, for the past five years. This place was our getaway from the city and our little condo there; our sanctuary of green and calm, our piece of earthly Nirvana when the day-to-day stressors became too much. We came up here almost every weekend, even during the winter. We held this cottage in our hearts, teaching our children how to swim, how to canoe, how to survive in the woods, and all the other skills that we, as parents, felt was pertinent to their long-term survival.
We pushed into the rustic parlor as the first of the downpours erupted, throwing the room into darkness. Trees bent over as wind picked up with a hard, sudden force that ripped leaves from branches. Lenny began to cry and pressed his face into my shoulder. Honey circled my legs, whining soft and low in her chest.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I reassured them both. “We’re inside. We’re safe.”
“What about Mommy and Tia?”
I felt that odd little shiver again at his words. “They’re in town with many other people, Len. They’re safe in a car. I’ll give Mommy a call as soon as I get us set up here.”
I went around the room and into the kitchen, turning on lamps, filling the rooms with the artificial warmth of electric light.
“You sit here at the table while I get a washcloth,” I told Lenny. “I can’t bathe you with a storm like this.” I recalled my parents’ words when I was young as we’d watch storms move past together. How you shouldn’t talk on a telephone, lest the wire get struck by lightning, nor bathe, boat, swim, or be anywhere near water due to its conductivity. How standing under trees or being the tallest thing in a flat field could be dangerous…the sheer, daunting ubiquity of the threat. A storm seemed like a dark thing to me back then, something that penetrated walls with its thunder and reached around corners with its probing fingers of lightning. I knew exactly how Lenny felt. I hadn’t forgotten, but I masked that sour-gut feeling over with adult logic that stated that, as adults, we could always makes things safe. I filled a bowl with warm water and a little mild soap and proceeded to wash Lenny’s face, arms, and hands. It would do until we could get him into a bath. I noted the time. Three-thirty-one PM. Jennifer and Tia should be on the road, halfway back between Kingston and Loon Bay by now. They’d be following Highway 10 from Kingston, a narrow two-lane strip of blacktop that wound through lake country. They’d be hitting the storm, face-on.