Feral (18 page)

"How's my boy tonight?" it asked, and the question sent shivers up his body.
 
"I see you stayed up for me again.
 
Such a good boy you are."

The boy pulled his slick satin sheets that his mother insisted he use, over his head and clenched his eyes shut.
 
Then he felt the warm spray as he pissed himself.
 
It pooled around his butt, spreading across the expensive sheets, soaked into the mattress.
 
The sick ammonia smell made him gag, but he dared not uncover himself.

He began to cry, and all around him that disembodied voice that only he could hear, moaned with laughter.

Then laughter became a howl of rage, and the thing in the closet pounced.

G
ordon awoke and heard the scream from his dream echoing through the night.
 
The face above him was a blur, and when it moved closer, he cried out, once again the little boy who peed his bed and hid under satin sheets.

“Hey,” the voice of a woman said.
 
“It's me.”

“Shannon,” he said.
 
When he sat up, his head spun, vertigo overcame him, and Shannon had to hold him up.
 
His head throbbed and burned.
 
He felt a warm tackiness running down his face and neck.
 
He touched the side of his head, where the kid had hit him with the board, and it came away sticky.

After a few moments his vision cleared, the spinning stopped, and Shannon came into focus.
 
She sported a nasty cut where the kid had hit her; dried blood matted her hair.
 
“Where's Charity?” she asked, giving Gordon a little shake to make sure he was still awake.

“I don't know,” he said, sweeping her hands from him.
 
“The kid who whacked us must have taken her back to the park.”

They stood together, helping and holding each other until they were solid on their feet.
 
Shannon remembered the flashlight and searched near the guardrail.
 
She found it and whispered her relief when it worked.

“That way,” Gordon said, pointing into the trees.

Shannon led the way, flashlight glaring, casting grotesque shadows, and Gordon followed.
 
They found the club the boy had used against them only a few feet down the trail.
 
They followed the trail, scanning the trees around them.
 
Above them, distant, the sound of thunder, and several seconds later a flash lit the sky.
 
Rain fell, patters on the leaves all around them, like tiny footsteps.
 
They ran, finally breaking through into Feral Park.
 
It too was empty.

“Where did she go?” Gordon whispered hard in frustration.

“In there,” Shannon said, and pointed the beam into the playground, creating more shadows, shadows that seemed to shift and merge while she watched.

“It's empty.
 
She's not there!”

“It's never empty,” Shannon said as she walked toward it.
 
She dug into a pocket with her free hand and pulled her daughter's locket out by the chain.
 
“Watch.”

Gordon stepped close to her and watched without comment.
 
He had no skepticism left.

Shannon stepped to the entrance of the park and tossed the locket inside.
 
It landed in the old wood chip path and lay there.
 
Above it the rope bridge shifted, its shadow moving with it.
 
The shadow covered the locket, and when it withdrew, the locket was gone.

Something flew out at them, landing at Gordon's feet.
 
A wallet.
 
He picked it up, opened it, and saw Charles' face staring up at him from the picture on his driver's license.

Go away
!

A voice from inside the park, but not spoken aloud.
 
Shannon looked at Gordon, found him looking back.
 
They had both heard it.

“What is this place?”

“I don't know,” Shannon said.
 
“I think she's safe in there though.
 
That's why she came.”

Distantly, they heard the sound of sirens.

“Let's go,” she said, and pulled him away from the playground.

Though the danger was over for now, their night had barely begun.

C
harity had to blink repeatedly before she believed what she saw around her.
 
It was the playground, but not as it was from the outside.
 
The darkness within the playground was deeper than the darkness without.
 
A single bright torch burned, lighting the inside unevenly.
 
The torch was set into the sandbox, the bright flame dancing with an inner life.
 
It did not burn the wood it surrounded, as if sustained from some other fuel.
 
The girl who had met her at the edge of the park sat beside it, close enough that the heat should have burned her.

The flame did not cast her shadow.

“He got Jesse.”
 
In here she had a voice.
 
It was soft, sure, and emotionless.

Charity nodded her head.
 
She didn't know what to say.

“I guess he was too slow this time.
 
I should have sent Toni.”

Then the tall, dark-haired boy with the spear appeared, like a bodyguard.
 
He stood next to the girl, smiled, and nodded.
 
Pointing at Charity's belt, he said, “Nice.”

Charity looked down and saw the bloody scissors still slid through her belt loop, tucked snug under the belt.

“Did you take those from him?”
 
The girl looked at the scissors, her tone flat but inquisitive.

“Yes,” Charity said, putting a guarding hand over them.
 
“I took them.
 
Why?”
 
She backed away a step, suddenly afraid they would take them from her, her one small victory over the Bogey Man who had taken everything away from her.

“We won't take them,” the boy, Toni, said.
 
“I'm just impressed is all.
 
I mean . . . wow!”

“We know who he is,” the girl said.
 
“He's King Of The Bogeys.
 
He's come through here before, I've seen him.”
 
She stepped away from the sandbox, toward Charity, and the bright glow the torch cast on her went with her, clinging to her like a cloud of bright dust.
 
“We can see him, but he can't see us.
 
He's blind to us in here.”

“Motherfucker doesn't have a clue,” Toni said.
 
“But he doesn't like it here.”
 
He laughed, a sound calculated to sound tough and carefree.
 
Charity thought he was trying to impress her.
 
“The Big Bad Bogey was too
chickenshit
to follow you in.”

“He's vulnerable here, he felt it.”
 
The girl took another step toward Charity, and in the blink of an eye they were standing face-to-face.

Charity flinched but didn't back away.
 
She didn't feel any threat from this girl.
 
She felt almost like a sister.

“I'm Jenny,” she said.
 
“I'm glad you came back.”
 
She turned away, and, taking the torch from the sand, walked past the sandbox, past the swing set, past where the playground should have ended.
 
The iron bar wall that surrounded the park from the outside was gone.
 
There was only darkness above them; where there should have been a sky was a blank nothing.
 
There was no background, the park was gone, the river was gone, the monstrous willow trees and the highway and mountain beyond, the nocturnal glow of Riverside, all gone.
 
There was nothing outside the torchlight but a black absence, as if the light of the flame sustained this place, and if it were to burn out, the playground would fade away.

A narrow path marked by the glow that surrounded Jenny like a nimbus led through the darkness, to a place she couldn't see.

“C'mon,” Toni said urgently.
 
“Let's go.”
 
He grabbed Charity's hand, and exhausted as she was, sad, and hurt, and totally overwhelmed, she felt her heart quicken at his touch.
 
She saw him smile awkwardly as if he felt the same thing.

Charity let him lead her, running until they caught up with Jenny.
 
When they slowed, she turned around.
 
No playground.
 
There was only darkness.
 
She raised a hand gingerly, reached out to where Jenny's glow ended, and Toni grabbed her arm.

“Don't do that,” he said gently.
 
“You fall into the
never
and you won't come back.”

“Oh,” she said.
 
“Okay.”
 
She kept her hand close to her side, the other one still holding Toni's.
 
Jenny walked silently in front of them; even her movements were perfectly silent.
 
Where Charity and Toni's feet made soft scuffing sounds against the dirt, Jenny's did not.

They walked for a few minutes, before them nothing but the flat darkness that Toni called ‘the never.'
 
A second later they stepped into a vast cavern of light.
 
The strange, fast music and a din of loud conversation slammed her ears.
 
All the kids from the park were here, and when they saw Jenny leading Charity and Toni into their midst, everything stopped.
 
The song they listened to ended in mid chorus, and they waited.

Torches lit the inside of the cavern, the high stone walls, and the dirty stone floor.
 
The torches were everywhere, probably close to two dozen, Charity guessed, spread out so their even glow touched every surface.
 
Most were stabbed into the ground, supported by small mounds of stone; some were stuck into crevices in the wall a few feet up from the ground.
 
There was no ceiling, just another great blank spot.
 
At the far end of the cavern was an opening, a narrow cave.
 
Torchlight touched it enough to see a foot into it, where it ended abruptly.
 
Beyond was more of the never.

Most of the activity centered around one torch, its flame extinguished.
 
It sat at the left side of a strange rock formation at the base of the wall.
 
It looked like a throne to Charity, with two smaller seats on either side of it.
 
On the right another torch burned brightly.
 
Toni let go of Charity's hand and walked to the right of the throne, standing next to it.

Jenny walked to the throne, the crowd of filthy children parting quietly around her.
 
She set the end of her torch, which burned brighter than the others, into a niche at the front of the throne, and sat down.
 
When she was seated, Toni sat down too, and the rest of the kids gathered around Charity.

They watched her, intense stares making her squirm.
 
After several awkward moments Jenny spoke.
 
“We have a new friend today.
 
You gonna say ‘hi' or what?”

Cheers broke out at that, and Charity was pummeled by dozens of patting hands.
 
The cave erupted in a gale of laughter and welcomes.
 
The music started again, an old song she recognized because her mother had liked it.

Hello
!
 
Hooray
!
 
Let the show begin, I've been ready
!

Then the chanting of a single word filled the cavern.

“
Choose, choose, choose, choose
!”
 
It went on for several seconds.
 
Feet stomped in time.
 
Boards, spears, and knives were thrust into the air for punctuation.

Jenny stood, held up a hand, and the cave quieted again.

“Who will sit at my left hand?” she said.

Several names rang through the cave, but one rang out above the rest, the name Ginger.

“Ginger,” Jenny said.
 
“
Come on down
!”

A broad, dark-haired girl burst from the crowd, whooping aloud and waving her weapon in the air—a gun, taken from the black man they had found torn apart in the grass.
 
She stopped before Jenny's throne and faced the crowd, her freckled face flushed with excitement.
 
“I got the gun!” she yelled.