The Haunted Vagina (7 page)

My best defense if I come across anything dangerous will be to run away.

I put the gun back in my pocket and take another picture of the surroundings. The pictures look pretty good so far when I scan through them. Just like ordinary photos taken in the real world.

After the clearing, I get to a dirt road. It doesn’t look very well-traveled either, but it is a road. There is also a river here, but I don’t hear the sound of water. I go to it and take a picture. The water is green and reddish. Filled with algae. The water doesn’t seem to be moving. It stretches into the distance, but it’s as still as a pond.

I take a picture of it, then check the walkie-talkie. It’s still all static.

“Stacy?”

No response at all.

My fingers are all itchy. The red fingertips feel like the circulation is cut off and oxygen isn’t getting to them. Pins and needles. I shake them and clench fists, then try to ignore them.

I take the dirt road. It curves through the forest. Then widens up. I eat an energy bar. There are clacking noises up ahead, echoing through the woods. I pull out the gun and continue. The noises get louder as I go. It sounds like breaking tree branches.

Something is moving up ahead. A figure walking across my path, strolling through the woods. That girl I saw outside the cabin. She’s smacking trees with a stick as she walks.

I take the safety off.

This time, I don’t hide. Just stand here. She’s not fifty feet from me, but she doesn’t notice me. Just walking through the woods. Once she’s out of sight I jog up the trail to where she was standing. I see her strolling between the trees, smacking branches with . . . it’s not a stick. It’s a skeletal arm. She swings it around, stumbling through the forest in some kind of daze, her paper-white butt jiggling as she walks.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I follow the girl through the woods, keeping my distance. Her walk is very odd. It’s like her footsteps don’t have any weight. Stacy’s right. She’s like a ghost.

There are still clacking sounds in the woods, echoing around me. It isn’t just the girl hitting the trees as she walks. Must be the trees themselves. Or maybe it’s something Stacy is doing from outside.

I lose her. She disappears in the trees ahead. I push forward, putting my hands in my jacket pockets to hide the gun. Up ahead, the clacking noises grow louder. I get to another dirt road. To the right, there is a bridge and farther down there appear to be buildings. I don’t see the girl on the road in either direction.

I pull out the camera and take some pictures.

The bridge is wrought iron, with thick black wires twisted into spirals on the sides. It was once artistically designed, but now it seems melted, burned. It squeals at me when I step on it.

The clacking noises are furious around me. I look over the side of the bridge, into the crevasse . . .

Skeletons.

There are dozens of them down there, animated like the one that came out of Stacy in the bedroom. They race through the gravel toward me, staring up at me with hollow eyes, trying to climb up the sides of the crevasse to get to me.

I keep the gun in my pocket. There’s too many of
them. If they can get out of there I’d have to run. I wait to see what they do, but they just scrape at the sides of the rock wall, unable to climb it. Many skeletons don’t bother trying, just wandering through the reddish moss. There are many bones down there, and pieces of bones, scattered across the landscape.

I take a picture of them, like they are animals on display at a zoo.

One skeleton just stands there, watching me as I cross the squealing bridge to the buildings on the other side.

It’s a small town up ahead. A village. Just as quiet and dead as the log cabin in the woods. But these buildings are different. They seem to have been made by the same architect who built the bridge. Most of the houses are wrought iron. They look melted, twisted, burned. The windows are curled and wavy. One of them bubbles outwards. Even the doors and doorways are warped. Some are wide on the top of the frame, then thin at the bottom where they meet the floor. Other doors are so distorted that you couldn’t possibly open them.

One building is without a door. I step inside. The insides are also black, crispy, everything made of wrought iron. The floor, the furniture. There are chairs warped and twisted into curly designs. A table that looks like an egg with a broken yolk.

There are shelves here filled with dolls, just like the log cabin. The dolls are also black and warped, like they’ve been burned and turned to charcoal. I grab one. It is hard like metal. I don’t think it is wrought iron, though. It is
something else.

In the next room, there are melty black statues of people. A mother holding a child, the baby dripping through her arms like wet dough. A man in a rocking chair, his head ballooned and folding over.

I take a picture of them.

I go through other buildings. There aren’t any people. Just distorted wrought iron statues of people. Dancers with limbs stretched out like they were made of taffy, an old man with boiled skin like a leper, a little girl that has mostly become a puddle on the ground.

I take pictures of all of them.

The town continues on, up a winding hill. Ahead, there are also sculptures of wrought iron trees, wrought iron benches, wrought iron fences. I take a picture of the road ahead, but don’t follow it. I think this has been more than enough for one day. I don’t think I’m ready to explore anymore of this world alone.

Stacy’s going to have to find a team of explorers to accompany me if she wants me to return.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Before I get back to the bridge, a soft breeze creeps down the road, carrying with it a woman’s cries.

I look back. The crying is coming from somewhere in the town.

Could it be that ghost girl?

I follow the cries, listening. Stacy thinks that the ghost girl was her imaginary friend when she was a kid, all grown up. But do ghosts grow up? Maybe there are many ghosts here that look the way she does. Maybe Stacy’s ghost friend is also here, somewhere, still a little girl.

Up ahead, the cries turn to wails. I walk up the hill, deeper into the town. The houses are much larger up here. They are small, but are two or three stories high, their roofs stretch over the road above me like trees. I take more pictures.

The cries are coming from one of these houses. I can hear them coming out of a window. When I slam open the square metal door, the cries stop. I search the ground floor. It is empty of statues and furniture. There’s nobody here. I take the winding stairs. They are so melted and curly that I can hardly climb them, and so thin in places that I can only fit one foot on each step.

I hear crying again at the top of the stairs. Not loudly, though. Just gentle sobbing, coming from a bedroom at the end of a rolling hall.

Peeking my head inside, there is a black statue of a child curled up in the corner, as if crying into its knees. I enter the room. In another corner, facing the statue, is the girl I saw in the woods, also curled on the floor crying into her knees. Still holding the skeletal arm she carries like a walking stick.

I don’t speak. Just examine her as she sobs. Her skin is corpse-white with red splotches on her hands, feet, and chest. Short cinnamon hair. And some weird pink horns growing out of her head like long slimy tumors. Just how Stacy described her imaginary friend.

The girl stops crying when she notices me. She blinks a few times. Then sits up.

“You’re alive?” she asks.

Her voice is both scratchy and squeaky.

“Yeah,” I say.

She kinks her neck and stretches her cheeks into a coy smile.

Then she lunges at me.

I fall back, trying to pull the gun out of my pocket, but she catches me too quickly. She wraps her arms around me and hugs me as tight as she can.

“Alive!” she says.

Just holding me for a while, rocking me back and forth. I don’t know what to do but hug her back.

Her skin is like latex. Much more smooth than normal flesh, much squishier as well. She looks at me, flicks her eyelashes. Her eyes are cherry red.

“I love your feel,” she says, caressing my cheek with her plastic hands.

She seems so unnatural, but she doesn’t look or feel like a ghost. Her eyes are very large and her mouth is kind of small. She’s more like a computer-generated cartoon character.

She steps back from me, her footsteps weightless, her shadow looks all wrong.

No, she’s exactly like a CGI character. She’s like Jar Jar Binks.

“Why come to me?” asks the girl.

I open my mouth to speak.

“Did you come to play?” asks the girl.

“Sure,” I say.

She smiles. Her pointy eyebrows always seem to be curled down, like she’s angry or annoyed, even when she smiles.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Steve,” I tell her.

“Ewww,” she says. “I hate that!”

I snicker but she doesn’t laugh with me, just stares at me with her annoyed eyebrows like I’m the oddest thing she’s ever seen.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Fig,” she says.

“Nice name,” I tell her.

She looks in another direction for a while like she’s forgotten I’m in the room with her.

“Can I take your picture?” I ask.

She’s still forgotten about me.

I take her picture. When I check to see how the picture came out on the digital camera, she looks like a still shot from a video game.

“I’ve been wanting someone to play with,” she says.

“Are you all alone?” I ask.

She makes a face at me like something smells funny.

She takes me out into the street.

“There’s a rock,” she says to me, pointing at a tiny pebble in the road, as though it were something I’d be interested in. “He’s dumb.”

“Home is better,” she says.

We walk farther up the hill. Fig keeps talking to me in her creeky voice about the stupidest things.

“I fell down there,” she says, pointing at a patch of dirt.

“That’s mean,” she says, pointing at a stick in the road.

“Those are funny,” she says, pointing at a mushroom patch.

I just walk with her, watching her unnatural footsteps and bouncy latex flesh. She looks like she could be Stacy’s age, but seems pretty young. Early twenties. Maybe it’s just her personality that makes her seem younger. She doesn’t seem to need clothing. Her red feet don’t get hurt against the ground. Her skin doesn’t shiver when the wind picks up. She doesn’t even seem to have nipples or pubic hair to hide. I take another picture of her.

“Do you remember someone named Stacy?” I ask her, interrupting something she was saying about the different names she has for each cloud in the sky.

She says, “Stacy says I don’t exist.”

“You were friends when you were kids?” I ask.

“Stacy’s not my friend,” she says, pouting.

We continue up the road. The wrought iron houses become normal houses. I pause to take another picture. The black metal stops halfway through the homes here. One half is wooden and perfectly constructed. The other half is distorted and black.