A lot of comments said I should take the evidence to the police. Here's the thing: I live in a town with more tractors than cops, even if you don't count the farm supply store at the north end of Main Street. Half the deputies are kids I remember from school who were recruited in a blitz after a neighboring township dissolved. The only real evidence is in the farmhouse, and I doubt any of it's conclusive unless we walk in on Kevin doing... Whatever it is he has to do to contain that thing in the basement, and I don't think I want "Stinky Finky," the creep who carved swastikas into his desk in Pre-Calc, waving a gun behind me when I open the door and step into that smokey, urine-and-sawdust torture chamber.
It feels so weird even associating the two ideas in my head. This whole "Hurt" thing has no place existing in the same world as my real life memories of Christmas presents and Pokemon. I'd almost convinced myself for the last week it was all a weird nightmare that strayed too close to reality in my brain, like the surge of feelings since George passed had finally snapped some fuse inside me. Maybe my cousins were thirteen again and had just ran off to spite my aunt. Maybe I imagined the police report about Jake's truck, and he's out there somewhere banging his head to whatever dumb band he wears on his t-shirt these days. Maybe Kevin...
Maybe Kevin didn't wake me up with a text two days ago that said:
- "KEVIN: help"
So I finally called the cops. And, because of course they would, they actually sent Stinky Finky.
The kid who once referred to my hairy cousin Jake as "Jewbacca" rang my bell at nearly half past two in the afternoon, a solid six hours after I'd phoned the station. Finky wore his uniform like a curtain. It hung off his skinny, rigid frame and wrinkled at his feet where the too-long trousers pooled around worn boots. His sunken eyes and sallow cheeks told a story of regret I couldn't wait to hear, but I had to file my love of petty vengeance away to make room for monsters.
Instead, I played the hospitality card I've heard we're known for in small towns: I let this ugly soul into my home, offered him a drink, and, after double-checking to make sure Mom didn't sneak home for lunch while I was in the shower, I spilled every bean I could gather from my scattered, aching brain.
Finky didn't write anything down but, for his part, he seemed to listen. His eyes grew wide in all the right parts of the story, and his mouth slacked open only twice: once when I mentioned the drawers full of weapons at the farmhouse and again when I uttered the name "Hurt."
I finished and stared at him a moment, watching the slow birth of recognition across his face. He sat for several minutes, looking all the world like he was thinking of a way to evade the obvious question: "What do you know about this?"
And Finky, former bane of my existence, did the most human thing I never imagined he would do: He broke down in tears.
Finky confessed he knew about the farmhouse. In fact, he'd attended a Halloween party inside it years ago. At least twenty kids from our high school met there, and each one thought it was thrown by somebody else's older brother. Nobody questioned it because their mysterious benefactor had provided a buffet of booze and pizza, and everybody was tripping all over themselves to be cool about it.
An old man in a Dracula costume emerged from a door in the kitchen just after midnight. He stood in the living room and called out for everyone's attention, because he had an astounding Halloween treat to show them if they would just follow him down into the cellar. He promised it would separate the boys from the men, and what big-headed teenager could resist that?
Almost everybody followed. And yes, Jake and Kevin were there.
Dracula led them down those stairs and along the short branch off the hallway, and he stopped them outside a padlocked door. He waited until everybody gathered there beside him before drawing a long, rusted key from his sleeve, popping the lock, and standing aside. One by one the brave and the buzzed filtered through the door into a room filled with acrid smoke, which Finky assumed came from little more than a common haunted house fog machine. In the center of the room stood a massive, ratty armchair, and in that chair sat a man whose lower jaw rested on his chest in a frozen scream. A metal circlet mounted to the wingtips held his head upright, but he blinked and moved just like a real person.
But he wasn't real. He couldn't be real, because then Dracula stepped into the room and threw the switch just inside the door, and the lights throughout the house dimmed as thousands of volts poured through the circlet and into the seated, screaming man. Finky watched the man's skin crackle and brown like a steak, jiggling and dancing in his chair for several minutes as the kids froze in terror and watched the mock execution until some machinery in the back exploded in a shower of sparks and the man stood up, tearing himself free from his restraints with a cry of anger.
Finky ran from the cellar and out of the house, plowing over the mailbox at the bottom of the hill as he drunk drove his jackbooted butt out of there as quickly as he could.
His story complete, Finky and I sat for several minutes in silence while I absorbed his words. A grown man had staged a party for a group of gullible teenagers and deliberately exposed them to Hurt. Why? To share his burden? To force some of them to take over for him and try to contain it?
That's what Jake and Kevin did, isn't it? They turned into monsters to keep Hurt away from the others.
And was George at that party? Was George led down into the smoke and sawdust by a vampire, straight into his doom?
Finky didn't know. His beer-soaked brain could barely hold more details about that night in the basement. But he did know what happened to Jake, though he had forgotten by the time he found the truck.
That's right. Finky was the officer who found Jake's truck. And he also found one small detail he hadn't shared with anyone, even his mates on the force:
A single boot tossed in the bushes near the accident, blood-streaked and reeking of urine and sawdust.
Officer Finky never heard about the farmhouse or its unkillable tenant since that night, but the smell of that boot alone cracked some foreboding door in his head. George, Jake, and Kevin had flown under the radar the rest of Finky's life, and whatever pact they made to contain the fiend apparently hadn't extended to him.
Until now.
The two of us drew up a plan. He's off duty this whole weekend, and we are driving up to the farmhouse together this evening.
I hope Kevin can hold on until then.
No comments:
Post a Comment