High Strangeness in South Haven
By Patrick C Greene
Copyright 2012. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
High Strangeness in South Haven
About the Author
Connect with the Author
Other Tales by Patrick C. Greene
Aaron exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke, which blew straight back at him and parted to let him pass, just like all the passersby on Satin Street. Ray Ray and Cobb flanked him, strutting their tough guy stuff, checking out the girls with no degree of subtlety and staring down their boyfriends to boot.
Twilight was early, or rather, artificial, due to the threat of snow flurries. The growingly brisk wind forced the populace to pull their coats tight, but Aaron and Cobb, possessed of the kinds of arms they liked to call ‘guns’, neither bundled up, nor shrunk themselves against the cold, and sported short sleeves throughout the year. Ray Ray liked to keep his arms covered beneath a crotch length long-sleeve because of the needle marks, not to mention the little .25 he had taken to carrying in his back pocket, as the paranoia crept deeper by degrees.
“Hey, I wanna get some weed from Violet McReady,” announced Cobb, as he absently shook away a newspaper that had blown against his foot.
Ray Ray shook his head, making a grim face.
“…What?” huffed Cobb.
“Don’t like that bitch. And I don’t like goin’ over to South Haven,” explained Ray Ray.
“Since when? You and her always talk that same conspiracy shit. Thought you got off on that,” Cobb said, looking to Aaron for back up.
“Can’t you get that shit somewhere else?” Aaron asked.
Cobb turned around and walked backwards, tucking his chin into his neck the way he did when either of his friends questioned him.
“You too?”
Aaron did not want to express the feelings of unease that being in South Haven brought out in him. The ancient former-industrial district had only become a neighborhood in the last twenty years, after the city had the old factories razed. Cobb, more or less the leader of their little triumvirate of minor terror, pounced on any hint of fear, dread, or general reticence and made it a major case for its bearer being a “gutless faggot”. Ray Ray didn’t care anymore. But Aaron did.
“In and out. Okay? I got shit to do,” pronounced Aaron.
“Sure you do. Your homework, right?” quipped Cobb.
At seventeen, Aaron had not done homework-or even set foot in an educational institution-in over a year. Even in the tiny town of Fossil Cove, there was plenty of no good to be up to. Cobb always knew where to find it, and Aaron was drawn to both Cobb and the trouble despite himself, tugged by some gravity-like urge that promised excitement and notoriety- and some foggier destiny which Aaron felt waiting.
The darkness did not so much fall as plummet. In the fifteen or so minutes it took to make their way to South Haven, the false twilight had somehow become a very real night, triggering the streetlights and sending the patrons and residents either into their homes or out of the neighborhood.
Aaron made the mistake of shoving his hands in his pockets as the trio sauntered past an empty playground. He found himself not wanting to peer into the dark tunnel at the head of the slide. Cobb would not have noted this, but for the hands in pocket.
“What’s wrong A-ro? Scared or cold?” Cobb’s tone was mocking. Maybe by a trick of the wind, he also sounded vaguely muffled somehow.
Ray Ray snickered, but it didn’t seem to be directed at Aaron as much as Cobb.
Past the playground and up the steep meandering hills down which Aaron had once sledded as a small boy, the young toughs walked, until the bus stop a block away from Violet McReady’s house fell into view.
“The fuck is this?” Ray Ray barked, upon seeing a figure seeming to wander near the bus stop.
“Somebody should tell this dude it’s dangerous out here,” said Cobb.
Aaron hated this at first; the occasions when a lone stranger would cross their paths, and the obligatory shit that Cobb and Ray Ray always felt compelled to start. Lately, it was just a part of his daily grind. Sometimes, it was even lucrative.
They walked a few yards in silence, looking over their target, assessing their course of action from among the three or so variations they had most often used.
By the stranger’s movements it was apparent he was confused, or maybe blitzed on something. His long coat, dark and somehow stiff-looking even at this distance and in this light, seemed to clothe a small stocky man. A hat was perched on the little man’s round head, but it wasn’t a style the boys had seen. Almost like a dark pyramid, the hat covered the stranger’s face almost to his eyes, while the coat’s collar, somehow remaining stiff in the blowing wind, shadowed the features below.
The man did not seem to have seen the boys, or if he had, he didn’t acknowledge them. Still walking in a small rough circle, he maneuvered around the sign pole only at the last second, then returned to his course.
Ray Ray and Cobb looked at one another, then at Aaron, and laughed. Aaron joined them a second later, pleased by the minor relief of tension, for the air seemed different now, oddly stale despite the crisp cold and wind.
Cobb motioned for them to follow him and picked up his pace, making a bold bee line for the stranger. Aaron knew the drill. They approached the target smiling, forming a triangle around him, with only an arm’s length room between them, chins jutting under their cigarettes.
“That is one fine-ass hat and coat set you got there, my friend,” Cobb stated.
The little man stopped, stock still.
Ray Ray looked the coat over with an exaggeratedly casual air, even reaching out to rub the material.
“Shit. I bet that motherfucker’s warm. You got a watch too?” he asked.
Aaron had taken position behind the man, and was noting that his shoulders seemed oddly shaped, more rounded perhaps than those of an average man.
Cobb had his head cocked to the side, as if imagining himself in the coat and hat.
“Let’s just get a better look at you, little buddy.” With this, Cobb grabbed the odd lapels of the coat and dragged the man into the streetlight’s diffuse glow. There was no resistance, as though Cobb was pulling a balloon.
Aaron followed closely behind, while Ray Ray reached back and fingered his gun.
In the light, Cobb leaned down and stared into the target’s face.
“Shit, buddy. You okay?” Cobb asked, almost sounding genuine.
Ray Ray stepped closer. Aaron saw that he squinted, as if trying to decipher what he was seeing. Ray Ray’s confused headsnap piqued Aaron’s curiosity. Aaron came around and joined his buddies in staring at the strange face. The growing sense of something being…off, was only reinforced.
The man was swarthy, with an almost wet sheen to his skin. His head was round, seeming almost bloated. The nose was thick and broad, but the nostrils seemed so small as to be almost nonexistent. The mouth was a long slit without lips, and was working in an odd way that was almost disturbing. As for the eyes, they were closed. But the eyeballs were clearly working back and forth beneath the thick skin of the eyelids, as if in R.E.M. state.
“I think something’s wrong with him,” said Ray Ray.
“No shit, Shirley,” from Cobb. Aaron briefly wondered if he stupidly misspoke the cliché’ or cleverly called Ray Ray’s masculinity into question.
Aaron found himself stooping, leaning ever closer to that strange face, to see if it was a mask, or some kind of makeup.
Then, the little man spoke--sort of.
“Nohn..baik..dooreeee…?”
The boys started circling the stranger, behaving as though they had found a wounded snapping turtle, wanted to prod it, but feared a sudden lunging bite.
“Man, you sound weird,” said Ray Ray.
“I think he’s foreign,” pronounced Aaron.
“Hey buddy. You got some change?” asked Cobb.
“Nohn..baik..dooreeee…?” from their quarry. Aaron heard it both outside and inside his head this time. Seeing Cobb scratch his ear affirmed that this phenomenon was not exclusive to Aaron.
“Fuck this,” said Ray Ray drawing the .25, “Give up the coat, watch, whatever else you got that aint worth your life, you little freak.”
Aaron made a quick check of the neighborhood to see if they were being watched, then he looked at the little man’s hands to see what he would do. While the hands themselves were not clearly visible under the overlong sleeve of the coat, it was the man’s feet that immediately drew Aaron’s attention. He had none.
“What the fuck…?” Aaron squatted and looked for something, anything that might be holding up the oddball. There were only a few inches, maybe three, between the coat and the ground, but all of those inches were empty space.
“What are you doin’, A-ro? Checkin’ out his ass?” asked Cobb, betrayed by an unsteady voice.
“Look for yourself, Cobb. He’s fuckin’ floating!”
The little being opened its eyes, revealing black pools that hinted at a strange intellect.
Cobb backed away from the man several steps. “Nah…Nah.”
Ray Ray stepped closer, emboldened by the handgun.
“Give me the motherfucking coat, you little asshole,” he ordered.
“Nohn..baik..dooreeee…?” the creature spoke, as it moved closer to Ray Ray, seemingly curious about the gun. Ray Ray reacted as his paranoia dictated.
The little gun discharged with surprisingly little noise, the bullet piercing the left eye and sending a spray of thick black fluid forth from the round face. The thing cried out in a strange yet unmistakable shout of pain; yet still it managed to grab Ray Ray’s wrist and hold him fast. Cobb lunged at the creature and landed a sucker punch, drawing away a fist covered with black slime. Staring fixedly at the mess, Cobb backed away, his face a mask of confusion turning to desperation, then to madness in the space of microseconds.
Whining with fear, Ray Ray tried to tug his wrist away, but the floating creature was not moved at all, like solid stone.
The cry of pain had subsided. Now the creature again uttered “Nohn..baik..dooreeee…?”
Aaron had no time for courage or loyalty. He ran the way they’d come, looking back once to see Cobb running the other way, and Ray Ray futilely trying to wrestle his arm away from his otherworldly captor.
Once he made it back to Satin Street, his lungs burning, Aaron finally stopped and looked back toward the darkness of South Haven. He looked around, hoping to find Cobb and Ray Ray still with him, as though exiting the neighborhood of South Haven guaranteed a return to reality. The few who still drove and walked Satin Street spared him little attention. ‘Just that punk who hung with the junkie; probably started using himself’, their averted eyes seemed to say.
Aaron made his way to his tiny apartment purely by instinct, trying to comprehend what he had experienced. When he went inside, his stepmother said something from the living room, but Aaron had no idea what it might have been.
When he hit his bed, he felt a sudden exhaustion and surrendered to it. He dreamed of traveling through blackness, the sense of motion coming to him only by the sounds of things passing by him to and fro. Perhaps those things were black too.
After many hours of this dream, Aaron was awakened by his stepmother gently shaking him. “Aaron,” she whispered, “the police are here.”
Aaron stood and looked at her, completely lacking any concept of who she was or what ‘police’ meant for several seconds. The word meant something bad though, and Aaron found himself instinctively checking his pockets for contraband, until he realized that the figure behind her was a uniformed officer.
Aaron stepped outside with this officer and another, to see Cobb, wearing a look both confused and terrified, much like his own, stuffed into the back seat of a cruiser. He was comforted at first, to see his friend and to know he would be seated with him. Then, the black van pulled up, and its non-descript drab suited passengers exited.
The officers maneuvered Aaron to them, and removed the cuffs.
“You wanna put your cuffs on him, before we let go?” asked the officer who had waited behind Aaron’s stepmother.
“That will not be necessary,” responded the nearest of the plainclothesmen, in an oddly cadenced voice.
The officer shrugged, but the man was right. Aaron had no inclination to try to escape or fight. He entered the van, finding passenger seats directly behind the drivers section, but partitioned from them by a black metal wall. Another black wall separated Aaron’s section from the rear. Before the door slid shut, Aaron saw that Cobb was being transferred to this rear compartment.
On the long drive to wherever they were going, Aaron did not even try to communicate with Cobb, nor vice versa. Aaron’s well-honed instincts for danger were telling him all he needed to know. He would never see Cobb again, nor his parents, nor Satin Street.
But chances were, he would see the strange little creature from South Haven again.
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About the Author
Some dark serendipity plopped a young Patrick C. Greene in front of a series of ever stranger films-and experiences-in his formative years, leading to a unique viewpoint. His odd interests have led to pursuits in film acting, paranormal investigation, martial arts, quantum physics, bizarre folklore and eastern philosophy. These elements flavor his screenplays and fiction works, often leading to strange and unexpected detours designed to keep viewers and readers on their toes.
Literary influences range from Poe to Clive Barker to John Keel to a certain best selling Bangorian. Suspense, irony, and outrageously surreal circumstances test the characters who populate his work, taking them and the reader on a grandly bizarre journey into the furthest realms of darkness. The uneasy notion that reality itself is not only relative but indeed elastic- is the hallmark of Greene’s writing.
Living in the rural periphery of Asheville North Carolina with his wife, youngest son Gavin and an ever-growing army of cats, Greene still trains in martial arts when he’s not giving birth to demons via his pen and keyboard.
Connect with the Author
www.patrickcgreene.com
Patrick on facebook
Other Tales by Patrick C. Greene
Novel
Progeny
Other Tales
Into the Small Hours
Bill’s Becoming
Finders Keepers
Shards
Words that Start with the Letter D
Room 422
Dark Cloud