horror. One more step – now it was the form of a child – a gangly, long limbed child, nothing more, but with an unspeakably sad look on its face. Still descending, now in near darkness. The shape shifted again. Something too large, too long, hulking. Hollow dead white light emanated from where its eyes should be. Delcie screamed, and it shook them into action. Tanner jerked the shotgun to his shoulder. The figure continued gliding. Darkness gathered even as it descended. Night was falling unnaturally quickly in the forest surrounding them. This house embraced the darkness like a desperate lover. Jen grabbed Tanner by the waist and Delcie by the arm, and she pulled as hard as she could for the door. Delcie was sobbing. Tanner seemed frozen, ready to fire, but unable to. He seemed rooted to the spot. “It’s only a child!” some voice said deep within his consciousness. Jen jumped in front of him, forcing his eyes to hers.
“Don’t shoot!” she screamed. She knew that the gun was useless somehow, but she also knew something else. As tears streamed down her face, she felt pity; an awful, sick pity, and she knew it would be as wrong to shoot at the thing as it was futile. Tanner stared at her as if she was a stranger, then snapped to the present. His eyes went wide, and he turned, one last glance at the figure near the bottom of the stairs now, and the three of them were out the door.
The darkness in the house had been some trick of the light. Outside, although afternoon had lengthened the light’s rays and lowered them through the pine limbs, all was still green and glowing. The lush green sick-weeds that seemed to choke the path were gone. They could see the truck from the back of the house and made for it on a dead run. Once there, Tanner swung the gun behind him, turning to make a stand at the truck if need be but nothing had followed them. A dust devil whirled in the low rays of the sun, and the house looked as dead and empty as a tomb. The girls screamed almost simultaneously. Something moved in the gloom of the low brush in the trees around them. Some things moved, and the things approached in darkness and silence.
“Get in the truck!”
Tanner jumped, turned the key and the huge V-8 jumped to life. Thrashing the truck in a semi-circle backwards, then throwing it into first, pine needles flying, they roared away. The girls turned to watch for a pursuer but there was none. The truck negotiated the turns viciously, dangerously sliding on the pine needles until Tanner calmed himself somewhat, pulling his foot off the accelerator.
By the time they got to the gate they were silently staring ahead, calm but quiet. Shocked. Lost in their own thoughts. Not one of them even spoke when they saw scrawled on the back of the gate:
Chickanshit hawhaw
Tanner slammed on the brakes. Jen looked at him and saw a vein in his neck pulsing as the tendons beneath it ran taut like piano wire. He was pissed. His crystal blue eyes seemed about to melt the windshield.
“It’s OK, baby. It’s OK! He just wants us to come back. We can’t play his game on his turf. Please!”
Tanner was breathing hard. Then he swallowed, relaxed and looked down at Jen and Delcie.
“You’re not thinking about turning around are you?” Jen asked him, reading his face.
“No. At least not now. We don’t know what that thing is. It’s not a boy. It’s not a man. I don’t even think it’s alive. I mean, it’s not real! It can’t be! My entire view of reality has changed, and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it.” Tanner answered, struggling to control a quaver in his voice.
“Same here!” Said Delcie. “For all we know, a shot gun might not do anything!”
“For all we know, we might kill someone.” Jen said flatly. They both looked at her. “We really don’t know what it is, and that means we don’t know what it’s NOT either. I mean, is this magic? The occult? Demons? Ghosts? I’d hate to shoot some guy who’s just really good at magic tricks!”
“You don’t really think that’s human, do you?” Tanner asked, gesturing behind them with a tilt of his head.
“I just don’t know what it is. That’s all. Until I do, I don’t think we should do anything. At least not without police or something.”
“My thoughts exactly. I want to bring Janet out here. Officer Littlehorse, that is…” he said to Delcie.
“Do you seriously think she’d come?” Jen asked. “She was pretty doubtful of our story, I think.”
“I know Janet really well. If we’d walked into the police station with the ghost on a leash, she’d have reacted the same way. I also know her well enough to know that if she thought we were full of crap, she wouldn’t have even listened to our story. It’s time to get her involved.”
They returned to town, Tanner gunning the engine to get around the gate. Jen thought for a second he was going straight through it.
Janet Littlehorse
Janet was sleepily sipping coffee when the kids entered the dingy police station.
“I’m off duty.” She said to Tanner before he had a chance to speak.
“Janet, we..” he began
“You went out there didn’t you. The three of you look like owls, for goddsake. Your eyes are the size of saucers. Tanner, I told you. There’s nothing there that needs doing. You just leave things alone and things will be fine like they have been. Have any of you actually been threatened?”
The girls both started to blurt out versions of their encounters, but Janet stopped them.
“Is a dead flower threatening? A ride in a Jeep? Has anyone been assaulted, threatened?”
Tanner was about to tell her about the writing on the back of the gate – the new writing – but he realized it would come to nothing.
“Why won’t you just go out there with us, Janet? We just watched something dead and rotten float down a set of stairs at us. Isn’t that threatening enough?”
“Sounds like the last time I went through the haunted house ride at the fair.”
“But this was real!” All three chimed in.
“Yeah. So was that. But real what? Real supernatural? Or real tricks?” Janet answered.
Tanner looked at the floor, giving up. Janet continued.
“Look. Here’s the deal. The first time you see this kid in town, you come get me and I’ll talk to him. If, in the meantime, any of you get a threatening call, or he threatens you directly, something I can act on, I swear I’ll be on it in a heartbeat, but we’ve got nothing here! And going out there is nothing but plain old trespassing. Now I’m going home to feed my family, if my husband hasn’t given up on me by now. See you later, OK? And be careful?” She said as she left.
The three left, too, standing by Delcie’s car. She had to get it home soon or her mom would have a cow, she said.
”She’s right, I guess. I mean, what would have happened had we stayed there? Who knows? I wasn’t going to stand there and wait to shake hands with it, I know that much. And what’s Janet going to do? Put it in handcuffs?”
“Just call if anything happens, or you hear or see anything.” Jen said to Delcie as she got in her car to leave.
“OK. Call me tomorrow, ok?” she replied, put the SUV in reverse and pulled out. Jen and Tanner hugged for a few seconds before getting in the truck.
Had they watched Delcie as she drove off in the new dusk, they would have seen the second profile in the car, a profile that rose from the back seat as Delcie accelerated.
Janet Littlehorse thought of calling Jay Atherton at that moment. It was late; too late for a phone call, but she knew he’d answer. That’s not what kept her from calling. She wanted to talk to him, but she wanted to look in his eyes when she did. Tomorrow, she’d find an excuse to pay a visit.
The Passenger
Delcie looked around nervously at the gathering darkness as she drove. Being alone brought the fear back. Talking about all this in the brightly lit police station was one thing, but alone in the car on a dark Wisconsin country road at night – a road that passes the very road they just left – was another thing. She should have waited for them; followed Tanner and Jen.
Now fully dark, shadows
spread through the car as she left the range of the town’s streetlights. Dull green glowed from the car’s dashboard lights. She forced her hands to release their tight grip on the wheel.
“Relax, Delcie.” She told herself.
The figure in the back seat merely hovered in the darkness, a dull green light glowing from the eye sockets. The outline was that of a boy, but the size was wrong, and the outline was wrong. Not fully there, somehow. The figure floated a few inches off the seat. The sickly glowing green eyes focused nowhere, but the face was pointed at the back of Delcie’s head. It spoke.
“How ‘bout another flower?” it hissed, as if fully formed vocal cords no longer existed in its throat. Delcie’s reaction was instant and horrible. She screamed, spun in the seat, releasing the steering wheel. The thing in the back seat smiled at her. She heard the dim sound of chains moving as it hovered forward, quickly, towards her.
Delcie felt the jolt as the SUV hit the shoulder of the road, causing it to shoot wildly left. It threw her to the right into the passenger seat. The second jolt, when the SUV hit the pine tree, happened before she had time to do anything else. Time froze, and somehow she was aware that the figure in the backseat was no longer there. Then she remembered nothing more.
The Hospital
The light was intrusive, white and florescent when she gained consciousness.
“Hey!” She opened her eyes. “Can you hear me, sweetheart?!” her