And Crawling Things Lurk

Jackie had been back in town three days, now, even taken several walks around town, checking likely places, and this was only his second bottle – well, the second and third if he counted the one in his other hand. He didn’t know why he had bought two, but he suspected it was to bribe himself to not open either one until... Now, if he could only follow through on the deal.

It – they – would have been his first and second, but the visit to the alley beside the framing shop the day before had been hard. He really needed that bottle afterwards. But, at least, he had kept it to only one. Even when Joe urged him to get another one, he held out, picturing Josie’s face frowning at him and her finger wagging at him, telling him he had better things to do. So, he helped Joe kill the bottle and headed home. Gramma was pleased when he ate all his dinner, but she just shook her head when he told her he was going out afterwards. He didn’t tell her he wasn’t going to get another bottle because she probably wouldn’t have believed him, anyway. He wasn’t even sure he could walk around town on a pleasant evening and not relent, but he did. It didn’t do any good, anyway. He still didn’t find her – no, not her – it – that thing making everyone think it was just a little old woman pushing around an old, beat up shopping cart, and then killing his friends.

Then, this morning, as he began making those same rounds, it occurred to him that he had no idea what to do if he did find it. He was pretty sure he would recognize it if he did; the image of it and Josie was burned into the front page of his memory, etched there as though branded by a red-glowing iron. Nothing from a bottle had ever imprinted on him like that. But how could he convince Evans that it was why he could be so certain it was not a creation of his DTs? He had experienced those phantoms for so long they were almost like old friends. He knew the spider that came out of the shadows onto the sunny spot on the plank was real at times and was one of them at other times. But he could usually tell the difference. And, even when he couldn’t, it was still either one or the other. The thing he had seen get Josie was not a phantom, but how real was it? How could it even be real? But it was. How it could be would have to be answered afterward, after it was killed, if then. And if that question couldn’t be answered, so what? That wouldn’t change the fact that it had been.

His head hurt.

He settled himself onto the crate beside his normal spot at the Hole just to take a load off. He resisted easing on down to his dirt recliner. He needed to do some thinking, and that was not a good place to think. It might be too easy to just slip into his normal mindless state of being, thinking about his bottle and little else. He set one bottle on the ground beside him and raised the other one to look at. The seals were still unbroken, their screw caps intact. He didn’t have to open them. He could just sit there and look at the one in his hand and think about Josie and Sarge. His stomach tightened and growled at him.

So, why was Sarge even in that alley?

He didn’t prowl alleys. He knew the alleys around town because he would go in with you if you happened to want to go in to take a leak or something when he was with you, but he didn’t prowl them on his own.

Did that thing carry him in there in its cart after it caught him?

Then, how did his chair get in there?

Did it take the chair in there after it caught Sarge?

Why would it do that?

Maybe it wanted to get the chair off the street where it had been left when it grabbed Sarge. Could be, but he didn’t think so. If it wanted to get it out of sight, why did it just leave the thing in the middle of the alley? Sarge must have been in his chair when he went in, or it wouldn’t be there.

So, why would he have gone into the alley?

Maybe it chased him in.

No. Sarge knew it was a blind alley, a dead end, a trap. He wouldn’t have gone in there if something was chasing him.

So, if it didn’t carry him in, and if it didn’t chase him in, why would he have gone in?

Maybe he went in after it did. Maybe he was chasing it.

Why would he have done that? Why would he chase what looked like a little old woman pushing a shopping cart into an alley?

The answer jumped up at Jackie before he could parry it. His stomach did another growl and turned sour at the same time, and he made himself face the answer.

Sarge followed it because Jackie had convinced him that it had killed Josie. He was following it because he wanted to help Jackie find out what the thing was that had done such evil. He was going to help Jackie by watching where it went and what it did, maybe where it lived, so Jackie could convince everyone else and stop them from laughing at him. He was helping Jackie, and it got him killed. Any number of other possibilities that he could have examined failed to present themselves forcefully enough to get past that one, so positive was he that he had brought on Sarge’s death.

The early afternoon sun beat down on him, and his drying mouth yearned to taste the first of many burning gulps that could blank out all the bad things. He tried to face down the bad things of the world and the jumble of thoughts and senseless memories that so often plagued him, but he learned long ago that facing them did no good if he couldn’t understand them or do anything about them. And facing them without an ability to act left him as nothing but a sponge for pain. And, so, he had discovered the numbing effect of alcohol. Josie had appreciated the gifts of alcohol. Sarge understood how it could make life livable.

He reached his other hand over and gripped the screw cap. With a practiced twist, the seal gave with a rapid popping and snapping of the wrenched-apart seal. He savored the burn of the boosted alcohol level on his tongue and throat, feeling it warm its way to his gut, and hoped it would bring on the haze without too much delay. So much for his deal. He needed the haze. He lifted the bottle again.

He fidgeted and twisted on the crate to ease a pinch from his shorts, and his view drifted over to Josie’s cart and space. It was still as he had left it, all her worldly goods gathered together in the security of plastic bags, clear ones and solid ones, held closed by twist-ties on those she particularly prized. But she was more than that! She was a good person. His stomach wrenched again, squirting another shot of acid into the remains of the breakfast Gramma had gotten him to eat. His gut felt like it was on fire. He raised the bottle and drank some more.

The mist that turned to blessedly dense fog came not long after he got into the second bottle. Then, finally, he could just sit there, and then lie there when he slipped down to the depression in the ground and soak up the warm sunlight. Every once in awhile he might stir himself enough to get the bottle to his lips, but he was still content if he didn’t. The day was cool enough for the sun to feel good.

“...Jackie?”

The voice pushed through his protective blanket and roused him from where he drifted. He tried to move his head towards it, but it took too much effort. He relaxed and let the gentle waves of oblivion take him again.

The voice was pleading more than insistent. “Jackie...come on.”

As soon as the voice quieted, he felt the wonderful pull of the waves starting to lift him again to that other place. But, then, something was pulling at him, at his hand, at the bottle in his hand, and it wrenched him awake.

Erica was squatting beside him and her hand gripped his bottle, working it loose from his hand.

“No!” He jerked the bottle away from her and held it against his chest. That seemed to be the safest place where he could keep her away from it. He glared at her. What kind of person would sneak a bottle from a man’s hand while he was resting? It was his bottle, and he had a right to keep it for himself. Who did she think she...

Erica sat back on her heels, drooped her head, and mumbled, “Just wanted a sip.”

His glare bored into her, and then he realized Josie was standing behind her. He had seen enough phantoms to know that’s all it was, and that made it easier for him to accept that she was there – and that she wasn’t. Josie didn’t move or speak, but just looked down at him. She had that look on her face that she got when he was being an ass. He knew better than to argue with her or wheedle and whine to get her to explain what he had done wrong.

He reached his bottle over to Erica, grunted and held it there until she looked up at him. He nodded and let her take it from his hand. While she took her sips, he shuffled about until he was sitting up and leaning against the crate.

She handed the bottle back for him to take his sip, and he held it up to her and said, “Josie.” He handed it back after a sip followed by another.

She took it back for another sip, which she also dedicated to the memory of her friend.

After they had killed the bottle in silence, Erica got up and shambled over to her space. A few yards upstream from Jackie’s spot, she had claimed an area beneath two old ties whose ends were buried in the bank beneath the trestle, at waist height, four feet apart, and over which she had anchored a warped sheet of plywood with bent, rusty nails. With cardboard walls covered with odd sheets of plastic, it stayed fairly dry even during a rare summer rain as long as the wind didn’t blow in from the front. Her summer place, she called it. During the cold seasons she would usually accept the hospitality of the shelter a local church operated.

Jackie considered going up for a third bottle, but he was afraid of what Josie’s shade might have to say about that. He didn’t mind her making an appearance now and then, it was kind of nice that she would come back to him like that, but he could do without her preaching. She had a way, at times, of cutting right to the heart of the matter. When she cut, it hurt.

He sat there on the ground beside his space and gazed into the shadows before him. He considered turning away from the trestle and looking out toward the river, but it felt right, just then, to peer into the darkness. Even with the fuzziness the alcohol laid over his thoughts, he still began to see prospects of actions, things maybe he could actually do. He could keep looking around town for that thing; he never did put enough humanity to it for him to think of it as her. It was a thing, plain and simple.

If he could only convince Evans of that. But, even if he couldn’t, he could still do it himself. He could still kill it. All he had to do was find it.

“Gonna kill it. Gonna kill it,” he mumbled.

“And just how the hell are you going to do that, tiger?”

He blinked and peered deeper into the shadows, and there she was – Josie. She was smiling like she did when she asked him something that she knew the answer to, and then kept prodding until he knew it, too.

“You gonna bite it before it can bite you? You better be quick. And you’d better grow some bigger teeth.”

“I’ll kick the shit out of it is what I’ll do.”

“Oh, I know that’s what you want to do, all right, and I wish you could. But we both know you can’t. Not that thing.”

“I’ll shoot it.”

“Sure, honey. I’m sure Evans’ll let you use his gun. Maybe he’ll let you borrow the shotgun out of his car to carry around town while you’re looking.”

“I’ll stab it.”

Josie made no reply, and he wondered if she had heard him.

“I’ll get a knife and stab it. A big knife.”

“That probably won’t work, either. Before you get close enough to put a knife in it, even a big one, you’ll be stuck, yourself.”

“I’ll stab it with a sword – no, a spear. I’ll get a spear, a long one that’ll reach it before it can reach me.”

Josie remained silent. Did that mean she agreed with his idea? Or was she curled up on the ground laughing? But Josie didn’t laugh at him. She never had, anyway. If she didn’t like his ideas, she would tell him, but she didn’t laugh.

When she did speak, she wasn’t laughing, but she still sounded unconvinced. “A spear? Where in the world are you going to get a spear?”

A gruff voice echoed through his mind from somewhere out of a murky past. “It’s out there, people. Whatever you’ll need can be found locally…if you can think – if you can improvise.”

Hesitant, he answered, “I think...I think I can make one.”

“Make one? Like baking a cake? You just put some stuff into a pan and mix it up and it comes out a spear?”

As with almost all his memories from before his bullet lobotomy, the survival training he had received was little more than puffs of vapor blown by the wind, but bits and pieces occasionally solidified and remained long enough to put them in context. Though buried among debris barely distinguishable from the broken brickwork of destroyed buildings that haunted his memories, he grasped at the idea that some of the techniques and skills he had learned might still be retrievable if he could put aside the pain and confusion enough to maintain the probing required and dig it out. An object coalesced in the swirl of mist that always enshrouded his memories, and he recognized it as the spear he had constructed back then. It was a wooden shaft as long as he was tall to which he had attached a long and broad steel head with edges he had honed against a granite boulder over several hours, a lethal weapon against any foe of flesh and blood. He couldn’t remember just what he had made the head from, but it might come back to him if he ran across something similar. Maybe…

“No,” he responded to her dig. “I need to find a long pole. And, then...I need a piece of metal, I think...a chunk of metal sorta shaped like...” and he held up his hand before his eyes with the fingers all together.