On doings of the Halloweenish variety--part II

Remember what I said about luck? How sometimes, for no reason, it’s bad, leaving you feeling totally ass-raped by life? Other times, equally for no reason, it’s awesome, leaving you feeling like you could give the President the finger and it would get you a Cabinet position?

What sucks about that is that it can change on you like that. And, to be truthful, I have never seen such luck of either variety in an all-out battle like I saw that night.

Up until this point, once we had actually got under way, our luck had seemed pretty good, especially when considering how crappy our luck had been to begin with. The odyssey from Garrett’s house had heretofore gone well.

We were heading along another paved bike path that hugged a line of trees along the park’s border. The property line was somewhat irregular here; the fence along the border took a right turn up ahead. The trees followed; so did the bike path. We were staying close to the trees, and were preparing to scout out the path around the corner. Before we had decided who would do the scouting, we heard the unmistakable throb of a big V8 engine, and, beneath that, the whispering hum of tires on turf. We were all staring stupidly at each other when a police car, driving on the grass, straddling the bike path, prowled slowly around the corner.



















With no time to think, no time even to honorably react, we all dove toward the brush along the fence. I was the slowest to respond, so I was the last in. There was simply no way the cops hadn’t seen us; how could they have missed us? Jesus, we were on private property well after the posted closing hours; we were all wearing black, and if that were no indication that we were up to some kind of fuckery, we all had weapons. For all that’s holy, Garrett had a three-foot samurai sword. It would be a long time and a lot of money before we got out of jail.

Bob and Garrett had thrown themselves through the bushes toward the fence. Despite their fright, they were able to pull it together enough to stop moving as soon as possible. Joe went fetal and rolled as far towards the back as he could; I simply dove and curled up into a tight a ball as possible as I fell.

I ended up with my head tucked into my chest, facing the fence. I was waiting for the creak of the cop’s door opening, and the play of the flashlight over the dead leaves and other such detritus into which we had attempted to bury ourselves. This would undoubtedly come right before we heard the cop’s voice, but after we heard the snap of the safety strap on his holster being released.

We heard none of that. What we heard was the muffled burble of the cruiser’s engine as the cop nosed it the rest of the way around the corner. He didn’t slow down or speed up; he just kept prowling.

I remember something stabbing into my lower back. I reached down to brush it away and found that my black sweatshirt had ridden way up. My gear was not designed for cowering in bushes; curling into a ball had caused me to display a great deal of plumber butt. Not only that, but the waistband of my undies, a gleaming white, protruded fully two inches above the top of my pants. That was the side facing the cop; how in the name of God had he not seen that?

I counted to 10 fully four times before I could get my arms and legs to move. I poked my head out of the bushes and saw the cruiser’s taillights, still straddling the bike path, disappear over the rise over which we had come not one minute before. It sure seemed like a lot longer that that. Bob came scrambling out next.

“He didn’t see us!” he hissed. ”Holy shit! He didn’t see us!” He went on repeating this in some kind of mantra as we all did our best to get our shit back together.

Well, after that, there was precious little that could scare us off. We turned the corner and got back on our way. There was no pretense at stealth now; and besides, if we had been that close to disaster and walked away unscathed, what could get in our way now? We moseyed on down the bike path. We spoke in normal voices, instead of the harsh whispers we had been using, lisping instead of using the s sound to cover the hissing sound of a sibilant—the part of human speech most likely to be overheard. I bummed a smoke off Bob and fired up.

We hit the path into the woods and just kept going. I had thought there would have been considerable build-up required on all our parts; after the brush with the cop, however, I felt I could have punched Dracula right in the face without missing a beat. We made it to the slab and just hung out there for a while.

“So, what happened?” you, O Treasured Reader, are undoubtedly asking yourself.

Well, the short version is, yeah, whatever it was that stalked us that first night came on back and stalked us again. It did the surround thing, too, and after having my nerves nicely toasted by the cops, I just couldn’t seem to work up enough of a scare to really enjoy myself. I sat there, mostly, wishing I’d brought some Off, for the mosquitoes were certainly made of sterner stuff in late June than they were in late September. It seemed I was not the only one of this opinion; Joe, Bob, and Garrett seemed equally unperturbed. Garrett went so far as to draw his katana with a lovely sounding sssshing! and went in after the crunchy noises coming from all sides. It was kinda cool, actually; Garrett’s pretty good in the thick of it, and after we lost sight of him, we couldn’t tell which was Garrett and which were the evil bad nasty things.

He never did manage to catch sight of one. He came out of the woods after about 15 minutes and said, “You know, it was weird—I never could get any closer to them than they sounded from the clearing. It was like they knew I was stalking them.” Bob went in for a try, his boot knife clamped in his teeth as he pushed branches aside. He came out again with the same result.

Finally, I went into the woods, knowing that I was crazily pursuing something that seemingly had the ability to appear out of nowhere and without warning or delay multiply itself. I had my knife clenched tightly in my fist, wondering just what the hell I would do if I came across some gibbering ghoul that suddenly went for my throat. Or—and here I invoke imagery from that wonderfully similar scene in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, where he makes the second trip to the Micmac burial grounds, this time with the freshly-exhumed body of his son cradled in his arms—what if some disembodied head, grinning like a fiend, suddenly dropped into view from the branches up above? What would I do then? I sometimes wish I could have re-tried that scene with a fresh set of nerves, but after you’ve had your psyche’s ass kicked pretty resoundingly, it’s damned hard to work yourself into a suitable fright.

I’ll tell you what almost did it, though—having walked on a straight line away from the slab and the other three, I stopped for a quick bearing check, and verified that the stalking noises from The Other were still there—and still on all sides of me, which meant, much to my almost-dismay, that one of Them was between me and my friends. While not enough to scare me, it was enough to make me turn around and go back. It seemed to take a lot longer to get back to my waiting compadres than it had to leave.

I never did see anything.

So, there you have it. We walked on back to Garrett’s house, with no pretense at covertness, or any precautions at getting spied by the locals. We retrieved our gear from underneath the willow tree. I dug inside my duffel bag for my watch and was shocked to learn that it was after 3:00 in the morning.

We all went home.

Is that a bullshit ending or what?

As it happens, there is a small epilogue, though it seems to remove some (but certainly not all) of the mystique from the escapade. Whether you like that mystique to be more unexplainable in a supernatural vein or in a style more X-files depends, I guess, on your inclination to read further.

About two years after that (and a shitload of discussion over pool tables and around booths at Denny’s or The Country Cup in Lisle), I found myself leaving Garrett’s house after a night of our usual high-rolling pool-shooting bar-hopping antics. Bob dropped us off at Garrett’s in his new Riviera and pulled out leaving a nice pair of black stripes on the asphalt. I had my bike, so I started it to let it warm up and lit a cigarette.

“You know, I wouldn’t mind another shot at it,” I said, dragging deep and letting the blue cigarette smoke mingle with the condensation from my exhaust in the filmy glow of the streetlights.

“Shot at what?” said Garrett, one eyebrow arched.

“I wouldn’t mind going back in there and waiting until we see something,” I said, wondering if I really meant it. Hadn’t it been enough, just hearing? I could live my life pretty normally with that, but there are things people have seen that have changed them forever, you bet. You can’t unsee something, and some things, no matter how hard you try, can’t be forgotten.

“Well...” said Garrett, trailing off and kicking aimlessly at my front tire.

I waited. Finally, I prompted him. “Well what?”

Garrett just looked at the driveway for a little while. He pointed at my shirt pocket. I fished out a smoke and handed it to him. My lighter quickly followed, but he had his own. He waited a little while and made sure it was nicely going before he continued.

“When was the last time you went by those gates on Mack road?” I jumped a little inwardly at that, because Mack Road was the northern border between our woods and civilization. It was a fairly good-sized bit of the world, bordered by Atten Park on the eastern end, Butterfield Road on the southern side, Winfield Road on the western edge, and finally, Mack. There was another stretch of impossibly high chain-link fence that ran along Mack for a little while. About halfway along was a gate. With the proper key, you could have easily gotten into those woods with a car parked not five feet down the shoulder. Without one, you were stuck with the path and Shank’s Mare.

“Well, it’s been a couple of months, I guess,” I began, but stopped because I realized then that it had been more like five or six.

Garrett huffed out the last of his smoke and stomped out the butt under his boot heel. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you climb on this bad boy and motor on by there and call me tomorrow night and tell me what you saw.”

I did. And when I saw what I saw when I came around the bend and my headlight picked out the gate around the next curve, I slowed down and finally stopped. The gates were wide open, and through their gaping maw, picked out in stark relief in my high beam, I saw the battered yellow shapes of construction equipment. And standing at attention, eyes fixed gamely on me was a state trooper, his hand resting loosely on the butt of his sidearm.

Like an idiot, I got off and removed my helmet. As I pulled it over my head and looked up, I noticed that the cop’s gun had cleared the holster.

I have never had a gun pulled on me before. I tried to strike up some kind of conversation, as though riding along a deserted two-lane at two in the morning and pulling up in front of a cop to have a nice nocturnal chat were all par for the course. The cop beat me to it.

“Climb back on your hoss, boy.”

“Well, look—I used to play in these woods as a kid,” the fear in me kindling the lie, letting me knit it out of ether and ashes while I stared into the lidless black eye of his sidearm. I was prepared to go on and on, clueless as to what I would say but knowing the words would be there as I needed them. I was curious myself as to what would come out of my mouth, but he stopped me cold before I could get farther with a wave of hand.

“That’s great, he said. “Soon there ain’t gonna be any woods here to play in. Puttin’ in a golf course.”

I sighed, all my inflated ego, my wordsmithing, dissolved. “Well,” I half-whispered, not really paying attention anymore to my flapping lips, which babbled on seemingly of their own accord, “I guess you can never really go home again.”

The hammer of the trooper’s gun came back with an oily click.

“What did you say?” he asked, his voice dripping cold poison.

Frightened absolutely beyond the capacity for rational thought, I haltingly repeated myself, hoping I had gotten my own words right, taking great care to enunciate clearly and hoping to God he had misheard me, and that had been what set him off, not what I had really said.

“Oh,” he said, after I had finished, letting the hammer of his gun ease on back
down. “No, I guess you really can’t.”

By this time I was backing slowly toward my motorcycle, fumbling my helmet over my head as I went. He didn’t seem to be inclined to pursue, so I threw my leg over the seat and, not bothering to strap my helmet on properly, gingerly started the engine and slowly motored onto the pavement. With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure the cop didn’t have his gun back out, I cranked the engine to the redline and let the clutch out with a snap. The front wheel came off the ground and stayed there, and the next time I looked at the speedometer I was over a hundred and climbing, and that was the last I ever saw of the woods behind Atten Park.
That’s where the story ends, dearest reader.

Or is it? As it happens, there is a small post-script. It turned out that what was surreptitiously stashed in those woods under that concrete slab was, according to my friend Adam’s home inspector, a fully functional Nike missile silo in retire. I guess the night I almost got shot by a state trooper was the night they were taking the missile out. Hey, you can’t build a golf course over a nuclear missile, for Christ’s sake. Think of what it would do to the back nine after a launch.

Though that explains the cops’ behavior, both on that night way back in September when the whole thing started, or that last hellish encounter at the gates, ready to expulge their mysterious and menacing contents, it doesn’t explain the slowly stalking thing that, while scaring us pretty badly, also helped to bolster our belief that there are some things out there that can’t be explained.

And, for a little while, I got to be one of them myself.