On strange doings of the Halloweenish variety...

A story whose time to be told has come

We’re in the meaty part of the Halloween season, and in no profession (other than, say, store manager or costume manufacturer) is this more evident now than in the schools. Jack-o’-Lantern and Frankenstein cutouts are plastered on every door (except mine), little embroidered ghosties bob jauntily from the rearview mirror of the Ford Excursion in the lane next to me; the school-teacherish lady behind the wheel of this behemoth remains next to me until she gets into the left turn lane about a half-mile on and turns into the Hobby Lobby. What’s she got a hankerin’ fer? Your guess is as good as mine, but I think the chances are at least even that she’s there for some more of that cuddly Halloween malarkey.

That’s all fine and well, and taking things like vampires and zombies and ghosts and horrid amalgamations of human body parts that are formed into one staggering, lumbering automaton with a suspiciously verdant complexion and a strangely-flat-topped head and making them all cuddly is fine. We don’t want to actually scare anybody with any of these things, now do we? ‘Course not. And really, what could be cuddlier than a furry little bat or a hook-nosed witch? I can’t think of anything offhand, can you?

In truth, these things are kinda scary before they get run through the cute-inator. Their histories and etymologies stretch back long ways, and there was a period of time when people actually believed in that stuff—that witches rode broomsticks, that bats drank blood and were the transmogrifications of Slavic aristocrats; that werewolves stalked the streets whenever the moon was full; that the house on the hill was full of ghosts.

Who’s to say that no one believes in that stuff today? I sure do. And sometimes, when you’re lying all snug in your bed, it can give you a bit of an uncomfortable pause to consider what might be stalking around just outside your tightly-shut and locked door. There could be anything out there, anything. Things that go bump in the night are not always totally explainable. There’s been countless volumes written, countless movies made, countless TV documentaries aired, on stuff that goes bump. It can’t all be explainable. You got your ghosts, your yeti, your chupacabra, the mysterious Goat-Man of the Northeast. There’s werewolves, and maybe just one or two of the countless goths that roam the colleges and cities really are vampires. I once read an account of a ghost sighting in Ohio that consisted of a woman in a blue ball gown standing in the doorway of a room and just staring at the viewer. Her head was that of a well-decomposed corpse. Another in Ypsilanti Michigan reported seeing a skeleton busily digging a hole in the viewer’s backyard. Can you imagine that? Just a skeleton, plugging away with a shovel in your garden?

There’s creepy stuff out there. And, of course, there’s me.

All right, here I gotta mention a little detail about what I was like as a kid. I read The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I loved them. I read all of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and a year to this day does not go by that I don’t read all of them again at least once. These books and others of their ilk spoke often about doors that led to other places.

"A door," said the Queen, speaking more to herself than to him.
"A door from the world of men! I have heard of such things. This
may wreck all. But he is only one, and he is easily dealt with."

From C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I spent a lot of time and money in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of my local bookstore, and on my free time, I’d get on my bicycle, or later on, I’d get in my car, and I’d look for my own door. I already believed in magic, ghosts, and UFO’s; why not my own wardrobe, my own magical country, with talking beasts and mythical creatures and battles and valor and knights and magic coming out of every hole in the ground?

I never did find that door. I haven’t stopped looking, either. I suspect I’ll find it someday, one way or another. It may come in the form of a fast-moving truck when I’m crossing the street and not paying attention; it may come in the form of some rapidly-metastasizing tumor that the doctors just didn’t catch; it may come in the form of a heart attack. More than likely it will come on the bike, when I’m (stupidly) not wearing my helmet and I hit a curve too fast. But it may be that I’ll be hiking in the woods and I’ll just come upon a door. Not in a tree or cave or anything like that; it may be just like the door at the end of Prince Caspian or The Last Battle, where a door that appeared to lead from nowhere to nowhere actually led farther than anyone could otherwise go in a lifetime.

I’m digressing like a bastard here. Like I said, I never did find that door, but what’s most interesting, it turns out, is that all my friends from high school were looking for it too. None of us have found it, and some of us have stopped searching. But there was a time when that was what just we did. Some groups of friends do the paintball thing; some got together and played Dungeons and Dragons (I liked the idea, but I always thought the guys who played that stuff were a bunch of pussies); we looked for the door, and we did stuff that felt like looking, even though we knew it wouldn’t get us anywhere.

We went to abandoned drawbridges. We went to cemeteries. (Hey, it seemed logical to us. Still does—if ever there was a gateway to the next world, it would seem to me that a cemetery is as likely as anyplace else.) We went to places where important historical events happened. My buddy Garrett went to Stonehenge. I went to Four Corners. Joe did all the research. Joe was, and is, by the way, the closest thing to a true psychic I have ever met. Larry provided the cigarettes, and Bob provided the booze. We took my old truck most of the time. We busted out the Ouija Board on several occasions, and that thing was a story in itself. We bought spell books, tarot decks, maps, incense. All we wanted was some kind of proof that the door to the next world existed, and we would have taken anything weird as evidence, using the argument, “Hey, if this could happen, why not that?”

Finally, one night, we were all hanging out at Garrett’s house. Garrett’s folks lived (still do, actually) on Creekside in a little subdivision called Adare Farms. What this meant was that Garrett’s house was close to our high school, St. Francis, and also close to Wheaton-Warrenville South High School, which adjoined a large outdoor sports complex called Atten Park.

In those days, Atten Park ended and the woods began, and they were some heavy-duty woods. Garrett, having grown up around there, played in those woods a lot and knew them like the back of his hand.

This night, we had nothing else to do, so we were on our way out the door to shoot a little pool at Gala North—a bowling alley in Carol Stream. It was Late September-ish, and still warm out. We were all dressed in what we thought were our sophisticated pool-shooting clothes—button-down shirts, black jeans or slacks, shitkickers, the occasional black leather vest. We all had two-piece cues, three of us were packing squares—Larry with his Reds, Bob with his Camel Turkish Blends, and me with my Light Wides—and Bob had his pocket-flask nicely filled to the top. We were waiting for Garrett to get his shit together. He came out of the bedroom after a few minutes, combing his hair back in that modernized duck’s-ass he used to use before the he went with the George Clooney look.

Walking out the door, I remember saying something like, “Man, I’m fuckin’ bored. I don’t wanna just go shoot pool again. I want something different. I want a fuckin’ adventure.”

“What, you wanna get into a bar fight?” Bob asked, grinning and cracking his big knuckles. “I could go for that.”

“Naw,” I said, “I mean something different. I mean like a quest.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘a quest?’” asked Joe. “There ain’t nothing to quest for around here.”

“I wouldn’t care if we had to make one up. I just wanna do something different—something that means something.”

Nobody said anything. After a little while, though, Garrett said, “Well, actually…”

Which is how we ended up walking through the woods behind Atten Park on a pitch-black moonless night at 1:00 in the morning.

It may have sounded up to now like I was in the midst of one of my usual pointless meandering blogs. This is not the case—because as of now, this is where the story gets weird, and I swear to you that what I’m about to tell you is true, for the very life of me.

As I said, Garrett knew these woods like the back of his hand. When I mentioned doing something different, he got his crafty look on his face.

“Okay. You want different? I’ll show you different. How’s this?

“In the woods behind Atten Park, there’s this weird concrete slab. I don’t know what it is—it’s just this rectangular slab, on the ground out there in the middle of these woods. It’s about the size of a basketball court. I’ve known about it for a long time, but I can’t explain it. It’s just—weird. Wanna go check it out?”

“What, now?” asked Larry, his tone incredulous.

“Yeah, now,” said Garrett. “Jay’s all on about how he wants to do something different, even a quest, maybe. All right, here’s our quest—to go check out this creepy fuckin’ slab in the middle of the dark frickin’ woods when it’s pitch black out.”

“Hell, I’m in,” I said.

“Me too,” said Joe.

“Hell yeah,” said Bob.

“What the hell,” said Larry.

So we piled into my old truck—a little brown Mazda with blue-dot taillights, raised-white-letter tires and a good-sized valvetrain racket from me running the poor thing at the redline while all kinds of crossed-up sideways in snowy parking lots. (See my previous blog for an action shot.) Larry climbed into the shotgun seat, and everyone else jumped in the back.

We pulled up in the rearmost parking lot of Atten Park—about 200 yards back from the street, adjoining the community garden plots. Garrett took us down a path through the middle of the postage-stamp sized gardens filled with late summer squash, armpit-high corn, beans, pumpkins. We ended up on a small beaten single-track into the woods. None of us thought to bring a flashlight. Larry and Bob alternately fired up their Zippos. It didn’t help.

We walked down this path, blacker than midnight in a mineshaft, for what felt like hours. In reality, it was only around 15 to 20 minutes, but when you’re out walking in the woods at night, I’m sure you can understand how time can stretch out when you’re not looking.

Garrett seemed to know his way pretty well, and eventually, we emerged into a clearing that was suspiciously geometric. Just like he’d said—a concrete rectangle, out there in the middle of these woods. For no reason.

I guess we hung out there for about a half an hour. Mosquitoes are still pretty thick ‘round these here parts in September, and we got our share, but we were too blown away to care very much. Larry’s Zippo had long since run out of fuel, but Bob’s was still going strong, and we estimated this big concrete slab to be about 100 feet long on the long axis and around 60 feet on the short. We also discovered that the surface was not perfectly smooth—it was lined with grooves at regular intervals along both axes, dividing the surface into congruently-sized squares.

Well, in reality, there was not much to do once we’d gotten there and sized up the thing, and so we were just hanging out, discussing in harsh whispers what the nature of the place could possibly be, when Joe stopped us all. He held up a hand, quavering in the flickering of Bob’s Zippo.

“I think it’s time to get out of here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Garrett hissed, his dander up, as you might expect, given that we were in a creepy place and Joe was insinuating by both word and action that things were about to get creepier. They did.

As if on cue, we heard someone walking through the woods. We didn’t hear it gradually get closer, as we would have expected; it was just not there one second and there the next. Not on the path, mind you; it sounded as if this person were crashing blindly through the trees. Its footfalls made a distinctively human sound—Crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch. One foot at a time, not hurrying.

In hindsight, the situation was even creepier than it seemed at that moment, standing there, listening. Let’s look at the facts—had it been a cop, I sure as hell don’t think he or she would have been taking his or her time, as this thing seemed to be doing. More than likely, a cop would have been moving at a far greater pace in order to bring us to bear that much sooner, and, probably, would have been waving a flashlight and/or shouting something to let us know he or she was on the way. Face it—crashing through the woods is no way to sneak up on something.

No flashlight. No hurrying. No shouts. Just crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch.

Had it been punk kids out to raise a little hell, I would imagine they’d do a lot of sprint-and-hide, just like any kids do when up to fuckery. You really can’t assess what kind of hell you’re raising if the sound of it is obscured by your progress through the branches, and anyway, what kid raises hell all by him- or herself? There’d undoubtedly be some hollering, some name-calling, perhaps a Black Cat or M-80 lit off every once in a while. Hey, I was a kid not so long ago myself.

No sounds of sprint-and-hide. No hollering. No M-80’s. Just crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch.

This is enough to scare the shit out of anyone, I guess, and we were. Transfixed there like an insect pinned to a card, that was me. I was just getting ready to whisper to the others that it was probably time to get the hell out of there.

Like I said, it gets weird, but I swear to you that I am not making this up.

Up to now, we had heard only one person (thing?) out in the woods, just walking. Getting closer? Getting farther away? Doing laps? Too scared to tell, but at least it was only one.

As I thought that (I swear I’m not making this up), instantly instantly instantly there were noises on all four sides. Crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch. Either some twisted sadistic quadrophonic deal, or now we were surrounded.

Garrett stepped up. I have never lost my respect for him for his actions that night, and in particular at this moment.

“We just gonna go back down the path to the truck,” he said, “and we’re not gonna run. We’re just gonna take our time, and while we’re doing that, we’re gonna talk. About anything. The Bulls. The White Sox. Monica Lewinsky. Anything. Just walk and talk. Now.”

That, O Treasured Reader, is what we did, and that was a) the scaredest I have ever been in my life, and I have been really scared; and b) the longest walk, by far, that I have ever taken. We made it back to the truck with no problems, no boogeymen jumping out from behind trees with fangs bared and a severed head in each dripping fist, no goblins, no vampires.

There were however, two police cars in the parking lot, nicely blocking the truck in its place, radio squawking with the results from the run on my license plates.

In ten seconds they had us spread out—Bob on the hood of one cop car, Larry on the trunk; Garrett and Joe on the other. It was my truck, so I guess it was only fit that they had me spread ‘em on my own hood. They held us there—no cuffs, thank God—while they searched my truck. I was too scared to notice whether they had us at gunpoint, but I’m sure they realized it wasn’t necessary.

It was a small truck, and there wasn’t anything in it to find, so the search was over quickly enough. The first cop had us line up along the side of the truck.

“You hold ‘em,” he said to the other. “I’m gonna take a walk back there and see what’s up.”

Now, does it sound to you as if the cops were overreacting just a little? It sure seemed like that to me at the time. It doesn’t any more, but I’ll get to that.

We stood there, feeling like assholes, while the second cop smoked a cigarette and stared at us. The first came back out of the woods after another eternity. We thought he went back there to look for beer cans, roaches, illegal fireworks. The following exchange between the two cops absolved us of that notion.

“Everything all right?” asked the second.

“Yeah,” replied the first, sliding his flashlight back onto his belt loop. “Nothing got touched.”

Rewind rewind rewind

“Yeah,” replied the first, sliding his flashlight back onto his belt loop. “Nothing got touched.”

Nothing got touched.

What the fuck were they talking about?

“All right, you punks,” said the second cop. “Park closes at sunset. You’re trespassing. Could bust you, I guess. How ‘bout you pedal your little asses out of here and don’t let us see you back here again, daytime or night time? That work for you?”

It worked. We pedaled. And when we got the chance, we talked, and talked. It turned out what was supposed to be a fuck-around quest became a real quest, of sorts, after all.

We didn’t really care what we had found. All we cared about was that we had found something weird. And what we wanted was not so much to find out what that big concrete slab was, or why the cops were so touchy, or even what it had been that was stalking us out in the woods.

What we wanted was some proof that we hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. What we wanted was to do it again, and see for ourselves if we had really heard what we thought we heard.

I guess it was the unseen thing that intrigued us most. The truck parked out on the gravel parking lot was visible enough from the street, I guess, and it wouldn’t have been too hard for the cops to pick up on that. But we had been way deep in the woods when we heard that noise, and we all agreed that it just wouldn’t have been possible for cops to move someone into stalking position without us hearing them move into position. The thing we heard hadn’t moved into position—it was just not there one second, and there the next. And besides, how had it multiplied like that, just instantaneously?

We wanted to answer these questions, true. But more than that—had we really heard something? Only way to find out was to do it all over again—but no truck, no cops this time. Nothing to give us away. If that thing had just appeared like that, like it sounded it had, it would find us no matter how we got back there. Or so we thought.

After many long nights of discussion over pool tables and at bars, waiting in line at the movie theater or for our turn to play Double Dragon or Street Fighter at the arcade, in the back of my truck in a blue haze of cigarette smoke, we decided that a mission of sorts was in order. Our mission—to make it under cover of darkness into the woods and back to the slab without a vehicle and without being seen by the cops. Once there, we would engage in a rigorous regimen of sitting and waiting for something to appear, as it had last time—with no warning. If it came back, would it come closer? Would it multiply like it had last time? Would we actually see it this time? Part of me hoped we would, but I think a bigger part of me hoped we wouldn’t.

We figured covering the two miles from Garrett’s house to Atten Park would take some doing—especially at night. We decided all black was the way to go. We put our gear together with the following criteria in mind—it had to be black. It had to be black, and anything that wasn’t black had to be black. It also had to be close-fitting, as getting caught on a branch by some loose flap would undoubtedly have sucked, especially when the chance that we would be chased by an unseen stalking thing was not altogether zero.

We also agreed that carrying a weapon of some sort was a must. If whatever was back there decided to show itself, I’ll be fucked if I’m gonna find myself defenseless. Garrett, who put his gear together in the ninja style, came packing a katana the length of one of his legs. Bob had a wicked little boot knife. Joe brought three tiny throwing knives that tucked neatly into a quiver on the back of his hand. We laughed at their effectiveness—how could something that tiny be accurate?—until Joe took all three out with one pull and went snick snick snick—and there were three tiny throwing knives sticking out of a tree ten feet away. I was convinced. For myself, I brought a hunting dagger that strapped to the outside of my leg. It was wicked sharp—in fact, the only blood spilt during the entire fiasco came when I tried to put it back in the scabbard and used my finger as a guide. I still have the scar.

We also felt it was necessary to plan out our route from Garrett’s house. To this end, we did some research and learned that there was a small corporation in West Chicago that specialized in taking high-altitude photos. Give the guy an address, and he’d produce a two-foot-by three-foot rolled photograph with your address’s coordinates as the center. At the altitude from which the photograph was taken, you could count on a five-mile spread in any direction from your specified coordinates. We gave the gentleman Garrett’s address, figuring that a five mile radius would more than encompass Atten Park and the surrounding woods. With such a high vantage point, we could plan our route much more effectively.

Surprise, surprise. Upon receipt of our photograph, we found that the area due west of Atten Park—our woods—was blacked out. Completely. For two square miles, on the photograph at least.

Now what the fuck? Strange stalking beasts? Hyperactive cops? And now you can’t even get a picture of the place?

This did nothing but increase our intensity and resolve. There was enough on the aerial shot to plan enough of our route to get close, and then we’d just wing it. We walked our planned path more than a few times in the daytime, knowing that it wouldn’t look anywhere near the same a) in the dark, b) while you were running your ass off and c) while you were scared out of your skull. We figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

All of our planning took almost the entire year. We set a date of June 23.

Have you ever noticed how, sometimes, your luck seems to turn for the worst when you most need it? You’re late for work, but every single traffic light you come to turns red at your approach. You’re busily trying to make dinner so you can eat so you can get on the road so you can get to the gig, but all of a sudden your parents, every single one of your friends, and about three telemarketers call your phone within five minutes. That happens to me all the time. Once, I got so angry that I took my cell phone, went into a nice slow windup, and heaved that fucker across the lawn.

Other times, your luck will run straight and true and blinding white for a little while. This doesn’t seem to happen as often, but it does happen. I once found myself at the heart of the Christmas season without a penny to my name and no way to buy Christmas gifts. I hired on as seasonal help with Toys ‘R’ Us, but the first paycheck wasn’t due ‘til after New Year’s, the bastards. I got invited to a pool tournament two weeks before Christmas and walked out of there with $250 big ones in my pocket. I pulled shots off that night I had never tried before and wouldn’t dream of trying. I simply couldn’t miss. I’m no pool shark, and if you played me tonight you’d have a good chance of winning, but I was unstoppable that night. I still can’t understand it, but I sure appreciate whoever was doing the shooting, ‘cause it sure wasn’t me.

We had luck of both kinds on June 23rd. It seemed the evening would be cancelled by rain, though it had theretofore not rained for the past three weeks. All that evening, it seemed to threaten rain with low-lying clouds and ominous rolls of far-off thunder. Driving to Garrett’s house, I got pulled over for having a broken turn signal. Garrett’s parents were supposed to be gone, but his mom came down sick and they cancelled their plans. Joe’s mom decided that day to put his one black shirt in the wash, and shrank it almost laughably. Bob couldn’t find his car keys.

We all got to Garrett’s a little late. I was a little lighter for the lack of my driver’s license. Bob had to borrow his folks’ extra set of keys. Joe stopped by Wal-Mart on the way and got another black pullover. We met on Garrett’s porch, wearing our street clothes, our gear and weapons stowed in a couple of large black duffel bags. It was 9:00 in the evening. We felt that it wouldn’t be right to get the ball rolling before the witching hour, so we dropped the stuff in Garrett’s garage and went to the local Denny’s to load up on caffeine and sugar. When you’re three hours away from an escapade you’ve been planning for almost a year, those three hours can take a hell of a long time.

Hit time. We had planned to get suited up and leave from Garrett’s back porch. His parents were, however, sacked out on the couch in the downstairs room adjoining the porch, so that was out.

“Fuck it,” said Bob. “What else could possibly go wrong? Let’s just get started, and bring the stuff with us. If there’s a place to change along the way, under a tree, behind a bush, I’ll do that. I just can’t stand waiting any more.” We all agreed, so off we went.

About ten minutes into the two-mile hike, along a route that took us through backyards, along deserted side streets, along the banks of a large retention pond, skirting the environs of a large waste-water treatment plant, and along an eternally long bike path that was far too well-lit by sodium arc lamps from the park, we found a big bushy willow tree. Pushing aside the drooping branches was like parting a thick velvet curtain, and we found the space within as dry and shielded from view as Garret’s house. We got ready, and left all our street clothes there. Dressed all in black, masks on, knives out and ready, we got started.





Remember how I said that sometimes, all the luck you have is bad? And sometimes, though it happens rarely, you get a run of luck that is so good, it scares you? We had used up all our bad luck for the trip, it seemed, and we were due for some good luck. As a sign that Luck herself agreed, upon emerging from the willow tree we were shocked to see the full moon emerging from a break in the clouds. Would Luck continue to smile?

The hardest part was the long stretch of bike path. Brightly lit, and narrowly guarded on both sides by high chain-link fence (the really flexy kind with the spiky stuff at the top that can’t be climbed), it provided the greatest chance that we’d get spotted—either by cops or nosy townspeople out for a walk. We decided to tackle that section on at a time. I was the fastest runner, so I ran point and sprinted down the path—a good 75 yards—until I made it to the dark shelter of the park beyond. I made it without incident, and turned around and flashed my little red LED flashlight to signal the others. In about 10 seconds, here came Garrett, almost as fast but silent in ways I knew I hadn’t been. Joe came after, huffing like a freight train but with arms tucked into his sides and his head held low. Finally, Bob, mustering all the speed for which he’d been known on St. Francis’s defensive line, came hauling down the path like a demented steamroller, arms pumping, knees popping almost to his chest, teeth bared, eyes blazing. Holy shit.

Getting past that point, we felt, was the most difficult part of the journey. All that remained was a lovely stroll through the park under cover of darkness to the path at the edge of the woods. Okay; actually, the walk through the woods would be more difficult, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about the cops.

Hee hee.

Well, like I said, this one’s a long one, and I didn’t think it’d be fair to make you have to swallow this all in one shot. So maybe this is as good a place as any to break it up. Stay tuned for the next post, which should be up shortly.

Dare I say it—to be continued?