Nowhere Blvd: A Horror Novel (10 page)

So instead of changing course, he charged right into the midst of the Rejected.  He dodged the first one, but crashed directly into another one knocking them both to the ground.  He was up and moving again in a flash, feeling talons brush the back of his leg as he jumped away.  The Hollow Man behind him, heedless of the living obstacles, tried the same maneuver.

It wasn’t so lucky though.  Its long legs were tripped up and it went sprawling amidst the Rejected.  Spencer didn’t wait to find out what happened next but kept running until he could not longer see them.  He climbed a tree and listened.  He heard cries of pain and grunts and noises like that of an animal.  It went on for a while, and he could even make out by the sounds when the second Hollow Man caught up and joined the fray.  After what seemed like a long time he could hear nothing more. 

He waited a long time for sounds of someone looking for him.  He tried to stay awake but in his terrible fatigue he kept dozing off.  Finally when he saw the first light of dawn he forced himself to climb down from the branches he was hiding in and sneak back to the scene of the battle.  There were a tangle of bodies such that he couldn’t be sure who had won at first.  Four Rejected lay full of stab wounds and bruised limbs.  The two Hollow Men also lay motionless, leaking fluids that in the dim light could have been either blood or oil.

He was surprised, he didn’t think anything could kill one of Smiling Jack’s creations.  Even if it had taken four of the Rejected to bring down two of them.  And there lying amidst the carnage was his horrible treasure.  The corpse of a boy wearing Spencer’s own clothes.  He grabbed it by the shoulders and dragged it out into the open, about halfway to the town. 

And then he walked away, deep deep into the forest as far as his tired legs would take him.  He buried himself with leaves and lay with his eyes open, trying to stay alert for anyone that would sneak up on him as he fell into a rough slumber. 

The next day that was it.  The patrols had stopped.  They had, obviously, found the body and mistaken it for Spencer, assuming he had been killed and mutilated by the Rejected.  He knew his old life was well and truly over.  He was safe from them forever, but only if they never ever saw him again.  No more was he a creature of the town, now he was a creature of the forest.  He would live amongst the Rejected but he would never, he told himself, become one of them. 

It was two weeks of living off candy before he made his first trip to the bone yard to feed.

*   *   *

Much of his time living in the Rejected Woods was a blur.  Survival was a day to day struggle, but one was much like another.  He sought at all times to avoid the Rejected, save those times he had to scrounge for his share of the meat.  In the year he lived amongst them he was caught by an aggressive one exactly nine times.  Five of them he managed to outrun or otherwise evade.  Two he managed to fight off in vicious, dirty matches.  And two he was forced to kill with a short spear he’d made from a broken leg bone he'd found in the bone pile.  Both times he ate of them until he had his fill. 

He never tried to speak to the Rejected.  It wasn’t that he didn’t think they could speak or understand him.  He’d heard them some whisper and some gibber and some crying with loneliness in the night (especially the new ones).   And it wasn’t just that he knew now how friendship could make you weak.  It was that deep down he felt that if he ever talked to them, he would become one somehow.  Become a monster like them.  And maybe they thought the same, since every time he thought he heard them talking to each other, they would stop when he drew near. 

Spencer didn’t give up spying on the people of Nowhere Blvd.  He could watch them through the telescope from the woods without a chance of being spotted.  It was the only way to pass the time, since the underground forest was nothing like real forests.  It held none of the wonder or surprise or wildlife (besides the
very
rare insect).  Just grayish brown trees circling the town from one end to another. 

It was in watching the town and its inhabitants that he learned why the Rejected never left the forest.  It wasn’t Smiling Jack they feared (at least not
just
him).  Spencer discovered that Mr. Buttons wasn’t fed by Jack like everyone else, it fed off of the Rejected themselves.  The teddy bear made regular hunting trips into the woods to catch one and devour them.  Spencer knew that avoiding Mr. Buttons was more a matter of luck than skill, everyone knew bears could climb trees and he sure as
fuck
couldn’t outrun it.  Still, when he saw Mr. Buttons heading for one part of the woods, he ran for another. 

In his year in the woods his one preoccupation was in finding a way out of Nowhere Blvd.  At the edge of the forest all the way around was an un-climbable rock wall, curving up to become part of the sky. 

With two exceptions.

The first was obvious, the river which fed Jack’s Lake.  The flow was gentle and he thought maybe he could swim beneath it until he came to an opening on the other side.  He tried it one day, counting how many second he could hold his breath then swimming half that distance in the dark before swimming back.  After that he spent weeks practicing holding his breath until he could last for almost 150 seconds count.  He swam hard in the water and counted a hundred before turning back.  He ran out of breath just before making it back, inhaling cool water which burned like fire in his chest.  Just as he thought he would die he saw light and swam up to shore, coughing and throwing up and trying to stay conscious.  After that he was haunted by the idea that the escape might be just 140 seconds in, if only he would go all the way.  But he never tried again, knowing he might not be able to make himself turn back in time. 

The second exception was a tunnel.  It wasn’t until he’d been exploring several months before he found it, owing to the twin facts that it was behind boulders and under a pile of old leaves.  He wouldn’t have found it at all if he hadn’t noticed while looking close one day that there was writing on the rocks.  It looked like the old cave man paintings they had pictures of at the museum.  In the primitive picture something was bursting from the ground.  It looked like it was maybe a giant stick bug, but it was simple enough to where it could even have been a picture of Smiling Jack.  The faded inks made it hard to make out the rest, but it looked like there were other things left behind under the ground.  Things whose shapes were hard to make out, but seemed to stare malevolently from the rock painting.   

The tunnel was pitch dark and Spencer had no source of light.  Near as he had been able to tell, there wasn’t a source of fire or light in all of Nowhere Blvd.  And he hadn’t bothered to try and make fire like the Indians with two sticks because fire would only attract enemies.  One top of that, the temperature was constant all year round.  It got chilly at night, but never freezing.  He was used to navigating in the dark though.  Even if he hadn’t been, nothing would have kept him from trying the cave.   

The first part of it went down at an angle, encouragingly under the rock wall itself.  It was small, but not so small he couldn’t crawl on his hands and knees.  He went with his pack tied to a rope around his ankle.  By this point he was wearing yet another pair of clothes taken from another body, the knees of which were being ruined pretty quick on the sharp rocks of the floor.  After what seemed like a long time, but may only have been a few minutes, he came to a large cave and was able to stand up. 

“HEY” he yelled, to gauge the echo in the darkness.  He couldn’t be sure but the place seemed pretty big.  With the exception of the cave leading to a dead end, this was the worst case scenario.  Getting lost forever in here would be all too easy, and a terrible lonely way to die.  But the ideas of starving to death and dying alone didn’t scare him like they used to, so he put his hand against the left wall and started walking. 

He walked slow and careful, more so after hitting his head on a sharp stalactite hard enough to draw blood.  The dark in here was far beyond even the exaggerated dark of Nowhere Blvd, though he'd known in advance what it would be like.  Once upon a time the William's family had gone on the tour of Carlsbad caverns, where the lights had been turned out briefly to show everyone what true cave dark was like.  Then as now it seemed as if the dark was tangible somehow, you could almost feel it on your skin.  And yet he had assumed that he would somehow sense it when a wall was right in front of his face, and had found out the hard way that without sight his other senses were pretty much worthless as well.  After only a few minutes the darkness was maddening, suffocating, making him wonder how long he could go on in it.

It wasn’t really a question though, because the answer was obvious.  He only had a couple days of water in a canteen stolen from the toy store.  He wouldn’t last much beyond the end of that.  Thinking about this he walked a little ways further, then stopped, because he
did
sense something.  He didn’t know how knew it, but he
knew.

Knew that he was not alone in the dark. 

He was sure he hadn’t heard them before, but once he stopped moving and making noise, there was no doubt.  And it was definitely a
them
.  They moved quietly, no louder in his ears than his own heartbeat.  But in the silence of the cave it was enough to be sure, and nothing moved that quiet unless it was sneaking...
stalking.
  A sound akin to footsteps, though what forms those feet carried he couldn’t imagine.  He could smell them too.  He’d been so sure the cave would be empty that he hadn’t even thought about the smell.  It wasn’t the smell of dry rock dust like it should be.  It was a scent he didn’t remember ever smelling, but was familiar all the same.  All of a sudden he was very, very afraid.  And the
fear
of them was somehow familiar as well.   

Something about that presence he felt, it was like he was
born
knowing to be afraid of them.  An echo left over from ancestors a hundred thousand years back.  Whatever they were, somehow every part of him knew they were bad.  The terror of them pushed his very thoughts away, left him as no more than an animal.  He wanted to reach for his bone spear, but was frozen in place.  Then a new noise came, a high pitched whine this time.  After a few seconds he realized it was coming from him, a tiny scream chocked off in his throat. 

Spencer ran blindly, making his way as best he could back the way he had come, forgetting at first to put his right hand against the wall to feel his way back.  By the time he did think of it, it was too late.  He reached out as he ran and felt only empty space.  He struck another stalactite, or maybe the same one as before.  Not full on, a glancing blow against the side of his head that left a burst of stars in his vision.  He couldn’t hear them following, such was their stealth. 

But he could sense it.  He
felt
them following. 

He ran on, tears streaming down his cheeks, knowing already his panic had ruined him.  They would have him in only moments, because there really was nowhere to run.  And then his foot missed purchase, sprawling him face first down onto the ground.  He started to get up dizzily, then realized even as his head still spun that he had stepped into the hole he had climbed in from.

He spun and scampered down it, pushing his pack in front of him before he could think to leave it behind.  Through every inch of the tunnel he thought he could feel icy claws ready to grab his ankles.  Crawling through that tunnel were the longest moments of his life.  His panic was such that he thought his heart would explode. 

And then, almost as soon as he saw the light of the end, he was out of it.  Out and running, though he only ran a few feet before he fell.  His right ankle was twisted badly from the hole and wouldn’t hold his weight.  He turned on his hands and knees towards the tunnel to see what followed.  There was nothing.

Or was there?  Something just inside the mouth of the tunnel, just outside of the edge of the light.  He thought just maybe he could make out eyes staring at him from the darkness.  Black, lumpy eyes.  The kind he'd seen just once before.  The eyes of Jack's people. 

Staring...staring. 

Afraid of the light
, Spencer thought. 

He backed away on his hands and his one good foot, never taking his eyes off it.  He backed around the curve of the rocks so it could not longer see him, though still watched in case he should see some terrible thing appear from around that curve.  He crawled until he found a stick he could use as a crutch, then moved as fast as he could as far away as he could.  It was only after some time he noticed the throbbing pain in his ankle and head or that his nose was streaming blood from the fall. 

*   *   *

The next day after Suzie’s broken arm Spencer woke with the sun, as always.  He put his bed back away from the door and sat waiting.  Trying to be stoic about what was in store for him and failing.  Back in Nowhere Blvd. he’d lived in constant fear, but at least there he had had some control over his destiny.  Here he didn’t control anything.  He used to take what he wanted, now he only had what he was given. 

After a while he heard something at the door.  It was Baby Suzie peeking in.  His first thought was that she came for revenge, trying to catch him while he slept.  After a moment he realized how ridiculous the idea was and actually smiled at the thought of it.