Chapter 5 – Come Home, Danny

I woke up the next afternoon after a fitful sleep, groggily getting up and moving. I showered, dressed, and was ready for yet another day of pure weirdness within thirty minutes. Life seemed to be getting more complicated by the second, and I felt like that day would be no exception. It was amazing, how within forty-eight hours our lives had gone from mostly ordinary, to full-tilt-boogie bizarre. There was no telling where the next horror would come from, or in what way it would present itself.

I used to love reading scary novels, or watching television shows with the creep factor, but they were fiction for me then. Despite the scary things I’d grown up hearing about, they were removed from me, and when it came to fiction, I could leave that world to walk out into the sunshine and shake off the gloom. Now that Blackwoods Bend’s particular brand of horror had invaded our lives, that wasn’t an option. There was no avoiding it, and we had to face it. What seemed to be happening to our group of friends was like walking blindly into a pitch black room, with nothing to give you any sense of where to turn, or even what waited for you in the darkness there.

I walked into my kitchen, leaning a hand on the counter, and I called Will. He picked up after two rings, sounding weary. “How’s James?” I asked.

“He’s back at his house. He still seemed rattled, but he went home. James said that he slept, but Keith told me that he went over there early, and James was up going through some papers,” Will said.

“Is everybody goin’ over there later?” I was wary of that. Evidence was presenting itself to me that there actually was something lurking in another layer of space in James’ house, and I had enough weird going on.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t wanna, but James could use the support,” Will said, suggesting I go over there whether I wanted to or not.

“All right, then. I’ll be over in a little bit,” I said, ending the call. I thought about going out for lunch before I went over to James’ house, but then I decided that I was just going to stay inside, and surf around on the internet for a while.

There’s a sort of safety in staying in one place. Your scenery doesn’t change, you can see if anyone is approaching you, and you’re steady. No big changes, no shifts in world-view—just staying as you are. I checked my email, then went onto Facebook—the social-networking site that everyone on the planet was a member of.

It was good to see there was still some normal life stuff going on in the world. People were posting about their normal everyday events, and that eased my mind. For instance, a girl that I knew from high school was taking her kids to the park, an out of state friend had run into a celebrity, and another friend announced with utmost pride that he was making a chicken salad sandwich for lunch.

I began to feel like the madness was past us, and that things were returning to the way they always should have been; calm and monster free. Maybe we just got caught in the fallout of some other, bigger thing, and we were in the clear. I should have known better than to tempt the Universe with positive thinking. I scrolled down my Facebook news feed, coming across a post by an old drinking buddy. He’d posted a journal entry about something that had happened to him just the night before. The title read: Seeing Things.

“There’s a monster in the laundry room.”

I turned to look at my six-year-old son from the computer screen where I had this month’s budget displayed. Aiden stared at me with his ever present, normally hilariously cute, matter-of-fact gaze that told me he wasn’t frightened, but he truly did believe that he had seen something. Probably the cat, I thought to myself, but I stood up from the computer desk, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Okay, champ. Let’s see.” I followed my son to the door to the laundry room.

The door is old, with nine panes of glass that serve as a window. It was original to the house, and before the previous owners had added on the laundry room, the door had let out to the backyard. The room, itself, is small, with a high ceiling, and it’s still unfinished—It lacks a coat of paint and weather stripping around the new backdoor, but it serves its purpose well enough.

My son put his little index finger over his lips, then pointed to the door. I smiled at him and winked. I approached it with measured steps for Aiden’s benefit, to peer inside the dimly lit room, and I looked around. There was the folding table, cabinets, wire shelving, and the washer and dryer, but nothing out of the ordinary.

I turned to tell my son that the room was all clear, only to find he was next to me now, peeking through the window, looking fearfully up towards the ceiling. I crouched down so that my face was level with his, and followed his wide-eyed stare to the point where his eyes were fixed.

I almost let out a gasp, but managed not to let my son see I was frightened. I grabbed him up by the waist, yanking him back from the door, and I carried him like a football out of the house. I put him in the car, and told him we were going to visit Gramma.

As we pulled away from the house at top speed, I heard him quietly ask from the back seat,“Daddy? Did you see it?”

I don’t know what I saw in that room, but I’m sitting here waiting to talk to Pastor Rick right now, and I’m not goin’ back to that house without him.

Was the world being devoured by the Bermuda Triangle? I sat back in my desk chair for a moment, wondering what he could have possibly seen, happy that I didn’t need to do laundry. Finally, I moved to click the link for the comments section where several people had responded, saying how creepy his story was and that he should be a horror writer. He insisted that the story was true, and that he was, in fact, meeting with his church’s pastor, but for the most part people expressed their amusement at his dedication to the story. Then, near the bottom of the comments was a name I recognized.

Janet Hayward posted 4hrs ago You’re in our prayers.

Finally, I thought. Somebody who gets it. Normalcy for this small town and its residents was falling apart, coming unraveled, slipping down the drain—evaporating, just like the people lost to the Road. It seemed to me that things were happening more frequently than they ever had before, and the instances were becoming harder and harder to brush off. I didn’t know if that was because the strange stuff had invaded my life now, or maybe it had always been this bad. .

I finished reading the comments, closed the browser window, and decided that nowhere, not even the internet, was safe for me anymore. I pulled out my phone to call Keith. “I’m about to head over there. How’s the house looking?” I asked, just as he answered.

Keith sighed heavily. “We couldn’t find a thing that would make the sound James was talking about,” he said. “We’ve pretty much got him convinced that he was just spookin’ himself, though, so I think that he’ll be fine to stay at home tonight.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, right? He needs to face whatever fears he has. Keith, there’ve been some pretty strange things going on in the past few days, and…I can’t quite explain it, but I think that we maybe shouldn’t completely dismiss what James is saying.” I chewed nervously on my lip, waiting for his response.

Keith let out a mirthless laugh. “I can see where you’re comin’ from. I’ve been hearin’ some really weird shit, too. What do you think the deal is? It’s he world is going to Hell, and it all started happening when Robert died.”

“No, I get a feeling that it started with Jessica. Or maybe it’s been going on longer than that, but we never noticed it until now.” I picked up my car keys off of the kitchen counter, walking to my front door. “It’s bigger than this.”

My hand paused on the doorknob when Keith spoke up again. “Now you sound a little paranoid,” he said suspiciously.

“I’m not paranoid.” I stepped out on the porch, turning around to lock the door, just in case Walter Rush decided he wanted to pay me another visit. I stopped to think about that for a moment. “All right, and if I am paranoid, maybe I have good reason to be. I’m gonna go to the library before I come over there. I want to check the papers for the past few weeks to see if there’s a noticeable up-tick in weird reports.”

“‘History has all the answers.’ That’s how your song goes, right, Dan?” he asked on the other end of the line.

I loved it when people quoted my own song lyrics back to me. I nodded my head as I walked to my car. “Precisely, Keith.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ll go over to Slateville and pick up some pizza and beers. We can be co-conspirators, and I’ll get drunk again.”

“Sounds like a plan, man.” I hung up the phone, cranking the car, hesitating as, for a moment, the radio was nothing but static. “Why aren’t you playing my music?” I asked the radio with a frown. Normally the connection with my cell phone’s Bluetooth picked up automatically, but just now there was nothing but a raspy white noise.

Then came a sound—something I wasn’t truly sure that I heard. “Come home, Danny.”

“What?” I asked out loud, leaning my ear closer to the speaker. “Did I really just hear—”

“COME HOME!” the gravelly voice barked, and then my music abruptly began to play loudly, blaring in my ears.

“Fuck!” I shouted, turning the music down quickly. I looked around my car, frantically. I don’t know what I thought I would find there. Someone hiding in the back seat, maybe? Something with pointy teeth, ready for a little homicide to get their evening started? I took a moment to settle my nerves as best as I could, then I pulled out of the driveway, heading for the library before anything else could happen.