Page 34 of Going Home in the Dark

“What sense does that make. It doesn’t make any.”

“One of them blinked and turned its eyes toward us.”

“Then another one.”

“Then all of them, lying there, staring at us.”

“This town is screwed! What are we doing here?”

“Saving Ernie.”

“To hell with Ernie.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“No, I don’t. But I wish I did.”

“We have a pact. One for all, and all for one.”

“It’ll probably turn out to be a suicide pact.”

“What if Ernie’s become a monster?”

“He hasn’t become a monster. Even if he has, he’sourmonster.”

In that ominous vault under the church, having conveyed a great deal of detail in quick, easy-to-read dialogue, thereby eliminating the need for clunky paragraphs of exposition, the amigos turned as one toward the most compelling feature of that large, empty room. At the far end was a drain the size of a manhole, and the floor sloped slightly toward it.

On the fateful night they’d just remembered, they had fled the room, pulling the door closed behind them. Bobby had been determined to hold it shut to prevent the golems—or whatever they were—from escaping. He insisted his three amigos go for help. No one wanted to leave him alone. They fell to squabbling among themselves about which two would stay behind with Bobby. Because they were a gaggle of adolescents whose brains were still developing and because they were also admitted geeks, the argument was drawn out to an absurd length, especially considering that the demonic brigade on the far side of the door had raised a fearsome caterwaul. The clones or pod people or escapees from Hell groaned and growled and squealed and snarled—and fell silent. No effort had been made to yank open the door and drag Bobby inside. Recognition of the sudden silence within the room had brought a matching quiet among those in the hallway. As Bobby held fast to the handle, his three amigos stared at thedoor with expressions of dread. They knew how moments like this always played out in movies. When the monster or monsters abruptly ceased raging, the final assault was at hand. The door would explode off its hinges, decapitating at least one amigo, and the horde would be upon them, devouring their faces. How could it be otherwise? But itwasotherwise. Bobby could not let go of the handle, and his friends were paralyzed by fear, but a minute passed and then five minutes. Teenage boys, even geeks, perhaps especially teenage boy geeks, were loath to look stupid or cowardly in front of girls, even in front of profoundly unattractive girls. At that time, Rebecca Crane’s true appearance was still unrecognized by her companions, buried as her charms were under voluminous thrift-shop costumes and one kind of ghastly makeup or another. Nonetheless, Rebecca was a girl, and Bobby Shamrock was a boy, and the scary prospect of epic humiliation lay before him, life-changing humiliation, extreme throw-yourself-off-a-bridge mortification, so after another minute of silence, he opened the door. The room was deserted. Not a trace of the ten naked men. Not even a finger crawling around in search of a hand; nothing like that. The amigos were relieved, of course, but also somewhat disappointed.

Now, two decades later, three of the four friends gathered around the drain near the end of the long room. It was about one yard in diameter. The iron lid featured inch-square holes. Perhaps the church basement was subject to flooding on rare occasion. The penlight beam revealed nothing of the drain below.

It was evident now, as on the night when they were fourteen, that the devil’s legions—or whatever those creatures might have been—retreated by way of the drain. Most likely they’d come into the church by the same route.

“What were they?”

“Where did they come from?”

“Where did they go?”

“Where have they been for twenty years?”

“Were they real?”

“You think we all hallucinated the same thing?”

“No, but is it true? Is that what really happened?”

“It must be. We all shared the recollection.”

“Maybe it was a false memory implanted by whoever erased from our minds what really happened. Maybe what really happened is worse and weirder.”

“What could be worse and weirder?”

“Weirder than ten sexless, naked clones? Nothing. Doesn’t there have to be some other explanation about what we saw that night?”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?”

Most people who have an encounter with the Unknown, capital U, have doubts about the experience and go through a period of denial, during which they try to explain away the event and restore a sense of normalcy to their lives, which is the kind of thing that often fills two or three episodes of a ten-episode Netflix series. Rather than continue to recount this phase at tedious length, we will get on with killing off our leads until only Rebecca remains, if in fact that is what happens. Life sometimes imitates movies, but if that were always the case, Earth would already have been destroyed in hundreds of cataclysms.

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