Blackened Spiral Down (3 page)

Just as Dan did two hours before, Susan felt like someone was watching her. She couldn't shake the eerie feeling as she made her way down the driveway toward the back of the house. She assumed that Dan must have entered from the back, since the front door was intact and the plywood was still screwed tightly over all the windows. The City did that and was adamant that if they had to take any plywood down, they secure it back to keep people out as much as they could. The smell coming from the house was sickening, and she took a handkerchief from her pocket to shield her nose with little avail. One of the engineers gave her a small but powerful flashlight to use, and she had it firmly in her grasp. The humidity was stifling. She was worried about Dan.

As she entered the kitchen, she could see a light coming from further inside the house. It looked like it was coming from the floor. She was worried that maybe Dan had fallen down. Her boss had told her to not enter the house and to call when she got there. But she thought it would be best to check to see if Dan was in trouble or not and didn't want to wait to call in to the office.

Susan tried to focus on anything but the filth surrounding her. She had been in a few houses like this during her tenure at Banner McBride, but it was only during a time when they were cross-training employees. Her boss wanted the office staff to know what it was like to be in the field. So Susan knew enough to change out of her dress pants and nice shoes into jeans and a pair of work boots she kept in her trunk.

She could see Dan's flashlight on the floor, pointed in her direction, which kept the gaping hole in the wood floor obscured in shadows. As she bent down to pick up the flashlight, Susan didn't hear anything as she suddenly fell into the hole, straight into the blackness below.

5

Duane was eating some cold pork n' beans from a can that he opened with his trusty P-38. It was one of the only good things he learned from his days as a grunt in the Army. He only served two years before he was medically discharged with a bad shoulder. He watched the pretty blonde woman slowly creep down the driveway like the big guy did earlier. Duane figured it was his wife or someone maybe checking on him. But Duane knew why he hadn't come out of 1312. No one ever did.

He knew about that thing in the crawlspace. One day a month or so ago, he wandered down into that basement and he saw that evil thing slithering around in the crawlspace. He about pissed his pants over the encounter. He begged and pleaded with the thing to let him go. He promised he would watch out and do what he could to get more people like him, the homeless from the neighborhood, to go down into the basement. Duane promised that he would feed him as much as he could. He did just that. With the gift of gab, Duane was able to talk several other homeless guys into going to the basement. He told them there was beer down there or some stored canned goods. He even led dogs and cats down there with a little tease of something to eat. Duane made up all kinds of stories, just so that horrible thing would stay in that crawlspace and not come out. He didn't want the monster looking for him.

So he stayed nearby and watched. He waited for anyone wandering down East Cypress Street. These two today were a bonus. Duane hoped that the thing in the crawlspace would live up to his end of the bargain and leave him alone. So he ate his cold beans and watched as the woman walked to the back of the house.

Duane thought he could hear her screaming and a distant rumble. It was really faint, but he was sure he heard it. They all screamed like that. It was a terrible sound. Better them and not him. He clanged on the can of beans with his spoon, his own version of whistling in the graveyard.

6

Two weeks passed since Duane had watched the big man and that blonde woman go into 1312 East Cypress Street and not come out again. He saw a police cruiser come by.  Two cops got out and looked inside the house. But they came out just fine. Duane was surprised. He had never seen anyone go into that house and come out alive. During the past two weeks, no one had been walking around that Duane was able to lure in the house. He started to worry. The last few nights he found it hard to sleep, wondering if that evil thing in the crawlspace would come looking for him. He barricaded the front door with a heavy dresser he found, and a couch. He even put some old tires he found in the alley along the staircase that led to his bedroom; anything to slow down something that wanted to get him. None of those things made him feel much better when he lay down at night. He could barely sleep.

On this night, he noticed that even the rats were quiet. Usually he would hear the vermin scratching in the walls or attic. Tonight he heard nothing. Maybe they sensed something wasn't right. Duane wasn't sure. He just knew if he wasn't able to find someone to feed to that shadowy monster, then that thing would come looking for him. He would want to feed. He thought about leaving the house and running away. But he was sure the creature would know where he was.

It was almost midnight, and the night air was humid. Duane was wide awake on his mattress, afraid to fall asleep. That was when he heard the noise. In the stillness, he heard a rumble.  It was a deep menacing growl that shook the house. Duane knew that the thing was coming to get him. He began to panic, trying desperately to open the bedroom window so he could escape out to the porch roof. But the window was frozen in place. Several coats of old paint and humidity made it impossible to open. He looked around the bedroom for something to defend himself with as the growling noise got louder. Duane heard what sounded like wood creaking as something came up the stairway toward him. In a frenzied dash he took his mattress and shoved it up against the bedroom door. But he knew that it was no use.

It only took a few minutes before the bedroom door shattered into sawdust as the thing closed in on its next meal. Duane was crying in the corner of the bedroom, with only his P-38 to defend himself with. He screamed as the shadows closed in, and the sharp teeth clamped down on his legs, pulling him into a bottomless pit that he could not escape. The fetid breath felt like a hot oven door had opened, enveloping him in a rotting stench of a mouth. In the end, Duane screamed like the rest. He tried to satisfy the creature from the crawlspace, but despite his efforts, darkness had come to call.

Blackened Spiral Down

1

              I had been watching him for the past two weeks.  I just knew the bastard was up to no good.  There is just no good reason a man would be going into an old, abandoned church at all hours of the day and night.  No good reason at all.  After two days of it, I began to keep a diary of the visits.  I took good, accurate notes, including times, what the weather was like, and other pertinent information.  It took two weeks for me to get the courage to go over there to see what was going on.  I only wish I had done so much sooner.  I could have stopped the horrible things that were happening in the basement and maybe saved some lives.  No one deserved what that sick bastard was doing to them over there at the old church.  I only actually saw him going inside the church one time, but I could see light from a flashlight or maybe a camping lantern coming from the basement.  I knew it was him, and I kept account of everything in my diary.  I knew the police would want to know the information I was gathering at some point.  In some strange way, it felt like I was doing a good deed, a sort of civic duty.

              Living in the small village of Armington, Illinois, doesn’t offer many distractions from the daily grind of a dying, small Midwestern town.   Not much ever happened in Armington, and most of the business and younger residents left many years ago. It is surrounded by several similar small towns and is 25 miles from Bloomington to the northeast. With barely 300 residents, it seems hard to believe that Armington was once a wealthy farming community, three times the current population, with a busy downtown, albeit only four square blocks.  At one time, the Norfolk &Western Railroad came through, providing steady business with the conductors and railroad employees.  Mama Norma’s Diner served the best biscuits and gravy around and did a great lunch business with her famous horseshoe sandwiches.  There was also a hardware store, a few retail shops, a barber, a tavern, and of course a grain elevator which served the corn and soy farmers for miles.  There was a Baptist church that has stayed open (somehow) and the Our Redeemer Christian Church that closed down more than 10 years ago.  It sits across the street from my house on Old Farm Road, on the far north edge of town.

It was fast becoming an eyesore from neglect, and now that the roof was starting to cave in, raccoons and other small animals were taking up residence in the attic.  It was only a matter of time before they took over the entire church.  The couple that owned the land and building retired to Florida, and while they paid the property taxes, both were unwilling to do anything else to keep the building and grounds presentable.  Residents complained to the Village of Armington, with no response.  Thankfully, one long-time resident had a nephew on the board at Tazewell County, and he was able to appropriate the funds to demolish the old church, and force the owners to either pay for it or give the land back to the Village.  The nephew scored lots of political points in closing the deal, and the Village of Armington was pleased to have the demolition planned for the fall, when the crops would be in and the local contractor would have the time to raze the old church.

The town had been dying since the late 1960’s  the grade when the grade school and high school closed, and the kids were forced to consolidate with the other small towns to form the Olympia School District.  When the railroad stopped coming through and the schools went away, Armington began its slow death.  Kids grew up and fled to the larger towns and cities, and the older citizens eventually died off and sold their rich farm ground to the big corporations, who gladly bought up the acres. 

There isn’t much of anything in Armington now.  The tavern barely stays open, just like the Baptist church, and one tiny convenient store remains.  The post office doesn’t even deliver mail, and the townsfolk have to go pick up their mail each day.  Armington is the classic story of a small town gone down the tubes.  The other two houses near mine, on Old Farm Road, are vacant.  The “for sale” signs in the yard are rusty and have weeds growing up around them.   So no one else would have ever noticed the strange visitor going in and out of the old church.  It was all up to me to find out what was going on and help the police catch the bastard.

2

It was two weeks after he started going over to the old church that I got the nerve to go over there myself.  He had a key and went in the front door the one time I saw him.  Since it was locked up tight, I decided to go around back and try getting in where no one would be able to see me.  Despite Armington being a ghost town the last 10 years, there was still the occasional passerby, and in a small town – everyone knows everyone.  There are few secrets.

I’ve lived in Armington all my 44 years.  I was raised by my grandparents, who both lived in the house on Old Farm Road, where I still reside.  Grandma had a massive stroke in the fall of 1985, and it left her nearly incapacitated.  Grandpa and I did our best to take care of her, but it wasn’t easy.  Six months after the stroke, Grandma hadn’t improved.  I walked in one night to Grandpa shoving a pillow into her face.  Tears were streaming down his face while he did it.  I knew it was an act of love, even though it was murder.  She barely put up a fight, as if she wanted to die and pass on to the other side.  Grandpa turned around to find me standing there in the bedroom doorway, and told me to keep my mouth shut about it.  He told me that he hated to see her like that, and he couldn’t bear it for another day. 

When the deputies showed up with the ambulance to pick up Grandma, they took me outside and away from Grandpa so we could talk.  They knew what happened, but it was difficult to prove that he smothered her with the pillow.  They threatened me and said I could go to jail as an accomplice to the murder if I didn’t tell them what happened.  So I told them all about it.  I figured they wouldn’t do much of anything to Grandpa since he was old and was a grieving widower, putting his wife out of her misery.  I was wrong.  They charged him with second degree murder, and his lawyer said that the jury would probably feel sorry for him and only give him ten years.

Two days before his trial was to begin, I found Grandpa in the basement, hanging from a noose he made with a bedsheet.  He swayed beneath one of the galvanized water pipes, his eyes wide open and staring at me.  Even though he was dead, I knew his eyes didn’t lie.  He hated me for telling the police what happened.  He never asked me about it, but he knew.  I could tell by the way he acted around me.  As he was swinging in the dim light of the basement, I felt an overwhelming guilt for putting him in this situation.

Now it was me all by myself in the big, 90-year-old, two-story Cape Cod-style house surrounded by cornfields on the north edge of town.  I was surprised that Grandpa had left me a sizeable inheritance, and since there were only distant relatives, it all came to me.  The old house was paid for, and the property taxes were relatively small.  I now owned forty acres of farm ground that surrounded the house, and many years ago, Grandpa had leased it out to a local farmer to plant corn and beans for a nice sum of money.  There were also the six wind turbines on the property that earned me $10,000 each on an annual basis.  Thanks to Grandpa, I didn’t want for anything, as long as I was smart with what he left me.