Screamscapes: Tales of Terror (19 page)

The sharp end of a crowbar stabbed into the car through the seam of the doors across from me. Fingers appeared – pulling, prying at the doors.

They yielded and popped open with a loud hiss, revealing a crowd of people standing in the darkness of the tunnel, their eyes glowing.

They flowed onto the train like flood waters breaching a levee, filling every empty space and drowning their unsuspecting victims in a sea of their clutching, grabbing hands, dragging them under, holding them down.

The mole people invaded the car through every entrance – ten, twenty of them at least – it was hard to tell exactly, after having polluted my eyes with the blinding fluorescent glare in which the train had been awash until only seconds before.

They moved through the darkness silently, with military precision. I moved my feet aside so as not to interfere with them.

Then Baby Kat was on her feet and in motion, leaving her pink sunglasses on the seat beside me as she joined the dark tattered crowd.

She whirled amongst the now helpless passengers as they were grabbed from the floor, their screaming mouths sealed with duct tape, nylon sacks pulled over their heads as they were stripped of their clothes, of their phones – of everything but the shock and horror of what was happening to them.

Baby Kat spun about the car with the cords she had been given, binding, tying and knotting as she went, with the grace of a master seamstress.

I beamed with pride; she really was something to behold.

In the light of day my daughter wilted like a cut rose tossed on scorched desert; but in the darkness she thrived, she was the best of her kind. In the darkness she was a steel-cable strong vine in the rainforest, pulsing upwards to greet the faint moonlight with bright glowing eyes, a tiny, thirty-year-old viper of death.

Only half a minute had passed, yet the dark intruders had successfully managed to restrain, muzzle and render immobile every passenger in the car. It was an impressive display, a silent ballet of overwhelming force.

Thirty seconds down, thirty seconds to go.

In the crisp darkness I watched, as the nine bound passengers were hoisted from the floor and passed from one person to the next like freshly stripped logs at a sawmill. Headfirst out the door and into the darkness of the tunnel they went, one after the other, until the train car was empty of everyone except Baby Kat, the old Chinese woman and me.

Baby Kat handed me a satchel containing all the cell phones that had been collected from the passengers we had taken. Those phones had to leave the train, be taken from the subway at its final station and be spread out across the city, tossed into dark corners or sold on the street. No one could ever connect this stopped train to anyone’s disappearance.

Our entire way of life depended on it.

I turned to face the old Chinese woman. She still sat clutching her bale of newspapers, staring ahead into the darkness. She looked up at me slowly, careful to avert her eyes from mine as I handed her the bag. She, too, had once been one of us, had lived in the darkness beneath and we had shown her great kindness. Now she lived on the surface, providing assistance to us, from time to time.

“As we agreed,” I said and she nodded, her wrinkled old face as vacant as space itself. She lifted the top half of the stack of newspapers and hid the satchel inside.

A city this big…sometimes it eats people,
I thought.
You gotta be careful.

Then Baby Kat and I climbed from the train into the tunnel, running alongside the tracks to join our family and friends, who had begun to drop into a small square hole, disappearing one after the other into the ground between the tracks, behind the train.

The equipment used to jam the track had already been gathered up and stowed, as had the new people we had collected for our tribe – nine captive souls, bound like mummies, each dropped into the hole for our people to catch below.

It was fitting, I thought, that we wrapped them like mummies as they left this world for ours; for it was just as the ancient Egyptians had believed – they, like the Pharaohs of old, had now passed from this life and into the next, into the underworld.

Five seconds remained. Baby Kat and I were the last ones standing on the tracks by the hole. She took her
Hello Kitty
sunglasses from my outstretched hand, then turned and jumped into the hole like a little rabbit, disappearing from sight.

I hesitated for one last moment and turned to look back at the train. Against the windows of the forward cars I saw the outlines of pressed faces, blind eyes wide with fear of the darkness.

For a moment I wondered if they could see me, but I knew they couldn’t; it had taken several generations before the first earth dwellers were born with eyes like mine, eyes that could truly see.

As I turned away from the blind faces on the train, I almost felt sorry for them, for their misfortune to be trapped in the blinding light and withering glare of the miserable surface world. They would never know the joy of living below – that is, unless they happened to ride the last car on the right train on just the right night.

I lowered myself down into the hole and closed it up behind me, taking care in the process to conceal its existence from the surface world.

Baby Kat waited for me in the tunnel that led towards home, where we would take stock of our catch. Some of the captives, those who possessed the proper traits, would become family – maybe we had found a suitable husband for my daughter, and a new red-haired wife for me. Others, those unlikely to adapt, would have to be hobbled and blinded, to be used as livestock. For the most desperately unfortunate, however, an altogether different fate awaited.

Baby Kat took me by the hand, and together we walked through the dark corridor as we followed our brethren and the captives they carried to the glorious city we had built below.

THE MOLE PEOPLE was my attempt at delivering a tightly-written thriller in a similar vein as Richard Matheson. Realism was a goal, as well as giving the reader very few clues as to where the story was headed. This is one of only a couple of stories that I’ve written straight through with little revision. It felt like it ended up being the perfect length.

A direct sequel to this story has been outlined, and I also have some ideas for creating a book based on the ‘mole people’ underworld that was introduced in this story. I envision a format similar to Ray Bradbury’s MARTIAN CHRONICLES, where the story is told through a series of interrelated but not directly connected tales told from various viewpoints. It would be interesting to explore this world not only through the eyes of different mole people characters, but also from the perspective of the victims and of their families who try to find out exactly what happened to their missing loved ones.

Writing this story was a lot of fun. I love it when I sit down at the keyboard, my fingers start dancing, and then the world melts away. Several hours later I come back from an adventure in my head and there’s a story about it finished and sitting on my desk. It’s the closest thing to real magic I know of.

Pay Back

I
remember it all so clearly, sitting here now - every detail, every word, every smell. That day keeps playing over and over again in my mind.

I keep trying to forget about it, to erase the memory of how I got here; but even a random event, a simple word or noise, will trigger a memory and then all of a sudden it’s like I’m really there, like I’m back in my bedroom at the start of that fateful day.

Before I know it, it’s all happening again and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

Now, I’m there again.

It was a Saturday in late spring, exactly shit-thirty A.M. when the beating on my bedroom door started.

Goddamn it, Mom, I’m going to have to kill you one of these days, you fuckin’ bitch
, I remember thinking.

Mom had locked herself into her room earlier than usual that evening, had made the excuse that she was feeling poorly. Unless “Poorly” was the name she had given to her vibrator, I knew she was full of shit. She was up to something, I could tell by the look on her face. I should have known.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

I peeled my pillow off my face; it was soaked with warm slobber. I stared daggers at the door through bloodshot eyes.

“Mom! Leave me the fuck alone!” I yelled. I was so tired it hurt to talk.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

“I said, go away!”

There was a half-eaten slice of sausage pizza on a paper plate next to my head. I threw it at the door. It stuck there for a second before slowly peeling off and falling onto the rest of the shit on the floor with a greasy plop.

I squinted at my R2-D2 alarm clock on the dresser.

Nine-freaking-thirty in the morning and that bitch was already harassing me? I
never
got up before eleven. It was my religion. If the house was on fire or something, she’d better go get a hose and put it out. I needed my rest.

“It’s not your mom,” a deep voice came through the door. I wasn’t expecting that. Mom hasn’t had a man in this house since dad left and I was only six years old back then. I think that was the year her pussy finally rotted all the way off.

I sat up and rubbed my aching forehead. I needed to lay off the Mountain Dew. Then I remembered: it was Saturday, the first in May. That could only mean one thing.

The Nard was here.

He knocked again.

“Come on Stephen, open up. We’re going to be late.”

I pictured him standing there, all sorts of shits and giggles excited about his big day with a friend at the amusement park, holding himself and doing the pee-pee dance. There was probably already a dark stain around his crotch, from dribbling on himself with anticipation.

As usual, I couldn’t resist fucking with him. I spoke in my most serious voice.

“Nard, you know I can’t open the door to just anyone. There are security measures in place, you know that. For all I know, you might be some crazy person with an axe holding my mom’s severed head in your hand,” I said. God, I almost wished that were true.

“Come on, Stephen, just open the door,” he said.

“You know the procedure,” I said. “No pass code, no enter.”

“Fine. You are so retarded,” he huffed, and then knocked the secret code I had made up for him. I didn’t need him walking into my room while I was beating off to a sexy spread of Princess Peach in my old Nintendo Power magazine.

Knock.

Knock-Knock.

Knock-Knock-Knock.

I unlocked the door, waiting a second before opening it, savoring the moment. It was all about the timing.

Then I swung it open to find the Nard standing there, looking surprisingly dapper, wearing a neatly pressed golf shirt tucked into olive green khakis. His hair was still wet and neatly combed, like he had just gotten out of the shower. He smelled like he was wearing my mom’s perfume; he probably did wear women’s perfume - probably douched, too.

Time for the punch line.

“Why hello, Joe Peeing-ping-pong! You have lovely knockers, has anybody ever told you that?” I said.

He just stared at me.

“Come on, I’m joking- no wait,
you’re
Joe King!” I said, and laughed loud and long. It was really the only thing the Nard was good for – a good laugh and I had developed this annual ritual of ours into an art form. I knew he loved it, he had to.

I’m sure I was the only friend the poor guy had.

“It just gets funnier every time,” the Nard said dryly as I let him into my room – nay, my abode. He was the only person to ever actually be allowed inside, except for my mom, I mean – but she’s my maid, so that doesn’t really count, does it?

He managed to step right onto the piece of pizza I had thrown at the door; it squished out from underneath his shoe like roadkill. A disgusted look crossed his face as he looked around my room.

I guess my room
was
a little disgusting; after all, it’s the same crap hole I’ve been forced to live in since I was little. The room stank like the sideways smile between the legs of a dead hooker on the floor of a Chinese brothel in the back of a condemned seafood shop. It’s a bunch of crap. I mean, come on – I’m twenty-one, I’m the man of this house now. Mom should have let me have the master bedroom years ago and moved her fat ass in here. She’s always bitching about how dirty my room is. Maybe us trading rooms would give her something to do: she could clean all this shit up.

“What the hell, Nard?” I yelled. “I let you in my abode as a special guest and the first thing you do is step on my food? What the hell kind of manners is that?”

I loved calling him Nard. It was a very clever name I made up that described him perfectly. It was a combination of the words “nerd” and “retard”. I think he thought it meant something awesome.

His real name was Joe King, but the way he said it sounded like “Joe Ping”, or “Joe Peeing”, which had inspired a lot of funny names since we first met, in second grade. On his first day in class, one of the kids heard his mom tell the teacher that he had Ass-booger syndrome, and we called him “Ass Booger” until they made us quit.

“How do you stand living like this?” the Nard said, looking around my room with a disgusted look on his face.

Jealous.

“You mean, how do I stand all this awesomeness?” I asked, as I proudly surveyed the fine assortment of rare collectibles that I had been lucky enough to stash away over the years. Star Wars action figures, vintage. Transformers, original series – none of that new Michael Bay bullshit. Every issue of Nintendo Power magazine since it started publishing. There were cheat codes in those that weren’t even on the internet.

And in the middle of the room, under my primo thirteen-inch color television, was my baby: my Super Nintendo with the Super Mario All-Stars cartridge in it.

The Nard tried to act as though he was unimpressed, but he didn’t fool me.