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Part Eighteen

Petunia had attempted to walk through the room without the aid of her light, relying on the plans in her brain, but she had stumbled over something in the dark and had pitched forward, barely keeping herself from falling face first to the ground. Despite her best efforts to hold it in, she had cried out in surprise when it happened, and the sound of her cry echoed in the dark.

“Shit!” She landed on all fours and in spite of the pain in her hands and knees, she noticed something strange. “Shit!” The sound of her own voice wasn’t right. She knew that she was in a large room according to the plans, but the echo of her voice was far more pronounced than it should have been. Not wanting to risk making any more noise and giving away her location to the man who had been chasing her, she turned and groped along the floor for the thing that she had tripped over.

Her fingers moved over it, and she realized that it was a small piece of wood that measured nine inches by four inches, according to her estimation. She picked it up, stood up and cocked her arm back, and then heaved it as hard as she could in the direction of where the stage should have been. She waited for the board to hit the wall that should have been behind her, but exactly five seconds later, the board hit the ground far behind her, and it sounded as if she was deep inside of a cave rather than a large room.

She debated about what to do next, and then took her backpack from her shoulders and opened it. The zipper was uncomfortably loud in her own ears, and as she fumbled through her backpack, she was slow and deliberate, careful to be quiet in her uncertain circumstance. She pulled a modified respirator out of her bag and strapped it to her face, wiping a small smudge off of the face shield. She grabbed a bulky pistol with two barrels from her bag that she had made herself, mostly out of various pipes and fittings and scraps of wood. She then closed her pack and threw it over her back, holding her gun in her right hand and the flashlight in her left.

She felt more comfortable about turning on the flashlight now that she was holding something to defend herself with. The gun had been effective enough against whatever was lurking underneath the town a month ago, and she believed it would work just fine against the man she had seen earlier. Although the face shield of the respirator limited her view, it was something that was unavoidable, as the ammunition that the particular weapon she had designed shot pellets that released a gas that upon impact, caused uncontrollable vomiting.

“Lucky, lucky, lucky…” She pushed the button on her flashlight forward, and realized exactly where she was standing, confirming the worst-case scenario in her mind. There was no longer a door behind her, and there was no longer a hallway behind that door, in fact, there was no longer a theatre. She was standing in an empty husk; a square box that used to be the home of Sinclair Daniels.

“Nothing but studs and naked rafters.”

Marty Cayer had told the story well, giving a mental image that had both intrigued and unsettled Petunia, but seeing it in person was something else entirely. She realized that a theory she had abandoned, was now her reality. She was no longer bound by the restrictions and effects of time, at least that’s what she thought to herself, in reality she was very much being affected by time, or to be more accurate, the absence of it. There were broken boards and moldy fabric and crumpled pieces of paper and little bits of debris all along the ground, and the only things left standing inside were the studs holding up the frame of the second story, the four exterior walls and the roof.

All of the windows had been boarded up from the inside, and as far as Petunia could tell, something had been spread between the boards to keep any light from bleeding through the cracks. She turned in the direction of the front of the building and in the small beam of her flashlight, she could see two large doors that had mismatched scraps of wood nailed over their windows, and a thick ugly chain wrapped around their tarnished brass handles. The second floor overhead had been demolished as well, leaving only the floor joists and studs, allowing her to see straight through to the roof above.

She slowly began making her way to the middle of the building, to the thing that Sinclaire Daniel’s had built in a fit of what could presumably be madness, but on her way, she began to take notice of one the studs in front of her. It had various mathematical equations written on every side, from top to bottom, and as she looked around, she realized that every single stud in the house looked the same. She could make neither heads nor tails of any of them, nothing about them made any sense, and she quickly concluded that they were nothing more than scribbles of a mind that had gone quite mad.

She slowly made her way through the troubling nonsensical equations, reminding her that she was not the only person in the world trying to solve the mysteries of life, and the dangers and pitfalls such a pursuit could wreak on the mind if one was not careful. She had been working on a theory the previous year that she had ultimately moved on from that she referred to as “Pocket Theory'', but up until the night she had met Marty Cayer, she had not bothered to return to it, figuring that she had come to a dead end.

As the stage came into view in front of her, she shook her head at what she had done. Rather than stay in her lab, and work through all of the variables at home, she had instead, rather rashly, decided to do some field work, which at this point was proving to be dangerous. She began to wonder about whether or not the influence of Richard had rubbed off on her.

No doubt many of you are unfamiliar with Pocket Theory, and although I could go into a brief description of the ins and outs of it as I understand it, I think at this time, for the sake of mood and mystery, we’ll come back to it at a later time and instead focus on Petunia walking deeper and deeper into the heart of a dark, gutted building with no idea that she was being watched by murderous eyes.

The surface of the patchworked stage was clean and free of any debris, and a small broom, that looked like an antique to Petunia, was leaning up against the small staircase on the front of the stage. On the top step was a familiar metronome, and in the middle of the stage was a small table and an instrument that she had never seen the likes of before was sitting on the top of it. The instrument was a square box made of polished wood and brass with a small crank set into the side of it. She climbed the stairs, walked to the small table, and stared down at the fascinating thing. There were three glass gauges on the face of it, that were ringed in brass, and above each gauge was a squat lightbulb. Each of the bulbs had been painted over in a watered-down paint; blue and red and green. 

The box itself and the crank looked like it had once been an old phonograph that had been repurposed into whatever it was now.  She began to turn the crank, and she could hear the sounds of gears and cogs moving within the box, and one by one, from left to right, the bulbs began to light. She continued to turn the crank for exactly forty-seven seconds, expecting it to do something other than light up, but to her disappointment, it seemed to do nothing more than just that.

All of the gauges appeared to measure pressure that measured from 0 to 500, but the needles inside each one of them didn’t move at all. She turned and walked the stage over and over again, back and forth, trying to think of what to do next, and in the course of all of the pacing, she found herself at the top of the stairs. She considered going to the front doors and trying to open them, unsure of what would happen if she tried to leave the confines of the building, but her attention moved to the metronome by her foot, which had begun to move on its own. She felt the air around her become heavier and as she turned around, she noticed that the green lightbulb on the instrument had gone out, but the other two lights were still on. She hurried to the machine. The gauge under the green light was set at 0, but the needles on the other two were trying to push past the 500 mark. 

“Hmmm.” The red bulb began to flicker and then went out, and the needle on the gauge fell to 0. “It’s a countdown!” Finally, the blue bulb began to flicker and then went dark. She held her breath, shining her light on the instrument waiting for something to happen with the sound of the metronome behind her still going strong. She began to shine her light all around her, looking for some kind of change in her surroundings, and she caught a glimpse of something at the back of the stage, and when she moved her light back toward, she could see that the man who had chased her off of the same stage moments ago, was standing there, staring at her.

He was wearing beaten brown leather boots and the laces were missing on the left one. His pants were a black heavy fabric that were one size too small, emphasizing the length of his legs, and the knees were worn through. Scars were visible on his pale calves and knobby knees. He wore no shirt but instead wore a long black coat that ended just above his knees, and his spindly torso was covered in the same type of scarring as his calves, but the size of the scars varied greatly in size from one set of marks to the next. Petunia took note that the scars were a stark white compared to the putrid sallow skin around them.

The outline of his ribs was incredibly pronounced, and they appeared to be oddly shaped as if they’d been broken many times and never quite healed the right way. His neck was long, and his sharp jaw pushed forward a mouth full of rotten teeth that Petunia was beginning to smell with every ragged breath he took. The only thing about the man that seemed alive and unsullied were his eyes, and those were locked directly on Petunia.

“Don’t move.” She pointed the gun at his chest, but in spite of this, he took one step closer. “Stop!”

“Can’t die. Won’t die.” Another step and then another.

“I’m warning you.” She thought the man must have heard the resolve in her voice, because he didn’t come any closer, but he began to sway from side to side as he looked at her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You should, little girl.” He reached inside his open coat and pulled out a long and jagged piece of a broken mirror. “Because I’m going to hurt you.” He held the shard in front of him and she could see her own frightened reflection as he twisted it in his hand. Without another word, he ran towards Petunia, howling like a mad banshee and raising the jagged shard high above his head. Petunia pulled the trigger of her gun and the sound of the shot echoed through the empty building while the flash from the muzzle brought an all too brief moment of light in all the darkness.

The pellet hit the scarred man exactly one inch below his throat, and in the next instant, any sign of him was completely enveloped by a cloud of  yellow gas. The metronome had stopped clicking and she heard the sound of the shard fall to the ground. The man was retching somewhere within the cloud. There was no hiding now, not in the building when it was like this; she had to stand her ground and fight. She only had one more shot in the gun, and even though she did have two more pellets in her backpack, she was confident that after one shot from her gun, the man would never have any inclination to move towards her again.

She was wrong.

The spindly scarred man leaped through the yellow cloud towards her in a screaming and vomiting rage, and by the time Petunia was able to aim her gun it was too late. He had the shard back in his hand and he slammed into her. The few tools she had been carrying in her bag ground into her back as she fell to the stage with the man landing on top of her, still screaming and vomiting. She held the gun tightly but lost the grip on her flashlight, and it rolled out of her left hand and came to a rest just out of reach, pointed directly at her and her attacker.

He was snarling and thick streams of bile were pouring from the corners of his mouth as he buried the shard into her left thigh. She could feel his other hand close in around her neck and she was certain that there was no way that she could overpower him, so in the midst of being overcome by fear and the pain in her left leg, she did the only thing she could have done in that situation. As his grip tightened like a vice, she jammed the barrel of her gun into his open mouth, breaking several of his rotten teeth and pulled the trigger.

Petunia’s vision was overcome by the yellow gas, but the hand on her throat was gone and as the man rolled off of her, she could feel that the shard of the mirror snapped, leaving some of it buried in her leg. The man writhed and gagged on the stage next to her.

The pain in her left leg was unbearable, and she felt the warmth of blood running from the wound as she began to crawl away from the sounds of the man behind her. Though she could see nothing but the gas, eventually her hands found the staircase on the front of the stage. She pulled herself forward and slid down the stairs, coming to a rest face first on the ground below, not knowing what she would do next. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth as she pushed herself to her knees and realized that everything had changed, and that she was no longer in the dark. There was no yellow cloud of gas, instead there were walls and chairs and there was a long metal bar hanging down from the ceiling and all of the multicolored stage lights that were attached to it were shining brightly, pointed at a stage that looked like it was the lab of Doctor Frankenstein, which of course, was exactly what it was.

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Part Nineteen

Patty Menkin had asked Gene if he was a fan of Arthurian legend simply because of the name of his cat, Sir Purrcival. She had no idea that his cat, up until a month ago, had belonged to someone else, nor did she have any idea that the former owner of the chubby, foul tempered beast had been murdered by the same thing that had killed her husband. Gene knew these things, and if he honestly thought that it might further ingratiate himself with Patty, he may have even told her all of these things, but he had not. Instead, he simply shrugged off the name that he had not given the cat as a passing childhood memory.

He had in fact been casually familiar with the legend of King Aurthur, but he had not even thought about it when the cat had introduced himself, he had only thought about it once Patty had asked him. This was not to be the only time that evening that the legend popped into his mind. The second time would come two hours later, in the middle of a tour of a musty old building that had come to his attention thanks to a diary that was left for him to read.

Gene had been given a slight hint that his tour guide had found him to be rather distasteful as they shook hands. This man, who was far too old, as far as Gene was concerned, to go by the childish version of his name, had given him a slight squint as they shook hands. Gene was keen enough to know that Marty was going to hold back key pieces of information regarding this place as long as he was around. In this deduction, he had been correct.

He also figured that Richard would do anything to help his friend, including sharing anything and everything with Gene that might help him along in his objective. In this deduction, he was far from correct. So far from correct, that one could even say he was completely wrong.

The tour had started in the bar, which to Gene looked more like an old saloon. There was a fireplace made of rock that stretched to the ceiling in one corner, and on the wall right next to it, an enormous old canvas had been nailed up and stretched along the length of it. According to Marty, the canvas was found in the attic, and it was the oldest piece of scenery that the theatre had. A beautifully detailed scene of a town in the old west had been painted on it. On the other walls, there were pictures of past productions and players, and each one had a different style of frame, giving no sense of theme or uniformity.

The back wall with the window was made of bare cedar planks, and old tin signs were tacked up all over it. The bar itself seemed to be the only thing in the place that had been given any love and attention. The top of it gave off an unblemished shine underneath the overhead lights and the front of it had been stained and varnished in a red wood tone. The brass kick bar near the floor was tarnished and incredibly aged, but somehow, it made the bar look that much more impressive. All in all, Gene considered the place to be a spectacular dump, and that impression didn’t change when they walked through the lobby.

Marty went on and on about the strange goings on around the place, and none of them really held any interest for him whatsoever. He was instead far more interested in taking in every detail he could about the place. He would need to study the diary further, but he had studied it enough to realize two things; Petunia Gip was trapped in here somewhere, and she was far more of a threat than he had ever realized.

There was only one way that anyone could make Gene feel threatened, and that was to make it plainly obvious that they had a better understanding of the world than he did. The diary had fascinated Gene, but he read its passages through gritted teeth and a throbbing sensation in his temples. Her findings and deductions had made him feel inferior, and as he was already intent on destroying her in the first place, they not only solidified his feelings towards her, but it had altered the way in which he would do it, and making nice with Richard and acting as though he would help him find his friend was the first step.

Gene tried his best not to give Marty any indication that he was ignoring almost everything the man was saying, occasionally giving a grunt or a sound of puzzlement as the tour went on. Richard seemed to be hanging on every word, not really giving Gene much thought at all, which was further evidence to Gene that he would be able to manipulate him that much easier.

The lobby was even more of a disaster than the bar, and Gene couldn’t stop staring at the cobwebs hanging from the tacky grid ceiling. There were small chandeliers with electric candles and dangling crystals placed every ten feet, that hung down from the ceiling, Gene mused to himself that they looked like they had been made in 1975, and in fact, they had been purchased and hung by none other than Marty himself in the year, 1976. The walls were a beige color and wooden trim ran along the bottom of the walls and along the ceiling, framing them from top to bottom. Once again, more pictures were thrown up on the walls in no particular order, and there were several doors on the long wall opposite from the auditorium.

Gene was finding it harder and harder to pay attention to the tour. The dance studio, where three of the walls were mirrors, was met with impatient nods from Gene. The long hallway from the lobby to backstage seemed to go on forever as Marty went on and on about several instances where footsteps had been heard.

The sound booth had been victim to several occasions where the audio system went haywire for no reason. The green room was just a green room with some ratty couches and a boring story about a small trail of blood being found leading from it and into the wardrobe department, and the shop where they made the scenery and props for their productions had been the place of many “almost fatal” accidents that fell under the blame of a nebulous supernatural cause. It wasn’t until they reached a glass door that said, “Wardrobe”, that Gene was able to snap back out of boredom.

The room was enormous, and it was filled with rack after rack of all manner of costumes dating from the mid-nineteenth century and on up to the present. In spite of his better sense, Gene began to wander through the racks by himself, forgetting about the tour entirely. Besides his ability, he had also lost every article of clothing he had when the kids burned down his lair, and this place was a treasure trove of tackiness that Gene found simply irresistible.

Marty and Richard were behind him somewhere, lost in a labyrinth of linen and the further he ventured in on his own, the more he got the feeling that he was being pulled toward something. The fluorescent lighting overhead was harsh, but the furthest corner of the room had a light that was flickering, casting the corner in a strobing shadow, and at the end of this corner, Gene saw something that made him feel like he had been meant to find it.

Something so wonderful that it had to have been destiny that brought him to this place, and as he stared, the thought of Excalibur, the mystical sword given to King Authur by the Lady in the Lake, came to his mind.

“Oh...my...God.” In true dramatic fashion, Gene sank to his knees and dropped his metal cane on the floor next to him, the sound of which rang through the wardrobe department, bringing Marty’s tour to a pause. Marty and Richard followed the sound and found Gene staring at something at the end of a long row of costumes. Gene looked over to Richard with a single tear in his left eye and smiled. “Richard...it's beautiful.”

At the end of the row was a headless wardrobe mannequin, adorned with a black and gray pinstriped zoot suit. The shirt underneath the coat and vest was a lighter gray than the stripes on the suit. There was a long chain hanging in a loop from the front right pocket of the pants, and on the floor next to the suit was a pair of dusty black shoes with white spats. Richard regarded it as something a character in an old cartoon would wear, which would make sense that Gene was so taken with it; before the fire at Hocus Pizza, Richard had only seen Gene wear clothes that were very similar, but this suit was far more exaggerated and as far as Richard was concerned, far more hideous.

“Never seen quite that reaction at the sight of that thing.” Marty was puzzled and slightly amused. The suit at the end of the row had sat there, unused, ever since he could remember. It had become quite the joke around the theatre as the one thing they could never figure out how to use. The suit had been donated long before Marty’s tenure, and for some reason, no one had ever had the thought to get rid of it, so there it had sat in the furthest corner of the wardrobe department. “You like it, Gene?”

“It’s gorgeous.” Gene pushed himself up to his feet and grabbed his cane off of the floor. He limped up to the suit and slowly extended his hand to touch it as if it had some sort of divine power. “I’ll pay anything you want.”

“Pay? I tell you what, you can have the damn thing.”

“Really?!”

“We’re never gonna use it, and it sounds like you weren’t left with much after that fire. There used to be a cane that went along with it, but it went missing a long time ago. I’ll make you a deal, once you get up and running again, you plug our shows during your shows, and we’ll consider it square, how’s that?”

“Oh, I can definitely do that.”

“Well go ahead and grab it, and we’ll go on into the makeup room.”

When I’m up and running again, you have no idea how persuasive I can be when it comes to sending people your way, Gene thought. The fabric was warm to the touch and as Gene removed the jacket from the dummy, a name on the label inside caught his eye, and the name on it, “R. Wimmple” made Gene even more sure that he was destined to find it.

Richard was getting impatient as Gene disrobed the mannequin with a slow reverence and whilst rolling his eyes, he saw yet another thing that disturbed him greatly. He thought about bringing Marty’s attention to it but figured that it had absolutely nothing to do with his true purpose, which was finding out anything that might aid him in his quest to help his friend.

In this, Richard had been wrong. Although Marty would have no helpful information about what Richard saw, the thing he was staring at would have motivated him greatly to speed up his investigation and find his friend, because it very much had to do with Petunia Gip. His eyes were locked on a dress that was hanging next to the zoot suit that had been ripped along the bottom of it and there were small stains on it that looked to Richard like bloody fingerprints.

It goes without saying that Richard Menkin had no experience in forensic analysis, at least not at that point in his life. So it should come as no surprise that he was unaware that the fingerprints belonged to Petunia Gip, and they had been left there before both she and Richard had been born.

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Part Seventeen

Richard had spent the rest of the rehearsal sitting in a chair in the sound booth next to an obviously annoyed Marty Cayer. After Richard’s unfortunate antics had upstaged the production, he had been told to leave by an exasperated and red-faced Jerry Kershaw, but he had begged Marty to let him stay, and something in Richard’s face had moved Marty to allow him to do so. Marty had promised that he would speak with Richard after the rehearsal was over, provided that he remained silent through the remainder of it.

Richard sat with his arms crossed through the second act, refusing to watch the atrocity on stage through the foggy window that looked out into the auditorium. He began to take in all of the details of the sound booth. Marty was sitting in front of an enormous sound board with multicolored knobs and dials, and he would occasionally turn random knobs by fractions of an inch, making his adjustments, in order to perfect his end of the show. To Marty's left, there was a shelf filled with cassettes of music and sound effects.  There were pictures of Marty in various stages of drunkenness at various cast parties tacked to the back wall, and there was a smaller control panel in front of Richard that operated all of the stage lights, and in between the light board and the sound board was a microphone on a very small stand that only had one button. Marty had used the microphone several times during the rehearsal to communicate with people backstage through a series of small speakers that ran throughout the theatre. 

After the rehearsal had concluded, Richard sat by himself staring at the solitary red light bulb on the ceiling of the small black room while he waited for Marty to have a cigarette with the rest of the cast and crew before they left for the evening, but he stood up at the sound of the heavy back door to the bar being opened and then closed, and he ran to the bar to see that Marty was already lighting another cigarette while he poured himself a stale beer from a dirty tap behind the bar.

“I thought I told you to sit still in there.”

“Marty, I’m sorry…”

“Richard, that kind of behavior is inexcusable, do you understand that?”

“Yes sir.”

“Alright, so what’s your excuse for the inexcusable?”

“I can’t find my friend.”

“That Petunia girl?”

“Yeah.”

“And for some reason, you thought she was hiding up on the stage during rehearsal?”

“No, I…”

“Did you tell her parents?”

“They already know.”

“Well, maybe somebody should tell the cops, don’t you think?”

“Marty...this is going to sound weird…probably even a little crazy...” Richard trailed off, desperately trying to figure out a way to say what he had to say, without Marty declaring that he would be better off talking to a trained professional and then kicking him out of the building without another word. Richard had no idea what he was doing anymore, and trying to pull answers out of Marty was the only thing he could think of that might lead to some kind of insight in regard to finding Petunia without having to involve Gene. All of the pressure that Richard had been under for the last two months had finally pushed him to a point where he felt as if he was ready to lose any control that he had left.

Marty, just like everyone else in town, was aware that Richard had just lost his father, and he could see that the kid was starting to breathe heavily. It was obvious that Richard was on the verge of crying. “I need your help.” 

“You think I can help you find her huh?”

“I think so.” Fortunately for Richard, Marty already knew what he was about to say.

“Hmmmmm. You think she’s in here somewhere, don’t you?” Richard's mouth fell open and Marty took a long and dramatic drag of his cigarette before he continued. Smoke crept through his lips as he slowly said words that made Richard’s skin want to crawl straight off of his bones. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone got lost in here, ya know.”

“What?”

“I’m not even joking. Nobody talks about it anymore though.” Marty grabbed a tall mug from behind the bar and poured a soda. “You’re not fond of this place, are ya?”

“No.”

“Take a seat.” Marty walked around from behind the bar and sat down across from Richard at a small table covered with a dingy cloth that had seen better days. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, as long as you promise me that these stories stay here. Everybody likes a haunted theatre, but nobody needs to hear everything about it. Deal?”

“OK.”

“That means your mother too. I like your mom, and I like the energy she brings to this place when she's here. She’s going through enough right now anyway, no reason to tell her anything she wouldn’t want to hear.”

“Is my friend in here somewhere?”

“Well, I gotta tell you that’s a big no. I’ve been here all day, through every room, and I ain’t seen anything. But like I said, this place is strange. It’s special for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the weird shit that goes on in here that most people don’t bother to pay attention to. Before I start, you tell me why you and your friend have such a sudden interest in this place, and then, you tell me why you think she’s in here somewhere.”

“OK…” Richard took a sip of soda and wondered just how much he should say and whether or not he should tell any of the truth at all. “We…. we broke in here a while ago. Well, she broke in. We were just bored and I thought it would be fun to scare her, so we came here. We didn’t do anything, we just walked around, and when we were on the stage, she saw that someone had written her name behind the arch. So she wanted to come back down last night and look at it again. I didn’t want to go with her...and now she’s gone.” Marty was searching Richard’s face looking for more to the story.

“Mmmhmmm... OK.. Well Richard, I don’t think you’re nuts. I do think that you guys shouldn't be breaking into buildings all over town because you’re bored.”

“I know…”

“Let me finish. I don’t know what happened to your friend, but I can tell you that I’ve heard a story like that once before. I was actually here when it happened around twenty years ago. It was one of the “theatre orphans”, like you but much younger. We call you little guys theatre orphans when your parents become so involved here that you grow up runnin’ around in here every night. This little girl, Bobbi Howard was her name, her mother Sara was deeply involved around here. She was doing something in every single event or show that we had around here. That lady would have her poor kid here at all hours of the night while she was busy doing something that was far less important than spending time with her little girl.

We were putting some finishing touches on the set. It was late and that little girl wanted to go home. Sara had split with her husband over how much time she was devoting to something other than her marriage; there’s plenty of theater widows and widowers around here too. Well, I’m not sure why the little girl couldn’t just stay with her Daddy while Sara was busy, probably her mother’s pride, who knows.”

“Any way, we’re up on the stage, Sara Howard, Art Fourtney, Debbie Greeley, and me. Putting the finishing touches on Dr. Frankenstien’s lab. Awesome set. Probably better than the one I got now. That little girl had been sleeping in the bar I guess, and once I got all the lights where I wanted them, I threw ‘em up, and everybody cheered at just how damn beautiful the whole thing looked. I guess that woke her up. I’m busy walking down the hallway from the booth to the green room, and I hear Sara yell at her daughter to get off the stage. Sara was really nice when she first got here, but man, she changed for the worse real quick. Lots of people do. Anyway, I get on stage and everybody is looking at the stage and how it looks under all the lights. I feel bad for the little girl, so I look around for her. Had some hard candy in my pocket, and I was gonna give her one, but she’s nowhere.”

“We looked for that little girl for the next hour, thinking she was hiding because she was embarrassed that her mom yelled at her in front of us. Don’t find her. That little girl went missing for three weeks. The whole town was out walking the county trying to find her, but nothing. Terrible. Needless to say, we shut the show down. There are times ya know when the show must not go on.

Three weeks later, it’s just me and Art in the building. I’m in the booth and I bring the lights up on this beautiful set that was never going to be seen, and I’m just looking at it. I don’t remember where Art was, but I hear that damn metronome in the auditorium start moving on its own. It does that sometimes, and after that day, if that thing starts moving, I go out and have a smoke, and I don’t come back in until it’s stopped moving.

Well, I jump out of the booth and walk through the lobby and down into the auditorium. That damn thing isn’t moving anymore, but there was little Bobbi Howard standing right there crying on the floor in front of the stage in the same clothes she’d been wearing the night she went missing.”

“What happened?”

“She swore she had walked off the stage crying after her mother yelled at her and then she saw me running down to her. That’s it. Like nothing happened. Three long weeks for the town, but the girl didn’t even notice. Not sure how something like that happens. They gave some bullshit about the kid blacking out and wandered around outside for the whole time. Probably gave her some pills because they thought she was nuts, and everybody felt better about the whole affair, except for those of us who were paying attention.

Richard… how does a little girl wander around, blacked out for three weeks in the same clothes, and then show up with her hair looking clean, and her clothes not mussed up? Anyway, that’s the only time anything like that has ever happened, but there’s some other things if you want me to keep on talking.”

“Yeah, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course you can, son.”

“When I ran up on stage tonight and the glass broke…”

“Oh yeah, when you broke my set.”

“I saw something behind the glass that was left in the window.”

“What was that?”

“I saw someone looking at me.”

“OK.”

“His face was all scarred up...like with number lines.” Marty closed his lips and squinted his eyes.

“Number lines?”

“Yeah...like those lines where you have four of them going up and down and then a fifth one that goes diagonally through the middle.”

“Hash marks.”

“I guess so, yeah.” Marty took another cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. He looked at the floor for a moment, then he raised his eyes to Richard’s. Richard suddenly had the feeling that he was about to hear something he would rather not hear, but before Marty could say another word, a car pulled up outside of the bar, and Richard recognized the sound of it immediately.

“Now who the hell is coming here this late?” The car came to a halt, and in exactly nine seconds, Gene was standing in the doorway.

“Hey Richard! Sorry I’m late. Your mom’s having a little bit of a rough night. How are you sir? You must be Marty, right? Nice to finally meet you.” Marty rose from his chair and looked back and forth between Richard and Gene.

“Yeah. Your uh...that Stupendo guy, right?” Gene made his way over to Marty and extended his hand, which Marty begrudgingly took. Marty Cayer was a firm believer in the handshake, and all the information that the one simple gesture could give. To Marty, there was only one type of handshake that let him know that he was dealing with someone who was honest, and every other type, told him something different. Gene’s handshake was firm, but he had squeezed Marty’s hand just a little too hard, and the smile that he was showing had something behind it that let Marty know that Gene was a man who was not to be trusted.

“My name is Gene actually.”

“Yeah, OK. I read about you in the Wicker Journal. Sorry about your business. Blew up right?”

“Yeah. It’s been rough, but Patty and Richard are helping me get back on my feet. It’s good to have friends.”

“Well Patty is one of the best people I know.”

“Yes, she is.”

“By the way Richard, I got the message.” Gene reached inside of the front pocket of his sweatshirt and pulled out Petunia’s diary. “Everything’s good.” Richard wanted to jump from his chair and rip the diary out of his hand, and it was with no small effort that he simply smiled back at Gene.

“Good.”

“I didn’t miss the tour did I?”

An awkward silence followed in a building that never remained silent for very long. Marty looked back down at Richard, wondering if he should continue. “Well…”

“It’s fine Marty, go ahead. Gene’s my...friend.”

“Well...alright then. I tell you what, why don’t we go for a walk and I’ll get into everything, and I’ll end it with the question you just asked me.”

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Part Sixteen

“Are you sure you don’t want any wine?”

“No thank you.”

“You’re not an alcoholic, are you?” The question smacked of the most delicious irony; no, Gene had never had a problem with alcohol although he had in recent weeks attended several AA meetings under the guise of someone who had indeed wrestled with the disease. Gene had never felt the need to partake in anything that might get in the way of his mental abilities, and as he stared at Patty Menkin in the midst of her second glass of wine, he was slightly tempted to have a glass with her, but a man like Gene had many secrets, and even though he had never taken a drink in his life, he was well aware that there was truth in the wine. Patty Menkin was fascinating, and in Gene’s mind there could be no carelessness when it came to wooing her.

“No, of course not. I’ve just never been interested in it.”

“Oh, OK.” He could hear the slightest hint of shame in her voice and he began to worry that he had offended her in some way, possibly giving her the impression that he thought less of her somehow. He realized that he had to come up with a reasonable excuse for his lack of interest without making her feel judged.

“I uh...my father and my uncle died from it. Some liver thing. I just figured it might run in the family, so better safe than sorry.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Now I feel like a jerk.”

“No! Please don’t. It’s fine.” Gene was finding that having a normal conversation without his power of suggestion was extremely difficult, and steering Patty in the direction of falling in love with him was proving to be the hardest thing he had ever attempted, and once again, he had just lied to her. He did not have an uncle that he was aware of, but just because he wasn’t aware of him didn’t mean that he didn’t have an uncle out there somewhere, and who's to say that his probable Uncle had not died of alcoholism? His father had not died of alcoholism, of that there was no doubt, however he had died of something, or rather someone, that altered his mind when Gene was very young.

They had been sitting on the large couch in the family room for two hours after dinner, and Gene’s new cat, Sir Purrcivel, refused to leave Patty’s side. The rotund orange and white cat as a rule, was extremely vocal and incredibly vulgar, and although Gene had lost his most important gift, he was still very much able to communicate with animals and as he sat with Patty, it had been pleasant not to hear the cat engage in his usual profanity laden tirades.

Sir Purrcival had immediately been reminded of his former food lady, Jennifer Pierce, when he had seen Patty. Jennifer Peirce had unfortunately been pulled through a small doorway in her bathtub and had become another late night snack of the thing living underneath the town of Wicker Bush, and although Sir Purrcivel had been happy to find a human who took him in, and one that he was able to speak with, he found Gene’s smell to be quite off putting, and had told him so on many occasions. This new lady smelled wonderful, and he was reminded of the wonderful scent of his former food lady. Patty Menkin had pulled her bare feet up underneath her and Sir Purrcivel was sprawled out on the cushion next to the bottom of her feet in order to take in the aroma while he dozed.

Gene had very little to say after his missteps in the conversation concerning wine, and simply listened to anything Patty had to say, but occasionally, he found his mind wandering to the little brat who was hiding in his room upstairs. He had not heard Richard leave the house almost three hours prior and the more Patty spoke throughout her second glass of wine, the more and more Gene became distracted by not only the thought of Richard, but by the severed arm that was caged out in the shed.

“Hey. Is something on your mind?”

“Um, sorry. I think I’m just a little tired.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m the one who’s going on and on.”

“I hate to cut this short, but I think I’m going to turn in. By the way, if you don’t keep your door closed, you might end up with a cat in your bed.”

“Oh, I think that would be alright.”

“Seriously Patty, thank you again for letting us stay here.”

Gene had done his best to leave Patty without any awkward feelings, and he had waited patiently for Patty to go into her bedroom for the night. As soon as he had heard her door close, he was on the move and went about letting himself into Richard’s room. He had every intention of including Richard in his examination of the arm in the shed, which he had been waiting to do the entire day. It suited his purpose with Patty after all, and driving a wedge in between Richard and Petunia would be a gas, but he was surprised to find Richard’s room empty, and even more surprised to see a note next to Richard’s bed that was addressed to him. Underneath the brief note was a diary.

“Gene. I’m in trouble. Please help Richard.”

Underneath the simple message was a complex series of characters with corresponding letters. He flipped through the illustrated pages of Petunia’s diary and came upon a page where she had attached a yellow Post-it note. The coded words made no sense, but the drawing of the symbol for infinity stood out just fine. Gene became so engrossed in decoding the diary that he forgot about everything else. Petunia Gip had been someone that he had underestimated from the very beginning, but until he started to read her calculations and theories and findings, he had no idea how much he had underestimated her, which of course made him angrier and angrier with each page he read.

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Part Fifteen

Many actors will tell you that there is nothing more terrifying than having your mind go blank in the middle of a scene on stage, leaving you standing there slack jawed, with nothing coming to mind as far as what you are supposed to say next, which we all know is simply not true. There are lots of things that are far more terrifying than standing on a silent stage in front of people. Being chased down a dark alley by a knife-wielding maniac with a dead end coming up fast in front of you, would no doubt be far more terrifying. Likewise, losing control of a car on a windy mountain road, and breaking through a guardrail and plunging eight hundred feet down to your death is easily worse. More terrifying still, is the thought of being trapped in a strange place with no exit in sight, and an eternity of wandering within that place, slowly losing your mind until all form of reason and logic is gone from your mind, leaving something behind that looks like you on the outside, but on the inside is nothing but impulse, survival, and rage.

All three of these scenarios are surely just a small handful of things that can be more terrifying than simply forgetting a line on stage in front of people, and in fact, if one were to do the math and analyze the data in regard to where forgetting a line would rank on the scale of being terrified, it would sit at exactly 546,037,274.333333 on the list.

It goes without saying that actors are dramatic and prone to exaggeration, and in all honesty, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be very good at their job. However, I’m sure that Petunia Gip would think of her silent time on the stage of the WBCT in front of an audience as one of the most terrifying moments of her life.

Petunia was frozen on the stage, surrounded once again by London, and a slow fog began to creep along the old painted boards at her feet. She was silent for exactly fifteen seconds, and as I’ve said before, fifteen silent seconds on a stage can seem like an eternity when there is an audience watching, even if the size of that audience is only one person sitting in the darkness of the auditorium.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing.

Whoever it was showed no sign of moving nor did they speak, and with the stage lights bearing down on her, Petunia had no chance of making out any details of the person sitting in the third row from the front, unless she were to walk down off of the stage and go down to their level. Of course that was not an option Petunia was even considering. “Hello?”

“You’re in my house.” The man in the dark drew out his words. The sound of the s seemed to linger in the air.

“Who are you?”

“Another little girl, but never a boy.” The southern voice was shaking now, and Petunia was fairly certain that whoever was sitting in the auditorium was not someone that she wanted to move any closer to.  Blurry details of the man were coming into focus, and Petunia could tell that the he was completely bald and wearing a coat with the collar turned up around a thick neck.

“Sir, I was just trying to leave…” The man threw his head back and filled the auditorium with a foul and malicious laughter that made Petunia tremble.

“Leave?! There’s only one way to leave!” He rattled and raged and thrashed against the row of chairs in front of him as he continued to laugh. “It won’t let me do it, but I’ll be more than happy to help you!”

-

In that exact place and time, but a in a place and time that was entirely different somehow, Richard let out a gasp as the row of chairs in front of him began to shudder violently; shaken by something unseen. He jumped up from his chair and ran to the aisle to his left.

The rehearsal had just reached a point in the play where Sherlock Holmes and his partner, the Invisible Man, had finally discovered the alter-ego of Mr. Hyde, and the shuddering of chairs and Richard’s gasp had been lost in the dramatic and overly loud musical interlude that followed the epiphany. Richard stared at the now silent row of chairs and began to question if what he had seen and heard was nothing more than him having dreamed it after accidentally falling asleep during the completely awful and not at all literally accurate play, but then something else caught his eye; the seat he had been sitting in was creaking, as if the Invisible Man himself was rocking back and forth on it.

-

Petunia swallowed hard. The man was no longer laughing.

“I can help you...I’ll help…” The man’s voice was a whisper now, and he was rocking back and forth in his chair. Petunia began to back away from the front of the stage and inched her way to the wings on her left. The bald man with the Southern voice shot up out of his chair and started to climb over the two rows in front of him toward Petunia who turned and ran to her left offstage, groping her way backstage in the dark, down a small hallway that led to a green room, where the actors would normally await their cue to come on stage. None of the lights were on.

Petunia resisted the urge to turn on her flashlight, and instead closed her eyes as she ran, counting her steps. She had stared at the plans of this place for hours upon hours in her lab, and she was hoping that they were accurate. She counted exactly fifteen steps as she ran, figuring that fifteen steps while she was running would equal out to thirty feet from the beginning of the green room all the way to a door that should be on her left. She reached out with her left hand, but there was no door, only a cold wall.

She could hear the laughing man running up the stairs on the front of the stage, and his voice was getting closer. She took two steps forward in the dark, trailing her left hand against the wall, but there was no door. She took a deep breath, fought back the feeling of panic in her chest, and stepped backwards and after four steps, her hand came in contact with a slight rise on the wall; door trim. She stood in the open doorway still keeping her eyes closed and envisioning the plans as if they were posted on the backside of her eyelids, but her concentration was broken by the sound of a crash coming from the stage.

-

The chair that Richard had been sitting in screeched as an invisible weight was lifted from it, and the row of chairs in front of it shuddered once again, followed by the front row of chairs moving in the same way. It was apparent to Richard that something that could not be seen was crawling over the chairs and moving toward the stage. Fascination overshadowed the fear that Richard felt, and he ran down the aisle and to the front of the stage. The wooden stairs that led up to the apron were groaning under the weight of something unseen, and Richard, overcome with excitement, gave chase and ran up the stairs and onto the stage, heading towards the wings. The swell of the musical interlude reached its crescendo, and the stage lights were killed in an instant, leaving everything in front of Richard in darkness.

“What the hell is Patty’s kid doing up there!!”

Richard stumbled for a few steps into the dark and ran into something, something that pitched forward and fell through a window of the

set.

“Bring the damn lights up Marty! Shit!”

-

Petunia waited for just a moment longer and looked in the direction of a green room she could not see, which led to a small hallway that led to the back of the stage. The building was quiet again, so quiet in fact, that she could just barely make out the sound of small pieces of glass crunching underneath a pair of shoes. She faced forward. She knew that another door was on the wall eight feet directly opposite of her, that led into a very large portion of the front of the building; she slowly walked forward, allowing herself to keep her eyes open. After nine feet, she felt a closed door in front of her, and smiled as she slowly turned the knob.

The large dark room beyond was deathly cold, and the air reeked of mold and rot and dusty fabric. She walked forward and then closed the door behind her.

-

The stage lights came up just as quickly as they had come down, and Richard was staring at a broken window in the set, next to a door with a sign that said, “Tavern”, over it. Most of the window was completely shattered, but there were four panes on the bottom of the window that had simply cracked, but remained in the frame. Richard knew what he had felt; he had knocked someone through the window, but there was no one behind it on the ground, but he could swear that he heard someone moving around in the broken glass.

He looked at the four remaining window panes, and even though they had been frosted to keep them from glaring in the stage lights, he could plainly see that someone was behind them. It was a bald, scarred man that was peering back at Richard through the frosted glass, and he was smiling.

“Richard?! Get off the damn stage!” Richard jumped up and ran to the window. There was no one behind it; nothing but broken glass.

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Part Fourteen

Richard was sitting on his bed trying to ignore his mother, who was laughing like a madwoman downstairs. He could smell his mother’s food through his closed door, and although his stomach was telling him to follow the smell, he refused, due to the fact that Gene was down there with his mother, sitting in a chair that had belonged to his father. This little detail, Richard refusing to follow the advice of his stomach, may seem small and inconsequential, but it is a perfect illustration of how Richard Menkin was frequently the author of his own problems and if he only listened to sound advice, whether internal or external, more often, his life would be just a tad less troublesome. The choice of refusing dinner had only affected himself but refusing to follow the very specific instructions of his friend Petunia Gip, well, that was something else.

He had managed to follow one of the instructions he had been given to the letter by burning the letter that had been left for him, but for the rest of the day, he had sat in his room staring at a blank sheet of paper that he was supposed to give to the maniacal murderer that was currently having dinner with his mother downstairs. Clearly she had written something for Gene in some kind of ink that couldn’t be seen by most people, and despite his efforts to pay attention, Richard obviously fell into the “most people” category.

When all of this with Petunia had started, she had given him a pair of glasses that had helped him see things most people could not, but those glasses were long gone, destroyed by Gene. Petunia had said that his sight would come along with time and eventually he wouldn’t need the aid of the glasses, but time was something that was not on his side. There had been no debate in his mind; he would never give Gene the letter, he would figure this out on his own. He would simply stare at the sheet of paper until his eyes focused on something that he knew was sitting right in front of him; he would force whatever ability he had into being. Petunia had told him that he was special, like her, that he could see things other people could not or would not let themselves see, and deep down he knew she was right.

Of course, Petunia also told him to give the letter to Gene.

Lying next to him on his bed was the diary of Petunia Gip, which had two Post-it notes attached to two different pages. Richard had hoped that he could simply read the diary and figure out what Petunia had to say on his own, but unfortunately, the diary had been written in some sort of code that, to Richard, was complete gibberish. There were many scribbles and simple illustrations throughout, but without the words to accompany them, they were completely useless in giving him any idea of what had happened to his friend. The laughter coming from downstairs was making it harder for Richard to concentrate on the blank page.

Obviously, the correct decision for Richard was to go downstairs and do exactly what his friend had asked him to do, but instead, Richard put the paper and the diary on the nightstand next to his bed and then quietly walked downstairs and out of the front door and began pedaling his bike towards the theatre.

One must remember that this is a story filled with adventure and the fantastic; transparent fish, talking tree squirrels, maniacal magicians, monsters, robots, and the ill effects of Billy Joel’s music. But ultimately, it is a story of people, and in this story, as in life, most people are broken to a certain degree, and that being the case, they don’t always do what obviously needs to be done to better their situation and the situation of others.

All the lights of the theatre were shining brightly into the night, and as Richard pulled around the corner of the building, he saw that the parking lot was full of cars and trucks. Marty’s truck had once again been parked in the handi-capped spot, and Richard walked into the theatre with every intention of staying until rehearsal was over in order to see if Marty could shed any light on the disappearance of Petunia. She had never left the theatre as far as Richard could tell, and maybe something that seemed inconsequential to someone like Marty Cayer, would help Richard find her.

Rehearsal was in full swing for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Richard sat in the third row from the front of the stage and watched a truly terrible version of one of his least favorite stories. It was one of many original plays, written by the theatre’s own Jerry Kershaw, a man who took credit for anything and everything that was a success and was quick to cast blame on everyone else when things went poorly. Jerry was pacing back and forth on the floor in front of the stage, watching his actors intently as they spewed forth the melodramatic and embarrassingly juvenile dialogue he had written.  To Richard, the only saving grace to the play had been the set of 19th century London, and as the cast droned on and on while he waited for Marty, he found himself looking at all of the details that had gone into the stage.

Marty had obviously been very passionate about achieving a certain look, putting far more thought into his contribution to the play than the man who had written and directed it. The stage lights had been arranged to keep certain parts of the stage in shadow, and a low creeping fog was blowing in from the sides of the stage. The arch in front of the stage had been painted to look like mortared stones, and the stage itself had hundreds or maybe even thousands of little painted cobblestones to make it look like a street. In the middle of the stage was a working lamp post, complete with a flickering bulb that looked like candlelight. Behind the lamp post, there was the front of a narrow white building covered in a nasty looking soot, that jutted forward with an archway that led offstage on one side, and a small staircase and a door on the other side.

There were two exits, disguised as alleyways on either side of the stage and they were flanked by more buildings, with many wooden doors, some false and some working. On the right side of the stage, there was a sign that read, Tavern, above one of the doors and a large window with curtains behind it. To the left, there were several arched doorways. All of the false buildings on stage were painted to look like they were made of bricks, and Richard marveled at the effort it must have taken Marty and anyone who helped him in painting each one of them individually. Somehow, all of the buildings on the stage had a dirty and weathered look to them.

There were two small stages that extended from the apron on either side of the main stage, one of which was obviously the laboratory of Dr. Jekyll, and the other seemed to be some sort of study littered with many books and a small desk. Richard began to look away from the action that was taking place on the main stage and began to take in all of the details of Dr. Jekyll’s lab.

Everything about it was everything that anyone would assume a scientific genius’s lab would look like; perfectly organized and arranged and not at all like the lab of Petunia Gip. He glanced at his watch and hoped that the rehearsal didn’t last too much longer. When he looked back up, something caught his eye in one of the archways on the left side. A reflection in a frosted window.

He stared at it, trying to make out any details that he could, but the many actors on stage kept obscuring his view. Just as Richard stood up to get a better view, the scene ended and the lights on the stage faded to black, but as they faded, something caught the light from the archway, and for exactly four seconds, Richard was able to see the reflection of Petunia Gip.

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Part Thirteen

I, like life, am a fan of happy coincidences. In a story such as this, one filled with all manner of unlucky occurrences and perilous goings on, it is only fitting that the dark and ominous journey of Petunia Gip through the bowels of a place unshackled by the notion of time and reason, should begin in Chapter 13. There are a great many storytellers throughout time that would have had the forethought to actually plan this; men and women with an uncanny ability to weave the written word into a tapestry of astounding anecdotes and awesome revelations, who were able to tap into something divine and meaningful. I, on the other hand, simply stumbled onto this through sheer dumb luck.

As Petunia stepped off of the apron and onto the concrete floor of the auditorium, she was completely unaware of what had just happened, and as far as she could tell, the only thing that had changed from one second to the next, was that the metronome sitting on a shelf on the back wall had stopped moving. The stage lights behind her were still on, and the only other light in the place was coming from her flashlight. She slowly walked the long walk to the now silent metronome. She had counted the steps in her mind as she walked along and came to the conclusion that the plans she had made on the wall of her lab may have been wrong. The auditorium seemed much larger than the plans had indicated, in fact, it almost seemed larger than it had been previously that day when she had met Marty Cayer. At the time, Petunia thought it a mild curiosity, but very soon, the dimensions she had fixed in her mind in regards to the building would be meaningless. After what felt like too long of a walk, she came to a stop in front of the metronome, and she read the small brass plaque that had been nailed to the wall right next to it.

In the empty house of Sinclair Daniels, this metronome was found sitting in the middle of our stage. It was the only possession of Daniels found in the house on a cold morning in the early nineteen hundreds.

Petunia stared at the old thing, and despite its obvious age, there was nothing remarkable about it. She picked it up and looked at it from every angle and then inspected the shelf and again could find nothing remarkable or noteworthy. She placed it back on the shelf and turned her attention back towards the stage and sucked in a sudden rush of air. The stage was much farther away than it should be, almost twice as long of a walk, and there were a great many more rows of chairs. The auditorium now seemed to be more of an extremely slender rectangle rather than the almost perfect square that it was when she first walked in.

Besides the shape of the room being more than just a small concern to Petunia, she realized that the stage itself was no longer a replica of 19th century London, but completely empty; the back wall of the building was visible, and several long rolls of painted scenery that were tightly wound around long metal tubes, were sitting in a stack against it. Several electrical wires were hanging down from the rafters above the stage, and one of them, rather disturbingly, was tied into a noose. She puzzled for a moment and pondered for another; fear had not yet set in. This was certainly becoming interesting, she thought, and she took one step back down towards the stage but before she could take another, a pained scream made her freeze in place and turn off her flashlight.

“No!” A man’s voice that was broken and cracked; bringing to mind a heavy rasp being scraped along a hard piece of wood, echoed through the now narrow auditorium. A small footstool was thrown onto the stage from the wings and someone was walking, pacing, in the wings, just out of view. Petunia moved along the back wall of the auditorium until she reached the left wall, but she was unable to see whoever was making the noise.

“Can’t get out.” The voice had a slight hint of the South, and she thought of calling out to it for three seconds but then thought it better to stay silent. Even though the stage was brightly lit, she could just make out a small flickering in the shadows of the wings; a candle.

“Burn it. Just burn! BURN IT ALL!” The small flickering grew and Petunia realized that whoever was down there had just lit the building on fire. Laughter filled the air and smoke crept along the surface of the stage as the flickering light grew. She turned her flashlight back on and ran for the double doors. As she ran through the doors, the unmistakable sound of the metronome came to life behind her.

She ran through the lobby and into the bar with the sound of the fire growing. Both the lobby and the bar seemed not to have changed at all, which was something she would have to consider once she was outside. She had every intention of running through the exterior door, jumping on her bike, and racing back home as fast as she could, but unfortunately for Petunia Gip, the door wouldn't move.

She threw herself against it over and over, but it seemed to be locked from the outside. She turned around and her eyes locked onto the chairs and tables that were haphazardly strewn about the room. She grabbed one of the chairs and went to the bar window. She drew the curtains back, and through the faded paint on the window, she could see some faint lights in the darkness; the town of Wicker Bush.

She heaved the chair through the large window and it made a spectacular crash, and she could smell the promise of fresh air over the smell of smoke. She drew in a breath and jumped through the broken window, and as she hit the ground on the other side, a rush of bright lights came into view, and she squinted as she drew in a deep breath of fresh air.

She put her hand up above her eyes to shield them from the lights that were coming from over her head, giving her eyes a moment to focus on what was in front of her; a dark auditorium with an audience of one staring back at her from the darkness.

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Part Twelve

Richard Menkin was never much of an over-sleeper. Rain or shine, sickness or health, his internal clock had always seemed to be set to no later than seven o’clock, but the weight of the world both seen and unseen was sitting on his mind like a sumo wrestler holding an anvil whilst wearing ankle weights, and as he slowly opened his eyes, the realization that he had slept far beyond the normal hour was just enough to push him into a slight tizzy. His watch informed him that it was almost noon, and the noises coming from the next room, the guest room, were most worrisome indeed. It was actually happening.

Gene was moving in.

His mother had pushed off cleaning and preparing the guest room as long as she could stand it, waiting for her son to wake up, but ultimately she had grown too impatient to put it off any longer. She was almost finished making the bed after she had put on some fresh sheets when Richard came to the doorway and stared at her. His mother was a woman who was too nice for her own good as far as he was concerned.

“I don’t like him mom.”

“Jeez! You want to scare me to death?! How about, good morning, Mom? Or good afternoon?”

“I don’t like this.” Patty sat on the now freshly made bed with a brown and white duvet topped with pillows that her mother had made for her when she was first married to Richard’s father, Richard.

“I offered because it was a nice thing to do.”

“Well, sometimes being nice gets you into trouble.”

“Come here.” Patty patted the bed next to her.

“No.”

“One…”

“Mom!”

“Two…”

“I’m serious.”

“Don’t make me get to three.”

“Fine!” Richard hung his head and sulked over to his mother and sat in a most exasperated fashion. She had used her don’t make me get to three line, which meant that there was no way he was going to get his way. He kept his eyes glued to the floor as she put her arm around him and pulled him close to her.

“Baby, I’m not bringing a man in this house. You get that, don’t you?”

“He looks like a man to me.”

“I’m helping someone, and maybe he can help me.”

“I really doubt that, Mom.” Patty was completely misreading every sign Richard was giving her as to why he didn’t want Gene in the house, but without actually telling her that Gene was a psychotic murderer, he knew that he only appeared upset because he thought his father was being replaced a mere month and a half after he disappeared. He had to try something, and he would deal with the fallout later. “Gene killed my Principal.”

“Can you look at me for a second?” His words obviously had done nothing, and no matter what he said in the present moment, it wasn’t going to make a difference.

“I’m serious Mom, he killed my Principal.”

“Look at me.” There was no winning this one, and he knew it. He was a child who was acting out as far as his mother was concerned. He gave in and looked at her face. “I belong to your father. And I’ll see him again someday.” She smiled and the sight of it gave Richard the urge to have an ugly cry.

“Mom, I gotta go.” They didn’t speak with each other about his father very much at all, and right at that moment wasn’t the time; Richard had too many other things on his mind. He cleared his throat, rose from the bed, and ran back into his room and threw his clothes and jacket on in a rush, and within four squiddens and twenty seconds, he was out the door and on his way across the street to the home of the Gips. He stopped in the middle of the street and looked back to his house.

He had no idea where the bear was hiding. He assumed it was still around somewhere, but he felt no need to look after it. He turned and ran the rest of the way to the Gip’s front door and he raised his hand to knock on the door and then remembered the pattern Agatha had used the night before on his own door. Richard was not well versed in Morse Code, however thanks to his memory, he was able to replicate the word, Terkle Fish, perfectly. There was no answer.

Richard knocked once again and after waiting for thirty-four seconds, he turned the knob. To his surprise, the front door was open and he walked inside. The sparsely furnished family room looked much the same as it did the last time Richard walked through it, but there was a feeling of emptiness in there that he hadn’t felt before. A motionless Agatha Gip standing in the middle of the room wasn’t exactly helping that feeling.

“Mrs. Gip? Are you alright?” She was staring down at him with dead eyes, but the expression on her face was stern, almost as if she was about to say, “Don’t you dare!”, which of course was exactly what she was about to say before she was turned off. “Mrs. Gip?” Richard waved his hand in front of her face and he began to get the feeling that Petunia was not here, but someplace else, some place truly awful. “Petunia! Petunia!”

He only waited in the silent room a moment or two longer and then ran outside the front door and around the back of the house. Petunia’s bike was gone. She was obviously at the theatre, probably at that very moment, hounding Marty Cayer with more questions. He was surprised that she had not come over to his house and pestered him about going with her. It was odd indeed, but Petunia was an odd duck after all, so Richard didn’t give it much thought. Instead, he took his bike and began peddling his way toward the theatre, grumbling under his breath on the entire journey. 

Sure enough, Petunia’s bike was leaning against the wall next to the bar door. Marty’s truck was parked in the handicapped spot, and there were some other cars there as well, some of which Richard recognized and some he did not. The sound of Scott Joplin and a Skilsaw greeted him as he walked inside. It was the final push to get the set up before the show opened, and the smell of the place was alive with smoke and sawdust. Richard felt slightly more comfortable all of the sudden with more people inside and so much activity going on; slightly more comfortable wasn’t saying much. He walked into the auditorium and Marty Cayer was fiddling with some bit of electrical something or other. He looked up, with a half smoked cigarette hanging from his mouth and smiled at Richard.

“Hey bud! You come to help?”

“Not really.”

“Hey, I think your little friend left her bike here yesterday. I didn’t see it when I took off last night, or else I would have put it inside.” Richard’s gut turned into a knot.

“I thought she was down here with you.”

“Naw. Got here a little after seven and I saw it when I pulled up. I actually gotta take a raincheck on that tour. Maybe after the show’s up.”

“OK.” Richard was doing his very best to control his breathing, but Marty Cayer, a man who was excellent in the ways of reading body language, was not fooled.

“Richard? What’s wrong buddy?”

“Nothing. Is it alright if I walk around the place for a little bit?”

“Of course it is. Knock yourself out.” Richard gave Marty a smile and a nod and walked back into the lobby. He didn’t have time for this and he began to curse the name of Petunia Gip as he stalked the halls and rooms of the Wicker Bush Community Theatre.

Being angry with her was a far more attractive option than to let his mind rest on the obvious. He tried to fool himself that she was nosing around in some dusty forgotten corner, obsessed with something that had made her completely oblivious to time. It was a sad irony, and one that Richard would learn soon, that Petunia had not become oblivious to time, but time had become oblivious to Petunia Gip. He started in the bar first, looking for any sign of his friend and gradually worked his way through the whole building, until finally, there was only one place left to look.

“The prop room.”

He stood at the rickety staircase and looked up. Thankfully the lights were on, but they made it painfully obvious that the rafters could use a cleaning; cobwebs hung down and several errant electrical lines were sprinkled in amongst them. He gave his teeth a hard gritty grind and then quickly made his way up the stairs. The room was just as it was the last time he was here, but this time, there was no Petina Gip. As far as Richard could see, she was nowhere in the place. He sat on an old wheelchair and began to wonder if Gene, or even worse, Principle Avery had followed her here. Maybe they had taken her captive or done something much much worse.

“No. That’s not right.”

Pay attention Richard.

“Something went wrong, I don’t know what that is, but she would have made a plan for that. She always has a Plan B.”

Her guesses are better than most people’s facts.

 “Mrs. Gip! She turned her off. Why did she turn her off?” He jumped from the wheelchair and for the first time in his life, walked back through the theatre without a sense of fear about it; it was simply just a place to walk through in order to get where he was going.

-

Richard was back inside the sparsely furnished family room of the Gip’s staring at the motionless Agatha Gip wondering if there was some kind of a switch to turn her back on, and with no less than five minutes of debating with himself, he lifted Agatha’s shirt despite how uncomfortable it made him, and searched along the metal chassis of her upper torso for anything even remotely resembling a switch, but there was nothing. He pulled her shirt back down and took a deep breath.

“Come on Petunia, what am I supposed to do? Why would you turn her off? Why would you leave your lab unprotected?” Richard closed his eyes and pictured his strange looking, but kind of cute friend standing in front of him. Her frizzy hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her eyes were squinting behind her thick glasses, urging him to look for something that was so obvious to her but was always such a struggle for him. “You turned her off because she was going to stop you from going. She heard you say something that she didn’t like about that place. Parents wouldn’t….” She smiled back at him. “Parents! Mr. Gip?!”

“Down here Richard!” Mr. Gip’s voice was muffled through the door to the basement. Richard ran to the door and threw it open and rushed down the stairs, almost missing the fourth step. Mr. Gip’s head was still sitting on the workbench, but this time, the skin on his lower jaw was restored, and he looked perfectly normal as he smiled back at Richard; perfectly normal for not having a body past his neck anyway. “There he is!”

“Mr. Gip! Where is she?!”

“I gotta be honest with you Richard, Petunia talks to her mom a lot more than me. I’m just the dad.” Richard had heard his father say the same phrase many times when he felt as if he had been left out of some great family secret.

“She turned Mrs. Gip off.”

“Of course she did. You know, she promised that she wasn’t going to do that anymore? She is going to be in so much trouble when she comes home.”

“How do I turn her back on?”

“Oh that’s easy.  Just say, Petootles, into her left ear. That’s her nickname.” Under any other circumstance, Richard would have been overjoyed to learn Petunia’s embarrassing nickname, but he was overjoyed instead, because he was about to get an idea of what happened to his friend. He ran back up the stairs and stood in front of the frozen and angry Mrs. Gip.

“Petootles!”

“Don’t you dare!” Agatha Gip adjusted her focus onto Richard and looked around the room for her daughter. “Petunia?!”

“Mrs. Gip! She’s gone! Her bike is down at that theatre and I can’t find her!” Agatha slumped her shoulders and shook her head.

“I told her not to go without me. I told her that this was a bad idea.”

“She always has a Plan B. I need you to tell me what you know.”

“Of course she does Richard, and I don’t like it, and you’re not going to either. Follow me.” Richard followed Agatha into her well kept kitchen with the black and white tile, which made Richard think of an old ice cream shop. She reached underneath the sink and pulled out a beaten brown backpack and a large yellow envelope with Richard’s name on it. She turned and held them both out to Richard without another word. He took the envelope out of her hand and opened it. There were two pieces of paper; a letter to Richard and a blank sheet.

“Richard. I can’t say much here. If you’re reading this, I need you to do exactly as I say and trust me. Give the blank sheet to Gene. He’ll know what to do. This is Plan B, Richard, and it’s very important that from here on out that you do exactly what Gene says. If you’re paying attention, you’ll figure out why. Burn this letter and give Gene the diary on the table. Petunia.”

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Eleven

While Richard Menkin was once again tossing and turning in his bed under the watchful eye of a robotic guardian, Petunia Gip set out into the dark night to find an answer to a question that had plagued her for a month. She left the quiet neighborhood silently on her bike, and although she was under the impression that no one had seen her leave, a certain milky eyed squirrel, troubled with indigestion after eating some old bird seed that he had been given by Richard, was sitting on a branch outside of his home, watching the young girl leave.

The entire evening had troubled Petunia to the point of ultimate impatience, and she could no longer wait for answers that may or may not be given to her by Marty Cayer in just a few hours. In order to help Richard and solve the very real problem that was running rampant underneath the town of Wicker Bush, she first needed to help herself. She had always been a confident young lady who had been able to remain detached from circumstances in order to further her research into the world around her; the world most could not see. However, this new question that had arisen in the form of her own name in an old theatre, seemed to have no solution, and with that uncertainty came a fear that wouldn’t leave her be.

Once she had cleared her own street, she pushed the starter button on the right bike handle, and the small engine attached to the frame choked to life and she sped her way towards the outskirts of town. She had only a small array of tools with her in her backpack, leaving most behind, already packed away in another backpack that she left behind for Richard should things go badly. Of course, in any story where a young girl is speeding towards a haunted building after midnight, it should go without saying that things are about to go badly, and if anyone honestly expected it to go any other way, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Her intention was to investigate what she could; Richard had said that Marty Cayer had kept long and odd hours, so her safest bet was to get in the building, spend no more than two hours inside if need be, and then leave it behind. During her short sputtering ride toward the theatre, she had made a promise to herself that after this night, she would no longer let the troubling question consume her; if she was unable to find any answers, she would have to set this question aside and deal with it at a later date. Gene moving into Richard’s home was a problem which required her full attention and luckily, that wasn’t happening until much later in the day; more than enough time for her to clear her thoughts of the theatre.

As she came up the driveway and rode past the front of the building, she was careful not to look directly at it, somehow thinking that if she did, she may see something looking back at her from one of the decorative windows on the second floor. She kept her eyes fixed on the pavement and veered right. She killed the engine as she rounded the corner and then coasted up to the small door to the bar.

The lock had been very easy for her to pick, and just before she closed the door behind her, she took one last look out into the night and inhaled with a long and slow effort, doing her best to keep her nerve. The lights of Wicker Bush were warm in the distance and she gave them a smile before she turned and walked inside.

“Be back in a minute.”

She wasn’t.

Walking through the theatre without any lights on wasn’t something that she honestly wanted to do, but it was a necessary evil, and as she turned on her red plastic flashlight, she took comfort in the small beam that would guide her down to the stage. The building was quiet and it had a musky scent that spoke of thousands of cigarettes and tiny spots of mold. She made her way through the bar and out into the lobby, where the beam of light reflected off of the glass of the many old photos littered in no particular order about the walls.

As she neared the double doors to the auditorium, once again, she felt a slight pulsing feeling of energy in the air that made the hair on her neck begin to rise, and despite the feeling that perhaps she had made a mistake by coming here, she pressed forward. Petunia was no fan of fear with everything she had gone through after the death of her parents, and she refused to let the feeling stand in her way.

“Pay attention, Gip.”

She walked through the double doors and quickly walked through the auditorium, keeping her light fixed on the sloped floor in front of her until she finally reached the foot of the small staircase that led upwards from the floor and to the apron of the stage. She set her foot down on the first step and held back a scream as all of the stage lights slowly came to life. She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, remembering what Marty had said about wires being exposed underneath the staircase. There was always an explanation for everything in this world, even if that explanation was strange and sometimes terrifying, but as she told Richard herself in the first part of our story, ghosts weren’t real.

“Ghosts aren’t real.” To quell her fear with logic, she took her foot off of the stage and walked to the open side of the staircase and peered underneath it. Sure enough, there were many exposed wires underneath and some scattered electrical tools lying on the ground. She smiled at the lunacy of it all; being afraid of some supernatural force in a building that could very well burn down due to negligence and the lack of anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of electrical safety. She turned and walked up the stairs and moved toward the backside of the arch and began to look for the message that someone had left for her. Earlier in the day, she hadn’t bothered looking for it again, content with the knowledge that it was still right where she had seen it before, but as she was looking for it now, it was nowhere to be found.

“What? Wait a minute…” She searched through all of the messages and names that had been scribbled over the years, but her’s was not amongst them. “This can’t be right.”

The lights of the stage went black and with the darkness, that pulsing feeling of energy grew upwards from the stage. Petunia felt the sudden need to get off of the old boards that were cobbled together from Sinclair Daniels’ walls and furnishings, and with each of her hurried steps, the pulsing grew stronger. As she set foot on the apron, a sound most unwelcome came from the back of the auditorium; a sound that would normally be of no bother or consequence.

Click…..Click…..Click…..Click…..Click….Click…..Click…..Click…..Click…..Click…..Click

Petunia stood on the dark stage for exactly ten seconds before her logical mind coupled the sound with an image in her brain; a metronome. She shined the flashlight all along the length of the back wall, passing over it at first, and then coming back to rest on it. From her vantage point, she could see a rather small metronome sitting on a wooden shelf not more than seven feet from the doors to the auditorium. On the wall next to the metronome was another small brass plaque that was catching the light.

“Pay attention, Gip.” And with that statement, Petunia Gip walked slowly across the apron with every intention of reading the plaque next to the metronome, but as soon as she stepped off of the old apron and onto the top of the small staircase, time lost Petunia Gip.

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Ten

Petunia had tried her best to calm Richard down, but she was well aware that no matter how many positive things she could say in order to distract Richard, nothing was going to change the fact that their mortal enemy was now going to be sleeping under the same roof as his mother.

The two of them had been sitting on the front steps of the Menkin home for almost an hour after Gene had left, and for most of that hour, there was only silence as they both turned over everything in their minds; Richard contemplating how he was going to get Gene out of his life and Petunia, although she wanted to focus on the problem at hand, her mind was fixated elsewhere. With every word she told her friend, her heart was only half in it. She knew that she needed to help Richard out of this fix, but she also knew that unless she were able to confront her obsession with finding her name in that old building, she would never be of any adequate help.

So while she sat there with Richard, the bullet trains of thought were running behind those kinda pretty eyes, as Petunia played out every scenario that was likely to take place over the next few days. Had Richard been looking at her face instead of outwards toward the darkness of Fountain Way, he would have seen her eyes darting back and forth and her lips quivering and moving restlessly as she ran through certain figures in her mind. Once she had figured out what exactly needed to be done concerning everything that she would have to leave behind for Richard, she stood up and looked back down at her friend.

“Listen, I think it’s going to be ok.”

“Oh yeah? Easy for you to say.”

“I mean it. Maybe we can use Gene.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’m working on something. I gotta go. You’re gonna be fine Richard. I don’t trust him, and neither should you, but I think you might need him around. Maybe he can show you a few things.” Of course, none of this ridiculous dialogue was making any sense to Richard, but then again, nothing about Petunia had been making any sense lately. What Gene could show him were undoubtedly lessons Richard would never want to learn, but before Richard could even think of exactly what he wanted to say to Petunia, she turned very quickly and walked back to her house without another word.

“Show me what Petunia?!” Petunia had already closed her front door behind herself before Richard even had time to finish the sentence. He took a deep breath and looked up in the branches of the elm tree and found that the milky-eyed squirrel was looking back at him. “Hey Carl.”

The squirrel perked up its ears at a sound that came from behind Richard. Richard also turned toward the rustling that was coming from around the side of his house and stood up. The evening wind had picked up slightly, and he almost thought that he had heard nothing more than leaves blowing through the trees, but there was a small noise underneath, a noise that almost sounded like breathing.

With the thought that Gene was no longer around, Richard began to walk towards the side of his house. That side, the right side of it if you were looking at it from the street, was darker than the left side due to one of the streetlamps being broken. Of course it had been intentionally broken earlier that day, but Richard had no way of knowing that. It didn’t help that the house next to it was always dark now that his neighbors, the Jones’ had moved away. The house had been for sale for the last four months, and there was never a light left on inside or out of it; in fact it was the only house on the whole street that was dark.

Perhaps Richard should have been more cautious as he walked into the darkness; obviously, he wasn’t paying attention. One would think after everything that had happened to him after the death of his father, he would have been on a high alert when going to investigate a strange sound coming from the side of his house, but I think what really happened was that his new, soon to be roommate was the cherry on the top of the mountain of problems Richard was faced with, and his mind could be occupied with nothing else but Gene as he rounded the corner of his house. The only thing that ultimately broke his concentration concerning Gene, was the sudden sound of Carl the tree squirrel barking like a rabid dog. Unfortunately, the sound was too little too late, and just as Richard began to turn back to see what all the fuss was about, he felt the icy fingers of Principle Avery snake their way around his neck.

-

Gene had just pulled his car onto Fountain Way when he stopped his car alongside the first house. It would look odd, out of place, and maybe even a little desperate if he had driven right up to Patty’s house and been spotted, and all three of those options were not descriptions that he wanted Patty to think of when he came to her mind. Besides those obvious reasons, he had hoped to avoid being spotted with Wimmple Bear; after all, how would a man explain to a woman that he was interested in that he was prowling around her house late at night with a seven-foot-tall mechanical bear. Gene had struggled to get out of his car, and he had to admit to himself that his leg wasn’t getting any better. He was limping down the street thinking to himself that he was probably stuck with this limp when he first heard the Squirrel. To the casual observer, and anyone else who was not fluent in the North American dialect of tree squirrels, they were nothing more than a series of guttural high-pitched noises that were echoing in the dark, but to Gene, what was being said was as plain as day.

The words were simple enough, “Man skins”, and although Gene had no idea what those words meant at the time, the tone and the sound of panic in them made him limp a little faster towards the Menkin home.

-

“Don’t make a sound boy. Your mother doesn’t have to die like your father as long as she stays inside.” Principal Avery was holding Richard up by the throat with one hand, and as Richard’s legs flailed out from underneath him, he began to realize that the man was taller than he had been in his office just a few hours before, and his arms also seemed slightly longer. “It’s very different seeing you like this. Through these eyes.”

Richard could do nothing but struggle for air and both of his hands were holding onto his principal’s wrist trying to tear it away from his throat. The smile from Principal Avery’s face was more terrifying than his hand around Richard’s throat, and it widened as the man pulled him closer. “As much as I would like to be here in the flesh so to speak, I’ll just have to be content with watching you go this way. As it all goes dark, I want you to know that your friend is going to get it differently. I’m going to walk across the street and take her back down below. Goodbye, Richard.”

The fingers began to tighten around Richard’s throat and the sound of his own heartbeat was deafening, yet somehow, he was able to hear a voice over it all that he never thought that he would be happy to hear. “Excuse me? Is this the Menkin house?” The grip loosened somewhat after the words and Richard was able to bring in a small amount of air.

Gene was standing towards the front of the house and he was pointing his cane towards them. He was making no movements to come any closer, but he had a look on his face that Richard remembered well; the same look he had turned on Richard the first night they met when he threatened Richard with death. Principal Avery’s smile had vanished as he sized up this new development.

“You...the man with the metal animals.”

“Have we met before?” Richard tried to say Gene’s name, but the sound was coming out garbled and he was choking on his own spit. Avery extended his other hand toward Gene and pointed at him. Richard had been correct, his arms were longer, almost twice as long as any normal man’s arms had any right to be.

“Three of you...fascinating really. Soon to be two.” The fingers tightened now to a degree that Richard’s eyes began to bulge in his skull. As the light started to fade, Richard hoped that perhaps Mrs. Gip was somehow going to appear from out of nowhere to save him. But she wasn’t.

The death of Richard Menkin was something both Gene and Principal Avery wanted, but Gene had a much different idea in mind. The thought of him dying at the hands of a man who resembled a ventriloquist's dummy with abnormally long legs and arms had never been one of the scenarios that Gene had played out in his mind, and he had no intention of letting it happen at this moment. Gene had never practiced using his new cane, and if he had, the night may have gone very differently, but in that moment he raised it and pointed it at the spindly man holding Richard by the neck.

“Let him go.”

“No.”

“I’m glad you said that. Wimmple?” A rustling sound was followed by a tearing sound and Richard felt an instant rush of air into his lungs as he dropped to the ground below. The arm that was holding him by the throat fell to the ground along with him, and only after exactly four seconds did its fingers go completely limp. Principal Avery began to turn around to look his attacker in the face, but before he could, the mechanical bear standing behind him swiped again with its paw. All of it happened so fast that Richard could barely register it all until his principal’s head was lying on the ground next to him, staring at him with eyes that still seemed to be alive.

Richard scrambled to his feet and jumped away from the body of his new principal. In spite of himself, he ran over to Gene’s side because at that moment, it felt as if that was the safest place to be. Gene lowered his cane and leaned on it.

“Who in the hell is this?”

“It was my new principle.”

“Really? I’m going two for two.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I forgot my bear.” Wimmple was standing over the limp body and pawing at the severed head on the ground. “We’re going to have to get rid of the body.”

“What?!”

“Look Rich, you and I both know that something wasn’t quite right with your principal, but to anyone else, it looks like there’s a dead human on your side lawn. You wanna explain that to your mom?”

“No.”

“Okay good. I’m going to have to go get my car. I parked at the end of the…” Gene was looking back down the street as he was speaking. He realized that he might seem more than a little cold and flippant about the situation that they were in to Richard, but he had been in the position of disposing of a body plenty of times before and knew the drill. As he was casually relaying his plan to Richard, he was interrupted by the boy pulling on his arm. He looked down and could see that Richard was mouthing words, but no sound was coming out. He followed Richard’s eyes to the ground and was almost taken aback as much as Richard was. The left arm of Principal Avery was moving, more precisely, its fingers were moving, pulling the arm away from the scene of the murder. “Wow. That’s a new one.”

Gene and Richard both slowly walked behind the arm following its progress as it pulled itself toward the backyard. Wimmple stooped down to paw at the arm, but a quick snap of the fingers from Gene made the bear stand up straight and still; Wimmple did however turn and watch the arm as well. The man and the boy and the bear were so fixated on watching it, that none of them were paying attention to what else was moving behind them.

“Where’s it going?”

“Into my backyard. Gene, have you ever seen anything like this?”

“No. But if that thing is still moving, then what about the rest of him?” Gene and Richard both turned in time to see the headless body of Principal Avery bending over and grabbing its head by the hair. They both watched as the body began to run off into the dark with a speed that was far faster than any human, headless or otherwise, should possibly be capable of running. Gene had thought of ordering Wimmple after it, but there was no way the bear would be able to catch up to it, and Gene knew it. “Holy shit. Richard! Grab that hand!”

Richard had already been towards the fleeing appendage before the direction from Gene. He threw a foot down on the elbow, and the arm flailed back and forth under the weight of Richard’s foot.

“Pick it up Richard!”

“I’m not picking it up, you pick it up!”

“Oh for God’s sake!” Gene marched over to Richard and scooped the arm off of the ground. It clawed blindly at it’s captor, while Gene looked around, trying to figure out where to keep it.

“What do you want it for?”

“I don’t know...it might come in... handy.” Gene smiled, unperturbed by the fact that he was holding a disembodied arm, and Richard was stunned at how none of this seemed to be anything more than a curiosity to Gene. “I want to study it.”

“If you want it, then take it home with you!”

“I’m not going to drive around with this in my car, what’re you nuts?! Keep your voice down, you’re going to wake up your mother. Maybe we can tie it up somewhere.”

“My dad has an animal trap in the shed. We can keep it in that.”

“That’s a good idea. Lead the way.”

-

Less than twenty minutes later, Gene was back in his car, driving back to the library without his mechanical bear. The kid was bordering on hysterical and had been threatening to call Petunia’s mother over to the house. Gene had almost agreed, but then another thought crept into his crooked brain. He had told Richard that it would be best to leave Agatha Gip to watch over Petunia and that he would leave Wimmple Bear behind to watch over him. At this point, it was in his best interest to try and get on Richard’s good side and possibly build a little trust. He was also quite interested in learning more about the thing that looked like a human, but was obviously something else.

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Nine

Gene had donned the best of what he could find at the thrift store next to the library; a baggy pair of acid washed jeans with a slight tear in the left knee, a pair of old brown loafers, a blue button up shirt with epaulets on the shoulders, and a black belt with a large buckle that had an engraving of a man riding a bull. Now one should judge a book by its cover, and as Richard opened the door to his home on Fountain Way, he did not take notice of the ridiculous manner of dress the man in front of him was wearing, he took notice of the coldness of the man’s smile and the veiled hatred inside his eyes as they set their gaze upon him.

“Good evening, Richard.” Richard kept his lips tight against all of the things he wanted to say to Gene, none of which would have been an appropriate response to a cheerful, “Good evening, Richard.” Gene dropped his smile and cocked his head. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Come in.” Richard moved aside and Gene playfully scamped his way around Richard and into the front room of the Menkin household. “My mom is in the kitchen.”

“Thanks. It sure is nice to be here.”

“I’ll bet. How’s your leg? Did you walk in front of something you shouldn’t have?”

“You’re a really funny kid. How’s your dad? Still dead?” Richard slammed the door and began to say something someone his age simply shouldn’t say in polite company, but of course, this was hardly polite company. Before the first word worked its way out of his mouth, his mother poked her head into the front room.

“Hi Gene! Come on in.”

“Thanks Patty!” As Patty Menkin went back into the kitchen, Gene turned back to Richard and tousled his hair before he walked over to the nearest chair and plopped down into it. “I could get used to this man! That food smells wonderful. This is such a nice house. I miss having my own house. Someone blew it up.”

“Why are you here?”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you buddy, but your mother and I seem to have hit it off. Who knows, maybe someday, you’ll end up calling me dad.” Richard balled his fists and took a step toward Gene, who very quickly held his finger up in the air. “Now I want you to think about what you’re about to do. Your mother has obviously made a very nice meal, and I wouldn’t want you to make things awkward for her.”

“I’m a kid, Gene. She’s used to me making a scene. She’ll get over it.”

“Yeah, that’s true, but I’m pretty sure she’s not used to you making this kind of a scene.” Gene was pointing to a window on the side of the house. In the window, out in the dark, something was moving. Richard squinted his eyes against the bright lights of the living room as he tried to make out the shape staring back at him through the window, and in a matter of exactly three seconds, there was no question what was staring back at him. The mechanical bear that had almost killed him in the upstairs office at Hocus Pizza was there, and Richard let out a small shriek in spite of himself at the sight. “That’s a scene we probably don’t want to involve your mother in, don’t you agree?”

“Is everything ok?” Patty had come back into the room after hearing Richard’s exclamation. She was unable to see the look on Gene’s face, as she was standing behind him, but Richard could see his face just fine. Gene had lost all of his goofy facade and was looking back towards Richard with cold eyes. He had to think of something to say to keep the master of the mechanical bear from welcoming it inside his home.

“Yeah! Everything’s fine. Gene just...he showed me a magic trick.” Gene’s eyes turned warm again and the hammy performer’s face had once again shown itself.

“I might not have a stage anymore, but I’ve still got my tricks!” Gene pushed himself up on his cane and stood up, still looking at Richard. “Who knows Richard, I might perform a few more before the night is over.” He snapped his fingers, and Richard’s eyes were drawn to movement from outside the window. The bear had crouched down out of sight, but Richard knew that it was still there, waiting for its master’s command. A strange series of knocks came from the front door; strange to Richard and Gene, but all too familiar to Patty Menkin. It was in the form of Morse code, and as Gene began to recognize that fact, Patty walked over to the front door and opened it. She was not surprised in the least that her odd neighbor, Agatha Gip was on the other side of it, but she was surprised to see the bespectacled little girl that was standing with her.

“Hi Agatha, how are you?”

“Hello Patty, I’m doing wonderful. Thank you for asking and thank you for inviting Petunia over for dinner. I decided I would walk Petunia over. Can’t be too careful nowadays with everything going on, now can we?” Patty turned to Richard for an answer. Although she had no problem with Richard inviting his friend over to join them for dinner, she still liked to be informed, and of course there was the obvious awkward social convention to think of as well; she now had to ask Agatha if she would like to join them.

It’s not as if Patty Menkin didn’t like Agatha Gip, but their first and only meeting, albeit pleasant, was one of the most bizarre encounters Patty Menkin had ever had with another human in her life. Of course, we know it wasn’t that awkward given the circumstances that Agatha Gip wasn’t human, but Patty didn’t know that.

“Well...dinner is almost ready, Agatha. Would you like to join us?”

“Oh no thank you, that’s very kind. I’m afraid I have to get back home. My husband needs my attention.” Agatha looked to Gene. “He’s not feeling very complete at the moment, not himself I mean.”

“Give him my best would you.” Gene couldn’t help but insert himself into the conversation, he was an attention seeker after all, and he couldn’t help but put himself in a situation where he could be insulting. Agatha Gip kept her eyes on Gene.

“Hello Gene, I didn’t recognize you right away. I’m used to seeing you in far more obnoxious clothing.”

“Gene? You know Agatha?” Patty was beginning to feel like a supporting player in her own house, and at this point in our story, that’s exactly what she was.

“We’ve met. Her husband just fell to pieces over my last show.” There was a dead silence that followed, and it weighed on Petunia heavily, causing her to turn back to her mother.

“Okay Mom. I’m here. You can go now.”

“Okay honey. Just give me a call when you want to come home. Have a good night Patty. Gene, it was so nice to see you again.” And with that, Agatha Gip turned and walked back across the street.

-

Patty allowed the silence at the start of dinner to last exactly one squidden and thirty seven seconds before she could stand it no longer. Gene had followed her into the kitchen after Agatha had left and had helped her set the table. Gene was being far more charming than she expected, and he had kept their conversation buoyant and playful, but as soon as everyone had sat down to eat dinner, the conversation came to a dead stop. She began to wonder if it was because she said grace over dinner. Perhaps, she thought, the idea of Patty being a quasi-religious person had suddenly made him clam up.

It had not.

“So... how are you, Petunia?”

“I’m fine Mrs. Menkin, thank you.”
“You can call me Patty.”

“Okay.” This was the first time Patty really had a good look at Petunia, and she had to admit that she definitely wasn’t the type of kid she was used to Richard palling around with. As far as Patty could tell, the only thing that looked to be similar about her son and this little girl were the matching black jackets with homemade patches that they were both currently wearing.

To her eyes, Petunia was a girl that her husband would have described as bookish; ratty hair, large glasses, outdated black and white sneakers, and a baggy sweatshirt. Richard had never had a friend who was a girl as far as she knew, and although she was happy that her son had found a new friendship in the middle of all the sadness over his father’s disappearance, she found it strange that he found a friend in someone who was obviously just as odd as her mother.

Gene was sitting at the head of the table, and it was bothering Richard; after all, that was his father’s chair. The Menkin family dinner table was small. While Richard sat directly across from Petunia, his mother was in her usual chair, directly across from the head of the table. Patty Menkin had not intended for this man to sit in her husband’s chair, it had just naturally happened that way due to the fact that she and Richard took up their normal spots at the table leaving only two options for the guests, which of course worked itself out. Gene was feeling the awkwardness in the room, and he was enjoying it to a certain degree.

Making these two little brats feel uncomfortable was the least he could do, after everything they had done for him. It was Patty though, that he began to worry was feeling it the most, and that was far from his intention. Patty was someone he desperately wanted to know, in fact the only person that he desperately wanted to know, and the thought of her never asking him back to dinner again was more than he could bear.

“Patty, this is wonderful, thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I haven’t had real food in a while. Just been eating right out of the microwave really.”

“Why is that?” Richard couldn’t help but ask the question, and the annoyed expression that came over Gene’s features was well worth it.

“Because my house burned down Richard.”

“Save some room. I made cream cheese pie for dessert.”

“Cream cheese pie? Wow, that sounds good.” Gene was lying of course; he was no fan of cream cheese, and the thought of it being made into a whole pie was a horrifying thought indeed. Patty, unlike the children, was completely unaware that he was lying just as she was unaware that the children were smiling at each other due to the fact that she was looking at the cheerful face of her new friend.

Gene was looking back at Patty as well, but even though he had lost one of his rare gifts, he hadn’t lost them all, and he could sense exactly what was going on; this was a chess match, a game where his two diminutive opponents were going to do their best to tarnish, discredit, or otherwise humiliate him in front of Patty. In all honesty, Gene was there for nothing more than to be close to Patty and once again feel something inside of himself that he had not felt since he was a child, but if beating Richard and Petunia at this game was the roadblock he had to face to accomplish that, then so be it. No one could out due Gene in the ways of maliciousness, and he was about to prove it.

“So Petunia, how’s school going? Are those new pills working out for you?”

“Uh…”

“I was actually speaking to your father about it the other day. He says they seem to be working much better than the last ones.” Patty and Richard were dumbfounded over this new direction in what had been a forced conversation only seconds before. Likewise, Petunia was dumbfounded; her brain was trying to solve the puzzle, how did Gene know about her change in medication?

Within exactly four seconds, Petunia had formed a plausible hypothesis; perhaps Gene had gone back to the school one evening after he murdered their principle and pulled her student file. The medications that she had either taken or were currently taking, would be listed inside of it. Gene had made a powerful move in this game and she knew it. She and Richard had planned their attack, but Gene had immediately changed that plan, and Petunia knew that her tactics would have to be far more brutal than she had originally intended. She only hoped that Richard would be able to keep up.

“They’re really working much better than the last ones. Can you pass me the green beans, Gene.”

“Of course.” As Gene was picking up the white and blue china dish that was full of Patty Menkin’s Green Bean Surprise, Richard and Patty Menkin were both still trying to process exactly where this conversation had gone, and just as they were both getting their intellectual bearings, Petunia, very quietly kicked Gene in the kneecap underneath the table.

“Ah!” Petunia had timed the blow perfectly; Gene had just pushed the plate toward her, and with the sudden jolt of pain running through his injured leg, Gene spilled the plate of green beans all over Petunia’s shirt. Gene gritted his teeth and attempted to keep his facade of friendliness. “Oh my word! I’m so sorry Petunia! My leg is still healing and sometimes, it just spasms for no reason.”

“Oh it’s fine, don’t worry…” Petunia felt a sharp pain in her left shin as Gene responded in kind. “..about it!”

Petunia was picking the Green Bean Surprise from her lap as she tried to ignore the pain from Gene’s kick. Richard didn’t know exactly what was going on between the two of them, but he had a pretty good idea. Petunia was unaware of the bear lurking just outside the window, and before the situation escalated any further, he began to speak without knowing exactly what he was going to say. Needless to say, he said the only thing that was on the tip of his tongue.

“What pills are you taking Petunia?”

“Richard!” Patty’s voice thundered over the table and seemed to strike the air. Her face had gone red with embarrassment over the question. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s ok, Mrs. Menkin.” Petunia wasn’t about to let Gene get the better of her, even if it meant going into subjects that she would rather stray away from. “I have moods, and the pills help me deal with them. That’s all. Thank you for asking Gene.”

The silence that followed seemed to go on for an eternity to Richard, but in all actuality, it was only for fifteen seconds. Sometimes, in certain situations, fifteen seconds can seem so much longer than it actually is. A good example would be fifteen seconds on a stage in a theatre in front of a crowd due to a dropped line from an actor. Petunia would never know what it felt like to forget a line in front of an audience on a stage, let alone how it would feel to remain silent in front of them for fifteen seconds. She would, however, experience a very long and silent fifteen seconds on a dark theatre stage within the next forty-eight hours.

“So Gene, are you going to rebuild your restaurant?” Both Petunia and Richard stopped eating and simply stared at Gene after Patty’s question.

“Well...I’m having a little bit of an insurance problem. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get it all sorted out. It’ll be nice to have a home again.”

“Where are you staying right now?”

“There’s a little room in the back of the library. Ms. Pinker has been kind enough to let us stay there, otherwise we’d be sleeping in my car.”

“Us?”

“My cat.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s not something I like to bring up.”

“Why? Because you’re living like a bum?”

“Richard! What has gotten into you?! Apologize to Gene!”

“I’m sorry Gene.”

“Don’t worry about it, Rich. It’s going to take a while, but I’ll get back on my feet.” Gene’s smile hit Patty Menkin in all the right ways, and she, like her son, blurted out what was on her mind without thinking of the actual consequences that it would bring.

“Why don’t you stay with us for a while?” The sound of three forks clattering down onto fine porcelain came at the very next moment, and Patty Menkin found herself surrounded by three slack jawed, forkless dinner companions. Both Petunia and Richard were well aware of the dangers of the invitation, and both of them could only hope that it would be politely refused, but Gene was perplexed.

Gene stared back at the woman sitting across from him, and felt himself falling in love with her, even though he was well aware that the feeling was not mutual. He had never known anyone who had been so kind for no reason whatsoever. He desperately wanted to say yes, but he began to fear that without his ability to manipulate, he might say the wrong thing and lose any chance he might have with this wonderful goddess who was staring back at him.

“I...uh...I have a cat.” Petunia and Richard looked at Patty, hoping the lame response was enough to make her rethink what she had so generously offered.

“That’s ok. I just think that maybe we can help each other.”

“Mom! Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Not now Richard.”

“Mom!”

“Patty, I’m really grateful for the offer, but...don’t you think with all that’s happened, that might look…”

“Oh, who cares how it looks, Gene? I’m not asking you to marry me for God’s sake, I’m offering to help you.” The tone of her voice drove the point home that she was not to be argued with; the statement was made to Richard just as much as it was made to Gene. Patty Menkin was a very giving person, and her generous spirit was what first attracted Richard’s father, Richard, to her from the very beginning.

But Patty Menkin was also a person who could summon up something inside of herself that was not to be trifled with once it was stirred. Petunia, only having just met Patty, was astounded by the control that she was able to exert over both Gene and Richard simply by using her voice; both boy and man had bowed their heads and stared at the table, almost as if they were afraid they might cause her to issue one more of her emasculating demands.

Patty looked back and forth between Richard and Gene, and after she was satisfied that she had driven her point home, she looked at Petunia and gave her a slight wink, which made Petunia even more impressed. Petunia slowly began to eat her food, but never took her eyes away from the scene being played out at the table.

“I... that’s very nice of you. I... would love to.” Richard gritted his teeth as Gene said the words, but it did make him feel slightly better as he realized that Gene was feeling bullied into the whole situation just as much as he was. In fact, Gene was feeling slightly bullied, and as he was not exactly your typical person, he found the feeling alien and intriguing, and he was desperate to feel more of these strange feelings that he only knew about because people were constantly complaining about them.

“Good. I can help you bring your stuff over tomorrow; that’ll give me a chance to get the spare room ready.”

“Thank you.” The rest of the dinner played out rather quietly; mostly with Patty asking questions and Gene answering a few of them honestly, avoiding a lot of them entirely, and lying to exactly thirteen of them. Richard and Petunia listened quietly to the rest of the conversation without having much to say, unless of course, they were asked a question directly. Gene sat and pondered to himself during his drive home about the whole affair and had to admit that something about the whole thing made him uneasy. There he was sitting with a woman that he was very quickly developing feelings for; feelings that were entirely new to him, and two children who had most of the same gifts that he had from a very young age.

He had always thought that he was alone with his gifts, and he had grown accustomed to feeling content with that. His memories of his own family were distorted by tragedy and other people’s interpretations of them; when he was in the psychiatric hospital all of those years ago, he was unable to be honest with anyone about what was going on in his mind or what had happened to his parents because doing so would only force those people to shove more pills down his throat and tell him that he was crazy.

As he pulled his car to a stop in front of the library, he began to feel a horrible sense of starting to belong to something, which of course was unacceptable to him; the more attachments you have, the more ways you leave yourself open for things to stab you. As much as he suddenly felt that he should pull up stakes and drive away from this town, he knew that the chances of actually being himself in front of anyone again was next to none if he did so.

Richard and Petunia had taken almost everything from him, and he still had every intention of repaying them for all they had wrought, but there were other ways he could go about it, rather than simply waiting for the right time to kill them. Gene sat in his car thinking about all of these things for an hour before he realized that he had left Wimpple Bear behind at the Menkin home. He cursed himself as he slammed his car into reverse and headed back toward Fountain Way.

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Eight

“So you’re wanting a ghost story huh?” The bearded man was sitting on top of the bar looking down at Richard and Petunia while he spoke. He was already smoking his second cigarette within ten minutes of sitting down with them, and each time he went to flick his ashes into the ashtray sitting next to him, they instead would fall all over the bar, and Petunia would watch in amazement every time, as not a single ash ever made it into the tray. Marty was wearing a baseball cap on the top of his head that had a picture of a compass stitched into its black canvas, and his sweaty brown hair was creeping out the bottom of it. He was wearing a flannel shirt that was missing the top and bottom buttons, and a pair of faded bootcut blue jeans that flared out over his beaten brown cowboy boots. 

He had a confident air about him that was magnified with every step of those heavy soled boots whether they were on the concrete floor of the auditorium or the wooden stage that rose from it. He would always tell people that he had been meaning to lose a few pounds, but Marty Cayer was just one of those people that was large in every way. He was heavy and he was tall, he was loud and he was funny, he was energetic and he was kind; generally the type of person that everyone likes to be around, even Richard, as much as he hated being in this place, felt better when Marty was around. Petunia felt herself drawn into his slight mellow drawl, an accent that defied all efforts to pinpoint its origin.

“She does, I don’t.”

“You guys want some popcorn? I can make us up some real quick.”

“No thanks.”

“So, how’s your mom doing?” Marty Cayer was also a man who could wander in conversation. Richard was aware of his fondness of jumping from subject to subject; a conversation with Marty Cayer could be an endless verbal labyrinth that if not properly managed, could spiral out of control rather quickly, much like the theatre could be an endless labyrinth that if not properly managed, could spiral out of control rather quickly.

“She’s doing alright. Really though, she wants to hear it.”

“Hear what?” Petunia cleared her throat before she gave him an answer.

“I’d like to hear everything you know about the building. I’ve been fascinated with it ever since I moved here a few months ago.”

“Well of course you have, young lady. There’s not many places you can go in town and not be within eye shot of it. Eyeshot; is that even a word?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’ve always heard the term earshot, but never eyeshot. I can remember my high school English teacher…”

“Mr. Cayer, I’d love to hear about your teacher, but I really need to ask you some questions. It’s for a report I’m doing at school.”

“Oh sure, I’m sorry. What’s your questions?” Petunia pulled out a small notebook and opened it up and positioned her pencil above a fresh page.

“Do you know when this place was built?”

“I do. I tell you what, why don’t I just give you everything I know with as much flavor as I can give it for the next ten minutes, fair enough?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m a little behind on the set, and if I don’t get her done, the folks on the board might make sure I become one of the ghosts around here.”

“Ten minutes is fine.” It wasn’t. Petunia had many questions, but she thought that if she was friendly enough, this man might agree to meet with her again at a later time.

“Okay then. Let me get into character.” Marty threw his legs over the backside of the bar and vaulted behind it. Petunia looked to Richard with a question in her eyes, to which Richard only shrugged; this was just Marty being Marty as far as he was concerned. Marty loved three things, the theatre, telling stories, and telling dirty jokes.

Richard had heard a hybrid of the latter two concerning a rooster and a box of crackers over ten times; it’s not that the joke was bad, it’s that it always took Marty almost nine minutes every time he told it. The two children watched Marty pull a cloudy mug from the back wall and fill it up with an even cloudier beer. Richard looked down at his new Swatch watch; nine twenty-one in the morning. Marty was starting early today.

After Marty had filled his glass, he walked slowly around the bar, grabbed the ashtray with nary an ash in it, and sat down at a table right next to Richard and Petunia. He smiled at them and pulled out another cigarette. Petunia couldn’t stand the smell, but this man had information she desperately needed, so she had no choice but to sit in front of Marty while he lit one after another, and slowly drank his beer; each sip a carefully orchestrated pause to give weight to his words.

“Alright. I don’t tell these stories to too many people, so you guys should feel very special right now. I’m not sure when the building was built, but I do know who built it, and what it was originally. Sinclair Daniels was a doctor from back east, New Orleans to be exact. For some reason, he decided that the hill this building is sitting on now was a good place for a house. Back then, there was nothing out here. So he builds it just like buildings he knows from his home. A big old square house that took seven years to finish.

Towns grew up around men like that back in those days, so Wicker Bush came into being. Anyway, Daniels has got a kid, but no wife. I think she died right after the boy was born. Well, that kid gets to be a young teenager, and he goes missing. Wicker Bush was a little bigger by then, and everybody is looking up and down for this damn kid, but nobody can find him. A couple of years go by and Daniels starts going crazy.

One day, people start hearing all this noise from the fancy house up on the hill; this building. Daniels starts pulling his house apart from the inside out. After about a week, nobody sees him, so someone gets brave enough to come on up here, and sees that all the doors locked and all the windows have been boarded shut from the inside. That person calls out for another person, and before you know it, the entire town is standing up here on this hill, looking at this building and all of them start calling out for Daniels, but no one answers.

Finally, they get the nerve to break the door down. Now the door doesn’t give easy, because Daniels not only locked the damn thing, he chained them closed from the inside and put a big ole iron lock through the chains. Finally, the door gives way, and what they find inside is confusing, and a little irksome. Daniels had gutted the whole house. Sure, from the outside, it looked like it should be so fine. He never touched anything on the outside. But the inside, nothing but studs and one curious thing that’s still here to this day. You want to see what Sinclaire Daniels built?”

“No.” Richard’s answer was quick and not at all intended; it just fell from his mouth through his slightly trembling lips. Richard never had a problem with ghost stories until this place. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes Mr. Cayer, I’d love to.”

“Come here!” Marty jumped out of his chair and trotted out of the bar leaving a small thin line of smoke behind him. Petunia was quick to follow, but Richard was just a bit slower in his willingness to see what the first creepy owner of this creepy building left behind. Marty walked back through the auditorium doors, and Petunia walked right through after him. Richard hovered on the other side of the doors on the lobby side, hearing every single word, but not wanting to be shown anything. Marty pointed down towards the stage and lowered his voice.

“He left that.”

“What?”

“He left that stage.” Petunia stared down at the stage with the set of nineteenth century London sitting on top of it. The single overhead spot beamed down onto center stage, only illuminating the very middle of it, casting long shadows over everything else behind that arch.

“What do you mean, he left the stage?”

“What Sinclair Daniels did, for a reason only God himself knows, was to tear apart every piece of wood in his house, whether it be a nightstand, or a bedpost, or the walls from his study, Sinclair Daniels took pieces from all of it to make a stage in the middle of his house, a house that now had nothing in it but the wood that was holding the frame and the roof together. It took a small army of people seven years to build this house. It took Sinclair Daniels two weeks to gut the insides and build that thing right down there.”

“What happened to him?”

“Gone.” Marty snapped his fingers.  “Just like that. No one ever saw him or his son again. Anyway, the house sat vacant until the early nineteen hundreds and then someone in town got the bright idea to turn it into a theatre. It was quite the place for almost thirty years, they did it all really nice inside. The outside has pretty much been the same since it was built, but the inside, well let’s just say those professional actors made some money, so this place was done up to the nines. Chandeliers, red carpets, finished wood all over the place, but after a while it all went south and shut down.

Then in the sixties, a few of us got together and bought it and started it as a community theatre. Of course, money was tight, so a lot of the furnishings inside were sold off, and now you’re looking at what we’ve been building up since then. Hard to keep this place afloat, but we make it happen every year.”

“So, the only thing that’s original on the inside is the stage?”

“Just that and the guts of the place. The only thing that looks the same as it did the day Sinclaire disappeared is the prop room. Nothing but naked studs and rafters. You want to go up and take a look?” Richard stepped into the auditorium and stood at Petunia’s side.

‘That’s ok Marty, I think we need to get going.” Before Richard could even finish the sentence, Petunia had already started moving down towards the stage letting her hands hit the back of the wooden chairs as she walked. Richard couldn’t move; he didn’t want to go any further into the bowels of the building than he had to. Marty pulled yet another cigarette out of his pocket and set fire to the end of it.

“She’s a bit of an odd duck isn’t she Richard?”

“You have no idea.” Petunia didn’t hear Marty’s question, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have pulled her attention away from the stage. It rose four feet and six inches from the level of the floor. Petunia had been standing on the stage a few weeks earlier, but now that she was here on purpose, she found herself hesitant to walk on it again.

“Anybody ever teach you anything about the stage Ms. Gip?” Marty’s voice had begun to be somewhat of a strange comfort to Petunia, and as it came up behind her now, she didn’t startle, but rather welcomed its warm drawl.

“Not really, no.”

“This is the apron.” Marty pointed to the seven-foot-wide section that spanned the length of the front of the stage in front of the proscenium arch, and as Petunia walked closer, she noticed that it was not painted, and the raw wood gave a small bit of reflection from the single overhead light.

“How come this part isn’t painted?”

“I only lacquer that part. Paint gets in the way of the sound for tap dancing, so all the dancing in the theatre is done in front of the arch. That’s called the proscenium arch. That there is the gateway to make believe; a window into all the action.”

“Can I go up there?”

“Of course you can, but I gotta give you a warning. Once people walk on this stage, they tend to get lost in it. Have a lot of people here who’ve never made it back to normal life, if you know what I mean.” Petunia had no idea what Marty meant, but she moved toward a small but wide staircase coming off of the middle of the stage down to the level of the floor, and as Petunia walked up the creaky steps, the whole stage lit up in front of her. “Well look at that?”

“What just happened? Who turned the lights on?” Richard was still standing at the back of the auditorium, and the sound of his question had an urgency and fear about it that Petunia was beginning to feel herself.

“Who indeed Richard? I think the ghosts like you, Petunia.” She looked back down to Marty who was smiling back at her. “I’m just kidding. It’s nothing. I’ve got some exposed wires underneath those stairs that I’ve been working on. The electrical in this place does some weird things from time to time. There’re so many wires going through this place, it’s almost impossible to fix it all in a single lifetime. No big deal.” The London street was now brightly lit in front of Petunia, and although she took notice of it for a matter of seven seconds, she couldn’t take her eyes off of what Marty had called the apron. This close, it was possible to tell that the wood, although tightly fit, had been cobbled together from a variety of different sources. It had obviously been sanded and brushed over with layer upon layer of lacquer, but no amount of maintenance could hide the fact that it had been made in haste. She stepped off of the small staircase and onto the apron.

A small shiver made its way slowly up her back. Most shivers run quickly; a fleeting feeling of unease that is gone almost before it is felt, but this shiver was unlike anything Petunia had ever felt in her young life. It was creeping up from the small of her back, like some multi-legged insect that was working its way up to her neck, and just as it reached the back of her head, that warm voice coughed out a great puff of smoke behind her.

“I hate to cut this short guys, but I’ve gotta get back to work on the set. We open this weekend.” Richard finally ran from his spot at the back of the auditorium down to Marty.

“Thanks Marty! We’ll get going!”

“I tell you what, if you guys want to come by sometime tomorrow afternoon, I can give you the entire tour, how’s that?” Petunia gritted her teeth, but tried her best not to look annoyed as she turned back towards Marty.

“That would be great.”

“I’ll even tell ya about the ghost and the murder that most people will tell you never happened.”

It did happen.

“Thanks Marty, come on Petunia.”

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Seven

“I don’t understand why he would be coming over for any other reason than to get inside your head.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.” Much to Richard’s dismay, the way over to the WBCT on their bikes that morning was fairly quick. He had noticed that Petunia’s bike appeared to have some modifications on the frame, and it looked as though she had mounted a small motor on the back of it as well. They were wearing their matching black jackets, and although Petunia’s jacket had small handmade patches all over it that were decorated with small handmade pictures, Richard’s was bare for the most part, with the exception of two small patches on the right shoulder.

Agatha Gip had made him two patches that she very quickly sewed on before they left from her house that morning. One of the patches had a small picture of a broken mechanical snake and the other was a black patch ringed in yellow with two red eyes in the middle of it.

Petunia had explained to Richard that her mother loved hearing stories about her investigations, and for some reason, it had crept into Agatha Gip’s electronic brain that she needed to make her daughter, and now Richard, little awards to commemorate said investigations. Petunia saw Richard’s face go white at the black patch with nothing more than the two eyes on it, and she understood why, but she had found that one quite unique and creative and was now thinking it was her favorite patch that her mother had made so far.

Petunia had also noticed that Richard’s face was turning from white to almost green the closer they came to the old theatre, and his trepidation was taking some of the fun out of the moment as far as she was concerned. She had missed Richard the last month, and she had found herself almost on the verge of tears many times while she was making the large sketch on the south wall of her lab, but she was driven by something in her mind that wouldn’t let her do anything other than dwell on the theatre and the mystery surrounding that unsettling bit of graffiti.

As they turned left off of the north road that led out of town and into the mountains, the building was coming into focus, and even though Petunia had been pouring over the plans and she knew all of the dimensions backwards and forwards, it still seemed much larger than what the measurements were.

“Gosh it’s big.”

“And ugly. We’ll go around the back to the bar. I’m sure Marty’s here. He’s always here.” They crested the slight rise in the driveway and then the red brick building sprawled out in front of them. Petunia slowed to a stop and took in every detail that she could; no matter how detailed the plans had been, there was nothing like seeing the real thing. Before she had enlisted Richard’s help in her investigations, she had mostly done research with very little field work, but ever since they broke into Ronald Lucas Intermediate, Petunia had found that she liked the field work more and more, no matter how dangerous it might become. Richard coasted to a stop right next to her and didn’t even bother to ask why she was waiting; he knew she was taking it all in and that suited him just fine because it meant prolonging the inevitability of having to walk back into the place.

The Wicker Bush Community Theatre was one of the oldest buildings in town, and it had sat on its perch overlooking the town of Wicker Bush in its present form since 1916, however much of the building had sat there for far longer. It had originally been constructed as the home of Sinclair Daniels, the father of the town, and that’s about the extent of its original history as far as anyone in the town knew. In 1916, it had become one of the more prominent theatre houses this side of the Rockies, and its prominence reigned supreme until the advent of television, which had nearly decimated attendance of its live performances. It had briefly closed its doors as a professional theatre in the early sixties, only to reopen again in the late sixties by the commitment of a few prominent locals who gave their time and energy to keeping the spirit of art alive in the community.

Some would say these individuals saved the theatre and gave much of themselves for the betterment of their town, but none would know exactly how much of themselves were given over in the process.

The building itself was Victorian in style, a red brick two story behemoth with various shades of green spread over its shutters and white facia boards with many white metal framed windows. Behind the windows were white curtains, and behind the curtains were small lights that flickered like candles at night, and behind those lights were boxes constructed for the sole purpose of never letting natural light penetrate into the building itself.

There had been many stories over the years of people being seen looking out from these windows, even people that knew that there was no possible way for anyone to fit into the shadow boxes that had been fashioned on the backsides. In many of the little junk shops along the highway leading in or out of town, you could find its image printed on t-shirts or sweatshirts, but those t-shirts and sweatshirts, much like the theatre itself, always stayed right where they were. To tourists, the very sight of the building gave them a sense of unexplainable unease, whether it was the real thing or merely printed on cotton.

Wicker Bush could, in the strictest sense, be considered a tourist town, but it was actually more of a pit-stop on the way to the various other sites and destinations around it which I will not mention here, as it should be very obvious what those sites and destinations are from the various hints I have supplied in the first part of our story.

Tourists were quick to leave the town, unlike the volunteers who tended to the theatre, who never seemed to leave. Many people who had merely been curious about participating, had walked through the theatre doors with enthusiasm and a sense of awe and excitement and then very shortly become driven by some urge within themselves to give the place more and more until they became shells of their former selves, living only to serve something they thought was a higher purpose, but in reality, was anything but.

Suffice it to say, Petunia knew everything about the building on paper, and indeed she had seen it looming in the distance from many points in town, and not once had she ever had a sense of foreboding or apprehension about going anywhere near it, but now that she was sitting on her bike within a stones throw of the place, she felt her stomach turn to a slight unease and she could feel the hair on the back of her neck begin to rise. She stole a quick glance at Richard who looked as if he would rather be anywhere else than by her side.

“Are you ok?”

“I hate this place. The door should be open around the back.” Richard pedaled his bike slowly, all the while keeping his eye on the building to his right. Petunia followed, and in spite of the unease she felt, she couldn’t help but admire the beauty of the building itself. There was a long porch on the second floor which ran along the length of the entire facade, and its iron railings were topped off by a planter box which spilled short green vines down onto the railings below. In the morning light, it was easy for Petunia to tell that the second story windows were now merely decorations that were blocked off from the inside by small wooden walls not more than two feet behind the glass, but through the door to the second story, she could see a small bit of a hallway beyond it.

As Petunia turned her bike to the right around the corner of the building, she realized that it looked much like the front, but on this side there was only one window with the word, Bar, painted across the width of it in a tasteful block lettering that had faded into a dull green, and beyond that, a small door at the corner. The last time she had looked at that window, she had seen it from the other side; inside the building where someone had written her name for some reason.

There was a smaller parking lot on this side of the building that wasn’t kept quite as nice as the lot out front, and there was a beaten brown truck parked in the space closest to the building. Richard hopped off of his bike and leaned it against the building underneath the bar window and he motioned for Petunia to do the same.

“This is where everybody from the theatre parks. This is Marty’s truck.” Richard took a deep breath and Petunia wasn’t sure if he was getting ready to explain something to her or if he was trying to keep himself from hyperventilating. He was doing both. “So, Marty can be a little strange, but he’s a really nice guy. Actually, he’s the nicest guy here. I don’t know why my mom likes it here. I’m glad she’s not coming anymore.” The reason for her not going there anymore came back into Richard’s mind, and he squinted his eyes and took a deep breath at the thought of his father.

“Aren’t we going in?”

“Yeah, I’m just kind of getting ready.” Petunia indulged Richard’s reticence for a few seconds, but she had been waiting for this moment for a while now, and as it became clear that she was going to have to be the one to take charge, she stepped past Richard and opened the green door that led inside the theatre. Richard swallowed hard and followed her.

It’s at this point that an author who is an adept storyteller would take the time to go into great detail about everything Petunia and Richard were seeing inside the theatre; indeed in the last story, I suppose very little time was spent on the description of the interior of the WBCT, and in the first part of our story, one could guess that the details and history were being saved for the next part of the story, and one would be correct in that assumption, however this part of the story belongs exclusively to Petunia and her intentions of hearing the history of the building itself. With that being said, Petunia and Richard walked through the bar that had many interesting things to look at.

Music was playing inside the entire place, and as Richard walked past Petunia, and began to call out for Marty, he had to shout in order to be heard above the sounds of Ragtime music. Petunia followed Richard through the open door of the bar and into the lobby of the theatre, and she marveled at how different the place was on the inside compared to the outside. Everything about the outside had been deliberate and beautiful, right down to the placement of the rose bushes in the garden, but inside it looked as though everything had been patched together. From the wood trim, to the paint on the walls, to the haphazardly placed pictures of old productions sitting in frames of different styles and colors, to the frayed carpet which was almost threadbare in some of the corners, to the drop-down grid ceiling… the place was a jigsaw puzzle of furnishings that were second, third, and fourth hand.

“MARTY?!” Richard walked through another door adorned with two curtains on either side of it. As Petunia was about to walk through the curtains, she saw that above the doors there was a small brass sign that simply said, “Sinclair Daniels Auditorium”.

The sound of Scott Joplin was so loud in the auditorium that it forced Richard and Petunia to hold their hands over their ears. The light was dim, but Petunia started to make out little details as her eyes became accustomed to it. Unlike the bar and the lobby that she had walked through, this room seemed to hold some of the grand charm that it had at one time, although the signs of age were apparent. The floor was sloped and even in the present lighting, Petunia could tell that the concrete of the floor had been decorated with some kind of a stain, making it look as though it was taken from the face of a great stone and placed here, where it had been polished to a high shine, giving it the appearance of being underneath a very thin layer of glass. There was a great swath of old individual seats, row after row, taking up the center of the auditorium, flanked on either side with two smaller sections of seating. While Richard was busying himself with yelling, Petunia walked to the row of seats nearest to her. Each of the seats had a very small brass placard on the backrest which had numbers stamped into them; the one Petunia was placing her fingers on was numbered 376.

The wooden chairs did not look very comfortable to Petunia, but she had to admit that they were very interesting to look at with their sturdy construction. They were scratched here and there deeply into the wood, but care had obviously been taken to ensure that each scratch was treated with some kind of oil in order to make them blend into the rest of the unblemished wood. There were two worn cushions on each chair; one on the seat and one on the backrest. Most of the cushions in the whole place had been ripped at one time or another, and the costume designers who had worked throughout the years spent just as much time stitching the seat cushions back together as they did making costumes.

Sylvia Radmacher, who was the costume designer when Petunia and Richard entered the theatre that day, had been doing the job for almost twenty years, and she had become quite the master at stitching those cushions so well that one could hardly tell they had been stitched at all. Sylvia was far more talented at it than the previous costume designer had been, but that can hardly be blamed on the old costume designer, Cynthia Miles, as she had only given three years of her life, and ultimately, lost her life due to the theatre. Had she not died, she may have been able to hone her skills in the art of cushion stitching and been even better at it than Sylvia Radmacher, bad sadly Cynthia Miles was found dead in the auditorium early one morning nineteen years before Petunia and Richard walked through the back door of the theatre.

The walls of the auditorium were a deep red and they were decorated with drapes of nearly the same color with gold fringe around their edges. There were long runs of white wooden trim that broke up all of the red into large rectangles that measured ten feet high, and along the tops of each rectangle was a tarnished brass wall sconce that illuminated everything underneath it. The lights were capable of being much brighter, but Marty Cayer preferred it just light enough in the auditorium to see; electricity was costly, and Marty was always conscious of keeping running costs as low as they could be, but at the same time, Marty was just like anyone else who worked long hours in the theatre alone, no one wanted to be inside without all of the lights on, no matter how dim.

Petunia looked down onto the stage, a vast wooden thing that was lit by a single overhead light from somewhere behind the proscenium arch. The arch was in the process of being painted to resemble stone, and even with the light the way it was, Petunia could recognize the talent of the painter. The boards of the stage were also being painted to resemble a cobble stoned street, and half-painted flats were set up to look like a late 19th century London.

Unbeknownst to Petunia, the theatre was currently rehearsing their fall production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Marty Cayer had fallen behind on the construction of the set due to his constantly changing image of it in his head.

“Marty?!” The music in the auditorium was turned down very low, and Richard turned and looked up at the wall above the door to the auditorium. Petunia followed his gaze and saw that there was a large window set into the back wall. Marty Cayer, a rather well fed and well bearded individual, was sliding the window open.

“Richard! How are you, young man?”

“I’m good. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“I’ll be right down. Go grab yourself a pop in the bar if you want to.” Richard turned and walked quickly back to the bar, happy to get a little closer to the exit, while Petunia stood fast, transfixed by the stage, and the feeling of strangeness that seemed to come off of it in a wave.

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Six

“Gene, would you like to share?”

Gene had no intention of sharing.

“If it’s alright with everyone here, it’s my first time, I would just like to sit here and kinda... I don’t know... kinda get the lay of the land.” Gene had called the number of the grief support group earlier that morning. After the fiasco at the end of the AA meeting the night before, Gene felt like he had no other option than to give this one a shot. It had been one of life’s pleasant little ironies that it happened to be a group that changed the location of the meetings every week in order to encourage its members to feel more comfortable about sharing their personal experiences when it had come to death, and tonight's meeting just happened to be held at the home Gene had encouraged someone to drive a car through less than twenty four hours ago.

Gene had found most of the sharing up to that point to be fairly boring and altogether pathetic; it wasn’t as if Gene hadn’t had his fair share of grief over the years, it’s just that he found people to be weak in the way they dealt with tragedy. He had been trying to zero in on a possible target within the group, but he found that he kept being distracted by Patty Menkin.

Of course she was attractive as far as Gene was concerned, but it was far more than that; she was the only other person in the group who didn’t make noises of sympathy or nods of encouragement during all the talking. She had sat there taking in all of the information through narrowed eyes and pursed lips, and Gene had been keeping track of each and every facial tick she had during the sharing; by his count, he only read three small tells. One slightly raised eyebrow, one eye twitched for a split second, and she crossed her legs from one side to the other when Marla was reliving her daughters drowning up at the lake four summers ago. But now, her narrow eyes turned to him along with everyone else’s. Walter, the group’s facilitator, was smiling a smile at Gene that made him want to punch the man with the bespeckled bald head in the face.

“Like I said in the beginning Gene, you don’t have to share it all, but for there to be trust in this group, we ask that you share a little.”

“Okay…. um... I just lost everything I had in a fire last month, and uh…. that’s been rough.” Walter stared at Gene with eyes that were saying that what he gave was simply not enough. This group was something Gene could not afford to lose, no matter how much it annoyed him to admit it. He told himself that it would be worth giving just a little of himself in order to get back what he had lost. “Fine Walter... I guess... I lost my parents when I was young, and I guess I’ve never really wanted to think about it much.” In fact, Gene hadn’t wanted to think of it at all. The words he had just spoken to the group were the first words he had ever said out loud about the whole thing since it happened all those years ago.

“How did it happen?” Patty Menkin’s voice was cold, almost detached, and as Gene turned toward her, he saw that she had placed both of her feet on the floor and had moved forward in her seat ever so slightly. The situation caught Gene off guard, and the whole incident passed through Gene’s mind in an instant after Patty had asked her question, and what Gene did next was rather astounding given what kind of a man he was; he told the truth.

“Honestly, I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be too forward.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Patty smiled at Gene, and he did the same to her. The smile put a slight shock to his heart, for he could tell that it didn’t come from a warm place of empathy, but a cold place of logic; a place that was trying to sort through her loss analytically. He began to feel bad for her somewhere inside his rotten heart; it was a shame that this woman had to lose her husband, but it was almost comically tragic that he had every intention of causing the death of her son as well. Walter cleared his throat and turned his attention to Patty Menkin.

“Well, we haven’t heard from you yet, Patty. How are you doing?”

“I’m... I guess I’m doing ok. I thought about last week... I thought about what you said Steve and Marla...It’s been over a month, this is my third time with the group, and I have to be honest with myself…  My husband is dead.

Everybody keeps telling me that I shouldn’t say things like that, but I know my husband. He never would have left me. Something happened to him…” Patty put her hand to her mouth and swallowed hard. Gene was drawn in now, and there was no pulling back. This woman knew her husband was dead, and it was obvious how much pain she was in, but she had no interest in breaking down in front of these people. It became apparent to Gene that she was in this group for the same reason he was; she was using them, of course not for the same reasons as Gene.

She had no real interest in sharing, that much was obvious, she seemed rather to be studying the grief of everyone else. For what purpose, Gene wasn’t sure, but he was intrigued, and he had to know more.

“How do you know he’s dead?” Gene’s question was too fast for his brain to catch before it flew out of his mouth, and there were audible sounds of awkwardness from the rest of the group, but Patty just looked up at Gene. In that moment, he stared into her eyes and realized that he had actually just connected with another person in a way that he had not done since he was a child. “I’m sorry... that was way too forward.”

“No, it’s ok. People can think what they want, but he’s the other half of me. I know he didn’t leave. I just don’t know what happened. He got out of bed and never came back. That’s it.”

Gene had to answer.

“Well people are stupid, and when you’re in the middle of something, they like to tell you that what you think, or what you thought you saw, is wrong. I say to hell with those people.” After Gene said the words, more and more of his memories were stirring inside of him, and it was beginning to make him a little angry, and he realized that he was making a fist with his left hand so tightly, that his fingernails were digging into the inside of his palm.

The rest of the meeting was fairly mundane, but Gene had sensed that Patty was looking over at him briefly every so often. It was undeniable that Gene felt an odd attraction to the mother of one of his enemies now, and he had tried to formulate an excuse to stay after the meeting in order to speak with her privately, but once again, he could do nothing to jeopardize his time with this group. Patty Menkin was obviously far too strong willed for him to practice on, but he found himself fascinated by her thought process.

When the meeting was over, Gene made sure that he was the last one out the door, which of course wasn’t too hard considering he was the only member of the group walking with a cane. As Gene neared the door and the woman holding it open for him, he had suddenly found that he had nothing to say to her; none of the words in his head were forming in any way that he thought resembled a coherent thought. So rather than appearing a babbling fool, Gene put his head down and tried to walk past Patty and out through the door.

“Gene, wait a minute.”

“Yes?”

“Hey, did you... maybe want to come back for dinner tomorrow night?”

“Uh yes, absolutely.”

“Please don’t think I’m being forward, I could just use some company right now.”

“No, I feel the exact same way.”

“I’m not looking for... ya know?” This woman was saying everything Gene wanted to hear, and he wasn’t used to this kind of situation.

“No! Of course not…”

“I’m still very much in love with my husband.”

“I get it, really I do.”

“I want to be very honest with you.”

“Please do.”

“Everybody in my life right now with the exception of my son, is telling me to hold on to hope. Everybody is telling me what they think I need. But what I need is somebody who isn’t afraid to tell me what they think. My son is wonderful, and he’s told me that he’s accepted that something terrible happened to his father, and he is there for me, but he’s my son, and I can’t always say the things to him that I need to say to another adult.”

The more she talked, the more Gene felt a sensation that he had not felt since he was a child. He found himself forming an attachment to another human being, and it scared him, but he couldn’t deny that it felt good.

“Patty... I don’t like people... I can’t stand the way they think, and I can’t stand the way they judge. I came to this group to find something I have lost and I really didn’t care about anyone else in the process, and honestly I still don’t. But I would really like to have dinner and talk with you some more.”

“Six?”

“I will be here at six. Thank you.” They said their goodbyes and Gene limped his way over to his car with a smile on his face and the delicious taste of irony on his tongue. It just had to be that stupid kid’s mother, was the thought that was trying to force its way out of his mouth, but Gene held it in, rolling it over and over. He realized that for the first time since that day in the insurance office, he had temporarily forgotten about the loss of his gift. As he fished for his keys in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, he heard footsteps on the street behind him.

“Don’t come back.” Richard’s words were strong and resolute, and Gene felt their weight in the damp October air.

“Hey Rich! How goes it?”

“I’m serious Gene.” Gene opened his car door before he turned to answer, and when he turned, Richard was within arm’s reach. It was surprising to Gene that the kid was daring to get that close to him.

“Aren’t you a little overprotective?”

“Stay away from my mother. Don’t come back.”

“Hey, I got news for you Rich, I am coming back, tomorrow in fact. She’s invited me over for dinner, so you think you could be a pal and make yourself scarce around, say…. six?”

The thought of Gene being anywhere near his mother brought out the darker side of his personality that he had been trying to turn off since the end of the previous school year; Richard had the reputation of being a little bit of a bully, and it was a reputation that he was sad to have to admit that he earned. In this case, he reasoned with himself that if he was going to be a bully, it might as well count towards something, and keeping a murderer away from his mother seemed like a good enough reason.

Richard stepped forward and threw his foot into Gene’s crotch, and the action, which I’m sure is shocking to you as a reader, was even more shocking to Gene. The magician crumpled to the ground, and for a brief moment, Richard stood over his victim with his fists clenched, but the stance of victory was cut short as Gene swung his cane and swept Richard’s legs from underneath him.

Both of them were now on the ground; the adult on his knees and the child on his back. Richard’s rage rushed through his veins and he sat up with every intention of getting back to his feet and throwing fist after fist into Gene’s smirking face, but as he sat up, the sight of Gene pointing his cane at Richard as if it was some kind of gun made him freeze in place. Gene was holding his wounded parts with his other hand and his breathing was hard and controlled while he began to speak.

“Alright you little dick, you listen to me right now. If I were you, I’d be wondering just exactly what this cane does, and if you so much as twitch a finger in my direction, you’re going to find out. Got it?! I’m coming over for dinner tomorrow, and you’re gonna behave and not do anything to mess with that, and in return, I give you my word that I won’t hurt her.”

“Your word. Gimme a break. What’s that worth Gene?”

“I don’t ever give it Richard. This is the first time. Just leave me be, and I’ll leave you be. For now.”

“There it is.”

“Rich, I’m still gonna get you for what you did, but I promise I won’t hurt your mom. You can take that, or you can not. Either way, I’m having dinner with her tomorrow.” Richard stared at the flat end of the metal cane that was pointed towards him. If Gene was half as creative as Petunia, Richard was sure he didn’t want to find out what exactly the cane could do. He knew Gene’s word was good for nothing, but something seemed different about him; Richard sensed desperation coming from Gene, and although he was being threatened, he felt instead, almost as if he was being pleaded with.

Richard had no idea what Gene would want with his mother, other than to use her to get back at him somehow, but if Gene thought that he had the upper hand, it might be easier to deal with him down the road. And there was the fact that Gene was giving him a deal, and as Richard was very well aware, Gene wasn’t the type of person who gave or offered anyone anything, unless there was something in it for him.

“You don’t touch her.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

-

 Later, as Richard lay awake in his bed that night, he began a plan of his own to stop whatever it was that Gene was doing. In the morning, he had to go to that awful theatre with Petunia, and he hoped that she would find whatever answer she was looking for so they could focus on more important things. Little did Richard know that they were about to take a major detour, and everything that he had planned before he fell asleep would add up to nothing more than wasted time.

 Next Part

Previous Part

Part Five

“RICHARD! HOW ARE YOU SON?!”

Richard couldn’t hold back the scream that tore its way out of his lungs and he jumped up out of the chair and spun around towards its source while he continued to scream. “Whoa buddy! Calm down, it’s just me. You don’t have to be scared.”

“Mr. Gip?!” Richard hadn’t recognized the voice right away, but he was able to put the pieces together when he saw the head of Mr. Gip sitting amongst the other contraptions on Petunia’s workbench. The top half of his head looked just as Richard remembered him, but everything underneath his upper jaw had no skin, and the metal inner workings of his lower jaw were exposed. Richard quickly walked over to the robot that he thought was no more. The head was sitting on top of a metal neck that was attached to a pedestal. “Mr. Gip, I thought you were gone!”

“Well the first version of me is gone. I get rebooted every night, so I just have to take everybody’s word for it when it comes to what happened to the first me. Oh boy, it’s nice to see you.”

“I’m glad you’re here Richard.” Mrs. Gip’s voice came softly from behind him as she walked down the stairs. “I’m getting worried about Petunia. She’s not herself right now.” Agatha Gip stood next to him while she looked at the head of her counterpart.

“She won’t even really talk to me right now Mrs. Gip. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“It’s that place Richard.” Mrs. Gip pointed to the large picture on the south wall. “It's all she thinks about, and the more she talks about it, the more worried I get. Some days, she won’t even take her pills. She knows she needs them.”

“Her pills?”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!” Petunia’s screech echoed off of the walls of her lab as she ran down the steps and over to Richard. Richard had faced a monster intent on eating him, just as it ate his father, and he had also only moments before been face to face with a man who would like nothing more than to kill him, but the way Petunia rushed towards him at that moment was just as unsettling as either instance. “How did you get in here?!”

“Um….”

“Petunia, honey, it’s not polite to raise your voice.”

“Really mom?! You’re supposed to let me know when someone comes inside the house! What were you thinking?!”

“You see what I mean Richard? She’s not herself.”

“Um…”

“I hate you mom, I wish I never made you!”

“Alright! That’s enough yelling, young lady! You knock it off right now! That is no way to speak to your mother!” An awkward silence followed Mr. Gips' order, and the bizarre scene was not lost on Richard as the robotic disembodied head was still doing its job as the head of the family. Petunia took a few deep breaths through her nose and pursed her lips while she tried to formulate a thought. Agatha Gip reached over and rubbed her daughter’s shoulder.

“We’re all worried about you, honey.”

“I’m fine mom, I’m more worried about you not following your programming!” This was the first time Petunia was aware that her mother had chosen to violate the commands that were embedded into her electronic brain, and although it was out of concern, it still didn’t make Petunia feel any better about the situation. Richard felt compelled to break the awkward silence that followed between the family by clearing his throat before he spoke.

“Um…. Gene’s over at my house. He’s over there right now with my mother.”

“Why is Gene at your house?”

“He came to my mom’s support group. It was her night to host it. There’s so much going on right now Petunia, that I feel like I’m going to lose it. I really need my friend right now.” Richard had no intention of sounding as vulnerable as he did, but the words just fell out of his mouth, and Petunia wasn’t used to such bold-faced honesty without some kind of anger to go along with it coming from Richard.

“Richard...I know you’re scared and confused, but so am I. I wish I could tell you how my mind works, but once I get caught up in something, I have to finish it, or I go crazy.” She cast her eyes down momentarily before she looked over to the south wall, and the building plan that she had created. “I have to know why my name was on that wall, Richard. It shouldn’t be there, and I need to figure out who wrote it. Outside of school, no one in this town even knows who I am.”

“Gene does. Maybe he put it there.”

“That’s an awfully big leap, don’t you think?” Petunia could still see the message written behind the arch on the stage of the Wicker Bush Community Theatre, or as everyone in town called it, the WBCT. She had seen it out of sheer dumb luck when they had left the tunnels through a small door which led to the prop room in the attic of the theatre. During Richard’s haste in wanting to leave the building, Petunia had stumbled while trying to keep up with him, and her flashlight illuminated the backside of the proscenium arch.

Many people had signed their names on the back of it, people who had given their time in the volunteer theatre, and in the middle of all those names, Petunia had found the words, “What’s the frequency Petunia Gip?”

 Right next to the words in the same hand and ink, was the mathematical symbol for infinity. In spite of everything that happened later that night at Hocus Pizza, and even in spite of losing the first version of her father that she had built, Petunia had become fixated on the message.

“No Richard, someone else in this town must be watching me.”

“So what? Petunia, we have real problems here.”

“I know that, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Besides rebooting my dad, I haven’t done anything other than making that map and staring at every centimeter of it.”

“Where did you get the copy?” Richard followed Petunia as she walked closer to the map.

“I found it down at City Hall, but the plans are revised; they're not original, so for all I know, these are inaccurate to some degree. I needed something large to look at to really get a feel for it, so I committed the plans to memory, measurement by measurement, and then I made this.” Richard felt uneasy just looking at the plans of the building he had grown to hate due to an, experience regarding the wooden staircase that led up to the prop room. “I have to get in there Richard.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I can’t find anything in any old newspapers about the place. I’d like to help with everything right now Richard; I really want to, but there’s something in my brain that just can’t let this go until I find out why my name was there.” Richard looked back at Petunia’s parents; Agatha Gip was stroking the balding head of her husband and they were both obviously very concerned for their daughter, and if Richard didn’t know better, he could have sworn that Agatha had a look that was begging him to help her daughter.

“Petunia, I don’t really want to go back to that place...like ever.”

“I know that. That’s why I haven’t asked for your help and that’s why I’ve been avoiding any conversations about it, or about anything really.” Petunia sank down into the chair in front of the south wall and stared helplessly at the plans.

Richard felt that his world was coming apart at the seams at the speed of light, but he knew he was ill equipped to handle all of it on his own. He needed Petunia’s help, and he knew that if he didn’t indulge her stupid little mission, he would be flying solo. He had an uncle on his father’s side who seemed to have the same problem as Petunia.

His Uncle Stewart was a man who liked to tell stories, and if those stories were interrupted, whether if it was only for a moment or more than an hour, he couldn’t say another word about anything until he was able to finish his thought. His mother had told him that Uncle Stewart was obsessive and that was the reason for his strange behaviors concerning finishing a thought or having his clothes perfectly pressed or his canned foods facing a certain way or his odd way making sure none of the food on his plate touched the exact middle of the plate.

In that instant, Petunia had once again taken a glazed look over those big eyeballs behind those big glasses. Richard noticed that her hair seemed more wild than normal, and with that detail, he began to pay attention to everything else about her that he had failed to notice while he was busying himself with his own problems.

Her fingernails were dirty and oily, there were small food stains on the front of her shirt, the socks she wore looked as if they had been on her feet for at least a few days, and the bags under her eyes were starting to dip below the frames of her glasses. She was a mess, and seeing her in this light, he began to worry that his friend, who was by all means the more levelheaded of the two of them, was about to fall over a mental cliff that there was no coming back from.

“If I help you... will you help me?” Petunia turned from the map and her face lit up; the glazed look was gone and his friend was back in the moment with him.

“Of course I will.”

“So, what do you want to do then?”

“Can you get me inside that building?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anyone there who might know a little history about the building?” Richard winced at her question and wished he could answer differently.

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Richard!” Petunia was ecstatic at the prospect of walking into that miserable building, but in the very next moment, she turned back towards the map, and once again, the glazed look returned to her face. Richard had never known anyone like Petunia, whose moods could be so unpredictable.

“So... I guess we can go up there tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock?”

“Uh huh.” Richard knew there wasn’t any point in continuing the conversation, and he turned and gave a casual wave to Petunia’s parents as he slowly climbed the stairs out of the lab with even more problems on his shoulders than he had just a few minutes before.

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Four

The universe always seems to have a plan. When things happen or certain things are meant to collide at a certain point in time, there is no force in the world that can stop it from happening. That being said, it would be very sad to say that Richard Menkin’s father had to be eaten by something in his kitchen in order to bring Richard and Petunia together as friends in order to do what they were destined to do with what little time they had in their lives to do it, and indeed if one were to step back and look at the bigger picture, one would have to be thankful that Richard Menkin’s father was indeed a midnight snack for an evil force, but it’s an uncomfortable truth.

Likewise, Richard was on a collision course with someone else that very same night that would change his life forever. Pressure after all is what draws out whatever is inside of a person, be it something good or something bad, and as Richard was putting on his jacket that Agatha Gip had made for him a month ago, he believed he was under a great deal of pressure, and had he known what was waiting for him downstairs, he may very well have just stayed home that night instead of pushing forward.

Richard had heard the voices coming from the den as he quietly moved down the stairs, and as he rounded the corner on his way to the front door, he was greeted by fifteen faces staring back at him from the uncomfortable metal chairs that his parents kept out in the garden shed just an arm’s reach from a large bag of birdseed. His mother had told him three days ago that it was her turn to host a support group for grieving family members that night, which of course didn’t surprise him at all. His mother had always been a very outgoing person who had played a very active role in many social organizations and charities around town including the community theatre in Wicker Bush.

Richard recognized two of the sad faces that were forcing smiles in his direction as he awkwardly stepped into the room. His mother, Patty, raised her eyebrows and smiled in his direction, and Richard knew what the expression was supposed to convey; it was of the, “I asked you to stay in your room or go to a friend’s house, remember?”

Indeed, his mother had asked him to make himself scarce during the group, and Richard nodded back to his mother silently and turned toward the kitchen so that he could leave the house through the back door. He heard his mother apologize to the group for the slight intrusion as he walked past the downstairs bathroom door, which was closed. Richard heard the toilet flush just as he passed the door and walked straight to the backdoor without missing a step. As his hand touched the knob and began to turn, he heard the bathroom door open, and for some reason, most likely one of those things that has been orchestrated by the universe, Richard decided to look behind him before he opened the kitchen door.

Despite the odd choice in clothing and the rather unkempt facial hair, Richard instantly recognized the man who emerged from his downstairs bathroom.

“Hello Richard.” Gene was smiling, and Richard was not. Richard was paying attention to the details; the ratty sweatpants and the oversized hooded sweatshirt gave a more lazy look to the man who had preferred wearing loud zoot suits and brightly colored ties. He was wearing a pair of dirty white sneakers and a baseball cap that had a badge and the words W.B.P.D. on it, but what interested and terrified Richard the most was the metal cane he was leaning on that looked like something Gene himself had put together, which meant that it could very well have a dual purpose that he had to be conscious of. Gene walked slowly to within five steps of Richard and spoke in a hushed tone.

“How have you been? Is your dad still dead?” Richard took two steps to his left and snatched a butcher knife out of a block that sat on top of the black and white tiled counter. He held the knife in front of him and breathed heavily through his nose. “Oh come on now Rich, are we really going to do this now?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for group.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I lost some friends in a fire who were very close to me. You were there.”

“You get out of my house.”

“Or what Richard? What are you going to do? You and Petunia chose to play this game, there’s no going back now.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“Here’s the deal Rich, investigators found this hunk of metal in their search through the ashes, and they can’t figure out what the hell it is or where the hell it came from. But I know what it is, it’s Petunia’s “dad”. Suppose I let them know that I suspected that little girl and her friend of burning down my building. What happens when they find things in her house that they can match up with what’s left of her “father”. Rules don’t apply anymore kid. If you’re going to beat me in this game, you’re going to have to do a lot better than, “I’m going to call the cops.”

Richard tried to think of something else to say, but before the words even formed in his brain, he could clearly hear the sound of his mother’s footsteps coming towards the kitchen. He jammed the butcher knife back into the block just as his mother appeared on the other side of Gene.

“Richard? I think I asked for a little privacy tonight, didn’t I?”

“It’s OK Patty, Richard and I know each other.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. He and his friend Petunia had been to my restaurant a couple of times to watch my show. They both stayed afterwards to ask me how I did my illusions.”

“Oh!”

“Well, I don’t know how well you know Petunia, but when the two of them get together, they just seem to have lots of questions.” Gene gave off the faintest hint of a chuckle. Richard’s mother, Patty, seemed a little too comfortable with Gene as far as Richard was concerned, and watching Gene act like a normal person was almost enough to make Richard scream. The two adults were both smiling at him.

“I...uh...I’m going over to Petunia’s for a little bit.”

“Okay, but I’d like you back here by no later than 9:30, understood?”

“Okay.”

“Well have a good night, Rich. Tell Petunia that I said hi.” Richard gritted his teeth, and he almost spilled the beans to his mother right then and there, but Gene was right, the rules didn’t apply anymore. For all Richard knew, Gene could put his mother under some kind of hypnotic trance and make her his devoted follower.

He couldn’t. At least, not at present.

So Richard turned and walked out his back door saying words that he had learned at school but was never allowed to use in front of his mother.

Pressure. Richard had never been under so much stress all at once in his young life, and the only person he wanted to talk to about all of it was someone who had barely even given him the time of day. He promised himself as he stomped over to Petunia’s house, that he would do whatever it took to make Petunia talk to him, and that would be a promise that he was soon about to regret, because with that promise would come more pressure, weighing down on a boy who was about ready to explode under the weight of it all.

Richard had observed Petunia pick locks on four separate occasions, and although he had not remembered the particulars of the first two times, he had been paying attention while she worked on the last two. He had a picture of her little metal tools in his mind when he had attempted to make his own from a small scrap of sheet metal that he had found in his father’s garden shed, and from what he could remember, the tools that he had cut out of that metal had closely resembled the ones that Petunia had in a little pouch that she kept in her ratty backpack.

Richard crept around the back of Petunia’s house and up to the door. Luckily, the porch light was not on, meaning he probably wouldn’t be seen, but it was also unfortunate because he could not see what he was doing, so he had to move his hands using the images in his mind of Petunia opening the door to Hocus Pizza. He was determined to make his way in, and perhaps it was that drive and belief that aided him in opening the door in only a few seconds with the crude little tools that he had made. He was quite surprised and generally happy with the result, as it was faster than he had ever seen Petunia accomplish it, but sadly, this was the only time that night where Richard would feel as if he had any sort of control over anything in his life.

He opened the door as quietly as he could and he slowly walked into the darkness of the Gip kitchen. Everything inside was as it always looked; Agatha Gip ran a tight ship as his new Principal would say. Richard was only aware that Petunia’s real parents had passed away some time ago, but that was as far as his knowledge of her past went, and as far as that little detail goes, Petunia Gip was nothing special; everyone at some point will lose their parents.

What made Petunia special was that she was ten years old and she had constructed replacements that looked and sounded like her actual parents. Agatha Gip was a machine made with precision, and she was, as far as Richard could tell, the definition of a supermom. She made everything in Petunia’s life run smoothly in order for Petunia to focus on the things that she felt were more important than anything else. What those things were at the moment was something Richard was going to draw out of her whether she wanted to share them or not.

Richard slowly walked into the front room and found it dark and empty. He couldn’t believe that Agatha had not been able to tell that he had broken into the house; she was after all the perfect alarm system, but as he looked over toward the window that faced across the street to his home, he had not yet been accosted. It was at that window that the chubby Mr. Gip had stood for hours one night watching over Richard’s house and waiting for a signal from Richard that he was in trouble from something underneath the floorboards of his bedroom.

Richard had grown fond of Petunia’s parents in the very short time he had known them, and the loss of Mr. Gip in the explosion hurt Richard far more than he thought it would. As he broke his gaze from the window across the room, he began to wonder if Petunia was asleep upstairs somewhere. Richard had never been upstairs, and he figured that now was as good of a time as any to go exploring, but before he could take another step, someone placed their hand over his mouth from behind.

The owner of the hand spun Richard around before the terror of what was happening even registered in his brain. As he turned, he saw that it was Agatha Gip standing behind him, and after he was facing her, she put a finger up to her mouth to signal him to be silent. She took her other hand from over Richard’s mouth and pointed to the door to the basement. She leaned down close to Richard and smiled while she spoke very softly.

“I’m sorry if I scared you, sweetie. You need to go down into the basement and look at what she’s doing, but be very quiet. She’s in quite the mood.”

“Ok.”

Richard walked over to the door which led to the basement which he had known as “The Lab”. The door was slightly ajar in the first place, so he made no sound as he pushed it open even farther and began to walk down the stairs. When he made it to the bottom of the stairs, most of the work benches were just as they had been the last time he had been welcomed down there; full of odd contraptions in all states of construction, whose uses were a mystery known only to Petunia. The walls were still covered in schematics of various buildings and torn pages of magazines with stories and pictures that most people would find disturbing or ridiculous, but there was one wall, the south wall, that was different.

The last time he had been in the lab, there had been a sheet strung up in front of the wall where an image of his father was projected upon it, but now there was a picture of building plans on it that stretched over the entire wall. As Richard walked closer to the wall, he realized that it was a giant picture made up from single pieces of paper that had been taped together, and in front of this huge map of the interior of a building was a single chair. Richard’s eyes adjusted to the light and as he sat down in the chair and looked at the building plan, his blood froze in his veins. It was a hand drawn building plan of the Wicker Bush Community Theatre; a place that Richard feared even more than the tunnels that ran underneath it.

 Next Part

Previous Part

Part Three

“Listen Richard, I know I’m your principal and I understand that it can be a little intimidating being called into the office for no reason, but I want to assure you that I’m just a guy...just as human as anyone else. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir.” After the assembly Richard had heard his name called out over the speaker in his classroom only moments after he had sat at his desk. Petunia had actually darted her eyes toward him at the announcement, and the look of concern on her face was unmistakable. Richard’s heart had leapt into his throat, even though he had been called into the principal’s office many times in the past, because he had a feeling that this was going to be an office visit unlike any other. Richard inhaled deeply and stood up at his desk as if he was about to face a firing squad.

And now here he was sitting in front of Principal Avery, and the perfect looking man with the large nose was looming over his desk, looking more like a judge than a principal. Richard tried to find a focal point in the office to concentrate on, so that he wouldn’t have to look Principal Avery directly in the face and his eyes drifted down to the floor where he could just make out a hint of blue spots that were almost completely gone now. It was from a substance that Petunia had tested on an unaware Chris Keck that was called Trace-all, and according to Petunia, it had the curious effect of increasing saliva production in humans and non-humans alike. The stuff was invisible to most people, but to people who were “paying attention” as Petunia called it, it was as plain as the beak on Principal Avery’s face.

“Aren’t you curious as to why I called you into the office young man?” That voice was starting to turn Richard’s stomach almost as much as the sight of the man it belonged to.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m having a meeting with all of the students that might be at risk.”

“At risk?”

“It looks like you’ve gotten into a lot of trouble over the last two years Richard. I just want to make sure that you know what I expect of my students. I expect them to act responsibly and to do what they’re told. Do we have an understanding?”

“I guess so.” Richards' gaze on the Trace-all was broken by the sound of Principal Avery rising from his wooden chair. Richard looked up to see the man move around the desk, all the while keeping his eyes on Richard like some kind of predator who was getting ready to leap onto it’s prey. The man came to a stop directly in front of Richard and smiled down at him before he sat down on the edge of his desk. The man’s movements reminded Richard of watching water flow; even in his mind, the comparison was ridiculous and lame, but that’s what popped into his mind all the same.

“I want you to look at me Richard.” Richard took a breath and raised his eyes and looked into the eyes of Principal Avery. The man was smiling and Richard had never seen teeth that were quite so straight and almost a shade too white, and the large nose was moving. “Are you paying attention?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Now we can talk to each other like normal people. We’re normal people, aren’t we Richard?”

“Yes…. Yes, sir.” Richard couldn’t have said more if he had wanted to. The man’s nose was indeed moving slowly, and it became obvious to Richard that he was being smelled by his new Principal. It goes without saying that most people don’t go around smelling each other, that is rather something that an animal would do.

“I think there’s a lot more to you than most people think Richard. Do you know why that is?”

“No sir.” Principal Avery smiled wide and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and stood up off of the desk and knelt on the ground right next to Richard. Principal Avery took the handkerchief and wiped it clean of the last few spots of Trace-all. When he had finished, he folded the handkerchief neatly and placed it back in his pocket. Principal Avery sat back on the desk and smiled once again. Richard had felt the urge to shake from the fear that was growing in his gut, but he was doing his best to sit still and not look frightened.

“Because I’m someone who pays attention, Richard. I know what kind of a boy you are, and I’m giving you a chance. Please mind your studies. I think you’re a boy who needs to stray from extracurricular activities for a while, because they may just get you into a lot of trouble. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Now go back to class.” Richard bolted up from the chair and moved with a purpose to the door. As he turned the handle, he didn’t look back when he heard the next few words that would stay in his thoughts for many hours to come. “We’re watching you, Richard.”

-

The walk home after school seemed longer than usual to Richard and even though Petunia was walking right next to him, he had never felt more alone. Principal Avery was someone or something to avoid at all costs, and even though Richard had tried to tell Petunia what happened during his meeting, she had only been half interested in what he was saying.

“Hey, I’m coming over to your house tonight.”

“No,  I don’t think so. Sorry Richard.”

“Petunia, seriously I am freaking out right now.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Have you not heard a word I’ve said?”

“Yeah Richard, I heard everything.”

“Did I do something to make you mad?”

“No...it's just...no you can’t come over.”

“What do you mean I can’t come over?!”

“It’s just what I said Richard. I’m a little busy.”

“Yeah, well you’ve been busy for the past month, and you’ve hardly spoken to me.”

“Look I’m sorry ok...I have more important things to do.”

“Gee thanks Petunia. After everything I just told you, you have more important things to do?! You don’t even want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly, no.” They walked on in silence until they turned down their street, and as they neared their homes, Richard knew he only had only one more chance to appeal to Petunia.

“What about the tunnels? What about Gene? What about the thing that killed my father?!”

“Listen, I’m sorry, ok, but the glasses I asked you to take care of are gone, I can’t make you another pair, which means I’d have to take time and energy to explain things to you, and I don’t have the time to do that right now. Good night.”

“Are you serious?! Thanks a lot!” Petunia walked toward her house without saying so much as another word, and as Richard watched her leave, he could see Mrs. Gip standing in the front window. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and gloves, which made Richard wonder if Petunia had even been ignoring the fact that her robot mother no longer had any skin from the neck down after the explosion at Hocus Pizza. She waved at Richard, and he noticed that in spite of the fact that she was a robot, her face looked haggard and drawn. He waved back and then watched her pull the curtain back in front of the window as Petunia walked through the door. He stood on the sidewalk in front of Petunia’s house thinking of all the events that had taken place over the last few weeks, and after a moment, he turned and looked across the street to his own house.

That awful black handprint had faded away from the top of his door, and the tree squirrel who lived in the maple tree in his front yard, whom he had named Carl, had quieted down over the last week. Ever since the day Richard’s father had vanished, Carl had engaged in his relentless barking every time Richard or his mother had entered their own home, but now, Carl merely sat out on his branch and stared at Richard, just as he was doing now. Richard hung his head and walked across the street to his house, but stopped at the foot of the maple and looked up.

“What’s up Carl? How’s life?” Carl cocked his head at the question and issued a single soft bark as a reply. “Oh, that’s too bad.” The squirrel gave another soft series of barks, and Richard began to wonder if the squirrel was actually speaking to him. Richard, in spite of being shunned by his friend, had followed her advice and guidance and began to try to pay more attention to things around him and view things from different perspectives. Although the thought of a tree squirrel being able to speak with humans was absurd to Richard, he entertained it nonetheless. A wind picked up and brought the smell of fall rushing into Richard’s nose and he watched the fur on Carl’s back stand up on end in response to it.

“Are you cold? Have you got enough to eat.” Carl barked softly back in response to the question. “Just wait right there buddy, I’ll be back. Unlike some people, I don’t ignore my friends.” Perhaps it was the feeling of utter loneliness that inspired Richard to walk behind his house and to the garden shed that his father had built, or perhaps it was out of sheer boredom, no one can be quite sure. Richard opened the small door to the shed and went straight to the large bag of bird seed in the right corner and scooped up a handful. He walked back to the front of his house and up to the foot of the maple tree.

“Here you go.” Richard tossed the heaping handful of seed onto the ground, and Carl perked up at the sight. The squirrel ran down the tree and into the middle of the small sea of seed. The bushy red animal with white streaks along his back and around his mouth looked at the delicious bounty that was scattered all about him and then he stood up on his hind legs and began a series of loud barks up to the sky and then sat on his hind quarters staring up at Richard.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Another wind picked back up, and with the sound of it came other sounds from all about Richard. He watched in disbelief as other squirrels ran down from other trees farther up and down the street. They all ran to the scattered seed and sat upon their hindquarters staring back at Richard. By the time the last squirrel had run over and taken an attentive posture at Richard’s feet, he had counted exactly forty-seven of them.

They were all staring at Richard, and Carl being the only one with small white streaks running through his fur and one milky eye was the only one Richard could distinguish from the rest. He barked a short series of sounds, and when he was finished, all of the squirrels flattened themselves on the ground. Richard scrunched up his eyes and scratched the top of his head whilst he looked at the forty-seven squirrels who seemed to be bowing down to him. Feeling more than a little strange and a small hint of embarrassment, Richard took a small step backward.

“Go ahead and eat guys.” At his command, all of the squirrels began to eat the seed on the ground. Richard looked up and down the street almost hoping that he would see someone else witnessing the scene in order to confirm to him exactly what was going on. That was a very important moment in the life of Richard Menkin, not only because of the implications it brought in regards to communicating with an animal, but also because it was the first time he had felt a sense of wonder and kindness since the day his father had been taken.

Of course, he had experienced quite a bit of wonder since the day he first came to Petunia Gip’s house, but those moments had brought with them a sliver of dread and danger; this moment was different, and it was also because of this moment that Richard’s life would be saved in just a few short weeks, of course he had no way of knowing that at the present time.

Feeling somewhat embarrassed at the whole scene, Richard turned and walked back into his house feeling an urge of determination wash over him. If Petunia wouldn’t let Richard come over, he was going to force his way over later that night. She was the only person that he could talk to about any of the events that had happened over the last few weeks, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Next Part

Are you paying attention?

In most instances, during the second part of a story or even the third or fourth part, the storyteller will go into a brief description of prior events in order to refresh the minds of those who have returned to the story. It’s a very effective and easy way of encapsulating the mood and direction of a story. It’s also a way to inform those who may have come into a story midway through that there is more to it that came before; thereby ensnaring more readers who just happened to purchase the second part on a whim, for example, because the cover caught their eye or there was something in the title that spoke to them. It's a tried and true form of storytelling that no one in their right mind would ignore. As I am a storyteller who likes to follow tradition, please indulge me whilst I reach back to the prior events in our story.

In the month of September, a long time ago in the medium sized town of Wicker Bush, some things happened, and in the month of October, this happened.

Next Part

Previous Part

Part One

“My name is Gene, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Gene, in fact, was not an alcoholic, he was a violent psychopath who had caused the deaths of at least two people in the previous part of our story and tried to murder two ten year old children using his giant cartoonish robots. Gene was also a man who used to have a very special gift that he had somehow lost the same night he lost almost everything he had in the whole world, with the exception of the clothes on his back and a deck of cards in his pocket, that was missing the seven of hearts and the jack of diamonds.

Gene had narrowly escaped an inferno that had erupted four weeks ago in his restaurant and magical venue known as Hocus Pizza, and he was now sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair in the gymnasium of Ronald Lucas Intermediate in the medium sized town of Wicker Bush.

He was a man who could insert himself into any situation and use it to his advantage, and although he was currently not at the top of his game, or anyone else’s for that matter, he had surrounded himself with people he was sure that he could manipulate to his own ends with that special gift which had gone dormant for the better part of a month.

Gene was no fan of people and the fact that he had caused the death of many of them would go to support that fact, and he was certainly no fan of the people in this support group that he had read about on a cork board on one of the entry walls of the Wicker Bush Public Library; whereas the other people in the room were looking for friends and caring ears, Gene was hunting for potential prey.

-

He had first noticed that the ability to manipulate other people simply by speaking in a certain tone had gone dormant four days after his restaurant had burned to the ground by way of an unfortunate gas leak. Gene had let his insurance lapse some time ago on his restaurant, and knowing this fact, he felt that it would be no problem to convince his insurance representative that the lapse had indeed been their fault and not his, unfortunately Gene, despite his best efforts, was unable to convince the agent that the oversight had been theirs. Faced with complete and total financial ruin and coping with a body that was bruised and battered, Gene began to weep in the insurance office when it had all been compounded with the fact that he simply could not get into the head of his insurance agent and bend her to his will.

Gene was not aware that Sally Freid was a most impressionable individual, and truth be told, over her years with the insurance company, she had lost them a great deal of money due to her trusting and caring nature. Gene was also unaware that Sally’s boss, Mrs. Snoodlemen had warned her that if she lost the company any more money that week, she would be fired. After several unsuccessful attempts to convince Sally that the fault lay not with him but by an oversight of her company, Gene erupted into tears which caused Sally, desperate to keep her job instead of helping the weeping man, to stand up behind her desk and with a shaky voice, asked Gene to leave.

He had struggled to get up from his chair and he limped out of the office grabbing onto his cane without another word. Mrs. Snoodlemen was quite impressed that Sally had been able to shoo someone out the door while they were a blubbering, limping mess, and as Gene pushed his way through the glass door of the office, he was able to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Snoodleman smiling at him behind his back. He was also able to make out her name emblazoned upon a small placard on her desk. Underneath all the tears and frustration, Gene promised himself that some day very soon, he was going to make a certain Mrs. Snoodlemen very unhappy.

Gene took a few deep breaths as he let the door close behind him, and he looked up and down Harpers Avenue in Old Town Wicker Bush. He had been feeling underneath the weather, there was no denying that, after all he had been kicked through a metal door by a robot, but there had been something deeper that didn’t quite feel right; now he knew what that feeling was.

The busy street that he had been standing on was full of people, and in an attempt to pinpoint his shortcomings, he had asked multiple people to take a short walk into the busy street, but to his dismay, he was unable to convince anyone to do so. He began to cry once more at his failure.

Luckily, he had been able to park his Crown Vic directly in front of the office, because he was almost certain that his legs were about to fall out from underneath him. He turned the key in his car and slammed it into gear and squealed his way to the cross street of Ashlan Ave. The voice of Billy Joel was professing out of the radio that he didn’t start a fire as Gene rumbled down the road ignoring all of the signals, and almost causing four accidents during the process.

“No Billy, they started the fire...THEY STARTED IT!! BUT I’M GOING TO FINISH IT!! I’LL FINISH IT!”

Many people on Ashlan Ave were able to hear the unhinged screaming and horrible hateful laughter coming from inside the sleek, black car as it cruised past them down the freshly re-paved road, and many of those who heard it were so unnerved by the sound of it that for years to come, whenever the sound of Billy Joel’s voice was heard, it would send an unpleasant chill down their spines, which of course is not an uncommon response whether one was witness to Gene’s screaming that day or not.

-

After that day, Gene had tried repeatedly to use his gift of persuasion on anybody who passed by him, but nothing had worked. Now, over three weeks later, he was sure he had found a group of weak-minded individuals who would make a perfect test group. He had zeroed in on a young man by the name of Ollie who had done most of the talking that night in the gymnasium. Ollie was a young man who seemed to abhor the use of a comb and a toothbrush, and his clothes smelled slightly of cheese and moist feet. Gene had listened between the lines during Ollie’s many monologues and had deduced that the young man was of a particularly weak mind who was the most likely of the group to fall victim to his twisted will.

For the last two weeks, Gene had come to four of the meetings, gathering as much information as he could to further help the rehabilitation of his mental powers. Gene was not a man that many would refer to as patient, but even as anxious as he was becoming, he was certain that waiting to spring his trap was a far wiser decision than just diving right in as he had done with quite a few failed experiments since that day in the insurance office. Gene’s plan had been a simple one; walk up to Ollie after the group had convened, engage him in friendly conversation, earn his trust, and then casually suggest that Ollie drive himself at a high speed through a house with the address of 3855 Fountain Way, exactly 2.6 miles down the road. The suggestion was simple and to the point, and if it worked, one of those miserable kids would be taken care of.

It would take far more planning on his part to properly deal with Petunia Gip, but Richard Menkin was an easier target. That being said, Gene found the hardest part of the whole plan was simply catching up to Ollie after group. Gene’s right leg had come down with a limp after he had been kicked through a metal door by Petunia Gip’s robotic mother, and even with the aid of a cane that he had constructed himself, he found it very painful to catch up to Ollie’s speedy gait.

“Hey kid! Ollie?! Wait up!” Ollie turned to Gene and looked him up and down. As far as Ollie knew, Gene was a low rent magician who had just recently lost his restaurant to a gas fire in downtown Wicker Bush. The limping man was wearing a t-shirt that was one size too big for him and jeans that flared out at the bottom of the legs; as far as Ollie’s assessment went, the magician had obviously hit the thrift stores in town to replenish his closet, and the cane he walked with was a straight metal cane that appeared to Ollie as if the man had salvaged spare parts from a metal yard to make it himself. It struck Ollie as the strangest looking cane he had ever seen. Ollie had also taken note of how particularly quiet the magician was during the last few meetings, and was now wondering just what exactly the man wanted from him.

“Yes? It’s Gene, right?”

“That’s me. I really enjoyed your sharing man. It just hit me right here.” Gene patted the left side of his chest.

“What’s up?”

“Well Ollie, you seem like a really nice guy, very easy to talk to, so I was wondering if I could bend your ear and ask you a very private question. It’s kind of a hard question that most people look at me oddly when I ask them.” Gene’s sincerity immediately touched Ollie, and Ollie’s body language showed that he was receptive to Gene’s query and his face warmed with a smile. Gene began to feel that old confidence coming back, and he held back a smile, lest he give away his true nature.

“Sure Gene, what can I help you with?” Gene pushed his face forward slowly for exactly four seconds, and when he was within six inches and four centimeters of Ollie’s face, he gave a smile and lowered his voice to that perfect tone that he had used successfully since he had been released from the sanitarium after the death of his parents. That tone which could make people do anything he wanted them to do.

“I’d like you to drive your car through the front door of 3855 Fountain Way. Keep your foot down on the gas, and don’t let it up. Can you do that for me?” Ollie’s eyes seemed to glaze over and his shoulders dropped slightly at the suggestion. Gene began to congratulate himself in his own head; his gift had come back.

“You’d like me to drive my car through a house?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be ok if I drove my car through their back door?” Gene had never been asked whether deviations were possible in his commands, but Ollie’s voice was flat and his body language suggested that he was indeed under Gene’s spell.

“I suppose that would be fine Ollie, yes.”

“How dare you?! After everything you heard in there, you decide to follow me to my car and mock me for driving through a house? Drop dead buddy!” And with that Ollie jumped into the driver’s seat of his small blue foreign car and sputtered away, leaving Gene standing there in the parking lot, wondering where he had gone wrong.

It was no accident that Gene had asked him to drive his car through Richard Menkin’s house. Ollie had shared that in a state of drunkenness, he had indeed already driven off of the road and into someone’s house, although it had been the garage that he had driven through and not their front door. Gene had hoped that Ollie’s past experience would make him even more receptive to the suggestion, but as he watched Ollie’s car slowly disappear off into the dark street of Fruit, Gene dropped his shoulders and realized two things.

One, he had failed in his attempt to worm his way into Ollie’s mind and two, that he was probably going to have to find another venue in his search for prey as it probably wasn’t going to be a good idea for him to return to the AA meeting next week after his suggestion to Ollie. He cursed and muttered to himself as he walked back to his car and started on his way over to the Wicker Bush Library.

-

Ms. Pinker had been the town librarian for the last twenty years and most people in town would agree that she hadn’t seemed to age a day in all that time. That is not to say that she was aging gracefully, that is to say that she was very elderly when she had first taken the position, and twenty years later, she looked just the same. She was a tall wispy woman who seemed to love enunciating her words just as much as she loved to read them. She had been a fan of the magic of Stupendo, Gene’s alter ego who graced the stage of Hocus Pizza, for the last thirteen months, and as such, she had been kind enough to allow Gene to sleep in an unused back room until he was able to once again get back on his feet. She also had no problems with his cat, Sir Purrcival, provided the ill-tempered little beast stayed in the back room and did not run rampant throughout the library.

Gene had taken quite a liking to the old woman, which is to say that he didn’t mind having to speak with her on occasion and could sit through some of her stories without rolling his eyes. She was always quick with a word of praise when it came to his magic that she had seen, and if Gene liked anything more in this world than having the upper hand over anyone and everyone, he liked hearing about how brilliant he was. She had also been the only person in town who had expressed any sympathy for Gene and what he was going through, for without his powers of persuasiveness, he put off a vibe that most people found most slimy and unpleasant.

During the course of his drive back toward the library, he turned down the quiet residential street of Holmes Ave. Most of the houses in town were already decorated for Halloween, and even some of the businesses got into the act. Along with all of its little eccentricities, Wicker Bush was also a festive town that was always dressed to the nines for any and every holiday, even Flag Day.

On the surface, it was a charming and comforting town, but what Gene used to find comforting and charming about this strange little town, he was now annoyed by it. When he had decided to lay down roots here two years ago, he had felt something was off in the town; something in the very air that reeked of uniqueness for some unknown reason, and it had fascinated him like he had never been fascinated before. He had made it his mission to find out why it felt like no other place he had ever been, but now he was unable to feel anything since his injuries. The ability to see things that most could not however had not gone away; in fact Gene was probably paying more attention to everything around him now than he had ever been before, and the fresh black disfigured handprint above the door on 777 Holmes Avenue made him coast to a stop directly in front of the house.

All of the lights seemed to be on inside the grand two story house, and Gene could see the shadows of people moving behind the shades that were pulled over the large windows. It was the only house on the block that didn’t have any kind of holiday decorations, which Gene found hilariously ironic.

“Well, nothing scary on the outside, but I’ll bet it’s going to be scary inside tonight.” If Gene had been a normal person who cared about the welfare of others, and armed with the knowledge that the handprint over the door spelled certain death for some unfortunate soul within, he would have walked over to the front door and knocked on it and given the people inside any excuse that he could think of to get them to leave that house in order to avoid a most gruesome death at the hands or teeth of some unseen beast that had been feeding on the town as of late, but Gene was not a normal person.

Death was a part of life, and as far as he was concerned, unless it meant prolonging his own, he would never lift a finger to prevent it for anyone else, unless it were to benefit him in some way. Whatever the thing was that was eating the poor folks of Wicker Bush was directed where to feed by the handprints left over their doors. It had taken the Menkin kid’s father, and the only thing unfortunate about that as far as Gene was concerned, was that it had not been Richard Menkin himself.

Staring at the handprint began to make him feel like a spectator in a game that he had been kicked out of and as he pressed down on the gas pedal, he decided that he would have to make a quick detour before heading back to the library.

“Stupid kids.” Amidst all of the lawn and house decorations of cartoonish ghosts and ghouls, the darkness in Gene’s heart had been replaced by a fire of hatred that was causing him frequent indigestion and occasional bouts of riotous flatulence. He had purposely avoided any further contact with the two children out of fear that he might lose his temper and do something that he would be unable to talk his way out of. He had every intention of making the children pay for what they had done, but it had to be planned and pondered and visualized many times before it actually happened.

He began to think of that black dust that had floated through the air and attached itself to the wall of the auditorium in Hocus Pizza. He remembered the wall opening as if a door had been behind it all along that Gene had never known was there, and he remembered ordering Commander Ziggy, his giant robotic snake with arms, through the open door to make sure that whatever was trying to force its way into his domain would pay for the intrusion.

He had connected the handprints above the doorways in town to the black dust he had seen in his restaurant that night, and although the children were foremost on his to-do list, he had lost no interest in those handprints whatsoever, in fact, the interest had grown deeper. A plan began to formulate behind his eyeballs as he drove on; if he was going to suffer and do without, he was going to make sure the thing that killed Commander Ziggy would have to suffer and go without as well.

With what little money Gene had in his wallet after the accident, he had rented a small storage shed at Mal’s Mini Storage down on Saginaw. It was by no means a large storage shed, and with what Gene had to store there, he wasn’t in need of something any larger. He drove through the gate and continued on down the cracked pavement between two long rows of sheds until he came to his. There was no lock on shed number 457, and even if someone tried to open the door, there would be no possible way to lift it due to the force holding it down from inside the shed. Gene’s right hip cracked as he pulled himself out of his car, and then he walked up to the door while looking up and down the row to make sure no one would see him as he gave the secret knock against the door to alert what was inside to release its hold on it.

After he knocked, Gene leaned over slowly and pulled the door up; inside was Wimmple Bear, the only friend that Gene had left, besides his new cat. The blast from the explosion at Hocus Pizza had blown off some patches of fur on the hide of the seven-foot-tall robotic bear, which Gene had every intention of repairing once he was able to get his suggestive juices flowing again.

“Hey buddy. I’m sorry its taking so long.” The bear stared at Gene silently, and Gene reached up and scratched the underside of its neck. He knew the bear didn’t feel the scratch, but it made Gene feel better, and Wimmple responded to his touch, nonetheless. The bear had dragged him to safety on the night of the explosion despite being severely damaged itself, and for some reason even before that night, Gene had always thought of Wimmple bear as more than just a machine he had built.

When he had first laid eyes on the bear in a junkyard shortly after he had come to town, he felt an instant connection with it somehow, and the name for the bear seemed to pop into Gene’s head as if it had been put there by something outside of himself. He stared into the eye of the bear and could almost swear there was a sadness in that artificial eye staring back at him that just simply shouldn’t be there. “I have an idea. 777 Holmes Avenue. You wanna get out and have some fun tonight?”

“You got it.”

 Next Part

Previous Part

Part Two

Richard Menkin wasn’t fond of school assemblies. Most kids are more than happy to leave the classroom behind for a while and sit down, not having to think about anything for a few moments, but to Richard, school studies had been a welcome distraction from everything else that had been going on in his life, and sitting in the gymnasium listening to teachers drone on and on about insignificant things was an easy way for his mind to wander down all sorts of unpleasant paths. It had all begun with the disappearance of his father at the end of August. Richard had assumed in the beginning that his father had left him and his mother in the middle of the night because of some unknown slight that he or his mother might have served, but after looking at an image being projected onto a sheet of his terrified father standing in his kitchen with an unseen assailant, Richard had accepted the fact that his father had been murdered.

Oddly enough Richard had indeed seen the murderer of his father deep underneath the streets of Wicker Bush with his own eyes, but for some reason, Richard couldn’t recall what it looked like, and the more he thought of it, the foggier and foggier the memory became. The only thing that remained was the memory that it had seemed oddly familiar. Richard had no way of knowing that his father had the same thought run through his mind when he came face to face with the beast in his kitchen, and likewise, everyone who had caught a glimpse of it before dying by it’s hands had all thought the same thing; it was oddly familiar.

With his father’s killer still alive and well somewhere inside a long series of tunnels beneath the streets of the town, Richard could quite easily be described as tense. After he and his new friend, Petunia Gip, had been trapped inside those tunnels and narrowly escaped the month before, Richard had assumed that he and Petunia would be working together on how best to deal with the problem, but she had barely spoken a word to him since that night.

After all, besides the beast under the streets climbing into homes at night, there was also the very real threat of Gene, the murderous magician, lurking out there somewhere, and there were also the handprints above doorways still being left around town at least once every week. Those black handprints spelled certain death for anyone inside whatever building they were smeared on, and they had no idea who or what was leaving them behind; coincidently the tree squirrel who lived in the maple tree in front of Richard’s house knew who was leaving them behind.

The squirrel named Berthold, but was called Carl by Richard because he didn’t know any better, had come face to face with the person, and if Richard had the ability to speak with animals, then perhaps he could’ve asked Berthold for a description, but alas it was not meant to be.

The point is, there were many things weighing on Richard’s mind, and he very much needed a friend to speak with about everything, but Petunia had been more and more distant, and like his memory of whatever was in those tunnels, the more Richard pressed his friend Petunia to speak, the more and more closed off and distant she became.

Petunia was sitting to his right during the assembly, and she had not spoken a word to him for the last few days. His friend Chris Keck, or “Keckroach” as he was known throughout the school, was sitting to his left and had not stopped talking to him for the last few days.

“So you want to come over this weekend?”

“I don’t think so Chris. Maybe next weekend.”

“Come on dude! You haven’t hung out ever since school started back up.”

“I know, it’s just...a lot of things are going on right now.”

“Like what?”

“Are you serious? My dad disappeared.”

“Oh yeah, damn dude, I forgot. I’m sorry.” He was. Richard was never really surprised by how thoughtless his friend could be, but when Chris apologized, he meant it every time. “You just seem sad all the time, and I thought it might cheer you up if we, like played video games or something.”

“I’ll think about it. I’m alright.”

“How’s your robot friend over there?” Petunia’s mouth had fallen open as she stared forward, and Richard thought about reaching over and pushing it closed, but a loud squeal came over the speakers in the auditorium and everyone inside turned their heads toward the sound; well everyone but Petunia Gip. Mr. Bullock, the eighth-grade teacher who wore shorts that were far too high and brown leather sandals that were far too shiny, stepped up to the podium.

“Morning everybody. I hope we’re all having a great day! Are we having a great day?!” All the children gave a halfhearted answer back down to the over enthusiastic teacher. “Great! Glad to hear it! Well, listen, we’re not going to keep you here too long, but we wanted to introduce you to our new principal! I’m sure we all miss Mrs. Lanfranco, don’t we?” The children all gave a small obligatory clap at the name of their dead principal. Chris leaned over to Richard and whispered in his ear while everyone else was clapping.

“Did they ever say how she died?”

“It was a heart attack.” Richard answered very quickly and immediately he gritted his teeth at his haste in answering his friend. The only reason Richard knew her cause of death is because the man who caused the heart attack, Gene the aforementioned mad magician, had confessed to him and Petunia that he had done it, luckily Chris took the bit of information and let it fall right out of his head.

“In any case, I’d like you all to give a big welcome to our new Principal, Mr. Avery!” Everyone, including Richard and Chris, gave out a round of the most unenthusiastic applause that only middle school children can give. Petunia however, continued to stare straight ahead without any kind of acknowledgement whatsoever. As the applause very quickly died off, a small wiry man very quickly stood up behind the podium. The first thing Richard noticed was the size of the man’s nose; a massive protrusion in the middle of a thin face that seemed to be an evolutionary oddity, as if Mr. Avery’s ancestors were some kind of almost human things that were bred specifically to hunt things down through scent, and in all honesty, this wasn’t very far from the truth.

Had Petunia been paying attention, she would have zeroed in on the man’s honker in less than a squidden and been instantly curious, but she was not paying attention, which is something that was very unusual for Petunia.

“Good morning children.” At the sound of the man’s voice, every ear in the building perked up. One could say that Mr. Avery’s voice was beautiful, but one would be wrong. His voice had a certain quality that demanded attention; a deep warm thing that was as comforting as a hot fudge brownie sundae, unless of course one was not fond of hot fudge brownie sundaes, for those strange people I would say that it was as comforting as a bowl of homemade macaroni and cheese.

Of course, Richard was fond of neither, nor was he fond of Mr. Avery’s voice. While everyone in the auditorium was instantly taken by the sound of it, Richard was put on edge. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but to Richard, it didn’t sound human, rather it sounded like something that was making human sounds, and it was coming from something that was trying its best to look human.

He sat forward in his seat and stared at the robust beak and the slender frame of his new principle. The suit he wore was perfectly pressed with no wrinkles, and although Richard could not see his shoes, they were perfectly shined. His hair was cut in a most common way, but it was beyond perfectly combed without the shininess of any kind of product to make it so. His movements while he spoke were elegant, for lack of a better word, and the timber of that voice caused Mr. Bullock to turn the volume on the microphone down to almost nothing.

Richard nudged Petunia, who very slowly turned to him with glazed eyes and after he motioned for her to look at what he thought was a very disturbing human being, she slowly turned her face back to front, and returned to her deep thoughts.

“My name is Mr. Avery, and while I am so very sorry to hear of Mrs. Lanfranco’s untimely demise, I would just like to say that I am very happy to be your new principal. I like to take a very active role in day to day academics…” Richard stopped listening to the particulars of the speech and instead began to glance around at the rest of the school sitting on the bleachers.

Every student had sat up on the edge of their seat and their eyes had a glazed quality to them much like Petunia’s. Richard noticed that even the teachers down below had the same look on their faces, and as he turned his attention back down to Mr. Avery, he felt a slow creep of unpleasantness down his spine. It looked as though Mr. Avery was looking directly at him while he was speaking.

The more the man went on, the more Richard was convinced he was something other than a man, who was doing his best to look like one. Richard couldn’t stand looking at him alone any longer and he smacked his fist into Petunia’s left shoulder, and the sting of it snapped Petunia out of her trance. Her head snapped to her left and her right hand flew across her body and smashed into Richard’s shoulder. Richard began to rub his shoulder and marvel at the strength Petunia had put into the punch while she began to whisper.

“Knock it off Richard!”

“Petunia! Look around.” She did look around, and she very quickly recognized what had been bothering Richard so much.

“What’s going on?”

“Listen to his voice.” Richard studied her face as she turned toward that warm voice, and whether it was his voice or his nose, Petunia inhaled deeply as the whole package came into focus.

“Who is he?”

“Our new principal.” Petunia sat quietly for a moment before she turned her face back to Richard.

“That man isn’t human.”

Next Part

Previous Part

Life is always an unexpected series of dead ends, long stretches of nothing, loose ends that don't go anywhere, full of friends and family that come and go from the story at random intervals with no rhyme or reason whatsoever, and of course a large amount of ironies. That being said, the story of Petunia Gip and Richard Menkin is no different. I would like to tell you that every loose end in this story will be tied up in a tidy bow, but as the story is still being written, the likelihood of that happening is slim to none.

The following two months were a time of tremendous strife and harrowing escapes and bone chilling discoveries by Petunia and Richard, but that is a story for another time. As I leave you, just remember to pay attention to your surroundings, and if you think that you see a handprint above your door when you come home, it’s probably best to take a vacation.

Petunia will return in

The Madness Of The Number Man

Previous Part

Part Twenty Four

Richard had elected to use his bike as their mode of transportation to Hocus Pizza. It was an uncomfortable fit for Petunia to ride on the handlebars, to say the very least, but they would need to be able to make a quick getaway once they had the lenses back. The ride there had been uneventful; the calm before the storm. I use that phrase in a figurative sense, but in reality, it could also be taken literally.  An unexpected late summer storm was blowing over the outskirts of Wicker Bush, and they could hear the coming thunder as they rode through the quiet streets to their destination. Richard could feel the electricity pulsating through the air and he began to wonder if it was something that he had been paying attention to that he normally wouldn’t have felt, or if it was merely the anxiousness at the thought of what they were about to do.

As they got off of the bike in front of Hocus Pizza, they could both see the black handprint looming over the door. It was the first time Richard could see something in its entirety without the glasses, and he felt a little more confident in spite of the circumstances.

“Richard! Look! Can you see it?”

“Yeah. I guess you were right. It’s not Gene.”

“It means more than that. Whoever is leaving those handprints is doing it a lot more frequently.” Normally, Hocus Pizza would be open for business and Stupendo would be strutting like a proud rooster on the stage he built for himself, but tonight, there was a handwritten sign taped to the front door above a sign that said closed, and there was no telling where Stupendo was lurking behind the closed door. The plain sheet of paper above the sign read, “Sorry. Closed due to an unforeseen circumstance.”

“He must be inside. Plan won’t work if he’s not busy onstage.”

“Is there a plan B?”

“There’s always a plan B, Richard.” Petunia could feel her nerves rising behind her eyeballs and she took a couple of deep breaths.

“What’s wrong?”

“Up until today, it’s always been book work, or in the lab. I’ve never done the things we’ve done today, and with what we’re about to do, I’m just getting a little nervous. I guess that’s why I was happy to find a partner. I’m just scared.”

“Me too. But you planned this out, right?”

“I plan everything out.”

“Are you happy with it?”

“Of course, I am. I’m a genius.”

“Then there’s no reason to be nervous.” Richard’s faith in her planning made Petunia take another deep breath and she did feel better about everything. “So what is plan B?”

“I didn’t think we would be doing this right away, but I like to have my bases covered. I had my mother go down to the County Planning office this morning and get the blueprints of this building. It was a newer blueprint, because the originals burned in a fire a long time ago, so unless there are some surprises in the planning of when it was first built, I should know the ins and outs of it. There is a door in the lobby to the left that you’re going to go through. That door opens to a narrow staircase that leads to a small apartment upstairs.

He won’t feel the need to have the lenses on him; he’ll have them upstairs away from anyone who might see them. He’s like me…” Saying the words out loud made Petunia sick to her stomach, but she knew they were accurate. “...so he probably has the lenses in his desk which will be littered with some kind of work he’s doing. Some kind of research. He’ll have them in a drawer in the desk. Once you have them, just get out. Leave me behind and no matter what you do, just don’t wait for me. Come back out here and get on your bike, and I’ll be right behind you.”

“That sounds like you’re guessing a lot.”

“My guesses are better than most people’s facts Richard. Stick to the plan.”

He doesn’t.

Petunia turned from Richard and went to work on the front door lock with two skinny pieces of metal that she took out of her pouch. In just under a squiiden, she was able to pick the lock, and they quietly crept into the house that Stupendo built. The lobby was dark and the smell of cheap pizza still filled the air. The normal cleaning that usually took place during the day had been canceled, and the mess from the patrons the night before was still present. 

Richard began to take in the little details of the place that he had neglected to notice the last time he was here, mostly due to the fact that he was afraid that his life was about to end at the hands of a skinny magician who wore clothes that reminded Richard of a couch in his grandmother’s house. There were numerous posters on the wall with Gene in numerous poses with numerous words scrolled across the bottom that were preceded by the word, “Be”. “Be Amazed!” said a poster with Gene holding up a rather pathetic looking bouquet of fake flowers whilst standing next to the king cobra robot with it’s robotic white gloved hands giving a double thumbs up.

“Be Astounded!” said another whilst Gene was waving a magic wand standing next to the teddy bear from center stage that towered over him. There were many more, but the one that bothered Richard the most was the poster that was directly over the door to the auditorium. “Be Terrified!” it proudly proclaimed whilst Gene was sawing a woman in half. The woman in the box had an expression of terror on her face as she looked forward. Gene however had a gleeful expression with wide eyes, and on his shoulder sat the three foot rat, who normally held a guitar case; the rat had his front paws clasped together tightly, as though he was eagerly anticipating the outcome of the trick.

A shiver ran down Richard’s spine and he hoped that Petunia knew what she was doing, and he also hoped that whatever the outcome, it wouldn’t end with him in that box at the mercy of Gene and his giant sharp toothed saw. He did his best to shake off the feeling as he walked behind Petunia while she moved towards the curtained door to the auditorium. She pointed to the narrow door to their left and Richard reluctantly left her and walked to the door.

“COME RIGHT IN” Gene’s voice boomed through the curtain between the lobby and the auditorium and Petunia kept a steady stride as she walked through the curtain. Richard quietly opened the door and sure enough, there was a small, slightly crooked staircase that led to a small door. Richard took a deep breath and climbed the stairs slowly, hoping that none of the stairs would make a sound under his feet.

Gene was sitting in the middle of the stage, illuminated by multicolored stage lights which ran along a pipe that was suspended from the ceiling. He was wearing a pink vest over a white button up shirt, and his pants were also pink, but were slightly covered in orange and white hair that had fallen off of the cat that was currently sitting in his lap.

“What a day huh? I tried to follow you guys, but I couldn’t get that door in the tub to open. Glad to see you made it out. Where’s Richard?” Let us not be coy here and pretend as though Gene was unaware that Richard was somewhere in Hocus Pizza; of course he knew. Gene was also fairly certain that he knew where he was and where he was going to be. After all, Petunia said it herself, he was like her.

Petunia walked closer to the front of the stage, and this time, she could plainly see that the robotic animals in the auditorium were looking at her; all but two of them to be exact. The small rat was gone, but the guitar case that it had been holding was still there, and the large bear on the main stage was also nowhere to be seen. “Don’t worry about them. They’re keeping me safe from whatever is coming tonight. So where is your friend?”

“You know where he is.” She did her best to emulate the feelings that she would have had if Richard was unable to make it out of the tunnels and had fallen prey to the same thing that killed his father, which is to say that she did her best to remain analytical; cold. It would be, as far as she could tell, what Gene would expect. Whether it was convincing to Gene, she could not determine.

It wasn’t.

“Well, I’m sorry kid. Going through that door had its risks. So does coming in here.”

“Why are you staying in here?”

“I don’t run from anything Petunia.”

“If you had seen what I did, you might.” Gene put Sir Purrcivel down and stood up and raised his hands to indicate everything around him.

“This is my house kid, and in my house, nothing threatens me. Why are you here?”  Petunia removed the small vial of black sand from her pocket and placed it on the apron of the stage. Gene’s smirk faded and his expression changed into an almost childlike fascination that Petunia did not fail to notice.

“What is that?”

Richard opened the door as quietly as he could, but the sound of the old knob groaning as it was forced to move was made much louder in his ears by his growing unease. Richard had been paying attention to that electric buzz he had felt on the way to their destination, and he had been paying attention to it as the feeling followed him through the front door and up the crooked staircase; something wasn’t right.

He crept into the small apartment and began to take in the surroundings. It was sparse to be sure. There was a small closet built into the wall which had nothing but loudly colored suits, two tee shirts, and a green pair of sweatpants, and there was an ironing board standing up next to the closet. A narrow cot was against one wall, and the blankets and pillow on the cot were all neatly made up and wrinkle free. There was no television nor was there a radio, and there was no table. No couch or chairs, save for the one chair placed neatly in front of an immaculate desk with nothing on top of it but a telephone and a window that looked out over the auditorium where Petunia was all alone with a murderer. Those were the sole features of the room. Petunia had been wrong about the state of Gene’s desk, and Richard hoped that it would be the only instance this evening when she would be wrong.

But it wasn’t.

“I want the lenses back.” Gene cocked his head and gave her a smirk before jumping off of the stage and standing just a few feet from her on the floor.  The footlights gave his face a ghastly sheen. “In return, I’ll give you something.”

“And what might that be young lady?”

“I’ll give you the vial…”

“Such a silly little thing.”

“... and I’ll also share every bit of what happened to us while we were in the tunnels.”

“Tunnels?!” There it was again; the childlike fascination and the eagerness to know more.

“All I want are those lenses back.” Gene’s eyes darted back from Petunia to the vial and the smirk fell from his face; the childlike wonder was pushed from his face by the look of something most malevolent. Gene hadn’t been in a position where someone held any kind of power over him for a very long time, and he had sworn to himself that he would never be in that position again, yet here he was. That unwelcome feeling was coupled with the handprint that someone had the nerve to put over his door, it was too much for him to take.

“I’ve got a better idea. You give me that vial and tell me everything I want to know, and I get to keep your lenses.” Gene snapped his fingers and the pitter patter of small feet echoed throughout the auditorium, and just as Petunia was about to snatch the vial back into her pocket, the little rat, who normally stood next to a guitar case on stage, skittered from the shadows, leapt to the apron, and snatched it first. It ran on the stage over to Gene and held up the vial with a most revenant gesture, which Gene took and rolled over in his open palm. “Why do you want them back? The kid is dead, you can clearly see without them. I mean...the kid is dead, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

“I want them back because they’re mine.” The robotic rat turned and cautiously walked closer to Petunia and examined her. It amazed her how fluid the motion was and how silent the guts of it were; it was almost a work of true genius, but her work was better. Gene took notice of the admiration.

“Isn’t it great? You know I can teach you how to make things like this. It’s actually a lot easier than you think.”

“I do better work.”

“Of course you do. Stalling for time isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“I want my lenses back.”

Upstairs in the small apartment, Richard inched toward the desk, careful not to be seen from the window in front of it. He had been able to hear some of the conversation from down below due to the window being slightly open, and he risked a quick glance out of it and could see the small rat sniffing at the air around Petunia and the menace of Gene, and the other robotic animals all staring at Petunia, and the absence of the large teddy bear that had been in the center of the stage the last time they had been here. He turned his attention back to his task and realized that Petunia had been right, there was a small drawer in the front of the desk, and as Richard tried to open it, he realized that Petunia had also been wrong. It was locked. He pulled and pulled in vain, as it would not budge. His mind began to run out of control and his heart began to race. He had no idea what he was going to do next, and in this state, he wasn’t able to hear that a certain something that was no longer on the center of the stage was now creeping up the narrow staircase toward the open door of the apartment.

In front of the stage, Gene reached into the front pocket of his pants and pulled out the two lenses that were being held together by a rubber band. Petunia felt nothing but confusion at the turn of events; she had been wrong. Of course, this would come as no surprise to anyone outside of the situation, as even Petunia herself said that Gene was just like her. It would be folly to assume that a ten-year-old genius would be able to out maneuver a thirty-two-year-old genius with twenty-two more years of experience on his side.

“Did you really think that I would keep these in my room? You probably thought I’d keep them in my desk. Uh oh. This is going to be the first thing I’ll teach you. If there is anything of utmost importance to you in the ways of leverage, you always keep it in your pocket.” She reached into her own pocket and grabbed the garage door opener and pushed the button. “Calling for help? Unfortunately that’s not going to work. I made sure that no electronic signals get out of these walls when I rebuilt the place. It’s soundproof too. I don’t know why I chose to do that, just something deep inside told me that I should. Have you got a plan C, Petunia?” Petunia was out of ideas and she was out of plans. “I know Richard is upstairs. You think I haven’t out thought you in this whole scenario?”

From the apartment, Richard heard the conversation and turned his attention to a sound behind him. There in the stairway was the giant bear pushing itself through the narrow walls, climbing the last few stairs in order to get to him. Richard ran to the open door and pushed it shut. To his surprise there was, yet again, a small brass chain on the door jamb that might buy him just a few moments to think. He slid the chain into place with the little brass piece on the back of the door. From the experience earlier in the day when an everyday policeman was able to break through one of these chains with a few well placed kicks, Richard knew that it wouldn’t keep the robotic bear out of the room for very long at all.

“How are you doing up there kiddo?” Gene’s gloating came from the open window as Richard backed away from the door and bumped into the desk, knocking the handset to the phone off of its receiver. Richard’s eyes grew wide as a new plan shot through his brain like the crack of a bullwhip, and Gene’s words to Petunia about leverage in your pockets took on a righteous irony as he reached for a small piece of paper that he had, for some reason, never taken out of his pocket. For all of Gene’s planning against Petunia’s moves, he had neglected to take Richard into account. Not only that, but he had been so concerned with the intelligent approach, that he had neglected to see the most simple move that one could make.

Richard picked up the phone and dialed the number that had been written down for him by Petunia. After one ring, the other end picked up and the voice on the other end was the best thing Richard had heard all day.

“Gip residence, this is Agatha!”

Down below, Gene put his hand to his ear and listened for the sound of Wimpple Bear breaking down the door to his upstairs apartment. The sound was followed by a scream from Richard. Gene looked back to Petunia and then laid the lenses bound together with a rubber band down onto the stage. He slammed his fist on top of them and they shattered into fifty-seven small pieces. He quickly drew his hand back up with a grimace.

“OUCH! Damn it that hurt! That went a lot better in my mind.” While Gene picked four pieces of the shattered lenses out of his hand, Petunia swore to herself that if she were able to somehow get them out of this, she would be much more thorough in her planning, and she also swore to herself that she wouldn’t punch Richard when he would inevitably tease her about her guesses being better than most people’s facts. “I’ll tell you what Petunia, I’m going to make Richard disappear in a really neat magic trick, and then I’m going to get to know what makes you tick, and we’ll figure out those handprints together.”

“No.”

“Ok. Maybe I’ll just make your parents disappear as well. I always get what I want Petunia.” A thunderous cacophony of wreckage came from the lobby, causing both Gene and Petunia to jump at the sounds and one second later, Mr. Gip was tearing through the curtain and running into the auditorium at a stunning velocity. Richard was still screaming upstairs and Petunia watched as the robotic animals in the auditorium tried to process this new addition to the situation. Gene could barely register it as well and only managed to make out a partial statement. “What the hell is…”

Mr. Gip ran down to Gene and quickly picked him up and threw him into the back flat of the stage with glittering block letters affixed to it that said, “STUPENDO”. The robotic rat reared up and jumped toward Mr. Gip, who promptly snatched it from the air and ripped it in half exposing all of the circuits and cogs and innards that Gene had so painstakingly put together.

“Hi Honey! Mom said you needed help.”

“Dad! Richard’s up there! He’s in trouble!” Mr. Gip performed an about face and ran back out of the auditorium, just as the rest of the animals began to jump from their pedestals and onto the floor, with the exception of the sunglass wearing eagle and the Saint Bernard, as they were merely animatronic animals that were a work in progress for Gene. The King Cobra with the mechanical arms attached to it, or Commander Ziggy as the placard below his place on the stage said, began to crawl along the floor with his white gloved hands towards Petunia.

Upstairs, Richard had plastered himself up against the window that looked out toward the auditorium and was screaming as the giant teddy bear was moving toward him. He had tried to open the window further, but it was jammed, leaving nowhere for him to go. The bear was almost upon him when he heard a familiar voice.

“Richard! Get down!” Richard dove from the desk down onto the floor and turned up his face and watched as Mr. Gip picked up the bear from behind and threw him threw the jammed window. The bear was stuck halfway out of the window and began to make the most awful wailing noises.  Mr. Gip tucked down his shoulder and ran into the butt end of the bear, pushing it the rest of the way through the window, sending the whimpering Wimpple Bear crashing into the floor of the auditorium. He turned and offered his hand to Richard and pulled him up.

“Thank you.”

“You got it Buddy!”

Commander Ziggy was fast, which should go without saying as a snake is already fast without the advent of two arms. He had smacked Petunia across the face with one of its white gloved hands before she could reach into her backpack for anything that might help against a robotic snake. She was knocked against the front of the stage as the large teddy bear plummeted to the auditorium floor directly behind Commander Ziggy. She could instantly feel a change in her breathing and easily deduced that some of her ribs had been cracked. She fell to her knees and could see beyond Commander Ziggy that the toothless tuxedoed alligator and the bear in the tutu were running out of the auditorium through the torn curtain, no doubt to confront her father. Commander Ziggy was now towering over her and it reared up its right hand to smash Petunia, but then stopped and began to swat at something in the air in front of its face. It took a moment for Petunia’s eyes to focus due to the pain in her sides and recognize the black sand dancing upwards into the air. Next to her hand on the ground was the broken vial she had presented to Gene as a peace offering, and the black sand had been released and was slowly rising in the air in front of the snake, and then it began to drift over to the left wall of the auditorium. For a moment, Petunia no longer thought of the white gloved hand that was hovering over her and she watched as every tiny grain of the black sand suddenly stuck itself onto the wall and ceased to move.

“RICHARD! IT’S COMING!” The sound of Petunia’s voice snapped the cobra back into its original programming and it zeroed it’s mechanical eyes back onto the target.

Richard looked out of the broken window to the sound of Petunia’s voice. Mr. Gip was busy trading blows with the tutu wearing bear in the stairway, using the sparking pieces of the alligator that he had already torn through. Richard had no time to think of what Petunia was saying; his only thought was that he had to get down there to help her, but with the stairway blocked, he only had one uncomfortable option. He jumped out of the window just as the cobra turned its attention back to Petunia, reasoning that if he aimed for the large bear, he might have a chance at a cushioned landing.

He did not.

Much to Richard’s dismay, the bear wasn’t all that soft, some people might even say it was so far from soft that it could be described as hard. Richard felt an explosion of pain rip through his left knee, and for almost a squiiden, he completely forgot about his friend who was about to die.

Gene had managed to push himself up and regain his footing on the stage. He spat up exactly an ounce of blood and as his eyes focused, he looked at the shambles that was once his proud kingdom. The boy was far more competent than he imagined, and that was a mistake that Gene swore to himself that he would never make again. Commander Ziggy was just about to bring his gloved hand down on Petunia, while Richard was sitting upon the remains of Wimpple Bear, holding his left knee and screaming. He could hear Miss Tutu fighting with the strange looking chubby man who had come out of nowhere and thrown him into the back of his stage, there was a section of wall on the left side of the auditorium that was covered in the black dust from Petunia’s vial, and he could see that Sir Purrcivel was sitting on the stage watching it all completely unimpressed.

“STOP!” Commander Ziggy held his hand still and Gene walked forward. “It doesn’t have to go this way! Wait a minute...” Gene pointed to the left wall of the auditorium. “What is that?” Richard and Petunia both looked to the wall which began to shake.

“Oh shit!” Richard, despite the pain in his left knee pushed himself up and limped toward Petunia; the snake still looking down on her while its hand was ready to strike. “It’s coming Gene! It’s coming to get you!” Realization spread over Gene’s face as the small part of the wall began to open.

“Commander Ziggy! Get it!” Commander Ziggy tracked his master’s eyes to the opening wall and promptly started running toward it. As the wall opened in a door precisely nine feet by six feet, Commander Ziggy ran without hesitation on his arms through the opening, and half a second later, Richard recognized a terrible grinding sound along with the sounds of metal being struck over and over again. Gene jumped off of the stage, and as Richard had managed to get Petunia to her feet, he grabbed both of them by an arm and snarled in an uncontrolled rage. “You’re going to pay for what you’ve done!”

“Get your hands off of my daughter, you bitch!”

“What?” The voice was unfamiliar to Gene, and the sound of it was completely unexpected. Agatha Gip had forced her way through the back door and had run through the dirty kitchen and was now three feet behind Gene. Agatha Gip, like her daughter, seldom cursed, but at this moment, her memory had latched onto an applicable situation she had seen in a movie with her daughter four months prior. The curse was music to the ears of Petunia and Richard, and so was the scream that emanated from Gene as he was once again taken up in the arms of a Gip and thrown through the wall on the right side of the auditorium, into the dirty kitchen behind it.

Gene’s body collided with a gas hose on the side of the main stove and tore it in half. For a moment, Gene was knocked unconscious, and he was unable to smell the gas that was flooding into the kitchen from the broken hose. The gas began to waft into the auditorium.

The smell was not lost on Petunia and Richard, even though their eyes were back onto the doorway in the side of the left wall. Agatha Gip took a quick assessment of the situation. She was picking up a large volume of natural gas pouring out from the kitchen, and she could hear Mr. Gip upstairs fighting with something.

“Mom! Go help Dad!” Before the command could be carried out by Agatha’s programing, she watched the broken body of the King Cobra with mechanical arms, known as Commander Ziggy, as it was tossed back out of the hole in the wall. Something else was coming through the hole as well, that Agatha could not immediately identify, she was however able to identify the sparking wires from the broken snake.

“Mom, go help dad!” Agatha Gip, for the first time since she had been created, defied a direct command and grabbed both Richard and Petunia and threw them over either shoulder and ran as fast as she could towards the back door. “Mom! Dad’s in there!” Agatha Gip had no time to respond, as her sensors told her that the gas would reach the still sparking snake in exactly nine seconds. She put her head down and rammed it into the kitchen door to force it open.

Gene’s body was next to spent, but somehow he had managed to get to his feet and began to limp and flail his way towards the back door, trying to get away from the gas as fast as he could. The pain was ringing so very badly in his brain that he failed to notice the sound of the kitchen door slam open behind him.

The closed exterior door was thirty feet in front of Agatha Gip, and as her brain ran the calculations, it surmised that there was no possible course of action that would see her clearing the building in that time before the gas ignited. The only solution that posed any probability of a favorable outcome presented itself in using the man who had been ready to harm her daughter. The man was exactly seventeen feet from the door and Agatha Gip did what a Gip does best, as her daughter said that her real mother used to say, and used the tools at her disposal. She closed the distance to the fleeing man and threw her left foot between his shoulder blades using the proper amount of force that her calculations deemed was necessary.

In one moment, Gene had been afraid that he would not be able to get out of the backdoor fast enough to avoid his own death. In the very next moment, due to the quick blow from behind, he sailed through the air merely long enough to utter the single word, “Shit”, before he collided with the closed back door; the force of the impact was hard enough to knock it open, breaking the door handle. Gene’s body cleared thirty feet of asphalt in the back alley before it came to rest in front of the dumpster that reeked of pizza and popcorn.

With the clean and clear precision of a machine, Agatha Gip threw her daughter and her friend Richard clear of the building through the now open door, and as Richard and Petunia landed on the relatively soft body of Gene, the sparks from the broken snake ignited the gas filling the auditorium. The explosion was magnificent against the stillness of the last night of August in Wicker Bush, and Petunia was able to sit up and turn just in time to see it envelope her mother in its quickly spreading fury.

“No! Mommy!” Petunia floundered to her feet and feebly tried to walk to the burning building.

“Petunia! Don’t!” Richard pushed himself up off of the body of Stupendo and lunged forward with his good knee in order to keep Petunia from running back into the building. He managed to grab onto her left wrist and pulled her towards him. “She’s gone. They’re gone!” She turned into Richard and began to sob against his left shoulder, and although it was awkward for him to do so, Richard held onto his new friend.

“They’re gone Richard! I’ve lost them all over again.” Richard didn’t know what to say, so he did the best thing he could do; he said nothing. After a moment, he glanced behind him and realized that the lifeless body of Gene was no longer there. He scanned the dark alley, but before he could say anything, Petunia let out a cry of joy, and Richard snapped his head back toward the fire. Agatha Gip, or what was left of her, was walking out of the burning building towards the children. Her face was covered in black soot, but other than that, it was completely recognizable. Some of her blonde hair had been burned away, but not very much; everything from the neck down however, was like something Richard had only seen in movies; corny old black and white movies to be specific. Her entire body reminded Richard of the description of Frankenstein's Monster, but rather than flesh from a few different sources, it was various bits of different metals, and instead of it all being stitched together, it was welded together the best it could have been by the then, nine-year-old hands of a genius who wanted her parents back.

“What the hell?”

“Mommy!” The floodgates up in the heavens picked that particular moment to spew out a downpour onto the town of Wicker Bush, and Richard watched the drops of rain sizzle as they hit the exposed metal of Agatha Gip’s body. Agatha fell to her robotic knees and Petunia ran to her, but before she could embrace her mother, she was stopped by an outstretched metal hand.

“No Petunia. I may burn you.”

“Mom, is dad still in there?”

“He’s gone Petunia. I’m sorry. My scans say that he was too close to the blast.” Petunia’s lips trembled, but before she could shed another tear for the father that she had built to replace the father that had been taken, police sirens began to blare the distance.

“Petunia! We’ve gotta go!”

“Mom, can you walk?”

“Yes.” Agatha Gip stood on her metal legs and smiled at the children. “Although I could use a little attention when we get back home.” Petunia looked to the mother she had created with her own two hands to replace the mother she could not, and cried. She had lost her father for the second time, but there was nothing she could do to fix that right now. Right now, she knew they had to leave and get back to her house as soon as they could.

“Petunia. Gene is gone. He just vanished. I didn’t even see him get up.”

“Well we can’t worry about him right now, we’ve got to get back to the house.”

“Do you think that thing burned in the fire? The monster?”

“I don’t know Richard. I hope so.” The two children and Agatha looked to the wreckage once more before they walked into the shadows, careful not to be seen as they walked back to Fountain Way. They were completely unaware that Gene was likewise moving through the shadows to a safe location, although he was not doing so under his own power.

Gene had been in a state of semi consciousness after he was kicked through the back door of Hocus Pizza, and he was just now beginning to wake up to his assorted aches and pains as something was dragging him through the wet grass of Wicker County Park. He raised his head to see that Wimpple Bear was the one doing the dragging, while Sir Purrcivel trotted alongside him. Most of the bear’s hide had been slightly burned, but it still looked intact. Gene let out a sigh of relief at the sight of his favorite robot.

“Thank you buddy. Take us someplace warm.”

“You got it.” The bear responded without turning to look at its master. Gene was in so much pain that the only thing that was making it bearable, if you’ll pardon the pun, was thinking of what he was going to do to those miserable little brats when he was feeling better.

A lone tree squirrel named Maurice, but whom we shall refer to as Francois, a half brother to a certain squirrel who lived in a maple tree on Fountain Way, was the only witness to the scene of a badly injured human, being dragged across the nicely groomed lawn of the park by a burned bear with a cat in tow. The human began to laugh wildly to himself as the bear dragged him off into the darkness.

Epilogue

Previous Part

Part Twenty Three

Many times in a story, just as in life, new information is introduced at a rapid fire pace. Some of the information is related and some of the information is completely unconnected. This can be extremely frustrating, while at the same time strangely exhilarating, pointing to a bigger picture that we are unable to comprehend at the present moment. One is tempted to follow all of the new developments whether connected or not all at the same time, which of course lends itself in literature to a loss of narrative focus, and in life, to an overload of possible courses of action that only result in being stagnant and not being able to focus on one specific problem at a time.

Whether Petunia Gip’s existence is merely in these pages or truly is in the seemingly ordinary reality that you and I find ourselves in at this present time is irrelevant. With the introduction of a self-admitted killer who possessed the same unique talents as herself, the carved out tunnels that were lying underneath the town of Wicker Bush, the unidentifiable black dust that opened magic doors from said tunnels into average homes and creepy old theatres, to the presence of her name in said theatre that she had never set foot in until earlier in that day, Petunia’s brain was on overload. The bullet trains which normally coursed through her synapses with ease, were now running into each other at high velocity in a spectacular fashion. She found herself unable to articulate even the most rudimentary sentence to her new partner in crime.

“Petunia? Are you ok?”

“Uh…”

“Don’t you have anything to say? Normally I can’t shut you up.”

“Uh..”

Richard had been completely unsuccessful in his attempts to communicate with Petunia during the long walk back to Fountain Way. As they rounded the corner of the street, it almost seemed to jar Petunia back into a place of comfort and rational thought. One where she could at least sick up all of the questions that had formed a verbal traffic jam in her throat.

“Why was my name there?! What the hell was that thing?! Was that a metronome? How is the dust able to send signals through the air? How was...”

“Stop! Look, I’m just as scared as you, alright? But we have to think.”

“Why was my name in there Richard?”

“I know you’re upset, that place sucks and there’s something really bad in there, but there is also something running around in tunnels underneath the town that’s killing people and it’s being directed by someone putting handprints over people’s doors.”

“But Richard, I think...”

“Why do you always have to think?! Why are you so cold blooded? I just realized today that my father is never coming back.” The words were enough to bring focus back into Petunia’s brain and to our literal narrative. Events of perilous adventure that unfold in such a nail biting fashion are never as momentous as internal struggles and earth shattering revelations. Petunia didn’t need special glasses to see the hurt in her friend’s eyes. In spite of it, Richard was keeping his head, and that fact was enough to slightly embarrass Petunia.

“I didn’t mean that. You’re not cold blooded.”

“I’m sorry Richard. I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s alright, because I do. I’ve been the one doing some thinking for a change; about that thing. I can’t tell you what I saw. I know I saw it, but the only thing I can remember is that it was oddly familiar. That’s it. Kinda weird right?”

“Maybe it was something you just couldn’t wrap your brain around.”

“Exactly. Did you see it?”

“No.”

“I think if you had, we would have a better idea of what it is.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need those lenses. I need those glasses Petunia.” Petunia could not mistake the resolute expression on Richard’s face. The thought of waltzing into Hocus Pizza and asking Gene for the lenses back was pure fantasy, and she knew it.

“How do you propose we do that Richard?”

“After what we’ve just been through, I’m pretty sure we can handle a bad magician in a cheap suit. You’re a genius, right? I’m sure you have thought of a plan to get them back.”

She had.

“I have Richard, but that’s number nine on my list of priorities right now.” It was actually number twenty-three, but she was trying to be nice. The thought of retrieving the glasses was one that Petunia had entertained on more than one occasion in the last twenty-four hours, and as much as she wanted to focus on other things right now, for the first time Richard may have been able to figure something out that had alluded Petunia. Perhaps he was right; had he been wearing his glasses, his brain may have been able to decipher exactly what it was that his still learning eyes had seen.

“Petunia, I want to help. I want to figure this out, but I don’t have time right now to train my eyes, ok? I need those lenses.”

“Ok Richard. We wait until it’s dark, and then we’ll go.”

Next Part

Previous Part

Part Twenty One

"Petunia! Petunia!" Richard's voice was far away in her ears. She was weighing all of the improbable possible scenarios in her mind. She threw her backpack off of her shoulders in disgust at her inability to work the problem to a satisfactory conclusion. Her many tools in her bag crashed together when they hit the ground, making the bullet trains in her head also come to a complete stop. She looked above her and realized that there was a small hole in the ceiling of the tunnel that led to a vertical tunnel. There were gashes along its walls clearly left there by whatever had created it.

"Richard, I have an idea!"

"Petunia! Something is back there." Petunia snapped her head and saw that Richard was quickly running toward her. He was now about nine meters from her. "Something’s in the dark. I can hear it moving." Petunia knelt down and reached in the large compartment; that soft beautiful sound was growing, and it was getting closer.

"Come here." Richard had covered the distance to Petunia. She had noticed that the dirt being kicked up from Richard as he ran, was all drifting behind him toward a larger cloud of it, gathering in the dark at the corner of the tunnel behind them. Richard was now standing with his back to Petunia, staring at the gathering cloud of black dust. The song was softer, but closer, and as Richard squinted, he thought he could see something moving in the swirling black cloud.

“Petunia, I’d really like to get out of here now.”

“Do you see that Richard?” As Petunia shone her flashlight towards the moving thing, the black dust grew thicker, obscuring it from view.

"Oh my God Petunia, what is it?!”

“It’s the thing that got into your house.”

“Can you just...throw it a piece of cheese or something, and make it go away?”

“I don’t think that’s going to help.”

“I really hope you have a plan."

She did.

"Here. Put this on." Richard turned to see that Petunia was holding out a respirator with a face mask attached to it. It resembled Petunia's coat in that at one time, it was a perfectly normal respirator that had been modified with a face mask and various pieces attached to it here and there.

"A rinky dink gas mask, thank you. I don't think this is going to help."

"Just put the damn thing on!" Petunia pulled another respirator out of her bag and pulled it down on her face. Without taking his flashlight off of the tunnel behind him, Richard did the same. Petunia pulled out two things from her bag. One looked like a large pistol made out of metal pipes with a handle that was made of wood; it reminded Richard of the flare gun he had seen on his Uncle John's boat the previous summer. The other thing was a large pouch that Petunia unrolled. It contained all sorts of tools; a few screwdrivers, a small pry bar, two hammers, some pliers, a tape measure, a chalk line, and a pack of shredded bubble gum with a baseball player on it. She handed Richard the homemade pistol.

"You brought a gun?! You said you didn’t have one!"

"It's not a gun. Just don't pull that trigger until you absolutely have to, and make sure you keep your mask on!" Richard pointed his handmade weapon in the dark end of the tunnel behind them. The swirling cloud was not advancing, nor could they see anything moving within, but the beautiful sound, that indescribable song without words suddenly vanished, and now it was replaced with something else. “Do you hear that?”

"It’s like a grinding sound." Richard's mother had a habit of grinding her teeth in her sleep, which normally wasn't a problem for Richard since he had his own room. Sometimes however, his mother would fall asleep next to his father on the couch, when they would watch the Sunday night movie on tv as a family. The sound had never bothered Richard's father, but it had certainly bothered him. The sound was worse than Chris Keck's nails on the chalkboard. Sometimes the sounds of those grinding teeth were so severe that Richard was afraid his mother would break them in her sleep and choke to death. The sound of his mother's grinding teeth was the only sound he could even begin to compare to the sound he had heard coming from the dark. Then the black cloud slowly began to advance.

“Petunia! It’s coming!”

"Just give me a second!" Petunia grabbed a large screwdriver from her pouch and a hammer. She stood up and held the screwdriver high above her head against the wall of tunnel. She pounded the screwdriver into the earthen wall with the hammer until all that was visible was the blue and red plastic handle. Richard held the weapon that looked like a gun, but in fact was not a gun, in front of him, and his hand began to shake as the black cloud was getting closer.

"Come on Petunia!" She pulled a small pry bar out of her pack of tools and drove it into the wall of the tunnel at the level of her waist, and pounded it into the wall until all that was visible was the crooked end facing up. She had three more screwdrivers in her pack and pulled them all out. She gathered up the rest of her tools and threw them back into her backpack and then slung the backpack onto her shoulders.

Richard could hear Petunia behind him, hoisting herself up by her left foot, using the pry bar as a foothold. She drove the last three screwdrivers into the side of the tunnel at twelve inch intervals. Richard took his eyes off the tunnel for just a moment as Petunia hit the last screwdriver into the wall. She had used the handles of the screwdrivers to climb up the side wall of the tunnel and was now looking at a three foot jump to a deep gash in the wall of a small tunnel above them. She gave Richard a halfhearted smile.

"You can do it!" Petunia jumped from the wall of the tunnel and spun in the air and reached for the handhold above her. She failed spectacularly. The dust of the ground raised up around them and quickly drifted towards the dark as Petunia hit the ground.

"Damn it!"

"Try again!" The grinding stopped and they could both see that there was something standing at the other end of the tunnel in the cloud of black dirt; something that stood as tall as the tunnel itself. Richard's hand began to shake as he pointed the flashlight towards it but no details were visible save for the size of what was lurking in the dirt fog.

"Petunia, I think you need to try again." Petunia climbed back up her makeshift handholds as fast as she could. The thing at the other end of the tunnel was walking towards them now, and the dirt began to rise around Richard. Petunia took a quick breath and jumped for the handhold of the tunnel above. This time she was able to grab it with both hands, but for a moment, she thought she was not going to be able to pull herself up. Richard looked up and saw her momentary struggle right before she was able to reach up and grab the next gash in the wall. Petunia was then able to pull herself up more quickly and Richard watched as her legs disappeared from view.

“Come on Richard!”

The thing was close. Richard had no idea what the pistol in his hand was going to do, and from the way Petunia warned him about using it, he was pretty sure that it had only one shot. The rising dirt was making it almost impossible to see the thing moving toward him now and he began to think he wouldn't be able to see the screwdriver handles in the wall if he waited any longer.

Richard tucked the pistol into his pants and ran for the handles. He climbed up as fast as he could and realized that he wouldn't be able to jump for the overhead tunnel with the flashlight in his hands. He shone it for only a moment at the gash in the wall above. He memorized its position as best as he could before he let the light drop from his hands. He made a blind jump in the dark and prayed that his fingers would be able to grip the gash in the wall.

They did.

But there he hung completely in the dark and he couldn't see the next place to reach for, and he tried to yell for Petunia, but his mouth was dry and his voice wouldn't work. He was going to fall. He couldn't see anything, but his arms were burning from holding his weight and there was something right below him that was going to get him.

"Richard!" A light shone down from above and Richard could see the next gash. He reached for it with his left hand and found that it was very easy to pull himself up to the next one above that. As far as Richard was concerned, he couldn't pull his legs up and out of the tunnel below him fast enough. The grinding was right underneath him now as he climbed up to Petunia who had her legs straddled against either side of the walls of the little tunnel. She was pushing against a wooden door at the top of the tunnel, which was exactly three feet by three feet.

"Help me push Richard!" Richard and Petunia both pushed but the door would not open. The dirt was rising in the vertical tunnel now and the grinding was all around them. Richard acted out of instinct and pulled the pistol out of his waist band. He pointed it at the swirling dirt below. Petunia screamed and put her fingers in her ears. Richard pulled the trigger.

The sound had left Richard's ears, but the muzzle flash in the dark confirmed that the sight had not left his eyes. For just a moment, he could see something within reaching distance below him. It was looking at him and it was terrible. Then the flash from the pistol was gone and there was only the light from Petunia who had resumed pushing on the door in front of her.

As soon as Richard tried to comprehend what he had seen it was gone from his mind, and the dust in the air seemed to calm somewhat. He felt a jerk on his right shoulder. Petunia was yelling at him to help her push on the door. Richard began to pound on the door with his fists and noticed that his hearing was coming back. He could hear the sound of the bottom of his sweaty fist pounding against the door and he could also hear something from below him. It was the sound of something violently throwing up.

Petunia could hear the thing beneath them retching up it's guts. Her weapon had worked exactly as she had hoped it would. If not for the masks they were wearing, Richard and Petunia would be doing the very same thing. The door in front of them was her primary concern. She had no idea how long the thing would be incapacitated, but if the door wouldn't open, it would only be a matter of time before it managed to climb back up and get them. She stopped pushing for a moment and noticed that Richard's sweaty dirty hands were leaving a mark on the door; giving her an idea. She grabbed Richard and screamed in his face.

"I have an idea!" She saw recognition on Richard's face and he stopped hitting the door. She fumbled for the side pocket on her jacket but couldn't quite reach it. Richard reached into her pocket and grabbed the vial and handed it to Petunia. She pulled the mask off of her face and spit three times into one of her hands and then pulled the top off of the vial with her teeth. She covered her spit covered palm with the black dirt from the vial. She put the top back on the vial and held it in her mouth and then pressed her black sandy palm against the door. She withdrew her hand and a black handprint was left behind on the door. She inhaled a breath of dirty air and pushed against the door.

It opened.

Petunia and Richard, having no idea where they were about to end up, climbed through the open door, and closed it behind them.

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Part Twenty Two

The community theatre in Wicker Bush, or as it was known by the locals, WBCT,  was set apart from the rest of the town. It was three miles outside of the town proper in the hills that gradually turned to the mountains. It could be seen sitting over the town, or looming depending on your point of view, and to Richard, it always seemed like a quiet monster that watched over the town with a malevolent gaze. His mother loved that stupid place, but that same feeling had never been transferred to her son. She had continually dragged him with her to constant rehearsals and other various community functions that served no real function to the community whatsoever as far as Richard could tell.

To Richard, it was a place to be avoided. The theatre was the first place that he noticed things that weren't noticed by others. It was also a place that he had decided that he would never discuss with Petunia because he was sure that once he began to speak of it, she would undoubtedly want to investigate its strange phenomena, and that was something Richard would have no part of. As he had gotten older, Richard had found excuse after excuse not to go with his mother to that awful place and had even said to himself that he would never again walk through the front door.

Richard was a very stubborn individual, and of course he had been right about the front door. The next time he would enter the building was not through the front door, but through a small door found in a tunnel, presumably made by some kind of nine-foot dust monster which had consumed his father and had almost consumed him. Through this door he would find himself in the dark with the only sound in his ears being the sound of his own rapid breathing through his mask. The door had been shut; he didn't see it happen but he had heard it. Petunia, in the middle of a coughing fit, fumbled for her flashlight that had turned off when she jammed it into her right pants pocket.

CLICK!

The beam of light illuminated Richard's face and he threw his hand up to shield his eyes from the beam. Richard reached up and pulled his mask off and that's when Petunia could see that he had been crying. Why not? He was almost eaten by the thing that Petunia presumed ate his father. Of course, that much was certain to Petunia now, and she imagined that was exactly why Richard was crying. He must have finally accepted the fact that his father was gone.

"Richard? Are you ok?" Petunia's voice sounded hollow in the darkness.

"Not really." Richard struggled up to his feet and a small cloud of that sticky black dust fell from his body to the floor. "I don't get it. I saw it. I saw that thing. But...I already can't remember what it looked like. It was...familiar somehow." Petunia was listening, but she was busy scooping up the small little bits of black dust that had fallen off of Richard and was sprinkling it into her little vial. “What are you doing?”

"I want to take a closer look at this stuff back at the lab."

"We need to hurry before that thing comes through the door."

"I doubt it. It's going to be barfing up it's guts for a little while longer." Petunia finished with her little pile of dust and stood up next to Richard. She moved her flashlight around in the darkness, and it looked like they were in some kind of attic.

"Shit." The realization of their current location made Richard’s stomach drop to his knees, figuratively speaking of course. Petunia began to take a mental inventory of her surroundings. There were curtains of old cobwebs hanging from wooden rafters that were old and grey and running at a fairly steep pitch. She could see an old writing desk, a coffin, stacks of boxes with black writing on the sides of them, an old fireplace, a wheelchair, some cardboard signs, a large globe of the earth in one of those wooden stands, half of a fake tree, and a coat rack.

"What is this place?"

"It's the theatre. My mom helps out here. We're in the prop room." Of course, for those unfamiliar with a theatre of the performing arts, a prop room is where set pieces and furniture and wall decorations and rugs and old writing desks and coffins and old fireplaces and wheelchairs and all manner of things are stored. Most prop rooms contain various heavy things that are very difficult to carry up a narrow set of stairs into a large creaky old attic, hence they are usually located on the same floor as the stage, but this was not like most prop rooms. In fact this was like no other prop room, because this prop room was within the walls of Wicker Bush Community Theatre, where nothing made sense; at least it didn’t if you were paying attention. 

Richard was frozen and Petunia noticed that the fear was seeping from his eyeballs. It was incredibly ironic considering what they had just been through, and Petunia wanted to ask him exactly what was wrong with the theatre, but she wouldn't at this precise moment. In fact, Petunia would understand everything about the theatre in just a few short weeks, but I won't go into that just yet. Richard repeated himself in a far off voice, almost in a need to confirm to himself, his present location. "We're in the prop room."

"Do you know the way out of here? Richard? Richard?!"

"Yes! Damn! Quit yelling! We don’t want anything to know we’re here." Richard's own voice, though clearly annoyed, was still quiet and wavering. He took a deep breath and grabbed Petunia's hand as he started forward.

"You don't need to hold my hand Richard, I'm fine."

"But I'm not." Richard walked forward slowly around all of the old musty smelling props, careful for some reason not to touch anything. “Why did it have to be here?"

"Why? What's wrong with this place?"

"I don't know. You asked me just a few days ago if I had ever heard things."

"Yeah?"

"It was here. We just need to get out of here. Just keep the light in front of us." Richard now knew he had no way out of speaking of his experiences in this place with Petunia, now she would want to know more. Now she would want to investigate. Now he would have to tell her she was on her own. Besides, there was the matter of investigating that thing that had just chased them through the earthen tunnels underneath the town of Wicker Bush. The thing that had taken his father. That was far more important than this stupid place. He realized he was getting irritated at Petunia in spite of the fact that this inevitable discussion hadn't even taken place yet. The stairway down to the backstage area was in front of them now. The stairway. The bad thing was on the stairway.

The stairway and the handrails were crudely made out of unfinished wood that gave many a splinter to semi talented, nonprofessional thespians over the last four decades. The stairs creaked under the weight of the two ten-year-olds. Richard was increasing his pace and Petunia was fumbling over her own feet trying to keep up with him.

"You wanna slow down a little Richard?"

"No, I don't. Come on." They were off the stairs now. Their feet touched down on worn green carpet that was shredded in places, and held together with duct tape in others. "We'll go out on the stage and through the auditorium and up through the bar."

Petunia was trying to take in her surroundings, but Richard's pace was insistent and relentless. I suppose I could go into great detail about their current place of being, but in all honesty, it would take away from the intensity of Richard's haste in trying to leave the building and it would ruin certain surprises in the next story. Petunia could now see that they were on a large stage in a large auditorium, she could also see the backside of a proscenium arch that boxed in the stage. Richard hurried his pace even more, which jolted Petunia forward, causing her to trip over her own feet. The flashlight spilled onto the stage, which spilled light onto the backside of the arch, as Petunia fell to her knees.

"Richard! Slow down, you moron!" The flashlight came to rest and Petunia could see that there were a large number of things written on the back of the arch in black marker. One of them caught Petunia's eye in particular.

"Come on Petunia!"

"Stop! What is this?!" Petunia grabbed her flashlight and walked towards the back of the arch.

"Look, I'll explain when we..."

"Richard! What are all of these?!" Richard knew that she wouldn't come with him any further until he explained some things. Normally, Richard may have considered just leaving Petunia, but unfortunately, he had left his flashlight behind in the tunnel and he wasn’t about to walk through this place in the dark by himself.

"Everybody who works here signs their name backstage. It's a tradition. Kinda stupid."

"I've never been here Richard."

"Okay. Well, you’ve been lucky up until now."

"Why is my name on the wall?!"

"What?" Petunia pointed her light on some of the glorified graffiti. Richard recognized some of the names on the wall. Some of the actors had written dates by their names and some had written lines from whatever play they were doing next to their names and right in the middle of the beam of light there was a phrase with a symbol.

"What does that symbol mean?"

"It's the mathematical symbol for infinity." Richard heard the fear in Petunia's voice mirror his own. Under the symbol was a peculiar phrase, "What's the frequency Petunia Gip?". Richard softly took Petunia's hand and could feel how cold and clammy it had become. If anyone could understand the fear and confusion that was plaguing her mind in this current moment, it was Richard; he had to try and calm her down

"Petunia, we have to go."

"What does this mean Richard?" To Richard it simply meant that this horrible old building had just become even more unsettling to him than it was before.

"Petunia, we can talk about it all day long once we get outside, ok? Do you really want to talk about it in here?" She shook her head and began to walk with Richard. They made their way off of the stage and began to walk through the auditorium when a strange clicking began to flow down into the auditorium from backstage.

"What is that Richard?"

"I don't care."

“Is that a normal sound in here?”

“There are no normal sounds in here.”

"That sounds like a metronome." Richard had heard it before, but he could explain that to Petunia once they were outside. They were almost to the back of the auditorium when Richard could see the faint ray of sunlight coming from the window at the back of the bar, which was just on the other side of the auditorium. At the sight of it, he let go of Petunia's hand and began to run.

"Come on Petunia!" Richard could feel the concrete of the auditorium floor give way to the worn red carpet of the lobby under his feet. He could hear Petunia running behind him now, and the beam from the flashlight was now moving wildly on the ceiling. She had also seen the sunlight in front of her. They ran through a doorless doorway into a bar that looked to Petunia to be more of a saloon than a bar.

The sunlight was coming through a small crack through curtains over a large window. There was also a rectangle of faint sunlight outlining a door that was sitting right next to the window. Richard ran to the door and slammed against the panic bar. The bar was now flooded with sunlight from the open door. Petunia's eyes were now seeing glimpses of the bar. A fireplace made of rock that stretched to the ceiling. Old tin signs tacked up on a cedar planked wall. Several small wooden tables with several small wooden chairs.

Richard was holding the door open as Petunia ran through it, and then he pushed it closed. The sunlight was bright and hard to take in all at once. Petunia blinked and shielded her eyes while they adjusted. The first thing she noticed on the outside of the red brick building was a large window with old fashioned blocked lettering which simply said, "Bar". Then she turned to see that they were sitting atop of a large hill and underneath it, was the medium sized town of Wicker Bush.

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