On the Day I Died (15 page)

“Get out!” shouted Kev. “Get out while you still can!” Taking a hand off the steering wheel, he shoved me hard.

I swung toward the still-open door, gripping the seat belt, feeling a rush of wind and pavement inches from my face. The car made a hard turn and the force pulled me back in. I grasped the door and yanked it shut.

The locks clamped down with a snap that sounded like a gunshot.

“No, no, no!” Kev moaned beside me. He was wrestling with the steering wheel, trying to gain some control. “This is all wrong. You shouldn’t be here. It was supposed to be just me—just me and
it
.”

Through the windshield I could see the stallion. Chrome legs pumping, hooves pounding. The thing was alive!

Fear coiled inside me, thick and suffocating.

“Slam on the brakes!” I shouted.

“Don’t you get it?” cried Kev. “There’s nothing we can do—nothing but go along for the ride.”

Outside the window, our neighborhood melted into a blur. In seconds—yes, seconds—we were on I-94, leaving the city. I turned in my seat to look out the back window as Chicago’s skyline winked goodbye.

And then we were barreling along roads I’d never known existed, country roads that were abandoned and forlorn, snaking through tangled marshes and treeless fields. Once we shot across an expanse of bloodred water on a rickety suspension bridge, and I covered my
eyes, sure we would plummet to our deaths. Instead we dropped into the dark, wet throat of a tunnel that spiraled down into complete darkness. I couldn’t see a thing, only sense the hurtling speed, feel the car heating up. I screamed just to let myself know I was still there. Still in the car. Still alive.

Kev’s voice came to me through the blackness. “Brimstone. That smell is brimstone.”

It was the same sulfury, burned-match smell that had invaded me in Kev’s driveway, only this time it was all over me. Coating my skin. Creeping into my lungs. The stench burned my nostrils, seared my throat, made my eyes stream.

“I’m so sorry, Rich,” said Kev. “You weren’t supposed to come along on this trip.”

We shot out of the tunnel into a tangled forest. As we hurtled along the narrow dirt road, the trees scratched and clawed at the car, and an especially big oak limb slammed into the passenger window, shattering the glass. I shrieked as the Chrysler skittered off the road and into the woods, plowing through barbed grasses and bushes with thorns the size of kitchen knives. Snakelike vines writhed and knotted, while black toadstools dripped yellow poison onto the forest floor. All around us the air was thick with black flies the size of my fist.

We burst out of the woods at the top of a tall sand dune, and I recognized where we were. I knew this
place. It was Mount Baldy, one of the tallest dunes on Lake Michigan. Only it wasn’t. It was like everything was backward, as if I was looking at it from the wrong side.

The Chrysler stopped at the very top of the dune. It idled, catching its breath.

Spread out before us as far as the eye could see was water—a boiling black witches’ cauldron of water. It stretched to the horizon, where red bolts of lightning flashed and angry storm clouds swirled. The air grew hot, furnace hot, so hot that tiny burning cinders began to fall from the sky like rain. They hissed and sizzled on the sand, the waves, the roof of the car.

A firestorm. It’s a firestorm
.

Overhead, thunder rumbled.

The car revved its motor in eager answer.

I felt the back wheels spin in the sand, searching for traction. On the hood, the stallion’s powerful front hooves pawed the fiery air.

I didn’t have time to think it through. I still had the seat belt in my hand. I saw the shattered passenger window. I seized my chance—my
only
chance.

“There’s no use fighting,” Kev said hopelessly as I knotted the strap around my waist and began to crawl out the window. “You can’t win.”

“I can try!” I shouted.

I was hanging halfway out when the car leaped forward, propelling me the rest of the way through the window. Jagged shards of glass raked across my legs as I was
flung backward like a tethered kite, slamming onto the car’s trunk.

I crouched there a moment, caught my breath, the cinders burning tiny holes in my shirt, my jeans, my skin. Then, with all my might, I gripped the luggage rack. Fighting the searing heat of its metal, I heaved myself up and over the roof. The fiery wind screamed in my ears. The heated sand pelted my skin like buckshot. The car hit the beach, charging toward the water’s edge. I had just seconds left. Eyes squeezed shut, I let myself roll down the windshield and across the hood. As I did, I felt patches of my skin peel away from my face and arms, sizzling like hamburgers on a grill.

The seat belt held, pulled me up short, my head dangling between the car’s headlights. Somehow I managed to right myself, brace my feet against the front grille and grasp the white-hot hood ornament. Steam rose from my hands, and the burned-meat stench of charred flesh—
my flesh
—savaged my nose. But I was beyond caring, beyond pain. I wrenched the monstrous ornament from the hood.

I struggled to hold it as the stallion kicked and bucked furiously in my charred hands. Arching its neck, it turned and sank its fanglike teeth into my thumb, its red eyes wide and maniacal.

“
You
can go to the devil!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. And just as the Chrysler reached the water’s edge, I flung the ornament. I heaved it with all my might. It
flew through the thick heat, legs flailing, eyes blazing. Out of the roiling water rose a hungry wave. It snatched the ornament in midair. There came a loud hiss and a spout of red steam, and then the ornament was gone, devoured by the lake.

And in that instant, everything changed. Suddenly, I was looking at the beach and Mount Baldy as I’d always known them. The water was blue again, cold instead of boiling. A cool breeze lifted off the waves. I turned my blistered face, took a deep breath.

“The lake!” Kev hollered, and panic filled his voice. “The lake! We’re sinking!”

We were still in the water, the car’s hot metal sizzling as we sank. Already the water was up to the bumpers, and it was rising quickly.

“Kev!” I shouted as I wrestled with the knot around my waist. “Get out of there!”

I could see him through the windshield—his eyes clear—the old Kev I’d always known. Rolling down his window, he splashed into the water and dog-paddled clumsily toward me.

“Get going! Get help!” I panted, gesturing toward the beach. “I’m right behind you.” I tore frantically at the seat belt, but it was no use. My ruined fingers couldn’t work the knot. The water was deep now. Even though I was kneeling on the hood, the waves splashed around my waist.

“B-but …,” sputtered Kev.

“Get going!” I shouted.

I watched him paddle toward shore as the water crept up my chest. The knot was too tight, the seat belt too strong. I wasn’t going to escape. But Kev would. I watched him stumble, coughing and struggling, onto the beach, calling for help.

And then, just as the lake closed over my head, I saw it, glinting in the afternoon sun just where Kev had emerged … a chrome stallion bucking in the surf.

For several long seconds, Mike stared down at Rich’s grave. Was it his imagination, or could he actually feel a vibration from below, something malevolent radiating up through the dirt?

Mike jumped away and hurried back to Carol Anne’s grave. “Creepy,” he said with a shudder, “that thing still down there … waiting.”

“We’re all waiting for something, even him,” said Scott, jerking his head in the direction of a willow tree.

Almost completely hidden behind the tree’s draping branches, a rail-thin, long-haired figure sat, silent and unmoving. The figure’s arms were folded across his chest, and his white hands—sickly white hands that Mike bet had never seen the sun even in life—gleamed in the bone-glow of the moon. Although his face was turned away, Mike could tell that the ghost was fixated on some nameless object in the distance, his expressionless eyes wide and staring.

“Hey, mutton head!” shouted Johnnie. “Whatcha got to say for yourself?”

“Shhh,” said Mike, suddenly panicked. “Let’s not … um … disturb him.”

“But, Mike, everybody needs to tell their story, remember?” said Gina.

“Yeah,” Mike said reluctantly. He sensed that he didn’t want to hear this one, didn’t want to listen to any tale this ghost might have to tell. “I remember.”

“C’mon, kid,” Johnnie hollered again. “Spit it out.”

A spasm shook the ghost, as if he’d felt a sudden chill. Shambling to his feet, he shuffled forward. His cheeks were thin to hollowness, his mouth a tortured line. He looked around at the others before settling those strange, blank eyes on Mike. And then he began to speak.

T
HE WALLPAPER WAS ALIVE.

Its flocked-velvet pattern of uncertain curves and twisting angles slithered across the guest room walls in varying hues of reds—here a lurid scarlet, there a pale vermilion, over by the window a sickly, faded pink, the color of a dying rose. It was hideous. Yet I could not look away. It provoked me. Commanded me to trace its tortuous pattern hour upon hour.

There was, I observed, a spot in the pattern that swirled in on itself, lolling like a broken neck. If I turned my head just so, the broken neck dissolved into a set of glowering red eyes. They accused me, those eyes. Always.

How dare the wallpaper look at me that way!

There was another place just above the bedstead where two strips of the paper refused to line up evenly. The unmatched pattern formed a slit of a mouth, and in that mouth a line of clenched white teeth.

The vision of that ghastly mouth jerked me from my pondering so suddenly that I felt like a hooked fish. One moment I was peacefully suspended in the murky depths of my musings, the next I was gasping on the shores of consciousness. And it was all because of the wallpaper.

Oh, how I despised that wallpaper!

How its mocking images drove me to fury!

Sometimes, after waking, I wept. Other times, I slammed my fists into the wallpaper as if trying to beat it into a velvet pulp.

“What is happening to me?” I asked myself after one such incident. I resolved never to enter the guest bedroom again.

For a few days I stood by this pledge. And still, those twisting bloodred patterns dwelt in my mind as the glass paperweight once did; as the brass knobs had done before it. And just as with those other objects, there were things about that wallpaper that nobody knew but me.

Secret things
.

I was not always like that, tortured and alone. Once upon a time, I had a home. A family. But I also had the ponderings.

I have
always
had the ponderings.

I was born with them as surely as I was born with heart, liver and lungs. Slit open my belly, I believed, and you would find them there, tangled among the blood and viscera. Passed down from previous generations, folded into my very soul, the ponderings were a part of me.

I was three years old the first time I was taken by one. I remember standing in the nursery, holding a colored building block in my pudgy hand. Blue it was, a rectangle of wood. I held it, and all of a sudden, I felt weightless. The blood in my head swirled, and the hand holding the block began to tingle. For one moment I felt like a teakettle about to whistle.