Oliver

  No new horror can be more terrible

  than the daily torture of the commonplace.

  They ditched the bike a half a mile from Amrita’s house. The sirens had long since faded in the distance, and nobody was following them. She said she didn’t want to tell her family that she’d stolen it, so they left it in the bushes beside the decaying country highway and went the rest of the way on foot as they talked the whole thing over.

  “Why don’t I remember any of it?” Amrita asked him, her hands withdrawn into her hoodie sleeves, her frown directed at the pavement.

  Oliver kicked a rock. “You looked like you were asleep or something when I got to you. Like those words put you in a trance.”

  “And then the, the… whatever-the-hell-that-was, it just went berserk? No reason?”

  He gnawed at his lip. “No reason.” There was nothing he could imagine that would ever convince him to tell this compelling, frightening, wonderful girl that a slimy tar goblin had crawled out of his face and attacked the monster.

  She stopped dead in the road and turned to him, her stance challenging. “This is bullshit, right? Like, this doesn’t… this can’t… can chlorine fumes make you hallucinate? Tell me this is bullshit!”

  He wiped his nose carefully and checked it. Nothing. “I don’t know. I think we’d feel sick, or out of it, or something.”

  She looked like she wanted to argue, but her mouth worked silently, and then she started walking again. Finally, she said, “You’re sure she’s dead?”

  He swallowed hard, trying not to picture Ms. Gilman’s broken body or the vivid smear she’d left on the stone, red blood shining black in the green light. “Completely.”

  “That’s nuts, Oliver, it’s insane! That thing… it was an animatronic something, or a government experiment, I don’t know, something. Come on, the grandma I never met was some cult priestess? Octopus monsters crawling out of a well and killing people? I don’t believe it. I can’t!”

  “I know.” He pointed at a congealed scratch on her forehead and then held out his bruised, scraped hands. “But something happened. We’re covered in rock dust. Does your hand still hurt? You punched that guy hard. We saw the building coming down. We heard the sirens. It happened.”

  “There were so many people in that building! You think any of those pool weirdos got out?”

  “Don’t know. It was moving really fast. I hope so.”

  “And they were looking straight at it before it even showed up. What was that? Could they feel it? Were they hypnotized?”

  He shrugged and nodded at the same time.

  She picked up a stone and flung it into the bushes. “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  They walked for a time in silence, and for all the horrors they’d seen, the only one Olly could think of was that black squid thing. He could still feel the after-ache of its exit in the flesh of his nose.

  She leaned into his shoulder as they walked. “Thanks for snapping me out of it.”

  His guts suddenly wanted climb up into his neck, and his brain stopped working. “Of course,” he managed.

  “Let’s maybe not tell my family, okay? They’d freak.”

  “For sure.”

  Edgewood Trailer Park had been named by someone with absolutely no imagination. It sat literally at the edge of the woods three miles outside of town at the end of the only road leading east into the national lands that formed the dark, empty armpit of backwater Indiana. There was nothing behind Edgewood but fifty miles of forest. The trailers themselves were wedged in among the trees, huge trunks sprouting up between aging mobile homes and shading the entire little village. Rutted dirt roads wove haphazardly through the mess of ramshackle buildings with no seeming plan or order; it looked like people had just shown up one by one and said, “I’ll throw down over here.” That was, Oliver reflected, the most likely scenario. Nothing else could explain the winding warren of narrow lanes and bunched trailers. There were more people around than he was used to on the empty streets of town, and they all seemed active and energetic, even the ones that were just sitting there chatting on their flimsy porches. Most of the homes had a car or two parked beside them, but nearly half looked like they hadn’t moved in a decade.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Amrita strode confidently down alleys formed by peeled-paint aluminum siding, crossing through what looked like people’s back yards with no concern for who might care. A skinny woman in a nightdress looked up from her lawn chair as they passed and gave them a smile. Amrita waved but didn’t stop.

  “My parents, the neighbors… they’re kind of a lot, okay? Loud. Just roll with it.”

  “Okay.” He felt suddenly nervous, but he couldn’t think of a good reason to just turn around and leave. It’d be rude, and he was halfway sure she’d hit him if he was rude. They approached a pair of trailers that stood side-by-side, their covered porches facing each other, the narrow strip of lawn between them busy with people. Old eighties rock he felt he should recognize was playing from somewhere, and the babble of friends competed with it. There were two aluminum park tables loaded with bags of chips, oversized soda bottles, and hot dog buns. He couldn’t keep track of the people – kids kept running around and adults leaned over the tables to hear each other even as their hands kept the children out of trouble. It was like watching a beehive.

  “This is your family?” He had to raise his voice.

  “Not most of ‘em. The Porters live right there, and they’ve got like a million kids. Dude’s gotta get snipped.” She raised her voice. “Hey, everybody!”

  A chorus of happy greetings bombarded them, and suddenly dozens of eyes were on Oliver. These seemed like nice, normal folks, but still it made him think of the pool and all those dead stares. His palms itched, and an echo of his old headache came back. He did his best to look pleasant.

  “Who’s your friend?” said a worn-out, overweight blonde woman with a wide smile.

  “Mom, this is Oliver. He’s in my biology class.”

  The slender, dark-skinned man with mechanic’s hands and a bushy black mustache sitting next to her mother peered at him. “Do you work on cars? That sleeve looks like a bad oil leak.”

  “No, that came out of his nose,” Amrita said casually. “He has cancer.”

  He flushed. “I don’t, I promise. She keeps saying that, but it’s just a sinus thing.”

  “I had a cousin with ass cancer,” the redheaded woman on the other side of the table said. “Bad way to go.”

  “Uh… yeah. I don’t have that, though.”

  “Remember Ray with the Camaro, Lizzie?” the woman asked Amrita’s mom. “Ass cancer.”

  Amrita’s dad stood and waved them over. He was tall and his eyes were kind. Oliver liked him immediately.

  “Come eat, you two.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Oliver protested. “I’m fine.”

  “Sit, young man,” Amrita’s mom said firmly. “I’m not sending somebody with cancer home unfed.”

  “I don’t…”

  A little boy with a messy shock of blond hair pulled him down onto the metal bench. “Are you gonna die?”

  “No,” he said, headache increasing. “I’m not sick.”

  Amrita plunked down at his side. “Anybody hear anything from town?” she asked as she fixed herself a plate.

  “No, should we?” her mother said.

  “Guess not. We just heard sirens on our way out and wondered if anybody, y’know, saw anything.”

  “I’ll have to ask Ray Gomez when he gets home tonight,” Amrita’s father said, his mouth half full. “He works down on Main Street.”

  Amrita and Oliver exchanged a fleeting glance, and he wondered whether Ray Gomez would be coming home tonight.

  In the end he ate three hot dogs, most of a bag of chips, and drank two big cups of root beer just to keep the noisy, unlistening horde from asking if the chemo was killing his appetite. One of the Porter kids, a girl of maybe twelve, ran into her older brother and ended up with half a dozen people around her trying to show her how to stanch a nosebleed. It gave Olly the opportunity to check his own nose, and sure enough, a black trickle had started back up again. The hidden stereo was cycling through Guns ‘N’ Roses, Def Leppard, and he didn’t know what else, and his headache was worsening. He managed to wipe his flow on a napkin without anyone noticing. Amrita was right there, but she was staring into space, her hot dog only half-eaten.

  She stood up suddenly. “Dad, can I talk to you for a minute? Inside, maybe?”

  Olly started to rise. “I should go.”

  She shoved him back down. “I’ll only be a minute. I can walk you back to, uh, your bike.”

  He was ready to leave, but the promise of another half-mile alone with her was enough to settle him back in his seat. She disappeared inside, and he watched her go. When he turned back, redheaded Mrs. Porter was sitting right next to him, eyebrows raised and lips pursed as she poured him another cup of root beer.

  “I had an uncle that didn’t die of cancer. Know why? Jalape?o enemas. Twice a day. Cured him like that. I can tell you exactly how to do them.”

  His head felt like it was getting jackhammered and he had to dab at his nose again, but he put on a smile and imagined walking alone with Amrita. Maybe he’d hold her hand. He wouldn’t, of course, but it was a nice thought.

  “Sure, Mrs. Porter. I’d love to hear about it.”