Feral

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Shannon Pitcher started taking her late-night walks after settling into her brother’s house on Walnut Street. They started late one evening as a walk to the convenience store for snacks, and maybe a good book to pass the next few nights with. She hadn’t slept well the past few months, hadn’t slept at all the past few weeks, except in short violent bursts just before dawn. She was tired of watching the midnight movie marathons, mostly B-movie rejects culled straight from the bargain basement of the trashy eighties, and the infomercials were pure insomniac hell.

That night, an hour after starting toward the Sunset Mart she had awaken to her surroundings and realized two things, she had no idea where she was, and she was exhausted. She could have curled up in the dew-damp grass of someone’s front yard and fallen asleep right then. Instead she did a drunken about-face and walked back the way she had come.

She stopped only to read the first street sign she saw. It was the corner of Fair and 17th Street. She had walked over a dozen blocks. She wasn’t used to this much street running unbroken and straight. Riverside was only a small city, but much larger than her hometown, Normal Hills.

She forgot the snacks and walked home, then crashed until late the next afternoon without the help of her hated pills.

While that long, uninterrupted sleep had been the greatest thing to happen to her in this new life, her post-Thomas-and-Alicia life, it had completely reversed her sleep cycle. Shannon found it was a change she could live with. Sleep during the day, take care of life’s mundane necessities in the evening, and spend her nights in a nocturnal parody of life.

She had money, and the ability to make more when she needed it, so she was set. All she needed was a place to crash and a good movie or book to keep her company. That, and her night walks. The exhaustion and the dreamless sleep she needed to do it all over again.

Shannon heard the music before she saw the playground. It was a muffled, almost ethereal mixture of heavy metal and children’s laughter. Her brother, Jared, had listened to heavy metal as a teenager.

Her taste for what their father called the wild stuff had never been as wide or varied as Jared’s, but she recognized this tune. It was Queen’s Stone Cold Crazy, but not Queen that was playing it. Behind the heavy metal noise, and running through the fast beat and sandpaper rhythm like a scarlet thread, was the laughter of lunatic children.

Shannon knew she should turn around, caution being the greater part of valor and all that s**t, and just go back the way she had come. Kids will be kids, she knew, and the safest thing to do when they got up to harmless mischief was to leave them alone. Just stay the hell out of their way and let them wind down.

Like I’m doing now, she thought. Let them exorcise, or maybe just exercise, their demons and hope their better natures kick in before any real trouble starts.

There was something fundamentally wrong about this though. It was not the boisterous carousing of teenagers. The voices behind the laughter were too young, the maniacal tittering of grade-school lunatics on a field trip to some carnival freak show.

Can’t be, she thought. You’re hearing things. Just turn around and walk your ass back home. It’s getting early, and you’re so f*****g dead on your feet you’re hallucinating.

Instead, she continued along the river, ear c****d toward the odd sound of toddler metal madness. She wasn’t hallucinating. There was a playground over there by the edge of the wild where all traces of the city ended. A goddamn big one, and so old and neglected she couldn’t believe any parent would let their child play in it.

The music and the laughter ebbed and swelled, ebbed and swelled.

The playground was empty.

A single voice, the voice of a haughty schoolyard queen, rose above the others. She sounded eight, maybe nine years old, Alicia’s age.

Stop it, a voice in her head screamed. We are not going there tonight. Not tonight, not ever!

She tried to kill the thought as she approached the playground. It quieted, falling back into the denied darkness of her subconscious, but it would not die. It hung on, whimpering in the darkness where she could still hear it.

That crazy music, ebbing and swelling, and the sound of muffled laughter, distorted into something horrible.

It was Her voice, beautiful and frighteningly familiar, singing some nonsense hopscotch song, one of many in her repertoire. Then she spoke to Shannon.

“Why did you let him do it, mommy? Where were you when he took me away? Why didn’t you stop him?”

The voice, Alicia’s voice, came from inside the playground, and from somewhere within her own head.

It can’t be her, she thought coldly. There’s no way it’s her, she’s dead.

You don’t know that, they never found her body. You don’t know she’s dead.

Shannon ran toward the playground, stumbling through ankle-high grass and clumps of stinging thistles. The music, the laughter, the screams of terror that she recognized only vaguely as her own, expanded. The jumble of noise pulsed between her temples.

“Alicia!”

She passed a large wooden sign, Feral Park, and as she ran beneath the sign at the entrance that proclaimed The Playground of Dreams, the noise popped like a bubble and was gone. Her momentum and the adrenaline pumping through her body carried her on. She ran through to the heart of the playground, dodging obstacles, ducking one low-hanging rope bridge strung between a pair of wooden towers. Her feet tangled in the cover of old graying wood chips and she landed, sprawled out in the sandbox a few feet away.

She lay there for a minute, not hurt, but physically and emotionally drained.

What the hell just happened to me?

She didn’t understand the specifics, but the basics were clear enough. She was having a walking nightmare. She was losing her mind.

When she felt she could trust her legs, she rose and brushed the dust from her jeans. She remained as still as possible, silent, listening for the music, the laughter, or the voice, but the silence endured. She looked around, eyes and senses wide open, but in the toy-crowded playground it was impossible to know if she was truly alone. There were too many shadows, too many cubbyholes, too many hiding places.

Behind her a rusty swing squeaked, nudged by the wind, or perhaps an unseen hand. To her left, old wood groaned as if being relieved of some unseen burden. Something moved in front of her. A shadow that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier snaked across the wood chip covered ground toward her. She stumbled away from it in horror, and something grabbed her from behind.

“Hey lady.” A soft young voice, faint but clear, as if someone had come unnoticed behind her and whispered in her ear.

Shannon spun around, a startled shriek escaping her lips. She tasted fear, thick and salty, in the back of her throat. She could feel, worse, could hear, the increasing tempo of her heart. It pulsed irregularly, echoed by a pounding behind her eyes.

No one was there.

Something touched her ankle.

She jerked away, striking something hidden in the darkness with her temple. The low ringing sound suggested it was metal, but the ringing may have only been in her head. For a second the playground was gone, and she was alone with the pain and a frightening sense of surrealism.

Then the laughter started, like a white noise broadcast in the tender gray tissue between her ears. It grew, its volume increasing like a radio that has been turned from one to ten, bringing her back to herself. She opened her eyes and looked up into the dirty face of a young boy. He was laughing too, but no sound came from his wide-stretched mouth. It was in Shannon’s head with the rest of the sounds.

A second later the face was gone.

Shannon rolled onto her knees and rose. Around her the shadows jumped, shifted, melted together like living pools of ink. Some vanished just as she caught sight of them, only to reappear in the periphery of her vision. Every swing, teeter-totter, and hanging length of rope was in motion. The rope bridges above and around her bounced and swung violently.

The noise of laughter grew and grew, again mixed with that distant music.

Shannon stood, her fists pressed to her ears, an attempt to block out the noise. It didn’t help. She searched for the opening in the playground wall, the arched entrance she had come in through, found it, and bolted. She glanced back as she ran and saw something following, a long serpentine shadow. It picked up speed and size as it absorbed the smaller shadows in its path.

Now Shannon could hear screams as well as the laughter, and realized they were her own.

“Come back lady! We wanna play!”

Something flew past her, sailing only inches from her right ear. It might have been a brick, but she couldn’t be sure in the dark.

“Nany-nany poo-poo, stick your face in doo-doo!”

Something grabbed her upper arm as she ran. It felt like tiny fingers, incredibly strong and with long fingernails that dug into her flesh like the teeth of an iron trap. She went into a rough sideways spin, stumbling over her feet and landing hard on her ass. The invisible thing lost its grip on her as she fell. She tried to rise again. The exit was only feet away. The great shadow serpent, more like a shadow river now, was rushing ever faster.

She scrambled and was grabbed again, this time the tiny iron trap hand closing around her ankle.

“Damnit, let go!” she screamed and kicked at the invisible hand until it released her.

“Ow! Fuckin’ spoilsport!”

She blundered to her feet, and fell down again as something large and solid struck her between the shoulder blades. She made a choked oof sound and landed face first.

“Get her!”

She turned over onto her back in time to see the monstrous shadow stretch out wide and rear up like a cobra. It came down on her legs and they disappeared from the thighs down. All sensation below her waist ceased.

She dug fruitlessly into the wood chips and dirt with the heels of her hands as it started to suck her in.

“Catch the Bogey!”

“Kill the Bogey!”

“Cram a stick up its ass!”

Then there was a scream, a sound of such honest terror that Shannon thought her heart might stop.

Then it was over. All was silent. All was still.

The shadow thing retreated and she had her legs back.

She turned to the exit and saw a girl, a girl who reminded her so much of Alicia it hurt, staring past her slack faced. The girl didn’t look anything like her missing daughter. It was the clothes. Faded Arizona blue jeans, pink canvas high-top shoes, pink t-shirt, and the small heart-shaped gold locket that hung around her neck. The locket had a picture of Thomas, Alicia, and herself inside it. The last time she had seen Alicia, she had been wearing those clothes. Then the girl began to sag, her eyes rolling up to the whites, and she collapsed before the arched entrance.