BY COLIN THORNTON
Copyright is held by the author.
EXACTLY WHEN evil moved into their peaceful suburban neighbourhood, no one could say. First there was a vague sense of unease, a feeling of being watched. Squirmy chills, rank odours, and wheezy, grunts at night. Suspicions became a certainty on a warm night in early September.
Franzi, Julia and Nishad were at Kenny’s house watching the Fright Night movie on tv; a weekly offering of low-budget creature features – aliens, slashers, vampires and zombies. Movies always ended at 11 and parents knew their children would be home by 11:15, eleven-thirty at the latest.
Kenny had it easy that night, he was already home. Franzi and Julia lived around the corner, a leisurely five-minute walk. Unfortunately, Nishad lived further away than the others and in the opposite direction. He had two options for the trip home: the long way up Pharmacy Avenue, past the strip mall, around the corner, and four more blocks home. Or, take the shortcut through the forest. Thirty minutes one way, 10 the other.
Naturally, he took the shortcut.
Parents preferred to call the unused scrubland in the middle of their neighbourhood by the quaint, if inaccurate, label, Wishing Well Woods.Kids called it The Pit. Five damp acres of stunted trees and bushes the planners decided wasn’t worth the cost of developing, and left it as it was – someone else’s problem.
A wide ditch ran from one end of The Pit to the other, home for frogs, leeches, rats, and several billion mosquitos. Brown water bubbled through the black muck thick with bulrushes and ferns eventually falling through a metal grate into a concrete sewer pipe. Beyond the ditch, a rusty shell of an old car lay buried up to its axles. Half a dozen dilapidated sheds stood rotting on their foundations, leaning left and right, looking like headstones slowly sinking into the ground in an ancient graveyard.
Saturday morning, Nishad described his shortcut through The Pit to Kenny.
“It stank something fierce.”
“Like a dead skunk?”
“Dead and rotting.”
“Worse than the sewer?”
“Way worse. Like Godzilla let loose a juicy.”
Both boys rolled their eyes, and waved their hands in front of their faces pretending to swish away the reptilian flatulence.
“What’d you do?”
“I hid under the willow. Behind the leaves staring into the dark, looking for any kind of movement. There was something out there. I could hear it. Feel its eyes on me.”
“Jeez Nish, where can you hide if you can’t see what’s coming?”
“You won’t tell anyone, right?”
Kenny shook his head, swearing complete secrecy.
“I was scared. Really scared. I knew I couldn’t stay there so I ran over and hid behind the old car, hunkered down and waited some more. The creek was bubbling and stinky. Mosquitos were killing me, but I couldn’t slap ‘em. Didn’t want to, you know, attract attention.”
“Who’s attention?”
“I don’t know! That’s the bloody point. Are you listening?”
Nishad dropped his voice to a whisper. Kenny leaned closer.
“I heard breathing. Like my old man when he snores, but bigger, way bigger. Deep and slow, and sort of wet and gurgly.”
Kenny’s brow furrowed while he worked it out. “If you could hear it, that means–”
“IT could hear me!”
Kenny had never seen Nishad so jittery. Pinpoint pupils. Face, pale and sweaty. “I couldn’t stand it any longer. Through the trees I could see the street lights on Sheppard. Close, but not close enough. I ran. Faster’n I’ve ever run in my life. Didn’t stop running ’til I got home. It was after midnight. Mom was totally pissed. ‘Where have you been? You know what time it is? I was worried sick.’ Took ten minutes before I could catch my breath and tell her, ‘there’s a monster living in The Pit.’”
“What’d she say?”
“She laughed. Can you believe it? Laughed! She said, ‘Stop watching those awful movies. Now, go to bed. Enough of this foolishness. You’re thirteen years old, Nishad. I’d thought you’d’ outgrown the boogie-men-in-the-dark nonsense long ago.”
By Monday morning, news of Nishad’s terror in The Pit had spread through the schoolyard like a flu virus. Things the kids had noticed before – strange smells, tracks in the mud, broken branches, deep gouges in the ground – previously dismissed as peculiar suddenly felt… sinister.
Rumours of a creature living in the Pit terrified Franzi. Short, stout, and not at all fond of any type of athletic activity, she knew she’d be in deep trouble if she had to outrun something with four legs, or six, or more. Nishad’s story kept playing over and over in her mind, an endless loop — the stench, the wheeze, the dull scrape of grinding jaws, hungry jaws – taunted her, amplified her fears, all but destroying any possibility of reasoning through… through what? That was the problem. It could be anything. Big. Small. Fast. Slow. Hungry and on the prowl, or still digesting its last meal. No one knew. And not knowing made it worse.
Instead of joining her friends in the school cafeteria, eating a lunch she knew would just curdle in her gut, Franzi found an empty classroom, took out her phone and Googled ‘Monster.’ In less than one second she had 2,270,000 results. Shocking! With numbers like that it was a statistical certainty that at least one was living in The Pit.
Next morning, on the way to school, Franzi told Julia about something she’d found online: Monsters are a deep sublimation of latent childhood fixations. Neither girl understood what that meant, or who this guy Freud was who said it. His brilliant insight did not calm their fears in the slightest. In their opinion, Freud was either carelessly missing, or intentionally avoiding, the most obvious conclusion: that there really was something evil living in The Pit. Not an illusion, not a dream, hallucination or a latent childhood fixation, but a living, breathing, cold-blooded, flesh-eating thing.
By noon Wednesday, a dozen parents had called the school principal demanding that she do something to quash this hysteria about The Pit. Their children were losing sleep, skipping meals, afraid of the dark, obsessing about creatures under the bed, in the closet, or glowing eyes peeking through the bedroom window. All children go through this phase she told them. But the parents insisted that the school’s responsibility was to teach children the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. Everybody knows, monsters aren’t real. Something had to be done.
Thursday morning, in History class, Mr. Barton drew a long horizontal line on the whiteboard. On the left, he wrote Ancient Egypt. On the right, Today. A little left of centre he circled a section of the timeline and turned to face the class.
“Today we’re going to talk about ancient Greece.” He scanned the faces in the room. “Julia. What can you tell us about the Greeks?”
She stood. “They had monsters. Cyclopes, and —”
“Cave dragons,” Franzi added.
Another voice: “That lady with snakes on her head.”
Everyone had an example: cannibal mermaids; three-headed dogs; death worms; gorgons; a half man, half bull —
“Minotaurs,” Barton interjected. He was pleased to have captured his class’s attention so easily. “How many of you believe in monsters? Hands up.” Every hand in the class shot up, several raised both. “This have anything to do with the, uh, thing living in The Pit?” Heads nodded. Barton told the class that ancient Greeks invented fantastic beasts to try and explain natural phenomena they didn’t yet have the scientific knowledge to understand. “Rational people don’t believe in Scythian Death Worms anymore.”
Thirty students emphatically disagreed. “We do!”
Julia, still standing, tried to set Mr. Barton straight. “It’s not imaginary, sir. It’s real.”
Barton lowered his chin and peered over the top of his glasses. “You’ve seen it?”
“No, but we’ve heard it.”
“Smelled it,” added Nishad, from the back of the class.
Julia’s gaze turned inward, her eyes went glassy and vacant while she searched her memory for a critical detail, naggingly close but still out of focus. When she came back to the moment, she said, “Ever notice birds don’t sing in The Pit? Where’d all the birds go?”
A hush fell over the class. Ya, no birds.
This would have been the perfect moment for Barton to point out that superstition begins where logic ends, one road leading to barbarism, the other to civilization, but what was the point. Instead, he said, “Why not just avoid The Pit. Walk around?” and regretted it immediately. It was too close to admitting that there might actually be something in there that should be avoided. That would only perpetuate the rumour. Before he could rephrase his comment the bell rang. The period was over. Kids streamed into the halls, everyone swapping second- and third-hand reports about the only subject that mattered. Speaking in hushed voices, in case the monster might hear them talking, and chase them down later to exact its bloody revenge.
Friday, Nishad, Franzi and Kenny all went to Julia’s for their regular Fright Night movie. The feature that night was a 50’s animation of a lone T-Rex that somehow managed to avoid extinction and lived into the 20th Century on an diet of tiny, shrieking humans. Totally lame. First of all it was black and white, and secondly, the claymation looked more prehistoric than the creature being animated. They left the picture on, turned the sound off, and speculated on the horror of being eaten alive: “Can you imagine being swallowed whole . . . inside and still alive . . . sliding down its throat . . . head first . . . swimming around in its stomach . . . digested over a week . . . like a rat in a snake . . . most monsters have teeth like sharks y’know . . . rows and rows of serrated razor blades to rip their prey to pieces . . . and spit out the bones like watermelon seeds . . . better’n being swallowed whole . . . gross . . . we’re doomed . . . maybe they have teeth like snakes . . . long and pointed . . . like needles . . . you think they’re poisonous, too?”
On that point, they all agreed: Their creature was definitely poisonous.
Franzi described a dinosaur skeleton she’d seen at the Museum last summer. “It had these, like, bone-crushing molars the size of grapefruits.”
“Easier to digest if they can grind us into a paste before swallowing.”
By the time they’d eaten all the chips and popcorn, they knew exactly what kind of creature was living in The Pit: A giant, poisonous lizard with fangs, claws, wings, and an insatiable appetite for young, tender, human flesh.
At eleven o’clock, Nishad and Kenny took the long way home, staying on the sidewalk, avoiding any pools of darkness, sprinting from one streetlight to the next, huddling together long enough to scan every shadow in every darkened recess between houses where something could hide, and only then, racing to the next streetlight.
Saturday evening, shortly before dinner, Mrs. Parmar called Nishad: “We’re out of milk.”
He looked outside at the sinking sun and gulped. This is it, he thought, the end. He could see his obituary now: Nishad Chini Parmar. Dead at thirteen. Beloved son, brilliant student, sadly missed, et cetera, et cetera. Cause of death: ravaged by a mutant reptile while on an ill-advised and completely unnecessary trip to the grocery store. An icy chill slithered up his spine.
She reached into her change purse, handed him five dollars. “Dinner’s in thirty minutes. Now go!”
Fifteen minutes later Nishad burst through the back door, gasping for breath, soaked in sweat, chest heaving, almost popping the buttons on his shirt.
“What’s wrong?”
Nishad was so winded he could barely answer. “I (gasp gasp) ran (gasp).”
“All the way? Don’t tell me, you’re still afraid of that thing in The Pit.” She mimicked her impression of the creature by wiggling her fingers like tentacles, gnashing her teeth together and going all goggle-eyed. “Grow up, Nishad.”
***
In time, Kenny, Nishad, Julia and Franzi outgrew their fears of monsters in the shadows, leaving that terror to future generations of thirteen-year-olds.
Franzi moved to Baltimore to work at Johns Hopkins, Julia became a high-school principal in downtown Toronto, Kenny a software king in San Francisco. Nishad graduated from Metropolitan University and had a job as a journalist on Canada’s national newspaper. Something he saw on one of his news feeds caught his attention:
“@SoulSurvivor — Serious action corner of Pharmacy and Sheppard. A million cop cars, ambulances, fire trucks, even sniffer dogs. Yellow crime-scene tape everywhere. #The Pit”
Forty minutes later, Nishad was driving through his old neighbourhood. Pretty much the same as last time he was there. The same brick bungalows, same tree-lined streets, same picket fences, the same everything, just older than before.
Seeing The Pit, however, was a shock. Looked like every cop on the force was in there, examining every leaf and twig, bagging evidence, photographing anything too big to bag. A crowd of neighbours lingered on the street outside the yellow crime-tape barrier, inventing gruesome theories in the absence of any solid information from the police. The consensus was murder. Eventually Nishad found one officer who would go on the record, a Sergeant Flaherty. He showed him his press card and asked if he could take a closer look. Flaherty said, “I hope you have a strong stomach.”
Nishad’s story appeared on page one the next morning:
“SAVAGE MURDER BAFFLES POLICE
Even the blackest heart couldn’t imagine that such a murder could happen in a peaceful, suburban neighbourhood in the north-east corner of Toronto with the name of Wishing Well Acres.
Michael Fitzgerald, 13, left his weekly scout meeting at the community centre Wednesday night at 8:30pm When he hadn’t arrived home by ten, his parents phoned the police who found his body shortly after midnight — what was left of it.
The few remaining pieces of young Michael were scattered over a ten metre radius in an abandoned lot known as The Pit. So little of the boy remained that he was identified by the merit badges on the shredded remains of his scout uniform.
Sgt. Flaherty said, “Savagery and brutality are, unfortunately, something we have to steel ourselves against in this job. But this… this was… the only word I can think of is ‘inhuman.’”
A second source, who asked to remain anonymous, described “Three parallel gouges ripped through the bark of a mature oak tree, right into the pith, up to a height of eight feet. An identical trio of gouges tore through the ground as if a giant metal claw had been dragged across the surface. There were strange zig-zag patterns in the mud by the ditch. A tail maybe. Forensics are baffled. They even brought a zoologist in who’s equally stymied.”
Police would not provide any more information or photos. The incident is officially under investigation.”
Horrified neighbours rallied around the distraught parents. Local politicians, swore that something would be done to remedy this tragic situation. Residents had heard it all before. No longer satisfied with empty promises, they demanded the municipality clean up this disgrace in the heart of their peaceful community. When their calls for action became too loud and numerous to ignore, a crew was finally sent in to clean it up.
They cut down every tree, cleared out the scrub, hauled away the old car, levelled every rotting shed, diverted the creek through a culvert, and put up so many floodlights that day or night the park was brighter than the surface of the sun. They sodded it all, and planted a few ornamental shrubs around a hand-carved sign: Wishing Well Woods.
Every politician on Town Council, plus the Mayor, and the Premier, showed up for the dedication. Hands were shaken, councillors congratulated, speeches made, photos taken. Problem solved.
Though this was exactly what the neighbours wanted — the illusion of safety — the creature was enraged. He, she, or it, was forced to vacate its perfectly comfortable lair and move to a cave in a ravine five kilometres up stream. A nice, damp, secluded spot to settle in, and wait . . . for the next slow runner.
***
Colin Thornton studied drawing and painting in college, played music for a few decades while he built a career in advertising. Today, his paints are dry, drums on a shelf, marimba locked in its case and his advertising days over, so he writes short stories.
