“Northern lights,” Cathy said. “Pretty southern tonight. This never happens here. This is a first. This is really weird. What are you doing?”
“Wishing on a star,” Matt replied.
“Aren’t we the romantic,” Cathy said, fearing suddenly which meaning of the word he might have taken her to mean. “Funny, I got the impression you weren’t that thrilled to be here,” she added quickly. “After all, this isn’t L.A.”
Romantic? “ On the contrary … it is more deeply stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been.” Matt returned his gaze starward.
“Last of the Mohicans . . . So you’re a reader, too,” she said in a way that for once didn’t sound like a slight. “Why is it some people look at the sky and see a thousand wonders when others only see sky?”
Too? “The same can be said for a lot of things. Now who’s the romantic,” he said, knowing exactly which meaning he meant. Cathy blushed.
Then something amazing happened. Thousands of fireflies began blinking in unison like traffic signals at an intersection gone haywire. Cathy had heard of the phenomena but had never believed it. As fast as it started it stopped -
“Okay, that was weird,” Cathy said.
- What’s that?” Matt blurted.
Cathy followed his gaze. A dull orange light drifted slowly through the tree canopy, “DON’T LOOK!” she blurted.
“What is it?”
“It’s been here hundreds of years. It only comes in the year of the cicada. Some people say it’s a Civil War soldier. Some say it’s the devil looking for souls.
“It lures travelers off the road and leads them over cliffs. They’re never seen again . . .”
Matt gulped. Wringing his grips, his eyes fixed on the orb, “Dyatlov,” he muttered. Suddenly he wanted to hightail it out of there.
“What - ?”
“Dyatlov Pass. . . the Urals . . . Russia. There was an orb there too . . . orange . . . red, I can’t remember . . . Nine hikers . . . they cut through their tent in the middle of the night . . . they ran into the snow barefoot in their underwear to try to escape. . . . it was 24 below . . . body parts were missing, surgically removed . . . bodies drained of – “
“SHUT UP!” Cathy screamed. “If you’re trying to act brave I’m not impressed.”
. . . “the only footprints in the snow were theirs . . .”
“SHUT UP!”
“It’s probably somebody’s drone . . . or swamp gas,” he added nervously.
The crickets stopped their chirping. The trees illuminated with a dark eerie light. Their eyes turned slowly upward. The will-o’-the-wisp split into three fiery balls which reformed behind them. Sweat poured down their backs as cries stuck in their throats. The semi-opaque balls of fuzzy light gave off a disturbing intelligence. Their color alternated between red, orange, white and yellow. Cathy closed her eyes. Her lips were moving. Their pulses pounded in their ears. After an eternity the fuzzy balls reformed, rose then flickered slowly from view. A lone cricket timidly chirped joined by a brave frog.
A jumble of emotions, a hysterical laugh crossed Matt’s lips . . . then a whimper, “That was no swamp gas.”
“G-GO-GO-GO-GO!” Cathy screamed.
“Light your phone. I can’t see you,” Matt blurted. Her phone hit the ground followed by a cuss word. Softly she began to sing the same refrain over and over . . .
♫ I am bound for the promised land …
I am bound for the promised land …
Oh who will come and go with me?...
I am bound for the promised land …
Up the road the others were waiting. “That was close,” Cathy gasped. Strangely, nothing more was said about the apparition. She refused to go back for her phone. Matt would learn later there are many ghost lights throughout the South.
The witch’s house was a two-story farmhouse framed by two lonely weeping willows whose crooked branches drooped to the weed garden like a Portuguese man o’ war waiting to sting the unwary.
In the ghostly luminance of the bug-infested sodium vapor lamp mounted to a wood pole in the front yard the house sat on regularly-spaced concrete trapezoidal piers and sagged in places. Its shabby roof was a checkerboard of missing pea-green and black-speckled asphalt shingles.
“Ready California?” Zak wheedled.
“For what?”
“Here’s how it works California. You go to the window, look inside, come back and tell us what you saw . . . unless you’re afraid.”
“No sweat,” Matt replied. “B’right back wacko, I mean Zacko.” A conspiratorial grin spread across Zak’s fat face. Matt gulped. He started to the house, burrs pricking his ankles, determined to find out who had set him up. The crickets stopped chirping. The only sound was the crunch of dead weeds and his harsh labored breaths. A deathly quiet fell. He slapped his neck praying the witch hadn’t heard the mosquito die. He desperately wanted to turn back but what would the others think? He was scared, but scared more of letting the others see he was scared.
The upper half of an open window looked like it hadn’t been windexed in years. No screen. Odd given the mosquitos. He tried to rid from mind the mental picture of a shotgun pointed at him. He had seen what they do to pig carcasses, turning them into something resembling Alpo. He crept closer. It grew quiet. An owl fluttered past overhead. His phone chimed. There was a text. ‘I SEE YOU.’ He looked for who might have sent it. It showed no sender. It can only be one of the others he thought. He looked for something to stand on. He spotted an old rotting wheelbarrow and dragged it noisily through the dry weeds. He stepped onto the teetering perch. Hesitantly he grabbed the windowsill and pulled himself higher . . . higher . . .
Powerful fingers clamped his wrist . . . “LET GO! LET GO!” he screamed. He struggled to pull free but the harder he pulled the faster they held. He began to feel lightheaded. His energy began to ebb. A dark barren panoramic wind-swept plain ringed by snow-capped peaks surrounded him. Black clouds roiled overhead. A city stood at the foot of a mountain range – not a modern city, but the kind he had seen in books on ancient civilizations with battlements, towers and ramparts. A line of interlocking H-shaped stone blocks stood in a line like giant Legos waiting to be assembled. Nearby a free-standing stone gateway stood. A portal at its middle opened to a hostile empty plain.
He stared in horror as giants chased down humans, slinging them over their shoulders, tearing off limbs, eating them as they walked the way a human would tear off a chicken leg. A young woman with long flowing black hair made eye contact just before being devoured, her desperate eyes pleading for help. The giant towered above the landscape. Stitched animal hides girded its massive loins. The colossus turned to face Matt. It wiped its filthy red hair from its wild eyes. The ground trembled as the monster bounded forward grabbing him around his abdomen with its giant six fingers, staring him in the face with its grotesque countenance, its breath stinking like rotten eggs, its body like a garbage dump. The monster let out a terrible sound unlike any animal’s.
A sharp blow left Matt gasping. Nettles stabbing his back like a bed of sharp nails, he staggered dazed to his feet.
“HE’S THE ONE, KILL HIM,” a telepathic voice inside his head said - it was a woman’s voice. The others had fled, leaving him there all by himself. He stumbled to his bike and began to pedal. In the road ahead lay a sprawled form. Chase. Snarling Rottweilers were closing, their paws barely touching the ground. Grasping his cousin by his collar he jerked him to his feet.
“GO! GO! GO! GO!! . . .” Cathy screamed from out of nowhere.
Chase scrambled awkwardly onto his bike. He began to pedal when one of the three beasts sank its teeth into his pant leg, shaking its head from side to side to rip him from his bike. Matt kicked it. With a sharp yelp it let go. Pedaling like crazy, inches slowly became feet until finally the growling beasts abandoned the chase. What had been a minute had seemed hours. The black and brown devil dogs stood panting, evil-eyeing the intruders through the sodium vapor.
Chase licked his bleeding forearm.
Matt faced the direction of the dogs. “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT!” he yelled.
“I know you didn’t just trash talk those dogs,” Cathy laughed. “We’ll have to do this again soon,” she quipped, as she picked the nettles from Matt’s back.
“You kidding me?” Chase blurted.
“Not anytime soon I hope,” Matt grinned, breathing hard.
That’s when he noticed Cathy eyeing him strangely. She looked away awkwardly at first, the way people do when they’re caught staring, then looked back at him and said, “You just might could be Young Marines material.”
“You think?” replied Matt, kicking himself for responding too enthusiastically.
“I said might.”
“Actually you said might could.”
“Just something we say in The South,” Cathy giggled, “like calling everything Coke. That’s The South.”
* * *
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood for something at some time even if it was only you.
Sir Winston Churchill (paraphrase)
Matt tossed his Introduction to Calculus textbook aside and held out his wrist. “Chase, you ‘sleep? At the witch’s house . . . .”
“Whoa, dude. Those are Monster Energy drink scratches. I’d put something on that before you get that flesh-eating thing!”
“I heard a voice say “He’s the one. Kill him. Kill me? . . . Seriously?”
“Whoa, like what’d you see dude?”
“When the witch grabbed me . . . I had a . . . a . . . a
vision.”
“Doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo,” Chase trilled The Twilight Zone.
“. . . btw, dude, when the witch grabbed you, you screamed . . . sorry. Just thought you should know.”
Horror of horrors. Boys don’t scream. It’s in The Boys’ Manual somewhere.
“Zak said you screamed like a girl. ‘Let go, let go.’ Chase screeched, in a high-pitched voice. “I never liked that dude.” Matt’s heart sank. Then he became angry. With himself. “Then he goes … ‘Big California Man … screams like a girl.’ You got a hater, dude.”
“I’ve got more than one,” Matt confessed.
“THAT’s what I’m talkin’! Anybody who doesn’t have ‘em needs ‘em. People hate when they feel inferior or insecure or just have to have somebody to hate to feel better about themselves. Or are envious or feel threatened or are just plain evil. But let’s face it, if you’ve gone your whole life without any haters, you’re probably pretty boring.”
Matt laughed.
“A thousand Facebook friends means squat. I’ve got a website, HateMe.life. I’ve got forty-two haters so far. That girl who killed herself should’ve been glad kids were hatin.’ Who wants to be invisible? Being hated is so validating!”
“Never thought about