Читать книгу Falter Kingdom - Michael J. Seidlinger - Страница 8

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IT WAS AN HOUR OR SO BEFORE SCHOOL LET UP FOR THE weekend, but Brad, Blaire, Steve, and I were late for final period so were like, Fuck it, and walked the trail that led from Meadows through to the southern tip of the city and beyond. Walk far enough and you’ll see all the buildings let up and some sense of a forest pulling in, taking over.

The spring weather in full effect, I felt pretty good. Getting out of final period made this work for me so damn well.

The fact that Brad always has a cooler full of beer in the trunk of his car didn’t hurt either. I usually wait until someone cracks one open before cracking into my first, but that day, it was different.

“You guys hear?”

Brad was driving me crazy, spreading gossip like an attention whore, a walking tabloid.

Brad brought along some dude I don’t really know named Steve, and they were going on and on about the latest on Nikki.

Nikki Dillon. She’s the “hot” girl—has been since sophomore year.

Nikki Dillon—the one who seemed to have a new guy every week. Not because she slept around; the world knows it’s more like she just lets guys audition to play that role. Doubt anyone ever gets in her pants, which makes the whole world only want to know more, everyone talking about the latest.

Like clockwork, I’d hear about it just like I was hearing about it now.

Brad with the “Yo, so I heard from Kev who heard from James who heard from Greg,” and then it goes on like that, a stepped-on piece of gossip that I shouldn’t care about.

But it’s Nikki.

Everyone is at least somewhat interested in hearing about the latest on Nikki. And Blaire is no different. Blaire’s been a bud of mine since sixth grade. She and I might have given it a shot if: 1) I hadn’t met Becca, and 2) Blaire lost that thing I can’t stand. She has this way about her that makes it so that we never get along. Let me make better sense of it.

I mean, Blaire’s great. She does my homework and I do hers for the subjects where we falter, the stuff I’ll never need and the stuff she’ll pledge, later in life, to be against (she thinks extracurricular activities are a waste of time).

Blaire just, I don’t know, seems to see through the front I put up. And by “front” I mean I’m usually not really listening to people.

It’s okay.

It’s true... I’m really not.

I kind of do this thing where I listen, but I’m also paying more attention to how the conversation works. There’s a sense to every conversation, even the ones that are nonsense. There’s a rise and fall to everything said, and there’s momentum that I pay attention to all the time, watching where it’ll go next. And on that day, hearing Brad tell us about Nikki’s latest guy, I listened but I also sipped from a can of beer. And beyond that, I walked the trail, my gaze to the ground, listening to how Brad and Steve traded gossip that couldn’t be true with this sort of mutual enthusiasm that I almost felt jealous about not having.

But I had the beer so I had a perfectly good excuse.

Blaire looked at me, that judging look.

I offered a can. “Want one?”

“Um, yeah, okay.”

I knew what she was thinking. “What?”

Blaire shook her head. “Nothing.”

Here we go again. Either I kept asking or she’d just tell me.

I took another gulp.

She didn’t even open her can.

Blaire sighed. “I’m just saying, when are you going to tell her?”

Why now? But then why did I even need to ask? I already had the answer: because it’s Blaire. She brings up whatever she wants whenever she wants. It’s probably why she’s stuck around. Persistence makes for someone who isn’t easy to ignore. It’s complicated.

“I figure it’s almost graduation,” I told her.

“That’s disgusting.” Blaire made a face. “Ugh.”

“She’s going up north and I’m staying here going to State. It’ll work itself out naturally.”

Blaire rolled her eyes. “I don’t get you, Hunter. I really don’t.”

There probably wouldn’t be a whole lot to get if we really got along. But Blaire has always been sort of my opposite. If she were in my shoes, she would have ended things with Becca weeks after going steady.

Where am I? I’m years in, putting in time.

But, you know.

Maybe you don’t.

That’s kind of why I’m going on about what happened on this day.

Yeah, well, we walked the trail to the point where it ends and it’s all just trees and, even at high noon, you get, at best, an inch of light before it’s all shadows. This is where we all used to go to get scared. All the grade school kids hung around this forested zone back when shadows were all we needed to get our thrills. But little do the kids know that if you keep walking south, you’ll end up in a clearing that really shouldn’t be there. You don’t really see it coming until you clear the last patch of trees. It’s a muddy pasture pockmarked with rocks and beer cans and other garbage. Footprints in the mud all over the place.

I couldn’t tell you how often this place becomes the scene of a killer party. We’re talking some of the best I can remember. I can’t really remember any one party in particular, but yeah, it’s usually half the school, bonfires and plenty of what we need to get mellow.

During those parties, everyone can almost be the same person.

But the clearing wasn’t where we were going that day. We had somewhere else far more secluded in mind.

You keep walking south, pushing past a water tower and that one abandoned car without wheels or axles, totally shot to shit, full of bullet holes—eventually you’ll get there.

This is the place.

Falter Kingdom.

I’ll try to explain it. It’s kind of a simple picture, nothing really wrong with it. You might see it and think, “So? Just another place where high school kids chill and smoke.” But the first clue is how it should be a sewer tunnel but it’s too big to be one. The concrete opening is the size of a car tunnel, and looking in you see nothing but darkness.

That darkness, it doesn’t let up.

Someone painted a crown around the opening of the tunnel. You can see the black paint, the spikes of the crown, from really far away. It has something to do with the lore, what people say about it.

I’ve been here a number of times but I’ve never taken part.

The thing about Falter Kingdom is that it’s not just any tunnel. The tunnel is full of darkness and it goes on and on and on, without end. People say that initially it was supposed to be part of the city subway system, but the mass transit authority discovered that, a couple miles in, there was a weak point, a sort of fissure. The fissure released all sorts of frequencies and energies and stuff. That’s what you get when people turn spirituality into hard science.

People used to play around with the thought that there was another plane of existence, probably because ours was too much of a bummer to be the only one. Everyone knew ghosts existed; they’d speak to you if you dared to listen. But demons want what people want, whatever that means.

Nearly half of the employees working on the tunnel attracted demons. Like anywhere else, the demon chooses you and you’ve got no choice. It latches on to you and you don’t have a whole lot of options.

Back then, it was really expensive to get rid of them. You couldn’t just call up a priest and get exorcized. You had to fill out a ton of paperwork, go to a number of experts and stuff. By the time they could get rid of it, there was basically only the demon left, the person gone, fully possessed.

So that’s how the legend goes. The legend of Falter Kingdom.

A bunch of us go here just to feel the change in atmosphere. A lot of Meadows students go here to prove a point.

But see, when we arrived here that day, we just wanted to be alone.

I wanted to get drunk. I was willing to listen to Brad if it meant getting a head start on the weekend. I didn’t think I would have to run the gauntlet.

But I’ll get to that.

We arrived at Falter Kingdom and the first thing that happened was our cell phones all lost signal. Again, that’s part of the fun of the place.

Blaire hadn’t been before and Brad was being a dick about that.

“Know what that means, bro?” He nudged me in the arm.

I finished my second beer, took the unopened can from Blaire, and said, “You know she won’t go through with it.”

That kid, Steve, stood at the opening looking in.

Brad shouted at him, “Careful or you’ll be dragged in!”

Blaire snickered, “You’re a walking cliché.”

Brad signaled to me and I tossed him a beer. “Yeah?” He cracked open the beer and took a gulp. “You know what they say about being judgmental?”

This went on—back and forth—for longer than it should have. I listened and I observed the conversation from where I sat, on a flat rock, drinking the beer probably way too fast.

Blaire wouldn’t let up.

Brad was too oblivious to care about anything Blaire could say.

Eventually the conversation made its way back to me. Brad saying something like, “Why the fuck do you keep this chick around?”

But that really wasn’t a question. Brad’s good at acting like an asshole because he is an asshole. I can’t stand the guy. But he’s there. He’s around. We were freshmen when we met. I think it was biology. Yeah, that was the one. We both sucked at the subject. We were failing and quickly facing summer school. We got assigned to some peer group for people who suck at science. We had to be tutored by substitute teachers, meaning we had to take the class twice in one day. It was horrible. Brad being around made it a little less horrible but only because he knew how to get the answers. He knew people.

He still knows people. I don’t think anyone really likes the guy but they see value in how he can slack his way through anything.

Brad gets his way. Brad always has beer.

I guess we’re friends because I’ve gotten used to him being around.

Sort of like most people, I get used to them and, in time, it’s all the same.

This is as close to getting along as I’ll probably ever know.

But yeah, Brad can be a real asshole and I was the one to break up the argument. It was easy—all I had to do was tell Brad to shut up and catch up.

“I’m on my third.” I dangled the can. “Which one are you on?”

That was enough to end it, but nothing would change the fact that Blaire wouldn’t end up having much fun. Not that she would have. This is what Blaire always does. She spent most of the afternoon sitting on some far rock working on homework assignments for next week. I let her do her thing. We all did.

She was doing my homework too.

Steve, Brad, and I stood at the opening of the tunnel.

Brad went on about all the girls he wanted to try to get with before graduation, like it would be that easy. “I’ve known the girl since, like, second grade. No way she’ll turn down a strapping young lad like me.”

Steve sipped from his beer. “Strapping young lad?”

Brad shrugged. “Got it from the band. I looked up the meaning.”

Then I said something, because it was a good time to say enough without really having said anything: “You, looking up something?”

Brad laughed. “Yeah, bro, it can’t be all porn. Got to sprinkle in stuff to keep trackers off my trail.”

That made Steve laugh.

That made me take another drink.

Steve said something about how Samantha—a girl I don’t know, but a girl who both Brad and Steve seemed to have been talking about quite a bit—just got into Yale. That impressed Steve, and, for Brad, it seemed to only confirm her status as irresistible.

They talked about how Brad will get all carpe diem and just ask her out. Doesn’t matter that she has a boyfriend. Doesn’t matter that Samantha wouldn’t go for a guy like Brad.

They both talked the same way everyone talked—about how there wasn’t much time left.

Either get it done, what you want to do, or you’ll never get your due.

Then the conversation turned toward something about our plans before graduation. Steve had his. Brad had his would-be lays. Blaire would have plans too, if she were part of the conversation. I looked back at her, busy highlighting some passage from some book for some essay we both had to finish by some deadline.

Lucky.

At some point she’d come up, Becca.

“You can’t waste prom on her, dude. You’ve already wasted years on her when you could have been seeing other girls.”

I did my best to maneuver around the topic. I’m usually good about this, but see, it might have been the alcohol and how it mellows me and I say stuff I shouldn’t say or worse. By “worse,” I mean being able to say anything at all.

And looking back, I got really drunk that afternoon.

Drunker than I should have. Even Steve got on me about Becca. He talked about how my situation took me off the radar, how nothing good can come from being trapped like that.

I’m not going to go into the exact words, because I can’t be sure how it was said, but being in that kind of situation is as bad as it gets. It put me on the spot. It made me the conversation rather than part of it.

Blaire found it amusing. I know she did. I didn’t look and I didn’t hear anything, but being in this situation is what Blaire’s been putting me through since we first met. I just wanted them all to shut up, you know? I wanted it all to wash clean, having them there but on mute, so I didn’t have to try.

The company I keep... Looking back at that afternoon, it feels like I was stuck on an island with a handful of mortal enemies. It didn’t feel at all like a chill time among friends. You get what you put in, I guess.

I chose to stick around Brad. Blaire lingered and I did the same thing.

Yeah, I went with them to Falter Kingdom of my own free will.

But alcohol and competition go hand in hand, and all it took was one mention of the tunnel and Steve shut up. It was obvious that he had never run the gauntlet.

It was a little less obvious that I hadn’t either. Every other time I’d hung out at Falter Kingdom, I’d gotten out of having to run. The trick is to wait until it becomes a possibility, the talking about running, and you encourage whoever it is who’s being pressured to run, but when he turns it on you, don’t freeze. Don’t stop and worry. Don’t say no. You pretend to think about it. If there’s beer, take a sip. By the time any pressure is given, you can ask someone who hasn’t run and have him mess up and take on the pressure. So he ends up running and you don’t. That’s how it works.

End of lesson, or whatever.

But yeah, I was drunk and on a short fuse. Brad was selling Steve on the whole thing, legend and all, and I downed the last of the beer in that can.

Then I said it: “I’ll do it.”

Instantly the conditions changed.

“Really?” Blaire had joined us, standing at my side.

Brad grinned. “My man!”

Steve didn’t say anything. He wanted to run it. He wanted the respect.

I just wanted the conversation to end. I didn’t want to hear any more about Becca.

So they crowded around me as I took my first steps into the tunnel.

“Ten minutes, bud, you got this,” Brad said.

Running the gauntlet is more or less exactly how it sounds. You run into the tunnel, into the darkness, for ten whole minutes or until you reach the end. But no one’s ever reached the end. So I had to run, sprint really, for ten whole minutes. They synced up and set a timer on each of their phones. On their count—three, two, one—I ran.

It was actually kind of easy, going through with it.

Everything leading up made it feel impossible. I wasn’t into running it; I had nothing to really prove, which could be cause for a bigger problem.

But I don’t know—

I guess it had a lot to do with being fed up.

With their voices. With their claims. With the fact that they were kind of right: it’s almost graduation and nothing’s changed.

It’s like I needed something to prove to myself. I needed to do something that anyone who knew me would have problems believing if told in the context of some story.

The actual running was the hard part. I felt like I couldn’t keep to a straight line. I felt like I couldn’t run fast enough. The air was thick in the tunnel, kind of a strange musk, the same kind you smell in old basements or places with stale air. The ground muddy and wet, each step had that sinking feeling that you get when you find out you spaced a test or some other important event.

But I ran the whole ten.

It didn’t even last that long.

I ran with my eyes wide but they might as well have been closed. The dark was so thick it was like running in place.

Something worth mentioning—you can’t really hear anything in the tunnel. You can’t hear your own footsteps. I ran until it felt right to stop and turn around. I didn’t hear my feet slipping in the mud. I didn’t hear my lungs gasping for air. I didn’t hear.

If I didn’t hear my own breath, there’s no way I heard their phones.

It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

It’s hard to explain. Telling it right is usually tougher than you think; it’s all about using the right amount of words to get your point across. You say too little and it’s just strange; say too much and you’re not really making any sense. This is probably one of those situations. It’s just that being inside the tunnel felt like... what’s that term for when you are frozen in a chamber?

Cryosleep?

It’s kind of like that. But there’s a better word. Let me look it up.

Oh, right—

It’s like being in suspended animation. Stuck in place, but you also know that your body is moving, your thoughts racing, because I could feel the sweat dripping from my forehead.

While inside, I could think about only one thing.

I thought about my body breaking into pieces.

And even now I can’t make complete sense of why.

When I made it back to them, you can bet they were surprised.

Brad saw me first. “Shit, bro.”

I was drenched in sweat. Dirt caked in layers all over my body.

Steve didn’t say anything.

Blaire played concerned friend: “Are you insane?”

I asked them if I lasted the full ten, but the words didn’t come out until later, after I had lay down against a cool rock. By then Brad and Steve had left. Blaire stayed with me. She was sitting next to me when I woke up. I stirred shortly before the sun completely disappeared.

“Did I make the full ten?”

Blaire stared at me in disbelief. Maybe she really was worried. I’m not sure what she felt that day. But when she told me I had been in there for twenty-five minutes, it clicked into place.

I didn’t feel any different but, well, it kind of made sense. I felt peaceful sitting there, letting the information sink in. Like I did something I wanted to do.

We walked back in silence.

I didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything.

When we got back to Meadows, our cars were the only ones left in the parking lot. “Where’d Brad and that other guy go?”

Blaire kind of ignored me but also kind of didn’t. It was a mumble, one that I maybe imagined. “They went for help.”

We left without saying good-bye.

By the time I got home, I felt fine. Not tired at all.

I stayed up with a six-pack that I finished and watched walkthroughs of two different video games. I didn’t have trouble sleeping at all that night.

Stuff started happening the following day. Minor things: mostly the broken vase and my bedroom door opening and closing on its own. I misplaced my cell phone twice only to find it where I couldn’t have left it. Why would my phone turn up in my dad’s pocket when he had been at work all day and I used the phone not ten minutes before it went missing? These aren’t really questions, really, just the mind fighting the facts.

And I knew the symptoms.

They say it’s best to get rid of a demon quick.

Yeah, I know, I know.

But just thinking about how much effort it would have been to tell my parents... what it would mean for them—their only son, haunted—made me feel exhausted. I would never hear the end of it.

So then it just felt better to put off telling them for a little bit.

It won’t be much longer.

Soon everyone will know.