"The Doom Statues" - Chapter 44

For Emily, the terror wrapped around this frantic dash from The Ruiner has nothing to do with the distance traveled. Rather, it’s the lack thereof. That and how it’s even possible to get this catastrophically turned around in such a short period of time.

While it’s true that, though she is running fast as she can — a progress only slightly impeded by these wet leaves on the ground — and that The Ruiner never breaks from his leisurely, almost roundabout gait, nonetheless the separation between them never shrinks, but instead seems to decrease slightly, with every glance she risks back at him. Even so, she only makes her way up and down a series of three or four small peak-valley combinations, covering a distance of what feels like the same number of football fields, maybe, tops. Or golf holes or driving range surfaces or baseball fields — a handful of any of those.

At the top of one such rise, she reaches a clearing, conveniently well-lit by the moon and even its reflecting nearby clouds, not to mention the mostly naked stars. She can’t see to the end looking either left or right, which are the longer sides of this tamped down, recently harvested field. But straight ahead lies another thick looking forest, and it’s this she sprints toward, for a number of reasons. For one, she thinks she can make better time across this open field than The Ruiner, and two, might be able to lose herself in those trees before he even reaches this clearing. But most of all, her internal compass tells her this is the direction to run if hoping to reach her car.

Except what happens next seems to make no rational sense whatsoever. She enters this stretch of woods, and it’s all downhill, a section so small that, unless hysterical and seeing mirages by now, Emily believes she can actually glimpse some road ahead, at the bottom. Yes! No fucking way! And this turns out to be true. Only problem is, Emily’s certain she recognizes this section of road, for some weird reason, and it isn’t Stokely Farm. Compounding her horror, one which finds her drenched in a cool, clammy sweat, possibly with another layer of freshly generated, panicked sweat atop it, she can’t see The Ruiner anywhere. But she can hear him speaking via that goddamn static riddled intercom, though unable to pinpoint where it’s coming from. Every instant where she nears getting a beat on its source, it shifts, and hails from somewhere else.

Thus she remains frozen, in the middle of the road. Hoping like hell that by some miracle, another car will come along. Doing a little dance, even, as she suddenly feels like she just might piss herself.

This is when she happens to glance ahead, down a section of road which would have been to her left as she exited the woods. As her eyes adjust, attempting to make out what these weird shapes are in the road, most of which are bright colored, possibly even pastel, or glow-in-the-dark, and that’s when it hits her: that’s a bunch of graffiti in the road. She’s at the top of that freaking gravity hill somehow, she’s almost certain of this.

Frozen still with indecision, unable to even wrap her head around which way to run — not until she lays eyes upon The Ruiner again, or else gets a definitive beat on his voice — she remains rooted right where she is, albeit bouncing around, light on her feet, in an attempt to look every which way at once. She can see her breath now, too, which is a curious development in that it hadn’t seemed anywhere near this cold earlier.

Since Emily is basically stuck here, however, there is something she’s been wondering about, and may as well resolve. The only question is, will anything around here roll to an adequate degree? She casts her eyes around the forest she just left, as well as one on the other side of the road, though it is bordered by a barbed wire fence despite being heavily treed. Unable to spot any object round enough on the ground, inspiration strikes and she begins fishing around in her front pants pockets. This is when her left hand grazes a small, mostly full bottle of paint, one she’d forgotten all about stuffing in there earlier.

She extracts the plastic bottle and holds it up to the moonlight for closer inspection. Okay, so how fitting is this — the paint in question is crimson colored. In this lighting, it all the more resembles the deep red, blue imbued, nearly purple color of fresh human blood. Chuckling somehow at the perfect morbid humor, she dips slightly at the knees, enough to bowl this bottle east, i.e. in the direction which allegedly only looks downhill, though it’s actually bending upward. Even Kay claimed that in walking it with her eyes closed, she could readily discern as much.

Yeah, well, except the bottle doesn’t stop, or reverse course and return to her. It keeps right on rolling, picking up speed, even, if her eyes are to be believed, before sailing into that graffiti soaked zone at the bottom, slightly up the next hill, then back down again, where it comes to rest.

Emily stares down at this scene in an attempt to draw any other conclusion. She remains here, her mouth slightly agape, that is, until she becomes aware of a sickly greenish-blue glow in her peripheral, the expected figure only now emerging from the woods to her left. She instinctively begins backing away from this apparition, in the direction of the top/bottom, however a person would even phrase such at this point, slowly inching toward the graffiti.

But then it smiles, and extends an index finger, beckons her nearer in the universal come hither motion. When this fails to do anything but paralyze Emily, however, The Ruiner extends both arms, as if pleading for a hug, head tilted slightly as if to suggest she’s being a bit ridiculous. As though disappointed that she’s chosen to keep her distance, even as he continues to wear that sick, perverted leer.

This is when she takes off running. Emily sprints and doesn’t look back, down the hill which, Kay’s testimony, gravity, and the scientific community be damned, certainly feels exactly like a downhill slope to her. Only upon reaching the graffiti itself, both a little winded and realizing she hasn’t heard any noise behind her, does Emily risk a pause, to catch her breath and glance backwards.

Standing near or precisely where she’d recently been, that nightmarish figure looms at the top of the road, watching her. And now he raises one hand, snaps it shut a handful of times in a sarcastic bye-bye motion, grinning all the broader as he does so. And then turns to disappear into the woods from which he came.

Though exhaling violent bursts of steam, her breath ever so gradually returns to normal, as does her heartbeat. Only now will she actually allow herself to examine the graffiti, just about all of which appears to be new. In fact, there’s a fresh looking, single line of yellow dashes down the middle of road, atop some newly poured looking asphalt — she’s guessing the county does what it can to stem the vandalism here, though it’s pretty much a lost cause. Already an absolute onslaught of spray painted messages and symbols has nearly obliterated their efforts.

Aside from the expected, gigantic, pure white outline of a cock and balls, there are also hearts, names ranging from Brent to Kate to Zebra, in a variety of fonts and handwriting styles. Among the more intriguing messages, however, remain a cursive, also white, Do Ya Love Me? which she recalls from last time, and can only mean someone took the trouble of reapplying. There’s a long, thin rectangle so neat it looks to have been either measured or else sprayed through a stencil, a gradual fade through every color visible to man, almost like a giant pH strip. Elsewhere, a dark blue — at least as far as she can tell, within this moonlight — line drawn perpendicular to the road, beside which a post still bears that purple blaze. And a message that must be in black just before the line, advising Charlie: start here!

This message creeps here out more than any other, even though a purely utilitarian one, serving some legitimate purpose. She uses this as her cue to turn and begin walking, continuing on this trajectory. It’s the only move that makes even marginal sense. Eventually, she knows, she should reach Stokely Farm Road, and Fairlawn Cemetery, but she can’t quite recall how far away this would be from here.

Now that she’s walking up this incline, though, the one leading away from the graffiti, Emily finally gets the point Jeremy had been making. This is clearly a sharp ascension she’s tracing here. Which means that if arriving from the other direction, toward that starting line, upon bottoming out, the road clearly bends in some fashion. So either both sides are optical illusions, or…something really weird is happening here.

But enough about that. While entertaining enough to pass the time during an endless hike, it does her no good from a survival standpoint. She can always return to these thoughts later, because who knows how long she’ll be out here. Oh, except wait, she had somehow forgotten all about this: just beyond the top of this latest rise, there’s that battered looking white farmhouse, close to the road, where the old man had been burning something in a barrel. And…wait a second…though the windows alone are lit, all of them she can see, with those faux candle thingies, could this possibly be…despite the late hour and the cold, that crazy looking old man is standing in his yard right now, burning stuff in that barrel?

Yes. He most certainly is. And though she’s frozen all over again, wondering if this isn’t even more insane than traipsing around in the woods with The Ruiner, eventually Emily is standing in the road so long that he becomes aware of her presence. Turns her way, and sticks a single, flannel jacket clad arm into the air by way of greeting, before turning his attention back to the fire. Still Emily debates the matter internally, studying his orange face in the firelight, though all she’s coming up with is a selection of really bad alternatives. Of which this definitely seems the least bad option. Which is how she finds herself shuffling up the gravel driveway to approach him.

The old man doesn’t really say much, but he seems kind enough. After standing around for a handful of minutes, during which time he extracts a pint bottle of whiskey from the breast pocket of his flannel coat a couple of times — and offers some to Emily, though she refuses — and pulls on it, he eventually offers the use of their regular old landline telephone, inside the house.

This comes on the heels of Emily withdrawing her own phone, and discovering it dead, though another quarter hour passes before she works up enough nerve to mention it to this old man. Until then, she’s weighing the pros and cons, wondering if such an admission would make her more vulnerable. But, after concluding he doesn’t really seem the axe murderer type, and anyways she’s freezing even with this fire, has no other valid plan for getting home, she reluctantly mentions her dilemma, then accepts his offer.

Emily still isn’t certain about any of this, but when this adorable ancient gent creaks open the door, and shouts for his wife, she immediately approaches from the direction of what must be the kitchen. Wiping her hands on one of those front apron thingies, and wearing some frilly, flower patterned grandma’s dress despite the late hour. Then, after sitting Emily down at their charming little Formica covered table, the kind with one of those shiny metal rims encircling its edges, a rim encrusted with six or seven parallel grooves, they point to their phone on the wall nearby, and the dear old woman makes her some tea. This time, when the man of the house extracts his whiskey bottle, and holds it above her mug with a quizzical expression, she readily nods yes. By this point, she is already dialing Denise’s number, then giving up in favor of Kay’s. This actually doesn’t work, possibly because they don’t recognize the number, although by now Emily’s phone has recharged enough that she’s able to text them from her own.

Emily hears the front door swing open, then click shut, and believes that the old man must have returned outside to his fire. While she waits for Kay to arrive, Emily sips at her hot toddy type concoction, one which seems to seep into the spaces of her ribcage and is basically the most magical beverage she believes she’s ever tasted. During this time, the old woman washes dishes by hand at the sink, occasionally looking up and out the window above it, which faces their backyard, occasionally glances over at Emily. Most of their conversation, however fitful, concerns local folklore, for example when Emily asks if they ever get tired of the teenagers down at that gravity hill, and the woman admits that they do, though adding they’re not sure what can really be done about it.

By the time Kay and Denise arrive, it’s an impossible seeming 2:30 in the morning. Yet this woman doesn’t appear the least bit fatigued. As for her crew, they remain in the car, honking the horn with the engine running, making jokes about being too freaked out to come retrieve her. Denise adds that they could see the silhouette of some dude out by that fire barrel, but couldn’t get a good look at him in the dark.

“Oh, he’s perfectly harmless,” Emily assures, as the car is backing out of the driveway. Staring wistfully over at the house, as they drive away, she adds, “they were really just the sweetest old couple…”

Still, Emily does wonder if he hadn’t poured a bit more whiskey into her mug than she realized. Nothing is really adding up. It takes them almost a half hour to retreat to the lake. All three of them glance over at Fairlawn Cemetery, tucked away in that little elbow, the hilly bend between road and forest, though nobody says a word. Then they’re immediately over the loosely S shaped bridge across the water, finally arriving at the mostly muddy parking lot beside the marina. Even through the fog, she can readily spot her idiot boyfriend, slumped forward in his chair, wrapped loosely in that pair of umbrellas.

Once they honk enough to rouse him, and he shuffles in half-asleep fashion to the car, they are on their way back to Otherwise. Emily attempts explaining to all of them, with frequent pauses to admit she knows how preposterous this sounds, about her recent interludes with The Ruiner. It’s only after they pull up beside Jeremy’s parked car, which Kay and Denise admit they somehow hadn’t even noticed on the way out, and she climbs behind the wheel so he can mostly half-doze again, that she really gets into addressing the timing and spacing issue, that he’s right, that the layout of this terrain makes no sense. Where they differ, however, even in his sleepy state, is their opinion of what it all means.

“I think we’re in some weird, like, other dimension or something, when we’re out here. Some kind of space-time…vortex…thingie…”

“Get out of here,” he scoffs.

“Is that not what you’re saying? What are you saying, then?”

“I’m saying there is an answer, we just haven’t figured it out yet. We’re gonna feel like morons, once we finally do piece it all together.”

“Okay, but, like, how do you explain where I ended up? Or how I got there without ever crossing that gigantic ass lake?”

“You had to have run across a small bridge of some sort. You had to have. You just didn’t notice because you were frantically running away from…our prankster friend in the ghost costume. I mean we have no idea about the layout of that lake. I’m not a freaking cartographer, are you?”

“Cartographer?” she questions with a laugh.

“Whatever. What I mean is, for all we know, that lake might narrow down to this tiny little stream at some point. Or even stop completely. You just happened to run over it at that point.”

“I guess so. I don’t know, this area is really starting to creep me out,” she observes with a shiver. “It’s creeping me out, but at the same time, like, I feel drawn to it. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”

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