Chapter Seven

There is a darkness in all of us, struggling to project itself onto the screen of our minds. But for five troubled teens, that darkness will project itself in a new form. The hate, mania, and sadism have chosen a new vessel. That vessel is a taxidermy

Chapter 7: Isaac Dehker

 

Nobody had noticed that the beaver was gone that day at school.  The day went on pretty normally, walking around and trying to make myself invisible.  I didn’t care that they were all looking at me, but I wanted them to stop thinking what I knew was running through their head. 

 

I practically darted home, numb and terrified of running into Adam and Eric again.  The early fall wind felt colder and even more raw than usual, and the scent of decaying leaves was buzzing through my brain.  I ran past Aaron’s house, half expecting to see his car in the driveway.  Half expecting him to come out and ask me what I was running from, like he used to do when I was eleven.  But he would never again rush to my defense, his trusty BB gun loaded and ready for justice. 

 

I always liked his BB gun.  It was crafted to look like a handgun, and had a good kick and an always satisfying “BANG” that made you feel like god when you shot it off, even though on the single occasion where I had shot it off at Eric, it hit him right in the stomach and didn’t do anything worse than make a purple-black bruise that spread fast over his left side. 

 

Still, the BB gun would never again be turned on my tormenters.  It would never again knock a blue jay from a tree and make the bird blood fall and taint the flower petals that fell under the cherry tree like snow.  He was going to spend the rest of forever locked up in a cage like some sort of animal.

 

I ran again, past the house and everything that it stood for.  When I finally got to my front door I was sucking in oxygen like a vacuum cleaner.  I crept around back and came in through the basement, half flying up the stairs and into my room to get the beaver.  It was under my bed where I left it, the little red lines still bloody on it’s back legs.  Stupid beaver.  Stupid stuffed animal. 

 

I stuffed it into a plastic shopping bag and held the top closed tight, making sure that no air could get in.  It made a gasping noise as I suffocated it, choking out swear words and calling me names.  I smashed the bag up against the wall, desperate to shut it up, then crawled out my window and onto the roof.  From the roof I shimmied down the emergency ladder, swing the beaver against the side of the house as I climbed, hearing it scream over and over again.

“You worthless piece of s**t!  You worthless f*g!  How is this gonna make anything better”

 

I went down to the corner of Rock Street and turned onto Ragna Lane.  The woods wasn’t wide, but it was thick and deep.  I darted in through a space between two shack-like houses into the start of the woods. 

 

It was like stepping between worlds as I abandoned the sun lit streets of suburbia to slither into the dark shelter of the woods.  The whole place smelled like mold and new rain, and was eternally in night’s clutches.  The sounds of squirrels and birds and frogs made the air thick, but not dead or gooey like a CD that was up too loud.  About six minutes into the woods was the lake.

 

There was a small, almost beach-like pit of sand bordering the waters where they’d found a body the day before WTC.  Aaron was one of the kids that found the body.  In my mind I could hear his voice as he described the scene.

 

“And so we were all just walking along by the pond, you know? And we saw something in the sand a few feet away.  We thought it was like… a dog or something.  You know?  Like a drown dog that floated to the edge of the pond.  And so we were all psyched up. You know?  Like… like we were all gonna cut it up and everything.  Like… to see what was inside of it.  But only if it was dead.  And so we ran up to it, but this kid named Jimmy started flipping out.  And we… like… we thought it was maybe like… like his dog or something that was dead.  But when we got closer, it was a kid.  And so I kicked him with my boot, because I knew the kid from around town and he was a total p***y.  And I was all like

‘hay kid, are you ok?’ but he didn’t answer and so I flipped him over with my boot.  And there was all of this… like… red, you know?  And when I looked closer, I saw that somebody cut up his neck, and he was all broken up and bashed in real nasty.  And then Dominic was all like

‘oh my god, this must be the kid who went missing!’ and we all started flipping, because there was this little dead kid just laying in the sand, but no footprints anywhere, so we thought that maybe… maybe the guy who killed him was still around.  So we… all of us, we ran to the cops and showed them, and they checked out the area, but there wasn’t nobody nowhere”.

 

The voice was too clear to be coming from my head.  I dropped the bag in absolute panic once I realized where the voice was really coming from.  It was the beaver, digging in my mind and ripping out the words that only I could hear.  Messing with me, hurting me, tearing at the walls of my skull.

 

I looked out onto the waters and waited for Rachelle.  I almost didn’t want to see her, almost didn’t want her to come.  If she came, I knew that I would mess up, or say something dumb, or…

“Or expose yourself for the f*g you really are”

The voice was strained and breathless, but the words of the all-knowing beaver flooded my head.

 

A rustling in the woods behind me let me know that I wasn’t alone.  I turned around fast, my heart racing with the swelling knowledge of being watched.  I tried to shake it off, but it wouldn’t be shaken.  Something about the place filled me with a hollow feeling, as if death was filling my gut and throat, dissolving all of the muscle and organs and leaving my insides pure and red and raw. 

 

And then she finally made herself known.  I wiped a few beads of cold sweat from my head and flashed an awkward smile, holding the bag closed with a death grip that turned my knuckles white.

 

Still not letting go of the bag, I held it out to here.

“Here” I muttered quickly.  It was as if a magnetic field was keeping my hand closed around the bag.  She reached out for the bag, but I pulled it back, not sure if I was willing to let the voices make her suffer. 

 

She looked at me, confused.  I extended my arm again, but it forced itself back.  Finally, all of my willpower forced me to hand her the bag.  She opened it up, then looked back up at me.

 

“Nothing in there but the beaver” I assured her.  She smiled and nodded, running her hand along the fur.  And suddenly all communication with the beaver was cut off, there was a feeling like I’d just stepped out of a force field.  I tried to tell myself that it was all in my head, but I knew that I’d freed myself from the cruelty. 

 

“Kinda creepy” I whispered without thinking.

“What?” she spun around, as if she was looking for a gremlin in a bush, suddenly as high strung and skittish as a caffeine addict.

“This place” the words slurred out of my mouth as my eyes scanned every grain of sand, as if there would still be a trace of blood left

“What about it”

“You know” I lowered my voice as if the ghosts could hear me “that kid who got killed around here back in like… 2^nd grade”

“forth grade!” she jumped down my throat “right before 9/11.  Mark something, right?  Mark Donavan?”

I shook my head “Donau, something Donau.  Matt or mark or…”

“Mike!” she breathed out the word.

“yah” I felt a grin crawl across my face “yah, that was his name.  I knew the kid who found him.  And yah, it was right before 9/11, because I remember seeing the towers fall on the news, and all the neighbors were running out screaming to the search party about the towers.  Crazy, right?”

“Yah, that day was pretty scary.  I mean, I knew that bad things happened, but I never thought that… like…”

“yah” I nodded, “I know what you mean.  Like… stuff like that just isn’t supposed to happen”

her face dropped, and the color drained from her skin.

“Creeped out?” I asked as a shiver ran down my spine.

She nodded, stuffing her hands intdo her pocket. 

“you can feel it, right?” she whispered “like… the air feels thick”.

 

My jaw dropped and I locked eyes with her. 

“yah” I cleared my throat and spat “It feels like… displaced”

“I want to get out of here” she shook her head in a spastic move “I gotta go, I’ll see you around”.

“see you” I shrugged and waved a quick goodbye.  Something was so wrong with the lake.  I looked into the cold waters and imagined how that little boy must have felt.  My eyes started to play tricks on me, and I saw little ribbons of red across the lake, as if the water was becoming blood.  The sun’s reflection made shapes and patterns on the water.  It wasn’t too hard to imagine the blood-wet texture of the sand beneath me as I lay bleeding to death, staring wide-eyes at my killer as the cold waves crashed over me.  Part of it was almost a sick fantasy.  I knew pain well enough, but death was so appealing.  Pain was a blank serge that left as fast as it came, but death was eternal. Death was a pull from the body and a promise of eternity.  The dead never feared death.

 

And suddenly, I craved the wholeness of eternity.  I looked at the waters and wondered if they would be cold enough to kill me if I went in deep enough.  The feeling of being watched still hung over my head as I pulled off my shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of my pants. 

 

It was a pretty thought as I stood up to my ankles in the water.  My life was already over, or at least it was in my opinion.  Curiosity drew me in closer.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live, or be alive.  I just wanted to know what death felt like; I’d felt everything else from pain to murder.  But I forced myself to back up, to stop being stupid and crazy and pull myself together. 

 

The sand coated my feet as I walked back.  The tar-black waters were calling me, begging me to disappear beneath the darkness, pleading with me not to go.  Standing at the waters edge, I had an almost positive feeling that I would end my life beneath the cold, dark waves.  It was as if the bottom of the world would drop from beneath the lake and pull me under as I entered it once more, but only to my knees. 

 

The water was cold and empty and stung like acid, but the bottom was soft like a cotton ball.  I backed out once again, starting to scare myself.  A twig snapped behind me, and I spun around.  I could hear the faint, drown out noises of two people talking.  One voice was clearly a girl, she sounded frightened.  The other was a boy or a man, who sounded sort of pissed off.  I slid from the sand to the dirt, slipping my shoes and socks back on. 

 

A snap rung out across the night, either a hand on a face or a foot on a twig.  I gasped and spun around, the five-o-clock sun starting to go down, turning the sky a pretty blood red, swirled with yellow and peach.  The only sky leaked through the break in the treetops above the lake, which would soon blend into the black canopy of eternal night that encased the woods. 

 

Another twig snapped, and I realized that I wasn’t alone.  I backed up against a tree, shutting my eyes in an infantile panic.  If leather face, or Jason Voorhees, or some other horror movie demon had followed me, I didn’t want to see the knife coming at me.  With my eyes shut tight I managed to whimper a single word.

“Rachelle”

But there was no answer.

“is that you?” I squeaked the last words that most Camp Blood kids called out before being impaled or decapitated or disemboweled with a weed whacker, or meeting some other horrible demise.

 

No answer came, and so I opened my eyes and looked around again.  In the woods I could see a raccoon, probably the source of the noise.  I cursed myself for being so easily startled, then picked up a stone. 

 

I missed the raccoon by a mile, but I managed to scare it away.  I didn’t get more than three steps into the woods before a figure jumped out of a bush and tackled me to the ground. 

“Where do you think you’re going?”

 

Author's Note

Just tell me what you think XD