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Today’s story is, “The Alone Place,” the sixth in Kindling’s first ever short story collection, Lights Out. Inspired by folk horror and mythology, this collection of short stories will explore the unknown, the consequences of touching the forbidden, and the mysteries that lurk in the dark, unexplored places of the world.
Inspired by my early exposure to horror, dark sci-fi and dark fantasy through anthologies and collections such as, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Illustrated Man, The Twilight Zone, and Tales From the Crypt.
“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”
- Lord of the Flies
It was the smell that woke him. Smoke, not of burning wood but rubber, choked him when he opened the cabin’s front door. It was his father’s car. Impossible. But more than that, a driver, slumped in the front seat. A person.
From the looks of it they were dead. He had only seen one dead person in his life—don’t say her name—but stillness, that was the hallmark of all dead things. He watched the car for a long time, waiting for some sign of danger. Finally, just before dawn, he went to the vehicle, and opened the door.
The driver was alive, sick with infection. The sores were like nothing Ishmael had ever seen before, green around a yellow raised center that oozed. It was almost like a mosquito bite, a tiny hole in the center of the discolored skin, but these lumps were larger, nearly fist-sized in some places.
His parents had taught him what they could, but they were average people, not well versed in anything but common medicine. He knew that he should keep the man clean and avoid touching the open wounds. He pulled the man from the car, the body limp and too warm, then heaved him to the cabin, his arms hooked beneath his armpits. The man didn’t weigh much, and Ishmael imagined he must have been sick a long time before coming to the Alone Place.
For a moment he considered leaving the man there along the dirt path that led to the front door. There would be honeysuckle come spring, the acrid smoke, steel and glass long gone by then. The man's body would be nothing but bones, picked clean and gone to seed like the rest of the dead things here. He could see the place at nightfall, imagined the man's eyes opening to darkness. The smell of Ishmael's wood fire, the rabbit stew he planned to have tonight. He didn't want to risk it. Killing was the reason his family had left Denver when he was still a young boy. They had made a pact never to raise a hand to another human being.
But you haven't kept to it, have you?
He nearly dropped the man at the words, pinging around his head like rocks on metal. He looked down, but saw his eyes were closed, his mouth shimmering with thick drool.
"That was different," he said to no one. The only sounds in the cool morning were sparse bird calls, and the man's bare, bloodied heels dragging against the winter hardened ground.
"Two books," his father had said when they first came to the cabin. The titles were familiar to him, though he had not yet reached an age when they were taught in school. The Coral Island, and Lord of the Flies. "Read them both, then tell me which one you like best."
His old man was trying to get a beat on him, see what he was really made of. His eyes asked the question, are you friend, or foe? When he chose The Coral Island, an adventure story of three heroic shipwrecked boys, his father was ready with the next lesson.
"Life isn’t like those hero stories Ish. Human nature is no different than any other animal. Survival of the fittest. To live a civilized life, we must be shaped into something more."
He picked up the copy of Lord of the Flies, held it out so Ishmael could see the cover. “This book isn’t fun, but it might as well be made of flesh and blood. This is the human story. If you don’t know this part of yourself—”
Ishmael could see his father, tapping his head with the corner of a paperback.
The rhythmic thump of the man's bony feet against the warped gray wooden steps brought him back. He stopped pulling, let the man's mouth twist and relax, before he opened the front door. Warmth rushed out, the radiant heat from last night's embers powerless against the endless expanse of cold. Ishmael wrapped his arms around the man's legs, and heaved him inside.
Light settled on the dusty places inside of the house. Shelves above a makeshift sink held exactly four of each dish. Four cups, four bowls, three and a half plates. His sister had broken hers when she was only three years old, and he had traded with her to stop the tears. He ate off half of a plate until just after her sixth birthday.
And then there were three.
“Then one,” the words barely left his mouth.
He turned his eyes away and went to the fire. The half-minute with the door open had drained the cabin of life. After his family left, Ishmael had come to think of those flames as a companion, in the same way as the springtime harvest. These were his partners in survival. They were keeping him alive.
The man sputtered and coughed. Ishmael stopped poking at the glowing wood and looked at him. His face was pale, a sheen of sweat glistening as the first flames crackled. His eyes started to open, milky white where the iris and pupil should be. His hands started to move, feeling the splintered wood beneath him.
"Relax."
The man flinched at the sound of Ishmael's voice. His lips were turned down, putting divots in the thin skin of his cheeks. His head looked like a skull.
Ishmael stepped softly towards him until he could look at him straight on. "What is your name?"
The man's eyes were wide open, opals that the light seemed to disappear into.
"You can't see," Ishmael rocked back on his heels.
"Bring your naked, your poor, your blind," he could hear his father's words, "and I will grant them peace." He was reading aloud the notice sent out by the central government.
"Who is it for daddy?"
His father’s eyes were as hollow as the starving man's before him. "It's your sister."
He could see her at two, eyes pale and drifting as she smiled at their voices.
"They've come for her."
The Alone Place was her salvation, the reason that they came when he was still a boy.
"Drink," Ishmael held a spoon of water to the man’s lips. White sores had broken out across the soft flesh. His fever was raging. He wouldn't make it if he couldn't keep water down.
The man slurped the liquid then sputtered, like a car engine dying after the first crank.
"Where did you come from?"
The man's eyes searched aimlessly. He licked his lips and grimaced. The sores hurt. Ishmael scooped more water, and held it above the man's parted lips. He let a drop fall onto his tongue, then pulled back an inch.
"First," Ishmael leaned in as he said it, so the man could feel the warmth of his breath against his infected skin, "you're gonna have to talk."
For a moment, the only sound Ishmael could hear was the man's scattered breathing and the crackle of the fireplace.
"No."
The man's voice was deep and raspy from disuse and disease. Ishmael wondered if those white sores stretched back into his mouth, down his throat. He pulled the spoon away from his mouth and plopped it into the cup loudly.
Ishmael stood, examined the panic on the man's face, and turned towards the kitchen. He made slow deliberate steps, and set the cup on the counter. The man tuned into his every movement, listening for the layout of the house, the distance to the kitchen.
"I'll be out for a while. If people come looking for you, the car will be a dead giveaway. Be a shame." He walked to the door slowly. When he opened it, he paused and stared at the shivering pile of bones that the man was. His tongue was working over his cracked lips in a fury. It wouldn't be long now. "Think about what I said."
He stepped out into cool morning light. The sun was rising, the old makeshift tree swing backlit in that golden glow, the color of Sara's hair. Her name—he hadn't allowed himself to think it ever since that day at the creek—but the man, those milky unseeing eyes. She was back with him somehow, his little sister reincarnate.
A second chance.
Perhaps. Or a karmic shot at revenge from beyond the grave.
"I didn't mean to," he whispered, but a chill breeze blew through the naked branches and hissed back, Liar, Liar, Liar.
"Will I ever have friends again?"
His father was carving away at a stick, sharpening the tip into a point. "We are your friends, aren't we? Your mother and me, your sister?"
"Yes."
"And not only us, but the animals, the trees, every plant in the garden. That creek you play in every afternoon."
Boy Ishmael said nothing to this. His father was missing the point on purpose.
"So we are not going home? Ever?"
His father stopped carving and looked up, eyes wide with some question. "Ish, we are home."
"No. Here we are alone." Tears sprang, and he focused on pushing down the knot in his throat.
He felt his father's strong arms around him, his breath hot on his neck. "If we go back Ish, they will take your sister to one of the camps. We can not. We can not hand her over."
"And what about me," he barely got the words out. "This place is her hiding place, and my tomb."
"Ishmael," his father was pleading, pulling him in, but Ishmael wriggled out of his grasp.
"This is my alone place. My prison."
When he walked away, his father did not call out to him.
Ishmael returned to the house at lunch time with two rabbits hanging from his belt, the wire snares that had captured them the night before still wrapped around their necks. The man sat up when Ishmael opened the door.
Ishmael kept his back to him. He pulled a block of wood from a shelf and sharpened a knife to butcher the kills.
"Water?"
Ishmael eyed the cup, nearly filled to the brim with water from the creek he and his sister played in as children.
"Will you tell me about the place you came from?"
The man didn't answer.
"My hands are bloody now. I will bring it to you when they are clean."
Ishmael listened as the man swallowed, then gasped. The sores were spreading. He didn't have much time.
The driving lessons started nine months after his father stopped seeing cars on the highways from his lookouts. Planes hadn't been seen flying for a couple of years by then.
"Now I didn't start learning until I was fifteen. That was the law, but you? You're free as a bird."
He smiled at that. A twelve-year old boy behind the wheel of his dad's car couldn't help but smile.
"We need to get back. The gas will run out otherwise."
"How do you know?"
His dad pointed to the fuel gauge, the red dial nearly on E.
"What happens then?"
"Then," his father looked out the window, fixated on the setting sun, "then it's the end of our driving days."
The man gulped down water in spite of the pain. Ishmael let him do it for a minute, then pulled the cup away, and waited. The man gasped, palms dug into the wooden planks as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. Ishmael sat across from him in a wooden chair and pulled one of the rabbits from his belt. The man's eyes wandered as he listened to the sound of the knife cutting through the soft white belly, then the squish of innards hitting the floor.
"I came from the water," the man smiled.
Ishmael stopped, but didn’t look. He was midway, working the knife in a star shape, drawing an incision down the length of each leg. He could feel his heartbeat in the soft web between thumb and forefinger. The stream of blood had reduced to droplets. Copper filled the air. The man licked his lips.
Ishmael paused, a flap of rabbit skin pinned gently between thumb and forefinger. The man was small, malnourished with skin that hung. It was hard to make out his age, especially with the spreading sores. He looked him over, then slowed his breathing.
“How did you find the car?”
The man’s wandering eyes landed on Ishmael’s. He was looking at him, into him. A strange smile spread across his face. Ishmael looked at the man's arms, the skin there thin and pocked with scars where there weren't boils.
"Who drove you here?"
The man's face twisted into a question.
"The car. How did you get it here if you can’t see?"
The man smiled again. His eyes rolled and searched the ceiling rafters. Ishmael looked up too, and for a moment he thought he saw the flickering movement of a shadow, a little girl walking in front of the glow of the fire.
The last time he saw the old beat up car, it was out of gas on a dirt road. It was dead summer and the golden fields stretched on for miles, a heat shimmer running across the wild grass. Ishmael cranked the key and the engine sputtered. He did it again.
"No use," his father said. "We'll have to walk home."
"From here?"
He nodded, unstrapped his seatbelt and opened the passenger door. He looked at Ishmael. He cranked a third, then a fourth time. Finally, he held his hand out for the keys, and Ishmael let him take them.
"Come on son. It's best if we leave it here."
Ishmael relented, unstrapped his seatbelt. They made their way down the road in silence, the sun burning the backs of their necks as they walked to the last human place on earth.
They didn't reach home until near midnight. His mother heard their footsteps in the drive and ran out to meet them, wrapping arms around their necks and offering them water. That night the crickets sang, and Ishmael thought up escape plans. That night he dreamed of the engine roaring, and the wind in his face. He would get back home.
"You've been watching me?"
The man's smile drooped at the heat in Ishmael's voice. He nodded his head. Ishmael stood, the knife gripped hard in his hands. The man's eyes didn't wander this time. He pushed back, away from him. Ishmael stepped forward.
"How did you come to this place?"
The man leaned forward and whispered, "I made this place."
Some of the sores on his arms had broken, a clear shimmer of liquid weeping, the fire's reflection like that summer sun on his sister's wet cheeks. He lunged towards him.
"Who sent you here!"
The man's breathing was shaky, but he growled a response. "You called for me, in your dreams."
Ishmael’s throat closed. The breeze outside picked up, setting the wood to creaks and groans usually reserved for his midnight rouse from night terrors, when the day his sister died—was killed—stop it! Came roaring through his watery nightmares.
The sheets were wet, the night heavy around them. Ishmael could hear his sister's breathing, ragged, a whistle the way it was in summer. The windows were open to let in a breeze, but there was none.
Outside, his parents whispered tense exchanges. His mother said something he couldn’t understand. Then his father. "No, no. We can not go."
"If we don't leave she might die."
"If we do leave, she will die!"
Quiet, then muffled sobs from his mother. "Why did you drain the gas?"
"I am trying to keep this family safe! To keep us together!"
"You are robbing us of the only chance we ever had to go back. How will we get her medicine?"
"I have someone on the inside. He promised to make a delivery."
"You said that two months ago, before her inhaler ran out. Where is he?"
His father's heavy footsteps crunched in the gravel. He was heading away from the house, leaving her to shake the way she did when she held in her tears.
He lay awake a long time, after his mother and father had come in and snuck to the bedroom they shared across the hall. He listened to the sound of his sister's labored breathing, more animal than little girl. His father had trapped them to save his sister, a dying girl who no longer breathed, but rasped and snarled. He would sacrifice them all.
Does not the shepherd leave the many to go after the one?
Not if he wants to live.
Ishmael and the man ate rabbit stew without bread. The last bit of flour run out two years prior. Ishmael watched from his periphery. The man’s blistered lips against the metal spoon, the brown liquid slipping out and down his chin. He was done waiting.
"Where are the keys?"
The man pulled the spoon away from his lips, hung it there suspended in mid-air. For a moment the only sound was the thick liquid dripping onto the wooden planks. His lips parted, revealing half rotted teeth. His hand went to his sunken belly.
"You have to go in to get them."
His jagged finger nail poked into the strange soft flesh. Ishmael saw it then, the jut of something sharp and metal.
After it happened, Ishmael could not remember the moment he decided to do it.
Was it that morning, when he asked his sister if she wanted to go on an adventure? Or did it come to him when she leaned, put her cheek into the creek to feel the cool water on her face?
And how did he keep holding her under, even when she thrashed, and worse, when her body went heavy and one little arm surrendered to the ebb and flow of current? It moved, animated with life, but not hers.
He didn't move his hands from her head for a long time, only sat in the shimmering shade of oak and listened to the breeze move through green leaves.
"I'm sorry I had to do it," her hair was tangled, wet on the ends and splayed like the silk fans he used to stare at in the Chinese place a few blocks from his home, his real home. Before the long car ride to the wilderness and his father's decision to sacrifice them all to save the one.
"Ish?" He moved his hand from the back of her head.
The air died when he faced him. His father stood beyond the shade of the tree, like a mirage behind the heat shimmer. His eyes went to Sara, her legs in a strange position, her belly to the earth. For a moment he didn't move. The scene was so strange, so quiet. The desperate finality of it was lost on him. Then, like an alarm startled him from his stupor, his father scooped his sister up in his arms, and ran.
Ishmael stumbled outside, the smoke from the fire choking him. He felt like his throat was closing. His father’s car was here, and the man with blind eyes that could see?
"He can't be real," Ishmael said to himself through shaky breaths. He pulled at the neck of his shirt, freeing himself from an invisible noose wrapped around his neck.
He paused, the words reverberating. Not real. The keys were probably in the middle of the room, the driver, disappeared or dead days ago. How else would his father's car have shown up here, crashed into the old cabin all these years later?
The dead don't drive cars.
"Not real," he said, and turned back to the cracked door of the cabin. The keys were just behind a thin curtain. The knife? Only necessary to finish off the delusion. Once he cut through, he would finally be free.
He didn't go in the house, only listened as his parents wailed. His heart was in his throat, his stomach a deep hole. The sun moved while he waited, burning his arms and face. Then they were quiet. He wondered if Sara had only been sleeping after all. Maybe lunch would be ready when he went in.
He started up the stairs, his mind on the splintering wood and the evening chores he would have to do later. When his dad appeared in the open doorway, his mind felt trapped in a dream, far from the events of that morning. His hand on his sister's head, no more than a phantom nightmare evaporated by the heat of morning light.
"Why?" his father's voice cracked, and for a minute Ishmael didn't know what he was asking.
The heat of his father's gaze brought a syrupy feeling of shame that engulfed him, warming his skin more than afternoon sun. He leaned forward and wretched. When he looked up his mother was there, her face, pale in the parts where tears fell, tiny streams that could not drown him.
He wanted to ask if they could go home now. Sara could come with them. He wouldn't mind sitting with her through the long drive, even if she was quiet. But all he managed was, "The car."
His father took in a sharp inhale of breath, drew his hand back, and slapped him.
The man lay on the floor with his eyes open. His chest rose and fell in shallow waves, a hitching ebb and flow that paused too long before starting again. The sores were everywhere now, on his cheeks and hands, dotting the skin pulled taut over his rib cage. Ishmael pulled his shirt up over his mouth.
"Stay still," he said, kneeling next to what he knew must be a hallucination. His knife didn't make a sound when he pulled it from his leather sheath, but the man still turned his head.
Ishmael stared at him, blade held low so that the man couldn't see. A slow grin spread across his face, pulling at his diseased lips. Ishmael cut in the place where the key poked the thin skin. The man didn't scream when Ishmael pulled the jangling metal from his body, slick with clots and sinew.
In his dream, he was coughing, water splashing his face as he fought for air. He came up to sunlight, but the breath turned liquid in his lungs. He woke up gasping, his fingertips pressed to the earth.
For a moment, he imagined he was one of the littluns stranded on the island in Lord of the Flies, naked, a last survivor in the dark of outstretched jungle limbs. Two eyes blinked on in the distance, a panther, ready to pounce at any moment.
Then, the sound of the engine roared to life. He sat up. The headlights from the car lit the trees in a wicked Halloween moon glow. The cricket sounds pulsed as his heart strained, squeezing pressure into his ears.
The night came rushing back to him. The exile, his walk to the stream, the strange black sleep that had overtaken in spite of his empty stomach. Now, the tires crunched in the rocky drive as the car turned.
"Mom," he gasped, then pushed up onto his feet. "Mom!"
His legs pumped a body that felt electric, an empty vessel that was more form than substance, weightless. Red break lights, then the car moved forward.
"Dad!"
He could see the shadow of them in the car. The wheels spun and spat fiery rocks his way as he closed in, screaming at his parents to wait.
"Don't leave me!"
The car peeled out and headed down that familiar path toward the highway.
It was just like he remembered it. Gas fumes poured into the window and burned his nostrils. He kept it rolled down anyway in spite of the cold. Prairie grass grew up in bunches along the old path, and the gravel was pitted where heavy rains had moved the earth.
The road was black and empty, the sky like a blank page. For the first time since his parents had left him in the Alone Place, he was free. The man had not been a dream. His hands were still covered in his blood. That meant that just off this lonely stretch of road, there was someone. Living. Alive. The thought flooded his chest until he could no longer contain it. He let the tears flow.
The sun was going down when he caught the green glint of an exit sign, the last cool embers of winter light splayed over the horizon. He turned right from the off ramp onto country highway. Faded signs peppered the sides of the road, arrows pointing to gas stations and fast food joints.
3 MILES TO THE ISLAND
Buildings started to pop up, then an old intersection, the traffic lights dead. “Main Street,” a drooping sign yelled, and down it, old American shops like in the ski town he had been to when he was a small boy. Some of the windows were broken, and dead plants poked out from the cracks in the brick.
"A ghost town," he said, fighting off a hollow sloshing feeling in his stomach.
He came to the end of the dead block of what used to be downtown, and saw a little white house at the start of a neighborhood. Just like the one he lived in when he was a little boy. Before Sara was born blind and sick. Before their father dragged them to survival on the edge of nowhere.
He pulled over in front of it, and watched in the rearview as the last bit of light went out. In the windows, he could see the shadows of his former life. His mother and father busied themselves, moving from the kitchen to the living room, serving Sara dinner no doubt. Her face appeared in the kitchen, the skin blue, visible in the rising light of a full moon. Her hair was dark with creek water, and when she smiled, a set of pointed shark teeth, rows within rows, shimmered.
A chill worked up his spine, and he ran a dry tongue over his cracked, sore lips.
"Ouch," he put his face to the mirror.
A lump had opened there, the soft squish of inner flesh yellowed and weeping. He glanced back at the window, and saw all three were there, waiting. His mother was only a shadow, but his father was flesh and blood, covered in sores. He raised his hand and waved him in, beckoning him.
Ishmael smiled against the painful blooms of infection spreading fast on his lips. They had come for him after all this time. He stepped out of the car into darkness, and made his way up the cracked concrete stairs to the porch. A breeze picked up and shook the leafless trees. The front door of the house opened like a mouth, welcoming him home.
Creepy good story telling!
Oof this was great. I always shy away from post-apocalyptic stories/shows/movies because they feel too close to home, revealing just how thin the veneer of civilization actually is. You really nailed that desperation, the animal-like quality in all of us. But then! You twisted my heart strings with the image of the family at the end - changed but together. So good.