It Came from Anomaly Flats Read online

  It Came from

  Anomaly Flats

  issue 01

  Clayton Smith

  *******

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  *******

  For Uncle Hank, for introducing me to Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King at a perfectly impressionable age.

  Table of Terrors

  The Time Capsule

  Faeligo

  Microbes

  Aberration

  The Lurchwood Bandits

  Dead Man’s Cave

  The Invitation

  The Thing Below

  Lucy

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  The Time Capsule

  Today is a nervous day.

  Most days are nervous days. Nervous days or frightening days. Sometimes there are happy days, but not very often. There are sad days too, I guess. We do have a lot of sad days. But today is a nervous day.

  Because today we open the time capsule.

  We don’t know what will be inside.

  I buried a time capsule of my own once. When I was a boy. It was a project for school—though since my “school” was my house, with my parents, it was really just the three of us burying a shoebox full of junk we didn’t really want anymore. Still, they always liked to say I was doing things for school, and I guess I liked that, too. It made me feel less removed from the other children, the ones in the schoolhouse. Or maybe it made me feel above them somehow. I was in a different school. An exclusive school. A private school.

  I don’t remember everything we put into that box. Some G.I. Joes, I think. A half-empty bottle of Clear Cola Crystal Pepsi. There were some clothes, socks and stuff, but I don’t remember what they looked like, or whose they were. We didn’t really have a whole lot to spare, so we didn’t fill the box very well. Maybe there was a yo-yo. One of those yo-yos that was supposed to zip back up to you all on its own, but it never really did. Now that I think about it, yes, there was definitely a yo-yo. Neon yellow with black zebra slashes all across it. I don’t know why I remember that yo-yo.

  We buried it when I was a boy, out in the woods behind our house. We always meant to open it ten years later, see how things were different. See how yo-yos had changed, I guess. But it didn’t work out that way. Mom died 18 months after we buried the box, and the following spring, some animal dug it up and ripped most of it to shreds. It took the G.I. Joes, and the yo-yo, too. It left the Pepsi behind.

  A big crowd has gathered for the unearthing of the town’s time capsule. I imagine it’s an actual capsule, a real capsule, not a flimsy shoebox from Red’s Shoe Store. The people around me are nervous, too; I can tell. They’re all trying to stay positive, make small talk, but it sounds hollow.

  They’re not just nervous. They’re scared.

  You never know what sorts of things people decide to bury.

  There are more people here than I thought lived in all of Anomaly Flats. It’s elbow-to-elbow, and that makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel like my throat is closing up, and I want a cigarette even though I’ve never smoked in my life, and then the thought of thick smoke in the tight crowd chokes me, makes me gag, and suddenly I’m bending over, my hands on my knees, and old Mr. Crowson next to me is shaking his head and making disapproving sounds in the back of his throat like he’s disgusted with me, even though I haven’t done anything, not really, I haven’t coughed anything up or spat anything on his shoes. I just need to catch my breath.

  I stand back up and fill my lungs. It’s good. The air is good. It’s chilly for summer, so maybe it’s not even summer anymore—who knows? Time is like taffy in Anomaly Flats. It stretches and stretches and stretches, then it snaps, and it gets flung across the yard, shrinking in on itself and drying up in the sun.

  I guess all small towns are like that.

  I don’t recognize everyone here. That makes me anxious. It sets my stomach rolling. It shouldn’t, I guess. It should probably be fine. But we don’t get many strangers here. When we do, it usually means trouble.

  Trouble for us. More trouble for them.

  Memories are their own time capsules, and I have a mausoleum filled with every stranger I’ve seen here, buried deep in the recesses of my mind. I try not to think about them, but every once in a while, the rains of remembrance wash away the topsoil, and the ghosts in the crates come clawing to the surface. My time capsule of strangers opens, and I see them. The ones who shouldn’t have come here.

  I see the woman with wild brown hair. She drove into town, a tornado of meanness and chaos. She sank her claws into our scientist, and he hasn’t been the same since. They say she drove away, but no one gets away from here. Not really. They don’t know what happened to her, but I think I know. I think she’s still here, somewhere. Maybe somewhen.

  I see the pilot—a decent man, in retrospect, but an outsider, a demon, we thought then, who fell from the sky. We didn’t know about airplanes back then. The things we did to him. The way he cried out. The way his blood pooled in dark, shining puddles in the town square.

  I see the salesman, desperate and needful. Hungry for work. Hungry for survival. Hungry for new territory. Hungry. I think of how we fed him, and a dark veil falls over my mind.

  Strangers don’t fare well in Anomaly Flats.

  My eyes well up, and I blink before the salt can become tears. I shove the memories of our strangers back into their mausoleum, I seal the door, and I bury it beneath the spongy earth of my here and now. I don’t want to think about them anymore. I don’t want to think about them ever again.

  Something gnaws at my brain, chewing and chewing and telling me that maybe the things we’ve done are terrible. Maybe we should be punished. But there’s no use in that.

  You can’t change the past. And it won’t change the future.

  The mayor climbs the makeshift platform now, her eyes shining with pride. Her suit is perfectly pressed, her hair is perfectly placed, and her smile is perfectly placid. This is a grand moment for her. She acts as if the key to our future rests in this capsule. She acts as if she’s the one who buried it in the first place.

  Maybe she is. I don’t know.

  I think about my own time capsule. Dirty cotton socks ripped and snagged on the branches. Plastic arms, plastic heads, littering the leaves. Savagely exposed, furiously destroyed. My past. Our past. Lying in ruins.

  There are familiar faces gathered here, too, of course. Lots of them. There’s Mrs. Myers, who’s been cutting my hair since I was a kid. After my mom died, Dad put me in regular school, and Mrs. Myers’ son Tommy was in my class. He liked to set fire to things. One day, in seventh grade, our English class was interrupted by the emergency alarm. We shuffled out into the lot behind the school, and when the fire trucks started showing up, and smoke started rolling out of the library, we all knew what had happened. Little Tommy Myers liked to sneak into the janitor closet behind the reference section and set rolls of that cheap, rough toilet paper on fire with his Zippo. That stuff went up like tinder, but Tommy was always fast about stomping out the fire. He wore thick boots, even in the warm months, just so he could do it. He was usually really fast. But not that day. That day, I don’t know what happened. Maybe he got distracted, or maybe he burned himself and didn’t recover from the surprise of it fast enough. Whatever it was, he didn’t put the fire out in time, and a second roll of paper caught, then a third, then another, until the whole closet was
alive with flames.

  The door to the janitor’s room was a fire door, which is sort of strange, looking back. Who puts up a heavy-duty door to protect mop buckets? Maybe something to do with the chemicals in the cleaners? Regardless, the fire should have died in that little room. But Tommy had managed to open the door. He ran out of the little closet, but they think he must have been on fire himself. The way the firemen figured, he ran out screaming, blinded by the flames that consumed him, and crashed straight into the picture books. The whole library went up after that. They found what was left of little Tommy Myers sprawled across an overturned bookshelf. His bones had fused to the metal of the shelves. I didn’t know bones could do that.

  Mrs. Myers keeps clutching and unclutching her fingers. Her jaw is tense. She keeps staring straight ahead, and when people say hello, she barely acknowledges them. She just stands and waits.

  I don’t know what she’s hoping to find in the time capsule. A connection, I guess. Or a reason. Maybe some hope.

  Connection and reason and hope. Three things that are in short supply in the Flats.

  Over there is old man Seymour. I haven’t seen him in ages. He doesn’t leave the house much. I’m surprised to see him here. He looks terrible. Like someone hung a pendulum from the center of his chest, and it’s been slowly pulling and pulling at his skin. His eyes are yellow and thick with pus. The sockets are drawn, and you can see the pink crescents below each eye, dry and shot through with swollen veins. His lips have gone purple; his skin has taken on the look of old paper. The hairs still clinging to life on his head are long, and he’s pawed them mostly to one side, but a few have twisted free and are drooping down the side of his face.

  Seymour hasn’t been the same since he walked into that green light in the woods out behind the Del Taco. He did it on a dare. Everyone knew the light was dangerous. Everyone knew if you got close enough, it changed you. But Jack Reagan’s old man Jumper had put a whole year’s tab at the Dive Inn on the line, and Seymour, a world-class drunk, just couldn’t pass that up. The whole town begged him not to go. Seymour’s girlfriend, Linda June, even leapt on his back, tried to drag him to the ground before he could get past the parking lot, and Linda June’s not a small woman, but Seymour was stronger then. Powerful. Head foreman of Lacke Construction, with a broad chest, thick arms, and a shit-eating grin. He hefted Linda June off his back easily enough, set her right down on the asphalt, then he turned around, flashed us that smile, flipped us off with both hands, and sauntered into the woods and toward the light with a spring in his step, like he was headed to the old fishing hole.

  Old man Seymour.

  He shuffled out of the woods three hours later, all whittled down. A whole head shorter, and sick. It didn’t take Doc Mason long to make the diagnosis. Liver cancer, stage four. Two weeks to live, tops.

  That was almost twenty years ago. I was just a kid then, watching him crawl back toward the parking lot on his hands and knees, the green light glowing brightly in the woods beyond. Two weeks, Doc Mason had said, and that’d be a gift. Yet here he is. Face drawn, skin yellow, lips purple, organs in a perpetual state of failure. Old man Seymour’s had stage four liver cancer pretty much as long as any of us can remember, and it’s metastasized to every other organ he has, but it won’t kill him off. Because whatever it was in that light that changed him, it changed him good. It made it so his own cells would become ravenous to feed, but it also made it so the cancer would never kill him. Just keep him right on the brink of organ failure.

  It’s a wonder he hasn’t killed himself. But he’s a Christian, and he won’t abide it. So he lives on, taking what pills he can and drinking away whatever pain is left. Not like he can do any more damage than has already been done.

  Old man Seymour. Went in strong, came out ruined.

  Jumper Reagan never paid up.

  I’m glad he’s here. I think we’re all glad he’s here. He needs the fresh air, and the distraction will be good for him.

  Over there is Trudy Pingle. You don’t see her outside of the diner much. She must’ve left the Nite-Owl in the care of that girl she’s training, Mandy…or Mindy. I can’t remember her name. Or maybe Trudy closed up shop altogether for the special occasion. She’d have a tough time scraping up customers anyway. Looks like the whole town’s turned out.

  Trudy’s standing with the scientist, and viewed from here, they make strange friends. Her, all rolls and light; him, all angles and scowls. He used to be different. Used to be the nicest guy around. He came from I-don’t-know-where, started studying the strange things that happen in town. He always seemed happy enough, but something changed in him a few years back, when that woman came to town. He’s mean now, and he tries not to show it, but you can tell. He’s mean, and it’s sad to see him go that way. But it’s not all that surprising. He’s an outsider, and Anomaly Flats doesn’t make it easy on them.

  Marshall Dawes is standing next to me, and he elbows me, laughing that nervous little giggle he has. “What do you think’s inside—ha ha!” he says.

  I shrug. “Hard to tell,” I say. But it’s more than hard.

  It’s impossible.

  No one knows what’s inside the time capsule.

  No one.

  I step away from Marshall because small talk gives me an itch, and I slip my way through the crowd and into an empty space near Miranda Pearson. Flies scatter lazily around her mouth, buzzing to a rest on her bottom lip, rubbing their little arms together, doing whatever flies do, then lifting off again to join the cloud swarming around her shoulders. The flies bump into me every few seconds, and I feel small, solid thuds against my neck, my cheeks, my forehead, and one gets tangled in my hair and struggles to get itself free, and all of this sets me on edge, but not as much as talking does. It’s not something that’s in me. Most people don’t stand too close to Miranda, and we’re given a wide berth. No danger of Miranda striking up a conversation, either. She’s got to keep the flies in as best she can. Otherwise, people get upset. So she gives me a nod, and I nod back, and we stand together amidst the swarm and wait for the mayor to speak.

  The mayor. She stands on a makeshift platform, an old hay wagon that’s been emptied out and turned over. She’s wearing pink today, a spotless pink suit jacket over a simple white button-down and a pink pencil skirt that’s half a size too small. Her hair is pulled back into her signature bun, the one schoolchildren whisper about. They say if the tightness ever comes out of her hair, her whole face will go slack, and it will hang from her skull like wet laundry from a line. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it will. No one knows. Her hair is never down. It is only pulled and pulled and pulled until her temples strain like guitar strings.

  Her smile comes easily, same as her words. She speaks nicely, but she carries a stick full of nails. She beams at the crowd from the center of the platform, and four men in cornflower suits and matching blue ties surround her, one at each corner. They stare down the crowd through impossibly dark glasses. They grit their teeth so loudly I can hear the grinding over the buzz of the flies. They flex their fingers, and the black leather of their gloves creaks as it stretches. These men belong to the mayor. They are her Administration. And we respect them, because we’re given no option.

  The mayor holds up her wrist and makes a show of looking at her watch. The rose gold links set off her suit perfectly, and I can hear an audible sigh of approval and longing from the dumpy women in the crowd. They shrink into themselves, trying to disappear into their torn denim overalls and their men’s flannels and their t-shirts stained yellow with nicotine and sweat, and as the mayor’s watch glints in the afternoon sun, they feel exponentially Less Than.

  The mayor lowers her wrist. She smiles at the crowd. She gives her head a little shake. It is not time yet.

  In front of the wagon is the standard bearer of today’s curiosity: an iron plaque set into the earth. Rusted over wit
h time. The stamped letters are filled with dirt and grease and muck from the years, and I can’t read them from here, not from so far away, but through the murmurs of the crowd, the information has made its way to the whole assembly. Anomaly Flats Time Capsule, it says, or some variation of that. To Be Opened Today, 3:27 P.M.

  To Be Opened Today. And today is Today. How do we know? Because despite the obvious age of the iron plaque—I’m not a blacksmith, and far from an expert, but it’s old, judging by the rust and grime—it didn’t exist in the dirt before today. Yesterday, it wasn’t there; today, it is. To Be Opened Today. And at 3:27, we’ll dig it up, unseal the capsule, and see what hides inside, because we are very good at doing what we’re told.

  Someone shouts, someone at the furthest reaches of the crowd. A second person shouts back, and then there’s an argument. I can’t make it out, but the voices are passionate and strong. I crane my neck to see what I can see, but the crowd is so large, and the flies cloud my view, and I’m not tall enough to see over most of the heads. But the shouting grows louder, and soon the entire assembly is electric with anticipation. Elbows are thrown, footing shifts, and I’m swept backward in a lazy wave of shoulders and shoes. A man lumbers forward now, frantic and huge, and I recognize him. It’s Farmer Buchheit. He shoves himself forward using his broad shoulders as a plow. His face is red, his temper is high, and we are stalks of grass under his furious hooves. “Don’t do it!” he screams. Farmer Buchheit has never been the screaming sort. He bellows, and he bullies, and he throws his words like he throws his weight, but he does not scream. Except for now. “Leave it be! Don’t dig it up!”