I've decided to re-write the beginning of Memento. Writing is going slow for me, so I was hoping to finish the re-write of most of this short story by like, two weeks ago. I barely got this much done, and I'm still retouching it constantly.
But fuck it, I guess. Pretty good chance a lot of this gets edited to hell and back, but I don't care too much. It's a rough draft, so it'll get the idea across.
A geyser of smokeless white flame casts towering, pitch black shadows against the back of our house, little bits of fire blossoming in the bright pink blood pooling into the concrete fire pit. The writhing movement of the silhouette in the fire slows to a stop; a thing that had been shaped like a stray cat when it jumped off my backyard fence, but after landing more closely resembled a giant centipede covered in patches of fur with a shrieking cat’s face.
I reach into the fire, and tear out the glossy, black handle of the broken hockey stick still impaled through its throat. Cool to the touch. I pluck the broken off slapping side out of the grass, its white painted crucifix splattered by pink bloodstains, before the fire has the chance to vanish and let midnight black take back the yard.
As I’m walking back toward the house, I notice Ada’s face peeking out behind her bedroom curtains, halfway hidden behind her hair. She watches me, nervously.
“Got ‘em,” I flash a smile and a thumbs up at her.
Her face relaxes slightly.
“Sorry to bother you . . .” She says softly.
“You aren’t the one bothering me,” I insist. “You see something freaky, tell me. Letting one of these fucking things find a way inside the house would bother me a whole lot more than being interrupted from sitting around waiting for the washing machine to finish.”
“Okay … Sorry … I didn’t ... think of it like that …”
“Now come on. You gotta work in, like, five hours. You should be getting some sleep, not apologizing at me all night.”
“Right …” Ada agrees quietly. “Sorry,” she whispers one last time, vanishing back behind the curtains.
It’s hard for me not to shake my head at her sometimes. The rabbits that hang out by our front porch are less skittish. I have no idea what she’d do without me.
Can’t dwell on that all night. I got a demon slappin’ stick that has to be duct-taped back together for the third time. Pretty sure I got some tape hiding in the basement somewhere.
I have to walk around some empty boxes to reach the stupid chain hanging next to the lightbulb. The yellow light feels harsh at first, just because of how dark it gets down here at night. I scan around, looking at the tops of tables and old furniture, hoping to see a roll of duct tape sitting in plain sight. Garbage bags full of old laundry on a musty, beige couch, a bunch of ragged stuffed animals piled onto the world’s ugliest green recliner, big plastic totes full of Christmas decorations Mom left behind, but no tape.
I might have stuffed it into a drawer somewhere without thinking about it. There’s just a bunch more old laundry in this dresser, and buried under that, some notebooks from high school that I’d rather never open again. It’s just dumb shit. Don’t ask.
Wait, there’s something else in here. I don’t remember what’s in this. There’s an old lock box; a little, heart-shaped wooden container, almost exactly small enough to cover with both hands. The pink paint is chipped slightly, and the gold colored foil spelling my name is starting to peel. There’s a faux-gold clasp holding it shut, but I lost the padlock sometime when I was too short to reach the kitchen faucet.
It takes a little bit of prying to convince the lid to open. There’s a bunch of little stuff in here. Some guitar picks my dad left behind, a couple of unlabeled cassette tapes, a little red ribbon I won for perfect attendance in second grade, the only award I won for anything in school. There’s some old photos in here too. Pictures from Mom and Jack’s wedding, me and Stephanie playing in a pool that’s been trashed for a decade now … My hair was a wild mess, even all the way back then.
Odd. Some of the photos at the back of the stack seem slightly stuck together. I carefully wedge a fingernail between two of them, and slowly peel them apart. Something stone-heavy sinks through my chest. I didn’t realize any pictures of Carrie still existed.
She was a tiny, frail-looking girl. She looked like she belonged in middle school, even though she was three months older than me. Still, the long scar running down the whole length of her cheek could make her look fierce at times, even though I knew she only got that from falling out of a tree when she was six years old. Carrie always had a different story about it every time you asked though. Usually involving a demon or a knife fight.
She was just like that. Between all the dark makeup, black hair, and a smoky purple trench coat perpetually draped over her tiny frame, she gave the impression of some kind of suburban phantom. Especially with her tendency to lurk in dark places and avoid people. She wore the shadows like they belonged to her, stalking like a starving hunter, with a bottomless appetite for chaos and mischief.
God damn, this brings back some fucking memories …
* * * * * *
There was this ditch about a hundred yards behind the high school. A deep, writhing valley that probably went on for miles in either direction, partially hidden by waist-high weeds and willow trees. An access to a storm drainage system, I think. A series of shallow earth valleys hidden behind tall grass and old trees on empty lots, and burrowing cement tunnels under the streets in some places; a gigantic worm slumbering unnoticed underneath the town’s feet, somehow hiding in plain sight.
Some of the passages under the street could get pretty low clearance, only four feet high in places, the tunnels winding off through corners into total blackness. Even when it was dry, the dank aura of standing water oozed out of the cement, and if it rained at all within the week, you’d be wading through two or three inches of water, usually just enough to cover your shoes, often cold enough to stab daggers to the bone when you jumped in.
One passage had an invisible fork in the path. Cloaked by a darkness so dense you couldn’t tell if your eyes were closed or not, and tucked away against the floor, there was this little drainage chute. You could feel along the wall to find your way through, and still never find it. And at barely more than a foot high, you’d have to be a complete lunatic to even try crawling through it, even if you did stumble across it.
Fortunately, I guess, sanity is in short supply among teenagers. Even after heavy rain, when the standing water could get high enough to cradle your chin with your head craned to scrape against the cement above you, we’d crawl twenty feet through a claustrophobic deathtrap to reach an odd little circular room, just barely too short to stand upright, perpetually dusted with a thin layer of cigarette smell.
In that brief moment she was lit by lighter flame, she looked like she was finally in her place. Not walking down the sidewalk in broad daylight, but just faintly visible in flickering firelight, surrounded by sinister-looking symbols painted onto damp concrete, and only for a moment before she vanished back into the blackness, the cigarette glow just barely enough to cast her as a silhouette. That was the Carrie I knew. The girl I saw at school looked like Carrie to me about as much as the stick figure outside the women’s restroom looked like Carrie.
We spent so much time down there. God knows how often she was there without me. She’d sometimes wedge a flashlight into a crevasse, and drape her coat over the entrance so the light wouldn’t leak into the main tunnel. She’d shriek like a wounded animal when they tried to claw her out of that coat for gym class, but when only I was around, she didn’t seem to mind.
Her backpack was full of notebooks, countless sketches of wretched abominations, and mountains of short stories written in scratchy handwriting, everything from pulpy, trashy, slasher movie stuff to the kinds of fiction that could burrow under your skin and leave a ragged hole inside you for days.
She always loved that stuff. Anything with monsters in it. From Frankenstein and Dracula to Alien and The Thing. Goddamn, she fucking loved The Thing. That movie woke something in her. That was it. “I’m gonna make stuff like that”. If she wasn’t doing monster effects in spook movies, she was not on the right life path.
Sometimes, we’d listen to music with the lights off instead, huddled together in a corner to share headphones. She fell asleep on me occasionally. I’d try to wait for her to wake up, but usually just fall asleep with her anyway. We missed school a couple of times, but it’s not like Carrie cared.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody hate anything as much as Carrie hated that high school. Whether it was the students, or the teachers, or the principal, the guidance counselor, her mom, her therapist … She HATED all of ‘em. I thought I understood what it meant to hate something, but Carrie just made that feeling seem silly, almost childish. They just don’t make words angry enough. Not even German ones.
