Robert Duperre - The Gate 2 - 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair

“Go where?” Matt said, his confusion fueled by her own. “Isn’t this where we were going?”

Behind Matt and his incredulous stare, the child’s mouth opened impossibly wide. A panicked squeal escaped Katie’s lips. She lurched backward, stumbled over one of Mrs. Hapler’s juniper shrubs that adorned the lawn, and landed hard on her backside.

Matt spun around, screamed when he saw the gaping mouth, and defensively swung his candy-laden pillowcase. It slammed into the child’s chest. Candy exploded around them. The candle tumbled from the child’s grasp, flame flickering to nothing as it rolled across the wet lawn.

In response, the voice in Katie’s head sliced through her like a hail of razors, no words, just an agonizing howl—and she howled with it.

The child’s eyes cataracted before them. Its statuesque stance faltered, and it crumpled to the ground. A few inches away, a curl of smoke rose from the crimson candle, disappeared into the night like a spirit gone home.

Katie scrambled to her feet, her pillowcase and candy forgotten among the shrubbery.

“Did you see that?” Matt said, nearly screeching the words. “Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick! Did you see that?”

“I saw,” she said.

Matt turned around, and Kate watched the color drain from his face like a cartoon character seeing a ghost, as if he were becoming one of the mysterious children.

“Holy goddamn crap,” he whispered.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“Not you. Look.”

Katie followed his gaze and the blade of fear sliced through her spine, paralyzing her.

A soft orange glow spread across James Rothney’s front lawn. There, another child stood, surrounded by the delicate light of a fire—which emanated not from without but from within its body. Its eyes were deep pools of flickering fire, its skin the pink-orange of a midsummer sunset. The child stood at attention, hands dripping with what appeared to be blood. The candle was gone.

Up and down the street, the children stood still as soldiers, sentries burning with an inner flame, like pumpkins.

Like pumpkins…

Pumpkins…

It echoed through the halls of her mind…and then she understood.

Katie had attributed her fear to the mere presence of the children, but all at once the shades of ignorance lifted and the sunshiny rays of realization illuminated her thoughts: The children weren’t there to harm them.

Like fucking pumpkins!

“My god,” she said. “What have you done?”

Katie rushed past Matt, and fell to her knees beside the seemingly lifeless ghostchild. “Help me,” she said. “Quickly!”

The child’s hands were streaked with red as though it had been freshly crucified, its body tossed aside for scavengers to feast upon. Katie’s hand closed around the child’s fingers, now paler than before, and a cold river flooded her veins, stomped through her bones like Death marching. She gasped for air.

The voice came again, unbidden as before, with such urgency it threatened to unhinge her sanity.

Darkness! You must flee the darkness, child! They come!

The world around her flickered like an old television transmission. She clenched her eyes tight, and her mind filled with the image of her father, smiling, radiant. He held his finger to his lips, like he had done so many times before when he wanted her to stop talking and just listen. The scene within her mind faded to Bridgetown Pines, as if she were standing in the middle of Farmington Circle with a million compound eyes at her disposal, each one helping piece together fragments of a single scene…

The ghostly procession emerges from the woods, and one by one the strange beings split from the group to stand like watchmen around the homes of the Pines’ residents…

Some turn and face the street, while others disappear behind the homes…

They hold out their palms like children collecting snowflakes…

Drops of red fall from the sky, into their upturned hands, and the red rises, rises, rises, until a single flaming teardrop descends from the heavens, burning bright…

Katie and Matt appear at the far end of the street, they linger in front of Samantha’s house, and then they’re standing before the child on Matt’s front lawn…

And then…

And then…

And then the darkness moves…

Thick strips of black break away from the shadows, undulating through the air like heartworms heading for the heart of the world. Bloodcurdling whispers echo down the street as if all the damned souls of Hell were marching to war, singing songs of deliverance…

The mass of shadows turn as one…

Katie’s eyes jerked open. For a moment she thought she was emerging from a nightmare, safe and sound under a tangle of blankets while the warm sun peeked through the blinds of her bedroom window.

But there was no sun, no warmth, just an icy realization that, if anything, the nightmare had just begun.

“What the hell, Katie?” Matt knelt beside her, a look of profound fear and confusion contorting his face.

The sweet smells of myriad candies floated up Katie’s nostrils and down her throat, and she had to swallow to keep from throwing up. “What happened?”

“You tell me,” he said. “First you’re scolding me like I’m two, and then you’re grabbing onto this stupid thing, twitching and muttering like a lunatic. What the hell?”

“How long was I like that?”

“I don’t know. Ten, maybe twenty seconds.”

Katie tried to resolve that in her muddled head. How had she seen so much in such a short period of time? She looked down at the child and the vision returned, this time from her own memory. She saw the black things detach from the shadows, twisting through the trees. She saw her father…

Her mind reeled.

She looked toward Samantha’s place. Samantha, who had recently lost her daughter—her only child—at the hands of an unlicensed drunk driver. And James Rothney’s father had just passed, at the age of 101, outliving all his siblings by two decades. Katie’s mind moved from house to house. Carmen Langford…husband…lung cancer. Dead. Garret Wilson…son…overdose. Dead. Melinda and Ray Kingsbury, Ian Millhouse, Sarah Forest, Tamara Jenkins…each of them had recently lost family members.

“Unlock the door,” she said. “We need to get inside.”

“Are you listening to yourself? Jesus Christ! You’re going crazy right before my frickin’ eyes.”

“Now!”

Spurred on by her commanding tone, Matt thrust his hand in his pocket, pulled out his keys, and stepped past her, his face twisted into an aggravated sneer. He made to kick the prone child on his lawn, but seemed to think better of it, and headed toward the house.

Katie turned and watched the child holding vigil on Samantha’s lawn down the street. The fire burned strong from within, but then, ever so slightly, it dimmed as if battling a biting wind. The flame shivered and pulsed and faltered to an ember.

Then, slowly, like the awakening of dawn, the small glow within the child brightened, brightened, and brightened more, until it repelled the darkness once again.

As if warding off evil spirits…

As if the vision she saw through the eyes of the fallen child had come true.

Though she couldn’t see anything now, she knew that the flickering of light was a battle being waged and that the darkness had been repulsed by whatever force the child commanded.

Darkness comes , she thought.

It was only a matter of time before that darkness got to Matt’s house.

Katie crossed the lawn and took all three porch steps in one stride. Inside, Matt pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. He sat down heavily, grabbed a red Granny Smith apple from the centerpiece, and began rolling it back and forth between his hands.