Agate Way – Reactor

A pair of sisters are hired to find–and if necessary, dispose of–whatever is killing neighborhood pets in a dying town.

Novelette | 8,730 words

Two and a half hours before sunset, the Jeffers sisters, Casey and Tara, drove through an underpass tunnel into the south end of Eel Neck. The tunnel entrance dripped with bittersweet vines. Dark. Went on longer than it should’ve, Tara decided in a weirdly extended moment between the impression of falling down a mine shaft and the return of sunlight. The opposite side opened into pure boondocks although she expected the suburb of her youth. Casey parked the Dodge in a dirt lot with a view up and down an empty street called Agate Way. First, entering the tunnel, then turning onto desolate Agate, Tara had experienced double jolts of vertigo—like they’d driven across a threshold. A hidden divide that nonetheless cut through everything right down to molecules. This quarter of town was backsliding into wilderness. Few standing houses and nobody mowing lawns or lounging on porches; mainly ruins and the small creatures that inhabit such places. Thornbushes choked lost yards. Roots erupted from sidewalks. Limbs of the white oaks, eastern white pine, and sycamores occasionally shifted with a breeze; their soaring tops brushed against a blue crepe-paper heaven.

Though familiar with its precincts in bygone years, neither sister currently lived in the town of Eel Neck. They had been summoned.

“I met a dog who was a serial killer.” Casey had probed this line of philosophical inquiry for the past hour. She lowered the window and lit a cigarette.

“Bullshit,” Tara said. Her surname had been Trampier before Dad married Casey’s mom and changed it to Jeffers. Upon reaching her majority, Tara hyphenated as the whim struck. Moments such as these, she found herself reflecting upon the fact that their sisterly bond was purely nurtured.

“Ask those jerkwads in nineteenth-century Kenya who got mauled,” Casey said. “A pair of lions stalked a province for years, noshing on peasants, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Killed for the hell of it, too. Decorated their cave with human bones.”

“That was a movie.”

“Based on real events. Next, there was a sloth bear who defaced a dozen villagers in Bangalore—”

“Defaced?”

 “Peeled ’em like decals. Animals aren’t innocent. Our furry friends can be murderers, is all I’m saying. In the situation I know, it was a smiling, adorable mutt.”

Tara twisted her mood ring until it hurt. Found it lying on the ground at some demolition job they’d done last summer. Perfect fit.  A lovely shade of turquoise, but an unreliable indicator of her mood. Cool as an ice cube nine times out of ten. She wanted a cigarette too but her girlfriend had begged her to kick them. The cab of the truck was roasting hot and tasted like metal, vinyl, and smoke. The windshield glass, starred by the impact of many pebbles, was manufactured back in the ’80s when American trucks were modeled after tanks. It focused light with the intensity of a magnifying lens. She unwrapped a stick of gum. “Okay. Tell me more.”

“This was middle school for me,” Casey said. “Mom and Dad weren’t hitched yet. Family friend operated a kennel of huskies. He promised an ‘Alaskan mushing experience!’ His dogs pulled tourists around a dirt loop on carts in the summer and freight sleds in the winter after it snowed good. Some of his younger dogs turned up dead. No visible marks except blood leaking from the snout. A vet performed a necropsy and said blunt force trauma to the body did for ’em. One day our friend happened to witness a male husky attacking a yearling. Slipped through a chain-link fence and rammed the pup with his forehead. The second the older dog realized he’d been caught, his whole attitude transformed. Acted like it was all a joke. He wiggled and his tongue lolled. He tried to play with the pup who was lying there dying of crushed organs. That’s what freaked the owner. It went beyond how dogs behave. Sly. Almost human. Nothing worse than ‘almost’ when you’re talking about an animal.”

“Is this your way of explaining why we can’t have a dog?”

Casey flicked her cigarette butt with a scowl, slightly embarrassed that she selfishly continued to smoke in Tara’s company. “You think our landlord hates us now? Add a pet to the mix. Come on.” She climbed down from the truck, and stretched. Her arms were sleeved with tattoos. “Let’s get the lay of the land. Be the only lay I’ve had of recent note.”

Catbirds shrilled. A door slammed a long way off in another century. They walked north toward Jasper Lane, where they’d seen cars parked.

“Uh, the estate is thataway.” Tara indicated a vague spot.

“This whole valley is fucking uncanny,” Casey said, lighting another cigarette. Her brain didn’t operate in a reliably linear fashion. “You in a hurry to snoop on Urach’s property? Probably have to machete our way past a thicket just to reach the front yard, and it’ll be dark soon. Knock yourself out, sis.”

Tara was very much not in a hurry. “Well, the high school isn’t far. It’s abandoned, right? Could be something denned up there.” She said it to her sister’s back. Casey strode on, smoke unraveling over her shoulder.

Upon arriving earlier that afternoon, the Jeffers sisters cruised through the north side of town, rolling past a dying mall, warehouses, and apartment complexes whose foundations crumbled into the strangling tendrils of invasive honeysuckle. Crown jewel of a chain of decaying settlements, Eel Neck dug in like a tick during colonial times as a trading post that peaked gloriously around 1940, and again, less gloriously, in the ’80s. Now came a last gasp. The town sprawled atop a butte above a river near ancient green mountains. The river wound sluggishly south and east along the valley floor, connecting somewhere to another, bigger river. Natives had farmed its murky waters. English and Dutch colonists usurped the tradition, harvesting eels by the wriggling ton in stone weirs now fallen into disrepair. Buildings were grimy and weathered except for a credit union splashed banana-yellow that shocked the senses with its gaudiness. Too many businesses were closed, too many residents had departed for distant, more prosperous cities. One got the sense of a poisoned organism contracting and calcifying, reabsorbed into the dirt, street by street, block by block.

Superintendent Janet Malcom awaited them at a shabby diner with décor last updated in the era of big sideburns and Formica. She appeared similar yet slightly different since last the sisters saw her. Leaner, more angular, and singularly morose. She perched rather than sat, like a chicken come home to roost; a dope-dealing acquaintance from their post–high school years and now an important bureaucrat who operated the town’s finnicky political apparatus.

 Her supervisory position sounded not unlike a battlefield promotion—functionaries higher on the ladder had quit, gotten fired, or died, and eventually the keys to the kingdom slipped into her hands. Be careful what you wish for never rang more truly. The Indian casino in the next county drained custom from the local bars and lone nightclub. The playhouse, so vibrant and popular at the beginning of the millennium, was kept afloat entirely by the largess of private donors. Even the historical downtown movie theater found itself under the gun of dire budgetary constraints thanks to internet and cable programming. Malcom bought the women lunch and explained these problems and many others, including that which compelled her to request their services, which ranged from minor home repairs to pest removal.

“Kingston is a long drive,” the superintendent said. “Thanks for coming. Here’s my situation: an epidemic of missing pets.”

“How many is considered an epidemic?” Casey said.

“Dozens. Scores. I dunno the exact figure. Let’s call it a veritable shitpot of beloved critters in the wind. Cats. Dogs. A goat. Widdershins won a blue ribbon at the county fair. Snatched from a fenced-in backyard in broad daylight. I lie awake and ask myself, what carries off a hundred-and twenty-pound goat?”

“Some asshole,” Casey said.

“Satanists?” Tara said.

“I’ve ruled out nothing and no one.” Superintendent Malcom wore an expensive suit with shoulder pads. Her prescription glasses dimmed or cleared according to the light. At the moment the lenses were smoky. “Agate Way, Jasper Lane, Opal Street, over to Onyx and Crystal. Terrible neighborhoods. Dark Ages. Conversely, you have the decent folks on Chariot, Atlas, and Whelm Boulevard. That’s where a lot of the critters were taken. People in those parts love their kitties and Fidos. They expect results from city hall. The mayor hears his people.”

“You need a cop.” Casey sipped coffee, feigning indifference in hopes of sweetening the eventual fee. “Or a park ranger with a trank gun.”

“Our animal-control person won’t investigate.”

“Why not? Too busy shooting rats at the dump?”

“South End might as well be the Darién Gap. Entire neighborhoods left empty. Shops closed. The old high school is a ruin. Folks think there’s leftover trouble at the Urach estate.”

“Leftover trouble?” Casey said. “Fifteen years makes for a mighty cold plate.”

“I agree. It’s a fact that Urach’s entire menagerie was captured or euthanized.”

“So they say.”

“Get a grip,” the superintendent said. “The locals are excitable. You aren’t a local, so I expect better. One damned hyena jumps the estate fence and mangles a paperboy and that’s the urban legend hung around our necks like a boat anchor for the next half century. You understand why I can’t get any volunteers.”

The women exchanged a glance. Once upon a time Tara had helped Casey shaft Malcom regarding a few hundred bucks of weed. Water under the bridge, according to the official. Nonetheless, Tara keenly wished to make amends. She nudged her sister.

“I saw squad cars cruising Main,” Casey said, ignoring the nudge. A guilty conscience was not among her faults.

Superintendent Malcom smirked. “Fuck the police. The town force is a joke. Sheriff’s boys have neither jurisdiction nor do they care. Leaves me clutching at straws. I’d hate to lose my cushy position. You were buddy-buddy with Urach, right?”

“Tara knew her,” Casey said.

Everybody knew that rich, eccentric Agnes Urach squandered a family fortune bankrolling expeditions to foreign lands, intent upon capturing prizes for her private zoo. Eventually she died and the creatures ran amok on the property, which led to an epic shitshow now spoken of in hushed voices.

“I did the lawns at the house one summer,” Tara said to the superintendent. “But that was before.” Before meant before the gas line explosion, the meteorite impact, or the choose-a-mysterious-disaster that burned the mansion and unleashed Urach’s beasties on the neighborhood.

“Close enough for government work. Recon the situation. Help me get a handle on this problem, I’ll cut you a check. Hell, I’m a sport. If you poke around and decide you can’t help me, I’ll still cut you a check.” When the sisters hesitated, she said, “You ladies owe me a bit of consideration. Take this.” She pulled out a money clip and handed Casey a C-note and several twenties. “Hey, I know what you’re thinking. Nothing like a public official distributing cash to a pair of seedy broads, huh?” She laughed. “Relax. Nobody gives a lick about my business. And you two sad sacks may as well be invisible.”

Casey slipped the money into her shirt pocket. She supposed they could do their old buddy a favor. Tara knew her sister supposed so because they’d fallen nearly a month behind on rent. Casey asked how many pets had vanished.

“Oodles and oodles.” Superintendent Malcom smoothed her tie with a long fingernail. Sunlight beamed through a window and her glasses blackened. “Oodles of poodles.”

Heeding Malcom’s advice, the sisters had begun their mission by canvassing the “nicer” neighborhoods. They snooped around, peeking over fences and interviewing a handful of locals who deigned to answer their doors. One nervous dude fondled a katana. In short order it became clear that a curse hung over South End. Yes indeed, numerous dogs and cats of various breeds and sizes disappeared on a routine basis. And yes, a huge goddamned goat had been taken. Who gave a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about the prizewinning goat? Hadn’t they heard? Pets and livestock weren’t the going concern. Sinister shapes lurked among the bushes. Folks drove straight to work and home again, or went in pairs if they absolutely had to walk. Nobody let children play in the yard unattended. Utter collapse of civilization. Everything south of Chariot was lost. Bolt High was a likely haven for miscreants—four-legged or two. God knew what might be occurring at the Urach mansion. The drunk ex-soldier who lived in a camper on a vacant lot near Vesuvius Park recently vanished. While the soldier wasn’t exactly missed, who’d be next? When did that damnable buffoon of a mayor intend to take action? Are you two high? You sure look high.

Casey asked whether anyone had actually seen coyotes or other predators.

“Predators,” one citizen sneered. Those feral assholes who lived above the Ravine were one-hundred-percent guaranteed to be the source of any dognapping or other, less concretely defined, shenanigans. “They’ve gone back to the old ways. Go bother them!”

“We will!” Casey said with an eyeroll to Tara as the duo took their leave.

Now, the lunch meeting with Superintendent Malcom and subsequent canvassing behind them, the sisters hiked several blocks along Agate before turning left onto Jasper. They’d entered the jungle for real.

Trees reared like their ancestors in the world’s hothouse epoch; tops bent close together until the sky was a bright slash whose light fell mistily and reflected against bushes and floated in wavering panels on concrete and asphalt. Foliage and moldering beds of needles smelled as raw as the depths of a virgin forest. The vehicles they’d spotted earlier were abandoned and inoperable, judging by the filthy windows and flattened tires. Weeds grew in their shadows. Dead leaves collected upon windshields, and dirt and pollen scum, too. Structures, or their remnants, could occasionally be glimpsed beyond wild hedges and under thick nets of vines. Some roofs were torn off, as though an extremely specific tornado had whirled through the neighborhood.

A considerable jaunt down the lane from the heart of whatever creeping apocalypse was in progress, undergrowth thinned to reveal houses that were nominally habitable. One split-level had its patio doors boarded and a ratty tarp draped over the second-story bay windows. A comfortable, even expensive, home inexplicably gone to seed. Three shirtless boys squatted in the driveway skinning an animal; Tara wasn’t sure what kind. Nearby was a firepit filled with ashes. The kids sang in guttural three-part harmony. A gangly woman in a ball cap (quantum physicists do it and they don’t) and a stained Columbia University T-shirt oversaw the project. The woman (Tara instantly thought of her as The Professor) flashed a three-finger claw in greeting, or threat. Her left hand went behind her back and Tara wished they’d carried the rifle, even if it was a relic. We aren’t really badass hunters, even counting the whitetail Casey bags once in a blue moon. Handyman jobs; landscaping; woodcutting . . . Those are our regular gigs. We’re just a couple of idiots willing to massage our résumés to make a dime. This was her attempt at a prayer.

The Professor smiled. “An altar to the Green. Nature revolts. Nature rises up. She opens her jaws. Nature never tires. She never rests.” Straight, sharp teeth; cool, mellow voice. The kids also grinned and made claws of their bloody fingers, pantomiming an unspecified act of violence. Casey’s stride faltered; an indication that her mouth might be shifting into gear. Certain folks referred to them as the Rooster Sisters, as both were short and wiry and given to rubbernecking with pop-eyed intensity. Casey, in particular, possessed a well-earned reputation for belligerence. Thankfully, she shrugged and moved on. Tara kept pace. An itch burned in the center of her spine. The children resumed singing.

The lane climbed until it made a T with Opal Street. Each leg of the intersection passed through an arch of tires and assorted pieces of metal somehow welded together into freestanding architecture that belonged to the movie set of a science fictional dystopia. Directly ahead was a clearing and the remains of a school with its walls yet upright. In a persistent theme, sections of the roof had caved in or been peeled and flung aside. A plaque over the front entrance spelled bolt high school. Underneath, in yellow block spray-paint letters: imdugud saves. “A lot of real little shits went here, huh?” Casey said. She’d played rugby all four years of high school in the next town over and owned a scar on her chin as a reminder of showdowns with Bolt High.

“Some of those chicks weren’t so little,” Tara said, reliving moments of Casey catching an elbow to the jaw, her hand stomped by cleated track shoes. Not much of an athlete, Tara had played nursemaid; ready with Band-Aids and ice packs.

“Shits, though.”

“To the last.” Tara patted Casey’s shoulder. The Jeffers girls stuck together against the world. Too salt of the earth for polite society, and a book or so too well-read for their fellow hicks and ne’er-do-wells.

The main doors and ceilings were gone. Windows everywhere were also gone. Knee-high grass surrounded the structure. Bare patches of dirt were imprinted by a muddle of animal and human tracks.

 Into the school they went. Farther along spread an open-air maze of corridors and rooms. No trace of further graffiti or refuse as one might expect to find had kids or vagrants hung around the place. Small creatures had encamped, however. Wasps hung paper nests high in corners. Chipmunks scuttled along rotted baseboards. Sparrows perched in lattices of morning glory and grapevine, coldly observing the interloping humans. Weeds and weather had demolished sections of the floor; in some places, human tools had shattered concrete. The weeds were trampled along the main corridor, creating a trail that arrowed deeper into the building.

That uncomfortable sensation between Tara’s shoulder blades returned. This time she voiced her unease: “Wish we brought the Winchester.” Casey didn’t respond; she would’ve commented that the damned thing was heavy, which was true. A hawk skated overhead. Its screech sounded surreal—like a stock Foley effect on a western.

They stopped at the entrance to the gymnasium.

The bleachers were in a shamble of upended planks smashed by a giant’s fist. A sculpture in the shape of a flat pyramid reared above a sinkhole in the center of the grassy parquet floor. The sculpture was composed of partially melted truck tires, scorched cinder blocks, and unidentifiable bones, surmounted by a shallow concrete bird bath that cupped a glitter ball. Sunbeams reflected off the ball’s mirrored plates. Dust and motes of dandelion puff drifted in the reddening haze. Clouds hung like glaciers and the shadow of the pyramid undulated closer to the sisters.

“See that?” Casey indicated the base of the altar where a black hole cored into concrete. And black was the only way to describe it. Almost cartoonishly dark. Over a foot in diameter and dilating. Tara figured it as an optical illusion, a weird shadow, until a shard of block chipped and fell. And another. The hole keened softly as it chewed; wind among rocks, an animal in a trap, dreamlike.

Strange understanding bloomed within Tara. “An altar to the Green. Nature revolts. Nature rises up.”

Casey turned her head slightly, attention divided. “This look like nature to you? Behold the handiwork of local yokels. The rumors were true. Eel Neck is chock-full of loonies.”

“She opens her jaws.”

Casey grabbed her sister’s arm. “We came, we saw, it’s a bust.” That hole in the base of the altar was now wide enough for a person to crawl into. The keening sharpened. Time to go. She pulled, hard.

Tara allowed herself to be half-dragged toward the school entrance. “Nature never tires. She never rests.” Her lips, a stranger’s words. At her back, shrill unheavenly music, the sense of an abyss yawning.

“Whatever you say. Be like her and move.”

They stood panting in the middle of Opal Street. The sun sank and the school’s walls were backlit in crimson. Casey lit a cigarette, affecting the steely calm of her childhood idols Eastwood and Wayne. Her hands barely shook. Already dismissing what she’d seen, already setting aside her instincts. “Didn’t see signs of a den. Hey, where you going?”

Tara ignored her. Fresh out of courage, she stumbled back toward the truck, anywhere.

Scribbled in lipstick across the truck’s windshield: imdugud lives! Who’d written this note? The creepy Professor? Some unknown party watching them at that very moment?

“Kid, you’re making me nervous.” Casey smeared the lipstick with a rag she pulled from under the driver’s seat. She referred to her sister as “kid” despite being a mere two years the elder and both of them fast approaching middle age. “That scene in the gym was kinda freaky, sure. But c’mon. Get your shit together. No reason to dwell.” She drove with her forearm atop the wheel, waiting in vain for Tara to speak. “Okay, okay. Tell you what. Let’s grab a bite, courtesy of Superintendent Moneybags.” She navigated a warren of potholed streets into real civilization where shop lights blinked on as a counterbalance to the sunset. They settled for The Drifter, a dive with a sputtering vertical marquee on the edge of a district of warehouses and shuttered factories. Burgers were cheap and so was the tap beer. The booth afforded a view of the bar and the entrance where traffic thickened: surly blue-collar men, paychecks in their pockets, and women; many in ripped jeans, biker leather, or bleached flannel. Casey sipped a brew and watched guys in denim jackets shoot pool. “It’s a bad gig. I admit it. Wanna bail? Fine. I’ll call Malcom, tell her the score, and that’s the end.”

“Kiss the apartment goodbye.” Tara spoke at last. She tilted her second, mostly empty bottle, sending a ray of lamplight tracing across the table. “Rent’s past due. We’ll be squatting in a tent. Or go slinking to Mom’s basement again.”

“Small loss. Shitty apartment.”

“A shitty apartment beats bunking in a shitty truck.”

“You could shack up with your girlfriend. She dated a drummer, didn’t she? Which means she’s used to paying all the bills.” Casey waited for a laugh that wasn’t happening. “I’m trying to make lemonade outta these lemons. Cut me some slack.”

“We’re out of our depth.” Tara rotated the bottle so its prism rainbow illuminated Casey’s forehead. “I was never fond of this town, but didn’t feel like anything was wrong. Now? I don’t recognize the place. Talking to Malcom, touring South End, hit me exactly the same as those nightmares I used to have as a kid.”

“The night terrors. Frozen stiff and whatnot?”

“I’m in the water and the current drags me farther out to sea no matter how hard I kick. Got that feeling right now. Except I’m awake.”

“A pile of tires really has you shook?” Casey said. “Huge pile, granted.”

“More than a pile of tires. There was intent. Ill will.”

“Ill will?”

“That tall, gruesome professor lady and her kids . . . Bad vibes. Missing pets. Missing persons. Haven’t even made it to the estate.”

“Please don’t tell me you think there’s still hyenas prowling the Urach grounds, or crocs, or what-the-fuck-ever else the kook kept behind those gates.”

“Pythons, tigers, condors, apes, big cats.” Tara ticked them off her grimy fingers. “Nah. Everything is dead.”

“Damned right. Twenty state boys with semiautos conducted a massacre on the taxpayers’ dime. The jerks planted spring-loaded cyanide traps to kill any survivors. Realistically, those traps could be what happened to the neighborhood pets. Same way old battlefield land mines detonate decades later when a kid stumbles across one.”

“True.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Casey said.

“Back in the day, I hung out with Urach. Whenever our crew rolled in to do the yardwork, Agnes invited us up to the house for lemonade and gin—”

“Agnes had a thing for you?”

Tara ignored the bait. “Nobody else dared accept. The guys were scared to death of the property. No matter that the critters were enclosed on a preserve on the mansion’s back forty. Our foreman agreed to do the front lawns and the hedges and not a step further. I went inside, though. Politely sipped gin and lemonade tonics and nodded while Agnes rambled about her expeditions. Heard lions bellowing from the parlor.”

“Of course, you kissed her ass.” Casey teetered on the edge of drunken belligerence.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you hoped the old broad would . . . adopt you.” She watched Tara abruptly unfold from her seat. “Whoa, dude. Don’t be mad.” Hurriedly as a woman casting a lifeline into the sea, she said, “Hey, I never knew any of this. You didn’t say anything.”

“You were a bitch to me over the gig is why I never said.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. Jeez. What was it like inside the house?”

Tara hesitated. “Like a museum. But dirtier. Stuffed wolves and a polar bear reared on its hind legs behind glass. Intact skeletons of rare critters from Asia and Africa. Prehistoric ones, too.”

“Dinosaurs, huh?” Casey owned dino models as a little kid. She’d loved T-Rexes and the flying reptiles—pterodactyls.

“Gotta shake hands with the governor.” Tara walked toward the rear of the bar. A bulletin board hung crookedly, papered with fliers and notes beseeching the return of lost pets. She stepped into the women’s room. The floor tilted sharply into a chasm like the aftermath of a bombing. The sinks and much of the wall had fallen away. Fluorescent lights were too feeble to illuminate what might lie below. Rank updrafts stirred her hair, carrying distant subterranean rumblings. She loosened her belt, squatted, and shot a stream of piss into the abyss.

Long walk back to the table. A fluorescent lamp blew with a sizzling pop. Tara moved blindly in sudden darkness, occasionally shoulder-bumping a slick rock cave wall, then she emerged into the dim light of the taproom. She asked if Casey wanted to drive home or spring for a motel. They opted to spend the last of Superintendent Malcom’s advance on a double at the Erinyes Motor Inn. The motel was an L of brown, dilapidated units on a lot near more jungle. A mangy deer lapped at a puddle. They got what they paid for, and less. Analogue-era television and a rotary phone. Curiously, both worked fine, although the TV received exclusively foreign stations. Soiled carpet. The dresser-issue bible was also printed in a foreign language—cover embossed with a gilt pyramid foregrounded over a black hemisphere. Lots of sticky fingerprints inside. Mold on the bathroom wall was thick enough to draw stick figures. Someone had done so and added bleed for the thunderbird. Tara read this doggerel while showering.

In the wasteland hours after midnight, she lay awake, fully dressed, hands clasped behind her neck. The muted television cast illuminated shadows across the ceiling. She’d quit watching a nature documentary shot in some cold desert when it got to the part where a buzzard ripped into a pile of meat and fur.

Casey said, “‘She rises up and opens her jaws.’” Her cigarette smoke drifted across the room. “A mite flowery, sis. Some reason you put it that way?” No close relative of either woman was well-read, much less a poet. Jeffers and Trampier folk thought simply and spoke directly.

“South End got under my skin,” Tara said. “Put me in a rare temper. Better question: Malcom has her pick of hard-luck cases. Why call on us?”

“She hates us is why us.”

“The dope? We hosed her, but it was a small deal.”

“Major trespasses imply honor,” Casey said. “Respect. To a woman like her, petty slights are unforgivable. Problem is, she’s desperate. The superintendent gig sounds cursed. Everybody wants the pay raise until they realize it comes with a shiv in the back. We’re her patsies. Easier to blame us than somebody’s nephew or golfing pal if this turns into one of those unsolvable mysteries.”

Tara thought it might actually be a case of local government workers demonstrating good instincts to avoid South End. She said, “Nobody really knows what went down at the Urach estate in the days before the shooting started. The whole town simply accepted the bloodbath and moved on. Malcom is the same as the rest. If the past wasn’t biting her ass, she wouldn’t care.”

“Bad shit happens and the world keeps turning. Shut up and go to sleep.” Casey snored moments later. Tara closed her eyes. Gravity reversed and she fell through the ceiling. Sulfurous gusts whipped her face. A plain of bones stretched until it merged with a crimson sunset. The golden eagle circled. A zebra galloped past, blood streaming from its side while state troopers watched through rifle scopes. The sun blackened in flames that glared bloodily atop a heap of carved volcanic blocks. The blocks warped as a hole ate into them. Gore-soaked talons reached forth from inner darkness, scrabbling desperately—

She opened her eyes lest she be trapped forever. “Pyramid” was the wrong word for the altar in the gym. She wracked her brain for the right one; found it in fragmentary recollections of junior high history class and textbook artists’ fantastical renditions of Sumer, Mexico, and Babylon. “A ziggurat. It’s a ziggurat.” This wasn’t quite right either. She lacked the vocabulary to winnow definitions any further. The ceiling shimmered redly to mirror her visons of ritual sacrifice and heat-black night. She raised herself on her elbows to regard the TV. Her nightmare was playing.

In the morning, Casey bought coffee at a convenience store. “Called Mal. Told her it’s off.”

“Oh?” Tara winced in the throes of a hangover.

“The bluff worked. She asked for our bottom line. I said five hundred per day, plus expenses. Bitch didn’t bat an eyelash. Said get to hunting.”

The coffee scalded Tara’s tongue, numbing her to its wretchedness. “I don’t want to shoot dogs.”

“Dogs aren’t shy. Especially a pack gone feral. If it was dogs, they’d be obvious. Or we’d have seen turds lying around. My money is on a pack of coyotes.”

“Rather not shoot coyotes either,” Tara said.

“You spot. I’ll shoot. Need to find a likely position for a blind. Wait for dark and see what critters come to play.”

They took the scenic route into the heart of town and out the other side. Tara paid more heed today, noting again an invisible threshold that marked a rapid decline of civilization. The transition into wilderness occurred within the space of half a mile. Casey piloted through the same disorienting tunnel and parked in the same lot as the day previous. She leaned against the truck and lit a cigarette. Her eyes narrowed. Warier by the minute, whether she cared to admit it or not. “It’s a decent hike. Might surprise something if we’re quiet.” She slung the Winchester on its shoulder strap. “Man alive. The size of those trees. Taller since yesterday?”

Tara belted on a machete and hung a set of binoculars from her neck. She carried a jug of water. Light dribbled through where the sun pulsed against the canopy vault. The sisters walked in blue shade across Agate, southbound. On their left, a concrete retaining wall buttressed a steep hill. They sidestepped juniper bushes that cascaded into the street proper. Agate curved and at last brought them to a cul-de-sac and a corroded iron gate flung wide. A shattered private drive passed into a tunnel of trees. Tara entered first, hacking at vines. Spiderwebs hung in sheets. She hacked those, too. The occasional dead and withered branch or vine indicated others had also chopped a path in from the street. Vegetation regenerated quickly here in the humid dimness. Thorns clawed them, ripping their clothes. “I think we should turn back,” Tara said during a brief rest. She noticed that the greenery appeared thick and whole behind them. A closed passage. No permanent trails were possible; the riot of nature was all-powerful here.

“Too late.” Casey drank from the water jug. “Almost there. Just another thousand years.”

Argument would be futile. Protest registered, Tara sucked it up and swung the machete. Forward, a foot gained with every metronomic slash. She thought of Livingston and Pizarro and how the wilderness devours everything, given opportunity. Sweating and breathing heavily, the pair eventually broke out onto the estate grounds. Saw grass and ragweed desolated acres of formerly manicured lawns. Wooden pylons stood at intervals among fading stalks of pink and white foxglove and clinging orchids. The chest-high pylons were wired together from sticks, planks, and slats, resembling miniature, stripped versions of the gymnasium ziggurat. A hodgepodge of prisms and busted mirrors were affixed to each peak. Some were merely weathered; others were fossilized. Banyan and cypress trees had rooted where the ground softened into marsh. Neither species occurred this far north. Whatever phenomenon had claimed the neighborhood and was, by all evidence, spiraling outward to reconfigure larger sectors of town, may have begun right here on this piece of property. Apple-green sky. Stars lay hidden beyond the veil, yet Tara couldn’t dispel the notion that constellations hung out of plumb. Stars one would see from the shores of an alien world or this world millions of years ago. She didn’t recognize the lusher, brighter flowers. How could tropical plants flourish in temperate upstate New York? Vertigo tipped her gorge into her throat at sweet fragrances mingling with a miasma of rot. She flashed to the previous evening and her vision of a replica of the ancient universe. Dinosaurs could easily lie in wait in this jungle. Or protohumans wielding flint-head spears. Or modern cultists who’d erected primitive monuments to primitive deities.

 “Goddamn.” Casey turned over a picked dog skull and pushed two fingers through a hole punched into its dome. Disgusted, she chucked it aside and held the rifle against her hip. More bones lay scattered among the grass. Skulls and spines, loose femurs, a few smaller pieces. “Five to one we’ll turn up poor ol’ Widdershins the blue-ribbon goat’s earthly remains any minute now. I’m gonna head toward the house. Wait here.” She gestured toward a lone, charred gable thrust up from the brush.

“I should stick with you,” Tara said. An unpleasant inkling had visited her in the night. She’d based her fear upon the notion that a dangerous beast had miraculously survived the purge of Urach’s menagerie. What if something moved in after the predators were exterminated? Something different and terrible? Nature abhorred a vacuum, right? Goose bumps rose along her arms. They were under observation. She knew it, her skin knew it, and so did Casey, but Casey wouldn’t back down now, not after coming this far. She said, “The sun is wrong.” Indeed, the sun drifted too close to the horizon considering the hour; an artificial ceramic model painted crimson. The moon, pitted and bright as a reflecting pool, hung directly above the sun, melting in its corona of black flame.

“Quit worrying. I’ll be gone fifteen minutes tops and then circle back. You got the machete.” Casey, oblivious to the presence of hell, stalked toward the ruins. She bent to scan for spoor, in unwitting parody of a big-game hunter. Her drab jacket and pants merged with the background.

 Tara sipped water. Leaves drifted. She twitched the machete, ready to jump. Probably better her sister toted the firearm. She didn’t see the shadow falling from the top of a grand sycamore on her left flank. However, as prey animals detect imminent danger with a sixth or seventh sense, she felt the shadow descending upon her. Her insides chilled and time slowed. A piece of naturalist trivia revisited her forebrain—how Homo sapiens’ skeletal structure, with its slopes and shelves, is designed to protect against downward blows, death from above. Tara turned and beheld a magnificent horror birthed in another eon, its glide path a heartbeat from intersecting with her position, killing talons splayed like daggers of industrial machinery. It blotted out the sun. Large enough to decapitate a dog. To lift a goat. Or a human.

Tara almost finished her thought: There are other gods—

Casey slogged under the head of the ruined mansion’s front door frame. A freestanding wall and scorched rubble remained of the palatial home. More bones were heaped among weeds. This was no den of coyotes nor any familiar animal. It was a tomb snugged into the corner of a killing ground. Dog-eat-dog world? For sure. In turn, something bigger and meaner had eaten the victorious canines, the felines, and the coyotes. And a few people? Intent upon shutting down Tara’s paranoid anxiety, she’d harped on about state-sponsored extermination. She’d put faith in shooting galleries and lethal chemical traps, but didn’t believe her own bluster. A sneaky bitch, Mother Nature. Alligators in sewers were a myth, although some occasionally swam in New York City lakes. One of Urach’s exotic pets might’ve survived the infamous purge. What if such a beast had given birth to mutant babies due to the poison? That which doesn’t kill makes a monster stronger . . . The clunky rifle was light as a BB gun.

What she initially mistook for a mound of plant-festooned debris proved to be the grandaddy altar. Fifteen to eighteen feet from base to summit, eroded and foreboding, it occupied the center of the ruins in a pool of scummy water. Reddish clay bricks, enshrouded in bittersweet and crowned by a raptor skull. The skull was so massive, it wouldn’t fit in a wheelbarrow. Surely a hoax. Shards of crystal, radioactive with gathered light, shined in its eye sockets. One of her childhood dino toys blown up into a B-movie prop discarded on the Skull Island set after Kong swatted it out of the sky. Biting insects swarmed. Except for their drone, all was hushed. Same as it had been the whole morning, except more profound. She wiped cold sweat from her brow. Tara had a point—the superintendent’s money wasn’t worth the chance of running into the maker of the bone piles or the bizarro pyramids. As Casey pivoted to retreat, she heard a loud snap—crisp and damp, like an enormous egg hatching. She looked over her shoulder. The altar’s foundation bubbled and split; first a hairline fracture, then a jagged grin done in red plaster. The grin broadened. Wide as a saltwater crocodile’s drooling jaws. Wide enough to swallow her alive. Black inside. Her legs were leaden. Why had she scoffed at Tara’s nightmares? Is this how sleep paralysis feels? Like you’re hip-deep in quicksand and a monster is breathing down your neck? Like you’re treading water in a vast, darksome gulf and you spot a fin? Casey’s vision bent like a fish-eye lens. Or so she convinced herself for about five seconds. The ground shuddered; the altar tilted and sank a couple of feet; water rushed toward the lowest point, sluicing into the yawning clay maw. The slurry of water, muck, and loose stones reverberated thunderously—a river plunging into a sinkhole. Galvanized by a burst of adrenaline, she lurched toward the front entrance of the ruin. The ground tilted, forcing her to clamber up a steep incline, free hand digging for purchase. Casey lunged across the threshold into the yard. She visualized claws snatching her back into the pit. Nothing emerged. The subterranean cacophony subsided and, in its absence, her pulse thudded in her ears. She caught her breath, managed to stand shakily, and shouted for Tara. Her cry echoed flatly. Pushing through grass with the rifle, a new, different fear rushed in to fill the void left by the fight-or-flight panic. Calling for someone without receiving a response stirs atavistic dread in the stoutest heart. Her voice rose, shrill, plaintive, and increasingly small.

The sisters had the one flip phone in Casey’s pocket. She’d charged the phone prior to the expedition, yet it lay in her hand, dead as a brick. All she could do was yell herself hoarse while searching the mansion environs. She kept at it until dusk swooped down with shocking abruptness; God clicking the dimmer switch. Tara bailed for the truck. Get back to her. Get back to her as fast as you can. Casey held on to that prayer, repeated it as she blundered through a wall of thorns that had somehow regrown since Tara did her machete work. Casey bulldozed her way to Agate, running on adrenaline fumes. Mist hung in webs from the blacked streetlamps. Except for the moon and stars, primeval darkness ruled. The truck waited in a pool of ruddy moonlight, a rusted hulk on flattened tires. Jags of windshield glass winked. Eaten by rust, the rig could’ve been abandoned for years rather than parked less than twelve hours.

Tara wasn’t there either.

Face and hands scratched bloody, throat burning with thirst, Casey refused to succumb to exhaustion. Instinct ruled. She focused upon what an uncle who served in the army referred to as evasion and escape. Why reality had flown off the rails was subordinate to reaching sanctuary. That meant hiking out of South End, so she got going. She made it as far as the underpass. The tunnel was gone, replaced by a rock wall sprayed with graffiti and topped by creepers. A snick of her lighter revealed: no. The rest was gibberish. She attempted to scale the wall. Something large and sinuous rustled among the vines and she flung herself to the ground. Took a while to get her wind back, and once she could manage, she scrambled away.

Fine, she’d detour; follow streets until she hit another outlet. She limped onto Jasper toward Bolton High. Trees and bushes crowded closer than ever. There wasn’t the slightest question of stepping off the asphalt. Even sticking to the centerline, hungry tendrils snagged her clothing. A light flickered and she smelled a tang of creosote smoke and singed fat. Here was a semi-familiar driveway. The Professor, as Tara had referred to the woman, and her three rug rats hunkered around their firepit, gazing upon spitted meat searing in the flames. Their dirty faces slackened as Casey materialized before them.

Casey snugged the rifle against her hip and aimed the barrel at the woman. “What did you sonsabitches do with my sister?” She blurted this, obeying the urge to name the fear bubbling inside her, to name a villain, a foe other than the formless menace of nature. To assign blame. No sooner had the accusation escaped her lips, she believed it wholly.

The Professor poked coals with the broken end of an antenna rod. The firelight played tricks. She wasn’t human, but rather a fairy-tale creature half in shadow. Beady eyes, snaggle fangs, and talons. Dressed in the same dingy ball cap and saggy sweater as yesterday. A witch, a troll, a composite of spare parts of extinct beasts. Grendel’s mom. The woman said, “Many of us squat in the ruins.”

Casey noticed other fires, wan and flickering, off in the darkness. “Where is she? I’ll kill you.”  

The woman unfolded. “Once, we crushed our enemies with rocks. Once, we skewered our prey with flint-head spears. Once, we flung spears with atlatls. Guns have existed for an eyeblink.” She stepped forward, long, bony arms extended, hands splayed. “Have you fired it recently, hon? Nothing here works like you hope it will.” The kids each brandished a knife or cleaver. They sidled onto the street and fanned into a semicircle blocking the escape path. The woman took another step and her chest bumped the Winchester. Casey squeezed the trigger. A hollow, anticlimactic click simultaneously relieved and horrified her. “Praise the Thunderbird,” the woman said. “Praise Imdugud. Praise the new dark age.”

Casey clubbed the professor’s jaw with the rifle butt. Another fighting move demonstrated by her uncle. This was a nightmare world operating on nightmare logic. Instead of crushing bone, the blow felt like smacking a tree and had a similar lack of effect. The stock splintered. She dropped the rifle and bolted past the woman through an open door into the house. There was nowhere else to go. The kids dropped to all fours and gave chase. The interior was a warren of corridors. Soot and stink, lit at wide gaps by tallow candles. Wind moaned in stony honeycombs beneath her slapping shoes. Cancerous Sheetrock. Holes in the walls; craters in the dirt floors. Shrouds of plastic, exposed pipes and wires, ocher daub pictograms of monstrous figures all merged into a phantasmagoric kaleidoscope of hell that kept going forever until she blasted aside a screen door, tumbling headlong onto heaps of offal. She belly-crawled down into a ditch and the waiting gape of a culvert. Her clothes were tattered, skin lacerated, and she’d lost the rifle. She gagged on shit and crawled, crawled, crawled heedlessly into a constricting steel throat. Ingested or reborn, she was too far gone to contemplate. She wriggled on, mindless as an infant.

The children’s war whoops closed and faded, closed and faded.

Casey lay upon a bed of trampled grass for a while before she understood the red moon shining into her eyes was a streetlamp beam lancing through a film of blood. She didn’t remember struggling to her feet or shambling aimlessly forward, but soon there were more lights, then moving cars, and people. She opened a glass door and stood in the cocooning fluorescent glow of a doughnut shop. Ghosts flitted in her periphery. Dim voices. Her legs were tired. She sat and regarded her grimy hands on a fake wooden table. Reality trickled, trickled and filled her mind: the scent of warm bread and coffee; Muzak filtered through the hum of conversation and chiming cash registers. A cop walked in and looked her over. Walked away.

“Hi, there.” Janet Malcom replaced the officer. “Hell of a night you had. Let’s get you somewhere and cleaned up.” The superintendent wore her prescription glasses and a stylish peacoat.

“My sister.” Casey’s neck had stiffened and she couldn’t turn her head to glance out the window. Her voice cracked. “She’s . . . They got her.”

“Who got her?”

“A psycho. And her demented rug rats. They got Tara and they tried to get me. The kids had knives.”

“Okay, okay. Where?”

“Some fucked-up house on Jasper Street.”

Superintendent Malcom made a call. “My people are headed over there to see what’s what. Come on.” She put Casey in a car and drove to the Erinyes Motor Inn. Same room as the sisters previously rented. The TV shimmered, mute. Onscreen, an eagle ravaged a scrawny wolf in black and white. Ten-second clip on a loop. Malcom said, “Enjoy the digs. You may as well be comfortable for what comes next.”

Casey struggled to shake off her stupor. Her shoulders and back burned where she’d scraped them in the drainage pipe. “What does that mean?”

“It means everything that can be done, will be. Meanwhile, take a shower, grab some shut-eye. Hey, you must be starving. This burg has an excellent Mexican joint.” The superintendent fluffed a pillow and turned down the covers. “Hit the rack, princess. I’ll bring you some takeout in a while.”

“No.” Casey’s reservoir of anger and fear refilled, drip by drip. The superintendent’s words were meant to soothe her as one would lull a baby. “Screw that. Get the cops. Get the state troopers. The National Guard. I don’t give a shit who.”

“Ah. Going to make this hard, eh?”

“You think I’m lying.” Casey’s anger burned hotter. She couldn’t make the figures balance, so she gave in to it. “Or nuts. Lady, I’m on the level. I’ll lead the way. Go in and find her—”

“Later, yeah. Right now, you’re ready to collapse.”

“Listen to me, goddamnit!”

The superintendent stuck her hands into her pockets. “Do you really think there’s anything left to find?”

“What are you—”

“Vines. Quicksand. Carrion birds. Hyenas. Ants. Nature works fast when she opens her jaws.”

Casey gaped in stupefaction, reliving her encounter with the bestial professor and those feral children . . . progeny of a wave of mutation that expressed itself in animal, man, and environment. The tunnel went too far, Tara’s phantom whispered from the opposite bed. The tunnel went too far. It’s still going. “Tara thought you wanted revenge. That’s why you hired us for this . . . job. I was a bitch. I laughed at her.”

“Janet Malcom invited you to climb down this rabbit hole. Janet Malcom is probably looking at her watch and wondering where you two idiots went. I’m a different Janet.” The superintendent dropped an envelope onto the dresser. Cash. “For services rendered. Maybe for services, too. Tell me something. How did you escape South End?”

“The fuck are you on about?”

“It’s not complicated. How. Did. You. Escape?”

“I crawled into a drain. Crawled forever.”

Malcom said, “You’re so very wrong, girlie. There’s no getting out. There’s only deeper and deeper. Only the universe folding into itself. Time is a ring coiled around a void. A worm convulsed in your palm.” The sun fell into a pit. Malcom’s glasses reflected red moonlight. Her nose was long and cruel. “Apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world. It means the end of the world for you.” She took her hands out of her pockets. Talons gleamed. She dug them into the wood-paneled door, inscribing a ragged pyramid. When she’d finished, she walked out, hitching and hopping, and left the door ajar. A breeze swept in the dander-gauze scent of dying flowers, the stink of a tropical swamp. Fur musk.

Casey went into the bathroom. She swayed upon the threshold, knew the space was too large by magnitudes. No walls, no ceiling, no human borders. Hungry wilderness. Flipped the light switch. The white sun flickered on and she beheld the cavernous shower stall canted amid a night jungle. A predator’s thorny nest entwined the showerhead and the frame. White, shattered bones: spinal cord, shorn ribs, a fractured pelvic girdle, all dangled as a piece from dripping vines. Tara’s mood ring lay amid bloody hanks of hair on the no-slip mat. Dead black.

She rode the next bus out of Eel Neck back to Kingston. The driver stopped continuously. No one else boarded. Eventually, she made it home to their lousy apartment on the faint chance Tara might be there. Emptier than ever. She hiked over to their mother’s house. Mom wasn’t around, so Casey waited, steeling herself to deliver the bad news that Tara was missing, maybe forever. Things were off, though. She got the sense she’d wandered onto an elaborate film set. First clue, the phone was seemingly frozen in its cradle. The remote control wouldn’t change the channel on TV away from that hellish nature documentary. The fridge was a sealed vault. The lone functioning cabinet held cobwebs and a bottle of whiskey. Dusty because Mom quit a while back.

On the nightstand, Mom kept a picture of them when they were young. Casey traced her phantom sister. The sun in the photograph hung in a strange green sky. Grass, thick and sharp, twined her sister’s legs. Everglades circa 10,000,000 BC. She said, “You were right, sis. She opens her jaws and she’s coming for all of us.”

“Don’t think of it as a bad thing,” said a voice from the air near the lamp.

A blackbird lit upon the sill. Its silhouette warped in the pane, enlarged. The shadow of its wings darkened the floor, the bed, the wall. Rising, spreading. Peck, peck, peck, its beak pitted the glass. Casey fled to the hall, howling inchoate protest against forces vast and implacable. The window shattered. Furniture crashed. Walls caved into the earth. The shadow doubled and redoubled and swooped after her, beating.

She tried every door, but none would open.

“Agate Way” copyright © 2025 by Laird Barron
Art copyright © 2025 by Wesley Allsbrook

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