Trey's First Dream

In his slumber, Hans had a dream. They were at Sunday school, only it was at a church he hadn’t seen around town.  It was small, modest, plain, and dark.  A creepy cemetery spread in front of the church through a small courtyard which (evidently) doubled as a recess area.  Trey, Greta, and several other children were sitting around with marbles, jacks, and playing cards.  The teacher entered the room, only it appeared that this teacher was a substitute.  He wore a strange hound’s-tooth jacket with patches on the elbows and fingerless gloves, singing a strange playful tune as he took control of the audience.

“If all you do is work all day,

How then will you grow stronger?

You all must learn to laugh and play

And learn to do it longer.”

As he sang, he danced nimbly around the room, removing his patchy coat and hat to hang on a coatrack at the front of the room.  From within the pockets, he produced a small flute which he played to accompany his odd opening number.  His rhythmic dancing was contagious, and it didn’t take long for the children to start swaying in time.  He continued:

            “For when you sing, forget these things,
Let’s leave them all behind.
And when you play, your heart will stay
At ease inside your mind.” He played a little segue and bowed. “Good morning, children,” the gentlemen stated. “My name is Mr. Westcaper.”

“Hello, Mr. Westcaper,” the children chimed.

“I will be your teacher, nay, your mentor, in today’s lessons, and – Oh, I do have a surprise for you…”

“What is it?” came from all directions.

“Today we’re going,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “on a field trip!” The class erupted in cheers.

“When are we going?” a child posed.

“Why right now! They are expecting us, you know!” Every face was shining and happy.  He skipped gingerly back over to the coatrack, put his hat and coat back on, and darted out the door to lead the children away. Students pranced everywhere through the small churchyard. The earth in the cemetery was a deep green loam that sank as they walked along merrily.

“Where are we going?” Trey asked.

“Today, we get to explore,” Mr. Westcaper announced, adding a flourish of mystery with a wave of his hands, “the mines…”

“The mines?” some of the kids asked, “They don’t let us down there.”

Greta and Trey followed the group down a path as Mr. Westcaper led the group toward a dark tunnel. “Ah, but today is a very special day,” he replied.  “Today is Hamburger Day in the cafeteria!”

More cheers and applause come from all around. Trey glanced at his sister, but she was lost in excitement for Hamburger Day. With clueless abandon, the children followed the musical substitute down the tunnel, further and further into darkness.  As they near a curve in the tunnel, a light source appears. They approach a well-lit mine elevator which plunges down deeper into the seemingly endless abyss expanding before them. They all enter the rickety contraption and ride it down for what feels like forever, until they come to a level that has an earth floor. A large industrial building appears before them, perhaps a warehouse or a service entrance to some large office building. At the base of the building, a plain set of steel double-doors sat, locked and chained. Brilliant silver chains, links as thick as ropes, bound the door shut.

“Oh, drat!” Mr. Westcaper declared.

“What’s wrong?” the children cried.

“The door is shut and locked,” reported Mr. Westcaper, “and I swear I arranged all of this yesterday.” He rubbed a grubby paw on his chin in frustrated thought.

“But it’s Hamburger Day!” some children started.  “You told us we were going on a field trip!” cried others.   

“Well, we just have to get in, that’s all there is to it,” Mr. Westcaper announced.  “Someone must find a way!” And then he looked directly at Hans. “You, lad!” He pointed at him.

“Me?” Hans stammered.

“Yes, you!” he urged. “You’ll do fine, I’m positive, you’re perfect.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Well, why don’t you try and get us in?”

So Trey approached this door, examined the chains, and found them to be weak and crumbly; more for show, it appeared. Confused, he crumbled off the silver chains, opened the door, and just like that, Hans woke up.

                                                                               ***

            It’s hard for Trey to remember exactly what had happened, and then to separate it from the dream.  Now his arms and legs are slowly coming back to life.  Sleep drains from his body in a slow leak, consciousness returning in waves of familiarity.  His mother, sitting in a chair, awkwardly rests her head on the hospital bed next to him as she gently dozes.  Trey raises his hand and places it on her hair.  His mom’s head raises softly, a spider web of pinstripes from the hospital sheets spun across her cheek like a strange tattoo.

            “Hey, baby,” she coos, wiping away a tear, “you’re awake!”  She kisses her son on the face and hands, fixing his hair, glowing with relief.

“Nurse,” a soothing baritone calls from the doorway, “he’s awake.”

            “What happened?” Trey asks, more than a little disturbed by his surroundings.

            “We were hoping you could tell us,” the voice speaks again, sounding serious.  His father stands resolutely in the corner, postal worker’s cap covering dark eyes, denim-and-sheepskin jacket.  

“You tell your sister where you went?” he asks. He snorts a mean sarcastic chuckle and shakes his head.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Trey whines. “I didn’t mean to –”  

“-Stop. Okay?” He comes into the light and takes off his hat, all the intimidation and intensity melting away to reveal sensitive grey eyes behind round glasses. “I love you, son.” He moves close to hug the boy. “You had your mother so worried! You’re my son.  Kay?  My only son.” He pulls him back to look at his face. “I’m just so glad you’re okay,” he admits, leaning down to kiss his forehead and cheek.

“What happened?” Trey repeated, more curious than concerned.

            “We’ll worry about that later,” Jan answered. “The important thing is that you’re okay.”

Dale took his hat off and knelt beside the bed to kiss his son’s hand as Jan kissed his forehead. “We thought we lost you, boy,” Dale stammered in a rare display of emotion. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” The couple quietly wept for a few moments while Trey lay confused, wondering whether or not he would start to cry, too. Tears welled up in his eyes as they all shared a warm embrace.

“What’s going on? What happened?” Hans choked out. Alarm bells had started to ring in his head.

Jan stretched in her chair as Dale moved back to the corner, giving room for the approaching nurse. “The nurses need to take a look at you, babe, you lost a lot of blood,” Jan admitted. Dale stood with his arm around the shoulder of his wife as they both looked down on their only son.

“Blood? What?” he blurts.

“Well, just a little bitty nosebleed,” a friendly nurse chimed warmly. “You worried a few people, didn’t you?” Dale and Jan laughed nervously, silently thanking the nurse for her bedside manner. “I just have to check a few things,” she added. With a practiced hand, she slipped a cuff around his arm to check his blood pressure and shined a flashlight in his eyes quickly to check dilation. She looked down his throat and checked his reflexes, noting that there appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary. “There’s no head injury, and no need for an IV,” she commented as she scribbled on a clipboard, “or evidence of any other symptoms that might be cause for alarm.” Dale sighed heavily. “But I think we’ll keep you overnight, just to be safe.” She stood back and folded her arms around her clipboard.

Dale shook the nurse’s hand in thanks while Jan leaned down to kiss his forehead.  “Oh, hallelujah, thank God, thank God, hallelujah, thank God,” she repeated, a deep mantra that she quietly whispered in Jeremy’s ear. The nurse glanced at her clipboard and stepped out of the room. It was just then that Trey noticed a policeman standing in the corner of the room.

“We’ll need a statement from the kid,” he stated.

“I understand,” Dale replied. Dale turned and looked at Officer James Malloy, a childhood friend and trusted ally. His fiery red bottle brush moustache poked out from all angles like a shotgun blasted red hair straight out his nostrils.

“Of course,” the officer continued, “I think that can wait ‘til morning.” He reached over to put his hand on Jan’s shoulder. “Glad the kid’s okay.”

“Thanks, Jimbo,” Dale replied. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Or where you’d be?” Jimbo’s eyes glittered a bit. “What in hell brought you out here, anyway?” He laughed heartily.

“Someone had to take on Old Man Stull’s torch,” Dale replied. Old Man Stull was none other than John Stull, himself – a man whose legacy was stamped with the permanence of having the town named after him, a fact that Dale held with great disdain.  The story of how the rural farming community turned into a bustling postal center captured about as much of Dale’s interest as dry toast. It was the necessity – no, it was the money – that brought Dale out here. To move up from Mailroom Foreman in Topeka to Chief Postmaster in Stull was a huge deal for his family, he reminded himself, and the family is much better off here: bigger house, nice forty-acre plot, and the kind of quiet that only the rolling plains of rural Kansas can offer.

“Besides, misery loves company, right?”

“Right,” Dale smiled. “Sorry I didn’t get a hold of you sooner.”

“Aw, no big deal,” the mustache answered. “We’ll catch up soon enough.”

“Yeah, I suppose. I just hoped it wouldn’t be like this.”

“It’s the most excitement we seen in this town in a while,” Jimbo agreed.

“We need to have dinner or something.”

“Tomorrow night sound good?”

“Sure. Jan can whip something up.”

“Better than I could.”

“Now, that would be misery,” Dale jabbed, smiling.

An Editor's Note

It's time to get to work putting this down... I am weary of this puzzle, this frustrating curse placed upon me. I fear I am not worthy of the task which is before me.

Read these words not with the expectation of hearing about the old legend of Stull, but with a blank slate. There are no facts to back up this crazy fiction. This isn't the legend that Stull is, but what it should be: not the stories Stull knows, but the stories Stull deserves.

The road is long and winding, and we are far from home. The journey is dangerous and nature offers no shelter. Darkness creeps in from every angle, and there is no escaping the enormity of this tale. Like a black hole, it swallows all light and thought.

You must continue on, for if you are reading this, then I must surely have failed...

October 18, 1957

October 18, 1957

Hans Rupert Gustavson III reached out nervously for the doorknob of the oldest house in Stull, Kansas.  “Trey," as his family called him, breathed in shortly and swallowed hard as he pushed his weight against the enormous white oak frame.  The cool night air vacuumed in at the sides and underneath the door, as if the house inhaled for the first time in decades.  A wincing squeak from the door broke the dead silence within.  The small 8-year-old took a moment to focus on the task at hand.

It had been two days since Greta came to him with a small brass bird she had taken from this very home. She was so excited when she showed him the prized trophy proving that she had been the first to do what they had been talking about since they moved into town two weeks prior. The gauntlet had been thrown. Trey felt, threatened with embarrassment, that he didn’t have much of a choice in visiting the dilapidated building himself, so tonight he made a jailbreak. After all, this was the first real sense of excitement he had felt since they moved. A cross look on his face, he mustered the courage to enter, galvanized by the feeling that he would not be bested by a girl, especially his twin sister. Trey clicked his flashlight on, determined to find some kind of souvenir proving that he had also crossed this threshold into darkness. He played the beam around the entryway.

Dust covered everything in this place. The large foyer led to an elegant dining room to the left, a sitting room to the right, and an eerie stairway leading up right in the middle. A short hallway leading true center continued into darkness. Brass candelabras and matching sconces hung on the wall, dim and austere. The floor creaked under his weight with each tentative step. Strange paintings were all over the walls: royal figures with chalices and swords, magic wands and weird beasts. Some were violent, some scary. Each painting seemed to have a certain portent about it. They looked like they could have been drawn by either a skilled artist or some kind of weirdo. This one showed a man hanging upside-down, by one foot. This other one showed two naked people standing under an angel with strange hair. Another showed the same two people, this time with horns, standing under a great winged demon with menacing horns, an upside-down star on his forehead. Creepy. The flashlight beam wandered around the house until it scooted down the hall and he saw something that made him start.

At the end of the hall was a portrait of a giant horrible black tower set ablaze. It sat in an ornately carved frame on the wall, this blazing building, the reds and oranges screaming angrily from thirty feet away. He moved closer to the frame, hypnotized by the color, when he noticed more detail. Two figures, a knight and a priest, fell just outside the tower windows, either thrown or jumping, as if to their death.  Something about this picture resonated deeply with the young man, and he kept staring for some time. The portrait burned with sinister intensity, blocking out all that was good, wracking him with cruel, foreboding evil. He didn’t remember anything after that except the dream.

Clouds pass ominously across a pale moonbeam splaying splatter patterns of liquid light across the bare countryside. Silhouettes of amoeba-like Rorschach patterns ebb and flow through the clouds and across the landscape like strange pools of darkness.  Trey emerges from the abandoned home dragging a shovel. His eyes are distant, vacant, and lifeless. As he steps into the moonlight, you can now see his nose is bleeding, and just now his eyes roll back until white.

He walked through a broken wooden gate at the stone wall that lined the property, pacing along an empty dirt road. At the main drag, he turns right, headed east towards Town Hall. His gait was steady, not staggered; with purpose. He marched directly in front of the brick building and found one of three trees, dropping to his knees. With grubby hands he began to dig, quickly making short work of a two-foot hole. The automaton blankly removed a satchel of canvas wrapping a large leather-bound book, heavily engraved. He opened the book, laying it out on the canvas. Grimy fingers leaf through several pages until he comes to the one that he’s looking for.  The boy stood over the book, a single drop of his blood falling neatly into the open page. Suddenly, his body convulses. He coughed violently, blood splattering off his nose onto his neat white button-down shirt. A deep, resonant quality took to the coughing, to where it no longer even sounded like a boy at all, but a beast. A pig, a bull, perhaps, or a large dog’s bark started to erupt from the boy’s chest as he wet himself, all while gouts of blood erupted out his nose. Heaving, growling, snarling, he made it back to his hands and knees, a possessed child thrust into grisly evil more potent than words can capture.  The demon-child slowly looked up as a flashlight fell on his face from across the small courtyard.

“Hey!” a voice called out. “You all right?” The boy stopped coughing. A young man, early 20’s, well-built, sprinted across the lawn; flashlight in hand, shiny five-pointed star pinned to his black suspenders. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What in God’s name happened to you?”

The boy was breathing normally, now, and stood up. His nose wasn’t bleeding any more, but crusts of the dark red stuff were now forming on the corners of his mouth and cheeks. The whites of his eyes shone in the darkness reflecting vividly off the beam of the flashlight.  He spoke with a deep unearthly voice. “It is time.”

“Look, I don’t know who you are, whose kid you are, or nothin’ so…”

“It is time.”

“It is time to get you some help…”

“You cannot stop it.”

The officer was at a loss.  “Why not?”

“No one can stop it.”

“No one can stop what?”

“It is time.”

“What’s it time for?”

“To build the gate,” the creature stated plainly. The young boy then dropped to the ground landing flat on his back.  There, he lay, unconscious.