The Smashed Man of Dread End Page 5

  The group crossed Noe’s front lawn and walked past the side of the house. At head level was the kitchen window. Noe looked through it and could see the black door to the basement. She caught Radiah looking at it too, but Radiah quickly averted her eyes when she saw Noe looking at her.

  They walked the edge of her backyard, past the large firepit. “Is your family going to host the summer bonfire?” asked Ruthy.

  “I don’t know what that is,” said Noe.

  “The neighborhood has a bonfire every season,” said Crystal. “Since we’re surrounded by trees, we get a lot of falling leaves and limbs. And every big storm seems to take an entire tree down. We make bonfires to clear all that out. It’s also an excuse for a block party.”

  “I like the winter bonfires the best. All the Christmas lights and hot chocolate,” said Ruthy.

  “It gets dark earlier in the winter,” said Radiah.

  They walked until the soft grass of the backyard gave way to the crunchy leaves of the forest floor. Noe saw trees painted with red arrows, marking the path.

  “You’ll get lots of animals in your yard from the forest,” said Ruthy, turning to Noe and almost smiling.

  “What kind of animals?” Noe asked.

  “Foxes and turkeys and deer and fishers. Sometimes coyotes. My dad said that one time a moose came out of the forest and walked down the street.”

  “What’s a fisher?” asked Noe.

  “It’s like a giant, scary weasel. Some people call them fisher cats, but they’re not cats,” said Ruthy. Noe wondered if Len knew about fishers.

  The path hugged the bottom wall of the ravine. From down here, Noe couldn’t see any of the houses atop it. Only the cliff going straight up. They continued through the break in the ravine wall until the path crossed a stream at a short wooden bridge. Radiah ignored a red arrow on a tree that clearly wanted her to continue on the path and instead followed the stream into the brush. The rest followed without hesitation.

  “This is why it’s called Old Man Woods,” said Radiah, slapping the white bark of a birch tree as she passed.

  Noe looked around the forest and saw the dark greens and browns shot through here and there with the shocking white tree trunks, like the dark forest was hair and the birch trees were streaks of white in it.

  About five minutes later, the four girls and the stream arrived at a copse of birch trees, their bark gleaming bright in the summer sunlight. In the middle of the copse and about a dozen feet away from the stream was a boulder the size of her family’s SUV. The entire forest was littered with boulders. There was one about half this size on the edge of the yard behind her house that Len had already christened Wombat Rock for no good reason. The kid would fit right in with the rest of these Dread Enders, giving boulders weird names.

  Except that, unlike Wombat Rock, this boulder was weird. Painted on its face was a large deformed R in sparkly black paint, like the one on the Dead End sign. “Another R?” said Noe.

  “What?” asked Radiah, who was clambering up the lichen-covered boulder. Crystal sat cross-legged on a patch of emerald moss, and Ruthy settled onto a fallen tree with large disks of orange shelf fungus rising from its bark. It felt like a court room, with Radiah as judge, Crystal and Ruthy as jury, and Noe as the accused.

  “Like the one on the Dead End sign,” said Noe.

  Radiah kicked her heels against the rock and gazed down at the rune between her shoes. “The runes.”

  “What are they?” asked Noe.

  “Nobody knows,” said Crystal.

  “They’ve been here as long as the rest of us,” said Radiah.

  “How long have you all lived here?”

  “All my life,” said Radiah. “So has Ruthy. Crystal was three when she moved here.”

  “I don’t remember living anywhere else.” Crystal threw a rock into the stream. It made a soft blurp, which was followed by a splash as a frog interpreted the falling rock as a threat and dived into the stream.

  “And we’re the only kids on the block?”

  “Now that Erica’s gone,” said Radiah.

  “And Brett doesn’t count anymore,” said Crystal, poking a finger in the soft moss.

  “Brett?” asked Noe.

  “My older brother. He’s in college out in California.”

  “And your little sister,” piped up Ruthy, who was holding a stick topped by a shiny green beetle, swinging it slowly around like a magic wand. “What’s her name?”

  “Lenore.” Noe looked around at the three girls. None of them was looking at her. “So what happened to Erica?”

  “Wait a second,” Radiah said loudly from her judge’s bench. “We’ve let you ask enough questions. It’s our turn. When did you see the Smashed Man?” The other two girls glanced down at the ground when they heard the question.

  “Last night,” said Noe. It felt weird telling strangers about what she still thought of as a private nightmare. What happened in the basement didn’t feel real at this second, standing in the middle of a forest with a bunch of weird kids.

  “I told you not to go down into your basement at night,” said Radiah.

  “And I told you that was like telling her to go directly into her basement,” said Crystal. “What happened?” she asked Noe, and the ridiculous image of a forest trial came to her again.

  “The first time, nothing.”

  “What?” asked Ruthy, and Noe could almost feel the hope radiating off her.

  “You’re lying,” said Radiah.

  “Don’t call her a liar,” said Crystal. She looked at Noe. “But . . . are you sure it was nighttime?”

  “It was almost midnight. I was probably down there for fifteen minutes. Nothing.” She left out the part about Len sleepwalking.

  “That’s weird,” said Crystal.

  “Everything about this is weird,” said Noe.

  “But last night you did see it,” said Radiah, the judge prodding the witness to clarify her testimony.

  “Yes. After I got your paper doll.” Noe nodded at Ruthy, who looked at her tight-lipped, her hope dashed. “I tried again. And I saw . . . something . . . coming out of a wall in my basement. He looked like that paper doll, completely flat like he had been rolled out on a cookie sheet, but the size and shape of a person. He had a . . . a messed-up face. It was terrifying.” She left out the part about her sleepwalking.

  “He didn’t get out, did he?” asked Crystal. She looked at Noe as if her answer was the most important thing in the world.

  “He got almost halfway out, I guess, before I ran away. I got my parents and went back down. He was there again, but he had started over. Like he had been sucked back into the crack while I was gone. But my parents . . .”

  “Purple eyed,” said Ruthy. “Like the Smashed Man.”

  “And they couldn’t see him.” Noe was starting to get worked up. “What was that thing? What happened to my parents?”

  “Okay,” said Radiah. “If you’re going to be one of us, you should know everything. At least, everything we know.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to be one of you,” said Noe.

  “It’s not up to you,” said Radiah. “As long as you live on Dread End. As long as you live above the Smashed Man. As long as every day is a bad one because you know there’s a monster in your basement that no adult can protect you from . . . whether you like it or not, you’re one of us.”

  “None of us like it,” said Crystal.

  “I just need an explanation,” said Noe.

  “Can’t give you that,” said Radiah, leaning forward on the rock. “Like I said, we call him the Smashed Man. And we have no idea who he is. We don’t know where he comes from. He’s just always there. Anytime you go into the basement at night, he’s there, oozing out of the cracks, staring at us like he wants to eat us alive or rip us apart.”

  “And he’s in all our houses?” Noe asked, remembering what Radiah had said in the attic.

  “Yes,” said Crystal.

  “W
hy?” asked Noe.

  “Nobody knows,” said Crystal.

  “What happens if he comes all the way out?” asked Noe.

  “We don’t want to find out,” said Radiah.

  “Why can’t our parents see him?”

  “No adult can see him,” said Crystal. “Their eyes turn that weird shimmery violet color, and they act like nothing’s there. It’s almost worse than the Smashed Man himself.”

  Noe found herself agreeing with Crystal. She would never forget her parents’ eyes in that basement. “What have you found online?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing about it on the internet,” said Radiah.

  Noe cocked her head to the side and squinted her eyes. “Everything’s on the internet.”

  “Look for yourself,” said Radiah.

  “I will.”

  “You won’t find anything. You just have to live with it. Like us. And it sucks.”

  “I hate it,” said Crystal. “Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. We stay out of the basement as much as we can, and never go down at night, but knowing he’s always down there, waiting for us . . . I hate it.”

  “Why doesn’t he just come out?” asked Noe.

  “We don’t know. And we don’t know why he only tries at night. And when we’re there. We don’t know why he starts over every time. We don’t know why adults can’t see it,” said Radiah. “We don’t know anything.”

  Noe thought for a moment and remembered the black-and-white werewolf movie she had shown Len. “Every monster has rules,” she said.

  “What?” asked Crystal.

  “Every monster has rules. Werewolves need a full moon. Vampires need blood. What are the rules of . . . the thing in our basements?” She hadn’t said the monster’s name out loud yet. She wasn’t ready. That would make him too much a part of her life. She didn’t want him to be any part of her life.

  “Those are stories,” said Radiah, shaking her head in disgust. “We’re talking about real life at Dread End.”

  “Erica might have seen him come all the way out,” said Ruthy.

  “Now can I ask who Erica is?” asked Noe.

  “She lived in your house before you,” said Radiah, looking down at the rune. Bugs flew around her head, but she didn’t bother to swat at them. “She was found in the basement of her house. Your house. In a coma. Her parents had to take her to a special hospital far away.”

  “Texas,” said Ruthy.

  “Texas,” Radiah continued. “They had to leave fast. That’s why they sold the house so cheap.” Radiah said it like it was the fault of Noe’s family that their friend had fallen into a coma and was moved away.

  “You think he got her?” Noe asked.

  “I don’t know what happened. Erica had gotten secretive. She was up to something,” said Radiah.

  “Erica was always up to something,” said Crystal.

  Radiah nodded. “Erica always talked about the Smashed Man differently than we did. She’d only lived here three years. Was always trying to figure out a way to beat him.”

  “She attacked him once,” said Crystal.

  “No way,” said Noe.

  “Yeah, with a softball bat. We were there. She tried to crush his head before his arms came out of the wall. But when that bat hit him . . .” Crystal shivered.

  “There was a flash of light, like she had attacked something made of electricity,” said Radiah. “It knocked her backward. There were scorch marks on the bat.”

  “Whatever happened the last time, she probably wanted to protect us by keeping us out of it,” said Crystal.

  “Lot of good that did,” said Radiah loudly. “Now we’re worse off. She’s not around, and now the Smashed Man has two more victims in her house.”

  “I miss Erica,” said Ruthy.

  “We all do,” said Crystal, getting up and trudging through the dead leaves to wrap her arms around the little girl. “Even if some of us have a hard time showing it.”

  Radiah rolled her eyes and swatted hard at a bug in the hot air.

  Noe wanted to go home. Away from these strange kids with their strange stories. She wanted to board up the basement door. She didn’t care if they never washed another shirt again. This was awful. Absolutely awful. She wished she had never seen that ad for the house.

  The Dread Enders grew silent again—they were really good at that—and after a few moments, without speaking or looking at each other, they got up and followed the stream back to the path until they reached Noe’s backyard. Noe led the way once they got there. As they walked around the side of the house to the front lawn, she could see the abandoned house around the curve of the dead end. She looked at the sparkly black X on it in the same sparkly paint as the Rs on the Dead End sign and Rune Rock. She decided to ask them about the house. “Hey . . . ,” she said, turning to face the other girls. She didn’t finish the sentence.

  All three girls had shimmery purple irises.

  The Smashed Man had gotten out. And judging by the direction their purple eyes were looking, he was right behind her.

  Noe screamed and ran into her house.

  Nine

  Noe made sure Len was asleep and the baby gate was latched, and then got into bed with her laptop. She could hear a low, sporadic mumble of conversation from her parents down the hall in their room, but otherwise the house seemed to be shutting its shades for the night. Everywhere except for in the basement, that is, where a monster was spring-loaded in a crack in the wall, waiting for Noe or Len to set foot on hard-packed dirt.

  Noe opened the laptop and went to Google. She searched for every variation of the phrase “Smashed Man.” She tried Flat Man. She tried Flat Monster. She tried Thin Man. Thin Monster. Flat thing in my wall. Nothing. Nothing relevant, at least. She tried all the creepypasta sites she knew. She tried to find any books about the subject. She couldn’t believe that something was not mentioned on the internet.

  And then she thought of her parents’ purple eyes and wondered who could write about something that they couldn’t see. And then she thought of the Dread Enders’ purple eyes.

  After she had screamed and run inside earlier that day, she immediately looked out the window, afraid that she would see the Smashed Man wrapping its flat arms around one of the girls. Instead, she didn’t see any sign of the Smashed Man. Just the girls filing slowly and calmly to their houses. They hadn’t even followed her to her house to see why she had panicked. It was like the way they treated the Smashed Man. No curiosity, no action, just suffocating under a weight of powerlessness and inevitability.

  After Noe had calmed down, she realized that she was more confused than scared. Those girls could see the Smashed Man. They would have run if they had seen him. And why did their eyes change color? They weren’t adults. They also said that he only came out at night. And that he had never gotten out of their basements. Nothing made sense.

  Still, she didn’t leave the house the rest of the day.

  Noe googled Totter Court, but that didn’t help. Just some real-estate information sites. The same on the socials. The same kind of information that had pulled them to this house in the first place.

  Finally she gave up, shutting her laptop and putting it on the desk. She grabbed a black scrunchie out of the drawer and tied her right hand to the bedpost.

  She almost didn’t need to. She barely slept. She couldn’t stop thinking about what was two floors below, waiting for her to come down and set him free. It was maddening. The Smashed Man in her basement. In everybody’s basement on Totter Court. And nobody knew what he was. Was he a ghost? She could deal with ghosts. Ghosts move furniture and make weird noises, but they don’t do much else in the stories. But a Smashed Man. A Smashed Man. Something that she had never heard of. That not even the internet had heard of.

  But he had rules. Every monster had rules. She knew some of them already. He only came out at night. He restarted every time you left. And he made people go purple eyed. Just adults, the other girls had said, but Noe had seen
them their irises go violet too, so that was a rule that needed to be figured out. But those were rules. And if he acted according to rules, he could be defeated by rules. Like werewolves and silver. And vampires and stakes through the heart.

  She eventually fell asleep and dreamed she was in an old movie, running through a shadowy castle and looking for a flat coffin where a monster slept.

  Noe spent a good bit of the next day unpacking and organizing and cleaning. She couldn’t believe her family had this much stuff. It felt like more than the house could hold. She was putting some of Mom’s books on a shelf when she had an idea. She ran upstairs to her room, opened her laptop, and called up the website of Osshua’s local paper. The site was archaic and amateurishly designed and a minefield of broken URLs, so it took her a while to find what she was after. Or, more accurately, to find out that what she was after wasn’t online. She had hoped that the newspaper archives had been digitized. But they weren’t. They were housed at the library.

  “Mom!” she yelled.

  “What?” Mom yelled back from somewhere downstairs.

  “How far away is the library from us now?”

  “What?” said Mom.

  “The library!”

  “Just come down here!” said Mom. Noe reluctantly unfolded herself from the laptop. Downstairs, she found Mom scrubbing out the cabinets in the kitchen. Mom couldn’t put dishes and food in these strange cabinets without cleaning them first with her own hands, even though the people who sold the house had had it professionally cleaned.

  “How far away is the library from us now?” asked Noe.

  “It’s about the same, I guess. You want to go? I could use a break from cleaning. And I’m sure Len could use a break from . . . whatever she’s doing.”

  A knocking on the front door interrupted Noe’s answer. A soft knocking. Like whoever was doing it didn’t actually want anybody to open the door.

  Noe thought for a second about letting whoever it was have their wish, but then went ahead and opened the door. It was Crystal. She was wearing another long dress and her long hair was done up in a bun on top of her head, making her look even taller. She was staring at her hands, which held a yellow notebook in front of her like a tray. Crystal looked up, startled that somebody had answered her knock, and Noe was relieved to see that her eyes were blue instead of purple. Crystal didn’t say anything. Just looked back at the notebook. The voice that ended the silence was neither girl’s.