What Lurks In Luther Woods - Chapter 1 - Part 2

Part 2

The next thing he knows, it’s like a hammer dropped on his brain and his mom’s arms are around them both, he and Ralph. He’s trembling and can smell her “adult drink” as she calls it, on her breath and she’s shaking him. Hard, over and over, asking him what’s wrong, why he’s screaming. He had already stopped when she grabbed him and he watches the monster pull its hand away from the glass, but he can’t speak. He can’t point and he can’t tell her why. Sam had read books where people were scared so bad that they froze. He had watched Shaggy and Scooby stammer on and not be able to tell Fred that there was a monster right behind him, but he had never felt terror, true freezing horror himself, until now. He suddenly understands. The lightning flashes once more and then his mom stops asking him what’s wrong. Susan sees it. It’s still standing there, just outside the window, watching them and her mouth hangs agape. Her lips tremble for words, but there are none. Her hands, her hands are perfectly still, frozen on Sam’s shoulders, stuck in the moment before her world is opened up to terrifying new possibilities. A world where monsters exist.

Sam wonders if this is his mom’s first time being scared frozen too. The room is silent except for the occasional thunder clap and the rain, now pounding constantly against the glass. The monster has left, because when the lightning flashes again, it’s gone. But Sam and his mom, don’t move, not for a long time.

When Jim follows the trench up and finds the shoebox ship, he doesn’t know what it is. When he gives up looking at it, kicking it, giving it a good couple of knock, “it’s just raining to hard” he says, he comes back inside, soaking wet, cold, and without any solid answers. He finds his wife and son silently huddling together on Sam’s bedroom floor, shaking much more fiercely than he is, even though they are quite warm. They are staring out the window.

That night, the night it arrived, Sam’s memory was clear as clear got. The next days, heck, the rest of Sam’s life were less clear.

Huddled together in the living room, Sam asks his mom again that night what it is, after he knows she saw it too. “What is what dear?” she says. Her eyes are blank and she stares at the wall when she answers him. She has several more adult drinks. When she doesn’t tell him or even acknowledge the monster, Sam wonders if this is going to be one of those things that his parents decide not to talk to him about. Like when they wouldn’t explain a story to him on the news because they say it’s “too serious for a young man like him to be worrying about.” Sam wonders if it isn’t that, maybe she’s worse than scared frozen. Maybe she’s scared so bad, she has to lie, even to herself. If it scares his mom that bad, a woman who he had never seen afraid of anything at all, it means the monster is probably even more dangerous terrible than he could imagine. He hopes that isn’t the case.

Sam decides to try his dad. He starts by asking questions, to get him talking, to gauge if he’s on the right track. He asks his dad, “What do you think it is? Do you think it’s a spaceship? Do you think there could have been an alien in it?” But his dad answers, “No” to them all with increasingly less patience. There are a few questions he thinks but for several reasons, including being too afraid to hear the answer, he doesn’t dare to ask. Are you sure there’s no such thing as monsters? Will you let it get me? If I tell you what I saw, will you believe me? When he doesn’t get anywhere with his father, it’s very late at night after all, he feels his frustration rising. When Sam feels he’s about to burst, his little cheeks are turning red, he just blurts it out. “Dad, I saw a monster. I think it came from outer space.” He says it very seriously. His mom gasps and stares at him as if he just given away a deep and terrible sworn secret. Something they had experienced together and without ever talking about, agreed to never tell. Sam gives her a look back that says, We want dad to know, don’t we? She doesn’t. Jim just smiles and pats him on the head. Sam can tell he is patronizing and stomps his feet while he goes on. “Come on dad! Let’s go look, I saw the thing land! It’s up in the trees!” He yells, scared, insulted, and desperate to be believed at the same time.

“I found something, sure. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a super-duty storage container. Probably fell out of a plane.” He said to Sam. He looks over to Susan and winks. “I made a call to the office and asked them to contact Southwest Regional. if there were any pilots that lost anything, we’ll be hearing soon. We can look more in the morning. Ok son?” Jim says kindly with sleepy eyes. He puts his arm around Sam and sinks them both into the squishy brown recliner in the living room. The television flickers in the corner as a car chases Homer into a garage and then the whole Simpson family sit together on a large pink sofa. The analog light flickers in the darkness and reflects streaks of blue and yellow against the wood paneled walls. Even with everything that happened and the topic of the conversation, it still draws Sam’s eye. “Anyways, If we go outside right now, we might get washed away son.” Sam thinks, Well, it is raining fiercely. And he doesn’t suppose he wants to go outside anyways with that thing while it’s dark, even with his dad. He didn’t think about that when he proposed the trek in the first place. Secretly he’s thankful his dad says “no” but he still wears his pouty face and puts as much attention into the cartoon that he can. They get settled in and then Susan fills with panic about the idea of Sam going back to bed in his room.

“A rock kicked up and hit Sam’s window. It’s broken.” Susan lies. “I don’t want him to get damp from the rain or sleep with a draft, so Sam had better sleep on the sofa in the living room. And yea know, with all the excitment, I better sleep with him so he doesn’t get scared.” She gets up from the dining room table, sets her empty glass of ice on the counter, and scoops Sam up out of his dad’s lap. Sam thinks it’s a really long and specific explanation and that telling his dad the truth about what she saw would be much easier, but she tells the lie just the same.

Early the next morning, the Maybeck family is awakened by a loud and constant knocking at their door. Sam’s eyes pop open at the first sound and he sees its five thirty in the am from the green flashing clock on the microwave. He looks in panic at the empty spot next to him where his mother had been when he’d fallen asleep, but she’s not there. She’s sitting next to him. Upright and alert and clutching at the blanket that’s draped over Sam.

Every few seconds there’s another knock of increasing ferocity. Sam wonders if the monster is back and how long it will take it to knock the door down. Not very long he assumes. It pounds until Sam’s father walks to the door, slow and confident, shotgun once again in hand, but this time already with pants on. Jim nods to Susan who is staring at the door with the eyes of a person who has long been awake, contemplating the meaning of a horrible nightmare. She thinks it’s the monster too, Sam can see it in her red lined eyes and grabs her hand. When Jim moves to unlock the door, Susan whimpers a bit and squeezes Sam back, but she doesn’t say a word.

Neither does Ralph. He just darts under the sofa. Jim opens the door in a slow arcing motion and the hinges creak until it opens wide. It should have been still dark, but Yellow light floods the inside of their home, blinding Sam and his mother. Lines of large trucks with spotlights are parked all along the trench the thing had cut into the ground and they surround men in orange plastic suits that walk about with gadgets in their hands. A row of men in dark slacks with expensive looking black shoes, covered in mud, stand on the entryway, casting long shadows into the house through the open door. “May we come in?” a man in a black hat asks. He tosses a cigarette behind him into the mud and Sam thinks, he looks like an old timey gangster in that hat.

“Who are hell are you?” Jim asks. Its five thirty three in the morning on a Saturday and a group of strangers has just awoken Officer Jim Maybeck, Sheriff of Bandon Oregon after an already very long night. Jim slowly pulls his shotgun from behind the door and leans against it, a commanding cane as he waits for an answer.

“Mr. Maybeck,” the man begins. He makes sure to look at the shotgun and then back at Sam’s dad, continuing in a tone that says he is in charge and this is a normal day for him. “I am representing the United States of America in this matter. May we come in, after you unload your firearm.” Jim begrudgingly waves them in and then Susan rushes Sam back in his parent’s bedroom while Jim and the men talk. Sam can hear voices, occasionally yelling, but he can’t make out anything they say in whole. Just a word here and there. Eventually, in his mother’s arms, Ralph never far away, Sam falls asleep again to the sound of Susan’s nervous humming and the clinking of ice, melting in her glass.

When Sam finally wakes, it’s almost midday. He’s hanging off the bed and staring at thick dark orange carpet. An ant is carrying a crumb and disappears in a crevice. He’s alone in his parent’s bedroom, or almost. Ralph is crouched on the bed next to him. Butt up and head down, in the universal sign of “play with me” in doggie language. “Hi Ralph.” Sam says sleepily. “Look at you. You’ve forgotten all about last night haven’t you,” and he ruffles Ralph’s ears. “I wish I could.” Sam says with a heavy voice, a voice much too weighty for a nine-year-old boy. Ralph playfully growls and happily chews on Sam’s fingers.

It sounds like a circus is being built around his house. Bells and whistles and hammers clang and hoot. Sam pulls the string and lifts the blinds on his parent’s bedroom window and sun light blinds him for a moment. A huge tarp covers a massive object that’s loaded onto the back of a yellow tractor truck. A series of chains and tractors were around it. All used to haul the spaceship shoe box up on the giant flatbed Sam correctly assumes. The tractor truck fires its engines and black smoke pours out of its twin exhausts, sticking up in the air. Two smaller trucks are in front of it and three behind it, forming a caravan. They all have flashing lights and signs that say “caution wide load.” Sam watches the thing that arrived last night from the sky be driven down his driveway and out onto the road by the United States men. He wonders where they’re taking it and what they’ll do with it when they get there.

Even as the trucks drive away, other tractors fill in the trench the spaceship had dug with loose soil and then compact it down. They work until the yard is smooth and very normal looking again. When the trench is filled in, groups of men in the orange plastic suits quickly empty pallets of grass, rolling it out and working to lay it down. By the time the sun starts to go down, the men are gone. Sam walks outside to his once again normal yard, free of any monsters or any sign there ever was one. He pretends it never happened and that he never saw what he saw at all. The ship is gone, so is the monster, and everything looks in order. He lives like that for the rest of the weekend, the rest of that day and the next, only thinking of it at night, eyeing his window with the thick brown tape over the cracks, clinging tight to his puppy until he’s too exhausted to stay awake anymore. He never heard Susan standing in the hallway, secretly checking on him in the night and staring out of his window. He makes out as if everything’s fine and he hadn’t seen a monster arrive from the sky. Then, Monday morning comes.

Jim calls Sam and Susan into the living room. He turns off the television when they walk in and his face has a very serious look on it as he talks to Sam. “I need you to know” Jim says, “I signed a paper with those men. I have been wrestling all weekend about what to tell you, but I think if I don’t tell you at least this, it won’t be the last we see of them.”

“What did they say?” Susan asks. Her fear, fresh again.

“We cannot talk to anybody about any of this.” Jim says and he eyes Sam when he says it. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I don’t really give a damn about what those ass hats told me I can and can’t say inside my own damn house. That was an American spaceship that crashed in our yard and we weren’t supposed to see it. They took all our cameras, even the disposable from Mexico we never got developed. Sorry Susan.”

“But dad.” Sam said. “I saw,”

“You didn’t see anything son.” Jim interrupts. “That is the point of this conversation. What you didn’t see, was a secret plane. Understand?” Sam’s head lowers to his chest and he successfully holds angry frustrated tears back. “Look son, I know you saw something. I believe you ok? But, if we start any crazy stories at school about, government men, or secret planes, these guys will be back and we don’t want that. I know you’re excited and we all want to talk about exciting things with our friends, but we are not going to.” Jim stares at Sam for a few seconds and his serious face melts to a gentle smile. He nods and pats Sam on the head. Sam wishes he was excited about something instead of scared and burdened with a terrifying secret. “Hey, at least now you know it’s not a monster right?” Jim says with a smile.

Jim went to work, Sam went to school, his mother a silent chauffeur. At the end of Luther Road, she kisses him on the cheek and hands him a paper bag with a peanut butter sandwich in it. She tells him to have a good day, that she loves him and drops him off at the bus stop. This is the last day Sam would ever play with a toy or laugh at a cartoon.

…

The bright yellow handrail is sticky in his hand. The air’s still wet, though the rain is gone for the moment. The pleasant scent of warm wet asphalt is in the air. Sam takes the steps up to his school two at a time and already the packs of children around him are talking about the happening last night. It was loud and bright and it’s a small town. Sam isn’t surprised other people saw it or heard it. The sounds around him are a drone of intermingling voices and key words pop out of the air and into his ears. Some say it was just thunder, others a plane, a few a meteor. Sam knows they are all wrong and he finds himself hating them for being happy, excited, and ignorant. The faces around him wear easy smiles and the children play and laugh, push each other and run. “Hey Sam, did you see the asteroid?” a kid with bottle glasses asks. Sam pretends he didn’t hear him and walks into class. The day is a blur of the teachers monotone droning, irritatingly cheerful children, and ringing bells. At recess, Sam plays alone. He kicks a ball gently against a wall until it rolls back to him and kicks it again until it’s time for class.

…

The bus door hisses closed and it pulls away with a dull roar and a few puffs of black diesel smoke as Sam walks up Luther Road towards his house. The rain is back and big slow drops pound on his jacket and glob in his scruffy dark hair. Puddles begin to creep up the canvas of his shoes and his socks squish between his toes with each step. His fence creaks open and then the metal spring slams it shut behind him. He’s halfway to his house and a small rock hits his backpack and falls to the ground at his feet. Its wet and red. Sam whirls around, thinking a neighbor kid must have threw it at him, but no one’s there, just the woods. He turns away and starts to walk faster. A larger rock hits him in the shoulder and drops him to a knee. “What do you want!” Sam yells into the forest. He rises and clutches his little hands into fists. The wind rustles through the branches of the giant pines and something flies through the foliage. Ralph’s head, devoid of any body, hits Sam square in the chest with a wet thud, lands in the mud of his walkway and rolls away. It comes to rest a few feet away and its little black eyes have turned white and are staring sightlessly, up at the sky. Sam begins to scream.

…