July 2017

  Dicky’s words had frozen me for a second, telling me that my son was down in the House of Tongues using a saw. I gaped at him, standing next to my dad, who looked so completely out of his element that it begged for a laugh. Pieces of the puzzle of my memories had been snapping into place left and right, but there were still some things that remained fuzzy. Not that it mattered. Whatever Dicky had just meant with what he said, there could be nothing good about it.

  I finally got ahold of myself and turned away, sprinted for the stone tower and its door on the other side, like I’d meant to do a minute earlier. Dicky had a gun and I knew it, but he had orchestrated this entire evening, and if he’d wanted me dead, I’d be dead. I didn’t know what his ultimate objective was and didn’t care, my mind only allowing one path forward before anything else could happen: reuniting with Wesley.

  I reached the broken column of stone bricks and rounded it, stopped by the wooden door with its iron bands. The waist-high door hung slightly ajar, dim light shining from within, leaving a long line of yellow across the weeds of the clearing. I dropped to my knees, pushed the door open, crawled inside. Everything about this place came back in a rush right before I experienced them again, its smells of rot and mold, its damp, dirty interior, the hanging, buzzing fluorescent tubes, the sounds of the rattling stairs. I jumped to my feet as soon as I cleared the threshold, flew down the spiraling stairs as quickly as my feet would move.

  I jumped over the last three steps and landed on the cement floor, ran down the hallway to the next door, also made of cracked boards, rusty metal bands keeping them together. It was closed. Not slowing, I rammed my left shoulder into its warped surface, throwing every ounce of my weight forward, the soles of my shoes actually leaving the ground.

  Crack.

  Two of the boards splintered even as the door itself collapsed inward, swinging all the way open and crashing into the wall on the other side. I fell to the floor, trying to scramble back up even before I’d fallen all the way down. I remembered this room, the shelves, the sparse furniture, the mason jars filled with amber liquid and tongues—though there were far less than last time I’d been here. I was able to get to my feet, obtain my balance, observe what was in the room of my haunted childhood.

  Blood.

  Bodies.

  Death.

  Stench.

  My son.

  When I saw the scene of nightmarish horror that lay before me, for a split second I thought it unreal, a figment of my imagination or the setting of a ghoulish film. Stumbling to the side, then backwards, I crashed into the shelves of bottles that had been there for decades, several of them tipping over to the hard floor, cracking as they spilled their reeking contents all over the place. I hardly noticed as my hands sought for purchase, trying to steady myself while my reeling mind did the same on the inside. I stared at the display of gore, filling my vision, time slowing as I took in the grisly details.

  Three bodies. No, four.

  Three of them were dead, without any doubt, the reason clear—their heads had been sawed from their torsos, lying next to them with strings of meat and bone and gore trailing between the space through which they once connected. The amount of blood was astounding, so thick that on first glance it seemed a pool of crimson, deep enough to wade into, dive into, leap into, legs clenched in a cannonball.

  And then there was the fourth body. The one cradled in Wesley’s lap.I looked at him, and the person cradled there, with such despair that my life almost ended along with those who’d expired, scattered across the room like abandoned trash.

  Wesley sat on the floor, legs crossed beneath him, a woman’s back draped across his thighs, her head dangling off one knee. Her hair spread across the cement in a fan, her legs splayed out on the other side. She twitched a little, a slight spasm that might’ve been my imagination, but her eyes seemed glazed with death. There was movement near her neck, a gruesome thing that tried to block itself from my reasoning mind at first sight. I had no choice but to focus, now, no choice but to see what was going on, see the truth, see the horror.

  Wesley had a handsaw in his hand, gripping the handle so tightly that his fingers shone white through crimson wetness. He sawed back and forth, back and forth, in a rhythm so steady that my heart told me he was possessed, hypnotized, under some kind of demonic spell, though I believed in none of those things. But I saw no possible reason within my sphere of understanding that could explain what my seventeen-year-old boy was doing. None.

  “Wesley,” I said, my throat cracking on the word. I cleared it. “Wesley.” Louder, with more strength. “What… I don’t know what they’ve done to you, but you need to stop. Right now. Stop… doing that to her. You’ve hurt her enough.” What I really wanted to scream was, How could you! How could you do this, Wesley! But I knew he was in some kind of trance, his entire psyche teetering on fragile, thin ice.

  His eyes slowly rose to meet mine. His arm moving the saw slowed.

  “Dad?” he asked in an innocently baffled voice. It seemed he couldn’t reconcile the awful things of this place with his other life, his real life, the one where I was his father. How had Dicky done this to him in just a matter of days? How?

  “Yes, Wesley. It’s me. Your dad.” I moved closer to him, literally taking this one step at a time. I took another one, having to lift my foot over the leg of a dead woman who lay sprawled in the middle of the room, on her stomach, headless. I was about ten feet from my son. “Please listen to me, okay? The Gaskins did something to you. This is not you, your real mind. I don’t know what the hell they did but I’m here, now. Okay? Dad’s here.”

  He stopped sawing at the woman in his lap. She was obviously past saving—the twitch I’d seen was her body moving from the inertia of the handsaw cutting away at her gristle and bone.

  “Just put the saw down, okay?” I asked, taking another step. “We’ll figure this out, we’ll get you out of here. I’m not gonna let anything else bad happen to you. I swear on my life.”

  His gaze on me seemed empty of acknowledgement, but he nodded anyway, threw the saw to the side. It clanked and slid to a stop in a smear of blood. Then I rushed forward, grabbed the woman by her shirt and lifted her off of him—not caring at this point about any kind of delicacy or respect—then collapsed to the floor next to Wesley, pulled him into my arms. He didn’t resist, but also didn’t hug me back. The stench of human flesh and gore made me gag, but I held it in check. Sticky blood covered my hands, my face where it leaned against Wesley’s; blood seeped into my pants from the ground beneath me.

  “We’re gonna get you out of here,” I said, trying to stay sane. “Come on. We’ll figure everything out one way or another.” Prison. They’re going to send my son to prison. It took every bit of my collapsing will to move forward, moment to moment. I put my arm beneath his, readied myself to lift him to his feet. “Come on, help me out.”

  Then I heard the echoing bangs of the stairs—someone clomping down the metal spiral at the other end of the hallway outside that room. Dicky. Armed. Coming to fulfill whatever sick destiny he’d set up for us tonight. I had no choice but to pull my arm back from Wesley and leave him there, sitting in a pool of his own crime. I jumped to my feet.

  I remembered, now. I remembered the last few details from so long ago, as clearly as if someone had projected a movie of my past onto the stone wall.

  I knew exactly what I had to do.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  June 1989

  I’d never been properly trained how to react when a man shoves his own tongue down his throat until the air is cut off, depriving him of the sustenance of life. Which Pee Wee had just done, right in front of us. I could only stare and gape, hope that he died quickly. Andrea reacted by shaking, almost uncontrollably, but I couldn’t rip my gaze from the ghastly scene before me. Pee Wee had collapsed to his knees, both hands wrapped around his bulging neck, his face purpling as his eyes—big, wet, white—threatened to pop from their sockets.

  Dicky sprang into action, the sudden movement spurring a feeling of great disappointment inside of me before I really understood why. But quickly, I knew. He was going to save him. He was going to save his dad, the last thing on Earth I wanted to happen. But did I act? No, I didn’t. Cowardice glued my ass to the chair. Andrea let go of my hand and stood up, her entire body tensed, but she didn’t make a move.

  The scene before us played out like a tragic comedy. Dicky, as young as us, had obviously been tutored beforehand on how to deal with choking. He almost calmly stepped behind his dad and wrapped his arms around the man’s chest. Then he squeezed hard, twice. Pee Wee made the slightest of sounds, a tiny crackle of sorts, as he then let himself fall to the floor. Dicky straddled his chest, leaned forward, and worked at his dad’s face—pinching his jaw forcibly, shoving a hand inside his mouth, digging as if for gold. Pee Wee violently coughed then, an explosion of phlegm and noise, as Dicky scooted off of his body. Pee Wee rolled onto his side, heaving and gasping and coughing, normal color slowly returning to his skin. The tongue had been dislodged, and my worst enemy hadn’t died. I had the strangest urge to laugh.

  The room grew quiet, still, as Pee Wee regained his composure. I stared at him, perplexed by what I’d just seen. He got to his feet, looking down at his son, still on the cement floor and breathing heavily. Then he looked at Andrea, standing only a few feet away.

  “Did ya like that, girl?” he asked, his voice strained from the bonkers choking incident. “Were you scared that Papa Gaskins might not make it?”

  Andrea had grown still, herself. She seemed relaxed, now, towering over me as I continued to sit like a craven. No visible tension in her, certainly no shaking. And she didn’t respond to his taunts.

  Pee Wee appeared to be taken a little aback. “Well ain’t you a brave one?” He stared her down for a few seconds more then returned his attention to his son. “Boy, stand up.”

  Dicky did as he was commanded. I tried to read his expression but came up empty.

  “Now listen to me, and listen real good,” Pee Wee said. “Once we’re done with the next part, I ain’t gonna do a whole lotta talkin’ if ya get me. See that bottle there?” He pointed at the one he’d taken from the bag, over by the wall, the hunting knife right next to it.

  Dicky nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m gonna cut my tongue out, son, and I don’t want you to stop me, ya hear? No matter what, no matter how much I scream, no matter how much I cry. I’m gonna cut it out and then I’m gonna put it in that bottle of formaldehyde to keep it preserved. Plain and simple. And when you’re ready, when you’re all well and done with what needs to be done, you’re gonna take a bite out of that son of a bitch. Got it?”

  I felt a blackness open up in me, a terrible gulf into which I wanted to fall. What madness was this? What lunatic’s dream had we just stumbled upon?

  I almost shrieked when Pee Wee suddenly whipped around to look at me, his eyes blazing as he stared into mine.

  “The Reticence, boy. The Reticence and the Waking, that’s what this is. The curse and the cure, right before your eyes. Then it’s gonna be your family’s turn for a while. It will be, or under God in Heaven I’ll slaughter every man, woman, and child alive with a drop of Player blood in ’em. Mark my words and doubt not, boy. Tell your daddy what I just swore to you. Just to prove it, I’m gonna kill your little friend before we wrap things up. Better her than your mama, right?”

  “You’re crazy,” Andrea said, the type of statement my future kids would deem worthy of Captain Obvious. “You’re insane and you’ll never get away with this.”

  Instead of responding, Pee Wee walked over to the wall, bent over, and picked up the knife with its gleaming steel and serrated edge. He twisted it in front of his face, closely examining its deadly potential—it was like a flashback to the Honeyhole incident. Then he sauntered over to stand just inches away from Andrea. Every natural alarm system known to the human race clanged inside my skull, trying to wake me up to the horror blossoming before my very eyes but I only sat there, scared and weak.

  Pee Wee brought his blade forward, its pointy end aimed at my best friend’s face.

  “You have no idea,” he whispered. “You have no idea the pain my family’s been through. All because of my ancestors, things I ain’t got nothin’ to do with.”

  “Oh, please,” Andrea replied. “If you really think that then you haven’t met my dad. I think he’s got your ancestors beat in the asshole competition.”

  I absolutely couldn’t believe her bravery. It changed me, forever.

  “It’s not my…” Pee Wee, visibly frustrated, dropped his head and sighed. “My ancestors were cursed by the Puritans. Don’t you get it? I can’t kill David—his family’s as mixed up in this bullshit as much as mine. But I can hurt him. Oh, I can hurt him in all kinds of ways, ways worse than death.” His gaze found me when he said the next line. “All the Players have done for 200 years is try to get out of the pact, make it all about the Gaskins.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said weakly. Andrea shifted slightly, planted her feet, moved an arm, all of it very subtle but noticeable from my lower vantage point. “I didn’t even know that our families knew each other.”

  Pee Wee stared hard at me. “The sins of the father shall be passed down, the Good Book says. I don’t care what you know or don’t know. But this all ends with my son, and that’s a fact.” He looked back at Andrea, then changed his grip on the knife, holding its handle in a fist as if he planned to rear back and drive the blade into her eye. “Be sure and watch, Davey boy. I ain’t allowed to kill your sorry ass, but I sure as hell can—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Andrea did exactly what she’d done at the Honeyhole. Her entire body twisted like a coiled spring that had been released, her arm swinging in an arc from behind her. She held a chunk of brick in her left hand, gripped tightly in her fingers, jagged, chunky red clay like a growth on her palm. Pee Wee had no chance, no chance at all. He’d just started to duck, just started to pull his arm up as a defense, but both actions were too late. Andrea’s violent swing connected, hitting the same mark as at the Honeyhole; the brick slammed into the side of his head with a horrible clunking sound. Pee Wee collapsed to the floor without making a sound.

  Andrea screamed, stepped forward, held the brick up again over her head, looking down on Gaskins. She fell to her knees, right next to where he lay, even as she brought the brick down with all of her strength. Right before it hit Pee Wee’s face—a thing that I’m certain to this day would’ve killed him—Dicky tackled her from the left, knocking her to the ground; he landed on top of her. The brick had dropped from her grip and thudded against the cement floor, about five inches from Pee Wee’s face. He was groaning, holding both hands to the gash on his temple, rocking side to side.

  I stood up. Ran over to where Andrea was fighting at Dicky, shoved him off of her. She leapt to her feet, gave me a look filled with bloody rage, then she sprinted to the wall of glass bottles, started swinging her arms wildly. She swept several jars off the shelf and they crashed to the floor, breaking in a loud, shattered chorus. More fell, more broke apart, the sound unbearable, mixed with the splashing of liquid, as if some crystal beast were being slaughtered. Dicky had stood back up, and he went at Andrea, his face a demonic scowl. I rushed forward and stuck my foot out, tripping him. He hadn’t seen me, sprawled forward with no chance to break his fall, cracked his face against the cement.

  But it did nothing to deter him; he scrambled to his feet, even as the broken glass all over the floor cut up his hands. He moved toward Andrea again; I moved toward him. Andrea swept another dozen or so bottles off the shelves—jars shattered everywhere; that disgusting liquid splashed onto the walls; preserved, gray, meaty tongues flopped and bounced. Dicky was almost to her; I was almost to him.

  “Stop!”

  The word was like a crack of thunder, a boom of such power that all three of us obeyed. We froze, our last steps crunching on broken glass, standing right next to the wall of bottles that now lay half-empty, its contents strewn across the room.

  A Baghead stood in the doorway. He held a shotgun, pointed it at us. He cocked it while we watched, a heavy clunk of a sound that echoed off the low ceiling.

  Using the disguised voice I’d now heard far too often, the man said, “Get away from that wall. Get away from the jars.” He jabbed the end of the shotgun toward the opposite wall. “Now.”

  Dicky, Andrea, and I scooted ourselves to the other side, each step precarious over the sea of glass at our feet. Crunches filled the air.

  “If any one of you makes a move toward me, or toward Mr. Gaskins, I’ll shoot you in the head with buckshot. You won’t like it. Trust me for a second.”

  All three of us breathed heavily, backed against the cool stone of the wall. The Baghead also breathed, his plastic bag puffing, retracting. He walked forward, twisting his body as he passed us so that the barrel of the shotgun still pointed in our direction. Glass cracked and crunched beneath his boots. He reached the spot where Pee Wee had fallen—the man still lay prone, moaning in pain, hands covering his face.

  Baghead knelt beside him, shifted the shotgun to one hand while reaching down with the other. He picked up the knife that had dropped out of Pee Wee’s grasp when Andrea bonked him in the head with that brick. He looked at the blade for a moment through the thin plastic, then back up at us.

  “Go on, now,” he said with his guttural voice. “Go get the police and bring them back here. Old Pee Wee ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d understood his words they surprised me so much. Not a one of us moved a muscle.

  “Go get the police!” Baghead shouted. “Now!”

  That kicked us into gear, especially Dicky. The poor kid seemed even more traumatized than us, as if maybe he’d broken out of the trance enforced on him by his dad. We hurried for the door, for the hallway, for the spiral staircase leading to freedom above. I was the last one to reach the base of the stairs, which rattled under the weight of the other two as they ascended, and I took one last look down the hallway, still able to see through the open door through which we’d just escaped. What I saw then was an image my mind immediately rejected, refused to believe was real. Even worse was the sound that came with it, rushing at me like a living beast. I think the whole affair had been mentally blocked by my abused psyche by the time I reached the outside air just a few seconds later. But, after the passing of decades, when I returned to this place, I’d finally remember.