Return To Eerie, Indiana

The Monroe family had not stayed in Eerie for very long - three months, she guessed - and so technically she should not have built up such an emotional link to this house. Now she stood in front of it, a hand strayed to the crystal pendant she wore around her neck on a silver chain. The nerves in her fingertips failed to recognise the familiar angular glassy surface of it, and instead felt a simple, silver heart. Memories that had drawn her across the country to this very place sang a sorrowful tune, and her lips pressed together and moved restlessly. Devon. She’d visit his grave, of course. That went without saying. A little boy, buried without a heart; a little boy that had given so much to her. She tried to remember his face, but couldn’t; Marshall had told her to throw all the photographs away, and she had. Devon had been surgically removed from her life, but the pump that had once given him life still beat inside her ribcage, still kept her alive.

She mentally shook herself. She had a lot of time to mourn for Devon now that she was back in Eerie, but she wouldn’t do it here. Though she doubted whether anyone lived here any more - the place was in such a state of disrepair - she was in public, on display. Bawling in the middle of the street would do her no good.

Her moment of sadness receded, but she still clutched the pendant as her free hand balled into a fist and rapped curtly on the front door of the house. She waited for a while, listening for footsteps on the stairs, but instead hearing children playing in the distance. Again she knocked; again, no sign of any occupancy.

She was about to turn and leave, when a strange thought entered her head. It was probably the last remnant of her meandering horror movie fantasy; it certainly seemed to have come from one of the hundreds of films that she had whiled away her time to in the company of bottomless cartons of soda and popcorn. *Open the door, climb the stairs.* A strange thought indeed, but instead of her voice of reason kicking in with its opposition, it joined forces with the rebel thought. *Why not,* it said. *You came this far, didn’t you? Now are you going to give up, just because no-one’s home? Face it, you want to go into the house.* And the thing was; she did. And in this whirlpool of thought she could see no valid reason for *not* going into the house. So her fisted hand unfurled and tried the door handle, which turned and allowed the door to swing freely in, in turn allowing her to enter the building that she had once called her home.

The Monroe house was now a place infused with melancholia. The flower patterned paper which had been plastered to the walls when they had arrived, and which they had left up through their occupation and beyond their leaving had now sagged and peeled under the burden of mildew. The white paint on the skirting boards and door frames had flaked like its exterior counterpart. She walked across floorboards bare but for a covering of dust, and pressed one hand to a doorless frame. The cracked painted stuck to her fingertips as she pulled the hand away, and she watched it as it crumbled beneath her thumb.

She moved from the hallway into the large room that had once been the centre of the house, the lounge. It had been stripped bare of any furnishings - even the ornamental fireplace had been ripped from the wall - and it looked as though some bird had once made its home here; there were splotches of white faeces on the floorboards, dimly visibly by the light that streamed through the boarded up French windows at the back of the room.

She walked towards the staircase and glanced at the kitchen and dining area to her left. It too had been ravaged by the long seven years. Saddened by the desolation of her home, Melanie walked upstairs on heavy boots that were made heavier by the emotional weight she had picked up upon entering the house.

As she reached the first floor, the smell hit her. It wasn’t so much a *bad* smell, although it wasn’t exactly pleasant either. It was the smell of habitation, of dirty clothes and food. She sniffed the air, her nose wrinkling in protest. Though there were undertones of the staleness of the house, there were also some identifiable ingredients to this nasal gumbo. Beer for one thing, a very strong scent of beer. Melanie’s father hadn’t been much of a drinker, but she had known some boys at school - the type of bird that flocked together proudly under the genus of *jock* - that had had the smell of beer ingrained into their bodily odour. She shuddered as she remembered that once or twice she had actually *dated* one of them. The beer smell made her stomach churn to remember this. Whomever was living here already had one strike against them, in her books.

She took a step onto the landing. In front of her were several doors, and although she had not seen them in years, she could easily recall what each of them had hidden: airing cupboard, spare room, mom and dad’s room, bathroom, her room. She recalled her room as it had been; pink, white, lace - the blandness expected of a sugar and spice, that’s what little girls are made of room. There were other touches too; the collage of photographs of Devon around her dresser mirror, (all in the rubbish bin; all thrown away) Marshall Teller, hands on the carpet, body half-in, half-out of her window. She smiled at that. It was like something out of Doogie Howser, though if she had ever said that to Marshall, he would have freaked. She would have to tell him that later that day.

The photos and lace and soft toys may have all been disposed of by now, but Melanie’s room was not empty like the rest of the house; she was sure of that. Even as she stood at the top of the staircase she could hear someone inside, moving and groaning. Whoever it was, it was obviously not the current owner of this house; why would anyone that legally lived here leave the rest of their home in such a state? Who was it then? A squatter? A tramp who had shacked up here for the night? Another bird, or a wild animal? No, scratch that. Last she heard, birds and animals weren’t well known for buying their own beer, or cooking their own food. This was a *man*, or a woman, of sorts. The voice of reason failed to warn her away from the door behind which the sounds were coming from - her door, as fate would have it, and so she walked towards it and, feeling that she had a bigger right to be here than anyone else, and that this was an intruder on *her* property, opened the door and stepped into the room.

As she had suspected, the remnants of her childhood - the items left behind after her family had moved from Eerie - were gone. There was still a slightly feminine air to the room, lent to it by the white textured wallpaper that was scattered with painted rosebuds, but the paper was mere background beneath the stench of living. On the floorboards (bare, like the rest of the house) lay a number of empty beer bottles, empty Styrofoam cartons and a navy blue sleeping bag with bright orange lining. Half in, half out of the bag was a pile of dirty clothes in the vague form of a figure, sprawled awkwardly across the floor. Melanie carefully approached the sleeping bag, her tiptoeing feet coaxing slight creaks from the boards. She noticed that there didn’t appear to be any sound or motion coming from the figure; not a snore, not a heaving of the chest (wherever the person’s chest *was*, under all that material). As she knelt beside it, extending one hand out to gently shake the slumbering figure, she allowed herself to think of the person as less of a person and more of a body. Her index figure lightly brushed the uppermost layer of clothing.

Suddenly a loud grunting came from the body, and it started to turn like a horizontally inclined dervish. Melanie rocked backward in surprise as a pair of flailing limbs missed her face by an inch. The figure ceased rolling about in its bag, and the hands on the arms grabbed at the clothing, tearing layer after layer downwards until a face was revealed.

All Melanie had time to notice was that the face was fringed with what seemed to be grey fur, before the figure leapt on top of her, banged her head against the floorboards, took a bottle from the floor and raised it above its head, ready to smash it across her face. She screamed, and closed her eyes.

“Any last words before I take out your throat?” the figure said. Its voice was masculine, deep and throaty. It made Melanie’s ears ache to listen to it. Then, as she waited for the glass to shatter against her skull, she felt a warm breath against her face. Soon after, the pressure of the figure on her waist was lifted. She timidly opened one eye, then the other. She levered herself up on her elbows and rubbed the back of her head where the floor had caught it.

“Geez, it’s a dame.” The voice came from the other side of the room.

Melanie squinted at the figure, now pacing in front of the window Marshall had crawled through all those years ago. The glass in it still seemed to be intact. “Dame? Where are you from, the thirties?”

The figure - still carrying the beer bottle, she noticed - looked at her for a second, and then resumed its pacing. “Good question lady. And now I’ve got a better one.” He turned on her, bounding across the room and holding the bottle millimetres in front of her nose. His voice thinned to almost a whisper. “Where are *you* from?”

She looked at him for second. He was about the same age as her, maybe a year or two older. At the top of his head was a shock of grey hair. She extended a hand. “Help me up, why don’t you?” she said.

The grey-haired man held the bottle to her a moment longer, then lowered it. He pulled her up without ceremony, and went back to the window.

“And what’s with your hair?” she continued.

He looked at her. “My hair? I almost busted your chops with an empty bottle of Heineken, and you’re asking *me* about my hair?”

She shrugged. “It’s unusual. Striking.”

“I’m George Clooney’s half brother, okay?”

“Fine. Be like that.” She looked about the room. “So,” she said. “Nice place you’ve got here. Very bachelor pad.”

“If you don’t like it, you can get out. I’m not asking you to stay.”

“I’m not asking to.” Then, after a pause: “What’s your story?”

Grey-hair turned and squinted at her in disbelief. “*What?*”

“Your story. Y’know.” She walked towards him. “You fell out with your folks; maybe you had had one too many at the local Cheers, and the next thing you know, you’re out on your ear with a haircut only a troll doll could love. You look for a place to stay - don’t find one, of course - and you end up here. *That* type of story.”

Grey-hair ran a hand through his grey hair. “Did I just *miss* something?” he asked. “Only, I *thought* that you woke me up , I *attacked* you, and . . and now you’re still *here?*”

“I don’t scare easily,” she said. “At least, my mind scares me a lot more than actual mad scientist wannabes . . .”

“Hey,” he snapped. “Enough with the hair insults, already.”

“Why? Sensitive, is it?”

Grey-hair chuckled to himself. “Ladylike, ain’t she.”

“This is the nineties, pal,” she retorted. “Girl power, and all that crap. Grey-haired freaks don’t scare us any more.” She stuck out a hand. “I’m Melanie by the way.”

Grey hair looked at the outstretched hand for a moment, then looked back at her face. “Melanie? Don’t you mean Mel? Girl power, and all that crap.”

She sighed impatiently. “Look, are you going to shake my damn hand or what? Only my arm muscles are starting to hurt.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.” He took her hand and shook it firmly. “The name’s Dash-X, but you can call me Dash.”

“Do your friends call you Dash?”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Because nineties girls don’t surprise easily, either.”

She looked at him for a while, and grinned. “Come on, Dash-X. I’ll get in the brewskis.”

He grinned back at her. It was a grin, she noticed, that had more than just a touch of devilment in it. “*Now* you’re talking my language.”

On the other side of Eerie . . .

Rooster’s Farm. Survivor of seventeen separate fires since it was rebuilt following the strike of Hurricane Bob, seven years ago. Bob had vented its wrath on the building, pounding it into match sticks and carrying Farmer Rooster away on its funnel into the bargain. No-one knew much about Farmer Rooster. He had been a solitary type, no friends, no family - in fact that’s all anyone knew about him. Oh, and the fact that he was completely off his trolley. Farmer Rooster was insane. Everyone knew *that*. He would be up with the cockerel, singing with his scratchy crabbed out shriek of a voice that carried all the way into the city centre. When people went to the farm to complain, they usually ended up running away at top speed with dust at their ankles and buckshot flying past their head. The Eerie police didn’t do anything about him. They told the crowds of sleepless people that complained to them that Farmer Rooster wasn’t doing any harm. Anyone could see that he was as nice a man as you could hope to meet. To tell the truth, they were scared as Hell by Farmer Rooster.

Farmer Rooster had had his own side to this story, of course. He hadn’t understood why the stupid townsfolk had kept coming to his farm, squawking at him in a language he barely understood. He had formulated his own idea, that they were trying to steal his grain. So, every time a townperson had ventured up the path to his farm, out would come the scatter-gun. He’d fire round after round, clucking “Get the hell away from my grain, you feather-less no wingers!”, and then he’d be left alone for a while.

In his more lucid moments, Farmer Rooster had had to wonder if he’d spent too much time with the chickens when he was a child.

After Rooster’s Farm had been demolished, someone had come up with the strange idea to build a monument to the unknown farmer, and for some strange reason that monument had taken the form of Rooster’s Farm Mark Two. There was no farmer to look after the place. The chickens all died, or ran away, or were stolen. And the local kids liked to torch the place every so often. But Rooster’s Farm had survived.

The car pulled up in front of the farm in a cloud of dust, some of which decided to cling to the dust that already covered car. What make of car was it? It was *the* car - it had no make, as far as anybody could tell. Maybe one of the two young men that sat in the front of the car knew, but to anyone seeing the car for the first time, it was makeless and ageless. It wasn’t that it was rusted beyond recognition - the car itself had been concealed beneath layer upon layer of paint, and the owners of the car had taken the practise of detailing to the very limit. Bits and pieces of junk were glued at random to the roof, smothering the painted black rack that was only just visible beneath the extras. Some kind of roll cage had been built up around the frame of the car, and this too was painted black. Beyond the assortment of horns attached by the windscreen, a giant portrait of a skull was sprawled across the bonnet. At the top of the skull’s cranium, a cruciform rose from an inferno. The skull bore a large set of fangs.

The engine cut ; a savage rumbling sound that vibrated through the air deepened and stopped, and one of the passenger doors opened. There was a vague “chink” as the passenger walked around the car; the sound of the two inch spurs on his black leather boots. The passenger walked up the path to the farm and rapped on the front door. After a while, he left the path and went to one of the farms windows.

The driver’s door opened and the driver got out of the car. He joined the passenger at the window. “This place deserted?” he asked. “I’m about up to my skull with this driving. You better learn to drive before our next road trip.”

The passenger, who had cupped his hands up to his face to try and cut down on some of the glare from this late burst of summer sun, now lowered them and looked at the driver. “Can’t drive. I’m better at shooting from a moving vehicle than you. You know that,” he said.

“Says you.” The driver tried to peer through the window. “This place deserted?”

“Yup.”

“Looks a little burned, to me,” he grumbled.

“We could always paint it black,” the passenger said.

“Guess we could.” There was a pause. “This *is* the right place, right?” Another pause. “Only, I don’t want to go through what happened last time. That sucked.”

The passenger sighed. “Bro, last time was an error, an aberration on an otherwise spotless record. We couldn’t have known that that would happen.”

“It did, though.”

“Yeah, shame it did. I rather liked that town.”

The World Of Stuff was a small town shop, but calling it that made it sound like one of those small-time grocery stores that also stock hardware, confectionery, toys - those shops run by an old retired couple that sit and chat to each customer and generally watch the world go by. They know your name, all right; they know everybody in town - their name, where they live, and every embarrassing detail about their lives, everything that they’ve hidden in their past and certainly don’t want brought to the surface. The kind of shop where you go in to buy a box of Andrex tissues, and after telling them how your folks are, you leave with a free stick of licorice and someone taunting you about the time you wet yourself in front of the whole school at the Christmas nativity, because the store keeper just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. But no, the World Of Stuff was not one of those shops. Neither was it a faceless supermarket. It was the size of the first shop, and contained more than the second shop. And it was magic. No doubt about that.

Simon had gone to the World Of Stuff whenever he was angry, or sad, or just moody for no particular reason for as long as he could remember, and he usually left happier by some degree. The shop had a personality of its own, and it liked to cheer its friends up, and Simon was definitely a friend of the World Of Stuff.

The bell rang as he opened the door, and all at once he was in familiar territory, a place where he and Marshall had whiled away the time between UFO hunts and psychotic housewives and every other bizarre thing that had passed through Eerie. He stepped into the shop and let the door slowly close behind him, sealing the magic atmosphere in.

“Simon!” Radford cried from behind the soda bar. “Come on in, make yourself at home.”

“Hi, Mr Radford,” Simon said, and made his way past the sale shelves (“X-Ray Spex, 2 pairs for $5!”) to the bar stools. He hefted himself up onto one, and sat, leaning on the bar with folded arms. “How’s the world treating you, today?”

“Not bad, not bad.” Radford bobbed his head in a shrug. “Getting in a whole new stack of horror videos next week. Corn Critters 8 sound good to you?”

“Not bad, not bad.” Radford bobbed his head in a shrug. “Getting in a whole new stack of horror videos next week. Corn Critters 8 sound good to you?”

Simon grinned. Radford knew him and his passion for cheap shockers only too well. “’The Maulers Have Ears’,” he quoted. “’This Time It’s Really, Really, *Really* Personal’.”

“So you’ve heard of it, then?”

“Of course. I heard it was a Joe Dante film, only it’s *so* bad he paid to have his name removed from the credits.”

Radford leaned forward, conspiratorially. “He has a cameo in it, too, you know.”

“Really?” Simon read all the horror magazines he could get his hands on, but somehow Radford was always one step ahead of him when it came to horror movie gossip. “Who does he play?”

“Well, I shouldn’t really be telling you this . . .” he looked around to see if anyone was listening, but those few shoppers that were in the store were too caught up in their own impulse buying to notice what he was saying. “ . . . but he plays ‘director’s corpse number three’. Look carefully at the end of the scene with the flying corn critter and the chainsaw. He’s under the combine harvester.”

“Combine harvester. Gotcha.”

“Actually, I’ve got a flier for it somewhere. It’s going to a good home, if you know of one.”

Simon’s face lit up. “Really, Mr Radford? That’d be great!”

“No problem. I’ll get it for you in a minute. Anyway. What’ll it be, Master Holmes?” He stood a little straighter, and grinned his familiar lopsided grin. “I’ll bet on a Black Cow.”

Simon unfurled his arms and dug into a jacket pocket. “Black Cow it is,” he said as he withdrew his wallet. He started to open it.

“No, no, no. Simon, you know that your money’s not welcome in here.” Radford walked over to a stainless steel machine and started to make Simon’s drink.

“Mr Radford, I’ve been coming here for practically fifteen years, and I can’t remember ever paying for a Black Cow since you started working here,” Simon said.

“Did the previous Mr Radford make you pay for them?” Before Radford had worked at the World Of Stuff, another Radford, an impostor had worked there. Before him, the current Radford worked there. Simon didn’t like to think about it too much; it made his head hurt.

“No,” Simon admitted.

“Then I can see no reason not to give you free drinks.” His voice was now punctuated by a hissing, gurgling sound from the machine. “Besides, it’s a celebratory drink, in honour of the impending video release of the lost Corn Critters movie!” He put the finishing touches to the Black Cow, reached under the bar to get the flier, and set them on the marble surface of the bar in front of Simon. “One Black Cow, on the house, to celebrate Corn Critters 8.”

Simon took a sip. “Great, Radford. Thanks.” He took another sip. “Ah, that hits the spot.”

Radford took a towel from beneath the counter and flipped it over a shoulder; his bartender act. “Do I detect tough times at home, Simon?” he asked.

“Do you ever. It’s my dorky little brother Harley.”

“Harley?” Radford thought this over for a few seconds. His eyebrows arched as he placed the name. “That little punk with the huge gang . . .”

“The very same.”

“He’s your *brother*?”

Simon smiled from behind the milkshake. When it came to horror movies, and facts that could be stored in a file labelled ‘weird’ Radford had a mind like a steel trap. Down to earth subjects such as who was related to who leaked through a sieve of a memory. Simon decided to humour him. “Yeah, he’s my brother. Why?”

“That’s some cookie cutter your folks must have had. Your brother? Wow.” He shook himself, and leaned forward again. “Simon, I’ve got the feeling that some of my . . . merchandise . . . has been going missing. I don’t know how long it’s been going on, but yesterday I saw some kids standing over by the magazines section. They kept glancing up, real guilty looking. I didn’t like to say anything - it’s bad for business - but once they had gone I checked the shelves. They looked kind of empty.”

“Radford,” Simon said. “Are you trying to tell me that my brother has been shoplifting from you?”

“No, not at all. He wasn’t in the World Of Stuff at all. It’s just that . . .”

“These kids were his goons?”

“Well, I’ve seen them hanging around together quite a bit. Well,” he admitted, “at least *before* the kids came in.”

“Let me guess: and after they left.” Simon finished. His face darkened. “Just typical of Harley to be the leader of some pre-teen ring of organised crime.”

“Jeez, Simon, you make it sound like your little brother’s in the Mafia.” Radford smiled, but to Simon there was more than just a touch of nervousness concealed behind the grin. Radford was a kind and gentle man, and Eerie - no matter how weird - was mostly a gentle town; the last thing that they needed was to have some group of droogs hanging around the neighbourhood.

“Believe me, Radford. My family’s not Italian, but if we were, Harley would be the first to dole out horses’ heads.”

The grin slipped for a moment, and Radford looked serious. “Do you mind if we move onto a lighter subject, Simon? Only this kind of doomy talk could be kind of bad for business.” Radford cast a furtive glance around the shop floor, and though there was still no sign that anyone was listening in to their conversation, the tense look on his face didn’t ease up.

“Anyway,” said Simon, loudly.

“Anyway,” said Radford, loudly. He removed the towel from his shoulder and began to wipe industriously over the bar’s marble surface. He was grinning once, more. “What brings you here today?”

“Well, I do have a list, but my cash reserves are a little dried out at the moment.”

“No problem. I can tide you over until you get a little more moolah in your pocket.”

“That’s kind, but with the free drinks and the Corn Critters flier, I don’t think I can take owing you any more favours right now, Radford.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Radford flapped a hand dismissively.

“No, I mean it. I feel guilty enough as it is. Especially with Harley, and all.” He noticed a faint twinge of pain - or fear - pass over the shopkeeper’s face at the name of his brother. If the mere mention of Harley could inspire this now, he wondered, what did the future hold? He pushed the thought to the back of his mind. “I’m after a soldering iron.”

“A soldering iron. Any particular brand, or size?”

Simon squirmed awkwardly on his barstool. “Uh, I was kind of hoping that you could recommend one to me.”

“Hokay. What’re you trying to solder?”

“A radio. Actually, it’s more of a receiver.”

“A radio receiver, eh? Trying to pick up transmissions from Mars?”

Simon laughed a little. “Yeah something like that.” Transmissions from Mars. He hadn‘t heard from Marshall for too long. Communicating via personal radio signal was the kind of idea that he would have had back in the good old days.

“Well, I’ve got a catalogue that’s packed full of electronic gizmos and doohickeys somewhere back here. I’ll tell you what; if you bring down your receiver tomorrow, or whenever you’ve got some time, I’ll take a look over it and pick out a soldering iron for you. How does that sound?”

Before Simon could answer there was a jangling as the shop door swung open. Radford looked up at the sound. “Uh oh,” he said. “Looks like I’ve got another customer.” Simon looked around and saw a heavy set man in a white jump-suit sewn with rhinestones walk over to the bar and take a seat three stools down from him. The man was a familiar face around Eerie, always wearing a pair of sunglasses, always wearing his greying hair in an almighty greasy quiff. He didn’t know who he was, exactly. He’d seen him hanging around with the Mayor and the Sheriff, and the rest of the town council, so he presumed that he had some influence around town. He also knew that he had a large and expensive house, and a set of expensive cars to match. Simon guessed that he was a millionaire of some kind, who maybe had owned a huge multinational corporation, and had moved to Eerie after his retirement.

Radford had walked over to him. “Hi, Aaron. What’ll it be?”

The man spoke with a southern accent. “Coffee, black as midnight on a moonlit night. And a hamburger.”

“Black coffee and a hamburger. The usual. I’ll be right back.”

Simon watched Radford retreat through the kitchen door, and turned back to his Black Cow. He had lost interest in the man in white, but he had the strangest feeling that he had seen him someplace before.

Suddenly a shudder ran across Simon’s body. His hands moved involuntarily, shaking the glass between them and almost knocking it over. What was *that? he thought. It felt like some intense cousin of the kind of shiver that accompanied the appearance of gooseflesh, the type of thing that inspired you to say ‘Someone just walked over my grave’. Simon shuddered again, but this time it was much more constrained - a reaction to the first. The feeling of the shudder still milled in his nervous system, the nerves slowly settling like white flakes in a snowglobe after it has been violently shaken. Whatever it was, it had not been caused by someone just walking over his grave. To gain that kind of effect, the perpatrator would have had to take a pneumatic drill to it, hammering through the soil and not stopping once it had reached the mahogany coffin. Simon had seen a lot of strange things in Eerie, but this feeling had been at least ten times worse than the strangest of them. Something had disturbed the very fabric of his being, and although he did not wish to find out what it was, he had a chillingly clear premonition that this was only the tip of the iceberg, that this signified something much worse to come. He took the glass in his hand, raised it to his lips and downed the remainder of the Black Cow in one gulp. When Radford returned from cooking the man in white’s hamburger, he decided, he’d ask for another one. No, make that two. With a nip of java, just like Mars used to have in the old days.