Cuneiforms

“We live our lives in the bright circle of our ignorance, never dreaming of the howling abysses of darkness that impinge upon the fragile barrier of our ‘reality’, hungrily striving to break through.” -- Reverend

It was one of those days you wake up feeling disconnected. Like there’s something important that happened in the night, and everyone else knows about it, but they won’t let you in on the secret. It was one of those days. No one was acting any different toward me; it was just a feeling, like I wasn’t part of the world anymore, and it filled me with a melancholy I’d been fighting all afternoon.

We were driving to work, which was forty minutes each way. And gas was about a hundred bucks a gallon now. Thank God for the other three guys. Car pooling to and from, with everyone chipping in for gas, helped a lot. This was Jason’s week to drive, which made it our week to pay for his gas. There was shit on the radio, so Jason was telling us about the fight he and the people working on the house next to his had gotten into last night.

Lee and Ray sat in the back. They were brothers, both in their forties, one of them still lived with their mother and one had a studio apartment a couple blocks away. Jason, the guy driving that night, liked to tell stories that always made him look like a tough guy. I’ve never in my life met a man who seemed like he had so much to prove to himself.

Forty minutes to work, another forty minutes back. Thankfully the drive back was after a twelve-hour shift of lugging hundred-pound bags of cabbage, or fifty-pound bags of potatoes here and there all night, and by the time we got off at four or five in the morning, no one felt like talking anymore.

I wished no one felt like talking on the way down there.

And that’s when Jason pointed out the bus.

“Look at that,” he said. At first all I saw was the big yellow school bus next to us, but I didn’t see anything special about it. “Look at the kids,” he said.

“Hmm,” I replied.

Yeah, that was weird. All the kids sat slumped over in their seats, their heads resting against the back of the seat in front of them. It was a surreal image and I stared at it for a minute, then said, “That’s funky stuff.”

Then I looked away, the light changed to green, and we drove off.

We stopped at a gas station to fill up before hitting the highway and the other three went inside to get a Coke or whatever.

“You got the gas?” Jason asked.

“I got some of it,” I said, and handed him a ten. He looked at it, stuffed it into his pocket, then stopped Lee before he went inside.

“Hey, you got some money for gas?”

“Yeah, I got a little extra. Put ten in on me.”

“Cool,” and Jason went to pump the gas.

I sat in the car, waiting. I was still trying to shake that feeling that had been bugging me all day. With it came this intense loneliness, even though I was crammed into Jason’s Escort with three other people, and all I needed to do was talk and there’d be a camaraderie. But still there’d be that nagging at the back of my head. This isn’t real, something’s changed. This isn’t the world.

They all piled back into Jason’s tiny ass car, bringing me out of my own head, and a fresh wave of disorientation hit me.

Forty minutes to work. We hadn’t even got going yet, not really.

I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes, and tried not to count the seconds before we got there.

Jason started the car, pulled away from the pump, and stopped at the street, waiting for a spot to pull out.

From the void behind my eyelids, I heard him say, “Hey, Dave, what time is it?”

I opened my eyes and looked at my watch.

“Quarter till four,” I said. “We’d better hurry.”

“Yeah, but look at that,” he said. “It’s awful late for that, isn’t it?”

I looked and saw the school bus again. And he was right. Three forty-five was late to be taking a load of kids home, I was pretty sure. It had been a while since I’d been in school, but I don’t ever recall getting home at four in the afternoon, even with detention.

“And they’re all sitting like that, really weird. All slumped over,” I said.

“What’s up with that?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s follow it.”

“We don’t have time for that, come on.”

Like I need even more time stuck in this cramped car with these guys. But I had to admit, it was strange, all those kids hunched over like that, like they were drugged or something.

The bus was in line at the stop light we were waiting to turn into and when the light turned green and the bus turned right on Guilder Avenue, Jason peeled away from the gas station parking lot, was nearly sideswiped by a red Pathfinder, and sped away in pursuit.

“What the fuck, man? Watch what you’re doing!” I yelled.

He glanced over at me, gave me a distracted chuckle, and said, “Yeah. Sorry.” Then he focused again on that school bus.

“Where’s it going?” Lee asked from the back seat. I shrugged.

“Yeah, where’s it going?” Ray echoed.

There were only two cars between us and the bus, so it was easy enough to follow. It turned onto Dodd Street, the two cars in front continued straight. We turned off on Dodd, then stopped half a block up. The bus was pulled over to the curb. From the passenger seat I saw a boy standing on the sidewalk. It was mid-November, but that particular day it felt like early September. However, the kid was dressed as if he expected a blizzard to tear down his street any second. Heavy coat. Thick astronaut gloves on his hands. A blue and green cap and a matching scarf. He wore dirty jeans tucked into his dark blue snow boots. Through the gap between the cap and scarf I could just make out his eyes, nothing more.

The side door swung open and the boy looked over his shoulder. I glanced over and saw a woman standing inside a storm door, waving him on. He turned back around and stepped up into the bus. From behind them, we watched through the glass in the emergency exit door as the boy climbed the two or three steps, then turned and walked down the aisle, searching from an empty seat. He took one on the driver’s side, toward the rear, swung into it, and vanished from our point of view.

The bus pulled away. We followed it up Dodd for a few more blocks before it turned and swung back around to Guilder Avenue. Guilder was four lanes, and Jason swung into the left lane and pulled up next to the bus.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

More of the same. All those kids. They looked unconscious. It was hard to tell if it was the quality of the windows or the air inside the bus, but everything looked dressed in gray and a little out of focus. Then the kid with the matching cap and scarf looked at me.

He pulled his head back just an inch or so and turned toward me. He’d pulled his scarf down and I could see his face. The boy’s skin was drawn down like it was melting off his skull. His eyelids were heavy, but he’d lifted them enough to see me and when our eyes met, I felt a shock in my chest, like the kid had reached through the bus, across the expanse between us, and had wrapped his cold fingers around my heart and squeezed. That disorientation again, swirling around the melancholy I’d been feeling, and these lonely kids on this cold bus.

I lost my breath and started coughing, doubled over with my head resting against the dashboard, trying to breathe, trying to stop coughing, trying not to vomit.

Forget it, I wanted to say, just get us to work, man, please.

But Jason was still following it. And I knew why. What kind of bus picks kids up at four in the afternoon, and then drugs them--or whatever it was doing--into falling asleep? But he hadn’t felt that shock I did. So he kept following, trying to figure out what it was doing. He followed while it picked up three more kids, one on Rose Street, and a pair of them on Simmons Drive, then the bus was full.

“Okay,” Jason said. “It’s got to stop somewhere now, right?”

“Says who?” I asked.

“Well, it’s full. So it’s got to stop somewhere.”

“I don’t know that that bus has got to do anything.”

“Yeah,” Lee said.

“Yeah,” Ray echoed.

“It’s got to,” Jason repeated, and kept following it.

I wondered if the driver had noticed us tailing them the last half hour. And if he had, I wondered if we should be worried.

With a full capacity, it seemed the bus was driving faster, almost as if with more purpose, and I knew Jason was right; this bus was headed somewhere. If you’d asked me to list the first five places I thought we would end up, I wouldn’t have picked that school.

Underwood Elementary School had been closed down as long as I could remember and the rumor lately was that someone had bought it and was going to turn it into apartments.

“What’s it doing here?” Jason asked. I shrugged.

We pulled up to the curb down the block and sat there, Jason’s Escort idling. It was almost dark this time of year and at first we didn’t see the kids filing off the bus. By the time we noticed, most of them were off and following one by one down onto the playground. The bus driver stood to the side, overseeing.

Maybe it was some field trip, or a lock-in or something like that?

Jason opened his door and stepped outside.

“Where you going?” I asked.

“Want to see,” he said. “You want to come with me?”

Not really. But I opened the door anyway. I heard Lee and Ray struggling out of the cramped back seat to follow us.

We made our way down the fence surrounding the playground, but stayed far enough back we were closer to the car than to the kids.

We still couldn’t see anything from here, though. Jason and I moved closer.

We were almost to the end of the fence where the kids had all filed down to the blacktop before we saw.

The Underwood Elementary School playground was decorated with four hopscotch grids, two kickball diamonds, four 4-square pads, a basketball grid, and a duck, duck, goose circle. At each base of the kickball diamonds stood one of the kids. In each 4-square slot stood another. Likewise through the hopscotch and basketball grids. And in the center of the circle stood the bus driver.

“What kind of game is that?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know. But we’ve seen where they were going, now let’s get to work.”

“In a minute, I want to see what’s going on.” Jason said.

I shook my head.

The wind was starting to blow and it no longer felt like September. The bus driver had his arms raised above his head, like he was waiting for God to toss something down to him, but with the wind, we couldn’t hear what he was saying. Streetlight shone on his face, though, so we could tell he was saying something.

I felt that shock in my chest again and I wanted to back away, get back into Jason’s car and spend the night lugging sacks of cabbage or stacking boxes of lettuce.

I glanced around and saw the others felt it too. Ray was kneeling beside his brother, looking like he was about to throw up. Lee had his fingers hooked into the fence, his face blank. Jason . . . I don’t know what he felt, but it was something. His face, even in profile like I was seeing it, carried a weight and a sadness that seemed to be dragging him down, like he was beginning to slough off his own skin. A tear spilled from his eye and his mouth opened.

I looked back to the playground, still fighting that tug in my chest.

The bus driver was still moving his mouth, but as his voice rose, so did the wind. It cut into us now and drowned out even the sound of our own voices. When Ray looked up to Lee and said something, none of us could hear his voice.

Something rumbled under our feet. I looked at the ground, then Jason’s hand fell on my shoulder. I looked at him, then followed his gaze and saw the ground had broken open. This couldn’t be random, though, because the crack had followed the circuit of one of the kickball diamonds, from base to base, and light flared up from inside the ground.

I had a moment in the midst of all this to look around and wonder why, with all this wind, the air wasn’t filled with autumn’s dead leaves. They were everywhere, but the wind didn’t touch them.

Then the ground rumbled again and the other kickball diamond split open, followed immediately by two of the 4-square grids.

The driver was on his knees now, his head to the sky and his arms up. Beseeching was the word that came to mind.

The children stood in their places, hands at their sides, dead faces.

The basketball grid broke open, then the last two 4-square pads.

Ray was vomiting and Lee seemed to have passed out. He was still standing, though, his fingers hooked into the fence and his face pressed against the metal.

Lee wasn’t leaning against the fence. He was being pulled through it, like water through a colander, only he was liquefying flesh and cracking bone and ripping clothes. A noise came from him and I thought at first it was a scream, but then realized it was just air rushing from his body.

Ray looked up just in time to see his brother ripped apart and sucked through. His pieces flew to the center of the circle, floating above the driver’s head, reassembled into a shapeless mass of skin, hair, and bone, nothing that resembled human.

Ray screamed, but his cry was lost to the wind. I glanced over to find Jason, but he was gone, and then I saw he was on the playground, staring at the mess that used to be Lee. His face was blank, his stare locked on Lee, and he was walking slowly toward the driver.

I tried to call after him, but the wind . . .

The children were frozen in place, oblivious to the noise or the cracks at their feet.

All around the playground, light shone up from underground in funny patterns. It wasn’t the entire grids that were breaking, but parts of them, and the shapes they made were like the originals with slight variations. They shone like the truth, as if they were the real thing and these yellow painted lines were only meant to mask that truth.

I tried to make out what it would look like from above, because I was sure they made some kind of pattern. I thought of cuneiforms and hieroglyphs. There was a message in those lines, I knew it. But to whom? What did it say, and who put it there?

Jason was almost to the bus driver. I yelled again and wanted to run in and pull him back, but didn’t dare.

Then again, if they really wanted me in there, they’d have sucked me through like they did to Lee, wouldn’t they? I looked at Ray. He was face down, passed out in a puddle of his own vomit and steam rose from it, looking like it was melting the skin off his face.

I tried to roll him over so he didn’t choke, and saw that’s just what it was doing. His flesh had been burned off down to the bone and Ray’s skull screamed back at me. I dropped him and backed away.

The bus driver stood and held his arms out to Jason who stepped inside the circle, crossed to the driver, and they embraced. As I watched, Jason’s form began to soften and run like Lee’s had and he spilled--it’s the only word that fits--from the driver’s arms, up into the air where his mass combined with Lee’s, twisting in the air like dough being kneaded by giant invisible hands.

I watched cracks form in the outer of the two duck, duck, goose circles, then the inner circle crumbled and the blacktop between them turned to rubble and fell away, leaving a glowing ring of fire around the bus driver.

I finally crossed the threshold to the playground, giving up the safety of the fence. I wanted to laugh at that thought--the fence as protection--considering what it had done to Lee. I saw the boy with the blue and green hat and the matching scarf standing on one of the kickball bases, and I ran to him and tried to get his attention. He stared straight ahead, no matter which way I turned him, but he never saw me. His mouth moved and I leaned in close, putting his lips almost to my ear and I could still only barely hear him. He was chanting something.

As I watched the others, though, and this boy’s words began to match the forms their lips were making, I realized they were all chanting the same thing. It was nothing that made sense to me, nothing in English, and the sounds of the words made my head pound. Lots of guttural consonants.

“This is crazy,” I said out loud. I stood up and grabbed the kid with the scarf, thinking whatever was happening these kids played a key role and if I got them away from here it would stop. I stuffed the kid with the scarf and hat under my arm like a football and ran back to the sidewalk to set him down. Before I reached what I hoped was safety, I saw something almost as horrible as watching Lee get strained; Ray was struggling to his feet, then stumbling foot over foot toward the playground, crossing to the blacktop. I set the kid down and tried to catch Ray. He fell forward and rolled end over end to the circle where he was sucked up into the swirling mass. I was close enough to the driver I was somehow able to hear the words he said to me:

“You’ve broken the Configuration! But the Master comes and he must be fed!”

Was that what had happened to the others? They were lunch? Not me.

I turned to break some more of the Configuration, grab another kid and get him out of here, and I felt the force of that pull. The mass of my friends acted like a magnet trying to reel me in. The basketball court was close, so I struggled toward it and yanked another kid off his mark. I felt the pull loosen a bit and I made it over to another kid, pulled him off. I grabbed both kids and hauled them up to the sidewalk. I had them slung over my shoulders like bags of potatoes and when I set one down I caught a glimpse of something. When I looked closer I saw a mark just behind his right ear. It wasn’t elaborate or large, just a tiny cuneiform tattooed there. I looked at the other kid I’d hauled with this one and he had the same mark, so tiny and well-placed, no one would have seen them during the normal course of a day.

I turned back to the playground and something came up from the ring of fire, something black and slick, a jointless limb, a tentacle, then another, and a third. They waved in the air as if searching, but I didn’t stop to ponder for what.

I pulled three kids off a 4-square grid, knocked another off his spot and he fell limp to the blacktop. That pull I felt trying to draw me in was almost gone.

“The Master comes!” the driver yelled. Was the wind dying down?

I grabbed two kids off a hopscotch grid, and saw the lights from underground were dimming. Something shrieked, I think whatever was attached to those tentacles.

“The Master comes!” the driver yelled again, followed by another one of those shrieks and a tentacle wrapped around the driver, lifted him in the air and the last thing I heard him cry was, “The Master comes! I give my life for his return!” Then another tentacle snatched the mess of my friends, smashed them into the driver, breaking him and adding him to their mix. They were pulled underground and I heard a sound like bones crunching.

I pulled more kids off the grids and the lights dimmed even more. The tentacles came back up through the circle, six of them this time, then two more, almost filling the ring. They began to batter back down onto the blacktop, cracking it and widening the circle. Another tentacle slipped through.

I counted kids, and only had half a dozen more to grab. The cracks on all the grids I’d cleared were gone. I ran toward a girl in a pink and blue coat with blue gloves attached to the sleeves with pink clips. She stood dazed on the last kickball base, but she was close to the circle and when I got to her one of the tentacles knocked me back, sent me flying and I cracked my head on one of the fence posts, then slid to the ground.

I couldn’t let that stop me, though. I didn’t understand what was going on, not fully, but I knew it wasn’t something that should be allowed to happen. I ran for the girl again, snatched one of her gloves and pulled her off-balance. She stumbled a little, and I caught her and pulled her off the grid.

Before I could go back for the next kid, the tentacles broke away the last of the circle and up from the ground rose . . . holy Christ, I don’t know. There aren’t any words for what I saw. The Master, I guess. But to describe it?

It was like the tentacles I’d seen coming through the ring of fire were only a fraction of their total number, and the body they were attached to . . . there really wasn’t a body, not in the way we would qualify the term “body”. The tentacles were all attached to each other and in their midst were a hundred mouths and a thousand eyes and this thing rose fifty feet above me and that shriek I’d heard earlier, I found out how muffled it had been underground because when this thing screamed, I felt pressure in my brain and my eyes wanted to drip out of my skull. My tongue threatened to rattle straight out of my head and three of my teeth cracked.

I pulled my gaze away and pulled a kid from the last hopscotch grid. The light blinked out, the cracks healed and the Master sank several feet back into the ground. Christ, I thought, if the grids closing up makes it smaller, how big is it with them open?

It tried to struggle back up through the hole and seemed to be rattled by the sudden loss of power. It searched for me, but most of the light was gone from the playground and before it found me I pulled another girl off the basketball grid. The Master shook, shrieked, and sank again.

I grabbed the last two kids off one of the 4-square grids and suddenly all the lights were gone, all the cracks healed, and the Master gave one last brief shriek, still struggling for purchase in this world before finally slipping back down into the hole it had come from.

The wind died and suddenly I could hear the world. It was silent.

I watched the hole from across the playground. There was no way I was stepping toward it. That’s how the monster gets you with its last dying breath.

The hole was black, the flames dead. Ash blew up from the depths, settled on the blacktop. The only light left was from the streetlight on the corner.

I went to gather the kids and help them but when I looked, they were gone. I thought of the marks on them and had an image of their parents, hiding in the background, afraid to get too close in case the “master” decided they’d make a good meal, too. They park a block or so away and hang back, watching. When they see they’ve failed, they quickly grab their kids when no one’s looking and steal away again.

I stood numb. What did I do next? I didn’t know.

Call the police? And expect them to do what? I could take them to the houses of the few we’d seen being picked up, but what good would that do? I could show the cops the marks behind the kids’ ears, too, but again, what good would that do?

The school loomed over me, empty and black, and suddenly getting away from there was just about the most important thing in the world. I ran to Jason’s car and got in, then found the keys were gone. He’d probably put them in his pocket and then he . . . well, he hadn’t made it. I checked my watch and saw it was just past six. I’d have to walk home, and when I got there, I’d call work and ask for Jason to find out why he’d never come to pick me up, and when they said he wasn’t there . . . hey, I hadn’t seen him either, I didn’t know where he was. His car was found outside the Underwood school? Hmm. That’s weird. Fancy that.

I zipped up my jacket and started walking.

I got a visit the next day from a man who called himself Reverend. He told me a story that, had I not been there, I wouldn’t have believed.

He told me about the drivers, who also serve as the lower level priests. He told me about the parents and how my initial thought had probably been correct, that they’d been watching from a distance.

The Master, whose real name can’t be pronounced by the human mouth, has been trying to free itself for thousands of years, and it’s only one of the things trying to get back through. Reverend said there are countless others.

Reverend also said they were here before, millennia ago, but were forced into darkness by the dawn of time. So far the Reverend and his Congregation had managed to keep them at bay. But that night they’d stalled the Reverend and he’d feared he wouldn’t make it before the Master dug its way out of that hole.

“Thank God you were there,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess.”

Later that evening, I was at a gas station filling up before going to work. I glanced over at a bus stop. An old man in a dirty green coat with a bright red cap on his head waited for his ride. A second later a bus pulled up and the old man got on.

Inside the big empty shell, an eerie blue light shone down on the half dozen passengers, and all of them were leaning forward, their heads resting against the back of the seat in front of them. Their eyes were closed, their mouths hung open.

The Reverend had left me a number to call. I dug it out of my pocket, ran to a pay phone, dialed the number. He told me where he thought they were going to try again to bring the Master through. That was two years ago. I’ve been with the Congregation ever since.