Missy, Brian and Jimmy along with Keith were a proper coterie right out of the box, no trials necessary. All were in the fourth grade, which in rural Kentucky in 1981 meant that they kept the same teacher for reading, writing and math. That is where they met, memorized state capitals, did long division and learned to write in cursive. In the cafeteria over hot dogs or pizza burgers and a mini, dampened cardboard carton of chocolate milk that often opened to a puckered beak they gushed over horror movies.

Missy, Brian and Jimmy saw them all, even the new ones at the theater that were R-rated. Keith’s parents wouldn’t let him watch more than a Scooby Doo cartoon since he’d stayed up late on a Saturday to see Chiller Theatre and caught Deathdream in its entirety instead of the cordial, expected Godzilla movie or Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Dire nightmares followed, or so he was told; Keith didn’t remember them.

As to how his best friends were able in single digits to see all of the latest and greatest zombies, vampires, aliens and ax-wielding psychos he neither knew nor cared. Maybe they went with their moms and dads or had cool older cousins who passed for guardians. Could be they snuck in after grabbing a pass to The Fox and the Hound. Didn’t matter to Keith, he knew they were telling the truth (or hanging out making up spooky stories without him) and he found their enthusiasm for the subject electric and contagious.

The lunch bell rang and Keith stood outside the doors to the cafeteria. He saw through their Georgian wired glass that the rest of his gang was inside. He was late from visiting his locker to grab a toy he’d snuck from home to show them. It was a battery-operated handheld game called Space Invader built by Entex to mimic the popular arcade game with a similar name. Keith thought it played better. Still he couldn’t help taking a moment to cross his corrected eyes at the crosshatched steel lines embedded in the safety glass, mis-focusing to cause the lines to fuse incorrectly. It was a trick that worked as well on chainlink fences and shopping carts. To Keith it emulated sliding into a different dimension.

A couple of fifth graders conducting an intense philosophical debate pushed past him, “You have to be either a cat person or a dog person.”

“Dogs and cats aren’t opposites!”

“Then why do they hate each other?”

As they thrust open the doors and rambled inside, Keith was hit with a pungent aroma and could tell immediately that pizza burgers were on the menu again. He liked pizza. He liked burgers. These didn’t taste like either, more like sloppy joes with toe cheese melted over the top. But he was hungry and at least they tasted better than they smelled.

Long, rectangle cafeteria bench tables in rows filled the room that also functioned as a gym and an auditorium. They were loaded with kids munching, yakking and clanking their silverware and between the sheet vinyl tile and high, open ceiling happened a cavernous clamor that imitated a drunken raccoon train station. At the opposite end from the doors leading in from the hallway were two security doors that opened to the playground. The service area was tucked to the left with a moderate line of ten or twenty students extending into the dining area. To the right there was a wooden stage set in the wall that kept a single microphone on a stand wired to an amplifier sitting under a hanging multicolored party banner declaring WELCOME BACK FAIRFIELD ELEMENTARY GRADES 1–6. Keith pondered that first graders had only just arrived and decided most probably couldn’t read the sign yet anyway. He patted the game in his pocket and got in line for his feet-za burger and chips.

***

Missy always packed her lunch and was wearing a red plaid cowboy shirt. The color complimented her hair and it had snap buttons that looked like pearls. She was pulling a clear, makeshift baggie made from a square of plastic wrap secured with a rubber band appearing to contain some dark red goo out of her brown bag when Keith planted his tray and took the empty seat across from her, next to Jimmy.

Keith was curious and asked, “What’s that?”

“Cat’s blood,” she replied.

“Better not Jonesy,” Brian said and bit from his open-faced sandwich. Brian sat next to Missy, liked to wear Polo shirts and was as large for his age as she was tall and slender for her age. Today he was wearing yellow, blue and white horizontal stripes. Jimmy in bluejeans and an AC/DC Back in Black tee stabbed at the pasty tomato-meat mixture on his styrofoam plate with his plastic fork like it scratched his records.

Keith recalled Jonesy was the kitty in the movie where the alien explodes from an astronaut’s chest. Imagine what that must look like! How does a whole alien even fit in a chest? Certainly Missy wasn’t bleeding cats. She had a cat. Most likely it was only ketchup.

Jimmy put down his fork, picked up a chip, snapped it into two pieces and said, “So my uncle Dennis took me to see An American Werewolf in London,” and chomped. It turned out that Brian caught it also, having donated three weeks’ allowances to a teenage pair on a date who didn’t mind propping a door by the screen open so he could slip in from the lot undetected. Tales of monster attacks and rotting, talking corpses and Nazi werewolves machine-gunning a family watching television in their den followed as Jimmy and Brian took turns with narration, Missy snacked on cold tater tots dipped in cat’s blood and Keith attended slack-jawed. He wasn’t sure what a Nazi was, but it sounded like the last kind of person you’d want becoming a werewolf.

The bell called them all outside for recess. Mrs. Harding escorted the lower three grades. The upper three escorted themselves. Only Keith had Mrs. Harding as a teacher. She was younger than the rest and always in a wrap dress with pretty flowers on it and low block heels one could hear coming if one were sketching fanged beasties and wild-eyed skulls while one ought to be diagramming sentences.

It was a bright and breezy Kentucky day in early September and the four trailed their schoolmates through the security doors and crossed the blacktop to settle at the Dirt Pile. In the gym that was recently a cafeteria, benches were being cached and steel folding chairs set for an assembly.

***

The Dirt Pile was a real, true home away from home. Sure you had your hopscotch on the asphalt, or a basketball hoop if that’s your thing or the see-saws by the swings and slide. If you felt like a monkey, Fairfield Elementary sported monkey bars, a monkey arch and a monkey tower. Keith liked walking over the arch and standing on top of the tower but that wasn’t allowed. You’d get the whistle for sure and maybe a turn in the Bad Chair (if not a paddling, at his age). Beyond the blacktop lay a field nigh a half an acre that was not fenced in. The lush lake of grass spread to a bent line of trees hugging the property and from the blacktop looked as tiny as plastic soldiers. Kids were permitted in the shallow end; venture too deep and hear the whistle but a few skips offshore endured a forty-foot-long fissure in the earth the width of a couple Big Wheels and around knee-deep (deeper at its midpoint, sloping to level at the tips).

Though surrounded by tickling bluegrass and moist, yielding ground the scar was bone-dry, barren and packed like sandstone. It resembled a canyon in miniature and had some straight walls, some angling inward forming pointy troughs and some discharging odd protrusions like roots or veins that zigzagged along the floor in illogical directions as if in search of something.

Missy flitted about close to the edge practicing steps and turns for a dance recital. The boys were hunkered in the depression huddling to keep sunlight off of the game screen as Keith gave pointers (wipe out entire rows as you can, stick near the sides, don’t shoot your own shield) to no avail. The gang were joined by an unofficial, fifth member, Russell. Some other kids sprinkled the rift playing with Hot Wheels or privately avoiding the mob of the playground.

Russell didn’t share the same interests as the group but shared in being interesting. His family operated a farm and each morning—including those before school—he helped to scoop manure, toss hay and fill water pails for horses, cows, goats and chickens and he would not need to tell anyone in his class for them to know. He did wash up before leaving, but the sweet, acrid barnyard smell, which Russell didn’t mind and associated with home, got into everything on a farm and bristles of hay clung to his clothes like scales on fish.

“Can I giver a try?” he asked.

Jimmy was on a roll. “I’m on a roll!”

Brian bumped Jimmy sending a ripple through the round but Jimmy didn’t choke. “Quit it!”

Missy stopped twirling. “Let him have it!”

“I almost beat it.”

“There are infinite levels. It just gets faster and stupider,” said Keith.

That shook Jimmy’s confidence and his red blip took a final blow. He flashed puppy dog eyes at Keith, “One more.”

Missy said, “Brian, mangle Jimmy,” and Brian slugged Jimmy on the arm, allowing Keith to swipe the game, which he passed to Russell who had to lean back as Jimmy made a pretty big show of making it look like he intended to sock Brian, who reacted merely by smirking into a camera that wasn’t there.

From the blacktop and playground behind the school where she patrolled observing students with her chrome whistle at the ready, Mrs. Harding saw the Dirt Pile well and spied the spat. She knew the covey and knew that they were tight. She couldn’t hear them but no one seemed hurt, no one was making a break for the treeline and on her mind weighed a question of how to suggest to Principal Preston that although 3-2-1 Contact and The Electric Company were educational, television might not be something that the school should be relying on as a teaching tool. She’s fairly positive he’ll say it gives her a couple extra hours to grade papers and work on lesson plans for which she’d no smart response.

She forwent the goings-on at the Dirt Pile and focused her attention again on the main grounds. Her thoughts were louder than recess and it wasn’t until activity hushed around her that she broke from them and faced the field to find her young charges stolid and transfixed, gathered around the crack in the earth like it’d been dispensing test answers and free snack cakes.

Russell had been firing on all cylinders, clearing the first two boards quickly without losing one life. Keith couldn’t tell if he was a natural or’d been paying attention to the tips. There wasn’t anything complicated about it; mostly being nervous made it difficult. Keith customarily felt that the more blips he took out without taking a hit, then all the more he must have one coming. Russell had no such handicap. Russell was a stone-cold blip assassin and Brian, Jimmy and Keith encircled him observing with rapt admiration until Missy from her heightened position noticed something that the boys playing had not.

“There’s a monster in the Dirt Pile,” she said.

***

At first came no response except Brian let go a fart that sounded like a dog bark. It startled Keith and he said, “Scared me.”

“It kind of scared me, too,” said Brian.

Missy and Keith were the closest since they’d met at a birthday party where Keith had missed the donkey entirely and pinned the tail on the tree, inciting laughter and sending him to sob solo behind the house on a beaten porch swing. That’s where Missy found him in his tan corduroy pants and dress shirt quite resembling Luke Skywalker (if Luke Skywalker had worn glasses) and assured him that the kids weren’t laughing at him, they’d just found it funny and it didn’t matter what they thought anyway, and they became friends. She dropped into the crevice with the boys, put both her hands on Keith’s shoulders, squeezed then removed one to point at a particularly gnarly and angular rhizoid jutting like the leg from a sleeper into the hole. She said, “That is Frankenstein,” grabbed a Matchbox car and commenced carving at the sandy foot.

Keith and Brian took an interest. Jimmy and Russell broke away blast invaders. Only Jimmy thought to mention that Frankenstein was the doctor’s name, though they all knew it just as they knew that the monster existed in reality as Frankenstein—it simply was cooler that way. Brian thought vampires were more cooler than animated automatons and saw Dracula’s coffin in the Dirt Pile. Keith supposed a shred of plaid flannel jutting from one unholy lump could be stuck on a werewolf’s bloody claw…

Missy, Brian and Keith dug with a fervor usually reserved for Christmas morning or a new The Dukes of Hazzard. For only the pay of what minutes remained before the school bell sung them back inside, using toy cars, rocks and sticks they picked, pecked and poked at crusty blocks of dirt, rock and sand until it became its own game with the three fourth graders obliterating suspicious lumps one after another, verily transforming their pocket of the Dirt Pile into a dust bowl.

They barely noticed when other kids playing at the spot (excepting Jimmy and Russell in-the-zone) slid over and asked what was going on. Keith half-heard himself say, “We’re looking for monsters,” in a certified tone from a faraway place that must have made it an invitation because the local smattering picked up their own hunting implements, or simply used their hands, and started to help with the job.

The cloud of dust grew. Word got out. Like chickadees to sunflower seeds more kids followed from beyond the field and then from beyond the blacktop to become the first to pull a monster out of the Fairfield Dirt Pile. Jimmy and Russell had to relocate closer to the school to keep the screen on Keith’s game clean and it put the contraband electronic in clear view of Mrs. Harding if she’d happen to look in their direction.

Most importantly the exorbitant amount of added foot traffic in conjunction with the compounded pounding and ramshackle excavating had loosened an artifact from a wall in the Dirt Pile that had been semi-consciously working its way toward the surface since the last ice age. It was a hollowed-out knot of an oak tree the size of an adult fist, stained black inside and outside from a controlled burn and sealed with bitumen.

It held something and had popped out where Missy’d set events in motion attracting zero attention; there was too much dust in the air, and many creatures to unearth. By now every Fairfield Elementary student at the first recess of the new school year was either down in the trench cooperating with the dig or lining its edges in an erect, sedated stance like the trees watching over the field mumbling to each other and awaiting a stirring of supernatural activity.

Had anyone noticed the vessel it would’ve appeared as yet another arbitrary, dejected clump.

No one did.

***

Mrs. Puckett, an older teacher as most at Fairfield were, whom the children thought of as somewhere between mother age and grandmother age and kind although she had a resting scowl and liked to peer at you over the rim of her cat-eye glasses when she spoke at you and who dressed like an extra in Song of the South had just threaded a 16mm print of Song of the South into a projector now set up in the auditorium behind neat rows of little chairs all facing the stage when she heard Mrs. Harding’s whistle bleating.

That wasn’t somebody not listening; it sounded like they were in trouble or maybe hurt. There were no windows that looked into the yard, only a long, glazed concrete wall adorned with last year’s art show winners with the steel doors with the bars one pushes to open. Mrs. Puckett raced from the projector and opened one, drawing in a breeze with a faint smell of Japanese honeysuckle. The contrasting daylight dazzled her sight. When it stabilized she still couldn’t be sure what it was she was seeing.

There were no children playing on the playground. Pushing her glasses all the way onto her nose, from across the blacktop she witnessed a dense cloud of dust and a crowd of kids surrounding that blasted dent in the yard and her friend June toot-toot-tooting and grabbing children up out of the hole like there was a bobcat loose in it.

Suddenly June Harding slipped on something and fell out of view among the inverted wedge, the tall grass and the dispersing crowd. Mrs. Puckett shot from the doorway and headed for the Dirt Pile as quickly as her somewhere between mother- and grandmother-aged legs could carry her, praying that June was alright and thinking about all of the official requests she herself had submitted to have that thing filled in.

***

Neither Jimmy nor Russell heard Mrs. Harding’s thick shoes on the concrete clomping their way or police whistle. Russell was about to clear another board (Jimmy’d had a couple of turns; he plainly didn’t live as long) when she sailed past the two of them angling for Keith, the hub of the congregation. Jimmy snatched the game from Russell, turned it off and tucked it under his shirt deciding he’d be the one getting caught with it.

The artifact liberated from the earth that had remained so far undetected started to wriggle and kick like a Mexican jumping bean. On opposite sides of the dark knot, symbols of a shield and spiral appeared in smoldering, ghostly blue outlines as the trapped presence inside sensed the opportunity of a myriad to smash past the eroded seal and had at it. June Harding stepped over it unaware, got her hands on Keith and in a concerned manner begged him, “What are all y’all doing?”

Keith knew a voice of authority when he heard one but he was caught in a spell—Missy’s game had become an occupation, then a mission then ultimately a meditation. When he replied again, “Digging for monsters,” this time it carried an exasperated attitude of How’s this not obvious? that sent Mrs. Harding over the edge of restraint and she lifted him up, out of the pit and dragged him far enough back that he could see (for the first time) the cluster that they had caused. How many kids were there? Jeez, it looked like the whole school! It seemed less real than the monster hunting, but this was real.

Mrs. Harding told Keith to park it and returned to the Dirt Pile.

The oak knot jumped to the left.

Jimmy thought he was seeing something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Russell considered the cows that entered his parlor every day for milking at the exact same times and in the exact same positions on the string without being told. Both watched as Mrs. Harding tapped Missy next, then Brian and made them stand with Keith beyond the congregation.

The knot jerked right.

Cecilia Puckett appeared in the doorway connecting the school and the blacktop.

Clarence, the shortest fourth grader who stuck thumbtacks in the soles of his shoes because he was learning to tap was digging for an imaginary blob when removed. Mrs. Harding snagged Beth next, the third grader who liked to say that her parents had had her IQ tested and that she wasn’t a genius but close, and who’d abandoned her mummy to scan for spirits in the ethereal powder. Sharon didn’t care what they found as long as it was not the floating boy from Salem’s Lot. Pete had a line on a zombie and was being careful not to get bit. When Mrs. Harding put her hand on him he screamed.

Jimmy and Russell stood up. Jimmy lifted his arms and ran his fingers through his shaggy hair. Keith’s video game fell out of his shirt without him noticing and Russell didn’t see it either because he was watching a glowing ball, or rock, or something hopping back and forth in the pother among the Keds and KangaROOS. Who’d brought that thing? They’re going to kill its batteries…

June was sure no harm’d been meant; the situation was weird and it’d come out of nowhere is all. She was being bellicose with the older kids and frightening the younger ones and resigned herself to calm down and make a general announcement to everyone to break it up, which many had already begun to do.

Inside the unearthed phylactery where there wasn’t the room for a pack of cigarettes, a quasiparticle with the effective mass of a cigarette ash (a lot) tethered to an adjacent plane made of a different kind of matter and operating under direct orders had been using its teensy body to trace the shape of an arrowhead in spacetime at such a speed as to render it tacitly solid, levitating itself and repeatedly stabbing the pointy end of its arrowhead shape into the brittle seal that along with the container having been formerly pressed into hard, hallowed ground had been aiding in barring the entity from its reentry into this world.

Runs at the wearing barrier were having little effect. Power inside the oaken prison was limited, but if getting out took it another ten thousand years (or so) that was fine, the dot had a job to do and it would do it. Printing the arrowhead shape again, generating a lean barrier in midair the way a turning fan makes an impasse betwixt its spun blades the racing point set its mimic for another collision with the softest part of its prison just as outside the shell Mrs. Harding turned in the direction of the asphalt, where from she’d chosen to make her plea to the remaining stragglers.

She’d’ve caught Russell pointing at the ground near her feet had she not first spotted Space Invader lying in the dirt at Jimmy’s. Whatever else was afoot, handheld video games were absolutely not allowed on school property.

June Harding instinctively grabbed her whistle and took a stride toward the two boys. The vessel lurched and twisted to a stop in the shadow of her left foot, which came down on top of it and by the providence of her weight plus the sharp, stacked leather heel of her shoe it got its brittle, cracking orifice pierced. This caught and kinked June’s ankle, sent her ass over teakettle and provided the agent inside with a means of escape. The lit-up shield and spiral on the exterior of the oak knot shifted their colors from spectral blue to cherry red and began flashing.

Purchase the ebook and find out what happens next!