Zenbator

Missy and 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, and memorized state capitals and did long division and learned to write in cursive, and 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, gushed over horror movies.

Missy and Brian and Jimmy saw them all, even the new ones at the theater that were R-rated. Keith’s parents wouldn’t let him see as much as a Scooby Doo cartoon since he’d stayed up late on a Saturday to watch Chiller Theatre and caught Deathdream in its entirety instead of the expected, cordial Godzilla movie or Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Dire nightmares followed, or so he was told; Keith never remembered them.

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

The lunch bell had rung and Keith was standing outside the doors to the cafeteria. He could see through the Georgian wired glass that the rest of his gang were inside. He was already late from having gone to his locker to grab a new toy he’d snuck out of the house to show them (a battery-operated handheld game called Space Invader by Entex; built to mimic the popular arcade game with a similar name… Keith actually thought it played better). Still, he couldn’t help taking a second to deliberately cross his eyes through his spectacles at the crosshatched steel lines embedded in the safety glass and focusing to have them fuse in the wrong places, a trick that also worked on chainlink fencing and made him feel like he was momentarily slipping into another 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 benches in rows filled the room that also functioned as a gym and auditorium. They were piled with kids munching and laughing and clanking their silverware, and between the sheet vinyl tile and high, open ceiling happened a cavernous clamor that emulated a drunken raccoon train station. At the opposite end from the doors leading in from the hallway were two security doors that opened out to the playground. The service area was tucked away to the left with a moderate line of ten or twenty students extending into the dining area—to the right, a wooden stage set back in the wall held a single microphone on a stand wired to an amplifier under a multicolored hanging party banner declaring WELCOME BACK FAIRFIELD ELEMENTARY GRADES 1–6. Keith pondered how first graders had only just arrived and decided that most probably couldn’t read the sign yet anyway. He patted the game in his pocket and stepped into 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 Raggedy Ann lunchbox when Keith planted his tray and took the empty seat across from her, next to Jimmy.

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

“Cat’s blood,” she replied.

“Better not Jonesy,” Brian said, and took a bite of his sandwich. Brian sat next to Missy and liked to wear Polo shirts and was as large for his age as she was tall and slender for her age. Today was yellow, blue and white horizontal stripes. Jimmy in bluejeans and an AC/DC Back in Black tee stabbed at the pasty tomato-meat mixture with his 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 do you even fit a whole alien in a chest? Certainly Missy wasn’t bleeding cats. She had a cat. It was probably ketchup… probably.

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 on one. Turned out Brian caught it as well, having donated three weeks’ allowances to a teenage couple on a date that didn’t mind propping the door by the screen open so he could slip in from the parking lot undetected. Tales of savage monster attacks and rotting, talking corpses and Nazi werewolves machine-gunning a family 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 rang calling everyone outside for recess. Mrs. Harding escorted the lower three grades. The upper three escorted themselves. Keith was the only one who had Mrs. Harding as a teacher. She was younger than the rest, always in a wrap dress with pretty flowers on it and low block heels one could hear coming if one happened to be sketching fanged beasties and wild-eyed skulls while one ought to be be diagramming sentences.

It was a bright and breezy September Kentucky day and the four followed their schoolmates through the security doors into the yard before settling at the Dirt Pile. In the gym (recently the cafeteria), benches were getting cached and 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 the basketball hoop—if that’s your thing—or the see-saws over by the swings and slide. If you were feeling 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 even a turn in the bad chair. Beyond the blacktop lay a field nigh a half an acre that wasn’t fenced in. The lush lake of grass spread to a bent line of trees hugging the property, which from the blacktop looked small as plastic soldiers. Kids were permitted in the shallow end; venture too deep and get the whistle but a few skips offshore endured an eleven-foot-long fissure in the earth the width of a couple Big Wheels and around knee-deep (deeper near the middle, 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. They were joined at the spot by a fifth, unofficial member—Russell. A few other kids sprinkled the rift playing with Hot Wheels or privately avoiding the mob of the playground.

Russell did not 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 and 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. Yes he washed 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 slipped out of his clothes like scales fell off of 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 momentarily shook Jimmy’s confidence and his red blip took its final blow. He glanced at Keith, “One more.”

Missy said, “Brian, mangle Jimmy.” Brian slugged Jimmy on the arm. This allowed 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 play area behind the school where she was pacing and observing students (chrome whistle at the ready), Mrs. Harding could see the Dirt Pile well enough and spied the spat. She recognized the covey and she knew that they were tight. She could not hear them but no one seemed hurt, and 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 reruns of 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 of extra hours to grade papers and work on lesson plans for which she’d no response.

Mrs. Harding decided to let go of what was happening at the Dirt Pile for now and focused her attention once more on the main grounds. But her thoughts buzzed louder than playtime and it was not until activity fell silent around her that she broke from them and turned to face the field, seeing her hundred students gathered around the dry crack in the earth stolid and transfixed like it’d began divulging test answers or Little Debbies.

Russell was firing on all cylinders. He’d cleaned the first two boards (and quick) without losing a life. Keith couldn’t tell if he was a natural or’d been paying attention to his tips. There wasn’t anything complicated about doing it right; getting nervous made it difficult. Keith customarily felt that the more blips he shot 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 the four boys encircled the game observing with rapt admiration until Missy from her heightened position noticed something that everyone else 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, put both her hands on his shoulders, squeezed with both then removed one to point toward a particularly gnarly and angular rhizoid jutting like the leg from a sleeper into the long hole. She said, “That is Frankenstein,” grabbed a Matchbox car and commenced to carving at the foot.

Keith took an interest, then Brian, but Jimmy and Russell broke away to game. 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 was simply 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 flannel jutting from one unholy lump could be hung on some bloody werewolf’s claws?

Thus the three 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, sand and rock until it became its own game with Missy, Brian and Keith obliterating suspicious lumps in succession, transforming their pocket of the Dirt Pile into a dust bowl.

They barely noticed when other kids (save for Russell and Jimmy, still in the Space Invader zone) near the spot 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 seemed to make it an invitation.

The local smattering picked up their own hunting implements (or simply used their hands) and joined in the dig. The cloud of dust grew. Word got out. Like chickadees to sunflower seeds more kids followed from over 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 Keith’s screen clean. It put the contraband electronic in full 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 world 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 was containing something and had rattled out at the original gaming spot near where Missy 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 job or lining its edge in an erect, sedated stance like the trees watching over the field mumbling to each other and awaiting a stirring of supernatural activity.

Had someone 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 who was kind although she had a resting scowl and liked to peer at you over the rim of her glasses when she spoke at you and who dressed like an extra in Song of the South was threading a 16mm print from 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.

Sounded like someone wasn’t listening. It sounded like someone was in trouble or hurt. There were no windows looking into the yard—only the long, glazed concrete wall adorned with last year’s art show winners and the steel doors with the bars one pushes to open. Mrs. Puckett left the projector and opened them, drawing in a breeze with a faint smell of Japanese honeysuckle. The contrasting daylight dazzled her sight. As things became clear she still couldn’t be sure of what she was seeing.

No children were playing on the playground. She pushed her glasses all the way onto her nose and from a hundred feet away saw a cloud of dust and a crowd of kids surrounding that blasted dent in the yard just off of the blacktop and Mrs. Harding toot-toot-tooting and grabbing children up out of the hole like there was a bobcat loose in it.

Then Mrs. Harding—June—seemed to slip on something and fell out of sight among the grass and the hole 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, hoping 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 near clearing 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 the hub of the congregation, Keith. 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 the episode had liberated from the earth that 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 of a spiral appeared in smoldering, ghostly blue outlines as the thing caught inside it sensed the opportunity of a myriad to smash past the eroding seal and had at it. June Harding stepped over it without any recognition, got her hands on Keith and in a concerned manner begged, “What are all y’all doing?”

Keith knew a voice of authority when he heard one. He was also caught in a spell. Missy’s game had become an occupation and then a mission and then a meditation. When he replied again, “Digging for monsters,” this time it came with every adult’s favorite attitude How’s this not obvious?

Which 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? It looked to be the whole school! Somehow it seemed less real than the monster hunting, but it was real. Mrs. Harding told Keith to park it and returned to the Dirt Pile.

The oak knot jumped to the left.

Jimmy and Russell were also not believing their eyes. Jimmy thought he was seeing something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Russell considered his cows that entered the parlor every day for milking at the exact same times and even in the exact same position on the string without being told. They watched as Mrs. Harding pulled Keith, and then Missy and Brian and had them stand beyond the crowd.

The knot jerked right.

Cecilia Puckett appeared in the doorway connecting the school to 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 and removed next. Then Mrs. Harding grabbed Beth, 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 dust clouds. Sharon didn’t care what they found as long as it wasn’t 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 hands on him, he screamed.

Russell and Jimmy stood up. Jimmy lifted his arms, ran his fingers through his shaggy hair and Keith’s video game fell from his shirt without his knowledge. Russell didn’t see it because he was watching a glowing ball (or rock, or something) hopping to and fro 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 kids and resigned to calm down and make a general announcement to everyone to break it up, which some had already began 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 world made of a different kind of matter—and operating under direct orders—had been using its body to trace the shape of an arrowhead in spacetime at such a speed as to render it tacitly solid and levitating itself and repeatedly stabbing the pointed end of its arrowhead shape into the brittle seal that along with the container having been formerly pressed into hard, hallowed ground had been helping to bar the tiny entity from its reentry into this reality.

Runs at the wearing barrier were barely having an effect. Power inside of 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 and generating a lean barrier in midair the way a spinning fan makes an impasse between its blades the teensy, racing dot set its mimic for another collision with the softest section 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 going on, handheld video games were absolutely not allowed on school property.

June instinctively grabbed her whistle then 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 way of her weight plus the sharp, stacked leather heel of the shoe, pierced the ancient, tarred threshold in the knot. It kinked her ankle, sent her ass over teakettle, and provided the agent inside with its means of escape. The lit-up shield and spiral on its exterior changed color from blue to candy red and commenced to flashing.

From the dandelions where they stood yards away, Missy and Brian along with Keith watched Mrs. Harding pulling out kids and breaking up the flock around the massive divot. Keith knew he was cooked. She’d find the game, know it was his and the trouble he’d get in at school wouldn’t be half of what awaited him at home.

Brian said, “You know what’s really messed up?”

“The Mr. Yuk commercial.” Missy.

Brian let out a fake yell. Keith turned away from the Dirt Pile and said, “As soon as I hear that song I jump behind the couch.”

Brian to Keith, “You hid behind the couch when you thought there was a ghost in my basement.”

“I knew that was you screwing around.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Your evidence was ‘get out or I’ll kill you’ scrawled with ballpoint pen into an old piece of cardboard and signed ‘The Ghost.’”

Missy laughed and said, “I remember that. You hung all those old bedsheets and plastic up, and tried to make it a haunted house but it was just a bunch of your dad’s spooky junk. Jimmy had that rock that barely stood up he was practicing telekinesis on.”

Now they were all laughing and so distracted as not to see Mrs. Harding take her tumble, but not too to catch Mrs. Puckett booking across the blacktop. She arrived at the pit and helped Mrs. Harding to her feet. The trio then watched them having words that culminated in Mrs. Harding pointing their direction.

She appeared to pick an object off of the ground near Jimmy, then the two teachers sent everyone left at the sandbox to the blacktop to await the bell. Mrs. Harding escorted Jimmy and Russell personally as Keith thought, That’s it, even if they don’t tell, I’m not getting it back, and they’re both gonna hate me forever. His belly felt like it was getting sucked into a drain.

“Anyways I was going to say what’s messed up is if children in China want my dinner I don’t understand why they can’t have it. Isn’t me saying they can’t.”

Keith stared at Brian. He appreciated his attempt to distract him from the trauma of losing Space Invader but also thought he could be on to something. Keith asked, “How many stamps does a fish stick take?” and looked to Missy for a clue. Missy was looking in the direction of the Dirt Pile, where only Mrs. Puckett was left standing. Well—her body dressed in her darkly colored pantsuit with laced collar endured. Her noggin was coming this way.

Missy said, “Guys?”

Brian didn’t have an exact answer. “Whatever it is, probably double for international.”

“Guys…”

The boys turned and everyone faced the head of Cecilia Puckett bobbing in the air only inches away yet connected still to the rest of her form by a thinly stretched neck the length of several lunch tables. Slimy, gray droplets seeped through small cracks in the head and neck and fell to the grass. It ascended, intensely scrutinized the three, then opened its mouth far too wide. The bell signifying the end of recess rang from it.

It was as loud as a KISS concert and the kids had to cover their ears. Then in a pinched voice the head hollered, “WE HAVE TO GET IT OFF OF THE PLANET!” and spit. Dozens of wee lights flew from its eyes and guided the dollops of gray ooze in the grass back to the Dirt Pile and body section. They worked their way up the body to the neck and head filling in any cracks and repairing them as they went. Seeming to feel the ooze had gotten the gist, the wee lights took off.

Missy, who’d been visited on and off by a ghost without any head or hands around her home since she was four (and that she presumed she might be motivated to help in some way if only it was able to communicate), found herself thrilled by the experience.

Keith threw up lunch on his Zips by Stride Rite.

Brian said, “We do?”