We’d been in the house on Arkham Lane for a little over three months when it happened. Ours was the two-story colonial in the left corner of the cul-de-sac—number 619. We were in the process of unpacking, with many of our things still in boxes.
I don’t imagine the government will be returning any of it anytime soon, but that’s okay with us. It’s all pretty much spoiled now.
I was hanging a set of drapes in the bedroom I shared with Marilyn when my boy burst into the room, the anguish clear in his voice. “It was there, Daddy! In the bushes!” he cried. They were words that cut me to the marrow at the time, and ones that will haunt me—hell, maybe all of us—to the end of my days.
I stood there staring at my little Davey, him dressed in dirt-streaked red shorts and an old teal Jaguars t-shirt. He was wearing flip-flops and there were bits of leaves and brush in his shaggy hair. He held his right arm out to me with his palm open and his fingers splayed wide. His arm was covered in a thin coat of black sediment—like he’d dipped it clear to the elbow in a barrel of crude oil.
“Davey!” I said, dismayed by his tears. He was a tough little guy and he usually made it a point not to cry when he hurt himself. “What happened, Bub?” I went to him and knelt down and pulled him into a fierce hug.
“There was something rustling around in the bushes behind the shed, Daddy! I was playing there with Sam and he’s gone! Sam went into the bushes and…and he’s gone!”
I wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes and his arm fell to his side. Some of the gunk smeared on his shirt.
“What happened to your arm, Davey?”
“I reached into it. I was trying to pull Sam back. But it got him, Daddy! And it was wet. I had a hold of Sam’s leg and he was barking and when it touched me, it was wet!” He started to cry again and I hugged him another minute and then hurried him down the hallway to the bathroom.
“I’m sure Sam’s okay, Davey,” I said as I worked the soap into a lather. “He’s a big dog. He can take care of himself.”
Whatever Davey had been into, it was just as sticky as maple syrup. It took fifteen minutes of scrubbing to get his arm clean. By the time I was finished, my boy looked exhausted. His flesh was a bright pink from all the scrubbing and I herded him down to his bedroom and helped him change into clean clothes.
“I think I need to sleep now,” he said. Such simple words. He walked over to his bed and crawled on top of the covers and was out like a light.
I headed into the kitchen, where Marilyn was putting contact paper down in the cupboards. I grabbed a beer and told her about what happened to Davey.
“What do you suppose it is? You don’t think he made it all the way to the creek?”
“Must have,” I replied, but I didn’t believe it myself. Our home backed up against the Timucuan Preserve, a tract of thick Florida jungle bisected by a series of tidal creeks and cypress swamps. The saw palmetto and mangroves grew so densely behind our house that I didn’t think a boy, even one as slight as Dave, could penetrate them. “He said Sam ran off. I’ll go see if I can find him.”
“Need a hand?”
“Nah, I’ll manage,” I said, and headed out to the back yard. There were thunderheads grouping in the east and the sky just above the preserve was a sickly yellow color. There would be a gully-washer in an hour or so—one of those Florida storms that blew an inch of sideways rain for twenty minutes before tuckering out and evaporating into steamy sunshine.
I crossed the lawn and headed down the gentle slope to the rickety old utility shed. It was a clapboard affair and looked like it might tumble over at any minute. I had a mind to knock it down myself just to keep Dave clear of it.
“Sam!” I called. “Here boy! Come on out of there!” I squatted at the side of the shed and stared into the jungle. It looked like a bone garden, all those knobby stalks of cypress and mangrove jumbled together like that. I whistled. “C’mon Sam!”
And then something moved in the brush. Something big. I heard it crashing around out there. “Sam?” I said. I called out for the dog, but I thought it might be something else making all that noise. I knew there were bobcats and bears in this part of the woods. A neighbor said that the park rangers had once counted sixty-seven alligators sunning themselves in the cypress swamp not a quarter mile from my back door the summer before we’d moved in.
It could be anything.
I took a step closer, squinting into that thick tangle while that thing fidgeted in the underbrush. I kept calling for the dog but I stopped when I heard the voice. It sounded like an old man. I couldn’t make out any words, but the tone was plain as day. Something was angry. I strained to hear it, to put reason to it and rationally identify it, and then the rains came.
The yellow clouds spilled raindrops the size of cherry tomatoes and they chased me inside, my shirt soaked through in less than twenty seconds.
Marilyn and I checked on Davey. He slept like the dead while our new home was battered by the warm rain. True to form, the squall played itself out within thirty minutes and when I went out front, a few of my neighbors were out in the street, watching the flash flood slide down into the storm drains.
I crossed the street to where Tom Riggins, an older man who lived alone after doing thirty years in the Navy, was using a rake to push a clog of leaves out of the opening to the drain in front of his house.
“Hello, Tom,” I called; we shook hands. “You haven’t seen Sam, have you? Davey said he ran off.”
The old man had clear blue eyes and he narrowed them when I posed my question. “Dog’s missing, is he?” He bit his lip.
I laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far. I imagine he chased a squirrel into the jungle. I just wondered if maybe you’d seen him. Dave’s kind of worried about him.”
Riggins ran a hand over the grey bristles of his buzz-cut. He leaned against his rake and fixed me with a stare. “I think you’d be wise to fence that back yard, Dennis.”
I nodded in reply. “We plan to, eventually. You thinking the deer will get at Marilyn’s tomatoes?”
“It’s not the deer I’m worried about. There’s something else in that stretch of woods. Something hungry. It’s taken a number of the neighborhood animals in my time here. Cats and dogs. I don’t believe it’s a bear or a gator though…”
We shared an uncomfortable pause and I watched the storm clouds trundle out to the west. The sun was back with a vengeance and my damp shirt was growing sticky in the heat. “I’ll keep that in mind, Tom. If you see the dog, would you bring him by?”
“I will,” he replied, returning to the leaves. “You keep Davey away from those woods, Dennis. The Timucuan is a beautiful place, but I don’t like that stretch behind your house there. It doesn’t feel like the rest of it.”
I suppressed a smirk and waved my goodbye and when I went back inside, Marilyn was anxious. “He’s got some kind of rash. Come take a look.”
Calling it a rash was generous. There were maybe a dozen quarter-sized welts on Davey’s forearm. They were bright red and rose up on the skin like chicken pocks. “Should we wake him up? Take him to the emergency room?” She was two degrees from full-blown panic, and I was headed in that direction myself.
I shook my head. “Let him sleep. I’ll put some calamine lotion on it and we’ll just watch it. I think we might have poison oak out behind the shed there.”
Her brow wrinkled at the words. “The shed? He knows the woods there are off limits.”
“I know, but he said Sam ran off. He said he tried to pull him back, whatever that means. I think he just tired himself out, but if it gets any worse we’ll take him to the emergency room.”
I put the lotion on the welts and they did go down some, but Davey was still out of sorts that night at dinner. He sat and picked at the chicken and coleslaw on his plate.
“Not hungry?” I asked him.
He weakly shook his head.
“What’s the matter sweetheart?” Marilyn asked. “Is it about Sam? He’ll be back soon.”
“No he won’t,” Davey replied. He spoke in a monotone before fixing his eyes on me. “It’s forever in there, Daddy. Eternity. Sam won’t be back.”
I shared a look with my wife. Our four-year-old son didn’t speak like that. I mean, he just didn’t.
“Sure he will,” I said quickly. “Sometimes dogs just need an adventure. But they always come home.”
I said it, but I was having a hard time believing it. I’d heard something out there. Something big. And Tom Riggins had said lots of animals had gone missing over the years.
Davey just looked at me with those blank eyes. “It’s forever in there, Dennis. Don’t ever forget it. Glorp!”
“Davey!” Marilyn said. She sprang up from her chair and went to our boy and stroked his face near his temple. “What is it honey? Are you feeling okay?”
He stared at her for a moment and then he nodded. “I’m tired, Mommy. Can I go to sleep?”
It was only 7:30, but we put him down to bed. I checked on him every twenty minutes or so until just after midnight, when I finally turned in. Marilyn was snoring lightly when I woke up two hours later, but it wasn’t her snores that stirred me.
It was the muttering coming from down the hallway.
I crept down to Davey’s room, trying to make sense of the sounds that were coming from inside.
“R’lyeh. Nyarlathotep. Shub-Niggurath.”
It was the same tone—that same dark pitch—of the harsh muttering I’d heard earlier in the preserve.
“Yog-Sothoth. Tsathoggua. Azathoth.”
I went inside. Davey was sleeping on his back. He was chanting in that foreign tongue, in that strange voice, repeating the same words over and over again. I shook him, trying to wake him. The welts on his arm were back. They looked like they had swelled a bit.
“Davey,” I said, then tried it a little louder. “Davey! Son! Wake up.”
His eyes flashed open and it took him a moment to recognize me. “I was dreaming of them, Daddy. I saw all of them.”
“What did you see, Dave? What did you see?” I knelt at his bedside and smoothed his sweat-soaked hair.
“All of the old ones, Daddy. All of the ancient ones.”
“Davey, do you feel okay? Do you want to go to the doctor?”
He shook his head. “I just want to sleep. Wake me up if Sam comes home. I have something I need to ask him.”
And just like that he was snoring again. I pulled the blanket up to his chin and kissed him lightly on the temple and went back down the hallway to my bedroom.
I never saw my son again.
It was Marilyn that found him missing. We’d slept later than usual so it was just after 7:00 when her shriek startled me from a dreamless slumber. I sprang out of bed and ran to Davey’s room.
His bed was empty, the sheets crumpled in a ball. The bay windows were wide open, the thin cotton drapes waving lazily in the faint breeze.
“He’s gone,” she said, her voice a choked squawk. “Our little boy’s gone, Dennis!”
I went to my wife and gave her a hug to try to reassure her. “I’ll take a look in the back yard. He might just be in the woods, Mary. He might have just gone looking for Sam. It’s going to be okay. Call the police. Tell them to come right away.”
I slipped into a pair of shoes and ran out into the dew-streaked grass in my pajama bottoms and an old tee-shirt. “Davey!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Davey!”
That’s when I saw them. His pajamas sat in a pile near the shed. It was as though they’d been sucked right off of him. Or, like he’d been sucked right out of them. I ran to the edge of the forest, fighting to erase the horrible image of my little boy running nude through all of that shadowed foliage. “Davey!”
I pushed my foot into the trees there. I had to go in. I had to try. But when the doorway opened, I jumped back into my yard. I only saw inside for a moment, but I knew in that instant I couldn’t go any further into those woods.
You see, there was a tunnel there in the jungle. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. It’s been written up in all of those journals. I can’t bring myself to read them. I don’t need a scientist’s description. I’ve seen the things at the other end of that portal.
Marilyn once read a snippet to me, but I had to beg her to stop when she got to the part about the eyes. The creature has many eyes…perhaps thousands of them…and tentacles that sprout from beneath its face like the petals of some horrible flower…
What more can I say? The government compensated us for our home. A team of scientists lives there around the clock. They are researching the portal. They’re trying to make sense of something that can’t be explained.
But if you ask me, and believe me, just about everyone with a stake in this thing has, my son Davey said it best.
It’s forever in there, Daddy. Eternity