Silas: A Supernatural Thriller (29 page)

A familiar screech ripped through the chorus of insects and tore me away from my quiet contemplation.
The night terrors of the Dreadnaught
, I mused. It sounded close, as if we were standing right on top of its lair. The scream fell silent and then picked up again a few moments later. The earth beneath me shook with its power. When it fell silent for a second time, I realized there was something strange about it, an aspect of the noise I couldn’t quite place. There was something…artificial about it. The picture in my head was that of the quitting whistle from old Disney cartoons.

I didn’t know what to do or where to go. As panic filled me, I glanced at Boy Silas, who had gotten off my lap and now stared beyond the trees. I wanted him to tell me the next step. The emotion I felt at the mere notion of my uncertainty, of my seeming cowardice, was shame.

“So Silas, what happens next?” I asked in spite of it.

Silas turned to me. He appeared calm and nodded toward the surrounding jungle.

I said, “Is it through there?”

He stuck out his tongue and smiled at the same time.

I got up on one knee, took his hand, and uttered, “Okay then, lead the way, kiddo.”

He did.

44

Silas led me through the jungle, squatting as he walked, his little-boy phallus dangling between his legs. He was much easier to keep up with in this form, but he was still quite agile. He bounced around on bent knees and used his knuckles to steady his upper body like a chimp. As usual, he’d trot off ahead and turn around every few seconds to make sure I hadn’t gotten too far behind. An expression of adoration stretched across his face when he did this. I smiled back at him, even though my whole body ached like hell.

I stopped for a moment, took a bottle of water out of my pack, and drank half of it in one gulp. Silas waddled up to me and looked up expectantly. Foamy spit had gathered at the corners of his mouth. I held the bottle out to him, but he just stared at it. “C’mon,” I said. “Take it.” When he didn’t, I tipped the bottle over and let the water flow out in a slow trickle. Silas hopped underneath the stream and lapped it up. When he finished I re-capped the bottle, laughed, and said, “If you’re gonna be a
real boy
, you’re gonna have to learn the basic tenets of manners.” He yipped and bounced away.

We resumed our walk after that. Time seemed to gain a distinct lack of meaning – we could’ve been going for ten minutes or two hours for all I knew – while I focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Silas then stopped short. He jumped up and down and made strange yapping sounds. His hand waved off in the distance.

He saw something. He knew where we were. My nerves started to unravel once more. To reconcile this I said, “Okay,
pardner
,” in my best John Wayne voice – an impression Wendy constantly made fun of because it
sounds like Bert from
Sesame Street
trying to be a badass.
It seemed to help a little, but not much.

45

Very cautiously, Silas maneuvered through the thick underbrush and seemingly impenetrable wall of trees. The insects continued their refrain while my heart provided the backbeat, pounding in rhythm with their song and skipping a beat every now and then as it was apt to do. I had more than a passing fear that arrhythmia would be the end of me. I hadn’t taken my medication in two days. Hopefully that sensitive muscle would hold up.

Don’t go there
, I thought. I couldn’t let self-doubt and uncertainty have rule over me. Not now, when I knew I needed my every sense to be sharp in order to
make it through.

Silas yelped, performing a good imitation of the way he used to whinny when he wanted to go outside. He yanked me head-first through a patch of broad-leafed shrubs. I noticed movement above me and stopped. Silas almost lost his footing, his hand still wrapped around mine. I thought I saw a shadow up in the trees and panicked, thinking there might be another vine-snake hovering nearby, but when I hunkered down and glanced through the darkened branches I saw only the moon. Silas let out an annoyed growl and tugged on my shirtsleeve. I followed his lead and crossed through another thick procession of trees.

The jungle then dropped away and a huge wall took its place, blocking our way. We stopped before it.

Not a wall
, I thought.

What stood before us, tall and impenetrable, was a mountain of rock.

46

What I’d assumed to be
a mountain was actually a cliff face that ran as far as I could see in either direction. I could see the top of the rocky overhang, twenty or so feet above my head.
It’s a gigantic plateau
, I thought. I scanned down the wall and saw a strange growth of ivy climbing up to the summit, reminding me of the outfield fences at Wrigley Park. I wrapped my fist around my chin, tugged on the two week’s worth of hair that grew there, and shrugged toward my now-human sidekick.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Silas sat there and stared at me while his chest rose and fell.

“Do we have to go over it?”

Nothing.

“Around it?”

Staring.

I rolled my eyes and pleaded, “C’mon, Si, give me a clue.”

The boy shook his head, something that any normal human might do, but seeing Silas perform the act struck me as otherworldly.
The kid’s learning
, I thought. He then shifted on his feet and sprang away from me in his ape-like gallop, only stopping once he reached the part of the cliff covered with vegetation. His shimmering eyes beseeched me to come over. I went as quickly as I could.

“What, we gotta climb?” I asked. Silas reached out and stroked the leafy green stuff with his fingertips. “Okay,” I replied, “climb it is.”

I clutched one of the thick, meaty vines. It was sticky and for a moment I thought it alive. I winced and tugged, testing its strength. It held. Placing one hand over the other, I pulled myself up a couple feet. My toes found purchase on the stone beneath the vines and I stopped to take a deep breath. I knew right then this was going to be a near impossible task. My abused body cried out in pain and fatigue overwhelmed me. Just the thought of having to do this for another fifteen feet made me cringe. I glanced down at Silas, who still crouched, looking up at me like I was nuts.

“You coming?”

Silas shook his head again and held out his hand. This time he didn’t touch the ivy but reached
through
it. He withdrew his hand quickly, as if the texture of the stone underneath frightened him. But then he did it again, this time spitting between his teeth with a strange, impatient hiss.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

Before Silas could give me another silent reply, I felt something strange. A breeze wafted over my nose and made me gag. It was a horrid, rotten smell, but nothing I’d imagine occurring in the middle of the jungle. No, this was more mundane, more…
domestic
, like the reek of an electrical fire. And it was blowing not from the open air around me, but
through the vines.

I leaned to my right, until I hovered above where Silas crouched, and kicked out with my leg. This time my foot didn’t connect with the wall – instead it pierced the vegetable curtain and entered open space. I breathed a quick gasp of surprise and dropped to the ground. Silas hopped up and down and, strangely enough, giggled. I raised my eyebrows at him and then plunged an exploratory hand through the creepers. Just as with my foot, it passed through the barrier, but this time I
did
hit something – something thin, cold and smooth; something
metallic.

I pushed forward and the material pushed along with me. I heard a creak. Withdrawing my hand, I shrugged the rucksack off my shoulders and dug through it until I found the knife. The excitement of this strange discovery flowed hot in my veins, so much that I had to calm myself down before I sheared off a finger. Silas leaned over me, his heavy breathing causing a puddle of wetness on my neck. With my instrument in hand, I stood up and went to work.

It didn’t take long to cut through the ivy, which wasn’t ivy at all but green rope created from some sort of synthetic material made to
look
like ivy, artificial leaves and all. This sort of facsimile would’ve been the pride of any Hollywood special effects department, I thought. With this contemplation came the memory of Ricky Davenport. The old jealousy rose up, but I quickly squashed it.

To my wonder, behind the wall of faux ivy was something I never expected to see – a chain-link fence. I pushed on it and it gave. I leaned my head against it, pressing against the linked diamond patterns as hard as I could. It still gave but didn’t buckle. Again came a waft of ill-smelling air – with no barrier to block the passage of air, I caught the full force of it – and pulled up the collar of my shirt. Silas, kneeling beside me and playfully jabbing at the fence, crinkled his nose in disgust.

“Smells bad, huh?” I said through the musty fabric.

It looked like he nodded, which caused another of those paroxysms of amazement to come over me. I managed to smile, though Silas obviously couldn’t see it with my shirt covering my face. When he smiled, however, I
did
see it, and it melted my heart.

I got down on my knees and pulled him in close, holding him tight while tears ran down my cheeks. I’m still not sure why I took that moment to show him how much he meant to me, but he seemed to feel the same way. His thick body shuddered and he stroked the back of my nappy, snarled hair.

“I love you,” I whispered. “I…love…you.”

“
Uv
u,” he replied, and I hugged him even tighter.

I held him at arm’s length. He was beautiful. “What do you say we figure out how to get through this bad boy?” I said.

He smiled when I put him down. After that I picked up the knife and tried to find a way to get past the fence. There was no going back now.

47

Using the knife as a wedge, I was able to peel back enough of the steel hooks to tear a small hole in the gate. With that finished we crawled through, myself in the lead. Darkness engulfed us. The moonlight shone on the ground outside the portal but distilled almost immediately, fading like a ghost into the suffocating barrage of blackness. The rank air, a boutique of smoldering copper wire and decay, seemed to lessen, as if the process of drifting through the narrow opening compounded the odors.

Silas grabbed hold of my leg. His grip was strong but not tense, as if he simply didn’t want to lose me. I looked down the length of space I now found myself in and clapped. The sound of my hands smacking together returned to me four times. I didn’t know what that meant and felt foolish for announcing my presence to whatever was lurking out there in the dark.

I held my breath and listened. I heard Silas’s panting and a faint, almost undetectable hum that sounded like a fan.

Turning back to the portal, I knelt in front of the hole I’d created, groping through the rucksack in search of one of the flares Kaiser had packed. When I found one I ripped it out too quickly, bringing a can along with it. The can dropped to the rocky floor and clanked. I clamped down on it with my hand as fast as I could and listened, but there was no sound other than our breathing. I stood up, threw the pack over my shoulder, and lit the flare.

Bright orange light filled a space that turned out to be a tunnel. Its dimensions were the same as the gate barricading it – twenty feet across and fifteen feet up, extending far beyond the reach of the flare’s sputtering light.

I knew I had to go deeper into the tunnel, but I couldn’t resist the urge to check out the gate. I got down on my hands and knees and discovered a thin steel beam with a gap in it running from one side of opening to the other, then beyond. It stretched out to my right, hugging the inside of the cliff wall. The gate itself looked like a panel from one of those large crated dog pens. The thick, stainless-steel tubing that created the gate’s frame had metal rods soldered to it every eighteen inches or so, and those rods were fastened into the gap in the beam on the floor.