"In the shadows… In the depths… In the murky afterthoughts of your darkest desires. Behind your eyes, behind your smile. On the borders of your consciousness. Unrelenting, merciless, remorseless. It waits, it watches. And it eats."
--M. Byron Geitzel, "Corporate America"

If I’ve given you the idea that a lot of odd things happen to me, allow me to disabuse you of that notion right now. Not much happens to me at all, or at least had not up until that point, and it’s been not happening most of my life. I live alone, and the condition of my apartment can usually be described as “there were signs of a struggle”. I spend two nights a week trying in vain to get my bandmates to hold it together long enough to complete a practice, and half the other nights with at least two of them borrowing my couch, smoking my weed and beating off to my porn mags.

There’s a reason I often long for the drudgery of the factory.

Tonight, however, I wanted some peace. I had let my encounter with Mr. Mister rattle me more than it should have. I mean, the guy himself wasn’t much to talk about, but for some reason, the more I thought about him handing me that newsprint clipping, the less funny that entire encounter seemed. Again, I look back and remember how innocent I was then. Later I’d know exactly what this feeling was, and why I was feeling it. But at the time, all I knew was that I had no interest in swapping dirty jokes and skunked beer with Soup and Chucky, and even less interest in hearing one of them snore as I tried to sleep. I didn’t even want to see Sam, which is a lie, because I always do, but I didn’t want any of the awkwardness that comes with it.

I signed off a bit late that night. It was already dark when I left. For some reason, I kept looking over my shoulder, perhaps expecting Mr. Mister to be following me. He wasn’t, but Officer Bacon was waiting in his squad car in the parking lot.

He rolled down his window and a plume of cigar smoke escaped. “Head straight home, Berry,” he said. “Not a night to be dawdling.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. Not even in the factory town do police feel the need to enforce curfew every night.

“Nothing yet,” he replied. “At least, as far as we can tell. All the cats in town are missing. I’m sure they’ll turn up but maybe don’t tempt fate. Feels like a good night to get indoors and stay there.”

“That was pretty much the plan,” I said. I started walking toward my bike.

“Every time a waffle iron curses in vain,” he said over my shoulder.

For a second I paused. There was something oddly familiar about what he said. I’m sure you’ve already picked up on it; he sounded a little like dear old Mrs. Bardham. In fact, he sounded just like her. It had been about sixteen years since I’d last even thought about Mrs. Bardham, but later on it would come back to me that he was the last person I saw with her, and when the shit hit the fan, one of the first things to happen was for him to start talking the way she used to.

"What did you say?" I asked, turning around. He was back to inhaling his cigar, not even acting like he heard me. Sitting there with that cloud of smoke billowing around him, I thought he looked kinda sinister, but also kind of pathetic, like a malevolent Don Knotts.

He finally turned his face toward me, a knowing look on his face. He knew what he had said, and he knew I’d heard him. "I said, it’s looking like there won’t be no moon out tonight."

I let the double negative stand and unlocked my bike’s chain. Now I wanted to be home more than ever.

The road that goes past the factory could be a stand-in for Robert Frost’s "Two Roads". It’s just one road, and there’s no yellow wood, and I guess this analogy didn’t hold up as well as I’d initially thought. But the point is that when I’m leaving it, I have only two directions I can go. I can turn left, and head straight out of town, following the only road that will actually let me leave, or I can turn right, and head back to the place I’ve always known. Now you kinda get the Frost comparison; I never have taken the road less traveled by. Not by my own volition, at any rate. My dad took me to the city once, and I swore after seeing it that once I was an adult and could do what I wanted, I would go back there and this time, nothing could make me leave.

I have to laugh at my former youthful enthusiasm. I’m getting dangerously close to the big four-oh and I have yet to even so much as put a toe across the town line since that one trip. I’ve also never been married, never owned a house, don’t own a car, still hang around with the same assholes I went to high school with and feel no compunction to leave my low-paying, spirit-killing job.

But if you asked anyone what I talk about the most, they’d say "he never shuts up about getting out of this town and making it big as a musician." Because I’m nothing if not a hypocrite.

The town was eerily silent as I biked home. Street lights flickered, casting a dim, wan light over the empty streets, giving everything a tinge of grey that made it look desolate and decrepit. In the daylight the town looks okay, if obviously old and a good deal boring, but in this light, it almost felt like the little town at the end of the world. The local shops and buildings looked dilapidated, and I could swear I saw signs of disuse and disrepair, like broken windows and holes in the siding. It was just the light, but it was enough to give me the creeps.

Then I passed Geffer Park.

Geffer Park is a little green area...okay, brown area. Not a lot of green grass here, thanks to the factory’s smoke. But anyway, it’s a grassy area where there’s some benches, and a swing set and a slide. It’s a pathetic playground, but it’s one of the more popular places for kids to go.

There were kids there now. At least ten of them, maybe more like fifteen. Most of them were standing in a circle, and I could see between their little bodies enough to note that two of the kids were kneeling in the center of the circle, crouched over something. Something that once let out a tiny mewling noise. It sounded like a...well...like a...

Oh shit.

One of them turned to look at me, and then the rest of them turned. Their faces didn’t change expression, and by that I mean that their faces didn’t really have an expression on them at all, and looking at me, they were still as stone-faced as they had been. I waved nonchalantly. They did not wave back, but continued staring until I had biked out of sight.

I had not realized until then that I was sweating. I still had not shaken the feeling of being followed. It wasn’t just the kids, either, though that hadn’t helped. The children in this town are always up to something, and they rarely talk to you or even acknowledge you, which is why it felt wrong when they’d all turned to look at me. Kids weren’t like that when I had been one, but increasingly over the last ten or twelve years, the kids were growing more odd. I blame television. That Paul has some ’splainin to do.

I will say right now that I didn’t think Mr. Mister had followed me. The feeling that was growing in me was not that someone was tailing me but that something was watching me. Something that didn’t have to move in order to keep me in its field of vision, and something that I would never, ever be able to outrun.

I stopped my bike and looked around. Everything remained utterly still. There was no wind, no smell to the air. It was as if time had stopped, perhaps to allow that presence to observe me until it was finished. This town has often had that effect on the rare stranger that visits, but usually not on the townsfolk themselves. At this moment, I felt like an outsider. I felt like the salesman who visited Ashworth Global three years ago, who had lasted all of twenty minutes before running back to his car at full tilt, driving like a mad man back up that road I’ve not had the courage to take.

When it comes down to it, that’s always been my problem. The factory town may be tiny, isolated and insular, and the factory itself an increasingly hazardous place to work, but it’s what I know, and I don’t know what strangeness awaits me in the big city. But right at that moment, I didn’t care. Nothing could feel stranger than this. I could feel little tendrils of interrogative malice tickling up under my shirt. It was just the rivulets of sweat dripping down my back, but my own sweat felt alien. A feeling washed over me that I could almost hear as if a voice was speaking to me: you do not belong here.

I gave my head a shake. I told myself it was just the familiar feeling of wishing I could get out, made a hundredfold by the interruption of Mr. Mister and the children deciding I was an interesting enough sight to wake them up from their catnapping.

I biked the rest of the way home, ignoring that feeling. It was no longer as strong; perhaps whatever it was had decided I didn’t merit any more watching, or perhaps it had never been there. I locked my bike up on the racks outside my apartment, slumped up the three flights I have to walk because the Thing Below ate the elevator, and walked down the poorly-lit hallway to my door. I went inside, had a seat on my sofa and turned on The World of Warren to see what kind of shenanigans Paul and his closest puppet pal, Moloch, could get into today.

I waited for about five minutes for my cat to come settle my lap, as she always had, before I remembered. Damned kids.

The World of Warren wasn’t on. I guess even Paul has to sleep sometimes. Local news was on instead, with local anchor Leslie Critchlow doing her best to read off the teleprompter the local ads anyone could read at any bus stop. Not that we had buses anymore; just the stops.

"The rummage sale will be on from Ten PM to Eight AM...no, I’m sorry, switch that around. This would be a great time to get rid of those unwanted items you have lying around your home. Don’t forget to bring your children. And now for wetter...and now for local weather. This evening will be partly crowd...cloudy with a thirty percentage chance of rain. We expect the rest of the week to remain overcast with moments of light dizzle, and tomorrow’s high will be 420 degrees." She coughed. "42 degrees."

She shuffled the papers in her hand, which probably had different information on it than the prompter did.

"The mayor’s office would like to remind everbody...everybody that construction continues on the off ramp to Highway 22 and Route 67, and that Old Factory Road remains the only thorough-way into or out of town..."

I turned it off. The construction was not news. Every road that led out of town had been under construction and closed to traffic since my father was a boy. It was not possible to get in or out of town without passing the factory. I wondered again, as I had many times, if I ever did try passing the factory with the intent of never returning, would it allow me to leave?

Next Chapter: Typical Day?