Strike the Sparkwheel

      Noah’s keyboard clicked as he repeatedly slammed the 4 key with his index finger.

           “Noah we need your ult!” Paul yelled as the double-headed serpent swept its crimson head across the screen casting a spray of venom.

           As if things weren’t bad enough, a hoard of undead warriors leapt from the ground that fizzled with the venom’s acidic burn and began to circle them.

           “Noah, come on man! We need the firestorm!” Sidney said as her character swept her broadsword attempting to clear away the ghouls as they edged closer.

           Noah’s hands were sweating and his heart was beating out of his chest. They had never gotten past the crypt spiders, let alone the final gatekeeper. He watched the cooldown timer in the corner of his screen as he cast a damage boost onto Sidney’s character.

           7…6…5…

           “I’m trying! Just a few more seconds,” he yelled over the serpent’s screech.

           The timer was almost finished, but the serpent was already multiplying its army of undead lackies faster than they could be cleared away. Noah tried a protection aura to buy them more time, but in seconds the advancing ghouls quickly cleared away the enchantment with their rusted blades.

           4…3…2…

           The undead had gathered on all sides. Not even Paul’s twin lightning hammers could keep them back. They were cornered as the serpent inhaled one final breath exposing its two sets of glistening fangs. Noah kept hitting the 4 key, but the fire never came. It was too late. The serpent coated the cavern in another poison spray that drained the last of their health.

           YOU DIED was plastered on each of their screens in giant red letters.

           Paul tossed his headset down beside his computer.

           “My bad,” Noah muttered sheepishly.

           “Don’t worry man. That boss is broken,” Sidney reassured.

           “That damn snake,” Paul sighed. “I’m gonna have to grind all next week to even have enough supplies for another raid.”

           Noah checked his phone. It was four hours after they had started the raid and he had two missed calls from his mom.

           “Crap! I’ve gotta go,” he said as he unplugged the keyboard and mouse tossing them into his bag. He had barely said goodbye when he retrieved his bike from the yard and started pedaling home as fast as he could.                  

***

           With each passing second the orange glow of late evening faded. Noah had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t going to make it. The raid had lasted longer than he planned. His mom was already going to be ballistic that he had missed dinner, but he would be taxidermied if he wasn’t home before dark. He knew he had to take the shortcut.

           He stood over the seat, hunched over the handlebars, and pumped his legs trying his best to push the top speed of the BMX bike that he had outgrown well before middle school. His legs burned as he pedaled as fast as he could through the sleepy neighborhood.  

           When the sun passed below the trees the street lights each flickered to life one by one, starting in the distance toward the very top of the hill on School Street and switching on one at a time until the whole street hummed. In moments, the dull, florescent lights were swarmed with mayflies and moths, casting their shadows down on the black asphalt that his bike glided across.

           Popping the curb, Noah rode over the sidewalk and through the Jackson’s backyard; taking the open gap in their fence and descending down the slope at the edge of their property toward the hilly street that was nearly a straight shot to his house.   

           He felt the momentary reprieve of the wind blowing through his hair as he hopped off the curb and coasted down the winding road of a deep hill where the houses had started to draw further apart, and thick woods started to crop up between the houses. With all the blind driveways and curves it wasn’t the type of place where anyone should be biking, especially as the shadows stretched further across the road, but Noah was certain that if he didn’t die taking the shortcut he would be killed by his mom if he was home even one minute after dark.

           The hill started to slope upwards aggressively and he started climbing again, digging into the metal grooves that perforated the surface of the pedals. His heart beat faster now in part because he was trying to haul his thick frame up a hill on a tiny bicycle, but also because the Morris house had started to creep over the top of the hill as he climbed, racing what little remained of the fading sunset.

           His heartbeat was even faster as he could see the shadow of the two-story wooden frame with its sagging roof and walls coated in a thick mesh of ivy. What stood on top of that hill was to some just the hollowed ghost of a house, but—regardless of what they thought—the house was never really empty. It remained filled to its mossy roof with the stories that were passed down on the blacktop and whispered between open lockers. These stories—some old and some new—all tried to sew together the threads that finally solved Wayne Morris’s death and the horrible murders he had committed in that house.

           Noah found himself staring through the trees and into the dark windows of the house when the blinding headlights of a black SUV whipped over the crest of the hill. Noah swerved and the car beeped as it narrowly avoided his bike. He lost control of his handlebars, toppling off the road and skinning his hands across the gravel. He lay there for a moment on his stomach feeling the sting in his hands and his knees as the peepers called from their muddy burrows, hiding in the creeping shadows. 

           A crash in the direction of the house broke their soft chorus. Noah leapt to his feet and grabbed his bike. He should have just pedaled off, but he listened to his momentary itch of curiosity, turning toward the house.

           It had not changed—its grimace remained the same—but when he saw the figure peering out from around the side of the house his heart leapt into his chest. For a fraction of a second, he thought it might be the silhouette of a man—the shadow of Wayne Morris staring back at him from beyond the grave—but as he looked closer the shape was all wrong. It had a barreled chest, long slender arms that clutched the ivy-coated siding and an elongated skull with two black, hollow eyes that were darker than the shadows that concealed them. Noah’s legs trembled. He could see the shadows of a cluster of twisting horns on the top of its head as it began to move toward him.

           He screamed from somewhere deep within the pit of his stomach—a depth from which he had never screamed before—and the resulting sound was much squeakier than he would have ever cared to admit. Without second thought he threw himself on his bike and pedaled up the hill until his thighs felt like they would deflate and his eyes stung with the salt of sweat. He waited for whatever he had seen to come crashing through the woods after him, but nothing came. There was only the sound of the trilling peepers and Noah’s heavy breathing as he biked away the final minutes of daylight.

           It was well past sundown when he pulled his bike into the driveway, his jeans torn, his shirt wet and his hands scraped to see his mom standing on the porch beneath a light swarmed with moths. At first she looked relieved and then she was angry.

***

           That night was the first time Noah had the dream. He stood in a clearing in the woods in total blackness as the chirps and croaks that accompanied nighttime enveloped him. His skin felt slick with sweat and his heart tremored as something lumbered through leaves on the edges of his vision. One second it was behind him, but when he turned there were noises from the opposite direction.

           In one hand he clutched a plastic lighter. With his chest pounding he flipped the sparkwheel with his thumb and a brilliant, orange flame spouted from the top of the plastic cartridge basking the clearing in a bright glow. He stood outside the bones of the Morris house. Its black windows reflecting the brilliant tongue of flame.

           A branch snapped. He whipped around to face the direction of the sound. Standing between Noah and the road was a towering figure with hollow black eyes and flesh that was stretched so tight it showed every bone beneath it. Its torso and arms closely resembled a human, but its head and its legs looked like the rotting remains of a giant deer carcass. Its crown of bone-white horns glistened in the small flame he held.

           Before Noah could run, it bellowed a singular long howl that echoed through the forest like hurricane winds; turning his blood to ice and extinguishing the flame. Its sunken eyes were the last thing he would see before morning.

***

           At first, Noah didn’t tell Paul or Sidney about what he had seen that night. At least not until it had followed him home. It wasn’t standing in his yard or hiding under his bed, but every night when he finally drifted to sleep he had the same dream.

           It was a week later when he finally told them everything. The three of them sat on one of the concrete bumper guards in front of the glass windows of the convenience store with their three bikes strewn across the asphalt. The store was in the middle of an empty lot just a couple of blocks from Paul’s house on the edge of town. It was late afternoon and the sun was just barely peeking above the rows of tall pine trees on the opposite side of the road.

           “You’re crazy,” Paul said, tossing a piece of candy into his mouth.

           Sidney remained quiet. She stared into the rows of pines on the other side of the road taking a sip from her can of soda.

           “It started on the night of the raid. It’s been the same dream every night,” Noah said with just a barely audible tinge of desperation. He had wanted to tell them all week, but he was afraid they wouldn’t believe him. Now, his anxiety had become a reality: they thought he was nuts.

           Paul let a single laugh out of his nose. “I donno man. That’s like some Freddie Kruger stuff.”

           Noah’s heart sunk further. “I-I know what I saw.”

           Sidney set down the can of soda on the curb. “You wouldn’t be the first,” she said.

           “Come on Sid. You too?” Paul waved a hand dismissively in her direction.

           “My older sister told me to stay away from that place.”

           “Wh-What do you mean?” Noah asked.

           “It was Halloween a few years back when she went to the Morris house with her friends on a dare. Something scared the crap out of them. I guess it was so bad her friend had a seizure. She just always told me to stay away from the house.”

           Paul frowned. “Total BS.”     

           Noah ignored him, “Did they see something?”

           “I donno. I just remember how scared she was. Wouldn’t leave the house except for school for months.”

           “Cut the crap Sid. Your sister is just scared of everything,” Paul cut in.

           “If Noah saw something, I believe him,” Sidney said.

           Noah was at first surprised and then relieved. “Y-you do?”

           “So what now?” Sidney asked.

           “What do you mean?” Noah replied.

           “If it just keeps coming back every night, we have to stop it. Right?”

           “You mean—like—go to the Morris house?” Paul asked, failing to conceal the terror that undergirded each word.

           “What? You scared Paul?” Sidney smiled mischievously at him.

           “If Noah did see something. You think we can do anything about it?” Paul said.

           “Think of it like a raid,” she said.

           “This isn’t a raid. It’s stupidity!”

           “I’ve got it,” Noah said.

           He stood up abruptly from his seat on the bumper guard and pushed aside the glass door of the convenience store. He grabbed a green, plastic lighter from its display holder and yesterday’s paper, placing the items on the counter. The elderly cashier rung him up with little more than a single puzzled glance over the rim of his thick glasses.

***

           It was the middle of the afternoon when silhouette of the Morris house peered down on them from the top of the hill. After laying their bikes in the ditch next to the road, they walked through the high grass that grew in the yard as the corpse of the house towered above them.

           Noah unzipped his backpack and withdrew the paper, but when he flipped the sparkwheel on the lighter everything suddenly went dark around them as if night had been flipped on like a switch.

           “Wh-what just happened?” Sidney asked uneasily.

           The three friends stood in a tight group as the blackness shrouded their vision leaving only the dull shimmer of the lighter flame and the sounds of night gradually closing in around them. In the blackness, Noah could hear the persistent hum of cicadas and a low rustling on the edge of the woods just beyond the house.

           “It’s here,” Noah said in a breathy whisper. His hands had started to become slick as he held the glow of the lighter in front of them and clutched the paper under his other arm.

           “What do we do?” Paul asked. He was too panicked to whisper.

           “This would be a good time for your plan Noah,” Sidney said.

           A branch broke behind them. They turned, following the sound of incomprehensibly large footsteps bounding over the dead leaves. When the shuffling stopped Noah could see the two hollow eyes, blacker than night, staring out at him from between the trees. His legs froze as it rushed toward them leading with its gnarled crown of twisting horns. He could see the reflection of the lighter flame in its eyes before he threw his body to the side, feeling the rush of air that extinguished the flame as its charge missed.

           The creature bleated in frustration as it turned back toward him. It stood between him and his friends that were slowly edging toward the road with the front steps of the Morris house just a few feet behind him.

           “Noah get out of there!” Paul yelled, his voice cracking. Noah couldn’t see him, but he knew the sheer terror that was plastered across Paul’s face.

           The creature let out a deep snort before surging back toward Noah through the tall grass. It closed the gap between them at an impossible speed, but Noah was ready. He dug his heels into the earth and ran. He could practically feel the hot breath on his neck as he bolted for the creaky stairs of the house and flung himself through the front door; crashing onto the floor that was littered with dry branches and dead leaves. Noah hardly noticed his heart pounding in his ears as the creature slammed against the wall of the house, trying to wedge itself through the doorframe. Its horns were stuck as it thrashed, shaking decades of dust from the ceiling in its futile attempt to enter. 

           Still clutching the lighter, Noah relit the flame and touched the it to the newspaper. The thin paper burned brilliantly, casting bright embers across the floor as the colored ink wilted beneath the heat of the fire. Noah looked back at the desperate beast that reached one slender arm toward him scratching at the air before dropping the burning paper. He took one step backward as the flame grew, billowing into a torrent as it feasted on the dead leaves that littered the ground and then the walls.

           When what remained of the house’s support beams started to fall, the beast emitted one final earth shattering roar before the roof collapse above its head, swallowing it in flames.

           With the house coming down around him, Noah lowered his head and rushed through the fire, crashing out the side door and tumbling into the lawn. He was drenched in sweat and his clothes were singed when he finally crossed the yard. Sidney and Paul stared agape at the flames that had engulfed the house.

           After the fire had disassemble the remains of the house, it continued to spread over the clearing and between the trees. It didn’t stop, growing larger and hungrier with each passing minute. They heard the sirens in the distance.

           “What now?” Paul asked frantically.

           “My house. Now.” Noah answered his voice shaky with adrenaline.

           They jumped on their bikes and pedaled down the road, but even as they rode away from the house the orange glow persisted, spreading faster than they could ride. The forest crackled and burning branches sunk to the earth as the fire peeled them away.

           When they had finally reached his street, Noah saw the curtain of smoke rising between the trees and the enormous tongues of flame leaping between the houses and toppling the tall pines—the monstrous orange glow stifling what would have been a calm, black night. People were standing in the street and shouting, but there was nothing that they could do except wait as the smoke thickened.

           Noah couldn’t believe his eyes. He threw down his bike at the end of his driveway, staring in silent horror as his house burned brilliantly in a towering column of fire. He watched the flames continue to spread until the windows shattered, the roof crumbled, and two hollow eyes stared back at him from the inferno that consumed everything.