Starshine Gate

Previous Chapter

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I strolled along the concrete footpath, over the spongy black foam at the base of the play structure, all the way to the swings.  I sat in the highest one; my feet dragged on the ground.  I felt like a bit of a freak - a grown woman in a child’s playground.

It’s strange, with age, how completely you forget the euphoria of a swing.  The butterflies in your stomach, the breeze against your cheeks, the hypnotic up and down, back and forth, to the squeak, squeak, squeak of rusting metal hinges.

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*I was playing Pokemon on my Gameboy Color at the tables by the basketball courts, challenging Sabrina in the Saffron Gym.  Her first Pokemon: Kadabra, Level 38.  I chose the Level 36 Charizard I’d recently acquired for my Blastoise in a trade with Tommy.  Slash should do it… and 24HP!*

*Engaged in the battle, I began humming a jumprope song to myself.  I’d learned it from Lacey Chung at recess, and it was stuck in my head.*

*“Mandy took a drive down to Indio, joined a curiosities show.*

*She’s got ears for fingers, teeth for toes, and a big brown eye on the end of her nose…”*

*A shrill tittering, like a cage of parakeets at the pet store.*

*I looked up.  Mathilde Koperski was sitting at the table beside me, pencil in hand, giggling uncontrollably.  I hadn’t realized I’d been chanting the words out loud.*

*“Do you like the rhyme?”  I asked her.  I’d never heard Mathilde’s laugh before.*

*She laughed so hard she dislodged her spiral notebook from her lap.  I put my game aside, picked it up, and handed it back to her.*

*Her drawing was of me, hunched over my Gameboy.  In the distance, silhouetted against the trees, was a dark, menacing figure.*

*I whirled around.  He was right behind me.  I yelped.*

*“Micah, what gives?  I almost peed my pants!”*

*Micah looked down, embarrassed, bushy brown curls falling over his eyes.  He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his red hoodie.*

*“Sorry,” he mumbled.  “You were gonna meet me by the Starshine Gate.”*

*“Yeah, at three!”  I checked my neon blue digital watch.  “It’s two twenty-one.  I was about to beat Sabrina!”*

*I turned off my Gameboy, put it in my purse, and left Mathilde to her artwork.  Her brother, Andy, was playing catch with another boy in the baseball field.  I decided to leave Sabrina for later. Instead, I sat on the swings with Micah.*

*“I know how we can beat the Great Bagwurm,” he said to me excitedly.*

*“We’re supposed to wait for Luke and Tommy to talk about strategy,” I reminded him.*

*“But we’re better than them at strategy,” he insisted.  “I don’t think Starshine Juice is gonna work.  She’s got a really hard exoskeleton, like a lobster or rhinoceros beetle.  Did you know that rhinoceros beetles can carry like 800 times their weight?”*

*“Why are we talking about rhinoceros beetles?”*

*He smiled a big, hopeful smile.  “Because if we want to kill the Great Bagwurm, we can’t just, like, squirt her with Starshine Juice.  I think I should find out where her exoskeleton is weak.”*

*I frowned.  “But you’re scared of the Great Bagwurm.  We should ask Luke first.”*

*Micah looked at me like a chastised puppy.*

*“You always do what Luke wants to do.”*

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I snapped out of my reverie to find myself alone.  The children were being herded towards the gate by their mothers, followed closely by the teen-aged basketball players, one of them bouncing the ball.  I listened to the *thump, thump, thump* fade away.  I let my feet drag on the ground, slowing my perpetual motion.

It was nearly dusk. I stared into the Forest, stoic and aloof, dried-brown leaves carpeting the floor.  A light breeze shook a waterfall of acorns from their heavy branches.  They fell, clattering to the earth like conspiratorial giggles.  The Forest kept secrets.

Irrational, baseless curiosity overcame irrational, baseless fear.  I stood, walked to the tree line, and peered into the tangled grove.  Nothing interesting.  Just oak trees, brown bushes, scattered trash.

I started walking around the nearest trees, bobbing in and out, gradually weaving deeper and deeper, farther away from the comforting sight of Fifth Avenue until the street was no longer within view.

I wasn’t lost.  All I had to do was turn to the left and walk straight, and I’d be out.

Suddenly, I noticed the forest smelled weird.  Oaks aren’t the most olfactory of trees, and I was sure it was a vegetable stench that tinged my nostrils.  Grass.  Fresh cut grass.  Something rotting, something sickly sweet.

They say smell is the sense tied strongest to memory.  And I remembered.  It smelled just like Colonel Lewis’s compost heap.

Then I saw Mathilde.

She was, maybe, twenty feet in front of me.  Crouching close to the ground, gathering acorns.  Digging a hole?

As I approached, she stood.  Whatever she’d been doing, she’d done it neatly.  Her pink dress was beauty-pageant clean.  Her ice-blonde hair hung straight and shiny, folded behind delicate ears.  A smile reached across her round face.

I was frozen.  Was it possible the smell had gotten worse?  It seemed sticky, liquid, clinging to me like sweat.  Shock numbed my fight-or-flight reflex, and I gaped.

“Mathilde?” I stuttered dumbly.

At her name, her smile drooped.  Her eyes bugged like a rabbit to a dog.  Then she turned and ran.

This, apparently, signaled my glands to emit the squirt of epinephrine I needed, and I chased her.  Weaving around trees, dodging low-hanging branches, acorns crunching under my feet, mouth-breathing through the compost stink...

“Hey, kid!”  I yelled after her.  “Kid!  Stop!”

I blinked as I pushed past a twig at eye level.  Then the Forest ended, I was at a chain-link fence separating the trees from the sidewalk, and Mathilde was gone.

I leaned on the fence and panted.  I’d made it to the southern end of The Forest, which bordered Huntington Drive.  I rested my face in my arms until my breathing slowed.

She had been there.  Then, she was gone.

I was losing it.

Straightening up, I realized the rotting grass stench had dissipated, replaced with something honey-sweet and familiar.  Jasmine.  To my right, interwoven with the fence, was a jasmine bush.

I picked a handful of the creamy white, star-shaped flowers and buried my nose in them, inhaling the perfume sweetness.  I was sizing up the strength of the fence and my climbing abilities when I discovered a more suitable Door Number Two - thirty feet west of me, a gate.

I knew that gate.  It was the point at which Tommy, Luke, and I would meet Micah when we decided to go to the park.

I gazed across Huntington, at the row of little grey and white houses with wide bay windows and sensible front yards.  Somewhere that direction, down a little side street, had been Micah’s blue house.  He’d cross Huntington at the stoplight and wait for us at the gate.  We’d called it Starshine Gate because of the jasmine.

Before escaping through Starshine Gate, I risked one more glance into The Forest.  It was nearly night, and the trees had assumed their horror-movie positions - clawing skeletal branches, discarded beer bottles catching the light of the full moon like hundreds of tiny eyes.

I heard something twitch; maybe a squirrel.  Then I saw them, and I ran.  I ran like a madwoman down Huntington, hung a left at 5th, threw myself in my car, and was in my driveway before my heart stopped pounding.

My medication really did need to be tweaked.  I really did need to call up that psychiatrist.  Because I knew what I saw at Allister Park.

Deep within The Forest, fixed on me like drones, two burning orange eyes.

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I’ll spare you the details of my torrid internet research session that night.  Haloperidol, the different drugs that make up Haloperidol and their various side effects, effects of alcohol on Haloperidol, symptoms of withdrawal, symptoms of biological assimilation.  I think I understood about half of it.  Finally, I gave up and switched over to Netflix, intending to spend the rest of the night binge-watching Doctor Who.

Then, I had a morbid impulse.

I Google’d Mathilde Koperski.

A Facebook page belonging to Matilda Koperski, a redheaded marketing manager from Ontario.  “Search for Mathilde Koperski on LinkedIn!”  Then, pages featuring bits and pieces of her name, always referring to other people.  Nothing useful.

I thought for a minute.  Then, I typed 'Andrew Koperski'.

Eureka.  I found his Facebook.  Alicia’s high school sweetheart was an IT specialist in Seattle now.  He seemed like your run-of-the-mill guy in his early 30's; there were photos of him hiking, playing with his dog, proudly holding a mug of green beer with a group of vintage bros.  His round face had aged poorly, his thick blonde curls had aged rather well.  Nowhere did I see any mention of a sister.

Before I had time to reconsider, I messaged him.

*Hi Andy!*

*I don’t know if you remember me or not, but I used to live across the street from you on Briar Rose Avenue.  I think you were friends with my sister Alicia.  I’m back in town for the summer, and was just trying to catch up with some people from the old days!  Hope you’re doing well!*

*Also, how’s Mathilde?  I remember she was an amazing artist, I think my parents still have some of her old pictures!*

*Message me back if you have time.  I’m sure Alicia would love to know how you’re doing!*

*- Ansley Vasquez :)*

 I hit send.  I highly doubted he’d get back to me.

I sprawled on the bed, landing on my little brown journal.  I pulled it out from under me and opened to a random page.  If I was going to be assaulted by figments of my imagination as I slept, I might as well know what I was up against.

I’d opened to an illustration of a swarm of small, grey, angry-looking fairy-people with gargoyle faces and fangs, taking shape out of black squiggles.

*The Droxies live and multiply in warm, dark places.  They feed off blood they suck from their pray.  Their very good at hiding.  They lure their pray with jewels and gold hidden in small, inclosed spaces.  Then they wait until their pray is completely in the space, then they block the exit and suck him dry.*

*The Droxies are the feet soldiers for The Daemon.  They are his spies because their good at hiding, and they do his biding.  He kills animals for them so that they can drink their blood if there is not enough humans around.  The Droxies are scared of light, and only go to see The Daemon on moonless nights.  They are meysers and like treasure and medal.  The Four Grand Adventurers must defeat them because they have stolen the weapon that can be used to kill The Daemon.*

I smiled.  This must have been Micah’s idea.  Once, during a game of hide and seek, he’d slipped under his bed and been mounted by a giant American cockroach.  After that, he was always scared of itchy, creepy things hiding in small, enclosed spaces.

I glanced at my closet.  I hopped out of bed, grabbed the wooden dowel, and positioned it along the track.  I tried the door a couple times.  Nope, the laws of physics still worked.  And even monsters have to obey the laws of physics.

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I woke to light streaming through my window.  I rolled over and realized the sky was still dark; the luminosity courtesy of the huge, full moon.  I took a breath.

I breathed in rotting grass and vegetable waste.

Then I heard a door creak open.

I snapped my head around, recalling the Droxies of Tommy’s grotesque picture, and their love of enclosed spaces.  I braced myself for ugly little forms emerging from my closet like bats, settling on the choicest parts of my flesh, baring sharp teeth.

The closet door had inched open, but the harried flutter didn’t come.

A purple, fleshy protuberance poked out of the depths, gingerly, like an elephant’s trunk but with a rounded tip.  It curled around the door handle, then pointed towards me.  Then it retreated.

I clinched my eyes shut.  I breathed slow and deep, letting the organic rot fill my lungs.

Just a dream.  Just a dream.

A giggle.  Shrill, tittering, like a cage full of parakeets.  Then a tap, tap, tap on my window.

My eyes shot open.  I think I screamed.

Mathilde was at the window.  Her round, porcelain-doll face pressed against the glass, staring in at me with big blue eyes that never blinked.

Her mouth was moving.  Open, shut.  Open, shut.

“Want to know?  Look below.  Want to know?  Look below.”

The same words, repeated again and again, in a high-pitched, inhuman voice.  Metallic.  Robotic.

I shifted my eyes to the ground, desperate to look at anything that wasn’t Mathilde.

I saw tentacles.  Long, boneless limbs.  Three of them, purple and bloated, slithering across the brown shag carpet like silly putty.  Weaving their way to my dangling blanket.  Towards my bed.

Through the crack in my closet door, the full moon reflected off glassy black eyes.

The monster in the closet.  With long legs that shot…

The slithering purple tentacles reared like cobras, expanded like balloons, and… opened.  I pulled the blanket over my head.

They stung.  I felt the poisonous quills on my arms and legs as I folded into myself, choking on the thick, liquid stench of vegetable rot.

“Help me, Ansley!  Please!  I’m sorry, Ansley!  Please save me!”

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***June 7, 2017***

It was almost noon when I opened my eyes.  My closet door was shut tight; the wooden dowel rested along the track.

I swallowed my morning dosage of Haloperidol, then looked up the local psychiatrist who’d been recommended to me.  It said on her website that her office was closed on Wednesdays.

Crap.  Another night of monster dreams.

I’d never been prone to vivid dreams, or even remembering my dreams for long after having them.  But two nights in the Briar Rose house had inspired two singularly disturbing nightmares.  And, for all the insistence on my meds being the culprit, I’d been on exactly the same regiment for years.

I’d experienced hallucinations, heard voices.  But those were shadow figures and incomprehensible whispers.  Nothing like this.  No autistic children, no rancid smells, no purple tentacles, and no screaming pleas from my dead best friend.

At least, not since I was eleven.

I curled up, wrapped myself in my blanket, and thought it over.

I had hallucinated about Micah.  I’d woken up screaming from nightmares of the horrifying behemoths in my imagination.  That was why I’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the first place.  Because, then, I was sure - completely, genuinely, life-pledgingly sure - I’d seen Micah dragged away by the monster that lived in Allister Park.

Was I, now, unsure?

The thought hit me like a punch.

No.  I knew what happened to Micah.  Kevin Gideon kidnapped and killed him.  They’d found Micah’s hoodie and inhaler hidden in his store.  That’s the logical explanation.  That’s what any moderately intelligent, mentally sound adult would believe.

But they never found his body.

Want to know, look below.

The thought of dream-Mathilde’s animatronic voice sent shivers down my spine.  I’d heard stories about repressed memories - people who experienced abominable things as children (usually women, usually sexual abuse), then buried the horrors deep within their subconscious, only to have them pop up years in the future, triggered by some sight or sound.

Was that what was happening to me?  Had I experienced something so traumatizing, years ago, that I’d forced myself to forget it in order to function in society?  Did that something involve Micah’s disappearance?  Sleeping in my childhood bedroom, wandering Allister Park - was all of this triggering those memories, dragging them to the surface?

I felt acid in my stomach.  The thought of violent, twisted memories hiding in my subconscious was scarier than anything in my dreams.

I went to the closet and removed the dowel from the track.  Blood pounding in my ears, I slid open the door.

Nothing but dust.  Again.

This time, I pushed myself further.  I stepped into the closet.  It really was a tiny space, I had to crouch to fit.  I turned around and pulled the door halfway closed.  I felt a rush of adrenalin - a bit of Micah’s claustrophobia had worn off on me.

A thin sliver of light seeped in.  I gasped.

There were scratches in the paint, on the back of the door.  They had to have been made by someone inside the closet.  Or something.  Something with claws.

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Next Chapter

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