Terror -the sequel (by Wes)

Imagination is a wonderful gift, and it keeps them crazy. It’s the summer after Wes’s senior year in high school. He works in the dish room at Jeff’s, a classy restaurant on Main Street, just above the hollow of Poor Meadow Brook. On weekends the crew cleans and scours until one in the morning. When they come out from their kitchen duties they all smell of beer and French fries. Luckily Wes has Maquan Pond and his grandfather Edgar’s waterfront property to head for. A little skinny-dipping before sleeping bag time washes away the stench and grease. Since it’s July, the family is already down there, asleep in a big army tent in Grampa Mac’s pine grove. Wes will take his midnight swim – this was before Jaws cured him of midnight swims – and then head back up to sack out. He fishes the car keys out of his cutoff shorts and climbs into his ’49 Chevy. He drives out of the parking lot, left onto route 27, and heads past the foot of Phillips Street, down to the lights at 58.
In those days you could take an early left onto Indian Head Street without going through the lights. He does. A man is hitchhiking, silhouetted against the traffic lights. He’s heading southeast toward Plymouth, maybe. Wes is headed north. The guy looks a little grungy. It’s at least the very witching hour. Wes slows down to make the turn, and turns, and drives on. His imagination kicks in. Boy, was that guy creepy looking. Gee, just like in all those spooky hitchhiker movies. The hitchhiker is always a crazed killer. What if that hitchhiker was a crazed killer? What if Wes had stopped and picked him up? Wes would never stop and pick him up. Wes hates crazed killers. But what if the man were really crazy? What if he was looking for his next victim? Luckily he’s heading to Plymouth for his next victim, and Wes is going in a different direction. But what if he changed his mind? Maybe he doesn’t care if his next victim comes from southeast of Monponsett or not. What if he jumped onto the back of the ’49 Chevy? Which he couldn’t, since the trunk on a ’49 Chevy is seriously rounded, and he’d slide right off. And Wes is going too fast. But what if when he slowed down to take the turn, the guy jumped on back? What if he’s hanging on to the back right now, clutching the bumper and rear license plate? Good grief, Charlie Brown! A serial killer is tailing Wes right into the piney woods where his innocent younger siblings are peacefully sleeping, unaware that death is rapidly approaching on the trunk of their brother’s car.
Wes turns down the dirt road into the piney woods. There is no psychopath on the back of his car. He knows that. He recognizes that fact quite clearly. He is a very bright boy. He is hyperventilating – and the stench of beer and French fries is overwhelming him. Still, you can’t go skinny-dipping alone in the middle of the night when there’s a madman on the back of your car. He could kill you even quicker than a shark in the dark. No, Wes doesn’t even think about a shark in the dark. Robert Benchley hasn’t scared him to death with Jaws yet. But what about that enormous snapping turtle that lurks in the black lake? Never mind about the turtle. No one’s going anywhere near the water with a homicidal fruitcake on his tail. Wes careens a little wildly around a couple curves to shake him off, but since he’s not really there, he can’t. When Wes reaches the tent, he’s still not with him, and Wes is scared to death. He slams on the brakes about three feet from the tent door. Does he dare turn out the headlights? Yeah, he has to turn out the headlights. He’s more scared of draining the battery than of feeling the killer breathing down the back of his neck – no, he’s not! – yes, he is! – but there’s no way Wes will be coming back out here later to shut off the lights. Besides if he doesn’t shut off the lights, he’ll wake up the kids.
What the hell, wake ‘em all up! They are all awake anyway. Laurie’s never one for letting the brothers and sisters sleep before it’s necessary, and tonight they have cousins Billy and Tommy Tobin, and their friend, bull-sized Franny Kramarski, the cheerful Pollack, staying over with them. Reinforcements! Yes! Wes lunges from the car to the tent (a three feet dive at most) and then, gathering his wits, enters calmly, to cheerful greetings, and announces calmly, to general consternation, that a murderous hitchhiker jumped onto the back of his ’49 Chevy down by the lights at 27 and 58, has followed him into the woods, and is in fact outside the tent this very moment, ready to do his worst.
Pandemonium ensues.
If any members of the Blauss-Tobin-Kramarski clan are less imaginative than Wesley Blauss, they are at least as eager for a good old-fashioned screamfest. The demented dishwasher is forced to recount the tale in lurid detail. Their eyes grow wide in the abrupt glare of flashlights popping on all over the tent. A hitchhiker? Murderer? Here? In the woods? At one in the morning?
And then, Laurie remembers. She’s left the axe outside. In the crotch of a nearby pine tree.
The axe!
Omigod, the weapon of choice for your average American axe murderer, left right out there in the pitch black where he can easily spot it.
Pitched whispers all around.
They’ve got to retrieve the axe.
“Laurie—you left it there—“
Fearless Laurie takes a flashlight. She will fetch the axe. Everyone waits breathlessly while she unzips the tent door, slips out into the night. Silence. Silence. Little noises. Silence. A rush of footsteps, and she returns, diving through the tent door. Wes zips it behind her to prevent any forcible entry. Where’s the axe?
“It isn’t there! It’s gone! I know just where I left it in the crotch of that tree, and now it isn’t there.”
“Omigod! The axe murderer has the axe!”
Pandemonium reensues. More or less.
And they have nothing with which to protect themselves except—they look around. The broom. That’s it. They have a broom. (Mom is a stickler for cleaning up every living space, tent included.) Wes takes the broom. He’s the oldest. And if he swings it wildly enough, he may fend the psychopath off long enough so that Wes is the last to die. Like musk oxen facing the wolves, they back into a circle, all their little heads bristling outward in a show of terror-stricken camaraderie.
They will face this cruel fate together. They will sacrifice the littlest ones, Eric and Dave, only if they must. They will be brave. Resourceful. Strong.
Snap. A twig cracks outside the tent.
A rushed intake of breaths all around, followed by intense silence. They cringe. So tight is the circle their shoulder blades have begun to fuse together.
Rustle. Shuffling in the grove.
No one inhales. No one exhales. Everyone holds his final breath in dread unison.
Thud! A heavy footstep in the pine needles.
Crash! Trees falling to the crazed murder weapon. (It may be pinecones dropping, but these are pinecones with the weight of imagination hurling themselves down like grenades.)
Moments pass. Seconds slip away. Minutes crawl. The night woods are alive with the sounds of – the night woods, amplified by ear drums stretched taut with smothered screams forced inward, accompanied by the pounding of nine little tell-tale hearts. The axe murderer is everywhere. He’s on the left of the tent, he’s on the right. North! South! West! He’s upon them! He’s holding them in awful suspense. He savors the agonizing beauty of an infinitely momentary pause before the attack begins. Where will the axe fall first? Through which pitch of canvas will it suddenly rip, cleaving an innocent sibling to the brisket? In Wes’s hands the broom swings crazily. More danger by far from concussion at Wes’s hands than dismemberment at the hands of –
“I have to go to the bathroom,” whimpers Eric.
The woods fall hushed.
“Sssshhh,” they all admonish. “You have to wait.”
The stillness stretches almost to eternity, and then Eric wails, “I really have to go to the bathroom.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Hold it.”
“I can’t hold it.”
“There’s an axe murderer out there.”
“I gotta pee.”
“He’ll chop it off.”
“I’m gonna wet myself.”
“All right,” says Wes, considering the options carefully, and finding none. “All right.” Gotta think this out. Death or wet sleeping bags. Neither alternative appeals, but the wet sleeping bags would be really gross. “All right. Here’s what we do. (They are speaking in stage whispers now) I’ll unzip the door. Then I’ll slip out with the broom and stand there outside the door. You duck out between my legs, take three steps, pee, and I’ll cover you with the broom.”
Silently Wes kneels before the flap and begins to unzip. It takes forever to unzip a tent flap when lives depend on absolute silence. Eric clutches his crotch. His big brother steps out onto the damp pine needles, soaked in the blood of dead squirrels and decapitated skunks. With an upward sweep he drives the nightsoft cobwebs from the air before them. Now, Eric!
Eric leaps out from between his brother’s legs, nearly upending him. He takes three steps forward and pees all over the bumper of Wes’s car. The broom ricochets wildly through the shadows as the terrified kitchen boy wards off serial killers and vampire bats. Then as one the pair fling themselves headlong back into the tent. They pant. They curse the darkness (the Tobins are more expressive than the Blausses are ever allowed to be by their mother, and their curses are more colorful and crude). The children sit in a huddled circle, backs inward, faces turned to impending doom, and await the morning.
The morning comes. Bird song filters through the grove. A groggy gray steals over the wakeful band. Not so wakeful after this night of the living dead, but everyone is struggling to keep his eyelids open. The flashlight batteries have long since died, but now they begin to see each other by the dawn’s early light. Up peeks the sun behind the tent. They are a retarded sight, the lot of them.
Laurie slips out into the relative safety of daybreak to relieve herself. She returns with a weak grin, clutching the axe. “I forgot,” she says. “It was in the other tree.”
“There wasn’t really a guy on the back of the car,” Wes says. “I was just hallucinating.”
Laurie swings at him, but fortunately the axe misses and only grazes a younger brother. Franny and Billy land a couple of friendly punches in his ribs, and Tommy, the monkey on his back, gets him in a headlock. The youngsters set upon their eldest sibling with pillows and, by the time Mom shows up with breakfast, the tent is full of sleeping children, covered in a snowfall of feathers.

You can never have enough terror in a cheerful childhood.