Kesh Read online
Kesh
by
Ralph L. Wahlstrom
Wild Child Publishing.com
Culver City, California
Kesh Copyright © 2013 by Ralph L. Wahlstrom
Cover illustration by Wild Child Publishing © 2013
For information on the cover art, please contact Posh Gosh.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Editor: Daenariea Irene
ISBN: 978-1-61798-097-8
If you are interested in purchasing more works of this nature, please stop by www.wildchildpublishing.com.
Wild Child Publishing.com
P.O. Box 4897
Culver City, CA 90231-4897
Printed in The United States of America
Dedication
Some years ago, my dear friends Justin and Andrea had a son who suffered from a heart abnormality. I was inspired to write a story to celebrate this little boy’s first birthday when, thanks to the Canadian Health Care System, his heart was repaired. I dedicate this novel to Kesh, his sister Kiran, and his parents, Justin and Andrea. I also honor my childhood friend Jerry, who died so many years ago, and who is the inspiration for Jesse. I’m grateful to my daughter for being such a willing and critical reader, and to my wife for being so encouraging and so good to me. Lastly, I thank Daenariea Irene, my editor at Wild Child, who so deftly sharpened my vision for this little book.
Chapter One
The Encounter
Kesh awoke with a jolt. His heart raced and the back of his neck ached. A sour odor seemed to cling to him like a layer of mist. He’d had that dream again. He slid out of bed onto the cold hardwood floor and shivered. He reached for his green terry cloth robe, finding it easily in the darkness, and then switched on the light. He slid into the chair at his small desk in the corner of the room and flipped open the journal that lay there. As soon as he felt the pen in his hand, the tension in his neck relaxed, and he began to write.
I’m running, panting, aware of my own breathing, my own heartbeat, and just like all the other times, something is following me. I can hear its footfalls keeping pace with me, soft padded strides staying behind me, just out of reach, matching me step for step.
I still don’t know where I am. It’s dark, no moon, no stars, and the trees and brush push in close on either side. The chaser falters for a moment, the steps falling out of rhythm, quickening, and again I force my legs to move faster, my muscles to increase their effort until they ache and the pace evens out once more. I know I have to keep ahead of whatever it is behind me.
I should be afraid, but I’m not. Not this time. I recognize the whole scene, the dark place, the long pursuit. I’ve been to this place many times before. When I’m in the dream I don’t remember the other dreams, but somehow I know I’ll be okay. Then when I wake up, it all comes back to me.
While I’m there, I just know I have to run and to stay ahead of the thing that tracks me so intensely, so close I can imagine the heat of its breath on my back. And each time I run through the dark over the soft leaf litter of the path I know it better. I know just when I’ll come up on the curve in the trail ahead, and even in the thick darkness, I begin to lean into the sharp turn moments before I see it.
I am running fast. Dry leaves, dirt, and debris spit out from under my feet as my body slants and I am propelled around the corner. The pursuer stays close and turns with me. In a few moments, the forest will open on either side, and I’ll sense the others running alongside of me.
I want to know who and what they are. Again, like every other time, I think I might do it this time. Then the forest closes in around me, and the other runners come so close I feel the electricity of their bodies. The next time, I really think I’m going to stop. I have to confront them. I have to find out who they are and what they want with me. I will.
Kesh put his pen down and closed the journal. He rolled over and looked at the alarm clock -- 1:10. Just beyond the glowing red digits, what sounded like the muffled grunts and hisses of animals filtered up through the heater vent. A chill ran through him, starting in the pit of his stomach and flowing outward into his chest and legs. He shuddered. Once more, he flipped the notebook open, found a blank page. He pulled the cap off the pen and began to write:
It’s happening again. I don’t know what’s going on downstairs, but it gets worse every night. I do know this—whatever is happening is scaring the crap out of me. It’s been happening a lot lately, mostly in the middle of the night just to make sure I can’t sleep. What am I saying—who could sleep through this insanity?
Or maybe it’s me after all.
I’ve been hearing things, strange things, quiet squeaks, low long hisses, barks, growls, yips, and some noises I can’t describe at all. I want to tell someone, but who can I tell? I tried to tell Evan. Some best friend!
He told me not to worry. He said I was probably just going nuts. What a funny guy!
Maybe there’s something to it. Evan said he’d heard about people going crazy from hearing things in their heads and seeing demons behind trees and rocks and stuff. He said that sometimes they think they’re covered in cockroaches or snakes or rats. Then he asked me if any of that sounded familiar? He said if it does, I’d better worry because those people end up in nut houses for the rest of their lives, playing solitaire, watching reruns of Sponge Bob, and drooling on themselves.”
I told him to take a hike, and I laughed about it, but I’m worried. This is starting to scare me. It isn’t funny.
Kesh closed the notebook, keeping his place with his index finger while he listened.
Outside, the wind was beginning to rise and the house rattled. Rain tapped against the bedroom window, and Kesh stared at the ceiling. Something chattered from the next yard, and small feet shuffled across the attic floor above him.
Through it all, in the dark, the sounds continued to filter up through the vent. A soft padding of many feet drew his alert eyes to where the ceiling met the wall opposite his bed. A minute creature glided over a web, a green spider on a delicate thread. Kesh squinted and stretched his neck toward the web. The tiny spider glowed with a soft green light.
“Fluorescence,” he whispered, almost forgetting to breathe. He lay his pen and journal down and moved closer to the web. The spider was delicately thin, like the strands of the web itself. Kesh went to his desk and fumbled for a magnifying glass.
When he turned back, the glow had disappeared. Now there was nothing but a nondescript spindly gray spider spinning a very ordinary web. Still, he thought it might do it again. He bent in close. The spider stopped working and, Kesh would have sworn, looked right at him. He glanced at the clock again—almost 1:30.
He yawned, crawled back into his bed and pulled the covers up tight against his chin. All around him, the house seemed to breathe, and the cacophony might have been an attempt to talk to him. But, the scariest noises came from downstairs, echoing up through the heater vents.
He lay listening, trying to make sense out of the sounds coming into his head. He was worried, certainly. Who wouldn’t be worried?
The truth was he felt like he needed a moment. No, he deserved a moment of peace, deserved to get some respect and to have a little certainty in his 12-year-old life. He was the scrawny kid, too small to play football, too short for basketball, and not great at sports in general.
The other old boys would goad him, “Go home. Doe
s your mother know you’re not in your crib?”
Every now and then, he’d find a surprise in his locker. Once, he found a baby bottle and a rattle, and another time someone had put a dirty diaper in his backpack. Worst of all, girls his age talked about him like he was a puppy.
“Oh, he’s just so cute,” they would say.
It made him want to puke. He remembered a photograph from the last school concert. His mother had said, “Look at these girls! They look like they could be in college. And look at Kesh.” She laughed.
He knew why she was laughing. He was always in the front row, the kid everybody pointed to as the runt while the girls were—well, they were changing. They didn’t look like sixth graders. And he was just as out of place among the boys.
That was bad enough, but it got worse. In Kesh’s mind, “worse” was defined as Jesse Madosh. Jesse was thirteen and looked eighteen, a big Indian kid who walked the halls like he owned (and hated) them. Most of the other kids called him “the Beast,” while a very foolish few quietly called him, “Half-breed.”
Kesh knew that nobody would have dared to call him that to his face, because he was liable to beat the crap out of anybody he didn’t like. And as far as Kesh knew, he didn’t like anybody. Above all else, Kesh dreaded the Beast, so it was his bad luck to run smack into him the day before. He turned a corner to go to science class and ran head first into Jesse Madosh. Kesh bounced off the muscular teen and found himself sitting on his backside, his books and science homework splayed out across the hallway.
He looked up in horror at what he had done. He knew it didn’t take much to get on Jesse’s bad side, and he was definitely there now. The collision had shaken him up too, so Jesse had to be pissed. Kesh tried to shrink back and prepared to be clobbered.
He stammered, “Oh, I’m really sorry. I mean, I didn’t mean it.”
Jesse Madosh looked down at Kesh. The younger boy felt an urge to run, but he couldn’t make his muscles obey. He was frozen to the spot. The bigger boy reached down suddenly, and Kesh shrank into the floor, trying to avoid the inevitable whack. Jesse paused, tightened his jaw, and pulled his hand back. His face went sour and he muttered something, then stormed off.
Kesh felt lucky this time, but his stomach still hurt, and he wondered how long it would be before Jesse would kick the crap out of him. After all, just about everybody said, “That Indian kid is just mean, that’s all.”
Later that day, while Mr. Fulkerson droned on about the Civil War, Kesh pondered the strange encounter. By all rights, he should have been dead or at least black and blue. Instead, he kept thinking about the boy’s face. It wasn’t an angry expression. He had just looked really disappointed. Was it because Kesh was too small to hit, not worth the effort? Kesh was relieved, but he was also puzzled.
He was jerked out of his thoughts by what sounded like a growl, and the house’s strange noises were getting louder. He looked at the clock again. He was bone tired, but he couldn’t sleep, and his head was pounding. He sat up abruptly.
“Enough! I’m going to go down there and I’m going to find out what’s going on.”
Cautiously, Kesh opened his bedroom door, and the muffled sounds became clearer. Deep grunts and airy hisses rose up to him, and a vaguely threatening murmur like a low growling thunder rumbled beneath it all. He eased onto the top step of the staircase. A slight vibration came through the wooden tread into the bottom of his foot, and as he moved down little by little, the intensity of the sound began to grow until it shook him from the inside out and made his eyes well up. His insides felt unsettled and queasy.
As he forced each foot to move and descend one step at a time, he could feel himself beginning to panic, like a weight pushing against his chest. He stopped at the bottom of the staircase and breathed deeply. He put his hand on the wall to steady himself and whispered, “Calm down, Kesh. You can do this.” He pushed his chest out and raised his shoulders as tall as he could manage, and he set off down the hallway toward the living room to face his fears.
His legs felt heavy, and his heart pounded in his chest. He almost shuffled, forcing his feet to keep moving. The low rumble vibrated right through him, and his eyes watered. He caught his breath with effort, and he considered the wisdom of continuing. He looked back, thinking he might want to turn around, to run back down the hall and up the stairs, when a voice in his head spoke to him, as clear as it could be.
It said, “Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you.”
Kesh stopped and looked around for the speaker. The light from the living room bled into the dim hallway, but nobody else was there. Then he heard it again, a woman’s voice he thought. “Don’t give up, Kesh. You must do this.”
At that moment, he didn’t think to wonder why he was hearing voices. It was a good, gentle, reassuring voice, and it was enough. He felt suddenly calmer, and he turned and continued the short journey to the living room. When he emerged from the hall, his new found confidence disappeared.
Suddenly, the terrible noise stopped and Kesh stood, limp, his eyes and mouth gaping in dumb, shocked silence. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t scream. It was more that he couldn’t comprehend what he saw in his parents’ living room in his ranch-style home on Ontario Drive.
A big worn out overstuffed chair sat just inside the living room and to the left. It was this father’s place to hunker down each night to read the paper and watch Jeopardy. Tonight though, instead of his father, a gigantic black cat lounged in the chair, his paws hanging lazily over the armrest and his tail curled around falling to the floor. The creature seemed to look past Kesh before yawning broadly, showing a mouth full of sharp, white teeth. Across the room, a magnificent and terrifying snake coiled itself comfortably on the couch, its huge head lying across the thick loop of its body.
Their nonchalance gave Kesh the impression of an afternoon conversation, but the cat’s voice shook the room. Kesh was inside the room before he realized what would meet him there, and the creatures went silent and turned suddenly, staring at him with equally surprised, bemused eyes. The snake rose up tall as if it were preparing to strike, and the great panther roared. Then, without taking a moment to think about his options, Kesh bolted for the front door.
The next instant, twelve-year-old Kesh Jones, wearing slippers, sweatpants, a tee shirt, and a green cotton bathrobe, ran out of 346 Ontario Drive and into the familiar streets of his town, but they didn’t look familiar tonight. Everything seemed alien, as if he was in the middle of bad dream. As he ran, he talked to himself to try to settle his nerves. “You’re panicking, Kesh. Don’t panic. Just keep moving.” He didn’t know where he was going, but he let his feet follow the slick pavement. He simply knew at that moment, he had to escape. How could he live with those terrible creatures? He thought, Who could blame me for being scared, for running away? Then it dawned on him that the beasts must have killed and eaten his mom and dad. And he ran faster.
The temperature was nearly fifty degrees, fairly warm for an early November night in the north, but Kesh, dressed only in pajamas and a bathrobe, was cold. The street was glossy black in the dark, wet night. He went quickly now, spurred on by fear and the chill that was beginning to creep into him. The McCarthy’s house next door was brightly lit with Christmas lights, even though Thanksgiving hadn’t arrived yet, and the night streets were as barren as the stale paths of ghost towns.
As he moved farther away from his block, the streets and the world around him seemed less and less familiar. The air was getting colder, and the chill was sinking deeper into him as he moved farther away from the brightly lit street. He had been running aimlessly without a plan, and now found himself on the path that led through the park and down to the riverbank.
He played here sometimes, although his mother had warned him about the dangers from the fast deep water of the river, homeless tramps and drunks, and the dangerous wild animals. She would say, “Somebody’s going to kidnap you, or something’s going to eat you if you go down there.”
He had never seen any wild beasts out here. The truth is, until that night, he would have had a hard time telling anyone what a wild beast was. Evan had told him it was all baloney anyway. “They just tell you that to scare you, moron!”
Until today, he had believed Evan.
The sky was an overcast mass of shifting darkness and he almost had to feel his way along the path in the park. The air felt thick. It was blacker than any night he could remember, yet he seemed to be gaining his footing and he began to move surely without stumbling. He went steadily now, not so frantically. He went over the events of the past half hour.
None of it made sense, but he was sure it had happened. At least something had happened Now he had to figure out what to do next. He couldn’t go home, but he wouldn’t be able to stay out here either. It would be best to keep on the path and cut through the park to Evan’s house.
He shivered again as a cool mist settled over him. A light rain coated his skin, and a long howl rose up in the distance. The middle of town and Ontario Drive now felt very far away. The howl came again, seeming closer now. He walked along more quickly and began to wonder if something, or someone, was watching him from the woods. As he went deeper into the park, the rain intensified moment by moment, until it drove down hard and soaked through his clothing to his skin.
Lightning flashed above him, illuminating the billowing black clouds. He kept moving. The thunder roared and the electrical storm threw a blinding white light on the leafless trees ahead and the rushing rain-swollen river to his left.
After each flash he counted, “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three…” He watched the sky, anticipating the next jolt of sound and light. His neck grew tense and ached with the cold. The intervals grew shorter, until the sky cracked open in one terrifying explosion, and Kesh’s insides shook with the force. He ran in panic, moving farther and farther into the woods as the thunder and lightning drifted into the distance. Then the rain eased to a dull drizzle, and the air grew calm.
Kesh