Ramsey and I headed toward the door. I hung back at the threshold and waited for him to lead the way. He didn’t move.
“You okay?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Shit, I’m scared. Those fuckin’ things, when they look like the Thumbprint People—”
“I can lead,” I said, “but I can’t work the batteries. I need you with me. Otherwise I think I’d blow us all sky-high.”
Ramsey took in a deep breath, grimaced, and then his face smoothed out. “Okay, let’s go.”
I led the way.
Near the corridor connecting the theater to the Box, the outside air seeped through the tunnel’s thin steel walls, my clothes, and into my bones.
This close, the mumbling voices were at their loudest. They called Ramsey’s name, sounding as if they were talking through mouths the size of pinholes, yet somehow their voices were loud, defying logic. Of course, most everything about the monsters defied logic. As did the summer snowstorms.
I went through the door, careful to stay as far away from the walls as possible. Ramsey followed at my heels. We stopped at the locked trailer door, and he struggled to pull the keys from his pocket, but he was shaking so badly they fell from his grip and hit the concrete with a soft clink. He hesitated to bend and pick them up, so I did instead. Time wasn’t our friend now. The longer we mucked around in here, the better chance the monsters had of getting inside—and with Mia in labor, that was something we absolutely couldn’t allow.
As soon as I touched the icy metal of the keys, a thump rattled the tunnel wall to my right. The lamp hanging above us from a scuffed orange extension cord flickered with the force of the hit, and when the first thump was followed by a series of half a dozen more (these on both sides), the lamp fell and shattered, extinguishing all light in the blink of an eye.
Luckily, some of the glow from inside of the theater cut through a good portion of the darkness, but it wasn’t the same. I felt like I was five years old again, hiding from the boogeyman, knowing my tiny basketball-shaped nightlight wasn’t going to do a thing to prevent the monster from escaping the closet.
I pulled out my lighter and struck it. That was when I saw the hunched shadows pressed against the curved wall. I don’t know how the shadows came through the metal with the absence of light both outside and in the tunnel, and with the walls being made of steel (albeit a thin steel), but they did, and the fear I felt branched through every vein in my body. I guess it was just their ability to bend the known rules of the universe to their will. Whatever, as long as they got their meals.
Mumbling, the one nearest me, said, “Ohhhh Gradddyyyyy…Gradddyyyyy, my dear…please let us innnnnnnnn—”
“Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin!” answered another. The rest let out wheezy laughs.
“Can you heaaaar me?” spoke the one to my right. “Or shall I do this?”
A long arm parted from the shadow, bent at the elbow, and shot toward the top of what I guess was its face, near the mouth. I heard a squelch as the point of the shadow’s elbow pulled away from the head and the arm extended. The squelch changed into a ripping sound.
“Ahhhh, that’s much better!” the wraith said in a louder, clearer voice. “I can finally breathe!”
All around us came the sounds of the Thumbprint People tearing open their pinhole-sized mouths. Imagining their jagged, uneven lips flapping as they spoke nearly brought me to my knees.
The heat of the lighter suddenly stung my thumb, and I dropped it, hearing it cartwheel away in the darkness. Before I bent to look for it, the monsters slapped the walls. Each one was like an electric shock to the heart. Ramsey let out a soft yelp as I watched the silhouettes of deformed hands smear their blood in waves.
“Which key?” I said. “Ramsey, which key?”
He kept on staring.
I shook him, and the keys jingled. “They can’t get in. We’re okay. But the sooner we light the place up, the sooner they’re gone.”
“We’ll never leave, we’ll never leave, we’ll never leaaaaaveeeeeee,” one said in a mocking, singsong tone.
Ramsey kept on ignoring me. “Fuck this,” he whispered, and his right hand, still shaking but disciplined by years of muscle memory, fell to the unseen holster on his hip and yanked a pistol free. In one smooth motion, he aimed at the source of the sound.
I lunged at him, grabbed his wrist, and he jerked the gun upward. It went off once, blasting a hole in the tunnel’s ceiling the size of a saucer. The sound was enormous, ear-shattering, and the heat coming off the barrel was enough to singe the hairs on my face.
“Get off me, Grady!”
“Stop it! Stop it!”
The monsters laughed together, their hands beating against the walls over and over again.
Ramsey and I continued wrestling, and the gun went off I don’t know how many times. I didn’t have a chance to count the holes in the tunnel when it was all said and done, because my focus was on not taking a slug to the gut. But I do know more than a few punched through the Battery Box’s walls.
The immensity of the bullets evaporating the metal exterior rivaled the explosion of the shots, but failed to drown out the chorus of monstrous laughter. Still, the struggle for the pistol continued, and it only stopped when another sound joined in. It was the sound of a giant battery powering down.
A low, dying hum.
Darkness.
The lights in the theater no longer reached into the tunnel, and the blackness filled every inch of the corridor and beyond, merging with the blackness of the outside world.
Both Ramsey and I went limp. My arms fell to my sides like wet noodles, and the gun dropped to
