This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?
There were children everywhere inside the shop area for Blueberry Falls. Janet straightened her hat and walked into the middle of a pack of charging six-year-olds and broke them up.
“I understand someone here has ordered, bought, and paid for the extended tour.”
The kids continued barging around, screaming, and throwing things. One of them, a kid with pale skin and incredibly dark hair was mashing the face of another child while digging his hands elbow-deep in the display of precious stones while another child toppled a display stand full of t-shirts with the Blueberry Falls logo on them.
“Okay,” she yelled. “It’s clear that I’m going to have to find some of you to feed to the monster of Blueberry Falls. You are the biggest, loudest, most obnoxious group so far. Just the way he likes them. Okay, line up now, let’s go. Time to march to your deaths!”
All the kids stopped. They gathered around her, as well as a handful of exhausted-looking adults, glad that for once someone else was doing all the yelling.
“Is there a monster?” said one of them.
“Yes, and he loves eating children, just like you lot.”
“You’re lying. This place is just as fake as everything else here. There are laws. You’ve got to keep us safe all the time.”
“Hands and arms inside the car at all times, kid. I can’t guarantee your safety, especially if you are stupid enough to leave the path, go under a safety railing, or otherwise leave the safety of where I tell you to go and where I tell you it’s safe to go. So, you see if you were to get away from the group and me, or one of the other responsible adults here didn’t notice you were gone. I’m not responsible when the monster eats you while I’m not looking.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s in the contract on your tickets. Your parents and guardians here signed them when you bought the extensive tour, so read ‘em. I’ll get the elevator. The one that goes extra deep.”
At some point, she’d gotten down on their level. She crossed the room, righted the stand of t-shirts, and hit the button on a second elevator. She turned and waited, grabbed a clipboard from the old lady at the front, and started ticking everyone in the tour group off.
Five adults, all tired already, and three of them looked like they might be high, and twelve children, a kindergarten class. Three were teachers, and the other parents were along for the ride. At least one teacher smelled like dope and she was the intelligent one.
The kids were all terrors.
Janet watched them try to line the kids up to head down, and it was fun to watch. Half of them were fine, but the other half, well. She shook her head.
“Jake, where are you?”
They found him sticking his hand up a teenager’s skirt, who was trying to buy a redundant ticket. They dragged him back.
“Maryanne, don’t do that!”
She was trying to pull one of the lower product shelves down by climbing on it. They got her back, batting her left and right to find…
“Cable, get out of that!”
He was climbing into a bin full of videos, kicking DVDs and CDs out onto the floor.
Cable came back, and no sooner, Alice was gone.
“Where’s Alice?”
“I’ve got her,” said one parent. “She was trying to get out of here.”
“Caught her headed out the door.”
“Cute. Alice, stay with us, honey.”
Janet wrote ‘screamer’ down next to Alice’s name, and this proved true the second the doors closed. The elevator opened, Janet called for everyone, led them in, and then turned to face the group. The doors shut behind her, and Alice started up.
She screamed. There is a piercing level of screaming that a girl her age is capable of, and Alice was perfect at it. She squealed a high-pitched wail that was so pure, Janet Thought that’s what her call in life might be if she made it to nineteen. Complete movie scream queen. Who knew?
She smiled. The other five adults were whimpering, and Alice was just getting going. Janet had rubber earplugs in. She leaned down, put a warm soft hand on Alice’s shoulder, thinking she wasn’t supposed to, and she hoped no one heard she did this later and said “Honey, if you keep up that beautiful screaming,” Alice didn’t even seem to need to stop to breathe, “then you’re just going to attract the monster faster.”
Alice dropped silently and grappled with her momma’s hand.
“That’s right. Everyone, adults included, has to behave from this point on, or you will certainly bring the monster down upon us.”
“Isn’t that the point?” said one adult. “You come in here, guided tour through a bunch of fake caves, and get scared by the monster who pops out once in a while?”
“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? I wish this was just a haunted house sometimes. Real caves. Real monster? Truth is, I’ve never seen him.”
“So you’ve heard it?” said a kid.
There was a lurch in all their stomachs.
“We’re here, thousands of feet down, and yeah, I’ve heard some strange things down here.”
The doors opened, but behind all the kids on the other side of the elevator.
“Everybody out, please, and I’ll take you into the natural hall of mirrors.”
The kids shuffled out, and the parents kept them surrounded as best they could. There weren’t enough parental hands to catch everybody, so a couple of kids had to be the second link in the chain, and they didn’t like it,
The mirror chamber was enormous, round, and admittedly largely man-made. Rock walls, a large cave room, well lit, and surrounded with strangely shaped fun house mirrors. It was clear they’d been brought down here for the tour. The top and bottom borders of the mirrors were all different colors.
The kids immediately spread out, looking in all the mirrors, terrorizing the under-prepared adults. One of them handling four kids seemed pretty competent.
“Look I’m tall.”
“I got a goofy head.”
“I look like an elephant.”
Alice wasn’t talking anymore but was standing before a mirror that made her look like a short kid with an enormous head.
“Bunny ears.”
“Welcome to the hall of mirrors. Yes, this is a natural cave, and we brought all these fun-house mirrors down for fun, but they are all real. They are here to highlight the real smooth cave face. This wall itself is a natural fun-house mirror.”
She gathered them together. One parent came in last. The entire class could get in front of it, with parents and teachers behind them. In this single mirror, all the kids were super tall, others super short, and everybody was wavy up and down.
They jumped up and down, waving their arms, watching their reflections bounce and wave all over the place.
“Very nice,” said Janet, “come back everyone, let’s keep it down some. Don’t want to bring him in too quick.”
“Wait, what?” said Jake.
“Yeah, wait a minute. I thought you said…”
“What I’m allowed to say on the ground floor is not all I’m allowed to say while we are down this deep into his territory.”
“So the monster is…”
“Real, oh yeah.” Several of them got out their camera phones. Later they had full hard drives of dark videos inside a cave, maybe some shadows, and a few times, the bounce of someone dropping it. You couldn’t get good videos while trying to keep kids from getting away from you.
Janet knew it, handing one adult their phone back after dropping it again while trying to catch Alice.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
“Around this corner, we’re getting out of the hall of mirrors, and deeper into the caves than we go almost any other time. In just a moment, we’re going to see the grand tortoise, a significant feature, before we connect back up to some tunnels from the main, shorter, tour that leads to the falls themselves.”
The grand tortoise looks like a huge turtle, and we’re going to walk right over it.
“We are?”
“You wouldn’t think, but it’s the one place in the caves. We are encouraging you to get off the path and feel the cave floor and features for yourself.”
She led them around, and there was a low ceiling. Everything was lit with green floodlights. The railing came around, and there was a four-foot gap, where there was a gate. The floor across the room thirty feet long across looked like an enormous turtle shell. It connected to another passage out on the other side.
“We can let them go?”
“Sure, just somebody gets on the other side to catch and get everybody together again to go into the falls when we’re ready.”
She smiled and gave them the gift, knowing what was going to happen.
She slid to the other side of the domed shell-like floor and hung out on the other side, looking around. Then the teachers and parents tried it, and they slipped everywhere. Parents went down, and kids slipped and slid left and right.
Jake and Cable were crying and sliding around, holding onto each other. Everyone was sliding down to the outer edges.
They climbed and slid and eventually grabbed onto the handrails around the outside, and started dragging their way to the other side.
Alice fell and, sliding slowly on her shoes. Janet slid out, almost skating across the slippery shell. She nabbed Alice and brought her back, then went to get two more off of the side.
Now that it was over, they laughed and screamed about it.
There was a thump and a crash above them. Something scraped its way through a crack near the ceiling. A shadow obscured one of the green lights.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“That shadow!”
“I don’t think he’s found us yet.”
She led them around, and into a section of a tall cave that was about twenty feet tall. Bats crawled on the ceiling, which got the kids yelling. They were echoing all over the place.
Another shadow flew across one of the magenta floodlights. Janet could tell which one. While everyone was looking at the ceiling for something, what was making the shadows was already clacking, and nearby. Behind them. It clawed and rumbled around.
“Where is it?” Everyone looked up.
Steam jetted their feet, and an old fog machine with an air puffer blew into the area. It made them all jump. Kids tried to spill over the sides. The parents grabbed and tugged, trying to keep everyone reined in.
Janet grabbed Cable by the belt. He turned around, and Janet looked him in the face. “Cheap tricks, lights, fog machine. All on timers, kid. He ‘invades’ every time we bring folks on this trek.”
He was out of breath, panicked, and sweating. “For sure?” He managed.
“Every time. I do this tour five, six times a day.”
“Okay.” He started getting himself together.
He straightened his shirt, pulled up his pants, and smacked a couple of his friends, telling them to be cool. They gathered in the middle, hearing their teachers now,
There was a crack. Rocks fell. Kids jumped. They screamed, and then the creature dropped from the ceiling and landed in the middle of them all.
