Chapter 3: Pain, More Pain, and a Crowbar

The needle went into the muscle of my arm, and it hurt. A lot. Like, I have never felt pain like this in my life. Right away, my arm was burning, my head was burning, my legs were burning. Basically, my entire body. Burning. Meanwhile, a phalanx of miniature jousters were stabbing every inch of my skin with tiny lances. At the same time, a really mean cymbal player was slamming his instruments on either side of my head, like I was Bugs Bunny or something. And I puked. Big time. Just threw up right then and there all over the ground. I’m talking serious projectile vomiting.

It was the only time in the past couple of months that I was glad Zoe Francis was nowhere around.

The ordeal lasted a good long eternity. The worst five seconds of my life.

When it was over, I slowly un-hunched my body to stand up straight and stared at Xander accusingly. He had one of the saddest faces I’d ever seen. Not that it made up for the five seconds of agony or anything, but I got it that he wasn’t thrilled with what he’d just done. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“What...” I spat dribble off my lip and tried again. “What did you do to me?”

“I’ll explain later if you still want me to. Right now, I need you to tell me where Gus vanished.”

“I told you! It was right over-“

I pointed to the ground a few feet in front of me and stopped. There, plain as day, I saw a small, blue crack glowing in the earth. I looked at Xander in wonderment and he solemnly offered me his crowbar.

“Could you wedge this in there?” I eyed the crowbar and he sighed. “Please.”

Slowly, I reached for the crowbar, ready to jerk back if it made any sudden moves. Of course, it did no such thing. It was a crowbar. But right then, I didn’t know what to expect.

I walked over to the glowing blue crack and stared down at it. “What is it?”

Xander joined me, standing over my shoulder. “The entrance.”

“You don’t see it?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him enter. You did. Again. Sorry.”

Not that I was in a forgiving mood, but I began to understand a little. Just a little. Being fourteen, I didn’t feel a need to understand any more. I took the crowbar and carefully wedged it into the glowing blue crack in the ground. It slid in very, very easily. Too easily. I let go of the crow bar and stepped away, leaving it standing on end, its tip wedged into the crack.

“Is that it? Is it in?” Asked Xander. I nodded. He stepped up, took the crowbar in his hands, and shook his shoulders, loosening up. “I hate this part.”

Then he strained against the crowbar with all his might. If this had been a normal crowbar jammed into the dirt, he probably would have very quickly and easily dug up a good-sized divot. Instead, the crowbar fought him, refusing to budge. He groaned with the effort for a bit, then paused to catch his breath, throwing a look at me.

“A little help?”

I joined him and we each grabbed the crowbar and pulled. Slowly, really slowly, it gave way and we made progress, opening the crack a little wider. “Put your back into it!” Shouted Xander for some reason. As if I was holding anything back.

Our combined effort seemed to do the trick, because suddenly the crowbar gave way with a very deep, rock-grinding-on-rock sound and we both fell to the ground. In front of us, the crack had widened and a lazy blue glow radiated from within a hole just wide enough for a crazy ex-hippie biker guy or a high school freshman to drop through into the earth, if they so wanted.

We got to our feet and stared down into the freaky blueness. “Thanks. I can see it now,” he said. “My name’s Moon. Xander Moon.”

“OK?” I said.

“I’m really sorry about stabbing you with the needle and pumping that stuff into your body. But if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have found this.”

“A glowing hole in the ground.”

“Right. Right.” He picked up his crowbar and turned to me. “I’d tell you to go home now. That you’ve done your part and you can just forget about this. But. Well. You can’t.”

“I can’t go home?”

“What? No! Of course you can go home! I mean you can’t forget this. You won’t. I’ve... You’re a part of this now. Forever. Sorry. My bad.”

We peered down at the waiting hole that really had no business being in the middle of my little suburban wood. It was eerily beautiful. Then I noticed something else.

“It stinks.”

“Yes, that’s Gus. He’s dead.”

“You’re going to kill him?”

He turned to me, a look of disbelief on his face. “Did you not see the hole in his head? He’s dead. Been dead a while now. Going on, I think, five or six years. I’m not quite sure.”

I blinked. I blinked again. Dead? I mean, OK, He had a hole in his head and was missing a couple of fingers, and sure, that might make it tough to live. But dead? “He didn’t look dead,” I protested. “Aside from the missing eye thing.” Then a thought occurred to me. “He didn’t smell bad earlier, either.”

“I hadn’t injected you earlier. Now I have. Now he smells bad. Now all the dead will smell bad. That’s how you’ll know.”

“Know what?”

“Who’s really alive, and who’s just pretending,” he said. “OK, OK. Go home. If it makes you feel any better, you may have just saved the world.”

I stared at him, more confused than I'd ever been in my life - which is saying a lot. Not twenty minutes earlier I had been a normal teenager obsessed with the new girl in school on my way home from baseball practice. Now I smelled dead people.

Like I said, not taking Gary up on the offer for a ride? Second. Worst. Mistake. Ever.

“That's it?” I asked. “I can go?”

“You can. You can and you should.” He stuffed the crowbar back into his fanny pack (it really shouldn't have fit) and put a patronizing hand on my shoulder. “You don't belong down there. Your father worked his life to keep you away from this, he'd kill me if I brought you in with me.”

And with that he jumped into the gaping hole and was swallowed by the earth.

My mind clenched. My father? Did he say my father? Did he know my father? I stared down into the glowing blue hole. What did he mean by my father? Why did he say my father?

The intellectual core of my brain tried to calm me down and lead me away from the inviting bowels of the earth, but the relatively insecure boy who longed for a father figure told that core to shut up and leave it alone.

I jumped in.

Absolute. Worst. Mistake. Ever.