A.J. Auger

(A fictional short story from the vaults)

There were three boys and two girls. They were raucous, bombastic, and already more drunk then they’d ever been in their very young lives. They spurned the couch to sit on the floor, with a few empty Miller Light cans in various stages of destruction next to them and a yet-unopened bottle of peach Schnapps resting on the cushions above them. They were attempting to play poker but couldn’t agree on the rules. One of them stood up suddenly and asked, “Do you have any milk?” He was skinny and red haired. 

“Uh, yeah.”

“How much do you have left?”

“Not a lot. Why, Bowe?”

“Great.” Bowe took the stairs two at a time. The rest of the kids could hear him open and slam the refrigerator door. He came down two at a time again but this time at a much slower pace. 

“Finish this.” He instructed Sierra, the girl who shifted in the oversized, camo hunting jacket she was wearing. 

“Booze and milk? No, thanks,” 

Dom, the boy sitting closest to her said, “It’d be like Baileys.”

“That is nothing like Baileys. Baileys isn’t peach flavored. You’ve never even had Baileys before!”

“Yeah, because that’s a bitch drink.”

Bowe passed the jug around then went into the bathroom to dump out the rest. He rinsed it then came and sat back down, flicking his wrist to open a gravity knife as he did.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Sierra asked.

“Making a gravity bong.”

“A what?”

“You’ll see.” He began cutting a hole in the bottom, not looking at his hands but at the other kids, letting the blade get dangerously close to his hand, which made the other girl fidget.

When he was done, he popped back up again. He started loping across the room, quickly taking ground as he searched the basement for items he knew had to be there: a bucket and some weed that belonged to Dom’s older brother. 

The second girl, Kasey, watched him as he went, admiring his confidence and casual understanding of drugs. When he completed his project he goaded and shepherded the rest of the group into the bathroom to hotbox. When they came back out, Reed, with dark wavy hair down past his eyebrows, produced a pack of cards and suggested a few games. All of them involved complicated rules and consequences that required a loss of either money or clothes. Dom, sitting between Reed and Sierra, suggested another whose consequences involved drinking or smoking. Kasey offered the more obvious Truth or Dare, and Would You Rather, looking at Bowe to gauge his interest. 

 “We need to do something.” Kasey realized. Bowe finally looked at her and nodded.

“I’m too high,” Sierra said, leaning closer to Dom.

“You barely held it in. And you’re the reason why the jug uncorked.”

“Weed is for cards, cookies, and twinkle lights, not for taking off outside.”

Bowe turned and looked out through the sliding glass doors. “We’re pretty much on our own here.” He murmured. 

“Save it for the horror movie.” Kasey said, following his gaze. 

“Let’s go outside.” Bowe said, more forcefully, looking away from the girls to stare daggers at Dom and Reed.

“Do we have to?” Reed coughed.

“No, let’s go off roading,” Dom said, nodding at Bowe and slapping Reed on the back. “You don’t know your own turf until you’ve navigated in the dark.” 

“Won’t we get in trouble?” Kasey offered, pathetically.

“Dom’s parents don’t care about what we’re doing,” Bowe, “And we’re alone. Fuck what anyone else thinks. You think anyone can tell him what he can do in his own truck, his own property?” 

Sierra interjected, “Don’t other people live around here?”

“No.” Bowe replied forcefully, “Just one or two. Trailer trash. Widowers. Whatever, they chose to live in the country, this is what it’s like.”

“And it’s not just a game, not just some distraction, this is real. This is our experience. This is life.” Dom was talking faster now, getting slapped on the back by Bowe after every assertion. 

Though sleepy, they felt a shared sense of warmth. Even the cool night air didn’t elicit cries for the boys’ sweatshirts from the girls. They were warm, they were relaxed, and they were moving. And they argued less and less with Bowe and David, even as the talk became wilder and wilder.

They piled into Dom’s car, a dirty pale SUV from the early 2000’s. Dom was driving, and Sierra was upfront next to him. She fiddled with the radio, barked orders at the others to put their seatbelts on. The other three sat uncomfortably in the back, with Reed on the passenger side, Kasey in the middle, and Bowe behind Dom, leaning in close enough to confer. They did so for a moment, asking “where first?” and “I think I remember a hill on the other side of…” and “doesn’t Mr. Jackson live over…?” Bowe leaned forward on to the center console to direct Dom. 

“Go out of the driveway and then take a right, a hard right. Off the road. Yeah, now floor it!” Dom did as commanded and Bowe flew back into the seat. If Kasey felt any nervousness or giddiness at being seated next to Bowe it dissipated in a moment of terror as the car flung forward and crashed around in a ditch before finding a faint dirt trail to follow. 

The children whooped and laughed, the warm giddiness of the weed making every lurch feel like a roller coaster. Not that such people needed weed to feel thrilled by being in a car, unsupervised, and under their own power. They could all see the woods stretch out before them and quite mistakenly thought that it was theirs to romp through. 

Bowe nudged Kasey playfully and the girlish butterflies returned. Reed rolled down his window and shouted into the night, reenacting some scene from a movie he’d watched with his father. David stared pointedly ahead, trying to see through the trees where the path would lead them.

They were like this for a while—speeding through bumps, playing chicken with trees, keeping their eyes peeled for deer. Before long, Bowe leaned forward and said, “There, by that tree, turn right.” Bowe used Kasey’s knee as a prop to push himself forward. 

“Why?” Dom asked

“There’s a house I know about. An abandoned place. It’s been abandoned for years.”

“I think I know it. I thought someone still lived there.” He said, dismissively.

“No, they can’t possibly, only a crazy person would live there. It’s all broken down. I saw it one day. No one lives there.”

“Someone does,” Reed laughed, “A crazy old guy who waits around with a shotgun and booby traps the driveway.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Maybe it’s a homeless camp now.” Kasey offered, as a sort of deterrent. But it only made Bowe and Reed more interested. “Or maybe someone died in their sleep, and no one bothered to come out here and check on them.” She kept rattling off a few theories, slowly coming around to the thought, and checking in with Bowe, hoping to strike the right chord, motivated by the secret grin Bowe gave her when he heard the most interesting one.

“Come on guys,” Kasey said, “it’s all just stories, just bullshit, we don’t need to go.” 

“Don’t be scared, I got your back.” Bowe leaned back next to Kasey and her stomach turned. Less butterflies, more roller coasters. She didn’t like roller coasters. Her fanciful theories pounded a little harder and more dangerously in her head.

“Don’t be that kind of girl.” Dom groaned and Sierra blushed, “Fine, whatever, you know I’m down for anything. A little breaking and entering tonight, huh? Huh? Badass shit.”

“Let’s speed through the booby traps.”

They screeched in delight and terror as Dom fishtailed and floored it through the laneway. No explosions, no booby traps, but a cloud of dust floated higher than the trees. It was dark and the only thing in the world to them was inside the car and whatever the headlights touched. 

The house did not look lived in but neither did it look completely abandoned. Like a base or cache. Some place they knew had been visited and used as storage for something. Maybe drugs, alcohol, sins. They intended to find them. 

“Oh my god you guys we’re totally trespassing.” Sierra was getting excited. She’d run around in the foundations of unfinished neighborhood homes when construction was delayed and jumped a few fences in her time. But this was new.

“Breaking and entering. B an’ E. ha ha, we’re doin’ a B an’ E!” Reed chuckled.

“Some guy’s corpse could be in there. Maybe he blew his own brains out.” Kasey said, not moving away from the car.

“Gross,” said Sierra, dramatically. 

The other boys enjoyed the reaction and sought another. “Yeah Sierra, maybe there’s blood on the walls and shit. Maybe the guy who lived here was into Satan worshipping and shit.”

“I totally feel like I’m in a horror movie. I’m not going in.”

Though there was clearly no one around, the girls and Reed kept looking over their shoulder, while Dom and Bowe went scouting ahead, so sure of themselves, so certain that they knew the procedure. They began walking around the house, looking through windows, trying to jimmy them open. 

The girls pushed Reed ahead of them and told him to knock on the front door. “We can’t rightfully break into this damn house without being at least a little bit courteous first.” Sierra reasoned.

“Then why don’t you freaking do it?” Reed dug his heels in, easily overpowering the girls in the tactless shoving war. Kasey thought for a moment about being the one to do it, to be on the front line. But it was difficult for any of the three of them to actually bring themselves to do it. The other boys would tease Reed about being a fly on the wall and chalk the girls up to just being passive and female, but they all craved that bravery. Mentally, they each took themselves to the precipice of action, could see the wide canyon of possibility but couldn’t bring themselves to go down into it. They watched as the others charged ahead, not thinking, just doing. Bowe wasn’t thinking about what would happen if someone answered, or if he saw something through the window, or if the owner of this shack came home and found five teenagers in his house. He only knew that he had to get in. 

Kasey crept up the front stairs, came to a stop at the door, and knocked. Without waiting for an answer or reaction, she jumped off the porch to the side and rolled into the bushes, amazed with herself. Bowe came up after, accepting that action as being in line with his agenda. When no one came to the door, he pulled it open. 

The others stood tentatively on the outside. They heard a cat meow. “A stray cat!” If there was one thing young girls could not abide by, it was an animal not being harassed. Freed from her power of thought, Sierra ran in and tried to search for the animal. 

It smelled strongly of piss inside. There were bottles and empty food trays everywhere, piles of cigarette butts, and messy blankets. Not wanting to touch anything, she kicked around, hoping to scare it out of hiding. The cat jumped out of a blanket and made a break for the door, only to be caught by Dom. “You’re my cat now,” they laughed at him, “Hey guys look at my cat!” It was a little ragged, but clearly someone’s pet. He handed it to Sierra, who became immediately absorbed in smoothing out its fur.

Dom and Bowe then went to the back of the house, into the kitchen. They looked for a bottle that wasn’t half empty and returned with a few clutched in their arms. With astounding mental acrobatics, they took turns giggling and saying, “What if someone catches us?” and “Who abandons all this stuff here? I mean, who just leaves it? Who does that?”

The house was not abandoned. Headlights came around the bend and crashed through the windows. They stood like deer for a moment before dropping to the ground. Sierra still held on to the cat, the boys stuffed a bottle or two into their jackets, and Reed and Kasey began their mental penance, I’ll never go out at night again. I didn’t even want to be here. I wasn’t the one driving. It wasn’t my idea.

They heard the car door slam closed and the crunch of gravel as someone approached the house. A man shouted, “Get out you fuckers! Get out! Get the fuck out of my house!” The lights stayed aimed at the house but none of them moved. The man seemed to be pacing but he wasn’t coming any closer. After a while of hunching down on the man’s dirty floor, the energy picked back up. They were in a situation. After a brief moment of action things slowed down again. They could think a little. Someone giggled. 

“Oh my god,” Bowe whispered, “this guy’s crazy. Dom, there’s a crazy man living in the forest behind your house!”

“If you don’t get the fuck out of my house right now I’m going in there. I swear to god I’ll go in there. I will.” The man’s voice sounded slightly less confident as he went on. 

“He’s not coming in.” Bowe seemed to come to a sudden realization. He raised his voice, “We’re not coming out.”

The man stopped pacing. Bowe continued, “How do we know you won’t shoot us as we come out?”

The man was quiet. It hadn’t even crossed Kasey’s mind that he would have a gun or that he’d want to shoot them.

He didn’t respond. “Does that mean he’s not going to shoot us?”

“He’s not going to shoot us because he doesn’t have a gun.”

Bowe raised his voice again, “Why don’t you come inside so we can explain?”

The door creaked and the man entered slowly. All eyes were on him as one foot, then another came in. He wore tennis shoes, dirty jeans, a flannel shirt, and looked like he’d just been woken up—messy hair, stubble, wild eyes bouncing around the room just above their heads, searching. He didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. He stood in the door and spoke in a gruff, but much less angry voice. “What the fuck are you kids doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Bowe shot back. The room became a bit more tense at the sound of his voice. “No one lives here.This place is abandoned.”

“You’re in my fucking house. My fucking house.”

Kasey looked around and for the first time saw a few photographs on the table. A mouse toy on a string on the chair next to it. Blankets and bottles and dust aside, the room was oriented around a coffee table and halfway decent television. One of the pillows had something embroidered on it. 

 “S-sorry.” She mumbled. He pivoted slightly to look at her standing behind the couch.

“You don’t live here.” Dom added from the kitchen. “I’ve lived here all my life. No one lives in these woods.”

The man rolled his eyes, “These woods are my fucking property, kid. I don’t give a shit about what you think you know, you’re like, 11.”

Dom looked like he wanted to correct him but decided that it wouldn’t help his point.

“My brother’s been through here a million times and he never saw anyone living here.”

“Good for him.”

It was quiet again. “Just, get out of my house. Alright? I won’t call the cops. Just leave.” The group bristled at this. 

“You won’t call the cops?” Bowe said.

“Yeah, I won’t.”

“What makes you think you’re in the right? Why are you so eager to get us out? Do you not want the cops coming here?” He looked excited. He chanced a glance over at Kasey but she was wide eyed, and frozen to the spot. 

They expected outrage. This was an adult here. They had an out. Why wasn’t Bowe taking it? The man was quiet. “Get out of my house. Now.” He stared at Bowe for a while. Bowe didn’t move. But slowly, the others started moving towards the door. First Dom scooted past, then Reed, Kasey and Sierra, and finally Bowe. 

They were all outside when the man barked, “Wait. Where’s my cat?”

Sierra turned bright red. “Oh, I, I’m sorry. I forgot. I was just holding him…”

She turned to give the man the cat back when Bowe said, “No. We’re taking the cat.”

The man glared at Bowe. Sierra stopped walking but looked utterly confused.

“No, you’re not.” He grabbed Sierra’s arm and tried to take the cat. Sierra, reacting to his grip, struggled back, forgetting her intent to relinquish the animal. 

Dom was enraged. “Don’t touch her you fucking pervert!”

Bowe and Dom were ecstatic. Bowe took out the gravity knife. “What have you done old man? You creep?” 

Sierra came to her senses and dropped the cat, which ran off into the trees. The man dropped her arm in response and headed after it. He got two steps in the cat’s direction before he saw the knife and stopped, panicked. He turned and ran back into the shack. Dom and Bowe took off after him. Dom brushed past Sierra, no longer concerned for her safety, to follow the man, taking the keys with him.

The other three stood motionless, trapped through witness of the twisted scene before them. They had at first feared and wondered at what horror might be inside the house. Now, Kasey thought, he must fear and wonder at what horror is outside. She watched Bowe, but he no longer watched her. He no longer cared what she was doing, or what part she had to play in the situation. They were grabbing at the door, looking through windows again, circling the house. 

Without thought, she drifted to the right off the path and into the trees opposite of the cat. She could hear footsteps and caught Sierra and Reed following out of the corner of her eye although none of them looked fully away from the pair of stalking men surrounding the house.

Even without the car’s headlights, the woods seemed a bit brighter and clearer than it was before. They hadn’t taken as many turns as they had thought. They weren’t all that far from the house. If they just kept going in the direction of the moon, they could leave the shack behind. If they made it back soon, they could miss the other’s coming back. They could call their parents. Reed would be able to walk home from Dom’s the house if only he could find it. Kasey thought about going to school on Monday, briefly wondering if the boys would even be there. It became hard to imagine Bowe sitting in biology—it would be impossible to let go of the image of the knife in his hand. 

They heard the distant noise of an engine turning over, and one of the cars coming to life. They walked faster.