The Waking Moon

Chapter Seven

I rode through the quiet streets, the front tire of my bike slicing into unplowed snow. The falling flakes felt like tiny daggers against my cheeks, and my fingers were numb inside my gloves. It was a long way, and by the time I reached 21st Street, the blood was moving through my body, and I felt warm inside the fleece.

The Ruins were what was left of an old gold smelting plant, torn down long ago. It was set far back from the road, across a field, scattered across a sunken basin. As I pumped hard up the 21st Street hill, the old derelict smoke tower came into view, glowing against the dark sky like a giant bone.

I stopped and climbed off the bike, panting billows of vapor. I’d never been anywhere near The Ruins, though everyone knew the stories. It wasn’t a place for normal kids like me. People said it was a gathering place for the occult, where Satanists would light candles and try to talk to the dead.

I pushed my bike down a narrow dirt path that dipped into a gully of frozen mud and weeds, heading toward the smoke tower. A cold wind hushed through the scrub oak. I walked for several minutes wondering if I’d gone the wrong way, or if this was all there was—just a field of scrub brush and yellow weeds. But a few minutes later, it came into view. In the winter moon that burned white through the clouds, I could make out the collection of broken concrete structures below, a maze of pillars and beams and cavernous rooms, all covered with bizarre pictures and symbols and graffiti.

I left my bike on the ground and wandered down the slope. It was so quiet, my feet seemed to thunder on the frozen ground. I moved through rows of stunted pillars decorated with graffiti eyes. Their gaze was inescapable, an army of disembodied observers watching my every move. I stepped over piles of rubble littered with the empty casings of votive candles, whiskey bottles, and used condoms. As I passed a series of low slung archways, which perhaps were once part of a basement, I noticed a message scrawled in red paint on a wall: THIS WILL BE.

Though everywhere I looked there were traces of recent activity—garbage, charred wood, spent candles, the place was abandoned that night. I followed a gravel road that wound its way through the seemingly endless maze of decay, but there were no signs of life. Finally, I came to a kind of hovel with a window cut into the concrete. There was something terrifying about the utter blackness inside. I forced myself to approach it and stood there quietly, listening. At first there was no sound. But then I thought I heard a soft rustling inside.

“Hello?” I called. There was no answer. My breaths became quick and shallow, and I felt like I was drowning. I thought about running back to the trail and biking home as fast as I could, but I had come too far. I walked around the building to see what was on the other side. Bizarre hieroglyphics covered the outside wall. At the back there was a small, door-shaped hole sliced into concrete. I gathered my courage and gazed into darkness.

“Hello?” I called again. It was silent. Then I thought I heard a faint wheezing, like an asthmatic struggling to breathe. At that moment, my brain told my body to run, but it was too late.

There was a sudden scrabbling on the gravel inside, and before I could move, a shadow flew out of the darkness, knocking me flat on my back. It happened too fast to scream. He pinned me down, his body heavy, his face so close to mine that I could feel the rancid breath on my cheeks. His hair was red and his thick lips were lifted into a deranged smile.

“Happy birthday to me!” he sneered.

In the chaos and the fear, I barely registered the girl peeking through the doorway behind him. She was wearing a black lace dress and chunky black boots. Only when I thought about it later did I realize she was the Goth chick from Penrose.

The next thing I knew, crusty lips were brushing against mine and my breath began to leave me. An unstoppable torrent of air rushed up from the pit of my stomach and the farthest points of every limb. My head seem to empty out like a Halloween pumpkin. I strained against him, airless, suffocating, my eyeballs bulging and my tongue jutting out of my mouth. Every ounce of oxygen and energy gushed up and out of my body, and into the mouth of the boy.

A dark tunnel closed in. And then there was nothing at all.