GARAGE by Jeb R. Sherrill
GARAGE by Jeb R. Sherrill
(First Place Winner)
“It’s almost Christmas,” Mom beamed.
Dad’s spoonful of cereal stopped midway to his mouth. I tried not to make eye contact with either parent, choosing instead to spread cream cheese on my toasted bagel.
“Isn’t that wonderful,” Mom added, when neither of us said anything. “And I was thinking,” she continued after another pause, eyes sparkling, hands clasped in excited glee, “it might be time to bring out the decorations.”
I took a bite of my newly coated bagel. The soft crunch of incisors through crispy goodness was the only sound. Dad’s eyes glazed over. Mom continued, undaunted.
“This afternoon is perfect,” she said, glancing around with her peroxide-whitened smile. “I’m really looking forward to the lights. The sleigh. The reindeer of course. The Santa. Oh, and if you two can find it, I’m really hoping to put the inflatable snow globe in the middle of the yard this year.”
Dad brought the spoon to his mouth and chewed his soggy cereal. I put down my half-eaten bagel and folded my arms on the table.
“Fantastic,” my mother said. “Then I’ll just leave it to you strapping lads.” She gave one of those sideways fist-pumps that only mothers can do, the ones we all thought had died a horrible death back in the 1950s, and she left the room as if making for the all-important laundry.
I looked up. Dad’s gaze met mine. He looked back down and shook his head. “Rick. Get the gear,” he said with a deep sigh. “I’ll get the flashlights.”
The door opened into the garage with an ominous shriek. I recalled a pair of fluorescent bulbs once gracing the ceiling and flooding the area below with a sickly green haze, but now it lay in darkness. The bulbs had met a bitter end at least six years before, and even if they hadn’t, none of us could remember where the switch had once been.
Dad clicked his headlamp on, and I did the same. Together we looked out over the maddening landscape that was the garage floor, or would have been if a single square inch had shown through the ten-foot high strata of layered junk. We’d named them after various prehistoric eras. Neither of us could remember what lay in the Paleozoic, but as far as we knew, most decorations resided somewhere between the Cenozoic and Jurassic layers.
I looked over as the click-clicking of Dad’s body harness sounded beside me. “Did you bring enough line?” I asked, as I pulled on my own harness and tightened it into place.
Dad shrugged. “Three hundred feet. If that doesn’t do it…”
“We abort?” I said hopefully.
Dad shook his head and clipped a figure eight to his main carabiner. “Your mother will never forgive us if we don’t get that Santa.”
I nodded. What else could I do? Dad avoided my gaze as he pulled back the string on his 500lb pull crossbow.
He was thinking about Gary. I could tell by the way he kept glancing at the entrance to a half-blazed trail that began a few feet away. Two years ago, we had tried the unthinkable, a land journey that had ended in disaster.
It seemed logical enough. Less dangerous. Instead of the usual aerial assault, we’d hack and burrow our way through the mountains of accumulated junk. Long story short, Gary lost his way somewhere between board games and Aunt Chelna’s crocheted garments. We tried to go after him, but the garage had swallowed him whole, his final scream squelched by mountains of pink yarn.
A slap on my back returned me to the present. “Ready?” Dad said.
I nodded. “Let’s do it.”
We ascended a stepladder, and Dad fired a bolt to the opposite side of the garage. A line trailed it all the way to the far wall. We tied off to an eyelet just above the doorjamb. This was the point of no return. Everything in me screamed to turn back. Return to the kitchen for a cup of hot chocolate or some OJ. I imagined the look on my mother’s face if we showed up empty-handed.
With a groan, I heaved myself onto the line and crossed my legs so that I dangled like a dead animal carried between two jubilant hunters. My father joined me as I moved farther up. There would be no more communication until we reached the summit.
At the halfway point I scanned the mountains below with my headlamp. The beam glinted off bicycle spokes, half-crushed lunch boxes and stacks of plastic VHS cases. Dolls and stick horses. Newspapers. 8-track players. An entire pile of table lamps my mother had bought and replaced a week later complaining she never liked the shades. Blankets and sheets. Speakers. Loveseats and sofas that had suffered a similar fate as the lamps. A Buick. I think it was a Buick. My grandfather’s, if I’m not mistaken. A thin layer of stuffed animals and National Geographic magazines hid all but the roof and antenna.
When we reached the support beam, I belayed myself and waited for Dad. He wasn’t as young as he used to be and I’d out-distanced him by thirty feet or so. While I waited, I scanned the series of other lines we’d set over the years. They stretched from the support beam to the outlying walls like rays of the sun. The lines passed over key areas mostly, but they also crossed uncharted territory. Places we considered either venturing to in the future or sending later generations as a sort of sadistic hazing. Heaven knows I’d endured my own hazing. Like the time I was left for a week in one of the far corners without a flashlight. I still shudder at the memory.
The crinkle of paper told me Dad had caught up and pulled forth the all but useless map. It never quite managed to accurately describe the ever-shifting tides of land masses that moved throughout like tectonic plates across what we assumed must still be a floor below.
“I’m thinking the bulk of Christmas stuff should still be around the 70s section,” Dad said, pointing to a poorly scrawled blob that might have indicated the 8-track players or possibly a mass of unidentifiable boxes which likely contained the remnants of Dad’s survivalist phase.
“It’s possible,” I shouted over the howling winds that often rose up and battered us close to the roof, “but last year it was near the Buick.”
“The Buick?” Dad said, peering below. “We don’t have a Buick.”
“Granddad’s,” I said, crossing the beam of my headlamp over his. “The one with the fins.”
Dad shook his head. “That’s not a Buick. It’s a kit car I started back in the 80s. I was building it onto the chassis of an old Cadillac.” His beam flashed off the antenna amid the mountain of stuffed animals. “No, wait. That is a Buick. My kit car is on the other side next to the VW.”
“Right. The VW bus,” I said, recalling the baby blue vehicle with holographic peace sign. “Wasn’t that near the boat?”
“Boat’s over there,” Dad said, motioning to a stack of scuba equipment and angler equipment. “Well, one of them anyway.”
I shrugged. “We could try over by remodeling,” I said, indicating a section we almost considered a stratum of its own. It consisted mostly of floor and ceiling tiles, wood latticework and 5-gallon buckets of Burnt Hawaiian exterior enamel paint.
Dad nodded. “Good idea,” he said, casting his beam forty-five degrees to the right. “I think I see a Santa hat.”
We switched our carabiners to the line branching that direction and inched our way over. Our lights barely penetrated through the layers of black fabric and dust, but there it was, a Santa hat sticking up amid the mass.
“Shall I go down?” Dad asked, after a pregnant moment of silence.
“No,” I said, and gave a deep sigh. “It’s my turn.”
Neither of us spoke as I threaded our reserve line through my own figure 8 belay and began to rappel downward. Below me stretched a gaping maw of pure blackness. My headlamp dimmed, sucked in by the vast depths. But the Santa hat beckoned me on, peeking through the fabric layers.
I shifted the rope in my left hand to get a better grip, but the line slipped off the braking spur. My shriek echoed as I plummeted into the darkness, landing with a sickening crunch and a staccato of loud popping as the pile enveloped me.
My headlamp remained firmly bound around my skull, but wads of fabric shut out its light. Whipping the fabric away revealed skeletal hands. Skulls. Giant spiders. Tombstones. The hacked remains of limbs crushed down on me.
I screamed with the realization. This wasn’t the Christmas section. Far from it. It was the black hole of Halloween. But the Santa hat? I tore through my memories for an answer, finally remembering that one year we put together a display with Santa Claus in an electric chair in the front yard. A strobe light had completed the effect rather nicely, making it one of our best Halloween scenes ever. That meant the Santa hat, wherever it was now, probably sat perched atop a skeleton.
My God. My dad must still be dangling somewhere above, but I knew there was no chance of rescue. He wasn’t in good shape, and couldn’t pull me out of superficial strata, let alone the depths of Halloween. I cursed the rope. Cursed the equipment. But I knew it was my fault. If only I hadn’t adjusted. Thought faster. Braked quicker.
What did it matter? I was flat on my back, buried in ten feet of macabre entrails with little chance of righting myself. I struggled against the fabric. The skeletons. The body parts. But the rubber held me tight, and the sickly smell of partially melted latex and fake blood made me nauseous.
Hands dove into the mess around me. For a moment I thought it must be some mechanical device from a display, but the hands were warm. Living. Human. They yanked me through layers of eyeballs, sheets of plastic wall hangings and bloody torsos.
The hands dragged me into a small clearing and helped me up.
“Rick,” whoever it was said.
I tried to focus on his features, but the bushy beard and shaggy hair obscured everything but his grey eyes.
“Rick. It’s me. It’s Gary.”
I almost screamed. It was Gary. His clothes looked as if they’d been pieced together from random rags and parts of discarded costumes. He even wore one of Grandma’s crocheted caps with little dangly things on the sides.
“We thought you were dead,” I said, embracing my brother.
Gary gripped my shoulder. “Never,” he said, glancing around as if he’d heard something. “I found Dad’s survival gear and I’ve been living off MRE rations and water from a leaky pipe. You guys should probably get that checked.”
“But you’ve been gone almost two years,” I said, scanning the ceiling for signs of Dad.
Gary spun, searching the walls of junk with the light of a toy laser gun. “There are things in here,” he said, stooping to examine a hole in a box. “Milton, our hamster. Tyler, the snake. Remember them? Harold, the ferret, Guppy, the fish and who knows how many other pets that just vanished over the years.”
I laughed. “You’re paranoid, bro. They’ve been dead for years.”
Gary grabbed both my shoulders and slammed me against a destroyed bookshelf. “You listen. They’ve inbred and evolved. All the insects and birds that got in. All the spiders that make those webs above the door. They’ve become things we can’t begin to imagine.”
I shook my head. “Look, let’s just get out of here. We can talk about the rodent problem later.”
Gary nodded. “Tons to tell. But why are you and Dad here anyway?”
“Christmas stuff,” I said with a shudder. “She wants the lights and everything.”
Gary nodded. “I always try to call out during the holidays, but no one ever hears me.” He set his mouth into a tight, thin line. “I’ll help you guys. Christmas isn’t far, but we’ll have to get back to the line.”
The line. Had Dad left it dangling, or rolled it up and gone in to tell Mom he’d lost yet another son to the woeful depths of the garage? “If it’s still there,” I said, “it’s got to be in Halloween.”
“No problem,” Gary said, looking around. He found a tricycle and with a heave, embedded it halfway into a wall of books and used cup holders. “We’ll just have to get above it.”
Gary had obviously spent his MIA years learning to scale the precarious mountains of quick-sliding junk. Even with our combined effort, it took at least half an hour to conquer the summit and stand tall on what I now realize was probably the VW. Now it looked like a prop from some post-apocalyptic 80s film.
“Now, where’s Dad?” I asked, scanning the branching ropes above.
“Look out,” Gary shouted, as something small and squishy crept from beneath a pile of rags. It looked like a cross between a rat and a blowfish, but with the slimy tentacles of some sea creature. “Don’t let it touch you.”
I jumped back, slipped and fell down the side of the VW cliff-face. Gary caught my arms and screamed as the creature wrapped around his foot. For a moment, Gary’s grip loosened, but then he gripped me harder as he bit through the pain, hauling me up while at the same time kicking at the… thing, whatever it was.
Scrambling over the edge, I laid on my back panting. Gary let out a high-pitched battle cry and speared the creature with a curling iron. He dropped the weapon and sat down to hold his foot. “It’s like stinging nettles, man,” Gary said. His face was red with tears crusting his cheeks. “My leg will be throbbing for days.”
“Are there more of those?”
Gary shrugged. “That wasn’t one of the big ones.”
“Boys!”
We looked up to see Dad shouting from the ceiling. He lowered a line, along with a pair of ascenders. Thank God he’d thought to bring them.
Gary was dead weight with his injured foot, but I strapped on the ascenders and pushed my feet into the stirrups. He clung to me like a starfish as I made my way up the line.
“Gary,” Dad exclaimed, as we reached him. He pulled a stripped-down sit harness from his pack and we spent several minutes strapping it around Gary’s waist and thighs, then belayed him to the line.
Gary pointed down and to our left. “That’s the Christmas stuff. It’s hidden beneath the tents. We’re almost right over it.”
He remained above while Dad and I descended and dragged out everything we could find. Strings of lights. The sleigh. Boxes of inflatable lawn ornaments. A nine-foot fake tree and a box of assorted decorations. We tethered it all with nylon line and fed it back up through a pulley.
This part we had spent years mastering. Like dock workers we hoisted everything in one bundle and slid it down the lines back to the door.
My mother let out a screech of joy as Gary hobbled in using a broom as a crutch. “Oh, you found it all,” she beamed, as Dad and I dragged the gigantic bundle into the kitchen.
Like a child on… well… Christmas, Mom dove into the pile of decorative possibilities.
Miles of lights. Foam candy canes. Fake candles. Wreaths.
Dad and I sat Gary down in a chair to check his wounds. “Good to have you back, son,” Dad said, as Gary massaged the inflamed flesh beneath his sock.
Gary grinned through the shaggy beard. “Just a flesh wound.”
Mom let out a soft whimper. We glanced over. She knelt beside the mounds of stuff, holding tangles of light strands in both hands like entrails from a gutted animal. “Dear,” she said, looking over at Dad. “I’m afraid you forgot the Santa.”
About the Author:
Jeb Sherrill has an oddly disjointed background. Having stumbled through everything from performing stage magic and kinetic juggling on French television and in Las Vegas casinos, to teaching martial arts and circus techniques, to competitive sabre fencing, film and stage acting, dance, songwriting, and his ongoing stint as a popular YouTube personality, Jeb has the ADD of a 10 year old. Writing, however, has remained his greatest passion since early childhood, having also written a barrage of short stories, novels and poetry.
