When I was thirteen, Jackie Rozier disappeared from my street. He was three years younger than me, and while I knew him, we never played together or hung out or anything like that. He was a quiet, nerdy kid who kept to himself most of the time, and he had a dark birthmark above his left eye that had gotten him nicknames from the meaner kids at school. And while I felt a bit bad for him, I also knew that if he came around me and my friends, someone would wind up messing with him. So I ignored him, and thankfully I rarely ever crossed paths with him, despite him living just a couple of hundred yards down the street.
The last time I ever did see him, the last time I guess most anybody saw him, was the year a new fair had come to town. It had been set up on the edge of town since before Halloween, and while it had been popular the first few nights, by the second week in November, things were winding down. Word was that it’d be gone by the weekend.
That’s when I decided to go. My family didn’t have much money back then—my older brother was starting college and my mom was worried about getting laid off again through Christmas. I hadn’t gotten to go when my friends all went back in mid-October, but I’d saved up some money since then. I asked if any of them wanted to go again, but they were either busy or weren’t interested. The idea of going alone killed some of my enthusiasm, but somehow the idea of weeks of scrimping and saving my allowance for nothing was worse. So I went.
The fair was decent but not great. There were no lines for most of the rides, but they were already starting to breakdown two of the big ones and most of the others were either very short for two tickets or too jerky to be fun. I tried my luck at a couple of prize booths, but between the obvious rigging and the shabby prizes, I gave up pretty quick.
By seven I was sitting on a bench, morosely eating a fried corn on the cob and trying to gauge the point at which I could admit defeat and go home with my pride intact. It was as I looked around and weighed my options that I noticed a small tent at the far end of a nearby row. I couldn’t make out the sign from where I was sitting, but something about the tent stood out in a way the rest of the fair hadn’t. It scared me a little, but in a fun way, and while I knew I was bound to be disappointed, I couldn’t help but feel excited as I walked down to check it out.
The yellowed, hand-lettered sign said “Martin the Mesmerist”, and while it and the tent had seen better days, they didn’t look rundown in the same way everything else did. I didn’t think of the word at the time, but it looked…authentic. Legit. Real in some way the other stuff lacked. Real enough, in fact, that it kind of gave me the creeps. I was already rationalizing not checking out the interior of the dark little tent when Jackie walked by me eating a turkey leg. He glanced at me, gave a silent nod, and then disappeared between the tent flaps.
That was all the shame I needed. I couldn’t let a kid, much less Jackie “Mudface” Rozier, show me up. Even if no one would know, I would know, and back then, stuff like that mattered to me.
So I followed him in.
The inside of the tent was confusingly bright and large. Tall twin lamps burned in opposite corners of the spacious room, and in the middle, a small man in a dark brown suit sat in front of two semi-circle rows of folding chairs. Aside from myself and the man, the only person I could see was Jackie—sitting on the front row as he waited patiently for the show to start.
I had a pang of concern seeing him sitting there. He looked so small and young. Where were his parents? I knew his father was an alky, but surely they hadn’t just dumped him at the fair by himself? I debated leaving, maybe even going and calling my mom to tell her that Jackie was at the fair alone, but then the man raised his eyes to me and smiled.
“Come on in, good friend. Come on in and have a seat. We have room to spare, as you can see, and you won’t want to miss what is in store.” His voice was warm and friendly on the surface, but something about it troubled me all the same. As though something unseen, something nasty, might be waiting under the surface of those words. Something cold and not friendly at all.
Still, I was walking toward the front row. I was sitting down. I didn’t understand how or why, but I was. I had a moment of real panic, and then it slipped away as the man began to talk again. It was hard to look away from him, but I managed long enough to glance at Jackie. The kid was rapt, his turkey leg laying limp on his lap as he stared at the man intently, taking in every word of his story.
The man was talking about “olden times”. About times before cars and movies and science. When people understood things better. Respected things more. Relied on what they knew in their hearts instead of what they were told. Times when magic wasn’t a trick but a truth, and the truth was the Law.
I don’t remember all of it—my head was swimming as he spoke, and most of what he said made little sense to me. He talked about words having power and places having wills of their own. He talked about things hiding in the clouds and festering deep in the rotten places of the earth. I felt like he talked forever, my mind and soul falling down the well of his voice—a well without light or an end.
I remember him reaching out and touching my forehead with a cold finger before doing the same to Jackie. I remember him looking between us before grabbing Jackie’s left hand and writing a word on his pale and greasy palm. He’d used a red pen or marker, and even now I remember having a second where I was distantly afraid he’d cut Jackie before realizing it was just writing. Just that one word in his crooked handwriting.
Aradat.
The next thing I remember is sitting back on the bench I’d started from. My head was pounding, and I had a bewildering moment where I thought I was just sick and confused from something I’d eaten. Then I remembered the tent, the man, and Jackie.
I ran down to where the tent had been, but nothing was there. The stand next door, a place where you threw darts to pop balloons, was already closed for the night, and as I looked around, I didn’t see anyone at all. I suddenly had the thought that I was trapped here somehow. Stuck in this place forever and forever alone.
But no, I was being stupid. It was getting late and the place was just closing for the night. And much like everyone else, I needed to be getting home.
I started walking back toward the bus stop, my mind still trying to make sense of what I remembered. Had it been a dream? A side effect of the fried corn or the hot dog I’d had earlier? I was tired and still felt bad, but could I have really fallen asl…
I froze in my tracks. Down the road ahead of me, just about to turn down a side street, I saw two figures walking together under a street light. One was a small man in a brown suit. The other…even from behind I could tell it was Jackie.
My first instinct was to call out, to try to get Jackie away from that strange man. But fear and maybe common sense held my tongue. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know if I could stand the idea of that man turning and looking at me again.
So I followed. I trailed behind, moving from shadow to shadow, as they walked silently down one street and then another. My plan was to find out where they were headed and then call my mom from the nearest phone. Maybe the cops too.
Then I turned the next corner they’d taken and saw their destination.
It was a house. Three stories tall and black as night, even with the nearby lights I could barely make out more than the arches of a pitched roof and the skeletal fingers of railing along a long veranda. I took all of that in before realizing the wrongness of it all.
I wasn’t especially familiar with that part of town, but I knew it well enough to know there weren’t any houses like that around. But more than that was where the house was sitting. It wasn't perched on one of the weedy lawns lining both sides of the asphalt or down at the end of the lane.
It was sitting in the middle of the street.
I could see the road continue on behind it, as though it had been sat down recently by a passing giant or spun into town on a witch-killing twister. It was impossible, but that didn’t stop the man and Jackie from climbing the steps and going inside.
I didn’t follow. Of course I didn’t. I was piss-scared and I was doing good to make it to a gas station and call my mom. Half an hour later I was talking to police, trying to not sound crazy and failing miserably.
The thing was, Jackie really was missing. His parents said they thought he was sick in bed with a fever, and had no idea he’s left the house, let alone gone across town to the fair. So they listened to me, after a fashion. Took down my description of the man, questioned people in the neighborhood, leaned on the fair workers before they could get out of town.
But nothing ever came of it, and within a week, they stopped asking me anything. After all, how much stock could they put in the word of a kid, especially one that claimed he’d seen a ghost house that they couldn’t find?
I moved away when I got old enough, and only came back to town last year to take a job as an EMT. And most days are good. I like my job, I’ve made new friends, and I’ve reconnected with old ones. I try not to dwell on the bad things in my past, including the night that Jackie disappeared.
But two days ago we got a call to respond to a death in the field. Someone had found a homeless man that was apparently in bad shape and unresponsive, and that meant we had to go and check it out. I always hate those calls, but this one was worse from the start. My stomach was in knots on the ride over, and by the time we reached the site and turned the body, I was already shaking.
It was a middle-aged man, dirty and scarred in several spots, with something protruding out of his mouth. Thinking he had choked on something, I went to try and clear his airway. But it wasn’t something in his mouth. It was his mouth. His teeth…they had somehow grown and fused together into a twisted wall of spiky bone that actually poked through his lips and cheeks in several spots. I had no idea how he ate or…
“What the fuck is wrong with his hands?”
I looked down to where my partner Jessica was pointing. The man's hands were fused together at the finger tips, the nails and flesh writhing together like a mass of tree roots. It made him look as though he was frozen in some kind of terrible prayer.
But my eye had also caught something else—a red mark, a bright crimson scar etched across the man’s left palm. I parted the hands as best I could and had Jessica shine her light onto the mark there. It was a word. A single word written in raised flesh.
Aradat.
I stepped back with a gasp and shined my light back to the man’s face. It was buried under the matted hair and dirt, but that red birthmark was still visible above his left eye. I felt my gorge rising, and barely managed to turn before I started to vomit. When Jessica asked if I was okay, I told her it was just something I’d eaten.
I write this because I don't know what else to do. My hope is that by reducing it to words, it willbe reduced. That it will stop filling my days and keeping me from sleep. I know some of it is guilt, or maybe just regret. The part of me that wonders if I really did enough.
But most of it is fear. Fear of the past and the unknown world I glimpsed that night so long ago. Fear of the horrors Jackie must have endured for so long. And most of all, fear that when Jackie came home…
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