Chapter 2 The Man With the Bags

The city park had been divided into two sections. The first was your typical park, trimmed trees and walkways, with little playsets scattered across the area. That was the park that most people used.

Then there was the “wilderness” park, kept more or less like the place had looked like before the first settlers had arrived. Outside of the occasional hiker, it was mostly deserted, especially after dark.

Mari had been here a few times, mainly when the school had tours to show off how the people had lived in the past before they were civilized and had things like air conditioning. She’d always wondered what moron would move to California without air conditioning.

But now the trees were rising up around them, blocking out the light and noise from behind the two teens. The pathway was just a dirt path, and Mari and David had to be careful to avoid stumbling over loose dirt or potholes that hadn’t been covered over since the last summer cloudburst. 

I could just call Mom and Dad, but… No. Mari really didn’t want to get her little brother in trouble, especially not big-time trouble, and this might be big-time trouble. Just find him, kick his ass and tell him what he needs to say to Mom and Dad.

“So, the barn’s this way,” David said, consulting his map app.

After all, it’d be nice to have straight pathways, but nooooo that wouldn’t give you the wilderness experience! Mari blew a lock of hair out of her face as she used the light to take a look at the woods around them. She tried to call Kado again, but…

“He’s still got the phone off,” she said.

“Well, we’ve got… 13 minutes,” David said. “Presuming your parents don’t lose their tempers and come over ahead of time.”

“Don’t remind me,” Mari said. “Let’s gooo…”

“Well, we can tell your parents that it was just a dare to face… The Man With the Bags!” David grinned at Mari, his teeth gleaming in the dark.

“Yeah, and he’s going to get grounded for taking a walk into the dark where he might face the Rattlesnake With the Fangs, or the Old Plank With the Rusty Nail.” Mari shook her head. “Seriously, that story was around when we were in first grade!”

“Oh yeah, remember Mr. Grundeson and the costume?”

Mari giggled. “Yeah. It was sort of hard to take it seriously.”

“Than why did you scream like a little girl?”

“Um, because I was a little girl? Why did you hide behind the teacher’s desk?”

David puffed out his chest and put his hands on his hips. “I wasn’t hiding, I was… preparing to attack!”

Mari snorted. “Yeah… Well, let’s get going before my idiot brother has a reason to scream like a little boy.”

“Still,” David said. “Stories like that sound kind of creepy, I mean, when you are out in the woods at night.”

“Want me to hold your hand?” Mari asked. But then she shook her head. It was kind of creepy.  Supposedly the Man With the Bags had been a lone settler who had gone crazy and taken some kids, stuffing them into bags and taking them to his home. The stories diverged from there, ranging from selling the kids to some unnamed accomplice to killing and eating them in front of the preserved corpses of his family.

Mari had actually looked up the real history behind the tale. All it had said was that there had been an individual who had lived on the grounds of the current park and had left not long after two children had vanished in a thunderstorm. But given that they had last been seen playing by the old barn and nobody had really known the guy…

Well, we can’t all have cool legends, Mari thought. In fact—her cell phone flared up, the display bright enough to dazzle her eyes.

“Hey!” Mari said. “What’s wrong—”

“Fuck!” David was shielding his eyes from his own cell phone. Their screens flared up, went dark, flared up again… and then went dark and didn’t come on again. Mari blinked the dazzle out of her eyes and then stood there, trying to look around.  Everything was really dark now.

She stared at her cell phone and tried to turn it on again. Nothing. Next to her, David was doing the same.

Then they stopped and stared at each other. Mari could barely make David out in the gloom.

“What do we do?” he asked. “I’m not liking that we couldn’t get in touch with Kado, and his phone just…stopped.”

Like ours just did. “Yeah…” Mari shook her head. “But now we have an excuse for him!”

“What about our excuse?”

“We were looking for Kado!” Mari replied. “It’s not completely dark and…” She gestured back the way they came, where the lights from the park, even if they weren’t directly visible through the trees, at least left enough light in the sky to serve as a beacon. “We just head back that way.”

“Okay, but if we run into a ghost from the past, I told you so…”

Mari snorted. “Fine. I’ll beat up the big, bad ghost for you.”  And I hope that’s all it is. If Kado’s put a nail through his foot or broken his stupid leg, we’re never going to hear the end of it… 

****

I don’t like this, David thought. He was walking beside Mari, but they were moving slowly because even with the light of the stars and the moon, it would be really easy to trip.

And what if Kado and Cecelia did trip?  If they’re hurt… 

“Mari, you want to head back and tell your folks while I go on ahead?”  David asked.

Mari shook her head. “Nope, because that gets back to getting Kado and Cecelia in trouble. We’ve got…”

“We had about 10 minutes, and then the phones went dead.” David frowned. “There’s no way we get out in time now.”

“Then let’s make certain we have my idiot brother,” Mari said. She flicked a lock of hair back, a fast, irritated motion.

She doesn’t like this either. It wasn’t that David believed any crazy story about a ghost, but Kado’s phone going off the air, and then both of their phones dying… that wasn’t normal. 

But he wasn’t going to bring that up to Mari because it might just be a coincidence, or maybe there were underground power cables or something that were jamming the phones. 

Stupid kids. Stupid dare. They were all going to be in trouble for this. Even if nothing else went wrong. I bet someone is waiting to scare them there. That’s why the other kids dared them into the bet. They didn’t tell us because they thought it would be funny.

David looked at the vision of a nice drive back home with Mari, vanishing into the distance behind the utter parental rage that this was going to produce. Then Mari would be in a lousy mood for the rest of the last full summer they were going to be able to spend palling around and…

Stupid, stupid kids…

Lost in his thoughts, David almost ran into Mari when she stopped.

“What”—David stared—”the hell is that?”

It was the barn, but the barn they’d seen in the daytime had been a dilapidated building with a little plaque mentioning that it was the first barn in the region. Supposedly, that somehow made an old wooden building important.

But this…  There was a shimmering, violet light that emerged from the open door and windows, a glow that seemed to cling to the structure of the barn. Somehow the light was bright enough to dazzle David’s eyes without actually illuminating anything around the structure.

Is someone screwing around with black lights?  Did they walk into a rave? That might not be good. Whoever was holding the party might not be happy to see some kids walk into it. David took a deep breath.

“Let’s go,” Mari said. “We can look in, and find out who is there and if Kado is there…” She glared at the barn. “He is going to be in so much trouble…”

“Yeah.” David looked around. “But Mari, let’s keep quiet. If they’re not there and it’s a bunch of college students having a party, they might not want to be interrupted.”

“Right. We’ll just take a look first,” Mari said.

They quietly walked across the bare ground the separated the barn from the trees. David didn’t see any cars around.

That’s weird. If they’re having a party, why would they leave their cars in the parking lot? That was almost a mile’s walk, especially when they could just drive their cars down the dirt path from the highway right up to the barn.

He shook his head. At least the door was open. It was then that they came to the edge of the door and were able to look in.

What the fuck…

****

    The interior of the barn was empty, save for a single table. But it was just shimmering with violet, eye-hurting light. There were no lighting fixtures. No gang of kids dancing. Just a huge, bulky figure, looking like a man dressed in a sack. There was a sack over his head, with two holes where his eyes would be. The man didn’t seem to notice Mari as she pulled her head back from the open door.

“Who—who is that?” Mari finally got out. Her mouth felt dry, and she swallowed a couple of times.

“I don’t know! Some crazy guy?” David looked pale.

Mari bet she looked pale. She peeked back into the barn. The guy’s back was turned, but he looked too wide to be a person. His proportions were… off.

And then she saw Kado and Cecelia. They were in bags, only their heads exposed. They were also gagged and frantically trying to get out, but save for making the bags move a little, they were trapped.

What are you doin—

“Bad little boys and girls, out at night…” the man said, and Mari shuddered at his voice. There was something… wrong about it. “You must be punished and put into the ground so the trees will grow… Yes…” He reached down to the table and pulled up a long, gleaming knife and started sharpening it, holding it so that the two terrified kids could see him.  Then he put it back down and started humming an oddly discordant tune.

Mari almost moved, but then David pulled her back around the door. “Wait!” he hissed.

“Are you—we’ve got to get them out!”

“With that guy chasing us all the way back to the park, with no phones or lights?” David asked. He held his phone out, finger pressing the power button so hard his skin had gone white.

Nothing.

Fuck. “What do we do?”

“I’m going to hit him really, really hard,” David said. He handed Mari his pocket knife. “You cut Kado and Cecelia out and run for the park.”

“And leave y—”

“I’ll follow. I just don’t want him to be able to chase us,” David said. He looked down. “We already know he’s a bad guy, so if I can hit him hard enough…”

“Yeah.” Mari nodded. “And he doesn’t look like he can move very fast.” With a costume like that, I bet he doesn’t so much walk as he waddles. “If you knock him down, he probably won’t even be able to get up.”

“Yeah,” David said with a sickly grin. “No problem at all.” 

“But that doesn’t mean stick around,” Mari hissed.

“Hell, no. Let’s go.”

****

The guy was occupied humming his tune, while he stared at the table and its array of sharp instruments. David moved as quietly as he could, staying behind the man.

Don’t look behind you…

Out of the corner of his eye, David saw Mari. She was heading for Kado and Cecelia, holding her finger to her mouth when the two kids saw her.

David reached out and grabbed a two by four from a pile of wood by the wall. There was a slight scraping sound as he pulled it free. David froze for a moment.

But the lunatic didn’t seem to notice.

Good.

David had lied to Mari. He didn’t intend to knock the asshole down. He intended to knock his head off. David’s hands were sweaty, the wood rough under his skin. He got a good grip and then charged the man in a rush. The would-be murderer paused and then turned to face David, just before David hit him in the head so hard the wood shattered. More importantly, the man’s head jerked to the side, an ugly cracking sound filling the room. David dropped the remains of the board, his hands aching from the impact as the man fell to the side.

Fuck. I killed him. I killed him… David stared at the body for a moment, then turned to run to Mari.

“Mari, get them off—”

“I can’t!” Mari said. “It’s…”  She gestured, and David stared, eyes wide, as she pushed the knife through the fabric… only for it to reform right behind the blade.

“What the…”  Suddenly, Kado and Cecelia started making frantic noises through their gags.

“We’re going to get you out of this,” David said. “Mari, Maybe we can—”

“Mmmm!” Kado started thrashing his head back and forth…

And it was then that David heard the sound of someone humming again.

Mari looked behind him, and he saw the color drain from her face.

“No way…”

David followed Mari’s gaze, his friend staring at the man who was now standing up, head lolling to the side.

“Yeah. No way.” There wasn’t much else to say.

****

Mari stared. That was all she could do. The thing stood up and turned around, even though its head was just flopping around.

People didn’t keep moving when someone broke their neck. They just didn’t! 

David started trying to help Mari get the kids out, but the fabric, whatever it was, kept healing. It was like the bags weren’t even made out of real cloth.

And then David tried to pull Kado up, bag and all, but it was somehow stuck to the ground. No matter how hard David pulled, the bag just sat there.

“Fuck…” Mari and David chorused.

“Now, children, bad language is a sin!” the thing was advancing on them. David stared at it, then grabbed an ax from where it had been leaning against the wall, supposedly to show what the barn had looked like in the old days.

Thank God nobody stole it, Mari thought.

David glanced over at Mari. “Mari, you’d—”

“Screw that! He’s my kid brother, and Cecelia is his friend!” Mari said. She reached over and grabbed a pitchfork. Let’s see how you do with holes in you!

“Right,” David said. His face was shiny with sweat under the strange violet lighting. “Watch that knife.”

“Right.” Yeah, the great big knife he’s carrying. The knife that looks like it has dried blood on it. Please let that be red paint. And then with a yell, David charged, swinging the ax at the thing. Mari followed after him, shrieking like a banshee because that sure sounded better than blubbering like a baby.

David buried the ax in its shoulder, the blade punching through the cloth, fragments of straw coming out, just as Mari stabbed it—not a he anymore, an it—in the chest, the three tips of the pitchfork going into its torso. She felt resistance and pushed harder. Mari hoped she was hurting it, but then it just grabbed the pitchfork and threw it and Mari across the room. She hit the wall, the back of her head bouncing off the wood and literally saw stars.

Then it was holding David, lifting him up with one hand while another held the knife, getting ready to eviscerate her friend. David was frantically kicking at the monster and…

Suddenly there were two other figures standing in the open door. A man and woman, holding…

Guns? Sort of?

“He-help him!”

They didn’t reply, just lifted their weapons and from the wide barrels bright light blasted, and where it touched the… thing, its body just seemed to dissolve. It turned and roared, but as it stepped forward, they kept their weapons on it, and the beams of light blasted right through it, the huge figure collapsing in on itself, tiny bits of cloth just drifting off like ash. David fell to the ground and frantically scrambled away from where the monster had been.

“Well.” The woman sounded annoyed. “I thought that nobody would be here?” Now that Mari wasn't focusing on her likely death, she noticed that the woman was wearing a business suit, while the guy was dressed in jeans, wearing a leather jacket over his white shirt.

“They weren’t supposed to be, but…”  The man knelt down by David, reaching out with one hand. “You okay, kid?”

“I—Mari!”

“Don’t worry,” The woman said, as she walked to Mari. Mari looked at her as she did… something with the gun, not so much putting it back as causing it to fold into itself, glow and then turn into a little metal box. “You look like you took a big hit,” she told her. “Did you blackout?”

“No… I just… What was that! You pulled out those—what was that!”

“We’ll explain that in a moment,” the man said as he helped David to his feet. First of all… He pulled out a bulky cell phone and flipped it open.

Their phones work…

He stared at the phone, then turned to the woman. “Yeah, you said it was a breach, not that it was a fully realized AE… ” He glanced at Mari. “So, here for some special time?”

“What—No!” Mari blushed. She gestured at Kado. “We were here for Kado and Cecelia—they came out on…” She blinked. “A dare about the Man With the Bags…”

“And that’s what caused it to get realized…” The woman shook her head and pulled out a small metal cylinder. She touched the top, and it glowed for a moment…

And then the purple glow was gone. So were the bags holding Kado and Cecelia, the material seeming to fade into the air. Cecelia burst into tears and hugged Kado.

“Well, at least the light is gone,” Mari muttered.

The woman looked up at her, then nodded. “It is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“What light?” Kado asked.

“You didn’t see it?” David asked. Kado and Cecelia shook their heads.

Now both the man and woman were looking at David.

“Interesting…”

“No,” Mari said. “What’s interesting is why were you here, what was that thing, why aren’t we dead, and what was that thing!”

“Oh, that?” The man smirked and pulled out a comb, running it through his short, black hair.  “That was just the result of a little hallucination from the illegal fireworks that had gone off in the barn.”

With that, his companion pulled out a small, brightly colored flare and tossed it into the back of the barn. Moments later, tongues of fire were running up the side of the barn.

“What?” David asked. “You think anyone is—”

“Going to believe that over a strange monster that got shot by rayguns?” The woman winked at David. “Just imagine saying that to your parents or the cops. By the way, we should leave.”

Mari didn’t hesitate as she grabbed Kado, and David grabbed Cecelia and they pulled the two kids out of the barn, followed by the man and woman. Outside, a three-wheeler tadpole sat by the barn. A glow started to rise from the interior of the barn, this time the natural light of a rapidly spreading fire.

“You set the barn on fire. Why did you set the barn on fire?”  David asked.

Mom and Dad sent me to get Kado, and now he almost got killed, the barn is on fire, and I’m talking to two rejects from a spy movie! We’re dead. We’re so dead… Mari tried to keep from hyperventilating. 

“Well,” the man said, looking up at the growing streams of smoke coming from the windows. “I know what I’d like to say—that some kids went to the barn on a dare, and just had the bad luck to be there when an ember touched off some illegal fireworks that a few teens had left in the barn.”

“It’s such a good story, especially if the police and fire reports back it up. I mean, better than non-existent monsters and mysterious people with ray guns. In fact…” The woman opened her eyes wide. “If some teens told me that, why, I’d wonder what they were trying to cover up!”

“I—”  Mari opened her mouth, and then she heard the sound of fire trucks.

“Tick-tock!” the man said.

“Yes!” David finally burst out. “It was just some fireworks that went off!”

“But—” Mari cut Kado off.

“That was it!” she hissed. “Unless you want Mom and Dad, and Cecelia’s Mom and Dad, to wonder why you two were here, alone, and telling a stupid story about it!”

The woman’s smirk got bigger. Mari really wanted to smack her.

“Well, then!” the man said, as he and the woman walked to their vehicle and got inside. He looked up at the four teens from the driver’s seat. “We have a deal. Just don’t make your story too complex. Kids, Dare, Barn, Fire. Don’t worry, you probably won’t see us again.” And with that, the vehicle sped off into the night, its engine eerily quiet.

“Well, that’s—” Mari’s phone suddenly squawked, and she jumped nearly a foot into the air. Then Kado’s phone started ringing.

Kado looked at his phone. “It’s Dad.”

“And this is Mom.” Mari glared at Kado. "A really, really angry Mom."

Then Cecelia’s phone started to ring, joined by David’s.

David stared at Mari. “We are in so much trouble.”

“Yeah,” Mari said, as what sounded like every fire truck in the city got closer. She could feel the heat of the fire from where she stood. “I bet we are.”