The Smell Of Fear

The neighbor’s boy from downstairs found me on the steps again. His mother worked late on Thursdays, and on Thursdays he came looking for the story about the rock, the one he had heard from me a hundred times already. I told him he knew it by heart. He said tell it anyway. So, I did.

* * *

Things were easy and then they weren’t. That’s how it begins when one turns 12 years old. One day, randomly on a sunshiny day, things crack open and life as we know it stops. I remember looking at a magazine, a Star or the like, lay on the living room table, on the cover was a UFO. I liked the idea of being taken by an alien ship. Better than school, where five seniors ran the halls and took my lunch and shoved my books to the floor. Better than home, where my mother's new man waited with a toothpick in his teeth.

His name was Frank. He always gave me chores, on top of the ones I already had, he made me do this and that, then turned around and took all the credit with Ma. Frank was not a drunk, drunk, nor did he come home and beat me or my mother. He was not like the other loser stepdads, he was worse. He did all the hitting with his words, smirks and looks. Making fun of how I dressed or talked. Telling me, I would fail if I had a test that day. Hinting, every other day or so, that my mother had to keep me, and if it were up to her, she would give me to my father. He called me a wimp because the seniors had made me one, and he knew about the seniors because I had come home crying on the first day with an empty lunch bag.

He would lean in and whisper: “you better be careful Jacob…” I could smell the spiced lemon mixed with shit cologne he bathed in, like the smell of rotten eggs smeared in tuna.

“This is a lousy job, Jacob, a mouse would do a better job,” Frank would say, holding that menacing toothpick between his teeth, which made each word come out with a tsk after it. How did he want me to do it, for Pete’s sake? How could a person do a lousy job of throwing the garbage in the bin outside? I ignored him mostly, other times I would sit my ass down to watch re-runs of the Star Trek show, trying to be invisible. I just wanted to be left alone.

I never told ma how Frank was like. They just started living together the beginning of this school year. She was always exhausted. She worked two shifts and came home to cook and clean while Frank explained whose fault it was that he had lost another job. She gave him the same blank face she gave him when he started in on me. I think she kept him the way you keep a mean guard dog at the door, for whatever a mean thing at the door does.

* * *

The day after my twelfth birthday I sat on the playground in front of our building with Max. There were not many dogs in our part of the city, and he was the best thing I had. I closed my eyes, knowing Max would be close by. Ma had bought me two red velvet cupcakes and a cold lemonade drink. I shut my eyes against the sun and thought of the many ways I could get back at the boys at school. I would smile at one or two satisfying revenge plans, and chuckle at the other outrageous ones. I was trying to forget Frank, and how I didn’t have any friends. I could feel the sun inches from my face, as the heat formed beads of droplets on my forehead.

Something hard pushed up under my thigh. A rock, gray and round, the size of a plum. I didn’t remember seeing that when I sat down earlier. I picked it up and it gave a small squeak, like a toy with the air running out of it. The sweetness came then, syrup at the back of my throat, out of nowhere and gone again. I dropped the rock in my pocket and shut my eyes.

I heard a thud and a loud crash followed; I opened my eyes. I only saw a blur. The light from the sun completely blinded me. I squinted hard, covering my eyes with my hand. A shape lay in the dirt. The color of it was red. I went toward it slow, and there was Max with blood going dark under his head, and the scream came out of me before I knew it.

Where was everyone else? Why was it dark all of a sudden? Wasn’t it bright just a moment ago? Something large stood at my back. I would not turn. I would not make it easy for them, because by then I knew there was more than one and I knew they had done this to Max. A shuffling came toward me, except it was not feet, it was nearer to hovering, and the sweetness filled the air again, thick this time.

I froze. They were more than one, I was almost sure, the air carried a thickness about it, and noise was absent from all around. I was sweating from fear, staring at my dog in tears. When it moved, I was so happy that it was not dead, that I instinctively ran to him. He disappeared, and when I turned, they were waiting. Eyes as big as an owl's, square, lit from the inside with a green light, no part of them I could call a face. They had long arms that could go around themselves twice and stout necks. I stared at their green square eyes looking for mercy.

Behind them a machine hovered off the ground with spikes all over it like a porcupine. Their mouths opened in a zigzag of small pointed teeth, a piranha's mouth. Those black blotches breathed. I could see them crawl on their own.

I was petrified. They did not touch me, but a force propelled me to move beside them toward their spaceship. I did not go peacefully; I was kicking and screaming all the two seconds it took to get me there. They shoved me in, what I imagined was, the back seat. There was no sound to the ride. It was like we were swimming in the clouds. There was a window with bars. I could see the house getting smaller and smaller as I got further and further away. I sat down in exhaustion waiting for my fate in tears.

* * *

Cold woke me. Stone pressed against my cheek, gritty and damp, and the dark gave me nothing to hold on to. Then it came back, the blood and the owl eyes, and I was on my feet before I knew I had moved. I ran until a wall stopped me, palms scraping stone, stone everywhere. I was inside a cave.

I looked around, not knowing where I was, when I suddenly remembered what happened. I shuffled to my feet quickly and started to run. There was some light, but I didn’t know where it came from. I tripped on a rock; I bent down to pick it up. I heard a squeak, I could have sworn it came from the rock. Too afraid of everything that moment, I tossed it as far as I could. I walked carefully trying to avoid any ditches or funny rocks.

There was light, I could not see where it came from. Far down the wall a glimmer showed, drawings in colors I had no names for, animals that were not animals, or a building, or a story, the shapes caught between circles and zigzags with lines run through them. When I went toward the glimmer it thinned and died, and another woke further on, and that one died too as I reached it.

The place kept offering me something and snatching it back, until I sat down in the dark with my head in my hands and gave up on learning anything at all.

Some time passed, I think I slept. While my eyes were still closed, I smelled maple syrup. I opened my mouth before my eyes. The dark, dim, door in front of me, big and imposing, was huge, bigger than the biggest big. It was round like a Ferris wheel, where did it come from? It wasn’t there before. I tore my eyes from it to inspect my surroundings. I was still in the cave. I was surrounded by mud, pebbles and a rock the size of a baseball. I got up and ran. I kept running, past the drawings, turning right and left trying to remember the look of things, so I knew I was not going in circles. Finally, I sat down. My forehead was full of sweat. I brushed it off with the back of my hand. My mind drifted to my mother. I put my head in my hands and cried some more.

I turned, feeling something brush me lightly, a figure was staring at me. I was startled. The smell of maple syrup was strong; it hit my nostrils like nose spray. This figure didn’t seem menacing, but curious. I stood still leaning back, away from it, as slowly as I could. There was no-where to run, God knows what my running would make it do. We both were staring at each other. It had a smooth, greenish velvety skin. Its eyes were squares, no pupil, just a green light beaming from them. Its body was floating, a malleable shape, changing shape as if to music only it could hear. It was slightly different than the ones I saw before, certainly it had smaller arms.

Nothing like facing the predator in the movies. No stinking stench or drooling or menacing look. My eyes relaxed, as I made up a story in my mind about this weird looking creature to calm my nerves. Its head was bopping like the bubble headed dog one sees on the dashboard of a taxi. I don’t know what came over me, but out of character, I extended my hand to touch it, very, very slowly. Suddenly, its mouth opened wide and steel pointed teeth drooled a thick black gel. A vibrating growl came out of it. It sent shivers down my spine. I slowly lowered my hand by my side, as I clenched my teeth willing it to go. I blinked and it was gone. I exhaled long and hard, realizing I had kept in my breath the whole time. I bent down, putting my hands on my knees exhaling several times, trying to calm my nerves.

The cave changed. Stone to steel, all at once, nothing moving under me, the way a room jumps when the light comes on. The walls turned bright, and the drawings stopped dying when I neared them. The steel held them still and sharp, and they had begun to move inside their frames the way pictures move in the wizard newspapers.

Relieved there were steel walls, maybe I could find a door somehow and be rid of weird rocks, disappearing drawings on walls and slimy creatures with knives for teeth. I started walking towards the lightened paintings again. I ran to them, then I stopped. My mouth opened in shock.

The first showed what I had already lived, the playground washed white, the machine, a boy carried up through cloud with his face pulled wrong. In the next, Max lay in the dirt, except nothing had knocked him down. A gray hand set him there, on purpose, in the exact spot where I would find him, so the boy would come running and be standing there alone when the light went out. The dog was the bait. I started walking trying to find the next painting to see what would happen to me. I kept going towards the light, thinking and planning my escape. The last drawing was a few steps away.

The weight of the rock in my pocket shifted.

Suddenly, I felt something touch my foot. My nose filled with the smell of maple syrup again. There lay the same rock as before circling around my feet. I had forgotten it, the gray rock from the playground, I jumped away, hands ready for combat. I circled around myself following the sound of the rock. The rock nudged me from behind.

“Help me.”

I threw it. It was back against my shoe before I finished flinching, circling my foot.

“Help me,” it said again.

And now it turned against my leg on its own. I dug it out and held it on my flat palm where it shook like an old man's hand. The sweetness rose off it. A squeak came, smaller than before, and under the squeak a voice, soft and close.

“What?” I screamed the words at the rock not believing it talked.

“Take me with you,” it said.

“Oh my God...oh my God, you can talk? I thought it was my imagination.” I said, brushing my hands through my hair. Its voice was soft and whispery. It seemed harmless. Nevertheless, things are not what it seems where I was at.

“What...what do you want from me?” words came out as a plea. My heart was pounding hard.

“Don’t be afraid, I come from the planet of the rocks. These creatures took me too.”

“The syrup,” I said, because it was the only thing I could get out. “Are you made of honey?”

“I do not know honey. That is the smell of fear. Yours, and mine.”

I decided the rock posed no danger. It was a prisoner, like me. I looked up to see where to go next. I saw in the far-right corner a light. I walked quickly to the next painting, ignoring the rock. I stared at it in horror. There was the creature lurking over me as I lay with my brain oozing blood like my dog. He was probing in my brain with a long spiked moving rod. It seemed to come alive as it neared my brain. I screamed as loud as I could and started sprinting.

At the end of the tunnel, an opening brought in light from my world. I ran towards the light of the sun as fast as my legs could carry me. The light seemed to get farther and farther away as I ran as fast as I could. I stumbled and fell, I felt a weight jump in my pants pocket, then it was as if I was on a jet plane, moving at warp speed out of the steel cave. I landed right in front of my building.

***

“Be careful what you wish for,” I told the boy. He was looking at me the way only an eight-year-old can, all wonder and no doubt.

“Geez, Uncle Jacob. It scares me every time.” He tipped his head. “But do you really think it came true because you wished it? That they took you for real?”

“I know what they say about me around here,” I said. “I am not crazy.”

I got up off the steps. My hand went into my pocket feeling the rock wiggle.

As my fingers shut it gave one small squeak that only I could hear.

2022