Pathway

An Amelia City Story

The punch that crashed into Adrian’s face wasn’t unexpected entirely.  No, it arrived with the certainty of a man being dragged before a firing squad.  He knew he’d be shot, just not when or how much pain there would be.  Adrian’s face was the laser-targeted side of a Middle-Eastern mud-and-brick dwelling when a tank shell hit; hammered back, fluid spraying, pieces (teeth) flying, and a scream throttled by the explosion.  He fell to the floor in a heap of gawky limbs and baggy clothes.

The man who’d struck Adrian loomed over him, an ambulatory golem in Cintas mechanic’s coveralls.  The name patch declared this man’s name was Mitch, and in the kingdom of Mitch, the whipping boy never walked away without a lashing.  A functional alcoholic who worked a lot of hours at Spencer’s Mechanics in downtown Amelia City, Mitch was Adrian’s stepfather of six months.  His favorite hobbies were fantasy football, getting drunk, playing baseball, and wailing on Adrian when the boy’s mother wasn’t around.  

Mitch hadn’t always been such a dick, and Adrian had been okay with him when the man had been dating his mother.  Quiet and always attentive to Cynthia, Adrian had actually liked the guy first.  But then Mitch and Cynthia got married, and Mitch moved in.  That was when Adrian saw the real Mitch Hawthorne.  Three days after Mitch moved in, Adrian’s mother started one of her two night shifts at Amelia General Hospital per week.  Mitch got home half an hour after Adrian got back from school, and as soon as Cynthia left for work, Mitch started blowing through a 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  After an hour, he was drunk.

Up in his room, Adrian had been listening to the Ramones, doing his math homework.  Mitch barged in around nine, storming in with a hammer, which he hurled through Adrian’s iPod Home with a resounding crash and crackle.  Adrian fell off of his chair in shock and confusion.  “What the fuck, Mitch,” he croaked.

“I been tryin’ a’’ tell you to turn that shit down for half an hour,” Mitch slurred, a half-emptied can still in his left hand.  

“I didn’t hear you, Jesus,” Adrian snapped, getting up and walking over to the ruined device on top of his dresser.  “You could have just come in and asked,” he said, taking the ruined device in hand and turning to shove it under Mitch’s nose.  But as he turned, Mitch’s free hand was already in flight.  The pain there, in that moment, was mirrored here, half a year later.  The only difference was in the reason and degree of experience Adrian now had with pain.  

Cynthia had gone to the hospital to cover part of a shift before her own.  Mitch, in a rare show of being decent, had asked Adrian if the gawky fifteen-year-old wanted to order a pizza.  Adrian had said sure.  Unfortunately, he’d said more, commenting, “Better than trying to watch you cook again.”  That was all, a minor jab, delivered with an innocent smile to show he was kidding.  Mitch didn’t find it funny, clearly.

Adrian sat up, spitting out blood and two teeth.  An incisor and a canine; there was no way his mother wouldn’t notice this time.  Aside from that first time, Mitch had been careful not to hit Adrian directly in the face.  Adrian slid the teeth into his pocket and half-crawled to the door that led from the kitchen to the back yard.  

Adrian’s home was All-American Dream, circa Leave It To Beaver.  It wasn’t unique in Amelia City’s outskirts, but it was nicer than most homes on the block.  The only thing that didn’t fit was the fence around the back yard.  Three of the boards were loose, the nails pried out on the bottom.  This was Adrian’s doing, creating a narrow escape when Mitch got violence on his mind.  

Adrian slipped through, out into the Jablonski’s yard, slinking along the side of the house and then out onto Grape Street.  With the sun setting, the neighborhood looked like a 20-year-old Los Angeles hooker; pretty in the right light, but a mess covered in bruises and sores upon closer scrutiny.  

The young man in his Offspring hoodie and gray sweatpants saunted down to Cleary Park, a beautifully maintained city park replete with woods, fields, hiking and biking trails, and three ponds for swimming.  This far into the fall, few people used the ponds, but one could always find a hearty Midwesterner or two using them even after the first snowfall. 

Adrian cut across the gass, spitting blood aside, as he headed for his favorite hiking trail.  He’d walk a while, let Mitch cool off, then head home.  This was the pattern for the last six times Mitch had hit him.  It wasn’t a permanent fix, but from Adrian’s perspective, the only permanent solution would put him in jail for murder.

As the foliage closed in on either side of Adrian, his mind blossomed with flowers of crimson horror.  “A baseball bat,” he muttered, envisioning himself standing over Mitch with a bat, blood everywhere, Mitch near death on the floor.  He smiled to himself.  “A butcher knife.”  In his mind’s eye, a scene played out of walking up behind Mitch’s recliner from the kitchen, burying the blade like an axe in the side of the man’s throat.  But his smile faded as he thought about being subsequently arrested and sent to prison.

His mother hadn’t believed him on the singular occasion he’d tried to say something about the beatings.  His own mother, and she had taken Mitch’s word over her son’s.  If his father had been around, he would have killed Mitch.  But Adrian’s father wasn’t around; he was already in prison himself.  The state didn’t take kindly to con artists fleecing hundreds of thousands of dollars out of unsuspecting, everyday citizens in a Ponzi scheme.  

Adrian stopped walking suddenly, the concrete path before him lit by the arc sodium lamps spaced every 20 or so feet along the way.  He’d been in his own thoughts so deeply that he’d barely noticed someone, or something, darting off into the brush up ahead.  Adrian’s mouth went dry, his heart stuttering.  He hadn’t seen exactly what moved ahead of him, but he’d caught the impression of something large and essentially wrong.

Too curious to listen to the symphony of ‘Get the Hell Out of Here’ in A minor by the Nervous System Philharmonic, Adrian slowly approached the narrow gap in the bushes where he’d seen the movement originate.  

Peeking through the gap, he saw a narrow dirt path leading several dozen yards to a small clearing among the foliage.  In the clearing was a red picnic table with two attached benches.  Sitting atop the table, back to him and hea hung down out of sight, was a large man in a strange black and white striped zoot suit.  Adrian could see little else in that unlit clearing, so he quietly began walking down the path.

A queer sensation of being watched settled over Adrian as he crossed the halfway point along the path.  He looked left, right, and behind, but saw nothing that would appear to be out of the ordinary.  Shrugging, he fixed his attention on the picnic table and its strange occupant.  When Adrian stood at the very mouth of the path into the small, circular clearing, the man on the table planted his hands, kicked up his feet, and spun around, raising his head.

It as the head of an oversized raven, the smiling beak full of teeth.

Adrian might have screamed if he hadn’t felt instantly paralyzed by terror.  He saw that the rave-thing wore no shoes over his clawed feet, and that its hands each had talons at the ends of the fingers.  It wore a red tie with a symbol of four hooked, blue claws, joined by a black line along their rounded tops.  “Hello, young man,” the raven called in an over-the-top game show host’s voice. “How the hell are ya?”  Adrian just blinked, moving his lips wordlessly.  The raven gave him a cartoonish look of exasperation.  “What’s the matter, kid?  Cat got your tongue?”

The raven reached behind itself, then, and held up an orange tabby cat with a bloody human tongue in its mouth.  The raven smiled, then tossed the cat off into the brush, yowling in loud protest.

“What, what, what the hell are you,” Adrian rasped.  The raven’s beak clicked open in an even wider, leering grin.  It stood to its full height, spreading its arms wide.

“I, dear boy, am Quoth!  And I’m here to lend a hand, as it were.”  Adrian took a step back as the raven-thing, Quoth, stepped down off the bench, but he bumped against something with his leg.  Looking over his shoulder and down, he hollered and jumped forward, toward the raven.  Standing behind him had been a brown scorpion the size of a German Shepherd. “Yes,” the raven was saying, now only a couple of feet behind him, “not exactly friendly, my pets.  Then again, they aren’t supposed to be.”

Adrian flinched away from the raven in the zoot suit, adrenaline threatening to burst his heart in his chest.  “What do you want,” he asked in a ghost of a whisper.  “Are you, are you going to kill me?”

“Goodness no,” said the raven calmly, taking a few strides away and then turning to Adrian, feathered hands clasping the sides of the ‘V’ of his blazer.  “I’m here because of what’s in your heart, young man.  And what’s in your heart, well, is murder.”  Adrian started to object, but the raven held up a finger to pause him.  Strange and fearful as this encounter was, Adrian didn’t think lying to this creature would help him any.  He nodded, looking down at the grass.

“Yeah, I was thinking about killing someone.”

“And that,” said the raven, jabbing a talon in Adrian’s direction, “is what caught my attention.  You want to kill someone but you can’t, because you know you’ll get caught.” Adrian shrugged, daring to look up at the raven.  It was standing there with its hands stuffed in the pockets of its pants, looking like an otherworldly used-car salesman.  Adrian cleared his throat.

“Yeah, so, it’s useless.”

“I could help you out,” the raven said lasciviously, grinning.  “I could loan you one of my pets, if you want.  All you have to do in return, my young man, is carry some soil, and a feather.”

“What?” Instead of responding, the raven knelt down and dug up a small bit of dirt with one of his talons.  He held it aloft, then let it slowly sift down from his hand.  

“Soil, my dear boy, like this.  And,” he said, plucking a single feather from his coat sleeve and holding it upright, “a feather, like this.”  The raven sauntered up to Adrian and held the feather out to the young man.  “Here, take it.”  Adrian did so with trembling hands, unable to get his fingers to cease from shaking in such proximity to the unnatural thing before him.  He stuffed it hastily into his pocket, to avoid dropping it.  “Smart lad.  Now, I’m going to make certain that my pet backs away, and you are going to take some of the soil from its walkway.”

“Why can’t I just take some from here?”

“My pets can only go where they are welcome, and they are only welcome where I set them up at the outset.  That one there,” the raven said, waving a hand casually in the direction of the scorpion, which stood on the edge of the clearing, clicking its pincers together repeatedly.  “It is only allowed on that pathway, between this little clearing, and the main hiking path.  I do not let my pets go too far afield.  There’s already so very many unpleasant, er, colleagues of mine, as it were, running around Amelia.  I’m sure you’ve heard stories.”

Adrian couldn’t deny that.  All of his life, he’d heard all kinds of crazy tales regarding the strange ghosts, haunts, and outright demons that infested the entirety of Amelia County.  Nobody lived in Amelia City for long without hearing at least half a dozen such stories.  Adrian, like most people, didn’t buy into them.  Until now.  Now, he was standing in the middle of a secret little clearing next to a raven-man, staring at a scorpion that could join the Westminster Show in the ‘working class’ category.  

“Look, I don’t know about this,” he stammered, shuffling his feet.  

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Adrian.”

“Well, Adrian,” said Quoth, draping one arm over Adrian’s shoulders.  “I can see into your heart, but not into your mind.  That, unfortunately, is beyond my abilities.  I know that you are afraid, presumably of whoever knocked your teeth out of your mouth.  Someone at school?  A neighborhood bully?”

“My stepfather,” Adrian said quietly, hanging his head.

“All right, a little typical for my liking, but who am I to argue with the status quo, eh,” the raven said, stepping away from Adrian.  “So, what’s it to be, Adrian?  Continued fear of your stepfather?  Or a solution that gets him to leave you alone, permanently, and your hands clean?”  Adrian looked the raven in the eyes, trying not to look at the improbable smile on its face.  He started walking towards the scorpion, which he saw thankfully was backing away as the raven muttered something unintelligible at it.  Adrian scooped up a small handful of dirt, stuffing it in the pocket with the feather.  

He stood up, and saw that the scorpion was nowhere to be seen.  When he turned around, the raven-thing was also gone.  There was only an aged, rotting picnic table and benches in the clearing, which no longer looked well-kept, but overgrown and forgotten.  Adrian quickly made his way back down the pathway to the hiking trail, and made his way for home.

It was going to be an interesting evening.


When Adrian slipped back into the house half an hour later, he discovered a pizza box, still warm, sitting on the kitchen counter. Mitch had already taken two slices out. Adrian grabbed a paper plate out of the cupboard over the sink, ears tuned in for any sign of Mitch approaching. He grabbed a couple of slices for himself and sat at the beaten oak kitchen table, trying to brush off what had happened at the park as a delusion, the workings of an over-stressed mind.

But as he sat eating, something jabbed into his leg. Adrian shifted slightly to the right, reaching into his pocket to discover what was poking at him. When his fingers brushed the soft threads of the raven feather, Adrian nearly let out a yelp of surprise and horror. It hadn't been a dream, or a hallucination. He'd become one of the many who encountered the dark denizens of Amelia City.

"The soil," he muttered to himself. He quickly finished his food, then headed upstairs, crossing the entryway to the living room on silent feet. Mitch was seated there in his recliner, head tilted to the side, snoring in drunken slumber. Adrian's pulse quickened, and he continued up the stairs with fear gnawing ruthlessly at his mind.

Up in the hallway of the second floor, Adrian paused outside of his mother and Mitch's bedroom. He ducked inside, sneaking over to Mitch's side of the bed. Clenching his teeth together, thinking of the broken teeth in the pocket opposite the feather and soil, he reached in, and sprinkled the pathway soil around Mitch's side of the bed and that entire half of the room, using the last bit to pepper the bed itself in a fine, almost invisible layer of the dusty dirt.

He felt ridiculous, yet somehow satisfied. Adrian nipped down the hall to his own bedroom, set the feather and his teeth on the dresser where his iPod Home had been, then crawled into bed with his laptop. He finished a couple of homework assignments, put the computer on the floor next to his printer, and printed out the sheets to hand in the following day.

He waited up in his bed, watching Youtube videos until he heard Mitch slam the bedroom door down the hall, then went to sleep himself. Adrian hoped that at the very least the unseen dirt on the bedspread would play hell with Mitch's sleep, at least give him an itch or something.

Adrian wouldn't sleep the whole night through.


The screams pelted down the hallway at three in the morning, a blood-curdling shriek starting what would continue with thumps and howls. Adrian shot upright in his bed, his nerves gibbering, a small animal noise of horror slipping out of his mouth. He leaped out of the bed, dashing down the hallway towards his mother and Mitch's bedroom. He came to a halt a few feet away from the door, eyes glued to the floor.

His mother's shoes were in the hallway. She'd come home early.

Adrian stepped forward and thrust the bedroom door open with his left hand. Inside, sprawled on the floor to the right, lay his mother, her left arm severed just above the elbow, blood spraying from the mangled stump as she lay twitching, dying on the floor. Mitch stood against the far wall, the massive scorpion's stinger impaled through his chest, its pincers tearing chunks of his legs and abdomen out of him. His eyes had rolled up into his head, bloody foam frothing up out of his mouth as the creature's venom laid waste to his internal organs and nervous system. His intestines hung on the floor from his belly, glistening darkly in the light shed from the single lamp on his nightstand.

Adrian began hollering, and the scorpion dropped Mitch like a sack of potatoes, wheeling about and surging toward him. Adrian stumbled back, but the beast stopped several yards away, pincers snapping uselessly on empty air. Adrian's eyes, focused with the intensity of adrenaline, saw that the pathway soil he'd sprinkled on the floor didn't reach all the way out to him.

He began laughing, nervous, manic chuckling bubbling out of him, the madness before him swooping in to claim his mind. "That's right," he said to the beast, which backed away. "That's right, you can't do anything to me! Ha!"

Suddenly, there was the clack-clack of claws on the hardwood floor of the upstairs hallway, coming from his bedroom. Adrian ceased laughing, and looked up to find Quoth, the raven, looming over him, smiling that bizarre, toothy smile of his.

"Quite right, my dear boy," said Quoth. "My pet can't go where there's no soil. Much as I can't go anywhere I'm not invited. But oh, what's this?" The raven reached into its pocket, pulling out the feather it had given to Adrian. He turned it this way and that, tossing it down into Adrian's lap. "Looks like an invitation to me."

Adrian let out a single moan as the raven lashed downward with its claws. By the time it was finished with him, a couple of broken teeth might have seemed like a cakewalk in comparison. Not that Adrian could say so for himself. Adrian wouldn't be saying much of anything, ever again.

"There's a reason that some paths are less traveled, Adrian," the raven said, shaking blood off of his claws. "They don't end well."


-Fin