E Minora in Dark Shade

7-9

7

George Holbrook withheld his disgust.

The boy coped with the subject changes and the questions. Able to reset himself to give out the next part, stop, question something/anything, then resume. This time, it was about how long George had lived in town. It was disguised as something else as Billy stepped back a few years to ask how things were in the years of a still-breathing McDougal.

"I would say eccentric," George answered. Interested in the kid's initial rouse. It seemed he had unknowingly possessed a talent in that he could captivate a child when on the spot with these interviews. He didn't mind. It was nice having someone to talk to in present circumstances and the audience, which he satiated. "You hear many things from people acting like he was some madman who hadn't yet been committed. The old coot was about as reasonable as most people. Though, he did have his moments. He was one of those end-of-the-world types that seemed to have a frequency to the moment. Sometimes, he couldn't help but tell you about it. Often, it was outbursts on what we all assumed was a bad day. But he wasn't a maniac as people around here like to make out."

As with Billy's generation, those in the past also avoided the McDougal house. That was simply a reason of interaction. The man wasn't dangerous. Or so it seemed. But no one was willing to take the chance with how he came out with his rants from time to time when most people thought of the world's future as something less bleak than McDougal predicted.

"He was always talking about the inner evils of mankind. And what would happen if it got loose on the world. I once remember him telling a crowd how each and every person had something inside of them that was trying to escape. Said it wouldn't take much to bring the Saint to a Sinner. Whatever that meant."

Billy pondered this wide-eyed and starry.

"Then you had your gossipers. The man was a Nazi who fled from the war. With that came all the stuff we saw on television following it. He was a war criminal. Acted with cruelty to prisoners. It went on and on for years. Didn't help matters, I don't think. That effect, I forget what it is called when people exchange one bit of information and reshape it with their own. All it did was shape an unnecessary legend. I think once I heard he liked to come home and beat his wife and kids. Funny, no one ever saw a woman going in or out of there, let alone children. And after that, I stopped listening. When they said after he passed, they tacked on some twisted German sexual thing." He dismissed this when he realized the boy wasn't old enough to hear it.

Just as Billy found the means to continue. George Holbrook wondered if there was some truth somewhere in all those musings. To have a bunker with some grotesque thing locked away inside. He listened.

"It sounded like a child. A kid around my age. It said, Please, help me."

George really had to swallow all this. It was hard to believe that someone inside this place had gone hidden for so long that it became a local legend. Just tucked way out in the woods somewhere for unknown years. Travis, his friends, and Billy couldn't have been the only ones brave enough to venture out there in the sticks. Some grown men went out with rifles to snag a deer illegally or a pellet gun to off a few dozen squirrels out of suburban boredom. The chance of it. The luck of it. Could it have been so simple as to have been made up by a bunch of bored kids who wanted to make an intricate fort out there? And then, years after it had been forgotten and abandoned, did some child find it before Billy just to get trapped behind that door? But, if it had been the heavy steel that Billy described. Then it couldn't have been kids building some dank fort. It was hard to swallow as nothing made sense unless you factored in the dark other half.