And Blaire is no different. Blaire’s been a bud of mine since sixth grade. She and I might have given it a shot if: 1) I hadn’t met Becca, and 2) Blaire lost that thing I can’t stand. She has this way about her that makes it so that we never get along. Let me make better sense of it.
I mean, Blaire’s great. She does my homework and I do hers for the subjects where we falter, the stuff I’ll never need and the stuff she’ll pledge, later in life, to be against (she thinks extracurricular activities are a waste of time).
Blaire just, I don’t know, seems to see through the front I put up. And by “front” I mean I’m usually not really listening to people.
It’s okay.
It’s true... I’m really not.
I kind of do this thing where I listen, but I’m also paying more attention to how the conversation works. There’s a sense to every conversation, even the ones that are nonsense. There’s a rise and fall to everything said, and there’s momentum that I pay attention to all the time, watching where it’ll go next. And on that day, hearing Brad tell us about Nikki’s latest guy, I listened but I also sipped from a can of beer. And beyond that, I walked the trail, my gaze to the ground, listening to how Brad and Steve traded gossip that couldn’t be true with this sort of mutual enthusiasm that I almost felt jealous about not having.
But I had the beer so I had a perfectly good excuse.
Blaire looked at me, that judging look.
I offered a can. “Want one?”
“Um, yeah, okay.”
I knew what she was thinking. “What?”
Blaire shook her head. “Nothing.”
Here we go again. Either I kept asking or she’d just tell me.
I took another gulp.
She didn’t even open her can.
Blaire sighed. “I’m just saying, when are you going to tell her?”
Why now? But then why did I even need to ask? I already had the answer: because it’s Blaire. She brings up whatever she wants whenever she wants. It’s probably why she’s stuck around. Persistence makes for someone who isn’t easy to ignore. It’s complicated.
“I figure it’s almost graduation,” I told her.
“That’s disgusting.” Blaire made a face. “Ugh.”
“She’s going up north and I’m staying here going to State. It’ll work itself out naturally.”
Blaire rolled her eyes. “I don’t get you, Hunter. I really don’t.”
There probably wouldn’t be a whole lot to get if we really got along. But Blaire has always been sort of my opposite. If she were in my shoes, she would have ended things with Becca weeks after going steady.
Where am I? I’m years in, putting in time.
But, you know.
Maybe you don’t.
That’s kind of why I’m going on about what happened on this day.
Yeah, well, we walked the trail to the point where it ends and it’s all just trees and, even at high noon, you get, at best, an inch of light before it’s all shadows. This is where we all used to go to get scared. All the grade school kids hung around this forested zone back when shadows were all we needed to get our thrills. But little do the kids know that if you keep walking south, you’ll end up in a clearing that really shouldn’t be there. You don’t really see it coming until you clear the last patch of trees. It’s a muddy pasture pockmarked with rocks and beer cans and other garbage. Footprints in the mud all over the place.
I couldn’t tell you how often this place becomes the scene of a killer party. We’re talking some of the best I can remember. I can’t really remember any one party in particular, but yeah, it’s usually half the school, bonfires and plenty of what we need to get mellow.
During those parties, everyone can almost be the same person.
But the clearing wasn’t where we were going that day. We had somewhere else far more secluded in mind.
You keep walking south, pushing past a water tower and that one abandoned car without wheels or axles, totally shot to shit, full of bullet holes—eventually you’ll get there.
This is the place.
Falter Kingdom.
I’ll try to explain it. It’s kind of a simple picture, nothing really wrong with it. You might see it and think, “So? Just another place where high school kids chill and smoke.” But the first clue is how it should be a sewer tunnel but it’s too big to be one. The concrete opening is the size of a car tunnel, and looking in you see nothing but darkness.
That darkness, it doesn’t let up.
Someone painted a crown around the opening of the tunnel. You can see the black paint, the spikes of the crown, from really far away. It has something to do with the lore, what people say about it.
I’ve been here a number of times but I’ve never taken part.
The thing about Falter Kingdom is that it’s not just any tunnel. The tunnel is full of darkness and it goes on and on and on, without end. People say that initially it was supposed to be part of the city subway system, but the mass transit authority discovered that, a couple miles in, there was a weak point, a sort of fissure. The fissure released all sorts of frequencies and energies and stuff. That’s what you get when people turn spirituality into hard science.
People used to play around with the thought that there was another plane of existence, probably because ours was too much of a bummer to be the only one. Everyone knew ghosts existed; they’d speak to you if you dared to listen. But demons want what people want, whatever that means.
Nearly half of the employees working on the tunnel attracted demons. Like anywhere else, the demon chooses you and you’ve got no choice. It latches on to you and you don’t have a whole lot of options.
Back then, it was really expensive to get rid of them. You couldn’t just call up a priest and get exorcized. You had to fill out a ton of paperwork, go to a number of experts and stuff. By the time they could get rid of it, there was basically only the demon left, the person gone, fully possessed.
So that’s how the legend goes. The legend of Falter Kingdom.
A bunch of us go here just to feel the change in atmosphere. A lot of Meadows students go here to prove a point.
But see, when we arrived here that day, we just wanted to be alone.
I wanted to get drunk. I was willing to listen to Brad if it meant getting a head start on the weekend. I didn’t think I would have to run the gauntlet.
But I’ll get to that.
We arrived at Falter Kingdom and the first thing that happened was our cell phones all lost signal. Again, that’s part of the fun of the place.
Blaire
