NOT ANYMORE

There are often clear signs that something is amiss in a small town. It can be in the way strangers stop and suddenly stare at you like you’re either a pariah or a meal. Or in the strain of an impossibly wide smile plastered on the face of a boutique owner. Or in dried spots of blood on a diner window.

In Landover, it was the children’s things. The red ball in the park. A pastel friendship bracelet on a bench. The jump rope in the playground. Broken chalk on the sidewalk. But no children, not anywhere.

I stopped in Landover on my way to Gower after I kept nodding off while driving. It was obvious it wasn’t safe to stay on the road all night. I wasn’t going to be any good getting things done in Gower if I was injured or dead. Better to pull over, get some coffee. But nothing was open in Landover except the local motel. Like the town, it was small and run down. There were eight rooms. Seven were available. It was cheap. I was tired.

The motel manager was a Black woman, maybe seventy, with a deeply lined face and a nest of white hair that seemed more like a collection of cobwebs than a hairdo. She gazed at me with irises ringed with the milky blue of age. Without a word, her thin, bony hands pushed the guest book and pen towards me. I filled out the book and paid cash. As I walked away, her voice croaked, “You dropped something.” I turned to look. I hadn’t dropped anything. I looked back at her, quizzically. She grinned. Clearly, this was her evening’s entertainment.

The motel room was serviceable. I had a long day ahead of me, so I pulled the dark green curtains closed, lay down on top of the covers fully dressed and immediately fell asleep.

Bright and early the next morning, I was awakened by the first rays of the day striking my face through parted curtains that stirred in a soft breeze through a window that I didn’t remember opening.

It was a gorgeous day. The coffee shop where I grabbed breakfast was buzzing. Sidewalks were full of friendly townspeople. It took me awhile to realize I hadn’t seen any children. I figured they were all at school. But it was Saturday.

As I started to check out of the motel, I casually asked, “Where are all the kids?” The manager gripped my hand…hard.

“There aren’t any. Not anymore.”

It’s my nature to be stubbornly curious, so I asked, “What do you mean? There have to be. Where would I find them on a day like today?”

“There used to be a lot of children in Landover. You can find a stray one wandering around now and.” That was all I needed to hear to postpone my intended trip. Something wasn’t right and this mystery had piqued my interest. I asked to book the room through Monday. The manager looked at me for several moments. “You don’t want to do that. Yetu wo fo na wanntie a, woko Anteade.” There was a long pause as I waited for her to explain what that meant.

“What does that mean?”

She replied slowly, “If you don’t listen, then you go to the place for those who don’t heed advice.” I nodded as if I knew what the hell she was talking about. I paid in advance in cash. She looked at the stack of bills lying neatly on the coffee-stained counter. When she lifted her eyes to look at me, I knew she didn’t want my money. Her eyes were full of…I couldn’t tell if it was pity or disgust. Maybe both. Her hand swept the money away. “I don’t want to have to clean up after you,” she mumbled.

I assured her that I was neat and no trouble at all. “You won’t even know I’m here.” She let out a tiny choke of a laugh that became a mucous cough. When she bowed her head to hawk a gob that I didn’t want to see, her hair slid forward. She quickly adjusted it and disappeared into a back room. As I stood there in the musty lobby, dull sunlight struggled through the streaked front window and I realized how derelict the place was. I looked towards the back room behind the lobby desk. A shadow slipped across the bottom of the door. Yeah, she was watching me. No time to waste.

My decision to stay in town had a purpose. It was how I found out about the school bus and teachers. The bus followed a route around town that circled to the school. But no child ever got on or off. The school was deserted, though a few cars were parked in staff parking spots. By 4:30 pm, the large yellow bus returned to an empty depot. The two teachers I followed drove home and drank beer on the porch. Not that I was stalking them. I was just curious. And by this point, I felt a sense of urgency. I love to solve a mystery and felt compelled to figure out why there were hints and vestiges of children, but none were to be found anywhere, especially since the motel manager’s pronouncement of “not anymore” meant there must have been children at some point.

But I hadn’t seen a single child. There were empty strollers and abandoned tricycles on the sidewalk. Playgrounds looked as if children had recently played there — there were small sneaker prints in the dirt, candy wrappers in the grass — but the little ones had suddenly disappeared. It was deeply concerning. Something I took for granted and looked forward to, was profoundly missing in Landover.

On my final night, I decided to be bold and forthright. In a local bar named Wednesdays, I waited until I was on my second Dewar’s to ask the mustachioed bartender, “Where the fuck are all the kids in this town?”

A deeply resonant voice challenged me from across the bar as if we were in an iconic Old West saloon, “Who’s asking?”

The man was nestled in a corner in half-darkness. He sat forward to reveal mirrored sunglasses on a brown face etched with a matrix of lines. His head was bald. Standing behind him were three older white women dressed in black, their pale faces framed by long silky white hair. It was an odd quartet. At that moment, I realized they’d pegged me. But I couldn’t let them know that.

“I’m naturally curious. I couldn’t help but notice.” I finished my drink and headed for the door as quickly as possible as the man called out.

“See you soon.” It was more a threat than a friendly farewell. I glanced back, which I shouldn’t have done. A sound made me look. Best described as skittering, it came from the corner the bald man had sat in. I had no idea where he’d disappeared to, but there was a strange stain on the floor that hadn’t been there before. The trio of white-haired women were still there. But they were smiling and not blinking. And it was fucking terrifying. The stain shifted and I realized it was a shadow. I didn’t wait to see what was casting it.

I high tailed it to the parking lot. Only one other car was there, an old convertible. I knew cars, since I’d carefully changed in and out of so many of them while on the road. This one was a vintage 1980s Fiat 124 Spider. Clearly not well cared for, its doors seemed rusted shut. As I walked past to reach my Toyota, something moved inside it. The windows were filthy, but I could make out a dark shape clambering over the driver’s seat. I quickly pulled my keys out of my jacket and gripped them tightly. I refused to be a cliché that dropped them just as something came for me. My car’s remote fob didn’t work. WTF? My insistent thumb pressed it repeatedly. Nope. I heard one of the Fiat’s doors creak open. I didn’t turn to see what had opened it. I was busy trying to free the manual key from the damned fob. The catch wouldn’t release. When I finally freed it, I dropped the rest of the keys. I hauled open my car door, jumped in, slammed and locked it behind me. I waited as I looked out the window at my keys lying on the payment. House key, bike lock key, mystery-no-memory-of-what-it-was-for key. They were right there. I thought about it for a hair’s breadth but the shadow that flitted across the ground decided their fate. Time to get the hell out of this damn freaky town. I screeched out of the lot.

There were no street lamps on the road. My imagination was in overdrive and in the inky darkness that stretched out on either side of the road, phantom tendrils yanked back when I furtively glanced left or right. The fear that closed in on me released a feeling I’d locked away for years and thought I’d never have to grapple with again: guilt. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the few feet of road illuminated by the headlights and willed that shit back where it belonged.

At the motel, I found my room’s door open and the lights off. I’d left the bedside lamp on. Every instinct told me to run, but my bag with my instruments was in there. All the room lights flared on as soon as I entered. The men and women from the bar, the teachers, the bus driver were all crowded around the bed. The contents of my bag were laid out in the middle of it. God damn them. The handcuffs, the scalpel and bone saw glinted in the bright light. My beauties, my dears. How dare they. As I lurched towards the bed, several hands firmly held me back. The motel manager stepped out of the bathroom in a black rubber apron. My apron. She wasn’t wearing her stupid wig now. No, the bald bitch reached for my treasured scalpel with her gnarled hand. She gave me a self-satisfied grin as she approached. Two surprisingly strong women held me upright. The manager held my dearest one to my face to tell me this was how it would come. I was dragged to the bed and at that moment, I realized how planned this had been from the beginning…how everything had been a trap. All the children’s things. The school bus. The tiny shoe prints to make me eager for the small feet that wore them. The motel manager paused with the scalpel poised over my neck. I felt my jugular pulsing and imagined how I’d seen it dozens of times, but smaller, much smaller, under my own hand. She paused. She wanted to make sure I was looking at her and that I knew who and what she was. I saw what was obvious all along. The manager and the man from the bar were one in the same. Only one thing came to mind. “You tricked me.”

It leaned close and I felt its cold breath on my cheek as it whispered, “We protect. We do not sharpen the stick that would like to pierce our eye. Instead, we uproot it.”

The three spindly crones spoke in eerie unison, “When you poison others, some touches your mouth.” Fucking foreign proverbs. I didn’t need them. I knew what was coming and why.

The slice was deep and slow, so I felt the intensely unbearable pain as my flesh parted and gaped with a sharp release of air and liquid. As my hot blood spurted and I bucked against the hands that forced me down, the righteous voice skittered once more into my ear, “You won’t be doing those things. Not to any children. Not anymore.”