This story is part of the U Pick it, I write it, short story contest!
Part Two, Missed Part One? Read This First.
Jillian Humboldt had been first to discover it. She'd revealed it to her mother at breakfast. Her mother had broken down, over her oatmeal, and Jillian went to console her.
"Mama, it's okay, Jason will be home soon," she said. "Just like Benny."
Jillian had patted her mother on the shoulder, then made her breakfast, humming happily as she worked. Benny Shaw had been one of the first to disappear, on the second night, he and a girl named Abigail had vanished from their beds.
Jillian's brother, Jason, had disappeared just two days after that.
"What do you mean Benny's home?" Pat Humboldt had asked his daughter.
"I saw him," she said, her mouth full of Frootloops.
"In a dream?" he father asked.
"In the playground," Jillian told him.
Over the course of the morning, Jillian was asked to retell her story six times. Twice for her parents, then for several groups around town.
"I went to the playground," she said.
"When?"
"Last night, I couldn't sleep, needed to get my ducks in a row," Jillian explained.
Any other time her mother would have smiled at this but not now.
"You were at the playground, alone, last night? Are you out of your mind?" her mother asked.
"Beth, it's not the time," Pat told his wife. "We can deal with that later. Go on, Jillian, what do you mean, 'get your ducks in a row'?"
"Like Mr. Benson says, you know, figure out all the things in your head, so it's not so busy," Jillian said.
Beth Humboldt pushed her chair back from the table. "Benson, I knew that man couldn't be trusted. What man, forty years old, never married wants a job teaching third grade.."
"Beth, please, just let her finish," Pat said, kindly.
"I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't have gone out, but I'm just so confused by everything and I needed to think, so I went to swing, and that's when Benny came," she said.
At first, it had been written off as a child's dream. It wasn't unusual, Dr. Martin had said, after what she'd been through, to dream of her best friend coming back.
But, when she revealed that Benny had left his favorite slot car in the seat of the swing when he left, his mother had broken down. She'd been looking for it, he never went anywhere without it, set it by his plate when he ate, held it when he watched television. It had been a gift from his college age brother, home for Christmas.
"He's alive," she said, clutching the car. "Why didn't he come home?"
Jillian smiled, "It's okay, he wasn't alone," she said.
"What do you mean, exactly?" Mayor Woodzi asked.
"They were all there," Jillian said. "All of the kids that are gone now, they all came back to play with me."
So, had begun the nightly vigils, watching the playground. And, every night, at precisely eleven p.m. they had returned, all of them. But, no matter what was tried, none of the children would acknowledge the presence of anyone but themselves.
Until Beth Humboldt had run onto the playground and grabbed her son Jason by the hands, "Oh Jason, you've come home!"
The boy had looked at his mother coldly, without a sign of recognition, opened his mouth, and screamed. An unworldly scream, at a pitch and volume, it was agreed, was quite unnatural. The others joined in, and Beth Humboldt had been fortunate to escape without serious injury as they attacked her.
In the end, she'd required stitches for no less than three bites that had broken the skin. On subsequent evenings, it was decided it was best to wait and follow them, try to determine what drug, or spell they were under.
But, each time, the searchers had been forced to turn back to town. As they pressed into the woods, surrounding the playground, the remaining children had each stood, stiff upright in their beds and let out the same horrendous scream that Jason had begun on the playground. They couldn't continue for fear of harming them.
Tonight would be different.
Don Price had laid out a plan. They'd take Penny with them. It was a risk, but they had to find out where they children were going. They'd need every flashlight, search light and torch available, the woods were very dense.
And so, at eleven p.m. the playground was brightly lit with headlights, flashlights and even a few living room lamps, run from extension cords from the nearby school house. Under other circumstances the setting would have seemed festive.
They didn't have to wait long, one by one, thirty seven in all, the children, from little Timothy Smith at 4, to Elizabeth Crawford 11 came out of the treeline and onto the playground. In the harsh light surrounding them, they played, if it could be called that.
There were no expressions of delight, no laughter, no sound at all. And twenty-two minutes after they'd arrived, they left the way they'd come. According to Price's instructions, the towns people waited thirty seconds, before following behind. It wasn't difficult to keep up, three dozen children, even without talking, make a terrible noise crashing through undergrowth.
Nearly 180 adults followed close behind. And tucked in the center of their moving crowd, hand cuffed between her parents, was Penny. The last unaffected child in Pineville.
By the time they'd gone two miles, almost a third of the company had been forced to stop, the walking was too much for them. But the children kept on. Meanwhile, ten vehicles, led by Sheriff Crawford, were circling around to the other side of the wooded area, five miles from the playground. They'd be spacing themselves along county highway 42, in case the children made it that far.
Between the playground and there, lay nothing but undeveloped land, leading up to the town's reservoir, a two mile long lake that had supplied water for the entire region for fifty years.
"Where do you think they're headed?" Captain Reynolds asked Del Humboldt.
"I don't know, for all we know, they make a 24 hour loop and come back around. This could all be a big waste of time," Del said.
Fatigue was beginning to get to all of them, there was hardly a man in Pineville that had slept more than two hours at a time since the whole thing had started. Then, three miles into their hike, the children took a turn. Those who knew the area, recognized the path.
"There heading toward the bluff!" Mayor Humboldt said.
From here, the ground rose steadily, to the edge of the reservoir, which on this side, was lined with a thirty foot high bluff.
Don Price held up a hand and those in the lead gathered around him.
"Look, it's possible, we could be causing a change in their behavior," he said. "I need to know now that you all understand, following past this point could be putting them at risk."
"What other choice is there?" someone asked.
"Well, we don't have no other options, at the moment, except just going on home," Mayor Humboldt replied.
"What do you think we should do?" another voice asked.
"If you're asking me to decide, I say we press on," Price said.
"Well, then, we're wasting time," one man said. "If they reach that bluff and we're not there, it's over."
After a short discussion, between Price, Captain Reynolds and the mayor, it was decided to push on and pick up the pace. A few of them would take a steeper trail to get ahead of the children, while the bulk of those left following would come right behind them. They'd been walking through the woods for over an hour, exhaustion was taking its toll.
Fifteen minutes later, the advance party reached the bluff.
"Okay, from here," Reynolds said, "It's about two hundred yards west along this bluff, to the head of that trail the kids are on."
"I suggest we turn off the lights," Price said.
"When we get up here a bit, all right, but this bluff is no joke Mr. Price, and I don't fancy a swim tonight," Humboldt said.
Price nodded and they set off along the edge of the cliff. Three minutes later, Del Humboldt signaled for the lights to be extinguished. There were thirteen in the advance party. They sat silently, watiting, they wouldn't have to wait long, they could hear the children coming along the path already.
With their attention on the wooded path, only one person really saw what happened next. Describing it later, Jim Woodall was at a loss.
"It was like this one time I saw a car go into the water, after dark, off a bridge when I was a kid, fishing with my dad, but in reverse," he said.
From deep in the lake, an orb of greenish light had risen to the surface. Jim hadn't realized he was the only seeing it, until the glow had risen out of the water and moved, to hover just beyond the bluff, thirty feet above the water below.
"Oh, my god," Jim said.
Several others turned, and saw what could only be the creature Martha had described from the night before. It had once been human, its limbs dangled at its side, the face was hideous, with glowing eyes, the rest was hard to see, even with the glow.
The advance party, turned as one, their jaws falling open as they saw the thing.
"I'm telling you, it's him," Bill Millwood, Elmer McCurdy's 50 year old great nephew whispered. "He's back, just like uncle El said."
As they watched, the children arrived and one by one, walked over the edge of the bluff. Don Price had to pull Jim Woodall back, when his daughter, Anne, pitched over the edge. But, instead of falling, the children, like something out of Peter Pan, hovered, then zoomed out over the water, to meet the creature.
When the first one was even with it, the phantom turned and, as if fired from a cannon, plunged into the icy water, thirty feet down, his light, continuing until it was lost the depths. The children followed, soundlessly, behind it, down into the water, one by one, until the edge of the cliff was empty.
"So, this is where they've been going every night?" Del Humboldt asked.
"Are they alive down there?" Reynolds asked.
"Yes, and I don't know," Price said. "I've never seen anything quite like this."
Mayor Humboldt squinted at Price, "So, what next?"
"You're not going to like it," Price told him.
Moments later, the first of the town's people exited the woods, just in time to see the last child, Abigail, plunge over the edge. Her mother wailed.
"No!"
Her husband, broke from the group that had arrived first and embraced his wife. "It's okay, Price thinks this has happened every night. It won't do any more damage than has already been done."
Follow this link to the read the exciting conclusion!
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