The Missed Step

By Edward J Heffernan III

Sometimes I wonder if Piggy Pendlebury ever came back.

What had happened is still fresh in my mind although it happened several decades ago when I was in the fifth grade. At the time I was a student at Our Lady of Mercy catholic school. What city it was in does not really matter, granted enough to say that it was like most cities anywhere at the time. A cold gray jumble of buildings and sidewalks with cracks in them that led to more buildings. I am sure you have been inside a city. You know what they are like. Some buildings are new and shiny, but lurking between them were the old squat brick and cinderblock buildings left over from a time when the design of function was preferred over form.

It took place some time in the mid 1980’s. I do not remember the year exactly. However the Image of the building that housed Our Lady Of Mercy is still as fresh in my mind as if I had walked by it yesterday. The building was originally built in the twenties. It housed a factory that made wooden spools for electrical cables. At the time America was thirsting for wires that spun across its face. Wires to bring power, wires to bring news, wires to bring heat and light. However once the Second World War came around there was a severe shortage of copper in the country, most of it being diverted for the war. Copper that was destined to bring electricity to homes and business instead ended up in the brass ammunition shells that, once spent, sank into the mud of lands far away. With the need for wire at it's lowest, the spool factory eventually went out of business.

The building sat empty for a decade or more and then was bought up by a developer with a keen eye. He partitioned the building up into two separate stories, and rented them out accordingly. The section on the bottom floor became a dance studio for giggling young girls in leotards who were governed by a sternful dance teacher who had a deep accent that I could never quite place. The upstairs and the dozen rooms found within became the classrooms for Our Lady of Mercy School.

The school itself is relatively unimportant to this story. I'll quickly say that a nun ran it by the name of Sister Marge Scarpone. A solid and stern woman who was probably no more than forty or fifty but to my young age seemed as old as Moses himself. The Nuns at my school never hit the children. I had seen in movies that showed nuns slapping knuckles with a big heavy wooden ruler. No, no hitting happened in Our Sister Of Mercy, however the Nuns did pinch. Talk out of line or snicker at the wrong moment and a nun would materialize behind you and have your neck or earlobe or any loose fleshy skin that might be exposed at the moment firmly clenched between two bony fingers.

Sister Marge Scarpone was the worst. She had a thumbnail that she never cut, and if she pinched you it would leave a deep half-moon impression branded upon our young skin. Randy Kyle had once made the mistake of calling it the 'Mark Of The Best' within earshot of Sister Marge and had spent the rest of the school year scrubbing out the toilets in every bathroom in the building, much to the amusement of the old black janitor who I only knew as Mr. Mack.

No, the nuns and the school are not important to this story. What is important are the steps that led up to the second story where the school was housed. They were not an original part of the building; rather the developer who had halved the building into two separate compartments added them later. The dance studio below, which had once housed the spool construction floor, had relatively high ceilings. Rather than adding a twisting flight of steps the developer had instead poured a single solid flight up steps on the side of the building that led up to the second floor. The steps themselves were short and steep and often gave some people a sense of vertigo unless the clutched the steel handrail provided. There was nothing special about the steps. A cold and gray slab of concrete that I must have climbed up and down a thousand times before.

It all happened during my third year at Sisters Of Mercy. Like most kids that went there I only lived a few blocks away and thus walked to school in the morning, rain or shine. It was not very fair and it was a more or less safe part of town, so my parents never thought twice about letting me go.

However, that was before the kidnappings.

The first kid to go was a pasty kid by the name of David Levermann. I knew him personally although he was no true friend. He had been in my classes in the past and of course I had played with in various games on the fenced in playground found behind the building. The only thing particularly memorable about him was once during a science lesson he inexplicitly yelled out 'BALLS!' just before he projectile vomited all over his desk and the poor kid who sat in front of him. A mild case of the stomach flue, but it had been the talk of the school for a week afterwards and cries of 'BALLS!' would often ring out in the hallway much to the distress of the nuns that ran the place.

David had disappeared one day on his way to school. His parents had sent him off in the morning but had simply never made it to school. Although his immediate family was distraught, it did not cause a whole lot of buzz in the city. Perhaps he wandered away, or perhaps he was kidnapped. At any rate it seemed to be an isolated incident.

They decided to start up the buddy system once the second boy disappeared. Liam Asby was his name, and by some twist of fate he was the very boy that David had vomited on the prior year. He too left for school one day and them had simply never shown up. Most parents were distraught had had begun taking their children to school themselves. However many parents were simply too busy to add on the extra time to their schedules and thus during one particularly heated PTA meeting the buddy system was invented.

The concept was simple... Students that lived close together would meet up and walk together in the morning. I personally never saw the logic in it, I suppose it was to dissuade each other from getting into a car belonging to a stranger offering candy, or if one of the buddies actually got kidnapped that they would be able to report the description of the kidnapper to the police. Regardless the nuns and the parents nodded wisely to each other and shook hands and decided the buddy system was a fine idea indeed.

That is when I first met up with Piggy Pendlebury. Piggy was not his real name of course, but during our first year at our Lady Of Mercy one of the nuns had decided to read to the class 'The Lord of the Flies'. Thinking back on it I suppose this was a bit of a strange thing to be reading to fresh new students in a catholic school. I suppose the nun thought that if the story’s boys had the fear of the Lord in them then they would have never ended up in the mess they were in. Regardless when the nun got to the point of the story that described the boy named Piggy, all the eyes in the class had rotated to poor Gavin Pendlebury who shrank in his seat under their gaze.

The book had described him to a T. Pasty, pudgy with a large round pair of spectacles and a soft mop of brown hair. And like the story, Piggy was smart. Not clever or witty or artistic, but smart in the mathematical sense. Numbers seem to flow through him like music out of a piano. It made the rest of the children suspicious and uncomfortable. It even made some of the nuns uneasy. I suppose in a different school and at a different time in a different city his gift would have been nourished and he would have had his own classroom for smart kids with clever tutors and advanced books.

However, Piggy had no parents to fawn over his gift. He never knew who his father was and his mother was a heroin addict who one day wandered off to California. Piggy lived with his grandmother, a great sweaty bulk of a woman whose daily wear was a floral green MuMu and who rarely ventured far from her television. She lived off a court settlement she had reconceived years earlier when she had gotten a bad case of food poisoning from a well-known fast food chain. Rather than go to court they had set her up with a tidy sum, and as long as she did not much more than squat in front of the television and pay the rent than she was set for life. Considering the woman’s considerable bulk and the fact the settlement would have been for food poisoning would have been humorously ironic if it was not so strikingly sad.

Thus Piggy sat during the math hours, staring off into space and daydreaming and easily completing every math problem and exam that was placed in front of him. In all his years in the school he had never missed a single math problem. Ever. Once when he was walking down the hall and some students had tripped him for their own petty amusement, his book bag had spilled open and out flopped a book with the title of 'MATH PROBLEMS FOR RAINY DAYS'. No one in the school could believe such a book had actually been written, much less being thoroughly thumbed and enjoyed.

So that was Piggy. I knew who he was, but like most of the other kids I did not associate with him. Thus it came as a bit of a shock that one chill autumn morning when he was assigned to be my walking buddy.

I still remember that day clearly. I was slouched in my chair fiddling with a pencil as Sister Marge Scarpone read off the buddies to be paired up from a list she clenched in her hand. I wonder know if she had left her mark of the beast in that crisp sheet of typing paper.

"And finally, " She said, "Kyle Miller will be teamed up with Gavin Pendlebury"

For a brief moment I had no idea who she was talking about until I saw the eyes of my fellow students bounce back and fourth between me and Piggy. I had no idea that he had even lived that close to my house. Although this would do little to help my playground rep, there was nothing I could do about it. I decided right then and there that if I was forced to walk with him, then fine. But once we reached the steps of the school I would be away and on my own. They were doing it for our protection; I was not getting married for Christ sakes.

Idle thoughts, I suppose. Randal Casner, a rat faced boy who sat in front of me twisted around in his seat and hissed at me "Looks like you got a new boyfriend. You are going to have to tell me what bacon taste like." I considered stabbing him in the back of his head with my pencil, but instead I simply let out a resigned sigh and sunk into my seat.

And so it began that I started walking to school with Piggy. Every morning he would meet me at the corner outside of my parent’s brownstone apartment building and we would trudge on off to school. The first couple day’s Piggy kept his eyes locked on the pavement before him, and I in turn offered him nothing in they way of conversation. He understood that I was as an unwilling participant in this act as he was, and did not want to do anything to provoke me. This suited me just fine.

However after the first week I began to notice that Piggy muttered under this breath as he walked. Curious, I strained to hear what he was saying. It sounded like he was counting. "One, two, one, two, FOUR, one two, one two FIVE." and so on.

At first I tried to ignore it but after a couple days it began to drill on my nerves, and in a fit of exasperation I barked out "What the hell are you counting?"

Piggly looked up, startled, and a flush crept across his cheeks. "I can't help it, " he said. "I count things. Steps I take. The number of cracks I see in the sidewalk. How far I am from home and how far it is to the school."

"Why?" I asked in a puzzled voice. I had counted a few things myself, to be honest. But never in the almost religious way that Piggy droned on.

"I do not know," he admitted. "Its just something I have done for as long as I can remember. It's almost as if I have to."

He paused a moment and then spoke on. "It’s not just walking. I have to count books. I have to count how much change is in my pocket. When I lift a spoonful of cereal out of the bowl and look at it on my spoon, I have to calculate just how many grams of cereal there is before I place it in my mouth. It's almost as if I don’t count it, it somehow makes it... less real."

I mulled that over for a moment and then said "Piggy, you are one screwed up kid. "

"I know." he said miserably, and then fell into silence as we continued on to school.

True to my vow I parted ways with Piggy as soon as we reached the top of the flight of stairs that led up the side of the building. Every morning we would march on up to the top while Piggy huffed under his breath "One. Two. three. Four..." and so on as he counted the number of steps.

There were twenty-eight steps on that flight of stairs. I know, not only because I heard Piggy huff them out every morning, but I had once counted them myself.

And so it went for a couple of weeks. I would meet Piggy, listen to him count under his breath on the way to school, listen to him count the number of steps up the stairs, and then we would part our ways.

But then something happened. It was a cold morning, autumn was coming to an end and the first signs of a blustery winter was blowing through the streets and alleys, stirring up cold dust devils of street trash and city grime. We had just arrived at school and were huffing up the flight of stairs. I had tuned out Piggy’s counting, my mind instead thinking about my birthday that was arriving the next month, and the sweet skateboard I was going to ask for. I was not sure how I was going to ride to school on it with Piggy trudging next to me. Perhaps he could jog. I glanced at his quivering bulk as he made his way up the stairs. He could use it, I decided.

We had reached the top of the stairs and I turned to give Piggy a little cursory salute before I headed on my way. I turned and stopped in my tracks because Piggy’s face was pale and his mouth was hanging open and he was gasping even more than normal. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

"Piggy," I asked, a little concerned despite myself. "What is it? You look sick."

Piggy’s mouth worked silently for a moment and then he sputtered out "There were thirty two steps, Kyle!"

"There are twenty eight steps." I said. "You count them every morning."

I Know!" he said "But today there were thirty two steps!"

"So, you miscounted." said. The conversation was starting to strike me as stupid.

Piggy looked shocked at my suggestion. "I NEVER miscount!" he whined out.

Exasperated at this point, I simply said, "Piggy. You are a an idiot." And I turned my back on him and headed to my homeroom.

That incident with Piggy was quickly shoved to the back of my mind because the school was abuzz. Another boy had gone missing. And not just any boy, oh no, this time it was Aaron Hemberger. Aaron was the schools prized athlete. He had been born to fairly wealthy parents, and handsome to boot. The girls in the dance studio below often rushed to the window to watch him walk by and let out dreamy sighs and thought out pubescent fantasies. Aaron was gone. Aaron had been kidnapped. The cream of the crop had been culled.

It turned out that Aaron’s walking buddy had stayed home sick that day. His father, a lawyer, and been late for a court date and suggested that Aaron simply head on to school. It had been weeks since any other kids had vanished, and he figured that just one day of Aaron walking to school in broad daylight next to a somewhat populated street would be OK. Only Aaron had never showed up at school.

“He’s getting corn-holed.” Randal Casner excitedly told me. “That’s what my uncle told me. Some pervert had kidnapped Aaron and he has him in some cellar somewhere and he is getting corn-holed.”

The thought made me sick. “I think your uncle corn-holes you, Randal.”

Randal’s face dropped. “That’s not funny,” he sulked.

Yes, Aaron had vanished like the others, but this time something was different. The police had actually caught footage of the kidnapping from a security camera located on a bank across the street. The footage was played on the evening news in hopes that some information of the kidnapper could be gleamed from the public.

I still remember watching that footage. It was during dinnertime at my house and I had been eating a second helping of mashed potatoes. I loved mashed potatoes, and I loved my mothers deep brown gravy that I liberally dosed it in. I was shoving spoonfuls of it into my mouth when the news clip came on television.

I had some faint idea of what a child molester should look like. I had seen the Different Strokes episode where the bike shop owner had molested Gary Coleman’s friend. Perverts were older people, dumpy, and usually lured kids into their lairs with sweet words and sweeter candy. Nothing I had learned in the sitcoms prepared me for what I saw on that television.

The footage was in black and white, and grainy to boot as security cameras often are. In it you distinctly see Aaron walking down the sidewalk. A few random cars passed by. Clearly the molester could not lure him with candy because he already had a sucker stuck in his mouth despite the early hours. You could see the stem of the sucker rotate from one side of his mouth to the other has he walked down the sidewalk.

There was a large concrete column in camera's view. It was part of the building just out of the cameras sight, an old gray relic from yesteryear. And it is from behind that column that the thing came out.

I use the word ‘thing’ because I hesitate to use the word man. Yes, it was man shaped to be sure. It had a head and it walked on two legs. But you could not tell much more about it. Its body was completely swathed in rags. Whether they were once proper clothing or if he had simply wrapped a sheet about itself that had decayed to tatters was hard to tell. And it was huge. It had to have been at least seven feet tall. I do not know how much of it's body was rags and how much was bulk, but what I saw was considerable. Topped on a scale it must have been at least four hundred pounds.

I watched the grainy footage on television with my mouth hanging open. Nothing had prepared me for this. The thing did not call for Aaron, offer him sweets or suggest they go back to his bike shop. Instead the thing shambled over, grabbed Aaron by the legs and swung him over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes and then turned around and marched back behind the concert column. It was quick and over in a matter of seconds. The spoon I had in my hand clattered to the floor and my father who had been watching the footage over the top of his newspaper uttered out a simple ‘Jesus Christ’. I could only agree.

The next day at school the kids had already given the thing a name. It was the Shambler.

Curiously enough, the video that was seen on television seemed to have a calming effect on the adults. The kids were nothing short of horrified of what seemed to be every closet and under the bed monster come to life and stealing kids on the prime-time news. However, the adults were relived. I heard sister Mary say "Oh, a man that size and that filthy cant hide in a city this size for very long. Someone will spot him out soon enough and the police will have him”.

Later that afternoon when it was time to go home, Piggy was not in our usual meeting spot. I looked around and finally found him squatting down on the flight of steps that led up to the school.

"What are you doing, Piggy." I asked, annoyed.

"There were twenty eight steps today, Kyle." Piggy said without looking up. "Yesterday there were twenty seven, and the day before that there was thirty two."

Piggy looked up. He was holding a piece of chalk in his hand. "The steps are changing, Kyle. They are appearing and disappearing. And I have a hunch why."

I looked over Piggy’s shoulder and saw that he had drawn a number of the corner of each step with a piece of chalk. One, two, three, four... all the way up to the twenty seventh step.

"Piggy," I said," are you expecting the numbers to change

tomorrow?"

Piggy stood up and dusted off the chalk dust off his hands.

"I don't know Kyle. I guess we'll find out tomorrow."

That night I sat glued to the evening news. I was hoping the adults were right, and they would have caught the Shambler sometime during the day. However, the police had no leads and the news team had run the same security camera clip over again.

"They will catch him. " my father said over his newspaper. "Heck, the only reason they had not caught him yet is because he saw himself on the news and skipped out of town."

How I had wished that was true.

The next morning I met up with Piggy and headed to the school. I had momentarily forgotten his obsession with the steps until we reached them and he eagerly climbed up them, counting down the numbers. He had only gone up a couple of steps when he turned to me and hissed out, "Kyle. Look. Look."

I went up a couple of steps and looked down. The chalk numbers were still on the steps where Piggy had drawn them. One, two, three four... However, something was different.

There were two steps with the number four written on them, one after another.

I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

"Piggy, someone is screwing around with you," I said. "After we left yesterday someone erased the chalk and put new numbers on the steps."

"No, Kyle." Piggy insisted. "It's my hand writing. Besides,

Look at the steps. Look at them."

I peered closer at the steps. Some student long ago had spit out a piece of gum on the steps and it had flatten and petrified and turned black from years of dirt and grime and rain. On the step directly above it, the gum spot was duplicated. Exactly. Gum spots are rather like snowflakes in that no two are the same size. These two were identical to each other. On top of that on the far side of the step was a small in the concrete. That crack was also duplicated on the step above it. The two steps were identical.

I found this to be very eerie. If one of Piggy’s numbers had simply disappeared, I would have chalked it off as someone playing a trick, erasing the numbers. However the step duplicated was just too perfect. Too perfect and too complex for a simple schoolyard prank. TO be honest, I simply did not know what to make of it.

"Come on, Piggy," I finally said. "We will be late for class.

Every morning for the next couple of days, Piggy checked his steps. He had a little notebook he carried with them that he wrote down the sequence in. Some days the number of steps would duplicate. Sometimes the number of steps would shrink, and there would be a number missing. One morning a totally new step appeared, one that did not have a Piggy-inscribed chalk mark upon it. It disappeared the next day.

I really did not know what to make of it, so I ignored it. Or I tried to. The hype with the Shambler was still going strong. Randal claimed to have seen him one night shuffling through an alley from his bedroom window, although few people believed him. Randal was known for making up stories.

One day during lunch hour I was eating the last couple of tater tots off my Styrofoam tray when Piggy suddenly sidled up to me.

"Kyle," He hissed. "I have to talk to you."

I was momentarily annoyed. It was one thing to walk to school and back home again with him, because I was forced to do that. It was a different matter altogether for him to be sitting at my lunch table in front of my school friends. Piggy was not that bad, strange to be sure, but I was not about to base my reputation on him.

"Piggy, get lost. " I hissed back at him. "If you have something to tell me, tell it to me after school."

Piggy look crestfallen, but he left.

After school that day I found Piggy waiting for me at the top of the steps. He looked nervous and was anxiously shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

"Piggy, what is it. What was so important that you could not wait to tell me."

Piggy fumbled about in his back pack until he found his little notebook."

"Kyle," he said, "I think I know where the missing kids when."

"So do I." I said. " They are off getting corn-holed by the Shambler. And we might too if we don't hurry up and get home."

"NO!" Piggy shouted out with such urgency that I took a step back. "Kyle, listen to me. I think I know where the kids went. I think I know where the Shambler is. But it's not here, or, at least it's not here as we know it."

Piggy opened up his notebook and showed me a page scrawled with his handwriting. It was an equation of some sort. I peered at it closer and sighed. It had Greek letters in it.

"Piggy, How am I supposed to understand this? I am just learning how to multiply fractions. You are going to have to explain it to me."

Piggy sighed in a way that annoyed me, a condescending sigh. Finally he said, "OK, remember a few weeks ago when we made the Mobius strips in class?"

I did. I thought they were pretty neat. We had made a little loop of paper and drawn a line on each side. Then we had made another loop of paper with a twist in it. This time the line we drew went all the way around and met the line on the other side. I had been tickled by it and had shown my father that night and he had been duly impressed.

"Think of the stairs of being like that Mobius strip," Piggy said. "They LOOK straight... but they aren’t. They are changing. The steps in the order they are now will lead to the bottom of this staircase. But if we take the steps own... take the steps down in the order they REALLY are... then they will lead...someplace else."

"To the Shambler. " I said.

"To the Shambler." Piggy agreed. "At least, to where the Shambler is. You know how when we walk to school we see cracks in the sidewalk? The cracks sometimes lead from one sidewalk slab to another. I think something like that can happen to the world itself. Cracks appear. They lead... somewhere else. But you can’t get into that someplace else unless you know where the crack is and where it leads."

I was quiet, looking at Piggy."

Kyle," Piggy continued, "I think the kids are there, on the other side of this crack. I think we can save them. But I am not brave enough to go by myself. I need your help."

Did I believe Piggy? At that moment in time? I cannot say. All I know is that he seemed deathly earnest. In the short time I had known him I had never seen him so serious. I really did not know that to say. Instead I said:

"OK Piggy, what do I have to do."

A look of relief flashed across Piggy’s face and he got to work. From his backpack he pulled another piece of chalk. This time it was red. He ran down the steps, carefully counting each one off. He then carefully consulted the formula he had scrawled out in his notebook and carefully made his way up each step, scrawling a number. The numbers were not in sequence… they skipped about, seemingly random to my eyes. Finally Piggy reached the top step and scrawled out the last number.

"Those numbers count out how the steps are aligned in that... Other place. If we follow them correctly, when we reach the end we should not be at the bottom of the steps here. We should be... elsewhere."

"How do we get back?" I asked, intrigued despite myself.

"Well, once we reach that other place, the steps with the red number on them will seem to be in sequence, however the steps with the white numbers will seem jumbled. If you follow the white numbers in sequence, it should lead back."

I nodded. That made sense. "Ok, lets get going."

And so we went. Sometimes we had to go down the stairs. Sometimes we had to take a couple steps back up. Once we had to jump on the same step twice. Finally we came to the last step in the red sequence.

It was a tricky step. The next number in the red sequence was a good four steps down. We were going to have to jump. It was really not far, not impossible, however jumping down steps is never a safe thing to do. Piggy looked down and took a swallow.

"Kyle," he asked, "Just for this last step will you hold my hand?"

"Piggy, don’t be gay."

"Come on Kyle, I am not sure I can make it that far. It’s a long jump and I don’t want to fall.

I sighed. “OK, Piggy.” I agreed.

I took his hand in mine. It felt soft and clammy. Taking a deep breath we jumped off.

We hit the last step with a hard thump. To Piggy’s credit, he teetered a little, but he had not fallen. Once he had steadied himself, I let go of his hand. And then I paused and looked around in wonder. For something had changed.

The street and the building behind us still looked more or less the same. However, it was as if a grimy filter had been placed over my eyes. Everything looked washed out and a little silvery. The buildings seemed to loom a little higher; the air seemed to be thicker. Thicker and damper, for a very light yet noticeably hazy fog seemed to hang over everything. Out in the street, a few old wooden wire-spools lay as if tossed about like tumbleweeds. The wood of the spools was old and gray and decaying.

It was quiet, too. Eerily quiet. Gone were the ever-present ambient sounds of the city. No cars rolled in the streets. No planes roared overhead. The chatter of children on the sidewalk and people in the buildings had been nullified. It was deathly calm, and it unnerved me greatly.

"Piggy..." I said in hushed tones.

"We are here…" Piggy said, his voice an equal mix of wonder and fear. "We made it through the crack."

We stood there a moment, simply looking around.

"Well, where do you think we should start looking?" I asked.

Piggy thought a moment and then said, "Remember the video that the police showed on television? How the Shambler came out from behind that big column in front of that one building a couple of blocks away? I think we should start looking there. I do not know for sure, but I think somewhere around that pillar might be another crack. One like the steps that we do not know about."

I did not have any better suggestions myself, so I agreed and we started down the street. The strange colors and the spectral silence of the place had caused a rash of goose bumps to break out on my arms. Our footsteps echoed against the concrete buildings, and every step I took sounded as loud as a gunshot. However, so far there did not seem to be anyone to hear. We saw no cars, not even the ones that are normally parked on the side of the streets. The windows of the buildings seemed dim and dark and although my gaze lashed around furiously, not once did I spy out a face peering out of a window or from behind a corner. It seemed to be appalling deserted.

I was just starting to get my nerves under control when Piggy suddenly hissed out "Kyle! Some...Someone is coming."

I peered down the sidewalk and sure enough a block or so away a figure was slowly making its way towards us. It seemed too thin to be the Shambler, but to be on the safe side I grabbed Piggy by his collar and shoved him into a door alcove of the building next to us.

We stood there in silence, waiting. I could hear my heart thundering in my chest and Piggy’s rasping breathing next to me. After a moment of nothing happening, I dared to peek around the corner.

A figure was standing there. A figure so strange that it took my brain a moment to grasp exactly what I was looking at. It was human shaped, tall and reedy. And it was dressed in clothes, a vaguely gaudy pinstriped suit that looked like something out of the thirties or forties. The suit did not look like normal fabric. It seemed to have an odd sheen to it, as if it was made out of some sort of shiny plastic. On top of it's head perched a black fedora with a white band that had the same plastic-like sheen as the rest of its suit. However... it's face…

It did not have a real face. It had what looked like a flour sack with two eyes drawn on, two big circles with a couple of little dots for pupils. It had two more lines drawn as little nose slits, and no mouth. The figure was not moving; it just stood there, facing forward.

Then, to my horror, one of the drawn-on eyes suddenly rotated and looked right at me, just one of them. Piggy must have peered around the corner by this time because I heard a low moan of terror escape from his lips. I was frozen in fear. All I could do was stare back.

The figure suddenly spun around three times in quick succession, and then continued on down the sidewalk. It passed us with out a second glance and drifted on its way. As I watched it recede I realized that it had no feet. It simply drifted along, the empty sleeves of it's pinstriped pants dragging on the ground.

We took a moment to regain our composure.

"I don’t think it means to hurt us, " Piggy said. "I don’t even think it cares we are here. The rules of this place seem to be, I don’t know, different."

"Maybe it did not care," I injected, "Or maybe it's going to tell someone about us. Come one, let's get moving.

We continued on the way we had been going. Before long we came upon the building that hosted the large concrete columns that the video had shown the Shambler coming out behind of. Up until this point the buildings and sidewalks had been more or less like they were back in our world. A little bigger, perhaps a bit grayer but pretty much the same. The building that hosted the columns was different. To begin with, it was a complete ruin. Most of the building seemed to have crumbled long ago. And it did not seem to be the same building it had been in our world. What ever this building was before it fell, it was monstrous. The blocks that had made up the building seemed more like sandstone than concrete.

A great gash cracked opened the facade of what was left of the building. A few midsize blocks of rubble were strewn about, and a metal garbage can stood next to the opening. Within it a low fire burned, throwing up choking black cloud of smoke.

Piggy and I looked at each other. This could only be one place… the lair of the Shambler.

Cautiously we crept up to the opening. We stood for a moment at the lip of the opening, simply listening. However it seemed to be as calm and quiet as the rest of the city. We had come this far, I thought. As quietly as we could, we stepped beyond the opening of the crack into the darkness beyond.

Once in side we stood for a moment and let our eyes adjust to the gloom. There was enough ambient light filtering in for us to see, once we got used to it. The cave (I use that word because I cannot think of any other word to describe it. The rock façade of the walls was more cave-like than building-link.) Was actually rather shallow, though the ceiling was very high and stretched off into the darkness. The floor was littered with rubble and pieces of junk. Old cans, rusty wheeless bike frames, chunks of lumber and discarded rags.

Piggy suddenly grabbed my arm. "Kyle, look!" He hissed.

I turned my head to where he was pointing, and off in the corner of the cave stood a cage. Dimly we could see the shadow of a figure sitting within. Together we rushed through the gloom and peered in. Sitting inside were Liam Asby and Aaron Hemberger. Liam was curled up in a fetal position in the corner. Aaron looked up at us blearily as we approached.

Aaron’s face was pale and his clothing was rumpled and tattered. He looked at us without recognition for a moment, his eyes darting back an forth between our faces. However, it was not mine that his eyes finally settled on.

"Piggy?" he asked in an incredulous voice. Aaron then scrambled to his feet. He reached down and shook Liam’s shoulder. "Wake up!" he hissed in Liam’s ear. Piggy and Kyle are here!"

Liam opened his eyes and then shuffled to his feet. He looked even worse than Aaron. His face was a deathly ashen color, and when he stood up his pants made a faint crackling noise. From the smell that drifted off of him I realized his pants were stiff from dried urine. He must have pissed his pants, probably more than once.

I looked at the door of the cage. To my relief, it did not seem to have an actual lock. Instead a piece of copper wire as thick as my finger had been wrapped around it, holding the door shut. It would be impossible to bend the copper out of shape with our bare hands, but if we had some sort of tool...

I peered around at the junk laying in the gloom. Not far away I spied out a metal fence pole. Quickly I jogged over and grabbed it. With Piggy’s help I was able to force it between two bands of copper wire, and Piggy and I put our full weight behind it. We were rewarded with a satisfying quailing creak as the copper bended. We could not remove the wire altogether, but we did manage to force it open wide enough for the two boys to squeeze out of the cage. Liam looked so relived I thought he was going to piss himself all over again.

"Kyle, Piggy," Aaron said in hushed tone. "What are you doing here? How did you get here? Where is here for that matter? We can’t stay here, that thing..."

Piggy interrupted Aaron in a quiet voice. “Aaron,” he said, “What happened to David?”

It was Liam who answered. He looked up sharply, his eyes wide against his ashen face. “It…it...ATE him, Piggy. I saw it. He did not even have time to scream, but I heard his bones crunch…”

We stared ate Liam in horror. I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped when I noticed Liam was looking over my shoulder. Dreading what I would see, I slowly turned around and stared at the cave’s opening.

The Shambler stood there. We did not even see it come in. It stood there, illuminated by the pale light that filtered in from the outside. The little grainy video I had seen on television had done it no justice. It was a hundred times more horrible in real life, a thousand times. It seemed larger as well, a huge man shaped thing covered in dirty burlap and rags. It stood there looking at us, and then it spoke.

I only heard the Shambler say one thing, but it was enough. It did not speak like a person would. Instead is seemed to swell up, sucking in the air not just from it’s mouth but from a thousand unseen pores throughout it’s burlap shrouded body. When it spoke a word, it was like the worlds oldest, dustiest accordion letting out a death wheeze.

“Booooyyyssss!”

We screamed. We ran. I have no memory of those few moments, just a blinding red haze of fear. The only way out was past the Shambler. Somehow we made it, although it was not through planning but blind fear. Like mice in the kitchen when the light was turned on, we ran around the only way we could. Somehow we made it outside.

When my sense came to me again, we were outside, running down the sidewalk. The Shambler was behind us. We could hear it running after us. It was taking large lazy strides and each time it’s foot hit the pavement a dull echo boomed off the walls around us. We were fast, but despite it’s great bulk the Shambler was faster.

Suddenly I felt a cold wet raindrop hit my face, and then another. Apparently it rained in this world. A light drizzle was starting to fall around us. Off in the distance I could still feel see the Shambler after us. I could not only hear each booming footstep, I could feel it in my chest. I looked over at Piggy who was doing a good job of huffing along with us despite his weight. Piggy’s eye’s suddenly lit up in alarm.

“Kyle!” He huffed out between footsteps. “The chalk!”

Suddenly it hit me. The way back to our world through the steps was marked in chalk. We had to follow the exact reverse sequence we had used to get here in the first place. That was not very hard to do, since the steps were marked in chalk. However, if the rain came down any harder, it would wash away the chalk marks. And we would be stuck here.

Piggy grabbed my shirt collar and we skidded to a halt.

“Kyle,” he breathed out. “You have to take Aaron and Liam back to our world. I’ll lead the Shambler away. If there is another way out of this world, I am the only one who is going to be able find it.”

I crouched there, my hands on my knee’s, catching my breath, looking at piggy and digesting what he said. When I think back on it, I perhaps should have said something nobler. Something like ‘No Piggy, we are sticking together!’ Or perhaps I would suggest distracting the Shambler while Piggy got the other boys away. I did neither. I was too scared. All I said was:

“OK.”

Piggy gave me a single grim nod. He turned around and faced the Shambler who had gotten appallingly close. Suddenly Piggy darted down an alley. I could hear him yelling out as he ran.

“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”

The Shambler took the bait. Instead of going after us, it suddenly turned its massive bulk around and chased Piggy down the alley. I turned around and raced after Aaron and Liam, who had never slowed down for Piggy and I.

There is not much more to this tale. I had caught up with the other two boys. Despite the drizzle falling, I could still make out the numbers scrawled in chalk on the steps. I grabbed each of them by the shoulders and they followed me as I made the sequence back. When we hit the final step we landed back in our world in a blaze of sunlight and a chorus of city sounds. We had made it home.

I never saw Piggy again. As far as I know, no one did. The police took our wild statements and chalked it off to fear. No other boys disappeared and the Shambler was never seen again. I sometimes wonder if Piggy got away. Perhaps he had used his amazing skill to finally make it out of that world. Perhaps he did not go to our world, perhaps he found a way out, but it only led to another world. Perhaps the Shambler finally caught up with him and he suffered the same fate David had.

Perhaps.

I still think about Piggy from time to time. Sometimes I find myself walking down the sidewalk, and I will unconsciously start counting off the number of steps I had taken under my breath. When I realize what I am doing, I stop. I simply do not want to find that missing step. I do not want to know where it leads.

I do not want to end up with Piggy Pendlebury.