Devil's Cliff

Devil’s Cliff

By Rick Hartford

I grew up in suburbia during the 1960s, a time when there were no bogeyman, no child molesters and no monsters under the bed.

Or so I thought.

In the summer of 1964 we would pack a sandwich for lunch and disappear into the woods, not coming home until we were called for dinner and even then I was allowed to go back out after dark, chasing fireflies, playing hide and seek in the dark and looking for meteors streaking across the starry sky.

In a word, summers were delicious. The air was sweet. When I went to bed, while Perry Mason was holding court in the living room, I listened to the music of the giant fan which my father had installed in the attic, the tinkling of the belt drive attached to the electrical motor playing in the background of what sounded like huge airplane propellers droning through the night.

My friends included Beth, my earliest girlfriend, her sister Sharon, John, my best friend who was a choir boy and Leonard, whose favorite thing to say was “pisser pisser,” for some reason, I remember the day he laughed hysterically after he threw a rock through a car windshield on Park Road as it passed next to the bridge over Trout Brook.

He was the first crazy person I ever met and even to this day he is in a class by himself.

We played all day on the banks of Meadow Brook, a small stream that fed into Trout Brook, which then ran to the Park River and then the Connecticut River and eventually down to Long Island Sound. The brook slipped into a culvert at the edge of “Devil’s Cliff,” which must have been six feet over the water in the brook. To us it seemed like a mile down.

It was there that a maze of underground concrete storm water sewers began, running all the way to the Park River.

It was where Beth saw a strange person with wild hair standing at the entrance of one, beckoning to her with a bony hand. Beth ran all he way home.

We were all sitting in my tree house in the 80 foot pine tree in my back yard when it happened The tree house was a 50 square foot plywood. box secured to the tree with steel cables my dad had installed. There was a threadbare oriental rug on the floor. We heated the place with a Sterno stove in the winter during snow storms and in the summer we drank High C and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and occasionally some Marshmallow Fluff, Beth was with us telling the story of the strange creature when mom called me to come down and brought me into the living room where two elderly women were standing. They were both tall and spindly. One of them was wringing her hands incessantly while the other was scratching scabs on her left arm with her right hand until she saw my mom and I looking at her and shoved her hand into a pocket on her dress.

“You’re bleeding,” I told her.

“Rude!” She snapped back.

“Dicky!” my mom said. ‘Where are your manners!”

“This is Teresa and Gloria,’mom continued. “They live on Meadow Brook Road, right by the brook, and they say that they have seen you and your friends going into the storm sewer down there. They are worried about your safety. They told me that there is a strange person who has been seen entering and exiting the culvert and they wanted to remind us that not too long ago a young girl playing in the vicinity of the storm sewer disappeared.”

“Who is the girl that disappeared?” I asked my mom.

Mom looked at me for what seemed like a long time.

“Beth” mom said.”You don’t remember? How could you forget something like that?”

I felt as if I had been hit by a lightning bolt. My face felt hot and I was aware of the two women looking intently at me.

“That’s impossible, mom. Beth is right here with us in the tree house. She said that she saw a strange person yesterday, but she ran home.

Even though I was certain of what I said, fear started to tear at me on the inside. I turned and raced back to the pine tree and quickly climbed the old branches to the entrance of the tree house.

I leaned in and looked around. “Where’s Beth?”

They all looked at me. Nobody said anything for a moment.

“Who?”

That was crazy Leonardl. I ignored him and looked at John. “Where’s Beth, John?”

“Beth who?”

Now I was getting mad as well as scared.

“Cut it out, John! Beth, my girlfriend, who lives on Thomson Road, right there with her sister, Sharon, who is sitting right in front of you. That’s who!”

I looked at Sharon. Her eyes evaded mine. She looked at the floor of the tree house.

“What’s going on Sharon?”

“I don’t have a sister Beth, Dicky. Why are you saying these things? You’re scaring me.”

t I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know where to go.

“Never mind,” I said.

I climbed back down the tree and ran to the kitchen where I found my mother putting dishes into the dish washer.

“Mom, have those two ladies left?”

Mom looked down at me with questions in her eyes.

“What ladies?”

“The ones who just told us that Beth had disappeared.”

“Who?”

“The two old ladies! Teresa and Gloria! One of them was scratching a bleeding arm. It was five minutes ago!”

“Dicky, you are starting to worry me. Have you had enough water to drink today? You look red in the face. Let’s get you some ice water and talk this out.”

“I can’t Mom. Not right now.”

I raced out the back door to the treehouse.

John, Sharon and weird Leonard were gone. I raced to Beth’s home three houses down from John’s on Thomson and knocked on the door. Beth’s mom came to the door and opened it a fraction of an inch.

“Is Sharon here?”

I was afraid to even mention Beth’s name.

“She’s not feeling well, Dicky,” she said. There was a darkness in her eyes. “Maybe you could come by tomorrow.” She immediately shut the door just as I heard, “who was that, mom?”

I raced over to John’s. His mom came to the door. “At the movies with his sister,” she said. “You know, the one with the cyclops?”

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

I ran to Leonard’s house. His mom, Pam, her red hair a mess of crazy curls, was in her front yard picking dandy lions.

“They make a good wine, she said, as she filled a bucket with them.

Leonard’s out with his dad,” she added..

I left and went straight to the culvert at Devil’s Cliff.

I looked around for a weapon. There wasn’t much of a selection, but I did have my Swiss Army knife.

I knew the blade was sharp. I had no flashlight, but I did have an old Zippo that I had found in the woods. It had a new flint and I had filled it this morning expecting to to go into the tunnel.

I took a deep breath and entered the culvert.

I wasn’t far in when I heard a rasping sound. Beads of sweat were running down my face. I felt like turning and running, but instead I just crouched there, panting. I took the knife out of my pocket and opened the blade, resting it against my leg.

I didn’t see it coming. A gnarled hand grabbed me by the left wrist and pulled me forward. I lost my balance and dropped the knife as the hand pulled me around the corner.

It was Teresa, the old woman with the hand wringing. Long grey hair fell down over her chest. That was the moment I discovered she was naked. As was Gloria, behind her, both with wizened breasts and liver spots.

There was a fire pit in the center of the chamber with a black iron pot over it. There were flies everywhere, feeding on some sort of flesh that looked like a dead dog.

Teresa saw me looking at the pot.

“You will be staying for dinner, dear,” she said. “Tonight’s menu: Eyeball soup, followed by roasted leg of man.”

It was at that moment when I saw Beth, tied to a chair and gagged with a dirty white handkerchief. Her eyes bulged out as she tried to tell me something through the gag.

“What are you doing?” I said to the two ugly sisters..

We knew you’d be along and we already had Beth. So we decided to cast a little spell to erase you two darlings from memory. Nobody is going to miss you, because nobody knows you ever existed.

“My father is coming to get me and when he finds us he will kill you both.” I said.

“Believe whatever you want,” Gloria said, stroking Teresa’s ratty grey hair with claw-like fingers.

“And now its’ time for dinner, young ones. We are starving!”

“We will start with your little girlfriend, Gloria said. “We already had her basting in some delicious herbs. Her eyeballs will come out first.”

I got up to run but the hag Teresa was quick to grab my ankle. She was powerful and brutal, slamming me to the ground where I struck my head, seeing stars. Before I knew it I was tied to another chair next to Beth.

Carol embraced Teresa and kissed her on the lips.

It was disgusting.

Then Carol went to Beth, whose hands were tied to the arms of the chair. She produced a pair of tin snips and as Beth looked down in horror she snipped off her index finger at the knuckle. Betsy screamed and fainted, blood spurting everywhere. Carol took a handful of the blood and smeared it over her lips.

“Now she won’t feel it when we take her eyes,” Teresa said, disappointedly. “She may wake up when when we scalp her,” though, Carol said.

Now I started screaming and soon I was gagged myself, tears running down my face as I wished I was home in my bed, listening to the attic fan.

Teresa stirred the pot.

Water’s ready,” she said to Carol.

And then suddenly Teresa sat down hard on the concrete, her hands up to her face and blood streaming down onto her shrunken breasts.

“Pisser! ” Leonard screamed with a gleeful laugh. He had a pile of rocks in front on him and he picked another one up and rifled it through the air, striking Gloria on her Adams apple.

She started gagging and clutching her throat. Paul sauntered by the both of them and untied us both and slung Betsy over his shoulder. He was a big kid for his age.The three of us left the skags and the burning fire and made our way to the opening of he culvert.

There was a light snow coming down and the air was frigid. The summer of our childhood had disappeared. We weren’t kids anymore.

Our parents had grown old and died. Leonard’s house was up for sale, and empty, so he opened up a basement window and we snuck in with items we had stolen from the market on South Main Street. We had managed to stop the bleeding on Beth’s finger but we knew that we needed to get her a doctor. Leonard had saved the severed finger, wrapping it in one of the dirty white rags. “Just leave me at the emergency room,” Beth said. “Don’t even come in with me. When I get out I’ll leave you a sign at Devil’s Cliff.

“I want to spend my life with you, Beth” I said. “I want to get married.”

“To get married you actually have to be somebody. Let’s work on getting that done first,” she said.

“But what if we can’t make that happen?” I asked.

“Pisser,” Leonard said.