Welcome to the weird and sort-of-scary conclusion to Oil from a Stone. Enjoy!
The Dare I knew was fearless to the point of foolishness. I’d never seen terror on him before. It stood up every hair on the back of my neck.
I approached cautiously, as though the gravestone would blow up if I made any sudden moves.
The sheen on the surface made it harder to read the carved details to the left of the edge where the rest had been broken off. I could still see the first name, "Redman," but the last was gone. And underneath, the birth year - 1849 - and no death year.
The dark spot on the floor grew.
“What is that?” I asked, backing away.
“It’s oil,” he said. His arms and shirt were stained with the same dark slickness.
“What did you do?” It wasn't an accusation — I was just baffled.
He looked at me, helpless. “I can’t pick it up. I can’t get a good grip. I got it up here, but then...“ He started pacing again, and rubbed his oiled fingers together.
“You poured oil all over it?”
“No! It just— it just started—“
He moved his hands in an effort to produce a fitting gesture, then gave up.
“I don’t know.”
I reached down and put my finger on the oiled surface, then brought it back. The substance was dark, but not black, and smelled like a garage.
“We have to get it out of here.” Dare pointed at the growing spot on the floor, the streak on the wall. “My dad’s gonna kill me.”
For fifteen minutes, we tried to pick up the jagged rock and carry it out, but we didn't get far. The thing sweat like a fat man on a stairmaster. In no time, it soaked our clothes and oil dripped from our elbows onto the furniture.
After the tombstone hit the soggy carpet with a loud THUD for the third time, we gave up. There was oil everywhere.
“We have to get it out of here,” Dare whimpered.
“How,” I said simply.
We both stared at the mysterious artifact as it ruined Dare's bedroom.
“We need more hands,” I concluded. “Or a dolly.”
Dare shined a flicker of hope at me. “Do you know how we could get one?”
I could picture one standing in the storage room at the Dog Shack. I didn’t have a key. I said as much.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dare said as he headed for the door.
It was two in the morning. If we wanted to get into the Dog Shack, we’d have to break in. But Dare's helplessness had evaporated. He was a man on a mission. I wondered what he’d do. I wondered how fired I’d be.
When we pulled up, we could see three other kids down the block. Loudly drunk. I hoped they wouldn’t see us, but of course they did. As we circled the building on the hunt for a point of entry, they stumbled over.
One of the two guys looked from the Shack to us, then back and asked, “You guys hungry?” The other guy and the girl thought that was just about the funniest thing they ever heard.
“There’s something in there we need,” Dare said.
Before I realized what was happening, the girl picked up a big chunk of asphalt and hurled it at the glass door. It made a sickening CRACK as it bounced off and hit the ground.
“Oh shit!” said one of the guys.
The girl stared dumb and wide-eyed at her work, backed away, then ran. The two guys followed her, all three laughing like maniacs.
Dare stared at the spiderweb crack on the glass.
“We should probably go,” I offered. I knew the security cameras didn't work, but how long before someone else noticed a couple of punks vandalizing a building?
Dare picked up the same chunk of concrete, held it firm in his hand and RAMMED it into the glass, instantly compounding the spiderweb cracks.
One more hit caved the glass forward in one big sheet, which shattered onto the floor inside like a flash hailstorm. Dare ducked and followed it in.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Here, let me.” I shouldered around him and found the narrow door to the storage room in the back. I thanked the gods of petty crime it wasn’t locked.
In the hazy street light, we fit the dolly into the trunk. It surprised me how easy it had been to literally break in and steal something.
Neither of us spoke on the drive back. Dread hung over the car. Vivid, unnameable. That broken tombstone, all that oil. What if we just left it? Would the oil spill through his doorway, down the stairs? Would it spread across the bottom of the house, leak into the basement? Would it flow down the driveway? Would it become a river of murk to fill the world?
Dare's silence said everything. He was not a quiet person. That slick, hard-edged horror had shivered the cornerstones of his soul. He would not be the same after this.
The best we could do was stop the bleeding. Remove the infection. Drag that slimy misery out and take it back to where it came from, to cover the shame of all those strangers in its ghostly humors.
By some miracle, we managed not to wake anyone as we carried the dolly up the stairs like a sacramental totem.
Standing again in Dare's room, we stared at the heap of stone and petroleum for several long seconds, admiring the volume of filth it had deposited on the bedroom floor. The wet darkness in the carpet had reached the very threshold of his door, threatening to soon break over and flow outward.
We set to work.
The dolly did exactly what it was designed to do, requiring only clean, perpendicular vectors of blunt force to get the position right. Then we tied it down hard with a rope Dare produced.
“We need some towels,” I observed. Any effort to manage the metal bars of the dolly without sopping up some oil would end in injury.
Dare nodded, left, and came back with four. He set two aside and handed me one. We wiped ourselves and the dolly down as best we could, then draped the used towels over the weeping stone.
At the top of the stairs, we stopped and got in position. I took the handles, while Dare worked his hands into a firm grip on the axle a few steps below.
I grunted at the weight, which seemed greater than it had been. We had to take a couple of breaks, but seeing the oil drip from the dolly’s axle onto the stairs kept us moving.
We were almost to the bottom when I saw her, standing like a dim statue at the base of the stairs.
“Stop!” I hissed at Dare before he backed into his little sister.
The word had the opposite of its intended effect. Startled, Dare lost his grip on the bottom of the dolly, which landed with a cracking thud on the next step down and threatened to mow him over even as he stumbled backward into the girl.
I fell back hard, arms stretched to pain to keep my hold. The stairs were so oiled that I lost two of them before I could stop, barely saving Dare and his kid sister tangled at the bottom of the steps from getting crushed by a jagged oily rock strapped to forty pounds of metal and rubber.
As Dare got her out of the way, we heard a door swing open somewhere else in the house.
Dare’s wide eyes caught mine for a half-second, and then he sprang to grab the bottom of the dolly and start pulling.
We managed to get it out of the house before his dad started shouting.
“What the hell are you doing? It’s three o’clock in the goddamn morning! What is that? Get over here and tell me what it is you think you’re doing.”
But we were too far down the rabbit hole. We didn’t even look back.
The oiled stone fixed to the bulky dolly barely fit into the trunk, but we couldn't get it closed.
“Derrick! You get your ass back in the house!”
We abandoned the effort to close the trunk and scrambled into the car, Dare's dad lurching toward us, boxers and belly and rage.
The thrill of the chase as we shut and locked the doors summoned a laugh out of me, I couldn't help it.
Dare's dad got behind the car to investigate what nonsense we had going on. Dare gave me a wordless look, then started backing up. I swung around to watch his dad jump out of the way, spraying expletives into the air like a dying skunk.
There was wild energy in the air as we drove back to the fluke of zoning that had preserved a pocket of wilderness. Dare crawled the car slowly along the overgrown path that led to the hidden trash heap, until the headlights revealed its outer edges.
I heard a whooshing sound, and we turned around to see a bright orange glow framing the open trunk.
“Oh shit,” I explained.
Without hesitation, Dare threw the car in reverse, pulled into a clearing, then flipped around and started backing up, flaming trunk first, into the heap of enigmatic garbage.
Both of us stayed twisted back, straining to see past the raging fire spilling out the back of his car, as he finished the maneuver.
Then we both tore ourselves out of the car before we got cooked. Dare ducked back to open the back door and yanked out the two clean towels leftover before joining me off to the side.
“That thing’s gonna blow,” I observed.
He looked at me for a second, and then we both skipped backward to a safer distance, crouched and waited. I don’t think it occurred to either of us to run away. Would be a waste to let a car explode all by itself.
A few seconds later, the car blossomed into a huge fireball that rattled our bodies and the trees around us. Dead leaves and loose twigs rained down on us while we covered our heads.
By the time it seemed safe to make our way back to the smoldering husk of the car, the rest of the trash had caught fire.
I wondered if the tombstone was still intact, but it was hard to see through the flames and smoke. Maybe pieces of it were scattered all around, still seeping oil into the bonfire.
Maybe it would burn forever.
Dare held out one of the towels. I stripped my shirt off and gave it to the flames, then took the towel and wiped myself down. When the towel had soaked up all the oil it could, I chucked it in too.
Dare did the same.
We stood there for a while, shirtless and dazed, staring at this pile of secrets turning to ash and smoke, and not understanding anything.
Dare was still silent. Light played across his bare chest and in his eyes, lost in the fire.
Later, we'd have to figure out how to get home, how to explain the what happened to the car, and deal with the hundred consequences of this…haunting. That’s what it had to be, right? We’d been haunted.
But by whom? By what? And what for?
Later. All of those questions, all of those problems, it would all wait till later.
At that moment, next to the wild pyre, the accidental alter of mystic sacrifice, I looked at Dare and discovered I was in love with him.
When he finally looked back at me, I didn’t know if he was thinking the same thing. How could I?
It didn't matter. I reached up and took his face in my hands, stood on my toes, and kissed him, nose full of that sweet, sharp smell of oil.
He kissed me back.
And now there we stood with our arms around each other, still slick with sweat and grime, still lost to some impossible future, while the whole world burned in front of us.
All done. Time for the buttons.
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Till next time.
Lines like "I wondered how fired I’d be" are why I wish I had the propensity to be a writer - I love your work.
But wow what an ending. Seems like less of a haunting and more of a matchmaking!
I am liking these short stories more than I thought I would. So many worlds to explore, so many stories to peek at, so many situations to wrestle with.