This was a town that got really excited about a Bigfoot sighting the winter before, but whose residents were crestfallen to learn that it was only a mound of old wigs someone had dumped out there, in the brambles, where a bear could get into them. Then some bear had gotten into them and started slinking around with a mound of old wigs on its back.
The bear had yet to be captured, and for all anyone knew it was still roaming the wilderness as some kind of indomitable mound of hair with razor-sharp teeth and claws. A scary thought unto itself—but still, no Bigfoot.
At the Diplomat Travel Agency, Barb and Hug Gibbershoot were hammering out the final details of their own personal journey. They wanted to get away from this, all this. Barb said, “We just want the best journey of our lives. We just want to go on one hell of a good journey.”
“We want to wipe sadness and depression from our shirt sleeves,” Hug said.
“Let me tell you, Mr. and Mrs. Gibbershoot, that while I think journeying is good and a good thing in your future, there is plenty out there of which to beware. One of the reasons the travel agency biz has hit the shits is, we are the only ones telling travelers to beware,” their travel agent, Lana Deen, said.
“What can we expect abroad?” Hug asked, worried now.
“In Germany, there are a lot of fires. Fires burn. You’ll burn, too, if you’re taken by the fires,” Lana said, gravely.
None of it seemed true. But none of it seemed untrue. It was hard to get a sense of what it seemed, and more than that, of what was true.
“There are fires everywhere,” Barb said. “But the fires in Germany are worse?”
“Very much worse. They’re almost a kind of plague, really. A fiery plague that will eat you alive, well after burning you to ashes. And the mice seem to encourage it. They metaphorically carry the fire. And they have all sorts of mice. All sorts of vermin. If you don’t want vermin who inspire the flames of plague and perhaps real fire, too, you should go to France. They’ll just poison you in France, slowly and sensuously.”
“Where’s a place we’ll be safe?” Barb said, running a finger along the words of a pamphlet that told her to visit Thailand.
“Not Australia. That’s my recommendation,” Lana said flatly.
A flaming garbage can shattered through the large storefront window of the Diplomat Travel Agency. The three of them turned to stare at it, smoldering in the room.
“That should end our business for the day. Thanks for stopping by. Remember what I’ve said,” Lana concluded. She got up, put on her coat, exited through the broken window, and went around to lock the travel agency’s front door, then left.
“I don’t think we’ll have an easy time getting out of here now,” Hug said. “I guess we could go out through the broken window like Lana did for some reason. It’ll be hazardous, but if we’re careful, we’ll probably only get a few bad cuts.”
“I think this is an abandoned travel agency, not an actual travel agency,” Barb said, looking around, noticing the floor was concrete and bare, like one you’d find in an unfinished basement. Barb further noted that there was only the one desk, and that the three chairs they’d been sitting on were old lawn furniture barely able to support their weight. There was a filing cabinet, and in its drawers, there was nothing, or almost nothing. A single empty manila folder with a tab that read “Aruba” in black marker. The recently added garbage can (its ember dwindling, but it was still filling the room with garbage-scented smoke) was the only other thing.
They both coughed.
“It’s like the restaurant we went to last week, Motley’s, remember? They gave us dirty glasses half full of water and then stared at us for a long minute till we were so uncomfortable we had to leave. There was dust all over the place. The bar was empty. The bathroom doors were boarded up. The lights in the kitchen were off. The lights everywhere were off. And really, there was just the bartender who filled the dirty glasses with dirty water and our waitress who never said a single word or looked us in the eye when she waited our table,” Hug said.
“Yeah, that bartender and the waitress did not like talking to us or making us feel like they wanted us there in any capacity. They could have at least mentioned the weather, which had been unremarkable that day, but better to mention it than nothing, right? Right?”
In Lana’s defense, she had talked to Barb and Hug. Aside from the abrupt leaving, she hadn’t been especially strange. All of that was something.
“Maybe this travel agency could be our journey,” Hug said, laughing.
“Ha, why not, right?” Barb said.
“PSSSSSSSSSSSSSST,” came a loud attempt at getting the couple’s attention.
“What was that?” Barb said. Hug looked around the empty room. There was an old wooden cabinet-looking door in the far back, almost completely obscured by darkness.
“There,” Hug said. “Better approach and see what it was. Even if it’s someone who might mean us harm. Because this is where we draw a line in the sand and say, ‘No, nobody better cause anyone harm without reason. And though we’re scared, by approaching you, we’re indicating that we won’t stand for this intimidation.’ That way, maybe, even if we die here and now, we’ve set a great precedent. And the person who means us harm might think twice about meaning anyone else harm in the future. What do you say, honey?”
“I think we have more options. But you make some good points, too, my love. I think we should visit the source of the sound, no matter the cost,” Barb said.
They opened the cabinet-looking door, and standing behind it was a big white ghoul of a creature, veiled in a white, hooded tunic.
“Whoa, gee, do not kill us,” Hug said, taking in the big white ghoul of a creature standing before them.
“Follow me,” the creature said. And they obediently followed it through the dim light offered from the hanging candelabra, down the stone, spiral staircase, and into the basement.
“How about all this?” said the creature, waving his hands at the room before them, which was empty. “I’m Entwhistle.”
“How about all this,” Barb said and gasped stiltedly to exaggerate her enthusiasm, as this seemed to be the reaction for which Entwhistle had been hoping, and she didn’t want to let him down.
“Hi, Entwhistle. Do you know Lana?” Hug said.
“Know her? I’m her uncle. Uncle Entwhisty Deen. That’s what she calls me.”
“What are you?” Barb said.
“Me? I’m not quite a ghost, but I’m something. I’m something like that. I’m something.”
“Why’d you bring us to this basement?” Barb said.
“Uncle Entwhisty Deen,” Entwhistle said to himself.
“Why did you bring us to the basement?” Barb said again.
“I’m sorry?”
“Wh-why did you bring us down here?” Barb said.
“Have a look around,” Entwhistle said.
“We’ve already done that. We’ve had a look. Everything to see is here. It’s empty,” Barb said.
“There are,” Entwhistle said, and then, after sighing for an uncomfortably long time, added, “stones.”
“We’re aware,” Barb said.
“They are nice stones. What is that, granite?” Hug said, kicking at the stones.
“Slate,” Entwhistle said. “Nothing quite like it in my experience. Although my experience is limited to slate.”
“I don’t know much about stones, especially ones used in flooring,” Hug said, forcing a laugh.
“There are no bodies buried beneath the stones,” Entwhistle whispered, squinting his eyes as he spoke.
“We’re going to leave,” Barb said.
“Goodbye,” Hug said and waved.
Entwhistle remained fixed in place, still squinting.
“I’m one of the original diplomats, for whom the travel agency is named. I was going to diplomatically suggest that you journey here. Wander here. I have a couple of sleeping bags. I have a couple of pillows. I wouldn’t watch you sleep,” Entwhistle said later, after Barb and Hug had been gone for quite a long time. “Ah, shit, shoot,” he remarked when he finally realized this.
Then a secret passage to the catacombs opened and out slithered another white figure, clad in its own strange white clothing. “Pssst,” it said. “Did you do what I told you?”
“Yes, exactly,” Entwhistle said.
“And?”
“They didn’t want to stay in the catacombs. They weren’t interested in journeying here. They’re gone now.”
“Come down into the catacombs with me, now, then. We can pretend at being buried alive.”
“I was going to suggest pretending at being buried–”
“Buried alive again.”
“Yes, buried alive again,” Entwhistle said, and once again let out an uncomfortably long sigh.
“Buried alive again,” the other being said again, over Entwhistle’s sigh.
But that night, long after they’d escaped through the broken window of the Diplomat Travel Agency, only cutting themselves superficially in the process, Hug Gibbershoot awoke from dreams of fires in Germany. All those men and their pants, their hosen. All their hosen in flames. And Hug didn’t think this was his mind’s unsubtle way of telling him all Germans were liars with hosen on fire. It was his mind’s unsubtle way of telling him Lana Deen was right, Germany is pretty scary, and the danger of fire there is great, so don’t go.
He needed to get back to Entwhistle, Ol’ Uncle Entwhisty Deen, no matter what. Not just him but they needed to go back to Entwhistle. Barb was going to be a tough sell, though. Her frown and her angered brow when he rustled her awake were enough to indicate that.
“Barb, we can’t go to Germany,” Hug said. “We have to go to Entwhistle.”
“What, the weird ghost guy who lives in the basement of the Diplomat Travel Agency?”
“Yeah!”
Barb went back to sleep. Hug knew he shouldn’t try to wake her again, but he tried anyway. She was really mad that he did.
Hug struggled to get comfortable sleeping on the couch, but he couldn’t. He needed to go for a walk. So he went for a walk to clear his head. There was air out there. The air would go in and out of his head and help to clear it. If maybe he ended up over by the Diplomat Travel Agency, maybe he’d see what was what in there, or something. He hadn’t decided.
Inside the Diplomat Travel Agency, Hug wandered across the room to the basement door where Entwhistle Deen had met him earlier that day.
“Oh,” he said, startled when he saw Entwhistle was restored there at the top of the stairs behind the door, like that’s usually where he would stand.
“Would you like to journey here?” Entwhistle said, a shower of dust and debris accompanying his words.
“Is there fire? In Germany, there are fires,” Hug said, child-like.
“None that I can think of, except the torches that light the catacombs,” Entwhistle said, coaxing Hug toward him and down the spiral staircase again.
Down below, Entwhistle showed Hug to his place. “Journey here!” Entwhistle said, pointing at a coffin.
“Ok,” Hug said, crawling in.
Entwhistle closed the coffin’s lid after kissing Hug gingerly on the forehead.
Barb awoke in the morning to find her husband missing. She made a beeline for the Diplomat Travel Agency. Along the way, noticing the many shuttered storefronts, some of them permanently, she remembered it’d been an especially difficult year for most people in their town (beyond just the false Bigfoot sighting). A lot of sadness. A lot of depression.
The town’s grocer had closed for selling something the FDA could only describe as “meat-like,” but that had never, “strictly speaking,” been approved for consumption by the public.
Then this guy who called himself “Octavius” had started a new religion, everyone was excited about in the old Presbyterian church near the center of town, but it turned out Octavius was actually Ronald Shive, the previous Presbyterian minister who was just attempting to repackage his erstwhile gospel with vaguely new age language, and a higher cost of tithing. The Christ-figure of his sermons being renamed “Ronald” was a dead (and wildly blasphemous) giveaway. (It was one of the reasons Shive had lost his congregation to begin with – his general impartiality about blaspheming during his sermons, frequently inserting himself as a character in the Bible, among many other sins he was startlingly blasé about.)
Paper boys kept going missing. That wasn’t new, exactly. What was, was that missing paper boys from way back kept suddenly reappearing with no memory of where they’d been or why they’d vanished in the first place, and no leads regarding the whereabouts of their more recently missing compatriots. After delivering their newspapers, they wandered around town looking for things they could be paid to throw. And when no one had anything, they all began asking if they were legally allowed to drink beer. Some townspeople suspected they were grifters.
(Plus, the articles in the so-called newspapers these boys delivered were mostly just advertisements, and that more than mildly irritated anyone who bothered to read them.)
She found the travel agency empty. She walked right through the broken window, almost hurdling it and suffering no cuts from the remaining jagged glass.
She went to the cabinet door in the back. Behind the door, it had been walled off with bricks and hardened fast in place. “Hug! Hug!” Barb shouted. “Are you there?”
“I’m here, Barb,” he said, on the other side of the wall. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m worried. You can’t get out. The wall is impenetrable, it looks like,” Barb said.
Hug was silent for a moment. Then he said he wasn’t aware there was a wall where the door had been, and it appeared to be impenetrable. Hug’s voice rose rapidly, and his words came with noted urgency. He was beginning to panic.
“I’ll get help!” Barb called to him. “Everything will be fine. Just hang in there, Hug. This will all be over soon, Hug. You’ll be fine. I swear it.”
“So in short, everything will not be fine,” the contractor Barb had found to demolish the wall said. “This is a load-bearing wall. If we take even a space large enough for your husband to crawl out of it, the whole of whatever is behind it will collapse in on itself. To be truthful, I don’t really believe this was the way your husband got in.” He turned to the wall, “Sir, sir, tell me, did you actually get in there this way? I’m thinking you went in through another way, maybe there’s a trapdoor in the floor? Is it possible there’s another door? One down here, in the floor? Is this a door?”
The contractor pounded his fist on the floor, but it wouldn’t budge. It was just a hard concrete floor.
“It’s hopeless,” Hug said, on the other side, howling in fear. “It’s hopeless, and I’m really scared, and I’m going to start yelling, and I’m not going to stop yelling until someone gets me out of here or I die. I am not good at remaining calm in this sort of situation. I’m just finding that out now, as I’ve never experienced anything quite like this before.”
“Yeeep,” said the contractor.
“Good, you can stay with us, continue to journey here with us,” Entwhistle said, standing behind Hug, gripping him gently with both hands on his shoulders.
Barb and the contractor could hear Entwhistle through the wall.
“Another guy behind the wall, too, huh?” the contractor said. “Yeeep,” he said, evidently instinctively, as some kind of characteristic expletive, scratching his beard noncommittally.
“If there is a will, there is a way, Hug. Don’t lose heart,” Barb said.
“I have no will left, Barb. There is no way. This isn’t any kind of journey I’d ever wanted,” Hug said, hoping someone would speak comfort to him, but Barb couldn’t think of anything comforting, and she was really trying.
“Yeeep,” the contractor said, once more.
Just then, Barb brightened, thinking she heard Bigfoot howling off in the distance, but that – alas – turned out to be Hug again, still anguished behind the wall.
“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep,” the contractor said again, this time with an air of finality.