Free The Men Upstairs by Tim Waggoner Page B

spin for a couple seconds before turning brown, slowing, and then stopping. I now know what the brown stains are. As impossible as it seems, the Spindlekin have somehow caused the playground equipment to rust, and they did it in a few seconds.
    They look around as if checking their work and then, satisfied, they leave the playground and head for the trees, coming directly toward me. It’s a bit of a hide-and-seek scramble for me to keep from being seen, moving from one tree to another, but I manage to keep them from catching sight of me. As they move among the trees, they stretch out their hands to brush fingers against bark, and everywhere they touch, blight erupts and spreads. They continue to the pond and walk to the water’s edge. There are a couple ducks in the water that haven’t gotten around to heading south yet. They notice the three men and eye them warily as they begin to paddle toward the opposite shore.
    The Spindlekin unzip their pants, pull out their penises, take aim, and piss thick streams of urine into the water. Their urine is a strange color, though. So dark it’s almost black. A slick rather like oil forms on the surface of the water and rapidly expands. The men keep pissing, their streams never slackening, almost as if their cocks are water hoses. No wonder they drink so damned much if they have this kind of pissing to do.
    The slick quickly covers the entire pond, reaching the ducks before they can get out of the water. The birds quack in dismay as black gunk covers their feathers, and they try flapping to get it off, but it sticks fast to them and like tar, it weighs them down, and they soon slide beneath the water’s surface and are gone.
    The men piss a bit more for good measure before finally finishing, giving their dicks a couple shakes to get the last few drops out, putting their equipment back in their pants, zipping up, and turning away from the pond, which now smells like an open sewage pit. They head back through the trees, touching more as they go, infecting them with blight. The trees they touched on the way here are almost completely infected now, their branches beginning to wither and snap off. I wonder if the blight will spread to the rest of the trees. If I come back tomorrow, will they all be dead and fallen to the ground, their once strong wood soft and rotting?
    When the men walk back through the playground, the equipment has mostly disintegrated into piles of reddish-brown flakes, and I’m sure the rest of it will be gone soon. I think of the slogan on the Spindlekin’s van
    Sons of Babel: Because Sometimes Entropy Needs a Little Help.
    I understand what it means now.
    As they head back to the van, I hurry to my car. I’ve captured everything on my camera, but I know my evidence is useless. No one will ever believe it. They’ll just think it’s some kind of Photoshopped hoax. Still, I intend to keep following them, more from a horrified fascination at this point than anything else. If they started their workday by destroying a park, what’s next on their agenda?
    * * *
    Visiting a nursing home, as it turns out. Hithergreen Senior Center is a recently built, very modern-looking assisted-living facility. Lots of windows to let sunshine in, lots of trees planted on the grounds. It’s too late in the year for flowers, but I have no doubt that come spring there will be plenty blooming around the place. Probably feeders set up to attract hummingbirds, too.
    The Sons of Babel pull into Hithergreen’s lot, park, and get out of the van. They chat as they head inside, and I wonder what they’re talking about. How they’re going to give entropy a little helping hand here? Or maybe how much they’re looking forward to getting their Desiderata back.
    I pull into the lot and park only a few spaces away from the van. I’m no longer quite so concerned with keeping the Spindlekin from spotting me, and I wonder if I’m hoping I’ll get caught as a way of forcing a confrontation with