SLEEPING CLUB- ALVAREZ AND SUNSET

At the corner of Alvarez and Sunset sat a shuttered and forgotten furniture store. At least that’s how it appeared to Steven Welcome who looked on from the air-conditioned comfort of his BMW. A poster with the name of a commercial real estate agent and a phone number were plastered prominently on the front door of the place. Steven produced a pad of paper and wrote down the name and number.

Floor to ceiling glass windows ran the length of the storefront facing Alvarez Street. They wrapped around the corner and continued along Sunset before coming to an asphalt parking lot in the rear of the store. Broken glass sparkled uniformly across the surface of the parking lot. Plastic bags, fast-food packaging, and such had been deposited by the wind and collected into its corners. A homeless man slept in the skinny shade next to the building. A heaped shopping cart stood nearby.

The furniture store was surrounded on all sides by night clubs, bars and restaurants. As Steven took in the scene, the corner looked competely deserted. Alvarez and Sunset was the sort of place that came alive after the sun went down. Memories of the corner were always bathed in a purple glow as if cast from a neon light. On most nights. music and revelers would spill out into the streets and cars filled every available parking space. Cruisers rolled slowly past as groups of people, smiling and dressed to impress, laughed and made their way from one establishment to the next. Others walked alone with shoulders hunched. Throngs of people, slightly warm around the edges and following after various appetites, were drawn to the scene by night, but by day the place was all but deserted. The old furniture store looked entirely out of place among its sexy neighbors.

“This must have been a different sort of neighborhood at one time,” thought Steven to himself. “I wonder what Aunty wants with this place.”

SLEEPING CLUB- AUNTY STELLIG AND AGENDA ITEM #14

One of the more eccentric members of the sleeping club was Catherine “Aunty” Stellig, heiress of the Stellig tire fortune. She lived as a recluse in a hilltop villa above Rancho Mirage, California. Preferring complete solitude she had become a hermit by choice. Her housekeepers and staff, even those who had been in her employ for several years, had never so much as laid eyes on her. Only one person, a man named Steven Welcome, had any regular contact with her. Steven was a personal secretary of sorts. He had obtained the job simply by answering an ad in the paper. He had been the first to respond to the ad, and when he called the phone number listed one of Aunty’s housekeepers answered and told him that he was hired.




“What?” he had asked, “I’m hired? Just like that?”



“Yes,” said the housekeeper. “I have been instructed to hire the first person that inquires about the job, and I will be sending you an information packet in the mail. Your starting salary will be $200,000 a year, and you are to begin work on Saturday morning at 10:00 am.”



For reasons that were never clear to Steven, Aunty trusted him completely- a trust which he never abused. They met every Saturday morning from 10:00-11:30 am. On Thursday of each week, Steven would receive an e-mail from Aunty containing an agenda for their upcoming meeting as well as any special menu requests, which he would dutifully forward to Mario Lazar, the head cook in Aunty’s kitchen. During the meeting itself, Steven and Aunty would work their way through the agenda, and when their business was complete Aunty would exit the room, and nobody would see her again until Saturday morning at 10:00 am.



Over the years, the meetings settled into a predictable routine and the agendas from week to week became more or less identical, but in late July of 2009 Steven noted with interest that an entirely new agenda item had been added. Line #14- “Discussion of ongoing sleep issues and the purchase of property at the corner of Alvarez and Sunset.”

THE SLEEPING CLUB- Seeds of Panic

In the waning hours of daylight, as I looked out through the jagged mouth of the cave toward the darkening woods, I attempted to suppress my growing concern for the members of our party who had not yet returned from their walk. I had been able to put it out of my mind while I was unpacking and setting up my cot and mosquito netting, but with nothing left to occupy my mind, and with night rapidly descending, I found myself nervously scanning the tree line for any sign of them.

I tried to sound nonchalant as I asked, "What time did they leave?"

"It was a few hours ago at least," answered Annette.

"I think it was around six," chimed in Steve.

The sun slipped irretrievably over the western lip casting its last feeble light against the cliff face above the cave, and the backlit woods blurred into a black and formless mass. "Menacing," I thought. "Hostile."

The stories of this place, which I had sought out so eagerly and catalogued in my brain, now fell like seeds onto the fertile soil of my worried mind. They were threatening to bloom into the weed of paranoia, which chokes out reason, makes you perceive things that aren't truly there, and which ultimately finds fruition in panic. The overwhelming terror, which was steadily growing in my fevered imaginings, was even then poking through, sprouting into consciousness, and eroding my capacity for self-help. The sun had not yet fully set, the events of that night had yet to unfurl, and I was staring with naked terror into the Demon Woods...on the verge of panic.

THE SLEEPING CLUB- The Old Indian Cave

The trail to the cave, which was surprisingly well maintained, ran straight through three-hundred yards of dense pine forest before coming to an abrupt end about 50 feet from the base of a cliff. Creeper vines trailed down over the exposed and weathered limestone face of the cliff, and approximately five feet from the ground a gash, maybe thirty feet long and four feet wide at its widest, marked the opening to the cave.

I had first heard of the Demon Woods while watching a Halloween special on The Road Trip Channel called America’s Ten Spookiest Places. The host, Mathias Howles, had interviewed locals about the legends surrounding the place, with his smooth British accent juxtaposed sharply against the locals’ hillbilly talk, and then he had capped off the segment by spending a disappointingly uneventful night in the “Old Indian Cave,” which sits at the center of the woods.

Over the past year I had worked my way through Howles’ list of America’s Spookiest Places sleeping in old haunted mansions and such, and now I was standing in front of the Old Indian Cave deep within the infamous Demon Woods, number one on Howles’ spooky list, which so far was significantly less spooky than the back seat of Raymond and Nina’s car.

A small trickle of water dribbled out of the corner of the cave’s entrance exactly like drool from the corner of a sleeping giant’s mouth. The creeping vines completed the effect, resembling unruly hair. The imagery pleased me so much that I produced a notebook from my pack and began to scribble it down for my memoirs when I heard a voice call to me from the cave’s opening.

“John! You made it!”

Looking up I saw Tony Baldamo, on his hands and knees grinning at me from inside the cave. Tony owned a Mercedes dealership in Newport Beach, CA and, like me, had suffered from crippling insomnia for several years before joining the sleeping club. Tony, who easily tipped the scales at four-hundred pounds, was grinning infectiously at me as he bellowed, “What took you so long? We were beginning to wonder if the demons had gotten you.”

With a burly arm, Tony helped me up into the cave. Nearly a dozen cots were set up under mosquito netting, and in the center of the cave a couple of card tables had been set up, likewise under mosquito netting, with kerosene lamps glowing confidently on them. Looking around in the dim light I saw Jim and Nancy Bellows, Steve Ducette, Ronnie Robtoy, Shirley Paines, Oscar Montoya, and Annette LaGrassa- all members of the Sleeping Club.

“Where are the others?’ I asked.

“They wanted to go for a walk before the sun went down,” said Oscar, a lawyer, and a fellow insomniac who I had met three years prior at a 24 hour coffee house in Cathedral City. “I’m surprised they’re not back yet,” he added.

THE SLEEPING CLUB- Alone in the Demon Woods

As Nina guided the car into the woods branches scraped across the windows and the overgrown center of the neglected road whispered against the car’s undersides. It vaguely reminded me of a car wash, and I said as much to Raymond who had closed his eyes and was whispering softly to himself as if he was praying. He either didn’t hear me or was ignoring me. “Creepy,” I thought to myself. Approximately two-hundred yards inside the woods the car came to a stop before a fallen tree that blocked the road in an unambiguous way.

“I ain’t going any further,” said Nina, “not on foot anyway.”

Raymond, stopped praying, and opened his eyes to look at his wife, who shifted the car into reverse as if to put an exclamation point on her statement.

“Hey, we had a deal here!” I said feebly from the back seat.

Raymond looked at me and then back at his wife.

“We ain’t going any further, Raymond,” she repeated.

“We ain’t going any further,” said Raymond to me, “You’re almost there anyway, and I can’t leave Nina alone here in the car. Not in the demon woods.”

“Alright,” I said with a resigned sigh, “how do I get there?”

“It’s real easy. You just walk another couple hundred yards down the road until you come to an abandoned house on your left. Behind the house there’s a trail. Just follow the trail for a ways and it’ll take you right up to the old Indian Cave. You should make it before the sun goes down if you walk fast.”

I got out of the car, and shouldered my pack. Neither Raymond nor Nina got out of the car. In fact, no sooner had I exited the car than Nina began backing her way down the road and out of the woods. There were no farewells, no “good lucks,” not even so much as a friendly wave.

I was alone in the Demon Woods.

SLEEPING CLUB- THE DEMON WOODS

The back seat of the car was covered in an assortment of old tools, which the toothless young man, whose name was Raymond, shoved roughly onto the passenger side before motioning me to get in. His wife, whose name I had learned was Nina, limped off the porch and slid in behind the steering wheel. Raymond sat next to her on the passenger seat. Inside the close confines of the car I could smell them. Their atrocious body odor mixed with the more honest smell of grease and sawdust which hung to some of the tools crowding the back seat.

Nina turned the key in the ignition, and with a lurch the car pulled out of the dooryard and nosed its way down a dusty dirt road toward the distant woods. The dirt, dry as baby powder, spewed out from under the car’s speeding tires leaving a long widening cloud behind us as we drove.

Fields stretched away on either side like a beige carpet as we drove in silence. Whatever had been planted in them looked pretty well scorched and withered under the oppressive sun.

Breaking the silence, I asked, “Are the woods really full of demons?”

Raymond looked over his shoulders and flashed me a toothless grin. “That’s what they say.”

They drove a little further in silence before Raymond offered more, “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen them myself, but my brother, Bill, swears that one day he was working a tractor close to the woods and he looked over and saw two little girls watching him from inside the woods. They was dressed all in white. Their skin was white as paper. Even their hair was white, but their eyes were black as a pit, and they were watching him. It wasn’t natural. No matter where he went they moved with him, staying inside the woods, and all the time just watching him. He just left the tractor and ran off. Old Top Manley had to go out and bring the tractor in.”

“Tell him about what Scott saw,” Nina suggested.

Oh yeah,” continued Raymond, “maybe two years ago, Scott Peters, he lives a little ways down from us, was out working the fields near the woods when he saw a whole forest full of animals come running out of the woods- bears, deer, turkeys, foxes, boars, you name it- they was all just running around at the edge of the trees, and even though he was rumbling past on his tractor they wouldn’t run back into the woods. The only thing he could figure was that something real nasty had scared them all out of the woods.”

“Everyone knows the woods the woods are full of demons,” said Nina.

‘That’s why they call it ‘Demon Woods,” agreed Raymond, “Just look it up on a map. You don’t get a name like that for nothing.”

SLEEPING CLUB- Hundred Dollars

A young man, rail thin, maybe thirty, and oddly toothless, sat in the shade of his front porch. His wife, fat and sweaty, stood in the doorway leaning against the door jam and staring out over the shimmering, sun-drenched fields that stretched away toward the woods which appeared as a black line on the distant horizon. An assortment of canes and walking sticks, each with a hand-carved, wooden handle, leaned against the wall between them. Wood shavings littered the porch around the man’s feet.

I put one foot on the second step leading up to the porch and leaned forward, resting my forearms on the elevated knee, waiting for an answer.

The summer sun beat down mercilessly on the dooryard. Sweat-darkened splotches spread out from under my arms and across the small of my back.

After a long silence the man finally spoke in a sloppy, toothless voice, “The woods are full of demons.”

“Uh-huh,” seconded the wife in agreement.

“Demons?” I said. “What do you mean, demons?”

They both just sat and stared soberly toward the distant line of trees.

“Well? What do you mean?” I asked again.

The man giggled unnaturally, but offered no explanation. The wife smiled broadly revealing teeth like crowded kernels of corn but likewise declined to offer an explanation. I couldn't be sure what exactly had struck them as funny, but something in their demeanor made me feel that I was the punch line.

"These two are unhinged," I thought to myself.

Interrupting the man, who was still giggling, I said, “Well, lets get down to brass tacks, will you help me or not?”

The man looked up at his wife, but she continued to stare straight ahead, ignoring him.

He shook his head in mock frustration then returning his attention to me said, “Maybe, a hundred dollars?”

The wife shrugged as if to wash her hands of the whole thing and went back inside the house.

“Hundred dollars,” I agreed.