The Horror From Beyond the Outhouse

by Rex Clark

or From Beyond the Outhouse

  By Rex Clark

  Copyright 2017 Rex Clark

  Other titles by Rex Clark:

  Waters Rise

  Seduction

  Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

  The Guest in 519

  Blood Doll

  Memoriae

  Earl sat on his front porch, a half-empty bottle of Leng Original Draught on the boards beside his cane-backed rocking chair. Beads of condensation slid down the sides of the bottle, leaving snail-trails of moisture on the peeling gray paint of the porch. For the moment, the beer sat forgotten beside him as Earl rocked. The old wood of the rockers squealed in hypnotic slow time.

  Earl’s house sat on top of a small rise, and he had a good view of King Hollow Road as it wound its way past his driveway. He turned a bit and looked toward where the road branched off of State Route 66, and he could just make out Sadie Morgan’s little shack of a house nestled right there in the corner where the two roads met. He was too far away to see if Sadie herself was out, but Earl was pretty sure she was, most likely hanging out her wash to catch the sun.

  He let his gaze travel along the length of the road, past the New Innsmouthe Free Will Baptist Church, now abandoned and left to rot under a blanket of kudzu and moss.

  Further along, less than a mile from Earl’s own porch, he could just make out the entrance to the Dixon Ranch, also abandoned. Its owner, Floyd Willis Dixon, was locked away in the state’s local nuthatch after murdering his wife and two children with a meat hook during that horrible summer three years ago.

  Earl shuddered at the memory of that year: eighteen murders, scores of cattle mutilations, the endless legions of rats and insects as big as your hand, and Horton Pulcifer Lovecraft’s prize cheese goat ritualistically sodomized by the Solace Springs varsity football team.

  The worst part, though, had been the whispering. Low and persistent, it had been like a constant buzzing of insect wings in the ear, and it spoke of eras forgotten by humanity, of the ages between the drowning of Lemuria and the rise of the kingdom of Hyperborea. It spoke of blasphemous, misshapen beings that lay dead and dreaming beneath the ocean waves. It drove men mad to hear that rasping whisper. It got inside their souls and twisted them until nothing human was left. It turned them into Jeff Gordon fans.

  It had been horrible, all right. Earl didn’t know exactly how or when it had started; no one did, really. It had just crept in and taken hold, turning each night into a sweat-soaked, nightmare-filled fit of thrashing, and each day into some dull, creeping stretch of rootless dread.

  Earl found his gaze lingering on the ivy-covered entrance to the Dixon ranch. He remembered what a beautiful woman Susie Dixon had been, and such a fine cook. She would make pumpkin pies every November first and give one to each family along King Hollow. He remembered how she’d been found in the barn, hanging from steel hooks driven through her eyes, her body covered with indecipherable carvings. And the girls…

  Earl shuddered and tried to turn his thoughts in another direction, but his mind lingered on Floyd, with his infectious laugh and the telltale beginnings of a beer gut, and how he had always been the first to help out a neighbor in need. Good old Floyd, who had been discovered naked in the upstairs bathroom, covered in the blood and gore of his slaughtered family, his hair chalk white, his eyes sunken and yellow. The lower half of his face was a caked mask of drool and snot. He had been speaking gibberish when they had found him and hauled him away, something about “Ia, Ia, fhtagn… Cthulhu fhtagn… Nim R’lyeh Nim R’lyeh Cthulhu fhtagn.” As far as Earl knew, he was still muttering that in his padded room today.

  Shaking his head and breaking that train of thought, Earl reached down and lifted his beer off the porch. He tipped a long sip into his mouth, gagged, and spat it out into the dust of his dooryard. Despite having opened the bottle only moments earlier, the beer was already flat as a plank.

  “Damn it,” he muttered as he poured the rest of the bottle over the porch rail. Things had a nasty habit of turning bad quick lately. He tossed the empty toward the blue recycle bin his daughter had pressured him into getting, missed, then reached into the cooler beside him for another bottle. He popped the lid off and tilted the bottle up, guzzling the beer. He hated drinking it that fast; chugging beer made him fart explosively, and Earl’s Army training had instilled a deep hatred of skid marks in his boxers.

  He returned his gaze to the road, and the driveway opposite his, where the Mitchum’s house had stood for a hundred and fifty years before the fire had consumed it three years ago. Its charred remains stared like a blackened skull, accusing any and all who passed it by of abandoning it to rot back into the earth. It was said that the screams of the people who died in the fire could still be heard, but that was said by people who were too scared to go near the place to begin with. Seven people had lost their lives there that night, each of them at the others’ throats, fighting to survive while the house burned. Even the two-year-old had been found with a butcher knife in her hand.

  Earl shuddered at the memory of that night and knocked back the rest of beer in one hurried gulp, then gritted his teeth as he let rip, not even wanting to think about what his underwear laundry was going to look like.

  Looking further up the road, Earl found his eyes drawn to the depths of Sapper’s Woods, which butted against his own property line and swallowed the road a short distance past his driveway. Some three hundred and fifty-seven acres as of the last survey, the Woods were dark and quiet, and covered nearly half of Solace Springs. It had always reminded Earl of Tolkien’s Mirkwood, although he knew that, under normal circumstances, it didn’t harbor giant spiders. It was, however, home to Earl’s childhood friend, LeRoy Reneau, and they had explored the woods thoroughly as kids, mainly looking for places to hide while they shared lunches, cigarettes, and the Hustler magazines they’d managed to steal from their daddies’ private stashes. They’d gone to school together and cheated off each other in the back of the room, which was why they had both toured the fifth and sixth grades twice, until LeRoy’s father had yanked him out of junior high at the tender age of seventeen and put him to work on the family farm.

  The longer he looked out over the trees, the more Earl noticed that the color of the leaves was washing out of them. They grew lighter, taking on an orange hue. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t the trees that were losing their color; the sky had taken on a sullen, sepia-tinged quality, and sun was now a brooding red ball hanging above the horizon. The air grew thicker, making Earl cough. It felt like trying to breathe underwater.

  Something buzzed by his ear, and Earl swatted at it, to no avail. It persisted, like a hornet flying around his head. He looked around the porch for the insect but saw nothing. After a moment, he began to notice that the droning buzz was the only sound he could hear.

  He pitched the empty toward the recycle bin, not watching but making the shot this time anyway, and reached into the cooler for another. He cracked the top and raised it to his lips, but stopped just shy of his face as the first of the cockroaches struggled to pull itself free of the neck.

  “What the shit!” he yelled, holding the bottle out at arm’s length. The roach was too big to fit through the bottle’s opening, yet there it was, pulling its bulk out one spindly leg at a time. Its antennae writhed in the thick air, adding a whispering undertone to the low hum.

  “Jesus,” Earl snarled, pitching the bottle into the dooryard where it exploded like a bomb, splashing a writhing smear of glass and bug guts as some of the cockroaches inside the bottle were torn apart by flying crystal pieces. Others, though, managed to scuttle free of the wreckage and took off across the dooryard, tracking th
rough the dark ichor of their fallen comrades.

  Earl stared after them, horrified, thinking not again, God, please please not again. No longer sparing a thought for his underwear, he didn’t notice when his bladder emptied itself as he tried to push up from his rocker. It slid back before he was fully upright, and he staggered backward, dropping to one knee beside the open cooler.

  There were five unopened bottles still in the cooler, and each one was vibrating as its contents writhed and churned, surging toward the tops of the bottles and freedom. With a low cry, Earl slammed the lid on the cooler and shoved it off the porch, where it fell onto the slower bugs still moving in the dooryard. There was a muted tinkle as the bottles inside broke, and the whole cooler began to shake and pulsate.

  Earl pushed himself to his feet, but swayed as he stood. It felt like the world itself was starting to pulsate around him. Waves of vertigo hit him and he staggered to the porch railing, one hand groping for the rough wood to steady himself. He raised his eyes and looked back toward Sapper’s Woods, and was struck by how the treeline seemed to be advancing toward his house. The trees were moving as if in a high wind, although the air was so still and thick Earl couldn’t conceive of anything moving in it at all.

  He pushed himself up from the railing and staggered toward the front door as the planks of the porch writhed underfoot. He fumbled with the screen door for a moment, all the time aware that the swelling presence of the approaching forest was filling his peripheral vision.

  With a grunt, Earl yanked at the door handle and with a groan and squeal of hinges that didn’t want to move, the door pulled open. He fell into the entrance hall, kicking the front door shut behind him as he dropped.

  The door swung shut, but didn’t catch. As it began to swing open again, Earl pushed himself up and pressed all his weight against it, shutting it firmly this time. He shot the deadbolt and heaved a deep sigh when it clicked.

  He leaned against the door, back against the coarse wood, and tried to catch his breath. After a moment, though, he noticed that the door was giving off a dull heat, as if there was afire somewhere on the other side of it and the warmth was radiating outward.

  And that damned buzzing sound kept filling the air, growing steadily louder, as though voices were being added to it. Words were now becoming noticeable, albeit words that were no more than gibberish.

  Earl pushed himself away from the door and regretted it almost immediately. The hallway began to swell and contract with a dull rhythm, like a giant diseased heart, and his head started to pound in time with it.

  With each beat of the house-heart, gusts of hot, stale air blew past him, filling his nose with the moldering reek of tombs lost beneath shifting desert sands. Earl coughed, trying to get the taste of it out of his throat, but it had settled in like fine dust. He found it increasingly hard to draw a breath.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and fell back against the front door, letting it support him as he slid down its length until he was sitting on the floor. The pounding in his head was increasing in intensity and speed, and with it, the house. It boomed with each contraction like a huge, hollow drum. Earl slumped onto his side and clamped his hands over his ears, trying to shut out that infernal pounding, but it was no good. After a moment, a thin, reedy wail joined it, and it took Earl almost a full minute to realize that the sound was coming from himself.

  This was just like last time. The thought came to him and planted itself firmly in his mind. In a way, it was comforting: it gave him something else to focus on besides thumping pulse of the house around him. It was all too much…

  As the drumbeat of the house reached a fevered pitch, Earl had a crazy idea that it was a song by that Gaga woman, when everything went silent.

  No, he thought, but couldn’t keep himself from opening his eyes just a bit.

  The hallway was still there, as was the house, but it wasn’t entirely solid.

  Earl could see through the walls that he was in some vast desert. Sapper’s Woods was gone, as was the rest of King Hollow and Solace Springs for all he knew. It was night, and the darkness had swallowed the world that he knew.

  He looked up, and through his insubstantial roof, saw three bloated, blood-red moons hovering above him. Behind those, stars shone out in alien constellations that shifted and changed.

  No, Earl thought again, squeezing his eyes shut once more. No, God no, not again, all it needs now is-

  The scratching started before he could even finish the thought.

  Under the floor, behind the walls, even above him in the ceiling, the sound of thousands of small, sharp claws scraping against wood and drywall assaulted him. It was underscored with the high chittering of small animals.

  Grimacing, eyes still screwed shut, Earl pushed himself to his feet and staggered down the hall toward his bedroom. He stumbled into the wall on his right, and the scrabbling tear of the creatures behind the drywall rose as they converged on the sound of the impact.

  Unable to help himself, Earl opened his eyes, and his mind was torn apart.

  The alien landscape that had intersected his house had begun to twist the corners of the hallway into tortured fourth-dimension pretzels that had no right to exist in the normal run of things. The pictures on the wall had been stretched like taffy into an infinite distance, where they looked to be getting devoured by the stars themselves.

  Panting, he looked down at himself and saw that his usual bipedal form was likewise stretched and warped; his legs had developed angles in some very unfortunate places, while his knees had vanished, and his arms had been drawn out into thick tentacles. The watch on his left pseudopod seemed unaffected though, apart from it flashing “6:66” at him. He sucked in a breath, felt it gurgle and pop in his chest, and looked down to see his own six-chambered heart pounding arhythmically in a mush that looked more like apple butter than flesh. Nothing inside that pulpy mass resembled the organ diagrams in his grade school science books.

  In the distance, mountains rose out of the shifting dunes, pushing up into the sky before falling back to the ground, where they pulsed and quivered before sprouting stubby, gelatinous arms. Their dark surfaces began to glow with the heat of vast internal furnaces.

  Nearer to him, Earl could see what scratching at the walls. Rats, some the size of Pomeranians, were clawing and biting at the drywall, tearing away jagged chunks in order to break through and get to him. Their beady red eyes were fixated on his face.

  “No!” Earl grunted and pushed forward. He clamped his eyelids together again and went by feel alone.

  The hallway was only fifteen feet long, but he found himself running for all he was worth over a distance of miles. The floor beneath him was far too soft for wood; it was more like running through thick mud.

  He slammed headlong into the doorframe all at once, causing him to wobble for a moment as he fought for balance, then he fell inside and shoved the bedroom door shut behind him, locking out the scratching feet and flashing teeth. His breath coming in sobbing gasps, his chest hitching and burning, Earl lay where he had fallen, praying to anyone who would listen to make this stop.

  Something hit the other side of the door.

  Earl’s eyes popped open as the impact was repeated and multiplied. In the half inch between the bottom of the door and the floor, he saw furry legs and naked tails churning, casting shadows through the narrow space.

  On the plus side, though, Earl discovered that his body was his own once more, and everything seemed to be working. The bedroom around him looked normal, as well: same primer-white walls, same tattered old king bed with the Bill O’Reilly bedspread, same picture of Jesus shaking hands with Johnny Cash. The only thing out of the ordinary was the sunlight spilling into the room from its only window; it was an angry deep crimson, like the blood of demons.

  Earl’s gaze wandered over the room and landed on the phone sitting on the nightstand by the bed. It was an ugly, worn out rotary unit that always crackled with static when it was in use.

&
nbsp; It looked like a hand reaching out to a drowning man to Earl.

  He lunged to his feet, made sure the door was locked to keep the rats out, then grabbed the dresser beside it and pulled it over to block the door further. Satisfied nothing was getting in, he threw himself across the bed and made a grab for the phone. He almost grabbed it, too, but just then a high, mewling shriek split the air and made the world roll over in pain. It was almost too high-pitched for the ears to pick it up, but it hammered all the way into the soft tissue of Earl’s brain, and he collapsed in heap on the bed, his hands pressed to his head to keep his skull from flying apart.

  After a moment, the pain decreased enough for Earl to pull himself the rest of the way across the bed to the phone. He made it and realized that the rats had stopped scratching at the door. He could still see their shadows, but when that weird noise had hit, they had gotten quiet. The light in the room was different, too, more normal, although it was beginning to tinge over scarlet as he watched.

  He grabbed the receiver and put it to his ear. Instead of a dial tone, it seemed to be playing some tinny, warbling atonal flute in his ear. Earl ignored and dialed the first number that came to mind. It turned out to be Sadie’s, but she wasn’t picking up on her end, or if she was he couldn’t hear it over the droning flute.

  He hung up, then lifted the receiver and started to dial LeRoy’s number. Before he finished with the exchange number, though, another one of those mind-melting shrieks split the sky and reality throbbed in agony. The desert landscape Earl had seen earlier flashed through his bedroom, there and gone, and then the sun was back in all its yellow glory for nearly a full minute before darkening.

  Earl managed to dial the rest of the number with fingers that shook too badly to operate the rotary dial. The warbling noise continued over the line, but it had changed into something Earl suspected was One Direction. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded like that crap his granddaughter listened to.

  By the third ring, Earl heard the phone pick up, but it took a few seconds before he heard LeRoy’s muttered “Y’ello.”

  “LeRoy?”

  “Earl? That you, old son? You gotta speak up.” LeRoy’s voice was fuzzy and undercut by the interference on the line, but it was impossible to mistake.

  Earl blew out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Thank Christ!” he said, feeling as if he might tear up out of sheer joy. “LeRoy, you won’t believe it, the craziest shit has been goin’ over here!”

  “Bet I can guess,” LeRoy replied. “You got rats. Big ones, like small-dog size?”

  Earl gawped.