He pushed his chair back from the table and said to his mother, standing at the sink washing the waffle iron, “I have to go.”
She turned, looking vaguely startled. “Where do you have to go? Nothing’s open.”
“I have to go,” he repeated. Only this time it sounded like other sounds came out as well. It sounded a lot like the sounds that sometimes went with his weird thoughts.
His mother’s expression changed. From that wide-eyed startled look to something like resigned horror.
He got his bike out of the garage, hopped on, and rode it to Twin Springs, Ohio.
* * *
Chris Hizer didn’t bother telling his mom he was leaving. This was a couple days before William left. Chris lived in Colorado and the only mode of transportation he had was a skateboard. It was going to take a while.
When darkness came to the Hizer household, it was his stepfather who finally said he was getting worried.
“I’m sure he’ll be okay,” his mother said.
His stepdad protested before finally acquiescing. He never really liked Chris anyway. He was creepy. One of the creepiest eleven-year-olds he’d ever met.
* * *
Penny Mugwump didn’t need to tell her mother she was leaving. She no longer had one. Penny was going to tell her. She went into her mother’s bedroom to tell her but she couldn’t get her to wake up. Penny thought about calling 911 but the voice in her head told her she didn’t really have time to do that, plus she’d have to answer a lot of questions. Not that Penny had anything to do with her mother’s death. Nor did she know what heroin was. Her mother called it her medicine and said she needed it to relax. Most of the time her mother’s medicine used to involved taking a pill or smoking out of a little pipe. This seemed to involve a lot more stuff.
Not that it really mattered now anyway.
Penny had a pretty strong feeling she wouldn’t be coming back to her tiny house in Evanston, Illinois, anyway. She hopped on her tricycle – sadly, the only thing she had – and headed to Twin Springs, Ohio, a pretty good jaunt for a twelve-year-old girl with asthma.
5.
Slade had been eleven the last time he’d seen the man on the couch. He hadn’t called himself Slade then. He was just Tyler Grimm, a small town kid with no hopes or ambitions. One ambition he knew he didn’t have was to be kidnapped and raped by a pervert.
He’d been at the park playing baseball with his friends. This was in Glowers Hook, so the park was pretty much surrounded by woods. It would have been an ideal place for drug deals to go down, along with all kinds of other unsavory acts. But that was practically every park in this area and somehow the reputation had escaped this one. Pickle Park was what they called the one by the river where every alleged homosexual in the tri-state region met to do whatever faggots did. It would take Tyler a long time to stop thinking about them that way but that was pretty much the accepted terminology for that area of Ohio at that time.
They’d finished packing up their equipment and his friends had left him behind. Ben was already late and Layne always gave Tyler a hard time for being so slow. He would shout “Lollygagger!” and dart out of the house, often while Tyler was still tying his shoes.
He didn’t think they would have left him if they’d seen the gray Honda parked in the small parking lot.
“Hey kid!” a man called as he got out of the car.
Tyler hoisted his aluminum bat onto his shoulder, his glove looped over the knob at the end of the handle, and began walking toward the entrance of the park. He thought it was best if he pretended not to hear him.
“Kid, wait up!” the man called.
Tyler kept walking. But . . . there was something in his head telling him not to. It told him he should stop. It told him he should stop and do whatever this man wanted him to do.
But he knew this voice wasn’t right.
What would Natalie think if something happened to him? She was his thirteen-year-old neighbor but she had finally let him do what he’d been begging to do for the past three months. It was every bit as good as he thought it would be, although he wasn’t sure if she thought so or not. It hadn’t taken very long and she had cried afterward. Nevertheless, she had a kind of power over him now.
Tyler walked faster.
He could hear the guy behind him.
“Hey kid, wait up! I just want you to help me figure out where I’m at!”
The guy was now practically right behind him.
Maybe he wasn’t a creep, Tyler thought, but wondered why he would try to get directions from a kid on a playground rather than in town or at a gas station.
Tyler stopped and turned around. Maybe the guy was legit. If he wanted to grab him, he was close enough to do so anyway. He would answer the guy’s question but if he reached for him he was going to clobber him with the bat, which he now gripped very tightly.
The man stopped short.
“Thanks, little guy,” he said. Tyler wasn’t really that little.
Now, facing the man, he thought the guy looked weird. He had these different shaped nostrils but that wasn’t the least of it. The man wore what had to be a wig under a hat that had a graphic of a police badge and the letters F.O.P. on it. And his eyebrows were clearly drawn on. And not well. It looked like whatever he’d used was already running down the man’s face with his sweat.
So it’s easy to wash off, Tyler thought just as the man reached out. He didn’t know where that thought had come from.
Tyler didn’t take the time to pull the bat back and administer a proper swing. He just rammed it forward into the guy’s crotch and took off running in the opposite direction, yelling “Help!” the entire time.
It was a pretty rural area and when Tyler hit the road he was the only one on it. He heard the car crunch on the gravel of the park’s lot, which meant the man was pulling out, and Tyler threw himself into the woods on his right. Under camouflage, he watched the road. He saw the front of the car pull out of the parking lot and head in the opposite direction.
Tyler sat down in the dirt, his heart hammering. He still felt uneasy but he also felt a sense of relief.
When he got home he told his mom about the encounter. She called the police and an officer came out to ask him questions and file a report. He felt nearly famous for a week or two. He also felt like the luckiest boy in the world.
Even though his mother had never mentioned his biological father, Tyler asked her, “Do you think that could have been my real dad, come back for me?”
She had rubbed his head and said she didn’t think he’d ever see that guy again. He wasn’t sure if she meant the creep or his dad who, he guessed, was also a creep. They probably weren’t the same person. The truth, which she would never tell him but he somehow knew just by glancing into her eyes, was that she had no idea how she’d gotten pregnant. Someone would have had to have broken into her house, drugged her and raped her, all without her knowledge. She wasn’t a slut. She didn’t go to parties. She wasn’t a virgin but it had been months since she’d had sex. She maybe remembered having morning sickness but didn’t go to the doctor until her belly became distended and hard. She was afraid she had a tumor or some kind of intestinal disorder. The doctor informed her that she was probably seven months pregnant.
She told Tyler he would never see that guy again.
Now Tyler, who called himself Slade, thought his mother was wrong.
6.
“I’m not helping you,” Slade said to the man.
The man’s volume had increased. His eyes stared straight forward and looked filled with fear.
Slade still did not think of this man as his father. He thought of the creep who’d tried to do something to him when he was just a kid.
The light from outside was flashing, closer, making it hard to think. Shapes moved amidst the light. Maybe Sierra had gone to the police.
But why would they be coming through the woods?
Slade stood slowly, wanting away from the man. Now he h
ad to go to the police. Who knew how many times the man in front of him had tried to do what he did to him. How many times had he been successful?
He went toward the patio door. He needed to tell the Brothers Brian to keep an eye out on this guy and to not let him leave under any circumstances.
He also needed to find out what that light was.
It was so intense it felt like it was burning a hole somewhere in his brain.
He opened the back door.
The Brothers Brian were in the chairs on the patio only . . . they had changed. Slade smelled burning. Their bodies were molten lumps, blood and unidentifiable ooze dripping from the straps of the chairs.
But Slade was having trouble making out anything.
That light. Flashing. And each flash seemed to be accompanied with some kind of heaviness that made him feel like collapsing.
But he had a sense of purpose.
He could not see into the light but, when he closed his eyes, he saw a lingering afterimage of shapes.
What the fuck was going on?
The light was so bright it illuminated the inside of the house so Slade was able to look in and see the strange man. He now stood in the middle of the living room, his arms raised to the ceiling and, even from outside, Slade could hear that alien chanting coming from him.
Slade didn’t want to go back inside.
Fuck his phone. Fuck his camera. He didn’t even care about going to the police at this point. He ran around the west side of the house and stopped under the cover of the carport.
There were kids.
A lot of them.
Coming down the road in front of his house. There were at least 25 to 30 of them. They all looked young. Some of them were on bikes. Some of them were on skateboards. One had ridden a moped. Another a go-kart. One girl was on a tricycle that seemed way too small for her. Some of them were on foot. If they had one, they discarded their particular mode of transportation at the guardrail that ended Spring Street. They walked purposefully toward the house. Their eyes all shone with the blinding light that Slade now thought came from the sky. He staggered out of the carport and into the side yard. He didn’t know if he was looking for an umbrella from all that glaring light or if he just wanted to be away from the house. What if whatever had happened to the Brothers Brian happened to him?
He heard sounds coming from the backyard, from the woods. It was the last earthly sound he heard.
More kids were coming from the woods. These had been the shapes he had seen. Now, as they moved closer to him, he could see their bodies glowing with the same light coming from the other kids’ eyes.
Now he heard a sound like a low flying military carrier only a thousand times more intense.
The light was so bright everything looked flattened and bleached.
The children were joining hands around the house.
The house’s windows shattered. Not hearing it, only seeing it, made Slade feel oddly disconnected.
Two children came toward him. One had the glowing eyes. The other had the glowing body. They held out their hands. Slade felt terrified but also strangely elated.
He let the children help him up. Their touch sent a strange current of calm through him. It was something he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt before.
He joined the circle around the house.
The house was being flattened. It reminded Slade of a tornado but the pressure seemed super concentrated. Flattened and shredded, the house spiraled in the middle of their circle before being sucked up into the sky like some kind of demolished house soup.
The odd man stood in the middle of the circle, still shouting, his hands raised.
Slade felt like they were somehow helping this man and wanted to be away from the circle until –
7.
They were finally coming for him, Alexander thought.
The house was lifted away from him and he saw it disappear into the bright light. He saw all of his accomplishments, both past and future, surrounding him. All of his children, harvested from him that one night.
He felt those things reach into his head. He’d always remained open to them.
He knew he had been a sick man.
Sometimes he’d tried to convince himself they were the reason for this sickness.
What people saw as his sickness was really his earthly reward for doing their deeds. He wanted to shout at them he had taken what he deserved.
Before everything went black, he tried to recall what it had been like the last time. He’d never felt anything like it since although he’d certainly tried. He closed his eyes and wished to go back.
8.
– the man’s clothes were ripped from his body. His flesh was ripped away from the bone just as easily until he was only a skeleton and the skeleton became so much dust, invisible in all that bright light.
Slade couldn’t think about anything over that deafening vacuum roar. It felt like the ground was lifting beneath his feet. Maybe he was going somewhere. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He wanted to stay here. He wanted to suck everything he possibly could from life. But he couldn’t move.
The circle rose toward that white light.
Suddenly everything was calm and peaceful.
Slade wondered if he would ever get used to it. He wondered if he could go back. There were colors and feelings but it all seemed too subtle and ethereal. He thought about flesh sliding against flesh. The sharp sting of pain. The explosions of pleasure. The lingering feeling in the soul of what it means to be in pain and what it means to hurt someone else.
That was what he wanted his life to be. A human life. In the midst of all that black sorrow there were pink explosions of joy and happiness. That was what he lived for.
He didn’t know what this was.
He felt the alien sensation of something entering his head. It was like that voice he’d heard in the park that day. Uninvited. Unwanted. It felt . . . unedited was the only way he could think to describe it.
He had been the missing link in the circle. What would have happened to him if he’d stayed outside of it? Would he have died? Was this death?
He tried to quit thinking.
He tried to give himself to it.
But he just kept wondering if his world would ever come back to him.
Other Grindhouse Press Titles
#666__Satanic Summer by Andersen Prunty
#035__Office Mutant by Pete Risley
#034__Death Pacts and Left-Hand Paths by John Wayne Comunale
#033__Home Is Where the Horror Is by C.V. Hunt
#032__This Town Needs A Monster by Andersen Prunty
#031__The Fetishists by A.S. Coomer
#030__Ritualistic Human Sacrifice by C.V. Hunt
#029__The Atrocity Vendor by Nick Cato
#028__Burn Down the House and Everyone In It by Zachary T. Owen
#027__Misery and Death and Everything Depressing by C.V. Hunt
#026__Naked Friends by Justin Grimbol
#025__Ghost Chant by Gina Ranalli
#024__Hearers of the Constant Hum by William Pauley III
#023__Hell’s Waiting Room by C.V. Hunt
#022__Creep House: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#021__Other People’s Shit by C.V. Hunt
#020__The Party Lords by Justin Grimbol
#019__Sociopaths In Love by Andersen Prunty
#018__The Last Porno Theater by Nick Cato
#017__Zombieville by C.V. Hunt
#016__Samurai Vs. Robo-Dick by Steve Lowe
#015__The Warm Glow of Happy Homes by Andersen Prunty
#014__How To Kill Yourself by C.V. Hunt
#013__Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#012 __Return to Devil Town (Vampires in Devil Town Book Three) by Wayne Hixon
#011__Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#010__King of the Perverts by Steve Lowe
#009__Sunruined: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#008__Bright Black Moon (Vampires in Devil Town Book Two) by Wayne Hixon
#007__Hi I’m a Social Disease: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#006__A Life On Fire by Chris Bowsman
#005__The Sorrow King by Andersen Prunty
#004__The Brothers Crunk by William Pauley III
#003__The Horribles by Nathaniel Lambert
#002__Vampires in Devil Town by Wayne Hixon
#001__House of Fallen Trees by Gina Ranalli
#000__Morning is Dead by Andersen Prunty
Creep House: Horror Stories Page 11
