"Jesus, so are you. Look at your arm."
Until then Simon hadn't realised the extent of the damage. His entire arm felt encased in ice. When he looked down, he saw his forearm swinging loose, held on by sinew and muscle. The bone was shattered, jagged flakes protruding from the wound. A chunk of flesh the size of his palm was missing. What was left behind had the colour and texture of raw steak.
"That's not good," he stated.
Somehow he got back onto the bank, still dragging the shark, before he collapsed. Timothy used a support bandage as a makeshift tourniquet around Simon's arm.
"Look at the teeth on that thing," Timothy muttered.
The shark lay gasping in the mud. Its distended jaw looked unnatural. The spiral of teeth was so large it prevented the shark closing its mouth fully.
Simon felt woozy from adrenaline and blood-loss. "A living fossil," he said. "Nothing like that's existed for a million years."
"I know you won't feel up to it," Timothy said, "but I think we should leave. We've got several hours until we're even declared overdue."
The last thing Simon wanted to do was move, but he had to agree. "We can help each other," he said. "It'll be tough, but..."
"But not as tough as killing a prehistoric shark with a Swiss Army Knife, right?"
"Right." Simon drew in a shaky breath. "Give me five minutes, okay?"
He lay on the bank, relearning how to breathe. He didn't let himself think about the arduous climb ahead. Even for someone at full fitness it would be a challenge. One-handed, weak, could he really...?
The ripples on the water and the flame of Timothy's lamp created dancing shadows and reflections across the chamber. Simon was watching them and, when he glimpsed movement in the water, he thought it was his eyes playing tricks.
A coldness seeped into his stomach.
At the far side of the chamber, a tapered fin cut through the water, smooth and swift, barely creating a ripple. As it reached the far side of the pool it switched around and came back.
A moment later a second fin broke the surface.
They circled each other, tracing broad arcs through the water, following a delicate scent.
The smell of blood had attracted others.
I is for Imp
Ma’s Good Boys
D.T. Griffith
In the periphery of his sight he caught something he knew was wrong. A small upright thing balanced on cloven feet, it sneered and squinted its large black eyes, emitting a soft hiss. He turned his head in a hurry to understand what his brain was processing, but the thing disappeared into the rose bushes he planted on Mother’s Days two years ago.
It was the last thing he expected to see on Earth, on this particularly warm spring day in Ma’s old garden, grooming the heirloom tomato and pepper plants whose seeds were passed down for generations by long forgotten ancestors from Newark. Something that George D. Giovanni would have to research before the sun went down, before he landed in the overstuffed recliner for the game. A devilish looking thing with a cow’s head – sort of – his mind wandered and obsessed over what it could possibly be.
A Jersey Devil? Nah, those things weren’t real. There was that story Joan from down the street heard about another neighbor’s cousin who tried to breed a raccoon with a bobcat out behind his garage last summer. Landed the idiot in the hospital, not sure any babies were born though; but this could’ve been one of ‘em. Anything’s possible, he surmised.
After another five minutes of studying the slight movements and shadows in the rose bushes he picked himself up from the soil and traipsed over to the plants to see what might be staring back at him.
Hissing broke the stillness of the investigative moment, which was a highlight of his day, his week, really. A hissing so familiar that he had to contemplate his connection to it before making his next move.
Ah-ha, he thought, he heard it in his sleep recently. He frowned – and as a kid. “Was it my dreams?” he muttered to the bush. A feint odor caught his attention, subtle notes reminiscent of a rotting pile of fish in the sun, artificial vanilla and deviled eggs; George hated deviled eggs and artificial flavors. It triggered memories of leaving his bedroom window open on warm nights and strange scents like this would waft through on an occasional breeze.
Then he recalled a man who always wore black downstairs after bedtime visiting Ma, but whom – her priest? He paused to contemplate some more. “No way!” His eyes opened wide raising thick eyebrows into the creases of his forehead. “This little bugger’s been watching me sleep all my life!”
A glistening between thorny stems and leaves caught his attention. George squinted for a better look, leaning his face closer than one should when studying a raccoon or squirrel, because a rational person would fear scratches, bites and rabies, and especially gouged eyes. But George was George: not so swift, though as inquisitive and contemplative as a life-sized Styrofoam replica of Rodin’s Thinker.
He leaned in closer still, in gradual increments of an inch or more. “What’s that smell?” he wondered at another permeating scent that reminded him of the soft-boiled eggs over fried peppers his mother use to enjoy, rest her soul. He took a deep breath to better gauge the odiferous situation.
“Oh my god that’s awful,” he shouted as he popped his head up catching a few rose thorns with his bald crown in the process. “Ahhhh…son of a bitch!” He stumbled backwards and landed in the garden bed among the tomatoes and some marigolds he had just planted to keep the bugs away.
Feeling the top of his head and checking for blood, he realized one of his prized tomatoes, a large one he left on the vine to ripen another day or two in that spot, was underneath his butt.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered emphasizing each syllable. George leaned forward and rolled to one side to lift his rotund torso above the plants. “Damn thing’s ruined,” he said studying the flattened remains.
He pushed himself on to his knees to stand up and heard a snickering sound from behind. Turning his head toward the bush his face was met squarely with an airborne fruit.
“Dammit! Who’s messin’ wit’ me?” He wiped away the warm flesh of an overripe tomato with the front of his polo shirt and looked around. “I’ll call the cops asshole!”
He quickly scanned the garden and backyard. “Come on! You wanna mess wit’ me? Let me see you!”
After a minute or two of quiet, the beastly ruddy little thing emerged from between George’s feet. It galloped across the garden bed kicking up dirt and knocking over plants as it went. In one sweeping motion it grabbed a small tomato from the vine, spun around and launched it at George.
The tomato bounced off George’s gut while he watched in awe as the creature dove into a square stack of firewood in the corner of the yard. “What the hell are you?” George whispered. He brushed the dirt and tomato off his clothes training his eyes on the firewood. “Guess I gotta call animal control and tell the neighbors to watch their gardens,” he sighed. “Little bastard.”
After a hot shower and boiling pasta for his dinner, he sat down at his computer to research that little creature in the garden. Garden animal he typed into the search, with little success in finding the desired results, upright garden creature did no better. Strange asshole evil creature yielded more useless information. “What the hell are jackalopes?” he muttered.
He tried a few more word combinations: little animal, little garden beast, little bastard, little devil, little cow headed devil. “Aha, success,” he shouted. “An imp!” He propped his chin on his palm, elbow on table, and thought some more.
I’ve heard of these things somewhere before, he thought. But he couldn’t remember where. He studied hundreds of photos of hidden imps in cathedrals made of stone, some sculpted on old cemetery markers, depicted in Renaissance paintings tormenting people, and hiding in shadowy corners of old photos on supernatural investigator websites.
“Now I remember, Ma had a thing for these. She had that coffee table book.” He leaned bac
k to stretch his arms and closed his eyes. “I thought they weren’t real. Figures I had to find one.”
Elated by his discovery, some really productive research if he did say so himself, George turned on the ballgame on the large flat screen TV and finished preparing his pasta and homemade marinara sauce for dinner. A relaxing night of baseball and good food lay ahead.
After the Yankees won ten-nothing, his family’s team since his grandparents moved into the neighborhood way back when, he cleaned his dishes and headed to bed.
He brushed his teeth for exactly three minutes thinking about the day’s events. George couldn’t make sense of the imp harassing him. He prided himself on his good intentions, particularly the fact that he would never hurt neither a fly nor a soul. He was a good son…No! A great son to Ma…all the way to the end. May she rest in peace, he thought.
An anxious hour or more passed. George lay there considering what he might have done to deserve such mischief in his Ma’s peaceful backyard garden. His mind raced through every scenario. Maybe it was the time he accidentally tripped the pastor down on the stairs at Sunday school when he was seven. Luckily the pastor only suffered a sprained ankle. Perhaps the girl whose pigtails he cut off while sitting in his fifth grade homeroom at Catholic school, she didn’t find out till a few hours later when she went to the girls’ room. Man, those nuns had no sense of humor.
He laughed out loud and quickly hushed himself forgetting he was alone. Nah, just a harmless little prank. Wait – it was coming – at fifteen when he took his mother’s car and crashed it into their church’s front steps because he didn’t want to attend mass that morning with Grandma. Who knew the gasoline tank would leak as some idiot dropped his lit cigarette on the spill after providing the cop on the scene with his eyewitness account. To this day the church’s front façade still shows marks from the accident, a constant reminder of his young stupidity whenever he passes by. The church reminded him of Ma’s service, then her deathbed one year ago.
The day Ma died was a regular day – slightly cloudy, birds signing, and the family encircling her deathbed in the house George now resides. She had been angry with her priest, Father Joe, whom she had known since childhood for the better part of a year.
No one ever knew why, she could hold a grudge towards the wind if it blew in the wrong direction. Ma refused him entry to her room, even to deliver last rites or to say goodbye.
Great Aunt Genevieve, a devout Catholic from the old country, wasn’t too happy with Ma’s spite, as George remembered it. She recited a prayer in Italian – or was it Latin, now that George thought about it – immediately after his mother passed, barely audible over the weeping of another aunt, his uncles, and a few female cousins.
He never thought much about it till a documentary he watched recently on the history of hexes and curses. The more he thought about it, the more it resembled the hexes portrayed in the dramatic sequences in the show. I bet that’s what she did, he thought, she was mad at Ma – there’s simply no other explanation. “Funny how she hasn’t shown her face since the funeral,” he mused.
Another sleepless hour or two squirmed by. He tossed and turned and jostled and rustled the covers till he could do so no more. He sat up in what used to be Ma’s bed and looked out the window upon the unlit backyard. He stared for a few minutes; studying the dark amorphous shapes guessing at what they might be. Then he saw it, the imp perched on the windowsill staring back at him.
“What the…” George leaned forward for a better look, “how’d you get in here? What do you want?” he asked hoping he might get more than a hiss or snicker from the little beast.
In the low ambient light George could see the imp’s eyes widen, revealing the whites around the large black irises and pupils. Eyes that seemed to glow just a bit like the scary eyes in cartoons from his childhood. He could hear a gurgling sound coming from the thing.
“The hell are you doin’?” George focused on the sounds.
Brrrrppppp! The imp’s belch was the loudest he had ever heard, ending with something dropping into George’s lap like wet meat. He looked down to see a dark mass, unable to make it out. He reached for the lamp on the nightstand and felt a squirming sensation against his thighs. He slowly turned on the light.
“Oh, sick,” he shouted picking up the blanket between his lap and the pile of worms and maggots feasting on clumps of dirt and some rotten thing that smelled worse than the odor from the rose bush earlier.
As his eyes focused he realized he was holding the partially digested remains of a large rat. Without hesitation he cradled the wriggling mass in the blanket, jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs and out the front door. He dumped the pile in the corner of the yard by a tree line and wrapped the blanket around itself. “I loved this thing,” he said as he dropped his mother’s tattered blue flannel blanket into the metal trashcan in the garage a minute later.
“That little bastard is so done,” he said grabbing his aluminum baseball bat leaning in the corner of the garage and entered the house.
He jogged up the stairs stumbling half way and smacked his forehead on a step. A clay vase lay on its side near his feet. “Little asshole,” he grunted, lifting his heavy torso and resumed his pursuit. The bedroom door was shut; George remembered leaving it open. An orange glow seeped from the space beneath the door, “oh shit … fire?” He placed his palms on the door, the way he learned from the fire chief who visited his grade school to detect whether a closed door was passable in the event of a fire. It was cold. He pressed his ear against the surface and focused on the sounds from the other side.
At first it was quiet. The quiet took on the static of white noise, gradually elevating to a higher pitch of blurred voices. “There must be hundreds of them things in there,” he whispered.
The sounds stopped in response to his voice. Little footsteps approached the door, George backed away as he had seen stealthy action heroes do in the movies – gently rock on the ball of the foot, pressing toes slowly against the floor as the heel drops and repeat. Two steps back he tripped on a laundry basket he didn’t remember being there. A hard drop and sore ass moments later, neighbors could have heard George shouting unintelligible words at the bedroom door.
The doorknob rattled and turned with some difficulty. George hurried upright, panting and lumbering through the laborious process, to stand his ground. The bat gripped in his hands ready to swing. The door creaked open revealing his dimly lit bedroom, the way he had left it; no orange glow.
He walked in, picturing himself a member of a SWAT team, silently advancing, weapon drawn and ready for surprises around each corner. Nothing out of the ordinary. All clear, he determined, the imp was gone and so were his friends. He took his pillow and an extra blanket from the closet and turned out the bedside light. The stairs proved difficult to tiptoe down silently in his current physique, but he managed it quietly enough to not alert the imp and assumed guard position on the recliner in the TV room keeping the staircase in sight. The light hollow aluminum thump was the only sound in the house as he lightly tapped the bat against his left hand.
Drifting off, finally able to rest, his imagination took over his senses. Bang! Bang! Rumble! George flinched at the cacophony, over-amplified by his nerves, coming from the kitchen. He calmed himself with a few deep breaths. The icemaker in the freezer, he realized, was dumping newly formed ice cubes into the bin. Nodding his head in disbelief he settled back into the seat cushion watching the stairs till he began to doze.
Crash! George immediately woke and sat up as quickly as he could, never one for fast responses. The sound came from the shelves by the TV. The nearby floor lamp knocked against the wall as he attempted to illuminate it. “Goddammit!” Stress levels heightened far beyond what his doctor told him was allowable; he remembered he needed to calm down. As he resituated the lamp he heard the now familiar sound of the little footsteps running toward the front door.
“Great,” he muttered, “Ma’s pictures are on the flo
or.” Emitting a long sigh he squatted near the TV to pick up the framed photos.
His parents’ wedding portrait lay face down; George immediately recognized it by the gold leaf frame. “What’s this?” He noticed in the edge of the frame backing that another photo sat behind his beloved parents. George never knew his father, who died of heart failure before George was born. He unclasped the felt board to reveal a photo strip taken in one of those booths found at the Shore.
“Looks like Ma the way I remember when I was young,” he whispered in disbelief, “with some guy. Why would she hide this?” He examined the blurry male images further, realizing they were too skinny to be his dad. He knew that face; he had seen it not long ago – Father Joe! “But he’s not wearing his priest uniform…it’s like they were dating…that’s why she was hiding this. How’d I not know?” Feeling awkward about his discovery he replaced the photo strip in the frame and returned it to the shelf.
He reached next for the high school-aged portrait of his mother that had dislodged from the antique frame it had resided in forever. Come to think of it, he remembered the aging black and white print sitting on the mantle in Grandma’s home growing up. On the exposed corner of the photo’s reverse were some scribbled marks in red ink. He removed the thick cardboard backing to study the markings: ME + BZO with a little heart underneath.
“Bee-Zee-Oh,” he sounded out, “what the hell is that? Bee-Zee-Oh.” He scratched his head studying the letters for a long minute then put the photo frame back together and returned it to its rightful place.
“Love ya, Ma,” he whispered glancing at the image one more time – goddammit he missed her – something wasn’t right. He squinted his eyes and studied the shadowy area to the left of his mother. “Nah, can’t be,” panic rushed through his belly from his kidneys and up to his throat as the subtle shapes took form, “It’s…that imp?” He stepped backwards, each step equating a level of disbelief ripping apart his mind, eyes trained on the photo until he fell back into the recliner. “That little bastard was with Ma?”
The Bestiarum Vocabulum (TRES LIBRORUM PROHIBITUM) Page 14
