Knock Knock
Page 25
The fire shot up all around her. She bit her tongue, tasted blood and gasoline. She swallowed the tip of her tongue, bitten off in her mouth.
The dead grass acted as kindling. Fire raced up the outside walls and climbed onto the roof. In seconds the whole place was engulfed and the smoke rolled up more than fifty feet into the sky.
Flickering out of consciousness, consumed by pain, Marietta fell forward. Her eyes roasted and popped. Her skin sizzled. When the fire hit fat and bone, it crackled. She let herself scream, and couldn't stop. Like a siren the scream rose with the flames.
In her mind she saw Greg's face and the blood-spattered tree trunk where Burt lay. She saw the tiny body of her daughter stuffed inside a metal box. She saw the girl she herself once was, running, all elbows and knees, running from the burning forest. She saw the dress Ethel had sewn for Connie Sara's funeral shroud. She saw the black and yellow and green, the falling gravel, the hot summer day when John Colquitt died. She saw Beverly's furniture piled against the fireplace in a panic while the thing that was once a child slithered down the chimney after its helpless prize.
She had only a moment to think of these things. Then the charred claws lunged out through the open door and she was seized, torn from where she stood and thrust into the open maw glistening with spit and blood.
Epilogue
The Box
Far behind her the girl heard voices. They were calling her name. There were two of them, a boy and a girl, and they were slapping at the grass with sticks.
"Ruthie! Where you hiding, girl? Say?"
She had run as far as she could, stopped only by a chest-high barbed wire fence. She followed the fence for a minute, but it seemed to go on for some distance. It probably encircled this piece of land. She would never get around it by the time they caught up to her.
She was heavyset and she felt overheated in her knit slacks and sweater top. These were worn at her mother's insistence. Ruth knew they made her look chubby. Her mother found this funny, and told her friends Ruth didn't get her looks from her side of the family. Then they laughed.
They laughed at every new family portrait. Ruth's mother sat in the center, sucking in her cheeks and looking hungry, flanked by two handsome sons who were away at college and her doting husband who had gone flabby and bald. Ruth was positioned next to her father, almost out of the frame, turned at an angle that the photographer assured her mother was the most flattering he could manage.
"Ruuuuuuthie!"
They were getting close. With trembling hands Ruth held the lines of barbed wire apart and carefully climbed between them. She was all right until she stood on the other side, on one leg, and started to pull the other one through. Then she panicked and let go of the barbed wire, which nicked her ankle with a white-hot gouge only an inch from her Achilles tendon.
"Ow!"
She got to her feet and began brushing the tall grass and weeds aside. Most of the vegetation was just over her head. Her heart beat crazily and she prayed that her tormenters would be too cowardly to follow. The grass was brittle. It snapped her in the face as she rushed through it.
"Where did you go, Ruthie?"
The voices sounded farther away. They were losing ground. She was getting away. She pressed on until she stumbled against a fortress of wild blackberries tangled up with the grass. She squinted and saw that there was something else, something underneath the blackberry bushes. It might be a rusted-out tractor or a truck.
Pinching and pushing aside the grass she ducked down and sat on the ground in a clearing just big enough for her. Thinking this spot was sort of a miracle, she tried to slow her breathing and rest.
She looked around at the ground. It felt hard and flat and cold. She moved aside and saw that the dirt was worn away in the place where she had been sitting. She scratched the dirt with a twig and found what looked like a metal door. Not a door but a lid, with a slim handle in the middle. She brushed away the rest of the dirt and freed the handle. It was metallic, too, and stained.
She listened for a moment. She couldn't hear the boy and girl. She thought with a rush of hope that maybe they had given up.
She dusted off the handle and pulled. It wouldn't open. There must be a latch still buried in the dirt. She kept pulling. She pulled so hard that she thought she might break a sweat. She began working the lid from side to side, until it snapped loose in her hand.
She stared at the lid and saw that the rusty latch below the dirt level had broken off. The whole thing looked like a cymbal in her hand, the kind she had seen in the school marching band, except it was rectangular and had black streaks all over.
She turned back to the hole she had just uncovered in the earth. Not a hole, but a sort of chamber, a box, a metal box full of something charred that smelled the way she imagined a dungeon might smell.
Ruth poked at the charred mess with the twig and lifted it. What she found on the end of the twig was a tiny blackened skull, no bigger than a fist.
She only had time to draw breath. She would have screamed if she had not heard the rushing sound behind her and looked up to see the blond girl's scowling face bearing down on her.
"Ruthie," the girl said. "Why did you hide from me?"
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my husband Cory James Herndon, for making everything possible. And thanks to my friend Suzanne Morrison for all the encouragement, support, and brilliant editorial advice, and to my agent Danielle for loving the book.
About the Author
S.P. Miskowski's stories have been published in The Absent Willow Review, Identity Theory, Horror Bound Online Magazine, Other Voices, The Stranger, New Times, and the anthology Words to Music, and will appear in Supernatural Tales 21. A member of the speculative fiction group Wily Writers, she writes Shock Room, a blog dedicated to horror fiction and films. Her darkly comic collection of short stories Red Poppies: 7 Tales of Envy & Revenge is available for Kindle. You can contact the author and comment on Knock Knock on our Facebook page or at the author's blog:
http://d-o-cat.blogspot.com/
The cover design and illustration for Knock Knock are by Russell Dickerson. You can find more of his work at Darkstorm Creative:
http://www.darkstormcreative.com/