“So, what are you doin’ out here, Anna?”
“I was out at this big party and I wandered off and got lost in the woods.”
“A little too much to drink?”
“No! I got into an argument with someone.”
“Sounds like boyfriend troubles. Not that it’s any of my business.” He took the gross hand off the skinny wooden wheel to make his point.
“No,” she shook her head. “Not boyfriend problems, just boy problems.”
Jeb chuckled and it sounded like a clucking chicken. “I don’t mean to laugh miss, it’s just that you’re so darn pretty that you probably have lots of boy problems.”
The thought of Jeb being attracted to her made Anna’s skin crawl. “No, not really,” she said curtly, brushing off the comment. So much for him just being a nice guy.
He seemed to get the point. He stopped making conversation and just drove.
But the comment hung in the air, and she started worrying. Who knew where he was taking her? Where the hell was this bait store? She should have asked. How long would she have to be missing before her friends realized she was gone? How many places were there out here in the boonies to hide a body where it would never be found? She squirmed in the seat, wondering if she should push the door open and jump out, make a run for it.
Her fingers twitched as they approached the door latch almost on their own. She hoped he couldn’t see from his seat.
The truck suddenly slowed as its headlights flashed on a bullet-riddled stop sign and Anna could see the same decrepit gas station they’d stopped at on their way to Jason’s place. The familiar sight made her think that maybe Jeb wasn’t so bad after all.
“Well…” Jeb drawled, “looks like it’s closed.”
She sighed loud enough for him to hear.
“Don’t you worry, miss, old Ezra’s place is just across there. I’m sure he’ll let you use his phone to call your...friends.”
She looked over at the farmhouse tucked a ways down on the other side of the road, remembering how creepy it seemed when they’d stopped for gas. It looked at least twice as frightening now. Like a place you wouldn’t spend the night for a million bucks.
Gravel crunched under the bald steel-belted radials as Jeb pulled the creaky truck into the terrifying house’s driveway. “You look like you seen a ghost,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll come to the door with ya. I’ve known Ezra my whole life. He looks scary, but he ain’t half as bad as he seems.”
The hillbilly wrestled his girth out from behind the wheel and stepped out of the truck, rocking it.
Reluctantly, Anna followed suit.
What have I gotten myself into now!
She walked behind Jeb as he shambled across the lawn to the decrepit front porch. The steps groaned in protest under his weight. She trailed him, staring at what appeared to be long wooden troughs lining both side walls of the house. Pigs, maybe? She didn’t see or hear any of the animals, however, or spot any pens. Maybe they were in back. They sure looked like feeding troughs, though. And there was a smell...smelled like hogs to her, not that she knew what they smelled like. It was more a stench, a permeating foul odor that increased in intensity as she breathed it in. Gag! She was about to ask him about the hogs when he turned to wait for her.
She lingered on the bottom stair––worried the porch might collapse if the two of them stood on it at the same time. Jeb grinned at her crookedly and knocked on the rickety screen door with his withered hand, rattling it in its frame. “Come on up here, miss. Old Ezra don’t bite.”
Sighing, she joined Jeb, her eyes focused on the door even though she was worried about her feet crashing through the paint-flecked planks. She wrinkled her nose as the smell intensified.
“That’s better,” he said. Adding, as if he could read her mind: “Ya see, this old porch ain’t gonna fall down. It’s solid. They don’t build ‘em like this any more. No, siree. It’s the wood. You just cain’t get wood like this any more. All the good trees been used up.”
The light inside the house clicked on audibly, nearly blinding her––she’d become accustomed to the darkness under the canopy of low-hanging trees and night’s falling. A grumbling voice mumbled half-awake curses as a figure appeared at the door. It was the creepy dude from the gas station. He used his hand to shield the interior light, taking a long hard look at Jeb and Anna through the screen door. At length he said, “Is that you Jeb?”
“Hey Ezra, don’t mean to disturb your early evenin’ slumber, but I come across this little lady walkin’ down the road. She needs t’ use your phone. Would that be all right with you?”
Ezra looked Anna up and down. Taking in her minimal pool-party clothes and a lot of skin. A crooked grin spread across his wrinkled face, displaying a few nicotine-stained teeth. “I seen you before,” he said. “Get yourself lost in the woods?”
Anna slumped a little.
“Uh huh, that’s what I thought. You didn’t listen to me, did ya? Where’d your fancy friends get to?”
“I don’t know, sir. That’s why I need to use your phone. To find them.”
“Well, I guess,” he said, swinging open the screen door. “Come on in.”
Did he just wink at Jeb?
Pervert!
Or just a lonely old man faced with an unexpected, attractive young woman?
What am I asking? There should be something in between.
Jeb held the door and Ezra stepped out of the way as Anna tentatively entered the house.
When the door closed behind her, the strange odor she’d smelled outside was cut off.
Thank God!
But then she inhaled and realized there was a sickly sweet, old-person version of the smell in here, too.
She felt a little like a fly who had wandered into the outer edge of a spider’s web––maybe still enough time to get out, but the spider was on its way. She shook her head, clearing the image, but a quick look around gave her gooseflesh anyway. Even if you ignored the smell, somehow the house was even ickier on the inside.
There were stacks and stacks of yellowing newspapers and magazines rising crookedly all around the floor with narrow pathways snaking between them. Some were taller than others, but most were at least waist-high. Old black and white photos framed in repurposed barnwood hung on the walls she could see, the glass in the frames so thickly coated with dust that it nearly obscured the images. Nearly...She realized some nearby were portraits of freaks. Oddities. The type of anomalous grotesqueries that drew crowds at circus sideshows in a previous century. Tall, impossibly thin people. Short, stump-like people with bird-like claws. Hairy werewolf-types grinning fearsomely into the lens. Group portraits of Siamese twins joined every which place they could be, their skin and bones fused like melted wax. The gross pictures did their damnedest to distract from the peeling, smoke-stained wallpaper and the cracked and crumbling lath and plaster walls themselves. Cobwebs spread across the shadowy corners of the room like ghosts hiding from the light.
The place was just this side of a carnival of horrors. Such a cliche, almost as if they’d planned it. But who would do that?
“Right this way,” Ezra––the spider?––said, pulling Anna from her waking nightmare. “For the phone?” he added, as if he had to remind her.
She nodded sheepishly, following the old man through the maze that led indirectly to an arch and another cluttered room beyond.
The front room had been like a trailer of coming attractions for the remainder of the house. This next section was ill-lit by the low-wattage bare bulb in the single ceiling fixture. She allowed the old man to lead her deeper into this new haunted maze. Afraid to look up––afraid to see the images in the many frames along the walls––she trained her gaze on the floor, made of wide whitewashed pine boards beneath a stained and tattered runner often obscured by more stacks of paper and junk. She watched Ezra’s shoes as he zig-zagged expertly then turned and went through a doorway on the right. He clicked on a light, whic
h then splashed a brighter swath onto the tight hallway floor. She followed.
Apparently they were going with the carnival funhouse theme, because this room was in keeping with a set from American Horror Story. The most obvious feature was the bizarrely colored wallpaper. Thankfully there were no freaks on these walls.
“Well, there you go,” Ezra said, motioning to an old-fashioned landline phone resting regally on a spindly old table barely large enough to hold it.
“Oh, okay,” she answered as if in a trance. She eyed the old rotary phone, almost confused.
“Damn it girl, don’t tell me you don’t know how to use a goddamned telephone. Kids these days, I swear. Here, let me show you,” Ezra grabbed the receiver and shoved it in Anna’s face. “You hold this part to your head and talk into it, and you dial the number like this.” Angrily he turned the dial with a finger and it made a clicking sound as it rotated back to its original position. “You think you can do that?”
“Uh huh,” she said, nodding as if in a daze. What a rude asshole!
“It’s almost time, gettin’ late,” the old man said. Apparently he was talking to Jeb.
“Yassir, I know, but we got a good start.”
She ignored them for a few seconds and stared at the dial hoping the numbers would come to her. Hell, she didn’t know any of her friends’ numbers from memory, they were saved on her cell phone. Normally she just had to stab a virtual button: Mandy, Krystal, Jason, Mom.
While struggling to come up with the number to one single person she knew, her attention was drawn to another photograph, this one perched on the small table beside the phone. It was an informal black and white family candid. Clearly the man in the picture was a younger Ezra, with dark hair and slim build. But his teeth were still fucked up as he grinned broadly for the camera. Beside him sat a woman with long, dark, straggly hair. She was looking away from the photographer, with a sad faraway look. After noting the woman’s somber expression, Anna gasped––the woman was a quadruple amputee, propped up in a chair for family picture day. In front of Ezra and the woman stood two young boys who were also physically deformed. The larger of the two had a harelip and misshapen head. The smaller––presumably younger––boy had a hairy, withered arm.
It was Jeb.
Jesus, they’re not friendly country neighbors…they’re father and son!
“Dumb bitch,” Ezra said from behind her, barking a laugh. “You ain’t even smart enough to know there ain’t no dial tone on that phone!”
She pulled the dead phone away from her ear, studying it for a moment as if she’d never seen one before, then slowly returned it to its cradle. The damned hicks had tricked her. Her situation was deteriorating rapidly, going from bad to worse to fucked-up-and-I’m-really-fucked worst. She’d have given just about anything to be back in the woods right now, walking in circles until the sun came up. Nothing out in the woods scared her as much as these two suddenly did. She felt the chill drop down into her bladder.
The creepy old man was still chuckling as she pivoted to face him.
And both his sons.
Ezra’s hideous teeth were prominently on display as he stood grinning like a mechanical toy monkey slapping a pair of cymbals together. Flanking him were his two sideshow offspring. Jeb with a deathly serious look on his pudgy face, his gnarled hand stuffed into the pocket of his filthy bib overalls. And the other one, the bookend to this horror bookshelf, towered over his family in a blue and red flannel shirt that looked two sizes too small. Grey hair almost concealed the unusual shape of his head at the edges of his weirdly shaped bald spot. His harelip curved otherwise somber features into a savage snarl. His arms seemed unnaturally long.
They were rejects from the goddamned Addams Family.
But this was no funny television show. Images of bones and skulls buried in the cellar flashed through Anna’s brain like strobe-lit slides and she imagined it wouldn’t take much to add hers to the collection.
After they were finished with her...
“Git’er, boys!” Ezra pointed, as if they couldn’t tell who the prey in the room was.
The abominable brothers advanced on her and it might have been hilarious in a bad zombie or hillbilly serial killer movie.
But this was her life, they looked like zombie hillbilly serial killers, and she wasn’t waiting around to see the credits.
Anna made a sudden move. She hurled the old fashioned telephone at the big one. It bounced off of his chest innocuously and fell to the floor with a loud clang.
She turned to run––eyes scanning for the exit––but a large hand clutched her left arm just above the elbow. She tried to wrench away, but the giant of a man’s grip was like an iron cuff clasped around her bicep. Still trying to wrestle herself free, Anna went on the offensive. She swung her free elbow backward blindly with all her strength––hoping to connect with something fragile, maybe her assailant’s throat. Instead her bony joint struck Jeb––who had maneuvered himself behind her––on the bridge of the nose.
She relished the cringe-inducing Crack! that rang out.
Jeb whimpered as he fell backward, flattening the tiny phone table and sending the creepy family portrait flying and crashing against the wall.
Serves him right!
But now the big guy grasped her right arm with his free hand. She went all-out psycho on him, but despite her fighting, kicking, and struggling, the mutant redneck held her fast at arm’s length, easily avoiding her flailing legs.
Ezra chided, “You might as well quit fighting, girl. Ezekiel there has never lost anybody once he gets his hands on’em. My boy’s as strong as an ox.” He cackled like an old witch. “And you,” he said to Jeb, “get your fat ass up off the floor. You are absolutely worthless.”
“Hey, I found her, Pa!” Jeb protested. He struggled getting to his feet, using the wall to steady himself, trying to cover his crooked, bleeding nose with his shrivelled hand.
“And that’s all you did,” said his father with a snarl. “I told ya it’s almost late!”
The big guy––Ezekiel?––held Anna in front of the old creep, apparently awaiting further instruction. They weren’t mental giants, not by a long shot. Ezra was looking her up and down, this time ogling her openly with an ugly leer.
Seizing the unexpected opportunity, Anna swung her foot up with all her might, kicking old Ezra right in the balls.
Shocked, the old man gasped as all the air inside him was sucked out and he doubled over, clutching his tenderized package with both cupped hands.
Too late, Ezekiel yanked her back to prevent a repeat performance.
“You bitch!” Ezra finally managed to croak, his voice barely more than a hoarse, pain-filled whisper. Then he pointed out the door and down the hall. “Take her downstairs with the others.”
She started to struggle, and then it sank in.
The others?
“Let me go, you fucking asshole!” She wriggled to free herself from Ezekiel’s grip as the brute dragged her through the doorway and down the hall toward an open door and whatever the darkness behind it concealed. Presumably downstairs and the others.
Were they alive? Or dead? And would she end up joining them?
Her struggling was fruitless. What the ugly man-monster lacked in the handsome department was compensated by size and strength. She hadn’t even managed to loosen his grip or force a break in his stride.
When they reached the open door at the end of the hall, Anna could see that it clearly did indeed lead to a darkened staircase down to a dimly-lit basement below. She threw her legs up and propped her feet against the doorframe like a dog trying to stay out of the vet’s, halting their progress dead, but it wasn’t more than seconds until Ezekiel pulled her back away from the frame, twisted her sideways, and thrust her forcefully through the opening––shoving her down the stairs ahead of him.
Her defense foiled, Anna continued struggling half-heartedly against the big man’s hold on her. She knew she had little
chance of escape while his enormous mitts encircled her arms with plenty of length to spare. She stumbled down the rickety steps with her feet barely touching them as Ezekiel maneuvered her like a rag doll. Once or twice her head smacked the slanted ceiling, but never hard enough to do more than cause a momentary friction burn. Then she almost tripped on her own feet when she finally reached the bottom, held up only by the brute strength of the monster who grasped her.
Jesus.
The smell.
It was the first thing she became aware of as they exited the staircase, other than the dingy lighting provided by dust-covered bulbs hanging bare just overhead.
She gagged.
Yes, there was the standard dank, mildewy scent of an unfinished basement. But there was something else, too. Something sweet and sour, sickening, immediately unrecognizable, yet somehow familiar to a primitive part of her brain. Something frightening. Different from what she’d smelled outside, the hog-smell. This was different, sweet, vomit-inducing.
She knew what it was without question and without a doubt.
The brutish abomination named Ezekiel carried her past a group of metal boxes and cylinders with pipes jutting out of them heading across the low ceiling in all directions. What were the things her father had always talked about in the basement? Furnace, water heater, fuse box… that’s what this batch of pipes must have been about. She’d never really paid attention to that stuff because in her parents’ house it was all hidden behind paneled walls.
Quickly dodging through the array of strange monster-like devices, Ezekiel marched Anna into a cramped area lit by another dust-coated bare bulb hanging from the ceiling joists by a twirly cord. On the bare concrete floor was a haphazard heap of leaf-patterned camouflage clothes, the type worn by hunters in the fall, on top of which sat the largest flashlight she had ever seen. Beyond the mound of clothes and jammed up against the wall sat a chest freezer and small table stacked high with tools: hammers, clamps, screwdrivers, wrenches…and a rifle. Perpendicular to the work bench a pair of chugging refrigerators formed a partial wall that obstructed her view of the more brightly-lit space beyond.
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