by John Hansen
He thought that maybe it had been the boy’s plan all along to shake him up, to rattle him enough that he’d make a mistake, and let them get away. Matthew was resolved. He wasn’t going to let that happen. He owed it to both of these kids to get them out of this mess, this nightmare, and give them a chance at a normal life.
Matthew stood at the top of the stairs looking toward the front door. His eyes darted from corner to corner of the scarcely lit room that spread out below him. He was convinced that there was something moving in the shadows down there, he just couldn’t ever get a look at what it was. Finally, unable to take any more of it, he turned away and headed back down the hallway. It was completely black outside now, and the lights inside all seemed dimmer. He had to get them all out of this place before he lost his mind.
The little girl was standing by the door when he got to her room. She had the bag closed up beside her. His gaze met hers and in answer she looked down at her feet again. He could tell that she was resigned to leaving, but she was still shaking. He didn’t know if it was due to the cold or her fear. He guessed it was a little of both.
***
Matthew opened the door and was completely unsurprised to find the boy sitting instead of packing. He brought the girl into the room with him this time, her packed bag slung over his shoulder. He looked into the boy’s bag and took it in the same hand as the girl’s, and slung them both onto his back. He motioned for the boy to stand and join him in the hall.
“For the last time, Deputy, please…just go. Leave us alone. Forget you ever saw us.” The boy sounded sad, almost broken now.
“I can’t just leave you here alone. This is about what’s best for you, not what you think you want,” Matthew said, exasperation ringing clearly in his words.
“But what about what’s best for you?” The kid seemed at his wit’s end with Matthew. “Just leave. Just go,” he pleaded.
Matthew stood up straighter and puffed out his chest as he shifted his voice back to the one Holly hated. He was no long speaking to the boy, as much as he was commanding him. “That’s enough, kid. You’re going with me. You can walk out of here on your own, or I can cuff and carry you. Your call.”
The boy didn’t back down. He simply stood in place staring at Matthew, daring him to do something. As he stepped into the room and took him by the arm, the boy piped up to continue his story. “One night in St. Charles, Missouri, Father…he came across a child being abused…”
“Aren’t we done with all that now?” Matthew asked, as he tugged him out into the hall.
“I haven’t told you everything! I’m not done! Deputy, you said you’d hear me out if I packed my things. I did what you asked, let me finish.” He almost yelled.
There was almost a sense of panic in his voice, and it showed in his eyes. Matthew decided to let him keep talking, but he wasn’t going to stop to listen anymore.
“Fine. But walk while you talk.” He said to the boy, as he pushed him toward the stairs at the end of the hall.
“Okay!” He said as he began to walk slowly down the hallway. “Father accidently came across a child being abused by his parents. He wasn’t sure he was going to do anything, but he watched them. He watched and he waited, and once they were asleep that night, he decided to act. He broke into their house. He woke the sleeping boy up, and carried him into his parents’ room. He took knives and…and he…he killed them. He killed the parents and he made him…the boy…he made the boy help.”
As they reached the end of the hallway and turned down onto the stairs, the girl began crying aloud. Matthew put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but she wouldn’t look up from her feet. Thankfully, she was still walking dutifully with them.
“He chops up the parents’ bodies and makes a big mess.” The boy tried to stop to emphasize the point, but Matthew continued to gently push him forward. “Then he lights the house on fire, and stands outside in the backyard, ya know, just watching it burn. When he left, he took the boy with him. He didn’t really force him to go, but where else was the boy going to go, really? He called him ‘boy,’ like he was called ‘boy’ by the man in Virginia.”
The boy looked up, to verify that he was still being listened to as they continued down the stairs. He searched Matthew’s face for a response, but didn’t find one.
“Again, kinda like you. Just called ‘boy,’ huh?” Matthew said, almost flippantly.
“This time, Deputy, yes. Exactly like me.”
At the base of the stairs, the boy turned to face Matthew. He kept moving, walking backward as he continued to talk. Matthew thought that this would be the point where the boy got desperate. Now he had to know he wasn’t going to get his opening to run, and he would likely try anything he could come up with to get away.
“He starts an orphanage with that boy, then he goes around and collects ‘his children.’ He’s collected over thirty children now. Each of us is ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ But I’m the first. I’m the first boy. Do you understand yet, Deputy?”
The boy stopped in the middle of the room and stared wild-eyed at Matthew.
“You’re finally admitting that some of the story is about you?” He asked the boy with some concern, as he tried to keep him moving.
“This is the part of the story where Father comes close to getting found out by a stupid, backwoods, hick deputy! A deputy that tries to take a couple of his kids! But his children would never let that happen, Deputy. Do you understand? They’d never let that happen!” The boy screamed at Matthew as he jerked the girl away from him.
Lightning ripped across the sky outside and for a moment the room was lit in an electric blue glow. Matthew could’ve sworn that he saw children everywhere – lots of them, surrounding the three of them. Then all went dark again, but now there was a depth to the blackness, and it was crawling with movement. Matthew thought the boy’s story was really getting to him, and he tried to simply shake it off again, but then he began to actually see the children inching forward into the yellow light of that single bulb.
They moved inhumanly fast, and were on him in a flash – a flurry of fists and feet and teeth. Then there was only pain and noise, and finally, darkness.
***
Matthew’s head throbbed and the vision in his right eye was blurry when he opened it. Everything in the room seemed to spin. He was bloody, naked, and handcuffed on a dirt floor. This was a living, waking nightmare. Who would have ever have expected, or believed this could happen. This must be the basement, he told himself.
There was only one light here - a giant floodlight, which was right over his head. The basement looked to be about the same size as the whole first floor, with no walls. It was huge, wet, and disgusting, and he was laying down in it naked and covered in blood. He could only hope the blood was his own, and not the children’s. Holly could never find out about this.
He could see something moving near the edge of the light beyond his right foot. It lingered there in the dark for a moment before moving forward. The boy finally came into the light and walked over to check on Matthew’s wounds.
“What’s going on here? Where are my clothes?” Matthew demanded. The boy continued to look him over, saying nothing. “You lied to me. What’s your name? Who are all those kids?”
“No! I warned you. I mocked you… I was rude to you… But I never lied to you.” The boy said it smugly, but Matthew thought he could see a hint of sadness in his eyes.
“You said that you weren’t the person in the story. You said that monster was ‘Father,’ or whatever. You lied.”
“No, Deputy Burroughs, he didn’t,” a man’s voice said. Matthew strained to look in the direction he thought the voice had come from and was instantly on fire with the pain of his broken limbs. A man’s form seemed to appear from the shadows, waving a finger in a disapproving gesture at Matthew. “My boys and girls don’t lie. I make it a point to punish dishonesty swiftly and with a kind of finality I doubt you’d be comfortable with.”
; The man was huge. He wasn’t fat, or even well muscled. While he was extremely thin, he was easily over seven feet tall. His skin was pale almost to the point of being translucent, and his short, dark hair sat perfectly atop his head, not a single strand out of place. He wore a black, finely tailored suit that he began to slowly remove as he approached Matthew.
“I must make preparations to relocate again. The children knew they’d be packing as soon as they saw you, so you really haven’t upset things too badly. People will come looking for you in time. A new location, a new orphanage with the children. Life will go on…for us.” The man finished his statement as he folded his coat and pants, placing them on a wooden table just outside of the light’s comfortable reach.
“Who are you?”
“The children call me ‘Father.’”
“But who are you really? What’s your name? We both know the story the boy told about you being born in Germany in the 1600s is crap.”
“Do we?” The man looked down at Matthew with a blank face as he removed his shirt and placed it with his vest on the table. “How little you really know, Deputy.”
“It’s not possible. You’re just a monster who kidnaps and frightens children. You don’t scare me!” He lied, more for his own benefit than the man standing in front of him.
“I realize you were just doing your job, Matthew. I don’t hold that against you. If it’s of any consolation, you won’t have to fight with Holly anymore.” The man said all this in the same unflinching monotone.
Matthew’s eyes grew wide. Panic ripped through him. It almost seemed like the man enjoyed that fear, as he now stood completely naked next to the table.
“How dare you! How do you know? Who are you?!” Matthew demanded as his mind swam with all sorts of fearful images.
“You are Matthew Curtis Burroughs, your birthday is July nineteenth, your parents both died in a car wreck when you were twenty-one. Your wife, Holly Marie, is the most important and valuable thing in your little world. You’ve heard my whole life’s story, but I’ve seen yours.” He examined Matthew’s reaction closely as he tapped his temple. “I’ve watched your life play out in its entirety, as though I had lived it personally. I took all your memories – copied them, I should say – out of your mind. I took everything, in fact. I had no choice in doing so, however, if that helps. The die was cast, and my part decided for me, as yours was when you were told to come to this house.”
“What…what are you going to do?” Matthew just couldn’t take it all in, no matter how hard he tried. He struggled again to get to his feet and was painfully reminded that too many of his bones were broken to allow him to stand. He yelped, wincing in agony, as he looked back up at ‘Father.’ “Who are you? I mean, who are you, really?”
The man held up Matthew’s uniform hooked on a single extended finger as his body shifted and contorted, reforming itself to change size and coloration. Matthew watched the man’s face reorder itself until the face looking down at him was his own.
“Why, Deputy Burroughs. I’m you, of course,” the man said as he put on Matthew’s uniform pants. “I have to be you, otherwise people might find it odd that I’m driving your car, and in your house. Like your wife, perhaps?”
“You leave Holly alone! Do you hear me, you sicko? Don’t you lay a hand on my wife!”
The man put the final pieces of the uniform in place and turned again to look down at Matthew. Looking up into his own eyes, Matthew was nearly hysterical, shaking with rage, and barely able to contain his suffering.
“I give you my word, Matthew. She will come to no harm by my hand. My word, Matthew, is solid. Take comfort in that. No harm…by my hand.”
The man turned and started to walk away. It startled Matthew to hear him speak with Matthew’s own voice as he said, “Children, you know the Deputy can’t live, and he can’t be found. Please eat him and powder his bones.”
The children, more than thirty of them, all came forward out of the shadows where they had been lurking and began to encircle Matthew. As an afterthought, the man called back to them, “Bring me those handcuffs when you’re finished.”
***
The knocking on door was a small but persistent sound, the kind one might imagine an indolent, heavyset woodpecker would make.
The raven-haired woman slid the deadbolt over, and opened the door enough to peer out into the ominous black of the night. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, forming angelic coronas around the young boy and girl, dressed in ratty white t-shirts, who stood outside the door in the warm, bright glow of the porch light.
“Can… can I help you?” She asked, puzzled, as she looked around in vain for the adults these children were missing.
As the girl looked down at her feet, the boy stepped forward. pulling the woman’s attention back to him. “I’m really, really sorry to bother you ma’am, but are you Mrs. Matthew Burroughs?”
Empty The Bones For You
by
Char Hardin
Twilight closed her curtains as the last of the sun’s rays faded away. I found myself all alone, now that my family’s last car had gone. While Death misted her recently departed perfume throughout The Pearly Gates Cemetery, the gravedigger’s task was handed over to the funeral home attendees. Gently they lowered me down into the Earth’s dark, damp, bug-infested womb. Clumps of dirt filtered through the flowers blanketing my casket, in haste to chase after me. The pelting against my coffin finally ended with a loud thud. The dust clouds settled and I was laid to rest.
Hours passed slowly as the full moon rose into the sky. I imagined, the Man in the Moon wept at my passing. It was tears from another being, which was more distraught at my passing that I heard. Her tears fell from the heavens, great big dollops of silvery tears dripped-dropped, dripped-dropped, and dripped-dropped down through the freshly turned dirt, to land a-top my casket. The angel’s anguish turned to anger that roared like thunder and caused those silvery tears to fall harder and slashed the ground with her pain. I heard her and yet, no one heard me.
I lay in my casket and remembered early this morning, during my wake, I had screamed! Terrified and alone, I yelled for help and no one came to my rescue, so I just screamed and screamed, “I AM HERE, HEAR ME! HELP ME!” I begged until, I was hoarse and my throat hurt. Something I found to be a bit ironic, that I could talk and feel pain, when everyone else, saw me as DEAD.
Lovely flowers graced my wake and followed me to the cemetery. I couldn’t make them hear me. I felt my mother press her warm lips to my cool ones. I felt her tears fall on my skin only to scald me with their finality. I heard my father cry. It broke my heart, to know, that he was in pain.
“Oh, Daddy, I beseeched, “This wasn’t supposed to happen to us…to me!”
I had heard my Aunt Ida as she talked to my cousin Ella-Claire. “I think Miss Celia did a wonderful job with your cousin’s hair. I know Elaina would have been pleased with the care given by Miss Celia.” Aunt Ida gushed on-and-on about how natural, my hair and make-up looked.
“I agree Aunt Ida. It’s…just so spooky how life-like Elaina looks, as if she were only sleeping,” whispered Ella-Claire.
“That child looked like at any moment, she would rise up and get out of that coffin.” Aunt Ida replied with a shudder.
“Oh Aunt Ida, IF Elaina had sat up, I would have fainted dead away!” Ella-Claire responded in horror.
I heard the whole conversation; while I willed, with my whole heart, for my eyes to open so that they could see, I was not dead, asleep or anything but ALIVE as they were before me!
Family from all over the globe came to bid their farewells. Something I found ludicrous, that the only time our family came together was either for a marriage, a funeral or of course the reading of a will! I knew my twin sister mirrored my angst at the family’s hypocrisy. She knew that I would have hated an open casket. She knew I would find it hypocritical that “NOW” people wanted to see me. Why not while I was breathing?
Hours passed sl
owly, until just before they closed my casket, an odd scent reached out and tickled my nose. Citrus topped with notes of sandalwood. It could be only one person … Zane. He came!
I would be rescued, Zane wouldn’t let them close me up forever, I knew he would come and deliver me from the endless line of family torturers.
“My beloved Zane…Zane, I am here, help me,” I cried out, “See me, release me, Zane!” I pleaded.
He passed through the line. I heard him. “I’m so sorry Barbara,” Zane leaned over and embraced my mother. Then he stood up and shook hands with my father, “Jack, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Something was wrong with Zane. His tone sounded forced. His tone sounded HOLLOW? Where was his PASSION? Who was this indifferent person? Where was my loving Zane?
“NO! He can’t believe I’m dead … I AM NOT DEAD! Zane, HEAR ME!” I commanded his attention and yet he ignored my begging.
His scent grew stronger; he stood over me. With delicate tenderness, I felt him reach down and brushed his fingers against my cheek. Cool to touch, I know, but there was a fire beneath, if he would have just trusted his heart, and reached for MY light. My torch burned so bright.
“Zane, please,” I begged “Help get me out of this hell!” A lone tear slipped down and landed on my cheek. I wracked my mind for a way, to reach him; to let him know ‘I am still here,’ but he pulled back suddenly and a stab of dread washed over my stilled heart.
My sister, Eileen had come to stand next to Zane. She put her arms around him and told him those soppy things people say when someone dies. Anger surged through my useless veins and threatened to erupt. Emotions roared with turmoil and yet, to their human eyes, I was as still then, as I when they first arrived.
My sister’s whispered words of comfort, felt like daggers of betrayal aimed straight at my heart. There was alien warmth in her voice, one I had not detected before. She cared for him, but not as a future sister-in-law should.
