by Pete Kahle
Buddy and I live in a small, two-bedroom house. Obviously, I only need one bedroom for myself, but I have the other setup as a den where I keep my computer, books, CD’s, that sort of thing. Back when Heather and I first started dating, John didn’t really have much to do at my house. So in an effort to make his visits more enjoyable, I told him he could bring over some toys and store them in the empty walk-in closet in the den. Soon he was bringing something – a toy, a book, magazines, baseball cards, comic books - with him every time they came over. I even brought him a Super Nintendo and a twelve-inch color TV, both rescued from my parents’ attic when I visited at Christmas, and set them up in his little cave. I made an agreement with John – whatever was in there was his business; I never went in the closet without his permission. I think it made him feel good to have someplace all his own, plus it built a real foundation of trust between us.
Of course my “secret hideout” was no secret to my parents, but similarly, it was the one place on the farm they let me have to myself. I’d scraped together old pieces of plywood and junk from around the farm, borrowed my dad’s tools, and built this little shack down by the creek. I’m not sure it would have passed the building inspector’s code, but it was a good enough place for me to go read comic books, listen to cassettes on my old player, and keep stuff I found around the farm.
Over the years, I’d amassed quite a nice collection of beer cans and bottles from the drunken, creek-side parties the high school boys would have; a few old car parts that, frankly, I have no idea how they got there; Indian arrow heads, and my prize possession – a February 1975 issue of Playboy, published the same month I was born. It was worn, ragged, faded, and water-damaged, but none of that mattered because - it had naked women inside. I sat for hours looking at the pictures of Mary Walters: 34/24/36. She was a buxom redhead whose turn-ons were: men who were confident, well spoken, polite, smart and funny - pretty much everything I wasn’t except for maybe the polite one. She was beautiful, and to this day, I still prefer redheads.
I rushed into the shade of the plywood roof and took the little puppy from under my shirt. He didn’t cry out now that he was out of the sun, in fact, he was back to his docile self. I overturned a cardboard box full of baseball cards and lined it with an old blanket my mother let me have. I laid little Buddy down inside, but when I tried to pull away, his tentacle was still wrapped around my finger, pulsing like it was before. I gripped the tip of the arm and squeezed, pulling at the same time and felt resistance; it didn’t hurt, I just couldn’t get the suckers to let go. I tried again, this time squeezing at the base of the tentacle by his ribcage, and the little arm calmly unraveled itself. Much to my surprise, I was bleeding from small puncture holes where the arm had been coiled. I felt no pain; in fact, my whole finger was numb from some kind of anesthetic. I panicked a bit, bundling the old blanket around my digit, but the next time I looked, the holes were healed and the bleeding had stopped. I realized then that Buddy had fallen asleep, probably quite exhausted from his liberation from certain death, and now, apparently, a good feeding from my unwilling finger. I covered him with the fold of the blanket and read Ms. Mary Walters’ likes and dislikes for the hundredth time while he slept.
Just as I suspected, John’s closet door is slightly ajar. I knock before opening, but I still startle him. He quickly throws something behind his back and holds it there nervously, looking up at me like he’s been caught red-handed.
“Hey!” I smile and step inside. “Wanna play some Nintendo?”
“Yeah. Um…could you come back in a second?” His face turns an unusual shade of pink.
“Sure. Just say when.” I step back outside and close the door behind me. I have to smile as I remember almost getting caught by my Dad during one of my Mary Walters sessions. I’m sure John, at only five, doesn’t have access to a Playboy just yet, but it’s probably something just as scandalous in his mind; a comic book that he’s not supposed to be reading, maybe. Regardless, I give him time to put whatever it is away. All boys have secrets.
Buddy stayed in my clubhouse and I came to visit him every day after school. He was always hungry and, while he was still small, I let him use his tentacles to suck from my leg or my arm. However, one day I almost passed out during his feeding and I realized that I was going to need to wean my little Buddy onto some other form of food. He was getting large enough that he could get out of his box without me around, so I had to rig up a lock on the outside of my hideout door. This gave Buddy free reign to run around the room and capture mice, squirrels, and just about anything else that made the mistake of trespassing through a gap in my amateur construction handiwork.
I can remember sitting in the shack one Saturday afternoon reading comics and watching little Buddy, maybe four months old, track a good-sized raccoon that had gotten inside. The coon was easily twenty-five pounds – a huge thing. When Buddy hunted, he didn’t sniff around like a normal dog; he simply let his tentacles move across the ground like an insect with antenna. I’m not sure to this day if he felt vibrations or if he actually “smelled” with his strange appendages; either way he tracked down the intruder with minimal problems and had soon sucked the old bandit dry.
It was the first time I’d seen Buddy eat his prey once he’d drained them. Using his massive jaws and razor-sharp teeth to cut and break the bones and flesh, he made quick work of the coon. I was a bit disgusted by the sight, but at the same time fascinated to see him bite clean through the hard skull of an animal and into the meaty brain. He had quite a voracious appetite.
“Do you have anything to eat?” John asks me after kicking my butt in Street Fighter on the Super Nintendo.
“Yeah. What do you want?” I ask standing up from one of the beanbags I bought for him.
“Got any cookies?”
“Sure. Oreos ok?”
“Yeah. And milk.”
“Coming right up. You wanna play Mario Kart next?”
“Yeah!” John pops the Street Fighter cartridge out of the machine and begins rummaging through the stack of old games made long before he was born.
As I’m walking down the hall towards the kitchen, I hear the phone ringing. Nearest is in my bedroom, so I step inside to answer it. It’s my Mom, so I sit on the edge of my bed and chat with her.
After the typical “how you doing?” chit-chat, Mom asks, “Do you know what today is?”
“Um…no.” I respond.
“It’s the anniversary of poor Andy Bellis’ disappearance.”
About a year after I’d found Buddy, I was well into fifth grade and things had begun to improve on the social front. I finally had a friend - a pudgy, coke-bottle glasses-wearing kid named Andy Bellis. Andy was sort of an outcast at school, too, because of his bulk and the fact that his family didn’t have a lot of money. The main thing that drew us to each other was our love of comic books.
He was a hardcore fanboy – plastic bags and cardboard backings, he knew the difference between mint and fine condition, and could recite almost issue by issue the entire history of Spider-Man. I was a bit more of a casual reader, but was still more versed in the exploits of Batman, Superman, and the Fantastic Four than most kids in our class.
Andy used to invite me over to spend the night on Fridays and we’d stay up late discussing comics, Transformers, He-Man, Star Wars and even the occasional question-and-answer session on girls. We could name every one of the characters in Jabba the Hutt’s palace from Klaatu to Salacious Crumb, but didn’t have the first clue as to who or what an “orgasm” was; pretty typical boys, I guess.
The first time I had Andy out to the farm for a stay-over, I was a bit nervous about Buddy. I didn’t know if I should introduce him to Andy, or if I should go with my instinct and leave my little dog my little secret. I purposefully avoided the shack until Andy asked to see the infamous February 1975 Playboy I had bragged to him about on many occasions. I tried to change the subject, but he was adamant about getting a glimpse of Mary Walters: 34/24/36.
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It was dusk when we arrived at the shack and Mom would be calling us in for dinner soon. As we got closer, I told Andy to wait on the other side of the creek while I ran across the fallen log that served as my bridge and got the magazine for him.
I undid the combination lock and crept through the cracked open door doing my best to keep Buddy inside. We’d begun to play in the pasture at night (he was still sensitive to sunlight) and I was afraid he might think it was time to go and come bursting out into the open. However, all was quiet inside my little shack as Buddy was nowhere to be found. I frantically looked for my dog and soon saw a huge chunk of the back wall had been pried loose and flung across the room, knocking over the beer can collection. Buddy was outside. I crawled through the hole, hoping maybe he was standing right outside, but much to my disappointment he was gone. Buddy liked to play at the log pile where I’d found him, so that was my first destination.
Mom and I talk about Andy, and Dad, and Grandma, and the Women’s Auxiliary Club Pancake Breakfast coming up next weekend, and after a good ten minutes, I finally hang up the phone. I continue my trek down the hallway, through the living room and into the kitchen. However, when I get back to John’s closet, the door is wide open, the menu screen of Mario Kart is on the TV, but John is nowhere to be found. I set the milk and cookies on my nearby desk and retrace my steps down the hallway.
The bathroom door is closed, so I knock gently, “You in there, John?”
There is no reply. I open the door and the room is empty.
Confused, I go out to the living room, but he’s not there. I look outside the window, but he’s not running around in the front yard. In the kitchen I look outside and he’s not in the backyard either.
When I got to the woodpile, the sun had gone down for the day. The crickets had already begun to chirp and the junebugs were starting to emerge. I hoped Buddy had cornered a rabbit and would be making his strange wheezing bark while thrusting his tentacles into the pile to grasp at his prey as I had seen him do before. However, Buddy was nowhere to be found. I called for him numerous times, but he never came. My mind was racing as I tried to figure where he might be next.
I ran to our house, my heart about to burst from the effort and the tension, and searched the backyard. Buddy was always curious about the house, but I did my best to corral him into the pasture and the perimeter of my hideout. I stopped by the garage, grabbed a flashlight from the storage closet, and ran to the orchard. The beam crisscrossed the apple trees; I scared an owl, but did not find my dog.
I searched the tool shed. I searched the barn. I searched up and down the lane and into the old cow pasture. As I stood at the end of our driveway leading out onto County Road #258, for some reason – I still don’t know exactly why – I suddenly knew where Buddy was. Something in my gut told me he was back at my hideout. As this thought flashed through my mind, another flashed through at the same time – Andy.
When I turn away from the kitchen window without finding John in the backyard, I notice the basement door is slightly ajar.
I arrived at my clubhouse, expecting to find pudgy Andy standing by, possibly with the front of his pants a little soaked from being left alone in the scary, dark woods. Instead, I found his thick pair of glasses and nothing else. I picked them up, folded them shut and held them in my hand, to give back to a frightened little boy when I saw him again. My flashlight beam swept back and forth around the area and there was still no sign of him. “Andy?” I called out in panic, but got no reply. I figured the obvious place for him to go would be my hideout.
I gently pushed the door and stepped inside. There in the beam of my flashlight, was Buddy hunched over Andy, simultaneously using his tentacles to drain the boy of his blood and his teeth to tear into Andy’s chest to get at the soft, fleshy intestines. He didn’t even flinch when the light hit him, he simply continued his feeding frenzy. For the next ten minutes I watched as my Buddy devoured every last bit of the geeky fifth grader. When he finished, he turned, ran to me and put his paws up on my leg as if he was ready to play now. Tears streamed down my face.
I slowly open the door leading down to the basement. I stand at the top of the wooden stairs, peering into the darkness below.
“John?”
I get no reply.
I flick the bare light switch and many small splotches of light come from the corners of the dank, unfinished, basement. I take five steps down.
“John? Are you down here?”
I still get no reply.
Buddy biting through the skull of the raccoon flashes through my mind’s eye.
I rush down the stairs.
There, in a corner of the room, is Buddy, leaning over the body of John; his pulsing tentacles are already wrapped around John’s little frame. I can see I’m too late; John is now only a husk of humanity. There’s nothing I can do to save him. As I ascend the stairs in a haze, shutting off the light as I exit, I can hear the snap of bone as Buddy begins the second course of his meal. I bow my head and close the door behind me.
I ran.
I ran as hard and as fast as I could, encouraging Buddy to follow me as we made the one-mile trek to Grandma’s house. It was well past dinnertime and I was sure Dad would be at my hideout any minute now looking for us.
Grandma’s house was easily sixty years old at the time. It was the house that she and my Grandpa raised eight kids in – including my Dad – and she’d be damned if she was going to leave it while she was alive. She shouldn’t have been living there, quite frankly. She was eighty-three, could barely see, could barely hear, and needed a wheelchair to get around. She spent a better part of Dad’s inheritance installing the chair lift so she could reach the second floor.
In the backyard of this farmhouse was a set of large, double doors leading underground into the fruit cellar. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d used the empty bunker as my commando team’s secret base that had to be defended against Nazi SS who were attacking from the apple orchard. But tonight, and for who knows how much longer, this was going to be my Buddy’s new home.
I nimbly worked the combination lock – had the numbers memorized since I was in first grade - and swung open one of the doors. Buddy looked at me with his black, spidery eyes, unsure of what I wanted him to do. I tried to tell him to go down into the darkness, but he only stared at me confused. Finally, I grabbed his collar and began to lead him down. He resisted, his claws dug into the ground, but I got him inside just the same. I hurriedly closed the door behind him and re-secured the lock. I told him I’d be back tomorrow and not to worry. He responded with one of his breathy whines through the crack in the doors.
By the time I’d returned to our house, dripping with sweat and my heart racing a million miles an hour, Mom was already on the phone with the police. She ran to me, crying; she put her arms around me and hugged. I pushed her away in a panic and asked if she’d seen Andy. Shortly after, my Dad came in with a flashlight and shotgun in his hands; he’d been out looking for us.
I explained how Andy had wanted to see a comic that was stored down in my hideout. He waited outside as I ran in to get it. Well, it took me a little longer than I’d anticipated to find the comic and when I finally emerged from my shack Andy was gone. I found these – I displayed his glasses still in my hand – and that was all. I yelled for him, but he did not respond. I ran down to the creek’s bank and he wasn’t there. I ran over to the woodpile and he wasn’t there, either. I finally ended up at the house, worried I’d get in trouble if I came in without him, so I got Dad’s flashlight and continued my search alone. However, after a while I decided I’d better get some grownups involved in the hunt, even if I got grounded for a year.
Andy’s parents were devastated; the whole town was devastated really. After the search for Andy’s body came up blank, the manhunt for the kidnapper began. Police scoured our farm, (I hid my Playboy in the woodpile before they arrived) and then went on to neighboring farms with a fine-toothed comb. They stopped by
Grandma’s and noticed the fruit cellar in the backyard, which was a bit scary. But she insisted it was locked at all times and there was no way a boy could have gotten in unless he knew the combination. Heck, it’d been so long since she’d gone in there, she couldn’t even remember the combination. When the cops asked if they could break the lock to be sure, the stubborn old mule refused and asked them to be on their way unless they had a warrant. Luckily, they never bothered to get one.
For about a week after consuming Andy, Buddy didn’t need to hunt for anything when I let him out at night; he simply wasn’t hungry. Actually, those were some of the best nights we ever had together. Instead of waiting for him to get food for twenty or thirty minutes, Buddy and I would play fetch with sticks in the oat field behind Grandma’s house. We played tug-o-war with his old blanket, though Buddy had learned he could sweep my feet out from under me with his tentacles so it was never a very long war. And he’d follow me down to the creek to chase frogs and fish. I wanted Buddy and me to have this kind of free time more often. Besides, how could I keep the cops going on the kidnapper story if there were no other kidnappings? Eventually they’d realize this was an isolated incident and come back around asking more questions about Andy’s disappearance. I soon realized what I had to do.
What am I going to do? Heather will be home soon. How can I explain this to her? Should I run? Just pack up the truck and leave? No, I love Heather too much to make her worry about her son like that; I couldn’t do that to her.
