by Doug Goodman
They could hear Jaxon and Kirk coming from a block away. The BMW coupe’s stereo was blasting away to some frenetic rock group. Jaxon pulled in to the driveway, Kirk pumping his arms out of the window, a trail of cigarette smoke dragging behind the car like the steam from a tiny engine.
Kirk jumped out of the Bimmer before Jaxon could stop the car. Running up towards the three brothers, he did a front-flip in front of them, but it had been a while since he had tried flips, so he stumbled backwards and fell in the grass. This caused another round of laughter from the brothers.
As Kirk fell, a rabbit raced out of the bushes. Rabbits were common in their neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Still, it shocked them to see it dart in front of them, then stumble as if shot. A few dogs howled, and the rabbit started to twitch. The boys gathered around.
“What’s going on?” Jaxon asked as he got out of the car, his backpack in his hand.
“Some rabbit’s freaking out on our front lawn,” Mike said.
They leaned down closer.
“Ew. That’s wicked,” Kirk said.
“What’s it doing?” Colt asked.
“Convulsing,” Peter said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Mike suggested chemicals. At seventeen, he was old enough to enter into such discussions that Colt felt ready for, but at thirteen, he was considered “too young” and inexperienced. Mike said, “Didn’t Dad put down fertilizer and fungus killer on the grass last week?”
“Maybe,” Peter said, then added, “Welcome to CSI: Vicksburg Avenue.”
Kirk grabbed a branch and gently poked the rabbit. It was a small one, but it screeched loudly as soon as he poked it. It was a wild scream with all the volume of helium screeching out of a large balloon. It sounded as if they had suddenly brought it back from damnation. Its eyes rolled, and its tongue hung out loose and uncontrolled.
“Gross,” Mike said.
The rabbit continued to wail. The sound was torture. It was unbearable. While everyone stared, mortified at the screaming rabbit dragging itself shaking across the lawn, Jaxon went to the garage. He came back with a shovel. He put the shovel in front of the rabbit to block its path. Then he ended it with a wet whack to the head.
“What the hell is this?” The sound was authoritative. It was Aidan. Nobody had noticed the van pulling up into the carport.
Peter answered. “Jaxon killed a rabbit.”
“What? Why?”
“It was acting weird, man,” Jaxon said.
Kirk said, “Come take a look. Its paws are still twitching.”
Aidan frowned. “Throw it out, and clean up the shovel. I don’t need Mom and Dad coming home and asking me why the garage reeks of blood.”
Everybody came in through the garage door, which was always open and unlocked. There was a time when their parents used to lock the door, but since the older boys had started Junior High, their house had become like a hostel that kids ebbed in and out of, so they no longer locked the door. On various days, the house was full of either gymnastics teams, football teams, or even amateur rock bands. Certain teens, like Kirk and Jaxon, were near-constants. Kirk came from a single-parent home where his mom routinely worked double shifts and Jaxon came from a home of doctors who were always on call, so the twosome wee always open and willing to spend weekends at the Fannins’ home. Kirk and Jaxon always had a bunk at the hostel and a seat at the restaurant. (Although Mrs. Fannin would complain that it was a sit-down restaurant, not a buffet, and there were no waiters.)
Because they were always in the house, Kirk and Jaxon already knew, where the Cokes were kept and where the cookies were stored when not in the ceramic cookie jar. The teens poured into the kitchen, gathered up what refreshments they needed, and headed into the living room. They found seats on couches, chairs, and the hearth, and then began talking about previous campaigns like old war veterans. Once the pizza arrived (three extra-large meat lover’s, (thick crust, of course), two orders of cheesy sticks, six liters of Cokes, and cinnamon sticks), the giant-gelatinous-cubes-of-doom stories ended, and the boys took their food and went to the den.
Mike stopped Colt. “Not yet. You got to feed Cthulhu.”
“But it’s not my turn. It’s Aidan’s.”
“And he’s setting up the game, so if you want to play, you have to feed Cthulhu. Don’t forget to give him his vitamin.”
“But that’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, and Mom and Dad aren’t here to say differently, so go do it or we send you to bed. Your choice, Colton.”
As Mike left, he yelled out, “Don’t call me Colton!”
Alone, Colt made for the kitchen where the cellphones were charging. He picked up his cellphone, which was for emergencies only. We’ll be checking the phone bill, his dad had promised him, and if Colt was calling for anything but an emergency, he would be grounded from Wii for a month. Phone in hand, Colt debated whether this was enough of an emergency. While he was not in danger, his brothers were bullying him, and he knew Mom and Dad wanted him to tell them when he was being bullied. But they would also be mad if he was calling for something other than an emergency. This was a difficult time for them. Aunt Renee was in surgery. If he called while she was in surgery, who knows how long he would be grounded. He took his hand from off the call button and closed the flip-phone.
Already the sun had set and it was dark outside when Colt opened the back door and picked up Cthulhu’s food bowl, a shiny metal pan. He looked around, but didn’t see Cthulhu anywhere, so he called out the dog’s name. Cthulhu didn’t come, so Colt went back inside without closing the door. From the laundry room, he took the old plastic gimme cup and shoveled two cups of dog food into the bowl. Then he opened a can of chicken-flavored dog food and spooned half of it into the bowl. Colt added the vitamin and stirred the food. Left the vitamin bottle and the can on the counter. Then he took it back outside and called Cthulhu twice. When the dog didn’t come, he whistled. It was a pitiful whistle, but Cthulhu always came.
Colt went back inside and turned the outside light on and off. The bulb sparked, then went out. Colt growled. It was really dark outside. The camper blocked the streetlight, so the closest light came from porches several houses down. Colt pulled out the flashlight from the cabinet drawer and clumsily entered the darkness, flashlight in one hand and dinner bowl in the other.
Colt looked under the camper and out behind the shed. He double-checked the gates, but they were all closed. Just as the tears started to well up in his eyes and he was ready to run to his brothers, he saw the large body curled up by the side of the house. It was hard to make out the dog in the beam of light. Cthulhu faced away from him. His side rose and fell sporadically. He looked sunken in the ground.
“Cthulhu?” Colt called out. He felt embarrassed that his voice sounded so weak. He wished it would sound stronger, more like his brothers. He put the food bowl down and crept up to Cthulhu, the light shaking in his hands. Colt sat down beside his pet and placed his hand on the dog’s side.
Suddenly, Cthulhu snapped. His teeth popped wetly and his head arched, all teeth and bite. Colt shrieked and jumped away. Cthulhu didn’t chase the boy, though. He just lay there on the ground snarling and snapping. Something about the way his head jerked around scared Colt. Made him think something was wrong with the mechanics of the dog’s body. Colt ran away, knocking over the food bowl, and slamming the sliding door shut behind him. He locked the door and stared out into the darkness. He couldn’t quite see out there, so he shone his light in the darkness. A beam of light set a golden halo around the area where Colt had last seen Cthulhu, but the dog was no longer there.
“What’s up?” Mike asked. Colt screamed, and Mike laughed.
“Shut up!” Colt yelled.
“What’s the matter – why so tense?”
“It’s Cthulhu. Something’s not right. I think he tried to bite me.”
“You think he tried to bite you? Let’s see where you think h
e thought about trying to bite you.”
Colt held out his hand.
“Well,” Mike said in mock doctor’s voice, “It looks like his thought was worse than his bite.”
Colt jerked his hand away. “I know what I saw. Something’s not right.”
“Of course not. He’s an old dog. C’mon, the game’s set up. All we have to do is build some characters.”
As the two boys walked back towards the bedrooms, a dark shape came up to the back door. The door began to rattle, quietly at first, then aggressively.
The hard part about role-playing is getting started. Once the game begins, the adventure commences. But until then, there was nothing for Aidan to do except watch everybody create characters, and everybody had a different theory about how to create a character. Some used generators to spit out characters, others made spin-offs of old characters, but most created super-sized versions of themselves. For Jaxon, that meant a mysterious ninja. Kirk, bard; Peter, thief-acrobat with an eccentric personality.
Aidan double-checked his references, and then braided some of Alyssa’s hair. Her hair felt so soft in his hands. He thought about the possibilities of the upcoming year, what the dorm rooms would look like, who he would meet, and whether or not he would get to absorb any of the “cool” of Austin.
Somewhere out in the distance, he heard a scream. At least, he thought it was a scream. It sounded too inhuman to be a scream. Aidan looked around the room, but apparently, the sound was faint enough that nobody else heard it. Everybody was too absorbed in creating their characters. He shrugged it off as people partying way too hard for this quiet little suburb and returned to braiding Alyssa’s hair.
Suddenly, the window rattled as if something hit it. The noise startled Alyssa, but the boys kept rolling dice and studying books as if nothing had happened. Aidan walked over to the back window that had rattled and hit the drywall beside it. “Cut it out, Cthulhu!” he shouted. “Go on.”
“That dog always wants in,” Peter said. “Dad says we could train him to track air conditioning.”
“I don’t like him,” Alyssa said. “He has that weird look in his eyes.”
“That’s what makes him cool,” Kirk interjected. “He looks crazy, so nobody’d fuck with him.”
The shadow moved around the house, passing from window to window and pushing up against them, too. While the boys finished off their meat-lover’s pizza, the shape jumped the fence and started around the front side of the house. First, it tested the windows along the front bedrooms, but they hadn’t been opened in years. Then the front door began to shake on its hinges. The doorknob fumbled, then turned slightly, but the door was locked. The shadow moved on.
The symphony of pages flipping, pencils writing, and Cokes being guzzled was broken by a high-pitched ringing, like the kind landlines used to make in the sixties and seventies.
“Sorry,” Jaxon said as he plucked out his phone to see who it was.
“What the hell kind of ring is that?” Mike asked.
“Dude, it’s classic,” Peter said.
“It’s annoying. Like PewDiePie annoying.”
“Mom and Stu,” Jaxon said. “Want to bet they’re calling me cause they smelled smoke in the house?” he said while glaring at Kirk. Kirk shrugged, as if there was nothing he could do about it.
“They can bitch about it in the morning,” Jaxon said. He silenced the ringer and ignored the call.
The shadow quickly passed by the kitchen windows without stopping. The garage door, which was never locked, swung open.
Aidan’s cell started buzzing. He picked it up to answer, when he heard another scream. This time it was much closer, and much less human. It was guttural and low, more a moan than a scream. From the look in Alyssa’s eyes, he assumed she heard it, too. He glanced out the closest window, but there was nothing unusual in the backyard.
“What’s up?” Mike asked.
“You didn’t hear that?”
“I heard it. It sounded weird,” Alyssa said. Aidan guessed that “weird” could easily substitute for “scary.” Then he saw something both strange and frightening.
He saw a man run through the alley, past their fence, and continue on. This was the sort of thing that was usually more odd than anything else. Perhaps the guy was high on something, or maybe he was a jogger taking a short cut. But this guy wasn’t jogging. He was running. Sprinting. Then the strange man turned to look behind him and saw something that made his eyes go wide and his face turn white. It was a brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it look.
“Did you see that?” Aidan asked Alyssa.
Her eyes tightened as she tried to see out the back window. With the lights out, it wasn’t easy to see.
“See what?” she asked.
“That guy with the crazed look running down the alley.”
Peter and Mike’s cellphones went off almost simultaneously, but they didn’t answer them. They just let them ring while everybody gathered at the window to look for the crazy guy.
“Shut off the lights so we can see better,” Aidan told Mike. The inside lights went out, and everybody stood at the open window, faces to the glass and hands above their eyes to cut out any residual light.
“It’ll take a second for everybody’s eyes to adjust,” Jaxon said. Finally, everybody’s phones stopped ringing. A few seconds later, they all started ringing again, but nobody paid them any attention.
“How did you see a guy in the alley?” Mike asked. “I can barely see halfway out of our backyard.”
Aidan’s stomach grew cold and his face darkened. He realized this was the part in the movie when everybody stopped and stared in shock at something inexplicable while the maniac with the chainsaw came up behind him. It was a paranoid delusion, but the night was turning weird, fast. The screams, the cellphones, the crazy-looking man – separate, they were coincidences, but combined, they were something else. But what?
Aidan stepped away from the glass and backed out of the den. Nobody asked him where he was going because they were all looking for the runner. Suddenly, a distant sound of wrenching metal resonated through the room, like a traffic accident out on the highway, but that was far away from them.
Aidan looked down the hallway towards the living room and the kitchen. Seeing only darkness and shadow, he retreated to his parents’ bedroom. First, he crossed the room to his father’s closet and pulled out the locked chest. He flipped through the combination with the numbers his father had taught him, yanked off the lock, and grabbed the family rifle, a powerful, high-caliber Winchester 70 that legend had it, his grandfather had used to hunt black bear in East Texas. It was a beautiful, well-kept weapon with a walnut stock that was worn from use. A few years ago, his father bought a new Leupold scope and had it custom-fitted to the rifle. He talked of hunting with it, but the only heads on their walls were passed down from their grandfather.
Aidan checked the chamber to ensure that it wasn’t loaded – it was not. He hopped over the bed to the other side of the room and his parents’ dresser. In the bottom drawer, he found the box with the bullets in it. The large 30-06 bullets felt cold in his hand. Suddenly, somebody screamed inside the house. Bullets spilled from Aidan’s hands as he ran for the den.
The growl started low and rose up in the air, like a chainsaw ripping into action. Everybody in the room turned around. Cthulhu stood in the doorway glowering at them with that wild look in his eyes, the look that had always set people off, the reason visitors would say he was part wolf or coyote.
Alyssa tried to scream, but nothing came out. Colt was first. His still-childlike voice pierced the air, then everybody else joined the chorus of fear.
Cthulhu stood in the doorway on boney legs too long to be his. His horribly disfigured legs were each at least four feet longer than they should have been. There was no way this horror was capable of standing, yet here it was.
“Cthulhu, go home!” Peter yelled. Cthulhu ignored the command.
He barked at them, then leap
t into the middle of them, like a wolf after sheep. And like sheep, they scattered away from Cthulhu, jumping to either side. Cthulhu targeted the easiest prey first. He clamped his tight jaws around Colt’s arm, then jerked him back to the middle of the room. Colt made a soft sound of despair as the wind was knocked out of him. Stunned, he lay helpless while Cthulhu shook him like a rag doll.
They heard a wet pop, and Colt screamed with white-hot intensity. His brothers stood paralyzed as the death scene unfolded. They did not know what they could do. There was nothing about this in the Boy Scouts Handbook. (At least one of them wondered aloud how they were supposed to Be Prepared for mutant dog maulings.) As if looking at the room from far away, they were each consciously aware to some degree that they were in shock, yet they could not break its spell. Then a much larger pop resonated through the room, something like an ear-splintering blast, and Cthulhu flew sideways into the wall, a red Rorschach test where his head used to be.
Aidan lowered the smoking rifle long enough to release the casing and fully load five bullets into the bolt action chamber.
Peter and Mike jumped to Colt’s side. His face and arm was covered in Cthulhu’s blood.
Peter held up Colt’s arm, and the youngest cried out.
“It must be broken,” Peter said.
“Mike,” Aidan said with urgency, “get the bandages and peroxide from the medicine cabinet in the pantry.” Mike ran to the kitchen. By the time he returned, Colt was wiggling his fingers.
“That means it’s not broken, right?” Mike asked.
“That’s what I’ve always heard,” Peter said.
“Then why does it hurt to move my arm?”
“Cause Cthulhu made you his chew toy,” Peter said, and Alyssa giggled. She was always the first to be amused by Peter’s wit. After she started laughing, everybody else joined in. It was more of a reflex than anything else. One of those “laugh or you’ll go crazy” moments. By the time they stopped, Kirk and Jaxon had returned.
