Howls From Hell

by Grady Hendrix

  She was sitting too close to the fire, wrapped in a blanket. One minute she was insufferably hot, baking in front of the flames, the next she was so cold she wanted to crawl inside the fireplace.

  “Maybe your wound got infected or something. What’s it look like?”

  Leigh hadn’t checked on it since that morning. She was afraid to inspect it. The four claw marks felt like living organisms, eating away at the flesh beneath the gauze.

  “Maybe I should look at it,” Ben said.

  “No.”

  “Well, take some Tylenol and drink a lot of fluids. Keep your fever down.”

  Ben vanished and then reappeared with a bottle of water and pills.

  Leigh could barely keep her eyes open long enough to place the pills in her mouth and swallow them with a few sips from the water bottle.

  “You need to lie down,” Ben said. “You need to sleep.”

  He helped Leigh to her feet, pulled her left arm over his shoulder and wrapped his right arm around her waist. They ambled together down the hallway, back to the bedroom she’d been staying in. Leigh fell onto the bed, still wrapped in the blanket. She suddenly needed to be free of its suffocating grip. She kicked and thrashed, but it was tangled all around her. Ben pulled it off and laid it beside her.

  “Go to sleep, Mom. I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

  Leigh’s head found the pillow.

  Slowly, her mind melted into a feverish slumber.

  “Mom,” Ben said. “Wake up.”

  He shook her. The whole world seemed to move beneath her.

  Leigh opened her eyes, but all she saw was darkness.

  “Mom?”

  “What?”

  Her tongue was completely dry. A crusty lump in her mouth.

  Ben stopped shaking her.

  “There’s somebody under the cabin.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. There were colors in the darkness, swirling all around her, or inside her. She couldn’t discern what was inside her mind from what was outside. She wanted to blend in with the colors, melt into them.

  There was a massive thud, coming from somewhere below.

  “Did you hear that?” Ben whispered.

  “It’s the bear,” Leigh said, and drifted back into the swirling colors.

  “It’s him, Mom.”

  She felt herself pulled back into the mess of swirling blues and pinks and oranges. Swimming through them, diving deep down into a gyre of churning hues.

  “Mom!”

  Leigh’s arms thrashed out in front of her, reaching for Ben.

  He wasn’t there.

  “He’s coming through the front door!” Ben screamed.

  His voice was somewhere in the dark, far away.

  Her boiling brain struggled to put something sensible together. The stench of her own sickness and sweat hit her nose. She moved her legs, rolled onto her side, and pushed herself upward into a sitting position.

  Ben screamed.

  The sound brought Leigh to her feet, sending her stumbling toward the bedroom doorway. There was light coming from the living room, and she moved down the hallway, bracing herself against the wall, toward the pale luminescence, the swirling colors dissipating as the darkness receded.

  Something crashed. Shattered.

  Reality was soft, like a wet oil painting. Surreal. Disordered.

  In the firelight, she saw Ben, holding up what appeared to be a piece of firewood, fending off a beast near the small dining area. Leigh strained to see, to understand what was happening. The beast was Douglas Sable, naked, with his silver hair reflecting the flickering firelight. The next second, he was an animal unlike anything Leigh had ever seen, covered with thick, bristling fur, its growls filling the room.

  “Ben!”

  Ben saw Leigh and made a run for her. Leigh watched in slow motion as Ben tripped on the shabby rug on the living room floor. He seemed to swim through the air. He floated downward, his forehead crashing into the long edge of the stone fireplace before his body finally thudded on the floor. In the light, she saw blood stream from Ben’s head, filling her with an electric sensation.

  She started toward him, only to see the Douglas Sable-creature lunge toward her, its claws poised to slash. A nerve-splitting roar, like a mountain lion on fire, filled the living room, sent Leigh stumbling backwards. She fell onto the hearth, nearly toppling into the fire.

  Beneath her fingers, Leigh felt something sharp and metallic. In the maelstrom of her fever, she remembered the marshmallows from the night before, watching them distend and blacken with flames. Time drifted around her, illusory and viscous.

  The monstrosity came at her again on two legs, its fur scintillating in the firelight, its presence a confusing blur of teeth and fur and growls.

  She grabbed the straightened wire hanger and brought it around in front of her just as the gnashing face descended.

  Leigh felt the pressure in the hanger give as it pierced the animal’s left eye.

  The shrill, fiery shriek filled the cabin once again, more ferocious than before.

  She thrust the hanger as far as it would go, shoving it deeper into the creature’s brain. The monster let out another scream, this one more human than animal. It stumbled backward and crashed onto the coffee table. The floorboards vibrated beneath her feet as the table fell apart beneath the beast’s weight and sent the monster crashing to the ground.

  Leigh closed her eyes, feeling as if she might faint.

  The crackling fire was the only sound in the room other than her own panicked breathing.

  The colors were still there, swirling, but she didn’t let herself melt into them.

  When she reopened her eyes, Douglas Sable was on the floor, completely naked. The hanger jutted out of his eye, pointing straight toward the beamed ceiling. The sight of it did not belong in reality. She was unsure if any of it was actually happening, or if she was still swimming deep down inside a dream.

  Leigh fell to her knees next to Ben. She shook him. Wiped blood from his forehead.

  Ben’s eyes stayed closed, but she could feel his chest moving. He was breathing.

  She stood upright, but she could not feel her legs. She could not feel much of anything, except for a horrible slithering sensation inside her. It scurried through her veins like a million fire ants, urging her to vacate her body entirely. Tear off her own flesh to the bone.

  Some sort of change was happening inside of her. Unstoppable. She moved away from the fire, toward the front door. And then she was out in the night, everything still wet with rain. There was no moon. The trees made dripping sounds in the darkness. The blaze inside her skull burned hotter, and the colors were more vivid. Blues, violets, greens smearing around her. Directly above her heart, her wound throbbed, forcing more of its poison through her blood. The change was happening.

  The next morning Ben found Leigh lying along the bank of Junco Creek.

  She’d ripped off her shirt and bandage during the night, and her exposed, festering gashes attracted flies. Ben brushed them away, covered Leigh up with her shirt, and shook her awake.

  Leigh stared up at him. There was a bloody lump on Ben’s forehead. She didn’t understand why it was there. Beyond him, sunlight was streaming through birch leaves, glistening in his hair. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. The sound of the creek chattered directly next to her head in urgent, fluid sentences.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked.

  “You had a fever.”

  “What happened to your head?”

  “I think I fell.”

  She sat up, clutching her shirt to her body, hiding her wound. Ben turned around, and she put her shirt on, not noticing it was backwards.

  “I’m going to take you back to the cabin,” Ben said. “Do you think you can walk?”

  Leigh took a deep breath and stood.

  Her feet were leaden. Her head was both light and pulsing.

  They walked in silence, out of t
he trees, slowly up the muddy slope back to the cabin.

  He helped ease her down onto the porch swing and went inside. He returned moments later with a bottle of water and a wet rag to clean her wounds.

  “I’m going to walk to his house,” Ben told her. “To call the police and an ambulance.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t go inside. Just stay here.”

  “Okay.”

  Ben kissed Leigh on the forehead and left her. She heard his footsteps smacking on the wet dirt road behind her as he ran toward Douglas Sable’s house, somewhere down the way.

  Leigh closed her eyes and leaned back into the old porch swing. The chains holding it up let out a rusty melody. She vaguely remembered the events of the night before. An animal attack. Douglas Sable. She remembered the wire hanger sticking out from his eye, but none of it seemed real. Part of her wanted to go back into the cabin and see for herself, but mostly it felt like a dream that would dissipate as more minutes ticked by.

  Instead, she remained on the porch swing, swaying with her eyes closed.

  There was a loud fluttering sensation nearby.

  Leigh opened her eyes, startled, and saw a bird flutter through her periphery and land on the porch railing, only an arm’s length away. It was brown and black with dark eyes. A junco.

  It studied her, and she stared back, consumed by its presence.

  In those brief seconds, amid her sickness and confusion, Leigh felt a blooming convalescence deep in her heart, beneath her wound.

  In the blink of an eye, the junco flapped its wings and flew away.

  S.E. DENTON began stashing Stephen King and R.L. Stine books under her mattress in middle school and grew into a lifelong horror junkie. Recently, Sarah transitioned into a career in product design. She writes fiction on the side and lives in Los Angeles with her two cats and some plants. You can find her on Twitter @InfiniteDent.

  * * *

  Illustration by P.L. McMillan

  KILL.

  It was written in the middle of the bill with a thick, red marker. I only saw it for a moment as the cashier counted out a stack of tens for my change. She said nothing; if she saw it, she was extremely good at pretending she hadn’t. The red letters disappeared into the middle of the pile as she tapped the small bundle on the counter and handed it to me.

  “Sixty dollars, in tens, cash back. Do you want a bag?”

  I only stared at her. “What?”

  “Do you want a plastic bag for your purchase?” She tore the receipt from the machine before folding it into thirds and holding it out to me along with the bills. I didn’t move. My eyes were still fixed on the cash in her hand. She paused and set the receipt and money on the glossy countertop. Then she glanced up at me, eyebrows raised, and her smile began to dim.

  “No, that’s okay, thanks,” I mumbled.

  She turned away a second time.

  I contemplated shuffling through the bills to verify if I had actually seen what I’d only glimpsed before. I didn’t know what I would’ve done, however, if I’d fully inspected the bill. Even the one small peek at the red letters had caused the hair to raise all along my spine and my pulse to throb in my throat. It was unnerving because I didn’t know where this burst of feeling could’ve possibly come from. I prided myself on being a fairly level-headed, unflappable human being. Always had. I decided to fold the bills and slip them into my jeans pocket.

  The cashier was saying something, and I managed to catch the end of her sentence. “Did you want me to put some extra oxygen in here for your little guy? We don’t recommend waiting longer than an hour before you put him in your aquarium tank.”

  “It’s fine,” I replied, holding up the plastic bag and gazing at my new angelfish. She was drifting in the water-filled, tubular plastic bag, flitting to each corner and exploring her temporary prison. Her silver and black scales rippled as I carefully supported the bulging bag with my left hand. “I’m going straight home after this.”

  “Well, thanks for stopping by, and we’ll see you next time.” The transaction completed, my cashier left her post and disappeared into the almost-empty PetSmart aisles.

  I eyed her register warily. Did I really see that red word scrawled on a simple bill? Where had it come from? Or perhaps I was imagining things.

  I was probably fretting over nothing. The uneasy feeling passed, each tense muscle in my body relaxing more with every step that carried me through the doors and out into the sunshine.

  The incident had faded from my memory by the time I stopped for a quick bite on my way home twenty minutes later. The first Saturday of the month was my official errand day. After loading the car with groceries, buying craft supplies for my wife, and picking up the newest resident of my freshwater aquarium, I decided to treat myself. My indulgence, when I was alone, was greasy, comforting fast food. There was a spectacular hot dog place several miles away from the PetSmart, and after two circuits of the parking lot, I finally spotted a car backing out. What luck!

  I turned off the engine and patted my pockets. Everything seemed to be in place. I glanced over at my angelfish, bobbing about in her bag in the passenger seat, which I’d placed inside a shallow box for support. She seemed a bit listless, and I reminded myself to be quick. The sooner I got her home and into her new aquarium, the better.

  As I got out of the car, stuffing my keys in my back pocket, my mind was filled with thoughts of the menu. A familiar internal dialogue began. Should I get the Cleveland Dog again? I got that last week. Maybe a classic Chicago dog, hold the neon-green relish? Hell, maybe I’ll get two. Why not? My reward for a busy day.

  I stepped up to the ordering window. Fatso’s was a small hotdog stand with window service and outdoor seating. Though paint peeled off the bricks and weeds sprouted freely from cracks in the asphalt, the place was famous for its delicious hot dogs, and rarely did one wait in line for less than five minutes. Families and friends enjoying the late summer day sweltered at tables in the sun, mouths full of fries, meat, and soda.

  The man in front of me got his order and stepped to the side. I nodded to the familiar face in the window. “Hey, Marty,” I said, greeting the skinny teenage boy standing behind the register. I was a regular and knew all the cashiers by name.

  “Hey, Dave,” the kid replied. “How’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain, now that I’m here. You guys seem busy, huh?”

  Marty shrugged. “I think people weren’t expecting such a nice day, but when the sun came out, they decided to do the same.”

  I smiled. “Guess so. Hey, I’m getting two Chicago dogs, no fries this time.”

  “Hold the relish?”

  I nodded sagely. “Yep, you know me well.” I reached into my pocket for my wallet and pulled out my Visa card. “Some extra napkins too, please.”

  “Oh, sorry, Dave, our card reader’s down. Crapped out about an hour ago, and our repair guy’s stuck in traffic.” Marty inclined his head towards a handwritten sign on which someone had hastily scribbled cash only, sorry.

  “No problem,” I said, reaching into the bottom of my pocket. “I usually don’t have any cash, but I happen to have a few bills today.”

  “Twelve-fifty,” Marty called over the counter as he stooped to unwrap a fresh pack of napkins.

  I dug out the small wad of bills and thumbed two tens off the top. They were slightly sticky. I’d have to wash my—

  KILL.

  Again, those letters flashed by, and before I could register them, the top bill covered them up, but not entirely. A hint of red peeped out from around the edges, almost daring me to uncover the words—the words I still couldn’t quite believe I’d read.

  Before I knew it, my fists clenched of their own accord, and the backs of my eyes went hot. My mouth dried up in a flash, and my vision swam for an instant before becoming sharper and more focused, every pockmark and scratch of the counter before me outlined in precise lines. What was happening? I stumbled forward, almost landing on my kne
es in the gravel as my hands scrabbled at the edge of the counter for balance.

  I’d never been a violent person. Never gave anyone the finger who brake-checked my car on the highway. Never ran my mouth when dealing with long wait times and unhelpful customer service representatives. I couldn’t even watch medical dramas because the blood made me queasy. This feeling dredged up a memory that had been pushed into the back hallways of my mind until this very moment.

  When I was eight years old, my dad used to watch boxing on Saturday afternoons, monopolizing the living room television with his sunflower seeds and six-pack of Schlitz. I wasn’t allowed to sit and watch, but walking past the open doorway, I’d sometimes glimpse the fights on our grainy thirty-inch screen—and once, my timing was excellent.

  I caught the very end of a round. A tall, hulking boxer with battered blue gloves dodged his opponent’s jab then swung his gloved fist right into the man’s jaw. Spittle spewed from the unlucky man’s lips with an audible thunk of connection, like a steel-toe boot kicking a heavy grain sack. In that moment, my eight-year-old heart leapt with adrenaline and vicious glee, and my dad let out a crazed whoop. I’d stood in the hallway watching the slow-motion replay until the match cut to commercial, and my dad, noticing me, hollered at me to get the hell out.

  Just like the fight I’d witnessed that day, those red letters on that bill ignited my rush of rage tenfold. I clenched my eyes shut, struggling to regain my balance. I was scared to open them—scared of what I’d do. My hands were itching to crush a soft throat, or snap an arm, with their steel grip.

  “Dave, you okay?” Marty’s voice cut into my consciousness. I didn’t dare look up.

  “Yeah, give me a second,” I gasped.

  “Geez, are you having a heart attack?” Marty’s voice grew louder. “I think he’s having a heart attack.”

  I opened my eyes just the slightest millimeter and stared at the gravel beneath my feet. As I took deep breaths, willing my thumping heart to slow down, a solitary ant wove its way slowly through and over the pebbles. Before I could think, my foot shot out of its own accord, my sneaker heel stomping downward. I ground the ant into the dirt.