Don't Look Behind You-A Collection of Horror (Chamber of Horror Series Book 3)

by Billy Wells

  Marty slept well that night. He didn’t know if he would ever find his three missing men, but at least, he had the other five to play with. His warm, fuzzy feeling dissipated the moment he opened his eyes the next morning. He couldn’t believe it when he found only four toy men on the shelf. Midnight Monster was missing. Even though, Witch Albert was nowhere in sight, he could still feel the menacing evil of her magic in the room.

  Dressing in record time, he scurried down the stairs to the breakfast table. His father was reading the paper, and his mother was preparing waffles. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Mom. Dad. You were right about the boogeyman in my closet and the troll in the flowerbed, but this time, I know I’m right. For once, I need you to stop what you’re doing and listen.”

  Both their mouths dropped open, and his mother took a seat at the table.

  “An old woman placed a toy man on top of our gate. I think she used it as bait so she could grab me, but I stayed away from the fence like you told me. Sparky was barking so she couldn’t come into the yard. When she finally left, I picked up the toy man and added it to my collection. I was so happy. At least, I was at first. He was the coolest figure I’d ever seen, and none of my friends had him.”

  “You never mentioned this new toy to us?” his mother said, returning to the stove.

  “No, I didn’t. I felt weird about keeping something that might belong to someone else, but the old woman picked it up off the sidewalk and gave it to me. I should’ve told you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t let me keep it.”

  “I don’t understand the problem, son,” his father replied sympathetically. “I don’t think we care if you keep the toy. If someone comes along to claim it, I’m sure you can find another one just as…cool at the store for your birthday next week.”

  “The problem is since I added the new man to my collection; I find one of my original men missing every day when I get up. And Prince Albert, that’s what I named him, is getting bigger and taller each day, and he looks just like the old woman who left him on the fence in the first place.”

  “That’s quite a story for this early in the morning,” his mother replied. “I can see we’re not going to solve this now; it’s almost time for the bus. Eat a waffle, and let your father and me talk about it while you’re at school.’

  “I’m not hungry!” Marty shouted. “You don’t believe me, do you? Real life is just like in the movies; no one will believe you until it’s too late.”

  “I believe you believe what you are saying, but how could a new plastic man eat an old plastic man and change from a man into a woman in the process?” his father said, trying to hide the smile widening on his face.

  His mother added, “It’s likely you had a bad dream. Have any of your friends come for a visit? Maybe they took your men and left you a different one they didn’t want.”

  “I threw Witch Albert, that’s what I call him now, out the window of the bus into the river yesterday while we were crossing the bridge.”

  “Oh,” his mother said happily, as she buttered half a waffle. “Maybe you solved your own problem.”

  Marty stared blankly at the refrigerator and said, “Another figure was missing this morning. Somehow, Witch Albert must have come back.”

  His parents looked at each other, and his father said, “Before you leave, go to your room, and bring down the Prince or the Witch, whichever it is now, I want to take a look at it.”

  “She’s hiding somewhere in my room. I can’t find her.”

  “Maybe she’s still in the river,” his mother chirped enthusiastically.

  “No!” Marty screamed. ”She’s here, somewhere, I tell you. Midnight Monster is missing this morning, and I think Witch Albert ate him.”

  “Let’s don’t talk about the prince who became a witch now. We’ll talk tonight. I’m sure there’s a plausible explanation for all of this,” his father said, trying to look hopeful.

  Marty grabbed a waffle and hurried out the front door to catch the bus.

  Looking down at the white water below the bridge as the bus headed toward school, Marty wondered why Witch Albert had come to his house to cast her magic spell, and more importantly, what she would do after she ate all of his toy men. Would he be next?

  Mulling it all over in his mind, he suddenly realized the figure of the witch that Prince Albert had become not only reminded him of the old woman on the sidewalk, but someone else he had known long ago. The cloudy image hung in his thoughts, but he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it. The bus pulled into the parking lot, and he followed the other students inside.

  During lunch, he asked his friend, Fred, “Can you think of any kids at school who died or got hurt really bad since we started here?”

  “The only one I can think of is Margaret Long, You must remember her. She’s the one who hanged herself after her parents burned to death in a house fire. If you ever saw her, you’d never forget her face. It was like something out of a horror flick,” Fred groaned, looking at the clock on the wall.

  A fire… Margaret Long hanging herself… Each image exploded in Marty’s mind’s eye like a molten bat straight from the blackest recesses of Hell. Immediately, he remembered everything about what Fred had just said as if it had happened yesterday.

  He closed his eyes and began to search his darkest thoughts. Gruesome visions of memories that only moments ago seemed completely erased from his mind had returned with a vengeance. He saw Prince Albert’s handsome face morph into the scarred face with the bulging eyeball of the witch on the sidewalk, then, into the horror of Margaret Long’s face after the fire. The nightmare images hung suspended in the blackness behind his eyes. He remembered the suicide note that said she could not go on any longer with the hideous scars she had received in the fire.

  Fred looked at him. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “I think I did see a ghost,” Marty said in a weird stupor his friend had never seen before. The bell rang, and when Fred saw Marty’s eyes beginning to focus again, he scurried off to his next class.

  Marty had to stay with Fred for basketball practice and caught a ride home with Fred’s father. The sun was going down when he opened the gate to his house.

  He didn’t know why, but he had a bad feeling about what he would find inside.

  When Marty entered the yard, he missed Sparky’s familiar woof of hello. The motion detectors in the eaves triggered the yard lights to illuminate the area around the doghouse toward the back of the property. When he approached, he found the German shepherd lying motionless with his eyes wide open. He knew he was dead. He looked the same as the dog they had before Sparky looked after a car had run over him. Why would Margaret’s evil spirit send Witch Albert to kill his dog?

  Tears rolled down his cheeks as he realized he would never see Sparky again. The lights in the kitchen were ablaze. Should he run down to Fred’s and get his father or go directly into the house to check on his parents? He was only ten years old. What could he do if the witch was in the house? The heavy feeling of dread returned as he unlocked the front door and went in.

  “Mom! Dad! Where are you? Sparky is dead,” he shrieked, entering the kitchen.

  There was no reply. The eerie silence unnerved him.

  Passing through the laundry room, he opened the door to the garage and found the blue Buick parked inside. Where were his parents? At the neighbors’ house? He didn’t think so.

  The sound of the icemaker startled him as he headed into the foyer. The black bedrooms at the top of the stairs seemed to beckon him as he climbed one agonizing step at a time. His eyes flitted to the left and then the right as he braced for something to spring upon him from the shadows.

  Placing his hand on the railing, he found it sticky to the touch. He turned on the light and saw a trail of bloody footprints on the treads leading down from the bedroom level.

  “Mom! Dad!” he screamed as he bounded up the stairs. Reaching the landing, he saw that the trail of blood le
d to the master bedroom, and then, to his bedroom.

  “Was this really happening or was it a horrible nightmare?” He paused at the door to his parent’s bedroom, and then, pushed it open. Gasping for breath, he turned on the lights and saw bits and pieces of his Mom and Dad strewn about the blood-spattered room. He recognized his mother’s gold earring on an ear lying next to the bedpost and saw his father’s anchor tattoo on a severed forearm. Everywhere he looked, he saw more ghastly evidence that some inhuman monster had sliced and diced his parents almost beyond recognition. He fell to his knees and began to cry like he had never cried before.

  His head began to spin as flashes of memories flitted like leaves across the landscape of his mind. From out of nowhere, a picture of a large building with barred windows floated by in his mind like a phantom.

  He remembered his father asking, “Son, are you having flashbacks again?”

  “Flashbacks?” Marty thought. “What did he mean?”

  Then, his father turned to his mother, and with a worried look on his face, he asked, “You’re sure he’s still taking his medication, aren’t you?”

  “Medication? What medication?” Marty remembered saying out loud.

  A small room with padded walls flashed into view. A pink teddy bear with no eyes lay on an ugly gray floor.

  He remembered his father saying, “The doctor said he might remember the fire someday, and if he did, it could bring back his psychopathic tendencies.”

  Marty didn’t remember where he was when he heard his mother say, “Marty is fine. It’s been two years since he came home from the institution, and the doctor said his episodes would not return if he took his medication every day. Believe me, I monitor his medication right after I brush my teeth every morning, and I know with certainty, he’s never missed once since he came home from the sanitarium.”

  Marty remembered her expression of horror when she poured the pills from a vial into the palm of her hand and discovered they were not the pills the doctor had prescribed.

  It seemed like he heard his parents screaming at each other from far, far away, a long time ago.

  Then, Marty remembered his mother’s terrifying words “return to the institution for shock treatments” that rattled every fiber of his being.

  He found them in the master bedroom when he returned with the axe from the garage. His father was reading his emails on his Ipad when the first blow caught him between the neck and his shoulder blade. It was pathetic the way he begged for mercy and tried to crawl into the walk-in closet. His mother was on the toilet when he bolted in and split her head open again and again.

  Everything was so clear now. He remembered he kept chopping them into smaller and smaller pieces. That’s why he could barely raise his arm to shoot basketball with Fred.

  He remembered the blood from his soaked tee shirt swirling down the drain when he took his shower to get ready for school. The bus came right on time, just like always. It was all so clear now. He had taken another one of his toy figures with him to throw into the rapids on his way to school, just as he had done every day that week. He had no idea why he threw his men into the river, but it felt satisfying.

  He remembered Margaret’s father had slapped him when he had caused everyone to laugh at the way she stuttered when he came to pick her up at the birthday party. It was the first time anyone had struck him, and he didn’t like it. It didn’t take long to find out where they lived. When he told his parents he had burned their house down, men in white jackets took him away to live in an institution for what seemed like an eternity.

  He would rather die than go back there. He would kill anyone who tried to send him back.

  He looked at the blood, gore, pieces of bones, organs and shredded limbs strewn about the grisly chaos of the master bedroom. If only he hadn’t lost it when his mother said “shock treatments.”

  Returning to the kitchen, he severed the gas line behind the stove with the axe, placed three lit candles on the breakfast nook table, and headed toward Fred’s house at the end of the block.

  “Maybe the fire would destroy the evidence like it had in several movies he’d seen when a gas line exploded,” he thought.

  Just as he rang the doorbell at Fred’s front door, he heard the earsplitting blast. The fireball that erupted was better than any fireworks display he ever seen, and the houses next to his were leveled.

  What would happen to him now? Maybe they would give him a new set of parents. Marty smiled like a boy who had just taken candy from a baby.

  No one knew he was with Margaret when she hanged herself. With his help, of course.

  BELIEVE IT OR NOT

  Garth looked at the two-lane highway ahead of him. It was late, and he had not seen one car on this godforsaken road. He had gotten away before the police set up the roadblock. He didn’t think his cronies had been as lucky. A black leather satchel with his share of the bank heist was in the trunk. He had counted ten bundles of twenties when he had stopped for a pee at a rest stop earlier. He had at least $200,000, and he couldn’t wait to see his sister in Mobile.

  The heist had not gone as planned. One of the security guards had tried to be a hero, and Clyde, his best buddy since middle school, had to waste him. Consequently, he had graduated from small time breaking and entering capers to the big leagues in less than twenty-four hours. The most likely to succeed and the captain on the football team would now have his face on a wanted poster for robbery and murder. He wondered if Georgia had the death penalty. He had never had a reason to think of such a thing before today.

  His eyes were getting heavy from staring at the miles and miles of yellow lines splitting the black asphalt ahead of him. He had stopped for coffee, a coke, and some No-Doz at the last gas station, but he was still struggling to stay awake. He turned up the volume on the one station that kept fading in and out. As far as he could tell from his dog-eared map, he was 70 miles from the next town, and his gas gauge was below a quarter tank. He should have filled up when he pulled off the interstate to avoid the police roadblock.

  Garth rolled down the driver’s side window and stuck his head into the onrushing wind. The rusted-out ‘99 Chevy hurtled into the blackness of the lonely road at 75 miles per hour. The sheer desolation of this stretch of highway without a single car, billboard advertisement, or even an occasional broken down shanty made him feel like the last man on earth.

  When the static on the radio became louder than the music, he turned it off.

  In the light of the full moon, the clouds had the ominous look of a giant tsunami coming from the gulf toward him. He had never seen a sky so scary.

  Trying desperately to stay awake, he slowed the car and ransacked the console. He couldn’t believe it when he found an old cigar buried deep in a sea of matchbooks and out of date maps that must have been in there for years. His lighter didn’t work and neither did the first three matchbooks that looked waterlogged from another life. But, when all seemed lost, he miraculously found half a box of wooden matches in the glove compartment that did work. He placed the big fat stogie between his lips, struck a match on the dash, and lighting it, sucked in a lungful of the worst tobacco smoke money could buy five years ago. He coughed and struggled to catch his breath. He rarely smoked, but he thought the cigar would help keep him awake. After inhaling the giant cancer stick until he felt he was going to puke, he finally had to flick the ghastly thing burning his fingers out the window. He saw the sparks dance across the asphalt and skip out of sight in the rear view mirror.

  It immediately dawned on him that a reporter on the radio had just warned drivers not to toss cigarettes out the window due to the lack of rain this summer. The commentator had also reminded campers to be sure to extinguish their campfires. He remembered the old commercials when Smokey the Bear had said, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Somehow, he was okay with being a bank robber, but he didn’t want to be a firebug. As he sped into the night toward Mobile Bay, he continued looking in his rearview mirror. W
as it his imagination or did he actually see an orange glow in the blackness behind him? The last thing he wanted was to bring attention to his getaway route.

  He continued to doze off. The final warning that he should pull over came when he awoke driving in his subconscious going 15 miles an hour. The landscape was extremely flat, and there was almost nothing to hit anywhere close to the shoulder of the road, but in the distance, he saw flashing red lights and the skeleton of tall concrete pillars he thought must be Interstate 10. Worrying he might fall asleep completely and drive into one of these massive blocks of concrete; he decided to pull off the road to get some much needed shut-eye. He saw a clump of bushes and pulled behind it. The low-lying mist that blanketed the marsh along the road would also provide cover if another car ever did come along.

  He heard the wind begin to howl and saw the bushes next to the car bending over in the torrent. He closed his eyes and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

  * * *

  Hours later, the sound of a helicopter above startled him awake. It sounded alarmingly close. Then, a large, feathered object struck the center of the windshield causing it to splinter outward in all directions. The beak of a duck protruded through the glass. In a heartbeat, several more ducks bombarded the roof and the trunk of the Chevy. The impact of each blow sounded like a bowling ball striking the exterior with tremendous force. Every hundred feet or so, several more ducks hit the ground in front of the car as the sound of a troubled chopper roared above and came rapidly closer. The aircraft exploded in a ball of fire a few hundred feet to the right. He guessed the helicopter had inadvertently flown into the flock of ducks.

  In the rear view mirror, Garth was mortified to see his fear of becoming a firebug had been realized after all. A raging forest fire was devouring the terrain on both sides of the road. Turning on the ignition, the Chevy roared to life and bolted forward. The forest fire coming at him from the left and the flames from the crash to the right left only a narrow path back to the highway. Even though the wingspan of the duck in the windshield, the blood splatter, and the billowing smoke made it impossible to see anything ahead, Garth fishtailed forward where he thought the road would be. He was relieved to feel the front wheels thump back on the asphalt. In the rear view mirror, he saw two feathered bodies slide down the back window, leaving a murky trail of blood.