Festive Frights

by CW Publishing House

  “Yup. Gotta love it,” replied Mark, staring down into the water. After a moment, he added, “C’mon. Better hurry before it gets dark.”

  Walking up to the pond, Mark described the electrical generation system. Pointing to the top of the waterfall, he said, “From the top of the waterfall down there are four wheels. Whether the falls are turned down or running at maximum flow, you can’t see the wheels. If you start to draw too much power, another wheel kicks in and turns another turbine. Get more power than you need and it shuts a turbine down and sends any excess power to ground.”

  “So, am I even hooked up to the grid?”

  “A dam-builder with three creeks, hundreds of acres of water, and all this vertical fall hooked up to the grid? I don’t think so.” Mark looked down into the pond at the bottom the falls, smiling, quite pleased with himself. And then he said, “Is that a bone?”

  The whole time Mark had been talking, Jason had been staring at the bone caught on a couple of rocks where the pond water entered into one of the creeks, wondering if it was really there or not. Acting surprised, he said, “Oh my. It sure looks like it.”

  “What kind of bone do you think it is? Must have been a pretty big animal.” “It looks like a femur.”

  “You mean, it’s human?”

  “Yeah. It’s human. How much excavation did you do at the top of the falls?”

  Mark scratched his head. “Well, in order to get the falls centered behind the house, we had to run culverts over to where the upper pond is. Barely even had to disturb the soil for that. There was a natural swale where the pond is now, a few mounds of dirt and rocks there, a number of trees. So yeah, we did some digging there. Oh, shit, you don’t think…”

  “Were you on sight when the work was done?”

  Mark answered softly, “No. I had Erickson do it. I never even went up there ‘til we placed the wheels and turbines. Ya think it’s an Indian burial ground?”

  Jason watched a group of Indians walk up out of the water and off into the trees. It was obvious Mark didn’t see them, or he would have tried to brush the hair on the back of his neck down, as Jason did now. Or, mark would have just run for his life, which was exactly what Jason thought he should be doing.

  “What are we gonna do?” Mark asked.

  “What can we do? If you dug up an old graveyard, it’s not like you can put it back together. Let’s get back. May as well go see what your lights look like.”

  Before they made their way around the corner of the house, Jason could already see that the front yard was awash in light, and it wasn’t even completely dark yet. Joshua saw his father at the corner of the house and was off at a dead run, screaming, “Look, dad. Look at the lights. Aren’t they awesome?”

  Joshua pushed his father along from behind as if he couldn’t make it to the gazeebo under his own power. Kimmy met her father just before he arrived at the gazebo and helped Joshua maneuver him into place so he faced the front house.

  Jason took in the house as his eldest children asked if he liked it. He put a hand on each of their heads and said, “It’s beautiful.”

  Jen turned to Mark and saw him staring at the ground. She turned to Jason, who also had a blank stare on his face. “Mark, are you going to show him what the lights can do?” asked Jen

  “Oh. Uh, sure.”

  “What’s wrong with you two? You’re both white as a sheet. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  Mark walked to a box mounted on one side of the gazeebo. He opened it and stuck a hand inside. All the lights along the top of the house changed from deep blue to white, then yellow, green, and ended in red. Then the lights chased one another back and forth the length of the house, alternating colors. They lit up in the blue along the eves again before the color cascaded down to the ground, the upper lights going out as the ones below them lit up. The lights did the same thing for each of the four other colors. After the red finished its turn, all the lights turned red.

  Jason’s head spun as he gazed at the front of his new house. It appeared as if a huge wash of blood flowed off the edge of the roof, running down the walls to the ground.

  Joshua tugged at his dad’s arm as he stared at the house. “Cool, huh, dad?”

  Jason shook himself from his daze and looked down at his son. “Very cool, Josh.” Then, almost in a whisper, he said again, “Very cool.”

  Jen walked over to her husband and asked again, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Just exhausted, honey. You guys enjoy the heat lamps and the tree and the lights. I’m going to turn in before I fall over.” He walked off without another word.

  Jen caught up to him and said, “You’ve never even been in the house before. Let me show you where our room is. You really must be tired walking off into a house of this size with no idea where you’re going.” As she reached for the door latch, an Indian dressed in chieftain finery walked through the closed door and then through Jason.

  Jen pointed to her left and said, “Up the left staircase at the end of the hall. Your clothes are in the walk-in on the right.”

  Jason trudged off to the stairs without a word or even a look at his wife or the magnificent foyer as he crossed it. He entered the bedroom and made a beeline for the bed, falling face-first into the lavish down comforter.

  It seemed like only minutes before Jason awoke to a high-pitched scream. He sat bolt upright in bed as the sound of his wife’s scream of “Kimmy…no!” sent him flying out of the bed towards the bedroom door.

  Still fully dressed, Jason took the sweeping staircase three steps at a time. As he ran across the foyer, the screams continued. Jason burst through the front door, across the porch, and down the steps into the drive. He looked at the great fir tree. All the ornaments were human skulls, their empty eye sockets glowing red from the tree’s lights. Other assorted human bones hung precariously from the tree’s branches. Jason heard pounding hooves and turned to see a skinned bison heading right for him. He had no time to react. The bison spun Jason around as it charged past, leaving him staring back at the house. The red lights that earlier had made him think of blood were now literally streams of blood, overflowing from the rain gutters and running down the walls of the house. The strings of lights whipped about in the air as if in a tornado. One of the strings caught him in the neck, drawing blood.

  His eldest daughter’s screams turned him back toward the fir tree. He looked on in horror as strings of Christmas lights wrapped themselves around her ankles and arms, dragging her through the presents and under the tree. He saw his wife standing off to the side. Her head was a present wrapped in bright gold paper with a green bow on top. Her box head tilted back as if she were looking to the top of the tree. She screamed, “Joshua,” over and over again.

  Jason looked up in the tree to find his son hanging from one of the upper branches, his neck tied tightly to the branch with a string of lights. He didn’t move. He looked like a devil, the lights coloring his face and bulging eyes red.

  A shrill scream came from his left. As he turned, he saw a string of lights whipping through the night sky, headed for the daughter he barely knew. It whipped right through her neck, severing it from her head. The string of lights swished back towards little Angie, picking up her head and flying it up to the top of the tree. Jason watched as the string of lights knocked off the angel perched there with his precious daughter’s head before placing it where the angel had only a second before sat watching the horror.

  Jason was shaken from behind, he guessed by one of the angry Indians.

  “Jason. Jason.”

  He spun around, flailing his arms and screaming.

  “Whoa there, big fella. You must have been dreaming. C’mon, get up. The kids are out under the tree. I don’t think I can make them wait any longer.”

  About Robert Mackey

  Robert Mackey, born 1961, (I’ll do the math for you here. That makes him just under fifty-five years old. No, fifty-four. On second thought, work it out for yours
elf.) Robert, a retired construction worker, currently lives in the megalopolis of Addy, Washington. He lives there with his wife Janice and teenage son, who commands a whopping two-sentence vocabulary consisting of “Huh?” and “I don’t know”. Robert decided to try his hand at writing after reading the Hunger Games series and wondering if it was humanly possible to write MG/YA novels which contain no murder, sex, or profanity. He is happy to say, “I’ve done it! Repetitively! Now if he could just find someone who cared!”

  Derailed Christmas

  By Sharon Flood

  I was born in 1933 to Verna and Gerome Hallet. Dad worked at a factory, making wooden shipping pallets were used to ship heavy equipment by rail. I was only three when my dad was killed in an industrial accident. He was operating a crane, lifting a ton of pallets into the hold of a ship. Somehow, the crane turned around and dumped its entire load on my dad in the cab. There wasn't enough left of him to scrape off the pier. I suspect Milton had something to do with it, but it was never investigated.

  My dad's boss, Anthony Milton, was a real piece of work. At the time, he was the yard foreman in charge of the heavy equipment operators, and he rode my dad hard. It was 1936 during the Great Depression, and my dad was lucky to have a job at all, so he put up with it. It must have been awful for him. Milton flirted with Mom when she picked Dad up from work, and he didn't dare complain to anybody. When Dad died, that scumbag had the gall to ask Mom to come work for him as his secretary—right at Dad's funeral. There was no such thing as worker's compensation then, so Milton knew that Mom had to work just to survive and feed me.

  She went to work for him, and the services she provided to keep her job were beyond what her training manual called for. Within two months, she was pregnant. He married her, not because he loved her, but because he was short, fat, fifty, and bald; and she was only twenty-three and really pretty. He knew he would never get her any other way than through desperation. He also worried about who would inherit his sizable fortune, and didn't want his sister to get it all. He despised her, because she had always been their dad's favorite. I think he beat me regularly because his father beat him. Maybe he deserved it, but I know I sure didn't.

  My half-brother, Joey Milton, was born later in the same year—1936. His father doted on the little brat, but he hated me. The man was violent, hateful, and kind of nutso. I made the mistake of trying to calling him Daddy the summer I was five. He was fat and slow, but strong. He came at me with both hands clenched like sledgehammers. This was my earliest memory, because my constant nightmares would never let me forget it.

  “You're not my son, and you never will be,” he screamed at me. “If you ever call me Daddy again, I'll kill you. You'll call me Mr. Milton or Sir, and that's all.”

  He grabbed me as I tried to run away and he smashed my right leg over his bent knee. It snapped like a twig. I could feel the crack all the way up to my groin. The bone stuck out through the skin of my lower leg. Mom came running into the living room when she heard all the screaming and yelling. She had been frying bacon, and brought the iron skillet with her without thinking because it was already in her hand.

  “You bastard. You rotten, crazy, rat bastard!” she screeched, and launched the skillet at his head with all her might.

  Bacon and grease flew everywhere, but most of it went on the right side of his face and the big bald spot on the top of his head. His caterwauling matched mine in sheer volume. Like all bullies, he was a coward when someone fought back. She ran to the phone, cranked the handle, and waited for the operator to answer her call.

  “Hazel, I need the police and an ambulance at my place immediately!” she screamed into the receiver.

  Hazel Dean, the telephone operator in our area, lived only three doors down and she knew Mom well, so there was no need to give an address. Besides that, Anthony Milton was a big shot in the pallet factory by that time in 1938, so everybody knew him. He was the boss of a lot of the men who lived around there. Mom wrapped me up in a blanket and put me on the front porch swing, in full view of the neighbors. to wait for the ambulance. She went upstairs to get Joey out of his crib. He was only two at the time. Milton ran to the bathroom downstairs to soak bath towels in cold water, but when he saw Mom come down the stairs with Joey, he ran out to the stairway to stop her. His face was raw, blistered and peeling, so the towels were only wrapped loosely around his head. Blood and scalded skin oozed from third degree grease burns on his face. He was a screamin', blasphemin' freak show!

  “Where in hell do you think you're going with my son, you bitch?” he yelled. He tried to grab Joey out of Mom's arms, so by then my brother was screaming too. Mom held him close and ran out the front door, just as the police ran in.

  “Stop her. She's kidnapping my son. She tried to kill me,” Milton yelled.

  The two uniformed cops blocked Milton's way as he tried to stop Mom. Jack Howell and Stephen Butcher walked the beat in our upscale, rather well-to-do neighborhood, and they knew all about Anthony Milton's abusive behavior. Still, their hands were tied. They could do nothing unless Mom pressed charges. She was too scared of him to do anything until he tried to cripple me—then she went into action full-force. The ambulance had arrived at that point. They took Mom and Joey with me to the hospital, where she called my Aunt Nancy and Uncle Mark, who lived two hundred miles away. By the time they got there, I'd had surgery to put the bone back where it belonged and had a cast put on my leg.

  My step-father was in another treatment room down the hall. Jack Howell took Mom's statement while Stephen Butcher questioned Milton. He lied through his teeth about all of it, but they didn't believe Mom had done the damage to my leg. Jack bought me a big lollipop from the candy store across the street to take my mind off how much I hurt. Between the bouts of slurpy noises I made while eating it, he got the entire story from me. I instinctively knew that this was how a Daddy should treat their kid. I'd never known anything but Milton's abuse within recent memory, but when Jack was so kind to me and actually believed me, I knew not all fathers were rotten-egg-sucking pricks.

  Aunt Nancy took Mom and Joey and me back to the house to pack up as much as they could, and Milton was taken to the police station to be charged for child abuse. He got off with only a month in the infirmary at the prison, because his horrendous burns were considered punishment enough, I guess. He didn't serve any real jail time.

  We were long-gone to live with Aunt Nancy by then. Milton tried to get custody of Joey, but his child abuse charge kept that from happening. He wanted his son, and he was willing to do anything to get him back, so he promised Mom he'd stop the abuse. The three of us were a burden to Aunt Nancy. We went back home a year after Mom left Milton, but we lived under an uneasy truce. The beatings stopped, but he still punished me in sneaky emotional ways that didn't leave any visible scars. When I started school, I was sent wearing the cheapest hand-me-down clothes with not enough school supplies, so I would feel embarrassed and inferior to other kids. It worked too, for a while, but eventually it backfired. People knew he was rich, so they started calling him cheap, Scrooge, skinflint. It humiliated him. He gave Mom money for what I needed.

  There were other ways he made me feel unloved, unwanted, and substandard in every way to his precious Joey. He rationed my food. He took cake off my plate and gave it to Joey. The kid was a little pig as well as a little puke. Christmases were the worst. Milton paid for my new clothes, but Mom wasn't allowed to wrap them and put them under the tree because he didn't want me to have a real Christmas. Mom tried using the household money to get me a few small presents, so he took that away from her, too. He just doled out enough for food. The man was pure rotten. If he couldn't hurt Mom and me physically for fear of going to jail, he was going to make us slaves to his money.

  Milton was pathologically protective of his son. Other kids wouldn't play with him because he punched them and broke their toys. It didn't help that he was pudgy and mean-looking. A neighbor kid named Arthur called Joey an ugly fatso, and Joe
y went whining to Milton. The next day, Arthur's beloved collie was found tied to his back yard fence—disemboweled, its intestines cascading down to the ground like link sausage. There was blood everywhere. It dripped off the white wooden fence like red paint and pooled into a small lake in the grass. Arthur was devastated.

  His dad talked to some other men about it around the wood stove in the general store when Milton mumbled that the kid shouldn't have gone around calling little kids names. The men were stunned. They suddenly understood why the dog had been killed, but they couldn't prove anything. My life at home was bad enough, but then I was shunned at school and in the neighborhood because I lived in the same house as the local dog-killer. No wonder Joey was sick in the head.

  When Joey was five, I caught him putting a baby kitten into the toilet bowl of the big bathroom downstairs. He was just as cruel as his father.

  “What are you doing, Joey?” I asked him.

  “Nuthin’.” He grinned in an evil way that gave me the creeps. I reached in to rescue the poor, mewling little thing, and he flushed the toilet.

  “You little monster!” I yelled and slapped him upside the head. He screamed his head off, and Milton came running. Joey told him that I slapped him because he was trying to save the kitten when I flushed it.

  Milton's body went rigid and his blood pressure spiked. His face turned an intense, purplish-plum color. His cheeks puffed out like he was trying to blow a bugle. His obese body trembling with fury, he picked me up by the upper arms. His big meaty hands squeezed my skinny arms so hard I was terrified he was going to break my bones again. He shook me like a Doberman pincer with a rag doll. I could feel my right shoulder dislocate.