The Marauder: Episode One

by Sean M. Hogan

  “Well, I think you should do it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Follow your feathered admirer into the basement. Why not? It could be fun. Imagine all the dark sinister secrets this old pervert could be hiding down there.”

  “Like what, laundry detergent?”

  “I don’t know...” Sarah grinned devilishly. “Maybe there’s the corpse of his dead wife buried down there.”

  The thought filled Sharon with unease. Not the prospect of finding dead bodies as much as the idea the crow might mean her harm. Strange, the thought hadn’t entered her mind until just then. Her encounter with the crow was fading like a dream, slowly slipping into the sea of distant memories. Each time her mind wandered to another subject, she lost a bit more. Soon returning would be all but impossible.

  “Can’t you hear her screams, Sharon?” Sarah raked her long punk-green nails, which matched her spiky blonde hair in attitude, across her keyboard. “Her scratches as she tries to claw through her coffin? Help me Sharon. Don’t leave me!”

  “Maybe I’m just imagining things.” Sharing her experience with the crow with Sarah was stupid in hindsight. Sarah couldn’t take her own funeral seriously.

  “Maybe you’re just scared.” Sarah hollered like a banshee.

  “Right... Or maybe I’m just crazy. My principal certainly thinks so. She even suggested therapy.”

  “You do have that habit of blacking out and waking up with someone else’s blood on your hands, now and then.” Sarah grinned like the Cheshire Cat.

  “Har, har.” Sharon fell back against her pillow. “My mother is the one who needs therapy.”

  Sarah frowned. “She still not past that first stage of grief?”

  “Not even close.” Sharon shifted her gaze over to her bedroom door. Mother should be asleep by now. Good. I don’t have to worry about her coming in for another talk. “She still thinks he’s gonna stroll in one day through the front door. As if we’d all go back to being one happy family, even if he did.”

  Sharon wished Sarah a goodnight and closed her laptop. She fell back against her pillow with a sigh. Some things, once broken, can never be put back together, even with the strongest glue.

  The day her father left, she lost much more than just a parent. She lost who she was supposed to be. No, he stole it from her. The girl she was. The woman she was meant to grow into. Her very identity robbed. Scientists have studied lab mice and how they raise their young, measured the success rates of mothered mice. Those cubs that were un-licked, uncared-for, and unloved turned into timid adults. Anxiety prone, weak, and sickly creatures that made less love and died short, sad lives. A life sentence spent cowering in the farthest corner of the cage. That was the fate he left her to. After he was gone she simply grew quiet, folded in on herself, and became adrift in an endless sea of terrible self-loathing thoughts.

  The reason why people throw things away is because they no longer hold any value. They become worthless and are soon discarded. “Why can’t you understand this, Mom?” she whispered silently to herself. “Why couldn’t you just accept the truth? We were trash in his eyes.”

  She curled up under the covers, too tired to form any more thoughts. Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier until she finally drifted off.

  ***

  Sharon opened her eyes. The black button eyes of her blue teddy bear stared back. But the bear wasn’t back on her bed. The bear was floating, bobbing up and down at her eye level. Sharon shot up, mortified. Her room was filled with water. No. She looked around. She was no longer in her room. She was adrift at sea, her bed swaying with the currents of the oily black water. She grabbed the sides of her bed, holding on with a vice grip. At the foot of her bed, the oil bubbled. Two blood-red basement cellar doors rose to greet her. Sharon gazed back with the stillness and rising terror of a rabbit caught in a wolf’s stare. The doors swung open with a hurricane’s force, revealing pure darkness within.

  Sharon peered into the void, motionless, breathless.

  Without warning, the entire sea tilted to one side, letting gravity take over as the black water poured into the entrance. Sharon panicked, plunging her hands into the oil and paddling with desperation through the thick muck. A hopeless endeavor. Her bed swept with the racing flow into the void. Sharon flung her arms over her face and screamed. She passed between the blood-red doors. Her scream muffled as the darkness devoured her.

  (You can find the rest of this book on A*M*A*Z*O*N)

  Still hungry for more stories? Why not check out my new book, A Halloween Carol!

  A Christmas classic with a Halloween twist!

  A Halloween Carol is an electrifyingly creepy and hilarious tale guaranteed to haunt and delight young readers for many spooky seasons to come!

  Fourteen-year-old Zach Hall begins the Halloween holiday with his patented miserly contempt. Even the sudden appearance of a zombie named Kevin and a little witch named Alice, his new friendly neighbors, can’t break him from his funk. That is, until Zach meets a magical scarecrow and makes his wish on the jack-o’-lantern.

  Now the three great Timeless Spirits of All Hallows’ Eve—a smooth talking devil, a witch with crocodile eyes, and a ghastly masked phantom—will take him on a soul-searching adventure through time and space, past and future. A journey that will reveal hard truths the young scrooge-in-training is reluctant to face.

  To save the holiday he despises most, Zach must open his heart to undo years of bitter stubbornness and discover the loophole to his ill-made wish on the jack-o’-lantern. Or else, an eight-foot-tall slime monster named Bobby will swallow his new friends and family whole.

  A Halloween Carol

  Sean M. Hogan

  Chapter One

  Private Collection

  Mr. Wilkins ran as fast as his hundred-dollar loafers could carry his 240-pound self. He should have listened to his wife Lenoir and gone on that diet and kept his New Year’s resolution. He would have been faster down those stairs, quicker on those hallway turns. Too bad he wasn’t, too bad Bobby was gaining.

  Bobby was far more menacing than your traditional things that go bump in the night. Most could be avoided if you followed the rules. Don’t fall asleep and Freddy can’t get you, don’t mess with Indian burial grounds or creepy summer camps and hockey masked psychos won’t bother you. Don’t go out on full moons, don’t get bitten, and definitely don’t feed it after midnight and you’ll make it out alive. Not so with Bobby, he didn’t have rules or limitations. If Bobby wants you he finds you, and Bobby’s good at finding things.

  The doorknob wouldn’t twist all the way; the door wouldn’t budge. So, Mr. Wilkins tried another and then another. All locked. School was out for the night. As Mr. Wilkins cursed his own misfortune he remembered something important. Bathrooms don’t have things like locks. He bolted into the girls’ bathroom and into the last stall. He shut the door, sat down, and waited. He waited and listened for Bobby.

  An eerie quiet filled that bathroom, the kind of quiet where there’s a buzzing noise in your ear and, for a moment, you’re not sure whether you’ve just gone deaf or not. Mr. Wilkins hoisted himself onto the toilet and crouched into as round a ball as he could manage. He pulled out his cell phone, flipped open the screen, and dialed the numbers 9-1-1. He placed the phone to his ear and whispered, “Please help me… someone’s… something’s after me.”

  “You’re a funny man, Mr. Wilkins,” said the voice on the other line. “What makes you think you can hide from Bobby?”

  “Who… is… this?” asked Mr. Wilkins in a cold shudder.

  “You’re also a bad teacher, Mr. Wilkins, smoking on school grounds. Bobby knows what to do with bad teachers.”

  The phone gargled and gulped as Mr. Wilkins felt something warm and sticky touch his ear. He pulled the phone away to find green liquid slime squeezing through the tiny speaker holes like playdough. He threw the phone into the toilet and flushed it down. He waited for the clear water to come b
ack up, but only green swampy gunk came back to greet him. Little by little it rose until the slime flowed over the edge, bubbling slightly at first, then faster like a boiling pot of chili.

  Mr. Wilkins pressed his back to the door and stared with unwavering eyes as five fingers poked out from the slime. Only they were much too long to be fingers, more like king crab legs, wielding the same hard and warty skin. Soon a complete hand emerged from the toilet, the slime tugging and pulling along like spider webbing. The whole arm dwarfed him, casting him in gloom. The shadows of the fingers danced and slithered like snakes and noodles over his terror inflicted face.

  An eye formed then a set of misshaped teeth, not one matching the other, each tooth unique and horridly special in its own sinister way. At last a face peered back at Mr. Wilkins, a deformed, lopsided, uneven grinning face with sheets of hard warty skin wrapped around it to keep it solid.

  “Bobby can fit through any hole. Bobby can squeeze through any crack,” said the uneven face. “Bobby knows how!”

  Mr. Wilkins ran out the bathroom and down the hall. He didn’t stop till he found himself in the middle of the gymnasium. The darkness had swallowed him up and he could barely see his own hands, but he didn’t need to see to realize he was cornered. Only one way out, the way he came in.

  He could feel the air behind him change, becoming thicker and soupier in nature and malevolent in taste, the sensation crawling up his spine like hungry spiders and scorpions. He knew Bobby was behind him, he was never more certain of anything in his life.

  Bobby smiled as he pulled his ribs apart to show his insides, only they weren’t insides as much as they were people wrapped in slime and bound with guts and intestines. They were keepsakes of Bobby, now a part of his growing collection.

  The slime-covered victims moaned as they grabbed at Mr. Wilkins’ shirt, ripping and pulling him in. He tried his best to cling to Bobby’s ribs, but they were far too slippery. When his cheek pressed against Bobby’s beating heart, he let out a shrieking howl before choking on Bobby’s bodily fluids.

  The light faded as Bobby clamped his ribs shut with a loud crackling crunch, a sound akin to a lobster’s shell cracking under the force of a butter knife.

  Chapter Two

  One Zombie and One Witch

  The morning air carried with it a tinge of Jack Frost’s patented spitefulness, the leaves were stained orange and yellow, the sky formed into a cloudy mess of anti-therapeutic gray, and the flavor of the wind that of hot ash and BBQ meats. Children’s laughter rang out from street corner to street corner, shadows of plastic webbing crept past every lawn, polished black spiders hung down each branch of each tree, and sunken pumpkins with sliced up faces and specialized glares filled each step of each front door. Today was the day for tricksters and pranksters, for treats and delights. Today was Halloween and no other day infuriated Zach Hall more.

  He tried his best to fog up the car glass window with a warthog’s puff, but to no use. He could see them, laughing, joking, skipping, running, dancing, and worst of all trick-or-treating—at eleven in the morning no less. What kind of town is this, he thought, have they no decency, no pride, or sense of self-worth? Fools dressing up like fools, acting like fools, impersonating fools, a town of fools for fools, a town that needed to grow up.

  Zach Hall was fourteen and, worst of all, serious.

  “We’re almost there, sport,” said Zach’s father Mr. Hall, “You excited?” He glanced back from the driver’s seat.

  Zach stared back, unflinching. “No,” he replied.

  “Ah, where’s your sense of adventure?” asked Mr. Hall.

  “The same place as his sense of humor,” answered his annoying big sister, Jill, “buried three miles under the sea.”

  She smiled back at Zach, a smile so big you’d think she had just finished a knockout performance of her own little comedy tour. It took every bit of Zach’s willpower not to throw her out of the car window these past six hours. He wasn’t sure he could make it to seven.

  Even though Jill was only two years older than him, Zach still couldn’t understand her. She might as well had spoken Egyptian and been a native of the planet Crouton. She’s a walking contradiction, Zach thought. She hated sticking out yet dressed in all black and wore the strangest piercings and jewelry. Her hair was some random color every two weeks or so—Zach was lucky if he remembered to brush his short and stubby blond hair that often. Everything he liked she hated and everything she liked made Zach want to vomit. They were the worst of friends, the best of enemies. They were unfortunately, tragically, ironically siblings.

  “Well, I’m excited. New house, new back yard, new neighbors,” said Mr. Hall as he stuck his nose out his car window and snorted a huge heap of air. “Smell that? That’s new life smell. Like a new pair of shoes.”

  “You’re not a dog, Dad,” said Jill as she covered her face in embarrassment. “People are staring.”

  And indeed, they were. One kid even pointed.

  Mr. Hall drove past a festively orange and black pumpkin shaped sign that read: Welcome to Crestwood, third safest town in America, population 856. There was a seven above the number six but it was crossed out with a green painted X.

  “Correction, 859,” said Mr. Hall with a prideful smile.

  “Third safest, so in other words this place is boring?” Zach mumbled as he glanced up from his comic book about solar powered superheroes and slimy coated villains.

  “I’m sure there’s lots of fun to be had here, sport,” said Mr. Hall. “Just use your imagination.”

  Zach didn’t have one of those.

  “We could all go bowling tonight,” suggested Mr. Hall.

  “On Halloween night?” protested Jill.

  “That’s right!” said Mr. Hall. “I almost forgot. It’s Halloween.”

  Jill planted her face into her hands again. “Yes, because people dress up in silly costumes and beg for candy every Friday.”

  “Hey, you guys want to go trick-or-treating tonight?” asked Mr. Hall.

  “Not a chance,” they both replied.

  The first thing they ever agreed on, probably the last too. Jill was at the age when she hated being seen with her father in public yet still needed things like rides and cash. Compromises were a necessary evil in her world. Zach, on the other hand, just hated pretending. People are always pretending, he surmised, lying with a smile. They were plastered on every billboard and on every television screen, not an honest smile among the sea of manipulation. The world had enough fake smiles as it is. It didn’t require his. Even his mother had that same fake smile on the day she left, which was the last day Zach smiled back. Halloween is every day, people just don’t know it.

  The car slid into the driveway and Mr. Hall eagerly stepped out to greet his new castle. It was a quaint little house, only a slightly different model from the rest of the homes on the block. No better, no worse. The charcoal red roof shingles were the best part because of the state-of-the-art solar panels that were woven in between each little shingle. Mr. Hall surmised they would save him thousands on energy expenses in the years to come. They would break in December.

  “I get dibs on the room next to the bathroom,” said Jill, bailing out the car door.

  Zach just sat and waited. Soon he would have to unpack and lift heavy things upstairs. He wasn’t looking forward to that. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had looked forward to anything in particular. Best to stay put for now.

  He gave a melancholy stare out his window. A zombie stared back.

  “Got any fresh brains?” asked the zombie.

  Zach didn’t reply, he just looked away. Best to avoid eye contact. He just might catch the hint and walk away. He didn’t.

  “Where’s your costume, stranger?” asked the zombie with a cowboy accent.

  “I don’t have a costume,” replied Zach.

  “But it’s—”

  Zach cut the zombie off. “I know what
day it is. I just don’t believe in holidays. It’s not my thing.”

  “Mormon?” asked the zombie. “My cousin in Nevada is Mormon. He’s not allowed to drink soda and coffee. I’m just not allowed to drink coffee… not after last time.”

  The last time the zombie, when he was still among the living that is, had coffee was Christmas Eve. His uncle Rob had given him a cup to celebrate his passage into manhood. He didn’t sleep for three days, dug a seven-foot hole in the front yard, and declared war on all bees and wasps. He was hospitalized after being stung over a hundred times.

  “I’m not Mormon,” insisted Zach. “I just don’t like dressing up like some kind of fool.” With that he stepped out the opposite side door and onto the driveway.

  “Oh yeah, well, I refuse to substitute your limited and highly subjective reality for my own conscious and subconscious perception of identity,” said the zombie, quite proudly at that.

  Zach stared back like he had just seen a cow with a rocket strapped to its back launch into space.

  “Sorry, Kevin can’t help it, our mom makes us listen to self-help audio books,” said a little girl’s voice.

  Zach looked down to find not one but two interlopers standing before him. One zombie and one witch. Correction. One small witch, so small in fact that Zach hadn’t seen her next to her fourteen-year-old brother, Kevin, whom she was standing by the whole time. Her name was Alice and she was twelve. In one hand, Alice carried a black handled broom with hot pink colored straw sticking out and, in her other hand, she held a book of spells she bought off the internet for 20 dollars. Its previous owner was a witch doctor from Venezuela who reportedly used it to raise the dead and exorcise demons. Alice was the only one who bid on it.