Bottle Full Of Scorpions
Page 18
Dill answered from somewhere off to the right. “What?”
“You in the corn?”
“Yeah. Come on in.”
Peter pushed into the giant green plants. It was even harder to see now – the big leaves slapped his face and towered so high above him that they blocked out any light from the moon or stars. It was just Peter, the dim beam from the flashlight, and the shhh shhh shhh of the corn all around him.
Peter stopped to get his bearings. He was about to call out for Dill again when a noise came from up ahead. The shhh shhh shhh of someone else moving in the corn.
“Dill?” he croaked, his throat dry.
No answer. But the corn stopped moving.
“Dill?” Peter whispered again.
There was the sound of something dropping to the ground, a series of light thumps. A gentle pressure touched Peter’s foot.
He gasped, stepped back, and shone his light on the ground.
A tomato. It must have rolled across the ground and bumped his foot.
Anger flared inside Peter where fear had once been. He picked up the tomato and forged ahead, pushing apart corn stalks.
“Dill, we’re out here to find raccoons, not pick – ”
He meant to say ‘vegetables,’ but the word stuck in his throat.
There was a man right in front of him.
He was kneeling on the ground, picking up the tomatoes and zucchinis and corn he had dropped. He was dressed all in black – black pants, black shirt, long black jacket. His head was bent, and he had on a black hat that hid his face.
A hobo.
Something smelled wrong, though. Literally. The scent of green plants was gone. Instead, the odor of burned leaves filled the air.
Peter gasped. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to – ”
He stopped speaking.
In the dim glow of the flashlight, Peter saw the hand that was picking up the last tomato. The hand was black, too.
But not African-American. Back in California, Peter had lots of friends at school who were black. Next door in his apartment building, there had lived a friendly man from Nigeria who was darker than anybody else Peter had ever seen in his life.
But even he wasn’t this dark.
Black, like ink. Like outer space, between the stars.
And the hand was too skinny for a grown man. It looked like a claw or a skeleton’s hand, but charred and cracked. Like the ashes of a log after the fire has died out. That’s when he realized the clothes and the hat weren’t black, either. Not originally.
They were burned. The man had been burned to a crisp.
He must’ve died. No human being could look like that and still be alive.
But he was moving. His arm was moving.
No no no no no no no no
The blackened claw gripped the last tomato…then paused.
The hat tilted up and the face looked into the light.
What was left of a face.
No ears, no nose, no hair.
No eyes. Just gaping holes.
It was more of a skull than a face, but black and charred. There was skin still left that covered most of the head and hid a lot of the teeth. But the skin looked like leather that somebody had roasted on a fire until it was shriveled as a burned raisin. The lips were gone, and had pulled away from the yellowed teeth in a permanent sneer.
The thing looked at Peter with its empty sockets.
Then it lunged at him.
9
Peter screamed, stumbled back through the corn, and ran fast as he could.
“DILL! DILL, GET OUT! GET OUT OF HERE!”
Dill’s voice piped up from somewhere off to the side.
“What? What is it?”
“GET OUT OF THE GARDEN! RUUUUUUUUN!”
Peter tore through the corn and into the tomatoes, flailing his arms and ripping apart the vines. His feet smushed vegetables underfoot, his head smacked into stakes. He spun around dizzily like a drowning man trying to find his way to the surface of a lake.
Behind him, he felt a tug on the bottom of his t-shirt. A tug that didn’t feel like it was snagged by a vine or a plant.
He screamed and ran faster, plowing through anything and everything in his way.
If I could only see the house again…
And then it was there, the dim lights from the windows. Safety.
Peter stumbled in the cucumbers but managed to keep upright, one foot flying in front of the other. For the first time since he started running, he looked over his shoulder.
Nothing was behind him, just the ever-receding garden patch.
Peter stopped and whirled around. “DILL!” he screamed.
Silence.
“DILLLLL!” he screamed again and prayed that he hadn’t left his friend behind to die in the clutches of a monster.
There was a giant shaking and shuddering in the tomato plants.
Peter’s heart froze in his chest.
And then Dill came tumbling out, batting away vines from his face, sputtering and spitting pieces of leaves from his lips. “Jeez, man, why’d you go and scare me like that?! I peed my pants, I was – I mean, I almost peed my pants, you scared me so bad. I think I lost my flashlight.”
Peter ran up to the edge of the garden and urged Dill forward, yet kept his eyes glued to the vines and stalks.
“Dill, I saw a hobo!”
“Really?” Dill gasped. “Did you talk to him?”
“No, he was burned to a crisp!”
Dill stopped in his tracks. His lower lip trembled. “He was…he was burned up?”
Peter grabbed Dill’s arm and pulled him over to the rose bushes. “Yeah, he didn’t have any eyes or nose or anything, and his hand was like this – ”
Peter contorted his own hand into the shape of a claw.
“ – except it looked like a branch after a fire, and his clothes were black and burned and everything.”
Dill looked into the field. “Do you…do you think I…” he whispered.
“And then it came after me!”
Dill frowned and looked at Peter. “It came after you?”
“Yeah, it chased me!”
From out of nowhere, Dill hauled off and hit Peter in the arm. “You stupid jerk!”
“OW!” Peter backed away. “Hey, what’s your problem?”
Dill was still coming, arms swinging. “I should kick your ass, making fun of me like that!”
“I’m not making it up!”
Dill stopped swinging. His chest heaved up and down as he panted. “Swear to me.”
“I swear!”
In the moonlight, it looked like Dill’s cheeks might be wet with tears. “So I…I didn’t kill anybody when I accidentally set that fire?”
Peter’s eyes widened with shock. “No, no, I don’t think so. Whatever it was, you sure didn’t kill it, cuz it came running after me.”
Both the boys gazed back at the garden. Nothing was moving within its shadows. The vines and stalks were completely still.
“Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?” Dill asked, in the same tone of voice he might say gimme a break, dude.
“I SWEAR. It came running after me. I think it grabbed my shirt.”
Dill frowned, and circled around Peter. He gasped. “Oh my gosh.”
“What? WHAT?”
Peter tried to turn to see whatever Dill was looking at. He tugged the edge of the shirt around to the front, but with the wrinkles and the nighttime darkness, he couldn’t see anything.
“Take off your shirt,” Dill whispered.
Peter yanked it off his body like it was on fire, then shone the flashlight on it. When he saw what Dill was talking about, he dropped the shirt like it was a live rattlesnake.
On the back, right where Peter had felt the tug, was the clear outline of very thin fingers, smudged in black soot.
Both boys looked back at the garden.
Nothing.
Somewhere in the forest, an owl hooted and fell silent.
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BOTTLE FULL OF SCORPIONS
Copyright 2012 John Dominick
Cover copyright 2012 John Dominick
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com (or another online retailer of ebooks) and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, used, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from John Dominick.
Edition: March 2012
PETER AND THE DEAD MEN
Copyright 2007-2012 Darren Pillsbury
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com (or another online retailer of ebooks) and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, used, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Darren Pillsbury.
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AFTERWORD