The thing gargled a breath and took a step closer. “Never answer a question with a question, boy. What do you think is causing it?”
Unconsciously, my hand came up to the rough red spot and rubbed absently. “I have an idea but I don’t know for sure. Maybe you caused it. Now who the fuck are you?”
I heard a clicking creaking sound, like a giant mandible trying to work. “I am the blue demon. The unholy god of sapphire. The azure antichrist. I am sent to devour your world and to shit you out. I am death come to you and also to her.” It moved into the pale glow of the moonlight through the bedroom window. I saw the two heads and the four arms. I saw the hazy blue aura surrounding and encompassing its disfigured, grotesque form. Black bile ran freely from any and all of its many orifices. Decomposing flesh falling from its hideous face in clumps. It reached the bed and placed a hand on the blanket. “This is the last time I shall speak to you. The next visitation…brings death to you both.” It slowly backed away from the bed and toward the wall. As its back pressed to the wall, it abruptly dissolved into nothingness. The room was again still and quiet. We were again alone together.
The last day we were together was the next morning. I knew as I got up from bed something was off. I sat up in bed after waking and slowly rubbed my eyes, yawning, so I didn’t notice at first. As I swung my legs out of bed and stood slowly, it hit me. Why the fuck am I in my own room? Did I sleep walk back in here last night? Where is mom? I looked down at me and I was dressed in a ratty old tee shirt and boxers that were sadly just a tad damp and smelling of urine. I slid them off and kicked them into a corner of apparently many others I had done likewise with. I slid on another pair and gave a disdainful look at the pile of dirty boxers as I walked out of my room. I got to mom’s room and the door was closed. Was the fuck-fest 3000 over then? I knocked. No answer. I slowly opened the door. “Mom?” I whispered. She didn’t stir. So, I figured I’d let her sleep off whatever she was sleeping off and I’d go get breakfast started. The clock on the wall in the kitchen said it was well past ten. That didn’t surprise me much with the late-night dream sequence and what she and I had been up to last night. I walked to the fridge, gave a cursory glance at the dry erase board then opened the fridge. The second my fingers fell upon the carton of eggs, time froze. My breathing grew heavy and uneven. My heart beat was a thundering herd of bulls stampeding the gate. Something had caught my eye. Some new shit. It was sinking in slowly and hitting me like a Mack truck. But, no. It couldn’t be that I saw what the fuck my mind says I just saw. No fucking way. I refuse it. Slowly my hand came off of the carton of eggs and staring down, I closed the fridge, knowing in the back of my mind just how royally fucked I really was.
Slowly and full to the brim with panic, my eyes made their way back up to the dry erase board. The message was written in blue with blue squiggles colored all around it. The message said: “Honey baby, your doctor called and is worried that you have stopped taking your meds. I hope this is not true. You get…funny…when you do. Please remember to take your meds this morning. Love, Mom.” I looked slowly down at the counter. The pills—vitamins—were also a medium shade of blue and there were four or five dozen lying there. The words on the dry erase board looked as if they’d been written a decade ago. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Inhale…hold…exhale. I opened them and glanced around at my surroundings. The house was in a complete and utter state of disarray. Clothes and books and unfinished meals scattered from hell to breakfast. Mud tracked in in all directions. Broken pictures that once hung on the walls were shattered and scattered all about. Holes—about the size of a fist—were popped in the drywall all up and down the hall and up the stairs. There were broken windows in the living room overlooking the woods out back. I looked out the front windows at mom’s SUV. I couldn’t tell from my vantage point, but at a guess I’d have to say she was sitting on four flats. Also, the side of the car facing the house had what appeared to be a rather large and long key scrape in the paint job. What the fuck…? just kept running through my head with each new discovery.
I walked to the foot of the stairs. “Mom!” I called up. “Can you get up and come down here?” No response, no creak in the floor boards. Out cold. I needed to wake her up but first, I had to go to my room. I wasn’t sure what was drawing me there but I had to get there quick. I bounded up the steps, taking them two at a time. At the top, I slowed to a near crawling pace as I approached my bedroom door. Things were starting to come slowly back to me but not nearly in time. Each new thing was a sudden heart attack, shock that I could have died from over a thousand times. The picture on my nightstand was the first thing that caught my eye. It was my favorite picture of Sarah in a sexy little goth dress. But what the unholy fuck was this shit? The girl in the photo wasn’t Sarah! She was enormous and had flat pancake tits and those sunken-in meth cheeks. She did not have on a sexy little goth dress but a gross, torn up second-hand moo-moo! The half of her teeth still in her mouth were revealed in the smile in this photo to be black and in desperate condition. Sarah was gone, replaced by this meth addict trailer trash ghoul! Something was wrong here! Someone fucked up somewhere down the road. I wanted my mom. One more thing and then I’d go wake her up.
I crossed the room looking at my feet the whole way. When I stood in front of the mirror, I looked up. I was a disease! Skinny as a crackhead, stringy greasy hair itching and crawling with lice (I assumed from the constant itching), missing many teeth myself, severely acned face, seriously bloodshot eyes and to add insult to injury—a huge patch of herpes on my upper lip! I slumped down on my bed. I was gross. I wanted to curl up right then and there and die. All the time Mom and I had been carrying on like I was this handsome young man. Was she fucking blind? Did she just like my huge…oh fuck no! I sprang up off the bed and ran to the mirror, ripping my clothes off. I stood, pock marked and pathetic in front of the mirror, staring at the two-inch little nub between my legs. God, no! Fuck! Did I really think I was 9+ inches long? What a fucking waste! I needed my mom to help me make sense of all of this shit! This fucking fucking bullshit! I got my clothes back on and scurried off toward her room. Reaching her door, I stopped with my hand on the knob. From beyond the closed door emanated the most foul wretched pungent stench I had ever smelled. Like something de-
I threw open the door and Mom was laying on her back in bed. The odor nearly made me throw up. It did make me extremely light-headed. I grayed out slightly as I staggered a few steps closer to the bed. Mom’s head was facing to the side slightly but I saw everything. Really saw! Her nude, drug-devastated body was a road map of cuts and burns and mutilations. Her legs were positioned apart and propped up so her vagina was exposed and in fact rigged open to a gaping state. Her clitoris was gone, looking suspiciously like it had been chewed off. One breast was likewise removed and a huge crater replaced it. Her mouth, vagina and the crater where her breast had been were all filled with drying congealing semen mixed with streaks of blood and other elements of gore. A huge, maggot-crawling shit lay otherwise motionless on her chest. Her arms and legs were lined with razor cuts and bite marks and pieces were…missing. A couple of her fingers and toes had been skinned down to the bone. Her hair in places had been pulled out in clumps and her throat had been slashed and also gaped open to allow penetration. A pounding sensation began to thump in my head. I walked around to the other side of the bed to see her face. The first thing I saw chilled my blood for the rest of my natural life. There was a ten-inch Philips head screwdriver protruding out from her forehead. I shuddered as I rubbed at the sore red circle on my own forehead. “What do you think is causing it?” the blue demon’s voice came echoing back in my mind. I saw the dead gray lips and the chewed off portion of her bottom lip—like old discarded bubblegum—stuck on the bed post. Her eyes had either been popped or deflated naturally. In either case, they were dried jellied masses sunken down into the sockets. Mom had been dead for quite some time it would seem. I sat down at the edge of her death bed and wept.
A short time later, it seemed I had dozed off…or passed out. I felt mom’s hand stroking my hair and her far-off sounding voice echoing: “Honey baby…don’t let it catch you sleeping…wake up…” My eyes popped open and the thunder and lightning outside brought me fully awake and straight up to my feet. I looked around frantically. It was dark outside, other than the lightning. The whole day had passed with me laying asleep at the feet of my dead mother’s raped and mutilated corpse. A boom sounded outside, not thunder but closer. Like a tree limb hitting the house. A few seconds went by and another boom. I began to freak the fuck out.
I didn’t know what to do. I was scared and lost and ashamed and alone and all I really wanted was my mom. My momma. My mommy. What the fuck had caused all of this? My pills? Did I flip out and… A faint echo of a glimmer of a memory came back. The sound in my memory of a knock at the door. I got up off of mom’s bed and made my way to the stairs. The sound of a knock at the door in my memory and then…and then…I opened the door, I thought slowly, because Mom was at work and I was off that day. I staggered down the stairs as the booming sound outside grew louder. I opened the door and dad, aka “the sperm donor,” stood outside asking if he could come in…I reached the main floor. An enormous tree limb had busted through what remained of the bay window in the living room. “What the fuck do you want?” I had asked. He needed to talk to mom. He wanted so badly to come home. Things were falling apart where he was and life hadn’t been any good without us. I walked through the kitchen to the basement door. My hand felt its way in the dark to the door knob. The power had been knocked out by the tree limb. “We don’t want you here! You fucked us both over pretty good when you left! Why can’t you fucking just stay gone?” The tears came then. His, not mine. Never mine. “Son,” he said, “please, I love you both. I just want to talk to her. I just want the chance to make right what I fucked up so long ago. Please!” I looked to my left squinting in the gloom. A brilliant flash of lightning revealed the flashlight on the counter by the door. I snatched it up and lit up the dark. There was a struggle. I had told to him to fuck off and leave and he refused, saying it was his right to state his case. Fucking worm! I opened the basement door and wondered just how long since anyone had been down here. I began to descend the stairs. We struggled and fought around the kitchen, me trying to get him out the door and him trying to stand his ground. I saw a steak knife on the counter and clutched it. “No, son!” he squealed as I gut-stuck him. I slid it in and out, moving upward until there was a warm plop of guts on my shoes. The basement door had been open from earlier that day doing laundry and as his hold on me loosened, I watched in amazed fascination as he slowly fell backwards and down and down and thump. I got to the bottom step and rounded the corner. The deep freezer was a chest type and it glared back at me with accusation. I slowly approached it, licked my parched lips, and opened it. The mutilated remains were dismembered and frozen and dead. I let the lid fall shut.
A voice in my head whispered: “There is one more scene to remember. Think hard, boy.”
“No,” I shouted, “I don’t want to remember that! I don’t want to see it!”
He laughed coldly. “But you must.” Hesitantly, I closed my eyes. Dad is falling. In my memories, forever, he is falling. As his hands release me and he begins to fall, the kitchen door behind me opens and I turn to the intruder thinking he has somehow survived and gotten back in around and behind me. I turn quickly, the knife cutting a line through thin air as I swing it toward the figure I am now beginning to understand is my mom. Too late. The blade paints a thin red line across her throat and the world is thrown into a red frenzy of hate and agony and sorrow and loneliness. A phantom hand rests on my shoulder, but I am so spent I hardly even notice it. The voice croaks for the final time: “Now you see it, boy, why I have to take everything from you. You have to be put down now. The road has ended into a ravine. I have come. Your time ends now.” And it spoke no more. The thunder continued to crash and raise seven kinds of hell outside as the thumping and booming on the side of the house worsened. Something was outside trying like the devil to get in. I heard a loud savage growl and a section of the house over the living room collapsed into a massive mess of debris. The thunderous pounding and booming centralized at the front door.
“Third time’s the charm,” I muttered, grabbing an even larger butcher knife from the block. “Come on, you motherfucker. Let’s end this shit right now!” I threw open the front door to the sight of the two-headed, four-armed thing. It advanced on me immediately and I sprang into its clutches, stabbing and slicing and feeling its hold on me intensify. It had me. Nothing for it now. Mom was dead. The sperm donor was dead. Both by my hands. Now this thing from the bowels of hell. Fuck it! I fought harder and went into a blinding rage. I managed to stab it in one of its two heads. It squealed an ear-splitting sound that rang through the very core of me. I fell back on my ass and the world quickly and quietly swam away into the void. Darkness. Calm. Peace. Acceptance. Was I dying or just in AA? A voice flowed back up to me, leading the way back up into the light.
“He’s still alive.”
The storm was over, the neighborhood ravaged. There had been two touch downs within a four-mile radius of us. Lights were flashing, but not lightning. Too regular. Too red and blue. Police. Ambulance. Fire. I was on a stretcher, hands and legs cuffed to it on both sides. Two men were beside me in EMS uniforms talking. I blinked and saw a stretcher go past me with a police officer laying on it much too still and knew the truth. He had suffered major facial wound trauma and they were past the stage of fighting. Now, it was down to merely transportation of the deceased. Another officer was in bandages being fixed up nearby. Two heads, four arms, two men, both of them in blue. I’m so sorry, mom. I should have taken my pills. I should have been your good boy. I should have…I should have fucking been aborted. I closed my eyes and tried mentally to prepare myself for the uncertain future that lay just beyond the day for me. I slept the sleep of the dead. There have been no new nightmares.
Well, gentlemen, I believe you know the rest. This is the part of the story where you all come in. I’m here now in your care at Greenview Asylum. I’ve been a good boy, taking my meds every day, not causing any problems and trying to help where I can. There have been no more nightmares, as I said. The voices have all completely stopped. I know what has happened was horrific and I also know that I have to live with it all the rest of my days. Some of my time frames in this narrative might have been a little off, but cut me some slack. I was in a really bad place. I miss my mom more than anything else, more than freedom even. Just to wake up and see those notes she left me and feel the love in the house she had for me. The hugs and kisses. The time we’d spend watching movies and playing games together. But yeah, mostly the love. I don’t mean the sexual fantasies or the travesty that followed. The real honest motherly love that every growing boy wants and needs. There will never be another woman like her. I spend a lot of my time here in quiet remembrance and reflection on the life we had and were supposed to have and what she tried to bring to my life. I regret the things that followed more than you could ever know. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I still don’t. I just more than anything want to be a good boy. I need to be a good boy…if for no other reason than…I need to be a good boy—for my mom.
****
2
“We Got a Lizard on the Lot”
I guess I should start by introducing myself. My name is Hank Peterson. “Handsome Hank” to those who know me well enough to joke about what a train wreck I am. Calling me handsome anything is like calling a 500-pound fat man “Tiny.” The people I associate with out on the road know that I’m basically a good enough natured fellow and know that they can rib me about my appearance. Those who do not know me usually don’t fuck with me. I just have that look of a stray junkyard dog that would be better off if left unapproached. I have been told that, more often than not, I wear a scowl on my face. Hard lines and sunken cheeks from 24 ye
ars of driving the godforsaken highways of all the lower 48 hellholes we call states. Any time I have ever thought about what a shit stain my hometown of Gum Springs, Arkansas is, all I have to do is run my loads for about a month a stretch and Gum Springs starts to look like heaven on Earth. My own little thin slice of paradise. I got this beautiful singing voice from 37 years of Pall Malls and whatever other brand was on sale. I’m 51 now, been a three pack a day fellow for more years now than I can rightly recall. Picked up this enticing little habit at the ripe old age of 14. But my pa always said, “That boy ain’t good for shit, but he sure as hell ain’t no quitter. He’ll keep on and keep on, knowin’ he ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of success. Basically, he’s too dumb to give up.” Yup, that’s me. Too dumb to give up. I stand a good 6 foot 3 inches tall and I only feel at home in my cracked and worn out cowboy boots and old battered Stetson. I’m the original Old Spice man and that ain’t a bad thing. My ex-wife used to go gaga for the scent and after a dab or two, she’d attack me like a ravenous beast. We were good together, me being who and what I am and her being an aging bar beauty with cocaine and pool boy habits. We got tattooed together, ran the truck together (she even took a few turns at the wheel after I trained her and we got her a license), we even shit kicked together down at the local tavern. I’m old school, it’s not a club or any other such bullshit; it’s a pub, a bar, or a tavern. Yeah, we were good together. But my being gone from home all the time and my not too inconsiderable temper mixed together with—on more than one occasion—finding her fuck toy’s skivvies in my laundry did us in. We had what you might think of as a world war three blow up. She took a few bruises, I suffered a few cuts from a somewhat dull steak knife and that was all she wrote. Her and that younger stud bull are over in Memphis now and good fuckin’ riddance to bad shit! I can concentrate now on my Peterbilt and my bank account. The only two things that really matter in life to me now. The old lady had been sterile for as long as I ever knew her and though we gave her body a good workin’ out through the years sexually, that little factoid never changed. No children. I was torn right down the middle about that. I do have a soft spot for kiddos and would have loved to have a son to teach how to be a gear jammer, but any offspring I had with the old witch would have probably been just about as psycho as her lyin’ ass. Yup, probably for the best that all of my little swimmers died in an unmarked grave deep in her subterranean cavern. Woulda been nice though…
Individually Wrapped Horrors Page 4
