Individually Wrapped Horrors

by Eric Joel Kleinschmidt, Sr.

  That was also the moment that Villads Pedersen and Miles Deacon came rushing through the doors toward the thing. The looks on their faces were of awe and utter madness.

  “Welcome!” Miles yelled as the thing roared. “Down here! We are here to serve you, master!” Pedersen came from behind Deacon and was yelling out his agreement. The monster or demon or whatever it was stood up from the table. The first most noticeable thing was the 18-inch red cock swinging between its legs. It had sharp jagged spikes sticking out from all sides, all angles of it. It had a steady flow of a clumpy milky liquid—like melted ice cream—running like a tap. The face was a battlefield of cuts and scars and the mouth was lined with enormous sharp fangs that showed even when its mouth was closed.

  “We are the ones who released you! We helped you escape from Hell!” Pedersen yelled over the roar. The thing now stood nine or ten feet tall, at least. It seemed to have grown all at once. Considering what it was, that wasn’t all too surprising. It swung a hand back and caught Miles in the side of the head with a back-handed blow. He flew backwards through the open doors and hit hard against a wall. He was either dead or knocked out. He didn’t get up. The thing turned toward the other men, cowering together behind The Cradle and Suzette’s dead body. The demon gave out an ear-shattering roar and a pair of red, fiery wings unfurled behind him. It bellowed again and rushed the group of men. It grabbed two of the men and lifted them over its head. Squeezing the life from them, it brought them together until their heads connected and burst like over-ripened melons. The shower of blood and brains coated the thing from head to chest and its cock appeared to get bigger and harder. Pedersen ran up beside it.

  “Wait! Please! This is all being for you! Why do you do this? We are here to serve you, master!” The demon looked down at Pedersen and laughed the most monstrous sound. It picked him up easily, looked him dead in the eyes and ripped him neatly in half at the waist. A last gagging sound came from Pedersen, then he was no more. The demon inspected both halves of Pedersen, lapping its forked tongue at the bloody end of the top half, then flung them casually aside. Men had begun to flee out of the room. [Video changes from room to room to follow the men and the demon.] The demon leaps at them, busting holes in the ceiling with its horns and head. Tearing men apart, destroying rooms and walls as it goes.

  [Video from hallway shows Miles Deacon come to and grab his cell phone.]

  A few minutes later, an entourage of armed men comes running into the footage. Rapid gunfire and explosions cloud and confuse some of the following scenes. Shouting and running, screaming and men begin flung like rag dolls. The demon rages all throughout the mansion, more explosions rock the very foundation of the house. Deacon is seen pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket. He begins to read from the paper as the demon lands on the floor beside him. He looks up, visibly shaken, and continues reading. The demon goes for him, but through the large hole in the ceiling leading up a floor to the kitchen, gunfire has drawn its attention. It looks around the room. There lie the two halves of Pedersen. It picks them up and launches them like rocks at the gunman. The gunfire momentarily ceases as the assailant is struck by the body halves.

  The demon turns its attention back to Deacon, still reading from the scrap in a foreign tongue. It clamps a mighty claw around Deacon’s waist and its wings again unfurl. It begins to lift upward, carrying its wayward treasure with. Deacon struggles with the words, both due to lack of breath and with pronunciation. The demon flies upward, through ceilings and flooring, busting a large hole right through the roof of the house and up into the air just above the house. No actual footage was seen of the moment the demon had Deacon above the house, but the audio suggests that Deacon uttered the final word at the moment the demon released him. Just before a blinding explosion above the house of brilliant white and blue light lapped with blood-red flame, we see Deacon fall through the rooms and straight back down to The Dungeon the way he had come up. There was nothing more than a broken pile of bones and guts where he landed.

  When the smoke settles in the video, all is still and quiet in the house. No one left alive. The demon is nowhere in evidence, likewise with the top half of the upstairs.

  [Video cuts to Chief Duggan.]

  “We believe that the words Deacon was reading at the time of his demise was the failsafe to put the creature back that they had summoned. It’s the best we can come up with. Sergeant Obernathy will fill you in on a few more details after this briefing. Otherwise, that’s all we have for now. This is a very sensitive case and well into the realm of unbelievability so again, keep it in-house. That’s an order. Thank you and good luck to all.”

  [Video cuts to static…then off.]

  Epilogue (Dumpster)

  The lights in the conference room come on and the dazed and horrified officers look around at each other. Sergeant Obernathy stands up and walks to the front of the room. He is a tall, slender man, yet well-built and long-established with this division. He has shaved since the last time everyone saw him before his three-week vacation. He looked less than thrilled to be back. He stepped up to the podium and put his mouth to the microphone.

  “OK, so as many of you know, Chief Duggan went missing shortly after comprising this whole video documentary. We will continue to put every lead and every resource into finding him. I’ll be Acting Chief until such time as he can be found or the city determines the time has come to appoint a new replacement. We don’t know much from the video other than Deacon and Pedersen were trying to summon something. We think the demon was wrong, a tag-along that got into the mix. We think from some of the papers we found that they were angling for something higher up the food chain and got a pawn instead. I know this situation shakes many of our religious foundations to the core, but remember…above all else, we are police officers and we have a job to do. So let’s get out there and do a little investigative research and find some answers. Let’s get out there and find Chief Duggan. You are all dismissed.” The room erupts into conversations overlapping and papers rustling. Acting Chief Obernathy walks casually into his new office and closes the door. This is Duggan’s office, but his for the time being. He sits behind the desk and fires up the Mac. He opens a file with a video and clicks play.

  [Video shows Deacon mansion interior after destruction. Officers comb the scene for evidence and clues. Obernathy is standing at the side of a large puddle of black sludge. He dips a pen in and sniffs the contents on the end. He pauses mid-sniff and a strange blankness comes across his face. The tip of the pen slowly draws closer and he inserts it into his mouth. He makes a sour bitter face, but swallows the contents. A black swirling ink begins to fill his eyes as his smile grows sharp with fangs. He looks at the camera filming him and smiles even bigger. He approaches it and reaches up, at which point the camera cuts off to static.]

  Acting Chief Obernathy packs up his gear and heads home for the night. Upon arrival, he opens his fridge and pulls out a large plate covered with tinfoil. He unwraps the tinfoil and sticks the plate in the microwave. When the microwave dings, he sits at the table with a glass of red wine and has the last steak from the late Chief Duggan. He smiles and closes his eyes in delight as the juices dribble down his chin. As he swallows a particularly savory bite, he opens his eyes—which have come over inky black.

  ****

  9

  “Coin Toss—Heads”

  “The dream is always the same. I am sinking. Sinking into a swirling vortex of cold darkness. Deep waters of the mind. The stuff of nightmares. I am reaching out desperately for something to grab onto, anything to anchor me to reality. In this dream, I know it is a dream, yet I am helpless to wake up. There is no up or down, left or right. There is only the swirling vortex. I hear my brother’s voice. Vincent calls out to me. ‘Vic,’ he says. ‘Vic, follow the sound of my voice.’ I try, but there is no direction to be achieved. I fight harder, going in any direction I can move. There is nothing and no one, just the fading echoes of the voice. And just at the point wh
ere I feel like all hope is lost—like, even though I’ve had this dream on countless occasions and I know it’s always the same, I somehow know this is the time I won’t make it out—at that point, it’s almost like someone pulled the plug in the universe’s largest bathtub. I feel the downward spiraling sensation again and I know that this is going to be just like last time. The cold darkness empties me out onto a deserted beach in the middle of nowhere. The thunderously loud crashing of the waves wakes me up to the fact that I am out of the swirling nothing and on dry land again. Somewhere, nowhere. A place where I have almost come to feel safe. I know this next part of the dream isn’t like the rest. It isn’t like the helpless sensation of being nowhere and going nowhere and not having any direction. I rise up to my feet and they are there—the twelve. I don’t know who they are or what they want. They are skeletal figures clad in living robes. Robes that move and seem to be a separate entity. They sort of remind me of the Ring Wraiths in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Well, the movies anyway. They have grey bone faces with only a faint trace of flesh remaining. Their eyes glow hollow and faintly blue and seem to me at the time to be portals to somewhere else, somewhere I don’t want to be. I am haunted by these robed figures, even when fully awake. There are twelve, always twelve, and I don’t know the significance of that or even if there is one. I just have this feeling that overtakes me that they are merely messengers or story tellers, destined to forever meet wayward souls on the beach in…I don’t know…the realm of the damned? The lost? Who knows for sure. They are gathered in a semi-circle in front of me and all of those twenty-four hollow blue eyes are staring at me, into me. It feels like my soul or conscience or something is on fire. Like I have done something so heinous in my life that I can never atone for it and they are waiting for me after death. The center figure is slightly taller than the other eleven and I do feel there is some significance to that, like he’s their leader or something, because he’s always the one that steps forward while the others remain in place. He takes three steps toward me, always three, and he hold out his closed skeleton fist, knuckle side up. ‘Choose the toss,’ he commands me in a hissing growl of a voice. The first time I dreamt this, I had no idea what he meant. That is the one and only variant in the dream. After the first time I always knew. He wanted me to choose the coin toss. ‘Heads,’ I said the first time after realization struck me, and have chosen heads ever after. I know another person might occasionally choose tails just to try to mix things up a bit, but I somehow know that tails is reserved for someone else. I choose heads and the skeletal hand gives an upward flicking motion, tossing the gleaming coin high in the air. It flips over and over, up and up, hangs for a split second suspended, then falls flat on his other wrist of bone with the first hand covering it. He does this, I believe for show, for I always know the outcome. He removes his hand with the soft sound of bone grating against bone and heads it is. ‘Your path is broken and cannot be repaired,’ he hisses at me. ‘Wake and find your mistake. Find your missing link.’ I wake up in bed every time covered in sweat and screaming bloody murder. It has been four weeks of this now, every night. I can’t take it anymore.” The young man covered in tattoos of the horror-core rap group the Insane Clown Posse leans back on the couch he is sitting on and lays his head back against the wall, eyes closed. The very strait-laced psychiatrist in the chair across from him finishes writing a few notes down and relaxes his pen. He looks up at the young man and says:

  “What do you feel the dream is trying to tell you, my boy?” The young man opens his eyes, but remains lying back against the wall. To the ceiling he says:

  “When I was 24…I swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.”

  ****

  The sound of a car door opens outside. The thump thump thump from the car’s subwoofer cuts off and the sound of the door closing is followed by footsteps on gravel. Vic’s back from the concert, Jennifer thought. She sat in the living room of their mobile home reading a romance novel. She hated it when he went off to his concerts with his friends, he always came home drunk and smelling of Faygo soda. The Juggalos—as they called themselves—were this so-called family or tribe or something and they always went nuts at the shows, dumping soda all over each other and painting their faces up like demonic clowns. She knew Vic was into that stuff when they first hooked up, but now he was way into it. It never used to bother her, but after three years and some change together, she hated it. Everything about it. She felt like he had found something he loved more than her and she felt deep down that he was leaving her behind. He loved her, that was true enough, but he loved that goddamned life style, too. She felt like she was in competition with a couple of white dudes from Detroit for Christ’s sake.

  The thin, flimsy trailer door banged open and Vic came in shout-singing, “Who’s goin’ chicken huntin’? We’s goin’ chicken huntin’! Cut a mothafuckin’ chicken up!” She was on the couch and he lunged at her and landed in a drunken slump on top of her. He immediately began kissing her all over and before long she had to close the book and toss it aside. She tried to hold back a smile, but the kisses he was placing on her neck, arms, and the tops of her breasts tickled and she began to giggle. He definitely smelled of booze and his shirt and brown-spiked hair were absolutely soaking wet with that soda, but she allowed the kissing and fondling. It was a pretty standard routine whenever the Insane Clown Posse came into town. She used to go to the shows with him, but she felt it all became too repetitive. Loud rap music, soda bath, booze. Now she just stayed home and let him go with the boys and she’d see him when he got home. He was with his twin brother Vincent at the shows, so she never worried too much about him. Vincent was a bit of a hot head and got into fights every now and then, but always returned him safe and sound and drunk.

  “All right,” she said through the kisses, “how was the show?”

  “Oh, babe, it was the total shit!” he blurted out. “I fucking love the new album and they did a bunch of old shit, too. I brought you back a shirt. It’s out in the car.” She rolled her eyes and he went back to fondling her. By now, he had her shirt most of the way off and the bra holding up her pretty C’s was up around her neck. She finally just reached up and pulled it off and flung it carelessly across the room. He took that as a green light and went straight for her nipples. She began to get that special heated feeling and sank back into the couch and let him take her all the way. Maybe the shows weren’t so bad after all if she got this kind of treatment afterward.

  The next morning, however, she felt somewhat differently. She came out of the house and in the driveway was the spray-painted remains of their car. The car itself was totally fine. The paint job was atrocious. Every color of the regular rainbow and most colors of the neon rainbow brightly decorated the car from bumper to bumper. The windshield was untouched, but the rest of the car looked like it had spent the night down in the city, in the gangland areas. Across the passenger’s side door, in the brightest green imaginable read: FUCK THE POLICE! in all caps. She felt tears stinging her eyes in pure rage. She continued around the car and saw every other swear word and some new ones she had never even heard tagged all over, along with amateur artist’s renditions of some of ICP’s album covers. That was probably when she had decided to leave. She loved Vic more than any other guy she had ever dated or even known, but this was bullshit and she was embarrassed and sick of it. The great sex they had and the three-plus years they had just didn’t cover shit like this. The time had come. She had long considered it. They had been having more and more arguments lately and the fact they had no kids and still had no money with his spending habits weighed heavily on her. She had her habits, too, of course. She knew she wasn’t perfect. She just knew in her heart that she couldn’t do this anymore. The last concert he had come from, there had been a back seat full of roadkill. He and his brother had made a drunken game of collecting roadkill for points on the way home that night. Vincent had been dropped off at home, but said he didn’t want his trophies. The car stunk for w
eeks before she spent four hundred dollars to get it detailed. Now this. It wasn’t a great car, but it was mostly hers. She planned on taking it with her when she left. She could already feel the dread of emptying out her savings to get this shit show cleaned up. It was enough. She was going to move across town to her sister’s house and fuck Vic! He could figure his own shit out.

  She walked back into the house, trying to be quiet to let him sleep it off. That’s what she told herself anyway. What she was really doing was slinking out. If she didn’t wake him, she wouldn’t have to face him. She crept into their bedroom. A pungent aroma wafted to meet her immediately. She looked at him sprawled across the entire bed. He was naked except for his stupid Riddlebox boxers. ‘Riddleboxers’ he called them. There was a large brown mess in the back side now. He had gone and shit himself in a drunken blackout. To add to this disgusting discovery was the somewhat fresh puddle of vomit on the floor by his side of the bed. She closed her eyes and softly counted to ten. When she was in the same ballpark as calmed down, she got a bag from her closet and began emptying out her drawers. She took the overflowing bags and put them by the front door. She made quick and quiet work of scavenging the house for ‘her stuff’. When she was nearly done, she heard the bed springs creak and the bathroom door close.