Yet another horror short story, kids. It's not Halloween anymore, but the world's still fookinspooky iddnit? It is if I've got anything to do with it! So, here ya go. Hope it delivers dread. If it doesn't, tell me why it didn't. Feedback's always helpful. In fact, it's all I really get out of this, so, pay up.
There's still a few more to come, potentially, sometime. Got a couple of things already written but not typed up. And I write more all the time. And until I decide I care about trying to submit things for cash (which so far I don't, oddly enough... I like money, but not as much as I dislike hassles), it's free.
And, as always, we maintain the Table of Contents so you can easily access all the other stuff here, at least some of which is just bound to be good, so, explore! And tell us why they work, or why they don't.
KickerOfElves:
Profbolt:
My stuff:
And
little descriptions of actual nightmares I’ve had
COUSIN CLAUDE
Jack
had quit smoking eight years ago, a long struggle that’d felt like climbing an
icy mountain. After eight years he’d
been pretty confident that he was all done with backsliding.
Wrong again, Jack.
Five
minutes ago he’d lit one of his dead aunt’s Salems, musing that this butt was
from the very pack that had finally killed her.
He looked at the fuming cigarette, thinking he’d never had a Salem. Burn
little witches, curse us from the pyre.
He was a little mad at himself, hardly able to believe he was really
holding one again. He’d had a hard time
lighting it, partially because of reluctance to commit to wrecking almost a
decade’s clean record, but mostly because his fingers were shaking so badly. The cigarette and the shakes were there
because he was now faced with an even bigger, steeper, icier mountain than the
bastard he’d just skied back down.
He
had to open a door.
Christ,
how was he going to do it? He’d been in
her house an hour already and he hadn’t even worked up the nerve to look at the
damn door yet. He’d just been moping,
listening, building even more fear when he already had plenty.
It
was just down the hall, there, right through the living room. He hadn’t been here in decades but he knew
exactly where it was. He’d dreamed about
it enough times. This was a small
house, the door wouldn’t be more than a dozen steps away, but damn if he felt
able to take them.
He’d
have to walk down that hall soon, though, to get to the bathroom. The need to piss had been getting worse since
he’d pulled up outside, but he’d been holding it in, afraid to get that close
to the door he was going to have to open anyway. It’s what he’d driven three hours to do,
after all. But now that he was here it
seemed okay to take a few more hours. As
long as there was still plenty of time before dark. Yeah, he was not gonna be here after dark,
for sure. He would NOT be in the dark
with it. Him.
Just
get it over with, he told himself. You’re
making it worse, smoker.
If
nothing else, he should at least be brave enough to visit the bathroom. Getting a urinary tract infection wasn’t
going to help anything. Or, hey, be a
coward and step outside and water the honeysuckle. There sure was enough of it to give him all
the privacy he needed, even if there’d been any neighbors around, which there
weren’t. There were few houses around
here and they all looked empty, lawns unmowed, that lonely kicked-around-dog
look unloved houses get. He’d passed one
house he remembered a hundred yards up the road but it was just a chimney in
the woods now, the rest burned. There
were vague memories of the old guy who’d lived there, a bald skinny horsey-toothed
jovial fella on a lawnmower and wearing a lady’s gardening hat who’d given him
little bags of Red Hots when he was a kid.
Probably had them around for making stewed cinnamon apples, a lot of
people did. He'd been a nice old guy and
Jack hoped he hadn’t died in the fire, although by now he was bound to be dead
of something.
Too
bad that fire didn’t happen here; a thought that came with an instant pang
of guilt for thinking it, but hung. If
Aunt Dorothy were going to die from cigarettes, it might have been better if it
came from smoking in bed and just taken the whole house down, spared him this
nightmare. As long as she didn’t
suffer. Maybe have her heart attack,
drop the cigarette…
But
it hadn’t happened that way so there was no point in fantasizing about it, it
was just more avoidance of duty.
The
place would have gone up like a bonfire, though, if it had only been given the
chance. Jack had been shocked by the
decrepit state of it all. In his
memories from childhood this had been such a neat little house. His mother was a terrible housekeeper and it
must have been because when they were kids Dorothy never gave her a chance to
practice. Whenever he visited this place
as a kid it was like stepping into a magazine.
Good Housekeeping, not Architectural Digest; they never had anything fancy, all cheap
furniture from the glory days of plastic, but it was all kept
immaculately. Mom would sneer that it
was because Dorothy went crazy cleaning up for their visits and most of the
year her house probably looked like theirs, but that was Mom’s sour old
jealousy again. Mom had always been
jealous of her sister, up until Claude was born and nobody’d ever be jealous of
her again. Claude’s birthday, and Poor
Dorothy’s.
That
must’ve been the last time the house was maintained. The paint looked scoured off the boards
outside but what was left was still that dark blue he remembered from
childhood, something you might paint a crab shack but not a house. If she’d ever gotten it repainted, surely
she’d have picked something else.
He’d
stepped on pieces of rotten trim that had fallen off, and a sill from a window,
more sponge now than board. Honeysuckle,
sugaring the air, making each breath deceptively sweet, had devoured the back
of the house like a crashing wave in a very slow ocean that would eventually
drown everything. And the ceiling in
the living room was freckled with brown water stains from a roof starting to
leak. The busy kerchief-on-her-head,
dustrag-in-her-hand, always-teasingly-shoving-him-aside-to-vacuum Aunt Dot he’d
known would never stand for that. Not
unless bearing it had become easier than having people come around to make
repairs.
Because
you had a seeeeee-cret.
That
was what the deal was. She hadn’t wanted
people coming around. It was because of
that thing in that room that was making him shake so badly he couldn’t build up
a decent ash on the cigarette. The floor
around him was littered with them like snow; old-school Aunt Dot would’ve had a
fit.
The
Salem was done anyway, so he stubbed it in the ashtray. The need to piss was turning into actual pain
so he said the hell with it and headed toward the bathroom.
He
pointedly didn’t look toward that door, just angled through the gloom, stepped
into the bathroom. He knew right where
it was, as it was the site of a landmark bad childhood memory – puking
violently after getting too greedy for spiced peaches one Thanksgiving – and a
landmark happy one – it was where he’d read his first Jonah Hex comic
book. He flipped on the light, lifted
the lid, unzipped, wrangled out, and started.
Standing there draining he had plenty of time to assess the
bathroom. Aunt Dot had made some effort
to keep it clean, he saw, although it was pretty spare. Some amber pill bottles, probably for the
lung cancer that was supposed to kill her until a heart attack got her
first. God laughs a lot. Especially at Poor Dorothy. There was nothing in the way of cosmetics,
and that was a lack he’d never seen in a woman’s bathroom. Aunt Dot had just given up, he supposed,
quit caring.
Nobody was around to
see her except Claude, and Claude was certainly in no position to fault anyone
for their looks. Prettier things than
Claude had been hauled out of fatal car wrecks.
Jack’s
mind couldn’t even put together a full picture of what Claude might look like
now. There were hazy childhood memories,
clinical images, as if from a yellowing case file, and his mind had blocked out
some, probably, and likely built up others.
One eye bigger and lower than the other, a tusk, a head that looked
melted to one side, those fingers that seemed as long as Jack’s arms. When he was born, nobody had expected Claude
to live more than a few days, much less end up as strong as he had. Few babies born that biologically compromised
survived more than a few hours, if they made it out alive at all, and that was
a kindness nature did them. But Claude…
Claude was nature being uncharacteristically mean-spirited. It must have really hated him to malform him
as it had, and then, worse, have him live to bear it. You didn’t look at Claude and keep believing
in a God, at least not a benevolent one.
Whatever formed Claude had been a mad, laughing mean-streaked
sonofabitch.
And
as twisted as his body was, lord, his mind was so much worse. His body was something that stepped out of a
funhouse mirror, but his mind was another funhouse mirror image of that. Gnarled, folded, warped, insane, cruel. From somewhere else. Infernal.
He wasn’t just an unfortunate victim of birth defects, blameless and to
be loved like any other child. No, there
was something far wrong with Claude. Raising
him with kindness, as he knew Aunt Dot had, had no effect. Claude had been little more than a toddler
the last time Jack had been here but even then he’d been all snickering
meanness. During the days when they
still pretended Claude might end up as a person, they’d let him play with
Jack. He’d been chewing up Jack’s
plastic army men and when Jack tried to rescue them Claude had pinched Jack
really hard with those fingers, long and thin as twigs but strong as
pliers. He’d really locked them on and
then imitated Jack’s squeals of pain and laughed so loud that Uncle Jerry –
who’d gotten bitten for it, hard enough to bleed – came and pulled Claude off
and locked him in his room, where Claude had scratched and screamed, becoming
frantic with the desire to continue his tormenting.
Uncle
Jerry. That was another story. He remembered Uncle Jerry as a very happy guy
back before Claude was born. Uncle Jerry
and Aunt Dot had toured Europe, Asia, even Africa before Claude came along, so
the life of stifling isolation afterward was quite a contrast, a death of
something. Any child brings that, of course,
but not to such a coffin-lid-slammed-shut degree. Whenever Jack came to stay with them, Uncle
Jerry was always taking him for ice cream, buying him comics (including that Jonah
Hex), chasing him around the yard and playing ball with him. He’d taken him to a little carnival
once. Jack had vague memories of
thinking it was a pretty shitty one even at his young age, chipped chunks of
plaster on red and blue merry-go-round horses that looked like they’d been
gnawed on by something big, which dragged along at the speed of a dying,
unmaintained motor. An anaconda in a
glass box that wouldn’t move. Maybe it
was dead. A quarter’s worth of disappointment,
but Uncle Jerry being a sport, making it fun, anyway. They’d watched movies on the television, and Uncle
Jerry stayed up late with him. They’d
watched Sands of Iwo Jima and Fistful of Dollars and Born
Losers on the late show, even Curse of Frankenstein, which had been
a bit much for Jack at five years old, but Uncle Jerry had made fun of it and
wouldn’t let him be scared.
Yeah,
Uncle Jerry, back when he was a great guy who thought he’d wanted kids.
Then
he’d gotten one, and became Poor Jerry.
A whole new family with the same black birthday.
He’d
toughed it out, stand-up-guy’d it for another six years, then abandoned Dot and
Claude and went somewhere and drank himself to death in a couple of years trying
to drown the guilt over having done it.
It made him hate himself but even that was easier than to live with
Claude. For a while, anyway.
Jack
finished and zipped up and washed his hands.
How had Aunt Dot borne it, that was the real mystery. It was understandable that Jerry
couldn’t. There was not only the terror
of having Claude in the house, but Jack couldn’t imagine the weirdness of
knowing your DNA could possibly produce such a thing. Into each life a little rain must fall, but
Jesus, Jerry and Dorothy needed to build an ark. And there wasn’t enough wood in the world.
Jack
dried his hands and stood there.
Usually, finishing pissing was a relief.
Not this time. Now he didn’t want
to step out of the bathroom. Claude’s
door was about eight feet away. He’d
have to look at it.
Look
at it, hell, eventually he’d have to open it, and step in there. He could hear birds tweeting outside, insects
buzzing, but it was still going to get dark in a few hours and he wasn’t going
to be here then. No. In the dark, in a house with Claude? No. No
sir, no.
Carefully,
like something might be standing on the other side of the door listening, Jack
carefully reached out, laid his hand on the bathroom doorknob, tightened, and
slowly turned it, pulling the door in.
He peeked out.
There
was Claude’s door. It still had stickers
on it. He remembered Claude had had some
strange fetish for taking the stickers off bananas and collecting them on his
door, and neat-freak Aunt Dot had decided it wasn’t worth risking a fight and
lord knew Claude wasn’t going to wring much happiness out of this life, so
there it was, a massive mosaic of the most banana stickers in the whole world. Blue vastly outnumbered red; Chiquita was
whupping Dole’s ass in the banana wars.
Bananas were very popular in this house, maybe because Claude’s skull
wasn’t a great design for chewing. Then
again, he’d done a bang-up job on those army men, so, who knows? Maybe he just liked them.
Higher
on the door was a hasp and a padlock, so they could keep Claude in his room.
The
hasp hung free, the open padlock dangling from it.
The
hasp. Hung FREE. Open padlock.
OPEN.
Claude’s
room, apparently, had been left open. He
could come and go.
With
ice invading his blood, Jack quickly, quietly went back up the hall, through
the living room, back into the kitchen.
He shook out another cigarette and lit it.
Jesus,
was Claude even in there? Had
Aunt Dot started letting him run loose?
How could she trust him?
After
all the things Dot had written to Jack’s mom about, about how Claude only got
worse as he matured, she gave him free range?
Jack
rubbed his arm where Claude had pinched him all those years ago. It’d left a hematoma like a ping pong ball,
gone now, of course, but he’d never forgotten it, or the maniacal joy in
Claude’s piss-colored eyes, one up here, one down there, as Jack had
screamed. Just because you couldn’t see
or feel it didn’t mean there wasn’t a scar.
There was nothing more horrifying than Claude, nothing, and Aunt
Dot left the fucking lock open?
Puffing
the cigarette, Jack searched the cabinets for booze. He’d had a cigarette problem, also an even
worse drinking problem (only four years free of that one, it being a
bigger-icier-steeper mountain), but now seemed a good time to restart that habit,
too. Strap on the skis, motherfucker,
and whoosh. Jesus Christ, public
nightmare number one having run of the place.
Aunt Dot had been insane.
No
booze, but the cabinets were full of pasta.
She sure hadn’t wanted to run out.
Bananas and pasta and your dear aunt’s soul, that’s what horror eats, I
guess. The whole place was a museum of
loneliness. Aunt Dot had Claude but
Claude’s company would only make her more lonely, driving away every
other kind. He was like some leech in
the back room, feeding, taking everything.
Aunt
Dot had died when Claude was born, really.
It’d just taken over thirty years to settle in.
The
drawers didn’t even have ketchup packets, like every other house in America
had. Hard to go out for fast food and
leave Claude alone that long. Lock
someone else in, you’re locked in, too, minding them. He imagined fast trips to the grocery store,
maybe dared once a month or so, a brief respite turned to torment by having to
go back home again. Face that malevolence
by yourself for thirty years.
Jesus. If she’d been crazy, she
came by it as honestly as anyone ever had.
In
one drawer he found letters from his mother, birthday cards with his own
childish signature on them. Love you
Aunt Dot! Birthday candles nobody’d
ever use. Her wedding ring, tossed in a
kitchen drawer in a knot of old bread twist ties that the ring was being used
to bind together. Wow, I guess that’s
what happens to sentiment when a man leaves you with an abomination-baby then
escapes guilt with booze-bleared death.
It seemed worse than hate, something not even worth putting energy
into. The sight of that ring made him
sadder than anything, except maybe the half of a wishbone she’d saved, the
winning half. He wondered what that was
about. Something from the last time she
would ever be lucky? The punchline to a
joke she still had to find hilarious no matter how bitter it was? He’d never
know now, there was nobody to ask. And
he’d never really known this Aunt Dot.
These were artifacts of the person who’d replaced her.
The
plates in the sink had holly leaves and berries on them. Nothing says fuck-you-world-out-there,
you-have-nothing-to-do-with-me-anymore than eating off of Christmas plates in
July.
Yeah,
Claude’s door had a big lock on it, but Claude, through her obligation to him,
was the real captor. Maybe when she felt
the heart attack coming she’d unlocked it.
They’d found her in her car on the side of the road, halfway to the
hospital. She’d escaped. Maybe Claude had, too.
What
a lonely, depressing place, in a sorrowful stretch of country. On the drive in he’d passed enough memorials
to drunken car wreck victims to recreate Bellingrath Gardens in plastic. Far more “I Don’t Call 911” signs with a gun
on ‘em than welcome mats. If you’re
going to have a psychotic freak hidden away in your house, it’s lucky to live
in a place where nobody loves anybody, anyway.
Loneliness must be easier when the environment presents no alternative.
He
wished he’d called her more, at least.
The last time he’d talked to Aunt Dot – and that’d been years – her
lungs were already so bad that even on the phone she’d rattled like she had a chest
full of dead leaves. How had she gone on
so long? Duty? Unkind periods of remission that only
prolonged, not saved.
He
could see why she hadn’t quit smoking.
“You mean these things are killing me?
I’ll add a pack a day, then!”
Poor woman. He just wished she
drank, too, but she hadn’t rounded the bases with her vices. Guess if you’ve got to live with someone who
might attack you you’d want to keep your wits about you.
And
that someone might – or might not – still be in that back bedroom.
Jack
leaned on the sink and listened hard, trying to hear any movement. Outside the birds sang and the air
conditioner unit throbbed with a whine like an idiot forever blowing the same
note on a harmonica. Even if you didn’t
start out crazy, that’d send you there.
But there was nothing else.
He’d
have to go down the hall and listen at the door.
Or
he could leave. Make up a story to tell
his mother and just leave.
If
he thought he could get away with it, he would, but he knew sooner or later,
his mother would find out that he’d lied and she’d really think he was
nothing. Jack was Cajun on his mother’s
side and she was already disappointed in him beyond all reason because he was
the first in the family not to be able to speak French. She was also disappointed in him for other
reasons, having several to choose from.
For one, his marriage to Gail had been a disaster, such a disaster that
he still wore his wedding ring, not because he couldn’t let go of the
relationship but because wearing it was armor plate against starting another
one. Sometimes he thought he’d married
her only because drinking alone seemed creepy.
His daughter Amber was absolutely indifferent to him and that had
cheated his mother out of a grandchild.
He didn’t have the best job, either… but somehow she always focused on
the French, maybe thinking that was one thing she could still bully him into
changing.
Her
bullying didn’t work for that – he still saw absolutely zero use in French –
but it worked for checking on Claude.
Guilt, that gun everyone puts to their own head and shoves. He kept hearing the hammer clicking, and the
live shell was behind that door down the hall.
The
fact is, he was doing this because he knew if he didn’t, his mom would nag his
increasingly frail father to take her here so she could do it herself, and Jack
could not – would not – let them face Claude.
He wasn’t up to it himself, and his father was well into his sixties,
his mother almost there. If Claude
didn’t outright kill them, he’d take years off their lives.
He’s
taking years off mine, Jack thought, but I have more to spare.
He
wanted to panic. Even in adulthood he
still had reoccurring nightmares about Claude.
It wasn’t the way he looked – it was easy to forgive a thing like that –
it was the way he was. His soul
was in there like a worm in an apple. It
had been apparent even in toddlerhood.
From Mother’s correspondence with Dorothy, it had only gotten worse with
time. Claude was intelligent, and used
his intelligence to increase his evil.
Once,
as a kid, Jack had asked his mother if Claude was the Devil. Mom had gotten very embarrassed and said that
wasn’t a nice thing to say.
But
she hadn’t said no.
He
stared at the darkness of the hall and wondered if it’d be better if Claude
just came out to him. Any second that
form, twisted like an old haunted tree, might float up from that darkness like
a ripened drowning victim, pale and staring from uphere-downthere and smile a
funhouse mirror’s smile and say hey cousin Jack, wanna play ARMYMEN?
Could
Claude even communicate? His mother
said he was capable, at least with Dorothy, but all they had to go on was
secondhand information filtered through his aunt. Mother believed Claude would be sensible and
reasonable enough to converse with, to discuss his new situation and make some kind
of arrangements for his continued living, make decisions about what he wanted
to do. He was a toddler when you knew
him, Jack, he’s a man now. Impaired
people grow, too.
Jack
felt Mother was overly optimistic, and doubted Claude’s mouth could even form
speech. He’d argued that they should
just call the cops and send them on a concern check, let them work out what to
do with Claude. But Mother said Claude
was family and deserved to have his wishes heard by family. And if those wishes were unreasonable then
the authorities would do what they do.
And Jack hoped maybe that’s how it’d go.
Maybe Claude had grown into a rational person. Maybe even a nice one.
But
of course he hadn’t. That’s why he was
kept secret. That’s why there was still
a padlock on that door. Hell, even
though it was open now, there was its key, by the wall phone on a little hook,
with a plastic tag, CLAUDE in Aunt Dot’s curlycue handwriting from I love
you Jack! on all the birthday and
Christmas cards.
Reasonable
people who can be talked to don’t have their nametags on padlock keys. That’s gotta be a rule of the universe.
“Just
open the door, Jack,” he whispered into the rasp of bugs and the whine of the
air conditioner unit. “Find out.”
He
could hear his own heart as he walked down the hallway, but he was
walking. It was like someone else was
doing the moving and he was a passenger inside, but he was moving, he was doing
it. And then he felt banana stickers
under his palm like the scaly hide of some beast and everything inside of him
was being squeezed.
His
cheek pressed to the scaly hide and he listened.
Muttering. Something in there, talking low.
Laughter. Music.
A television, he realized, turned down very low, mumbling through a
commercial.
He
held the knob and his heart drowned the TV noise. He turned the knob. Carefully, carefully, he pushed.
There
was blue-silver light in the room but not much of it. Clutter was everywhere, filling the place,
and a trapped sour stench of breath and sweat and worse. They’d boarded up Claude’s windows, of
course, like one did with everyone with whom one could have a reasonable
conversation about their future plans after the death of nearly the only person
they’d ever known. Strung around the
room were Christmas lights, forming absurd constellations, tacked and taped in
madman’s geometry, a glowing web. There
was junk everywhere, dolls, big homemade and twisted scarecrow things. A gnawed rubber baby glared at him from a
chair, much abused. Another three hung
from the ceiling, things done to malform them, to make them not look so much
like people. Drawings covered the walls
like pictographs.
This
was INSANE.
He
should shut this door, run to the car, drive away, call the cops from the road
and let them come and do what they were going to end up doing anyway. There was no one in here with whom he could
have any kind of discussion.
But
there was someone in here.
Draped
with a blanket, it was sitting on the bed, the television’s flicker playing
over it like a light show, revealing it and hiding it again. The television made cartoon noises that just
made the craziness of doing this even more absurd. FA-DOINK!
BOING!
The
blanketed thing shivered.
“Claude?” Jack tried to say, but it was a rustle of
breeze through a rotten cornfield, nothing.
He couldn’t talk. He waved
slowly. Claude would be afraid, too, he
realized. Even a sane person would feel
strange meeting someone new after nearly thirty years of only seeing one. And Claude was, it was clear, not even remotely
sane.
Jack
cleared his constricted throat and the shape on the bed dropped into a
crouch. It crawled to the side and
mewled. The blanket slid back and Jack
saw waxy-white deformity and a shag of long black hair and it thumped onto the
other side of the bed, plump and soft, and made snuffling sounds of pathetic
fear.
Jack
stood, waiting, seeing his pulse in his vision.
There was no way, no way, he was going around that bed. Claude would feel cornered… already did
feel cornered. The TV went to a dark
scene and Jack forgot to breathe.
“It…
it’s okay, I’m your cousin… juh-Jack,” he managed to croak. The screen lightened again, red, then green.
Hairiness
poked up over the edge of the bed, and they stared at each other as seconds
dragged by. The cartoon came to a
brighter scene and Jack clearly saw eyes gleaming at him amidst the hair, shiny
black eyes like huge drops of ink, spidereyes the size of golf balls, blinking
rapidly.
There
were three of them.
Jack
wanted to scream. Claude’s eyes were
horribly mismatched but there were only two of them. Hands came up to the edge of the bed, stubby
ones, little more than mittens of flesh, while Jack knew very well that
Claude’s fingers were long, freakishly long, like twigs on a winter branch.
This
was not Claude.
This
was… his child?
Oh
god. What had Claude done to Aunt
Dot? Had he… or had she gotten so
lonely, so deranged with it, that she…?
Their
offspring mewled, a horrible raspy cry of fear.
And
with a wheezing roar Claude burst out of a side door – the bathroom, of course
there must be one – and he filled the room.
Jack
threw himself backward and fell and crawled through soured laundry and
cardboard boxes and rattling cans as winterbranch fingers sought him, raked
him, trying to grab but being kicked away.
Jack scrambled frantically toward the doorway as plierfingers nipped a
piece from his leg, then brushed his face, seeking eyes.
Claude
had gotten BIG, a thin, spidery, spread-everywhere big. He loomed, face all in darkness, a hairy shadow
with gleaming wet parts in it, and his breath rattled as it navigated features
not made for living. It sounded like an
accordion, wheeze-WHEEZE, then angry mumbling slurps. The gabble was probably English but Jack
hadn’t been trained to understand the deformed noises made by that ruinous
mouth, so it sounded like someone shouting in their sleep.
“Stay
away from me STAYAWAYFROMMEEEE!” Jack yelled, kicking at long hands and
bone-thin wire-strong arms, making it on all fours and diving through the door,
and a gnarled veiny white hand slapped down after him, and he slammed the door
and pressed himself against it as Claude battered the other side, raking it,
wheeze-roaring. In the background the offspring
bawled like a tortured lamb.
“Oh
god, oh GOD!” Jack whispered, fumbling for the padlock. Claude slammed himself at the door and pushed
it half open before Jack threw himself against it to keep it closed. The hasp didn’t want to fit. As he fumbled the padlock nearly closed
itself and terror shot through Jack because if that locked before he got it in
place, then that’d be the end. Claude
would come out, he’d be dragged back into that flickering den, and he’d find
out how long it took to die by pliers.
Fingernails thick as horn tore at the door, and they’d trail through his
flesh like twigs through water. And Claude,
he knew, would laugh as he picked Jack’s bones clean.
The
hasp slapped over its eyelet and Jack’s shaking hands hooked the padlock in
place, and he stared at the lock before he clicked it shut, making sure before
he snapped it.
Relief
flooded him and he breathed again.
Claude, hearing that padlock snap, knowing what it meant, leaned against
the other side of the door and snuffled and wheezed and slurped. His offspring mewled. The two conversed in gobbling babble.
Carefully,
still not trusting it wouldn’t be flung open or burst apart, Jack backed away
from the door. His mind still would not
encompass what must have gone on in this house between Claude and Aunt
Dot. Two scenarios, both nightmarish.
Unless,
perhaps, there’d somehow been some other woman involved? Some captive?
God, that might be even worse.
And more impossible. Poor Dorothy
would never let that happen, even if she allowed the other.
Jack
ran to his car, blindly drove through the honeysuckle and twittering birds, and
was over fifty miles away before he even thought of calling the police.
By
the time they got there Claude had already burned the house down. The two charred skeletons they dug from the
ashes looked less like human remains than twisted driftwood washed up on a beach in a dream.
THE
END
© 2022 by me
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