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The fence rattled as Charlie climbed over it. I winced, looking back over my shoulder at the little farmhouse 30 yards away. The lights remained off. The two-story house was little more than a gray blur on the cloudy, moonless night. Ed, squatting behind a shrub on the other side of the dirt road that divided the small animal enclosure from the house, made a "keep going" gesture with one hand.
He was the lookout. But he was so stoned, I wasn't sure if he could see 10 yards in front of his nose. Charlie, who had stopped moving as soon as his cowboy boots touched the dirt inside the enclosure, took the hint and made his way toward the cows inside. Scott, standing next to me with his hands on the cool metal bar of the fence, laughed nervously. What we didn't know at that moment, what we only found out when the long, unfolding tragedy began,
was that our classmate Curtis wasn't the only one inside the farmhouse that night. His parents were supposed to be gone for some farming convention in Omaha, but they had changed their plans at the last minute. The reason for the change of plans was another thing we didn't know. Had we known it, we likely wouldn't have started the stupid senior prank in the first place. There had been a recent rash of thefts on the farms in the area. Even as little as I paid attention to the news, I knew that.
It was a big deal when several hundred dollars worth of feed was stolen, or an expensive piece of irrigation equipment or livestock. What I didn't know was that, just two nights previously, Curtis's father, Kyle, had chased some would-be thieves off his property. Apparently, one of them took a potshot at him as they drove off in their truck with the license plates removed. He hadn't reported it to the police. He wasn't that kind of man.
Instead, he'd made Curtis swear not to tell anyone about it, sure that the thieves would return one day. And when they did, he would be ready. We lived in a state where castle doctrine was the law of the land. Curtis's father, Kyle, thought he could claim self-defense after shooting one or more of the thieves. So as Charlie moved toward the four cows currently in the corral, Kyle was inside.
barely asleep, a rifle propped by his bedroom door. The idea was that we would take one cow and put it inside the high school as our senior prank. But we would get the cow back to Curtis well before his parents came home, and they would be none the wiser. That was the plan, but it didn't work out that way. As the newcomer to the group, I had been pressured into the prank.
I had only moved to town at the beginning of the school year, after my mother had been arrested for selling meth. My dad had been out of the picture since my first year on this earth. I lived with an aunt and uncle who clearly didn't want me. I went to a small high school in a town where xenophobia was a favorite pastime. Even a blonde-haired, green-eyed farm boy like me was treated with blatant disrespect or callous disregard.
I was from away, so I didn't belong, and I never would. This was something I was used to though. I had never belonged. I'd always felt like a dangerous weed in a field of delicate crops. And although I thought this cow prank wasn't the best idea, I was excited to be a part of it. I didn't think I would ever be truly accepted, but this was a start. Maybe I could forge new friends with these guys. Maybe they could be the brothers I never had.
I watched with excited interest as Charlie approached the cows, bringing a halter out of a back pocket. One animal mooed loudly in defiance and hurried away from him. I glanced over my shoulder at the house, seeing that the lights were still off. Scott snickered again. "Shh," I said, stifling my own laughter. Had we known that Curtis's father was home, our decision to wear dark clothes and ski masks would have been truly insane.
But since we thought Curtis was the only one home, we figured the get-ups might strike some fear into him if he woke up and found us out here. Then we could pull off our masks after giving him a good scare. We would all have a laugh about it. Charlie, holding out the halter, darted after a cow while Scott and I watched, snickering softly. Out on the road, our buddy Roger sat in the front seat of his pickup with an enclosed livestock trailer attached, waiting.
You couldn't see the truck from where we were because there was a line of trees in the way. Looking back on what happened next, I can only think that there's one explanation. Curtis' dad, Kyle, heard that first distraught moment, got out of bed, grabbed his rifle, and went out the back door. He must have circled around the house because none of us were aware of his presence until he fired the rifle.
The sound of the gunshot made my entire body stiffen and then go loose in almost the same instant. Confusion and panic came rushing into my mind, making it impossible for me to make a decision. In the animal corral, Charlie fell like he'd been knocked out. I stared at his body, a strange sensation ballooning in my chest as one cow stomped on him in its hurry to get far from the source of the loud noise.
That sensation frightened me more than the sight of Charlie's body, but I dismissed it as shock. "Run!" Ed said as he bolted toward the door. "He shot Charlie!" Scott whispered from next to me. Finally, I looked over and saw Kyle behind a tree next to the house, taking aim at us with a rifle. He was shirtless, only wearing a pair of jeans and cowboy boots.
I grabbed Scott and pulled him away from the corral fence as the man fired a second time. We bolted toward the road and the swath of trees that could provide cover. "Don't run in a straight line!" I said, turning right and running a few steps before turning left, trying to keep my head low the whole time. Up ahead, Ed burst into the trees. Another gunshot sounded, and I ducked as I ran.
Distantly, I heard the rev of an engine, and I knew it was Roger driving off, leaving us behind because he was too scared to wait for us. Still, I hoped it wasn't true. "Don't you do it, Roger, you chicken shit," I thought, but there was a certain mad glee to that inner voice. Was I enjoying this? Scott and I moved into the trees about ten yards apart. "Guys!" Ed said from nearby, waving at us. "Over here!"
We rushed over and crouched, peering back toward the farmhouse. I couldn't see Kyle anywhere, but it was difficult to see through the foliage. "Roger left," Ed said. "He fucking drove off." "Is Charlie really shot?" Scott asked. "He didn't just trip and fall?" Neither Ed nor I answered. We just peered through the darkness at each other, looking at one another's eyes through the holes of the stupid ski masks we wore.
The sound of branches moving put us on edge, and we all looked back toward the house to see Kyle stepping around a tree. "Wait, mister!" A gunshot cut off the rest of Scott's sentence, and wood splinters flew from a nearby tree. We all turned to run, sprinting out of the trees, across the road, and into the woods on the other side.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew where we were headed. But some old, children's ghost stories about a haunted house seemed ridiculous compared to the very real bullets searching for our fragile bodies. Scott, Ed and I stayed fairly close as we raced through the thickening woods, tripping over brambles and scrambling over deadfalls, ducking with every gunshot that rang out behind us.
Each time we thought we'd lost Kyle, he appeared nearby, closer than we thought, forcing us to run. After about 10 minutes of this, we reached a crumbling stone wall that surrounded the old Devlin house. Across the overgrown yard, the two-story Victorian stood dark and silent, somehow sinister, as if ready to pounce. The home had been uninhabited since a gruesome and still unsolved quadruple murder occurred about 20 years before I was born.
Without thinking, I jumped over the crumbling wall and crouched on the other side. Ed and Scott were a little slower, but they soon joined me. "What if we try to call out and tell him who we are?" Scott asked, huffing. "Yeah, because that worked so well last time," Ed said, also catching his breath. "I didn't have a chance to say two words!" Scott objected. "I think we lost him," I said. "If we call out now, he'll know where we are."
"Let's just go inside the house and find a place to hide. If he comes inside, then we'll tell him. Maybe if he's closer, he'll actually be able to hear what we're saying and he won't shoot us." "I don't want to go in there," Ed complained. "That place is freaky as hell." "Suit yourself," I said. "That's where I'm going. I'm not going to die because of some stupid ghost story." Without waiting, I darted from the wall into the house. Before I made it halfway there, I heard the other guys following me.
It was surprisingly hard to find a way in. The windows were all boarded up tight and the front door was locked. But around the back, I found that the lock securing the cellar door was badly rusted. It only took one good yank to break it. We made our way down the steep concrete steps. Scott took his phone out and illuminated the cellar while I closed the door quietly behind us. "I'm calling 911," Scott said. I had no objection whatsoever.
Neither did Ed. But after a moment, Scott said, "You've gotta be kidding me!" "What?" Ed asked. "No service down here." I looked around at the shelves and dust-coated items and cobwebs stretching between objects as an odd sickness took hold. Like what I'd felt when seeing that cow trample Charlie's body. But it wasn't what I expected. There was something sweet in that sickness. Something giddy. Something attractive.
As Ed pulled his phone out, I heard a crunching sound from outside the cellar door. I wasn't the only one who heard it. Ed and Scott both looked up from their phones. Quickly, Scott put a hand over the flashlight, plunging us back into darkness. Blinking, I peered toward the cellar door, reaching up absently to rip my ski mask off and toss it aside. If Kyle came down here, I hoped he would recognize me as one of his son's friends and maybe decide not to kill me.
But the door didn't open, and the crunching sound that we heard never came again. Only silence emanated from the other side of the door. Still, we stood in the dark, waiting, holding our breath. The gleeful fear I felt was so potent that when I saw something moving over to my right, I chalked it up to my reeling imagination and over-revved senses. But the movement continued, like someone standing up from a crouching position behind a couple of stacked steamer trunks.
I shifted my eyes away from the door and looked into the dark corner, seeing that someone was over there, and they were wearing the ski mask I had tossed aside. But something was off about them. The shape of their head was odd, and the mask bulged in strange areas. I blinked in the dark basement, trying to see the dim figure clearer. My lizard brain was still unsure whether this was fantasy or reality.
Two eyes snapped open, flooding the room with sickly gray-blue light. In that illumination, I could make out the figure. It was an old woman, saggy white skin like unfired clay, naked body covered with hideous gashes and stab wounds that all leaked profusely. She looked directly at me and opened her arms, as if expecting a hug.
A screeching cry escaped my throat as I turned and ran back up the stairs, pushing against the cellar door. But I couldn't get it open. It was locked or obstructed from the outside. Fear plucking my nerves like banjo strings, I turned around and ran toward a stairwell I'd seen earlier. One that led up into the house. What is it? Scott hissed, shining his flashlight around again.
I didn't answer and ran up the stairs, thankful to have the light from Scott's phone. "Mike," Ed said, trying to calm me down. I burst through the basement door and into a small pantry. Behind me, Ed and Scott raced up the stairs. Outside the pantry, I found myself in a kitchen that had been modern in the 50s. I turned and headed to where I assumed the back door would be as Ed and Scott caught up with me.
"Dude, what the hell was that?" Ed asked. I turned the corner and stepped into an empty dining room with a set of double doors that I assumed led outside. They were boarded up, so I couldn't see. "You didn't see that woman?" I asked, half turning and looking over my friend's shoulders. "What woman? I didn't see anyone," Scott said. "Me neither," Ed said, taking his ski mask off. "I swear I saw someone down there. I swear."
The sound of an old, squeaky hinge screaming stopped my words and sent a tendril of ice up my spine. Ed and Scott peered beyond me, toward the double doors. Slowly, I turned my head that way and saw a shirtless man standing in one now open doorway. It was Kyle, and he was pointing his rifle at us. As he stepped forward, his eyes went from killer cold to head injury confused.
He peered at us from behind his rifle for a few long moments before he said, "You're the ones trying to steal my shit!" "It's not like that, Mr. Bishop," Ed said. "It was a prank. We were just doing a prank. We only thought Curtis was home." Kyle Bishop lowered the rifle, his face falling and his eyes diverting to the floor. "Who did I shoot back there? Who was in my corral?" None of us answered. Ed swallowed, the noise loud in the empty room. "Who was it, goddammit?"
Kyle shouted. I swore I heard a child crying somewhere in the house, but it was gone as the faint echoes of Kyle's voice faded to nothing. "It was Charlie, Mr. Bishop," Ed said. "Charlie Dunlap. Jesus and Mary," Kyle said. "This isn't happening." A thud so loud and forceful, it shook plaster dust from the ceiling from the second floor. Everyone looked up. "Who else is here?" Kyle Bishop asked. "No one that we know of," Ed said.
"I saw an old woman downstairs," I said in a whisper. "A woman?" Kyle asked. "What woman?" I shook my head. "I don't know. She was hurt though. She was hurt bad. We didn't see her," Ed said, as if to distance himself from my crazy talk. Kyle Bishop swallowed, his throat clicking loudly.
Bishop turned and stepped toward the same door he'd come through. But before he reached it, the door swung shut on its own, crashing back into the frame. Bishop froze for a moment before looking over his shoulder at us.
Without saying a word, he moved over to the door and turned the handle, but the door wouldn't open. He adjusted and tried again, his thick back muscles working, but it still wouldn't open. I looked at Scott, who'd finally taken his ski mask off, and I saw the fear in his eyes. "Come here and help me," Bishop said. Ed did as Bishop asked, trying to get the door open. Scott shined his light around the space.
"You didn't really see her downstairs?" I asked. "I didn't see anyone but us," Scott said. "Let's try the front," Bishop said, moving between Scott and I. The three of us followed him back into the kitchen and down a hallway to the front door. Bishop turned the deadbolt, grabbed the knob, and pulled. Nothing happened. Another massive thump sounded from upstairs. "If this is some kind of prank, it needs to stop now," Bishop said, setting his rifle down to use both hands on the door.
"It's not a prank, Mr. Bishop," Ed said. Scott shined his light up the wooden staircase. I fixed my gaze on the top of it, expecting something even more grotesque and impossible than the woman from the cellar. The stories came rushing back to me. One of my first experiences in the new town was when a group of other high school boys invited me out with them under the guise of drinking some beers. They brought me to this house and told me the stories, trying to get me to venture into the place.
The first story I heard started with the man who'd built it way out here in the woods, Orlin Devlin. According to the tales, he had never been quite right in the head, and when he moved his aging mother here, along with his wife and their two children, things seemed to get worse. Some people accused Devlin's mother of being a witch. Others said it was his wife who practiced the dark arts in an attempt to cure Devlin of his mental illness.
Whatever the cause, it seemed that Orlin only grew worse. Until one day, he snapped. Reportedly, the local constable came out to check on them after the grocer said they hadn't ordered any food in a month. He found the entire family slaughtered, body parts strewn around, one child's limbless torso hung from rafters in the attic, while the other child lay nearby, stomach ripped open and intestines spilling out.
Orlin himself was found naked and halfway in the fireplace. The top half of his body burned to a crisp, as if he'd built a raging fire and thrown himself into it. The streaks on the hearth seemed to support this notion. It appeared to the constable that Orlin had been kicking his feet while he burned, not trying to get out of the fire, but to push himself further into it. The house sat empty for nearly a decade after that.
The next family to move in, the Garretts, fared no better. But there was a big difference between the cases. Whereas the constable surmised that Orlin had killed his family and then himself, the killer of the Garretts remained a mystery. Mr. Garrett had been found with his head completely removed.
The other family members, all three of them, had been killed in similarly gruesome manners. The killings were such that it would have been impossible for any of them to have done it to themselves. Yet, there had been no evidence of another party in the house. Likely suspects were rounded up, but one by one, they were alibied out. The case remained cold. Of course, I hadn't believed these stories to be true, and I hadn't been curious enough to look them up.
I figured they were urban legends. Fun, but ultimately harmless. True or not, I had stood fast against the cajoling and peer pressure of the guys who'd brought me here. Even back then, when I was so desperate to fit in, something told me to stay out of the house. After I had ruined their fun, those guys took off, leaving me to walk home. But something strange happened as I trudged away from the house that autumn night last year.
I could have sworn I'd heard someone calling my name from the dark Victorian. Damn it to hell! Kyle Bishop shouted behind us. I glanced that way to see him picking his rifle up again. He slammed the butt of the weapon into the knob as Ed backed away, frightened by the man's sudden violence. I felt the vibrations of each strike through the floor.
Or at least, I thought that's what it was at first. But I soon realized that there was something else in the house making noises in concert with Kyle Bishop's strikes. And it was getting closer. Soon, it was apparent that it was coming down the upstairs hallway. Dust flew into the air on one of the top steps, but there was nothing there to cause it. Nothing that I could see. Still, I backed away from the staircase. More dust flew, this time from the bottom step.
Wild, screaming laughter echoed in my head, but I barely recognized it as my own inner voice. My stiff legs took me back, away from the staircase, away from the front door.
Ed yelled for Mr. Bishop to stop, but the man ignored him. Scott was following the progress of the invisible entity with his phone's flashlight, but he, too, had moved out of the path between the stairs and the door. "Got it!" Kyle Bishop said. Reaching into the hole left by the fallen doorknob and pulling the door open, the air outside seemed as stagnant as the air inside. There was no breeze. No crickets chirped. No night birds sang.
and as the still shirtless Kyle Bishop stepped one foot over the threshold, he jerked his head up and back, his spine lengthened, and he dropped his rifle to the floor. He stood frozen in that position for a moment before his skin started to tear. At first, I didn't realize what was happening. The wet ripping sound made my stomach churn, but I didn't know why. Not until Scott shined his flashlight on the doorway.
lit from the back like he was. The first thing I noticed was the blood splattering the wooden porch boards in front of him. Then, his arms came jerkingly up to his sides, creating a T with his body. He seemed to vibrate and shiver as the skin ripped down the front of him and folded itself away from his body, reaching out toward the sides of the open doorway. Growing up in the country, I was no stranger to the process of skinning an animal, but this was something entirely different.
His pants ripped and fell as the skin of his legs tore down the front and then stretched out. It took me a long moment to realize what the purpose of this was. I didn't put it together until the muscle started coming off his bone. The connective tissue sounding like beef jerky ripping apart as it separated. The muscles and skin fused together to form a grisly door. But more importantly, it was a message to the rest of us. A warning about what would happen if we tried to leave.
as all went quiet in the house, except for the sound of blood dripping from the newly formed door. Ed turned away and vomited onto the dusty wooden floor. Scott only stood paralyzed, phone flashlight still fixed on the human door. I was shocked once again to find that this gruesome violence had little effect on me. My stomach felt tense and tight, but it wasn't an entirely unpleasant feeling. Once again, after I'd seen Charlie get shot,
I chalked it up to numbing shock. I thought it would only take time for the reality of the situation to dawn on me, at which point I would be inconsolable. But the fear was still there, battering my insides like a hurricane making landfall on an unprepared village. "Are you guys okay?" I asked. "No," Ed said. Scott didn't answer. He was still fixated on the gory door. I moved over in front of my friend, blocking his view.
"Hey Scott, why don't you try calling 911 again?" Eyes glazed, Scott looked at me, but I could tell he wasn't seeing me. "We need to get out of here! The cellar!" Ed said, coming over. "That's how we got in. Maybe we can get out that way. Did you not just see what happened?" I asked. "Something doesn't want us to leave. Maybe it was just him." Ed said. "Maybe it just wanted him, and now that it killed him, we can leave."
"Do you want to be the one to try it?" I asked. Ed answered the question with silence. "What are we talking about here?" Scott asked, in an emotionless tone. "What's happening? Check your phone, Ed." I said. "What about yours? I left mine in the truck." Ed pulled his phone out. "No service. Try calling anyway. You should be able to make emergency calls without service." Ed tried, but nothing happened. The call wouldn't go through.
"Scott, try yours," I said. After a moment, Ed snatched Scott's phone away, muttering, "Fuck it, useless." But he had no luck without phone either. "Mr. Bishop said his wife called the police," Ed said. "Surely they're searching for us by now. And what about Roger? I bet he told someone. I mean, he heard the gunshots, right? That's why the asshole took off and left us there. It's only a matter of time before they come here and get us out." It was true.
Surely the bishop house was crawling with cops by now. At most, they would find us in several hours. "So I guess we waited out?" I asked. "Waited out?" Scott shouted, suddenly animated. "There's something in here with us! What if it decides it wants to rip our skin off too? Are you kidding me? Waited out?" He dashed away from us, heading into one of the nearby front rooms. Ed and I followed, worried he might do something to get himself killed.
Scott's boots crunched on broken glass as he kicked at one of the mostly broken windows, thudding into the board affixed to the outside. "Let us out!" he screamed, kicking at the board again and again, until Ed and I grabbed him and dragged him away. Once in our grasp, his body went limp, and he sank to the floor, sobbing. We put him down gently, and then looked at each other through the gloom. "I don't see that we have much of a choice," I said. "Waiting it out is our best option."
"Shit," Ed said. "Yeah, I know." We both sat on the floor next to our sobbing friend and settled in for the wait. "Where are you going?" Ed asked as I got up. I had been dozing, but my butt was falling asleep. "See if I can find some blankets or something for us to lie on," I whispered. Scott was curled up on his side, clearly asleep, but Ed and I had been mostly awake. "What time is it?" I asked. Ed pulled out a phone.
"What the hell?" he said. "This can't be right. It says it's nearly four in the morning." I frowned. We'd gotten to Curtis' house to borrow the cow shortly before midnight. No way it had been four hours. "I guess we dozed off?" I said. "Anyway, I'll be right back. Don't you want a flashlight?" he asked. I shook my head. My eyes have adjusted. I want to keep it that way. I could feel Ed's eyes on me as I moved over to the stairs.
I paused, looking up the staircase, wondering why I was drawn up there. The thing about the blankets was just an excuse. I now realized as I started up the stairs. I must be crazy, I thought, wandering alone in a haunted house. But my fear had lowered to a dull simmer. I still wasn't feeling the shock I had been expecting about Charlie's death and Kyle Bishop's gruesome flame. "It's coming," I told myself, but I wasn't so sure.
I reached the top of the staircase and looked both ways. A long hallway stretched off to my left. To my right was a shorter hall that led to just two doors. Somehow, I knew one of those doors belonged to a small bedroom, and the other led up to the attic. How do I know that? Turning left, I made it three steps into the longer hallway before the sound of a door opening behind me halted my progress.
A lump crawled up my throat as I looked over my shoulder and saw two mangled children in the hall next to the now open attic door. There was a young girl sitting in a red wagon and a slightly older boy standing in front of the wagon, holding the handle with one pale as snow hand. They both wore 50s era pajamas, but their attire wasn't what caught my eye. The boy's intestines hung in glistening loops from a gash across his stomach.
and the girl's limbs had all been torn off. Her stumps poured blood as she sat awkwardly in the wagon. Despite these hideous wounds, both children stared at me with blank expectation, unconscious of their injuries. I knew I was supposed to feel fear, and I did, but it wasn't the kind of fear I expected. I wasn't terrified of these two impossible children. I didn't want to run away from them.
Instead, I wanted to get closer to them, inspect their wounds, look deep into their eyes to try and see whatever lurked behind them. That impossible and ephemeral thing called a human soul. I wanted to feel the girl's blood on my hands, and I had a mad yet fleeting vision of yanking on the boys' intestines until they were pulled to their maximum length. The depth and width of these urges were what scared me most, because I suddenly knew that they had been inside me all along.
I raised my hand and waved to the children. They did not return the gesture. Instead, the boy pulled on the wagon and started toward me. He stepped on a loop of intestine, which unfurled more of his insides. Yet he didn't seem to notice, and he kept walking toward me even as one wagon wheel ran over his guts, jostling the girl slightly. Turning back, I headed down the hallway to the master bedroom at the end, already knowing what I would find there.
knowing that, in a great sense, I had found home. Mike? Ed called from downstairs, sounding distraught. Mike? You okay? I stood near the top of the stairs, pressed up against the wall where he couldn't see me. There was a way out of the house. There was a way out, and I knew what it was. Mike? Ed said. I heard the bottom stair creak as he stepped onto it.
Glancing to my left, I saw them all gathered in the hallway. The mangled children, the dismembered women, the decapitated man, and the one who started it all, Orland Devlin himself. His skin was still smoldered, horrific burns distorting his features, but amid the bubbling mess that was his face sat a Cheshire cat grin, teeth white as the driven snow.
Of course, saying that Orlin started it all was kind of like saying Adam and Eve started it all. In a sense, they did. But who started them? Orlin Devlin's mother was not in the hallway with the rest of them. She was much closer. She was the one who'd told me about the way out of the house. Although I hadn't seen her in the literal sense once I'd left the cellar, I knew she was still wearing my ski mask.
As she spoke to me, she whispered through the mouth hole, her bright eyes shining directly into me. And even now, as I stepped out to the top of the stairwell, she helped guide my actions. Ed jerked in fright, shining his phone flashlight at me. "Jesus, man," he said. "What have you been doing? I was worried about you. Just looking around," I said. "For an hour?" I hadn't realized how long I'd been gone, but I shrugged it off and moved down the stairs.
I need to check the cellar again. What for? A way out, I said, moving past him. At the bottom of the stairs, I glanced in to see Scott sitting on the floor, looking toward me with a confused expression on his face. He won't be a problem, the old witch whispered in my ear. Are you okay, Mike? Ed asked, following me as I went back to the kitchen. I thought I heard you talking to yourself up there. We just need to get out of here, I said. How?
"The cellar. There's something in the cellar," I said. "I saw it earlier, but I didn't realize until now what it was." "You saw a way out?" Ed asked. "I don't understand." I moved down the cellar stairs, only noticing at the bottom that Ed wasn't following. I turned and looked up at him, squinting against the light. "Come on," I said. "I need your help." Without waiting, I walked into the dark cellar.
going to the corner as the old witch whispered directions in my ear. There were several loose bricks in the wall, which I quickly removed, listening to Ed's slow footsteps on the stairs. I reached into the recess and gripped the wooden handle to an antique farm tool. As I pulled the tool out of its hiding spot, the curved, rusted blade scraped along the brick. Ed's footsteps stopped. "What was that?" "Shit," I thought, holding the corn knife up in my hand.
a simple tool used for harvesting corn in a bygone era. It consisted of a sickle blade attached to a wooden handle. "Mike? What was that noise?" Ed sounded terrified, gritting my teeth. I moved back toward the stairwell, holding the tool down behind my right thigh. "Nothing. I bumped into something," I said, stopping near the stairs but out of his view. Ed was silent for a long moment. So was the old witch. So was I.
"Mag?" "Yeah, Ed." "Are you okay?" "I'm fine, Ed. Come give me a hand down here, would you?" Another moment of silence passed, and I knew I had screwed things up. A stair creaked as Ed shifted his weight. I knew without looking that he was going back up the stairs.
As I darted around the corner and bolted up the stairs, I brought the sickle up. Glancing over his shoulder, Ed saw me coming. He screamed as I thrust myself up toward him, swinging the sickle. The blade sliced into his right ankle, severing tendons and chipping bone. Ed fell onto the stairs, his phone tumbling out of his hand and falling on a step between us. "Get him down!" the old witch screamed in my ear.
Still screeching in pain, Ed managed to kick me in the chest with his left foot. I tumbled back down the stairs, smacking my head. Ignoring the pain, I got to my feet and ran back up the stairs, getting to Ed as he crawled along the kitchen floor, shouting for Scott to help. I slammed the tip of the sickle into his lower back, prompting another tortured scream. I pulled on the farming tool, slicing through flesh until I felt the tip catch on bone.
Why are you doing this?
I reached into the hole where I'd gotten the corn sickle and felt around to the right until I found what felt at first like a bowl. But as I pulled it out, I saw that it was the top part of a human skull. I heard footsteps from overhead as I moved back over to Ed. Scott called out, asking where we were. The old witch whispered furiously in my ear, urging me to hurry. As I came to Ed, he reached out and grabbed my ankle.
"Mike, what's wrong with you?" he asked, looking up, his face a mask of pain. I swung the sickle down as hard as I could, severing his hand. His mouth opened as he looked at his injury, but no sound came out. I knelt, setting the sickle down and grabbing his wrist just below the bloody nub. I positioned the inverted skull piece at the injury and let it fill up with blood until the old witch told me to stop.
Then I raised it to my lips and drank. The thick, hot liquid coated my throat and filled my stomach. Gasping, I took the empty skull away from my lips. I could feel them getting closer. They were no longer just gruesome images standing together in the upstairs hallway. It was as though they were standing in the cellar with me, standing beside me, like the family I never had. But I still wasn't done. Mother told me what to do next.
and I had to do it while Ed was still alive. "Hurry!" Mother said. "The other one is coming. You must be ready for him." Ed was losing consciousness, and he fought feebly as I flipped him over. Switching the bowl for the sickle, I knelt to get to work. But I soon realized that the sickle wasn't the tool for the job. It wasn't delicate enough. So instead of extracting his eyes with the metal tool, I decided to use my fingers.
Ed screamed as I popped the first eye out with my thumb, but it was all he could muster. I batted his one remaining hand away easily, but the optic nerve was still attached. To save time, I leaned down toward his face, popped the dangling eyeball in my mouth, and used my teeth to sever the nerve. After that, it was only a matter of chewing and ingesting the eyeball, which popped between my teeth like a tough, hot grape.
By the time I finished with the other eye, I could hear Scott at the top of the cellar stairs. Ed was no longer moving. I could feel the life leaving him. I picked the sickle up again and moved swiftly to the wall next to the stairwell, pressing my back up against it. "Guys?" Scott called. "What happened? Ed? Mike?" The boy hauling the wagon with his sister in it came over to the foot of the stairs and looked up at Scott, then over at me. The others came forward as well.
stepping close to see the kill, living vicariously through me. Scott came down slowly, calling out on every other step, bawling like a little baby. I stood, looking at all the mangled members of my new family. The decapitated man, whose name I now knew was Richard Garrett, held his own head in his hands. His eyes moved from Scott on the staircase to me, and a smile came to his face. Scott stepped down, feet touching the cellar floor,
I pivoted and swung the sickle at his neck. Sometime later, I stepped in front of the flesh door made from Kyle Bishop. I held the sickle in one hand, and with the other, I adjusted my new getup. Skinning Scott hadn't been all that difficult once Mother pointed me to a sharp knife in the cellar.
But since I still had my clothes on, my friend's skin didn't fit all that well. It hung loosely in some parts and clung tight in others. But Mother said it didn't matter. She said I just needed it to get out of the house. Once that was done, I could shed it like a snakeskin. I cleared my throat, suddenly nervous despite all the support now with me. I could feel them all clamoring to get out into the world once again. They'd been trapped in this house for a long time.
But now they were leaving. We were leaving. I reached out and touched the fleshy door, pushing it, scared somehow that I wasn't good enough to open it. But the door shifted, swinging open as if on expertly machined and well-oiled hinges. The smell of foliage sifted through the aroma of blood as I stepped out onto the front porch. It was still dark somehow, and I realized I could hear sirens off in the distance. Time was different in there.
Mother whispered to me, "Fuck out, but you must hurry to get away." I stepped down off the porch and into the overgrown front yard. Their dirt driveway was so choked with weeds that I could hardly see it, but I followed it easily. At the end of the driveway, I took Scott's skin off and threw it in a nearby ditch. Then I moved down the road toward the nearest house. It was far enough away from Curtis's that they might not have heard the gunshots from earlier.
at least not clearly enough to cause them concern. As I made my way up to the house, I realized I could see through the walls, in a sense. I could see the three people in there as spots of hazy, bright light amid the inert darkness of their surroundings. They were all asleep in their beds. Two adults and one early teen child. "Eyes!" Mother whispered. "You can see differently now because of the eyes."
I tongued a piece of eye jelly out of a gap in my molars as I got used to my new way of seeing the world. Two cars sat parked in the front yard. I would need the keys to one of them. It wasn't hard to find an unlocked window. Those now with me helped. They had all sorts of useful information for me, and I reveled in their glee. They were free, and they had me to thank. But I was free too. I had never imagined I could be so free.
Inside the house, I crept toward the nearest white flame, the teenager sleeping in her bed. "It's too bright," Mother said. "I can't stand it. Make it go away." "Yes, Mother," I thought, grinning as I pushed open the door and stepped inside, raising the sickle. As I stopped the car at the end of the driveway, I looked behind me, past my gruesome passengers, past my family, at the house.
There were no more bright white flames in there. I had snuffed them out. Grinning, I turned back around and directed the car out. Pretty soon, we were on the highway. I could see so many of those bright white flames everywhere. Most of them were too bright, but some burned with an inverted darkness, much like my own. Those dark ones I could ignore, Mother said. The other ones? I wondered how many I could snuff out before the police caught up to me.
