She walked through the living room, turned right into a short hallway, and entered the kitchen. She now looked through the kitchen and into the dining room. Sometimes different perspectives provided fresh insights to things. But she didn’t have any revelations. She opened up some cabinets and drawers. All silverware, plates, and cups seemed to be left here. A coffeemaker and grinder were plugged into the wall but she was sure the power had been turned off, probably as of this morning. She opened the refrigerator, figuring she should probably remove any food that might have or would potentially go bad. There was a half-empty glass bottle of water with a rubber pop-top and an unopened bottle of Stone IPA. She’d probably take that back and put it in her own refrigerator.
The freezer contained three empty ice cube trays and a yellowed letter, still kind of cool to the touch, that read: REMEMBER TO GIVE BACK.
Cryptic, maybe. Or maybe just a simple reminder.
She walked down the hallway, stopping at the bathroom on the right just long enough to throw back the shower curtain and lift the toilet seat to make sure nothing too organic had been left behind. She’d have to remember to wash her hands when she got back to the office.
She glanced into the bedroom at the end of the hall but it was completely empty.
The smaller bedroom across the hallway contained a bed with messed up covers and a chest of drawers.
She wondered why Beaumont would have chosen the smaller bedroom and reminded herself he might not have been the only person living here, even though his was the only name on the agreement. Maybe he’d actually spent most of his nights in the larger bedroom and decided to take that stuff with him because it was newer or more expensive or more comfortable. Or maybe he had preferred this bedroom because of the large window looking out into the backyard and the thick woods beyond. It was a good view. There were no curtains hanging on the window and she wondered if Mr. Beaumont had ever put any up.
She watched two squirrels fucking in the yard. In the distance, a cat hunkered in the tall grass, hiding in the shadow of the woods, ready to spring into action.
In his closet she found that Mr. Beaumont preferred mostly khaki pants and blue jeans with a number of black shirts, one light blue oxford, and a clown costume. This was more creepy than hilarious and she tried to convince herself it was probably a Halloween costume. Still, she pulled it out and inspected it for blood, rips, anything. Nothing. Not really a surprise.
She went through the chest, expecting to find socks and underwear and t-shirts since most of the clothes seemed to be left behind. The only thing she found was an eight-inch black dildo in the middle drawer.
She closed the drawer, embarrassed.
Why was she embarrassed?
She didn’t know. Now that she thought about it, it seemed irrational.
There’s no one here with you.
You’re all alone.
All alone.
With her hand on the dusty chest of drawers, she stared almost longingly into the woods across the yard. They seemed darker and more foreboding than the woods closer to town. A person could get lost in these woods.
The squirrels had finished fucking.
A third squirrel came up and began fucking the squirrel that had been on the bottom.
It made Zena think of a rabbity guy in a porno waiting his turn.
The cat sprang out from the woods and attacked the now idle squirrel.
All four animals made panicked squeals and dispersed.
There was an explosion of bird sounds. The birds were still there, watching.
Maybe it was all the animals making Zena feel watched.
But an animal was not a person. An animal could react to something she did, but it had no way of recounting her actions. Beyond the animals, there was the other natural world – the trees, the weeds, the sky – that never reacted to something a human did. Not consciously anyway. Not by choice.
Zena realized she was wet.
You’re all alone.
She wondered if she was ever alone. Sometimes she felt like she had to do things to prove she was alone. To prove there was not always a reaction to her actions. To prove this to herself. This sensation of being watched was really just ego, she thought.
She slowly lay down on the bed, watching the early afternoon make the green backyard glow.
She shucked down her pants and underwear and ran her fingertips over herself, spreading her labia. The cat was back, spotting her, casually licking its paw. Not judging her. Zena scooted to the edge of the bed, her pants still around her ankles. The chest was close enough for her to reach forward and open the drawer, pull out the dildo.
She didn’t know if it had been cleaned since its last use. She didn’t know how many times or on how many people it had been used.
She didn’t care.
She leaned back.
The cat was gone.
She stared at the ceiling and slowly slid the dildo inside of her, as deep as it would go. She looked at the shadows gathering in the corners of the room and closed her eyes and created a shadow within herself. When she thought about who she pictured on top of her, she wasn’t surprised to think it was probably Alan Beaumont, even though she had no idea what he looked like. A stranger thought – that this was his big black mummified cock she had so deep inside her. That turned her on more than it disgusted her.
* * *
On the way out, she threw the dildo in one of the trashcans outside. It was now a talisman of her guilt. She hadn’t used one of those in a really long time. She’d forgotten how pleasurable it could be. In many respects, it was the perfect man. The house was only a ten-minute walk from the office so she hadn’t bothered driving. She walked slowly, as if in a daze.
She thought about stopping off at her house before going to the office. She should probably wash her hands and change her underwear.
CANDY HEART
In the middle of the woods, Diane Celine whirled around, her pulse quickening. Sudden movements snapped twigs around her. Her eyes stabbed the moonlit darkness, trying to find the source of the noise. Madness gnawed at her, the culmination of weeks of worry.
If she stopped to think about it, if she stopped to think why she was standing out here in the cold purplish darkness, beneath the bare trees and the fat moon, she could almost see the lunacy of her situation. Almost, but not quite. Maybe another month or two of fruitless searching and she would be there, ready to bow to sanity and run the opposite way . . . but not yet.
Joey was gone. Her madness wouldn’t bring him back. She didn’t know who would take a six-year-old boy but she had seen the news enough to know it happened all the time.
Yes, those things happened all the time, only the television glass always added just enough of a layer of fiction to them so her thin wall of safety remained. That wall was gone now. All the faceless psychopaths she had heard about on the television had finally found her. Actually, they had found Joey. And now she was prepared to do anything necessary to bring him back.
If something in her gut told her to leave the house and come out here to this clearing in the woods then that was exactly what she was going to do. If that gut feeling had told her to wake up and drink a pint of motor oil, she would have done that too. She didn’t have to explain herself to anybody and if something happened, if one of those gut instincts panned out and she found Joey, the need for explanations would be erased.
Again, there were those scurrying sounds off in the woods, heavy and so quick. Her head whipped to the side, breath spuming out like factory steam.
Probably just a deer, she thought.
Then a pain ripped up her spine and she dropped to the floor of the woods.
* * *
The weeks had passed in a darkening whirlwind where some things, mental things – thoughts and memories – were smashed, shattered, or devoured completely.
It began with the morning she woke up and found Joey gone. His father had run out on them a long time ago and now it was just the boy and s
he, living alone in a ramshackle house between a winter quiet town and hibernating woods. Amazing how she could live alone like that and never have so much as an inkling of fear. Also amazing was how fast the fear could wrap its steel-thick trapjaws around her heart, lungs, and mind.
The day was off, not quite right, from the moment she woke up on the couch in the living room. It took her a couple of minutes to put things together. She was confused, unable to recall the last time she had fallen asleep anywhere except her bed. Maybe she had dropped off while watching television.
She searched her mind for an explanation.
The pills.
It had to be the pills.
She had changed doctors last week and the new doctor (she remembered jokingly referring to him as “the incredibly hairy Dr. Bath” to Joey) had changed her pills. He told her these new ones would still help her sleep at night when the red anxiety crawled all over her skin, but they wouldn’t leave her feeling so groggy the next day. She wasn’t used to them. That must be why she fell asleep on the couch. But she still couldn’t see how that fully explained it. She always doubled up on the old pills during this most special time of the month because they helped with her cramping and bloating as well as her anxiety. Sometimes she thought the pills were like some magical cure all. Now if they could just take care of excess weight, depression, and a tight financial situation . . .
Not only had she passed out on the couch, she had also overslept. The angle of the meager February light coming in from the windows told her she should already be at work and Joey should already be at school.
With her heart pounding and her head in a foggy spin she started to run down the hall and wake Joey before something caught her eye.
Glass double doors faced the woods, taking up half of one wall in the living room. It provided a good view. It was one of the things that made her decide to rent this place upon walking into it, despite it being a little out of her price range. There was something smeared across the doors – a clear, hardened substance – something that reminded her of snot.
She stopped before turning into the dim hallway. A thought popped into her head, reaffirming her assertions that she needed the pills she took. She had to get rid of whatever that was on the doors. She would not be able to think of anything else until it was gone. She would yell at Joey and be tense all day at work if she knew that single streak of yuckiness was still there.
Rushing into the bathroom, she grabbed some paper towels and Windex, opened the double doors and vigorously cleaned the snotlike substance from them. The streak was about six inches wide and, at its arc, reached her chest. It made her think of a large drooly dog. Maybe a coyote, she thought, for she had heard them howling at night.
Once the streak was gone, she immediately felt a little more clearheaded, now able to go wake up Joey and get ready for work.
She glanced into her bedroom as she passed it and noticed a light flashing from her answering machine. A digital red “2” blinked repeatedly as she approached it.
Shit, she thought. The first was probably Joey’s school, calling to find out where he was. The school would have probably called her work, also. The other message was probably from work.
Way to get everyone all worried, sleepyhead. How was she going to excuse Joey? Give him a note letting the teacher know that his mom was an anxiety-ridden pill popper?
She hit the play button and listened to the messages robotically spurt from the machine while she hurried to Joey’s room, not knowing why she now felt so sure he wasn’t going to be in his bed. Until that point, that pinprick of panic, she had simply thought he would be in there sleeping because she had not woken him.
Please let that feeling be wrong.
She saw a lump in the covers and her hopes rose until she reached the bed and punched down on the hollow fabric, feeling nothing, her heart beginning to steadily increase its rate.
She could only hope one of the messages was from Joey or somebody who could tell her he was safe and sound. It was perfectly possible he had woken up on his own, gotten dressed, and gone out to wait for the bus. But he just seemed too young for that.
Her feelings were right about the messages. One of them from Joey’s school, one of them from work. Both of them sounded vaguely concerned but more concerned with her complete failure to call and report either of these absences than any kind of panicked, genuine concern like that which now surged through her body.
The alarm she felt held court with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The last time she had seen Joey, she had sent him to bed early because he had scattered little candy hearts she had bought for him on Valentine’s Day around the house. She had been incredibly mad at him. Even after yelling at him about the mess, he had tried to smuggle some of the hearts into bed with him, the palm of his sweaty little hand multi-colored pastel after she pried them from it.
She spent the next hour searching the house inside and out, not finding anything.
He was gone. How could she have let this happen? Before letting panic punch a devastating hole in her sanity, she tried to seize on the only rational explanation.
His father had somehow found a way into the house and lured the boy away. He had been threatening to do that ever since the divorce three years ago and now she figured he probably had. A secret part of her, buried beneath the hate and resentment, almost wanted this to be the case. At least then she knew he would be safe, or as safe as a child could be in the company of a womanizing alcoholic.
Now she figured his father could probably make an actual case for gaining custody of Joey, coming into the house to find her whacked out of her skull on sleeping pills, completely neglecting Joey’s education and her means for financial support. What would it matter that he had only before come to see Joey sporadically, at best? Or that he had paid her exactly nothing in child support?
She wanted to call the bum, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do that. He would just lie to her or try to make her feel smaller than she already felt.
She did the only thing she could think was left to do. She called the police. Officer Branson was very kind to her. He asked all the right questions. He kept her calm. He asked her about her ex-husband, Stanley. Surprisingly, she was able to answer most of the officer’s questions in a reasonably intelligent manner, even though it felt like her brain or her heart was going to swell and pop out of her body. Branson assured her they would contact the police in Stanley’s area and have them check out the situation.
That afternoon, she called Officer Branson again, wanting to know if they had any leads. Branson told her they had questioned Stanley and were not under the impression he had Joey. Stanley had let them come in and search his house without a warrant.
She had already known this. Stanley had called her as soon as the officers left, out of his head with anger and frustration. Of course he blamed her and she didn’t think she had a right to disagree with him. He said he was going to search on his own before hanging up the phone.
That evening, the police came to her house, dusting for prints, looking for any evidence of a break-in. Other officers searched the woods, questioning the occupants of the houses located closest to hers.
The next day, Diane broadened her own search to the woods. As the investigation progressed, she went back there every day, mentally mapping the dead trees as landmarks so she wouldn’t end up searching the same area over and over. Sometime during the second week, she found something that gave her both a sense of dread and a faint glimmer of hope.
She almost didn’t notice it at first. It could have been any tiny piece of debris. It was the color that caught her eye. Bending to pick it up, she saw that it was a pastel green candy heart.
The inscription on the tiny heart said: MAYBE.
She knew it was stupid. She knew it meant no more than what the kings of holiday commercialization intended it to mean but, under these circumstances, it seemed to contain some kind of mystical prophecy, like a girl on a first date opening a fortu
ne cookie that says, “You have found the love of your life.”
Maybe, she thought. Maybe he is out here.
She continued to search the woods all through the bitter cold days. She didn’t know what she was looking for and she didn’t know how she would be able to deal with it if she actually came upon his dead body lying out there somewhere.
All of her searching led to nothing. Only more panic, more depression, more guilt, an increased feeling of doom.
* * *
Down on her knees in the woods, a month later, staring longingly at the pale moon, everything came back to her.
The new medicine wasn’t working.
The old pills had kept this . . . this changing away. Images of this night the previous month flashed through her dulling mind, before what was human was completely devoured by what was animal. There was just enough human left to grasp those fleeting animal images and feelings.
She had locked herself outside because she felt strange and she hadn’t felt that way since before Joey was born and she knew what feeling that way meant.
She had tried to get into the house, tried so desperately, beating her snout against the door until she finally found one flimsy enough to batter open.
Only she hadn’t had to batter it open at all. It opened for her. And Joey stood on the other side, looking at her with a combination of awe and fear until he realized what was in front of him. He took off running for his room, screaming. She had dragged him out here. He had yelled for her to stop. And she had tried to communicate to him that his time had come.
Oh my God, she thought. Had she murdered her own son? But before she could answer herself, those thoughts were gone, surrendered to the animal thoughts, the ones that could only focus on hunger and scent and desire.
* * *
Jeff Branson didn’t know what the hell he was seeing. He didn’t know why this shit always happened to him. He guessed that was what he got for trying to be a responsible officer, a good cop.
Creep House: Horror Stories Page 3