The loss of hair bothered Alexander but, even at that young age, he understood a sacrifice had to be made.
He didn’t go to school that day.
His mother had made an appointment with Dr. Benway who’d asked him a lot of questions and provided not a lot of answers. His mother was with him the entire time. He told Dr. Benway about the aliens. His mother asked the doctor if he thought Alexander had been molested. Benway said he could examine Alexander for that too, and made Alexander spread his butt cheeks so he could peer at his anus. Alexander said nobody had touched him in that way because he’d already told them about the aliens. He hadn’t told them the way it made his penis feel because he thought that was private. Benway told Alexander that if he kept talking about aliens, he could make an appointment with a child psychiatrist. The only person Alexander knew who saw a child psychiatrist was Chad Hanger and he chewed on girls’ hair and occasionally shit himself in class. Alexander decided to stop talking about aliens, but that didn’t stop him from reading and watching everything about them he could get his hands on. His mother probably saw this as further proof he’d made the whole thing up, even though he had not been remotely interested in aliens before the abduction.
The aliens did not contact him again until he was twenty-four, a fairly recent graduate of Ohio State University, and working as a data entry specialist at a major health insurance company in Dayton.
He had to find a child and take it to the woods behind that old house his mom had rented for probably only a year back in the nineties. Of course Alexander knew exactly where the house was. That was where it had happened in the first place. Ever since getting his driver’s license, he’d driven by it several times. He knew it was the aliens telling him to do this because it was an alien thought. One he’d never had before. He knew he was attracted to young boys sexually, although this was something he’d never acted on. He had simply resolved not to put himself around them. Oh, there was a time when he’d considered entering the priesthood to gain unlimited access but, in the end, he knew it was wrong, could see it being a potential problem, and resolved to stay away. He even had every intention of becoming a middle school science teacher when he started college. He had convinced himself he just wanted to teach kids about the stars but, before so much as even shadowing a teacher in a local middle school, he had become aware of the real reason and promptly switched his major to a degree in general science. That was something he was genuinely interested in. He found himself working where he did because he needed a job and they were looking for someone with a degree, any degree, it didn’t matter.
The alien thoughts did not announce themselves as perfectly formed things. He did not hear a loud voice in his head saying: ALEXANDER, YOU NEED TO ABDUCT A CHILD. No. It was a revelation he usually stumbled upon after some kind of intuition. Once he did stumble upon it – and this had, thus far, been the most potentially life altering one – they were impossible to shake. The communications became immediate obsessions. When he received this particular one, he remembered exactly what he was doing. He sat at his desk in the huge open office on the second floor, gazing toward Angela Bent’s desk. It was a Friday afternoon, not long before they’d be walking out for the weekend. Three of their coworkers were gathered around her desk. Alexander got it. Angela was what these guys found attractive. Therefore, he should have probably found her attractive, as well. But he didn’t. He’d never met a man or a woman he had been attracted to. Well, not since he’d been about twelve. That he was still attracted to people that age – particularly boys but a few tomboyish girls as well – didn’t strike him as particularly mysterious. Psychologically, he’d never really gone through the full rite of puberty. He’d never graduated to the next level, so to speak.
He went back to entering data from the sheets before him when that intuition became crystal clear.
Really? I need to find a child and take it to the woods behind 523 Glowers Pike?
Yes. That was what he needed to do. He would have to figure out the specifics. He would have to figure out if this was even in his moral universe. There was no real timeline. No rush. The aliens’ sense of time was not like his.
Nevertheless, he found himself eager to get started.
He left work and sat around his tiny apartment that weekend mostly figuring out ways to abduct his first child. He couldn’t write anything down. He realized there would be very serious consequences if he was ever caught and the worst thing in the world would be to create any sort of paper or data trail. This was much the same reason he’d never so much as viewed what was popularly called child pornography. The closest he’d come were some art books he’d found in a bookstore two cities away. There was no way he would buy them or even steal them. He had taken them into the restroom, even though a posted sign had expressly forbid it. In a stall he had perused the books and, yes, shamefully, he’d ended up masturbating. It did not take long. It never did. Even when the only thing he had was mental porn conjured from his memories of the couple times he’d had to shower with the boys at gym class and the one summer he’d gone to camp.
The first and most obvious question was where he was going to get this child. The farther away the better. But it couldn’t be so far away that he couldn’t return home to his apartment. He wouldn’t want his neighbors to notice his absence.
He would probably need to cull them from lower middle class or lower class neighborhoods. This wouldn’t be a problem. Those types of people tended to breed more than the others and their parents were often more inattentive and the areas underpoliced. He would want to be as far away from the scene of the abduction as possible before anyone even noticed the child’s absence.
His was pretty much a blank slate. His body type was average in every way. As long as he properly disguised himself he didn’t think being seen was a big problem.
He decided he would have to try to fit in at work more, so he didn’t fit the spot on profile of a serial killer or child abductor. Maybe he would go to the mixer. Occasionally, the girls in the office had invited him along on their nights out, probably because they felt sorry for him or thought he was gay. He resolved to go the next time he was asked. Maybe he should tell them he was gay. Maybe that would go a little toward explaining some obvious gaps he’d have when talking about his personal life.
There were some questions for the aliens and he asked them, waiting for them to emit a response. While he was eager to get started, he didn’t want to be too hasty. He had to know what he was doing. He had to know what he could expect to get out of this.
The questions were asked and the answers were given in the coming weeks.
How often would he be expected to do this?
It was hard to say. It would depend on need and transportation. Alexander’s earth was not always open to these beings. He would be given advance notice and the beings would appropriately coordinate their arrival.
Would the children have to be alive?
That was not really an issue. As long as there wasn’t significant deterioration of the tissue, the beings would be able to use them.
Why did they want children?
Research.
Male or female?
It didn’t matter. Preferably both so they could study reproduction and the differences in the sexes.
Would Alexander ever see them again?
Possibly. If he did what the beings asked, and did a good job, there may be a special place reserved for him.
Would there be any bodies? Any evidence to cover up?
They would take care of that.
What if he got caught?
That was outside their capabilities of control. He should take every precaution.
On June 1st of that year, Alexander abducted a boy named Max Hamlisch from a small rural town just north of Columbus. The boy was walking his dog along a road just before sundown. Alexander bashed the dog’s head in with a tire iron, snapped the boy’s neck, and tossed him in the trunk of his car. In the woods behind the hou
se in Twin Springs, he stripped the boy naked, violated his corpse, put the boy’s clothes back on, and left the body there. Alexander didn’t hear anything about it.
The next month he took a boy from a Pittsburgh suburb.
Over the next six years, there would be 43 more children. If he should ever want to abuse their bodies for too long, there was always the voice of the beings reminding him what a valuable asset he was to them. There was also the fear of recrimination and punishment. Although the more he got away with it, the more invincible Alexander felt. Most of them were boys. A few of them were girls. They were all between the ages of ten and twelve.
With the exception of one boy getting away, everything had gone off without a hitch until that night, exactly seven years later, when he left a dead boy in the woods, swerved to avoid a deer standing in the middle of the road, and lost control of his car.
He emerged from the car without really thinking. He could walk fine. He gave himself a pat down and didn’t seem to be bleeding from anywhere. He felt more like he was in a daze, almost like he was outside of himself. He staggered to the house he remembered from his childhood. It was the place he’d been in least of all, and yet it was the one most seared into his memory. There had been the house where he’d lived with his mother and father. Then his father had run off and he and his mother had moved to this house in Twin Springs where they lived for no more than a year. Then, probably because of the troubles his mother was having with him, they’d gone to live with his grandparents in Glowers Hook.
Alexander approached the door to the house and everything went kind of blank for a while.
He was pretty sure he needed help.
He hoped these people could help him.
Shortly after entering the house there was a bright flash of light that seemed to simultaneously suck everything out of the air while also infusing it with some form of wild energy. That would be the aliens, he thought, coming to claim their human child.
3.
The man continued to sit on the couch, his hands resting on his knees, staring straight ahead at the dead television. His lips were moving but nothing was coming out of his mouth. Thinking he was trying to talk, Slade asked, “Huh?” the first couple of times. The Brothers Brian had quieted down on the patio.
Slade crouched by the wall outlet. Sometimes when the battery ran out completely, it took the phone a couple of minutes to come to life again even when connected to the wall. Since the lights to the house were still on (maybe there had been a brief flicker) he didn’t see any reason why this shouldn’t work. Unless everything was fried. That would suck hugely. He wondered if he could get renter’s insurance to cover something like that. If it worked, that would be great. That meant he could get his camera running and at least record a few minutes of this weird guy. He thought it could be the beginning of one of those documentaries that said as much about the director as it did the subject. Start with this weird, pale, hairless guy sitting on his couch mumbling and work backward from there. Why was he here? Where had he been going? Why was he hairless? The reasons were probably mundane, but it was this beauty in mundaneness or in the quiet captured moments of great extraordinariness that seemed to resonate with indie audiences.
Slade glanced down at his phone. Still no sign of life.
He had not set out to make fuck videos. He wanted to make a living in the arts and this seemed to be the easiest way. He had grown up in the rural town of Glowers Hook, Ohio, and later enrolled in the film program at Wright State. He’d done well and his senior project was much lauded. His professor encouraged him to enroll it in some film festivals. On top of his already sizeable student loans he knew he was going to have to pay back some day, he had taken a bank loan to pay the entrance fees to all the festivals he was to enter it in. He did this for about a year, living with his parents and working on a feature length script. The film was accepted into most of the festivals it was entered in. It was rejected from South by Southwest and Sundance, the two he was really hoping it would be accepted into. Being accepted into either of those would have probably gained him more exposure than winning a grand prize at all the other ones combined. It did take the grand prize at a small festival in Tukwila, Washington, and a “silver” prize at a festival in East Lansing, Michigan. He hadn’t attended either of them and was surprised at the film’s success. Both of them awarded modest prize money that amounted to only about three times the entrance fee. He was still in touch with his university professor and asked him for advice. Well, his professor said, if he was really serious about filmmaking, he’d need to move out to LA. So Slade took what was left of the loan and his prize money and moved to LA, where he shared an apartment with three other forgettable film school graduates. He shopped his script around to agents and tried to get a distribution deal for his student film. He was met with rejection for the following year. Finally he said fuck it and uploaded his film to YouTube while continuing to shop his wares. It sat there for a year where he obsessively checked its view count. It never got above 400. One night, he drunkenly made a POV film of himself fucking his girlfriend at the time and uploaded it to a porn site. By the end of the week it had over 400,000 views on that site alone. He was pretty sure it had spread itself around to other sites too. His face wasn’t in it. His girlfriend wasn’t as upset as he thought she would be. She left him and accepted the many, many offers that came her way. He shifted focus. Hired people to design and manage a website. Ultimately he left LA because he realized he could do the same thing back home for a fraction of the price. The women in LA wanted too much money and a lot of them thought it was a stepping stone to some fabulous career. He couldn’t afford to pay them and he couldn’t afford to keep paying his lawyers to fend off their lawyers. Back in Ohio, there was still enough shame attached to it that he hadn’t been sued once in the three years he’d been doing this. And girls worked for about a fourth the price plus drugs. Drugs had been somewhat of a given in LA too. But even their drugs were more expensive. In Twin Springs, he could get a girl high on pot, film an hour long video where he fucked the girl in the ass and finished in her mouth, send her away with a couple hundred bucks and they felt like they’d won the lottery and were now definitely the hippest one amongst all their friends and might even get famous to boot. That video, through advertiser revenue, would earn him around 20,000 dollars, of which he would retain around sixty percent. Not bad. You just had to watch out for their boyfriends. That never happened in LA. The guys just didn’t care and, if they wanted to, the girls probably wouldn’t let them.
Of course, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that if all of his fucking equipment was fried.
His phone still had not blinked to life and the man on the couch was now not just moving his lips but whispering.
Slade couldn’t make out any of the words.
It almost sounded like he was chanting but there was a nearly electronic sound coming from his mouth.
Still nothing from his phone.
Slade was not an overly superstitious person, but he thought maybe if he just walked away from it, it would happen. Plus he needed to get away from that sound.
He walked to the carport door and glanced out.
Sierra’s car was still out there.
Of course it was. The battery was probably dead.
He considered going out to check on her and then thought, Fuck it.
He stood in the doorway and watched the man on the couch. He considered telling him to keep it down, the chanting had grown so loud. What had gone from being an inconvenience to a major pain in the ass was now quickly escalating into a situation that was starting to creep him out.
Obviously there was something off about the guy. Something that went beyond shock. Besides that, though . . . there was something familiar about this guy. At first he’d thought it was perhaps the most notable thing – the complete absence of hair. But Slade knew he’d never met anyone with that . . . was it a condition or a preference? He didn’t know. Then he thought
maybe it was the blank expression in the eyes. And it was a familiar expression, but had nothing to do with the bearer. He’d filmed enough scenes with girls who’d had one, maybe two partners in her life before suddenly getting her ass fucked by the biggest cock she would ever see in person while simultaneously having another huge cock shoved down her throat. Yeah, some of them looked a little dazed and blank afterward. Especially when this went on past the point of pain or pleasure and into numb grinding muscle movement.
He moved closer to the man. Maybe if he placed a gentle hand on him and calmly asked him to quiet down, the guy would stop.
Slade glanced at his phone on the floor as he crossed the room. Still nothing.
He would have to ask one of the Brians to go to the police station or sit here with the guy while he did. He was feeling so freaked out right now he almost wished they would refuse to go.
He crouched down in front of the stranger and put his hand on his knee.
“Sir?”
Those sounds continued to come from his mouth. Slade had almost grown used to them. It was almost like they didn’t actually come from his mouth but were made somewhere in his head and poured from his nostrils.
From this lower angle, Slade noticed his nostrils for the first time. One was round. One was tear-shaped.
Just as it all came back to him, he heard White Brian say, “What the fuck!”
Slade turned to look out the window to the backyard and saw them.
4.
That morning, it was like an alarm had gone off in William Tanner’s head. William was twelve. He sometimes had weird thoughts but never with as much clarity as he had this one. It was like, for whatever question he had for the voice, the answer immediately waited for him.
What about Mom?
She will understand.
How will I find this place?
You’ll just know.
How long will it take?
You will make it in time, if you leave now.
Creep House: Horror Stories Page 10