“Goddammit,” he gasped. “Why do I bother resisting?”
A minute later Tom reached his front steps. He had two choices. He looked across the street at the darkness and shadows that waited for him behind the Dunkin Donuts. He knew what he had to do, whatever this sickening curse was that haunted him since childhood, whatever the answers to all these questions were, it all resided right back there in those dark little unseen pockets of the night.
Then he looked back at the photo of Sand’s crotch.
He tapped on the keypad to type in his response.
You win. See you in an hour.
Then he looked back to the shadows across the street. For a brief moment he knew he saw someone standing there, cloaked in darkness. But he convinced himself otherwise. Maybe tomorrow he’d conquer the shadows.
***
Once again, Bob was alone in the dark silence of the night. He hoped to try and make the best of the peace and quiet, but the strange behavior of Tom was not sitting well with him, and for some reason it made the nocturnal serenity feel awkward and creepy. He lit up another cigarette and tried his best to think peaceful thoughts.
He had succeeded for a minute or two, until Rusty started growling at something off in the distance somewhere.
“What is it, boy?” Bob asked the dog, who was now standing on all fours and tensing his back with his tail down between his hind legs.
Rusty only answered with more growling.
“Time for a shit?” Bob asked, leaning forward and grabbing the leash from the floor of the porch. “Come on, pup,” he said as Rusty came over and allowed him to fasten the leash around his neck.
He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and walked down the three steps of his porch, letting Rusty lead the way.
Rusty was still growling, but Bob wrote it off as probably just a skunk or raccoon off in the distance.
Rusty passed the spot where he usually peed and turned down the dark driveway.
“Come on, Rusty,” Bob scolded his dog. “It’s just some stupid animal. Probably bigger and tougher than you, Napoleon. Just do your business and let’s get back to the porch.”
The little seventeen-pound dog showed a level of strength that Bob had never seen or felt before as he thrust on forward, nearly ripping the leash from his hand.
With only the light of the bright moon that hung so low in the sky, Rusty was leading Bob into almost complete darkness. But Bob allowed the dog to take him further into it, since the sensor light on the back of his house would kick on by the time they reached the backyard.
And once the light illuminated the darkness, it shined like a spotlight on the most hideous monstrosity the decorated veteran had ever seen. He opened his mouth and struggled to force the words out through a throat that had suddenly become bone-dry.
“What in God’s name…”
Only the eyes were clear: ovals of crimson and black shining on him like flashlights that shadowed the finer details of the creature attached to them.
***
After a quick shower and shave, Tom was dressed and walking across town to Sand’s apartment, where further text messaging assured him that the door was unlocked and all he needed to do was walk right in, lock the door behind him and take her as he found her.
He made sure not to look into the shadows across the street when he walked out his front door, and continued convincing himself that he had seen nobody there, even though the shape of the person looked eerily familiar.
No way. No how.
The chugging, pounding sounds of death metal rumbling through his headphones carried Tom across town, adding a spring to his step that wouldn’t have been there normally after a long day of standing around in an empty bookstore. The only thing weighing him down tonight was his guilt of procrastination. And his weakness. I put off the one thing I’ve known I had to do since I was ten years old for the same pussy I get almost every night of the week. Whatever. It’s been waiting for me for twenty-four years, it’ll surely still be there tomorrow.
After ten minutes of trying to purge his mind of Cassie and the mystery of the dark shadows, he came to Sand’s front steps and made haste through her front door.
Then the smell hit him and he remembered why he was such a sucker for this girl. It wasn’t just her body, face, hair and sex. It was the number she pulled on his other senses too. As he shut and locked the door behind him, he smelled that smell, whatever the hell it was. Perhaps a conglomeration of clove smoke, perfumes, hair products, shower gel, lip gloss and who knows what the fuck else. It was just intoxicating, plain and simple. There were hints of strawberries and cherries and cinnamon and other sweet aromas that he couldn’t identify. Letting his inhibitions go completely, he let the aroma’s magnetism pull him toward Sand’s bedroom.
“I’m coming for you, Sand!” he called out as he floated through the hallway, forgetting in his hormone driven stupor that he was ever annoyed by this girl. Much to his surprise, he got no response. Leaving the door open for him and waiting naked in bed was fairly routine, and when he called out to warn her of his entry, she always playfully yelled something back, usually to the tune of is that you, my knight in shining armor? Oh come save me from the evil wizard’s lair. You shall be rewarded ever so handsomely.
“Sand?” he called out again. “You hear me?”
Still no response.
Gone was the ease in his mind and muscles that Sand’s multitude of aromas had been kind enough to instill in him. The anxiety that he’d been denying since he saw that shadow of a man behind the Dunkin Donuts was now kicked up several notches into full gear.
Creeping out from the space between the doorframe and the door itself that stood ajar was a dark light. A strange contradiction of logic that he had seen before only in the nightmares that were all too real to be cruel tricks of the subconscious. A thick beam of light that was the darkest black, the utmost absence of color and substance was there before him in a solid, almost corporeal form.
“Sand?” he called out again with a voice that cracked like a nervous, mid-puberty adolescent boy.
“I’m waiting for you,” she said.
Her voice somewhat eased his turmoil. So she was in there, but the dark light was still unaccounted for. When he saw it, it meant he’d be seeing the man with the red eyes. That cursed old Red Eyes never came to him unaccompanied by the most horrifying images of violence and brutality.
But that’s only in dreams! This is not a dream!
“Are you coming or what?” Sand called out again.
Swallowing hard, he pushed the door open.
There in a sea of dark light, illuminated in a hellish red glow, on her bed and naked as promised, was Sand. Her lips were sewn shut by a bloody thread, and her hands and feet were bound to the bedposts by thick rusty nails driven though them. Standing above her was none other than Red Eyes himself. His face was hidden under the shadow of his hat’s brim. As always, no feature other than his shape and his glowing red eyes was clear to Tom.
Looking back down at Sand he saw that her naked body was now crawling with slithering creatures unknown to his eyes. Slimy tentacles caressed her, licking her body up and down while she struggled to scream through her crudely sealed lips.
Red Eyes laughed his guttural growl while fear paralyzed Tom, rendering him only able to watch as these heinous creatures tortured her body.
Struggling to break from his unseen bond, he screamed as its grip finally eased.
“Sand!”
“What the fuck, dude?” she bellowed, her mouth now open and her face showing she was plenty turned off.
The dark light vanished and there was Tom’s naked girlfriend sitting up in bed with a vibrator half inserted in her crotch, scornful and confused.
No man with red eyes stood there anymore; only Tom, Sand and the wonderful grouping of aromas that lived in her apartment with her.
“Fuck,” Tom muttered, then sighed and fell back against the bedroom door, forcing it shut.
>
“Are you okay, Tom?” Sand asked as she shot up from the bed to help him keep his balance.
“I don’t know,” he answered, sounding drunk and exhausted.
Once Tom was able to stand up straight without aid, Sand went over to the closet and threw on a nightshirt and a pair of plain black underwear.
“I’m going to make some tea, sweetie,” she said as she finished pulling her panties up under the long top. “And you’re going to tell me what’s going on. And I mean everything.”
Still smothered under the weight of his waking nightmare, Tom had not the strength to do anything other than agree.
***
An hour had passed. Many cigarettes were smoked and several cups of chamomile tea had been drunk between the two of them. Tom had indeed told her everything without hesitation or fear of ridicule. His dead father, his murderer of a mother, the enigma called Cassie, the man with the red eyes, and lastly, what it was that he had just seen happen right in Sand’s bedroom.
“Go,” was all Sand said once the story was fully told.
Tom didn’t know if it was an angry go, a worried go, a “do what-ya-gotta-do” go, or even any other form of the verb.
It didn’t matter. He went.
***
Eight minutes later, two less than it took Tom to go the same distance in the opposite direction less than an hour before, Tom was standing across the street from his apartment.
There they were.
The shadows.
Look into the shadows, Tommy.
Those were the words Tom had been repeating to himself since that day when he was ten years old.
Cassie’s words.
Red Eyes’ words.
Tom closed his eyes and inhaled the deepest he could. Upon exhale he opened them and walked bravely into those petrifying, horrid shadows like a soldier preparing himself to walk into an ambush.
Behind the Dunkin Donuts he turned into the darkest of the hidden corners of the night. There stood the man he thought he had seen earlier, but had been too stubbornly skeptic to accept it.
This was a man he knew had been found dead and buried in a ditch five years ago.
***
Sand moped around her bedroom, picking up the pieces of what she had hoped would be an amazing night of sex with her boyfriend. Still wearing just a t-shirt and black panties, she put away the bottle of cherry-scented lube, her ball-gag and all the other little trinkets that came into play when she and Tom were intimate.
Once her bedroom was restored back to its regular state and resembled an actual bedroom instead of a bondage dungeon, she went back to the living room to have some more tea and settle down for the night with a good horror movie. Sitting herself down on the couch, she reached for the remote control and clicked the television on. After three clicks of the power button, the screen still hadn’t come to life.
“...the fuck,” she muttered. “Can anything go right tonight?”
Knowing well what the answer to that question was, she went over to the entertainment center to see if something had come unplugged. Much to her chagrin, the entire power strip was as it should have been, with not a plug out of place.
“Fool I am, expecting easy answers,” she said to herself. “Now what to do?”
Though her night had been ruined and Tom left her for some strange quest that had something to do with fictional demons and ghosts from his past, she was still yearning for sexual gratification, and found herself getting wet between the legs as she thought more about it.
Part of her felt bad and thought she should have been more supportive of her boyfriend and less disappointed about not getting what she wanted, but she was a creature of habit and she would scratch the itch one way or the other. Then she could worry about her boyfriend.
She stripped herself of all clothing and grabbed a vibrator from the top drawer of her bureau where she kept all the other toys and tools. Lying down on her bed she closed her eyes and envisioned all that she had hoped would have taken place in that bed tonight. It didn’t take long for her to get to the place she wanted to be, and she put the vibrator inside herself.
But something was wrong. The room had grown cold and a tension began creeping all around her like tendrils of slithery smoke.
Fear took too strong a hold of her to allow her to scream as she opened her eyes and saw a dark shadow of a man standing over her bed. From what seemed miles above, the figure was looking down on her vulnerable body with two red orbs that served as eyes.
That’s the man Tom was telling me about, was the last thought that went through her mind, further giving her the need to scream. But Sand would never be able to utter that scream, as the dark man went to work right away sewing her lips shut while she lay there paralyzed.
TWO
The Diary of Thomas Sullivan
Moving up here to Portsmouth was a little hard to get used to. It was a pleasant change of scenery and pace from the suburbs just north of Boston, that’s for sure. But getting used to the way things are at night, that was the tough part. Even the not so rural parts of New Hampshire seem to have that ominous silence at night that a Boston kid just might never be able to get used to.
I grew up in a little city that was more like a town. Just a smidge more than three miles up from Boston’s North End was where I learned the lessons of life.
Leedham, Massachusetts.
By all outward appearances, it was a typical place for a boy with a typical name like Tom Sullivan to grow up a son to an angry, drunken, working class father and a dip-shit homicidal mother. (Both of which are now deceased) But beyond that façade, hiding in the dark shadows of Leedham was a deeper darkness. In the late 90’s, a couple of teenagers had supposedly set fire to a church in some kind of Satanic ritual. A local shopkeeper who was also an old drunk named Tom Seeley (who I knew quite well as a child), had supposedly gone mad and told the kids to do it. He was not among the bodies found and he was never seen again after the incident.
The town had become famous for all of this, and all sorts of urban legends surfaced. While many scoff at such things, I have every reason to believe that there was some kind of supernatural force at play. Eight years before that incident at Saint Anthony’s church, I experienced quite a bit of the supernatural myself. That’s the whole reason I felt the need to write this all down. I also feel, or I should say I know, that this story isn’t over. But should these writings ever be seen by eyes other than my own, I just hope someone else who has experienced the terrifying-unknown might gain from this the knowledge and comfort of the fact that they aren’t alone. I certainly felt alone as a child when these things started happening. And now I would say I am very much alone, too, up here in the dark quiet of New Hampshire, where my only real human interaction is with a crazy, old man whom I share a beer or several with on most nights, and a girlfriend who I can barely tolerate being around when we aren’t having sadomasochistic sex.
Before I ended up here in the Granite State, I was used to the sounds of the night that would lull me to sleep. Starting from when I was a child, I can still remember how I got used to sleeping with noise all around me.
From the third floor of the three-decker next door there would be drunken tenants fighting with each other all hours of the night while their numerous children screamed and cried. They never came to physical blows, thank heavens. The husband, or boyfriend ─I never knew what he was, really─ was the size of a professional wrestler.
Their obnoxious and volatile spats always seemed to end in weird noises and lots of saying “I love you.” Of course, later in life I figured out that they were just furiously fucking.
On the floor below them there’d be people coming and going constantly at all hours for short periods of time, arguing about their cut and how it was never enough.
The tenant, an overweight slob named Vito, always explained quite rationally that had they delivered the money on time, they’d see more of a cut. “Find me a loan business that doesn’t charge i
nterest!” he would always say. I guess that even in the criminal underground there certainly has to be rules. Crooks and dealers aren’t impervious to the chaos that results from lack of order and organization, you know.
Then there was the first floor. That’s the floor that still haunts me to this day, and this isn’t just the spooky “door opening by itself” kind of haunting that I’m talking about here. I’m talking a full on Amityville type infestation taking over my noggin.
I could even say in all honesty that the first floor of that house next door was what made me into the person I am today.
On the floors above, those people just seemed to be the ones responsible for their own misery. They were like stereotypes; parodies of themselves.
With the exception of the screaming children who had to hear their mother yell back and forth with the guy who may or may not have been their father, I just felt no pity for any of the other comers and goers of the second and third floor. They all chose their lifestyles. I know I put myself at risk of sounding insensitive by saying so, but hey, I’ll plead guilty if tried for it. I’ve been guilty of worse things.
It was because of that miserable house next door that I learned to judge things by comparison at a very young age. And when two floors of people who drank their lives away or chose the profession of dealing illegal substances sat on top of what went on in the first floor apartment, I think it would be hard for even the most enlightened Tibetan monk to waste any sympathy on those people.
So now I’m at the point where I have to start rehashing my memories of floor numero uno. It’s never an easy thing to do.
Poor Cassie.
Cassandra Otis was beautiful. So beautiful. Majestically beautiful.
She was my next door neighbor from the time I was nine until I was ten, when she suddenly vanished from my life and left me haunted with the ghost of her memory.
I always got giddy whenever I would see her. While most boys my age fell in love with the pretty girl in their math class, I set my sights on someone far more unattainable than any of my female classmates. And I had zero chance with most of them to start with.
The Halloween Girl Page 3