Scraping the Bone: Ten Dark Tales

by William Malmborg

  Riley’s car skidded as well, but not as badly as the truck, which was overturned.

  Cautiously, Riley exited the vehicle and walked around to the driver’s side door. It was standing open. The boy was gone.

  He looked to the right and left, trying to find tracks. About ten feet away he saw something sticking up out of the snow. It looked like a foot.

  Five feet from that was an arm.

  What the hell was going on?

  Snow crunched behind him. Riley whirled around. He was struck across the face with something.

  Nothing was right after that. First there was blackness and then a bright light. Then pain.

  When he awoke hours later he was in a hospital bed.

  A nurse walked in. “Oh, you’re awake. Let me get the doctor.”

  “Wait. Hold it a sec.” His head screamed in agony. “What happened?”

  “You were hit in the face.”

  “I know. What happened with the boy and the truck? All the bodies?”

  “I better get the doctor.”

  “NO!” he screamed. “Tell me.” For some reason he had to know.

  “They didn’t find the boy and I don’t know anything about the bodies.”

  He wanted to ask how many there were, but wondered if he really wanted to know the number. Or worse, how long the boy had been driving around with them. With the weather they had been having the snow could have been there for weeks.

  The nurse left. A moment later the doctor came in. The head wound was not bad, slight concussion. He would be back at work within a week.

  Later that day Mike Walker, friend and co-worker, came to visit.

  “The address checked out,” Mike said while sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Yeah?”

  “The boy wasn’t there but we found his mother.” Something in his eyes said this was going to be bad. They were right.

  “She was dead.”

  Riley considered this for a moment then said, “The boy killed her?”

  “Well, um . . . you could say that. You know those bodies that were in the back of the truck?”

  He would never forget.

  “They were from Oak Hill.” Oak Hill was a cemetery on the edge of town. “After he hit you he dragged one of the bodies home and . . .”

  Riley waited. Finally, he asked, “What?”

  “The boy’s mother needed a liver transplant. She’d been in and out of the hospital for some time by then but they couldn’t do anything for her because there weren’t any liver donors available.”

  Riley started to know where this was going.

  “The boy tried it on his own.” That was when Mike started to lose it. “God it was a mess. Her stomach had been cut open and blood was everywhere. In the wound the boy forced in the decaying liver of a dead woman.” He took a deep breath. “The morgue guy says it looks like her heart failed after that and the boy tried CPR for a long time, all her ribs were broken.”

  Riley remembered the boy’s urgency. He had been trying to get home quickly before his mother died. In the end it hadn’t mattered.

  “Did they find the boy?” Riley asked.

  Mike shook his head. “It looks like he left after it didn’t work.”

  “His father?”

  Mike again shook his head no.

  The Bone Yard

  “Leo, stop!” Brian yelled from the couch. “I’m trying to watch this.” On the TV screen a ‘King of the Hill’ episode was coming to an end. Brian loved the show and watched it every night at six thirty on channel eight.

  Leo’s whining continued, and grew louder with each passing second. Brian tried turning up the volume, but it didn’t do any good. The sound from the TV was no match for the constant ear-piercing ring that echoed from the dog.

  “It’s not seven o’clock yet,” Brian shouted.

  It was no use, and a second later Brian turned off the TV and headed down into the entryway. Leo stopped his whining and looked up at Brian, a grin spreading across his long snout.

  “You’re a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?” Brian said to the Sable and White Collie. “A real pain in the ass.”

  Leo didn’t respond. He knew better than to believe a statement made in anger. Brian loved him, had loved him for the last three years. Nothing would ever change that.

  Brian pulled out the leash from the closet and attached it to Leo’s collar. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’d be humiliated to, but it’s the law.” Three years earlier Brian wouldn’t have followed the law that required dogs to be leashed, but lately the town’s deputies had been stepping up the patrols and he was bound to cross their path several times during the evening stroll.

  “Ready?” Brian asked.

  Leo let out a let’s go bark.

  * * *

  “Evening Mr. Tuttle,” Deputy Parker said. The older deputy had pulled his car alongside Brian while Leo was lifting a leg to pee. “Out for your nightly exercise?”

  “Yep.” Brian didn’t like talking to the police, even if it was just a small town cop. It was hard to judge their intentions, and he always worried that they knew more about him than they should. “A little exercise before bed, right Leo.”

  Leo didn’t reply. His distrust for law enforcement ran even deeper than Brian’s.

  “Well, just make sure you clean up any, um, well solids.” The deputy looked ahead while speaking and smiled when he saw a group of kids playing Kick the Can.

  “Yes sir. Got a bag all ready for it.” He pointed to his pocket where a small plastic grocery bag stuck out.

  “Good. Well, have a nice evening.” With that the deputy headed on his way. Once out of earshot Leo let out a mean growl. Brian agreed with Leo’s distaste.

  * * *

  The neighborhood was full of children playing games; only the games were not as widespread as they would have been a few summer’s earlier, and now parents sat out on the front porches watching. Their concern, however, didn’t stop them from allowing their little boys and girls to come over and pet Leo as the two passed on the sidewalk. Leo pretended to enjoy the attention.

  Twenty minutes later the two left the neighborhood and entered the weedy scrubland that connected several backyards to the forest that surrounded the town. From that point on Leo was leash free and ran several yards ahead of Brian, anxious to get to the clearing in the woods. It didn’t take long.

  “Hope no one stole it,” Brian taunted while walking to the thorn bush where the small shovel was hidden. Leo let out a playful growl. For three years the thorn bush had kept the shovel hidden, and it would do so for many more.

  Leo’s excitement caused him to run around for a while before picking a spot, and then he began to dig.

  Brian watched for several seconds and then said, “You want to dig it up, or should I?” It would take Leo a long time to dig down deep enough, but only seconds with the shovel.

  Leo stepped aside and waited, his tail wagging.

  Brian walked up to the small hole Leo had begun and stuck the shovel in. The dirt was loose and didn’t take long to move. Once that was complete, Brian set the shovel aside and reached into the cold hole.

  Leo spun in circles.

  Brian pulled out the bone. Leo waited. Before tossing it he checked it over, his eyes searching for a clue as to where it had come from. The fact that it was part of a femur narrowed it down, but not to the point of identification; however, the small hatchet marks on the lower side did.

  “Ah, I remember this one,” Brian said. With that he threw the bone across the grassy clearing.

  Leo gave chase.

  The brown object flipped over and over for several seconds, loose dirt falling free, before crashing back down to the surface. Leo was on it instantly and ran it back to Brian.

  “Ugh,” Brian said as his hand pressed against a glob of sticky saliva. “You slobber too much.”

  The bone went flying.

  Leo sprang after it.

  Brian waited.
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br />   This time Leo didn’t bring it back. Instead he sat on the grass and began chewing at an already worn area near the top. Brian wondered if there was a great deal of satisfaction in what Leo was doing. The bone, after all, had belonged to his previous owner, an abusive man who had struck the dog one too many times.

  His mind replaced the clearing with an image from the past. In it Brian was driving home from his parent’s home near Chicago when suddenly he heard someone calling for him from the town up ahead.

  Without much thought he flicked on the turn signal and glided his car off the interstate and into the town of Fair Oaks. The house where the voice was calling from didn’t take long to find, and soon Brian was at the front door, the hatchet from his trunk in hand.

  Brian savored the bloody memory.

  Leo returned with the bone.

  “Jeeze,” Brian said while trying to find a dry spot on the slimly femur. There wasn’t one and he had to settle for a less wet area. The throw was one of his best and nearly caused the bone to disappear into the trees.

  Leo didn’t give chase.

  “What?” Brian asked.

  Leo didn’t say anything for several seconds. Once he did Brian took a step back while shaking his head. Leo knew what this meant and growled.

  “I just got you a new one two weeks ago. What’s wrong with it?” Most of the bones were difficult to find because they had been buried for a long time. However, the newest one was still fresh in his memory and he wouldn’t need Leo’s great sniffing skills to uncover it.

  Leo let out a second growl.

  “But that one is from a little girl,” Brian said. In fact, the last three had been from little girls. What was Leo’s fixation with little girls lately?

  Silence engulfed the two.

  Brian wanted to deny Leo’s request but knew what would happen if he did. In fact, now that he thought about it, he figured Leo had probably chosen to play with the bone of his former owner as a way of reminding him what could happen if Brian displeased him. This made him wonder if Leo’s former owner really had been abusive or if that was just a lie Leo had told?

  “Okay fine, but I can’t do it until this weekend. The boss is already breathing down my neck to get this project done.” Getting a new bone for Leo wasn’t an easy task. Not only did he have to hunt down someone, kill them, and hack of the chosen limb; he also had to set up a giant pot, boil the water, and slowly work away the flesh, muscle, tissue, and ligaments.

  Leo seemed to understand and turned to get the bone Brian had tossed. Once back he dropped in the hole and then watched as it was reburied.

  Before leaving the clearing Brian took a look back. The shadows had grown long since their arrival and most of the clearing was dark. Even if it weren’t dark Brian wouldn’t have been able to pick out where all the bones were buried.

  Leo let out a soft bark. He wanted to get home so Brian could begin his plan for the next bone.

  “How about Sara?” Brian asked later. Sara was a young girl that lived about two miles from their house. She loved dogs and would always come out to pet Leo if the two were walking by.

  Leo liked this choice.

  “Okay.” Now all he needed was a plan. Leo would be part of it. That was the nice thing about having a dog that looked like Lassie. Kids couldn’t resist coming over to him.

  Once back in the neighborhood Brian attached Leo to his leash. Not long after that the two were walking up the front steps of their home. Not a single kid had been out playing on the return trip. This wasn’t unusual anymore. Once darkness was spotted parents were quick to reel in their young ones. What else was to be expected in a town where children disappeared frequently?

  Code Blue

  Ronald Dempster was sitting on the toilet, holding his head in his hands, and grinding his teeth together when the alarm for a Code Blue: Heart Failure rang out beyond the room.

  Footsteps echoed, along with some cart or stretcher being rolled down the hallway. Ron could hear everything as if it were in the room with him, which, of course, meant that the staff right outside the door had probably been able to hear the sounds he had been making a few second earlier.

  The alarm continued to ring and masked the rush of water that echoed through the small bathroom as Ron flushed the toilet. Again, nothing but blood had come out during this midnight visit, though from the sounds one would have thought he filled the bowl.

  Ron left the bathroom and walked toward the hospital bed his fiancé was sleeping in. Her body seemed at peace with the world, and had it not been for the IV and feeding tube lines one could easily think she was in her own bed in her apartment sleeping the night away.

  This wasn’t the case.

  Kim Yearly, soon to be known as Kim Dempster, suffered from Cystic Fibrosis. Great strides had been made in the fight against the genetic disease. Once considered a childhood illness because people born with it wouldn’t live past their first year, those with the illness now sometimes lived into their twenties or thirties, though a lot still lost the fight early on due to breathing complications.

  Kim was twenty-two. She had done well thus far with a few mild setbacks, but because of the damage done to her lungs from repeated infections, she didn’t have much longer to live and needed a new set of lungs. Her hospital visits were becoming much more frequent, and somewhat longer in duration.

  “Hey,” Kim said as Ron climbed back into bed with her. She was halfway asleep and wouldn’t remember the conversation come morning. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Go back to sleep.” He kissed her on the forehead and ran a hand through her hair.

  She pulled his arm around her while forcing him to snuggle up against her and then drifted back to sleep. Normally guest weren’t allowed to share beds with patients, but up on the Cystic Fibrosis floor exceptions were made.

  Ron’s statement had been a lie. He wasn’t all right. Something was seriously wrong with him. The pain he had awoken to in his groin and lower stomach was intense, and the blood that had come out of him from both his penis and butt was frightening.

  Grinding his teeth and praying that the Advil he had taken in the bathroom would kick in; Ron closed his eyes and tried to sleep. At the moment it seemed an impossible task.

  * * *

  Two months earlier it had been lower back pain with the occasional gut-wrenching stab into the groin. His doctor had assumed he had a kidney stone and told him he would have to wait it out. No kidney stone ever came out, however, and eventually the pain started to fade away.

  Then a month later it came back, only this time it was more intense in the groin and lower stomach area. Rather than going to his crummy doctor, Ron had decided on seeing a specialist. Unfortunately, his insurance wouldn’t cover the cost of seeing a specialist without a doctor’s written approval, and when he went back to see his doctor no approval was written.

  “You’ve just strained yourself,” his doctor had said with a shake of the head. “Stay off it for a while and stop all the roughhousing with your friends.”

  Ron didn’t roughhouse with friends, unless the bouncing around in the bedroom with Kim could be considered roughhousing, but it was impossible for him, at the age of twenty two, to convince a fifty year old doctor of this, so he had just taken the advice and gone home.

  Now, after seeing so much blood in the toilet so many times, he was going to demand that his doctor write him a referral because this was getting scary. As soon as Kim was done with her treatment he was going to make an appointment.

  * * *

  Code Blue! Room 1130! Code Blue! Room 1130!

  The words echoed through his mind as he opened his eyes, a terrible fog distorting everything within his head. Something was not right. Everything in the room was calm, yet behind his memory he could see chaos. Nurses were running about, a doctor was shouting orders, and someone else, a woman, was screaming. None of this was going on in the room, but for some reason he saw it clearly.

  Room 1130.

  They we
re in room 1130.

  He shifted positions and looked over at Kim, only she wasn’t there. Blood marked an outline where she had been, along with a terrible substance that might have been fecal matter. Urine hung in the air.

  “Kim!” he shouted while standing from the bed.

  She wasn’t in the room, nor was the IV pole, and the oxygen she usually took in through her nose at night had been shut off, the cord with its nosepiece dangling against the wall.

  Oh God, Kim. Something awful had happened and for some reason he had slept through it, his mind only catching glimpses of things as it happened.

  Ron ran out into the hallway, his voice shattering the two AM stillness as he demanded to know what had happened to Kim.

  No one came to his aid.

  He went to the nurse’s station. Hillary, Stacy, and Mark were there, each one doing something different. Amid their work, the three were laughing about the ghost people sometimes claimed to see around the floor. Ron had heard about this wandering spirit many times during his visits. Apparently it was the father of an eighteen-year-old Cystic Fibrosis patient that was fading fast who had taken his own life in hopes that his lungs would be right for a transplant.

  “Hey, what happened to Kim?” Ron demanded.

  The three went on laughing about the ghost.

  “Hey!” he snapped. “What’s going on here? What happened to Kim?”

  Again there was no response.

  Movement caught his attention. A man came out of Kim’s room. Ron raced over to him; questions about Kim firing at random, yet the man, like the nurses, did not say anything. He did, however, point down the hall.

  Ron went that way, though he wasn’t sure why. If something bad had happened they would have taken her to the emergency room. Down the hallway was nothing but patient rooms.

  The man stopped outside of the nutrition room, which also served as a break room for nurses. Most people didn’t realize it, but the nurses didn’t care if you went in to fill up a coffee mug or grab some tea or use the microwave or fridge, especially when you were a frequent visitor of a Cystic Fibrosis patient. Ron hadn’t known this for a week and still cringed at the amount of money he had spent in the cafeteria below on coffee and snacks every day.