Amy popped two of the opioid painkillers upon getting to the kitchen, before she had even poured herself a glass of water. She pulled a bottle of Woodford Reserve, fine Kentucky bourbon, out of her cupboard and took a long pull off of it before pouring herself a hefty glass. “Fuck water,” she thought. “Whiskey is all I need right about now.”
Amy didn’t leave the kitchen until she was well liquored up. By then, with little else on her stomach she was starting to feel a little buzz from the pills she had eaten. She got back to the master bedroom and saw that Hank was rolling a joint. She pulled the gargantuan bottle of painkillers out of the pocket of her robe and shook them. Hank turned with a startled look on his face.
“Where did you get those?” he asked her, eyes gleaming with avarice. He rubbed his hands together, making fun of himself as he knew how he had sounded.
“These are the pills that Jared gave Ana Sophia that night of the party, when you had your worst seizure ever and they…well they…” Amy’s voice trailed off, she couldn’t finish her sentence, but she knew that Hank understood.
“Hell yeah, give me some!”
Amy poured a few into Hank’s palm and he popped them into his mouth immediately. Now it was his turn to make the icy walk to the kitchen. Hank always had a hard time swallowing pills without anything to drink. He asked Amy for a sip off of her cup but it was whiskey and he couldn’t have alcohol with his seizure medication.
That was the first day they spent with that bottle of pills and over the course of the winter they would eat them all. By the time the first day of spring had come Amy was fully addicted to opiates. Hank had taken far less of the pills because he already took so many valium and with his other seizure medications he didn’t want to over do it. Still with all the pills he did manage to eat and all the time he stayed completely intoxicated Hank didn’t notice at all that his wife became a junkie right before his eyes.
Amy began to steal things from the stock room at work. There were always returns and exchanges that got lost in the system. There were items which went on clearance and then got returned to the warehouse. Then there were items which she marked down with her managerial abilities, which with her employee discount became basically free. Hank started getting on her by mid spring about how many things she was bringing home. Everything from tooth brushes to lawn chairs. From boxes of candy to charcoal grills. She even brought home inflatable pool toys although they did not have a pool. Hank was annoyed, but he was hoarding almost as much as she was. With his income from his grow operation he was making ten thousand dollars a month, which was more than he was easily able to spend, isolated as he was. Deep in the bowels of Marion County Kentucky. With so much more money than he had ever been used to having Hank bought all of the toys he had wanted when he was a kid but his parents couldn’t afford. At first he was dismayed to see how expensive they were, but he soon got over that. He was just excited that with the internet and auction websites every toy he had ever had or wanted and many he never even knew existed were available at the click of a button. He spent thousands of dollars on Star Wars toys from the nineteen seventies and eighties. He bought Robotech toys which were rare in Kentucky when he grew up. He bought Transformers and G.I. Joe men. For Amy he found her favorite dolls; Strawberry Shortcake and all of her friends. She was legitimately shocked to get them and displayed them prominently throughout the house.
Eventually as spring wore on Hank was on a good track to make good on the ten thousand clones that the Cornbread Mafia were demanding in payment for disappearing the bodies of Yuri and his wife. He was doing well financially and Amy got a promotion at her job. Everything was going well for them, although there wasn’t much intimacy left in their marriage. Hank didn’t seem to mind or notice at all, but when Amy brought it up he would always apologize profusely and pleasure her as best he could. When he was unable to get it up, which was more often the case than not, he would pleasure her orally. So when Hank took all things into consideration he thought of his life and their life together as pretty sweet for the most part. Sure they had their ups and downs but mostly life had been good for them. So Hank decided to ask Amy about expanding their family.
“Amy, our family is too small. We need to bring in another member. Somebody to love us unconditionally. Somebody to always be there for us and with us, somebody for us to always be there for too,” Hank felt awkward talking about this subject out of the blue, but decided that was the best approach. To take her off guard a bit and gauge her initial response.
“Hank, you always said you didn’t want kids. You have said since day one that you don’t want to pass on your genes because your dad was epileptic, because you are epileptic and you don’t want your kid to suffer from that too. What made you change your mind?” she seemed outright shocked, not only that he brought the subject of kids up, but in the way he had done it. From out of nowhere.
“What? No, no, no. You have me all wrong Amy. I want to get a dog!” he was emphatic and animated for somebody who had eaten so many valium that morning.
They shared a good laugh and then they did just that. They went to the pound and got a dog. He was a shy, bashful, undersized and malnourished looking pit bull with white fur with black and brown splotches all over. He was all wiggles as soon as they saw him and they both knew in that instant that he would be their dog, despite having not looked through all of the dogs at the pound.
When they got him out of his cage he was all love and affection. They noticed some scarring on his head and legs and the shelter informed them that he had been a fighting dog. He obviously wasn’t very successful and had been turned loose by his owner. They didn’t have a name on file for him so Amy named him Boris after Boris and Natasha from The Bullwinkle Show. Within half a day of getting him home it was more than obvious that Boris liked Hank, but he was Amy’s dog. He loved her unconditionally and guarded her loyally and fiercely. With Boris the duo became a trio and the dog quickly assumed his role as the third member of the family.
With the changing of the seasons Hank’s seizures became much more severe and common. He had Jared come over and prescribe him a more potent seizure medication, but first he had to ween off of his old medication. This proved incredibly hard for Hank, but by the end of spring he made the switch and was getting some sense of relief. His seizures went from several a day, sometimes a dozen, to several a week. Jared upped his dosage on valium, prescribed him muscle relaxers and gave him a Vicodin prescription as well, so that in case he ever needed them he had them. Hank was grateful.
Jared also gave Amy a new prescription for painkillers after she explained to him that she had found Ana Sophia’s bottle and taken them all over the last few months. He did not scold her as she thought he would and wrote her a prescription with a higher dosage and unlimited refills. She was shocked and thankful. She was just at the state where she understood that she was addicted and was relieved that she would be able to quit on her own terms. She wouldn’t have to buy on the black market, beg, borrow or steal to get her fix. She simply had to go to the pharmacy, literally at Walgreens where she worked, and could fill her prescription at any time.
One night in early April after a long day at Walgreens, on her feet, dealing with attitudinal customers, Amy headed home with a mind thick and cloudy from all the pills she had been popping throughout the day. When she got about a hundred yards from her own driveway something appeared on the road in front of her. Something too big to just run over. Before she could discern whether it was a horse or a deer or what it was she had swerved and wrecked into a guard rail.
When she came to her hood was up and the engine pouring smoke. At least she only had a few feet to walk to her driveway, but the driveway itself was nearly a quarter mile long. She sighed, turned on the hazard lights and grabbed her flashlight out of the glove box. The wind was a bit cold so she tightened her hood up around her head. She bent into the wind and clutched her hooded sweatshirt closed as she made her way towards her house.
; She got to her driveway soon enough and she could easily see the lights on in her house. It wouldn’t be long until she would be inside, with Hank, warming herself. She tried to reach him on her cell phone, but he didn’t answer.
Hank awoke the next morning to find Amy face down on the front porch. Her clothes were shredded off of her back and she had several slices from right shoulder to left hip. She had obviously lost a lot of blood, but when he opened the door she let out a moan that let him know she was still alive.
“Oh, fuck!” Hank screamed aloud as he ran back inside, going immediately for his cordless phone, fingers frantically pressing 9-1-1. Before he could hit the dial button Amy called out to him from the porch in a voice strained with extreme pain.
“Hank, don’t call the ambulance. Don’t! Remember the party…call Jared. Call Jared. Call Jar…” her voice trailed off as she lost consciousness.
Hank erased the numbers he had put into the phone and looked Jared up by name on the handset. He hit dial and crossed his fingers, running back out to the porch to Amy’s side, praying to the god he did not believe in.
10
The Thing in the Basement
Amy’s recovery proved to be long and arduous. She had five lacerations across the entirety of her torso, from shoulder to hip. They were deep gashes that the doctors were baffled by. The only common ground that any of the professionals who looked after her during her hospitalization could agree upon was that it was some sort of animal which had attacked her. The wounds were incredibly slow to heal and remained infected for over a month despite a hardcore regimen of antibiotics. Amy knew she would no longer be comfortable wearing the backless patchwork shirts that she was so fond of sporting in the summer time. It was a status symbol among hippie girls to have high quality, handmade clothing and Amy had spent quite a bit of money on patchwork shirts. She had invested years into cultivating her look and it was depressing for her to know that she would have to come up with a new style or leave her hideous scars exposed to the world.
Hank came out to Lexington, to the University of Kentucky hospital, as often as he could to see his wife as she recovered. With his epilepsy it wasn’t safe for him to drive, although he did so a few times and lied to Amy as to how he had come to town. Thankfully since Jared worked at UK hospital Hank was often able to catch a ride with him, both to and from seeing Amy. Hank was happy that Jared was there for them like he was. If it weren’t for Jared they would both have a hard time getting the medications they needed. Hank’s new seizure medication was working much better than the last stuff he was taking. He had a never ending supply of Valium and Vicodin and he stayed pretty much too mellow for stress to trigger seizures like they did before. Although he still had them they didn’t dominate his life like they once had. Because of this Hank did not notice the monkey on his back. He was unaware that the cold fingers of addiction were gripped about his throat. He could still breathe, but should have been feeling that grip tighten. With his mind on Amy and her recovery at pretty much all times that shadow easily crept in and blotted out what light he had in his life.
Those spring and summer days alone in the house proved to take quite a toll on Hank’s mental health. He didn’t feel a disconnect like he did with his addiction. He knew he was going slowly crazy. On some levels he embraced it. That his mind was shattered beyond repair was the one thing on which he could rely. How else could the beasts in the woods be explained? How else could the whispers he heard all throughout his house be explained? The doll, the dreams, the visions during his seizures. None of it made sense to Hank, that is unless he were suffering from an overwhelming madness.
So he wore that label like a mantle, made it his armor. His craziness would be the anchor to his sanity. Some days Hank would awaken into the house and was sure it was the nineteenth century again. Other days he would see a little girl in a white dress playing in the living room or the front yard. Always she carried a doll with her and over time Hank came to believe he was seeing the very same doll that he had found in his attic and thrown out. That creepy doll from the wheelchair, that Bernice had just mysteriously known had been found. ”Did she really show up the next morning to take it back, without any possible way of knowing they had found it? “
A man whose sanity was questionable was an easier way for Hank to identify than as a man who was experiencing extreme situations and supernatural events. Still even if it was just in his mind he lived in terror for the most part. Through that terror and the anxiety it brought with it Hank’s mental faculties deteriorated to a wretched state of paranoia. Every creak and moan the old house made was a nightmare come to life, a sword forged in the crucible of his imagination whose blade carved easily through his shattered mind.
The days would come and go and sometimes Hank did not even notice. Between cowering through his own fear and overmedicating with his prescriptions he did little living; he simply existed. Without Amy in the house all he had to talk to were Boris and the ghosts of the past occupants, the ghosts in which he held no belief. Boris did not seem to have any inclination toward bonding with Hank, but wasn’t unnecessarily cold to him either. As he waited on his momma to return from the hospital he tolerated Hank and was not shy in the least about letting him know when it was time for food, or to go outside to use the bathroom. The ghosts of Gravel Switch on the other hand did all they could to get Hank to engage with them.
From full form visual manifestations to loud bumps and bangs in the night they constantly tried every trick they could think of to get Hank’s attention. He had shown no interest at all since he began to place all the blame of what was happening on his lessening mental capabilities. Even times when he would come to direct physical harm because of their actions or pranks Hank was able to write off as his mind playing tricks on him.
Still the day came when his lack of faith in what he was experiencing was challenged. Two nights before Amy was due to come home from the hospital after her six week stay Hank heard a noise so strange and so unique that he had no choice but to investigate its source. Walking through the kitchen he found that it emanated from the laundry room. From the back wall, where there was an old door to the basement. As he approached Hank realized that he had not yet been in the basement. He had in fact never even opened the door. Yet that night it stood ajar a few inches. The strange noise growing slowly but steadily louder. It was such an odd sound that it seemed to be a menagerie of other noises. There was a dull long foghorn sound that was a massive white noise behind a wall of insects chattering, chitinous legs of crickets screeching alongside the undulating waves of locusts. There was thunder and heavy breathing. All these noises rolled into one cacophonous audible mass that assailed Hank’s mind as much as it overwhelmed his ears.
He used his cell phone as a flashlight as he pulled the basement door open with a loud creak from rusty old hinges. Immediately he was overwhelmed with a dampness thick with mold, mildew, spores…he could not tell what all he was breathing but it had a foulness too it from, what Hank assumed to be, staying closed up and moist for decades. The noise became louder, intoxicating, drawing him ever closer even as it made his body and mind both more uncomfortable by the second. His curiosity peaking he peered into the basement, down those rickety old steps, into the darkness that his phone’s light would not penetrate more than a few feet.
As his foot hit the top step and he began his decent into the unknown dark a smell foul and rotten overcame all of his senses. He spun to his left side ninety degrees and vomited involuntarily out of reflex. Whatever he had smelled hit him like a miasma of sewage and pestilence. He got woozy and stumbled down the next few steps before regaining his footing, lashing out with his right hand, clasping for the handrail. When he got to the bottom of the twelve steps he found a light switch and turned it on. The bulb reluctantly flickered on, gasping for a moment in protest as if being called upon to work were asking too much. Yet still it was dutiful and lit the immediate area thoroughly.
Hank was shocked to see tha
t the basement was essentially empty. There were a few old trunks and chests, an old wine shelf that was empty but otherwise the basement was empty of objects.
It was not however, empty of things. In the corner farthest from the stairs Hank perceived something so alien to his consciousness that he doubted that even his own schizophrenic nightmares could conceive of such a horror. It was surely the source of all the crazy noises and the wretched smells that made him puke and gag upon his own bile. Hank knew this thing was in all likelihood the source of his own insanity, of the strange and violent events that had occurred since he moved into the house. Just one second of gazing his eyes upon its hideousness and Hank knew all those things.
A foul beast that resembled a maggot the size of a small car writhed in the corner. It had a series of legs as if a centipede down each side of the lower half of it and it stood upright from what appeared to function as a waist from the upper half. The bloated and distended body was a sickening green-grey and pulsed with thick blood vessels that steadily pumped a thick black ichor throughout the repellent form. Two eyes stared down at Hank, who was only about half of its height. Eyes that seemed far too small for a thing of such proportions, similar to those of a blue whale. They looked glazed over, dead, like a blind man’s eyes. Yet Hank knew that they could see everything that he was, everything he knew, everything he was made of…down to the molecular level. The bulbous mass that functioned like a head split and peeled apart vertically, revealing a maw containing row upon row of barbed hooks. It had squid like, ropey tentacles writhing from its back, tasting the air about Hank’s face as they inched toward him, dripping slimy green goo from their tips. Hank stared in absolute and abject horror with his mouth wide open. He did not know whether he stood paralyzed with fear or whether he was subdued by some strange power of the thing which clearly was physically before him.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 9