Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror)

by Douglas Clegg

  Maybe if he’d been over at the fire, like Josh and Bronwyn and Ziggy, they’d hear that as a metallic sound.

  Maybe.

  Tammy scrambled out of the car seat, and ran back to to the trunk. She could make out Griff, but wasn’t sure what she was really seeing. It looked like he was doing some kind of crazy fast dance. His arms were jerking around and his legs were all wobbly.

  And then he began moving toward her, now slower, almost slow motion, and she saw something that looked almost like a small dog snapping at his heels.

  “Griff?” She asked.

  As he got closer to her, he whispered, “Help me. Help me. Get it off me.”

  She saw it, finally, as it scrambled up his back and perched on his shoulder, its teeth going into his neck.

  She tried to scream, but her voice was gone. All she could do was whimper. She stood there, naked, watching Griff fall to the ground, to his knees, while something on top of him made the most awful sucking sound. A spray of blood hit Tammy across her face, across her breasts, and she tasted Griff's blood on her tongue.

  And then her voice came back to her, and she screamed loud and long.

  Before the three around the fire could register the scream let alone get up and go running to them, Tammy remembered the gun. She tried to swallow the feeling of horror and shock inside her—if you stop it gets you, move, girl, move and do something, don’t just be scared, take action—and she remembered Griff’s gun. He kept it in his duffel bag. The duffel bag was in the trunk. If she could run around the other side of the car, she could get it. She knew she could. She had no other weapon. There was nothing else. Quickly, she turned around and ran. She heard a strange yelp from Griff’s throat, which would be the last thing she’d ever hear from him. Her mind spun a mile a minute as she tried to process what she had seen, what was happening, but her thoughts moved into a darker place where survival was more important than logic, and where nightmares could be faced. She reached into the trunk, and felt around the suitcases and the clothes and then, she found it. His duffel bag. She reached in, pulling out his dirty laundry. Her hand touched metal. The gun. She grabbed it. She wasn’t even sure how to work it, but she knew it wasn’t rocket science. Point, aim, pull trigger, fire.

  She brought the gun up in the dark and pointed it at the thing. Her hands were shivering so she kept both of them on the gun, holding it as steady as she could. She felt for the trigger. She tried to aim as best she could.

  Griff fell completely to the earth, and that little thing was moving over him rapidly, its arms going up and then down on his body, and she saw what might be scraps of…skin? It was skinning him?

  Oh my god oh my god oh my god, she thought as she closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger. But she hadn’t squeezed hard enough. Come on. It’s a gun. You can do it. You’ve watched TV. You know how guns are shot. She squeezed it again, this time using all her strength.

  She heard an explosion that was momentarily deafening, and saw a bright light. For the barest second, she saw it—the bloody mass that was Griff, and that thing—that Scratch-thing—its claws going up and down like a Beni-Hana chef as it skinned Griff, with blood pouring everywhere.

  She hadn’t hit it. She hadn’t hit anything. She hadn’t even aimed well.

  Scratch made gurgling sounds as it moved rapidly around Griff’s body.

  Then, when a flashlight’s beam hit its face—those turquoise eyes shiny green and alive in the light—it made a noise that was part growl and part shriek, and grabbed something and ran off into the darkness.

  Josh stood there, his flashlight focused on Griff’s body.

  Bronwyn came up behind him, holding a long stick that burned at one end, like it was a torch.

  Then, he put the light on Tammy. She pointed the gun at him. “Tammy,” Josh said.

  The gun went off.

  Josh instinctively fell to the ground.

  “Tammy!” Bronwyn shouted. “Put the gun down now!”

  Josh hit Tammy with the flashlight beam. Tammy’s naked body was covered with blood. Her eyes seemed wide and vacant as she stared at them. Then, she just started screaming and wouldn’t stop for the longest time.

  Ziggy was shivering as if he’d been doused with ice cold water. He kept the blanket wrapped tight around him, and he was standing as close to the fire as he could get without burning himself. He kept turning slowly around and around as if sure that someone or something would pounce at any second. He rolled the fattest doobie he could and lit it up and just sucked in as much of the smoke as possible. The world turned into the blue haze of smoke with tongues of flames shooting up from the fire.

  He saw something coming toward him in the dark—a low, thick shadow moving among the low scrub-brush.

  “Heya, Zigster,” it was Griff’s voice, and as the thing moved into the aura of light from the fire, he saw the little bastard monster with bloody skin all over him, moving rapidly forward, claws clicking, waving the skin of Griff’s arms and hands like too-long sleeves from its own arms, and on its large skull head, Griff’s face-skin, with eyeholes that showed shimmering green.

  Ziggy felt his heart in his throat, and his pulse grew rapid, and he took another toke and tried to get his feet to move, but something in the purple weed smoke seemed to make him feel safe. He was transfixed as the little bastard wearing Griff’s skin moved around the fire, and came toward him.

  “You ain’t gonna get me,” Ziggy said. “I’m high. I’m floatin’.”

  The little bastard scurried well around the fire, and Ziggy knew that it was the fire itself that scared the creep. Ziggy reached in and picked up the end of a stick from the edge of the fire. He waved the burning stick in front of him, slashing at the air.

  He saw the green eyes through the bloody skin. They seemed to be twitching. It was like the little bastard was thinking.

  Ziggy took a step backward. He could run. He could either climb into the fire and burn up to protect himself from the little bastard, or he could run.

  He stood a chance if he ran.

  “What are you thinking you dumb stoner?” Griff’s voice came from the creature. “You can run from the Great and Omnipotent Flayer of Men? You can’t. This thing can run, boy, let me tell you. It can run like a jaguar. It can leap real high. It can do all kinds of things. But Zig, it ain’t so bad. It really ain’t. Getting your skin all torn off ain’t the worst thing. It feels pretty good. It’s sweet. It’s about giving your life to something bigger than you. Something eternal.”

  Ziggy held his breath, and tried to get as stoned as he could off his last hit of weed.

  And then, the little bastard leapt through the air, discarding Griff’s skin, which floating slowly down into the fire as the creature latched on to Ziggy’s balls.

  “What in the world is that…stench?” Bronwyn asked. It was in the air—smoke from the fire off the road smelled like a barbeque gone bad. She and Josh and Tammy had been standing around the car, stunned. She had her arm over Tammy’s shoulder. Tammy had finally calmed for a few seconds—enough time to lower the gun and quit shooting haphazardly.

  Then, they heard Ziggy’s choking scream.

  “Shit!” Tammy shouted.

  She went running down the road, her arms raised up, gun in hand, no doubt terrified for her life.

  Bronwyn began swearing, and Josh held his breath.

  They both stood there one more second, and then Josh exhaled and said, “Ziggy.”

  Josh went running out on the desert, toward the fire. He felt he was moving too slow, and he saw Ziggy’s red-lit face as he approached the fire, but it wasn’t just the firelight—blood spurt up from his body. Josh got there just in time to watch the creature tear open Ziggy from neck to bowels. His steamy entrails poured out in loops. Ziggy’s eyes seemed to follow his body being ripped open, and Josh wondered for a second if he could see it.

  Josh stopped at the opposite side of the fire. He grabbed a stick from the fire. It was so hot that his hands felt as
if they were burning, but he slashed it in the air, its trail of flame lighting up the night. As he got closer to the creature—now, scaping at Ziggy’s skin and laughing gleefully in a voice that was too close to Griff’s, Josh began slamming the burning stick down on the creature. It squealed, and leapt up onto Ziggy’s head, leaning over to scratch Ziggy’s eyes out and hold them at the end of its black talons.

  It stared at Josh, but it was nearly comical looking. Its turquoise eyes seemed to change from blue to green and back to blue again. Now it spoke first with Griff’s voice and then with Ziggy’s, alternating back and forth as if, in tearing out both their throats, it had stolen their voices.

  “Get away!” it screamed. “You son-of-a-bitch, this is your old pal! Come on, boy, get the hell away!”

  Then, as Josh brought the stick down to hit the creature’s head, it leapt up as if it could fly, its claws spread wide, its arms impossibly long, and ran off into the night, letting out a shrill scream that sounded like the way Ziggy had screamed one night in his sleep.

  “Oh my god! Oh my god!” Tammy shouted while Bronwyn took a blanket and covered her. They had made it back to the fire without getting attacked. Josh stood on the other side, crouching over Ziggy’s body.

  Tammy’s teeth were chattering so loud that it was like some old typewriter noise, and she shivered as if she were freezing.

  Josh stared at Bronwyn who stared back at him. All three of them had tears streaming down their faces.

  After several minutes, Josh said, “It’s scared of fire.”

  Bronwyn, one arm still slung across Tammy’s back, reached into her breast pocket and pulled out her Merits. She slid a cigarette between her lips, dropped the pack back in her pocket, withdrew her Bic lighter, flicked it, lit the cigarette, took the first puff and said, “What the fuck is that thing?”

  “It’s the Unspeakable Mystery,” Tammy whimpered. “We let it out. We stole it. We’re all gonna die! And not just die, we’re all gonna get torn up just like Griff. Torn to itty-bitty pieces.”

  She hadn’t actually seen Ziggy’s body yet. Josh had laid a blanket over it, barely aware that he could function at all. Tammy looked around the campfire. “Where’s Ziggy?”

  Bronwyn raised her eyebrows to Josh, who went to the cooler and brought out a can of Pearl Beer. He tossed it to Bronwyn who missed it, but picked it up off the ground and dusted it off with her hand. She popped the top, and passed it to Tammy. “Take a sip. Come on. Take a sip,” she said.

  Too eagerly, Tammy grabbed the beer and chugged it down. When she was done, she dropped the can by her feet. “It got Ziggy, too?”

  Josh nodded.

  “What’s the plan?” Bronwyn asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ve got to make a plan. We’ve got Scratch coming at us.”

  Tammy started giggling. She covered her mouth, but couldn’t contain it.

  “What’s funny?” Bronwyn asked.

  “It’s not happening,” Tammy said. “Don’t you see? There’s no way in hell this can happen. It’s all a trick. Some kind of trick. Griff must be in on it.”

  Bronwyn petted the top of Tammy’s head like she was a puppy. She leaned into her, touching her scalp to Tammy’s cheek. “We’ll get through this. Don’t worry. Somehow.”

  Tammy guffawed, pulling away from Bron. “No, there’s no way this is real. It can’t be. There’s no such thing as that…thing.”

  Josh went around the fire and sat next to Bronwyn. “What about each of us grabbing a log from the fire. We walk over to the car. If we set the car on fire. Maybe…”

  Bronwyn said, “Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t you have flares in the Pimpmobile?”

  Josh brought his flashlight into the trunk of the car, and shone it around the clothes and luggage. He pulled some of the suitcases out, and the bags of clothes.

  Then, he reached down and drew something out.

  Bronwyn and Tammy huddled together, each with a burning stick in their hands.

  Josh held a small cylindrical object up. “One flare, coming up.”

  Back at the campfire, he had to wrangle with it a bit to get it to work, and then when he snapped it, it shot out into the air.

  A brilliant, ragged orange-yellow streak of light. He set it down on the ground.

  They all looked at it.

  “No one’s going to help us,” Tammy said. “No one.”

  Bronwyn glanced at her watch. “It’s just almost midnight. Maybe six hours ‘til daylight.”

  “What good’s daylight,” Tammy said. “We’ll be dead by then.”

  “We could start walking along the road.”

  “Someone will see that flare,” Josh said.

  “No one is going to see that flare unless they’re looking for us. That monster is going to come back,” Tammy said. “It’s going to cut us all up. It…it…it.” She hiccupped this last part.

  “We should go to the road. We should start walking,” Bronwyn said. “We can keep lighting sticks, one after another and then drop them when they burn out. We have the flashlight.”

  “What if we walk the wrong way?” Josh asked.

  “I’m not sure there is a wrong way.”

  “What if it’s there, out there on the road?”

  “I think it’s gone,” Bronwyn said. “Let’s assume that it’s the Flesh-Scraper. Let’s assume it got enough flesh. Let’s assume that’s all it wanted.”

  Josh wanted to go to her and hold her—she looked haunted now. She looked as if she’d gone from being a young woman of twenty to being fifty. She looked as if she had enormous sorrow at the center of her being, and he wanted to make it better for her somehow.

  But he was scared shitless, only didn’t want to talk about it. Just looking between Bronwyn and Tammy, he wasn’t sure what the hell he could do. He wanted to cry out to his father and mother to come get him. He wanted to find someone to protect him, but when he looked at the two of them, some other instinct came out within him. He wasn’t sure what to call it, other than something more than the will to survive. It was something that seemed to wrestle deep inside his mind, that made him want to protect his two friends, although he wasn’t sure that was possible. But another part of him just wanted to be safe himself, to get away from this place, to somehow wake-up from this nightmare.

  Tammy leaned forward and tapped Bronwyn to pass another beer over. “Please, I need it,” she said. Bronwyn opened two, passed one to her, and began drinking one of the cans herself. Tammy chugged this one also, and let her blanket slip. Josh was so stunned by the night’s events that he barely noticed Tammy’s nakedness beneath the blanket.

  Tammy wiped at the blood on her face as if it were water. “That thing talked. I heard it.”

  Josh nodded. “I did, too.”

  “This fries my brain,” Bronwyn said, sipping the beer. “Am I the only one who feels as if everything I ever heard of in life was a lie?”

  “Maybe this is what happens before you die,” Tammy said. “I been bad in my life. Real bad. Maybe that’s the Devil. Maybe that thing is the Devil. It sounded just like Griff. Poor Griff.”

  “It’s the ritual,” Josh said. “When Griff pushed me over, and I fell on it, it got some of my blood and some of my skin. That’s what the sign said. You turn it on that way. And now, it’s skinning them.”

  They all said nothing for several minutes, each one looking out into the darkness beyond the flickering fire.

  “Where’d it get Ziggy?” Tammy asked.

  Finally, Bronwyn broke the silence. “He’s over there,” she pointed to the blanket at the edge of where the firelight stretched, opposite them.

  “We never knew his real name,” Josh said. “Just Ziggy.”

  “James Wallace,” Bronwyn said. “I heard it on the first day of one of our classes. That’s his name.”

  “James Wallace,” Josh said. “Rest in peace.”

  Tammy closed her eyes and began saying the Lord’s Prayer aloud.

  �
�Stop it,” Bronwyn said.

  Tammy opened her eyes and turned to her. “You got something better? I think we need to call on a higher power.”

  “If God gave a rat’s ass about us,” Bronwyn said, “He’d never have created that thing in the first place.”

  A strange and probably insane light seemed to brighten Tammy’s eyes. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe this is God’s way of giving us purpose.”

  “Say what?”

  “Maybe we’re meant to undergo this. Like a trial. When I used to go to revivals, they talked about how God tested you. How the Devil tempted…and you need to believe in Jesus’s power. That’s what we need.”

  “Well, I guess being the Jew here, I’m outta luck,” Bronwyn said.

  “No, just accept Jesus,” Tammy said. She had a weird little smile on her that Bronwyn wanted to slap out of her. “If you accept Jesus in your heart, it’ll be okay. We can get out of this. Through Jesus.”

  “Oh Christ,” Bronwyn said. “Just keep drinking the beer, Tammy.”

  “It takes on the voices of whoever it skins,” Josh said.

  Bronwyn said, “I say we start walking.”

  She pushed herself up from the ground. “We have fire. We have what’s left of that flashlight battery. If we walk fast, we can do more than three miles per hour. Tammy, you run cross-country.”

  She nodded.

  “We could even try to run,” Bronwyn said. “At least some of the way. Maybe Jesus will help you run.”

  “Do not tempt the savior,” Tammy said.

  “When did you get so religious?” Bronwyn asked.

  “Since I saw that thing tear Griff open. Since all this,” Tammy said, still with that weird light on her face that made Josh and Bronwyn both think of the movie Song of Bernadette.