“Is that it?” Junior asked, putting on his clothes and shoes, because he was thinking just like Seth. They both wanted to be dressed in case they had to bolt for safety.
“I don’t know,” Seth replied.
A rustling caught their ears.
They turned towards the closed closet door when they heard metal coat hangers rattle.
They looked down when the closet door handle started to turn, ever so slowly it clicked until it stopped.
The boys inched across the room, away from the closet, as the door started to push open.
They peered into the darkness when the door stopped moving. A salty fishy smell issued forth from that tight space, as two yellow eyes appeared, followed by a smile filled with red glowing teeth. Then its sandy fur began to shine and pulse white.
The boys couldn’t breathe, anticipation claimed their lungs, as the rabbit beast leaped out of the closet towards them.
Somehow the boys managed to pull their wits together enough to dive out of the way.
The beast hit the far wall head on and splattered into a thousand pieces of squirming, wriggling, white glowing sand. The pieces of the creature immediately started to reform.
This gave the boys enough time to get to the window and get it open. Seth pushed Junior through the screen in order to get him out first. Junior and the screen fell to the ground with a hard twisted thud. Seth looked behind him, as the creature (now reformed) stared at him. When it growled, it wasn’t a normal sound, but the sound of the roaring raging sea.
“Come on, Seth,” Junior replied, as quiet as he could, standing on the ground on top of the broken screen, looking up at the window.
Seth dove out a second later, and landed hard on the ground. He rolled over onto his back and looked up at Junior, who offered him a hand. With Junior’s help, Seth found his way back to his feet.
Both boys turned to the window. The creature had not pursued them. In fact, they could not see anything at all glowing in the room. It looked dark in there, dark as it usually was at this time of night.
“I’ll check it out,” Seth replied.
“Check what out?” Junior asked.
Seth ignored him, and creeped over to the window. He lifted himself up on his tip toes, peered with tense eyes over the windowsill, expecting to see the rabbit beast staring back at him. It wasn’t there. It was gone. The room was silent, and empty.
“Coast is clear,” Seth replied, turning back to Junior.
The bushes rattled nearby, and a second later the rabbit beast roared that strange raging ocean sound. The boys watched, as it came charging out of them, on all fours, running top speed.
“Go!” Seth screamed.
“Where?” Junior asked, taking off with Seth on his heels, the rabbit beast feet behind them and closing fast.
A voice on the wind – ghostly and peaceful. “The cave. You have to run to the cave.”
And they listened.
And they ran towards the cave.
11
When they reached the cave, they didn’t hesitate to go in this time. They raced into the dark without a moment’s pause, as the beast pursued them.
Once inside, they stopped, and took a moment to look around. The place was alive with red light, every rock and shell was glowing bright, and they were singing a sea chant – your life for my creature, death to its creators. On and on it went with just these two lines repeated over and over again.
“What’s that?” Junior asked, trying to ignore the singing rocks and shells.
“What’s what?” Seth asked, as he looked towards the spot where Junior was pointing.
In a back corner of the cave, there was a pool of something on the floor glowing blue.
Seth and Junior walked over to it, and stopped when their tennis shoes were just inches in front of it. They looked down, and what they saw was what looked like a glowing blue puddle of frozen water.
That strange ghostly peaceful voice they had heard before, the one that had led them to this cave, said this to them. “To kill the beast that stalks you, take a piece of frozen water, jab it into the evil heart.”
“So do we break it or what?” Junior asked, looking at Seth, as the peaceful voice fell silent.
“We can’t very well stab the creature with it the way it is now, can we?”
“Man, you’re a smart ass.”
Seth ignored him and raised his foot.
“Wait,” Junior replied, grabbing Seth on the arm. Seth looked at Junior, as he held his foot in mid-air. “What if this is all some kind of a trap?”
“What do you mean?” Seth asked, putting his foot down.
“Whoever put the messages on the wall,” Junior replied, pointing towards the beach. “They could also be the one talking to us now. Don’t you think?”
Seth paused on that thought for a moment, as the rocks and shells continued to sing their song, and the rabbit beast, which they had managed to get ahead of by taking several short cuts, stalked closer to the cave. They could hear it outside tearing through the forest as they stood in here debating about what to do next.
“True,” Seth replied. “But maybe something good was set in place just to make sure if something was created in the sand that that something wouldn’t be able to run amuck without someone being able to stop it.”
They paused, turned towards the cave entrance when the rocks and shells stopped glowing and singing. The rabbit beast had now caught up to them, and it was stalking in their direction without its skin glowing. They couldn’t see it, but they could smell it and they could feel it.
The boys drew in their breath, waited, and listened, as they hovered closer to the only light now in this cave, the glowing blue frozen water.
Behind them, suddenly, too quickly, a growl that sounded like a roaring ocean. Yellow eyes lit up, a big red glowing smile, and then the white fur started to shine again. The rabbit beast jumped towards them with its ears pointed down ready to gore.
The boys broke their stance long enough to get out of the way.
Seth dove right. He let out a small oomph sound as the breath left his body for a brief moment when he hit the ground.
Junior moved left, tripped on a dark rock, hit his head on the wall, bounced off it, and passed out cold.
The rabbit beast missed them both and smashed into a nearby wall head on, disintegrating on contact.
While the rabbit beast reformed, Seth managed to find his breath, and get up onto his knees. He grabbed a nearby rock, still warm from the glowing and singing, and chucked the rock into the glowing blue pool, which exploded sending a large beam of blue light straight up and out of it. This light hit the ceiling of the cave and shot off in two different directions.
Seth shielded his eyes for a moment until the blue explosion of light subsided. When he could see again, he looked for the rabbit beast, who had reformed, and was now charging at him like a bull.
Seth got up off the floor, as the rabbit beast missed him by inches. It tripped, and fell but didn’t explode on contact.
Seth looked down into the glowing pool, and what he saw there were hundreds of small blue glowing jagged sharp pieces, like shards of a broken mirror. He grabbed one, the biggest one he could hold, and started to run towards the beach, towards the place where all of this had started. He thought that might be the best place to end it.
The rabbit beast grabbed Seth’s right ankle just as Seth passed it. It held him there for a moment, as a smell of burning flesh and cloth reached his nose. Seth wriggled free, and took off for the beach. The rabbit beast got up of the floor, and gave pursuit.
Seth rushed out into the sand, and turned just as the rabbit beast leaped towards him. Its ears pointed down ready for a good, old-fashioned gore.
Seth on instinct squatted down, and as the beast sailed over him he looked up. That’s when he saw the area where the heart was located. He jabbed the blue glowing shard upward and hoped he would hit the right spot. As luck would have it, he hit his mark.
The beast let out a scream, and then exploded into a thousand pieces of sand. When the grains of sand hit the beach, they were quickly consumed.
Seth stood up, glanced around, dusted himself off, and headed back into the cave to check on his friend.
The cave was back to its normal suffocating dark, so it was hard to see, but Seth managed to find Junior, who was just waking up.
“It’s all over, buddy. Let’s go home,” Seth replied, helping Junior to his feet.
They made their way home easily, safely, and as quickly as they could.
12
The phone was ringing somewhere inside the house as the old man finished up his story of The Living Sand. He got up and went inside to answer it. When he rose, his grandkids noticed for the first time, the bald spot on his right ankle that looked like something had gripped it, and left its mark there many years ago.
THE END
3
Bonus Short Story: Fear of the Scarecrow
A desperate man stumbled and slipped as he made his way aimlessly through the endless rows of corn. He was a short man – about 5 foot 5. He had thinning hair, a somewhat in shape forty-year-old body, and was wearing a once clean black suit. His tie hung loose, swinging from side to side. Dried chunky vomit covered it from top to bottom. He smelled unwashed, of the gutters. He had a cheap bottle of two dollar liquor in his pocket that he removed and swallowed a gulp from. He grimaced at the harsh taste, a wino’s taste, but enjoyed the rush it gave him. It took him out of his current tortured state of mind and put him into a world of drunken bliss.
He tripped and fell, and then while standing and dusting himself off he cursed his wife under his breath. He also cursed the old woman by the river who had told him of the field and the scarecrow that hung somewhere inside it. She had told him that revenge would be his once he found the scarecrow, but if he was meant to have revenge only he could find it. She couldn’t tell him anymore than that, so here he was, drunk, pissed off, five hundred dollar shoes covered in dirt and shit, and his legs aching from the random endless walk.
Then, as if in a dream, he stumbled into an open circle surrounded by stalks of corn that almost seemed to be staring at him with multiple yellow eyes. He turned from the green stalks to a brown wooden cross sitting in the center of the circle. Tied to it was a scarecrow with a head and face made of burlap. It had long yellow-brown straw hair, hand drawn triangle black eyes and circled nose, and a gash in the fabric that looked like a mouth. It wore a faded red and black checkered shirt and was covered in overalls. Dirty black boots, loosely laced, covered its feet.
Tommy Thompson looked up at the scarecrow, and laughed. “Is that it, bitch?” He asked, not expecting an answer. “Looks like something a child put together.”
“It is,” the old witch somehow replied. The voice was ghostly in nature, as if it was transported across all space and time.
Tommy’s eyes spun the circle for sure she was nearby hiding among the shadows inside the rows, but he was all alone. Goose bumps raced across his body as he looked back at the scarecrow. He was now unsure he wanted to do this, but then the thought of his wife and that night he had walked in on them burst inside his brain like an exploding A-Bomb. He could still see her, on all fours, naked, and that stud from hell pounding away on her like she was his personal pleasure machine. She was screaming his name in a way she had never screamed Tommy’s. Ten years of marriage vanished in that instant, and when she saw her husband watching she didn’t stop, nope, she smiled at him and then begged the guy to go harder and faster. Tommy stumbled from their bedroom that night on shaky legs about to throw up. He could hear their orgasmic screams as he made it to the tub, and fell in. That’s when he threw up. He sat there in his two thousand dollar suit and just cried, covered in vomit, crying like a little child who had lost his mommy.
Tommy pulled himself out of his nightmare thoughts and looked up at the scarecrow again. He took another bitter shot of cheap liquor, grimaced, and then put the bottle away. He pulled out the scrap of paper with the old witches incantations scribbled on it, and then he took out his wife’s wedding ring. He placed the gold band on the ring finger of the scarecrow, slipping it over the burlap flesh that seemed too life like for something so inanimate. It fit perfectly. He looked down at the paper, and then up to the moon. He read these words out loud.
“BY THE LIGHT OF THE FULL MOON!”
“AVENGE ME!”
Tommy looked from the moon to the scarecrow who was now alive. Its eyes burned an eerie green color, and its cut out mouth was now filled with razor sharp teeth and plump red lips. The scarecrow broke the bonds that held its wrists and ankles in place, and floated out towards Tommy, who, of course, took a few steps back, stopping when his butt reached the green corn stalks.
The scarecrow looked down at him, and Tommy up at it. Their eyes locked, and a second later two bolts of green lighting shot out of the scarecrow’s eyes and entered Tommy’s. He felt his head start to swell like meat inside a microwave, and then heat and sweat raced across his body just before his eyes burst in a gooey slimy blood filled explosion. He started to scream as his soul was ripped free.
The scarecrow consumed Tommy’s soul. Greedily eating it as it took in every bit of information Tommy had inside his head. The scarecrow then released Tommy and let his body crumble lifelessly to the ground, setting off to exact Tommy’s revenge, racing into the rows of corn, and disappearing.
When the scarecrow was gone, Tommy’s body lifted off the ground and floated up to the post. His husk of a body spread out its arms and allowed the wrists to be bound to the wooden cross by rope that appeared out of thin air. When the bonds were tightly wound, the ankles crossed and fell into place. Again, rope appeared and tightened so the legs couldn’t move. Tommy then started to decay and turn, morphing and changing until he looked just like the scarecrow he was now replacing.
+
“Harder faster, lunkhead,” Tommy’s soon to be deceased and soon to be ex-wife replied, as her stud lover pounded away on her from behind.
“Bitch, I’m trying,” the man replied. He resembled a muscular built ape, complete with Neanderthal forehead.
She fell silent, and let him thump away on top of the bed she and Tommy had spent many bad years of marriage on. She was just starting to get into his groove when the bedroom window shattered, sending glass flying all over them and the bed. They stopped and turned (still connected) towards it as something orange sailed into the room. It hit the floor with a solid thump, and rolled to a stop at the edge of the bed. They dismounted, and cautiously leaned over the edge to see what it was.
A pumpkin.
An uncarved giant orange-brown pumpkin.
Samantha looked at Ben and he looked at her. They both then looked up towards the window, feeling watched. The scarecrow was looking in on them, unmoving, unblinking. It just stared with its glowing green eyes.
Ben scurried backwards across the bed, pushing chunks of glass into his back and butt. He never felt the pain as he dropped onto the floor and raced for his shorts.
Samantha looked from the scarecrow to the pumpkin on the floor when she started to smell something burning. Her eyes widened as the pumpkin transformed in front of her.
A flash of fire and two triangular eyes appeared. Another flash of fire, and a large open jagged mouth appeared. Then three little black creatures, naked, sexless, and covered in scales crawled forth from the newly opened portals in the pumpkin. They hopped down onto the floor and looked up at the scarecrow. It nodded towards Ben, who had somehow managed to get his underwear on and nothing else. Blood was now racing down his legs and pooling at his feet while he stood there like a statue.
Ben looked down at the little creatures as they ran towards him, clicking their hooves on the floor. They jumped onto him and began clawing, biting, and gnashing their way up his hairless legs. He fought them the best he could as he backed around the room, bleeding intensely while they continued their assault upwar
ds.
The creatures swarmed into his shorts and destroyed his manhood while he screamed, and then out of his shorts they came, clawing and biting him as they scaled his hairless chest, sending blood crashing and splashing around the room, painting the white walls red while he fought a hopeless fight.
The creatures reached his neck and dug into his jugular, sending blood spraying like a fountain. He spat and gurgled as one of them dislodged and climbed up towards his eyes, destroying his cheeks. One black creature burrowed into Ben’s left eye, splattering it all over his destroyed face.
Ben continued to scream but was silenced when one of the creatures jumped into his mouth. It began tearing him apart from the inside as it descended downwards. A few minutes later, Ben fell to the floor with a hard dead thump.
Samantha was frozen in place, knowing she should have been running, but powerless to do so. Her mind raced as she heard a crunch and looked up to see the scarecrow standing in front of her. It had entered the room while she watched Ben’s slow demise and now it stood before her with judging eyes.
She backed up from it on all fours. “Please, please don’t hurt me.”
The scarecrow held out its empty hands oblivious to her pleas and a sickle appeared in them, brown jagged handle, long silver sharp blade that glinted in the lamp light.
“Oh no,” Samantha replied, as the scarecrow lifted the sickle and slung it forward.
The blade entered the back of her skull, pushed all the way through her brain and exited out of her face, pinning her head to the bed. She wiggled and squirmed as death’s embrace slowly drained her life.
The scarecrow dropped to its knees, as the pumpkin, sickle, and tiny creatures exploded. It clawed at its face, as it started to burn and catch fire. The floor opened up and flames rushed up from below, consuming the scarecrow and Tommy’s soul in the fiery furnace of the afterlife.
The bed caught fire a few seconds later and started to burn. Then the walls caught, and then the ceiling, and then the floor . . .
It Sleeps at Dawn Page 5