Come Get Me

by Michael Hunter

  “Got any hot dogs?” he giggled pointing towards Jim’s feet. Jim looked down between his legs and saw the house from last night. It didn’t look that bad by daylight he decided. Especially since it was on fire. One of the candles must’ve finally caught on something and then that was all she wrote. It was well on its way to being nothing but a bad memory. As he watched what was left of one of the ground floor walls fell over in a shower of sparks.

  Pete began laughing for no apparent reason and for no apparent reason Jim soon found himself joining in. This once again proved to be too much for him. He quickly fell back hitting his head on the soft ground behind him. It was just enough to send stars shooting through his vision and make him pass out again. He could still hear Pete’s laughter and the sound of approaching sirens as he started to dream of a familiar dream but his time it wasn’t scary. This time it was just a normal dream about a walk through the woods. The Goatman wasn’t physically present but Jim’s dream self knew all he had to do was call and he would come.

  Epilogue

  The two of them sat in comfortable silence on the front porch of their newly purchased old house watching the sun slowly set over the horizon. After all the moving they’d done recently it felt good to be able to just sit and relax a little now and then. It would take a while before the place felt like a home but it was theirs and they were together and that was all that mattered.

  The events that occurred over the past couple of months were already fading in their memories and those of the town. For the first couple of days after the events of that horrible night they weren’t left in peace for more than a few minutes at a time. Finding three people in the middle of nowhere next to a burning house was bad enough but after sifting through the rubble and finding two bodies they almost ended up being locked away for good. It was even worse when those two bodies were identified. The police had nothing but questions and threats after that.

  They’d finally gotten the hint after about two weeks. The story they heard was always the same with nothing that could be proved or disproved either way. It was their words against those of dead people. This time the evidence had supported the living. The cops were still confused as to what had actually happened but Jim, Jill and Pete had no more answers to give them. They’d said all they could say about what happened. Well, at least Jill had told them everything she knew which wasn’t much. She luckily slept through everything that happened. The one thing that she did shed light on was how she’d been abducted.

  Apparently when she’d been out for her walk Maria had come upon her in a hysterical state saying all kinds of crazy things. When she’d finally gotten her calmed down enough that she could understand her what she heard terrified her. Maria told her that Jim found her and demanded to be taken out to the place Tommy had been killed. Jill thought this sounded funny and said so but Maria explained it away saying that her and Jim had been old childhood friends and that they hadn’t parted on the best of terms but that they had made up since he came back and had come to her for help since she knew just about everything that went on in town. After that the scenario played much the same as it had with Jim. She was taken out to the abandoned house and jumped from behind. Instead of leaving her free to wake up on her own though they drugged her. They used a little more than they should of though which explained why she was unconscious for so long.

  Jim and Pete, when asked had just told a seemingly outlandish tale of a lover scorned. They said Maria was crazy and had somehow gotten Johnny to go along with her plan to make Jim lover her. They also made sure that the police understood that part of Maria’s great plan was blaming the local legend for everything that happened. At first they weren’t believed. It was too crazy. Most of them knew Maria. A few of them had even dated her. They were ready to throw the both of them in the asylum until they were finally searched Maria’s house. Then the story was suddenly much more plausible.

  Upon entering her home they’d first been confronted by a normal everyday single woman’s home. Then one of the officers had been being a bit of a pervert and was looking through Maria’s underwear drawer looking for a souvenir when he’d stumbled across some pretty damning evidence. A nice hefty stack of pictures was found in the back of the drawer buried under everything. Flipping through the pictures they found little notes Maria had made to herself about when she’d taken them. But that wasn’t all they found. In the back of her closet hidden behind a few old boxes they found notebooks filled with love letters and stories all dealing with one person.

  Jim Collins.

  Apparently Maria had a very vivid imagination and liked committing most of it to paper for later remembrance. After finding all this stuff it was pretty hard not to believe their story.

  Then they found the goat.

  In the woods behind her house they found what was left of a rotted goat. After doing some checking, the police found that one had been stolen from a town a few miles away. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The police quickly apologized for detaining them so long and released everyone but Pete. They wanted to know what his part had been in the whole adventure. That took a little more explaining but he too was eventually freed with no charges filed against him. The only thing that was ever mentioned about the creature was how Maria was going to blame everything on it. Nothing about how it saved them. They knew if it was ever mentioned that asylum was still out there waiting for them.

  Jim knew why he wasn’t talking but couldn’t understand why Pete didn’t. He, unfortunately, was going to be staying in a mental hospital for a while. Not a full blown asylum, but close enough. With Jim’s help Pete’s parents had finally convinced him he needed to get some help. If nothing else he could rest for a while. Jim kept his mouth shut so he wouldn’t have to join him.

  When the police and ambulance had arrived at the smoldering ruins and found them, Pete had lapsed back into talking to himself about the damned purple dinosaur again and laughing at a joke only he had heard. Who knows maybe he was laughing at the world around him and the people who thought they were sane. After talking to Pete with his parents Jim didn’t see him again until the day they took him to the mental hospital. Jim went to see him off with his arm in a sling. He tried not to be too sad about the whole thing because he knew Pete would at least have some peace and quiet where he was going. He also wouldn’t have to worry about lighting his nightly fires anymore. But he was still sorry to see him go. Maybe Pete would be sane enough to return to the outside world again someday. Jim wanted to be there waiting for him. He hoped now that Pete knew he didn’t have to fear the creature he would be able to get better a lot sooner than the doctors were telling everyone. Jim wasn’t holding his breath though. This was Pete they were talking about after all. Jim was hoping Pete would say something, maybe act like his normal self, before he left to give everyone a little hope but he didn’t. As he got in the van to leave Jim heard Pete mumbling about the purple dinosaur again and decided he needed to get to the bottom of at least this part of Pete’s problem before he could let them take him away. He walked over to say goodbye and quietly asked what the whole thing with the dinosaur was about. Surprisingly Pete looked at him and smiled like his old self.

  “Oh, that?” he said happily. “It was just something I saw on TV one day that bothered me so much I can’t get it out of my head. Kinda like one of those damn jingles you hear on the radio. That stuff annoys the hell out of me.” Then with a wink and a wave he climbed into the van and was off.

  Jim couldn’t help but laugh. Something as simple as that and it made him seem like a raving lunatic. He decided Pete really was laughing at the world when he giggled to himself.

  He hadn’t seen Pete since that day. He kept meaning to go see him but hadn’t made the time to do it. He scolded himself almost daily for not going but he still couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just didn’t want to see Pete in a place like that. Somehow he thought Pete would understand and not hold it against him. As far as the Goatman went Pete hadn�
��t uttered a word and if he did there wasn’t anyone that would believe him.

  Since Jill didn’t remember anything, Jim chose to wait until they were both out of the hospital to tell her everything that had happened. He figured there was no reason to confuse and upset her when she was being asked so many questions about what happened.

  One day while they were still trying to figure out where their relationship was going he sat her down and told her everything that had happened. At first she didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Her initial reaction was that he was playing a joke on her but that night her grandmother sat her down and told her all the legends that had been passed down through the years and had ended up with her. Come to find out what she’d said earlier about her father having died at the hands of the Goatman wasn’t exactly true. It was actually a hunting accident that had done it. The only reason she thought it was the Goatman was because he’d supposedly been seen near his body. Even after that she still wasn’t completely convinced. Finally she said it didn’t really matter because they were all still alive and that was something that everyone should be happy about. With that she ended the conversation and would hear nothing more about it.

  Jim, himself, had ended up having three broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. It had fallen on Jill and his mother to nurse him back to health. It was the worst time he could ever remember in his whole life.

  The two women had hit it off right away and spent most of their time mothering him until he thought he would go crazy. He even thought about going to join Pete until he was better but wasn’t sure he’d ever want to leave so decided against it. Slowly but surely he finally healed and was able to fend for himself once again but through it all he’d ended up growing closer to Jill than he ever hoped to be. With her helping him do almost everything they’d slowly fallen in love almost like it was planned. He finally decided to stay in his home town for good. Except for recent events it actually was a nice place to live. Now that the town psycho was gone there was hardly any crime, just the occasional kid breaking some windows or something equally harmless. That’s what was nice about small, out of the way towns. After thinking about it he realized that was what he’d missed when he was living in the city.

  With him needing a place to stay and the two of them growing closer by the day they figured why not move in together. They went to the local bank got a home loan and bought one of the better old houses on the outskirts of town. It needed some work but that was ok. It was a sturdy little house and it was what they wanted so they’d bought it. Now here they sat quietly enjoying each other’s company.

  The silence was suddenly shattered by a loud banging noise from the rear of the house. It sounded almost like rocks hitting the paneling of the back wall. But that couldn’t be right. All that was behind the house were woods; there weren’t any rocks back there.

  Looking at each other for a confused second they quickly got up and ran off the porch and around to the side of the house. Stopping at the corner they slowly approached the backyard. When they finally rounded the corner they were surprised to find nothing. No animals or anything else that might have caused the ruckus. They did hear something running heavily through the woods. They didn’t see it but it could be heard rushing through the woods breaking branches as it went. After a few minutes the noises suddenly stopped. It was a little eerie.

  Eyes darting here and there, neither of them saw anything out of place in the yard itself. The table and chairs were still where they’d put them, the flowers in the garden were undisturbed and everything else appeared normal. There was no evidence of where the noises had come from.

  Then they turned to look at the house. What they saw instantly set Jill into a yelling fit but for some reason it didn’t surprise Jim in slightest.

  “Goatman was here” was written in very small letters for one end of the house to the other finally ending right next to the backdoor. It was at a level that looked just about right for a kid but the writing was nowhere near neat enough for it to have been done by one.

  Jill was outraged. She was yelling at the top of her lungs telling whoever was hiding in the woods to come back and do it now that they were there. She also told them in no uncertain terms that if they did come back they’d better watch out. She was going to set some bear traps that would take care of them and how did they like that. She was sure there were kids back there laughing at them. At one point she even thought she could hear them but that turned out to be Jim himself. Her anger was turned on him for a while after that. She thought he was encouraging stuff like this. She surprised him by saying that when they had kids he better not act like that. She obviously surprised herself too by what she’d let slip because she instantly shut up.

  Jim was prepared to just let her calm down but when she made that little slip he couldn’t help but pick on it. Eventually he let her maneuver the subject back to what she wanted and demanded to know why he wasn’t mad. He told her he couldn’t get mad. He gave her some lame excuse about doing the same type of thing when he was little and luckily she bought it. Not happily but she still bought it and let the whole thing drop. Although she did tell him in no uncertain terms that he was cleaning up the mess. He thought that was a fair trade.

  As they walked back around the house he made sure she didn’t notice what he had. On the ground under the place where the writing was were huge goat shaped prints. Not deep and not really that noticeable if you weren’t looking like he was. This was something he remembered from childhood. If he looked closely he could see them coming from the woods to the house and back again.

  “This doesn’t piss you off?” she asked once more as they walked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said putting his arm around her, “it’s just kids being kids. We are kinda famous now after all.”

  Then he tugged her gently towards the front of the house. Looking over his shoulder once more as they rounded the corner he could almost swear he saw something with a huge set of antlers walking along the edge of the woods toward the back side of their property. He just turned around with a smile on his face and continued walking knowing they had chosen the right place to live. Maybe, if what Jill had said was true, they would have kids of their own and he could tell them all about the Goatman one day.

  The End

  About the Author

  I joined the United States Army right out of high school 17 years ago. By day I’m an Apache Longbow Armament Platoon Sergeant. By night I’m a writer and artist but no matter what time of day it is I’m always a husband and a daddy. Currently I reside in Killeen, Texas right outside of Fort Hood but who knows where I’ll end up. Feel free and encouraged to contact me at mchlhunter20602@yahoo.com.

  A Note from the Author

  I’d like to thank everyone that actually took the time to read my story. It took a while for me to get to the point of actually putting it on paper and even longer to get it out to everyone for reading. I had this story in my head for quite a few years and started and stopped the writing process many times. I grew up on the legend of the Goatman and came up with idea after going and looking for him with some friends one time. Needless to say, we didn’t find him but it sure makes for a good story. Hopefully you enjoyed it. I’m currently working on more so keep an eye out. You can also check out my webcomic, The War Out There at www.thewaroutthere.webs.com or on Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/michaeljhunter

  Thanks again.

  Michael