There was a quick rush of air in the hallway and suddenly the dog's massive head, the mouth yawning and the teeth snapping, was just inches from his face. It had been lying in wait; invisible in the dark. Instinctively Jackie put up his arm, warding the dog off and the animal's leg knocked the letter opener out of his hand. It clattered away in the darkness. The dog sprawled in the shadows beyond him.
Jackie rolled to his feet and ran in the opposite direction, but his legs felt like they had been tied together. Behind him, he could hear the canine getting up and following. Jackie tried to run faster but his knees didn't want to bend. He felt like he did at Hampton Beach trying to walk against the incoming waves.
The sound of the dog's breath and the clicking of its nails on the floor grew louder and louder until Jackie felt its paws hitting his back left shoulder. He was flung forward by the dog's weight, and its teeth caught on his T-shirt, tearing it across his back. Jackie sprawled into the darkness, smashing into the base of the wall with the shoulder the dog had just hit. He bounced off the baseboard and lay still.
His shoulder was burning with pain so badly, Jackie almost wished the dog would hurry and rip his throat out and put him out of his misery. But it seemed the dog had other plans. He walked over to Jackie's prone body, sniffed it, and grabbed his injured shoulder firmly in its mouth and picked him up. Jackie screamed with the pain and blacked out for a second. The dog began to drag him down the hallway. Jackie screamed again, drowning in a dark black hole of hot acid pain. He sunk into unconsciousness again but rose back to the pain. Through it all he managed to realize that the dog was taking him to the witch.
Jackie opened his eyes and gritted his teeth against the torturing pain in his shoulder. He hung limply from the dog's mouth as it dragged him along on his stomach, his left shoulder clamped firmly in the canine's mouth. He could feel its breath on his neck; it smelled of dead flesh. Jackie glanced around for some way to escape, but when he moved his head, the pain in his shoulder intensified.
Just as he was fainting away, giving into the pain, giving into the witch, ready to give it all up, he noticed the glint of something metallic for a moment on the hallway floor a short distance ahead. The dog dragged him nearer and Jackie realized it was the letter opener he had dropped when the dog first attacked him.
With a supreme effort, his shoulder sending white-hot lightning bolts of pain through his entire body, Jackie twisted and reached out with his free arm. He just barely grabbed the end of the handle, pushing it along a few inches until his fingers closed on it and he could pull it in.
Jackie's fingers fumbled with the opener for a moment, and he almost lost it again, but then managed to grip it tightly in his free right hand. Striving to keep conscious through the pain that every move he made and every step the dog took brought to his shoulder, Jackie tried to twist around to stab the dog in the chest.
It was no use.
The dog held his shoulder so firmly, and the pain was so bad, that even if he could reach the dog's chest with the letter opener he would not be able to put any force into thrusting it into the dog.
All seemed lost again. Jackie began to cry, but instead of giving up, he began to get angry. Tears streaming down his face, he yelled and flailed wildly with the letter opener, trying to make the dog let go of him. The dog growled and shook Jackie back and forth like a rag doll, making him scream from the pain. The pain blotted out everything and he felt like he was caught in a whirlpool, being dragged down into an evil blackness. And within that blackness, Jackie knew the witch was waiting for him. If he blacked out now, he would waken to the witch's embrace.
With one last ditch effort Jackie twisted his body against the pain and swung the letter opener in a wide arc, stabbing upward with all the force he could muster. The ensuing pain was excruciating. The black whirlpool sucked him in and, gratefully, he let it.
He woke to a strange sound, part scream, part gargling. He was lying on his right side, with his legs crossed and his hurt shoulder throbbing. He realized the dog wasn't dragging him anymore when something large and black rushed by him. There was a loud crash and he craned his head to see what was going on.
The dog was a few feet away, dancing madly round and round as if chasing its tail. It crashed into the left wall, bounced off, and jumped sideways across the hallway, crashing into the opposite wall. It slumped to its side, its paws clawing at its head, and Jackie saw why. The letter opener was sticking halfway out of the bottom of the dog's mouth. The dog clawed at it as blood stained its teeth and tongue and gargled in its throat. It whined so shrill that it sounded like a girl screaming.
Jackie moved his feet, felt the pain in his shoulder shake him again, and tried to crawl away.
The dog let out an inhuman growl of rage and pain and, fixing its eyes on Jackie as the source of its torment, pounced on him.
Jackie felt himself moving as if he were in slow motion. He rolled onto his back, sending another spear of pain through his shoulder, and held up his right arm to ward the dog off. The dog lunged and Jackie's forearm hit the bottom of the letter opener, ramming it up into the dog's head where the point pushed out of its left eye with a gush of blood and white pulpy tissue as it pierced the eyeball.
The dog went over him, gyrating madly and convulsing as it jerked its head around wildly and clawed at the handle of the letter opener sticking out of the bottom of its mouth. It tried to turn and bite Jackie, but it couldn't get its mouth open wide enough with the opener stuck through it. It smashed into the wall several more times, then charged head first into a closed door and collapsed on the floor a few feet from Jackie. Bloody foam bubbled from its mouth as its thrashing grew feeble. Its breath rattled loudly and it blew blood from its nose. Its good eye rolled up into its head, showing only white. The dog's legs twitched, and its head jerked once more before it settled almost peacefully into a pool of its own foamy blood and lay still.
Jackie's shoulder hurt worse than anything he had ever felt; even worse than the time when he was four and his Cousin Danny had slammed the car door on Jackie's fingers, breaking two of them. This pain was ten times worse than that.
Jackie lay on the floor, sobbing, and looked fearfully back at the dog. He cried harder. He had always liked dogs; they were one of the few things he had never been afraid of. He had always thought he had a special way with dogs. Never would he have thought of hurting or killing one, or of one trying to kill him. Never in a million years.
The tears kept coming. Once they started, Jackie couldn't stop them. He cried for the dog and he cried for the pain; for Jennifer and Mark and the other boys; for his mother and Steve. He cried especially for himself because he was hurt and scared and tired; he just wanted to go to sleep and forget everything.
Several minutes later, he was all cried out. His shoulder was becoming numb, which was a vast improvement over the excruciating pain, but it also became very stiff, along with his left arm, hand, and ribs. With some difficulty and a flaring resurgence of pain in his dead shoulder, Jackie struggled to his feet. Leaning heavily against the wall with his good side, Jackie slid down the hall, away from the dead dog.
He didn't know how long he'd been walking, wincing at the dull pain throbbing through his entire left side, drifting in and out of awareness of his surroundings, when he came to a corner and turned it. He found himself in a short hallway that led to a narrow stairway going up into the house. To the right, a short distance ahead was another, wider stairway that went down to the first floor.
Before Jackie could take another step, the air on the stairs leading down danced with minute sparkles like a cloud of dust made suddenly visible by a beam of sunlight. The very air began to take shape, forming into something huge. The air swelled and bulged, turning as black as boiling tar. Fire suddenly erupted from the middle of the seething mass, blossoming toward the ceiling, and the form emerged in hideous detail.
Its ears were batlike, wide and pointed. The scales of its head were green razors crusted with barn
acles. Its eyes were crocodile eyes, cold and deadly. Its snout was long and supported a mouth studded with foot-long teeth. Above the teeth, two wide nostrils spouted licks of flame and puffs of black smoke. Its body was something like that of a stegosaurus, a picture of which Jackie had in a book at home. Spiny green razor-sharp fins made a ridge down its back to its long, twitching spiked tail. Its neck was long and its legs short.
It snarled at him, its forked tongue slithering from its mouth. A billow of flame erupted from its nostrils and travelled up the hallway to within inches of Jackie.
He could feel the heat from the flame on his face.
"You're not real," he mumbled defiantly at the dragon.
The dragon's mouth curled into a frightful mockery of a smile. It spoke and its lips moved like a human's. "If I'm not real, how come you're sweating?" the dragon asked him in a hissing, growling voice.
It was true, the blast of flame had made him break out in a sweat. Jackie looked disbelievingly at the dragon. It couldn't be real. It just couldn't. Another blast of flame poured from the dragon's snout, driving Jackie back from the heat of it. The hairs on his arms singed while at the same time the wallpaper along the hallway and the paint on the stair's banister began to peel, smoke, and bubble. Jackie's shoulder throbbed from the heat.
Jackie backed away from the dragon. This isn't real, he told himself. It's the witch. If she could make him see things that weren't there, couldn't she also make him feel things that weren't there? Of course. But it didn't make the heat from the dragon's flame any less hot knowing it.
The dragon crawled to the top of the stairs. Its long claws scraped on the wood like fingernails on a chalkboard. The sound ran over the back of Jackie's neck like a cold ice cube being rubbed there. The dragon's head swung back and forth, low to the floor. Another cloud of flame shot from its nose and rolled down the hallway, blackening the floor and setting the wallpaper to burn where it had peeled away from the wall.
Jackie felt the heat of the flames and again told himself they weren't real. This was just like before. If he charged the dragon, he could run unscathed through the flames and the dragon itself and get downstairs to freedom. His worst enemy was fear, and he had to conquer it.
Taking deep breaths, and psyching himself up to do it by repeating, It isn't real! over and over again, he started forward.
The dragon began to shrink.
Jackie stopped in his tracks and watched as the dragon grew smaller and smaller, losing its shape and changing, metamorphosing into something else, something on two legs that was not much taller than Jackie.
It was Mark Thomas.
Jackie groaned, the sound thick and hurtful in his throat.
Mark was standing naked at the top of the stairs, his stomach still painted with the witch's bloody symbols. His chest was laid open to reveal a blood-oozing, wet cavity where the witch had removed his heart. More blood ran from a wide gash between his legs where his private parts should have been.
"Give it up, Jackie," Mark said with a sad smile. "You can't get away. Come with me and we'll be friends ... forever!"
Mark stepped toward Jackie, arms outstretched for an embrace. "Come on," he pleaded, "have a heart" A sick smile crossed Mark's face and he chuckled.
Jackie couldn't stand this. It didn't matter if he knew whether it was real or not, he just couldn't take it. In a panic, he dashed back down the hallway to a door on the left. With his good arm and hand, he grabbed the doorknob and flung it open.
A huge, smiling wolf looked into his eyes. It was dressed like Robin Hood and sat at a wooden dinner table. A drop of blood clung to one long, sharp tooth. On the plate in front of the wolf were the cooked remains of something in a red cape and hood. On the other three plates set at the table were pigs, roasted brown in tiny, charred business suits, legs up and apples in their mouths. One of them wore gold-rimmed glasses.
"Come join me," the wolf said, leering. "Plenty for everyone ""
Jackie backed away and ran to a door on the opposite wall. He opened it on a bedroom that looked normal. Just as he was about to dash inside, the window in the room burst inward, glass flying everywhere. Jackie stared, dumbstruck, as a branch of a vine as thick as a redwood tree filled the room. Through the broken window's frame he could see a skinny boy was on the vine, climbing down. He glanced up, then quickly jumped through the window into the room.
"Hide me!" he begged of Jackie. A moment later, a huge body climbed down the vine and a giant face appeared at the top half of the broken window. A massive hand and arm reached over the viny branch, through the window, and grabbed the skinny boy. With one quick squeeze of the giant hand, the boy was squished to a bloody pulp, his head popping like a squeezed grape.
Jackie slammed the door and stumbled down the hallway. Just ahead, a naked Snow White came out of another room, stumbled, and fell. The dwarfs, following hot on her heels, fell upon her immediately. This time, sex was not their object. Now they carried chains, knives, and clubs. They began beating Snow White, who screamed in agony at the bite of their weapons into her too-white flesh.
Jackie looked away, but there was Santa the derelict standing in another doorway, Jackie's decapitated head swinging lazily in his hand.
Jackie spun around, in his terror barely even aware of the pain the movement brought to his shoulder, and saw Mark coming down the hall. He held his beating heart in his cupped hands like an offering and opened his mouth wide to show his private parts stuffed into his throat.
Jackie, teetering on the edge of hysteria, looked around wildly. Everywhere, the hallway was coming to life with horrible images.
From the narrow stairway that went up to the next floor, a giant toad hopped forth, croaking: "Kiss me!" Its long tongue rolled out of its mouth. Jackie could see half-digested insect parts stuck to it.
From behind Mark, a unicorn trotted into view, a screaming baby impaled on its spiral horn.
The air in the hallway began to dance with spirals of light. Tiny winged fairies, like Tinkerbell, began to flit around Jackie's head, yanking his hair and nipping at his ears and neck with stinging little needle-sharp teeth. He swatted at them with his good arm the way he would at bothersome insects.
From the walls themselves, more apparitions appeared: the Pied Piper, rats climbing over his body; the Three Bears, each gnawing on a different part of Goldilock's torn body, their teeth as pointed as their ears; the Big Bad Wolf, picking the shreds of a red cape and pork flesh from between his teeth with a long claw; a horde of elves and leprechauns, each looking evilly deformed and demented as they advanced on Jackie.
Jackie was surrounded. Every way he turned there was a new horror waiting for him.
Santa was joined by the troll who was tying a napkin around her neck as if in preparation of a meal.
The dwarfs stopped their mutilation of Snow White and advanced on him. Behind them, a giant, grizzly looking rabbit, with long spiked teeth jutting from its mouth, hopped into view. It carried an Easter basket filled with gray eggs. The eggs began to crack open and spiders and snakes slithered out.
Panic and fear built in Jackie to the exploding point. He whirled around, looking for escape and shrieked at what he saw coming around the corner behind him.
It was the witch's dog, letter opener still stuck through its head, blood pouring from around its point showing through where his left eye should have been. The dog was on a leash. Holding the other end was the walking corpse of Jackie's stepfather, Steve. "Come on, Jackie," he gurgled. "It's time to go home"
"No!" Jackie screamed and ran away from the horrible sight. He swatted at the fairies with his good arm and shoved elves, leprechauns, and dwarfs out of his way. Screaming, "You're not real!" at the top of his lungs, he plunged through the apparitions of the Easter Bunny, Mark Thomas, the unicorn, and the giant toad.
He reached the top of the wide stairway to the first floor and didn't stop. Wincing with pain at every step down the stairs, Jackie descended to the kitchen. Behind him, the
howls of outrage and sounds of hot pursuit suddenly faded.
Jackie ran into the kitchen and slipped in blood. He fell hard on his butt, the pain in his shoulder imploding deep to the bone with the jolt. He saw the back door and, knowing he was so close to escape, struggled painfully to his feet. As he pushed himself off the floor, Jennifer walked in.
"Stay away!" Jackie gasped in pain.
"It's okay, Jackie," his sister said excitedly. "Look, the witch is dead and I got Mother free"
Behind her, on the floor of the short corridor to the entrance hall, lay the witch, her eyes open, the pupils rolled up into her head, and a thin line of blood running from her mouth down her chin. Jackie saw his mother, still naked, her left arm hanging limply at her side, standing in front of the dead witch. She looked dazed as she stepped into the kitchen, but managed a weak smile at Jackie.
"Mom!" Jackie sobbed with joy. He limped to her, wrapping his good arm around her waist, and buried his face in her belly. Likewise, she drew him near with her right arm and hugged him. Pain shot angrily through his arm and shoulder with her hug, but Jackie didn't care anymore. The nightmare was finally over. He cried and held on to his mother, enjoying her embrace despite the pain.
She hugged him tight.
And tighter.
Jackie was having trouble breathing. His mother was holding him so tight he couldn't lift his face from her belly. His shoulder was going beserk with pain, leaving him faint and nauseous. Suddenly, the realization that he had never heard Jen call their mom "Mother" before popped into his head.
Managing to pull his head away from her long enough to suck in a gasping breath, Jackie looked up at his mother and screamed.
The swollen, bruised and blood-encrusted face of the witch stared down at him with a malevolent smile.
"Bad boy," Eleanor scolded. She threw Jackie hard against the cabinets along the wall. Blood spurted from his nose. One of the cabinet handles caught him in the stomach, knocking the scream out of him in a gasp. She quickly picked him up and swung him by his bad shoulder, head first into the large upright freezer in the corner by the door. His breathless cry of anguished pain was abrupt, as was consciousness.
Grimm Memorials Page 37