“Okay,” she said, making an exaggerated whistle and motioning wildly. “Have you had any customers since I left?”
“Yeah, Mr. Jermyn came in, just like he does every day,” replied Wes as he got up off the floor. “Bought his two lottery tickets and bottle of root beer, just like he does every day! What is going on?”
“Where’s Maria? Or Dwight? Have you seen Dwight?” Wes rubbed his elbow where he had fallen. “No, neither. Why are you spazzing?”
Kim looked up at the large digital clock that was above the far counter that held all the tobacco products. It was only a quarter after seven. Thru-Drug closed at ten. The last three hours would not be able to pass fast enough.
“You saw that fat guy, right Wes?” she said in a quiet voice.
“Yeah…” Wes replied, slowly.
“Angie saw the old lady with me. Maria saw an old man. Only…
only I saw the little boy.”
“What are you talking about?”
Kim gave her head a hard little shake. “I need to go find Maria and Angie. Shit, and Dwight. Just… just don’t leave here, okay? Please?” Wes’s face was unreadable. “Gotcha, Kim.”
Going back the way she had just come, down the aisle of medical supplies, Kim found she was hugging herself. She had put on a long-sleeved black thermal underneath her red Thru-Drug polo, and while she had been fine earlier, she was sweating now. Of course, her gesture was one of psychological comfort not temperature. Realizing how shaken she had become, she paused to pull out her hairband and tie her long black tresses back up in a tighter ponytail. Flicking a loose strand behind her ear, Kim took three more steps to scan down the second perpendicular aisle, hoping she didn’t see anyone surprising.
Anyone, no. Anything…
Something was on the floor, a mess of some kind. It was a few aisles in, between pet supplies and children’s. Something spilled? Kim’s sense of job duty and her innate human instinct to investigate the curious led her to walk forward. Not even twenty feet away, right along the end display of dog collars and matching leashes. Right on the floor where anyone could step in it.
The smell hit her first, thick and warm. A pile of feces had been strewn out, the perpetrator squatting, leaving his mess, and then playing in his own shit. Defecating on the floor in the middle of the store would be bad enough, but that someone would then paint and mold their steaming delight seemed an abomination. The worst offense was the art itself, some abstraction or symbol that struck Kim more horrid than the stench.
She backed away, gagging and eyes watering from the fetid stink, or perhaps from what the befouled lump had been shaped into. A sea of nightmare images washed through her imagination, each one more atrocious than the one before it. This wasn’t the product of ill customers or Halloween pranksters. Some primal, instinctual part of Kim recognized the sigil scrawled in shit and felt her soul desecrated by the sight of it.
Running, stumbling, falling. Kim made her way back to the front of the store. She crawled the last few feet around the corner to bring her head up and find Wes engaged in a conversation with Maria. Wes joking, Maria drinking her diet shake. Kim’s voice wouldn’t come, the sounds from her throat nothing more than choked bleats. She coughed, once then harder.
Get up! she told herself. Holding back an urge to be sick, she pulled herself up by the metal shell that held shopping baskets.
“Holy shit! Kim, what happened?”
Wes rushed over to her, Maria close behind. Kim yanked her eyes off them long enough to gaze at the doors. Something was in the Thru-Drug, something sadistic and perverse, something diseased and hungry. She could feel it now, behind her eyes and low in her stomach.
As she came to these conclusions, a scream tore out from the back end of the store.
“Joyce! Was that Joyce?” asked Wes.
“Ohmigod, what’s going on?” yelped Maria.
Kim looked back to the doors and let out a small groan. Angie stood there now, having appeared out of nowhere, looking nothing less than an incarnate of hell. Her glasses shattered, but the frames still hanging on to her pallid face, her hair was streaked back with filth and her eyes had been gorged out. In the hollow sockets, a visceral blackness oozed like hot tar, the same bubbling and running from her mouth. An arm raised, one that looked irreparably broken, and Kim saw that the liquid blackness squirmed under the skin of her extended digits as well.
Maria had spun at the Kim’s sound of terror, and she too had screamed. However, Maria had then taken off as fast as she could scramble past the cash register counters. Angie’s head snapped with the motion and her arm tracked Maria’s movement. Glittering shards, obsidian-like and sharp, projected themselves from Angie’s stretched arm and toppled Maria into a display of cleaning supplies. The pharmacy tech howled in agony as Angie very calmly glided over to her, those wet black orifices never leaving Kim and Wes. Her neck cracked, head twisting one hundred and eighty degrees to watch them behind her. Retrieving a bleeding, sobbing Maria and dragging her shuddering form along the floor, Kim trembled when she registered that the projectile spikes had been Angie’s own fingers.
“Angie, hon?” Wes tried as she came upon them. “Can you hear me?
Please, you in there?”
No response, no show of any emotion. Still gripping Maria by the collar, Angie tilted her head in the direction of the back of the store. It was slow, but quite deliberate. Neither Kim nor Wes moved. A slight crease in the brow. Angie peered at the space between them and the door and, without warning, violently vomited a massive amount of the seeping darkness. The others screamed, and Kim began to pull Wes away when the discharge started to reform into the symbol she had seen back farther in the store.
Herded by their captor, Kim and Wes did their best to help Maria along. One of Angie’s fingers had punctured the back of her left thigh and walking was near impossible. Mostly carrying her down the aisle, Kim couldn’t help but eye the medical supplies that lined the shelves, but she didn’t dare pause to retrieve anything. Not that it would matter. She had seen the sigil scrawled in shit and felt what it represented. None of them were going to survive tonight, and if anything, she should try for any item on the shelves that would allow her to take her own life as quickly as possible.
Maria continued to bleed and weep, blubbering an occasional prayer while Wes just stared blankly, the shock too much for him to fully absorb. Kim wondered which of them would get slaughtered first.
Rounding the last corner in the store, they found Joyce cowering under a shelf of boxed wine. She was shaking uncontrollably, eyes wide and staring off. The large puddle underneath her form drove home her fear.
Kim’s heart lurched, and she surged forward only to then follow the older woman’s line of sight to the doorway of the stockroom. Kim fell to her knees, a scream lost in the madness she was seeing, and found by Maria behind her.
Once it had been all of them. The old lady, the fat man, the little boy, the elderly man… even a teenage girl and a toddler. Once. Now they had stripped down to their barest, truest forms and all congealed together like animal fat cooling in a frying pan. A single, quivering bulbous entity, it hummed with a black cellulite frequency not meant to be experienced. From holes and digits, midnight rivulets of living corruption writhed and undulated. One had clasped onto the corpse of Dr. Homme by the leg, her skull smashed in, and was drawing it closer to its mass. Dwight was already half-consumed, his legs already devoured and his flabby torso hanging upside-down up of its center. The stockboy’s dead eyes were already twitching with black flecks.
Wes deposited Maria over by Joyce, then helped Kim up as Angie moved almost gracefully over to the hulking monstrosity. With her good hand, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a boxcutter, a tool used so often when on receiving duty. Liquid black eyes turned to examine them all in turn as she extended the blade, Wes’s mouth opening as if he were going to protest whatever action she had in mind. But Angie was no longer “in mind,” and the employees wat
ched aghast as she deeply split open Dwight’s unconsumed belly. The horizontal gash began to bleed, and Angie cut again and again until he looked ready to be disemboweled, a few bits on entrails hanging out. Then, her act completed, she stepped back and lowered head almost reverently.
“What the…” tried Wes, as the gaping wound began to shift.
“Go ahead,” came a voice from Dwight’s bloody torso.
It was voice as black as the night sky, warm as newly spilled blood and as sweet as rotting apples. Kim felt it tickle between her legs as it spit pus on her heart. The four assembled merely gawked in abject horror.
“Go ahead,” it said again. “Ask.”
“What?” Wes managed to feebly get out.
“Hmmm… almost. You scurrying mammals always ask the same things. Questions to quantify and qualify. ‘What, how, why?’ There are no answers. Perhaps it’s all pointless.”
“What?” Wes blathered again.
It laughed, wet and malicious. “Such small things, so scared. All you have are moments.”
One of the blackened tendrils shot up and then plummeted down into Dr. Homme’s damaged head. It began to suck the flesh out in a meaty grind, its own disease left in wake. The carcass seizured and began to void fluids and waste. A second dark tentacle came to lap up the spillage. Kim covered her mouth and nose to hold back a gag.
“Ah, it doesn’t matter, remember?” it said.
Kim’s eyes shot up.
“Now, which of you will be the betrayer? Who among you will abandon your friends and escape? Which of you would be free?”
“None of…” began Wes.
Kim spun and fled.
Behind, she heard Wes scream something, then she heard him really scream. She kept running. She skirted the vomited symbol as Maria’s voice was added and the bubbling, malevolent laughter overcame everything. Kim bolted out the doors, she herself now screaming and sobbing. Outside, the sudden chill and relative calm of the night was like a slap in the face.
She paused only for a second, then kept running. She had left her purse inside, so she didn’t have her cars keys. Didn’t have her apartment keys, money, license, anything. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter! Kim started laughing hysterical just as tears kept coming. She could run forever, but it would be pointless, right? That… thing could find her if it wanted. It could be tomorrow or in forty years or never. Or she could be hit by a freakin’ bus next week.
Kim collapsed by the side of road, giggling in between her sobs. She hadn’t really escaped, it had just wanted to see her damned and broken.
While she might be alive, she had seen behind the curtain and was now damaged by the knowledge gained. It doesn’t matter! She babbled to herself, over and over, eventually biting her tongue so bad that blood drained from her mouth. It doesn’t matter!
There on a length of grass along a state route in Logres, Ohio, a young woman lay with a violated psyche, her presence undetected for sometime until a passing driver called 9-11. There were no bodies found at the Thru-Drug store, no scenes of violence, no questions ever answered. None of the employees present that night, save Kim Reynolds, were ever seen again.
She never said a word, because she knew the truth. She knew that monsters had been out Trick Or Treating that evening and would do so again anytime they wished. She knew she had been given a few extra moments, as ruined as they were, and that in the end…
… it didn’t matter.
THE WOLFMAN’S WIFE
Sarah E. Adkins
Sarah E. Adkins earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing/Poetry from Chatham University in 2008, and a Bachelor of Arts in Writing from the University of Mount Union in 2003. She has published poems in Babelfruit, Plainspoke, The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online, and Istanbul Literature Review, as well as publishing reviews in Fourth River. Sarah lives in Ohio with her three cats, and enjoys skateboarding, Martial Arts, calligraphy, and making collages.
***
Alexandra Grayson pushed the old Subaru slightly over the speed limit to get to the grocery store, and her pace walking in was quicker than any of the other store patrons. She practically threw items into her cart and when she had everything she needed, her eyes scanned the available check out lines for the quickest option. She chose to use the self-checkout machine, but was behind an elderly woman who was moving very slowly.
“Here, let me help you,” Alex forced a smile.
“Oh, thank you, dear,” the old woman patted her hand and let Alex scan her items for her and bag them up.
Timothy Greyson finished stuffing a change of clothes into his gym bag, along with soap and shampoo, towels, a toothbrush and toothpaste. He zipped the bag and threw it over his shoulder and began pacing back and forth across the kitchen. He grabbed a banana from the counter and peeled it, took a few bites, then tossed the rest in the trash. Timothy looked at the clock on the microwave. He looked out the window. He let out his breath he didn’t know he’d been holding when he saw the Subaru pull into the drive way.
Alex pulled the grocery bags out of the hatchback and walked towards the two-bedroom-one-bathroom ranch house she shared with her husband of two years, Tim. Timothy met her half ways and grabbed more than half of the grocery bags and carried them inside. “What took so long? It’s almost time.”
“Well, hello to you, too,” Alex began putting away the cold groceries.
“I made it in plenty of time. Besides, I got stuck behind an old lady in the checkout line,” she offered.
“Well, that’s just great. I’m sure the neighbors would understand that.
‘Well, I’m sorry you were eaten by my husband, but I got stuck in line at the grocery store. If only it weren’t for that old lady, I would have made it on time. But I just had to get....”Timothy pulled an item from the nearest grocery bag. “‘ I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter”. Yes, don’t you just love Fabio? Sorry about your dog. Fido was my husband’s appetizer when he turned into a were...’”
Alex cut him off by jingling the car keys inches from his face. “Just go now, or you’ll be the one making excuses.” She smiled at him, but her eyes betrayed her weariness.
“Right, dear.” Timothy grabbed the keys in his left hand and kissed Alex on the cheek. He pulled back and looked at his wife. “You’re amazing, you know that?”
She swatted him on the behind as he went out the door. No sooner had the door closed than it opened again and Tim poked his head in. “Lock the door,” he said, “there’s a bad moon on the rise.” He wiggled his eyebrows and pulled the door shut behind him. Alex heard the motor starting as she turned the deadbolt and then turned back to the groceries. She paused in her task to turn on the lights in the kitchen and living room, and then walked back to the master bedroom and turned those lights on as well. She flipped the television on to the evening news and resumed putting away the groceries.
Alex looked out the kitchen window at the moon. She pursed her lips together and turned to heat up the kettle for tea. Her body froze rigid when she heard a noise from the front of the house. She grabbed the biggest thing she could see at the moment, a large metal spatula, and tiptoed to check it out. The floorboards creaked as Alex approached the area she thought the noise had come from. She froze again. She felt a slight breeze. The front window was open a crack and the blinds were banging against the pane.
Alex let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and shut and locked the window. She felt silly when she let out a little scream when the kettle whistled. She admonished herself and went to pour the water on the tea bag in her favorite mug. It was the mug she’d gotten at the ski lodge where she’d first met Tim. She settled on the couch with her cup of tea and watched an old movie, something with Audrey Hepburn. Before she knew it, Tim was kissing her on the cheek to wake her up. His hair was still wet from washing it. That full moon was over. Alex wrapped her arms around Tim’s neck and breathed in his scent, musk mixed with fresh soap.
The next full moon was
on Halloween. Alex was actually looking forward to it because people would be out and about, and the neighborhood would be well-lit. The moon would provide extra light for the revelers. She always looked forward to seeing the kids in their costumes, too. Truth be told, Halloween was Alex’s favorite holiday as a child. She remembered her favorite costumes as a little girl: a robot when she was eight, complete with a large-pad calculator on her chest, and a sorceress when she was 10 (she thought that was particularly creative at the time). Alex had already bought candy weeks in advance, and she tucked a Reese's cup now in Tim’s pocket as he walked by.
“I’m thinking more like rabbit tonight, hon, but thanks,” he grinned, showing his white teeth.
“Oh, you’re so clever,” she admonished him, and faked a pout. It had taken a while to get used to the idea of her husband’s “hunting,” but then she thought, it wasn’t really that different than the husbands who went out with their Winchesters and Brownings. Just a little more visceral. She tried not to think about it.
Tim left the room to gather some last minute supplies, then was back in the kitchen with Alex. “Happy Halloween,” said Alex brightly.
“Mmmm,” Tim pursed his lips. “Boo!”
“You don’t scare me,” Alex said.
“Well, would you like tricks or treats when I get home,” Tim sidled up next to Alex.
“Oh, definitely treats,” she said, her voice lower.
“See you then.” With that Tim was out the door and Alex continued her Hallow’s Eve preparations. She lit the candle in the jackolantern outside, even though it wasn’t quite dusk, and flipped on the porch light. Alex had time to make herself a cup of tea before the first trick-or-treaters arrived.
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