“Should we be worried?” Mom asks with her hands over her heart.
“Aw, naw, ma’am,” Sheriff Rourke assures her. “I’d lock your doors when y’all call it a night just to be safe, but I don’t think Jethro is much of a risk to you folks.”
“He’s just a dirtbag,” Deputy Dingo reaffirms.
“Yeah, I already called Big Roger, and he’ll be out here with his tow truck to drag his heap of junk off the road. If’n y’all need anything, just call at the station.”
Sheriff Rourke tips his hat and leads Deputy Dingo down the porch steps. Mom waves and steps from the door, heading back to the kitchen. Dad remains at the threshold watching their retreat, obviously unnerved.
Sheriff Rourke and Deputy Dingo slide into the Jeep. The highlights turn on, illuminating the west end of the two story house.
Dad goes back inside, mumbling under his breath. Jethro can’t make out any of what he is saying except “fucking with me.”
The next instant Jethro spins around and rushes over the grounds. He can’t let them take away his fun – the hitchhiker is his to do with as he pleases! Darkened scenery flashes by as he charges towards the dirt road. A minute later, low hanging branches scrape at Jethro’s cheeks as he forces his way through thick growth of old trees and waits for the lawmen. He just needs to stay hidden long enough for them to pass so he can get back to his car.
Unfortunately, he would have to shit where he ate for once – the Harker Place had been compromised for the night.
The Jeep finally turns out of the driveway and onto Whittleback Road. Its headlights bounce momentarily over Jethro peeking, blinding him. Gravel crunches under the wheels as the sheriff slams on the brakes. The headlights come to rest on Jethro, brighter than the light of the cursed moon above. Rourke clicks on his high-beams, and Jethro’s eyes sparkle in the dark.
Shit. He thought he’d been hidden well enough…
“Jethro! Jethro Sapp! Stay right there!” Sheriff Rourke barks as he exits the Jeep and draws his sidearm, a handsome .454 Smith & Wesson. Behind him, .357 already drawn before he jumps out from his passenger seat, is Deputy Dingo.
“Don’t you move, you motherfucker, or I’ll blow your brains out!”
Jethro has no choice but to comply – there is nowhere else to hide. He doesn’t want to end up in a jail cell, but he can see no way around it now.
The men approach, each step they take either illuminating them in the warm glow of the headlights, casting them as walking shadows twitching in the dimness at the edge, or blocking the light out completely. They stop several feet away, Deputy Dingo silhouetted smack in the middle of the light and Sheriff Rourke just at its edge, but illuminated slightly by the light of the moon.
“We done saw ya, shithead! Don’t even try to run!” Deputy Dingo snarls at his former classmate.
“Jethro,” Sheriff Rourke says. “Now, come on over here and talk with us. I don’t want ya sneaking around this property and bothering that nice family. They got enough to be weary of, goddamn it.”
“Hey! Dirtbag! He said git’ over here!”
Jethro fails to hear a branch snap somewhere behind him, and he inhales deep the pungent tandem odors of petrol and decay emanating at his back. His mind, already stretched and torn, loses all sense as he moves to leave his concealment, too scared to turn and see what could be emitting such powerful, outright rank smells so near to him.
The next instant, hands clamp tight around Jethro’s head, hands so large the palms slap over his ears and the fingers – charred black and reeking of gasoline – press forcefully against his cheeks. The hands squeeze, vise-like and merciless, and Jethro feels several of his facial bones crack under the impossible pressure. The hands lift as they squeeze. The ground disappears beneath him, and he desperately kicks his feet as he is hoisted into the air. He feels his neck break; excruciating pain shoots down his spine to his limbs and extremities. He hears the sound of his vertebrae snapping, the huge palms pressed against his ears forcing the sound back into his panicking brain. The flaring pain throbs to nothingness as he is heaved through the cool evening air at Deputy Dingo.
As Jethro is flung forward he hears a thudding to his left, and the sheriff shouts something angry and muffled. Jethro sees the look of frightened shock on the deputy’s face a split second before their craniums collide, and Jethro’s limp body crashes down on the much smaller man. Deputy Dingo flails his extremities, which only serves to tangle them together. When the two hit the gravel, he not only takes Jethro’s full weight onto his chest, but gets two more head-butts from the momentum. The back of his head smacks against the gravel each time, ensuring a state of unconsciousness.
Jethro gets blasted in the face by Deputy Dingo’s cigarette breath as his crushing weight forces all the air from the unconscious cop. He then slips off the deputy until his head comes to rest on his chest like a pair of relaxed lovers cuddling at the edge of the desolate road.
Jethro tries to move, but his nerves have been so badly damaged he cannot even close his eyelids or alter the awestruck grimace frozen on his face, much less wiggle a finger or toe. He smells his bowels and bladder empty into his overalls, but their combined stenches are the only sensation he experiences. Fear consumes him, nibbling on his remaining sanity. He was no small man and he hadn’t met a meth-head hitchhiker yet that could fight him off, but something had just lifted him up by his head and snapped his neck like a goddamned twig. That something stood above him now, its shadow falling across his face and cooling his reddened cheeks. Its reek drifts down on him like a wet blanket of gas-soaked rot.
Despite never having left the forested mountains of Hoo-Doo County, Jethro senses a malevolence – ancient and evil – in its looming presence.
The shadow shuffles off. Jethro sees Sheriff Rourke just out of the glow of the headlights and illuminated only by the light of the cursed moon above, slapping at the hulking shadow attacking him. Jethro can see the look of absolute terror etched on the old lawman’s face. Sheriff Rourke jerks his hand away from the attacker and pulls the hammer back on his .454. However, before he can either aim or fire his weapon, a giant hand – charred black except for where strange symbols have been carved and appear as angry pink scars – wraps around his forearm and snaps it as easily as it had Jethro’s neck.
The attacker leans into the light, allowing Jethro to finally see what had broken his neck. And in all of his hellish and malevolent glory, standing there as real as the fact Jethro couldn’t feel his feet, is the monstrous Elijah Harker, freshly risen from the dead. The big man wears tattered, scorched jean overalls, and a filthy red flannel stained black-brown from its years under the earth, melted into his burnt flesh in several locations. Elijah is charred crispy black over ninety percent of his body, and is equally covered in the pink scarred symbols. A few long greasy strands of tar-black hair hang over a face melted beyond recognition, a face with uneven yellowed eyes sunk deep in lumpy oozing flesh covered with deep red cracks and dripping jaundiced pus.
Sheriff Rourke bellows a scream of confused agony, but the shadowed hulk reaches one hand down and rips the Sheriff’s lower jaw away in a nonchalant fashion. Then Elijah tucks the severed jaw bone, with wet scraps of flesh dangling from it, into the back pocket of his overalls while Sheriff Rourke slaps his remaining hand uselessly at the sudden crater gushing bright red blood from the bottom of his face.
With the stolen jaw secured, Elijah presses his huge hands against the Sheriff’s chest as if he’s about to attempt some sort of crude CPR. Instead, Elijah shoves down with all his supernatural strength. Jethro hears a symphony of the Sheriff’s sternum and rib bones cracking and splintering. A flood of deep red and brown spurts from Rourke’s ruined face as he twitches and dies before Jethro’s aching eyes.
The monster stands. Its shoeless feet are charred black and covered in pink symbol scars like the rest of him. They stomp in Jethro’s direction.
Elijah grabs both men by their ankles, though Jethro doesn�
�t realize it until he’s tugged from in front of the Jeep. With Jethro still tangled and on top of Deputy Dingo, both men are dragged next to Rourke. The way his head is resting on Bobby Dingo’s chest, Jethro’s view rises and falls with each of Dingo’s shallow breaths, and his involuntary focus is purely on the dead sheriff’s eyes, which are solid red with every blood vessel within them burst.
Elijah smashes the head and taillights with his fists, and then shoves the sport utility vehicle off the road and into the dry ditch on the opposite side as if it were made of balsa wood. As the Jeep rolls away, Jethro’s view is cast back into near darkness, lit only by the cursed moon above.
In the dimness of the evening, Jethro sees no defined edges or shapes, only darker patches of shadows. He hears Elijah’s big bare feet crunching the gravel as he re-approaches. Then Elijah hefts the Sheriff onto his shoulders. Jethro doesn’t feel Elijah’s grip, but senses sudden, steady movement as he and the unconscious Deputy Dingo are dragged back in the direction of the house.
As he is tugged roughly through the overgrown yard, Jethro tries in vain to close his eyes. When that proves fruitless, he then tries to gauge which direction he is being taken. It proves useless as well, until he is suddenly jerked back up into the air and hefted against a slab of stone sticking up out of the ground. Since the only nerves still sending signals to Jethro’s turpentine-soaked brain are in his cranium, he is swallowed in sharp, resounding pain as his skull cracks against the stone monolith. His vision blurs and doubles, and Jethro more senses than sees Deputy Dingo slumped against a second monolith a few feet to his left.
Elijah bumps Jethro while moving the Sheriff’s corpse and Jethro’s view is momentarily only of the moon-splashed ground rapidly approaching, and then he feels the sensation of his face crashing into it.
***
Jethro awakens and tries to turn his head, then remembers he’s been broken. He remembers Elijah as well and panics, heart thudding in his chest. The monster is nowhere in sight.
The Sheriff is slumped forward at a nearby monolith, his cowboy hat resting in his lap. The crater at the bottom of his face has slowed its flow of gore down onto his blood-soaked khaki uniform. Several of his ribs jut through his flesh as if he has sprouted crimson thorns, and have ripped through the filthy fabric of his uniform like too many thumb tacks in a gunny sack. Only one of his eyes is open, and it stares back at Jethro.
Jethro now has a better view of three more monoliths as well, each placed in a wide circle and fashioned from an odd green and gray stone covered in the same strange symbols embedded into Elijah Harker’s burnt flesh. The meth-head hitchhiker Jethro had been planning on having some fun with tonight is propped one slab over from the Sheriff. Both of her arms have been ripped off and her face is lumpen and misshapen, not near the trailer park beauty she had been a few hours ago.
Beyond the Sheriff, Jethro’s stolen victim, and the monolithic circle is a peeping tom’s dream view into the Old Harker farmhouse. Mom hasn’t had time to put up any drapes or blinds so all the rooms on both floors are visible. Unable to move or speak, Jethro looks into each lit room, observing the family as they settle in for the evening, though any sense of malice, menace, or perversion has left him along with the control of his extremities and sensation in his genitalia.
Jethro looks into Junior’s room as the teenager tacks up posters of buxom beauties in skimpy thong bikinis. Jethro feels something akin to worry for the poor unsuspecting boy as Elijah Harker steps out of a shadow into the first floor living room, two windows over. Every light in the house flickers with each of the monster’s steps.
Alison doesn’t notice because she is washing her face in the upstairs bathroom, leaning over the sink so her muscled rump flexes beneath her cotton panties. Mom and Dad fail to see the lights flickering because, the instant before Elijah takes his first step, Dad wraps his arms around Mom’s waist and tugs her into the darkened walk-in closet in the master bedroom.
Junior is the only one to take notice of the lights as they spasm. He yanks his headphones off his head and throws them at the pillows on his bed as if they had screeched in his ears, flinching visibly from the flickering bulbs above.
Jethro doesn’t witness the monster take an actual step – he seems to just move several feet at a time in some jerky supernatural fashion. In two of these long strides, somehow convulsing and motionless at the same time, Elijah stands just outside the door to Junior’s bedroom. Inside the room, Junior dashes towards his door, but the lights cease blinking and he stands there with his hands trembling mere inches from the doorknob. The boy sniffs the air and whimpers. Jethro can tell Junior is frightened, can see the fear etched on the kid’s face, but he can also see the brash teenage attitude fighting it full force.
Jethro screams inside his head. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He should be the one in there making them shake in fear, not Elijah – not some risen ghoul!
He hears sounds to the right of him. Groans, unintelligible curses, and soft scraping, shifting noises emanate from the direction of Deputy Dingo.
“Wha..wha..wh, whu…where the hell am I? Jethro? Jethro! What the hell did you do, you motherless fuck!”
Jethro can’t turn to face his accuser, can’t take his eyes off the monster he sees through the living room window.
“Jethro, you hear me? Jethro, hey, you okay? What the fuck is going on here? Sheriff? Oh, my God…Sheriff!”
Seeing his best friend and idol in his current cold and mutilated state breaks something deep inside poor Bobby Dingo. He screeches non-coherent words as he scrambles across the patch of land and into Jethro’s line of sight. Deputy Dingo cradles the jawless face of Sheriff Rourke, rubbing his ruddy cheeks and attempting to smooth his blood-sticky hair while blubbering uncontrollably. Strings of snot and drool dangle off his face, sparkling under the cursed moonlight.
While in the thrall of confusion and sorrow, Deputy Dingo finally sees the third body, Jethro’s would-be victim, leaning against another monolith. He catches it first out of the corner of his eye, and Jethro figures it frightens him pretty bad because he reaches for the gun on his hip. But, due to his crouched position so low next to the Sheriff, his weight shifts backwards quicker than his balance and he falls flat on his ass. His flailing hand slaps Jethro across the face as he falls and his cowboy boots kick up into the air as he comes to a stop. He spins on his ass like a breakdancing bumpkin, and comes up with his weapon pointed at the arm-less corpse. The scowl melts off his face and his lips pout, his bottom lip specifically quivering pathetically.
“Dolly? Holy Jesus above, what happened to you? You scared the hell right out of me, girl. Get your skinny ass over here right now.”
Despite the concern and authority in his whispered command, the dead girl doesn’t comply in the least.
If Jethro had any control of his useless body he would point and laugh at Deputy Dingo right now. For he hadn’t recognized her at the time of picking her up from the side of the road and smashing her head against his dashboard (or at seeing her with her arms yanked off for that matter), but the meth-head hitchhiker Jethro had been planning on having his rowdy fun with tonight was, in fact, sweet little Dolly Dingo, Deputy Bobby Dingo’s little sister.
It was common knowledge that the years since high school have been hard on little Dolly. Jethro had heard she dropped out of college when she figured she wouldn’t be able to blow her way to a degree. She left the big city and came crawling back to Hoo-Doo County, but not before picking up a ravenous appetite for methamphetamines. After that she found some minor fame over in the city of Stillwater with a stripper routine which included her old high school cheerleading outfit and pom-poms, a show Jethro had heard much about and had long promised himself he would one day witness with his own eyes.
Jethro’s breath catches in his throat. Had he known who she was, he would never have had the urge to watch Mom and Dad and Alison and Junior. He would have run deep into the Harker acreage, away from prying eyes,
and had his way with her. His need for revenge against those high school girls would have been sated, he thinks, and none of this would be happening now.
Jethro sobs internally as Deputy Bobby Dingo totally loses his shit over the great personal losses he is suddenly confronted with. Jethro has never heard anything like the bellowing, screeching wails of agony and longing which Bobby Dingo begins to emit at the top of his goddamned lungs.
Inside the house, Elijah turns his disfigured face and looks out the back window, in the direction of Deputy Dingo’s mournful wailing. Even from the distance between them Jethro can see pure hateful evil glowing in Elijah’s eyes, especially the one slipped down his melted cheek next to the crater where his nose had been. If Jethro still had control over his facilities he would have pissed himself in fear.
Junior’s hand, trembling uncontrollably, remains floating in the air inches from his doorknob. Despite not knowing why he is so frightened, the teenager is suddenly fighting back tears (Jethro recognizes the grimace which accompanies them) and his knees threaten to give way when he too hears Deputy Dingo’s wails.
In fact, everyone inside the house hears the caterwauling; Mom and Dad hustle out of the closet, Mom adjusting her sundress and Dad struggling to do his pants back up, and Alison rushes from the bathroom and out of Jethro’s view. Mom and Dad exit their room seconds after her and disappear from view as well.
Downstairs, Elijah takes one of his jerky, teleporting steps, causing the lights in the house to flicker as he moves towards the back door. Inside his room, Junior freaks out when the lights in his twin Star Wars lamps explode in unison. As he is showered with shards of shattered bulb, Junior opens the door to his room and dashes through it only to see the terrifying form of Elijah Harker standing across from him in the living room. At the same precise moment, the rest of the family re-emerges into Jethro’s view, scampering down the stairs.
At the base of the staircase they find Junior, pale-faced and weeping. A few feet away from him stands the seven-foot monster, its flesh charred and covered in unnerving scars. They scream at the unbelievable abomination, and Junior’s prepubescent voice climbs an octave higher than his mother and sister. Elijah reacts with fury and reaches down to fling their couch out the window.
What Goes Around Page 20