Turn Down the Lights

by Richard Chizmar (ed)

  Wood began to pop and crack as whatever secured the privy to the ground began to give way.

  “Do it, man!” urged Mike, laughing. “Get er done!”

  “Keep your voice down!” warned Frank. He looked nervously up the dark pathway that led in the direction of the Chambers farm. “The old man will hear you!”

  “Let him!” snapped the half-drunk quarterback. “I’ll kick his shriveled ass if he comes down here giving me shit!”

  Mike and Frank watched as Bubba grunted and gave the outhouse a final shove. It tipped over slowly, then cart wheeled down the embankment, crashing loudly into the rocky bed of Green Creek. It hit with an explosion of splintered wood and mangled tin.

  In spite of the danger of doing so, Mike Stinson unleashed a hearty rebel yell. “Hell yeah! Search and destroy! Bedloe County Bears—One...outhouse—Zero!”

  Frank couldn’t help but laugh. “You just ain’t right, dude.”

  The moonlight revealed what the outdoor toilet had been perched upon. It was a broad, flat bed of smooth gray stone with a wide crack in the center. Curiously, Bubba walked over and peered inside. Usually, in an old outhouse, you could see something through the toilet seat; maybe a pile of lime with toilet paper and a few random turds scattered across it. But there seemed to be nothing beyond the fissure. Only pitch darkness.

  “What do you see?” Frank asked him.

  “Nothing.” He found a stone lying nearby and chucked it through the hole. They waited to hear the echoing report of the rock hitting bottom, but there was nothing. No sound at all.

  “That’s weird as hell,” said Bubba. The big fellow turned toward them, shrugging his massive shoulders. “Must be some kinda bottomless...”

  It was at that moment that Mike Stinson and Frank Bennett noticed movement behind their friend...where the hole in the rock gapped just behind his feet. Then, suddenly, the thing was squeezing out of the jagged opening and looming over Bubba, making him look more like a three-year-old toddler than a 310 pound steroid and corn fed seventeen-year-old.

  Bubba saw the shocked expressions on his buddies’ faces. “What?” Then he turned around and screamed.

  It looked sort of like a bat, except that it was pasty gray and hairless and two dozen times bigger than any he had ever laid eyes on. The thing’s white, sightless eyes stared blankly at him until he began yelling. Then it latched its winged talons deeply into his shoulders, ripping past the vinyl of his letterman jacket and anchoring into the meat and bone underneath. Bubba tried to lurch backward, tried his best to get away, but his efforts were fruitless. He was in the creature’s grasp and going nowhere.

  Mike and Frank watched stunned as the bat’s massive, fanged mouth clamped over the crown of Bubba’s crewcut head and bit down. There was the crunch of bone and a curtain of blood coursed down their friend’s horrified face. Then, with a violent shake of its gray-fleshed head, the bat-thing ripped Bubba Cole’s head from the column of his neck bone.

  “What the hell’s going on down here?” someone demanded.

  The two surviving high schoolers turned to find Old Man Chambers marching down the pathway, dressed in filthy long johns, his white hair flying like dandelion fluff around his head. He held a Remington semi-auto shotgun in his liver-spotted hands.

  When he reached the little clearing where the outhouse had once stood, his face grew deathly pale. “Oh shit! What have you done, you damn fool kids?”

  Mike didn’t seem the least bit inebriated now. Funny how fast you can sober up when one of your best buds is decapitated by some freaking, giant bat-monster. “What...what the crap is that thing?”

  The three stared at the gray creature. It grinned at them, rolling Bubba’s head around inside its mouth like a jawbreaker, before finally swallowing it.

  “I don’t know exactly what it is, son,” the old man told him truthfully. “All I know is that it was safely trapped where it was, before you pushed the cap off that crack in the rock and let it loose.” He spat to the side and lifted the muzzle of his shotgun, pointing it toward the thing as it struggled to squeeze the rest of the way through the hole. “Dadburned thing killed my wife and drug her down into its cave, lair, wherever, while she was sitting on the pot taking a dump and reading Better Homes & Gardens. I chained up the outhouse to keep it locked inside. Told everybody that story about her leaving me because, frankly, I didn’t think anyone would believe me otherwise.”

  The thing was almost free now. Its right foot was caught in a narrow corner of the crevice, which looked as though it was growing wider with each moment. The pale bat-creature shrieked shrilly, nearly bursting their ear drums with its unholy resonance. It spread its lanky arms, displaying a wingspan that was every inch of twenty feet across.

  “You boys get outta here!” hollered Old Man Chambers. “I’ll try to hold them off as long as I can. And head down the highway toward the lake...not toward town.”

  “But...but...” stammered Mike.

  “No buts! Move your sorry asses!” The elderly man began to fire the shotgun, pumping alternate rounds of double-aught buckshot and deer slugs into the thing as it unleashed its foot and lurched forward.

  The two boys didn’t wait around to see if he had brought it down. They leapt off the top of the embankment, landing in the creek with a splash. They scrambled up the opposite slope and tore through the dark woods, listening to the piercing screech of the creature behind them. Then the boom of the twelve-gauge stopped and Old Man Chambers began to scream frantically.

  Oh shit! Thought Mike as he ran through the brush and bramble as fast he as could. Ohshitohshitohshitohshit!!

  A second later, Frank ran past him with a speed that had led the Bears to victory, game after game. It wasn’t long before the running back was a good fifty feet ahead of him.

  “Hold up, man!” Mike yelled. “Wait for me!”

  “Screw you!” his friend replied and kept on booking.

  Mike felt pain stitch his side and he struggled to keep up. He had suddenly realized that Old Man Chambers was no longer screaming, when something spun over his head and landed a couple of yards ahead of Frank. It hit the ground with a wet thud and, in the moonlight, Mike saw exactly what it was. It was Old Man Chamber’s right arm, severed at the elbow. It still clutched the Remington 1100 in its twitching hand.

  Even in death, the old man’s fingers reacted with fear and panic. His forefinger squeezed the trigger again and again, causing the shotgun to discharge. One blast sent a twelve-gauge slug slamming squarely into Frank’s left leg, blowing it completely off at the kneecap. As Frank fell, another blast peppered his abdomen with double-aught buckshot. The pellets pierced the muscles of his belly and lodged deep within his guts.

  The disembodied arm spun on the ground and, in the process, began to fire impotently into the darkness of the surrounding forest. Mike continued to run and leapt over his fallen friend without a second thought. He continued to run for the edge of the woods and Highway 70 just beyond.

  “Come back here, Mike, you son of a bitch!” wailed Frank behind him. “Don’t leave me here!”

  The bat-thing screeched again, much closer than a moment ago.

  “Screw you, Frank!” Mike called back and kept on running. He glanced over his shoulder once and saw his friend lying, crippled and gut shot, in the autumn leaves. That and something huge and hungry and as pale and gray as newly-poured concrete lurching through the trees at an alarming pace.

  Mike sprinted a few yards further, then abruptly found himself out of the woods and sliding on the loose gravel of the shoulder of the road. He regained his balance and ran across the two-lane highway to where his pickup truck was parked. As he reached the vehicle and wrenched the door open, he heard Frank’s blood-curdling screams begin to rise into the cool night air.

  He slammed the door and was comforted to find the key still in the ignition, left there for a speedy escape following their midnight escapade. He cranked the truck’s engine into life and stamped on the ga
s.

  As he pulled onto the highway, Chambers’ instructions echoed in his mind. Head down the highway toward the lake...not toward town.

  “The hell with you, old man,” Mike said. “I’m heading home!”

  He heard Frank scream again, but strangely, his shrieks seemed to come from above rather than from behind. A moment later, warm blood began to rain upon the truck, splattering the windshield.

  Mike turned on his wipers, but they only smeared gore across the glass, obscuring his vision. Then beyond the red haze, in the swath of the Chevy’s headlights, he saw the thing land on the center line of the highway. Clutched in the claws of its feet was the armless, legless torso of Frank Bennett. The boy was still alive, still shrieking hysterically; the flesh was peeled away from his scalp and face, leaving a wide-eyed, screaming skull in their place.

  He jammed the gas pedal to the floor and sent the big truck barreling into the bat-thing in the road. The grill hit the creature dead-center in its chest, pitching it over the roof of the cab, and into the long bed in the back. The truck lurched precariously, nearly flipping as it continued onward, crushing poor Frank beneath its tires. Mike fought with the wheel and brought the truck under control before it could roll. He eased on the brake and glanced through the rear window. In the glow of his tailights, he could see the thing from the crack in the rock, struggling to lift itself from the bed of the truck. It looked battered and broken, but far from dead.

  Frantically, Mike sped up, then slammed on his brakes sharply. The creature lost its balance and flipped over the tailgate, landing on its back on the blacktop of the highway. The quarterback stopped stone still in the center of the road, then shifted into reverse and backed up, building speed. He ran over the thing completely that time. With satisfaction, he could hear—could actually feel—the bat creatures bones and cartilage breaking and shattering beneath the weight of the pickup truck.

  After the truck had cleared its obstruction, Mike stopped and, through the blood-streaked windshield, saw the pale-fleshed creature lying in the road, utterly motionless. The boy sighed in relief. He sent the truck forward again, steering past the thing, as well as the silent, bleeding hunk of torn meat and bone that was once his best friend.

  As he drove past a sign that read WELCOME TO COLEMAN and headed down a steep slope toward his hometown, Mike Stinson wondered if a trip to the carwash would eradicate all traces of the night’s bloody outcome and if he would be able to sneak into his bed without his father being aware of exactly what had transpired.

  Behind him, in the distance, he thought he heard an ear-piercing shriek. Impossible, he told himself. The thing’s dead. I saw it die!

  But, as he drove onward, toward the outskirts of Coleman, Old Man Chambers’ words came back to haunt him once again.

  Head down the highway toward the lake...not toward town.

  I’ll try to hold them off as long as I can.

  Mike’s blood ran cold.

  Them.

  As the screeching, both urgent and hungry, grew louder and louder, he looked in his rear view mirror...and saw the moon turn black as the hole beneath the outhouse gave birth to horrors once forgotten...but no longer contained.

  JACKSON HAD MOVED BACK TO MONROE COUNTY A YEAR after retirement, three years after the divorce. Without the divorce he probably would’ve worked until he dropped, making Sheila a pretty comfortable widow there in Ann Arbor. She hated Tennessee. How could anybody hate Tennessee?

  Jackson stood behind a purple avalanche of Catawba rhododendron like some kind of peeper and watched as the three large men in their roomy homespun coveralls cleared a lot of rotted logs and tangled deadfall. He’d been following them as they worked odd jobs all over the Smokies: clearing trails, cutting firewood, moving furniture, putting up barns. Folks just told them what to do and they did it.

  He didn’t know yet what their story was, but he was pretty sure they had one. Since he’d moved back here he’d been taking notes on eccentrics: that fortune teller living on the old Poor Farm, that granny woman who cured pretty much everything, that fellow in Gatlinburg who could talk out of his belly. Someday he’d make a book out of these stories, Strange Tales of the Smokies or some such. He wouldn’t be putting the locals down—it would just show how interesting folks around here could be. He’d finally have something to say about the world.

  Jackson didn’t know if he was a great writer or not, although he daydreamed about being known someday as the Henry David Thoreau of Tennessee, who understood living in these hills and appreciated the mysteries they surely contained. In Walden Thoreau said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Around here people got desperate and didn’t have anybody to tell it to. Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about people “that never sing, but die with all their music in them.” That surely was these people. That surely was him.

  He’d first seen the brothers two weeks ago shambling between the trunks in a dense stand of trees, like apes with their too-long arms, faces a dark shaggy blur, and in the shadows with those baggy coveralls they looked like a family of Big Foot, or Cave Yellers as they called them in Kentucky. And wouldn’t it be a hoot to include those monsters in his book?

  Those coveralls must have been uncomfortable, it being mid-July and steamy. But they worked as if their lives depended on it, picking berries and seeds out of the bushes and trees and dropping them into their sacks. Jackson could tell there was something wrong with these fellows—something physical or nervous or both. Every once in a while one of them would jerk his head back and forth in a seizure-like motion, and he’d turn his head and open one eye wide as if trying to see something better. They all three looked agitated and impatient, but about what?

  Then another fellow would be moving his shoulders funny, so they looked tremendously swollen, ready to burst. He would leap up on a log or a big stone, teetering, waiting to fall or jump again, until he’d calmed himself down, and then he just closed his eyes as if he were taking a nap in that awkward position.

  It appeared that whoever’d made the coveralls had kept running out of cloth in one direction or other so different fabrics and colors had to be added on. These men had odd, swollen shapes, and the coveralls had been built around them. So they weren’t pretty outfits, but they were tailored.

  All three men resembled one another with the same kind of rough face, carved from flesh and bone by a sculptor who really wasn’t all that talented, who didn’t have a very sure hand. One was smaller than the others—Jackson named him “Junior.” The biggest one looked like a “Bubba” to him, so that’s what he called him. And the one that kept turning his head around and looking sideways, one eye a little bigger than the other, he called “Walleye.”

  There surely were strange things in Monroe County: maybe some version of Big Foot, and that Lost Sea attraction that was supposed to be the largest underground lake in North America, and the ghosts of all those displaced Cherokees, and the tales about big birds that walked away like men, and the mountain witches and the UFOs and maybe once or twice a hitchhiking Elvis had been seen out on Highway 411. But these fellows had real potential. There wasn’t a thing normal about them.

  So he followed them around from job to job, taking notes and not a few pictures, keeping his distance but still close enough to observe their habits, just waiting for them to slip up and betray their secrets.

  That very morning he’d followed them to the rough shack where they lived. He parked his beat-up Datsun on an old logging road and used his binoculars to spy right through their open front door. At one point he saw an old woman’s hideously-scarred naked back. She wore this silly hat loaded with feathers, as if she were getting ready to go out to some high-class society do, but she’d forgotten to put on her blouse. This afternoon, peeking at them from behind these big purple flowers like some kind of low-life voyeur, he thought there was something different about them, an increased nervousness maybe, as if they knew they were being watched. Every once in a while the smaller one, Junior,
would jerk his head up and twist around, staring as if he’d heard something. Jackson stood perfectly still, wondering what excuse he could make if they caught him.

  Walleye, whose mismatched eyes made him look surprised or suspicious, kept messing with the zipper on his coveralls and shrugging, adjusting their fit. The zipper came down a bit, and something dark and ragged sprang out before Walleye tucked it back in.

  “What you doin’ here?” the deep scratch of a voice asked behind him. Jackson turned around. Bubba stood there, and Jackson realized the binoculars and the distance had been flattering. The fellow was far uglier close up.

  “Trespasser,” came out with a spit, scraped up from inside the big man’s chest.

  Jackson made himself smaller, the way you were supposed to do if you ever ran into an angry bear. But it was hard to look away. It looked as if Bubba had tried to shave both his face and his scalp, and the hair had resisted, or he’d just been clumsy, because he had little nicks and scars everywhere, and the remaining stubble was too tough, each whisker too thick, like heavy-gauge wire, and there were all these protrusions that looked like tubing that had been severed at the surface of his skin, but the roots went deep into his face, as thick as straw, as if he’d been in an explosion, or the bad end of a hurricane had driven these broken stalks into his flesh.

  “I got lost.” Jackson couldn’t think of anything else. “I was hiking.”

  “Hik-ing?” Bubba’s mouth tried out the word as if he’d never heard of such a thing. “No pack?” The fellow stank badly. Jackson had a foul taste in his mouth from breathing the air between them. It wasn’t much like any body odor he’d encountered before, a little like dirty feet mixed with kids’ crayons, and maybe some greasy French fries in the blend. He’d smelled something like it before, around his daddy’s old chicken coops and near the bird cages at the pet store.