It was a human head. One which, as he looked more closely at it, realised he recognised. It belonged to their neighbour, Conwell, he with the red barn from down the road. His lower jaw was missing, and sturdy branches jammed into each hollow eye socket. Around the head, was an elaborate cage made of more branches and tied with string, which in turn connected to the branches jammed into the eye sockets of Billy’s neighbour. Conwell's tongue had been nailed horizontally to the front of the makeshift cage, and bizarre markings, which could have been words, had been carved into it.
Billy’s stomach flipped and threatened to eject its contents as the man from Trans Energy stood proudly by his creation.
“I hope you like it. It’s not as detailed as I would have liked, but I wanted to finish it before dark. Everyone knows Snifferblobs are most active at night.” He said with a shrug.
“Get it away from me!” Billy blurted, unable to tear his eyes away from the awful contraption.
“Why? What’s wrong with it?” The Trans Energy man asked, sounding genuinely hurt.
“Just get it away, get it out of here!”
The man’s bottom lip began to tremble, and he glared at Billy.
“Don’t tell me you're one of those Snifferblob sympathisers?” He said, shaking his head putting a hand on the bloody wrench. “Don’t make me tell my mother on you. You remember what she did last time!”
“What have you done with my wife?” The ferocity in which the words came even startled himself and the man took a step back.
“You are one of them aren’t you? You and the Squeaker of a wife, spawning little Snifferblobs.” The man grabbed at his head, fighting whatever inner conflict was going on in there.
Now he had recovered from the initial shock of what had been happening, Billy noticed just how dark it had become, and how the night had almost completely taken his house. He also realised he had to act, to do something. This man was obviously more than just disturbed. He had already killed two people, and probably more than that. Billy had never committed a crime, nor had he ever been arrested. He knew if he were to survive, he would have to kill this twisted man who had invaded his home.
The man was walking slowly towards him, his expression one of rage, betrayal and disgust rolled into one.
“All of you are the same, all of you hiding the Squeakers, the Sniffers. I bet you even mix with the Lungtangs and Cripodoops don’t you?”
Billy’s inner voice screamed at him to move, to use his knowledge of the layout of his home to his advantage, which could only be further assisted by the lack of light. He only hoped when he made his move, his legs would comply. His first task was to get past the hulking man who was now walking towards him.
“I should have known. You people are always the same.”
He swept his arm across the table, sending its contents spilling onto the floor. Mr. Conwell’s head came to rest face down near the basement door. It was that event which triggered him into making his move. He launched towards the door, skirting past the giant man. Hoping for the element of surprise, he lurched towards the hallway. Just as he was sure he was going to make it, he slipped in the blood on the floor. He tried to right his balance, pitched forward and slammed his face into the granite counter, the corner catching him above the eyebrow. He went down hard, white flashes exploding in front of his eyes like a miniature fireworks display as he tried to regain his footing. He failed and fell to his knees, then rolled onto his side. The man from Trans Energy was smiling, and as Billy watched, he took the bloody wrench out of his belt.
“You are one of them aren’t you?” The man asked as he slowly approached.
Billy couldn’t answer, his brain was like mush, a thick soup which was taking too long to clear. He touched his forehead and when he looked at his fingers, they were coated in blood.
“I’m not what you think,” He mumbled, trying to compose his thoughts.
“You wouldn’t know if you were, mommy. He didn’t,” The man said, pointing the wrench at Alex’s corpse. “Not until I peeled him open and looked inside.”
“Please… don’t do this.”
“I need to see if you have a pure soul, and to do that, I need… to look… inside.” The man said, speaking slowly as if he were trying to convey some basic information to a child.
It was only then Billy remembered the gun. He reached around and pulled it out smoothly, aiming it at the man from Trans Energy, who stopped and smiled.
“I’ll use this, just back up!”
“No, you won’t.”
“I swear I’ll shoot you.”
I can see how your hand shakes. You won’t do it.” He said, taking two quick steps forward. Billy didn’t want to, that much was true. He had been left with no option. It was either kill or be killed, and he desperately wanted to live. The wrench wielding man was close, there was no way he could miss. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Safety switch!
His inner monolog screamed at him to release it, but he knew there wouldn’t be time. He saw the flash of chrome as the wrench was swung towards him, catching him on his outstretched hand. Pain exploded through his wrist as the gun was launched down the hallway and into the darkness. Billy gritted his teeth and clutched his broken hand to his chest. He had never experienced the agony of a broken bone before, and with his wrist on fire, he stared helplessly up at the towering mass of flesh standing over him. He was grinning, his teeth barely visible in the darkness.
“I’m doing this to help you. I'll peel you open quick and get that parasite out of you. I promise mommy, I really do.”
Billy was barely listening. All he could focus on was the wrench hanging limply in the man’s massive hand. He wondered how long it would take for the pain to stop, and hoped it would be soon. His wrist throbbed and pulsed like a rotten tooth in need of extraction, although, despite it, he had somehow transcended beyond fear, beyond pain. He had reached a place of acceptance that his time was up. The Trans Energy man noticed it too because he widened his grin.
“Just relax, I’ll make it quick,” He said, and began to whistle that annoyingly repetitive tune. Billy tensed as the man reared back with the wrench.
With everything he could muster, Billy kicked out at the man’s knee. It hadn’t been pre-planned. In fact, there had been no thought about it at all. Something inside, perhaps some primal instinct to prolong life which lives within everyone, stirred and made his body react. Because Billy had no idea he was going to do it, his assailant didn’t see it coming either and wailed painfully as Billy’s boot connected solidly with the side of his kneecap. The blow would be enough to hurt anyone, but due to the immense size of his wrench wielding attacker, it was especially effective. As the knee Billy had kicked skidded from under him, the rest of his near four hundred pound frame, was for a moment, supported by just the one leg, which was both unprepared and ill-equipped to carry such a load. With a grunt, the man twisted and fell, crashing into the table, then onto the floor, his head hitting the wood hard enough to echo around the room. He let out a surprised grunt as the wrench skidded across the floor and came to rest by the blood streaked leg of Alex’s body. Billy, however, barely gave his dead friend a second glance, and had already staggered to his feet and was making his way down the hall, his eyes scanning the gloom for the gun. Behind him, he could hear the grunting of the man from Trans Energy as he got to his feet and hobbled in pursuit.
Billy staggered down the hall, sliding across the wall and knocking photographs onto the floor. Behind him, the man was whistling as he followed. The door was just ahead. He was sure once he was outside, he could easily outrun the man, even with a broken hand. He just needed to get some distance from that wrench. He hurried to the door, fumbling at the handle with his left hand, his right useless. A task that should be incredibly simple felt alien to him. He didn’t need to look over his shoulder because he could sense the man behind him.
It was the same instinct which
made him kick out at the Trans Energy man’s knee that alerted him to the danger. Instinctively, he ducked to the side a split second before the heavy wrench embedded itself into the door, splintering it with ease. Ignoring the fact his skull would have suffered the same fate had he not moved, he squeezed passed the man as he tried to free the wrench and ran upstairs. Even in the dark, he was familiar with the layout, which he supposed gave him a slight advantage. The hallway had four rooms leading off it. The tiny guest bedroom was first, then the bathroom. A little further down the hall was Billy’s office, where just a few hours ago his only worry was finishing his presentation for work. Finally, at the end of the hall was the master bedroom. It was there he headed, trying to be as quiet as he could. He tried to remember exactly which floorboards creaked and which doors made a sound when they were opened. He made a point of slamming the bathroom door closed as he passed, hoping it would act as a decoy before he entered the shadowy confines of the bedroom. He had no idea what he was going to do when he got there. He stared through the gloom, looking for somewhere he might be able to hide other than the horror movie cliché of under the bed or in the closet. It was then he realised he would have been better served hiding in the study. From there, he could break a window and drop down onto the porch roof, then down to the ground. Cursing his own stupidity, he doubled back intending to do just that, when he heard the creepy unhurried whistle and saw the ugly shadow draping across the wall as the man from Trans Energy slowly climbed the stairs.
~IV~
Billy crouched behind the bed. Although he wasn’t exactly hiding as such, it felt good to have a solid object of some kind between himself and the man, who he could now see standing at the end of the hall. From this distance, he looked even more immense. His face thrown into ghoulish shadows which made his eyes look like bottomless wells and his mouth like the screaming maw of some unearthly creature. He was taking his time, whistling that maddeningly familiar tune as he stared into the gloom. It appeared he couldn’t see Billy yet, perhaps due to his unfamiliarity with the layout of the house, or maybe through sheer blind luck. Trying to ignore the agony in his arm, Billy watched the man approach the guest bedroom, pushing the door open with the end of his wrench and glancing inside. It was no more than a box room, and it was obvious enough there was nowhere in there a person might hide. He turned his attention back to the hallway.
“You can’t hide from me Snifferblob. I can smell you up here. You Squeakers are all the same. Pesticides are what you need. Well, I have justice for you, just like mother said I should.”
He wasn’t shouting, and to Billy that made it worse somehow. He was cool and calm, speaking with certainty and – more worryingly – absolute belief Billy was a Snifferblob – whatever the hell that meant. The man was obviously deranged, perhaps the victim of a violent upbringing or some kind of untreated mental illness. Whatever was wrong with him, his grasp on reality was dangerously skewed. The silence was broken by the sounds of boots on hardwood as the man slowly walked down the hall.
“I've already killed her you know, that wife of yours. She split open like ripe watermelon.” He whispered, his voice carrying through the darkness of the house.
Billy knew its intention was to draw him out, but once again, fear had taken him, and he could only cower in the shadows and wait.
“Filthy Snifferblob whore wife,” He growled as he pushed open the bathroom door. Once a Snifferblob, always a Snifferblob. You know that already, don’t you?” He muttered as he moved on, making his way ever closer to Billy’s hiding place. The study was up next, and because of its shape, Billy knew the man would have to go fully into the room to ensure he wasn’t there. It was his best chance of escape, and he crawled as slowly as he dared through the darkness to the edge of the bedroom door frame.
The man was now at the study door, and paused, tilting his head as he listened. Billy held his breath, sure he would give himself away somehow, that he would cough or scrape a wall. Angeline and Tyler flashed up in his mind’s eye, and as cold as it felt, he pushed them aside. He couldn’t deal with it right now. His entire reason for carrying on was in the hope they were alive and the freak in the hallway was either toying with him or so deluded that he really believed the things he was saying.
“Are you in there Sniffer?” The man cackled as he knocked on the study door. “Are you hiding in there, pissing and waiting to die?”
Billy tried to stay calm, which was easier said than done with his heart beating its own tune in his chest at a tempo way higher than he would have liked.
“Come on out of there Squeaker. Come to Grant.”
Billy found it strange that the man stalking through his house had a name. He was sure he had, in fact, introduced himself by name when he first arrived.
“Name’s Grant,” He said, pointing to his chest, where, indeed, his name was embroidered in a tatty red font. “Power Company sent me. You need a fix, right?”
He wasn’t Grant to Billy. He was just the man from Trans Energy, the one who had chosen him to inflict his reign of terror upon. A memory that had been long forgotten suddenly came to stark clarity in his mind, so clear and vivid he wondered how he could ever have forgotten it.
It was when he was a boy, back when his father had taken him to a turkey farm to choose a bird for thanksgiving that year. He remembered standing there beside his father, watching the turkeys gibber and gobble as they went obliviously about their business.
“Which one do you want to get Billy?” He had asked, watching his son carefully.
Billy remembered turning his attention back to the birds. Trying to choose one. There was one in particular that caught his eye. It was set apart from the others and had a strange skitter to its walk.
“That one.” Billy had said, pointing to the bird with the gimpy walk. “He looks like a Joey to me dad. What do you think?”
He remembered how his father’s face had soured slightly, perhaps because he had underestimated how much his nine-year-old child understood.
“Oh, you can’t give it a name son.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes it harder.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you give it a name, it makes it harder to kill when the time comes.”
He remembered looking at the bird in a different light, perhaps for the first time seeing it for the purpose it was intended. He recalled the guilt at choosing the fate for this animal he had chosen because he liked the quirky way in which it walked. He never considered that he had sentenced the animal to death. His father had seen the doubt on Billy’s face and smiled as he ruffled his hair with a cracked, calloused hand.
“Don’t think of them as animal’s son. Think of them as food. That’s why we don’t name them. We might keep them at the house for a couple of weeks, but come thanksgiving, that bird is gettin’ its neck broke n’ goin’ in the oven.”
Billy never thought as he crouched there in his own bedroom, that the advice he received twenty-five years earlier would resonate now, but those wise words of his father, fit with his current plight perfectly.
“If you give it a name, it makes it harder to kill when the time comes.”
Billy made the conscious decision to not think of the intruder as ‘Grant’ or anything else which might humanise him. He was an animal, an insane thing dressed in a blood-drenched Trans Energy uniform which seemed hell bent on tearing him open to see if he had a Squeaker or Snifferblob inside him. An animal he would kill if he had to.
He watched as the man entered the study. Billy was grateful he hadn’t bothered to tidy it of late, and it was going to mean his stalker would have to go inside and physically check he wasn’t hiding in there amongst the accumulated crap.
He peeked around the corner in time to see the man disappear into the room. It was now or never. He took a second to compose himself and convince himself this was all real. This was no movie or video game. If he screwed up, he would die, of that he was now certain. He gripped th
e edge of the door frame and launched himself out of the room, charging down the hallway towards the steps. It was both exhilarating and horrifying to finally be doing something other than cower in the dark.
Look straight ahead. Concentrate on the goal.
It was sound advice. He charged past the study door, denying his urge to look and see how much time he might have. As with earlier, he sensed the man rather than saw him. A quick flash of silver entered his peripheral vision, and he instinctively flinched away. The wrench connected with his shoulder, missing his head only by inches. Pain exploded down his ribs as he careered off balance, his legs threatening to give way. He bounced off the wall, his momentum sending him pitching him towards the top of the stairs. He pinwheeled his good arm, trying desperately to keep his feet, but he knew he was going down. He couldn’t stop, and fell head first down the stairs, rolling and crashing against the wall before landing on his side at the bottom. Fresh jolts of agony surged through him, his arm and shoulder now useless. Somehow, more on instinct than conscious thought, he scrambled to his feet, sucking air and ignoring the taste of blood in his throat. He stumbled into the front door, flailing at it with his one remaining good arm. The reassuring click as the door opened was, Billy thought, the greatest and sweetest thing he had ever heard. He wrenched open the door, ready to make his escape, and it was then he screamed. A raw pained sound which came from the pit of his stomach.
Two bodies hung from the porch, strung up by the neck with the Christmas tree lights Billy kept in the garage. A woman and a small boy.
His family.
Tears blurred his vision, and he felt the air leave him, making him deflate as if he were some kind of punctured balloon. The fight had gone. His wife’s green eyes were open and staring, her swollen tongue protruding from her mouth as she swayed on the porch except…
Angeline has brown eyes!
He wiped tears and snot from his face with the back of his good arm and as much as it was a harrowing sight, looked closer. The bodies did indeed belong to a woman and child, but it wasn’t Angeline or Tyler. Now he had really been able to take a closer look, they didn’t resemble them at all.
Forgotten Fears Page 6