by Bryan Smith
Instead of getting to my feet, I turned over and gaped up in disbelief at a creature that looked as if it had emerged from the depths of my most lurid, movie-inspired fevered imaginings. The beast had the general shape of a man. It was a biped, with very long arms and legs. But it was abnormally tall. It towered above me, seeming at first as tall as the trees surrounding us. This was a false impression exacerbated by the darkness and my prone position on the ground. Even so, the thing was extraordinarily tall, reaching a height of perhaps nine feet. You might be thinking the high level of alcohol in my bloodstream was distorting my powers of perception. But that absolutely wasn’t the case, I swear.
The creature’s mass was also abnormal. Two NFL offensive linemen squashed together would be almost as huge, though not nearly as tall. The creature’s bare, glistening flesh was bursting with muscle. Its claw-like hands looked like they could tear me apart as easily as I’d tear apart a sheet of notebook paper. But the most fearsome thing about it—the thing that made my insides quiver like jelly and nearly made me pee my pants—was its head, which was, of course, enormous. It was also grotesquely misshapen, a bulbous and swollen rotting pumpkin of a head. The scalp was pink and hairless. Its eyes were huge black orbs. It had large and sharply-pointed pink ears, a detail that would later cause me to describe it as looking like Mr. Spock from Star Trek after having turned into a gigantic and hairless werewolf. Its chin was also pointed and extended outward in a way that made me think of goblins from some of the darker fairy tales. Worst of all, though, were the teeth. Rows of them were visible as the thing hissed at me. They were long and sharp and dripping saliva. Its lipless mouth seemed designed to display them prominently, making them even more mind-bogglingly terrifying.
Clutched in its claw-like right hand was a human arm. A twinkle of moonlight helped me spy a wedding ring affixed to a stubby finger. The ragged, bloody stump end of the arm indicated it had been torn from the body to which it had formerly been attached. The strength necessary to accomplish such a thing was, of course, astounding. As the creature stared at me, it raised a fleshy part of the arm to its mouth and tore off a bite.
I felt like puking. I also knew I should get up and start running again. And yet I felt paralyzed, completely incapable of movement or action of any kind. And even if I could move, what good would it do? It would give chase and catch up to me with just a few strides of its long and powerful legs.
But I had to try. What choice did I have?
After scooting backward several feet, I got shakily to my feet and started backing away from the thing. I was afraid to turn my back on the thing out of fear that it would pounce as soon as I did. This caused me to lose my footing yet again when I stepped on a large rock. But this time I was able to maintain some semblance of balance and only dropped to one knee rather than falling flat on my back again. I bounced right back up and resumed my backward retreat.
The creature opened its strange, lipless mouth wider and hissed at me. I was sure it was about to come at me, but before that could happen the sound of a branch snapping somewhere out in the woods distracted it. Its head jerked to the right and that was when I finally mustered the courage to turn tail and start running for my life. Within moments, I emerged through the tree line, moving at full-speed through the overgrown vacant lot. My terror was such that it overwhelmed whatever level of critical thinking might have been available to me in my drunken state. In another moment, I was no longer running. Instead I was falling, having plunged into the foliage-choked pit at the center of the lot. I experienced another jolt of pain when I hit the bottom, but the foliage at least cushioned my fall, so it could have been worse. That small bit of silver lining was canceled out by yet another jab of pain when I blindly grabbed a thorny vine in a desperate effort to pull myself upright again. I cried out and let go of the vine, but my palm was already leaking blood in several places.
But by then I was in so much pain—and in such a state of overall distress—that a little more agony didn’t matter much. I got to my knees and began to crawl up a sloping side of the pit. Fear of being caught by that hideous thing out in the woods was a big part of what drove me onward and made me push through the pain, but I was also motivated by how close I was to home and perceived safety. I’d glimpsed my house upon emerging through the tree line. Had I been watching where I was going, I could’ve been back in my own room by now. Just then that was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. I wanted it more than I wanted a million dollars. More than I wanted to party with Van Halen. More than I wanted to have sex with Christie Brinkley.
It was an absolutely staggering amount of want, is the point I’m trying to get across.
But just as I reached the top of the pit, I heard a car moving slowly down the street in front of my house. And it was coming in this direction. I groaned and ducked down when I saw the spotlight sweeping across the front yard of the house. Within a few moments, that spotlight would illuminate the vacant lot, but I was pretty sure the cops wouldn’t see me if I just kept my head down. In the interest of further obscuring my presence, I allowed myself to slide a few feet deeper back into the pit. The vegetation choking the lot would also help. Unless the cops got out of their cruiser and came out to the lot to poke around, there was a good chance I would remain undiscovered. I nonetheless flinched when the spotlight’s bright beam swept over the lot. The sweep of the beam happened with excruciating slowness. That cruiser was just inching along. I had no doubt these were some seriously pissed off cops. And they were aching to give someone a beating, I was sure.
After a seeming eternity, the spotlight completed its sluggish sweep of the vacant lot and the cruiser finally moved on. I crawled up again and poked my head out of the pit. A check of my surroundings revealed no signs of the monster. Part of me was already beginning to wonder if I’d really seen it, after all. A more sober examination of my memories would soon stifle my brain’s instinctive attempt to protect me against the horror of what I’d seen by throwing up a wall of denial. In that moment, though, nothing at all was clear, except that I had to get home.
So I hauled myself out of the pit and took off running again. Soon I’d vaulted over the rock barrier and was sprinting across my yard. There were no lights on in the house. No one was waiting up for me. This wasn’t a big surprise. It was past midnight and my dad was a very early riser. He and my mother went to bed at ten sharp every night. Though the dark windows were what I’d expected, my relief was immense. It was the one lucky break I’d caught all night that didn’t involve not being devoured by a monster.
I headed for the far end of the house, where I flew right by the closed garage door at the top of the driveway. I continued around the garage and came to the six-foot-high privacy fence that encircled our backyard. After scaling the fence with the ease that comes from years of late-night practice, I dropped into the backyard. There was no lawn back here. Instead there was an inground swimming pool with a concrete deck. To my right was a large pool house. There were no lights on back here and I could only faintly discern the shapes of lounge chairs and wrought-iron deck furniture. Conscious of a need to make as little noise as possible, I made my way around the pool house by treading as lightly as I could across the pebbled landscaping and the deck. Finally, I reached a door that opened into the garage. I dug my keys out of a hip pocket, clutching them tight to keep them from jingling. I got the door open, slipped inside the garage, and let myself into the house.
Fortunately, my room—or living area, really—was immediately adjacent to the garage. There was a short hallway through the door into the house. If you continued to the end of it and through the open archway to the left, you would enter the kitchen. To the right, however, was a door I normally kept closed. I opened it and slipped into a room that had been a rec room when my sister and I were kids. But now it was part of what my parents had been calling my “apartment” for the last couple years. The ping pong table and other games that had once occupied the space were gone. It was
now outfitted with a refrigerator, a bathroom with a shower, an old sofa, some chairs for guests, and a big Zenith floor model television my parents had passed down to me.
I left the lights off as I closed the door to my apartment and continued through the outer room to the door that led to my bedroom. Once I was in there, I closed and locked that door and again left the lights off as I fell facedown onto my bed. I crawled to the headboard, wrapped my arms around the double-stack of pillows, and immediately began to drift down toward unconsciousness.
I didn’t think of my friends again until those last few moments before the darkness swallowed me. A twinge of guilt made my eyes snap wide open for a brief moment as a wild panic gripped me. I had no idea what had become of them. Had they all made it home safely or had they been apprehended by the police? Worse still, had any of them encountered the thing in the woods?
As much as these questions troubled me, I knew there would be no answers to them tonight and allowed my eyes to flutter shut again.
Seconds later, I was asleep.
That return to consciousness was not a gentle one. It came courtesy of a banging on my door. This was my mom waking me up to tell me breakfast would soon be ready. The way the door rattled in the frame told me she’d been trying hard to wake me for a while. She was a little cross with me when I finally came to and acknowledged her entreaties, but she didn’t further berate me. Instead, she wandered back off to the kitchen after I groggily reassured her I would be out there in a bit. By then both my parents were well-accustomed to me sleeping late after returning home from a night out with the guys.
The first thing I was aware of after mom retreated to the kitchen was my overall miserable physical state. My head felt like someone had dropped a truck on it. The ache was huge and seemingly all-encompassing, but I soon realized I had other problems. My mouth was so dry I could barely swallow or move my tongue. When I did attempt to swallow, it was like trying to force a razor blade down my gullet. This dryness, however, was a typical consequence of failing to hydrate prior to crashing after a night of heavy drinking. It was something I could remedy easily enough.
Less ordinary was the pain I was feeling in so many other places. I felt beaten up, as if I’d tumbled down the side of a mountain. There were several raw places on my legs. Some of the lingering grogginess began to dissipate as I tried to remember the reason for that. That was when the first memories from the night before came to me. I didn’t know the term “panic attack” back then, but I had one then. Flashing images from my delirious dash through the woods danced through my head. If I had been capable of it in those moments, I would have sat bolt upright in bed, my eyes bulging in their sockets as I gasped for breath, but something in me recognized that this would be a bad idea in my current state and blocked the impulse. As it was, my heart galloped and my eyes were wide as I remembered the grotesque face of the beast.
A bad dream, I tried telling myself. That’s all it was. Just a really bad fucking dream.
I grimaced as I turned onto my side to stare down the length of my body. The physical effort made all my various pains even worse, but I had to know what I was dealing with here. My jeans were shredded, ripped and torn open in several places. I remembered tripping and falling in the woods, and I remembered a tearing sound and that feeling of wetness, but the actual damage was beyond anything I had expected. The reason my skin felt raw was now obvious—my legs had endured numerous abrasions and cuts. I felt dried blood on my skin.
There were blood stains on the sheets.
And something else that rolled out of my long, tangled hair as I tried to sit up—a badly-mangled human finger. I could only surmise the beast in the woods had spat at me as I turned and ran, and the blood had caused it to stick in my hair, where it had remained all through the night.
It had been real. All of it.
That terrible, hideous thing.
I never went into the woods again. Any woods, anywhere.
Would you?
A SLASHER’S DILEMMA
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sometimes even serial killers have to balance home life and career aspirations.
THE MAN AREA MEDIA HAD long ago branded “The Lone Star Slasher” started getting impatient after an hour of waiting for his intended victims. He was standing hunched-over in a cramped bedroom closet. A low shelf kept him from standing fully erect. It was an uncomfortable place to hide, in purely physical terms, but being in the closet put him in perfect position to do the work he’d come here to do. He was therefore reluctant to vacate the closet in search of a hiding place that would place less strain on his aching back.
Having been at the hack ’n’ slash game for more than twenty years, he still had much of the zeal for killing that had characterized his long career in serial murder. Thanks to advancing age and a changed set of priorities, however, opportunities to engage in his life’s greatest passion had become increasingly rare in recent years.
When he first started out, he had a lot more freedom to go wherever he wanted any time he wanted. He was young and single with no serious attachments and little in the way of outside obligations. Other than the six hours he used to put in at his part-time job at the video rental store five days a week, his time was his own. In his lone wolf days, he’d been free to prowl the streets of various Texas cities in search of victims for hours on end. Back then there’d been no social media and the internet had been in its infancy. The world was less connected and it was easier to get up to nefarious nocturnal activities. There were no smartphones and less constant surveillance of citizens in general. He hadn’t known it at the time, but it’d been a golden age for mad slashers.
Not that he was actually “mad” or otherwise mentally inhibited. He was a bit above average in intelligence and, as far as he’d ever been able to tell, was perfectly sane. He knew the difference between right and wrong and had no problems separating fantasy from reality. There were no voices in his head telling him to do what he did. Aside from that one time when he’d tried peyote in his college days, he’d never hallucinated. Nor were his urges driven by abuses or traumas he’d experienced in his youth. He understood this was a common scenario in cases of serial murder, but it wasn’t the case for him.
To the contrary, he’d grown up in an ordinary and happy middle-class home. His parents loved him and he received all the support a kid could ever ask for. He didn’t get bullied at school, and while he hadn’t been part of the popular crowd, he hadn’t been a social outcast either. To all outward appearances, he was the most normal guy ever. None of his friends or acquaintances would ever guess he’d committed more than forty vicious murders over the course of almost a quarter-century.
With one exception.
His wife knew all about his hobby. In fact, they only met because she’d been one of his intended victims. It happened on a chilly winter’s night almost a decade ago. Lydia was returning home after a night of bar-hopping in Austin, walking alone to her apartment in the wee hours after parting ways with a trio of gal pals. Having trailed them from bar to bar much of the night, he’d been thrilled by this development. The gals were all pretty sexy, but Lydia was the hottest of them all by a mile. Following along behind her as she drunkenly stumbled her way down a series of dark sidewalks, he had plenty of time to admire her leggy form, emphasized to great effect by her short skirt and heels. At some point during that long walk, his interest in her shifted from murderous to amorous. He caught up to her and initiated a conversation. At first she was wary. After all, he was a stranger and she was an attractive young woman walking alone at night. But he turned on the charm and she wound up inviting him to her apartment. If she’d been sober, it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened that way.
Even after being invited into her apartment, he still thought he’d wind up killing her after having sex with her. It wasn’t his usual way of doing things at all. The murders he committed were never sexually motivated. He never copulated with corpses or did other super-weird stuff like that. Guys like
Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer weren’t his role models. He didn’t have some deep-seated hatred of women. As far as he was concerned, women were superior to men in virtually every way that mattered. He had great respect for them. All of which made it so weird that he enjoyed killing them so much. And he did enjoy that a great deal. The screams. The struggling. All that blood. The sound a knife made punching through vulnerable flesh. All of it was so thrilling and gave him a rush no drug could ever equal. And yet none of that impacted how he interacted with or felt about women in the context of normal, everyday life. His was a highly compartmentalized existence. The way he saw it, these polar opposite sides of himself need not negate each other. With just a little effort, they could coexist. It wasn’t even that difficult.
He didn’t wind up killing Lydia, though.
They got to talking and he found himself genuinely intrigued by her on an intellectual and emotional level in addition to the lust he felt for her. She was a smart lady. They liked a lot of the same things. Maybe it was the booze talking, but she kept turning the conversation in daring directions. She kept hinting at a deeply kinky streak and confessed to a morbid interest in murder and death. Her bookshelves were lined with true crime books. By the time she broke out her collection of autopsy photos, he was falling in love with her. After they fucked, he compulsively confessed to her that he was the Lone Star Slasher, who’d already been notorious for years even back then. She didn’t believe him at first, but then he showed her the knife he carried with him every time he went out on a killing expedition. After admitting he’d initially followed her with the intent of stabbing her to death, she did a strange thing. She smiled. When they had sex again a short time later, she had him hold the knife to her throat the entire time.
Obviously they were meant for each other.
They dated for less than a year before getting married. She got pregnant with their first child. He got a better-paying job and soon they moved into a nice suburban house a lot like the one in which he’d grown up. Less than a year after their first child was born, Lydia was pregnant again. Now they had three kids under the age of ten. His free time was down to almost nothing. Providing for his family displaced murder as the dominant factor in his life. Almost a year and a half had passed since his last kill. He knew the clock was ticking on his career. All serial killers aged out of the game eventually, growing too weak and infirm to overpower younger victims. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe it wouldn’t happen to him, too. The truth was, after being at it for so long, the day when he’d have to call it quits for good was almost upon him. All he wanted now was to indulge in one more round of kills and go out in style.