Last Rites in Beckham County by Stuart R. West

     Country living can be peculiar; dying is worse...

*** 

     The summer afternoon had been a bright one, hotter than a three-alarm fire. Hardly a proper send-off for Mrs. Sauers, town witch and killer of cats. At least those were the stories around these parts. And around these parts, the stories grew taller than well-tended stalks of corn, gossip fattening the tales until they were good and plump and ripe enough to scare.

     Pa made sure I didn’t buy into such nonsense. It was hard enough growing up in a funeral home without all the campfire tales burning a path into my nightmares.

     But the day Harry (“Harry’s Hearses: Going out in Style”) rolled Mrs. Sauers in through the back door proved to be anything but ordinary. The cluster of cats gathered at the back door should’ve been enough to tip me off. They mewed and hummed the way cats do, rubbin’ up against one another, their tails swattin’ at the flies that had gathered.

     A feline clowder of mourners; or maybe well-wishers.

     From my upstairs bedroom window, I watched. Pa’s red scalp peeked through the long spider legs of hair he combed over, fooling absolutely no one except maybe himself. He conferred with Harry, grown-up talk with down-turned faces. Harry helped usher Mrs. Sauers down through the cellar steps into Pa’s work area. An area Pa only let me visit if invited. Not that it was a nifty place to hang out, mind you (although I’ve had more than several passing acquaintances—around here, my friends don’t tend to last—beg me to take them down there), but sometimes I got the feeling Pa kept secrets from me. Even though as a man of mountain-tall pride, he claimed he was an open book, as honest as ol’ stovetop Abe.

     But Mrs. Sauers held a special fascination for me. In life, she was a peculiar person; death only cast more mystery upon her. The legacy she’d left behind had been built on stories most people only reckoned to be true. But true or not, the tales were enough to keep me out of her pasture, off her front porch at Halloween, and dodging her at the general store.

     Suzette (a rightly beast of a different kind, expensive braces hiding her fangs) swears to the fact that one night, while bicycling by Mrs. Sauers’ house, she saw the body of Tommy Talipin swinging from the ol’ elm tree in the front yard. Most folks say Tommy—a handsome teen of a movie star fashion, but troubled by wander-lust—just took off, tired of the country way. I might’ve believed it, too, if Tommy’s folks hadn’t done got Sherriff Landry involved, sniffing out the less-travelled woods. I can’t imagine a soul just up and leavin’ one night without letting his folks know his whereabouts.

     Other stories meandered on at great lengths about her practice of witchcraft, the details muddier than a country road after a rain. Take, for instance, the tale about ol’ Sy Norton. Everyone knew Sy liked to tip at the bottle, no secret there. But rumor had it he made the mistake of sayin’ some mighty disparaging words about Mrs. Sauers down at his favorite tipping hole. Once word got back to Mrs. Sauers (and ‘round here, word travels faster than electricity), ol’ Sy found his foot rotting away, the end shriveled up like a sun-baked walnut. Course, Pa brought me up to believe in science, explained Sy’s leg away with an educated diagnosis. It sounded good to me, science being much more preferable than witchcraft.

     It was hard to know what to believe.

     But the stories that remained constant about Mrs. Sauers, the ones that rarely changed, all had to do with the cats. Now, a missing cat in the country isn’t an unusual occurrence. Like Tommy, cats are prone to wander, following lust of a different sort. And in Beckham County, cats are mighty plentiful. You can’t swing a, well, a cat without hitting another. But story has it, every time Mrs. Sauers fancied dropping a spell on somebody, she’d sacrifice a cat to her god, who I assure you was a far cry from my God.

     Guess what I’m sayin’ is even Job himself would surely have his patience tested by having Beckham County’s biggest mystery lying flat on her back in his basement.

     So, that night, after Pa’d tucked himself in with a nightcap, I stole downstairs, quiet as a whisper. Two flights down and I entered Pa’s workshop. The cold air struck me first. Pa never said it, but I imagined he kept it that way to preserve the mortal remains for as long as possible. I flipped on the light switch, hoping to chase away a chill of a different sort.

     Clak, chak, chak…

     Like dominoes of lightning, the overhead fluorescents clacked on, one after the other, painting the room in a moon-glow of white.

     For what I imagined to be one of the messiest jobs in Beckham County, Pa always kept his work space cleaner than fresh laundry. His tools were lined up, biggest to smallest, orderly like soldiers, on his cart: all manners of scalpels, something he called a trocar, various ointments and disinfectants (both for him and his projects). Several tubes snaked from the great chugging, grey beast of an embalming machine. The sink, longer than the tallest fella Pa’d ever buried by a foot, remained sparkling, good-as-new looking. On my few visits down there, I’d never seen nary a drop of blood.

     But the body beneath the blue blanket drew me, surely as a magnet attracted metal shavings. Mrs. Sauers’ brillo-pad grey hair stuck out, wiry and mean. Her toes peeked out the bottom, tiny blue veins wrapping around them and exploding into corns the size of thumbs.

     I didn’t know what I expected to see but was pretty dang sure what I didn’t want to see. Sometimes you don’t get what you want.

     Slowly, I tugged the blanket down. Her eyes stood open, milky and nobody home. Peculiar. Pa always closed the project’s eyes first thing. He said he did it out of respect for the deceased. But after seeing Mrs. Sauers’ open eyes, I suspect he did it to keep the dead from watching him.

     I wanted to stop, I really did. But I’d come this far, and if nothing else, I wanted to prove to the nay-saying voice in my head that I could do it, wasn’t a chicken at all.

     The blanket rode the ridge of Mrs. Sauers’ nose, a crooked blue snow jump, until her nose popped out. Little tiny hairs drooped from her nostrils. And I swear what I saw next was only a trick of the bad blinking overhead light. One hair pulled inside a nostril, blew out again.

     That’s what I thought I saw, at least. That’s what I didn’t want to believe I saw. My brain told me to run, go crawl into bed. But my feet didn’t listen, holding to the old adage, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

     As I pulled the blanket down below her chin, my hand shook worse than ol’ Sy’s three day tremors. I withdrew my hand fast as a jackrabbit, afraid of things that might bite.

     Her mouth opened. Not an involuntary movement caused by gas either, the way Pa explained sometimes happened. She gasped. No, that wasn’t quite right. More like a hissing radiator.

     Shhhhhhhssssssss…

     Spit gathered at the corner of her mouth like condensation. It ran down her pale chin in teary streaks.

     I slapped my hand over my mouth and turned tail outta’ there, forcing my legs to cooperate.

Behind me, the gurney rattled. A rustling of cloth. I didn’t want to look, but…

     Now, she was sitting up. Head turned at a sharp, unnatural angle. Chin cocked. Looking at me. The milk had siphoned out of her eyes, now fully clear. And full of anger.

     “I…didn’t do this.” That was all I said. All my addled brain could muster, a weak apology so I could stay out of Hell, for surely that’s where she intended on sending me.

     Varicose veined legs swung over the side. Meaty toes dangled above the linoleum. I was doomed, damned for messing with things beyond my ken. Had I not been so terrified, I would’ve dropped to my knees right then and there, and prayed loud enough to wake even the snooziest of angels.

     My heart jumped. Something scattered across the room. Soft pitter pats of hesitant rain. No, not rain. A golden cat, walking toward Mrs. Sauers, white paws prancing about like horseshoes. Striding toward her, more determined than Mr. Jones and his prized pig at the fair.

     Mrs. Sauers framed an ugly oval with her mouth and hissed between gaudy red lips, part feline herself. The cat took no heed. Jumped right on top of her, claws digging into the blanket. Mrs. Sauers gasped again, then lay back down where she belonged. The cat strolled up to her face, lowered its head, a strange mouth to mouth resuscitation ritual. Only it had the opposite effect. Mrs. Sauers’ eyes closed. Her chest rose once more, dropped and stayed that way.

     The cat looked at me. Licked its chops like it’d just eaten the plumpest mouse in the county.

     As soon as the cat hopped down, I bolted like lightning out of there. Straight up to my room. Blankets over my head. I don’t recall (as you may well imagine, there were quite a few other things to recall) sleeping, either.

     I never told Pa what happened that night down in the cellar. Not only did I not want to get punished, but I reckon I wasn’t rightly sure what did happen.

     It’s hard enough being young, deliberating between science and religion, navigating the rough and turbulent waters of school, without having something new introduced. Something no one could explain, something horrible.

     They say that life in the country is different, I reckon so is death.

***

 Here I am, talking about myself, pretending not to. Ah, I'm probably not fooling anyone, but play along anyway, 'kay? Just imagine Morgan Freeman narrating and we'll all get through this just fine.

For more of Stuart R. West's adult and young adult suspense tales filled with light heart and dark humor, check out his Amazon page.

And please do check out Stuart's blog featuring weekly rants, failed stand-up comedy routines and incisive author interviews: Twisted Tales From Tornado Alley

Brand spankin' new and creeptacular trailer for Ghosts of Gannaway:

Trimixer by Eric Price

Scary does not need darkness.
It doesn't require monsters, ghouls, or ghosts.
Not all evil lurks in human form.
The most ordinary day can become a horror story.

****

Aiden’s childish screams pierced the humid air as he ran through his sprinkler. Water warmed in the inflatable pool. The cool, cloudy morning had turned into a bright, hot day.

Steve stood on the edge of the wet grass watching his son play. Matted hair dripped water from his head, and his soaked green and blue swim trunks clung to his legs and made a sloshing sound as he ran. Steve’s wife, Annie, sat on the front porch step. She looked striking in her cutoff denim shorts and maroon bikini top. He could think of a handful of things he’d like to do with her instead of work, but none of them would happen during the day with Aiden awake. Oh, well. Nothing wrong with planning ahead for tonight.

Once they wanted to have another kid; a girl would have been nice. A boy and a girl, what more could they ask for? But after three miscarriages in a row, the hurt became too much, and they decided Steve should get a vasectomy. With Aiden turning seven, they didn’t want to start over with a baby. This would mark the last time Steve would wonder what it would have been like having two children.

A dull, splashing sound brought Steve out of his daydream. He looked down to see water droplets splatter the toes of his work boots turning the tan leather a reddish brown.  He remembered he had work to do. As he walked to the silo shed, Annie’s phone rang. “Hello. Oh, hi Clarisse. Thanks for calling me back. Hold on, I have to run in the house to find the paperwork.”

He passed the barn door and remembered he needed to take another bale of hay to the orphaned calf. He had thrown several bails down, so as not to half to climb the rickety latter to the hayloft more than every couple days. After carrying a hay bale to the stall where he kept the calf, pulling off the twine, and breaking the bale apart, he checked the water tub and found the calf still had plenty before setting off for the silo shed again.

He found the light on in the shed. He had finished chores at dusk the night before; had he left it on? Mistakes like that happened when he hurried. He flipped the switch off, turned on the fuel to his old tractor and worked his way to the rear of the Trimixer to open the silo shoot. He turned on the silo unloader and gave it a few minutes to fill enough for the cattle.

When silage piled to the opening of the shoot, he started the tractor and turned on the power-takeoff (PTO) to bring the silage to the front of the wagon. And earsplitting screech cut deep into his sole. Something must be grinding. He reached for the PTO lever, but the noise stopped.  The shrill screech happened again, this time much shorter, and stopped. The sound couldn’t have come from metal grinding metal as he first suspected. It came from a living creature.

A raccoon? The mixer wagon had killed them from time to time. Usually their head would get crushed when he shut the door. Occasionally one would get ground up by the three augers used for churning the feed, hence Trimixer. But he never heard one scream out before.

The scream sounded almost human, and the only animal he knew of that could make such a human like sound when in distress was a cat. He must have turned the wagon on and caught one of the farm cats. This would devastate Aiden. They had a lot of farm cats, but the boy had a name for each one, and he could tell them apart from a hundred yards. Should he tell Aiden, or just let it go? Let him think the cat ran off? The toms would do that.

Steve’s mind flashed to a time when Aiden climbed into the feed wagon. The boy was a climber since before he could walk. He climbed out of his crib and crawled into their room at nine months. Last winter Steve rounded the Trimixer to open the silo shoot when a voice screamed, “Hi Daddy!” Aiden’s head popped over the side of the mixer and Steve’s heart damn near stopped.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” He had screamed, before he could catch his language.

Annie came around the door and yelled, “Aiden! How dare you run off!”

His stomach did flips, and he shook the memory away. A replay of the sound occurred in his head. His stomach churned again. Steve didn’t particularly care for cats. Death didn’t bother him. He hunted every fall, and brought home the occasional deer. But the sound. Oh God, the sound! Ugh!

He turned off the silo unloader, and climbed on the tongue of the wagon to look in. A streak of crimson impregnated the silage’s normal tan color. He looked away. He closed his eyes and thought he would puke the reminder of his lunch. After a few deep breaths of the sweet, fermented smell of fresh silage, he felt better. He stepped off the tongue without looking at the mess again.

After a tough drought, cattle feed had already grown scarce. Steve didn’t want to waste it, so he drove the wagon to the bin to add corn. The normally herbivorous cattle would have to be omnivores for the day.

He could see the house from the corn bin. The sprinkler shot streams of water in the air, but Aiden was nowhere around. Annie walked around the house apparently looking for him. Lust for his wife and anger for his son tore him in two. They had told Aiden countless times not to wander away…especially while Steve did chores.

Steve filled the wagon with corn, and while it mixed, he searched behind the Trimixer for Aiden. When he knew the boy wouldn’t get ran over by the wagon, he backed up and drove to the cattle lot.

Steers lined up at the bunks jostling for a better position when he turned the corner to the feedlot. Steve wondered if they’d be so anxious if they knew what they were getting this time.

The wagon unloaded, and Steve half turned to the rear watching the feed fall into the bunk. A flash of movement in front of the tractor caught his eye. He instinctively hit the brakes, certain Aiden had managed to elude Annie and come to the cattle lot. They had stressed over and over not to go near the cattle lot, especially while Steve did chores. A brown tuft of fur disappeared under the bunk. Just a groundhog.

Steve released the brake and turned to watch the silage fill the bunk again. The light colored silage looked wet with crimson. Even as he drove, the blood didn’t stop; in fact, it seemed to grow thicker. I must have killed a whole litter of cats.

The grain turned to a trickle as the wagon emptied, and Steve increased the throttle to get the remainder out of the Trimixer. He reached for the lever to stop the PTO when a piece of tattered material dumped into the bunk. Even through the dark red stains, Steve recognized the green and blue pattern of Aiden’s swim trunks.

“What the —?”

He didn’t understand what he saw. How could Aiden’s swim trunks have gotten into the feed wagon? The humanlike scream replayed in his mind. But there’s no way. I went straight to the tractor from the house. Aiden played in the sprinkler.

A dark shadow of realization crept over him and he vomited. He had stopped in the barn and checked on the calf. How long was I in there? Several minutes. Where was Annie? She went in the house when the phone rang. He stumbled off the tractor and snatched a piece of the fabric from a steer’s mouth.

“Oh, God. Oh, please God no.”

He looked at the trunks and tears blurred his vision. His head grew light, and the world faded dark. He thought he would pass out, but he vomited again instead.

Carrying the remains of the trunks he left the running tractor and headed for the house. Annie came around the corner of the house looking worried. “Steve, I can’t find Aiden anywhere. Steve. Steve! What are you holding?”

He stopped and looked at her from across the yard. He wanted to speak, but desert sand tore at his vocal cords. The worried look on Annie’s face stretched into complete horror and she ran. She didn’t run to Steve. Instead she ran in the direction of the feedlot. Steve wanted to follow her. He wanted to grab her and stop her from seeing the nightmare, but he couldn’t. Something in him refused to take even one step in the direction of his son’s mutilated body.

****

The sound of sirens snapped Steve out of whatever kind of daydream or blackout he had been in. A look around revealied he sat on the end of his bed. How did I get in the house? And who called the cops?

He felt a weight in each hand and heard a voice. “Hello? Sir? Are you still there?”

His left hand lifted a phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Sir, the police and an ambulance are on their way. I need you to stay on the line with me.”

“I killed my son.”

The phone clattered on the hardwood floor. His right hand raised the barrel of a .22 caliber pistol to his mouth. The barrel tasted like metal and oil with a faint hint of smoke. Steve never heard the report or felt the recoil when he pulled the trigger.

****

Eric Price lives with his wife and two sons in northwest Iowa. He began publishing in 2008 when he started writing a quarterly column for a local newspaper. Later that same year he published his first work of fiction, a spooky children’s story called Ghost Bed and Ghoul Breakfast. Since then, he has written stories for children, young adults, and adults. Three of his science fiction stories have won honorable mention from the CrossTime Annual Science Fiction Contest. His first YA fantasy novel, Unveiling the Wizards’ Shroud, received the Children’s Literary Classics Seal of Approval and the Literary Classics Award for Best First Novel. His second novel, The Squire and the Slave Master, continues the Saga of the Wizards. It is scheduled for a Fall 2015 release. Find him online at authorericprice.com, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

Cost of Freedom

Freedom. He blinked at the random thought. Must mean something to somebody. It was nothing, here in the dark, the bricks cold and hard against his back, underneath him. The darkness was all consuming, empty. Loneliness ate his faltering courage.

The lock rattled at the top of the stairs, sending his heart leaping into his throat. "Hello? Will you talk to me?"

He cringed at the pleading note in his voice, clamped his lips closed on the words desperate to tumble out. He swallowed hysterical laughter. He'd spent days, weeks—could be years—down there, without a word from another soul. Would he die down there with no one to know but his captor?

Tears fell hot on his face, startling him. He hadn't cried in a long time. When had that been? Oh, not a good memory. His son, tall enough to look him in the eye, said he hated him, snagged the keys and put the car around a telephone pole at seventy miles an hour. He should have hid the keys, the beer, his despair. Funny, he hadn't shed a tear since then.

But he wanted to feel the sun on his face! The wind kissing his cheeks. Fresh air filling his lungs. He stretched his arms and froze, ice shivering through him at the weight of chains on his wrists. He'd forgotten them, put from his mind the times he'd twisted and tugged until his wrists bled, to no avail. There was no loosening the chain from the iron ring fixed in the stone floor.

"Annie," he mourned in the dark. I'm sorry. She had warned him about hiking alone, but he could never resist a secluded trail, the crest of the next hill. He hadn't been aware of the man following him until the footstep behind him and the rock at the back of his head sending him into blackness and pain.

He leaned his head back on the bricks, sighed, desolate with the thought that darkness would be his last sight when he would give his life to see Annie's face one more time.

*  *  *

Tom gave another tug on the rusted padlock. "Wonder what's down there?"

"Here." Neil handed him a brick from the tumbled fireplace.

Tom looked at it, uncertain. "I don't want to knock the roof down on us."

They'd hiked farther than they should have, stumbling on the dilapidated old shack by accident, hidden in a grove of old oak trees by the river. It leaned heavily to one side and Tom would never have gone in if Neil hadn't teased him into it.

 "Just open the damned door. I want to see what's down there." Neil nudged him with an elbow. "Maybe there's a body down there."

"More likely an old wine cellar," Tom said hopefully. They'd grown up on horror stories of the serial killer in the area who used to chain his victims in basements, torturing them for days before gutting them. It was rumored he'd drowned while trying to avoid a police chase, leaving victims behind unaccounted for. But they were only stories, right?

A sudden, inexplicable panic seized Tom and he swung at the lock, the crash and clank loud in the quiet summer afternoon. Boards creaked overhead, but he didn't care. He needed to get the door open, right now. He swung again, bashing at the lock again and again, ignoring Neil's shout when something crashed to the floor behind them.

"Dammit, Tom, just stop!"

Tom shoved his friend away, swung one more time, the lock springing open with a snap. Dropping the crumbling stone, he wrenched the door outwards. A cold draft wafted up from the darkness, brushed against his face, heavy with despair, loneliness. And then joy! Overwhelming, wild, a spirit winging free from fetters that had weighed its soul forever.

"Dude, what is it? What did you see?" Neil shook his arm.

Tom looked at him, his friend's face made blurry by the tears filling his eyes. He shrugged helplessly. "I didn't see anything, only felt…"

"What? Man, tell me. You're scaring me. What did you feel?"

Neil's brown eyes had gone wide with concern, his grip on Tom's arm painful. Tom swallowed the hard lump in his throat. How to describe…

"It felt like freedom," he whispered, voice trembling with unbearable gladness.

Dianne is the author of paranormal/suspense, fantasy adventure, m/m romance, and anything else that comes to mind. Oh, and a floral designer, which is the perfect job for her. When not writing, she can express herself through the rich colors and textures of flowers and foliage.

Blog: http://diannehartsock.wordpress.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/diannehartsock

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/diannehartsock

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4707011-dianne-hartsock

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Dianne-Hartsock/e/B005106SYQ/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1361897239&sr=8-1

Vegetables Are Bad For You by Stuart R. West

Kyle will never forgive his parents for telling him vegetables are good for you. They lied.

* * *

Eleven years old, Kyle considered himself too mature to believe in ghosts or any of that silly supernatural nonsense. Just the stuff of spooky movies, nothing more. But regardless of his age, he couldn’t deny the sounds he heard coming from the cellar. Actually, more like felt the noise as weird as that seemed. High-pitched humming echoed in his mind, circling round and round in his skull’s cavern.     

Drawing him down the steps. 

He couldn’t decipher what the voices were saying, not really. Just sort of a sad song, a desire, a longing for companionship. 

Something Kyle missed as well.

With his parents still at work, Kyle had no reason not to investigate. They weren’t here to tell him to stay out of the cellar. Not that that would stop him. In fact, every adventurous kid worth his salt usually took such orders as a challenge. 

His family hadn’t lived in the old house for too long. One day, out of the blue, Kyle’s dad had come up with a stupid idea about country living. Cleaner air, better values, living off the land, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Kyle’d been against the move, recognized it for nonsense. But his voice never carried any weight in family decisions, the curse of being eleven. So when they packed up, Kyle had no choice but to man up and say goodbye to his friends. The friends he thought he’d have forever. But when you’re a kid, things change. And you’re powerless to do anything about it. 

The steep and narrow stairs slanted, dirt-covered piano keys groaning out percussive notes with each footstep. Kyle’d been in the cellar before, not his first rodeo. But earlier when he’d gone down with his mother, he shamefully snatched onto her apron the entire time. For good reason. Shadows danced and swooped, threatening to snatch him up and whisk him away to a dark world. Rusty and sharp-looking tools lined up along a stone wall, a Grim Reaper’s one-stop shop.  Bottles flanked another wall, sitting on shelves and lined up perfectly like at attention soldiers. In the bottles, bulky yellow globs swam in even murkier water. Kyle’s mom warned him not to come down here alone. At the time, he’d silently agreed, thankful for his mother’s wisdom. Even though it seemed embarrassing now.

But he had to know about the sounds. The noise drew him down like metal shavings attracted to an unseen, but definitely heard, magnet. Simply, he had no choice. Just like so much of his life.

The light bulb at the bottom of the stairs provided very little coverage, a small oval of light. Once he pulled the string, the bulb swayed. So did everything else. Shadows darted to even blacker places. Eyes and grins seemed to form in the jars’ gelatinous masses. The light continued swinging, a pendulum chop-chop-chopping light across the dirt-covered floor. Like a metronome, it counted out the beats of Kyle’s hammering heart.

And the strange humming intensified. One voice, two voices, a disembodied chorus singing in Kyle’s ears.

At the foot of the stairs, Kyle grasped the flashlight his mother had placed there on their last visit. Flicking it on, he swiveled the beam, familiarizing himself with the creepy cellar, a far cry from their refinished basement in the Kansas City house. Green strips of algae—or something else entirely—painted the stone walls. Spider webs hung like forgotten cotton candy. Leaves crunched beneath Kyle’s feet as he shuffled across the dirt floor. With no windows or doors in the cellar, how in the world had the leaves gained entrance? A chill roller-coastered down his spine. But he couldn’t turn back now, no way. That’s not how a man would act.

A mummy of a bookshelf leaned against a back corner, the bottom warped and aging into dust. And Kyle knew—absolutely so—the sound came from behind it. After tucking the flashlight beneath his arm, he planted his feet solidly and yanked the bookshelf. He watched as it toppled backward. When it landed in the dirt, a cloud of dust rose. So did a rotten scent, so strong Kyle’s eyes watered. Bent over, he coughed until the fumes passed. Then he aimed the light toward the uncovered corner.

Glistening stalks of varying sizes grew out of the dirt, not unlike the asparagus Kyle loathed. Except these were slug-colored, pink, white and grotesque. Black rings circled small nubs, almost limbs. Kyle rubbed his eyes, swung the flashlight away, then looked again. No illusion, the stalks moved, actually moved! They twisted and bent as if uprooting unseen legs from the ground. As Kyle dropped to his knees for a closer examination, warning sirens bellowed in his head. Some of the strange growths attempted to dodge the flashlight’s beam, but the dirt cemented them firmly. Little holes opened at the top of each stalk, mouths silently gasping for air. Whispering. Small hairs (teeth?) waved out with each puff of breath. 

Kyle yelped when the flashlight landed on the tallest stalk. A smaller stalk branched out of it, an eyeball dangling at the end. Milky and wide-eyed and horrible. The branch extended, rigid as if held up by a hidden string, a gross one-eyed mannequin. It darted toward Kyle, snapping at him.

Kyle fell back in the dirt. He scrabbled back, leaving a trail of dust behind as if his sneakers had caught fire.

Suddenly the sounds in his head clarified. Voices from somewhere else. Comforting and warm, almost hypnotic.

Yet, even though the voices made Kyle feel as if he were lounging in front of a cozy fireplace, the messages were anything but soothing.

Something needs to be done.

The older people are not your friends.

They’re holding you back.

They must die.

“No!” Kyle locked his eyes shut. He slapped his temples, hoping to stop the voices, the awful messages, praying to awake from this nightmare. Daring a peek, though, confirmed his worst fear. He wasn’t dreaming. The stalks continued to stir, shifting in unison like a mass wave at a sporting event.

Kyle…

Listen…

Cut them, make them bleed.

A blade across their throats.

The old people have to die.

How easy it would have been to give in. Kyle relaxed, propping up on his elbows. Warmth filled him, sunshine on an August day. He floated in an invisible raft, bouncing and bobbing on tranquil waters, nature taking him where it may. When he breathed, the cellar’s rank odor had vanished. Now the smell of flowers and cinnamon and freshly cut grass in the summer and everything fine and wonderful he’d associated with growing up filled his nose, his thoughts.

That’s good, Kyle.

Don’t fight us.

Let us take over.

Destroy the older ones.

But as Kyle basked in golden memories—everything good about his childhood zipping by in a hurried slide-show—one image burned stronger than the others. His parents. 

Clearly, these creatures—aliens, monsters, mutants?—wanted him to kill his parents. His parents who sometimes sucked and made him move and leave his friends behind and punish him and…

The parents he loves.

With a small battle-cry, Kyle climbed to his feet. “Not gonna’ listen!” Holding one hand over an ear (even though the sounds came from within), he shot the flashlight around the cellar. Shadows played hide-and-seek, zipping up the walls like bats skittering away in a cave. Then he found something. A fairly ancient looking gas can, rusted and crumbling at the top.

What are you doing, Kyle?

Stop.

Listen to us.

We wouldn’t lie.

“Shut up. Just…shut up.” The can weighed heavy in Kyle’s hand. Giving it a good shake, liquid sloshed up, spilling out a hole at the top. Orange and brown rust flakes coated his hand. The pungent aroma of gasoline swept all other smells away. Using a heave-ho motion, he spilled the gas onto the stalks. “Eat it.”

No.

Don’t do this.

You’re killing us.

Killing us….killing….

The hellish stalks wilted, then sprang up like air dancers at a car dealer, their lives contingent upon the wind’s whim. Kyle tossed another round, giving the eyeball stalk an extra dose. The voices died down to a hiss, air deflating from balloons. The stalks shriveled and collapsed on themselves, their dried husks curling up into nothing but small kernels. And the voices stopped.

Kyle dropped the can, wiped the sweat from his forehead. And listened. Nothing. Just the plinks and tinks of rafters wheezing under the weight of the house. One last touch, Kyle buried the hideous garden beneath the bookshelf, a gravestone of sorts.

He clapped dirt from his hands, a job well done. Then raced up the stairs like the devil himself had pitched a fork in his bottom.

At the top of the stairway, he slammed the door shut. Leaning against it—keeping monsters at bay—he thought about the new role forced upon him, a very responsible, adult role. Caretaker, gardener, year round de-weeding.

* * *

Here I am, talking about myself, pretending not to. Ah, I'm probably not fooling anyone, but play along anyway, 'kay? Just imagine James Earl Jones narrating and we'll all get through this just fine.

For more of Stuart R. West's adult and young adult suspense tales filled with light heart and dark humor, check out his Amazon page.

And please do check out Stuart's blog featuring weekly rants, failed stand-up comedy routines and incisive author interviews: Twisted Tales From Tornado Alley