🚩 Just a story

“Well, I guess it wasn’t until I got to edge of the park that I stopped to realize how dark it was, how abandoned everything looked when it was that late at night. It was about midnight-about one A.M. I think. Real late. Darker than the devil’s dingus. I rode out there real fast, so I was already kinda breakin’ a sweat. I thought one or two good trips through the gauntlet would be all I needed, and then I could go back home. I wasn’t creeped by then, you know? It was dark and abandoned, sure, but I’m not no weenus. I’m not afraid of the dark and I’m not afraid of being alone. I’m Big Cal, I ain’t afraid of nothing!”

I knew differently, but on this subject I kept my own counsel. I didn’t want to drag this shaggy dog story out any further than necessary.

“So I started climbing the rope ladder, and already I could tell something didn’t feel right. I didn’t know what. I didn’t hear nothing, didn’t see nothing, didn’t smell so much as a rabbit fart. Just, I dunno, I felt something. It felt… hinky. Only I ignored it because I’m Big Cal and Big Cal don’t scare. I got to the top of the rope ladder, started going across the monkey bars, and I felt the whole thing, the whole castle, just give a big shake. Almost shook me off the monkey bars, tell you the truth. But I kept my grip.”

I sat there with my elbows on my knees, hands under my chin. He was on a roll, and when he got this way I knew that not even the imminent arrival of the pizza and wings could stop him. His stories, no matter what the subject matter might be, were always little more than a delivery method for self-aggrandizing statements. With every line his gestures became grander, his voice more bombastic. How long had he rehearsed this? I wondered.

“By the time I got to the rock climbing wall, I knew that something was up in that castle with me. Something big. Something terrible. It was waiting up in the slide tower, lurking in the shadows. I could hear its wet bubbly breathing, could smell the foul fetid stench of its rancid dripping poison breath. I could hear the flabby flopping lurches of its bloated nasty body scraping against the timbers.

“I shoulda ran, I guess, brave or not, but I didn’t. Even though my brain was screaming at my feet to take a powder, they somehow didn’t get the memo. They just stepped ever closer to the tower across the draw bridge, zipped me along the zip line, and climbed the final stairs. I think maybe I just had to see it with my own eyes. I had to convince myself there really was something up there. I had to.”

“What did you see?” I whispered, drawn into his tale in spite of myself.

“I saw the beast,” Caleb told me, eyes blazing, milking the tale for all it was worth, “Just a glimpse, you understand. Just a glimpse and thank the old guy in the sky I finally found the sense to skedaddle before it was too late. If you ask me to describe what I saw, I can’t. It was gross and grisly, that thing. I know that. It had pale and putrid skin, great busted teeth and glimmering eyes.

“It was a thing. It was a monstrosity. It lives there at night, I think, when the darkness comes and no one is there to see it. Maybe it waits there for the brave and the bold to venture into its lair so it can eat them up. Or maybe it called to me somehow, all the way from the park to my bedroom. I think maybe that’s it, don’t you?”

I made a show of giving the subject much thought, and finally, I said, “I think you’re full of it! You just don’t want to go back for the bicycles, because you don’t care. Well, I do care, and I’m going with or without you. That’s all there is to it!”

I turned away then, feeling the hot sting of tears in my eyes, brought on by the sudden burst of feeling that came with my declaration. I didn’t mean to call him a liar like that, only I was sure he was lying. Just trying to put a scare into me.

It wouldn’t have been the first time, you understand. A couple of months ago there was a sort of incident. I played it off like it was no big deal, but really it hurt my trust in my friend. I just didn’t have the tools at the time to confront that feeling or him for causing it.

Caleb came to me, in much the same spirit of gravity and conviction, and informed me that his basement was haunted and that we would be famous ghost hunters if we could just get proof. I gamely agreed to stake out the basement with nothing but a flashlight and a walkie talkie. The whole thing was just an elaborate setup to lock me in the spooky back room of the basement all night while he recorded the whole thing on a hidden security camera and piped in spooky sounds.

So you could see why I was skeptical.

With my final Final Words finally issued, I marched out of his room and down the stairs, where his mom, Lisa, was signing for the pizza while trying to negotiate the boxes of food, her pen, and her cocktail. I could see her totter a bit and knew she was in no condition to take on the challenge, and so I took the food from her.

I snagged a slice of pizza from the box and dashed out the door, saying, “Back in a minute!”

I was gone before she could issue a word of protest. Behind me, I could hear the front door slam again and I knew that Caleb had decided to follow me after all. I considered this to be an astonishing show of loyalty and solidarity, considering the bounty of junk food that awaited him. At least, I thought that for the moment before I saw him with a fistful of wings in one hand and two slices in the other. He was stuffing this repast into his face as he jogged after me.

I had to chuckle. He could be a jerk sometimes, but he always came through in the end. I suppose I have been showing my friend, Caleb, in a bad light. He had a forceful personality, true, but he was really my friend, and I really was his.

“You’re being an asshat!” Caleb informed me, losing a lump of sausage in the process. “No one’s gonna steal your freaking bike from the park tonight!”

“Yeah?” I asked him, still riding pretty high on my act of defiance, “Then what made you decide to come with me?”

I watched the struggle play across Caleb’s face as he tried to find an answer to my question that would sound more like a noble gesture on his part than a concession of defeat. I decided then to accept whatever answer he had to give. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but I realize in retrospect that my friend laid himself on the line with his cock and bull story about some playground ghoulie. I felt bad for calling him a liar. Even if it was true.

“So maybe I didn’t see a monster in the slide tower,” he said at last, with a sigh. “But there was something up there, I swear. I heard it, and it stank, and I saw something. I dunno, maybe it was a gaggle of crackleheads fighting over the last Bugle.”

I laughed, laughed a bit too hard in the dark. Caleb was right, before. There was something strange about walking around the neighborhood after dark when all the other families were inside eating dinner or watching losers try to win singing contests on television. Something strange, like the yards and the streets didn’t belong to anyone. I was glad he came with me.

“I didn’t want some cracklehead to jump off the jungle gym and eat your face, and I notice you didn’t leave the house strapped, so I thought I better come along and protect you. Me and Henrietta here.”

He always called crackheads crackleheads, which cracked (ha ha) me up. Henrietta was the name he gave to his weapon of choice, an aluminum baseball bat. I’ve never seen him hit anything larger than a garden gnome with it, but he claimed the bat has claimed three souls so far. Which of course, I believe with all my heart.

“Thanks, Big Cal,” I said, and I meant it. I seldom called Caleb ‘Big Cal,’ because I thought his ego was big enough as it was, and because I knew it meant a lot to him on the rare occasions when I did. A lot of the other kids saw Caleb as a bit of a bully and so he had few real friends. “Let’s put some boogie in our butts so we can get back to that pizza!”

“Not so fast,” he said, a phrase half-lost in the middle of a lengthy belch, “I guess I kinda overdid it with my roadie slices.”

In the end, we settled for a light jog, and even then we reached the park in no time at all. As I said, it wasn’t much of a trip if we hurried. Contrary to this point, I slowed as soon as we crossed the gates that announced our entry into Teasley Park.

Once again I was struck by how strange it seemed to be in this familiar world, made unfamiliar by returning to it after dark. A sharp chilly breeze sent dried leaves corkscrewing through the air with a constant shushing noise. There was nothing reassuring or familiar about it, then. It sounded like the whispers of dead children in empty rooms.

I shuddered and wondered what put such a macabre thought in my head. I looked over at Caleb and saw that similar thoughts must be rushing through his head. He had Henrietta drawn and was trying to look in every direction at once. I decided I had better clear the air.

“Say, Caleb,” I said, seeing the castle emerge from the far side of the park through a sparse copse of dead trees. I thought I could see my bike’s reflectors shining in the dim light of the street lamps and my spirits lifted a little. “What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?”

“Dunno.” Caleb whispered, snapping his head suddenly to the left as if he heard a branch break. I didn’t hear anything. “What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?”

“Elephino,” I said, diffidently.

Nothing, at first, and then a short sharp laugh like a hiccup bubbled from his lips. Two more quick ones, Heh-heh, and then he said, “Good one.”

I picked up the pace a little more, the light jog turning into a brisk jog. We were almost there. Both our bikes were still right where we left them, completely unmolested.

“Why are skeletons so lonely?” I asked him, smirking.

“Why?” He asked, puffing a bit but in better spirits. I could tell.

“’Cause they ain’t got no body!” I crowed. Caleb groaned but he smiled as he did it.

We reached the drawbridge and picked up our bikes, making a show of checking them over for any damages or signs of misuse. Neither of us had anything to report.

Caleb immediately straddled his bike and duck-walked it around in the direction of home. I, however, found that with that ephemeral fear that welled up within me successfully dispersed, I was curious about Caleb’s supposed monster.   Stay tuned....👽

“Not so fast,” I said, gazing up at the slide tower with its three different slides branching off in all directions. The twisty tunnel was, by far, my favorite. I couldn’t see the inside of the tower from where I stood, and if there were any grotesqueries lurking within, I could glean no sign of them. “I think we should go up to the tower, climb to the top and slide to the bottom. Then we leave.”

“Hot take, Bernford,” Caleb said with only the slightest of quavers in his voice, “but I’m gonna pass, I think. Hard pass. Let’s hit the road, huh?”

“Ah, come on,” I said, “You said Big Cal don’t scare, right? Well, I don’t want people to think Big Bernie scares either. If there was a cracklehead up there, they would have chased us off by now, don’t you think?”

Why I tried so hard to sell him on the idea, I can’t say. Maybe I just thought of our little outing as an adventure, and the adventure couldn’t be complete without a final test. The final test had to be a confrontation in the tower. That was just the sort of quest into which the Knights of Greatwood Castle always found themselves embroiled.

At any rate, I could see that Caleb was wavering. Maybe he saw things the same way I did. I’m sure that was it. He said, “Oh fine, real quick. But I’m tellin’ ya now, if I so much as hear a mouse fart inside that tower, I’m getting the heck out of here.”

Since I felt much the same way, I found his terms easily agreeable.

“Shall we go by way of the gauntlet,” I asked, gesturing grandly toward the rope ladder, “as is the tradition of our sacred order?”

“Aye,” he said, mentally playing the part of Sir Caleb the Mighty, gruff champion knight and victor of ten thousand battles. We set off to the rope ladder, Henrietta left behind with the bicycles so that both Caleb’s hands could be free to climb.

I gave a three count and we both scrambled up the ladder and over the top to the first drawbridge, pushing and shoving and tugging at one another’s shirts to try and be the first to the monkey bars. That was the way one ran the gauntlet. My mother never quite understood this tradition and the toll it took on my t-shirts. Mothers never understood such traditions.

In the end Caleb reached the monkey bars first, which granted him a huge advantage in the race. That was okay when it came to the gauntlet the thrill of the race itself was always greater than the thrill of victory.

Nevertheless, I pursued him with great vigor and all fury through the second bridge and on to the rock climbing wall. The wall could be climbed two abreast, the knowledge of which did little to dim the intensity of our struggle.

Still, Caleb maintained his lead as we reached the wall, and he was a master at the wall. Don’t ask me how I don’t know. He must have been half mountain goat. I saw the soles of his sneakers disappear over the top before I had reached the halfway point. He would win the gauntlet for sure now.

I climbed over the top and could see Caleb already crossing the third and final bridge that lead into the slide tower. Beyond the door and under the tower’s domed roof, an impenetrable darkness. I sprinted after Caleb, crossing through that doorway just behind him.

We stood in the cramped space, waiting for our eyes to adjust a bit and reveling in the success of our venture. Both of us were breathing hard, clutching one another’s shoulders and laughing. I guess that’s why we didn’t hear it at first. Didn’t smell it over the ripe odor of Cheetos, pizza, and Buffalo wings. Not until we heard that thick, mucousy grumbling growl, like the snores of pigs dying of head colds in the muck.

There was something in the slide. Something big. Something terrible.

“What is it?!” I asked, shamed somewhat by the fear that found it’s way back into my voice. I wasn’t having fun anymore.

Caleb did not respond in any coherent way, but he fished his smartphone from the cargo pocket of his shorts and tapped on the flashlight mode. Together we leaned toward the hole, ready to sprint as far away as we could after we saw the thing we came to see. We peered within.

It looked like a crude rubber mask of a human face with a streak of red paint around a gaping mouth and a bluish blur ringing its bulging, rolling eyes. It looked like a human face, except that it was stretched over a body that fit snugly within the tube as if they were made for each other. Its skin was a greasy, tallowy pale yellow like piss-stained bed sheets. The thing let out another belching, putrid, gasping growl and lurched up the tube-like an overgrown earthworm, its milky gaze fixed upon us.

Caleb turned to run away, only to crash into me. I was standing, transfixed, giving no thought to the prospect of my own escape. We bounced apart, and I landed outside the tower on the bridge. Caleb landed on his back with his head pointing toward the loathsome worm thing, which I could see in the dankness had already emerged from the tunnel.

Its underside was busy with writhing feelers and skittering grabbers. And teeth. So many teeth. The thing’s clownish mouth split open at the bottom, revealing a bottomless maw of unequaled foulness. The great beast enveloped itself over the shrieking form of my friend. It spent a very long time indeed in taking his life.

All the while I could not seem to will my limbs into attempting any manner of escape. I could only watch in horror as it swallowed the last of him, collected itself, and slowly began to advance upon me. Strangely, it did not strike out at me. It only looked down upon my prone form, seeming to… smile?

As it smiled down at me and I oggled up at it, I suddenly remembered something I had forgotten before. Something from my night in the basement.

After a moment it sucked itself back down the tube and was gone. For a while, I just sat there. Just sat there and stared until my own laughter came in hiccups and breathless wheezes. I laughed and I tugged at my hair, and I thought I would go mad. Then I laughed harder.

It worked.

It worked! ........Stay tuned.  We're getting there  👽

Ooooh YES!!!

I had a suspicion when apartments on either side of hers were unoccupied he was spying from one of them ... creepy!

I’m going to sound crazy, but I need to tell someone the story of what happened to me. Someone other than the police. Those creeps laughed all the way back to their patrol car.

It started this morning, when I woke up to ten inches of snow on the ground. The storm came out of nowhere. Thanks to global warming, it’s been warm and sunny around here lately. I honestly thought we’d be able to get away without a drop of snow the whole winter. But then it all hit at once.

I wouldn’t have even bothered to step outside if it wasn’t for my dog. He needed to use the bathroom, which meant I needed to shovel a path. I strapped on my snow boots, slipped into my heaviest coat, and rummaged in the basement for a pair of gloves.

I had a large, heavy-duty shovel, but it didn’t help. Clearing out the snow was useless. Whenever I felt like I was making progress, the snow would pile up again. I had to stand on top of a fresh patch and call for my dog, begging him to get his paws wet, because there was no way he’d be stepping on grass for a few days.

He timidly joined me outside, but after a few minutes, he was loving it. He pounced around, leaving circles of paw prints throughout the yard. He dug his nose into the ground, turning his whole snout white. It was adorable.

I rolled up a snowball to see what he would do. As I should have guessed, he tried to eat it. Then I rolled up a larger one. Without really planning it, I built a snowman and a snow dog. Then I snapped a selfie of us in front of it. It was cute. Got lots of likes on Instagram.

I expected the snow to clear up within the next few hours, but it only got heavier. The weirdest part was, instead of getting covered over by snow, my creations only grew bigger. They nearly towered over my fence. They also looked like they’d moved a few inches, but I figured it must’ve been an illusion.

The next time I let the dog outside, I wasn’t brave enough to join him in the cold. I was already in my pajamas, sipping cocoa. I figured he would be fine on his own since he had so much fun earlier, so I closed the door and waited to hear him scratch to be let inside. But I heard him yelp instead.

I assumed he’d gotten frightened by a branch snapped by snow or a whistling gust of wind. I opened the door to let him inside and he came in, tail between his legs, whimpering. There were slashes across his back. Four of them. Like claw marks. It must’ve been a damn raccoon.

Thankfully, the scratches weren’t deep, so I cleaned him up and fed him treats. Then I marched outside with my shovel, putting on shoes but skipping the coat and gloves, planning to chase the creature away.

There were blood drops on the snow. They led up to the snowman. To his stick hand with four wooden fingers poking out. Like he had done the attacking.

It was a ridiculous thought. Impossible. But whether it was a raccoon or a squirrel or a snowman, I was pissed about my pup getting hurt, so I raised the shovel over my shoulder and whacked off its head. It made me feel a little bit better, so I kept going. I knocked off its buttons. I bashed in its stomach. I kicked a hole through its bottom.

I only stopped once something sharp dug into my leg. I stumbled forward and fell into the snow, shivering. When I looked down, my ankle was bleeding. And I swear, that blood trailed from my flesh, all the way over to the snow dog’s teeth.  👽

YES!! YES!!  YES!!