Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories Read online

  Leggy counted off about twenty paces and smiled. Some of the wax had sweated out of his mustache and it drooped a little bit. “Fuckin book.” He pulled the trigger and Dump watched as bits of paper flew up from the book as the buckshot ripped into it. Leggy yipped and raised the rifle up in the air. Score one for the illiterates, Dump thought, and then said, “My turn.”

  “Get it right in the middle and we’ll split that fucker in half,” Leggy said.

  “I’ll try.” When Dump looked through the sight, he saw two books and decided to aim for the one on the left.

  The deafening roar of the shotgun threatened to split his skull but the effect was satisfying. The book didn’t come completely apart but a large hole had opened in the middle.

  Dump handed the gun back to Leggy. “You gonna give it another go?”

  Leggy was now so drunk he had to hold his left eye open. He chose to do this with the end of the gun while he patted himself down with his free hand. “Shit,” he said. “I didn’t bring no more shells.”

  Dump staggered up to the mound, pulling his penis out of his dirty jeans. Once he got within pissing distance, he let go with a stream of rancid urine. It soaked the pages of the book.

  “Shit, man,” Leggy said. “I can smell that all the way back here. Don’t make me blow your dick off.” He aimed the unloaded gun at Dump. It still made Dump nervous.

  They took the rest of the beer and the gun into the trailer and waited for dark. Destroying the book seemed to have taken both of their minds off it. They watched the baseball game, drank more, and played some cards. Eventually, after all the beer was gone, Dump decided he wanted to go back to the apartment. The truck was a company truck both of them used to do most of their driving. As long as it showed back up at Leggy’s house in the morning to pick him up, he didn’t really care where it went.

  Leggy had fallen into something like a stupor on the couch. Dump didn’t know how but he knew Leggy would be just as well-coiffed and crazy-eyed at nine o’clock in the morning as he had been earlier. Dump would be dragging. He didn’t like to get this drunk through the week, on work nights, but sometimes there just wasn’t anything else to do.

  As he walked toward the truck, something caught his eye. Movement. Over by the dirt mound. His first crazy thought was that fucking book had some kind of tracking device in it and now the police had come to claim it. He thought about just hightailing it to the truck and driving away as fast as possible but he was too drunk to follow what could be considered the path of reason.

  Drawing closer to the dirt pile, he saw the book had fallen down off its little ledge of soil.

  And it seemed to be crossing the ground on its own.

  Dump stopped there. That was some freaky shit. If the book was crawling now, he didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

  Then he noticed the book wasn’t moving on its own. It was... attached to a figure.

  Dump’s heart began a hard thud in his weighty chest.

  He moved closer to the book. The reason he couldn’t see the figure so well at first was because it was covered in blood.

  Now he was maybe ten feet away. He didn’t know if he should move any closer to the figure, mainly because of the sheer oddity of the situation. But what harm could it do? It seemed to be pulling itself along the ground. And he had to know who it was. Because if his suspicions were correct then he would have to seriously reevaluate his reality.

  The figure let out a garbled wheeze.

  Besides, Dump thought, moving closer, what if this person needs help? He couldn’t just turn and leave them. He wouldn’t do that to anyone.

  Now he was only a couple of steps away, looking down at the shattered and bloody face of Ms. Blanchette. Her body was riddled with buckshot. She reached toward him. Dump thought of something like a nuclear bomb, opening up some other world, ripping everyone up, turning them all into a shadow of this mutilated Ms. Blanchette.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done,” she said. “You have to stop him.” Her head dropped down, nearly hitting the grass.

  “Stop who?” Dump asked.

  “Him.”

  “I think maybe I need to get you to a hospital.” He said this knowing that a hospital wouldn’t do any good. No doctor was good enough to patch up all those holes. And how would he explain this to the hospital staff? True, maybe they had shot her but she was a book when they shot her. Just a fucking book.

  “Close it,” she coughed up at him, dying madness in her eyes. “Please, let me die at home. Close it.”

  Dump reached down, the hole was opened as far as it could be. He didn’t see how it was possible, didn’t know how she would fit in the book, but he closed it anyway. And Ms. Blanchette was gone. He held the book in his right hand, not minding that there wasn’t much of it to hold or that he had urinated on it only a couple of hours ago. It deserved better than to just be buried in a pile of dirt. Standing there, he realized he could very well be holding some kind of apocalypse.

  He started back toward the trailer. He would have to wake Leggy up and tell him about this. He didn’t know how he would take it. Since he hadn’t actually seen Ms. Blanchette, half-in and half-out of the book, he probably wouldn’t believe him at all.

  Dump opened the door to the trailer.

  Leggy was not at all how he had left him.

  He was changed.

  His legs were still very long but he had more of them. They bent from his torso, all six of them, like the fattest spider legs Dump had ever seen. His eyes had changed. They were silvery and slanted, reaching back nearly to his ears. And now his handlebar mustache was curved downward and looked more like fangs.

  In front of him was the black book. The bastard had taken it after all. Had probably, in fact, known about the import of those books far longer than he had let on. For all Dump knew – and judging by what he now witnessed – Leggy wasn’t human at all.

  Briefly, watching this weird spiderthing in front of him, Dump thought back over all the years he had known Leggy. Curiously, he found himself thinking about all the stuff Leggy hadn’t told him. He could spout philosophies, ideas, and opinions but he never talked about the good old days, the school days, the teenage years – the things most of their blue collar ilk talked about.

  “Leggy,” Dump said. He wished he had his gun. He wouldn’t hesitate to put some bullets into this snarling thing in front of him.

  Leggy didn’t seem to hear Dump. He looked at the open book beneath him and Dump’s eyes strayed in the same direction. The picture there was spread across two pages and looked very dark. Dump thought he saw other things, things like Leggy and some maybe even worse, flit across the pages. Leggy lowered his head and began squirming into the book. Shocked, Dump looked on, not knowing what else to do. He dropped the book he held in his hand onto the couch, picked up the shotgun that had been drunkenly tossed aside and went toward the back of the trailer.

  In Leggy’s bedroom was a strange smell. One Dump did not like at all. It was far worse than Dump usually smelled, even on his worst day. And there were pictures plastered on all the walls. Alien pictures. Pictures of things Dump could easily imagine existing in the pages of Ms. Blanchette’s library. For all Dump knew, these pictures could have come from the books in Ms. Blanchette’s library.

  Dump rummaged through drawers until he found what he was looking for. The bright red plastic shells. He split the gun and put in two shells, heading back to the living room. Just as he entered, he saw the last of Leggy, heading into the black book, a toothed tail dragging along the worn down carpet.

  Dump didn’t hesitate. Maybe he had had enough of this world. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the thought of that spider creature being loosed on some other world. Maybe it was the guilt at having aided in the theft and destruction of the other book. Maybe he had always hated Leggy. Picking up that other book and holding it in his free hand, Dump jumped into the black book after Leggy, having no idea what he would find on the other side.

  Mu
sic from the Slaughterhouse

  The midday sun continued to burn the already brown grass in the meadow. It was the hottest, driest summer Jakob could remember. Marcie, his younger sister by two years, sat next to him under a shady crabapple tree. Together, they stared across the field at the slaughterhouse. It was owned by their neighbor, Sully Bussard. Any breeze blown from the direction of the slaughterhouse was tainted. Especially in this heat. It smelled like meat gone bad and made Jakob think about what happened in there. Maybe it was a blessing that, today, the breeze was nonexistent.

  “I don’t like that place much,” Marcie said.

  “Me neither,” Jakob said.

  Marcie had brought her sketchpad out. She had completed her first year of high school where she had taken an art class and been absolutely consumed with her drawings and painting ever since. She sketched quickly with her left hand, holding the big sketchpad in her smaller right hand. Jakob didn’t think anything of that hand’s size deficiency until she actively used it. It looked strange. He tried to think of the word... Anomaly. That was the word he was thinking of. The hand looked totally out of place. It was the hand of a six-year-old girl.

  “That’s a good drawing,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  He had almost forgotten why he had come out here. Then he remembered. Marcie’s friend, Geneva Kaufman. He wanted to try and get Marcie to see if she liked him. He was seventeen and desperate and didn’t see anything wrong with using his sister as a pimp.

  He started to ask her about Geneva when a round of bleating came from the low white cinderblock slaughterhouse.

  “Grotesque,” Marcie mumbled under her breath.

  “At least we don’t get the smell today.”

  “Do you remember what dad used to tell us about the slaughterhouse, when we were too little to know it was a slaughterhouse?”

  “Yeah. He said they made music in there and the sound of the cows dying was just some new music that wasn’t played on the radios or anything yet. He said it sounded like it came from a whole other land.”

  “Yeah. It kind of made me want to go, like, look around in it or something. Only, when I got a little bit older and I knew what slaughterhouse meant I imagined they still played music in there only they used the ribs for a washboard, the eyeballs for castanets, and a bloated stomach as the drum.”

  “Jesus. That’s sick, Marcie.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have thought all that stuff if Dad didn’t fill our heads with that music nonsense.”

  “So it’s his fault you’re morbid?”

  “Isn’t it always the father’s fault? Or the mother’s? Maybe both.”

  She sat the notebook down in her lap and wiped some sweat away from her forehead with the small hand. Jakob was going to ask her about Geneva again but he remembered something he and his friend, Jeff, had seen the other night.

  “Do you know if old Bussard’s taken up with Darla Minnow?”

  “Who?”

  “Darla Minnow. The really fat librarian. You know... the one who’s like so fat she has to use canes to walk?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I was just wondering. The other night when me and Jeff were out here we saw her wandering into the slaughterhouse. Well, I wouldn’t really call it wandering. It was more like trundling.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “I know. But why would she be there? Why would she be going into the slaughterhouse?”

  “So how much had you and Jeff smoked while you were out here?”

  Jakob stood up. “That’s none of your business,” he said. “Besides, you know we don’t do that.”

  “Well, all I’m saying is you would have to be high not to notice the sort of obvious facts you’ve overlooked.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sure you’ll fill me in.”

  “Okay. First, it’s a slaughterhouse. They slaughter cows and other assorted animals so they can sell them for food. Sometimes, people provide the animal. They don’t all come from Bussard’s backyard. And if someone supplies an animal to be slaughtered then it only stands to reason they would have to come back to collect said animal. And, since our lady Minnow is of an expansive proportion, it would only stand to reason that she likes to eat. Maybe she lives on a farm. Maybe she had one of her animals slaughtered so she can rest easy knowing she has like a year’s worth of hamburgers.”

  “Yeah. I guess. It just seemed kind of late.”

  “It’s probably not like either of them had anything else to do.”

  “It’s hot. I’m going inside. Oh, by the way, you know your friend Geneva...?”

  “I knew there was a reason you were out here.”

  A few days later, Jakob lay in his bed in a post-masturbatory near-slumber when someone knocked on his bedroom door. He hurriedly zipped himself up and threw the soiled paper towel under the bed before saying, “Enter.”

  He propped himself up against the headboard. Marcie came in and sat on the far side of the bed.

  “Why are you all sweaty?” she asked.

  “Because it’s hot.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  He didn’t know why she had come in but she had a look of excitement in her eyes. Maybe she had finally asked Geneva about him. But she just sat there. She liked to do things like that. Like make him practically beg to get anything out of her.

  “So why are you here?” he asked.

  “Well... remember what you said about Darla Minnow the other day?”

  “Yeah. And I also remember how you debunked my small town-really-creepy-love-affair theory.”

  “Maybe I was a bit hasty. You’re not going to believe this.”

  Then she did it again. Just sat there on the edge of the bed with her lopsided hands clasped together, staring at him, waiting for him to ask her what it was he wasn’t going to believe.

  “And?” he said.

  “Okay, so I just came back from the library. They have this really great Hieronymus Bosch book I was going to try and steal and Darla Minnow was there behind the counter only at first I didn’t know it was her.”

  She stopped again.

  “Okay,” Jakob said. “If you keep making me pull the story out of you then I’m going to be too tired to pay attention by the time you’re actually finished.”

  “I could just stop.”

  “No. Don’t stop. Okay, why didn’t you know it was her?”

  “When she went into the slaughterhouse the other day, was she fat?”

  “Of course she was fat. I don’t know that I would have known it was her but for the girth and the canes.”

  “You are so mean. Anyway, the Darla Minnow I saw at the library was not fat. In fact, she was very thin. Like model-thin. I had a stroke of conscientiousness brought on by my curiosity and decided to check the book out instead of stealing it outright so I took it up to the counter and she got up from behind her desk to come and help me...”

  “Did she have the canes?”

  “No. No canes at all. She looked more like someone you would see dressed up as like the ‘dirty librarian’ in a Playboy spread or something.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering. You want to know what I think?”

  “You’re the brain.”

  “I think something happened to her at the slaughterhouse.”

  “That’s not possible.” But Jakob was already turning the possibilities over in his head.

  “We should watch it tonight. See if anybody goes in. And see what they look like when they come out.”

  “I don’t know. It just sounds crazy. I’ll call Jeff and see what he thinks.”

  “Well, I’m going to keep an eye on it and you can listen to your stupid friends if you want to. By the way, Geneva said you don’t really have a chance. And she has a jealous boyfriend who may try and emasculate you if he sees you in public. I’m sure it’s all talk but... well, he is pretty big.”

  “Talking to you makes my head hurt,” Jakob said a
nd reached for a music magazine on his bedside table, officially ending their conversation.

  When she left, he picked up the cordless phone and called Jeff, hoping Jeff would be able to refute everything Marcie had told him. Instead, Jeff only agreed with her.

  Jeff worked a part-time job at Bang’s supermarket. He said the manager of Bang’s was an older man with a limp. Until yesterday. Yesterday, he had come in looking twenty years younger without any trace of a limp. Jeff kept waiting for someone to ask about this sudden appearance change but the only thing anyone said was, “You’re looking good today, Mr. Castle.” Today, Jeff said, Mr. Castle had given Cynthia Raymond a “ride home,” but Jeff suspected something much more prurient was at play.

  “So,” Jakob said, “you want to come and scout this place with me and my sister tonight?”

  Jeff agreed, called Jakob a “gentleman and a scholar,” and hung up.

  Disappointment washed the night. By two o’clock, Jakob was tired of being bitten by mosquitoes and he was ready for bed. The two boys’ sophomoric banter had frustrated Marcie about an hour ago and she had since retreated to the house.

  “So, we done for the night?” Jeff asked.

  “Yeah. I think so. This was stupid.”

  “Not if you saw Mr. Castle.”

  “That’s supposing he came here. We don’t know that he did.”

  “Still, people don’t just transform overnight. Even if they have some kind of surgery, they have to have some healing time.”

  “I guess. Maybe we could just go to the library and ask Minnow about it tomorrow.”

  Jeff laughed. “Why? You just want to check her out?”

  “Hardly.”

  “I hear she’s pretty hot.”

  They walked through the meadow, swatting at mosquitoes and gnats, the sound of peepers and cicadas providing a churning whir in the background.

  “You know,” Jeff said. “Marcie’d be pretty hot if it wasn’t for her hand.”

  “That’s my sister. Besides, the hand’s not so bad. I can imagine a pedophile taking a keen interest in her.”