For Want of a Hunter, Pt. III

ISSUE #127

For October, I decided to try writing fiction—each week will unfold a new part of a scary story I've written for the Halloween season. I recently brought my high school CDs back into my car and found a purple disc with a scribble that read "Halloween." This week's playlist is essentially that. What is fall if not nostalgia as a season? The cold brings back memories of every school year. I indulged a bit this time with a mix made by a teenager—life's most terrifying form.

“Get behind me,” Kate says. I step into her shadow, her apron stained with rhubarb. I look up at her tight blond curls, some fading into spots of gray. Her smell is sweet and heavy, like the curtains that hang in my grandmother's home. Cate makes her way into the hall to stand beside her sister, then turns to face the tapping on the window.

We walk into the front room, the twins before me like saloon doors. The tapping continues, steady, slow. Through their shoulders, I see the black mass. The tapping comes from what look like its antlers. Its firefly eyes are pulsing in rhythm.

Tap. It was stronger that time. Tap. The lights surge brighter with each. Tap. Cate hits a switch and the room goes dark. I hold my breath—no tap.

Outside, the things stare at us in silence, waiting like children in line at the fair. In the dark, their shapes come into focus. Each resembles an overstuffed toy, forms I almost recognize but are too distended—a fat deer, a fleshy badger, a house cat shaped like a rugby ball—all as if inflated by a bicycle pump, stopping when their veins were bulging and their lips folded back. Each eye socket burns with a miniature star.

The twins are not breathing, I notice. They stare at the beasts right back. Then, two small fireflies start to jump. They bob like birds on a windblown wire. Then, bigger. They are getting bigger.

“Hold,” Cate says, hands tight around a fire poker.

“You get over onto that chair lift, hun,” Kate whispers from the corner of her mouth. “Strap yourself in. Press the button.”

I run—or do I tiptoe? It’s hard to tell whether I sit by myself or I'm pushed by the force of the window exploding. The twins shield their faces as a shadow engulfs the room in glass. I hear the most deranged cry, like a foghorn blowing chunks into a sea cave. An immense mass scrapes the ceiling with what could only be its head. With the glow of its eyes, I see streaks of black blood it leaves on the walls and floor.

The twins are running my way. “Button!” Cate yells. I smack a red square—a blur. I whirl, and the room is gone.

I find myself in a stairwell of softwood as my eyes adjust to the coffee-cream light. At my back, through a wall, I can hear the beast bray, and the twins grunt and moan as if wrestling a tree.

“Climb!” I hear from one, muffled. “We’ll meet you at the top!”

I stand on my shaky legs and climb the stairs through a corridor no wider than an inch beyond each of my shoulders. The noise starts to dim as I focus on trying not to touch the exposed nails and splinters. At the top, I crawl out a dormer window and find myself on a narrow rope bridge. Below me is a fenced-in garden. I figure I must be behind the house. I follow the bridge with my eye to the woods. It must end tied around one of the trees.

A creak to my left. I crouch. No movement from the ground. Again—no, it’s more of a screech. I squint to see farther in the dark.

There. Movement, behind the chimney. I start to crawl out along the bridge when it wobbles and almost throws me down.

From behind me, out tumbles Cate with a crash. She’s covered with black blood, like syrup on a sundae, wielding a computer mouse like it's a morning star. I can see that she is crying, silent. She slams the window shut and waves at me to run. I can barely blink before she’s past me.

“But Kate!” I shout. “I can wait for her!”

Instead of speaking, Cate stops and turns. Her teary eyes get wider as her gaze lifts up behind me. I hear a window open. I turn and wait to be engulfed.

Kate scrapes her body barely through the frame. Only it is not Kate. She is crusted in black, like a coat of burnt marshmallow. Rivers of red pulse over her like veins in cooling lava. Her hair is streaked with soot. She smiles—this tears off her bottom lip, spilling blood onto her apron. Her eyes are bulging fireflies.