Hurting The Dog

By: Gerald Crum
September 4, 2008

Prologue

     The whistling beneath his nose hairs jetted out in long belated whimsical exhales. He was an older man, whose legs have long since failed leaving the rest of his body to use a new form of mobility. He was a lonely man, a blind man could notice. His beard told most of his life’s history but to fill in the details his mouth did most of the talking. No sign of dismay or disdain for the way he had been living. His voice had been under complete content and satisfaction. This could also be because sitting beside the crippled elderly man was a young ten year old boy whose interest in this fossil grew with each wheezing whistle.



     The ten year old boy’s name was Luck. It was an odd name that derived from a fatal night that took his mothers life while she was in labor with Luck. She died in the car wreck but he was able to be extracted from his mother before he died as well, so upon this fateful night his father named him Luck hoping that all the luck in the world will some how follow him because of it. The old man’s name was Leroy. Grandfather to the little boy. Both chatted it up through out the years as Luck’s father would go on business trips and leave Grandfather Leroy in charge. They loved nothing more then to talk it up and pass the time away day dreaming about how life could be and use to be.



     Puckering up his lips in an over exhausting fashion Leroy moistened his gums and chapped skin. His eyelids drooped across his eyelashes with several uncoordinated blinks. A stretch for his cheeks was next in line before he spoke, when he ever began only an army could make him stop. His facial muscles tend to tighten up before he ventures into a tale of epic proportions. His tongue flicked a bit within his mouth, testing the boundaries in which it could reach.



     “Ah. Luck, how many stories have I told you in the past? No, don’t answer that it might make me feel like an old fool. Hmm. How old are you now? No, don’t answer that either, I’ll feel even more like an old fool if I was guessing wrong. In my head. Ah you knew that. You, yeah you look old enough. I’m pretty sure out of all the stories I’ve ever told, that I’ve never told you this one. Now, I know exactly why I’ve never told this to you but there is something I need to tell you that is involved in this story. You see, death, isn’t something that should be coped with easily but should be, well accepted. Hmm, let me just tell you the story and fill in the details along the way. I don’t understand why things are worth telling and why they aren’t but this one in particular isn’t worth a lick of shit. Don’t be saying that word now, if your father catches your saying that thing ooh he’s gonna make me have to tear his hide. Yes boy I’d spank your daddy if he ever told me what to do. Well anyways back to my story. I guess under rational thought I just cant understand how some things actually exist. I guess if they can find glowing creatures inside the ocean then there can be anything on this planet. Okay well remember how I told you about evil fellas and how no one on this planet could be born with evil, no ones just meant to be evil, but this guy. This one was different. Something that just doesn’t belong. Something like a Hitler and such. Well this man’s name was John, John Riddle. He would hurt people for love. Not just because he’s crazy but because he actually enjoyed it. It’s just really hard to explain his actions. How would you explain such a person to a… whatever year old. Uh, don’t worry he was found dead not to long ago, but… no. This I should just keep to myself. Some things are just best left secret while others should be known at all.”



     Leroy soaked in a mighty breath of air till his body slumped completely back into the wheelchair. His eyes became lifeless and cold as they stared directly ahead of him into the forehead of Luck’s. The skin under Leroy’s eyes bagged immensely as a build up of lime green liquid formed causing the skin to become a greenish yellow. Slipping threw a pore which has been dug out of long exposure to the sun the liquid escaped out of the left eye’s bagged flesh. With uncertain movements Leroy’s head drifted from side to side till the glass eyeballs bore directly into the eye’s of Luck’s. Leroy’s mouth lowered open as loose bodiless voices surged from the depths within his throat. High pitched, low pitched, and monotoned vocal vibrations soared from the darkness.



     “Today, a majestic totem pole of rationalization. Pick the cherries my lad yet eat my vomit. These words are yours to keep. Lucky that, Luck my lad. Have you dreamed lately of a time born with a standard family styled household? Have you wished for a greater understanding? A power that turns every wish into a substance worth generating. All of these and more can be accepted when you agree to my terms. None of this that I speak of is negotiable so please don’t pursue a different gift. I my lad am a being known as the answer. Ha, yes such a profound confusion generates when I speak of this name of mine. This is not merely a name but a way of life, to you a religion. I am a fact that must be dealt with. You see, this is a playground. We try to rise but they keep us down. We try to gain power against them so that we can live in turn. They Wish for us to stay back as long as possible as they germinate their consistent belief. Come with me, help us rise to power, I will teach you. For this you give me, I shall grant you a new understanding. Like my followers before you I grant them a gift. Like you will give me.”





The scab

     A silhouette of cracks formed across a saturated tiled ceiling. A pensive curiosity stricken drip of sludge riled its head out from between two previously conjoined slabs of stone. With one quick intoxicating breath of moist air it sped up its decent onto the tile and then shifted into a suicidal freefall. It’s ameba body broke free from invisible boundaries after the impact with the concrete.



BODIES GATHER.



     The sludge was in pieces. Tears shed. The people surrounding the sludge wilted as their tears drooled from sightless eyes. Their faces where plastic, frozen in awe stamped poises. Happiness and laughter hid behind sheets and covers, childlike. Hearts and hands held communications under the circumstances but swept in a virus which whispered orders of betrayal, to leave. The virus’ wishes were carried out as each soul turned from the ameba and walked away carrying out their own life’s tasks.



EVERY DAY.



     The ameba quaked. The heartbeat still struggling to hold the life essence. The grip slipped as the life balloon sailed into the sky for another day, another soul. The ameba died. Since death succeeded it graphed a name on the body, including a gender, an image, an identity. No one saw, no one knows.



THE BLIND.



     Laughter thundered across the street corner next to the sidewalk which supported the dead man. Beside the sidewalk was a set of stairs leading up into a mediocre dwelling, a stained household. The door to this building rocked back and forth, open. Windless day. Joy developed completely concentrating into one manifested orb and injected itself into a being slouching down against the stairs. This being witnessed the entire suicide first hand. His giggles frolicked from a tongue of delight.



     “You couldn’t do it could you. Ha, through a dead beat world of blind, you couldn’t complete your task. Another one will suffice. There are many out here, there are many who’d give their life to fix others. Should I give you a thank you? Or should I just say you did well? Neither one is true. Maybe only goodbye is in order. But your bye wasn’t good nor a farewell, just a happening. I guess all I can say is … I see you.”













































CHAPTER ONE.



     Officer Witherspoon stood beside a suicide victim. His body lay on top of a sidewalk, the blood was dry and splattered. Officer Witherspoon was in his fifties but still fit. His life force has dwindled, he continuously acts and feels younger then his age declares. The young woman, the deceased, was barely out of her teens. Witherspoon hiccupped with a slight stream of depression. He envied her youth.

     Witherspoon’s eyes pushed back his heavy eyelids and gazed up towards the top of the sidewalk conjoined building. His mouth was mute but his lips mimicked the words as his mind counted the floors. With a striped frown he stopped counting at ten. His mind questioned, “What if she were afraid of heights. Would she have jumped if it were eleven stories high?”

     Witherspoon gave a slight spurt of air out his nose as he shook his head. His mind erased all signs of emotion with a systematic deletion, a technique he developed over the years of being a small town police official.

     “What do you think Stan,” Witherspoon questioned his partner who was busy poking the stomach of the corps.

     Stan Dunn stretched himself up in a sudden jerk after being called out. His face turned stern and his mouth drooped into a serious faze. Stan was twenty years younger then Witherspoon and twenty cents dumber as well. Witherspoon knew this and treated Stan as if he were a rookie, and a son. Stan nodded, “Well I was just making sure she wasn’t still breathing. She could have pulled a weapon on us,”

     “Your hearts in the right place Stan I’ll give you that much. But think, why would she want to play dead for us? Did she kill someone or steal something,” Witherspoon placed both his hands on his hips and spoke as his head gazed across the surroundings. “Such a beautiful part of town too. Just wouldn’t strike you to end it here would it? No, guess not.”

     “Do you think this was a murder,” Stan stood next to Officer Witherspoon.

     Witherspoon seemed ancient next to Stan. The wisdom of time next to the future of handicap. Witherspoon connected his thoughts when his eyes crept up to see Stan Dunn copying his own movements. His cheeks peeled up a bit in a smudge, he smiled.

     “No, clearly this girl didn’t know what she was doing,” Witherspoon slumped his body closer to the deceased woman. The aroma of decaying flesh breathed its hot acidic breath into Witherspoon’s nostrils.

     “Why do you say that,” Stan wanted in on the scheming.

     “Well she’s clearly dressed up. And…” Witherspoon tilted his head and connected emotionally with the blank lifeless eyes of the woman. Her hands and feet had been missing entirely but he couldn’t see any sense of despair in her eyes, they reminded him of his daughter. He wondered where she was. Both this woman and his daughter. “She doesn’t look like the type to commit suicide.”

     “Well you can never tell these days. Can you,” Stan poked once more at the body and then snapped his eyes back at the head of the woman to see if she was still alive.

     Witherspoon turned his head towards Stan in an uneasy disgusted and slightly frustrated manner. “She’s dead.”

     “Yes sir,” Stan understood the look being transmitted and he stood up acting professional.

     “Well, I think were done here. Suicide,” Witherspoon rose up from his crouch with a tingling pain in his back from sore muscles. “Do you recognize her?”

     Stan stared at the girl as if he were trying to solve a difficult math question, “No, should I?”

     Witherspoon let out a simplistic yet complex sigh, “To die without an identity. Doesn’t seem right now does it?”

     “Somebody’s gotta know her. It’s a small town,” Stan busted in with his two cents. He acted as if what he said did not even cross Witherspoon’s mind.

     “Yehap, someone ad must know her,” Witherspoon turned towards the stairs closest to the body. The door was shut. Witherspoon squinted and approached it with curiosity.

     He noticed the doorknob was smudged with a grimy liquid. The doorway was guilt ridden and infected with a hatred that reverberated from each molecule. The hinges of the door were rusted to the point of it screaming “NEVER OPEN”. Tilted slightly the door’s wood was rotting with disintegration, erosion with time caused the doorway to be seething with anger.

     Witherspoon halted in the presence of the door. His muscles commanded him to knock but his heart stopped him. There was a slight ringing in his ear that nibbled bit by bit at his senses. He reached out for the doorknob. He touched it feeling the liquid cheer as it splashed against his caliced fingertips. His arm twisted a moment then stopped entirely. His body wouldn’t go any further, couldn’t. Giving up Witherspoon released the doorknob and backed away reuniting with his partner down the stairs.

     “What happened,” Stan questioned Witherspoon.

     “Some doors shouldn’t be opened,” Witherspoon turned to his vehicle. “Call in the boys. I’m going to lunch.”

     “Yes sir.”

     In his vehicle Witherspoon held the steering wheel tightly without starting the ignition. He held the wheel to drive through his memories, his forgotten thoughts. He steered his way throughout memories of his daughter’s ageing. A left, to her teenage years. A right to her death. A “U” turn to forget once more. He pressed the gas, his memory surged past the present and now he drove into the future. His vessel now encircled a family gathering, two elderly people stood next to a middle aged woman who clutched two troublemaking twins. No father. The woman looked like his daughter but older then her passing year. This was the future to look forward for. This was the future he wanted, he wished for her to be alive. He promised her. “ I’ll live forever and see you daily when I’m an old man.” What he meant by it he didn’t even know anymore. He just said this to get his daughter to sleep after a nightmare one night, but he is a man who keeps his promises. He’s kept it this far.

     A slap to the glass awoke Witherspoon from his sorrowful journey. Stan had been watching the entire time. His mind could not understand what was up with Witherspoon but he knew enough not to ask questions. He just made sure to bring his partner, his friend, back to reality, “I’ll meet you at the diner after they’re done.”

     Witherspoon nodded as he started the vehicle and drove off.



















THE REASON



     The hole sat on a cloud of cushioned relief. It rested without temptation nor greed, it begged for them both. The ease of darkness had spilt itself across each gravitated wall platform, its own paint. This hole’s muscles where weak, the thought process dormant by necessities lack. The senses where dull, filed down from the progressive discomfort of uselessness. It breathed. It beat.



USELESS.



     The cooperation with darkness was withheld in the room, except when light stampeded through a seam from between a door and its doorway. Naturally led into another coagulated deteriorating existence but now it shined a glimmer of hope. The light blasted through into the hole’s eye cavity. The pain surged from the sight of actual sight, the blind can see. A lure was set for the hole to creep from its rooted foundation. Temptation breezed its way in through the cracks and wafted its way through a musky heavy air and into a pair of weakened lungs. A stifling overpowered sensation overwhelmed the hole as its legs peeled the flesh from the couch. With a hunched erythematic walk it made its way to the front of the door. A fumbling fleshed hand reached out to open the barrier but before contact was established a voice dammed all.



     “You will be whole. Stale you‘ve become. A senseless pile of filth. Incarnation is in store for you. Swallow this reconciliation and reconcile. Repent what woes you‘ve been fumbling with and lament the day you foiled with this turmoil. Speak a satisfactory hello to me. This is your conscience, your epiphany, your life changing event. Not for your sake but for mine. Hold out for the time being. I will teach you to no longer be blind. You will see like others before you. You will be whole.”



     This voice was bodiless and overbearing trifling the hole into a ball of fleshed torment.

     

     “You will be whole.”



     The flesh banded together in agreement and wrapped itself around the hole creating a body, a human being. A woman, a man.

     Neither.



USEFUL.





     “You will be the teacher. Teach the disputing captives of the reason. Shadow their doubt and bring to them their hammered fate. All those who appose will delegate your fateful action. Fix, this is your broken toy. Each opposition you face will be recreated under your teaching if taught correctly. My thumb, I shall bestow you the nail for you to scratch pieces off into societies eye. Weeks will pass but your body will become more in tuned to your goal. This life for you now is a liquid, they are sponges. This is now the time to study, research your destiny.”



     The platform once called a floor broke apart into chains of light spiraling into a series of shields. The surrounding air stayed stained in the blackness, the shields warped while embedded with the chains. The warping spun into a churning mass of seduction. He revolved in an essence of powdered seclusion. His eyes watched flakes of reasoning and rationalization pry from his flesh which became a solid crimson. With each turn his bones snapped, the pain became a spore which piled up squared beads of fever to feast on later. His teeth where lost in the jumble of his wholeness so he watched the tongue of his lop up the fever beads he dreaded so much. His fear was now spilt from his pores into a liquid container as the fever sealed the container not letting the fear escape. Pounding rivaled with the heartbeat until the churning mixture became one, now the two where rivals no more but a single unit. A green light symbolized a completion of the mixture and now the pieces where disgorged into a salted plate. The plate was cold toughening the hide as the salt fused the puzzle into their rightful places.



     The mind was recreated into what the voice had commanded.



     A man now laid in the middle of a room, he was naked, his mind was naked.

Opened.

          Against a wall was a bench, offering a teaching.



FULLY TAUGHT.







































     Blind.



     With a long drawn in yawn Officer Witherspoon drove up to a deli right outside the county line. The road to get to the deli was a rough rocky dirt track. The sky was cloudy with a foreshadowing of rain on the way. Stan waved Witherspoon down with enthusiastic arms, his fingertips jetted out into each direction wildly. Witherspoon kept up his slow pensive movements by parking the vehicle and getting out in a steady manner. Once the door cracked open Stan was already there babbling as if he were bringing news of the end of the world.

     “Did they tell you what is going on? Did they,” Stan Dunn threw at Witherspoon with a force that nearly knocked his middle aged legs right out from under him.

     “Nope but I think you might,” Witherspoon knew what was up but let Stan do all the talking because his head was almost about to erupt from his excitement.

     “Sure do. Mrs. McAdams in there didn’t like the sandwich she got so she tried to get a refund or a better sandwich and they wouldn’t let her so you know her being all big and any. She began peeing on everything,” Stan spoke with his hands more then his words. His hands waved sporadically all about in the front of his face.

     “And how the hell did she do that,” Questioned Witherspoon with a delighted tone.

     “Her jumbo cup of tea. She…” Stan held his hand up under his body as if mimicking the way she peed in the cup and threw it about the building.

     Witherspoon’s hands rose up in disgust, “Whoa, whoa, I get the picture. So what do you think we should do about this?” Witherspoon tries to give Stan a few of the easier cases so that he can learn some, plus when Witherspoon retires someone will have to take over and Officer Dunn is the most likely candidate for the job.

     “Could I arrest her,” Stan asked with pure excitement radiating from his cheeks which smiled enough to cause pink to sprout from his pores.

     “Sure… I think peeing on things is vandalism,” Witherspoon spoke in a smooth satisfied undertone. His cheeks tilted upward receiving the cool desert breeze along with the hint of moisture ridden beams of light gleaming about now and again. The clouds smiled in a threatening rumble of intimidation, hungry. Witherspoon was also hungry. His stomach clashed with the outside noises showing it was more important then anything else. Witherspoon neglected it as usual. “Here comes the rains. Always seems to wash in the worst of people.”

     Stan walked into the deli with a smile on his face. The door to the deli had normality written all over it except for the yellowish liquid sticking to the inside of the window. When Stan entered his mouth was cupped over by his left palm as his other hand held out a pair of handcuffs.

     Witherspoon couldn’t see Stan from his perch. He stood outside in thought. That’s all he could do at his age anymore. Think. Remember. There’s nothing but this job that keeps him occupied. His love life at home is nothing more then a repetitive act he constantly puts on for the sake of habit. He puckered his lips for a second and muttered a few words real quick making a slight beat with them. His favorite song from when he was a kid. He didn’t know what brought this memory up from the bottom of the ocean of thoughts but this one surfaced so he went with it. This delved him deep into memories he had never known were there. He found his first best friend, he remembered beating up a dog to save the boy until he found out both the dog and the boy where just horsing around. He felt bad about hurting that dog. It never walked right again. His cheeks pushed back some overhanging skin and a smile formed. “So that made me his new friend, took out his old one.” His neck rotated without his asking as he shook his head back and forth revealing his teeth in amusement.

     The sound of a car door slamming shot chills up Witherspoon’s spine as he whipped around to see Stan coming up on him from putting an obese woman in his car. Stan walked in a proud chest puffed out stature.

     “Well, just come back from ropin the cows,” Witherspoon shot out a joke in hopes of Stan to laugh.

     “No I just…” Stan paused in a blown away look. “You didn’t, aw, that’s mean. She is awfully fat.” Stan turned to the vehicle and offered up a wave. Mrs. McAdams tossed back a message via sign language through a middle fingered gesture.

     “Normally we cuff her hands behind her body,” Witherspoon placed his hands to his hips as he stood in an outstretched slightly leaned forward poise.

     “I would have but they don’t reach,” Stan said sarcastically but scared all at once.

     “Well now lets go survey the damage,” Witherspoon’s smile faded as he escorted Stan towards the front door of the deli.

     Upon opening the door Witherspoon was attacked with a violent poisonous musk. Coughing was the only way to retaliate so he did with a stinging in his nostrils and a burn in his throat. The yellowish brown liquid coated the entire interior of the building. The tables, the windows, the countertop, including the microwave, a cash register, and even the sales clerk. The entire room dripped with stagnant coagulating goop. The smell was a nickel like aroma that bathed in a septic tank. The sales clerk sat at a table which wasn’t so covered in the human piss as he just slumped over pouting.

     “How’s it going,” Witherspoon added in just to break the silence and progress into the topic of the attack.

     The sales clerk looked up in disbelief and annoyance, “A fat woman pissed on me. How else would I be?”

     “Yeah, I see that,” Witherspoon acknowledged the sales clerk’s answer trying as hard as he could to fight the smell away from his nasal passages. “Would you say she acted out of line?”

     “Excuse me? Did I not say this clearly. I just got peed on by a very big lady,” The clerk yelled with an overly harsh tone.

     “She kinda looks like she belongs in the ocean but that doesn’t give you the right to insult her the way you just did,” Witherspoon put on a mask of seriousness as he snickered on the inside for being able to insult the woman and man both and get away with it.

     “Okay, do you want me to tell you what happened,” The sales clerk spoke in a stern harsh manner.

     Witherspoon pointed to his partner, “No I think you told enough to my partner here.” Witherspoon paused for a second thinking about the act itself, about an obese woman peeing in a cup and throwing it everywhere across the store and a young man like the sales clerk being fit enough to stop her. “Could I ask you one more question?” He spoke without waiting for a reply. “Why didn’t you stop Mrs. McAdams?”

     Stan blurted out a hypothesis of his, “I think they were in cahoots.”

     “Don’t just make up words Stan its childish,” Witherspoon smirked at his joke once more, he clenched his fist in amusement for how well he was on a roll this morning.

     “Now you cant say that I did this and blamed it on an old lady,” The sales clerk shouted in a spurt of anger.

     “I didn’t say it, you did,” Witherspoon raised his eyebrows with curiosity. “Stan another one for the back seat.” Stan smiled wide with a face full of bliss.

     “Behind your back,” Stan deepened his voice so that he could sound more menacing but he just sounded like he was trying to sing the blues.

     Witherspoon watched as Stan handcuffed the Sales Clerk and took him outside with the fat woman. He turned around in the deli and looked it over, to his surprise he actually accepted the haunting smell of piss. The deli felt peaceful with a diligent coarse rattle of progress and business. Age has dawned on the deli, the old now replaced with the new and hip forms of advertisement and attraction. Witherspoon made his way around the corner of the counter and into the back area where his eyes spotted a heads up penny. He wrangled a long musk filled deep breath and then bent over to pick up the penny, as he reached down something about him told him not to pick up the cent. His arm was outstretched hovering over the entirety of the penny but something within his chest whispered a request for him to leave it be. What little gain it was to own the penny in the first place but it just seemed odd to him to have such a force pushing him not to pick up the tiniest object.

     “Hey, what is it,” Stan peeked over the counter at Witherspoon crouching down.

     “Change, its always a change,” Witherspoon twisted his head up to look Stan in the eye. As soon as he saw Stan Witherspoon drooped his head in disappointment. “You do realize that counter is covered in human piss.”

     Stan paused as electricity sparkled throughout his nervous system, his hand along with his shirt where pressed flat up against the counter top. He bit his lower lip as like Velcro the shirt peeled off the counter, “I didn’t see it.”

     “You know my father once told me of a man who was blind. Now most folks kept saying he couldn’t see. Well of course he was blind. Well this old boy would always go to church with me and my family,” Witherspoon rose from his crouch making sure not to bump into anything within the Deli. “I’d always see him off behind the booth acting like he was reading the darn Bible. So one day this just baffled me to death so I asked my daddy why he acted like he could read the Bible. That’s when my daddy told me this. Once said a blind man cant see, but all I see is the blind man can see better then me.”

     “Wow, you really have a lot of stories from your childhood,” Stan said as his fingers wiped the sticky liquid from his grayish brown shirt.

     “Well Dunn that’s all that’s left for you to do when you get my age, tell stories,” Witherspoon’s gaze focused down into a chair.

     His glare alarmed Stan, “What is it?”

     “She broke the chair,” Witherspoon pointed towards a crack down the center of an aluminum lined chair with a plastic indent for a rump.

     









CHAPTER TWO.







UPSETTING



     Tranquil. The boarders of the room holding the student who’ll soon become a teacher was blessed with a second hand form of tranquility. Meditation held the salvation that molded his cerebral cortex into the proper concoction. The placid sanctuary of his salivated after each lesson learned. The drapes covering each window blew inward repulsed by the outside air as it tried to rekindle its own satisfaction once again. A flame formed upon the student’s nose and cheeks, charring the skin with knowledge of pain and suffering. His lesson’s for the days concluded themselves. Nothing more could be taught without refreshing the mind after a long sleep.



KNOCK, KNOCK.



     A deafening sound dominated the pleasant space within the room. The air molecules screamed in pain pleading for the Whole to do something about it. A frown conformed to the emotions will. His muscles joined together as a single unit and lifted his carcass off the domain of his and into the air’s area. I am sorry, damned his skin cells to the rest of his surroundings. His head thumped to the rhythm of his heart beat.



Thump.



     His hand evaluated the door’s sturdiness as it pried itself open with a solitary bound. No physical means swung the door open. A woman stood in the white seclusion huffing inward towards his hovel. Her eyes where soldered shut as her lips bobbed up and down unattached to any auditory sensations received. She wore a delicate fibered skirt with crimson all over it. Her hair danced around her scalp unaware of any wind transmitting a new generalized direction to be sought. His mouth shuddered up and down trying to reenact her motions.



     “Hey, your not looking to good. Sick? Well anyways I’m here for some stuff if you got any,” Her voice finally, after its side track, made its way into his eardrums.



Thump.

     

     The woman forced her way in barreling through his defenses. Her siege was enough to overthrow any kingdom. He whipped his body around loosing control in his legs or arms as they crashed into the walls and furniture. Bruises developed on his flesh instantly in a cautious demeaning way.

     

Thump.



     “Scott. This isn’t like you,” Her words fluttered about the room, He tried to dodge them but they were far to quick for him.



Thump.



     His mouth continued to bobble up and down as his cheek muscles rotated in opposite directions giving off a clumsy unstated aura.

     

     “I see your busy,” She tried to side step him and get to the door but no longer was he in a complete convulsion. His body had controlled itself for the time being and stood directly in her path.



Thump.

     

     “Blind…” A word escaped the snapping lips, his arms extended to each opposing side as his head tilted forward quivering. “Blind.”



Thump.



     His voice jetted out from his body as every muscle stiffened, “Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock.” Systematically his leg lunged forward and then drug his body closer. “Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock.” His eyes where completely blackened with rage from the interference of his relaxation. She could not control her self for long, but right now she kept her fear bottled inside by explaining to herself that this was all just an acid trip of his gone bad. “You will see.”







     Witherspoon fixed his eyes on a doorway, the door was swinging back and forth inviting his body in. He tasted the afternoon breeze on his tongue as he drank a gulp of dew down his esophagus. His mind reassured him, your not ready for this. His head dangled itself on the string he called a neck as he witnessed his right toes tapping the floor, he frowned as he stopped them. He raised what willpower he had and entered the door, all the while he heard Stan’s report coming in to his mind from not twenty minutes earlier.

     

     “Hey, we just got a call from Suzan about a postman who was delivering some mail. Well he knocked on the door of the house to get the owner to sign for some box delivered and the door just swung open, just knock, knock, knock and there goes the door right open. Well the postman then looked in and there was this dead body all mutilated and another one by it too.”

     

     Peering into the doorway Witherspoon witnessed what seemed like the remains of a young woman half way laying down and half way at a kneeling position. It was hard for Witherspoon to fully evaluate on the notion of only her lower half of her body was actually intact. Her organ’s had been played with and placed into a deliberate pattern across the floor of the room. Her right leg was bent towards her thigh as her left leg had been twisted around breaking every bone and ligament connected inside the tissue. Her upper torso sat upside down against the other wall as all her innards where aligned in a flower like array, her upper torso became a work of art, a flower pot.

     The other body was clearly another suicide with a puncture wound penetrating his upper mandible and exiting the back of his cranium. Chunks of his brain littered the area just in reach of his hair fibers. His eyes along with his tongue where missing completely, not in a sawed off or cut out fashion, they just weren’t present.

     Witherspoon swallowed a hunk of saliva as his eyes cried out with each new image ingraining itself into his pupil. He turned away when he saw the flower pot art. He didn’t turn because of the grotesque spectacle but because he knew another being did this. There was a person out in the world who’d do something this twisted to another human being. He scratched his elbow with his right index finger, he felt the end of his nail sinking deep into his leathery skin. His skin folded like paper, signs of old age. He nodded to himself for commanding Stan to check the perimeter instead of accompanying him into the house.

     Witherspoon lifted his right foot and proceeded into the room. The strong smell of sweat and blood coursed through his veins. He could feel his heart beat skipping a few times in his chest. It wasn’t use to what it’s seeing.

     His eyes wandered first to the woman’s carcass, the first nearest to the door. He noticed it didn’t seem like she had fought off a sexual encounter. Also he could tell by the direction she was laying that she had tried to leave the structure, meaning she had either been abducted or she must have been invited in. She knew him.

     Hearing no noise at all Witherspoon continued to probe the corpse. The legs he judged where the first to be attacked, the attacker crippled his prey first then dismantled her torso into two parts. He was aware that the blood trails along the floor from the lower split torso suggested that the upper torso was dragged along with the attacker dragging himself with it. This made no sense to Witherspoon, an attacker pushing his body up and over a woman cutting her in two then pushing the second half away while sliding his own body through her blood.

     With ease he determined that the attacker used the flower pot gag last, but the second body. Was he an accomplice or the attacker? Witherspoon pulled back his emotions and surveyed the next body. His eyes where missing, this suggested another presence. He nodded confirming his suspicion.

     Suddenly with no real reason behind it all a flashback to a previous suicide occurred. He remembered the woman who died without identification. She also had been missing some body parts.

     Hands and feet.

     A slight serine squeal rang out from the fissure of Witherspoon’s nostrils. His joints ached, his body serenaded him with an aged over his head silence. He heard the cascading soothed country breeze maneuver around the wafting door to the room, spill abroad the deceased unidentified woman and then flutter its way over to the finishing line, the boy’s dead body. He heard the silence of the country breeze blow against his skin whispering words of sincerity and failure as an option. It was there to comfort, to bring understood defeat.

     Witherspoon tilted his head to the ceiling of the room, coping with his fraying ego. A notice of blood splatter against the overhead boundary relinquished the temptation to leave the crime scene.

     Outside the building Witherspoon was confronted by Stan, “Well I checked the entire parameter, didn’t see much of anything.”

     “Not a track or a foot print,” Witherspoon pleaded in exhaustion.

     “No. Didn’t see one. Should I,” Stan asked with turmoil in his voice.

     Witherspoon ejected an un amused exhale through his nostrils, “Ugh, guess not.”

     “What did you find,” Stan swayed to his right to try to nab a sneak peek at the interior of the building.

     “A bloodbath,” Witherspoon slapped the sweat from his brow. “Boy must have cut his girlfriend in half then killed himself, but not before turning her into a flower pot.”

     Stan glanced quickly back at the door while fidgeting his feet about, “I don’t want to see this.”

     “I didn’t either,” Witherspoon wise cracked in order to flee his mind of the atrocity inside.

     “So what do we do know,” Stan questioned with absolute confusion.

     “Well,” A snort of air puffed out of Witherspoon. “As much as I hate to admit it this was a murder suicide. So I guess unless you want to go take a gander inside then were done. Just call in the boys,” Witherspoon became tied up in thought. “Don’t forget to tell them to look for some missing eyes.”

     Stan swallowed a stone of saliva, “Oh, you didn’t have to tell me that.”

     “Yeah Stan, I did,” Witherspoon gazed up at the sky. “We might come across them soon enough.”



















CHAPTER THREE.



     The clock ticked in a tock spoiling fascination.



     The walkway hovered above a chorus of hymns singing praise to the slug whose slow motioned drift exceeded all hopes and prayers. It was halted at a boarder, some boundary needing a special key. They key there of was hidden under tithes of silver and green. The slug offered the green color in shards of two as a velvet statue spit out the key granting guidance from above.



UNLOCK



     Inside the forbidden zone everything became infected with a dark plaster. A smudge of the plaster dripped against the only limelight present, the carpeted path. The red welcomed the traveling slug with sweet delicate messages against its body as it slithered past. Now came its biggest test, a black hole.

     

HOLE



     Foreboding the innards, the hole extracted screams from the past adventurers who’ve set foot inside. The slug refused to be intimidated and crept its body within the passageway. Hypnotizing the room with its rows of seats called out to the slug. A grunt eluded its way from the furthest darkest realm of the giant box as an unseen source of light created a bridge for the streams of rays to enter the hole. All displays of emotion where projected on to a pallet of pure white sand, under the right temperature the sand painted a new picture across its grain. Entrancing the sand mesmerized the audience, the slug.



HEAR

     

     Harmonizing with the new music rolling down the floorboards was a sound of pure immensely orchestrated melody, all configured to play precisely at the perfect tempo to appease the slug. The light dimmed some as the bridge broke under a weight surpassing its limit, the strands of rays fell down towards the slug illuminating it full of splendor. In this new light the slug could see the source of each sound creating the entrancing music. Surrounding the poor slug were faces lengthened by a stretching unseen force splitting the skin apart as the screams harmonized together beautifully. Red mucus spewed forth from each of their eye sockets and nasal passages, each one still writhing in elaborate song. The slug agreed and joined in laughing, having a splendid good time.



ANOTHER



     Another body sat inside the movie theatre, watching the show performed by the slug. This body possessed mismatching hands arms, its face unstructured and pieces of flesh missing completely. A smoldering smile of teeth enflamed and spoke from between the cracks of each florescent tooth.



     “Hmm… poor little child, a teenager, how sad. A slug not yet a snail. To fit in among the crowd. Fit in too well. I see as did you see that your gift did not expel much of an enlightenment for myself so thus your consolation prize was neither that compelling nor that much of a gift. Some people are generous and some are greedy. I am neither, I am also neither. Why would I need you to complete my goals when I’m completing my own. Through you. Your stature. Your flesh. You seem to be accepting luxury items that do not belong to you anymore, your body. Take them for granted please, I need more. Once you would not see, now you can never be.”

     It then rose up from its perch high in the upper rows of the movie theatre. A figure, man like in appearance yet nothing like a man at all. Its face appeared to be construed with un matched facial features. His lower mandible was a smooth textured skin which was attached to a upper jaw structure that had been tanned under numerous trips to the tanning salon. From there on his skin changes every few inches up creating a layered cake of flesh all hinged together with a pinched off melting technique. The same went for its body as well. One leg alone contained at least three different sets of feet, calves, and thighs. All the way up from the toes to the scalp the skin had been fused together by squeezing two unfamiliar tissue tightly together to form a lip, then using a flame or an extreme temperature burning the two, as a result, uniting the parties to materialize a unified democracy, one mobile figure.

     The mobile flesh fathomed itself a limp induced upright walking style. Its backbone extruded out from its upper shoulder region and constructed an impression of another being inside covering itself with a suit to tuck away it’s natural form. Clumsily the tissue mass collided with each stationary seat cushion. Each collision rocketing malicious loathing to spill from its mouth cavity. The liquid splashed against the floor like a brick just slopping there reeking with ammonia and hate. The stairs to get down the theatre posed no problem as when enveloped by the darkness the being evaporated from the scene.

     





























     In his car Witherspoon sat firmly staring out the drivers side window. His mind raced through the last crime scene revving its engine every time it came to a stand still. The sun was shinning down on the brightly lit desert and the narrow roadside. Quickly past his window sped a Mercedes, rare to see in these parts. Leaning to get a better look out the window Witherspoon witnessed the Mercedes pulling a “U” turn and heading back the way it came. This rarity pulled up slowly along side Witherspoon’s police vehicle. Sitting in the drivers seat was a well groomed woman around the age of twenty nine. Her perfume fragrance was strong enough to be smelt from Witherspoon’s settlement.

     “Excuse me, are you the sheriff in this town,” The woman cocked her head over at Witherspoon in an arrogant fashion.

     Witherspoon offered a gift of laughter her way as he enlightened her, “No mam.”

     The woman shook her head with a deliberate frustration, “Then are you the deputy?”

     “No mam, we don’t use words like Sheriff and Deputy. We try to practice equality here. We go by Police Officers,” Witherspoon used his hillbilly accent to strike down the woman who had not formally introduced herself.

     “Well by that wording it means you’ve got a retard on your payroll,” The woman snickered at her sarcastic remark.

     Witherspoon gave into the woman’s joke and played along, “You could say that.”

     “Well, I’m Miss Elizabeth Sanders and I’ve just moved here,” She extended her greeting through a delightful nod.

     “Well nice to meet you Elizabeth Sanders, I’m Jasper Witherspoon,” He replied sincerely with a smile added on in the end.

     “The industrial revolution hasn’t really hit this town of yours now has it Mr. Witherspoon,” She smiled back at him giving off a sneer.

     “Well were actually expecting a Dairy Queen to come into town not long from now,” Witherspoon relayed a bit of town information.

     “Really, a Dairy Queen is technology,” Her tone struck as extremely rude.

     Witherspoon stretched back his aged skin for a wide smile, “I’d like to think of technology as throwing rocks, sometimes she does seem to break a window.”

     “Oh my this is a Podunk town now isn’t it,” Her smile draped across her teeth as an insult.

     Looking every which way Witherspoon put up an act, “Well I don’t know but I think your in the wrong county.” He pointed down the road then second guessed himself and pointed down the other stretch the road took, “Couldn’t tell you where this Podunk is.” He put his hands up in the air with a giving up gesture.

     Miss Elizabeth Sanders gave a glare at Witherspoon that could melt butter, “Excuse me?”

     Officer Witherspoon smiled with zeal as he knew he was getting under her skin, “Oh no excuse me. My retard is about done with his piss so we’ll be off doing some actual police work soon enough. Thank you for your visit.”

     Miss Elizabeth Sanders drove off after a huff of air spewed from her chimneys. Stan galloped back to the passengers seat of the police vehicle where he rendezvoused with Witherspoon.

     “Who was that,” Stan questioned in a stream of concern.

     Witherspoon turned to Stan giving him a survey and making sure he looked the part he acted, “Oh just someone new moving in, had to welcome her to the town.”

     “Oh,” Stan’s head shook like he knew all along. “Does it ever seem to you that no matter what we do nothing can stop crime?” Stan started a conversation in order to pass the time away.

     “Well the way I like to think of it is that its like taking out the trash,” Witherspoon turned to Stan to make sure he was listening. “How many times do you take that thing outside?”

     “Lots.” Stan shook his head in compliance.

     “Well what would it be like if you didn’t take it out at all?” He offered a scenario for Stan to ponder on for a moment.

     Stan’s imagination sunk and shuttered into a previously composed situation, he watched his imaginary self walking bags of trash to a street corner every day without a single person clearing it away. The trash piled on top of itself becoming a massive skyscraper of garbage. Stan stared at it shaking his head no, he wasn’t going to clean that up, “It would just keep stacking up till I wouldn’t have anywhere to stack it.”

     “Well what might happen if we weren’t around to clear out the garbage, how many of these wacko’s would be roaming the streets.” From afar Witherspoon noticed a dust devil being created under the intense frying pan outside. The clouds have evaporated and the dew had disintegrated as well. No moisture was left on the country side except for any spit or blood that could be drawn.

     Stan chuckled with the thought of himself being a superhero protecting the poor and helpless. This idea could now on tickle the heart of him any time he felt depressed. Even though they work as police officers in a small town out in the country there are still instances where Stan questions why he does the law enforcement profession. He didn’t say it but deep down inside his heart he thanked his partner for giving him that piece of information and sense of accomplishment.

     Witherspoon squinted for a spoiled moment. He saw something he could not explain. The dust devil sped its funnel up over the roadside kicking up the dust and debris into the air manifesting a fog. Pressing softly against the rubber of the brake to ease the vehicle to a stand still confused Stan momentarily.

     Under the tremendous heat the wind could not keep up its friction and just collapsed with exhaustion dropping all the particles it held in its arms. With a clatter the rocks hit the floor like rain on a stormy day, one artifact that fell made a muffled thud. This object was the source of both Stand Dunn and his partner Witherspoon’s gaze.

     Without a word spoken between the two Witherspoon cracked his door open allowing the sea of desolate heat to conjure salted beads of sweat to arise from both person’s skin. Stepping out into the lava his sole of his shoe screamed in agony as it kneaded against the tar. His back strained itself rising up from the car, a sign of old age, but nothing a covertly placed bite of the lip couldn’t fix. Fully erect in the middle of the street staring down the road at his questioning desire he realized if this is exactly what he believed it was then his job was bout to get a lot more exciting. His thoughts echoed throughout his mind like he screamed inside an hour glass bouncing each syllable from wall to wall. As his footsteps chimed a bell of achievement in his ears, his heart imploded asking for this not to be true.

     Witherspoon stood gawking at a shoe in the middle of the road.

     “What is it?” Stan crept up behind Witherspoon.

     “Does this look familiar to you?” Witherspoon twisted his body in away to reveal the shoe to Stan.

     Stan shook his head no real quick in minor intervals.

     “It matches that suicide not to long ago,” Witherspoon stared at the shoe with thoughts rampaging through his membrane’s fibers till caught entirely in a snare, so he could probe the idea in a more intimate technique. “The girl who had no feet.”

     “Oh, do. Do you think that means she lost her foot out here?” Stan turned about remaining on the cautious boarder.

     “No,” He turned to Stan as he placed his hands on his knees and stood up. “Why does it seem that everyone whose died lately has been unidentifiable or else the people who could identify the deceased dies along with them?”

     Stan probed the area like a monster hid prowling the area waiting to strike at any moment.

     Witherspoon spoke to himself while staring down the road, which proceeded on till a normal man’s eye can see. “ These are not general nobody suicides, someone or some people are making sure that these people are wiped away completely. We have bodies, we have bodies that have no name next to them and no way to verify that they even existed.” A smooth heat induced exhale vented outward into the fevered acid. “This is a small town. Everyone knows everyone else. If one of those people go missing, you know about it. Even if they die… you know.”

     Stan didn’t know how to react. His arms shot to his sides as he were about to have a shoot out with an unseen figure. Stan’s thoughts went straight to his wife, how they first met: He remembered the sensation of being nervous enough to drop the flowers he bought her, she lived across the street from him all his life but he never made a move or even said hi. Her family when she was at the age of twenty one decided they were going to move away and take her with, it was Stan’s last chance to ask her out or even speak to her. He couldn’t let something he coveted so much go without even saying a word, so he set up a date in which he would tell her how much he felt. Of course Stan showed his true clumsy nature right off the first breath but to her it was romantic and charming. Her folks still moved away but she stayed any way she could, they’ve been together ever since. This was Stan’s only will in life, to keep her happy and safe. Now that someone might jeopardize the sanctuary of his guard sent tears swelling beneath his swollen eyelids. If the heat hadn’t have been so intense the tears would have run over the bridge but none made it past that marker.

     Witherspoon noticed Stan’s whimsical pain of confusion, “No, Everything is fine. There’s no reason to worry. We wouldn’t even be knowing what to worry about, if we were to worry. Lets get back to the station and see if Muriel has anything for us.”

     The entire drive back to the station was different, something Witherspoon has never seen before. Stan didn’t say a word, he sat straight up surveying the land, on alert for anything that might pose as out of the ordinary.

     Witherspoon’s hand trembled a bit at the steering wheel. Just a tremor, he has them from time to time. Another marking he has put down displaying his age. He’s never wanted to be old. From the get go in life he decided to be as dangerous as possible so he’d go out with a bang and never reach feeble. Only scratching the surface of the fifty age boundary he already foreshadowed the harsh older years to come.

     Pulling up into the parking lot of the police building which was a trailer with the words POLICE on the side of it. A smooth film of dust puffed out into the sky as the police vehicle rolled to a stop. In a ritualistic fashion Witherspoon left his car and made it inside as quick as he possible could. This ritual was from his rookie years, but continued over so that he can continue feeling his youth regenerating itself in front of his eyes for even just a moment.

     As soon as Witherspoon entered the trailer his hat came off and hung on a manikin that stood beside the entry. Stan followed in adjusting his belt as if he had just wrangled a perpetrator.

     Witherspoon acknowledged Muriel who sat in directly in front of the entry with a tiny self proclaimed desk, “How are you today Muriel?”

     Answering with a high pitched almost yelling tone, “You know I just cant keep doing this every single day!”

     Witherspoon smiled in annoyance but he didn’t show it, “Ah you say that every single day now for six years Muriel. I think its time for you to get a better greeting.”

     “No, no, no, this time I mean it. There’s no work here, I’m seriously gaining weight. I don’t like it!” Muriel twisted her head about in frustration while Stan and Witherspoon chuckled a bit because Muriel was an overweight sixty year old woman who would be sitting in her house doing her needle point right now if it wasn’t for her sitting in the police trailer at the front desk doing needle point.

     “Your keeping up hard work Muriel. There should be no reason why you have any reason to complain,” Witherspoon shadowed an insult through his comment.

     Stan like always crept back out of sight and watched mommy and daddy fight. To him these two were his un biological parents. Like always Stan’s tongue whipped back and forth according to whose wielding the mace of verbal attack. Stan rooted for his partner Witherspoon with every bone in his body.

     Muriel spoke with a vibration that rippled through her body fat in waves, “You’ll see one day you’ll come back to the station and there I am walked out that door. I will go home and never leave that house again. You couldn’t find another person to do this job, you couldn’t.”

     The truth was everyone in the town understood the laid back nature of the job.

     “Muriel the day you can fit through that door without a push from Stan and I is the day I’ll hire someone else to sit all day long and get paid,” Witherspoon pulled out a good line from his hat of insults.

     Muriel shifted her flab to the right side of the chair, “Go ahead keep up your jokes. I was skinny as can be before this job. You and huckleberry over there don’t ever appreciate anything I do in this station.”

     “I don’t ever get your bickering Muriel. You show up at noon and then we close at five. You basically sit here for the afternoon doing needle point as Sherry calls to tell you who she’s just slept with in the town. And damn it I swear that woman is like a virus, almost everyone in the town’s caught it I don’t care what your age.” Witherspoon glanced over at Stan who leaned against the nearest wall shaking his head in agreement, “Sometimes I fear for the children in this town. We might have to arrest her for going after them next.”

     Muriel planted her foot firmly as she backed her friend, “She’s a very lonely woman.”

     Witherspoon enjoyed hearing Muriel’s response cause it caused a snicker to escape, “I don’t know how lonely she really is.” Muriel closed her mouth not able to say anything back. “Well she is a looker. You know I might give her a call one day she’s only about… what forty… ish? Well no, I don’t think I’d have it in me. From what I heard I think she might break these old bones.”

     Muriel’s face burned with a bright red coil across her cheeks. She had the appearance of a little red balloon held down by a boulder. Under a lowering of her head she slid a note closer to Witherspoon.

     “What’s this?” Witherspoon took the note with curiosity and read it aloud. “Bubba Thompson down at the theatre closed up for the day not letting anyone in.” He put the note down to his side and looked at Muriel with a squint. “You want us to check this out? He has a right to close up whenever he wants.”

     “I wanted to see a movie tonight with my nieces,” Muriel’s eyes rolled in their sockets making her seem like a whack-a-mole.

     Witherspoon’s eyebrows rose up in compliance. “Alright,” He turned his focus to Stan who became eager for something to do. “Lets check it out.”

     They drove to Bubba Thompson’s house-

     The house glowed under the constant radiance of the sun, not helping that the color of the paint was a dull yellow. Each window clearly covered in cheap store bought tinfoil and in an attempt to make the home more welcoming there planted along the walkway to the front entry was malnutrition stoned shrubbery. An archway of cheap fiberglass tinted plastic sparked the start of the walkway to get to the front door.

     Both Stan and Witherspoon journeyed down the maze of store bought stepping stones until their shoes scrapped against the three foot by four foot welcoming mat. Witherspoon pressed his lips tight to form a slight frown as his knuckles drummed a rhythm against the aluminum coating of the door.

     Inside the one story house and through the thin walls echoed the sound of an irritated young man dropping a remote and thundering his feet over to the door. With a forceful jerk of the doorknob the door flew open revealing a pot bellied red neck who was unshaven and wore a fancy unbuttoned three piece suit. Bubba Thompson stood in the doorway gazing upon the two police officials on his doorstep.

     Bubba squinted from the annoying rays of the desert sun, “What can I do for you officers?”

     Witherspoon smelt the beer on Bubba’s breath as he flinched from it, “Sorry for the interruption Bubba. How’s your father been lately?”

     Bubba’s annoyance turned to sorrow and solitude in an instant, “Oh, not to good. He’s got to go to the city and get one of those…” His fingers twitched as he demonstrated a pinching of his belly. “Things where they cut stuff out of you. You know for the cancer and all.”

     Stan bore witness to the both of them conversing back and forth as his keen eyes realized that the wrinkles affecting Witherspoon’s face and the same plaguing Bubba’s were almost identical. Bubba was years behind Witherspoon in age. Stan could see that Bubba at the rate he was heading would become a very homely looking man.

     “Has everything been going well for you at the theatre, since you had to take over for your dad and all.” Witherspoon paraded into interrogative conversation with using normal everyday tactics.

     “Well, yeah um. We’ve been doin good,” Bubba’s eyes wandered about his eye sockets hinting a fabrication of the truth.

     “Yeah. Well Muriel down at the station told us you had closed up today. I hear that upset some people, including Muriel. Some folks only entertainment is that theatre,” Witherspoon nodded freely with his words.

     “Well, I dunno. I had plans so I decided to close it for the day. Its mine ya know so I can do with it as I please,” Bubba’s eyes told the story even though his words led nowhere.

     Witherspoon sunk back into being a police official once again, “Have you been in your theatre today Bubba?”

     Bubba stuttered as his mind raced through the dimensions of possible answers, “Yeah.”

     Witherspoon’s mind smiled as he drove Bubba directly where he wanted him, “When?”

     “Ten or so.”

     Witherspoon turned to Stan acting shocked. “Ten… well that was about five maybe six hours ago Bubba. Don’t chu know that there could be people in there right now vandalizing your precious theatre right as we speak.”

     Bubba’s face quivered in lost thought, “I just come back from there.”

     “If you want we can head up there and just check everywhere drive all of them hooligans out if there are any,” Witherspoon motioned towards his partner including him so that his presence will be noticed.

     Bubba’s head sailed upwards in a worried swell.

     “What’s goin on Bubba?” Stan rushed in with the question before Bubba could speak.

     “If I tell you, you promise not to tell nobody?” Witherspoon and Stan crossed glances as Bubba pleaded.

     Witherspoon rested both his hands on the lip of his belt, “Bubba were the police, there’s no place else to tell.”

     Bubba’s head drooped below his collar bone as he clung to the door, “I um found this person in my uh theater, you see. It was this girl and she… well she had um cut her self in the theatre. And she’s dead now. I uh found her body just off in the morning and that was when I closed. Before you go on a judging me Jasper, I want you to know if folks find out they wont want to go anymore. They’ll be afraid. Everyone knows about ghosts.”

     Witherspoon stared with an overpowering glare of authority into the top end of Bubba Thompson’s head, “Where is she now Bubba?”

     Bubba’s head remained drooped as he opened the door a few more cracks revealing a blood trail leading down a hall, right next to the trail was a bucket full of shampoo and soap. His left hand that held the door dropped in a flutter of quakes. He was afraid of the consequences for what he’s done.

     Without and invite or even a word Witherspoon accompanied by his partner Dunn proceeded into the living quarters of Bubba’s house as their vision had been caught by the blood without a signal of release. Radiating the truth, the blood trail showed that a heavy object was drug down the length of the hall.

     Creeping around the corner Witherspoon’s eyes rested upon a frame of unspeakable acts. He saw a mouth gaping open out of a clothes hamper as feet jetted up out accompanying the head and according to the other appendages that were suppose to be attached, her arms were placed in an “X” behind her back.

     Witherspoon’s eyes and heart submerged itself into the floorboards below his feet. Her body was mangled and twisted in ways that reveal strong affiliations from Bubba towards the corps. Stan slumped forward gawking at the dead body’s poise. Blood drizzled from the plastic rim of the white clothes hamper. The white caused the blood to seem illuminecent and glossy.

     “What did you do to her Bubba?” Witherspoon whispered knowing that through the opaque silence all mechanized thoughts can be predicted and understood.

     Bubba moved in rigid quirks as he spoke, “Nothin, the clothes she’s where she had when I found her. I didn’t know what to do. I guess I musta freaked out and tried to dispose of her. No one will know who she was. She has no I.D. and her teeth were all filed down to nothing.”

     “If she was born into this world, then she has a family Bubba. Someone cares for her. There’s always someone who does,” A strained breath exhaled from Witherspoon’s chest cavity. “What did you do to her Bubba?”

     Bubba’s fingers twiddled between his palms, Stan witnessed this at the same time placed his right hand on the holster of his gun. Fear tickled the hair fibers bristling out across his entire canvas. Stan’s wrist trembled close to the gun as his mind begged not to have to use it.

     “This is a desert Jasper, Stan, you know what its like. Women don’t grow on trees. It was a mistake. I couldn’t help it.” Bubba’s body wilted into a soggy ashamed hunk of flesh. “I… no one will know about this will they?”

     Witherspoon couldn’t resist, his eyes burned a fire in the floor with the force he put on them to not look at Bubba in the face. “No. Bubba they wont, but you will have to come with us.”

     Bubba’s initial reaction to Witherspoon’s words was a wild frantic flailing, anything to not go to jail, anything to hid his crime. Startling Stan Dunn, Bubba lay against the floor bleeding from a belly wound, a gun shot. Stan’s arm was stiffly erect and pointed directly at the antagonist, Bubba. Witherspoon noticed a change in Stan, since earlier with the shoe Stan has matured from his pampered hillbilly background and reformed his mentality to fit his police lifestyle. This was the first time his gun has ever left his belt, his motions and the usage of his weapon could rival professionals.

     Bubba allowed the blood to spill from his belly, pleaded for it to escape as quick as it could. Bubba tried to die, begged his body to die, his heart to pump all the life force and essence from his busted seam. Bubba wanted to die, wished for it.

     Bubba will survive-





















































































CHAPTER FOUR.







     The police vehicle was parked out in the driveway of a newly developed building, the only doctor in the town. Stan sat alone in the passengers seat staring off into the worsening weather. His vision was crippled by the image of Bubba’s stomach erupting into a hole as his essence spilt across the surrounding blankets of white among Stan’s mind’s wall. He didn’t move, he just watched as his mind tucked the dieing image of Bubba in keeping it forever to haunt his memories.      

     Outside the clouds rumbled inward with the pushed force of growing moisture. The sun crept to the point of a slight opened wink of dusk, manipulating the senses causing the storm to transform itself into a lurking monster high above the peasants it stalks. The gentle breeze of the country side mopped up the land with dewy kisses.

     Witherspoon exited the doctor’s house and hurried his way to the drivers seat of the vehicle. Once inside his body settled down with the dry heat comforting his chills. His head did not turn towards his partner at all. He understood the way Stan felt, this was his first time ever using his gun. Now he knows the extent of the damage a gun could perform, it shatters the very fabric of worlds surrounding the glass just destroyed.

     Witherspoon drilled deep into the oil of his past finding one that could nurture Stan Dunn’s wounds, “I’ve told you all my stories throughout the years. Well, here’s one I don’t ever tell to anyone. Back in the years of my teens I was one of those hunting nuts. I just couldn’t go a week without enjoying the pan fried eggs over an open fire while me and my pop just sat around waiting to kill us supper. It was a primitive lifestyle, kill or be killed, just survive. I enjoyed it, cause I was good at it… but there. There was this one time when I felt invincible holding my rifle in my right hand and just started picking off whatever little critters I could find. I got myself a whole kinfolk feast. Then there was this one a grand looking boar. This was a mighty looking beast, it scared me. I knew if it were ever me with my rifle versus him I’d stand a chance. I don’t know what it was that made me hold my fire and not take its life, cause that’s what I was doing, taking lives. I didn’t know better. Both our eyes met, but that was it. He scurried away. My heart was beating fast in my heart, I didn’t know why. So being a child at heart I decided to head over for a swimming break down near the stream we would always hunt by. When I was done I headed up back to camp to meet up with my dad to see what he had killed. When I got back to the camp everything we had set up was a mess. Blood was everywhere. I didn’t see my dad till I started off into the woods a bit following the trail. That’s when I came across the same boar and my dad. The boar had ripped my dad’s abdomen open, the last memory of my dad was him holding his intestines in his hands. The boar’s eyes and mine connected one last time and with that I understood something, his intentions where like mine, he wanted to just kill, and kill without mercy. If I hadn’t been killing all the animals maybe he wouldn’t have killed my Pa. But then goes the opposite, if I had pulled the trigger killing the boar, then my father would have lived. It took me years to understand this but, there was not right answer. This was just its nature, it was evil, you cant predict it, it comes upon you like a storm in the desert. The only thing we can ever do is stay prepared for it. I believe today you were prepared for it. You might feel bad now, but there could be a little one speaking the same now as I am about their daddy who didn’t shoot. You did right. You did what you could.”

     Knowing that Stan’s mind focused now on his wife and the positive aspect of the situation Witherspoon drove Stan home to be with her. Witherspoon understood the kind of comfort only a loved one could offer. Without saying it verbally Stan thanked Witherspoon once again. He nodded from his perch in the drivers seat as Stan Dunn walked pensively to his doorstep. He will be fine, Witherspoon drained his thoughts into his hand.

     The storm above struck with force as a crack of lightning wound up hitting the conductive vehicle of Witherspoon’s. A startling jolt erupted through his nerves as he slowly pulled his car over recuperating. The rain busted against the windshield like bricks on pavement. The moisture from the storm caused the windows across the interior to fog up in seconds. Witherspoon sat there with his head sinking into the fathoms of the past. In a colorless erosion he watched the cars dashboard dissipate and directly ahead of him stood the ancestors of his whom have passed on.

     He saw his father, looking well groomed and properly dressed for a formal party or ballroom get together, standing beside his father was his feeble minded grandfather. His grandfather slumped forward in his wheelchair as the rain poured across his fabricated body, he was without clothes and lost, lonely. His eyes where blackened with the sensation of a marker had just blotched out his corneas. He knew that this image wasn’t his grandfather but of him years down the road. Alone, lost, and feeble.

     Another strike of lightning snapped Witherspoon back into reality as the light illuminated the stormy exterior with snapping flashes. Through the moisture condensed fog and through the bombing rain his eyes stained itself with the image of a dark figure limping away down the street towards the town hall. The figure seemed to have more appendages then the extremity of a normal human being and limped like a wounded animal.

     In a flash, like how it was born, it had left the sights of Witherspoon. Because of the sudden loss of his discovery all his rational thinking told him that nothing existed, his eyes were playing tricks on him, they’ve grown good at that. Witherspoon’s head bent to a hunched over pose recovering from the sensation of an elderly life.

     His words exited his mouth to tell the world and all that’s in it a message so that nothing could be misconstrued later, “Time to go home.”





































     Stan laid in a cricketing exile from his surroundings. His bed. Calm and comforting. The lightning outside the storm windows danced in a symphony of orchestrated rumbles and groans. Stan’s blankets where not his anymore but his wife’s as she hogged them completely, but this wasn’t a worry for Stan. He seemed to enjoy the soft drips of cold sweating over his fleshed surface. This was his very own escape from any pain or sorrow the day could release.

     His right arm was positioned directly behind his head to ease it up into a more slanted angle instead of horizontal. This had always been his thinking pose. Unlike normal census, his thoughts contained detailed probes into the lurking memories of his instead of plain shapes and colors detailing a fractured subconscious. He sifted through detailed visual bliss of his, any orbiting thought that stimulated a joyous content.

     Like a train straight through country and continent, it tore through each membrane shielding his destination. The train slowed, the echoing rhythm of the whistle and the draining rotation of the wheels bound into Stan. I’m here, his voice reverberated across the hollows of the subconscious. First his right foot then his left until his feet pulled his mind’s eye into a new room, a dream. A dream of a time not his, never his. He was in the forest, a haze had fell upon the surrounding trees and shrubbery, but normality questioned the dream, the colors where not present. Trees were suppose to be mixtures of brown and green but except they were mixtures of grays and blacks. The grass and bushes along with the platform that was the Earth were all stained acid brown. His brain became curious to this unknown place. A moan scratched itself across the new canvas. From between two sheltered colorless bushes a massive boar crept in full illuminated gold lining. The two connected through a taming glare, as the boar sat. He realized no matter what he wanted it to do it would perform for its master. His mind molded the thought of the boar smiling, and as the thought pulled a suggestive smirk across its cheeks. It was happy for some reason. Fear choked the chest of Stan’s with ferocious hatred, whose manipulating who? Beside the over grown creature a body lay, he need not see the face to know whom lay at the foot of the beast. All his mind could do was focus on the boar, the monster at hand, it limped a bit closer.

     “I’m sorry,” Every bit of Stan’s body begged the surrounding dreamscape. “I’m so sorry.”

     A tear peeked out from a swollen cluster of flesh formed around a duct tightly sealed. His body, consciousness, lay awake staring directly into the captivating abyss of the ceiling above. None of the exotic surroundings, just him beside his loving wife laying prone to his left elbow. His eyes never disconnected from the piping glare his eyes built. He felt his heart and his chest cavity fading away from existence. As if the chemical makeup of his body transgressed into a pebble like substance and just blew away hand in hand with the wind. His face turned itself into an iron as steam hissed from his sweat glands. All of his body soaked into the fabric, he was no longer his former self anymore but a part of his bed sheets.

     “Who am I,” A sliver of the tongue jetted out an exhausted question. Stan could watch this question travel upward into the ceiling then fall right back down till it hit its start and there it will as well finish.

     From somewhere unseen in the darkness saturated room a sound crackled into the ears of Stan Dunn. “Who wants to know. It was a secret.”

      A dampened sloshing probed around the room in a steady pace. His ears erect and convulsive in nervous fever.

     “Whose there?” Stan whispered into the air.

     Nothing.

     The solitude was stifled by the presence of the complete trance. Stan waited now battling with is mind for sanity. Was he still asleep or truly awake, did he in fact hear a voice or was it all in his head? A profound headache etched its way from Stan’s skull, he was on fire with torment inside his mind. His sanity was losing the war.

     “No God.” A sound jetted from the furthest point of the room.

     A surprised Stan leaned up from his laid position. “Get the hell out of my house!”

     The darkness propelled a sensation of restless annoyance into his cerebellum. He was alone, having both a dream and a nightmare together. His head twisted back and forth telling the brain to cope with the situation. Nothing was here, his wife was safe, all was and will always be okay.



     “Don’t worry. Were all suppose to die one day and this is going to be my time. Forgive me for my choice brother, but I love you. I will always love you. Some choose their fates and die happy, others die alone, it’s the way of the world. And with this I must leave your side, goodbye.”

     These words haunted Witherspoon’s dreams as he slept in a thirst quenched slumber. These were the same words that continually loomed over his head every single night. His brother told him these simple words. Words that were far more meaningful then an eight year olds comprehension. To Witherspoon he never felt that it was his brother’s choice to die but someone else’s. This has always given him grief to think of it in an unmotivated puppeteer fashion. He loved his brother, his brother was his best friend. He was only six at the time of his brother’s death, but no matter what his age it still hurt just the same. Because the way he figured was his brother chose the first method of dieing happy and in his choice, and now he himself is choosing the other, to die alone.

     A heavy sigh shrieked its way from out Witherspoon’s breath. “Its getting late, why wont you sleep.” He muttered to himself.

     Witherspoon’s face offered a stern nod, this was his habitual ritual every night, fight with his past woes then excrete a sense of disappointment as his body calls in for a towel, giving up.



     What was here? Did it breathe? Was a pulse stuck to it? Was it maybe just an old man making up a masked evil character? What is being senile like? Am I going crazy? How is a world like this, one that gives birth to such innocence, spoiled with the darkness of a select few. All that’s ever heard on television or on the radio is killing and murder. Why cant someone comment on Mrs. Jefferson’s beautiful rose garden or give a medal to the boy scout who rescued a dieing horse a few years back. The boy wasn’t even important enough to have a name. That’s how this world is coming. Its picking at you, scratch by scratch. Teaching you to think how it tells and obey its every command. Three people. Three young people. All found dead in a matter of days. Same kind of death, same peculiar absence. I really don’t get it. Ah, again, here inside my head, there’s that damn dog. He has a limp, I did it. His pain is mine, I am the catalyst to all his woes. On a normal day I don’t think I’d know the word catalyst. Some how in your mind you know everything, but know nothing. He isn’t in a dream or even a figment, he is just there. His little head turning about to see if any other beings are present, the feet scurrying along at a half speed mustered out of sore bruised muscles. It was a constant pain, even though I had stopped beating on the poor pup it still had to deal with the pain of walking, the pain never went away. Never taking a vacation at all. I want to say I’m sorry but its dead. Long gone now. But I, I’ve grown like the dog, constantly in pain, hurting with the whip of age. It did stop. When he died. As he was, I will be.



     Witherspoon spun one last churn of thoughts through his head as he finally drifted off. The dust in the room settled, the crickets chirped with ease. The night withered comfortably molding the man into a piece. All was calm, all inviting. Goodnight.



     With a hefty squeeze Witherspoon suffocated what little air was left under his eyelids while him and Stan Dunn listened to a rambunctious Suzan Harley. Stan and Witherspoon stood whimsically in the center of Suzan’s living room where she said she saw the perpetrator. Her arms wobbled about her body with frantic enthusiasm.

     Suzan Harley was a stout woman whose been creeping up on the age of fifty, she wore a nightgown with ducks across the bosom. Her hair was bowed up into a bun and her legs which showed far more then wanted were covered in black knotted hair.

     Her house was fairly large for the part of town she resided in, a two story, four bedroom, two bathroom building. Her living room seemed as if a tornado of filth had settled directly in the center of her house and spun around for days destroying what was left of a halfway decent household.

     “I tell ya now, I wont tell ya again. This house, uh, I cant stand it. The spooks and the specters. That’s it. That is it!” Her hands attacked the neighboring space of Witherspoon’s and Stan’s. “I saw him, I saw him this time. I noticed on television that there are three different kinds of spooks that show up in a house. My house. One which was this un. This one was one of those shadow people, you know what people call shadow people. The black things that come out of the ground looking like people but their a kind of ghoul. Another which showed up about a week ago was a white spook who just kinda stayed residual, I learned that word in the dictionary meaning repetitive.”

     Witherspoon raised his hand to acknowledge Suzan to stop her blabbering so he could put in a few words.

     Suzan bounded right in to defend herself before Witherspoon had a chance to put up any guard, “Now listen up there is one left, the third type. A spirit, its like a sphere in the sky, they call them orbs. They being the television people. Orbs are just suppose to be a ball of energy but I’m not to sure what energy is inside of them, not my electricity I hope. You better, if its stealing money from me because its using up my electricity that you arrest it and take it in cause this is harassing me beyond the grave, and that’s not Christian.”

     “Now you know Suzan without proper evidence of it stealing your electricity I cant take it into custody.” Witherspoon mocked her with a sarcastic charm.

     “Don’t do that to me, I know you know I don’t like to be made fun of.” Her finger stuck out like she was about to sword fight him. “This one spook this time tried to be a little girl, but last time it was a deep voice. I recorded it and made sure I had a copy of its voice, that’s called an EVP Electric Voice Phenomenon. Yes sir I know my stuff when it comes to spooks. You should pass it on to your kin, the world needs to know.”

     Witherspoon sputtered a joke, “Now how do you know this ghost here wasn’t trying to pretend she was a little girl to get closer to you?”

     A surge of fright enclosed Suzan’s face, “Oh don’t you talk like that Sheriff, Oh don’t you do it. That’s just scary as hell. Why’d it try to get closer to me by using a little un’s voice?”

     Witherspoon’s hands went up defensively as Stan fidgeted a bit uneasy, “Now I didn’t mean it like that, and remember there is no Sheriff, we are police officials now.”

     Suzan’s head encircled her neck, “I could give a rats ass what you are now Sheriff, I just want my home to myself. And if this thing is pretending to be something that its not, then damn it, damn him, and damn you, I want it to go away.”

     Witherspoon’s eyelids felt as though they were in the way of his eyes, their heavy weight bore down on the facial muscles making it a burden to hold them up. His hands retracted to his hips and pressed down firmly to symbolize an in depth thought process beginning.

      The surroundings slipped a subtle hint into the ears of Stan Dunn, “Why don’t you just tell the spirit you want your house back?”

     The concept outstanding enough took a hold of Suzan and wrestled all strain from her mind, “You know what, your not as dumb as you are made out to be here. You actually made good sense. I like it, I think that will work. Tell the damn thing that this is my house, get the hell out!”

     Her chuckles splattered a proud smile across Witherspoon’s cheeks, he nodded approvingly at Stan who granted a similar gesture back towards his partner. Stan rarely overthrows Witherspoon but when he does it always seems to be a unpredictable to his characteristics move. These nuances in his partner seemed to tickle Witherspoon every time they rear their intelligence.

     Suzan stared deep into Stan’s eyes profoundly entranced, “I always tell myself, Suzan you’ve got a gift and so no matter who thinks it you should always share. Give the world a taste of your greatness young one do it for the poor souls who need it.” Her eyes laced into the threads of Stan’s stare as she climbed her way towards his face. Her face came within inches of Stan as she halted in a vibration induced stance. “She will run, you need to save her. This is all a mistake, a mistake till you take your rights as a lover and exceed them to the tip of your happiness.”































     “Jas, what do you suppose she meant by me doing a mistake?” Stan questioned as him and Witherspoon drove back towards the station.

     “Sometimes Stan you’ll realize that people that age aren’t fully in their mind anymore, but more on the outside of it looking in. Its like trying to look into your house through a window, you can see what’s inside but you cant see all of it. And nothing ever like how you remember.” Witherspoon injected his knowledge into Stan’s veins.

     “Do you believe that the supernatural is real?” Stan stared off away from Witherspoon feeling down right embarrassed to bring up the topic.

     Witherspoon turned his head to connect emotionally with Stan’s brainwaves, “I believe we’ll never know.”

     “Never know what?”

     “Well, you have to take it in doses. Have you ever seen wind? You know its there but do you know it really exists?” Witherspoon’s eyes offered comfort to Stan.

     “So you do believe in the supernatural?” Stan questioned.

     “Nope didn’t say that, I believe you just never know.” Witherspoon smiled knowing his words were clever and over Stan’s head.

     Stan stared dumbfounded, “Who raised you to think like that?”

     “My mama. She was pretty strict, we’d disobey and she’d just paddle our ass with a frying pan,” Witherspoon laughed. “It would just tickle her to death. Never did see my father talk back to that woman. I guess he was afraid of the same treatment. Ah, yep. You just don’t hear about good old family values like she did teach.”

     Stan smiled wide, but through his teeth leaked a worry that he could never control.

     





















     “Whispers in silence spill forth the shades of time. Congratulations my next follower. On this day when you need your brothers and sisters to care, neither can, but I will. I will care if you care for me. This sound escape into my dreamscape reality will be rest assured in your minds cavity. Trust me. Believe in me. Give up your past essence and suppress them inside a hollowed captive hull made of skin. You are nothing, until your something with me. I need you, collective. My collection. I need you to obey your master, I do have a plan for you, this plan rivals the plan of humanity by leaps and bounds. Rest your head, on this day, but I’ll be right here. Plan for me, your time is dwindling, if you follow me your time will be set in stone, forever remembered. Hope and pray, pray, just keep doing these actions or else you can know, know it will happen, and work. Know me instead of pray for me, ask me, never, you follow. This comes once in a life time. Right now it goes to you, you are welcome. Right now just listen to my words and here you will have it all. Love it all. Keep it all.”









     The rest of the drive fumbled around on a leg of unspoken breath. Both unsoundly agreed that any verbal communication was clearly not needed to understand that the day is over.

     In a clear flawless gesture of good will Stan turned to Witherspoon as he pulled up into Stan’s driveway. “Would you like to come in for some coffee?”

     The offer always struck the right chord with Witherspoon even though it was a ritualistic offering every day from Stan. It always helped Witherspoon make it through the remainder of the night. The offering seemed to keep the forsaken memories of the past at bay.

     “No I’m pretty sure your wife wouldn’t want any company, it is getting late.” Witherspoon replied to Stan’s offer.

     “Oh no she’s always asking if you want to come on in, she really likes your company.” Stan added with enthusiasm.

     “She’s a nice girl Stan.”

     “Yeah,” Stan lowered his jaw about to continue.

     “Did she make any of her home made cookies at all this week? God I love those.” Witherspoon stared off.

     “Yeah… no she didn’t this week. But she always makes them good.” Stan nodded knowing that this was small talk.

     Witherspoon focused his attention on the steering wheel for no direct reason, his mind wandered and so did his senses. Once Stan finished speaking Witherspoon snapped back into his normal self with a quick jerk of the neck.

     “I’m sorry, who?”

     Stan squinted with a head ache, his cheeks quivered suddenly as if he were struggling with something.

     Witherspoon caught a glimpse of Stan’s frustration. “Stan…” Witherspoon breathed in cautiously surveying the situation. “Who where you talking about?”

     Stan’s face started to burn, the red color stained his flesh. “I…”

     “What is her name Stan?”

     A wild chill shouted through Stan’s body giving him a vibration of deep seclusion, his consciousness strayed from his mind’s eye, lost. Quickly in a ferocious explosion of anger Stan cracked his fingers against the chrome of the handle and escaped the vehicle. In a blink of an eye Stan was gone.



     









































CHAPTER FIVE.









     Musky hatred-

     Smoldering among the four walls of the bedroom was a thick encasing of vomit. Sitting among the vomit and the mucus was a clean shirt, washed and untouched. The air was a thick mildew cloud entangling everything within its clutches.

     A pair of nasal passages belonging to Officer Witherspoon vacuumed up the coagulated disease of disgust and revolting digested food. A wisp of oxygen and carbon dioxide unleashed itself from a puddle of depression filled lungs. The inside illuminated itself a lime green as the passing headlights gleamed through the vomit glazed window panes.

     Outside the household a night of loathing screamed its presence as heavy pressure beat down on the spines of the town’s residents. The essence of the night churned in an unsocial goop of frost. The stars invoked in the night stared down at Stan Dunn’s household as time lapsed minute by minute instead of second by second.

     Witherspoon in a dreary masked state exited the doorway into Stan’s former sanctuary. The night air suggested a theory with tithes of filtered oxygen. Witherspoon’s aged caliced hand stroked his leathery neck as his mind ravished the thoughts coursing through his electrical impulses. STOP, his body commanded as his teeth sunk into the inward folded flesh from his lower lip. He felt the vibration of tooth smacking against tooth as his skin peeled back allowing access to blood and pain.

     Directly across from Witherspoon was a Chevrolet pick up truck completely blasted apart by shotgun slugs. The white painted metal was bent inward revealing the completely tortured interior. Leathered seats were split in two and the plastic dashboard was frayed into everlasting shambles.

     Witherspoon blinked with an intense squint as his legs forced his body towards his friends vehicle. His eyelids rose to solicit the presence of the mangled metal. Interrogatively he stared solemnly at the injected holes, each dynamic in their reason for existence.

     He spun around to gaze at the walls of the house to see if there where any shots fired at the attacker. No holes can be seen along the smooth wood and brick of the house. A frown over took his facial region. The evidence pointed to nothing that could help further the investigation.

     

     “Stan…”



































     The afternoon sun beat down in a mulch pot of heat. The desert floor was relaxed in an ocean of fire. Mirages lurked directly below the ameba like surroundings as Stan Dunn dropped his heavy weary stricken boot into the rocky floorboard.

     His sole seemed to have molded intertwining itself into the fire. With each exhaustion filled step the boots rang out a thundering rip.

     His clothes were drenched in dried up sweat and salt particles, his skin and muscles seemed to have drooped right off the bone. Tears glittered his cheekbones and a static frown hindered his lips.

     His brain felt like a bubble continuing an inflation that is reaching its breaking point. Snot drizzled from his nose as another shot of dismay exited his nostrils. His body begged to just fall over and lay there but his legs refused the request, they will continue on.

     

     “Your drowning now. Look around, already your hell is spilling itself into your former domain.”



     Stan shuttered with frustration as he spun around cursing the air, “No, I…”

     

     “You, you, you, think about you. That’s all you should do. Yes, continue this selfish thinking please continue it, I enjoy this.”

     

     “I remember her.” Stan spit the remainder of his saliva into the air. “I remember her!”

     

     Stan’s knees collapsed from under him and he fell towards the fiery ground below. In a flash his eyes blinked and now his knees felt a cool breeze blowing past as his hair amongst his arms swayed back and forth. His eyes opened relieved to see the image of his wife standing there but also horrified in the state she is in.

     Her body was different, not because of the heat causing a change in clothes but her physic was different, her body had been disfigured slightly as she hunched over in a pouting sort of way and her cheeks have sucked in giving her bone structure a more gaunt look to it.

     She just stood there smiling then frowning, switching from both instantly without hesitation and feeling. She did not blink at all as he approached her, could not blink. Her body was no longer under her control.

     “What are you doing here Stan?” Questioned Stan’s wife.

     A quiver of his lip struck the smile function of her facial structure. “What are you doing? Why are you out here?”

     “After what you’ve seen you ask me this? Clearly he hasn’t shown you all now has he?” She rose up completely from her slump and froze interlocking stares. A brief connection between both in limbo spoiled fast as she ripped franticly at her night gown tearing flesh from her body along with cloth. “Do you think this is me, ever was me? This was a swollen zit, do you think you are anything more then I? What have you come to do? What is it here for?”

     Stan’s eyes and chin drooped down to sway from the sight of his wife’s naked scratched up body. He scrambled falling through his vocabulary trying to wrangle any words that could help soften the situation. Humidity swarmed his legs as each one jetted forward a step. He clapped his eyes back onto his wife as now the background behind her came into view. She had been standing next to Clover Canyon, the fifty foot crack that runs around their desolate town.

     Her heels hung directly off the sheer wall of the canyon, her toes clutched to the steaming rocks in fear.

     “Ba… back away from there!” Stan motioned to his wife.

     “Why, tell me…” Her head trailed downward transfusing into a hatred loathing status. “Who am I?”

     “Your…” Stan slapped his left hands to his left eye to cope with the tremendous pain echoing from behind the window. “I know you.”

     “Well then say it.”

     Stan’s breath filled the air in front of his eyes so now he was granted clear vantage to his wife’s acts. “Please, I know you. I know who you are.”

     “Then say it.”

     Stan crippled over in a river of salted water as the floor bruised his numbing flesh and muscle. Stretching out directly from his position was a rope blending into the image of his wife. His mind showered through the puzzle pieces and trimmed the boarders till an answer arrived, she was being held by this rope, he could save her.

     With heavy lavished eyes the tint of his tears rocketed across the land and into his wife’s view, a smile arose. Stan smiled back thinking his choice was what would save his marriage, grant ever lasting hope between the two until both grew old and died with grandkids and happiness forever flocking to their hearts. Stan chose the wrong path as he shouted, “I love you.”

     His hands gripped the rope and pulled, the rope tugged his wife forward being tied around her neck she fell towards safety but her lower half of her body slipped off the ledge. Fighting forces stained the gravitational pull off the edge and her carcass plummeted too, but her lower mandible snapped as it collided with the floor and the rope tightened allowing the neck to be stretched out by the rock. Bouncing playfully throughout Stan’s ears was a voice, ringing a simple chorus of words along with a beautiful tranquil hymn. “Take this to him.”

     The rocks as she fell sliced her throat wide open causing the flesh to tear away from each other and unravel her life force, from her head.

     Her head sat with a smile at the edge of the canyon staring straight at Stan who bowed over in horror and dismay, he had killed his wife. The blood created a peaceful wholesome feel to her head, the red bubbled and fried, the carcass branded itself into Stan’s woes.

     “Thank you Stan.”

     







































     Witherspoon sat in a whirlpool of warmth in an outdoor rocking chair. The night beamed onto the heels of his socks which harnessed the glow of the moon’s reflective rays. The wind tickled the hairs upon his face with gentle strokes. The aching of his muscles shook his appendages violently in a storm of dissatisfaction.

     The strain upon his wrangled thoughts dribbled rants of saturated tears out from normally dry tear ducts. His leathery eyelids glistened in the moonlight polished and aged. A solstice of barren heat stained his forehead with a piercing sting.



     Creak.



     The chair rocked back.

     

     Creak.

     

     The chair rocked forward swaying Witherspoon’s head into a slumped position. His entire head ached.



     Creak.



     His mind frolicked into the memory of Stan barging through the police trailer door. Stan looked as if he had been tossed about by hurricane force winds. He also displayed a deep twisted un relaxed confusion.

     Stan barged in breaking the upper hinges off the door as he collapsed in the entry. Witherspoon hurried to the curled up body but didn’t recognize him at all. Stan reached out without gazing upward to see whom knelt down to offer aid, he clutched Witherspoon’s right knee and lower thigh.

     Witherspoon could see the fear of lonesomeness plaguing the man’s eyes as in one quick tilt connected the two lives together. This bond felt to Witherspoon as if the two have met before and a history between them lurked somewhere in the abyss of memories.

     He sat without rocking, pondering the incident of the day. First a disturbance from local kids that an elderly couple reported, second a crime scene involving an inflammation of disgust and vomit across a suburban household. He could not remember the home owners name. He also reminisced about the man who barged into the trailer along with the words he proceeded with,

     “It’s got a purpose, it wont let you know. It’s run its course here, now its coming for one more. Prepare for the worst tonight Jas. It’s always been here for you. This is its purpose.”



     Creak.

     

     Witherspoon leaned forward and stood up from his rocking chair. His head sunk low as he proceeded into his household. All around the air inside the house dropped several degrees. His arms popped with goose bumps.

     Entering inside the living room developed a sheer drought of sunlight, pouring down the darkness soared across the walls and ceiling. From out across the room a slow shadow enveloped the wall side. A soft breathing speared Witherspoon with a quick shock of electrified pain. The pain sporadically placed neurotoxins giving off numbing cold. The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves as the shadows danced about the surfaces of the room.



     A barking erupted from the black. Witherspoon stood still in a wet dull statue state. His legs immobilized and his senses shrieked in terror.

     Was this a shot sent from his own subconscious or was it an actual entity hiding behind the walls somewhere in his home? He questioned his own ears. Its nothing, there is no one in the house. You always did have an over reactive imagination Jasper. That’s all it was, He pleaded with himself as he removed all the fear from his pores.

     “The green stays gray.” Jasper spoke blandly into the air.

     Witherspoon tore down his drapes of fear and charged himself through the curtain of over excessive color. He stepped his way into the hallway, his gaze devoured the dieing vantage of his. Etching itself across the walls spun a yarn of unrivaled sadness spoiling the voices of reason inside of Jasper Witherspoon.

     “Jas, you didn’t, you didn’t stay with me.” A voice with no source echoed from the opposite end of the hall.

     Witherspoon’s dreary eyes manifested an image in front of him; it was his wife, alone feeble in a hospital bed, dieing. Her body was plagued with boils and crusted sores while clear yellowish tinted sludge dripped across open wounds in her shoulders and thighs. The hospital bed slowly rolled his way as he bore down on the image, his tears sheltered themselves as he pried the image form his mind. The bed bumped into Witherspoon’s left thigh causing him a jolt of nervous fear as he noticed the image itself had been evaporated into the darkness, its home.



     Stan, the man whom barged into the trailer appeared into Witherspoon’s thoughts once more. Stan frowned as he kept his prone position while clutching Witherspoon’s knee. Witherspoon couldn’t think of any response at the time, his mind thirsted for words yet nothing reeked of importance, he became dry and barren.

     “Whose after me?” The twisted crackling of Witherspoon’s voice spat its way from inside.

     Stan trembled as he threw his hands from Witherspoon and propped himself up to his knees, “… Change.”



     A deep low rumble rolled across Witherspoon’s skin. He felt all the hairs in an instant shudder back and forth trying to wipe away a foreign force sprinkled atop. His stiffened gaze sailed into the abyss now pronouncing its dominance over the hallway.

     His rubber lips stretched into an elastic smile as he reached his sturdy arm adjacent to his shoulder and flicked his index finger ahead of him subjecting his darkness friend into a blinding world of light and bleach. A slight snort boasted from Witherspoon as he proceeded down the length of the hall.

     

     “If a murderer came into my house. What would be the out come? Would he end what little life I have left or will this bag of bones with a bag drooping off them actually give this perpetrator a run for his money? You never know. How much have I been through in my life time? Age against youth, who wins? Wisdom verses strength, is it the same match up?” A projected image of Witherspoon leaning against the doorway into his bedroom talked back to the actual Witherspoon whom walked past to gain access to the bathroom.

     “I guess this is what happens when you think your safe, everything just walks right up to you and slaps you in the face with reality.” The manifested image continued speaking to Witherspoon.

     Witherspoon halted his unzipping of the pants and turned to the doorway of the bathroom, “Safety is in the eye of the beholder.”

     A low chuckle propelled itself from the projected Witherspoon image. “Do you really believe that? Nah, I know you,” The projected Witherspoon looked over into the bathroom seeing a humungous plunger for the weak. “Yikes, where would you find something like this?”

     A slow trickle of urine drizzled upon the toilet seat, “Who was that guy?”

     “Its kind a sad when you don’t worry about the seat you just pissed on. Who needs visitors anyhow, especially because they never come.” The projected image continued its rant.

     “I remember him but I don’t. I knew him once.” He zipped up his pants after finishing his leak. He reached out to flush but then froze before touching the smooth metallic surface and decided not to finish the act, but to walk away entirely.

     “Is it eating at your mind, does it give all other worries and thoughts a dim projected feel. Not yours but like your looking from the outside trying to decipher what is inside your Christmas present?” The imaginary Witherspoon smiled wide as he hopped up onto the sink and kicked his feet childlike.

     Witherspoon placed his right thumb and his index finger on the brim of his nose as he exceeded the limits of the bathroom and walked out into the bedroom while involuntarily switching off the lights. The bedroom whispered splintered haikus of the past into the ears of Jasper Witherspoon. This burden rammed the gates of Jasper’s fortress, he had become quite immune to the itches of memories filed away in the past section.

     Witherspoon surveyed the room one last time as he unhinged his belt buckle and readied himself for a humble nights sleep.

     Tucking himself solemnly into the sheets his eyes drowned out the darkness with more darkness as his ears stayed keen to the world around him.



     “Leave us alone.” The metallic sound spiraled throughout the stationary image of Witherspoon alone in his room with a voice he has never heard before.



     





     Witherspoon’s eyes were dilated as his face stretched towards a desk lamp that is now on its side in the middle of his living room. Witherspoon stared off studying an object resting itself atop of his rocking chair. “You thought I was asleep. I cant be asleep, age wont let me anymore.”

     A heavy mucus filled breathing passed from the rocking chair in a laughter tone. Sitting now in the chair staring intensely at Witherspoon was a three legged, multi torso, melted together creature. Its chest bobbed up and down in multiple breathes, it possessed several lungs.

     “Mr. Boar.” Witherspoon whispered close to its multi molded together face. “I know you. Cant you tell. Look right now, it’s a mirror.”

     Three sets of eyes peered directly into Witherspoon’s soul. Its mouth opened and shut revealing three inner pairs of mouths and razor sharp teeth. It was flexing its jaw. Slithering itself side to side it stretched its back a bit as it tugged against the belts that held it to the chair across the chest cavity.

     “It was at the first suicide,” Witherspoon coughed catching himself. “Murder, that I suspected something else other then human.”

     The head of the creature tilted upward in a smile, “Human…” Its words reverberated across the walls with high electric sounding fluctuations. “Murder…” It shook its head in a negative fashion, human personification. “It was never murder. And you never believed it was.”

     Witherspoon squinted in curiosity and confusion, “What did you do to those people?”

     Enlightenment screamed from the creatures words, “Offerings, to me. There was no choice not left up to them and their free will. I served as a means of realization.”

     A slight wheezing spilled from Witherspoon’s nasal passages. “Are you a demon of some kind?”

     Feeling the monsters laughter now quaking the walls as it sought amusement in Witherspoon’s questions. “A demon, quite pathetic. So I seek souls on Earth to send to my master, ah, pathetic. I am myself. No minion for a greater presence.”

     “Then why do you need people, why the kids?” Witherspoon surveyed the creature once more noticing all the appendages it possessed in an abundance. “You’re a movement.”

     “Behold my name, Advancement, in a tongue you couldn’t possibly pronounce.” Its head vibrated quickly from left to right in a shake as it spoke. “Not a movement, yet idea.”

     Witherspoon became entranced as he stuck out his right index finger towards the wrist of the creature. It cracked in numerous bone breaking positions, it showed no pain, it performed the actions out of entertainment. “I’m guessing the only reason you haven’t escaped is because your body must be holding your real form or something and these, these limbs of yours must be like a puppeteer costume.” Witherspoon motioned his hand towards the creature.

     The legs of the monster stomped in unison, “Clever, but no. Why am I here Jasper Witherspoon? You clearly received my message.” Witherspoon squinted in a bland shocked face of realization and rationalization as he tried to put together a puzzle in his mind. The furthest eye closest to the right side of the creatures head swiveled up and gazed at Witherspoon with a delighted satisfaction. “I allowed you to catch me Jasper.” Hot breath spewed forth from its ventilating mouths. “Think, reason. Why Jasper. Why would I do such a thing.”

     Witherspoon averted his eyes to the hardwood floor beneath him and the beast. He rambled through the suicides, missing limbs, mutilations, vomit. Few must be misdirection of some kind. A demon would want souls, but its not a demon, not a demon. A monster? It would want food, but it said it didn’t kill. Didn’t kill. Suicides, why suicides, why did it need them to kill themselves. Pieces missing, it has more appendages then average people, did it attach the body parts from the victims to itself? Why? Where, wait. Where is it now? My house, my home. Missing evidence from the suicides, limbs, which are now in my home, making it not a suicide anymore but murder if this thing is discovered. In my home. It wants to pin this all on me?

     The creatures mouth lopped up a smoldering smile, the jumbled up skin patches and facial structure pressed together in a grotesque bliss. “Ever fear the presence of thought. It is a tough concept. Think, thought is the only thing that notifies you that I even exist, visa versa. Ever dreamed of dieing Jasper, yes you have. Horrifying isn’t it. Not the dieing part but the reality that your memory your presence on this planet will easily vanish with your body. The only thing that would keep you hear would be other’s thought, who would think about your Jasper. What memory of yours would be worth passing on, what knowledge? The sorrowful reality of it all Jasper is that you must accept your fate, all the others have as well, willing to die for a greater cause. Advancement Jasper Witherspoon. Advancement. There is something you possess, you own in your head that I can not allow. This is not a world altering strand of knowledge here in your noggin, no. It is as simple as a whisper. What it is, is the end, the end of a primitive form of lifestyle. Your age has come and gone, its time for the advancement Jasper. Time for it to all be over, let your kind move on peacefully. This, what I have done is show you what I can do, consider it a bargaining. You are not easily tempted Jasper, take your life, offer your essence to the rest of the human race to proceed as normal as always, or consider the other option. You will be remembered but negatively, as a psychopath, demented and insane. Anyone who has ever shared the same air you breath will curse your name, do you want this? You will never be without your free will, Jasper. I give you this choice. I am not here to harm you, I am here to help your kind.”

     Witherspoon’s eyelids pulled downward hoping that if they could somehow shield his eyes away from what was going on all will gently float away. The easy way out, never taken but always a road worth traveling. He collaborated with his eyelids and the rest of his thoughts in the darkness of his flesh barrier, as his eyes were shut he slowly eased his rear down into a chair setup directly across from the creature named Advancement in another tongue.

     Inside his seclusion he felt the cold damp choice of death sweat cooling beads of moisture down his cheeks and ultimately plummeting from his chin. He could see the hollow existence of his flashing by once more showing how much he has done in his lifetime. A blood drawing bite to his lip changed choice options as he imagined himself facing off with the police and trials by a jury of his peers, guilty verdicts plentiful throughout his dream. In a purgatory between both hells he gave his attempt at the limbo, directly failing in all terms.

     Opening his eyes Witherspoon once again his pupils cowered to the sight of the molded being ahead. Witherspoon could never think of a time in his life where he took the yes or no option. He had always thought up a middle option in between one that has always worked out for him. He had always proven that there is always an option right for you, or there will be. He couldn’t let this time be any different. He has lived his entire life one way, why would he change now, he is elderly. God willing he would live a decade more. Why would he need to worry, if this choice he makes goes wrong then either way he wont be around to experience any of the torment from them.

     With a subtle smile Witherspoon acknowledged an inner strength of his that has always steered him wrong, his stubbornness. “You’re an idea. If I heard you right. Then what is the best way to destroy an idea or movement?” He asked the creature.

     There was no answer from the beast just a low churning growl.

     “You hide it.” Witherspoon leaned forward.

     “What? You shame me Witherspoon I believed you were smarter then this.” The creature gazed down at his bondage. “Do you really believe you can keep this up?”

     Witherspoon leaned back in his chair not breaking eye contact. “What I believe. You wouldn’t even understand what I believe. You maybe a rotting pile of flesh but your lacking something us humans are all granted, morals.”

     “Do you mean these kind?” A light flipped on clear across the house as a dim ray made its way into the forbidden hall.

     Witherspoon broke the plastered muscle causing him to drain all the sight from his eyes by staring at the monster and he now stared in bewilderment at the shadow of light being cast down the end of the hallway. Witherspoon spoiled the chairs warmth as he stood up and turned his body direct to the hallway and proceeded towards it.

     His first step gave out a low dull thud as words fluttered forth from all around him.

     

     “Think for me Jasper.”



     The steps of his grew louder, the thud reverberated causing it to not decrease in force but gain.

     

     “Come on Jasper, what is real?”



     He approached the end of the hallway. The shade of light slightly shadowed on his right pant leg.



     “You fell asleep Jasper. When did you wake up? Can you even remember?”

     

     He turned his head according to the hallway’s design so he could gaze into the open door and witness what lies within.

     

     “What do you see Jasper.”

     “I… I see me. As a child. I’m locked in my room. I… I had just been in trouble for hurting a neighbors dog. I was being punished by my parents. I can see it in front of me. There I am, walking, pacing my room with anger. I didn’t mean to do it, not at all. I was angry at my parents for not understanding. I didn’t really want them to understand. I guess I was more angry at myself. I hurt a poor innocent animal for no reason, destroyed its life by crippling it forever. I was hurt, just like it. This, actually I don’t remember what I did. I guess I just passed out. But, no. I’m still pacing, my hands are going across a smooth object, metallic. What am I doing with it? I see the arms of mine, their being split in two. My blood? Is that my blood, its going across the ground. I cant see me anymore, I’m locked in a room… neither one of my parents know, I’m dieing. I can see my tears, through all the blood. I don’t believe it, I am not crying, I want this to bad to cry. This boy, this boy is not me. This isn’t my past. What is this?” Witherspoon did not turn away from the doorway.

     

     “What do you think? How are you any different then the boy in that room now?” The voice caused the boy to raise up, blood pouring from both arms of his. He had dull black burning eyes.

     

     The boy opened his mouth and began speaking towards his doorway. “This is all your suppose to do. This is what I did. Look how happy I am, I’m nothing different then you. Please, join me. Join me.”

     Witherspoon stared into the doorway, the doorway called for him with whispers. Inside the doorway the boy with the bleeding arms entered the doorframe and turned to the left frame with a smile.

     His head cracked against the frame like and egg as pieces of brain and muscle peeked out of his wound, “Its not evil, its candy. Its just candy flowing down, all you have to do is enjoy it. You will enjoy it all.” The boy’s head reared back for another bust to the frame but stopped, thinking, pondering. He shrugged finishing his actions and spinning around towards Witherspoon. “Do you want to join me?”

     Witherspoon’s lips puckered together as he tried to throw out some words at the image ahead of him. “N… no.”

     The room flashed as darkness engulfed both images. Witherspoon could feel a cold damp breath against his pale skin. He felt nothing, a secure numb developed across his hair fibers and rippled flesh.

     A red arose inside his old bedroom as he witnessed the boy once more in a lying down pose on a water bed of skin stretched across each bed post as heads encircled the motionless blood. The boy’s face tilted on the bed in the direction towards the doorway to guilt trip Witherspoon. The jaw dropped from the child’s face as its tongue slid out onto the flesh. “Don’t tell daddy.”

     The room dissolved as now a normal unlit room shivered in the heat devoured household. Witherspoon felt a faint brush of tire swarm his head as he stumbled to the center of the hallway, his eyes struck the vision of the chair that the beast was in positioned directly ahead at the end of the hallway in the living room glazing the actions it watched with a sense of dread and loathing. Witherspoon didn’t understand how this creature turned the chair its in around and pulled itself to its current position but it did and there it stayed watching him. Continually watching. It did not say a single word to Witherspoon, it didn’t have to. Witherspoon could hear the laughter from its eyes, its body like a statue of disgust and horror.

     Witherspoon rose up to a proud standing position as he eyeballed the creature sitting across from him. The two entangled emotions together as both filtered rage and want for the other to be deceased or non existent.

     Erupting from all around him from each room containing a shut door which connects to the hallway a pounding arose. Blasting into Witherspoon’s ears he flinched to the left side of the hallway next to a door which led to his bathroom but now something was inside the room banging on the door. Its intentions of escaping the room or just to annoy could not be present. His consciousness managed to overcome the excitement and disregard it entirely, he staggered his way out of the hallway and over past the creature’s chair. He gripped the back of the monster’s chair and swung it around feeling all the dead weight of the attached appendages. Now the chair did not face the hallway but once again it faced Witherspoon’s chair, he sat.

     He calibrated the tone of his heart and the frequency of his breathing. Slow, steady. Calm.

     From light of recent events a memory squeezed in through the files of his mind.



     He was a child, once again at peace with the world brightly lit ahead of him and all his goals aligned like Lego blocks. Building the blocks had always been the boy’s specialty, he had towers of medieval castles lurking in the corners of his room. Each sky scrapper or tower he built would always have its rival which would always be located across the room from it. The rivalry was so that the game would have a purpose, a meaning for the buildings existence. Young Jasper smiled as he completed a very special structure he had been working on for almost an hour now. An explosion detonated at his door as there in the doorway stood Jasper’s father, he had a very mangy looking beard that stretched down his neck and he wore a construction worker’s gray get up.

     “What the Fuck. Playing with these things again!” His father knelt down to a knee to look Jasper right in the face, the smell of alcohol bled from every pore. “Listen to me, I know you enjoy playing with these things but here is how its going to be. Your getting to old to be playing with blocks and Lego’s. So I want you to pack up all of these in one of mommies trash bags and take out the trash for me and your mommy. Okay son?”

     The little boy developed a hurt in his face from having to give up something he loved so much. His father could see this but lacked the sense of caring, he was right, he is always right, he has to be right. The boy then did what he was told. Prying apart each Lego from his tower, the dreams, the happiness faded quickly. From outside his window he noticed neighbors moving in to the house next door. They moved in with a puppy and they all seemed so happy with goals ahead of them. Tiny Jasper smiled in window towards their happiness hoping some of it would rub off on him.

     Nothing ever came that day.



     Witherspoon blinked a long tear corrupting blink, he damned his dad’s intentions from long ago. He knew why his father had done the things he’d done, but being in pain from work and all liquored up was never an excuse to demolish a growing boy’s dreams. Witherspoon felt his teeth bearing down on his inner lip, no blood, no puncture. The heat from the pain offered hope of forgetting. The tears washed away, the memory now filed.

     His eyes glided upward to now focus on the monster ahead.

     “This will be a long night.”





















CHAPTER SIX.









     “Stan.” Stan’s hands pricked at the hairs of his face. “My name is Stan Dunn.” His moist lips quivered as particles of saliva dripped across his mouth’s barrier.

     Stan squinted and slid his body against the cold floor of the trailer. He had been put into a room for containment so everything could be figured out in the morning.

     Across the walls a sliver of cracks immerged, trickling down a smooth stream of red. The red wallpaper with the plaid designs across it peeled back revealing the glue and the plain wall behind.

     A smell of honey spilled across the damp cold floor. It reeked up into Stan’s nasal passages poisoning his mind with delirium. The sweet and sour smell ravished his senses with a swelling of tasteless beads and prayers for his own demise.

     The room owned the same characteristics of any other room, four walls, a ceiling and a floor, but here resided obscure artifacts. Along the side wall nearest the door was what looked like a couch, it steamed as the liquid tar oozed from its fabric. The steam caused the ceiling above it to droop and bow to the point of almost breaking. Folded across the side arm rest of the tar pit was a gray magnetic pile of stones. These stones twitched, calling out for Stan to come closer and lay his head down upon them.

     Stan Dunn clutched his eyelids together trying to rationalize everything like Witherspoon his partner use to. His forehead began to secrete enzymes of soothe and comfort. His heart beat thudded loud and offbeat, his head jittered from side to side as he was compelled to open his eyes and continue to absorb the bizarre.

     His stare stunned by a picture frame on the wall holding a rather strange picture. The picture was of a person, its gender was not known because of the face of the person. The face had two massive gapping cracks through its eye sockets and a widening gray frown. The entire skin color was pale gray while the picture itself had been taken in color.

     This picture did not frighten him. It seemed to be more accepting then the room surrounding him. Slowly his lips split from their intense junction and the silhouette of a breeze blew through. The frown on the person in the picture glided from bending down to the complete opposite creating a smile. I am happy, sailed words from across the room.

     “M…me too.” Stan blinked in bewilderment.

     Stan felt the room transform into a putty as his skin bathed in the creamed wood chippings. The putty spread itself blanketing Stan’s body sheltering him inside a cocoon of illusion. His heart bounced quaking wildly trying to inhale any form of oxygen from the room but only the fabric of his manifestations entered. His blood choked, his eyes fried, his legs kicked, his soul cried.





















     Witherspoon clapped his hands around the throat of his tire and refused to let go. Over exhausting himself with the overload of endorphins and adrenaline injecting into his blood vessels continually keeping him alert and aware. Witherspoon worried about sleep, worried about what he’d wake up to, what kind of monstrous hell the creature ahead of him can cook up in one nights time. He sat steady, calm, in a peace. His skin felt as if it were a never ending tide slowly rippling across his exterior in a slight wake. He was comfortable.

     Witherspoon thought to himself as he watched the creature gazing into his soul, What is this thing? If this was a movement of some sort in the flesh then why would it take peoples body parts and attach it to himself? It didn’t just go for the old people, younger people died too. What is this things real intentions here. Its been lying to me from the start, but why? Why does it need me to kill myself?

     His mouth strung open as a bland sound puffed into the face of the creature, “How are you liking my home, your having a nice time aren’t yeah?”

     The monsters mouth continuously dangled from the jaw without moving as a gargled solstice of moans piled forth, “P…ea…ch…y” A timid particle of saliva toppled over the rigid lower lip of it as the air from within caused the crime.

     Witherspoon enjoyed a tick of entertainment from it’s answer as he proceeded talking with a stern unmoving frown. “Do you enjoy doing this?”

     A sudden echo blasted from the walls, “Enjoy.”

     “Do you?” Witherspoon prodded.      

     A whispered creaking swarmed from behind Witherspoon as hinges behind him screamed in warning. A chorus of dubbed rustic scratching noise forewarned Witherspoon not to turn around. A closet door that has always been more for decoration stretched open in a yawn. A slither of chills pierced his back like a million nails, fear.

     A warmth swirled away from the doorway out towards his fingertips where it took cover. His hair fibers chanted together on end, “No, no, no, no, no.” A stiffening sensation dissected Witherspoon’s neck muscles simply immobilizing them from their normal function.

     Witherspoon noticed that his entire group of back muscles still contained life and he swooped his upper torso around to immerse himself in the vision of what was entering the room. Childlike the images of shadows in a storm of tar giggled and pranced about playfully enticing Witherspoon’s eyes and attention. High pitched whistles and hushes could be heard fluttering about the air. In the raining darkness of tar came a fluctuation of color, no more darkness, but a masked woman on her back in a white long dress kicking her legs as if trying to swim across the floorboards. The mask was disfigured and looked as if it where a cloth bag with cut open patches so that sight could be obtained. Her hair poked out the top of the cloth bag and the left eye was not cut open for her to see but a sewn on button. Her arms were pale as her veins poked out immensely almost extruding the skin.



     “Come play with us.”



“Yes play with us!”

“We are nice to play with.”

“We wont hurt you.”

“Much.”



     The woman cocked her head up towards Witherspoon as he continued his stunned stare. As the mask glared directly into his eyes the mask slid, slightly down the edge of her cheeks revealing a bit of what lies beneath. Her lips were able to be visible and a frown over took the face but looked like a smile from where Witherspoon stood because of her poise. Her head twitched from left to right gliding on ball bearings while the entire mask dripped off her face. Revealed now to Witherspoon was a face that exactly reflected the mask, her left eye was a large skin pinched button like image as her right eye was an enormous gapping hole.



“Cant you see us?”

“We deserve your company.”

     “Witherspoon.”



     Witherspoon rose from his chair in a quick startling jolt of fear. The room became entangled in a hypnotic darkness. The sound of footsteps all around him and giggling. Witherspoon did not move from his position but stayed put listening, keeping his senses alert.

     All noise stopped.

     Nothing moved. Witherspoon heard his breathing echoing off the walls of his house, he was still home, that realization struck a bit of calming adrenaline into his nerves. He tried to slow his breathing, big inhale, big exhale, repeat.

     “Shh.”

     A random voice thrashed out from the saturated room.

     “I’ve seen you,”

“I’ve seen you.”

“You’re the monster.”

“You’re the monster.”

               “You wont let us live.”

“You wont.”

“You wont.”                     



     The voices dimmed, silence fell once again.

     Just as Witherspoon heard his breathing once more the darkness faded away as standing around Witherspoon was ten young children all with the same disfigured face as the woman. Their eyes were either skin pinched together to form buttons or entirely carved out from their faces. They were on their knees praying. They had no knees now that Witherspoon’s eyes adjusted just little nubs kicking as their mouths jittered up and down in a chewing motion. Witherspoon’s hands went up to his ears as chattering of teeth bombarded his eardrums.

     “NO!” Witherspoon yelled into the air forcefully.

     Everything was back the way it has always been, the monster still tied up, Witherspoon standing next to his chair and the closet door shut. Witherspoon regained his composure and turned to the monster. It still did not ever blink, never loosing its connection with Witherspoon. Witherspoon compiled his thoughts together with a heavy inhale as he spun around and plopped his butt back in the chair facing the creature once again.

     “Their just images. Nothing you do is real.” Witherspoon mocked the creature.

     A slight chuckle exited from in front of Witherspoon’s face, trailing a small smog which showed where it initially began from inside the creature’s abdomen.

     In a soft spoken child’s voice a rhyme immerged from the shadows. “In the walls which are forgotten the dead watch you scream. By a blind man’s wandering arms you will touch the seam. In this darkness the light chooses not to beam. Shake your head no, because your listening to a dream. In toys you use to reside. Now in age our youth does hide. Skip this rope one last stride. Here you struggle to maintain your pride. Listen to the children they can help, Run away, Run away, Run away, Run away. Find these answers falling in the day. With out the dear fear we choose to play. What you cant see is us children are experts at running away. So I hope you take this lesson and I hope you hear this voice. Us children just want you to know, you never had a choice.”

     Witherspoon’s eyes tilted on a spring towards the floor then back up to the beast, “Why do you choose children to tell me these things? I haven’t heard the voice of my daughter yet, where’s she? If your so mighty and such why haven’t you manifested something like that, really get the water works flowing. Why children?”

     Without even a minute jitter of the jaw words escaped the creature across from Witherspoon, “Old man. Plagued by youth and its previous benefits. Wish for the beginning instead of the end, old man. Why use the image of your daughter when I can bring her here?”

     His hairs on the back of his neck erected them selves in a rocketed fashion, “What? What do you mean? How she is now or back to life? What?” Witherspoon’s head filled with helium as it floated above all other demons infesting his mind.

     “She comes.”





































CHAPTER SEVEN.







     A salt lavished tear dripped across Witherspoon’s lower eyelid and cascaded across the surface of his cheek. He just meant to mock the thing sitting ahead of him not provoke it. He regretted ever throwing out a comment such as that. He knew deep inside his diaphragm that no matter what comes from this monster before him will not be good, nor his daughter.

     A smile split across the creatures lips, “Believe for a second that this is not your daughter coming home one last time. She was on her way from the start of this night, you just so happened to have created a mighty amusing coincidence.”

     A knock on the front door startled Jasper Witherspoon as he just sat up glaring in the direction of the noise. No voice exited the beast, it’s smile just lingered. Witherspoon’s body looked similar as a deer in headlights, confused and aware of danger.

     Another rap on the door.

     From behind Witherspoon the voice of the monster shouted into his ears sanctuary.

“She awaits.”

     Jasper consoled his toes as they spilt a numbing liquid across their skin cells, he stood in line for the door.

     Another knock boomed through the compacted wood shavings and into the room.

     “She’s not there, just open the door. Just open the door. She cant be there. She isn’t. Just confront what ever it is and all will be okay.” Witherspoon muttered to himself as each inhale and exhale of breath pushed his body closer to the front door.

     The knocking continued.

     His fingertips tickled the smooth metallic surface of he doorknob, the cold from the doorknob screamed at him telling him to not touch and go sit back down. He paused knowing choices did dangle ahead, just pluck one from the air. His hand pulled back away from the door, good choice.

     “Dad?” The voice of his daughters spat through the door at Jasper. He was over taken by this and opened the door with the acidic want to hold his baby in his arms again and know that she was alright.

     The door slammed against the adjacent wall as the outside air swooped in claiming all, no one stood at the doorstep. Nothing was there. Witherspoon could not tell if it was disappointment or just an extreme relief drizzling from his pores but it soothed his conscience.

     A cushioned thud rang out from beside Witherspoon’s feet, curiosity spoiled fast in his eyes as he quickly sought the source of the noise.

     A clump of dirt lay beside his standing position. He squinted in confusion as he noticed slight crumpled particles of more dirt and mud led across his floor as if someone had tracked it in from outside. One and one snapped together quickly in Witherspoon’s mind. His body almost shut down as he spun around completely to bear witness to his daughters dead body dangling from an unseen object just floating inches off the floor.

     Witherspoon couldn’t control himself, a drowsy gasp bleated from his lungs.

     Her decayed body moved about like someone else had been moving her arms and legs, but her head continued to stay lowered and directed at the floor.

     Jasper could not help himself, tears spewed from his tear ducts as behind her body he saw his reflection moving and manipulating her limbs while he smiles.

     With a sudden laughter exiting the creature Witherspoon’s daughter fell to the floor in a jumbled up mess and his reflection disappeared in a flash. Witherspoon could not stop staring at his daughter’s corpse. She is actually here he whimpered in his minds microphone.

     Without the slightest bit of warning the head rose up to poison Jasper’s eyes, “Dad.” The cocoon jetted flopping about into the nearest doorway and was absorbed by the darkness.

     Witherspoon slumped to his knees staring off into the fathoms of reality and all that could lie beyond. His fingers chilled and solemn but lost and damaged. Everything was quiet submerged in a dense calm.

     Across the lens of white smog of sorrow projected a long wilted image. His daughter, newly born lying solemnly under tiny foot long sheets. Witherspoon rested parallel to her body as he continued to be entranced by her breathing. The happiness he sought all accumulated in a manifested being and she slept ahead of his eyes. Buried inside his chest beat tears of joy spewing forth every time her little nose twitched and her sponge like cheeks fluttered. He could taste the liquidated happiness congregate across his senses in a warmth slick feeling. He felt his body fighting the urge to jump around flailing with joy as he also slumped into the urge of pure confusion and bliss. Huddled in the corner of his eye socket bodied salt particles stood on the brim of his lids in relevance to the awe inspiring sight of new life. Each clapped their hands crying a hopeful prayer into the night’s sanctum. He pursued no more happiness, it was found, crafted in a painting and modeled in a sculpture, it was his daughters smile, her every breath, her.

     “Look at her, she’s breathing. Just breathing.” Witherspoon said under the hem of his breath. A spasm tickled at his lower eyelid as both his eyelids blinked in unison. Moisture appeared like a magicians finale.

     Once again in years Witherspoon felt youth and rich flavors of belonging rain upon his flustered cheeks. The pink flushed color enveloping his cheeks melted from the canvas and joined the rest of the past in a migration to goodbye.

     His loose smile formed under tear chewed emotion.



     “Jasper.”



     The shot to Witherspoon’s daydream jolted the horrific reality back into his able mind. Cold snarled it’s way back through his facial features stunting his smile and driving his senses into a numb falsehood.

     

     “Where do you see her Jasper? Where will you see yourself? I can fix this Jasper. Just trust me and follow my instructions. Follow them well Jasper.”

     Witherspoon stood up from the floor wiping the mucus and moisture from his face. “You don’t stop talking now do you.”

     “How much more pain must I cause you Jasper?” The creature’s head orbited once around its center neck axis.

     “I just thought we were getting to know each other better. You don’t want to ruin that now do you?” Witherspoon felt a stinging jolt of immense strain scream out from his lower back as he drained the warmth from his body against the chair’s cold surface, the chair he knew so well, sitting directly ahead of the beast, in its line of sight.

     “I do not wish for your pain Jasper. I do not wish for anything but your cooperation. You have no idea what its like having to monitor these new times. The distant future seems not your concern but do you really believe in the afterlife enough to believe this? If you obey me… then maybe your chances of salvation could be redeemed.” The body of the creature started to moan and groan as it panted with hearty breathes.

     “With all your traveling you have you been able to go to Moe’s Restaurant down the street a ways. I swear there’s something in them tater tots that just make you believe in miracles because I don’t know where he gets potatoes tasting like that. I swear Moe’s got to be some kind of a food profit.” Witherspoon leaned back basking in his thought and story as he tried to pretend that what sat ahead of him was nothing more then an old friend. He placed an old colleague of his in that chair. Bruce. Bruce was never a hard working man but an imaginer at best, he dreamt up wild tales that he swore were true. Witherspoon chuckled on the inside as he remembered one such tale about Bruce boarding a sea going vessel as he called it going north towards the mighty New York. He reflected the story some more as Bruce carried on about one such man aboard the ship whom would tie random loose pieces of the ship together making sculptures out of anything. The crew use to call him the artist. Yes, plopped ahead of Witherspoon sat Bruce.

     



































     “EARL! The baby needs to be changed. Get the diapers out of the bathroom for me.” Betsy coughed from the bowels of her throat. A string of slime and vomit streaked through her closed mouth. Betsy was a young mid twenties house wife. Her only duty in life was to make a baby and take care of it by all means. She had lazy fat developing across her body, she stood only 5’6 but from the weight she has gained gravity pulled her down to a 5’4. “EARL!”

     From the other room, “Damn it. Ya know I cant be getting up and down for ya all the time. I have a bad back woman.” Earl sat sprawled across the couch in his underwear flaunting what little he had.

     Betsy tried to yell back in retaliation but she covered her mouth once more as bits of vomit surpassed her boundary up into her mouth, an acidic taste ravished her taste buds as she swallowed it back down. “The guy only told you to milk that in public not to lie around all day. When I tell you to get the diapers you get the damn diapers.” She stood in the kitchen holding her only heir by the arms as the baby laid on her back staring happily up at her mama. The kitchen was like any other kitchen in the town, nothing to look at, yellow walls, yellow counter and sink. Everyone liked to pretend the yellow color was originally the color of the paint, just a source of mildew denial.

      Directly across from her stance bleated a loud annoying ring.





     Down at the police station Muriel held the phone to her ear as behind her Stan stood staring down into a hypnotic daze. “Yep, Betsy. Yeah you know the damn sheriff hasn’t shown up for work today.” Muriel flexed her lower jaw stretching out her muscles and getting them ready for her job, talking.

     Betsy raced words back over the receiver to her mother. “ So what, are you just going to come home?”

     “Naw. I’m get’n paid for this any how.” Muriel grunted as she twisted her body around and saw Stan in his trance, Stan’s lips quivered up till a smile formed completely across his mouth. “Better yet… Could you mosey on up to the sheriff’s house and get him out of the bed.”

     “But I’m busy. I cant just.” Muriel hung up the phone and turned entirely around to look Stan directly in the eye. A few grunts got her facing him. “Alright I don’t know who you are but your going to have to get out before I kick your ass out of this trailer.”

     Blood shot his eyes circled upward till they picked at the scab that was Muriel. His lip curled inward as he licked the brim giving a peace offering of moisture to his chapped flesh. A flicking of his nose hairs lopped up the dust floating across his track to Muriel. “How many times do we regret a mistake?” His eyes bit down on the life force of Muriel.

     Muriel knew her body was obese and if this man attacked her she would certainly be dead so her tough hard ass routine wont help. “I don’t know.”

     Stan once more curled his lower lip into his mouth so he could coat it evenly with saliva. “You don’t know a question with no specific answer?”

     Muriel asked in a loss for words, “What was I suppose to say?”

     “You don’t…” Anger penetrated the very strands of his body creating a whirlpool of hatred to swell. “Just answer the question.”

     “But I don’t know what to say.” Muriel’s head backed up into the chair as she prepared herself for pain of any magnitude.

     Stan did not thrive in anger and hate any longer but smoldered into a joyous mask. “You failed on the simplest of questions. What if I had asked something greater but this question did not involve just merely loosing but came at a cost? An amount only you can pay. What would you do?”

     Muriel squinted in confusion, “Pay it I guess.”

     Stan’s eyebrows jetted upward in a fake surprise, “Ah, yes of course. Who would you pay it for? You? Your family? Maybe your race? Your species? Or just cause you merely lost?” His charade of being a jokester unplugged itself and now a stern emotionless statue of flesh scratched at Muriel.

     Muriel’s eyes shut as she just hit back the annoyance of her headache building from the stress of the situation. “Could you just leave?”

     “But your payment.”

     Muriel felt her heart beat skip, her throat clogged up as it sunk into her fatty tissue. All the hairs on her body raised from a shot of fear. She swallowed the dry saw dust of spit from her mouth. “Why do I owe you money?”

     “You don’t. You don’t owe me anything.” His pupils reverted to a nullifying gaze. “But you owe them everything.”

     A convulsion of confusion baffled Muriel, “Who are they?”

     Stan slid robotically to the right as he cupped his ear with his right hand, “What, you don’t hear them? He placed his left index finger over his layered salivating lips and shushed Muriel. “They are here right now… you can smell their presence. Don’t you see. Its change. A disease. Mankind is a disease. What creatures inhabited the world before man? Reptiles, where did we come in? What disease spawned us? You Muriel. It was a change. And how come change can not have its own identity? Do you see… through that fatty lard you call a body. You Muriel along with all this plague are just the manifested embodiments of change itself.” Stan reached his left arm out to touch the hair follicles perched upon her head, she sat still without flinching. “I can not blame you for your injustice, nor can I cope with your misguided ruins, but this malfunction can be corrected by elimination. You must be the satellite for the rest of your race. Muriel. Put your hand in mine, please.”

     With out hesitation her right hand cupped Stan’s left hand. A stampede of worry accumulated within her. She wanted to run but could not. She had been hypnotized by his words.

     “There’s so much here. I wonder what kind of message can be made from this body of yours Muriel.” Stan probed her body with his eyes. “My satellite.”



































     Betsy drove down a desolate suburban road, the over head casting of heat from the sun baked the entirety of the vehicle and the entity inside. Sweat glistened from her forehead as she blinked rapidly to spray the dashboard with liquid salt. Her lips puckered in frustration over her husband and the nagging of her mother. She had always wished to drive away and leave the barren town she lived in but the day never came. No body ever dropped a key for her to unlock her cage and flee.

     “I swear if you end up watching that damn television instead of your daughter again I am going to beat your ass Earl.” She muttered to herself in the security of her car.

     A tail of dirt and debris rocketed out from beneath her tires across a barren wasteland of discomfort and self loathing. She had never been more miserable in her life. She believed if she married the first man she had a child with love would slowly appear like some fairytale but love has been as far out of reach for her as the moon itself.

     She reached her hand up and scratched at her temple, the slick moisture ridden ooze that accumulated pissed her off. The swelling of her blood temperature and the hastening breathes were coals to her already ablaze fire.

- You could always file for divorce.

     Her best friend told her that constantly. Her best friend being her mother that is. This concept of divorce never settled right in her thoughts. Reason being that her mother and father performed the same ritual. A year after the conception of herself her mother and father decided to part ways so the rest of Betsy’s life had been a torturous slide show of wanderlust father figures off of television and her mom’s occasional weekly guest.

     She hated her mothers unique form of raising a child, neglect it. She thinks of children as an “it” and not as young human beings. Her mother was a low life and nothing Betsy wanted to even be associated with, but now for the last two years her mother had controlled her life. Even now as she drove to satisfy her mothers bickering she cursed her very existence and her choice to stay in the town that bore her.











     Witherspoon dangled his head from the thin piece of thread he once referred to as his neck. His eyelids sunk low forming heavy oversized leather bags gathering tire and weary from all methods of osmosis. The oils of his face formed a thin layer of mucus boiling from the excretion of gases from his flesh. His face gathered dust particles from the air. Witherspoon hasn’t slept, with his age contaminating his muscles and his mind he bit down on his lower lip keeping his body awake and alert.

     The creature had not ceased its staring void. Dull and numbing this monster’s eyes never twitched from its obsession, Jasper Witherspoon. It’s breathing annoyed Witherspoon. In the breath entered the creature. An annoyance trembled beneath his skin. Out the air skid past his face stirring up deeper hatred inside his blood vessels.

     All across the walls a clear black and white color sprouted absorbing the rest of the vibrant colors. The absorption tore at the color devouring every bit of character left in the room. Witherspoon did not even flinch care. He has seen far too much, it has filed down his entire body and mind.

     “What would happen Sir progression if I…” Witherspoon reached over towards a drawer, it slid open with ease. Reaching in he pulled out a normal sized .45 caliber pistol. He slid his left hand across the smooth exterior of the glistening sliver.

     “You cant harm me. Jasper, I am a progression. I am a natural commodity in the world. The environment demands for my presence. You could give yourself to our cause. Your cause Jasper. Do this for yourself. Your race. Turn the gun to yourself, end your misery Jasper. Save yourself. You don’t have enough life inside of you to keep this going. Do you wish to die peacefully into the night Jasper. I know you don’t want suffering. You don’t want this. Just turn the gun towards yourself, it will be over in a second Jasper. No one will feel pain. No one will feel remorse.”

     Witherspoon’s right hand trembled as the gun was in his hand clutched with all his might. The barrel tilted up towards his neck area, his eyes fluttered back and forth in liquidic tears. The torment of his mind swiveled around on a teetering pinwheel of decay and loss.

     “Do it Jasper. Do not fight it.”

     The newest foreign sensation bubbled beneath his face muscles, he was complying. His wrist twisted, his face smiled, his mind did not agree with either. A corruption within his blood stained it cold, slow moving and not neurotransmisive. His eyes focused on the barrel, but mainly the depths inside the barrel calling his name, it was a destructive black hole inside ready to choose the fate of its victim. Just one victim, and it will all be over. Why did he pick up the gun, why did he try to test the limits?



-He didn’t really know, it felt natural, it felt as if it wasn’t him choosing to threaten the creature with the gun but another being inside of him taking over.



-Is this why it just kept staring, and staring with its dull numbing eyes.



-Is this what his last moments on Earth will be, staring down the barrel of a loaded weapon while a monstrous statue gazes down the borderlines of his soul.

     Witherspoon’s sweat reared back from the stifling cold of the pistol. It did not welcome Witherspoon’s presence but rejected it with hatred and dismay. He didn’t want to die, feared it and what lies between its doorways. There are no flashbacks, why? Witherspoon demanded to his brain.

     Witherspoon wanted at least a minute thread of hope to turn his color. He begged for an answer, some place he could call his own, some place he could find peace.

     His finger trembled next to the trigger. After all this time this was the answer, just end his life? Why is this the answer Jasper? Why is this the way? Stop it.

     Witherspoon’s head violently shook back and forth as he tried to regain his composure and stop his body. Everything around him jittered and dissolved into a new room, pure white with lavender tiles across the ceiling. There stood all of his heroes in life, baseball legends, his parents, his entire life stood there waving him forward, accompanying him. Tears surfed down the leather of his face and soaked the floorboards of his dreamscape.

     With muscles emptying the movement fluid out of its vents the gun dropped to Witherspoon’s side still occupied by his grip. A slight hint of saliva whispered over his lips and the tear residue glistened from his slender cheeks. With a heavy drowsed squint Witherspoon coughed up the desire to end it all.

     “I … I cant, you cant ask me to do it.” Witherspoon drenched himself in preparation. “What could you possibly have in store for me now? You’ve got to have a back up plan. Well I’m here, I’m ready.” Both rivals clashed with their onslaught of emotionless stares. “I’ve allowed you to take shot off and shot off at me. Even just one shot from me would that even effect you. You seem mortal, rope holds you now. Why cant this gun harm you? Lets see.”

     Witherspoon raised the warm handle of the gun till the barrel was pointed directly down the sights of the beast’s chest. “A gift from a giver.”

     The echo from the firearm danced a musical number throughout the room, a ringing entered Witherspoon as the pitches condemned themselves never to hear again. Witherspoon could not fight the surprise he felt once he pulled the trigger, not from the kick back of the weapon or even the entry of the bullet into the being ahead of him. He felt a shock because of whom now lay dieing, through an open entryway once stood Betsy Muriel’s daughter. Witherspoon’s front door must have been open. The creature manipulated his eyes and must have laid the image of itself ahead of Witherspoon’s face confusing him.

     Witherspoon crawled his way up from the floor over to the bleeding woman. Her chest was split open from the projectile, red essence waved a final goodbye to the life force of her soul. Betsy’s mouth twitched up and down as slight whispered words exited.

     “Late, just … check…ing… on… just… che…ck…” Her face contracted in a quick muscle spasm and then released, peace. Tranquility evaporated from her skin and fluttered in the air, a few beads condensed on Witherspoon’s nose and dripped back to her lifeless corpse. Nothing could get her back to life.

     A slurping chuckle boasted from behind Witherspoon. “You did not try to save her. Did you not believe your own eyes? Can you still ? Touch her, feel her, she is real Witherspoon. But she is no longer with us. Why do you test me Witherspoon. Do you believe that your petty little games are going to change what is inevitable? You must do this for your race, your loved ones. You must end your life just as you ended hers.” The creatures mouth did not move at all, the voice was happy, solemn now. “Do you know why humanity dies Jasper? You die because you know not how to live. You try constantly to better yourselves, just yourselves. What about all the others your screwing over in the process do they deserve a break, do they deserve what you’ve got. No, by societies means today they applaud the poor man and ridicule the rich. Your race deserves to move forward but at the same time deserves the pain of death.”

     Witherspoon knelt beside the life he took. He noticed across his able conscience that there was remorse but no tears, no pain. His emotional plain has become nothing but a vast endless vortex of tingling numb. He searched deep inside records and filing cabinets in his mind but nothing could be found under the feelings section. There were a few charred remains of papers left on the ground and signs of a immense fire that must have swept in one night.

     She wore marks of aging across her face. Witherspoon noticed tidbits about her as he immersed himself into the shoes of this woman he barely knew. She was fully dead, but her eyes retained some of the life that once enveloped her. There might be hope, Witherspoon questioned within his subconscious. No, the day, the night, the length of it all has just toyed with your thoughts think rationally. She is dead.

     I have to outlast it, wait it out, but what am I waiting for? Only death is waiting for me, only death can be my future. Why am I waiting for it? Why is this thing waiting for me?

     The images of that dog Jasper Witherspoon injured long ago spiraled over head like in an accelerated orbital flight documentary narrated solely by the audience whom would always misinterpret what they see. Witherspoon misunderstood all the collaborated thoughts and images currently bombarding his gated frontal lobe.

     “Access denied.” Witherspoon hissed across the unmoving mountainous stones of his lips.

     Witherspoon reached down grasping the still warm ankles of Betsy as he ached his way to a hunched position and began dragging her more into the room, he felt the hard wood sinking more and more as his left foot tapped the chair the disfigured creature sat. An exhausted sigh escaped Witherspoon as he dropped the woman’s feet and stood up fully erect, he swayed his body around to continue his voyage into madness.

     As soon as he spun around he bore witness to the creature shaking violently against the ropes, its mouth’s snapping open and shut, the legs and arms swinging freely into the air. All its eyes directed at the dead body of Betsy. Witherspoon was not ready for such a startle as he quickly lost the balance in his legs and he collapsed over the lying cocoon. From his new perch Witherspoon writhed in a vision of complete confusion, the beast flailed in all directions trying to loosen the knots but every two second intervals its head and body would stop momentarily to check up on the death stricken victim. The clattering of its mouths and grinding of the teeth splashed against all the objects in the room.

     Witherspoon slid his way off her and pulled her body back from the creature as fast as his age tormented body could move. The clattering of the teeth boomed louder. A coughing and a wheezing snarled out from its throat. It rocked back and forth wailing a blood inducing cough.

     She was safe from its reach as Witherspoon regained his composure and stood back up to his feet. “What the hell are you?” The monster quaked and vibrated as if having an epileptic seizure. “Your wanting a part of her. Your pouting. Like a child.”



CHAPTER EIGHT.



     “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Yes, I’ve laid witness to the beasts presence. All the while I stand on a bridge far too long. Cracked and famished the roots begin to splinter and out from the rubble appear a moderately laid line of translucent beings. You are one, an invisible pendulum of life. You follow your master, your teacher, and will.” Stan stood grinding his words down till they could be fully dissolved into the mindset of his audience.“

     The room was dimmed from the outside light and influences, shades covered the windows as furniture lined the walls. Muriel once an elderly woman with her sassy tongue and wit was now kneeling against the floor sweat pouring from her body as a yellow film started to take its place across her fingers and wrists. Her skin seemed infected as it swelled from an over exertion of sweat blossoming out from her pores. Her eyes could barely see through her swollen eyelids and cheeks, but little helped her vision. She had been corrupted by Stan, entranced by an outside influence.

     “Soak it in my satellite, project its presence to the world.” Stan chuckled with fluctuations in his voice and huger in his soul. His right arm trembled and quaked to the dial of his heart. “You will reflect pain. Suffer my satellite, you must for the good of you kind.”

     On her right forearm a gas pocket bubbled up into a wart and pushed out a tiny zest of steam into the sweltering climate. Whining whimpers escaped her throat as her mouth continued to be strapped shut from her excessive bloating of her flesh.

     “I need your eyes, Muriel, I am the last one who knows your name. Muriel, listen to me. This is important, I need to see your eyes. Open as wide as you can and stare for me, welcome me. Do not reject what I am about to do here. This is for your daughter and your kind.” Stan held in his right hand some nails and in his left hand a hammer. “You will feel no more pain.”



























     Excited by the work he had just done and proud of himself for thinking of such an action he marveled at what feat he had just conquered. Above him still strapped to the chair dangled the creature, a chain had been looped around the creatures body several times and also around a beam within the wall. Witherspoon had knocked out a hole in his wall to wrap it through. Witherspoon smiled. Everything seemed to be on the brighter side.

     “I have no idea what your intentions are for this lady but I don’t think I should ever find out.” Witherspoon reached down and picked up the woman’s leg, he drug her into the center of the room. A smooth maroon to black trail followed quickly struggling to keep up with Witherspoon’s actions. “You want this to attach to you? I believe so. I know what you are. You may not be able to be killed but there is one thing that kills ideas or movements, a boarder. A bridge of some kind that it can not pass. I will be your bridge, and as long as you still exist I will exist making sure you do not continue whatever it is you are doing. But first because this will effect you a lot more then it will me, I have to defile this woman’s body.”

     Held in Witherspoon’s left arm was a food processor. Witherspoon reached down after he discontinued his actions and unraveled the chord to the chord to the food processor. His hand extended towards the nearest wall outlet as he plugged it in. Quiet congregated in the center of the stage as Witherspoon arched over the body with pain in his heart, and hurt on his face.

     He knelt gripping her left hand by the wrist and figured out the best way to do this. He first fumbled with the idea of just grinding it down without chopping off the limbs into sizeable pieces. This idea posed a messy disaster. Knowing he will have to do it the unwanted approach, his right arm grasped an already placed hand axe. He wished he hadn’t had to use this item he brought in from his tool shed, it was a back up measure.

     Worry severed his heart in two, he had never chopped a being up before, he knew not the internal anatomy nor the effects of human flesh and bone on a food processor. How long would it last? Folding and molding the delicate soft young skin of Betsy’s Witherspoon hated his situation and what acts he must commit. He decided to start with the wrist.

     The snapping of bone, the floor dripped of human life, dancing about in a ballet of dark color and ambient noise. Red color fabricated a tale of friendship and delight as that crazy character buzz hummed its way around the room playing pranks on Mr. Cabinet and Mrs. Wall. The glistening sparkles reenacted jokes of laughter and spoiled Jasper Witherspoon with such a fantastic enthusiastic smile. The sparkles hopped from object to object like a child provoking an adult to watch them perform a hopscotch maneuver. Cracking continued as Buzz waltzed right in tripping across the yellow pigmented rug, a hairless leather, and dashed himself up a tiny bit of Red who scowled at Buzz for not knowing it was Red. Red threw away his frustration and hugged his pal. All spun right in the world conjured up in Witherspoon’s mind to drown out the ferocious atrocity he is sewn into.

     After each hour seeming minute of the flesh concocted blend he emptied it out into a large metallic bowl he once used to wash his vehicle with. Betsy’s body which no longer belonged to her was still in one giant piece but missing two entire legs and possessing a nub for her left arm. Her face still stained with her previous emotion, hurt, confused. He wished she begged for her life, at least that would give her living characteristics and a sense of existence, right now she was dead, nothing, a lifeless manikin.

     Witherspoon wafted the toxic fumes of the blended entrails, flesh, and stagnant blood. Vomit erupted into his mouth’s chasm but concealed by the elastic flaps. It was an oatmeal delicacy of grotesque bliss. Witherspoon frowned with rage injecting itself through every ventricle in his bloodstream. He cupped his palms in a furious gesture and submerged them inside the steaming pile of creamed Betsy. Witherspoon splashed a hand full of sadistic hate from the metal container onto the creature. A snort reverberated throughout its vocal chords as a snarl pulsed along the scrimmage line.

     The creature now reflected signs of actual life, its enhanced breathing and trembling muscles encouraged Witherspoon’s tension and rage. After the creatures initial reaction Witherspoon was doused with a sense of thrill and enlightenment from torture and the imprisonment of his captor. The tables have turned, Witherspoon was in control.

     “Ha, Eat it up! COME ON! Isn’t this what you want? Isn’t it?” Witherspoon hurled another slick glob of human muck against the monster’s chest. A coughing pout exited the creature with almost a woeful cry, no facial emotion but the sounds were enough visual representation he needed. This creature was in pain from what he was doing. He noticed the vibrating stuttered inhale from the creature, something he use to do as a child when struck with the inflammation of pain or extreme sorrow.

     Glazing across Witherspoon’s eyes succumbed a new image, his childhood. He was a young boy sitting beside his father, this day was unlike any other day in the sad fact that both he and his dad were actually getting along. He ventured forth into the day dream as the time period fluttered by to a point where there was no father, was no adult figure in the house, just a lonesome overall wearing little boy staring down at a newspaper recalling the last minutes of his mom’s life.

     “Woman gunned down while saving the lives of a couple complete strangers from a burning building.” Witherspoon whispered into the clouded day dream, his voice puffed steamed messages into the face of his former self. “Go live with your grandparents, forget about this moment, and mistake them now for your parents for the rest of your life. Forget the sorrow. Its all over now.” The dream captured child raised his chin till his eyes focused on Witherspoon.

     The stare became a connection once disposed of. He was touching the roots of his former long lost life through the locked on visual ray. The child’s mouth opened slightly, the saliva salivating his mouth stretched from his cheeks widening stretch. From Witherspoon’s vocal chords came the child’s words, “I wanted them to die.” Influenced by the boy’s words Witherspoon knelt down to see eye to eye with the boy.

     “No you didn’t. Don’t say that. They tried to be heroes. Please don’t say you want them to die, I know you didn’t. I know.” Witherspoon reached his arms out to hold the stubborn child, whom still clutched the paper and kept his frowning face. The boy’s eyes gleamed as he glanced downward stepping back from Witherspoon’s attempt to have and to hold.

     “No. I did want this. You see just last night I wished for them to die. Then the bad man made them go away. I will be fine now. Cause he took them away.” Witherspoon’s vocal chords said the words as the child appeared to be speaking.

     Witherspoon’s cheeks trembled as his body ached with intense sorrow, “No, don’t say that. Please, don’t say that.” His hands which were outstretched slumped to his salted sides and his tendons contracted, giving up.

     The little boy’s eyes somersaulted inside his eye cavity and fixed themselves on the beast, “I will die one day, I know this, but you.” The boy’s head turned to Witherspoon and offered a static actual speech filled warning. “You will die today.”

     NO! Witherspoon screamed inside his subconscious and lunged at the boy who had already appeared to be dissolving from the room. His hands reached out knowing for a fact that nothing was there and he would still be alone with the creature in his own dormant house. He grabbed what looked like the child’s arm, the child halted it’s head only half evaporated into the pages of Witherspoon’s mind.

     The beast upon the wall began to compose an enthusiastic chuckle which promised an unhappy experience for all that breathed in the room. It harmonized with the fear in the air, synchronized into a melodramatic dance which sputtered a symphony of overdeveloped emotions into Witherspoon.

     A barrage of pain feasted upon his hands. He noticed the body of this young boy was no longer there nor the arm he had grabbed onto but a smooth glistening liquid covered his hands. The inflammation of pain came from beneath this foreign liquid like a form of acid. In shards of screams he noticed his skin beginning to be eaten away by this unknown substance smeared across his hands. Pouncing towards the nearest form of water in his house he stumbled his way into the kitchen scratching ferociously at the sink handles. Both ended up being turned completely on and off under the hastened attempts of a pain infested man. No water exited, no sanctuary, no hope. In a rage of help pleading acts he quickly slapped his hands against various objects within the room hoping to tear a piece of the burning liquid away. The thick plastic of the counter top instantly dissolved from a splatter of the acidic goop. Witherspoon shook his hands incredibly hard in front of his body under pure impulse, the liquid broke its grip on his hands and splashed across his shirt and face. Extreme worry banished all attempts of natural thought. Witherspoon spotted the entire bucket of creamed human flesh, Betsy, and flopped in drenching himself.

     He bathed his body in the former ladies fluids and flesh. Rubbing slick blood and enzymes all over his face to cleanse the acid’s burning effect, but nothing could be felt. No pain, no burning, nothing at all but the slop he washed off in. An army of confused nerve spasms forced his gaze and ears to the creature tied to the wall. Its mouth hung open as an explosion of laughter exited the monsters lungs, a moaning painful laughter which forced its disfigured face to smile in a haunting fashion.

     Witherspoon paused not understanding the exact situation in its entirety. He directed his bewilderment at his hands, no loss of skin. He snapped his mind into a recent past spectacle of himself smothering the cream of Betsy all over the beast’s body. It had done the same to him. A development of vomit constructed itself within his stomach as he regained all senses in a flash giving him a first hand cascade of the leviathan’s breath. Overcoming all obstacles the vomit spewed from his mouth and also particles drizzled through his nose and out into the bath of his.

     His body slumped out of the chum with a drowsy muscle less movement. His spirits where beat, his intentions dwindling. He slid into a feeble fettle position exhaling gingerly from his mouth. A droplet of stomach fluid still dangled from the loose chapped skin or his lips. Through the straws of his nose he compiled all the tainted air into his lungs. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.



Calming.



     This has been the first time since the creature had come into his life that he has been this unmeasured tranquility rotating in his cerebellum. His conscience soothed into a new aged mindset, comfortable with all. Witherspoon could not conceive an emotion of his disapproval.



Do it all. Any of it.



     Witherspoon’s eyes drifted above the eye sockets, on calming clouds. There was a white haze over his pupils as nothing seemed the same anymore, an enlightened sense of seeing and awe.



I know this place, I’ve seen it before. This use to be my house.



     Slight minute vibrations of chuckles bounced out from his sternum. His jaw rocked up and down briefly knowing what has to be done. His right hand fingers wiggled in slow robotic movements till they plucked at the smooth wooden handle of the hand axe. A greased up exhale whistled out from his esophagus.



I am ready.





















CHAPTER NINE.



     “This life can prove to be alittle bit more difficult that you believed cant it Jasper. Thinking this heroic act of yours will actually do the slightest bit of good? Your challenging a movement here, an idea. How on earth do you justify these actions? Don’t you want the new ways to flourish, don’t you want the old ways to die out all the same? There can not be this unlawful murdering and mayhem like in the past anymore. Don’t you see Jasper, this time of yours is over, let us move on and show the world a new movement.” The transformed Stan spoke from behind Jasper whom was knelt clutching the hand axe.

     Directly behind Witherspoon lay Muriel with all the grotesque agony she’s been put through, and also stood Stan. Stan’s arms were outstretched down by his sides open and waiting a confrontation.

     Witherspoon wheezed as he inhaled through his nose in a stutter, “Who are you? Why are you in my house?” He did not turn to meet the stranger eye to eye.

     “I… am the newly forgotten. Yes, newly forgotten. This thing you have… nicely tied to the wall is my, lets say teacher. I have been directly called by my teacher to help in the situation at hand. To convince you Jasper to see reason. To know how its always been. This I don’t believe has ever been just publicly announced, normally it goes along its route and does not ever get contested, for this I applaud you Jasper. Amazing feat, but that feat has long since past and now your just alone. Alone in your decision, alone in your home, alone at heart. With this last decision to take your own life, for the cause that will make you apart of something once again. To matter in the world. Don’t you want to matter once again? To somebody?”

     Witherspoon closed his eyes with tremendous strain against his eyelids. His head tilted back till all that was in the room could be shielded from his view and the ceiling could be easily accessed to his vision without contamination. There was a strange fire inside his old body. A fire which had been blown out long ago. It rekindled as his stare to the heavens had been reached.



I am not alone on this decision.



     “I have never been alone.” Witherspoon whispered in front of his face, where the words grouped up and hid as the outside air was far too cold to venture any further.

     Witherspoon spun around in a flash cupping the creamed Betsy flesh and splashing a wave of chum into Stan’s face. Stan stepped back in shock and confusion gagging in a pouting furry just like the creature earlier as Witherspoon turned to the sum of all his troubles. Witherspoon raised the hand axe to his shoulder and with all the force he could muster sank it deep into one of the left legs of his woes severing it from the body.

     Muriel exploded into a loud screaming fiasco, this did not even cause Witherspoon to flinch but enraged his actions. Witherspoon dropped another one of the creatures surgically sewn on appendages. It’s thuds against the floor of the room sent chills up Witherspoon’s spine.

     “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” Stan screamed at the top of his lungs as he reached under the influence of rage and grabbed Witherspoon’s shoulders spinning him around and throwing him to the wall.

     Witherspoon finally connected his sights with the other figure in the room. He noticed a sense of familiarity, warmth for the other. He stopped in wonder and confusion. “Wait… wait… I know. I know who you are. I know you…” A tear crept past his eyelashes tickling it as Stan stopped and listened in want. “Uh… S..tan? Stan? … I know you… Stan. I know you. I remember Stan. I remember you.”

     Stan’s head tumbled about on a spring trying to hold back. A sorrowful unwanted face scrunched together on Stan. “I… its to late…”

     Witherspoon granted one last caring gesture to Stan, “I know.” He kept his stare directed into Stan’s face as the hand axe came down splitting Stan’s face in two. His body collapsed to the floor as his feet quaked a bit from the nerves. A last release of gases from inside Stan bubbled out which sounded faintly like words.

     From the center of the room Muriel continued her screaming. Her body still continued to swell, puffing up. Her skin stretched as if something was growing inside of her getting ready to escape the elastic boundary. A slight film of liquid seeped from her flesh and raced along her body till it leapt to the floor once it hit the floor it attacked the boards eating it away.

     Witherspoon quickly took his position back in front of the creature and commenced his process of hacking off limbs. He took off arms, and legs, and a head. The screaming of Muriel continued but became even more louder and unbearable now. The back of her reached the point of almost snapping as her skin frayed back.

     Out from the back of Muriel erupted a slime which rocketed up towards the ceiling covering it like an upside down waterfall. The slime hit the ceiling and expanded outward towards the opposing walls. The acidic slime dripped from the ceiling like rain burning and melting anything it touches.

     Particles of the corrosive rain dripped across Witherspoon as he knelt down and gathered as much arms and legs as he could from the floor. He clutched them with all the might he could muster as flesh from his scalp and body sizzled away. Before turning away from the monster for the last time Witherspoon eyeballed it with hatred sailing form him. The beast did the same, no more emotionless rag but an actual humanistic stained mask.

     Witherspoon could not carry all the legs and arms dropping a few to his sides as he turned to the slime waterfall barreling out of Muriel’s back and to the ceiling. Muriel continued her screaming as it steamed to a halt and her mouth collapsed shut.

     He clutched his teeth together and stepped up toward the waterfall. He closed his eyes as he stood inches away from the liquid blasting out. It roared from her back as Witherspoon prepared himself for the inevitable. He leaned his upper body into the acid along with the limbs he pulled off the creature.

     The liquid from inside was a beautiful sight for Witherspoon. A white glow accompanied his eyes as he stared down into the pain. He saw the past, alone with his grandfather. Witherspoon journeyed there.

     















     Little Jasper Witherspoon sat plopped upon his grandfather’s knee feeling sorry for the act he had done previously. His grandfather held a can of chewing tobacco in his hand and rocked back and forth in his stationary chair.

     “Grandpa?” The blue shirted boy asked as he stared out the window to a bright and shinny day pouring through.

     “Yeep?” His grandfather answered as he sloshed around the spit compiling inside his cheeks.

     “Grandpa… Do you think Chad forgave me?” He felt the bony leg of his grandfather’s poking into his hind quarters.

     “You mean for doing that thing to his dog?” The tiny boy nodded up and down. “Oh, well here get up for a second let me tell you something.”

     Jasper pulled his little body off of his Grandpa’s leg and stood in front of him ready to learn a life lesson. “Okay… “

     His grandfather smiled at Jasper and all his willingness to learn. He knew for a fact he was going to grow up into a well distinguished person in his community.

     “Well Jasper, he will forgive you. Because you hurt his dog. The only pain for him was to know that dog was injured and wont be the same. Now the thing you have to think about is. What’s that dog feeling? Yeah you stopped beating on it, but in a sense your always beating on it. Look at it this way son. You may have hurt the dog, but you crippled it as well. So basically in a sense you will always be hurting the dog.”