Animal ( a short horror story )

Photo courtesy of ph.

INTRODUCTION

I say this story was written in 1988 but don’t quote me on that.

It was written in the 1980s, of that I’m sure. It has the tone of my ’80s fiction – bleak sketches set in a rural back road or bar. I worked the night shift at the local newspaper and afterwards, we night-shifters would venture out in search of an inexpensive watering hole or, if not a bar, a convenience store with ice cold beer, and off we’d go, into the hinterlands, because it was there a beer-drinker was less likely to be pulled over by the boys with the blue-and-red lights atop their cars.

Out there in that rural dark – the real dark folks don’t see these days because cities are too damned illuminated – I found a mysterious tint to the world, what Yeats might have called that glowing afterimage of the realm which lies beside this one, visible only to young children who have not had their senses dulled by maturity and experience. Except this glow was of the darker variety, and I wonder if Yeats could have appreciated that, too, given his musings about the nature of the new messiah.

To me, there were mysteries to be discovered in the implacable dark of the countryside, mysteries to be glimpsed and felt, not articulated but sensed in the way you know to stay out of that abandoned house in the woods, the one that looks something terrible might have happened there decades ago, resulting in it being scorned by humanity. Your ability to sense hidden dangers depended on your willingness to believe.

Which is what this short story is about.

When I was a kid there was mystery in the world, things we did not understand and places we had not seen. But we wondered about them. There might be jungles and dinosaurs on the Venus, or spindly, water-starved creatures on the surface of Mars. Who knew what lay in that jungle heart of darkness, or the deepest ocean trench? Were flying saucers winging overhead, always when we’d left the damn camera sitting on the table by the front door?

But as time went by and we learned more, the world began to shrink and the mystery fade, replaced with cold facts (or hot facts in the case of Venus, a roasting hell hole of carbon dioxide). Poor Mars became an icy desert with air so thin there might as well not be any. Flying saucers became swamp gas and ocean trenches are filled with nothing but silt and a scattering of weird, glow-in-the-dark shrimp.

Think “Excaliber,” and the world of magic giving way to the world of men.

I liked the world better when I didn’t know so much about it, just as I liked my friends better when their thoughts weren’t paraded across a glaring panoply of social media. Didn’t we get along better before we found out so-and-so voted for that evil bastard Trump?

The lack of knowing every stinking detail about every stinking thing – and the curious imaginings that filled in those gaps – made life so much more magically delicious, to borrow a breakfast cereal jingle. And that’s what this story is about, in a darkly roundabout way.

Maybe there’s still a bit of mystery – and magic – left in the world.

Lord, I hope so.

—

ANIMAL

Earl’s Tavern and Package Store. It was the last place Billy Stafford wanted to be.

He took in the bar with a sullen stare. Most nights he’d have been happy to stop off at Earl’s, knock back a couple of long-necked Buds and crook quarters from the high school kids who weren’t supposed to be there shooting pool. He worked the graveyard shift at John Sandusky’s BP station, and it was SOP to wheel in the big racks of recaps and the cartons of motor oil, lock up the pumps and the front door, then shag ass for Earl’s.

But not tonight.

Not when he had the carb rebuild staring him in the face at eight the next morning. Christ, he hated carbs – especially the ones greasy thick with buildup in just the right places to bugger up the works. And you don’t rebuild scummy carburetors when it pains you to bend over and your skull is throbbing and the taste of stale cigarettes and too many beers keeps coming back up on you until the really sweaty part of the afternoon.

Which was the shape he’d be in tomorrow if he stayed here much longer. Listening to Bob Decker.

He’d all but finished hosing off the concrete around the pumps and was thinking he might make a clean getaway when the office phone rang. He hadn’t wanted to answer it, but he knew sometimes Sandusky called a little before midnight to make sure whoever was on the clock didn’t close up early – “We ain’t no all-nighter, but by God we’ll keep ’er open to midnight,” Sandusky was always preaching.

Only it had been Bob. Drunk. His day off, and he’d been sniffing the cork so to speak, and now he wanted company because he had lots on his mind, and couldn’t Billy drop by Earl’s for a couple of brews? C’mon, Billy Boy. Be a sport.

“Sorry, buddy,” Billy had told him. “I’m broke and I gotta carb to do first thing.”

“One – one beer. That’s all. And I’m buyin’.”

There was no point arguing. Bob was drunk. “OK man. Half an hour.”

That had been an hour ago.

One beer had become two, then three, and Bob had gone on and on, cheerfully flipping dollar bills to the empty-headed brunette behind the bar. Earl’s was dark tonight, a humid kind of dark – like somebody’s basement. It was sparsely populated. Three men were sitting at the other end of the bar, giving the brunette a hard time in a friendly way. They didn’t look familiar to Billy. He’d given them a thorough looking over in his search for some excuse to get up and leave.

“‘Course,” Bob was pawing at his shoulder, his hand as insistently nagging as his voice, “I s’pose you don’t think much about that, do you?”

“About what?”

“About whatever’s out in that lake.”

“What lake?”

Bob sighed. “That lake over in England. Scotland. Goddamned Lock Nesh. Got ’em a monster over there. I even saw a picture of it.”

Billy fingered the rim of his Budweiser bottle. The men across the way were laughing loudly and whispering things to the barmaid Billy couldn’t hear. She tittered. The men gobbled laughter again.

“Betcha don’t think much about that.”

Billy started to say he didn’t but remembered that come tomorrow, a monster of a headache would be pounding against the walls of his skull if he didn’t lay off the brew and get some shut-eye. But Bob didn’t wait for an answer.

“I do. I think about that stuff.”

The barmaid shrieked, a sound like a nail file sawing through a Coke bottle, and said breathlessly, “An animal? What kind of animal?” Bill caught a fragment of the man’s reply – ”out in my Jeep” – and then Bob shoved an elbow into his ribs and slumped heavily to the bar, his eyes rotating in the sockets as if he were too sickly drunk to turn his head to face Bill.

“It’s the same – with flying saucers. An’ Big Shot …” He frowned. “Big Foot. And those damned yetis and giant squid that crawl up outta the ocean and grab boats. They pick sailors off the boats like flies on shit … and swallow ‘em up, one by one.”

Billy turned away. He’d never seen Bob like this. Drunk, sure. But not incoherent. All this babbling about sea monsters and flying saucers. Bob had always been sort of a square peg back in high school. He got along OK with most people. But he’d been a thinker who made straight A’s on his report card, and that put distance between him and everybody else. Later on, when they’d needed an accountant at the only place in town that passed for industry, the Texas Instruments plant out by the old railroad spur, Bob Decker was the man they hired.

But this was not Bob Decker.

Snatches of words drifted to their side of the bar. The barmaid was saying, “Oh, go get it. I want to see it.” The men were sniggering. One of them warned her, “It might bite!” and the barmaid uttered a tiny, squeeze-toy cry of terror. The man in the middle stood and shouted, “All right then. But I warned you fair and square.” The other two chortled. He strode across the carpet for the door. He got it open, turned and winked, then stepped outside. The door clicked shut behind him.

Bob pawed Billy’s arm and whispered, “I guess you think I’m nuts, huh?”

Billy said, “No. I think you’re drunk.”

Bob shook his head and almost knocked over his beer. He steadied the bottle. “It ain’t the beer talkin’, Billy. It’s what I’ve been thinking.”

The door swung open abruptly and the man came through. He had a burlap bag in one hand. His other hand was hidden inside the bag. He bugged out his eyes at the barmaid; his friends snickered.

Bob said, “When I was a kid my mom gave me this coloring book, you see, and it had this puzzle where you had to find the elephants in the picture – hidden in the picture – ”

The man sat down heavily at the bar, an inscrutable smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. The barmaid stepped back, uttering a cartoon chipmunk giggle.

“I spotted ’em right away, but Dad couldn’t. Couldn’t find a damn one of ’em. No sir.”

The fellow sitting on the far right leaned and peeked inside the bag. His face wrinkled into a grimace. He pushed a tentative finger inside then snatched it out, his grimace deepening into a thing of pain, and he hissed, “Goddamn sonovabitch bit me!” The barmaid stepped back. Again, the nervous laugh.

“Here’s my dad, see, and he’s got a mortgage payment and two car payments – no, no, that old Dodge was paid for outright – but he had groceries and utilities and insurance and clothes and everything it takes to keep a family going, and just when I’d begun to think he was the smartest sumbitch in the whole world for being able to do all that, I find out he can’t see an elephant hidden in an 8-year-old’s coloring book.”

Billy cleared his throat. This was ridiculous. He couldn’t fathom what long-winded point Bob was leading up to. He only wanted to be back at the boarding house, in his bed.

The man squeezed the bag hard against the hemisphere of his beer gut. Something seemed to wriggle inside. Billy wondered what the hell he had in there – if, in fact, he had anything. Billy doubted it was a wild animal. The man’s grin was too conniving, too shit-eating, and his friends were yukking it up as if they’d seen him pull this trick many, many times before.

“It’s a part of growing up, I s’pose,” Bob said absently. His stare was cemented on nothing in particular. “A kid is able to believe all kinds of things. You see what I’m getting at?”

No, Billy thought.

“A kid doesn’t have to see something for himself to believe it. Like Santa. The Easter bunny. And that goes the same for monsters in the closet.” He looked Billy straight in the eye. “You ever think there was a monster in your closet, Billy Boy?”

Billy shook his head. No monsters in the closet. But there was the crawlspace … the door with the latch he wouldn’t go near. …

Bob took a long pull on his beer. He used his sleeve to wipe his mouth. “Of course you did. Every kid does. You never saw a monster in the closet, but when your mom turned out the lights and closed the door and suddenly the only thing you could hear in the whole world was the sound of your heart trying to jump out of your chest, you damn well didn’t need to see nothing to know there was a damn monster in the closet.

“That’s what they call faith.”

Bob’s voice had taken on the urgent, roller-coaster cadence of a TV evangelist. He wasn’t slurring his words so much anymore. He seemed seized with purpose.

“The kids, Billy Boy. They don’t have any problem believing in things you can’t see, but by God they know they’re there. Good and bad things.”

Across the bar, the men had become strangely silent. The barmaid was approaching them … carefully. The bag was on the bar top. The man kept his hand inside it.

“But when you get older, you stop believing in those things. A part of you seems to pass away, and it’s like switching from stereo to mono. Suddenly, there’s no mystery left. Plenty of good and bad to be found, but all the mystery is gone and everything seems flat and ordinary.”

The barmaid was standing opposite the men. She said, “You won’t let it bite me, willya?”

“That’s when you gotta tote that barge and lift that pail, Billy boy. You gotta get yourself a job so you can pay the rent and put steaks on the table and keep the kids in Nike hightops, and once a year you and the old lady and the kids load up the stationwagon and shag it for Epcot Center. What a life.”

Billy stared across the bar with a vengeance. He didn’t want to look at Bob. The sound of his voice alone was enough to set a person’s teeth on edge, not to mention the topic of conversation.

“Sure. OK.” Bob mumbled. “So I like to think there might be little green men out there, or apes hiding in the Oregon backwoods. Seems kinda childish, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. Flying saucers, sea monsters. Those are my elephants in the puzzle and monsters in the closet. They make the world seem special, that there are still things I don’t understand and have to take on faith.”

The man jerked his hand out of the bag. The waitress went as rigid as a slab of ice, a sawed-off cry of terror twitching out of her throat.

“You have to believe in some things, Billy boy, because when you stop it’s nothing but watching TV and getting drunk, and you end up wondering where all the money went and what happened to all those years you thought you had … you stop living.”

It was a puppet. A damned puppet, one of those Muppets, Billy thought. Bert or Ernie. The one with bushy eyebrows.

The other men were cawing loudly. The one with the puppet made snarling noises as he opened its mouth and made to bite the barmaid, who was tittering in the throaty way people who’d almost pissed their drawers from a bad scare titter.

Bob tapped two fingers on Billy’s wrist. Billy swiveled in his seat. Bob was hunched over the bar, but looked more alert than at any other time that night. He pointed to the barmaid, his face desperately serious. “Like her, Billy. You gotta believe.”

Billy nodded. It was a gesture he’d learned a long time ago. It didn’t convey agreement. It meant, Yes, I know my friend is plastered and it’s way past bedtime and I’ve got that frigging carb to rebuild first thing in the morning, and why the hell don’t I just stand up and walk, for Christ’s sake? He looked at his watch. Both hands were on the two.

So he stood. He flipped a one – it was all he had – onto the bar top. “I’ll tell you what I do believe,” he said. “I believe you could use a ride home.”

Bob scowled and waved him away. “I’m gonna close ‘er down tonight, Billy boy. Don’t need to get up tomorrow. Got some comp-time owed me. If I’m too skunked to drive, I’ll sleep it off in the car.”

Muffled snorts carried across the room, and then Billy distinctly heard the big man bray, “Got me another animal out in the Jeep. A flesh-and-blood, real animal.”

“Oooh, I want to see it,” the barmaid purred. She had the puppet in her arms and was stroking its head, as if it were somebody’s cat.

“I dunno. This sucker is pretty awful. Part grizzly bear and part octopus – ”

The others sniggered like coughing lawnmower engines.

“ – part God-only-knows-what. Had to give it both barrels of No. 4 shot to make it stay dead, and I’m gonna sell it to the government for a million dollars.”

The barmaid hopped once, twice. “I want to see it.”

“I dunno. …”

Billy slapped Bob’s back and said, “Stay off the roads, pal.” He made his way across the room quickly, before Bob had a chance to remember any more words of wisdom. He had his hand on the doorknob when he heard Bob call to him. A little shudder of dread shook him. The others, he saw, had paused to stare. Bob was leaning waaay back in his chair.

“Remember what I said, OK?”

Billy offered him a mock salute, then stepped outside.

The cool air washed over him, blowing away the odor of cigarettes and spilled beer. He felt his thoughts begin to congeal. Time to go home. Get some sleep. Lock the front door, or there’d be hell to pay the next morning. Drink a few glasses of water and taken an aspirin before turning in.

Get some sleep. …

A big CJ-7 was parked by the front door. He had to practically climb over the thing’s bumper to get around it. He guessed it belonged to the big guy.

You gotta believe.

Billy blew air out of his cheeks with an explosive snort and shook his head. Old Bob, the square peg. Martians and sea monsters, for God’s sake. Billy knew what life was about. He knew damn well what it was about because he’d been doing it the past 23 years. Life was working your butt off so you could play – unless you had carburetors to rebuild the next morning. Life was pulling down $5.65 an hour – better than what a lot of people were doing. It was paying your own way and drinking with the boys and maybe shooting the shit with that little number at the Circle K, maybe doing more than that if you played your cards right.

That’s what life was about. Not kiddie nightmares about monsters in the closet, for God’s sake. The only monsters Billy ever saw were monsters of the two-legged variety, and that, too, was what life was all about, because when you grew up you had to put all those childhood fantasies behind you – the good and the bad. There was no such thing as monsters … just as there was no such thing as fairy tales.

No such thing as monsters. No such things as dreams come true.

He edged between the CJ and an old LTD next to it. His Nova was parked across the lot so some asshole wouldn’t ding the door. He was halfway across the lot when the sound hit him. It was not so much a sound as a dull, shuddering throb that he felt rather than heard. It started at the base of his skull and worked its way down the bumps of his spine, scraping the bones together. It was a foghorn moan of agony and, he couldn’t help but believe, anger.

It was coming from the CJ.

He stopped dead on the asphalt. He was unable to work his legs, and the breath lodged in his throat like dried cement. He thought he saw something move inside the Jeep, against the uncertain neon light of the Earl’s sign above the front door. He squinted. The Jeep seemed to jiggle on its springs. And then a heavy cable of dark uncurled along the plastic sheeting of the rear window panel, and the entire window was thrown into eclipse as something big gathered itself inside the Jeep, something bigger than a man and very much alive … maybe something that had taken both barrels of No. 4 shot and hadn’t stayed dead after all and now was half out of its mind with pain. …

A single claw divided the Jeep’s canvas top, cutting it as neatly as a letter opener. Something began to probe at the opening, to nuzzle its way out. Something strangely serpentine.

 – part grizzly bear and part octopus –

Something with suckers the size of teacups.

 – you gotta believe –

A storm of whickering tentacles exploded inside the Jeep, claw tips slicing into the canvas and plastic and twanging loudly against bare metal, like a nest of live wires.

Billy turned away. His brain seemed to float in his skull, as if it had been disconnected from his body. He felt like a spectator to some grim horror-movie scene.

He walked to his car, quietly. Once inside, he closed the door and locked it. His first thought was to start the engine and idle out of the parking lot like he’d done a hundred times before. No such thing as monsters.

His second thought landed on the pistol in the glove box.

Sandusky had given it to him, those many moons ago when he’d started working at the station, filling gas tanks and checking oil and taking cash from people as part of Sandusky’s weird insistence in returning the word “service” to the phrase “service station.” Sandusky had given him the snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson, which he’d kept in his glove box since moving up to mechanic, because there were people who were too greedy or lazy or desperate to earn their way in the world through the salt of their own sweat, and if Sandusky – or anybody who worked for him – could put in an honest 10 hours a day for an honest buck, no two-bit hood with a hogleg was going to take that away from him – not without a fight, anyway.

No such thing as monsters.

Billy started the Nova. He backed it into a half U, shifted into drive and idled toward the Jeep. He stopped. The Jeep looked like any other Jeep that might have been parked at Earl’s, its owner inside sucking down long-necked Budweisers and crooking games of pool from teenagers who really weren’t supposed to be in there.

Monsters.

Everything looked familiar and ordinary … and tomorrow morning he had that carb to rebuild and he needed to remember the water and aspirin, and he needed to remember to lock the front door or there’d be hell to pay. …

He opened the glove box. He pulled the Smith and Wesson from the leather holster. He checked the cylinder. Fully loaded … six 110-grain high-power hollow tips. Monster killers. It was against the law to carry a concealed firearm … funny how he’d never worried too much about that.

He climbed out of the Nova. Whatever was in the Jeep had quieted down, but he could still see it there, a dark shape against the light, like the suggestion of something horrible lurking in the closet after the lights had been turned out.

No such thing as monsters, Bob, old buddy. Just the two-legged variety.

He drew a bead on the shape and fired. Everything happened very quickly: The muzzle flash was lightning to the gunshot’s clap of thunder, and the thing inside the Jeep uttered a bone-grinding wail of agony and began to thrash insanely and Billy emptied the cylinder into the thing with five more ruthless pulls on the trigger. …

The door to Earl’s banged open and people were barging out, the big guy and his pals, the barmaid, and finally Bob.

“It wasn’t dead,” Billy said quietly, his ears ringing, his thoughts dreamily disconnected from the words. “It wasn’t dead yet.”

The big guy stared into the Jeep and ran a hand over his head. He looked pissed. “Goddamn thing,” he muttered. “Trashed my rig pretty good. It wasn’t even a grown one.”

Then Billy heard the distant warble of a police siren, and saw that Bob was smiling like a kid on Christmas morning, and heard him say something about coming back inside for another beer, that nothing else was important right now. They had a lot more to talk about.

Billy thought a moment. And then he sighed and headed for the door.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .