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As Jimmy and I laid in bed I asked him about the things he was saying with the older kids. “So, that stuff at school?” I asked. “You didn’t really mean what you said about not believing?”
“I meant it,” he answered.
The moment he said it I heard the clicking and creaking of the radiator come on, blowing warm air from the living room into our room via the duct. The warm air was calming.
“How could any of it be real? And, the older boys all say it’s made up. I mean, If it was real wouldn’t they have stories to tell. Like Jacob Conners, he sure isn’t a good kid. I saw him smoking behind the Lewis’s grain silo.”
“But, mom says it’s real?” I argued.
“And she’s a liar too, just like all the other parents.”
The clacking grew louder from the vent at the floor in the far wall.
Jimmy talked on as his voice grew more defiant, “Plus, how could a person keep an eye on us all the time? It’s stupid.”
“Magic?” I suggested.
He answered, “Magic isn’t real and Black Pete isn’t real. Watch, I’ll prove it. Fuck shit fuck fuck crap”.
I was stunned by his language.
I heard a hard knock from the far wall. I looked at the vent. Inside it was dark except for two round reflections.
“Black Pete is here,” I whispered.
Jimmy ordered me to shut up.
“There. There is the vent,” I continued.
There was a pause and then Jimmy said, “I don’t see anything.”
But I did. They had vanished, but I was sure that those two round reflections were there.
Source: Black Pete
That night, after hearing a long muffled, yet obviously heated conversation between our parents downstairs, the door to our room opened and there, in the beam of hall light stood our mother. She came into the room and closed the door behind her. There we were, Jimmy and I tucked in bed as my mother took a seat at the other side of the room, the light of the moon beaming through the window creating a lake of moonlight between her in the chair and us in our beds. It seemed like an ocean away, but still not far enough. I could see the seering moonlit look of disappointment in her face.
In the dark she spoke. “I have had enough of your attitude Jimmy and both of you always fighting.” It was about to come, the worst punishment ever, and this time, not just for Jimmy, but for me too. But, it didn’t come. “You two are not in trouble. You have created your own trouble. Christmas is fifty-five days away. You have fifty-five days exactly to sharpen up and prove that you are going to be good little boys or else.”
She was calm, too calm. I was terrified. Everyone in Winterthistle knew of Father Christmas and we also knew of his servants, the creatures and characters that traveled with him at Christmastime. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “or else” but I knew it was scary, too scary to even want to know about, at least too scary for me to want to know, but not for Jimmy.
“Why,” Jimmy’s voice trembled, “What will happen?”
“Old Man Whipper will come for you,” she said.
Source: Black Pete
“Male… how do you know it was male?” Kent asked.
James had had enough. “Fuck man, you’re asking me about bat dick. I don’t fucking know!” James’s face was turning beat read as he went on without a breath, “I dont fucking know what a bat dick looks like, Kent. Some weird flap thing?! I don’t know! But, I do know what a bat vagina doesn’t look like, and what it doesn’t look like is a goddamn bat dick! The fucking monster is a boy and it wants to fucking eat you you fucking child!”
“Well, Sorry man. You’re the one who brought up that it was a boy.”
“So we could fucking hunt it more effectively you dumb mother fucker!”
“Jesus, calm down.”
It was in the third century of my exile into the virtual world assigned to me when I encountered the Lunch Lady.
My spinal fluid (the real meatspace stuff) was being harvested to add a choice “seasoning” to the food of our ultra-dimensional overlords. It turns out that I am part of the 3% of the humans that have rarified spinal fluid… I’m finally part of the elite! Yay!
They gave me a choice “life” to live while they milked me. It was part adventure story, part erotic thriller, and part music video. So it was a surprise when my living room turned into a high school cafeteria serving area.
“You are late again little Jimmy,” said a woman’s pinched mouth while her pinched eyes accused me. “No sloppy joe for you today. Just this pistol.”
I looked down and saw my small, child-hands holding some sort of ray gun.
“Now,” she said looking invitingly, “Make sure you eat all the food on your plate.”
I was suddenly and extremely hungry for whatever came out of that barrel. I just knew it would be the tastiest of treats. I put the barrel of the strange gun in my mouth, winked at the lunch lady, and pulled the trigger.
My meatspace eyes opened. I was in some sort of encounter suit with tubes and cables. I looked up and saw that the biological computer my suit was hooked up to was dead. It smelled like a rotting frog I found once.
I clumsily got myself out of the suit (it was going to take a while to get my strength and coordination back) and looked around.
Everything was broken and deserted and insectoid scientists, still wearing their chitinous lab coats, were dead around me.
What the fuck had happened?
Instinctively he lept back as the librarian dropped from the ceiling landing on the ground with a cracking sound as her nobbed, blackened knees knocked together.
She looked confused. Her body looked like a corpse wearing a coat, both of which had been hung on a rack.
She started to walk forward, her face still confused, but her black reflective eyes looking right at him. Her eyes almost appeared to plead with him to help her, but her teeth and jaws were grinding back and forth. Her veins bulged as she walked toward him, her once freckled white skin tainted by and engulfed in veins that flushed from red to black. She was silent other than the grinding of her teeth and the cracking of her bones.
He started to move back in a panic. The librarian struggled toward him, as if half of her body wanted to move one way and the other half wanted to move another. Johnny wanted to believe that the woman was in there somewhere, struggling to gain control , but he couldn’t believe that. Her look of confusion had been replaced with a look of terrifying joy, a twisted grimace of happiness; happiness that she was going to eat him.
Source: https://www.screamingeyepress.com/twisted-pulp/issue-027/the-librarian/
Johnny’s vision was like the contrast-gray of a television as the power shuts down. He stumbled back landing on his ass and hands, the stinging pain giving him a burst of adrenaline. As the world returned to his mind’s broadcast he quickly remembered his situation. Scared shitless on the floor of the library bathroom. His eyes darted to the shadow behind the door. There was nothing there.
The flickering lights created long shadows along the hall. Johnny’s fear caused a stark vignette, zeroing in his sight to the corner where he had seen the reflective eyes.
He slowly scooted back, back the way he came, back toward the exit sign.
The hall was silenced under a heavy weight. The only sounds were the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the white noise of the room. But in it, in the silent din he could hear scratching. He looked to another corner and quickly found his focus pulled back to where he saw the eyes. But the scratching, the scratching was closer now. He looked to the now closed bathroom door. He saw nothing as his focus darted between shadow pockets and the black shadow where the initial sighting occurred.
Would he make it if he ran?
Source: https://www.screamingeyepress.com/twisted-pulp/issue-027/the-librarian/
Pain. He knew nothing but pain. Until he opened his eyes. At that point he also knew confusion.
He was on his back, spread-eagled, with each limb tied firmly to stakes in the ground. It was a hot summer day and he could see the leaves of the corn stalks swaying around and above him.
His entire body ached as if someone had punctured him thousands of times with wooden golf-tees. God, he missed playing golf. Maybe after starting the new job out west, he’d be able to afford to play again. He could feel that he was bleeding all over but he couldn’t lift his head up enough to see. He was too weak from loss of blood.
He remembered pulling over on the long and nearly deserted two-lane road as he drove across Iowa to take a piss. He vaguely remembered seeing a strange statue, next to the corn rows, shaped like a rooster with two-heads and four wings. It had strange symbols carved on its chest. Symbols that had made him angry, even though he had no idea what they meant. He remembered pissing on the statue to show his disgust.
He had no recollection of what happened after he finished emptying his bladder but, as he heard the sound of angry clucking, he knew he had made a mistake. A very serious mistake.
