Scary Holiday Tales to Make You Scream (30 page)

-John Edward Lawson

GOBBLE, GOBBLE, OXEN FREE

By Kurt Newton

Walter huddled his thin, eleven-year-old body against the morning cold. He'd spent the night in an abandoned warehouse wrapped in mothball-smelling dinner jackets and old lady dresses he'd stolen from a Salvation Army dumpster. He wished the bag he'd grabbed had contained clothes he could wear, but then beggars can't be choosers, as his father was fond of yelling when he'd come home drunk with a bag of pretzels and a can of soda for supper and say, "Here, now eat and shut up." And if Walter showed the slightest hesitation or hint of complaint, somehow that message would find its way through his father's drunken fog and the accusations would start flying. "Good for nothing parasite...Just like that whore of a mother of yours...." And like grease for the wheels of violence, the words would soon turn into fists and Walter could only hope that unconsciousness would come quickly.

Walter watched the morning sun stream in through the warehouse windows and tried not to think that today was Thanksgiving. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and all the fixings. He supposed that "fixings" were all the other side dishes that came along with Thanksgiving dinner. At this point he'd even go for just the fixings to satisfy his hunger.

His stomach growled, then spasmed with pain. Somehow the hunger he'd felt over these past two weeks was worse than any bruise his father could inflict.

His ears perked as the scrape of a box came from across the warehouse. It was followed by a whispering of voices.

Walter buried his head and tried to disappear.

"Hey, here's one!"

Walter could hear the footsteps gather around him. Then all was silent. He pushed back the sequined hem of an old lady's dress from his face and stared at the faces that stared down at him.

Three boys and one girl. Each was dressed in winter coats, wool mittens, scarves and earmuffs. They ranged in age from perhaps eight years old to fourteen. Each looked well fed.

"Hey, don't be afraid," the oldest said. "I'm Matt, this is Marshall," he placed a mittened hand on his younger brother's shoulder, "This here's Melinda Sue, and this one's Mikey."

Walter looked at Melinda Sue. She looked to be about his age and her smile was as warm as the roses on her cheeks.

"How would you like to come home with us?"

Walter looked at the four cherub-like faces and thought he might still be dreaming. He saw visions of a Thanksgiving Day feast, surrounded by brothers and sisters, a mother and father who were neither an addict nor an alcoholic. Walter's stomach growled again, but he was still unsure.

"We do this every year," said Matt. "It will be fun!" The others nodded, their eyes bright. They seemed eager to get going.

Matt held out his hand. The others did the same.

Walter almost felt like crying. He sat up and they pulled him into their group as if he were one of their own.

They made their way out of the city, over railroad tracks and into the woods beyond. They walked along a well-worn path that wove its way deeper and deeper into the woods until they came upon a field where the grass was waist high.

Walter thought this was great. He'd lived in the city all his life, in rat infested tenements and crappy hotels. He'd always wanted to live out in the country, out where there were trees and leaves and squirrels. Maybe they had a dog, he thought. A big fluffy dog he could lay his head against on a hot summer day. He always wanted a dog.

"Gobble, gobble, oxen free!"

Walter jumped. It was Matt who yelled it. The children scattered, each to the surrounding woods, leaving Walter standing alone in the middle of the field. He wanted to run after Matt, then thought that maybe he should follow Marshall instead. Melinda Sue would have been a good choice, but she was girl, and he couldn't follow little Mikey because the young boy disappeared into the grass like a snake. So Walter simply stood in the middle of the field as the others fled.

"What's going on? Are we playing a game?" he shouted. He could feel the crisp November air against his cheeks. His feet were numb from the walk. There were rustlings in the woods, followed by giggles. "Count to ten!" somebody called.

Walter spun around. It was hard to tell which direction the voice had come from. The field was like a big open circle, except for one large stone outcropping jutting up out of the ground at its center. He really didn't feel much like playing. He was hungry. He was cold. But these kids seemed to want to play a game of hide and seek first before they brought him home. Maybe it was some kind of test to see if he would be a suitable brother and playmate. They'd been so nice to him, he figured the least he could do was play along.

"Okay! I'm going to count now! You better hide real good!"

Walter walked over to the stone outcropping and leaned against it, forearms covering his eyes. He began to count.

"One..."

(he could see himself seated in a nice chair, his hands washed, his hair neatly combed)

"Two..."

(the table dressed up like one of those displays in the department stores, all silver and sparkly, with candles and a fruit bowl, and nuts)

"Three..."

(everyone would be seated around, his newfound brothers and sister, his newfound mom, all pretty face and smelling nice, his newfound dad)

"Four..."

(and the smells, all smoky and sweet)

"Five..."

(sausage stuffing and giblet gravy)

"Six..."

(candied yams and cranberry sauce)

"Seven..."

(baby onions, green beans, and corn)

"Eight..."

(apple pie and pumpkin pie)

"Nine..."

(and in the center, all golden brown and glistening, the largest Thanksgiving turkey he'd ever seen)

"Ten!"

Walter opened his eyes. The field was still, the air a silent calm. They could all be hiding in the grass for all he knew. He climbed up on top of the stone outcropping for a better look. He could see the individual trails each of the kids had made when they cut through the grass into the woods.

A wide grin spread across his face, the first grin he could remember feeling in a long, long time. "Gobble, gobble, oxen free!" he yelled. His voice echoed across the field. Walter didn't so much feel the gunshot as heard it reverberate in his ears.

He flew through the air and landed on his back in the grass and lay staring up at the sky. It felt like one of his father's backhands, only this one didn't hurt. For some reason his eyes were locked open and there was a curious twinge that ran along his scalp, like the tickle he used to get when his mom would cut his hair. Aside from that, he couldn't feel a thing.

He could hear footsteps though. And voices. Young kid voices. And one adult. Like trees they gathered around.

"What do you think Uncle Frank?" Matt's voice, eager to please.

Uncle Frank, hunter's hat pulled down over his ears, rifle under his arm, lit a cigarette. He crouched down, grabbed the collar of Walter's jacket, lifted him slightly off the ground and let him drop. "This one's at least a hundred-pounder. You kids did good." Uncle Frank straightened up. "Okay, you two grab his shoulders, you two grab his legs."

Walter wanted to shout that this wasn't right, they couldn't do this to him, that this was Thanksgiving for crap's sake!
I'm not dead...I'm not dead....

But the smaller faces that stared down at him looked so happy, so...hungry. In fact, Walter was having a hard time remembering what it felt like to be hungry, what it felt like to be cold, even what it felt like to be alone. In fact, these strangers had given him more in a few hours than his mother and father had given him in his entire life-a sense of family and togetherness.

"What's the matter, Melinda Sue?"

"It's his eyes, Uncle Frank. They got tears."

"It's just the cold, that's all. Here, let me fix that."

Walter watched as Uncle Frank leaned over, cigarette gripped between his fingers, and stamped the hot end into each of his eye-sockets. With a hiss and a sizzle the sky went dark.

Walter could hear the boys laugh as Melinda Sue went, "Eeyou."

After that he was probably lucky he couldn't feel a thing.

KURT NEWTON

Kurt is the author of two short story collections-The House Spider and Dark Demons-and The Psycho-Hunter's Casebook, a collection of murderous poetry penned by fictitious serial killers. Denizens of the Cityscape, an illustrated collection of poetic tales, is forthcoming from Double Dragon Publishing. For more information, visit Kurt's website at www.kurtnewton.com.

By Jeremy Carr

It started in high school when she was sixteen years old. Emma still cringed when she thought about it, the old memories of that awkward morning often rushing to the surface when she least expected it, sharp and clear and painful as the day it happened. She told herself that it made no sense to be embarrassed about a past event, recollections that her long lost friends had probably forgotten about, but this rationalization never helped. After all, it didn't happen to them. It didn't affect their lives. It wasn't their cross to bear.

She had been spending the night at Judy Hudson's house, along with four other girls. A slumber party. They stayed up late watching goofy romantic comedies on TV, gossiping about the boys in their class, and smoking a few illicit cigarettes that Shannon had managed to pilfer from her mom's purse. Emma didn't like to smoke, but she always gave it her best shot so as not to be ousted from the little group. Shortly after two a.m. they began to nod off; Emma was one of the first to go, crawling inside her sleeping bag and drifting into a deep, dark sleep.

In the morning she awoke to the sun in her eyes and the laughter of her friends, both focused with unusual clarity directly at her. Shielding her eyes from the glare she sat up, disoriented, and momentarily confused by her surroundings.

And then she felt it.

With her palms resting down against the floor, she experienced an unusual feeling. Something squishy and cold. Her hands felt like mush. She was still too tired to think clearly, and would have preferred to ignore everything and go back to sleep, but her friends' incessant giggling made that desire impossible. She struggled to make sense of their remarks, her mind in a muddle.

"God Emma, what's wrong with you?"

"What a pig."

"No self control."

Her eyes finally ceased their rapid blinking and opened wide, the fog in her brain starting to clear. She looked around at the snickering faces and lifted her hands for closer inspection. They were coated in black and white goo, smeared with clumps of messy, sticky stuff.

"What's this?" She asked to their utter amusement.

"You really don't remember?" One of them asked.

"Remember what?"

This caused a new eruption of laughter. Emma sniffed the stuff on her hands and recognized the odor. The texture and consistency could only be one thing: chocolate cake with white frosting. Cake she had seen in Judy's refrigerator the night before. It still didn't make sense to her.

"You got up last night about an hour after you fell asleep. Me and Katherine were still awake and watched you," Judy said.

"And then you went to the kitchen and totally pigged out. You should have seen yourself. It was sooo disgusting," Katherine added.

At first she didn't believe them. These were teenage girls after all, and apt to pull a prank like this on her. Like the time they smeared shaving cream on Jenny Alberton's hands and then waved a feather over her face. Now that was funny. But this was different. This was no harmless prank. These girls hadn't done something to her. Emma had done something to herself. Something that she had no recollection of. Something disgusting.

"I didn't eat any cake last night," she fumbled.

But by later on that day, after she'd had time to clean herself and interrogate her friends more lucidly, she was certain that they hadn't made it up. Besides, Mrs. Hudson had been saving that cake for Judy's sister's birthday, which made Emma feel extremely guilty, and for which she apologized to no end.

She found smears of frosting inside her sleeping bag, crusted onto her pillow case, stuck to her hair. She was disturbed. Frightened. Unnerved. To borrow an expression from her teenage years, freaked out. Who wouldn't be? It's one thing to talk in your sleep, or even to walk in your sleep-but who ever heard of eating in your sleep? She tried to block it out, to write it off as an odd occurrence, a once in a lifetime fluke, a story to laugh about then ultimately forget. And for a while she really believed that it would never happen again.

But it did.

The problem persisted throughout college, the circumstances varying, but always with the same end result. Embarrassment. Frustration. Self loathing. Her roommate Lindsey would often report the events to her the next day, as offhandedly as possible, pretending that it was no big deal, nothing to really worry about. Emma wondered what Lindsey said about her behind her back.

She dated as infrequently as possible, quickly realizing the potential that she had to disturb and sometimes frighten her bedside partners. Like the time she went home with Christopher Hankins, the guy from her American Lit. class who she'd had her eye on for an entire semester. The same guy who woke her up in the middle of the night, shaking her until she stirred, only to find herself standing in his kitchen, nude, her hands and face coated with Aunt Jemima syrup. And the whole time him saying, "You'll wake up my roommate, what's wrong with you?" It was bad enough for Emma to have to cope with her unsavory condition every night, but to bring someone else into the game was just plain unacceptable.

After college she moved into an apartment by herself, anxious for privacy and freedom from embarrassment. But the problem only got worse. How many mornings had she awoken with a foul taste in her mouth, and that all too familiar feeling of nausea and dread which seemed to spill forth from her dream state and into the waking world? She couldn't remember them all. But the worst ones, the most awful discoveries, she could hardly forget. Like the time she woke up with shiny, greasy hands and lips, later to realize that she'd eaten four entire sticks of butter. Or the morning she found an empty package of uncooked hot dogs, which gave her gas and sat in her stomach all day long. There was the jar of cocktail onions which she had thoroughly consumed, down to the last drop of vinegar, a taste she was not able to rid from her mouth for a week. All too often Emma would awaken to discover traces of her nightly raids still clinging to her bed sheets, an unpleasant reminder of her nightly excursions.