Bone Dry

This is going to be my collection of short fiction and story blurbs.

This is a slight edit from the original rough draft. I thought I had lost it.
Good thing I save everything. Now I just have to find a way to sort thru it all.

Bone Dry

It began long ago, in the house at 1004 Reese St, in the town of Greensville.

A rare house for East Texas.

The red brick building loomed over the surrounding neighborhood, dwarfing the houses it squatted among.
Pecan trees grew in a tight formation around the house, like the walls of an ancient castle. The canopy of foliage obscured the upper floors of the three story house from view.

The building was three stories tall, it had an attic and a full basement.
The basement was the rarity.
The water table in Hunter County was high enough that most basements would be flooded, especially the basement of a building built back in 1904.
But not this place, it was different somehow, as if it stood apart from the laws that dictate these things.

It had been the music building for the turn of the century Texas Holy Righteous Bible College.
The college was haven of extreme Christian fundamentalism, and was closed in 1910 by a scandal concerning a Dean and his midnight dalliances with his coed students.

A number of children were born by the Dean’s appetites and the young mothers were whisked away from campus.
The story was that the new mothers were paid off to keep silent and sent away.
Some said the newborns were sent back to the north east for adoption, or taken in by other congregations.
Others, however, whispered of darker things.
Terrible things that happened in the basement of that building.
Regardless, the elders of the church worked hard to keep the charismatic Dean under control and out of trouble.

This basement was bone dry. That’s what was so odd.
The kind of dry that seemed to suck the moisture right out of your breath.
My dad thought maybe they stored the musical instruments there to keep them safe from the humid east Texas summers.
Maybe some kind of desiccant built into the walls, he said.

But no one stayed in the basement long.
Oh sure, adults would try to talk it off like it was no big thing, but there was something more.
A faint gnawing at the back of your mind that would slowly swell into dread as time wore on.
I couldn’t stay in the basement long without my eyes drying out and getting scratchy.
My baby sister Jenny used to say she had crackers in her eyes

Jenny was five, and not supposed to open the basement door.
And boy, the trouble we would get into if we left the door open.
The stairs leading down into the darkness were steep and worn. I always wondered how many people must have tromped up and down each step to wear and discolor them like that.

The smell of old earth, and something more, like a mild decay, was the first thing you would notice when you opened the door.
My mother tried and tried to get rid of the smell, but even though the floor was made of concrete and the walls a dull red brick, she couldn’t find the source of the odor.
It seemed to come from everywhere.

I had three older brothers, and we would play a game of chicken.
To see who could stay on the landing at the top of the basement stairs, with the door shut and the light off.
Those were the scariest times. When it felt like something old, something evil was slowly stirring in the inky black, just down the stairs.

The first sound of a creak, the first faint scratch would send me out the door, heart racing as I imagined a dark malignant presence creeping slowly, every so slowly, up the stairs.
I always thought of huge black spider, fangs quivering and dripping, waiting to suck every juice out of my body. Leave me as dry as that basement, a husk of hair, leathery flesh and bone.

I remember that night in the fall when I was when I was in sixth grade.
It was a week before my twelfth birthday. I had fallen asleep reading the latest issue of Famous Monsters.

Time to get a drink of water, then back to bed before I woke up to much and stayed up the rest of the night.
I walked on the balls of my feet. The long hall way to the bathroom would creak, but years of hide and seek had taught me how to keep quiet.
I was almost to the bathroom when I saw it.

The basement door was ajar.
It was never ajar.
Not at night.
Especially not at night.

The flight instinct almost overwhelmed me.
What horrors had already escaped that gloomy dungeon and even now were ready to strike?
My heart was beating so hard, it felt like it was going to hammer its way out of my chest.

For what seemed an eternity, I stood there, rooted to the floor in fear.
As I was starting to regain my composure, something happened that almost sent me over the edge.

A cold, wet something touched the back of my right leg. A strangled cry gurgled from the throat as I lurched across the room, whirling to get away from whatever was about to surely kill me.
Then I saw it.
and let all my breath out in one incredibly sigh.

It was Bo, my dog.
Shaking, laughing silently at how silly I had been, I patted him, grinning my relief.
I had almost forgotten the basement door.
Almost.
Then I heard something that I didn’t want to hear.

*tap*

A sound from the basement.

Faint.

*tap*

Bo had heard it too, and he stiffened.
He started to back away from the door, his gaze fixed intently on it.
His ears were pinned back to his skull and he was shaking.
Bo was a full size poodle, and I had never seen him back down from anything.
As I went to pet him on the head, he snapped at me, turned and darted down the hall and into the living room.

I stood in shock.
He had never snapped at me.
Never.

*tap**tap*

There it was again. I was so close to the door now I could reach out and touch the knob.
Part of me wanted to slam the door shut, run to my room and dive under the safety of my blankets.
But there was something familiar about that noise.
What was it? I know it.

I leaned in close, slowly moving my eye to the cracked door. As I peered through, visions of skeletal fingers gouging my eye out played in my mind.

*tap**tap**tap*

I could make out a faint light spiling on the the floor at the right side of the staircase.

Ha! flashlight!

It hit me like a semi hitting an armadillo on the highway.
It had to be my oldest brother. I bet he was down there hiding his girly books.
What a perfectly sneaky, perfectly perfect hiding spot. I had to admire his reasoning.
No one would ever think to look there.

And here was my chance for payback, now I could scare the living daylights out of him for a change.

Slowly, so very slowly I opened the door to the basement. Maybe it was the night air, maybe it was the time of year, but the smell of must and decay was way thicker now.

Maybe he was hiding them behind a wall, and that is what is causing the smell. The exposed earth, or some rotted support that he is moving.
I filed this away for future reference if I needed blackmail material against him.

*tap*

In my minds eye, I could see him softly tapping the wall back into place, hiding a virtual treasure trove of fleshly delight.

With all the will I could muster, I moved slowly down the stairs, keeping the balls of my feet to either side of the step, avoiding the middle, where it would be most likely to creak.

*tap**tap*

I was grinning like a madman, my heart pounding, this time not from terror, but exhilaration.
I was the hunter here, and my prey would not escape.

When I finally set foot on the basement floor, I almost gasped at how cold the concrete was under my bare feet.
November in Texas isn’t a particularly cold month, sure not this cold. I moved around the stairs, staying in the shadows, until I could see the light.

*tap**tap**tap*

It was a flashlight, but not my brothers.
It was a Raggedy Ann flashlight.
It was Jenny’s light.

That’s when I saw her.
And those things.
In the basement, beside the wall under the stairs.

The bricks in the wall under the stairs looked like they had crumbled. They were scattered about the floor.
It looked like something had dug them out, or maybe pushed them out?

Jenny was sitting with her back to the wall, surrounded by crumbled bricks and piles of rotting earth.
Her face was gaunt, and her eye sunken.
She looked like a balloon that was slowly deflating.
Her right hand moved mechanically, as she dropped the rubber ball then caught it again.

Roots had sprouted from the dirt behind the wall and had forced their way under her skin.
Thick, scaly roots had entwined her whole body, boring into her soft skin and piercing her organs.
They pulsed rhythmically, as if they were feeding on her, draining her of every bit of fluid in her body.

The pile of dirt next to the girl’s body began to move, taking shape.
A leg appeared, then another and a tiny hand. In a matter of moments, what had been the pile of dirt and roots sat up and looked up at me.

I looked like, like a baby.

A baby made of black earth and roots running thru it like veins.
It even had something trailing out of its center that looked like an umbilical cord.
It’s head lolled on its shoulders, as if it the neck were unable to support the weight.
The freakish head bobbled obscenely as it shambled towards Jenny, leaving a trail of wormy dirt in it’s wake..

I saw its mouth out, and the head surge forward, latching on to Jennies left thigh.
A horrible sucking sound came from the abomination.
The things head worked feverishly back and forth, all the while still making the horrible gurgling.
A trail of blood rolled down Jennies leg and onto the floor.
After a moment, the thing sat back and swivelled its head to look up at me.

It’s lips were a mixture of blood and dirt. A muddy mix of horror and perversion.
The girls blood trickled down it’s front and mixed with the blood already on the floor.

When those lips smiled at me, I screamed…

*tap**tap* as the ball hit the concrete floor.