NEIGHBORS part 2

Copyright (c) 2018 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

By R. Peterson

It was after midnight when I finished making the torn sheets from my bed into a rope. It was about thirty foot to the ground. I figured I had braided a little more than eighteen. I could drop ten foot without breaking a leg … I hoped. I only weighed ninety-five pounds so I wasn’t worried about the cloth- rope breaking. None of the doors on the rooms appeared to be locked. I guess they figured the security in the place was sufficient to keep a kid from escaping. I checked the hallway outside my room. Born on the Bayou blasted from a room three doors down the corridor. The smoker offered his companion a cigarette it was politely declined. When I looked at them through the knothole board, one of the attendants was a regular person and the other a goat demon. The demon was the non-smoker … go figure. I figured the Credence Clearwater Revival Music was loud enough to muffle any pounding … so I went after the bars on my windows.

The steel bars were tough but the frame they were attached to was rotted pine. I had the entire window out and lying on my bed in about ten minutes. Mom always told me I was destructive for a twelve year old … I guess she was right.

My bed was bolted to the floor so I tied one end of my rag rope around it, squeezed out of the window and hand over hand, started my descent. I was near the end of the rope with perhaps a drop of fifteen feet when I suddenly began going up. Two smiling attendants were busy hoisting me back up to my window. I thought about dropping but took too long to get my nerve up. By the time I decided that I might escape even with a broken leg I was too high … no one escapes with a broken neck.

About three feet below the window ledge, just out of my reach, they stopped pulling me up. I heard laughter from below and looked down. Mr. and Mrs. Fisk were down there with most of the cult members who had been at the bloody cat ritual in their backyard. Mrs. Fisk leered up at me as she dropped what looked like construction debris on a pile directly under me. “I was hoping you’d try to escape,” she cackled. “This should be pretty amusing!” Most of the boards the Devil worshipers were putting on the pile had jagged, rusty nails sticking out of them and they were careful to make sure the nails were all point side up.

“Pull me up! I won’t try to escape again!” I pleaded.

Mr. Fisk chuckled. “We have no intention of pulling you up,” he said. “We all have bets on how long a thirteen year old boy can hang onto a cotton sheet rope.”

I started to tell him I was only twelve but then I remembered my Birthday was tomorrow. It didn’t look as if I was going to get that party I wanted.

My fingers were already aching when Fisk and the others started marching around the pile lifting their hands high in the air rubbing them together and then wiggling their fingers. “Another minute is all I’ll give him!”

            “He’s young … I’ll say ninety seconds!”

            “Some of those nails are three inches long … I say three minutes!”

My hands were beginning to cramp up. I let go with one hand to try to stop the cramping. The crowd below gasped in some kind of sadistic ecstasy. I don’t know why I put the knot hole necklace up to my eye and then looked down perhaps I wanted to see what my tormenters really looked like. They were all split-hoof creatures, mostly goats, but what astonished me was the pile of deadly nail infested debris was actually a pile of mattresses and pillows. I smiled as I let go. If this was some kind of dream or wishful thinking I was going to find out real fast. I closed my eyes for three long seconds …. and then I bounced.

-------2-------

            I guess my abductors had had their fun I spent the next two hours in and out of showers and getting my hair cut. They gave me a three piece suit to put on. “To a rehearsal,” was all they would tell me when I ask where I was going.

We drove downtown in a long black limousine that I kept expecting to have a coffin in the back. We stopped in front of Wicket Towers one of the tallest office buildings in the city and then rode the elevator up to the roof. The entire roof was a huge garden surrounded by a three-foot retaining wall. Elegant waiters dressed in white tuxedos served drinks and oeuvres to guests seated at round glass top tables. A twelve piece string orchestra was tuning up.

            “So who’s getting married?” I asked wondering why they had brought me here.

            “Why you are!” Mrs. Fisk laughed. “Didn’t you ever wonder why we went to so much trouble to get you?”

            “I’m too young to get married,” I assured her.

            “You’ll be thirteen tomorrow,” Mrs. Fisk grinned. “The most flavorful age … just like she likes them.”

We were nearing the far end of the roof when I noticed two women dressed in white on what appeared to be a portable stage. Mom and Jelly! “What are they doing here?” I gasped.

            “You don’t expect your mother and sister not to attend their own son and brother’s wedding do you?”

            “Mom! Help me!” I tried to pull away but Mrs. Fisk’s fingers felt like iron clamps on my neck.

            “They can’t hear you,” Mrs. Fisk laughed. “They only hear my voice and I assure you they are very obedient.”

She called Jelly by the name Adaurea and gestured for my sister to come to us by wagging her finger. Jelly’s eyes were like blue beach balls bouncing on white sand but they reflected no light. She paid no attention to me. “Go down to the newsstand on the street corner and buy me a newspaper,” Mrs. Fisk tossed her a fifty-cent piece.  Jelly started toward the open elevator that had brought us to the roof.

            “No,” Mrs. Fisk scolded. “I don’t have time …. Just go over the side!”

My little sister whom I loved more than life itself walked to the edge of the roof with no hesitation and climbed up on the wall. “No,” I screamed. “I’ll do whatever you want but don’t make my little sister do this!”

Mrs. Fisk smiled and gestured Jelly back to the stage. “Just so we understand each other,” she said. “Your mother and little sister are both under my command. You don’t do exactly as I say and they will both die … before you do.”

We spent the next two hours going over an elaborate ceremony and the bride wasn’t there. At one point they gave me a ring and Mr. Fisk told me not to lose it. I was wondering how that would be possible. With the size of the ring my bride had to have fingers about two inches in diameter. I was wondering what kind of woman I was marrying … if it was a woman.

I guess I wasn’t surprised when they let me go home … alone. They had my mother and sister I had to do what they said.

-------3-------

There was no way I could sleep. I lay on my bed tossing and turning. I tried to conjure up an image of my father wondering what he would do in this situation. I kept hearing him talking about his fence boards and the Juhar tree they had come from.  A gypsy woman lived in my town who had a small box carved out of the same kind of wood. Something magical happened each time an object was placed in the box …. and then after the lid was opened.

I was off my bed and out to the garage in a flash. I had enough scrap wood from the board I had cut the knot hole out of to make a small box … I hoped. I worked most of the night. I didn’t want anything to diminish the magic, if there was any, so I didn’t use glue or nails. The entire box was pinned together with wooden pegs made of the same strange wood. I used my dad’s old hunting knife, the one found with blood on it next to Jelly’s dead cat, to carve the single word Ombré just like my dad described. Just before dawn I said a short prayer and dropped the ring inside before closing the lid.

It was a miracle I didn’t fall asleep on the way to my room. I was out the second my head hit the pillow … without dreams and with the first embers of hope slowly starting to kindle.

-------4-------

I woke up late; the wedding … my wedding was at midnight, but I was ordered to be there at nine.  It was a little past seven PM. I showered and combed my hair. I had a little trouble with the tux. It took me a couple of tries to discover you didn’t tuck in the coat tails. I almost forgot the carved box with the ring inside. I was hailing a taxi when I discovered I’d left it on the kitchen table. Once I had the ring and the box tucked safely away in my pants pocket I couldn’t find a taxi to save my life …. or my mother or sister’s.

I walked over two miles before I finally got a hack to pull over. The back seat was nauseating. The last fare must have been a farmer selling horse manure as garden fertilizer. By the time I arrived at Wicket Towers, it was 9:45 and Mrs. Finch was fuming. “I almost decided to do with only one bridesmaid,” she said pointing to the roof edge.

It was the longest two hours of my life. I stood less than twenty feet away from my zombie mother and sister and neither of them recognized me. The rooftop began to fill with persons unknown.

-------5-------

A hush fell over the crowd and the music stopped. I knew my bride had arrived. The string orchestra began to play an agonizing slow wedding march as if the entire ensemble had been victimized by an overdose of Quaaludes.

The elevator door burst open and the Fisk’s daughter Hamilton appeared alongside something large draped in black lace. Hamilton looked as if she had somehow acquired the worst characteristics from both of her parents. Her long face was punctuated by an equally long and sharp nose which ended in a knobby chin resembling the socket bone on a femur. She didn’t walk so much as lurch. The lower half of the body jerking the upper half as if with an invisible rope.

            My bride moved with purpose toward the stage. My god she had to be over seven feet tall and with more than two legs! Halfway down the aisle an overweight woman holding a Persian cat in her arms suddenly cried out as the cat scratched her and flew out of her arms.

The thing in the black lace was fast. My bride flung off her veil and hissed just before broomstick thick insecticidal arms grasped the terrified feline and speared it through the neck. The crowd actually applauded the eating. I barely received passing grades in fourth grade biology but I’d learned enough to know my future wife was a seven foot tall species of Mantodea … a Praying Mantis.

            I started to pass out several times but each time my best man the guy standing next to me with fingers like pliers would give me a sharp pinch and my eyes would fly open. Mrs. Fisk was smiling and licking her lips and I remembered something else about the female Mantodea they eat their mates shortly after breeding.

I was hoping this was not really what my soon to be wife looked like and during the preacher’s extra-long discourse I sneaked the knot hole up to my eye. She looked even worse than before. The beak at the end of her snout appeared to be cracked and one of her eyes was missing! She smelled like the rotted vinyl behind an old toilet.

I don’t remember saying I do, but my arm still aches as if someone twisted it.

When it came time to exchange rings, my bride scratched a circle around the third digit of my left hand and then stuck the claw in her mouth obviously liking the taste of blood. I held my breath as I opened the box and handed her the ring inside … it felt oddly cold. A second later my finger felt like I’d touched a hotplate.

A long green tongue came from my bride’s mouth and licked the entire area around the spiny opening as she slipped the ring on one of the many appendages that passed for fingers.

Her mouth opened wide and I thought she was going to eat me right there without waiting for cake or photographers. What came out was like escaping steam or a gunshot hole in a monster truck tire. She was belching fire and now resembled a horrible dragon rather than a religious insect. Vomit, which smelled like gasoline, ran from her mouth like a river. She spun in place and helped spread the flames. Black smoke rose into the night sky like someone trying to cover the stars with a blanket. A viola and two high strung violins caught fire and the heated and contracted strings snapped and broke like firecrackers.

People were running looking to escape the roof. Now my entire bride’s head was flaming. A waiter sprinted past holding a glass tray filled with overflowing champagne glasses the back of his white jacket was on fire but he never spilled a drop.

            Much of the vegetation around the roof edge was arborvitae evergreens and the cone shaped bushes caught fire quickly making the entire top floor garden resemble a torch. I saw my huge blackened bride plowing through the crowd, shoving terrified and fleeing guests into her mouth like peanuts obviously determined to enjoy one last meal before she dissolved in ash.

Mrs. Fisk was trying to slap away flames coming from her husband’s toupee and caught a bit of one lacy dress sleeve on fire. The next instant she was a torch from the waist up …. I watched her go over the roof edge like a giant half-smoked cigarette. It may have been my imagination but I thought I saw the Fisk’s daughter, Hamilton, climb on an old thirties style black ladies bicycle and pedal furiously away into the night sky.

            Mom and Jelly appeared to be back to normal. They both looked as if they awakened in a party raging in Hell. I grabbed them both and we forced our way into the over-crowded elevator of screaming people just as the door closed.

There were police and fire truck sirens coming in the distance as we reached the street level. We didn’t try to hail a cab we just kept on running. About three blocks away from the burning building Jelly began to laugh. I thought it was about the dumbest sound I’d ever heard. Thirty seconds later, me and mom both joined in. We were going home.

-------6-------

            It’s been almost three months since the tragedy that took the lives of the Fisks and so many other prominent citizens in our fair city. The FOR SALE sign had been on the front lawn of our former neighbor’s house for more than a month, today it was gone and a big orange moving van was backed into the driveway when I came home from school. I couldn’t help staring as two beefy men unloaded furniture.

I wondered if the new neighbors had any children my age.

THE END?