Scaredy-Cat

By Monica Marier
I’m in a Hallowe’en-y mood today. Enjoy!


“…Kyle looked down at Tommy, and realized that he was dead. What he thought were the sounds of muffled speaking were actually a nest of rats that had carved a hole in his rotten stomach.”

“STOP!” shouted Isaac jumping to his feet, covering his ears.

“Aw jeez,” moaned Phillip through his pillow. “I told you Isaac would freak.”

“Scaredy-cat!” called Lewis and Phillip joined in. “Scaredy-cat! Scaredy-cat!”

Alex stopped the story immediately, a fleeting expression of guilt crossing his handsome face. “Calm down, Isaac. It’s just a story. It’s not real.”

“No! I told you I didn’t want to do ghost stories! I told you!” moaned Isaac, running out of the bunkhouse.

He desperately tried to conceal the tears streaming from his eyes down his pointed features. His spidery limbs shivered in the chilly Fall night as he left bunk 2 for the seclusion of the pine thicket. Isaac didn’t much like it out here either. The wind howled mournfully through the trees as slivers of moonlight broke through the swirling tendrils of black cloud. Other than that, there was no noise out here. No humming of machines, no ticking clocks or the whir of the furnace. It was eerie and dark and very lonely out here.

The one comfort was that no one would see him cry.

Isaac cursed his own cowardice as he sobbed, his slippers padding silently on spiny pine needles. He was ten years old for Pete’s sake! He was too big to go screaming like a girl and crying every time his friends told a creepy story! But he couldn’t help it. They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that while Alex was describing the rat-infested corpse of Dead Tommy, Isaac could experience everything.

He could smell the rotting flesh, hear the nightmarish squeaking. He could see Tommy’s eyes, milky white, staring unseeing at the ceiling while his friend screamed in unhinged terror. He heard the scream tear the very air as the rats dove for Kyle’s face, clawing at his eyes—!

Isaac had to stop himself in mid-thought as another sob broke free of his tight chest. He was scared —so scared that it hurt. Why did everything have to feel so real? He knew it was a story, yet he knew he wouldn't get a wink of sleep that night. He would be seeing Dead Tommy in his dreams all night.
Isaac squealed as he heard footsteps and whirled around.

“It’s just me,” said Alex.

Isaac relaxed. It was okay to cry around Alex.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” said Isaac petulantly.

“Look I’m really sorry. But you said you’d be okay.”

“No, you said I’d be okay. I said you were full of it,” said Isaac looking upon Alex with an expression of hurt betrayal.

“I keep forgetting you’re such a…”

“Sissy?” prompted Isaac with venom.

“That you’re really imaginative,” said Alex, ever the diplomat.

“I hate it,” muttered Isaac.

“But you’re really good at coming up with your own stories! You know your sketchbook that’s full of dwarves and orcs and manticores and stuff.”

“Yeah, but I only like nice stories, where nothing bad happens. Nothing scary anyway. Bad things… hurt me.”

“Yeah I know.”

“I wish I could be brave like you,” said Isaac. Alex often bragged that he’d seen Friday 13th and Nightmare on Elmstreet without being scared. "I'd rather be brave than creative."

“I wish I could come up with stuff like you,” said Alex with a grin. “Come back inside. It’s freezing out here, and if Phillip’s dad catches us out here we’ll be in trouble.”

“Are the others going to call me scaredy-cat again?” mumbled Isaac.

“I won’t let them,” said Alex staunchly.

Isaac stood up with a sigh. “I really hate camping.”

******

20 years later…

Gilda closed the word document shuddered. She’d been biting her knuckles for the last few pages, her legs curling up on the sofa as she read the last chapter. She forgot that she was supposed to be editing and would have to re-read the last chapter again. She’d gotten too into the story.
Pushing the laptop to one side she glanced up at her husband in both admiration and shock.

“Good grief, babe! I don’t know how you manage to take the English language and write something so terrifying! Woof!” she said.

He just laughed good-naturedly at Gilda as he pulled the nachos out of the oven and stirred the chili. “Sorry. Too graphic?”

“No, it’s good. I think you have another best-seller, it’s just…” Gilda left off and shivered. “Your readers better be made of strong stuff, that’s all I’ll say. Enlighten me, honey. Were you always this ghoulish? Were you one of those kids who ate R.L. Stein books for breakfast every morning and pretended to be Freddy Krueger?”

Isaac smiled at his wife as she looked up at him wide-eyed. “Believe it or not, I was actually quite the scaredy-cat as a kid,” he said.

(Based on a true story.)

Campus Spirit

By MONICA MARIER

“You’re a witch?” I asked, goggle-eyed.

Sandy just shrugged and pulled a lock of ash blond hair away from her mouth.

“Yeah,” she said.

It took a while before I could say anything else. One fact kept poking me in the back of the head like a pencil.

“BUT YOU’RE A REPUBLICAN!” I blurted out.

Sandy snorted and rolled her eyes. “So? Doesn’t matter.”

“I thought you couldn’t be both,” I insisted. There was something about Sarah Palin the NRA paired with incense and crystals that didn’t mesh.

“Look, you’re born a witch. It’s not a lifestyle choice like who you vote for or what color socks you wear,” she told me.

I shrugged, but I tried to thoroughly examine my roommate without staring.

It still looked like Sandy Parks: a skinny but rather plain-jane physical therapy major, with horsey teeth and freckles. She still had a drawl after moving here from Norfolk VA —not that it mattered. Her genuine snakeskin boots (that had seen better days) and straw cowboy hat was a dead giveaway.

She told me that she envied my “striking features” and overflowing EE cup, but I didn’t believe it for a second. Who’d want to be a big fat marshmallow when they were a size 2? You can fix bland features with a little makeup (which Sandy never tried to do) but you can’t fix fat.

And then this happened. We were on the floor, eating Milanos (hers) and watching The Last Unicorn (also her movie on her TV) when we suddenly announced she was a witch.

“Alright prove it,” I said, REALLY hoping she wouldn’t.

“’Kay,” she said. She pointed to a box of Pop Tarts (hers) on the shelf and said, “Cthinos h’yel meh taftut.”

 If anyone ELSE had said it without a thick Southern Accent it probably would have sounded really cool.

The box flopped over and remained on its side.

“Pshh. Is that it?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said and my eyes returned to the box. A rustling sound indicated that something was happening to one of the shiny foil packages. I stared as the rustling got louder and louder until—

“HIT THE DECK!” shouted Sandy suddenly.

 Sandy and I ate the carpet as two shapes went whizzing overhead. There was a dull thudding sound as the room shook and I tentatively got up.

“Sorry,” said Sandy looking abashed. She rose and straightened her denim skirt. “I lost control a little.”

“A LITTLE?” I asked looking at the white cold walls.

Sticking out of the cinderblocks, like ninja throwing stars, were two perfectly toasted s’mores-flavored Pop Tarts.  I gingerly pulled one out of the wall, after it was cool enough to touch. The icing was now a caramelized brulee, but otherwise intact. How it managed to fly into the rock-hard wall without crumbling and showering us with molten sugar was beyond me. Gingerly I bit off a corner that wasn’t covered in plaster. It tasted fine.

“Cool,” I said warily. “So what else can you do, other than fire ballistic pastries?” I asked.

She winced at my comment and I felt ashamed of myself.

“Sorry. I can’t turn the snark off sometimes,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, I know,” she said shaking her head indulgently.  “Well, there’s a reason I told you I’m a witch, now that you ask me.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” I asked.

“I need your help with something.”

“Like what?” I asked, uncertainly. I was worried this was going to get uncomfortable and fast.

“I need you to help me get to a book,” she said.

Oh, thank GOD. She doesn’t want me to do something dumb with colored candles and silver knives, I thought.

“What kind of book. Is it expensive?” I asked.

“It’s priceless,” she said nodding. “It’s kept under lock and key at the library and only certain majors can get access to it.”

I nodded. There were a few of those. Our University was one of the oldest in America, which was really one of our only claims to fame these days apart from a champion ping-pong team.

“So where do I come in?” I asked.

“Well you’re a history major, minoring in archaic lore, right?”

“Yeah…” I said, growing nervous again.

“The book I need to get access to is the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. I think MU has a copy of it in the Library.”

“Oh,” I said my stomach sinking. Maybe colored candles wouldn’t have been so bad. “Well, see, that’s going to be tricky. They kind of don’t let any students see that book anymore.”

“But they used to!” she cried.

“Yeah, but every time they did someone went bonkers! I think they were theorizing that the book had lead ink or fungoid spores in it — something that was making people go nuts. It’s sealed up in storage now.”

“Shit,” Sandy cursed a rare thing in itself. “Now what.”

“Well, they sell the English version in the campus bookstore,” I said.

Sandy looked up. “That might work,” she said, her eyes hopeful. “We can try anyway.”

“Well, okay. Let’s go — I could use a latte. What do you want it for any way?”

“Well you know how kids have been attacked on campus at night?” she said slowly.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I think the book might give me some clue as to how to stop it.”

I stopped dead as I strung the two factors together. Kids were getting attacked on Miskatonic campus behind the science buildings and Sandy wanted access to occult literature.

“What… are you saying something …weird is attacking students?”

“Rosemary West, what do you know about the reanimated?” Sandy asked me.