Twisted Tales Read online

“Umm, I was just using the bathroom,” Jared said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Slow down, little man.” Dad raised his hand. Jared smelled whiskey and funk rolling like hot steam from Dad’s body; he coughed into his hand. “You know what me and your Mama were tangling about tonight?”

  Jared shrugged. He chastised himself for not escaping back to his room before Dad appeared.

  “Don’t act dumb, Jared. It was about your sorry-assed daddy. I don’t want him calling my house. I don’t care if he’s only calling for you. This is my crib and he’s disrespecting me.” Dad suddenly farted loudly, and the nauseating sound was like an exclamation point. Jared grimaced.

  “The next time he calls here, you hang up on him,” Dad said. “You don’t say a word to him, and you don’t tell your mother. Clear?”

  “But ...”

  Dad sprang from the wall. “But what?”

  Jared chewed his lip. “But ... he’s my father. You aren’t.” The words slipped out of him, and the instant they did, he knew he’d made a mistake.

  Although Dad had been drinking, he moved toward Jared with startling speed. The next thing Jared knew, Dad had seized him by his shoulders, hefted him in the air, and pinned him against the wall. Terror ran like hot oil through his veins, and he felt himself needing to pee again.

  Dad’s face, twisted by fury, floated like a death mask in front of him. Spittle sprayed from Dad’s lips as he spoke.

  “You listen to me, you little bastard. I’m your daddy. That nigga that you think is your daddy—forget him. He ain’t here. I pay the bills and take care of you and your Mama. If I ever hear you disrespect me like that again, I’m gonna break my belt over your ass. Clear?”

  Jared could barely breathe. When he tried to speak only a thin whistle of air came out.

  Dad shook him, making Jared’s head knock against the wall. He felt dizzy.

  “Hear me? Is that clear?”

  Tears leaked from Jared’s eyes. His throat was too tight for him to say anything, heart pounding so hard he felt like he was going to choke. He felt warm pee streaming down his leg, and the shame that burned through him made him cry harder.

  “Put my baby down right now!”

  Mom’s enraged voice cut through the haze in Jared’s mind. His mouth flew open, and all he cried out was, “Mama, help!”

  Dad dropped him, and Jared hit the floor on numbed legs. He stumbled, tears blurring his vision, but not even his tears kept him from seeing Mom in her nightgown, coming at Dad with a hammer.

  Bust his head wide open, Mama, bust it open like a watermelon, he wanted to shout at her. But she was so tiny compared with Dad. Even with a weapon, she couldn’t beat Dad. He was just too big, too strong.

  As Mom swung the hammer at Dad, he snagged her arm in midair. He backhanded her across the mouth. She cried out, spun around and struck the wall.

  “I’m the king of this house, goddammit!” Dad said. He took the hammer and smashed it against the wall, paint chips crashing to the floor. He whipped the hammer around in another wild arc, clobbered another wall. Jared was sure he was going to hit Mom. Mom cowered under Dad, holding her lip.

  Jared couldn’t stand back and act helpless anymore. He just couldn’t. He had to help Mom.

  He fled to his bedroom.

  Dad whirled. “That’s it, run, you little bastard. This is all your fault anyway, you know that? Everything would be fine if you hadn’t been born!”

  Jared made it inside his room. Had to get his hands on something that could keep Dad away from Mom. He could get his baseball bat. Mom had bought him a nice Louisville Slugger for Christmas last year.

  He looked back and forth across his room. He didn’t see the bat. Where was it ... ?

  He remembered that he’d left it under the bed.

  He’d put the bat under the bed months ago, in anticipation of something just like this happening. But that was before the monster had arrived.

  There was no way he was going to reach under the bed with the monster there. No way.

  Outside in the hallway, he heard leather snapping against flesh, Dad cursing, and Mom crying softly. She endured Dad’s belt whippings quietly.

  He felt sick. He wanted to cover his ears and crawl back under the covers, like he always did. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t take this anymore. Bat or no bat.

  He rushed to the doorway. Dad’s back to him; Mom was sprawled underneath Dad, her delicate body trembling as Dad popped the belt against her legs and arms in smooth, rhythmic strokes.

  “Get away from her, you crazy motherfucker,” Jared said. It was the first time he’d ever used the “F” word, and it felt strange coming from his lips. “Get away from her right now.”

  “What?” Dad looked at him. “What did you say, boy?”

  “I ...” Jared couldn’t finish his sentence. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Oh, was he in for it now.

  Dad charged after him. Jared backpedaled into his room, fists balled at his side.

  He wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go. The only escape was through the doorway.

  And now Dad was there.

  Dad chuckled, winding the belt around his hand like a whip. “You think you’re a big man now, huh? I’m gonna beat the black off your ass. This is my house, dammit.”

  Jared backed all the way up against the wall. Cold sweat had glued his fingers together. He couldn’t have held a baseball bat if he’d had one.

  “Leave him alone,” Mom said from the hallway, but her voice sounded frail, beaten. There would be no rescue this time, Jared realized. He would endure this beating like a man. No more crying.

  “Trying to be brave, little man?” Dad asked. “We’ll see how brave you act when I start popping this belt.”

  Jared breathed so hard and fast he was light-headed. He felt like he could be dreaming. He wished he was dreaming and he would wake up and everything would be okay in the morning, and it would be only him and Mom in the house (they’d lived there before Dad, though Dad always called it “my house”), and Dad was gone forever. But that was only a dream. He wasn’t dreaming. This was real, and Dad was going to get him.

  Dad stalked forward, belt swinging, fingers flexing.

  Jared always closed his eyes when he was getting a whipping. But he wouldn’t close them this time. He’d suffer the beating with his eyes wide open.

  If he had closed his eyes, he would’ve missed what happened.

  As Dad stomped past the foot of the bed, a thick, purple-black tentacle launched from under the bed and wrapped around Dad’s ankle with a wet, slapping sound.

  “What the ... ?” Dad started to say, staring at the rope of flesh around his ankle, and his voice was suddenly drowned out by an inhuman roar that exploded from beneath the bed, as if a lion was under there. Jared’s eyes grew large enough to pop out of his head.

  It’s the monster, the monster, the monster ...

  The creature yanked Dad’s ankle, and Dad hit the floor on his back, yelling in a high-pitched voice: “Oh, shit! What the hell? Help me, help me!” But Jared’s feet seemed to be nailed to the carpet; he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. He was mesmerized, terrified.

  Another dark tentacle shot out and twisted around Dad’s other leg.

  “Help me!” Dad was hollering now. He reminded Jared of an old woman.

  The monster bellowed, a sound that made the walls tremble and the bed quake.

  Jared didn’t move. He imagined the creature beneath his bed as something that looked like an alligator but with lots of tentacles, and even more teeth . . . uh-uh, he wasn’t moving.

  The beast began to pull Dad toward the bed. Dad’s arms flailed wildly. His hand snagged the leg of Jared’s desk, slowing his progress toward the darkness underneath the bed.

  Jared ran forward, raised his foot, and stomped on Dad’s fingers. His hand fell away from the desk leg, and he slid closer to the bed.

  “You bastard, I’m gonna get you... .” Dad groped
for Jared’s leg, but Jared moved out of his reach.

  The monster thundered louder than before—and the bed itself was flung upward as if it was the lid of a hole. It hovered at almost a ninety-degree angle, suspended by an invisible force.

  Beneath, there was the monster.

  It resembled an alligator, like Jared had imagined . . . but not really. It had maybe a dozen muscular tentacles, like an octopus ... But it didn’t look like an octopus either, really. Its eyes glowed a gas-jet blue. And it had teeth ... rows and rows of long, sharp teeth.

  How did this thing fit under my bed? The question flitted around the back of Jared’s mind. How did I ever sleep with something like that right under me?

  A shimmering pool of blackness surrounded the monster, like a dark ocean. Jared thought that the monster was much bigger than he’d figured; most of its body was concealed in the dark, watery aura.

  Dad screamed.

  The monster reeled Dad in, its enormous, toothy mouth wide open, Dad shrieking the entire way.

  Jared wanted to turn away. He didn’t want to watch. He had seen enough. But he could not stop staring.

  The monster swallowed Dad whole, like pythons gulp down their prey, except the monster did it so quickly that one instant Jared saw Dad ... and the next instant the only thing left of Dad was his worn leather belt, dangling like a spaghetti noodle from the creature’s lips. Then the creature sucked in the belt, too.

  Jared stared at the monster’s glowing blue eyes. He waited for a tentacle to come out and grab him, too.

  But the monster did not attack. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but it seemed to wink at him.

  The bed, which had been suspended in the air the whole time, banged back to the floor.

  Jared exhaled. His chest hurt.

  He turned and saw Mom watching from the doorway.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  Mom nodded. Her eyes were wide. “All of it.”

  Jared cautiously went to the bed. He didn’t hear the monster breathing. He nudged the bed sideways a few feet.

  Underneath, there was only the carpet, a few forgotten socks, and his Louisville Slugger baseball bat. No sign of the monster. No otherworldly pool of darkness.

  No sign of Dad.

  Mom came forward and put her arm around his shoulders.

  “I don’t think it’ll ever come back,” Jared said. “I guess it got what it wanted.”

  “That’s right—the monster,” Mom said, and they walked out of the bedroom together.

  Death Notice

  Ever since her husband’s death eight years ago, Mrs. Mary Pryor could never wait for morning to arrive.

  Every evening, she went to bed no later than nine o’clock, and woke up at six AM. She was usually just in time to shuffle outside in her house robe and slippers and pick up The Harbor News from her driveway even while the delivery van was still in sight, trundling down the street.

  Standing at the kitchen table, Mary would carefully unfurl the paper with her spindly copper-brown fingers. She’d flip past the front-page news, sports, business, and lifestyle sections, to peel open the most important part of the paper: the Metro section.

  It contained the obituaries.

  No matter the day, the obituaries were always there. Someone had always died. And more often than not, Mary knew one of the deceased.

  Pencil in hand, bifocals balanced on her hawk nose, she would scan the death notices, making check marks near the names of those she certainly had known, those she thought she or someone of her acquaintance might have known, and those she wanted to learn more about—to confirm whether she had ever known them or not.

  After marking off the obits of interest, she would extract them with a pair of scissors as carefully as a surgeon removing an organ from a living body, and spread them on the kitchen table. She would then brew a weak cup of Folgers.

  When the clock struck seven, she would start making phone calls.

  She worked the phone like a telemarketer on a deadline, telling family and friends who had died, skillfully probing for connections. It was a small world—six degrees of separation and all that—but in Mary’s experience, in a small town like Spring Harbor, it was more like two degrees of separation.

  Sometimes, she had to dig deep to discover the connections. For instance, there was the time last year when she’d told her daughter, Denise, that an elderly gentleman who had died used to be the stepfather of the mother of the boy who’d had a crush on her in high school thirty years ago, before he went to Vietnam and got killed. Her daughter had been amazed at Mary’s research.

  Mary took seriously the task of unraveling the obits. Too seriously, her daughter told her. But that was fine. Her daughter was only fifty—a long ways away from Mary’s wizened seventy-six—and the promise of Death wasn’t near enough to her for her to understand how critical Mary’s role was.

  People needed to know. It was her duty to tell them.

  But Friday morning, things were different.

  That morning, Mary shuffled outside at dawn to pick up the newspaper, and when she brought it to the kitchen table and unrolled it, she discovered something that almost made her scream.

  The obituaries were missing.

  Pages four and five, which always contained the obits, featured only advertisements for cars and furniture. There were no death notices.

  Mary flipped through the rest of the section, and could not find them. She searched through the entire newspaper. There were no obits, anywhere.

  Had the folks at the paper forgotten to include them? In nearly a decade of her plying her trade, that had never happened. It seemed like a sick joke.

  Maybe she’d gotten a defective paper.

  She grabbed the phone and punched in the speed dial number for the newspaper, to demand redelivery. She was no good with gadgets; her daughter had programmed the number in for her, since Mary often called the office to complain when the paper arrived more than thirty minutes late.

  A prerecorded message greeted her:

  “THANK YOU FOR CALLING THE HARBOR NEWS CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT. OUR BUSINESS HOURS ARE MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY, EIGHT AM TO—”

  She hung up. In her anger, she’d forgotten that the paper didn’t open its offices until eight o’clock, two hours from now. She couldn’t bear waiting that long to read the obits.

  The telephone rang.

  She glanced at the wall clock—6:05. Who would be calling her this early?

  Maybe someone’s died, she thought. A strange glee coursed through her.

  She snatched up the phone. “Hello?”

  Crackling static filled the phone. Underneath the static, she heard, faintly, voices, as if a television was playing in the background. But she couldn’t understand what was being said.

  “Who’s this?” she asked.

  Static. Low, garbled voices.

  She hung up. The phone didn’t ring again. It must’ve been a wrong number.

  Back to her problem.

  She parted the drapes at the front window. She spotted a paper, bundled in blue plastic, lying at the mouth of Mrs. Johnson’s driveway across the street. Mrs. Johnson, the insufferably proud owner of the lush lawn that resembled the greens on a golf course.

  Problem solved.

  Gathering her house robe around her, Mary crept across the street. She felt like a thief, and perhaps she was doing something wrong by stealing her neighbor’s paper, but it was in the service of a noble cause, she believed.

  She snagged Mrs. Johnson’s paper and hurried back across the road, nearly tripping over the curb in her haste to get back to her yard.

  She couldn’t wait until she reached the kitchen to look. Once she reached her walkway, she ripped the paper out of the wrapper and dug through it, sections falling to the pavement and skipping away in the cool morning breeze.

  “No,” she said.

  The obits were missing from Mrs. Johnson’s paper, too.

  Eyes narrowed, Mary looked
up and down the block. Many of her other neighbors subscribed to The Harbor News, but what if theirs were defective, too? Stealing all of their papers would be foolish and risky.

  But her need to know who had died was like a hunger pain.

  Her watch read a quarter after six. Her daughter would be up; she had to be at work by seven thirty. If Mary left now, she could catch Denise while she was still home. Denise subscribed to the paper, and she lived on the other side of town, where perhaps this awful mistake had not been perpetrated.

  She could have called Denise first, but she knew her daughter would refuse to look up the obits for her. She didn’t understand how important they were.

  The Harbor News was sold at local convenience stores, too, but that meant Mary would have to pay fifty cents, and she’d already paid for her own subscription. She lived on a fixed income and couldn’t afford to waste even a half dollar.

  She dressed quickly in gray sweatpants and a shirt—her exercise clothes—and got in her old Cadillac DeVille to drive to her daughter’s house.

  “Morning, Mama,” Denise said, opening the door. She wore a house robe, and red rollers were in her hair. “You look upset. Is everything okay?”

  “Did you get the paper?” Mary asked, brushing past Denise as she came inside the house, her head swiveling about like a vulture’s seeking a tasty morsel.

  “Huh?” Denise frowned. “Yeah, I—”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the kitchen, I was reading it like I always do before I go to work. What’s this all about, Mama?”

  But Mary had already set off down the hallway. She hurried into the kitchen.

  Terrell, her twelve-year-old grandson, sat at the table. He was eating Froot Loops and reading the comics page. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw her.

  “Hey, Grandma. Why you here so early?”

  “I need that.” She snatched the newspaper away from him. Hands trembling, she searched through it.

  But her search was in vain. The obits weren’t in there.

  She gnashed her teeth. This was just crazy.

  Denise came into the room. “Mama, what’s this all about?”