Dead...wet....and cold
6
Pastor Ed put on his fine dress polo shirt, smoothed his gray hair into his normal 1960s look and with his humble propert-wife, that was, in tow and his son who simply resembled a younger photocopy, the two men swaggered into the church rocking side to side with that arrogant the big-big-man-owns-the-world walk they had. Indeed, on the table at the front of the church was written material and booklets put together by the heavenly host of men in the church detailing what the church and its empirious leaders stood for.
Curious about his boss's church, and still suffering from trying to clock out from his work day and being grabbed to spend four more hours in recon, Jerry had brought Genny to church since fitting himself into her car, or her house slipper which was the only name she called it by, would have required a separate procedure and also an extraction from the tiny passenger seat.
Genny was in high heels with jewels and bare legs, a ruffly Gothic skirt, a fancy blouse with flared, ruffle and lace sleeves she referred to as The Wings, and a choker. She had a constant flair for elegance and in her RV Jerry saw nothing but high heels with one pair of flats she used to take out the garbage. She lived largely in her own world, and as they talked she had told him "look at the news. Murder, robbery, war, poverty, violence, misery. That's the real world they tell me so much about. It's serious people who seriously hurt each other, serious greed, and serious trouble. I am rarely serious except about looking nice. If I live in a self made fantasy world then so be it. It's alot happier than the dump out there everyone else lives in."
Jerry tottered in with Genny bouncing along and he grabbed a copy of one of Pastor Ed's books and sat down in the third row from the front next to her and began to read it as people milled around and got ready to listen to their great uplifting message of the day.
Pastor Ed openly proclaimed to be, as he put it, "God's annointed", and he did not prepare sermons, he simply swaggered around till the holy spirit told him what to talk about, which struck Jerry as nothing more than an opinionated man talking about whatever was on his mind that day.
Indeed, as he read Ed's book he became shocked and infuriated. The book detailed how men and women should look, hair cuts, clothing, and it stated women were property, created beneath men, and as such the man needed to control and own everything, including the women. His demeaning language was incredible and Jerry shook his head. To add to the jazz, Ed came out on stage and began to slowly swagger around as if in thought till he glanced out into the audience and saw some of the members. His large mouth then opened, and in a booming voice he filled the three story tall room, adorned with a God on one side and a dragon on the other at roof level made of stone and facing each other.
"I'm going to tell you how it is!" Ed said, his hand outstretched in full Godly authority. His captive audience listened as if God himself stood before them, some with open mouths.
"In modern times...we have these things called sub cultures." He boomed. Genny tilted her head wondering where THIS line of thinking came from.
"Sub cultures are nothing more than rebellion against society and a means to get childish attention from everybody."
Genny raised an eye brow and realized he had seen her come in. Ah, so the unholy spirits had given him utterance. He was utterly obese too.
"Like the Goths, a bunch of childish vampire wanna be's, and the trans gender people..."
Jerry felt his stomach knot in anger.
"There is no such thing as trans gender!" Ed blasted. "All a trans gender man is, is a man in a dress who likes to hang out in women's bathroom to endanger the safety of our women and children!" He boomed. The congregation nodded in agreement.
"Name one." Jerry said out loud. The silence was frightening and Ed looked at him. "Did you say something?"
Jerry continued as two men looked at him. "Name one single instance where a person who identified as trans gender went in a bathroom and molested or raped. Sex predators identify as men."
The two men got up and looked at Jerry. Pastor Ed smiled amusedly. "So you're going to slap God almighty in the face and claim he doesn't know how to make people!"
"No more than saying a child is blind says God made a mistake. How do you know what goes on in another human being's head?" Jerry said. The two men moved toward him to remove him and Jerry stood up. "You touch me and you kiss the floor." He said. The church goers gasped and Ed laughed. Jerry turned to Ed and as he walked toward the end of the aisle he said "not one trans person said God was a fool, Ed, But it's pretty lame singling out people in your church to spend your time humiliating, especially when they didn't do anything wrong." Ed laughed and the people gaped open mouthed as one of the men came close and Jerry froze nose to nose with him. "You wanna go there?" He asked.
Jerry walked out and Genny flipped her hair, sprayed herself with perfume and trotted out like she owned the place. Ed yelled "See you fellas later!" Genny made a gesture at him as if casting a spell and said "arghaffa magua, sonatacheemoo." Several people gasped in horror.
Jerry and Genny went to the Timm mansion. The tape was gone and bodies removed. Blood stains still addorned the floor but Jerry knew he had to clean it up or hire someone. Monique and the little doll had been taken to evidence by Dee Wayne.
As Jerry and Genny looked over the old house and enjoyed it, no one in town noticed the swaying of the trees in a still daylight.
Dee Wayne was ten miles away, one foot on the floor, the rest of him in bed, television on, snoring loudly when the phone rang. He picked it up. "This better be mutha fuckin' important." Minutes later...
To almost everyone he was Sammy. He was one of those fixtures in town that is there from so far back that not seeing him on the road or in town is strange. His mother had helped in one of the local clothing stores for most of her life and he had actually played there as a child, staring up in wonder at the waxy faces of the mannequins in amazement at the frozen face that looked for days at a time onto the street outside with clothing changing every few days.
Sammy had a nice little van he had picked up for payments, then when he paid it off he tore out the inside and redid it the way he needed it to hold tools, zip ties, tape, rope, electric wire and various other things, along with a skill saw and chain saw. The inside was lined with tarps to keep it clean.
Sammy liked to take rides around town and beyond, going outside the loop here and there on long weekends and he would go cruise the bars and the alleys with a slight smile on his face. He had a rounded head like an old van roof, thin gray hair and his right eye sagged down and looked down toward the ground, his mouth slightly fat and looking like he had a permanent sneer.
As Sammy drove around town, someone would inevitably look good to him, and as such someone would vanish into the night from where they were and much of the night would be spent with friends and family searching for them as they took a ride with Sammy, then in the night his truck would bump and bang over the ruts down the sparsely populated road toward Sammy's farm, a run down, out of service place choked with weeds and overgrown with untrimmed trees surrounded by dark fields with occasional stands of trees blacker than the grave at night, some of them towering and leaning over a slimy pond, their fronds dragging in the water like fisherman's poles, with slimy wet green goo climbing them like monsters.
The trees made the pond invisible to anyone outside, which is how he liked it.
Sammy was single and always had been, seemingly because his features made him far below attractive for a discerning woman, but also possibly because he did not conduct himself in a social fashion.
Indeed, Sammy Kennedy's old farm sported a barn that had no livestock in it, but since his teens it had been a haven to a storm shelter under the ground where Sammy had invented implements of torture fit for the Roman Army, utilizing electric wires and cords, razor ribbon and wood in horrific ways that could have given any rational human being nightmares to imagine.
As such when Sammy decided to be social that person who vanished from town would be drug don the wooden stairs and their screams would fill the night, far unheard by anyone in the town or country.
After his amusement ceased, Sammy would drag the same person, generally still alive, but beyond functionality, to his boat, secure them to a bock of cement, then he would paddle them, begging for their life, to the dark, black horror that was his watery hideout and he would let them sink into the wet blackness of the pond, and choke their last breath, joining the legion of victims below the water.
In darkness stood a citizenry of people whose remains stood like horrific statues, their skulls gaping in silent screams, ribs and bones exposed in the darkness, below the black water surface, with all manner of living things crawling through them as they fell to pieces, unknown, many of them with their living faces decorating faded, time tattered posters still searching in the land above.
The town loop was crowded with cars tonight not including Clyde, who was busy on the internet franticly searching for answers to obscure religions and finding himself a bit horrified at how many existed. He got a schooling fit for a college graduate in religion, occult, and the mishmash of gods and godesses of the ages, in desperate search to find out what could be done to stem the continuing flow of dead mysteriously coming from town.
Clyde had come to the conclusion he was either not well enough educated or the force haunting the town could indeed not be stopped, which only filled him with more terror.
Sammy Kennedy bagged some chicken meat and vegetables and went to his house in the hopes of relaxing over dinner, and adorning his evening with both a movie and also a flashback to his own amateur horror films in which his many victims had starred and he reveled in playing back, enjoying the euphoria of their screams.
Sammy closed and locked his front door, since locking it made it more of a wall and less of a door, locking out the outside world and placing him in his own universe, occupied otherwise by his aquarium and his cat, the one creature who was around his ghoulish recreation but had no idea what it was.
As Sammy sat down to relax, he heard the crack of the can and took a cold drink, and the moon outside vanished behind a cloud. The trees began to sway, and the house vanished into a shadowy blackness like a distant universe. Moment by moment the trees swayed more as if they were growing angry and a shadowy darkness filled them, spreading out like a gentle ghostly touch from the night, but pitch black.
Sammy turned his television up all the way and the sounds blasted into the room and swept him away. The trees around his house swung and swayed violently as if a hurricane was blowing, unseen by Sammy, who was drinking down his first can and enjoying his television show.
The kitty cat jumped up onto his lap, sat for a moment, then her head jerked toward the front window of the house, and she let out a growling sound and her hair stood up. She cowered down, then jumped down and darted under the couch. Sammy noticed her for a moment, gestured as if to say "what?" and called to her. She would not come out.
As the trees moved, a deep, black shadow fell across the pond, crawling over the water slowly, deliberately, and as Sammy lost himself in concentration, the darkness descended into the water like a thick oil, slowly going deeper and deeper and the bones of one sunken, rotting skeleton, then another, began to twitch, and then heads moved, and arms, gently at first, then the faces of skeletal figures looked upward and the rotting ropes securing them to the bottom of the pond snapped all at once and slowly the corpses began to ascend. A thick cloud of blackness surrounded them, and it crawled over the top of the water in a black fog, spreading out and onto the land, with the house a few feet away.
Sammy turned his television down and got off of his pillow, going to the bathroom first and then to the kitchen, where he fished through his refrigerator and found lunch meat, spread, and vegetables.
The pond water parted and slimy, rotting heads filled with hair as well as clean, yellow skulls appeared, then ribs, and corpses rose from the water, their flesh hanging in shreds from the bodies as water spilled out of them into the pond, and their bony legs took slow steps toward the house. Here a corpse that had been a local woman in town slowly slogged out of the slimy mud, her hair sliding off of her head and onto the ground exposing her skull, and there, beneath torn, rotten clothing ribs cradled black, oozing guts with pond water streaming out of them, with pond creatures scurrying away as their long motionless hosts walked toward the house, their empty eye holes moving toward the windows.
Sammy made two sandwiches and replaced the ingredients in his refrigerator, then stretched and walked toward the living room again, seeing the nose and slightly shining eyes of his cat.
Sammy looked down at her. "What's the matter with you, kitty cat, you act like you're seeing a ghost?"
Sammy stared at the cat, sat his sandwiches down and turned to get another drink. He opened the refrigerator, then turned off the kitchen light, stopped, and slowly turned toward the window.
Sammy froze and his cold can slid out of his hand to the floor.
In the window was the rotting face of someone looking at him, one eye hole black, the other adorned with a rotten eye. Sammy waited for a moment then he walked forward, wondering if someone was playing a prank, and if they were, why would they come so far into the unpeopled wilderness to pull it, standing at his window wearing a mask...
Sammy stood three feet from the window and it came to him that this was not a mask, or a prank. As he studied the bone face closely his stomach knotted in sick terror, vaguely recognizing one of his murder victims, barely remembering torturing that face in the basement of his barn some time ago.
Filled with terror, Sammy Kennedy ran to his back door and checked the lock, looking up to see through the thin curtain the full outline of a dead woman and recognizing the shreds of clothing, hair, and knowing she was someone he had picked up two months ago and tortured in his barn, from Mannington loop.
Sammy began to feel terror, wondering why she was there, only to realize that two more corpses had joined her, upright and walking, one of them a man he had killed long ago, his bottom jaw missing, and his thin hair familiar to Sammy. Sammy had not realized that he had claimed so many victims, and as a black shadow covered his porch and corpses stood outside his back door he began to hear terrified noises force themselves from his throat. Sammy was not used to feeling terror, he was used to giving it to others.
Sammy stood frozen till a skeletal fist drove through the window, and reached in, unlocking the door. Sammy watched the door slowly open and he stood face to face with the murder victims from his pond.
Turning to run for the front door, Sammy saw another face in its window. He let out a scream of terror and went to his bedroom, slamming and locking the plank door. He turned and saw the tall thin window to his bedroom, occupied by another woman he had murdered, still in relatively decent condition, easily recognized by him.
Sammy grabbed his shotgun and several shells, and when the window was broken by the dead woman he shot at her, shattering her skull. Sammy saw her brain explode and she fell to the ground, and he reloaded his shotgun.
He stood terrified as the door was battered by skeletal corpses and he stood for a moment and shook himself, trying to figure out if it was a dream, but no, Sammy realized it was real.
Sammy went to his bedroom window, but again, it was blocked by another corpse. Sammy fired two more rounds, shooting the head off of the corpse. Bone crackled and shattered in pieces, and the window was shot away as Sammy fired round after round, more terrified as he faced his murder victims, free from rotting forgotten in his pond. He climbed out of his window, cutting himself on the broken glass.
Sammy ran around the house past the legion of corpses descending on his house and climbed into his van in an attempt to drive away from the farm, but as he turned the key and the engine caught, a hammer smashed his driver window and two corpses grabbed him and began dragging him, fighting in terror, out of his van.
Sammy found himself surrounded by corpses, and was horrified at how many of the large group of victims he had claimed were out of the pond.
To add to his terror, there was barely a breeze and the trees on his farm were blowing wildly as if in a hurricane. He could see a black shadow like a ghost, emanating from the trees, and Sammy screamed and screamed as cold, slimy, wet corpse hands drug him across the ground, kicking and screaming, tearing off his socks, shredding his skin on rocks and weeds, and pulling him silently toward the pond.
Sammy began to call out, his sanity slipping into desperate horrified cries of terror, but in the night, his yells faded into the deep darkness of the open farm, forgotten by time and people.
Sammy saw the pond ahead, and he clawed and fought the corpses, gagging as he felt their rotting, slimy flesh gripping him.
Sammy felt the ground turn to mud under him, and he felt the cold of the pond and smelled the horrid stench of slime and algae.
The cold water sloshed over him as his murder victims drug him into the water and down into the hiding places they had been for so long since he murdered them. Dirty water gushed into his mouth and throat and he tasted the sick water.
Sammy's screams turned to gurgles and as the dirty water poured down his throat he fought and choked as corpse hands pulled him down into the blackness he had sentenced them to in times past.
Sammy gagged silently as his lungs filled with water and he wrenched and squirmed as he drowned, blacking out in the agony of death, his eyes open wide, finally staring into the green, slimy water, floating among his own victims as the shadowy blackness melted into the trees, and the trees slowed, then stopped moving. In the blackness of the pond Sammy's eyes, frozen open in a look of terror, stared inches away from the face of one of his victims, as his body went limp, dead, wet and cold.
The black shadow shrank away into the trees, which slowly returned to standing silently, motionless in the night as serial torturer and killer Sammy Kennedy stayed in the water with his victims.
Kitty cat trotted outside, glanced toward the ponds, let out a meow and vanished into the darkness.
One of the old men who had nearly been forgotten by time had decided to fish in the pond, and the big fish he thought he had caught...was a rotting Sammy.
Dee Wayne missed his morning coffee to stand over Sammy, and a young officer, dirty from his mornings work, addressed him as a small boat brought up other bodies.
"What we got so far Mr. Dewayne is Sammy owned this place, he has clothing, identification and so on from all these dead girls. He has a torture chamber and some other stuff. Funny thing is he had stuff stuck on him that came from these corpses..."
Dee Wayne finished his sentence, "as if they killed him."
"I know it sounds crazy but that's where the evidence is taking us so far. There is no evidence of any other people out here, but we even found a false finger nail lodged in him that matches ones on one of these girls."
Dee Wayne shook his head. "We just got done cleanin' up two dead dudes that got killed by some wooden dummies. We got some wierd shit goin' on. It started with Vickie Timm dying during a forced eviction. Gotta wonder if there is a connection." He said. "Seems like there's some shit goin' on."
The morgue was overflowing with murder victims that evening. Miles away, Jerry shook his head in his trailer, eating dinner Genny cooked and petting a sleeping Twinkie. He expected his job to be gone tomorrow, but all things considered, he almost didn't care.