Prankster, p.9
Prankster, page 9
Instead of going back to bed, he got dressed. Then he reached out to open his bedroom door.
The hall outside his room was dark and silent. The clock in his mother’s office, a big grandfather clock she said was a family heirloom—like he cared—ticked loudly. From behind the closed door at the other end of the hall, his dad’s snores attempted to drown out the clock’s even rhythm.
Joel thought about calling out to his parents. Maybe they could snap him out of whatever was going on with him. But he couldn’t make a sound.
He walked, stiff-legged, down the hall to the top of the stairs. He then began a descent so awkward that several times he thought he was going to topple forward and fall, end over end, down the stairs. It wasn’t that his body was moving wrong, it was that it was in such a state of resistance—his own body’s will versus that of some outside force he didn’t understand—that he was totally off balance.
Somehow, he reached the base of the steps. At this point, his body turned and pointed itself toward the kitchen. It made its way to the back door. There, using an arm that felt like a stone appendage, he brought up his hand to grab the knob.
Joel stepped off the back porch. He headed around the house toward the driveway.
He felt like he’d become a small version of himself and he was now trapped inside the large version. He was being taken for a ride by this big Joel creature who had an agenda little Joel knew nothing about.
Every time Joel swung a leg out, it felt like his leg belonged to someone else. Each time he planted his foot, he felt like his foot was in a cement shoe. But he kept walking; he strode, totally against his will, down the driveway to the road in front of his house.
The night was cooler than usual for this time of year. A breeze was coming down off the mountains, bringing with it the hint of a frost. Fragile spring green leaves fluttered on tree branches near the road. Fallen blossoms whispered as they skimmed over the pavement.
The night sky was similar to that of the previous night. Stars twinkled above, like all was right with the world, and an ever-so-slightly thicker wedge of moon sent pale rays of white light down to illuminate the cement in front of Joel. Even without the warm yellow glows reaching out from porch lights and lampposts in the yards along the street, he’d have been able to see just fine.
Not that it mattered what he was seeing.
Joel was pretty sure that even if he’d gone totally blind, he’d be moving along the street without a problem. He wasn’t the one calling the shots. So why did he need to see anything?
His legs pivoting sluggishly at his hips, their rigid extensions lifting ahead of him like horizontal pistons, Joel headed down the street. After just a few steps like this, the creaking he’d thought he should hear when he was in his room actually began. Every time his leg raised out ahead of him, his joints rasped and groaned. It sounded like his joints were rusting. He’d heard lesser creaks from ancient oxidized gate hardware. The garden center had a gate with hinges like that. The sound they made was straight out of a horror movie: cree—aaa—rrrr—eeek. That’s the way Joel’s joints sounded as he walked.
But it wasn’t the way his body sounded that concerned him. It was the way it felt.
Leaving aside the terrifying fact that he was no longer in control of his own movement, his body was starting to feel as unyielding as the granite up in the mountains that overlooked the town. Unfortunately, though, it didn’t feel as strong as the granite. It felt, well, fragile. He felt like instead of being made of rock, or even wood, he was made of some kind of hard plastic.
And he felt like he was fragmenting, disconnecting from himself.
Joel didn’t know how long he’d been walking because looking at his watch wasn’t something his body wanted to do. However, given that he was now leaving his neighborhood, he guessed he’d been on this hijacked journey for at least ten minutes.
During whatever length of time he’d been out here, though, he’d noticed his body was starting to feel strained, as if it was reaching some sort of breaking point. He was starting to hear cracks interspersed with the creaks in his movement.
Were his bones fracturing?
He wasn’t in horrible pain or anything. He just felt … wrong. He no longer felt like him, like a human. He was feeling more and more like a thing.
He was also feeling more and more panicked.
The panic rose as it became clear where his body was taking him.
When big Joel had gotten to the turn out of his neighborhood, he’d veered left on the cutover road that led to Glenwood Fields. Joel was heading back to where Caleb—or where Caleb’s lifeless body—lay in a ditch.
Joel screamed in his mind. His mouth could no longer make sounds. It couldn’t even open. It felt like it had been welded shut.
And it was just one of the systems in Joel’s body that was shutting down.
In spite of the fact that Joel’s movement had been labored, he couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t sweating, at all. Nor was he breathing heavily. He was scared, more scared than he could ever remember being. And yet, his heart wasn’t racing. In fact, he couldn’t sense any heartbeat. Usually, if he concentrated, he could feel his pulse. Not anymore. When he put his attention on his neck or his wrists, he felt nothing.
And now, as his panic began to morph into despair, he realized he couldn’t generate tears either. He could feel that his face was an expressionless mask that in no way reflected how he felt on the inside. Anyone observing him would think he was perfectly calm.
Was anyone observing him?
Joel wanted to look around, to see if anyone was looking out their window at the freakish figure lumbering by. But did he really look freakish? Or did he just feel that way? He couldn’t see himself, of course, but given how he felt, he didn’t think that anything he was doing would look normal. He felt as if he was moving like a flash-frozen zombie. His surroundings seemed to shudder as he looked at them.
In spite of all the systems in Joel’s body that were outside his control, his eyes were still his to use. He couldn’t turn his head to look around, but he could see whatever was in front of him. And there, just a couple hundred yards away, were the entrance stones to Glenwood Fields.
Shaped vaguely like angel’s wings, but dingy gray instead of white, the entrance signs were far grander than anything within the subdivision. Joel had always thought the houses in this area were pathetic—shallow-roofed structures shaped like Ls, with simple siding and plain small windows. Houses like these deserved a flimsy wood sign, not an elaborately carved set of huge stones.
As Joel got closer and closer to the stone markers, he noticed that they looked more like gravestones than entrance signs. That seemed oddly appropriate now, given that they marked the spot where Caleb likely lay dead.
Joel’s mind offered up an image of a child’s dead body, its face waxen, its eyeballs eaten by scavengers. As soon as this horrific visual flashed through his brain, his thoughts screamed, just as he would have if he’d seen something like that in real life.
Was he about to see something like that?
His feet, which he could no longer feel, were crunching through the gravel on the shoulder of the road by Glenwood Fields’ entrance. He was no more than a couple yards from where the kid had been standing in the road when Joel had hit him. If Joel could have turned and taken two or three steps to his left, he would have been able to reach the edge of the ditch. He might have been able to look down the steep embankment to see whatever was lying in the narrow rocky bottom of the ditch. He would have been able to see for himself, finally, whether Caleb was dead.
But Joel couldn’t turn, and he couldn’t go anywhere he wasn’t being compelled to go. He was not much different than a toy figurine at this point, subject to the whims of whoever or whatever wanted to position him.
And apparently, this was the spot.
Joel stopped moving. For several long seconds, Joel was still.
He could tell he was just off the pavement, right where he’d hit Caleb. He could even see the black snakelike track of his skid marks on the gray street.
Joel wondered if this was it. Would he be released now that he’d been brought to this point? Had the whole purpose of this body snatching been to get him where he’d refused to go?
Joel didn’t get much of a chance to ponder this question before the answer revealed itself.
No, this was not it. His ordeal was not over.
In fact, it was about to get much, much worse.
Joel felt an ache begin in his mouth, at the roots of his teeth. It was a dull pain, but it was noticeable. What did it mean? What was happening in his mouth?
Jake was now so terrified that he felt a scream climb up his throat and into his mouth. But it didn’t come out. It couldn’t. Joel wasn’t able to control his vocal cords.
Joel did, however, open his mouth for the first time since he left his house. Apparently, it wasn’t welded shut because he could sense his lips hinging apart. He even heard the opening. A little smack and suctioning sound preceded the sensation of air moving against his gums and his tongue. That sensation was barely noticeable because of how much the pain in his teeth commanded his attention, but he knew it meant his mouth was open.
Suddenly the pain in his teeth stopped, and he felt something different. He heard something different, too.
The sound he heard was a quiet clicking, a faint intermittent tapping like the sound of pebbles dribbling to the ground. It felt like pebbles falling too … in his mouth. Small hard bits were dropping onto his tongue and tumbling past his lips.
No. Not small, hard bits.
Teeth.
One of the bits rolled across his lower lip in a way that allowed him to feel the smooth surface on one side and the rough surface on an adjacent side. He also felt the triangular shape of the end of the bit. It was a tooth. The sound he was hearing was his teeth landing among the small, jagged rocks that made up the gravel beside the road.
While Joel tried to make sense of this inexplicable event, he felt one of the bits fall back, down his tongue. It lodged in his throat, and he felt like he was gagging. He wanted to—needed to—cough up the tooth and spit it out, but he couldn’t control his neck muscles any more than he could control any other part of his body. All he could do was imagine himself choking to death while the tooth stuck to his throat.
Crazed with disbelief, Joel’s inner voice shrieked and shrieked and shrieked. But his inner voice had no volume. No one could hear him because he made no sound.
His sight, his hearing, and his ability to feel pain were the only things Joel had left. He was pathetically grateful for these small gifts … until his eyes showed him what was happening next.
A tuft of black hair fluttered out in front of Joel’s vision. It got caught on a current in the night’s breeze, and it wafted away. Another tuft followed the first. Then a third, then a fourth. Then chunks of hair started dropping in front of his eyes. He felt more hunks slip down the back of his neck. Joel’s hair was falling out.
His silent shrieks turned into wails.
Joel’s consciousness, trapped within his traitorous body, could do nothing with the outrage and despair that strangled him from within. Every reaction he was having to the unspeakable things happening to him was being consumed by the black void of whatever controlled him.
Make it stop, Joel thought. He didn’t know who he was addressing. It was a universal appeal, a weak command from a peon in a universe that didn’t care.
Joel didn’t want to see anymore. He couldn’t take watching another piece of who he thought he was falling away.
Perhaps because he literally couldn’t withstand the trauma of seeing anything else, his “wish” was granted.
Joel’s eyes dropped out of his head. He actually felt them disconnect and roll down his cheeks.
As soon as his eyes left his body, he went blind. As horrifying as this was, at least Joel didn’t have to watch his eyeballs drop to the gravel beneath his feet. He didn’t have to see a sharp point of basalt puncture one of the brown irises.
He did hear it, though. His ears ever-so-helpfully delivered to him the sickening splat of his eyes reaching the ground.
His ears were also still doing their duty when Joel’s fingers fell away from his hands. He heard his fingers clatter onto the ground like sticks hitting rocks.
Before he could even begin to process this inconceivable mutilation, his hands disconnected from his arms. It felt like wires wrapped around the tendons and tore his hands from his wrists.
He heard what was left of his hands land beneath him. The sound was a crunchy thwack, similar to what he once heard when he’d accidentally dropped his empty orange juice glass in his Fazcrunch cereal.
For a second, Joel was nauseated by the sound. But only for a second. He didn’t have time to linger for long over the sound of his hands hitting the ground because his awareness was immediately yanked to a new form of suffering.
Now he could feel something pushing its way out through his empty eye sockets. It felt like some pulsing form was being pumped through the openings, something like a balloon or a ball being inflated. He could feel the pressure around the space where his eyes used to be. The pressure built and built until he could sense whatever had been inflated was protruding out over his cheekbones.
Once again, he didn’t have long to think about this new abomination because the following one started immediately. The next thing to terrorize him was his skin.
He felt his skin beginning to snap apart and slip from his body. The sensation was similar to what he’d felt when sunburned skin started to peel, but it was much stronger than that … because it wasn’t just the top layer of skin that was unraveling from him; it was every layer. His skin was flaying away from his muscles and his tendons. As his skin parted from what was beneath it, he felt the breeze sting his exposed tissues.
It felt like some unseen hand was pulling his skin from his body, paring wet sections from him as if he was a fish being filleted. He could hear the soggy strips slap the ground. He knew long ribbons of his skin were piling up beneath him because every sinew of his body felt exposed.
Joel knew …
Nothing.
Finally, after being subjected to more heinous misery than any human could have been expected to survive, his consciousness succumbed to whatever force was orchestrating his transformation. The person that was Joel ceased to exist.
* * *
The partial moon dripped the palest of white glows above the tall mountain peaks east of town when Chief Montgomery’s SUV rounded the corner and stopped just inside the stone-marked Glenwood Fields entrance. His radio squawked as soon as he turned off his engine. He picked up his mic, keyed it on, and listened.
“Chief,” his dispatcher said, “I just got confirmation from that Glenwood resident that the strange man he saw was headed toward the entrance.”
“That’s where I am,” the chief responded. “I’ll check it out.” He put the mic back into its holder and got out of his SUV.
The angle at which the moon brushed the mountain range told the chief it was about 3:00 a.m. or so. Night still wrapped its blanket around his town.
A surprisingly small man whose personality and authority didn’t match his short stature, the chief grabbed his hat and pulled it over thinning brown hair. He hefted his flashlight and got out of his vehicle.
Chief Montgomery held his flashlight stiffly as he aimed it around the subdivision entrance. He’d been tense all day, ever since Jenna Bell had called him in the early morning hours the day before. The long hours that Caleb had been missing had taken a toll on Montgomery and his officers. He felt like he’d aged at least five years since that call. Several times during the day, he’d told Jenna everything would be all right. But he wasn’t sure he believed it.
The chief turned in a slow circle, scanning the areas illuminated by the glow of his flashlight. He didn’t see anything at first. But then he did.
He froze, concentrating on the strange shape hunched in the shadows just beyond the range of his flashlight. He stepped forward so his light would land directly on the form.
Montgomery gulped and took a step back. He immediately felt silly. His response had been ridiculous. What he was looking at was nothing to be upset about.
The chief’s flashlight beam lit up a large, misshapen plastic boy positioned right at the edge of the road. The plastic figure had a mostly featureless face—no nose, no cheeks, no chin. All the face had was two bulging black eyes and an open, darkness-filled mouth.
Montgomery had seen a few figures like this around town. It was part of some Freddy Fazbear public safety initiative to deter reckless drivers in areas where kids were running around. Most of the figures he’d seen were much smaller than this one, and this one was oddly contorted, as if some of the plastic had been deformed in the molding process.
For some reason, the shape disturbed the chief. He was spooked, but he couldn’t possibly have explained why if anyone had asked him.
He shook his head. He was just overtired; that was all. Too much stress. The chief started to move on and search beyond the bizarre figure, but then his light landed on something piled up on the ground. He tilted his flashlight downward and frowned in confusion. What was that? Mulch? What was mulch doing out on the road?
Leaning closer, he shined his light over what looked like glistening pinkish-brown ribbons tangled together. Not ribbon, obviously. The mass of material appeared to be something organic, and for some reason, it gave him the heebie-jeebies. He shook off the shiver that ran through him.
The ribbon-like lengths looked a little like freshly stripped bark. He glanced to the side of the road, at the trees clustered near the subdivision’s entrance, looking to see if a tree had been ravaged by a vandal or maybe an animal. All of the trees looked okay, but …
From the left of the trees he was focused on, Montgomery heard a whimper. He froze and listened. Was that really a whimper, or the cry of some injured animal?
