short stories

This was the hour when the girls were their happiest.  Red-faced and giggling, the sisters had frolicked together all afternoon, chasing each other around the timeworn Victorian house.  The roof sagged from the weight of two-hundred winters, and large holes revealed rotting rafters, like an exposed rib cage.  It was a decaying mansion with a turret at one corner.  The ten-year old twins played Hide and Seek in the sweet-smelling wisteria that draped the porch.  

While smoking his last cigarette, the father watched them sullenly from the wooden bench beneath  the alcove.  Ever so often he glanced up with dread at the sun setting into the twisted tree limbs.  The dense forest stretched twenty-miles in all directions beyond the ten-foot high fence.  At noon the day had been sunny and green, but now the purple shadows blew a chilly breath on his face and neck.

“It’s getting late,” he said to his wife.

She sat next to him, leaning forward, hands locked between her knees, watching the two girls.  A bulky, shapeless, yellow sweater almost hid her bony body.  She turned to him with a sad expression. They shared a secret they never said aloud.  “Maybe a little longer,” she whispered.

It’s always the same!  he thought, grinding the cigarette butt out on the moldy bricks beneath his heel. She wants to drag it out till the last minute, Every. Damn. Time.  Each visit is getting worse.  It bothered him that the changes were intensifying.  He couldn’t explain the transformation any more than he could tell why he loved his wife.  She was slipping into a rabbit hole of insanity, and he wasn’t able to stop her.  Shaking his head, he said nothing. 

“We can’t wait.  Remember what happened last time?” he said.

He stood up and called out their names in a loud, firm voice, “Amanda. Zoey.”  Two pretty faces swiveled toward him.  Two mirror images of each other—long blond curls, wide cobalt blue eyes with eyelashes so white they were nearly invisible.  Their mother dressed them in two identical dress, as if trying to keep them little girls forever.  They looked like photos out of a turn-of-the-century family album, dainty lace frills, pale blue bows, with little white socks and buckled Mary Janes.

“Girls, time’s up,” he said striding toward the gate.

They both protested, “Aww, do we need to go?”

“Time to go,” said Dad.

“Just five more minutes.  Pleeease,” Amanda pleaded. 

“Not yet!” Zoey shouted.

Amanda and Zoey stood up.  From a distance, he had trouble telling them apart even though Amanda had grown an inch taller than Zoey.

“What time is it?” Zoey asked.

“It’s nearly six,” Dad said sharply.  “It’ll be dark soon.”  

His wife struggled to keep up with her injured leg still not healed.   The depression and fatigue worsened as night approached.  Both girls ran to her and wrapped their arms around her legs, nearly knocking her over, burying their faces in her yellow sweater.

“Mommy, I don’t want to go,” Amanda’s muffled voice pleaded.

Zoey cried, “Mommy, don’t go.”

The mother began to weep.  “I need to go.” She hugged them tighter.  “I’ll come back.  I promise.”

“Come on,” the father said, glancing around nervously.  “It’s getting dark.”

With her two daughters clinging to her, she made her way to the gate and knelt down at eye level.  She held and kissed them.

“Please, Mommy, can’t you stay?” sobbed Zoey.

Brusquely grasping his wife’s shoulder, the father said, “Say your goodbyes.”

Her voice broke then, and she struggled to get the words out.  “Baby…baby, I…” 

The father checked his watch and looked up. The dying red rays of the  sun only illuminated the dome of the cupola.  The mansion windows had receded into gaunt holes, like eyes in a skull.  The air felt cool and damp, and the yard had already succumbed to gloomy darkness.  The father grabbed his wife’s arm and Amanda’s hand.  He yanked the two past the gate beneath the archway of coiled razor wire.

“Watch out!  Stand back!” he shouted.   His hands were shaking as he slammed the massive metal gate shut with a loud CLANG blocking his other daughter, Zoey, from passing through.  The father had the portal special built at great expense with wrought iron bars as thick as forearms.

The three—mother, father and Amanda—stood frozen, staring back through the narrow gaps at Zoey.

“Bye-bye, Baby,” the mother whispered to her, standing alone on the other side.  

“Mommy, come back,”  Zoey whimpered, her cobalt blue eyes brimming with tears.

“Stand back, Zoey.  Get back.” His voice was shaking along with his hands as he threw back the cover on the control panel.  He turned the key.  In seconds, the current surged and hummed into the metal gate and the chain-link fence which circled the perimeter. 

Zoey staggered back away from the gate in terror.  She called out to them. 

“Please, Mommy, don’t leave me,” Zoey moaned.

They stood petrified, unable to answer.  Only the buzz of electricity filled the air, vibrating like a swarm of angry yellowjackets.

Then, with one loud shriek, Zoey raced to the house and up onto the porch.  In the shadows, she turned and stood still, looking like a tiny, white bird.

The father gasped for breath and shook from head to foot.  Finally, he pulled himself together and shoved his wife and Amanda into the off-road truck with the oversize mud tires.  

Amanda scrambled into the back seat onto her knees and stared out the rear window.  The father started the truck and shouted, “Don’t look back!” But she couldn’t help herself.  The hair on her neck stood up as she heard the screams.

Shafts of white light blazed from the porch.  Zoey had started her metamorphosis—body tripling in size; skin sprouting coarse hair as black as obsidian.  Her fingers mutating into claws; cobalt blue eyes morphing into fiery, blood-red slits.  After her lips flared back exposing fangs, her face elongated into a long ugly snout.  Then, she reared her head back, opened her jaws, and let out a fierce, loud howl.  The wolves in the forest picked up the cry.   

As the father sped away on the dirt road into the tunnel of trees, he felt as if he were barreling down the same rabbit hole of  insanity as his wife, where the world’s upside down and inside out.   The transformation complete, Zoey’s screams echoed in their heads, “COME BACK, MOMMY! DAMN YOU, COME BACK!”