[Short Horror] Shadow Play

Shadow Play

By Hannah Nyland (shared with her written permission)

The pickup truck makes a noise like a dragon belching as John holds down the accelerator. Even breaking every speed limit in the county, he’s still not going quite fast enough.

“You know, if we end up pulled over by the cops, it’s going to take twice as long to get there,” Nolan drawls from the seat beside him. He’s got his feet propped up on the dashboard and a lazy smile on his face.

“Sorry. Just excited.” He lets up on the gas.

“It’s weird. I never thought you were even into hunting. Why the sudden interest?”

“Some guys at school were talking about it, and it sounded like a lot of fun,” John lies.

“Uh-huh. It’s dad’s record, isn’t it? You want to beat it.”

It’s not about the record, really. I just want him to look at me like I mean something.

“Yeah,” He says.

Nolan nods sagely, and they continue on in companionable silence.

John’s never been a fan of driving for the sake of driving, but he has to admit that this is nice, soothing even. Besides Nolan, there’s not another living being in sight; just the forest to their right and the vast expanse of prairie to their left, and the infinite road ahead. With the sun beginning to set, it looks like an alien world, and perhaps a better one.

He looks over at his brother to voice this thought, but Nolan stiffens, staring straight ahead. Instantly, John’s attention jerks back to the road.

The deer ahead looks at him with wide, startled eyes – unmoving.

John swerves into a waiting tree at sixty miles per hour.

*****

When he comes to, hands are scrabbling at him, tearing at his arms and body. There’s something slick coating his face, and the smell of copper burns in his nostrils. John thrashes violently, but he’s trapped in a prison of straps and vertigo, and there’s no escape. His fist crashes hard against something, leaving a throbbing in his wrist.

“Whoa, easy there,” A familiar voice says. “You’re gonna be okay, Johnny.”

Nolan unclips the seatbelt and eases him out of his torturous position, carefully sitting him down on the ground by the side of the road. John only realizes that he’s been hanging upside-down when all the blood comes rushing away from his head.

Then he notices what remains of the truck, and his heart sinks well past his stomach into the cold earth below.

“Shit. Dad will kill us,” John whispers. He will not cry. His father always says that a man doesn’t cry. Even when -

Nolan gives him a brotherly pat on the back. “Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself. Dad can’t kill you if you bleed to death out here. Now sit still.” He pulls out a roll of bandages from his backpack, and wraps it tightly several times around the still-bleeding cut on John’s forehead, then begins applying pressure to the injury.

John struggles not to wince. “You got really lucky. Not a scratch on you.” 

Nolan shrugs. “Yeah, we both did. Look at the truck; we could easily be dead right now.”

The thought is sobering. Neither of them says anything for a while, listening to the insistent buzz of crickets and the rustle of the wind, until Nolan finishes his makeshift doctoring. “There, I think that’ll do for now. Keep some pressure on it though. We’ve got to get you to a doctor; you took a pretty bad blow to the head.”

 There’s no reception out here, of course, and they’re a good twenty miles from town. The truck is a lost cause. They bicker; John wants to wait for a passing car and flag them down for help, but Nolan will have none of it, insisting that they walk to a telephone as soon as possible.

Nolan wins. He would say that it’s because he’s the older brother; John would claim that it’s because he’s still woozy from the accident and in poor sport to argue.                       

“Closest phone is probably Roy’s place,” Nolan says. “We can cut through the woods and make it there in an hour or so.”                                              

“Great. I’m sure the nutcase survivalist will be thrilled to see us.”

“C’mon. Roy may be kind of out there, but he’s a friend of dad’s. He’ll help.”

John grunts, conceding the point, and turns to face the shadowed masses of trees. “Guess we better get walking.”

*****

The woods are wrong tonight.

There’s something small, something hard to define, that has John jumping at literal shadows, holding his rifle as tightly as a security blanket.    

It’s not the darkness; that is expected. This late in the day, at this time of the year, it’s hard to imagine a forest being anything else. And besides, they have the lights they brought with.

No; not the darkness. But maybe it’s the claustrophobia, the lanky trees like iron bars that crowd him on every side, and that seem to shift closer when he isn’t looking. Or the stark outline of their branches, jutting out at angles too sharp to be natural.

Maybe it’s the noise. Back by the side of the road, the crickets were background noise. Here, they’re a cacophony, discordant bursts of static exploding inside his ears. Even his heartbeat is unbearably loud, a full-bodied squish squish squish that keeps pulling his attention to the blood pumping through his all-too-soft throat.

Maybe it’s even the moon, fat and full tonight, and the way that it seems to leer down at them; an Uncanny Valley face, a pitted monstrosity. Nolan makes a few cracks about werewolves, and John pretends to laugh.

His brother has no rifle, no weapon at all; only John’s made it through the crash still intact.  Yet he’s still calmer somehow, more sure of himself. He always has been. At the thought, John swallows down something that feels less like envy and more like raw, electric nerve.

Footstep after footstep, swallowed up by the earth. His head pounds, and his stomach churns with nausea.

How long have they been walking? Nolan said it would only be an hour, but already it feels like five, and there’s no end in sight. He’s set with the suspicion that they’re circling, that he’s seen this tree or this rock before. They keep coming to places without him being sure how they got there. But when he mentions it, his brother just gives him a worried look and says, “Johnny, are you sure you’re thinking clearly?”

The head injury.

That shuts him up right good. John doesn’t want to know if Nolan isn’t seeing what he’s seeing. He doesn’t want to be losing his mind, when he’s so far out of it with dread already. He soldiers on like a good boy, and tries to ignore it.

But there are smudges at the edges of his vision, and sparks crawling up his spine.

*****

Some time later, with John lagging, they stop to rest at small clearing. There’s a split second of relief, of letting himself relax, before he sees it, the thing that’s finally too visceral and awful for him to write off.

John just stares; it’s all he can do. His silence carries a heavy weight, as though every impotent moment in his sorry life has been building up to it. 

Nolan lies sprawled on his back in the dirt, his throat and chest torn open. And it’s messy; god, it’s messy, like a wild animal decided to eat him but then tossed the body aside, half finished. His brother’s eyes are screwed shut, and his face frozen in a grimace of agony.

He turns to the Nolan standing right beside him, looking for . . . what? An explanation? Comfort? He doesn’t know. He can barely vomit out the words.

“This can’t be real, right? It can’t. It’s a trick. Someone’s playing a joke on us . . .”

Hell, maybe this is what brain damage feels like.

Nolan smiles. Nothing more.

“Fuck you, Nolan! Say something. Anything.” He hates himself for the pleading sound in his voice.

Nolan reaches up to scratch the back of his neck, and as his hand lifts into the moonlight, John finally sees what he couldn’t in the choking labyrinth of trees.

The blood caked under his nails.                                           

And

John             

freezes.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have drawn this out so long,” Nolan says. “But we were having such fun together, with him out of the picture.”

They are just words. Just words, echoing around inside John’s head. He struggles, but for the life of them he can’t understand what they mean. The whole world has started to take on a dreamlike quality. Isn’t that why Nolan’s eyes are suddenly too pale – almost bleached – and his skin slightly loose, as though something is crawling around underneath? The face blurs and swims; the little black spots in his vision look like bugs crawling on Nolan’s face.

John makes a sound like a strangled animal.

“If you want me, Johnny, come and get me,” He says, and backs away into the darkness of the forest until it covers him up, his hands raised playfully. Just like Nolan would have.

He killed my brother. He killed my brother, and I’m standing over the corpse.

In that moment, the scream that’s been bubbling up beneath his skin his whole life finally grows too loud. Fear and rage overtake him; wear him like a coat. He raises the gun and fires wildly into the blackness.

*****

John comes home the next morning a bleeding wreck, nursing the rifle under his arm. His clothes are torn in all the wrong places, and there’s a deep, puffy gash on the side of his face, as though someone tried to split open a ripe melon.

He’s never felt better.                                

Even in this state, John is careful to shut the back door softly as he enters the house, to wipe his feet off on the welcome mat so that he doesn’t track mud into the living room. He is courteous enough to blot up some of the blood with what remains of his jacket – wiping it over his face, his hands, his chest. Not all of the blood is his - maybe not even most of it. Hard to say, really.

The blood reminds him of the day he invited over Joey Matterson, the boy from up the street, when Nolan wasn’t home. They were both only twelve then, and desperate to feel like adults. Stupid; John knows better than anyone now that adulthood doesn’t change a damn thing. He brought Joey down to his father’s secret stash in the basement and handed his friend a lukewarm beer, taking one for himself. John warned him to be very quiet, and he was – at first. But soon enough they were drunk, and braying like donkeys.

John remembers his father stomping down the stairs with booze on his breath and thunder in his voice, and the sudden weakness that paralyzed his legs. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t breathe. Even drunk, even at that age, John knew well enough to be afraid. It was written into his bones.

After that day, Joey never came over again.

Oh, he remembers it so well.

Inside, the house is dark; all the lights off, and the shutters drawn – a prison that doesn’t even have the decency to pretend to be anything else. Large sections of the carpet are an uneasy brown, marked by too many food and beer stains, and the air is thick with the smell of nicotine. John brushes a hand over one of his mom’s tacky velvet paintings as he passes it. Besides him and Nolan, they’re the only things of hers that his father kept after she left.

His father lounges on the overstuffed couch in the living room, basking in the dim glow of the television screen, meaty hands curled around the neck of a bottle. It may as well be a permanent fixture there.

“Well, about time, dumbass,” the old man slurs, hearing his footsteps. And then he turns to look. “Shit, son. What happened to you?”

He remembers a lot of things about this man, but not him flinching. Not this small sliver of concern. He steps closer, and his father’s eyes finally land on the rifle in his hands.

“Where’s your brother, John?” His voice trembles.

He smiles. “I’m not John.” His eyes flash too pale as he pulls the trigger.