GRUEBERFEST '07 - A Cleaver and a Half (620 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.97 on 27 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by write-of-way (View user info) at 2007-10-04 05:39:28 EDT
The McAllen farm was always the subject of wild gossip after the old man came to town for supplies, which was roughly four times a year. He was actually just in his forties, but his manner resulted in the senior designation. He was plain mean, and that meanness was like a black hole, exerting such an inward force no joy or happiness could possibly exist within, and it was obvious from three blocks away.
Because of his sour disposition, no one who knew of him would consider initiating a conversation, even to mention the weather, but there always seemed to be a new person in town with whom the locals could have a little fun. It was usually one of the high school boys who'd do it. He'd sidle up to the new resident, who knew nothing of the strange McAllen family or the old man's temper, and suggest the hapless person offer to help the old man load his supplies into the back of his ancient truck.
The result would usually be one of the most shocking displays of vulgarity the clueless helper had ever experienced, and one that could be heard up and down Main Street, eliciting chuckles from old timers and stares from newer residents lucky enough to be a witness to his anger and not a recipient.
But the last time it happened shocked everyone, regardless of tenure, and the tragic consequences echoed across the decades like an evil bell, tolling its misery and suffering upon the innocent.
This time, old man McAllen just looked at the stranger, who waited politely for a response to his offer, though growing warier as the silence grew longer. The prankster looked on nearby, puzzled at the delayed eruption.
Finally, McAllen did something he had never before done, something which shocked the prankster so he actually flinched, which had also never happened, no matter the ferocity of the farmer's actions.
Old man McAllen agreed.
Witnesses to the event were stunned as he allowed the newcomer to lift a feed bag up onto the gate of his truck. Years later, everyone in town spoke of it as if they had actually watched it happen, but in truth, there were few who did. It was like a sporting event whose crowd of spectators, over time, grew in size much larger than the venue could possibly hold.
Some remembered it was on the first bag when McAllen calmly removed a knife from his belt and slit the stranger's throat. Others said he'd waited patiently until the entire truck was loaded. What was undisputed was, when the guilty prankster ran to the aid of the stranger, McAllen intercepted him and jammed the knife into the corner of his eye, popping it into the street like a button off a banker's suit.
The reason this detail was not in question is because Jimmy Foster, who still sits outside his father's drug store most days, regularly lifts his eye patch to strangers after recounting the story and telling them how amazed they'd be at just how big an eyeball actually is, before offering to display the phantom organ as he pretended to search his pockets.
Once a prankster, always a prankster.
Shortly after he entered prison, old man McAllen was brutally murdered by a cell mate who could no longer tolerate his nonsensical, late night ramblings. His throat was cut open with a chicken bone sharpened against a metal bed frame, after which the cellmate slept soundly, not waking even when the blood soaked through the thin mattress and dripped onto his forehead during the night. Old man McAllen was forty-seven years old.
During his trial, it had become known just how strange the McAllen family was. When the house was searched, it was discovered their only child, a thirteen year old son by the name of Junior, had been kept locked in the cellar for up to eighteen hours a day from the time he was four.
He had supposedly died shortly after birth, but the body in his grave was actually an older unnamed sister for whom a cause of death could not be determined so long after her demise. The boy was put in school, but the horrors of his childhood were fodder for the cruel derision of his peers, and he lasted barely a year. There were laws on the books which could have been used to punish his mother, but no one seemed willing to subject the family to any more suffering than they had already endured, and the McAllens were left alone after that.
Until the disappearance of four year old Sadie Williams.
The girl went missing two summers after Mrs. McAllen died. Junior McAllen inherited the farm and the acreage surrounding it. He was twenty-nine by then, and rumors of his strangeness only grew after his mother passed. His father had left a substantial sum to his mother, who passed it to him, and it was possible he would never again have to work the farm if he sold a bit of timber from the north side of his property every few years and lived frugally, which he appeared to do. He came into town even less frequently than did his father, although with nowhere near the attention. He was merely a curiosity to most, though the occasional teen would jeer his parentage or appearance, which Junior steadfastly ignored.
They called him 'that half-wit' even when he was near enough to hear, and rumors of his father's cruelty were wildly inventive. Some said old man McAllen had cut his son's pecker off before he went to jail, so his little head would match his big head.
Mostly, he was pitied, until the disappearance of four year old Sadie Williams.
Sadie's father was a large, easy going man with nine other children whose mother died when Sadie was born. His farm bordered the McAllen place, and his first thought was that Junior McAllen had taken his daughter. He was not alone in that assumption.
A group of men from the surrounding area caught Junior as he came out of his ramshackle barn that afternoon, and beat him within an inch of his life. As he laid broken and bleeding just steps from his front porch the sheriff arrived with news that the little girl had been found. She had simply wandered off and was discovered on the road by a well meaning family who took her into the next town, after which a simple miscommunication led to the delay in identification.
Most thought it odd rather than charitable when Junior failed to press charges against those who battered him. Even his best intentions were suspect.
But the incident did factor into the actions of law enforcement when little Mary Lansford went missing the following summer.
Mary Lansford was an angelic little towhead whose appearance often stole the breath of those who saw her for the first time. She was one of those golden children, so heart achingly beautiful that other parents almost looked ashamed when they looked at their own kids.
More than one parent audibly sighed when told little Mary was a deaf mute, as if grateful the good Lord had withheld something from the child that a moment ago had so outshone their own.
Some of the folks in town wanted Sheriff Potter to immediately search the McAllen farm, but Potter wasn't about to risk a lawsuit or his job by operating outside procedure. Besides, he remembered all too well what had happened the last time.
So Potter simply called Junior McAllen on the phone to request he come down for an interview.
Just as Junior picked up the phone, Potter heard a loud crash, screaming voices, and then the line went dead. He knew immediately what was happening.
When the sheriff and his deputy pulled up next to several cars parked askew in front of the ramshackle McAllen house, it was obvious someone had endured quite a beating. There was blood all over the porch, with several teeth and even what looked like a piece of wispy scalp swimming in the gore.
A large knife was stuck deep in one of the rotting wood columns that framed the front of the house, and it looked like a piece of collar was embedded with it.
Potter and his deputy banged through the screen door. The house looked like a tornado had blown through, and it was just as eerily quiet. They drew their guns and looked at each other.
"Anybody here?"
Silence.
Potter motioned the deputy down the hall, and slowly approached the splintered, half-opened door to the front bedroom. He took a deep breath and pushed it open.
The room was trashed, but empty. As he turned to leave, he heard a scream from the back of the house.
Potter ran down the hall and rushed into the filthy back bedroom. His deputy was just standing there, his back to Potter, facing the corner.
"What the hell happened?"
The deputy spun around, looking sheepish.
"Big fuckin' rat jumped outta the closet," he said, sheepishly. "Scared the shit outta me."
"Fuck's sake."
"Ran right into the wall. Big as a cat."
Potter looked past the deputy at the broken plaster.
"Jesus Christ."
Potter walked over for a closer look, but something slammed shut outside the house and shook the thin walls.
Potter and the deputy, realizing simultaneously, rushed into the hall and outside.
They ran around the side of the house to an old cellar door and opened it, the dankness immediately assaulting them. Potter propped the door open to take advantage of the outside light, but it barely helped. They went down several steps past the reaches of the faint light from the doorway.
"Go get your flashlight. Hurry it up."
The deputy nodded and disappeared up the steps.
Potter waited for several minutes, debating whether to continue down the narrow steps or check on the deputy, when he heard a muffled scream from below.
"Hell."
He descended into the darkness.
The cement steps turned sharply and the light from the outside receded to nothingness just as an eerie sob emanated from deep below the house. He could barely see but he quickened his pace along the narrow steps, feeling his way along the walls and finally coming to a thick wooden door.
Potter holstered his gun so he could swing it open by its thick, rusted handle.
A faint orange glow crept around the edge of the door.
And then the lights really went out.
When Potter woke up, he was cuffed and propped up in the corner of a large root cellar with cheap plywood walls. A single lantern provided the only light from the far side of the room. Several men stood in a semi circle around the miserable lump of flesh and bone that was Junior McAllen. He was tied to a four by four support post, and he was beaten almost beyond recognition.
His captors, townsmen all, looked beaten and tired themselves. They obviously had expended great physical effort in this endeavor, without result. One of them was kneeling and another was bent over with his hands on his knees like he wanted to puke.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Potter yelled.
The men turned around.
"He took my baby girl." It was Mary Lansford's father.
"How do you know that?"
"Bobby saw her hair ribbon out front," Lansford said.
"I said it looked like her hair ribbon."
Lansford turned to the speaker. "You said it was hers."
"I said it looked like hers."
"Uncuff me, goddamnit."
Lansford walked slowly over to the sheriff. "He took my little girl."
"Did he tell you that?"
"Not yet."
The sheriff looked past Lansford to Junior.
"He ain't gonna tell you shit now, you goddamn fool. You beat him too bad. Now uncuff me."
"Bobby saw her hair ribbon."
The man who was kneeling stood up.
"I said it looked like her hair ribbon."
Lansford rushed him, taking Bobby by surprise, screaming with rage and pain and sorrow that echoed violently around the room as the other men, startled at first, moved to pull him off.
Potter nearly wrenched his shoulder out of its socket reaching for his spare key, but finally got the cuffs off. He pulled his gun and fired into the floor.
Out of chaos, silence.
For the first time, Potter noticed the weapons the men had found in the kitchen and brought down to this hellhole to torture this poor, miserable creature. He felt sick to his stomach.
He was about to speak when he heard it.
A tiny, scratching sound.
From just behind the far wall.
Where the wood looked a little different.
Newer.
Lansford scrambled to his feet and grabbed the cleaver from the dirt floor.
Upon later reflection, Potter was stunned at his slowness at this key moment. Most of the time he was able to assuage his guilt by remembering he merely assumed what everyone else assumed.
He assumed, of course, that Lansford thought, as they all did, that his daughter was hidden behind that wall. She was scratching to get out. It had to be. They had done too much, come too far, and this was how it must resolve.
So of course her father's grabbing that cleaver to bust her out.
Instead, he buried the cleaver in Junior McAllen's skull.
Now Potter's reflexes sped up.
He shot Lansford out of pure instinct. He didn't think about that golden child, that beautiful little blue eyed, blonde haired angel trapped in that dank pit, with the worms and the spiders and no voice to cry. He didn't think about anything. He just blew her father's face onto the cheap plywood that held her captive.
Lansford fell on top of Junior, and for a moment there was complete silence.
Until Potter leaned over and threw up.
When he finally stopped, he looked around for something to pry the plywood apart at the joint, and nearly lost it again when he saw the only thing that could do the job.
Potter rolled Lansford off Junior and pulled the cleaver out of his skull. A couple of the men vomited at the gaping hole that was their friend's face. It didn't help at all that that face was plastered right across the seam between the panels.
Potter leveraged the panel and finally pried it out enough to get his fingers behind it.
He yanked the panel back, pushing it open as the common nails groaned.
He grabbed the lantern and shone it into the wall.
"Oh God, no" Potter whispered, so softly no one could hear.
And then he fainted.
The lantern fell to the floor, and the men screamed in blackness.
When the deputy finally convinced the townsman who got the drop on him to just let him take a flashlight and go down there, he nearly tripped over the men as they crawled in total darkness up the cement steps.
Potter was not among them.
When the deputy opened the heavy wooden door, Potter was sitting next to Lansford and Junior, weeping in their blood.
The deputy shone the light into the wall and saw the source of the scratching.
It was a fat mother rat, suckling her babies.
The sheriff had the entire house boarded up immediately. There would be a grand jury convened next month, but until then no one was going into that house. Halloween was coming, and he didn't want any pranksters in there.
That night, inside the house, in the back bedroom, in the corner, through the broken plaster, inside the wall, little Mary Lansford woke up.
Like many who were born deaf, her sight was extremely keen, so Mary saw them immediately, though it was almost pitch black in the wall of the shuttered house.
It was both a cruel irony and a blessing that Junior had not only bound her hands and feet, but taped her mouth as well.
The rats' eyes glinted in the darkness.
User Reviews
Submitted by DudeThatsBOSH (user info) at 2007-10-10 12:48:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by ColchesterDr (user info) at 2007-10-07 12:45:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Killer twist. (pun intended)
Submitted by Ballare (user info) at 2007-10-06 14:12:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by rorrim (user info) at 2007-10-06 14:02:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Sacrilicious (user info) at 2007-10-06 13:36:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was wonderful, Mr/Ms whoever you are.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2007-10-05 23:36:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fuck me, I just noticed I already reviewed this. And I was thinking I'd read something like it before. Either I'm getting senile or I'm dizzy with reading Gfest tales. But fuck it, I enjoyed it just as much the second time.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2007-10-05 23:29:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No matter how this ends, it gets a +2 for this...
"...when the guilty prankster ran to the aid of the stranger, McAllen intercepted him and jammed the knife into the corner of his eye, popping it into the street like a button off a banker's suit."
Now back to the story.
Submitted by FALLEN (user info) at 2007-10-05 08:21:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I almost didn't read this.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2007-10-04 23:41:12 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I enjoyed this a lot.
Submitted by HotWillie (user info) at 2007-10-04 21:39:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Great fucking ending.
Submitted by wrinklebeast (user info) at 2007-10-04 20:32:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
So far, this was the only good one.
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2007-10-04 18:40:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fuck TheUniter! Haha beat you CJ
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-10-04 18:37:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-10-04 18:37:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Lib (user info) at 2007-10-04 13:09:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by forensicgirl3 (user info) at 2007-10-04 13:00:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I didn't see the end coming.
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-10-04 12:42:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2007-10-04 06:17:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Brilliant twist at the end.
fuck yeah! this kicked all sorts of ass.
Submitted by ConorJS (user info) at 2007-10-04 12:07:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fuckin'... nice!
Submitted by EatMeCompletely (user info) at 2007-10-04 11:54:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Awesome ending. Just when I'm feeling for Junior, you turned it around...
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-10-04 11:09:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This struck me as a macabre variation of "The Green Mile" by Stephen King.
VERY well done.
Submitted by baronMunchausen (user info) at 2007-10-04 10:57:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
It was me and mine was lame. Even if it was good I would have lost, though.
Submitted by Amontillado (user info) at 2007-10-04 10:37:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Void_Where_Prohibited (user info) at 2007-10-04 10:28:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Best. Hands down.
Submitted by HurtByTheSun (user info) at 2007-10-04 09:36:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2007-10-04 14:35:11 BST (#)
Ranking: 2
Fucking aced it. Not sure exactly who your opponent was, but this will be tough to beat.
=========
Was baronMunchausen. This wins.
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2007-10-04 09:35:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fucking aced it. Not sure exactly who your opponent was, but this will be tough to beat.
Submitted by orph (user info) at 2007-10-04 06:22:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Not bad.
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2007-10-04 06:17:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Brilliant twist at the end.