Mary's Place (364 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 0.66 on 3 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Pentameter (View user info) at 2006-09-25 20:02:21 EDT
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
"Blow into this paper bag."
Billy was stupid enough to do it. He believed Adam when he told him that he wasn't going to do anything to scare or hurt him, even though Adam told him that every time he was about to play a trick on him.
Gingerly, Billy put his lips to the opening of the bag, and even jerked back once to gauge Adam's reaction. He didn't flinch, so Billy pressed harder. Instantly, his lips felt hot and picky, and when he pulled the bag away, a few bees began to buzz from the opening. Fighting the urge to cry, he began to feel around his lips to see how badly he had been stung.
"I can't believe you fell for that, you little fag!" Adam shouted as he tried to catch his breath from laughing so hard.
Without saying a word, Billy started to walk home, brushing the dirt off of his hands onto his blue and white striped t-shirt. He could feel his lips swelling, the soft flesh underneath feeling as though it would burst through the tautness of his skin. Something inside Billy told him to hold his tears.
Suddenly, he envisioned Adam with a spike directly through his forehead. Blood gushed from the wound, covering his shirt. Billy shivered all over as he tried to dash the image from his mind. He wanted to hurt Adam for what he did, but he didn't want to kill him.
Thoughts like that scared him. He remembered when he thought that his puppy, Miko, was going to die, and the next day he woke up and she was dead. There were many times when Billy had seen something in his mind, and it happened. He needed to keep it a secret, because no one would have ever believed him.
Billy walked around the back of his house, flipped his shoes off and walked into the back door, where his mother was busy cooking dinner.
She hurried around the kitchen, grabbing paper towels and band-aids, blotting his lips and trying to keep the sauce from burning on the stove. Her blonde hair kept coming loose from her ponytail, her forehead a little clammy. After a dose of Benadryl and a hug, Billy was sent to his room to take a nap.
He lay down in his bed, and the walls began to abandon their shape. Voices echoed inside his head. They told him to hurt, kill and destroy. In his mind, he saw a tiny rundown cottage in a clearing in the woods. A man stood on the front porch with a shotgun in his hand, and it seemed as though he was looking for someone. He waved to Billy and called out his name.
A trail of blood led into the house, and rats gathered at the front door. The old man's eyes were crystal clear blue, and his smile revealed a mouth full of broken and yellowed teeth.
"C'mon Bill, I'm waitin' for ya!" he shouted.
Sweat began pouring down his face and his shirt was soaked. Claws wrapped around his throat and squeezed with all of their might, and he was barely able to get his tiny voice to escape from his mouth. His mother rushed into his room.
"Honey, are you all right?" she asked as she tried to wake him.
He flailed in the bed, then came to with heavy breath. "I was having a bad dream," he said between pants.
"It was probably just the medicine," she said.
"Probably," he said.
But he wasn't completely convinced. The images stayed with him all day no matter how hard he tried to repress them. He was so afraid of what would happen that when a neighborhood kid he actually liked stopped by to ask him if he wanted to play, he stayed home.
The next morning, he woke up early and set out by himself. A few years ago, he and Adam had stumbled over a long dirt road, but neither one of them had the nerve to follow it to its end.
Billy decided that he was going to find out, no matter how scared he was about what he would discover. He scrawled a few words on a piece of paper, which he left on his dresser. The last thing he wanted was for his mother to worry, so he figured that a note would save him a week on his probable grounding. Before he left his room, he grabbed his favorite Raiders cap and put it on his head.
Tall weeds and stalks of grass lay across the road, and Billy took high steps almost the entire way. By the time he reached the end, he was completely exhausted. Little trees were clustered here and there, and in the middle was the cottage he had seen in his dream.
"I can't believe this is real," he whispered as he made his way up the front stairs.
When he looked down at the steps, he saw the trail of blood, but he wasn't scared. With every ounce of courage he could muster, Billy pushed open the door to the old cottage.
Inside, it looked as though it were lived in just yesterday. The furniture was tattered, the floor was worn, yet it still had that feeling of home. He wandered into the kitchen where there was still a kettle on the stove, and when he peeked in the refrigerator, there was still some food, even though it was rotten and moldy.
The entire morning was spent looking through all of the cabinets and cupboards in the house, searching through photo albums and drawers. He ran his hands across the mantle, where he found a picture of a woman that had been turned over. She looked very beautiful, with a bright smile and eyes that had a certain mischievous look, with which Billy was very familiar.
Billy puffed up his chest as he walked past the dirty old mirror. Adam would surely be impressed that he made the journey all on his own.
The house was filled with feminine touches, from lace to flowers to porcelain dolls. Many of the dolls were broken in some way. Some had no arms, no legs, some heads were smashed in and some of them had no eyes.
Right before he left, he opened the closet next to the front door. Inside was the shotgun the old man had been holding in his dream. Billy took it in his hands and aimed at the mirror, pretending to pull the trigger.
"Bang! Bang! BANG! Adam's going to shit his pants!" he yelled.
He burst out of the door and ran all the way to Adam's house, where he spotted Adam getting ready to play baseball with some other neighborhood kids. He shouted, "Hey, wait for me!"
"Don't wait for him, he's a loser," Adam said.
In his loudest voice, Billy shouted, "I went down the rooooooad all by myself!"
"Bullshit. What's back there, then?" Adam asked.
"A house. Wanna see it?"
"Yeah."
When they arrived at the cottage, Billy asked Adam if he wanted to go inside, and Adam shot back with, "Of course I do. Do you think I'm some kind of pussy or something?"
As soon as they walked through the door, Billy picked up the shotgun and said, "Check this out."
"Cool, does it have bullets in it?"
"Naw, I tried shooting it before and nothing happened," he said.
"Let me see it," Adam said as he ripped it from Billy's hands.
He raised it up and pointed it at the mirror, then pulled the trigger. The force was so strong that it sent him reeling back so hard that he nearly broke the window on the front door.
"Holy shit! Are you all right?" Billy asked.
"Yeah, I think I'm all right," Adam answered.
Billy walked over to where the mirror was and cleared some of the remaining glass out of the way. In the darkness of the cottage, he squinted hard and noticed that a staircase was hidden behind the mirror.
They were both thinking the same thing.
As they made their way down the stairs, they realized that the basement was surprisingly bright. All of the windows were smashed open, allowing lots of sunlight to reach every corner of the room. Old tools were scattered around the room, covering a worktable and littering the floor. Newspaper clippings and old advertisements lined the walls like makeshift wallpaper, and they flapped in the chilly fall breeze.
From opposite ends of the room, they began to work their way around, flipping over boxes and rooting through drawers. On one of the shelves, Adam noticed what appeared to be a safe. "I bet there's something cool in there," he said.
He stretched, but his fingertips were no where near being able to reach.
"Try this," Billy said as he handed him a dusty old chair.
Adam placed the chair in front of the shelf, and tested it to see how sturdy it was. He extended his hand, but just wasn't close enough, so he jumped up to see if he could grab the safe. The chair was so dusty that when he tried to keep his footing, he slid and fell to the floor.
Then Billy heard a shriek.
His legs were so wobbly he could barely make his way over to Adam, who was lying on his back in a pool of blood. A rail spike was flush in the middle of his head, and when Billy looked on the floor, he saw it protruding from a railroad tie that had been tossed aside.
It was exactly as he had seen it in his mind.
He didn't need anyone to tell him that Adam was dead. He tried to run as fast as he could, but he kept slipping and tripping over everything that was scattered on the floor. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his heart thumped heavily inside his chest.
"What am I going to do? Am I going to go to jail? What the fuck am I going to do?" he cried as he scurried up the stairs.
"Don't move."
Automatically, Billy raised his hands up over his head.
"Put your arms down, son."
The man stepped around in front of him. Billy began to feel pins and needles all over his body when he recognized the face of the man from his dream. The old man spoke, "That stairway was sealed off for a reason."
"I didn't know! Me and Adam were just fooling around and he wanted the box on the shelf so I gave him a chair and he climbed up and then, and then," Billy said between sobs.
"She always yelled at me for leaving my things on the floor. She said it was dangerous," the old man said.
"Huh?"
"Mary. My wife. She's buried down there, you know. I killed the fucking bitch. She never had a sense of humor. Well, not when it came to me."
"Oh my God."
"No one misses her. She was a crazy son of a bitch. She liked to cause a ruckus, make me look like an idiot in front of anyone and everyone," the old man said.
"I think I want to go home," Billy said.
"You aren't going anywhere, ya little bastard. I'll call the cops and tell them what you did to your friend."
"You're gonna call the cops?" Billy asked.
"Well, they will come looking for your friend down there, don't ya think?" he asked.
"I'm going to go to jail," he said as he began to cry.
"No you aren't. C'mon, we'll go downstairs and clean everything up. Don't worry about it. I'll take care of you," the old man said.
"But what about Adam? What about his parents? They're going to want to find him."
"Don't worry. They won't be able to find anything," he old man said.
"I don't want to go down there again," Billy said.
"If you don't, I can always tell the police that a little boy named Billy Mitchell was with Adam when he died."
"How did you know my name?"
"I have ways of knowing these things. Now, get down into the basement so that you can help me."
The old man turned and began down the stairs. Billy thought about running for a moment, but when the old man muttered, "Don't even think about it," he thought it wiser to just do as he was told. In the basement, the old man pulled the carpet off of the floor and tossed it against the wall. He began moving the floorboard, revealing a makeshift grave.
"What the hell is this?" Billy asked.
"Shut the hell up and grab your friend's feet," the old man ordered.
Billy's hands were so sweaty that he could barely keep his grip on Adam's ankles as he dragged him over to the hole in the floor. When he was right in front of the grave, the old man said, "Go on, push him in there for Chrissakes!"
He kicked Adam with his feet, and he toppled head over heels into the grave, the rail spike still sticking out of his head. Rats and maggots began crawling up his legs, and Billy could do nothing but scream. The old man pushed him against the wall, trying to stifle his screams with his hand. Desperately, Billy tried to break from his grip, and with some effort, was able to free himself.
He bounded up the stairs, dizzy from the struggle. With his last ounce of strength, he ran out into the clearing.
"C'mon Bill, I'm waitin' for ya!" the old man screamed. "You little fucking shits, always coming up here and fucking around in my house, breaking everything you see. Son of a bitch!"
Billy shouted, "No, please! Don't hurt me!"
"There's no one here to stop me. There's no one around to hear this gunshot, either."
Billy's mother went into his room just like she did every other day to pick his dirty laundry up from the floor. As she was cleaning up in his room, she noticed the note he had written earlier in the day, which read, "If I'm not back by sundown, you'll find my body and Adam's at Mary's place. The old man did it. He killed his wife too, but that was a long time ago."
"That kid, always being dramatic," she said to herself as she threw his dirty socks into the laundry basket.
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