Try Some You
Might Like It
Stillness had come over the old white
house that stood directly across the street. He could not put his finger on it
but something about the home was different. It was almost as if one day it had
been alive and vibrant then suddenly it had passed on. Ordinarily he would not
have been quite as worried about this but this was not an isolated incident.
The whole neighborhood seemed to be little by little growing quieter. Being a
retiree he had little to occupy his time. He would spend countless hours doing
busy work in his front yard’s flower garden. During his labors he had noticed a
rhythm to his street. People coming and going, getting their mail, mowing their
lawns in the same general time frames but that had all changed with the arrival
of the strange boy with the dark piercing eyes.
He had first noticed the peculiar child
lurking around the neighborhood a few weeks back. There was something about
this kid that was just off. He didn’t seem to belong to anybody and the other
children wanted nothing to do with him. The strange lad would stand on the
sidewalk bouncing a small black soccer ball up and down for hours on end. For
the longest time the old man thought nothing of this but then he began to
notice something eerie. Whichever house the odd boy would dribble his ball in
front of would soon go quiet then there would be several more missing faces in
the neighborhood. As the old man sat at his kitchen table pondering all this,
his stomach began to rumble. Feeling suddenly famished he went to the
refrigerator in search of sustenance. Inside setting on a plate were two large
steaks that he did not recall purchasing when he had last made a trip to the
market. He shrugged his shoulders and muttered, “Must be getting senile.”
He removed the cuts of meat and fried
them up. After he had greedily consumed his meal he decided to take a stroll
around the neighborhood to walk off his supper. As he wandered along he noticed
a police car parked out in front of the Kovac’s house. An officer with a
clipboard in hand stood on its porch taking a report from a visibly upset Mrs.
Kovac.
As the old man shuffled passed he said
to no one in particular, “Neighborhood’s going to hell in a hand basket.”
As he neared his home he saw the strange
boy who endlessly loitered around the neighborhood exit the Widow Murphy’s
home. His black soccer ball was tucked under his arm and over his shoulder was
a brown burlap sack. As the boy stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of him
the old man decided he would follow him and see where he lived. As he traveled
in the odd child’s wake he noticed something dripping from his sack. The old
man stopped, bent down and dabbed some of the liquid onto his finger. The fluid
appeared to be blood. The old man frantically looked around and for a moment he
thought he had lost the boy and his strange burden.
The old man balled up his fist as he saw
the child cross onto his own lawn trampling through his flowerbed as he made
his way to the old man’s front door. He
shuffled after the trespasser as fast as his elderly body would allow. The old
man was more than a little surprised when he saw the boy open his front door
and enter his home. He could not even begin to guess at how the intruder had
gained entrance to his home given the fact that he knew that he had locked the
front door before he had left for his walk. He rushed in after him and saw the
boy vanish into the basement shutting the door behind him as he descended the
stairs. When the old man arrived at the cellar he was shocked to see a large
padlock on its door that he had never seen before. He angrily grumbled, “What
the hell’s going on here? Is this kid Harry Houdini or what?”
As he stood pondering the things he had
witnessed that night something drew his attention to the framed photos that
lined the hallway walls. He began to tremble as he examined one of the
photographs more thoroughly. The picture was of his mother and standing next to
her was a boy with a black soccer ball clutched in his hands. It was the same
boy that had vanished into the basement moments earlier. He wondered how this
could possibly be since he was the child in the photo. Somehow he knew the
answer to this strange string of events lay beyond the basement door. He went
out to the garage, retrieved a hammer and smashed opened the padlock with one
vicious blow. Slowly he descended the basement steps and by the time he
finished his journey down the short flight of stairs he knew that he was
hopelessly insane. His missing neighbor’s dismembered corpses lay scattered
haphazardly on the cellar’s cement floor. In the corner sat a pile of human
bones. He felt bile rise up into his throat when he observed that some of the
skeletal remains bore his teeth marks. The old man began to sob when he saw the
boy seated at a wobbly card table. Piled high on a plate before him was the
butchered remnants of Mrs. Murphy. The boy motioned to a folding chair and the
old man took a seat. The child stuck a fork into a hunk of the raw bloody flesh
and offered it to the old man. The child smiled sweetly and whispered, “Try
some you might like it.”
The old man ate the offered morsel and
God help him he found that he did like it very much indeed.
About
the author:
Kevin
l. Jones comes from a lifetime of experience in the popular arts. He has in the
last two years widely published at such companies as Static Movement, Panic
Press, Red Skies Press, and Rainstorm Press where he has gained great notice
for his many works of short horror fiction. He has been especially prolific at
Static Movement where he has over fifty stories either come out already or are
about to be published soon.
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