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arry Paultz and Benny Ringman heaved the sixty pound pumpkin onto their shoulders between them and with a running start, shot-putted the behemoth through a plate glass window into the main hallway of Emerson High. Amidst an explosion of flying glass, the pumpkin burst into fragments with a meaty “thud” and skidded in all directions.
“Fuckin’ bull’s-eye!” Larry said. Both boys fell to the ground, doubled up with insane laughter.
“Ohh—ohhhh—oooohoooo-haa-haaaa,” Benny gasped by way of reply. “I—I’m gonna piss myself!”
But their celebration was cut short when a pair of headlights cut the darkness at the entrance to the high school parking lot.
Sixty feet away in the circle drive behind the wheel of his idling pickup, Steve Wilson, the third member of the dubious triage, urgently shouted, “Haul ass, you guys! Someone’s comin.”
Still giggling hysterically, Larry and Benny leapt to their feet, sprinted for the escape vehicle, and dove headfirst into the pickup’s bed. Like a choreographed ballet, Steve stomped the gas pedal, and the old Ford fishtailed out of the parking lot via the back entrance burning rubber while Larry and Benny were pummeled by unused pumpkins rolling around in the truck’s bed. “Whoo-haa!” Steve said through the open rear window over the engine’s roar, “Bet you two turdheads never knew bein’ bad could feel so damn good!”
Fifteen minutes later, Steve pulled over beneath a weeping willow tree draped along the side of county road D, four miles removed from Hay Corner, Iowa. So far, they’d had quite an evening thanks to a volatile blend of youthful testosterone and two cases of Old Style beer—eleven mailboxes either dented or knocked clean off their posts by pumpkins stolen from local farmers, or Jack-O’-Lanterns filched off of front porches. And of course, there was the ‘crowning jewel’ of their achievements at the high school.
Savoring the moment, the trio sat in the front seat and laughed their asses off. Then, gasping for breath, Steve turned to his friends and said, “Goddam—gonna piss myself, yet. One of you guys wanna snag me another ‘Dog Style’ from the cooler in back?”
Benny snorted at Steve’s sexual innuendo regarding their favorite beer. Then he turned, grabbed a can, and lobbed it to his friend. “Sure thing, boss.” Then he said, “I don’t know about you two fuckheads, but I don’t want this night to freakin’ end. What’s next?”
Steve belched and wiped the froth from his lips after chugging half a can. “Well, it’s gonna be tough toppin’ what we’ve already done. I mean: trashin’ those mailboxes is a Federal offense. By now, I’m sure someone’s phoned in some of our ‘handiwork’ to the cops. I think we’d better lay low and cruise the countryside for three or four hours, then sneak back into town while we’re ahead. And speakin’ of that, we’d better ditch the rest of the pumpkins in the back so’s we don’t get busted.”
His friends were about to agree when a sly smile crossed his face. That thought would change the entire evening, and not for the better. “Wait a second. There’s something that we haven’t done, yet. You guys ever tipped a shitter?”
“Fuck yeah!” Larry said. “Tipped several of ‘em down at Goldie’s Cafe. Worst waitresses I ever had.”
Benny snorted and sprayed beer on the console. “Dammit, Lar. You just made me waste a quarter of my fuckin’ beer. What the hell you talkin’ about—tippin’ a shitter?”
Struggling mightily to regain control of himself, Larry said, “He’s askin’ whether we’ve ever tipped over one of those old-fashioned outhouses, numbnuts. Used to be a major Halloween prank back in our grandparent’s generation.”
“No, can’t say that I have,” Benny replied. “And anyway: where we gonna find an outhouse? They’re not exactly common nowadays, you know.”
“You kiddin’ , Benny?” Steve said, “We’re smack-dab in the center of southern Io-fuckin’-way. I know where there’s one not five miles from here.”
Twenty minute later, the trio pulled to a stop on the edge of a dusty gravel road. “This is the place,” Steve said, pointing to a crumbling Victorian crouching in the moonlight on their left. Near the front of the yard, a tilted Realtor’s sign struggled to stay afloat in a sea of rippling weeds. “Shitter’s around back.”
“Hey!” Benny said, “Isn’t this the old Harmon place?”
“Yeah. So what?” Steve said.
“Don’t you ever read the paper, douche bag? The old codger snuffed it a year ago. In fact, his body was discovered Halloween afternoon by Cynthia Bergman.”
“You mean that hottie that drives for UPS?”
“Sure do.”
“Wow,” Steve said, “what I wouldn’t give to have two hours alone with her in the sack.”
“You and half the friggin’ men in the state,” Larry said around a sour belch.
Benny cleared his throat. “Dream on, dickheads. Like I said: she found old man Harmon dead in his living room when she came to deliver a parcel. Seems the old geezer was really keen to get his paws on it, ‘cause he told her to leave it inside if he didn’t answer.”
“How do you know all this, o’ omnipotent one?” Larry asked.
“’Cause she told me. “ Benny replied with a shit eating grin, playfully punching Larry on the arm. “Conversation’s a beautiful thing. You oughtta try it sometime. Anyway, that ain’t all she told me. If either of you ever are so lucky as to get her into the sack, you might just find out she’s got bigger balls than you.”
“What you mean by that?” Larry said.
Relishing the moment, Benny said, “’Cause of what she saw. Jesus. Gives me the willies just thinkin’ about it.”
“What happened?” Steve asked.
“Well, Benny said, “After knockin’ a few times and calling for Mr. Harmon through the door, she decided to nudge it open a crack, and try again. When she did, two things happened at once: three yowling cats tore by her into the front yard from inside. But she didn’t have time to ponder that, ‘cause then she noticed the smell.”
“Oh, Jeez,” Steve said.
“Yeah,” Benny replied. “The place stunk like an untended gut wagon in August. But that wasn’t the worst. She fished a hanky from her pocket, covered her nose, and went inside to investigate what she was pretty sure she already knew. That’s why I mentioned her havin’ bigger testicles than any of us. No way I’d have gone in there.
“But it was worse than she could have imagined. There in the middle of the living room floor was what was left of old man Harmon. At first, she couldn’t see the body. You see, he had a lot more cats than the three that had just escaped—twenty-seven in all. And they were busy. That creep coroner Evans estimated that the old codger had been dead for at least two weeks. But it was hard to be sure, ‘cause that many starvin’ kitties can do a lot of damage pretty quick.”
“Jesus. I think I’m gonna puke,” Larry said. “Thanks a lot, asshole.”
“You asked,” Benny said.
Steve shivered. “Yeah, that coroner Evans guy is a creep. Once I was down at my old man’s gas station, and Evans pulled in for gas. When I went out to service the car, he got out. Jesus. I swear his eyes looked right into me, like he was peeling my skin back, or something.”
“Evans is a weird duck,” Larry added. “My dad says he’s been county coroner for as long as he can remember, but the guy doesn’t look a day over forty.”
“Must be his lifestyle,” Benny said. “Maybe there’s something therapeutic about havin’ your hands in human goo all day long.”
“You guys are grossin’ me out, Steve said. Changing subjects, he asked, “I wonder what was in that parcel that was so important that old man Harmon wanted it brought inside?”
“Might have something to do with those weird old books he was trying to get his paws on,” Larry said. “My Aunt Tricia is the head librarian in town. Some time back, she told me old Harmon asked her to make a special search for some rare old books. Naturally, our little piss-ass library didn’t have ‘em, and had never heard of ‘em. She had to do a lot of research, and finally found some university back east in Massachusetts that had ‘em. Even then, all they sent her were bits of Xeroxed copies. Later she told me the names. One was named something like
Un—Unespresso Kulten, I think.”
“Sounds like a shitty pot of coffee brewed for gang members to me,” Steve said with a lop-sided grin.
“Yeah,” Benny replied. But he didn’t smile. “Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I remember the name of one of the other books; it was Necro somthin’ or other. Some really creepy shit,” he said, shivering. “I sneaked a peek at the Xeroxes one afternoon when she was away from her desk. About a week later, she took the stuff home and burned it in her fireplace. When the old geezer showed at the library asking about his order sometime later, Aunt Trish lied and told him she couldn’t fill his request.”
“So what was the old fart into?” Larry asked.
Benny shivered. “Dunno. But after seein’ some of that stuff, and overhearing the old geezer mumbling to himself in the library one afternoon, I don’t wanna know.”
“What did he say?” Larry asked.
“Something about the Great Old Ones, ‘the keeper of the gate’, or ‘the guardian of the key’, I think. But what really freaked me out was how those passages tied in to some of the stuff I’d read.” He looked at his friends with frightened, pleading eyes. “C’mon guys, let’s go back to town and forget this. Something just feels wrong out here.”
Steve laughed and fluttered his hands. “Wooo-ooooo. You really had me going. I thought the old fart might be into something serious. Like cheating at bingo. Or whacking off while watching his neighbors through binoculars while they showered. Anyway, the old fart’s feedin’ the worms now, so what does it matter?” Then he reached under the seat and fished out a roll of toilet paper. “All this talk’s plumb scared me shitless, or soon will. Think I’ll put that outhouse to good use before we trash it. Opening the door and getting out, he added, “You pussies with me, or are you gonna sit here crappin’ your drawers over some old dead fart’s fucked-up hocus-pocus?”
A few moments later, the trio walked briskly through chest-high grass and weeds. After making their way around the side of the house, they spotted the roof of a small building next to a barbed wire fence at the back of the yard. “That must be it,” Steve said, leading the way.
As they drew closer, Benny lagged behind and fanned the air. “Whew! You guys smell that? Seems the outhouse has had some visitors, recently.”
“Probably clients who stopped by to check out the house,” Steve said. “I mean: would you buy a house out in the sticks if the shitter didn’t work?”
Larry laughed. “You’re a trip, Steve. Seems to me that shitters oughtta be ‘mechanically foolproof.’”
“Yeah,” Steve said, grinning in the moonlight. “Unless your family happens to be elephants. Anyway, you guys hang loose while I go take a honkin’ dump.” Pacing rapidly to the weathered, wood structure, Steve threw back the door on protesting hinges. “Fuckin’ one-seater,” he said over his shoulder. “No wonder the old codger never had any dates.”
Benny and Larry milled in the yard a few feet away while Steve closed the door, and attended to business. From inside, they heard a muffled string of farts, followed by sighs of relief.
But in the space of a few heartbeats, Steve’s mood changed from one of relative contentment to one of startled surprise, followed by unease edging toward fright. “What the hell?” he yelped. “Hey, you guys! Something’s down in the crapper. It just brushed my ass.”
Larry laughed and said, “Sure thing, Steve. Take your prank and stuff it you-know-where.”
“I’m serious, man! There’s something in here,” Steve said in a frightened, falsetto voice.
Through the closed door of the outhouse, Benny and Larry heard Steve frantically moving around, attempting to yank up his pants.
He was too late.
Suddenly, Steve’s agonizing screams cut the crisp night air like a razor. “Get away! Oh, oh God. I-it’s got me. N-no! Nooooo! Please. Not that. Anything but that. I-it’s….crawling up my ass. Oh, God, it hurts, it hurrrrttttsssss…”
Benny and Larry were frozen in fear when the top of the roof exploded off of the outhouse moments later. Rotten planks rained down around the pair, and one splintered plank pierced Larry’s arm.
But their eyes were riveted by a scene of horror far worse.
Suspended twenty feet in the air above the ruined outhouse, Steve continued to scream in extremis. Between his parted legs, a glistening, pulsing, gelatinous mass that thickened rapidly toward the ground weaved and danced, forcing Steve to bob and dip with it like a grotesque, screaming human puppet. Occasional wet sucking sounds, accompanied by upward pulsings of the wet, glistening monstrosity nearly unseated their minds; they knew what was happening to Steve, and the horror of it was unthinkable.
They still hadn’t seen the worst.
As more of the horror forced its way inside Steve’s body, his screams gave way to moans. Dark blood flowed from the corner of his mouth, and his lolling head sank to his chest. Unable to turn away, Benny and Larry watched while Steve’s body, stuffed with more of the horror, bloated until the skin was stretched drum-tight. And then without warning his body exploded with a wet ripping sound, raining grisly chunks of bloody flesh down upon the horrified pair.
Benny was the first to find a thread of sanity. Grabbing Larry’s arm so hard that he cut his friend’s flesh with his fingers, he said, “Run, goddammit, run!”
But Larry remained frozen to the spot while saliva drooled from the corner of his gaping mouth.
Benny sprinted for the truck and never looked back. Even when Larry’s screams began moments later.
Hay Corner cop Travis Henderson was deep into a game of computer chess when the front wall of his modest office was caved in by the front of Steve Wilson’s pickup. Amidst a cloud of tinkling glass and choking dust, Travis’ mind briefly flashed back to the famous scene from the movie The Terminator when Arnold Schwarzenegger had “come back.”
But when a babbling, white-faced teenage boy tumbled from the truck’s ruin and crawled to Travis on hands and knees and screamed once before he fainted, the small town cop knew that something serious had gone down. Travis managed to revive the boy a few minutes later , and puzzled together just enough from the boy’s insane ravings to send the highway patrol to the old Harmon place, where investigating officers discovered a scene rivaling an abbatoir gone mad.
After leading the strangely docile, mumbling youth to a holding cell, the boy crawled beneath the bunk, curled into a fetal position, and sucked his thumb, staring at nothing through glazed eyes. The youth was later identified as Benny Ringman. The young man was eventually transferred upstate and placed in a mental ward. He never uttered another coherent word, again.
Behind locked doors in his office at the county morgue two days later, coroner Evans switched off the surgical saw, and removed the skullcap from what was left of Larry Paultz’s head. On a stainless steel table nearby, two sets of mangled human remains sat in eerie, oozing silence, awaiting the coroner’s examination. A low, nasty odor clung to the remains, pouring from them in noxious waves and saturating the office.
Evans was about to examine Larry’s brain tissue when the phone rang. Wiping one latex-gloved hand on a towel, he picked up the phone. “Coroner Evans speaking. Yes, I’m examining the Paultz boy right now. No, nothing definitive as to cause of death yet, but I did find traces of alcohol in both sets of remains. No, no indication of drugs so far. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that drugs were involved. You know how kids are, today. Yes, I’m sure the parents are anxious to know more. But with the bodies in such a terrible state, it may be difficult to determine exact cause of death. Yes. I’ll call when I know more.”
But Evans already knew what the cause of death was, and had known it all along.
With urgency, he turned his attention back to the brain lying on the table. He could no longer be denied. Beneath his latex gloves, strange ripplings and swellings had begun. If he didn’t remove the gloves soon, his native tissues would stretch and tear the rubber to shreds.
After discarding the gloves, Evans bent over the brain lying on the examining table, and his fingers elongated into squirming, gray-green tentacles. On the tip of each, a tiny, sucking mouth drooled in anticipation. Delicately, the tentacles probed, pushing the convoluted folds of tissue aside seeking the source of the dead youth’s persona.
Evans’s eyes glazed in anticipation as his probing appendages neared the source. The death of the young was so much more sweet and savory; their emotions—fear and horror among them, so much more intense. Already, he could feel the first frightened stirrings of Larry Paultz’s mind. This was the sweetest moment of all: when a mind regains consciousness but knows it is dead, and must relive past and present horrors, forever. Already, Larry Paultz’s mind was screaming.
After a couple of hours, Evans sighed, withdrew his alien appendages, placed Larry Paultz’s brain in a jar of formaldehyde, and stowed it away behind false paneling on a shelf next to other "mementoes", some dating back hundreds of thousands of years. Due to the horrific nature of the young men’s death and the horribly mangled remains, no one would miss the brain tissue. The boy’s funerals would be closed casket affairs.
Returning to the sink, Evans washed his hands and glanced at the clock. Time to lock up for the day. He had an urgent errand to attend to; an oversight on his part to correct. He needed to visit the old Harmon place tonight, move the shoggoth to a remoter location, and close the lesser gateway it had protected. The outhouse was no longer secure now that old man Harmon, a minor disciple of the Great Old Ones, was gone.
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