After a moment we started to run, knowing it couldn’t be the police that soon. The figure loomed closer to us, his walking speed nearly matching that of our running speed. When I looked back the second time Ricky’s face disappeared from sight, and a cry cut through the woodlands. My heart dropped, and I realized this time that the screams don’t belong to a baby.
I ran back to Ricky’s house, alone, and his mother held me tight as I told her what happened. They called the police, and my parents too, not feeling like they had the option not to. My mom cried hysterically on the other end of the line, and I knew that she’d probably be mad later. Especially since she had to get Dad to wake up, then get the baby ready and then come and pick me up. By the time my parents arrived the police had just knocked on Ricky’s front door, and the officer politely waited for my parents to enter the house before entering it himself. His face looked disturbed, like he’d seen something terrible.
“Please tell me it’s not the baby!” I couldn’t hold back my anxiety any longer. “Officer, did you find the baby? Is it gonna be okay?” He said a few hushed words to the adults, and my mother buried her face in my father’s chest. I think she was holding back tears.
The officer cleared his throat, and he asked me to sit down. He assured me that no babies were hurt, or in danger, then he started to tell our parents what the police found out there in Neuman Woods, inside of that metal hatch door. It appeared to be locked from the inside, and they were the first adults to hear the baby cry besides the 911 operator. After some attempts they managed to pry it open, and then the officer paused. He told me to leave the room, but I heard him though...I heard it all.
What they found inside wasn’t a baby. It was a very thin, weathered old man holding a tape recorder with the play button pressed. He was bare, except for a pair of dirty, brief-style underwear that appeared to be stained with old blood. His teeth were also reported to have been reddish in nature, and his gray beard was streaked with crimson.
The only sign they found of my friend was his blood-covered jacket, and his flashlight.
N.M. Brown
About the Author
N.M. Brown is an international best selling author from Florida. She’s a happily married mother who sheds light on the dark corners of the mind that we like to keep hidden. Her other publications include stories in each of Sirens at Midnight, Calls From the Brighter Futures Suicide Hotline, Fantasia Divinity’s Elemental Drabble Series, the Scary Snippets Collections, the Mother Ghost Grimm children’s horror anthology, Dark Xmas, along with several others being released in the next year.
Thirteen
Craig Crawford
I watched them from the inside.
It’s a lonely existence, bound to the earth for decades, rooted in a prison of my own doing by one who knew the ways of the world better than most. I couldn’t do anything but watch as others passed by, my hunger a gurgle in the basement of my gut.
Incarcerated for my indiscretions, I can only stare out the windows, peering into the forests around me. It’s madness. Powerless as the seasons come and go around me. Watching as the snow melts with the coming spring sun, only to shrink to the dark corners as the winds batter and sway the trees in the violence of the storms one after another. Even in the sun-bake of summer the heat is replaced by wind as the sentinel orb in the sky rains rays down on my prison.
Autumn is the one breath I get each year, when the weather softens, the tempests replaced by gentle winds crackling the leaves as they fall from the oaks and maples surrounding me. Though I am witness to the slow death of the Earth each year, and everything is ground back into the soil to herald the desolation of winter, I continue to endure.
It was my one hundred and twelfth autumn when my sightless eyes followed the trio hiking by. Two young men and a woman, dressed lightly in the fall sun, the woman sporting a pack and a stick. The taller man talked incessantly, constantly readjusting a sack off his shoulder, never still. I grew giddy at his boundless energy, but it was too much to hope.
The third, shorter and stouter, carried the inquisitor’s eye, silently stopping before me, casting looks in all directions. “Wonder who built this way out here?” he echoed out, shutting the other man up.
“Some old hermit,” said the second. “You know — some trapper dude or a crazy who can’t stand to be around people. He probably came up here and built a shack, talking to squirrels and shooting rabbits and shit.”
The young woman shoved him with an arm. “Randy, knock it off. This place looks like it’s been abandoned for ages. No one lives up here.”
“My dad told me this place has a spook about it, Sam,” the third said. “There are legends of ancient druids and cults creeping around up here.”
“And you think some cult built this place?” The second asked dubiously. “It wouldn’t fit more than three or four at best. Sam’s right, it looks like it’s ready to fall down. Look at the roof: those wood shingles are curling and about to blow away or cave in. I bet the door is swelled shut in the frame.”
The third took a step in my direction, and hope wriggled out from the depths of my decades-long despair. Bound in blood, there was only one path to freedom for me. The number was thirteen, and my memory stretched back over the other eleven, seeming eons ago, forcing me into something akin to rage and insanity.
He took another step toward the door.
“Harris, leave it alone,” the woman said. “Randy’s right, it’ll probably collapse if you pull on the door.”
He stopped.
I focused on the tree behind him, well aware my intense gaze had ruffled others in the past. Some people have a sense, or a gift, able to “know” when things aren’t right. I was afraid
