A Penny Down the Well: A Short Story Collection of Horrifying Events (12 page)

“
Clint? It’s Kaylie. Where
are you?” She asked, completely unaware of the horror that was
transpiring.

Clint looked to the man,
getting his first clear look at him. His neck was slit and blood
ran freshly from the wound, as though it had happened only moments
ago. His eyes were evil and enraged. The top of his head was bald,
but thin, grey hair hung in a horseshoe pattern toward his
shoulders. The man’s dreadful image caused another gasping
utterance from Clint that brought Kaylie to ask, more
alarmed.

“
Clint?!” She said.
“Clint, are you alright? What’s going on?” She became more
insistent.

“
Say goodbye.” The man
instructed.

Clint shook his head,
pleading. “Please don’t. Please don’t do this.” His voice torn by
the streaming of tears.

“
Clint! Clint! Where are
you?! Are you with someone else?” Kaylie remained persistent. “Are
you in trouble? Please, talk to me!” Her voice littered suddenly
with tears itself.

“
K-Kaylie. I...” And he
was cut off.

“
Put your finger on the
trigger.” The man instructed, dark, bloodshot eyes burning into
Clint.

Clint slowly shook his
head, feeling the grinding metal against his skin.

“
Put... your finger... on
the trigger... or I’ll kill your little friend after I’m done with
you.” The man sneered, nearing himself closer to Clint, allowing
Clint to feel the threatening puffs of rancid, alcohol-imbibed
breath.

Clint cried. “Please don’t
do this!”

“
Clint! Please tell me
where you are! I’m calling the police! I’m calling the police right
now! I’ll call you right back, Clint!” Kaylie shouted, static
ensuing on the line before the phone’s screen turned red, denoting
the call ended. Clint’s finger went to the trigger of the
shotgun.

“
How does that power feel,
huh? Feel strong, big boy? Feel like you finally have something
between your legs that’ll make that pretty little tramp proud of
you?” The man spoke, words spewing like venom.

Clint, however, was beyond
words. He bordered on unconsciousness, unable to take the immense
stress that overcame him, unable to succumb to the terrible demands
of the monster that appeared beside him. He merely sobbed,
helplessly.

“
Pull the trigger.” The
man instructed.

Clint’s consciousness
returned suddenly. “No. No! No!” He shouted, his head struggling to
lift from the gun, but the man held him firmly. His finger pulled
from the trigger, only to make way for the man’s own. As the man
took control of the weapon’s trigger, Clint halted his
protest.

“
You should have
listened.” The man said.

Clint’s eyes shot wide
open. “No!”

The gun blasted a single
shot, killing Clint instantly.

Larry and Morton arrived a
short while later and stepped casually from their truck. Larry
gestured to Morton with his tuna fish sandwich in hand, waving it
as he usually did in his moments of professorship. “The kid can
handle it. We’re movin’ a murderer, not the damn Pope.” And Larry
laughed until he saw the agonized face of his giant accomplice,
who’d managed to see the grisly scene before Larry did. Larry’s
eyes turned to the hearse to see the windows tinted with a shade of
red, streaming down every transparent surface of the interior of
the car. Only the silhouette of what was left of Clint remained
inside, alone, but for the casket containing his final
“client.”

RETURN TO THE TABLE OF
CONTENTS

A Penny Down the Well

“
You think this is some
sort of game, pussy? Do you remember what happened last time you
didn’t listen to me when I told you something?” Lloyd Barker barked
as his name implied, somewhere branded indefinitely in the course
of history to culminate to this moment, at this very time, with a
balled fist held threateningly near Jacob Fidder.

Jacob stood helplessly
beside Harold Grigg, or Harry for short, waiting for the punch to
come. Behind the veil of squeezed eyelids, nothing came. When he
peeked, the nightmare wasn’t over. In fact, it was only
beginning.

“
Put the hair ties in your
hair, you little faggot! Make ‘em nice and pretty, like all the
faggots like their little bitch boys!” Barker barked again with the
mouth of a tempered sailor.

Harry, taller and lankier,
with a general demeanor even more defenseless than that of Jacob,
had already gone about putting the hair ties in his hair, as Barker
instructed. Two different hair ties were used to create pigtails
atop his head, like what was often seen on young girls. Sobbing and
helpless as he was surrounded by Barker and his gang of eighth
graders, Jacob carefully maneuvered the hair ties into his own
hair, creating two embarrassing pigtails the same as his best
friend had. The bullies began to laugh aloud, one of them snapping
pictures of the two.

One of the boys from
Barker’s gang shouted, the one Jacob called “Crater” because his
face was terribly ridden with acne. Of course, Jacob would never
call him that to his face, unless he cared for a crater in his own
head via a swift beating. “Oh, this is too good! Let me post this
online, so you two lovebirds get all the attention you deserve!”
And his laughing ensued.

Another one, probably the
most intelligent of the group, but never enough so to keep the
horrendous bullying from happening, was Bryan Chandelling, or
“Brain” as Jacob and Harry had dubbed him. Brain spoke up, slapping
Crater one good time to the arm. “Load it up on the other account,
jackass, or they’ll know who did this! I don’t want to end up on
Oprah.”

The last of the vile
quartet was Pete “Gassy” Gadson, his nickname given to him not by
Jacob and Harry, but instead by the general public. The name
represented a sort of twofold nature about Pete: One, that his
flatulence was legendary, often unabated by concerns of
embarrassment or worry in public and the stench that reeked from
the exhausted bowels of the kid were a culmination so foul that
children were known to have lost their lunch when trapped in his
vicinity, something he often ensured with force. Second was that
Gassy was a renowned pyromaniac. The extent of his damages from the
public perspective resided in a gruesome burning of a neighborhood
cat he’d managed to get his hands on. The truth, or from what Jacob
had been told in the myriad of scare tactics used to keep him under
control, was that Gassy was responsible for a house fire that
happened two years prior, when they were all in the sixth grade.
Gassy still smiled when the news came on during anniversaries,
those that were designed to pay respect to the single mother and
her daughter that were lost in the home. To Gassy, it seemed like a
sickening homage to his success. He got away with it, if the tale
was, in fact, true. Gassy stayed mostly out of the verbal exchange,
striking up a match or two on the outskirts of the closed circle
around Harry and Jacob.

Barker suddenly reached
back toward Brain. “Did you get it?” He asked,
impatiently.

“
Yeah. Pink, too.” Brain
snorted.

Barker snatched the object
away from Brain, revealing it was a jump rope, like those used in
gym class. It was mostly white, except for the bright pink handles.
“Time to have a little fun, faggots.” And a dark grin came over
Barker’s face. “Get to movin’” And he shoved Jacob in the back,
sending him toward the more open part of the school’s quad, a
social square for lunch breaks. Walking like prodded, helpless
slaves, bound by fear instead of ropes, Harry and Jacob proceeded
with the group to one of the smaller trees in the quad, the most
open and obvious one to other students. Barker tied one end of the
long jump rope to the narrow trunk of the tree and put the other
end in Harry’s hand.

“
Time to play jump rope,
like the little girls you two are, huh? Why don’t you show the
whole school what little faggots you are and play jump rope, huh?”
The tagline “huh” was less of a question and more of a demand, a
conclusory statement, like “there’s no going back now unless you
want to be beat to a bloody pulp or worse.” Jacob had enough
terrible beatings to know that there was no chance to stop what was
happening. Without faculty intervention (or divine intervention, if
such a thing existed), Jacob was doomed to do exactly what he was
told. No great beam of light parted the clouds this time either and
Harry stood staring at Jacob hopelessly as an audience of curious
school children started looking their way, already beginning to
giggle at the ridiculous pigtails at their heads. In dread, Jacob
returned the look to Harry, as if administering a silent, “Let’s
get this over with.” Harry began to swing the rope and Jacob jumped
over it, occasionally getting tripped up. The school children
closed in, beginning to laugh aloud. Jacob had finally stopped
crying. He saved those tears for the realization that his day would
be spoiled by the brats, not for the resolve of getting through
whatever it was that would happen. The fortunate thing about all of
the attention is that it wouldn’t take long before a teacher or
supervisor moved in and broke up the act. Until then, it
continued.

Crater shoved at Barker’s
arm. “Hey, how ‘bout we say that every time the shit bag trips, we
punch him in the gut.” And he laughed his high-pitched,
nails-to-the-chalkboard laugh, bringing Jacob to cringe. He tripped
again.

“
Sounds like a good idea.
Better jump a little better, faggot.” Barker laughed
himself.

Brain watched the events
in silence, but donned his normal, amused smirk, while Gassy kept
an eye out for any adults.

Jacob focused on Harry for
a minute as he swung the jump rope around and around with a simple,
rhythmic pattern. Harry was different from Jacob in that he seemed
to just “disconnect” when these events came about. His eyes glazed
over. He never cried, he just seemed to step out of his body and
turn into a robot that did whatever it was programmed to do. Today
the program was to swing the rope, humiliate yourself and your
friend to prevent physical violence and having to explain bruises,
bloodied noses and black eyes to his parents that always said they
would do something, but never actually did. In the end, they were a
lot like Harry. The kids continued to laugh, some of them recording
the event with their phones, destined to send the act into
cyberspace where it would undoubtedly travel virally from one
person to the next. The video would land in the hands of objectors
that would use it to push an otherwise pointless agenda from behind
their desks to end bullying, without actually having to make any
other personal contribution. It would go off to other kids that
would make music videos out of it, dubbing in sounds and editing
the footage. It would land in the hands of pedophiles that would
love to get a look at an eighth grade boy with pigtails in his
hair, jumping a rope. Jacob and Harry just hoped that it would end
here and tomorrow would be another day with another program. The
intervention eventually came in the form of Ms. Holly.

“
Hey!
What’s going on here?” As the tall, slender woman made her way
through the crowd of children. When she finally got to the center
of the group, she brought a well-manicured hand quickly over her
mouth. “Jacob! Harry! What are you two doing?” She asked, almost as
if they were jumping rope in pigtails because they
wanted
to.

Harry stopped, looking
over his shoulder to Ms. Holly. He stared at her from behind those
large glasses he wore, not answering the question immediately. He
looked toward the four boys, all of which were making their way
from the group, toward the doors and towards the school’s halls.
Harry looked then to Jacob, hoping he’d provide a logical answer
for the absurdity they’d been damned to carry out. Jacob sought for
an answer; anything that didn’t rat out the bullies. If he dared to
do that, which he’d done before, he would have faced a wrath much
worse than anything he’d normally experienced.

“
We were...” Jacob began,
with an obvious pause that denoted the immediate guilt of lying.
“...just playing a new game.”

Ms. Holly watched the two
quietly in disbelief before challenging Jacob’s suggestion. “You
two put pigtails in your hair and decided to jump rope as a game?”
And her question prompted additional laughter from the children,
those that were quickly shooed off by Ms. Holly a second
later.

“
Yeah. We saw it on the
internet.” And Jacob knew that was the thing that would get him out
of it. In a weird world where “planking,” the “Harlem Shake” and
other ridiculous pop-culture trends rose and vanished, the internet
always was a decent scapegoat for the unexplainable.

Ms. Holly shook her head
in puzzlement. “I just don’t understand you kids these days. Take
those out of your hair and get on to class. The bell’s about to
ring. Does that rope belong to the school?” And she looked it
over.

Jacob didn’t know. He just
shrugged. Besides, it wasn’t him that got it in the first
place.

Ms. Holly gestured to the
doors of the school building. “Get on. No more of this, you hear?”
She said.

Jacob and Harry began
their slow trudge toward the building, tugging the hair ties from
their head. Harry looked back Ms. Holly’s way and nodded before
continuing his slow march beside Jacob.