Mad Tales

Chapter 8 - Under the Rocks-2

“Mitch, it’s gotta be past one in the morning.”

“So?”

“We're gonna get in trouble if we get found out.”

“Jesus, Jason. We’re already in trouble. You’re the one made us take you.”

“But mama wakes up earlier than the sun rises! She’s gonna go looking for me, and if she don’t see me—”

“Shhh!”

Mitch stopped abruptly and crouched down in the bush, his head c****d like he was listening for something. I crouched down next to him.

“What is it?” I asked. “You heard daddy? I knew it! I knew he was gonna find us.”

“Shut up!”

“Both of you shut up,” Lee spat.

He was crouched down about five feet in front of us, daddy’s rifle in his left hand, spying at the river around a thick growth of bushes, past the hanging branches of a river tree. The water shone black and silver in the full moon, and though it was lower than I’d ever seen it, low enough to expose more than the top of Diving Rock, it was still strong and swift. All I heard was the rush of the current, and the occasional fish splashing in the distance.

“Stay down,” Lee whispered.

“Why?”

“You hear that big splash a minute ago?”

“Yeah.”

“That was it. The thing got Amanda. I seen it jumping off Diving Rock.”

It was enough to make both me and Mitch mute with fear. Then suddenly that fear evaporated.

Two summers before, when I was eight, Lee and Mitch took me out to the movies. Daddy let Lee drive his car, and afterward we stopped at Carl’s and got some ice cream. Lee drove out to the docks and we ate our cones in the car, watching the river.

“I gotta piss,” Mitch said, and got out to go shake it off in the bushes.

We sat and listened to the crickets and cicadas sing their night songs, and under that the calming sound of the river. Every now and then there was a mechanical whirr as a car drove across the bridge or the echo of a dog barking in the distance.

“You ever hear of the Hook ‘n Eye killer?” Lee asked after a while.

“No,” I said, concentrating on my cone. I hated it when the ice cream dribbled down on my hand, so I was focused on licking the base clean.

“Never learned it in school?”

“No. Course not.”

“Don’t surprise me.”

“Why?”

“Well, your teacher’s a Yankee. She wouldn’t know about it.”

Lee was right. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Tucker, was from Chicago. She’d just moved down here with her husband, who was in the Marines. She was young and pretty, but she had the funniest accent I ever heard. She said the same thing about us.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Never mind.”

While Lee could be less than skilled when it came to reading and writing and school, he had a Harvard degree in child psychology.

“C’mon, Lee!” Suddenly the ice cream cone wasn’t all that interesting anymore.

“Okay, okay.” He finished his cone and chucked the paper napkin out the window. “See, when I was your age, all the third-grade teachers had to tell this story. It was like a . . . a public service announcement. About twenty years ago, a couple of kids were murdered. Right around here, as a matter of fact. Right near the docks.”

“Really?”

Lee glanced up in the mirror. He knew he had me.

“Heads tore clean off,” he went on. “Hands, too. And their eyes was plucked out. Or so they thought. Nobody ever knew, cause there was just holes where the eyes should have been.”

“Oh man.”

“That’s right. Anyway, nobody thought nothing much of it till about three weeks later when two more kids was found murdered, same thing again. Heads tore off. No eyes. The rumors started up from the first one, but this time everybody knew. It was the Hook ‘n Eye killer.”

Oh, he had me good.

“Who was it?” I asked. I bet my face’d turned completely white.

Lee stifled a smile, but I was too young to see it. I thought he was trying not to get too upset.

“Nobody really knew who it was, but a few years before the same thing happened. Some people thought he was an escaped mental patient from up north, some thought he was a hobo lived out in the woods. Didn’t really matter, though. All that mattered was that he liked to kill kids, ‘specially kids who hung out late at night in his neck of the woods.”

I let my eyes wander out to the trees to our right. A little ice cream dribbled down my palm and I licked it, letting this new information set in.

“Why’d he take their heads off and poke out their eyes?”

Lee nodded.

“That’s a good question, Jason. See, the Hook ‘n Eye killer was blind. Lost both hands in the war. He knew he couldn’t ever get his hands back, but for some reason he thought he could with his eyes. So he put hooks on his hands, sharpened them up real good, and went around looking for victims.”

By this point, I was wound up tighter than a cat’s ass. You could have bounced a nickel off my head and I wouldn’t have noticed. Lee swung his hand out the window, started tapping lightly on the roof.

“And the story goes that before he killed his victims, he’d drag his hook along something nearby, something loud, like the asphalt, or a light pole, or a car.”

Just then something scraped along the side of daddy’s car, right on my side.

I hit the deck, screaming. “Oh Jesus, Lee! Start the car! Start the car!”

The driver’s side door opened.

“Oh God, Jason!” Lee screamed. “God help me!”

“Lee! Lee! Lee!”

Then suddenly I heard laughter.

Mitch’s laughter. And Lee’s.

I sat up, poked my head over the head rest.

There they were. Outside the car. Holding onto each other, belly-laughing.

My cone was mashed up on the floor; ice cream was smeared all over my face.

“You sonsabitches!” I cried. I didn’t even know what it meant, I just heard daddy say it whenever he was mad.

I scrambled out of the car and leaped on Mitch, started hitting him in the face.

“That wasn’t funny, you sonsabitches!”

Lee tried to pull me off, but only managed to topple us over, and we ended up in a big pile on the ground, and then we were all laughing.

And that’s what they were doing right now. Playing a trick on me, just like they did before.

“Now I know both of you is full of it,” I said. “There ain’t no river monster. Just like there ain’t no Hook ‘n Eye killer. You’re just trying to scare me, that’s all, you sonsabitches!”

Lee jumped for me and clasped his hand over my mouth.

“Dammit, Jason, shut up! We ain’t trying to do nothing but kill the thing that killed Amanda. I didn’t want you here in the first place, so you can go on home if you won’t take it seriously.”

I bit his hand and he held it there until he couldn’t take it anymore, then he pulled it away with a bitter curse.

“See. You’re just keeping it up now,”

“Listen, you i***t. Really listen. You hear anything?”

I c****d my head and listened.

“No.”

“That’s cause all the crickets stopped chirping. You ever hear the crickets stop chirping down here?”

Lee was right. It was dead silent, nothing to be heard but the rush of the river. The crickets never stopped chirping by the river. All of the sudden I was very afraid.

“Same thing happened right before that thing got Amanda.”

I looked at both of them, and my voice wavered when I spoke.

“Ya’ll ain’t messing with me?”

Lee shook his head.

“This ain’t no Hook ‘n Eye killer?”

I must have looked about as pale as a ghost, because Lee’s attitude changed. He smiled.

“Listen. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you if you do what I say. I got daddy’s rifle, you got a machete, an Mitch’s got an axe. It’s more than what it’s got.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna wade out to Diving Rock. That’s where it likes to hunt. Then I’m gonna kill it.”

“I’m going with you,” Mitch said.

“No. You stay here with Jason.”

“You’re gonna need another set of eyes. What if it comes at you from behind?”

Lee thought about it for a minute.

“Okay. But I’ll go first. Jason, you sit tight here on the shore, make sure ain’t nothing coming at us from anywhere else.”

I started to protest but Lee cut me off.

“We can’t see everything from out there. You got to be another set of eyes, too.”

I couldn’t argue because I knew he was right.

“Okay,” I said.

Then Lee did something he rarely did. He hugged me.

“You’re gonna be all right, okay? Anything comes after you, you just chop it up with the machete, got it?”

I nodded meekly. My eyes felt like they were like big, fat basketballs.

“All right, then. Mitch, wait until I’m about halfway out then come on in after me. Keep your eyes on the water around me.”

He patted me on the shoulder, took off his shoes and shorts, and waded into the river. When it got too deep to walk, he put the rifle over his head in one hand and started to paddle with the other.

When Lee was halfway out, Mitch said, “All right, Jason.” Then he waded into the river, too.

I crouched at the bank to watch. Lee reached the rock, threw the rifle on top and scrambled up after. Mitch was a strong swimmer, but the axe weighed him down. He struggled to keep a straight line in the current. Lee strained to see down into the water. All of the sudden he shouldered the rifle, aimed it toward Mitch, and fired. The report echoed up the river.

“Jesus, Lee!” I heard Mitch shout. “You almost shot me!”

“Mitch, drop the axe and hurry up.” He aimed his rifle at the water near Mitch again. “Now!”

Mitch opened his mouth to speak and then he was gone. One second his head was there, bobbing above water, perfectly visible in the full moonlight, then he was gone.

“Mitch!” I cried, standing.

“Jason, get down!” Lee yelled.

“What about Mitch?” Tears streamed down my face.

“Get down!”

I obeyed immediately and crouched back down in the bushes, keeping my eyes where I could see the river. Lee fired into the water again. A second later something popped up against Diving Rock, gasping for air. It was Mitch, extending his hand.

“Get me out!”

Lee put the rifle in his left hand and grabbed Mitch’s forearm with his right. As he pulled, I saw a huge black form shoot out of the water. It was aiming right for Lee. Lee fell back, still holding onto Mitch, and shot from the hip. The form squealed and spun in midair, knocking the rifle out of Lee’s hand. Then it crashed back down into the swift moving current. Lee pulled Mitch up onto the rock then dove back into the river. He resurfaced and yelled, “Jason don’t move!”

Mitch dove in after Lee and began to swim toward the bank with strong, determined strokes. He overtook Lee and made it to where he could stand. I stood up out of the bushes.

“Get down!”

But it was too late.

The huge thing burst out of the water almost as soon as I stood up, roaring and snarling as it shot straight for me. Then all of the sudden I was on my back. Didn’t even remember getting there. Both of my arms were out on either side, and I discovered with some amazement that I had managed to hold onto the machete. It struck my chest, claws ripped into my shoulder and neck, and an unearthly roar rumbled out of the monster’s deep lungs.