A dark shadow rose from the bed of the truck, a white grin peering from beneath the hood.I jerked backwards back into the cabin, but JJ’s hands reached forward to grab at my neck.His thumbs pressed into my windpipe.I gasped, trying hard to struggle, but he was too strong…
“Stop it, JJ!”Tyler screamed, hitting.
Carol Anne shrieked.
There was a honk—a screech of brakes—and my lungs collapsed.
I blacked out.
8.
The static soundof a gramophone turning on met my ears.A jaunty tune played in the background.My eyes ached, but it was fine—I couldn’t open them anyway.There was something tied around my head.Nor could I scream.Something slimy, graced with the taste of old feet, was stuck in my mouth.My hands were bound behind my back.I tried to wriggle, but couldn’t move far.I was sitting upright, tied to a chair.
“The Lady lies laid up.Longing for her lovers.Low, little lamb, for love will leave you lonely.”
“Don’t you touch her none!”This was Tyler.
“You shut up and watch your Uncle Sawyer, boy,” John Jacques was saying.“It’ll do you some good to see this.”
“I don’t like this!This lady didn’t do nothing wrong!”Carol Anne was saying.
“She was having sin in my Doll Room,” Aunt Patti’s hoarse voice called.
“She didn’t know!”Carol Anne cried.“She didn’t know the rules!”
“Untie her eyes, and unleash her indignity,” Uncle Sawyer said.“The shrieking shrike shall see the shepherd’s scythe as it sheathes itself in her supple, soft skin.”
Someone ripped the coverings off my eyes.I could not help but scream, moving backwards only slightly because of my restraints.I was at an elaborate dinner table in what looked like the inside of a church.There were pews everywhere around us.
And before me.As a centerpiece.The gaunt, emaciated, decapitated face of a man’s head sat staring at me, candle in an eye socket burning merrily.His lips moved soundlessly.
It was Eddie’s head.I screamed into the wrappings in my mouth, but it was muffled.
Tyler and Carol Anne were tied up on the opposite end.Uncle Sawyer was sitting at the head of the table opposite me, and Uncle JJ on my left.Aunt Patti stood at attention on my right, towering over me, her broad face and eyes piercing and uncomfortable.From this angle I could see the broad veins and musculature of her hand.
“Remove the rag,” Sawyer said.“The children come charmed at her coy uncouth crass criticisms of our culture.Perhaps persuading her of our point of view may prove proper.Patti, the pillbugs, if you please.”
Patti leaned forward and ripped the rag from my mouth.I immediately shrieked, and she backhanded me.I screamed again, and she hit me again until I started sobbing.
“Shut up,” Patti said.“Or I’ll hit you again.”
She stomped over to the far edge of the worship space.A crucified goat’s head stared out from the head of the altar.Under it, she grabbed something in a jar.She shook it and came stomping back.I watched as she sat it next to my boyfriend’s decapitated head.In it, big pulsating black bugs the size of tarantulas writhed against one another.
I closed my eyes.
“Please,” I said.“This is torture.I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry.Me and my friends—we were just here to check the place out.We got lost?—“
“A bigger ball of bull has never been bellowed before,” Sawyer screamed and pounded the table.“Illustrate for the ill-informed itty bitty ones here.Tell them the truth about your trip.About your awkward adventure to ascertain the accuracy of our atrocities.We were the winning weirdos in your worldview.Your monster men, motivated by the munchies, mentioned that we were merely memos on a menu.Snack food for Satan’s sons.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“You sure about that?”JJ asked.He slapped at Eddie’s head, which rocked on the table.“This one.I peeled that confession out of him, alongside his fingernails.He said you were coming here because you knew what we got up to, and you were going to drain us dry.”
“You can’t just eat people,” I said.
“The implication of your idiocy is astounding,” Sawyer said.“Come and kill our kin for our crimes?What makes you moral murderers and us monsters?”
“Look, it wasn’t like that,” I said.
