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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years

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Going Home for the Holidays

Rita hid behind the couch. She dared not peek over the edge or around either of its corners, fearful that she might be seen.

Almost everybody grows up in fear of the dark, using light to keep at bay any things unknown and scary. But the bright overhead lamps and strings of fairy lights on the shelves and even the mellow shine from the Christmas tree did nothing of the sort.

Even night itself had yet to fall, dusk’s twilight shedding a dim blue glow from outside, pouring in through the windows. The living room of her old family home was anything but dark.

None of that helped. For they were here and not a single one of them feared the light.

Worse, the light only made their each and every visage all the more horrifying to behold. Masks covered their faces—masks made of what could only be identified as dried husks of flesh, stitched together like bandages, covering any semblance of a human countenance.

Rita trembled all over. The grandfather clock tick-tocked away, so loud and obnoxious as if to mock her. She prayed without words that they had not seen her hide where she cowered, that they could not hear her. Holding her breath only made her heart race faster.

She hoped their hearing was no better than her own. Because these were no normal vampires.

They did not bite you, nor did they drink your blood. They did not have superhuman strength. They could not fly, nor could they turn into bats. Vampire fiction had gotten it all wrong.

All they did was chase, and talk in familiar voices not their own. Regurgitate words and phrases that sounded almost exactly like the people whose faces they had stolen, with only a mild warble or eerie distortion that gave them away.

When they caught their quarry, they made them wear masks.

Like Rita’s brother, Steven. They had made a mask out of their father’s face, and now Steven wore it. Or whatever Steven was now.

Her whole hometown, the entirety of Greenwick—everybody had been turned. Everybody she ran into on her mad dash through town, everybody had been wearing these hideous skin-masks. Every one of them gave chase.

Whenever Rita lost one, others spotted her, or heard her, and ran after her in pursuit.

Her lungs now burnt with the fire of exhaustion. The house of her family where she had grown up in had been her last resort. She had hoped to find safety here, to warn her family, to escape Greenwick with them. But she was too late.

Vampire Steven, wearing her father’s face, now stalked through their childhood home, hunting for her.

Something fell, something that sounded like plastic slapping on a hardwood floor. Her nostrils flared as she struggled to not breathe loudly. Part of Rita wanted to peer around a corner—needed to. If she saw him first and knew which way to flee, then she would have better chances at outrunning him.

Worst case scenario, more of them were converging on the house. Right now. Hunting her. A blanket of beautiful snow had covered the entire town, and her tracks would lead them all right here. Even as night fell quickly outside, all the Christmas lights adorning this suburban winter wonderland would clearly outline her footprints crisscrossing through the village. Right back here.

Just a matter of time. Time she wasted in hiding. Behind a crummy couch.

That realization finally sank in, steeled by an instinctual drive to survive. She had to escape and she had to make a move—now. Complacency would get her turned into one of them and she did not want to find out what that meant.

Shaking like a leaf, she crawled to the end of the couch and looked around its side.

Vampire Steven sat atop the bookshelves, amidst the fairy lights, perched there in a grotesque pose of a human mimicking a predatory bird.

The awful mask hid his natural facial features. The layers of frayed and sewn-together human skin strips left only hollow dark spots where his eyes should be, through which he could see. And she could feel his stare, meeting her gaze and burning a hole into her very soul.

He tilted his head. He had been waiting there. He had known she was there, all this time.

Rita scrambled to her feet and stumbled up into standing, staggering as she broke out into running from behind the couch. The loud thud behind her heralded Steven leaping down and chasing her right out of the living room. Her awkward lurching start robbed her of any much-needed momentum and he grabbed her by her arm.

“You know how expensive that tablecloth is?” he asked—but in dad’s angry voice, repeating a traumatic line she had long forgotten from decades ago.

Heart pounding like a drum, she kicked and screamed and flailed about. A fist connected here, a kick there. Multiple times, hitting things both soft and hard. Fleshy patches, spots that hurt where bone struck upon bone. His grip tightened, another one of his hands groped at her shoulder but slipped away in the struggle.

“Why the hell are you late? Answer me,” said her dad through the vampire mask. Repeating that caused her blood to curdle as he screamed, “Answer me!”

Rita began crying, sobbing, and Vampire Steven grunted. The next moment her eyes were open, she had clawed him in the face and he let go, clutching his horrid man-mask, burying its front in both hands.

She had no sympathy for him—for it. Deep down, she knew: this was not Steven. This was not her father. This was a thing. This was them.

She ran, knocking over a chair and slamming a door shut behind her. She almost gasped in relief when she saw a set of car keys on the counter. She snatched them while dashing and exited through the next door, hearing thundering footsteps nearing until someone ripped the kitchen door open through which she had entered.

“Bacon’s great, but bacon alone is hardly breakfast, honey,” said her mother’s voice, albeit distorted. The words came from Vampire Steven again.

He lunged at Rita, swiping at air instead of connecting.

She grunted and stifled a scream as she pushed over the heavy metal shelves in the garage. A cacophony of metal screws rattling out and a toolbox clattering to the ground and plastic boxes exploding and spilling everywhere erupted, the contents of those shelves all tumbling down and barricading the door to the garage.

The pounding of Vampire Steven’s fist as it hammered against the door sang with murderous rage. Rita whimpered as she backed away from it, growing certain that it would hold for now.

He stopped punching the door in futility and retreated, likely to find another way to get to her, but she wasted no time and fumbled with the keys, unlocking the car, sliding into the driver’s seat, and firing up the engine.

Little lights on the dashboard flared up, a soft and repetitive dinging sound nagged her to put on her seatbelts, and the quiet engine all drowned in the bedlam of the car smashing through the garage door, splintered planks of wood raining down on and around the vehicle as she backed down the driveway.

The car skidded, the inch of snow on the ground reducing its traction. She pulled the hand brakes and ripped the wheel around, causing the car to slide and spin around in violent motion, surprising Rita with how effective the unintentional maneuver ended up being. The car was now facing down the drive, ready to roll out into the streets of Greenwick, and she could escape this doomed town.

Switching her headlights on, the cones of bright illumination sliced through the darkness of night that had fully fallen. They exposed the many people from around town, all standing in the road, all staring at her with hatred, or hunger, or some combination of both.

All of them wearing those God-awful masks. Even outside of the cones of light shed by the car, the Christmas lights on the lawns and houses of neighboring properties drew clear and ghastly silhouettes of the horde of these vampires, standing in wait for her.

The tires spun out of control when she stepped on the gas and the car lurched forward but the mass of vampires engulfed the vehicle. Some of them must have gotten hurt and knocked around, but they were too many. A living sea of bodies that brought the car to a halt before it ever really started.

Hands and fists thumped against its body and windows with fury, a staccato of menacing thunder erupting all around Rita. The car’s wheels found purchase and propelled it forth another few feet, but the mass of vampires held the car in place.

And voices of people she had known from growing up in Greenwick, they reached her through the windows, muffled, sounding bizarre in how out of place their words seemed now.

“I tried my hand at professionally raising and selling koi carp for a while, but I got back into working at the hardware store after two years of that,” said a garbled Jacob from down the street.

“Both of these toasters look pretty good. Help me decide,” said Gina.

“Eh, I wouldn’t rely on those maps. Just use your phone,” mumbled Mister Ferrer.

The voices blended together and the shock and adrenaline and the pounding of Rita’s heart and the rushing of blood in her ears and the panic all blended together into one toxic soup, clouding her every thought. The darkness encroached from the edges of her vision, the chaos and noise blotted out her hearing, or her sensory faculties just all began shutting down, all at once.

She remembered the nightmare from the night before. The blur of the day, waking up early and slapping the alarm clock beside her bed, silencing that annoying beeping noise when it went off—and tearing her out of that nightmare.

Packing her bags for the long drive from the city to Greenwick. The weird thing about that dream was how she had been someone else—a woman named Caroline. Everything else looked and seemed and felt like her own life, but she was this Caroline instead. On her way home for the holidays to get together with her family. All the same, but something was slightly off about it.

And before that alarm clock went off and saved her from the end of the dream, the sky ripped open in it. The void between the stars of a night over the same idyllic town of Greenwick, it just parted and the hungry maw of something greater began to feast on the ripe fruit that was this town. Something colossal, monolithic, and awful. Something that wore the heavens like a mask. An entity by the unspeakable name of Yoz'odrhaxz.

The ringing in her ears grounded her, the thumping of hands against the car which she still sat inside of, locked in, with the vehicle bobbing wildly in every direction due to the vampires in the hideous masks shaking it. The dream was gone. Reality mercilessly caught up to her.

It dawned on her that thinking of last night’s nightmare was her last form of escape. Her final feeble attempt at thinking her way out of this predicament. Her last hope that none of this—none of these vampires, none of this hopelessness—that none of it was real.

But the shaking of the car was real. The horde of aggressors, separated from her only by thin sheets of safety glass, plastic, and metal; protected only by pathetic synthetic things that bent and groaned and threatened to break any second now.

And that panic, seeping into her bones.

The first window cracked, then a fist punched it in and hands started grabbing her. Rather than fighting back anymore, the shock had fully seized her. Just like the hands that grasped and clutched and pulled, the cold embrace of wintry air engulfed her as she was tossed onto the wet ground, slipping and sliding on a slick of trampled-down snow.

Before she could turn around onto her back of her own volition, vampiric hands had pushed and pulled and thrown her into that prone position. And Jacob, her childhood friend and long-time crush, held out one of those hideous masks. In a way that she saw it from the inside.

The stitched-together strips of flesh shuddered, either in a gust of wind, or because they were alive somehow.

He lowered it down onto her with slowness and precision until the last inch in which it just slapped onto her face like a piece of raw chicken. All the air got sucked out as it nestled snugly against her skin, like a suction cup grabbing hold of the flesh.

She did not black out. She did not wake up.

Rita was one of them now.

Only one objective remained in the wasteland of her quickly eroding mind, standing atop a mountain of bleached bones and rubble, looking out from the mountain of broken thoughts and surveying her surroundings with a laser focus.

The violence ceased abruptly. They helped her up, getting her back up onto her feet.

They had more people to turn. Had to make more. Make them more like them. Once they had gathered enough, the feast would begin.

Yoz'odrhaxz demanded it.

The sky waited.

Caroline awoke.

—Submitted by Wratts

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