THEY WARNED ME AGAINST THIS

1. It’s Just A Game

The box clinked and clanked as I walked it up towards my sister’s bedroom.
I had stumbled upon it one late summer’s day in August. One of our many excursions to the local yard and garage sales that spread across the greenery sidewalks of Sawyer. I hurried along the staircase up to my sister’s bedroom with wonder in my eyes and a spring in my step. It was like getting that long awaited present that you always wanted to get for Christmas, only mom and dad wouldn’t buy it for you. But there it was that rectangular box that held a jewel of a game that I’m sure my sister and I would spend many a waking hour devouring.
“Did you get it?” Laura asked with that gleam of greed in her eye.
“Yep, a steal too.” I was salivating at the mere mention of it.
Laura didn’t get to come with mom and I on this trip to town. She was laid up in her room, with a broken leg. I told her not to jump off of the roof onto the trampoline that we owned but she didn’t listen to me. Oh I can do this…she would say or…I’ve done this so many times. Well it only takes one time. Stupid girl! When we decided to go on that hot August day I remember Laura whining and complaining that she couldn’t go. She was old enough to stay home by herself anyway. It wasn’t like we were leaving a two year old at home by herself. Even though she acted like one.
“So how much did it cost?” Laura commented as I sat the box on the table in the corner of her room near her bed.
“A buck fifty!” I was exuberant. “And it’s still wrapped in the plastic. You can’t get a better deal than that!” I sounded like a raving lunatic. The sunshine came through the window and illuminated the dust that was in the air. I went down stairs and got one of the folding chairs that were stashed away in the garage and brought it upstairs so that I could have a place to sit. Laura sat on her bed, her leg propped up on two pillows. The big white cast was like an upside down gun with her foot as the handle. The names that were scrawled on it were the names of kids from school and the like. She had many friends, though most of them couldn’t write their own names. They looked like chicken scratches against a white matted canvas. I started to tear through the plastic that covered this jewel of the gaming world. My eyes became large and finally I took a breath of relief as I lifted the box top and peered inside. First there was the board. It had a sinister smiling sun in the left hand corner which peered across its way to the profile of a half moon that was on the opposite corner. The moon’s face appeared to be disappointed as you could tell by the frown. Next was the name of the board…OUIJA…THE MAGNIFICENT. The name flowed from my lips and stopped in midair. I ran my fingers across the fancy alphabet that was in the center of the board. The letters made a crescent shape from side to side along with the numbers 1 through 9 then 0. It was ominous to see the words “goodbye” on the bottom as if the game was speaking this. It was then that I remembered the commercial for this particular type of game. It had the tag line…it’s just a game, isn’t it? Then the kids would answer back…well, isn’t it? Laura and I gazed at the game as it lay there sprawled out on the table waiting for someone to play it. We laid our hands on the heart shaped piece of wood.
“You ask it a question first, Jack.” Laura was giggling, her eyes moving wildly.
“Okay.” I said. There were always the stories that floated around with this type of game. I remember one TV preacher blaring out from the glass tube.…IT’S A PORTAL FOR SATAN!! They even went as far as to bring on one of them people who supposedly were demon possessed so that they could tell the story about how they had been delivered from the oppression. I honestly thought it was a bunch of hogwash.
“So… I went on. Who is Gracie Jenkins sleeping with?” We both laughed at the thought of this intriguing question. It wasn’t really that intriguing though. Gracie Jenkins knew every man in Sawyer and she had the battle scars to prove it. You could always tell when she had just been with someone. She walked around as though she had a corncob stuck up her butt. It was said that she had an abortion some time back. Lawrence Reynolds beat her up pretty bad when she tried to pin her pregnancy on him. She was so distraught that the thought of having a child made her vomit. She was a cruel woman anyway. No one liked her. Most people thought that she was only good for one thing only.
Our fingers plopped on top of the wooden heart. The shape started to instantly move with our hands. There definitely was something guiding this. I didn’t know what it was. Laura didn’t know either. Our eyes were fixed upon the board, our hands starting to move wildly. Soon circular motions gave way to letters…D…E…A…and then D again. This didn’t make any sense. I asked the question again. The same series of events populated the board, and then the letters…D…E…A…and then D again. After this our hands moved magically to the word GOODBYE. It was like magic, which was the only way to describe it. We ended up playing the game into the evening hours until mom called upstairs and told us to come down for dinner. We didn’t even put the game back in the box. As I walked out of my sister’s bedroom, my eyes gazed toward the board. That sun just winked at me! Like I said before, for the next two weeks we would meet in the bedroom and play this game that seemed to have a lasting impression on us, especially Laura. She would sit and stare sometimes out of her window, leg still propped up. The white cast covered in pen and marker and chalk. So many people came to the house to write on it. Laura was definitely tired of the publicity and she was bored out of her mind. She would play the game by herself. I, myself, had started to become bored with the game. When August turned to September and Laura’s cast came off her leg, I remember wanting to be outside. The crisp autumn air that would float around in puddles of coolness would ever so slightly tickle my nose and freeze my lungs every time I took a breath. The trees were becoming bare now, the branches like skinny fingers that shed its skin to reveal the bone inside. Laura didn’t enjoy it though. I would tell her to come outside with me…you need to exercise that leg, Laura, it’ll get stiff and then you won’t be able to move it! Stupid girl! She was in her own little world, a world filled with school and that game. She had to hurry home after school and hover over that ridiculous board. During the third week of school, I decided that I was sick one day. Fooling mom and dad would be easy. Mom was a hypochondriac and dad was always at work so he didn’t even know what day it was. Laura always kept her door locked especially when she was playing that game. She would not be home though, at least not until school let out. This was my opportunity. I crept into Laura’s room with the anticipation of a cat burglar, ready to salivate over whatever treasures I could find inside. I was pretty familiar with the room anyway seeing as how we played with the board so many times there. My wondering eyes glanced over at the table where the board usually was laid out but it wasn’t there. She hid it from me, didn’t she? I ended up turning her room from this tidy little space to a disaster area. I swear a nuclear bomb went off in there. I found the game though, hidden away at the bottom of her laundry hamper amongst the dirty panties, shirts, and shorts.
I ran downstairs like a race horse, opened the front door and ran around towards the back of the house. Near the back of the house was an old shed that dad kept his lawnmower and tools in. I knew that he kept his charcoal grill in there as well and where there is a grill there is bound to be some lighter fluid along with some long matches. My thoughts went back to the fourth of July when dad singed his beard and the hairs on his arms, his eyes loud and dreadful as he watched the bursting of the fireworks in midair. I remember how hot it was that day as well. Towards the back door was a fifty gallon drum filled with ash. Dad used it to burn trash since the garbage trucks didn’t come out that far. We were in the middle of nowhere. Among the rusted out cans and an old toaster oven that dad somehow thought would burn, I laid the rectangular box on top. It barely fit in the circular drum and I used my hands to cram the corners down into it. I drenched that thing in fluid and struck a match. The flame went about six feet high and the smoke billowed forth like the smoke from the fires of hell itself. It was then that I noticed the school bus coming up our drive. Laura stepped off the bus and noticed the smoke from the back of the house. She ran as hard as she could back there where I was standing, lighter fluid in hand. She slowly walked towards the billowing smoke and peered inside the barrel. The remnants of a rectangular box lay in there; a hideous mesh of cardboard and carbon, the evil sun had not burned away yet.
“HOW DARE YOU GO INTO MY ROOM?” Laura screamed. Her voice was shrill and a bit garbled. She hissed at me…YOU LITTLE SNEAK…THAT’S MY GAME, NOT YOURS! I PLAY IT ALL THE TIME…YOU DON’T EVEN LIKE IT ANYMORE! She stuck her hand inside the barrel and reached for what was left of it, which wasn’t much, mind you. Laura howled as she fell back towards the ground, her hand bubbling like water in a tub after you have put soap into it. This isn’t Laura anymore…I thought. I ran towards the front of the house and jolted inside. Mom was gone. She had been gone for the past five hours. She started a part time job at the Sawyer diner at the corners of Tribbs and Calhoun. I wanted her to be here so bad. I ran quickly up the stairs and locked myself in my room. My room was across the hall from Laura’s and soon I could hear her footsteps on the staircase, her door opened and she walked in, closing it behind her. I heard it lock.

2. What Is In Laura’s Room?

Laura refused to talk to me. She wouldn’t look at me when we crossed paths each morning, getting up and preparing for our day. I did notice sinister glances my way when passed by my seat on the bus; I always got the better seat before she did. Each day would end the same. We would come home from school and she would lock herself in her room for most of the night. She still had her hand wrapped from the incident at the smoking barrel and I could hardly sleep at night because I heard scratching noises in her room. I didn’t know what these noises were; only they were starting to become unnerving. I finally decided that there should be a showdown.
“Laura, please open your door…I would…like to talk.” My voice was quivering at the thought of how she would react to the pulsating knock on her door. There was no answer. Fortunately it was unlocked this time. I ventured in, unaware at what I would find. Nothing. There was nothing. She wasn’t even there. There seemed to be a spell that abounded throughout the house. Mom and dad were living their lives as though we never existed. They did live in their own little world now. They were unaware of the things that were happening between Laura and I. There was deadness now that permeated Laura’s room. I wanted to leave it but couldn’t, not now. I followed the deadness to the corner of the room. There was the table. The table that held that monstrosity of a game that I so longed to be rid of. Suddenly I gasped in horror as I looked down at the table. The board was there in all its evil demonic glory. I grabbed the board with one hand and broke it over my knee, it was then that I turned around toward my sister’s closet and fell on my knees. I could hear them crack as they hit the hard cold floor. Hello there…it gurgled. Standing in the corner near the closet door was a hideous deformed fellow about four feet high. He gleamed in the sunlight and his teeth were as razors. He smiled a most foul grin which sank me more to the ground until I was on my stomach. I tried to slither away from him but couldn’t move. My eyes were fixated on his stature and his appearance. He had an elongated nose which he constantly flipped with his fingers; his eyes were large and yellow. When he smiled his mouth contained horribly sharpened teeth that gleamed red from stale blood. His ears pointed towards the sky and he didn’t have feet. They were hooves. He wore a simple jacket that had coat tails which flowed from him towards the bedroom door. His laugh was grating and I longed to escape the room. My body was plastered to the floor. I cringed as he raised one arm, revealing small, ghastly nodules on the underside. They are filled with pus…MY GOD…they’re…dripping on the floor.
I could hear his thought in my head…open the closet door, Jack…
It didn’t speak to me. His eyes were now burning holes through me. Open it. Open the closet door! I could hear it scream at me through my brain. My head started to ache. I got up from the floor and reached for the door knob. With one twist it flew open. Laura’s dead eyes stared back at me. I was frozen. My feet did not move. It was if I was glued to the floor. Her neck was purple from the rope that was around it, her tongue wagged out of her mouth like the tail of some mangy dog. Oh God! I cried. Oh God! I once again fell to the floor, my heart sinking down to my diaphragm, my breathing was labored and the evil little man (not a man) loomed over me, dripping red colored saliva from his horrid teeth. It wasn’t until I was on the ground that I realized that Laura’s body was naked, bloody letters and numbers covered her chest and legs. A horrible sun was engraved in her forehead and the half profile of the moon, frown and all, was slashed into her left hand. Etched across her stomach was one word…goodbye. Droplets of blood dripped from her toes, making a pool that gleamed in the sunlight. Goodbye was all I could think about at that moment. The little monster still stood over me…waiting…waiting as if he was looking for me to say something about his handy work.
Do you like it?
“Get away from me! Leave me alone…please!” I said, tears flowing down my cheeks.
DO YOU LIKE IT?! The thought rang in my head. He could speak to me. He could hear me thinking. You could play the game now…she won’t mind…she will just lay there…hey, maybe we can use an internal organ in place of the heart shaped wooden thing-a-ma-bob! My eyes rolled towards the back of my head. My face was flush and the monster’s face was pressed against mine, his breath that of a decaying body. He took hold of one of my hands and started to drag me across the floor. I was still and my mouth could not speak. My lips were dry like the desert ground, hard and cracked and begging for moisture.
I killed your parents as well…they are dead…
The thought raced in my mind. All of this over a stupid game. I began to understand the TV preacher better every second. I really didn’t know if this creature was the devil or not, but he had my hand; pressed it hard within his, I could feel the bones start to crackle and the pain shot through me like a hot bullet on a summer day. I could not mutter a sound, not even a whimper as he dragged me out of the room and by the stair well. I was dangling above a precipice now. The staircase was not there anymore, only blackness underneath my feet. He let go. I fell, screaming all the way down until I hit the carpet which was connected to the front room where mom and dad were peacefully watching TV. Upon further inspection I noticed that mom and dad were not breathing and their throats had been torn out as if someone took a bite out of a juicy apple. They both were sitting in their respective chairs, listening to the TV chatter on about some new fangled gizmo on one of those half hour info commercials. Only their ears could not hear and their eyes could not see. They were glassy. I could see inside but no one was looking at me. Like a vampire that cannot see his reflection. Upstairs I could hear the shuffle of hooves against the wooden floorboards and the slithering slide of a dead body that once hung in a closet. I once again hurried up the stairs and reached my sister’s bedroom. There was no one in there. No little man. No monster or demon or whatever it was. I hoped to never see it again. I did, however, discover my sister’s bloody bones underneath her bed. She had been eaten.

3. Dead Town and Mrs. Trundle


Two months came and went since that day. The chill of winter was now commonplace. I had buried mom and dad near the old oak tree that sat near the edge of our property. Laura’s bones were buried along side of them. A makeshift cross stood in place as a tombstone. The game that we had played all those months ago was still upstairs in my sister’s room…waiting…waiting for the next player. I nailed a sign that said KEEP OUT on the door to the bedroom. I intended to never go back in there. I, myself, waited, sitting in dad’s old lazy boy, I waited…waited…for it to return. Soon it did return. It returned to my sister’s bedroom one day in early December, the newly fallen snow was a blanket of white against the murky grayness that filled the sky. He wanted to play.
So that freakish little imp wants to play…huh? I only assumed that this thing came out of the board. A grotesque sort of creature that those TV preachers warned me against. The board rested on the floor of my sister’s bedroom, the letters faded a little. The numbers were peeling off of it; I would find little pieces of black lettering on the floor from time to time. I would play with the little demon for awhile and then put the game back in its rectangular box. This would go on for days at a time, the creature threatening death if I didn’t play with him. I soon discovered that Sawyer was starting to look a little bare at times. No children played in the streets, nobody sitting on their front porches rocking back and forth. Even in the dead of winter there would be life outside every little house that lay across the main drag that ran through town. But now there wasn’t. I found out that anytime the demon and I would play that horrible game, someone in Sawyer died. One day I took a walk along the main drag. The street was cold, the cracking of the road seemed to gape in places and I wondered if there were other creatures that had escaped through these cracks. In certain areas of town you could smell a stench. A foul stench that permeated the air, it was death in all his glory. He came out of nowhere when that rectangular box was first opened; our greedy little hands caressed the heart shaped wooden thing that would circle around a board that summoned some untold evil. This evil slipped by us and manifested itself within the game. I pulled out a handkerchief that I had in my back pocket. I shoved it up to my nose and mouth as quick as I could to fend off the odor. It didn’t work.
I tried to rummage through the deadness of the town…this town is definitely dead…my thoughts raced, my eyes boggled and my head hurt. It hurt enough that I took refuge within Miller’s One Stop Shop on Miner and Keefe Streets. I knew that Bill Miller had aspirin and I needed some fast. I took the aspirin off the shelf behind the counter where Bill now lay. He was contorted in some weird fashion, a dead smile upon his face and his eyes rained tears of blood…stale blood. I swallowed the aspirin hard as I gazed upon Miller’s face. I remember long ago when I would come into his store and get the latest Spider-Man comic or a pack of baseball cards; let’s see whose rookie card I could get this time…I always collected the Diamond Kings from Donruss. If he was out of Donruss, I always settled with Topps. Picking up the package, a gleam of sunbeam radiating on the lettering, I worked my way toward the back of the store. It was then that I heard a whisper…a murmur…and then a scream. One of my freshman teachers, a Mrs. Trundle sat there in the corner, eyes wide and she just stared back at me. Mrs. Trundle was a healthy woman. She was heavy set. She wore the classic horn rimmed glasses that everyone always made fun of. I wasn’t making fun of her today. It seemed as though we were the only survivors of this game. She looked up at me with terrified eyes.
“Jack…Jack Loren?” Her voice was gravelly as if she had swallowed a bunch of rocks.
“Mrs. Trundle. What happened here?” I asked
“It’s as if the whole world has gone topsy turvy, Jack.” Mrs. Trundle said.
“You’re gonna think this is weird, boy.”
“I don’t think so, Mrs. Trundle.” I would not be surprised at what she was going to say.
“I saw this…this…little man, he walked up to the counter and put his little grimy hands on it and tried to pull himself up, I never seen anything like it before.” Mrs. Trundle was shaking. An ugly looking, little man…now that I think about it…A HORRIBLE GROTESQUE CREATURE! I looked at her with pitiful eyes. She walked with me as we left the One Stop Shop and our feet hit pavement. We looked down the stretch of Old 45 and my eyes peered in the distance. At what I thought was the end of the road was the creature. Mrs. Trundle gasped. She saw it too. She fell to the ground with a thud, her thighs seemed to bounce and her belly shook. She was down for the count. I started to run the opposite direction of the creature. He ran after me. I looked back and saw his salivating mouth and his wide yellow eyes, peering at me. He stopped short and loomed over Mrs. Trundle’s body, claws digging into her stomach. I couldn’t watch. I wish I had never gotten that game on that hot August afternoon, when the air was thick with humidity and my sister still had her leg cast. All was ok in the world. All was ok in Sawyer. The street lamps still came on at dusk and there were the older folk, rocking in their rockers, yelling at the young kids to stay off their properties. What I would give to go back to that day, but I can’t. My reality was the monster, which was feeding off of my old high school teacher. She didn’t last very long in this. I continued to run…run past the A& P Grocery…run past the old Sawyer Cemetery. I ran right out of town. It let me run…it’s still waiting there for me, I know it. I later learned that Sawyer had become a ghost town; the creature took refuge in the old Cemetery where it feeds on whoever travels down the stretch of Old 45. I suppose it’s still there, smiling a horrible grin, using a finger bone to pick at its blood stained teeth.