Red Underneath - Preview

Here is the beginning to an older story. It's been submitted to a few horror publishers and has made a few short lists.


tw: animal death

Red Underneath

by S. M. PIKE

So many gleaming red eyes. All from within the shadow of the dark Louisiana tree line. Eyes both high and low, as if they belonged to all the little critters that lived in the trees and in the dirt. A dense nighttime wilderness that steadily swayed in pleasant chaos.

Mikey stood motionless on the gravel looking into the darkness at these strange silent watchers. Behind him was the high grass of his yard that led back to his Aunt Mertha’s and Uncle Tim’s 1974 one and a half bed trailer. Carried in the breeze was the faint but very persistent, very pointed curses of Aunt Mertha from within the trailer, carrying on about something Tim had left out in the living room.

Mikey didn’t want to go back inside where his aunt (or rather, Uncle Tim’s wife) was likely already drunk. He’d rather have stayed out here amongst these ominous red dots that partially surrounded him. He liked it out here, preferred just wandering the lands around the trailer at night, as opposed to, well, normal activities for sixteen year olds. Didn’t mind the glowing red eyes, either. He had a large fist-sized rock to toss up and down and up and down and daydream, or nightdream in this case, about anywhere he’d rather be than here. About what his real parents may have been up to.

The last time he saw them, he was five. All he remembers is being dropped off at his dad’s brother’s trailer (Uncle Tim’s) and that was it. Never a phone call, a letter, a visit, nothing. And ever since then, Mikey hasn’t shown much enthusiasm or emotion towards, well, anything. It’s the type of behavior that would easily attract strange looks from others, or name calling in the school yard. People thinking he’s just some empty shell of a kid, unwilling to actually apply himself to anything at all. His blank stare didn’t help much either. Always the most wooden of facial expressions under his wavy black hair. If he weren’t as tall or naturally athletic-looking, school would’ve been a real problem over the years instead of the very lonesome, very moderate problem it really was.

And now his aunt was drunk in the trailer with her Reba McEntire Greatest Hits CD starting up, and she was spewing words of venom at him to come back inside and clean up something that he didn’t even cause.

As Mikey stood there at the trees, the wind carrying Reba’s country accent singing One Promise Too Late, he took a step away from the red-eyed darkness and moseyed back to the trailer.

The eyes watched in the nighttime breeze.

#

“Think you can handle straightenin’ this damn place up a bit instead of walkin’ around out there like some brain-dead zombie?” Aunt Mertha said a little more than she asked. She was marching around in her thigh-length black robe, fiercely searching for her cigarettes.

Mikey didn’t answer, only looked on at the dirty work clothes his Uncle Tim left strung out over the sofa and recliner. Of course she’s gonna get me to do this bullshit, he thought. He spaced his mind out and picked them up.

Above the old stained corduroy couch, on the wall between the Jesus is Lord sign and the wide-strung Rebel flag, rests Aunt Mertha’s highly prized possession: a three foot tall, five foot wide bar-room poster of herself from nearly twelve years ago, when she was just twenty-five, striking an arched pose over a haystack at an angle that would remind Uncle Tim for all these years just why he needed to have her in the first place. Back then, down at Ol’ Joe’s All-Nighter, Ol’ Joe would put up banners of the sexiest local women all around the bar room. Pay was descent, too; a few hundred bucks for the top three women who made the final cut. And Mertha very much made the top three; straddling a big haystack in nothing but tiny little unbuttoned short-shorts that looked more like blue-jean panties, and an even tinier high-cut white tee. Always greeting the living room in sweet southern cowgirl fashion – a curved physique that still drove the bar-goers a bit wild to this day, even under the couple pounds she’s since acquired from beer and whiskey.

Gathering Uncle Tim’s clothes was just as pungently tedious as it always was. They were rancid, smelling like piles of cow shit. Literally. Tim had been working the slaughterhouse down Highway 44 for the better part of a decade once he realized weekend bouncing at Ol’ Joe’s wasn’t cutting it (nor was it cutting it when it came to Mertha’s self-prescribed weekly allowance and almost daily booze budget). Sometimes Mikey wasn’t sure what was worse: trying to eat and play videogames with the foul stench of phosphorus hanging in the air, or with the drunken bitter barks of Aunt Mertha that usually accompanied it.

He had just tossed the clothes into the hamper at the end of the hall when he heard Aunt Mertha scream, “Ahhh! What the hell?!”

Mikey peered back through the living room and saw Aunt Mertha with a cigarette in hand under the yellow kitchen light looking down at something. He walked more into the living room and saw that it was a great big green, round frog. Just staring up at her, or up at something.

“Kid, get this big sonofabitch outta here. Come squish it.”

He stood behind her in the living room and said nothing.

“You hear me? Hello!”

Still nothing. She brought the cigarette to her mouth and turned to look at him.

“Earth to Mikey!”

And after a few more seconds, he finally said in a low, calm voice, “Why?”

She tilted her head in confusion and shook it like you would at a clueless person. She’d have gotten Tim to do the dirty work but Tim still wasn’t back yet. She’d gotten him to run into town and fetch some more liquor (because God forbid their booze inventory ever got down to only a couple bottles).

So she downed the tail end of her drink and slammed it on the small wooden dining table, bent down to pick up one of Tim’s crusty work boots, walked over to the frog, and slammed it down onto the thing.

When she brought it back up, the frog lay there on the linoleum with a twitching leg and splat of blood from its face.

A very dull, very dark feeling sorrow, perhaps misplaced, perhaps not, began to come over Mikey as he stood there and looked at the scene, and Mertha tossed the boot aside. She told him to go throw the old slimy thing into the woods and then come back in and clean up the mess.

#

He stood at the pitch black tree line at the edge of the property holding the dead frog in his hand, just looking at it. A dull sadness filled him as the trees swayed above.

When he swung his arm back to toss the carcass into the forest, the red glowing eyes started to turn on one after another.

A dozen. Two dozen. Five dozen. Silently popping on in the dark both high and low like a nightmare Scooby-Doo scene.

Tonight wasn’t the first night he’d seen these bizarre, almost evil looking peepers, either. It happened once a few years back the day a squirrel got loose in the living room and Uncle Tim caught it and took it out back with the pellet gun. Then again the next year when his uncle had his work buddies from the slaughterhouse over and they all sat out on the front porch drinking, showing off their handguns (or more like Tim wanting to show off his old 1889 six-shooter he acquired after Mikey’s grandad passed from cancer), and taking out birds till the sun went down. Then again just a few months back when Aunt Mertha found a black snake out in the back yard and chopped its head clean off with a shovel.

On all these completely separate occasions, the red eyes never showed themselves during the day, or even around Mikey’s aunt and uncle for that matter. Instead, they seemed to just silently flicker on whenever Mikey, and only Mikey, went to wander the nighttime woods. Just looking. Whether they were watching Mikey, or judging him, or just plain trying to scare him, he’s never known, but what he does know is that he’s never truly been afraid of them. He always looked right back at them, as still as a statue and observing, but the idea that they were going to hurt him simply never took hold of him, as ominous and as deathly silent as they actually looked.

He walked calmly to the dark of the tree line.

Then slowly, and ceremoniously, he began to kneel down, and then placed the fallen creature at the base of the tree in front of him. Though there was no true fear in him of the looming eyes, he still felt the need to not potentially anger them any further after the frog’s murder. One could say it were a form of pity or strange off-handed grief that Mikey felt. And even though this emotion wasn’t particularly strong, and had been fleeting on all those other nights the eyes would appear after a foul deed done by his aunt and uncle, he noticed just how pungently empty the feeling was tonight, if only by a little more than usual.

When he turned to go back to the trailer, he looked back more than once, and saw that the eyes remained watching. Waiting.

---

That's all I'll share for now. Maybe the whole thing will be published one day.