Into The Abyss

Caleb

My life, which I had thought was already a living nightmare since the thing-from-under-the-shed had started coming into the house every evening after mom fell asleep, had completely imploded tonight. Years, I had spent years trying to convince my mom that there was a supernatural presence, an unfriendly supernatural presence, invading our home. With her being the skeptical unbeliever that she was, she’d been reluctant to take me at my word. She might have even thought I was delusional.

Everyone I talked to about it had thought I was probably delusional…at best. I had been under no illusions about that. So, I’d ‘sucked it up’ and tried to keep quiet. It made me feel…I mean, are there really words to describe the kind of hurt and betrayal I’d felt all this time?

As horrible as that had felt, it would have been better than being right. Being right meant that the thing from under the shed had followed me to Grandma’s house tonight. I wasn’t even at home this time and the thing had walked right up to grandma’s front door wearing my mom’s body like a cheap Halloween costume store costume.

You know, the generic ones that are ‘one-size-fits-all’ so they don’t quite fit anyone and clearly don’t have licenses for the copyright characters they are pretending to be. I’m looking at you Optimal First, the shape-changing robot in red, grey, and blue. Mom’s body had been such a bad fit on The-Thing-From-Funder-The-Shed, that I’d just…known…it wasn’t Mom. It was a thing pretending to be my mom. My mom, I knew, was fine and somewhere else.

But the thing was there, and everything sucked and was scary.

Luckily, my grandma is a prepper.

Noooo!

Not a regular prepper like you see on T.V. with all the cans of food and the reinforced underground nuclear apocalypse bunker. My grandma is a religious four-horsemen-book-of-revelations prepper. She keeps a spray bottle of Holy Water on the coat rack in the front hall. And just gallons and gallons of it in her pantry.

Yeah. She’s a weirdo. But I love her. And I now have a new appreciation for all her churchiness. Like, the Holy Water she stores by the barrel, or the pounds and pounds of salt she has blessed to make it Holy.

For someone as bizarrely prepared as she was, with the salt, the water, the squirt guns, the crucifix, the Holy Water grenades; why in the raspberry bubble gum did it take her so many gosh darned years to believe me? Like, I’m pretty sure that if Mom and grandma had just listened to what I was saying about some kind of supernatural spookiness coming up out of the ground in our backyard, I would not be in the greasy clutches of some freaky tentacles as they drag me body and soul into the depths of – oh for the love of GodI’mnotsupposedtosaythatinvainpleaseforgiveme don’t let it be hell.

The screams from Mom’s spirit are fading. She’s calling my name. Even in her spectral form, she can’t keep up with the speed this creature is moving at. The-Thing-That-Doesn’t-Need-A-Body. That’s its new designation in my head. Probably also the thing that I had been calling The-Thing-From-Under-The-Shed, but it is definitely not the same as the thing that’s possessing Mom’s body.

Mom’s body. I hadn’t believed that was a real body until I saw her spirit outside of her body. Did this mean she was dead? Was my Mom dead?

But her spirit was alive. It thought, it spoke, she tried to save me. She wasn’t in her body though. Her body was possessed.

I had to get back to Mom. She couldn’t help me now. My mom needed me.

So, I begin to struggle. The amorphous blob of greasy shadowy tentacles is carrying me further and further into the ground. You’d think something so greasy – why is it greasy? You’d think it would be slippery and be easy to get away from. Still, my struggles are futile, and I’m carried on, shivering in the chilly underground. Past asphalt, and gravel, under the utility pipes and the sewage system, down below the soil, where layers of cold rock begin. And end. And begin again. And end. And change…

Then the wailing starts.

It’s not cold anymore.