| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
PNEK MEKS here. Sick of me yet? Well, anywho. I bring you yet another tell, this has very little comedy in it. In fact....I don’t think there is any. Oh well. I hope you injoy it. It’s a one shot horror tale. Here we go.
*********
Changes
Living on a farm with her dad was just something the young woman named Annabel knew how to do. She had done it all her life. Like clock work, she worked all week except for Saturday and Sunday, stopping at about noon for a two hour lesson on reading, writing, and arithmetic from her father. She normally dreaded the lesson, her rough elbows resting on her desk and the annoying sound of chalk on the board. She tended to dream, waiting all week for her two days off. On Saturdays, she and her father, a tall man who was aging slowly, went fishing or picnicking. On winter days they would ice skate or put up bird feeders. On Sundays, they went to church and visited his wife and her mother’s grave.
Her mother had died in the oddest way.
It had been eleven years ago on the night of a blue moon. They found her out in the fields, clawed and bloody. They had assumed wolves had gotten her.
Annabel had been thinking about the gruesome fate of her mother as she continued to plow the dirt of another field. She slowly started to walk back when a tabby cat came running out of the long rows of corn after a small mouse. The cat leaped and pounced on the small creature, lifted its paws, and discovered nothing.
Annabel shook her head at the silly creature as it began to lick clean its fur to look like it hadn’t been chasing anything at all. She picked it up and walked back to the old house. There, she laid down a small saucer for the cat and walked inside just as one of the workers, Bernie she thought was his name, started towards the door yelling back to her father. “I’m quittin’, old man! I ain’t riskin’ my neck out here on this God forsaken farm!” he said as the door slammed behind him.
Her dad stood in the kitchen looking a bit flustered. “We lose another one?” she asked as he nodded his reply.
“It’s all because they think this place is haunted,” he father grumbled as he stroked his beard. “Ever since the Blue Moon incident, every Blue Moon someone is found with claw marks or never found at all. So they’re all afraid to work on that night.” He sighed again as she washed up for dinner.
Days went on and worker after worker quit his job and wouldn’t come back no matter how much her father begged him. The work became harder and there weren’t enough hours in the day. Her father stopped her school sessions and they both began to work from dawn to dusk out in the fields. Her father, the man who hadn’t aged in years, seemed to be completely grayed and wrinkled with in two weeks of this.
This went on until he could no longer work any more and poor Annabel had to work in the fields all week, including the Sabbath, all by herself. Life became harder and more frustrating for the young girl. Then that fatal day came.
Her father, now more grayed and aged, sat at his kitchen table in the early hours of dawn. The sun shown just slightly through his open window as Annabel walked into the kitchen to join him for breakfast. “Good mornin’ dad.” He turned towards her and starred blankly.
“He’s goin’ to kill me one day, and he’s goin’ to enjoy it.”
Annabel starred hard at him. “Who dad?”
He starred through the doorway into the living room. “Not in the day, but at night, when ya look at ‘em eyes... then he speaks to ya... he tells ya... him and him buddies, they’ll get me one day, and they’ll enjoy it.” Annabel turned as her father stood and sat down outside and stroked the fur on the big, old, black, barn cat who’s purpose in life seemed to be to sit on the man’s lap and get his ears scratched.
Annabel walked out the creaking door as the soft melody of the wind chimes drifted on the wind. She slipped silently onto the path, a bag of seed in her hands, and walked towards a plowed field singing a soft tune. “I’m a slave to myself, a slave to me teacher, a slave when I get home. I work all day and cry all night, oh Lord please save my soul.”
She slowly sprinkled seeds into the fresh, wet dirt as the birds came to take the worms and the freshly laid seeds as she continued to seed the field. A sleek, almost bony cat stalked each bird to try to take it down, but failed each time.
Once, Annabel caught sight of the cat gazing at her dead on and she heard a voice on the wind that sounded like a rope being pulled across coarse fibers. “One day, you’ll die at my claws, one day...” then the cat broke the gaze and the voice disappeared. She finished her work and slowly walked back.
As Annabel moved almost every cat on the 100 acre property seemed to be stalking her from somewhere in the long rows of corn. Every time she turned to look, nothing was there. She kept heading towards her sanctuary.
Annabel found the fat barn cat bathing in the sun, her father nowhere in sight. It gazed into her eyes, as if piercing deep into her heart, and a voice that sounded of old squeaky metal spoke to her. “We killed him, me and my friend,... you’re next!” at that the girl tossed a nearby hoe at the cat and ran inside locking the door, panting heavily. “What’s going on... what’s happening?” she said to herself in a whisper even she couldn’t hear.
Annabel lit a lamp and climbed the stairs to her room on the top floor. She opened the door to her father’s room and found the sight of three sickly cats, each with red shining eyes, crouched over the bloody corpse of her father. Their fur and claws soaked in his blood.
Annabel backed away slowly as the one cat stared into her eyes; this time as if he was grabbing at her soul, the voice entered her head, the sound of teeth being ground together. “He is dead... you are next...”
Annabel ran screaming as the angry growls and hisses of the cats closed in on her. She tripped and fell, her back against the closet wall and screamed as the cats close in, each one’s voice sounding in her head worse then the other, chanting,
“You thought us friends...” they drew closer,
“...But instead...” closer, their tails twitching.
“... We are here...” their ears turned back,
“...To take your head...” their eyes flashed one by one,
“...Satan’s pawns, we roam earth...” they prepared to pounce,
“...Waiting for him to say, we can fill our girths...”
With that, the cats pounced.
*********
OOOOOOoooooo! Creepy! Review and tell me what you think!