Come Get Me Page 14

  “Pete!” he yelled. “Calm down! It’s me Jim! Stop waving those damn things around for a minute and think!” He was afraid Pete might be so far gone that he wouldn’t recognize him. Jim watched as he got closer and closer. It didn’t appear Pete was going to stop until he was almost within attacking range. Almost tripping over his own feet Pete skidded to an abrupt stop roughly ten feet from Jim. Deep throaty breathing burst heavily from his direction obviously caused by his short run.

  “Jim?” whined a hesitant voice after a few tense seconds, “Is that really you?” As he spoke Jim saw the branches lower slightly. That was a good sign. Maybe he wasn’t going to die. The pain and sorrow in Pete’s voice cut Jim to his very being. If it hadn’t been for the threat of imminent attack he would’ve rushed over the few remaining feet to his friend and hugged him like the brother he was. Then he saw the torches again and thought he’d better wait until he was sure Pete wasn’t going to brain him.

  “Yeah Petey, it’s really me,” he answered with tears creeping into his eyes. “Why don’t you put those things down before you hurt someone? Then maybe we can go back to your house and have ourselves a little talk.”

  Pete took a few steps closer, obviously straining his eyes to see him. With no other warning than a quick sob and a flash of discarded weapons Jim found himself being rushed. He only had a few seconds to react to what was happening. His first instinct was to back up or try to jump out of the way but that was quickly forgotten as Pete reached him and threw his arms around him. The thrashing Jim was expecting didn’t come. Instead he found himself in a great bear hug of the type a little kid might give and adult. A minute ago he was sure he was about to be bludgeoned to death by his only remaining childhood friend but instead he was pleasantly surprised.

  Pete was obviously a person of unexpected mood swings.

  If the rush and sudden burst of affection was unexpected what was even more unexpected was that as Jim put his arms around Pete to return his hug he could feel his friends’ body shaking with great, raking sobs. The sound of them reached Jim’s ear and forced a few tears of his own out.

  “It is you,” Pete repeated over and over through his tears. Knowing that Pete needed to be held more than he needed to be let go, Jim hugged him back and realized while doing it that he needed it too.

  They stood in that position for several minutes before Pete finally pulled away. When they finally did separate Jim realized he’d been crying and hadn’t even known it. Pete was still crying a little and talking to himself but unfortunately it was getting more and more incoherent. Jim thought he heard something about a “fucking purple dinosaur” or something along those lines but he wasn’t sure. Having no idea what his friend was talking about he shrugged and waited until his friend had exhausted his imaginary conversation.

  While waiting Jim had a chance to get a better look at what his friend had become. By the flickering firelight Jim found that time had not been kind to poor Pete. The pitiful sight before him had always been smaller than everyone else but now he looked like some kind of demented dwarf with only vague similarities to the man he’d once been. Standing at a whole five foot four inches there wasn’t much to him. Since their last meeting Pete had looked as if he’d somehow turned in on himself. He’d gotten quite a bit stockier and looked almost fat, but if the bear hug he’d received was any indication looks had definitely been deceiving. His raven black hair now hung down in his face and was quite a bit longer than it needed to be and definitely a lot dirtier than it should’ve been. It was so thick that Jim could barely see any of Pete’s face through it all. This was probably a good thing since it smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in a while.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Pete stuttered, gazing out into the darkness. “But let’s go back to the house where it’s safe. My fires need tending and shouldn’t be left for long. They must never go out when night comes.” Stooping down without another eerie word Pete picked up the two barely burning branches he’d discarded earlier and started towards the house.

  Jim, caught slightly off guard by his friends words, followed the waddling form ahead of him trying not to trip over any of the holes in the road that were waiting for him. Pete reached the house first but didn’t stop to wait for Jim. Instead, he continued on towards the back not even looking over his shoulder to make sure his friend was there. He seemed more worried that the roaring fires would go out than anything else. Jim thought there was no need to worry about that happening. They were actually quite a bit bigger than they should be. Especially this close to the woods and definitely bigger than any one person could handle.

  Just before turning around the back corner of the house Pete paused and grabbed some wood from a nearby pile. Jim tried taking advantage of this momentary stop to make up some distance between them but Pete still beat him and was out of sight by a few steps. In his haste to catch up with Pete Jim tripped over something in the dark and half fell half tripped into the back yard. Falling to the ground he quickly pushed himself up brushing off as he did so. After he was as clean as he could get he looked up and didn’t know what to think of the sight that greeted him. He’d heard of a living hell before but never thought he’d see it. Now he had. Hell had finally come to earth. That was the only thing he could think as his eyes watered from the heat cast by the fires.

  There were four separate bonfires burning about twenty feet from the back of the house. Scattered haphazardly around the yard were piles of wood and what looked like an assortment of different sized cans of gas and kerosene. Some appeared empty, at least Jim hoped they were since they were laying on their sides, but others, which must’ve been full, were sitting upright and much too close to the fires. It was those that made Jim’s skin crawl. He could just imagine one bursting and turning him into a Jim-kabob. Not exactly a pleasant thought.

  Heat wafted out in waves that could be felt all the way over where he was standing. Knowing that if it was this hot where he was he didn’t even want to think about the temperature where the cans were. With every passing second he was surer and surer they were going to blow. He moved to grab the closest one so he could move it to a safer spot but Pete turned on him viciously yelling.

  “Don’t touch that!” he screamed. “Leave it where it is!”

  Jim, faced by the crazy Pete once again, quickly backed up to where he’d been and watched as the man he’d once known returned to his task. Over the crackling of the fires Jim could still hear Pete mumbling to himself. Moving from one conflagration to the next Jim saw Pete’s lips moving. He actually managed to catch a word every now and then but still couldn’t make any sense of what he was hearing. He was beginning to see that Pete did indeed have many problems he needed help with, the least of which was the mumbling. Seeing no hope of reasoning with Pete, Jim looked around the yard trying to decide what to do.

  Thinking he’d seen all the strangeness Pete and his yard had to offer he was horrified when his eyes settled on what lay at the immediate rear of the house.

  The four windows running along the back had been hit many times by God only knew what. If it’d been rocks he knew he’d see just maybe a piece here or there missing. Most likely a bunch of holes. These windows instead looked as if whole boulders had been heaved through them but that wasn’t the worst part. Around most of the holes was stuff that looked like pieces of flesh. Dried ragged hunks of blackened meat hung from some of the windows looking like jerky left too long to smoke. That was bad enough but what he saw next was enough to make his stomach heave.

  Written all over the wall from the top to the bottom were words. They’d been scribbled in an almost childlike handwriting in what Jim thought was brown paint. Wanting to get a better look he took a step closer and almost tripped over something on the ground. Looking down he discovered what had actually been used to do the writing on the wall. Littering the ground from one end of the house to the other were heads. Heads of cats, dogs, deer, raccoons and a lot of other animals he couldn’t even guess at. The
skin had rooted off the ones near the bottom of the pile. All he could see were eye sockets and teeth. The wall above was splattered with blood from the heads. They had apparently been slammed up against it with some force. Big splotches of brown marked the wall. After overcoming his shock Jim quickly glanced at the wall to see what was written there since that was what had first drawn him to the spot. As he gingerly crept forward he carefully avoided the heads that had rolled away from the piles but not before noticing that most of the heads didn’t look like they’d been cut off like he’d first thought. They instead looked like they’d been ripped off. Strings of meat and parts of bone were still attached to the necks.

  After swallowing the bile rising in his throat he slowly looked up to see if he could make sense of what was written oh the wall.

  “Goatman was here” was scrawled all over. It looked more like gibberish than actual writing. The words tended to run together and were messily written. There were other things like “Come Get Me” and various curse word but the most prominent and numerous were the call for the Goatman.

  Jim’s heart slammed in his chest as he read the words. They were the words that could supposedly call the Goatman to a person. The “Goatman was Here” phrase was what the Goatman himself supposedly wrote when he’d claimed a place as his own. Who cared that it was impossible for a creature that didn’t exist to write this much less anything else. The only explanation was that Pete, in his deranged state, did it himself. Jim didn’t want to believe that his friend was so far gone that he would do something like this but he couldn’t deny the proof in front of his eyes. Pete really had gone off the deep end.

  While thinking all this, a shadow slowly fell on the wall in front of him. He spun around and was confronted by an even more deranged looking Pete than he’d seen before if that was possible. Sweat was pouring from his soot covered face. His shoulders heaved as he drew in deep gulping breath. It was almost as if he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. Smoke and steam clung to him like a cloak making him look like the boogeyman made flesh. In between the breathing noises Jim could still hear mumbling. Pete was still talking to himself even though he was looking at Jim. The few words he was able to make out made no sense. They definitely didn’t make him very comfortable. Words like “kill” and “goat” were the only things Jim was sure he understood but there were others that Jim thought he understood but hoped he actually didn’t. Looking in Pete’s eye he was only sure of one thing. He wanted to get the hell out of there. To do it he would have to go through Pete and hopefully avoid the fires. He wasn’t sure he could do that. Not with having to worry about Pete at the same time. Then there was also the long road back down to civilization. There were no lights and Jim really didn’t want to try that.

  Pete looked at him without speaking for what seemed an eternity. Jim didn’t know what to do. Pete looked like he was waiting for something. Maybe the voices in his head were telling him to kill Jim and he was trying to resist them. Maybe he was just trying to figure out the best way to do it and then he could blame the Goatman. Then again he could just throw him in the fire and no one would know any better. The sheriff was the only person that knew Jim was out here. Pete could just say that he’d left if they came and asked where he was. There probably wouldn’t even be that big of an investigation if the way things had been handled so far was any indication. He stood waiting for whatever Pete would do next. It wasn’t what he’d thought.

  “It wasn’t me,” Pete cried. After mumbling a few words about a purple dinosaur he continued. “It was the Goatman Jim. We made a mistake when we were little.” He said looking up at the wall behind Jim. “We called him and he came but we escaped the first time. We didn’t stay so he could finish his visit. We ran. That made him mad.”

  At first Jim wasn’t sure what to think. Pete spoke as if the Goatman were real. What he was saying was at least partly true. They had called the creature when they were little but it had never showed up. But at the back of his mind he felt a tickle. He concentrated on the memory trying to bring it in to focus. They’d been calling the thing and something had come out of the woods and that was the last he could remember.

  The thing didn’t come. Did it?

  In the dream Jim had a few days ago he’d come but that hadn’t happened in real life. It had only happened in the dream. None of that was real. Things from dreams couldn’t kill people. All the stuff that was happening with his friends had to have some kind of rational explanation. Jim couldn’t think of one right now but there must be one. A fictional creature running around killing people just because they’d called it when they were little wasn’t a rational explanation so that couldn’t be it. But at the same time it had to be it. They were standing in a yard, at night, with a bunch of decaying animal heads rotting around them while bonfires burned merrily in the background. If this wasn’t the perfect situation to prove Pete’s theory, then Jim couldn’t think of a better one.

  Although there was another possible answer.

  He was just going crazy himself. That had to be it. The pressure of his friends’ deaths and not knowing how it’d happened had just gotten to him so much that his mind had decided to take a break for a little while. He couldn’t be going crazy though. He’d just met a great girl. Except for his friends dropping dead in gruesome way everything was going good. So how could he be going crazy? The answer unfortunately was that he wasn’t. He was completely sane and his friends were dead and the only explanation that fit was that the Goatman was the one responsible. Jim wanted to deny it but all the evidence he’d heard and seen pointed to everything being the work of the Goatman.

  It was common knowledge in these parts that the beast carried an axe with him. That would account for the tree in the woods near Tommy. He also took perverted pleasure in decapitating animals then eating everything but the head. Once in a great while it was rumored that it would mark it’s territory by writing “Goatman was Here” or something to that effect, never mind the fact that it was an animal and couldn’t possibly know how to write its own name much less an actual sentence. But somehow it still wrote on things in the places it’d been. Never mind the fact that no one had ever gotten a picture of the creature either. That didn’t matter to anyone. It was like Bigfoot. It was an urban legend. Not real.

  Jim kept telling himself that but looking at the facts he couldn’t believe it. He had to come to grips with the fact that the Goatman was very real and was quite possibly coming for them. All because of being stupid little kids looking for fun. He told himself he still had to make one more try at convincing Pete that he was imagining everything. Maybe if he could do that he might also convince himself. It was probably too late but what the hell he would try.

  “The Goatman isn’t real!” he yelled at Pete. “We called him that night sure as shit but he never came. He isn’t frickin’ real and he’s not frickin’ coming for us!”

  “What! You really believe that? You think I did all this shit myself?” Pete yelled back. “You think I came out here to the middle of nowhere because I like it? I may have a few loose screws here and there but trust me I didn’t come out here by choice. I came out here so everyone in town would be safe. As long as I’m not there it has no reason to go bothering them. It’s after us not them.” Jim was caught off guard. He hadn’t thought of that. If the thing was real and it was after them then the farther they stayed from people the better. He had nothing to say that would convince Pete his delusion. He wanted to say something but Pete beat him to it.

  “There’s another reason I came out here too,” Jim waited. He had no choice. There was nothing to say. Pete knew Jim was convinced but he was still explaining his reasons for his belief.

  “I couldn’t start the fires in town,” he said. “So I came out here where it was at least sorta safe. This way that thing will be kept away from them too.” Even though everything he said would sound crazy to someone else, to Jim it made perfect sense. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. If the creature w
as after him and Pete and no one else maybe it could be kept at bay out here where it was safe.

  “If the creature isn’t real, as you say, then someone needs to explain why Tommy and now probably Rob are dead,” he continued. “They also need to explain to me why someone has been throwing these heads at my house every night for at least the last three weeks. If that stuff ain’t real then I don’t know what is.”

  Pete was only done talking for a few seconds when something suddenly flew from the woods through the firelight and slammed into the back of the house. It hit with a wet splatter, slid down the wall and rolled to a stop between the two of them. Jim looked down and found himself staring into the eyes of a raccoon or at least what used to be the eyes of a raccoon. The head was there but nothing else. It looked like it had been hacked off or something. The blood was still draining from what used to be its neck. It was very fresh and very grizzly.

  Pete yelled something about telling him so and ran for his fires. Once he reached them he started throwing more wood on each of them making them bigger. Jim just stood looking back and forth between the Pete and the bloody mess in front of him. This latest turn of events really tilted things in Pete’s favor. Why else would a head be flung at them? Better yet, who would do it if it wasn’t the Goatman? Before he could think of a reasonable answer Pete came walking up. He’d apparently gotten the fires built back up to an acceptable height and wanted to talk some more. Jim was glad he was coming back. Pete had said his piece now it was his turn.

  “So you know something happened to Rob. You must’ve been out here playing with your fires when it happened. Hell, you might’ve even heard what it was or maybe even saw it,” he said harshly. He was getting mad just thinking about it. Heaven help him if he found out Pete did see everything and did nothing to stop it. He felt he was handling everything pretty well but the pressure was building. Pete just might have to bear the brunt of the explosion. “Why didn’t you go help him?”