Rancid Soil

THE JAWS

    Her father gravely puzzled stood there for a second... he had just turned and begun up the stairs when her mother popped out from the kitchen "Is everyone OK?, what the hell is going on!" she exclaimed. "I have no idea!? I think so..." Sara's father replied. "Sara literally just freaked out yelling something about Dodger dying!? She said she heard a man upstairs or something, she's very distraught!". "Really? I thought I saw him run out the front door just before the earthquake" Sara's mother replied. "I know me to; she ran in to her room and slammed the door. I'm going to run upstairs and see what's going on", "OK, well I'll go check on her" her mother said.

    As he made his way up the stairs he noticed that it was a bit cooler then downstairs, which was odd because it was the middle of summer and as we all know heat rises. As his foot left the last step that led to the floor the room was on he paused dead in his tracks. The door to the room was only cracked, there was a dense silence. He grabbed the door knob and swung the door open. What he saw horrified him to his very core. There, in the middle of the room... was the most horrific scratch in what was a beautiful wooden floor. Ugh he muttered as he dropped to his knees to feel how bad it was. Just as I suspected, he said to himself. No more playing in this room! As for the room there was nothing out of place, the room was completely empty, other than for some unpacked boxes, odds and ends left in there from moving in, as they had yet to determine a purpose for this room. No sign of Dodger, No man... or voices. He turned the light off and returned down stairs and made his way to Sara's room where her mother was trying to comfort her.

"Honey please calm down" he could hear her mother saying while she ran her fingers through Sara's hair as she continued to weep frantically. Her father opened the door to Sara's room "baby girl I just checked upstairs and Dodger's not up there, the room is completely empty (Except for the huge scratch... he thought to himself privately) Me and your mother both saw him run out the front door just as the earthquake hit". "NO! She screamed, it wasn't an earthquake it was the house, it's mad, It was mad that we were in the room" Sara yelled. The look in her eyes told her parents that something wasn't right. As they continued to calm her down, her mother suggested an old favorite in times of crisis. "Baby would you like a glass of chocolate milk?" Sara's mother asked. Sara sat in her bed trembling with her head down, unevenly hyperventilating and sporadically mumbling. Her hair covering her face, and completely unresponsive, as if she didn't even hear what her mother just said less than two feet away from her. "Oh... I almost forgot, a moon pie!" Sara's head lowered even further and then as if slightly distracted mentally by the mentioning of a moon pie, her head came up ever so slightly. Then down and up again. "OK honey I'll be right back and after that we will go into town just you and me, OK?"

   Her mother turned to her father with one of those maternal instinct looks of unease... As they went to leave her father grabbed the handle to her door and all but shut it. "We did see Dodger run out didn't we?" he asked his wife. "Of course we did! Are you seriously suggesting she just saw him get eaten by the floor upstairs?" She replied in, "No but at the same time where is he, he's not one to stay outside, He's lazy as shit!", "Look I'm not sure where he is at the moment dear, but I know where he isn't. He's surly not in the floor upstairs!" Her father wasn't totally convinced of anything at this point, the evening seemed to quickly descend into madness pretty quickly and without any warning. But he was accustom to random bouts of chaos, as is any father of a family this size. After a moon pie and some chocolate milk Sara got herself together the best she could. She got cleaned up and her and her mother headed into town for the rest of the evening, nothing takes the mind off of discomfort like shopping.

As soon as the car left the drive way Sara's father was out the front door. "Where are you going Dad" said Tara, Sara's older sister. "Uh... I'm just looking..." before he could make something up Tara shouted "OK well we just wanted to see if you wanted to play monopoly with us we need a fourth player". "Oh no you go ahead babe; I got a couple of things I have to do in the garage". As he made his way back to the garage he looked everywhere. "Where the hell is that damn mutt," he thought to himself. Just then he heard whimpering. He stopped and stood perfectly still so he could pin point where it was coming from. Seconds past and the sound did not return. So he started to call for the dog. "Dodger, come on boy, DODGER!" just then faintly a tiny whimper seemed to be coming from inside the house. He looked up and was standing directly below the window to the third floor room. A chill ran across his spine. Just then all the lights in the house went out... He stood there for a second, it was so silent you could tell something was wrong... Panicked he ran as fast as he could around to the front of the house and up to the front door. The door slammed just as he reached the door frame, body checking him back into the grass just off the porch.

As he came to and looked up at the house he noticed that the windows where fogging up from the inside. "What the hell is going on?" he jumped up and wiped the blood from his nose which felt as if it may have broken. He walked up to the door and grabbed the handle to find it locked. He began knocking and yelling "Tara, Jessica OPEN THE DOOR RIGHT NOW!" He listened for the shuffling of feet coming to open the door but nothing. He ran off the porch and into the front yard bent down and grabbed the first rock big enough to break the glass in the front door. He turned around and went to break open the door when he stopped cold in his tracks. Starring puzzled and confused the rock dropped out of his hand, as the once locked door lay wide open, exposing the infinite darkness within. He walked slowly up to the door way and peered in to the dark silent house, the stench of death thick in the air. Minutes went by he did not budge an inch, That door slam screwed him up pretty bad and he was starting to wonder if more than his nose was broken.

Faintly he heard strange noises coming from the living room. "TARA!?" he yelled in to the darkness. A few moments went by then a high pitched cackle screeched back. "I'm in here DADDY", He shivered with fear, he knew the voice was not his daughters, it wasn't even human. "TARA!!!" he yelled, it answered back "It's me Daddy, come play with us". He closed his eyes and thought to himself as he started to cry, "What the hell is going on..." He took a deep breath and began to walk slowly towards the living room, hurting with every step he took. All the while the voice giggled and mumbled the most unsettling of filth with what sounded like more voices present the closer he got. As he peered around the corner what he saw left him breathless with dread. His daughters, his beautiful family mutilated and horribly disfigured with grizzly indescribable things tearing at them. What he saw could not have been conjured by the darkest of imaginations, yet here he was in this reality. They had dug out the backs of their heads, their hands were inside the jagged holes carved and the grotesque things were playing with their lifeless corpses like puppets. Screaming back and forth at each other with a type of morbid banter, as if to shrewdly pretend to be them. As he mustered the strength to run they noticed him, one look from their empty wicked eyes paralyzed him with fear. They acted startled and lifted the lifeless bodies up off the floor and stepped into the shadows of the room as not to be seen, leaving only the mangled floating bodies of his kids jaggedly moving about in the faint moon light coming in through the windows. It took everything inside of him to inch backwards toward the front door that remained wide open. "Where are you going Daddy?" they yelled, just then the body in the middle child slammed violently against the ceiling almost crushing it into an unrecognizable gory mass then dropped her to the floor.

As the blood from his once beautiful daughter began to pool on the floor the house started to vibrate violently almost like the earthquake from earlier that day. Just then the floor under her body burst open violently and began to devour the body. "NO!" he screamed, as he turned to run. But he wasn't going anywhere. for as soon as he turned the thing that crushed his baby had double backed on him and was in front of the open door, down on all fours covered in Dodgers scraps and wearing his collar, it tilted its head and tried to emulate a dogs snarl, growling it leapt at him knocking him to the floor, sliding towards the hole. It immediately started eating whatever it could lock its mouth onto. He struggled with all he had inside him. After milliseconds they were almost to the hole when it got a hold of his face, He screamed as it quickly re-positioned his skull in its jaws, just as they slid into the wooden jaws it violently crushed his skull with so much force it simply burst. They both sloppily slid into the jaws.