Creepypastas

Tongueless

James Stanton was tired of running. He knew that eventually he would have to stop, the German shepherd was right behind him and Bill, and it was gaining on them, its powerful legs pumping and its bared teeth gleaming with menace. A painful ache was curling in his abdomen, every time he took another step it got slightly worse until it was like poison that was eating him up from inside, perhaps burning a hole in his stomach.

Bill Deplume was seventeen years old and James's drug dealer. James knew how he had found himself in this dire situation. He owed Bill money. The last three times James had bought his usual ounce of marijuana, it had been with the promise of cash the next time he came over to fork on the winding mountain road that they had utilized for drug deals.

Eventually Bill had grown tired of James's broken promises, so he had him come along to help him in a little heist to even things out. "It'll be simple," Bill had said. "It's a two man job. I need you to be on lookout when I break into Old Man Dillard's house. I'll pop in, grab what I need and get out. It'll be easy and the debt will be paid. No harm done. Isn't that right, kid?"

At first James had tried to get out of it. There was, after all, a serial killer on the large in the mountainside town of Seven Devils, North Carolina. Nobody knew who he was or what he really looked like, but somebody had to have killed those five little girls. They were all kidnapped last December, and now their mutilated remains had been found in the one of the creeks in nearby Hawk's Nest Resort, where James's father, Martin Stanton, worked. The tongues of each girl had been cut out. James remembered seeing an eyewitness account on television of a woman who had claimed to have seen a suspicious looking man at the site of one of the kidnappings. She had described a "tall, intimidating figure wearing a black jumpsuit." She claimed she couldn't see his face due to the hood that the man wore in broad daylight. James had heard of serial killers before. He had even read about quite a few of them. John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Albert Fish. James loved to read. Other than smoking pot it was one of his favorite hobbies. In a way it sort of made up for how slow to learn the drugs had made him. The prospect, however, of a serial killer being within the same town as him terrified him to the core. He had heard of disappearances of teenage girls in Oriental, but this was different. It was closer to home, and that somehow made it horrifyingly real.

He couldn't shake the feeling that, whenever he walked home, there was somebody prowling in the shadows. Perhaps waiting for the perfect moment to swoop in and go for the kill. All the girls had been taken in that way. Hit over the head with a blunt object while they were making their way home from school. They were knocked out cold before being dragged out of sight. Many of James's friends called him the Black Butcher because of the dark clothing the eyewitness had described. He became a sort of joke. A common goodbye at Appalachian Middle School was "See you later! Don't let the Black Butcher get you!"

In the end, there was nothing James could do to refuse Bill. He had to help with the robbery or he would get hurt. Although Bill had never said this directly, the threat was always there in those ice blue eyes whenever James tried to turn him down.

He had watched in fascination as Bill pulled a stiletto switchblade from his right pocket and flicked it open. His tattooed arm had reached around and he inserted the blade within the opening that the window to the basement provided. He then pushed, widening the gap. Nobody knew how Bill had gotten his tattoos. He was probably too young for them, but even so, an inked in Dragon curled its way up his forearm. James had regarded it with a grudging respect. Being only fourteen and born into an esteemed family, he had nothing of the sort. Not even a piercing.

James wasn't really a bad kid. His grades were above average and he almost never got in trouble. He just loved his drugs. Two or three puffs of a blunt when he was eleven was all it took. Before long he was hooked on the green gold. The only problem was getting his greedy hands on it. He had a summer job mowing lawns but that really wasn't sufficient enough to cover his funds. There were many times when he was forced to slip a portion of money from his father's wallet. Eventually he had been caught, and that was the end of that.