When Monsters Have Nightmares

When Monsters Have Nightmares

By Richard C. Morgan

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Randall didn't understand how anyone caught anxiety over getting rid of a body. It was damn boring if anything. A cold body meant that the fun was over.

A living body was what gave him anxiety, but that's also when it was the most fun. Randall liked it when they struggled. When they thought they actually had a chance against him out there in his woods, his world. Sometimes he'd let them sprint ahead a little just to get their hopes up, but not before giving them a little injury to deal with. Insurance, you know.

Now when they cried and begged and pleaded for their lives? That was delicious. Angel tears are the sweetest nectar.

Well he had another cold angel. He'd wrung all the tears and fun out of her that he could. Now he had to pay the price of back-breaking labor.

Behind his home and the woods was a nice river with lots of sand. He dug a decent hole, plopped her down in there, laid her belongings and her clothes on top of her ruined body, and put it all back. Done. He'd kept her in the cellar for a couple of weeks to break her mind down. After that, he got four days of good solid fun out of her. A few hours of work was a fair toll to pay.

He finished the day's rigorous activities with cold beer in front of his ancient box television. The girl's parents hadn't wasted any time getting their ugly mugs on camera and raising awareness of their daughter's absence.

Her mom looked like someone that would complain to the manager about her iced tea or something. She was schmoozing to the camera.

"Please, if you know where our baby girl is, or if you have her, please help her—let her come back home!"

Randall laughed, nearly shooting beer out his nose. He imitated the woman's voice. "Puh-leeze let her come back hoooooome! Bitch! She ain't coming home! Ever! Get your ugly ass in a wood chipper where it belongs!"

The TV showed a still image of the girl the last time she was seen. She was wearing the very shirt that Randall had torn off of her in a frenzy, a shirt with a bunch of frogs sitting on a rainbow. He threw an empty beer can at the screen.

Laughing felt good. Winning felt good. Knowing that his winning hurt somebody else felt good.

Falling asleep in front of the TV under a cloud of booze kinda felt good, too. Waking up from such a thing, not so much. He thought about which can of beans he was going to have for breakfast as he made for the front door to step outside and drink in the late morning.

Clearing the threshold, he lost his appetite. The girl's shirt was in a sandy and muddy heap right on his doorstep. His heart went from zero to ninety in a snap. He went down a mental checklist of the likelihood of anyone seeing or hearing him or her. He'd cleaned up any and all evidence. And here someone was taunting him.

Worse yet... could she still be alive? He knew he should have made the grave deeper. He shook the prickly thoughts from his head and grabbed his shovel and his gun. If she had gotten back up, he'd put her back down.

Due caution and adrenaline made the journey to the shallow grave unbearably long. It wasn't lost on him that this was how she must have felt when he turned her loose for a little bit just to hunt her down. It wasn't pleasant.

There was the grave by the water in the sand and it looked the way he had left it. He attacked the site with the shovel until she came back into daylight. Her mouth was open and full of sand. Her things were all there along with clothing except her shirt.

Randall scratched his head and looked around, checking that he hadn't just led anyone to her resting place. He swallowed down against a lump of dread that had set up camp. He threw the shirt on her face and started to put the sand back when a thought struck him. He took the shirt and put it underneath the body. He buried her and then stomped it all down and gazed at his work. He didn't want to stay and he didn't want to go back home, but at length he left.

He calmed down, but his mind wouldn't stop grinding its gears. He chewed his beans slowly as he stared out his broken window.

Had he just forgotten to bury the shirt? That wouldn't explain all the sand. But it was the only thing that made sense. Daddy had gotten that Old-Timer's disease real bad before he went. Maybe Randall was getting a touch of it.

If somebody had really found what he had done, why just take the shirt? And why not take it to the police? It didn't add up and it didn't paint the right picture of someone out to get him. But there was an unease he couldn't shake and it was driving him to the possibility of day-drinking.

If police were on his trail, he wouldn't want to be at home where they could corner him. But going out and about could mean running into them just the same.

Easy, old boy. No sense in doing The Man a favor and cornering yourself so they don't have to.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and reached for his beer. Once he started, he couldn't stop. If there was ever a day to take Randall without a fight, it was that day. But nobody came calling. He fell asleep in front of the TV without interruption.

There was something about surviving the previous day and the night that followed that made him feel better about it all. BUT—If there was anything that his string of bad marriages should have taught him, it was that feelings aren't everything.

A special bulletin popped on the TV screen. There was a breakthrough in the missing girl case. Her shirt had been found. The same one in the picture plastered all over every TV in the broadcasting area. It had washed down the river and was found by hikers. Police were calling it a breath of fresh air.

Randall couldn't breathe.

He was glued to his television from that moment forward, waiting for any and all "special reports" as things progressed. He got more beer in his system as soon as he could stomach it.

His brain spun in circles all day long and no amount of drink could stop it.

There was a lot more news to be seen in the days that followed. It was good news unless your name was Randall. Police and investigators were crawling all over his neck of the woods trying to backtrack the journey of the shirt that Randall, so far as he knew, buried twice.

Alcohol and panic drove him to once again take his shovel and his pistol out to where the girl had been laid. It was a decision made too late. Voices of other people bounced off the trees as he neared the shallow grave.

"No. No, no, NO." he muttered.

Peering from the timber, he saw a team of people digging in the exact spot the girl had been buried. It was a miracle that his heart didn't explode. But something in his mind did. He stood there in stunned silence and waited for the big moment.

The team was huddled around, focused on the dig. One of them held back a couple of dogs, no doubt responsible for the pinpoint accuracy of their find.

The digging stopped. There was no ripple of excitement. Several of them scratched their heads. One of them got on a walkie and said something that Randall couldn't hear. They each drifted away from the hole. The profoundly and utterly empty hole.

"Let's get outta here. Startin' to look like rain," one of them said.

There were no words to describe what Randall was feeling. One soul-searing anxiety was quenched while another started to kindle. He knew it was stupid to return to the scene of the crime before the team had completely cleared out, but he had to see. He had to make sure it wasn't a trick of the light.

He eyed the team which was now some distance away and they didn't look like they were coming back. He leaned over the hole. Yep, it was empty. Nothing there but air. No clothes. No girly trinkets. No cell phone. None of the stuff he had buried there. He touched the wet sand with shaking fingers. Hold on. There was something under there. Something the team would have found if they had just dug a little deeper.

It was a brass pocket watch. Randall's heart stopped beating for several seconds.

He patted his pockets furiously. He did this several times due to the fact that he couldn't believe what his senses were telling him: Daddy's pocket watch wasn't on him.

But that's the one thing he never lost. He kept it close like Daddy's memory depended on it. But it wasn't in his pockets. It was in his hand. And it had been in the grave.

Just one more stroke of the shovel and those damn investigators could have gotten the watch, popped it open and seen Daddy's name engraved on the inside of the cover. He specifically wore pants with deep pockets so that there was no chance of him ever dropping that watch. If Randall's vocabulary had been bigger, his word choice for the occasion would have been "inexplicable."

The sky was darkening fast. He remained rooted to the spot even as the first few drops struck him. He only moved when it began to come down hard.

The beer was disappearing fast and Randall questioned if he'd be brave enough to go into town to buy more for the evening. Hell, he had all kinds of questions. But they weren't anything he could ask of anyone. All he could do was drown them out with drink.

The storm turned the early afternoon into night. The thunder was a battering ram against Randall's sanity. He stared at the light show created by the lightning grazing the tops of the trees.

It created the classic illusion of monsters with long jagged arms. Snapshots of the nightmares that Randall endured as a boy. He dreamed about demonic monsters so much that he became one. Nah, he couldn't blame this on his dreams. Not entirely.

His thoughts were broken when the congruity of the vista was broken. One of the flashes outlined a shape that was a little too human. Someone with long hair flattened by the rain. Someone deprived of their clothes. Someone with their gaze leveled right at Randall's window where he sat staring.

He wavered in his seat, half-preparing to get up. Another flash. Someone was out there and they were closer, their naked skin gleaming like the moon. Randall's brain was trying to protect itself. It wanted to process the fact that his nude visitor looked female. But it didn't dare add this bit to the stack of mind-shattering information it had already taken in.

Randall was a simple man used to processing simple things: Hide. Run. Kill. Harm. Escape.

He didn't have the bandwidth for the veil that his senses were trying to pierce.

There was a great clawed hand reaching from the back of his head, reaching past memories of Daddy beating Mama, past memories of getting beaten by the big kids on every playground he ever set foot on, past memories of that teacher that liked to get him alone and touch him, past memories of that first kill, his best friend right before they were going to graduate, past memories of the rush he got when he realized that killing was the key to getting everything he ever wanted, past the memory of how comfortable and carefree he was when he buried that girl by the river, past the memory of—something beat on his door as loud as the thunder, causing him to mess his drawers with the beer sludge he had been holding in.

He screamed and immediately cursed himself for letting whoever was out there know that he was home. Next thing he knew, the door was no longer on its hinges. It sailed across the room and hit a far wall.

He fumbled for his gun on the table and it resisted his inebriated fingers. The footsteps were on top of him the moment he got a grip.

Well, the storm eventually burned out. Investigators, detectives, and forensics were back out as soon as they could be. The discovery of the shirt had reinvigorated them and they wanted to get to the bottom of the case while the bottom could still be found.

The hounds plodded ahead, eager to please their humans. But it became clear that they were going the same way they had before. Bill squinted at the site of the shallow grave, disappointed at first. But he elbowed the closest teammate next to him.

"Hey, we didn't fill that hole in, did we?"

His accomplice just shook his head.

Bill spotted a shovel, an army-issued type. The kind that nobody on his unit would use.

"Somebody's been here! Let's go!"

So they dug the same spot again. To their surprise, there was a body this time. They found her. She was naked and in terrible condition. But it was clearly her. There were the rest of her clothes. Her things, including her phone.

This wasn't going to be good news for her parents, but it meant that they could get some closure.

Taking her out of the grave revealed another surprise. There was a second body directly under her. His expired ID said he was a Randall O'Connor. His heart had been violently torn out of his chest and shoved down inside his esophagus.

Bill tightened his lips. What kind of maniac doesn't just stop at killing, but moves the bodies around to taunt law enforcement?

"We're coming for you, ya bastard," Bill growled. "Wherever you are."