Night 5: “Play-thing”
“This is silly,” he said after awhile. I didn’t disagree.
We were in a yard behind a wood house. The house had two balconies, one in the front and long and one in the back overlooking the yard. The house itself was decrepit and abandoned.
We had found the house while out cruising.
It was along a grid road leading south from the city and towards a town called Minton. Jct. 623.
The front yard was very small compared to the back yard. The front yard was overgrown grass and there was a line of shorter grass running down the middle and towards the house’s front cement steps. The shorter grass was where the sidewalk had been.
First we had tried the front and found it locked.
We walked around peering at the windows but all were boarded up with warped, decay-weakened wood.
We walked around back.
There the back yard really opened up and though it was overgrown too you could tell by its size and by the solid shelter-belt surrounding it like a barricade that this had once been a sturdy household. If we looked we probably would’ve found a break in the trees where a lane would’ve been, leading beyond to some squat wooden bins where spare tractor tires and rolls of fence-wire might still remain.
It was one of the last nice days of the year and it was a quiet road. The house was an excuse to stay out in the sun. We went back to the truck and got a football. We went back to the back yard and starting tossing the ball.
“This is silly,” my friend said after awhile. I didn’t disagree.
As we were walking back a sound came from within.
It was a thumping sound.
Thump thump thump thump.
It came from inside the house and it came from the second level. Something was banging against the dried and wooden windows along the second floor.
It didn’t stay in one place. There was one window up to the right.
Thump thump thump thump.
When we heard it we looked and then we heard it again, without ample pause, from the window up and to the left:
Thump thump thump thump!
Then we heard it from the back.
Thump THUMP THUMP THUMP!
Then again we heard it. But this time it came from even higher. It must have come from the attic.
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP!!
My friend suddenly and angrily threw the football at one of the windows. Survival instinct, maybe.
It cracked through the weak wood and flew in.
“No way I’m getting that,” I said.
“No way I’m getting that either,” said my friend. “Sorry. I didn’t think it would go through.”
“No problem. Let’s just go.”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” said my friend.
“Nope. This was stupid,” I said. Then we ran.
We ran back to the truck.
We got in.
I backed up.
I backed up and started going the opposite way we had come. Towards home.
The house was on the passenger’s side. As I pulled away we both saw it coming towards us: a perfect spiral.
The football slammed against the truck’s passenger window. It hit right where my friend’s head would have been had the window been open.
“Jesus fuck!” he said.
I tore away. I drove 120 down the grid and 140 up the highway.
I dropped off my friend back in the city. I drove home.
The next morning I was asked to come back over to my friend’s place but not by my friend, by his wife.
I drove over.
“I-I don’t know what to do,” she told me. “I called the police but I don’t want them to think… But I was working so they can’t think I did it, can they?”
She had been waiting outside on the doorstep.
She was a nurse and she must’ve just come off work; she was still in her scrubs.
Her scrubs were smeared in the front and her hands were pale and smeared and trembling.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said again. “I just came home and… And the way he… He can’t have done that himself, he can’t have. He can’t have done that to himself. He can’t have. He can’t have. He can’t have…“
I went inside and upstairs to their bedroom.
He was on the floor and my friend’s wife was right; he couldn’t have slashed himself open like that.
Over and over.
All over his stomach.
His arms.
Deep through the pants of his legs.
And then there was one long slash, it followed the hair-line of his forehead. It then cut off abruptly as if he had died while still scalping himself.
There was a message in streaky-red above the headboard of the bed:
WHY WON’T YOU PLAY WITH ME???
Later that night I came home.
In my state I could see three of them waiting there on the bed but I knew that that was just the booze.
My football.
The Compendium 