It started one Friday evening. All of the goats were standing still, staring intently into the woods. They didn't move, they didn't make a sound.
When a derelict truck is found in the driveway, Scott and his friend Gina search the wood lot out back...
Jason awoke with a start. It took him quite some time to get his bearings and remember where he was. The hospital. At least that's what they called it. He thought of it more like a prison. And not a pleasant one at that. Waking from nightmares in that place had become commonplace.
But the nightmares were only annoying. The real horror was what he'd encountered in the woods that day, the thought that it was real. But he knew he couldn't talk about it with these people. They already thought he was crazy. What would they think if he told them he'd seen a giant spider tearing his friends apart, all the while laughing and chewing on their arms and legs?
Insane. That's what they'd think. Sometimes Jason thought that too. But better to be insane than eaten alive by a big-ass spider. And yet, he knew it best not to tell anyone about it. The only problem was, he was afraid that if he opened his mouth to speak, all that horror would just come spilling out. So he kept quiet. He spoke to no one. He listened to everyone. And most nights, he had terrible nightmares.
He knew what needed to be done. He knew that he was the one to do it. So he waited for his chance. On Wednesday, January 6, 2020, his chance came.
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Marilyn Bastian had been a resident of Creekside Sanitorium for several months. Forty-seven years old and married to the same man for thirty years. Well, it would have been thirty years if he had lived until August.
Charles Bastian had been a bit of a bastard (living up to his grade school nick-name). He barely bothered to hide it when he was having an affair with the waitress from the diner, the hostess at his favorite restaurant, the Uber driver that gave him a lift when the car was in the shop, the girl at the service desk in the shop where the car was. The list just goes on.
And meanwhile, he didn't pay much attention to his wife, Marilyn. At least not the kind of attention she would have liked. Mostly he complained about the way she kept the house, the food she cooked, the clothes she wore, etc, etc, etc. When he wasn't complaining, he was generally slapping her around. She needs a firm hand, he often thought and used his firm hands to batter and bruise her, sometimes breaking a bone or two.
Marilyn's was not a happy marriage. But the day came when Charles (Chucky, to the waitress at the diner) was particularly unhappy with his wife. After an extended bout of verbal abuse, he decided he'd had enough of her. He grabbed her by the throat and began slamming her head against the kitchen door frame.
This might have worked out for him had he chosen a different door for this particular activity. But alas, the kitchen knife block was well within Marilyn's reach. Although battered, bloody and barely conscious (maybe because she was barely conscious), she managed to slip the chef's knife out of the block and place it firmly in her husband's neck. It went in the left side and poked out the right.
"I didn't realize that knife was so long!" she thought at the time. "Or maybe I didn't think his neck was so skinny."
Either way, the blade severed a few major arteries and effectively blocked his esophagus. He stumbled backwards, trying, without success, to remove the offending cutlery before falling, face first, to the floor, where he gurgled his way to oblivion.
