1971, it was the summer of drugs. In a small semi rural town called Sunland/Tujunga Merril Graves discovers life through hallucinogenics and the horrors of the mind....
In less than a heartbeat Dales head was at Gales' breast! It happened so fast everyone was stunned to silence for a moment, then the blood, turning Gales bikini top crimson, Dales' head making gobbling, gnawing sounds on her breast. She grabbed the head with both hands, screaming at the top of her lungs but unable to pull it off. Everything paused then, silent, horrified, screaming faces of terrified girls caught between time, stopped, trapped in a photograph, Kodachrome grotesqueness, only my eyes able to move.
My hearing especially acute, behind me, I heard a new record dropping on the turntable. Slowly, I was able to turn and saw the needle drop on the vinyl, the heartbeat from the first track of The Dark Side of the Moon, began thumping quietly through the speakers. I turned in my chair as everything started moving again, the heartbeat growing louder and louder, bass shaking the floors as the lady on the album began screaming AHH AHH AHH AHH!!!
I turned just as fucking Heather walked out of the much too yellow kitchen and dropped a huge stainless steel cleaver halfway through the top of Gales' head, splitting it in two down to her shoulders. Terror, terror, TERROR was all that remained of me. The cleaver was so buried in Gale that Heather was struggling to pull it out. Then Mr. Worm, dressed in a pink tuxedo with a red polka dot clown-sized bow tie, stepped out and grabbed the cleaver's handle and said, "man you really stuck that fucker in there kiddo," and wrestled it back and forth until it came free.
I looked around the table and the other two girls were still frozen as Worm danced around behind them, "Eeny meeny mini moe, which of these girls get to go home."He was shining the suns rays off the bloody cleaver in my eyes, as he raised it over my Michelle's head, blood dripping in her blond hair, the input was too much for my brain to untangle. The repetitive sound of Dark Side, louder and louder, mad with laughter, driving me crazy till all I was was screams of terror tearing at my throat!
Then in the distance, I heard the sound of an engine racing, louder and louder and louder then
CRASH!!!
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Right through the front of the house, a cacophony of glass and walls and revving engines turning the living room into a mass of wreckage with Jimmy's Studebaker pickup truck, seemingly undamaged, in the middle of the maw. Popping his head up from the driver's side of the truck , he yelled.
"Get in the truck, NOW!" he commanded.
It took a couple beats to try and make sense of what I was seeing. "COME ON FUCKER!" he yelled. With no time to think I followed his command and grabbed Michelle by the wrist and tried to drag her with me but she wouldn't move, she sat like a statue, solid and permanent. I turned to look at the Miner and he just shook his head, "not this time son, hurry before I can't help either one of you.
Tears running down my cheeks I made my way to the truck as if on autopilot, climbing through the wreckage as "Money" came on the record player. I sang it to myself under my breath, "Money, get back, get a good job with good pay and your okay," My shaking hand got a grip on the Stude's door handle and drug it open through the debris and climbed in. I didn't even get the door slammed shut before Jimmy was cramming the big shifter in Reverse with a grind and we were backing out of there.
Now the whole ghost crew was laughing and trying to catch up with the truck as it struggled to back out of the house. A couple of big bounces and the sound of shit dragging all over the bottom of the truck and we were free. Jimmy got out in the street, crammed it in first gear, popped the clutch and the smell of burnt rubber swept us away from the terror, leaving me with a frozen brain that could no longer think.
Jimmy was talking over the sound of the truck, but I could not make any sense of what the words he was saying meant. "That was a close one son, now listen to me, do you know where you are?" I heard the words but I was unable to decipher them, I stared blankly out the windshield, it seemed like we were going awfully fast, much faster than an old beat up truck should be going. I knew Jimmy was trying to tell me something but I was not present, I was only an occupant, a body without will, sectioned off in some back room in my mind, a witness, nothing more.
Jimmy then grabbed me by the arm and shook me hard yelling ...
