Whisper Down the Lane, Clay Chapman [best short books to read txt] 📗

been following me. Can’t be an accident.

“I’m sorry if I—”

“Stay away from me!” I rush off, leaving him by the side of the highway. I glance over my shoulder to make sure he’s not following. He stands there, struck. His girlfriend has crossed the street now, the two of them standing together, staring at me as I pick up my pace.

“That’s him?” I swear I hear her whisper.

“That’s him.”

The farmers market. The customers are watching. Staring. Now they’re all whispering. “That’s him,” they say. “The art teacher.” They know who I am. How do they all know?

What if…

People are watching. On the street. From the other side of windows. They have the same look in their eyes. I see them speaking to each other, discussing me under their breath, their hushed tones just out of earshot. What if they’ve always been here, hiding among us?

have you seen me? The telephone poles all ask the same question.

Now I can. I see them all.

missing. help. It’s too late. The animals go first. That’s a part of their ritual. Now they’re ready for me. They don’t think I see them. I have to pretend. Pretend that I don’t notice.

It’s impossible not to sense their eyes following me down the street, wherever I go.

There are eyes everywhere.

They are here. Right now. Hiding in plain sight. They look like you or me or anyone else.

But they are watching. Always watching.

I never believed. Never thought it was true.

What if…? What if Mom was right? What if she saw them and I didn’t believe her?

What if the stories are true?

Mr. Cassavetes’s closing thought was practically a sermon. He stood before the studio audience as if they were his congregation. The devil is here, he said, in our backyard, in our homes, as we speak. His followers, his disciples, are hidden among us at this very moment. There is a widespread network of Satan worshippers operating throughout our great nation, he proclaimed. This secret society exists in the open daylight, right under the sun for all to see. They are engaged in child pornography. Sex trafficking. The torture of children. They brainwash our boys and girls into becoming devil worshippers, continuing their profane legacy…

These devil worshippers have infiltrated the highest levels of our society. They are embedded within the very institutions that hold our nation up and maintain its laws, in order to subvert our society, subvert our institutions, subvert our very laws. They want to create chaos. They want to let this world burn. Its houses of worship, its schools. They want the world to descend into darkness and let their master rise, rise up and bask in the flames of our nation.

How did Mr. Cassavetes know?

Because our children told us so, he said. From the mouths of babes, we’ve been told that this threat is here. That evil is here. Evil walks amongst us and we have to heed the warning.

I never believed. I never believed because I was the one who made it up. The stories were mine. The lies. I never believed—until now. Until the devil began believing in me.

In Richard.

I thought I could run away from myself. Hide. But there’s no hiding. Not from them.

What if the people living here have known about me this whole time? What if they followed me? They’ve known all along. They’ve just been waiting for the right moment.

Full circle.

These people have always been too perfect. Too clean. All the cookie-cutter residents, wearing crisp catalogue-brand clothes, the refurbished stores for a revamped Danvers brought back from the dead, the prefab antiquity of this entire gentrified hamlet…it’s all a façade.

A mask.

I’ve been in their box this whole time, an animal imprisoned in their cardboard container, trying to claw my way out…but the walls are too high. I’m trapped in this town.

I’m their sacrifice. All this time they’ve been prodding me along, pushing me in whatever direction they needed me to go. Leading me to this. This has been their plan all along. I never wanted to be an art teacher. I never planned to have a wife and kid. They made me this way. They turned me into him.

Now I see them everywhere. You have to know what to look for.

The devil’s in the details.

They look like us. Talk like us.

They are us.

There. That woman. There. That man. This whole fucking fake town. Danvers is just an elaborate cage to keep me in until they’re ready. Finish what they started all those years ago.

To sacrifice me.

I’m trapped. A rabbit in a cardboard box. I rub my eyes, kneading the sleeplessness from them. The sheer weight of exhaustion. Everything’s blurring. The sun stings.

A bird in my pocket begins to trill.

My phone.

I don’t want to answer—but how can’t I? This is never going to end. They know where I am. They’ve always known. I answer without saying a word, bringing the phone to my ear.

“It’s time, Sean,” Mom whispers. Her voice sounds so compassionate. There’s a tenderness to her words, I can hear it. “Put an end to all this. It’s for your own good, son.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” I sound pitiful. Such a frightened little boy.

“Come home, Sean. Come back to me. I’m waiting for you, honey.”

The line goes dead.

I need to run. Hide. Get as far away from these people as humanly possible. I sense them following. They’re right behind me, just at my back, keeping a safe distance so I won’t notice. But there’s more of them now. More eyes. All of them saying my name. Whispering it.

They know my name. They all know my name.

Sean.

Sean.

Sean.

School. I can hide in my classroom. It’s the only place. There’s nowhere else for me now.

Nowhere safe.

DAMNED IF YOU DO

  SEAN: 1983

“Wake up, Sean.”

First he felt fingernails. Then shaking. He couldn’t wake up. He was tired. So very tired.

“Sean, wake up…Sean!”

His eyes snapped open. The room was dark, but he could just barely make out his mother kneeling right next to him, her hands