POST-MORTEM RELEASE: STATEMENT OF EVENTS
VICTIM ACCOUNT, NOVEMBER 24. 2022
Found on notepad, basement. Eleven bodies. No survivors. Single account of events, final written statement to be published here, by victim request.
- Agent Beauregard, Supernatural Homicide Department
Today is Thursday, November 24, 2022. Nana’s eyes are darkly ringed– I can tell she’s stayed up all night, baking and frying and seasoning in preparation. A massive turkey sits on the table, seasoned and browned, flanked opposite by potatoes and stuffing and soups and squash, brussel sprouts and brocoletti and all manners of sauces and gravies. Two pies rest on the windowsill, pumpkin and apple, and their sweet scent washes over the party, heady and agreeable.
Everyone’s here. All twelve of us, mostly grandparents and aunts and uncles. I’m easily old enough to be considered grown, but still they seat me at the kid’s table, with my younger sister, and our two cousins– little rambunctious youngsters with too much of a mind for mischief. The eldest, Asher, is just ten; the smallest of all, Lucas, just five, and gushing with tales of the first-grade.
I think they admire me, in their loud, clingy way– dangling off my arms and trying to wrestle me to the ground at any opportunity. I appreciate being included, although I don’t much care for the occasional scratch or bruise their affection entails. They play rough, a bit like teething puppies, but I’d always assumed they’d be harmless.
I write from the basement. We’re all holed up down here, all ten of us. It’s only a matter of time before the door gives, and we’re all lost.
I guess I had always just assumed the kids were harmless enough. I didn’t have any reason to believe otherwise, but something changed about an hour ago, and it’s a mistake that’ll likely cost me my life.
My little cousins like making “movies,” as they call them, or, rather, little skits or parodies– re-envisioning their favorite scenes from Ninjago and The Dragon Prince and whatever else they watch before bed on weekends. Shortly before dinner, on November 24th, they decided to stage a horror skit– a rather innocuous activity, which I agreed to film gladly.
The littlest, Lucas, wanted to play the monster.
“But you’re not scary enough,’” whined Asher, clearly envying the role of his brother. “You’re too little, you look silly when you make those faces.”
I don’t know how or why it happened. I don’t know if whatever he was had just been lying dormant, or if something possessed him that night. I’ll never know for sure, but eventually he just wasn’t Lucas anymore.
“Scarier!” his big brother yelled, frustrated. “You’re just not scary. You’re not good at this.”
Lucas frowned. With every jeer and jab, he tried a bit hardier, but you could tell the criticism was bothering him. Being the littlest, he was prone to tantrums, and I waited for one to bubble up, full of tears and perhaps an angry scream or two. He was only five, after all.
But he kept trying, harder and harder, take after take. He walked the same hallway over and over again, growling, clawing at the walls, at his face. Asher continued to drill him, but no tantrum came. Instead, for a moment, it seemed the house had a meltdown– the power went out, wind seemed to whistle in from between windows and beneath doors, channels of drafts running down my neck and pooling in the hallway. Lucas stood stock still, just for a moment, until the lights flickered on once again, in a trembling snap.
“You kids okay!?!” Nana Maggie shouted from the kitchen, stirring freshly made gravy on the stovetop. “I think there were too many lights on. Turn one off in the living room, if you can!” We turned off two, the floor lamp and a little horse shaped ceramic piece, over by the bookshelf.
Now– I’m not entirely sure it was an overloaded circuit. Lucas seemed to move differently after it all, as if compelled to put on an increasingly terrifying performance. It wasn’t right, how he was moving. He was charged with a sort of dense, sinister energy, seeped deep into his tiny frame, turning his eyes pale and glossy. His tongue lolled out of his mouth.
One simply isn’t scared of a five year-old. After all, what can a five year-old do, in his worst moments, other than pull loose a few tufts of hair, or kick a few shins? But Lucas didn’t seem much like a five year-old anymore, hardly like a boy at all.
Asher grinned, oblivious but finally pleased. “Start rolling!” he cried, rubbing his hands together. “This looks great!”
Lucas advanced. His gait was stiffened, he dragged his left leg along as if it were no longer useful. Wailing, he clawed again at the walls, and, this time, tore the wallpaper with him, leaving deep gouges in the drywall, bloodied trails from broken fingernails. Asher’s eyes widened. Lucas was closer now. He raised his hands to scratch his face, but there was no regulation of force, no hesitation. It wasn’t acting. His fingers were writhing, grabbing, pinching, clawing– pulling at the flesh of his cheeks and chin. He reached towards his eyes. With a sickening tearing sound, a ripping squelch, he tore the skin from his eyelids. Pale eyes stared back, unblinking and welling with blood. Jagged scratches raced down his face, and those too weeped in red.
There was something very wrong with Lucas.
They say in circumstances of profound fear, “fight or flight” kicks in. But me, I just froze. Asher began crying, silently. I noticed I had dropped my phone. The filming dot blinked in the corner of the screen, as the phone lay, face down, on hardwood. The house must’ve been built on a slant, because blood crept across the floorboards and pooled beside it.
Everything seemed to slow then. Nana called out from the kitchen.
“Kids! You alright in there? What’s happening? It’s almost time to eat!”
Dinner was the least of my concerns, then, but Lucas– he swiveled on his heel, and with sudden swiftness, scrabbled for the kitchen. He began making a horrendous crunching sound, that I recognized –horribly– to be the sound of teeth snapping. He slammed his jaw up and down and up again with such staggering force that his teeth broke, leaving only jagged, bloody shards…fit for what– I dared not imagine.
He scrabbled towards the kitchen, and, suddenly, shock and paralysis gave way to pure and utter panic. Asher took off for the living room, screaming for his parents, a strangled and sobbing cry. I ran for the kitchen, where Nana stood with her back turned, still stirring the gravy, and humming to herself.
Lucas was faster than I, and nearly close enough to pull at Nana’s apron strings. With a rattling howl, he sank his jagged teeth into her hip, pulling forth a resounding pop– like deboning a turkey, when the bones are separated at the joints. Nana yelled, fell to the side, and promptly dropped the entire pot of gravy on Lucas’s dark, shaggy head. It bubbled and seeped over his shoulders, thick and viscous, melting down his face and throwing forth the scent of burning hair, skin. He seemed unfazed, but in the single moment he buffered –feeling perhaps a whisper of pain as his nose fell away– I began to drag Nana from the kitchen. The basement stairs were a feat –her leg was clearly out of socket– and the bite lay dangerously close to her femoral artery. I pulled her down the stairs. Her apron came undone halfway, catching on a nail, but we made it to the basement. Nana sobbed and clutched her leg, blood pooled around her. “Where’s Lucas?” she cried, softly. I dared not answer.
By then, family had begun pouring down the steep basement stairs, mothers falling over fathers, grandparents tripping and stumbling, clutching their bad backs and hips as they hurried. Lucas’s mother was missing three fingers from her right hand, cleanly snapped off, likely bitten. Perhaps she had tried to reason with Lucas, a last ditch effort of motherly consolation. I don’t know. Lucas’s father never made it down at all– from upstairs, only one set of footfall, light and abnormal, sounded. Dust fell gently from above, like snowfall, as what was once Lucas paced, scrabbled, slithered.
The door to the basement hadn’t been closed, and from the top, I could just faintly see Lucas’s silhouette. He was on all fours now, small and compact, but twisted, broken. Limbs were distended, others ripped far from socket. Fingers stretched every which way, fanned and folded. There wasn’t much of a head anymore, at least not one recognizably human. He dripped a foul smelling mixture of melted flesh, gravy, and spilt blood, all brown and red and oily.
Nana started crying from the floor, where she lay.
I felt a single tear fall from my left eye. This is how I’ll die. The truth hit me like a truck. There were no doors in the basement, no windows more than a few inches wide. The door could hold him perhaps for a few minutes –a half-hour at best– but it was hollow, made of that thin, cheap wood. The kind you could punch through, if you tried real hard.
Vision blurry, I ran up the stairs, my mom and another uncle in hot pursuit. We slammed the door shut with a resounding crack, just seconds before Lucas, sliding now in a pool of sludge, reached the landing. We held fast, hearing his scratching from the door’s opposite face. The door had no lock, no bolt, and so we just held it there, the three of us, pressed against one another in desperation.
There was a table in the basement. Most of the dishes had been laid out already– tin foil and plastic wrap pulled back gently. The sweet pie scent still wafted deliciously from the windowsill, and perhaps it still would, after it all, mingled with the metallic scent of blood.
We had planned to eat together, down here. The spread was beautiful. The turkey sat on the table, both main course and centerpiece, now grown cold. Asher sat crying on the landing. “Good enough, good enough, good enough…” he whispered, rocking back and forth. His face was wet and glistened in the faint light–- no one had thought to turn on the lamp, and it was doubtful anyone ever would.
A half-hour gone now and I’ve left the barricade by the door, replaced by an aunt. She used to play softball in high school. She’s strong, perhaps not enough, but strong. Lucas, or whatever used to be Lucas, can now reach his fingers through the clawed fragments of the door. He screams and rattles and clicks from above, digging down, punctuating any silence with a strangled, broken cry. His fingernails have to be nearly ground down by now, but still, he advances.
I write from a paper pad by the table. I found Nana’s old fountain pen in the pocket of her apron, halfway up the stairs. She’s nearly unconscious from the blood loss. I doubt we have long left.
Today is Thursday, November 24, 2022. Today is Thanksgiving, and we’re all on the menu.