My mother and father are going through a divorce. There’s not much backstory to that, mom had been fooling around with a co-worker and thought she was smarter than she really was. It didn’t take dad long to catch them in the act once he suspected something was going on between them. He had called mom and told her he would be late in from the office. In reality, he would come in at his usual time but park a block down the road from our house. He saw how a nice car had parked in our driveway and a man maybe ten years his junior barged in the house like he owned it.
My dad waited some 10 minutes before walking to the house, so to not alert my mom or the man inside. When he went inside he caught the two fucking in the kitchen as they probably had been doing dozens of times before. My dad beat that man within an inch of his life while mom called the police. Although no charges were filed thanks to dad being friends with some of the police in our small town, he did spend the night in a jail cell. He confessed to me he had never slept better.
Due to the very complicated legal battle that was underway, my parents decided I would be spending the summer with my grandfather. I didn’t know the man, I had maybe seen him once when I was six at some family reunion. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic to be taking care of me either. “Mara this isn’t a good time for him to come over… Things are complicated over here on the summers.” I overheard him while he was talking to my mother on the phone. “For fucks sake dad, I never ask anything from you, just look after him until we get the divorce sorted out with the lawyers.”
A week later I was on the road with my dad, we had to drive from Kansas City all the way to Des Moines. I used to enjoy road trips with my dad but this one wasn’t fun and it certainly was a lot quieter. After what felt like a few hours of watching YouTube videos and browsing Reddit, if only to break the silence I asked my dad what my grandpa was like. “He hasn’t really been in your life much but he’s not a bad man. Your grandfather is a recluse now a days but he did love you whenever he was around back in the day.” I paused for a moment and asked: “What changed?”
My dad, not moving his eyes from the road, just answered: “You’ll have to ask him that yourself when you get there.” The neighborhood was rundown. It didn’t look like one of those bad neighborhoods where being stabbed or shot was likely. It looked more abandoned and unkempt. After driving past a few eyesores, we got to a relatively nice-looking house.
Two stories, lawn well-kept and looked entirely out of place compared to everything around it. From inside came an elderly man who somewhat resembled my mother in some facial aspects. “Are you kidding me, dad? That guy is going to kill over before the night is through.” I said, not trying to hide my frustration with the situation. “Don’t judge a book by its cover. He’s a Vietnam vet.”
I grabbed my baggage and walked past my grandfather, who barely acknowledged me as he went straight to talk to my father. I dropped my bags inside of the impressive house, and a window drew my attention. From it, I could see Grandpa and Dad having some type of heated discussion. They were too far away for me to make out anything they were saying, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t exactly welcome. My dad pulled away from the driveway, and Grandpa walked back to the house defeated.
I went to pick up my bags and tried not to make my eavesdropping too obvious. We met at the staircase, and Grandpa awkwardly uttered: “Hey Ben…been a while hasn’t it?” his pathetic excuse for small talk just made the whole situation even more uncomfortable. “Look…grandpa. I know I’m not wanted here, and I’m sorry my parents just dumped me here, but it looks like we are stuck with each other for a few weeks.”
Grandpa looked a bit shocked or maybe relieved at how direct I was with him. “It’s not that I don’t want you here… This place isn’t exactly safe on the summers… but you are already here. If you are going to stay here there’s some rules you absolutely can not break under any circumstances.” This whole interaction had me a bit confused as to why my parents would ever send me to live with this guy for any length of time. “You can only go outside during the day, and you can not speak to anyone if you see anyone outside. Absolutely no going outside during the night. Under any circumstances, it doesn’t matter what you see or hear.”
I didn’t know if my grandfather was lying in order to freak me out and get me back to my parents faster, or there was actually a reason behind those rules he put in place. In any case, I nodded, and my grandpa showed me the room I was to stay in for a few weeks. We went up the stairs, and he opened a door to a room seemingly stuck in time, looked like 80’s décor was all over the place. “This used to be your mothers room… before she went to live with your late grandma.” The room had a single window overviewing the house entrance and neighborhood.
I settled down and made myself at for the next few hours watching YouTube videos and scrolling through reddit. Late at night, my service was interrupted, and I was out of entertainment and prey to my insomnia. I walked downstairs to see what my grandpa was up to, and I found him passed out in his sofa next to a half bottle of whiskey. Boredom and curiosity got the better of me and decided to pour myself a glass of grandpas top shelf stuff. I immediately regretted it as I realized I was swallowing fire, never really had any hard liquor before, and I definitely was not ready for it.
Out of the blue, I started hearing music coming from the outside, I thought the booze was hitting me somehow because I was hearing ice-cream truck music. I had not seen an ice-cream truck maybe since I was a kid and much less at so long after dark, yet I could still hear those very distinctive tunes. I went upstairs since moms old room had a great view of the neighborhood, and to my surprise, there was an old, timey looking ice-cream truck parked outside under a light pole. I remembered grandpa’s earlier warning: “Absolutely no going outside during the night, under any circumstances, it doesn’t matter what you see or hear.” Maybe it was my morbid curiosity or that miniscule amount of whiskey I had but I said fuck it and decided to check it out.
I quietly went down the stairs and sneaked past grandpa who was still passed out. I closed the front door behind me and walked over to the ice cream truck. The light pole illuminated the truck to where there was perfect visibility in an otherwise dark and uninhabited street. The truck was oddly shaped, like it was designed in the 50’s yet looked like it was in pristine condition. The joyful music stopped as soon as I was standing right in front of the trucks service window.
“Hello? Is there anybody in there?” I asked with a wave of anxiety splashing over me. It took enough time that I was ready to turn around and walk back to the house when I heard a reply coming in from the truck. “Yes son, there’s certainly someone in here.”
The service window slid open, and a skinny man was ready to attend me. He wore badly fitting white clothes an ice-cream man would wear in the 50s, complete with slicked back hair and a white hat. “Say you look like you could be Maras boy, am I right?” The creepy looking man in front of me was somehow familiar with my mom as she used her first name. “How do you know my mom?”
The ice cream man gave me a sickly smile from ear to ear that had me convinced his skin would break and tear around his mouth. “She and I were good friends when she was around… Do you want to be good friends too?” Something absolutely felt off about the guy that was in front of me, and every fiber of my body screamed to get the hell out of there. “Actually I think I should be going. My grandpa could wake up any minute now.”
The man frowned yet seemed understanding. “Of course, I don’t want to cause you any trouble, but before you go, try some of my ice cream. It’s to die for.” Before I could reject his offer, he extended his hand, which was unnaturally long, and was holding an already served strawberry ice-cream cone. “It’ll be our little secret.”
I hesitated for a moment but took the ice cream from him, not wanting to anger the creep. I licked the ice cream, and it actually tasted better than any ice cream I had before. Before I could compliment him, the light pole started to fail. Light was flashing on and off, and I could hear the ice cream man giggle and then full on cackle. As soon as the light would come back on I could see that the ice-cream truck had turned into a rusty unserviceable junk pile, and the ice-cream I was holding in my hand stank like a putrid carcass and had gone from strawberry ice-cream to chunks of human flesh.
The ice cream man grabbed ahold of my shirt with his inhumanly long limb. “My ice cream tastes so much better when it’s made out of kids!” I panicked and tried as hard as I could to break free, eventually ripping my shirt and falling to the ground. The ice cream man shrieked and tried to squeeze out of his service window. I immediately got up and sprinted as fast as I could back to the house looking back only once I was opening the door to see that the creature dressed in a man’s clothes was only a few feet behind me, running on all four elongated limbs.
I slammed the door shut and locked it behind me. I waited for the inevitable impact of that creature with the door, desperately trying to knock it down, but it never came. “What did you do?” My grandpa had gotten up from his sofa and had a double barrel shotgun in his hands. “I… I didn’t mean to… Ice-cream man.” Were the only words I could say while out of breath.
My grandpa pulled me in closer and away from the door. “That thing has been away since it took all the children, probably starving. Now that it knows about you… it won’t stop.” We heard a crash upstairs, and I knew it had gotten in. we could hear how fast it ran from one side to the other upstairs. “We need to get out of here.”
My grandpa signaled for me to get the grab the keys for his car from the table near the door, as I got the keys I saw my grandpa aim at the top of the staircase to the ice-cream man that was on all fours drooling at us. The creature ran down the stairs, and Grandpa shot it as it fell the rest of the way down and produced an inhuman wail. We ran out the door and sprinted to grandpa’s car only to have that creature follow us only moments later. Grandpa shot at it again as I started the car and drove away into the night. It would be a long drive back to Kansas City, but neither of us would be getting much sleep.
As I started to relax a bit from this life changing experience, I looked at my rearview mirror and saw that the ice cream truck was following and gaining on us. I floored it and started to leave the truck in the dust when we heard a loud bang on the roof of the car. The ice-cream man broke the driver side window and grabbed me by the hair, desperately trying to pull me out. Grandpa took control of the wheel while trying to hold on to me as I was halfway out of the window at this point. Before that thing could drag me out entirely, we had invaded a lane with incoming traffic, the creature let go of me as grandpa managed to pull me back in just in time as we swerved and lost control of the car.
The next thing I remembered was being surrounded by medics who had pulled me out of the wrecked car. I looked around as much as I could to see where my grandfather was. To my horror, a few dozen feet away from the crash site, I saw his unconscious body being dragged away by the ice-cream man and being thrown into the back of his truck. The last thing I saw before passing out again was the ice cream man turning back around and directing a grotesque smile towards me.