Unspeakable Horror!

The moon floats in the frozen sky like a lascivious eyeball, peers inside Victor’s bedroom where the digital clock glows in blood red digits: 3:18. Victor wakes from the nightmare, discovers the wetness in the bed, but not the wetness of the white blood from which the tentacles emerge.

The puppy beside him is dead.

Victor knows how his grandmother will respond to the bedwetting, the same as Agatha, the head nurse at Mt. Salvation. He does not want his grandmother to know about the dead puppy, the welcome home present. She will think he killed it.

If his grandmother knows that Victor wet the bed again, it will mean a call to Nurse Agatha and a one-way ticket back to Mt. Salvation. Victor knows this.

He wraps the dead puppy in the wet sheets, pulls on his snow boots, and tucks the bottom of his pajamas inside.

He crosses the fresh snowfall on the silent moonlit cul-de-sac, drops the package into the dumpster near the edge of construction site. As far as he can see, new cul-de-sacs with the skeletons of new duplexes frosted with snowy moonlight.

On the return to his grandmother’s duplex, Victor sees the quartet of snowmen in the neighbor’s yard. He trips a motion detector porch-light as he passes, and the shadows of the snowmen reach almost all the way to Victor’s path.

Victor shows his grandmother the undisturbed snow outside the doggy-sized flap in the kitchen, proving that the puppy left the house before the snowfall, a bad sign for sure.

No sign of the morning paper.

Returning from a walk of the construction zone, his grandmother hoarse from calling for the puppy in the frozen air, Victor sees his footprints from the previous night, a clear trail from the duplex to the dumpster, but his grandmother does not see.

Clarice calls to them across the frozen cul-de-sac. Her heart condition prohibits snow shoveling.

Victor shovels, creates a long snow barricade between Clarice’s driveway and the quartet of snowmen, the furthest the most deformed from melting slowly over time, the nearest and most recent completely intact.

Victor finds no sign of the morning paper beneath the snow.

Clarice tells Victor he must make his snowman before she serves him the hot chocolate, his payment for shoveling. Every boy on the cul-de-sac takes a turn shoveling Clarice’s driveway; every boy makes a snowman for Clarice.

Victor packs snow into a ball, rolls the ball into an abdomen, then the torso, followed by the head, each like the segment of an arthropod.

Clarice instructs Victor to leave his hat and scarf with the snowman.

What about the mittens?

You will need the mittens, she tells him.

Inside, she serves the hot chocolate with her mittens on. Victor tries not to notice the hard nipples showing through her nightgown.

At 3:18 Victor awakens. He has seen the blue lips of his own corpse-face inside the snowman’s head. Clarice has stolen his soul with his hat and his scarf, trapped his soul inside the snowman like the other boys who withered and lost their paper routes.

Outside, a blizzard.

Victor crosses the cul-de-sac, pajama bottoms tucked in his boots. He wears his mittens. He will topple his snowman and free the others. Tonight, no motion detector porch-light. Victor retrieves his scarf, wraps it around his neck.

Clarice emerges from beneath the front porch like a trap door spider, wields the duct tape like nimble spinnerets.

On the plastic sheeting inside, Clarice removes Victor’s scarf to expose the vulnerable neck. She removes her mittens. Victor sees the white skin covering her hands, white like a marshmallow, like a clown’s face. The white skin burns Victor’s neck; the white skin begins to draw the blood.

Rise and shine, his grandmother says. Clarice needs her driveway shoveled. Grandmother stands in the doorway. Victor groans, his memory blurred and distorted. Would Victor please look for their morning newspapers?

Victor wraps the scarf to cover the palm-sized welt-burn on his throat before going downstairs.

He shovels the walks.

No hot chocolate today.

Inside the house, he keeps the scarf around his throat. His grandmother wears a scarf around her throat.

The newspaper calls the house. Does Victor want a paper route?

No sign of your puppy today, his grandmother says.

At 3:18, Victor tucks the pajama bottoms into his boots.

He can barely see over the steering wheel of his grandfather’s old work truck. He puts the truck in reverse, backs into the cul-de-sac.

In the headlights, Victor sees Clarice’s glowing eyes beneath the porch.

Victor hits the gas; the tires spin on the icy street. The tires hit a patch of gravel; the truck accelerates into the yard, knocks over the snowmen and crashes into the front porch.

The escort receives a cell phone call on the train back to Mt. Salvation Psychiatric Facility, informs Victor that they found the old woman’s body crushed beneath the porch. Victor murdered her.

In three days, the body vanishes from the morgue.