The Hook

4

Sitting there on the roof of the car was a man dressed in a long tan overcoat. His right hand was resting on the car, helping him to keep his balance on the roof so that he wouldn't fall off. He had no left hand. Where his left hand should have been, a large metal hook was attached to the end of his wrist.

But it wasn't the hook that made her scream. It was the thing attached to the hook. There, with the hook through the top of it, was the head of a boy Janice's age with thin brown hair and light hazel eyes.

Dean's face stared at her in a permanently shocked expression that she knew would never go away. She saw the bloody, meaty stump of the neck still dripping blood onto the car. A small piece of bone was sticking out of it, its whiteness stained pink by all of the blood. The man with the hook was lifting the head up and bringing it back down onto the roof of the car. He was doing it over and over and over again, making tiny splashes of blood as he did so. Not only did it make a sound like the thumping Janice had heard inside the car, it also made a sickeningly wet squelching sound that made her sick to her stomach. He just kept banging and banging Dean's severed head onto the roof. Now that Janice was outside, he was laughing maniacally as he did so.

The laugh was maddening, and Janice knew that she had to run, but she couldn't. She was frozen to the spot with a fear so solid it just might tear her in half like a fucking phone book. Her fear worsened when the killer looked at her. She stared deeply into blue eyes that were so icy that they might have frozen her to the spot for good. She was pulled out of her trance when the killer spoke.

"Hello," he said, his voice grizzly and maddened, "Well, aren't you such a pretty girl? I saw another pretty girl earlier tonight. She was a nurse at the hospital I've been staying at. Do you know what I did to her?"

When she didn't answer, he yelled out, "Well? Do you?"

She shook her head slowly and frightfully in a resounding "No".

"Well, I'll tell you. She came into my room to bring me my pills. I took pills until tonight, you know, they told me it helped with my 'problems', bunch of lying fuckers. Anyway, when she got close enough I wrapped my hand around her throat and forced her to take me to the room where they kept this."

He held up his hook to show her, Dean's head, cold and lifeless, still stuck on the end and dripping blood.

"So she took me into the room where they kept it, and I told her to attach it back onto the end of my arm. And you know what? The dumb bitch actually did it! So when she finished putting it on, I put the point of the hook right through her eye. I had the damnedest time trying to get it out, though. The whole eye ended up coming out with it! I bet your eyes won't cause me that much trouble, will they, pretty girl?"

At those last few words, He jumped down off of the car and started towards Janice. She was broken out of her paralysis and started running. The killer ran after her, but he had a slight limp. Janice noticed this advantage and gained speed, greatening the distance between her and the killer.

She stopped when she looked back to see how far behind the killer was and ran into something. It was heavy, but gave way when hit. It knocked her to the ground and she looked up to see what it was. She wished she hadn't looked.

There, hanging from a tree by a long rope, was the rest of Dean's body. It was hanging upside-down, the rope tied around the ankles and the arms dangling freely past the meaty pulp where the head had once been, veins hanging down from the bloody mess like vines. As the body swung back and forth from the force with which Janice had run into it, the fingers scraped at the ground, crackling and scratching as they passed over dead leaves. There was a massive pool of congealed blood right underneath the stump of the neck, flies buzzing all around and occasionally landing in the puddle to drink from it. There were thick, pale, pulpy maggots crawling in and out of the gore of the neck, slowly eating away at the rotting tissue. Janice saw all of this and screamed. It was a terrified shriek that rung and echoed throughout the entire forest, sending birds flocking hurriedly out of their resting places in the trees.