Come Get Me (19 page)

“Yeah Petey, it’s really me,” he answered
with tears creeping into his eyes. “Why don’t you put those things
down before you hurt someone? Then maybe we can go back to your
house and have ourselves a little talk.”

Pete took a few steps closer, obviously
straining his eyes to see him. With no other warning than a quick
sob and a flash of discarded weapons Jim found himself being
rushed. He only had a few seconds to react to what was happening.
His first instinct was to back up or try to jump out of the way but
that was quickly forgotten as Pete reached him and threw his arms
around him. The thrashing Jim was expecting didn’t come. Instead he
found himself in a great bear hug of the type a little kid might
give and adult. A minute ago he was sure he was about to be
bludgeoned to death by his only remaining childhood friend but
instead he was pleasantly surprised.

Pete was obviously a person of unexpected
mood swings.

If the rush and sudden burst of affection was
unexpected what was even more unexpected was that as Jim put his
arms around Pete to return his hug he could feel his friends’ body
shaking with great, raking sobs. The sound of them reached Jim’s
ear and forced a few tears of his own out.

“It is you,” Pete repeated over and over
through his tears. Knowing that Pete needed to be held more than he
needed to be let go, Jim hugged him back and realized while doing
it that he needed it too.

They stood in that position for several
minutes before Pete finally pulled away. When they finally did
separate Jim realized he’d been crying and hadn’t even known it.
Pete was still crying a little and talking to himself but
unfortunately it was getting more and more incoherent. Jim thought
he heard something about a “fucking purple dinosaur” or something
along those lines but he wasn’t sure. Having no idea what his
friend was talking about he shrugged and waited until his friend
had exhausted his imaginary conversation.

While waiting Jim had a chance to get a
better look at what his friend had become. By the flickering
firelight Jim found that time had not been kind to poor Pete. The
pitiful sight before him had always been smaller than everyone else
but now he looked like some kind of demented dwarf with only vague
similarities to the man he’d once been. Standing at a whole five
foot four inches there wasn’t much to him. Since their last meeting
Pete had looked as if he’d somehow turned in on himself. He’d
gotten quite a bit stockier and looked almost fat, but if the bear
hug he’d received was any indication looks had definitely been
deceiving. His raven black hair now hung down in his face and was
quite a bit longer than it needed to be and definitely a lot
dirtier than it should’ve been. It was so thick that Jim could
barely see any of Pete’s face through it all. This was probably a
good thing since it smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in a while.

“It’s good to see you again,” Pete stuttered,
gazing out into the darkness. “But let’s go back to the house where
it’s safe. My fires need tending and shouldn’t be left for long.
They must never go out when night comes.” Stooping down without
another eerie word Pete picked up the two barely burning branches
he’d discarded earlier and started towards the house.

Jim, caught slightly off guard by his friends
words, followed the waddling form ahead of him trying not to trip
over any of the holes in the road that were waiting for him. Pete
reached the house first but didn’t stop to wait for Jim. Instead,
he continued on towards the back not even looking over his shoulder
to make sure his friend was there. He seemed more worried that the
roaring fires would go out than anything else. Jim thought there
was no need to worry about that happening. They were actually quite
a bit bigger than they should be. Especially this close to the
woods and definitely bigger than any one person could handle.

Just before turning around the back corner of
the house Pete paused and grabbed some wood from a nearby pile. Jim
tried taking advantage of this momentary stop to make up some
distance between them but Pete still beat him and was out of sight
by a few steps. In his haste to catch up with Pete Jim tripped over
something in the dark and half fell half tripped into the back
yard. Falling to the ground he quickly pushed himself up brushing
off as he did so. After he was as clean as he could get he looked
up and didn’t know what to think of the sight that greeted him.
He’d heard of a living hell before but never thought he’d see it.
Now he had. Hell had finally come to earth. That was the only thing
he could think as his eyes watered from the heat cast by the
fires.

There were four separate bonfires burning
about twenty feet from the back of the house. Scattered haphazardly
around the yard were piles of wood and what looked like an
assortment of different sized cans of gas and kerosene. Some
appeared empty, at least Jim hoped they were since they were laying
on their sides, but others, which must’ve been full, were sitting
upright and much too close to the fires. It was those that made
Jim’s skin crawl. He could just imagine one bursting and turning
him into a Jim-kabob. Not exactly a pleasant thought.

Heat wafted out in waves that could be felt
all the way over where he was standing. Knowing that if it was this
hot where he was he didn’t even want to think about the temperature
where the cans were. With every passing second he was surer and
surer they were going to blow. He moved to grab the closest one so
he could move it to a safer spot but Pete turned on him viciously
yelling.

“Don’t touch that!” he screamed. “Leave it
where it is!”

Jim, faced by the crazy Pete once again,
quickly backed up to where he’d been and watched as the man he’d
once known returned to his task. Over the crackling of the fires
Jim could still hear Pete mumbling to himself. Moving from one
conflagration to the next Jim saw Pete’s lips moving. He actually
managed to catch a word every now and then but still couldn’t make
any sense of what he was hearing. He was beginning to see that Pete
did indeed have many problems he needed help with, the least of
which was the mumbling. Seeing no hope of reasoning with Pete, Jim
looked around the yard trying to decide what to do.

Thinking he’d seen all the strangeness Pete
and his yard had to offer he was horrified when his eyes settled on
what lay at the immediate rear of the house.

The four windows running along the back had
been hit many times by God only knew what. If it’d been rocks he
knew he’d see just maybe a piece here or there missing. Most likely
a bunch of holes. These windows instead looked as if whole boulders
had been heaved through them but that wasn’t the worst part. Around
most of the holes was stuff that looked like pieces of flesh. Dried
ragged hunks of blackened meat hung from some of the windows
looking like jerky left too long to smoke. That was bad enough but
what he saw next was enough to make his stomach heave.

Written all over the wall from the top to the
bottom were words. They’d been scribbled in an almost childlike
handwriting in what Jim thought was brown paint. Wanting to get a
better look he took a step closer and almost tripped over something
on the ground. Looking down he discovered what had actually been
used to do the writing on the wall. Littering the ground from one
end of the house to the other were heads. Heads of cats, dogs,
deer, raccoons and a lot of other animals he couldn’t even guess
at. The skin had rooted off the ones near the bottom of the pile.
All he could see were eye sockets and teeth. The wall above was
splattered with blood from the heads. They had apparently been
slammed up against it with some force. Big splotches of brown
marked the wall. After overcoming his shock Jim quickly glanced at
the wall to see what was written there since that was what had
first drawn him to the spot. As he gingerly crept forward he
carefully avoided the heads that had rolled away from the piles but
not before noticing that most of the heads didn’t look like they’d
been cut off like he’d first thought. They instead looked like
they’d been ripped off. Strings of meat and parts of bone were
still attached to the necks.

After swallowing the bile rising in his
throat he slowly looked up to see if he could make sense of what
was written oh the wall.

“Goatman was here” was scrawled all over. It
looked more like gibberish than actual writing. The words tended to
run together and were messily written. There were other things like
“Come Get Me” and various curse word but the most prominent and
numerous were the call for the Goatman.

Jim’s heart slammed in his chest as he read
the words. They were the words that could supposedly call the
Goatman to a person. The “Goatman was Here” phrase was what the
Goatman himself supposedly wrote when he’d claimed a place as his
own. Who cared that it was impossible for a creature that didn’t
exist to write this much less anything else. The only explanation
was that Pete, in his deranged state, did it himself. Jim didn’t
want to believe that his friend was so far gone that he would do
something like this but he couldn’t deny the proof in front of his
eyes. Pete really had gone off the deep end.

While thinking all this, a shadow slowly fell
on the wall in front of him. He spun around and was confronted by
an even more deranged looking Pete than he’d seen before if that
was possible. Sweat was pouring from his soot covered face. His
shoulders heaved as he drew in deep gulping breath. It was almost
as if he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. Smoke and steam
clung to him like a cloak making him look like the boogeyman made
flesh. In between the breathing noises Jim could still hear
mumbling. Pete was still talking to himself even though he was
looking at Jim. The few words he was able to make out made no
sense. They definitely didn’t make him very comfortable. Words like
“kill” and “goat” were the only things Jim was sure he understood
but there were others that Jim thought he understood but hoped he
actually didn’t. Looking in Pete’s eye he was only sure of one
thing. He wanted to get the hell out of there. To do it he would
have to go through Pete and hopefully avoid the fires. He wasn’t
sure he could do that. Not with having to worry about Pete at the
same time. Then there was also the long road back down to
civilization. There were no lights and Jim really didn’t want to
try that.

Pete looked at him without speaking for what
seemed an eternity. Jim didn’t know what to do. Pete looked like he
was waiting for something. Maybe the voices in his head were
telling him to kill Jim and he was trying to resist them. Maybe he
was just trying to figure out the best way to do it and then he
could blame the Goatman. Then again he could just throw him in the
fire and no one would know any better. The sheriff was the only
person that knew Jim was out here. Pete could just say that he’d
left if they came and asked where he was. There probably wouldn’t
even be that big of an investigation if the way things had been
handled so far was any indication. He stood waiting for whatever
Pete would do next. It wasn’t what he’d thought.

“It wasn’t me,” Pete cried. After mumbling a
few words about a purple dinosaur he continued. “It was the Goatman
Jim. We made a mistake when we were little.” He said looking up at
the wall behind Jim. “We called him and he came but we escaped the
first time. We didn’t stay so he could finish his visit. We ran.
That made him mad.”

At first Jim wasn’t sure what to think. Pete
spoke as if the Goatman were real. What he was saying was at least
partly true. They had called the creature when they were little but
it had never showed up. But at the back of his mind he felt a
tickle. He concentrated on the memory trying to bring it in to
focus. They’d been calling the thing and something had come out of
the woods and that was the last he could remember.

The thing didn’t come. Did it?

In the dream Jim had a few days ago he’d come
but that hadn’t happened in real life. It had only happened in the
dream. None of that was real. Things from dreams couldn’t kill
people. All the stuff that was happening with his friends had to
have some kind of rational explanation. Jim couldn’t think of one
right now but there must be one. A fictional creature running
around killing people just because they’d called it when they were
little wasn’t a rational explanation so that couldn’t be it. But at
the same time it had to be it. They were standing in a yard, at
night, with a bunch of decaying animal heads rotting around them
while bonfires burned merrily in the background. If this wasn’t the
perfect situation to prove Pete’s theory, then Jim couldn’t think
of a better one.

Although there was another possible
answer.

He was just going crazy himself. That had to
be it. The pressure of his friends’ deaths and not knowing how it’d
happened had just gotten to him so much that his mind had decided
to take a break for a little while. He couldn’t be going crazy
though. He’d just met a great girl. Except for his friends dropping
dead in gruesome way everything was going good. So how could he be
going crazy? The answer unfortunately was that he wasn’t. He was
completely sane and his friends were dead and the only explanation
that fit was that the Goatman was the one responsible. Jim wanted
to deny it but all the evidence he’d heard and seen pointed to
everything being the work of the Goatman.

It was common knowledge in these parts that
the beast carried an axe with him. That would account for the tree
in the woods near Tommy. He also took perverted pleasure in
decapitating animals then eating everything but the head. Once in a
great while it was rumored that it would mark it’s territory by
writing “Goatman was Here” or something to that effect, never mind
the fact that it was an animal and couldn’t possibly know how to
write its own name much less an actual sentence. But somehow it
still wrote on things in the places it’d been. Never mind the fact
that no one had ever gotten a picture of the creature either. That
didn’t matter to anyone. It was like Bigfoot. It was an urban
legend. Not real.