Come Get Me (32 page)

“Got any hot dogs?” he giggled pointing
towards Jim’s feet. Jim looked down between his legs and saw the
house from last night. It didn’t look that bad by daylight he
decided. Especially since it was on fire. One of the candles
must’ve finally caught on something and then that was all she
wrote. It was well on its way to being nothing but a bad memory. As
he watched what was left of one of the ground floor walls fell over
in a shower of sparks.

Pete began laughing for no apparent reason
and for no apparent reason Jim soon found himself joining in. This
once again proved to be too much for him. He quickly fell back
hitting his head on the soft ground behind him. It was just enough
to send stars shooting through his vision and make him pass out
again. He could still hear Pete’s laughter and the sound of
approaching sirens as he started to dream of a familiar dream but
his time it wasn’t scary. This time it was just a normal dream
about a walk through the woods. The Goatman wasn’t physically
present but Jim’s dream self knew all he had to do was call and he
would come.

Epilogue

The two of them sat in comfortable silence on
the front porch of their newly purchased old house watching the sun
slowly set over the horizon. After all the moving they’d done
recently it felt good to be able to just sit and relax a little now
and then. It would take a while before the place felt like a home
but it was theirs and they were together and that was all that
mattered.

The events that occurred over the past couple
of months were already fading in their memories and those of the
town. For the first couple of days after the events of that
horrible night they weren’t left in peace for more than a few
minutes at a time. Finding three people in the middle of nowhere
next to a burning house was bad enough but after sifting through
the rubble and finding two bodies they almost ended up being locked
away for good. It was even worse when those two bodies were
identified. The police had nothing but questions and threats after
that.

They’d finally gotten the hint after about
two weeks. The story they heard was always the same with nothing
that could be proved or disproved either way. It was their words
against those of dead people. This time the evidence had supported
the living. The cops were still confused as to what had actually
happened but Jim, Jill and Pete had no more answers to give them.
They’d said all they could say about what happened. Well, at least
Jill had told them everything she knew which wasn’t much. She
luckily slept through everything that happened. The one thing that
she did shed light on was how she’d been abducted.

Apparently when she’d been out for her walk
Maria had come upon her in a hysterical state saying all kinds of
crazy things. When she’d finally gotten her calmed down enough that
she could understand her what she heard terrified her. Maria told
her that Jim found her and demanded to be taken out to the place
Tommy had been killed. Jill thought this sounded funny and said so
but Maria explained it away saying that her and Jim had been old
childhood friends and that they hadn’t parted on the best of terms
but that they had made up since he came back and had come to her
for help since she knew just about everything that went on in town.
After that the scenario played much the same as it had with Jim.
She was taken out to the abandoned house and jumped from behind.
Instead of leaving her free to wake up on her own though they
drugged her. They used a little more than they should of though
which explained why she was unconscious for so long.

Jim and Pete, when asked had just told a
seemingly outlandish tale of a lover scorned. They said Maria was
crazy and had somehow gotten Johnny to go along with her plan to
make Jim lover her. They also made sure that the police understood
that part of Maria’s great plan was blaming the local legend for
everything that happened. At first they weren’t believed. It was
too crazy. Most of them knew Maria. A few of them had even dated
her. They were ready to throw the both of them in the asylum until
they were finally searched Maria’s house. Then the story was
suddenly much more plausible.

Upon entering her home they’d first been
confronted by a normal everyday single woman’s home. Then one of
the officers had been being a bit of a pervert and was looking
through Maria’s underwear drawer looking for a souvenir when he’d
stumbled across some pretty damning evidence. A nice hefty stack of
pictures was found in the back of the drawer buried under
everything. Flipping through the pictures they found little notes
Maria had made to herself about when she’d taken them. But that
wasn’t all they found. In the back of her closet hidden behind a
few old boxes they found notebooks filled with love letters and
stories all dealing with one person.

Jim Collins.

Apparently Maria had a very vivid imagination
and liked committing most of it to paper for later remembrance.
After finding all this stuff it was pretty hard not to believe
their story.

Then they found the goat.

In the woods behind her house they found what
was left of a rotted goat. After doing some checking, the police
found that one had been stolen from a town a few miles away. That
was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The police quickly
apologized for detaining them so long and released everyone but
Pete. They wanted to know what his part had been in the whole
adventure. That took a little more explaining but he too was
eventually freed with no charges filed against him. The only thing
that was ever mentioned about the creature was how Maria was going
to blame everything on it. Nothing about how it saved them. They
knew if it was ever mentioned that asylum was still out there
waiting for them.

Jim knew why he wasn’t talking but couldn’t
understand why Pete didn’t. He, unfortunately, was going to be
staying in a mental hospital for a while. Not a full blown asylum,
but close enough. With Jim’s help Pete’s parents had finally
convinced him he needed to get some help. If nothing else he could
rest for a while. Jim kept his mouth shut so he wouldn’t have to
join him.

When the police and ambulance had arrived at
the smoldering ruins and found them, Pete had lapsed back into
talking to himself about the damned purple dinosaur again and
laughing at a joke only he had heard. Who knows maybe he was
laughing at the world around him and the people who thought they
were sane. After talking to Pete with his parents Jim didn’t see
him again until the day they took him to the mental hospital. Jim
went to see him off with his arm in a sling. He tried not to be too
sad about the whole thing because he knew Pete would at least have
some peace and quiet where he was going. He also wouldn’t have to
worry about lighting his nightly fires anymore. But he was still
sorry to see him go. Maybe Pete would be sane enough to return to
the outside world again someday. Jim wanted to be there waiting for
him. He hoped now that Pete knew he didn’t have to fear the
creature he would be able to get better a lot sooner than the
doctors were telling everyone. Jim wasn’t holding his breath
though. This was Pete they were talking about after all. Jim was
hoping Pete would say something, maybe act like his normal self,
before he left to give everyone a little hope but he didn’t. As he
got in the van to leave Jim heard Pete mumbling about the purple
dinosaur again and decided he needed to get to the bottom of at
least this part of Pete’s problem before he could let them take him
away. He walked over to say goodbye and quietly asked what the
whole thing with the dinosaur was about. Surprisingly Pete looked
at him and smiled like his old self.

“
Oh, that?” he said happily.
“It was just something I saw on TV one day that bothered me so much
I can’t get it out of my head. Kinda like one of those damn jingles
you hear on the radio. That stuff annoys the hell out of me.” Then
with a wink and a wave he climbed into the van and was
off.

Jim couldn’t help but laugh. Something as
simple as that and it made him seem like a raving lunatic. He
decided Pete really was laughing at the world when he giggled to
himself.

He hadn’t seen Pete since that day. He kept
meaning to go see him but hadn’t made the time to do it. He scolded
himself almost daily for not going but he still couldn’t bring
himself to do it. He just didn’t want to see Pete in a place like
that. Somehow he thought Pete would understand and not hold it
against him. As far as the Goatman went Pete hadn’t uttered a word
and if he did there wasn’t anyone that would believe him.

Since Jill didn’t remember anything, Jim
chose to wait until they were both out of the hospital to tell her
everything that had happened. He figured there was no reason to
confuse and upset her when she was being asked so many questions
about what happened.

One day while they were still trying to
figure out where their relationship was going he sat her down and
told her everything that had happened. At first she didn’t know
whether to believe him or not. Her initial reaction was that he was
playing a joke on her but that night her grandmother sat her down
and told her all the legends that had been passed down through the
years and had ended up with her. Come to find out what she’d said
earlier about her father having died at the hands of the Goatman
wasn’t exactly true. It was actually a hunting accident that had
done it. The only reason she thought it was the Goatman was because
he’d supposedly been seen near his body. Even after that she still
wasn’t completely convinced. Finally she said it didn’t really
matter because they were all still alive and that was something
that everyone should be happy about. With that she ended the
conversation and would hear nothing more about it.

Jim, himself, had ended up having three
broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. It had fallen on Jill and
his mother to nurse him back to health. It was the worst time he
could ever remember in his whole life.

The two women had hit it off right away and
spent most of their time mothering him until he thought he would go
crazy. He even thought about going to join Pete until he was better
but wasn’t sure he’d ever want to leave so decided against it.
Slowly but surely he finally healed and was able to fend for
himself once again but through it all he’d ended up growing closer
to Jill than he ever hoped to be. With her helping him do almost
everything they’d slowly fallen in love almost like it was planned.
He finally decided to stay in his home town for good. Except for
recent events it actually was a nice place to live. Now that the
town psycho was gone there was hardly any crime, just the
occasional kid breaking some windows or something equally harmless.
That’s what was nice about small, out of the way towns. After
thinking about it he realized that was what he’d missed when he was
living in the city.

With him needing a place to stay and the two
of them growing closer by the day they figured why not move in
together. They went to the local bank got a home loan and bought
one of the better old houses on the outskirts of town. It needed
some work but that was ok. It was a sturdy little house and it was
what they wanted so they’d bought it. Now here they sat quietly
enjoying each other’s company.

The silence was suddenly shattered by a loud
banging noise from the rear of the house. It sounded almost like
rocks hitting the paneling of the back wall. But that couldn’t be
right. All that was behind the house were woods; there weren’t any
rocks back there.

Looking at each other for a confused second
they quickly got up and ran off the porch and around to the side of
the house. Stopping at the corner they slowly approached the
backyard. When they finally rounded the corner they were surprised
to find nothing. No animals or anything else that might have caused
the ruckus. They did hear something running heavily through the
woods. They didn’t see it but it could be heard rushing through the
woods breaking branches as it went. After a few minutes the noises
suddenly stopped. It was a little eerie.

Eyes darting here and there, neither of them
saw anything out of place in the yard itself. The table and chairs
were still where they’d put them, the flowers in the garden were
undisturbed and everything else appeared normal. There was no
evidence of where the noises had come from.

Then they turned to look at the house. What
they saw instantly set Jill into a yelling fit but for some reason
it didn’t surprise Jim in slightest.

“
Goatman was here” was
written in very small letters for one end of the house to the other
finally ending right next to the backdoor. It was at a level that
looked just about right for a kid but the writing was nowhere near
neat enough for it to have been done by one.

Jill was outraged. She was yelling at the top
of her lungs telling whoever was hiding in the woods to come back
and do it now that they were there. She also told them in no
uncertain terms that if they did come back they’d better watch out.
She was going to set some bear traps that would take care of them
and how did they like that. She was sure there were kids back there
laughing at them. At one point she even thought she could hear them
but that turned out to be Jim himself. Her anger was turned on him
for a while after that. She thought he was encouraging stuff like
this. She surprised him by saying that when they had kids he better
not act like that. She obviously surprised herself too by what
she’d let slip because she instantly shut up.