Gutter, a short story

Note: This is another that is not for the little ones.  It may not even be for the big ones.  It's a horror story, thanks for reading if you can.  

There's a monster off of 13th street and Duval, Devon said aloud at school.  The teacher put down the key for the quiz, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and ignored Devon's statement all together.

Devon wasn't scared but concerned.  Why wouldn't anyone listen?  Two days before on the first day of school--it was a beautiful autumn day--the temp was beginning to turn into crisp sweater weather.  On his walk to his junior high, about two miles from his house, he passed several school bus stops.

Devon hated riding the bus.  The year before, some goof had put rubber cement in his hair, and he had to shave his head completely bald.  When he saw himself in the mirror, as a bald 13 year old, it reminded him of his father.  He swore to never be bald again.

On that first day of school Devon began walking.  His new shoes, a pair of Nikes--but not the paid he had wanted, were an almost gleaming white.  He paid mind to stay out of the dirt and puddles.  When he came up on 13th St. and Duval, there was some sound, some voice.  Devon swore it had come from a rain gutter just below the bright red stop sign.  "I want to eat your bones," the voice said.

Devon stopped walking and looked over.  The bright red stop sign stood alone.  Underneath, where the darkness of the gutter sat like a sleeping dog, was nothing.  Devon didn't want to shrug it off.  For one, it could have been another kid from school, giving him a hard time to see what Devon's reaction would be.  Devon wasn't afraid.  Not yet.

He walked over to the stop sign, took a knee, and peered over the rain gutter upside down like.  He waited and listened.  Nothing.  He stood back up, swung his pack over his shoulder and walked on.  He almost forgot about it, with the first day of school, first day of football practice, and all the homework he'd been assigned--that was, until the next morning, when he heard it again.

"I'm going to eat your bones.  Don't think I didn't forget," the voice said.  On this day, the clouds were gone, and the summer sun was threatening to turn it into a triple digit day, as if the sun refused to let the September air get the best of it.  Devon stopped beyond the gutter, but did not look back.  "You don't scare me gutter person, whoever you are," Devon said.

"I'm the bone snacker, and I don't scare you, because you haven't seen me," the voice said back.  The voice was guttural--a sound deep and from many sources.

Devon took a few steps forward, and when he was far enough away he looked back.  There, reaching up out of the gutter--patting the concrete curb in an attempt to find Devon's foot, was a bony withered hand with long fingers and sharp nails.  The nails were black and dead looking.

Devon ran to school, dirtying up his shoes and blistering his feet.  But the teacher did not listen.  He thought to bring it up at lunch with Shodrick, a fellow teammate and non-foster child:

"It's a hobo."

"I don't think it is--"

"We'll stop by tonight and see what's up with the creep.  We'll go soft like, sneak up on it.  I ain't scared of no hobo," Shodrick said, spooning a mouth full of school cafeteria potatoes and shaking his head.

"I ain't scared of a hobo either.  And it's not one.  It's a…"

"A what, a monster?  Freddy Kruger is living in a rain gutter in the ATX?  No, we ain't having that.  I think the doctors are prescribing you too many throwed pills," Shodrick said, with a mouthful of mash.

"You don't even know about it.  I don't go for pills--I don't even take them.  I go for counseling, for PTSD or whatever."

"Yeah, and some of that PTSD is making you crack your brain in the gutter."

Football practice was terrible.  At the beginning of the year, the coaches made it a point to weed out the kids who weren't fully committed.  That basically meant two hours of nothing but sprints and laps.  Devon just wanted to get behind center and get some work in against the A team defense.

After dressing back in their street clothes, Shodrick and Devon went walking.  Shodrick used another player's cell to call his mother and arrange plans for an alternate pick up.  On the way there, they discussed the best MC's of the current crop.  Jay Z was still the only living legend, Kanye the best producer, The Game the hardest, Emenim the tragic one.  Devon almost forgot about the monster in the gutter--until they rounded 13th.

"Listen, we don't need to do this now.  Let's come back in the morning, in the daytime," Devon said, holding Shodrick back.  The gutter was two blocks down the road, but covered in shadows.  "You're probably right--it's a vagrant.  Then what?  We just stick our faces in his home--there's no telling what he'll do to us, maybe even stab us with his needle."

"No, we do this tonight.  We'll be careful.  I'll stick my foot in real quick like--kick that hobo in the head, and then we'll run.  He won't bother you anymore," Shodrick replied.

Devon wasn't worried about being bothered.  He could care less about being bothered and would take a thousand days of being rubber cemented before he would face this thing.  He was scared to death of being eaten.  It was real.  Sometimes during that day he had to remind himself that it was real.  Last year, when the night terrors started, things that were real and not real blended together in the early morning hours.  He'd wake up seeing his mother's eyes resting on the pillow next to him, her face drawn and puckered up.  Then they would be gone--the dream over.  But the next morning, he'd find himself hard pressed to choose what had been real.

Shodrick and Devon walked down 13th.  This section of the road tarried through an older neighborhood filled with brightly colored houses, long driveways, and front porches.  During the day this looked like any older neighborhood chocked full of senior citizens and their grandchildren's cars.  But during the night this neighborhood and its shadows created a haven of angled shadows and unseen areas.  The bone snacker could be anywhere, Devon thought to himself.

They walked up to the gutter under the stop sign and stood a moment, waiting for a voice, for a sign.  None came.  Devon took a knee, a deep breath, and then laid on his stomach, peering over and into the darkness.  The reasons for the action were twofold--fist, Devon wanted to prove that what he was seeing wasn't real.  During the walk over, he'd decided that real or not, the monster had no place in his mind--much like the dreams of mother, or his father's bald dome.  Secondly, Shodrick was his closest friend, really his only friend.  And he didn't want to let Shodrick down in the guts department, especially considering Shodrick was his top wide receiver.  A leader is a leader, after all.

Devon could feel the grit of the concrete beneath his new sneakers.  The toes of which were undoubtedly getting scuffed.   In the blackness of the gutter, something was visible--a foot.

Maybe it wasn't a foot, maybe it was the foot--the Bone Snacker's foot.  But the Bone Snacker wasn't real, he remembered.  "I see a boot down there, but nothing else," Devon said, standing up and wiping his hands on his jeans.

"Is the boot attached to a leg?" Shodrick asked.

"Too dark to tell."

 Shodrick moved over to the next concrete slab of sidewalk and bent down to inspect the rusted over lid to the gutter.  He put his fingers through three of the holes of the grate, and gave a half hearted pull.  "It's heavy--I'm going to need a hand, hero," he said, and when Devon bent down to help, they pulled it from over the entrance route.  The sound of the lid slamming down on the pavement was terrifying.  Shodrick jumped and then shook his hands.  "I got nerves," he said as he tried to shake it off.

After the clatter, several lights in the neighborhood began to turn on.  "If we're going to do this, we need to do it now," Devon said.  He took his shoes off, placed them next to his pack, and swung his legs down through the hole.  "This is the part of the movie where the black people get killed," Shodrick told him.  Devon went through the grate and his feet hit the concrete ridge below.  Shodrick followed and they stood on the narrow concrete ridge a foot above a small flowing brook of water.

 In the small confined space, with only the stars' light shining from the manhole above, the room seemed too small to contain a monster.  The brook came in on one wall and exited on the opposite, into a metal tube which was just big enough to crawl through.  The room was empty except for the black boot.  Devon scooted over on the ledge, careful not to fall socks first into the rainwater.  He bent over and picked up the worn leather boot by its lace.

"Good God, that's disgusting," Shodrick uttered under his breath.  And it was.  The leather was green in places, molded over, and there was a terrible stench coming from it, of spoiled bread and juice from the bottom of a dumpster.  Devon tossed it into the brook, and they watched it float down the water and disappear into the shoot.

"Let's jet," Devon said, and he looked back up at the circular sky above them, wondering how they would get back up through the hole eight feet from where they stood.  Devon cupped his hands together and offered to give Shodrick a lift, but that's when they heard a sound.  The sound was metal scraping against concrete and it set Devon's teeth on edge. 

Both Shodrick and Devon were silent as they watched the rusted lid placed back in its slot.  From their position, there was no way to open up the lid--due to the weight of it.  "We got to try anyway," Shodrick said.  His voice shook now, not just his hands.  The Shodrick of S. Houston Junior High, star wide receiver, one for who even two competing high school coaches had come to visit, was now shaking.

Devon, however, was calm--surprisingly so.  Someone above shut the lid to play a prank, the Bone Snacker was not real.  "Get on my shoulders and push," he told Shod, and he kneeled down to allow Shodrick a boost.  His left foot slipped and fell into the running water below.  "Wet socks--that's great."  He found his footing and lifted Shodrick back up to the ceiling of the eight foot room.  The lid would not budge.  There in the darkness, attempting to push up the heavy metal lid from below, they heard footsteps going away from them--like dead meat slapping the concrete.  Flap, flap, flap.  "Was that him?" Shod asked, pausing and then adding: "I don't see it being anyone else."

Shod then tried lifting Devon up, which proved more difficult because Devon outweighed him by twenty pounds.  Devon had no luck.  "I think he placed something on top of it--it won't budge a bit."

They attempted to reach the gutter's slit along the street by standing on their tip toes and leaning over the brook, but only their fingers reached and even if they could gain a foothold, neither would be able to fit.

The night that Devon was taken from his parent's house, his mother was already dead.  There had been a fight that night--over car keys.  His father, Reginald, wanted to take the car out to an uncle's house.  That was code for going and getting high for a few days.  Devon's mother, Simonetta, wouldn't have it.  She was done with the disappearances, with the abuse, and she took a stand and he took her life.  There was a struggle.  Devon was only 10, and he tried to help but was slapped so hard it cut his tongue.  He went and hid underneath the kitchen sink and covered his ears.  He sang songs to himself and recited his multiplication tables all the way through two different times, and then he heard the gun shot.

 There was a shot and then silence.  A boom and then nothing.

 "Why you so flippant?  We're about to be killed," Shodrick said.  Devon hadn't noticed, but he was.

"When my moms was shot two summers ago, I hid in a cabinet and wouldn't do anything about it.  Just because I busted my tongue, I didn't do anything.  Maybe he wouldn't have shot her if I'd have been there.  I don't know.  But tonight, we're not staying here--we're getting out," Devon said.

Shodrick stopped shaking and shook his head.

 Devon kneeled down in the water, soaking his pants leg and feeling the slow flow of the rain gutter's bowels.  "We go through there," he told Shodrick.

"I'm not so good with sewer tunnels I can't even fit my skull into.  I don't think so," he replied.

 The water, which before had been a constant but slow moving stream below them, began to ripple with small dainty waves.  They both turned back to the opposite pipe in the room, the one which led in the direction of the earlier footsteps.  Water was gushing out quicker in succession.  Someone was crawling through.  Shodrick didn't think twice, but dropped to all fours and began climbing through the pipework.

 Devon kept his eyes in the other direction, wanting to make sure that no monster was directly behind them.  One Shod was in, Devon ducked down and began crawling.  In the pipes there was no light.  It was darkness absolute.  The pipe was not big enough to get a good speed up, and Devon and Shodrick were forced to go elbows and knees as quickly as possible.

 30 feet in, they heard a splash behind them and a scream.  The Bone Snacker was now occupying the room they had been in 2 minutes before.  The voice--now irate, now angrier than before--rang out in the pipes.  "Like a shish-ka-bob," it uttered, and the sound of the voice echoed on the pipes' ceiling.  The boys crawled faster.

"My elbows are going to fall off," Shod said up ahead.  Twice, Shod's feet had accidentally kicked Devon in the chin.  Shod was not going fast enough.  Devon first learned that the monster was gaining ground when he heard the breathing, a wheezy-chunky sound, emitting from not far behind him.

 In the slosh of the water, the panic of the moment, Devon punched Shod in the back of the thigh.  "Move it faster."

"My knees are about to fall clean off--I can't go any faster," Shod replied, but despite the plea, he sped up.

 The breathing was getting louder, a form, white and cracked, could be seen in the distance of the pipe's outline.  Devon knew that if they didn't come to a clearing soon--if there was not somewhere where they could run on foot, they'd soon be eaten.  Images began flashing in his mind, victims of the Bone Snacker.  He imagined Shodrick hanging on a hook somewhere in the city's drainage system, a slack of skin and muscle, absent of bone.

There was light shining ahead.  He saw it through the swinging arms of Shodrick, through the spraying of water.  "He's on me--get going, get going!" Devon yelled, and Shodrick fell when he lunged to go faster, going face first into the pipe.

Devon froze in place, turned around and looked behind him.  There was a head--a large bulbous patchwork of skin, teeth and giant black doll's eyes.  There were slits for nostrils, and the head was the size of a microwave oven.  The Bone Snacker screamed and snapped its jaws towards Devon's legs.  Devon attempted scrambling over Shodrick, but before he could do so, Shodrick lunged forward again and disappeared.  Devon, reeling backwards, inched away from the teeth, the drool the rotten skin.  Then he fell.

The pipe had come across a ravine, where the gutter angled down in an almost acute angle towards the concrete flood plane below.  The two boys spilled out of the gutter pipe and fell into a shallow pool of trepid rain water which smelled of dog waste, and something dead.  But they were out of the belly of the system.

Both stood up and wiped their face.  Devon took a plastic can holder off his shoulder and looked back up at the hill, at the pipe.  The boys began scrambling for the hillside, back towards a neighborhood road.  On top of the embankment they looked back and saw nothing but the stream of water pouring out into the still pool.  No Bonesnacker, no monster.

 Later that night they both drove back in the back of a squad car.  While the officer searched for the gutter, eventually calling over another officer to help with the man hole cover, the boys waited in the back, silent.  There was no sign of the monster--none that the officers could tell.  They took both boys home and promised to keep up an extra patrol on the road--to see if they found any "persons of interest."

Devon didn't see the Bone Snacker again.  Devon never went down Duval and 13th street again.  He never got back those shoes.