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Jason Sturner

The October Editor's Pick Writer is Jason Sturner

You can email Jason at: flowerpetalsonthecreek@yahoo.com

Jason Sturner

THE HUNCHBACK’S CAPTIVE
by Jason Sturner

I was facedown in swamp muck beneath a moss green moon, gasping for air and choking on aquatic slimes, when a female hunchback grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me ashore.

Red will-o’-the-wisps twirled through the fog about us, and needle-straight cedars creaked ominously as a colony of stinkhorns twitched like slugs throttled by nightmare.

Who was this savior of mine, this decrepit hag wearing nothing but a potato sack for a garment? I asked but she would not speak. Instead she hummed, though not in any musical sense. Rather, that soft buzzing deep within her wizened, dewlapped neck sounded more like an electric power line.

How weird, I thought, this woman’s presence near such a terrible, noxious swamp; for the woman was frail, homely, and her crooked form looked like that of an armadillo rising to its haunches. Her filthy gray hair dragged along the ground, each wiry strand writhing in that eerie green moonlight.

And those eyes! Tiny, piercing red pupils on owlish retinas, the outer whites thick with veins that came and went like tiny bursts of lightning. They seemed to relay a truth I must have been too civilized to comprehend, for there was something of an animal in them, a mother wolf protecting her young. And despite her appearance, I was unafraid, going so far as to say I longed for her affection, even as she drooled heavily while helping me to my shoeless feet.

As we trudged away from that vile swamp to a nearby path of dry ground—where the cedars still creaked but fog no longer violated our hair—the old woman began pulling stones from the potato sack and hurling them into the forest. There, squat green lizards leapt from fallen logs to avoid being crushed, their eyes shining like the brake lights of cars, each tight mouth holding a gold coin.

I grasped the woman’s skeletal hand. “Is that gold?” I asked. “Why would you scare them away?”

Again, no reply. Instead she yanked at the crutch of my arm and we continued along the path in silence, the moon arcing high overhead as it shuffled the forest shadows. I had no choice but to follow.

She led me to an old stone cottage, its windows glowing with dim lanterns that gently prodded at the encroaching darkness. Again drooling, the hunchback pointed a clawed finger at the arched door as if to say, go inside!

Moments later I was sitting in a stout, medieval-looking chair in the cottage, a fire crackling in the stone hearth. The bare, spider-infested interior seemed uninhabited, though a stench, not unlike rotten meat scraps at the bottom of a garbage can, permeated the air. A black cat wandered around the room.

Dehydrated, I inquired about a glass of water. “Ma’am, if I could trouble you for—”

This seemed to trigger the appearance of a slithering, eel-like rope from a cobwebbed and shadowy corner. It rose off the floor like a cobra, encircling me ever closer, then quickly secured my arms and legs to the chair as a large cauldron materialized over the fire.

I was terrified, and pleaded with the old hag to let me go. But the crooked thing remained silent, her back to me, her unseen head behind that large hump.

Finally the hunchback turned around, wobbled up to me, and touched my chest. I was ready to scream when the floorboards ahead of me cracked and fell, uncovering the gaping mouth of a moss-lipped cave.

A pair of white eyes appeared in the dark opening, but their owner did not reveal itself. Instead, a massive tentacle shot up out of the hole and produced a scorpion-like stinger just below the tip. It held before my eyes one foreboding moment before piercing my chest with a heavy, damp slap.

I screamed for help from my contorted captor, only to find her silent and cross-legged upon the floor, each wiry strand of her hair writhing about in the likeness of a gorgon. Nearby, the cat sat on its haunches, its body dead stiff, its neck unnaturally elongated like a giraffe and held at a forty-five degree angle toward the hole—the freakish creation of some insane taxidermist. A fly crawled inside the frozen animal’s wide-open mouth, stopping on occasion to taste the landscape with its proboscis.

By now the tentacle had shot some kind of liquid into my bloodstream, a bluish secretion I watched drip from the retracting stinger. Those terrible eyes then sank back into the darkness and my head plopped to the side. Blackness sealed itself over me like warm tar.

I found myself running through the streets of my city, its skyscrapers leaning over me, windows breaking and raining shards of glass while the open hoods of cars spit out $100 bills. The falling glass was slicing me apart like deli meat, layer by layer.

The dream repeated multiple times, always with another few layers of my body being sliced away by the falling glass. By the end of the final dream I was nothing more than a conscious thread of animated flesh crawling through the smog of the city, a six foot worm. And like a worm, I seemed to be in search of a puddle of muck to drown in. I felt an intense need to go to the swamp.

What had tempted me to such a place? Had I been dreaming of what might lay beyond the edge of the city, far from its apathetic citizenry, tangible greed, all that privilege and expectation? Away from the howls and squeals of cars, trains, and other oiled machines? Had my soul looked to escape the leech-suck of it all?

When at last I awoke—possibly days later, I had no way of knowing—I was lying naked on a soft, log-frame bed, hunchback and filthy cat nowhere to be seen. Sunlight poured in through the windows, and an abundance of canned goods were stacked neatly inside the doorless kitchen cabinets. A bowl of fresh fruit lay on the table.

Tying on a robe left hanging on a nearby hook, and prodded along by rising hunger pangs, I shuffled up to the bowl of fruit and grabbed an apple. But the first bite made me ill, causing me to belch out a long, flowing cloud of—car exhaust!

I keeled over and from my rumbling stomach, I puked out my wallet, car keys, and wrist watch, these trailed by long wires with electrical outlets at their ends. Accompanying this clunky waterfall of tangible items were sounds and smells—the din of traffic, odors of fast food burgers and fries, commercial jingles, and the sound alerts of incoming emails.

As I spat out bits of rubber and plastic between final gags, an iridescent cloud of polluted air rose from my throat and floated to the ceiling. But the attack was far from over. I was struck again, this time much more violently. It was as if my body had some desperate need to purge itself of its former prison, the city, like a gorilla trying to kick and claw its way through the walls of a zoo.

I quickly plunged two fingers into my expanding throat and puked out my cell phone, a mess of batteries, some DVDs, and larger items like balls of computer chips and chunks of video game consoles. This went on for several minutes.

When at last I sensed a conclusion to the awkward, yet painless, heaving, I glanced out the nearby window and noticed a wooden flowerbox, its shriveled petunias beginning to rise and bloom.

The front door creaked open with a flood of sunlight, and in trotted a gray cat, clean and loudly purring, followed by an attractive woman in a yellow sundress who regarded me with quizzical eyes. I straightened my posture, smiled, and quickly moved to greet them, a bit surprised at how urgent my need for companionship had become.

The bile-covered cell phone in the nearby pile of expelled items began to ring. This stopped me dead in my tracks. At this, the cat’s back rose like a shark fin, and the woman scowled, the intensity of her gaze now wolfish.

I held up a finger, and, without thinking, back stepped to the man-high mass of junk and pulled out the phone; I just couldn’t help myself. I thought, What if it’s a family emergency? My boss with a new deadline? Someone that could explain this crazy delusion? I had no way of knowing—the screen was blank.

Outside the sunlight grew dim as if blocked by a passing cloud. I looked over, saw the petunias in the flowerbox droop and fade. A butterfly gliding nearby burst into dust, and the fruit in the bowl turned to mold, the food beneath twitchy with maggots.

Still I held the phone. I just couldn’t ignore it.

Suddenly the woman’s eyes popped out of her head, rolled up to the wall and turned into salamanders. Her head decomposed down to the skull, blonde hair smacking the floor like a wet mop. Her body went limp and twisted to the ground, morphing into a fetid puddle of swamp muck full of wiggling mosquito larvae. The cat hissed, then scratched at the air. A moment later its body jerked in multiple directions as it collapsed onto the floor in a lifeless heap.

I stepped back and considered the small device gripped in my hand; the call was still coming in, and I had an urge—an overwhelming need—to answer it. And why not? Wasn’t this all just a dream?

I pushed the button and brought the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

A terrible scream burst through the earpiece like a firecracker. Other tortured voices rose up behind it, these mingled with the barks and howls of some diabolical beast. Something cracked a whip, and the phone morphed into a screeching bat. The animal wiggled angrily out of my hand, then flew and crashed through the nearby window where it fell into the flowerbox and died. The petunias, in turn, puked out their nectar.

And then the floorboards dropped out in front of me and those orb-like eyes floated up and up through the darkness and I knew from where that phone call had come.

In the nearby muck puddle, a wispy, rising form began to materialize, its wet hair quickly growing beyond the length of the humpbacked body. The gray fur of the dead cat blackened and dirtied, while its bones reassembled and propped up the shaky corpse, jaws chomping madly as if eating taffy.

The wood beneath the cauldron ignited with a loud burst, and the knives and hatchet over the mantle trembled and smacked the cottage walls with a kind of inanimate anticipation that raised the hair on my arms. Two pallid gray tentacles, tightly covered in screaming, fiery maws, rose from the dark hole and slithered toward me.

I bolted for the door, tripping over the emaciated, extended arm of the grotesque hunchback as she glared up at me with bulging eyes, her fat, blue tongue swirling over the lips of a wide, exaggerated mouth full of alligator-like teeth tinged red. I grabbed a nearby chair and pulled myself up, leapt forward and flew out the cottage door into a full-on lightning storm. I ran as fast as I could, bolts exploding all around me, running as if the last train bound for reality were about to leave the station forever and I needed to be on it.

Down I went, sliding and falling through that awful forest of needle-straight cedars and twirling red will-o’-the-wisps, all the way back to the familiar smog of my city, its filthy streets swamped with broken glass and money and all the things I had come to love and despise; all that I had come to depend on.

I’ve not been able to leave since.

Jason Sturner was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in small towns along the Fox River. In 2010 he relocated to the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Though known for having written love and nature-themed poetry in the past, Sturner’s current focus is on speculative fiction, of which he’s long been a fan. His stories and poems have appeared in Space and Time Magazine, Star*Line, Disturbed Digest, Tales of the Talisman, Mythic Delirium, and Aphelion, among others. In 2014 his poem “Faerystruck Down” was nominated for a Rhysling Award. A compilation of his best work is forthcoming.