Hello ladies and gentleman and welcome to the first installment of my tales of terror for the Harpers. Those of you who are familiar with my page know my sadistic tales usually revolve around three main universes; Big Time Rush, Grey's Anatomy, and The suite life of Zack and Cody. If you're not familiar with my work... this isn't pretty. If you came here to find some cheap kiddie erotica or some cute little ghost story I'm afraid your in the wrong place. With my latest adoration I present my very first horror story of Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn.
Fourteen, guitar in his still growing hands, chalices had already formed and Dicky had only been playing for about six months. That's how it starts. You pick up the tools and widdel your way out. That's what life had become for Dicky Harper, an elaborate escape plan. Was music the answer? His face on the screen? No, the very thought frightened him. Something about cameras made him feel so trapped.
Often he envisioned the bug like machines with their massive eye and blinding lights. He could see them swarming in clouds as if minded by their own authority. They would capture anything. Turn it into something vulgar or innocent depending on how they needed the story to go. Didn't matter to them, he supposed, so long as their dark cloud kept swirling over the world.
Over the last two years he'd grown so weary of the television. It angered him most days, some days it left him in perpetual states of agony. Attached onto someone that isn't even real due to a face that belongs to a very real very trapped individual that has litterally nothing in common with the character they portray.
That mind of his was swimming and his fingers had stopped strumming so he didn't hear when his brother Nicky entered the room the two of them shared with their other brother Ricky. The three of them and their sister across the hall made up the Harper Quads. How different even they have become to Dicky.
Nicky was almost oblivious to the pain of his brother as he sorted through his drawers for some clothes. When he began packing a bag to leave for the evening is when he saw the pale white of someone in sheer terror behind him. Nicky easily rests the bag down and walks over to his brothers bed, "Talk to me dude. What's wrong."
"I'm alright." Dicky promised as he looked down at his strings but he most certainly was not because his paranoia had knocked something loose in his head and now his vision wasn't working. Perhaps it was his fathers copy of Scary Movie he watched with Dawn last tuesday. The idea of life like that. Seeing human beings associate with one another in such a hollow way. He couldn't stop imagining everyone in the world that way.
Nicky furrowed one of his dark brows and reached out his hand to his, usually, more playful sibling only to turn sour when Dicky pulls away to lie in his sheets.
Dicky says, "I think I just need some sleep. Thanks nick."
Nicky steps back. Kind of hurt that his brother would reject his gesture but understanding in that the four of them were all going through changes and trying to figure out who they are deep down or more often who they're not, he decides to not let it get to him too much. Still Nicky couldn't help but consciously feel as though he was gross or invaluable in some way.
He continues to pack his bags and swipes his blu from the counter. The cartridge of bright orange THC twisted in and ready to get him through the next three out through the door and into the hallway he passes his brother Ricky, the more hyperfocused of the quad, out in the hall who asks him where he's going.
Nicky replies, "Mitchell's medical practice camp. I'll be back before the end of January."
"Since when do they have camps in winter?" Ricky's nerves were always complimented with his swirl of words. He could make the most suspicious question feel like friendly banter.
Only to Nicky, who'd just been brushed off, this felt like an invitation. So he slithers his arms around his brother and says, "Look out for Dicky while I'm gone. He doesn't seem to be doing to well."
In his snow boots, collection of winter clothes, and sunglasses Nicky decends the staircase and makes his way out the front door into the blinding white of the morning. By nightfall the deep clouds will be back and all of this will be as pitch in the fire place as the cold freezes down to the bones. He piles into his friends car and drives away.
He wasn't wrong. An hour, two went by. The darkness came. The roads were slick, no passing traffic. The trees would whistle with the whimper of a thousand winds as if wolves were opening their own wounds just to feel something. The leer of the creaking on the doors and windows was enough to drive the sane mad and the mad into their own personal Hell.
Dicky had gotten lost in the corridors outside the bedrooms, refusing to cut the lights on because he didn't want to be seen. Not even by his own eyes. No, it had so bad that he had crawled into the shadows just before the window to see if he could catch glimpse of the late December moon in a break through the clouds.
She was the only thing that ever felt truly real. He wasn't the type to get through his courses with a bright mind but he was the type to understand things in a way the other's could but wouldn't For example mythology is something he can skate through without having to so much as ask for help. These stories have told him the moon is a goddess who controls everything from the tide to what Dawn is going through to the very reason he and his siblings were born. If the human body is seventy percent water who's to say she can't influence him a little bit?
His mother's voice comes through the vents calling him to dinner. Oh, how frightening. Interacting with them all at the same time is so weird when one of them isn't there. Nicky rounded them all out, just as Ricky did, just as Dawn did, just as he did. He felt their banter was impossible when he wasn't there. The lights down in the living room and kitchen were bright enough to disorient him as he came into the scene.
There was a meloncholy morose about the house and he was just as surprised as the rest of them to see Mae there. According to Dawn she'd gotten snowed in with them and would be spending the weekend until the storm went away. After she finished talking to him Dicky's mind went soaring, 'What if she suspects I'll try to sleep with her friend? What if she thinks I'm being a pervert right now? Is that all I am? A sexual object? Am I doing it now? Is this it?' Then flashes over his minds eye of the act it's self. First with Mae and when that sent a fire down his spine he thought of himself with Dawn and walked briskly away as the very concept made him so nauseous but a twisted mind caused him to think he had failed some sort of test.
Ricky sighs as he cracks open a cherry pepsi and looks around. His own mind full of it's own issues, what with a major test coming up on the online courses he was taking for a theatre program that would be opening in the spring. He very much enjoyed the arts despite his unmatched wit in the highest of academics. It was the emotions he liked to study the most.
When Dawn approached him though his casual disposition returned, he lost all of his worries and frustrations to the comfort of family.
"What's up with Dicky? Does he seem off to you?" She said quietly.
He shrugged, "Nicky mentioned something before he left today."
They both looked out to see the bolt of purple lightning flash across the sky and hear the pick up of the wind in the dreadful downpour of shadowy flakes that hid even the streetlights from view.
"Maybe it's the weather." Says Dawn.
Ricky shakes his head as he slips past her to enter the kitchen, "You know better Dawn. He's never like this."
The fractured mind of Dicky was transfixed into the scene as they all entered the kitchen. The lights went out and a bowl busted as it hit the ground. A slip and someone falls. Who's playing the violin?
Mae's cries of anguish come from nearby and naturally, as if he could sense the camera's had started rolling, he knelt down and hovered his hand in front of him ensuring he would not touch her. Then offered, "Are you alright? Can I help you?"
The flick of a lighter and the candles around the room begin lighting up and Mae looks up at the calm collected face of someone who only moments ago was in shambles. Who is this? Since when does Dicky talk like that?
He's helped her up, Dawn has cleaned the mess, the girls have slipped out of the room and upstairs to find an outfit for Mae to change into and Ricky's hand finds his brother's shoulder, "Will you sit next to me? I need to talk to you."
'He wants something from me. Why else would he be so kind?' Dicky's mind once again faltered the the chaos of it's own imagination as he sat down at the table. Their father, tom, a tall and seemingly dorky gentleman, joined them. He's so much different from their mother. Mother is a sparkling faucet in a new home and he's a leaky apartment shower head. There's so much disconnection between Dicky and his parents, so much to where her touch feels infinitely unnatural.
Not meaning to he grips the thigh of his brother as she speaks to him, "Your brother's going to be just fine out there Dicky. He's a smart kid and he got on his flight over an hour ago. The storm hadn't even set in then and it's brisk and dry where he's going so he'll be okay."
She crosses over and sits across from him and how his stomach churns at the idea of her naked legs being so close to him draped only the thin cut to thigh black dress she wore this evening. She never wears dresses. Certainly this isn't a romantic evening for her. Is she trying to suck up to their father? Had she been caught cheating with the pool boy?
She had worked tirelessly on the display before them and Christmas was two days ago. There's something deeper going on here. When he fell into the analytics the food was passed around the table. Pot roast, steak and potatoes. Obviously this is meal women made for their husbands during a much more patriarchal time. Broccoli, the entire head, he'd eat it just to confuse people. As if today he was someone different. The salad mix of romain lettuce thin carrot shavings grapes, and cold shredded chicken, all of it tasted like cardboard. A slight panic in his mind of a possible virus but no, the surpass of the grape wine his parents let them drink was bold and pungent. Ten percent alcohol ninety percent grape juice.
Ricky's hand found Dicky's knee and an ease fell about Dicky. His more intellectual sibling was always very in tune with his emotions and suddenly he felt the cameras would expect him to be a bully and disrespect the kid beside him but he decides to take an alternate role, "I'm alright Ricky. I appreciate you. I just got a lot on my mind." He looks across the table not at his mother but through her, "Is it alright if I turn in early. I'm not feeling too well?"
She nods, "Of course. If you need anything just let us know."
It was too late, he had already left the kitchen.
A stumble through the dark. The rush to his head, he had never liked the wine much and only drank the entire glass this evening to appear to have his wits about him. How poor a decision it seems now. His fingers wrap tightly around the banister's wood and he finds himself alone in the upstairs corridor. Suddenly a strange noise came from the cracks in all the doors around him. It was loud and it was abrasive. To top it all it was continual. A song of sorts.
How could they not hear this down stairs. The neon lights came out and lunged at him. Swan dive. Roll across the carpet. Back to his feet. 'Somethings here. It wants to kill me doesn't it?' A door opens, it's his sister's. Long green fingers with sharp daggers as nails oozes green slime as it laces around the frame of the door. The sounds in his ears were that of a song with speed repetition and uplift. All the things he's not even feeling. There is no energy in his body and it's as if the more he sees of this creature the less he has. It was draining him.
The camera would want him to lay down and take it or run screaming, he chooses another rout. His body knows the moves to the Harper Quad's set list in their thirteenth year at edgewood even though his mind does not. The eyes come into view and Dicky shuts his. He keeps moving even as the breath of something fowl hits him in the face. He doesn't hesitate when the fingers find his stomach. And he does not scream as something hot and wet presses down on his forehead.
The music ends and his body eases. The lights are on, a voice is coming through to him. It's Rickys, "Dicky? You had a seizure. If you can hear me I need you to follow the eraser on this pencil."
The creature was gone. His face was covered in dried blood.
His mother and father stood in the open frame of their door discussing weather to risk the icy roads to get him to a doctor. This has never happened before. Dicky wouldn't have it, "No. No one's dying for me. I'm going to bed."
Slowly he stands to his feet and takes Ricky's hand into his own, "Thank you Ricky. I'll be okay."
He takes hold of the cloth and wipes his own blood off of his face before catching a glimpse of the girls looking at him in pity. Oh, this is how it starts. He's so quickly falling into the role of the sympathetic patient. The dying. Well not today. They don't get to decide what to see him as today. So it's into his room to shut and lock the door.
As he lie there he felt like he was trapped in this vortex of time. No sleep would take him away from this place. The terror of the idea of seeing that creature again. The crass phobia of the insects crawling all over him and suddenly he's on his feet enraged that the hallway light is still on. Throwing off the blanket he flies out into what is supposed to be the corridor but is in fact the outer corner of the schools parking lot in the middle of the hot and mucky summer.
Standing all around him are the students holding their phones laughing as blood drips down his nose. He feels so naked and vulnerable. How quickly both of those fade with a dark haze over takes the field and cell phones become massive rocks and stones and the laughter has given way to vengeful gory screams as they, including his siblings, begin pelting him with rocks. His hands, his toes, the crackle and the crunch. His nose, his stomach. Then not one, not two, but three stones find his skull and he looks up from his puddle of blood to see Nicky and Dawn and Mae. Through the blur he find Ricky.
Ricky who refused to throw his rock. Ricky who now stands over him in his bed, "Dicky please." He whisper, "You're scaring me."
"Could... could you leave the light on? Seeing you makes everything feel okay." He admits.
Ricky nods, then crawls beneath the sheet to rest his head on Dicky's bare chest. The rest of the night is peaceful as the hum of the heater keeps them both warm and the only eyes he cares about are shut in deep wholesome sleep.