Bittersweet
Part 1: Cannibal
The cannibal dragged the corpse of the vagabond brother through the straw fields where, without a dwelling to call his own, the third brother had made his home. All three brothers had wronged him and all three would suffer. The man withdrew the carving knife from his thick jacket and began working on the corpse’s left hand. Within minutes, he had already devoured three fingers and would finish the rest in short order…
The second brother had been harder to lure out. He was a woodsman with weapons of his own and a distrust of strangers that the homeless brother had not possessed. Luckily for the cannibal, a house made of wood was ample fuel for a fire. After pouring the accelerant on the side of the wooden house, he activated his lighter and watched the flames completely engulf the home. After his stubbornness had waned, the woodsman ran through the backdoor of the pyre and into the embrace of the cannibal’s carving knife. With this brother being the fattest of the three, the cannibal would not go hungry for some time.
Sensing what had befallen his kin, the eldest brother, a gunsmith, had been prepared. He stormed to the second floor window of his brick house, shotgun in hand, and unleashed two slugs in the direction of the knife-wielding intruder running across his lawn. The cannibal narrowly avoided death in that moment and, unbeknownst to the gunsmith, slipped to the top of the roof where he would exploit the structure’s weakness. Upon seeing the chimney and its great size, he jumped through the opening. He had noticed too late the smoke that filled the shaft, for the gunsmith had covered his bases and lit the fireplace upon his enemy’s arrival. So the cannibal burned in the most horrible way until the gunsmith came upon him and ended his misery with a slug to the head.
Part 2: Butcher
The man freed his three pups from the cage though they could not see their liberator. For the rest of their lives they would only ever smell him. At the hands of the butcher, his poor children had been robbed of their eyes. His mutts had a penchant for chasing the butcher, hoping for scraps, whenever she drove past his farm. The man had seen too late the woman carting his dogs into the back of her van. It had taken a week, but he finally found them. The two larger pups were unspoiled beyond their loss of vision, however, the runt of the litter was missing his tail with only a bloody stump remaining. Try as he did, he could not locate the tail…
A farmer by trade, the last few years had not been kind to the man. Sales had been scarce, but food had been scarcer. Thin and malnourished, when he entered the butcher’s shed it was stacked with chicken wire cages filled with gaunt animals hungrier than he. On the table at the center of the room was the runt’s missing tail floating in a pot of stew along with six small orbs he knew weren’t meatballs. Beside the stew was the carving knife and the pictures. The pictures showed his dogs being “operated” on with the knife by the butcher and her three sons: a vagabond, a woodsman, and a gunsmith. All three had bad reputations and all three he knew well.
The butcher had not been prepared when the man overwhelmed her in the darkness of her home. Beaten, bloody, and bound, it wasn’t long before she revealed the location of her three sons. Immediately after procuring this information, the man fetched the carving knife. His dogs barked and howled as he went to work on the butcher. Killing her would not be enough. Licking his lips, he carved a thick slice off the butcher’s left hand. He knelt as a man, but rose a cannibal. With the butcher dead and his pups now safe, all that remained were the lives of the three sons. And now he had their locations: the vagabond dwelled in the straw fields, the woodsman in a wooden house, and the gunsmith was holed up in his large, expensive brick house…
Part 3: Teeth
The gunsmith’s eyes shot open when the scratching noises came. Sequestered in the darkness of the master bedroom’s large, foul-smelling bed, the gunsmith carefully left the comfort of quilt and pillows to retrieve his machete. From the hallway of the abandoned farmhouse, the clacking of nails against wood traveled closer to the bedroom. Through the entryway came a dark figure the size of a small bull, though in the darkness he couldn’t make out its features. Snorting and grunting irritably, it stopped in its tracks then held its nose in the air, searching. And although it could sense him, it couldn’t find him. The gunsmith was perplexed by its inability to spot his form in the relative dark, but quickly moved into the adjacent bedroom.
He was shocked to witness another beast, similar to the first but smaller in size, prowling the other bedroom near a shredded futon. It too did not see him, but like with the first beast, the gunsmith managed to sneak out of the room unspoiled. He had found himself here, at the farmhouse, after his past transgressions had finally caught up with him. He’d been driven from his home and now lived the life of a nomad and fugitive. When he had first discovered this large house, based on the wear and many spider webs noted throughout, he had assumed it was abandoned, but it appeared it was the chosen abode for these demon leviathans: one with its large quilted bed, the other with its long shredded futon. His heart sank when he noted the small cot located by the living room entrance where he had made his initial ingress. He hadn’t noticed it before…
The open front door creaked as the wind swayed it to and fro ever so lightly. When the gunsmith was not two feet from the entryway, the sound of feet scraping against dirt was audible nearby. A third beast, much smaller than the first two, moved into the house with his nose held high. The gunsmith gasped when the creature’s face became clear. It wasn’t the sharp teeth of the giant dog that scared him. It was the missing tail and the lack of eyes. Eyes that had been torn from the dog’s sockets years prior. He barely had time to scream before the runt had his teeth in his neck, blood spewing from his carotid arteries as the dog tore out flesh, always coming back for more. The barking forms of the runt’s kin soon filled the gunsmith’s vision before his eyes and lips were ripped from his face. The dogs took no mercy on the gunsmith, especially the runt, for he recognized the scent of the man who had severed his tail and taken his eyes when he was only a pup.
Additional Artwork:
For more stories like this:
Midnight Knock: A Horror Anthology
I hope you enjoyed my story!