THE HOUR OF ANIMALS (SHORT HORROR STORY)

Peter Mayberry, a disturbed man who kidnaps and dismembers women, must face the consequences awaiting outside the front door of his upstairs apartment.

Outside, a hot rain fell from a black July sky. All around him was the decorative poison he proclaimed a gift. So vile and hungry, a lair of poison could ever be.

“Hickory dickory dock…” he whispered.

Peter Mayberry went on labeling his voice a dreamy sensation no woman could ever deny the efforts of. Because his charm was a dream. His voice was a dream. His voice… his charm…

The parlor was a hue of an immense afterglow, straying into prominence the auburn cupboard filled with the framed faces he dreamt to caress once more. The lowboy lulled like some dead thing in the corner beneath a wreath that had been in the family for generations. Damned if the thing hadn’t been on the verge of being thrown out. His mother once told him it was good luck… that it would bring him the perfect mate in life, that it would uplift prosperity in love. Lately, he had to agree. He hadn’t had this much attention in all his life, not even in his teenage years when times were fast, and women fancied a lad’s lust because lust was their ticket to high school stardom. Ahh… the things mother never knew about…

But he was aware, as he let his eyes know the interior of a place he had established as his very own ballroom, that there had never been a voice to accompany the raging blows upon the front door. The power of the blows had begun to bend the flames of twenty-five candles encircled amidst the lowboy, the cupboard of photographs, the beige sofa draped in a hand-knitted quilt (another object of sentiment his mother dared fortunate; it had been weaved by his grandmother), and his four-poster bed. Twenty-five was a perfect number.

They had all been twenty-five.

“Who could be longing to visit at this hour?” he uttered, approaching the window overlooking the fire escape that loomed above Hanover Avenue, a street that’s houselights always resembled a black hole filled with burning lanterns. It was also a street that never mistook the portrayal of any visitor’s automobile. In the veil of the night, he quivered at the high-shrieking sirens of police cruisers pulling to the curb in a flurry.

Peter turned to the room just off the parlor; he thought, for a moment, he had heard crying coming from inside. “What troubles you all?” he said solemnly, wading a trail of blood across the parlor’s white, plush carpet.

The knocking went on. And there still wasn’t a voice to accompany its presence.

***

The rag had been given to him by Father George Stylahn when the urge to confess broke him into the same kind of sweat that plagued his skin as Karen Dunlevy strolled Hanover Avenue in her mesh knee-highs and red stilettos, navy mini skirt swaying prettily in a calm evening breeze. He kept it neatly folded in the palm of his hand as he began conversation with her. He talked with a rich elegance and a tone of sleight appeasement. And Karen talked back; he heard every word as if he had been living up to the vow he had made not to let a woman’s insight fall to deaf ears.

She had just come from the corner of the Maisonet Theater on Hanover’s south side. Her stark black hair had been in a bun and held tightly with a pin. The nape of her neck glowed like the hue from the candles all around him. Flesh was an obsession of his. A woman’s beautiful flesh.

“You look very pretty tonight, Karen.”

Her stilettos pegged the sidewalk with a proportional rhythm and volume. Her vision was devoid of all behind her and rallied north to the birthing stars over the city. But somewhere in the midst, she spoke: “Thank you, Peter. And might I say, you look very handsome, like a knight in shining armor.”

“Karen, Karen, Karen. When will you learn the result your words conjure upon a man whose heart has been empty and waiting for sustenance? Must you go on enchanting my greatest desires?”

“Now, Peter, it’s not my fault I can’t resist your charms. You know just what to say to make a lady blush.”

Peter’s unseen eyes, misting in their ominous black color as twilight haggled daylight for a ransom of adulation, scoped upward from her ankles and got lost in the uncouth sight of her buttocks: She wasn’t wearing any undergarments.

“Karen… Oh, my my my, you are a rather naughty girl, aren’t you?”

“As naughty as you like, Peter. So why are you waiting so long to ask my hand for the evening? It’s rude to keep a girl waiting.”

Karen passed the alley between Van Lofton Drive and Statler Street, a place where the traffic got heavier when the night came on and the moods were born. Between two dumpsters, reeking of spilled booze and ammonia, sat a duffle bag full of Karen’s dead-light clothes (the normal wardrobe for her time off the streets). She knelt down, unzipped it, and retrieved a Kent from the soft pack she kept stashed under the collar and leash she never let out of hand. She lit it and watched the smoke rise to the vastness of the night, disappearing in more than one oracle of gray cloud. She was under the impression there had been a shuffling coming from the end of the alley, as if someone had run past and out of sight in the brief moment it took to strike a match. It was a very shifty city, Saxon was.

“Karen, your hand for the evening shall become more than your hand. I fear my control is beckoning the animal inside of me. I can’t keep it caged forever,” Peter whispered, vacating the premises of passing people, something he feared would become the discovery of his magical charms in regard to gripping the binds of love. There was no one around… just distant headlights of cars whose drivers remained focused on the road before them.

Karen put out her cigarette and came to the end of the alley.

Peter’s grip seized her at once, and he pulled her firmly into his sternum. Karen had no recollection of the man who grabbed her and looked deeply into her petrified blue eyes. But she knew he had been looking at her. She could feel it, all the vision of a million eyes together, knowing everything about her in one glance. His hand covered her airways with a cloth tinged in the smell of bleach… a smell… a smell of… a.. smell.. of…

“Your hand for the evening, my beautiful Karen. Turn off your red light.”

Peter’s dreamy voice was the last thing Karen Dunlevy heard.

***

Peter pranced around the parlor in Karen’s street clothes. Outside the window, where cars passed like rows of ants, Peter pretended all the men who desired women like Karen had seen him as he stood on display like a mannequin in the window of an apparel store. His mammary vest shone brightly in the light of the candles. Her breasts had been rather voluptuous and bounced with each frolic he excitedly peaked.

But Karen’s death hadn’t been in spite of the act of being reported to the local authorities. It had a more intimate and romantic precedence. Just moments before penetrating her on the blood-soaked bed, he had held her close to him, feet dangling freely above the shins of his souring blue jeans and danced slowly on the floor amidst the burning candles. He was mindful not to trip over the hacksaw he had let fall to the carpet with a tired hand. The last thing on his mind was his apartment a blaze because of his insolence.

There was one problem that kept coming to the surface, however: he was running out of room. Never mind all the mess he had to clean up every time the urge came over him. And the smell, coming from the room ruminating on the lingering sound of crying, was more than enough to drag Ms. Applewood downstairs out of her rocker to see what her skittish and lonely tenant had been up to. She often heard the boards above her creak when the sound of some hypnotic love song came over the quiet radio atop the cupboard. Sometimes she heard Tom Petty mewling gently Mary Jane’s Last Dance, and sometimes it was REO Speedwagon with I Can’t Fight This Feeling, or Percy Sledge harmonizing When A Man Loves A Woman.

Fortunately, the old bat had only been up once, a time when he had to wipe the sweat from his brow multiple times because she was beginning to suspect something. Yet, overall, Applewood had been rather quiet about what he had been doing, and he never sought it necessary to worry about her.

Peter, after a moment of strutting in the window with Karen’s breasts alight, returned to the bathtub where her butchered corpse lay staring coldly towards the shower wall. Like it was never there, and she was still visualizing the hand coming over her nose and mouth. Did the dead get stuck in limbo? He always wondered about such things. He never once saw a body whose eyes were closed. They all were wide-eyed and frozen in a traumatic expression.

Did they�"

The knocking had grown louder, and that’s when his memory vanquished and brought him back to the room of crying.

***

Peter found the switch with a sure hand, pulled it, and beelined his eyes into the oncoming light.

There they hung like poorly hooked Christmas ornaments. They were strewn up by their necks. Peter stifled a sick laugh at the idea of how much rope he had to buy down at Maybelle’s Hardware: One three-foot section every other Monday, and when Maybelle had once taken the curiosity to inquire why a man with very limited storage space needed so much rope, he joked and told her it was a secondary escape route if the old place went up. He went on to explain how he would tie one end to the leg of his bed and let the other down and alongside the fire escape like Rapunzel let down her hair. From there he would shinny down with far less exertion than descending every flight of stairs on the catwalk that looked like it wouldn’t take more than a man’s desperate footsteps to bring falling atop the line of parked Mercedes at the curb of Hanover.

Looking at them more closely, he grew angry. It was since last Wednesday that he bathed them: One five-gallon bucket of Dawn and one of warm water from the tap. He told the twenty-five-year-olds, those that were inhabited, that he would care for them. He promised. And here he was breaking his promise.

Above him, the bulb dwindled madly and began to spark. The rats had become a real nuisance in Parish Hall and had eaten through much of the electrical wiring. This room alone was overrun with them. Peter gazed about at them all as they formed a mob pit under all that hung above the diseased b******s. He was reminded that they were the primary reason he only came in here once a week to bathe them (not to add the fact of neglect). Other than that, the door remained bolted shut.

A real nuisance. God were they.

In fact, they had gotten worse when Peter’s urges came calling more and more frequently. They were drawn to something in here; he was certain of it. Most times a residence will get one rat, maybe two, even three, but when a whole army of the b******s start invading the joint, it’s a positive indication of something leading them inside.

“Hickory dickory dock,” he said, lifting the heel of his boot.

The rats cried and strangled, causing Peter to nearly lose his balance when they looked to be constructing a ladder of themselves and making way for the cold, blue-red feet of the premature infants. Their small innocent arms stubbed against their gelatinous bodies. Their eyes were as small as the ogling eyes on a paper-made craft, yet solid and frozen in place.

“The mouse ran up the clock�"”

Bong! Bong! Chimed the grandfather in the parlor. Peter swung his neck around and saw the time of midnight had struck hard and abruptly. It was the infamous hour. One he called the hour of animals because the rats seemed the most lively at the particular time and appeared to have an insatiable hunger for whatever he possessed. Whatever was so damn alluring. God, what was it?

The knocking went on, a little more demanding this time. Peter stared at the door and undoubtedly fathomed that on the other side were the bleeding knuckles of a serrated hand. But why wasn’t anyone speaking? Was it Ms. Applewood? Had she perhaps been speaking the whole time and her weak vocals were too strained to be clearly audible? The old bat smoked like a freight train, and years of the habit had taken a toll on her voice, rasping it as if with a blunt file.

Or was it the officers who had pulled in at the curb who had caught on to his womanizing ways and were practicing the standard silence of kempt Englishmen, only to demand he open the door after a chosen span of time… And just how long had they been knocking?

Over the life in the parlor and the pounding at the door, he took his attention back to the infants, faces seeming to turn downward in menacing snarls. They once had mothers who carried them and nurtured them and planned a loving home and future for them. And now, they were just the result of his urges. All he owned that was but a dream. His charm… His voice…

“Hickory dickory dock,” he said, and brought his heel down on a mess of rats, blood and guts exploding out all ends and covering the aging concrete floor. He seized in place, feeling his groin begin to warm with semen.

He allowed his heart to slow, his breathing to normalize. “I’ll be back, dear children. I have to get the buckets from the storage closet.”

Boom! Boom! Boom! The front door rattled against the catches when he walked by. He saw the wood beginning to splinter from top to bottom. Soon whoever was out there would be coming in, with or without his consent.

But there wasn’t time to tend to the door. The bed was a mess of blood, the carpet rank of dead rats and death, Karen’s torn and breastless body lay a cesspool of intestines (he looked down and forgot all about wearing the mammary vest around the house; Christ, wouldn’t the police go guns blazing when he opened the door and let them see how beautiful a woman’s severed breasts looked on him), the spare room off the parlor looked like the essence of an evil and sacrificial occult. There were too many of the unborn without names to relate back to a missing persons case. They had hung so long that they felt like petrified wood. Peter found it grotesque, the feeling, and began to rationalize the fact he never had the ability to be an undertaker and that a proper burial was dually awaiting. He supposed he could break them down with a handful of hefty bags and the garbage disposal once the bathing process became too deviant and rigorous to uphold.

Peter grabbed the buckets from the supply closet, filled one with Dawn soap and the other with warm water, and came back to the spare room.

From the spark of his eyesight came a panorama of snarling bucked mandibles, whiskers coated in blood, eyes beady and black, rage painted over their dead, tiny faces. “Mother!” they barked in a livid, guttural cry.

The buckets sprang from Peter’s hands and came crashing to the floor. Soap and water trailed around his boots and proceeded to span over the cement. His mouth fell open… and his mind traveled afar.

***

He held the rag Father George Stylahn had given him at confession in the palm of his hand. Neatly. He never made an uneven crease. He was a methodical man, Peter Mayberry.

Lillian Blaine had been one of the unwed darlings on Hanover Avenue. She wasn’t of sophistication like Karen Dunlevy when she took to the streets at night, looking to put out the fires of every man who longed for flesh. No. Lillian was the supporter of sweats and messy hair. But that never ceased Peter’s desire for her. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder. It was true.

Lillian marked the distance from the north side of Hanover to the corner of Statler with a light jog. She had never wanted to follow in her folks’ footsteps and wind up out of shape at the age of fifty. She was all about cardio.

Peter stuck to her closely, black overcoat hugging his face and blocking the light of the sun. He was a stranger but not. He knew Lillian as well as he had Karen. Distantly acknowledging their daily routines from within the shadows of a building-faded source of lighting. On rare occasions when the sun got too bright, he would lurch behind a streetlight or duck in a nearby alley or hide out under the ledge of someone’s overhang.

And like Karen, he talked to Lillian like a lover. Like some years-married vault of love and not a f*****g creep at all: “You look stunning, Lil… Woops, can I call you Lil? I hope it’s okay. But you do. you look mesmerizing. I could literally eat you up.”

“Now, now, Peter,” he heard her say to him, “don’t say anything you can’t fulfill. That’s no way to tease a lady.”

He saw her womb, plump and climbing towards the heavens as she jogged. It wasn’t abnormal to see a pregnant woman exercising. It was perfectly fine… and healthy… and safe as long as they were careful not to fall. The pregnant women did everything they could to maintain their figures due to over exaggeration. They could be as thin as a noodle and complain about their weight. On the contrary, Lillian was far from not maintaining her figure. She looked golden, kissed in a bliss of supernatural light even on this dying day.

“I’m serious, Lil. If I could just get you to my place, I would show you a level of excitement you’d never dream possible. “Peter picked up his pace, walking faster as the alley on Statler came upon them. He grinned and twirled his tongue violently, eyes pinned to her moving haunches pulsating the fabrics of her sweatpants.

“Then what are you waiting for, Peter? Aren’t you a man of your word?”

She was reaching the sprinting point of her jog when Peter speared her into the alley and covered her airways with the rag he had used to take Karen into his arms. She writhed and scratched at his face, fearing for one life more than her own: her unborn son’s.

Lilian met the darkness and never awoke again.

***

Ms. Applewood knocked on Peter’s door later that night, claiming to have heard a baby crying. It was against the lease for a tenant to keep a child without signing the proper paperwork. She had even tried to barge her way in to inspect, but Peter held his ground, as well as the umbilical cord that held the silent child dangling on the floor at his back foot. The door was the only thing keeping unwanted eyes on his decorative poison.

“There’s no child here,” he insisted. “I am single and have never had any children. You must have heard the television, Ms. Applewood.”

“You just make sure to follow the proper rules, Mr. Mayberry. Unless of course you want to seek another place to reside.” Her voice, though harsh, was a monotone that of an old schoolmarm. She came across snappy as well as brisk.

“No, mam. It’s just me. Always has been.”

Peter felt the cord give way, and it was followed by a hard thump!

“What was that?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

Applewood glared around, gave him a sharp grimace, and walked away mumbling.

He was afraid she would have come in and seen the back pelt of Lillian Blaine draped over the parlor lamp, one he had considered tossing out because flies were beginning to churn. He was fortunate that wasn’t the case now.

Before he was so rudely interrupted, he had doused her lips in blood with a fine art and blocked the mess her neck was jetting when he dismembered her head. Lillian’s lips had been his favorite and had been what was to drive him into following her.

He had just enough time to stuff her body in the spare room before he had heard Ms. Applewood knock. He had rushed to the door, uprooted infant in one hand and her head held in the other by two blood-drenched fingers, just out of sight.

He sighed heavily and watched Ms. Applewood turn back to him, still mumbling. But one of her sentences had been coherent: “Why does a man wear ladies' lipstick? It’s just not manly-like. Repulsive…”

Peter ran his fingers over his lips and looked down to see they were etched in blood. He had forgotten about kissing the severed head moments ago, loving the way his tongue floated over hers, so wet and warm.

He closed the door, set the lock, and pondered about his good fortune in love. With one blooded hand, he saluted the wreath above the lowboy. And for a moment he thought he saw it salute back. Smiling, gleaming, and then turning astray in disgust when he saw a rat emerge from behind it.

***

“Mother!”

This group-adapted sound even in the memorabilia of his darkest dreams.

First, there was reality, and then there were dreams.

But this was no dream. The knocking became a pulverizing battering ram, the parlor flaunted its coat of blood. Peter looked about, eyes rumoring to Karen’s butchered body lying cold in his bathtub, never to be scrubbed clean again, to Lilian’s severed head at the foot of the bed. And the parlor began to spin like a carousel destined for what lies behind the front door. The infants screamed repeatedly, “Mother!”

Faster and faster,

and faster and faster,

and faster and faster the carousel spun.

“Mother!

“Mother!”

Faster and faster. The parlor a whirlwind; the parlor a carnival of the dead; the parlor a stage for kempt Englishmen to dance with all that was but a dream.

His charm… His voice…

Peter slammed his foot down on the floor, causing the beams to bow and crack loudly.

The spinning stopped. The infants quieted, but he could still see them snarling at him. “Stop looking at me!”

Bong! Bong! Peter heard the grandfather triumph again, and he spun around to see the hour of midnight arrive. Were his eyes deceiving him? Midnight should have been long gone… The hour of animals.

The light bulb above him sparked and hummed, blowing to shards at the will of nothing. Behind him, in the parlor, the sound of breaking glass erupted. He ran and looked.

Rats. Rats by the hundreds were shambling over the window sill and inside. They were piling in and becoming a saturated city in Asia, Hong Kong perhaps. Their eyes were the color of bright blue, dark brown… and the size of flashlights. And in their eyes, Peter could see the south side of Hanover; he could see the alley on Van Lofton and Statler; he could see Karen Dunlevy walking the streets; he could see Lillian Blaine jogging briskly; and he could see reality. All that was but a dream.

Karen never spoke back. Lillian never spoke back. He was a stranger. A man who had taken the lives of those he had no right to.

Peter gasped and backed towards the door. His hands felt hot, slicked with oil. He looked down at them and saw the infants appear. One after the other like he was watching a slideshow of his own demented life.

“Mother!”

“Ahhh!” Peter shrieked, falling against the buckling door.

The rats lunged up his shins. Their teeth felt like crisp barbed wire, jagged and disheveled. He kicked them away frantically and staggered towards the bathroom. The window inside would be his escape.

He reached the opening and grabbed the windowsill, tugging and pushing to get it open. It came up mere inches when he suddenly heard a soft, garbling voice. Hard-edged but pleasant. It was Karen’s voice.

“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done you f*****g pervert! I’m going to cut you open and take everything inside of you out… just like you did me. Just like you did all the others…”

A tear fell slowly down his blushed cheek. His mouth was agape, for he was seeing the impossible become possible. Karen’s head swiveled on her neck like it was full of ball bearings and turned and faced him implacably.

“Oh, God…….” he stammered.

“But don’t you fret,” she said, beginning to stand. Her guts dangled above the white ivory hue of her flesh. Flesh was his obsession. “You look very handsome. Like a knight in shining armor.”

Her body snapped and twisted into an upright state. At her feet, moving on the wet and blooded tile, a trail of molded footprints made way for him.

“No!”

The rats had reformed their army and were leaking over the threshold of the bathroom doorway.

“No!”

The ropes entwined around the infants’ necks began to pull apart, lowering them like the dropping of the ball on New Year’s Eve.

Peter clutched his mammary vest and jerked back at the foreign feeling of it. It had gone cold since he had first constructed it. The skin around the areolas were cracking open, letting a yellow infection foam out in bubbling globs. The veins had dyed Indigo blue, and the skin started to flake.

“Mother!”

“No! No!”

Peter stumbled past Karen’s lurching corpse and back into the parlor. One by one, the infants came down and hobbled on their rubber legs. Screeching commenced as they padded towards him. Faces snarling, eyes ogling towards the chance at redemption.

The front door had split down the middle. Chunks of wood kept what was just out of sight hidden.

He backed into the corner between the door and the mess of his bed in the next room over. The hour of animals had arrived. Everything dead was walking, breathing or not, he had no way of knowing. But they were walking and living for a time unknown… for a time to kill.

“Oh, God…” he uttered as the door gave way and became kindling on the parlor floor.

The hour of animals had arrived… indeed.

***

Florence Applewood, a decrepit eighty-four years of age, shook her cup of hot tea with a slice of lemon down on the saucer and pulled herself up with her cane. She had got a call from Mary St. Helen across the street about police coming in and arresting another tenant for assault on a teenage girl. She saw the lights and heard the sirens, but she had no interest in what the police of Saxon had been there for.

She had been in the middle of watching Rod Stewart live in concert when a rain of wood chips came sprinkling down in her cup of Lipton. She hated not knowing what Peter Mayberry was doing in there to cause such a ruckus. Last time he had been rather secretive about something. But now was the time to get to the bottom of it all.

She glared at the clock on the wall (precisely midnight) and headed upstairs.

***

The rats jumped all over him, sinking their bloodthirsty teeth into his flesh. The infants sprawled up his torso and had made a rope appear like some demonic voodoo and coiled it around his neck. Karen’s corpse stood before him and removed one of her stilettos. She turned it over and angled its point towards his chest.

He gurgled as she plunged it into his diaphragm and seared it downward. His guts splayed out of him and fell into a large pile on the floor.

Peter Mayberry saw a thick haze cover his eyes as he began to lose consciousness. But that was far from the end of all that was but a dream. He heard a deep strangling screech of a voice cry out in the haze as the door collapsed.

“Hickory dickory dock.”

The beast was wearing the shreds of Applewood’s nightgown. Her cane lay curled under its giant webbed feet. The haze allowed him to see the horrific view of its long, chattering mandible of bucked teeth, its hungry eyes fiending over his fresh innards, its ears like antennas high on a hillside, peeled back in a flaring rage.

“The mouse ran up the clock�"”