Amy's Favorite Pink Jacket

A coward's nightmare.

"You're different than you sound behind the walls" The thin man keeps an ink-black pistol trained on my chest. “I thought you’d have some fight in ya.” His pale finger twitches slightly against the trigger, and I hear a small whimper. My daughter Amy hides behind me. She's only six years old with tears falling from her face onto the collar of her favorite pink jacket.

My heart pounds violently against my chest. My head feels light and my eyes take on a dangerous heaviness. The room gets dark and I realize I haven't blinked yet. I'm afraid to.

The thin man moves towards Amy, keeping his eyes and the gun pointed at me.

"Okay sweet-pea," He says with a voice like a toad that’s swallowed a rusty screw. "Come over here now. Your Daddy's not gonna move, is he?" The thin man slowly reaches out with his free hand; his long, blackened nails brush the zipper of Amy's jacket. She whimpers again and cowers behind me, and I wish I could do the same.

The smell coming from him engulfs the room, like spoiled fish found in a long-vacant apartment. His skin is pale-white and sore-ridden, with long scars crisscrossed against his chest and shoulders. What is left of his hair stretches down across his face in knotted, dirty clumps. His pale figure stands out against the Cherrywood bedroom set, giving a pulsing glow of violence to an otherwise domestic setting.

"Pl...please..." I force out. My shoulders and arms are shaking, and I feel Amy's small hands loosen somewhat behind me.

"What?" he whispers. The iris of his left eye is a bluish-white color, and the skin underneath has bubbled - the result of some long-ignored infection. "You gonna be a hero now John?"

He knows my name.

"How..." I get out before the thin man pushes the gun hard against my forehead. I feel the cold steel push against my skull, and I wonder what my brain might look like.

"Oh, whas' the matter John?" he says. I close my eyes and feel a warmth trailing from my groin to my shoes. The harsh smell of ammonia hits the air.

"Whas' that? Ha! Is that what I think John? You sick f**k! Oh Lord, I should just end you"

I can feel his breath against my cheek getting faster with his resolve, and I brace for the sound of the gunshot.

"No!" screams Amy, and she jumps from behind me. The thin man grabs her by the hair and howls with laughter that fills the room like rocks down a metal chute.

Some buried fatherly instinct breaks to the surface and I run at the thin man. Before I can make it, my eyes force themselves closed, victims of the fear. The movies build up the image of the hero yelling an empowering war-cry as he rushes into battle. I give no war-cry. I'm silent as I run blindly toward the thin man. He says nothing as I jump at him, but I'm able to hear a dull thud against something soft. As the pain explodes in my temple and the warm blood trickles down my cheek, I realize he's hit me with the butt of the gun. My eyes remain closed as the rest of my senses give way to the dark.

 

I wake up hours later to a scream. My wife is downstairs and I can already guess at what she sees. There's blood on a pink jacket, leaving a darker hue that's closer to red. Too much blood.

My eyes slowly come back to me. The pain in my temple seethes through my body, spinning the ceiling with a nauseating rhythm. I use my legs and push myself on my back towards the sound of my wife, which has lowered from a scream to a guttural sob.

I somehow make it down the stairs, still on my back, and I roll over to lift myself up. My feet give way and I barely catch myself on the wall. My wife doesn't notice. She's cradling a lifeless thing in a red-pink jacket, asking "Why?" in an anguished moan with every breath she's able to find.

My heart punches inside my chest and falls towards my liver. I fall again, this time on my knees, and I let out a wail only the animals can understand.

The police search the house and find a hole in the office closet. It's small but it leads to the space behind the walls. I consent to an exploratory demolition and they break the walls down. We find evidence of life - food wrappers, water bottles, and wrinkled books. The tell me that the thin man may have been there all along, coming out when we weren't home, and even maybe when we were asleep. There are trinkets and long-lost items recovered: a watch, my wife's favorite comb, Amy's favorite teddy bear.

Behind the wall in Amy's room, they find a notebook of disturbing sexual images and drawings, as well as a lock of Amy's hair.

The first page is dated a week after Amy was born.

Reviews

[sette]

this is a socially relevant story, there will always be child molesters and pedophiles around, it is the sickness of the mind and the work of the demon to do something like that but molesting and killing are not the same, in molesting a child there is already an abuse, a killing of an innocent but in murder any child doesn't deserve not only it is killing of an innocent but more than that which is simply unforgivable

[Jeremy]

Thanks for reading it. My original goal in writing this was much loftier and a little more fantastical. I plan to go back at some point and maybe rewrite it, but I wanted to complete the story so I could work on something else.
The daughter's death wasn't my intention. Originally, the thin man takes Amy through the hole behind the wall and John goes to find them. I planned on doing a story of John's literal descent into madness as he searches for his daughter in the space behind the walls, where he finds evidence that the thin man has been there all along. I hit a bit of a roadblock after John gets knocked out, so I went in a different direction. I purposefully didn't give a resolution with the thin man because I thought it was more powerful to the story. We don't know who he is or why he did what he did, and they don't catch him. The idea that the threat is still out there was very interesting to me.

[sette]

that i can picture out that the thin man is just waiting for another kill. he did it with amy and he think he committed a perfect crime which will encourage him to do it again.

[Jacob Clifford]

I had an idea of how this story would end, and so it was painful reading all the way through, but those final lines hit really hard. The somewhat open, unsatisfactory ending lends itself well to the horror of the story. Very potent writing.

[Jeremy]

Thanks! Like I replied to Sette, my original idea left Amy alive. John rescues her after a strange chase behind the walls. I may return to that idea later on, but I found the idea of a true coward coming face-to-face with pure evil and losing was a really interesting take on a story. Everyone wants to believe that if and when they come face-to-face with danger, they'll act heroically. It doesn't always work out that way.

I've always wanted to write a story about a man who lives behind the walls. The idea comes from a true story of a man who was having an affair with a married woman and lived in the couple's attic for 10 years, then murdered the husband. It's a crazy story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walburga_Oesterreich