Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28428152-20181002083401

Ben woke up that morning feeling exhausted, though he did not know why. Despite the fright he had suffered the night prior, Ben did not once think about The Book of Agony or Mohamed that day. Nor the next week, for that matter. Not that he felt happy, necessarily, or that he suddenly became more sociable. No, in those regards he was in a definite state of decline. His parents never noticed, of course, though the Sunday following, while at church with his parents and grandparents (who on occasion would go to church with them), his grandparents—Penny’s parents that is—noticed that something was amiss.

“Hey, Ben, you okay?” Helen asked him as they were standing up to leave, the church a soft cacophony of noise as people gathered their things.

Ben quietly nodded his head, eyes cast at his old penny loafers, in which he had stuck pennies for good luck.

“Well, how ’bout some ice cream before we head back to your place?” Charlie asked as he put on his jacket.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and said, “I guess so.”

Charlie gave him a warm smile and leaned over to Dave and Penny.

“Hey Penny, we’re gonna stop by Baskin-Robbins with Ben on the way back. That okay?”

“If it’ll get him to wipe that look off of his face, then sure,” she answered.

Charlie gave a goofy thumbs-up to Ben, who forced himself to smile.

“Oh, man, ice cream sure does sound pretty good right now, ha-ha!” a tan middle-aged woman who’d sat in front of them hollered. “What’s your favorite flavor?”

Ben shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno.”

She waved her hand at him playfully. “Well, you gotta have a favorite, sweetie.”

“I don’t really have favorites,” Ben added quietly.

“Well, mine’s chocolate mint. Isn’t chocolate just the best?”

“I prefer regular chocolate. Chocolate mint kind of makes me want to throw up.”

The woman stared widely at him with a wide grin that made sure to expose as many teeth as possible.

“Well, bless your little heart.”

“Yeah, bless your little heart, too,” Charlie interrupted with a strained smile. “Come on Ben, let’s go get some ice cream.”

“Is it weird that I don’t really have any favorites?” Ben asked once they got in the car.

“No,” Helen said. “I think it just means you can see the good in a lot of things.”

“What does that mean?” Ben asked.

“It means…” she started, “it means that you don’t see things in black and white. That you can see both good and bad in the things around you.”

Ben wasn’t entirely sure what his grandmother meant, but he accepted the compliment nonetheless.

“Hey, honey, where’s Baskin-Robbins, again?” Charlie asked as he put the car into reverse.

“I think it’s on Bakker Pike,” she said.

“Sounds about right,” he returned. He gave a sly look towards Ben. “We may or may not go there more than we should.”

He turned on the radio and pulled out of the church’s parking lot.

“And the hangman plays the mandolin before he goes to sleep. And the last thing on his mind is the Wild-Eyed boy imprisoned ‘neath the covered wooden shaft….”

“Oh hey, it’s Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” Charlie mused. He turned to Helen. “I remember we used to listen to this one a lot back in the day. Your parents ever show you David Bowie, Ben?”

“No, sir,” he answered. “Who’s David Bowie?”

“’Who’s David Bowie?’” he cried in mock surprise. “Helen, the boy doesn’t know who David Bowie is! Can you believe that?”

“My goodness, I can’t,” she teased. “We must not have raised our son properly if he can go ten years without showing our grandson David Bowie.”

Charlie violently twisted the knob, cranking the song to a deafening volume.

“Blankets smoke into the room, and the day will end for some as the night begins for one….”

“Charlie!” Helen shrieked. “Turn it down!”

“Whoops. My bad,” he said as they were turning into Baskin-Robbins.

They went inside and waited patiently in line as a green-haired girl took their orders.

“Oh, man, this Cherry Jubilee is just fantastic!” Charlie moaned a few minutes later as Ben was piddling around with his chocolate ice cream. “I don’t know how you can hate this stuff, Helen.”

“Oh, I’ll just stick to my cookie dough flavor, thank you very much. And you say that every time.”

“’Cause I know it pisses you off,” mumbled. Helen promptly kicked him in the leg.

“Whoops. My bad. Don’t say ‘piss’ or ‘shit’ or anything like that, Ben.”

“Charlie! You’ll get us in trouble!”

“I don’t give a shit what Dave says,” Charlie said. “I’m his father, I don’t have to answer to him.”

“Yeah, but he’s Ben’s father,” Helen retorted.

Charlie made a face that looked to Ben like he didn’t take the threat of being reprimanded by Dave very seriously.

“So, how’s school going?” Helen asked after a moment.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and mumbled, “Good.”

“That’s not what your mother told us,” Charlie retaliated. “She said your grades aren’t doing so hot.”

Ben could feel his face turn red and he stared down at his melting ice cream. He’d used to make straight A’s.

“Ben, honey it’s okay,” Helen soothed. “It’s been rough lately, I know.”

The way the melted ice cream seemed to swirl around in his cup suddenly became very interesting.

Helen rested her hand on his, and Ben looked into her eyes to see not disappointment or anger, but sadness.

“It’s okay, sweetie. We’re here for you.”

“I know,” he murmured, not sure how to respond.

“Ben, you’re more than a grandson to us. You’re more like a son.” Charlie’s voice had lost its joviality. “And we want you to be happy. And I know you’re in grief. The death is a hard thing to cope with. And we’re not gonna tell you to turn to God or anything, but we do ask that you turn to us.”

A tear ran down Ben’s cheek, but he was too embarrassed to wipe it away. Helen did it for him.

“Ben, it’s okay to be sad.”

“I know,” he said. They both smiled at him.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?” she asked.

Ben started to shake his head but thought of the dream he’d had.

“What is it, son?” Charlie asked.

“It’s just… on my birthday, my parents went out on a date after everyone left, and I had this dream.” He paused for a moment, trying to think of the right words. “And in it, me and my friends were riding around on our bikes, and I suggested we go on top of the school because I thought it might be fun.

“But when we got there, my friend Thomas tried to stop us because he was scared of somebody calling the police on us. But we ignored him. And my friend Jay went up first, and then Mohamed started to climb up as well. I climbed on top of the dumpster underneath him in case he fell, and then Thomas told us that he saw cops coming, and Mohamed fell. That’d actually happened over the summer, except in real life I had caught him. But in the dream, I didn’t catch him and he—he hit his head on the metal and fell onto the ground. And there was blood everywhere, and he wasn’t moving.

“But right before I woke up, he looked up at me, and he had a hole in his head and his eye was all popped out, and he looked right at me. And I can’t stop thinking about it, because that’s how he looked when they… when they… when….”

“Found him?” Helen finished softly.

Ben shook his head and tried to stop his chin from quaking before they noticed, but Helen came around the table and held him, and he couldn’t stop himself, not even when people began to stare.

“Shh, it was only a dream, sweetie. It was only a dream.”

“Hey, Ben, you wanna go out to the car? Think we’ll have a little more privacy.”

They went out to the car, where Ben was comforted by the unrelenting love of his grandparents, but was reluctant to go back home, and saddened when they had to leave.

The next two weeks saw Ben’s humor sapped away only to be replaced by a total apathy, leaving him in an emotionless void. He wasn’t depressed, but simply uninterested. Even the new Harry Potter book he’d been so excited about had become dull, being so much a chore to read that he instead put it away and chose instead to sit by the window in his playroom and pretend to observe his surroundings. Sometimes he would try to think about things, but no thoughts seemed to be worthy of his time. The only thing of any real interest to him was an increasing sense that he was never alone, that something was always glaring at the back of his head. Eventually, he found himself thinking again of The Book of Agony, but try as he might, he couldn’t push it under the bed of his mind. He felt that it was somehow responsible for the restless invisible eyes that followed him everywhere. He started to become paranoid, frequently throwing his gaze behind him only to find that nothing seemed to be amiss. But he would not read that damned book.

Then the nightmares came.

At first, he couldn’t recall what terrors kept sending him headfirst and shivering into the night air of his bedroom at odd hours, but as time wore on, he could remember them with increasing clarity. They weren’t unlike the nightmare he’d suffered on his birthday, and indeed all crouched under the same dark umbrella: every night, another positive memory he’d shared with Mohamed would be tainted by the events being gruesomely twisted to encompass him dying or suffering in ways Ben would never have thought possible. And as the days wore on, they began to creep into his daily life by forcing him into an unwilling slumber, never leaving him to rest peacefully, nor to live peacefully for that matter.

At the same time, though, his thoughts kept being forced towards The Book of Agony, until eventually, he could not stand it any longer. His willpower had been ground away, and in Ben’s mind, there was no other choice but to sit down and read it, cover to cover. Even if it made him sick.

“What in the sweaty hell have you been watching on TV?” Dave demanded during one December morning breakfast after Ben had described a chapter about a man being drowned in his own blood. After reading it, Ben had felt as though he couldn’t contain himself. He simply needed to tell somebody, to get help from someone who could make things right.

“Just normal cartoons, Dad,” he replied. “But I’m not talking about the TV. I was talking about the book with the pictures in it.”

“Davie,” his mother called from the kitchen, “did Ben steal a copy of Hustler from the school library again?”

“No, honey, he’s not talking about nudie magazines, he’s talking about—” he stopped and peered at him over an expansive newspaper. “What were you talking about?”

Ben stared at him incredulously, if not with an ounce of terror. He’d been talking for at least ten minutes about it. But instead of repeating himself, Ben simply led his parents upstairs to his bedroom, so that he could just show it to them. The only problem was that it was nowhere to be found.

School that day was unusually normal for Ben. The only events of any notice were when one girl soiled herself and a fat kid broke the tire swing. And walking home from the bus stop, his mind somewhat eased by the blissfully peaceful day, Ben could see that both cars were parked in the driveway. But when he went inside, there were no signs of life.

His parents were usually busying themselves around the time he got home from school, but no lights were on anywhere in the house. Confused, he tried calling their cell phones from the house phone but was only greeted by their curt and slightly rude voicemails. Unsettled by this point, Ben decided to set off to check upstairs, nervously glancing in each room until he had only the playroom left to investigate.

A pit forming in Ben’s stomach, he tried to ignore the creaking of the carpet floor as he approached the door, which had been closed for some reason.

The room was completely empty and dead silent. It was eerily darker in there than the rest of the house, too, as the quickly fading winter light struggled to squirm through the closed blinds. A quick glance over gave him nothing, but there was still the cubbyhole and the attic left to check, as he’d made sure to check all the closets, just in case. If they weren’t there… then what? He figured he’d figure that out once it got to that point, which he had a sneaking suspicion might happen.

Ben slowly eased across the room, apprehensiveness coming over him. By the time he’d crossed the long room to the small door, the sun had completely down, drowning the room in darkness, the only light coming from the hallway. In his state, Ben had forgotten to turn the light on, and it was all the way across the room by the door.

Oh well, he thought.

Then he flung open the door.

A great crash erupted from inside the attic from behind him across the room, and immediately the door to the playroom was slammed shut with terrifying force, causing the walls to tremble and carry the noise around the room. It had happened so fast, that he hadn’t even noticed the total darkness that had swept over the room. He hadn’t even realized that the door had been closed until he flung himself across the room and frantically tried to twist the locked doorknob.

Then the black silence took hold of him.

The attic was attached to the left side of the playroom, opposite from the cubbyhole, and was accessed by a door slightly smaller than a normal one, but still bigger than that of the cubby’s. Ben never went into the attic, nor had he ever been curious about its contents in the slightest. One of his earliest memories had always been of his father forcing him to watch a horror movie about a monster that lived in the attic, and ever since he’d always been terrified by the thought of entering it, despite spending the majority of his time in close proximity to it.

But Ben knew that there was something in the attic now, something real. Something he was locked in there with. And despite the silence, his heart boomed and thudded rapidly in his ears like a drum, and his sharp shallow breath was a whirlwind of sound. His eyes remained locked on the door in front of him that led to the hallway.

Even when he heard the door to the attic creaking slowly behind him, groaning like some monstrous demon.

He stood there, frozen in place, imagining pale, slimy hands reaching out, silently stalking towards him, ready to wrap their gnarled skeletal fingers around his throat. But, instead, he heard something else. But… it couldn’t be.

It was the sound of a woman weeping softly. The sound of his mother.

“Ben…. Ben…. I just want my baby…. Please, please give me back Ben….”

“Mom?” he whispered, but there was no answer.

Ben turned around and could vaguely make out the open doorway to that long, narrow room that was somehow even darker than the rest of the room. He silently tried to flick the lights on but to no avail.

“Mom? Mom?” he whispered again, though to no reply. It sounded as though she was all the way in the back of the attic. Drenched in sweat, he finally mustered up the courage to venture towards that black abyss.

He forced his feet to move forward and tried to ignore the goosebumps sending icy shivers down his body. He kept forcing his legs to move, until eventually, he was standing just within the attic.

“Mom?” he repeated in a hushed voice.

“My baby… that’s all I ask…. I just want Ben….”

“Mom!” he hissed. “I’m right here! It’s Ben!”

“B-Ben?” she croaked. “Ben, is that really you? Oh, thank god, I—no, no, NO!”

He heard a short-lived shriek followed by what sounded like a large sack being slammed against the wall and crumpling into a pathetic heap on the floor.

Ben stifled a sob and clenched his teeth, eyes wide and stinging, trying to penetrate the absolute darkness.

From the back of the attic came a scratchy, quiet growl, followed by a faint click behind him from the door being gently closed.

“Give it to us,” a high, raspy voice hissed not a mere two feet away from Ben’s face.

“Yes,” a second voice growled from behind, gravelly and guttural. “We know of the book.”

Ben could vaguely sense that they were closing in on him, corning him.

“Where is it?” the creature in front of him spat.

No words or thoughts could have become of Ben in that moment. He had lost all reason and was simply in a state of pure terror.

“Tell us!” the thing behind him roared.

Tears escaped Ben’s frozen eyes and his muscles cramped as he crouched in the attic, unmoving.

An ear-rupturing shriek exploded within the room, and Ben’s torso was seized by powerful arms that whirled him around. He saw a blinding flash of light, and—

“Scared ya, didn’t we, sport?” his father guffawed idiotically, ruffling Ben’s sweat-soaked hair as if he had simply startled Ben by making a loud noise and jumping out of a closet.

Ben didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at his father’s face. He simply shoved him away as hard as he could and stormed out the attic and through the now unlocked door, slamming his own bedroom door shut and locking it from the inside.

“Hey, what the hell, Ben? It was a fucking prank, you don’t need to act like a little fucking bitch about it!” Dave shouted from the other side of the door.

He heard the doorknob rattle momentarily before his father began to beat on the door again.

“How dare you lock the door on me! How fucking dare you! You better open this right now, you little cocksucker! You hear me? You open it right fucking now!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Ben screamed, hurling a baseball at the door.

“''Excuse me? FUCKING EXCUSE ME?”''

“I said shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!”

“I’M GONNA CRUSH YOUR LITTLE FUCKING SKULL WHEN I GET IN THERE! NOW YOU OPEN THIS FUCKING GODDAMN DOOR!”

“David!”

Ben thrust his fist into the wall, ignoring the pain as drywall scraped against his skin.

“OPEN IT NOW OR I’M GONNA FUCKING BUST DOWN THE DOOR!”

“DAVID!”

“What the fuck do you want, bitch?”

“Step away now, or I’m calling the cops.”

“I’d like to see you fucking try, you whore.”

“I’m serious, David.”

There was a hefty pause outside the room, the air heavy and suffocating.

“Fine. Ben, get to fucking bed. I’ll deal with you in the morning, you little fuck.”

Nothing more was said as he stormed down the stairs. Ben almost expected his mother to come in to comfort him, but he only heard a quiet sigh before her softer footsteps followed his father’s.

Ben didn’t sleep that night. 