Spooky Halloween Excerpts, Part 3
Halloween is creeping closer! I’m posting some of the spookiest excerpts from my new book Day of the Devourer his week to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve. Here’s the third passage. This is the story of two young Bebdejettans and what happened when the slitherers came…
He found himself lying on the sandy floor at night. He felt confused. So many memories flooded his brain. He couldn’t comprehend his own thoughts. He knew he had become someone else now. He felt heavy, sick, and unable to move, staring at the infinite sea of grey dunes as they disappeared into a dark storm on the horizon. Near the edge of the world, where the dunes met the darkness, one of the slitherers crawled out of the sand. His stomach turned in knots. Every muscle in his body grew tense. He knew the end had come for him. The slitherers would finally carry him away, just as they had with everyone else he knew. This one must be huge. It looked so far away. Another slid out of the distant dunes and then another and another, until a gigantic black tentacle emerged from the sea of sand in front of him. He could feel the floor of the stone house shake and sand sprinkle all over him from the ceiling above as the huge mass of black flesh fell on the ruins of the nearby village. Until that moment, he had no idea the black writhing worms were the arms of one giant creature that hid underground. Now, its dark body lay in full display in front of him, with arms sprawling for miles across the dunes.
He felt an incredible sadness. He missed everyone. He felt despair and exhaustion. They all must have been terrified when it happened. That thought looped in his brain repeatedly. They must have been so scared and desperate and confused. His mother, his father, and his brother, Dashtu. He felt guilty. He should have been there to help them—to protect them.
He remembered his brother’s voice the night they had to flee the village. “We can’t go back, Lamu. It’s too dangerous. The slitherers will get us. We can’t risk it.”
He cried and screamed, running the whole way. He remembered being exhausted and wanting to just lie down on the ground, but Dashtu kept tugging his arm. They raced across the arid landscape as fast as their short Bebdejettan legs could carry them. They ran where the crops used to grow, taking care to stay on the rocky ground and away from the sand where the slitherers lived. They finally stopped at the old, abandoned farmhouse made of big stones and looked back. The village looked far away now. He remembered asking his brother when they could go back and how sad his brother sounded when Dashtu said he didn’t know.
They sat, tired and hungry in the old stone building all night. He felt scared. He had never been away from home at night. He remembered crying himself to sleep, wanting his mother. Dashtu rubbed his back and said he wished she was here, too. He knew his mother was gone. He knew she couldn’t help them anymore. None of the grownups could.
Even before, the grownups had begun acting strange with a faraway look in their eyes. When the slithering things came out of the ground, the adults said they didn’t see anything. They couldn’t see the animals and the plants being pulled underground. He and Dashtu had begged their parents to run from the house, but they acted like they couldn’t hear them. They just stood there, letting the tentacles wrap around their bodies and drag them away. So, he and Dashtu ran away as fast and as far as they could. The slitherers dragged grownups out of their houses, screaming and in pain, but their eyes looked blank—like they couldn’t see anything around them. He and Dashtu didn’t know where to go. They just ran.
He couldn’t help them now. He knew all along the slitherers had taken their minds away a long time before it took their bodies. He also knew his time would come soon.
He and Dashtu stayed here in this old stone building for days without food or water, terrified to go any further. One day, a lone child had come staggering out of the village. Dashtu knew him. The boy walked across the sand. They shouted to him to walk on the rocks. The slitherers would feel the vibrations of his feet. They shouted and the boy stopped and turned toward the rocky ground, but too late. A black arm wrapped around his legs and pulled him, screaming, down into the sand. Now they knew they could not leave the rocks. Dashtu knew they wouldn’t live much longer, but he hadn’t given up yet. He said he would go and try to get some water for them, but he never came back.
Now he had nothing more left in him. He felt exhausted, terrified, and more sadness than he had ever felt before. He would wait for Dashtu. The slitherers were coming across the sand now. He would lay still. He would wait here for Dashtu.
Day of the Devourer is available on Amazon
