My friend Mike was a tough guy with a temper that he always had to take out on someone. It had gotten him into trouble in the past. As he got older, had a family, bought a house, his temper didn’t dissipate but he managed to find more useful places to direct it. Like protecting the community. There wasn’t an official neighbourhood watch scheme but Mike took it upon himself to do the things that needed to be done. Sometimes he brought me along to help. 

The dilapidated, empty council house at the end of Mayberry Avenue had recently attracted something other than rats. Mike had spotted comings and goings. There was a skinny guy, malnourished and sneaky looking, that had been prowling around the locality. He’d tracked him to the abandoned house and reckoned there were more inside.

“Fucking junkies,” he said to me.

“We should report them to the council.” I said.

He laughed at that, then got serious.

“The council won’t do anything for months. You want our kids to see that shit? You want them picking up a dirty needle off the ground?”

No, I didn’t. So, I went along with him to check it out just as the sun dipped and the streetlights started to shimmer.

We could have been just two buddies out for a stroll apart from the fact of the steel baseball bat swinging by Mike’s side.

“I told you to bring something too,” he said, disappointed with my empty hands.

“Let’s just check things out first, ok.”

We stopped on the other side of the street from the suspected squat and tried to spot signs of life. The front garden was overgrown, wild with untended bushes, knee-deep grass going to seed. Summer-full trees obscured the ground floor windows. The upstairs ones were boarded-up.

“If we hop the wall instead of the gate, they won’t see us,” I said.

We strolled across, nonchalant as you like, and swung our legs over the corner of the wall, kept low all the way to the house, ducked down below a window sill. Mike signalled and we both rose to peek inside.

A soiled net curtain hung ragged like a dead bride’s dress. We could see through the gaps. Candles lit the room. There were five of them, two spindly women, three scrawny men, sitting on the ground cross-legged. Each of them was holding a random piece of clothing in their hands, rolling them around like sacred relics. I recognised a blouse that one of the women held.

“That was stolen off our clothesline.”

One of the men brought the bra he was holding up to his nose and inhaled.

“Thieving pervert junkies,” said Mike.

The bra guy picked up a pipe and a bag filled with some kind of red flakes. He stuffed the pipe, lit it and sucked hard. He released his breath and passed it on. Orange smoke rose above their heads. It grew heavy in the room by the time the pipe had done the circle. Then they started to change.

“What the fuck?” said Mike.

The bra guy began to shudder first but it didn’t take long for them all to start vibrating and shaking. That wasn’t the weirdest part. Through the smoke we could see their faces and their hands change. Their skin turned translucent red and we could see their bones pulsing through it as they shook. Big skeletal smiles glowed on their faces.

“Jesus Christ,” hissed Mike. “That’s some crazy shit right there. You ever seen anything like that?”

I shook my head. The air around the place seemed heavier somehow, like a weight of knowledge had dropped on me but I didn’t know how to understand it.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “We gotta put a stop to this. Here, stick this on, it’s my spare one.”

He pulled a balaclava from his pocket and handed it to me, took another and put it over his head.

“What the fuck? We’re not going in there.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. You need a weapon.”

He pointed to a garden shed over by the wall.

“I bet we’ll get you something in there.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s just report it. We don’t know what they’re smoking in there. It could be dangerous.”

His eyes sulked through the two holes in the black ribbed material.

“I’m going in there now to sort this out, man. You know I am. You can back me up and do your bit for the neighbourhood or you can chicken out and let that scum have free reign. But I know you’re not a coward.”

I pulled on the balaclava. It wasn’t worth arguing. It would be easier in the long run to put the shits up a bunch of druggies than go against Mike, no matter what freaky shit they were smoking. That’s just how it always was with him.

We snuck over to the shed. I was hoping that there’d be an old spade handle in there or another bat, nothing too sharp or too dangerous. I didn’t want to be stuck with a claw hammer or a pickaxe. These things with Mike had a tendency to get out of hand. I opened the latch. None of those things were in there, just a huge cloud of smoke and another pulsing red guy sitting within it. I swallowed a lungful of the stuff before I knew it and then things went crazy.

It was like slow motion. I was floating. My consciousness focused on the balaclava I wore and the fact that it didn’t belong to me. Vertical slices opened up in Mike’s body, down his arms and legs, along his torso. I slid inside him like I was a liquid. The slices sealed back up and I was enclosed. But it wasn’t my body that was in him. I could see through his eyes and I saw where my body was. It was sitting down dumbly on the grass, glowing and vibrating. Then Mike moved and it felt like I was on a roller coaster without being strapped into the seat.

The sensation was wild. Mike bashed in the guy’s head with his bat, kept beating and beating. I could feel all the emotion and the physicality of it but I knew he was totally unaware of me being inside him. Then, with a jolt, I was back in my own body on the ground, just in time to see Mike deliver a final blow and lean over to check on me.

“Fuck, Mike. You have to try this out!”

I started taking off my shirt for him to hold.

#

Mike saw the possibilities straight away. He started talking about staking out the rich houses in the hills, reckoned he knew where some famous people lived. He wondered if there was a proximity that you had to maintain or did you just need an item of their clothing. He had lots of questions. So we went to get answers.

The front door of the house was locked. That didn’t matter. Mike smashed the window and stepped in through it while the five of them were still pulsing. He kicked one of the men in the ribs and that seemed to bring the guy back to himself. I nicked my arm on a shard of glass following him. All I’d been able to get from the shed was a garden shears. I tried to look like I’d use it on them if I had to.

The rest of them slowly stopped vibrating, stopped that freakish glowing and stared up at us. The woman who was holding the blouse giggled manically until Mike popped her in the head with the bat.

“What is this stuff? Where did you get it?”

“We’re not harming anyone, man” said the guy with the bra.

“Holy shit, check this out,” I was looking into the room next door at bags and bags of the red flakes. The bra guy used Mike’s distraction to reach up and pull off his mask.

“I know you,” he said after he got knocked back down. His voice was taunting and creepy. “You’re Mike. I’ve been inside your wife. I mean I’ve been her. You’re a sick, sick puppy.”

That set Mike off. He started with the bat, then he took the shears from me. I’d always thought that Mike’s anger was because of something about himself that he didn’t like. Like he was trying to burst out of himself. I’m not into that psychoanalysis shit but some things are just obvious. Especially with what I saw him do to those five people in the house and the one in the shed. After I saw that I couldn’t ever go back to that house and I couldn’t ever go near Mike again. He went back though. He went back there every night just to get away from who he was. Every single night. Who was I to judge him? I wouldn’t want to live with being who he was either. But I could never look at anyone else the same way again, just in case he was in there.

Some grotesque creatures lurk in the ancient countryside of County Meath. Colin Leonard is one of them. He writes horror fiction mostly set in Ireland, and his short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and online venues including Horror Library Volumes 7 & 8, It Calls From The Veil, Eyes, The Vampiricon and Fudoki Magazine. Country Roads, his debut novel, was published in 2023 by Brigids Gate Press.

You can find more details and connect with him through his website http://www.collyleonard.com

X (Twitter) – @collyleonard