Michael Hunter - Come Get Me

Heat wafted out in waves that could be felt all the way over where he was standing. Knowing that if it was this hot where he was he didn’t even want to think about the temperature where the cans were. With every passing second he was surer and surer they were going to blow. He moved to grab the closest one so he could move it to a safer spot but Pete turned on him viciously yelling.

“Don’t touch that!” he screamed. “Leave it where it is!”

Jim, faced by the crazy Pete once again, quickly backed up to where he’d been and watched as the man he’d once known returned to his task. Over the crackling of the fires Jim could still hear Pete mumbling to himself. Moving from one conflagration to the next Jim saw Pete’s lips moving. He actually managed to catch a word every now and then but still couldn’t make any sense of what he was hearing. He was beginning to see that Pete did indeed have many problems he needed help with, the least of which was the mumbling. Seeing no hope of reasoning with Pete, Jim looked around the yard trying to decide what to do.

Thinking he’d seen all the strangeness Pete and his yard had to offer he was horrified when his eyes settled on what lay at the immediate rear of the house.

The four windows running along the back had been hit many times by God only knew what. If it’d been rocks he knew he’d see just maybe a piece here or there missing. Most likely a bunch of holes. These windows instead looked as if whole boulders had been heaved through them but that wasn’t the worst part. Around most of the holes was stuff that looked like pieces of flesh. Dried ragged hunks of blackened meat hung from some of the windows looking like jerky left too long to smoke. That was bad enough but what he saw next was enough to make his stomach heave.

Written all over the wall from the top to the bottom were words. They’d been scribbled in an almost childlike handwriting in what Jim thought was brown paint. Wanting to get a better look he took a step closer and almost tripped over something on the ground. Looking down he discovered what had actually been used to do the writing on the wall. Littering the ground from one end of the house to the other were heads. Heads of cats, dogs, deer, raccoons and a lot of other animals he couldn’t even guess at. The skin had rooted off the ones near the bottom of the pile. All he could see were eye sockets and teeth. The wall above was splattered with blood from the heads. They had apparently been slammed up against it with some force. Big splotches of brown marked the wall. After overcoming his shock Jim quickly glanced at the wall to see what was written there since that was what had first drawn him to the spot. As he gingerly crept forward he carefully avoided the heads that had rolled away from the piles but not before noticing that most of the heads didn’t look like they’d been cut off like he’d first thought. They instead looked like they’d been ripped off. Strings of meat and parts of bone were still attached to the necks.

After swallowing the bile rising in his throat he slowly looked up to see if he could make sense of what was written oh the wall.

“Goatman was here” was scrawled all over. It looked more like gibberish than actual writing. The words tended to run together and were messily written. There were other things like “Come Get Me” and various curse word but the most prominent and numerous were the call for the Goatman.

Jim’s heart slammed in his chest as he read the words. They were the words that could supposedly call the Goatman to a person. The “Goatman was Here” phrase was what the Goatman himself supposedly wrote when he’d claimed a place as his own. Who cared that it was impossible for a creature that didn’t exist to write this much less anything else. The only explanation was that Pete, in his deranged state, did it himself. Jim didn’t want to believe that his friend was so far gone that he would do something like this but he couldn’t deny the proof in front of his eyes. Pete really had gone off the deep end.

While thinking all this, a shadow slowly fell on the wall in front of him. He spun around and was confronted by an even more deranged looking Pete than he’d seen before if that was possible. Sweat was pouring from his soot covered face. His shoulders heaved as he drew in deep gulping breath. It was almost as if he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. Smoke and steam clung to him like a cloak making him look like the boogeyman made flesh. In between the breathing noises Jim could still hear mumbling. Pete was still talking to himself even though he was looking at Jim. The few words he was able to make out made no sense. They definitely didn’t make him very comfortable. Words like “kill” and “goat” were the only things Jim was sure he understood but there were others that Jim thought he understood but hoped he actually didn’t. Looking in Pete’s eye he was only sure of one thing. He wanted to get the hell out of there. To do it he would have to go through Pete and hopefully avoid the fires. He wasn’t sure he could do that. Not with having to worry about Pete at the same time. Then there was also the long road back down to civilization. There were no lights and Jim really didn’t want to try that.

Pete looked at him without speaking for what seemed an eternity. Jim didn’t know what to do. Pete looked like he was waiting for something. Maybe the voices in his head were telling him to kill Jim and he was trying to resist them. Maybe he was just trying to figure out the best way to do it and then he could blame the Goatman. Then again he could just throw him in the fire and no one would know any better. The sheriff was the only person that knew Jim was out here. Pete could just say that he’d left if they came and asked where he was. There probably wouldn’t even be that big of an investigation if the way things had been handled so far was any indication. He stood waiting for whatever Pete would do next. It wasn’t what he’d thought.

“It wasn’t me,” Pete cried. After mumbling a few words about a purple dinosaur he continued. “It was the Goatman Jim. We made a mistake when we were little.” He said looking up at the wall behind Jim. “We called him and he came but we escaped the first time. We didn’t stay so he could finish his visit. We ran. That made him mad.”

At first Jim wasn’t sure what to think. Pete spoke as if the Goatman were real. What he was saying was at least partly true. They had called the creature when they were little but it had never showed up. But at the back of his mind he felt a tickle. He concentrated on the memory trying to bring it in to focus. They’d been calling the thing and something had come out of the woods and that was the last he could remember.

The thing didn’t come. Did it?

In the dream Jim had a few days ago he’d come but that hadn’t happened in real life. It had only happened in the dream. None of that was real. Things from dreams couldn’t kill people. All the stuff that was happening with his friends had to have some kind of rational explanation. Jim couldn’t think of one right now but there must be one. A fictional creature running around killing people just because they’d called it when they were little wasn’t a rational explanation so that couldn’t be it. But at the same time it had to be it. They were standing in a yard, at night, with a bunch of decaying animal heads rotting around them while bonfires burned merrily in the background. If this wasn’t the perfect situation to prove Pete’s theory, then Jim couldn’t think of a better one.

Although there was another possible answer.

He was just going crazy himself. That had to be it. The pressure of his friends’ deaths and not knowing how it’d happened had just gotten to him so much that his mind had decided to take a break for a little while. He couldn’t be going crazy though. He’d just met a great girl. Except for his friends dropping dead in gruesome way everything was going good. So how could he be going crazy? The answer unfortunately was that he wasn’t. He was completely sane and his friends were dead and the only explanation that fit was that the Goatman was the one responsible. Jim wanted to deny it but all the evidence he’d heard and seen pointed to everything being the work of the Goatman.