What a delightful tale coming from the mind of Christa Planko. It reminds me of the games my cousin and I used to play in a haunted house somewhere in the Northwoods. But they weren’t games for Corey and the gang, were they? – Jim
The Shutterbug
“Do you think this is a good idea?” Jeremy hesitated at
the bottom of the warped wooden stairs. His three friends already stood upon
the creaking porch.
The shortest, stockiest of the boys swept the cobwebs
out of his way as he led the pack toward the front door. “What he means,” Corey
said. “Is ‘do you think we’re a bunch of wussies?’”
“Hell, no!” chimed Randy and Raymond in unison. They
were identical twins and always in sync.
“I’m not wussing out!” Jeremy cried. “I just don’t want
to get busted for trespassing. The cops patrol the streets on Mischief Night,
you know.”
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“So, we’ll keep extra quiet,” Corey said. “Now shut up
and follow me!”
Jeremy gulped and climbed the rickety steps. The boys
stood by while Corey picked the lock. Slowly, he pushed open the door. It
moaned on rusty hinges.
“Quick, guys!” Corey ushered the boys in and shut the
door behind them. Their flashlights immediately scanned the dusty room. Nothing
but a few pieces of furniture draped with sheets—a sofa, an armchair, a coffee
table. Otherwise, the house stood as vacant as the day it was abandoned.
“We’re here again why?”
Jeremy asked.
“To see the room where it happened,” Corey said.
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“Um…where what
happened?”
“I’ll tell you all when we get there,” Corey’s
flashlight illuminated a staircase. “This way!”
He mounted the stairs, bravely leading the way. Randy
and Raymond prodded each other to go first.
Corey paused halfway up the stairs and spun around. He
frowned. “Come on!”
Jeremy shoved the twins from behind and they squeezed
up the stairwell, side by side. They followed as Corey ventured up the
second-floor hallway. He shone his light into each room, passing each one by
until he came upon the largest at the end of the hall.
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“This is it!” he cried. “The master bedroom. This is
where they found her.”
“Found who?” Jeremy asked.
“Shirley Sugg,” Corey whispered. “The Shutterbug!”
“Oh, we know this story!” Randy elbowed his brother in
the ribs.
“Yeah, but we thought it was just an old tale,” Raymond
added, clutching his side.
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“What tale?” Jeremy asked. “Someone please tell me
already.”
“It was told to us as an old rhyme,” Randy started.
Then he and his brother chanted in unison:
Shutterbug. Shutterbug. Shirley Sugg was a shutterbug. Photography her only role, she captured your photo, then captured your soul. She carved your smile with a box cutter. The Shutterbug will make you shudder.
The boys all jumped as a rat suddenly darted across the floor, startling them.
“OK, that was really
creepy, guys!” Jeremy panted, holding a hand to his racing heart.
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“Oh, it gets better,” Corey smiled. “I know the true
story. Shirley Sugg was an actual person. This was her bedroom.” He propped a
lantern on the bed and turned it on.
The twins froze, then glanced about, trying to play it
cool. Jeremy’s body shook with fright.
“Check you out, bro!” Corey snorted. “You really are a
wuss!”
“Am not!” Jeremy snapped. He collected himself. “It’s
just that it’s cold in here.”
He shone his light around the room.
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“Hey, look!” He snatched an object from a nightstand
and turned around. “It’s an old Polaroid camera!”
He held it up and aimed it toward them all.
“Group selfie! Smile!”
He pushed the button. Surprisingly, the camera groaned,
producing a square, white photo. They stood around, watching as an image began
to develop. Within minutes, their awkwardly smiling faces emerged.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Corey said.
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“Why not?” Jeremy asked. “We needed to lighten the
mood.”
Corey shook his head. “I didn’t get to tell you the
story.”
“Well, tell it already so we can all get outta here.”
Jeremy crossed his arms and glared at Corey. Corey
glanced from face to face, then began.
“OK. So, Shirley Sugg was a local photographer about
half a century ago. She was an oddball, but good at what she did. She never
married and she lived alone—here.”
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Corey observed the captive audience before him, then
continued.
“Over the years, she got stranger and stranger. She
started walking around with a Polaroid camera, taking pictures of random things.
Then one day, someone got in her way. That’s when she completely flipped out
and went bonkers. They say she stalked the person afterward, then killed her.”
For dramatic effect, Corey lowered his voice to a
whisper.
“When they found the body, it was posed in a chair, the
mouth carved into a permanent smile. The ruined photo sat in the dead woman’s
lap with her image scratched out.”
Corey stared at the horrified faces before him. The
twins whistled low in disbelief.
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“That is one creepy story, dude,” Jeremy finally said.
“But whatever happened to Shirley? Was she arrested?”
“No,” Corey smirked, enjoying the fright he was giving
his friends. “That’s the strange part. When the cops showed up at her house,
there was no answer. So, they entered. What they found was Shirley Sugg in her
bed in this room, dead. She had a huge grimace frozen onto her cold, dead face
and a Polaroid on her lap. It was a selfie she took—in this very room, but her
smiling face was missing from the photo. Instead, it fixed itself permanently
onto her dead body.”
“Christ!” Jeremy cried. He slowly backed up, bumping
into the bed. He jumped. The Polaroid fell out of his hand, onto the bed. It
landed image side up.
“Holy, shit, guys!” he screeched. “Look!”
Corey snatched the photo. The twins gasped as they
looked over Corey’s shoulder. The photo showed the entire group with the
exception of Jeremy’s face, now a white smear.
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“OK, let’s get outta here!” Corey said. He bolted out
the door and down the hall, the twins immediately in tow, when a slam occurred
behind them. The last sound they heard from behind Shirley’s closed bedroom
door was Jeremy’s scream, followed by a maniacal laugh.
Christa resides in South Jersey—home of the Pinelands and the Jersey Devil. She is a medical writer by day with a passion for creative expression. Her poetry and short stories have been featured in several publications, including Jitter Press, Rune Bear, Tanka and Haiku Journal, and Every Day Fiction.
So we’re going out on a limb here in this segment of Nightmarish Nature and exploring one of the most terrifying, most dangerous, most impactful species to walk this planet. I’m talking about us of course. Sure, as humans, we may not seem all that horrific to ourselves, but to many other creatures we have been a force of nightmares.
Why are we terrifying?
Humans are among those species that engage in massive modifications to our environment to serve our needs, like beavers who dam rivers, elephants who eat all of the new growth scrub to keep the savannahs tree-free, and so on. Yeah, all creatures have some impact on their surroundings, but some take it up a notch, and we do so at an order of magnitude higher still. And we have gotten so good at it that we have managed to exist and thrive in places that would otherwise be inhospitable. We are outwardly adaptive and opportunistic to the point of being exploitative. We are the apex predators now.
We have forced many creatures into extinction, intentionally and not, and have sped up these effects enormously. The National Audobon Society chose the egret as its symbol after it made a comeback from being hunted to near extinction, and it was one of the lucky ones. Many weren’t so lucky, especially if they came in direct conflict with humans, such as wolves and the big cats who were in direct competition, or those who were really specialized in really specific niche circumstances that we pushed out of the way. And this is in only a very very limited scope of our earth’s history, and has since been even more ramped up with industrialization.
But humans aren’t all bad are we?
Depends on who you ask… We have created all sorts of incredible opportunities for some species too. Take mice for example. And coyotes. And kudzu. And a whole host of animals whom we’ve domesticated, some of whom wouldn’t have continued to exist otherwise or certainly wouldn’t exist in anything resembling their current forms. And the most massive extinctions occurred long before our arrival, when the earth was still forming and underwent rapid catastrophic changes and swings, decimating critters as they were trying to get a foothold. Nothing is constant except for change; that has always been true.
So it isn’t my goal to get all eco-conscious and environmentalist here. Just that I feel if we are going to explore some of the more terrifying aspects of nature, we need to look in the mirror. Because if a consensus were taken right here, right now of all living beings globally as to what is among the most terrifying creatures among us, I’m sure we’d appear on that list.
If you enjoyed this closer-than-kissing-cousins segment of Nightmarish Nature on Horrifying Humans, please check out past segments:
Continuing our junkyard dawg werewolf story from the previous two St. Patrick’s Days… Here are Part 1 from 2022 and Part 2 from 2023 if you want to catch up.
So apparently it really was my lucky day at that suburban gas mart last St. Patrick’s Day. I got the mother lode of all Scratchers. I hit it big time. I had no real idea of what that meant, but it looked promising. Maybe I could get a Cadillac to tour Route 66 AND a cabin in the woods… But who was gonna drive?
Now apparently you can’t just cash these things in at the register. You have to mail them in or something. Why does life have to be so complicated? Anything involving those good for nothing mailmen has to be rigged or part of some larger conspiracy, I’m sure. But I pocketed my prize and made some plans. I couldn’t rely on old Sal not to just pocket my prize for himself; he wasn’t the sort that would let me have my dream. Or even understood that I had dreams beyond just chasing rabbits (though those are the best).
The next full moon I whined and howled at Sal to take me in to work with him. Sal just patted me on the head. Didn’t even offer a treat or nothing. Seriously, I had to get out of there, this suburban situation was the pits. I couldn’t do another year of it, watching my life tick away. So, when that didn’t work, I gently grabbed my Scratchers ticket like I was retrieving a very important slipper and slunk over and hid in his truck under that ratty blanket he kept in the back.
I managed to creep into the junkyard office and hide there while Sal was sleeping on the job. Those mastiffs nearly ratted me out, but fortunately they were chained up, and they weren’t all that bright anyway. Just growled a string of profanities at my cur form, like I hadn’t heard that before. Anyway, I waited it out and before long I heard Monty’s car pull up, rattling like the dilapidated Honda Civic held together with duct tape that it was. Sal’s truck pulled off, spitting gravel and exhaust in its wake as always.
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Dusk was setting in and I could feel the change starting. Nothing to do for it, guess I’d just have to run with it then. Monty had settled in as usual, watching bad porn and staring off into nothing. He still smelled like day old jelly donuts (the kind you can get a whole bag for $1) and coffee, as usual. Good boy Monty, how I’ve missed you and the occasional stale donut, even if it wasn’t a cookie. I approached him from behind and coughed.
Monty nearly leapt out of his skin. He blanched as if he’d seen a ghost before he managed to find his voice. “Shit, that wasn’t a dream,” he stammered, pointing. As he realized I meant him no harm, he regained his composure and even offered me a day-old jelly donut, which I accepted gratefully. I think he could tell that my tail would have been wagging if I’d still had one at that time.
“Lucky, what in all of hell are you doing here?” he asked, eyes still wide as saucers. “And for Christ’s sake, put on some pants.” He offered up the spare uniform that still just hung from the hook behind the door. I guess in my fervor to talk to him I’d forgotten to dress. Oops.
“Monty, old friend, I need a favor,” I barked. I handed him the Scratchers. His eyes grew wider.
“Shit, where’d you get this?” That’s a lot of money,” Monty exclaimed. “They’ve been looking for the winner of this one…”
“I’d stashed it in my hidey spot under the place where the carpet peels up after I got it… It’s our ticket out of here,” I retorted. “You don’t think I want to spend the rest of my days laying around suburbia with tightwad treat-skimping Sal do you?”
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“I suppose not,” Monty quipped. “But what’d you have in mind?”
“You and me, we could get a cabin in the woods, live off the land. Get out of this shit-hole. Hell, you could even get a real car, one of those big-boat Cadillacs with the wide tongue-lolling windows…”
“Um, you could do a lot more than that with this, but I catch your drift. And I want out of this hellhole too. But, like…? I mean, you aren’t gonna bite me or anything, or get all weird.” Monty fidgeted like he did when he was nervous. “I guess I knew but didn’t want to admit it – dude you’re a freak show.”
“Gee thanks. Trust me, being a dog is better any day except that you can’t drive or get your own treats and crap,” I retorted. “And if was gonna bite you I’d have done so a long time ago. It doesn’t work that way, anyway. Seriously, you don’t believe all that werewolf mumbo jumbo on Netflix too, do you?”
Monty shook his head tentatively. “I don’t really know what to believe. I mean, I guess I always knew you were like this, but I didn’t let it sink in.”
“Well, get over it and help me get my dream cabin,” I snipped. “Seriously don’t just stand there gawking all night; I put on clothes and everything. I only have tonight.”
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“You mean before you turn back into a dog?” Monty asked.
I nodded, still licking the jelly off my lips.
“But I thought werewolf changes happened every full moon,” Monty asked.
“I do, but these Scratchers change like the wind. We gotta cash in quick,” I growled. “And if you try to turn on me, I’ll hunt you down. That’s OUR ticket outta here.”
“No, no, I get it,” Monty said. “I’ll make good on it, I promise. I can follow up on the ticket first thing tomorrow; it says to mail it in or go to the courthouse or something. I’ll figure it out… I guess you can stay with me until we get it sorted, but you have to be really quiet about it. I’m not supposed to have pets in that crap apartment for all that a little dog hair would be an improvement.”
Work is letting you go. Amidst all of the layoffs, you just didn’t make the cut. Well, I’m sorry to say, but it behooves you to go quietly. And quickly. Because you don’t want to stick around for the Firing Squad…
In fact, if your HR department is outsourced to one of those Eldritch contractors like so many are nowadays, get outta dodge NOW. Like seriously. Leave the lunch you brought in the fridge; leave the personal items in and on and around your desk. Hell, leave your coat and purse if you are not near them. You can get new ones. Maybe one of your ex-coworkers can help you retrieve your stuff later. Because you need to get out while the getting is still good.
The Firing Squad is coming.
And if they so much as see a pink slip anywhere in your immediate vicinity, it is complete and total annihilation…
williamdprystauk
May 21, 2019 at 5:16 pm
Great, old time, spooky horror fun!
I want more!