Author: Garrett Roth
Marcus lay on his untidy bed, staring at the familiar sight of his bedroom ceiling. The house, much like his life, was enveloped in a disappointing silence. He had been forgotten again, at least by people who mattered to him. He had only just begun to close his eyes when his phone’s lock screen came to and the LED on its top right corner began to glow blue.
He sighed and turned to face it, half-heartedly tapping its screen, to reveal that his aunt had just wished him a happy birthday. It was 4PM and she was the only one who had. They also hadn’t seen each other in some twelve years. He looked out to the setting sun through his window as he grimaced and rolled back over, holding back a depressing, melodramatic sob.
***
Amaius ducked out of sight of the window, fearing the boy had made them.
“Fuck, man,” he whispered loudly as he looked down to his fellow sneaky skeleton, Jackus. He looked around briefly and peered back in to the window, the tip of his skull just barely crowning the bottom of the frame.
“What?” Jackus replied, holding steady on the branch of a rather large tree just outside of Marcus’s window. He held Amaius up on his shoulders, the two forming a sort of dire skeleton. “He spot you?”
“I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway,” Amaius rolled his jaw slowly, providing a brief relief from his achy jaw while avoiding the usual ear-shattering popping that accompanies a skeleton resetting broken or uncomfortable joints.
“Well hurry up, man. Humans creep me the hell out. All that skin and shit,” Jackus shifted uncomfortably before turning his head and spitting out a loose tooth, pinging it off of the kitchen window.
***
The pair waited intently, Amaius watching Marcus’s stomach and chest for the fateful moment when Marcus began using his diaphragm to breathe instead of his chest – a sign that the youth was asleep. It wasn’t before too long that the moment came and each of the boney compatriots began moving with purpose. Amaius carefully lifted the window, making the greatest care not to disturb Marcus’s slumber. The two scuttered across the floor, quietly clacking their bones as they tied each of Marcus’s limbs to the posts of his bedframe. Jackus skeleton sneaked through the rest of the empty, depressing home, and within minutes had acquired the family’s stupid fucking loud yappy dog and brought a sharpened femur (not his, he’s insistent on that) in to the dog’s throat over and over, splashing blood along the floors and wall, staining the shag carpet. He lazily dragged its corpse to the room and began writing in their ancient skellyman tongue over all of the walls using its blood, covering it with all of the incantations he learned in skellyman school for skeletons. They would need them for the ritual.
***
Marcus slowly opened his eyes and upon realizing his predicament, contorted his face in horror as his eyes darted across the room. After catching the visage of the boney interlopers he tried to scream, but his fear held his tongue. He began to violently pull on his limbs only to find that they were bound by rope to the bedposts. His jerking caught the attention of his captors almost immediately.
“Dude, shit, Amaius,” Jackus rattled and pointed to the boy on the bed. Amaius let out a loud sigh and ran his hands over his skull as though it still held hair.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Marcus swore he could see the skeleton’s face form a sort of frown, but he realized that the face was but mere bone and couldn’t possible emote in such a fashion. Marcus gasped attempting a shriek as the skeleton crept to his bedside and leaned down to meet his gaze, its face sitting only inches from his nose. “Alright, kid,” he began. His eyes, or his un-eyes, looked awkwardly off to the side as he began fumbling his words. “Well, uh, we have to do this thing-“
“A thing?” Marcus yelped, catching the surprise of his captors.
“Yes, a thing,” Jackus interjected, leaning backward in to Marcus’s view for a solitary moment before returning to his preparations. “We’ll be ready to go here in a sec’. Just dottin’ some ‘I’s and crossin’ some ‘t’s and we’ll be good to go.”
“Hell yeah,” Amaius held out his hand in a balled fist towards Jackus who responded by smacking the top of it with his own fist and having the same done to him by Amaius before the two of them shook their fists while reeling backwards, making obnoxiously loud rattling noises all the while. Amaius snapped back to attention and returned to Marcus, who had begun to weep uncontrollably. “SoI know you’ve got some questions, and that’s okay, I got you. Y’see, my compatriot here an’ I are on our way to a celebratory shindig of a kind,” the skeleton began attempting to console Marcus in a mock-informative tone, the syllables for the longer words seemingly colliding in his mouth before falling off of his un-tongue in a dreadful cacophony of derision. Marcus couldn’t tell if the skeleton was actually intelligent and mocking him, or merely stupid and attempting to appear to be intelligent and mocking him. He didn’t concern himself with the thought for longer than a breath before returning to the horrifying as fuck circumstance he found himself in.
“It’s gonna’ be pretty rad,” Jackus chimed in again, tossing the open torso of the dog over his shoulder. “We’re lookin’ to get totally fucking wrecked, but we need a DD before we head out. We’re going to pull Jeff’s soul from the immaterium and bind it to the skeleton inside of you. You’re not gonna’ make it but try not to think about it for too long or else this shit gets tragic.”
Marcus could barely utter a brief ‘Wait, wh-‘ before his bones began to contract in his body. His fingers and wrist began to bulge against his skin. The bones began to violently shake, breaking themselves free of his muscles and tendons. Marcus’s screams pierced the uncomfortable, melodramatic silence of his home shortly before turning to gurgles, which in turn became exhausted gasps and groans. His endoskeleton began using his binds to find purchase against his skin, writhing freely though the living body now that it had shed itself of the muscles that bound it to its fleshy form. Marcus let out a single, solitary gurgle just before erupting in to fleshy gibs, his blood painting the walls and splattering across the window. Standing in the hazy, bloody mist was a new third skeletal fright. This new figure picked over his new body, removing chunks of nervous system and leftover muscle tissue.
“What’s up motha’ fucka’!” he shouted enthusiastically, raising his arms above his head and waving them excitedly. The other two paid him no attention. At this point Jackus was thumbing through Marcus’s phone, his face lighting up with amusement.
“Wow, this guy was a fucking nerd. It was his birthday and nobody gave a shit,” he chuckled. He scanned through a few texts, some poorly hidden fetish porn and his abysmally short list of contacts before tossing it back on the nightstand and looking to their new comrade. “You drive.”
“Aww, man, how come I always have to drive? I never get to have fun with you guys and do all the cool stuff!” its lowered its shoulders and appeared to pout as it stepped down from the bloody bed. Its gaze wandered down to the floor in general dismay.
“It’s ‘cause you keep getting’ put in dweebs, ya’ dingdong, now scoot or we’re gonna’ be fuckin’ late again, like always,” Amaius slid the window fully open and slipped out of the room. Jackus followed, sitting on the window sill and falling out backwards. Jeff lazily dragged his feet to the window before exiting through it and closing it behind him, letting out a sad, heavy and melodramatic sigh.