He Came
He Came
by David Michael
The floor, every wall, every window, even the ceiling, splattered and smeared with blood. Not just in this room, but throughout the house.
In the middle of that sat the man, William Revell, pale as a ghost, sitting on the only clean spot on the floor, curled up, arms crossed over his knees, hugging himself into a ball, rocking back and forth.
“He came,” Revell said, as he had said over and over since the police showed up. “He came. He came.”
“Who came?” asked a detective.
For a second Revell seemed to focus on the detective, the rocking stopped. “He came,” Revell said. Then Revell’s eyes became unfocused again and the rocking resumed. “He came. He came. He came … “
Neighbors said that Bill Revell had a little girl, Peggy. A lovely little girl of six or seven. She attended the local school, first grade. No sign of Peggy was found, in the house, under the house, or, later, within the walls or under the yard.
The wife–”ex-wife,” she corrected, her voice sharp, her eyes sharper–Lana, had a new last name now, lived far away from suburban Oklahoma, in suburban California. When asked about the little girl, Lana said she hadn’t seen Peggy in three years. When asked about Revell, she said, with much more visible emotion, “He’s crazy. A religious fanatic. Always preaching.”
“No,” Lana said when asked if Revell was a Christian or a Muslim. “He wasn’t any of those. Some other religion. Older than either of those he kept saying. Look, I’m still in therapy trying to forget about the son of a bitch and his angry, hungry god. I’m sorry about Peggy. I really am. I loved that girl. But you want to know about Bill’s god, you ask him.”
None of the blood in the house matched up with Peggy, who shared Lana’s blood type. Every blood sample taken, it was found, came from a single source. Every drop had come out Revell himself. DNA testing confirmed it.
Revell had no fresh wounds on him when found in the house.
The human body contains just over five liters of blood. Experts estimated that it would take 10 liters at least, and more likely 15 liters, to account for the scope of the gore. So there was no way all of that blood could’ve come from Revell.
The results, double checked, triple checked, the disturbing photos looked at time and again, and the results always came out the same: it was Revell’s blood. And none of it had been on the wall long enough to fully dry when the first police officers responded to the call by the neighbor.
“Four in the morning,” the neighbor said to anyone who asked. “Four in the flippin’ morning. I thought at first he was just having some weird ceremony, or maybe an orgy of some sort. Revell was always a religious nut, ever since he moved into the neighborhood, yelling at my kids, and everyone’s kids, tellin’ them they were sinners, and they would be food for his god when his god came. Yeah, that’s what he said: food for his god. No, I don’t remember if he ever said the name of his god. I just assumed he was some loopy Jesus-freak. Lord knows we have enough of them around here. In that way, Revell fit right in. What’s one more fruit loop in a whole state of them?”
“Right, four in the morning,” he went on, when prompted, “and I can see all sorts of flashing lights. All colors, but mostly, if you can believe it, a kind of black light. Not purple, no, black, bright black. And silhouettes flashing on the windows. People dancing, or writhing, and, sometimes, something not a person at all.” He paused, shuddered. “Sometimes … sometimes … it was like an eye looking out all of the windows at once, looking at me. Still gives me the creeps. No, I can’t describe it. But it was like the house, or something in the house, looked out, and saw me. So, yeah, I called the cops. Like hell I was going to go over there by myself.”
No relatives of Revell, besides the ex-wife, were ever found. Revell and Peggy had moved into the house after Lana left them and headed west with a stock broker. Revell looked American, through and through, hearty mid-western stock from Nowhere and Everywhere, USA. Before that night, if someone had asked him, maybe he would’ve said where he came from, where his roots were. After that night, though, all he would say was, “He came.”
There was only one time he said more than that. A week after being taken into custody, his fifth day in a state facility for the insane.
The nurse on duty heard him crying and stepped in to look. Revell lay on his side, curled into a fetal ball, crying. His face, shiny from the tears, though, showed a mix of emotions: pain, loss, exalted joy, horror, love, and more, like a human slide show, flickering from expression to expression.
“Only she was good enough,” the nurse reported Revell as saying. “Oh, my little girl. He chose you. He chose me. Chose us both. A sign. Only you were worthy…”
Then Revell saw the nurse. He pushed himself up, reaching for her, his backwards hands extended toward her. “Only she was worthy,” Revell said. “Only her.”
The nurse, scared, pulled back. Revell teetered and fell off the bed, landing in a crash that set off the entire ward yelling and shouting. Two other patients died that night, of self-inflicted wounds, one bashing her head repeatedly against a bed post, the second chewing up and swallowing his own tongue.
That first night, though, at his gore-painted house, Revell had made such a perfect ball of himself on the floor, rocking on his feet and buttocks that no one noticed what had changed about him. It wasn’t until they took Revell by the arms to make him stand, to cuff him, that they noticed that both of his hands and both of his feet had been altered.
The cuffing officer, pulling Revell’s arms behind him, didn’t see anything unusual about the hands at first, but looking down, and seeing Revell’s feet pointed towards him, that he noticed. He let go of Revell’s wrists and stumbled back, yelling something incoherent.
No scars marred Revell’s wrists or ankles. No signs of surgery were ever found. But, somehow, both hands and feet had been reversed in their sockets.
Revell stood there, his arms at his sides, palms facing impossibly out, feet pointing impossibly behind him. He still rocked as he stood there. “He came,” he said. “He came.”
Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.
Nothingman said,
September 17, 2006 @ 8:01 am
Awesomeness man!! really cool…leave a lot to imagination but if i had to write this i’d give a killer punch in the end, still it rocks..and yeah thanks for the knowledge that human body contains only 5 liters of blood
DavidRM said,
September 17, 2006 @ 11:25 am
Thanks!
I structured this story, or tried to, like a Lovecraft story. That’s why I focused on the bizarre details, provided no explanations, and tried to end on a disturbing image.
I’ll be checking out your blog today. Looks like you’ve been doing this story-a-day for a while too.
-David
PS 5.6 liters, if you want to be more precise.