A Penny Down the Well: A Short Story Collection of Horrifying Events by J. A. Crook Page A

there” but they
weren’t. Instead, there were three people in the relative location
of the gravesite, a taller figure with two shorter ones; the two
Clint suspected were children.
    “ Clint? Clint, are you
there?” Marie called, seemingly at a distance as the phone was held
away from Clint’s ear and near his lap.
    Clint called out, trying
to get a better look. “Marie, I’ll call you right back!” And he
thumbed the screen of the phone until it hung up. Clint opened the
door of the hearse and stepped out of the vehicle, cautiously
stepping across the street in the direction of the three. He called
out, still a bit too far out of view to make a clear image of them.
“Hello? Are you here for someone?” They didn’t look to him. Clint
knew this was the right place, according to the map. He tried
again. “Are you here for a funeral?” Clint hoped he wouldn’t have
managed himself into a terribly awkward situation. Instead, Clint
managed himself into one that became suddenly and intensely
terrifying.
    The three looked up,
simultaneously, as if a set of strings were attached to each of
their heads, but all controlled by the hand of a single puppeteer.
Clint eyes took a moment to take in their faces — or what was left of them. A woman,
with curly black hair stared with haunting white eyes while the
lower section of her face, where her mouth and nose would have
been, hung in a mangled mess of flesh and bloody tissue. The
children, each of them, bore crimson pits in their chests, one of
them able to be seen completely through to the dirt fields behind
them. Their eyes were dead and cold like the woman’s, so bleak and
torn that their innocence could not fight through their harrowing
observance. Clint yelled and ran back to his hearse, “Holy shit!
Holy shit!” He screamed, tugging rapidly on the door handle until
it opened. He sat into the driver’s seat and quickly reached for
the ignition and key. There was nothing. It was then that he felt
the cold metal press against the side of his head.
    “ Hey,
sweetheart. Going somewhere?” The voice was not the gentle,
inviting tone he’d felt with the woman at the cemetery booth. It
was the blood-curdling, guttural male tone. Clint’s eyes shifted in
a panic to his right, toward the passenger’s seat, though he didn’t
dare move his body. In his peripheral, he followed the long barrel
of the device pressed against his head to the wooden stock of what
he recognized what a large shotgun. Immediately, Clint began to
cry. “No, no, no... No, please, this is a mistake! I’m just here to
bring this casket to the cemetery! I don’t know anything, I
promise, I don’t know anything! Don’t do this!” As he receded into
a babbling, begging mess unavoidable of most people ever put into a
position of helplessness with the added potential of losing one’s
life.
    “ Shut your fucking mouth!”
The man screamed, pressing the gun toward him so fiercely that it
guided Clint’s head against the driver’s side window, slamming it
against the glass before the barrel dug into his temple. “Look out
there. It’s a pretty fucking picture, isn’t it?” The man said,
laughing. “Model family!” And his laughing erupted, causing the
cold metal to quiver in a counter to Clint’s uncontrollable
shaking.
    Clint’s eyes drifted back
to the family that continued to watch as the event took place. The
woman huddled the two children protectively against her body and
shook her mangled head as chunks of shattered flesh swung where her
chin once sat, much like a grisly pendulum. Clint’s breath beat
against the window, fogging it, then clearing as he breathed it
back in, moving into a mild hyperventilation.
    The familiar sound of
Clint’s ringer went off between his legs, where Clint had left his
phone upon exiting the car initially. The barrel was pulled from
Clint’s temple, and the gun was maneuvered in a way that the
buttstock sat at the floorboard, behind the pedals of the