The ethereal beauty of the choir’s voices haunted Detective
Matt McQueen’s mind like a schizophrenic voice. He felt as though he was being
lovingly pulled into the center of this heavenly sound, but kept his pistol
drawn knowing this was the calm before the storm. He already ventured into the
unknown by looking for clues in this dense forest. Every once and a while a
spider would land on him and he’d get chills running down his spine before
swatting the arachnids away. Those voices. So innocent. So magnificent. They
couldn’t have been older than the single digits. What were small children doing
all the way out in this secluded nightmare?
Matt took a massive gulp of saliva and wiped the sweat off
of his forehead when he found the source of the voices: a broken down church
covered in foliage and insects. Another plunge into the unknown. With every one
of Detective McQueen’s steps, the choir grew louder and more haunting. His
finger tightly wrapped around the trigger, the cop slowly advanced toward the
front entrance, which was guarded with little else than a cracked wooden door
barely on its hinges. It wasn’t so much the robust structure that kept city
folks away; it was the creepiness of it all.
Matt’s eyebrows furrowed and his goateed mouth curled into a
dark frown as he kicked down the front door and stormed in on the church
screaming, “Freeze! Paulson
City
The children’s choir’s lovely voices were tainted by blue
jumpsuits and putty-faced masks with blood dripping down from their mouth and
eye holes. Each and every one of them had puppet strings attached to their
ankles and wrists, strings that lifted their arms in conformist salute when
prompted by their leader.
“Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! It’s so good to see you again.
Perhaps you’d like to sing some hymns with us.” Detective McQueen quickly
turned around with his pistol aimed at the source of the creepily sensual
voice: Reverend Laguna Pearman. No longer was he the trusted member of the Paulson City
“Laguna…I trusted you!” shrieked Matt before bull rushing
the preacher and slamming him against the wooden wall. Even with the barrel of
Matt’s pistol planted firmly in his jaw line, Laguna’s smile never faded. “I
went to your sermons every Sunday. I let my child around you. And this is what
you’ve been doing this whole time?! Where’s Caylee?! She better be in here or
I’ll blast your fucking head clean off your shoulders!”
“Daddy, no!” shouted a little girl from the choir, who came
flying toward her father on puppet strings before clamping around his legs
tightly. “Daddy, please don’t kill him! He’s going to take us to heaven to see
God! This is our mission!”
“You heard her, Detective. Caylee is much happier here than
she was at home. She’s not your child anymore. She belongs to Jesus Christ
now,” said Laguna, still not wiping that smug grin off his slender face.
“Shut up, you snaky piece of shit!” yelled Matt before
pistol whipping Laguna’s breakable face repeatedly. Caylee begged and pleaded
with her father while pounding on his legs with those tiny child hands. The
rest of the choir levitated in on their puppet strings to pull Matt off of
their “master”. By the time the detective was being held on the ground,
Laguna’s visage was covered in blood and bone splinters.
“My face…my beautiful face…how could you do this to me? How
could you do this to the face of God?!” sobbed Laguna as he dropped to his
knees clutching his shattered mug. While some children held a struggling Matt
to the ground, others circled around Laguna and hugged him tightly while crying
drops of pink tears.
“Is this what you call leadership?!” bellowed Matt. “This
guy’s not your master! He’s not anyone’s master! He’s a false prophet with a
child fetish and he needs to be locked up forever!”
“Don’t talk that way about my new daddy!” shouted Caylee
with tears running down her masked face.
Matt’s own eyes were sore and swollen from the sorrow of
watching his daughter being ripped away from him by this monster. Detective
McQueen’s heart felt like it was being put through a juicer. His stomach felt
like he’d taken a liver kick from an MMA champion. “Caylee, please don’t say
those things,” begged Matt with all of his soul.
“I hate you, Dad! I hate you! I belong to God now!” shrilled
Caylee with her fists at her side.
“Oh, Matthew, don’t you ever get sick of questioning things
you don’t understand?” asked the bloodied Laguna Pearman rhetorically. “Don’t
you ever get sick of taking my name in vain? You should be. It’s a mortal sin
after all. And you know how we punish sinners in my church, don’t you?” That
last line was punctuated by Laguna gently rubbing his calloused hand across
Caylee’s trembling back.
“Don’t touch my daughter!” roared Matt as he struggled even
harder to free himself from the choir’s grips.
Laguna spit out some teeth before he reached down for Matt’s
gun (which he dropped on the floor earlier) and pointed the weapon at the
wiggly detective. “Looks like your beautiful daughter isn’t the only one who
belongs to God now. Rest in peace, Detective McQueen!” Matt wiggled his foot
free and kicked Laguna in the ankle, causing his gun blast to accidentally
strike one of his pupils in the chest. The false prophet along with his choir
watched in horror as the child clutched his wound and bled all over the floor,
dying a slow and painful death.
“No…no, no, no! Why, God?! Why would you take this innocent
child from me?!” shouted Laguna as he dropped to his knees and shook his fists
to the sky. “We’ve done so much for you! We’ve done everything we could to make
you happy! Why, my lord! Why?!”
The shocked children’s grips were loosened by this sudden
turn of events and Matt shoved them off to earn his freedom. He spear tackled
Laguna to the ground and wrestled the gun out of the preacher’s hands. Despite
the knee-bending pleas from the choir, Matt unloaded all six rounds into
Laguna’s already shattered face, spreading his brains and skull all over the
wooden church floor. Caylee shouted, “No!” as she watched the preacher’s blood
run down a tiny crack in the floor.
What started out as a kidnapping investigation turned into a
full-on massacre for Matt McQueen. His hands trembled as he held his now
unloaded gun still in Laguna’s splattered face. The cop slowly climbed to his
feet and finally holstered his weapon when the realization set in at what he’d
done. Still shaky, yet firm to the core, Matt declared, “Alright, kids. It’s
time to go home to your parents. This investigation’s over. Enough with the
Halloween bullshit. Take your masks off and load up in the van outside.”
With their puppet strings loosened and their heads hung low,
the children, Caylee included, removed their putty-faced masks. When they
lifted their heads again, Matt’s newfound resolve shattered into trembling
fear. Their faces were even bloodier than Laguna’s was. Their frowns were
contorted beyond their natural limits. Some of their teeth and eyes were
missing. They even had abscesses that peeled off parts of their faces to reveal
their teeth.
“Sorry, Daddy. We warned you!” whispered Caylee. The choir
formed a circle around the shivering Matt before jumping on him and chewing at
his flesh. The detective’s screams were muffled by the blood pouring out of the
hole in his throat. His eyeballs squished and squashed inside the maulers of
the deformed children. His blood was slobbered up off the ground and his flesh
was ripped and shredded. The final munch came when the evilly smiling Caylee
devoured her father’s exposed heart like it was a juicy steak. All that
remained of the detective were his bones and small pieces of slashed skin.
As the children lapped down the final pools of blood and
chewed the last of their meals like animals, one of them asked, “Hey, Caylee!
What should we do with Master Pearman’s body?”
The little brat’s grin never washed away from her bloody
face when she said, “We’ve already had our supper for the evening….but we haven’t
had dessert yet! Come on, everybody! Sing with me!”
As the choir carried the lifeless body of Laguna Pearman
away from the church, they sang in their most innocent voices, “I scream, you
scream, we all scream for ice cream!”
