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Small Town Monsters

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to tell boys around the camp-fire; but I wouldn’t dare waste a minute of what little time I have left believing in them.”

“Everyone seems to believe in monsters around here.”

“You have to understand what this town has been through. What do you know about Danny Slade?”

“I glanced through his file. He was a mass-murderer—the Ed Gein type. But he wasn’t a werewolf. Last I remember, my mom told me there was no such things as monsters.”

“Your mom wrong; there are monsters in this world; Danny Slade was one of them. He killed without motive. He cannibalized his victims. He kept trophies. He buried the remains close by in his own private graveyard.”

“But that was over fifty years ago, why is everyone so anxious now?”

“I want to show you something,” Hugh said. He rolled up his short, white sleeve, baring his upper arm. There on Hugh’s bicep was a four-inch diameter burn scar—a mass of puckering, bumpy flesh, sprinkled with red pigment imbalances and ugly dead skin. “This represents one of the most painful moments in my life. My mother used to bottle peaches, picked fresh from trees in our back yard. She boiled the jars in a pressure cooker. A short, rubber tube extended from the bottom of the pot with a stopper fixed to its end. As a five-year-old, I let curiosity get the best of me. I pulled the stopper to see what would happen. Hot water shot out of the tube and splashed on my upper arm. It was like napalm. It stuck and burned all at the same time. I remember screaming, but I couldn’t do anything about the pain. My mother came running. She lifted me to the sink and ran cold water over the burn. She finally stopped the agony, but the scar has stayed with me to this day.

“DePalma Beach has its own kind of scars, Kurt; some of those scars will never heal; not after fifty years, not after a hundred years. People went missing for weeks and when they were found, their bodies were mangled and gnawed beyond recognition, buried in Artemus Slade’s backyard. No matter what you say, that Danny Slade was a monster in every sense of the word.”