Chapter 9
It slipped silently under the bleachers, undetected in the darkness until Paulie felt the heat of its furry paw reach around the side of his head, pulsing in pain with his tooth, and press vinegar softness up his virgin nostrils and into his lips.
The world wobbled.
Paulie wobbled along with it.
It pulled him backward by the face on rubbery legs struggling to stay solid enough for his boots to find balance or ground—
They were on open ground.
Its paw inched up to cover his eyes. They stung. His mouth gaped open. Breathing was hard. Screaming was impossible. The sound that he wanted to be "Help me!" left his throat as a muffled babble.
"Be silent," it said in accented English. Its voice was deep and distorted. "Make a sound and I kill you."
Paulie's eyes rolled back in his head seeing grey clouds moving across a sky in which no stars twinkled.
A dull orb moon blurred.
It sped up. Its grip was strong. Paulie's legs moved faster to keep up, to keep vertical. The girls' football field bordered a forest, toward which it pulled Paulie...
Into it.
Branches bent back by its body snapped when they passed.
Dry branches broke.
"Stupid boy, imbecile head. Tell me all or I kill you," it said. "I beat you harder than your heart beat you now."
Paulie's pulse raced.
Over the forest floor they went, the two of them moving swiftly over exposed roots and rocks slick with snow.
Paulie's foot lost traction, slipped.
It spun him around—briefly, Paulie saw its shape: slim, taut and pure black, a head with a humanoid face obscured by mesh that was like the magnetic triangle of Miss Collins' panties behind a layer of panty hose as she bent forward to correct someone's accent grave into an aigu—said, "Keep ahead or I kill you," and prodded him in the back with something hard and sharp, like a rifle barrel. "Don't look back."
The ground inclined.
Ahead, the trees thickened.
Their branches scratched Paulie's cheeks.
It prodded him.
He moved.
They crested a hill and began traversing its decline. Paulie had never been here before. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Google Maps, to place himself, to predict where it was taking him. He nearly walked into a tree.
"Watch where we're going," it said—accentless for the full sentence, before adding immediately in its accent again, "Or I kill you."
Paulie's back hurt because of its prodding.
The forest opened into a clearing.
In the middle of the clearing beckoned a hole, human sized and freshly dug. A shovel lay nearby. Next to it was a snow shovel. Several ropes were slung over the stub of a branch.
Paulie stopped several strides from the hole.
"Go," it said.
He stepped obediently to the edge.
It spun him so that they were face to mesh-obscured face. "Don't look at me," it said.
It had a cube shaped lump on its neck.
It held a gag in its hand—the kind of spider gag that Paulie recognised from BDSM porn and a party last summer, where a group of twelfth graders had tied a naked ninth grade girl to a table and forced her to swallow alcohol until she threw up all over her face. "Vodka boarding," they'd called it. They fucked her after wiping her down.
Paulie closed his eyes.
It placed the spider gag in his mouth and fastened it around his head.
It placed its furry paw on his throat.
"Imbecile boy, you are a mistake. I will correct you," it said, squeezing. And with its other paw it punched Paulie so hard in the stomach that his heels stepped back on air and he tumbled into the hole.