nosleep

It all started with a simple schoolyard rhyme, no one knows the original incarnation, only a fragment of it survived and was circulated amongst our school. “A pail of snails lifts the veil to Blackbart the Frail.” Blackbart became an amalgam of the boogeyman and a wish-granting genie. Lara was the first one to suggest the rhyme as literal instruction, and then it spread amongst the rest of the school children. I don’t know who added the instruction of salting the snails, I don’t know if it was sheer coincidence or implanted in a young mind with sinister intent.

It had rained for a week straight the day we brought it home, the first summer rains breaking the month-long dry spell. Sunbaked and water-parched snails had begun to peek out from their shady hiding places at the first sign of moisture and had overtaken our small trailer park. All of us had done our part in bringing them in, My little brother Mark and I used old Tupperware. Others used cups and boxes but we brought them to the same place, a rusty old metal bucket on the outskirts of the nearby forest.

Terry had kept watch over the bucket using a stick to push any snails that had tried to slither out back in. Thomas was the one to bring the can of salt and Jeremy had been the one to open the can and salt them. I had seen the way snails had ruptured and spilled out in sudden bubbling agony when salted. But even then I couldn’t have foretold the sight of hundreds writhing in panic, and the frothing fluids that rose to the top of the bucket and spilled out in one long sloshing drool. Lara gagged, some of the boys jeered, Mark pressed close to me and I was entranced by the vileness of it all.

Something shifted from within the still-writhing mass and my stomach lurched at the realization that something had peeked out from the liquid. It was a small digit, but it was wrong, looked both frostbitten and semi-translucent. It felt as if the world was falling away as if time was slowing to a crawl, the moments between heartbeats stretched out into an unbearable eternity. With a twitch and vivid motion, a diseased hand reached out from the slop, gripped the side of the bucket, and hauled itself up. Another hand followed by the head and shoulders of what might have once been human or something that had formed itself in the rudimentary shape of a human. Its face was smooth and featureless, only stained splotchy flesh.

Everyone witnessing this otherworldly birth was paralyzed by primal fear and forced to watch as the *thing* adjusted its hold around the bucket, and tried to find leverage to pull itself out. It had managed to free its torso when the bucket tipped over and spilled the creature out, a naked thing the size of a toddler, the irregular patterns of its malformed flesh repeated throughout its entire form. Its head jerked up to face the group and the skin where its mouth should have been shifted, stretched, and thinned until it tore open, like an amniotic sac, and from within dull white teeth grinned at the group.

“Hello, little children,” it croaked out, almost pained.

“Blackbart?” Jeremy asked.

The creature tilted its head and aimed its eyeless glare at Jeremy and the boy tensed.

“Blackbart? Is that the name you know me by?”

The silence answered in lieu of any word or movement and Blackbart settled his lipless grin into something more passive. A collectively held breath eased out and some of the others dared to take a step closer.