The Lawn Ornament
by Andrew L. Hodges
Andrew Hodges was born in Woodbridge, England, but spent the majority of his life growing up in Virginia. He has worked as a paint contractor, a biology teacher, a research assistant, and a hospital orderly, all experiences he draws on for his writing. He has a southern gothic horror novel called The Guardians on Amazon, and several of his stories have been featured on The Night’s End podcast. He lives in Appalachia with his wife.
More TTV Stories by Andrew L. Hodges: https://talltaletv.com/tag/andrew-l-hodges/
Gus saw the geegaw in Mr. Krayton’s yard and knew immediately that things had changed. When the wind blows cold on a summer day, you know fall is waiting to sweep in with a blanket of leaves and pumpkins. When the clock hits three and the bell rings, you know that school has given way to a brief splinter of freedom before beldams shuffle the kideroos off to the land of Nod. And the hideous monstrosity on Mr. Krayton’s lawn signaled an end to his era of being tormented by local hoodlums.
“Well?” Debbie said, her thin hands on her hips. She and Sean were standing on the sidewalk, looking at poor little Gus with twin sneers that demanded action. I knew you couldn’t do it, Debbie’s smarmy smile said, you’re too fat to do anything right. Her hateful eyes made Gus look down at his shoes while his pudgy fingers fidgeted. He and Debbie had been in school together for a dog’s age, but she had recently decided to make his life hell. To his knowledge, he never did anything to earn Debbie’s ire, yet she had a vendetta against him.
Gus’ original plan for leaving the safety of his room had been nothing more innocuous than buying a Rocket Pop from the ice cream truck when it pulled up across the street. Summer was a time for dreams, and this was a well-to-do neighborhood where food trucks of all times regularly cycled through. Gus loved food trucks, whether on the curb by his dad’s engineering office or in a lot by the grocery store, each one an adventure waiting to titillate his tongue. But Gus dreamed most of those delicious starship-shaped works of genius that always tasted so good on a hot day. He loved how they glided over his tongue, making his taste buds tango to the tart texture. His throat would hum happy melodies as that cold ambrosia trickled down his gullet, singing a song of sweet satisfaction that served as a balm to the summer swelter.
But Gus was getting bigger every year, so big that the other kids on his block could no longer ignore him. On the better days, they just called him names: the usual barrage of barbs about his weight that was so typical as to be of no consideration. His dad was big, and even though he had a grade school understanding of genetics, it only seemed natural that he would also be big. Gus loved his mother with explicit dedication, but for his father, he had a deep yet unspoken admiration. Only dweebs like their parents, or so went the unwritten code of schoolyard politics, but Gus knew even as a child that his dad was a success. He had no compunction about being big: everybody else seemed to have the problem.
While he could avoid or ignore most of the kids who pestered him, Debbie was like a Gus-seeking missile. When Gus asked his father about Debbie’s sudden turn of nastiness, the old man sighed and responded with something cryptic.
“If she didn’t like you, she wouldn’t be so hard on you. You’ll understand when you’re a little older.”
Being older did him no good in the world of here and now. He had been ranked something fierce and brought to the edge of no return. He had not even made it to the ice cream truck before Debbie, who lived three houses down, had intercepted him. There had been no hesitation: she had asked him flat out if he had ever done a runner on Mr. Krayton’s doorbell. His current situation had quickly consolidated.
Sean gave him a soft punch on the arm. “Come on, man! Go for it! You’re not scared of Old Man Krayton, are you?”
Gus tried not to cry, knowing that such a crack in his armor would only egg Sean on into some further betrayal. Sean was a cool dude, so cool that he smashed the windows of abandoned buildings and etched phallic doodles into the school bathroom stalls with a pen knife. Gus always felt blessed by the Gods of Kiddom whenever he hung around with Sean, the present situation excluded.
“Forget it,” Debbie said with a sneer. “He already looks like he might wet himself.”
Gus felt a heavy lump form in his throat. He always thought of a metal ball bearing, lodged in his esophagus and choking him with a torrent of forbidden sobs. They wanted him to perform The Right of Passage that everyone under thirty on their block had already accomplished. He turned his large eyes to the house at the end of a weedy walk, towards that citadel of legend for decades past.
On the surface, Mr. Krayton’s house was identical to all the others on the block: a brick one-story box with a cement porch and an adjoining garage. An outsider could not, at a glance, guess the three decades of history that lay hidden beneath the house’s drab exterior. But every neighborhood has a particular domicile that is TP’ed every Halloween, where baseballs and dog poo accumulate in the yard with reckless abandon. On Gus’ block, that house belonged to Mr. Krayton.
The little ranch-style house was unprepossessing on the surface, yet it loomed with the ominous air of a Frankensteinian castle. No one, so far as he knew, had ever seen the interior…at least, no one who had ever lived to tell the tale. Mr. Krayton was a famous clothes horse for everything children whispered about, the boogeyman every older sibling used to scare to terrify their younger charges.
Some said Mr. Krayton was a crooked cop who had stolen drugs from the mob and was now hiding out in their small town. Others said Mr. Krayton was a murderer who had killed his wife and buried the body in the backyard. There was a rumor that Mr. Krayton had killed some kid who broke a window with a baseball, the friend of an older brother or a cousin, and got away with it because he had connections with the police or the FBI or the president. This and that and a million similar stories. For years, kids told and re-told these legends like hand-me-down clothes, passing them on as schoolyard folklore. His house suffered regular attempts at every type of vandalism imaginable, from having his bird bath filled with soap and bleach to his mailbox regularly being spray painted with nasty slogans. There was no end to what idle hands would do, generation after generation, once a ritual gets started.
But now, only a single ornament decorated the front lawn, standing on the right-hand side of the walkway a foot from the cement porch. It was charitable to call it an “ornament” since it was without apparent redeeming qualities as a decoration. On the contrary, the thing was disconcerting at best, and down-right terrifying if abstract gimcracks were not your forte. It was a statue of a figure in a headdress, but the age of the stonework made discerning the figure’s features almost impossible. The rough surface of the cement made the doodad look both sodden and grotesque, as if it were a rotting corpse mounted atop a pedestal. The cloak of moss, lichen, and fungoid protrusions encasing the ornament like corrupted flesh only amplified the aura of filthiness.
Debbie gave Gus a push on the shoulder. “Come on! Sink or swim, Gus!”
Sean nodded, and it broke Gus’ heart. Sean was his only real friend, and disappointing him was not an option. “Seriously, man. Everybody in class has done it except you.”
Gus clenched his fists and started down the walk. He saw Debbie watching him with her arms crossed while Sean glanced over his shoulder to ensure no adults were nearby. Gus was supposed to run, but it took every ounce of courage in his soul just to march up to the porch. It was like being led to the gallows, facing the scaffold for a crime he did not commit. He knew it was silly to be scared of old Mr. Krayton, a frail mummy who had to be pushing eighty at least. The pot-bellied crank usually sat by himself on his porch, drinking beer from a cooler while listening to the radio or reading the paper. He was a pensioner with no known dependents who rarely received visitors, even during the holidays. Like the lawn ornament, he was a lonely anachronism.
Poor Gus was cursed with being brighter than the other kids his age, and thus a little more conscious of his situation. His presumption had always been that people did not like Mr. Krayton because he was different. From a distance, Mr. Krayton looked like any other oldster, stooped and dressed for comfort rather than style. But when you got up closer, you realized that there was something wrong with him, something in his face and eyes that made you want to scream. He was like something wearing a geezer’s skin as a disguise, with his true outsidedness sequestered beneath his flesh.
Gus once asked his father about Mr. Krayton, who seemed to be a mystery to so many people. His father had grown up in the area and knew almost everybody in town. Gus’ dad had sighed at the question, lowered the novel he was reading, and adjusted his glasses like always when he was about to lecture Gus on something.
“He’s a Vietnam veteran,” his dad had said. “He was in the Navy for several decades and spent most of it in the East. He was married to some woman over there, a Korean or a Chinese girl I think, and at some time or another, she left him. So he quit the military, moved back here to his parents’ old place, and has been here ever since. He’s just a lonely old man with no family. So stay clear of him, ok?”
Gus was drawing close to the lawn ornament, the only thing in the yard. It stood about halfway between the sidewalk and the porch, watching passers-by with an eerie pock-marked face. Gus observed the stone monolith’s corroded flesh and shuddered. It reminded him of a coral reef, the twisted body home to broad patches of lichen and moss. There were jungles of toadstools and slime molds sprouting amongst various molds and algae. Among the usual harbingers of decay were growths less easy to define: fuzzy patches of fungoid fur, gelatinous drippings that looked like snot oozing from the dimpled stonework, and spiky protrusions that resembled the spines of sea urchins.
But the shape of the ornament dominated Gus’ impression of it. His mind, fed on pulp novels and fantasy comics, immediately assumed an Asiatic origin. It looked like some Hindu god, a defaced shrine to Kali or Rama, standing with arms open towards Heaven. Yet the face was unreadable, the body weather-worn and moldering, such that this shrine to an ancient deity had transformed into a disgusting hunk of stone folderol. It felt profane, like the desecrated remains of a saint.
Gus could not take his eyes off the infested knick-knack. He craned his neck as he passed by, tentatively approaching the front porch steps. But as he mounted the first concrete stair, his ears started to buzz. The sensation reminded Gus of the tuning fork from Mr. Willingantz’s music class, a high-pitched hum that made him feel dizzy. He stumbled forward and caught himself on the porch column, his stomach doing somersaults as gravity danced the tango with his bulky torso. He leaned forward on the column, trying to catch his breath…
The hairs on his arms and neck started to prickle as a tickling sensation spread over his back, arms, and legs before finally encasing his entire body. Gus scratched absently at first, but then he pawed at himself in desperation. He had survived the Chicken Poxs as a kid, as well as a terrible case of hives caused by his sudden and unwitting discovery of a peanut allergy: but this was a hundred times worse than all those incidents combined. He was scratching before he even registered the danger he was in, his flesh demanding assault from his fingers as his skin crawled.
Debbie was shouting something, but Gus paid no heed: he whipped off his shirt to see the damage. His stomach sprawled before him where skin flaked off in patches, revealing red welts that swelled before his very eyes. All he could think of was bees and wasps, an invisible legion of stingers attacking his pale tenders. He scratched, but his fingers gave him no relief. Through the fog of pain and discomfort came a single thought: that he needed to get to a hospital before Mr. Krayton heard his screams and came out. Completely abandoning his original intentions, Gus turned and fled.
He tried running, but the itching only intensified. The coarse fabric of his clothes was unbearable, and every movement chafed the soars now sprouting all over his body. He jogged down the walkway while undoing his belt, finally ripping his britches off as he fled. Debbie turned red as a baboon’s backside while Sean whistled in mock lasciviousness, but Gus didn’t care. His underwear came off when his nethers similarly demanded freedom. Soon, Gus was streaking down the walkway towards his friends, squalling at the top of his lungs.
As he clawed at himself, something came away in his hand. Gus’ first thought was horror and disgust at the assumption that he had dislodged a clump of skin. But when he looked down, his palm held a crumbling mixture of broken fungoid flesh and dripping green slime. His chest exploded with welts blossoming into growths that emerged like giant boils. His scaly skin sloughed slimy flakes that sprouted like lichen from his pale pores. Scratching worsened his agony as the flakes he dislodged gave way to more growths.
Gus was passing the statue, which had its back to him, and something drew his eye. Through the pain and discomfort came an odd revelation, one he could never be sure of afterward. As he ran past it, the figure appeared to have changed. It was bulkier now, naked, and with flabby folds of skin erupting into a myriad of pernicious growths. But was that his own pock-marked moon face on the figure’s bull neck? And was the pose no longer with the arms open in an embrace, but his thick stumps scratching frantically at the flesh? Even if his circumstances had been more conducive to clearer perceptions, his rational mind could have never accepted this strange implication.
Gus was screaming now, screaming and crying. Sean hollered questions at him while Debbie stared helplessly with bulging eyes and her hand over her mouth. Gus cared not a wit for them: his skin was turning host to a jungle of alien fungus that burst from his flesh even as he collapsed at their feet. He rolled around on the ground, jerking and ripping at the strange things consuming him. But as he ripped the bits away, more sprouted until his torso and neck were a garden of budding horrors.
Sean was on his knees, trying to help Gus. He assumed initially his pal was jibing them, but he quickly realized that something was seriously wrong. To him, Gus’ naked pink flesh was pristine, but Gus shrieked about something exploding from his skin. Sean slapped at his thick rolls, trying to kill whatever might be worrying Gus. He saw no flies, no bees, nothing but the red marks from Gus’ clawing fingers.
Only Debbie watched as Mr. Krayton came out on the porch. The old hermit wore only an undershirt and shorts, his pot belly straining the waistband. He had a six-pack in one hand and a magazine tucked under the other. Slowly, Mr. Krayton set these down on the porch by his chair, then came down the front steps. At first, Debbie thought he would come to scold them, but he stopped halfway.
The old man approached the statue, a weather-beaten monstrosity with its arms outstretched as if in an embrace. Mr. Krayton walked up to it on his shambling knees, his hand outstretched. He laid it on the shoulder of the stone figure and Debbie watched in amazement as the growths and protrusions vibrated as if in approval. All the organic matter growing on that crumbling creature tickled the air in unison.
Then, Mr. Krayton turned his sagging face towards Debbie and caught her eye. He smiled and winked.
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