Page 41 of His Trick

“Where are we going?”

He ignored me. Eventually, I just shut my trap and followed in his snow-covered footprints. We stopped at an abandoned-looking shed. The warped wood was decaying. It smelled like rotting meat mixed with an unknown chemical.

“Dad?” I questioned, hesitant as he kept dragging me forward right to the door of the foul-smelling place.

“Shh. Inside is your gift, Shiloh. Go ahead. You’ll know what to do. It’s okay. I’ll be right here for you.”

I stood frozen for a moment. I was confused about what I was supposed to feel and uncertain about what lay ahead. I didn’t hear an animal struggling. There was no sound whatsoever, just that protruding odor that made me want to vomit.

“Uhh…okay, Dad. If you say so.”

I tried to remain nonchalant, like I wasn’t about to lose my breakfast pizza. My skin burned from the vapors of the strong chemical coating the air. Nudging the door open with my foot, I walked inside the dark shed. The door smacked shut behind me with a loud crack.

I grimaced, trying to let my eyes adjust in the darkness. The worn-down wooden slats were my only means of light, and I squinted, walking forward with my hands out. I tried to see what animal was strung up in here for me to kill randomly.

I coughed from the sour scent, my stomach roiling with unease, and bile rising in my throat.

“No. Shiloh, get a grip,” I told myself, spitting onto the ground and wiping my mouth with my sleeve.

“H-Hello?”

I froze.

What. The. Fuck.

The voice came from the back of the shed, and I wondered for a second if it was my father trying to pull a dumb prank on me.

“Dad?” I choked out, walking forward, letting my eyes adjust to the dusty darkness of the wooden shack.

Fuck me, that stank was so bad. It was the most sour scent I’d ever smelled. It physically coated my tongue and burned the back of my throat.

What the heck could stink so bad?

“H-Hello?”

The voice again. Unease slammed in my gut, and I swallowed the panic, continuing to push forward toward the soft, strangled sound. There was something on the ground…maybe moss…and my feet kept getting stuck in it.

I stopped cold, like something electrocuted my ass as the light from outside shone through the cracks and onto a pale figure on a slab in the back.

It was a woman, a human being, crudely tied with a rope coated in the liquid that smelled like a vat of bleach. Etched into her skin, filled with maggots and pus, green sores formed a word…no, a name.

Shiloh.

I turned my body and vomited all over the ground.

No. What the fuck was this?

My dad didn’t leave a woman inside a shed. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

I coughed, continuing to puke until there was nothing left but bile in my burning throat.

Now I could see it.

It wasn’t moss on the ground. It was…body parts: intestines, livers, hearts, every organ I’d harvested from animals over the years with my father.

They were thrown on the ground in a crude, ritual-like manner, coating the ground until it was sticky and wet. It looked like they were all at different stages of decay, and the rotten smell made me even more nauseated.

“P-please,” the woman whimpered on the wooden altar behind me. “Help…me.”