The Rules
The Rules
♦ Thomas Beard ♦
♦ Thomas Beard ♦
Based on Scream (1996)
Rule one: Listen to the kids
“There’s a man in my closet.”
“He’ll grow out of it, Mary. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“He’s still there.”
Rule two: Don’t say “I’ll be right back.”
Because she wasn’t.
“Honey, I’m home.”
The house was empty; hopefully. The night was windy and cold. Hal walked in slowly, unaware of his own fear. The only thing talking was his footsteps the creaks in the floor.
“Honey?
“Hello?”
She fell out of the closet door.
Hal couldn’t see through the blood on the floor.
Red sprayed: Mary was on the ground. Hal screamed.
Rule three: Listen to the kids
“He didn’t do it,” Jack said. “I swear to god, officer, Hal didn’t kill my mom.”
“He’s your step-dad, Jack.” Deputy Howard said, flicking her cigarette. “I don’t think you want to believe that he killed-“
“He. Didn’t. Do it.”
“Cops found him in the house covered in blood. Mary was-“
“I know how she died,” Jack yelled. “…Hal didn’t-“
“He’s our best lead.”
Rule four: Listen to the film guy
“Hal’s a red herring,” Meg said. “It’s simple, Jack. The cops think it’s Hal, they go after him, not the first killer. Keep ‘em busy ‘till the forty-minute mark, you know.”
“This isn’t a-“
“But-“
“IT’S NOT A GODDAMN MOVIE, MEG! SHE’S DEAD! SHE’S FUCKING DEAD!” Jack stormed out. Meg sighed.
Rule five: don’t investigate the noise
“Hey, who’s there?” Jud couldn’t hear as well in his old age, but he knew there was something down there. A raccoon, maybe. A vandal. He made his way down the basement stairs, opening the door slowly.
Long, thin fingers stretched out from behind the door. Jud screamed.
Rule six: Listen to the kids
“He’s getting biii-gggeer,” The children sang. “He’s gonna geeet yoouuu.”
Jud was hanging from the ceiling, draped like a curtain made of skin. His face had been stretched out, cut to a smile.
He swayed.
Rule seven: The cops always die
“PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR!” Deputy Howard yelled. No one responded. Wind turned gently in the night, before taking on a sharper edge. There were five cops outside the house.
As slow as a dying man, the door creaked open.
The night was filled with screaming.
Rule eight: Heed the warnings.
The final officer stumbled in wearing a uniform covered in blood. He was coughing heavily, chest sinking like the tides. Every one of his steps stained the walls with red.
“It’s-”
“Sir, are you-”
“It’s not-” The officer fell over and died. It’s not human, he had tried to say.
Rule nine: Listen to the film guy.
“Here’s a list of the rules. I wrote ‘em all out, everything is on here.” Meg handed him the paper.
“I can’t believe I’m going along with this,” Jack said.
“You’d better.” She patted him on the back.
Rule ten: Take the fight to him
The house was empty; each shadow moved like it’s own organism, a heavy imprint of darkness in the world. Long, crystalline light stretched out from the moon. Jack opened the door, holding a knife.
His little brother was safe at the police station: both his parents were dead. Hal had been gutted like a fish, found stuffed in a car on the edge of town. Maybe he had tried to run.
The shadow stepped out like a sliver of the night cut loose. Jack turned around. For seventeen he was fast, and smart. He slashed the knife across the air. The metal hit nothing. The shadow was gone.
Jack ran. The shadow followed him, lurching in the back of the hallway. Jack wheeled around and threw the knife, his only weapon. Bad decision. The blade clattered to the floor. The thing was longer than Jack thought: rail thin, like a line of pencil drawn across the night. It folded over, shoulder blades rolling like an outstretched hand.
Something snapped, and a face full of teeth sped towards Jack. Prepared, he opened the oven and shoved as much of the thing as he could inside. A scream: smoke, and Jack kept running, forcing himself not to look back.
The room was huge; it was the room where Mary had died. The room where Jack’s little brother had seen the thing first. But it was too late for that now. Now the spindles of skin and bone grazed Jack’s chin, the side of his face. Trickles of blood ran down his neck, but nothing lethal. The dark smiled.
It really did get bigger.
Jack turned on the lighter and shoved it forward. More smoke, another grating scream. The light expanded with the flames, drawing the darkness, the teeth, farther back. The thing screamed, and furious, furious for his mother, his father and his step father, his little brother who would never remember any of them, Jack screamed louder, stabbing again and again and again.
After the ordeal, the room’s fires had been put out and the dark, the length of gray flesh, smiling teeth, was dead. It lied, a shell, on the ground. It was over. Jack was finally free. He sighed, turning his back.
Rule eleven: There’s always a sequel.
“Hello?” Jack yelled, forgetting the rules he had lived by, had forced his brother to live by, for ten long, hard years.
“Who-”
The dark smiled, and something long broke through the back of Jack’s shoulder, pulling him down.
He fell.