Jeepers Creepers ✮

The night was too quiet. No crickets. No wind. Just the wet crunch of their sneakers on gravel and the smell of turned earth. That’s when they heard it first. A song.

The voice was a low, ragtime warble, tinny like an old phonograph. It drifted from the drainage ditch ahead. Riley slowed. A rusted culvert pipe jutted from the bank, and something was blocking it. Not something. Someone.

A floorboard creaked directly above their heads. A single yellow eye peered through a knothole, blinking slowly.

Riley kicked, clawed, bit. Nothing. Its grip was iron. She felt her vision narrowing to a tunnel. In that fading light, she saw the creature’s back—the patches on its wings. One was a piece of a high school letterman jacket. Another was a scrap of a police uniform. The third was a square of orange cloth. Prison issue. Jeepers Creepers

Jamie fumbled, pulled his camping lighter from his pocket. Riley threw the bottle into the fuel tank’s open valve. Jamie flicked the lighter. The flame caught the trail of black ichor—which burned like gasoline.

“…Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those eyes?”

“I’ve been waiting for fresh ones.” The night was too quiet

“Where are we?”

“Nowhere, apparently.” Riley grabbed her phone. No signal. The map on her lap showed a dashed line—an old county road decommissioned in the 1980s. “We walk. There was a church back about a mile.”

Then the singing started again, soft and playful. Just the wet crunch of their sneakers on

“Jamie! The lighter!” Riley choked out.

The harvest moon hung low and swollen over the backroads of Poho County, a jaundiced eye watching the rusted Chevrolet Impala crawl along the asphalt. Inside, sixteen-year-old Riley tapped the steering wheel, her younger brother, Jamie, snoring softly in the passenger seat. They were three hours from home, taking the “scenic route” back from a college visit.

The cellar door ripped off its hinges. Riley grabbed a broken bottle, held it like a knife. The creature descended, its wings folding tight to its body. Up close, it reeked of copper and formaldehyde. It didn’t attack. It just crouched, tilting its head side to side, studying them like a taxidermist examining fresh pelts.

Then the engine coughed. Sputtered. Died.