INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER – Things are never normal in the dysfunctional and crazy Hawkins house in Sydney Australia, but when the occupants awaken on Friday morning everyone – Alistair, Faye, Cornelius, Danielle and Erica – are seeing and hearing strange, disturbing and unexplained phenomena. Up the road, Erica’s boyfriend Gavin is also acting weird to the dismay of his older sister, Lisa.
With things getting more and more horrifying by the second, the family with Gavin flee the house in terror and take to the road. But will this save them from the aliens, demons, monsters, ghosts and dangerous animals pursuing them? Find out by reading Chapter 3 of this story series.
Please note that this story has very strong themes and violence, as well as scenes involving female characters using the toilet and having their periods, so reader discretion is advised. Otherwise, enjoy the story, look for more coming up and rate and comment. All characters and events are fictional, with any similarity to real persons living or dead coincidental and unintentional.
*
The thunderstorms through Sydney abated after midnight and the rain died away in the early hours of the morning. At the Hawkins house, Alistair, Faye, Erica, Cornelius and Danielle were all sound asleep, and presumably Brendan was too. Although given Brendan never came out of his area in the house and nobody else ever went in, and that he kept the drapes closed at all times causing the difference between night and day to be blurred, this was difficult to ascertain.
Up the road at the Baxter house, Gavin was sound asleep in his bed before waking shortly after 2.00 am, the young man feeling very thirsty. Swinging his legs out of bed, Gavin walked to the kitchen half asleep and took a jug of water out of the fridge, pouring himself a glass. As he drank, he was joined in the kitchen by his older sister, Lisa also waking up thirsty.
Gavin looked across the kitchen as the tall blonde figure of his sister entered the kitchen and his eyes went wide. Normally Lisa wore an oversized tee-shirt over panties to sleep, but to his abject horror his sister had not worn any clothes to bed and was now walking towards him on her bare feet in a state of complete and absolute nudity.
“Hi Gavin,” she said, her voice indicating she was still pretty sleepy.
Gavin could only stare at his sister in horror with his mouth agape, taking in his sister’s shapely C-cup breasts, her triangle of pubic hair on her feminine mound that proved she was a natural blonde and her long legs.
“Gavin, is something wrong?” Lisa asked as she poured herself a glass of water.
“Lisa, please can you cover yourself up?” asked the dismayed Gavin.
Lisa looked down at the oversized tee-shirt she was wearing, and could feel her knickers covering her bottom and her private female areas. “Gavin, what are you talking about?”
“You walking around the house naked like that, even in the middle of the night. Ugh.”
The extremely confused Lisa could only shake her head. “Gavin, I’m clothed, I’m wearing a tee-shirt and panties.”
“No, you’re naked. We’re brother and sister, I don’t need to see that.”
Lisa thought back to when they were younger and sighed, realizing what must be happening. When he was a kid, Gavin would on occasions sleepwalk, and say all sorts of confused things when doing so. He hadn’t done it for some time, but this must be the case now.
“Okay, I think I know what’s happening,” said Lisa. ‘You’re sleepwalking, and we need to get you back into bed.”
Gavin was adamant. “I am not sleepwalking, I am wide awake, and you are completely nude Lisa.”
“I think it’s bedtime again Gavin.”
The very disturbed Gavin allowed his naked older sister to lead him from the kitchen and back to his bedroom. He hadn’t enjoyed the view of his sister’s nudity from the front — her bare breasts and her triangle of blonde pubic hair, and he didn’t enjoy the view from the back — his big sister’s bare bottom — any better.
It only got worse when Lisa got an itch on one of her bare feet and without thinking bent to scratch it, Gavin horrified to see his sister’s arse cheeks part and the explicit view of Lisa’s vagina and anus. “Now, back into bed for you Gavin,” said Lisa, putting her brother back into bed. “You sleep tight and have sweet dreams, okay?”
“Like I can do that have seeing you naked Lisa,” Gavin protested. “Can you please cover up your junk in the future?’
Lisa left her brother’s bedroom and returned to her own, swinging her bare feet back in under the covers and reaching under her sleep shirt to adjust her knickers, Lisa getting a wedgie around her left butt cheek. The young woman tossed and turned for a bit, disturbed by her brother’s weird behavior while sleepwalking. Oh well, at least he hadn’t liked what he apparently saw, and hadn’t sported an erection. That would have been really disturbing. After about half an hour Lisa drifted back to sleep, joining her younger brother in the land of nod.
The early morning hours passed and dawn was about to rise over the Pacific Ocean. All across Sydney birdsong and calls were the first sound many people heard — magpies, kookaburras, crows, currawongs and willie wagtails — and the street in Sydney’s northern suburbs where the Hawkins and Baxter families lived was no exception.
Cornelius was first up in the Hawkins house, and he got out of bed shortly before 5 am, leaving Danielle snoring under the covers. The tall lanky young man went to the bathroom and chucked a piss, then returned to the bedroom scratching his balls through his boxer shorts. Putting on underpants, a pair of black football shorts and a black tee-shirt that proclaimed ‘I HATE FAGGOTS’ Cornelius went into the kitchen and got a huge bowl of cereal.
Going into the living room, Cornelius turned on the television to watch an early morning cartoon about human settlers on a far distant planet in the Andromeda Galaxy in the far distant future that were always having problems with evil robots that wanted to dominate the galaxy and were always cranky. Although enjoying the kids’ cartoon, the cereal and still happy about fucking his wife on her period last night, Cornelius was still pissed that the drugs he had purchased yesterday were duds and had had no effect at all on anyone.
In the master bedroom, Alistair and Faye Hawkins awoke, yawning and stretching. Faye headed straight into the ensuite bathroom to sit on the toilet for a while, the petite redhead lifting her short nightdress, pulling her white cotton full brief panties down to her ankles and sitting barefoot on the loo.
Her husband, dressed in a wife-beater vests and boxer shorts, lumbered to the other bathroom that their son, daughter and daughter-in-law shared, stopping to get a glass of water in the kitchen, Alistair feeling exceptionally thirsty this Friday morning.
On his way to the bathroom, Alistair heard the sound of the TV in the living room and went in there to see his slacker unemployed son lounging around feeding his face with cereal Alistair had paid for and watching a TV show for primary school aged students. It was only just after 5 am, and already Alistair was angry.
Alistair stood behind his son. “You going to get a job today, Cornelius?”
“Nuh,” Cornelius grunted.
Alistair half slapped, half punched his son on the back of the head. “Get one!” he bellowed, before leaving for the bathroom.
“Miserable old bastard,” Cornelius grumbled, rubbing his sore head and trying to concentrate on the television.
In the laundry toilet, Alistair stood peeing and grumbling about his lazy slacker of a son. Finishing his piss, the patriarch of the Hawkins family flushed the toilet and went to wash his hands. His grouchy mood was not improved by the cold water that flowed from the tap. It wasn’t normal cold, it was icy cold, like iced water from the fridge.
“What the fuck?” Alistair growled as he played around with the taps, turning off the cold and leaving only the hot running. The mirror steamed up but the water poured from the tap freezing cold, as though it was being pumped directly from the Labrador Current in the North Atlantic Ocean during winter.
Getting angrier still, the puzzled Alistair went outside to look at the hot water system. He had one suspect in mind for this — Cornelius – and if he had been messing around playing silly buggers with the hot water system, then Alistair would kick his arse from Sydney to Melbourne via Canberra, and then across to Adelaide for good measure.
Retrieving his keys, Alistair opened the laundry door and stopped short, amazed at what he saw. With Cornelius’s antics over the years, Alistair was well used to surprises none of them good, but what he saw in the dim early morning light had even he too shocked for words.
On the back patio was a pig. A large pink pig with a curly tail, obviously a boar given how well-endowed the animal was between its hind legs. Alistair turned on the patio lights, and the pig remained clear as ever on the now illuminated porch. It was snuffling around in a garden bed of agapanthus with its snout, grunting. Alistair looked at the pig, the pig looked back at Alistair and grunted at him, then went back to the garden bed again.
Having recovered slightly from the shock of seeing a pig in his garden when there obviously shouldn’t have been one, Alistair became very angry. He knew Cornelius was responsible for this, and he was going to pay big time.
“Cornelius!” Alistair boomed, storming into the living room. Cornelius was still feeding his face with cereal and watching cartoons and Alistair belted him around the head like he had done earlier, only much harder.
“What the fuck did you do that for Dad, you fucking dickhead?” protested Cornelius.
“What is a pig doing in the back garden, Cornelius?” roared Alistair.
Cornelius burst out laughing, enraging his father all the more. He grabbed Cornelius by his shirt and dragged him off the couch, the plastic bowl of cereal and milk going all over Cornelius and the couch in equal measures. Alistair gut-punched Cornelius, his son doubling over but still laughing.
“What is so fucking funny?” demanded Alistair. “You think it’s funny, to bring a pig into the back garden?”
“There isn’t a pig in the back garden,” laughed Cornelius.
“There is a pig in the back garden!” boomed Alistair.
“No there isn’t, Dad,” insisted Cornelius. “Have you been drinking, at five in the morning?”
Alistair grabbed Cornelius by his hair with one hand, his shirt by the other and dragged him through the house to the laundry and outside onto the patio. “There is the pig!” he shouted, releasing his grip on his son.
Cornelius joined his father in looking at the pig in amazement. “There is a pig! How did a pig get in here?”
“Oh don’t play stupid with me you idiot, I know you brought it in here, you were up to something last night. And now, I’m going to bust your arse.”
Alistair raised his fist, but Cornelius insisted. “Dad, I don’t know how the pig got here. It shouldn’t be here.”
“Of course it shouldn’t bloody be here you fucking retard!” Alistair’s voice was such that early morning swimmers and surfers at Dee Why and Cronulla beaches could probably hear the shouting.
“Perhaps it escaped from a farm?” Cornelius suggested as his father lowered his fist, watching the pig which ignored the two men, continuing to sniff around grunting.
“In the middle of the suburbs of Sydney?” snapped Alistair. “And how did it get in here?”
“Jesus, how the fuck should I know?” grumbled Cornelius. “Why do you always blame me for all the shit that happens around here?”
“Because you are a weirdo always doing stupid shit, Cornelius!” Alistair stood looking at the two problems he had, his unemployed layabout of an adult son and the pig, and came up with a solution to the problem of the pig at least.
“When we’ve gone to work, you call the council and get the rangers to come out here and pick up the pig,” said Alistair.
“Why do I have to do it?” Cornelius grumbled.
“Because you are the only one in this house apart from your loony brother who isn’t going to work or classes today. I don’t know, on top of everything else I wake up to a fucking pig in the back yard.”
Alistair went back into the house, mumbling and grumbling and Cornelius followed him back inside, sitting down to watch cartoons again.
“Turn that crap off and do something productive Cornelius!” came his father’s voice, a direction Cornelius ignored.
The angry Alistair stormed into his bedroom, in time to hear his wife unwinding toilet paper as she finished on the loo, then the toilet flushed.
Behind the closed ensuite bathroom door, Faye was pulling up her knickers as the toilet flushed when she stopped, looking into the bowl in puzzlement. The water was going counter-clockwise. Faye had never been to the Northern Hemisphere, but knew from family members such as her brother and sister visiting England and America that water went anti-clockwise, whereas in Australia the water swirled clockwise. The toilet had finished flushing now and the sound of the toilet cistern refilling was audible, and the puzzled Faye walked to the sink to wash her hands. Unlike her husband earlier, Faye found the water from the taps warm, but again as the water went down the sink Faye noticed it was going anti-clockwise, just like the toilet.
“Faye!” came Alistair’s booming voice, to which she inwardly cringed. She had enjoyed some rare peace and quiet while she was sitting on the toilet, although she had heard her husband and son arguing, which was far from unusual. Now her peace and privacy was being shattered.
“Faye, you will not guess what’s in our back garden,” said Alistair as his wife emerged from the bathroom.
“No Alistair, I wouldn’t,” said Faye, as she went to put on a short bathrobe.
“There is a pig in our back garden.”
“A pig?” Faye stood incredulous. “Alistair, there cannot be a pig in our back garden.”
“Come and I’ll show you.”
The perplexed Faye went through the house with her husband to the back laundry door, and she stopped short as she saw and heard the aforementioned pig, the large pink animal grunting and going through the garden.
“There really is a pig in our garden!” Faye stood dumbfounded.
“That’s what I told you,” grumbled Alistair.
“How did it get there?”
“I think Cornelius knows more than he’s letting on but he’s playing dumb, even dumber than usual.”
Faye was unconvinced. “How could Cornelius get a pig into the back garden without anyone else knowing about it? And where would he get a pig in the first place?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past that son of ours,” said Alistair. “Anyway, I told Cornelius to get the council out here to take the pig away while we’re at work.”
“Talking about work, we’d better get ready early while the girls are still asleep, otherwise we won’t get a chance,” said Faye.
“Tell me about it, how long can they bloody take?” complained Alistair. “Oh, that reminds me, there’s a problem with the hot water I need to check.”
“The hot water seemed fine. I washed my hands after I’d been to the toilet, and there was hot water.”
Alistair turned on the hot tap in the laundry sink, and hot water flowed. “Strange,” Alistair grunted.
“That’s strange too,” said Faye. She indicated the water swirling down the drain anti-clockwise. “It was happening in our bathroom too when I flushed the toilet and ran the sink.”
Alistair stepped into the laundry toilet and flushed it, both he and his wife looking amazed as the water in the toilet swirled anti-clockwise. “The water always goes clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, so what the fuck is going on this morning?”
Both Faye and Alistair showered, Faye in the ensuite and Alistair in the main bathroom, both pondering the water swirling down the drains anti-clockwise. Alistair put on his work clothes and boots and went into his bedroom, where he stopped short.
His wife had also dressed for work — in a light blue 1970s pantsuit sporting very flared trousers and shoes with platform heels. Alistair shook his head. “Faye, what are you wearing that for?”
Faye shrugged as she brushed her red hair. “Just ordinary clothes to the office Alistair like every day.” She indicated her pantsuit. “I wear this all the time.”
“No, you wouldn’t have worn that since 1978 or 1979, before Erica was born. Are you feeling okay this morning, Faye?”
“Perfectly fine Alistair, apart from there being a pig in our back garden and the plumbing doing strange things,” said Faye.
*
Up the road at the Baxter house, Gavin and Lisa had both awoken. As he got out of bed, Gavin thought about that strange dream about his sister being naked and tried to banish the images from his mind. “What a strange dream,” he said, brushing his teeth and shaving in the bathroom. Gavin had a peculiar feeling today upon waking, an odd sensation of the disquiet of missing time, as though Gavin had overslept until around noon, but it was still early morning.
While her younger brother brushed his teeth and shaved, Lisa had walked into the laundry toilet, and closed and locked the door, putting down the toilet seat. The attractive young blonde lifted her over-sized football shirt to show she was wearing light blue bikini-style cotton panties, which she pulled down to her ankles before sitting her bare bottom down on the toilet.
Adjusting her bum so she was comfortable on the seat, Lisa was very much aware of the uncomfortable feelings in her bladder and her bowels. From Lisa’s urethra came a stream of yellow urine that tinkled into the toilet bowl, soaking her vagina. When her piss abated, Lisa reached for the loo paper and unwound herself some toilet tissue, using it to dry her pink pussy, the hair that grew on Lisa’s mound and around her vulva indicating that she was a natural blonde.
Relaxing the muscles in her bowels, Lisa gave a practical demonstration that pretty girls do fart and she felt the relief as her poo came out of her anus with quite a rush, the smell immediately making itself known in the toilet. Lisa got more toilet paper and wiped her bottom, and remained sitting on the loo, looking down at her lowered panties and bare feet.
Gavin of course did not want to know what his big sister was doing on the toilet, so was disturbed when he heard her voice from the toilet as he washed the last shaving foam from his face.
“Gavin? Gavin, it’s Lisa,” she called out. “This is really embarrassing but I’ve run out of toilet paper and now I’m stranded on the loo. Could you please get me a new roll of toilet paper and pass it to me through the door?”
This wasn’t something Gavin really wanted to have to deal with, especially after that weird dream about his butt-naked sister in the middle of the night. Gavin had passed by the toilet earlier and could have sworn there was paper, but then again maybe he was mistaken. He was pretty confused after that strange vivid dream about seeing Lisa naked. Gavin also wished Lisa had checked that she had enough toilet paper before she sat down on the toilet for her morning shit, but obviously she hadn’t and he couldn’t leave his big sister sitting on the toilet with her knickers around her ankles and a dirty bottom.
“Gavin?” came Lisa’s voice again.
“Sorry Lisa, I’ll just get you some, just sit tight,” Gavin called back.
Then Lisa’s voice again, her tone clearly puzzled. “Gavin, who are you talking to?”
Now Gavin was puzzled. “You Lisa, obviously.”
Gavin opened the small closet under the sink and retrieved a roll of nice soft toilet paper and took it to the laundry toilet, where he knocked on the closed and locked door.
“Lisa, I’ve got your toilet paper for you, if you just open the door a few inches I’ll pass it to you.”
On the toilet, Lisa was already puzzled and now was utterly perplexed. She was also not too pleased, she could feel more poo in her rectum pressing against her anus, and didn’t want to defecate with her own brother right outside the toilet door.
“Gavin, what is going on out there? What are you talking about?”
Gavin was starting to get cross. “Lisa, you asked me to get you some more toilet paper.”
Lisa looked at the toilet roll holder, which contained close to a full roll of toilet paper and a second toilet roll on the cistern. “Gavin, I don’t need more toilet paper, I’ve got plenty in here. I could be on the toilet for a week and I wouldn’t run out of loo paper.”
“Then why did you ask me to get you more?”
“I didn’t,” Lisa insisted.
“I swear I heard you ask,” said her unconvinced brother.
“Well, I didn’t,” said Lisa. The young woman was getting more desperate. “Actually Gavin, do you think you could please move away from the toilet and leave me in privacy? I really need to well, you know.”
The completely confused Gavin did as his big sister asked him. “Sure Lisa, sorry.”
He moved away from the lavatory, but unfortunately not fast enough. Lisa couldn’t hold on any more, and Gavin was close enough to hear his sister farting loudly into the toilet, her bottom making a squelching noise and then her poo splashing into the toilet water with an almighty rush, before she got more toilet paper from the roll.
Gavin scurried away blushing bright red at the embarrassment of hearing his sister farting and pooing on the toilet, and on the toilet Lisa blushed bright red as she wiped her bottom with a length of toilet tissue at knowing her brother heard the graphic details of her bowel movements.
Lisa remained sitting on the toilet for the next five minutes, Gavin in the quiet of the house able to hear his big sister unwinding toilet paper every time she wiped her bottom. Finally though, Lisa finished and stood up, flushing the toilet but was so perplexed by her brother that she forgot to spray any toilet freshener around. She pulled up and adjusted her knickers and exited the toilet, washing her hands at the bathroom sink.
Gavin saw Lisa pass by on her bare feet as she returned to her own bedroom, adjusting her knickers under her sleep-shirt. At least his big sister was wearing her knickers this morning as well and something to cover her tits, unlike in that really weird dream from last night.
Needing to pee, Gavin went into the lavatory recently vacated by his older sister — and stopped short as the full impact of the terrible toilet smell that Lisa had left behind herself struck him. It was like walking into an open sewer. How did Lisa have such foul-smelling poo? The gagging Gavin hastily grabbed the toilet freshener and sprayed it around the loo, trying to banish the stench of Lisa’s bowel movements. He most definitely did not want to be standing here peeing and absorbing the smell of his own sister’s shit.
*
The two sleeping members of the Hawkins household — Erica and Danielle — awoke unaware that there was a pig in the back garden. Danielle didn’t feel any different but Erica awoke thinking that it was much later in the day than it really was, the same strange sensation of missing time shared by her boyfriend although Erica hadn’t overslept. The young girl put on her glasses and looked at her clock radio — it was definitely still early in the morning.
One thing both girls did know they needed to do was go and sit on the toilet. Both Erica and Danielle could feel the call of nature in their bladders and back passages, and in Danielle’s case between her legs she had a saturated sanitary napkin that needed to be changed.
Erica and Danielle walked into the hallway on their bare feet, Danielle carrying a new period pad to change her female protection and both girls stopped short in utter puzzlement when the petite figure of Faye Hawkins appeared in the hallway.
“Mum, is everything okay?” Erica asked.
“Yes of course Erica, why do you ask?”
“Is it fancy dress day at work today or something?” Erica stood perplexed at why her mother was wearing a 1970s pant suit with flares and platform shoes, Danielle equally perplexed at seeing her mother-in-law attired in clothes some 20 years out of date.
Faye frowned. “Your father said something similar, I don’t know what the problem is, I wear this all the time. On the subject of Alistair I should warn you both, he isn’t very happy this morning.”
Erica and Danielle would have been more surprised if Faye had told them Alistair was in a great mood. Both needed to sit on the toilet pretty badly so weren’t going to ask for more details, until Faye said, “There’s a pig in the back garden and Alistair’s not too pleased about it.”
“A pig?” Danielle and Erica spoke in unison and complete amazement.
“Yes, a pig,” Faye confirmed.
“Mum, there can’t be a pig in the garden,” said Erica. She looked at her mother in her 1970s outfit and felt concerned. “Mum are you — and Dad — both feeling okay?”
“Fine yes, but there really is a pig,” Faye insisted.
“This I’ve got to see,” said Danielle, leading the way to the back garden, where she and Erica stopped short with their mouths open when they saw the grunting pig again foraging in the garden, going through a bed with his snout.
“Your father thinks Cornelius brought the pig to the house as a joke, but I’m not so sure,” said Faye. “Anyway, Cornelius is going to call the council when they open and they’ll come and take the pig away.”
“This is a strange start to the day, it’s not Friday the 13th?” Erica mused as she went back into the house.
“I don’t know about that, all I know is that if I’m not on the toilet in two minutes my knickers are going to be more terrifying than anything on Friday the 13th,” said Danielle.
“I um, was going to use this one,” said Erica, the young girl having turned into the laundry.
“Knock yourself out kid, I’ll go and use your parents’ loo,” said Danielle. “Or maybe I’ll scare Brendan by going into his tiny flat to take a shit in his toilet. Then he really would have something to be scared of.”
Erica went into the laundry toilet and closed and locked the door. The teenager put down the seat, checked she had enough toilet paper to use, then lifted her oversized tee-shirt. Underneath Erica was wearing white cotton bikini-style panties with cute cartoon cats and kittens on them, which the young girl pulled down to her ankles before sitting her bare bottom down on the toilet seat, her knees slightly apart showing her light brown pubic hair and tight pink vagina.
As the teenager started to urinate, Erica’s yellow pee splashing into the toilet water, she began to relax. However, this was short-lived as she heard a voice — a male voice with a very posh, upper-class British accent say, “Good morning Erica.”
Erica sat upright on the toilet, thinking she was hearing things and shook her head, continuing to have her piss. Then came the upper-class voice again. “I said good morning Erica. Isn’t it simply a spiffing day today?”
Young Erica’s pee stream abated, and she sighed, realizing what must be happening. Cornelius was standing outside the toilet door playing a practical joke on her. It wouldn’t be the first time. Just last year Erica had fallen prey to one of Cornelius’s pranks of putting fake toilet paper in the toilet that was impossible to tear from the roll. Erica, that day wearing her work uniform had to shuffle out of the toilet with her pants and her knickers down around her ankles and into the bathroom to get some tissues to wipe her bottom.
“Cornelius, this isn’t funny,” Erica protested as she got some toilet paper and wiped her wet teenage pussy. “Go away and leave me alone to have some privacy.”
“So, you think I am your brother?” came the voice again. “A sound theory I must say, but if I was Cornelius, how could I talk to you from inside the toilet? And how would your brother know you were wearing white knickers with cartoon cats and kittens on them? Such cute pussy cats to cover up your own cute teenage pussy.”
Her heart racing, Erica went rigid on the toilet, adrenaline surging through her body and the teenager feeling cold. The voice was indeed coming from inside the toilet, no way could Cornelius have done this. And how did he know about her underwear?
“I just love seeing your knickers when you’re on the toilet, Erica,” said the voice. “Especially the female stains on your panty saddle. Was that your vagina self-cleansing during the night? Or were you being a bad girl and dreaming about your boyfriend Gavin’s penis up that tight teenage pussy of yours again?”
“This isn’t funny, go away and leave me alone,” the frightened Erica protested, looking down at her bare feet and knickers. Fear stimulated her bowels and the terrified teenager farted loudly on the toilet, her anus staying open to release a massive rush of feces from her rectum, the distraught girl’s poo going everywhere in the toilet.
“Now why would I go anywhere when I have such a wonderful view here?” the voice teased. “I can see your crack.”
Erica put her left hand between her legs to cover her vulva and squirmed on the toilet seat. “Please stop bothering me. Who are you, what are you?” The frightened girl was unable to prevent more feces coming out of her anus, joining the rest of her poo in the toilet.
“I am a demon,” the voice from inside the toilet intoned. “A toilet demon, who follows you everywhere when nature calls. I love to drink your piss and eat your shit Erica, especially today when you stink the toilet out, it tastes so much better.” The terrified Erica pooped again, and the toilet demon intoned, “Yes, that’s a good girl, lots and lots of teenage girl poo. Of course, I like it even better when you’re on your period, all that red blood and clots — Y U M — yum! It’s like having tomato sauce on your shit when I eat it, or ketchup as the Yanks always say, but I’ll be waiting another three weeks, just counting down the days until you’re menstruating again.”
There was more upper-class laughter from within the toilet. The last thing Erica wanted to do was to wipe her bottom with a toilet demon watching her, but the young girl could feel her feces around her anus and between the cheeks of her bottom, and knew she had no choice. The teenager removed her hand from her vagina, reached for the toilet roll, unwound a length of toilet paper, folded it up and used it to wipe her bottom.
“That’s a lot of poo for such a petite young girl,” the toilet demon said. “You’re a folder, aren’t you? Your mother is just the same, she always folds her toilet paper when she wipes her bottom. Your sister-in-law Danielle on the other hand, she’s a scruncher, always scrunches up her toilet paper to wipe her shit away from her arse.”
“Please stop talking to me, please leave me alone,” Erica pleaded, again wiping her bottom with trembling fingers, the terrified teenager close to tears.
“You’re a bit of an unusual one aren’t you Erica?” the demon asked, its voice echoing in the toilet bowl between Erica’s legs. “Most girls talk when they go to the toilet, like Danielle, she takes her mobile phone with her to the toilet and has conversations with her mother or sisters back in Newcastle, her friends or even your brother when she’s taking a shit. But you, you keep quiet. I know you worry even when you shit in a public ladies’ room that someone will hear you fart, Erica. Isn’t that right? You’ve never once farted in front of your boyfriend, have you Erica and you’ve known him for years? And when it’s your time of the month, you worry people will hear the rustling sound of you unwrapping your new pad to change it.”
Erica’s eyes were filled with tears, the girl removing her misted glasses to wipe at her eyes. “Why are you frightening me like this?”
“Because I’m a demon,” said the voice. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t scare people, would I? Plus the more scared you are Erica, the more you shit and the more you shit, the more I have to eat.”
“I told you to leave me alone!” Erica snapped, again getting toilet paper to wipe her bottom.
“You’re so thorough at that, Erica,” complimented the demon. “I’ve never seen any girl so careful at wiping her bottom as you before. Is it because you worry about getting poo-poo stains in your pretty little panties, Erica? Do you worry about leaving some of your poop behind and it causing an infection in your fanny or urinary tract? Of are you scared of your Daddy seeing your knickers with skid-marks in them in the laundry, and taking his belt to your cute teenage arse to punish you for it?”
“You aren’t real, I can’t hear you,” said Erica, getting a piece of toilet paper to come away from her butt with no smelly brown poo stains.
“Oh, you know that I’m very real, don’t you Erica?” the demon taunted.
“I don’t have to listen to you, I’ve finished and I’m going, and then you can’t bother me anymore.”
Erica made a move to stand up off the loo, but the toilet demon laughed his evil laughter. “Come on kid, who are you fooling, me or yourself? You’re not going anywhere. You’re scared and when you get scared, you shit.”
The frightened Erica desperately wanted out of the toilet, but to her horror the toilet demon was right. Her colon felt like it was about to explode, and the hapless Erica could only sit on the loo as she farted and a massive rush of smelly, messy shit that stank like rotten cabbages came out of her bottom, joining the rest of her excrement in the bowl. With tears rolling down her pretty face, all Erica could do was look down at her bare feet and lowered knickers, as she got more toilet tissue to clean herself up.
“I just love watching you wipe your arse, Erica,” said the demon. “I could talk about it all day, but that would be selfish of me. Would you like to talk to me about things you like? Music you listen to, TV shows that you like to watch, your favorite movies, sports teams you follow, the way you like to suck your boyfriend’s cock and do it bent over something with you knickers around your ankles.” Once again, the toilet demon laughed his evil laugh.
Such was Erica’s fear of the toilet demon that the defecating teen could not answer him and could only sit on the toilet frozen in terror, wishing she had used the toilet in her parents’ bathroom and Danielle this one. “I would have got you in the other toilet too, Erica,” the demon said, reading her mind. “Now you relax and do your poo-poos and wipe your dirty, smelly little bottom properly like a good girl, always front to back.”
Erica was so frightened that she nodded and meekly complied with the toilet demon’s orders, wondering if a demon was also hassling Danielle as she sat on the toilet in the ensuite bathroom.
*
While all this was going on, Danielle had no issues with toilet demons or indeed any demons. The young blonde woman lifted her oversized tee-shirt, pulled her knickers with her overnight pad attached down to her ankles and sat down on the toilet.
Danielle began to pee, her piss tinkling in the toilet bowl, and the young woman casually looked down at her bare feet, lowered panties, and her period pad. She was expecting of course to see massive red stains on her napkin, but nearly leaped off the toilet seat in shock at what she saw instead.
The menstrual blood that covered Danielle’s pad was blue. Bright blue in color. The young woman blinked several times to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. Her period stains remained bright blue. The dumbfounded Danielle opened her legs wide to examine her fanny, and saw that the menstrual blood around her vagina was bright blue like that on her period pad.
Finishing her piss, Danielle looked into the toilet water and was in for another big surprise. Normally when she urinated on her period, Danielle’s menses mixed with her yellow urine to cause a pink-colored liquid like tropical juice in the bowl. Today however Danielle’s yellow pee combined with her blue period to create a bizarre green liquid on the bowl.
“This is so weird,” said Danielle. “What color is my shit going to be? Bright purple? Orange?”
The answer was only seconds away as Danielle farted hard on the toilet, and her poo came oozing out of her anus and went into the toilet. Danielle looked at her excrement — it was brown as normal — no weird colors. Danielle got toilet paper, scrunched it up and wiped herself front to back.
Danielle’s toilet paper came away from her back bottom smeared in smelly brown feces, but from where her toilet paper had touched her front bottom, the stains were bright blue.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Danielle mused as she again moved her bowels, and watched as a big clot of bright blue menstrual blood dripped out of her pussy and went into the toilet with her shit. She leaned forward, pulled her knickers up slightly and sniffed her napkin. The blood stains on the pad smelled as to be expected of her period, the musty fishy feminine smell distinct, leaving Danielle even more perplexed.
*
Alistair and Faye Hawkins had no idea that their teenage daughter was on the toilet in tears, being hassled by a toilet demon while she was trying to wipe her bottom. They did not have any idea that their daughter-in-law’s vagina was bleeding bright blue menstrual blood as she sat on the other toilet. Nor did Cornelius have any clue about his sister and wife’s respective problems in the bathroom, he was still engrossed in his kids’ cartoons and feeding his face with cereal, Cornelius replacing the cereal which was spilled earlier with a second bowl, not cleaning up what had been spilled on the sofa.
They were more concerned about the pig being gone by the end of the day and not being late for work. In the kitchen Faye was eating a small bowl of cereal, while her husband was waiting impatiently for the pop-up toaster to pop and allow him to enjoy Vegemite on toast.
The sound of the doorbell ringing and an urgent knocking on the door was heard as Alistair glared at the toaster to hurry it up, and Alistair’s displeasure at waiting for his breakfast was clear on his face. The doorbell ringing and the knocking came again.
“I’ll get it, Alistair,” said Faye, making for the front door as the toaster went.
Faye answered the front door wondering who was out there so early in the morning — and found nobody there at all. Perhaps it was kids playing a joke? Faye went out onto the porch and surveyed the street — then stopped short. Faye already had fair skin courtesy of being a redhead, but now as she looked across the road into the garden of Number 10, all color drained from her skin, making her look close to albino.
Her heart pounding in her chest, all the horrified Faye could do was yell out, “Alistair!”
In the kitchen, the pop up toaster had finally popped, but Alistair had not removed his toast as yet as he was getting and opening the Vegemite jar. He was walking to the bench with the open jar, then heard his wife’s urgent call.
Sighing, Alistair put the jar down and walked towards the front door, before hearing his wife’s urgent call again. “Alistair! Alistair! Come here now!”
“Faye, what is it?” Alistair asked as he emerged onto the front doorstep. His pale, trembling wife pointed across the road, and Alistair’s troublesome heart skipped a beat as he looked at the garden of Number 10.
There, in full view of he and his wife, stood Henry Cole, the man pruning his oleanders in the way meticulous way he always did. He looked across the road at Alistair and Faye Hawkins with a stern expression, then went back to his gardening.
“I thought you said he died yesterday, Faye?” demanded Alistair.
“He did die yesterday,” Faye insisted. “I saw the coroner’s office taking away the body bag.”
“Obviously he didn’t die, because there he is!” boomed Alistair. “He’s not dead at all!”
The noise was enough to drag Cornelius away from the TV and out of the house. “Mum, Dad what’s going on — oh shit!” he exclaimed as he also saw what should have been the late Mr. Cole pruning his oleander bushes.
“He’s dead, why is he still alive?” Cornelius wanted to know.
“Beats me, there’s something really funny going on here,” said Alistair. “Let’s go back inside.”
With Alistair and Faye’s bedroom and bathroom close by, Danielle was able to hear snippets of the conversation outside. Was Mr. Cole still alive after all? Danielle finished pooing and wiped her bottom clean, then unwrapped her new period pad. Leaning forward on the toilet, Danielle removed her saturated overnight sanitary pad from the saddle of her knickers, then pulled back the peel-back strip from the new one. Danielle pressed the new period pad into her panties, adhering the feminine hygiene product in place before removing the tabs from the pad’s wings, adhering them to her knickers.
Danielle stood up off the toilet, pulled up her knickers and adjusted her pad around her box, looking into the lavatory at her poo, her dirty toilet paper, and the bright blue menstrual blood that had emerged from her vulva while she was on the loo. Danielle flushed the toilet, but was so consumed by worrying about menstruating blue period blood that she didn’t notice that the water swirled anti-clockwise in the bowl.
Hastily washing her hands, Danielle exited the very smelly bathroom holding her used period pad, immediately running into her husband and mother-in-law, Alistair going in another direction.
“Cornelius, Faye, is Mr. Cole across the road still alive?” Danielle asked.
“Yes, still very much alive and well, see for yourself,” said Faye.
Danielle, with Faye and Cornelius behind her, walked onto the front porch on her bare feet, and stopped short at the sight of Mr. Cole still pruning his garden. “He is still alive!” she exclaimed, running her hand through her messy blonde hair.
“Yes, there’s some peculiar things going on this morning,” said Faye.
“Like this,” said Danielle. She showed her dirty period pad to her husband and mother-in-law, Cornelius and Faye visibly jumping at the sight of Danielle’s bright blue period stains all over the napkin’s white stay-dry cover.
“What the…” Faye stammered.
“I was bleeding bright blue blood while I was on the loo,” said Danielle. She turned to Faye. “You ever had a blue period, Faye?”
“Um, never,” said the astounded Faye.
“Yeah periods are never blue, except in commercials for pads and tampons and shit, they always have blue dye rather than red dye,” said Cornelius. He took Danielle’s sanitary napkin and sniffed his wife’s bright blue blood stains.
Faye recoiled. “Cornelius, stop it, that’s disgusting.”
“Just checking that it smells like a period, and yeah that smells like period blood,” he said, returning his wife’s dirty period pad to her.
“Pigs in the garden, water going the wrong way down drains, dead neighbors coming back to life and now blue periods, what is going to happen next?” Faye mused.
These of course were not the only strange happenings in the Hawkins house this morning. In the laundry toilet, the terrified Erica still sat barefoot on the toilet with her knickers around her ankles, trying to finish pooing and wiping her bottom as the toilet demon continued to taunt her in its posh British accent.
“Nearly done for this morning, Erica?” the demon taunted as the young girl applied toilet paper to her buttocks and anus, desperately trying to get herself clean.
“I’m not talking to you,” said Erica, tears rolling down her pretty face.
“Well, aren’t we an impolite young lady?” asked the toilet demon.
Erica, who could feel her bowels were now finally empty and seeing that her last piece of loo paper came away from her anus with no poo, knew she was finally done. The teenager leaped off the toilet, slammed the lid down and flushed it, the water taking Erica’s urine, feces and the toilet paper that the young girl had absolutely shit all over down the drain to the sewers, and presumably into the toilet demon’s lair.
“Such a lot of nice smelly girl poo for me to eat fresh out of a pretty teenage girl’s bottom, I’ll need to start watching my weight,” came the demon’s voice, the closed lid of the toilet and the refilling cistern not affecting its voice. “Cheerio Erica, we’ll catch up again next time you need to sit on the loo. Oh, and don’t forget to pull your knickers up.”
Erica looked down and saw that indeed her white cartoon cat knickers were still down around her ankles, such was her fear of the toilet demon. Erica hastily pulled her knickers up, flung open the toilet door and ran in tears for the bathroom to wash her hands.
As the frightened teenager washed her hands with plenty of soap and water, she heard another voice, this time a nasty, evil sounding male voice. “The toilet demon may like the smell of your shit Erica, but I sure as hell don’t. And you let the smell follow you back from the toilet in here, didn’t you? You dirty little bitch!”
Her heart pounding, Erica looked for the source of the latest voice tormenting her and backed away in terror from the power-point at the sink. The sockets had come to life, looking like a face with eyes and a mouth. “Who are you?” Erica managed to say in a tiny voice.
“Another demon,” intoned the power socket face in its nasty tone. “A demon that doesn’t appreciate girls with stinky little asses like you Erica. The way you stank the toilet out in there, disgusting! You filthy little bitch, and it’s 100 times worse when you’re menstruating! I feel sorry for your toilet paper. And it’s not only your back bottom that smells bad, it’s your front bottom too. How your boyfriend Gavin goes down on you is amazing, your snatch absolutely stinks, it would be like him licking rotting tuna fish!”
Erica cried and cowered in terror as the power point demon continued to berate her in its menacing tone. She tried to find her voice to call for help, but was so frightened that she could not do so. The power socket was taunting her about the sexual aspects of her relationship with her boyfriend, and she wished that her boyfriend was here now to save her.
*
Up the road, Gavin and Lisa had dressed for the day, Gavin in jeans, a blue polo-neck shirt and running shoes, Lisa in the green jacket, blouse, skirt and shoes that was the female uniform of the insurance company where she worked in the city. Gavin of course had no idea of the strange goings on at the Hawkins house this morning, and that his girlfriend was being terrorized by demons.
The siblings were grabbing a quick breakfast, Lisa noticing that her brother was on edge this morning, not his normal self and after what had happened both earlier in the morning and when they got a drink in the early hours, she was a bit concerned.
Gavin finished his cereal and looked at his sister as she took her own bowl to the sink, and stopped in dismay. Across his sister’s backside was a massive red bloodstain, which was showing prominently on her green skirt. She must have had a menstrual mishap, her period pad had leaked or something.
Gavin hadn’t known that his big sister was menstruating, but then again he had no reason to know. He and Lisa didn’t sit around having in-depth conversations about her periods, and Gavin of course was not comfortable with knowing his sister’s uterus shed its lining every 28 days and subsequently that she had blood coming down her birth canal and out of her vagina and into her pads and tampons one week each month.
“Um Lisa, I don’t want to embarrass you,” the blushing Gavin said nervously. “But you’ve got a bit of an um, ah — ladies’ problem.”
Lisa looked at her brother quizzically. “Gavin, what are you talking about?”
“Lisa, you need to look behind yourself,” said Gavin. “There’s a massive bloodstain on the back of your skirt.”
The utterly confused Lisa looked at her bum and saw nothing but the green fabric of her work skirt, not the massive stain of red that Gavin did.
“Gavin, my skirt is fine, and in any case I don’t have my period, I last had it two weeks ago,” said Lisa.
“No, there’s blood on your skirt,” Gavin insisted. “Lots of blood. You need to change it before you go to work.”
“Gavin, are you sure you’re okay?” Lisa asked, her face etched with concern. “This, the incident with the toilet earlier and in the kitchen during the night?”
Gavin’s face showed horror. “That was real? I thought it was a dream. So you really were naked?”
“No, I wasn’t naked,” said Lisa. “Nor did I ask you to get me some more loo paper when I was on the toilet this morning, and I don’t have period stains on my skirt right now.” She put her hand on her younger brother’s head. “Are you sure you’re not coming down with something? Maybe you should take the day off and lie down for a bit.”
“No, I’m fine to go to university,” Gavin insisted.
“Okay then, but I’ve got to get to work otherwise I’ll miss my bus,” said Lisa. “I’ve got my break at 10.30 this morning, I want you to call me on my mobile to confirm you’re okay.”
“I will, but I’m fine,” said Gavin, looking in bewilderment at his big sister’s bum as she left the room. Her massive menstrual stain had mysteriously vanished and her skirt was back to normal. The young man shook his head? He didn’t feel unwell, but why were things so weird this morning?
In her bedroom, Lisa collected her purse and looked at a large green plush toy frog that sat in a chair adjacent from her bed. It was her favorite toy from her childhood, and the concerned young woman shook her head and spoke to it rhetorically. “Hey Mr. Frog, do you have any idea why that my brother of mine is acting so strangely? Ever had one of your brothers or sisters acting so strange?”
Of course the toy frog didn’t respond. “No suggestions?” Lisa asked. “Okay then, have a nice day Mr. Frog.”
“Remember Gavin, call me later to let me know you’re okay,” said Lisa on her way out the front door, noticing her brother was staring blankly out the kitchen window at God only knew what.
“Will do, Sis,” Gavin confirmed.
Lisa walked down the street heading for the bus stop. She passed the Cole house where she had heard that the grumpy owner had died yesterday afternoon and the Hawkins house and saw Cornelius’s crappy car parked on the front lawn. She also thought she could hear yelling inside. This wasn’t unusual. While Lisa loved Erica like a sister and liked Faye Hawkins well enough, the brother Cornelius was a nightmare as was Erica’s father, and the sister-in-law Danielle was an absolute bitch. Then there was that other Hawkins brother Brendan who hid inside the granny flat and never came outside. Was her normally level-headed brother spending too much time with his girlfriend’s crazy family and going crazy too? Lisa hoped not.
Catching her bus with a minute or so to spare, Lisa was on her way to the office in the Sydney CBD, the pretty blonde looking out the back window half expecting her younger brother to be chasing the bus or something crazy. He wasn’t of course, and Lisa hoped that he wasn’t doing some other crazy thing.
*
In the Baxter house Gavin was collecting his books for university again getting that feeling that it was much later in the day than it actually was. The house was quiet apart from a ticking clock, so quiet that the silence was eerie. So when Gavin heard a rustling noise, he stopped short, his heart racing.
He paused, and the noise came again. “Hello?” Gavin said. Had Lisa forgotten something and come back to get it?
No reply, but again the noise came, Gavin nervously tracing it to his sister’s bedroom, where he paused in horror at the door, a cold sweat going through his body.
On Lisa’s bed sat a burglar, dressed in a stripy jumper and jeans, his face concealed with a black balaclava, only his eyes showing. In the burglar’s hand was a pair of Lisa’s knickers — white cotton-bikini style panties with red, blue and yellow flowers — which the masked intruder was sniffing, absorbing Lisa’s feminine smells on her the double cotton saddle of her panties.
Fear soon turned to outrage for Gavin. “Hey!” he yelled at the burglar. “Hey you, put my sister’s knickers down you pervert!”
The burglar turned and looked at him, Gavin running at the prowler and snatching his big sister’s knickers from his grasp. The burglar turned and fled, Gavin chasing him through the house towards the front door when Gavin saw that the burglar was only one of two intruders in the house.
The second intruder in the house however wasn’t human it was a large green frog that stood over six feet tall and which ran athletically on its hind legs with the burglar. With Gavin still in pursuit the burglar and frog burst out the front door, running up the road. Gavin followed, clutching his sister’s panties.
The panty-sniffing bandit and the giant frog led Gavin up the road, where the young man watched in astonishment as both ran into the front garden of the Hawkins house and Number 9. With considerable athletic prowess the burglar climbed up the front porch and onto the roof, while the frog showing the leaping ability of amphibians got onto the Hawkins’ roof with a single leap.
Gavin, Lisa’s knickers still tightly clutched in his hand, then watched in amazement as the burglar and the frog turned to face him — and began Irish-step dancing, often called ‘River Dancing’ on the roof. Gavin stood amazed, his mouth agape as he heard the Irish music playing, the burglar and the frog river dancing in perfect rhythm, their arms at their sides, their legs kicking out.
Then Gavin’s eyes went wider as from the back of the house a pig climbed across the roof, stood next to the burglar and began river dancing too, the trotters on its hind legs keeping perfect timing with the frog and the burglar.
Seeing something red and shaggy in the large eucalyptus tree in the front garden of Number 7 distracted Gavin, and he watched as an orangutan swung down from the branches and into the Hawkins’ front garden, climbing the side of Number 9 with typical ape-like ease. The orangutan took his place next to the frog, and joined in the Irish dancing display, the Gaelic music getting louder and louder, the legs of the burglar, frog, orangutan and pig kicking out with precise choreography, their upper limbs perfectly still.
Gavin still finding it hard to believe what he was seeing looked up at the sky. It was a morning in which the full moon was visible long after daybreak, and it was prominent in the western sky. Gavin stared at it, then watched in incredulous disbelief as the ‘Man in the Moon’s’ face changed to a big smile.
“Hi Gavin!” called the moon, the voice heard above the Irish music to which the burglar, pig, frog and orangutan continued to dance on the roof.
Increasingly terrified, Gavin turned and looked across the road and became even more alarmed as his eyes took in Mr. Cole, the man who had died yesterday working in his front garden, and seemingly oblivious to the Irish river dancing and the music on the roof of the Hawkins house, and the talking moon.
Still holding tight to Lisa’s knickers, Gavin ran for the front door of the Hawkins house and banged frantically upon it, the tall bearded figure of Alistair Hawkins coming running.
“Mr. Hawkins, help, there’s a burglar on your roof, I chased him out of my house and now he’s on your roof, Irish dancing with a giant frog, a pig and an orangutan!” Gavin blurted out in panic, assuming that his girlfriend’s grumpy Dad would slam the door in his face.
Instead, Alistair’s face showed concern and he ran outside. “Where’s that Irish music coming from?” Alistair demanded, before he stood with his daughter’s boyfriend and they stood watching the burglar, frog, pig and orangutan as they continued dancing.
“Hey, you freaks, get off my fucking roof!” Alistair boomed, the dancing burglar and animals paying him no attention.
“And what’s Mr. Cole doing alive again?” Gavin asked, pointing at the deceased man working across the road.
“You’d better come inside Gavin, you’re in danger out here,” said Mr. Hawkins. “They might get you if you stay outside.”
Gavin went into the Hawkins house, where Faye and Danielle came running towards them. There came an almighty banging sound on the back door, which within a split second was followed by more rapping sounds only this time to the side of the house. Then again in less than a second there was more banging, only this time it was on the front security screen door, only there was nobody there.
“Gavin, what’s wrong?” Faye asked anxiously.
“That pig’s on the roof now, river dancing with a frog and an orangutan,” asserted her husband. “And a burglar that Gavin chased out of his house.”
“We need to call the police, something’s very seriously wrong here today,” said Faye urgently, going to run to the telephone but her husband stopped her.
“No Faye, the police are in on this, conspiring against us,” said Alistair. “They would send somebody else to get us.”
“Alistair’s right Faye,” said Danielle.
Cornelius, looking definitely afraid, an emotion Gavin had never observed in his girlfriend’s older brother before, hurried in from the living room.
“Mum, Dad when I went to turn off the TV something really weird started happening,” he said.
Whatever was wrong with the TV would have to wait. In the bathroom, the crying Erica still cowered in terror of the power-point demon, which continued to berate her. “You deserved to get bullied in school, some people are born to be bullied and you are one of them,” sneered the power point. “Why didn’t you commit suicide like the other kids told you back then? You would have done the rest of the world a favor. But you’re too weak and gutless to kill yourself, aren’t you Erica?”
“I’m sorry,” Erica pleaded through her tears.
“You’re sorry, typical response from a weak little cry-baby like you,” mocked the demon. “Stand there and cry like you always do, you worthless little bitch. One day your boyfriend Gavin’s going to meet somebody better than you, and when he does he’ll dump you without a second thought.”
Erica tried to call out, nothing happened as the power point laughed at her distress, before finally she was able to call out. “Mum, Dad, help me!”
Erica’s cry of terror filled the house, alarming everyone else.
“Erica!” exclaimed Faye.
Alistair, Faye, Cornelius, Danielle and Gavin raced for the bathroom, Danielle dropping her used overnight sanitary pad covered in blue stains on the floor, Gavin releasing his grip on his big sister’s knickers, these joining Danielle’s feminine napkin on the floor.
“Erica, what’s wrong?” Faye asked urgently, she and Gavin moving to comfort her, Faye grabbing tissues to wipe her daughter’s eyes.
Erica pointed at the power point. “There’s a demon! He’s been scaring me, help me please, I’m so frightened!”
The rest of the Hawkins family plus Gavin looked at the socket, which appeared to be just an ordinary power point. Until the eyes opened wide as did the mouth, and it emitted an evil laugh. “Yes, I am a demon. I’ve been scaring the pants off your daughter for the past five minutes. Such a nervous young girl, so easy to scare.”
“You stay the fuck away from my daughter, do you understand me you useless demon!” roared Alistair.
“I’m not scared of you Alistair,” the demon asserted.
“There’s another demon!” cried Erica. “One down the toilet, it was scaring me while I was on the loo.”
“Now if I was down the toilet while your teenage daughter was sitting on it taking a shit, I would be scared then,” laughed the power point.
“Shut up!” Alistair shouted at the power-point. Outraged that a second demon had been frightening his teenage daughter while she was sitting on the toilet, he stormed into the laundry toilet to confront it. Gavin was right behind him, equally appalled that his girlfriend had been terrorized while she was using the toilet.
“Alright demon, what do you think you’re doing?” bellowed Alistair at the toilet. “Answer me!” he thundered as there was no reply from the toilet.
Then Erica squirmed in terror in her mother’s arms as the posh English accent of the toilet demon replied to her father. “Oh, good morning Sir. Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, I had my mouth full of your daughter’s shit, and it isn’t very polite to speak with one’s mouth full, is it?”
“You are disgusting!” shouted Alistair. He put up the seat and looked into the bowl, Erica’s lingering toilet smell making him even more convinced that a demon hid down the lavatory. “Come on out, demon! Come out and show yourself!”
The voice of the demon laughed. “No, I don’t think so Sir. I’m having way too much fun down here with your teenage daughter’s shit.”
“You heard Mr. Hawkins, come out demon and face us now!” shouted Gavin, his face red with rage. “How dare you scare Erica while she’s trying to go to the toilet!”
“Always so protective of your little girlfriend, aren’t you there young Gavin?” asked the toilet demon. “Too bad there’s nothing you can do to protect her from me, or my ill-tempered colleague in the bathroom.”
The utterly perplexed Cornelius and Danielle stood outside the lavatory looking for any sign of the demon. It did not appear, but did address Danielle. “Oh good morning Danielle, the young woman who scrunches her toilet paper when she wipes her bottom rather than folds it like your little sister-in-law. When I’ve finished eating Erica’s shit, I’ll be diving down in the sewers to eat your bowel movements too. Menstruating girls’ feces and period blood, what a treat.”
“You are disgusting, you freak!” Danielle yelled at the toilet.
“Yeah, come out here demon and I’ll fucking smash you,” Cornelius said. “Talking about my wife like that! Come out so I can fight you!”
“If I were you I wouldn’t threaten a demon young man,” said the toilet demon. “Anyway, I think you have bigger problems. Why don’t you go and see what’s happening in your living room with your television?”
Cornelius, who had forgotten about the strange things with the TV over the drama with the demons, ran back in there, seeing flashing brightly colored disco-style lights coming from this room and this room only. Everyone else followed him, also seeing the multi-colored lights in the room and hearing the evil laughter of the power point demon in the bathroom as they went past.
Inside the living room, Cornelius’s half-eaten bowl of cereal sat on the coffee table, and the kids TV cartoon show about the cranky robots that were always giving the Earth settlers a hard time on the far distant planet was still on.
Except now the robots were not interested in the settlers, they were interested in whatever was going on in the Hawkins’ living room, staring at the tall figure of Cornelius. “There he is!” intoned the lead robot, which was black in color as it pointed through the TV screen at the young man. “Cornelius Hawkins, our enemy. Capture him and take him to the space ship for interrogation, then kill him!”
“Kill him, kill him, kill him!” chanted the robots repeatedly, working themselves into quite a frenzy.
“No, please don’t!” the terrified Cornelius pleaded, something the robots did not heed.
“Kill him, kill him, kill him!” they continued to chant, before making their move. From out of the TV came the black robot, followed by his minions which were in a variety of colors — red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown and white — and stood in the Hawkins’ living room, pointing at Cornelius.
“Kill him, kill him, kill him!” chanted the robots, Cornelius running back down the hallway as the robots chased him. All Gavin and the Hawkins family could do was watch as the robots chased Cornelius through the house, Alistair and Gavin chasing the robots after the last of them came through the TV.
Cornelius sprinted for the back door and with the pursuing robots very close, he threw the door open and ran outside, the robots chasing him. Then when he reached the back fence Cornelius threw himself face down onto the grass and rolled to one side into the bushes. The robots must have thought their quarry had escaped over the fence and fired up their jet packs, flying over the fence in pursuit, Alistair and Gavin watching them go on their way.
“Come here, come here human so we can get you!” the furious lead robot chanted, before they all vanished from sight.
“Are the robots all gone?” Faye appeared on the back patio while Cornelius emerged from the bushes, looking nervously to make sure there were no more robots to get him.
“Yes, they flew away over the fence,” said Alistair.
Faye felt momentary relief but this was soon replaced by more fear when she heard her daughter’s terrified voice again. “Mum, Dad, Gavin — help!”
Faye, Alistair and Gavin raced inside, Cornelius following them still terrified of the robots coming back to get him, and encountered Erica and Danielle standing outside the living room, from which the disco lights continued to flash unabated. Erica was clearly terrified as was Danielle, an unusual reaction from her.
“Mum, Dad, I’m so sorry,” Erica sobbed, again dissolving into tears. “We tried to turn off the TV to stop any more robots coming through it, but we made it worse.” The terrified teen put her fingers in her mouth.
“Worse, what do you mean worse?” demanded Alistair.
“I think you’d better see for yourself,” said the clearly freaked Danielle.
Alistair, Faye, Gavin and Cornelius stood at the entrance to the living room, amazed at what was going on, despite everything else that had happened on this extraordinary Friday morning.
“We couldn’t turn off the TV, we tried, but eventually we managed to change channels,” said Erica.
“But there was a segment on a morning news show about the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and the next thing we knew they came out of the TV and were in the living room before we could stop them,” said Danielle, pointing nervously at the scene.
“We managed to get the TV to the VCR channel,” said Erica, indicating the television which was now showing static snow. “But it was too late. I’m so sorry. Please don’t be angry.”
“Erica, it’s okay, it wasn’t your fault,” Faye assured her, looking in dismay at what was happening in her living room.
From out of the screen had emerged quite a number of gay and lesbians from the Mardi Gras parade. There were men dressed in black leather skimpy outfits carrying rainbow flags, drag queens, butch dykes with weird hairstyles and that awful new body piercing trend, some gay men and women in costumes such as firemen, sailors, cowboys and cowgirls, and there was even some fruit — quite appropriately — dressed up as a banana. All were dancing happily in the Hawkins’ lounge-room, oblivious to the occupants of the house.
Alistair Hawkins was not so much dismayed at the homosexuals and lesbians in his house, he was outraged. He hated the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, wanting the ‘poofter parade’ banned, and had even joined a protest against it one year. Now he had these faggots and lesbians in his house, and he was not standing for it.
“Get out, get out of my house you faggots!” bellowed Alistair. He ran into the living room, chasing the gays and lesbians around the room, the poofs when confronted with the angry home owner sensibly running away.
“Go on, get out, get out of my house you homos, go on piss off you fucking perverted freaks!” roared Alistair. Like the robots had done with Cornelius earlier, Alistair chased the homosexuals around the house, before they ran towards the front door.
Gavin, anticipating what would happen, opened the front door and held open the security screen so that the homosexuals and lesbians could leave, which they did, running away across the front lawn and up the street.
“And don’t ever come into my house again!” roared Alistair as he chased them to the front verge. “Faggots, poofters, homos, freaks, dykes!” he bellowed at their departing forms, the guy in the banana outfit struggling to keep up thanks to the cumbersome costume.
“Fucking faggots, all I need this morning,” growled Alistair as he turned back towards the house, again irritated by the Irish music as the burglar, pig, orangutan and frog continued to dance on the roof. “Fucking stop that!” he bellowed at them, to no effect.
Erica, who had come to make sure Gavin and her father were both okay and that the homosexuals and lesbians were gone, stepped her bare feet onto the porch and stopped short, her face going white before she let out a scream, pointing in terror at the house across the road.
“Dad, Gavin, what’s he doing still alive?” Erica said in a voice full of panic, indicating Mr. Cole who still worked in his garden, oblivious to the dancing creatures on the Hawkins’ roof and the large group of costumed homosexuals and lesbians that had ran up the street.
Gavin realized Erica hadn’t seen the supposedly dead neighbor yet this morning. “Erica, it’s okay…” he began, but Erica was having none of it.
“He’s dead, he can’t be here,” she said. “He can’t just be back from the dead.”
Alistair guided his terrified teenage daughter inside with Gavin’s assistance. “Erica, you need to calm down and stop panicking, okay?” he said firmly.
“How can I calm down with the dead neighbor coming back to life across the road?” Erica lamented. “He’s a ghost, I know it.”
Danielle appeared to assist in calming Erica down, but her advice wasn’t helpful. “Erica, I don’t think he’s a ghost, he’s a zombie.”
“A zombie?” Erica looked even more terrified.
“Great advice Danielle,” sighed Faye from an adjacent doorway. She then turned to Erica. “Erica, there must have been a mistake yesterday and he must still be alive. He isn’t a ghost or something, there has to be another explanation.”
“Yeah come on Erica, he doesn’t look like a ghost,” said Gavin, trying to reassure his terrified girlfriend.
“Now that looks like a ghost,” said Cornelius, pointing at a spot further along the hallway. Everyone turned to see a floating, ill-defined but definitely female white shape hovering, before it flew towards them emitting shrill, evil, witch-like cackling. Everyone threw themselves to the ground as the ghostly figure went over their heads, then vanished up into the ceiling through a corner vent, where it could still be heard in the roof-space, banging and rapping and laughing its evil laugh.
Soon there was another sound to alarm the Hawkins family, and this was what sounded like an aircraft engines. All six of them rushed outside onto the back garden and their mouths dropped open at what they saw in the skies overhead. Passing over their house was an unidentified flying object of enormous size, the engines of the flying saucer emitting a droning noise.
“Cornelius, get back under the fucking patio you fucking idiot!” yelled Alistair, as his son went out onto the lawn to get a better look at the evil and menacing alien spacecraft as it passed by. “You want them to capture you?”
Cornelius scurried back onto the patio, and Alistair spoke urgently. “We have to get out of here. It’s obvious what’s happening, aliens are after us, they want to capture us and make us go and live in a spaceship in outer space. They’ve got demons, ghosts and monsters helping them too, so we can’t stay here, we need to leave now!”
“Your father is right,” asserted Faye to her kids. “Erica and Danielle go and get dressed, all of you pack some changes of clothes and essentials like toothbrushes. Quickly!”
“What about me?” Gavin asked.
“The aliens want to capture you too, Gavin,” said Alistair solemnly. “They want to do experiments on us, and they will stop at nothing until they take you too. You’re coming with us.”
His girlfriend’s father was talking perfect sense. “Yes, do you want me to go and pack?”
Alistair shook his head. “No. We’ll stop very quickly when we leave so you can get a few things. If you go back to your house now, you’ll be more vulnerable to being abducted.”
The UFO seemed to have gone on its way, but Alistair was far from relaxed. “It will call other craft to come and look for us, so we need to move fast,” he said.
Everyone turned to go back inside the house, but stopped short as they heard a noise on the back fence. Turning to look, they watched as a large black panther leaped up and walked with perfect feline balance along it. The panther looked at them with its big yellow eyes and while it did not make a move to attack them, the appearance of the alien big cat obviously alarmed all of them, not least Erica, who led the way inside before slamming the door closed.
“Now quick girls, hurry up, essentials only, don’t waste time when you get dressed, we need to get out of here before the aliens arrive,” said Faye. She in turn hurried for the door that led to the granny flat and banged urgently upon it.
“Brendan, Brendan, we have to go!” she yelled. “Come out, there’s already demons and ghosts in the house, weird animals outside plus robots and monsters, the aliens already have UFOs out searching for us, and they’ll be here soon to capture us and make us live on a spaceship!”
Alistair pulled his wife away from the door. “Faye, what are you doing?”
“Alistair, we need to take Brendan with us,” said Faye. “We can’t leave him here for them to get him. He can travel with Cornelius and Danielle in their car.”
“Faye, he won’t come out,” said Alistair. “We’re just wasting time, putting ourselves in danger. We have to leave him behind. Plus he’s weak, it’s too much of a risk to take him. If we take him with us and the aliens or demons get hold of him, he will betray us.”
Faye was distraught. “Alistair, we can’t just abandon our own son.”
“Maybe they won’t know he’s here?” suggested Alistair. “He hides away all day, he’s got plenty of supplies and never goes outside. Obviously the aliens and the people helping them have been spying on us for some time, conspiring about how they are going to get us, but have they ever seen Brendan? No, so if they don’t know he’s here, then he should be safe.”
“I don’t know Alistair,” protested Faye.
“Dad’s right Mum,” said Cornelius, for once siding with his father. “Brendan is way too much of a liability to take with us, the aliens will have us in a UFO and out past Neptune by this afternoon. But I’ve got an idea to keep him safe.”
Cornelius ran out the front door and to his wreck of a car, flinging open the back door and retrieving the blow up crocodile and the male and female sex dolls he had scavenged from the dumpster at Newtown the day before. He was in such a hurry he left the car door ajar, and could only look in bewilderment as a burglar, giant frog, the pig from earlier and an orangutan danced on the roof, accompanied by Irish music which had no clear source.
“What are those supposed to do?” Alistair growled, regarding the inflatable crocodile and the sex dolls with suspicion.
Cornelius explained to his parents. “Crocodiles are scary. Clowns and witches are scary. If we blow up the crocodile and the dolls, I’ll put my clown costume on the male doll and Erica can put that witch costume of hers on the female doll and we’ll put them in front of Brendan’s door. Then if aliens turn up to search the house, they’ll probably be scared of the crocodile, witch and clown and won’t go in there to look for Brendan.”
“It might work, Cornelius,” said Faye doubtfully.
“It’s our only hope,” said Cornelius.
“Come on Faye, we need to get going,” said Alistair, leading his wife away into their bedroom. While Faye hastily threw some changes of clothes for her and her husband into a sports bag, she watched as Alistair went into a locked cabinet in their walk in wardrobe and retrieved two firearms plus their associated ammunition.
One gun was a 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun, the other a high-powered 0.44 caliber hunting rifle. Faye had long worried about there been powerful guns in the house, especially with a bad-tempered husband quick to anger, one son who was a complete fruit loop and another son who was a paranoid schizophrenic with serious drug problems. When Australia had a gun amnesty and buy back following the massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996, Faye had hoped Alistair would get rid of the firearms and lamented the fact that he had outright refused and two years later, the guns were still here. But now Faye could see that Alistair was extremely wise not to have surrendered the firearms.
“I’ll take these out to my car, we’ll take that and Danielle and Cornelius can take their car,” said Alistair, Faye nodding in agreement and listening nervously to the ghosts in the ceiling and the rapping sounds, presumably from poltergeists on the outside of the house.
Cornelius meanwhile had gone into his bedroom. Danielle had dressed in a tee-shirt, her stirrup pants and some sneakers, and was hastily throwing her and her husband some clothes into a bag, leaving the dresser drawers open and giving the already untidy room the appearance of having been ransacked. Ghost and poltergeist noises filled the air as Cornelius asked urgently, “Where’s my clown costume?”
Danielle looked at him in disbelief. “Your clown costume? What do you want that for? We need to pack essentials.”
“To protect Brendan, I’ll explain later,” Cornelius said, locating and grabbing the costume. “I’m just going to get Erica, and then I’ll be right back.”
In Erica’s bedroom, she and Gavin had packed some of her things first, and now she was putting on some clothes. She had put on some clean panties — white bikini briefs with purple flowers and leg and waist elastic — and a white bra, which she had just fastened when her brother burst in.
“Cornelius, do you mind?” Erica protested, deeply uncomfortable about her older brother seeing her in her underwear.
Cornelius shook his head. “Never mind that now. Erica, where’s your witch costume? The one you wore to your high school Halloween dance last year? Quick, hurry up!”
“In my wardrobe,” said Erica. “Cornelius…”
“I’ll explain later, just hurry up and get dressed and come out here,” said Cornelius, frantically searching his sister’s wardrobe before retrieving the black dress and pointy black witch hat.
In the bedroom, Erica hastily put on a tee-shirt and a pair of denim shorts, before slipping her feet into sandals and she and Erica joined Cornelius and Danielle in the hallway. “Now, you need to blow up the dolls and I’ll blow up the crocodile,” he said. “Gavin, go and get two chairs then you dress the female doll in Erica’s witch costume, and the male doll in the clown costume. We’ll put them in front of the door to the flat, and hopefully the aliens will be scared of them when they come here to get us and they won’t go through there and find Brendan.”
This all made perfect sense, and the girls hastily blew up the sex dolls while Cornelius blew up the inflatable crocodile, Gavin getting two chairs then dressing the female doll as a witch and the male doll as a clown, Cornelius sitting each of them in a chair, the crocodile in the center as though standing guard.
Alistair was about to open the door that led to the garage when he stopped and rushed back to the bedroom. “Faye, make sure you grab the bank stuff,” he called, before returning to the garage, where he looked at the guns and spied some other useful weapons on a shelf in the form of a chainsaw, an axe, a shovel and a length of pipe.
Putting down the guns, Alistair grabbed the chainsaw and other items, but as he turned around to put them in the back of his four wheel drive he stopped, and looked in dismay and disbelief at what he saw.
His four wheel drive was fine, but in Faye’s small hatchback sat five men. All were Mexicans, sporting large moustaches and wearing enormous sombrero hats. They showed no reaction to Alistair as he stormed up to the car, brandishing his shot gun.
“Get out of my wife’s car!” he bellowed, slamming his fist on the bonnet and taking aim with his shotgun. “You heard me you bastards, get out of the fucking car right now!”
None of the Mexicans acknowledged him, and the one in the driver’s seat turned on the ignition. Alistair went to fire the gun, but the fucking thing wasn’t loaded. Damn! Before Alistair could get his ammunition, the Mexican reversed Faye’s small hatchback car out of the garage, the car somehow going through the metal but when Alistair went to chase it he couldn’t follow it.
Alistair hurriedly opened the garage door and ran out in pursuit of his wife’s car, but it was far too late, and by now vanishing up the street at great speed.
“Come back here, you fucking Mexicans!” boomed Alistair, but of course the Mexicans who had stolen his wife’s car did no such thing.
Storming back into the garage, Alistair threw the firearms, the chainsaw, the axe, shovel and length of pipe into the back of his four wheel drive. He slammed into the house, seeing Faye throwing some paperwork into a plastic shopping bag.
“What was going on out there, Alistair?” Faye asked anxiously.
Her husband shook his head in fury. “Mexicans stole your fucking car, Faye!”
“Mexicans? Stole my car?”
“Yes, they drove away up the street,” growled Alistair. “I tried to stop them, but my goddamn shotgun wasn’t loaded.”
“Alistair, I still think we need to call the police,” said Faye.
“No, we can’t,” said Alistair. “The aliens sent the Mexicans to steal the car hoping we’ll go to the police, and the police are in on this for sure, conspiring with the aliens and the demons to get us.”
“Did Mum’s car get stolen?” Erica asked, she and the others emerging from the back of the house carrying bags containing a few changes of clothes.
“Yeah, five Mexicans did it,” growled Alistair. “But we can’t worry about it now, we need to get going before the aliens come to the house.” He noticed that Danielle had her mobile phone. “Danielle, leave that, the aliens and demons can use it to track us, or they could use it to put messages in our heads to control us.”
Danielle, realizing her mistake put down her mobile phone, while Alistair turned to his son. “Cornelius, go and get some bottles of water so we have something to drink and won’t have to stop so much.”
“Yeah,” said Cornelius. He ran into the kitchen and threw open the refrigerator, then immediately slammed it shut.
“Oh fuck!” yelled Cornelius, running back into the hallway, white as a ghost.
“What’s going on?” his father snapped. “Where’s the water?”
“Dad, there’s a tiger in the fridge!” exclaimed Cornelius.
“A tiger?” For some reason despite every crazy thing that had happened in the Hawkins house that morning, Alistair found it very hard to believe that a tiger lurked in the refrigerator. “Oh don’t be so fucking stupid Cornelius, if you’re acting like a moron when there’s all this stupid shit going on…”
Alistair stormed towards the kitchen in a rage, Cornelius following him. “No Dad, don’t open the fridge, please, there really is a tiger in there!”
His father had no intention of listening, and to his son’s horror flung open the refrigerator — and was immediately confronted by a tiger, which snarled and roared at the men, baring its formidable fangs. Alistair tried to slam the fridge door shut, but was too late and the tiger sprang out, chasing Alistair and Cornelius from the kitchen.
Faye leaped back in horror as her husband and son ran past followed by the angry tiger, and Erica cowered in Gavin’s arm as the big cat ran after them.
“Lead it into the laundry!” yelled Alistair, he and Cornelius running for the laundry door, then ducking at the last minute, the big cat going through the open door, Alistair slamming it shut. The angry roaring of the tiger filled the house, and the laundry door shook on its hinges as the tiger flung itself against it in a frenzy.
“Let’s go!” shouted Alistair, the family grabbing the clothes and other items they had hastily packed, Faye quickly opening a kitchen drawer and taking a large carving knife, which might come in handy if they were under attack later. “Erica and Gavin, come with us, Cornelius and Danielle, you go in Danielle’s car.”
Cornelius and Danielle ran for the front door, fumbling with the doorknob as they hurried to get out, their fear and urgency increased as the same ghost as earlier appeared at the end of the hallway, and began to advance towards them. Finally they managed it, racing out the house and slamming the door behind them, frantically locking the screen door.
With the burglar and the other three creatures still dancing on the roof, Danielle and Cornelius hastily ran to her car, threw their things into the back with Danielle jumping into the driver’s seat, Cornelius into the passenger seat.
“I left my car door open!” said Cornelius, making a move to go and shut it, but his wife stopped him.
“Leave it, there isn’t time,” she said, Danielle putting the car into reverse gear and backing off the lawn into the road to wait for the four wheel drive.
It wasn’t long in coming, Alistair speeding out of the garage leaving the roller door up, and racing up the road. In the back of the car with Gavin, Erica looked backwards at Mr. Cole, the man still standing in his garden and watching their hasty departure.
Both cars screeched to a halt outside the Baxter house. “Now remember, just grab essentials, no messing around!” Alistair warned Gavin.
“Yes Mr. Hawkins, I’ll be really quick,” Gavin promised his girlfriend’s father, before running out of the four wheel drive and into his parents’ house. In a frenzy, Gavin packed some changes of clothes, underwear and toiletries like his toothbrush, running out so fast he almost forgot to lock the front door, Gavin hastily doing this and sprinting for Mr. Hawkins’ car.
He was not a second too late. From the skies came an ominous whirring noise, and the occupants of both cars looked upwards to see another UFO. This was a different design from the other UFO, but an alien craft regardless that had come to capture them.
“Just follow me!” Alistair called to Danielle, his daughter-in-law giving him a thumbs-up signal in response. With a squeal of tires, both cars sped away as fast as they could, their departure impeded by the aliens or possibly the demons with whom the aliens were clearly in alignment.
The house three doors down from the Baxter house was an Italian-style house with columns, lots of marble, and six lion statues in the garden. As the cars came level with it, the concrete lions morphed into real, living lions, which let out terrifying roars, chasing both Danielle and Alistair’s cars up the street, baring their teeth, the wind flowing through the lions’ manes as they picked up the pace. Soon they were joined in the pursuit by other felines. The tiger had somehow escaped from the laundry back at the Hawkins’ house and was running behind them, next to the panther from the fence. A cheetah ran from one garden, a leopard leaped out of a box tree planted on the verge of another house and a jaguar jumped off the roof of another house.
“Alistair, hurry!” urged Faye, Alistair putting his foot down so the four wheel drive was now at 100 kilometers per hour in the quiet suburban street, Danielle likewise pressing her foot down too to keep up with her father-in-law, but the big cats could no longer keep pace and fell away into the distance. With squealing tires both cars sped through a roundabout at the end of the street, and raced along the new road at breakneck speed.
Gavin looked out the window at the UFO, which was still hovering around making the scary whirring noise, but it seemed to be going north, perhaps anticipating setting up an ambush further up the road.
“We’ll head south to the city,” said Alistair, also looking at the flying saucer as it flew away in a northerly direction.
With Danielle right behind him, Alistair drove for the road that would take them to the Harbour Bridge and across into the Sydney CBD. In the back seat of the car, Erica hoped that her brother Brendan was okay back at the house, especially with big cats loose in the street, a zombie neighbor across the road, toilet and power point demons and ghosts roaming around.
Back at the Hawkins house, it looked as though everybody had headed out to their respective days. Nobody would have given the house a second glance, except that it would have been unusual for Cornelius to leave his car door ajar, and for the family not to close the roller door of the garage.
In the house itself all was quiet, the only sound to be heard that of Brendan Hawkins using the dust-buster in his granny flat, and the sound of the refrigerator struggling to keep cool with an open door, a ticking clock and a dripping kitchen tap that punctured the eerie silence of the Hawkins family’s abandoned house, the flickering static snow on the TV set left on adding to the creepy atmosphere. The sound of the telephone ringing was audible through the house, but the telemarketer on the other end would never have their call answered before the answering machine kicked in.
END OF CHAPTER 3 — TO BE CONTINUED…