Dough-ty Walker

      It was a dreary midnight and a ravenous snowstorm wailed mournfully outside. Dougherty Walker sat in his old armchair by a lit fire as he read a curious, ancient book from his weathered library, deep and focused. Though it was an interesting book in its own right, Dougherty had started to nod off and fall into a late nap for the night. As his head slowly drooped down, he heard what sounded like a faint, sing-song voice coming from the other side of the chamber door in its lockdown. He anxiously turned his head to look at his dog Dingo who was lying on the floor; Dingo seemed to hear it too, as he had also perked his head up and was curiously looking at the door.

           “It’s only the wind,” Dougherty Walker muttered, “I left a window open in the hallway, and now the wind is blowing in at my chamber door; nothing more to it.”

           He let out a tired sigh, stood up from his chair, and stared into the fireplace before him, watching the illuminating dance stretch upon his floor as he ran fingers through his hair. He knew why the howl of that wind had disturbed him so, the way it had sounded so much like someone singing low. He would recall an austere December, almost a decade ago now, he would remember. The reason why he only wishes for the next morning as he escaped the past in his considerable assortment of books – though he tends to avoid any book that was written in a way meant to inspire nostalgia in their nooks. He did not know of nostalgia; the only feelings he invokes when thinking of the past are that of sorrow and mental myalgia.

           When he was a younger man in this house he now depends, Dougherty Walker once lived in this house with Molly Lynche, his girlfriend. During that bleak December all that time ago, there was a harsh and frigid winter storm not unlike this one, though. The two had been snowed in, for an amount of time which Dougherty still could not recall how long it had been. As the insufferable seconds, minutes, hours, and days drawled on, Doughtery and Molly experienced the worst case of cabin fever as they learned to despise each other’s hon. One mournful evening of that wretched winter Dougherty felt he could not take her presence any longer and, in a fit of blind animosity, he took a candle stick from a small table, this long hateful finger, and struck Molly over the head with it. She slumped to the floor and blood quickly pooled around her head, like a crimson viscous halo, oozing into a watery bed. Fearful of what repercussions he would face, even in this fit of passion, he took Molly’s limp body to the bathroom and slumped her lifeless self into the bathtub in a most macabre fashion.

           From the closet by the front door, he brought a small scythe, and Dougherty’s work was quick and lithe. Ignoring how he already missed her when Molly was like a precious cub, he sawed her apart and let all the blood drain down the tub. He would let the drained parts burn in the fireplace and would plan to call the police later, saying Molly went out into the storm and never came back at her hurried pace.

           Dougherty was never caught for his crime, and though the guilt weighed heavier on him with each passing year, he never dreamed of turning himself in – there would never come that time.

           As Dougherty quietly lamented, muttering the name of his lost love, he heard that sing-song voice howl outside his door again, and Dingo started to growl. Dougherty strode over to the door and flung it open in haste but was only greeted by darkness, harsh and bold-faced. He peered into the longing darkness with a silence remaining unhinged, his imagination went to dark places of macabre whispers, thinking again of Molly Lynche.

           “Hello?” Dougherty called out hesitantly, and an echo murmured back, “Hello…” through the dark and empty hallway. He turned back to his study, closed the door behind him, and slumped back in his makeshift cubby.        

           “Surely,” he muttered, “There is an open crack in my chamber window – that song is only the wind, not some unseen foe.” He turned his gaze back to Dingo who turned his head nervously to the side. Dougherty checked the window, but it was sealed shut, not a crack for any whistle of wind to cut.

           He took his purple curtains and pulled them together concealing the window and the endless window from view. But the singing returned, and the now understandable words came to Dougherty as if on a cue. "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!"

           Dougherty spun around and shot his eyes from side to side, his heart thumping heavily in his chest while his once-heated veins had dried. “What do you come for?” Dougherty cried into the room, whose only occupants appeared to only be he and Dingo and an omnipotent doom.

           Silence greeted him, save for Dingo releasing a whimper of a mournful hymn. “I hear you,” Dougherty tried again, “Come out into view! You who sing there outside my door, tell me what it is you come for, I implore!”

           Again, the song would proclaim, and closer this time it came, "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!"

           Dougherty fell to the floor with his quivering eyes fixed upon his ever-seemingly eerie door. As he stared, he saw a quick movement near the fire and turned to see something fall from the fireplace and land before him as he began to perspire. He beheld a charred and rotted severed foot, and Dougherty cried in terror as he watched the macabre display of its toes wiggling through ash and soot.

           Another charred foot fell down the chimney, followed by their respective legs which dripped upon the floor an inky substance of some dregs on the wooden floor. "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!" The voice was so close now, and cold sweat beaded upon Doughtery’s pale brow. He shuffled weakly far from the fireplace until his back was against the wall, and then he tried to pull himself to his feet, moving up the surface with a sort of crawl.

           Now a torso had tumbled down, and two arms, and a charred and smoldering head which wore a sickening frown. Dougherty Walker watched in fear as the severed and charred limbs assembled and reattached themselves in the firelight, and Dougherty hadn’t even noticed that poor Dingo had died of fright. The broiled limbs had assembled themselves to a gangling woman, who slowly and sluggishly began to dance with joints that seemed stiff and wooden.

           "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!" she sang as she waltzed towards Dougherty. Dougherty was trembling as he stood frozen in place, all the blood had gone now from his limbs and face. He tried one more time, pleading, “What… What do you come for?” against his shirt his fingers kneading.

           The grim and ghoulish woman opened her eyes and looked at Dougherty, and he saw they were the eyes of Molly Lynche, solely.

           “I COME FOR YOU!”