THE BONK HOUSE

THE BONK HOUSE
by LH Michael

The thing started with a letter from my father, an unwelcomed letter left unopened for three weeks. We hadn’t spoken in two years.  

I opened it; more chicken scratch. The man’s handwriting had become shakier than a polygraph needle.

“Dear Malcolm….”

The letter made another aloof request for a visit. We hadn’t met face to face in three years. I saw no need to break the streak. When I first left home, we conversed on occasion, but then he started penning these fawning, off-the-wall letters about the trials and tribulations of Chet Bonk, the “kid” who lived behind us. I say kid ironically because we were both 26. Chet still lived at home. My father didn’t care about him until I moved away. That’s when he befriended the Bonks and commenced his unsightly chronicling of Chet’s every deed.           

The last time my father used his ancient cell phone to call me, I laid out the inappropriateness of this fixation. The conversation reached a stalemate because he wouldn’t stop shouting. His words were rational, but they soared to a volume that caused my phone to hiss like a waterboarded boombox. After I asked him to pipe down, he (loudly) proclaimed ignorance. I insisted (loudly) that he lower his voice, but some heinous vacuum noise on his end stymied my appeal. After that, I quit calling.

The fawning letters didn’t stop: Did I know Chet had tried to join the Coast Guard? Did I know Chet had written a business plan for a landscaping business? Did I know Chet had sold hot tubs for a while?

I hadn’t been Chet’s friend for years, assuming we’d been friends in the first place. The Bonks moved behind us a few weeks after we moved to the neighborhood. Chet and I, high school seniors, hung out until Christmas Break. After that, Chet’s new stepmother took to homeschooling him. According to him, she feared he’d be “forced to take drugs in the bathroom.” Let me put it on the record that such utopian bathrooms did not exist at our school.  

I never spoke to Chet’s parents, but on several occasions, I witnessed Mr. Bonk borrow appliances from my father, and every so often, I witnessed Chet’s stepmother pass by one of their windows. As they frequently kept their house completely dark, she carried candles, usually while donning a clunky apron that gave her the profile of a baseball umpire.

Like all bonds, mine with Chet depended on routine, so his exile from school depleted our acquaintanceship. I remember trudging up the Bonks’ driveway the one time I tried reconnecting. At the foot of the driveway sat a tiny half-fridge, presumably awaiting the trash collector. The house’s only luminosity came from a porch light so bright it seemed more for security than illumination. They had the vastest lawn in the neighborhood and still the light exceeded its boundaries. The closer I got to the door the worse I felt about knocking. How could I not feel self-conscious under a porch light that aspired to be a tanning booth?

There were other oddities. The window shutters, in addition to being gaunt, had all sorts of intricate and peculiar ridges. They were like screenshots from Pac-Man.

I pressed the doorbell. The button rumbled so much I backed away from it. Chet yelled down through his closed bedroom window that he couldn’t come out. His bear-trap tone left me wondering if we’d had a dispute I didn’t know about. I turned to leave. Something popped behind me.

When I “came to,” I teetered on the edge of the porch. I’d been out on my feet, a split-second faint. The porch light was off.  

I must have gotten over what happened because I steered my trembling legs to the driveway. The house was a carton of shadows. I saw a candle flitter past an upstairs window. I sensed danger for Chet, but despite leaning forward like an action hero prepped for bravery, I couldn’t summon the will to act. I retracted down the driveway, feeling sturdier with each inch I put between the house and myself. As I turned off Chet’s street, I felt the porch light come on but couldn’t bring myself to look.

That incident probably warranted further monitoring of the Bonk place, but I focused instead on expelling the memory from my brain. My bedroom faced the rear of their house, which made my “forget and move on” scheme kind of a lost cause.  

Have I mentioned the noises that came from the Bonk house? I awoke to them many times but never budged to investigate. I couldn’t tell you what they were. If you asked me to describe them, I guess I’d call them blasts.

Getting back to my father, I eventually agreed to a visit. Not for any special reason, I just wanted to strike it from my to-do list.

I pulled in his driveway and noticed a paper sign on the door: “Helping out the Bonks – Dad.” I walked through the side yard towards the front of the Bonk house and found they were holding a yard sale. Many of the items on display belonged to me. Things I’d left at my father’s were waiting there with price tags. The prices were outrageous.

Mr. Bonk stood in the yard. I put my hand out to greet him but checked myself when I got a better view. He had aged appallingly. Though he couldn’t have been beyond his mid-fifties, he had the stoop and wrinkles of a corroded senior. Equally bewildering were the lines in his face. They were so wide, so defined, and almost orderly in the way they spidered together.

“Malcolm?” His voice had faded as much as the rest of him.

I floated an incoherent question about my possessions being for sale, which bled into an incoherent statement about wanting to locate my father. Mr. Bonk told me his family needed money and that my father had pledged my assets for the cause. Evidently, most of the Bonk’s appliances had burned out and weren’t sellable. I might have balked were I not so engrossed in his stenciled face. He related that I could find my father inside the Bonk house.

I drifted towards the porch and found the front door open. I had reservations about announcing my presence to whatever waited inside.

Something roared.

A dog rushed into the foyer. Though puny, it sounded like it had a kennel of other barking dogs inside it. The barks were tigerish, guttural, not at all in harmony with the dog’s appearance. It heaved forward without getting closer, as if bound in place by an invisible rope. Someone shoved me between my shoulder blades. It was Chet’s father. He motioned for me to enter the house.

“C’mon, are you afraid of a little puppy?” he hollered over the dog’s barks.

“Where’s my father?”

“I told you already, he’s inside.”

He eyed something past my shoulder. I peered into the house and watched a scrawny figure approach.

“Malcolm!”

The voice, a hollow shriek, belonged to Chet Bonk. Like his father, he’d aged far more than he should have, and his face had similar geometric lines. His eyes were smoky pits.

“All I’m trying to do is find my father,” I said.

A whirring commotion within the house interrupted me. It sounded mechanical yet alive. Mr. Bonk murmured a word in my ear that sounded like “vacuum.”

Chet had almost reached the porch. I heard a POP.

My brain flickered. When I came to, the “vacuum” clatter had ceased. Chet and the dog had fallen over. They looked dead.

Chet’s stepmother finally showed herself. Suited in a lead apron, she hadn’t withered like the others, and frankly, looked younger than her son did. She drew a thick, industrial glove from her apron’s right pocket, reached high above a front closet and opened a panel. The panel’s interior resembled a circuit breaker. With her gloved hand, she flipped a switch. Chet and the dog hopped up, their puffed-out hair twirling like a caucus of squid legs. The dog resumed its protest barks, only now they indicated trepidation. Chet took an uneasy step onto the porch and staggered right up to my face. He uttered my name again, this time employing a normal tone. The lines on his cheeks sparked some nasty déjà vu. They were reminiscent of the lines on the shutters.

His mother pointed a gloved fist in my direction. Chet swung at me. I ducked and malleted his wispy ribs until he crumpled at his mommy’s feet. Before he could get up, I took one small step for man onto his orbital socket.

Mrs. Bonk’s eyes fluoresced. She dug around in her apron’s left pocket. I stomped Chet twice more before searching out an escape route. Chet’s father stood athwart the porch like a middle linebacker. I jumped over him, but upon landing, my right knee tore north to south and east to west. Molten pain flambéed every nerve in my body.

While I tested my leg strength, Mr. Bonk jumped on my back and did everything he could to flatten me on the ground. I pushed him off, and as soon as we were both standing, I dropped him with a shot to his Adam’s apple.

I was about to stamp his midsection when I heard a noise, a blast, from inside the house. I limped a retreat. The puny dog barked and chased after me. With my enfeebled knee, I wasn’t hard to catch. While it tore the skin off my right ankle, I knocked over a yard sale table. The clanging items backed the dog off. For the first time, I noticed the shriveled state of the poor pooch.

I made it to the side yard, and found something smoldering in the grass. I hobbled through the leathery, copper-scented vapors, sensing it might be better not to know what it was.

“Grrrrrrrr!”

The dog planted its teeth in my left ankle. No matter how much I kicked, the damn thing wouldn’t let go. The pooch caught a face-full of the copper-smelling smoke and released my ankle. I faltered ahead, gripping my obliterated right knee. The dog forced out a bark and backtracked to the house.

The thing smoking in the grass was a body. The stench had made it impossible to look closer, and anyway, I would not have learned much. When you puke out your intestines, there isn’t time for a field study.

I dragged myself through my father’s front yard. The sign on the front door had gone missing. Too nauseous to care, I rumpled into my car and gunned it out of the driveway. After I’d advanced a few miles down the highway, my chest vibrated. It took me a moment to figure out that the vibration came from my phone. I checked the ID of the caller: “Dad.”

I answered, “Hello?”  

I heard clamor, but no voices.

Me again, “Hello?”

A voice raged through the phone, “Malcolm!” The decibel range rendered the voice unidentifiable.

“Dad?”

The puny dog bellowed in the background.

“Dad, are you there?”

“Malcolm!”

“Chet? Is that you? Put my father on the phone!”

“Your father?” he screamed.

“Yes, I said put him on!”

“Didn’t you see?”

“Didn’t I see what?”

“The yard! Didn’t you see it?”

I heard a blast. Then I heard nothing.

“Hello? Chet? Are you there?”

I called back but no one answered. I redialed several times without reaching anything but voicemail.

In no shape to drive, I stopped on the shoulder of the highway. I’d borne so many unreal things in such a short span my brain couldn’t keep up.

My right wrist was powder thanks to the haymaker I’d laid on Mr. Bonk. I couldn’t believe I’d grappled with that wrinkled goblin, even less his wrinkled son. As I recollected my war with them, I had a revelation about the lines on their faces. I realized what they reminded me of. Circuits.

Fiction © Copyright LH Michael
Image by D. Strohl

LH Michael’s credits include The NoSleep Podcast and Vastarien