This was a submission for a short horror writing contest inspired by an image, which I have included in the post. Ultimately, I did not succeed, so I am sharing it here. Enjoy.
Mister Splinter
When I was a kid, there was a story about a man in the woodpile. Nobody quite knew where the story came from, but everybody knew it. The man was called Mister Splinter, and the woodpile was the foundation of a house that had never been built – a ruin of concrete, half-erected walls, and piles of construction scrap, surrounded by trees. Kids ran in and out of the cluster of trees to stomp across the concrete pad where a dream died. Teens would go there to smoke or hook up. Adults went there looking for kids or a place to sleep.
The story went that Mister Splinter would make himself known in the spaces between the rotting slats that made up a wall. Or might be seen peering out from small gaps in too-small scrap piles. You’d look and see something in the space, but walk around the wall to see nobody – maybe a friend trying to spook you. The local legend was so pervasive that everyone saw something. Mister Splinter haunted us every summer and terrorized us every fall.
We realized that with our own local monster, we needed a monster hunter. Kenny Dyson, always ready with a knife or a hammer “just in case,” had taken to leading a few of us on monster hunts that always came down to a game of chicken. The longer you lasted in the ruin on your own, the better you did.
Someone called Kenny’s bluff. The tide turned, and we pushed him into the trees and told him to wait. He tried to fight us, and he broke Tom’s nose, but we outnumbered him, and he relented. He told us he’d kill Mister Splinter if he saw him, flipped us off, and vanished into the trees.
We decided to look for him as the sun began to set. We stepped into the thicket of trees and toward the ruin. When we arrived, we found Kenny standing over the body of a stranger. A nearby shopping cart had fallen over. The man’s things had scattered across the foundation.
Kenny was delighted to see us, eyes wide, bragging about finding Mister Splinter and taking him down. The man’s head lay in a pool of dark blood, and Kenny’s grip on the hammer was white-knuckled. The kid just smiled.
I ran to my parents, told them what I’d seen, and they called the police.
I never saw Kenny again.
After that, the kids who came later had a new Mister Splinter.
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