Scratch

April showers bring May flowers. But as the rain-swollen creeks recede, the residents of one rural Pennsylvania town learn that April showers bring something far worse than destructive floods and property damage. This year, the April showers have brought a cryptozoological nightmare named Scratch, and only pain and terror follow in his wake.

This novella by Brian Keene also includes a bonus short story, “Halves.”

Contents

Scratch

“Halves”

About the Author

Also by Brian Keene

Excerpt from
The Man on the Bench
by Robert Swartwood

Copyright

This one is dedicated to Ed Gorman, with all of my respect, admiration and appreciation.

For this edition of
Scratch
, thanks to Robert Swartwood; the folks at Cemetery Dance (who published the original hardcover edition of
Scratch
); Russell Dickerson; Tod Clark; Mark Sylva; Tim and Ellie Lebbon; and to GAK, Mike Hawthorne, and Christopher Jones for their technical assistance.

T
here is an old adage that says April showers bring May flowers. I guess this is true, but with global warming, who really knows? Things are definitely different from how they were when I was younger. The last few years, I’ve seen deer ticks clinging to my dog in December, and fruit trees budding and blossoming in late February. When I was a kid, we had maybe six or seven snow days a year. I always looked forward to those—a day off school spent sledding down the big hill behind my parent’s house, staying out until my fingers, ears and nose were numb, and then coming back inside to find a mug of hot chocolate waiting for me, complete with little marshmallows.
 

These days, my son, Dylan, is lucky if he gets one full day off school due to inclement weather. Last year, they just had a few two-hour delays, and there was never enough snow for him to play in. You can’t make a snowman with powder and you can’t build a snow fort out of slush. The brand new sled I bought him at Wal-Mart sat in our garage all winter long, shiny and unused.
 

The weathermen and politicians argue about the cause, just like they do every year. Some say it’s global warming. Others say it’s El Nino. And still others say that it’s just part of a cycle—that these things happen every so often.

Perhaps that is true. Perhaps some things appear and disappear in cycles.
 

Regardless of your political or spiritual beliefs, I think there’s one thing that we can all agree on—Mother Nature is changing, and not for the better. There’s another old adage that we often hear—the more things change, the more they stay the same. But that wasn’t true last spring.
 

Last spring, everything changed and nothing’s been the same since.
 

A few nights before it happened, Dylan crawled up on my lap with one of those little paperback joke books, and asked, “Daddy, if April showers bring May flowers, then what do Mayflowers bring?”
 

I pretended that I’d never heard the joke before. “I don’t know. What?”
 

“Pilgrims!”
 

Then we laughed and played some video games together before I tucked him into bed.
 

That was the final good memory I have from last spring. After that, things were forever altered. Our backyard. The creek. My heart and mind. My beliefs. All of it just washed away.
 

Last year, the April showers brought the flood and destruction and death and permanent, irrevocable change.
 

And Old Scratch.
 

And when it was all over, the May flowers growing in our backyard seemed to pale in comparison to him.

My name is Evan Fisher. If you read comic books—or graphic novels, as they’re called today—then you’ve probably heard of me. I’m an illustrator and inker. Or, as my father used to put it before a long, ugly battle with lung cancer took him from us three years ago, I draw ‘funny books’ for a living. I’d always explain to my father that there wasn’t much ‘fun’ going on in modern comics—that they were dark and bleak and full of adult situations and characters, but I don’t think he ever quite believed me. It took me a long time to convince him that illustrating comics was a serious job. My Dad worked for the foundry in Hanover all his life, and it gave him a certain mentality common to his generation of working Americans. Unless you were earning a living with your hands, he didn’t view it as work. But eventually, I showed him that I
was
working with my hands—and furthermore, that I was able to earn a pretty decent living by doing it. Sure, my wife, Marlena, still had to work, but show me a middle class married couple that
doesn’t
have both spouses working these days. So we weren’t rich—so what? We weren’t unhappy. We did okay. We weren’t poor and we didn’t have much debt. In the end, I won my father over. Before Dad died, he told me that he was proud of me.
 

But he never stopped calling them funny books.
 

Before last spring, life was pretty good. I’d been nominated for my second Eisner Award, along with my co-creator, Timothy Graco, for our work on
United Hero Federation
. I’d just picked up a regular gig doing the pencils for
The Electric Skull
. Dark Horse and Antarctic Press were throwing more work at me than I could handle, and both Marvel and DC were trying to convince me to sign exclusivity deals with them. All of this without an agent.
 

With the money I was earning, Marlena and I were able to buy a house near Craley, one of the more rural parts of York County, Pennsylvania. We had three acres of land—enough room for Dylan to do all the things that boys do at his age. There were lots of tall, old-growth trees jutting from the yard, and at the far end of our property, there was a swift, cold trout stream. It was about twelve feet across and knee-deep in most places. I fished there every weekend for a few months until the novelty wore off. We bought a dog for Dylan—a friendly, playful mutt that he named Sanchez. The two of them ran around in the backyard together.
 

We only had two neighbors. A retired couple named Jeff and Anna-Marie Price had three acres bordering the east of our property. A single mother named Thena lived on the far side of the trout stream, along with her kids, Derrick and Josie. They were a bit older than Dylan, but seemed nice enough. The other side of our property bordered a vast marsh, and past that lay four miles of state-owned game land—a lush, thick wilderness that could never be developed or forested. Beyond the woods was the Susquehanna River, which our stream also fed into. Many times that first year, the four of us—me, Marlena, Dylan and Sanchez, would hike along the creek bank all the way to the river, where we’d have a picnic lunch before trekking home again. Usually, Dylan’s legs gave out halfway back, and I’d end up giving him a piggyback ride the rest of the way.
 

We’d bought the house in early summer. We landscaped the yard, filling it with shrubs and fruit trees and a multitude of seasonal flowers. I spent most of that first autumn setting up my office. We had a cement block two-car garage next to the house, and I converted half of it into a workspace. Even after I’d finished, the office still looked like it was under construction. Marlena called it “organized chaos”, and I guess that’s a pretty apt description. There were three work tables. One was a drawing table with an architect lamp attached to it. Another housed my computer and both of my printers. The third held my scanner, along with sketch paper, an automatic pencil sharpener, jars full of pens and markers, my light-box, rulers, t-squares, a watercolor tray, tubes of paint, pastel boxes, charcoal, a matte cutter, and razor blades. Atop all of this lay scripts for whatever I was currently working on. There were three bookshelves stuffed full of reference material, and binders with my sketches and notes. On top of the bookshelves was an army of action figures and other toys—everything from
Judge Dredd
to
The Herculoids
. Next to the shelves, an oversized nine-drawer filing cabinet stood with more toys lying on top of it. I’d covered the windows with drywall—I didn’t want the distraction. There was a bulletin board on the wall, and a mirror for making faces in (that way I could copy the expressions). A framed picture of Marlena, Dylan, and me hung next to that. We’d had it taken at Sears a year before. There were no paintings or art—especially mine. I found stuff like that to be distracting, just like windows. The only other artwork on the walls were the various crayon drawings that Dylan had made for me over the years: Godzilla fighting some stick figure soldiers. The Hulk eating a bowl of beans. Dylan often said that when he grew up, he wanted to be an artist like Daddy. Or an astronaut.
 

Personally, I was hoping he’d lean towards astronaut. Maybe that was just my subconscious desire to live vicariously through him. I’d wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up, but life didn’t work out that way. Sometimes, I still dream about it.
 

Marlena worked from home, too, which was really nice. She had to keep regular hours (her bosses could tell if she was logged in or not) but I made my own schedule. As a result, we didn’t have to put Dylan in daycare. It wasn’t unusual for an entire week to go by without us leaving the house. Marlena’s work was sent via email, and I sent mine as FTP files. I used Globe Package Services for shipping actual art, and they picked it up right at our front door.
 

It was a comfortable, happy, safe environment until Old Scratch came.
 

After that, I never felt safe again.

Here is what happened. Only a few other people know the whole story, and none of them are talking, either.
 

You won’t believe it at first, but that’s okay.
 

Neither did I, until it was too late.

When the storm began, I was in my office, trying to beat a deadline. My MP3 player was cranking out some old school Anthrax—“Be All, End All”—so when the thunder started, I mistook it for Frank Bello’s bass-playing at first. I sang along, oblivious. It wasn’t until the rumbling grew loud enough to drown out the music that I realized what it was.
 

We rarely watch television, and we don’t get the newspaper, so I had no idea if the local forecast was calling for thunderstorms or not. It didn’t matter in any case. I had just been out-side a few minutes before to sign for a delivery, and the sky had been a clear, pale blue with baby powder clouds. The storm had come on suddenly. I turned down the music and listened as another blast rolled overhead. It was followed by the patter of raindrops hitting the roof. They fell slowly at first, but their speed quickly increased. It sounded like someone was throwing coins at my office.
 

I was just about to get up and go have a look when the power went out. Without the benefit of windows, my office was instantly dark. I couldn’t even see the desk in front of me. The printer beeped and fell silent. The monitors blinked and then faded to black. Anthrax stopped playing. The only sound was the rain drumming steadily on the roof, growing louder with each passing moment, and more grumbles of thunder.