Hell is Other Rabbits

Originally a competition entry for HolidayHorror, and since posted in three more easily digestible chunks on NoSleep, 'Hell is Other Rabbits' is officially one of my longest horror stories yet (and the longest to be largely rabbit-based...). I hope you enjoy it, and Happy Easter!

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When I was growing up, being the Easter Bunny was a death sentence.

You see, Easter wasn’t originally about chocolate. It wasn’t about eggs or rabbits or fluffy little chicks. Easter was about the torture, death and resurrection of God’s only son Jesus Christ. To some Christians, the very existence of the Easter Bunny is nothing short of blasphemy. And my parents did not tolerate blasphemy.

Father in particular resented what he saw as the distortion of the holiday. He took it upon himself to create a new tradition just for our family; one that would ensure, for the remainder of our days, that we could never think about the Easter Bunny without also thinking of the execution of Christ.

Before I go into more detail, you need to understand that my Father was a twisted fucker. He never showed his children any love or emotion, he told us at length and in detail about how we were on our way to burning in Hell for all of eternity, he beat us for laughing or playing or just generally acting like children. He saved the worst of his beatings for Mother, which happened in front of us and seemingly at random, but don’t feel sorry for her. She was just as cruel. At least Father gave us the courtesy of avoiding us as much as he could, spending his time out in the woods or in the barn with creatures who didn’t cry when he struck them. Mother, on the other hand, felt it was her Christian duty to oversee her children at all times. She was the ever-watchful eye of the household, ready to dole out harsh punishments for any perceived transgressions. While Father used his fists, Mother had a variety of implements that she enjoyed using on us. Well, perhaps ‘enjoyed’ isn’t the right word; I don’t think she enjoyed anything. I can’t remember her smiling once throughout my entire childhood. But the implements satisfied her. Canes. Belts. Fire pokers. Anything that would beat the message of the Lord into us.

To make matters worse, both of our parents rejected modern medicine. I never saw a doctor in that household, nor a dentist, nor a chemist. Mother and Father believed solely in the power of prayer. I had to watch several of my siblings die from what I now know were completely curable illnesses or injuries. Mother would be at their bedside praying day and night, and we would be beaten for not joining in, but the moment my brother or sister – their child – died, Mother and Father would simply bury them and move on. They took the lack of recovery as being God’s judgement. In their minds, our prayers went unanswered not because the prayer was impossible or unnecessary, but because the child wasn’t deserving of God’s mercy.

After the death of a loved one, a normal family might say that “they’re in a better place now,” or “they went home to God.”

Not the bastards who brought us up. Whenever one of our siblings passed away, their response was:

“The Devil took them back.”

That was my childhood. That was the only life I knew until I escaped years later. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, you should know about our Easter Bunny tradition. We kept a variety of animals on our land, all horribly mistreated and underfed. The most unfortunate were the rabbits. As I said, Father bore a particular resentment towards rabbits, because he felt that the very concept of the Easter Bunny was an insult to our Lord. So he found a way to punish them – and us – while drilling in what he saw as the most important lesson of Christ’s life: We are all sinful, and we must all suffer for the Lord.

Each year, Father would march us out to the rabbit hutch and force us to choose one of them to be the Easter Bunny. At first we used to pick our favourites, but we soon learned better; in later years we would choose the scrawniest rabbit we could find, vainly hoping that the ceremony wouldn’t last as long for them. Once we’d made our choice, the newly-declared Easter Bunny would be taken to a special spot in the garden. We would all be forced to sit in front of a small, wooden structure, with Mother standing behind us to ensure we watched. Then, reciting Biblical verse from memory, Father would thrust the rabbit against the wood.

And crucify it.

Did you know rabbits scream? They’re normally so quiet, it catches you off guard. A shrill, shrieking wail. Every year I hoped I’d be ready for it, but every year it cut to my core. One nail through the first paw. One nail through the next. One through the legs.

Then we watched, and waited. Waited until they died. Sometimes they’d last half a day, but even when my youngest siblings were crying from cold and hunger, we were forced to watch until it was done.

Afterwards, the sacrificed rabbit would be taken down from its cross, and my Father would lead us to a narrow cave at the edge of the forest. There he would place the rabbit’s corpse, and the cave mouth would be sealed with stones.

Three days later, on Resurrection Sunday, the whole family would march up to the cave and kneel, with Father leading us in prayer. We would ask God to forgive us of our sins, and to share with us His glory. When we had finished, Father would remove the stones one by one, and a true miracle would be revealed to us:

The Easter Bunny would be inside the cave, alive and well.

As a child, this brutal ceremony was softened by the magic and wonder of the rabbit’s resurrection. It was proof to me, and to all of my siblings, that God was real, and that He worked through Father’s hands. Of course, as an adult, I know better. I know that on the morning of the third day, Father would find a similar-looking rabbit, head to the cave before us, and replace the mangled corpse with a living copy, sealing it back up for us to find later that day.

Looking back, I’d like to say that this ghoulish Easter tradition was the worst thing my Father did. But it wasn’t. The worst thing was what happened to Joshua.

Joshua was one of my younger brothers, and he was always a little different. Joshua cried when nothing was sad, or laughed when nothing was funny. He struggled to use words, but grunted and groaned almost constantly. He never fully learned how to use the toilet, even with Mother’s increasingly vicious beatings after each accident. Any other family would have known that Joshua was disabled. He wasn’t a bad child – far from it, he often surprised us with his kind and gentle nature – but he was different, and for our parents that was unforgivable. In his final few years, I don’t recall Mother even calling him “Joshua”. He simply became “the Devil’s child”.

One winter’s night, something unusual happened. Father announced he was taking Joshua to work with him. This had never happened before, not for any of us; Father hated spending time with his children, and work was his escape from us. Yet for Joshua, it was the most exciting development in his young life. He hugged Father and let out a kind of moaning squeal. Father grabbed Joshua’s wrist and pulled him through the door. I watched them go. When they walked out of sight, I ran upstairs and watched from my window, tracking them past the barn, through the fields, and into the woods.

For hours, I waited. I whispered with my brothers and sisters about what they could be doing out there, even after Mother caught us and beat us for keeping secrets from her. For once in our lives, we were excited for Father to return from work.

He came back home that evening.

But Joshua never did.

I realise now, of course, that Father killed him. It seems strange that there was a time I didn’t know that. It’s incomprehensible to me that none of my siblings, not even Mary, the eldest of us, once considered contacting the authorities. We knew Father was a monster. We knew what he did to defenceless rabbits. But as a child, the realisation that he was capable of murdering his own children was just too much of a leap for us. I think, deep down, I was still trying to convince myself that Father was a good person.

My parents never acknowledged what happened, and all of our questions about our missing brother were deflected or ignored. His name was never again uttered by either of them, and soon we stopped asking as well.

We stopped asking, but not thinking. I lay awake for countless nights wondering if Joshua was still out there, cold and alone. If he was dead, I wondered whether God would take pity on him - like he did on the Easter Bunny - and bring him back to life. I wondered if there was anything I could have done to have saved him.

But Joshua’s death does not lie with me, nor with any of my siblings. That sin lies squarely at the feet of my parents. Yes; both of them. Make no mistake, Mother knew exactly what was happening. She resented Joshua every bit as much as Father did, seeing him as some kind of personal failure on her own part. I told you she was a cold bitch. She never loved a single one of us.

I finally got out of that wretched house when I was sixteen. I packed everything I had into a rucksack and walked out in the middle of the night. I left a note for my remaining siblings, but nothing for Mother and Father. I didn’t care what they thought about me leaving. I was just glad to be rid of them.

I travelled as far away as I could go and set about starting a new life for myself, far away from the hell of my childhood.

I never once dreamed I’d be back there ten years later…

It was Mary who brought me home.

Her letter arrived one morning, explaining that Mother was on her deathbed and unlikely to survive the week. A doctor, of course, was out of the question, regardless of how much Mary tried to pressure our parents to change their minds, so Mary had little choice but to reach out to us. She felt, regardless of our history, that children should be there for their parents’ final moments. She always had been the most responsible of us. It came naturally to her, given that she was the only real care-giver me or my siblings had in that house. As the oldest child, Mary was the one who provided comfort and guidance. Mary was the one to bandage our wounds and teach us the difficult words from the Bible. Mary was the one who advised us when to own up and accept punishment, and when to bury a secret and never speak of it again. One of my brothers, Paul, is only alive today because Mary forbid him from ever mentioning his sexuality to our parents. I have no doubt that Father would have done to Paul what he did to Joshua, rather than allow a gay son to live.

Because of this, I had – and still have – enormous respect for Mary. That’s the only reason I accepted her request. It wasn’t for Mother, who I would happily have never seen again. It certainly wasn’t for Father, who I doubted was any more invested in Mother’s situation than I was.

When I arrived back home, very little had changed. I was pleased to see that the rabbit hutch had disappeared – the Easter Bunny ritual must have finally come to an end, given that my youngest sibling was now a teenager – but otherwise it felt like I was stepping back into my childhood. All of those horrible years came rushing back to me, and my chest tightened the closer I got to the house. If Mary hadn’t been standing in the doorway waiting for me, I think I’d have given up and turned back the way I came. As it was, I couldn’t leave her alone with those monsters, not even with one of them dying.

Mary thanked me for coming, and we spent some time catching up. She and Luke were the last of our siblings to have stayed at home. Rachel had run away last year and was now living on the other side of the country. Mark, we both knew, had moved out some time ago, though she’d had no idea he was in prison now. Paul was doing alright, although had refused Mary’s invite to come back – he couldn’t face Father again, he’d said. I could sympathise.

As it started to get dark outside, we both realised I was simply putting off what Mary had called me here for. I had to visit Mother. I stepped into the house, peering around every corner like a wary animal, but I needn’t have been so cautious. Father was out working. Naturally. The old fucker had never cared about anyone else before, there was no reason for him to start with Mother dying. Mary took me to the top of the stairs, and directed me to the spare room, where it transpired Mother had been forced to sleep since her health deteriorated.

I heard her before I saw her. Through the thin walls, her shaking voice filled the hallway.

“- as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done -”

That, Mary explained, was all Mother said anymore; the Lord’s Prayer, repeated over and over again, hour after hour, day and night. I imagine Mother hoped it would secure her place in Heaven. After spending our whole childhoods telling us how easy it was to be cast into the fires of Hell, perhaps she was getting nervous.

I entered Mother’s room, and the person I saw lying on the bed was a shadow of her former self. Her eyes were white and sightless. Her hair was thinning and grey. I could count her ribs beneath the stained white dress she lay in. As she spoke the Lord’s Prayer, her head tossed from side to side, as if she was trapped a nightmarish sleep she couldn’t wake from. It was the most frail – the most human – I had ever seen her.

Mary explained that I’d arrived, but Mother didn’t appear to notice. She continued her recitals of the Lord’s Prayer without pause. As I stood there, Mary excused herself to prepare dinner, and I was left in the awkward position of being alone with Mother as she rambled on her deathbed. What exactly do you say to someone who helped destroy your childhood? What words of comfort can you share with a monster?

In the end, I said nothing. I simply watched her as she tossed and turned on the bed, droning out a prayer that wasn’t being answered.

It was almost a relief – almost – to hear Father arrive downstairs. I waited until Mary called me down, then joined them at the table. Luke, my youngest brother, greeted me with a smile. Father ignored me. Stubborn bastard. He was thinner than I remembered, and his eyes appeared sunk into his face, but he carried that same imposing aura that I feared as a child. I had planned to challenge him about Joshua, but seeing him again in that moment, I admit I didn’t dare. I took my place as Mary dished up the meal, and then Father led us in silent prayer.

At least, it was supposed to be silent, until Father slammed his fist into the table, clattering the plates and spilling the drinks.

“Whoever is making those stupid noises,” he roared, “you stop it right now, before I beat it out of you!”

None of us spoke. Mary, Luke and I shared glances, and it was clear we were all thinking the same thing. There hadn’t been any ‘stupid noises’. Still, none of us had the courage to openly question him, even now we were adults. Under his furious glare, we started our meals in silence.

It was a pleasant enough spread. Mary was a good cook, and I helped myself to some home-made bread with salad and slices of ham. In the middle of the table was a steaming pot of stew, and while I was eager to try some, I remember too many beatings from both parents for daring to start the main meal before Father had taken some first. Soon enough, he stood with his bowl, picked up the ladle and dipped it into the pot.

Then leapt back as if he’d been electrocuted. His bowl shattered on the floor as he thrust an accusing finger at the stew.

“What… what have you put in that?” he cried.

Mary tried to reassure him by listing the perfectly ordinary ingredients, but he shook his head, pale as a ghost.

“There was a head…” he growled, “A whole rabbit’s head. Fur and eyes and teeth…”

I felt sick. Surely Mary wouldn’t do that to us? She had hated the old Easter Bunny tradition as much as I had. I couldn’t imagine her dismembering a rabbit, not even to get back at Father in some way.

With Luke’s help, we lifted the pot over to the sink, and slowly poured it out. Father peered over our shoulders, poking at every lump with his ladle. At last, the pot was empty. There had been nothing remotely rabbit-like inside.

Father sat down and wiped his brow.

“Are you still not sleeping well?” Mary asked him.

Suddenly, there was a cry from upstairs. Father swore under his breath and told us to “Shut her up, will you!”, before storming outside. The three of us ran upstairs and into Mother’s room. She wasn’t repeating the Lord’s Prayer anymore. Instead, she had arched her back, and her twig-like arms were flailing, trying to grasp at invisible ropes dangling around her. Mary ran to her side, and tenderly took a hand in her own. I followed suit, taking Mother’s other hand. She turned her sightless eyes on us and spoke with breathless excitement.

“The gates… the gates are open for me! So bright! Do you see?”

She squeezed my hand, and I gave a gentle squeeze back. The blind, dying woman before me had done many horrible things, but I couldn’t bring myself to take it out on her. She seemed so vulnerable. So frail. I’m sure that, if the situation was reversed, Mother wouldn’t have wasted a second of pity on me. But I’ve spent my life trying be different to her, and this wasn’t going to be an exception.

Mary, too, was trying to comfort her, whispering soft reassurances. Soon, Mother settled back in her bed, and a peace washed over her.

“I see light,” she wheezed, “The Lord is welcoming me! Lord! Lord!”

A fragile smile grew on her wizened features - the first I had ever seen on her face - but after a few moments, it melted away. Her blind eyes flittered across the room, like a lost child in a busy street. She squeezed my hand one last time.

“Lord?” she breathed.

Then she was gone.

I don’t know what she saw as the moment of her death arrived.

But I don’t think it was Heaven.

That night was difficult for all of us. Father wouldn’t allow anyone to be contacted about Mother’s body, insisting that he’d bury her himself the next morning. It would be no different from my siblings who had passed away at home, of course, but I was a child then, and I didn’t know any better. As an adult, everything about the situation seemed wrong. Surely someone couldn’t just die at home and be buried in the garden? Wouldn’t a doctor need to confirm it? A death certificate be issued?

I decided not to argue with Father, and when he told us all to go to bed, I agreed. My plan, though, was to wait until everyone else was asleep and then call the nearby hospital and ask them to pick up Mother’s body. For all I knew, she could have still been alive and slipped into a coma or some other medical complication. I wanted professionals to be involved and confirm her death before we chucked her under six feet of dirt.

So while I sat on my bed, I listened out for any noises from Father’s room, ready to make a quiet call as soon as I was certain he was sleeping.

It was about 2am when the shuffling started. Low, muffled movement, first coming from one side of his room, then the other. At some points it fell silent, only to be followed by a flurry of scrambling. I stepped out into the hallway, crept over and pressed my ear to his door. I couldn’t even guess what he was doing in there, but I heard a quiet voice. Father’s voice.

I think.

Unsure whether I should fetch Mary first, I pushed open the door and peered through the darkness inside. What I saw barely made sense to me, but there was no denying it; Father was down on all fours, half-naked, crawling along the floor. At intervals, he leapt away from invisible objects as if he were navigating a minefield. His eyes were wild and he muttered under his breath constantly:

“The rabbits… the rabbits… the rabbits…”

“Father?” I asked, “What are you doing?”

Father’s ashen face turned to me, his lip trembling.

“Why are there so many of them?” he whimpered, “Why do they talk like Joshua?”

Hearing those words nearly knocked me to the floor. I hadn’t heard Father speak Joshua’s name since his murder. I think he sensed my shock, because he closed the distance between us and scrambled to his feet, thrusting a wild finger at me.

“You let them in here! You put them in my stew! You’re doing this to torment me!”

Father raised his fist to strike me, but something caught his attention over my shoulder. The colour drained from his face.

“You…” he wheezed.

Father ran. I turned to look behind me and saw nothing but an empty doorway and a blank wall, but it gave Father enough time to hurtle down the stairs, lunge at the front door and practically fall through it. By the time I got down there, he was a good way towards the woods, being swallowed by the darkness of the night.

Luke and Mary had been woken by Father’s shouting, and as they joined me downstairs, I tried to fill them in as quickly as I could. Mark took a flashlight and followed in Father’s direction, calling out to him, while I stayed with Luke and checked again for anything that might have frightened Father away.

We found nothing. Mary, likewise, came back empty handed. We waited until the light of morning, and then set out as a group to track him down. For hours we searched, combing the forest and the fields, but there was no trace of Father anywhere. In the end, I proposed we call the police.

To be honest, my suggestion wasn’t based on my worry for Father. Instead, it was an opportunity to finally involve the authorities in this sinister situation. If Father did return, we could say we only called them to find him, but once they arrived, we could ensure Mother’s body was properly dealt with, while also filling them in on Joshua’s fate. I owed Joshua that much, and I owed myself that closure.

When the police arrived, they checked in on Mother’s body and informed us of the proper process for getting her a burial. She would be the first in our family to enjoy that privilege, even if she’d never know it. After that, they started a search party for Father. They advised us to contact any friends or family members who would want to help. We had to explain that there weren’t any.

A slow week crawled past, and by the time Father was located, we had all come to expect the news.

The police sat us down with grim faces. They explained that his body was found in the woods far from home. He was covered in cuts and grazes where he must have run through bushes and brambles, but those injuries were superficial. His death came afterwards when, at some point in his haste and confusion, he had tripped.

And impaled himself on a tree.

Three branches; one through each shoulder, one through the legs. He was stuck, unable to move, unable to free himself or get help. They told us it had taken him days to die. I suppose I should have felt bad for him. Or, given what he put us through, maybe I should have been glad that he suffered.

Instead I just felt empty.

In the months that have followed, I’ve done my best to move on, put my past behind me. It’s something I’m becoming used to. I meet up with Mary, Luke and Paul as often as I can, although we’re all busy now, distracting ourselves from our own childhoods as much as possible. My other siblings have drifted away, and I doubt we’ll ever see one another again. I don’t care much, if I’m honest.

Yet when I’m alone at night, without the haste and hassle of the modern world to occupy my thoughts, I’ve often found myself dwelling on Father’s final moments. I can’t help but imagine what he was thinking as he hung on that tree, alone in the woods, the life slowly leeching from his body.

I wonder if he thought about how he spent his time on this earth.

I wonder if he thought about God. And Joshua.

And rabbits.

Submitted April 24, 2019 at 08:13PM by JRHEvilInc http://bit.ly/2DIaNtB