Bob Boyd's Mini Stories

I always brought a first aid kit with me when I went hiking. I never dreamed I’d get to use it the way I did when I went hiking in the Obo Chobi mountains near the small village I live in. The sun shone on the land. Daisies swayed in the spring breeze. Clouds shaped like flowers floated in the sky.

I heard something moaning, like a wounded animal. The sound came from behind a pine tree near me. I edged toward the tree and cautiously peered around it. What looked like a space alien child lay before me trembling and gasping for breath. It had a small, gray body with spindly arms and sinewy legs. I saw fear in its large almond-shaped, black eyes. A dark liquid gushed out of the side of its head. I guessed a bullet had grazed it, and the dark liquid was its alien blood color.

Seeing a wounded species that I thought would die if it lost more blood, my need to help it overshadowed my fear. I spoke softly to it, staring into its large, worried, black eyes with a look of concern.

Stretching my hands slowly toward the alien child, I said, “Don’t worry. I’m here to help you. I’m here to fix that wound. It’s okay. I’m going to help you.”

Somehow it understood me. A calmness replaced the fear in its eyes. I wondered if it spoke English. I wondered what it was doing by itself in these woods. Maybe, like earth kids, it had run away. But, from where?

I stopped the alien’s bleeding with a gauze pad. I applied antiseptic cream to the wound and wrapped bandages around its head. I offered it some water, not knowing if it drank water. Its eyes met mine, and I heard a thank you in my head, as it drank some water.

“Who wounded you?” I asked, thinking a hunter might have been spooked by it and started shooting in fear.

I saw a burly, bearded hunter in my mind, like when I imagine things. The hunter chased the alien child and shot at it. I saw a huge, black bear leap on the hunter, bite and claw him, and drag him away with the hunter screaming the last screams of his life. The scene vanished, and the alien faded away right in front of me. I wondered where it went, to another dimension or maybe an alien craft, like beaming up into a Star Trek space ship.

After the alien child’s mysterious exit, I was exhilarated. Excitement burst in me, like I’d inhaled a drug and become mind-blowingly high. I wanted to tell everyone in my village about the alien child and my experience with it. I jogged out of the forest with thoughts of that racing through my mind.

After I got in my old Chevy Pick Up and motored down the road to the village, I remembered how a guy named Howie Noones told everyone he’d seen aliens. And everyone said he’d had his tin hat on when he drank the I-see-aliens Kool-Aid. I remember saying he must have been drunk or on drugs and hallucinated. He became the laughing stock of the village, and nobody believed him. The village folk were not surprised a few months later when he got committed to a psychiatric hospital and never came out.

I realized if I told my alien story I’d meet with derision. The village folk would call me the second coming of Harry Noones and make jokes about me behind my back. They’d lose respect for me. They’d think I was just another raving lunatic. I wondered if I would get committed to a psychiatric hospital for telling the truth about an alien and get locked in there for the rest of my life. I decided to keep my mouth shut and not risk being labeled a looney.

Bob Boyd

He had met her on a dating site and didn’t believe the things simps said about her in a chatroom. They said she was bad news and to stay away from her. One wrote run away from her. Another wrote, if you want to go on living, do not get involved with this dangerous witch of a woman.

He thought those were the whinings of beta men she rejected. And as beautiful as she was, few men would be worthy of her. He felt flattered and honored to know he was one of those men she had deemed worthy.

The first date was wonderful! So many things in common, so much fun. She was highly intelligent and witty. He felt she had the makings of a soulmate. Date number two, even better. He felt like she was growing on him and he was beginning to fall in love with her. For the third date, she invited him for dinner at her cottage secluded in a forest. When he arrived at her cottage that evening, it was far from other houses. He worried about her safety, being a woman living alone in such an isolated location.

When he knocked at her door, she opened it, smiled a big smile, and greeted him dressed in black, which reminded him of the simp in the chat room who wrote she was “a dangerous witch of a woman.” She gave him a kiss, said she was glad to see him, and invited him in. She said she had prepared a pasta dinner for him with wine to drink and hoped he liked her cooking. The dinner was delicious he said after he sated himself and got a little tipsy on the wine.

After dinner, she took him by the hand and led him to her bedroom. When she undressed, he glimpsed a black widow spider tattooed on her chest. Noticing him looking at her tattoo, she laughed and said, “I know it’s weird, but I just like those spiders.”

Having sex on his mind, he didn’t respond to her strange liking of those horrible spiders. He embraced her and began making love to her. But when they consummated, he felt weak and passed out. As he lay on her bed unconscious, she placed a tarp under his body. She retreated to her kitchen and took an electric carving knife out of a cabinet drawer. Back in the bedroom, she turned it on and sliced his head off with it, just like a black widow spider kills the male black widow spider after copulating with it.

She wrapped his body and his head in the tarp, dragged it out to her garden, and buried it alongside the three other men buried there. Pleased with herself, she smiled, skipped back into her cottage, and answered the email of her next doomed suitor.

Bob Boyd

With his second sight, he knew the werewolf was stalking him, as he strolled through the moonlit park that night. He knew it was an apex werewolf with exceptional stealth because it didn’t give itself away by howling, and it silently followed him. He acted as if he didn’t know he was in the werewolf’s sights. Inexplicably, he seemed nonchalant despite the impending doom.

But he was no ordinary human, and he was armed and formidable. When the werewolf came upon him howling and about to rip him to shreds, he wheeled around, grinned, leaped in the air, and sliced off the werewolf’s head with his samurai sword and superhuman cyborg reflexes.

Bob Boyd

An old man with a heart problem needed his walks to salvage what was left of his ticker. He had become fearful of taking those morning strolls because a pit bull moved into his neighborhood. The pit bull owners had been responsible in keeping their dangerous dog on a leash and behind a tall fence in their backyard. But the old man had seen stories on the news about pit bull attacks across America. Sometimes those dogs killed people, and at eighty-five years of age, he wouldn’t have a chance against a ferocious dog intent on killing him. He’d remembered the news story about an old woman whose daughter’s two pit bulls mauled her to death. What a horrible way to go out of this world. Hopefully, her death was quick.

On a foggy morning, his fear became a reality. The pit bull silently stalked him as he shuffled down Oak Street balancing on a quad cane. A tear formed in his left eye. He was thinking about his beloved Chihuahua, Prince, who had passed a year hence. His mind fixated on fond memories of Prince, he failed to perceive the approaching danger behind him.

The pit bull growled and lunged at the old man knocking him to the ground, his glasses flying off his face. Both hands on his cane, he blocked the dog’s attack with the cane against its neck. The dog was far stronger. Just as it was about to break through the old man’s defense and sink its teeth into his neck, the old man heard Prince’s bark coming out of the ether. In a millisecond, he saw Prince’s fiery spirit race through the pit bull’s body, severing it in half like a buzz saw from the beyond, the stink of death in the air, blood streaming on the ground.

The old man struggled off the ground. He gasped for breath feeling unbearable spasms of pain in his chest and dropped to the ground dead. Prince met him in the afterlife and guided him through the tunnel of Light and into the heavens.

Bob Boyd

Marcus and his brother Charles had been digging up graves looking for a vampire that had been terrorizing their town and turned a dozen people into vampires. They had hunted and destroyed the infected twelve. But the apex vampire had eluded them, and none of the graves contained it. Whoever or whatever it was, it seemed invincible.

Then with a tip from an elderly woman who claimed she saw the vampire sneak into a nearby building before the sun came up, provided Marcus and Charles with a good lead. When they reached the building, it was an old abandoned building. With wooden stakes and mallets in hand, they cautiously crept into the building. They searched all through the two story building but didn’t find the vampire’s liar.

Dusk turned to night. They lit their flashlights. Then they heard a baby crying beneath them on the first floor. They found a trap door and climbed down the ladder attached to the door. When they reached the bottom, they saw the baby crying. Marcus immediately rushed to pick up the baby to rescue it. But as he picked it up, fangs protruded out of its mouth and it sunk them into Marcus’s throat.

Charles, shocked by the harmless baby being a vampire, ripped it off of Marcus and hammered his wooden stake into it. The baby morphed into an adult vampire and slowly expired. Marcus with blood seeping out of the two holes in his neck, turned to Charles and said, “I’m doomed. You know what to do,” and handed his wooden stake to Charles.

Charles said, “Marcus I can’t do it. You’re my brother.” Marcus snatched the stake out of Charles’s hands, positioned it in the center of his chest and leaped on the ground. The wooden stake embedded in his chest. He said, “I love you brother. Tell mom I said goodbye.” Marcus closed his eyes and died.

Bob Boyd

After his head nearly smashed through the windshield of his car in an auto accident, Mark developed an unusual ability. He could see auras around people’s heads that looked like halos. Some people’s auras were grey, others were white, some a glowing white. Those he felt were saintly.

His girlfriend, Gina, had a white aura, and he felt lucky to be with her, the woman he was going to marry. He had decided to propose to her when they were going to dinner that night. But that night before their dinner date, she called him and said she couldn’t go to dinner with him because she had fallen in love with another man. She hoped they could be friends. His heart crushed, he dropped his cell phone and broke down crying.

He saw her a week later in passing with her new love, a tall blonde haired man. But the man had a black aura, which he sensed meant the man was soulless and capable of evil. He called Gina after he had seen her with that man and tried to warn her. When he told her how he could see auras that that man’s aura was black, which meant he was evil, Gina thought he was having a breakdown over her leaving him. You need to get counseling, she told him before she turned off her call phone, ignoring his warning.

A year later, Gina and the man got married. Mark wondered if he’d been wrong about the black aura since Gina was happy and the couple were made for each other, according to what mutual friends told him. But the next time he saw Gina, her aura had turned black like the man’s she had married. He wondered what that meant, and thought maybe the auras he saw were imaginary, as if his head injury had caused him to have some kind of mild mental health condition.

But when he saw on the news that Gina had been arrested for helping her husband hire a hitman to murder his ex-wife so he could have custody of their kids and not have to pay child support, Mark was shocked that Gina had let the man influence her like that. And he knew his aura readings were not a symptom of a mental health condition.

Bob Boyd

At 2 AM, I heard a soft knocking on my apartment door. Cautiously, I peered through the peephole and saw a little girl about eight years old with unusually bright blue eyes. I opened the door worried for her. I wondered what a child was doing wandering around at 2 AM in the morning, and I’d never seen eyes quite like hers.

“Can I have some food?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. “What are you doing out at this hour? Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m okay. I’m always out at this time.”

“You should be home in bed. Where are your parents?”

“What are parents?” she said.

“Your mother and father?”

She gave me a puzzled look, and I decided it was more important to get her some food than interrogate her. I warmed up a slice of pizza and poured her a glass of cola. She sat at my table and ate the pizza ravenously as if she hadn’t had any food in days.

When she finished, she gave me a little hug, and I felt heat in my heart. For a moment I wondered if I was going to have another heart attack like the one I had six months earlier. When she let go of me, the heat subsided, and I felt relieved my heart seemed okay.

The little girl said, “I have to go now.”

“Can I call your parents or give you a ride home?” I said, worried about her being out at that hour.

“No, I’m more okay than you could imagine,” She said smiling, and turned toward the door.

I was surprised she exuded such confidence. But, when she left my apartment, I decided to follow her from a distance to protect her if necessary, so she would get home safely. I hoped she wasn’t a homeless little girl. About a hundred yards into her walk in a seedy side of the city, a man leaped out of the shadows to grab her. When his hands touched her, his entire body lit up as if struck by lightning, and he fell to the ground dead, his burned-up corpse smoking.

Shocked and astonished by what I saw, I wondered who or what that little girl was and felt the urge to run away from her. Just as I was about to sprint home, green lights shone down on her. Frozen in place, unable to run, I looked up and saw a UFO hovering above. Just like in the movies, it beamed her up into the UFO and it vanished, probably into some other dimension. I went home shaken by what I’d seen. I couldn’t sleep that night and it took me a month to get over the nerve-rending aftereffects of that night. When I went for my three-month checkup for my heart condition, my cardiologist said my heart had mysteriously healed itself. I knew the little alien girl had gifted me with that.

I never saw her after that bizarre night. I wondered why she picked me to visit and why I often have dreams of aliens and other worlds since then. Sometimes I wonder if her visit was a precursor to aliens abducting me someday, as if she was like a scout seeking humans to abduct for unknown reasons. Or if those dreams of aliens and other worlds were actual abductions of me that my mind blanked out except for glimpses in dreams. I guess I’ll never know for sure.

Bob Boyd

My dog Amadeus had been a loving Lab that never hurt anyone or anything. On a half moon night, that all changed.

I’d let him out and he started barking at something in the spooky woods behind my house. I write spooky because as far back as I can remember people in my small town in upstate New York called the woods behind my house spooky woods. They circulated all sorts of rumors about those spooky woods; an Indian burial ground was in them; a vortex was there and interdimensional beings traveled in and out of it; Bigfoot, Dogman, Mothman, and other cryptids frolicked in those woods according to many supposed sightings; hikers often disappeared there; Satanists sacrificed kids in those unhallowed woods, and some called it the Devil’s playground.

I never saw any of that. It was poppycock. The nonsense of people with too much time on their hands and probably some with mental health problems. But when Amadeus ran into those woods and didn’t return until the next night, I had to rethink my beliefs about the spooky woods being benign. He snarled when he saw me, as if I was an enemy or an intruder in my own yard. His eyes had changed. The word eerie comes to mind. No. I have a better word, demonic. His eyes remind me of the name of a poem, The Hounds of Hell. Had I been a believer in hell, and if I didn’t know Amadeus was really a loving Lab, I would have thought Amadeus had been sent from Satan to do the Devil’s work. Amadeus looked that evil that night.

At that moment while I was dwelling on Amadeus’s growling and evil eyes, a toddler named Brently stumbled and yelled Mama in my neighbor’s yard across the street. Amadeus’s eyes glowed. He growled like a demon from hell and dashed toward the child. I spied his mother, Audrey, and yelled, “Get Brently in the house! Quick! Get him in the house! My dog’s gone crazy and he’s after him!”

Audrey scooped up Brently just in time and ran to her house. She opened the door but Amadeus sank his teeth into her leg and trapped her in his jaws before she could get in. She shoved Brently into the house and slammed the door knowing she couldn’t get herself in. Amadeus had too good a hold on her leg, which began bleeding profusely. Audrey hit Amadeus on his head and body many times, but her strikes had no effect. They seemed to energize Amadeus to bite harder and growl more like a devil dog.

I started running to rescue Audrey. Just as I reached Amadeus, he seized and shook Audrey’s body like a rag doll. I tried to grab him but with supernatural strength and speed, he sped away from me with Audrey’s leg still in his jaws and her body dragging on the ground, as if she weighed no more than a feather. I sprinted after him but I wasn’t fast enough to catch him. His speed increased like the speed of a jaguar, and he vanished into the woods with Audrey.

When I reached the woods, I saw no sight of Amadeus or Audrey. I feared Audrey was dead. Curiously, I saw no signs of the blood that had been pouring out of her leg. None on the ground, or the bushes. To this day that still puzzles me.

That was the last time I saw Audrey or Amadeus. The police searched the woods as did the National Guard and various volunteer groups. The searches went on for three months, but no one ever found any traces of Audrey or Amadeus. It was as if the horrifying Incident had been paranormally erased from the spooky woods.

The townspeople said Amadeus dragged Audrey to hell. I began thinking they may have been right, and that they may have been right about all the things they said about the spooky woods that I thought were foolish superstitions. Eventually, I became such a believer in their dark tales and so afraid of something else terrible happening around me or to me, that I sold my house, packed up my stuff, and left that town and the spooky woods forever.

Bob Boyd

“Why did you bring that evil-looking doll into our home?” I asked my wife Gena.

“There’s nothing evil about it. It was a sweet gift from the nice lady at the Thrift Store,” she said.

But I wasn’t so sure. The damn thing had evil eyes that surprisingly my wife couldn’t see.

“She has the cutest eyes,” she said when she showed the doll to me for the first time.

I couldn’t figure out why what was obvious to me wasn’t to my wife.

Did the doll show different sides of itself to different people? Was it that deceptive and supernatural?

Then I started thinking about how people showed different sides of themselves to different people, like the way they acted with close friends compared to how they acted with people they didn’t know as well. I had to stop that line of thought when I considered that I was giving human attributes to a lifeless doll. Yet, I remembered hearing about evil dolls who did have human attributes. And some dolls gave people eerie feelings because the dolls had scary eyes.

Our dog, a feisty Chihuahua named Taco, knew the doll was evil. He barked and growled at it when he first saw it.

“See?” I said to my wife. “Even Taco knows the doll is evil.”

“Oh, hush,” she said. “Taco growls and barks at people and things all the time. He’s just high strung.”

I knew better. Just like dogs can hear sounds we can’t, I believed Taco had a heightened perception for detecting evil. But it may have been at the cost of his life. The first night the evil doll was in our home, we found Taco dead the next morning.

“I know your devil doll did this,” I told my wife.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Taco was 15 years old and many dogs die when they are old. It was just a coincidence, a sad coincidence. I miss Taco. He was a good dog.” My wife’s eyes teared up.

“Maybe you’re right about the coincidence,” I said, not wanting to argue with my wife, especially when she was so sad over Taco dying, and I realized she had a point. Taco was an old dog and his death could easily have been a coincidence. But still ….

After Taco died, I walked past the doll and punched it in the head. I couldn’t help myself. I hated that doll so much it felt good to hit it, but, granted, it was immature behavior.

Shortly after I hit the doll, I got a wicked headache and severe dizziness. I fell to the floor barely able to talk and unable to get up. My wife called 911. I got diagnosed at the ER with a stroke and returned home in a wheelchair. Luckily, I was able to talk, and the doctor at the ER told me after I started my treatment plan and did some rehab, I’d be out of the wheelchair soon.

I knew that goddamn devil doll caused the stroke. When I arrived home and saw it in my wife’s arms, I swear for a few seconds it had an evil smile on its face. At that moment, my hatred for the doll increased a hundredfold. Reining in my anger, I silently vowed to kill the devil doll and rid our house of its curse.

That night after my wife fell asleep, I wheeled into the kitchen and pulled a steak knife out of the knife drawer. I wheeled back into the bedroom and reached for the doll that was in our bed next to my wife. Though it seemed to have supernatural powers, it offered no resistance when I yanked it off the bed by the neck. Capitalizing on that, I quickly sawed the doll’s head off with the steak knife. I wheeled out to the kitchen with the doll’s head and body in my lap. I unrolled a trash bag from the roll of trash bags kept in a cabinet in the kitchen. I spread the trash bag out and put the doll’s head and body into it. I wheeled it out to our condo’s dumpster and threw the bag in it, relieved to be finally rid of the devil doll.

After I wheeled back into our condo, I didn’t have the energy to hoist myself into our bed. I fell asleep in the wheelchair at the foot of it. When I woke up, my wife wasn’t in our bed. In her place lay the devil doll with its head intact. A horrible thought entered my mind. As if reading my thoughts, the devil doll sat up and smiled the most wicked smile I’d ever seen. Too distraught to be terrified by the devil doll’s animations, I wailed and wailed as I wheeled to the dumpster.

Bob Boyd

When I was nine, I had two friends the same age, Andy and Bart. Bart was the brave one. Andy and I were the chickens. Bart would climb high trees while Andy and I watched in wonder. Bart was the fearless daredevil. I never understood how he could be so brave and do dangerous things. Like when he ran in front of a moving train just in time for it to miss him by a few feet. Or when he climbed up the top of a school gym building that had only small ridges to grab onto.

In the summer of 2003, our parents took the three of us to the Sequoia National Park in California. Bart, Andy, and I went exploring there. We saw thick, giant trees and weaved in and around them. They were amazing to see. After walking for about ten minutes, we saw a small cave with an entrance about five feet in height.

“Let’s go in,” Bart said.

“No way,” I said.

“There might be a bear in there,” Andy said, staring at the mouth of the cave.

I agreed. Something seemed spooky about that cave, and Andy was right. There could have been a bear there. From what I’d seen on TV, you didn’t ever want to mess with a bear, especially a mother bear with cubs.

“Bart, don’t go in there. It’s too risky,” I said.

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” Bart said and marched toward the cave. He ducked his head and walked into it looking like he was just taking a casual stroll.

“Come on in,” Bart yelled with an echo.

“Come out of there,” I yelled, worried for Bart.

He didn’t answer, and he was quiet for the next fifteen minutes.

“Bart! Bart!” Andy and I called, but he didn’t answer.

“C’mon, Bart, quit kidding around. We’re worried about you,” I yelled.

“Should we go in after him?” Andy said.

“No way,” I said, too scared to go in there.

After half an hour, we decided to go back to the camp where our parents were. We told them we were worried that Bart was lost in the cave. Our parents told us to show them where Bart was. We led them to the cave, and braver than Andy and I, they went into the cave calling Bart, but we didn’t hear him answer. After a while, we couldn’t hear our parents calling Bart anymore.

“Do you think we should go in there and look for them?” I said to Andy, not really wanting to go in because I feared we would never come out.

“No way,” Andy said, and we waited for everyone to come out.

Neither Bart nor our parents came out. When it got dark, Andy and I tramped back to the campsite and went to bed hoping Bart and our parents would be back at the campsite in the morning. We woke up alone. We hiked to the forest rangers’ station and told them what had happened. They told us there were no caves where we said the cave was.

We led them to the cave, but it wasn’t there. We and the rangers searched all over the park where it had been and never found it.

“But our parents and Bart are lost then,” Andy said.

“We’ll find them,” the rangers assured us.

They searched for days, then weeks, and never found Bart or our parents. Luckily for Andy and me we both had grandparents who took us in and adopted us. To this day twenty years later, we have no idea what happened to Bart or our parents. It was as if the national park swallowed them.

Bob Boyd

Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
— Luke 10:19

Reverend Notts, a brawny, big-eyed man was one of the best snake handling preachers in the Appalachian Mountains bar none. He’d handled rattlers for years. He claimed he felt the power of the Holy Spirit enter into him as he took up serpents. He danced wildly, possessed by the Holy Spirit, and ecstatic, while he talked in tongues to the rattlers.

On Christmas Eve in 1953, he made the mistake of trying his luck with an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, one of the most dangerous rattlers on the planet. When holding the rattler, he started hooping and hollering and talking so much gibberish that the rattle had had enough of his nonsense.

Exasperated with Reverend Notts, it reared back, hissed, and bit him on the neck, delivering a massive amount of deadly hemotoxic venom, enough to kill a bull elephant.

The Reverend, as mad as a raging bull, bit the rattler back on its neck. They both fell to the ground unconscious. The Diamondback rattler died, the Reverend more venomous than the ratter lived.

Bob Boyd

Even as a baby, he had an evil look about him. So, it wasn’t surprising that my kid brother became a bully and always got in trouble in grade school. He was destined for infamy. Our parents were sure he’d end up in prison. He had an incredibly high IQ, which made him doubly dangerous. When a little older, he began torturing and offing neighbor’s pets and not getting caught, I wasn’t surprised.

The signs were there. I knew like beasts in jungle born to kill, he was born to kill and a bit more, to kill and torture people. Because he was my kid brother, I didn’t want to believe what I knew – that he was destined to become a serial killer. I stuffed what I knew deep in my mind and locked it away.

I left home at 18, when my brother was in the 9th grade of high school and still getting in trouble. I joined the Army, having no skills and not cut out for college, with the hope of getting some training I could use for a good job when I got out. I was thrust into a deadly war zone, a place I never wanted to be in. I didn’t sign up to be killed or have to kill. But after killing a few enemy soldiers, I learned I loved to kill, a compulsion that gave me thrills and made me unimaginably high.

When I came home from the military 8 years later, I lost control of my civilian restraints. The compulsion to kill, the thrills and the high, ruled me. I became the serial killer I always thought my brother would be. My brother became a pastor, perhaps because God delivered him from his demonic infamy, and service to God was my brother’s way of thanking Him. Even our parents said he’d changed and called it an act of God.

I sit in a prison cell, the clock ticking down the days till my execution. I keep tearfully praying to God, begging for forgiveness for my murderous sins and some leniency when I die. My pastor brother is praying for me too. I hope despite the seven women I murdered, he hears my and my pastor brother’s prayers and doesn’t send me forever to Hell.

Bob Boyd