STAY INSIDE! (part 2)
Officer Gurt figured he’d better not go outside, since in Crumb Hill, when weird things happened or messages appeared, it was best to pay attention to them. But he was worried about the rest of the residents. Would they all stay inside? And what about those who didn’t get the newspaper, or simply didn’t look at it?
He looked again at the cryptic poem at the bottom of the last page. Everyone in Crumb Hill knew Dangling Jerry — the little beast who loved to hang from chains and chain smoke. Most of the time, that term means smoking a lot of cigarettes, but for Jerry it meant smoking his chains. He was addicted to them, so he’d smoke them while he hung from them.
But this was strange because there was no way he could pull off a stunt like changing all the copy in all of the newspapers in Crumb Hill. Either he had help, or someone was framing him, or at the very least, pointing to him.
Officer Gurt knew he had to get in contact with Jerry, which would be difficult because Jerry didn’t have a telephone…or even a house. He just hung from his chains in random places around Crumb Hill.
Officer Gurt went upstairs to his bedroom window, which had a decent view over a good portion of Crumb Hill. He stood at the pane and scanned the yards, parks, and houses he could see. Several people were walking around as usual over in Crumb Park, and one couple was walking down his street, about to pass his house.
He yanked the window up and yelled down to them. “Hey, you two!”
The couple looked up and he saw that it was the Nattingers.
“Morning, Officer Gurt!” the man yelled back.
“Didn’t you see the newspaper today??” he shouted, ignoring their greeting.
They stopped walking, intrigued. “No, officer. We stopped getting it years ago. It was nothing but So and so got thrown into The Dimension this week, and such and such monster crawled out of it this week.”
Well now I know which radio stations they’ve been listening to, thought Officer Gurt to himself.
“So you didn’t see the headlines today?” he yelled down to them.
“Well no, why?” shouted up Mr. Nattinger. “What did it say?”
“It just said ‘Stay inside’ over and over. I’m trying to figure out what it means and who wrote it.”
“Oh, what does the article talk about?”
“Nothing. It’s just those two words. Stay inside.”
“Well that’s curious. Can we look at it?”
“Sure.”
He descended the stairs and met them at the front door, careful not to pass through the door frame, just in case. Even though the Nattingers were fine outside, Gurt wanted to be extra cautious. He opened the door and let them in. They walked to the dining room, where Mrs. Gurt sat with the paper on the table.
They greeted each other and the Nattingers looked at the paper for themselves, flipping through the pages and seeing that indeed, each page said the same two words.
“Well,” said Mr. Nattinger, “clearly we were outside and nothing happened. It’s some sort of hoax!” He chuckled to himself and they walked back to the front door.
“Well please be careful,” said Mrs. Gurt warmly.
“We will and have a great day!” called back Mr. Nattinger over his shoulder. They stepped out the front door and Officer Gurt closed it behind them.
A moment later, the Gurts heard screams from outside. The screams lasted only a couple seconds and then stopped. Officer Gurt ran to the front door and looked through the peephole, but saw nothing. Just an empty street in front of their house.
He leapt up the stairs and ran to the window in their bedroom again. He looked down on the street before their house and still saw nothing. It appeared to be just a normal day. The Nattingers had vanished. There was no way they could have made it out of view that fast, yet they were nowhere to be seen.
He descended again to his wife with concern in his eyes. “They’re gone.”
“What happened?” she said, mainly to herself. “They were fine before they came in here…” her voice trailed off.
“Well I don’t know, but I know two things: We are staying inside, and I need to find out how to get in touch with Dangling Jerry.”
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Day 75 of 100 Days of Blog
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