The Devil's Hour Presents, "Sinistrous Lepus"

"The knives felt like the gnashing of a thousand teeth devouring me faster than the promise of a family was supposed to."

“Hello, My Nasties! You are starting to feel that chill move up your spine. That breath at your ear that tells you there is a presence just beyond your senses.”

The slow bass of “Rabbit in Your Headlights” by UNKLE feat. Thom Yorke slides away as a sultry voice wafts into your dark bedroom. Your headphones feel ethereal as the low thud of a heart pulsates low under the sounds of the night. 

“Helena Pretorius is with you. My heart beats under your floorboards. My breath chills your skin.” 

A beat passes, and you feel your bed shake with the rhythm as the heartbeat grows louder. You move from the bed to the floor, placing your hands upon the wood, trying to feel the thrumming that is slowly taking over your mind.

“What is that moving around below you? How have you not realized what was going on right under your feet?”

You feel it now. Something is moving, tapping on the floor. Tapping in time with the rhythm of the beat. Tapping in time with your own increasing heart rate. 

“You have found your way through the darkness to 666 kHz. I am Helena Pretorius.”

Something howls far off in the night. Beyond your windows, across the airwaves.

“The clock has stuck the Devil’s Hour, and it is time for a story.”

Another beat of the heart and then a scream tears through the ether just behind your head. You throw the headphones to the floor. You have to stop listening. 

Under the floorboard, the beating of a rushing heart still thrums. 

You pick up the headphones once more and slide them worriedly back in place. 

“...of the Middle-Class can be soul-crushing. Why not get a pet? Something to love, cherish, and sacrifice your family to…” 

It wasn’t until the night of my death that I finally believed our pet rabbit was a Necromancer. 

I now see that I should have known earlier. There had been hints and foreshadowing. There had even been her actual shadow, a pitch and smoky imp that bent around corners and stole teeth from under my daughter’s pillow. 

The rabbit had arrived at my door one day nestled in an old egg hunt basket. The rainbow threads of wicker splintered and jagged. A decoration that would have cost pennies new but had just enough faded luster to attract my wife’s eye at a high-end antique store. Spread among the chocolate eggs surrounding the bunny was a tattered yellow note that read, “I am Laquita Bloodmoon. The frame of your house was built on the tombs of baleful dead. Please, take me in and feed me blood cabbage until my powers are restored.” 

I had taken this as farce, a practical joke by pagan neighbors who loved to screw with the Presbyterians. They had hung the severed head of a four-point buck on my front door two nights before. “A little joke,” I told my wife as I promised to research that privacy fence we had talked about last time the pagans had celebrated a bacchanal

For days after I accepted the rabbit into my home and the children, unaware of the sinister proclamation, had christened it Ms. Hopper, the neighbors would cross my yard in robes that covered very little of their lithe bodies, only to hand me small nylon sacks of what they called, “the eldritch seed of the blood-cabbage.” I tossed them in the trash and bought cheap green leaf lettuce from Piggly Wiggly.

My life passed in the blissful ignorance of my mundane world. I didn’t even notice the crimson lacquer of the moon as I stepped out of my car that night. I walked through the kitchen and grabbed a beer. Then, moved into my comfy chair to recover from a hard day at work, put my feet up, and turned the game on. The house was quiet, and I was glad for it. Wherever my family was, I hoped they stayed there for hours. 

I had almost drifted to sleep when I started to hear the chanting from the basement. I called for anyone in the house, but there was no answer, just the steady and rhythmic drone from below.

Creeping down the stairs, I found my wife and children marching around our bunny. Each carried knives from the block by the sink in our updated stainless steel kitchen. Laquita Bloodmoon’s black pelt glistened in the light of the candles stacked around the center of the concrete room. She chanted in a tongue that sounded almost human, yet the language was much older than my pop-culture American. 

My five-year-old stabbed me first.

His earlier dictum that he wanted to marry his mother and saw a future in Ninjutsu flashed through my mind like the oracle’s presage that it should have been. I could see the tentacles of crimson capillaries in the whites of his eyes. His shadow loomed over me, much larger than his small form should ever cast.

Before I could protest, the others had turned on me as well. My socks slipped on the blood that pooled at my feet, and I went down hard onto the concrete. The knives felt like the gnashing of a thousand teeth devouring me faster than the promise of a family was supposed to. 

I opened my eyes sometime later. My cold, stiff body was laid out in a quixotic and ancient configuration, drawn from my currant-shaded flood. I stood and looked at my new mistress as she rested in the lap of a fetch who used to be my daughter. She twitched her nose once, and I went to find a spade. It was time to plant the blood cabbage. 

My rabbit was a necromancer, and by the elder gods, she was hungry. 

"Sinistrous Lepus" first appeared in a slightly different form in anthology, Scary Snippets: Easter Edition.

Check out “Rabbit in Your Headlights” by UNKLE feat. Thom Yorke