Jeepers Creepers ★

Jamie screamed. Riley clamped a hand over his mouth, dragging him backward. “Run,” she whispered. “Now.”

“…Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those eyes?”

And then she saw it. A loose board in the wall behind the creature. Beyond it, a glint of metal. An old fuel oil tank. Jeepers Creepers

Then the singing started again, soft and playful.

With her last breath, she grabbed the broken bottle from the floor, still wet with the creature’s own blood, and jammed it into the knothole above—the same eyehole it had used to find them. The creature howled, not in pain, but in shock. Its grip loosened. Jamie screamed

The cellar exploded in a ball of white fire. The creature shrieked—a sound that split the air, that shattered the remaining stained-glass window, that sent every bird for a mile into panicked flight. It thrashed, wings flaming, and crashed up through the church floor, taking half the roof with it.

The night was too quiet. No crickets. No wind. Just the wet crunch of their sneakers on gravel and the smell of turned earth. That’s when they heard it first. A song. “Now

The voice was a low, ragtime warble, tinny like an old phonograph. It drifted from the drainage ditch ahead. Riley slowed. A rusted culvert pipe jutted from the bank, and something was blocking it. Not something. Someone.