I never really believed in God or heaven or hell or any of that other religious nonsense. It was too far fetched, too far out there... and had no connection whatsoever to the mediocre existence I lived in the tiny little town I called home near the bank of the Columbia.
All that changed on Sunday, May 18, 1980.
Mom and Dad had gone to church and left me in charge of my little sister Molly and our ugly family dog, Dammit. Molly and I got along okay: She was much younger but she wasn’t a bad kid. Not usually, anyway. She kept to herself, watching TV or playing with her little plastic record player, which is what I found her doing on this particular morning after our parents had gone.
“Hey Moles, what’cha doing?” I asked.
She had just finished winding up her little record player and hit the play button. The little toy began playing “London Bridge is Falling Down” in its high-pitched metal twangs. She sat and listened to the little blue record as it spun in a slow meandering circle.
I didn’t hear it immediately, but after several seconds of music, I noticed that “London Bridge” sounded unpleasant. It wasn’t that it was twangy or cheap. It was wholly different, an octave lower and flat.
The record stopped spinning, but the music continued. I picked up the little plastic record player and shook it, but the music didn’t stop. When I looked at my sister, she was staring back at me, her eyes dead and vacant. The music wasn’t coming from the box, it was coming from her: A perfect mimic of the low octave “London Bridge.”
I took a step forward and called her name, reaching for her shoulder. “Molly?”
She jolted forward as if yanked by unseen strings. Her arms flew up and her hands came to a stop before her face where they suddenly cracked and contorted into unnatural, horrific angles.
I covered my mouth to stifle a sudden scream.
And then came the explosion. A low, loud rumble hit the house with the force of a bomb. The house ruptured with violence as plates and glasses flew out of the cabinets and shattered against the floors.
My sister stood, her arms continuing to twist and pull in random directions, her joints cracking, bending backwards and breaking. They continued to crack and bend as she opened her mouth and started to scream, her scream rising in crescendo with the force of the explosion outside.
It didn’t sound like Molly screaming, though. It sounded like hundreds of men burning alive. I stepped away, my eyes wild with terror, until my back hit a wall.
That’s when Molly’s eyes boiled out of their sockets. Blood ran down her face in a fury of sanguine liquid. Her arms were now so broken they appeared to fling around her tiny body like over-done noodles. She threw her head back as her lips melted away, her jaw bone clearly visible under blood and tissue.
Gore exploded from her mouth and eye sockets. She covered the ceiling with thick, red liquid. The smell was unbearable, like the stink of a rotting corpse.
“Are you okay,” she asked as blood and bile continued to paint the walls in red. Her bloody body and quivering arms reached for me, her head lolling as if on a loose swivel barely attached to her neck.
I blinked. Everything was fine. Normal. Molly stood before me, looking me over with questioning eyes. “London Bridge” filled my ears with its beautiful, cheap twang.
