Bat out of Hell by Alan Gold

Author:Alan Gold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yucca Publishing
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

9

HENDERSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

Little Jessie Marquis turned right out of the school gates and, under strict instructions from her mom, walked home along the pavement and well away from the roadside toward her home on Wilmont Drive in Hendersonville, a township in the eastern part of North Carolina.

She looked around to see who else from her class was walking in her direction. Most were met by their moms or older sisters, even a grandma or grandpa, but Jessie’s mom and dad were working and so she had to walk home alone from school. Not that she minded because unless it was raining, she loved the ten-minute walk and used her imagination to peer through the hedgerows and try to see what lay behind in the hidden garden.

She was deep in her imagination, flying around a garden holding hands with a beautiful fairy, when suddenly she felt something real fly into her head. For the first instance she was unsure of whether she imagined it or whether it really happened, but when she felt something twisting and turning in her hair and scratching her scalp, she reached up to her head, felt something warm and furry, and screamed.

The little eight-year-old’s hysterical screams of distress attracted a small group of parents who were holding hands with their children as they, too, walked home. Mothers ran over to Jessie to see why she was panicking. There were no strangers about, no cars or motorcycles, because this was a quiet part of town, and people helped other people when there were problems. And suddenly, for no visible reason, a little girl was standing on the pavement, frantically flicking her hair and screaming as if she’d been stung by a bee.

“What is it, honey?” asked a mother, looking anxiously around. The child didn’t answer but frantically pulled at her hair trying to dislodge something. The mother looked closely at Jessie’s head, and then she too screamed as a small Indiana bat dropped out of the girl’s hair and onto the ground.

Horrified, mothers hid their children from the bat as it lay on the ground, squirming, struggling to flap its wings and eventually hiding its body in the flaps of its arms until it lay silent and barely moving other than an odd twitching.

Jessie stamped her feet in horror as she looked at the bat and wouldn’t stop her screaming. The mother put her arm around the little girl but try as she might, the mother couldn’t comfort her, and Jessie continued to look in terror at the bat twitching on the pavement. Other mothers, equally horrified, gripped their children and pulled them away so they couldn’t see the bat in its death throes.

Marlene Devoss bent down and held her arms tighter and tighter around Jessie to comfort her and asked, “Darlin’, how’d you get the bat in your hair?”

Crying and still distressed, Jessie sobbed, “I don’t know. It just got there. I was just walking and then I felt it. It was so horrible.”

“Okay, darlin’. First thing I’m going to do is to call your mommy.

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