I forgot to queue this up in time, so this week it'll be Statospheric Sundays, I guess. It's going to take me forever to charge back up after breaking taboo, again. Sigh.
This is a short story based on the ritual of the same name described in Book 4 of Unknown Armies 3e. I wrote it for the 2025 Jam-o-Ween on the UA fan discord. Next week's post will be my other entry, which will be actual game content.
Content warnings: graphic descriptions of gore, harm to children
BUTTER KNIFE
Mikey woke up to the sobbing of an unfamiliar voice. He held his blanket tight with one hand, and his stuffed hippo with the other. He watched the door to his bedroom, waiting to hear Mommy’s or Daddy’s voice. Sadie, the babysitter, had put him to bed before they came home, but he guessed by the dark poking through the bottom of his window shades they would be home by now.
He heard only the one person, crying in a way he had never heard. It wasn’t a tantrum, which Mommy had told him not to use to get attention. Neither was it quiet, in the way he had seen Daddy cry sometimes, when he thought he was alone. They – he thought maybe it was a woman’s voice, but he wasn’t sure – went from just crying to screaming, too, then back into a low, shaky kind of cry from deep in their chest. It sounded like crying because they were scared.
Mikey was scared, too. But he also felt sad for whoever this grownup was, and a little curious. He wondered what could have made them so upset. He got out of bed and reached up to open the door of his bedroom. Once he was at the top of the stairs, he could tell they were down below, somewhere near the back of his house. He breathed faster as he moved further away from his nightlight, by he didn’t think of the grownup as a stranger, or an intruder. Just another person. He was a timid four-year old. His parents had yet to feel the need to issue any lectures on stranger danger.
By the bottom of the stairs, he could tell they were in the kitchen. He stopped when his foot touched the cold tile of the foyer. The person got quiet suddenly. He thought they might have heard him. They sniffled. He saw through the front door that the street was empty.
There was no more sound from the kitchen for a while, so he snuck closer. Rounding the corner, he thought about how good he was at hide and seek. Mommy always took ages to find him. He calmed down a little. He saw the grownup in the kitchen. It was a man. The only light came through the door to the back porch. It hung open a little, letting in moonlight, and it had a new dent in it on the outside, just above the knob.
The way the man peered over his knees around the room was also less scary. There was something about how carefully he held himself that reminded him of other kids from daycare more than any grownup he’d ever seen. He shuffled a little closer and saw the door to the oven lay open. The man had shrunk into the opposite corner. Something glinted in his hand. He kept looking around the kitchen and seemed to look right past Mikey.
He didn’t know what to think of that, but he waved “hi” anyway. As far as he could tell, the man couldn’t see him, or maybe he was too scared to say hi back. But there was nothing scary that Mikey could see. Maybe he had been chased into their yard by the neighbor, or the neighbor’s big, mean dog, and found his way here.
He kept walking toward the man, but then he changed all of a sudden. He got up fast, standing over Mikey, making fists and an angry face with his jaw clenched. All of a sudden he looked dangerous. He growled like the neighbor’s dog. Then he shook his head just as suddenly, like a fly had gone into his ear. He brought his hands up. They were still in tight fists. He kept growling.
The change in the man and how fast it happened made it impossible not to see him as a grownup and a stranger. Mikey ran right back upstairs.
“Daddy! Daddy!”
Myra’s eyes came open a crack. Dave had adjusted back to sleeping through the night a while ago, but she wasn’t sure she ever would. Her head pulsed with pain as she sat up in bed. Drank too much again. When Mikey saw she was awake – and only then, she couldn’t help but bitterly note – he ran around to her side of the bed and started tugging at her hand instead. What made Dave the one to come to in a crisis? She always ended up dealing with him anyway.
“Mommy! Mommy!”
“What is it, sweetie?” She grabbed her phone as she stroked his hair. Nearly four in the morning. She groaned inside, wishing this was a rarer occurrence.
“There’s a man downstairs!”
This was more original than his usual ploys to worm his way into their bed, but she was half-asleep. Dismissal was still the best tool she had a hand, so she told him to go back to bed. Usually it was better to indulge him a little, tell him Daddy would handle whatever it was he’d come up with to spook himself.
Sooner or later, Mikey would have to realize that his father was just as mortal and flawed as every other man. She took it easy with that because she knew he had his own daddy issues, but sometimes she worried he was unwittingly setting up the same chain of events in their son.
“But there is a man! Wake Daddy up! Make him go see!”
“Sweetie, go back to bed. Daddy’ll go downstairs once you're nice and cozy, and… Uh, talk to him. And make sure everything is OK.”
Apparently that sounded placatory enough, because he left her side, albeit still wide-eyed. She watched until he’d gone back into his room and closed the door most of the way. With him leaving it ajar, he’d no doubt be back again before morning. Maybe she’d just lay there and let him shake Dave awake next time.
Dave snuffled out of sleep with a hand clamped over his nose and mouth. He still let out something of a bellow, eyes searching the darkness to make sense of what was going on. The hand pushed down harder. With only a trace to see by from Mikey’s nightlight down the hall, it took him several seconds of squinting before he trusted the fact that he recognized the face peering down at him. Confusion overwhelmed his fear momentarily. Then he saw the knife, and he resumed his freakout, reflexively reaching for something on his nightstand that might function as a weapon.
“Lay still and shut up.”
And he did, as a grisly vision of his son flashed in front of him. His son, his baby boy, slit open across the belly with one long, rough laceration, blood and viscera just beginning to poke through.
His body was motionless as he came back to it. Questions as to what Eli Hillam was doing in his bedroom with a truly grotesque blade in hand sank beneath abject terror. He saw the jagged edge already dripped blood and forced himself to look to his side. As far as he could tell out of the corner of his eye, he hadn’t hurt Myra yet.
Eli peered down at him, evidently taking in a lot in the nearly total dark. He didn’t look angry or excited, just… Harrowed.
He had drifted in and out of Dave’s classroom almost five years ago. He didn’t like to admit this about any of his students, but he had been forgettable. Quiet, did most of his homework on time, middle of the pack when it came to exams. He’d seemed lonely, but not in any unusual way for a middle schooler. Drew religious symbols in his notebook? Or had that been someone else?
Clearly young adulthood had not been kind. What had begun as the awkward, blotchy beginnings of facial hair when Dave had known him was now an unappealing crust around his mouth. His hair was oily and he smelled like the street, and also like he’d maybe just pissed himself. His dark eyes had receded into restless pits.
Dave wanted to ask what he wanted, but that awful vision of butchery appeared in his mind when he opened his mouth. Eli held the knife up to his mouth as if it was a finger, shushing him. He remained grim, his face barely moving. Dave thought he saw the traces of tear-tracks down his grubby face.
“Get out of bed.”
The vision returned when he hesitated. This time he saw the cut had gone through to his son’s ribcage, which was no bigger than a basketball, and bile rose to his mouth. He leapt up, hoping to purge that horrible sight from his eyes. Somehow, that worked, which left even more troubled. He stared toward Mikey’s room.
“I haven’t touched him,” Eli whispered, mouth close to his ear. He took Dave’s shoulder and steered him toward the bathroom. “Go get your first aid kit.”
Dave recoiled as his mind filled again with his worst fear. He wracked his brain for where Myra kept the damn thing, but all that came up were similarly awful sights of her. Disemboweled as well, with entrails hanging over her shoulder. Her head lay hanging away from her neck just enough for him to tell her throat had been slashed deeply open, despite her facing away from him on their kitchen floor. He started to weep.
“Fuck’s your problem, man?” Eli said, then gritted his teeth. At first Dave thought he was worried about waking Myra up, but then he saw blood along his lower teeth, and his demand made more sense. He noticed a dark patch under the kid’s armpit, and how he held his knife arm awkwardly close to his body above the elbow.
“Don’t get any ideas. Just get me the first aid kit.”
Gore overtook Dave’s eyes again. He opened his mouth to either speak or retch, but could produce nothing.
“Say it,” Eli said, back to speaking right into his ear.
“I don’t know where it is,” Dave said. His voice was tiny. Deep down, under the fear, he was repulsed at how emasculated he was by this slobby teenager. But the way those things came to him every time he gave him a command-- something wasn’t right here. He wondered if it was a nightmare, but couldn’t find any solace in detachment. He was unfortunately as present and alert now as he had ever been in his life. The extent of the detail, the horror he felt each time he saw his massacred family, felt real.
“Fuck!” Eli hissed. The word sent his spit onto Dave’s neck, and he recoiled. Eli gripped his shoulder hard, then pushed him out into the hallway. Despite trying to stay upright, Dave sprawled forward, and as he landed with a thud on the carpeting, the visions wracked him again. Eli ran up and yanked him to his feet. He held the knife toward him not so much like a weapon, but like something volatile he didn’t want too close to him, or even – though the thought felt incongruous – like a magic wand. As if to himself, Eli said,
“I did not go through all this shit just to bleed out!”
As he spoke, Dave saw a shifting of the shadows behind Mikey’s door. His heart sank. He prayed Eli hadn’t noticed.
“Then just… Get me a couple towels and come downstairs,” he said. “Do you have any alcohol? I gotta clean this…” He looked down at the wound in his side, paling as he noticed how much blood continued to seep from it. It ran across most of his hoodie sleeve and right side now. His knife hand shook a little. Still, Dave did what he was told, as best he could in the midst of the waking nightmare Eli was somehow inflicting on him.
A moment later, Eli tucked a towel soaked with isopropyl alcohol he’d found under the bathroom sink under his arm, then bit into his lip to suppress his howl of pain.
“I-I can call you an ambulance,” Dave said.
“Like fuck you can,” Eli said. “Think I’m an idiot? Think the pigs are gonna bail you out? Hell no, man, it’s just you and me. You’re gonna do what I say, or-”
And then they both heard a faint creak of the floor and saw Mikey’s door shift just a millimeter.
“Please-” Dave said, eyes clenched but still bombarded. “I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t hurt my family! Oh, god!” The images got worse as he lost control and his voice climbed in panic. Now he saw them move, saw the blood pour from Mikey as his stubby fingers probed the wound, saw Mira’s chest rise and fall with her dying breaths. It was real. It was happening. There was nothing he could do to stop it.
Daddy lay crying on the floor in front of the man. The man had a knife in one hand now, and he was leaning to one side. The knife was just the kind he got to eat his peas with now he was getting big, not the kind mommy used to cut his sandwiches. He didn’t understand why Daddy was so scared of it. But he was definitely crying from fear. The other man kicked Daddy in the side and then winced in pain himself.
“Useless piece of shit!”
He looked at Mikey. He looked tired and desperate. Mikey thought maybe he needed to lay down. Grownups usually didn’t have problems that could get fixed with laying down or having a snack, he didn’t think, but grownups didn’t usually shout at each other and kick each other, so he didn’t know what would help. The yelling and the bad words scared him, but they shouldn’t scare Daddy.
He noticed a flash of light in Mommy and Daddy’s room as Mommy picked up her phone. She did something with it, but then dropped it on the floor because her hands were shaking really badly. The man in the hallway noticed. He turned around fast. Daddy had started to blink and look around again.
“Dave! Jesus!” Mommy shouted. The other man started walking toward her with the butter knife. Daddy grabbed him by the leg and started to get up, so the man turned around and held it right in his face.
“Don’t you fucking touch me! Don’t call the cops, and don’t let her call the cops, or I’ll make you kill them both!”
And Daddy’s face scrunched up again and he started crying harder, that same kind of crying as the man had done before, the kind of crying that shouldn’t come from grownups, shouldn’t come from anyone. But he still held onto the man’s leg. Then he pulled him down on the floor with him. The man held the knife up over their heads, pointing it right up at the ceiling.
“I said stop, asshole!”
Daddy reached out fast and grabbed him under the arm and he screamed, and dropped the knife. Then Daddy hit him in the face and pulled on his arm and made him scream some more.
Mikey couldn’t watch any more. He turned around and put his back to the door, and he covered his ears and shut his eyes and tried not to listen, either, but the shouting and the crying were too loud, and he could still picture Daddy’s face crushed up with emotions, Daddy’s fist hitting the man in his teeth, the whine he made as he started to beg, the way it faded out until all he could hear was Daddy panting and Mommy saying something he couldn't hear.
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