Jeepers: Creepers

Then the engine coughed. Sputtered. Died.

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. Jeepers Creepers

They ran. The song followed them, not from the corpse, but from above—a rhythmic flap, flap, flap of leathery wings. Riley looked up once. Mistake. Then the engine coughed

Then the singing started again, soft and playful. The voice was a low, ragtime warble, tinny

They drove until dawn. They didn’t speak. They didn’t cry. They just drove. And twenty-three years later, Riley still checks her backseat every time she gets in the car. She still locks the doors before the sun goes down. And she still wakes up some nights, sure she hears it—flap, flap, flap—just outside the window, waiting for the next spring.

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

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.