“…Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those eyes?”
Then the engine coughed. Sputtered. Died.
Jamie screamed. Riley clamped a hand over his mouth, dragging him backward. “Run,” she whispered. “Now.”
“Gonna get you, too…”
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.
“Every twenty-three years,” it whispered, tapping a claw on its chin. “Twenty-three springs. I wake up. I eat. For twenty-three days. Then I sleep. And you, little mice, are the first course.”
The cellar door ripped off its hinges. Riley grabbed a broken bottle, held it like a knife. The creature descended, its wings folding tight to its body. Up close, it reeked of copper and formaldehyde. It didn’t attack. It just crouched, tilting its head side to side, studying them like a taxidermist examining fresh pelts. Jeepers Creepers
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.
It lunged. Riley shoved Jamie through the church’s broken door and slammed it shut. The wood splintered instantly as a claw punched through, retracted, punched again. They scrambled over pews, into the dusty apse. A stained-glass window of a saint watched them with serene, indifferent eyes.
Riley grabbed Jamie and ran. They didn’t stop. They ran through the burning church, through the graveyard, past the corpse in the culvert, whose mouth had finally fallen silent. They reached the Impala. The keys were still in the ignition. “…Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those eyes
The last thing they heard, fading into the static of the radio, was a single, scratchy line:
“Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those peepers…”
A floorboard creaked directly above their heads. A single yellow eye peered through a knothole, blinking slowly. Jamie screamed