Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

The Elixir

“I promise on everything I hold dear, if you don’t feel mighty different—rejuvenated even—after you take a sip of this here elixir, I’ll give you one thousand dollars. In fact, you can hold it while you take your sip, just so you know I’m not trying to pull the wool over your eyes,” he says, holding out the crisp, new, one-hundred-dollar notes in one hand and a bottle of blue liquid in the other.

“Don’t take me for a fool, boy!” the old man says as he pushes the shotgun’s barrel into the man’s face. “I’ve seen scum like you come to our town promising shit like this before, and you know what? They’re always full of lies, every time, just like you are.”

“P-P-Please, I’m not lying, sir, I swear, this here eli—” But the words don’t get a chance to finish escaping from his lips, as the old man fires the shotgun, removing half the man’s head in the process.

“I said I would, I goddamn warned you, you piece of shit,” he says, gathering saliva and spitting a large wad onto the man’s headless remains that lie on the ground before him. “LEROY! Come out here and clean this fucking mess up,” he yells out. “LEROY!”

“N-No-N-N-Not ye-yet, w-weeeeeee hav-av-haven’t finish-ish-sh-shed ou-ou-our conversation-n-n-n,” the man says as he awkwardly, clumsily gets to his knees, as his head somehow rebuilds itself.

“W-W-What in the blue blazes are you?” the old man says, his eyes growing wide with fear, holding the now shaking shotgun towards him.

“Everything you want to be, and can be,” he says, as he holds out the elixir again. “Do you believe me now?”

“This, this blue stuff, that stuff there, does all that?”

“And more,” he says with a smile, his head now back to how it was before the old man fired his shotgun. He looks at him with hesitation, as the man shakes the bottle and nods his head, smiling. “Go on, you know you want to try it, you know you want to see what it’s like,” he says. The old man grabs it from his hands, rips the lid off, and quickly drains the contents into his mouth, swallowing it down in one breath, then lets out a loud, grotesque burp soon after.

“I don’t feel any different, boy. How long does it take for this miracle shit to work?” the old man asks with a grunt.

“Give it time, old timer. It’ll happen soon enough, and trust me, when it does, we’ll both know,” the salesman says, his smile growing broader. The old man burps again, and then again, feeling the burn of the bubble at the back of his throat. He frantically clutches his chest as the pain rips through him, his eyes widen in terror, his lip trembles, and then he explodes like a balloon overfull with water. “There we go, see? Didn’t I tell you, you’d feel different?”