Short horror and strange imaginings; all these bits and pieces belong to me unless stated otherwise.
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Rene is the next to leave. Jon walks him to the door and for a moment Holly is left all alone in the living room. She looks around, suddenly aware of how startlingly quiet it is, movie paused, Jon’s parents away for the weekend. There’s no traffic on the street and, save Rene and Jon’s muted voices filtering through from the foyer, it’s dead quiet. She becomes uncomfortably aware of her own heartbeat, but that may just be the fading effects of the pot they all smoked.
Blackjack—
—The name tears through her like a bullet. She sits up suddenly and puts her hand to her chest, trying her damndest to fight back the abrupt oncoming a panic attack. Her heart is beating so fast. Why is it beating so fast? She’s suddenly finding it hard to breathe.
“Holly?”
“Kerry! Where you going, man?”
Kerry turned around. Josh was standing on the bottom of the hill, waving up at him. Kerry blinked. “What?”
He jogged up the hill to meet him. “I said, where you going, man?”
Kerry blinked again. “Into the woods.”
Josh sighed. “Listen, if this is about Sarah, you need to let that shit go. Forget her, man. Fuck it. She’s gone and that’s that.” He gave him a sympathetic look. “Come back to the fire with us.”
“Sarah?”
Amanda had never been terribly fond of her grandmother, but with the funeral more than a week behind her, she found her thoughts turning to her periodically. Little thoughts and long forgotten memories. The smell of her grandmother’s apartment and of her hair, the corduroy texture of her recliner and matching couch, the smoothness of the varnished coffee table—rising up to her out of the fog, seemingly from nowhere.
Before the funeral, she’d been allowed to go through her grandmother’s apartment and pick through her personal affects—assuming her mother, snobby aunt or piggish uncle hadn’t claimed them first. She hadn’t been in the apartment in years, so it’d felt surreal to walk through it then. Like stepping through a tear in the fabric of space and time. She’d felt like a little girl again. The same brownish hue that covered everything, like the walls and furniture were rotting away and crumbling to dust. Her eyes traveled across the ancient clock hanging above the sagging television set—that TV was at least a decade older than she was—across the endless shelves of novelty plates and ceramic elephant figurines. She’d swept the house at least twice and yet, guiltily, she’d found nothing worth taking. Nothing that hadn’t made her stomach churn a little, anyway. She’d gagged trying to imagine any of these things sitting on the shelves in her apartment. How could anyone, let alone someone in her family, have such awful taste in decorations?
I’d rather not say how I got my hands on this report, but this is a brief summary of its entire contents:
When the police had found him, he was splayed out on his couch, a line of ants swarming around the spilled bowl of popcorn on his belly. The ants were slowly working their way from the dwindling food to his putrid flesh, picking deep. The photographer snapped photos all around the room, taking careful documentation of his twisted, unrecognizable face and the long, trailing tendrils that had once been his fingers.
It was these two things that had the medical examiners so confused. His fingers were each approximately seven feet in length, boneless and entirely seamless. And his face, a gnarled mess of skin and teeth and hair, which was entirely free of incisions or lesions of any kind. In fact, the cause of death had been impossible to determine. Despite his strange defects—they were careful to avoid the word “mutilations” because that implied some sort of deliberate, outside force—he had been a perfectly healthy twenty-five year old man.
I found her in Frank’s out on the 6. It was about two in the morning and I stopped in for a few cups of coffee. I’d been drowsing pretty badly so I’d figured the caffeine would help me out. I’d just ordered my first cup and a slice of pie when I spotted her sitting in a booth in the corner, her ragged colorless clothes drawn up around her like a nest.
She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen, but underneath all the grime and that dark mop of her hair it was hard to tell. Kind of pretty too, in that frightened animal kind of way, her eyes wide and staring. But at the same time there was something broken about her that warded off any sort of unsavory thoughts. She seemed somehow too damaged. The kid was definitely homeless and, based on the weird looks the staff were giving her, she didn’t have any money either.
I don’t know what I was thinking. And, honestly, I still don’t. But a minute after I first saw her, I picked myself, strolled across the diner and sat in the seat across from her.
Allee woke at dawn, startled out of a vivid nightmare she’d been having. By the time she sat up, hand at her chest, the dream was all but forgotten. Sweat-drenched she threw back her covers and glanced at her clock: 5:55 am.
She got up to grab a glass of water.
On the way back to her bed, she was overcome with a strange, vulnerable feeling. She felt like she was being watched. Paranoid, she glanced out her window, peering between the blinds at the dim, blue-washed landscape outside.
You ever have one of those dreams that’s so strong it colors your whole day after you wake up? You know what I mean. There’s just this atmosphere that hangs around you like a veil and you can’t help but see everything through its cloth. It’s indefinable, inescapable. It’s like you pull a piece of your dream out with you and it doesn’t go away until you go back to sleep the next night. Put the piece back where it belongs.
I’m sure you’ve felt this many times in your life. That’s normal, right? Well. Me, I’ve only felt it once.
In the house where I grew up, there was a hall that was always dark. An architectural anomaly, it was up on the second floor, through the master bedroom, behind a tall wooden door. It was narrow, tall, and surprisingly deep—fifteen feet at least—and made entirely of dark wood, black with age. There was a small window at the end of it, about a foot from the ceiling, no bigger than the palm of your hand. If any light that came into the hall, it came through there.
Most of the hall was blank wall space, save two doors, one on either side of the hall. Through the doors were two empty rooms: hardwood floors, lined with colorless, peeling wallpaper. Both were completely lightless.
He woke to the sound of alarms and the distant roar of fire. The side of his face was buried in the mud and he spat out a mouthful of it as he pulled himself to his feet. His head swam and he nearly toppled into a patch of ferns. Thick smoke filled the air overhead, billowing over the treetops, visible even against the night sky.
The complex. The entire complex was on fire, burning to the ground not even half a mile out. He couldn’t see it, but he could smell it. An explosion. He remembered that something had overloaded. Blown up. He’d hit his head. And then running. He was running, everyone around him was running. But it’d been too late—for most of them. Blood flying, streaking the walls. The sound of flesh shredding. Screaming.
Every day after work, I had to walk past the cemetery to get home. This could get pretty nerve-wracking at night. Fenced-in and lightless. Black hills dotted with stone teeth, stretching on forever, washing into the horizon. Silent.
Walking alone one night, I caught sight of three people strolling along the opposite side of the road. I watched as they crossed the deserted street, gathered around the cemetery fence and, one-by-one, climbed over it. By the time I reached them, the last one was coming over the top of the fence. She landed on the opposite side with a soft thud, boots muted by the damp grass.
June stared at the dead rat in her closet, at a loss. For months she’d been hearing it scuttle around her apartment at night, little feet on the hardwood floor, droppings in the morning to mark where it’d been. With disdain she’d sweep up the little black pellets with her hand broom and deposit them in the trash. Almost every morning. So often it’d nearly become routine.
The mousetrap that had snared it, she’d put down within the first week after discovering that the thing was running around her apartment. She’d almost forgotten that it was even there. Just another feature of the closet. So it had come as quite a surprise to her when she’d opened the sliding door to find a twisted, furry body pinned beneath the trap’s wire jaw. It was quite decidedly dead, its little face pointed up in the air, mouth open, frozen in an expression of agony and surprise. Its yellow teeth gleamed in the morning light.
And then she came onto a land of grass and hills.
She had been certain the wasteland was never going to end. Grey deserts and fields of slate. Howling wind. Hot days and freezing nights. And then the mountains had come, silent, distant. Black teeth on the horizon. She had been forced to go south for miles before finding a reasonable pass over their heights.
I
Animal instincts, animal extracts. Bone powders and bone grinds. Strike the bone against the flint. Forty-degree angle, eight hundred pounds per square inch. Extract a blade. Fasten the blade to a branch. Becomes a spear. The spear enters flesh. The spear enters bone. The spear sits behind an inch of glass. The spear glimmers benign under spotlights. Eyes click in their sockets, following its edge. A swipe and the neck is severed. Hung upside-down the blood pools on the ground. Crooked legs kick for a minute then are still. Cut the animal down. The blade enters at the groin, shimmies upwards to the belly, rests at the rib cage. Steam pours out of the cavity into the frozen air. Sever the head and feet. Peel the skin back, carefully. Save the pelt. Scoop the organs out with both hands. Save the heart. The liver. The kidneys. Careful not to break the bladder or intestines. They spoil the meat.
It had been watching her for nearly three months now and she was doing her best to ignore it. “It’s not real,” she told herself over and over again. “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.” But no matter how many times she said it, how many times she thought it, the thing never went away.
It had started in the bathroom, as she was getting ready to take the kids to school: She’d just stepped out of the shower and was beginning to towel off when saw it, peering at her through the window. She didn’t scream. Her brain couldn’t even process it as possibly being real. It was so unexpected, so unbelievable, she could do nothing but look away from it as quickly as possible. Reality seemed to melt around her as she turned and faced the mirror, stricken.
Eric had been single for nearly two years. In that time he’d gone on blind dates, tried talking to strangers and had even toyed around with idea of signing up for a few dating websites. All of these had fallen through, in the end. A combination of chickening out, bad timing and, ultimately, bad luck.
Or that’s what he liked to tell himself, anyway. He knew, in his heart of hearts, that it had everything to do with him. He was clingy, weak, too lacking in self-confidence. Anytime he got close to a girl, he could feel those familiar anxieties and self-doubts creeping in, filling his brain. He’d start wanting to be around her constantly and hating himself for knowing it was too much. That hatred would expose his bones bare and then the girl would get scared and run. Every time.
