Fifty-Two Stitches

Lil' Giggles

2010-12-26T00:01:00.001-06:00

by Stephanie Kincaid

Jessie didn't tell her parents that the doll frightened her. She didn't want to seem like a cowardly little baby. She even worked the doll into her toy rotation, playing with it dutifully, then putting it away with relief. This was less for her parents' benefit than for the doll's. Jessie feared that if she didn't play with the thing enough, it might become angry with her, and she didn't want to think about the possible consequences of the creepy doll's anger.

The doll had come with its own name--Lil' Giggles--and it was supposed to laugh when you squeezed it. Mercifully, the noisemaking mechanism had broken in shipping, so Jessie never had to hear the creepy doll giggle. Still, its lips were frozen open, its little rounded teeth bared in an eerie parody of mirth. The thing sported a sculpted tuft of bright red hair that was set back just a little too far on its high bulbous forehead. Its dull black eyes were unnaturally wide, and they rolled when Jessie moved the doll so that no matter how she held it, Lil' Giggles always seemed to be staring at her.

She had tried setting the doll down so that it faced away from her, but she couldn't stop stealing glances at it, fearing that its oversized head would turn itself around so those dead eyes could find her again.

The longer the doll lived in Jessie's room among her lovable and nonthreatening bunnies and bears, the stronger Jessie's fear grew. After a while, she found herself checking the cabinet under the bathroom sink before she used the toilet just to make sure Lil' Giggles hadn't concealed itself among the towels, waiting for a vulnerable moment.

She engaged in lengthy staring contests with the doll, her eyes watering as she fought to keep from blinking, certain that during the fraction of a second that her eyes were closed, the doll would move.

It was during one of these tests of Jessie's will that she learned the true depth of ultimate horror. She was supposed to be trying to sleep, but she had unthinkingly left Lil' Giggles too near the night light, and the blue glow lent the doll's usual pallor a deathly cast. Jessie stared at it from across the room. She felt sure that if she closed her eyes for so much as an instant, she'd feel a cold little hand touch her, and as soon as she looked, she'd see that the silently laughing doll had abandoned its seat near the night light and crawled into bed with her and …

“Eee-hee-hee-hee! Eee-hee-hee-hee!” A high-pitched cackle shattered Jessie's thoughts. She screamed. It had happened! Lil' Giggles had come to life and was cackling maniacally over and over again. Any moment now, it would move toward her. She prayed that Mommy and Daddy would rescue her before the doll could get her.

The maniacal giggles continued. Jessie shrank back into the bed. It was just the opportunity for which the advancing teddy bear had been waiting. Its tiny fangs tore into the back of her neck. Powerless to help its owner, Lil' Giggles did the only thing it could: it kept up its shrill alarm. Jessie hadn't heeded its warning, but perhaps her parents would come before it was too late.

__________

Stephanie Kincaid is a freelance editor and writer who lives in Oklahoma. She has an MA in literature and a weakness for bad horror movies. She highly recommends being very very nice to your toys.

A Christmas Collection

2010-12-19T00:01:00.003-06:00

by Harold Kempka

Jeremy spotted the tables of knick-knacks on the front lawn of a dilapidated old house and pulled over. After spending the morning perusing garage sales anyway, he figured one more wouldn't hurt.

He loved the rush of excitement in finding a rare piece of memorabilia someone considered an outdated piece of junk. He'd haggle, get it for next to nothing, and then sell it for a nice profit, capitalizing on other people's stupidity.

Jeremy found a box of hand-blown Christmas ornaments that appeared hand-painted on the inside in the style of Currier and Ives, and perhaps dated back to the late 1800's. He picked it up, and breathed the Christmassy, outdoors aroma of pine needles emanating from it.

The decorations appeared to be in good condition, except for their lost luster. Paint cracks marred the detailed images of people on sleigh rides or sitting hearthside staring outward at the ornament glass.

His hands trembled as he carefully examined each of the fragile glass orbs. The last one's highly reflective surface made it look nearly new, and not part of the set. A faint image on the inside that resembled a countryside scene of new fallen snow illuminated by a full moon, made it look like it was an unfinished piece.

“May I help you?” A gravelly voice from behind said.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, nearly dropping the ornament.

He spun around to find a hunched over, wafer thin old woman, brow furrowed and head cocked to one side staring up at him.

“How much do you want for this mismatched set of old ornaments?”

“Why would you want those old things?” she asked, waving her hand. “You can buy new ones for about the same amount of money.”

“I know, but there's a nostalgic feeling about them,” he replied, fighting back a broad smile that said he was about to screw her out of them.

She wrinkled her blood vessel road mapped nose. “How about twenty dollars?”

“Are you serious, lady?” he said. “Look at the paint cracks, and how faded they are. Besides, they're not even a complete set.”

“You trying to take advantage of an old lady?”

“No ma'am. They remind me of some ornaments my grandparents put on their tree when I was a kid,” he said, fighting back a smile that said she was about to be screwed. “I really loved Christmas at their house. I'll give you five bucks. That's a buck a piece, and I'll even take the one that doesn't match the others.”

She studied him for several seconds. “Well, it sounds like you want to relive better times. Tell you what, give me ten dollars, and it's a deal.”

“Great,” he said.

Jeremy hurried home, and checked the ornaments on numerous websites, but found nothing that even resembled them.

After awhile he felt tingly, like his arms and legs had fallen asleep. Jeremy stepped away from the computer and walked around to get the circulation going. Then, he poured himself a glass of wine and sat in his easy chair with the box of ornaments.

Jeremy re-examined each one until his eyes burned and the ornaments' images appeared blurry. The tolling Westminster chimes on the grandfather clock told him it was late.

He gulped the remaining wine in his glass, and rested his head against the back of the chair. As he rubbed his tired eyes, little specs of light flashed behind his eyelids.

A few hours later, he awakened shivering uncontrollable. He stood alongside a country road ankle deep in freshly fallen snow, wearing Victorian style winter clothing. It was nighttime and although there was no moon or stars, a silver sheen illuminated the wintery landscape.

He heard some bells jingling and the “clop, clop, clop” of a horse. Jeremy waved frantically and tried to run toward a couple approaching in a horse drawn sleigh.

“Help me, please!” he yelled, but his feet were stuck to the ground.

The couple drove by, smiling and cuddling up to each other. They ignored him as though he didn't exist.

__________

The old woman stepped from the shadows in Jeremy's living room. She held the glass ornament up to the light.

“Ah, my collection is finally complete,” she said, admiring the silvery image of a man standing alongside a road waving to a horse-drawn sleigh.

She set the ornament in the box and closed the cover. Jeremy stood alongside the road screaming helplessly as a shroud of sudden darkness swallowed him up.

__________

Harold 'Hal' Kempka is a former Marine and Vietnam Veteran. His short stories have been published in Dark Valentine, Thrillers Killers and Chillers, Night to Dawn, Golden Visions, House of Horror UK, 69 Flavors of Paranoia, Night to Dawn, Blood Moon Rising, The New Flesh, Sex and Murder, and Death Head Grin, among others. Hal also has stories appearing in upcoming anthologies from Pill Hill Press and Blood Bound Books. He is a member of the FlashXer flash fiction workshop, and lives in Southern California. His email address is: rvnvet6667@yahoo.com

Maid Marion

2010-12-12T00:01:00.002-06:00

by Scott Davis

Step/creak, step/creak, the rough wooden stairs Marion used to ascend to the sanctuary didn't make for a surprise entrance. But that was OK. Marion was resplendent in a rouched white gown, veil and bright red roses, to symbolize her true devotion. Marion felt like a princess. She was envisioning the damsels of old, strong but delicate, in children's stories. Real princesses met bad ends in French tunnels, but stark reality did not intrude on her reverie.

The wedding guests due to the long wait had run out of small talk and so resorted to discussing the latest news.

“Did you hear about planet Sargasso?”

“No, what?”

“They're going to colonize.”

“But, it's only water! And, the sea life is primitive. Nasty predators!”

A third woman chimed in: “Excuse me, but I'm with Myth Engineering, and I can tell you they are well underway. The bioengineering folks are doing recombinant DNA for the Sargasso project. I'm working with Greek mythology about Neptune to provide cultural support for the shark people.”

“Well, at least they didn't stray too far from Earth norms with us! We had to compensate for the lack of quality protein for fetal development here, but we aren't fish!”

As Marion reached the top of the stairs, all eyes turned and rose to behold her. She felt dizzy with all the attention, trying to maintain her balance in the surging sea of attention. She couldn't look down, or she would catch her legs in the hoops of her skirt, her mother had warned her. Looking left or right was disorienting, so she looked ahead, where the minister and her beloved stood waiting. A ruffling sound that she imagined was angel's wings, sounded quietly, for this was a praying church. She made it to his side.

Wow, this is really happening, thought Marion, I'm really becoming an adult. Under her mother's loving gaze Marion stood and appeared to attend to the minister's words, but her own thoughts intruded. She caught snatches. “…as our progenitors of old Earth had done before us, he will supply the seed for new life as well as the nourishment to help the child grow…”

She hoped her wedding gown was hiding her changes, for Marion's body was growing in its excitement. How she wanted him! She remembered what her mother taught her about sex, to let him enjoy her fully, since he would never have a time like this again.

Her jaw loosened, reassuring her it would detach properly as she had prepared it to do in her pre-marital exercises. She quickly closed her mandibles demurely, since the minister was finishing up.

“You may now kiss the groom.”

__________

Scott Davis has stories published at NovaSciFi, Ray Gun Revival, and Sonar 4 Magazine. Links are on his blog, Universe of Possibilities. He is of the opinion that changing the human genome will require less energy than terraforming planets. So, in the far future, we will be the aliens on other worlds. Mixing our DNA with terrestrial animals will be the safest way to adapt humans, since we know those genes work. However, such meddling will have far-reaching effects, including psychological and cultural adaptations, changes in religion and customs around procreation that may seem sacrilegious or monstrous at first blush.

The Listener

2010-12-05T00:01:00.000-06:00

C.L. Scarr

Chill winds rolled off the tundra to steal each puff of Semyon's labored breath as he clamped the heavy collar onto the bit. He and Boris stepped back from the drillstring as it started rotating. Like a dog in heat, it plunged back into the hole.

"Do you think there's anything left?" Boris asked.

Viktor, their boss, hawked a wad of phlegm from the back of his throat and spat onto the barren ground. "You're not paid to ask questions about the meteorite. You're paid to drill."

They watched and waited while the drill retraced its path through the rock it had already bored. They smoked cigarettes, stamping their feet, hunching their shoulders against the cold.

“More slurry!” Boris shouted when the drill slowed as it bit deep into undrilled rock. Semyon turned to fetch another bag and pain filled his head. Sharp shrieking noises rose from the earth with the plume of fine grey silt. Violation. Anguish. He clutched the sides of his head. Through tear-filled eyes he looked to his drill crew for confirmation. They hadn’t moved.

It wasn’t until he sagged to his knees that the other crewmembers gathered around him. They carried him to the small tent where their six cots crowded together and laid him on his bed. As darkness battled the pain in his skull for control, voices mixed within and without. "... finally cracked", "... hearing things ...". Darkness finally won, and he slipped gratefully into its embrace.

Semyon woke in utter darkness and tried to gauge whether the pain from earlier in the day was gone. He sensed an uncomfortable remnant of it in the back recesses of his brain, slowly drifting away from him like the resistant tendrils of a dream. Soft snoring surrounded him like a comforter, the crew resting after a hard day’s work. It would take an explosion or the morning chow bell to wake them. He sat up and found his boots, then stepped carefully outside. A vague sense of unease, a balled rock of doubt in his stomach, told him that all was not as it should be.

He picked up the sledgehammer next to the drill rig and hefted it in his hands. The weight was comforting, solid. A voice whispered in his head, Yes.

He turned back to the tent. Semyon tried to stop, but his body refused to obey. Sweat beaded his brow in the chill night air as he struggled to control his body’s actions without success. He watched like the passenger in the back of a car as he opened the tent flaps and secured them to let in the moonlight. He stepped inside.

Semyon's hands gripped the sledgehammer, his knuckles white against the sun-stained brown of his skin, then his feet carried him to stand over Viktor's cot. The arms raised up and brought the hammer down with a thud and a squelch on Viktor's head. Next it was on to Boris, and Pavel and Yuri and Mikhail.

The shaft of the hammer slipped from his grasp, sliding easily from his fingers due to the lubrication provided by blood and brain matter. Semyon stepped from the now quiet tent. He listened very hard. Over the sound of his pounding heart and panting breath came the memory song of the one trapped in the meteorite, disturbed by their drilling after so many years.

Primitive and victorious, it rang stronger and stronger from deep within. Semyon smiled.

___________

C. L. Scarr currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, penning short fiction across a wide variety of genres, and is also a freelance editor with credits such as the wildly popular Secret Service Agent series by Stephen Templin and the soon-to-be-released Blade Red Press Anthology, Dark Pages Volume 1.

Killing Field

2010-11-28T00:01:00.000-06:00

by Brad Chacos

"He seemed like a decent enough guy," the neighbors said. Don't they always say that about killers?

They caught him eventually, in a sting operation. Only so many people, even hookers and junkies and street people, can be killed before Things Are Noticed. And they locked the man (if one can call him that) away for a hundred lifetimes, sentencing him to die the drawn-out gray death of boredom and certainty that his victims never had.

But they never found the bodies.

You may have noticed the field of wild roses outside of town, their petals drawn in on themselves, bright red and shivering in the autumn wind; once a month, when the moon is at its apex, they bloom in the cold, dark night, shedding dew like so many tears. And the smell... oh, the smell...

__________

Brad Chacos is hairy fellow who inspects sapphire products for aerospace and semiconductor applications by day and scribbles down semi-readable fiction by night. He has both a short story and a non-fiction article appearing in upcoming issues of Withersin magazine and has been featured on Nanoism, a Twitter-fiction site.

The Chronicles of Blackbriar

2010-11-21T00:01:00.004-06:00

by Michael Colangelo

Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi, Joseph, the Virgin Mary. These are the gilded portraits that hang from the walls inside Nana’s little apartment on Thanksgiving Day.

Blackbriar the Bear, Hamstring the Rabbit, Farmer Carrion – the names of the characters in the book tucked beneath little Peter’s arm, The Chronicles of Blackbriar. These are his personal heroes.

He just wants to read his book, but this is a family get together. They’re celebrating an important, and holy, occasion. Great Grandmother sits in an armchair unblinking. The others chat and hug and drink around her. The men go out on the balcony to smoke and chat some more.

Uncle Vince picks Peter up, grinning. He places him on his knee. Peter gets a quarter from Vince’s pocket and then he’s offered the cigar hanging from Vince’s mouth.

The smoke makes Peter cough and he doesn’t like it. Uncle Vince just laughs and laughs. His face turns red he laughs so hard.

He makes sure he tells Peter’s Mum and Dad that their kid likes cigars, just like he does. He makes sure to tell them that Peter is going to be just like him one day - a success.

Later on, after they eat dinner, Peter is tired. He rubs his eyes and sits on the couch while the adults move around him chatting and smoking and drinking some more. He’s trying to read his book but it’s so late that the colors in the pictures seem to smudge and the letters look all blurry.

The adults are ignoring him. They usually do. They’re here to talk about adult things with one another. But Uncle Vince, as always, comes to help Peter out. He sits down beside him on the couch and takes the book from his hands.

He digs out his reading glasses and holds the cover up to the light.

“What is this, Peter? A book about a bear?”

He opens up the book and begins to skim through the pages. Near the end he begins to nod in understanding. His brow furrows like he’s concentrating hard.

“Ah, so this bear. He goes to the farmer’s house for dinner? Even after his friend the rabbit warns him not to do it?”

Peter nods. He’s read the book before. He knows the ending. The last page of the book is a full page splash of Farmer Carrion and his wife all dressed up for a night on the town. The farmer’s wife is wearing what’s left of Blackbriar like a coat.

Uncle Vince turns serious. His face and his eyes grow very dark right before he leans over to whisper into Peter’s ear. His breath smells of strong liquor.

“This bear, Peter. You know why the lady’s wearing him at the end, right?”

Peter shakes his head.

“Because this Blackbriar’s some kind of motherfucker. That’s why. Farmer Carrion, he just wants to take his wife out for dinner. Poor bastard can’t afford to buy her nice things. Who can blame a guy for wanting the bear as a coat, eh?”

Peter shrugs and Uncle Vince gives a little laugh. Or maybe it’s a growl. Peter’s too tired. He can’t tell.

“But the bear, he’s just looking for a free meal. Some sort of handout. ‘Don’t be a motherfucker, Blackbriar’. That’s what this rabbit is really saying. I don’t think they’re really friends. Do you?”

Then Peter’s Mother is standing over them both. She snatches the book from his lap and takes Peter up in her arms.

“But we were reading,” Peter protests. He curls his head against her shoulder and then falls silent.

“We have to go, honey.” She strokes his hair and takes him away from Uncle Vince.

It’s later in the next year when Peter sees Uncle Vince again.

He’s sitting on the front lawn with his old book in front of him when his Dad pulls into the driveway. Behind him, a big black car with fins on it turns in and Uncle Vince gets out.

He’s carrying a baseball bat. They’re not about to play any baseball.

As Uncle Vince approaches, Dad turns to Peter and waves him off.

“Go inside, Peter. Uncle Vince and I need to talk.”

Peter runs inside. His mother runs outside. Peter runs upstairs and goes under the covers of his bed with his book.

He reads for the one hundredth time about the time that Hamstring got caught in the fox trap. Blackbriar happily gnaws his rabbit friend’s leg off to free him again.

Michael Colangelo is a writer from Toronto. Visit him at http://michaelrcolangelo.blogspot.com/.

The Insanity Vessel

2010-11-14T00:01:00.002-06:00

by Harper Hull

Neil shook on the sofa, knees pulled up, toes curled, watching his Gran swat away imaginary insects and invisible bats across on the other side of the room. She is just sick, his Mom always told him, just sick in the mind, no need to be frightened. He was constantly frightened, though. Gran saw things all over the place that no-one else could see. Things that no-one else would ever want to see. Each evening, as his Mom made dinner in the kitchen, Neil had to sit with his Gran in the living room and keep an eye on her, just to make sure she didn't wander or fall.

Gran told him awful, awful things. He tried not to listen, he told himself she was just sick, but she frightened him none the less. She told him about the shiny white people that visited her in the night, appearing inside her frilly old-lady clothes that hung in her wardrobe, growing into them until their long, bent fingers crept from the sleeves and whispering terrible words to her with their flapping black lips and flicking blue tongues until morning came. She told him about the long, wriggling snakes with human faces and the tiny, dark, snapping creatures that slithered and ran through the patterns in the carpet and the wallpaper, surrounding her and trying to bite her. Most of all, though, she told him about the heads in the fireplace that came up in the crackling orange flames and gave her messages. Messages that never seemed to make any sense. Sometimes the messages were for other people, but those other people were always dead people. His Dad. His Granddad. The poor old blind lady who had lived next door. More than anything else she talked about, Gran's talking fire heads scared him.

Neil hoped that Gran would stay busy shooing away the invisible flying things all around her and not pay attention to the spitting fire tonight. Remember, he told himself over and over, she is just a sick old lady; her brain doesn't work properly anymore. He didn't mind her so much when she was just slapping thin air. It was almost funny to watch. Almost.

Suddenly and inevitably Gran stopped flapping around in her saggy cloth armchair and became still, focusing her watery eyes on the popping, jumping fire. Neil groaned a little and wrapped his arms around himself.

“Oh Neil, they're talking about you tonight! All of them are looking at you and talking.”

Neil forced himself to glance at the fire and, as usual, saw no speaking faces. His Gran was completely entranced in the flames, slowly nodding her head and cracking her thin, colorless lips. The stupid sickness, thought Neil again, her mind is broken. Remember!

“They say you're a bad boy, son. They say they see you doing things that a ten year old shouldn't be doing.” Without averting her gaze, Gran feebly lifted one arm and pointed towards him, wagging one finger.

Neil looked back to the fire, wide-eyed. He couldn't see anything except the dancing flames and the hot, blackened wood glowing and splitting as it fuelled the tiny inferno. He knew he hadn't been a bad boy, the fire heads were lying. Silly, he immediately scolded himself, there are no fire heads, no people in the grate it's just her sickness, remember that always!

“They say they're going to get you Neil. They're going to get you tonight when you're asleep.”
His Gran sounded unusually sad as she spoke. It pushed Neil past his breaking point and he jumped up and started walking towards the kitchen, to the safety of his Mom with her boiling vegetables, baking pie and roasting beef.

“They want you to know one last thing!” said his Gran, loudly now. “They say to tell you that I am not sick. They say I am not sick and my mind is not broken. Now why would they say that?”

Neil stopped dead in his tracks, legs like ice and face like fire, feeling his Adam's apple roll all the way down into his belly.

__________

Harper Hull was born and raised in Northern England and now lives in South Carolina with his Dixie wife and 4 vicious dogs. He started writing fiction in 2009 after doing it corporately for too long and has a delightful cross-section of work scheduled to appear in 2010 with hopefully more to come. His favorite authors are Ballard, Bradbury, Tartt and McCarthy. You can track Harper online at http://harperhull.weebly.com/

The Last Crunch of Autumn

2010-11-07T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Patrick Rutigliano

Jamie Eisenberg was halfway down Crescent Avenue before the sight of his own breath stopped him cold. Jamie’s run had no real aim, only pleasure, but the weather simply wasn’t conducive to such activity.

Halloween was two weeks past and winter was already draining the color from the landscape. The days of snow forts and sledding had yet to arrive, and as the fire on the trees dulled and littered the streets with brown, he couldn’t help but feel as though he was in the heart of something dying.

Neither Shane nor Jacob wanted to venture from their homes that day, and now, Jamie was beginning to realize they had the right idea.

What the hell could he do out there? Most of the neighborhood’s overripe Jack-o’-lanterns were already smashed at the bottom of the quarry, and the cold demanded heavy coats and gloves that made sports more trouble than they were worth. All he could do was walk, and already a block from his house, he would have to do exactly that.

Turning the corner, Jamie stomped his way through a ridge of dead leaves on the side of the road. He hated them. Each footstep squelched, and not once did he hear the crunch of a proper autumn leaf. He took a moment to root through the debris with the toe of his sneaker before venturing on. Even the crickets were dormant.

Jamie knew the storm was to blame for most of it. The winds tore nearly all the remaining foliage from the branches, and the rain permeated the soil to the point of overflow. He could almost swear he felt the asphalt yielding underfoot.

Despite his mood, Jamie smiled as he reached Mr. Rutner’s house. The man was a neat-freak, and everything around his place looked immaculate even after the squall. He might be good for a little fun later that night if he could sneak out without waking his folks. There were still a few eggs left in his Mischief Night stash he was dying to make use of.

Jamie was nearly beside the next yard when he noticed the mound of color earlier obscured by Mr. Rutner’s hedges. The leaf pile looked tall enough to reach his waist, and even in the shadow of the greenery, Jamie could determine the quality of the leaves--dry, bright, and ready to be crushed by a falling body.

Jamie didn’t know why Mr. Rutner hadn’t bagged and hauled the leaves to the side of the road for pickup, but he didn’t care either. It might be a bit childish, but nobody was watching, and neither Shane nor Jacob was there to tease him.

Jamie took one final look around to ensure his privacy and made a beeline for the pile.

As he raced forward and leaped into the air, he got the strange impression that the mound already had an imprint at its center. It was large, child-size, and he wondered if one of his friends might be as immature as himself as he landed at its core.

For a moment, he lay there panting. The crunch he was expecting was absent, and the leaves his hands rested on around the rim of the imprint felt harder than they should. He tried to squash one in his palm and failed, yelping instead as he felt blood trickle through the slit across his glove.

The wound distracted him. Jamie did not notice the slight tremor in the mound until the borders were already swelling over his head. His scream was muffled as he again felt something sharp bite through his clothing. Sinking deeper into the maw of the thing, he finally heard a crunch.

__________

Patrick Rutigliano resides in Fort Wayne, Indiana with his fiancée and a bloated collection of weird fiction. Since embarking on his writing career, Patrick's work has appeared in History is Dead, Monstrous, Northern Haunts, and Shroud Magazine #6. His stories are also slated to appear in numerous releases from both Library of the Living Dead Press and Library of Horror Press. Updates as to his progress and a full bibliography are available via http://www.patrickrutigliano.blogspot.com/.

Famous Monsters Remake

2010-10-31T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Joe L. Murr

The Celebrity Bimbo sneaked through the dark forest. Right on cue, the Wolfman popped out from behind a tree, a machete held high in his hairy paw. The Celebrity Bimbo assumed a fighting stance and let out a battle cry.

“Cut! You call that a scream?” the director bawled.

The crew cracked up. The Celebrity Bimbo gave them the stink-eye. “What’s so funny?” she said. The crew laughed twice as hard.

The director was the only one who was not amused. Eight crappy takes of the same shot. The actress wasn’t even trying. At this rate they’d be stuck in the forest until dawn. “Honestly, was that the best you can do?” he said.

“Alan, I feel that she wouldn’t scream.” She put her hands on her waist. “She’d fight him. Punch him right in the face.”

He leaned back in his canvas chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s not in the script.”

“But maybe it should be.”

Here we go again. Time to massage the ego. He went over to her. “Everyone, take a break.”

Alan watched enviously as the Wolfman plopped a cigarette into his maw and flicked a Zippo, careful not to set his fur on fire. It had been two years since Alan quit, but now a coffin nail would be just what the doctor ordered.

The Celebrity Bimbo hissed, “second-hand cancer.” The Wolfman flipped her the bird.

Alan inhaled the drifting smoke and put his arm around her. “First of all, let Wolfie say his line. And then ... look, all I’m asking you to do is scream. Just a little scream. Like this: Eeee!”

“But, Alan, didn’t we discuss my back story?”

Oh God had they ever. Or, rather, she had rambled on forever about how she saw the character while he nodded patiently.

“Her father was a Marine,” she said. “He taught her how to survive.”

“Be that as it may, in this shot she screams. Just give me one good scream. Or I’ll have to cut your big dramatic scene.”

She stared at him, shocked. “You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

She nodded timorously.

“And remember to let Wolfie say his line, okay?”

He went back to his chair. Action--take nine. She approached the tree. The Wolfman popped into view and growled, “I’m gonna make you my bitch,” a line that made Alan die a little inside, but the studio loved it, so ...

She gave a lackluster squeak.

“Better,” he coaxed her. “Maybe with a bit of fear this time?”

They took it from the top. She approached the tree, peered around and unleashed the scream of the decade. Alan grinned. Until he saw what she was seeing. A rangy beast held the Wolfman’s decapitated head in its claws. The Celebrity Bimbo fainted. And at that moment the lights went out.

People ran screaming into the woods. Alan scrambled out of his chair, slipped and fell on the wet grass. Hairy hands clamped around his neck and hauled him up. He stared straight into the creature’s fetid maw.

A voice as old as mountains whispered, “You know what you’ve gone and done? You’ve turned me into a joke.”

Alan struggled and squealed in animal panic.

“Once, we had power,” the werewolf said, eyes gleaming yellow in the inky blue darkness. “We were iconic.”

Things shuffled from the trees, wreathed in a charnel fog.

“Then you people started re-imagining us,” one of them hissed through a mouthful of razor fangs.

A chorus of voices joined in:

“Taking from us our poetry and tragedy.”

“No more sequels. No more remakes.”

“We’ve had enough.”

Alan saw his line producer, or rather what was left of him, in the hands of a brute swaddled in ancient bandages. Another monster wore the makeup artist’s face as a mask.

“It’s not my fault,” the director gibbered. “My hands are tied. Blame the studio, the writer ...”

“We’re going for them next,” the werewolf growled.

Red lights started blinking. Lenses came in for a closer angle. Camcorders.

The werewolf said, “Action!”

The monsters fell on Alan and tore him to pieces.

And then they set out to teach film executives the real meaning of fear. The Mummy insisted on taking the Celebrity Bimbo along, believing that he had finally found the reincarnation of his lover. She screamed all the way to Los Angeles.

__________

Joe L. Murr has lived on every continent except Antarctica. He currently divides his time between Finland and the Netherlands. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Dark Recesses, Necrotic Tissue, Read by Dawn I & II, and other publications. Visit him online at http://joelmurr.blogspot.com

The Hungry Ocean

2010-10-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Ken Muise

Walking along the break water, fighting the wind that tried to force her ocean-side, she counted her steps to the ladder as she had always done. When she was a girl, when she had started the counting, she could recall reaching the ladder somewhere between two hundred and fifty steps. Now, as her body had grown wearier and her steps choppier she often didn’t reach the ladder until after three-hundred steps.

The Atlantic exploded against the large granite stones, throwing icy water shrapnel against her. She tasted the salt from the cold water on her lips. It traced its way down her shirt.

When Steve died last year during a tuna trip she had stopped coming here, unable to bear the thought of walking this expanse without him. She always appreciated the way he would come with her on this walk. The ocean was a mundane part of his everyday life but to her it was a wondrous adventure.

Having had no children her decision was acceptable. Being a young widow it was understandable. Having lived two excruciating years without the only thing she had ever loved made it inevitable.

She would curse the ocean as it happened. Curse it for the suffering it had caused her husband and for the misery it had left her in.

She made it to the ladder on step two hundred and fifteen. She was in a hurry to die.

She climbed down, cove side, onto a piece of beach the tide was quickly consuming. Flakes of rust encrusted themselves into her palms and fingers.

It was calm. The ocean rippled like a pond and the pleasant sound of the wet sand crackling pleased her.

She entered the small cave where the dingy was stored hoping after all this time it was still there. She remembered the count. Six steps in and the dingy would be there in the diminishing light.

There was no dingy.

She walked further into the opening hoping that her age had altered her count as it usually would do on the breakwater. At ten steps in she knew she couldn’t that be far off but still no dingy.

There was a stirring from a few feet farther in.

She heard a thump to her left and slightly in front of her.

She backed up slowly.

Another thump into wet sand closer this time to her right.

In the faint light she saw a single webbed claw of grey-green scales with talons long and yellow. She heard a low throaty growl like a lion with a mouthful of water and a single yellow eye with no pupil opened suddenly reflecting the sunlight behind her.

The beast lunged and bit into her mid-rift, thrashing it’s head wildly, ripping her in two and throwing pieces of her out of the opening in its ferocity.

The beast dragged the large pieces back into the cave methodically.

The tide would wash away the blood.

__________

Ken Muise has been an active-duty Soldier for 15 years. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Flashes in the Dark, The Nautilus Engine, Hypersonic Tales, Full of Crow and the Horror House. He blogs at www.elmuise.blogspot.com. When he isn't reading, writing or working he enjoys terrorizing his three daughters via Facebook.

Imprisoned

2010-10-17T00:01:00.002-05:00

by AJ Brown

Dim light shone through air holes in the dungeon's ceiling. Vlad sat in one corner, the darkness concealing him from his prey. Shallow breaths billowed upward, and he shivered in the cold, clenching his teeth to keep them from clattering.

The roach appeared in the dusty light. Tentative steps from the shadows led to a quick dart across the room and back into darkness.

Vlad shifted his weight, lowering his body into a crouch. With eyes long adapted to the black of the tunnel, he followed the roach's movements toward the crumbs of molded bread lying near him.

Again, the roach crawled from the shadows, stopping in the center of a patch of light. It was large--a couple of inches long--its brown shell dirty; long antennae twitched, feeling its surroundings.

"Come," Vlad whispered, cupped and lowered his hands to mere inches above the ground.

The roach scurried toward him, tickled Vlad's big toe. Vlad's breath caught, skin tingled as the bug crawled beneath his hand. With a quick swipe, he scooped up the insect. It squirmed, legs tickling Vlad's palm.

"Little bug, I name you Matthias."

The roach poked its head from between Vlad's thumb and index finger. The once proud ruler laughed. "You can't escape me, Matthias. You have sinned against your king. For the crime of betrayal I sentence you to death by impalement."

Vlad stood and hobbled to the corner closest to one of the air holes. He lifted one of the many slivers of wood he had pulled from the giant door that kept him from escape. The roach squirmed.

A crooked grin split Vlad's face, and he drove the splinter into the roach's abdomen. Its legs moved fast, trying to run; antennae twitched and its cerci vibrated wildly. Vlad pushed the small stake in further. He imagined the bug screaming, begging for mercy. He chuckled in delight, his chest heaving, tingling in excitement.

Vlad lowered the roach he named after the ruler who imprisoned him, made a hole in the dirt and set the stake's edge into the ground. In the dim light of the dying sun, he sat, watching the bug--watching Matthias--twitch and writhe in agony. His eyes glazed over as he scanned the many insects and rats he had impaled, each one given a name of an enemy, each one having died slowly.

He leaned his head against the wall, eyes fixed on the dying roach, his body quaking in ecstasy.

Hours later sleep found him. Cradled him in her arms, he dreamt… dreamt of thousands of crying, screaming boyers and princes, women and little children, all of them on stakes, all of them sliding, sliding…

__________

AJ Brown is a writer that sits in a small box with holes poked in it for air. He pens stories that have appeared in SNM Horror Magazine, Sinister Tales, Allegory, and Liquid Imagination among others. Be wary of his fiction--you've been warned.

Gourmand

2010-10-10T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Brad Nelson

Most of us will eat anything; we see food, we go for it—most of us. I’m picky. I prefer certain dishes. What? You may ask. How can you be picky? I’ve seen your kind, you say. Well, so have I, and as I said, most of us will eat anything. And, frankly, I am offended, Madame. I don’t have time for your preconceived notions and prejudices. My kind? How could you be so insensitive to the feelings of others?

I have a theory about my preferences, my snobbishness as my brethren might think of it. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t know why I like what I like. It’s more a theory of how than of why.

You see, when The Outbreak first crossed our borders, it came from the south, crossing from Mexico into the United States in the blood of drunken state-college students, American tourists, and Mexican immigrants. Drug dealers and human smugglers also helped. The Outbreak spread to college campuses, trailer parks, ghettos, barrios, and every corner of lower- and middle-class society—and it spread like fire, cleansing the land.

The average human being is lead by simple desires, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Have you heard of it? Physiology, safety, love, esteem, self-actualization? Any of this ring a bell? No? Anyway, you are driven by certain instinctual motivators. Once the most basic of those needs are met, such as physiological needs—breathing, food, water, sleep, homeostasis, excretion, etc.—a person may move on to the next tier, but not until the basic needs are met. Example: If your physiological needs are not met, if you do not have food, shelter, etc., you do not care about morality and creativity, which are needs at the very highest and intellectual level. Sadly, most people never attain those higher levels or even care to, which brings me to my next point.

The majority of those initially infected were of little or no means, and of little or no intelligence. What? You wonder about the drunken college students who brought The Outbreak to college campuses? I did say they were students from state colleges. You think students of Ivy League schools are spending spring break in Mexico? Come now, Ivy League mummies and daddies can afford better than that for their little sweetums.

You’ve gone and distracted me. Where was I? Oh, yes—intelligence. The average IQ in the United States is 100, give or take. Average IQ drops exponentially based on social class, geography, race, etc; and I’d wager that the average IQ of students in state-run institutions adheres to the national average. Community college? Much, much lower. So, you see, pre-infection, the average person wasn’t very bright to begin with. And you’ve seen what The Outbreak does to the mental capacities of those it touches.

Given that the majority of those initially infected fell into a category with a below average IQ, is it any wonder that when fulfilling their basic need, food, they eat what they see, without discrimination. With the infected, Maslow’s Hierarchy is obsolete. Food is their only need. It is no different with me. Food is still my only need, but, as I said before, I have preferences. My theory? I am getting to that, my child. Be patient.

Pre-infection, I had an IQ of 138. That’s two points away from genius, you see. My theory is this: the effects of The Outbreak—aside from reanimation, impervious to pain, and the hunger—involve a reduction of one’s IQ by a specific percentage based on pre-infection intelligence. What? You still don’t understand? Then, here, let me show you, my dear.

Where others would come in moaning and carrying on, mobbing you, marring your beautiful flesh with gnashing teeth and clawing nails, I will take my time enjoying the juicy portions slowly. Don’t worry. I stay above the neck; I’m old fashion that way. I will take your soft cheek first, and then your lips, your tongue. Your eyes I will slurp with abandon. Blue eyes are truly delightful. Please stop screaming, child. It does not make the pain any less. Now I will peel back your scalp, because I don’t like getting hair caught in my teeth, and crack your skull. The real treat, the one those other idiots can never stop asking for, are inside.

__________

Brad Nelson is a former backyard samurai and blue jeans Zen master who spends most of his time now on the back porch with his pipe and a cup of coffee. He retired his sword and took up the pen after serving five years as an interrogator in the U.S. Army. Brad is also a creative writing M.F.A. candidate at National University and Chief Editor of Eclectic Flash, a new online literary journal. You can find Eclectic Flash at www.eclecticflash.com. Brad’s literary endeavors are forthcoming from a number of online and print publications—just as soon as he can decide where to send each piece.

Darkling

2010-10-03T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Christopher Green

The loss of Marion’s vision was a gradual thing.

By degrees, the edges of her sight slipped away, the world to her left and right made into old friends she thought of occasionally but never missed. She saw her home, her husband, and, less and less, her children and their children, through a circle that grew ever tighter, like a noose.

When she began to trade paint with nearby cars in parking lots, she left the driving behind and taught herself to take the bus. She made arrangements for the grocer to deliver the week’s groceries on Thursdays.

This Thursday, when the doorbell rang, Marion made her way to the front of the house by touch. She brought her handbag, to pay Mr. Williams, but by the time she opened the door he’d already gone, leaving the groceries on the front step. She brought the bags inside one at a time.

In the bottom of one, next to the milk, was the darkling. It was a spot, a smear, no more than a tear in the light, and it slid around in the vast dark corners of her vision. It went with her into the family room, watched her soaps with her, and when Stan got home smelling like beer, the darkling slipped closer to Marion, where Stan’s vision had always been weakest.

Stan ignored them both.

When he went to bed, the darkling had already found a little to eat, scraps, old glances and smiles and even a kiss Marion or Stan or both had let fall behind the couch. The thing was bigger, now, and bolder, and when it strayed from the corners of her sight she didn’t notice. The room had never been well lit, and the television threw flickering shadows that let the darkling, if it was quick and cunning, as all dark things are, roam the floor and find other things to eat.

When Marion finally saw it, the darkling froze. By now, near to midnight, it knew Marion enough to call her mother, if it called her anything at all. When it crawled up beside her on the sofa, its thick hide slick with lost recollections, she lay her hand against its bulk.

“Hello, there,” she said aloud, and the darkling quivered with joy. “What have we here?”

The darkling had no voice.

“A friend,” she said to herself, and pat it once or twice. “A friend at last, again.”

The darkling fed her back a little of what it had found in the room, old Christmases and birthdays and nights she and Stan had stayed in together. She took what it offered and smiled to herself in the dance of the TV’s light. The corners of the room held nothing for her, and the darkling at her side swelled as she fed it more of her wisps and fragments.

As it grew, the couch springs creaked like they did when Stan sat there. Marion smiled and took it by its new hand. She led it in to where Stan was sleeping. She would give it his voice, and let it remind her of the things she had let remain forgotten for far too long.

__________

Christopher Green was born in the United States. After moving to Australia at the age of 20, he attended Clarion South and has been published in Dreaming Again, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Abyss & Apex. His work has been nominated for an Australian Shadows Award and several Aurealis Awards. When he isn’t writing, he’s thinking about writing, unless he’s talking to his wife, at which point he is most certainly listening to what she has to say. Honest. He maintains a blog at http://christophergreen.wordpress.com

Beside Himself

2010-09-26T00:01:00.004-05:00

by Joe Nazare

Forget that heals-all-wounds nonsense--time for him to expedite matters. He can't bear any longer to just let such grotesquerie be.

So, thrumming with impatience, he extends his right index, and with his left hand picks up the smallest of the tools lying atop the butcher block. He clamps the tweezers to his blueberry-shaded nail, the concentrated bruising of his fingertip making him think of a well-fed tick squashed under a microscope slide. In its protracted death throes, the nail has pinched inward into the shape of a miniature seashell, but naturally he has no intention of holding the thing up to his ear afterward.

Plugging the tip of his tongue into his gums, he tugs at his blighted digit. The fingernail pulls forward slightly before rebounding into place. He tries again, and again, but on the third try the tweezers slip off, etching a hairline white scratch on the nail. Frustration rattles in the base of his throat as he tosses aside the useless tool.

So close. The taunting words echo in his head. He grabs the pair of slip-joint pliers and applies them to the task at hand. Like the lips of the most unyielding pistachio, the fingernail offers only a few millimeters of airspace between itself and flesh, but the pliers' bulkier pincers nonetheless manage to find a grip.

He steels himself with a quick series of snorts, then jerks the pliers back hard as he can. A dull ache radiates down his finger and seemingly right into his forearm. The nail feels like it has grown tendrils, and for a moment he wonders if in tearing free it will yank a trail of ligaments out through his fingertip--the physical equivalent of some magician's handkerchief trick. He pulls on the nail regardless, relentless, and after several tormenting seconds finally succeeds in the extraction. The nail un-suctions itself from his fingertip and drops clattering to the butcher block.

He pays scant attention to the pearly nub of new growth on his right index, focusing instead on the brittle relic just removed. Slit-eyed, he picks up and turns over the unfastened nail. The blue-black grue caked to its underbelly looks like what you might find inside an old tin of shoe polish.

Another moment of intrigued scrutiny, and then he pivots and limps across the basement, into the corner occupied by the cyanotic clay effigy. This inert reflection of himself, painstakingly dusted with his own dead skin. It stands grinning at him through an imperfectly aligned set of grayed teeth. He splits his sunken mouth into a smile as he presses the fingernail into place at the tip of a crooked index. The transplant accomplished, he turns and scurries back to the butcher block.

So close, he tells himself again. Spurred by the sudden, unmistakable crack of knuckles off to his left, he seizes and raises his trusty ball-peen hammer.

And gets started on his right thumb.

__________

Joe Nazare holds a Ph.D. in English from New York University; his academic work focuses on the genres of science fiction and horror. He has sold stories and poems to such magazines and anthologies as Shroud, Pseudopod, Harvest Hill, Damnation Books, Champagne Shivers, Death in Common, and Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes.

Rare Steaks, Black and Blue

2010-09-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Rachel Green

Luisa browsed the menu again. She'd been ecstatic last June when she'd found this exclusive little steak house tucked into an alley off Manhattan's East 67th Street. Bored with the standard fare of beef, buffalo and venison, the restaurant promised gastronomic riches. Tattooed waiters and waitresses of several nationalities catered for the high-class clientele.

She'd picked and chosen for the first few visits. It was expensive but the rarity of springbok, kangaroo, giraffe and zebra was worth the expense. She was more methodical after that, working her way through the menu one visit at a time, every steak cook black-and-blue, just how she liked it, with sauces on the side, never on the meat.

After thirty visits her palate was jaded and she sat at her customary booth flicking listlessly through the menu. Peter, the only waiter still working there since she'd found the place, stood poised with his pencil and pad. "I want something different," she said, "something really unusual."

"I know just the thing," Peter said. "A chef's special, Yes?"

She smiled and handed back the menu. "That sounds divine."

It took a little longer to prepare but every morsel was worth the wait. Tempted as she was, she left the strip of fat and the edge of skin.

She'd recognised the tattoo.

__________

Rachel Green is a forty-something writer from Derbyshire, England. She lives with her two partners and three dogs. She was the regional winner of the Undiscovered Authors 2007 and her novel An Ungodly Child was published in 2008. When not writing, Rachel walks her three dogs, potters in the garden and drinks copious amounts of tea. Her website www.leatherdyke.co.uk acts as a portal to her daily-updated blogs

Flash Cards for the Blind

2010-09-12T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Kurt Newton

These are not your average 4x6s. Instead of an equation on one side, a solution on the other, these thin rectangles are virtually featureless. They look more like opaque panes of glass...without the sharp edges, of course. That would be cruel.

(You fidget slightly. I know the feeling. Trust is a difficult commodity nowadays...rare in its purest form.)

"Then how do they work?"

(Your eyes stare past me. Though blind, they appear eager, open to new experiences.)

Well, they work the way a window works, only instead of using the sensory organ designed for sight, it uses something much more intimate: touch. It is the reason I am wearing these specially designed gloves. Just the slightest skin-to-surface contact induces a chemical transference that affects the region of the brain responsible for perception. Touching is seeing.

"What will I see?"

(A smile graces the corner of your mouth. It informs me I have chosen well.)

Ah, that's the beauty. It is entirely up to you. The mystics say if you stare at your reflection long enough your true essence will eventually reveal itself. Perhaps you will see your own death. Perhaps you will witness the torture of the innocent, or the savagery of nature, or the oppressive immensity of the universe. Perhaps you will be whisked away to a place unknown, a place forbidden, a place where your darkest fears dwell. A place where truth lies bound and screaming.

(You swallow your last naïve notion. Your fingers tremble as I place the first card in your hands.)

"And my blindness will be cured by doing this?"

Yes. But you will wish it hadn't.

__________

Kurt Newton lives as a recluse in the woods of northeast Connecticut. He has been spotted on his plot of land harvesting grubs from rotted logs, setting tripwires for small animals and drinking from fresh water streams. He uses wood pulp and dried viscera to make the paper on which he writes his stories. He drives a black Ford Focus.

Un Ultimo Hombre Lobo

2010-09-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Adam Blomquist

“Action,” yelled the fat man standing behind the camera.

Maria, the gorgeous Italian, pushed the intricate Gothic candelabra into Molina’s face.

“Closer,” said the director.

Molina frothed at the mouth and growled at the young actress. The film was a period piece so Maria wore a corset that threatened to suffocate her with her own cleavage. She backed Molina as far into the corner as he could go. The film was shooting on location in an ancient castle on the coast of Portugal, and the stone wall felt pleasantly cool against Molina’s back.

“Closer, try to burn him,” cried the director.

Molina stayed in character even though he could now smell burnt hair. The prosthetic fur on his face was beginning to go up in flames.

“Cut, cut,” he slapped the cameraman on the shoulder. “Molina, what the hell are you doing? Where is the anguish we discussed? I expected more from the supposed master of monsters,” Marques wagged a dark stubby finger in Molina’s face who allowed himself to stay a bit in character and bared his fangs at the director.

“I’m sorry, it’s your film, we’ll do it again,” Molina said with no sincerity in his voice.

“Forget it, we’re losing daylight as it is,” Marques said. Why the director was shooting a scene with a werewolf that needed daylight was beyond Molina, and he laughed at the director’s ignorance. Marques did not take notice and turned his attention to the girl.

“And you, where is your fire? Where,” Marques asked. Molina couldn’t help but scoff at the pomposity in his voice. The director was wasting his time anyway. The girl spoke absolutely no Spanish and her translator had failed to show up to work today.

In fact, much of the crew had quit in recent days. Molina looked around the set and took a quick roll call. Inside the chamber there were only the two actors, the cameraman, Marques and a production assistant who had been promoted to a soundman for the day.

“Don’t yell at her, she’s doing the best she can,” Molina’s public persona was that of the perfect gentleman, and he had attained that persona by actually being a perfect gentleman. Maria had no idea what the two Spanish men were arguing about, but she knew that Molina was on her side. He gave her a wink and watched her blush.

“Grazie,” she said.

Marques looked over at the impromptu soundman, who was leaning on the boom microphone as a cane. The director started histrionically pulling at his balding scalp and cursing under his breath. In his excitement he yelled that the day was wrapped and then stormed off the set.

The remaining crew members began to strike all the equipment and pack it back in the truck for the night. Molina went back to his trailer and began to gingerly remove his makeup. He needed the makeup artist in order to apply it but he had mastered the art of taking the pieces off himself without damaging them. It was a lengthy process and he began to let his mind wander to Maria.

He then took out the fake dentures and his mind turned to that toad of a director. Dusk was finally complete and he could see the full moon outside his trailer window. He ran his tongue over his teeth. The actor laughed to himself as his real fangs started to elongate and sharpen. Hair began to sprout on his arms. I think it’s time for Marques to retire, we don’t need him. And anyway, I’ve always wanted to direct, he thought to himself. Maybe I’ll try some Italian for dessert.

__________

Adam Blomquist was raised on a steady diet of candy corn, rock 'n roll, classic literature and horror movies. This mix severely warped his brain. He currently attends Boston University where he studies English and Film. You can find his blog and more of his work at www.brain-tremors.com and in the pages of Shroud Magazine issue #7.

Milk of the Goddess

2010-08-29T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Brendan P. Myers

I was six weeks into a yearlong contract for American Oil, working a desert outpost south of the border. At night, I went to Pablocito's and drank pulque, the milky liquor favored by the locals.

The girl was seventeen and slinging drinks, with only the barest hint of Indian in her milky complexion. She smiled shyly while fending off the drunken advances of my boorish colleagues.

When Larsen reached out to grope her, she flashed a look my way. Filled with liquid courage, I walked over and popped him one. After that, drinks were on the house.

Later, we walked the dusty streets of town. In the shadow of the lecheria, I took her in my arms and then took her to my hotel. It was her first time.

Her name was Mayauel, named after the milk tree Goddess, the Goddess of pulque and childbirth, the foundation of all life. In bed, she whispered reverently of the Goddess's four hundred breasts that suckled her human offspring. I grabbed her playfully and said two were enough.

We met furtively, exchanging glances in the bar, later sneaking off to my hotel. I knew she was falling in love. I didn't know what love was. And then it happened.

She said she was with child. I got angry and said it wasn't mine. I called her a whore and stormed off.

I moved to a rooming house close to the worksite. But every night, after closing my eyes, I saw her face. Her stare grew harsher with each passing day. I kept my eyes open most nights.

They sent me into town one day for a delivery. Avoiding once familiar streets, I snuck in the back way and heard music playing. Sad music. At the end of a darkened alley, I saw a procession. Hysterical women dressed in black. Pablocito crying. An open casket on the back of a wagon. I caught a glimpse of her face and ran.

I hitched as far away as I could, but there was no escaping her. In one sleepy town, I saw a mural of a many-breasted woman in peach garment, with white fringe and flame colored hair. She was seated on a throne of a turtle and a snake, holding out a bowl filled with a milky substance.

The Goddess. Mayauel.

I staggered toward the center of town and saw a church. I knew then I needed forgiveness.

Inside, blinding sunlight streamed through stained glass, turning the holy chamber orange and red and yellow. Halfway to the altar, I collapsed and prostrated myself before God.
Begging forgiveness, I crawled down the aisle, finally raising my head toward the marble pulpit and whitewashed stone of delicately carved archways and saw then I wasn't alone.

It was Mayauel. My Mayauel.

Twenty-feet tall and growing taller by the second.

Sunlight set her hair aflame. Sitting astride the pulpit, she wore a peach dress with white fringe. But this Mayauel did not offer sustenance. Instead, I watched as she poured a bowl filled with the milk of human kindness onto the floor, where it pooled like a sea of bitter tears. For me, there would be no forgiveness.

__________

Brendan P. Myers stories have appeared in such publications as the Northern Haunts anthology from Shroud Publishing and Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror from Stygian Publications. He can be found online at http://bpmyers.blogspot.com

Jeff Newman's Headaches

2010-08-22T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Alan Baxter

The only interesting thing about Jeff Newman was his headaches. Never a particularly social animal, Jeff lived alone in a small apartment in a grubby city. He worked for a nondescript company doing largely irrelevant administrative roles and took his pay home every month to spend on DVDs, video games and take away food. He was boring. But he did get such headaches.

He could tell when a headache was coming on. He would start to feel nauseous, the back of his neck would tighten up and get hot. He would feel as though his right shoulder was hitched up a couple of inches and he couldn’t relax it, almost as if the base of his skull was trying to suck the rest of him up into his brain pan. Then the eye thing would start. Initially a kind of dull pinch behind his right eyebrow, it would grow until it felt like a sickening bruise all around his eye and he’d get a grabbing, stabbing compression, as if his brain had grown a hand, taken hold of his eyeball and started to squeeze. That was when he had to shut everything off. He would go into his bedroom, draw the curtains, turn off the light and lie in swimming, excruciating darkness, unable to rest, simply enduring. Eventually the vomiting would start, great deep heaves from the depths of his gut. Gasping, eye-watering retches until he brought up nothing but gobs of yellow bile and finally collapsed, exhausted, into blank, black sleep, not dreaming or stirring.

When he woke the headache would be gone, his brain releasing its hold on his eye, and he would feel purged. Weak, wobbly, trembling with the slightest effort. He would give anything to be rid of the headaches.

__________

‘It’s stress, Jeff. The tension builds up and causes the headache. We’ve discussed this before.’

Jeff shook his head, looking at his doctor with disdain. ‘It’s not stress. I’m not a stressed person.’

The doctor smiled. ‘Everyone has stress. How often is it happening?’

‘It used to be only once or twice a year at most. Now it seems like it’s happening every few weeks. I can’t handle it.’

‘I’m going to prescribe you something to help you relax.’ The doctor held up a placatory hand at Jeff’s expression. ‘Process of elimination.’

Jeff shook his head but sat quietly while the doctor wrote the prescription. He passed the pharmacy on his way home and took a pill as soon as he got in. By seven pm his brain had a hold on his eyeball and he squirmed and thrashed on his sweat soaked sheets, cursing the doctor with every heartbeat that pulsed lightning through his head.

__________

‘I’m sorry, you can’t see Doctor Steed.’ The receptionist’s eyes were puffy and red. ‘He... he’s not available.’

Jeff frowned. ‘When will he be available?’

‘I’m afraid he won’t be. He...’ The receptionist trailed off into sobs.

A female doctor appeared. She patted the receptionist’s shoulder. ‘Go home, Jennifer. It’s too much to ask you to work today.’

Jennifer hurried from her desk, grabbing bag and coat as she scurried, snivelling, for the door. The female doctor turned to Jeff. ‘I’m sorry. Dr Steed was killed last night. Home invasion. I’d be happy to see you if it’s urgent.’

‘No. No, nothing urgent.’ Jeff stared at the doctor for a moment then turned to leave. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added over his shoulder as he reached the door. The female doctor nodded once, lips pursed.

__________

Jeff sat on the bus staring at trees whipping past. How many people did he know that had died? It seemed uncanny that so many people he was acquainted with had met strange, grim ends. His doctor killed in a home invasion, his last boss murdered while jogging at night, that stuck up bitch at the video store killed in a botched robbery... Jeff’s heart began to hammer as a hot fist pushed its way up his throat. His mouth popped open as he gasped for air. But he’d had so many more headaches than that...

‘Strangers are just as sweet.’

Jeff whimpered, stiffening on the rough fabric seat of the bus. ‘What the fuck...?’

‘Took you long enough to realise. But there’s nothing you can do.’ The voice was high and sharp, laced with malice, echoing through his mind. Each word was punctuated by the sensation of a tiny hand flexing its grip on Jeff’s right eyeball.

__________

Alan Baxter is an author living on the south coast of NSW, Australia. He writes dark fantasy, sci fi and horror, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. Read his short stories, novella and novel extracts at his website - www.alanbaxteronline.com - and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.

The Wind Whispers My Name

2010-08-15T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Jameson T. Caine

At night the wind calls to me, whispering my name. I lie in bed, eyes closed, desperate for the solace of sleep, but it eludes me. As I drift away into fitful slumber, the soft sound of the breeze brushing against my window stirs me from my repose, my name carried to me through the surrounding darkness.

It speaks with her voice.

I do not look, afraid of what I might see...or what I might not see. It couldn’t be her, not after all this time. Not after that last, horrible night. To find her standing there now beyond the frail glass would surely drive me insane, yet the thought of throwing aside the curtains and seeing nothing frightens me even more.

I recall her final words, spoken in anger, defiance and finally, hatred. The way her pleas and denials became an antagonistic admission of truth, her fury boiling over, transforming once beautiful features into the menacing snarl of a stranger. The elegant face I knew so well now a terrifying visage of rage and malevolence. Forever will I remember the look those icy eyes had cast my way seconds before the light within them was extinguished forever.

Or not.

Had she somehow survived? I took such care in disposing of the gun and locating a suitably remote place to bury her horrid remains. She was dead, I’d made sure of it. In all the intervening years, I have had no cause to doubt the outcome of that night. Still, after three sleepless nights haunted by the sound of her voice upon the wind, I had to be sure.

I came to the ancestral cabin in which we spent that fateful evening, high atop a bluff overlooking the restless sea. By day I searched the nearby woods, looking for her final resting place. But time wasn’t kind to the land or to my memories. I could not find her.

Can the vow made before her death be coming true? Could she even now be drawing upon dark, arcane forces to enact the promised revenge from somewhere beyond the realm of the living? I push aside such thoughts as fanciful imaginings, but when darkness engulfs the land and the wind rises, I think differently. I recall the unholy things she did and the lives ended through her deeds; all performed under the watchful eyes of the one whom she called Teacher. How could I not put an end to such evil when I finally learned of it?

Night has come again. I huddle inside, a fading fire my only source of warmth and illumination. The wind rises and falls outside, her voice a whisper and then a shattering scream. I dare not look through the window, for I know the only thing I will find is my end.

I cover my ears but the shrieking gale cannot be denied. I scream, desperate to drown out her mournful cry with the ragged sound of my own voice, but my tortured howls cannot overcome the intensity of that ghastly lamentation. The wind has become her voice, throwing my own name back at me in accusation and anger.

I hurl the door open, determined to heave myself from the cliff to the cold waters below. I stagger towards the edge, my fear of death at war with my desire for this madness to end. It’s then that I see her, standing a few feet from the ledge, waiting.

The one whom she’d called Teacher.

Teacher looks at me, eyes dark and penetrating. “You will replace the servant you took from me,” she says.

And I know that I will. Her voice is commanding, insidious. I must not disobey. I eye the nearby ledge, but the wind keeps me from jumping, blowing in off the sea and forcing me back, preventing my demise at my own hand. It pushes me forward into the embrace of the soulless thing before me and I scream with unbridled terror when I peer into those dark eyes, seeing the fate awaiting me.

Taunting and cruel, the wind laughs at me in her voice, the one I killed that night so many years ago. The one whose face I still see when I look in the mirror.

The one whom I called twin sister.

__________

Jameson T. Caine has at one time or another worked as a carpenter, meat cutter, shipping clerk, forklift operator, assembly line worker, long haul truck driver and minister. Currently he drives a tanker truck by day and calls himself a writer by night, the latter fueled by a steady diet of soda and salty snacks. He has numerous stories appearing online and in print. He lives in Northern California with his wife and two dogs. Visit him online at http://jamesontcaine.blogspot.com/

Aftertaste

2010-08-08T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Karen Schindler

She was exquisite.

Her naked body seemed to pulse and thrum as he circled her, snapping image after image, the afterglow of her pale form burning into his retinas. His mind reeled as he captured her likeness. He’d never worked with someone who looked so luminous through the lens.

He kept snapping and circling and circling and snapping convinced that he could see heat rolling off her in waves. He could feel her energy feeding his as he revolved closer and closer. When they came face to face for the last time she widened her eyes and made a sound that was as close to a groan as he could bear and remain upright.

He felt a jolt of something run top to bottom through his nerve endings. He wanted to reach for her but he couldn’t stop snapping images. He couldn’t tear his face away from the camera.

Mesmerized, he watched as her left hand reached out to caress the long shaft of the telephoto lens. Her right beckoned with a delicate finger.

He leaned toward her, her face getting larger in the viewer until it filled every corner of his vision and his mind. She tipped her head, licked her lips and parted her mouth into an inviting O.

He felt himself drawn into and through the prisms of the camera, out the lens and into her mouth.

As his body crumbled away she gently placed the camera onto the floor. She licked a finger and delicately sampled the pile of dust that had been a man moments before.

She smiled, languidly stretched and savored the memory card melting on her tongue just as a devout Catholic savors a holy communion wafer.

She could feel his juices mingling with hers, feel his hot blood soaring in her veins. He had been a good one. Young, vital, full of sexual power. He should last her for at least a month.

The happy accident of a wave depositing her into a time plane that sported photographers on every corner and the internet to help her find them made it so easy. She hardly even had to hunt.

The only downside was the memory cards.

She just couldn’t get used to the digital aftertaste.

__________

Karen Schindler writes even when she's not writing. A lover of words her whole life, she is amazed and awed when she can string them together in a way that touches another soul. You can visit her at Miscellaneous Yammering where you'll find fact, fiction, sillyness and lots of descripitons of weird things that happen in Ohio.

The Wrong Thing to Say

2010-08-01T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Jonathan Pinnock

Father Skerritt was enjoying his first solo exorcism. The young girl was writhing about on the bed with considerable energy, and it took both her parents to hold her down. She was blaspheming away like a Clydeside stevedore and producing some spectacular projectile vomit. And it might have been a trick of the light, but he was convinced that her head had rotated a full 360° at one point. This was the full Monty.

And yet, in the middle of it all, he was calm. He felt serene. He had a hotline to the Boss, and he was ready to make the connection.

“In the name of the God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, release this poor girl from her travails—”

“Fuck you bastard!” said the ten-year-old girl.

“—go now and leave her in peace—”

“Fuck you!”

“—depart from this world into the shadows—”

And then it happened. The girl gave one final contortion and began to hemorrhage. As she shrieked in agony, her belly was torn open and a revolting reptile poked its head out. With a malevolent squawk, the beast forced the rest of its body through and hurtled out of the room.

When reflecting on it later, it struck Father Skerritt that “Whoa, mash-up!” was probably an inappropriate thing to say at this point. But he still couldn’t help thinking that it was massively cool.

__________

Jonathan Pinnock was born in Bedfordshire, England, and - despite having so far visited over forty other countries - has failed to relocate any further away than the next-door county of Hertfordshire. He is married with two children, several cats and a 1961 Ami Continental jukebox. His work has won several prizes, and he has been published in such diverse publications as Litro, Every Day Fiction and Necrotic Tissue. His unimaginatively-titled yet moderately interesting website is at http://www.jonathanpinnock.com/, and you can follow him on Twitter as @jonpinnock.

The Farmer's Daughter

2010-07-25T00:01:00.002-05:00

He kept her heart in his hands when it wasn’t in the barn, and he made her dance for him when he held it to remind him of what he’d lost.

__________

He liked being a farmer. It was an old trade, an inevitable transition for someone who is endless. You can’t make your way through life with magic alone, after all. Magic was too conspicuous, too unexplainable. Farming was not. Farming was idyllic.

His wife, the last of dozens, eventually left. He forced her out finally, and he sealed any possibility of her return with a binding spell. It was an unfortunate consequence, but a necessary one should the little girl be raised as one who is endless. This was all before the little girl was old enough to remember. So that made it good.

The little girl loved to dance around the farmhouse. It was the only trace of her mother that remained.

He loved her more than the world since the day she was born. They were inseparable.

She was his first – a funny thought, given the fact that he was two centuries old and well able.

He raised her himself. He bore her proud upon his shoulders when they rode into town. She learned her way about the farm at a very young age. She loved her father more than anything else that could possibly exist in her little world.

They were alone together and very happy.

__________

Inevitably, she turned fourteen.

And she met a boy.

She told him that she had fallen in love. He told her that, in time, she would come to find the notion of love ridiculous. Their kind did not fall in love with strangers.

She told him that she did not believe in being endless. There was only now. He forbade her from such blasphemy.

She stopped talking to him about the boy.

Life went on, but quieter. There was no more music. She told him that she had forgotten how to dance.

She didn’t sit with him on the porch in the late afternoons as she had always done. She grew nervous around him at the supper table. He sensed that she had begun to wander away in her soul.

__________

One morning, he woke early to bail the hay.

He found them in the barn. He found her naked with straw in her hair, curled up fast asleep in the arms of the boy that she thought she loved.

He snapped and before he knew it, a good bit of his old self made things known within the world again.

He snapped his fingers and her heart exploded from her chest into his hands before she had time to wake. The boy saw the blood pour from the wound in her breast and screamed like a little boy does until he made a sign in the air and closed the boy’s throat from the inside. He lifted the boy from the ground and threw him so hard that it sent him through the roof into the sky so far up that the boy’s people never found the body.

The girl eventually opened her eyes. They were milky white and sightless. She stared after her own beating heart in his hands, and she followed it stumbling back into the house.

Inside the house he wept for her. He sat in his chair in the dark before dawn and whispered for her to dance and she did, twirling naked around him through the shadows, the gaping hole in her chest empty and throbbing black blood, until the sun began to rise and he felt like things were right again.

In the early hours, he locked her and her heart in separate corners of the barn and went about his chores.

When the sun fell, so did his heart, so he drew hers out again. She followed.
Things went on this way for many, many nights, until he eventually died of a broken heart. She took her heart back from him but the damage was done, so she held it in her hands and she stumbled as she wandered away from him for the last time.

She met a violent end, finally, at the hands of those who do not know magic and are afraid of things they cannot explain—an unfortunate ending to an endless tale.

__________

Jeremy Kelly is a writer who lives in Decatur, Georgia. He's currently writing his first novel. Find out more about him at http://jointhebirdies.blogspot.com/.

Handover

2010-07-18T00:01:00.004-05:00

by Brendan Carson

I come into the ER, wet from rain. Bulmer looks up. “The late Doctor Robinson,” he says.

“Sorry,” I say. “You seen Donna? She didn’t come home”

“She was around,” Bulmer gestures vaguely. “It’s been busy.” Bulmer turns to the interns. “Doctor Robinson is senior on the morning shift. Run everything past her. She has a particular liking for the mad, the malodorous and the malingering.”

I grin and shake my head. “Who’ve we got?”

It’s first shift for the new interns, and night shift in Emergency can be hell. Sometimes I think I should have done Psych like Donna. She’s on one night in twenty, I’m one night in four. It’s hard to keep a relationship going. The screen is full. It’s been a busy night. Bulmer starts handover.

“Cubicle one is a sixty two year old man, viral pneumonia, stable on four litres oxygen…”

The new interns scribble copious notes, the others jot a word or two. The litany rolls on. Bulmer hands over the unstable cases himself, lets the interns (nervous, occasionally stammering) do the others. I smile, thank them, try to sound less impatient than I am. The last intern is squat, muscular, a thin film of sweat over his face. For a moment he seems oddly familiar. His lab coat hides his name-tag.

"Cubicle forty,” he starts, “is a thirty two year old man, detained under the mental health act as a danger to himself or others, with a long history of a schizophreniform illness. Since his early teens he -…,”

Bulmer looks up, irritated.

“We’ll see him first,” I say. “Tell me as you walk over there.”

Away from the other doctors he seems more nervous, more sweaty. He checks his notes as he walks. “Classic erotomanic psychosis, resistant to diagnosis and therapy, delusions about his female neighbours spying on him, inserting erotic thoughts into his head, she’s the one to blame for all his symptoms. Previous diagnoses paranoid subtype--,”

“In emerge,” I say, “we don’t care about all that developmental history stuff, how his mom molested him with a carrot or whatever.”

He looks surprised. “But what-- ,”

“It’s all about problem solving.”

He nods, like he understands. We reach the secure cubicle. I swipe my card, “So, briefly, what are we doing with him?”

“He’s for psych review today,” says the intern.

I shake my head. Psych are meant to review all emergency patients on day of admission. They act like seeing patients will kill them. I can say that because I live with one.

Inside the room is silent, simple. The thick door hisses shut behind us. No windows, a single light. A low stimulus environment keeps things quiet for all of us. The patient is a shape beneath the blankets.

“Medically stable?” I say over my shoulder. The intern is doing something with the keypad.

“Medically, he’s very strong.”

I glance over at him. It’s a strange thing to say. The patient hasn’t moved. The intern steps forward.

"Here" he grins. "I'll introduce you."

He reaches past me. He twitches the blanket away.

I stare. It's not a patient, it's Donna, and she's dead. My heart thumps in my chest, I feel like I’m going to be sick. I turn. I’m shaking so I can hardly stand.

Behind him, I see the keypad, hanging by a flex.

"She got me in a lot of trouble," says the new doctor. Now I remember his face, dark and suspicious, his door closing as we opened ours, across the apartment hallway. "But you won't, will you?"

And then I see the blood beneath his fingernails.

__________

Brendan David Carson is a writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He has been published in Aurealis, Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and a number of other magazines. His blog is at http://brendandcarsonsfiction.blogspot.com/, he went to Clarion South 2009 and he is facebookable.

The Scenic Path of Human Artefacts

2010-07-11T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Cate Gardner

You arrive at a fork in the road and you have a choice.

A Buddha statue tells you that your path lies to the left, noting that said path is leafy, dark and plain creepy. Beside him, a man with a guitar points to the right advising you to take the populated route with its souvenir shops, tourists, alien artefact museum and security cameras.

You listen to Buddha, right? Because the guy with the guitar, well he has no face.

Anita found the sneaker a little way down the path. Its sole covered in mud, its laces gnawed, and the foot that had once inspired movement severed at the anklebone. At that point, screaming was redundant. A sword swept out of the dark to sever her vocal cords. Anita’s disembodied head spun at dizzying speeds and landed nose down in the dirt. Unfair, she thought. Now she couldn’t scowl at her attacker.

A hand gripped hold of her ponytail and picked her up, dangling her in front of his face. The last remnants of her spit travelled across the air to land on his bulbous nose, his snot dripped blue, his tears welled green. Adding insult to obvious injury, he jammed her head down onto a branch--it scraped against her brain--and stepped back to take a photograph. A Polaroid--the guarantee of instant humiliation.

In a bizarre twist on the ‘who am I?’ game, her attacker stuck a post-it note on her forehead and the photograph of her rotting head on his. He sat and stared at her, while she just stared. She wanted to ask, “If I get it right, will you sew my head back on?”

The shake of his confirmed he was telepathic and unsympathetic. Several of the arms attached to his coat waved their fists at him. The non-blue tinge to their skin confirmed they’d once belonged to humans. Anita recognised the deer tattoo on the hand beating against the attacker’s chest. It confirmed that Red had not walked out on her.

I’m not playing. She pulled her tongue at the blue man and found she couldn’t pull it back in. She felt sick to her phantom stomach. Fall leaves dislodged with the shake of her head and the twig prodded into her brain. A few memories dissipated with the act, but sight, hearing and pain remained.

He pressed Red’s fingers to the Polaroid and pointed at her. If her fingers weren’t digging into the dirt, she’d rip off the post-it note and point at him.

And I am what became of your kind. She blinked.

He nodded and pulled her head off the branch when she would prefer he slammed his fist
down on her skull and ended this. Perched beneath his B.O. soaked underarm, and deaf from the press of stolen flesh against her earlobes, Anita joined him in the journey back to the path’s beginning. The man, he of the wise advice, continued to rest against his guitar, and she now saw that it was jammed into his butt and their attacker had pasted his missing face to Buddha’s backside.

The alien placed her head in Buddha’s lap, and then he waddled back down the path to wait for the next fool.

A duo of giggling girls stopped to take photographs of Anita’s head—now she was a celebrity—and the Guitar Man’s faceless skull. Their sneakers tripped against the yellow lead and woke Buddha. The sage advised them to take the scenic path.

__________

Cate Gardner's addiction to souvenir shops means she wouldn't have followed Buddha's advice. For once, her long suffering family are grateful. You now have two choices, you can visit her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com/ or you can read more Stitches, she recommends the latter.

Fire Boomers

2010-07-04T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Doug Murano

What a cluster-fuck, thought Officer Hammond as he crossed the threshold of the doorway into the machine shed. A drive out into the country to find an old man who'd worked himself to death in the July heat was one thing. But the smell coming in waves from inside the metal structure suggested a wild animal problem, and that was quite another thing entirely. He drew his pistol and moved forward.

Hammond couldn't call for backup. In a town the size of Cherry, he was the sheriff, the deputy, and the goddamn dog catcher. Besides, most of the town was already half-cocked at the Independence Day street dance. That meant yet another busy night, another holiday he'd have to miss.

The day's last light filtered through the small, rectangular windows spaced along the tin shed's long walls. Hammond's flashlight cut an alley of daylight through the spacious blackness that didn't reveal much--just some dusty cardboard boxes, broken lawn mowers and a few moldy straw bales.

A flash of green and red seared through the windows, followed a few seconds later by a loud crackling sound. The sun wasn't even down yet, but the good people of Cherry didn't waste any time when it came to celebrating the nation's birthday.

Before he left town, Hammond promised his son that this year would be different, that he'd be there this time to watch "the fire boomers." If he didn't get himself in gear, Davie would be crushed. Again. He decided to perform a quick sweep of the shed and then scoot his boots down the road. The heat in there had started to choke him out. And then there was that smell--the sickening sweet-and-sour of death and something underneath, like the lion cages at the zoo.

He stopped when he saw a human form on the floor a dozen feet in front of him.

"Well, shit," said Hammond as he approached the old man's corpse, which lay facedown in the dirt. Pools of blood flanked his midsection like like obscene wings. Kneeling down, he grabbed the body by the shoulder and wrenched it onto its back. What was left of Miles Brody's abdominal cavity reminded Hammond of the cattle mutilations he'd seen over the past few weeks. It was a growing problem nobody in Cherry wanted to acknowledge with more than threats toward the local coyote population. Whatever had disemboweled the old guy had also plucked his eyes out of the sockets and sliced off his nose, leaving only his mouth intact, which hung open in mute protest. Red and blue lights blossomed outside and glinted off the old man's teeth. Soft reports followed.

That monkey-house smell grew stronger still. Ragged breaths filled the air behind Hammond.

He barely had time to turn around before it was on him, ripping into his insides just the way it had done to Miles Brody. His only shot went wide before the thing reached one of its malformed limbs to knock the pistol away. Then the other hand fell to the ground, still clutching its flashlight. Thus disarmed, Hammond screamed and battered the creature's moist skin with his gushing stumps as the creature continued its deadly work. Wet sounds, like a serving spoon moving through his wife's famous macaroni salad (which she brought to the pot luck earlier in the afternoon), echoed off the shed's thin walls.

More colorful blossoms filled the shed's windows when the thing pinned him to the dry ground and brought its smooth, broad face up close to Hammond's. As he faded into oblivion, Hammond watched little stars--blue, green, red and yellow--cavort and dance deep within the thing's vast black eyes. I made it to the fire boomers, Davie, he thought. I made it this year.

__________

Doug Murano lives somewhere in the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains. Before beginning work on his M.A. in English, he promised himself that he would make his living with the written word upon graduation. So far, so good. When he's not on the job, he composes dark little stories. During the last two years, he's even sold a few. Find a complete listing of his publications, and keep up with his latest shenanigans, at http://muranofiction.blogspot.com.

The Mannerisms of Runners

2010-06-27T00:01:00.004-05:00

by Barry Napier

It started off as an exercise thing, but now he has no idea why he runs. His leg muscles are toned and immune to shin splints; his ankles work like the hinges of a medieval drawbridge.

There is a rhythm to the wind against his face, to the pounding of his feet on asphalt like the heartbeat of a ghost. He runs and he runs and he has no idea where he is going. Three days ago he tasted salt in the air, the perspiration of the Pacific at his back. Today he smells manure and diesel. A large tractor trailer with a milk company logo barrels by like a big silver bullet looking for a werewolf that isn't there.

He has no idea why he is still running.

There are blisters on his feet and he is certain that both socks are filled with blood. He can feel the broken flaps of skin that were once the balls of his feet rubbing against the blood soaked fabric. His eyes, lips and the insides of his nostrils are dry. His lungs are burning and there is the sensation of a weight that has sat upon his chest for so long that it has started to absorb into his skin, through his breastbone and into his heart.

Sometimes when the milk trucks go racing past, he thinks about jumping in front of one. Then maybe the running would stop and his muscles would get a rest in the ensuing explosion of calcium and Penzoil and New Balance.

He has been running for thirty weeks. He does not sleep. He only watches the world as it slumbers around him, clouds rising and falling and sprinkling stars like salt along the way. The night sky should represent rest, but it only urges him on. Run faster, it says. There is a maniac behind you.

Maybe that is why he runs; the maniac is surely still on his heels--the maniac he encountered on the corner three blocks from his home. The maniac had worn a sheet of black that covered his entire body, standing outside a bakery at 5 a.m. among the smells of baking bread and dawn. He had looked like a shadow. The man had reached out and touched him.

Tripped him.

Joined him.

Is that why he runs?

Four days ago, he coughed out his tongue.

His calves are burning. The sun exchanges skies with the moon and another day begins. He keeps running. He tastes blood in the back of his mouth. His breath sounds like sandpaper dragging across shattered glass. A car passes and beeps its horn.

He raises his hand to wave and sees the decay on the underside of his forearm. There is no blood, only mottled gray splotches. It looks like mold on bread. This brings to mind the bakery and he peeks behind him to see if he is being followed.

The maniac is back there, gliding like a rogue shadow running from the sun. It runs without feet and points him onward. It then sinks into the road and leaves only the deserted Missouri highway (or was it Kansas or Connecticut or Calvary?) to show him where to go.

The laces of his shoes bounce up and down like the ears of a mauled rabbit. This scene looks familiar. He has been here before.

God, his feet hurt.

He coughs out his tongue; two days pass. A milk truck passes him, like a silver bullet looking for…

A car passes, beeps its horn.

He has run through this place before--always running, breathing electric pain, listening to the squishing sounds from his blistered feet in his soggy red socks.

He tastes the salt of the Pacific for several days. This is soon replaced by the wafting scent of manure and pastures.

He looks back and sees his companion, always pointing forward, always robed in black--a shadow cast not by light but by the absence of it.

He hears the approaching grumble of a milk truck as he brings his left foot up, right foot down, left foot up, right foot down…

He runs on and on.

Soon he will cough and his tongue will fall out. Then a car will pass, beeping its weak little horn.

He has been here before.

And no matter how hard he runs, he will never be faster than the shadow behind him or the truth it carries.

___________

Barry has had more than 25 stories and poems included in online and print publications. His collection Debris is currently available through Library of Horror Press. He enjoys coffee, minimalist music and irony.

The Neighbor

2010-06-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Dawn Allison

Emma Cannon was a stout woman with thick arms and a stern face, one of those sorts who like things best when they are precisely just so. She was dusting the windowsill when a rustling in the magnolia tree out front caught her eye. Damn squirrel probably into the birdfeeder again.

“Henry, get your twenty-two.”

Henry glanced over his shoulder from his seat on the sofa. “What for?”

“Squirrel. Quick about it, now. Don’t want him getting away.” She scowled him into motion and while he was fetching the gun, she leaned on the sill, squinting out the window to find the vulgar little beast hiding behind the waxy leaves.

“Where?” Henry said, gun slung over his shoulder.

“Wait.”

Henry waited. Generally, he was good at doing what he was told. That was why Emma loved him.

“Shit, Henry, I think you might need a bigger gun.”

“Raccoon?”

“Ain’t no coon up there, no sir.”

“Well, what the hell, Emma, just spit it out already.”

She shot an irritated glance over her shoulder, then turned her glare to the window. “It’s that Jim Garby again, and damned if he ain’t been pawing through our trash. Look at him, wearing that tablecloth I threw out three days ago.”

Henry sighed. “I’ll get the deer rifle,” he said.

Henry was good at doing what he was told. That was why Emma loved him.

__________

Dawn Allison lives in the backwaters of North Carolina where her closest neighbors are two abandoned pig farms that creak in the night. You can check out her work in Necrotic Tissue, Burst literary e-zine, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and others. The complete list is here: http://huntingthemidnightmuse.wordpress.com/published/.

Something Different

2010-06-13T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Chris Reed

As Darren watched the obese woman get undressed, he wondered if he could really go through with this. Her breasts were enormous, which he didn’t really mind, but the rest of her—the flabby arms, the double chin, the pouch of blubber that hung down over her crotch—had him second-guessing his decision to meet her here at the motel. After eight years of marriage, he’d grown accustom to his wife’s slim, athletic figure. She was the complete opposite of the woman who lay on the motel bed, sprawled out before him like a white, pasty whale. (He couldn’t even remember her name. Was it Margaret? Margie?) Before he was married, Darren wouldn’t be caught dead with a chick like this. She was a disgusting pig, so fat he couldn’t see her genitalia. But he could smell it. Despite her obvious attempt to mask the stench with perfume, it still smelled like something had died down there.

But it was something different. So he took off his pants.

__________

As Margo watched the man step out of his jeans and climb onto the bed, she felt her stomach growl. It had been a long time since she’d eaten, and this man was much thinner than she was used to—nearly anorexic—but she’d sought him out for precisely that reason.

As the man pushed her pouch up in search of her vagina, she delighted in the shock on his face when he saw her writhing nest of pubic hair. His eyes grew wide, jaw dropped, body trembled. He was so stunned he made no attempt to move as the wiry hairs reached out like insect feelers and coiled around his arms, wrists, legs and neck. He kicked and thrashed as they pulled him inside the gaping maw of her vagina. And when the teeth inside bit down on him, crushing those bony shoulders and knobby knees, ripping that long, lean torso in two, she felt oddly satisfied.

It wasn’t the best meal she’d ever had, but at least it was something different.

__________

Chris Reed is the author of more than 50 short stories. His fiction has appeared in a variety of small press publications including Black Ink Horror, Chimeraworld 5, and the Cutting Block Press anthology, Tattered Souls: The Provocative Boundary of Fear. Aside from writing, he enjoys frozen pizza, Seinfeld reruns, and hockey fights. He lives in Davison, MI, with his photographer wife and their two enigmatic children. Visit his official Web site: www.ChrisReedFiction.com.

Body Language

2010-06-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Jim Valenti

The warm sand and tropical breeze of Playa Tiburon was coaxing me to sleep when I heard the voice. It was calling to me in bulleted Spanish.

"El gran blanco devadora de hombres!"

Huh? I squinted my sun-seared eyes upwards to find a black tussle-haired boy standing over me, pointing frantically down the beach.

"Rapidamente, por favor! Rapidamente!" he was sobbing.

I had been back in Cabo San Lucas barely an hour. After much too long of taking part in the ritualistic debauchery that is L.A. I had just up and left to kick back and take stock of my life. I felt the need to reacquaint myself with the ripping curls and virgin sands of my pre-corrupted surfer days and let time just take me where it may. The shimmering seas, lazy heat and cheap tequila of the Baja peninsula were the only tools I needed to start rebuilding. My possessions consisted of a pair of cut-offs, a long board and a frosty pitcher of margaritas. My brain and my Spanish were rusty, and I certainly wasn’t interested in any interaction with the locals beyond a request for a "cerveza fria". But there he stood pointing excitedly down the strand and working himself into a panic.

"Gran blanco!" he repeated breathlessly, "Date prisa!" The beach was just about empty except for the two of us, and as my eyes started to regain focus I looked past his extended finger and saw the girl. She was maybe fourteen or fifteen, foundering in the deeper water just outside the surf break and a few yards down the beach. She was in obvious trouble, flailing wildly and beating on the surface in a frenzy to stay afloat. By the way she was panicking I knew she wouldn’t last much longer. My indifference to the commotion going on around me washed away as my inner lifeguard rushed in, then instantly I was sprinting down the beach with the boy close behind. I charged headlong into the surf and came up in full swim.

I closed the gap swiftly and was on her in seconds. She was just slipping below the surface when I reached her and made a desperate lunge for her arms. They were flimsy in my grasp and I felt her strength slipping quickly away. I watched panic flash in her full, dark eyes--her mouth hung open in a silent scream as though she realized that death was upon her. Then she suddenly lunged forward and struck me above my eye with her forehead.

Hey, I’m trying to save you here! I tried to stay afloat, although her body suddenly took on renewed life and began spasming violently all around me in the churning water. I went under briefly as she thrashed at my legs from beneath the surface. I pinned her arms back to get her under control, but they soon fell limp. She bobbed up and slipped beneath the water again. As she sank in a wake of colored foam her face finally relaxed and she uttered something that chilled my soul.

"Tiburon".

She wasn’t drowning at all.

It’s funny how quickly it all comes back. Playa Tiburon. I gasped for breath as I was pulled from below with renewed strength, this time not by the girl. Shark Beach. It was suddenly so familiar. Devedora de hombres--the man eater--the Cabo nickname for the great white. I felt my torso contort in grotesque rhythm, my new life of leisure all but assured as my legs were ripped one at a time from their sockets. I looked towards the shore where the boy stood crying and pointing. My margarita pitcher was tipped over and soaking slowly into the sand.

When I leave the institution I will return to Playa Tiburon, what’s left of me, and console the boy. Instead of my long board I will pack a Spanish-English dictionary to go along with my new pair of cut-offs and my margaritas.

__________

Jim is a professional engineer fixing the many large suspension bridges in New York City by day, and a married father of three dealing with the numbing reality of middle-age by night. Jim views life as he thinks it should be--rife with weird opportunities around every corner. He never passes up the challenge of a good wiffleball game.

The Man in the Mirror

2010-05-30T00:01:00.004-05:00

by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

My sleep had been dreamless, timeless blackness.

I don't remember waking up or how I got there, only squinting in the bathroom as the fluorescent tube blinked to life, flickering. I kept my tired eyes downcast, on the sink, my mouth feeling dry, like bones and ashes. I yawned and ran my fingers over my scalp, turned on the faucet, splashed icy water into my mouth and onto my face, swallowing and then letting the cold drops fall into the sink a while before toweling dry.

Suddenly I felt I was being watched and looked up to meet an unblinking stare.

My perfect, left-right reversed doppelganger looked back at me, mouth slightly open, breathing slowly, hands gripping the sides of the sink as he examined me like a stranger.

I found that I couldn't break his gaze.

Hypnotized, the man in the mirror used me like a puppet: preening, grinning, winking. Unconsciously I yawned and my eyes jammed shut, watering. I slowly cracked them open.

There he was, still locking my eyes with his stare. He looked tired.

"Good morning," he said without much enthusiasm, and I felt the same, crackled words escaping my lips. Standing straighter and smiling--I felt my spine jerk upright and my lips curl up in concert--he repeated the greeting, louder, more confident, as if to convince himself: "Good morning!"

When he finally frowned, sighed, and reached to turn off the light, my hand hit the frame and I realized the awful truth, a moment before returning to blackness:

I was the reflection.

__________

Samuel Montgomery-Blinn is a software engineer by trade andwho lives, works, and writes in Durham, North Carolina with his wife,two kids, and three cats. The cats help out as they can with his newest vocation as managing editor of a small speculative shortfiction publisher, BULL SPEC, at www.bullspec.com.

Foreplay

2010-05-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

by J. J. Steinfeld

During his retirement party, the math teacher was talking to the attractive science teacher, and she told him about her dream of having sex with an adorable visitor from a recently discovered planet. Drink in hand, he told her that two days after a Saturday double-feature matinee, enthralled by The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and The Incredible Shrinking Man, he sat in elementary-school class and wondered aloud what would happen if the Amazing 50-Foot Woman went out on a date with the Incredible Shrinking Man but the teacher kicked him out as if he had drawn the Amazing Woman and the Incredible Man naked in his notebook, passing it on to every student in that long-ago class, completely warping their expectations of lovemaking for a lifetime to come. Then the science teacher, finishing her third drink, asked the math teacher, “If I were a sexy space alien, would you go to bed with me?" In his excitement, nostalgic film musings, and incipient drunkenness, the math teacher failed to notice the tiny tentacles that were emerging from the back of the science teacher’s long, lovely neck.

__________

Canadian fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives hidden away on Prince Edward Island. He has published two novels, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press) and Word Burials (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), nine short story collections, the previous three by Gaspereau Press — Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized?, Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown, and Would You Hide Me? — and two poetry collections, An Affection for Precipices (Serengeti Press) and Misshapenness (Ekstasis Editions). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act and full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.

Lock and Key

2010-05-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

by L.R. Bonehill

I found the box on the day Richie Norton saved my life. I was just about lost to it; that sense of serenity that comes when you’re drowning, despite your body thrashing as it struggles against the end. I was ready to let it all slip away, to fade into silence when Richie dragged me up from the muck and grime of the water and pulled me away to the embankment. I’ve never forgiven him.

We both lay panting and exhausted on the damp grass. Cold shivers ran through us despite the heat of the afternoon sun. Brackish water stung my throat and my lungs burned as they clutched for air.

Richie’s yellow Spiderman t-shirt clung so tight I could see the rack of his ribs. The shirt was covered with algae and there was a ragged tear where it must have snagged on something in the water. He peeled it away from his chest and stuck his finger through the hole.

‘You ruined my best shirt,’ he said, scrabbling to his knees. He spat on the ground and ran a hand across his mouth, long fingers pulling at something on his tongue that wouldn’t quite come away. He spat again.

‘The hell you think you were doing?’ There was a venom in his voice that was rare to hear from Richie. His eyes narrowed and he shook his head. ‘Hope it was worth it.’ He nodded at the box that I still held in one hand.

To this day, I don’t know why I’d reached out for the box as it bobbed on the surface of the water, or how I’d managed to stumble in after it, or why I’d held it so firmly and wouldn’t let go even as the life began to seep away from me.

I looked down and saw my knuckles were white, pale as the cataracts that clouded Grandma’s vision.

The box wasn’t much to look at; about the size of a hip flask from an old film noir, dented and battered all over, rusted clasps at the sides and a scuffed lock at the front.

‘At least take a look inside, since you almost killed the two of us,’ Richie said.

I flicked at the clasps, each in turn, and found they wouldn’t budge. It felt light; I shook it and nothing seemed to move inside.

Richie snatched it away from me and dug his penknife out of his jeans pocket. It was the same knife his brother had used to carve three dots into his hand the year before. He’d promised he’d ink Richie with a crazy life tattoo just like it when he was older. Richie couldn’t wait.

He prised the clasps apart with the blade and quickly moved on to the lock. It seemed the knife would give before the lock did. I could see the strain on his face, the tension in his muscles.

‘That’s not meant to be opened, no way,’ he said and tossed the box back to me. ‘You should be dead, man, you should be gone. Your eyes were rolled way up.’ He mimicked the look and I shuddered as I saw the whites of his eyes.

He pointed at the box with his knife. ‘You look after that, keep it safe; your soul’s in there. Vida loca, my friend.’

Richie Norton was my best friend. Richie Norton saved my life. I never saw him again.

At school the next day Mrs Walker told us about the accident. Richie slipped in the bathroom and fell back into the tub unconscious. He drowned as the bathwater leaked away.

Crazy fucking life.

__________

I’m cold all the time now; it’s as if the water saturated my bones. My palms and the tips of my fingers are still pale and wrinkled and there’s a sour, stagnant taste in my mouth. Some days my lips are blue as the veins on the back of my hand.

There are times I’m sure Richie was just the first; the first of many. That everyone I’ve ever lost is because of that damn box, because I didn’t die that day, because Richie was right.

Wait long enough though and answers always come. I found a key today, deep down in the mud by the embankment. It’s small and the colour of dried blood and it’s a perfect fit.

All I have to do is find the courage to turn it.

__________

L.R. Bonehill never meant to hurt anyone all those years ago; he just wanted to play, that’s all. Forgive him online at http://bonehillsboneyard.blogspot.com/

Thor's Hammer

2010-05-09T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Alan W. Davidson

The three children floated on their raft in Diablo’s pond. Meaghan, usually boisterous, was quiet today. Her knees were drawn up to her chest and she stared into the murky water.

Luthor nudged her with his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

She shrugged in response.

“Holy crap! Did you see that trout jump?” Dickie shouted.

“Shut up, I’m talking to Megs,” Luthor shouted, swatting him with a rolled up horror magazine.

“Jeez, sor-ree!”

“We’re your friends, right?” Luthor continued. Meaghan stared ahead, nodding slightly. “Tell us. Maybe we can help.”

“It’s just…I’d really miss you guys if we moved.” she said.

“But you told us your mom wouldn’t move again until you finished school. That’s still four years away,” Dickie said.

“Yeah…,” Meaghan answered, tears tracked down her pale cheeks.
“…it’s really got to do with that man—“

“What man?” Luthor said.

“You’ve seen him around. That creepy, bald guy at the end of Cochrane Street?”

“I know him. He hardly ever goes out.”

“I’ve seen him too. He jogs every day. Just before dark,” Dickie added.

“Tell us…,” Luthor whispered.

“He’s talked rude to me. Dirty stuff. “He also touched me…,” she added, glancing at Luthor through reddened eyes.

Luthor grasped the edge of the raft, his knuckles white. “Did you tell your mom?”

“She wouldn’t do nothing. The same thing happened in Jersey three years ago.”

“What did she say then?” Dickie asked.

“She told me it was all a misunderstanding. A week later she had us packed and moved here.”

“I know you’re worried,” Luthor said. “But this is wrong and we’re going to fix it.” Dickie nodded in agreement.

“How?”

“Don’t you worry about it, Megs.”

__________

The boys had found a large, moss-covered boulder on a hillside far from the path. Luthor’s grandpa called it an erratic and said they were scattered all over New Hampshire during the last ice age. For three days they removed dirt from beneath the rock, propping it up with long bits of wood wedged into the dark soil.

On the Friday evening before Labor Day, Luthor stayed in the woods while Dickie waited near the jogging trail. As the bald man neared, the boy, frantically waving his arms, jumped into his path.

“Please help, mister—my friend’s hurt!”

“What happened?”

“I think he broke his leg. Come quick!” Dickie said, and dashed through the trees. The man hesitated for a moment and then followed the boy. They ran far into the woods, eventually stopping at the boulder.

Dickie was breathless. “Down there, mister,” he said, pointing under the erratic.

The man bent over the moaning boy. “Are you hurt?”

Dickie snatched the hammer that lay against the base of the rock and struck the man in the temple. Luthor scampered from the hole as his friend swung again, sinking the claw into the base of the man’s skull. He screamed, clutching at the hammer as Dickie shoved him into the void.

Luthor grabbed a shovel and rammed the blade into the man’s throat, unleashing a gush of blood. “That’s for Meaghan, you perv!” he hissed.

The boys removed the wooden supports, causing the boulder to list forward. They shoveled the excess dirt around the edges of the rock and covered the soil with moss, leaves and branches.

__________

Luthor watched the grey clouds from his office; the rain pelted the window and wound down the glass in sparkling tears.

The intercom voice startled him. “Dr. Guttormson, your patient is in exam two.”

Luthor strode down the sterile hall, rapped the door and entered the exam room. A thin, vaguely familiar woman sat on the bench. She smiled and offered her hand. “I’m Meaghan King. You probably don’t remember me, but my name was Murphy when we were in junior high.”

Luthor chuckled and squeezed her hand.” Of course I remember you, Megs. How did you end up in sunny Seattle?”

“I’m in computer sales and my work transferred me here. Dickie Stein said I should look you up.”

“Dickie? We haven’t talked in years. When did you see him?”

“Years ago, after we moved back to New Hampshire. He showed up at my door one day selling life insurance. What a grand chat we had.”

“That’s great,” Luthor said. He swallowed and leaned closer to Meaghan. “Didn’t you and your mom leave town because of that bald guy…on Cochrane Street?”

She thought for a moment and laughed. “Oh that! Mom got another job in Boston and moved us away. Practically overnight. What I told you guys was a huge pile of crap. He never touched me—he never even talked to me.”

__________

Alan is employed as a structural steel draftsman and lives, with his wife and son, on the continent's edge in the old city of St. John's. He is a member of the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador and is taking baby steps towards writing his first novel. You are invited to attend his ramblings at http://conversationsfromlandsedge.blogspot.com

Dangerous Premonitions

2010-05-02T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Laura Eno

The first snowfall of the season dusted the ground in light powder, revealing small footprints that led to the cellar door. Jack shook his head in disbelief. What child would be wandering out here barefoot in the cold?

He scouted the area, not finding any other evidence before reluctantly coming back to the cellar, a place he’d avoided since moving in last month. One look into its dark, dank hold had been enough to dissuade him from further exploration. Who knows what lurked down there? Jack hadn’t been keen to find out.

Returning from the house with a flashlight, Jack swung the wooden door open and peered inside. The musty smell of damp earth assaulted him, whatever traces of potatoes or onions it might have once held no longer discernable. He shuddered at the thought of black widow spiders hunkered down to spend the winter in cozy comfort.

The light played across the small space, showing a fresh mound of disturbed earth in the center of the floor. Thoughts of spiders faded as a small hand pushed up through the dirt, tiny fingers curling once before hanging limp.

Jack bounded down the rickety stairs, tripping and landing in a heap in his rush. He dug furiously, having only his hands for tools. His skin cracked and bled from the effort. Within minutes, he’d unearthed a small girl, no more than three or four years old. Her blue eyes stared forever fixed at a point beyond his understanding. Her mouth had been filled with dirt as if buried alive. All she wore was a tiny pink nightgown.

Gagging, Jack retreated back up the stairs and into the house. He called the police to report his findings. When they arrived, they found nothing amiss: no body, no small footprints, no soft dirt. Although naturally suspicious of Jack’s story, there were no reports of a missing child. They labeled him a crank and warned him about making false calls.

Did he hallucinate the whole ordeal? Only his bloody hands told him no. When the footprints appeared again two day later with the next snowfall, Jack moved out, deciding the place was haunted.

One month later, three-year-old Abbie Tinsdale was reported missing by her mother, taken from the house sometime during the night. She mentioned the girl was wearing a pink nightgown. The police remembered Jack’s report and checked the root cellar of the house where he used to live. They found the girl too late. She’d been buried alive.

The police arrested Jack based on his detailed description of the crime scene, even though he’d reported it a month before it happened, and the DNA evidence. His blood was mixed in the soil where the girl was found. They were convinced that only the killer would know such details, even accused Jack of setting up an elaborate alibi for himself with his story. The small town jury placed their trust in the hands of the law, sentencing him to life for a murder he didn’t commit—but had the misfortune to predict.

__________

Laura Eno (http://lauraeno.blogspot.com) has written two YA fantasy novels and a paranormal romance. Her flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Twisted Dreams, The Monsters Next Door, Flashes in the Dark, 10Flash, House of Horror, The New Flesh, Everyday Weirdness and MicroHorror.

The Trouble with Gnomes

2010-04-25T12:01:00.002-05:00

by Jamie Eyberg

The lilac had come into bloom so we slept with the window open, enjoying the fragrance as it filled our bedroom. It was through the open window that we heard them. They were small but sharp, not unlike the sound of ice cubes exploding in a water glass from across a room.

I got up to see what was going on, thinking, perhaps, that a spring shower was moving in and the drops of rain were falling on the leaves.

I saw instead the moon, full and high in the sky. It illuminated the first buds of the roses and the petunias that had yet to establish themselves. Still the popping continued and I peered into the night to see what was the source.

That was when I saw the gnomes. The ones she had bought in bulk from the garden center. I watched as they all began to move, trembling really, the small concrete bodies crackled and popped as they did.

It was slight at first, then the rock facade crumbled and the gnomes moved more freely until they were running about, ransacking the garden and taking joy in pulling the petals from the flowers one by one. They stomped them into the dirt as they walked on small hoof-like prints that cut through the hard soil.

I said nothing but felt my wife come up beside me. We watched as they upended the fairy statue I had given her, the one with the bouquet of lilies in her arms, and buried it in the compost pile we had started the year before. The leftovers from the night before were still fresh on top and even in the dull light of the moon I could see rotting potatoes and eggshells.

We gasped as they took a brick that edged the walk path and threw it. It smashed into the fairy and shattered her into a thousand bits of ceramic and dust. They laughed a coarse laugh as we watched it disintegrate. I couldn't help but notice that some of them were eying the birdbath in a most conspicuous manner.

It was the gasp that got us. They must have heard it through the thin walls and the open window. They turned their attention from the broken fairy and the birdbath and looked at us.

Hundreds of little eyes looked at us with ill intent and fresh bricks, torn from the earth as they came our way.

The only thing in their way was the window.

We both eyed the door and I almost opened it when she grasped my arm and I realized it opened into the garden. The first brick hit the window and a crack spirals across the glass.

__________

Jamie Eyberg is a full time father and a part time writer. He has a few stories out in publication land and you can see where in the right hand side of his blog at http://acontinuityofparks.blogspot.com/. He doesn't like to garden.

Swept Away

2010-04-18T00:01:00.004-05:00

by Brenton Tomlinson

His tongue flicked out and dragged across parched and cracked lips. He held a grease-stained hand above his eyes in an effort to decrease the never-ending glare of the crystal blue water. In the distance, a bank of black and grey clouds marked the tail of last night’s storm. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

The yacht was a mess with tangled lines littering a battered deck. The mast had disappeared before midnight, the distress beacon flashing from the top as it sank beneath the black waters. If rescue came it wouldn’t be because they managed to track that cry for help which now sat at the bottom of the ocean god knows how many miles to the south.

Mary-Anne had disappeared overboard about an hour later, quietly slipping into the ocean’s embrace. In truth she looked peaceful and glad to go. Talk of separation had always been unpleasant to her, a reality she couldn’t face. News of a replacement and pending divorce papers had been too much.

The fight had been short, but every bit as violent as the storm. His own much vaunted mast of patience having broken long before the yacht’s central pillar relinquished to nature’s torment. The boat hook was too convenient an object not to use, and Mary-Anne should have learned by now when not to push. The look of surprise and fear, mixed with a touch of betrayal, on his ex-wife’s face lingered in his mind’s eye.

The storm had washed away his torment and ruined his boat, but it had scrubbed the deck clean of Mary-Anne’s blood as well. It had been easy, a moment of rage, a flexing of his superior strength, and the barbed steel penetrated her body more easily than he ever had. It had been difficult to pull it back out, but the thought was quickly forgotten when he drove it back in. The rush had been better than sex.

Rescue would see him start a new life with Trisha. If not, then maybe being claimed by the tainted waters would be a form of nature’s justice. He shrugged and returned to trying to fix the engine. He’d kill for something to drink.

A smile crept across his face as a warm feeling grew in his gut. Well, he’d kill again for something to quench his thirst. He gripped the brine encrusted wrench tightly as a bubbling laugh crept through him.

Somehow he’d survive, he had to. Trisha wouldn’t understand anymore than Mary-Anne had, but his new thirst had to be sated.

__________

While living in a sun drenched country is nice, he finds his mind continually delves into places that are not so warm and comforting. Strangely he seems to enjoy this. Writing credits include:52 Stitches 2009, Fear and Trembling, and Yellow Mama. New work will be published in: The Blackness Within anthology from Apex and Night to Dawn magazine. He is the editor for Blade Red Press Dark Pages Volume 1 anthology. And for something different, he is currently working on a YA novel. For more information you can read his blog at Musings of an Aussie Writer.

Driftwood

2010-04-11T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Daniel LeMoal

Something is wrong at Crane’s Beach. I know because I've been living here and fishing The Lake all my life. If you walk a half-mile beyond the service road, you'll see a small trailer and a series of sheds. It looks like nothing, but it is my home.

It has been over two years since I started to notice the broken bones along the shoreline, cracked and as dry as driftwood. I've called Parks and Wildlife, Fisheries and even the police. They all tell me the same thing.

"This is floodland, J.P. Cows and all sorts of animals get washed away and end up in the lakes."

Since I was a boy, I have seen many things wash ashore here. I know the difference between an animal and a person.

"Thanks for the call. Next time we're out that way, we'll take a look for you. Okay?"

They never come. They figure that Crane's Beach is all rocks, no sand and no people. They are wrong. The odd family will come, looking to get away from the crowds at the sanded beaches. They put on old running shoes and brave the stones to go swimming. Sometimes they barbecue on the beach well into the evening. I have no family of my own, so when I hear them laughing and singing, it makes my heart glad. These people are my only family; even though they don't come often, they are always welcome. I try to keep the beach clean, collecting the broken bottles, rusted hooks and stray netting. But surely they see the bones. I can't keep up anymore. Crane's Beach never gets many repeat visitors these days.

One Saturday, as I'm fixing one of my motors on the dock, I see a new couple walking on the beach. They make a camp for their lawn chairs and walk towards The Lake. The man and woman both scream, as they all do when they make those first steps into the frigid water. It's a big lake that never warms up.

My dog, Mahkwa, suns himself and watches as I put the motor back together. When I'm finished, I look at him and smile. That's when I see his ears perk up; over the wind, I hear more yelling from the beach. I can hear panic in their voices.

Mahkwa is already running down the shoreline. In the water, I see the couple swimming towards a flailing set of arms. A child? Maybe. Whoever it is, they are drowning.

I jump into my fastest outboard boat. Mahkwa barks at me as I speed away from land, the boat skipping on the waves. Past the break, the couple is floating together now; as I kill the motor and drift towards them, I see that the water has turned a cloudy red.

The man is already dead. The woman still holds onto him, keeping them both afloat. Even though a piece of her neck is missing, she tries to speak.

"The girl," she says, as her eyes start to roll into the back of her head. I look further out and see a small child floating in the water, face down. It's hard to leave the woman behind, but I rev the motor and steer towards the girl. I use my net to pull her towards me; she weighs next to nothing. When I pull her into the boat, she is already cold. Her skin is scaly to the touch. I roll the girl over and her eyes open; her mouth is filled with needle-like teeth that should belong to a walleye.

I recoil but she's already bitten into my leg, tearing away a large chunk of muscle. I kick with my other leg and fall overboard. She stands in the boat, watching as I try to swim away. I don't get very far; I've lost too much blood already. From behind, I can hear her as she jumps into the water.

Not like this, not like this, I whisper to myself. But then I grow faint and realize that it won't be long before my bones are driftwood, just like all the others: being worn down by the tide until there is nothing but dust. Then, at last, Crane's Beach shall have its sand.

__________

Daniel LeMoal lives and writes in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His work has previously appeared in On Spec, Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest and Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year anthology.

The Worm Eaters

2010-04-04T08:20:00.001-05:00

by John Boden

Lawrence watched the rains from his station underneath the carport. The clouds had literally rumbled in from nowhere, great black bison lumbering across the rainbow plain of sky. They snorted thunder and spat lightning. The sky opened and let loose a rain of maggots and worms that covered the ground in a fine, wriggling blanket. Children and emaciated adults scrambled from beneath their shelters to clamor and grab as many handfuls as they could, stuffing plastic bags and shoe boxes with living stringy things.

Some shoved great, gray handfuls into their slobbering, lipless mouths as they gathered. They moaned in disturbing ecstasy as they ate and cavorted in the slithering mud. In the shadows of his hiding place, Lawrence sat and watched and picked at the black sores that decorated his skinny legs. He popped the scabs into his eager mouth like candy, and, with disgust, grimaced at the worm eaters.

__________

John Boden resides in the shadow of Three Mile Island with his wonderful wife and children. He is an editor for Shock Totem magazine.

Red Shoes

2010-03-28T00:01:00.002-05:00

Red Shoes
Danielle Ferries

Mia Millington watched from her position on the highest branch of the tree as a new friend arrived. The girl didn’t yet wear the uniform but she’d look pretty in it. Like most new people she had a funny smile on her face like she was super excited about something but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Her lips were smeared with bright red lipstick, and her curly hair sprung around her face like a giant ball of orange twine.

Mia climbed down the tree slowly so as not to scratch her legs like she had the other day. Dr. Scott was cutting across the grass towards her, and she wanted to talk to him before she went to meet her new friend. Dr. Scott was in love with her and it was only a matter of time before he asked her to marry him. Then she could live at his house.

She reached the bottom and twirled for him, hoping he’d notice her dress.

“Mia, I need you to come with me,” he said, drumming his fingers against his clipboard. “We’ve found something in your room that we need to talk to you about.”

“Okay.” Mia batted her eyelashes exactly how she knew men liked. She was careful to walk two steps behind Dr. Scott because he didn’t like it when she ran ahead, and she didn’t want him to give her the shocks again. It burned and hurt like holy hell. She had to be good for Dr. Scott or he wouldn’t want to marry her.

When they reached her room, Mia hovered shyly in the doorway. Dr. Scott didn’t come to her room very often so she wondered if he was going to give her a special present.

“Come in, Mia.”

She smiled and skipped across the room, wishing she had a skirt that swished. Her mother had once made her a pink one with frills.

“I want you to tell me what happened to Sally.”

“Sally?” Mia asked as she studied herself and Dr. Scott in the mirror. She was a bit taller than him and wondered if it was bad for a wife to be taller than her husband.

“Over here.” He motioned for her to come closer. “Don’t be shy.”

Mia turned and took four steps, her eyes resting on Sally’s cherry red shoes. Her red shoes.

“What happened to Sally?” Dr. Scott asked again.

“She wouldn’t play with me.” Mia glared at the brown haired woman.

“What game were you trying to play?”

“I wanted to play Dorothy and Toto, but I wanted to be Dorothy and she wouldn’t give me her red shoes.”

“What happened then?”

“She was mean to me. She said I was too ugly for pretty shoes.” Mia nudged Sally with her foot and waited for a response. When she didn’t get one she knelt down and pulled her hair. It made no difference and Mia straightened up and clapped her hands. “She can be my new dolly,” she beamed. Sally was pretty enough to be her dolly, even though she wouldn’t give back the shoes. And evil Nurse Mavis had taken her old dolly away so she’d had nothing to play with for weeks.

“Mia, Sally is dead.”

“She’s just pretending so she doesn’t have to give me her shoes.” Mia practised tapping her heels together, just like Dorothy had in the movie.

“Why is her corpse under your bed? What did you do to her?”

“Corpse?”

“Yes, Mia. Sally’s corpse. Tell me what you did to her?”

Mia glanced at Sally’s body. So still. “What a pretty corpse.” She curled her fingers around Dr. Scott’s. “Can I have my shoes now?”

__________

Danielle Ferries lives in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia) and adores dark and dreary weather, wicked characters with fractured worlds, gothic horror, collecting creepy dolls and Hitchcock. Other publications include stories with Darkened Horizons, Atrum Tempestas (Black Hound), Sinister Tales, Flashes in the Dark, and the Festive Fear with Tasmaniac Publications.

The Slough

2010-03-21T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Kent Alyn

The slough was as murky as Dave’s belief in humanity.

In winter, when the brown water was deep, Safeway bags and toilet paper dangled from the briars; in summer, when dried hard like concrete, the place was a junkyard of beer cans, rusty appliances, and cat skeletons. The water was home to larvae, frogs, salamanders, and snakes; the muddy bank was home to skunks, possums, raccoons, and rats. Only nasty critters lived in the ugly slough.

Dave Franks hated the slough, though the waters called; if not the slough calling—the boy: Matty, the kid with the oversized hat and tight sweatpants that always waited for his mom after T-ball practice. After the last game ended, after the last hot dog sold, after the last car left, he sat against the cinderblock restrooms, hoping the next, or the next, or the next approaching car was his ride.

Three years later, Matty was forgotten, erased. The “Breaking News” moved on. The police did, too. Judging the way parents left their kids—waiting alone the way Matty waited—it was obvious the town forgot. Matty’s mom, Donna, did. She moved to Colorado with her newest boyfriend, Methhead Hank.

Dave, a detective at the time, found Matty’s Ken Griffey Jr. glove in the slough—nothing else. When the police gave up, Dave quit the force in protest.

With no steady paycheck, no self-control, and no self-esteem, Dave’s wife filed for divorce.

Finding Matty was all that was left.

__________

Early spring, the slough was still deep enough to paddle. Dave hunted the slough on and off, usually alone. Equipped with a half-rack of Pabst he conned Pete Sanders into coming along, not so much to paddle, but to offer a second pair of eyes. The last time, Dave saw something unexplainable.

The baseball glove was at his feet, beside the camcorder and the beer.

“Damn no-see-ums,” Dave said, slapping his arm.

“Stinks out here,” Pete said, and then tossed an empty can into the water. “What’s another can, anyway?”

Dave shook his head. That summed up Pete—didn’t care much.

Pete stuck out his tongue and panted. “How much further?”

“Not much.”

The stars and moon were out. Frogs croaked. A bat dove and touched the water. The raft cut through the ripple.

“Okay,” Dave whispered, grabbing a low-hanging limp to stop the raft. “Over there, Pete.”

The spotlight shone on the cock-eyed, clothes dryer across the slough.

“Last week I was right here when I heard a voice, saying words I couldn’t understand.”

“Bullshit.”

“I ain’t shittin’ you. My neck hairs stood up. And then, I looked over at that dryer and saw a face, inside that dryer. Bulging, wide eyes, sharp cheek bones, and black teeth. It looked at me and then slithered out like an otter into the slough. The body—naked, yellowish— and the spine like row of rough knots. It went under and never came up.”

Pete downed his beer. “What the hell?”

“Do you want to paddle over to there?”

“That thing live inside?”

He shrugged.

“Hell-no.”

“You rather wait on the bank or come?”

Pete looked at the dryer, then at Dave. “Shit, I ain’t stayin’ here alone.”

“Okay, let’s keep it quiet,” Dave said, and then handed Pete the camcorder. “Know how to use one of these?”

Closer, they paddled and then drifted, paddled and drifted. Dave kept the spotlight on the machine. Pete recorded.

They coasted. Grass stuck out of the open dryer. Something pale jostled. A hand crawled out.

Then, the creature looked into the light. A dead rat fell from its mouth.

Pete screamed as the creature climbed out and scurried behind the machine.

Dave shushed him, turning to see Pete ready to swing an oar.

A heavy rock sailed through the darkness, splitting a bloody gash in Pete’s forehead. The big man teetered, and then splashed into the slough.

Dave hurried to the rear, the spotlight aiming up at the stars. “Pete!”

The raft rocked over the waves. He couldn’t see. Turning to get the light, he saw the creature crouching at the front of the raft—the light angling upward at sinister eyes.”

Dave surrendered his hands. He squinted and his eyes blurred. “I’ll be damn, it is you. Just wanted to bring you something.”

The creature’s head tilted.

“There, buddy, by your feet. Ken Griffey Jr.”

Matty picked up the glove, looked at Dave, and then leapt from the boat, escaping into the darkness.

A tear slid down his cheek. Lost.

__________

Kent Alyn is a Seattle-based fiction writer, husband, and father of three. Just like his website, http://www.kentalyn.com/, he’s a continual work in progress.

A Eulogy for Jimmy

2010-03-14T00:01:00.003-06:00

by Uri Grey

I don't really know why I was chosen to give this eulogy. I mean, I'm not that great with words. People say I'm blunt and always say the wrong thing. And I guess a eulogy is probably the worst place to say the wrong thing. But what can I do? You ask and I deliver—I'm that kind of a guy.

So, Jimmy's dead. Obviously he's dead, or we wouldn't be burying him right now. I think he died from a drug overdose or something like that. I know many kids die from that shit these days, but I don't think any of them will be missed as much as Jimmy.

I know Jimmy touched us all in one way or another. I see now, how all the ladies cross their legs... yeah Jimmy sure loved his touching. Never asked for permission or even said “hello.” Nope, he just went "Look! There's a bird" and wush! there's a hand down your... well never mind.

Jimmy loved many things, not only touching; he loved money, he loved horses, he loved fancy hats and shoes, he loved all sorts of words which I best no repeat right now. “Whatever he found, we lost” as the saying goes. I remember one time I caught Jimmy sneaking to my daughter's bedroom, so I slammed a pan right down his head and down he went on our carpet. I raised my pan again, you know how I am with kids... a bit hot-headed I guess, but my daughter woke up and said, the precious little thing, she said "Dad, it's Jimmy, let him go." And I did. If she had the courage to say that and forgive him, then shame on me if I didn’t!

I thought that thing would ruin Jimmy, but it only made him better. From that point, Jimmy really was an invaluable member of our small community. If there was some vice the little fiend didn't practice then it's only because I smashed it right out of his brains with that pan of mine. Otherwise, he was the very catalogue of evil.

Of course, a blessing like Jimmy can't last for long. “If you stray too far from God you're bound to fall someday.” These are Father Habakkuk’s words, not mine. So, I guess just to be contrary, Jimmy mixed alcohol, drugs, sex and whatnot one night and now he's with Satan now and we're left here crying for our loss. And I’m telling you, that’s one big loss!

I mean, as long as Jimmy was here, his sins screamed so loud it made all of us look like saints. Salvation was ours! Sure, I roll the dice now and again. And you, Jeremiah, it's no secret you like sleeping late on Sundays. And, Miriam, I know you like to gossip here and there, eh?

Well, no more. Now that Jimmy's gone, we can't afford to be anything less than perfect. “You can miss a candle by the sun but not a candle by another candle.” These are Father's Habakkuk’s words, not mine. I’m not that great with words.

__________

Uri is a game writer, translator, humanist, twitterist and storyteller from Israel. He spends his days slumbering at www.werecabbages.com/user/10 castle and his nights stalking innocent virgins at twitter.com/urigrey.

Edible Flowers Perched above a Dying Landscape

2010-03-07T00:01:00.003-06:00

Cate Gardner

A square of paper marked with the blood seal lay across Moira’s keyboard. With trembling fingers, she picked it up. Whispers stalked, following her along the corridor and waiting for the moment when she opened the note and read the words they already knew.

You’re evicted. Only, the powers on high had worded it in a more eloquent, tied with a legal-bow manner. She ran her fingers across her wrists. She hoped they cut deep and fast.

Moira screwed the paper up and dropped it in the recycle bin. She blinked back tears and offered her colleagues a salute before marching out of the building. She understood their ghoulish behaviour stemmed a little from relief. Today it was not them.

One last deep breath and the change in air knocked her sideways, reminding that the world no longer turned for them. A distant grumble caused her to shudder.

A man holding a canister of oxygen and a mask picked her up off the pavement. She grabbed at his arm, pulled the plastic mask to her face and drew in long breaths.

“Easy,” he said. “The air is thinner out here, but it will sustain you.”

“Thank you,” she said, despite his collaboration with the enemy.

He passed her a ticket marked 8A. “The ride from here to there is painless. In fact, you won’t remember a thing.” He meant to be kind. “It knocks for us all.”

“I wish my blood poison,” she said.

He backed away. No doubt, he’d heard the same line many times.

Regaining her composure, she watched similar scenes to her own unfold across the business district. Around them, ghost faces peered out from the myriad windows in the surrounding glass towers. She knew by their distant gaze that they looked out towards the barren fields.

A soldier’s life is worth that of a hundred citizens. The words scrawled in graffiti across streets not paved with gold. That epitaph she knew concealed the bold new truth—all the soldiers were dead and the law bowed to a new dictator.

The Revoking of Emancipation, Statute 101-B: Citizens have the right to eat, sleep and work in the towers until such time as the state requires the donation of their blood and organs.
What the wars had not killed, the new legislations would destroy.

“Line up, line up,” a collector with a megaphone called from a bus numbered 8A. “See the hand of progression at work. You stand on the threshold of an exciting new future. Document your final thoughts and your words will be etched into history.”

Or be deleted from it, Moira thought.

“Climb aboard. We will ensure your memory lives on in the Hall of Heroes.”

Moira turned around, pulled her arm all the way back and hurled her briefcase at the collector. It hit him on the nose. She marched up to the bus and grabbed the megaphone from his startled fingers.

“Hear my words,” she called to the evicted. “See your boss choke on their vomit after drinking poisoned coffee. Watch a vacuum cleaner suck them up as if they were nothing more than a stale cornflake. Don’t take this. Staple their butt to the desk and type them a letter of eviction.”

The lack of applause shocked. “Have they snipped off your vocal chords? They murder us and you do not even whimper.”

With the continued silence, Moira threw the megaphone aside and climbed aboard the bus. She pressed her hand down on the horn and released a primal scream. They had left her with no other choice. She started the bus engine, closed the doors, knocking the man off the step in the process, and revved the engine.

“Next stop, the end of the world,” she shouted to the empty seats.

The avenue spun by in a dizzying stream of glass, metal and concrete. The convenience of living on a rock perched high above a ruined landscape meant it was a long way to fall. Tipping the vehicle over the edge, she crashed through the windscreen, somersaulted clear of the bus, and came to rest alongside all the other broken flowers that lay scattered in the dust.

With the final flickering of her eyelids, she saw her blood run deep into the cracked earth by means of a swollen tongue and knew it was not rocks that had split her skull but teeth.

__________

Cate Gardner hopes the future is bright. Her stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Postscripts, and Necrotic Tissue. You can visit her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com
or you can read more Stitches; she recommends the latter.

If You See a Fisherman, You Better Look Away

2010-02-28T00:01:00.001-06:00

Deborah Walker

Alice pushed her mother around the park. It was a cold and blustery morning, a miserable day. A fine, dirty rain drenched them both. At one time, her mother would have called it ‘mucky weather’. They came to the park every morning, come rain or shine. Alice needed to get out of the house.

Alice pushed the wheelchair into the Memorial Garden, where thieves had stripped the Memorial and sold the names of the war-dead for the price of scrap metal.

Alice saw the fisherman, dressed in scales that caught the light even in the feeble November sun, a man-shape with the face of an ocean beast. He stood immobile in his impenetrable armour, an unseen force-field which repelled all earthly weapons.

Alice stared at him, transfixed, as he turned his head, so slowly, as if moving through water. He returned her gaze with white-filmed, unblinking eyes.

Alice was caught. She was drowning in the star seascape of his old-eyed imagination. She washed clean in the unconceivable sights of his understandings.

The fisherman broke the connection. He walked past Alice and out of the gate.

Alice stood gasping in the Memorial Garden. She looked around. She was alone. Alice had heard stories of groups of concerned citizens who were prepared to take action, the vigilantes prepared to root out any alien taint.

“Alice,” asked the thin voice of her mother. “Who was that? Was it the devil?” Mother was confused, sometimes.

“No, Mum. Remember, I told you about the fishermen. They live here now. We can’t get rid of them.”

Alice crouched down to face her trembling mother. “Did he look at you, Mum? Did he do anything strange to you?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Alice.”

Alice pushed her mother home. Pretend that everything is normal, pretend that you’re still normal and everything will be fine.

__________

Alice sat in the living room, thinking about everything she had heard about the fisherman. Fishermen copy your mind and upload your emotions. Alice shivered. She had felt the touch of his strange mind. Then they sell you. There’s a thriving market for mind clones in the universe, apparently. Her life, her mind, which seemed so ordinary to Alice, would be considered an exotic, marketable commodity. Alice imagined herself copied into the body of some robot, insect, wave form, another species of life relishing her mind. There might be thousands of her mind clones, already.

The fisherman will copy and corrupt you. Her clone mind would be compelled to do new things. Who knows what strange desires might arise when merged in a new body?

What should she do? Should she join one of the self-help groups? Should she turn herself over to the government to assist their research? Alice shuddered.

No. Her first instinct was correct. She would carry on with her normal life, and wait. She wondered if anyone else felt like her.

“Alice,” the familiar sound of her mother echoed through the house.

Alice walked to her mother’s bedroom, “Mum, are you alright? You don’t feel strange do you?”

“Is that devil coming again? He wants to steal your soul, Alice.”

Alice thought how strange it was to imagine herself elsewhere, spinning through the universe in other bodies. She would sense a small part of her mind clones. They would send her psychic postcards though the immeasurable distances of space.

Everyone said it was a terrible thing to be copied and spun into a different body. It was the ultimate theft. The government was frantic. They could not rid the Earth of the fisherman.

We will become less than human.

“Don’t worry mum,” said Alice. She felt a twinge, and an image of an endless dark nebulae entered her mind.

Alice smiled.

A fisherman had copied Alice’s soul.

And she liked it.

__________

After a twenty year period of procrastination Deborah Walker has started to write short stories, poetry and tweets. She lives in London with her partner Chris and her two lovely, yet distracting young children. Find her horror stories in Bards and Sages, Champagne Shivers, Innsmouth Free Press, Tweet the Meat, and the following anthologies: Creature Feature, Zombonauts, Scroll of Anubis, Zombology VI: Flash Fiction, Horror Through the Ages, Alienology, Night of the Giving Dead, The Morons’ Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse, and Through the Eyes of the Undead.

A Delicately Beautiful Haunting

2010-02-14T00:01:00.004-06:00

by Mercedes M. Yardley

She reached out for his hand. It was natural. It was what they had always done.
He wrapped his bony fingers around her soft ones.

“Are you certain that you want to do this?” he asked her. His voice was strained.

He wanted to blame it on his decaying larynx, but that wasn't entirely it. He cleared his throat, tried again. The same tight, rough voice. “You know that you don't have to.”

She didn't say anything for a long while, but stood perfectly still. Her pink toes were lined up neatly with the edge of the cliffs. Water rushed and roared beneath her bare feet.

“It's beautiful,” she said.

The wind tossed her hair around her face and pulled at her clothes. It made a strange morose whistling through the holes in his cheeks. For a brief moment, he was deeply ashamed of his appearance, of what he had become. As if she knew what he was thinking, she tightened her grip on his hand.

“I'm glad that you came back,” she said. “You don't know what it was like living without you.”

Simple words simply said, but they touched what was left of his heart. He would have cried if he had been able to.

She looked at the sky. “I thought that it would get better, that I would forget you eventually. Isn't that what they always say?”

He studied her profile. Her eyes were sad, but nothing else had changed. He spoke softly.

“I don't know if I want you to do this. I don't think you understand what you're giving up.”

She turned to him and smiled.

“I just want to be with you. It won't work with you being on my side, so I'll cross over to yours.” She looked at the water and laughed. “I think that I'm a little scared.”

He took both of her hands and pulled her to him.

“I'm with you. Just look at me. Think about something that will make you happy. Remember our first dance?”

Her eyes lit up. She remembered. She remembered and it was time.

He nodded his head slowly. “Keep thinking about that.”

He had planned to nudge her but she surprised him. She took a deep breath and let herself fall.

The sound of the wind and water blurred together. He wrapped his arms tighter around her, protectively, as if he could somehow shield her delicate bones from the rocks and thrashing surf.

He couldn't, of course. That was the whole point. But he didn't know if he could listen to her fragile body break against the stones, or failing that, watch her gasp for breath under the waves. Would she cling to him? Would she scream his name? Would she push him away? All of these thoughts came so quickly, but they had only been falling for two seconds, maybe three.

“That song that you used to sing. The moon song. How do the lyrics go again? After you died, I couldn't remember them.”

He was surprised but pleased. “The wolf comes from the forest and howls at—”

When it happened, it happened in silence. She made no sound, and his thoughts were swirling in the wolf-filled moon.

__________

Mercedes M. Yardley writes about beauty and horror. They are more intertwined than you might think. Visit her blog at http://www.abrokenlaptop.wordpress.com/.

Second Sight

2010-02-07T00:01:00.004-06:00

It ran like an unending torrent of hot molasses, like the seaweed green vomit extruding from little Regan's mouth in the Exorcist. Blood. So much of it. Too much of it, pouring from the old man's eyes.

"I can see… I can see…"

It was all the old man had been saying since he was brought in to the emergency room.

"Where was he found again?" said Doctor Marks, plastic face shield securely in place.

Nurse Penny pulled her eyes away from the twin rivers of blood long enough to comment. "In an alley behind St. Joseph's church. A nun heard him howling and called 911."

"Bet she thought it was stigmata." The doctor shined his penlight in the old man's eyes and flicked it to the side. "There doesn't seem to be any damage to the eyes themselves. The source of the bleeding appears to be anterior."

"But, Doctor, if his brain were hemorrhaging, wouldn't it be exiting his ears, nose or mouth. Why just the eyes?"

"Some hemorrhaging can be more localized. It's rare with the brain, however." The doctor continued to hover over the old man, shining his penlight. "Strange…"

As Doctor Marks moved in for a closer inspection, the old man's body convulsed. Veined hands with gnarled fingers reached up for the light. "I can see… I can see…" the old man cried, his voice hoarse, his neck strained. The old man then collapsed, his breathing and the flow of his blood slowing to a stop.

"Should we call it? Doctor?"

Doctor Marks had turned away to avoid the old man's death-throe spasm. He turned back to Nurse Penny and the now deceased patient. "I'm sorry, nurse. Yes…time of death --" Doctor Marks squinted at the clock on the wall. His vision momentarily blurred. "Four fourteen p.m."
He removed the face shield, snapped off his gloves and untied his gown, and tossed them into the trash. "Nurse, I'll be in the private lounge if anyone needs me."

For Doctor Marks, it felt like a headache was coming on. The hallway light hurt his eyes. The lounge was dark and empty. He went straight to the couch and stretched out.

Funny how, even though it was dark, he could see a strange illumination. The outline of the room glowed like a polarized picture. What was dark was light, and what was light--like the thin line underneath the room's entrance--was dark. Even with his eyes shut, he saw light, tiny streamers, as if he were looking into a microscope at the blood vessels in his eyelids. He got to his feet and walked to the bathroom, unsure of what was happening.

He flicked on the light and an explosion of stars filled his vision. The image in the mirror was hideous, nothing but veins and corpuscles and filarial wisps of moving fluid. In his eyes were twin upside-down crosses, death signs, burned into his retinas.

He wanted to scream but instead his mind replayed the incident with the emergency room patient--only from the old man's point of view. He saw himself hovering over him, the penlight shining like a beacon into his eyes. Then came the sudden convulsion, and a single drop of blood rose upward, arcing in slow motion in an unnatural trajectory, above the face shield, landing in his eye.

A sudden hunger gnawed at the doctor's gut and he doubled over in pain.

He shut off the light off and stumbled out of the lounge into the hallway. He needed to get back to the emergency room. Along the way he was assaulted by all manner of hideous replicas of human transformation: goblin, devil and demon faces; some asked if he was all right.
But nothing was all right, nothing would ever be right again, unless…

He burst into the emergency room, avoiding the stares of ghastly maintenance men and grotesque nurses, and lurched over to where the old man had died. A plastic basin sat on the floor, the old man's blood still in it. He picked up the basin. In the blood he saw creatures swirling, amoeba-like, the substance of life. Before anyone could stop him he tipped the basin to his lips and gulped the thick liquid. The room spun and he collapsed.

___
Some time later Doctor Marks awoke. Nurse Penny leaned over him. "Doctor, how are you feeling?"

He stared at her. She was the most beautiful creature on the planet. He took a deep breath. The air was sweet.

"I can see," he said. "I can see."

__________

Kurt Newton lives as a recluse in the woods of northeast Connecticut. He has been spotted on his plot of land harvesting grubs from rotted logs, setting tripwires for small animals and drinking from fresh water streams. He uses wood pulp and dried viscera to make the paper on which he writes his stories. He drives a black Ford Focus.

Blue Plate Special

2010-01-31T00:01:00.003-06:00

by Nick Contor

The operating room was dim, but Javier preferred it that way. He could see well enough as he placed the medical equipment in the spot assigned to it. The doctors and nurses at Presbyterian Hospital (heck, any hospital) were very particular about the positioning of equipment. Seconds were often crucial in OR, and no one wanted to tell Mrs. McKenzie that her husband had passed away suddenly but couldn’t be revived because the defibrillator had been put away in the wrong spot.

Javier was in charge of OR cleanups because he was careful. Every box of gauze, every scalpel, every monitor was back in the proper place when he was done. He had been working at Pres for ten years now, and liked it much better than his previous job at Our Lady of Mercy. Too many priests and nuns around there, all of them decked out in their work clothes.

Presbyterian was much more ecumenical. You could walk through the halls here at Pres for years and not see anything resembling a religious artifact.

Javier had righted a fallen tray table and was about to go out to the hallway to fetch his mop and bucket when he saw the small blue basin, seemingly tossed carelessly in the corner. It must have fallen off of the table. Maybe the tray had been knocked over by a nurse in a hurry, or a tech carrying the patient out following surgery. The circumstances were unimportant, the tray was what mattered.

It lay forgotten, inside was a medium sized puddle of blood. Some of the blood had splashed up the side of the basin, and a few drops were splattered on the wall, but Javier ignored them. His interest was in the basin, which had retained almost all of the blood.

He licked his lips.

These were the times he waited for. The reason he was working here. He knew the Hazmat procedures backwards and forwards, knew about the proper disposal of biohazardous material. And no one ever complained about Javier’s work. The OR was always left spotless when he was finished with it.

He slowly lifted the basin. It was a relic from years past. Blue porcelain containing rich, red blood.

His lips parted to allow his tongue to snake out, slowly running along the rim to catch the splatters, which were not even dried yet. He tipped the basin, watching with anticipation as the blood flowed ever so slowly towards him. Just slightly congealed. Perfect!

His eyes closed as the blood flowed over the edge. His adam’s apple bobbed and a low moan escaped. He swallowed until the flow slowed, then tipped the basin further to lick along the inside surface until the blue porcelain gleamed with his saliva. He quickly examined the bowl to be certain he had not missed a drop before depositing it along with the other pieces destined for sterilization.

The few droplets on the wall were quickly taken care of with a bleach soaked rag. Javier had already taken quite a risk by feeding out in the open. He would have a tough time keeping his job if someone happened to walk by the OR and saw an orderly licking the walls. Very difficult to explain that one.

Javier smiled as he wheeled his cart outside to grab the mop and bucket. This was why he loved working in a hospital. He knew he would never starve.

__________

Nick Contor was born in 1968, which explains all the protests. He has managed to survive thus far and writes things down occasionally in southern New Mexico, pausing now and again to eat, sleep and enjoy life with his wife and two children. This is his first published story.

The Rise of Azaliel and Lorcas

2010-01-24T00:01:00.003-06:00

by Michael Stone

(read "The Fall of Azaliel and Lorcas" if you want the first bit of the story)

I perch on a rock rimed with frost and gaze at the distant horizon. When my brother Lorcas and I became stranded during a routine reconnaissance of Hell, we’d expected God’s forces to mount a swift rescue operation—and been disappointed when none came.

And so, as the days wore on, we had squatted inside the Bottle—a brass cylinder mounted on cartwheels and powered by holy fire—and braced ourselves to have our squashy bits stamped into the earth by the legions of demons waiting impatiently outside. Instead, when the warding prayers finally expired and we were dragged through the aft porthole, the hordes had simply roughed us up a bit: a bite here, a gouge there, and lot of farting in our general direction. Positively a welcome by demon standards. Probably because we’d looked nothing like angels by then; the presence of sin had corrupted our immortal forms.

The frost makes my tail itch. I scratch it as I stare at the mile-high wall cutting me off from Heaven.

“Forget it,” a voice grates near my ear. “You’re not going back.”

I turn on my rock to face the speaker. “Don’t bet on it, you spiky-faced—oh! Sorry, Lorcas, I—I didn’t recognise you with the, um…” I avert my gaze. Lorcas had been such a beautiful angel with his rosebud lips, baby blue eyes and blond curls. Four days in Hell and his face looks like a porcupine is copulating with it.

Copulating. I shake my head. I shouldn’t even know words like that. The presence of sin has corrupted us spiritually as well as bodily. I go back to contemplating the far-off wall.

“They’ll come for us,” I say, stubbornly

Lorcas tips his head to the milling demons. “Face it, Azaliel, we are just like them now.”

I regard our bodies with sadness. The black scaly skin, stunted wings and the inchoate horns prove his point, and the thing that meets my eyes when I peek under my loincloth isn’t something an angel should be packing either. Lorcas, sadly, has been exploring new avenues with his beastly equipment. He even tried to have his wicked way with me. Only a swift prayer and an even swifter raised kneecap deterred him from exploring my avenue.

“But I don’t feel demonic, Lorcas. I miss life in the Celestial City. I miss—wait, what’s that?” I point to a star in the blood red sky. It descends and the blurry light concentrates into a golden disc. Only one caste of the nine choirs possesses a non-humanoid form.

Lorcas gasps. “It’s a throne!”

“Quick, Lorcas, to the Bottle!”

I run and dive through a porthole. The vessel creaks as the throne exerts its influence, and then lifts gently off the ground. Several demons try to follow. I thrust the stowaways out.

Lorcas is still standing where I left him.

The Bottle is gaining height.

“Lorcas! Quickly, before it’s too late!”

He shakes his head slowly, as one resigned to his fate, then runs and makes a desperate leap. I grab his wrists and haul him inside.

“For a horrible moment there I thought you’d decided to stay.”

The quills on his face wobble as he smiles. “It was something you said, about missing the Celestial City.”

“Yes, it will be good to get back to the choral singing, the mission briefings, the camaraderie…” I trail off when I realise that his smile is a bitter one. “What is it?”

“You think they’ll welcome us back when they see us like this?”

I had no answer, for I had given no thought to what sort of homecoming two corrupted angels would receive. Not a pleasant one, I suppose.

“Then why are you coming back, Lorcas?”

“Because someone missed his welding classes.”

“What?”

He gestures to the battered Bottle with a talon. “Sin got in and touched us because someone screwed up the welds. We never stood a chance.”

“The cherubim do the welding.”

His coal-red eyes narrow to slits. “I know.”

We kick out a side panel as we pass over mile-high gates. Overhead, the throne hums a rousing hymn, while far below verdant fields form a pastoral quilt, pierced here and there by pearlescent minarets. There is an uneasy feeling in my throat. I think it is anger or resentment, or something equally foreign.

Lorcas follows my gaze, and the spines on his face rearrange themselves into a malevolent grin. “What say we go kick some cherubic ass, Azaliel?”

I try to hold back the words on my tongue, before succumbing to the uneven struggle.

“Fucking A, brother.”

The Sweetest Candy

2010-01-17T00:01:00.005-06:00

by Joshua Rainey

Million Dollar Teeth smiled, and his gold teeth shimmered in the buttery light. In his hand was another jar of honey. Albert’s diet consisted solely of honey for the past two months. He vomited the sweet substance, he shit the sweet substance, and he dreamed about the sickening sweet substance.

“Mjaltë Më shumë për ju njeri sheqeros.” The huge olive skinned man laughed. Albert didn’t understand a word that had been spoken to him since he had been taken captive.

Another man appeared in the doorway, Babyneck, an immensely fat man with an undulating neck like a baby huddled under his chin. “Si është gjë e ëmbël tona sot?” At that both men laughed.

Million Dollar Teeth set the jar down on the stone floor, and both of Albert’s captors left the room. Albert heard the door being locked and screamed, “What do you want from me, goddammit! Tell me! Someone speak fucking English!” Albert’s voice grew hoarse, and tears streaked his hollowed cheeks.

In the background Albert could hear a buzzing drone that never stopped. It was the bees. They never slept. Albert never slept.

Albert paced his chamber and stared at the amber liquid in the canning jar. They knew that eventually the gaunt American would eat the honey. He always did, it was just a matter of waiting. Albert stared down at his forearms. They were frail. His frame was dwindling. His teeth were loosening. Albert was probably losing his mind.

“Hani, ju do të jeni nevojë për fuqinë tuaj.” Albert heard Million Dollar Teeth laugh outside his door. Every night he could hear him and his friends, Babyneck and MGD, playing cards and drinking.

The only light Albert had came from the other side of the glass window of his chamber, and it shone in through a wall of honey jars casting him in amber.

The bees never slept.

Hungry, Albert grabbed the jar and tore off the lid. He reached his curled fingers inside to scoop out the contents. The honey drooled down Albert’s chin and snarled in his chest hair. Albert scooped the liquid into his mouth greedily. Beads of honey had hardened in his hair the length of his naked frame. After two months Albert no longer cared.

Albert knew that soon Million Dollar Teeth would leave him a glass of water under the door. Besides the honey, it was the only nourishment he was allowed.

Albert looked up from his gluttony, and saw his three captors tapping on the glass and laughing. All three were smoking long thin cigarettes.

“Ju duken aq i mirë sa mund të hani të gjithë ju lart.” Babyneck chuckled. Albert smiled at the fat man’s neck. He thought that it had to be a growth of some sort.

As quickly as Albert ate the honey it came up in a gut-wrenching wretch. Then everything went black.

Albert slept fitfully. The droning of the bees kept creeping into his mind. When he did awaken Million Dollar Teeth loomed above him. Albert was shackled, hands and feet.

Million Dollar Teeth waved for Albert to stand up.

“Sot është ditë e madhe.” He smiled.

Albert stood on shaky legs. Obediently he followed Million Dollar Teeth out of the room, and down a long earthen corridor lit with bare bulbs hung on chains. Million Dollar Teeth whistled a solemn tune that made Albert’s skin crawl.

“Ah, here we are.” The bastard smiled at the trembling American.

They were in a large sparsely furnished room whose only distinguishing piece of furniture was a large rectangular box. The box was a sturdy, clear, plastic box that frightened Albert. Next to the box was an open earthen hole.

“You sonuvabitch.” Albert cried. Tears stained his emaciated cheeks.

“What? You don’t like your new accommodations?” Million Dollar Teeth asked. His voice was cocky and smooth. Albert wanted to punch him, but it took an effort just to remain standing. A part of Albert was relieved just to hear English again.

Albert stared at the box. “No.” He understood this to be his new accommodation, and nearly collapsed. “No!” MGD and Babyneck grabbed Albert by his arms and held him.

“Yes. You see you are going to be a confection of sorts. You are going to be placed in that coffin which we will fill with honey, and in a few years you will be dug up and fed to the rich as a holistic medicine.” Albert struggled to break free but they were too strong for him.

“Goodnight.” MGD said before Albert felt a prick in his arm.

__________

Joshua Rainey lives in WA with his wife Delores and kids Billy, Dream, Sophia, and Aidan. He also has 3 cats Bronson, Cherry Darling, and Gumball. His short story "Scotch on Rocks" was published in Black Petals #42.

Picture This

2010-01-10T00:01:00.002-06:00

by Anna Taborska

Picture this: you've been hanging around for years in Uncle Geoffrey's stinking dark house, waiting for the old codger to pop off so you can inherit his loot. You've wasted your youth listening to his plaintive gibbering and cleaning out his bedpan. Finally, you can't stand it anymore. You wait until he's asleep and then you put his pillow over his face and push down hard until he stops kicking. Then you dig a hole at the bottom of the garden and bury him in it. At last you're free to live your life the way you deserve.

But Uncle Geoffrey comes back. And he brings with him Aunt Mildred, cousin Hildegard and a dozen other decomposing occupants of the local cemetery. They shuffle grimly towards the house. You try the back way out, but are stopped by a rotting corpse with green guts dangling from its bloated belly. You bolt the doors and secure the windows, but from somewhere to your left you hear the sound of breaking glass.

Then the front door comes flying off its hinges, and enter Uncle Geoffrey, his face grey and his eyes still bulging from the strain of breathing mucus-covered pillow instead of air. He moves towards you stiffly, rigor mortis turning his fingers into talons and his legs into rigid planks of wood. He's drooling down the front of his gown, and his bloodshot eyes never blink. From the way he's staring at you, you can't tell if he's overcome with rage or if he just wants to rip your head off and eat your brains.

You fumble with the shells for the shotgun you've just wrenched from the cupboard in the corner. You aim at Uncle Geoffrey's head and pull the trigger. Uncle Geoffrey's head explodes. But Uncle Geoffrey just keeps coming...

__________

Anna Taborska was born in London, England. She was first caught reading horror at age ten, when a teacher, impressed that Anna was sitting at her desk during lunch break and reading rather than playing with other children in the school playground, found that Anna’s science book was actually hiding Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs.

Brainwashing at a posh girls’ school didn’t succeed in suppressing Anna’s horror obsession, and, alongside William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Anna avidly studied such classic authors as James Herbert and Stephen King.

Following a misguided attempt to wean herself off horror by studying Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, Anna went on to gainful employment in public relations, journalism, advertising and the BBC, before throwing everything over to become a filmmaker and horror writer.

Links: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1245940/
http://www.freewebs.com/mortburypress/
http://www.thehorrorzine.com/Fiction/October2009/Anna%20Taborska.html
http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/index.cgiboard=deathdisco&action=display&thread=3272&page=1

Kill Your Darlings

2010-01-03T00:01:00.002-06:00

by John Paolicelli Jr.

He sat in the dark living room holding the letter close to his chest. Finally, after hours of procrastination, Eddy opened it. The note from the editor simply read: “My advice to you is to kill your darlings.”

It wasn’t the in-depth response he had hoped for. What was supposed to be constructive criticism somehow managed to piss Eddy off. He crumpled the page into a ball and muttered, “Kill your darlings.”

He had heard it all before, but this rejection stung more than usual. “Stock Broker Massacre” was his favorite story, and he expected a better reception for the shorter version. After so many professors and editors had critiqued his writing as wordy, he concentrated on being succinct, and thought he nailed it with this, the eighth rewrite.

Okay, let’s clean this up one more time.

He tossed the manuscript onto his empty desk, pulled a file labeled “submittals” and a sharpie from a drawer, and placed them next to it. The rejection letters and writing projects from college once served as inspiration, but were now just painful reminders of his failures.

His dead eyes stared at the manuscript until the words blurred into gray haze. He shook his head, refocused, and then scribbled, “KILL YOUR DARLINGS” across the title page in giant letters. A sad laugh escaped as he exhaled.

He was introduced to the phrase by his first rejection letter. Eddy found it humorous, and had it printed on a t-shirt in jest. And though it wasn’t funny anymore, he pulled the shirt from his dresser drawer and put it on.

Maybe this will change my luck.

He leafed through the file, searching for hope in the scrap pile. Among the form letters were a few personal notes of encouragement. But as he came to the last, “Kill your Darlings” again jumped from the page. He grunted.

He pulled out a story he wrote in college. “While your attempts to cut out the fat are admirable, you still need to kill your darlings,” was written neatly in red below the C+ in the right hand corner.

Cut out the fat. Kill your darlings.

He reread ‘Stockbroker’ again. A red pencil circled and scribbled until the pages were left bleeding. An hour of intense self debate ended deadlocked, and in the end, he left the piece as it was. He sighed.

He read it aloud. The words seemed to dance rhythmically from his mouth. He shook his head, and threw the script across the room. He sat motionless for a long while, glaring at the pages scattered over the carpet.

“Kill your darlings,” he mumbled.

“Eddy it’s six a.m. Why are you still up?” his roommate Jim asked on his way to the bathroom.

“Just doing some editing.”

“Maybe someone should’ve edited that shirt. ‘Darlings’ is spelled wrong.”

Eddy pulled the shirt away from his chest and glanced down. He shrugged his shoulders. “It figures.”

“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for work? Wall Street waits for no one.”

“No, got laid off last week. They blamed the economy.”

After a pregnant pause, Jim changed the subject. “Your story is good, but could be shorter. You need to visualize the story through the eyes of the killer. Get rid of the stuff that doesn’t advance plot. Then go back and kill your darlings.”

Kill your darlings.

Eddy nodded absently, his eyes fixed on the folder on his desk. Before he looked up, Jim had dressed, grabbed his gym bag, and hustled out.

“Through the eyes of the killer,” Eddy whispered, as he trudged to his bedroom closet and grabbed his hunting rifle.

Through the eyes of the killer.

With the manuscript in one hand and the rifle in the other, Eddy went to the window and opened the shades. From his perch eight stories up, he watched the city awaken through the scope of his rifle.

Below, a pretty blonde waited for the bus. She fiddled with a blackberry, grinning as her fingers clicked away.

There’s the ex-girlfriend. She really doesn’t advance the plot.

Gotta kill your darlings.

Bang! The girl crumpled to the ground. A screaming man dove behind a dumpster, sending seagulls flying in every direction. Eddy watched through the scope with a satisfied grin.

Looks good.

He picked up the manuscript and wrote a few notes in the border, then turned his attention back to the street. A man in a dark suit came out of a doorway and strode toward the subway.

“Just doing some editing,” he whispered as he moved the crosshairs onto the man’s forehead.

__________

John is a 48-year-old new writer that lives on Long Island, NY with his wife and five Ridgebacks. This charming sociopath works as a manufacturing manager by day and a breeder of champion Rhodesian Ridgebacks by night. When not cleaning up puppy crap, he attempts to write and watch TV. He is an active member of the Science Fiction Writers Workshop.

The Greatest Disciple

2009-12-27T00:01:00.000-06:00

by Jonathan Pinnock

The crypt was cold and damp, and the stairs leading down to it were slippery. Father Pietro led the way with a burning torch.

“Don’t you have any fucking lights down here?” said the journalist.

“No,” said Father Pietro, “We feel that electricity would destroy the atmosphere that our pilgrims find so special about this place.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, it’s got about as much atmosphere as a dead dog’s armpit. Can we just see the relics and piss off back into the real world?”

“Patience, Mr Armitage, patience. You will have your story all in good time.” He held the torch in front of his face and smiled. “Excuse me for asking, but I can’t help feeling that you are a little–how do you say–cynical?”

“Listen, mate, I didn’t pick this story. Just my editor back in London told me his readers wanted to know more. As if a fucking miracle could happen in this day and age.”

“Ah, you sadden me. How can you be so sure?”

“Look, can we just get to the fucking relics?”

“We are there already. They are in this cabinet. See here: one of the largest fragments of the True Cross in the whole of Christendom!”

“Yeah, right. If I got together all the fragments of the True Cross that I’d seen in my time, you’d be able to build a fucking housing estate out of them.”

“Then perhaps you will be more impressed in the holy bones that cured that child?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Just let me take a pic, and I’ll be off.”

Father Pietro lifted out part of a skeleton. “But perhaps you would first like to touch the bones of the greatest of all the disciples?” He held it out. “Go on!” he said, “Go on!”

Armitage reached out and touched the bones. Immediately a look of agony shot through his face, and he ran off screaming into the darkness, scrabbling around and trying to find the way out.

Good old Judas, thought Father Pietro. You could always rely on him to put the wind up an unbeliever.

__________

Jonathan Pinnock was born in Bedfordshire, England, and--despite having so far visited over forty other countries--has failed to relocate any further away than the next-door county of Hertfordshire. He is married with two children, several cats and a 1961 Ami Continental jukebox. His work has won several prizes, shortlistings and longlistings, and he has been published in such diverse publications as Smokebox, Every Day Fiction and Necrotic Tissue. His unimaginatively-titled yet moderately interesting website may be found at http://www.jonathanpinnock.com/.

The Bump in the Night

2009-12-20T00:01:00.001-06:00

by Bill West

Footsteps on the staircase woke Timmy. Light flickered under his bedroom door and the 'clonk' of something heavy that bumped against each step grew louder.

Wide-eyed, Timmy sat up in bed, clutched his teddy bear tight, and whimpered. By the dim glow of his snowman lamp he could see the door handle turn and the door swing wide. An arm holding a lantern extended into the room.

Icicles dripped from Santa's nose. His beard and bushy eyebrows glinted in the lantern light.

Timmy saw the meat cleaver tucked into the broad belt. Rolled up sleeves revealed matted hairy arms and Santa's fist held a big red sack which bulged with the dismembered bodies of all of the naughty children.

Well, nearly all of them.

__________

Bill West always wanted to be a mortuary technician but when he failed the interview he took a job in IT instead. He's met a lot of odd people working in IT.Bill lives in a remote part of rural Shropshire, UK. He likes to explore ancient ruins, which is where he found his wife. He has two sons who tell him they are a) a Rock Star and b) an Avant-garde Film Maker. He suspects they may be either confused or exagerating as he has never heard of them.Over the past five years Bill's Flash Fictions have been published in a wide variety of print and on-line e-zines and been included in a number of anthologies. See further details of his work at his website, http://writewords.org.uk/bill_west/

The Homeless Situation

2009-12-13T00:01:00.004-06:00

by Felicity Dowker

Tyler grimaced, pretty pink lips drawn into an ugly bundle of disgust.

“God, these people,” she hissed, stepping wide to avoid the beggar propped against the wall. The man’s head was bowed under the weight of the yoke he bore on his stooped shoulders, his grimy hands dangling limp from the contraption. Melinda’s belly churned with the agonizing pity and shame she felt each time she came across one of the city’s many unfortunates. She knelt down before the man, pinching her nose against his stench as she read the cardboard sign that rested against his twisted legs.

They took family and put me here. It hurts.
Please help.
It could happen to you.

“Here,” she mumbled, stuffing five dollars in his tattered pocket. His eyes widened in surprise and gratitude, and a tear traced its way through the ragged beard and accumulated muck on his cheek.

“Thank you,” he whispered, his lower lip trembling. “You’re kind. There’s so few like you left.”
She was already walking away, cheeks flaming, head tucked into her shoulders in defence against the stares of her fellow commuters. She caught up to Tyler, who strode in silent fury on her towering heels.

“Honestly, Melinda. Why would you go and do a thing like that? He’ll only spend it on drugs. Everyone saw you, hunkered down in front of that filthy thing, encouraging him.”

“He’s in pain, Ty. Of course he’ll spend the money on painkillers. What else can he do?”

“He got himself into that mess. Whatever he did, he must have deserved what he got. Why else would the government make him Homeless? Wise up.”

Tyler stomped right over the top of a woman who lay hogtied on the ground, whimpering into the asphalt with bleeding lips, a cardboard sign with her own short tale of horror tied to her neck. Tyler’s six inch heel plunged into the woman’s right eye, popping it like a blister before wrenching free with a loud sucking sound. The woman screeched as pinkish liquid bubbled out of the wet mess in her socket, dripping on the pavement.

Melinda felt the stares of those around her like blades laid in threat against her skin, and forced herself to shut her ears to the Homeless woman’s cries and walk on.

__________

The office was cool and quiet. Melinda looked around, fingers moving furtively across the keyboard, typing in the web address she knew by heart. Nobody looked up from their cubicles as she focused on the screen.

- what did you do today to help, M20996?

She squirmed. Five bucks to one Homeless was hardly an admirable resistance effort.

- $5. Man in yoke at Flagstaff Station.

She paused, the lump in her throat burning, before continuing.

- don’t think he’s got long left. He used to work here. Everyone pretends not to remember.

Her anonymous ally went silent for a moment. It was dangerous to say too much, but her emotions overpowered her better judgment.

(it hurts…it could happen to you)

She gulped down the scream that was always eager to erupt from her throat.

Come on, she begged the unmoving screen. Talk to me. I’ll do better. I’ll help more. Just don’t leave me alone in this madness. There has to be hope.

- every bit helps, M20996. Keep going.

- I’ll try.

“Coming to lunch?” Tyler materialised at her elbow, and Melinda yelped. She fumbled with her monitor, flicking it off, trying to hide her shaking. Had Tyler seen the words on the screen? God, would she tell? Would they put Melinda out on the streets, a display of agony for the world to ignore?

Tyler smiled at her. Her teeth were very white and her eyes were dead and flat. Melinda stretched her own lips in response, bile rising in her throat.

“Sure.”

“What do you feel like?”

“I…don’t care.”

But she did, and that had always been her problem.

Tyler kept smiling, not moving away from the desk. She held onto the edge of the cubicle, and Melinda noticed her knuckles were white. Too late, she also noticed the men in purple Government suits walking towards them across the office, their faces dark.

“Tyler,” she whispered. “Please.”

“You people,” Tyler said, her cheek twitching. “You deserve what you get.”

__________

Felicity Dowker is a 28 year old Australian writer with a husband, two young children, and a not-so-hidden feminist and atheist critique nestled in much of her work--especially the flash pieces, for some reason. Quite a few people have been foolhardy enough to publish her short stories, and she has one limited edition chapbook. For ramblings, news and a bibliography, go to http://holeinthepage.blogspot.com/ but enter, stranger, at your riske; here there be Tygers.

The Confession

2009-12-06T00:01:00.000-06:00

by Jameson T. Caine

“You’re late,” Father Rivera called out from the confessional when he heard footsteps in the empty church.

“Couldn’t be helped,” replied a deep voice, echoing in the dark. “It isn’t like this place is easy to get to at night.”

“That’s what you said the last three times,” Rivera said, agitation evident in his words. “God’s patience may be infinite but mine is not. I suggest you try harder to be more punctual, Mr. Jonas.”

The door to the confessional eased open and closed. “Why? What else have ya got to do?” Jonas asked from within the adjoining booth. “It’s not like there’s a lot to do in this town.”

Rivera leaned closer to the screen that separated them. He spied the faint silhouette of the larger man and was suddenly aware of the stale smell of sweat that filled the air. Jonas had once again chosen to wear a T-shirt to his debriefing, despite the chill permeating the church this time of night, and was busy scratching his bare arms.

“Is there a problem?” Rivera asked.

“Nope.”

“Then I suggest you get on with your report.”

Jonas took a deep breath and was silent for a few seconds before speaking. “We followed up that intel you provided. Sure as hell, that town your boys scouted out was filled with bloodsuckers.

“We ran our usual game, acting out the parts of lost travelers and what not until we located their nest. Then we followed SOP and hit them midday.”

“How did that go?” Rivera asked.

“You’ll be glad to hear that I didn’t lose a single person to a vampire.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Rivera said. “I presume that as we speak, your crew is at the local watering hole imbibing themselves into unconsciousness?”

“Nope,” Jonas said. Again he began to scratch his arms.

“Then where are they?”

“They’re dead. All of them.”

Rivera frowned. “But you just said no one died.”

“I said that I didn’t lose anyone to a vampire, because what we found waiting for us in that nest wasn’t just a bunch of soulless undead.”

“I don’t understand,” Rivera said.

Jonas sighed. “Werewolves,” he spat. “Those bastards had a group of werewolves guarding their nest. We were taken by surprise and before I knew it, half my team was in pieces on the floor.”

“Preposterous,” Rivera scoffed. “Where is your team?” he asked again.

“I told you, they’re dead. Some got torn to shreds right off the bat. The ones that made it out, well…” His voice trailed off.

“What became of them?” Rivera prompted.

“I shot them.”

“What? Why?”

“Because they had been bitten by werewolves and lived. They were doomed to become the same.”

“Mr. Jonas,” Rivera began harshly. “I will not accept this ridiculous tale. Werewolves do not exist. Don’t let the fact that Satan’s minions walk this earth in the guise of vampires lead you to believe that every mythological creature ever invented truly exists. They do not. Now, what happened to your team?!”

Jonas stopped scratching himself and was now very still. “I told you, I killed them,” he said solemnly, and for some strange reason Rivera believed him. His instinct told him that this man was responsible for the deaths of some, if not all, of his team.

Muttering now in a low voice, Jonas continued, oblivious to Rivera’s presence. “I killed them all. I should have seen it coming. I should have seen it. It’s all my fault.” There was no doubt that his days as a field agent were over.

“Pray for me, father,” Jonas whispered, almost to himself.

Feeling tired, Rivera simply nodded and said, “Of course I will pray for you, my son.” It was going to take a lot of hard work in order to help Jonas find redemption.

“Pray for me, father,” Jonas repeated, this time his voice sounding heavier. Rivera noticed that his breathing had changed as well, becoming more labored.

“Yes, Mr. Jonas. I will pray for as I just said.”

Jonas began to fidget. “No father!” He suddenly howled. “Prey for me! YOU ARE PREY FOR ME!”

Father Rivera looked up just in time to see two tremendous hands, taloned and bristling with dark hair, tear through the flimsy screen to grab him by the throat.

__________

Jameson T. Caine has at one time or another worked as a carpenter, meat cutter, shipping clerk, forklift operator, assembly line worker, long haul truck driver and ordained minister. Currently he drives a tanker truck by day and calls himself a writer by night, the latter fueled by a steady diet of soda and cheese puffs. He lives in Northern California with his wife and two dogs. Visit him online at http://jamesontcaine.blogspot.com/.

Perks

2009-11-29T00:01:00.001-06:00

by Aurelio Rico Lopez III

She laughed at his jokes a little too loudly. She laughed at them a little too much. It was sickening.

I poured her another glass of wine.

“Aren’t you having any, Robert?” Danny asked.

“No, thanks. Ulcers.”

Janice reached over and stroked my cheek. “Are you all right, baby?”

I pulled away, literally revolted by her touch. I felt like someone had just slapped me on the face with a dead fish. “Doctor says I’ll be fine.”

“Ulcers? That sucks, man,” Danny said. He sipped his wine and sighed. “Got to hand it to you. This is good stuff.”

I smiled. “I’m glad you like it, Danny.”

Danny Gleason, the writer. When I first met him six years ago, he was peddling his short stories to the small presses. His second book Noose was receiving great reviews. No doubt, sales would surpass those of his first novel. Critics were already calling him the next Stephen King.

He was good-looking and in his mid-thirties. He worked out regularly and had the facial features of a young Harrison Ford. It wasn’t uncommon for Danny to sleep with one of his “avid fans” after a book signing. Women were always throwing themselves at him. We used to joke about it. It was funny.

Before he began sleeping with Janice.

I should have seen it coming. Janice was an attractive woman, and years of working behind a desk as an editor hadn’t exactly done wonders for my physique.

I had my suspicions, of course. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to them. There were nights when Janice came home late. When I asked her where she’d been, she’d say she’d been shopping with her girlfriends even though she clearly hadn’t bought a thing. Then there was a time I came home and found both of them in the living room. Danny said he had dropped by to discuss his new book.

The thought that I was just being paranoid had crossed my mind. But all doubts were erased when I woke up in the middle of the night to find Janice gone. Figuring she probably went to the kitchen for a drink, I got out of bed and went to my study at the end of the hall. That’s when I heard her on the phone.

‘I have to see you again, Danny. No, he’s asleep. Of course, I’m sure. I can’t stand us being apart like this. It’s driving me crazy. I miss you. I miss the way you feel inside me.’

I went back to the bedroom and sobbed quietly. Sweet Janice. What have you done to us?

“Hey, Robert!”

“Huh?”

Danny smiled. “I was asking how the new book is coming along.”

I managed a smile of my own. “It’s going to make a killing, Danny.”

He laughed and turned to Janice. “See? That’s what I love about your husband, Jan. He has such a way with words.”

They both laughed. I felt like an outsider. I pushed my chair back and stood up. “Please excuse me. I think I’d better go to bed. I’m sorry, Danny. Is it all right if I leave you two?”

Janice was quick to answer. “Oh, sure, honey. You go right ahead and get some rest. I’ll take care of the dishes.”

“Thanks again for inviting me to dinner, Robert,” Danny said, getting up. “It was delicious. I’ll stop by your office next week, okay? We’ll have lunch.”

Danny Gleason, snake in the grass.

Instead of going upstairs to the bedroom, I went to the living room and sat on the sofa.
In the dining room, Danny cracked another joke, and they both laughed.

One of the perks of being an editor is the stacks of manuscripts you’re required to read–mysteries, science fiction, horror, non-fiction. Over the years, I had amassed a wealth of knowledge on a wide array of topics–guns, cars, botany, wildlife, computers, cultures, history, wine.

And poisons.

Keep laughing, bastards. Keep laughing.

I sat in the dark and listened. And listened.

Until the laughter stopped.

__________

Aurelio Rico Lopez III is a self-diagnosed scribble junkie from Iloilo City, Philippines. His work has appeared in various venues such as Mythic Delirium, Star*Line, Sybil’s Garage, The Horror Express, Dark Animus, Goblin Fruit, Scifaikuest, Kaleidotrope, Tales of the Talisman, Electric Velocipede, Black Petals, and elsewhere. He is also the author of the chapbooks Jolts and Shocks (Sam’s Dot Publishing.

They

2009-11-22T00:01:00.000-06:00

by Pat Moran

I can hear them eating, under my bed.

The bones smacking and popping, blood pooling at the base of the headboard.

When they first came to the neighborhood, there was little notice. The sleepy homes with their precisely manicured lawns and gleaming SUV’s were left unaware by the slowly creeping darkness.

At first it was just small pets – Hamsters, Guinea Pigs and the like.

Mickey Drapes found the crumpled remains of his ferret, Ferguson, shoved into his mighty mouse pillowcase. Sandy Figgins didn’t speak a word for a week because of the placement of her puppy’s face on the ceiling. When she finally spoke, it took four teachers to get her to stop screaming. “They are going to kill us all!” she screamed, her voice horse with fear, “They are coming!” She passed out, cracking her head on the floor.

As more and more pets disappeared, the PTA called an emergency meeting. With no suspects other than their precious children, the parents began to panic. They said the violence was a manifestation of ADD, video games and Japanese cartoons. The Consensus decision was a communal silence and to not acknowledge anything was wrong. Positive encouragement and sugar cereal.

But it was too late.

Jacob Reese disappeared on Tuesday morning.

His mother found the bed torn apart, the word “They” painted in blood on the wall, a streak of blood leading under the bed.

I knew Jacob. He lived across the street. I could see his light from my window.

Susan Johnson, the clerk at the county library, was found in a pile outside the drop box. Martin Forster, the deli owner, was identified only by his dental charts. Both with the word “They” splattered on the wall. They both lived at the end of my street.

“They” became a whisper at the edge of each wide-eyed schoolyard conversation, a darted glance to those in the check out line at the grocery store, the silence at every dinner table.
After each death, the darkness swelled a little more. Every inch of the neighborhood seemed to be enveloped in the swooning blackness.

One by one the houses would empty. The Richardson’s on Monday, the Marcus’s on Tuesday… the entire west side of the street was vacant by the weekend.

Classes had to combine as less and less students came to school. In the end, there were five of us. Two third graders, a fat second grader, my sister and myself. We spent the majority of the day staring at our feet, waiting for the teacher to come. The teachers never came.

“They” finally came for us, the only lit house on the block, after dinner on a Thursday. The ripping noises from my sister’s room… The stifled screams from my parents… No one would come. No one would help. The blood seeped under their doors, turning my socks a sticky pink.
I can hear them eating, under my bed. The bones smacking and popping.

“They” had come.

__________

Pat Moran is a writer from Portland, Oregon. His work has been featured in journals such as Apparatus Magazine, 4and20 Poetry, Defenestration, Poor Mojo's Almanac(K) and many more.

The Chin Chair

2009-11-15T00:01:00.003-06:00

by Paul Newton

I can’t sleep. Jeremy took the last of my pills. That’s why I’m sat here on the edge of my bed, staring at my mother’s rocker, counting twos.

Two…two…two…two…two…two…two

Somebody told me counting to two would eventually bore you to sleep; I should have took the pills Jeremy swallowed.

Jeremy Stephens was a pain in the ass, which is ok if he was the sort of pain in the ass you could keep at arm’s length; dirty-looks-across-the-street kind of thing or completely blank if happenstance brought you shoulder to shoulder, but no, Jeremy was the worst kind of pain in the ass. He was the kind that was also my best friend.

He first came into my life during second grade—some thirty years ago— halfway through Mrs. Carlton’s English class, and I saw it immediately.

The Chin Chair.

Are you familiar with The Chin Chair? It’s a strange phenomenon. No, that’s the wrong word, more of a charismatic power, a talent or a gift. I wasn’t aware it existed until Jeremy walked into that classroom all those years ago, all black hair, blue eyes and confidence.

I know all about it now, though.

Mrs. Carlton led Jeremy through the aisle of desks towards the empty seat beside me, and as she did so, like toppling dominoes, each kid he passed—one after the other—raised their elbows upon the desk, clasped their hands together, rested their chins in the upturned palms and gazed, glassy eyed, at the new arrival.

The Chin Chair.

Over the years we got along famously. He always had interesting tales to tell, casting charms upon his listeners until slowly they’d assume the obvious position, and drown in awe and wonder. When he’d finished his latest story, or left their presence, they would shake themselves like a wet dog, or a victim of a vaudeville hypnotist.

Women flocked to him, of course. Maybe that was one of the reasons I hung around Jeremy for such a long time; picking up his cast-offs whilst they were still under his spell, using them for a night or two until they got bored to resume the search for whatever it was I couldn’t give them.

The Chin Chair.

After university we went our separate ways. I went into banking and eventually consulting, making a fortune in the process, bought a beach front property, got married, had a son.
Jeremy left the country to travel the world, and after receiving one or two postcards we eventually lost contact. It’s the way life works I suppose. I got on with things, and never thought of him again…

…Until a couple of days ago that is, when he knocked on my door.

He was forty-two years old yet he didn’t seem to have changed a bit. I surprised myself by being so overwhelmed. Tears and hugs and stories of his adventures took us well into the night. He asked if he could stay for a while so he could find his feet and get settled. What could I say? He was my closest friend after all.

My wife loved him at first sight of course…

The Chin Chair.

He took my son fishing, hiking, karting and….

The Chin Chair.

I know he didn’t know how he did it but it had to end soon. I had to approach him, to reason with him, man-to-man, friend-to-friend; my very future was at stake.

So we sat down together—and over a few cans of lager came to a solution. We should have done it years before when I think about it now.

Removing Jeremy’s head from his body was quite easy. The sleeping pills I mixed with the beer rendered him immobile and the new blade I put on the hacksaw made light work of the decapitation. The fleshy bits were a nuisance but a little research on the Internet about bleaching animal bones sorted out that problem.

So there he sits on my mother’s rocker—Chin on Chair—opposite my bed staring at me with those wide black sockets as I relate to him the stories of my day.

Staring at me as I sit on the edge of my bed.

Elbows on knees, hands held together, chin on…

The Exquisite Beauty of Death

2009-11-08T00:01:00.001-06:00

by Mercedes M. Yardley

She was so beautiful, all dandelion fluff hair and white skin. But she bled from her eyes, and it was most disconcerting, although Allen tried not to show it.

“What?” she asked him one day. It was a normal Tuesday afternoon, and she had sequestered herself under a pastel umbrella. Blood ran from her eyes and down her face like painful tears. It soaked into her white scarf.

“N-nothing,” he said. He tried not to stare.

“Do I…do I have something on my face?” She reached a hesitant white mittened hand, tentatively dabbed beside her mouth. Blood smeared across her cheek in an artistic swoop. “I had pancakes for breakfast. Did I make a mess with the syrup?” She blushed delicately. “Sometimes I make a mess with the syrup.”

Allen’s lips twitched up. “No, you don’t have syrup on your face.”

“Is it my hair then? I can’t get it to do anything in this weather.”

Her light hair was fighting its white knitted hat. It tried its very best to stand on end, floating about her face like water.

He smiled fully, then. “No, it isn’t your hair.”

She turned her eyes to him, big beautiful gray eyes that were wide like a child’s. She blinked and two more bloody tears pooled and ran down her cheeks, mimicking the rain. “Then what is it? Why are you looking at me?” she asked. Her curiosity was endearing.

“I think that I like you,” Allen said. She smiled back, and he continued. “There’s just…something about you.”

“There is. I can call the lightning.”

He smiled and she laughed.

“You think that I’m kidding, don’t you?” she said.

Allen shrugged. “I’m not really sure what to think.”

She stood on tiptoe, kissed his cheek. Her felt the warmth of her lips and the blood that she left behind.

“I’d like you to stay with me for a while,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, and she cried tears of joy.

He also came to realize that she cried tears of pain and tears of sorrow. There were tears of frustration and tears of anger. Those were the most bitter and the most torrential, and they stained the couch and the carpet and the warm gray blanket that she wrapped herself in. And she could, indeed, call the lightning. A man was struck while running away after a rape. A family was killed while picnicking in the rain.

“Sometimes I can’t control my aim,” she said, and sighed.

Allen loved her, and love can hurt, as he soon found out. He shyly opened his hands to show her a lovely diamond ring that somehow reminded him of a butterfly, and she threw her arms around him and sobbed.

“Oh, I want to, I want to, but if we marry, you shall die,” she cried, and there were tears and tears and tears. He nearly drowned in them.

Until one day she came out of the room wearing the ring on her finger.

“I think yes,” she said, and Allen spun her around.

Blood crimsoned her wedding dress. They stood in a pool of it, and when he kissed his bride, she ran her fingers through his hair, making it stiff and sticky.

“I love you,” he said. Already he was faint. He dropped into an empty chair.

“I love you, too,” she said, and kissed him again. He felt his heart pumping, but in vain, for there was no longer any blood to circulate. She had cried it all out.

“Don’t be sad,” he told her. She tried to hold him, but he slid to the ground. “Now I understand why you cry.”

“Oh, Allen,” she whispered. “I tried. They told me to take you and I wanted so badly for you to live. I want you to be with me forever.” Blood leaked out of her eyes and touched her lips.

Allen smiled as his eyes closed.

“There’s something that I have wanted to tell you,” he said, “from the very moment that we first met.”

“What is that, my love?”

“I never understood why everybody fears death so. You are so beautiful.”

And she cried.

__________

Mercedes M. Yardley writes on a laptop that is undeniably broken. She has a special affinity for sharks and red lipstick, (but not sharks in red lipstick) and always covers her eyes during the gory parts. You can see a list of publishing credits at http://www.abrokenlaptop.wordpress.com/.

Lacey's Kisses

2009-11-01T02:01:00.003-06:00

by Felicity Dowker

Everyone agreed that it was the worst sort of tragedy.

Lacey Kensington was five years old when a drunk driver veered up onto the kerb and slammed into her tiny body one bright afternoon. The impact jerked Lacey’s hand out of her mother’s and threw her clean over to the other side of the road. Kendra Kensington watched with horrified eyes as her little daughter slammed into the pavement and lay unmoving in a growing pool of blood, both legs sticking out at crazed angles. Ignoring the slurred apologies of the driver (who didn’t seem to know where he was), Kendra ran across the road, desperate to reach Lacey. She knew if she could just lay her hands on the girl and beg her to sit up, to speak, to plant one of her sweet soft kisses on her mother’s cheek, Lacey would be alright.

But the air was thick sludge around her, and as she struggled to move through it, each moment agonizingly slow, Kendra was filled with the sudden certainty that Lacey would never gift her with a warm wet kiss ever again.

She didn’t know it, but she was screaming even before she saw the gaping hole in Lacey’s head.

__________

Five long months in hospital followed, plugged into an IV drip, a respirator, a catheter, a colostomy bag, and riddled with wires and monitors. There was not much of the little girl left in Lacey. She had become a skeletal old woman, her diminutive form pitiful under the stark white sheets and fluorescent glare. Her skull bore a visible crater from the fracture she’d sustained, and her legs were twisted beyond recognition. Their healing had been slow and problematic, plagued by recurring infections. Her sunken eyes were perpetually closed, ringed in garish yellow. The only sound in the bare room was the whoosh-beep, whoosh-beep of the respirator and heart monitor. Kendra heard that noise in her sleep; not that she got much sleep these days.

Every time she dangled on the brink of slumber, she heard the shriek of brakes, the squeal of tyres, and the grisly whump as the car hit Lacey’s body and plunged them both into an endless waking nightmare.

My baby. My darling, precious, poor tiny baby. Look what’s become of you. It’s beyond unfair. It’s…evil. Do you blame me? Sometimes in my dreams, you tell me it’s my fault. I should have seen the car coming. I should have saved you. But I didn’t.

Kendra kept a photo of Lacey from Before propped on her steel bedhead, so that when it became too overwhelmingly terrible and she wanted to run sobbing from the sarcophagal room, she could look at the picture and remember who the ravaged creature in the bed used to be. A plump girl with curly blonde hair and an impish grin twinkled at Kendra from the photo, all blue eyes and small white teeth.

You used to tell me I was your best friend in the whole world. You used to tell me you loved me THIS much. You used to crawl into bed with me in the morning and smother my face with your kisses. I’d give anything for one of your kisses, Lacey, my cherub, my angel, my wee one. Please, darling. Come back from where ever you’ve gone. Come back and give mummy a kiss. Just one last kiss.

Kendra’s tears fell on the parched wasteland of Lacey’s face like desert rain.

__________

A strange sort of suicide. Kendra was found sitting next to Lacey’s hospital bed, face buried in the blankets. Her blue lips hinted at asphyxiation, and the autopsy backed up their story. She’d been alone when she died; the nurse had been just outside at her desk all night, and could vouch that nobody entered or left the room. Ms. Kensington must have simply put her head down in the bedding and held her face there until the last breath was smothered from her body, the nurse said.

Lacey, though still unconscious, was smiling. Her lips, dry and pale for so long, were red and swollen. She seemed suddenly healthier, and there was speculation she might wake up—alas, too late for her mother to see.

Everyone agreed it was the worst sort of tragedy.

__________

Seven-Year Itch

2009-10-31T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Joshua M. Reynolds

The itch started on a Thursday. It was a tiny thing at first. A tremble in the meat, just below the skin. Greene barely noticed it, as he scratched. And scratched. And scratched. But the itch didn’t go away. Instead, it became a bone-deep squirm that no amount of clawing satisfied.

By Saturday, the itch had spread and grown, a virus of sensation spreading under his skin. Like rot through the frame of a house. It was warm. His skin flushed red where he laid fingernail to flesh and he scratched harder, faster.

Greene tried to ignore it at first. But it only got worse, digging at his mind, always there, wriggling just out of reach, a nagging sensation that made it impossible to sit down. Or stand up. Or do anything but scratch.

He wasn’t allergic to anything. Not a blessed thing. Poison oak maybe. Or poison ivy. Those were his first and second thoughts, respectively. The source of the itch.

His doctor said no. The doctor prescribed a lotion. Another doctor, a second opinion, prescribed a pill. Nothing worked. Greene could only scratch and scratch and scratch.

It wasn’t an irritation of the skin, the doctors swore. There was nothing on the skin. No cause. His third opinion recommended him to a psychologist, a specialist in the ’it’s all in your head’ school. Greene ignored the recommendation. Just another dead-end he knew. By then, the itch was unbearable. He couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. He could only scratch.

By the following Tuesday, he had discovered the cause of the itch. Something under his skin. Something rubbing against the underside of him. Spreading. Growing. Carrying the itch with it. He knew it. Knew it was there. He couldn’t sleep for the tiny explosions of irritation that blossomed between his pores.

On Wednesday, his fingers clawed strips off his arms and legs and head. Tiny, curled rolls of white, dead skin that flaked to the floor of his apartment. Blood streaked him like some garish decoration, painting him in red zebra stripes. And still the itch echoed along his bones, fleeing deeper and deeper from his questing fingers.

His fingernails cracked and split and he turned to mechanical aids. Backscratchers, forks, hair brushes. None of them scratched deep enough. Hard enough. The itch remained where it was, tantalizingly, agonizingly out of reach.

The steel wool, however, worked beautifully.

Blood burped and welled as he scraped it across his bare skin. He had stopped wearing clothes on Tuesday. He gritted his teeth against the pain, the excruciating, scraping pain that sent fire rippling along his nerves and up into his brain, but it was still better than the itch. Anything was better than the itch.

So he grasped his handfuls of steel wool and flayed himself, rubbing himself crimson, digging for the itch that hid under his skin. His flesh came away in ragged sheets, sticky with blood.

The first hairs, wiry black things like bristles, popped up through the blood on the third pass with the wool. Bobbing like buoys on a red sea. More and more hairs sprang out of his wounds, hidden beneath his skin. Dozens, hundreds, until the rough surface of a pelt was visible. Black patches of stiff hair that grew thick and wild beneath the surface of him.

And the itch began to subside. The more hair that was visible, the less he itched and Greene knew he’d been right, that it wasn’t in his head at all but under his skin. And so he scratched and scratched and the itch grew less and less as he sloughed away.

By Thursday morning, only a bit of him was left. He had stopped using the steel wool when his fingers fell away and resorted to using his tongue. Long and wide and beppled like sandpaper, he licked the last of his skin, the last of the itch, away. Until there was nothing left of him at all.

Then the wolf that had been Greene trotted out the door.

__________

Joshua M. Reynolds is a freelance writer of moderate skill and exceptional confidence. He has written quite a bit, and some of it was even published. For money. By real people.
Feel free to stop by his blog, Hunting Monsters, and cast aspersions on his character.

The Beginning is Nigh

2009-10-25T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Michelle Ristuccia

“The Beginning is Nigh.”

Janice tsked. “Just ignore him.”

I paused, trying to remember what I had been about to say before the interruption, but the man's high-pitched thought-speak had scattered me like so many falling leaves. It had been a long time since we had heard the thought-speak of any others. A lot of our kind speak only with those that they knew in the before-life.

“The Beginning is Nigh,” he echoed.

“I want to hear what he says,” I tittered to her privately. Then, “Hello?”

“Hello?” he echoed, sounding equally unsure. He paused before continuing on a stronger note. “Are you a believer?”

“A believer?” I asked, hearing Janice groan.

“A believer in the Beginning. It is coming! There will be flesh on our bones once again. We will rise up and the earth will be our keepsake, as it was always meant to be, as it can only be for us, who have lain in its womb!”

Janice cackled. “Don't encourage him.”

“Be warned. Only those who Believe will Rise.” Everything about the prophet, from the serious timbre of his thought-speech to his freshly-dead impatience, reminded me of my before-life.

I held my proverbial tongue, listening to the thump and rumble of the live ones passing overhead. I checked over my bones, but didn't feel any stray nerve impulses. All of the sinews and ligaments had deteriorated long ago, the rotting corpses of plants and small creatures collapsing over me, filling in where my flesh had been. Though my bones remained, their calcium had long leached out, and I would never wiggle my toes again.

But the prophet was shouting, “Believe, believe!” and because it was his thoughts that I was hearing, I knew with absolute certainty that he did believe.

A part of me believed, too.

He was gasping now, his thoughts whipped into a frenzy. “The Beginning, it is here!”
“It's here!” I echoed without thinking. Other voices joined in the chant.

I could hear Janice tsk-tsking in the background, but her words were drowned out by our shouting. I believed, and I could feel the ground shaking. My bones creaked--the earth split away to reveal the blinding brightness of a full moon. My skull seemed to rise up of its own accord, and the vertebrae followed. I was standing up!

As I crawled out of the ground, I could see the bones of my hands gleaming in the moonlight. My spine creaked as I straightened and turned to the skeleton rising next to me, its gaunt eye sockets black in shadow. “You lied to me!” I shouted, and my shout was a real shout. “Where is my flesh?”

The other skeleton's hand rose to point over the top of the cemetery wall. Beyond were rolling hills topped with rows of multi-story houses. “Flesh,” he hissed, his jaw moving down and up once.

My bones tingled with hunger as we lept over gravestones, leaving chicken-foot patterns in the dirt behind us.

__________

Learn more about Michelle Ristuccia at: http://wakingdreamsblog.blogspot.com/

Not Easy

2009-10-18T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Michelle Howarth

For Jackie, life never comes easy. Nothing is natural to him. Like water for instance. Forget it. He sinks like a dirty great rock, and usually ends up getting fished out by some small, weedy kid nobody likes, or worse, the next door neighbour’s toy poodle.

Riding a bike. He’d tell you the story of his one and only attempt, but he’ll be damned if he can remember it. The paramedics say it’s best he avoids anything with wheels from now on.

To most, Jackie is just an everyday kid, a bit of a disaster zone, and not someone cool to have at parties, but there’s nothing exceptional about him. His eyes are an ordinary shade of brown, and Douglas will tell you he’s a bit on the fat side, and Brody will say he’s too short for his age— but how many kids are there with brown eyes, a bit on the fat side, and too short for their age?

Hundreds.

Thousands.

Nothing extraordinary there.

That’s what Jackie likes them to think. He’s read the Guidebook twice, and it says it’s best no one suspects. People start suspecting and he’ll have to deal with them, and as already explained such things have a giant tendency not to come easy.

Especially for Jackie.

It’s difficult at the best of times. Everything that’s supposed to happen, doesn’t. Perhaps if he keeps his teeth sharply filed they’ll learn to grow like that? Maybe it’s like pruning a bonsai tree? His whiskers could still use some work, and his ears, and his tail–work, work, work. There has to be a better solution to stuffing his belt into the back of his pants.

And the moon, well, that’s supposed to work wonders, but not for Jackie. He’s howled and bayed at it until his throat is sore, but it seems to glow on without even noticing.

It’s not easy, not easy at all, and worse, people are starting to suspect. They give him weird looks in the street. They cross over to the other side. If you ask them about Jackie, they’ll raise an eyebrow, look left and then right, and whisper, “That kid is weird. Something strange about him.”

It’s a real problem, and the Guidebook says they can’t know. They have to be dealt with. His life will be at risk if he doesn’t.

Still, the moon refuses to take effect, and it doesn’t surprise him one bit. Nothing comes naturally for him, nothing at all—so he’s sat on the lawn with his pencilled on whiskers, newspaper ears, and belt of a tail, sorting out the final part of his transformation.

Claws.

He’s filed his teeth to make his fangs, and now it seems logical to do likewise for claws. Blood flicks from each finger as he uses the knife to mould it, slicing nail and skin to get the perfect design.

He’s biting his lip and drawing the nub of his thumb into a fine point, almost ready to deal with the people. Those who suspect.

It’s hard, painful work, but then, like everything else, this werewolf business doesn’t come easy.

__________

Learn more about Michelle at www.michellehowarth.co.uk

Dead Weight

2009-10-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Robert Swartwood

Just after sundown they emerge from out of the ground. There are eight of them, just as Merle said.

I stand with my gun drawn, waiting for them.

Who has the money? I ask.

One of them, a man, steps forward hesitantly. He tells me it’s in his pocket.

Then get it, I say. Slowly.

He reaches into his pocket, slowly, then pulls out the wad of bills. It doesn’t even look like a hundred bucks.

I take it and stuff it in my own pocket and motion with the gun for them to start walking.

A mile later we come to the van. I load them in, one at a time, and then shut the back. I pull a heavy-duty lock from my pocket and place it on the door. I can hear them inside, whispering to each other.

I drive ten miles before a sheriff’s cruiser pulls me over. I stop the van and then just sit there before Jacob walks up to my window.

How many? he asks.

Eight.

How much?

I pull the wad of cash out of my pocket, hold it up for him to see.

That’s not much at all, he says.

No, it’s not.

That hardly even pays for your gas and time.

Tell me about it.

He looks off over the desert, toward the horizon that marks the border between our world and theirs. He nods once, touches the brim of his hat, then strolls back to his cruiser.

A half hour later I arrive at the cabin. Merle is waiting for me.

About time, she says when I get out of the van. She already has the shotgun out, cradled in the crook of her arm.

We go to the back and take off the lock and then open the doors. The eight of them stare back out at us.

Okay, I say, this is how we’re going to do this. One at a time. The faster you cooperate, the faster this will go.

One of them—a woman this time—says, Food?

I glance at Merle, smile, and then nod at the woman. Yes, food.

The first one to go is a man in his thirties. I keep my gun aimed at his back as I lead him toward the cabin. Before we get to the door I reach into my pocket, grip the switchblade, pull it out. I flick my wrist and there’s a sharp snick and this is what the man hears and turns and sees and before I know it he opens his mouth but I jab him in the throat with the knife and his eyes roll back and his body goes weightless and he falls to the ground.

Fuck, I mutter.

I drop the knife and pick him up but he’s heavier than he looks, now that he’s dead weight, and I get blood on my shirt as I drag him forward. I have to prop him on my knee as I open the door and then I have to drag him across the dilapidated boards toward the center of the cabin, where the locked trapdoor is located.

I undo the lock, grab the metal ring and pull the trapdoor open but the thing inside is already waiting and one of its tentacles reaches out and I have to slam the trapdoor back down, slam it hard, and the creature gives a kind of mewling noise that makes my brain want to explode.

Merle comes running in the cabin, asking what the fuck was that?

I think I hurt it, I say.

No shit.

Here, help me.

She stands behind the trapdoor, her hand on the ring, and I position myself in front of it with the dead man in my arms.

I look at her and nod and she pulls the trapdoor open and one of those tentacles comes out and I push the man forward and the tentacle wraps around his legs and pulls him forward and then the body is gone down into the pit and Merle shuts the door and locks it.

When we get back outside the rest of them can be heard inside the back of the van. They’re crying and screaming and praying to a god that doesn’t exist.

I look at Merle and shake my head.

It’s going to be a long fucking night.

__________

Robert Swartwood has always had a fondness for horror. In the seventh grade he was inspired to become a writer after reading Insomnia by Stephen King. Robert's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chizine, Postscripts, Space and Time, elimae, Wigleaf, and The Los Angeles Review. His sf action novella The Silver Ring can be read for free at http://thesilverring.wordpress.com/

Mr. Lucky

2009-10-04T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Kurt Newton

H. Michael Casper (H to his friends) was always in the right place at the right time. Lottery tickets purchased on a whim…would win. Raffles, radio contests--you name it. Always the thousandth guest or the millionth customer. Even those lucky coins at the supermarket checkout line. One year, he had so many of the brightly colored tokens he decorated his Christmas tree with them (which he won as a door prize at the office Christmas party). Luck was on his side. Luck was his lady every night. Until, a package arrived on his doorstep.

The package had no return address. Inside the package was a doll, a small wishnik doll to be precise. With lucky horseshoes on the soles of each foot. It was a good luck doll.

Someone's idea of a joke, H thought, placing the doll on the fireplace mantle. A little more luck couldn't hurt.

Or could it?

The doll stared at him with wild hair and wide grin, as if to say luck was crazy, luck was insane. It appeared as if the doll wanted to wink, but was prevented from doing so by its rigid construction. H thought nothing of it.

Within a week H had wrecked his car, was laid off from his job of twenty years, and had developed a rash that just wouldn't go away. There was also the flooded basement, the three broken mirrors, and his television was struck by lightning. Not only had his luck dried up, it appeared to have turned black and was oozing bad juju.

Meanwhile, the wishnik sat atop the fireplace mantle, its eyes feral-looking, its grin nearly touching its ears. H did what any right-thinking person would have done. He built a fire and threw the wishnik into the flames.

He watched it burn.

Hair ignited, rubber melted, but the grin, shaped like a lucky horseshoe, seemed to stay put as the flames grew, flaring up in orange tendrils like strands of wild hair, and flaring out like a yellow tongue, extending beyond the hearth, licking a stack of nearby newspapers and setting them on fire.

H ran, but the flames appeared to have a life of their own and beat him to each exit, zigzagging in continuous Ws along the walls and across the ceiling. The flames were accompanied by a hideous insane laughter, as if luck itself were mocking his very existence.

Which seemed to be at an end, thought H, as the smoke overcame him and he collapsed on the living room floor…

…only to wake up in a hospital room five days later, wrapped from head to toe in gauze, with over ninety percent of his body burned. A nurse leaned over him.

“You're a lucky man,” she said.

H nodded, thankful to be alive. There were several bouquets of flowers in the room, along with Get Well Soon balloons hovering near the ceiling.

“Someone left this here for you. Isn't it cute?”

The nurse held up a wishnik doll and waggled it back and forth. Its yellowish hair danced like flames, its eyes appeared to glow red.

The nurse needed to call the doctor because H just wouldn't stop screaming.

__________

Kurt Newton tries to let the story dictate how long it wants to be. Sometimes that means a very short story, sometimes it means a novel. One thing for sure is he's written a lot of them--both large and small. News about his latest can be found at http://kurt-newton.livejournal.com.

What Today’s Well-Dressed Mind Parasite is Wearing

2009-09-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Jonathan Pinnock

“So, Mr Sampson,” I say, “I believe you had a question for me?”

“Well, yes.” The man pauses, looking at me in an odd way. “How do you do it? Yesterday, when we first met, I could have sworn you were short and fat. And yet today, you are tall and thin. You also seem to have grown a beard.”

“Oh dear,” I say, “And I thought we were going to have an interesting conversation.”

“I’m sorry?”

“What I mean,” I say, “Is that surely the question of how I do what I do is much less interesting than the question of what I could do with it? Or indeed why I would want to do it.”

He takes a while to parse this. Jesus, he really isn’t that bright at all. Could be cat food, this one.

“Yes,” he says, “But I really would like to see how you do it. Are you some kind of shape shifter?”

“Nah,” I say, “I just pick a different body each morning to suit the mood I’m in.”

He laughs. It’s an uneasy laugh. “You’re kidding. You mean, you just pick one off the rack, like choosing a shirt to wear?”

“Yeah, sort of,” I say, maintaining a straight face. Oh well, nothing for it. I pick up the remote control, and propel him gently towards the closet. I press a button and the doors glide open. There they all are, a couple of dozen bodies hanging from meat hooks. I press another button, and they begin to revolve slowly around. Sampson is transfixed.

“Take a pick,” I say.

“My God,” he says. “But ...”

“They’re in a state of suspended animation, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“But don’t the hooks ... hurt?”

Thanks for the cue, dickhead. I press the pause button and reach into my pocket. I plunge the hook into his back, pick him up with it and attach him, screaming and wriggling, to the end of the rack.

“Well, you tell me,” I say, “Do they?”

__________

Jonathan Pinnock was born in Bedfordshire, England, and - despite having so far visited over forty other countries - has failed to relocate any further away than the next-door county of Hertfordshire. He is married with two children, several cats and a 1961 Ami Continental jukebox. His work has won several prizes, shortlistings and longlistings, and he has been published in such diverse publications as Smokebox, Every Day Fiction and Necrotic Tissue. His unimaginatively-titled yet moderately interesting website may be found at http://www.jonathanpinnock.com/.

Cat-Napped

2009-09-20T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Paul Milliken

It’s pretty amazing what a guy will do for a date.

Take Dan O’Leary: it’s Sunday, and the Patriots play a game at two. Any other Sunday he’d be at Davie’s, the best beef-and-beer joint in northern Massachusetts. But this time around, instead of slamming back a shot and placing bets, he’s…

“Cat-sitting?”

Dan challenged Stacey with his best are-you-serious? sneer. She laughed, tossing a honey-blonde curl off her shoulder.

“Come on, Dan. One afternoon. You know there’s a cat-napper on the loose.”

Dan rolled his eyes. He’d seen the articles; residents in Upton Heights were panicked. Nobody knew what was happening, but Dan envisioned the ridiculous image of some idiot riding around in a van, sliding open the door and snatching cats off the street.

“Cats creep me out. My pop once told me all cats come from an underground city where they’re plotting mankind’s destruction. He was a drunk.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Stacey said dryly. “The neighborhood girl who usually checks on her is out of town. And Susu keeps trying to find ways to get outside.”

Dan and Stacey had worked in adjoining cubicles for nearly two months, answering phones in a computer help center. He liked her immediately; she had one of those smiles that transformed the entire landscape of her face, adding dimples and contours while showcasing luminous teeth and tight, glossy lips.

Stacey raised an eyebrow, upping the stakes: “I’ll make you supper afterwards.”

So now Dan’s sitting in Stacey’s living room, and Susu is watching him like he’s a TV dinner in the microwave. It’s unnerving; the cat is as daffy-looking as her name suggests, with an oversized head and a stubby tale obviously somehow truncated. Stacey had left with only one instruction:
“She loves to run out of the house when you open the front door. So don’t.”

Of course, an hour later, watching the ESPN pre-game breakdown while sipping one of Stacey’s puckering wine coolers, Dan’s already forgotten.

Ding-Dong!

Everything happens so fast that Dan never even realizes nobody is at the door. He opens it, and suddenly Susu whooshes between his legs.

“NO!”

Dan bolts after her, leaving the door wide open. His socked feet slide over the marble-stoned walkway as he struggles to keep up with the little white puffball, which darts across the street. It dodges traffic and disappears down a large drainage opening under the curb.

Dan is less successful crossing the street, and after nearly causing a few fender-benders, he stops by the drain. There’s no way he’s reaching blindly into the darkness; he’s seen that movie about the man-eating rats. But there is a manhole in the sidewalk; opening it could at least give him an idea of how deep the cat is. The cover’s rusted over, and Dan grunts as he pulls on it; finally, just before giving up, it pops loose.

“Meooooooooow….”

It’s definitely Susu; she doesn’t sound that far away. Dan quickly assesses the options; he can call the fire department and run the risk of Stacey arriving home to witness the debacle. Or, he can grab hold of the little rusty rungs and climb down just a few feet, enough to hopefully scare the cat back up through the drain.

I better get more than dinner, Dan thinks, taking the first few steps down into the hole. The air is hot and stifling, and smells like rotting milk. In the midst of taking a deep breath, one of the rungs wrenches loose; Dan’s hands slip away and he falls a short distance, finally landing on his ass.

It’s dark, but the light streaming in from above is enough that the white blur catches Dan’s attention. He turns his head, realizing he’s looking down a tunnel. Dan reaches into his pocket, pulling out his cell phone; the dim blue display light illuminates the passage just enough so that he can see Susu’s eyes reflected back.

“Here kitty…” he begins, stopped by the realization that there are other glowing eyes watching him. Dan struggles to his feet, almost tripping on the dozens of felines now winding around his legs. They begin meowing, all of them; Dan suddenly can’t feel anything except the slicing of claws up his arms and legs and Susu’s fat, stubby tale knocking against his face.

__________

Paul Milliken is an award-winning journalist by day, horror enthusiast by night. His fiction has previously been published in Byzarium and the anthologies Chilling Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (PD Publishing) and Tainted: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Strange Publications).

The Regular

2009-09-13T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Sanford Allen

He is the kind of regular no bartender wants. Bitter, belligerent, obnoxious.

He never gets his drink fast enough. It’s never strong enough.

He regularly spackles the bathroom with the contents of his stomach.

He flashes his cash in a vulgar show of status, but he never tips.

After tonight, he won’t be back.

I will smile as he slaps money on the bar, grunting and ogling my breasts.

I will watch him throw back his glass in one gulp. Just like he always does.

I will feign concern as he clutches his throat, gurgling, and drops to the floor.

I will savor the screams as his lips and tongue sizzle away—and lose the bottle before the ambulance and police arrive.

After tonight, he won’t be back.

__________

Sanford Allen is a musician and former newspaper reporter from San Antonio, Texas. He gave up on journalism after he found out it’s more fun to tell lies than to uncover the truth. More than two dozen of his horror and dark fantasy stories have been featured in magazines, web publications and anthologies. His band, Boxcar Satan, recently released its fifth full-length CD. Visit him on the web at www.sanfordallen.com.

Little Problems

2009-09-06T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Patricia Russo

It was just after eleven, and Gerard was outside having a cigarette. Two fifteen-minute breaks, they were supposed to get, but that shitstain Richardson always looked personally pained whenever Gerard grabbed his jacket. Richardson. A little man with little problems. That morning Carol had used a pencil instead of a pen when she initialed the timesheet, and Richardson was still riding her about it.

Since Richardson got pissy when people hung out in front of the store, Gerard walked to the end of the block, past a cell phone place with the same old special offers, a dollar store, a fast food joint, and a storefront of discount appliances. It was a discount sort of street. A discount sort of town.

Cloudy day. Moderate traffic. Friday tall on the horizon. Gerard lit his cigarette.

A car turned off the main street, heading west. Dark green Corolla, rolled-down windows, crumpled fender. Gerard wouldn’t have looked at it twice if he hadn’t heard a pop, and then the crunching of glass.

The car had run over a Snapple bottle. The driver slowed down momentarily, then continued on his way, leaving the shards where they lay.
It was nothing.

On the opposite corner, a man waited to cross. He looked down at the broken glass.

He was a thin man in his thirties, wearing a gray cord jacket and faded jeans.

Stepping off the curb, he bent down and gathered the biggest pieces of the broken bottle. There was no trash receptacle on his corner; the closest one stood a couple of feet from Gerard, next to the light pole. The man crossed the street with care, his hands cupped.

“Hey, yeah,” Gerard said, nodding. “That’s pretty dangerous.”

“Yes,” the man said. “Not just for tires. I was thinking about kids.” He dropped the glass into the trash bin, then brushed one palm over the other.

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely,” the man repeated. He glanced at Gerard.

Gerard smiled politely.

“Or, you know,” the man said. “Somebody could do this.” He showed Gerard his right hand. He pinched the skin at the base of his third finger, then cut it. There was no way he could have used a sliver of glass. He’d emptied his hands, brushed them off. The man continued the impossible incision, on and on to the wrist, and beyond, slicing the sleeve of his jacket so that it fell away, slicing the skin underneath, his movements as casual as if he were drawing a line with a crayon.

“It could happen,” the man said, drawing his line past the elbow, up to the tip of his shoulder. “You know. People get tempted.” He tugged on the skin, exposing bloodless gray flesh. A second later, red began to well. The man kept on cutting and tugging, until the skin of his arm hung down like a second bisected sleeve.

Gerard had dropped his cigarette. “What the fuck?”

“Only showing you.” The man raised his arm slightly. The whole of it was wet now; the crimson had a reflective sheen. Blood dripped onto his jeans, and onto the sidewalk, but not nearly as much as there should have.

Gerard backed away from the man; the cigarette lay, still burning, by the guy’s foot. But the distance between them was much too small. The other bridged it with a smile.

“Put it back on,” Gerard said, which was nonsense, which was ridiculous. “Why do you want to show me something like that for?”

“I thought I could.” The smile wavered. “You looked at me. We spoke. You sounded like you understood.”

“Understood what?”

The man was standing in front of him. Gerard couldn’t remember how he’d gotten turned around.

The red was very shiny.

The man looked away. “I thought I could talk to you. Sorry.”

The man’s arm dripped and dripped. Gerard’s head swam.

“I’m always making this mistake.” The man’s voice shook, but his face went still, except for a tremor in the corner of his mouth. “Sorry,” he said again. He touched Gerard lightly on the shoulder and walked away, up the street and gone, leaving Gerard lost in the shiny red, so bright and so shiny that he could hardly breathe.

__________

Sitting Up with Grandpa

2009-08-30T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Blu Gilliand

It was twelve-year-old Jimmy they asked to sit up with Grandpa. The men had spent the evening building the coffin, and needed to rest before getting up early to dig the grave. It was easy for Jimmy to agree, sitting on Grandpa’s front porch in the unflinching August sun. When he said yes, Pa clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good man.”

But that night, sitting alone with Grandpa in Grandpa’s room, Jimmy hated his daytime self. Daytime Jimmy was nowhere around, and Nighttime Jimmy was a little spooked.

Grandpa lay on the bed, dressed in his Sunday best. His snow-white hair was neatly combed. His hands were folded atop his chest, gnarled fingers knotted together in an attitude of prayer. A shiny new nickel lay on each of his eyes. They caught glints of moonlight streaming through the window; when they sparked just right, it looked like the old man was winking.

Jimmy tried not to look at Grandpa, but part of his job was to shoo away flies that gathered around the body. He could have shut the window, but the moist Alabama heat made that unthinkable.

A fat black fly circled Grandpa’s face. Jimmy moved forward to fan it away, and noticed something about the nickels. One showed heads, and the other showed tails.

Pa had told him that the nickels were there to pay the ferryman for taking Grandpa’s soul to Heaven. He said they should always show the same side, heads or tails, otherwise Grandpa’s soul might get confused about where it was going and be lost for eternity.

Whoever put the coins on Grandpa’s eyes must not have known that. The thought of Grandpa wandering in confusion for all eternity bothered Jimmy. He thought he should set the coins right so his Grandpa would be okay.

But to do so meant maybe touching cold, dead flesh. Jimmy really, really didn’t want to do that.

Go ahead, Jimmy, his Pa’s voice urged him. Pa had a way of popping in his head when Jimmy was worrying over a big decision. Go ahead and be a good man.

Jimmy reached out to his Grandpa’s face. His hand trembled. His fingers brushed the nickel showing heads. The metal was cold. Carefully, he lifted it clear.

Grandpa’s eye opened.

Jimmy gasped and dropped the nickel. It lodged underneath his Grandpa’s chin, caught in the tight, starched collar of his shirt. Grandpa’s eye stared at the ceiling.

Jimmy’s heart galloped. He wanted no more of this. But he was a “good man,” according to his Pa, and he meant to see it through.

He gave himself a moment to calm down, then leaned forward to retrieve the coin. He managed to tweeze it between two fingernails without touching Grandpa. He turned it tails-side up and used it to close his grandfather’s eye, leaving the coin on top.

He heard something; a soft whisper, like a sigh. A hint of breath drifted across his face. It smelled of rot and decay.

Jimmy, not a man at all, not yet, right now nothing but a scared little boy, got up and ran across the room and grabbed the doorknob with sweat-soaked palms. As he tried in vain to turn the knob, the metal refusing to obey his slick hands, he began to scream. And yet, over his own cries, and over the sound of his own heart pounding, he heard a noise: the solemn ring of metal as two nickels struck the wooden floor.

__________

Blu Gilliand is a freelance writer whose nonfiction work has appeared in publications such as Dark Scribe Magazine, Dark Discoveries, Hellnotes.com, Bookgasm.com, and Shroud Magazine. His fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Horror Library Vol. 3 and Northern Haunts. You can visit him online at http://blugilliand.wordpress.com.

Nobody Smiling

2009-08-23T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Cate Gardner

Vern Gobel won by a margin.

That is by the margin in my notebook where he scrawled threats in pencil. Or rather where he had one of his minions scrawl them for him. The words have faded now. My thumb has run over them so often they are just a blur.

The silence in the auditorium, peppered with nervous coughs and the scraping of chairs, makes my ears hurt. No one in the crowd is looking at me, but they should. I fuss with my signet ring, running a finger over the R and trying to ignore the tightening in my stomach. Lulu Adams was a good, fair candidate. Her policies were sound and, despite the blood gushing from her neck wound, bloodless.

She is looking at me. Holding onto her throat and peering up to the back of the auditorium.

She knows.

The headmaster’s left eye is twitching, his fingers drumming against grey flannel. He wants to say something but Vern’s henchmen have sewn his lips together with garden twine.

Vern clears his throat, then clears it some more. His voice is a not-quite-broken squeak that doesn’t reach this far back. All I see are his lips moving. Not that I care what he has to say. Not that anyone here cares. We all just want out.

He points towards the wall and we don’t need a window to visualize the black smoke that hangs over the rival Eberhart High. Science experiments go wrong, everyone knows that, especially when you add dynamite to the formula. A few dazed, misguided students, who believe they voted Vern into office, wonder how they could have missed the combat policy. It was all there in black and vicious white. Of course, without the right light it is impossible to see the white words written on white paper. I believe I invented that code.

Vern Gobel’s photocopied manifesto begins with a confusing paragraph on how one day he doesn’t want to be just the President but the President. I’m guessing he means of the U.S. and not of some nameless global corporation or of the school. A smile twitches at the edge of my lips as I envisage Vern as a fifty-year-old bone thin geek handing out cookies and badges to kids.

Of course, they would be cookies laced with cyanide or fertilizer. Badges fastened to fat cheeks by means of safety pins.

Lulu looks at me now with the blank eyed stare of a dead girl as her blood drips from the stage onto Mrs. Mendelssohn’s birds nest. The math teacher’s shoulders heave up and down.

The dull whine of sirens penetrates the thick walls of the auditorium. In quick succession the doors bolt shut as Vern’s henchmen, a collection of science club geeks, stand guard at the doors. They fold their puny arms and I wonder why we don’t rush at them. They would break with the slightest kick.

Maybe it’s the hacksaws and sharpened kitchen knives putting us off. Maybe it’s the frozen stare of Mr. Adams, the gym teacher. When muscle and brawn lies stupefied by fear then we should all sit very, very still and not attract undue attention.

Did one of the students just look at me? A sly glance. It only takes one person to whisper and the fact of this sham election will swarm through the crowd.

Oh joy, Vern is pointing at me. I think he’s encouraging everyone to clap. Some students are doing so in a regimented sarcastic fashion. Though the kids from the school newspaper are having problems. It’s hard to clap when the class president has chopped off your hands.

__________

Cate Gardner is a writer of all things odd. You can find her stories online at Arkham Tales, Three Crow Press and Every Day Fiction. She also has stories forthcoming in Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Dead Souls, Sand, Necrotic Tissue and Space & Time. You can find her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com/ and at http://catephoenix.livejournal.com/

White Paper

2009-08-16T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Rachel Green

He offered me pristine white paper to write on, and I accepted it gladly, filling it with outlines and plots and characters, each connected by arrows and bubble clouds and crossings out. He watched me work; a silent sentinel guarding me from distractions who smiled whenever I looked up, nodding his encouragement.

I wrote longhand and forgot the time. There were no windows and the door was behind me—just a fluorescent light overhead to dispel shadows from the table. Page after page I wrote, picking up a new pencil whenever the current one ran became a stub. He always made sure the next was freshly sharpened.

I ignored the hunger. If I didn’t eat, I needn’t leave the room at all, and if my clothes felt a little looser, so much the better. After two hundred pages my fingers were sore. After five hundred I couldn’t open my hand to release the pencil. After a thousand I could see bone through the calluses.

When I finished the book he stood to shake my hand. My legs were more like sticks and wouldn’t support my weight but he didn’t seem to mind. He patted my shoulder as he passed and I could hear the door open and close, even if I couldn’t turn my head.

I waited for about an hour until the door opened again. A different man sat down and handed me a stack of white paper covered in tiny, crabbed handwriting. I looked at him, and he smiled and nodded and handed me an eraser.

__________

Rachel Green is a forty-something writer from Derbyshire, England. She lives with her two partners and three dogs. She was the regional winner of the Undiscovered Authors 2007 and her novel An Ungodly Child was published in 2008. When not writing, Rachel walks her three dogs, potters in the garden and drinks copious amounts of tea.

Feeding Frenzy

2009-08-09T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Rebecca Nazar

Dagget consumed pies, hot dogs, and hot chilies in gluttonous quantities for sport. He was the undisputed champion, but the thrill was gone. An adrenalin junky and attention seeker, he craved risk, a heaping helping of tasty fame.

“Only the old school competitive eaters gorge themselves on digestible fare,” he said, scratching what he believed to be a cast iron gut. “I’m going to ratchet up the stakes.”

Rabid Rush Energy Drink sponsored him; the product needed launching. ESPN-Extreme was eager to broadcast; their ratings were slumping. Oh, and yes, The Guinness Book of World Records dutifully chronicled it all.

So Dagget hunkered down and ate a large bowl of needles, tacks, and crushed glass. For hours, this modern day gladiator spooned that killer kibble down his gullet like breakfast cereal until it protruded from every pore.

Starved for entertainment, savoring the grim stunt, the large stadium audience cheered then jeered their hero; and as vultures are compelled to do, they picked his corpse clean of flesh-snippets for lockets and sharp souvenirs.

What? You’re surprised we acquired an appetite for this sort of thing?

__________

Rebecca Nazar feels you should turn off your television and go play outside.

Rocked the Hell Out of It

2009-08-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Rob Brooks

Jesse found a tree away from the crowd where he could exorcise his guitar.

He set the case down on the grass and lifted out his Gretsch hollow body, leaving the case open. He stared at the guitar with a mix of admiration, love and, just recently added, horror.

“I know you’re in there,” he muttered. “And I’m going to destroy you like you’ve tried to do to me.”

He strummed the strings, sliding his fingers between the frets, listening to the changes in the chords. He played no discernible tune, just listened for the music to find him first.

Jesse only played a few minutes before he saw the first signs of the apparition, rising from the guitar strings as if it were just steam. “I see you,” he whispered. “Even if no one else can.”

The shape hovered over the neck of his guitar, holding on to it with six little tendrils, one to each string. A face formed. “So you’ve found me, Jesse. I’ve loved all your music these last twenty-four years.” It mocked him.

“Shut up, monster,” Jesse growled. “Just what are you? A ghost? A demon? I thought musicians made deals with the devil to help their career.”

The shape definitely laughed this time. “Call me a hitchhiker. I’ve just been along for the ride.”

Jesse continued to strum, his fingers playing bits from actual songs now, everything he’d learned since he’d started as a boy. Familiar songs and artists, his oldest friends. Buddy Holly. Neil Young. Tom Waits. Classics and unknowns. The shape in front of him danced to the snippets.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” No answer. “All these years, all the bands I’ve been through, all the failures. You caused it all didn’t you?”

“Always looking to lay the blame somewhere else, aren’t you?” it said, then it hovered closer to him. “But I will destroy you. I will make you a miserable old man, playing on street corners for dollar bills and change, too attached to his guitar to let go and too stupid to realize no one’s listening to him anymore. And that’s really the worst part, isn’t it, Jesse? That no one will hear a word you sing.”

Jesse shook his head. He didn’t want to hear it. “Why?”

The shape’s ghostly mouth smiled. “Because I can, and you’re so easy. You’ve doubted yourself so much, I’ve barely had to do anything.”

Jesse watched the shape, saw how its tendrils were coiled around each string. Holding on. Anchoring it.

“What if I just force you to leave?”

The apparition said nothing.

“Maybe I’ll just smash the guitar. Then you’ll have to find a new ride, as you say.”

“I don’t think you’ll do that, Jesse. You love your Gretsch like it was your own child.”

“I don’t think I have to smash it.”

His fingers still played, longer pieces of songs. He wondered briefly if the monster was right, maybe he really was ruining his own career with bad choices, poor writing, horrible bands.

Didn’t really matter. In either case, this parasite had to go.

“I’ve got a song you haven’t heard, only play it on my electric. From a little band called Nirvana.”

The ghostly face looked worried a moment, and Jesse saw the tendrils tighten.

Jesse started in on the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” strumming away with a viciousness he’d never laid onto his acoustic before. The song didn’t sound right on the guitar—it was too bluesy—but that didn’t matter.

He played each chord harder than the last. He saw the apparition vibrating, and when the D string snapped and that tendril flew loose, he grinned.

One by one, the strings broke until he was down to just his two high strings left. He didn’t even bother with chords, he just hit the strings as hard as he could. They broke together with a twang, and the apparition screamed. The shape spun in the air like a balloon losing air, and then it was gone.

Jesse smiled. He’d done it. He’d freed himself from the monster.

He heard a clink. He looked into his guitar case and saw two quarters. The crowd had moved closer to him, and as he watched, a woman bent over to put a dollar bill on top of the quarters.

__________

Rob Brooks enjoys writing speculative fiction of all kinds, and has had poetry published in Scifaikuest, Daikaijuzine, and Chimaera Serials, as well as fiction in A Thousand Faces, upcoming issues of Arkham Tales, Sonar 4, and NVF Magazine, and Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror.

Late in July it Meanders Through the City

2009-07-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Kevin Shamel

The street was a sticky trap laid down between buildings—oil-smelling dinosaur tar speckled with pebbles to keep it from running off the edge of the city. It crept along flypapery and sinister, slow and hot.

The asphalt grabbed at him as he crossed, bubbling under his feet, burning his soles. Cars sang by in low tones, too fast for the street’s grip.

He stopped to light a smoke beyond the cool shadow of a building, straight in the sun’s conspicuous face. Two steps back and he’d have been safe, but he alit too far from the solidity of shade.

The street splashed up and took him in the time it took to strike a flame. A mean wave of asphalt snatched him around the waist and pulled—a huge black frog tongue—and he a fly.

It took seconds for the street to eat him. He told himself, I knew this was going to happen. He remembered scenes from several movies—or maybe parts of his life. He revisited his last seven loves. He recalled definitions of words like oblivion, xanthocroi, and quagmire, an address of someone long-lost among the streets of his life, and most of the lyrics to “Big Balls” by ACDC.

His hands were the last to disappear under the tacky surface. They flopped and twitched at the sticky hide of their captor. Soon they too were swallowed.

Bubbles on the surface of the street smoothed themselves back to blackness.

__________

Waves of heat fumed from the street as she crossed. The asphalt sucked at her feet—curling around her shoes and slowing her to a confused trudge. Metallic colors of a dark rainbow swirled before her.

The street tugged at her ankles. It bit at her calves, her knees and higher—reaching for the silent scream driven from her lips.

__________

Kevin Shamel lives in an old haunted house in the Pacific Northwest with his family. You can find links to more of his writing at http://shamelesscreations.blogspot.com/. Look for his first novel coming soon from the New Bizarro Author Series from Eraserhead Press.

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

2009-07-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

Rick McQuiston

Chad thumbed through the phone book until he reached C. Carpet cleaning was his destination due to the dog watering his front room.

Clean-n-Fresh, Suds-o-Us, Jerry’s Kill the Spill Inc., Distain the Stain Services... Chad’s eyes roamed over the prospective companies, noting how colorful the ads were. Each offered its name and phone number as well as a short sales pitch or catchy slogan.

Within a few minutes, Chad reached the end of the advertisements for carpet cleaners, and made several notes on the best looking ones. Page 142 had a few that were good, as did page 149.

As he began to think about which ones to call first something caught his eye.

Bee’s Carnivore Services. Bloody Meat Eaters Corp., Bone Crunching and Gristle Packaging. Chad quickly scrutinized two of the nastier ones.

The first, from a company called Blood under Bone, featured an oversize man running for his life from a psychotic looking-character wielding two enormous sabers. The would-be killer was covered in blood and was grinning from ear to ear.

The second ad displayed a man’s bloody torso, complete with dangling entrails, with knives and forks protruding from it. The slogan ‘Yum, yum. Eatum up!’ was written across the top.

Feeling his stomach starting to churn, Chad instinctively reached for a cigarette. He suppressed his guilt over lighting up as the cool, pungent smoke drifted upwards.

“Hey Liz? Would you come here for a minute?”

Elizabeth, his slightly neurotic wife of nine years, sauntered into the room. Her eyes reflected the boredom of her day.

“What’s the matter?”

“Look here,” Chad said. He pointed to the Yellow Pages.

Elizabeth sluggishly glanced down at page 140. Her eyes widened.

“Are those the only ads like that?” Elizabeth questioned with a hint of suspicion in her voice.

“I don’t know. I didn’t really check,” Chad replied while thumbing through the book. He flipped ahead to M.

Machinery…masonry…monsters?

There, on page 352, staring up at the astonished couple, were close to a dozen ads for monsters, listed in alphabetical order from apparitions to zombies.

Bloody Services, Sterling Creatures Inc., Fangs-n-Thangs.

Thinking of another heading Chad quickly flipped back to D.

Delivery services…demolition…demons!

Any size demon. Specializing in demon princes and lords. Long fanged, short fanged…

S. Sea monsters. All makes and models. Sale on kraken. Discount coupons available for man-eaters over twenty-five feet.

W. Witches. Bag a Hag, Curses Inc., Broomsticks and Candlewicks.

V. Vampires. Drain City Central. You’ve got the blood, we’ve got the teeth.

Elizabeth’s face lost all its color. “Is this some sort of joke?” she asked through a frown.

“Where did this book come from?” Chad blurted out.

Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just on the porch one day. Isn’t that how they deliver phone books?”

Feeling a knot forming in his stomach Chad remarked, “Is it just me or is it getting warm in here?”

Elizabeth didn’t reply, but her expression confirmed what Chad was thinking.

It was getting warmer…much warmer.

The heavy knock on the front door sliced into the silence. Chad looked over at his wife and both of them looked over to the door.

It was beginning to crack around the edges. Thin plumes of black smoke were leaking in around it and the carpet near it was starting to become singed. Chad finally worked up the nerve to walk over to the door, and just as he was about to reach for the knob, a putrid stench seeped into the house, one that was an overpowering aroma of burnt meat and decayed flesh.

The knocking increased dramatically. Chad had no choice but to use his shirt to grasp the doorknob and open the door. With one swift motion they were greeted with a nightmare right out of a horror movie.

The eight-foot-tall creature on the front porch loomed over them. It had a grotesque goat’s head and stood on huge cloven hooves. In one of its clawed hands it held a bloodstained pitchfork and in the other a smoldering book.

“Pardon me puny mortal,” it boomed in a voice that shook the house. “But I believe there has been a mistake.”

__________

Rick McQuiston is a forty-one year old father of two who loves anything horror related. He has had nearly 200 publications so far and edits the ezine, Many Midnights. Rick has published four collections of short stories, Many Midnights, Chills by Candlelight, Beneath the Moonlight, and As Mean as the Night. They are available on Lulu and Amazon.

The Black Egg

2009-07-12T00:01:00.001-05:00

S.J.Hirons

I
There had once been a tower on the far side of the bay. The tower was the reason that, on this side, there was now a city: a long time ago a furious storm had smashed the tower down, leaving only the rough ring of white stones that had once been its base. Men had come some time after and taken the loose, lightning-blackened rubble and built the city with them.

The water of the bay was as glossy as treacle. Marchioly rowed Ilisabeth towards the far side, keeping close to the eastern bank where a burst of swampy green growth tipped down to touch the water. Under the overhangs the air was hot and heavy. The afternoon sun on the clear water had been a bright glare.

It was shallow here under the eaves. Ilisabeth could see the bed of the bay below where gnarled shapes gathered bright jade-coloured detritus. Further out the ground fell away sharply and the water showed only rippling reflections of the sky on its flat green face.

Crossing the water was the only way to get to the ruined tower from the city. The crescent shore and much of the inland was complicatedly dense, thorny with trees and underbrush. All the paths and roads that once led from the city to the tower had been overrun.

“I see the stones!” Ilisabeth exclaimed.

Marchioly turned the boat out of the shade.

“There,” he said to her. “You can see them from here.”

The low stones were just to be seen on the treeless crest of a rise in the land. They looked like a row of broken teeth.

Marchioly eased the boat towards a tight shoreline of soft sand and the white stones disappeared from view.

II
Marchioly pulled the boat up onto the beach while Ilisabeth ran about gathering deadwood, her wet feet and calves getting sticky with sand. On this side of the bay the water made no waves. Marchioly pointed to the sand and Ilisabeth put the blanched branches down in a small pyre for later. Marchioly took the blanket from the boat and put it next to the pile of firewood and Ilisabeth lifted out the basket.

“It’s hard going,” Marchioly told her.

“I want to see,” she said. She leant against the boat and brushed the sand from her feet and legs, slipping her sandals back on.

III
The second time they stopped they had cleared the trees and could see the bay again. The sun was close to setting. The city was hazy. Marchioly looked across the water. Ilisabeth looked along their way ahead.

“Do you think the tower really is cursed?”

He shook his head.

“It must have been huge,” she said.

“Yes.”

She stood up.

“Are you coming?” Ilisabeth took a few steps further along the grassy hillside, the basket swinging in the crook of her arm.

“I want to watch the sun go down behind the city,” he said.

“But then we won’t see very much!”

He shrugged. “You go on if you want,” he said.

IV
When she came back down he had his head in his hands. He looked up, hearing her.

“Was it worth the look?”

Ilisabeth shrugged. “Just some old stones. That’s all. Old stones and blackbirds.”

He nodded. “It’s getting dark quickly. Let’s go back down.”

V
She laid out the blanket and the food as he lit the fire. They ate and then lay together. The night took away the city and the stones above. The firelight encircled a small world of sand. Marchioly walked up to the ruins as Iliabeth slept. He checked the small alcove on the north wall. The black egg was still there. Another of the golden eggs had gone. He walked back down the hill.

He stood with his bare feet in the still water for a little while and then, very quietly, pushed the boat back out onto the glassy, black bay, scuppering it some way out with a swift blow from one of the oars. It sank, joining other wrecked boats from other times.

When the water was at his knees he took to the air. Below and behind he heard her thin and outraged voice as the stolen egg began to hatch.

He flew ever higher, up into the dark and free sky of the cool night.

__________

S.J.Hirons (sjhirons@yahoo.co.uk) was born in Greenwich, England in 1973. Educated at Rugby and Cambridge, he currently resides in Leamington Spa where he works with young Asylum Seekers. He has studied creative writing at the National Academy of Writing and Birmingham City University. More of his short fiction can be found in Subtle Edens: An Anthology of Slipstream Fiction from Elastic Press , Farrago’s Wainscot, SFX magazine’s Pulp Idol 2006 and at http://www.pantechnicon.net/. Further pieces will appear this year in The Willows, A Fly in Amber , and in The Absent Willow Review .

Clothes Make the Man

2009-07-05T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Iseult Murphy

Tracy sat at the bar, surveying the crowd. She was looking for someone classy, but all she saw were the usual losers.

She sipped her drink. A man on the other side of the dance floor caught her eye. He was easily the best-dressed person in the club. There were no labels plastered over his clothes, but Tracy could tell they were expensive.

He oozed style as he prowled the edge of the dance floor, keeping to the shadows. Tracy couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He looked fit. Athletic. He must be rich too, to afford such clothes. She wondered what his face looked like. She bet he was handsome. He was too far away to tell.

She tried to attract his attention. He wasn’t looking in her direction so her come hither eyes were wasted.

She put her drink down and teetered to the dance floor. A few shimmies and she had every man in the room watching her. She looked around for her mark. He was leaning against the railing near the courtyard door. He pointed at her. She smiled and invited him to join her. He shook his head, but beckoned and then slipped outside.

She didn’t want to seem too eager. She danced with a couple of men, teasing them. When the time was right, she sneaked away.

He was waiting for her in the shadow of the entrance. He pushed her against the wall as soon as she stepped through the door. She giggled, aroused by the feel of his body pressed against her. He caressed her bare arms. She was surprised to feel gloves. She ran her hands up his chest and reached upwards. He had a scarf wrapped around his mouth.

“Let’s see what you look like under that hat,” Tracy said.

She pulled it off his head. There was nothing underneath. She ripped the scarf from around his neck. The suit was hollow. There was no one inside.

The gloves climbed to Tracy’s neck. They wrapped around it and squeezed.

Tracy gripped the armless sleeves and tried to break free, but whatever will was animating the clothes was too strong for her.

A mouth formed with the collar of the shirt.

“I like your dress,” it said.

__________

Iseult Murphy writes horror, fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Alienskin Magazine , Necrotic Tissue , The Drabbler and From The Mouth, a flash anthology .
She is an associate member of the Horror Writers Association . She is based in Ireland. Iseult is also a keen actor and qualified speech and drama teacher. She has appeared in numerous stage productions as well as featuring in television programmes, film and commercials. In her spare time she enjoys painting. To learn more about her writing journey, follow her blog at The Inkpot Files .

Bring Girls Home to Meet Mama

2009-06-28T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Michael R. Colangelo

I went down to the store on the corner to get Mama some bread on Sunday. It was the only time I had out of the house with myself. Mama spent Sundays in the bathtub filled with milk to her neck. She said that it would help her age properly. Since Papa died, it was the only time that I was allowed to leave the house because she was busy sitting in the tub and we often needed groceries.

So it was inevitable that eventually I met a girl at the market and that we spent the afternoon chatting and even holding hands for a little while. When the sun began to set I realized I had been gone for most of the day. I apologized and said that I had to go right away, but the girl told me that it was okay and asked if she could come too.

It never occurred to me that any girl might like to come by the house, and so I grinned very large and told her that it would be excellent if she could. We hurried through the darkening streets until we reached my house.

Inside, I called to Mama to come and meet our visitor. I heard the milk sloshing about in the tub up the hallway, and while we waited, I showed my new girlfriend around. I was so fond of her that I even went as far as to show her the empty studio loft behind the wall. That was the place that Mama made me drywall over after I was born. I left a space you could crawl through anyway. The jagged charcoal sigils on the walls and the star-shaped symbols on the ceiling were pretty. I read in a magazine that girls were impressed with you if you acted sensitive towards these things.

The bones maybe scared her, but Mama's scintillating rainbow eggshells held her in place. Her mind was paralyzed, forever trying to comprehend the impossible surfaces of the broken eggs.

Then Mama came into the room, dragging her bulk down the hallway and leaving a trail of milky slime in her wake. She murmured approvingly of this new girlfriend of mine and then tasted her frozen body with her feelers. As she did this, she readied the sharp and dripping appendage that protruded from her private parts. This was how Mama made babies with the people that we brought home.

I stared down into Papa's black and hollow eyes and winked at his skull. There was comfort in knowing that the old man would probably approve of me—making Mama so proud.

__________

The Ballad of Willy Bragg

2009-06-21T03:30:00.000-05:00

by Jeremy Kelly

See that dark-skinned man walking beneath a rust-colored sky beside the Wilderunion Railroad?

That’s Willy Bragg come down from Sasquatch country to lead the way back home with a song.

He’s all dressed up in hobo clothes: a pair of dusty trousers strung up over his shoulders with suspenders cut from plow rope and a ragged old railroader’s hat hanging off the side of his head. He’s got an old guitar case slung across his back.

Listen. He’s singing to himself low and deep, muttering a song he’s been working at while wandering towards the crossroads:

A sad world is the Wilderunion,
Where there’s no such thing as home.
Like there’s no such thing as God or Mama,
Just the rust in my veins and my iron heart.
Please lead this boy back home, Lord.
I hear my mama callin’ me home.

Before he knows it, Willy’s at the crossroads. He looks west out over the tracks and he looks east out into the fields.

There’s a mighty rumbling now and the ground shakes something severe. He’s got to bend over a tad just to keep balance while he holds onto his cap. He looks behind him and sees a great black train coming like a blight upon the land. The face of the engine is a grinning iron skull bellowing thick smoke as it howls like a rabid wolf down the Wilderunion Line.

As the locomotive passes, Willy gets the feeling that if there were any green grass around, it’d surely die with the passing of this train.

The Brethren engineer leans out over the side railing and hollers at Willy while another shovels coal into the blazing firebox. They’re both hulking creatures covered in wicked tattoos.

Behind the engine come all the wood-slatted boxcars. Hundreds of pairs of little hands poke out from between the slats. Willy takes off his hat and bows his head in silence. So many children lost in the dark. Working for the railroad.

The train passes. Willy looks up and sees a man at least nine feet tall, black as soot from head to toe like a walking eclipse upon the world, standing on the other side of the tracks. The man speaks and his voice comes out like the sound of crushing embers inside a giant firebox.

“Hello, Willy.”

“Hey mister.”

“You desire something,” says the night-lacquered man, thick smoke escaping from his lips. “And you have something to give.”

“Well, sir,” Willy says, pulling the guitar case off his shoulder and dropping it into the dirt. “I don’t know if you a bad spirit or a good one. But I been playin’ these blues for a long time. The children trapped here in the Wilderunion—and the rest of us too, I guess—we needs a song. To bring us together. I wanna be the one to play it.”

“Give me your guitar.”

Willy pulls out this old guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Brethren” scrawled into the wood, and he walks towards the Scratch Man, holding it out in front of him.

“I’ll teach you a song, Willy Bragg,” says the Scratch Man. “But hear me now. No matter whom you play for in the world—in the end, your soul belongs to me.” Scratch’s eyes are burning like smoldering coals.

“Alright.”

The Scratch Man takes the guitar from Willy and cocks his head sideways as he tunes the strings. Then he plays a short song that Willy can’t hear.

The Scratch Man hands Willy the instrument and steps onto the railroad tracks. “Go,” Scratch says. “Play your song, Willy Bragg, but don’t forget our deal.”

“I won’t.” Willy feels the blood begin to run hot in his veins down through his fingertips. Words and rhyme begin to fill his mind like sweet honey collapsing into a mason jar surrounded by buzzing bees. As he bends down to put the guitar back in its case, the Scratch Man starts walking down the tracks after the train full of children.

By the time Willy Bragg stands back up, the Scratch Man has disappeared both from sight and memory, and Willy forgets why he ever stopped at the crossroads in the first place.

So he shoulders his old guitar case and heads back the way he came, humming a new tune.

__________

When Jeremy Kelly is not in the backyard digging tunnels and looking for new "specimens", he spends most of the time in the closet writing scary stories. Sometimes his lovely wife and son attempt to slide food under the closet door and plead with him to at least turn on the lights once in a while, but Mr. Kelly knows better. His most recent work appears in Shroud Publishing's Northern Haunts Anthology as well as Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror from Stygian Publications. He has work forthcoming in Necrotic Tissue's premiere print issue, coming in July. Find out more about him at jointhebirdies.blogspot.com

Hector's Last Stand

2009-06-14T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Kurt Newton

Hector thought the first one was a dandelion, but it appeared to swivel its head and stare at him before going under the mower's blades. Hector turned to look.

Just a splash of wet on the green grass. Hector didn't know what to make of it.

When he turned back around, a newly planted sapling was dead ahead. He wheeled the zero-turn-radius mower sharply and narrowly avoided disaster. He glanced up at the office windows to make sure no one was looking.

The back of the research facility loomed above him like a concrete fortress. He wasn't sure what went on inside the building, but the people who walked through the front entrance looked like doctors.

Another of the dandelions appeared up ahead. Hector aimed directly for it. This time, the dandelion not only turned its head, it blinked! Hector got a good look at it before it disappeared beneath the mower's carriage. It was no dandelion. It was a human eye sitting atop a fleshy-looking stalk!

"Ay, Dios mio!" Hector gasped.

He scanned the thick mote of grass that stretched between the building and the outlying woods. It was flat except for a slight rise in the middle where a large underground pipe deposited wastewater into a woodland stream. Along the rise stood a small army of the bug-eyed blooms.

"Pequenos diablos!" Hector revved the mower's engine.

He cut across the lawn, not caring how it looked. They would thank him later, referring to the doctors inside the building. Obviously something had leaked out into the wastewater. Hector couldn't remember what his boss had told him about the work they performed there. All he knew was it was top-secret government-type work. Stuff scary movies were made of.

But Hector wasn't scared. He hit the clot of fleshy flora at full speed. A viscous spray hit him in the face; some entered his eyes.

He blinked, momentarily blinded. When he opened his eyes again his vision was slightly clouded, but he could still see. And what he saw frightened him.

Every few feet a yellow-eyed, swivel-necked sprout sprung up out of the grass. Each hooded orb was ringed with petal-like black lashes. Wherever Hector looked the eyes turned and stared back at him. Blinking. Watching.

Hector cut across the grass in a deadly game of connect-the-dots, mowing them under, leaving a trail of gooey mulch in his wake. But he couldn't mow them down fast enough. They popped up two and three in places where one had been just moments before.

And if that wasn't bad enough, he was now having vision problems. One moment he was on the mower, the next he was at ground level watching the mower hurtle toward him. And there were voices in his ears, a multitude of whispers speaking as one, entreating him to not be afraid, to join them, to lay down his arms…and legs…and torso…and be free…

Hector shrieked.

It wasn't due to the startling vision he'd just experienced; it was something much worse. The mower's gas gauge needle had dipped below E. Somebody must have tampered with the fuel line.

Men in white lab coats now lined the windows of the facility like department store manikins. Some held clipboards. Others held movie cameras.

Hector gazed across the growing sea of yellow. Don't worry, they whispered, they will be next.

The mower sputtered and stalled, and rolled to a halt.

Hector felt the world tip, and his life passed before him in the blink of an eye.

__________

Kurt Newton tries to let the story dictate how long it wants to be. Sometimes that means a very short story, sometimes it means a novel. One thing for sure is he's written a lot of them -- both large and small. News about his latest can be found at http://kurt-newton.livejournal.com.

Murky Depths

2009-06-07T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Brenton Tomlinson

Richard braced his foot against the back of the boat, a massive rod bent almost to breaking point in his hands. “Get the bloody chair organised.”

Andrew, his best mate since pre-school, gestured toward the waiting game fishing chair, but Richard couldn’t drag the rod backwards. He flipped the lever on the reel and allowed the line to spool freely into the water. The monster on the other end didn’t need a second invitation and took off; nylon zinged from the rig.

Shrugging off the thought of having to wind in all the line now disappearing into the deep blue, Richard settled into the chair and allowed his friend to buckle him in. “What took so long?”

“The pin securing the chair to the deck was bent, but I straightened it out,” Andrew said. “Should be fine now.”

Richard flipped the lever on his new fishing rig to stop the free spool of line and began winding the thick aqua blue nylon back on. The line went taut, causing the rod to bend. Leaning forward, Richard reeled as fast as he could before pulling the rod back, drawing the piscatorial wonder on the other end closer to the boat. “This thing is huge,” he gasped as he leaned forward and wound on again. “We won’t be needing to shop for seafood for some time to come.”

The grin on Andrew’s face matched the excitement Richard felt as the adrenaline coursed through his veins. This was life: the thrill of the hunt, the chase, the kill.

A hundred yards out from the boat, something big broke the surface and Richard’s line went slack. He leaned forward and wound on, squeezing his eyes shut as exhaustion threatened to overwhelm his muscles.

“Jesus,” Andrew said. “Quick, cut the line.”

“What, no,” Richard said, snapping open his eyes to see what was going on.

“We have to,” Andrew said, his face a deathly white, spittle flying from his sun chapped lips. “A Great White is chasing your catch, and it’s too big for this boat to handle. Sometimes you have to let one get away.”

Richard scanned the ripples and white caps in the boats wake. There, his giant sailfish broke the surface, pulling against the strain he’d setup on the line, almost dislocating his shoulders in the process. As it disappeared back into the water another grey torpedo shaped creature broke the surface.

“No,” Richard yelled.

Andrew bent forward, a knife poised to sever the line. “That shark can go to hell before I let it win.” He leaned forward and wound on another length of line, ignoring the screaming muscles in his back.

“You don’t have enough time or strength—” Andrew stood motionless as the pin holding the chair to the deck gave way. It was only meant for small game fish.

Richard sucked in a lungful of air as the chair broke free, but it was forced from him as he struck the rail and went over into the water. Instinctively he unclasped the belt around his waist and kicked free of the fast descending chair.

A black shape sped by him. The sailfish was magnificent as it shot through the water, the gleaming hook in the side of its mouth the only blemish. The heavy weighted nylon between the steel barb and the fishing rod still tangled with the chair snapped taught, cleanly severing Richard’s right ear and filling the water with blood.

Another shape sped past him.

Richard struggled to the surface. In the distance the boat was turning, Andrew, at the helm, waved in his direction. He tried to raise an arm in reply but his energy reserves were spent.

He dipped below the surface. Beneath him the darkness resolved into his worst nightmare: a gaping maw full of razor-sharp teeth. Freshwater tears and warm urine mingled with the sea as Richard tried to utter a final expletive.

Intense pain immediately dulled as he was shaken from side to side.

The sailfish streaked by, iridescent scales flashing in the red filtered sunlight.

Richard wished he was the one which got away as the Great White rose from the depths again.

__________

Knowing nothing about writing when starting in 2006, BT has taken many false steps in an effort to harness the craft. With past publication credits in Fantasy, Erotica & Sci-Fi, it wasn’t until he turned to dark fiction that things began to fall into place. Publication in NVF print magazine, Yellow Mama, Fear & Trembling, and now Fifty-Two Stitches has seen him embrace his twisted soul. To find out what other blackened delicacies he has in store, and all sorts of other tips and advice for writers, visit http://musingsofanaussiewriter.blogspot.com/

Something in Common

2009-05-31T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Joshua Scribner

“Did you ever go to Magic Springs Amusement Park?” asked Cho.

“Yes. I’ve been there a few times,” replied Walt.

“You know that ride, Dr. Dean’s Rocket Launcher?”

“That’s the one that lifts people straight up and then drops them.”

“That’s the one. You ever see the people at the start, when it suddenly jerks them up?”

“Sure.”

Cho, who was a stranger to him a few hours ago, and now was the only person he had seen in a week, gulped and said, “That’s what the people looked like when the tentacles fell from the clouds and whipped them up.”

Walt got both pictures in his head. That was what the people looked like, except the horrors were different. On the ride, they had expected it.

Cho had said little after joining him, but now seemed to be warming up. She said, “I’ve had them right by me, a few different times. I’ve seen them bust through the roofs of cars to take people, but they don’t take me.”

They were zigzagging through overturned and wrecked cars on the road. The damage the tentacles could do was apparent.

“They took everyone else,” said Cho. “Why don’t they take us?”

There was a croak in her voice. Walt was long single. Communication wasn’t his forte, and now this woman was in crises and wanted to talk. All he could think to do was be empirical.

“What are the similarities between us?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“How are you and I alike?”

She took nearly a minute to answer, but he was glad to hear she was no longer on the verge of crying. “You’re a middle aged white man. I’m a young Asian woman. You’re big, and I’m small. We’re not really alike at all.”

“True, and in the ways we are alike, being human, speaking English, we were also like all the people who got taken.”

They came to a steep slope in the road. Near the end of the slope, Cho said, “This reminds me of The Peak Trail. I’d just come off it when the tentacles came.”

Walt laughed, though it was hard with his lack of air. “I wish I would have hiked more; then I’d be in better shape for all this walking.”

Cho didn’t laugh. She seemed deep in thought. They were making their way around an overturned tour bus when she said, “What were you doing when they first came?”

“Mowing my lawn.”

She seemed deep in thought for a few seconds and then said, “You were mowing, and I was hiking, both outdoor activities”

Now Walt thought for a few seconds and then said, “But we couldn’t have been the only ones. There must have been hundreds doing both activities on a summer day.”

She sighed and then said, “Yeah. I guess.”

Just then, he felt a sting and slapped it. He withdrew his hand from the little mess of blood and insect parts.

Cho got into her backpack. She pulled out a little blue cylinder. “Here,” she said. “I got this repellant off the internet. It works wonders.”

Walt went to spray it on his exposed skin. It wouldn’t spray. “It’s out,” he said.

“Oh yeah. I don’t know why I didn’t toss it. I finished it last night.”

The tentacles were transparent and you could only see them briefly when the sunlight hit them just right. Right now, Walt could see the suction cups behind Cho.

The thought that came seemed to have arrived to mock him. He looked at the can he was holding. He laughed with exasperation and said, “I got this off the internet, too. Good stuff. I bet we were about the only ones to have this particular brand on that day.” He laughed again. “I ran out last night too.”

Cho stared at him with an inquisitive look for a few seconds. Then there was the stunned horror when she was lifted into the sky.

“Yours must have worn off too,” he said to the girl who was gone.

He wondered what his face would look like when he was going up. After all, he was expecting it.

__________

Joshua Scribner is the author of the novels Mantis Nights, The Coma Lights and Nescata. He's published over 100 stories. Up to date information on his work can be found at joshuascribner.com. Joshua currently lives in Michigan with his wife and two daughters.

I am the Light of the World

2009-05-24T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Rich Sampson

The eclipse got stuck, and the world turned black.

Buildings stood forgotten, plants died and people scrabbled about in the dirt. They fed on beetles, cockroaches and grubs—anything that could survive. Life was bleak, and the light stayed away.

In amongst the rubble one man found he had the light. Whether by drugs or by accident was unknown to him, but he looked at his glowing fingers and knew he was special.

His family discovered his secret and made him hide. They knew the hunger of others.

But he would not listen. He had a gift. Where there was blindness he could give sight.

A year passed before he decided it was time. He stood atop a broken pile of machinery and called out into the endless night.

"I am the light of the world." He spread his arms wide, lighting the world.

The yellow light spread like wild fire across the tops of abandoned buildings and long forgotten houses. Alleyways and deserted streets burst into brightness. Every corner, every crack was touched by the glow.

People had begun to gather and now they saw their world in all its glory; half naked bodies huddled together, some covered in feces, most covered in dirt. The dead lined the streets, stinking and rotten where they had fallen. A group of men raped a young girl as she stared blankly at the concrete. Underfoot, still born babies and cockroaches were trampled together their innards blending with the dull grey of pavements.

The people saw themselves for what they really were and they could not handle it.

They tore him down. Extinguished the light.

And so began the end of everything.

__________

Rich Sampson lives in Hampshire, England with his wife and new baby boy. He has previously been published in Space and Time Magazine and can be found on the net at rich-sampson.blogspot.com

Nuts

2009-05-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Jameson T. Caine

Looking my opponent directly in the eye, I slowly took another Barbados Nut seed from the bowl and, after the slightest pause for dramatic effect, placed it in my mouth. The crowd gathered in the old warehouse roared its approval. In my peripheral vision I saw wads of money exchanging hands.

“Wait!” roared Thorne. “He has to swallow!”

The referee—I have no idea what his name was—waved his hands, quieting the throng of onlookers, then looked at me and nodded.

I regarded Thorne from across the table and smirked as I bit down and began chewing. Seconds later I opened my mouth to prove that it was empty.

“Seven for DeSoto!” the referee announced. “They’re tied now, seven apiece.”

More money was exchanged in the stands. Thorne stared at me with smoldering eyes, his anger and hatred obvious. Few had ever dared go beyond five seeds before, and Thorne was accustomed to winning every match.

We both sat back to wait the five minutes until the next round. I could see Thorne fuming. I had matched him seed for seed at each round and now, just past the half hour mark, we were well into the time frame when their poison would begin to take effect. In fact, I already felt a sharp pain in my gut and fought the instinct to vomit.

I knew Thorne experienced the same. Soon enough the nausea would get worse. Then the flatulence, diarrhea, muscle cramps and dizziness would kick in. After that, a lingering death if neither of us chose to vomit. The longer one waited, the better the chance of dying. Hell, wait long enough and even puking your guts up was no guarantee of survival. That’s why a stomach pump was kept on standby.

Of course, the longer one waited, the more money there was to win. The rules stated that whoever threw up first was the loser. The other would get a cut of the House’s winnings, and with each seed eaten and the frenzied betting that ensued, that cut got bigger and bigger.

I needed this money, so there was no way I was going to call it quits. I’m sure Thorne was determined to hang in there out of pure spite.

Five minutes elapsed and the spectators hushed as the referee pointed at Thorne. A coin toss had determined that he’d go first in each round. Without hesitation, he grabbed a large seed from the bowl between us, then popped it in his mouth and dry swallowed it whole. The crowed went insane when he revealed his empty mouth.

“Eight for Thorne, Seven for DeSoto!” yelled the referee.

“Beat that, you bastard,” Thorne sneered at me. I could see from the pallor of his skin that the poison was working its mojo on him. I doubt I looked any better.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling like utter crap, but like I said, I needed this money. I took another seed and ate it, albeit a bit slower than the last one. Waves of nausea washed over me.

A foul smell suddenly cut through the air. I gazed at Thorne. He looked bad. His complexion was as pale as a ghost. He was grasping the table with both hands, no doubt feeling the affects of vertigo. The smell was originating from him, or more to the point, his pants. What had probably started out as just a fart had evidently become something much worse. The SOB had actually soiled himself.

“Need some tissue?” I mocked.

“Up yours,” he said. Well, he tried to say it. The last word elongated into a cough and then became a full blown retch when he proceeded to blast the contents of his stomach all over the table.

“DeSoto wins!” the referee exclaimed. The crowed erupted in a fanfare of shouting and swearing. Money moved between owners again.

I was too busy motioning to the guy holding the stomach pump to notice any of it. As he approached, I was dimly aware that I had won. I smiled. Yes, I needed this money.

Baby needs a new pair of shoes, after all.

__________

Jameson T. Caine has at one time or another worked as a carpenter, meat cutter, shipping clerk, forklift operator, assembly line worker, long haul truck driver and ordained minister. Currently he drives a tanker truck by day and calls himself a writer by night, the latter fueled by a steady diet of soda and cheese puffs. He has stories appearing in the forthcoming Devil's Food anthology and issue number five of Sand. He lives in Northern California with his wife and two dogs. Visit him online at http://jamesontcaine.blogspot.com/.

Mother's Love

2009-05-10T00:01:00.003-05:00

by L.R. Bonehill

Ben couldn’t cope. That’s why he left, his stale breath smelling of whiskey and fear. He packed a bag on the night his four year old son came home to die and left. A single fucking bag. Shirt cuffs poked out of the zipper like hands rising from a grave.

He looked almost like a stranger to her, this man she had loved for more years than she cared to remember. An unwanted visitor standing in the hallway. “I’m sorry,” he said and stepped out into a flurry of snow. It quickly dusted his head and shoulders as if trying to obscure him and pull him out into the night.

Rachel watched him go and found that she couldn’t cry. Didn’t want to cry, she realised. A part of her didn’t blame him. A small, ugly part of her.

Mothers have no choice, she thought, we have to be strong, no matter how painful and cruel life could be.

Warm lights burned brightly in the other houses along the street. Inside, other lives and worlds turned peacefully.

The cold wind bit hard as she watched the snow smooth over Ben’s footprints before shutting the door. It was just the two of them now.

She had the first dream that night.

A dark, midnight corridor with a dirt floor, weeds creeping out of cracks in the dry earth. An acrid chemical smell hung thick and cloying in the air. Wraith-like children sat in bone-chairs, holding blood filled drips. They stared at her with empty eye sockets, flesh sunken and sallow, mouths glistening with viscous fluid. Hickman lines grew like infected parasites from their chests. Painfully thin arms reached out for her as she edged past, their joints popping and cracking. Clutching fingers grabbed at her.

Sleek rats crawled and writhed at their feet, gnawing at broken skin and exposed tissue. “Mrs Macmillan, the Doctor will see you now,” the children cried in unison. They pointed to the door at the end of the corridor as dust fell from their ragged hospital gowns. A battered and splintered door, uneven letters carved into the pitted surface. ‘Chemo-Man,’ they read.

Each night Rachel walked the same corridor and watched as one by one the children slowly turned to filth and mulch. Each night she got closer and closer to the door, until eventually she heard whispered promises from within.

__________

She pulled on the restraints as tightly as she could and Jake cried out again, struggling weakly as the rope dug into his wrists and ankles. The skin there was raw and mottled.

“Hush now,” she said and stroked his forehead. Wisps of hair lay like smoke across his balding scalp. A few strands came away in her hand and she cried.

He didn’t look like a child, not anymore. The leukaemia had slowly leeched that away from him. He looked frail and alone and scared as he lay tied down on the narrow, sweat soaked bed.

It didn’t look much like a child’s room either, not a used one at least. Toys were packed neatly away in brightly coloured storage boxes, stacked one atop the other along the edges of the room. Action figures stood in calm, regimented order on high shelves. Cartoon characters grinned inanely down from posters on the walls. It was almost obscene, she thought, a mockery of childhood.

She sang a soft, lilting lullaby and tried to calm his fevered panic. She had seen fear in his eyes all too often and would ease it as best she could. He bucked and thrashed in feeble protest.

The room was cold and grew colder still as a shadow juddered in the swirling snow at the window. Bone fingers rapped an ancient tattoo against the glass. Eyes sparked with feral need.

“He’s here,” she said. Chemo-Man, with his promise of a blood cure that would last a dark eternity.

“Don’t worry, my love,” she whispered in Jake’s ear. “You’ll be all better soon. Mommy knows best.”

__________

L R Bonehill never meant to hurt anyone all those years ago; he just wanted to play, that’s all. Drop by the boneyard at http://bonehillsboneyard.blogspot.com/.