Archive for August, 2011

Divine City: Bangkok Fantasies, by Scott B Robinson

Posted: August 29, 2011 by Shaina in Scott B Robinson
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Divine City: Bangkok Fantasies, by Scott B. Robinson

Divine City: Bangkok Fantasies, by Scott B Robinson
Available at:
Amazon,  Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Sony, iTunes

Divine City: Bangkok Fantasies Scott B Robinson @SBR_author info@scottbrobinson.net Dark fiction Speculative fiction Short stories Supernatural forces and secret societies descend on modern Bangkok as a series of mysterious black boxes surface into the lives of five remarkable individuals in this magic realism collection of five short stories. As this cross-genre piece modulates through elements of the psychological mystery, horror, the thriller, the detective mystery, adventure and romance, it explores classic Western themes—the Fall, the Temptation, Pandora’s box—in an Eastern setting. The book is ultimately a study of the human obsession with the unknown.

Excerpt:

I was woken by the sound of scratching. Groggy, I at first wondered if it was a branch blowing as I peered out the palely moonlit window. But the broad silhouetted leaves of the mango hung motionless. No, the steady resonating was not that from glass, but rather deeper and hollow, as from something wooden. And it was without question emanating from within the four walls of my room, faintly yet methodically. From within my closet.

As I crawled from bed and inched to the narrow opening, the noise louder with each step, I was certain I would discover Boonnam’s soft ears when I crouched to reach inside. What could my little sweetheart be doing in there? But instead my knuckles rapped against something hard, unrecognizable…unexpectedly inanimate. It was rectangular and solid and heavy, like a chest. My mind was completely bewildered by its existence. Did I own such a thing? As I hurriedly felt around its surfaces, the scratching persisted, as if from right beneath my touch. There was something prickly…countless small points arranged along the object’s top. And when my hand settled into a bare section, in unison with the noise I felt a sharp scrape, like that of a needle along my palm. A cold shiver ran through my arm and I leapt back with a start. The scratching had stopped.

I quickly flicked the switch. Brought to sudden light, my room appeared bizarrely ominous in its familiarity. I looked down at my palm, still twinging, but found no wound. My legs trembled as I clung to the bedstead with my good hand for support. The whole room seemed to throb along with the pain lingering up and down my right arm.

Just like one struck nearly by lightening, in whom an echo rings long after the thunder’s gone—the dire question pulsed through my head: what had made the noise? I stood paralyzed, too afraid to uncover the sinister thing that still lay unseen in the closet’s shadow. My throat clinched, my heart pounded ceaselessly. For it knew that something inside, something alive in that mysterious box could sense and was feeding upon my mounting terror. The floor felt like it was tilting toward the closet, an oppressive gravity pulling me and the entire room inward. My fingertips dug into the wood and I looked away and up to the window, instinctively, desperate for some distracting thought…

There…there was the moon outside…the full moon, awash in the windowpane’s reflection of my room. That small, veiled, frozen circle became a point of focus for me, an ungraspable talisman that perhaps promised this experience would truly pass, without harm, beneath its vigilant eye. The moon continued its destined course behind the slowly coloring leaves. What seemed like a moment frozen was pierced through by one indomitable fear—what if the scratching should resume? I thought I would die if I had to hear it another time. If only this perfect silence would endure, time might once again take hold and draw this torture to an end. And slowly my own reflected image faded behind the scene kindling outside; the lamp’s fixing glare at last dimmed into the first suffusing rays of light; the black pocket of my closet was no longer sharp and pure; the tingling in my hand had ceased. Somehow I had made it through this most horrible of nights. And the diminutive courage of one who survives finally took seed in my heart…

So starkly differently do we behold the world in the full of day, so unthreatened and in our element, the previous night’s dreams would seem embarrassing to us if we were still children. But I’m too old for embarrassment. So what am I to do with nightmares when they are through?

I hardly remember the mundanity of removing the black box from my closet and carrying it to the kitchen table for inspection. It was smaller than I’d imagined (possibly big enough to stick your head into) and made of some sort of dense, black lacquered wood. It was more tall than wide, crouching on four fat and crude legs. On its dusty lid I saw the small jet stones I’d felt the night before, dull and unevenly encrusted. While the box’s lid was thick, its tiny tarnished lock looked incapable of keeping it shut. Really the whole thing was so generally antiquated and tacky, like something your grandmother might bequeath, the mystery of its sudden appearance was frankly overweighed by its relatively benign gaudiness. There was nothing to prevent me from trying to open it…and with the lightest of touches, the lock sprung open.

It took me a few moments to understand what strange shape I saw motionless inside that recess which had tasted no light in god knows how long. At first I thought it must be a pile of dried sticks, or perhaps some primitive statuette. But then one of its extremities began to move…and then another…mechanically, like the inner workings of a clock tapped into motion. The shadowy clump dragged itself upward, slowly. A thin barbed claw reached over the box’s lip and three menacing spikes emerged into view, followed by the prehistorically helmeted head of a tremendous beetle. The monstrous form, as large as one’s hand, filled most its outlet. I stepped back as I watched it pull its smooth, dark brown mass over the ledge and smack onto the tabletop with a dull clack. The giant was not phased. Its triple horns advanced and I withdrew another half-step.

The insect thankfully halted at the table’s edge, its antennae unfurling from a clump of orangish hairs under the head and furtively tapping about. Beneath the deep rim of its belligerent crown, you could see the two huge lifeless eyes that seemed to stare at nothing. Did they sense me? How long had this fascinating creature slumbered within the box? How on earth could it have survived…?

And it was then the insect resumed its crawl, counterclockwise, around the table’s rim, as if it had reached a decision about the best direction, deliberate and plodding, its antennae navigating about like blind men’s canes. The beetle disappeared behind the box.

I’ll admit I was afraid when it came round and completed the last of a full rotation, as if it were returning for the one thing it found worthy of attack. But the flashing horns and dead eyes passed me by for another circuit.

Then again.

Then again.

I cannot say how long I stood there watching this repeating cycle. Eventually I pulled a chair under me so I could observe more closely to its level. And each subsequent time it disappeared behind the box, I grew more and more anxious for its return to sight. The thing was amazing. Except for the small yet precipitous curve it followed tirelessly, it seemed utterly oblivious to everything around it. Its path was insanely hopeless, yet it moved as though it knew nothing of it, feared nothing. As if it could clutch the very globe inside the lethal space between its one lower and two upper horns. I thought to myself, ‘It really is the absolute master of this tiny realm. What is it trying to achieve with this dire circumference…? What hex is it attempting to cast?’ And I began to imagine that perhaps instead it saw all, that those impenetrable eyes would engulf the entire cosmos if they only wanted. Maybe, just as for the solipsist, what it did not gaze upon didn’t even exist. And it was with these sort of meditations that the forgotten hours of the day dissolved away while the creature’s lengthening shadow shifted back and forth across the table, like a mad shuttle through an invisible weave, like a swart comet witnessed from irrationally far outside its orbit. My vision solidified. My mind began to penetrate into the crevices of that gloriously perfect shell, as though to glimpse beneath the robes of Phra Phrom himself. Becoming the creature—empty and pure. The insect’s mesmerizing silhouette faded into the blackness overtaking the room; its ominous pigment oozed into every corner, out into the world and across the entire city. I could no longer see. I did not notice that it was actually spiraling inward, ever so incrementally with each revolution. And when I at last broke the spell and mustered the sense to turn on the light, its unbreachable armor flashed in my eyes more brilliantly then ever before.

When did the thing suddenly stop before me, so much nearer to the box now than to me? Yet in truth I knew it would stop just then, that it had completed its trek. And I suddenly realized—this was a beetle. It could probably fly. Now was my only chance. I had to snatch the box from the table before the insect was able to withdraw back inside forever…

Without another thought I lunged and arched my reach over the beast, but it spun on its legs like a spring. Its battle-ready carapace instantaneously flared at me in defiance as two grotesque bat-like wings shot out like an infernal gown. It was too late—my weight was in freefall and I was already right upon the demon. A deafening thrum exploded in my face and eclipsed my vision as I flinched and crashed blindly onto the table, knocking shut the lid of the box. I heard a distinct click beneath the low, resonating, satanic chant of the beetle’s wings as it thundered past my ear, out the kitchen window and into the bottomless night.

Divine City: Bangkok Fantasies, by Scott B Robinson
Available at:
Amazon,  Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Sony, iTunes

The Slab, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

Posted: August 29, 2011 by Shaina in Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Thriller and Suspense
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The Slab, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

The Slab, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

The Slab, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

Description: Three veterans of different wars, their lives once saved by magic, find themselves brought together in one of the most strange, remote, and cruel parts of the California desert. As serial killers ply their deadly trade, a young woman, abducted and endangered, seeks her own brand of justice for those who threatened her, and an ancient evil sprouts from beneath desert sands, these three war veterans must learn to embrace the terrifying bond they share. Written in powerful prose as dry and dangerous as its desert setting, The Slab, for all its horrors, is ultimately an epic tale of hope and redemption.

Excerpt:

Billy Cobb hated the way the washboard road juddered the squad car. The road up from town was mostly paved, but once you got back into the maze of concrete slabs that made up the area folks just called the Slab, the road wasn’t maintained, and then even that primitive paved road petered out and became nothing but dirt and rock. A man needed a sport-ute out here, and that was a fact. Butler, of course, had his old Bronco, which he seemed to love like the wife he didn’t have. And, Billy thought as he pulled the car onto the Slab, it really should have been the Lieutenant checking out something like a human skull being discovered, not a Deputy, even though he knew that Ken was supposed to be meeting with that real estate guy today.

Man had a fine brain, and he was fair. But he was shy, Billy knew, not hide-in-a-closet shy but it was trouble just the same. It got in the way of doing his job sometimes.

The good part of it was that there would come a day when he would step down, and then Billy would be there, next in line, logical choice. From there it was only a few steps up to a job down in El Centro, maybe eventually Imperial County Sheriff. Sheriff Cobb had a natural ring to it, and when he was Sheriff he could requisition funds from the County to buy himself a new Expedition every year if he wanted it.

And Carrie Provost! Jesus God, why did she have to be the one to find it? If ever there was a reason that humans should be muzzled, she was it—the woman could talk all morning about the texture of her Corn Flakes. Give her something genuinely interesting, like finding a skull, and Billy figured there was a good possibility that he’d still be here come nightfall listening to her jaw about her discovery.

He slowed down as he wove his way among the mobile homes, trailers, buses, broken down cars and camper shells that made up the Slab. There were only a few locals out this morning, it seemed. Old Hal Shipp sat outside of his RV in a broken-down lawn chair, the kind with the ribbons of contrasting colors woven together, but half the ribbons on this one seemed to be sprung and trailing on the ground. Billy raised a hand to the old man, but got no response. Shipp’s wife, Virginia, stepped out of their ancient Minnie Winnie—wheels gone, rust-covered cinderblocks propping it up—with two tumblers of lemonade on a plastic tray in her hands. She smiled and nodded her head at Billy. She was a good woman—a saint, the way she put up with Hal, whose memory was shot and who, half the time, thought he was back fighting Nazis in World War Two. Billy touched the brim of his Smokey hat at her and kept going.

The Slab was a weird place, there was no getting around that. It was, literally, a series of vast slabs of cement poured on a flat stretch between the Chocolate Mountains and the Salton Sea. At the beginning of Hal Shipp’s war, the military had decided that the best place to train troops to fight the Nazis in North Africa was in one of America’s hottest and driest deserts. Imperial County fit that bill, and besides, this was California’s ass end, where the waste-brown Colorado dribbled down into Mexico, so there’d been a few farmers in the Valley but mostly empty land, and no one to complain about the noise. They’d built a camp up here, then abandoned it right after the war. There was nothing left of it but the slabs now.

Flat and level, the slabs were a perfect parking place for recreational vehicles. So that’s what they had become. But not primarily for tourists, although its population exploded during the winter months, with as many as two thousand snowbirds moving in and parking their mobile homes on any unclaimed stretch of cement or dirt. But during the hot months, most of the RVs here were, like the Shipps’, permanent fixtures. People lived on the Slab year round, even though there were no services like water or plumbing or electricity and they had to drive into Niland to pick up their mail, most of them, because it was cheap. As in, free. No one taxed them, no one came around to collect rent or mortgage payments. Anyone who could afford a broken-down motor home and a generator to power it and some food at the market in Salton Estates or Niland could live there. The Slab attracted society’s outcasts, retired folks, nudists, survivalists. A few drug dealers had set up shop there but they tended to be frowned upon, even ostracized. This was a white, conservative, blue-collar bunch, mostly, people tired of paying taxes and living by society’s rules. Imperial County’s only real concession to their existence was to send a school bus up, during the school year, to pick up the dozen or so young kids and haul them off to become educated.

One thing that had always struck Billy Cobb as strange, which he noticed again as he threaded between the RVs, was the yard sales. People hauled the most bizarre crap out of their homes and put it up for sale, and their neighbors bought it, putting their own crap up for sale to make room for it. This formed the basis, as far as Billy could see, of most of the cash economy of Slab society. Outside the Hudsons’ Winnebago was a folded ping-pong table with a sign taped to it offering it for sale for five dollars. Never mind that there wasn’t a doublewide on the Slab with room inside it for a ping-pong table. By the weekend, somebody would have bought it, and they’d set it up under the shade they made by jamming poles into the dirt a dozen feet from their trailer and stretching a sheet between them, and they’d drink beer and play ping pong for a couple of weeks until it got old, at which point they’d sell it to some other neighbor for the same five bucks.

In the past few days, Billy noted, patriotism had flourished like a fast-growing fungus among these people who had willingly turned their backs on governments large and small. Flags, those printed in the newspapers and taped to windows, small plastic ones hung on foot-long sticks, and even a few full-sized cloth ones, were everywhere in evidence, competing for space with animal skulls, faded Christmas lights that had never been plugged in, random graffiti and other attempts at personalizing the mass-produced housing these people lived in.

Carrie Provost’s mobile home was the same as most of the others, in that it looked like it had been decorated by a coalition of the blind and the insane. An army of ceramic beings defended its ramparts: gnomes, trolls, elves, deer, sheep, geese, ducks, rabbits, and a single pig, on the side that Billy could see on his approach. Most of them were cracked or broken in some way—a good number of them having suffered bullet wounds somewhere along the way—but the pig looked brand new, pink and shiny in the morning sun.

Aluminum foil coated every window, which was not all that unusual in the desert. It deflected the heat that would otherwise be magnified by the window glass. In Carrie’s case, though, Billy thought it might serve the secondary purpose of blocking the radio transmissions of invading aliens. He had heard that she’d covered the whole roof of the trailer with the stuff too, but had never cared enough to climb up and check.

From rusting wire hangers, she had hung a wide and bizarre variety of found items from the edge of her roof. Anything discovered in the desert seemed to be fair game. The hollowed-out shell of an ocotillo branch hung next to the skeleton of a small bird, next to the carcass of a television set with its picture tube blown out, next to a shredded tire. The overall effect was strangely disturbing, a kind of museum of litter and cast-offs that meant nothing to anyone but its curator. Billy was a little surprised that Carrie had made the effort to find a phone so she could report the skull, rather than simply hanging it from yet another coat hanger.

He parked the Crown Victoria in front of her place, got out, and sauntered up to the door. It had taken him a couple of months, once he’d decided on law enforcement as a career, to perfect the walk he wanted to use. He’d adapted it from a John Wayne walk he’d seen. He kept his legs somewhat stiff, moving at the hips, arms swinging freely. He felt that this walk gave the impression of a coiled jungle beast, ready to run or strike at any moment, and emphasized the spread of his shoulders and the depth of his chest, two features of which he was especially proud. The chest, in particular, was the result of many hours on a weight bench in the back yard of his parents’ home in Brawley. He didn’t know if Carrie Provost was watching, or anyone else for that matter, but it didn’t matter. The walk was second nature by now.

Carrie had a screen door pulled closed, with an open interior door. Billy tapped on the screen. “Carrie!” he called. “Ms. Provost! You here?”

“Coming!” Carrie Provost called from inside the mobile home. There was a clattering noise, like sheet metal hitting a concrete floor, and then she appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Sorry about the racket,” she said. “I don’t have room to turn around in here.”

“We can talk outside if you’d rather, ma’am. It’s Deputy Cobb.” Truth to tell, he’d rather she came out than to set foot inside her place.

“Oh, you’re here about that skeleton head?”

“The skull you found, yes ma’am.”

She stepped down from inside, pushing open the screen. Carrie Provost was in her fifties, and she looked like she’d lived in the desert the entire time. Her skin was dark and leathered, muscles stringy, hair bleached and limp. She had big stained teeth and her eyes had that perpetual smoker’s squint, as if there was always smoke drifting into them even when she didn’t have a cigarette going. She wore a baggy T-shirt with a Marlboro logo on it, a giveaway at some long ago county fair or supermarket promotion, and her thin legs protruded from cut-off jeans. Rubber flip-flops on her scarred and wrinkled feet completed the ensemble.

“Can I see it, ma’am? The skull?”

“Oh, sure, just a minute,” Carrie answered. She climbed the two steps back into the trailer. Every time the screen door flopped open the cloying stench of cigarettes wafted out, as if someone had emptied an ashtray into Billy’s mouth. He hated cigarette smoke.

Inside, there was another loud metallic rattling and then a muffled “Sorry!” from Carrie. A moment later, she reappeared with a plastic supermarket bag in her hands.

“Here you go. I put it in this Vons bag to keep it clean.” The skull’s outline could clearly be seen imprinting the hanging bag. She handed it to Billy, and he carefully set the bag down on the cement slab and opened it.

He was no forensic pathologist, but even through the scorch marks and black smudges of ash, the skull definitely looked human to him. A gold tooth shining up at him from the lower jaw clinched it. And the neat circular hole in the forehead, in combination with the larger, jagged one at the back of the skull, pointed to a cause of death. Billy felt his stomach flop like one of the Salton’s dying fish. This had just become a murder case, and he was the first officer on the scene.

“Looks like somebody punched his ticket, don’t it, Billy?” Carrie said. “That’s a bullet hole, right? I seen that on TV before. Exit wound out the back.”

“I’ll have to take it to the lab to be sure, ma’am,” Billy said, not wanting her amateur deduction to cloud his own professional judgment. “But it does look that way at a glance, yes.”

“Well, I’m no expert,” Carrie went on. “Just know what I see and hear, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell me how you happened to find it?”

“Well, you know the fire pit, right?”

The fire pit was where, most nights, residents of the Slab gathered around a roaring bonfire to talk, drink beer, sometimes watch the “fireworks,” which is how they referred to military bombing runs in the Chocolates, and generally enjoy their freedom from both taxation and representation. “Yes ma’am.”

“Well, I was over there last night, at the fire pit. Just talking and, you know, hanging out with the neighbors, having a couple of beers, I guess. Anyways, I got close to the fire once to poke a stick in it, shove some logs around and all. And that’s when I thought I seen it, or something anyway that didn’t look quite right. It was hot and all, though, so I just left it until this morning. Then I went back and poked through the ashes a little, and there it was. That gold tooth just about glowed at me. I pulled it out of there and took it home and then went down to the Lippincotts’ because they have a cell phone, and I called the Sheriff. You don’t suppose it was Arabs put it there, do you? You know, like in New York?”

It took Billy a moment to make the connection, since he didn’t recall any Arabs putting a skull into a fire pit anywhere in New York. But then he decided that she must have meant the Islamic terrorists who had attacked the World Trade Center.

“No, ma’am,” he assured her. “I don’t believe it was. Do you remember who was at the fire pit when you found it?”

“I didn’t say anything at the time, because, like I said, I wasn’t sure what I seen, entirely. But the usual group was there, I guess, the Hudsons and the Lippincotts, Jim Trainor, the Shipps, Rusty Martin, Lettie Bosworth, Hank Dunn…I guess the McNultys were there for a bit.” She stopped, chewed her lower lip for a second. “But wouldn’t it make more sense to make a list of who wasn’t there? I mean, if you put somebody’s head in a fire pit, you probably wouldn’t want to be there when it was found, would you?”

“That depends on when it was put there, I guess,” Billy replied. “You don’t know that, do you? Unless you check it every morning?”

Carrie Provost hesitated before answering, as if considering whether or not to give away a secret. “You find some great things in there once in a while,” she said finally. She pointed to a metal lunchbox suspended on one of the coat hangers. It was fire-blackened and the plastic handle had melted, but it was probably from the 1960s, and the cast of Gilligan’s Island was still recognizable on the side. “I found that in the fire pit once. And money, now and again, coins, you know, not bills.”

Billy found himself strangely moved by this side of the woman. A little frightened, but moved just the same. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. If you can write me out two lists—one of the people you know were there last night, and one of the people you know who weren’t there last night, why then, I’ll check them out and maybe we’ll get someplace.”

“I guess I can do that,” she agreed.

“I can pick them up at the meeting tonight, if that’s all right.”

“Oh, the big meeting.” She nodded. “At the fire pit, yeah. I’ll be there.”

I’ll just bet you will, Billy thought. As he headed back to his squad car, he shook his head slowly. The Slab, he thought. What a weird f***ing place.

The Slab, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

The Diviners, by Julian White

Posted: August 25, 2011 by Shaina in Dark fantasy, Ghosts, Julian White, Thriller and Suspense
Tags: ,
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The Diviners, by Julian White

The Diviners, by Julian White

The Diviners, by Julian White
Available at:
Amazon

Description:   ”The woman swam closer. She twinkled as the light passed through her. Her fingernails had smoky tips. Her body was young but her eyes and mouth were pockets of crow’s feet …”

Four people in a small town find themselves persecuted in different ways by the same terrifying supernatural force.

Karen was happily married – until her husband became a religious maniac and set himself on fire. Since then, she has worked on her own to raise their daughter and establish an elegant seaside bistro – all by the age of 27. Now her husband’s back, madder than ever, and she sees her polite, chattering customers transformed into a raving monster bent on destroying everything she loves.

Sandra holds down a tough job as a district nurse, looking after the sick and elderly in her neighbourhood. She has money worries, guilt over the death of her abusive mother and disturbing memories about a mysterious event in her past. Her life slides into chaos when one of her patients turns up dead in the boot of her car and she can’t get rid of the rapidly decaying body.

Felix is a dull provincial solicitor – so dull, in fact, that his wife goes elsewhere in search of sexual fulfilment. When a perverse young couple hold her captive in a luxurious house, he comes to the rescue, only to find that something utterly evil and as ancient as civilisation itself lurks beneath the sparkling surface of their swimming pool.

Mick is still licking his wounds six months after being dumped by his girlfriend. In hopes of forgetting her, he goes to bed with an enigmatic lady whose hair smells of blackcurrants. As a result, he undergoes a transformation into a creature out of an insane nursery story.

And that’s only the beginning. When these four stories converge, the stage is set for an earth-shattering climax.

Welcome to the world of the Diviners’ Guild.

Who are they? The answer takes in cannibalism, deadly maggots, reincarnated cats, body horror, psychological chills, blood magic, black farce, breakneck action, a thousand-year-old secret, a silver coin and a supernatural threat to Creation itself.

The Diviners is the no-holds-barred fictional debut by writer and critic Julian White, full of surreal scares, adult imagery and laughter in the dark. Read it if you dare.

PROLOGUE

GLOSTEN FIELDS

1982

Thunderous music shook the little girl out of her sleep. That record she hated. Songs about scary stuff, bloodsuckers, dead people walking … Lilith had put it on at full volume, and now the wall between their rooms was angrily throbbing as though something was sandwiched in the plaster and trying to break out.

She opened her eyes a chink. Just to make sure the Magic Roundabout wallpaper didn’t suddenly rupture like a circus hoop. She could see every detail, for there were no curtains to filter out the moonlight, not since Lilith ripped them off their rings. If she really strained she could even read some of the speech balloons the child of a previous council tenant had scrawled over the heads of Dougal, Ermintrude and Zebedee: POO – WHOS FART – CIGGIE?

She stiffened under her bedclothes. There was something unfamiliar in the room, crouched on top of the little chest of drawers. Then she remembered. Her Tiny Tears. She raised her head off the pillow to admire it. Its saucer face caught the moonlight in a slightly off-putting way but it was amazing that it was there at all.

True, it was last season’s model with the floral dress, rather than the one with the blue gingham trim and true again it didn’t have a box but had come loosely bundled in old Christmas wrapping paper, but it was a genuine Tiny Tears … never mind that the seat of the frock had a couple of dirty smudges as though the doll had been sitting on some other girl’s front lawn …

What did it matter? It was hers now. She lay back, ignoring a niggling desire to pee, burrowing her face hard in her pillow and pulling the blanket tight over her ear so that it almost hurt. The scuffing bedclothes raised a cloak of static between her and what was happening next door.

Alvie had come back with Lilith from the pub and now they were making friends. When she was very tiny she had heard the noise Lilith and one of her friends were making and pictured them standing together, hand in hand, using the double bed as a trampoline. But when she’d crept out to investigate, she’d seen something very different, that didn’t look at all friendly. Yet appearances must have deceived, because Lilith continued to have ceaseless callers. The record, the one she hated, railed on.

Is it tomorrow now? she wondered. Or is it still my birthday? It had been a pretty decent one, all told. Lilith had made an unusual effort, what with the doll, and the pizza, and even a cake of sorts: a lemon drizzle from Asda, topped with a candle (black, but never mind) and with some Smarties squashed into the crust in the shape of a seven. And to round the day off, The Great Muppet Caper on video. Lilith had been encouraging throughout, despite mashing out countless cigarettes on the sole of her DM.

But while they were sitting there watching the antics of Kermit, Fozzie and the rest of the gang, there had come a single tap on the door and Lilith had bolted out of the settee.

With a sigh at the interruption, the girl froze the tape. She heard the front door open and close and nothing else. No one there, she thought triumphantly, but then a man padded in.

There was nothing especially startling about him, especially not compared to the company Lilith usually kept – big fellows in sweaty leather and ripped jeans. This man was young and pale in a long coat, with a grave manner as if he brought bad news.

Yet Lilith, for some reason, was put on edge by his presence. Black fringe lowered, eyes wide in their pools of powder, her thin chalky arms covered in snake tattoos tightly knotted.

“Heeey Alvie.” Lilith’s voice dropped into a soft cooing.

“And who’s this?” Alvie looked beyond her to the little girl.

“The birthday girl. Ain’t she?”

“Many happy returns,” said Alvie.

“It’s past her bedtime.” Lilith prodded the little girl with the toe of her DM. “Come on, let’s be having you..”

“But -”

Lilith had a way of skipping to the end of an argument before it had even begun. She did so now, eyes rattling in her head like wind-up beetles as she bawled:

“ARE YOU DEAF? I SAID GET ON OUT OF IT!”

Grabbing her doll, the little girl darted upstairs with Miss Piggy still in prison and the fate of the Baseball Diamond unresolved.

Her bladder was tickling away, demanding action. She sat up, head resting against the wall, nose catching the wet-rot taint of the peeling window-sill. She looked at the Tiny Tears doll. In her mind’s eye, she saw it being hoisted at lightning speed over a garden wall and deposited in the crochet shoulder-bag where Lilith kept her evil-smelling treasures.

Lazy cow didn’t even get me my own wrapping paper, she thought. Lazy cow. Get on out of it, you stupid lazy cow.

At least that sodding record had come to an end at last. Hooray! About time too! She listened for other sounds – friendly sounds – but there was nothing. Just wind under the roof-tiles, leaves in the guttering.

For a moment she basked in the quiet. Her bladder wouldn’t let off, though. She slipped out of bed. Her hand-me-down Snoopy pyjamas came down a good four inches over her toes. She grasped the Tiny Tears doll by one ankle. She was half in mind to dunk it head-first in the toilet. Only, now she had it in her hands … stuff it, it was hers now, that’s what counted.

Lugging it under her arm, she opened her bedroom door and ducked towards the adjoining bathroom.

“Where are you creeping off to?”

Alvie’s voice. A low whisper, yet somehow as plain as if he had shouted in her ear. She froze and looked towards the master bedroom. The door was ajar, but the bed was on the other side of it, so she couldn’t see him and he, she was reasonably sure, couldn’t see her. Clutching her doll tighter, she took another step in the direction of the bathroom.

“I know you’re there …”

That all-pervasive murmur. A rhythmical plucking had started in her privates, but she hesitated, wary of disobeying. If he turned nasty she could expect no protection from Lilith. Eight months ago one of Lilith’s boyfriends had picked her up, bounced her from arm to arm, and dropped her on her head. She’d been out cold on the kitchen floor, finally waking up on her bed with a dab of margarine on her temple and Lilith and the man making friends next door.

Rubbing her chin on the doll’s stiff blonde hair, she moved towards the master bedroom and peeked in. The wardrobe was open, and in its mirror she could see Alvie sitting up in bed. He was smoking, wide awake and apparently sober. Lilith was slumped face-down under the blankets.

“Tell you what …”

His voice dropped so it was little more than a tickling on her eardrums. Alvie leaned over to grope in his jacket. He held up something that even in the gloom had a winking allure.

“Shiiiiinnnyyyy, hmmm?”

He rose from the bed. She looked away, heard the rasp of denim on hairy legs and the snap of a belt buckle – both were loud after the whisper. Barefoot, he hobbled into view. His toes were hairy, the nails painted black.

She shuffled back three paces to make way for him. He switched on the landing light, pulled the bedroom door closed behind him, dropped down on one knee. It was the first time she’d seen him up close. His arms and chest were covered in pale down.

“Happy birthday.”

He held up the shiny thing. A coin on a fillet of leather. As it twirled, her eye chased its rich decoration. He eased the fillet over her head and dropped the cold metal into her waiting palm.

“Our little secret, yeah? Keep it out of sight of you-know-who.”

“Keep what out of sight?”

The Diviners, by Julian White
Available at:
Amazon

Driven to Kill, by Gary C. King

Posted: August 24, 2011 by Shaina in Gary King, True Crime
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Driven to Kill, by Gary C. King

Driven to Kill, by Gary C. King

Driven to Kill, by Gary C. King
Now available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes and Noble

Description:

The true story of sex killer Westley Allan Dodd–his victims were too small to fight…and too young to die! Includes eyewitness execution report.

By all appearances, twenty-nine-year-old Westley Allan Dodd was the perfect all-American boy—model high school student, camp counselor and U.S. Navy enlistee. But behind his mask of normalcy lurked a predatory sex fiend with a seventeen-year history of appalling acts of molestation and violence. Children were his victims and the parks of the Pacific Northwest his personal hunting grounds.

On September 4, 1989, his unnatural desires had driven him past simple satisfaction to abduct, torture, and kill two young boys in Vancouver, Washington. Undetected despite his record, Dodd killed a third innocent victim only weeks later near Portland, Oregon. But only when he was caught trying to kidnap a child from a local movie theater was he finally taken into custody by police. Confessing to this heinous murders, he was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to death.

Based on exclusive access to police files and riveting trial testimony, personal interviews with Dodd himself and excerpts from his chilling “diary of death,” Driven to Kill dramatically recounts a hideous spree of death and horror that brought every parent’s worst nightmare frighteningly to life!

Excerpt:

The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now, if I were a gravedigger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.

-Douglas Jerrold, 1803-1857, Ugly Trades

Life for life,
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
Burning for burning, wound for wound,
stripe for stripe.

-Exodus, XXI, 23

Preface

It was in the late summer of 1989 that a young man named Westley Allan Dodd trespassed into thousands of lives, and before it was over his rampage of unleashed savagery would make it perhaps the most hideously unforgettable summer on record in the Pacific Northwest. The horror he created that summer would, albeit unintentionally on Dodd’s part, forever change the way that citizens and lawmakers alike in the states of Washington and Oregon viewed virtually all classes of sex offenders, especially child molesters and child killers.

Dodd, at the time of his arrest, had not yet developed into a full-blown “bona fide” serial killer as set forth in FBI standards, which states in part that for a killer to be classified a serial murderer he must claim three or more victims in at least three separate “incidents.” But for all intents and purposes he was a serial killer all right. Dodd fit the mold in that he had claimed two victims in one incident, another in a second incident, and would have committed his fourth murder in a third episode if he hadn’t been stopped by a screaming child and alert bystanders while he was attempting to carry out the crime.

Although Dodd had not murdered anyone until late that summer, at least not as far as the authorities knew, it would later become crystal clear that this seemingly near-perfect ail-American “boy” turned adult had been, in reality, inextricably enmeshed in an extended fantasy state during that period and had been trolling for victims for at least several months before the first murders. He had been gradually working up his nerve to begin the atrocities that would first unbalance the Pacific Northwest, and then ultimately shock the rest of the nation.

Powerless, as most serial killers are, in the day-to-day relationships with those whom he closely associated, Dodd had begun searching for someone, not just anyone, but someone special to play out his ultimate power trips on, lurking in the shadows of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, and waiting until the moment to strike was just right. Many people, including psychiatric professionals and police officials, knew about this sex fiend’s long history of indecent exposure, child molestation, and violence, but because of the constraints of the system in which they worked they were powerless to stop him from commencing his killing spree.

In many ways, upon retrospect, he was like the monsters that had come before him, killers like Ted Bundy, Jerome Brudos, Dayton Leroy Rogers, the Green River killer, and a seemingly endless slew of other cold-blooded serial murderers who had learned how to manipulate the system. Like his murderous predecessors he sought out complete strangers as his victims. Instead of women, however, the victims of choice of most such murderers, Dodd always preyed upon helpless little children, young boys whose trust he managed to gain with promises of friendship, money, candy, and toys. When it was all over, few could argue that his malignant deeds, perhaps because children were involved, proved more feral and emotionally painful in the eyes of law officers and the disconcerted public than those of his notorious predecessors.

Dodd knew early on that he liked molesting young children, and in his mind the dictum was “the younger the better.” He also did what he had to do to avoid jail time, and would play the “game” of the system so that he could continue to molest kids and expose himself. He learned early in his life how to effectively manipulate the system so that he could slip quietly, almost unnoticed, through its cracks. Despite his extensive criminal record as a sex offender in cities and towns throughout the Pacific Northwest, the authorities always seemed to forget about him when he dropped out of a treatment program and moved on to another locale. Because he had been successful at avoiding prosecution for so many of his earlier crimes, Dodd, even at the time of his final arrest, had not significantly changed his modus operandi. Under a more sophisticated and more communicative law enforcement system, Dodd’s continued criminal activities could have caught the attention of authorities early on and saved the lives of his innocent victims. But the system, even when functioning at its best, had its pitfalls. Thankfully, in response to citizen outrage over his crimes, a superior although controversial system requiring convicted sex offenders to register for the rest of their lives with police agencies is now in place in the states of Washington and Oregon.

If it can be said that anything good came out of this case besides instituting a more efficient system for reporting and keeping track of sex offenders, it is only that this sexual sociopath, clearly a livid monster hiding inside a human shell with an insatiable appetite for violent and bloody death, was stopped before he could put his nightmarish fantasies into full play and snuff out even more young lives. Despite the efforts of four police agencies and numerous detectives to thwart his perverted activities, however, he had committed murder with calculated cold-bloodedness, terrorized entire communities, and virtually turned the populace of two states upside down before being stopped.

There have been few crimes that have instilled such a high degree of fear in a populace as those committed by this killer, mainly because he struck out at pure innocence and left everyone wondering who and where he would strike next. In part by his own design and in part by the laws governing sex offenders that were in place at the time, Dodd ultimately was driven to kill.

Prologue

A hushed silence fell over the long, rectangular courtroom when Westley Allan Dodd, flanked by armed sheriff’s deputies, appeared through a side door, hands cuffed securely behind his back. After a deputy removed the restraints that held his thin wrists together, the convicted child sex killer took a seat at the defense table next to his attorney. Clad in a light blue, short-sleeved pullover shirt, pre-washed faded blue denim jeans, and a pair of sneakers, Dodd uneasily faced the judge, his back to the families of the victims he’d kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Their eyes were upon the dark-haired young man, just as they had been throughout the month-long guilt or innocence phase of the trial. They had heard startling, shocking testimony about child molestations, violent depraved sex, torture, and necrophilia.

The courtroom was packed to capacity, and many of the spectators who had sat through portions of the trial had to be turned away at the door. Those who managed to get in were required to pass through a metal detector, just as they had been required to do on all previous days. Everyone present that day, Thursday, July 26, 1990, was there to hear Clark County Superior Court Judge Robert Harris pass sentence on the “normal-looking” pedophile turned child murderer. First, however, Harris had decided to allow members of the victims’ families to make public statements.

Karen Osborne, an aunt of four-year-old victim Lee Joseph Iseli, nervously shuffled a sheet of paper as she faced the judge. She was going to read a handwritten statement by Jewel Cornell, the boy’s grief-stricken mother. She swallowed hard, looked directly at Dodd for a moment, and then began to read from the paper she held with trembling hands in front of her.

“You have taken my whole world apart —my family’s world apart,” read Osborne from Cornell’s emotionally charged statement. “You are the scum of the Earth. You get on the news and the radio and tell everyone how you felt when you did these unspeakable crimes . . . and you get a high just by talking and going over what you did. You make me sick. I hate your guts . . . you are a sick, cruel and ugly person … I will never rest until the day your life is taken … I hope you rot in hell.” If Dodd felt anything as a result of Cornell’s statement, he didn’t let it show.

Robert Iseli, Lee’s father, next stood in front of the courtroom. Brushing back an occasional tear he turned toward Dodd, angrily facing the man who had confessed to brutally raping and murdering his little boy.

“How did we allow this,” he said, gesturing toward Dodd, “to end up where he is today? It is sad to take a life. . . . Taking a life, any life, even this man’s, is never right. It is a grave decision that the state has to make…So do we blame ourselves for this death? No. We are left with no choice.”

Relatives of the other murder victims—Cole Neer, eleven, and his brother, Billy Neer, ten—declined to make a public statement.

“Do you have a statement to make before this court, Mr. Dodd?” asked Judge Harris.

“Yes, your honor,” said Dodd as he stood up at the defense table. “I didn’t offer any mitigating evidence during the penalty phase because, in my mind, that’s just an excuse. And I don’t want to make any excuses.”

Dodd occasionally looked up at the judge and stoically reiterated how he had been arrested numerous times over the course of his life for sex crimes against children, and stated matter-of- factly how the criminal justice system had failed him and his victims.

“I do not blame the criminal justice system for anything…but the system does not work and I can tell them why….It doesn’t really matter why the crimes happened. I should be punished to the full extent of the law, as should all sex offenders and murderers…I can accept a death sentence, and I don’t want to see any delays in carrying it out….If my death will bring peace to the people I’ve hurt so bad, then it’s time for me to die.”

“Amen,” said someone from the gallery of spectators.

When Dodd finished, Roger Bennett, deputy prosecuting attorney, stepped forward and submitted a legal document to the court that would, if signed by Dodd, allow Dodd to waive his rights to appeal. Bennett fervently recommended that the judge allow Dodd to sign the document.

“I like what Mr. Bennett is saying,” Dodd offered. “I don’t want this thing tied up in the courts for years.” He added that he didn’t want the mandatory review of his case by the Washington Supreme Court, and insisted that he did not want anyone filing any appeals on his behalf. He said he would instruct his lawyer to sue anyone who tried to intervene.

“You have an ongoing, depraved, sadistic desire to hurt, injure, and maim others,” Harris told Dodd as he looked him square in the eye. “To you, it is clear that murder is the ultimate goal —the ultimate satisfaction…I am able to sign your death decree without looking back….”

Driven to Kill, by Gary C. King
Now available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes and Noble

The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories, by Aaron Polson

Posted: August 23, 2011 by Shaina in Aaron Polson, Ghosts, Thriller and Suspense
0

Bottom Feeders and Other Stories, by Aaron Polson

The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories, by Aaron Polson
Available at:
Smashwords and Amazon 

Description:

A collection of ten dark stories from Horror Writers Association member Aaron Polson. Witness hotels with shifting rooms…carnivorous beetles bent on devouring a sleepy mountain town…vindictive spirits with beautiful eyes…an undead Marine on his return from Iraq…a pond full of restless dead in the title story, and more.

Excerpt:

1: Everything in its Place

The mail boxes were labeled wrong. That was the first hint that Lucey should have canceled her reservation at El Hotel de la Trampa. She wasn’t too fond of other aspects of the lobby, either: cheap candy in gaudy foil wrappers sat in a glass fish bowl on the counter, the strange man on the sofa who kept looking at her 

“Can I help you?”

Lucey’s attention shifted to the clerk.

“Oh. Sorry…I was,” Lucey forced a smiled, “I need to check in.”

The man opened the guest book and pushed a pen across the counter. “Reservation?”

“Yes. Harrison. Lucey Harrison.”

He turned to the mailboxes, but looked over his shoulder. “What is it you do,Señora?”

“Oh…I’m not married. Why do you…” Lucey’s eyebrows knit together. “Well, I work with books.”

The clerk’s brown eyes burned into hers. “A teacher?” His hand slid into one of the boxes, fishing for the key.

“No. A librarian. Only an assistant, really.”

His hand stopped, crept out of the box, and plunged into another labeled with a ‘G’. “Si.” He moved to the counter and dropped a heavy brass-colored key. “Your room. Second floor.” With a nod to her bags, he asked, “Would you like some help?”

Lucey took the key and shook her head. Her peripheral vision caught the face of the man on the lobby sofa. Was he watching her?

“Señorita?”

“No, I’m fine. Second floor?”

The clerk smiled, showing a mouth of teeth mismatched and yellow.

Maybe next time I won’t travel on the cheap, she thought.

Lucey avoided the elevator and took the stairs. As she opened the door to the second floor hallway, a shadow moved at the end of the hall, perhaps someone entering their room. Goosebumps crawled up her arms. She read the key, simply labeled G, and felt the grooves of the embossed letter.

The first door on the right was labeled ‘H’; on the left she found the letter ‘A’. She walked further, dragging her suitcase across the worn carpet. Room designations descended on the left in alphabetically order, but ‘G’ came directly after ‘E’. Lucey felt the blood in her face.

“Disorder and chaos. Not very helpful at all,” she mumbled.

Her key slid into the lock, but would not open the door.

“Wait a second…”

The door was clearly labeled with a ‘G’—a brass letter screwed to the center of the door. She touched it, and then tried the key again. Nothing.

Lucey shook her head at the thought of asking the clerk for help. The door was scratched around the brass letter. Maybe a prank, she thought. From the left side of the hall, Lucey counted seven doors. She was at the sixth.

With a soft click, the key slid into the lock of the seventh door. Lucey turned the knob, and pushed inside. The air was cool and clean. She worried about moldy smells or the lingering odor of tobacco after seeing the state of the lobby, but all seemed in order. Good.

Her folding screwdriver set—the miniature kit for repairing eyeglasses—was in the front pouch of her suitcase. Lucey Harrison wanted rest, but she also needed her room letter set right. It wouldn’t do to have some stranger try to enter in the night. Whoever played the prank could not be allowed to let chaos seep in to a logical world.

Worse than the books at work, she thought. She slipped her key in one pocket, and began unscrewing her letter ‘G’. Only three letters were out of place overall, and she fixed them. It was quick work really, as only one screw held each letter in place. Quick work and proper order.

Her job done, Lucey tried her own door—‘G’—again. The key would not work. She glanced down the hall and counted again. Seven. The key still would not work.

But my bag is inside, she thought. Lucey Harrison’s stomach began to knot, a prickly, unpleasant feeling.

She hurried down the stairs to the lobby—something I should have done immediately, she self-chastised. The first sign of things gone wrong sat in the fish bowl on the counter. Instead of the brightly wrapped candies, the bowl was now teeming with small snails—too many, really, for such a small container. Her eyes swept the rest of the room, noting the now-alphabetized mail boxes behind the counter, the artificial palm tree where once stood a display of vacation brochures. The old man still sat with his paper, but now the sofa was a deep burgundy.

“May I help you?”

The clerk was wrong, too. He smiled, and his teeth were too white. Perfect. His once-brown eyes had lost all color, and now reflected her startled image in their grey irises. Lucey looked at the key in her hand, but staggered a few steps away.

“You…you’re not…”

Lucey jumped as a hand patted her on the shoulder.

“Come with me,” the man with a newspaper said.

The clerk’s grey eyes sent a frost into Lucey’s chest. She allowed the newspaper man to pull her aside, close to the main entrance.

“Is this a joke?” She asked, her voice shaking.

“I wish.” The man smiled; not a warm smile, but one of knowing. “How’d they get you?”

Lucey frowned.

“Can I see your key?” the man asked.

She hesitated, but held it out.

“Oh. Second floor.” He pushed a hand into his pocket and produced his own key. “Me, it was numbers. See.” His hand opened to reveal a silver key with the number five.

Lucey’s hands began to tremble. “I—I don’t understand…where am I?”

“I don’t know, really. But wherever it is you want to be…well, you can’t get there from here.”

Lucey blinked. “I’ll fix things. I’ll change the doors again.” She backed toward the stairs.

“Good luck.” The man crossed his arms. “I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”

2: In Hollow Fields

Rolling fields of golden wheat and green pasture swallowed a silver Honda as it sped along a stretch of snaking asphalt. The driver leaned forward and shrugged his shoulders, trying to stay awake after three hours in the car. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and tightened his grip on the wheel with the other. His passenger, eyes flitting from the asphalt ahead to the side mirror as if measuring the length of road, shifted in her seat.

“How far will we be from a hospital?”

Zach leaned back. “Don’t worry, Court. I think there’s a hospital in Springdale—about fifteen miles away.”

Courtney’s shoulders dropped. She rested both hands on the top of her bulging belly. “I’m just not really comfortable, you know.” She tilted her brown eyes out the window, watching acres of Kansas prairie melt in an amber blur. “I’m seven months along, Zach. Seven months. I don’t really want some redneck doctor delivering our baby.”

“Everything will be fine. If all goes well, we’ll be out of this little shit-hole in a couple of days. A week at most.” He smiled and patted her leg. “This could be it, Court. The goldmine. The old bastard had his fortune wrapped up in the farm. The land has to be worth thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”

The car crested another hill and sped into the valley below. The town of Broughton’s Hollow lay in front of them, a loose arrangement of graying houses and broken streets, a dying carcass of a village, left to fester in remembrance of an era when family farms, railroads, and general stores ruled the American Midwest. No fewer than four church steeples rose from valley.

Courtney shivered. “Well, at least we won’t be short on Jesus.”

Zach offered a meek chuckle, but neither spoke again as Zach steered the Civic through the dilapidated main street and out the other side, toward his grandfather’s farm.

Courtney stayed in the car. Zach promised a brief introduction to the lawyer and real estate agent, and then they’d be off to Springdale for the night. She picked at her fingernails while the three men stood and talked on the lawn in front of the family farm house, discussing, she hoped, the sum Zach could earn from a sale of the land his father left upon his death. Zach Galen was the last of the family line, his own parents dead from cancer and heart disease, and the farm with all its surrounding fields were now his.

Zach glanced over at the car, and Courtney waved with a return smile. He carried himself with ease, an amateur musician trying to make his way in Kansas City. Once they met, introduced by mutual friends after a show in a smoky club, she lost herself to the easy wave in his hair and the thick dimples that pulled back at the edges of his mouth when he smiled. At least he looked like a rock star.

The other two men appeared grey, maybe an effect of the pale sky. Since leaving the city, the world had looked less colorful, but Courtney couldn’t quite understand. The country air was supposed to be cleaner. Fresh air, clean living, right? She turned around and scanned the empty field behind the car. Clean living.

Zach approached the car and tapped on the window. She lowered it.

“I think we’re going to stay here tonight,” he said.

She opened her mouth, paused, and said, “I didn’t think the Hollow had any hotels.”

Zach smiled. “No, Court. We’re going to stay here, at the farm.” Zach glanced behind him. “Mr. Olson, the realtor thinks it would be a good idea, you know. Make it look like I cared about being part of the town.” He knelt so he could look at Courtney face to face. “It’s only one night, babe. Besides, Springdale isn’t much bigger. Just the one motel with twenty rooms.”

She nodded. “Just the one night.”

“C’mon, I want to introduce you.” Zach opened her door and led her from the car.

As far as Courtney was concerned, the men were bad clones of one another. Grant Olson, identified as such by the name badge he wore, emblazoned by the red and gold logo of Valley Realty, was slightly taller than the lawyer. Both were clad in the same sort of tan-grey suit, the color of which changed in shadow or direct sunlight.

“Gentlemen, this is my girlfriend, Courtney Bauman.”

Courtney winced at the mention of her as “girlfriend” although no more formal descriptor existed. She thought the men bristled a bit too, both glancing down at her stomach when Zach said the word. “Hello,” she offered.

“Grant Olson, but you probably already know that.” He tapped his name badge with pale, waxen fingers.

“Please to meet you, Miss Bauman.” The other man reached out his hand, his fingers painted with the same strange translucence as Olson’s. “My name is Joe Weedeman. Mr. Galen’s lawyer.” He blinked. “The deceased Mr. Galen, that is. Zach’s grandfather.”

She took his hand, surprised that it was warm. Both looked like they wore a good layer of frost.

“They were just telling me about the farm, Court.”

Olson stepped closer to Courtney, gently turning her to face the road across from the house. “I was just about to explain the legend of the hollow field,” he said, pointing toward the empty space just beyond the road.

“All I see is a bunch of dirt,” Courtney said.

The two local men exchanged a quick glance. They smiled. “Exactly the point,miss,” Weedeman said. “But it’s hungry dirt.”

“I don’t like those men,” Courtney said as she undressed. “And I hate these damn pregnancy clothes. This stupid elastic.” She snapped the navy band at the top of her jeans.

Zach wrapped his arms around her from behind, rubbing his fingertips over her bulging belly. “I think you look cute, especially out of the jeans.” He pushed against her buttocks.

The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories, by Aaron Polson
Available at:
Smashwords and Amazon 


 

Ivory, by Steve Merrifield

Posted: August 22, 2011 by Shaina in Mystery, Steve Merrifield
0
Ivory, by Steve Merrifield

Ivory, by Steve Merrifield

Ivory, by Steve Merrifield
Available for free, at Smashwords

Description:

Martin Roberts is a successful artist, but is finding that his creativity is slipping away until he is responsible for running a teenage girl down in his car.

Miraculously the girl survives, but stranger than her lack of injuries is her striking physical appearance; stark white hair and skin, and jet black eyes. Haunted by her looks, he seeks her out, facing dangers of this world and another.

Excerpt:

Phillip Mayhew surveyed London’s buildings as they stretched out from beneath the crane cab into the grey haze of smog on the horizon. The site was at the heart of Camden where three high-rise blocks of flats had been demolished. The neglected and dated buildings had been cleared to make way for a smaller affordable housing development. He thought it a shame they would be low-rise and lose the arresting view that North London had to offer over the basin of the city and its landmarks; the skinny finger of the post office tower, the glittering glass gherkin and the group of skyscrapers around the obelisk of the Canada One building at Canary Wharf.

The crane’s cab creaked in protest against a gust of wind that leaned heavily against it. The sway became a lurch as the wind’s strength built and it was several minutes before he felt the crane shift back into its centre as the current of air weakened. The floating-like motion didn’t concern him since he had spent fifteen years working with cranes in his time in the building trade. As a labouring lad if there had been a crane on-site he would ask to go up it and if a foreman actually refused him he would sneak up anyway. That kind of mischief had got him suspended from sites for a few days, but he had taken his punishment of lost earnings like a man, and would then commit the same crime again if he had wanted to.

The days of being a labourer were far behind him now, but he still couldn’t shake his love of being in the cab of a crane. As an architect he had even less reason to be up there than his crane stowaway days, but it was well known by those around him in his office that whenever he visited a site where one of his company’s designs were being built, he had the quirk of giving a foreman a laugh or a coronary by asking to go up a crane. No one had any reason to suspect that today his motive for his visit was different.

Although his body lacked the energy of his youth and the climb had exhausted him, the experience had lost none of its appeal. It was a combination of things that drew him to the crane cabs, the view obviously – it didn’t matter what area the site was in, the height always made for an awe inspiring panorama. The constant listing drift of the crane was how he imagined it would be as a bird suspended in a thermal updraft. There was also the sense of power through being in control of a giant arm that would reach down and lift heavy things from the ground and move them effortlessly around the site, like Zeus in the Clash of the Titans film moving people around like pawns. He laughed as he remembered fantasies he had as a lad of plucking miserable foremen up from the ground and depositing them high up on builds on exposed girders.

However, what had drawn him to the crane today was the solitude the cab gave him and the much needed sense of escaping the mess that he had made of his life. At that moment in that place – his cherished place – he experienced a comfort and a peace that he imagined faith would give to those that had it. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a dog-eared photograph of his wife Brenda and their three boys. He rubbed the corners, trying to smooth it out, but the creases were too deep. He couldn’t fix it. Like the family in the picture – he couldn’t fix what he had done.

The love he felt for the family in his hands sharpened his guilt into wicked barbs in his chest. He and his wife had planned their life well. In the early years they hadn’t allowed their love for each other to distract them from their university courses, and they had made it through four years of living in different parts of the country while they studied. They then threw themselves into their respective jobs and getting themselves noticed by their employers. Once the money had been good enough they got married and bought a house and allowed themselves the luxury of a family, with the knowledge that they could give their children the good start in life they had both lacked themselves.

Over the thirty-five years they had known each other, Brenda had gained some weight to her face and her skin had lined in the delicate areas around her eyes and mouth, but she was still attractive and was all he had needed to fulfil his fantasies. He had the love of his wife, and his fantastic boys and he was a success in his job. That was supposed to be enough.

It had been enough. Until he had seen the girl.

He had never considered straying before – it was against his moral code. Yet he had. She was unusual in appearance but strangely attractive. Considering the probable thirty year age gap she would never have looked at him twice if she hadn’t been a prostitute. Going to a prostitute was something else that he would never have considered, yet he had been to her many times now.

He had felt shame every time. It was an awful feeling. A feeling that he had wanted to cut out of him if he could, along with his sin, but his shame hadn’t been potent enough to stop him paying for her again and again. The cancer of guilt had grown with every visit. He had no idea of the going rate for such services, but knew she was expensive. Even if she had cost less he had seen her every other day for months on end and he would still be facing the same financial crisis.

He had tried to stop himself, but she was beautiful. Even after the first month had destroyed his personal savings, he hadn’t been able to stop himself squandering the family savings, money that had been reserved for his boy’s education, their deposits on property and cars, and the nest egg for Brenda and himself in retirement. All gone on sex with a prostitute. Brenda was due an annual statement any time and his betrayal would be uncovered.

He stifled a sob. He hated himself. Yet that wasn’t enough to stop him meeting the girl. He would make up for it. He would replace all the blood money he had wasted and his family would never know what he had used the savings for. He might even retain the love and respect of his wife and boys. He looked at the cityscape of north London. It was a powerful panorama that imbued him with inner strength. He felt more than the weak man he had become. He felt free. Like a bird. Like a Giant. Like a God. Like the young man that had craved this view throughout his dreams and achievement of love, family and success.

Clutching the photograph of his family he stepped out of the cab and plummeted. The air rushed over his body, pulling at his clothes like a thousand snatching hands. After this industrial accident the insurance pay-out would cover all his debts. He did it for Brenda, the girl who had lived next door to him as a child. The girl he had courted, the woman he had married. Did it for the babies he had cradled, the young men he had raised. He did it for his family. He crammed his mind with their faces and scenes from their life together like his own imagined heaven. They would be the last thing in his mind as he died. It would secure his link to them in the afterlife. Christmases, births, birthdays, picnics, day trips.

A face filled his mind. It was a pale phantom of a face with blackness for eyes. The girl. The thoughts of his family scattered. He slammed against the concrete below and burst open. The last thing in his mind and heart was not his family, but his guilt.

Part One

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.

God and Devil are fighting there,

and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

Fedor Dostoevsky

Chapter One

Dark bloated clouds swathed the night sky in a low crawling ceiling, haemorrhaging their substance over London, turning the dark grey streets into stretches of black glassy marble infused and splashed with the reflected lights and neon signs. Martin Roberts’ Volvo estate hit a puddle with the impact of a hydroplane touching down, sending fans of silvery water into the air like wings. The lights of the streets were distorted by the vertical veins of rain and the watery pearls that twitched across the glass away from the direction of the car.

The outside world was a blur in Martin’s peripheral senses, swept away by the trudging march of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A that strained the speakers of his music system, blocking out the sound of rain rattling onto the roof and the hiss of the tires thrashing the puddles. The music’s steady climb to its crescendo imitated the rage that was building from the red lights and busy junctions that seemed to conspire against Martin’s need to get home and end his evening. The track came to its quiet close but instead of another pounding classic taking its place it was replaced by bouncy notes and saccharine voices – the Tweenies. One of the boys CD’s had been left in the CD changer. Ditched by the powerful classic tracks his mood suddenly had nowhere to go, and he had been so enjoying his rage. Feeling passion instead of the constant mire of his underlying melancholy and frustration was a refreshing change.


Ivory, by Steve Merrifield
Available for free, at Smashwords 

I, Keveny, by Gerald Rice

Posted: August 17, 2011 by Shaina in Gerald Rice, Post-apocalyptic, Zombies
0
I, Keveny, by Gerald Rice

I, Keveny, by Gerald Rice

I, Keveny, by Gerald Rice
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

Description:

Keveny is dead. But even at the onset of the zombie uprising that’s difficult. Straddling between the realm of the living and the dead, he’s tethered to his reanimated corpse as it eats its way across the countryside.

Somewhere out there his girlfriend may not be safe, but is there still enough time to save her?

Excerpt:

“Keveny—Keveny.  Yo—wake up.”

I slowly came to.  Daniel was kneeling over me, slapping me in the face with one of those meaty paws.  If I’d had a brain still, he would be giving me a concussion.  I grabbed his hand to give my eyes a moment to stop rattling in my head.

“What the hell was that?”  My head throbbed.

“I don’t know, man, you tell me.”  He helped me up and I noticed he was looking around a lot.

“What’s going on, did you pull me back again?”

“Pull you back?  Again?”  Daniel shook his head.

“Yeah, that thing.  It yanked me back here a little while ago.”  He looked at me.

“K, don’t trust that thing.  I don’t think it’s what it’s pretending to be.”

“What’s it pretending to be?  I thought you don’t know what it is.”  I rubbed the side of my face, the ache going from my eye to my brain gradually easing.

“I don’t.  But I know it’s not good.”

“What do you mean, what happened?”

Daniel smiled.  “See my man, Keveny.  Always ready to step in and help out.”

I hadn’t said that, but I let it go for now.

“What happened?” I asked again.  “Hey, I thought you had moved on, when I was here last it told me you were ‘nonesuch’ or something.”

“See, that’s why I’m suspicious of this thing.  I didn’t go nowhere.  Nobody has.  It looked at me wrong and I could tell it was about to try something.  So I bashed it in the head and threw it into the fog.”

The image of the very big Daniel throwing a little blonde haired boy came to mind.  I smiled for some reason.

“I’m starting to think we’re not going anywhere, but something is coming to us.”

“Why?  I mean, you seemed so sure before.”

“I know, but… it’s hard to explain.  You’d have to really be here to understand.”

There was a noise not far away from the house.  I looked over and saw two orange-reddish lamps about twice the size of basketballs hovering near the top of the mist.  For a minute they just hung there.

“For instance, stuff like that,” Daniel said.  “I tried, but I knew I hadn’t killed it.  That’s it.  Sometimes it just stares.”

“You mean those are its eyes?”  If the hairs on the back of my neck were real, they would’ve been standing.

“Right now they are.  It doesn’t have a real form.  I don’t think it needed one before now.  Before us.”

“Why is it just staring?”

“It pretends when it wants to, but I don’t think it understands us.  I think it tries to copy, but it’s at a loss when it comes to humans.  Or at least the human spirit.”

It rose to about five feet above the mist.  Yellow globes within the lamps swiveled around to our side.  Okay, now it was looking at us and fake or no, the hairs on the back of my neck did stand.

The lamps came closer until they were hovering over the porch stairs.

“Let’s go inside,” Daniel said.

“Good idea.”  We retreated through the creaky front door and shut it behind us as if it would do anything at all.  I mean, the door didn’t really exist and what was on the other side of it was beyond the understanding of any human.  Even if it were a real door I doubt one as dilapidated as that one would hold it at bay.

“So what’s going on with you?” he asked me.  “Outside, I mean.”

My return had been so abrupt I’d forgotten.  “Something’s very wrong,” I said.

“You mean other than the fact you are now a member of the legion of the undead?”

“Yeah.  All this time I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get to Sefra.  To protect her.  I might have already been too late.”

“Why?”

“I figured out how to control my body.  To make it do what I wanted.  But I think she’s already dead.”

“Already?  What—you found her body?”  We went into the kitchen and Daniel opened the refrigerator.  Surprisingly, he pulled out a pitcher of lemonade and poured into two glasses on the counter.

“Whoa.  Is that real?”

“Well…” Daniel shrugged.  He handed me a glass.  “Quit stalling already.  I’m hanging in suspense over here.”

I only intended to take drink a little.  But a sip turned into a swallow and turned into a full-out chug.  I must have been parched, but such a thing didn’t seem possible to me; I never considered it.  My head was clearer, thoughts and realizations came to me faster than at any point before this whole nightmare began.  I had to—

“Ahem,” Daniel said, his arms folded and tapping an index on a massive bicep.

I held the cold empty glass to my forehead and closed my eyes.  “I think I might be dead for good.  Sefra’s sister Susanne just shot me in the eye.”

“Susanne!” Daniel said.  “But she’s two crackers shy of a bowl of crazy soup!”

“I know.  Sefra had her locked away.  If she got out and she’s pretending to be Sefra…”

“But what can you do about any of that now?”

“I got an idea.”

“No-no,” Daniel said.  “You went out there a few times already and by some retarded fluke you didn’t get erased.  Don’t you know what that mist is?  It’s entropy.”

“Okay, what does entropy mean?”

“It means, uhhh, well.”  Daniel scratched his head.  “Remember The Neverending Story?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember the kid had to find a new name for the princess to stop the Great Nothing?”

“Yeah.”

“The Great Nothing is the same as that mist.  And considering you just took a shot to the dome, I’d say your lifeline just got cut.”

“You don’t know that, though.  I mean my body could still be alive.  Besides, there’s something else going on.”

“I seriously doubt that as I have shot many an individual in the eye and none of them started whistling Dixie.  What do you mean something else?”

“Look, we know a shot to the brain works, but come on—any part of the brain does the trick?  Isn’t motor function like in the back of the brain or something?”

Daniel scratched his head.  “I don’t know.”

“I’ve got to try to get back.”

“No, man.  No.”  Daniel put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.  But it seemed as though it might have been out of concern even though it still hurt.  “You can’t.  You’ll be dead for good.”

“But something is coming.  For real.  Once I tried to stop my body from… eating someone.  I blanked out.  I wasn’t here and I wasn’t there.  It was like I was someplace that didn’t exist at all, that didn’t know it could exist until I came there.  I came back, but I wound up bumping into Wynn and I went back there.  This time it watched me.  It started to move.  I think it’s coming here.”

“Here?  Like here-here?  Or there-here?”  Daniel pointed outside.”

I shrugged.

The lamps floated through the door and into the room.  They were bigger and pulsed red and orange.  Daniel and I stepped closer to each other.

“You know, on second thought, K,” Daniel began, “I think getting out of here is a good thing.  Matter of fact, I think I’m coming with you.”

“But what if you’re right?  What if there’s nothing outside of here and you just cease to exist?”

“Gotta be better than this.  That thing is gonna try to gobble me up or something.”

“But what about the others?  You said this house was filled with other people.”

“Gone.  And I don’t know where.”

We went through the living room, around those lamps and back to the front of the house.  They followed us, the pulsing going even faster as we stepped out on the porch.  The mist was like a wall, bumping up against the stairs.  I stepped over and put my hand through.

“I don’t know if this is gonna work,” I said.

“I’m not waiting around to find out it didn’t.”

We held hands.  It was kind of weird, but felt like the right thing to do.  Daniel looked at me, his head bobbing slightly.  He was counting.  Just like me.

One… two… three…

We stepped off the porch.

And fell.

I stood.  Where ever I was, it was dark.  There was a moment of panic as I thought I was back in that place, but then there was someone’s voice nearby.  I could feel my feet beneath me on the floor, like gravity had something to do with it.  The feeling was odd.

I kneeled and put my hands on the floor, cold concrete.  This wasn’t right.  I hadn’t been able to touch anything since… since… well, whatever the hell had happened to me.

Was I back?

“Hello?” I said and listened for my voice to reverberate back to me.  Nothing.  But I didn’t know where I was—it didn’t mean anything necessarily.  I was at least semi-corporeal, but that didn’t mean alive.

 I, Keveny, by Gerald Rice
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

Nine Frights, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

Posted: August 16, 2011 by Shaina in Ghosts, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Vampires, Western, Zombies
Tags:
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Nine Frights, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

Nine Frights, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

Nine Frights, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

Description: Janey in Amber: A woman visiting her mother’s house encounters some uncomfortable realities about her own life.

Santos del Infierno: In a tale set in the world of Clive Barker’s “Hellbound Hearts” (Hellraiser), a man loses his family and gains a new friend—one with a dark agenda.

The Strip: At the edge of a city plagued by zombies, a small community gathers to try to watch out for one another’s humanity. But when it goes, it’s gone…

Nine short works of terror by award-winning novelist and comic book writer Jeffrey J. Mariotte (The Slab, The Devil’s Bait, the Dark Vengeance Quartet, Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, Cold Black Hearts, four 30 Days of Night novels, and more). Some of these stories have appeared in Hellbound Hearts, The Stories in Between, and Zombie Cop, while others are published here for the first time.

Excerpt:

Janey in Amber

Sometimes her mother’s house seemed like alien territory. After Dad’s death, Mother had redecorated the place, almost top to bottom. The room that had been Janey’s was called the sewing room now, although Mother had never done much sewing and rarely seemed to use it for anything. She kept a day bed there, which Janey and Jack slept in when they visited. At night, with the lights off, the room whispered to her, reminding her of half-forgotten memories, but when the sun streamed through white lace curtains in the morning it was an unknown land full of sights and odd floral scents that evoked strangers’ lives.

What hadn’t changed were the three maple trees in the backyard. Maybe they had grown a little taller, but it was hard to tell, because as a child they had always seemed so towering anyway. This time of year, afternoon sun angled between the houses down the street and lit the crimson leaves on fire. Those that had already fallen pooled around slender trunks like children hesitant to leave their parents’ comforting sides. Janey kicked through them, dry and crackling underfoot, making her think of the cast-off skins of serpents.

“You like this place, don’t you?” Jack asked.

“Yes.” Janey answered without hesitation. She sniffed the autumn air, which carried hints of wood smoke and dark spices and enough of a chill to start her nose running. She touched its tip. “Out here, I mean. In the yard, it’s…the most like it was. Inside…I can hardly find Dad in there at all. Or me.”

“Fortunately,” Jack said, draping a strong arm over her shoulders, “I can always find you, inside or out.”

“That is a good thing.”

“I think so.”

Janey burrowed against his chest for a minute. His other arm wrapped around her, cutting the cold, like rolled blankets against her shoulders and back. “We should go in,” she said, wishing she didn’t mean it. She would give anything to stay here, in Jack’s arms, captured in the dying rays of the sun. Like an insect trapped in amber, she could remain that way forever, watching the eons pass from within a golden cage.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Jack said. “She’s probably asleep.”

“Probably. But I think we should look in.”

Jack kissed her forehead. He hadn’t shaved that day, and his chin rasped against her flesh. “Whatever you say, darling.”

And Janey thought, idyllic, that’s the perfect word for what this is. Idyllic.

***

Mother’s room smelled bitter, like piss from one of her rare accidents mixed with some tart liquid medicine she had spilled, all of it confined in stale air. She didn’t like having the window open, not this time of year. She was always cold and kept a space heater going, in spite of the central heating that kept the house at seventy-four degrees. Janey worried about her starting a fire somehow, but the space heater seemed safe enough. If it was knocked over it shut off automatically, and you could put your hand right on it without getting burned.

Janey pushed open the door a few inches and looked inside. The warmth slapped her face. Mother was sitting up in bed, eyes open, and she turned her head toward the door as slowly as if she’d had to force it through unseen tar. The hairbrush that always sat on her dresser was on the floor.

“It’s me. Janey.”

“I know that,” Mother snapped, as she almost always did these days. She couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak in a pleasant tone. Either it was an angry-sounding bark or a phlegmy complaint, with very occasionally a screeched dismissal.

“Okay, I just wanted to make sure.” Janey didn’t like to think about Alzheimer’s, but there probably weren’t hugely significant differences between one type of dementia and another. Her mother’s mind was slipping away, and at this age Janey suspected it wasn’t coming back.

She pushed the door open more. Her mother had lost weight since Dad’s death, four years before. Lots of it. The skin on her face was pale and tight against her bones, like it might split at any moment and her skull would erupt from beneath it. Mother’s mouth sagged open and a tiny wedge of pink tongue flicked out, then away again. “Is there anything I can get you?” Janey asked. She picked up the hairbrush and put it back where it belonged.

“No.” Mother looked at the water glass on her nightstand. She liked having water handy, but the glass was three-quarters full. “No.”

“Do you want me to read to you?”

“No.”

“Jack was reading this article, this doctor, he said—”

“Please don’t start with that,” Mother said. She touched her hair; short and wispy, she had given up on it after her seventy-fourth birthday and taken to wearing wigs whenever she left the house. As if just remembering it was there, her fingers brushed her hearing aid.

“Start with what?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

Mother made a huffing noise, and saliva dribbled down onto her chin. Janey hurried to her side, picked up the folded cloth napkin from the nightstand, and started to dab at Mother’s chin. Her clawed fingers snatched it away. “I can clean myself.”

“I know, Mother. I just wanted to help.”

“If you want to help, then cut out the nonsense.”

She seemed lucid at moments like these, but that was illusion, Janey knew. It was temporary lucidity at best, as shot through with holes as a soda can used for target practice. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Mother turned her head away and threw the napkin onto the bed. “Honestly,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m tired.” She closed her eyes. “Wake me when dinner’s ready.”

***

“Have you talked to Mother today?” Janey asked.

“She doesn’t like me.”

Dinner was over, the dishes washed and put away. Janey had built a fire, and she sat with her feet up on the sofa reading a hardcover bestseller from the 1980s she had found on the bookshelves flanking the living room fireplace. Jack was on the floor, his back against the sofa, where she could reach out and tousle his hair from time to time. His masculine musk wafted to her on the fire’s warm breath.

“That isn’t true,” she said, putting her finger on her page and closing the book.

“Sure it is. She never has.”

“Jack…”

“Remember when we were here, when your father died? She wouldn’t speak to me the whole time.”

“She was a wreck then. She barely spoke to anyone. She wasn’t eating or sleeping, either.”

“She’s made it very clear, Janey.”

“I think you’re exaggerating. And anyway, I don’t care, I love you, and that should count for something. Whether it does or not is her problem.”

Janey protested, but she couldn’t deny the truth in Jack’s words. Her father had died suddenly, choking on a bite of bagel at breakfast one morning. A flailing arm had knocked his orange juice glass on the floor, shattering it. While dialing 911, Mother had tried to pick up the shards and had sliced open her right index finger, a wound that she said bled like a son-of-a-bitch and required two stitches to close. She told Janey the mixture of blood and juice had looked just like a particularly vivid sunset.

She had come right away, arriving late that night, and stayed for two weeks. During that entire time, she couldn’t remember a single conversation between Mother and Jack. Maybe he was right after all.

“Thanks, honey,” Jack said. “I appreciate that.”

He turned back to the fire. She looked at the back of his head for a moment, his hair thick and sandy blond, brushing the collar of his red sweater. In the four years since, they had made periodic trips down from the city to keep tabs on Mother, who refused to move from her house. She didn’t mind spending money redecorating, but she didn’t want to leave her small-town home. Then her mind had started to drift, she rarely slept through the night, and she stopped eating right. Janey had hired a nurse to check in on her a few times a week, but found herself having to make the trip more and more often. Jack always came along, which made it easier on her.

Five days ago Mother had what she called a “dizzy spell.” The nurse had let herself in and found her on the living room floor, soiled and still. The nurse had feared the worst until she touched Mother to take her pulse, and Mother had swatted at her hand and called her Sue.

Sue was Mother’s younger sister, who had died at seventeen, more than sixty years before.

The nurse had telephoned, and Janey had rushed down.

Mother had been confused when they arrived, referring to the nurse as Sue or Helen, a woman who had lived down the street for years, and utterly ignoring Jack. Jack had insisted that part, at least, was intentional.

Janey didn’t know how long they would stay this time. She didn’t feel like she could go back to the city with Mother in this condition, clearly unable to fend for herself. Janey couldn’t afford to pay for full-time nursing care, and so far Mother had refused to entertain the notion of moving into a senior facility. If she could make the obstinate woman pack up and go to the city, it would be so much easier. Janey’s job was there, her life. Jack liked it here, but Janey didn’t know how she would make a living in such a small town.

She opened her book again, found her place. No sense dwelling on it nonstop. A decision would be made. Maybe she would make it, and maybe circumstances would dictate it. But it would have to come in its own time, or she would just have to knock Mother out and drag her from the house.

She resumed reading, her free hand stroking Jack’s broad shoulders.

***

Janey woke up alone the next morning. The bed was cool beside her, but still smelled of Jack. She slipped into a robe, tugged on heavy wool socks. Mother was sound asleep in her own room, a softly undulating lump under her blankets. A chair in her room had been overturned sometime during the night, so Janey righted it and then left, closing the door behind her.

She made breakfast, took a quick shower, put on a black sweatshirt, soft jeans and sneakers. Mother was still asleep, so she called her office, in the corporate headquarters of a sportswear company, to see if anything demanded her attention. There had been crises, she was told, but manageable ones. “You just worry about your mother,” her supervisor said. “We’ll take care of things here.”

“Thanks, Barb. Jack and I will—”

“Who?”

“Jack,” Janey said. “You know, my husb—”

“Look, Janey,” Barb said. “I have to go. Take it easy, and don’t worry about us.”

Before Janey could respond, she heard a click and a dial tone.

She and Jack had never actually married. They felt married, that was the important thing. She called him her husband. She spent every night in his arms, never tired of gazing into his blue eyes, felt able to tell him every secret and know he would understand. Had anyone ever been more married, whether some church or government agency had validated their union? She couldn’t see how.

She hadn’t told many people about the minor deception. She must have told Barb at some point, though, and now Barb was sensitive about it.

When she turned around, Jack was leaning against the sink, his arms folded over his chest. “Everything okay, sweetheart?”

“Oh, I suppose. It’s just…sometimes Barb is a little sensitive, you know?”

“Not everyone’s as level-headed as you.”

A slight flush warmed Janey’s cheeks. “I try.”

He crossed the kitchen to her, enveloped her in his arms. “You succeed,” he said hoarsely. His lips found hers.

“Are you making tea?”

Janey spun around, startled by Mother’s voice and not expecting her to be up and about, much less in the kitchen. Janey’s hand went to her throat. Her pulse fluttered like a hummingbird’s wings. “You startled me, Mother.”

“I didn’t mean to. You usually make tea in the mornings, so I wondered—”

“You should be in bed. I can bring it to you.”

“I’m perfectly capable of walking around my own house and sitting upright at a table, Jane.” Mother’s robe was gray with yellow trim, a matching fabric belt snugging it in at the waist. Beneath it and at the cuffs, a faded rose nightgown peeked out.

“Sit then.” Janey waved toward the mahogany dining table. Something else she had bought since Dad’s death—for all of Janey’s life they had used an old steel table with a spotted yellow plastic surface. That kind of plastic had a name, but she couldn’t think of it now. Her heart had barely begun to slow. “I’ll get the water boiling. Jack and I were just—”

Mother interrupted her as she sat in her usual chair. “Please, Janey, don’t start that up again.”

“What?”

“That Jack nonsense, of course.”

“What on Earth do you mean?”

“I hope to hell you know what I mean.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I am, Mother. Whatever you’re talking about, you need to—”

“He doesn’t exist, Jane.” Mother was snapping again. Flecks of saliva glistened on the dark wood of the table.

“Maybe you should go back to bed after all, Mother.”

“Don’t, Janey.”

“But—”

“It’s bad enough that I can’t trust my own mind half the time. Don’t try to make me think it’s worse than it is.”

“Mother, he was right here in this room!”

“And where is he now?”

Janey glanced over her right shoulder. He had been there a minute ago, leaning against the sink, then holding her in a loving embrace. “I don’t keep track of him every instant. Maybe he went outside. Or to take a shower. What’s the difference where he is right now?”

“I think you need to come outside with me.”

“You shouldn’t go outside, Mother, it’s cold out.”

“I’m hardly an invalid. I can walk around my own damn yard.”

Janey started running water into a kettle. “Can’t it wait until I make the tea?”

“I don’t believe so, no.” Mother started toward the back door.

Conflicting urges bumped up against each other. Should she drop the kettle, spilling water all over the floor and perhaps distracting Mother? But why? Whatever idea had cropped up in her addled mind would pass quickly, maybe by the time they got out the door and down the four concrete stairs to the yard. She wanted to shout out to Jack, to put all this to rest by summoning him back into the kitchen.

But Mother yanked the door open. Cold air shouldered into the room. Janey stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans and followed Mother out the door and down the stairs. The morning was frigid, more like winter than fall, a taste of what the next few months would bring.

Dry leaves whispered in a sudden breeze. Mother led the way to the back fence, passing between two of the maples. Janey hunched her shoulders against a chill more pronounced than the cold morning could account for. By the fence (wood slats, the reddish-brown paint peeling like early summer sunburned skin) her mother stopped, one thin arm pressed against a slat for balance while she scuffed away leaves and dead grass with her slippered left foot.

“What are we doing out here?” Janey asked. “It’s so cold.”

“I’m going to show you something,” Mother said. Her mother had never minded the cold, Janey recalled, in her younger days. It was only recently that she had begun to complain and insisted on blasting the heat inside. Having cleared a space at her feet, Mother lowered to an awkward crouch and started pawing at the earth. Janey moved closer, peering over her mother’s shoulder. Bit by bit, a flat slab of stone was revealed, bone-white beneath hard crumbled dirt and yellowed grass and those big red and brown leaves.

“What is that?”

“You don’t remember it?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“It’s Jack.”

Janey tried to pay close attention, sure that she would have to report this entire incident to Mother’s doctor. But she felt suddenly dizzy. The wind swirled leaves around them, chittering urgent warnings that wouldn’t be silenced. She put both hands against the cool wood of the fence. Goose bumps mottled the flesh of her forearms. “Don’t be ridiculous! Can we please go inside now?”

“Not until you look at this.” Mother stood up. The stone was fully revealed now, eight or nine inches square, with uneven sides, mostly white but with gray and black streaks she hadn’t noticed at first.

“I see it. It’s a rock. So?”

“It’s a gravestone.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Well, not a real one. I can’t believe you’ve forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?” Janey touched the stone. It felt like a block of ice. She caught a whiff of Jack’s musk, heard a sudden intake of his breath, as if something had startled him. But when she looked, he was nowhere in sight. The dizziness wouldn’t leave her alone. “Is there…something buried under there? A bird or something?” Trying to force thoughts of Jack from her mind, she tried to remember any dead pets, but her parents had not been big on bringing animals into the house. She’d had some goldfish, but when those died, usually after only a few weeks, they went into the toilet or the kitchen trash.

“You put this here,” Mother said. “You were nine. No, eight.”

“What is it?”

“Not a bird.”

Nine Frights, by Jeff Mariotte
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble 

Fall Leaves and the Black Dragon, by Erik Gustafson

Posted: August 15, 2011 by Shaina in Erik Gustafson, Thriller and Suspense
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Fall Leaves and the Black Dragon, by Erik Gustafson

Fall Leaves and the Black Dragon, by Erik Gustafson


Fall Leaves and the Black Dragon, by Erik Gustafson
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Sony

Description:  Somehow six-year-old Willy survived a huge fire. The memory of the flames engulfed his childhood and haunted him for years. Terrible secrets that should have burned away have come back. Now an adult, he must return to Iowa, with his best friend by his side, and confront the evil that haunts him. The dark secrets that await them threaten their very lives.

Excerpt:

My earliest childhood memory is something much worse. My earliest childhood memory happened to be the worst day of my life and occurred when I was six years old.

That’s the day I met the black dragon for the first time.

When you are six and you see a dragon you don’t doubt what you see. Believe me a six year old is in no way prepared to go up against a real fire-breathing dragon. Back in 1975, I was still Willy, a skinny blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who liked running through backyards playing Army.

I had no awareness of being alive before the tragedy that unfolded that terrible night. I can still recount the events as if they had just happened. A therapist once told me that type of memory is what is known as a flashbulb memory. She went on to explain that flashbulb memories are usually very vivid but not always accurate in every detail.

This is my well-hidden, rarely discussed flashbulb memory.

That evening, I remember the sun was sleeping somewhere out of sight, draining the sky into the dark purples of dusk; just before most of the stars reveal themselves. I was in my room but I don’t remember what I was doing. I must have gotten bored. Out in the living room, I could hear my parents laughing and signing along to a Rolling Stones album. Mostly my dad sang and my mom laughed. I was drawn by the laughter and started roaming the house. I think I stood in the doorway at the end hallway watching them sing for a few minutes. I couldn’t linger long or my mom would start singing my name and make me dance with her. I wasn’t that bored.

“Mom I’m going out to play!” I shouted above the music.

My mom raised her hand in acknowledgment but never looked away from my dad who was making a fool of himself singing like he was Mick Jagger.

My dad, singing like a mad man along to the album, pointed at me and shouted “You can’t always get what you want…”

His screaming impression of Mick Jagger continued as I laughed and fled through the kitchen.

I could still smell the hamburgers we ate that night for dinner. There was a white-painted wooden door out the back with a large knob that was painted to match the door. I turned that knob and opened the door then I shoved the flimsy screen door and it rattled open.

“…ya get what ya need!!!” I heard my dad howl as I stepped outside. I remember not being able to hear the old door close behind me that night. Instead I heard crickets singing in front of me and my dad singing behind me.

The inside of my home fell off behind me and the expanse of the backyard unfolded before me.

I paused on the wooden deck and stood next to a green metal lawn chair while I scanned the yard. When I did that, I always noticed two things pretty fast. The first was that our backyard was always disappointingly empty. We didn’t have a cool shed that some of my friends had; sheds that could double as a cowboy fort or a space ship or a secret hideout. We didn’t own a swing set or a sandbox. We didn’t even have a doghouse or a sleepy hound to look up at me as he napped in said doghouse for that matter. Our backyard usually only had a black Weber grill and a dusty, faded-red lawnmower in it. The other thing I always noticed was that, despite the yards’ emptiness, this backyard was always somehow an amazing place to play.

To my creative little mind, my unfilled yard was a fortress surrounded by walls of evergreens pointing skyward, thick trunks of maple trees and spindly bushes hunched around the boundaries on all three sides. The closely spaced trunks, hanging branches and undergrowth all snuggled together to form hidden pathways that I crawled through and hid in. The rows of woody stemmed shrubs made small spaces and cubbyholes to play in and around.

These green walls were always there protecting our yard from any number of invaders- medieval, Native Americans, Confederate soldiers, World War Two Germans, the Vietcong, or even aliens.

I remember there were two mulberries trees way in the back that we loved to munch from all summer. I also remember the bottoms of my feet being stained purple most of the summer from squishing those delicious treats.

But tonight there was something more.

Fall was smothering the lust from summer, so by then dry leaves of all colors covered the ground. Only a few solitary leaves clung to the branches and bushes, making them look like thin, spiked hair. The wind had blown the leaves around the yard but the majority had clumped up against the trees making deep, crunchy drifts. The backyard itself had a few un-raked patches of leaves that looked like small brown islands in a sea of green grass. I always wished my dad would rake those leaves into a pile for me to jump in but the truth is I don’t remember playing in the leaves. My therapist has told me that not being able to remember something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Maybe I jumped and rolled in the raked leaves with my dad maybe I didn’t.

Just about a minute after I went outside, a small boy ducked out from between two bushes along the side yard. It was Rich Cooper. Rich was a real good friend and my next-door neighbor. He had messy black hair and was always grinning. He was holding an orange bucket I knew was stuffed full of little plastic army men.

“Hey, Willy!” his voice was eager with adventure.

“Hi Rich!”

I was happy to see him and charged out to greet him.

We walked the short length of the yard and started playing back in one of the corners. Our cove was a shadowy setting beneath the dark purple sky surrounded by trees that looked like dangling skeletons in a dark closet. That sounds frightening, but I didn’t pay any attention to that fact- it was too much fun! We snuggled back into a recess among the bushes and trees then squatted down on the dry leaves. They crunched under us.

Rich dumped the Army soldiers out of the bucket and we started setting troops up all around us, poised in the leaves and behind the sticks.

“The bad guys are coming, Willy! I need back up!”

“I’m coming Rich!” I shouted and started making my little soldiers advance in the leaves. War was declared in our nest as soldiers were running about ambushing each other and radioing in for backup.

We were busy making little machine gun noises and explosions.

It was getting dark fast and hard to see. I looked back toward our house and saw the kitchen was now lit up and the porch light above the deck was on casting off a white circle of light.

The color was draining from the leaves around us until they blended with the shadows and the evening sky. Rich stood up and pulled a red box out from under his shirt and dropped it in the leaves.

It was a box of wooden matches.

I remember looking down at the small rectangular box and marveling. “Cool!” I quipped with excitement. My superego didn’t start screaming warnings that matches were dangerous or that I should flee; nothing like that at all happened. I was six after all.

We both plopped down in the leaves again around the box like we had just unearthed a treasure chest that we were about to open.

“Let’s try one!” Rich whispered.

Rich slid open the box and pulled out a match. He struck it across the flint and the alcove we playing in exploded with light and the smell of sulfur was strong. My eyes squinted and when I looked again my friend was holding a wooden match with a brilliant orange ballerina dancing atop the stick.

He was giggling and waving it around.

“Incoming!” he yelled and pretended the match was a missile. He made a huge arc with his arm. It looked like a rocket ship blasting off into the sky, the way he made it soar up.

“You will never get me!” I started making a few of my soldiers retreat. Then he swung his arm back down and the flame was a falling star, bearing down on one of my plastic army guys but it went out.

I started making my machine guns noises again; spit was flying everywhere.

Rich pulled out another match and lit it.

He held the new match against the barrel of a machine gun until it twisted and shriveled into a stinky black stump. It reminded me of the way the wicked witch’s legs curled up when Dorothy’s house fell on her in the Wizard of Oz.

I was smiling in awe. Then the flame went out and it was dark again.

“Lemme do one!” I grabbed the box of matches out of the pile of leaves and yanked the small stick across the side of the box.

“Ahhh” Rich cried as I burned the barrel of a bazooka that one of his soldiers was carrying.

It was so much fun.

Not to be outdone, Rich slid open the little Matchbox and pulled out two of the wooden sticks and he smiled. Rich held the two matches in between his thumb and forefinger then drug the matches along the flint. It was a huge burst of light and it startled us both!

Rich dropped the box.

The small redheaded sticks fell all over our legs and the leaves around us. Many of the matches seemed to vanish right away into the leaves. There must have been hundreds of matches in one of those little red boxes. The scene reminded me of a game from my childhood called pick-up sticks.

But right then those sticks looked like a logjam in a leafy river. We were in that river.

Matches were everywhere.

From what I remember, I watched Rich hold a match that was burning down toward his fingers, the black burnt part twisted like a witch’s finger at me. We were both still laughing as his tiny fingers that were pinching the flaming torch just stopped squeezing. It may have started to burn his fingers, maybe his eyes shifted his attention to marvel at the match mess before us, or maybe he just forgot the match was in his hand. No way of knowing what happened but time seemed to freeze at that moment when that match fell.

Most times a dropped match extinguishes itself on the way to the ground, but not that night.

At first it was just a leaf next to his bare foot curling and turning black with smoke rolling out from under it. Then there was a sharp hiss as a new match ignited.

And crackling.

After that, flames spread very quickly. Fire seemed at once to explode all around us as if the scene were a coordinate performance on a stage. The only thing I could think was that an angry dragon, swooping down from the sky, was spraying its fiery breath down on us. Huge balls of fire ignited in the piles of leaves and in the trees.

We were screaming.

I tried to stand but I put my knee on a half melted radioman and it burned so bad I fell over. The plastic soldier was stuck to my knee. It stuck to my hand too when I tried to brush it off, leaving sinews of green plastic going between my hand and knee.

I looked over at Rich through the smoke and growing blaze. For an instant I wasn’t sure what I was seeing: I watched Rich’s bare foot turn orange and seem to dance.

It was like an optical illusion.

The area around us became so hot and so bright I could no longer see Rich but I could still hear him screaming. Screaming seemed to be coming from everywhere. I could hear the terrifying roar of what I was certain was a dragon high above us. I started screaming, I could feel my skin getting hot, and I was sweating all over.

I couldn’t tell which direction I could escape to, I could only see fire.

I craned my neck back and looked up through the bony tree branches into the sky. The night was black. I was trying to see if a dragon was really flying through the sky but I couldn’t find it. I heard it roar several times and saw the arcs of fire so I knew the dragon was still there.

And then through my burning eyes, I saw it for the first time. A huge black dragon with giant pointy wings spread wide, flying overhead. I glimpsed the beast between billows of smoke.

Everything seemed to be screaming: the fire, the trees, the bushes. Everything was bellowing out in protest and pain. I don’t know how many times the dragon attacked us and breathed its horrible fire down on us that night.

I don’t know why the dragon attacked us.

I didn’t know what to do. I was coughing and choking. I could smell leaves and other horrible things burning. I don’t know how long I thrashed in the fire but I was yanked out of the flame-ridden cave and my mom on top of me.

She rolled over me and began slapping me all over my body. It was hard to breathe.

I was screaming and crying. She was screaming and crying too.

I lay in the grass coughing next to my mom. The rest of the world seemed so dark next to the burning corner of our backyard. I looked up at cords of flames curling and climbing up the leafless branches.

I searched the sky for the dragon as I lay on my back but all I saw were the stars and the half moon.

I heard sirens and they were getting louder.

My dad was there as well. He grabbed my little arm with one of his large hands, grabbed my mom’s hand with his other hand, and drug us farther away from the hot flames.

People were running everywhere.

That ended the horrible evening of October sixth.

Fall Leaves and the Black Dragon, by Erik Gustafson
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Sony

Mental Shrillness, by Todd Russell

Posted: August 11, 2011 by Shaina in Thriller and Suspense, Todd Russell
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Mental Shrillness, by Todd Russell

Mental Shrillness, by Todd Russell

Mental Shrillness, by Todd Russell
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

Description:   The Mental Shrillness ward will shock with six twist ending horror tales: a never blinking glass eye begs its host for extraction, a wife’s flesh ghastly transformed by her husband’s secrets, a misshapen creature unlocks the afterlife’s gates, a dark, twisted marriage vow plus two award winning stories. This version contains four bonus stories, including an ebook exclusive story.

Excerpt:

It was his quest for the suspension of reality that held Damon Brooks captive.

He pressed another key on his laptop and wished that he could POOF! Disappear like the magician he’d always wanted to be. Life had become hideously normal. He was happily married, gainfully employed, overstocked with worldly belongings. He had everything but the daughter Linda’s doctor said they’d never have without the aid of adoption.

A sound stirred his daze.

“Linda, you hear that?”

Linda snored softly, rhythmically, her half-finished romance novel guarding her breasts. Damon peeled back the blinds and saw the bushes rustling. He heard the guttural sound again.

His breath caught upon seeing its depthless green-orange eyes. Damon edged his nose closer to the glass. He put a hand against the cool pane.

“What the hell are you?” he whispered.

It crept slowly from the bush, half-crawling, half-walking away. The streetlight’s faint beam grazed its face and Damon gasped, pulling instinctively away. His nose and breath left a pregnant fog.

Whatever creature it was its gestures were universally familiar.

It was wounded.

Damon turned to Linda who remained shackled by her dream. He pushed past his unfinished paperwork and unclosed briefcase, entering the hallway. Moving quicker, he slipped on his black loafers and moved into the kitchen. He grabbed a flashlight and his gun from the compartment beneath the sink.

He checked to see that it was still loaded. Linda was forever the spooked one when it came to prowlers and insisted upon it. Flicking on the flashlight, Damon stepped into the night and turned toward the bush.

“Nrrro liiight,” the voice grated across Damon’s brain. He quickly snapped the light off, but kept the queer target centered.

He started to ask what it was again and it rose what faintly resembled a paw. The paw-thing was wet and gleamed in the faint light. Bloody.

“Are you a dream?”

“I am an Illusion.”

“Illusion?” Damon said, stepping closer. The gun wavered in his hand. “You are neither man nor animal, what are you?”

“No time for further explanation, Damon.”

It knows my name, Damon mouthed but made no sound. His finger twitched on the trigger.

“Y-you a-are a d-dream.”

“I am dying.”

“What happened?”

The bloody paw rose again and the Illusion made a loud, strangled throaty sound.

“I’ll call 911,” Damon started away.

“NRRO!”

Damon froze.

“Only you can help me. You must take it to Harry. Your turn. Youuu.” It raised the paw even higher into the faint beam of the streetlight. Harry moved closer, the gun practically shaking from his hand.

He moved closer.

Closer.

“Nrrrooo tiiiiimmme.”

He saw the bloody paw and his stomach somersaulted. Closer.

“Harry, youuu.”

Damon reached. Only inches from the mangled paw.

The Illusion jerked and knocked the gun out of Damon’s hand.

(touch meeeee)

The neighbor Doberman’s started barking.

Damon raised the flashlight in defense but almost instantly realized the illusion wasn’t fighting. The pungent odor struck his nostrils next. He blinked several times, watching its death spasms.

Damon lowered himself and re-clicked the flashlight. The light’s beam sawed through the flesh of the Illusion, melting it like a candle. He saw its eyes fuse with its long bony nose. Its three red-white teeth outside its face pooled in the hot beam of the light.

As Damon watched the light rapidly cremate the Illusion, the realization of what was in its mangled paw seized his mind.

Nothing.

-2-

Damon awoke the next morning, showered, shaved and went straight for his jeans. Linda watched, just pulling down her covers.

“Damon, it’s Friday, dear. Not Saturday.”

“Not going to work today, honey.”

Linda reeled from the bed. “Not feeling well?”

“You could say that,” Damon pulled up his jeans and buttoned his shirt. “I’ve got to find Harry.”

“Harry who?”

“The carnival in town. He works there. A magician, I think.”

“What….why?”

Damon slapped his tennis shoes on and kissed Linda. “An unfulfilled dream.”

* * *

Karper & Sons Carnival inhabited the outskirts of Medina like a storm cloud. Once a year it fell over Medina and sucked money from the townspeople. A week later sunshine reappeared. Damon Brooks penetrated the open gate on its second day of business.

He passed the carnies and various rip-off midway games. The nearly impossible ring toss, the slightly bent machinegun with red star gag, the dart—

“Three for five bucks, mister, give it a try.” The carnie started lowering the darts and quickly reclaimed them upon catching Damon’s odd stare.

Damon’s mind stirred with the picture of the enigmatic Harry. He’d woken with Harry’s visage etched in his mind. Damon started to ask where to find Harry when a hand tapped his shoulder.

“This way,” the tattooed-faced man said. His entire face was a jigsaw puzzle.

Damon followed the short man across the midway and into a huge black tent.

Inside there were rows of bleachers and a short set of stairs leading up to a vacant stage.

“Harry will come.”

“Wait. How do you know who I’m here for?”

“Call me Stag.” He rolled up his white sleeve and showed Damon a tattoo of a set of haunting orange-green eyes on his right bicep.

ONLY YOU CAN HELP ME. YOU MUST TAKE IT TO HARRY. YOUR TURN. YOUUUU.

Stag started walking away.

“Wait! What am I doing here? Why am—Stag, please!”

Damon wanted to run, jet as far away from the carnival but his legs were uncooperative. Instead he turned toward the stage.

Slowly his legs moved him down the aisle and up the stage. There was a table with a red tablecloth and black magician’s cap. He reached, touched, and felt it crawl up his arm and under his skin.

The scream surfaced in his throat but lodged unspent.

He picked up the hat and placed it on his head.

He turned to the crowd and Mom and his stepfather Denny clapped.

“For my next trick I will pull a rabbit out of this…” He reached into the hat and paused. Staring into the small crowd he caught his mother’s mascara-smeared eyes. She looked up but wouldn’t lock eyes with him.

Damon reached into the hat and felt the mousetrap SNAP! his fingers.

The laughing in his head began. The crowd unwittingly applauded. There was Denny in the front row grinning evilly. The drunk from the abyss. He’d never belonged in either of their lives. He was the crack in the mirror, continuing to ripple and fragment until he—

“—took her to Satan?”

Damon turned, startled.

A tall man with straight black hair and a knobby face nodded slowly.

“She was a good woman—my mother—but Denny brought her misery.”

“And that mousetrap thing… that was his idea of a joke?”

Damon raised his right index and middle fingers. “Broke them in two places.”

“Denny blamed it on you, too. What were you, only ten years old?”

“Yes, said it was me just craving attention. Nobody ever believed me.”

The man moved closer into the spotlight and took the magician’s hat. He held his hand out. “I am Harry, Damon.”

-3-

Damon shook Harry’s hand, managing a smile. He was disturbed that everyone seemed to know him.

“Your confusion right now is warranted. An Illusion escaped last night.”

“Escaped?”

“We’ve known of its insecurities and instabilities around here for some time. It wanted out. For its own, well, complicated reasons. Stag was its guardian and friend. He felt betrayed and despondent. We almost had two tragedies last night.”

“What the hell did it do to me? I feel…not right.”

“Quid pro quo. It took your normal life in exchange for…”

Damon’s eyes raised and then darted around the empty auditorium. “Wait one damn minute I’m not…”

“You’re not what?” Harry replied slowly.

Damon tried picturing what happened to his real father. He could only focus on his stepfather’s wicked scowl. It was one of many first pieces that had eerily vanished from his memory.

“I…I’m having trouble…”

“This is how it begins. Soon you will lose all but pertinent pieces of your identity, Damon. Don’t fear, we will assist you with the process. You are among us, now.”

Damon fell to one knee and then a sitting position. He stared ahead, falling, falling deeper into the chasm inside his mind while Harry spoke steadily in his ear.

“You dreamed of being a magician more than anything, remember?”

“I … yes, more than anything.”

Harry extended his hand. “Your car keys, wallet and wedding ring, please.”

Damon’s hands trembled and his head throbbed. He produced his wallet, car keys and touched his wedding ring. A sharp pain lanced his temple. He saw the inside of an immaculate church flash before him.

Harry knelt and caught Damon’s fall, keeping Damon’s head from cracking the hard wooden stage.

“What is … happening to me?”

“Rest, Damon. Stag is here. He’s your friend and guardian now. We’ll handle the unimportant details.”

“No…no…I won’t…can’t s-stay…”

Suddenly a medium height brunette with entrancing brown eyes stepped from behind the curtain. She wore a tight velvet skirt and her nipples poked curiously through.

“Ah, it’s your number one assistant, Regina. Welcome darling.”

“Damon, my poor baby.” She kneeled beside him and laid her smooth hands on his cheeks. “We have a show later, baby, we need to get you in shape.”

She kissed him lightly, then harder, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

He welcomed her passion, as her hand wandered down his chest, gingerly circling his belly button with the tip of her finger.

“In…shape,” Damon whispered.

“I want you right here, baby.” She said and started undressing. She pushed his hands to her hard breasts and moaned softly.

“Right…here…” Damon’s mind had become a shell, ripe for cracking.

She pulled down his jeans, running her hand down his pants.

“Then it is settled, Damon.” Harry said, clapping his hands. “Welcome to our family.”

(!FAMILY!)

Mental Shrillness, by Todd Russell
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble

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