13
Tales of Dark Fiction
Edited by Adam Bradley
13 stories of dark fiction by
Eric S Brown
Joseph D’Lacey
Gary Fry
Andrew Hook
Shaun Jeffrey
Matt Leyshon
Gary McMahon
Andy Remic
Stanley Riiks
Tommy B. Smith
Alan Spencer
Fred Venturini
William R.D. Wood
ISBN: 978-1-4659-8904-8
Cover By Eleanor Bennett
Smashwords Edition, December 2011.
“Civil Beasts” copyright © 2011 By Eric S Brown
“Dirty Story” copyright © 2011 By Gary McMahon
“If You Lay Here Quiet Next to Me” copyright © 2011 By Alan Spencer
“Desperate Measures” copyright © 2011 By Stanley Riiks
“The Tax Collector” copyright © 2011 By Tommy B. Smith
“Organ Grinder” copyright © 2011 By William R.D. Wood
“The Machine” copyright © 2011 By Fred Venturini
“To Hear a New World” copyright © 2011 By Matt Leyshon
“Whatever It Takes” copyright © 2011 By Joseph D’Lacey
“Wounder” copyright © 2011 By Andrew Hook
“Mongrel Days” copyright © 2011 By Andy Remic
“103” copyright © 2011 By Shaun Jeffrey
“The Watchers at Work” copyright © 2011 By Gary Fry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners.
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this works has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All characters in this publication are fictional and any resemblances to persons real, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Morpheus Tales
Presents:
13
Tales of Dark Fiction
Table of Contents
Introduction: 13: Tales of Dark Fiction
If You Lay Here Quiet Next to Me By Alan Spencer
Desperate Measures By Stanley Riiks
The Tax Collector By Tommy B. Smith
Organ Grinder By William R.D. Wood
To Hear a New World By Matt Leyshon
Whatever It Takes By Joseph D’Lacey
The Watchers at Work By Gary Fry
Proofed By Samuel Diamond, Craig Saunders and Sheri White
Introduction: 13: Tales of Dark Fiction
An original anthology of dark fiction. I thought it would be a good idea. It was better than I ever imagined.
I wrote a wish list, authors I admired, authors I dreamed of working with. Names I knew would never let me publish them. How wrong I was.
Writers want to write. If you give them the freedom and the opportunity to tell a story they grasp it. The stories in this book are written by authors, both established and up-and-coming, who inspire me, thrill me, excite me and scare me.
The number 13 is considered to be an unlucky number in some countries. There is even a recognized phobia, Triskaidekaphobia. During the last supper there were thirteen people around the table. The Knights Templar arrests were sanctioned by King Philip IV of France on Friday the 13th, October 1307. Thirteen moons instead of the 12 caused headaches for monks working on calendars who considered it an “unfortunate circumstance.”
But the alternative community has taken 13 as their number. Tattooists consider 13 their symbol. Italy thinks of 13 as a lucky number. On a more personal note, my sister was born on the 13th.
As was Taylor Swift, you decide for yourself if that is unlucky or not!
13 is an original anthology of dark fiction: dark SF, dark fantasy and horror. Thirteen dark stories by thirteen (surprisingly nice and well-adjusted) authors, the anthology includes tales of murder, hurt, music, loss, writing, pain, murder, insanity, Sasquatch...
Thirteen very different stories, offering a range of dark fiction, to draw you in, to creep you out, to send shivers down your spine... To entertain you.
Adam Bradley
Civil Beasts By Eric S Brown
Private Jessie Morgan of the Union Army held his position in the trees above the road and prayed the Rebs passed by without noticing him or any of the other remaining members of his unit. His hands were shaking so bad, he was terrified his Springfield rifle might go off accidentally and doom them all. He wasn’t a newbie; Jessie had seen plenty of action in the last few days but at the moment he felt like one.
Robert, Wes, himself, and the Colonel were the only survivors that he knew of from the engagement two days earlier when the Rebs had sprang their trap. With all the fighting going on to the north in Virginia, no expected the Rebs to have such a large force, over a thousand strong, on patrol in this part of North Carolina.
Their unit had stopped near a creek they’d come across, for their midday meal and for the officers to plot their next move, when the Rebs had caught them off guard, taking out their sentries silently. No one saw or heard the bastards coming. The first volley of fire from the Rebs cut their numbers nearly in half. The Colonel rallied the men as best he could and they tried to make a stand but it was futile and hopeless. Most of the men were dead before they got to fire more than a single shot. The Colonel gave the order to retreat but there was no organization to it. By that time, it was every man for himself and everyone knew it. Most of the men were gunned down, shot in the back as they made a break for it. Jessie had narrowly escaped with his life. There had been a couple of rounds that came so close, whizzing past him as he ran, that he’d nearly wet his pants.
Jessie felt no shame in running though. His wife and son were waiting on him back home. Dying in a battle that was already lost wouldn’t help them or serve to do anything except get him a fast fall into Hell. He’d fled into the trees and kept moving until the sounds of screams and gunfire were far behind him. For a long time, he’d merely wandered about trying to decide what he should do. Jessie was alone, lost behind enemy lines. When the Colonel and the others found him, he nearly wept at the sight of them. Now, the four of them headed north. The Colonel assured them all their best hope was to stay low and keep moving. Eventually, he told them, they’d reach safety or stumble across another battle group who had fought their way through the Rebs’ lines and be able to join up with them.
None of them had any real rations to speak of and their weapons were limited too. In the chaos of the Rebs’ surprise attack and their frantic retreat, Wes left his rifle behind and Robert had nothing more than his Springfield and the uniform he wore. Between them, they had two rifles and the Colonel’s revolver which only had three bullets in its chamber.
By the second day of their flight northward, they were all exhausted and starving. Random chance and bad luck had conspired to get them stuck in their current predicament. They’d heard the Rebs coming and taken cover in the trees on the hillside. On the road below them, a wagon carrying supplies bounced along the dirt and gravel on rickety, wooden wheels. Jessie counted sixteen rebels in shoddy looking gray jackets and tattered pants. An officer sat beside the driver of the wagon riding shotgun. The rest of the Rebs were on foot, fanned out about it.
Sweat beaded on Jessie’s forehead. If the Rebs noticed them, they were dead. He glanced over at the Colonel who crouched in the brush a few feet away. The Colonel scowled at him.
Someone started screaming in the distance. Even the Colonel jumped at the sound of the bloodcurdling wail. Something was happening on the road. The Rebs had stopped. Jessie risked a peek about the tree he cowered behind to see what was going on. The Rebs stood with their rifles ready as an Indian woman with long, flowing midnight hair came running down the hill - opposite where he hid - towards them. She was yelling the same word over and over again. Her dress was torn and spotted with blood. Jessie half expected the trigger happy southern troops to gun her down before she reached them but the officer on the wagon shouted, “Hold your fire!” as the woman stumbled into their ranks.
Jessie used the moment to move closer to the Colonel, knowing the Rebs’ attention was fixed on the woman. “What’s she saying sir?” he whispered. Jessie knew the Colonel spoke Cherokee and handful of other Indian dialects.
The older man carefully leaned over to him. “I don’t know. Now, will you keep quiet?”
“But I thought you spoke... ”
“I do private but the word she keeps saying is not one I know... Sasquatch,” the Colonel repeated the word as if musing over its meaning and trying make sense of it.
“Well, whatever it is,” Jessie said,” It’s got the Rebs spooked. Should we try to take them?”
The Colonel shook his head, motioning for Wes and Robert to keep their cover as well. “No, distracted or not, there’s too many of them. Let’s see how this plays out.”
One of the Rebs shrugged his jacket from his shoulders and tried to wrap it around the woman. She broke free of him and slashed his cheek with her fingernails leaving trails of red. The man backed off stunned, pressing a hand over his wound. A second Reb offered her the canteen he carried. Slapping it from his grasp, the woman howled the word “Sasquatch!” once more and pointed into the woods. The Rebs poor attempts at comforting her turned to mockery and flat out anger.
Together, the Colonel and Jessie watched as one of the Rebs hauled back a hand and smashed a fist into the woman’s mouth to get her to shut up. She fell backwards onto her butt. Jessie could see the blood leaking from her lower lip as she sat there, eyes wide and finally silent.
The officer in charge climbed down from his seat on the wagon to the road and walked over to her where she sat. “You’re scaring my men, little missy,” the officer said. “Ain’t no such thing and we all know it. Ain‘t that right boys?”
Several of the men shouted “Yes, sir” as others bent over in laughter.
“You scared the devil’s gonna get ya squaw?” one of them taunted the woman.
The officer leaned closer to her. “You ready to behave now?”
The woman spat a mouthful of red tinted saliva into the silver hairs of his beard. “Sasquatch!” she howled again at the top of her lungs.
The officer jerked his revolver free of the holster on his hip and put a bullet into her forehead. The point blank shot blew open the back of skull as the bullet exited, spraying the gravel with hot, red liquid and bits of brain matter. As her corpse flopped over, the officer wiped at his beard with the backside of his hand. “Get her out of the way boys. We got some Yankees to go and kill. Time’s a wasting.”
Two of the Rebs picked up her still twitching body and tossed it into the grass at the side of the road. Jessie ground his teeth in anger at the sight. How could any one be so cold? he wondered. His hatred for the South and their ways grew hotter within him. They would lose this war and he swore to himself he would be there when it happened. If men like these were the best the South had to offer, maybe the Union was better without them but even so, they couldn’t be left to their own devices. The evils they committed from slavery to the cold blooded murder he’d just witnessed were too great to be allowed to continue.
The officer started to return to his seat on the wagon as a roar that sounded like fifty dogs barking together at once in perfect chorus thundered through the woods. A tree toppled over as if something had just shoved it over to the ground. The Rebs looked as if they were about to break.
“Stand your ground!” the officer yelled as the beast emerged from the woods. It stood at least eight feet tall. Thick, shaggy, brown hair covered its body from head to toe. Jessie’s breath caught in his throat as he stared at it. The thing looked strong enough to rip a grizzly apart with its bare hands.
Burning yellow eyes filled with a feral, primal rage took in the men before it as they raised their rifles. The trees echoed with the cracks of the southerners’ shots as they unleashed a volley of fire at the monster. Jessie saw the rounds hitting the beast but they didn’t look to be having any real affect on it. A few tiny dots of red blossomed in its hair but that was all. The thing stood as still as a stone statue. “Oh Lord,” Jessie muttered aloud as the beast sprang forward. It closed the distance between it and the Rebs so fast it was almost a blur to Jessie’s eyes. Reaching out, it folded the first Reb it came to backwards, snapping his spine where he stood. It backhanded another with such brutal power the man’s head left his shoulders in a bloody spray and went rolling through the dirt. A few of the Rebs were attempting to reload their Springfields but most of them were scattering and making a run for it.
The horses were squealing, straining against their reigns. The driver lost control of them and they pulled him and the wagon with them as they tried to flee. The beast blocked their path. Its huge hands ended the horses’ lives with quick blows to their heads as the wagon turned over, crushing the driver beneath it.
The beast roared again as the officer, who was either too brave for his own good or very stupid, advanced on it emptying his revolver into its chest. He got so close that the barrel of his weapon was nearly touching the monster’s brown hair as he fired his final bullet. The beast grunted as the round ripped into its flash from the point blank shot. The officer looked up at the beast in disbelief that it was still very much alive as its hands closed on him and hefted him into the air above it. With an angry grunt, it tore him literally in half. The beast threw his two halves in different directions as the officer’s shredded intestines flopped in the wind.
Jessie felt his heart stop beating as the beast looked straight into his eyes. He had no idea how it knew he was there but it did. There was no question of that. Maybe it had smelt his fear. It didn’t matter. All the Rebs who hadn‘t taken off were dead now. It would be coming for them next.
“Run!” he heard the Colonel shout next to him. Wes and Robert were already moving, their legs pumping under them as they scurried further up the hill. The Colonel took off after them. Fighting Rebs was one thing. Fighting a demon beast straight from the depths of Hell itself was another altogether.
Jessie couldn’t move. He was frozen with terror as the beast stepped over the bodies of the dead rebels and charged towards him. His Springfield slipped from his trembling hands as the beast towered above him. “Oh Lord, please no,” he managed to say aloud before two, large hair-covered hands slapped together on the sides of his skull and his brain matter burst into the air between them.
Eric S Brown is the author of numerous books including Bigfoot War, Bigfoot War II, War of the Worlds Plus Blood Guts and Zombies, Season of Rot, and World War of the Dead to name only a few. His short fiction has been published hundreds of times. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and son where he continues to write tales of flesh eating corpses, blazing guns, and the things that lurk in the woods.
Dirty Story By Gary McMahon
(For Rob Shearman)
That night, when he got home from work, Harry couldn’t get all the dirt out from under his fingernails. He washed his hands in the sink, using washing-up liquid mixed with sugar (an old trick a mechanic friend had once shown him), but the dirt wouldn’t budge. He scrubbed his nails in the shower, but still it didn’t clean off. Finally, in an effort to promote sleep, he took a long bath, and while he was in there he once again took out the scrubbing brush and scrubbed his fingernails until the fingertips began to ache. The dirt, despite a lot of it being removed by the process, remained smeared and ugly-looking.
“It’s weird,” he said to Sharon, on the phone, later that evening. “I keep cleaning my hands but the muck under my nails just doesn’t seem to shift. I can see it coming off the skin, but it’s like there’s more replacing it.”
“You always were a filthy bastard,” said Sharon, giggling. Then she started to talk dirty, just the way Harry liked it, and all thoughts of his reddened fingers – and his grubby fingernails – were forgotten. He couldn’t see them properly in the dark anyway, and once those fingers were clasped around his prick they felt clean enough. Especially when he pretended it was Sharon’s hand stroking him to climax rather than his own.
He slept for a little while, about two hours. This was better than usual; certainly it was longer than the night before. He reached out to turn on the bedside lamp, and once again noticed the blackened ends of his fingernails. Sighing, he grabbed the book he’d been reading and opened the page to the part he’d got up to yesterday. It was a good book, a political thriller, and soon he was lost in a fictional world of spies and intrigue.
When morning arrived he was dozing. He hadn’t quite managed a proper sleep after his nap, but had slipped in and out of a light snooze. He didn’t feel very refreshed; a headache was forming behind his eyes. He got up, showered and dressed in his work clothes, and then left the house without having breakfast.
The work was backbreaking that morning. Harry and his crew had to dig up one side of a small residential street in the suburbs, making ready a trench for the installation of fibre optic cabling. Most of the time Harry liked his job: It was easy, if strenuous, and allowed him the time to think about things that a more technical position would not. He’d lied about his qualifications to get this job, pretending that he didn’t have a degree and that he had failed all his O-Levels at school. It had been easy when he thought about it; because what kind of idiot would lie about something like that?
The simple life. It was all he wanted now, after everything that had happened. His wife’s death had changed things. The cancer that had consumed her had also eaten into him in some way, stripping away some essential part of him and how he perceived things. The world looked flat and uninteresting, and the only vividness in his life came from the many books he read at night and his purely sexual relationship with Sharon.
“Shower broken?” Jake, the man digging next to him motioned with his head towards Harry’s hands. “Or has your water been cut off?” He smiled, showing the gap where his front two teeth should be.
“Oh,” said Harry. “No. It’s strange, but I just couldn’t get my hands clean last night.”
Jake was a big man. He wasn’t fat, just large all over, like an old-fashioned wrestler, the kind that used to grapple on television on a Sunday afternoon when Harry was a child. “It gets like that sometimes. This job. Always digging, digging, digging… Making holes, disturbing the dirt. It gets on your hands and under your skin. All over your life. Sometimes it feels like it’ll never wash off.”
Harry nodded at his workmate’s profundity, unsure of what he could possibly add.
Jake smiled his urchin-smile. “It will, though. It will come off. If you scrub for long enough.” He smiled again, and then bent over his shovel to try and dislodge a large rock that looked like it had been there a million years.
Sharon rang Harry on his mobile during his lunch break. She was on her lunch break, too, and sitting in the park eating her sandwiches, feeding the ducks and watching the world go by. At least that’s what she said when he asked where she was calling from.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
Harry closed his eyes and then opened them again. The quiet street was still there. Jake was sitting on the edge of the hole they’d dug, eating a Pot Noodle and staring at the unrelenting rock. The other men were scattered around, some of them going to the chip shop round the corner. Cars passed by the end of the street. A woman walked with a dog in the direction of the park. The dog was tugging on its lead, trying to get ahead of her, to force the pace, but the woman was battling against it.
“I need more from this, Harry. It’s great – don’t get me wrong on that score. The sex is, well, terrific. I like being with you, and talking to you. But I want a little bit more than you’re giving me right now.”
There was a pause that Harry was expected to fill. He coughed. He threw away the rest of his tuna sandwich. “I know. I’ve known for a while now. It’s just that I have to take things slowly. I can’t rush into anything. It’s only been two years.”
“Two years is a long time, Harry. And it’s not as if you’ve been suffering in silence and crying into your pillow every night. I’ve been there for you, holding your hand, helping you when things got tough. I think I deserve a little bit of recognition for that. Don’t I?”
His headache threatened to start up again. There was a ringing sound in his ears. He looked down at his left hand where it was resting in his lap. The skin was filthy, covered in the dirt from the hole in the ground.
“Well, don’t I?”
He nodded. “Yes. Yes, you do. It isn’t fair, I suppose. You’re a good woman, Sharon. We get on well together.” And he realised that he wasn’t being dishonest; that was exactly how he felt.
“So? What does that mean?” She didn’t sound angry, or even anxious. All she wanted was to get her point across, and for him to make his own standpoint clear. She was being fair; she wasn’t trying to force the pace, unlike that overeager dog on its short lead.
“Come round tonight. We’ll have a proper chat. I’ll make a stir fry.”
“That’s good, Harry. It’s what I hoped you’d say. I’m not going to push things, but I do feel that we need to move forward, even if it’s just a few steps.”
He nodded again, and was about to say something when he realised that she’d hung up without saying goodbye. She often did that, but it never annoyed him. That fact in itself, he thought, must mean something in terms of their relationship.
They finished their shift early that afternoon because it was a Friday. The rest of the boys went off to the pub – it was someone’s birthday. Harry cried off, saying that he had a headache. It wasn’t a lie, not really, just an exaggeration of the truth. So instead he went to the local supermarket and bought the ingredients for dinner: some chicken breasts, a green pepper, a bunch of spring onions, a sealed plastic packet of noodles, and two bottles of white wine. He felt ashamed of his dirty hands at the checkout, and the woman behind the till raised her eyebrows, as if judging him. He smiled awkwardly and tried to keep his hands hidden, but that proved impossible as he packed his bags and particularly when he had to pay the bill.
When he got home he ran another hot bath; too hot to sit in, really, but he climbed into the tub anyway, wincing and watching as his thighs turned pink. He scrubbed and he scrubbed, but still the dirt wouldn’t vanish. A lot of it came out from under his nails, and he did manage to get his hands quite clean, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get rid of the dirt completely. It was as if the area under his nails kept filling up again; like dirt was bleeding from the spot directly beneath each cuticle. Even when he got out and trimmed his fingernails with a pair of curved manicure scissors, the dirt stayed where it was.
He thought about wearing gloves for the evening, but decided that it would just look silly. He couldn’t imagine cooking and serving stir fry whilst wearing a pair of leather driving gloves, or yellow rubber marigolds. Sharon would probably think he’d suffered some kind of mental breakdown and want to talk it all out in that perfectly reasonable and rational way of hers.
Sharon arrived at eight o’clock. She was wearing a short skirt, a tight sweater, and the kinky little ankle-high boots he liked. They kissed awkwardly in the hallway of his flat, and then he moved aside to let her through into the living room.
“Hungry?” he said.
She nodded. “Starving. Work was a bugger today – I haven’t eaten a thing since lunch, and that was only a sandwich and a bag of prawn cocktail crisps.” She sat down at the dining table and smiled at him.
“I’ll get the wine,” he said. “Dinner won’t take long to prepare.”
After they’d eaten they continued to sit at the dining table rather than move onto the sofa. She helped him clear the dishes first, and pile them into the sink, but they returned to their seats as if they were both afraid to stray from the neutral territory where they’d eaten.
“I hope I wasn’t being too pushy when we spoke on the phone.” She lifted her glass and drank, licking her lips as she moved the glass back away from her mouth and placed it on the table without letting go of the stem.
“No, not at all.” He placed both hands on the table, but curled his dirty fingertips under his palms. “I think we’re probably overdue a little talk like this one. It couldn’t go on forever, not like that.” He glanced at his knuckles. Where they dirty, too, or was the dim light just making them seem that way?
“I’m not asking you to marry me, Harry. Nothing like that. I just want an indication that you’re at least serious about this – about us. I’m serious about you. You know that. But you never give on if you feel the same, or if all I am to you is a regular shag.”
He smiled at her bluntness. It was something else he liked. “You have to understand that after Sally died I swore I’d never allow my life to get complicated again. All the grime and the grubbiness of everyday existence, I promised that I’d do everything within my power to reduce it. So I left my job and started working on the road gang, I sold my car and started using buses and trains. I simplified my life as best I could.”
But hadn’t he almost gone much further than that in the pursuit of this notion of simplicity and cleanliness? He’d read in a magazine that there was a growing social movement, probably in America, where young people had sold their houses and possessions, and lived on the move, using a rented P.O. box as a registered postal address. He’d considered it himself: getting rid of everything but his mobile phone and his iPod and their relevant chargers, living out of a rucksack and sleeping in squats and abandoned buildings. He could even buy a Kindle, he’d thought, on which to read his beloved books…
“Then I came along and spoiled your plans.” He’d almost forgotten that Sharon was there. She cocked her head and grinned, but there was a deep sadness behind her eyes that he’d seen before – one that she kept just for him, to use during these peculiar moments of near-connection they sometimes shared.
“I suppose you did. Just as I thought I’d stripped it all down, cleaned everything up, you stepped in and brought back the messiness of emotional involvement. I didn’t know my wife long. We were only married for two years, and had known each other for only a year before that. But she was everything to me. She was a beautiful kind of chaos.” He felt a stinging sensation in his eyes and tried desperately not to cry.
“I know,” said Sharon. “I know, and it’s okay. Like I said, I don’t want the world. Just a little bit of it, so that I can filth it up. Leave my stain.” She smiled again, and this time the sadness lifted.
Later that night, long after Sharon had gone home claiming that she thought he needed to be alone to think about everything they’d discussed, Harry lay awake and stared into his room. The curtains were open; street light illuminated the walls and the ceiling. He kept his hands above the covers and stared at them, turning them over and over before his eyes. The dirt had emerged from beneath his fingernails, and like a henna tattoo it marked the skin of his hands and wrists. He felt tired – exhausted, really – and it could have been a trick his mind was playing, but it really did look like the dirt was spreading, trying to infest the rest of his body.
He got out of bed and went into the bathroom, not bothering to turn on the lights. He didn’t want to see his hands clearly. He was happy to look at them in the sodium-gloom. He stood at the sink for an hour, trying to get them clean. Every time he made some kind of progress, rubbing the dirt from his hands, grime seemed to leak out from under his fingernails and creep along the insides of his fingers.
Finally he went back to bed, and this time he slept. He dreamed of being underground, walking in dark tunnels. He was lost; he didn’t know which way to go. The darkness was absolute, like something solid he needed to push through. He could feel the loose dirt dropping from the walls and the roof of the tunnel; it clung to his skin, matted his hair, and blinded his eyes in the darkness. Something was hovering in the air ahead of him, like a giant moth but with a small, filthy human head, and it was trying to lead him up to the surface. Or perhaps it was leading him deeper into the dirty dark of those tunnels.
The next morning he was awake later than usual, but only because he’d managed to sleep. Yet he felt more tired than ever, as if the very act of sleeping had drained away some vital essence, siphoning it off as he lay there with his eyes closed, lost in those subterranean tunnels as he followed the hovering thing-with-a-person’s-face and dirt-smeared cheeks.
He shifted on the mattress, trying to gain an upright position. His neck ached, the muscles in his shoulders were tight, and his face felt as loose and floppy as a wet paper bag. He looked down at his hands and they were black. The nails, the fingers, even the palms as he turned them over to take a look. A jet black substance, like coal dust, coated them. He could see it pulsing slowly at the ends of his fingers, coming from under his nails and swarming like tiny insects across his skin.
“What the hell is this?” He rolled out of bed and ran to the bathroom, stripping off his clothes with his filthy hands. He left handprints everywhere: on his clothes, on the bathroom tiles, on the glass of the shower cubicle. He stood in the shower for ages, and used two whole bars of soap to get his hands clean. When he was finished he reached out and turned off the water. The skin of his hands was livid, a raw, mincemeat red. But the dirt was still under his fingernails, slivers of grime that he would never be rid of.
He walked back out into the main part of the flat, wrapped in a long towel Sally had stolen from a hotel in York. He remembered the time fondly; their first dirty weekend.
He sat down on the sofa and reached for the phone. He dialled Sharon’s number. She answered on the fourth ring.
“I’m sorry,” he said, staring at the wall, at a framed painting he could not remember buying. “I don’t know if I can keep going with this.”
“Tell me, Harry. What is it? What’s happened?”
“I scrub and I scrub and they won’t get clean. There’s dirt under my fingernails, all over my hands, and it won’t come off.”
“Listen to me. This will pass. The guilt will pass. I know it’s a big step, reinvesting yourself in the world, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to stay dirty. The world’s a grubby place, yes, and it’s covered in scum and dirt and grime… but it’s also wonderful. Oil-slick rainbows, dung beetles making their homes out of shit, the blood and slime that coats a newborn baby.” She was extending what she thought was his personal metaphor, looking for a way inside his problems. He could almost love her for that. “Nobody can stay clean. It doesn’t work like that. You have to get dirty if you want to live your life. You might get covered in muck but the people who love you will always be there to help you get clean again.”
And didn’t what she was saying make a kind of sense? Your loved ones would always scrub you down, clean you off, and make sure you didn’t stay dirty. That was part of what they did; it was what they were there for. Sally had kept him clean; she’d made sure he stayed out of the deeper areas of grime. Beautiful chaos, that’s what he’d called her… and she had been exactly that. The very fact that she existed in his world had kept everything else at bay, reacting against and fighting through the worst of the filth that life could throw at him.
Couldn’t Sharon do the same, if he let her? She was willing enough, and patient and loving. She might be the one to help him clean himself. She could be his soap.
“I’ll see you this evening,” he said. “I’ll come over and we’ll go out for a Chinese – that place you like so much. Let’s go there, on me. Let’s call it a first date. A new first date…a second one”
“I’ll see you then,” she said, and hung up without saying goodbye.
Harry hung up the phone and looked at his hands. The ends of his fingers were stained, like those of a heavy smoker, but the staining was dark brown, turning black. He watched as it ate into his skin, like the cancer that had taken his wife. Despite what Sharon had said on the phone, it was still there: the dirt, the grime, the filth of entanglement. It would never wash off, not for good. It would always come back, probably stronger and darker than ever. Even Sharon wasn’t clean enough to help him.
He’d been foolish to even hope for anything else.
Harry decided to go for a walk, just to try and clear his head if not his hands. He shrugged on his coat and walked into town, feeling as if everyone was looking at him, as if they could see the filth on him. He tried to keep to the side streets, but that made him feel like he was creeping around, a dirty little thief in the night. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself; that was all. He wanted to be left alone to think about things.
Before long he came to a small park. He couldn’t recall ever being there before, but the park looked old, maybe Victorian. There was a cast iron fence around the grassed area, and the gates were wide and ornamental. Low benches were dotted around the inside perimeter, and at the centre of the enclosed area there was a nice flower bed. The place was empty this late at night, but Harry suspected that during daylight hours local office workers probably congregated here to eat their packed lunches and read their airport paperbacks.
Harry sat on one of the benches and examined his hands. They were filthy. His throat felt dry and his eyes itched. He started to cough, a deep, hacking sensation right at the back of his throat. He couldn’t stop; the coughing just got worse. For a moment he thought he was going to choke, right there beside the bright little explosion of flowers. He grabbed at his neck, closed his eyes, and wished away the pain. Then, abruptly, he felt something dislodge inside his chest and hitch up into his throat. The coughing helped move whatever it was out of his gullet and into his mouth, and he spat it out onto the ground.
He’d coughed up what looked like a large chuck of mud, a dense lozenge of compacted dirt. The mud-ball sat there, not doing much of anything, just making itself known. The dirt was inside him now, deep inside where nobody could see. It wasn’t just on the surface of his skin; it had dug right into him, polluting his blood and his organs. Maybe it had always been there.
Harry waited until he felt like moving again, and then he got up and headed home, wishing that he’d stayed indoors. He kept his hands in his pockets and tried to hide his face beneath the wide collar of his coat. His throat hurt. He prayed that he wouldn’t bring up anything else as he traced the route back through thankfully quiet streets.
He went straight to the bathroom when he got home. By the time he’d reached the mirror, the dirt had spread everywhere. He took off his clothes and stood there naked, inspecting his body. Trails of dirt ran along his arms, across his shoulders, and moved like a shadow across his chest, shading over the area of his heart and lungs. His neck turned grimy; his cheeks took on a grubbiness that made him wince. By the time his eyes started to fill with dirt, it was too late to do anything but accept what was happening to him.
“I’m sorry, Sharon,” he said through a mouthful of gritty dirt. “But I tried.”
He rubbed at his eyes, clearing them enough that he could see to grab his manicure scissors from the shelf. This time he wasn’t about to cut his nails. He opened the scissors wide, baring the blades, and acted without thinking too much about what he was trying to do. The skin of his forearms parted like rubber sheeting. Dirt trickled out of the wounds, pattering onto the floor to form small, messy piles at his feet. There was no pain; he was already too deep inside the tunnels of his dream for that.
He cut and he cut and he continued to cut, looking for the source of the mess, the shitty little end of the tawdry little rainbow. Hopefully the human-headed moth-thing would appear to lead him where he needed to go. Or had that simply been a figment of his imagination, a convenient image of hope in an unimaginably filthy world?
I always did have a dirty mind, he thought, poised at the lip of hysteria. Then, managing to compose himself, he smiled. And a thin dark line of soil dribbled from between his grubby lips, running down his chin to create a grainy little beard of filth.
Not long afterwards he put away the manicure scissors.
He stayed in the bathroom the rest of the day, watching in the mirror the gradual build-up of dirt across his body, the shell that was slowly cocooning him. He hoped that whatever he was about to become would hatch out and emerge from the filth in time to take Sharon to dinner.
Gary McMahon’s short fiction has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of the novels Hungry Hearts from Abaddon Books, Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things from Angry Robot/Osprey and The Concrete Grove trilogy from Solaris.
If You Lay Here Quiet Next to Me By Alan Spencer
“Don’t ever go in that room, Stacy. It’s not a place I want you to go.”
Before she could remember why she couldn’t enter that nook in the bedroom, that glorified closet, she once again succumbed to a bout of dizzy confusion. Always confused. How did she get here in the first place? - in Robert’s flat? That was his name, she believed, though she had only recalled that after he had called himself “Robert”. The memory of getting here and arriving at this point laying down on the bed, his bed, open eyed and staring at the padlocked door across the foot of the bed, wouldn’t occur.
Glancing at the suspicious door, she asked him, “Am I locked in, Robert?”
Then she was bringing him in close, the black-haired man who smelled of fresh shaving cream - and how his face was so smooth; she didn’t want to be affectionate with him unless he’d just shaved - kissing him on the lips and teasing that special place under his neck and jaw line that always tickled him. She kept him near, the man she loved, who she now knew again, and declared, “I love you, Robert. I’ve missed you. How long have I been here? Did I stay the night?”
She assumed she stayed the night, the morning light barely lighting up the closed drapes from the other side.
“No, Stacy, you’ve been here all this time. It’s like you never left.”
Then she shoved him away by pressing against both his shoulders, horrified by this strange man who seemed so comfortable - comfortable enough to clutch her breasts between kisses and admire her with knowing, familiar eyes - and she cried out, “Just who the hell are you?”
Weak with tears, the source depleted from so many forced cries and delirious fits of confusion, she asked herself why did she smell like this man? Why was the bed so familiar? Where could she run to and escape?
Robert watched her across the room, his back against the wall, his eyes doughy and on the verge of tears. He then shook his head in defeat, and he walked to a shelf of old pictures and removed a white leather bound book.
She shirked from him as he closed in, and the man quickly reassured her, “It’s safe. I’m not going to hurt you. I want to show you some pictures. It’ll get you up to speed, baby. I promise.”
“Don’t call me baby,” she hissed, glaring at him and the leather bound books in offense. “I don’t know you. Why am I on your bed? Why do I smell like you? Why-am-I-here?”
“Oh Robert, it’s you - it’s you!” She put the side of her hand along the back of his neck and brought him in for a hearty kiss. “I love you, sweetie. What’s this? You brought out our wedding photos.”
She thumbed through them, the photos taken outside of Lake Vernon, their altar and ceremony at the foot of the woods, as was the glistening blue waters of the lake standing out in the background. She was about to remove the picture of their kiss after Preacher Louis Gordon said, “You may now kiss the bride” when Robert snuck out of the room in a hurry, saying he had to go to work and would be back soon.
Alone now, she realized how the room wasn’t larger than an apartment’s. The walls grew in close after awhile, as if drawing in on her, and she squeezed the pillows to her body for comfort. Reacting, she steeled herself, gathering the courage to rush the door and turn the knob. The lock crunched, failing to open.
That left the padlocked door.
What was behind it?
She fiddled with the lock, even going as far as using her hairpin to attempt to pick it, but it only broke in half. Her hair fell about her face, those wavy golden locks rendering her blind. Then the fatigue hit her, so awfully tired, she barely managed to flop onto the bed and fall into a deep, deep sleep.
She awoke to Robert sleeping next to her. It was nighttime again, the room bathed in pitch. But was it Robert? He was a formless shape beneath the blanket, and in one wild swipe, she threw the layer off, and there he was, her husband, the man she fell in love with upon meeting him at a local coffeehouse hangout. At the time, he’d been an EMT who aspired to be a firefighter and was studying for his Fire Science classes. They shared a booth one day when the place was jam-packed, and a friendly conversation between strangers became so much more over a semester-
-screaming in horror, she raked her nails down his chest, repelled by this interloper, this evil awful man playing games with her, locking her in this room, keeping her so tired and out-of-sorts, and why was it stifling hot in this room? Robert reeled in pain from the red trenches drawn jagged along his face. The afflicted man staggered backwards until he teetered awkwardly off the bed.
“Please, let me go, whoever you are! I want out of this room!”
Robert, from the floor, insisted to her through grunts of pain, “You don’t want out of this room. I let you out once, and I brought you back. After that, you told me you didn’t want to be out of this room ever again. Think, Stacy, try to remember where you came from. Focus. Think as hard as you can, baby.” He issued those statement while bright red blood seeped from between his fingers.
She stared and stared and stared at this man and tried to recollect a shred of her memory, that special part of her mind that seemed to be gone forever. Nothing could trigger a synaptic reaction. Dwelling on what she couldn’t figure out, she noticed Robert was asleep again. Watching him, his voice filled her mind:
“Just lay down, Stacy, lay down next to me, and everything will be okay. Everything will be as you remembered it to be, if you just lay down next to me.” The words kept cycling in her mind, as she’d heard them many times before. “If you lay here quiet next to me, all will be well, all will be as it used to be, if you let yourself think, think about what has been done and what has changed, if you lay here quiet next to me...”
Then the black surrounded her, in veils, as if black sheets flapped for miles all around her. She then fell asleep, laying there as she was told to do earlier, thinking, letting herself process, and it only grew darker, so dark, she was nothing in this ether, buried in colors so bleak, the colors that hid other bodies, others like her, others who couldn’t escape, because they couldn’t see out far enough, but she could, because her eyes had adjusted to this extreme darkness. Or was it that she’d been here long enough to know others were out there without seeing them? Only sensing them? But did they see her too? Would they know of her? How long would it be before they began to scream at her like she would at them, each side in helpless terror as the dark began to suck them all in, snuffing their airways, and blocking their eyes just enough so all anyone could see were the bodies floating in the darkness and the look of complete terror on their faces. It wasn’t long, maybe seconds, before she couldn’t take it anymore-
-”You’re with me now, baby, you’re here,” Robert blathered, poised over her, shaking her, rousing her awake. “It’s safe now. I love you, Stacy; you’re in a good place now. You’re no longer there.”
She was in a good place now, yes, and being so grateful, she brought in Robert close, the hug so tight and so powerful. It was a happy reunion until she asked, “Can I leave this room? I can’t stand it in here. It’s so hot.”
“You can’t leave, honey. I’ve told you this before. You know why.”
This was her husband, the person she loved, but he was playing games with her. Knowing this, she pointed an accusatory finger at the padlocked door, insisting, “Open that door right now. I want to see what you’re hiding from me.”
He sighed, his face going pale, half his energy depleted by the command. “I’ve shown you so many times. It won’t change a thing. This is how it has to be. I’m protecting you, Stacy. God help me, if you know what my life has turned into every day dealing with you, trying to keep you happy, to keep you safe, because of the things you told me, the things you’ve told me about the other side-”
-“Just who are you? Quit talking to me like you know me!” She clutched the lamp by the bed, yanked the plug out of the wall, and it was out of her hands and shattering against his forehead. A gash was bleeding above his left eye, and snarling with blood covering half his face, he threatened her, “Do you really want to see what’s behind that door again? You’ll only forget, like you keep forgetting, and this is what I’ll keep going through, but I can’t let you go again. I can’t, not when I know where I’d be sending you.”
She was trying to wrestle his words into something that made sense, but he was right about one thing. She was confused, had forgotten things she needed to remember, as if she were fading in and out of scenes, and even now, she had so little energy, as if she’d been awake for weeks and hadn’t eaten in days.
It required nothing else of her but to wait as he worked out the key from his corner desk and began to unlock the padlock. He was already weeping, trying to hold himself together, as he fiddled with the door and edged it open. The room was in darkness, and he stayed poised on the threshold, suddenly unsure about his decision.
“We’re just going to keep doing this.”
She was already shoving through him, the man who folded to the slightest contact, now on his knees a balled up mess. Storming the closet, she scanned the wall with her hands, trying to locate the switch, and when she did, she couldn’t make sense of it. Standing there, watching, and trying to read into the blot on the wall. The dull red blot, as if two rough circles had intersected, but the edges were rough, in dripping lines, though the blot was dry and gave an enamel sheen. And then there was the jelly jar full of red paint on the floor underneath the blot-
-”W-what is this, Robert? Robert, what am I looking at? Please, honey, you have to help me remember.”
He was dragging her from the blot, but she stayed rooted in place, transfixed by the dull shape, and its possible significance.
Then Robert cradled her from behind, his lips just outside her ears. His confession was a collection of broken up words, his version of events as troubling to recall as they were to share. “This is your blood on the wall. I put it there, honey, so you’d stay here with me. You were dead, Stacy. I was there on a call, riding with that ambulance during my shift, and you were dead in your car at the wheel, and so much of your blood got on my clothes, the street, everywhere, and when I came home and undressed, you were standing there with me.
“You kept saying you’d seen things in the darkness, horrible human suffering, and it kept getting darker, and it wouldn’t end, and you’d do anything to stay here with me and away from that black place. But Stacy, it’s the blood on my clothes that kept you here, but it’s only for a small radius. This room, you can’t go beyond it, or you’ll be lost. So I’ve locked you in here, so you’ll be safe.
“The blood is a part of your body, you see, and if it’s on the wall, it’s like a small part of you can be here with me. I had to get more of it, so when I identified your body at the morgue, I asked the mortician if I could be alone with you. I had to do it then. I stole more of your blood and kept it in that jar. That’s when I began painting that blot. I keep touching it up. The problem is as the blood fades, so does your memory. That jar is all I’ve got, and eventually, you’ll fade away for good, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”
-”Who the hell are you, damn you, what are you doing to me!” She screamed at the stranger whispering in her ear, and she gave him a stiff elbow to the midsection until he fell off of her. Racing back into the bedroom, it wasn’t long before she was tackled by him, and he hugged her, keeping his hands firm over her to force her in place as she squirmed and writhed. “Let me go, you bastard! You’ve kidnapped me. Why’s there blood on the wall? It’s mine, isn’t it? For Christ’s sake, let me out of this room!”
Minutes up to a half hour burned away, and she finally fell asleep again on the bed. When she woke, the padlocked room was shut. She turned to her husband, smiling at him. “I love you dear. Oh,” she placed her hand on his bandaged forehead, “what happened to your head?”
“It doesn’t matter, Stacy, because you’re here, and I’m going to keep you here as long as I can, away from the darkness.”
But she didn’t hear his last words, already pointing at the padlocked room. “What’s in that room, and why is it locked?”
Alan Spencer is a horror author who has published the novels The Body Cartel, Inside the Perimeter: Scavengers of the Dead, Ashes in Her Eyes, and the forthcoming book Zombies and Power Tools. His short fiction has appeared in over twenty anthologies and in the magazines Morpheus Tales, Black Ink Horror, and House of Horror. Spencer's story “Suffering Begins in the Mouth and Ends in the Belly” was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Visit his blog at:
http://horroralan.blogspot.com/
Desperate Measures By Stanley Riiks
They always used to say that cockroaches would be the only ones to survive a nuclear holocaust. Well, they were half right. The cockroaches did survive. But they weren’t the only ones. No, the fucking rats made it through too… most of them from what I’ve seen.
Humans didn’t fare too well. Apart from the explosions at the beginning destroying the population centres, there were the after-effects, the nuclear winter. But that wasn’t the worse.
I haven’t seen a human being for almost a month according to my watch. It’s difficult to tell time when the sky’s a permanent dull grey, no sunshine, only acidic rain and ashy-sleet. Anything that comes from the sky burns, so you have to hide during the regular downpours. Staying underground has other advantages. The flies don’t come down here. Up there, out on the streets of a decimated London, the flies rule. Swarms of them feast on the dead bodies that litter the city.
I was on holiday at the coast when it all started. That was ages ago now, must be over a year. Time stopped, almost literally. With no news, no papers, no daylight, no night, it’s difficult to keep track of time.
At first it filled the TVs, and it wasn’t a great big bang. Not to begin with. Kim Jong Il, that crazy little North Korean, from his deathbed, set off a load of missiles heading towards South Korea. We watched them on the news, fourteen there were. Everyone expected that they would be nuclear, but they weren’t. Of course, by the time we found out it was too late.
The South Koreans retaliated, the U.S. retaliated, and the Chinese then retaliated against the U.S. and the South Koreans. And the North Koreans had started a world war without even using a single nuclear bomb.
They’d used something far worse. It was a deadly virus. It didn’t just kill people, it twisted them, turned them into monsters, making them killing machines. It was like an ultra-fast version of rabies and it spread across the devastated world like a plague.
The nuclear fallout affected crops, food supplies started shrinking, prices exploded. Russia was basically the only major country still able to produce crops after China and America virtually wiped out each other. When the Russians attempted to save themselves by banning the sales of wheat and corn outside the country, the European Union went to war with them. More bombs dropped. The devastation that caused affected me directly.
Everyone thought it would get better, but with the world powers out of the way it meant that the crazies came out to play. Iran went to war with Israel, bombing them to hell. The Palestinians were lost in the mess.