Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror

by Joe Hart

  The scorpion-like thing landed exactly where it had been aiming: Mike’s chest. The thing’s talons tore at Mike’s soft flesh as it smashed him to the ground under its immense weight.

  Jasper stared in awe at how fast the large creature was. The clicking pincers dug channels and bored holes into Mike’s muscles and internal organs. Mike opened his mouth to scream, and at that moment the thing stuck its bone tongue into his mouth. For several seconds it looked as though the two were embraced in a rough kiss, but suddenly the creature yanked its oblong head back and pulled Mike’s tongue and most of his upper spinal cord out. Mike’s head lolled back limply like a balloon that had deflated slightly, and the thing released its grisly prize in a spray of blood and spinal fluid.

  Jasper’s hands tried to do something as he watched the macabre display before him. He looked down to see that his fingers had fumbled open the steel cylinder of his Colt and were dropping empty brass out as fast as they could.

  “Reload!” Jasper yelled at the two men who were still standing.

  Dillon and Lyle both began to shake out the still-warm brass from their guns, as the creature eyed them curiously from atop its kill.

  “Rrrreeeeelooooaaddd,” the thing hissed with its misshapen jaws. The mandibles clicked and clacked on the sides of its tongue.

  “Rrrrrreeeeeelooadd,” it again mimicked the three men, who had stopped fumbling with their weapons.

  “Mother of God almighty,” Lyle whispered, quickly making the sign of the cross.

  “Shoot that fuckin’ thing!” Jasper yelled. He slammed his now-loaded cylinder home and began firing at the creature.

  The monster flattened itself on the floor, then flung Mike’s body across the room as easily as it had thrown the chair at Marty. Mike’s two-hundred-pound corpse slammed into Jasper in a tangle of broken arms and legs.

  Jasper crumpled under the weight of Mike’s body and bounced on his tailbone hard when he landed. Mike’s corpse fell on top of him in a strange spread-eagle position. Something had gone wrong with Jasper’s legs when he fell, because he could no longer feel them. He tried to lift Mike’s weight off his chest, but his strength had ebbed considerably. Every attempt only weakened him more.

  The only good thing was that he had managed to hold on to his Colt. He clicked the cylinder open and counted three unfired shells in their tight holes. He smiled grimly and waited.

  Lyle had watched Jasper fall under Mike’s dead weight. When his vision swung back to the creature’s position, his stomach tightened even more. The thing wasn’t there. Lyle’s eyes scanned under the tables and behind the corpses that sat at them, but he couldn’t make out the thing’s dusky-orange bulk anywhere.

  “You see it?” Lyle cried hoarsely to Dillon, who was still fumbling the last shell into place. He snapped the gun closed and looked with bulging eyes around the darkened room, his vision flicking from one shadowed corner to the next.

  “No. Where the fuck is it?” Dillon answered, as he tried to steady the gun in his right hand.

  A muffled sound behind the two men made them spin around. The frightened eyes of the bartender and the whore in the blue dress met their own frantic gazes, as they stopped just inside the open doorway that led to the afternoon street. The bartender grabbed frantically at the woman’s hand until he caught her wrist and dragged her out the door and into the hazy sunlight.

  Both men began to call out to them as if they had been friends, not victims of their greed only minutes before. Their calls were cut short as they heard a click echo throughout the room. At the same moment, both men turned and looked toward the ceiling.

  The creature was tucked into a space between two rafters above them. Its brownish-orange eyes gazed at them respectively, and then it dropped lightly to the floor like a gargantuan spider leaving its web. As Dillon brought his gun up to fire at the thing’s head, it ducked low and snagged his left foot in its talons.

  “You fucker! Get offa me!” Dillon cried, as the monster’s digits sliced through the leather of his boot and into the meat of his foot beneath. His gun clattered to the ground and was kicked away by one of the segmented legs. Dillon reared back with his other foot and swung an enraged kick at the outstretched head and neck of the creature, but the boot was stopped short by the creature’s other arm. In that instant Dillon knew, without a doubt, his days of riding and pillaging were over.

  Lyle circled to the right of his friend, trying to get a clear shot at the thing’s head. The creature moved Dillon, keeping the man between itself and the barrel of the gun. Suddenly, the thing yanked Dillon’s legs away from each other and split the man down the middle. Intestines and blood flew in several directions, like candy spilling from a child’s piñata. Dillon’s head and neck stayed on his right side, while the left half of his body was flipped away across the demolished room.

  “NO, YOU FUCKER!” Lyle cried, and fired wildly at the creature. Two bullets ripped through Dillon’s ruined torso and pinged slightly as they glanced off the hard shell that covered the monster’s shoulders and back. The other four shots went in different directions since Lyle’s hand was not as steady as it had been a half hour before.

  Several seconds later all that could be heard in the room were the clicking of Lyle’s gun and the dripping of blood from Dillon’s body. Lyle stood completely motionless except for his trigger finger, which seemed to be moving of its own volition.

  With a roar, the thing dropped Dillon’s ruined corpse and, without pausing, whipped its right arm out and cut the top of Lyle’s head off at the bridge of his nose. A moment later Lyle’s body dropped to the floor, but it was much longer before his finger finally quit pulling the trigger of his gun.

  Jasper listened as the last of his gang was killed. He then waited for what seemed like hours, and for a brief moment, he began to believe that the thing had left the saloon. He started thinking that it had crawled back to whatever hell it had come from and had left him here alive. He could wait until he had enough strength to move Mike’s body off him, then drag himself out to the horses. The next town was nearly a day’s ride south, but he could make it. He could find a doctor, he could definitely make it, he could—

  His thoughts were cut off abruptly when the creature peered over Mike’s ruined body. Up close, its eyes were an even deeper shade of orange than Jasper had thought, with dark swirls in the pupils. The swirls started spinning in circles like dirty water draining down a bath. Slowly, so slowly, they twirled.

  Jasper forced his eyes closed and turned his head as he whipped his gun up and tried to fire directly into the thing’s face. The creature caught his wrist as if the movement had been expected, and it twisted his hand as he pulled the trigger twice. Both bullets flashed out of the barrel and lodged harmlessly in the wooden ceiling.

  Jasper began to cry. His tears fell from his eyes in small rivulets that washed trails in the blood and dirt that was caked on his cheeks. Slowly, he began to twist his hand back toward his own face. The creature strained against him, but a flood of adrenaline pulled his hand back toward him.

  There was one bullet left, and by God, there was no way he was going to let this demon take him out of the world as it had his gang. The deaths they had died weren’t even good enough for dogs. The barrel of the gun slowly came into view, and to Jasper the dark hole looked like salvation. He could see the empty cylinder chambers, and the bright sights of the Colt twinkled at him. Another inch and he would flex his finger to escape the monster above him.

  With a flick of its pincers, the creature cut Jasper’s hand off at the wrist. Blood poured out of the wound and onto his face in a drenching sheet. Jasper screamed loudly into the thing’s face, speckling it with spit and blood.

  The last thing Jasper saw before the foot-long spike protruding from the monster’s tail penetrated his skull and drove into the floor was one translucent eyelid dipping down in a lazy wink.

  ANGEL CHARLIE

  Carolyn opened her eyes and quickly closed them. She realize
d two things. The first was that she was upside down. The second was that she was in an enormous amount of pain. It seemed as though the pain was an entire ocean made of roiling currents of fire that for some reason had been poured inside of her stomach.

  She tried to cry out. She opened her bloodied mouth and attempted a shout for help, but the yell rushed out of her in an inaudible hiss. She licked her lips and tried to capture and lock the pain away inside a part of her so she could think clearly. Waves of it rolled upon her as if she was caught in a tide that flowed without ebbing, and she lost control of it.

  A cry escaped her lips, and in a strange way, it brought her comfort. If she could cry out, she was still alive. If she was still alive, she could be rescued. If she could be rescued, she might continue to live.

  Carolyn tried opening her eyes again. Blurriness greeted her, and it wasn’t due to consuming several tall vodka martinis. In fact, she felt completely sober, which wasn’t a particularly comfortable feeling at this point in time.

  After blinking rapidly a few times, her vision began to clear. She was inside her car. The car was upside down, and she was hanging from the seat, her arms dangling like the appendages of a marionette. She looked down—or was it up? Did it matter now? She could see the dashboard, which was still lit with an iridescent green glow. As her vision traveled down, she identified what was causing the excruciating pain in her midsection.

  The steering wheel had somehow jutted back like a broken jaw and was pinning her to the seat. The rest of the driver’s area was also pushed in much too close. The steel frame and exposed metal of the Mercedes were bent and twisted like a child’s Erector set. She could see her cell phone, which had flown free of her purse in the crash, lying well out of reach above the passenger seat.

  She began to do an assessment of her body. She could feel her toes and feet, which she deemed as a good sign, and wiggled them to be sure. She tried moving her arms and succeeded in lowering them to her midsection, where she found her seat-belt latch and unbuckled it. To her dismay, this did nothing to release the pressure that kept her upside down in the seat.

  After a few more moments of fumbling and struggling against the steering wheel, she let her arms hang above her head once more. The large ring on her left hand glinted in the dash lights, and even in her current state of pain, a part of her still admired the enormous diamond that was secured with platinum settings.

  She could smell gasoline and motor oil now, the acrid odors assaulting her nose from the direction of the engine compartment. Other than the light from the dashboard, the darkness was complete. She began to cry then. The tears burned at first as they slipped over her eyelids, but after a few seconds, they soothed the reddened blood vessels around her pupils. Soon her sobs filled the close air of the car. The pain in her stomach began to lessen, and the helplessness of her situation took over her normal composure and self-control.

  “Oh God, help me. Help me, help me, help me.” She repeated the words as though, if she said them enough, they would gain power and release her from this trap of highly polished precision machinery. Her sobs reverberated in the confines of the car, and a short time later she reluctantly spoke again. “Charlie, oh Charlie, help me! If you can hear me now, help me!”

  She hadn’t spoken his name in over six months, and it felt strange to now. The guilt that welled up inside her at his name was immediately forced back down into the depths of her conscience by the militant thoughts that she had placed there as safeguards against such feelings. It wasn’t her fault he had been a coward, not a real man, not like Jake. It wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t had any aspirations beyond fixing cars in the greasy mechanic shop that he called a business.

  Sure, he had loved her, she was positive of that. He had made it clear every time he had come home from work, sometimes well past ten o’clock, apologizing for how late it was and saying he loved her so much, how he wished he could be home more. He would crawl into bed, sometimes without even showering, and try to cuddle up next to her.

  In the first years of their marriage, it had been sweet. He had worked long hours in the shop so they could afford her tuition for college courses at the state university. She would spend the day at college, and he at the garage. They would meet at home at the end of the day, both exhausted and triumphant in their youth, sure that their hard work would pay off and they would live the life of their dreams. They would eat a meager supper and make love in their small double bed, which barely fit in the cramped bedroom they shared.

  The years went by. She graduated with a major in business administration and a minor in accounting, and was hired at a large insurance firm in a busy part of downtown. She swiftly moved up in the company, quickly gaining titles and promotions through long hours and a fair amount of flirting with the higher-ups. Her salary increased exponentially year after year, and soon they were living in their dream home and she was driving a seventy-thousand-dollar sedan.

  But Charlie remained the same. He didn’t have the same drive as she did, or the same taste for life. He was content to work his fifty-hour work weeks and to tinker on the old muscle car he kept on his side of the garage.

  Carolyn, however, fell out of love with Charlie and in love with the corporate world and all that it offered. Over the years she became enamored with the flow of the executive life, the business meetings, the company expense accounts, the lavish trips that many of the vice presidents went on. She spoke of these things to Charlie, and he smiled and nodded. She knew he didn’t have the faintest clue as to how good it felt to close a multi-million-dollar deal. But Jake did.

  Jake Miltrone walked into the firm and into her life in her fifteenth year of marriage to Charlie. Jake was her senior by several years, but he could have passed for twenty-five. He was aggressive, bold, smart, and sexy. Basically everything that Charlie wasn’t. It was a matter of weeks before they were sleeping together. She would leave work early sometimes to meet Jake at a ritzy hotel near their building. Sometimes she would bring him to her home and they would do it on the kitchen counter. She would blush when Charlie would cook a dinner for her and hours before another man had ravished her there.

  But it was only a matter of time before Charlie caught on. Carolyn realized that even a fool like Charlie could sense the difference in her: the way she wore her hair, her perfume, and her lack of interest in lovemaking.

  He had caught them at their home, in their bed. She still remembered the look on his face when he opened the door. It seemed as if his soul had drained out of him. He just stood there as she and Jake gathered their clothes from around the bed.

  Her initial reaction had been not guilt or fear but anger. She had screamed at him about how he had never evolved with her. How he had stayed in the past with his cars and poker nights with his friends. Charlie hadn’t said a word while she had berated him, and that had angered her more. She left him to wallow in his silence at their home and went to stay with Jake at his penthouse suite across the city.

  The phone call the next morning had woken them both. Jake answered, and then with a puzzled look on his face, handed her the phone. It was a sergeant from the local police department. He informed her that after she had left the night before, Charlie went to his gun cabinet, loaded one shell into his twelve-gauge, and redecorated their modern-style bedroom with his own organic shades of red and gray.

  The funeral had been small, and she had shed the necessary tears. The rumors floated about for several months afterward, but Carolyn didn’t care. Truth be told, the first emotion she felt when the phone call had come through was relief. Relief that there was no messy divorce to go through and nothing to hold her back from her future in her business.

  Jake proposed three months after Charlie’s death, and tonight she was driving home after an engagement party at the country club where she and Jake were to be married. Apparently the drinks had been too much for her on the winding road that led to the city, and she had missed a turn.

  The pain in her midsection
was beginning to lessen. Perhaps she was only pinned and there wasn’t internal damage. She hoped so. She didn’t want to postpone the wedding if possible. Even with a catastrophe like a car crash, she didn’t want to keep Jake waiting.

  Had she actually called out Charlie’s name? Why had she done that? She supposed that it was because she believed in the afterlife. She believed in God. She also believed somewhere beneath her consciousness that if Charlie could hear her, he would help her because he had worshipped her on earth. Why would he not in the great beyond?

  She shook her head to clear it of the crazy thoughts. If anyone came to rescue her, it would be Jake—the man who took charge and knew what to do in situations like these. He was a natural leader, one of the many attributes that she so admired about his personality. Although he had been sloppy drunk at the party and had been hauled off to the private bar in the clubhouse by several of his giggling friends, she was sure he would sober up and come looking for her when she didn’t call after several hours.

  These thoughts were suddenly washed from her mind as a pale glow began to light up the ditch that the car had landed in.

  A car! she thought, and her heart leapt with hope. Surely they would see the broken guardrails and the trail of debris where the Mercedes had cascaded sideways over the shoulder, coming to rest on its top.

  The light became brighter and brighter, yet she could hear no sound of an engine. The light also seemed off somehow. It was bluish, not the pale gold or bright white of normal headlights. It also shimmered, as if the light were shone through depths of water and filtered to its base color.