by Pete Kahle
This should work, Lewis thought. He picked it up, hefting it in his hands. It felt right, and he felt a surge of confidence shoot through him. He pivoted and headed for the stairs, ready to fight whatever lay ahead. Lewis took the stairs, the baseball bat up and ready. When he reached the top, he stopped. His mouth dropped and the baseball bat was temporally forgotten.
The door had been ripped off its hinges. The floor was littered with the remains, both splinters and large chunks of broken wood. Lewis ran his fingers over the wall opposite it, feeling the deep groves and even tugging at the long splinters of wood sticking from the wall. How did I not hear this happen? Lewis looked down at the bat, and he suddenly felt small and weak. After all, he was just a frail old man. And whatever this thing was, not even this door, solid oak held together with steel hinges, could hold it back. None of that mattered. If he turned around and went back to bed, it would win for sure. That couldn’t happen. He would stop it. Or die trying.
Lewis turned toward the narrow hallway, terrified of what awaited him in the dark. It was the hallway that led to his bedroom. There were also two other rooms, the spare bedroom on the left, and the storage room on the right. Lewis moved forward slowly, trying to keep his feet from crunching the remains of the door. He felt like he was back in the jungles of Vietnam. But instead, he was on the second floor of his own home.
With a heavy sigh, Lewis stopped at the first room. If the damned thing was in here, he was going to bash its little head in. Alright. On three. One. Lewis gripped the bat tightly with one hand. Two. He reached out and grasped the doorknob. Three! Lewis twisted the knob and pushed into the guest room, a battle cry escaping from his lips. Nothing moved. The room was empty save for a bed and a dusty dresser.
Lewis closed the door and continued on down the hall. The next door was the storage room on the right. After this room was his bedroom, which had a bathroom leading off of it. Lewis reached the storage room and repeated the ritual, only to find another room filled with boxes labeled Christmas Decorations and Old Magazines.
One more to go. Lewis turned toward the bedroom. The door was slightly ajar. Lewis took a step when the voice of the doll rang out. It sounded like a little girl, but the words were obscene.
“Red Rover, Red Rover,” it sang, “I’m going to spread Lewis’s guts all over!” Where is that voice coming from? “Red Rover, Red Rover, I’m going to eat your liver all over!” The doll laughed again, its laughter became shriller and more demonic as the seconds ticked by. It’s coming from my bedroom, Lewis thought.
Lewis edged forward until he reached the door. He gave it a gentle shove, moving it open with a loud creak. His bed was made and the room seemed empty. The doll’s laughter ceased for a moment, but it had gone on long enough for Lewis to pinpoint its location. It was coming from their bathroom.
He moved slowly into the room, trying to see behind the door. It was the only thing between him and seeing into the bedroom. Lewis raised the bat and steeled himself for what lay in the bathroom. With one final deep breath, Lewis stepped around the door and leapt into the bathroom.
The doll was seated on the counter near the wall. It was propped up in the corner, its head looking away from Lewis. The doll’s head slowly turned, clicking loudly. Its eyes stayed on Lewis’s face, its grin full and total, the corners of its painted on mouth stretched nearly from one ear to the other, the entire leer full of triangular white teeth... Its jaws opened with a click.
“Hi Lewis! My name’s Lorelei!” Lewis brought both hands to the bat and raised it high. “Have you come to play my game?” It asked, its eyes unwavering and bulging in its porcelain head. “Because you can’t win my game. No one has ever won. In the end, you’ll be like the rest of them. Weak and drained. I’ll be strong.” The doll’s head twitched. “And you’ll be rotting in a shallow grave.”
Suddenly, the doll was on its feet. Lewis didn’t even see its legs move. “I’m forever, and you are nothing more than a speck of nothing on the fabric of reality.” The doll had dropped the voice of the little girl in favor of the blaring baritone. “Soon, I’ll be rid of this tiresome body. And you’ll be worm food.”
“We’ll see about that.” Lewis said. He took a step forward, swinging the bat as hard as he could. Since the bathroom was narrow, the tip of the bat struck the medicine cabinet, smashing the thin wooden box nearly in half, smashing the mirror into thousands of pieces of reflective glass. Unfortunately, the cabinet caught the baseball bat and ripped it from Lewis’s hands, sending it sailing into the wall, smashing a chunk of the bathroom wall off.
An invisible force hit Lewis then, and he felt himself hit the bathroom wall, his head spinning. Pain rocketed through his body. As he tried to peel himself off the floor, the massive force pressed down on him, holding him there. He began to scream, his own voice foreign to him, high and filled with suffering. Darkness swam through his head, white spots swarming his vision. The pain was everywhere, all at once. Lewis felt his bones cracking, ribs fighting against the pressure. I’m going to die! Blackness was closing in and Lewis felt unconsciousness coming…
The force vanished. Lewis cried out and fell over, his muscles screaming and his bones broken. Laughter filled his brain, deep and foul. With all the energy he had left, Lewis looked up to find the doll standing up on the counter. From his vantage point on the floor, soaked in blood and coated with shards of glass, the doll looked tall, a behemoth. I’ve lost. It’s beaten me.
The doll, while he stared at it, began to change. It became black, a midnight black that seemed to suck the light from the room. The doll became nothing but a silhouette, its shape formless and ancient, shifting and bending obscenely. Lewis scooted backward, averting his eyes, not wanting to see what horrors were about to transpire before him.
One of his hands struck a cold metal object, and he screamed in surprise. He pivoted and looked at it. It was a can of hairspray that had been thrown from the cabinet. Lewis picked it up to toss it away, but an idea struck him then. He picked it up and his eyes scanned it for what he needed. Warning: Contents Highly Flammable.
Lewis looked up, smile spreading across his face. The doll had compacted into an orb of black, an orb that shone and danced with fleeting glimpses of strange and alien things. A tentacle snaked out of the top of it, pale flesh quivering. The sound of howling madness emanated from it, the sounds rising and falling. It reached the ceiling and explored it blindly, leaving a trail of green lubrication. Lewis looked away, knowing what he had to do.
Lewis reached into his pocket and withdrew the Zippo, snapping it open with the disciplined hand of an ex-smoker. Light. He flicked the wheel and only a spark shot up.
“Come on!” Lewis screamed. He glanced up to see another appendage emerge, this one covered in dense brown hair, thick and muscled.
Lewis turned his attention back on the lighter, blocking out Lorelei, which was finally escaping its doll form. Please God. Let this thing… LIGHT! Lewis flicked the wheel and a tiny, flickering flame erupted. Lewis wasted no time. He raised the can of hairspray, pointed the nozzle, and pressed down. The sweet scent of hairspray filled the room, followed by the bitter smell of flame.
The hairspray caught with a whoosh, a stream of flame. It engulfed the shape. The two appendices lit first, and the black orb suddenly imploded back into the doll, a doll that was aflame. It raised its arms and screeched; a sound that filled the entire bathroom. It began to dance and shake violently on the counter, little chunks of its dress and hair floating away. In its burning head, its eyes raged pus yellow.
“YOU!” It squealed, “YOOOOOOOOUUUUU!” It jaw became unhinged and crashed down to the floor, exploding into burning fragments of porcelain. The doll began to glow and vibrate. It imploded into blackness, a thunderclap. Lewis shielding his eyes as it crashed, screaming, the black light washing over him. After the blink, the doll was gone. The horror was over.
Lewis tried to stand, but he fell. He was weak. The fire alarm went off over head, and Lewis kn
ew the fire department would be on their way. He laid his head on the floor. I beat it. I stopped it from changing into… I beat it. As he drifted off, he thought of the shapes in the orb. Things from other places… He could hear the sirens. Lewis drifted into oblivion.
# # #
When Howard unlocked the door of the diner and stepped inside, the first thing he noticed was the smell of something burning. No, he thought. It’s back. Howard closed the door behind him and stepped into the diner locking it behind him. When Howard reached it, he stopped in his tracks. He felt old. So very old. The doll was sitting atop the mountain of stuffed animals, its smile large and its skin perfect.
“This one tried to burn you.” Howard seemed to consider that. “Even that didn’t work. Someday someone will take you and kill you for good. I’ll be rid of you.” The doll stared. Its jaw opened with an audible crack.
Then it spoke.
Logan Noble is a horror writer who happens to include a dash of humor and sci-fi if the literary recipe calls for it. He spends his days thinking about more interesting places from his home in Ohio, reading and wasting time with his wife Elizabeth and his two dogs. His short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, most of which can be found on Amazon. A novel should be coming soon, assuming he's not writing something else at the time.
You can follow his daily adventures and musings at his Twitter account @logan_noble.
Mockery
by Patrick Lacey
Something moved outside the tent.
Mark shut his flashlight off and stared at the zipper that marked the entrance. It was shut tightly. He always double-checked it before turning in. Wind battered the cloth, discarded leaves scraping the fabric like fingers. A few stray raindrops dripped onto the top of the dome. And above all this was another sound. Something distinct from the rest of the noises. Something undeniably lifelike.
But that was impossible. He hadn’t seen or met anyone in weeks. The last had been a man named Howard who had accompanied him for a few days before blowing his brains across the side of an oak tree with a pistol he’d found on the ground.
Mark listened closely, pulling up the edge of his sleeping bag like a child. Perhaps if he stuck his head underneath all of this would go away, the death, the loneliness, perhaps even the end of the world.
There it was again. Footsteps. They sounded much too heavy, like the individual was severely obese. They paced around the tent, as if assessing the best way to enter, and finally stopped just in front of the tent’s flap.
Something about the faint light streaming through the nylon told him it was early morning, the sun not too far off. It cast enough illumination so that he could just make out a shadow not six feet in front of his face.
He stopped breathed, stopped moving. Whoever it was stood just outside the entrance now.
After a long time, he broke his paralysis and searched for the knife. There had been a time when he’d slept with the handle clutched in his fingers. But being alone had softened him. He’d almost forgotten how horrible the world could be, even after it was over.
He reached into his pack, his eyes never leaving shadow. He winced as his hand knocked over the small pile of books. The thing outside moved slightly.
Thing? When had it become a thing and not a man or woman?
He did not have an answer for himself but the thought was enough to put his arm back into motion, not caring about the noise, so long as he found that damn knife. Eventually he felt the cold steel of the blade, grabbed onto it with a white-knuckled grip, and held it out like a talisman.
The shadow had grown so close it was hard to see its outline anymore. Whoever—or whatever—it was, its frame was massive.
Come on, he silently begged. I’ve been waiting for a long time.
It would feel good to die here, in the early light of dawn, so long as he died with a fight. He wasn’t itching to off himself but he wasn’t looking forward to the future either. He’d given up hope long ago.
He took a long breath, readied himself, reached for the zipper. His fingers froze for an eternal moment before opening the flap.
He expected to see that Howard had risen from his grave, his shattered skull holding together by a thread. Or perhaps it was some fur-covered beast, Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil, finally coming out of the woods now that most of those pests called humans were gone.
But instead he found nothing. There was only the cool breeze of morning, the pink sky in the distance, and enough leaves to nearly bury the landscape. No sign of life whatsoever, just like always.
It didn’t feel that way though. He could sense something nearby, eyes watching and waiting for the opportune moment. He could not shake the feeling that he was not alone, a concept that had become foreign to him the last few weeks.
He had travelled two and a half miles east that morning when he realized he was going crazy. He was not shocked by the revelation, only amazed it had not come sooner.
There was a general store on the side of the road, a quaint country affair that almost reminded you of life before the end. Everything inside had mostly been ransacked but he found two bottles of Coke, unopened and unharmed. The refrigerators had long since died but the soda was cool enough to be refreshing. He finished the first bottle in seconds, wiping his mouth, belching, and tossing it onto the ground.
Just before he opened the second, he heard Natalia’s voice.
He froze, the bottle still in his hand, fizzing from how much he shook. He listened closely and heard the voice again.
“You can’t give up yet. You still have me.”
Bullshit. Even when I had you, I didn’t really have you.
By some miracle she had not been affected by the plague or virus or whatever the hell you wanted to call it. They had left their Hartford apartment together when things got bad and had travelled for almost four months. At times it would seem they were the only ones left. For some odd reason they’d been spared and he wasn’t about to question it.
Except the miracle had turned into a sick joke. They’d nodded off one afternoon after making love, snoring under the warm summer sun. He’d woken up a half hour later. She hadn’t.
“Come with me,” Natalia said from somewhere close by. “We can figure all of this out together. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Fuck you.” He was surprised by the sound of his voice. He hadn’t spoken since Howard.
Natalia did not answer him.
He cracked open the second bottle of Coke, grabbed his pack, and started again down the road.
He was heading toward his hometown, a tourist trap just north of Boston. He hadn’t been there in over a year, six months before everybody started to shit the bed. He’d called his mother when things started getting crazy. She told him not to worry. This was the modern world. Plagues did not wipe out countries anymore.
He begged to differ.
The road leading in should’ve seemed familiar to him. He’d travelled it thousands of times. He could close his eyes and see its curves, could navigate the turns in his sleep. Now, though, it seemed foreign. Leaves and debris covered nearly everything. A rotting corpse that could have once been a dog lay in a ditch.
The wind was bad, a storm not far off. The trees swayed, the branches brittle and snapping with each gust. He wasn’t sure why he was heading home. Perhaps he was finally ready to lie down in his old bed and drive the tip of his knife into his temple. Or maybe he just longed for someplace familiar. Either way it seemed as good a place as any.
He walked for a while, his mind combating oncoming memories, before something caught his ear. He slowed his pace and eventually stopped.
He swore he heard something like footsteps, separate from his own. He started walking again and a few moments later he was almost certain.
Someone was following him. The same someone from the night before. It was toying with him, letting him think he was in the clear. He didn’t bother to turn around. Instead he let the footsteps continue their
pursuit, always several paces behind, but never quite catching up.
Much of the town had burnt to the ground. When people started dying, those left living had snapped.
What had once been city hall was now a pile of stone and bricks, the middle portion still smoking. His favorite bar was rubble. The coffee shop was littered with graffiti, animated cocks and cunts defacing his high school hangout.
He turned left at the end of Main Street and made his way toward his old home. It had been a convenient location, just far enough from the city center to be quiet but close enough so that you would walk to any attraction. He’d despised the town, had counted the seconds before he could move away. Now that it was mostly gone he realized it had been a kind of heaven.
His house came into view. Some part of him did not expect it to still be standing. The paint was chipped and a few boards hung loose but it was mostly intact. The front lawn had grown jungle-like. The living room window was shattered. He studied the shadows inside, making sure nothing moved. It seemed empty but you could not take any chances anymore.
He slid the knife from its sheath, tightened his grip around the handle. As he stepped through the front gate, the footsteps came again. They were quicker now, no longer worried about remaining hidden. His pursuer was sprinting. He closed his eyes and listened. They were at the end of the street, gaining.
Five houses away now. He breathed, tried to slow his pulse.
Three houses. He tensed, readied to turn around.
One house, just next door.
He spun and was greeted with something large, black, and impossibly hairy, a disfigured bear, a nightmare that had exited his mind and entered into what was left of the world.
