At The Edge of Night - 28 book horror box set - also contains a link to an additional FREE book

by Bray, Michael

  He thought to himself as he looked at the table full of half-eaten buffet food, now pulsing and flexing with a life of its own as the arachnid mass explored the fleshy sandwiches and small containers of dips and breadsticks.

  Yes indeed.

  He supposed that the little voice in his head might be right. He could well have lost the plot, gone mad, bought himself a ticket to the funny farm, lost a few vital sandwiches out of the picnic basket. Because the world ticked on as normal, but for him, it was filled with spiders.

  Spiders here, spiders there, spiders everywhere.

  He felt a shrill, giddy laugh begin to move up to his throat, and he knew that if he let it out they would hear, and like the words smallest army they would come for him. He knew it as a certainty.

  The laugh was close now, and he lifted a clenched fist to his mouth and bit down hard enough to draw a little blood and make his eyes water. The pain didn’t bother him, though, in fact, he welcomed it, because the laugh had gone, and the status quo was maintained.

  He started to relax and then drew a sharp breath.

  There was one of them perched on his knee.

  He looked at it, too afraid to swat it away, and

  the spider looked back. He could feel its glassy multi-eyed stare boring into him, and could do no more than wait to see what would happen.

  It was as if time had stopped, and even though the party and its oblivious guests went on with the business of drinking, pairing off and trying to boost their popularity, his world was no more than the small square of denim on his left knee.

  The spider skittered forwards, just a few inches, but it was enough to make Andy try to push himself back into the sofa. He was going to scream. He knew it and knew there was no way that he would be able to stop it this time. When it came, he knew he would be gone — his mind broken as he fell into the black hole of perpetual insanity – but at the last second, the spider changed direction and ran instead off his leg and down out of sight into the dark place between the seat cushions.

  He felt sick and saw small white spots dancing in front of his eyes. He was going to faint and knew he couldn’t allow it to happen, because if he did they would come for him.

  He laughed.

  A short, shrill, cackle which went unheard amid the thumping bass and the constant stream of party chatter. Yes, he was sure of it. Something in his brain was defective. Something had broken, and now he could see them everywhere. He imagined how his life would be; living in his own personal world filled with spiders.

  He heard a groan. Jonny’s date had come up for air, and when she smiled, thousands of tiny newborn spiders streamed out of her mouth and nose, covering her face and neck as they looked for dark places to shelter.

  The terror bubbling in Andy’s guts told him that his brain was on the verge of shutting up shop and refusing to play ball, and so he closed his eyes, trying to regain a little composure and maybe bring himself under a modicum of control, but even that was no good.

  Because even with his eyes closed he could still see them, cast in stark white negative on the blank canvas of his mind’s eye. He blinked away the image and found that his reality was only marginally better than the squirming, scurrying mass that lived in his brain.

  He glanced towards the corner of the room, and when he saw it — saw her, he felt something break, a sharp click as whatever small thread had been connecting him to his sanity snapped.

  Jenny slumped in the corner.

  Jenny.

  The girl he had known since they were four-year-old neighbors.

  Jenny who had always seen him as more of a friend than the more serious thing that he one day hoped they would become.

  Jenny who had brought him to the party, even though it was a place where a quiet, reserved kid like him wouldn’t have otherwise been invited.

  However, all of that was before the spiders.

  Her petite frame was swollen, chin resting on her chest. As he watched and his broken mind processed what was in front of him, he knew without a doubt that he was irreversibly damaged.

  He could see them moving under her skin, making it ripple and pulse, and bizarrely reminding him of childhood trips to the coast and the way the tides ebbed and flowed as they crept up the beach. They were streaming out of her nose and ears, and as he watched, her mouth slowly opened and a huge, thick-limbed monster of a spider pushed its way out. Andy had seen them on T.V.

  Bird-eaters.

  He was sure that’s what they were called.

  The huge spider dragged its immense body out of her gaping mouth and flopped down onto her chest where it stood in splayed legged triumph. Andy was beyond screaming, beyond anything other than looking on with a sick and twisted fascination.

  She’s the queen, and Jenny was her nest.

  The thought danced, darted and spun in Andy’s mind, and when he couldn’t make any rational sense out of it, it danced and spun some more. He wanted to ask what it wanted. Why him? What did he ever do to deserve this?

  But he couldn’t move, and his mouth remained closed as still more of them came – a never-ending procession from every conceivable place in the room.

  His skin itched, and his stomach danced as he tried to put the situation into some kind of order. But his brain wasn’t cut out for dealing with such horror, and so it had decided to leave Andy to his own devices.

  He saw Jenny move, and for a moment, there was hope, hope that she was ok, hope that he could get her out of there and maybe then she would look at him in the same way he looked at her.

  But it wasn’t Jenny that was moving.

  It was the spiders.

  The spiders in their Jenny skin that were going about their business and making her loll and dance like a macabre marionette.

  Spiders.

  Spiders Spiders Spiders

  He would do anything. Anything to avoid having to watch the jerky, skittish way that they moved in that horrible, stop-start motion. Anything to avoid having to watch the spider filled Jenny puppet that pulsed and rippled along to the bass line of the party.

  You know what it’s going to take. You know what you have to do.

  The voice in his head whispered, and he did. As terrifying as the thought was, it was the only way. He lurched out of his seat with a defiant roar and did it before he could change his mind.

  His scream brought the party to a halt. The music cut out and his fellow classmates, students, friends, and those that he was indifferent to were looking at him. He could feel their judging gaze, and found a bitter irony that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t an anonymous face. He was finally the center of attention.

  The silence was broken by a single high-pitched scream. He thought it might have been Andrea Gill — she of the over the shoulder wandering eye on test days, but couldn’t be sure. Whoever it was; they set off a chain reaction, and the silence morphed into chaos.

  Andy stood where he was and smiled. Because although the sounds of the screams were loud, at least they were natural. They were normal, everyday things that he could rationalise and make sense of.

  He thought that the world made more sense when it was rational. And he thought that he would be just fine now that it was done. He began to laugh, a sound rich and hearty and full, because he had won.

  The chaos was a thick, heavy thing and seemed to hang in the air like a physical entity. Yet, amid the confusion, he heard several distinct things.

  Someone shouting for help.

  Someone else repeating ‘oh god, oh god, oh god’ like it was some kind of bizarre mantra.

  Someone quite close to him, crying.

  He thought it might have been Jenny, and hoped that it was because that would mean he had saved her. He would have looked for himself, but he had already torn out his own eyes.

  He continued to laugh as the sound of police sirens drew close.

  SCRATCHERS

  I’m not crazy.

  That’s something I want to get straight right off the
bat. I’m sure they will say otherwise of course when they get here – especially when they see the holes in the walls and the blood on the floor. But really, I’m not. I have already called the police, and I want to write this down before they get here.

  My name is Trenton Hughes, aged thirty-three. For work, I’m a surveyor for a pretty big global firm you have probably heard of them, but I’ll spare them the indignity of being associated with me after word of this gets out. I’m paid well and have always tried to live a good life.

  I started to see the little people who live in the walls a few days ago.

  It was just after my wife, Hilary, told me she wanted a divorce. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t, and the news hit me like a freight train. I went through the usual responses. Told her things would change, told her things would get better. She responded by informing me that not only did she not want change, but she was already seeing someone else, a work colleague called Ted.

  Thanks, Ted. Thanks a lot.

  How did I respond to this earth shattering news? Was it with the British stiff upper lip that my birth parents possessed? Was it with grace and dignity, or a steely determination to get on with my life?

  Not exactly.

  I went and had myself a nervous breakdown.

  You hear all this bullshit about how time heals, and if you love someone, let them go. But none of that means anything when all you can think about is your wife with her legs wrapped around another man’s waist and screaming his name whilst you gradually come apart at the seams.

  I started smoking again, not because I missed the delicious flavour of those tar-packed cancer sticks, but because I knew Hilary hated me smoking. She used to moan and whine about the smell and the damage that I was doing to my body. Let me tell you, that first one tasted pretty sweet, and almost made me forget all about her fucking someone else whilst I was by myself polluting my body.

  Same story with the drinking. The six pack a night that I started with to help me get through to the next day soon became twelve, and in the interest of efficiency, those have now been replaced with a bottle of Vodka a day, or failing that, good old Jack Daniels. Hell, I would drink anything if it would help to take away that feeling of absolute worthlessness and self-pity for a couple of hours. It was during one of these self-depreciating binges that I first saw the wall people, or Scratchers, as I have since christened them.

  I was slouched on the sofa, eyes raw from lack of sleep, booze, or crying – take your pick – when I saw one of them scurry across the edge of the wall. I didn’t freak out as you might expect, instead, I sat there and stared, feeling like Gulliver in the Lilliput of my too expensive, too empty apartment.

  He was about six inches tall – action figure sized if you will – and wearing a tiny brown tunic. His tiny eyes glinted in the semi-gloom, and he was armed with what looked to be a converted nail file sword, one of Hilary’s no doubt that had been lost at some point in the past. He froze and stared at me, holding the tiny weapon defensively in my direction. I could only gawp back, the worthless drunk and the impossible tiny man engaged in a stare down. The Scratcher sniffed the air, then shoved the kitchen door open a crack and squeezed inside. I just sat there, listening to the tiny pitter-pat of his feet as he went. It was then, as I sat and really listened to the house, that I heard them.

  They were stealthy, moving behind the walls, a subtle scratching as they moved between plasterboard and insulation. The sound of them reminded me of the house I grew up in, the way the rats that used to make nests in our barn during winter months used to scurry around as the looked for food to scavenge on. I think that was when I started to feel afraid, because as I sat there and listened, It sounded like there were a hell of a lot of them.

  My response to this disturbing discovery was not to leap into action the way any self-motivated hero would, but to finish my freshly opened bottle of Mr. Daniels’s finest and bring on a glorious, booze-fuelled sleep. The next day, with a head that throbbed like a rotten tooth, I dragged myself off the sofa and walked to the kitchen, trying to convince myself that I wanted a glass of water when I knew it was the unopened bottle of Smirnoff that I was really looking for.

  Gleaming white tiles greeted me, the room edged with expensive, custom made fitted cupboards which I had never wanted but Gloria had insisted on. I wondered in the back of my mind what kind of cupboards Ted had in his house.

  Anyway, I’m losing track.

  As soon as I opened the door I could hear them, that same subtle scratching sound as they went about their business. I don’t know how long I stood there and held my breath. It felt like hours, the average lung capacity of a human being told me it was significantly less.

  With more effort than I expected it to take, I forced myself to walk across the room to the cupboard under the sink and kneel in front of it. Most of the noise seemed to be coming from there, and I grasped the handles with every intention of looking, but just couldn’t bring myself to open them. I don’t know if I was more afraid of seeing them, or of not seeing them. Either way, I didn’t think it bode well for my sanity. Eventually, I yanked the doors open, expecting to see a fully function micro- village like something from The Borrowers, but was greeted instead with the familiar landscape of spare mop heads, cleaning materials and old washcloths. I was about to close the doors when something caught my eye. I fished out one of the washcloths from the back of the cupboard and held it up to the light. Clothes had been cut out of the material, leaving tiny templates for trousers and shirts behind. With my racing heart feeling like it was now beating in my throat, I checked the other rags and cloths that were in there, and almost all of them were the same. It looked as if my dish rags had clothed an entire tiny populace.

  Surely now he will react and do something proactive, I hear you say.

  Actually no. I closed the cupboard, opened the Smirnoff that I had tried to lie to myself I didn’t want, and drank until I passed out on the sofa. ( I hadn’t been able to sleep in the bed since Hilary left. It still smelled of her perfume). When I woke up, I was aware of three things all in fairly quick succession. First, that my body felt as if it had been put through a mangle stamped on and then put through it again. Second, that I was struggling to cope with the amount of booze I was consuming, and that I ought to slow down a touch. The third thing I noticed was the note taped to my chest. It was written on a small scrap of paper, and the text looked to have been scrawled by a young child, or - dare I say it - a tiny hand. The text uneven and spiky, and in truth barely legible, but still, the message was clear enough despite the awful spelling.

  Firgit abot us

  Or els.

  Ice replaced blood, and even the throbbing headache subsided for long enough for me to be afraid of that tiny scrap of paper. There was sinister simplicity to it. A way of wording that told me that these people- pardon my French – don’t fuck around. As I write this – covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrive – it dawns on me that I should have left there and then. The second I got that note, I should have packed a bag and got the hell out of dodge, but stubbornness has always been a problem for me, and so I decided instead to try and catch the little critters on video, partly to prove to myself that they weren’t a figment of my imagination (Believe me, the idea had dawned on me) and second, to maybe discover something new, a new species of undiscovered creature. Hell, my booze addled brain even thought that I might even earn a little bit of money and maybe, just maybe, win my wife back from the arms of the mysterious Ted.

  I set up a couple of cameras. One in the corner of the living room, getting as much of the room in shot as possible, the second in the kitchen, facing the cupboards. The idea was to leave the cameras recording, stay awake all night and log everything that happened. I wanted to get everything. How many there were, where they came from, what they did when they came out, and more importantly, what they wanted with me. But my grand plan was, as always, derailed by the demon booze, and I had passed out by ten o clock, three-
quarters of a bottle of whisky for the worse with my notepad in hand and pen poised over the paper. It was almost three in the morning when I jolted awake, spilling remainder of the precious liquid all over myself, and for a second, I didn’t know where I was. It was when I reached over to turn on the lamp that I saw the notepad. Before I had nodded off, the page had been clean and empty, ready for me to log the night’s events. But now, there were words on the page, scrawled in that same spiky longhand, and with much the same abruptness.

  Last chans

  Stoppe now.

  The word now was double underlined, and I glared into the gloom, looking for any signs of them watching me, but all was silent. Hell, even the scratching in the walls had stopped. The silence was total as I sat there, staring at those four words and clutching the three-quarters empty vodka bottle hard enough to turn my knuckles white. The state of my sanity again came into scrutiny as I tried to decide if I was seeing things or if these little people really were coexisting in my home when I remembered the cameras. Lurching out of the chair, I went to the one in the corner first, desperate to check it. Surely whatever had written those words would have been captured on film, and I could at least answer the nagging doubt over my state of mind, or at least that would have been the plan. I snatched the camera off the tripod and found that it had been switched off. There was no sane reason for that to happen, but I thought perhaps the battery had died. I powered the camera up, noting that as I suspected, there was almost a three quarter charge remaining. Somebody, it seemed had switched it off. Tossing the useless gadget on the sofa, I hurried to the kitchen, shoving the door open to see if the other device had suffered the same fate.

  If there had been any doubts about low batteries of technical gremlins with the first camcorder, there were none with the second. Its remains lay on the kitchen floor, shattered fragments of green circuit board and copper wire strewn around it. With hands that shook either from the booze or through fear, I picked up the remains of the camera. I could see the markings on the outside like somebody had hacked at the casing with a pair of scissors (or perhaps a nail file knife) and had done a damn good job of destroying the innards of it too. I thought my legs were going to give way, but they somehow carried me back to my beloved sofa, where I crashed down and lit a cigarette. I could hear the need for alcohol gnawing at my gut, and was equally aware that the small amount that I had left wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to talk to someone, to tell them what was happening. Hell, maybe I even wanted to ask for help. I know I shouldn’t have done it as I was still half drunk, but I called Hilary. It was a mistake, and part of me knew it when I dialled her number, but my booze-ravaged mind didn’t care. I slurred at her, first telling her how afraid I was of the people in the walls, then turning angry and blaming her for leaving me and making me feel the way I did. Another voice came on the line then, crisp and authoritative. The elusive Ted. He told me never to call again, and that if I did, he would call the police. I tried to think of a witty retort, something sarcastic maybe about my adulterous wife, but he had already hung up the phone and left me there with a dial tone in my ear. It was then that I had the idea that would bring me full circle as to the reason why I’m sitting here and writing this now. I decided that if I couldn’t catch them on camera, then I would have to literally catch one and find out what they wanted. It seemed like a perfectly rational idea.