by Wilson, Jay
My daughter, who'd just turned sixteen, had fear twisting her face, but despite that, she was a spitting image of her mother’s beauty, which was good because for whatever reason, the women on my side of the family were no better looking than the frogs frequently flattened on a highway.
"Here's the deal. I live in this world. This dark place that neither of you seem to understand. I can't be expected to just go back to being a normal dad or husband after living in this tiring and scary world for the last twenty years. I just can't, and all you do is fucking nag." I said, and motioned to my wife, but then I pointed the knife at my daughter. "And you. All you want to do is hang out with your friends, send Instagrams of your foot to everyone on the planet, and spend several hours on that FaceSpace or whatever the fuck you call it. I can’t watch you every second of the day worried that something is going to happen to you, sweetie. So, in order to be the writer I need to be, I need to be in this dark world with no interruptions, and the only way I can think to do that is to, well, actually live in it."
I stood, walked to my daughter, and thrust the knife into her chest several times. My wife's high-pitched scream escaped her lungs and filtered through the gag into a muffled yet still very audible cry of terror and sadness. I don't think she understood why I did what I did, but it was important for my future that I do what was necessary to succeed. How could I be the greatest horror writer of all time without first giving in to the dark creature that lived inside of me?
I looked down, and there was only a slight ring of blood around the outer edge of my hand closest to the blade. It was strange, because for so long I'd written about how people stabbed other people and that the blood ended up all over their hands. Well, I could honestly say that was no longer going to be the case, except I could mean it metaphorically. Right? Yeah, especially since I've killed my daughter for success, so in a sense I did have blood on my hands. How wonderful.
I turned to my wife and her eyes burned deep red. Her brows furrowed with anger, but there was also a glint of sadness and fear that assured me I was having a lasting, though soon to be short-lived, effect on her. A look that would forever permeate my work.
I said, "I understand you're upset, but let me remind you that you both are doing so much more for me now than you ever did. Obviously, you're not cooperating willingly, but that's the beauty of it. I'm learning so much more than I could have ever hoped for."
I moved close to her, and she flinched. I took a deep welcome breath, and stabbed her several times. She screamed until the last breath wheezed from her, and I looked down. My hands were mostly clean, but there was still a ton of blood all over them. I smiled, walked to my desk, and started writing a novel that just knew would become a top seller.
Dionaea Muscipula
Rain, a name given the woman by hippy parents whose religion consisted of puffing prayers to the Gods of Hemp and Dope, opened her eyes to a dark room and a blinding headache. A single white light cut through the inky blackness and shined upon a small empty spot of white tiles directly in front of her. The place smelled wet with a soft sweet scent of fresh paint accented by musty air. Then the man she had delivered pizza to earlier entered the cone of light.
While she was out cold from some sedative he’d given her, the man had sat her on a chair and pulled her arms back to tie them at the wrists. She tried to extricate them, but the binds he used were too strong. He’d also tied her ankles to the legs of the chair. A strong tape covered her mouth, which prohibited her from speaking.
The man spoke with a deep rough voice powdered with a subtle nasally sound. He said, “You delivered to the wrong house, you sexy little bitch.”
Each one of the words he spoke was supposed to be offensive, but she didn’t see it that way because she was, in fact, a sexy twenty-two-year-old woman. She could also be a real bitch when needed. That’s not to say she didn’t have her moments of kindness, which he would’ve observed if he’d heeded her pleads to remove the gag.
He ran his hand down her thigh and said, “No, no, no. Not gonna let you talk. There’s nothing you can say that’ll change what’s going to happen to you tonight.”
The man began to unbuckle his belt.
He said, “I’m glad you’re finally awake. I was running out of patience.”
Owing nothing to shame, the man unbuttoned his jeans. She banged her feet and shook violently hoping that she could free herself. All she needed was one hand and she could escape, but he’d secured her too well.
With her heart racing to the pace of a galloping horse, he dropped his pants. He was already hard and ready to go, and she took a deep breath. Anxiety pushed its way through her veins, putting her body into overdrive, and that’s when the thing she so desperately wanted to keep suppressed finally revealed itself.
Near her throat, just below her esophagus, she felt an intense burning sensation as though someone held a bar of hot glowing metal against it. Suddenly, her skin tore in half, but there was no elegance to it because it ripped as though something reached in and peeled her skin apart. Her body continued to shred down the center, and bold muffled screams escaped from her. Spindly strands of muscles reached to each side of the gaping wound, and just behind them formed sharp tooth-like ridges. Her ribcage cracked, shattered, and spread, but instead of revealing a human heart and a pair of lungs, there was a pulsating stomach and a gland attached to a large gooey sac.
Eerie ululations erupted from deep within her, and the man screamed back at her with fear. He tried to turn and run but his pants caught his legs, which sent him crashing down upon the cold tiles in front of her. The gland in her chest immediately shot a stream of clear acid at him, and his cry of terror turned into that of torture. White fumes billowed into the air as the acid slowly melted away his skin, which soon slipped off his body and slapped against the ground like a wet towel. Chunks of his body fell to the floor, and he crumpled into a final lifeless heap.
Rain tore through the binds at her wrists and ankles. She quickly fell to the ground, groaning and huffing as her transformation continued to burn with pain. She crawled to the slush pile on the floor and began to feed. It didn’t take long for her body to suck every drop and chunk of him from the floor.
Just as painful but much faster, she transformed back into her human form. The pain fled her body almost immediately, which was a welcome comfort. She did feel a little distended as though she’d eaten a huge meal, but, to be fair, she had.
Rain stood and picked scraps of her torn clothes from the floor. She looked down at the empty spot illuminated by the light, pulled the silver tape from her lips, and smiled.
Consequences
I remember back when Tom Hanks informed my young brain that life was a box of chocolates and that I had no idea what I was going to get. Despite the fact that most chocolatiers put the contents of the box on the packaging, I still got what he meant. In my case, however, I had a need to maintain control of my life, so I made sure that I always determined the consequences of my actions. I looked ahead as far as I could see, as if I played chess with my life, and made sure that the demon called fate never cornered me into a checkmate. That remained true until ten minutes ago when chaos finally caught up with me.
I sat at my desk using my computer as I usually did late at night before bed. The small halogen lamp illuminated the corner of my desk and cast little shadows of everything sitting on the surface of the table. Some of those items appeared upon the wall as dark wraiths waiting for the moment they could break free of their seemingly eternal shadowy bonds. They always terrified me, so I tried not to look at them. That was the first step to having a consequence-free evening. No fright or fear meant there would be no accidents.
I slumped so lazily in my chair that my ass hung from the edge and most of my back laid against the cushion. I kept my foot planted against the wall to keep myself from slipping fully off the chair, and I used the mouse to navigate the internet.
I started the evening with a search that involved loo
king up how stuff works. More specifically, I wanted to know why in the hell the well-known fresh-maker caused carbonated drinks to vomit themselves all over the place. As all men know, one click led to another and then to another, and before I knew it, I found myself surfing the dark side of the internet. The place where only the strange tread. Right then, my foresight should've told me to click the little red 'x' of the browser window, but what the hell, right? It's only the internet, after all.
There's a few types of people that post videos on the internet, but only two that I'm concerned about. One type will post, indiscriminately, violent grizzly videos for all those sick fucks to enjoy in the privacy of their own home. It's almost like pornography for them, and because people really get into that sick stuff, you can find it pretty much anywhere. Sometimes, you can find videos that don't get to the dark stuff, and instead it shows a reel of close calls where fate tried to murder their face but they miraculously made it out unharmed. Well, I clicked on a link that claimed to be a video of people making narrow escapes, but found myself having to make a near escape of my own.
As soon as I clicked the link, the light on my table went dark. My first thought was that the power went out, but the desktop computer was still on. However, it cast no light on anything in my room, and the clock on my dresser no longer told the time in bold red numbers. So, you can understand how I might be confused. To add to that, when I looked back at the computer screen, I saw myself in the video staring at the computer.
I leaned close to the monitor just to be sure, and a popup window appeared. It read, "Don't stand up. Do you understand?"
Sure, whatever. I clicked to agree.
Another one said, "You're the 1,382,321,873,232 visitor! Please click OK within the time limit to claim your $30,000,000 prize!"
"What?" I said aloud, and moved to click the OK button as the timer slowly dropped. The problem? The window moved away from the pointer every time I got close to the clicking it.
"This is stupid." I said.
A popup window appeared, "This is not stupid. This is your life. If you do not click OK to claim your reward, you will be killed."
"The fuck?" I said, and situated myself to sit straight up. I pressed the OK button to remove the new popup, and began to chase the other one around the screen.
At about 15 seconds, I started to feel the urgency even though I didn't know exactly how I would be killed. At 12.5 seconds, a giant pipe burst in my wall, and the room began to flood with gallons water. I tried to stand to run out of the room, but I couldn't get up.
So, I did what anyone else would do in that situation. I let out a high pitch scream hoping someone would hear my cries for help. As my banshee call began to kill my throat, I realized I was losing valuable time. At nine seconds, I stopped screaming and continued to chase the OK button.
By five seconds, the water reached my chin, but somehow the computer continued to work. I chased and chased, and suddenly realized I had to fake it out. I quickly began to pass the mouse from each corner of the screen in fast successions so that the window stayed in the center of the screen. I eased closer to it, and eventually found my mouse over it. I began to click absurdly hard and fast, mashing the button. When the water covered my mouth and nose, the window disappeared.
I thought for sure that was it. I had a fear of drowning, and now I was to die a most feared death. As I held onto my breath, making every second count, the water finally receded from the room. I don't know where it went, but it was gone. The burst pipe? Well, that had gone, too. When the light on my desk flickered back to life, nothing was wet, including my clothes. On the computer screen was a video of people having near death experiences.
"Sleep deprivation? No. Too much Redbull? I know. Someone must've spiked my pizza. That's it. Shrooms instead of mushrooms." I thought, but then I got a wild hair to check my account balance.
I logged on to the website managed by my bank, and viewed my account balance. As I expected, it read a zero balance. No shocker there. No, the real shock was that I had 30,000,000 dollars pending from an unknown bank account. Consequences be damned, I thought. Maybe I should take more chances knowing that the higher the risk the better reward. That was, of course, just five minutes before I tried to do a nude handstand for a YouTube video, but instead I slipped and cracked my skull wide open. Death wasn’t sweet and I was a little bitter that I didn’t get to enjoy the money I won, but at least I didn’t drown to death. As a bonus, no one heard my girly scream earlier, so I guess I died with some kind of dignity. A thought I immediately retracted when I looked at my nude body crumpled on the floor with my ass somehow pointed directly at the camera. Consequences.
Summer of ‘46
There's nothing I can imagine that’s more worthy of note in my life than this moment. Born to a small family that added up to three, my father was a metalworker who died in 1943 at a battle in Sicily and my mother, once my father died, volunteered her services to the war effort. The Nazis executed her in the summer of '45 when Germany attacked the plant she worked at just north of our hometown. As for me, I was an eighteen-year-old man who couldn't fight because I was the only remaining member of my family to carry forward the Walsh name.
After the war ended, the Nazis murdered the weakest of us and put the rest to work. In the summer of '46, I was lucky enough to be young with a strong back, so my captors had me working at one of the labor camps in West Virginia. Sometimes I wished I were feeble or broken somehow so that they might show me the mercy of a bullet, but I wasn’t so fortunate.
More than once, I considered damaging my leg or something important to make me cripple enough to be useless, but I quickly learned that the people who harmed themselves to get out of work paid a much steeper price than death. The Nazis took them to the North Star building where they were presumably tortured. We don’t really know for sure, but the terrible screams that kept many of us awake at night was enough of a deterrent.
I worked the fields, which the Nazis monitored as much as all the other areas of der Bauernhof, or The Farm. However, it was negligibly better because I worked with my good friend Willy, a Negro who saved my life four times in that camp. Between the Nazis and the other prisoners slowly losing their minds, the camp was a dangerous place. Despite being a strong fighter, he also had a kind and gentler side. He was, after all, a father and husband to, from what I heard, the most amazing family.
On July 10, 1946, just as the sun cracked over the edge of the horizon, I pushed the manual mower along a field I would need to plow later that afternoon. I wiped my already sun-scorched skin clear, licked my salty lips, and took a break. I wasn't allowed to, but there weren't any guards around to stop me.
As a young Christian, I recalled the boyish things I would pray for: a wooden train, a pellet gun, and so many other things. That day I prayed for the Heavens to care for Willy. Just the day before, a guard abused one of our bunkmates, and Willy lost control. He killed the guard, and they quickly arrested him. They immediately put him to death by driving a spike through his skull, and they made all of us watch to ensure we understood the consequences of our actions if we chose to go against their directives.
As I now stood alone in that field of misery, I prayed for a better world. I prayed and thanked the Lord that my father, mother, and Willy didn't have to live in a world controlled by the Nazis. I prayed for forgiveness because I'd stolen a shard of stained glass from the rectory and planned to kill myself that morning.
While I contemplated the end of my existence and hoped for my eventual acceptance into divinity, an earthquake interrupted me. As the ground shook violently, the earth fell away leaving a sinkhole where part of the farmland had been.
I tightened my grip upon the glass, and stepped closer to the pit. Fear swelled in my veins as I looked into it. I expected to see the fires of hell for I had assumed I had already killed myself and that hell had come to collect my tainted soul. What I saw, however, was something else. It was a bunker with a man hiding feverishly s
cared as bombs blasted overhead. When he looked my direction, he didn't seem to see me. I saw him, though, and I recognized him, too. It was Hitler, the man solely responsible for the world's plight, for the death of my family and dearest friends, and he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
For a moment, I thought that I was dreaming. Perhaps I’d fallen ill to sun sickness, but I felt fine. Then I wondered if the Nazis tested some kind of drug or chemical on me, but they would never test us secretly. They liked to let us know what they were doing to us when they ran their experiments. Besides, it’d been weeks since they lined us up and forced drugs into our arms, so I was fairly confident it wasn’t an hallucination.
Whatever it was, I felt the urge to jump into that hole, and I don't know exactly what possessed me to do so. Maybe my mother or father urged me, or perhaps it was God telling me that I had a chance to do something to end it all. The reason to this day eludes me, but in just a short second, I found myself standing with Hitler in that small bunker.
He looked at me wide-eyed as if I was a ghost who appeared from nowhere. To him, it may have seemed that way, but I knew exactly where I’d come from. The fear in his eyes burned more powerfully than I'd ever seen in even the weakest of camp prisoners.
The man tried to run, but I grabbed him and threw him to the ground. As I held him there, a woman lay on the ground near him. It was Eva. It was rumored that she killed herself when she thought the war would go south, but it appeared he'd killer her. I don't know why, and I didn't care to ask. Instead, I reached up, grabbed the German pistol laying on the desk, and, without hesitation, emptied the rounds into him.
