by Joe Sullivan
"She took a turn for the worse, in a matter of hours, really."
"Did she say anything strange?" Abbie asked.
"She hasn't spoken much, just asked for you and said its time to fly away to heaven. That was about twenty minutes ago."
Abbie took the stairs two at a time, a feat she hadn’t attempted since she was much younger. The hallway was unusually silent, even for that particular type of facility. It was a hush she had felt before, like every spirit trapped in each ailing body knew one of them was being called home. Abbie could hardly breathe when she reached Charlotte's door. She didn't knock, just pushed the door open. Her mind registered the empty bed, an empty bird cage sitting on the white sheets and then blood, pools of it on the floor.
"I'm gonna fly away," a small voice said, "she told me how to get to heaven."
Abbie's heart stuttered when she looked to the open window and saw Charlotte perched upon its edge.
"Come down here!" Abbie pleaded.
"I don't want to die here and be stuck; she said it’s hell."
Abbie pointed to the corner of the room where no one stood. Abbie took two steps inside and saw the dead bird, plucked nearly bald. Its tiny wings stripped of the feathers that should have helped it to fly for the first time. Her eyes went to Charlotte who held her bleeding arms out to show Abbie that she had stuck the fledgling's feathers beneath her own skin to create mangled wings—only a hopeful child would believe they were enough to conduct flight.
"NO!" Abbie cried.
"Fly away, little fledgling." a rasping voice spoke from the corner of the room. Abbie caught a peripheral glimpse of something in the mirror. She turned to look upon the reflection of a skeletal woman with ratty, white hair, and blood running from her mouth, which spread in a wide, crimson smile.
"I'm happy you came to see me fly away to heaven." Charlotte said before she leapt from the window.
Abbie's screams echoed down the quiet hallways as the girl, the fledgling, failed in her first attempt at flight—though she found heaven in the sidewalk below.
THE END
Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason are a twin sister writing team from Arizona. They have been dubbed the Sisters of Slaughter for their work in the horror genre. Their work has been published by Serialbox, Thunderstorm Books, Sinister Grin Press and Bloodshot Books. Their debut novel, Mayan Blue, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. Their next novel, Tapetum Lucidum, is being released by Death’s Head Press.
Forget the Burning Isle
Michael Whitehouse
Iam glad I found this place. A good venue for my thoughts. Buried among fictional accounts, most probably lost in a sea of anonymity. You see, I do not want to be believed. I certainly do not care if you believe me. I must admit, however, that I feel the need to share. I am a remote and singular person, and as such I do not get to vent my emotions often. It has certainly been a long time since I last told my story, and those present then did not believe me either. Whether you believe or not is up to you. It does not matter to me, but I have a strange need to hope that someone will at least read my story. That it will be passed on. Other than that, I consider this little exercise as nothing more than therapy.
Back then, I lived on the island of Hirta. It is an isolated place in the North Atlantic just off the Northwest of Scotland. There were not many people there at the time, but those who were, had deep affection for one another. I remember walking the rocky hills caressed by wild grass and moss, watching the might of the Atlantic crash against the cliffs below me. As a young girl, I thought the sea would consume the island like the hand of Pluto dragging the rocky outcrop and all those who lived upon it to its murky depths. But it was an all too human hand which brought the place to its knees.
You will find mention of Hirta in the history books. The official account claims that the island was finally abandoned in the 1930s due to illness. It is rumored that the illness was brought by outsiders and that we islanders did not have immunity to it, but that is only half true. In my experience, half-truths are more insidious than any lie, so let me set the record straight: We were not evacuated from that island, we were wiped from its memory.
At the time, I was a pretty girl, and I knew it. I was 18 years old and the boys clambered over each other to make an impression on me. Though I did not enjoy that attention, I did not blame them, as the island had no more than 200 folk on it—another fact erased from history—and so opportunities to meet someone and get married were limited. One of those men who tried his hardest to impress me was the last healthy Hirta face I saw. His name was Jacob. He had blonde hair, but the type which shines red when the sun meets it. A hair color which could only come from the Nordic peoples who settled in parts of Scotland’s North.
Jacob did not care for history or lineage, but he was a gentle soul. The other young men on the island were rugged farmers, but Jacob was slight in stature, though his kindness more than made up for that. After poetic letters and secret glances across the way, I had finally agreed to walk with him through the town to the festival. It was nearly the solstice, and the town wanted to mark the coming harvest with a celebration. Everyone was there. Tables were set outside and for once the wind which usually lashed the island had stilled somewhat. Cider and whiskey were drunk by the bucketload, pies and stews of every description were devoured. That day was everything I loved about Hirta. We all knew each other, and there was a solidarity in our shared conquest of the elements, come rain or shine.
What would now be called a migraine was something which I had suffered from since childhood. Unfortunately for Jacob, I had to cut our day in the sun short so I could return to my family’s cottage and lie down in the darkness, hoping that the agonizing pain in my left eye would soon pass. I could see the disappointment in his face. He clearly thought I was abandoning him because I was not enjoying myself, but I offered the reassurance that we would go for a walk together again in the coming days when I felt better.
Once home, I lay in my room. The thick curtains were tightly closed, as even the slightest sliver of sunlight would make the searing headache worse. The town festivities continued just a few streets away and I could hear one of the town elders, Ross Brady, booming loudly with a badly written poem for the occasion.
I do not know how long I lay there, but I was awoken from a fragmentary sleep by the worst sound I have ever heard. I wish I could describe the noise as a scream, but it was more like a gasping, retching sound, like someone had drank too much in the street outside my window. At first, I paid no heed to it, but the retching was soon joined by vomiting. I thought I had better check on the poor man, but as I pulled myself out of bed and reached over to the curtain, it quivered at my touch. The tiniest line of sunlight poked out from between and embedded on my forehead. I cannot convey the pain to you in words. It made the agony of a migraine in full flow seem almost enjoyable by comparison.
Falling back off my bed, I reached up and touched the skin on my head, but I could already smell it. I was burning. I rushed to the wash basin in my room and poured what little water was in it over my head. The cool liquid not only calmed the searing heat, but I could hear the sound it made as it touched my burning skin—it sizzled like water thrown on a campfire. The thin vertical burn on my forehead still felt horrendous, and so I reached for the door to the hall thinking that I would go outside and immerse my head in the cold water of a nearby stream. Thank God I held back and recognized the danger amongst my confusion and pain. If I had walked out into that hall with the sunlight bathing me through the unshuttered windows, I would not be writing this today. I would have writhed in agony as my flesh burned off my bones.
I realized then that the retching outside had been joined by other sounds. They came from a few streets away. I knew immediately what they were. Every person on the island was outside at the festival. Distant howls and screams of agony met my ears, and the smell of people burning filtered through the air. There was nothing I could do. I lay there in the darkness and listened. First the man in
the street outside choked on vomit or his own insides putrefying. Eventually he expired, as did the cries of pain from everyone else.
In some way I am ashamed that I did not rush outside to help; after all, my mother and father, my brothers, my friends—everyone I had ever known was out there, cremated by the sun. However, I have learned to live with this memory. Had I stepped outside I would have suffered the same fate, and perhaps it was meant to be that one person from the island should survive as a witness.
Grief swirled around me in waves. Denial took over, whispering hope to me that perhaps some had survived. Perhaps my own family had not perished in that cruel way. But as I lay there frozen by the horror, imprisoned in my room for fear of burning, I waited for my family to return home. They did not. Night fell, and by then I knew that everyone was gone. A numbness took me, and the trauma removed me from the immediacy of it all. I lay there thinking of my loved ones, tears replaced by a temporary void of no feeling at all.
When darkness had finally blanketed the island, I tested the curtain once more. Flicking it slightly, I was relieved that the starlight and the moon contained no fear for me. Stepping outside into the night was the eeriest moment of my life. The village I had loved all my years, the place where I had run free with the other teenagers of the island, was now silent. It was suffocated by the stench of death. The wind had still not returned, and so the smell of burnt flesh hung in the air.
Armed with my father’s paraffin lantern, I lit it and observed the street under the dim yellow glow of its burning wick. The street was empty, all but for something sitting in the shadow beneath my window. The figure was contorted. Its charred skin frozen in position by whatever malevolent event had caused this. The man’s hands reached upward, and the fingertips of his right hand were resting on the window ledge in seeming desperation. Most of the clothes were burned, but it was the eyes which gave away the figure’s identity. I let out a whimper. It was Jacob. He must have come back to check on me just before it happened. And I had sat on the other side of that thick curtain as he burned and suffocated on his own liquified insides. It was the eyes which haunted me. I would have thought they would have been destroyed by any fire, but they had not been. They were open and as blue as they had been that sunny afternoon. The paraffin flame glimmered in them, and for a moment I thought he was still alive. But that was not life, it was but a shadow of it. Frozen in place by the burning.
I could no longer bear to think of what might have happened if I had reached out of my window and pulled him inside. And so, I fled the grief. Panic took me, and I ran through the empty streets of Hirta island, my white summer dress fluttering, ghost-like in the night. When I reached the scene of the festival, I vomited. The smell of nearly two hundred Hirta folk frozen in position like Jacob was overpowering. Many of the bodies were on top of each other. There had obviously been a panic when it had happened. People who loved each other had lost their minds. The pain too agonizing, overriding any desire to help one another. I saw things under the light of Father’s lantern which I can never unsee. The burned bodies of young children crushed under the weight of adults clambering to escape the pain. Broken limbs hanging off the bodies in places, burned marionette dolls who were once those I loved.
I was compelled to search. When I saw the charred face of my mother staring at me, her body gazing upwards but bent unnaturally at the spine over a table, I lost my mind. Falling to the ground, my thoughts dissolved. The grief of losing everything was too much for me. There lay my mother, her body broken in the stampede, and my two brothers on the ground next to her. One had his hand on my mother’s leg. Was he trying to help her? Or had he reverted in that moment of pain to the outlook of a child, needing to be saved by his mother. My father was not far from there, his crumpled body lying amongst three others at the door to a cottage. Perhaps they knew if they could get out of the sunlight, they would have had a chance at least.
As I sat on the ground of that street, I tried to cry, but no noise came from my mouth. No sound could represent that loss. The only thing which woke me from that nightmarish despair was a loud bang. It was a gunshot. Perhaps one of the farmers had survived. Had there been but one gunshot, I would have thought it self-inflicted, but no, another sounded. Then another. And the shots were getting closer.
Across the street, I saw that a window had been broken. The body of someone, Ross Brady I think, was hanging out of it. His legs were still in the street, burned to a crisp, but he must have broken the window during the panic and managed to claw halfway into a shop before the burning killed him. As the gunshots drew nearer, I heard the shuffle of feet coming from the bottom of the street. Something inside of me told me to hide, that those footsteps were not friendly, and so I panicked, leaving my father’s lantern behind in the street, and pulled myself in through the shop window, trying not to touch Ross Brady’s corpse. Something dragged across my leg. It was a shard of glass from the window, cutting my thigh open. I let out a short yelp and then bit into my hand to stay the pain. In response, someone from outside the shop came running down the street, and then accompanied by another. I scrambled underneath a shop table, hiding behind the red checkered tablecloth which draped over it.
Peeking out from behind the cloth, I could see the dim outline of two men in the street outside. They had a short conversation about whether they had heard something, and the lit lantern on the street which I had left behind. One of them, a man referred to as Sergeant Blake, told the other, obviously his subordinate, to continue with, and I’ll always remember these words, ‘the job at hand.’ Sergeant Blake then aimed what looked like a rifle at something on the ground and discharged his gun.
They’re making sure everyone is dead.
As each gunshot sounded outside, tears began to flow from my eyes. They were desecrating my people. The two men then pointed to Ross Brady’s legs hanging out of the window. As they moved over to him, the other man readied his rifle. That was when Ross Brady moved. I was not the only one to be startled. The two soldiers gasped and swore in response. The body let out a horrid groan of pain. Looking up at his face—I was just a few feet away from him—the whites of his eyes rolled in his charred head as he regained consciousness. And then he began to sob uncontrollably. No doubt from the pain, but perhaps from the grief also. Ross had a young family. I had seen him sitting with them in the street earlier in the day. And now they were gone like everyone else.
The two soldiers argued about what to do, but Sergeant Blake reprimanded the other man, who I now knew was named Private McClusky. I watched as the private’s hands shook as he pointed the rifle to the back of Ross Brady’s groaning head. Silence then fell for a moment. Ross looked up and for the first time saw me, staring up at him from under the table. He let out a loud garbled cry at the sight of me, and then Private McClusky pulled the trigger. The bullet passed through his head and out through the front of his face, which was now largely gone, and then embedded itself in the floor next to me. The resulting blood and skull fragments covered me, but though I wanted to scream, my body merely trembled terribly as though cold.
I dared not move for fear of being seen, as it was now clear that the soldiers were there to ensure no one was left alive. But the trembling continued, the shock coursing through my veins.
Sergeant Blake patted McClusky on the back and said, “good job.” He then walked further up the street and continued putting a bullet in the heads of each and every Hirta resident, man, woman, and child. McClusky turned to the broken window and then said: “Stay there. If they find you, they’ll kill you.”
My blood ran cold. He had seen me. I wanted to scramble away from his attention, but by the increasing number of footfalls outside, I could tell the island was now overrun with soldiers.
McClusky looked around to see if anyone was watching. He took off his brodie helmet, pulling the strap away from beneath his chin. In the dim light I could just about see his features. He was young. No older than my brother, Charlie, who was just 23 yea
rs old and but a burned corpse behind in the street.
“No one is to leave Hirta,” McClusky said, now in a gentler voice. “I thought we were here to put the people who burned out of their misery, but Sergeant Blake just put a bullet in a young kid a few doors back who was hiding under his bed.” McClusky’s voice was trembling, and though I could not be certain due to the lack of light, I thought I saw a glint of tears in his eyes.
“Once this street is cleared,” he continued, “they’ll do a sweep of every building on the island. Then, they’ll find you. Is there anywhere you can hide on the island that they won’t know about?”
I stared at McClusky in a daze.
“Come on!” he whispered forcefully. “If we don’t find somewhere for you to hide, they’ll put a bullet in you.”
Wracking my brains, I could not think.
“It has to be somewhere the sun won’t touch you,” said McClusky. “You’ll end up like everyone else here if you don’t stay out of it.”
A commanding voice now shouted “McClusky!” It was Sergeant Blake.
“Hide!” McClusky whispered. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
What followed was McClusky being reprimanded by Sergeant Blake for taking off his brodie helmet. McClusky said he was not feeling well, but this meant nothing to the sergeant.
“That’s everyone done in the streets,” said Blake. “Now, we need to sweep the buildings for any possible survivors.”
“And then?” asked McClusky.
“You know fine well ‘what then,’” answered Sergeant Blake. “Listen, boy, my superiors were dead set against a young fella like you coming to the island. I vouched for you. Don’t make me regret it. We have a job to do to clean up this mess, and no word of it can ever get out. Any of my lads make me think for a second that they’ll say anything about what’s gone on here, and they’ll end up with the people of Hirta. Bagged and thrown somewhere your body will never be found. “You understand?”
