The Horror of our Love: A Twisted Tales Anthology

by Nikita Slater

  My dress and bag were on the floor with my jacket, bodysuit, my bra, and my panties. And they were all folded in a pile beside my boots. Folded? No care like that was taken last night.

  I crawled on all fours to the edge of the bed and craned my neck to peek over the wooden gates, which were closed but not latched.

  Nothing.

  No fire, no movement down there. It wasn’t cold in the space I was in. The temperature the night before signaled a pending snowfall, maybe heavy frost at least, but definitely not hot and balmy weather. The temperature in here without the fire going felt hot, like a summer’s day.

  I got into my bra and underwear, my socks, and then pulled the bodysuit on and threw my dress over my head. I got into my socks and boots, so I could be prepared for anything.

  There was no sign of my ruined tights.

  I jolted in place and lifted the hem of the long, black, gauzy dress up. My leg... the gash from my thigh? It was gone and in its place, a reddish burn. It was the shape of puckered lips. Not feminine, but I knew. I knew it was from when he kissed the sizzling spot and made the burning sensation stop.

  This wasn’t a burn last night. It was an open wound.

  I flexed my toes and rolled my ankle. No pain. No swelling in my ankle at all.

  I looked at my hands. They were still a little scratched up, but not nearly as bad as I’d expected.

  I blinked hard. I rubbed the back of my head, finding no bump, and gave my head a shake in disbelief. Sliding the gates apart, I then turned, and shakily climbed backwards down that ladder.

  Everything was dim, light filtering through the window panes.

  No one was here but me.

  I went to the door and twisted the knob, heart rapidly smacking the inside of my chest so hard that it also echoed with pounding in my throat.

  No sign of him outside within my field of vision. Leaving the door wide open, I turned back to face the interior of the cabin.

  The silver chalice sat on the floor, almost against the chair, where I’d left it. I stopped in front of it. There was still brandy in it.

  I moved to the table area and opened doors and drawers finding them all empty. The tabletop empty. I spun around and looked at the room at large and shook my head in disbelief.

  A pile of fabric in the fireplace caught my eye. I hurried to it and saw my ripped tights in there among the remnants of the ashes, which were piled in front of logs that must have been doused in water. My witch hat was there, too.

  I hadn’t had the witch hat on when he brought me here. I’d lost it on the road. It had come back to me, flew by, and been lost again, and yet here it was.

  I stared at the pile of ash and fabric a moment and then I cautiously moved to the window and looked outside. The sun beat down on the ground and russet, crimson, and sunflower-colored leaves fell slowly and gracefully to the ground from the surrounding trees. The raging river of last night looked more like a little creek today with a little bit of water that certainly didn’t appear in a rush to go anyplace.

  Ensuring I had everything that was mine, I took a quick look around before stepping outside. I needed to relieve myself. I needed to do that after knowing it was safe, that there wasn’t that satanic horse in that paddock around the back of the cabin, that he wasn’t anywhere around here, ready to grab me and hurt me or force me to do anything with his brute strength.

  Was he still in the area? Was his head invisible all along, felt only by touch, or had it magically re-appeared sometime last night, giving him a voice, too?

  I had found a tree to pee behind, paranoid the entire time, using leaves to clean myself and hoping that they weren’t any sort of leaf that would bring me an itchy and blistering rash. I cautiously approached and investigated the half-falling-down horse paddock and it was empty, except for a dusty old bridle sitting on the dirt floor beside a rusted-out feed bucket. There was a trough filled with water, but it looked old and was filled with dead bugs and fallen leaves.

  I stepped outside the paddock and glanced around. I was shaking my head in disbelief and I was timid as a rabbit.

  A flash of brown sped by me and I reacted with a scream.

  A white tail dear ran for its life, away from me, while I breathed out relief. It had been so close as it ran by that I could’ve touched the fluffy white tail. I clutched my chest, feeling my heart pound against my palm while my eyes darted all around me.

  Peace. Tranquility. A forest scene with an old cabin and a horse paddock beside a little creek. This spot would be beautiful. It was beautiful. It was also filled with the memories of the previous night.

  If not, it would be the most beautiful spot to reflect, to meditate, to enjoy the beauty of nature.

  I couldn’t lament on the beauty of the spot, not with the urgency to get to safety. I quickly rifled through my bag and found my phone. I pushed the home button. 93% power. What?

  That didn’t make any sense. But what, in the past seven hours did?

  I also had signal, two bars.

  I opened my map app and it zoomed in to show me that that I was downstream from what looked like a country road that led to open field that backed onto property directly behind Sleep Hollow Elementary School. The directions said it’d take me 31 minutes to walk. I didn’t know what terrain I’d encounter and had no idea if I was safe or not. I phoned my roommate.

  “Katie!” I gasped at the same time as she greeted with her sleepy “Hello?”

  “It’s Isabella. I…” What the heck should I say? I just started babbling. “I was stranded all night in the woods with no signal. I obviously have signal now, so I’m gonna start walking down along this creek that runs to the back of a road behind the town’s water tower. It should bring me out by the school I taught at yesterday. Drowsy Hollow. Can you meet me there?”

  “Shit, Izzy…” She sounded so drowsy.

  I started to sob. “Please, Katie? I needed you to know where I am and the route I’m taking. Did you get all that?”

  “Yeah,” she assured. “Stranded all night in the woods? Holy shit, Iz. That sucks. Where’s your car?”

  “Katie! Focus. Did you get all that?”

  “Yeah. What’s with you? Why are you crying?”

  I sobbed, rubbing my eyes. I heard a noise. I screeched in reaction. A bird. Just a bird breaking through the trees and soaring up into the sky. I quickened my pace down alongside the creek, hoping, praying I’d be okay somehow.

  “You okay, Iz? What was that?”

  “Please, can you leave now? If you leave now, we should meet up in about---”

  “I’m not even out of bed yet, Izzy…” she yawned.

  Was she kidding me?

  “Katie!” I yelled.

  “Okay, I’m a comin’.”

  “Where? Tell me where?”

  She sleepily told me. I demanded she recite my planned route back to me and swear to me she wasn’t going to hang up and go back to sleep. I wanted to know they’d know which way I came, in case anything happened to me. She sounded very concerned and a little more awake by the end and I brushed off her questions and asked her to “Please. Just. Hurry.”

  I couldn’t tell anyone what happened to me. No one would believe it. I didn’t know if I believed it.

  And this is my story.

  There. I’ve written it all down.

  I’m going to put these papers in a safe place until I’m ready to burn them. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day… I’ll buy a pregnancy test and pray that my intuition is wrong.

  I pray I will find a way to move on.

  Chapter 9

  ONE YEAR LATER: OCTOBER 31st

  “And the soldier lost his head when the cannonball sounded with an enormous ear-splitting explosion and struck. It is said by some that each Halloween, he hunts for a new head, taking the first one he sees. But, some with more romantic hearts believe he may actually be hunting for the one true love a fortune teller had told him he’d find, when he was instead killed just before being sent off
to go to war…”

  Trina Powers, my education assistant that worked with the special needs student in our class, along with being my savior on a regular basis in the second-grade classroom, read the book aloud to the class.

  I meant to be back only when the story was already over. I’d tried to get away with reading three other Halloween books to the class before the end of the afternoon, but they would not be tricked into skipping this story.

  “We neeeeed to hear the Headless Horseman of Drowsy Hollow.”

  “Miss Krane, Miss Krane… it’s tradition!”

  I’d asked Miss Powers, Trina, if she would mind doing the honors.

  “Absolutely!” She’d jumped up. When we passed one another as she headed to the front of the class and I moved toward the door, she whispered, “You okay? You’ve gone grey.”

  I’d nodded. “I’ll be back in twenty. You good?”

  “Of course!” she assured.

  I dashed out of there in my kitty cat costume and hid in the staff washroom, hyperventilating for at least twenty minutes before I came back.

  I didn’t know why she was still reading.

  My knees wobbled as I grabbed the doorframe for stability.

  Stability. Hah. A year. A whole year. Stability had no part of the past year.

  A year ago, when I got to town without incident, I was stunned, relieved, and absolutely baffled by it. All of it.

  Katie was there thirty minutes later. I told her nothing much, just that I’d gotten lost when the car broke down and found a little cabin to take shelter in. I’d explained my jitteriness as seeing and hearing a lot of wild animals. I was not okay. I was not remotely close to okay for days, maybe even weeks. Maybe not even now.

  A few hours after Katie got me home, my car was towed to me there. It started right up. They couldn’t find a thing wrong with it.

  I found this out from Katie after a twelve-hour nap. I had terrible dreams. The dreams continued to haunt me nightly for weeks until I wrote it all down. After that, they didn’t nag at me relentlessly each night, but the ordeal was never far from the forefront of my mind. I had dreams every night, of him, but they were no longer all the same, all a revisiting of the events of that night. They were different. Him chasing me. Him and I having sex. Me running through the woods with a baby in my arms, getting to the cabin and finding that the baby was headless.

  The days that followed, I spent a lot of time alone in my room, crying, wondering if I’d gone crazy.

  My brain was telling me I was crazy, that I’d had a breakdown and imagined the whole thing, but my leg told another tale. That burn, to this day, is still there, still looks like the shape of his kiss, only slightly faded. The scars inside me? Still vivid. Maybe indelible.

  Three days later, I worked up the nerve to drive the route I’d taken to and then from the school again, and found nothing odd, other than the fallen tree. I wouldn’t go far from my car to find the cabin via that route. I considered taking the route behind the school to the cabin, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go back there.

  I inquired with some locals at the little café in town about the cabin. They told me it was owned by the mayor’s family, had been in their family for generations, but was rarely used, as the land had been for sale for a few years and had never sold.

  I found that to be odd. As much as it was the locale of my nightmares, it was the prettiest little piece of property during the day.

  I went online and didn’t find much about the storybook, so went into the Drowsy Hollow Library and researched the storybook. The author was local and had died twenty years earlier, according to the librarian.

  He had a grandson in the area. I reached out.

  When I tried to ask questions about the genesis of the story, under the guise of it being a class project, the guy agreed to meet me for coffee. We met in the café in Drowsy Hollow.

  The story was based on the local tale of a soldier who was killed during a training exercise in the late 1700’s, decapitated by a cannon ball that had been launched by his own sergeant. A freak accident, apparently, that took place on Halloween and there were murders on that day for the following few years in the area so there were those who said it was the ghost of Private Holloway. Others said it was someone using the facts of the ghost story to get away with murder.

  It was said he haunted the area, unable to move on for two reasons. One: he wanted revenge against the man who took his head. Two: the night before the battle, soldiers were in a tavern and the man had his fortune told. His fellow soldiers teased about the reading, which told that he would find his true love, but that it would be a long and painful road for him until they met.

  The grandson told me he’d perused the notes years back and read that the legend was that he looks for revenge and also looks for her. As it was to be a children’s book, the tale focused more on the revenge, so they could use it as a cautionary tale. Book publishers wanted there to be a ‘moral to the story’.

  “Gramps probably took a bit of creative license,” he said with a shrug. He shrugged a lot. More than my questions, he was interested in mostly trying to flirt with me. After a long chat, he agreed to lend me his grandfather’s file folder of research material. I turned down his offer of dinner and a movie, and he creepily requested that I bring the file back to him a week later, on a Saturday night for dinner at his home. I told him I’d check my calendar and confirm. I had no intentions of dinner with him.

  On my way toward the café’s door, I ran into the vice principal of the school, who was on his way in.

  “Isabella, how are you? What a fortuitous meeting.”

  “Fine, Mr. Henry. Um. How are you?” I tried to hide how flustered I was. I was also a little nervous at being caught misrepresenting myself as a local schoolteacher.

  This was the week leading into December. Mr. Henry asked me if I would be available as of January to be the second-grade teacher for Drowsy Hollow Elementary School on a full-time basis.

  Part of me wanted to run as far away from Drowsy Hollow as I could. But, I was nearly broke. I wasn’t getting any hours anywhere else, which had been a blessing and a curse as I hadn’t been functional. But, I had a car payment and rent to pay and my student loan that I was still paying off, with not much more than two months of expenses left in savings (two months if I really penny pinched).

  I said yes. I said yes and decided I would stay off that road at night at all costs. Moving into town would mean I wouldn’t have to travel it daily, at least.

  As I was leaving the café, I spotted the local paper sitting on a table by the door and read the headline.

  Local 300+ Year Old Tulip Tree Down. Town Mourns

  The front page of the Drowsy Hollow Gazette had a full-page story that was mostly photos, but that briefly recounted that the ancient tree was found to be mysteriously toppled.

  I needed to know more about that tree. That was the tree, the spot where it all began.

  When I got home, I scanned every page from that author’s file and saved them to my computer. The notes were handwritten, in bullet points, and I surmised that information came from a local historian who said the tale was spread by word and old versions of the tale confirmed the name, Private Holloway, died in error at the hands of his own sergeant, a man named Archibald Krane. Krane. My last name.

  I found the last name of the man’s accidental murderer to be bone-chilling.

  I joined a genealogy website and found three Archibald Kranes in my family tree, the first one born in the mid 1700s. It was a name passed down to the first-born son on that side of the family for three generations. Was hurting me some twisted form of revenge because of my bloodline?

  I drove to the author’s grandson’s home the following morning and left the original file in his mailbox with a Thank You Post-It. I had no intentions of allowing him to flirt with me again.

  After I left, I drove back to the felled tulip tree, not brave enough to do it without the light. And though it was day
time, I still brought a kitchen knife with me. And a stun gun.

  Nothing. Nothing but a stump. A very round and wide stump.

  The pregnancy test was something I avoided for far too long. The day after the visit to the tulip tree stump, I made myself take the test. I was not only a few weeks late, but I was spending three or more hours per day vomiting with agonizingly sore breasts at that point, so the test was but a formality.

  The test was positive.

  I was an absolute wreck.

  Impregnated by a ghost. A monster.

  I went to the doctor to confirm what I knew to be true, what the test also confirmed as true, and he gave me a “Congratulations”.

  I burst into tears and got him to book an appointment for a termination. I couldn’t think of it as a baby. I didn’t even know if it was a baby.

  It didn’t get there. Protesters set the clinic on fire the day before my appointment.

  It didn’t matter, because a day later, I had heavy bleeding. Very heavy. The hospital told me it was a blighted ovum.

  And then, strangely, I mourned the lost baby that might not have been a baby at all. I mourned that baby for weeks. Months even, feeling washed in guilt that I’d wished it away. What if it was healthy? What if it was good. What if it was innocent?

  Was I a monster, too, for wishing it away? I felt like I murdered my baby through my sheer will.

  I knew what had happened to me had happened to me. I just didn’t know why.

  And I didn’t know how to move on.

  January rolled around, Christmas a non-Christmas because of where I was at emotionally, and Katie got a new roommate while I moved to the apartment above the dry cleaners in Drowsy Hollow. It was still available. It was affordable. It was perfect. The landlord was reportedly overseas, according to the number I’d called, so I dealt with an agent in his absence, but only remotely. She couriered me the keys and told me to take a look.