What Fears Become: An Anthology from The Horror Zine

by Piers Anthony

  And by suppertime the Ouija board was back on Liza's table, reeking of sesame oil.

  Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that Liza went out and got back that board. I admit it. I was thinking the same thing. So when she called me that night, I went over and got the board. Then I took the bus to the ocean by myself. I walked along the boardwalk on the water's edge and flung that Ouija board out as far as I could. I waited while it was dragged out to sea and I stayed there until I saw that gawddamn board sink into the ocean.

  Half an hour later, I got home and found Liza sobbing on my front porch. In her hands she held a sopping wet Ouija board.

  Oh my Jesus, and all that's above! I was more than shocked. For the first time in my life I was deathly afraid.

  Realizing that we had no choice, we sat at my kitchen table with the board between us.

  "What on God's green earth do you want?" I yelled.

  My fingers tingled as the wood slowly slid across the board.

  U.

  I thought of Ursula Bigelow or Ugene Pierce.

  The wood stayed where it was.

  "U?" Liza moaned. "What does that mean?"

  We waited for the board to spell more, but the wood didn't move.

  Liza bit her lip. "We asked what it wants. I-I think it wants us."

  Suddenly the room vibrated and we heard a wicked laugh echo through the house. We snatched back our hands and watched the wood race around the board.

  LIZASHAR―

  "We gotta get rid of this thing," I said.

  "We tried that!" Liza cried. "But it just keeps coming back."

  When I glanced at the fireplace in my living room, I got an idea. We built us a fire and when it was blazing hot we fed it pieces of the box.

  "Put another log on the fire," I sang bitterly, tossing the wood piece into the flames.

  Together we threw the Ouija board into the fire and watched as it slowly crumpled on the edges. When it ignited, we let out a sigh of relief. Me and Liza stayed there, arm in arm, watching the letters slowly fry until the board turned to ashes. And then the smell hit us. The stench of rot and decay was awful―like an Easter egg long forgotten after Easter.

  That was the night before last.

  Yesterday morning, I found Liza on her front lawn―dead of a broken neck. Beside her lay the Ouija board with one small scorch mark on its edge.

  The sky is blood-red over the lake and the air tastes like death.

  I have to hurry. I don't think I got much time left. The board said both of us, so I know it's coming for me next. I'm so afraid, but I have to try to get rid of this thing one last time and I have to let everyone know the truth. I was the one who opened Pandora's Box. I'm the one who needs to close it.

  Just so it's clear, Liza and I tried throwing the Ouija board in a dumpster and a trashcan. I threw it in the ocean and when that didn't work, we both watched it burn in the fireplace. Each and every time, the gawdawful evil thing ended up back at Liza's.

  Then again, Liza never could throw anything away. A pack rat. That's what she was.

  And my best friend.

  I'm writing this letter and watching the Ouija board burn. This time I soaked it in lighter fluid, and when it's done burning I'm gonna take the ashes and bury them by the lake.

  When we asked it that first night what its name was, we should have waited. Actually, we never should have asked in the first place.

  NATA―

  I know now that only one other letter was missing and that if I held a mirror to it, the word would read backward―the devil of all evils. SATAN!

  He's coming for me. I can feel it in my bones. It's all my fault. I was curious. And you know what they say about curiosity.

  I have to get these ashes to the lake.

  Be back later…I hope.

  Sharon Kaye

  On February 13th,, my aunt Sharon was found lying near Aurora Lake, her gaping eyes frozen in fear and her hands blistered and burnt. The coroner said she drowned. But I think something else killed her―something insidious and older than time.

  While packing away my aunt's belongings at her lakeside cottage, I discovered this letter in a box of old party games. Curious, I read the letter and then reached into the box, pulling out something damp and slightly scorched. A OUIJA board.

  You know what they say about curiosity…

  About Cheryl Kaye Tardif

  Cheryl Kaye Tardif is a bestselling, award-winning, Vancouver-born suspense author now residing in Edmonton, AB. All of her works touch on some element of suspense or mystery, with an emotional hook.

  Her novels include: Divine Justice, Children of the Fog, Whale Song, The River, and Divine Intervention. She's also the author of these new releases: Remote Control, a novelette, and Skeletons in the Closet & Other Creepy Stories, a collection of suspense/horror stories.

  In 2004, Cheryl was nominated for the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award. In 2006, she was a contestant on A Total Write-Off!, a reality TV game show. In 2009, she placed in the semi-finals of Dorchester Publishing's "Next Best Cellar" contest with her romantic suspense Lancelot's Lady, which is written under the pen name of Cherish D'Angelo. In 2010, Lancelot's Lady won an Editor's Choice Award from Textnovel.

  A full-time writer, Cheryl has presented at many events. She has been featured on TV and radio, and in newspapers and magazines across Canada and the USA.

  When asked what she does, Cheryl replies: "I kill people off for a living."

  http://www.cherylktardif.com

  Waiting Near

  Joseph Patrick McFarlane

  Fragments

  Thomas Bossert

  FRY DAY

  by Melanie Tem

  My daughter Rachel always loved carnivals, and she'd have been delighted by this one. A seedy, smelly, gaudy, two-truck affair, it set up last Saturday in the little park near our house. I'm sure they don't have a permit. I'm sure they're violating all kinds of ordinances, not to mention the boundaries of good taste. Rachel would have been charmed by all that.

  There are more people here than I expected. A lot of people I know—neighbors, the day clerk from the 7-11, the relief mail carrier. I don't know many of their names anymore, but I remember their faces and most of their stories. This one's husband was killed in a car accident. That one is dying of cancer of the prostate, liver, bowel. I hardly believe in their sorrow, and it angers me to have it presented as though it mattered, as though it gives us something in common. None of them lost Rachel.

  That one, passing now in front of me, has never had anything bad happen in her life, a story that seems far more plausible to me than the others, easier to accept. I smile at her and raise a hand in greeting. She waves back. Her bouquet of balloons both obscures and magnifies her face.

  Unlike many children, Rachel never was afraid of clowns or barkers, the Ferris Wheel or the Tilt-a-Whirl or the roller coaster, speed or height or centrifugal force or things that are not what they seem. The world for her was a good place, and only going to get better.

  Which is why, thirteen-and-a-half years ago at the age of twenty-one, she died. Brian James Dempsey killed her.

  Killed and raped her, I remind myself diligently; it seems especially important to be precise tonight. Killed and raped and mutilated her. Along with, depending on which theory you subscribe to, fourteen or thirty-seven or a hundred other pretty young women with long dark hair.

  A clown skips by. The orange yarn of his wig is unraveling and he's lost the middle button of his polka-dot blouse so that you can see the gray hair and the gray sweatshirt underneath. He bows elaborately to me and I bow back, laughing a little, a little bit scared.

  Unless there's another stay, which at this point doesn't seem likely, Brian Dempsey will die in the Florida electric chair at five o'clock tomorrow morning, our time, for the only murder they've been able to convict him of. Not Rachel's.

  At the end booth is a fortune-teller. She's dressed, of course, like a cartoon gypsy—bangle
s on her wrists and ankles, a black lace shawl over her head. Maybe she really is a gypsy. Maybe she really is a fortune-teller, come to this.

  She's reading the palm of Mrs. McCutheon, who used to babysit for me when Rachel was a baby. Foolishly, I wonder if the gypsy could have foretold Rachel's death, or the death of Mrs. McCutheon's daughter, Libby, a grown woman with a husband and children, of a heart attack two years ago. I wonder if now she can see whether Brian Dempsey really will die tomorrow morning, and how it is that I could have lived after my daughter's death, and how I will go on living after her murderer's execution.

  When Mrs. McCutheon gets up from the fortune teller's table, she is crying. Her tears offend me, whether they're for me or for herself. She doesn't know me at first; we haven't seen each other in a long time, and I've changed. When she realizes who I am, she gasps, "Oh, hello, dear," and looks at me as if she thinks she should say more. But I don't encourage her. Especially tonight, my grief is too good to share. Finally, Mrs. McCutheon just shakes her head and goes off down the midway.

  The gypsy mistakes my hesitation for interest. "Come and see into your fu-tah!" she cries in a hoarse, heavy accent. "Fortunes, one dollah only!"

  "I can already see into my future," I tell her, "Thanks anyway." She shrugs and turns to another, likelier prospect. I went to a medium once in those first desperate weeks after Rachel died, but I knew before I went that the woman would be a fake.

  When the execution date was finally set, I called the governor's office to ask if I could come and watch. Be a witness to Brian Dempsey's extermination. Bear witness to what he did to my daughter, what he did to me. But Florida allows only official visitors at its executions. The woman on the phone sounded very young, younger than Rachel would be now, and she hardly gave me the time of day.

  I couldn't stay home alone tonight counting the hours. I tried to find out what his last meal would be, but they won't release that information till tomorrow, so I fixed for myself what I thought he might have: a hamburger, French fries, baked beans. He'll talk to his mother tonight. He'll dream. I couldn't stay home alone, trying to imagine all that, so I walked over here. It seems a fitting place for a vigil. Rachel loved carnivals, and this tacky little traveling sideshow will stay open all night.

  "Hey, lady, win a dancing bear!" calls a barker in a dirty red-and-white striped shirt from under a tattered red awning. "Flip the switch and it dances, just like Brian Dempsey!"

  The plywood counter in front of him is crowded with the chintzy gadgets. The midway lights make him and them and me, I suppose, look ghoulish. The toys are about the size of my clenched fists, and they make a tinny whirring sound when you turn them on. Actually, they look more like slightly melted human beings than like bears. All around me people are clapping, hooting, laughing appreciatively. I appreciate the gag, too. I laugh, too.

  "Three chances to win for just one dollar, lady! Take home a souvenir of this great day in history to your kids and grandkids!"

  Rachel was my only child, so all my grandchildren died with her. A few years afterward, when there were still no real suspects in her murder, but serial killer Brian Dempsey had just started making the news, a young man I'd never heard of called me one afternoon from California. His voice breaking, he told me he'd been in love with my daughter and planned to marry her. Now he was married to someone else and his wife was expecting their first baby. If it was a girl, they wanted to name her Rachel.

  I don't know why he called me. For my blessing, maybe; my permission, at least. I had none to give. I have no interest since Rachel died in other people's happiness, or in their pain.

  I wait in the short line to pay the man my dollar. He takes it with a practiced gesture much like palming, and he doesn't look at my face or react to the condition of my hand. Probably he's seen worse. He offers me the bucket of multicolored balls and I take three. It doesn't matter which three, and it doesn't matter how I throw them, since the game is, of course, rigged.

  I come close on two of my throws, but don't hit anything. I've lost most of my dexterity and grip; my thumbs scarcely oppose anymore. The tall kid next to me wins. I can't remember his name, but he's been living in foster homes since his mother shot his father and then herself when he was five or six. I wonder what he's doing here, how he dares be seen in public. His bear writhes and hops in his hands. Someone in the crowd yells, "Hey, Brian, it won't be long now!" and, briefly, I feel as if I've won something after all.

  Over and over I've imagined what must have happened. At first I could hardly stand it, but I told myself I owed it to her; if she could go through it, the least I could do was think about it. So I've read everything that's ever been written about him watched the TV movie four times, seen interviews, studied psychological theories about sociopaths. For a long time now, imagining in detail what must have happened to my daughter Rachel has been a daily habit; those are the first thoughts in my head when I wake up if I've been able to sleep, and they give me energy and reason to face the day.

  Speed and height and centrifugal force, and things that aren't what they seem. He'd have been quick—quick-thinking, quick with his hands and his words, though probably not quick, the experts have said, with his killing. Quick with his handsome smile. Even after all these years on Death Row, he has a quick and handsome smile. His approach to her that early, snowy morning thirteen-and-a-half years ago—his offer of a ride to the bus stop, his thermos of steaming coffee—would have seemed to her an innocuous little adventure in a thoroughly adventurous world.

  While he drove her into the mountains, he'd have kept up his patter, his pleasant jokes, his intelligent observations. Once she realized she was in terrible danger, she'd have thought of me. I was on my way to work by then, worried about a committee report that wasn't done. Things are not what they seem; she was already dead before I even knew she was missing.

  That isn't going to happen to me this time. I'm going to know the exact moment Brian James Dempsey dies. I'm going to be wide awake and cheering. Then, I don't know what I'll do.

  He didn't take her very far into the mountains. The roads were snow-packed, and he wouldn't have wanted to risk an accident. He dumped her nude body into the shaft of an abandoned silver mine just outside Idaho Springs; they didn't find it until nine weeks later. Most of his other victims, the ones he killed in summer, he buried; I suppose the ground was too frozen for him to bury Rachel, or maybe he'd forgotten his gloves.

  The crowd is thinning. I'm approaching the end of this improvised midway; beyond it is the rest of the park, and the darkened houses of people with their own tragedies. Here's a guy swallowing fire. I watch him for a while and can't see the trick. His throat and lungs and chest must burn, like mine. I have a fleeting image of him setting all those houses on fire, one by one by one.

  I check my watch, wind it. If the guy who flips the switch isn't late to work or the governor's heart doesn't start bleeding again at the last minute, Brian James Dempsey will be dead in five hours and ten minutes. Noticing a vague pain, I raise chilled fingers to loosen my lower lip from under my canine teeth. There's blood, but not much. I wipe it on my jacket, and nobody will notice.

  This booth sells cotton candy. I'm one of a handful of customers. The kid behind the counter has an enormous "Fryin' Brian" button pinned to the bill of his cap and an empty sleeve. As he hands me a large cone and then change, his glance inadvertently cuts across my face, and he does an obvious double-take. But this is a traveling sideshow, after all, and it's nearly midnight; he probably sees all manner of strange and deformed creatures.

  "Where'd you get the pin?" I ask him. It's one I don't have.

  He doesn't hear me because he's already saying very loudly, not exactly to me, but to the whole little crowd of us, "Hey, didja hear that Brian Dempsey didn't know tomorrow was Tuesday?"

  One of the teenage girls behind me, who have been blatantly flirting with him, yells back as if this were a rehearsed routine, "No! Why?"

  "Because he thought it was F
ry Day!"

  The girls shriek with laughter. I laugh, too, and wave the gaudy blue cotton candy as if it were a pompon. As I turn away from the counter toward the end of the midway, I think deliberately about those three pretty girls and the young man behind the counter, and I imagine in quick detail how he might lure them away from the carnival tonight, kill and rape and mutilate them. The fantasy calms me a little. The cotton candy sticks like clots of hair to my teeth.

  There's even a freakshow. I thought freakshows were illegal. I walk slowly past the tents and cages lined up across the end of the midway, staring at everything.

  Siamese twin girls joined at the top of the head. Both of them stare back at me and give little shrieks, as if I frighten them. I stand in front of their tent for a long time, probably longer than my quarter entitles me to, savoring their distress and my own.

  A boy with fur all over his face and body. Wolf Boy, one sign declares. Dog Boy, says another. He's sitting in an armchair reading Time magazine by the display light over his head, taking no notice at all of me. I long to be in there with him, to have my arms around his hairy neck, my teeth at his throat. I'd make him notice. I'd make us both a display. I'd make the world acknowledge this awful thing that has ruined my life. But others must have had the same impulse, because bars and mesh make a cage around the Wolf/Dog Boy, protecting him from me.

  A Two-Headed Calf, asleep in its straw, all four eyes closed. A Fat Lady whose flesh oozes toward me as if it had a life and a purpose of its own. A woman with six fingers on each hand; since otherwise she looks quite ordinary, she makes sure you notice her deformity by leaning far forward on her stool and pressing her hands against the screen that shields her from anything other than the stares and words of the audience. The palms and all twelve fingers have hatch marks on them from the screen.