This was absurd, as surreal as a dream, which perhaps it was. Could he really be here to write nightmares for people, he wondered. If so, it was an intriguing assignment. But how would one begin?
The empty page before him was becoming hypnotic; the pure emptiness of the sheet increasingly absorbed him. As this happened, Tom’s inner eye opened and he saw the sweet face of a sleeping little girl. She was in her bed, her cheek resting on her hands, which were pressed together palm to palm. Two graceful black ringlets of hair fell across her serene face. Her name was Anthea Karagounis, she was twelve years old and lived with her mother, Penelope, in a two bedroom council flat in Peckham, London. Her father, Nicolas, was dead; he had died a year ago in a traffic accident. He had been a motorbike courier. Anthea loved her daddy. He use to make her laugh at the dinner table by pulling funny faces and always tried to get her while she was drinking so that she’d laugh and have orange juice spurt from her nose. On Saturdays they would do the shopping at the supermarket together, and always stop off for hamburgers and milkshakes on the way. She missed her daddy a lot. At bedtime, with everything so silent, she could not help but think of him and sob.
“Argh!”
Tom wildly shook his head, shaking away Anthea’s image.
“Don’t fight it,” Howard advised. “You need to know who you are writing the nightmare for, if you want it to be effective.
“It was a little girl.”
“Little girls.” Howard spat the words out. “They’re the easiest.”
Tom pulled the blank sheet of paper from the typewriter, crumpled it up into a ball and threw it aside. He would not stand another one of those visions.
“So we’re trapped here?” he queried.
Without looking up from his work, Howard nodded.
“What about food, who brings us food?”
Throwing up his hands in exasperation Howard exclaimed, “It’s all very simple.” Then he stood up and marched over to the cabinet. He opened it and pulled out a bowl, which he presented to Tom. The bowl was full of hot porridge.
“That cabinet was empty when I looked,” Tom objected. “Who put that there?”
Howard shrugged and went back to sit at his desk.
“You try it,” he said.
Tom went to open the cabinet and found another bowl of porridge inside. After removing the bowl he examined the cabinet interior. It was solid concrete.
“Porridge, is that all we get?”
“Before opening the cabinet imagine what you want to find inside,” Howard advised. “Try it.”
Tom closed the cabinet door, but kept his hand on the knob. He then imagined opening the door again and finding a hot plate of pizza, topped with jalapeno peppers, anchovies, caramelised red onions and feta cheese. Eagerly, Tom reopened the cabinet. There was a bowl of porridge.
He took out the bowl and showed it to Howard questioningly.
“The cabinet takes some practice,” Howard explained.
“And what about our toilet facilities?”
“Get a metal bucket from the cabinet, then put it back when you’re finished. The cabinet will dispose of it.”
“Get a bucket from the cabinet!” exclaimed Tom. “The place our food comes from.”
“Stop complaining. We’re writers; we have everything we really need at our desks. Sit down and write something.”
“No! I can’t stay trapped here. I’ve...”
Suddenly a door appeared. A seven-foot high white panelled door with a brass twist handle materialised in the wall directly opposite the cabinet. Howard looked upon it, aghast.
“You’ve put that door there,” he said accusingly to Tom, his voice a panicked croak. “It’s there because you’re thinking about leaving. Get rid of it, sit down and start writing, quickly, before something comes through it.”
“You said we were trapped here.”
“We are! You don’t want to go out there. Every horror from every nightmare there has ever been is out there.”
Tom paced the four steps to the door and grasped the handle. In a frantic scurry, Howard interjected himself between Tom and the door.
“Do not leave this room,” he warned, pleadingly. “You have no idea of the eldritch terrors that lurk beyond this door.”
“I have to go,” Tom confessed. “I cannot stay trapped in a room with a man who uses words like eldritch.”
Howard moved aside, clearing the way for Tom to leave.
“Then go. But as soon as you walk through this door it shall vanish behind you and you shall be stuck out there.”
Twisting the handle, Tom swung the door open and stepped forward. But, without giving him the opportunity to survey the nature of the land beyond, Howard shoved him over the threshold and out into the unknown. The door instantly slammed shut behind him and then vanished, as promised.
He was stranded.
NO LONGER ALONE
By Brian Kirk
The single-storey houses on Darrell’s street were utterly interchangeable. Vinyl sided, ranch-style facades, with cookie-cutter floor plans. Simple structures, these, as though constructed out of erector sets intended for children aged six through fourteen, the unfortunate by-products of the small town’s only uninspired architect.
Not that Darrell noticed.
Nor did he pay much attention to the rows of matching yards with their precision lines and crosshatch patterns, or the mailboxes modeled after fishing boats or fire trucks or camping tents, futile attempts at originality. Instead, all the townsfolk had achieved was a quaint predictability.
For Darrell, life after April had become a mindless exercise of repetition in this land of bland similarity. Exiled from a world filled with purpose and potential, driven away by friends and family who had convicted him in their hearts and would always consider him guilty, even after the evidence had exonerated him. Even after he had been set free.
Jail would have been a preferable sentence to this.
Death, even.
At least in death he wouldn’t have to relive each mundane moment like some eternal Groundhog Day in hell.
At least in death he could be with April, with their, what? Son? Daughter? He’d never know.
The sun set as he turned into his driveway and parked beneath the sagging carport, closing the curtains on an expansive copper sky rippled with sorbet colored clouds. Another inspired evening’s end ignored.
Darrell climbed from the car and was rounding the house when he noticed an irregularity in his backyard: a bright, white splotch covering a section of lawn that should have been cloaked in the shadows of early dusk. At first he thought it was a moon ray casting a spotlight on this singular patch of grass, but an upward glance quickly dispelled this suspicion. The moon was just a grey sliver slung low in the sky, dull as a dead man’s grin.
As he approached the spot, he confirmed that the discoloration was not from a source of light, but, rather, appeared to be stained into the earth itself, stark white against the shadowed ground, like a bleach mark on a dark shirt.
Paint?
No. Well, not your standard hardware store ivory paint product, at least. Even white paint would be dulled by darkness. This patch of ground was aglow, radiant as a fully lit moon.
He came to the perimeter of the mark and stopped, again inspected the sky, then slowly circled the stain, which was approximately thirty feet in diameter, its shape somewhat lopsided, like a bloated state of Texas.
From a distance came the woeful howling of a neighbor’s neglected dog, disrupting the unusually soundless night. The evenings were normally so alive with the incessant buzzing and chirping of restless insects. He stopped, and simply listened, to nothing. Not a rustle of wind. Not a scuttle of bug. Just the dog in the distance, desperately pleading for attention.
Darrell’s skin prickled. He suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable in the expansive backyard. He scanned his surroundings, looking towards the neighboring homes, separated not by fences but by flat, barren ground speckled
with patches of brittle grass. Even in the ever-darkening evening, he could see that he was unobserved from either end. He turned towards the wooded barrier fifty feet behind his property – a sheer wall of forest brush so densely packed it seemed it had been created by God’s understudy, whose overzealous attitude towards creation had produced this nearly impenetrable cross-section of bramble and vine. If anything lurked within these woods, it was now concealed by shadow.
The silence became oppressive. It took on a physical quality – a weight bearing down on him, hunching his shoulders.
Darrell turned his attention back to the phosphorescent stain before him, from which a scant mist was now rising, as if from a large slab of dry ice. He squatted and lowered his cupped hands to the thickening mist, then wafted the vapors towards his face.
The stench nearly put him on his back. A dank and rancid musk pickled with cloying sweetness. His head jerked reflexively and he staggered back, his nose buried in the crook of his arm. Cautiously, he crept back towards the stain, relieved to find the smell contained closer to the ground, only the faintest hint detectable from above.
Darrell reached out one foot to test the solidity of the stain. The surface was slick, and his foot slid when it landed, nearly causing him to spill forward. He waved his arms for balance, his foot skidding across the stain, a gelatinous sludge pouring over his shoe as the putrid stench bloomed, engulfing him like a fog. He yelped and scrambled for solid ground, his feet slipping on the slick surface as though on ice.
Back on dry grass, he retched into his sleeve, then inspected his sludge-caked shoes. He stomped his feet and moonwalked back towards the house, leaving incandescent trails on the coarse grass. Behind him, the night remained silent, save for the despairing dog.
Darrell left his shoes to air outside and entered through the back door. He grabbed the county phone book, then paused. Who could he call to treat a rotten blob in the backyard? He tossed the book onto the kitchen table and rubbed his eyes. He’d deal with it in the morning, should it still be there, when the daylight would better assist his inspection.
He fell into his nightly routine and the numbing relief of familiar repetition. The strange, wet stain was a small, dissolving thought by the time Darrell turned out the light for sleep.
The braying alarm jolted Darrell from a pleasant, sexually explicit dream, dragging him back to the reality of his dingy bedroom. A sharp ray of morning sunlight shone through the window above the bed, casting a spotlight on the sheets tee-peed over his groin. He groaned, shoved the sheets aside and shuffled to the bathroom.
Darrell awoke every morning in this state of sexual frustration, his body suffering from nostalgia. This had been his and April’s favorite playtime, frolicking beneath the sheets in the grey haze of early dawn, gliding between the real world and the ethereal, bodies warm and ready, senses awakening to sensual touches. Whenever anyone complained about their morning malaise, Darrell and April would share a secret smile.
But now Darrell was one of the others - morning’s mortal enemy.
He released his sexual frustration in the shower, letting the warm water wash away his wasted seed, and settled into his daily routine, wiping steam from the mirror and inspecting his grizzled face.
Would she even recognize me anymore? he thought.
Would she still love the man I’ve become?
He didn’t think so. And he couldn’t blame her. It was his self-determination and independence that had attracted April in the first place, but it had all been a façade. A Faberge shell that had crumbled after she died, exposing his vapid hollows. He was April’s husband. That had become his identity. And without her, he was nothing.
Worse, he was this.
The faint laugh lines framing his mouth were the only remnants from his previous, happy life, and even those were fading into a network of tired wrinkles and fleshy folds. The result of a life lulled into tedium. A life ruined by loss.
Darrell was applying shaving cream to his face when a loud and urgent gurgling startled him. It was coming from the shower, a grumbling, like hunger. Then water began spurting from the shower nozzle in bursts.
He reached in to turn the water off, but the handle was already in the off position. He angled the nozzle away from himself and searched for a shut-off valve as water began to flood the tub, a faint vibration causing it to ripple. Bubbles began to percolate up through the drain. Just a few at first, then more, rising in rapid succession – large, roiling bubbles that burst with force, releasing a noxious stench.
Darrell had just shed his towel and stepped in to clear the drain when a hammering began on the underside of the tub, a violent assault that caused him to hunker down for better balance. The rattling tub rocked him against the walls as the cacophony – splashing, boiling water and banging, jangling pipes – reached an apex. A geyser erupted from the drain, spraying dark, red, gelatinous fluid over his outstretched arms, where it hung in heavy, mucous-thick ropes. Silence pursued.
Stunned, Darrell gaped down at the mess covering his arms and legs. As the liquid dropped back into the tub in clumps, he noticed a fleshy-looking mass of… something, floating on the surface of the shallow water. It too was red, but of a lighter shade, coursed with violet lines, almost like veins. He was still processing the sight before him when the drain opened up with a vacuum-like sound, sucking down the clumps of debris along with the tainted water.
Darrell collapsed against the back of the tub, chest heaving, and watched the murky liquid retreat until all that remained were slimy tendrils of residue reaching out from the drain.
The water choked off, the pipes sputtering. He stepped out and surveyed himself, shaking in disgust. Not trusting the taps, he decided to try and towel the gunk off.
Another noise then came from the drain. A hitching, wavering sound; soft, yet abrasive to the senses, pitched at a tone that seemed more intuited than heard – a warbling, like gargled song. Darrell leaned in closer, and held his breath.
Must be echoes from a broken pipe, he figured. The noise was faint, as though wafting up from a barren well. Funny, Darrel thought, it sounds like feral cats fighting, or the urgent wails of an unhappy infant.
Making his way back to the sink, Darrell checked the faucet, which was dry. The pipes were clearly busted. He listened for the sound here, but it seemed restricted to the shower drain. He toweled off the rest of the gelatinous liquid as he made his way to the kitchen phone to call up a plumber. He retrieved the phone book and glanced out the window. There was a large indention in the back yard, in the same spot as the stain from the previous evening.
As he approached the depressed area, he saw that there was a hole near the center of the concavity – an uneven, ragged hole revealing a hollow recess below. He caught a whiff of the stench as he approached, and quickly retreated to the house, deciding to leave the inspection to the professionals.
The county plumber was large and lumbering. A tan uniform shirt, starched stiff with stains, strained to sheathe his bulging belly. He inspected the concave area, prodding with instruments and probing with a high-power flashlight.
“Hey man, what the hell’ve you been eating?” he said finally, pushing the brim of his ball cap up out of his eyes. He seemed unaffected by the debilitating smell that caused Darrell to retch every time the wind shifted his way.
“It must take some hell kind of toxic shit to bust up a septic tank this bad. Seemed to be in good condition, too. Sometimes if they get corroded you may see ‘em bust apart, but this one looks like it just exploded.” The plumber stood and backed off, as though out of reverence for the sight before him.
All Darrell saw was the depressed ground and a dark hole. Peering closer, though, he noticed some disturbances around the hole’s rim – small, parallel streaks running perpendicular to the hole. Upon closer inspection they almost looked like scratches, as though something had been grasping for purchase, attempting to claw its way out of the ground.
“What do you make of those
marks?” Darrell spoke through his shirt collar, pointing to the scratches surrounding the septic hole.
“Probably just some varmint or hound come to investigate the smell. They can be attracted by some vile stuff. I’d say possum, if I had to guess.” He offered an indifferent shrug.
“Anyway, it’ll take us a couple of days to line up a replacement tank and get out here to install it. Shower’s off-limits and don’t flush the shitter till then, ‘less you want what’s down there to flow out into the yard. I’ll call to schedule a time to come back out.”
Darrell was hardly listening. He offered a distracted wave, sending the man back to his truck, as he continued to inspect the claw marks, noticing now that they extended out even further on the far side of the hole. He walked around to that side and observed a subtle path of glistening, trampled grass leading away from the hole towards the woods at the back of his yard.
Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One Page 10
