Dark Avenues

by Brian J Smith

  A teenage girl talks of her encounter with an old house and how it effects its inhabitants in “1342 Lindley Road”....

  A family curse repeats itself in “A Proper Burial”...

  The celebrated supporters of a newly-elected president show their love for him in a peculiar way in “Notifications”....

  And, in the title story, a man grieving with the loss of his wife is pulled into the mystery of a teenage girl’s murder.

  These are just a few of the tales, in all of their dark and brooding glory, that could only come from...

  DARK AVENUES

  DARK AVENUES

  BRIAN J. SMITH

  Copyright © 2019 Brian J. Smith

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-5136-4767-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5136-4767

  The author has allowed the following stories to be reprinted here for the first time.

  “Me And My Gang” published in Metahuman Press’ The Dead Walk Again in Oct. 2011

  “Dark Avenues” published as a Kindle book in July 2012

  “Uncle Bubby” featured in Vol. 2 No. 1 of Heater Magazine on February 2014

  “Dice” featured on The Wi-Files e-zine on July 2016

  “Big Daddy” featured in Deadlights Magazine Vol. 1 on January 2017

  “Apartment 13” featured on the November issue of The Horror Zine, then reprinted for The Horror Zine Anthology 2017

  “Notifications” was featured in Dark Helix Press’ Trump: Utopia or Dystopia

  Some of the stories featured in this collection have been previously published but have been given a complete polish for creativity’s sake. There are also a few unpublished pieces in here as well because I didn’t want to publish a book full of reprints. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did writing them.

  Thank you for reading my book and I hope this isn’t the last journey we have together.

  B.J.S

  This collection is for the dreamers that are still looking for their moment in the spotlight. Don’t give up.

  Contents

  Introduction..................................................................................1

  1342 Lindley Road.......................................................................5

  Dice..............................................................................................64

  When You Marry The Daughter..................................................76

  Apartment 13...............................................................................80

  Notifications................................................................................88

  Rightful Place..............................................................................96

  In Laudamus Jack.......................................................................108

  Big Brother.................................................................................122

  3rd Day Of The 3rd Week Of Every Month.................................138

  A Different Kind Of Therapy.....................................................147

  A Proper Burial...........................................................................155

  Uncle Bubby...............................................................................165

  Odio............................................................................................174

  Dark Avenues..............................................................................196

  Me and My Gang.........................................................................270

  Big Daddy....................................................................................280

  Stiff Breeze..................................................................................290

  Acknowledgements.....................................................................300

  About The Author.......................................................................302

  INTRODUCTION

  So here we are.

  It’s a cool night; the sky is that cool shade of blue that it gets before it gets dark. We’re walking hand-in-hand through this dark quiet neighborhood made up of neat little houses we see at all hours of the day and night; some of the windows are still lit up with the phantom glow of a television or a lamp. You don’t know who lives there and neither do I, but we both know someone does.

  Relax, though. I didn't drag you here to bore you but to entertain you. Whether you laugh, cry or lock the doors at night, I'll know I've done my job.

  I'm pounding all of this out on a gloomy December morning when most people like me are begging for snow which I believe is a good time to nestle up with a good book and forget about everything.

  I've been writing stories since I was thirteen and had no intention of slowing down. I wasn't the popular kid; I didn't go out for Chess Club because I was (to quote a famous actress) " the geeky Stephen King kid".

  As a child, I watched a lot of horror movies and t.v. shows ranging from Freddy and Jason to my personal favorite, Kingdom Of The Spiders. You can’t have one without the other but I'm sure other people have their own preferred tastes.

  My love of horror started from a dream I once had when I was five. I still remember it today.

  I was standing on a lush green meadow beside of a tall leafy oak tree in a red shirt, jeans and sneakers and the sky was clear and the sun was warm. At the end of the meadow, my family was sitting on a light-blue picnic blanket spread out under the shade of another leafy oak tree waving for me to come over. I ran toward them through a patch of wildflowers when something crawled across my arm and looked down to find a monarch butterfly sitting on the back of my right hand. When I raised my hand up to my face, it opened its mouth to reveal two rows of sharp jagged little teeth and then reared its head back to take a chunk out of my flesh when I did what any person would’ve done and opened my eyes.

  It was like some piranha-hybrid; a pirafly or maybe be a butternha. Either way they sound like something the folks at The SyFy Channel would produce by the end of the week. I wrote it in a flash fiction piece a long time ago and only one person has read it and enjoyed it; it was my sixth grade teacher and it gave him nightmares.

  I don’t know what anyone else would’ve thought about that, but I took it as a sign. I was meant to write horror.

  Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by horror fiction and how far we can go with it. In my opinion, there is no box because we’re too busy thinking outside of it.

  After that, I wrote stories for extra credit for my sixth-grade teacher. I used my stories as a tool for my boredom but over the years they became my one and only confidant; it was cheaper than a psychiatrist that’s for sure.

  It wasn't until after I purchased a paperback copy of Dean Koontz's Phantoms from a yard sale at fifty cents that I began to take my writing more seriously. I'd read it from front to back twice in a month, then read it again the next month and then again for the next five months. Not only was a good book but it gave me the same inspiration that the writers before me had felt when they were reading their favorites.

  At the beginning of high school, I would sit during homeroom, never said a word to anyone and wrote short stories in notebooks. I had a very small clique of friends that I spoke to and that was it; I'd had my share of girlfriends (it was only two but then who didn't) but I didn't go to any of my school proms or any dances because I couldn't dance to save myself from a bullet (and I still can't).

  Eventually, I fed myself on every horror and mystery writer I could get my hands on. If I wanted to write it, I had to read it.

  After high school, I spent hours upon hours writing and rewri
ting and rewriting. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, I'd dealt with mountains of rejection so I did what any other writer would do. I shook it off and kept going, pounding out more and more short stories, reading more and more novels and short story collections in hopes of getting an idea of what to do.

  I my first story on Drabblecast as an audio file when I was 26. It was like Christmas morning; everyone showered me with praise. It was then that I finally realized that it wasn't just about the money; that it was never about the money but about entertaining people and painting a picture about a world we only know exist in our heads—and our nightmares.

  Since then, I've contributed to many e-zines, magazines and anthologies on either "for-the-love" status (which was good if you wanted to make a name) or paperback and electronic copies. My mother thought I should've got something more for pouring my blood, sweat and tears into my work but she was proud of me, nonetheless. It wasn't like we were broke because most of the stories I'd wrote were during a period of my time when I worked five days a week (sometimes six during the summer or not at all during the winter) at a local eatery in the next town over.

  Now, at the age thirty-six, I've managed to publish three Kindle books (one of which are included in this very collection) and even a few pieces of flash fiction in several popular e-zines and anthologies. I thought it was time to release a collection because I'd always loved short story collections whether they be single-author or multi-author platforms.

  The name of this collection is from a line in the title story: Everyone has a dark avenue of their own.

  There are plenty of tales here for you to enjoy

  A group of co-workers assimilate during the zombie apocalypse.

  A strange journal drives its readers to eviscerate themselves.

  A western tale, a crime noir and a...

  I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just stop here. From here on in, it’s just you and me.

  If you should feel something slithering along the back of your neck, don’t be afraid to look over your shoulder...

  Or should you?

  Brian J. Smith

  10/15/2019

  1342 LINDLEY ROAD

  *****

  This story has been in my possession for a year and when I finished it the first time, I wanted to burn it because I thought it was just poorly written. I’d written two ghost stories in the past (one of which is featured in this collection as the title story) and I was on the verge of doing another.

  When I sat down to rewrite this, I turned it into a haunted house story instead, only with a little twist. This type of house has no origin of evil; it wasn’t built on cursed land or anything.

  It was another type of evil altogether.

  *****

  1

  I was thirteen when I discovered the truth about 1342 Lindley Road. The place had always been there but I never paid much attention to it because I was young and dumb and had better things to do.

  Now that I’m no longer around it, I still don’t like to think about it as much as I used to but then the nightmares returned. They made it hard for me to sleep; my therapist encouraged me to write this because there isn’t any other way for me to shake it off.

  Like any other house, this place had its share of ups and downs, cries of sadness and moments of joy. This was the start of something both lovely and fierce but in the end they all eventually picked up and took off, never be seen or heard from again; the only traces of their presence were marked by the imprints of their furniture branded into the carpet. Memories were made, love fluctuated, children grew by the inches marked into the doorways by felt tip pens and parents aged over time whilst shaking their heads about how much this generation had changed compared to theirs.

  The summer of two-thousand-thirteen was the best summer a girl like me could’ve ever asked for. My mother Larissa had taken me to the movies three times a month and my father Kyle and I would walk the trails around Lake Campbell until sundown and then take the shortcut back home depending upon the weather. I still had a month of summer vacation left before I had to drag my ass back to school and we all know how much of a toothache that was going to be.

  We lived in a two-story brick-on-clapboard house with a shingled-green roof and a cobblestone patio with a steel mesh-topped patio table with metal-cushioned chairs, a firepit and one of those large propane grills that look like those hibernation chambers you see in sci-fi movies. The back yard wasn’t much to boast about so we’d have to play badminton and toss Frisbees around the patch of grass sitting across the street from the front of our house.

  The day I became familiar with said house was the day when my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bruce came down for the annual cookout with my favorite (and only) cousin Jared in tow. After we ate, we asked Dad if we could ride our bikes around until Ruth and Bruce were ready to leave; he said yes, of course. We hopped on our bikes (I had a spare one here because my parents had bought me a new one last year before summer began) and followed the gravel road hugging the right side of our house and back around while our parents who sat around the table discussing things that we didn’t care to hear or weren’t even supposed to know about.

  The gravel road veered upward and led us to the top of a gently-rising slope that took us to the top of Lindley Road. Once we got there, we grinned from ear to ear and flew down the hill with our legs stuck out from the side of our bikes.

  The wind whipped at our clothes and blew wayward strands of curly blonde hair across my face; we knew we were acting a bit childish for our age but we didn’t care. Back before cell phones could do everything but microwave our lunch, it was the little things in life that meant so much to us.

  Jared and I had so much in common it was almost uncanny. We had the same taste in video games, t.v. shows and music but food was where we drew the line; he liked hamburgers and I preferred chicken. Mom always reminded me that Jared and I had been no different than the relationship she once had with her cousin Sandra, who was currently living in Oregon.

  That night, a bright pink horizon sent bottle-gas blue flames of dusk flaring across the sky; the treetops loomed above us like strange cryptic steeples. Waves of pine sap filled my nostrils and rode on the same cool breeze that ruffled our clothes and skin. Once we reached the bottom of the hill, we had to push our bikes to the top and then go again; the windows from the downhill stretch of cozy houses and double-wides occupied by old retirees and middle-aged bachelors sitting on modest lawns were sparsely lit from the mixed backwash of lamp light and television screens.

  After we did it three more times, we called it a night.

  When we reached the top, our chest rising and falling with each breath, Jared glanced over at The Larson Place with a probing look on his face. It was a squat-green clapboard house that sat low to the ground so that the lawn could hide its façade as if it had some kind of facial deformity. A turkey-necked street lamp was fixed to the edge of the roof on the left side of the house and stared down at the end of the driveway which then dropped down at an angle toward a thick wall of dark-green pines.

  “Do you know who lives there?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

  “Not rea–”

  “Well do you or don’t you?” He chuffed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess there’s only one way to find out.” He said, his eyes beaming with excitement.

  He glanced back at the house, his face creased by a wide baleful grin.

  “They’ll kill us.” I whispered.

  I glanced back down the road toward my house; a tiny radiant orange light beamed across the front lawn. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but all I could hear were the crickets chirping from inside the forest and the wind whispering softly amongst the trees. A loud metallic crash rang out in my right ear and startled me so that I tightened my grip on my handlebars and felt my skin prickle with fear.

  He’d lowered his bike ont
o the shoulder of the road that merged with the front lawn and disappeared behind the lone pine tree standing between the far left corner of the front lawn and the edge of the driveway. I scanned my surroundings, set my bike down beside of his and went after him, my face flushed with both shame and excitement. The thin wall of trees standing along the left edge of the driveway shrouded our parents from seeing us which, now that I think about it, was both good and bad in a way.

  For the first time in my life, I wished that our parents would’ve called out for us but they didn’t. I’d have done it but I don’t think I’d have forgiven myself if he stopped talking to me because I’d snitched on him; he was my only cousin.

  A thin sheen of sweat coated my forehead and dampened my hair and the nape of my neck. It might’ve been an ordinary house to a newcomer’s eye but there was something about it that soured on my stomach. Something glowed in the corner of my right eye, but then died before I could get a better look at it; if it’d been a passing motorist or the owner of the house then there was nothing we could say or do to talk our way out of it.

  I cursed under my breath, stepped over and onto the driveway. I found him standing on the left side of the house, peering into a large window facing the end of the driveway. The glass was dotted with wayward spots of white paint and streaked with grime along the corners; flakes of white paint sprinkled the windowsill.

  We saw a bare empty bedroom with outdated lime-green carpet and a small set of stairs that led past a curtain of colorful plastic beads and into the next room. Carpets of sour light poured through the windows, pooled across the floor and streaked the oak-paneled walls with cryptic shadows. The owners must’ve valued the tacky seventies interior enough to keep it there for sentimental purposes.