“This isn’t really the hollow,” Sally said. “That’s miles from here, near that ghost walk where all those people died last year. The real hollow is all burned down now.”
“Yeah, but this is still part of the same forest. People call it LeHorn’s Hollow, even if the actual hollow isn’t there anymore.”
“How come you never hunted here?”
Roy shrugged. “Never had the chance before. I live all the way out in Hanover. I don’t get to this side of the county very often.”
“So what brought you out this way tonight, then?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Tired of drinking at the same old bar, I guess. Needed a change of scenery. Figured I’d see how things looked out this way.”
Sally gave her hips a little shake. “And have you liked what you’ve seen?”
“So far.”
“Me, too. I’m glad you decided to have a drink in my regular bar.”
“You go there often?”
“Every Friday night. You come back next week, and I’ll be waiting. Maybe we can do this again.”
“Well, we didn’t do anything yet.”
“The night is young.”
Roy smiled. His erection grew harder.
“So, are you married?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Boyfriend?”
She shook her head. “Nah. Only men in my life are my father and my two brothers. You’d like them. They’re big hunters, too.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Every year, they take a week off work for deer season and go up to Potter County.”
Roy paused, let go of her hand, and lit a cigarette. He offered Sally one, but she declined.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got some of those Listerine thingies in my pocket.”
She took his hand again and squeezed. “I don’t mind. And besides, those things burn if you—”
“What?”
She seemed flustered. “If you put one on your tongue, and then go down on somebody, it burns.”
Roy’s laughter echoed through the darkness. When he shined the flashlight on Sally, she was blushing.
“Don’t laugh.” She punched his arm playfully.
“Don’t worry. I won’t put one on my tongue if you don’t want me to.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Is that a promise of things to come?”
“We’ll be doing more than that, soon as we find a good spot.”
“I still don’t understand why we had to come all the way out here.”
“Well, not to be rude, but I don’t want to get stuff on my upholstery.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Now it was Roy’s turn to seem flustered. “You know. Bodily fluids…”
Sally snickered. “You’re really something, Roy. I’m glad I met you tonight.”
“So am I.”
“Still, I don’t know why we couldn’t have just spread that old blanket out in the cab of your truck.”
He swept the flashlight beam in a wide arc, letting it glide across the dark tree trunks and boulders. “And miss all this ambience?”
“Aren’t you afraid of the monsters?” Sally teased.
Roy snorted in derision. “What monsters?”
“Oh, come on. You’ve never heard all the legends about these woods? The Goat-Man who plays his pipes at night and seduces women? That writer guy from Shrewsbury supposedly went nuts while working on a book about him.”
“Writer guy—the one who escaped from the nuthouse last year and killed those people on the ghost walk?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he was bat-shit crazy.”
“But he wasn’t the only one who was supposed to have seen the Goat-Man. And there’s more. The black hound dog with red eyes. Balls of light that float around through the forest. Ghosts. Demons. And some people say that the trees move on their own.”
“It’s all bullshit,” Roy said. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”
“You don’t believe any of the stories about this place?”
“Well, I know that a lot of people have died here over the years. But that doesn’t mean it was monsters. It was just people acting like people. Human beings are evil enough. We don’t have to invent stories about monsters. Why? Don’t tell me you believe in that stuff?”
Sally pouted. “I don’t know…a little, maybe.”
Roy stopped in the middle of the trail, and shined the beam across the ground. He released her hand, sat the flashlight down on a rock, and unfolded the blanket. “This looks like a good spot.”
“You read my mind.”
“Come here.”
He pulled her close. They kissed, tongues entwining hungrily. Their hands explored each other’s bodies. Sally shivered.
“You cold?”
She nodded, nuzzling his chest. “A little. And a little nervous. I mean, we just met.”
“You sure that’s all?”
“Well what else would it be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re afraid of the Goat-Man.”
She hugged him tighter. “You’ve got to admit, it is a little creepy out here at night.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “There are no monsters in LeHorn’s Hollow.”
Then he pulled out the knife and stabbed her in the neck. He let her body sag onto the blanket, and watched it jerking and twitching. Sally’s eyes were wide. She clawed at the hilt jutting from her throat, and made faint gobbling noises. Her hands grew slick with her own blood. Roy could no longer contain his excitement. He pulled down his zipper and let his erection bob in the cool night air.
“No monsters,” he repeated. “Just hunters, like me. The monsters are all ghosts now. I’m the real thing.”
Splinterette
by John Palisano
John Palisano’s short stories have appeared in anthologies from PS Publishing, Terror Tales, Lovecraft eZine, Horror Library, Bizarro Pulp, Written Backwards, Dark Continents, Darkscribe, DarkFuse, Dark House, and, likely, one or two more ‘Dark’ places in there. Hard to say. They’re all so . . . dark.
His novel NERVES was put out by Bad Moon Books and promptly placed in the “What the hell category is this?” section of Amazon. John writes all the time, but does his best not to look at the word counter until it’s absolutely necessary, less he have a flashback of glimpsing the abyss, like he did during a mandatory high school Calculus class. Google it. It happens. While you’re hunched over your phone, look up John on Facebook, because no one really goes to author’s websites anymore, do they? He’ll be the one who isn’t posting his daily word count, but you will find out how long it took him to walk the [expletive deleted] dogs.
The Great Beyond is white. Millions of snowflakes swirl, hiding my memorized world under a pale bright blanket. Lost and losing warmth, there's shelter beneath the branches of an unfamiliar oak. It's not much, but at least it partially blocks the punishing snow. The whiteout came out of nowhere. Within minutes, the backwoods I'd learned by heart were erased. Both my sense of direction and my pocket gizmos failed me. Alone, and with no clear way home, walking blind could be fatal. A steep cliff looms less than a quarter mile from my back door, dropping off hundreds of feet toward bare boulders. Picturing myself stepping out, and ultimately twirling toward certain death, staying put seemed best. Storms that came on fast could leave just as quickly, I reasoned. If I could just wait it out, I'd be fine.
As I hunched down and rubbed my arms for warmth, someone's shadow came forth through the blizzard–a figure as fair as the storm around her. At first I thought it was Sabrina, my wife. The figure moved just like her. This, though, was different: Splinterette’s fingers were long and tapered into sharp, needle-like tips. That was how I came to name her.
Her large, dark eyes blinked, meeting my gaze.
I must have died, I thought, for that was the only explanation for what could only be a hallucination. There was no way I was really seeing what I was seeing. Impossible. Her bod
y changed with each step, the outside darkening. Her face formed–her features smoothed and polished until she glistened. Her eyes were alive, reflecting a shade of winter-themed light blue.
I’d gotten lost–impossibly lost. In this age of smart phones with maps, and everything, the world, being so built up and over developed, all it took was a pure whiteout of a storm. The phone lost service. I’d walked around aimlessly looking for a signal, but had gotten myself deeper in trouble. With no roads, how would it have guided me, anyway? At the very least, I’d reasoned, I’d be able to make a call. Home. Sabrina. At least she’d be able to hopefully find me, or get someone who could. To top it off, I’d only been a few, brazen steps from my own back yard when the storm had hit. I’d known it was coming and had ventured out to see if I could grab some firewood. An old-fashioned, romantic notion had turned out to be a tremendous mistake.
What else could I do other than freeze and wait for the storm to lighten up. Usually, I could see my place for miles, no matter where I ventured inside the Calistoga Woods. At that moment? All I saw was blinding white anything more than a few yards away. My nose felt like it might break off at any moment. The only thing I could smell was the icy scent–that sharp, cutting scent specific to the freezing snow. Very strange.
I’d rested down by a tree. I’d cleared away the snow and put a few of the small logs on the ground to keep my hind warm. My eyes were shut for several minutes when Splinterette came forth. Now you know how and why I felt like I was hallucinating. Maybe I’d slept and the image formed strictly from my imagination–this thing coming toward me–and I couldn’t move–I was frozen in thought and movement. There I was, all alone. Or so I thought.
Strange as it sounds, her figure was curved and feminine, reminiscent of a woman, but Splinterette was also tree-like, with her limbs splitting off like branches.
I wondered if I should get up and run away from her. Maybe there were sinister intentions behind Splinterette coming to investigate me. Maybe she smelled blood. Maybe she sensed my death was imminent, and had come to feed.
She moved faster than I thought possible. Her arms outstretched above her, the branches that made her arms shook slightly in the wind. There were smaller, sub-branches, too, just like a real live tree. Only she was moving and alive in a way sedentary trees were not. She moved with a grace I couldn’t quite comprehend. It reminded me of a spider. It was off-putting, while at the same time? I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She was transfixing, mesmerizing, captivating, and absolutely horrifying, because every part of me knew…just knew…she meant me harm.
Splinterette bent down in front of me. Her light blue eyes examined me and I at once felt like an animal in a zoo, or the subject of an alien autopsy. Her arms stretched outward, the branch-like limbs making stuttering sounds in the air, as puffs of snow shook off. The storm had gotten worse.
For a moment, she stood. She turned her head and back to me, but still looked over her shoulder at me. She was ready. She seemed to be calling for me to follow her into the cold and snow. I couldn't’ move. Maybe it was just my mind that was frozen, but my body wouldn’t budge from where I sat at the base of the tree, even though I tried my best to will myself up.
Splinterette blinked several times. It was like she knew that I was stuck. She came back to me then–her body moving and arriving in front of me in a blink.
The snow blew around her aquiline face. It made me wish to fall upwards into the snow and vanish into the whiteness. My fear had subsided and a calm serenity filled my soul. Splinterette curled her arms and reached toward me, going first for my underarms. The ends of her branch-like arms slipped over my shoulders and curved back round, under my armpits, and lifted. I saw the sharp, needle-like tips. Splinterette’s branch tips slithered up my arm like a boa constrictor, crushing prey, although her touch was anything but harmful. At least at first, she felt warm, slick and strong. I was reassured in that moment. She was there to take care of me and to shelter me, and Angel made from trees come to life in the snow.
Her tips reached my wrists. When they made it to the flesh under my gloves, they followed the same direction as my veins. My flesh split, and for a moment, all I saw were the pale insides of my own innerness. Two snowflakes fell and instantly dissolved on the hot, exposed flesh. The blood seeped in, filling the wound like saltwater filling a trench dug deep on a beach. The blood overflowed, trickling over my wrists at first, until it poured much too terribly fast.
Her hands, or branches, then wrapped inside mine, and I grabbed them like handles. Splinterette lifted me, and I immediately felt her strength. She held me like an infant. I curled up in her arms. I looked up and saw her face, and the ring of white sky overhead, snow falling quickly and seemingly from nothingness.
The cold had known me, although the slices to my wrists burned. I couldn't tell if I was still bleeding. I wondered: how deep are the cuts? Would I need stitches? I could die. Had she known that she had hurt me? Could she have realize just how much pain she'd caused me? How close to death I might actually be?
Our house became visible area just some small details. The chimney, its gray bricks. The shutters. Reddish brown. Glimpses. My shelter in the storm. My nose felt clocked. My head hurt; the temples pulsed and there was an aching pressure where the back of my head met my neck. My stomach hurt badly, two. That all paled in comparison to my chest, which hurt worse than anything else I’d ever felt in my life.
I figured it out–I must have been losing a lot of blood.
We arrived at the back door. Splinterette knew where I lived, somehow. I had a vision of her looking in on. Perhaps maybe she was what I said so I looked into the darkness, and felt that special pull that made my hair raise and my belly feel hollow. She watched me. My dark Angel. My savior from doom. My Splinterette.
The back tour took only the lightest touch open. How could the storm got not have opened it? I really left it unlocked? Yes. I thought I'd go outside for just a few moments. Our backyard was completely fenced in, except where it met Calistoga Forest. I’d been secure in thinking it had been safe to leave the back door unlocked.
The snow blowing around us, we passed the wooden shoe rack and I noticed Sabrina shoes were gone. Where did she go in the store? My heart sank–she must have been out looking for me in the storm when I hadn't come back. Picturing her out in the storm, lost like I had been, scared me to my core. Then I looked to Splinterette, initially to try and tell her, but as soon as I did, I once again fell silent. My mouth wouldn’t form the words. She had some unnatural spell on me.
We approached the stairs that led up toward the bedroom. Splinterette whispered to me, saying, “recover”, and carried me in her arms. She spoke more, but it was as if I were underwater. Even though I couldn’t make out her words, I somehow knew what she was telling me. I’d need bandages for the wounds and Tylenol for the pain. Would she be able to help? How would I do these things myself? Would I soon die?
I looked at the paintings while we made our way up–scenes of the world me and Sabrina had collected. Near the top, one was missing. Sabrina's favorite–the two foxes drinking from a river. She always said that they were she and I. All that was left was a rectangular outline of old dust.
We turned the corner and Splinterette lifted my head to make it through the doorway. I felt drunk and incapacitated, and completely controlled by her every movement.
There was something wrong. More things were out of place. Sabrina's nightstand was empty. Not even her beloved knock-off Tiffany lamp was there. Had someone broken in and robbed us? Had she been kidnapped? Where'd she gone? I didn't see any signs of a struggle. No blood. No resistance.
Splinterette put a branch to her lips, and I somehow felt her hushing my thoughts. She placed me on the bed, and as I fell gently on my back, I remembered everything.
Sabrina yelling when I found the pictures on her phone. Wearing her favorite white, lacey top I'd given her for her birthday. Her favorite jeans and ankle boots.
My sho
e slipped off and fell to the floor.
Only a traitor would look on my phone and through my pictures, she’d said.
My shirt opened–a cut from Splinterette’s branches did the job, while cutting me underneath. The tingling warmth of her incision filled me.
We can work it out. I know we can. True love will prevail, I’d begged.
More cuts as Splinterette cut through my clothes. She was on top of me. Her pure, dark form caressing me–I held her sap on my skin, streaming from open holes where her branches connected. So sticky, and it soon hardened and pulled my skin, making it raw. True love. Pure as the new virgin landscape outside. My eyes caught a glimpse outside our window, to look at Calistoga Woods, past our backyard, where a trail of red was visible. Bright red. My blood–tracked toward our back door. Our back door. Was it even ours anymore?
Who is he?
It doesn't matter.
Splinterette’s arms and legs cut me. Her tips were inside of me, like little fingers, like little fiery worms, like prodding needles.
The new pain took away the old pain. I could feel the hurt instead of just thinking. The release made me hungrier.
More. More. Touch me more.
I had to know it’s…her…name. A whisper in my ear as she bent down–Splinterette.
And that’s how I knew who she was.
I said her name to make a real, so I wouldn't forget.
Splinterette. Splinterette. Splinterette.
One of her branches broke inside me. I knew then that she was of the forest, of the trees, and being inside was doing to her what being outside had done to me.
I heard a knock downstairs, then someone calling my name. Who could it be? Sabrina? Had she come home, after all? Maybe the storm had brought her back and somehow brought her to her senses?
Come home my darling.
I am home.
Splinterette’s branches broke. Her face started to lose its life. Her hands and her body trembled.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 54
