Logan wanted to look away. He wanted to throw his legs over the bed and run like hell—but he couldn’t. He was frozen there, staring back at the shiny black eyes. It was a child’s face. A little girl. She had fat cheeks that were alive with maggots and worms, and her smile was black. Her hair was matted to her head as if she’d just come out of a bath.
Logan’s wife lay next to him, snoring.
When he’d first seen the face out of the corner of his eye, he tried to blink it away. Whenever the lights went out, Logan always thought that he saw something that wasn’t there. One night he flicked out the lights, settled into bed, and screamed when he saw a tarantula, just inches from his face. Leaping up, he slammed on the light switch with his balled fist until it finally came on, and he saw that, with the glow of the lamp, his tarantula was just a scratch on the wall.
But that was different—now as much as he blinked, as hard as he looked, the face didn’t go away. The eyes that bulged out of the tiny sockets didn’t turn into a shirt thrown over a chair. The worms that writhed from the flesh didn’t reveal themselves to be the shadow of branches moving with the wind.
The face stared at him.
Beginning to get short of breath, Logan elbowed his wife. “Ash,” he said. She stirred. “Ashley,” he said again, and this time it sounded like begging.
She groaned. “What? What?”
“Ashley,” Logan repeated. He closed his eyes, looking away from the face, and put his forehead on his wife’s shoulder.
“Ugh, Logan… Stop saying my name,” Ashley said. “I need to sleep. We have to get up early and… and get stuff ready for the party. Why do I have to explain this to you at three in the morning?”
Logan stretched his arm across the bed and slowly pointed.
“There,” he said. “Look.”
Not wanting to see the face’s fat eyeballs move with delight when Ashley made eye contact as they had when he first looked, Logan watched his wife sit up in bed and squint through the darkness.
“What am I looking for?” she asked.
Logan looked across the bed and there it was, still staring at him. Slowly, a tiny, dirty hand rose up from beneath the bed and waved.
His voice hushed, he said, “You don’t see it?”
“There’s nothing there,” Ashley said, ripping the covers off of him as she turned over in the bed. “Go to sleep.”
“Goodnight,” Logan said, staring at the face. Silently, its wet lips parted and, revealing a tar black smile, it mouthed a word to him.
Hello.
LOGAN FELL IN LOVE with Ashley on her favorite holiday…Leap Day. She was the only person that he’d ever known that celebrated, much less recognized, the holiday—but every four years, when February was granted an extra calendar day, Ashley went all out and threw the biggest party she could afford. In college, back when dorm parties were thrown for reasons as small as someone getting a B minus, a professor calling in sick or a frat boy taking a particularly monstrous shit, it wasn’t odd to see parties thrown for bizarre or obscure holidays. Upon entering Ashley’s dorm room, though, he could tell that she was serious about Leap Day. Her entire room was covered in decorations from every holiday, Christmas to Rosh Hashanah to Arbor Day, and there were tables lined with food that would rival any Thanksgiving feast Logan would ever see. Amazed, he sought out the girl behind the party and discovered Ashley in the kitchen, preparing desserts as people chugged forties around her, smiling her proud smile.
“Leap Day, huh?” he’d said.
“Best holiday in the world,” she had replied, giving him the smile that he instantly wanted to kiss.
“Why?” he’d asked, though he was starting to really dig the holiday himself.
“The world is a mess,” she said. “Time is a mess. Reality is a mess. Leap Day is the one holiday that tries to catch up with everything, set things back in order. It stops the world from breaking.”
“Wow,” he said.
“Also, my daddy used to celebrate it when I was a kid,” she said. “And I loved that.”
He walked over to her, looked down at the desserts that she was working on and asked if he could help. That was the beginning of their story.
“ARE YOU MAD AT me?” he asked. Eight years had passed, and they were back in a kitchen, now in a different house—their own house—setting up for Leap Day.
“Annoyed,” she said, which is what she always said when she was mad.
“I saw something,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, putting a tray of breaded chicken into the oven. “But there was nothing there. If you’d have gotten up and looked around, you would have seen that there was nothing there. You know how important Leap Day is to me. We have a bunch of people coming over, and—”
“I saw a face,” Logan cut in.
“A face,” she repeated.
He nodded. In the daylight, with his wife in front of him holding a bowl of cookie dough with hands covered in bright yellow oven mits, the idea seemed more preposterous than it was scary.
He shook his head. “Sorry. I, uh…I don’t know. I thought I saw something. Maybe I was dreaming.”
“Sometimes, the shit you say really creeps me out,” Ashley said. “Now, make those cookies into awesome shapes and make me forget that I’m pissed at you.”
“Annoyed,” Logan corrected with a smile.
Ashley, chuckling, walked out of the room saying “A face,” under her breath.
Logan looked down at the cookie dough and remembered the little girl’s rotted, torn flesh. A face.
FOUR YEARS BEFORE LOGAN saw the face, on their second Leap Day spent together, Logan and Ashley threw a party at the apartment they were renting together. The party was smaller than the one from college and there fewer cases of beer, but it was still a blast. With Logan’s help, Ashley turned the apartment into a veritable house of worship for holidays. It was part haunted house, part winter wonderland, all amazing. When their friends arrived and made their way to the den, where turkey dinner would be served with egg nog and pumpkin pie, they all complimented Ashley on how beautiful—and, to quote Logan’s friend Charles, “how batshit crazy”—the place looked.
“Bit of a smaller crowd than last year,” Logan whispered to Ashley when they went to the kitchen to bring out the pie.
“Yeah,” she said, “which means less broken ornaments and more coherent conversation. Anyway, we’re still waiting on a guest. I’ve got a friend from work coming. Stephanie. You’ll love her.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She’s so intense,” Ashley said, grinning. “She told me this amazing story that made me really think about Leap Day. It’s…it’s actually kind of delightfully creepy.”
“How so?”
“I’ll let her explain it to you when she gets here,” Ashley said. “She’s something else, Logan.”
LOGAN SAT ON THE couch, looking at the decorations. Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving…even Groundhog Day. Who knew there were decorations for Groundhog Day? If someone could find them, though, it was Ashley.
Thinking about the face all day had slowed him down, but Logan managed to help his wife make the house look as decorative as all of the previous Leap Days. He hoped that the party, his favorite day of the year that only happened every four years, would take his mind off of those wet eyes that seemed as if they were ready to pop out of the little girl’s skull.
And her black, rotted grin.
By the time the night came and the party was about to begin, Logan found that it was hard for him to stand on his feet. As a child, he had been deathly scared of spiders to the point where he would, much to his embarrassment, scream like a little girl whenever he saw one descend in front of his face. It played with his mind; it made him see tarantualas when there were only scratches on the wall. He’d never been paralyzed by the fear, though.
Now, he felt the terror running through his veins like static. He couldn’t move from the couch because every time he close
d his eyes, he saw the dead girl waving at him from across the bed.
Hello.
He had been sitting there for thirty minutes while Ashley did the last bits of preparation from the party. She was not happy about it. It was Leap Day, though, so the smile didn’t fade from her face the way it had from her eyes. If he had room in his mind for sadness, he would be crushed that he was ruining their favorite day.
The doorbell rang.
Ashley walked past Logan, throwing a “Get up, please! Come on!” over her shoulder.
He did. He forced himself up. His legs were weightless, and he felt as if he would topple over, so he lumbered over to the wall, propping himself up. He leaned back until he could see down the hallway, looking past the den and into the foyer, where Ashley was talking in hushed whispers to someone at the door. He couldn’t hear any of it.
Finally, Ashley closed the door, turned around and walked back to Logan. Alone. Now, she wasn’t smiling. Her lips were pulled down into a harsh frown and her eyes were wide, glassy with shock.
“Stephanie is dead,” she said.
For a moment, the face was pushed out of Logan’s head. He reached out and touched Ashley’s shoulder. “What?”
“Stephanie…she died She got into a… She spun off the road,” she said, and pushed her face into Logan’s shirt. She hugged him, so he hugged her back. Muffled, she said into his shirt, “No Leap Day this year. No…”
He hugged her, thinking about Stephanie, about meeting her at the last Leap Day. The orange, glowing, toothy face of a jack-o’-lantern grinned at him from the wall.
FOUR YEARS PRIOR, STEPHANIE made a big impression on Logan and Ashley’s Leap Day party. She showed up in time for dessert, bringing with her a big brown bag. Her hair was streaked with white, but it wasn’t like an old person’s hair. It was straight and neat, like the rest of her. Logan guessed that she must have been fifty, but she had a young smile and bright eyes.
“Okay, let’s creep this up a bit,” Ashley said after dessert had been dutifully devoured. She took out some candles, lit them and turned off all of the lights.
“Scary stories? What are we, eleven? Should I get my marshmallows and branch?” Kathleen, one of Ashley’s oldest friends, cracked.
“You laugh now,” Ashley said. “But wait until you hear what Stephanie has to say.”
The group of friends gave a chorus of oooooooohs. Logan laughed and felt young again. He put his arm around Ashley.
“Thanks for the atmosphere, Ash,” Stephanie said. “Nothing like a few candles to make a normal room extraordinarily sinister, right? That’s kind of how I think of Leap Day. February 29th. The day that shouldn’t be.”
“I think of pie, crazy decorations and excessive amounts of beer,” Charles said.
“Which is fine,” Stephanie said. “I love those things myself. I was just a bit surprised that Ash hadn’t heard of the…darker side of this day. So I figured I’d share.”
“Bring it on!” Ashley said, and Logan smiled. He planned on asking her to be his wife later than night.
“I can list all of the disasters that happened on February 29th. I can give you a million reasons why it’s scarier than Halloween, than Friday the 13th, than…well, just about any day. But here’s something that’s more than a reason…here’s a legend.”
“She is intense,” Logan whispered in Ashley’s ear.
“The twenty-ninth is a day of chaos. It’s when the fabric of reality between our world and…well, I’ll say ‘other’ worlds, is at its weakest. It’s when things can communicate with us, if we try. That’s the legend, anyway. That all it takes is as much as a wave from one of us and something other than us will be able to see us. And maybe…just maybe…it will be able to wave back,” Stephanie said, letting her eyes pass over each of them.
“And by ‘something’ you mean…?” Logan said.
Stephanie gave a slight shrug that seemed at odds with her knowing smile. “Let’s find out.” She reached into her brown bag and pulled out four small mirrors. “Who wants to say hi?”
“Do it!” Ashley said, pushing Logan.
“Huh?” Logan said. “Do it?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fun,” Ashley said. “I want to watch you shit your pants.”
“Fine,” Logan said. “Give me.”
Stephanie handed Logan a small mirror, also giving one to Charles and one to his sister Charlotte. She kept one for herself.
“Now,” she said. “It’s simple. Look into the mirror. Make sure you can’t see anything. Just pure darkness. Take a step back from the candle if that helps. When you’re just looking at nothing but darkness, look at the mirror and say, ‘Hello. I know you’re there. I can see you. Can you see me? But! Don’t do this lightly, friends. When you make contact with another realm, it leaves you forever susceptible to…seeing things. Experiencing things.”
Smirking, Logan leaned away from the candle, looking into the mirror as Ashley leaned over his shoulder, clearly entertained. He heard Charlotte start to speak to her mirror, so he figured he might as well start.
He looked into the black mirror.
“Hello,” he said. “I know you’re there. I can see you. Can you see me?” He waited. Of course, he saw nothing…just blackness.
The others had similar results. Stephanie shrugged and said with a laugh, “Maybe the spirits are too busy having Leap Day parties to give a crap about us. Let’s drink.”
Logan put the mirror down and, wrapped his arms around Ashley again. For a moment, he felt a strange feeling on the back of his neck, as if he were being looked at from behind. He almost got up to turn on the light the way he had for the not-tarantula that had been on his wall, but he shrugged and hugged the woman who, after that night, would become his fiancée and, later, his wife.
AFTER THEY TOOK DOWN the Leap Day decorations, Ashley told Logan that she didn’t want to think about anything, least of all Stephanie’s death. She just wanted to go to sleep. It was as if she’d never been mad about Logan’s behavior.
She cuddled up to him in bed, crying softly. Even though they no longer worked together and Stephanie seemed to get stranger every time they would meet up, Ashley and Stephanie were very good friends through the years. Stephanie had been a bridesmaid. If Ashley hadn’t felt obligated to give the title to Kathleen, her childhood friend, she would’ve made Stephanie the Maid of Honor.
Now, she was dead. Logan didn’t know what to say. His mind was still muddled from the horror of the previous night. But that was over—it was time to be there for his wife.
He fell asleep to the sound of her quiet sobs.
He woke up to the familiar, creeping sensation of being watched.
He squinted in the darkness and saw it at the end of the bed. The face, just barely peering over the end of the bed.
“Ashley,” he said. She snored quietly.
The face moved up until he could see the smile again. The black, dripping, toothless smile.
“Ashley,” he begged. He went to shake his wife awake, but his hands were gripping the sheets so hard that he couldn’t release them. He was completely paralyzed.
The face lifted as the dead girl stood up, revealing a ripped grey dress with decayed, festering flesh beneath it. She waved to him, and then, this time, she spoke.
“Hello.”
Her voice was like glass breaking. Like tires squealing on the road.
Logan tried to call his wife’s name again, but nothing came out of his throat. Slowly, delicately, the dead girl placed a bruised, bloated knee onto the bed, lifting herself up onto it. She leered at Logan, grinning, dripping scum onto the sheets, and said, “I know you’re there.”
He tried to scream, but it was just a moan. Ashley stirred next to him.
The girl climbed across the sheets weightlessly. Logan gagged at the hot, oily smell. “I can see you.”
He looked away from her, pretending she was just a not-tarantula, a scratch on the wall, nothing. He settled down in bed and looked at
Ashley, pretending that nothing in the whole world existed but her.
The girl leaned over him, her face inches from his, the black juice dripping from her mouth, the worms crawling through her soft flesh, her eyes threatening to pop out of their sockets. “Can you see me?”
She brought her hand down into his mouth, forced it down his throat, and ripped, feeling the vibrations of the scream that Logan couldn’t make run through his ruined, bloody throat.
ASHELY WAS ASLEEP. SHE didn’t know that the man lying next to her was dead, that blood was flowing from his mouth and the horrible, gaping hole in his throat, forming a warm, crimson puddle on the sheets. She didn’t feel the weightless creature crawl off of the bed and sit on the floor. She couldn’t see the creature, and it couldn’t see her.
But it still stared, because it knew something was there. The creature stared at Ashley in the dark, unseen, and stayed until the sun peeked through the blinds and woke Ashley up… so she could face her own nightmare.
PINCH
by Shane McKenzie
Slim tilted the vodka bottle over his mouth, tapping the bottom of it to get at that last stinging drop he knew was in there. He stuck out his quivering tongue and snorted when the bottle refused to comply.
“Fuck!”
The bottle smashed into a sparkling mist as it disintegrated against the brick wall.
“Fuck…”
Luther sniffed Slim’s right leg again, and for the hundredth time, Slim kicked him away with the left. The right leg lay there on the concrete like a useless slab of meat; he hadn’t felt a thing in that leg for some time now… but he could smell it loud and clear.
And Luther smelled it too. As strong as the odor was to Slim, he imagined Luther’s heightened sense of smell made it like fireworks in his nose. The dog’s saliva poured from his tongue as he panted.
Slim didn’t like looking at it. Nothing he could do about it anyway, so he just kept his pant leg down and pretended nothing was wrong. Even when the wound would leak fluid, soaking it into the fabric of his already grime-covered jeans, he would just let it dry, then scrape away the milky film with his serrated thumbnail.
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 3
