Razorblade Dreams: Horror Stories

by Mark Lukens

  The ten minutes flew by. Mr. Vance was back. He didn’t even bother sitting back down. He stood at the other end of the table, waiting for Jordan’s decision.

  “If I take your offer,” Jordan said, “then I’m going to disappear anyway, right?”

  “I’m afraid that’s how relocation works.”

  “Aren’t you worried that I’ll run?”

  “You’ll have a chip implanted inside of you. Several of them and you won’t know where they are in your body.”

  “So I just . . . just live somewhere and what? Just wait?”

  “We’ll create a background story for you. You’ll have a schedule to keep. Someone to check in with often. We’ll always know where you are.”

  Jordan didn’t say anything for a long moment, and he could feel Mr. Vance’s impatience. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll do it.”

  On the TV, the pine box was already inside the incinerator, the metal door closing.

  “Good decision,” Mr. Vance said, clapping Jordan on the shoulder as he walked towards the metal door. “It’s not really so bad. Remember, you’ll be doing this for your country.”

  This is one of the newer stories that I wrote for this collection. I don’t really know where this idea came from, it just kind of popped into my mind as a question: What if the government hired serial killers as assassins? And then that question led to other questions like: How would they get the serial killers? How would they make the serial killers cooperate? And those questions led to this story.

  THE BEDROOM LIGHT

  This can’t be happening. I’m just imagining this. Or no, maybe my mind has finally snapped. Or

  (Oh God No)

  maybe I’m already dead—already dead and in Hell.

  I sit here saying these things over and over again in my mind as I type this down on my laptop computer in front of me. The electricity has gone out (I think some of those things chewed through the wires somehow), and the only light now comes from the screen in front of me. I am curled up at the end of the couch, as far into the corner of the living room as I can get. But even the walls aren’t safe . . . because they’re in the walls too.

  Nowhere is safe now.

  I have a battery-operated radio next to the now-useless telephone, and I’m listening to the weather reports as a storm-of-the-century rages over this house. My cell phone is useless way out here in the country, and the engine in my car has been destroyed.

  I feel like I only have moments to live. I need to get all of this down as fast as I can; I want someone to know what really happened here.

  I can hear them upstairs now. I can hear them outside. I can hear whisperings. Plotting. I’ve got to hurry.

  My name is Evan Sommers, and if you’re a fan of horror and supernatural books and movies, then most likely you’ve heard of me. I was on a ten year success streak with my books and screenplays. Everything I wrote seemed to turn to gold.

  And then the muse decided to give me the silent treatment, and writer’s block landed on me with a thud. I tried taking some time off from writing. I got divorced. I almost got married again. I tried a few different hobbies. Nothing was working. I just stared at the blank page day after day after day. I tried to write; I would hammer out sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, but it was all garbage. And I couldn’t do that to my fans. I couldn’t do that to myself.

  I came up here to Vermont to visit my sister. The area really appealed to me—the mountains, the never-ending forests, the small and cozy towns, the isolation. While staying with my sister for a few weeks, I heard a rumor about a haunted house in the next county, in a small town called Carston. So I went to check it out. I drove into the small hamlet nestled in the woods and asked around. Everyone there had heard of the haunted house, and a few pointed me in its direction. Of course they warned me to stay away, but they knew a reckless city slicker when they saw one. They knew I wasn’t going to heed their warnings, so they only shrugged their shoulders and resigned me to my fate.

  It took forty-five minutes of driving outside of town, and another twenty minutes of back-tracking, before I found the dirt path snaking through the woods that led to the house. For a few moments I believed that the townspeople had purposely given me wrong directions, either to send the out-of-towner on a wild snipe hunt or because they didn’t want me to find it.

  But I found it. I drove my Jeep Cherokee over the rutted road and emerged from the suffocating woods to see the dilapidated, two-story structure looming up on a hill with no vegetation around it, like nature itself had pulled back away from the house in fear and disgust a long time ago.

  I drove up the hill as far as I could. I put the Jeep in park and turned it off. I got out. The world around me was silent. Not even the sound of birds filled the air. Maybe the wildlife had abandoned this area, or perhaps they were holding their collective breath, waiting for an explosion of violence to occur.

  As I stood there in the knee-high grasses, I could feel stories coming alive in my mind. Worlds were opening up to me—dark worlds, terrible worlds. I saw characters coming into existence, tales unfolding. My fingers were actually twitching, like I was an addict suffering through writing withdrawals. Suddenly, I needed to get back to a keyboard.

  I needed to be inside that house, I needed to live in it, breathe in its musty air—I needed to write in it.

  I spotted a sign discarded in the overgrown brush thirty yards away. It was a rental sign and it looked pretty old. I jotted down the phone number in my cell phone and raced back to my Jeep. I didn’t care if I had to rent the house or buy it outright. It didn’t matter. I had to be here. My muse had left me a while back, and now I had found her again; she was holed up in this haunted house, and I had to be with her again. She was waiting for me somewhere inside those gloomy walls, waiting to embrace me again, waiting to whisper dark secrets in my ears.

  I sped back to town and found the real estate company. The agent seemed shocked that I wanted to rent the house. She asked if I wanted a tour even though I could sense a plea from her for me to decline her offer. She let out a held breath when I told her I didn’t need a tour. I paid for a six month lease right there in her office. I would’ve paid more. This house was going to let me write again. This house was going to be my salvation.

  Or so I thought.

  How wrong I was. I wish I could go back and tell myself that.

  After securing the lease for the house, I went back to New York and packed up everything in my apartment in one day. I put anything I wasn’t taking with me (which was most of the furniture) into storage units. I had just broken up with my umpteenth girlfriend after another disappointing and hopeless relationship (my fault, not hers), and there was nothing holding me back. I loaded up my Jeep with only the bare essentials, and I was on my way back to Vermont.

  Once I got the keys from the real estate agent, I walked into the house for the first time . . . my house now. As soon as I stepped inside, it felt like I had been away from home, my real home, and I was finally back. The house was old, built in the mid-eighteen hundreds. It was a three-story Victorian with an attic occupying the entire third floor. It was dilapidated. Shutters were missing next to some of the cracked windows. Paint was peeling away from wood siding. The front porch looked like a safety hazard. The whole structure seemed to have a slight lean to it. The floorboards moaned and creaked when I walked across them, and there was a constant chilly draft throughout the house even though it was the middle of summer. The house was furnished with dumpy furniture, but I didn’t care. To be able to write again I would’ve sat on milk crates and cinder blocks. The rooms in the house were spacious. They had ten foot high ceilings, and on the far side of the living room was the wooden staircase hugging the wall that led upstairs.

  I am looking at that staircase right now as I write this—I keep glancing back at the steps that lead up into the darkness. Those things are moving around up there . . . I can hear them. It’s only a matter of time before all of the
m come for me. I need to hurry . . . I have things to tell before they get to me.

  On the day I moved in I made the twenty mile trip to the supermarket to buy two weeks’ worth of groceries and liquor. I came back, put the groceries away, and got my laptop out, setting it up at the rickety kitchen table where I sat down to write. The ideas were pouring out of me, almost like the stories were writing themselves, like they were channeling through me. I watched my fingers dance across the keys of the laptop like they weren’t even my own. I had always written outlines before, copious amounts of notes, constantly re-writing and editing—but these stories seemed to come out fully formed. I couldn’t write fast enough.

  Now I know that they were telling their stories through me; they wanted their stories told—they were freeing themselves through me.

  The noises started happening about three weeks ago: noises inside the walls, creaking in the floorboards, crackling in the ceilings. There were scratching noises. There were sneaky, scurrying sounds. I looked and looked for the source of the noises, but I never found any evidence of rats.

  I was starting to lose sleep; those noises were driving me crazy. But I wouldn’t let them stop me from writing. If anything, I was writing even more. I was beginning novels, racing through them towards the shocking endings, stockpiling manuscripts. I was writing nonstop fifteen to twenty hours a day, fueled on whiskey and snacks.

  But still, the noises—they were always in the background. I played music, blared the TV on some twenty-four hour news channel, but I could always hear them, like they were whispering to me, coaxing me to write their stories. I could’ve called the owner of the property about these pests, or I could’ve even called a pest control company. Looking back now, I wish I would’ve called an exterminator. But I know now that the exterminator wouldn’t have seen them or heard them or spotted any evidence of them. No, they would’ve hidden, and hidden well. But if truth is to be told here, and everything I write now is the truth, the real reason I didn’t call anyone for help was because I was afraid that if I exposed them then the stories would stop, that this obscene partnership we had created would be over.

  So I kept on writing . . . and the noises continued.

  Three nights ago I finally tore myself away from the house and went to a bar in town. I had to get away from here for a little while, try to clear my head. I was afraid I would pass out soon from exhaustion. I had been cooped up in this old house for nearly a month, and I needed some time away. I came back to the house drunk, not even remembering my drive back. I staggered inside and clomped up the steps to the upstairs hallway. I needed to take an urgent piss. As I got to the top of the steps, I stopped and stared down the long hallway. At the end of the hall was my bedroom door. The light was on in my bedroom—I could see the strip of light underneath the closed door.

  I was certain that I had turned off the light before I left. In fact, I don’t know why I would’ve turned it on because it had been daylight when I’d left.

  I moved down the hall slowly, flipping lights on in the bedrooms off of the hallway as I went, leaving illumination behind me like a trail of breadcrumbs. I got to my bedroom door and listened for a moment. I didn’t hear anything, no scratching or creaking noises, everything strangely silent like someone was waiting to pounce.

  And then I heard it beyond the door—a man whispering. I thought I could make out the words, but not quite. I couldn’t help thinking that those words and that voice were familiar. I know I should’ve ran downstairs and called the police, but I didn’t. The alcohol in my veins produced a false courage. Instead of running, I opened the door and rushed inside. I might have even yelled, but I can’t remember. Everything in the bedroom seemed fine; nothing looked like it had been disturbed.

  I went back out to the hall, to the bathroom and relieved myself. I was shaky, trembling with fear and adrenaline. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone in this house, that someone else was here with me. I entered my bedroom again and grabbed my pillow and sheet, taking them downstairs to sleep on the couch in front of the comforting glow of the flickering light from the television. I was forcing myself to take a night off from writing, afraid of burning myself out.

  But, of course, I couldn’t sleep. And soon I was at my laptop again, finishing the book I was working on, finishing a few more stories, adding to my stack of finished drafts.

  This afternoon I went to the grocery store to stock back up on food. I double checked before I left to make sure I had shut off all of the lights—especially my bedroom light.

  As I drove back, a monster thunderstorm formed in the sky above me from out of nowhere. I made it back to the house just before the downpour. I set the grocery bags down on the dining room table and then put them away.

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor and froze at the top of the steps.

  The bedroom light was on, the strip of light shining brightly in the murky shadows of the hall. I walked slowly down the hallway again, listening to my footfalls echo around me, bouncing around me. I glanced in at the dark bedrooms as I passed them.

  Moments later I stood in front of the door to my bedroom and stared down at the strip of light underneath the door. My mouth went dry with fear, and my heart hammered against my breastbone. I glanced behind me back down the hall.

  I reached down for the door handle, about to grasp it, about to turn it and enter the bedroom.

  I heard a voice; someone was whispering to me from inside my bedroom . . . right on the other side of the door.

  “Chop, chop,” a man’s voice said from behind the door.

  And I knew those words. I knew where I had heard them before; I had written those words in my book The Boneyard Murders which was about a serial killer who waited in the darkness, whispering to his victims before attacking them with an ax.

  Chop. Chop.

  Someone was inside my bedroom pretending to be the deranged character from The Boneyard Murders. Some insane fan or some fundamentalist Puritan was waiting to punish me for the horrors and filth I had written and unleashed on the world.

  I backed up a step, trying not to make any noise. But he already knew I was outside the bedroom door. He had been waiting for me.

  He struck that ax against the door and just the tip of the blade punctured through the bedroom door, splitting the wood down to the bottom of the door.

  I ran back down the hallway towards the stairs. But I could already hear something moving around in one of the bedrooms to my right. I raced past the open doorway and saw a creature filling the opening, trying to squeeze through. The being’s flour-white skin hung in loose folds on its massive body, rolls of flesh bunching up around its neck and sides. On its large head, the skin was stretched taut, and there was a network of bluish-green veins just underneath the papery skin. Its mouth hung open impossibly wide, like an anaconda unhinging its jaw to devour its prey. Inside the creature’s mouth were rows upon rows of yellowed, needle-like teeth. Its eyes were bulging and red, and they seemed like they were about to burst out of the thing’s face.

  The thing growled at me and lifted up its head, crushing the top of the doorway. Wood cracked and plaster exploded, raining down on me as I fell backwards. I slid down the hallway wall towards the stairs as the creature began to push its massive bulk out through the doorway. The plaster walls popped, the cracks radiated from the doorway.

  In the distance, behind me at my bedroom door, I heard another whack of the ax blade against the door. I swear I could still hear the killer whispering to me from behind the door.

  Chop, chop.

  I got to my feet and rushed down the stairs so quickly that I tripped over the last few steps and crashed down to the first floor. It felt like something had snapped inside my knee and there was a starburst of pain that blanked everything out for a few seconds. I collapsed down onto the floor, holding my knee, writhing in pain and groaning with tears of agony rolling down my face.

  But then I heard the crashes from upstairs. That creat
ure was free—it had burst through the doorway—and that was enough to get me back up onto my feet. But I could barely walk, and I definitely couldn’t run. I hobbled to the kitchen table, dragging my nearly useless leg behind me as I grabbed my car keys.

  What was happening? Upstairs, there were two characters from my books that had somehow come to life.

  I didn’t understand it; I just wanted to get out of the house. Maybe the house was haunted. Maybe it was making me see things that weren’t there, making me see the horrors I had created through the years, the horrors I had infected the world with.

  I yanked the front door open, ready to get to my Jeep as fast as I could through the torrential downpour. But I stopped in my tracks. The hood of my Jeep was open, and there were giant slug-like creatures devouring the engine and the metal of the Jeep. The clear slime the creatures left behind was burning through the metal like acid.

  I had seen these creatures before—I created them in a short story called Slugs.

  A noise off to my left whirled me around on my unsteady legs. There were people out there shambling about in the darkness and the rain—a lot of them. I watched as the mass of people stumbled towards me.

  Zombies, just like I’d written about in my post-apocalyptic novel When Hell Rises.

  I hurried back across the creaky porch to the front door as the undead stumbled towards the porch steps and railing. Their arms were extended like they were already reaching for me, their mouths wide open, ready to bite down on my flesh and tear it away piece by piece.

  I got back inside the house just as the horde of zombies fell against the door. I backed away, afraid the door was going to explode inward from their weight. But it held. At least for the moment.

  I hobbled over to the couch just as the electricity went out, plunging the house into darkness. In the darkness I could hear the sound of the storm more clearly; I could hear the zombies outside clawing at the doors and windows, their fingernails snapping off as they tried to pry the windows open. I heard the sound of heavy work boots from upstairs strolling down the hallway, the ax being dragged along the wood floor. I heard the sound of the madman whispering and singing to himself; I heard him whispering: “Chop, chop.” I heard the creaking and groaning sounds inside the walls, the wood lath and studs snapping as the giant white creature forced its way from the world I had created into this world.