Scary Stories: A Collection of Horror - Volume 1 (Chamber of Horror Series)

by Billy Wells

  “Hey, George, any luck finding a job?” Paul asked politely, even though he already knew the answer.

  “No, no one will hire me, now that the bitch has blackballed me.”

  They looked at each other again sheepishly, and Harry said, “Did you try the chicken plant; they always seem to have an opening in the eviscerating room?”

  “Yeah, I checked with them, and they said there’s no openings right now, but they would put me on the waiting list.”

  After a long pregnant silence, George decided to put out a feeler, “You know, fellas, when I passed by the old Nightshade house this morning, I saw a face in the window on the second floor.”

  “Really,” Ed said in disbelief, “no one I know has caught a glimpse of the old woman who lives there for nigh on twenty years. Fred Barnes told me he’s been delivering groceries to the back door every Friday for more than ten years, and he's never seen the woman once. She leaves a check under the mat for him.”

  “How old do you think she might be,” George asked, pretending to yawn to show his lack of interest.

  “Clarese, that’s her name,” Harry said, scratching his head and taking another sip of coffee. “She got married when she was about twenty in 1959. I guess that would make her almost seventy-five by now. She was Albert Wilkerson’s daughter by a second marriage. Her pappy wasn’t rich by any means, but he wasn’t poor either. She met the young man she married at a frat party at UVA as I recall. It must have been love at first sight ‘cause they married right after graduation.”

  “She must come out sometime,” George replied.

  “Fred said she has visitors once in a great while, but they’re not from around here. Except for him delivering groceries, no one from these parts has stepped foot on her property for fifty years as far as I know,” Paul explained.

  “How does Fred get in the gate to deliver the groceries if she don’t come out to let him in?” George asked.

  “She has some kind of remote control device,” Paul explained.

  “So you think you saw someone in the window this morning,” Harry said skeptically.

  “I saw someone peeking out from the second floor window,” George muttered, as the smell of the rank coffee began to make his stomach churn.

  After everyone remained silent for a time, George slapped his knee and said, “That woman has to be as crazy as a shithouse rat to stay alone in that old house all these years. Her mind must be like mush.”

  Ed looked up from his crossword puzzle, “She's not entirely alone.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not alone?”

  Fred says there is a sign in several places on the brick wall that says “BEWARE OF FIDO.”

  “Fido?” George said in bewilderment.

  “I guess the old bitty has a dog to keep her company. She also has an entrance at the back of the property with a loading dock.”

  “A loading dock?” George said, totally confused, and then replied, “What a strange old bird.”

  “She’s strange all right,” Paul nodded in agreement. “She was always strange even when I pulled her pigtails in the third grade. If looks could kill, I would have died when I was eight years old. She had a mean streak in her that was as plain as the nose on her face. If she’s been sitting there day after day, month after month, year after year never going anywhere, she must be waiting for something, and she’s afraid she’ll miss it if she leaves.”

  “Waiting for what?” George asked, his face narrowing into a question mark.

  “Dunno,” Paul responded. “Maybe for the maniac who hacked up her husband fifty years ago. They never did find out who did it.”

  “That’s insane, where did you ever come up with that crazy idea?”

  “Then, you tell me, George,” Paul replied. “Why else would she stay there all these years and never go anywhere. She's got something on her mind, and whatever it is, she doesn't want anyone in these parts to know what it is.”

  “Why are you so interested in the old crazy woman anyway,” Ed inquired suspiciously.

  “Like I said,” George replied, “I saw someone in that window this morning, and it made me wonder what her story really is.”

  George saw the black coating in the bottom of their coffee cups that almost gagged him when he rose to leave.

  “Sure you don't want a cup of coffee, George, it's on us.”

  “No, Paul, I'll pass this time, fellas,” George said, half smiling.

  As he opened the door to leave at the front of the store, he heard the stifled tittering of the three old timers in the back. He knew they knew why he’d lost his job, but they hadn’t rubbed it in, at least, not to his face.

  George believed the old woman had money. She probably had loads of cash under her mattress. She even had a loading dock. The brick wall around the property must have cost a fortune.

  The only wrinkle he hadn't planned on was Fido. What kind of dog was it? Dogs could be scary. He knew that from catching strays and delivering them to the local shelter. Some dogs could weigh almost two hundred pounds, but Fido sounded more like a cocker spaniel, not a Doberman, or a wolfhound.

  George returned to his trailer to settle his nerves before he left for the break-in. He hadn't eaten since yesterday, and he was hungry.

  Tonight was the night. He shoplifted a rope from the hardware store and a small flashlight. He forgot the batteries and had to go back to get them. They were harder to steal since they were in a rack right on top of the register, and old man Jacobs kept watching him like a hawk.

  He planned to use the rope to get far enough up in the tree to hop on the top of the wall. From there, he would walk along the bricks to where the wall bordered the corner of the house. He was pretty sure he could reach the roof of the porch from there and get to one of the upstairs windows.

  Everything would be simple, if not for Fido. No matter how he entered, the dog would sense him and start barking. The old woman might even have an alarm system that could be set off by motion detectors.

  Whatever happened, he had no choice at this point. If he couldn't get into the house, he would have to try hitchhiking out-of-town. Once in the car, he would knock the driver in the head, steal his car, take whatever money he had on him, and hope for the best.

  As the sun faded on the horizon, a fog bank oozed eerily across the landscape. George’s stomach growled as he stood under the oak tree next to the brick wall, listening for the sound of a barking dog. He hadn’t heard a peep when his watch told him it was time to make his move. He found a branch on the ground under the tree and pitched it over the wall into the yard to see if it would set off a motion detector.

  When the branch landed without consequence, George’s head darted in all directions. Could he be this lucky? He simply couldn’t believe no alarm sounded. The night remained as silent as a tomb as the fog continued to roll in.

  The old hag could have a silent alarm that automatically called the police. There was no way to tell. He would keep his eyes open, but he didn’t think he would see flashing lights in this fog if the police did show up.

  George crept along the top of the wall until he reached the corner of the porch. Standing on tiptoes, he leaned forward, and steadying himself against the wall, he gripped the frame of the only window he could reach and attempted to open it.

  He couldn't believe his eyes when the window slid up without the slightest creak. Placing both hands on the sill, he jumped forward and stuck his upper torso halfway inside the dark room. Without knowing what lurked inside, he felt like a man with his head in a guillotine. Wasting no time, he squirmed from side to side until his whole body slid silently to the floor inside the black room. He listened for Fido's bark and braced for an attack, but nothing happened.

  The house remained deadly silent. So silent, George wondered if the old woman was really inside. Maybe the old timers and Fred were wrong, and she did make secret trips no one knew about.

  George dropped into a crouch, crept across the dark room, and pe
eked out the open door into the hallway. Hearing nothing from the room directly in front of him, he stealthily crossed the hall, slipped inside the door, and put his back against the wall.

  Pulling out the small flashlight, he pointed it into the pitch darkness and turned it on. Recoiling backwards as if hit squarely between the eyes with a Louisville slugger, he saw a floor to ceiling portrait of a young man in a tuxedo smiling back at him about ten feet away. The red boutonniere in his lapel was so striking; it seemed to have a three-dimensional quality against the backdrop of his black and white suit. The portrait was obviously the work of an accomplished artist who had painted a young man so lifelike he looked like a living, breathing person.

  As George drew closer, the young man’s eyes seemed to follow him. His foot bumped against the edge of a platform about half as high as a normal bed, lying directly in front of the portrait. George lowered the flashlight and saw the outline of a body covered by a sheet of white linen except for the head. Moving up the length of the torso, George saw the gaping hollow sockets of a skull much like the horrible face of the thing in the rocking chair in “Psycho.” The shreds of flesh that remained looked like ugly patches of dried scabs clinging to the bone. The rictus grin of its yellow teeth weakened his knees like something from his worst nightmare.

  Suddenly, the high keening sound of a maniacal screech reverberated in the massive interior, and the rasp of a voice straight from hell shrieked, “I've been waiting for you all these years. I’d almost given up hope when my doctor advised me my leprosy had finally returned as he predicted it would so many years ago. But you're here now, that's all that matters. I’ve prayed for this moment. And now that I know you can’t escape, I can let go at last and die peacefully, knowing you will pay dearly for what you did to me and my poor Archibald.”

  George's eyes darted about the shadows cast by the small beam of light like a cornered bird out of its cage. The room appeared to be a perfect square with one window closed off by a black shutter and the door he entered by.

  “Look lady, I don't mean to burst your bubble, but I'm not who you apparently think I am. Come and look at me. I'm thirty-five years old, not some 75-year-old ax murderer. I am just a guy down on my luck who needs road money to get out of this sorry town. Grease my palm with some cash, and you can have your life back. At least, whatever's left of it.”

  After a prolonged silence, the rasp continued, “Nice try, Satan, but I know it's you. I’d know that voice anywhere. I'm blind, and I can't see your face or anything else since you put out of my eyes with that screwdriver, but I see you in my nightmares every night just like it was yesterday.”

  “Someone said the old woman may have been blinded by the fiend who hacked up her husband,” George muttered under his breath, “and damned if they weren’t right.” He suddenly felt a pang of guilt that he had intruded on this pathetic creature. “Hey, I'm sorry about your eyes, I didn't know you were blind. It's nothing personal. I'm just here for the money. If you could see me, you’d see I’m a young man. I'm not the killer. I'd swear on a stack of bibles.”

  George heard the sound of a clank from somewhere below and the creak of an ancient hinge moving in protest. Then came the clinking of chains scraping against iron bars and then the rattling on what sounded like a cement floor.

  “What could that be?” he wondered.

  Suddenly, instead of guilt, another more gut-wrenching feeling gripped him. A creepy, crawly premonition that something terrible was about to happen.

  He turned abruptly to retreat to the open window where he’d come in across the hall. Plan B looked better at this point, he’d just rob some motorist and leave the woman alone. As he bolted to escape, his foot tangled in the linen draped across the platform before him. As he fell with a thud to the floor, he exposed the lower portion of what lay on the platform. Struggling to his feet, in the beam of the flashlight, George saw the hideous skull was attached to the muscular torso of a male sex doll like he’d seen one time on HBO.

  Its permanent erection protruded from between its bulging, sinewy legs. Nipple rings glinted in the beam of light like golden crescent moons studded with diamonds.

  George stood aghast at the mind-numbing erotic image of a seventy something bag of bones riding bareback atop a robotic doll man with the face of a skull.

  He imagined the portrait of the young man on the wall was there to turn her on like a man would use the centerfold of an old skin magazine. But what good would the picture do if she were blind? He could only guess the portrait was there before she was blinded, and she could still see it in her memory.

  Why had the old woman replaced the handsome face of the sex doll with the skull of dear Archibald? George didn’t know that either, but like his pappy always said, “It takes all kinds of people to make a world.”

  Without further analysis, he bolted through the door and sprinted across the hall toward the doorway of the room with the open window to the outside.

  Hell-bent on fleeing this death trap, George exploded headlong into an immovable panel blocking his escape route that wasn’t there a few minutes before. The sudden agony of his face flattening on the steel covering the doorway approached the excruciating pain of a three hundred pound lineman kicking him in the balls in his junior year. He slumped to the floor in a heap.

  As he lay there dazed from the collision with the panel, he heard a sudden yelp from below that reminded him of the sound someone makes plunging upside down through the loop de loop of a roller coaster. Then, he heard a sickening squish like someone had run over a watermelon with a steamroller, followed by a loud thump like a softball hitting a brick wall. He could only assume the series of snaps and pops emanating afterward were someone’s bones breaking.

  George struggled to his feet in a stupor and cowered against the wall, cringing in unbridled fear. He placed his hands over his ears, but he could still hear the slurping, the sucking, and the awful chewing that sent his mind deeper into a maniacal frenzy.

  After a series of grunts and belches, he heard the chain rattling across the floor, closer this time… much closer than before. Barely able to muster a voice, he wheezed, “Mrs. Nightshade, are you all right? What are those awful sounds?”

  He listened, and the chains stopped moving… as if whatever had made the sounds was now listening to him. George struggled to his feet as the sound of the chain striking each step as something ascending the stairway caused his heart to pound faster and faster until he thought it would explode.

  George continued to struggle like a wild man to remove the panel blocking his path to the open window. His fingernails became bloody stumps as he clawed futility on the unmovable steel panel, and then, he gasped when he heard the chain finally clunk on the floor at the top of the landing. A smell like rancid meat began to assault his nostrils.

  He picked up the flashlight that had fallen to the floor and pointed it toward the end of the hall. The beam of light fixed on the bloody head of an old woman suspended from a hairy fist attached to a harrier, giant arm.

  Suddenly, the head spun across the distance of the space in a strobe light effect as it pulsated in and out of the light until it landed with a splat at his feet. A splash of blood spattered his cheek as he lowered the light and saw the mutilated, eyeless face with only a hank of hair clinging to the exposed flesh above her missing left ear.

  George heard the ferocious growl of something born from the depths of hell as a dark, hairy shape filled the space at the end of the hall from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Then, like a herd of buffalo, it came bounding toward him with its hideous bloody teeth and massive muscles bulging.

  The last thing George saw was the small dog tag hanging from its neck that read “FIDO.”

  NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

  Every New Year’s Eve since they graduated from college seven years ago, Ben and his friends, Frank, Murray, and Harold, met at the Purple Puma Lounge to make resolutions for the coming year.

  In keeping with their an
nual custom, they were well on their way toward inebriation when Frank proposed the theme for this year.

  “Did you guys see the movie, The Bucket List’?” Frank asked, and then belched.

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Harold replied. “It was damned good.” Ben nodded in agreement, and watched a busty coed swivel by on her way to the ladies’ room.

  Murray shook his head and said with disdain, “Everybody said how great it was, and I wanted to see it, but somehow I never did.”

  “One of the first things Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman decided to do before they kicked the bucket was to go skydiving,” Frank replied. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a bad case of acrophobia, the fear of high places. So…I’m making skydiving my New Year’s resolution for this year, and I propose we make a pact that each of us will eliminate something from our own personal bucket list this year we never thought we’d have the balls to do.”

  His friends looked at each other in dumbfounded amazement at this unexpected proposal to go skydiving.

  Frank saw the shocked expressions on his friends’ faces and continued, “After years of not being able to go on an airplane because of my fear of heights, I’ve decided not only to go up in a plane, but I’m going to jump out of one. I’ve been to a shrink, and he says I’m ready.”

  “Skydiving,” Ben said, pounding on the bar and laughing so hard, he couldn’t catch his breath. “You’d better pick an alternative resolution, dear friend. Something you might actually go through with when you’re sober.”

  “Yeah, Frank.” Harold chided, “Ever since you almost fell off the barn roof when you were ten, you’ve had trouble taking an elevator above the fifth floor.”

  “Not anymore,” Frank said with determination. “I’m a new man. Come down to the airfield on January 2 and watch me go airborne at over 5,000 feet.”

  “I’ve got $100 that says you won’t make the jump,” Murray declared drunkenly.

  The three of them teased Frank mercilessly about his insane idea of going skydiving the rest of the evening. No one thought he would actually go through with it.