Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction
Page 10
How will she pick Rachel up, now?
She catches that thought in the next instant. Monica’s insides still shake when she thinks of her daughter. She was never far away, always smiling, blonde hair shimmering in the sun, ready with a hug. “Big hug!” she would say in a soft, squeaky voice like her favorite Teletubbie character, Poe. It had been only six months since she died; seven since one of those hugs.
Five years old, that’s all she’d been.
Just five.
Sleeping had been a torment since Rachel first became ill, and it grew worse with each passing month until she died… and then Monica couldn’t sleep at all. Jack left her, selfish, self-centered Jack. She was stuck in a world of not caring if she slept or not… if she lived or not.
But sleep did come.
Then the dreams started.
The first time was shocking, mind-numbing, when she woke to the right leg gone.
The first thing she had to do after losing the leg was deal with her mother and her surprise visits. The woman would have had a heart attack on the spot if she saw the stump, so Monica came up with the idea that she was going away; she needed to get herself back up on her emotional feet.
“You understand, Mom. With Jack leaving and Rachel, well, it’s all been too much….”
Of course Dolores Reed didn’t understand. She went on and on about how Monica’s reaction to Rachel’s death and Jack’s leaving her was a major concern for her, and how much this preyed on her mind, and how all of this affected her life—on and on and on.
“Where are you going, Monica? How will we get in contact with you?”
“Just away, mom, I need some time to get my head together. Deal with things better than I have been.”
Her mother liked that, ‘Deal with things better than I have been.’ That was a nice touch.
“Well, can I get your mail for you, dear? Water your plants? Have your father stop by once in a while to check on things?”
That was just an excuse to get into her home, find out who she was receiving bills from and generally snoop around to see what else she could learn. As for watering the plants, the woman couldn’t keep a plant alive if her life depended upon it.
“That won’t be necessary, Mom. I’ll have the mail stopped and a neighbor will be checking the doors and windows and watering my plants. Thanks anyway.”
She knew that her mother wouldn’t relent easily on that. A couple of days later she heard them rattling the doorknob and pressing up against the windows trying to get a look in; Dad mumbling to himself, Mom telling him to shush. But they couldn’t get in the house because Monica had the locks changed when Jack left and she had never given them a key. Consciously or sub-consciously it was a good thing now.
She’d immediately followed that phone call with one to work. She spoke to her boss about taking a leave of absence. He understood.
“Been expecting it,” he said. “Take whatever you need; your job is safe, Monica. Get back on your feet.”
She nearly burst out laughing when he said that.
Sleep would never be possible again. Or so she thought. Twenty-four hours later, exhaustion overcame her fear and she nodded off. When she woke from another chase and found that her left leg had been removed it wasn’t so shocking.
She kneads the area of the blanket where her legs had been. There never was any blood, never any pain. The stumps are shiny moons of flesh… as if they had always been that way. As usual, the missing limbs are nowhere to be seen.
Eating will be more difficult now. Dragging herself to the kitchen had been hard enough with two arms. She sighs and pulls her hair back with her remaining arm. What did it matter, she isn’t hungry anyway. Two o’clock that afternoon, the day’s sunshine peeks through the sides of the drawn shades; Monica is exhausted and ready for sleep. When it comes she slides easily into it.
She lays in absolute darkness, shivering, the glow from the small, empty room where she lost her arm standing a mere three feet behind her, but the light couldn’t break through the shadows. Evil drips from the walls, touching her skin in large black drops, but she doesn’t care. The fear has disappeared.
The scraping is silent for the moment, but she knows it will soon start again. It is expecting the chase. A chase that It enjoys very much. She collapses back against the cold wall; with a shaking hand she sweeps back her wet hair.
Then, something completely unfair occurs. From a distance, she hears Rachel cry, “Big hug!”
Monica holds her breath.
“Big hug!”
“R-Rachel?” Monica gasps. “Rachel?”
“Big hug!”
Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!
It’s going for Rachel!
“RACHEL!”
Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!
God, It’s somewhere down there in the dark!
“Rachel! Mommy’s coming, sweetheart! Hide if you can! Do you hear me, Rachel? Hide!”
Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!
Monica throws herself down on her side and drags her half-dead body across the cold cement.
“Big hug!”
“Stop… honey… stop… calling… me! It… will find… you!”
Oh, God, if It did this to me what would it do Rachel? She doesn’t want to think about it. The images she is conjuring are too horrifying.
The darkness suddenly seems thicker and Monica has to rely on feel to get through. But that is the least of her problems — she isn’t sure that she has enough strength in one arm to continue for long; it hurt something awful already.
Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!
“Big hug!”
“Rachel,” she gasped.
Her arm can’t pull her any further. Breathing heavily, she stretches out across the floor.
The scraping continues, distant, but still echoing. Death accompanies its spine-scraping move.
With every ounce of energy she has remaining, Monica surges back up and starts dragging her self again. Pain shoots up her shoulder, exploding in her brain. She pushes it aside. The need to get to Rachel outweighs everything else.
“Big hug, Mommy!”
Ahead a block of light illuminates the floor, white on black, shining down from above. It is the only light in the corridor.
“Mommy, big hug!”
Rachel’s voice drifted down from the light.
“Rachel, Mommy’s here, right here!” Monica drags herself into the glow.
Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! The sound of Its movement now more rapid.
“Mommy…”
“Rachel, don’t make any sound, honey! Go back to the dark! Get away from the light! Go to the darkness!”
Scrape! Scrape!
“Mommy… Mommy…”
“RACHEL! RUN! RUN!”
Scrape!
“Mom…”
Cut off.
Then, the most horrible sound Monica has ever heard. It is the same gurgling sound Rachel made when she was a baby and Monica bounced her up and down on her knee, like she was going over a thousand little bumps. Only now it is thick and wet and unimaginably sickening.
A split second later, it abruptly ends.
“Rach…”
Her daughter’s name dies in her throat. She’s lost her again. Let her down like she had before. Monica sobs; tears run down her cheeks in torrents as her lungs wheeze a coarse, rattling sound. Monica crumples to the floor, exhaustion claiming her, futility accompanying it.
Rachel is dead.
Jack is gone.
What else mattered?
Nothing.
It drops silently down in front of her, again absorbing every bit of light. She barely notices.
Scrape. Scrape.
She feels the stirring of air slide across her face as It raises Its arm.
Monica doesn’t move.
○
Monica finds no comfort in the mothering hold of her pillows. Her other arm now gone, she can’t wi
pe away the tears from her face and the misery that they represent. So she just lays there.
The thunder of her heart and the shallow breath from her lungs is all that she hears. Her lips are dry and sore, her vision thick and pasty. Her mind is just as bad. She isn’t sure if she’s just awoken from her ordeal or if the last of it actually occurred days before. Monica can’t tell. She has no sense of time. With the shades drawn all there is, is the blots of her furniture, the dark yawning maw of her open closet, and shafts of darkness painted into the corners.
Lying in the folds of her blankets, Monica stares into the dark.
The intruder slipping into her bedroom didn’t crease the silence; but Monica senses that she is no longer alone.
“Mommy? Daddy?” she calls out, sounding very much a little girl.
She hears shuffling of feet; the mumbling of voices.
Monica is too buried in the blankets to hear anything clearly, but she feels a presence by her bedside. Suddenly there is pressure on her, an embrace. Through the blankets and sheet, the sweet fragrance of her father’s cologne caresses her senses.
“It’s alright, sweetie,” he whispers in her ear. “Daddy’s here — it’s okay now.”
There is more than just Daddy here, though. Phantoms move quietly, steps barely discernible on the bedroom carpet as she feels herself gently lifted her by her shoulders and legs, still covered in the bedding.
Daddy says softly in her ear, “You’re going to a place where you can get rest. It’ll be alright now.”
A lie; it would never be right again and rest meant sleep.
Monica whimpered quietly.
She doesn’t want to sleep anymore.
Not anymore.
Brian D. Mazur’s publishing credits include “Raven and the Darkness” in the 2009 Horror Bound anthology Return of the Raven. In 2012 his short story “Home Coming” was published in Wicked East Press’ Behind Locked Doors and in the same year, from Jaletta Celgg & Frances Pauli, the anthology Wandering Weeds: Tale of Rabid Vegetation, a dark fantasy influenced “Oh, Dark Tumbleweed” was published. Halloween of 2013, from Sekhmet Press, Wrapped in Red: 13 Tales of Vampiric Horror is his short “Shattering Glass.” Also released on Halloween 2013, from Diabolic Publications, another vampire tale “Dumaine” published in Dying to Live. Brian can be found on Facebook at BDMazurAuthor and on Twitter BDMazur.
Spy Glass Hill
by Lisa Mannetti
The chiggering of insects.
The drone of distant traffic.
A harvest moon — giant yellow buttercup tea saucer—
perched on the very horizon of a farmer’s field that’s
frost-kissed stubble now;
Sounds and light that tell me just how far we’ve come—
how low we’ve sunk—
Since the dolls, our captors, took us...
since August.
I was the one with the reputation for finding haunted houses—and owners who would let us in to snoop around — but it was Allie who brought us to the place we’re trapped in now.
It’s a big house on a fair-sized lot, but it’s not all that isolated. Sometimes, at night — on those nights I’m allowed to tilt my head and sleep — I lie there awhile and I think I hear the traffic on Rt. 138, which is only about three miles away. Or, as Paul must have said a hundred times: “If we could just get to the roof and spit, our gobbets would practically land in my mother’s front yard.” He means in Rhode Island where we all used to live.
Paul used to be my boyfriend, just like Allie used to be my best friend.
But none of us are very human anymore — the dolls have seen to that.
“Okay, so the Griswold place was a bust,” Allie said one night last July when the three of us were sharing pizza and a pitcher at Bruno’s just across the border in Connecticut. She didn’t say it in a mean way; she was just stating a fact. We’d all looked forward to witnessing phenomena at the Griswold Inn which was supposed to feature everything from eerie voices and pictures flying off the walls to brown, smudgy apparitions and black menacing shadows that rose up out of corners and covered the occupants like the icy folds of Dracula’s cape. In fact, we’d spent at least three weekends there, and the closest we came to observing — or recording — the paranormal, was finding a 1964 Casper the Friendly Ghost coloring book stashed on a cheap pine shelf up in the attic.
“Great house, though,” Paul said, tipping me a wink. “Twelve rooms... and that staircase....”
Allie cut in. “No one’s blaming Em,” she said, leaning forward. “Hell, when that stupid Penny Griswold called up begging us to investigate, she laid on so much shit, it could clog every toilet between here and Providence.”
“Yeah, and every time I tried to tell her that not only weren’t we picking up a goddamn thing on the equipment, but that none of us had even gotten a good case of goose bumps, she’d start in with one of her famous screaming ‘You just missed it!’routines.”
“‘Come back over right now!’” Paul’s voice rose in a whiny falsetto, “‘Tommy has welts that look like snakes all over his body! My mother-in-law — and you know, she’s 87! — said the incarnation of Paimon came out of hell and had intercourse with her!’” His voice dropped back to normal. “Guess he must’ve been sick of fucking camels. First time I ever felt sorry for a demon — imagine having to pork that old hag...”
“Can it, Paul,” Allie said.
“Hey, I’m agreeing. It wasn’t Emily’s fault; that Griswold chick figured she could make a bundle on a book or movie deal and grab more business for the Inn at the same time—”
“Will you just shut up?”
He grinned and began to refill our glasses. “I sense a toast coming...”
Allie ignored him and began to tell us about a Victorian house that was called Spy Glass Hill because of an ancient copper beech tree that stood next to the house where, during the Revolutionary War, scouts would signal if they saw the enemy.
“The place is packed with history,” Allie said. “There was a one-room tavern there in the early 1700s — also located alongside the tree according to the documents I’ve seen. The current house was built around 1885...”
“Why don’t you show us around so we know where to set up?” Allie said.
We were in the pale green hallway of Spy Glass Hill, all of us clumped together because of the mound of cables and stacks of boxy equipment Paul had trotted in.
“Sure, sure.”
I was gathering impressions, taking notes; recording would come later. “Just you and your wife?” I asked, pen poised over a spiral-bound Steno notebook.
“Yep, just me and Nina. You’ll meet her when we go upstairs, she’s usually up there, fussing in one of the rooms with the...” his voice trailed off and we all followed Sandor Williams into a large parlor on the left.
“What happens in here?” Allie asked him.
“Happens?” He was short and balding, and for a second he looked so blank he reminded me of a discarded marionette.
“Yeah, in terms of paranormal activity,” Paul said. “We got tons of video cameras, EMF meters, sound recorders and all that happy sh— stuff,” he caught himself, “but with fourteen rooms and an attic, we can’t cover the whole house, Mr. Williams.”
“Sandy, just call me Sandy. I know young people are always impatient, but we’ll get to it, we’ll get to it... I promise you that. Now just off the living room,” he said, “Nina’s set up a kind of special collector’s room in what used to be the library...”
I grabbed Allie’s elbow, while Paul moved through a set of wooden pocket doors. “You think maybe this guy’s just lonely and likes the idea of some live-in company?”
“He’s doddery, but I don’t think he’s losing it...”
“You talk to him or to the wife?”
“Him,” she said, sighing a little and going into the room toward what sounded like a dozen tinkling music boxes.
I know it’s too late for if-onlys, but if I’d had my pocket recorder switched on during this homey little tour — maybe while there’s still time, say, while I can still press buttons, or most importantly, while I can still feel and think as humans do — I could take a chance listening to it once in a while at night. Maybe I’d be able to understand better just how we were caught and why we succumbed.
We trooped through the massive kitchen, the ornate dining room, a coffered study — passing room after room beneath dusty mahogany ceiling beams, and peeking at a myriad of typically Victorian alcoves and niches. I’m considered the psychic among us, and without my feeling so much as a vibe or a shiver, I was beginning to think this investigation was going to be a reprise of the Griswold fiasco.
Then, at the top of the stairs, I honed in on a window seat with a worn velvet cushion. Framing the stained glass window itself, were old-fashioned red curtains tied off with gold ropes and thick tassels — like the ones you see in pictures of bygone movie houses.
The actors on this miniature stage were an ensemble of dolls. Some were standing, some sitting splay-legged, some leaned against their comrades. I saw dirty cracked faces, thickly-lashed glass eyes, looped yellow braids, plush lips open to reveal white teeth. There were dimity dresses, tiny leather shoes, sailor caps, cowboy hats, and pink riding jackets. Too much to take in all at once.
“Now, down here…” Sandy turned the corner on the landing, making a hairpin turn and heading down a dim, paneled hallway, when something snagged the corner of my eye. I stopped. The light wasn’t all that great: cloudy weather, stained glass, thick drapes. I saw it again — a minute flicker of movement. “Hey, did you see that?”