Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  Sally looked out at the open field, at the place where he’d caught Jeanie up in his arms. She followed his gaze, and without hesitation, ran back out into the field, into the downpour, into the storm.

  Sally made a swipe at her.

  Jeanie ran with single-minded purpose.

  The rain assaulted her.

  She searched, eyes wild.

  A branching bolt of lightning and its thunder cracked the sky, and the bleaching light put a shine on Dolly’s face. Jeanie saw the doll. It laid face-up, spread-eagle, eyes closed, awash with rain.

  She ran to her doll, picked it up under the armpits and hugged it to her heart.

  Lightning struck. It connected with a nearby tree, coursed down it with white-hot fury, and sent its blaze arcing across to where Jeanie stood. It entered through her shoulder and rocketed down through her body. It expanded and filled her, wrenched her insides and twisted her brain as if it were wringing out a dishrag.

  Jeanie’s every muscle convulsed, and she was squeezed out, out into mid-air, her soul shooting like a star. Her arms and legs flew wide, and she landed on her back, with a little bounce. Her eyelids rolled closed.

  ○

  For the longest time, Jeanie couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t move. The smell of chemicals and burned plastic assaulted her. She lay there, listening to Sally wail. She heard Mr. Conti as well. They sounded distant, like the dogs had sounded before. She couldn’t hear the dogs anymore.

  The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started. The storm ended.

  Jeanie felt herself lifted off the ground and carried, like a tiny baby. She couldn’t tell who was carrying her, and her eyes still refused to open. Everything felt skewed. She felt smaller than normal, too lightweight. Her body seemed compact, as if maybe it weren’t all there anymore.

  Far-distant thunder rumbled, non-threatening.

  “Crack o’doom,” Jeanie thought. She couldn’t speak.

  Sally said, “My mom and dad are gonna be mad.”

  The walk took forever, or maybe Sally took his time. Jeanie didn’t know. All she knew was that she was awake, but she couldn’t open her eyes, and she couldn’t speak. None of her muscles worked.

  Sally’s footsteps reached creaky stairs, then wood. A screen door slammed shut behind them. Sally climbed some more stairs, opened a door and stepped through it. He sat Jeanie upon a cushion upright with something soft against her back.

  One of Jeanie’s eyes cracked open halfway. The other felt stuck, crusty, wanting to roll upward, but unable. She saw that she was in a bedroom, but she could only stare straight ahead.

  The eye was half open, but it didn’t move in its socket.

  In her peripheral vision, Jeanie saw the arms of the chair extending out on either side of her, larger than life, dwarfing her. She remembered that chair. She remembered it smaller.

  Sally moved across Jeanie’s field of vision. She watched him from beneath the one eyelid.

  He paced in the narrow track between his bed and the wall. He undressed, stripping out of his wet clothes and throwing them on the floor. He dropped his underwear and left them where they fell.

  Jeanie couldn’t turn her head. She couldn’t take her eye off the pallor of his skin, splotched red where he had pimples on his back and arms, on his bottom. His belly stuck out in front, and his hunched shoulders made him seem malformed.

  It wasn’t the first time Jeanie had seen him without clothes. Memories of moonlit midnights, dancing under the full moon, the harvest moon, the blue moon, the wolf moon, the hunter’s and the hay moon, with her parents, naked, and Sally’s parents, naked, and Sally with his white skin that glowed in the moonlight, dancing and celebrating, good memories, filling Jeanie’s head. The Contis had sung songs with words Jeanie didn’t understand, and her parents had sung along. They had brought cakes and drinks that smelled like the garden and tasted sweet. On the solstice, Jeanie could stay up past her bedtime and eat as many of the special treats as she wanted. She could drink the magic juice to her heart’s content. And she danced naked under the moon’s watchful eye, with a cake in one hand and the world in the other, and her parents told her she was being groomed for greatness — because that’s what the Contis told them.

  Sally crossed to where Jeanie couldn’t see him, but she heard him pull open a drawer. He tossed dry clothes onto the bed. They flashed into her line of sight and landed in the middle of the bedspread.

  Raised voices, angry voices, came up the stairs — Mr. and Mrs. Conti. It was a brief storm, however, over almost as soon as it had begun.

  Sally came back by the bed to dress. “My mom and dad are gonna be mad.” Stepping into white briefs, he rushed and caught his foot in the leg-band. He started to topple. He let go of the underpants and reached out to catch himself on the arm of Jeanie’s chair. The chair shook, rattling Jeanie and tipping her to one side. Her one eye opened the rest of the way. The other rattled around in its socket, but the eyelid remained stuck shut.

  Sally tugged up his underpants.

  “Salvatore! Where are you?” Footsteps echoed in the stairwell outside the room.

  Sally pulled on a pair of sweatpants. “My boy’s in his room, Mom.”

  A small woman came into the room.

  Mrs. Conti was tiny. Jeanie’s dad had called her a little person. When the woman stood next to her son, she barely came above his belly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Okay.” Sally pulled a t-shirt on over his head.

  “Are you hungry?”

  He considered for a moment, then shook his head.

  The woman took her son by the hand and led him to the bed. She jumped up to sit on it and patted it to indicate that he should sit, too.

  Sally sat beside her, dipping the mattress low so that she slid up against him. “My mom and dad are gonna be mad.”

  “Why would we be mad?”

  “The window is closing.” Sally looked over at the chair. His mom followed his gaze and gasped softly.

  For a long moment, no one said anything. Sally hung his head.

  “I’m not mad. Salvatore, I’m not mad at you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You did good. You showed your dad where Jeanie was.”

  Sally nodded.

  The tiny woman folded her hands in her lap. “You remember what we said, right? Sometimes bad things happen to the people we love, and it’s sad. But it’s worth the sacrifice if it saves someone else. Do you understand?”

  Sally nodded. He looked across at Jeanie and met her one-eyed gaze. “My boy will be normal.”

  Mrs. Conti rubbed up and down Sally’s arm. “Yes, my darling boy. You’ll be normal, and we’ll move to a new place where no one knows us, and we’ll start a new life there. It’ll be wonderful. You’ll see.”

  Sally’s dad appeared in the doorway. He still wore his one-piece jumpsuit, torn at one thigh and stained at the knees. The brim of his hat dripped onto his shoulders, and the rest of him dripped onto the floor. He and Sally’s mom exchanged a look. It was the look of grown-up secrets that Jeanie recognized well.

  Mr. Conti nodded. “I’ve got her ready.”

  “Let’s hope this works.” Mrs. Conti slid off the bed and moved to the door. “At least the rain’ll wash away any evidence. You buried the gun deep?”

  “Told you I did.”

  “Yeah, you told me you’d bring Jeanie straight home, too.”

  They made angry eyes at each other.

  Mrs. Conti said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “‘Any required change may be effected by the application of the proper kind… and degree… of Force…”

  Mr. Conti joined her, reciting the quotation from memory. “‘…in the proper manner, through the proper medium… to the proper object.’ I know Crowley’s damn postulate, woman.”

  “We had our object primed, and lig
htning’s a pretty damn powerful Force.”

  Mr. Conti nodded, but not in a happy way, in a bad-day sort of way. “We don’t know that it disrupted the magick.”

  “What if the lightning set her free? She could be anywhere. The only place we know for sure she isn’t, is in the afterlife, ‘cause we blocked her from that.”

  “It makes sense that she’d stay in her own body. All we can do is perform the ritual and see what happens.”

  “Let’s get it over with, then.” The woman looked back at her son. “Come downstairs, Salvatore. It’s ritual time.”

  “Okay.” Sally rose. He paused to grab Jeanie, tucking her in the crook of one arm.

  The world tipped askew for Jeanie. Her eye stared straight forward, locked open now, her only window on the world. When Sally turned, the dresser slid into Jeanie’s view, and she saw Sally reflected in the mirror.

  He stood there, with Dolly tucked in the crook of his arm. Half of Dolly’s face had melted and blackened. Her hair was singed, her dungarees filthy. Jeanie saw a single blue, sparkle eye, staring back at her. The other was melted shut. All Jeanie could do was stare. She understood. Panic, like static electricity, crackled inside her and all over the immobile, plastic surface of her arms and legs.

  Sally carried her out the bedroom door. He descended the stairs, and Jeanie caught glimpses of photos on the wall, pictures of Sally at all ages, from birth to adult. Most of the pictures showed him with his mom. As he got bigger and bigger, his mom looked smaller and smaller by comparison.

  “Come in here, my boy.”

  Jeanie’s insides crackled. She watched a living room go by and a hallway with a door that gave a peek into a bathroom. The kitchen came into view. It had white cabinets with shiny red handles and white linoleum on the floor.

  “Come closer, Salvatore.”

  Sally moved deeper into the kitchen. The tabletop came into Jeanie’s line of sight, and upon it, she saw a girl lying on her back, wet hair hanging off the edge of the table. Someone had removed the girl’s clothes. Her chest and shoulders had bright red marks that looked like roots growing across them, under the skin. They branched and sent out shoots of scarlet tributaries that spread down her belly.

  “I hope it’s not too late.”

  “Get the boy in position. We’re only going to get one shot at this.”

  Jeanie’s line of sight shifted. She tried to close her eye, but the eyelid wouldn’t budge, and all she could do was stare down into the girl’s face. It had no life left in it. The girl’s eyes were closed, but her mouth lay open, showing a blue-pink interior, tongue swollen and overflowing her bottom teeth. Jeanie recognized the face.

  It was her own.

  “Don’t be nervous, Salvatore,” Mrs. Conti said. “This won’t hurt a bit. Jeanie’s going to be with you forever, inside, where she can help you be smarter. You’ll see. My boy will be normal. It’ll be worth the sacrifice.”

  “Don’t promise the boy something we’re not sure we can produce.”

  “After all the trouble we went to, all the years of preparation, all those rituals to loosen her soul from its anchor and block it from the Light, I reckon some positive thinking couldn’t hurt. Besides, if this doesn’t work, it won’t matter. We’ll move on. We’ll find another child and start all over again. And Salvatore, well, he’ll never know the difference.”

  “I’ll know,” said Mr. Conti.

  Sally’s mom petted her son’s arm absently, and her fingertips brushed the melted side of the doll’s face. She jerked her hand away. “Salvatore, give me that filthy thing.”

  “Okay,” Sally said.

  Mrs. Conti took the doll from Sally, holding it by a heel.

  Jeanie’s world turned upside-down, and she saw Mr. Conti wrap his hand around a big, shiny knife.

  Sally’s mom opened a drawer and dropped the doll inside, into the old-fashioned trash compactor. She pushed down on the doll with the heel of her hand, compressing it into the paper, plastic and Styrofoam beneath it.

  One blue, sparkle eye stared up through Mrs. Conti’s fingers to Sally, who stood by the table. He reached out his big, man hand to stroke the other Jeanie’s wet hair. Mr. Conti raised the knife in both hands, high over the other Jeanie’s chest. He started to sing.

  The compactor closed slowly, cutting off the light as it went, gradually, until Jeanie was left in complete darkness, giving her the welcome illusion that she had finally managed to close her eye. Inside the compactor, it was quiet. Mr. Conti’s chanting sounded far away. Jeanie thought of her mom and dad. She thought of the dogs.

  An engine rumbled to life.

  “Do you have to do that now, woman?”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” said Sally’s mom. “It’s habit to turn it on when it’s full.”

  “Well, too late now. Let it run. I’ll start over when it’s done.”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  The trash compactor slowly squeezed its contents, making neat the discarded containers. When it crushed the doll’s head, the hard plastic gave way with a loud crack!

  “Crack o’doom,” Sally said.

  Angel Leigh McCoy is a narrative designer at ArenaNet, where she writes for the Living Story project in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game environment of Guild Wars 2. In her spare time, she writes short fiction and has had some success as both a fiction writer and editor. She produces the fiction podcast at WilyWriters.com and most recently co-edited Deep Cuts: Mayhem, Menace, and Misery, a horror anthology. She lives in a cozy commune of cats in Seattle. Learn more at www.AngelMcCoy.com. SFWA & HWA active member.

  A Distinctive Curiosity

  by Dave Ingalls

  Willard was there, having a cigarette and a beer, on the afternoon they wheeled it in. He swiveled on his barstool and turned to watch the commotion as his grandson Dennis tugged on the thing’s hitch and Dennis’s friend Paul pushed from the rear. The lumbering carriage’s huge spoked wheels clacked and rattled as they cleared the threshold of the tavern’s double-wide doorway.

  It was all wood and chipped black paint, dust, iron and leaded glass. Its four gigantic wheels were suspended by creaking leaf springs and squealing axles, upon which sat a long coach body and a high, uncomfortable-looking coachman’s seat. The rectangular, box-like rear had long plate glass windows on either side, was topped with ornate railings of iron trim and was crowned with a tarnished silver mourning lantern. Within the glass windows of the compartment — which was roughly the length of a man — ebony tassels and curtains of moth-eaten black velvet bobbed and shifted as the vehicle was pushed and pulled along.

  It was a horse-drawn hearse, and one that, by all appearances, had seen its last cadaver nearly a century before.

  “Where in hell are you going with that thing?” Willard asked, but he wasn’t really surprised by Dennis’s bringing another piece of junk into the tavern. The kid was a collector.

  “Oh,” Dennis replied, “about another ten feet.” And another ten feet it was, and then Dennis and the old hearse came to a stop. “Hold right there, Paul,” he told his friend, whose freckled face appeared from behind the tail end of the coach.

  “Right there?” Willard asked. “In the middle of the goddamn floor?” By then all the other folks in the bar — the usual scant mid-afternoon crowd of Daphne Ederson, 67-year-old drinking matron, Patsy Reed, bartender, and Roy, the tavern’s burly cook — were paying rapt attention to the situation unraveling before them.

  “Yeah, right here,” Dennis said, his voice sounding distant and dreamlike in the shadowy tavern. “Fits kinda nice with the decor, don’t you think?” He motioned around himself, indicating the antique clocks and sleds and saws and telephones and mirrors and snowshoes and paintings and tonic advertisements that adorned the tavern walls. Dennis’s fondness for things outdated was evident upon taking a drink in his tavern, and he took pride in each and every one of his acquisitions.

  “
You’d never even believe the price,” he added, as if it would persuade his grandfather to share in his enthusiasm. “The guy’s barn burned down and he didn’t have anywhere else to keep it, so he let it go for 800 bucks.”

  Willard rolled his eyes and placed his hand over his heart in mock attack. “Fool and his money...” he muttered. He looked at Paul. “And you just let him write the check? Couldn’t stop him, no matter how hard you tried, I s’pose?”

  Paul shrugged sheepishly, his face flushed red.

  "Aw, c’mon. It’s got character,” Dennis said. “It’s quite the distinctive curiosity, if you ask me. Plus it’ll be good for business — people around town’ll talk and come here just to see it, and maybe stick around for eggs or a burger or a beer afterwards.”

  “Oh, bosh!” Willard scoffed. “People’ll come all right — to see if it’s true that some idiot paid 800 bucks for an old meatwagon!”

  Patsy, behind the bar, young and blond, couldn’t help laughing. Nor could Daphne and Roy.

  “I dunno, Gramps,” Dennis said, stepping back from the hearse and taking a good hard look at it. “I think people’ll like it. I mean, where else can they see one of these around here?”

  Willard laughed and winked at Daphne. “Who’d want to see one?” he said. “I don’t know about anybody else, but when you get to be my age you know where it is you’re headed, and you don’t need to be reminded of it every time you sit down to take a drink.” With a grunt he swiveled on his barstool and turned his attention back to his beer.

  Dennis shook his head and smiled. He looked around himself at the shadowy walls of the tavern and at the array of antiques that decorated the place. It was all part of his dream, of keeping his own small-town New England bar and giving it an authentic antiquated air. The pieces he brought in added that ambience, that old sepia-print atmosphere he loved so much. His eyes came back to the hearse, to its big spoke wheels and its dusty coachman’s seat, its glassed-in compartment where who knew how many bodies had lain on the way to the grave, and its silver mourning lantern. The hearse certainly was the Queen Mary of his collection.