“ShieldPro,” Willard now grumbled to himself. He looked at the antique hearse in loathing. “I’m sure those boys’ll have a swell time downing their grub next to you, you bitch.” He peered into the back of the coach, at the curtains and tassels and empty coffin pegs, and was glad to see not a single fly. You fool, he thought, a little relieved, letting your imagination get to you that way. He turned and grabbed hold of his broom and set to sweeping the floor immediately around the hearse, all the while trying — in vain — to forget about the horror which had unfolded there the night before.
He swept beneath the tables and around the chairs, beneath the hearse and along the front of the bar, and before he even realized it he’d cleaned up the entire dining area. Satisfied with the progress he had made, he caught up the last pile of dining room rubbish and dumped it into the plastic garbage bucket beside the bar.
One down, he thought.
He dragged the bucket to the center of the dance floor and, laying down his broom, went to the stage and cleared it of trash. There were the customary wads of rock n roll tape, slivers of drum sticks, a butane lighter, a few spent guitar picks, a stray guitar string, and even a woman’s bra. All of this he caught up in his wrinkled hands and dumped into the trash bucket, except for the lighter, which he clicked on and, seeing that it still worked, slipped into his pocket.
The dance floor took a little more time. It, too, was strewn with rubbish. Willard swept it all together into a large pile at the center of the floor. While periodically glancing back over his shoulder to check on the hearse
(Make sure it isn’t moving!)
Willard gathered the trash into the dustpan, loading four heaping panfuls to clear the pile.
Black thoughts crept back into his head while he worked: the mind-movie of the hearse and its skeletal coachman running him down, the flies swarming in the glassed-in bed, the rear doors which had
(SOMETHING GOT OUT!)
opened all by themselves, and he remembered the intense fear which had clamped around his heart at the sight of the carriage bed, powdered with dust and looking incredibly empty — too empty — in the bright light of the tavern little more than a day before.
Whistling nervously, Willard stepped over to the hearse and took another careful, reaffirming look inside it...
No flies. And the rear doors were closed, just as he figured they should be. He sighed with great relief and swabbed with his wrist at the sweat that slicked his forehead. You silly old bastard, he thought. You’re gonna give yourself a breakdown if you keep it up. Just get back to cleaning and get it the Christ over with, will you? There ain’t nothing in that old meatwagon except what your fool mind is putting into it.
He dragged the broom and pail across the floor to the pool room and, moving with renewed determination, set to sweeping around the pool tables. Although the floor there was littered with trash like the rest of the tavern had been, it wasn’t nearly as thick and wouldn’t take him more than a few minutes to clean up.
Trying to keep the death buggy and the ill feelings it gave him at bay, Willard smoked a quick cigarette and once more took to whistling while he swept. He gathered a pile of trash and then filled another dustpan, and as he turned to empty its contents into the wastebasket he was unnerved to find the wall opposite him awash in an eerie red light. At first it was only slight in shade and intensity, but as he stood there, with his back to the hearse and a broom clutched firmly in his hands, the hue deepened and the light grew more brilliant, so bright, in fact, that his own too-tall shadow stretched across the floor and crawled half-way up the wall in front of him. The whole tavern was suffused in the eerie red light, and Willard knew that for as long as he could remember no bulb in the tavern had ever given off light of that color.
He turned sharply to face the antique grave wagon and felt the snake-thing turn in his guts as he discovered the source of the light — it was coming from the mourning lantern on top of the hearse — and in his mind’s eye he saw the same red glare on the way to a grave, and the slow revolutions of the spoked wooden wheels and the grey procession of mourners trailing drearily behind, and heard the muted sounds of tears and the horse’s hooves on the packed dirt of the roadway and in the distance the dull tolling of a bell... Was a fine man, shame he had to go, he heard a faraway voice say.
The lantern was ablaze with a flame so bright and fierce that it hurt his eyes to look at it. He had to shield them with his hands, and he realized with a sick feeling that the hearse could run him down at any second and he wouldn't even see it coming.
But as mysteriously as it had flared up, the light began to fade. It waned by degrees until it went out altogether and left the inside of the lantern black as pitch.
And just as the lantern went black the bed of the hearse began to glow; a weird luminescence, cool, green, and mist-like, shone from within the plates of glass at the back of the carriage. Willard was scared to death. He stepped cautiously to the side, far enough to see what was happening in the trunk of the hearse, and considered bolting for the tavern doors. But the death buggy stood between him and them... he watched in terror as the light grew brighter, became almost white-bright at its center while its outer fringes burned an electric yellow-green. The insides of the glass appeared slick with condensation, fogged over like the hot-cold windows of a loved-in automobile, wet and milky and (SOMETHING’S BREATHING IN THERE) opaque. Willard shuddered. His knees buckled as his terror grew, and he nearly fell when he saw the hand.
A withered, black, claw-like hand with crooked fingers and jagged graveyard nails appeared in silhouette and swiped along the inside of the glass to clear a long, bright streak across the fogged-over window. Willard tried to cry out but there was no voice — his breath had left him and his head swam with rushing blood. An awful pressure seized his chest, an excruciatingly unpleasant feeling like something massive was sitting on him, and he felt his legs giving out beneath him...
The doors at the rear of the hearse creaked open, slowly, and — to Willard’s ears — painfully. (IT’S GETTING OUT!) He heard the voice in his muddied intellect cry out, but he could do nothing. His arms were going numb. Blood surged in his head and his entire chest began to collapse in the grip of a giant invisible fist.
I can’t move, he told himself. I’ll fall, fall over and die...
Feet and legs, skin purplish-black, green-splotched and mouldering, wriggled through the hearse’s rear doors. Strained creaking noises arose from the carriage’s rusted leaf springs as they worked. Inside the glass box the black curtains swayed and the silky black tassels bobbed while mummified hips, shrouded by clinging fragments of a mottled white dress, shimmied from the bed of the hearse. Two wasted hands, dark and spidery, skin drawn taut over knobby bones and fingers caked with graveyard dirt, clawed at the bed’s outer edge as the thing pulled itself out with atrophied muscles.
Breath hitched in Willard’s lungs. He had no air to scream. He felt his face turning purple and his heart contracting and expanding, contracting, expanding, like a hot-water bottle being overfilled, while pressure behind his eyes built up so incredibly that it seemed at any second they would pop out like champagne corks. The images fed through them were grainy... misty... fading...
MOVE, DAMN YOU! a drowning voice cried. GODDAMNIT, MOVE!
Using every bit of the meager strength he could muster, he pried his feet from the floor and. forcing one in front of the other, staggered towards the bar. One step. Two, and with a numb hand — four heedless fingers and an equally ignorant thumb — he fumbled in his pants pocket, while before him a sunken abdomen and two small breasts, shriveled and hard beneath a wisp of white burial gown, appeared from between the open glass doors of the hearse. The cold yellow-green light in the belly of the carriage began to fade... slowly, eerily, as the foul Thing was birthed...
Struggling against the darkness that fought to consume him, Willard reached over the bar and grabbed hold of the nearest bottle. “…old… bitch�
��” he managed, his voice grating an almost nonexistent whisper as he sent the bottle hurtling at the carriage. The grip on his heart tightened. Another bottle hurled and shattering on the empty coachman’s seat. Alcohol streamed to the floor, ran along the spokes of the big wooden wheels and formed a pool beneath the hearse.
A devastating pain to the heart, a mind swimming with bright red explosions.
“…not… me...” he croaked. He toppled over onto his side as two rotten and filthy feet settled onto the floor.
Matted white hair fell in tangles at the sides of the thing’s emaciated and ghastly face, its glazed, lidless eyes rolled horribly in its head. A gaping black hole stood where a nose had once been and the corpse’s dried, taut lips — the lips of a mummy — were drawn back over mould-discolored teeth in a terrible, sickening sneer. Earthworms dangled from puckered holes in its skin, and its putrescence filled the tavern with the reek of decay and graveyard earth.
Willard clutched the butane lighter in his numb fingers. He crawled towards the hearse on his belly, breathless and growing weaker by the second. He knew the lights were going to go out for him at any moment but if he could only set fire to the pool of alcohol... fix Dennis’s big mistake... rid the world of the godforsaken hearse...
His thumb went for the lighter’s tiny ratchet, but he couldn’t work it, couldn’t feel his thumb enough. Again. Again. Goddamnit, Again! Death’s fingers, crooked and razor-nailed, came over his shoulder and went for his throat. Reaching, clutching. Cold and unfeeling, not to be denied. “No…”
Willard looked up into Death’s face as It came down for him. He looked into Its milky white fathomless eyes, smelled Its stale wretched rotten-apple breath, saw the slimy worms dangling from Its leathery skin, and he was dead before It even touched him.
Dave Ingalls’ written work has appeared in FATE, Aberrations, Nightmares, Outer Darkness, Autopsy, Black Petals, Horror Bound, Country Discoveries, The Storyteller, Worcester Magazine, and local newspapers. He’s currently shopping a nasty horror novella called I Have Always Driven a Lexus, and a full-length humor/travel/non-fiction adventure story that he's co-authored, Asleep in Wolves’ Clothing: Las Aventuras de Dos Gringos Gordos en Habana. You can learn more about these—and him—at www.DosGringosGordos.com.
Dark Horse
by Martin Rose
Troy Winter had ten fingers; at his birth, he had eleven.
A floppy, boneless mass, he kept his sixth finger of his right hand until he turned fifteen, at which point he agreed to cosmetic surgery. His parents reasoned it could interfere with job prospects, and he needed to maintain an image of self-assured sophistication — difficult to manage when you sip wine with two pinkies held out instead of one.
He underwent the surgery without incident. Snip, snip! A bloody mass roughly the size of a pen cap fell into a sterile, metal tray. Troy stared at it with growing uneasiness, until he was compelled to vomit into the trash can by the exam table.
Troy strove to put the incident from his mind, refusing the proffered gift of his amputated finger, floating in a vial of formaldehyde. He imagined a landfill of unused, rejected body parts, half-formed arms, useless legs, rejected sixth fingers in heaps. Where did all those body parts go, anyway?
He forgot about the finger.
He lost his voice the day the traveling carnival left town; and the night after he began to dream strange, terrible dreams that left him sweating and shaking.
A man with straggling gray hairs on a bald head stood before him, and forced Troy to his knees by pressing one long fingered hand on his head. He could not run or escape; as hard as he tried, he was powerless.
A little girl entered the dream, with hair fine and blond, with eyes like clear water. Her head bowed, she cried as she handed the old man a bridle, the sort used on horses, but the material was black and sharp; he fought and shook, but could not fight them off as the old man held him down and forced the bridle over his face. The material cut into his skin like the edge of a knife each time he moved.
These were the worst dreams; he spent the whole night in this fashion, standing in place wearing the bridle. In others, his head was jerked back by a rider, who climbed on top of him with spindly, constricting legs and rode him across the countryside, through brush and thorns, riding him like a prized racehorse until Troy woke up, exhausted, deep circles and hollows beneath his eyes.
If the girl found him first, she hid him from the old man in an empty stall in the back of a barn, where the hay was sweet. She took his cut and miserable face and held it in her lap, where she caressed him until he finally slept. He cried into the soft material of her dress, and she sang strange lullabies in another tongue.
He could not tell her his name, he could not speak his feelings of despair or hopelessness, but he ardently wished to make love to her; and then, when it would be over, he wished she would kill him, so he would never dream again.
Night after night he woke up wishing he were dead. After three years, he began to forget there had ever been a time when dreams were good, when sleep satisfied. He lost himself in school work, in college exams, dedicated his entire life to the pursuit of a good career in a corporate environment; anything to distract him from the nightmares he could not dispel. He forced himself not to forget them, just as his voice, his long lost sixth finger had been forgotten.
Troy became a thin man with a persistent atmosphere of unrest; and in the wake of his parents passing, judged it time to visit the home of his childhood once more to settle the estate.
He came home, to the same narrow bedroom he spent his childhood in, the same picture frames of forgotten relatives. He began the long, tedious work of packing possessions into boxes and throwing out anything that it did not suit him to keep. He tired easily, and he stopped from time to time to have a seat at the window and listen to the sounds of passing cars. He ran a finger over the scar tissue on his hand, reflecting on the sixth finger; whatever happened to it?
He heard the familiar sound of carnival music strike up as the sun set. Children’s laughter floated on the air, and he heard the distant sound of machinery.
He felt alone then, and recalling that he had some cash in his pockets, thought he might alleviate the passing sadness by amusing himself with the delights of others, with the brightly colored banners of the rides, the shows, the clowns and the dunk-tank hecklers. He loved the carnival, but had not visited one since, since… since he had six fingers on his right hand, come to think of it.
Shady characters with foreign accents milled about him as they shouted instructions, a carousel dizzied past him. Sword swallowers and fire breathers enticed him into candy-striped tents, where he sipped at a cold bottle of root beer and watched with smiling eyes.
He had forgotten this carefree happiness, and found himself amazed, amused, excited by the prospect of this outing. Children exclaimed and applauded, and he wandered in and out of tents, watching the carnival rides from afar, unreliable machines manned with unreliable manpower.
Troy ran into a woman. His bottle fell, slippery with condensation, spilling brown liquid into hot sand. He looked down at the mess in dismay, and then turned his attention toward her.
The woman of his dreams.
Her hair fell to the small of her back, her red velvet dress to her feet. He opened his mouth but the words would not come, and they never would, his voice was gone. He reached for her but she already vanished, swirling away from him in the crowd as he stumbled forward after her, his face flushed with excitement and fear.
He struggled to follow her. He went as far as he had last seen her, pushing his way through rude and fat strangers, through loud and obnoxious kids. A moment ago these same people amused him, filled him with pleasant nostalgia — now they menaced him, tripping him and standing in his way.
His serpentine journey let him to a blue tent. Doubts crowded in as he stood before the door flap, second-guessing his fleeting glimpse of the blonde girl in her red skirts
.
Not the same one? Surely, not the one who soothed my tears, cooled my fevered, lacerated cheeks? It cannot be...
For where there was one, there would be the other; and the thought of the sinister old man, paralyzing, heart-stopping, froze him in place. Fear killed his purpose, but curiosity, and the trailing tendrils of that fine blond hair against his arm as he passed, spurred him into action against all reason.
He entered the tent.
Troy forked over two dollars to a menacing, sharp-nosed man in a coat of velvet patchwork; before him stretched several aisles of glass cases, which tourists, gawkers, and snot-nosed kids perused with keen interest. Troy felt dizzy and weak, the lingering taste of root beer in his mouth turning into bile. The carnie by the entrance announced that Anya the Fire Breather would commence in ten minutes, and Troy stepped into the aisle, where the cases refracted light back into his eyes.
He fell into step with the other carnival-goers, and loosened his tie, suffocating and sweating with anxiety. There lingered a sensation both elusive and familiar, and as his eyes traveled over the showcases, he felt the growing conviction that his dreams were here, in this tent, and when Anya the Fire Breather made her entrance, there would be a cutting bridle swinging from a long, narrow finger, and he would be the freak, the side-show attraction.
He wiped sweat from his brow and glanced down. Strange objects arranged on red velvet greeted him — some were innocuous, old Daguerreotypes of previous freak show sensations, some familiar and others forgotten. Chang and Eng posed before a camera, along with a tailor-made shirt (fitted for two, of course) folded beside it, a lock of hair from the Bearded Lady, baby-booties made for the Lobster Girl, and then other, more grotesque objects, preserved like relics from an ancient and distorted time.
Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 15
