Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  His nervousness increased. When he saw the baby with two faces on one head preserved in a large pickling jar of formaldehyde, he had to choke his nausea back; Troy wished he could credit it to the atmosphere of his nightmares alone, but the persistent idea that he was a part of this show, a part of these glass cases with odd body-parts and strange items, grew stronger.

  Find the girl and get out, he told himself, and struggling to stay in the tent, he carried on, noting the objects as he went.

  Lights dimmed, and applause thundered around him. The carnie ascended the stage and held up one hand for silence. When he was satisfied, he announced the modern day marvel, the beautiful Anya, who enflames hearts, so please, gentleman, keep your distance or risk the burn of her passion! Anya! The Fire-Breather!

  Catcalls and clapping ensued, and as if in a dream, Troy brought his hands together, like a mechanical drummer. His eyes continued to roam the exhibit while people moved and shifted about him, until he stood before the final glass case. He heard the sound of heels on the stage, the beginning of the night’s performance underway.

  He came face to face with a shriveled black object inside a jeweler’s showcase.

  That’s my finger.

  He choked and strangled on a cry of protest. No single event or shred of evidence could prove the wrinkled black object in the case was his — only the gut feeling, the recognition of one’s own flesh, long lost twins reunited. Troy always assumed the doctor had thrown the finger away. Here it was before him, on display like the Hope diamond.

  He caught himself reaching for the case and stopped. The carnie’s eyes roved past the crowd, and beyond him, on the stage, her red velvet dress clung to her like cobwebs, her blonde hair pulled back from her face as she exhaled fire: Anya, the Fire-Breather.

  Anya, the girl of his nightmares.

  Her eyes met his for an instant as she dunked a flaming torch into the metal pail of cold water with a wet hiss, and then they flicked away.

  I’m not supposed to know it’s her, he realized, and it struck him then, all of his nightmare memories, how close Anya was to him, comforting him through the pain of his bridle, through the exhaustion of riding. She was afraid to acknowledge him, and why?

  Because she is like that finger — in a glass case. I could set her free.

  The extent of his impulse had been to steal the finger away — all it would take was shattered glass. He could outrun the mean-looking carnie, and forget this place.

  But Anya changed everything. He could steal the finger, or he could rush the stage and carry her away; but he could not do both. And who could say she wanted to come with him anyway?

  The nervous flicking of her eyes, as she struggled to look everywhere but where he stood, disputed that — she was a caged animal in a freak show circus. Fifteen years of a mute existence allowed him to read her nonverbal language like sheet music, a heartbreaking story of captivity.

  So which will it be?

  The finger, or the girl?

  He made his choice in an instant.

  Troy rushed the stage, knocking over bystanders like ninepins. Anya held out the torch before her, caught in mid-act, hesitant to swallow the greedy, licking flame. The entrance carnie had his back turned, taking in more admission money. Troy took advantage of his lapse in attention and held his hands out for Anya.

  She stared as though she did not recognize him, and for a terrible second, he was mortified and frozen by the possibility he had gone crazy, entangled in a fantasy of his own design, a dream without end.

  The spell broke. She gripped the handles of her torches in one hand and leapt from the stage. He had expected to lead her out, but she took over, gripping his soft hand with her hard, sweaty fingers, dragging him to the tent flap. He followed, feet kicking up red dust of the earthen floor beneath them.

  The cruel-looking carnie spotted them, and Anya’s face, new as rose petals, turned grim and determined as they rushed toward the entrance in tandem. Troy had time to see the carnie reach inside his velvet coat and release with a flick of his wrist; something buzzed past his ear and punched with an audible rip into the canvas fabric behind them as they escaped into the open air.

  A knife? Did he just throw a knife?

  Troy had expected consequences — he did not expect to pay for them with his life. Intermittent shouts rose up from the crowd around him, and nameless, faceless strangers hawking wares and selling carnival acts gave out cries of alarm in a language he did not comprehend. Fingers lashed out to grab at their clothing, to snag at their fleeing sleeves, and he found himself pushing his feet harder to outrun the sudden flux of carnies who were scattered everywhere in the crowd, turning their focus upon them like the heat of the sun.

  She pulled him to the left. He stumbled. His shoes slid in the mud, spattering his expensive business suit. The life of billing, reports and pie charts seemed far away, his suit an outlandish costume from an ancient land. She pulled him out of the midway and behind the tents. They’ll find us back here, why aren’t we leaving?

  Her fingers tightened their grip. Beyond the fabric, insubstantial tents of the side shows and attractions, a small building rose from the ground, a black square. The sight of it filled him with a gasping panic, leaving him breathless as he stopped in his tracks.

  “No,” he choked, and leaned backwards, away from her as she tugged relentlessly on his hand. The word burst from his throat like rusted cogs spitting from a clock. The sound of his own voice shook him. “Not there.”

  He tasted blood and bile in his throat. He recognized the barn: his torture chamber, his prison cell, his private Guantanamo. The place where they rode him, on and on and on…

  “You have to come with me!”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” he rasped and jerked his hand away from hers. “You can’t make me!”

  After all those years of silence, he was horrified to hear himself, angry as a petulant child, refusing to take his medicine. His cheeks burned with shame at the sound of it, but horror of that building, the thousand burning cuts, the endless, restless nights, a lifetime of shredded sleep… he could not go there.

  She slapped him. He shook, stunned, and glared at her.

  “If you don’t, they’ll kill us.”

  His legs were jelly as she took his hand again and dragged him on. With each step his heart groaned with the fear of the derelict building, whose stall door opened to let them in with the fragrant smells of hay and manure. They stood together, the shouts and cries of the carnies tracking them in the distance. How long did they have? Seconds, maybe?

  She pushed a saddle out of the way with a grunt, and after a second of rummaging through odds and ends, she faced him with something in her hands. He looked at her, his throat constricted in a strangled sigh.

  “Anya,” he said, and could not force himself to say more.

  The bridle dangled from her fingers, so black, it looked woven from pieces of midnight.

  “You can get us out of here.”

  He shook his head.

  “That… that thing cut me.”

  “If you wear this for me — for me, not for him — it will be the last time you ever have to wear it.”

  The shouts were louder, and he reflected on the knife thrower from the tent. How stubborn was he going to be? Stubborn enough to die here, because he couldn’t suck it up one last time?

  “The last time?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He steeled himself, and spoke through gritted teeth. “Put it on, then.”

  She stepped forward, holding the harness open, an oddly-shaped loop. The bridle danced before him, and he studied the lines of her face, her delicate skin, her eyelashes like cobwebs over warm, crystal eyes. He breathed deep, and let it happen.

  He opened his eyes. Everything was different, a life lived underwater, nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office. He towered over Anya, and he felt the sharp slice of the bridle in his skin as he turned to
look at her. She smiled, and pressed one hand against the side of his neck, allowing it to trail to his shoulders.

  Then she thrust her fingers into his hair with a jerk and pulled herself on top of him, the bridle cutting fresh wounds into the skin. She turned him, and he broke through the stall, kicking hay and dirt up around them in a shower.

  The carnival workers were there to greet them. Troy laughed through the blood dripping down his chin — their chance to cage him was lost, the feeling of release exhilarated him through the pain of the bridle. The gentle pressure of her hands against his neck urged him on, and he burst through the center of their crowded figures, their angry faces. The mean-looking carnie reached for his knives, tossing them like bright, silver arrows. One thudded into the meat of his flank with a flare of pain, and Troy kicked out wildly, trampling several cruel-faced men beneath the vigilante surge. They collapsed like crushed flowers.

  He pounded through them, and then to the midway, where he wheeled into the first tent, a thrown knife whizzing past him. He stumbled into the ropes and the fabric, pulling the tent down around them as the crowd erupted into screams and cries of panic, permeated with the sweat of fear and hysteria. Carnival performers and tourists alike struggled to escape the deflated tent as Troy exited the other side, pulling the tent down behind him.

  His face burned, and he blinked his eyes to clear it of blood. With the crowd well behind him, he wheeled about face to clear the midway altogether, to leave the carnival.

  A man stood in the midway. Troy paused, tasting the wind, sitting back on his haunches. The old man was a dark smudge in the landscape, a stain; his left hand hung limply by his side, and his right clenched in a fist; beneath his opening fingers, a black, shriveled inch of flesh: the finger.

  Troy moved toward him.

  “No,” Anya whispered, and pulled back on the bridle. His skin separated beneath the material, but he would not stop. Troy wanted that old man, wanted him done and dead and finished. When she saw she succeeded only in wounding him without result, she let go of the bridle; and he advanced on the old man, one slow foot step after the other.

  “Troy, please, don’t, there’s still time, we can leave.”

  Troy did not want to leave; he wanted the author of his misery to die.

  The old man laughed and he drew closer. Troy’s finger balanced on his palm like a black worm, and the old man spoke a language in a confusion of words until Troy felt dizzy and fevered.

  He struck first. His violence came easy, delicious, a taste he wanted to savor over and over again, the revenge of a thousand, unslept nights; the man collapsed easily beneath his crushing feet, old bones and old skin parting like water, blood and broken limbs. The sixth finger rolled away from his outstretched hand, but Troy was lost in killing, lost in his own pain and misery.

  Anya cried and jerked and dragged at his bridle, to stop him, to bring him back himself, but he was dimly aware of her efforts — all he could see was that old man’s upturned face, his grinning teeth, his dizzy words, and his long fingers that grasped at his reins and bridle, smearing blood over Troy’s skin like a child at finger paints.

  It was finished.

  She kneeled in the midway, crying into her hands. He waited for her, but she shook her head vigorously.

  “We needed the finger! Don’t you get it? We needed the finger, and you’re soiled in his blood… his blood.”

  Troy stared at her, uncomprehending.

  “Without the finger, I can’t get it off.”

  Get it off?

  Her voice emerged in a broken whisper. “The bridle.”

  Her hands searched the mud of the road, seeking his finger, lost in the grasses, the weeds, the blood and the broken body of the old man. Troy attempted to grasp the situation, but it seemed unthinkable. She did not mean his bridle, surely, she did not mean it could never be removed, she did not…

  She did. And the carnival folk were regrouping and surging from behind them. They did not have the time, and Troy stared at the road with wild eyes, as though he could divine the location of the fallen finger by looking everywhere at once. But he could detect nothing in the blurry mud, the road weeds. He could stay, he could refuse to bear her away until they found it; but they would die while they waited.

  He shuffled to her side and she stood, leaning against him. He pushed at her, forcing her to take up his reins once more. Once she was astride, he rode on, feeling the pain of each push of the bridle as though for the first time. She did not speak, and he could not; the bit in his mouth was a hot piece of metal.

  I can’t go on like this forever.

  He felt warm, wet against his neck and turned; Anya remained out of his reach, even with her subtle presence upon him. She sobbed into his mane with hot and sticky tears, and he attempted to imagine forever. He had been doing this so long, it seemed nothing else existed.

  A train of tired horses weaved round and round in a dusty ring. Children with dreams of speed, of wind in their hair and wild beasts, clamored for their attention, offering sugar cubes and apple slices. A row of colored tents dotted the landscape.

  An old woman in a red dress watched with solemn eyes as a dark horse pulled the lead around the ring. An untethered, intelligent animal, his scarred face watched the carnival with a blank, empty stare. And behind his stare, a bridle latticed over his face like a cage.

  Martin Rose resides in New Jersey where he writes a range of fiction from the fantastic to the macabre. Recent short work appears in anthologies such as Urban Green Man and Handsome Devil. Look for his debut horror novel Bring Me Flesh, I'll Bring Hell in Autumn 2014 from Skyhorse's Talos imprint. More details are available at www.martinrose.org.

  (To Live, To Die) By Dusk’s Dark Light

  by Charlie Loudowl

  1. Lesson

  We breathe,

  To eat,

  To grow,

  To learn

  This one

  True thing:

  To be

  Was sweet.

  2. Lacuna

  Two men in crisp white smocks strained, rolling the great, grey sarcophagus into the antechamber, ancient steel wheels grating on the cold stone floor. We — a small group of professors from the local university and myself — waited with breath drawn, lungs full of icy, dead air.

  Each man entertained thoughts of calling the whole thing off, I knew it. Each man stood there, dumbly, for what was probably the first time in decades, not able to say a word, not able to even think, or put in motion their legs to act on fear.

  The fear: from where did it come? Surely not that mammoth stone box grinding slowly across the floor. Not the box’s keepers, small men labouring to push it into position beneath the clerestory windows forty feet above. Not the frozen building itself, that monument to the dead. The fear, that inexplicable fear. Death is death, is it not? Of what did we, a group of worldly, intelligent and alive human beings, have to be so damned afraid of?

  “This is it,” Professor Orlov muttered through his beard beside me as the box was finally wriggled into place. “Ty v poryadke?”

  I didn’t look over; I couldn’t steal my eyes away from that stone box, but I could see Orlov in my peripheral, tensing up.

  “Da,” I breathed. “I’m fine.”

  “You know,” Orlov whispered discreetly, out of the side of his mouth, “perhaps this is not the time or the place, but I think you should know that there have been some rumours, some questions raised, about where your funding comes from. About who you represent.”

  Not to seem taken unawares, I opened my mouth to recite my usual cover story when the scene fell into chaos. One of the box’s keepers somehow lost his footing and dropped heavily to the floor, smashing his head on the great stone box on his way down.

  Gasps from our group. Eyes grown wide. Hands covering mouths. We stood there frozen as the fear turned to shock for a cold second before it turned back to fear. I thought to rush forward. I though
t this, and as I did, a number of identically clad, white-smocked men appeared from the shadows, hovering around their fallen comrade, helping him to his feet.

  From our vantage point, we could see that the man’s head was badly injured, the blood running in thick, dark streams from his head, down his face, his neck, and onto his once-white smock. The wounded man could barely stand on his own, and his colleagues supported him, leading him out of the room, struggling to avoid slipping in the blood pooling on the floor.

  As they exited the room, one of the men frantically shouted something over his shoulder, and I looked to the professors for a translation. “Is everything all right? Vsyo v poryadke?”

  Professor Breshinski offered me a sombre look through his wire-framed spectacles, saying, “I think they are accusing.”

  “Us!” I cried. “They’re accusing us! Of this? This is—”

  “Nyet, they are accusing her,” said Professor Orlov, pointing toward the sarcophagus.

  There are different levels of fear. There is the fear of the unknown, that fear one feels when faced with something uncertain — a closed sarcophagus, perhaps. Call this anxiety; it’s something I’ve felt many times in my life. Then there is the fear of the suspected, that fear one endures while dealing with something suspected, something expected, but something at odds with what we’re comfortable with. Call this one dread.

  That’s the one I was feeling then: dread. Then, when a two-hundred-year-old corpse was blamed for causing injury to a living man. Then, when it dawned on me that death may not always be so simple. Then, when I realised that the difference between life and death may not be so cut and dry.