Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  He realized there must be a unique incarnation of nocturnal beings for each person. So, the Tooth Fairy hadn’t been killed for everyone. Just for him.

  His Sandman had killed his Tooth Fairy.

  Sleep hadn’t ever come easy for Carl from that point forward.

  And all those special holidays, times when children were supposed to be delighted and thrilled at the arrival of the magical nocturnal legends in the middle of the night such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, Carl was left with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  He was terrified that the Sandman would kill them, too.

  At night, unable to fall asleep quickly, he would plead to the Sandman, hoping beyond hope that the entity could hear him, asking him not to kill anyone else just because Carl couldn’t sleep.

  He pleaded and promised not to tell anyone what he’d seen.

  And, unlike all the other children he knew, he didn’t lie awake at night hoping for a glimpse of the jolly fat man who crept into houses and left presents, nor the fluffy little bunny who left chocolate treats. He’d lie awake, desperately wanting to be asleep, but frustrated at his inability to simply drift off.

  The very first Christmas after he’d witnessed the strangling of the Tooth Fairy, he laid in his bed, listening to the clicking of hoofs on the roof and the soft bumping of someone moving around downstairs. Softly crying, he half-prayed, half-begged to the Sandman.

  “I won’t tell anyone, ever!” Carl said, upon hearing the distinct honey sweet chuckling of “Ho Ho Ho” coming from the living room directly below his bedroom. “Not about you, nor about Santa or the others. I don’t need any gifts, I don’t care about that. Just please, Mr. Sandman — please, don’t hurt Santa. Leave him alone. I promise.”

  As the years passed, though the Tooth Fairy never returned, Carl regularly heard the nocturnal noises of Santa and the Easter Bunny, even well beyond the years when children were supposed to no longer believe.

  At the age of eleven, when most of the kids in his class were talking about Santa Claus not really existing, that it was something parents made up, Carl knew better.

  Because that Christmas, when he’d gotten up in the middle of the night to head downstairs for a drink of milk, he almost bumped right into the jolly old elf.

  Sitting at the kitchen counter, just finishing off the last of a pile of cookies left on a plate for him, Santa cast a startled look at Carl.

  “It’s okay,” Carl said to him, turning around and abandoning his quest for a drink. “I know about you and the others. But I won’t tell. I’ve never told.”

  And, as he headed back upstairs, he cast his fearful eyes to all the dark corners, looking for a sign of the Sandman, listening for the sound of a struggle between him and Santa.

  But nothing came.

  Santa wasn’t hurt. And he continued to sneak into Carl’s house every single year, eating the cookies left for him and leaving a short note of thanks.

  And, as part of the deal, Carl never said anything to anyone. Each year he simply tore up the note and tossed it away.

  Unlike all of his friends, he never stopped believing in Santa or any of the other nocturnal legends that kids eventually abandoned as they age. Even as an adult, he continued to either see or hear Santa every Christmas Eve.

  But it wasn’t just Santa and the Easter Bunny.

  When he reached his adult years, he occasionally caught a glimpse of Father Time ushering in the New Year if he was awake when the midnight parties were taking place. But he often avoided crowds, particularly during times when the drinking was rampant, because that’s when Cupid often revealed his mischievous side and shot golden arrows into mismatched lovers.

  Cupid disturbed him profoundly. And it wasn’t the cherubic naked youth flying about with the silly grin on his face.

  It was what Cupid had done to Carl.

  He hadn’t seen the little winged boy infect him and his wife Melinda, because they’d fallen in love during the day. And for some reason, Carl was only able to see the incarnations of these supposedly imaginative entities during the onset of twilight.

  But he certainly witnessed the mischievous little shit when he shot arrows into Melinda and the man she ended up leaving Carl for.

  It was at a fourth of July barbeque. Carl and Melinda were there with their two year old son Jeffrey and in the midst of enjoying a spectacular fireworks display when Carl spotted the naked youth swoop down. Jeffrey, whom Carl was holding in his left arm, seemed to track the winged youth as well. But then Cupid made eye contact with Carl and an evil grin lit upon his face as he raised his bow and aimed an arrow in Carl’s direction.

  Jeffrey cooed as the arrow flew through the air towards them and disappeared into Melinda’s chest. She, of course, didn’t react, but Carl watched in horror as Cupid turned and let another arrow fly at George, who worked with Melinda at the college where she taught and who’d already spent a great deal of time conversing with Carl’s wife earlier that evening.

  “You have a lot of nerve!” Carl yelled, storming towards Cupid, still holding his son. “Doing that right in front of her son.”

  Cupid didn’t respond, merely grinned a horrid smile that sent shivers down Carl’s spine. Jeffrey reached out and tried to take hold of the feathery wings of the cherubic youth, but Carl yanked his son back.

  “How dare you do this to my family, you filthy little punk!” Carl yelled, before Melinda moved over to him, asking him who he was yelling at, then suggesting he’d had too much to drink and they should leave.

  The fighting began that night.

  Melinda admitted that while Carl’s youthful nature and overactive imagination were cute when they’d first met and been married, she needed someone who could grow up and be a real man.

  Despite how close they had once been, Carl had never once mentioned any of the nocturnal visions he’d had to his wife. He knew it was part of the bargain he’d made with the Sandman and couldn’t risk letting any other innocent nocturnal incarnation die.

  Two months later, Melinda walked out on Carl.

  And the night of that fateful barbeque which led to their breakup had also been the last time Carl had any evidence his son had inherited his unique ability to see things others could not.

  Until tonight.

  Carl was just drifting off to sleep when seven year old Jeffrey walked into Carl’s bedroom. The boy had been staying with his father during one of the “every second weekend” visits he was allotted during the divorce.

  “Dad,” the boy mumbled sleepily, “the Bogeyman’s in my closet. He keeps peeking out from the closet door and whispering that he’s going to get me.”

  Conventional wisdom suggested Carl was supposed to tell the boy that the Bogeyman didn’t exist and to go back to sleep.

  But he couldn’t.

  Carl had never had a Bogeyman in his own closet or under his own bed. But he knew enough not to pretend the creature wasn’t real.

  So he scooped up the boy in his arms, saying. “It’s okay, son. Daddy won’t let him hurt you,” and went back to Jeffrey’s bedroom, tucked the boy into bed and lay down on top of the covers beside him.

  “Where is he now?” Carl said. But he could already feel the presence of something evil in the room. The air was charged with a humid static tingling and the room had a pungent fungal smell to it.

  Jeffrey slowly extended an arm out toward the closet door which was just a few feet beyond the foot of his bed. The door was opened a slight crack. “He’s still in there,” he said. Carl could feel the boy shivering as he spoke. “He keeps peeking out and teasing me. He’s really ugly.”

  A low growl came from the closet, followed by a deep chortling voice. “Two victims now within my grasp.”

  The closet door opened slowly and a large hairy hand appeared on the frame.

  “I’m coming to get you now,” the voice taunted as the closet door opened further.

  The hairs
on the back of Carl’s neck lifted further as a hideous face with deep shadowed eyes and a domineering brow materialized from the darkness of the closet. Yellowish green overbite teeth seemed to glow in the dark beneath the creature’s bulbous, wart-encrusted nose.

  “It’s okay,” Carl whispered to his son. “He can’t hurt us.”

  “Your Dad can’t protect you, Jeffrey. Because he sees me, too. I’m going to get both of you.”

  The boy ducked under the covers and Carl felt himself freeze. His fatherly instinct to protect wanted to get out of the bed and confront the monster. But he was rooted to the spot, unable to move.

  The gigantic creature, impossibly large for the tiny space it occupied, moved out from the closet. Its massive hairy body reeked of mildew, mould and sour milk.

  “I’ve heard about you, Carl,” the monster whispered as it advanced toward him. “But you never believed in me, so I could never get you. Until tonight.”

  Still frozen in place, Carl couldn’t even scream as the Bogeyman reached out over the end of the bed and took a firm hold of Carl’s ankle in its massive cold hand.

  The pain of the claws digging into his flesh couldn’t even break the paralysis which held Carl rooted in place.

  It was the scream of horror from under the covers that broke the spell.

  “Dad! Get under the covers. We’ll be safe here.”

  “N-no, son.” Carl said, not willing to risk the chance that covers actually held some sort of protective element from this particular incarnation. “Nowhere is safe from this Bogeyman.”

  The monster pulled at Carl’s leg, dragging him slowly toward the end of the bed.

  “I’m going to enjoy slowly tearing you into little pieces,” the monster boasted. Carl felt drool spatter onto his bare foot as it lifted his leg closer to his mouth. “And when I’m done with you, the same to your son.”

  “I’m sorry, Jeffrey!” Carl said. “But I have to do this!”

  The monster reached its other arm toward Carl, grabbed his left arm. “I think I’ll start by pulling, ripping and making a wish,” it said in a deep dark giggling voice.

  “Mr. Sandman!” Carl yelled. “The deal is off! We’re both going to tell everyone everything!”

  A loud hiss echoed through the dark and a whirlwind of sand materialized beside the head of the bed.

  The Bogeyman let go of Carl. He dropped back onto the bed as it slunk back and away from him and his son.

  The Sandman advanced on it.

  Carl scrambled under the covers with his son and clasped his hands over the boy’s ears, hoping to drown out the sounds of the struggle taking place.

  “The Bogeyman won’t come back, Jeffrey.” Carl whispered. “But neither will any of the others. I’m so sorry. So sorry, my son.”

  Mark Leslie is a Hamilton area writer and bookseller whose non-fiction examinations of the paranormal include Haunted Hamilton, Spooky Sudbury and Tomes of Terror: Haunted Bookstores & Libraries. Mark has edited the anthologies Campus Chills, Tesseracts Sixteen: Parnassus Unbound and North of Infinity II and written the 2014 novel I, Death. Mark can be found online at www.markleslie.ca.

  For Fear of Little Men

  by Sandra M. Odell

  Once upon a time, there was a boy named Alton who longed to be a kobold and keep treasure in his stone shoes.

  That is until one came to live under his bed and he learned what horrid little creatures they truly were. The wicked thing smelled of licorice and MaeMa’s kisses when she went too long without brushing her dentures. It hobbled around in its stone clogs in the dark of night, knocking over books and tumbling shoes off the rack. “There is a kobold living under my bed, Mama,” he said when his mother came to see what the fuss was all about. “He pinched me here, and here, and even here.”

  “There will be none of that, young man,” Mama said in her most sensible Mama voice as she tucked the brushed cotton quilt under his chin. “You go to sleep this instant, and in the morning you will pick up your room or else. You should take care of your things.”

  That night Alton realized mamas did not know what it meant to have a kobold living under one’s bed.

  Most nights the wicked sprite kept Alton awake with sharp, twisty pinches. When he did manage to fall asleep, it would pull the quilt off his feet until his toes were fit to snap off in the cold. Those were the nights Alton liked the least as he had to dare the treacherous expanse of cold tile between his bed and his chest of drawers for a pair of wool socks or not make it back to sleep at all because Mama said socks were not for bed. Other nights the kobold left Alton quite alone to hobble around the house instead. Safe beneath the quilt, he listened to the unwholesome beastie muck about downstairs, pulling the cat’s tail, tipping over the flowerpots, making a mess of things.

  “Why is there jam on the ceiling fan?” Mama wanted to know the next morning while tuning in the wireless on the counter.

  Papa looked up from the paper. “What’s wrong with the cat?”

  “The wretched thing was in my begonias again,” MaeMa said, sucking on dentures in need of brushing.

  Alton knew better. “It was the kobold. I heard it moving about last night.”

  “Nonsense,” Papa said with a phlegmatic harrumph. “Now, kiss your grandmother. You’re going to be late for school.”

  That morning Alton realized no one understood the least little bit about kobolds, and he would have to take matters into his own hands.

  The next night Alton curled on his side with the quilt tucked under his chin and his toes safe and warm in wool socks. The house settled to sleep with creaks and pops and groans. The icebox hummed a lullaby to the mixer and sink, the clock on the landing keeping time. His Aunt Bessany once called those telltale tics and tremors “once upon a times,” but she had left years ago without saying good-bye and once upon a times changed.

  Alton lay in wait. Very still. Very quiet. No sooner had Papa begun to snore than Alton heard the clunk-thump of uneven steps under the bed. The moment the kobold crawled from the dusty hollow and reached up to give him a pinch on the backside, he whipped over quick as he could and grabbed the miserable thing around the throat with both hands, pinning the kobold’s arm between his bum and the mattress.

  The tiny hunchback was brittle leaves and chicken bones as Alton brought his thumbs together and squeezed until they met his fingers on the other side. The kobold’s eyes bulged and its mealy gray tongue protruded as Alton snapped its spindly neck with a tinder crack. The kobold twitched once, twice, and then sagged limp and still as a bag of rocks in his hands.

  When he stopped shaking, Alton pulled up his socks and snuck downstairs for a knife to see if a kobold really was filled with rocks. It wasn’t, and Mama sent him to bed without supper the next night for making a sticky mess on the sheets.

  ○

  Alton knew what he must do after that. It seemed only he knew where to look — and the more he looked the less he liked what he found. There were hook-nosed gnomes in the grocer’s bins, and pixies peeking around the corners of pews. Catty spriggans hunched in the corners of prams. Mulchins hid under girls’ skirts during class to tickle tender panty-bits with sticky feathers until the girls squirmed in their seats on long sunny days. These were the wee folk, the gentry, and the kindly musters. Some were more fair than others, but all were gimlet-eyed and not to be trusted.

  Alton read everything about them he could lay his hands on — paperbacks, encyclopedias, plays, TV listings. He skipped school to devote an entire afternoon to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the library. He learned about leprechauns, phooka, and the foul-humored fir darrig with their backwards hands and four-foot long beards. He compared the satyrs of Greece to the fauns of the British Isles, and wondered if the kilyakai of Papua New Guinea were more or less common than sprigash. No detail was too small to note in the pages of his ever-growing collection of carefully-organized composition books.

  The depth of his studies left Alto
n with little time for extracurricular activities; not that he minded, but the expectations of others were constant impositions. “A boy your age should be on the field, not behind the stacks,” Papa said the day he signed Alton up for the local youth football league.

  “But I don’t want to play football.”

  “Of course you do. I did when I was your age.”

  “Listen to your father, dear,” Mama said, and set to organizing the league carpool.

  The majority of Alton’s schoolmates were equally understanding.

  “Dool-a-girl?” Brenton Panes said, turning the composition book every which way. “What’s a dool-a-girl?”

  “It’s pronounced doo-lah-garl and is from Australia. I would like my book back now, Brenton.” Alton kept his voice as low and reasonable as he could. His hands balled into fists at his sides.

  The rugby captain wrinkled and creased the pages as he ham-handed his way through the book. “Is this what you’re doing with your time in the library, Waddlemouth?”

  Brenton’s cohorts Peter Willich and pig-eyed Allan Hembridge snickered at the bullying wit.

  “What’s a fomorian?”

  Alton took a slow breath. “A fomorian is a Celtic sort of fae supposedly supplanted by the Tuatha De Dannan in Ireland. Now, if you don’t mind, I really do need my book. My parents are expecting me home in time for dinner.”

  “That’s an awful lotta Paddy talk,” Peter said, kicking at the tender green shoots sprouting in the cracks of the walk. “You soft on the IRA, hmm?”

  “I’m studying, that’s all. I can do what I want with my time.” Alton was more annoyed than angry with the upperclassmen; they wallowed in ignorance and praised the fashionable stench. The redcaps leering from their jacket pockets were another matter entirely.

  “Studying fairies is more like it.” Brenton eyed Alton with the superiority of the popular. “Are you a fairy, Waddlemouth? You a poo pirate?”