The Cold Inside (Horror Short Stories)

by Saunders, Craig

  He turned his head slightly left, right, up, down. They covered every surface he could see - those from inside the house, those from outside. Perhaps ten thousand of them...maybe even more. At his feet they had left a rough simple trail for him to follow out into the night.

  Even though Menzies was ninety years old, he did not need glasses. But it was dark and his eyes were not so good that he could see where the spiders wished to lead him. He picked up a torch he kept by the door because of frequent power cuts and clicked it on so that it lit up the path. The spiders, unlike they should, did not shy from that light, but remained as they were - a kerb that marked out that slightly wavering, shifting path down shallow steps and out over the long grass to a spot somewhere near wild bushes.

  DOG.

  He knew before the spider-path ended.

  Their mass seemed almost black in the torch light, and so much thicker than he'd ever seen. A blanket like soot, blown in a gentle wind, that covered the grass.

  There, in the centre of his flattened lawn, was DOG.

  That his dog had been killed - murdered - was plain enough to understand. The heavy concrete. The grass; trampled one way, then the other.

  Menzies knelt and put his hand on DOG's side. The grass rustled in a growing wind. His friends, his spiders, clambered to and fro, atop and around each other.

  After a moment, he pushed himself upright on his worn-out knees.

  In the morning, he would dig a grave. Friends should be buried, if a man can.

  That night, though, as he sat beside his reading lamp in his dusty and worn armchair, Menzies Donaghue looked down and DOG - long tongued, bright eyed - was not there, and he cried. He couldn't remember the last time he'd done so. Decades ago, certainly.

  Spiders crawled up and over him as though they sensed his grief and tried to grant him some measure of comfort.

  Old people. Frightened old people...what can they do? Scared and old...like me?

  A man shouldn't live in fear, he thought.

  Then don't, said the spiders. Let us inside.

  Menzies felt more tired than he had ever been, in his long, long life. He closed his eyes.

  I'm tired enough to give up.

  With his eyes closed, he nodded.

  Come in, he said.

  *

  8. Molt

  There he sat in his comfortable chair as spiders of many varieties, of many shapes, began to crawl inside him.

  A spider has no concept of revenge - not like man. It is driven in other ways, diverse as the number of species. Spiders create webs or traps or leap or use their guile to hunt. They have venom and senses outside - different - to those humans understand. Some that live in the dark and hunt by plucking nothing but a hint of a distant pheromone, or chemical, or vibration, from the world that surrounds them. Some, like the recluse spider, have only six eyes. They're venomous. They're not lions, or sharks, or mindless like jellyfish, or belligerent like some snakes or scorpions. But threatened? Trapped and backed into a corner?

  Then, they are deadly.

  Menzies slept and his old skin grew loose, and soft.

  In time, he shrugged and yelled but found his cry muffled. Inside that dead skin, every sensation was suddenly new. He moved and the old thing he had been sloughed loose with each movement. In parts his flesh cracked, in others it slid, wet, from the thick, sensitive hair that covered his limbs. He reached out to pull some of that old flesh loose and found his hand...strange. Wind and touch played across his skin through those sensillae that he'd never known or had before - but more. Urges like waves of colour, and sounds he'd never heard, but things that brought feelings and understand like sixth senses, or seventh...or...

  He tore at his wrappings, his hands and arms moved differently. Those shrouds came free of his face and he blinked, and blinked, and blinked.

  He had six eyes.

  His limbs weren't segmented like they should be.

  His internal organs weren't human.

  And the thousands of spiders around him, inside him, they couldn't speak - of course they couldn't - but they understood him.

  He understood them, too.

  Pheromones, scents, the ghost of a presence lingered on those new, segmented limbs he still thought of as hands. His mouth was unusual, breathing unsatisfactory, but effective. His stomach was empty.

  Those long limbs unfurled and all the spiders crawled, or leapt or ran outside into the morning light.

  A web can take days.

  Waiting in the undergrowth, twitching and urgent but forced to think slowly; these things are human and arachnid.

  When dark fell again, Menzies and the things inside, and all his friends, moved on.

  To grow, spiders must molt.

  Menzies didn't grow.

  He shed what he once was.

  *

  9. The Spider's Footsteps

  Everything was dark and everything was light, but not always in equal parts.

  There was a park near the town that the thing used to know, where these strange news senses led it and those spiders that were able follow. Night covered the field. Ahead, there was movement - subtle senses of things unmistakeable. Too far, too dark, to see with six eyes, but not so far as to feel inside his limbs and the thinner, sensitive parts were his legs and hands had split, and changed, and grew these bands of flesh that winds and changes played like lyres.

  A set of swings grated somewhere near. The spider was good at climbing, now. Good at many things spiders know - jumping, the making of webs.

  Hunting.

  Perhaps Menzies new eyes were not as fine as even his old-man eyes had been, but there was more to seeing, and knowing, that vision alone. With its clever segments and the dark and silence, it climbed the frame that shook gently at each shudder from the seat and chains that moved lower down, beneath it.

  It lowered itself, not on webbing, but on legs longer than any spider that ever lived. Spiders; remnants from a time when concepts like mortality and morality did not exist. Reviled, they took to the dark places where they could live unobserved and away from the bright lights and noise and dusters and vacuums and retirement homes and strange, useless gadgets for clever young fingers and all the other things made to push the old down.

  Spiders aren't spiteful, or hateful. Menzies wasn't that.

  But now, the old man had fangs strong enough to piece a child's skull, and venom powerful enough to turn the tissue inside necrotic.

  The child on the swing next to the boy screamed.

  But a spider is a thing that is perfect in every way. A creature outside of evolution, as man imagines himself to be.

  But older...much older.

  Over three hundred million years, a spider's footsteps have barely changed. A thing that works has little need of change, and that suited a man like Menzies' Donaghue very well. Near dawn, Menzies began to spin first one child, and then the other.

  *

  10. The Cool, Shaded Corners

  Menzies Donaghue's house remained as it had been - strewn in white webs and old, yellowed ones. In the day time, a passerby might think the place derelict, as brambles and ivy and other climbers reached into the roof space and pushed tiles up and out of place. In the winter, they might spy the upper floor when the overgrowth fell back enough for them to see a house that seemed so far gone into disrepair as to be home to nothing but spiders and rats.

  Rats didn't last long.

  To reclaim such a house would cost more than the price of a new one, but this place wasn't for sale. It belonged to spiders. Somewhere inside that shambling house the largest of them rested while the day ruled, but at night it moved through the dark, cool rooms and sometimes, further.

  The End

  The wonderful DarkFuse paid me actual money to publish this and a couple of other shorts (three of them in this collection, I think). They publish some of my novellas and novels, too. I like people who give me money and edit my stories. I really like people who read my stories. Otherwise
, people...pfft. Got no time for 'em.

  The Wooden Headed Man and the Lady with a Hole in her Heart

  Money was always an issue for Alice, but in small ways, because she understood that having more of it wouldn't make her any happier. Nothing could do that. She lived in a small flat in a high rise block, just a bigger cage for a person-sized canary. Some people in the block were kind, polite. Some people were indifferent, broken or crazed from lives full of disappointments. Others, downright mean. One or two, evil.

  The stairwells smelled heavily of piss and weed. She refused to use the elevator at all.

  Alice, thirty-nine, wasn't disappointed. She was polite and thoughtful wherever she could be, and insanely talented at something that would never make her wealthy enough to leave the cage.

  But she didn't want out. She didn't want money. The cage wasn't the high-rise concrete and glass one in which she lived, but the walled garden of her heart.

  *

  She smoked a hand-rolled cigarette without a filter on the stone walkway high above the small car park, coffee sitting on the edge just below the safety barrier that Alice looked through. The smoke ignored the barrier. She, too, could have climbed it and flown out. A flight of twenty storeys through the crisp autumn air.

  She sipped her coffee, which had creamer, not milk, and four sugars. Her teeth were still good, despite the cigarettes and the sweet coffee she drank all day long.

  She sipped and stared, down, at her favourite spot in the whole high-rise estate. A lone chestnut tree flourished in the middle of the three high-rise blocks, central to all three. A city dweller all her life, a woman who'd never known the beauty of the forest or woods, or of a large garden, or the sea or a lake or a river that didn't have a shopping trolley and a bicycle in it.

  A woman born in the stone cities, born with no money and no prospects, who grew to have no money and no prospects. She could have taken a bus to a park. But that, too, was a walled garden, wasn't it? Just like this, and yet, there in the centre, that sole chestnut was somehow more honest, more soulful, than all the trees in Hyde Park.

  She wondered, often, how old the tree was. Hoped, too, that she would never find out.

  *

  Alice worked during the day, quietly, so as not to disturb her neighbours. A small hammer, a chisel she sharpened herself, an old wood file, a few very sharp knives, some sandpaper. The sandpaper often cost more than she made from her carvings.

  She'd never seen a dolphin in real life, but people liked dolphins. Dolphins sold, and she enjoyed creating them.

  Nearly finished, this one, and a precise 3-D rendering in a cheap piece of wood, a perfect, if not in some ways, better copy of the dolphin tattoo on her right calf. Alice had many tattoos. When she felt low, she had inked somewhere on her person a new animal, a new work to learn to breath to life in the wood she worked.

  Her face had a small swallow below her eye. Her right and left arms, from shoulder to wrist, covered with an intermingled menagerie of creatures both real and mythical. Salamanders and scorpions, beetles and butterflies. A dragon in flight, a unicorn running, a manticore with a studded, curled tail, a griffin with wings spread wide. Sharks, whales, dolphins, rays, seahorses and a lobster, blue.

  She was a work of art, thirty-nine years in the making.

  The heart of the tree below was a mere year old, but surrounded by another one hundred and fifty-three years of experience, protection, armour. A heart as well-protected as Alice's. Battered on the outside until scar tissue grew around it, holding that walled garden in stasis against the encroaching hands of weeds and winds and time.

  But nothing stands forever.

  *

  Alice woke with a sense that the world was moving all around her. She flicked the switch above the headboard of her bed to find that the light did not work, and the constant light of the city distant. Normally, the light, even here on the twentieth floor, was intrusive. Now it felt unutterably dark. And there was movement. The kind of movement a tall building gets when the wind blows very, very hard.

  Gentle, but there, definitely. And the sound of it, whistling and calling her at the window, cheap and mildewed, damp in the summer and cold in the winter. The wind called her out.

  She stepped into her slippers and pulled her dressing gown on, cinching the belt tight around her narrow waist, and stepped out of her flat to see if she could see the wind.

  She couldn't. She could feel it, bruising and brutal, a rough lover with calloused fingers and long, dirty nails.

  She did, however, see the chestnut go down as the street lights below flickered on and off. She saw it fall, not dead, not yet, but broken in half low down, like it had long been rotten and the wind had done little more than pushed an old man down the stairs.

  She didn't hear the crack or tear of the great tree from up on high and through the wind's calculating laugh sliding through the safety barrier between her and the tree she loved.

  Alice looked at the tree, resting, dying, atop someone's cheap, ugly car.

  And she knew she wanted it. Wanted to carve that heart into something the tree would want to be.

  *

  Alice stood looking at the carcass of the tree in her dressing gown with several other people, the wind whipping away all their words. But it didn't matter, because Alice wasn't talking. She was listening to the tree.

  What are you?

  She stepped around it, listening, looking, getting to know the heart of the tree. She could see the heart, jagged and broken in the fall. She pushed against the wind to stand still. The last of the tree's leaves blew away until it looked dead, not like something in its dying throes any longer, but a thing dead and gone.

  But it was not.

  I want to be alive, said the tree.

  At last, for the first time ever, she reached out and touched the tree.

  You will be.

  *

  To create what she wanted...what the tree wanted, she'd need help, she knew. She'd never worked on such a scale. She didn't have the tools, the space, nor, possibly, the strength.

  Yes. Yes you do.

  The tree.

  I will help.

  The tree still swayed as Alice walked around it, touching, late into the night, early into the morning. The wind tired and left the block quiet but for Alice and the tree. She didn't sleep, nor did she go and get dressed, and when the council turned up early in the morning, she was frozen, still in her dressing gown.

  She had little money. Nothing to pay with, nothing to give.

  They would take the tree to pieces, make it into woodchips or burn it. She didn't know. No one owned the tree. But she knew it belonged with her - if not to her. She could never possess the tree. But it should be with her. Of that, she had no doubt.

  There were two men, a van with a trailer. On the trailer was a wood chipper. In the van was a chainsaw.

  She spoke to the men for some time. She wondered, during the conversation, what she could give, what she'd be willing to give, to get the tree.

  In the end, she spoke, they listened, and then, they shook their heads.

  No way we can let you use a chainsaw, they said.

  I don't mind, said the tree.

  So she took them into the back of their sawdust smelling van. They still wouldn't let her use the chainsaw, but they would do it for her.

  They cut out the heart of the tree, and the flesh, and the bone.

  Too large for her to carry. Too large, possibly, for the stairwell. But not for the elevator.

  Too heavy.

  They carried the wood, grunting, sweating and swearing to her small flat. The wood, a cylinder cut from higher in the tree where the experience was, barely fit in her small flat. She went in first, they came in after. She paid them what she could, but not all she had.

  Twenty or so minutes later she had the smell of men gone from her flat, from herself.

  I'm sorry, she told the tree.

  I understand, said the tree. The tree had seen mu
ch. It was old. Sap bled onto the carpet from its mortal wounds or her unabashed shame. She didn't know which. She ached, she was tired, she was sore.

  She went to work, sleepless, in her nightgown, with her meagre tools, while the tree and she spoke of things and nothing at all.

  *

  Her chisel blunted. Her file snapped. She broke the haft of her old hammer.

  With a few pounds, she bought some ancient tools at the flea market on a Sunday morning.

  Sometimes, she hammered late at night and her neighbours complained. She slowed the work, though the pain was immense and she lay awake on her couch looking at the thing in her small living space. Her coffee table, at which she ate, lay on her bed. She didn't sleep in her bed anymore but on the couch, with the tree.

  Chippings, shavings, dust. Her floor was littered. Sap stained clothes lay in a pile in one corner. Plates and cups she rinsed from the draining board to use again. She took her coffee black for a week because she spent every penny she had on bandages for her hands, plasters, and, once, butterfly stitches when her chisel hit a knot and sliced through the pad at the base of her small finger.

  Alice knew she was possessed with fever. She burned with it. No dolphins, foxes, dragons. She had nothing to sell, nothing of worth but the art of herself. But she refused to debase herself for anything she did not need. She could have, easily. Could have had money in her pocket, but she understood what she'd done for the tree, she'd done for him. To do so for something she needed would be crass, base. She did not need tobacco, or coffee. She drank water and ate little but a handful of rice, sometimes pasta.

  To create something so large with nothing but cheap hand tools takes time. A long time.

  She took weeks. Her hands bled into the wood and the sap bled into her wounds, sealing the cuts as her bloodstains, later, added to the texture of the wood. The rough and rugged thing before her became more and more human as Alice became more like a thing of bone and wild hair. A sapling, wind-blown in the spring.