The Cold Inside (Horror Short Stories)

by Saunders, Craig

  It had to be.

  Why wouldn't it come out?

  Because it couldn't. It lived in his head. A world, in his head. Lives, people, animals, plants, geology, magnetism, suns, gravity, space, atoms.

  Bob sat down with a thump at the thought, the truth.

  If he fell asleep, what would happen to the world he'd birthed with his imagination?

  Shit.

  *

  On the last day, when a billion suns shining on dead planets and doomed civilisations winked out of existence, Bob stared at the black hole barrels of a shotgun he'd borrowed from the farmer along the road. Nobody knew he'd borrowed it, but he thought they'd either get it back after some sort of unseemly inquest, or the world would end when he pulled the triggers on the gun with two barrels and the farmer wouldn't be around to care.

  When Bob Storm was eleven and didn't understand commas, he'd thought these kind of guns fired bullets. But they didn't. The fired pellets. Round planets that would fly through the universe in his brain and let him sleep.

  Maybe. Maybe too many metaphors on long, elliptical orbits travelled around his brain. Dark matter colliding with his own molten core.

  Bob was mad.

  Bob was going to die.

  At this point Bob was so far gone, way, way over the edge of the heliosphere, out past the next galaxy, on and on to the edge of the universe where things got weird.

  Bang, said the gun, bored to tears with Bob and the universe and everything in between.

  Gerald jumped and wet the study carpet in surprise.

  And, with sleep, The End.

  *

  Transmission, like a virus, remember? A story just needs to be read to live on.

  Gerald stared up at the universe of Bob's mind spreading across the wall behind the space where a mind had exploded. Of Bob's head atop his body, there was nothing but a few scraps of jaw and neck remaining. Both barrels of a shotgun made a pretty mess.

  A pretty mess, a beautiful story. The way a story should be. The way a life born in a head should play out. A universe scattered across a wall, words and thoughts and the light of a billion suns. An imagination spread out like a map, but drawn in blood and bone.

  Gerald was a dog.

  So, how come the world didn't end? Who writes down the stories when worlds end? The great big editor in the sky? You? Me?

  Of course not. We're already gone. We go in each moment that passes...then and then and then.

  Gone. Gone forever more every second of the day with barren worlds strewn in our wake.

  Gerald couldn't read. But he could smell. He could smell the story, the promise of the world birthed in the shape of continents and archipelagos on the simple plaster wall of a study.

  Gerald sniffed greedily like a teenager reading their first truly gripping yarn. He took that story in, held it in his head. He holds it there, still.

  The whole world, in a dog's head. A dog, alone and forgotten in a writer's study. The sausages are gone from the fridge. The water in the toilet bowl long gone, too. The brain and blood and fragmented bone story, Bob's stinking rotten fingers, the flesh of his forearms, his shoes and feet both.

  A hungry dog stuck in a room with a computer and the internet and the story of the world in its head. Like a virus.

  Of course, a dog can't read. A dog can't type.

  But maybe, thought Gerald as he sat at the computer with his head cocked to one side, maybe a story can type.

  Maybe it can.

  The End

  This was written specifically for 'Behind Closed Doors' - an anthology from Matt Shaw Publications. I like him. Not really much of an introduction to the story, but if you want something else from me, well...OK. This was inspired in a tiny, tiny, tiny, way by Arrow (the DC show with that archer fella).

  Man Cuts of His Own Head

  Mihael Katovich knows the word 'stock', and that it has many meanings. His English is good. Not perfect, but more the functional kind of English. Like most people who speak a second language, he's never going to interpret at the UN, or translate literature to his mother tongue. It's the everyday words and phrases that people use eighty percent of the time if they've an average vocabulary. He speaks it well enough for people to understand what he wants, or needs, or thinks. Things like 'coffee, strong,' except here they say 'Americano', or 'with an extra shot' are simple enough, but he gets most of what passes for the news, and can watch TV and laugh along, too.

  Sometimes, now, he dreams in English instead of Russian. He's been away from his mother tongue for a long time.

  Mihael's the man people glances slide over as he sits in the coffee shop or stands like everyone else, bored, at a supermarket till. Quiet, unobtrusive, mindful...but while others' attentions might skip this plain-looking man, he watches them - that's how he learns. It's also how he worked, once, when killing was his business. Killing is in the past, though, like so many other things, and it's not killing, or the past, that concerns him, but his own death. His own death seems a little more important than it used to, now that he has a son.

  He hopes for better for the boy opposite him. His boy. His son.

  'Sin,' he says. 'Mal'chik?'

  This is how the words come out. Russian isn't English. Language or men, Russian and English aren't ever going to be the same.

  His son doesn't reply because he's unconscious. There's a thick welt over a large bump that Mihael can still see despite his son's long hair. Unconscious is for the best. Mihael doesn't want the boy to see or hear a thing until his business with the other man in the room is over.

  There are three of them, and only three. Opposing parts. Mihael, Mihael's son, and the other man. A triptych, like Mihael used to see back home in alcoves and on old stands all around the churches he saw in his youth. Things that were hidden when Russia was the U.S.S.R., dragged out into the light again. Not like him. His kind were never hidden.

  Bratva. Old as the czars that came before the great socialist state. Thieves and scoundrel, criminals and killers. Like the mafia, maybe. But more...Russian. Once they'd been held in check, contained. But the borders between Russia and the world had been down a long time now.

  'Mihael,' says the other man. Mihael can't see behind him but he can feel the man at his back and knows he's there with the same surety he knows his son, who he can see, is real and present, too. He can't turn his head, or reach his son, because the two of them are in stocks. Not stocks with any of the other meanings, but stocks like he's seen in movies about peasants and criminals and people who are sometimes the same thing. Stocks from hundreds of years ago.

  He learns a lot from movies.

  He knows the voice.

  He knows how this all works, too.

  It's not a complicated arrangement, this triptych. There's Heaven, Earth, Hell. It's a common theme, in those religious paintings he remembers. Good, bad, indifferent. Mihael's unsure what he'd be. He hopes, perhaps, that he'd be earth - simple, indifferent. But he thinks it more likely that two of the men in the room come out bad, no matter how much he's tried to wipe his slate clean. He's got blood in his past and maybe more than the man at his back.

  'Mihael? You know who I am, don't you? It has been too long.'

  He senses the man's shrug, unseen, and the man adds something else. 'Not long enough for you, maybe?'

  Mihael's good at watching and he learned his trade early and young. Crime families, like mafia, like bratva...they're a brotherhood, and he's a brother and always will be. You can't simply walk away from your brothers - they're still there. Distant, yes...but always connected.

  This day was always coming.

  'I am Sovietnik, now. Boevik days long gone, no? Remember those days? We fought like dogs. Like hungry dogs. We had to, didn't we? We were starving. You remember. I know you do.'

  He speak Russian, of course, this Sovietnik, but mixes in English words, too.

  Mihael remembers. It's not something a man forgets. His family, how things were and how they still are.
A Boevik when he left - a simple warrior, but a ferocious one, remorseless and ruthless. He's been where the Sovietnik is now - behind men in a position just like his. Where the killer stands.

  Those men would beg when Mihael stood at their backs and it didn't work then and it won't work now. So what he begs, his son begs? It makes no difference. People beg, run, give in and let themselves die. It makes no difference.

  Mihael says nothing.

  'A long time, Mihael. You are changed. Both of us, I think. Softer. I haven't killed a man for seven years now. I thought I wanted this but you know it's harder? I thought it would be easier. Money, power. It's not easier, brother.'

  The man at Mihael's back sniffs, like he's got a cold. Probably not that but the change in air - a man used to living in the country now. Maybe in a fine house once belonging to the Party's latest favourite, some good communist who gained the right friends. From cold to warm air, clean to dirty air filled with exhaust and dust and all the other tiny things that hang over England's grey cities. That change in air's enough to irritate a man's nose.

  'But...listen to me. Like a woman. Soft. Complaining like a woman, soft like a woman. I am embarrassed. Forgive me.'

  The man doesn't need or care for forgiveness. It's an affectation. He might be wearing an expensive coat now, and might have flown into England in the comfortable seats in a plane, maybe even his own. But it doesn't change the fact. The man came up a warrior. Promotion doesn't change a man. Mihael knows that well enough. One of them tries to be a politician in the Bratva. Mihael can't judge. After all, he's pretending to be a father.

  'How long now, Mihael? Eleven years? The boy is grown big.'

  The stocks that hold Mihael and his son are comprised of a single block of wood. It's sliced in two, almost exactly in half. There's a clasp one end and a hinge the other. Both are black, probably iron. Undo the clasp, open it up. Like a clacker. Take one, he thinks. Like in the movies he always loved.

  It's not a clacker, he thinks. And I'm not in a film.

  Three holes - one in the middle, two either side. His head fills the middle, his hands fill the two smaller holes.

  'Did my brother beg?' says the Sovietnik. 'You think you were better? You do better now? You are braver than my brother? 'Nyeht, nyeht,' he said this?'

  The man is asking Mihael if his brother begged for his life when Mihael took it. Mihael is still Russian. If a man begs, that was between him and his killer.

  The word the Sovietnik says means 'no'. 'Nyeht' is how it sounds. The man behind Mihael is angry, and he's been angry for eleven years. What good a simple word like 'no' to such a man?

  Mihael loves the boy, now thirteen years old, who hangs from a second set of stocks right in front of him. The boy says nothing because he fought harder than Mihael and forced the Sovietnik to knock him unconscious. Mihael was caught surprised, his son was not.

  I'd like to see my son's face before I die, he thinks. But he would never ask for such a thing. He has his own pride, still...but his pride in his son towers over any love he ever felt for himself, even though Mihael and the boy are not blood.

  The man behind Mihael is the boy's uncle. Mihael killed this Sovietnik's brother - the child's blood-father. When he fled Russia to England he took the boy for his own and the boy never knew different.

  Russia's full of history, but then so is every country, every continent, every man, every child. It doesn't matter how old a thing is. History's short or long, but it touches all. Once Mihael killed a man and took that man's son. Now, someone else will kill Mihael and take his son away. History - massive and uncaring as the mountains he remembers.

  For eleven years, Mihael's been running.

  But then, he's been happy, too, and proud, and gifted with this child. The man behind doesn't know that. If he did, it would make no difference. Nothing will. Except, maybe, Mihael.

  'You love the boy, I know. But he is not yours. Not your blood.'

  Mihael does love him. He's his son, blood or not.

  'It doesn't matter, you know. Your...sentiment. Too many movies, Mihael. You forget you are Russian?'

  I tried, thinks Mihael.

  The boy's not Russian. The father he knows is Russian, as is the father he doesn't know. But Mihael never taught his boy the language of his fathers. He speaks only English, learns some French and Spanish already at his school. He might never speak Russian.

  Probably not. We're dead, he thinks.

  I'm sorry, he thinks.

  'He's my nephew. You made him yours. People think man forgives man. But you and I know, do we not? We are Russian. My father loved you. Mihael...like he had three sons, not two. Did you know that?'

  The man wipes his running nose on a handkerchief he takes from his no doubt expensive coat, like a gentleman might. For all that the Sovietnik derides Mihael for his love of movies, the man at his back has been affected, too.

  The man taps a finger on the wood over the back of Mihael's neck.

  'Clever thing, this. You used this once, didn't you? The old man was proud of you. I remember him smiling, talking about you and what you did. You were like a superstar to my father. I like this. Like justice, yes? Balans - it's English word, in Russian?'

  The word the Sovietnik says sounds like 'balance'. A borrowed word, like so many languages have and will have, now that the world grows smaller.

  'You always love your English so much. Your movies, yes?'

  Many words in many languages have similar sounds. '...yes?' is what he says. 'Yes' sounds just like 'Da.'

  Da - like the diminutive of 'Dad', Mihael thinks.

  Mihael thinks many things.

  'It is a pressure plate,' says the man. He sounds tired. 'If you put some weight on it, my nephew is freed. It needs about the weight of a human head, Mihael. Your head on the plate for my nephew's life. This sounds like justice?'

  Mihael turn his head a fraction to his right and checks what he feels around his wrist. It's just string. He turns his palm up instead of down, like it is, and the string will slip. He knows how it works. He has done it before.

  'About right, I think. Goodbye,' says the man.

  Mihael doesn't cry or beg, but he needs one thing. Same thing he did for his son's real father. It's not the child's fault he's only know killers. 'Don't let him see.'

  The man behind him nods.

  Mihael turns his palm from down to up so the string can slip free. Letting go, he thinks the Russian for son sounds very much like the English word 'Sin'.

  Sin, betrayal, murder...none of these things make a difference when a man dies. In Russia, there will still be mountains. Here, there, his son will see them one day. Mihael dreams in English, sometimes in Russian, but the best dreams never need language. They're emotions, and images, and hopes or fears.

  This is a hope. His boy before the mountains where the air's still fresh, and will be cold for thousands of years in the future, just as the air's been cold for thousands of years in the past.

  Mihael's head hits the plate and it's not his blood he sees while the oxygen flees his brain and those neurons and receptors cease to fire. It's his son, standing before the snow-capped, green-shouldered mountains, breathing deeply of air untouched by pollution and dirt and all the filthy things that men do. Clean, and clear, and full of chances he never had, nor understood. Chances and hopes that never were his to give, no matter how badly he wanted to.

  The End

  DarkFuse published this, 'The House of Oak'. It ties in with the Hangman and Highwayman novels, and the stories which revolve around a strange travelling family and their matriach, 'Ma Mulrone'. Stories of Old England, the myths and legends...not all of them cute and cuddly.

  The House of Oak

  People say a witch was once buried beneath the old oak. The kids who played in the woods, back when kids still played in the woods, used to talk about digging under that fat and gnarly tree to look for her bones. No one ever did.

  The bole of the tree was large enough for maybe
three or four men to hold hands around it, should the inclination take them. It didn't. Grown men didn't often hold hands around a tree, except maybe hippy types defying the developer's blade, or pagans worshipping their fairy trees out in England's old places.

  People didn't climb that lonely oak. It wasn't protected, by statute or man.

  Kids were a funny breed. Sometimes they hit upon the truth just by feel, blindly fumbling for explanations an adult couldn't fathom.

  The tree was indeed protected by the witch in the earth beneath, those old roots growing in and around her bones. The power of her blood coursed through it, trunk and branch and twig, and her will whispered in the leaves whenever the wind blew.

  *

  Wayne and Neil Nelson weren't really wayward kids. Just a bit scruffy and scuffed. People now might have said they were neglected, but back then, 1976 or maybe '77, they were just kids like most others. They played out in the sun and rain, in mud or on the hard packed dirt. They skinned their knees and wore holes through their jeans before their mum would buy them anything new. They weren't neglected at all. Their mother loved them to distraction. Enough so she worked two jobs to keep the house and her boys going, wore herself just as thin as her boys' tight blue jeans. People were mean back then. Maybe they're not any less mean now.

  Wayne and Neil weren't just brothers, but friends, too, and the two things don't necessarily go hand in hand. They played together, fought together, and later, much later, when Wayne was put in the dirt, pretty much died together, because Neil followed soon after, dead with a weak heart in the winter of 1997. Neither left wife or child of their own, and the Nelson family faded into nothing, forgotten.

  A whole family of nothing more than whispers in the leaves of a grand old oak tree, haunting and familiar as the rustle of leaves in the autumn and the sight of the buds in spring.

  But this isn't the story of the death of Wayne, or Neil, or their mother. This is my story. A story about the house I built them in the branches of an oak tree back in 1976 or '77. A story about a witch, about evil, but about idle hands, too, and these old man's hands that planted two acorns in the soft dirt above their graves.