Onyx Neon Shorts Presents: Horror Collection - 2015

by Wesolowski, MJ

  “Truth: Who would you rather fuck?” He wiped his lips on his sleeve. I swallowed saliva, trying not to be sick.

  “That’s a shit question.” Amy swallowed her glass and shuddered with a smile. “You get a dare...”

  * * *

  Dare.

  “Oh my fucking god!” Myles’s laughter was caustic, each reverberation a slap to my face, sobering me instantly.

  We ran back the way we had come, Amy in the lead, Myles and I panting behind her. The alcohol made me slow, my mind clutching to catch up. It made Myles red and loud; Amy danced away from us, past the station and into the cobbled streets of Ellie Hill. A nymph in the gloom.

  Our footsteps were thunder between the squat cottages and crumbling walls. My legs felt drained, hollow. Amy and Myles scattered before me, their shadows scampering in the plastic light of a supermarket whose yellow sign hung from the front of one of the ancient buildings like a fungus from the bole of a tree.

  Ellie Hill rose higher as if forcing us back, the shops and houses giving way to the uneven teeth of pavement. The air of the place felt thick, poisonous, the road rearing upward in the underbelly of some terrible black steed. Closer and closer.

  You must never go there.

  But we were here and I heaved back a lungful of air so I could shout, “come back, come back!” I knew if I called to them, my words would scatter behind me, tumbling forgotten back down Ellie’s Hill. As the streetlamps thinned, their lights sneering spots that cast no brightness on this place. They averted their gaze in a vague circle around that last, bubonic swell. Ellie’s Hill. My heart gave a heave as Amy and Myles vanished beneath the shadow of its centrepiece, its grim cenotaph.

  There was not enough flat land for a town square.

  Dare.

  This wasn’t the way I’d seen it. The picture I conjured in my nightmares was enveloped by the twisted reality in stone that rose from the black heart of Ellie Hill.

  I stared. Unable to move. The others swayed and giggled; Myles had his phone out and was already too close.

  “Getting a fucking selfie with this, oh yes, oh fucking yes… what a ledge, what a leg… end!”

  The flash of his phone sent shadows pulsing against the statue that sat with her bone legs astride a clutch of ancient iron lattice.

  “Don’t....don’t touch...” My hands covered my mouth. I didn’t know if I was speaking or thinking it.

  Myles was astride her; bouncing on her lap one arm about her shoulders. Another flash of his camera. Ellie’s top half wobbled, the stone wind-whipped and brittle. Below her waist, where the chair held her, the iron casings thronged with roses. Stone rats peered from between them, forever feasting on her flesh.

  “The morning they found the children had gone, they followed the hoof prints in the unbroken snow; across the barns, the fields and even the roof of the church to the top of Ellie’s Hill.”

  “Oh...aren’t you just so fucking hawwtt?” Myles was yelling, still bouncing, his phone flashing. The shadows capered in a psychotic jig around us. My granddad’s words fell around me like thunder.

  “They clapped Ellie’s feet in blessed thorns and brought her down the cripple’s road to the gallows mound.”

  It was Amy. She was reading from the stained brass plaque affixed to the fence.

  “...where they condemned her to sit in ‘Ellie’s Chair’, crafted that very night so those who had lost their children could smell her cursed flesh burn...”

  Myles got down in silence. Ellie’s gargoyle bent over him, claws to the sky, blunted by the winds, bent at an inhuman angle, her expression carved in endless agony. I couldn’t tear my eyes from hers. Amy kept reading, her voice smaller and smaller.

  “...she was still alive, still crying out. ‘Death by vermin’ they chanted, Ab Vermes, the same way they disposed of sheep thieves.”

  The hill ways.

  She looked at me. Myles swayed below Ellie’s fury.

  “Is that,” she pointed. “Is that it?”

  The gnarled metal cage that held her legs. The rats in the roses. The gloom made them horribly real. Myles raised his voice, its pitch higher than before.

  “Is that the actual Ellie’s chair? The actual fucking thing?” He looked repulsed, hands brushing feverishly at the seat of his shorts.

  Silence hammered down.

  Ellie’s last words smelted into the metal, just like he told me.

  “’I fought the devil for them’, those little corpses.”

  “Fucking hell...” Myles whispered.

  I was gasping, my breath coming in great shivers. There was a silvery pain over one eye. My stomach churned.

  Don’t go there.

  I didn’t tell, I didn’t tell truth, nor do dare. The forbidden tale, the terror that held me awake on the long nights of my childhood. I would not talk of the tiny, broken bones we used to find beneath the peat of the fells. I would not tell of the lambs born on the banks of Ellie’s Hill, their faces all mouths, their heads all eyes, wretched and squalling. The smack of their soft skulls against the stones.

  I threw up hard, bile burning the back of my throat as I screamed out sick that soaked into the soil of the gallows mound.

  Myles and Amy took me and held me up as we made our way back to the platform to catch the last train home. Myles’s powerful arms and Amy’s voice. I heard them talking, in and out of black shadows.

  “...I’m hung-over already...”

  “...just a bad… a bad place...”

  “What a ledge...”

  Plastic seats clutching at my neck.

  “...you didn’t!... Oh no, please....”

  “It was the dare. IT WAS THE DARE!”

  “Please put it back… please.”

  Please.

  Please put it back.

  * * *

  To their relief I transferred resident halls not long after we returned. They couldn’t look at me anymore, their voices in my presence always quiet, too sweet. I couldn’t bear to see them. We drifted past each other through my last days in the shared kitchen like ghosts. I sometimes saw Amy disappearing into his room, heard the tinny sound of his phone.

  The day I left, I walked down that corridor for the last time. His door was ajar and I crept toward it, my head rushing, heart pounding. He sat at the far end of the room, curtains closed, computer screen blank. He had his back to me, the light from his desk-lamp casting a long, distorted shadow against the wall. I saw Amy’s pink pyjama top crumpled in the corner, the smiling face of a bear poked out beneath a muddy rugby shirt. The room smelled of rain.

  “Myles...” I whispered it as if I didn’t want him to hear me.

  He remained still, hunched over his desk, no music, just looking down at something I could not see.

  Please put it back.

  It was the dare.

  I waited there for a few seconds, then left. He never even knew I was there.

  * * *

  I like to sit in the library, alone. My legs ache and my back is hunched. The cold makes my fingers throb.

  I like to watch the world go by through the painted glass window up on the second floor. It’s peaceful there. I have time to think.

  The kids from the primary have hung crumpled tissue ghosts by the Harry Potters; blood drips from painted fangs and black pipe-cleaner spiders climb up crepe paper tombs. It’s the winter when Ellie Hill comes back. Like it or not. She’ll never leave me.

  He married her, of course he did. Amy stayed an eternal blossoming child in my memory, her pale skin and the pink clip in her hair.

  Terrible place, this world.

  They had a daughter. Her eyes were Amy’s and she carried Myles’ high-end grin, even at three. Their grief when she vanished was spattered ceaselessly on the fronts of the red tops for months until his money ran out. As the years passed, little Alice’s appeal dissolved into eulogies and petal-laced sentiments online. ‘Let’s find Alice’ on Facebook, “one ‘like’ equals one prayer.” My hand hovered over t
he mouse.

  As her face smiled from the sides of buses and the fronts of T-shirts, I thought they might come looking for me. I didn’t hide, waited for the phone to ring or the front door to rattle. It never did.

  The years went by and little Alice faded on the sides of the buses, the pink clip in her hair was replaced by adverts for loans. It’s a tough world.

  I composed a few letters in my head; even wrote a few of them down. I just had to get the words out, stop them flapping like trapped birds at the inside of my skull. They were never sent. My letters fade in the pockets of my wax coat.

  “I can’t help,” they say, muddled among too many words, and “I just want to say I understand.”

  We fought the devil up there on Ellie Hill. I want to tell them. That night long ago, we fought the devil.

  I understand, I want to say.

  Some of us fight him still.

  82 Rungs

  Brit Jones

  Trask dangled from the top of the ladder, gazing lazily at the circle of light far below. His shift started in ten minutes.

  There were 82 rungs on the ladder. He had been up and down the shaft more times than he could remember counting them. It was upsetting to him because, when they had closed the vault-like steel hatch above him on his first day on the job, he had counted the rungs going down. There were 72. He was sure of it.

  It was an obsessive-compulsive thing. He climbed the ladder every few days and banged fruitlessly on the hatch with a pipe wrench. He counted the rungs every time. At some point there were 82 instead of 72, but he couldn’t remember how long ago that was. He could only remember being alarmed.

  Severin had laughed it off. Said it was “junkie math.” Trask nagged at him constantly. Finally, Severin had climbed the ladder.

  “Eighty-two rungs, Trask,” Severin said when he came back down the shaft. “Going and coming.”

  The exercise had really been pointless. Trask knew that Severin hadn’t counted the rungs coming down, or made any trips up and back when there were only 72. But Trask wanted Severin to be sure that there had been 82 rungs when, one day in the near future, there were 92.

  “Trask!” Severin shouted. “Get your ass down here or I’ll hide your works and black pen again! You’re on in five!”

  Trask knew Severin was serious. He’d done it before. The endless four days without his Dilaudid had left a scar seared into his brain. He started down the ladder.

  When he reached the bottom, Severin was already headed for his quarters. The control room was unmanned.

  “Have a good shift,” Severin said neutrally as they passed in the corridor.

  The control room was dimly lit. Underneath a large window was a console with five levers on it. Four of the levers were in the down position. A green LED shone above each. The last lever was in the up position. Its LED was red. There was a captain’s chair. In the upper right corner across from the door there was a camera. It had been attached to a cable, which now dangled uselessly from the wall. Some time back Trask and Severin had agreed to pull the cable out of the camera. Trask had steadied the captain’s chair while Severin climbed up on it and yanked the cable out of the camera.

  There was an old fashioned rotary telephone. It never rang. When they picked it up there was just a hiss, and sometimes what sounded like the echo of distant voices.

  The window looked out over a large, underground drainage canal. There were catwalks on both sides with ladders descending into it. On the far side, next to the ladder, was a ramp that led up to a large ten-by-ten elevator with a lever next to it. Off to the left was a large steel grate that crossed the drainage canal side to side and top to bottom. Severin referred to the grate as “Hell’s net.” Trask found that apt.

  There was a clock on the control room wall. It didn’t indicate AM or PM. Every twenty four hours, at three o’clock, the clock would chime. Then it was time to pull the last lever. That was when the work began.

  Trask had fixed before climbing the ladder. He tossed the pipe wrench into a corner and settled into the captain’s chair to wait.

  Severin couldn’t sleep. He tried reading the latest spy novel that his employers had sent down the dumbwaiter three days earlier, but couldn’t concentrate. He had a standing order with them to send down the new spy novel releases as they came out. Trask had his Dilaudid, Severin his spy novels.

  Severin didn’t particularly care for spy novels. The bosses wouldn’t send down newspapers or magazines, and there was no television in the bunker. Reading spy novels was the only way Severin could at least infer what was going on in the world.

  He was a political activist. When he applied for and got this job he decided the world wouldn’t end during the six months he would be isolated from it. Why the company insisted on isolation was a mystery to Severin. Especially considering the nature of the work.

  Then there was the issue of the six months. Trask insisted that more than six months had passed.

  Severin considered Trask a loser. A junkie. He may or may not have started out as the former, but the latter was a fact and had turned him into the former.

  When they met on the first day, Trask had introduced himself as a writer. He even mentioned the names of one or two books that Severin recognized. While Severin had wanted a break from the non-stop politicking his work at the think tank entailed, Trask had wanted relative solitude to finish his current novel. A novel that he said would be his magnum opus.

  Severin was accustomed to dressing immaculately. In the office, at a restaurant, in the gym. The perfect outfit for each occasion. One never knew who one was going to bump into. In beltway politics public appearance was but one of many essentials. So he was slightly put off by Trask’s rumpled appearance. Jeans, a wrinkled flannel over a t-shirt sporting some logo or slogan, beat-up boots. But he made an allowance due to the man’s profession. Trask was, after all, successful. In spite of their many differences in opinion and outlook, their personalities had seemed a good fit.

  It was unclear to Severin exactly when Trask had started putting Dilaudid on their order list. He had noticed Trask’s appearance getting sloppier. He would find Trask nodded-off in the captain’s chair at shift change. Trask quit bathing regularly. He quit talking about his book. And, in Severin’s opinion, he became very paranoid.

  And so the six months. Severin had been certain it had not yet been six months. He had been certain of this because they hadn’t been relieved. Whenever they sent their list of necessities up the dumbwaiter in the common room, roughly twelve hours later the dumbwaiter would arrive with everything on their lists that they had asked for.

  There seemed to be almost no limit to what they could obtain. Trask getting vials of hospital grade Dilaudid and sterile needles every week was an example. Some time back, when Severin was just learning to hate Trask, they had experimented. A garden gnome. A single beer. A fifth of whiskey. Cases of beer. Cases of whiskey. Marijuana and a water pipe. Illegal vintage trench knives. .45 caliber automatic pistols with ammunition. All these things showed up with their standard food and toiletry requirements. The only things denied were anything that indicated the current date and any kind of news whatsoever.

  This last, of course, fed Trask’s paranoia once it started to manifest. Severin, on the other hand, found it reassuring. As long as the deliveries came it meant they had not been forgotten. Six months couldn’t have passed. Severin was certain of it.

  Trask spun in the captain’s chair, staring at the ceiling. He was imagining scenarios for the next phase of his novel. He knew he would probably never write any of them. Something was wrong. There had been 72 rungs. Now there were 82. There was something else. He hadn’t mentioned it to Severin because he knew the reaction he would get but, when they started the job, there had only been four levers. Six months had come and gone without contact or relief.

  He had asked for a pipe wrench and gotten one. Just to break the monotony, and hopefully annoy someone on the other side, he used it to bang on the hat
ch when he wasn’t on shift. If he actually wasn’t on shift. He had lost track quite a while back. He thought Severin needed to pull the broomstick out of his ass, but he trusted him to keep the schedule. It was the kind of guy Severin was.

  Whatever Severin thought, Trask didn’t mind that six months had passed. He was perfectly happy where he was. Even if the job was kind of a drag. He had a large, private room, his own bathroom, plenty to eat, presumably a large amount of money being deposited in his bank account every month, and an endless supply of hospital grade Dilaudid.

  He had used heroin fairly frequently as a younger man, but never so much that he considered himself a junkie. He had been high most of the time while writing his first novel. Not only had it sold almost immediately, it had won two awards and been optioned for film. He had continued to dabble in pharmaceuticals over the last decade as his fame had waxed.

  He looked at the clock. Two fifteen. Plenty of time to fix before the mess. He called these shifts the “messy shifts.” He wasn’t sure this was one, but he was always one to assume the worst.

  Severin was okay, for a stuck up prig. It bothered Trask that he seemed to be deliberately ignoring the changes occurring in their environment. Trask was many things, but paranoid was not one of them. He knew that Severin wrote off his observations as drug induced, but Trask was familiar enough with the effects of Dilaudid, even at the dosage he was currently mainlining, to know he wasn’t imagining things. Things would become impossible to ignore soon enough, if Trask’s instincts were right.

  He was jolted out of his reverie by a loud thump on the window. He spun the chair around and gasped.

  There was something clinging to the outside of the window. Four cruelly barbed multi-jointed legs held a sharply ridged carapace in place against the glass. An insectoid head with a bloom of tentacles surrounding fanged mandibles was scanning the control room slowly. Its faceted eyes met Trask’s incredulous ones and held them. The intelligence deep inside them wasn’t what sent Trask scrambling frantically out of the control room and down the hall yelling for Severin. It was the burning, focused, malevolence.