Onyx Neon Shorts: Horror Collection 2016

by Brit Jones

  Then he laughed.

  It finally made sense!

  He had tripped over one of his corpses, discarded from the truck by some bump that Yuri had been too drunk to detect. The bump, whatever it was, had somehow jostled the engine and radio. Salty tears came down his face and left burning streaks where they froze. He would have to look at the engine again. Hopefully he could fix it so he could get back. He thanked God that the radio was broken. His call to the Gulag, even if it had been an honest mistake, could have become a death sentence.

  The snow stopped for a moment, the land seemed to revert back to its natural tranquility. Yuri saw the body in full form, and a glacial terror receded from his eyes all the way down the base of his spine. It was a man; his skin was a sanguine red, full of more blood than men were supposed to—especially dead men. He looked…ripe, a very ripe and red corpse that had let loose little streams of steam. There was not a patch of blue or black over the man, impossible since all starving prisoners died and decayed prematurely from the cold.

  The man was unnaturally healthy.

  He was lean, but not skeletal, with an uncharacteristic plumpness in his stomach; his closed eyes weren’t hallowed cavities, but were, instead, normal and even handsome.. There was something oddly grotesque in the uncharacteristic plumpness of his stomach, the bulge resembled someone who had been fed well for a long period of time . There were no stomachs like that in the Gulag. The only fat that existed was in the trash-meat soup they fed the officers who watched over barbed-wire walls and ramshackle wooden mausoleums.

  Yuri, not in courage but in that reflexive curiosity which makes children touch stoves, went to the body to stoop over it. He could not recognize the face or any other distinguishable thing about the body. There was nothing about the shape of the nose, the sculpting of the chin or any sort of scars or hair that would have caused Yuri to recognize the man. He was part of an endless, unremarkable crowd, only remarkable because he stood out against the decrepit wreckage of what is left in the human frame after its humanity has been forcefully removed.

  The heat was radiating and vibrating in an invisible cloud. There was an aura of perverse warmth in the air next to the corpse—that unlike a fireplace this created no comfort. It was unnatural, musky and humid in a place where water was dry. Every nerve on Yuri was creeping, every inch of him humming with tense electricity as he reached down to touch the man’s forehead.

  He felt the heat through his glove.

  The corpse’s eyes opened.

  This time Yuri heard his own scream. The eyes were glazed over and grey—the ornament-eyes of a troglodyte creature to which light is useless. Bulbous and blind though they were, Yuri could feel them following him as he ran away stupidly and desperately from the corpse and his truck. The eyes followed him like the bead of the gun, and Yuri felt that he was in a line of sight far more dangerous than any armed soldier.

  The wind stirred up again, into a maelstrom of glowing white snow that blotted out the night. The storm was an assault on his senses, where sight became muddled with the booming cacophony of the blizzard and his sense of touch became as dull and blunted as his eyes. There was an undercurrent of exhaustion and electricity under Yuri’s skin as his breathing became more ragged with each gasp. He moved slowly, encumbered by his clothing, and tripped over something again. Shivering, screaming, the reflexive realization rushed to Yuri’s mind before his subconscious could try to repress it:

  Warm.

  Yuri could feel the tears and snot on his face, panic binding him as much as the storm around him. Yuri felt the softness of flesh through his glove as he lifted himself from the thing he could not see. His mind recited all the prayers he had ever been taught into incoherent syllables, streaming together chants and songs that he had forgotten until he needed them. Everything in him was alert, stumbling and crying through the blizzard. He fell over five times in what only seemed like a few minutes. Each time he felt the awful, steady warmth beneath him, and each time he pushed himself off of something other than hard ice.

  The flurry must have masked the graveyard, the unholy place where corpses were still warm and opened their eyes to watch their gravedigger at his work. A creature seemed to scream out in the wind, a demonic laughing cry that came through the whipping white and the night blackness. It was not far from him, he imagined only a few yards away and getting closer with each shrill call that matched the tempo and torrent of the storm. The place was littered with these warm bodies, and he could feel the weight of their blind eyes laughing malevolently as he stumbled and tripped over them.

  He was not a bad man! No worse than the men he worked with! But he had been a hero! He had been a hero of Stalingrad! Stalin had personally thanked him! This alone should have been a ticket for his salvation, something to save him from whatever cruel trick the winds and snow were playing on him now! He screamed out his life, that it was not his fault men were killed! He was not the one who decided to leave their corpses unhallowed in the Tundra; he was not the one who gave the order to pollute the Siberia with the litter of executions!

  The wind lifted him off of the ground and tossed him onto another warm body. Screaming, thrashing against the loose arms that softly wrapped around him like a mother, Yuri pulled free and began running again. There was no destination in his mind, even if he had cleared his mind for a moment and thought rationally, the Gulag was no longer open to him. The tundra had exposed itself to him, the casualties of war and cold had been revealed to Yuri and he knew he could never work in snow again. He would leave Siberia; he would run across the Arctic Circle into Canada. He would keep running until he never saw snow or ice again!

  Something cold and strong grabbed at his ankle, pulling him down and dragging him along the endless floor. He clawed at the ground with all his force, making out red trails through the flurries and he knew that the blood was from his own raw, ungloved fingers. Death was all around him now, the storm thundering and mixing with the own songs and prayers in his head into a mocking sound. He flipped upright and exposed his cold throat.

  Was he choking, or were there cold fingers thrusting themselves into his mouth? Was something laughing at him? Were there warm, red bodies standing around in snow looking down on him? They must have been, he could see them, smiling stupidly with straight white teeth, staring with lifeless grey eyes unmeant for sunlight.

  The grey eyes were unchanging, constant and unmoving. They did not blink, but glinted and shifted with the patterns of shifting snow. He could not hear breath, moans or any other sounds to indicate the existence of sentience in those eyes. Only the patience, the constancy and weight of the stares crushed Yuri into believing that he was being watched. He was dying, he was mad and he was dying while the lifeless world watched without remorse.

  The cold was inside of him now, his throat dry and cut with shards of ice and fear. An arm covered in knives was tearing him apart from the inside, and he could feel the taste of wind-scarred blood running down his mouth. Every part of him seemed to bleed as numbness spread from his fingers to his arms. Slowly all motion became impossible as his nerves became unresponsive. The numbness entered his lungs and crept into his heart.

  A new, mad, thought entered into his head:

  Breath, please, breath!

  His lungs stopped heaving. The throbbing in his head soon became aware of the slowing of his heart, calming and stopping for intolerable intervals. All thought left him, and death entered Yuri Zaystev as one final, slithering breath.

  The steam from Yuri’s face rose up into the dark. The now calm air of the tundra night. The world around him watched content with another of countless bodies that had already been brought into its fold. Nothing blinked for centuries, and nothing changed for all eternity.

  * * *

  Yuri had been wrong in one regard: they had not sent a search party for him, but they sent one for his truck. After all, equipment was expensive and valuable. Yuri would be replaced after he was killed, and his replacement woul
d drive his truck. The soldiers followed the tracks to a spot not far from the prison. Yuri lay on the ground next to the truck, eyes frozen permanently open on a green-blue face with an open mouth.

  His mouth seemed to have been forming a word when he died, but no mention was made of that in the report. Yuri’s name disappeared into records, and his body was left to disappear into the unknowable currents and winds of the Tundra. He was never found or remembered again.

  The Marked Men

  Ben Stallwood

  I had a dream...

  Dear Greta,

  This letter must come as a shock. I’m sorry I couldn’t find another way to contact you first. My name is Emily, and I deeply wish we had had the chance to meet in person before all this, not least because I feel like it would have made having to write this letter easier. As it is, this letter seems so impersonal and inappropriate that even as I write, I still don’t know whether or not it will do you more harm than good. Please, please accept my sincerest assurance that any hurt caused by receiving this package is far removed from what I intended. However, I deeply feel, that these papers enclosed belong with you and your family, and not with mine. In the end, I suppose I feel that if it were my family that were the subject of these notes and not yours, I would like them returned to me, however much hurt they may cause. The last thing I wanted to do was to reopen old wounds.

  I don’t know whether or not Per ever mentioned me in connection to Dylan or whether Dylan himself ever told you about me. I’m not sure how often the boys would talk about things like their wives or children. I never met Per, although we spoke over the telephone on a few occasions when he called the house looking for Dylan. He seemed like an unbelievably gentle person.

  Firstly, I just wanted to tell you how deeply, deeply sorry I am for your loss. I can’t find the words to tell you how overcome I was when Dylan told me about the death of your son. It’s not something that should ever have to happen. If there was anything I could do to help, even to share the pain, I would. There is nothing worse than the death of a young man, especially one as talented and imaginative as Yngve must evidently have been.

  Secondly, by way of an explanation, I’m writing because Per sent me the letters enclosed in this package last June, and as I said, I feel that they are rightfully yours. I don’t know why Per sent them to me. I knew that Dylan was writing a journal whilst away but I never read it until Per sent me these pages from it. It was always an issue of trust between us that I never interfered with his work until he invited me to; having read these now, I feel like I have somehow violated something between us. There’s also material here written by Per himself, that relates to Yngve, that seems incredibly sensitive, and I don’t feel that it is appropriate for me to keep this.

  Again, I’m sorry that I had to send you such difficult and painful material in such an abrupt way. However, I really, strongly feel that I am doing the only thing that I can do by sending them back to you. I think Per thought that reading these would help me find some sort of solace, but all they have done is raised questions that have no answers, and left my mind in a kind of turmoil.

  I’ve enclosed the letters below

  * * *

  ...a wondrous thing

  It seem’d....

  Dylan’s Journal: 07/05/2011, mid-morning, on the plane

  You can’t ever really imagine the way a forest looks until you are there in it. What people fail to imagine is the detail. When people think about forests they think about something like a child’s drawing; flat plains with straight, symmetrical trees growing at regular intervals like rows of posts. Once you are there, you realize it’s nothing like that. It’s chaos, without a straight line in sight. Everything you see is its own living being, fighting for water and sunlight. Every tangle of thorns, bank of undergrowth, hollow and stump is a microcosm, like a continent on a tiny scale. Every tree is alive.

  I love the woods. It’s the smell that brings them to life, that really lets you know you’re not just looking at a picture or watching TV, but are really there in the middle of it. You can nearly taste the leaf-mould; that damp scent like old houses where the moss is creeping I wish I could bottle it and bring it home with me. I’d sit at my desk and sniff it when I began to feel restless, the same way other people look at postcards.

  But here, as well as the woods and the mountains, there’s the water. That’s what makes Norway so different to anywhere else in Europe. We are nearly in Bergen, and the plane has just banked to give me a view of one of the fjords. It’s a huge, silver coil of water—so vast you could lose a whole city in it. I think we must be flying up the coast from the south. Perhaps it is Stavanger? I will ask Per when I see him.

  If the woods seem like countries and continents then the water is the sky, and space—massive, blank and unreadable. And the rock is jagged and tumbling, and huge, the way that an adult looks to a tiny child. I can’t describe it. I don’t have the skill.

  The landscape here sets my imagination racing. Flying into Bergen, I always get the same feeling. I feel like a little kid. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to think about things like trolls in the woods and the Jotun throwing boulders off the cliffs. I try and rationalize it to myself—my adult self—by pretending it’s serious and historic and not just fun and fantastical. I imagine Norwegians a thousand years ago sailing longships down the fjords out into the open sea, seeing the cliffs and the water all around them, and inventing these monsters to express their fear and explain the world. Then I daydream. Vikings are just as much a fantasy as the trolls, in this day and age.

  But really, that’s why I’m writing this. I always come on these trips so exuberant, full of these crazy thoughts that I feel like a different person to the Dylan behind his desk in London. It’s so hard to keep these ideas to myself. I have to express it somehow or else I’ll end up ranting to the flight attendants about Eric the Red, and they’ll probably think I’m drunk. I can’t talk to Per about it, either. He’s good company, Per, really he is, but he’s so cynical and hard about it all. He just sees all of this as something for the tourists. Besides, he sees the countryside here every day. He’s used to it, and he’s very much a part of the ‘modern Norway’—sharp suits, speaks four languages, loves Portuguese food. If I’m honest, I find it a little bit disappointing. He’s not the type of person I could start going on about trolls to.

  The seatbelt sign has just come on. I think we’re landing. If I don’t let the excitement out I feel like I’ll burst. I can’t wait to smell the woods again.

  * * *

  Dylan’s Journal: 07/05/2011, Afternoon, in the taxi

  We landed safely. Bergen airport is sort of wheel-shaped from above. It’s a classic piece of Nordic design—unashamedly efficient and sort of knowingly weird. I remember Per’s wife Greta, a Swede, showing me around the Lipstick building in Gothenburg one year —“A classic piece of dorky Scandinavia,” as she put it. The Norwegians are the same as the Swedes, really. Everything feels slightly ‘ironic,’ although I’m sure Per and Greta would stickle with me over that point.

  Per has given me the address to the campsite that he says I need to give to the bus driver, because he doesn’t trust me to pronounce Norwegian names. I’m not going there straight away, though. I’m spending my first night here in Bergen, so I’ve taken a taxi to Bergen city centre. I’ve asked him to take me to the Bryggen district, by the harbour.

  I’ve known Per for ten years. We used to meet twice yearly; us, Naotake, Wyatt and the others on the Photovolt project. Most of the work was done via Skype, of course, but every so often we’d all conspire together and come up with some excuse, about how the funding panel absolutely had to send us to Toronto or Bergen or Tokyo for some reason or other. It was always a great trip.

  It was a weird mix of personalities, that group. Naotake I never got to know; I mean I knew him well but I never got to know him away from his nationality. Something always got lost in translation. It’s not that his English wasn’t good (and much b
etter than my Japanese, of course) but it was hard to get a sense of him as anything more than a representative of his culture. He’d typically start conversations with things like ‘In Asian culture’, or ‘speaking as a Japanese man’, or something. Perhaps that was all he wanted.

  Now I think about it, Per and Wyatt never quite understood each other. Wyatt, the Canadian, is one of the biggest idealists I’ve ever met. He’s a real ideas-man as well. He would throw out suggestions and just sort of jam off the ideas. It didn’t matter to him. It was all about the creation. He was a real artist, in a way, and he never lost sight of the politics behind sustainable design, either. He was really passionate. He saw himself as someone who was building the future.

  I remember lying down on a roof terrace in Toronto with Wyatt, late at night, after having one too many beers, and Wyatt turned to me and said “Dylan, man, you know what the thing about this job is? We’re a voice to the voiceless.” I asked him what he meant and he told me that people who had no idea who we were were benefitting from our work. Photovolt, if it had caught on, would have saved fossil fuels and made electric cars a genuinely viable, affordable alternative to petrol. They could have spread around the world and the environmental impact would have had an influence globally, even to those people who would never drive the Photovolt cars. As petrol became scarce, Photovolt would have become the cheaper option in disadvantaged countries. It was sustainability for everyone, not just for a trendy few in Europe or the USA. And of course, the global affect on the environment would have much more of a beneficial impact in the developing world than in the west. It was about empowering people to change their own futures, not just waiting for us to do it for them. Wyatt had a real world vision.

  Per was more pragmatic. Not even that, but in conversation. Per sat back one evening, smiling, and told us all that he had just sold his house for nearly twice what he had bought for it. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. That was conversation, with Per. He was like a caricature of the kind of ‘straight’ that you didn’t really find in the world of sustainable engineering. And that wound Wyatt up the wrong way. Wyatt could never quite figure Per out, either. There was always something... not knowing, exactly, but as if he had a point to prove to us all. He was always sharp and business savvy, but it always seemed like there was a whole other side to him at home, which he was quite happy for us not to see.