DarkTalesfromElderRegionsNY

by Hieber, Leanna Renee

  She was hot…

  ~~END~~

  Leaking

  by David Neilsen

  He stood hunched in the darkness, empty eye sockets peering into the black, utterly useless. His grotesquely swollen legs stretched along the tunnel floor, allowing him to ‘see’ his environment: rusted rails, stone walls, rats scrounging through decades of garbage. An abhorrent hunger drove him to reach for one of the rats, but too many arms responded to his brain’s call and he became disoriented. Panic smothered his senses and he desperately tried to catch his breath, only to find no mouth through which to suck down air.

  *************

  Brian Jerrod woke with a jolt as the Red Line screeched to a stop. Groggy and befuddled, he nonetheless made his way to the platform as the train rolled away. His heartbeat slowed its frantic rhythm as conscious thought returned.

  This ends now, he thought.

  The tiles on the wall welcomed him to Canal Street, the oppressive fluorescents reflecting off the white walls as if taunting him with the fact that he’d overslept Houston yet again. It was becoming a common occurrence. For nearly two weeks he’d been falling asleep on the ride home into a horrific, repulsive nightmare. Always different, yet always the same. He was in the dark. He was hungry. He wasn’t human.

  The dreams invariably occurred at the same point of his ride —a few moments before pulling into Sheridan Square —as if triggered by something the train passed as it roared beneath the lonely streets of Greenwich Village. Standing at the edge of platform, Brian leaned over the tracks and peered back down the subway tunnel. Somewhere down there, he thought. It’s stirring.

  The first time he’d dreamed of the abomination, he’d dismissed it as the result of bad take-out. The second time, he’d blamed it on the vividness of the previous ride’s dream.

  By his tenth visit to that realm of horror, he’d understood.

  It wasn’t his dream.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the small flashlight he’d brought to work that morning for this moment. He’d studied the subway timetables and tunnel maps, knew the schedule, where and how far apart the alcoves had been placed.

  Somewhere deep in the darkness, something abominable was dreaming a dream of such horrific madness that it refused to contain itself within a single intellect. The dream was leaking out into the larger world… and into Brian.

  It had to stop.

  With a last look around the deserted station, he jumped down onto the tracks, flicked on his light, and marched resolutely forward.

  Avoiding the trains proved easier than Brian had expected. Their telltale rattle echoed down the tunnel far in advance of their arrival, and he had no difficulty ducking into the multiple indentations built into the walls as it passed. Led by the sinister connection drawing him deeper down abysmal avenues of darkness, Brian made his way from one track to the next, scrambling over concrete dividers and pushing his way through cobweb masterpieces undisturbed for decades.

  At length, he found his way into tunnels long since abandoned. His single point of light, dwarfed by the oppressive blackness around him, shone upon remnants of a forgotten and neglected past. Iron rails eaten away by time. Filth and putrescence covering the floor. The concrete bones of the city above crumbling away in the unending subterranean night.

  There was life down here. Foetid, shameful life scratching out a parasitic existence amongst the debris. Brian could hear it skittering around him, feel it hugging the walls and ceiling, eyeing the intrepid interloper who braved this inhospitable realm.

  And there was something else down here as well. He felt it first. A hauntingly familiar presence, seemingly all around him. He recognized the way the hair stood on his arms, the way his pores opened up, the way his mouth dried out.

  From his dream. Or rather, from its dream.

  “Where are you?” he called into the black.

  He was answered by a cryptic rustle or scrape from somewhere up ahead. Shining his woefully inadequate flashlight into the gloom, he journeyed deeper into the unknown entity’s lair. Here, the once proud subway tunnel grew even more decrepit. An unholy stench invaded his sinuses and he found himself tripping on sickly vines interwoven through garbage at his feet.

  “Why am I having your dreams?” he demanded. “What’s happening to me?”

  Something brushed against his ankle. He jumped back and aimed his light at the ground, finding only rotting vegetation underfoot. A glimmer of movement just outside his circle of illumination taunted his nerves, but no matter where he pointed the flashlight, the culprit was not to be found.

  His heart quickened as he pushed on, both drawn and repulsed by the siren call of whatever lay in wait to be discovered.

  “I know you’re down here!” he screamed, then stopped as the echo of his cry bounced around a chamber considerably larger than a subway tunnel. Raising his pitiful beam of light, he found himself within a long-abandoned subway station. Hailing from a far more regal time, majestic columns spiraled floor to ceiling and faded artwork hinted at egregious opulence. This had been a station for the well-to-do. A station of luxury.

  Now it was a station of horror.

  His first thought upon seeing the station’s singularly abhorrent inhabitant was, how does it exist without sunlight? His second thought was, how does it exist at all?

  A massive growth pulsated on one wall —a twisted, vile form of plant life which mocked the very laws of Mother Nature. Dozens of vines or branches or —God forbid— limbs spread from the central mass in every direction. Too late, Brian realized he had already strayed within their sphere of influence. The rustling or scraping sound, the movement beneath the trash —all stemming from this singular terror.

  Worst of all, however, was the gruesome joke at the center of the entity.

  A human body.

  “What in God’s name—” Brian’s cry was interrupted by a wave of gruesome sensation threading its fingers through his mind. He saw… things… burrow through his clothes and into his body. Felt them gestating within his flesh. Knew terrible hunger.

  He was dreaming again.

  It was dreaming again.

  “No!” Brian shook himself awake and shone his light at the unholy creature. “No more dreams! Stay out of my head!”

  In answer, the thing mentally vomited a final vision at him.

  He wrapped arm after arm around the surprisingly large rat and tore it to shreds, unleashing a torrent of blood from which his tender fingers lapped greedily. Though locked in the abhorrent horror’s dream, Brian nevertheless screamed as the first vine curled around his ankle.

  ~~END~~

  The Sixth Borough

  by Gregory L. Norris

  Cyrus forged deeper. Another few inches of gray block wall passed close by the sides of his face. The tightening press focused the ghostly howl of the wind, which mocked him as it freely wandered through the alley. Alley? Cyrus exhaled a humorless chuckle. Little more than three feet separated the Blayne Building from the converted luxury condos at 51 Hapsburg Street.

  Something crunched underfoot. A bit of board worn down by time more than weather, he assumed. Air circulated freely through the alley, but the overhangs high above had banished rain, snow, and sunlight. Cyrus pushed forward, kicking up dust. The rational voice in his head wondered how much of the cloud was made up of atoms left over from the World Trade Center towers. That cancerous shit filled his lungs as he struggled for breath, and the walls squeezed tighter, attempting to pin him between the two buildings. The Big C instead of the Big D —leapfrog one letter up the alphabet, die quicker. In the end, he thought while fighting the sting of tears, it would still be painful.

  Cyrus’s scarf snagged. He shook free of it. A knock-off bought on a street corner, it joined the scraps of wood, discarded bottles and one of his gloves already sacrificed. The giggling breeze cooled the sweat on his neck. He placed the hand without glove ahead of his body on the cold outer wall of the Blayne Building, which was ma
rked by vast, raised rectangular grooves, and left a smear of crimson. He’d been cut along the way. 51 Hapsburg was a vast patchwork of cracking gray scales that showed bare bricks bleeding through a crust of crumbling mortar.

  “Come on,” Cyrus huffed.

  One or both of the buildings threw his voice back into his face, along with the sour smell of his breath. Panic tickled him unpleasantly in the guts and behind the balls. The walls were closing in.

  “Of course they are,” Cyrus said aloud. “This is the way to Bella Vista —do you think they just open the gates and let anyone stroll right in?”

  He laughed again, only a crazy note had crept into his voice. Cyrus turned his head, and his ear grazed the Blayne along one of those raised rectangles. Wetness trickled, itched. He’d spilled more blood in his attempt to reach the other side of the alley. Cyrus shifted his head again, aware of the ache that accompanied the itch, and of other painful jolts spreading across his body —both ankles, his flank, the bare hand, and one knee now twisted at an awkward angle. The far end of the alley loomed somewhere in the platinum-colored glow filtering in from the street. Dust swirled in layers of toxic ash disturbed by the treads of his boots.

  “Bella Vista,” he moaned, speaking the name like an incantation in his attempt to remain calm.

  At first, the spell worked. Then Cyrus tried to pull in air. His next breath stalled while still in his throat. His chest was pinned tight against the ancient ruddy scab of bricks protruding from 51 Hapsburg’s outer skin. One of his boots had jammed beneath the bent knee —source of the pulsing pain in his ankle.

  He whispered the incantation once more, but when miracles failed to appear and the buildings refused to let go, freeing him from imprisonment and welcoming him to the Promised Land beyond, he swore a rosary of expletives.

  Go back, Cyrus told himself.

  The last breath boiled in his lungs, and his heart galloped, its cadence bounced off the Blayne Building’s cold concrete and broadcast through his bleeding ear. Back to Hapsburg Street, where he could breathe and, perhaps, see the clearer way through.

  But the two buildings standing guard had already sipped of Cyrus Wellington’s blood, and it was clear they thirsted for more.

  *************

  Here name was Penelope.

  “Pen-a-lope,” the new guy called her, as though she were some graceful creature, sure-footed, able to navigate life’s runway with ease and elegance. Not a short, chunky bottled redhead with thick ankles who walked pigeon-footed through the apartment in beaded moccasins, and who regarded Cyrus with disapproving scowls more frequently as the winter weeks deepened.

  To Cyrus, she was Penny, which was fitting given her accounting skills. Penny’s name was on the lease, which meant, like it or not, she was in charge. If he didn’t like it, he could leave.

  Cyrus didn’t like it, especially after she invited the new guy to move into the Federal-style townhouse on Morton Street.

  “Rich,” he said, extending a hand of sausage fingers with dirty nails.

  Cyrus hesitated from shaking, but knew that to deny the gesture would be a bad strategic move with Penny-Pincher watching, already giving him that imperious look.

  “Dick, did you say?” Cyrus asked, and shook.

  “No, just plain Rich. Pleased to meet you, roommate,” Rich said.

  Given her accounting skills, she must have loved his first name, Cyrus thought. He smiled, nodded. But that was it. He broke the shake and resisted the urge to wipe his hand on his jeans. Roommate? The 1,000-square foot living space had already taken on the feel of a box with the walls closing in after Cyrus made it clear he wasn’t interested in anything more than a friendly relationship with Her Lordship. Soon after, that look had appeared, and since had rarely left Penny’s face.

  *************

  The Wellingtons had money. Not a fortune. Certainly not enough to buy the triplex on Morton Street, which had reportedly sold for $3.7 mill months before Cyrus appeared at the door to the third floor rental. Only later, when Penny and Rich were screwing behind her bedroom’s closed door, did Cyrus figure out the rest of the details. He’d already gleaned that her father had made the original lease on the apartment, which boasted a fireplace with an elegant carved mantel, columned doorways ripe with petrified acanthus leaf carvings, and built-in bookcases. Rent stabilized, she’d revealed to Cyrus back in the autumn, before the arrival of Rich Chesser.

  Cyrus attempted to make sense of the couplets he’d scrawled in his Moleskin notebook with his favorite fountain pen and made faces in the smaller of the two bedrooms while they fucked. The noise filtering through the wall eventually drove him into the kitchen for a drink. There, he discovered that in her haste to have all her itches scratched, Penny had left her checkbook exposed from the top of the ratty tote that contained the spoils of her existence. A cup of Chai with extra sugar was all he really wanted, something that would soothe the soul but not rouse the monster living in his pancreas if he placated it with an extra dose of insulin. Lately, that fucker had been a real beast, letting him know it was conspiring against him alongside his two human roommates. An enemy from within.

  But then his eyes settled on the green plastic sleeve jutting out of Penny-Pincher’s cruddy bag, atop the ugly table she’d gotten from the curb —black metal with matching chairs, a relic of bad taste from the 1990s— and he felt compelled to look. Cyrus sensed the knowledge would be his undoing.

  The rent check to Mazol and Associates, the triplex’s new owners, got written that morning, placed in an envelope, and delivered to a lockbox on the ground floor. Chai tea, that’s all. He’d carry it back to his rented room, with its chipping white paint walls and single mattress and box spring on the bare floor, stacks of old books, and few bits of new technology. He’d stick himself with enough insulin to stop the shakes and keep the fog from sucking out his gray matter, hide under his ear buds, dial up music, attempt to edit the new poem into something reasonably clean, drown out the primitive grunts from the savages in the room next door that they tried to disguise from him, but not really. They were grunting more for Cyrus than each other. They wanted him to know, to hear. Two against one, they were gunning for him, readying to strike. To force him out of the apartment. And so Cyrus looked.

  The Wellingtons had money —comfortable was the proper word, thanks to a capsule chain of furniture stores in three towns, two in Connecticut, the other just over the border in Massachusetts. Cyrus’s dad, Andre Wellington, was that man you saw talking at light speed like an auctioneer about sofas, bedroom suites, and recliners with cup holders. The crap was made in China, and was about as comfortable as a sweatshop, but it was cheap, and cheap was good. Cheap sold well. Cyrus’s college graduation gift was a sweet $10,000.00—his to do with as he pleased. Use it to buy a car. Work on getting his M.F.A. while slaving away in the Little Dodd, Connecticut flagship store selling particleboard dinette sets on commission. Move to the West Village in order to find yourself; be an artist, a poet, making something out of whatever time he had left on the planet. Be anything but a furniture huckster like the old man, oh yeah.

  He paid the money-grubbing harpy seven hundred a month for rent plus half the utilities, and bought his own food. Rich’s arrival, she’d emoted, would cut things in third and help ease the money crunch. They still had it easy, because Dear Old Dad had waved his magic wand long before Mazol and Associates, and voilà—rent control!

  The table’s vinyl place-mats still bore the crumbs and streaks of butter from their pre-coitus toast and orange juice, according to the glasses containing pulpy residue. He’d bought orange juice at the nearest bodega a day earlier and knew without checking the fridge where his insulin was stored that they’d again helped themselves to his stuff.

  In Penny’s haste to go horizontal with Rich the Dick, she’d left her secrets exposed. Cyrus shot a glance down the narrow hallway—door still shut. He reached a shaking hand toward the checkbook, plucked it from the tote, and fumbled open the g
reen plastic protector. Cyrus didn’t use paper checks; Penny was up to Number 876, the latest written out for February’s rent to Mazol and Associates.

  He blinked to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, that his eyes hadn’t crossed, blurring a pair of ones together.

  $172.00, read the carbon on the top of the checkbook. No additional ones pulled free the longer he stared. Less than two hundred bucks a month, and she was soaking him for seven. He tallied up the last six months of payments out of his bank account into hers and tensed —he’d actually paid for two years of rent on the apartment on his own, with a few bucks left over!

  A shudder teased the fine hairs on the nape of Cyrus’s neck. He fought the urge, failed. The sensation tumbled, curiously hotter than chilly. She’d played him. Penny-Pincher was a master at this particular sport. She’d pinched him, all right. Stung him but good. Stolen more than money or groceries. She’d taken his freedom.

  Cyrus replaced her checkbook and tried to ignore the image of the open tote, with its frayed strands and jagged zipper down the middle; how it reminded him of her. He fixed himself that cup of Chai, heavy on the sugar, and downed it in three painful gulps. Then he grabbed his coat and scarf off the hall tree. The scarf, a deep forest green embroidered with a white calligraphy ‘W,’ had been a Christmas gift to himself bought on the cheap on the street corner on a day that felt impossibly distant, part of some different life.

  He switched slippers for winter boots and pulled on the coat. If he didn’t get out of there and fast, he saw himself kicking down the door and choking them both to death with the scarf —serious coitus interruptus, he thought and snickered.