by Mr. Deadman
He laughed. “Jesus.”
“You were thinking it, though, weren’t you?”
“No.”
“What, then? If you don’t mind me asking?”
He looked at a jetski buzzing along the water’s surface, leaving decaying waves in its wake.
“I was thinking about my wife,” he said. “Little Angus is due this summer, and you could say I’m out here training to be a dad. Well, training to do a better job than my dad did—though I guess that’s how everyone does it. Picking up where he left off on all of the good stuff, trying to break the bad cycles.”
“O-Of course.” She looked away. “Sorry. I’m so weird. That was wrong of me. Y-You can just go.”
“No, no.” He saw a piece of seaweed in her hair. Water droplets, flecked with sand, covered her bare shoulders. Had she been in the water, alone, in running gear? Wind blew; she didn’t even shiver. Molecules, purposeless, inertia—maybe she’d even tried to drown herself. “I felt like you before.”
She turned to him. “You did?”
“Yeah. My, um—my dad left when I was young.” He scratched at his neck. “Why am I telling you this?”
“Please,” she said, hugging her legs close to her chest.
“I felt just as you described. So insignificant. If he didn’t care about me, who would?”
He retrieved the seaweed from her hair, and gasped as she snatched his wrist in her hand. But he left the hand there as she stroked up and down his arm. Her dark eyes shimmered with a glint stronger than the dying sun could provide. With her touch, he was entranced. When she removed her hand from him, the sky had gone so cloudy it scared off most of the Scots; he could tell, as their echoing chatter had died. How long had they been here?
“God,” she said, “I mean, what are we saying? You’re worried about the future. I don’t care if I have one, and yet, all we have is today. Wouldn’t you say?” She played with a strand of hair and ran her hands in the direction of her breasts, her hard nipples poking at the neoprene. “It’s pointless, all of it. We deserve to have fun while we’re here, no?”
“I guess.” He bowed a little to hide a growing erection.
“Fraser, can you help a girl out?” She slipped off her sneakers. “I’ve been here alone for so long, lost in my own sad thoughts. Won’t you join me in the water?”
He stared into her eyes, which glowed with some dim green fire. It was no good. He was transfixed. The sky turned black, the only light coming from the moon, which created wide white streaks across the lapping waters, interrupted by the woman’s naked silhouette, her sports gear discarded on the sand. She walked in, not stopping even as the water chilled her. Neither did he as he followed her. Why? If anyone found out, maybe he’d say that for a moment, the fear of fatherhood eclipsed its potential joys, that the pressure of expectation had become unbearable. No; his head was empty. He was a horny zombie, guided by the divining rod of his dick.
Soon, they were two heads, bobbing in the water, her soaked hair tickling him as she swam ahead, the distance between them expanding; and yet the hair seemed to grow, winding itself around him. It soothed and seduced him in a way that kept his shock and fear at bay.
“Won’t you join me?” she said again, but this time in a booming, gravelly voice. Light shone out in front of her as if she had two beaming green flashlights embedded in her head.
He reached out to her with an arm drenched in gradually constricting black hair. The light of her eyes blinding him as he managed to grab her shoulder and spin her around. Her mouth gripped onto his arm. As he forced his eyes shut and screamed, she dragged him into the water. He tried to wrestle free to no avail, the teeth clamping onto his arm so hard he thought his hand had cleaved off. Screaming, soundless bubbles filling the water as he emptied of air. Reflexes seized his mouth and throat, holding them tightly closed, until his self-suffocation became too painful, and he chanced a breath, only for his lungs to flood with water, his last conscious memory before the drowning process enveloped him in its comforting arms.
***
As he regained consciousness, Fraser fell to his knees and tried to cough the water out of his lungs, only to find that he breathed it, just as he had breathed air. Water was denser, and he tasted every gulp. It would be a while before the maritime saltiness would dissipate. He could breathe still, just differently. This water was oxygenated. He looked up and read the glowing neon sign in front of him, which shone blurrily through the dark water: Nubile Equestrians on Demand.
“Be kind to our new recruit, ladies.”
The voice of that woman from the beach. He got up and stood on a mossy carpet in the murk. He approached her and winced through the water’s spottiness: it was like an old stuffy room plagued with macroscopic dust particles. The woman’s hair had condensed into a Mohawk, which flowed off her horse’s head.
“Where are we?” he said.
Her eyes glowed cones of clarity through the water. “Consider yourself at home now, amongst the other skeevs who answered our siren song.”
Men glowed with pink bioluminescence. They gathered around the underwater bar’s dancer’s poles, gesturing with plankton-coated “ones” that they would insert into the panties of the horse-headed dancers before them, as the day progressed. Special cocktails, designed with fluids heavier than brine, glowed pink, yellow, green, like paint under a blacklight. Olives had little lead anchors in them, mooring them to the glass.
“I’m nothing like these men, th-these skeevs, as you call them,” Fraser said. “I had a momentary wavering! I love my wife and child.”
She laughed deeply and whinnied, pointing to a slate above the bar, into which the words momentary wavering were chiselled.
“I resent that!” he said. “I—”
“You were just trying to help me out, right?” she said.
Her glassy horse eyes remained dark, but the way she arched her eyebrows was eerily human. He kept quiet; she’d stolen his last excuse.
“You think I didn’t already know about your whole dad-abandonment thing?” she continued. “You weren’t helping me; you were only helping yourself. I played you good. What?” She shrugged her shoulders. “I had to keep you enticed long enough for the beach to clear so I could take my clothes off. Then I didn’t need to pretend to be human at all, did I?” She ran her hands down her sides. “When the body looks like this, what difference is it to you what the person inside is like? Or whether or not I have a horse’s head? Though you were right that you’re not quite like these men—yet.”
“Pioneering Spirit?” said another horse-headed woman who came over. By her body, Fraser could tell she was mature, but her brown eyes burned with more vibrancy than Spirit’s. She appeared to be the club’s madam. “I trust you are being hospitable to our latest invited guest, Pioneering Spirit. We value our clientele, here. Sir, won’t you follow me?”
“Kelpies!” The saltiness diminished, and his diaphragm had adapted to producing a larger pressure differential in order to draw in brine, a heavier fluid, into his lungs. “I know about you.” He pointed at the madam. “The way you lure unsuspecting, innocent men into the water? You’re monsters.”
The dancers stopped spinning to face Fraser and pointed at him, braying with amusement.
“How dare you do this to me?”
“You can go back whenever you want,” Spirit said. “I might’ve dragged you here, but you swam out to me. I avoided your touch. You had enough chance then, and you can still leave. But you won’t.”
The sedated men sitting by the poles raised their glasses in honour of Fraser’s defeat.
“There will always be kelpies,” the madam said, “but we simply do what we do without questioning it. We don’t have free will like humans do, but we cause no harm so long as men resist our seduction—even slightly. I’ve run this bar for four hundred years. The men keep coming.” Sadness filled the madam’s eyes. It seemed she wanted to believe each new man did have the strength to leave. “I think you�
�ll find Shepherd’s Dee-lite entertaining enough for your entire afterlife.”
“What do you get out of this?” he said.
The dun-coloured, lime green bikini-clad Dee-lite approached and coyly flicked her mane over her eyes as she said, “Company.”
What kind of evil, immortal titty bar was this? So the women weren’t just pretending? They really needed his attention? Maybe he was meant to be here. For they could only catch those who willingly fell into their trap—and since he had, perhaps he wasn’t worthy of the life he’d built on the surface.
Dee-lite led Fraser to a private room, and began a sensual dance, grinding on a pole in front of him. He sat on a velvet couch, brazenly stroking his crotch through his shorts as he thought about his next move. She was a racy type: he could tell by her athletic figure, by her thighs, which could crush his Neanderthal brain into pulpy fish food with one squeeze while he stared into the Nirvana of her pussy.
She swung her hips in front of him as he considered this. He’d been to clubs like this before, only the women had human heads and weren’t genuinely interested in him. Scanning the adjacent room, through moss-soaked velvet curtains that were no doubt ransacked from some horny pirate’s ship, he saw tens of balding, middle-aged mediocre middle managers for whom this terrifying reality was a dream. And if what the madam said was true, it was no trap. This was not a place where momentary lapses in judgment resulted in permanent lives of regret: these were perpetually chosen existences, for the reaction was reversible at any time.
He looked around: men had sat by the poles while lichen, barnacles, coral and moss grew over them, and they became rheumy-eyed old pervs, more puddles than men, getting their jollies to tiresome equestrian gyrations, to the same old tawdry shite that crusted every alleyway since always.
Fraser thought again of his wife, of little Angus growing in her belly, how the boy would grow up without a father if he stayed. Who wanted a father like him, anyway? He imagined Angus as a thirty-year-old man, finally forgiving Fraser. In so doing, Angus would forgive himself for years of denying love because he thought his father, a man he’d never met, in so abandoning him, had pronounced him unlovable before he was even born.
What a tough, long journey that would be. Fraser’s dad had done the same to him. He thought of his father now, standing in the threshold of the front door on a grey February afternoon, staying only to scold his son for crying and begging him to stay, before leaving forever.
No! How silly this was! Time to leave, to demonstrate that he didn’t belong.
He made to stand up—but his limbs wouldn’t move. Had Dee-lite cast a spell over him, numbed his legs? Looking down, he saw the truth: he was coated with moss, stuck to the chair by some nondescript, biological jelly and plankton-based glue. His hands were liver-spotted. Years had passed.
The bar’s doorway creaked open once more. Fraser cranked his head as far as it would move to see who had arrived. It was a young, ginger-haired man, holding onto Spirit’s hoof, nervously peeking around the bar. For a moment Fraser thought he was watching his own arrival at the club, before he figured out who this young man was.
“Angus?” Fraser said.
The kid met Fraser’s eyes and gasped. “Dad?”
About the author:
Leo X. Robertson is a Scottish process engineer and emerging writer, currently living in Oslo, Norway. He has work published by or forthcoming in Helios Quarterly, Unnerving Magazine, Twisted50, and The Stockholm Review of Literature,among others. He also runs the "Losing the Plot" podcast, where he talks to writers, editors and readers about anything and everything. Find him on Twitter (@Leoxwrite), Goodreads or check out his website: leoxrobertson.wordpress.com .
Bloodstream Revolution
M.R. Tapia
My village is dirt poor. Death rich.
My 14 years of life have always been about embracing the end of life. We celebrate it every year, on the first two days of November. El Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. We bake the deceased’s favorite foods. We sing. We decorate tombstones. They're more like tomb-sticks, crucifixes twined together as grave-markers.
My country is also one of death. Right now, two revolutionary fronts are uprising against the government. Emiliano Zapata and others are rebelling in southern Mexico. Pancho Villa and others fight in the northern region. Both fronts attempting to free Mexico from itself, creating more death.
My family and I, we live in between both fronts. Central Mexico. When I say my family, I mean me, only me, an only child. My mother and father, gone.
The morning I lost my parents, my father had taken me with him to milk our cow. Roosters were shouting angrily at the rising sun. As we got to the corral, two soldiers were standing next to my father’s cow. They said they were hungry, so they ordered my father to butcher his cow.
My father refused.
They said butcher it, or they would shoot him and eat it anyways.
At gunpoint, my father refused. Fire exploded from the barrel of the rifle, and my father went down. A marble-sized hole in his forehead led to a fist-sized hole in the back of his head, chunks of hair-covered skull skidded next to me.
I screamed as the soldiers dragged me away from my father. The town stepped out from their houses and watched in silence as I was scraped along the dirt toward the edge of town.
Another scream froze my father’s murderers. It was my mother, the only brave soul left, running after me. She arrived at my feet, swinging her fists at the brutes, pulling at me.
The soldiers smirked and chuckled at her fortitude. Pain fired against my head as I was released midair and thumped on the ground.
My mother then fought for her own release, her hair balled within their fists, and she kicked at the dirt as they made their way towards the nearest house.
The nearest townspeople shifted to the side, allowing them to pass. Tears smeared down their cheeks as my mother clawed at the doorway, before becoming a shadow in the house. Her screams pierced my heart. Her shouts became tear-filled cries.
Her captors walked out, buckling their pants and shifting their gun holsters back into place.
One of the captors rendered me useless by swinging the butt of his pistol against my head as I ran towards my mother.
My mother shrieked in pain, only wearing her brazier as the other captor dragged her away toward the woods. Toward their horses.
***
My ancestors have also surrounded themselves in death. They sacrificed their own people to satisfy their bloodthirsty gods. When warriors, mothers, and babies died, they went to a warm, comforting heaven. Thirteen of those. The common Aztec people had nine levels to travel through in the underworld, each level a terrible trial.
Once the Spaniards came and destroyed the Aztecs, it all changed. We now only have one heaven. No underworld, only hell. And only one God.
But I don't believe in any religion. No, I only believe in death. It is the true affirmation of life. Life has no reasoning without it. Death is the only truth.
There are three types of death in my village: elder death, ugly death, and clean death. This is the reality. Elder death belongs to Father Time. Ugly death belongs to mankind. The clean death belongs to those unseen. I believe the tales which surround the unseen predators. The elders, they call them Chupacabras. I call them Chupas.
Elder death creates odd looking corpses. Their faces contorted and twisted in forever pain. Mouths stretched open, saliva strings stretched from one lip to the other, dried and strong as a spider’s web. Eyes wide in shock, no longer glossy. Fingers, twisted.
Until recently, most corpses came from the revolution around my village. Here, in between the fronts, we don't see much of the revolution, only the revolutionaries. Death by war is an ugly death, full of entry wounds and exit wounds. Chunks of skulls, gone; sometimes the back, sometimes either side. It's when the face is missing that I am truly disgusted with mankind: the front of the head is an empty space. The ugly death corpses, torn apart. Lim
bs, missing. Blood, everywhere.
My village and I, we remain motionless as death consumes everything. We aren’t like the bastard revolutionaries. We are the living dead. We are helpless. Pathetic.
Clean death is unique. Chupacabras, or Chupas, are partial to animals. They love livestock for the easy pickings. Lately, it's becoming unbiased to species, seeking only the warm-blooded. Cow, Revolutionary. Goat, Federalista. Chicken, villager. Chupacabras don’t care. But I do. It continues to feed.
The Chupacabras aren’t like other animals. Their killing methods are unique. Their prey, they’re left intact, only thing is, they’re depleted of blood. A few months ago, I witnessed their killing methods.
Nightfall had consumed the sun, the full moon bright and illuminating the foothills. I went out to my spot of escape, an old tree near the river with a hollowed out trunk. The elders say it could collapse any day. They tell us all to stay clear from it. In daylight, I obey as a means to stay unnoticed. At night, it becomes my refuge from mankind’s ugliness.
The soft trickle of the river was soothing as I sat in the hollowed trunk, until an unfamiliar sound overcame it. Peeking through one of the holes in the trunk, a goat came into sight, grazing near the lazy river. It wasn’t exciting to watch, until glistening eyes shone in the darkness behind it.
The top of its head peaked out from the shadows. It was flat from between the ears down to the tip of its muzzle, and its body ran the length of my lower leg. The moonlight revealed its hairless, oily brown skin. Its ears were tall and pointy. Two large canine teeth protruded from the upper jaw, curling over the lower jaw. Its eyes bright as stars on a clear night.
The rest of its body creeped out into the moonlight. It was just as hairless and oily as its head. Its frame was muscular, intimidating. Its forelegs slightly shorter than its hind-legs. Its spinal column protruded, giving the appearance of spikes.
