Julia stood at the breakfast table, eating from a can of peaches by candlelight and humming snippets of Rock-a-Bye Baby between mouthfuls. The flickering light on her calm, composed face made her look like an angel. And there sits the devil, Corey thought, glancing uneasily at the ghost baby in her jar on the table.
"You know, Julia," he said, "maybe it's not such a good idea to keep your baby in a jar like that. It's a bit. . .creepy. Maybe you should bury her. It'll make it easier for you to let go."
Julia looked at him with wide, demented eyes. "What are you talking about? What kind of sicko would want to bury a baby alive?" She snatched up the jar and hugged it to her chest. "But you're right about one thing. I shouldn't keep her locked in like this." She put a hand on top of the jar and twisted the lid a quarter turn.
"No!" Corey lunged toward her and made a grab for the jar. For a moment they held it between them, Corey's large tanned hands over Julia's small pale ones, and then the jar slipped and fell, shattering on the kitchen floor.
"My baby!" Julia gasped. She stepped forward, slicing her foot open on a shard of glass, and bent over to pick up the infant ghost that now lay on the floor. A wave of nausea overwhelmed Corey, and he dropped, retching, to his knees. David came rushing through the kitchen door, clad only in grimy boxer shorts.
"What's going on? I heard a crash. . ." He skidded to a halt. The ghost baby slowly rose from its bed of glass until it hovered in the air a few inches above their heads. It turned in a circle, examining each of them, its little face oddly intent. Seeming to come to a decision, it flashed a predatory grin.
Then, the screaming began.
Tracie McBride is a New Zealander who lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and three children. She published her first short story in 2004, and since then her work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 50 print and electronic publications, including Pulp.Net, Coyote Wild, Abyss and Apex, Space & Time, Sniplits and Electric Velocipede. She won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent for 2007.
She is a member of the Melbourne-based group of speculative fiction writers SuperNOVA, an associate editor for horror magazine Dark Moon Digest and vice president of the writer's co-operative Dark Continents Publishing.
—THE DREAMCATCHER
by Nate Kenyon
Jeremy Foxx stood at the kitchen window, flicking the edges of the photo he held against his breast. He watched as the sheet of rain swept across the hay field and up the sloping lawn to the house.
Mom always says a glass of milk is good for the nerves. The scrawny blond boy in wool socks and long underwear slipped away from the window and put the photo on the counter to pour a cup. The carton shook and a little milk slopped onto the kitchen table. He stared at the spilled milk and tried very hard not to think about what was waiting for him upstairs.
His grandmother had gone with his mother to the hospital. Apparently he was too young to go with them, but old enough to stay by himself for three hours. He was half-inclined to prove them wrong by breaking something. But then he would have to "face the music." That was no big deal for movie tough guys like Bruce Willis, but Bruce Willis had never met Jeremy's grandmother. When she yelled at you it was like sticking your hand in a hornet's nest and holding it there while they did what came naturally.
He took his milk into the living room and plopped down into a chair. Bugs hit someone over the head with a hammer on the television, and that helped a little. But he couldn't seem to focus on the cartoon. He kept looking at the ceiling above his head.
It's waiting for me.
Immediately he stuffed the thought into his handy mental drawer and locked it. Everyone gets jumpy sometimes when they're alone. It was, in the immortal words of his father, NO BIG DEAL.
But adults weren't always right. Some said that the way to beat something like that was to stare it down, but these were undoubtedly the same people still sleeping in a room with an especially strong nightlight.
The thing was, he'd never actually seen the coat tree move. At first he thought his mother was responsible for it. But why she would move the thing two or three feet to the right or left made no sense to him, and when he asked her if she was coming into his room in the middle of the night, she denied it.
He couldn't very well tell his grandmother. He knew exactly what she would say: Don't you go and upset your mother, not in her condition. It was hard enough when your father left, and now this. She needs her strength.
The coat tree was really a sculpture that Dad had brought back from a trip to Senegal years ago. It was carved from a rich mahogany and polished to a shine. Two legs and a long tail in back helped it stand up straight; the fat belly of the thing tapered up to a round ball that was much too small for a proper head. Two upraised arms made it look like a football referee signaling a touchdown.
There were really three places to hang things, the two arms and the little head in the middle. But when you put a hat on the head, the coat tree began to look a little too human. And if you hung your jacket around it, that was even worse. Alone and naked, the coat tree gave only the barest suggestion of human form, but with a little help it changed into a potbellied troll squatting in the corner, waiting to pounce.
When he told his friend Maria, she said that it must be possessed. She described a show she had seen on the Discovery Channel about primitive cultures. "You should get someone to come look at it," she said. "An expert could tell you right away if there was a spirit inside."
He didn't know anything about any experts. He tried to recall what his dad had said about the coat tree when he brought it home. But it didn't make any sense.
Jeremy realized he had forgotten his father's photo on the kitchen counter. He jumped up and ran to get it, and a familiar feeling of relief washed over him when he held it in his hands. Flick, flick, his thumb absently moved a corner up and down as he looked into his father's face. He forced himself to concentrate. Then he tucked the photo in the waistband of his long underwear and went back to the living room.
Bugs Bunny had given way to a talk show that featured a fat woman with a microphone and a bunch of bigger, fatter people who yelled at each other. A minute later the channel went to a commercial about a diaper that would make old people feel more secure.
That was when he heard a noise above his head.
A gust of wind shook more drops off the big oak tree near the window. The builders had placed the house right on the edge of a valley. Below the porch the ground fell off at a steep angle, and on clear days, if you looked out the back windows, you could see for miles.
Now he was thinking about different things. For example, theirs was the only house within three miles, and if he needed help, it would take someone at least ten minutes to get to him. That was assuming they knew he was in trouble and came right away.
He padded catlike up the stairs and paused at the top. His bedroom was at the far end of the hall, the door partway open. He couldn't remember if he'd left it that way.
When he tiptoed down the hall and peered through the shadows, the coat tree was standing in the middle of the room, halfway between its accustomed corner and his bed.
Jeremy stared. The coat tree stared back, its bulbous face as smooth and shiny as black ice.
He could feel his heart thudding so hard it shook his scrawny chest. His grandmother had come up to use the bathroom, as she always did before a car trip, and when she was on her way back down she must have moved it.
But why would she do such a thing?
I don't know, but she did, okay? Because coat trees can't move by themselves.
Okay. Fine. So he would just go back downstairs and watch TV. After he put it back in the corner, of course. Because if he didn't do that, he would be a big sissy. It was bad enough that all the kids made fun of him because his daddy had run away. Maybe he grew an inch already this year, but that didn't mean much if you couldn't even go into your own room and move a stupid coat rack back where it belonged.
Jeremy st
epped through the open door. His window was cracked open. He caught a hint of that metallic smell that came with a summer storm. The sky had darkened outside, deepening the shadows in the corners.
Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the coat tree by the neck and lifted it off the floor. The wood was slippery, but it was just wood.
He was almost to the corner when the coat tree wriggled in his hand.
He dropped it like he'd been scalded and ran back into the hall, slamming the bedroom door shut.
Oh god oh god oh god. It hadn't really moved. His hands were sweaty, and it had slipped, that was all. Just slipped.
I'm not going back in there, no way.
He cracked open the door and pressed his face into the gap. The coat tree leaned against the wall, one of its legs sticking rigidly up into the air. He watched it for a minute, but nothing happened.
Jeremy sighed. His hand went to the photo tucked into his waistband, and the callus on his thumb found the dog-eared corner and flicked it up and down, up and down.
As he made his way back down the hall to the stairs, his mother's voice from this morning popped up in his head. I have to go to the hospital today so they can run a few more tests. I need Gramma there. You'll be okay, won't you?
Jeremy imagined a very large, very mean-looking needle sinking into her belly. Hospital tests meant needles and knives and machines that made terrible noises as if they were slowly sucking out your insides. He had seen a picture once of a machine that had a hole in the middle the size of a culvert, and in the picture there was a person stuck halfway into the hole. It looked like it was eating the person from the head down. Gulp, there goes the hair, and the eyes, which must have tasted pretty good to a machine like that, because in the next picture the person had been almost all the way inside. The only things left were the person's legs and feet, sticking out like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz when the house fell on her.
He hadn't worried too much this morning. He simply pushed the whole conversation back into his handy mental drawer, slid it shut and threw away the key.
Why had the drawer just slid open again with a bang?
It's because I touched it!
The thought floated to the surface as he reached the foot of the stairs. For a moment he almost remembered what his father had said about the coat tree, but it slipped away again and he frowned in frustration. He had a terrible memory. His mother always teased him about it. You'd forget your head if it wasn't screwed on she would say when he was younger, or, how's my little absentminded professor this morning? Sometimes she would sneak up and tickle him until he gasped for mercy, and then she would give him a kiss on the forehead and say, that's to keep all those happy thoughts inside, where they belong.
***
He watched TV for a while. The clock on the wall seemed to be standing still. They had been gone not quite two hours now, though it seemed like ten, and if he could just last a little while longer without thinking about anything, he would be all right.
Wolverine was trying to slice up a bad guy on The X-Men, normally one of his favorite shows. Now he wondered why he had never noticed how ugly Wolverine really was. These were mutants, after all. Mutants were not like real people. They were taken over by something terrible that would either make them into freaks or kill them.
It had started to rain again. He turned on all the downstairs lights and that helped a little. But soon it would be getting really dark. This was when his father used to come home from work, before he had run away. Blink. One moment he was there, the next he was gone.
One hand on his father's photo, Jeremy got up to fix himself a TV dinner. This time he clearly heard, over the pattering of raindrops, a sound like a small puppy scrambling through the upstairs bedroom.
The rain began to fall harder as he took the stairs once again and faced the hallway. The wind picked up, rocking the house on its foundation. It was now as dark as night outside.
The door to his bedroom was open wide.
I touched it, he thought again, and shivered. Without warning an old, forgotten memory came back to him; he was not quite six years old, and he and his father stood on the porch looking out over the valley to the lights of town. This was perhaps only a month before his father disappeared. He had asked about the coat tree, and his father had told him it's a dream catcher, son. A very wise old man made it for me. It's supposed to catch all those mean little thoughts that only come out when you're sleeping.
Jeremy thought of a big net catching all his nasty thoughts and letting the nice ones through. Something like that couldn't be bad, could it? He had kept it in his room all these years, and he had hardly dreamed at all. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a nightmare.
His throat made a dry clicking sound when he swallowed. The darkness made it almost impossible to make anything out in his bedroom. It'll be standing right where I left it, leaning against the wall with its stupid ugly leg sticking up in the air like one of those dead animals on the side of the road.
And it was. When he reached the door he could just make it out through the gloom. He let out a great, shaky sigh, and was alarmed to discover he was close to tears. Stupid old coat tree. He stepped into the room and felt for the light switch. Stupid little sissy. . .
Standing there in the dark with his hand on the switch, he was struck once again with a memory of his father, in a brown jacket and corduroys (the ones with the patches on the knees), the smell of his pipe drifting away as he stared out over the valley. Jeremy had asked, does it ever get full? What happens then?
It has to find some other place to put them, I suppose.
Jeremy screwed his eyes shut tight and tried to close the drawer again on the memory, but this time it refused to budge. He opened his eyes and turned on the light, bathing the room in a soft yellow glow.
The dream catcher was looking at him.
Eyes had formed within the swirls. A bump that may have been a nose thrust itself out below the eyes; and then a slit for a mouth like the gills of a fish. The twisted legs had gained the look of flesh, and the arms now hung down at its sides. The eyes gained definition and wetness, the nose grew long and pointed, the cheekbones climbed upward and settled, as the lower part of its face sagged inward around a tiny jaw. The fleshless hole of a mouth lengthened and stretched.
The dream catcher turned its creaking head in the shadows. The little twisted man made of wood flexed his limbs.
A bolt of lightning split the dark sky. Jeremy screamed and staggered backward, hitting the door with his shoulder and slamming it shut, closing himself in. He screamed again, soundlessly this time, screaming for help that would not come, screaming in the face of such an impossible thing.
His father's face.
The dream catcher opened its mouth and darted forward. Two fangs of dark wood slipped out from under fleshless lips.
Jeremy searched frantically for the corner of the photo with his hand and felt it crumble into dust. He pressed back against the closed door, as if trying to force himself through.
There was nowhere left to go.
***
The rain stopped and a car pulled up to the silent house. Two women got out; one of them, the older one with silver hair pulled back in a tight bun, helped the other, pale-faced and thin, out of her seat. They moved together up the walk toward the front door.
At the back of the house, a small, dark shape wriggled out of a half-open window and into the big oak tree. It swung down to the ground and darted across the lawn and over the drop.
The wind picked up and the oak tree shook its thick pelt of leaves. Up in the corners of the lonely bedroom the shadows deepened, layer upon layer, reaching out to where little twelve-year old Jeremy stood, arms up and outstretched like a football referee signaling a touchdown. He had grown a wooden tail, which helped him stand upright. He was waiting to catch that first bad thought, his mouth frozen in a soundless scream.
Nate Kenyon grew up in a small town in Maine. He sold hi
s first novel, Bloodstone, to Five Star Publishing (Thomson Gale), in 2005. Bloodstone was published a year later to critical acclaim, becoming a Five Star bestseller, winning the P&E Horror Novel of the Year, and eventually becoming a Bram Stoker Award finalist in hardcover. Leisure Books published Bloodstone in paperback. Kenyon's second novel, The Reach, received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. It is currently being developed as a major motion picture. The Bone Factory was released in 2009, along with a trade paperback science fiction novella, Prime, from Apex Books. His fourth novel, Sparrow Rock, was released in May 2010, and is currently under option with Chesapeake Films.
Kenyon's stories have recently appeared in Shroud Magazine, Permuted Press's Monstrous anthology, Legends of the Mountain State 2, Horrorworld, Deadlines, and The Harrow, among others, and he has several more forthcoming. Four of his stories were featured in the 2010 Dark Arts anthology When the Night Comes Down. He lives in the Boston area and has recently completed his next novel, StarCraft Ghost: Spectres, for Pocket Books and Blizzard Entertainment. Visit him online at www.natekenyon.com.
—JAMMERS
by Bentley Little
When he was little, Coleman could not understand the concept of traffic jams. Each time his family was stuck on the freeway on the way to some destination or another, he would ask his dad why the cars were moving so slowly. His dad would patiently explain that this was a consequence of living in a crowded metropolitan area. Coleman would argue that packed freeways didn't just happen, there had to be a reason. He'd say that there had to be a car or truck at the very front, a vehicle either wrecked or stalled or moving too slowly that was causing the traffic jam.
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