DARK ENTITIES
David Dunwoody
DARK ENTITIES
David Dunwoody
This eBook edition published 2012 by Dark Regions Press as part of Dark Regions Digital.
www.darkregions.com
Dark Regions Press
300 E. Hersey St.
Suite 10A
Ashland, OR, 97520
© 2012 David Dunwoody
Dark Entities is the first book in the New Voices of Horror imprint from Dark Regions Press.
Available in signed collectible editions featuring interior illustrations by artist Tim Moran at:
www.darkregions.com/books/dark-entities-by-david-dunwoody
Table of Contents
Foreword
In The Clay
Brownlee’s Blue Flame
The Ambrosia Supper Club
Minotaur
Hell's Razor
Sunset
A Carrion To Wounded Souls
Birthright
The Abbot and The Dragon
New Eyes
The Run
Foreword
Imagine sitting on a small chair in the center of a room. The walls are high, the floor is white, everything is quiet. You remember the moment you sat down but nothing more. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know what your name is, you don’t remember your friends or your family or what you do for a living. You are sitting and alone; this is what you know.
Like the floor, the walls are white. And when you look up, you see that the walls go on and on. There must be a reason for this, although you have no idea what that reason might be.
You decide to stand up; you can’t.
Your head can move but your arms and legs will not. Perhaps you’ve been drugged. Perhaps you have been paralyzed for years and years. This is a mystery without an answer.
A door opens; there is movement behind you.
A tall man steps into your line of vision. He has a lop-sided sickle for a mouth, eyes that are burned open with a blowtorch and long fingers that look like the legs of a crab. In one hand he holds a butcher knife. In the other he holds a child. She is four, maybe five. She has blonde hair and big blue eyes. And she is screaming. You know the girl is very frightened, but you can’t hear her shrieks. Her screams are lost. And as you open your mouth to voice your concern you realize something that startles your immobile body into flinching.
You are deaf.
The girl continues screaming.
The man with the burned eyes raises his knife.
You try kicking your feet but they will not kick. You try raising your arms but they will not budge. You are paralyzed, and the man with the sickle for a mouth is grinning. His eyes grow dark and wide. They seem to be melting down his terrible ashen face.
The knife comes down hard and fast.
Steel rips apart the young flesh and the child’s face splits in half.
Blood splashes the air, leaving a long splatter of red on the white wall.
And although you turn away, horrified and repulsed, you see something from the corner of your eye. Something so disturbing and impossible that you turn towards the awful scene again, just as the knife is raised a second time.
There are insects spilling onto the floor, hundreds of them. Big ones. Black ones. Bugs with wings; bugs with stingers. Bugs the size of baseballs and heavy like rock. They are coming from inside the child’s face, falling onto the floor and running. They leave little streaks of blood everywhere they go, but they are only traveling in one direction.
They are traveling towards you.
The knife slams down a second time, stabbing the child in the throat. Dots of red spray into the air like mist. The man yanks his arm back and forth, left and right.
Blood drips.
Insects fall.
The girl convulses and her eyes roll back. She is in shock and she is dying.
But you’re not looking at the girl with her throat cut or the man with fingers like crab legs. You are looking at the bugs––the big bugs, the black bugs, the bugs with wings that are heavy like rock. They are crawling up your legs now, crawling onto your lap. Soon they will be scurrying onto your face, onto your eyes, across your lips and into your mouth.
The man drops the child.
She falls hard; her skull crashes against the floor.
You scream, wondering where you are and why things have become so terrible. For this place is incontestably dreadful, a little corner in hell. Nothing else makes sense.
Well my friend, I can tell you.
I know exactly where you are and why things have turned so grave.
You have entered the world of David Dunwoody; things are bad here.
So pull up a chair and stay a while, but be warned. These stories aren’t fucking around. They’re not designed to make you smile. They’re designed to make you nervous, make you scared. And things aren’t always what they seem. Bad things happen within the pages of Dark Entities––bad things, nightmarish things, evil things.
Some things go bump in the night.
But with Mr. Dunwoody, they most certainly do more than that.
James Roy Daley
Author of The Dead Parade
In The Clay
The man in the light-blue windbreaker is circling the block for the eleventh time. When he reaches the property line between my house and the vacant lot, he will have completed one-half of the next circle. Eleven and one-half times two is twenty-three; the significance of this does not escape me and I watch his slow approach.
He’s in his fifties, salt and pepper hair, prominent jowls, big hands deep in pockets. I read the creases in his face. Faces are shaped and etched by psychology, so much so that a trained eye can follow a laugh line and tell whether the flesh prefers naughty limericks or philosophical ironies. Windbreaker’s face is almost absent of laugh lines, those remaining faded and swallowed by the puffy red cheeks of an alcoholic. His jowls are heavy with shadows of grimaces and frowns and the echoes of screaming arguments. The eyes, they’re small and dark beneath a jutting brow. He only sees what he wants to see and what he sees feeds his anger and anxiety. We all kill ourselves like this.
I’m no saint. My face, as it were, is all lines, but indiscriminate scribbles meant to conceal my true self from the world. How would someone like Windbreaker describe my face? “As if—“ No, “Like someone jammed a pike right in the middle of it and gave it a sharp quarter-turn.” It’s a snarl of pink tissue, obscuring my lips and eyes, my nose a scabbed-over ruin. Brightly-colored ribbons of infected skin rope around my hairless head, but I’m not worried about that. The infection has to eat through all the scar tissue that, like clay, surrounds my true face.
Windbreaker stops on the property line, his gaze shifting from the empty lot to my squat. I cower beneath the broken window. I’m not sure yet whether or not he’s an avatar sent here for me. He looks like a tired old man, but they can look like anything: children, mothers, painted clowns. I peer over the edge of the sill and see him stepping onto the lot. He stands on the ground, studying it, then crouches and pushes one stubby finger into the damp earth. It doesn’t yield easily; he twists his wrist and screws his finger down. Paying no mind to the old house, his fascination lies solely with that barren lot.
There’s a little hole nearby, and he moves to study that. One hand plucks thin white gloves from the pocket of the windbreaker. He shoves his hands into them, splaying anxious fingers.
Pulling my hood over my head, I shuffle across the floor. Insects scatter and reform their milling ranks at my back. I find the rust-eaten knob in the dark, turn it with a squeal.
I pull the door open and he looks up. His narrow gaze sharpens further. I back away into the house, inviting him in.
/> Boldness enters his step as he crosses the porch and, as I expect, flashes a police badge. Just a tired old cop after all. “What’s your name?” His voice is sandpaper on gravel. He drinks a lot and has a cold. “I honestly don’t remember.” I tell him. I bring my face into the light.
Windbreaker doesn’t flinch. He takes it all in with a pitiless stare. He’s seen worse, he’ll tell me, in graver circumstances. “I’m Detective Kaufman.” Another flourish with the badge, and he puts it away, filling the door frame with his girth. “You own this place?”
“I stay here. Is that a crime?”
“As a matter of fact, it is.” But he’s preoccupied; stealing another glance at the adjacent lot he asks “Who else hangs around here?”
“No one. I don’t make trouble.” Besides the hooded shirt, I’m wearing baggy sweats, and I cross my legs on the floor. “Sometimes I go to the shelter on Luther. That’s all.”
“You’re well-spoken.” Kaufman studies my twisted visage as if it might help him guess my lineage. My voice still has a bit of an Eastern European cadence to it. “How’d you end up here?”
“When one falls from a mountain, they don’t stop until they hit bottom.”
“Did you know this house is condemned?”
“Asbestos. It falls from the ceiling. Bugs.”
“What happened to your face?”
The hundred-thousand-dollar question. I fold my callused hands and look up to give him the full view. “I rearranged.”
“You sculpt.”
An unexpected choice of words – surprisingly intimate. Was I wrong? Is he an avatar? I clench my toes and wait.
“You make pottery.“ He continues, “I saw it at the ceramics shop down the block. I assume you dig your clay from this lot over here.” So it comes together – his fascination with the lot, with the holes pockmarking its surface – and with me.
“So, then, I’m under investigation for stealing soil?” My wretched spiral of a face tightens in a semblance of a smile. Kaufman smiles back.
“Doug, the guy at the shop, says he lets you use his kiln.” He steps into the room, comfortable now as he works the suspect. “He sells your pots on a shelf right by the door, that’s nice of him. Does he take a cut of the money?”
“We’re both happy with our arrangement.” I reply.
“Let me get right to the point. He towers over me. “One of your little masterpieces broke open. There was a lady’s pinky finger inside.”
He’s no avatar.
He isn’t what chills me to the bone in this moment. No, he’s delightfully ignorant of the revelation that pours from his chapped lips. “Neatly severed – surgically, maybe. Or maybe some sort of terrible accident. We’ll know soon – the finger was well preserved, you know.”
The smile hasn’t yet left his face. He awaits my response.
“They’re coming.” I breathe, spittle running over the shelf of my chin. “It never even occurred to me…they’re building…coming…”
He kneels. “All right pal, just calm yourself down. Who’s ‘they’? Tell me.” Now I’m in his snare, he’s thinking, time to cut through my derelict’s ramblings to the prize, to my crime, my shame. “Talk to me,” he says.
“I was only a king of men,” I stammer,” How many kings have there been, who bought and sold their kingdoms – yet they still pursue me! Ravenous devils! Don’t you see why I’ve disfigured myself? To hide from them? And you want me to speak their names? I’m no madman!” The cold fear pitted in my gullet makes my teeth chatter, and I see daylight fading over Kaufman’s shoulder. It’s all coming down, isn’t it? And here I have only the skeptic of skeptics to mock me! “I gave my soul for a thousand years’ reign, before Christ, before science made fools of us all. At the very last second of my last day I watched the city walls crumble to dust – and I fled. They sang my name and called for my debt to be paid, but I ran. I’ve never stopped running. I’m so tired, and stupid, I never saw them coming—“
“The finger!” Kaufman shouts. He shoves a plastic bag into my face. The finger tapers to an accusing point.
I knock it from his hands and pull the hood over my eyes. “No!” I scream, again and again, and steel bonds close over my wrists.
* * *
They’ve erected floodlights around the perimeter of the lot. Men with instruments crawl along the earth, nattering insects. I’m cuffed in the back of a police cruiser.
Kaufman strolls across the scene and opens the door opposite mine, sliding in. What little I had is now all is, and that, for the moment, includes me. “They’re mapping out what it looks like under that field,” he says. “We’ll have a complete picture soon, then we dig. Until then, I’m giving you one last chance. Just tell me what you know, what you’ve seen. C’mon, no one thinks you buried all those people yourself. But you do know something – I can see it in your face, no matter what you’ve done to it.
“Now, who are ‘they’?”
“You mean the bodies, or my pursuers?”
“Start with either. The bodies.”
“I’m quite sure that you’ll find no means of identification for any of those so-called corpses. Oh, I know all about fingerprinting, and DNA, but there are none of either to be found.”
He frowns. He knows that the flesh on the pinky finger had no ridges, no creases; it was just translucent putty. He can dig and dig and collect gruesome treasures, but will find no purchase.
“I’m done for.” I laugh. He sighs. “You know, I was actually off duty when I first came out here. My daughter bought that pot, painted it and gave it to me. I must’ve dropped it when I got home, or set it on the edge of the table. I can’t remember.”
“What was the occasion?”
“Anniversary. My wife – her passing. Maggie and I get together and exchange gifts every year. It helps, a bit.”
He nudges me. “Your turn. ‘They’.”
An officer trudging past steals a glimpse at me. They’re bringing in a backhoe now. Kaufman drums his fingers on his knee.
“I sold my soul.” I tell him again. “I reneged on my half of the bargain. Hell comes.”
“The devil made you a king. In ancient times.”
“Devils. Yes.”
“Tell me about no fingerprints and no DNA.”
Before I can answer, a gloved hand raps on the glass by Kaufman’s head. He slips out with a quiet scowl.
Despite the long, gnawing knowledge of what was coming to me, despite the cold inevitability of it all – and maybe now I’m even a little relieved – despite that, there’s no stopping the pressing dread that seeps from the earth and permeates the garishly-lit excavation. They feel it too; I see the investigators glancing over their shoulders at a prickling on their necks. The vacant lot suddenly seems miles from any city center. Beyond the reach of the floodlights is only blackness without depth or detail. Like we’ve entered the slavering maw of the beast and only I, shackled in this flimsy metal shell, realize it. Like we’re already dead.
The backhoe drives its greedy hand into the clay.
The car door opens, and terror spikes in my throbbing veins; but it’s only Kaufman. He seems lost. His hands grasp at unformed questions in the air. “Bodies…” He says to himself. “The bodies…dozens…so far down, they may have been there for decades—“
“They weren’t buried there,” I whisper, “they grow.”
“Our instruments found them stacked atop one another, crisscrossing, latticework.” He turns toward me, eyes boring through my skull. “What did you just say?”
“They grow.”
The dark is closing in. The lights outside are beginning, ever so subtly, to die. “Detective, I’m putting you on. You should go. Go now.”
“You’re telling the truth,” he insists, “somewhere in what you’re saying is the truth. Tell me!”
“I can’t. I won’t! Don’t you feel it?”
“I feel…yes. I feel it. What is it?” He grabs my arm. Kaufman has a daughter and
the memory of a wife. Even that would be too much to bear losing just to know the truth. Tendrils of darkness slide over the glass. Outside, the backhoe raises a clump of earth, with one pale leg dangling out the bottom—
“Get out. Go. Come back tomorrow. You’ll have a tomorrow if you go!”
“You were a king.”
“I’m nothing!” The word scrabbles about in the back of my throat like a panicked spider. “I’m already damned! Leave me!”
The men have stopped their digging.
Kaufman won’t let me go. He’s right on the precipice of understanding and he can’t stop, so much like the relentless idiot-things that…”Hell comes. Please just go and leave me to this. It’s over for me. Kaufman!”
“They grow?” He muses. “In the earth? No prints, no blood, no—“
“No navels, no pricks, no life. God made men from clay and breathed souls into them. Hell, it can forge flesh and bone but it can’t endow them with a spirit – no, instead Hell uses these vessels to move between worlds. Conduits, Kaufman, a goddamned ladder – not latticework, you fool, rungs on a ladder and now you’ve helped them the rest of the way!”
Pinpricks of light denote the lot, vague patch somewhere outside the glass. Then it all goes black.
Kaufman paws at the window. White hands push through the night-shroud to fill his vision. He’s gibbering here in the backseat and their pale moon-faces are smeared across every inch of glass and, I don’t know, I just can’t help laughing and screaming out their wretched names.
Brownlee’s Blue Flame
The soles of Death’s feet padded silently, catlike, down the tunnel. All around him flickered and danced tiny flames set in candles forged from milky tallow; he felt not their heat, not did his eyes follow the hypnotic movements of the flames. Death studied the dark spaces in between.
Melted fat pattered on the cave floor at his back. He turned and watched as a spent candle sputtered and died. A life, extinguished; she had been old and ached terribly when bouncing great-grandchildren on her knee, though she’d kept the pain to herself. Death crushed out the smoldering wick and saw her off to eternal rest.
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