Mind Hemorrhages: Dark Tales of Misery and Imagination

by Dane Hatchell

  “Bill, you okay? You hit the wall kind of hard,” Rachel said.

  Bill rubbed the back of his head. “I’ll live. But that vampire won’t be alive for long.”

  Caroline’s eyes blazed with anger. She grabbed the silver portion of the spear, and her hands started smoldering on contact. With a cry of anguish, she let go.

  “Whew, what a stench,” Jeremy said, the one who had driven the spear through her.

  “So, what do you do now? Call the police?” Zelda asked.

  “No, that’s not the way it works. We’re going to take care of the vampire and dispose of it. This is a war between good and evil. Between God and the Devil. You don’t have to be part of this, although we would like you join us. God could use more soldiers in his army.” Rachel reached out and pressed her hand on Zelda’s.

  Zelda turned to Caroline. She appeared as a scared little girl, not some horrible monster. Zelda looked to Rachel. “I’d like to stay and help.”

  “That’s great! A new world is going to open up for you. Just wait and see. You’ll learn about things that’ll change your life forever,” Rachel said.

  “Let’s get this over with. Where are the stakes?” Jeremy asked.

  Rachel let go of Zelda’s hand. “I left them in the truck. I’ll go with you. I need to get the body bag, and I want to get the medical kit and clean up her bite. Bill can stay here and watch things.”

  Bill pulled out a 9mm pistol from his side holster and chambered a round. “I’m ready. Wooden tipped silver bullets. Custom made by yours truly.”

  Rachel led the way with Jeremy following. “All right, cowboy. Don’t shoot that thing unless your life depends on it.”

  Bill waited for them to leave the room, and then approached Caroline with the gun raised in firing position. “You’re nothing but the spawn of the Devil. Don’t worry, we’ll be sending you back to your daddy soon.” Bill pushed the spear deeper into Caroline until the wooden part passed entirely through and the silver part touched her skin. Caroline twisted in pain as the wound started to smoke.

  Zelda moved away from the bed behind Bill.

  “Yeah, you’ll be smoking even more when you get to Hell,” Bill said, just before a vase hit his head rendering him unconscious.

  Caroline looked at Zelda with surprise as she grabbed the spear and pulled it out, freeing her from certain doom.

  Footsteps came up the hall. Caroline sprang by the bedroom door with the speed of a jaguar as Jeremy stepped in. Her hands went straight to his head. In one smooth motion, she twisted it and broke his neck.

  Rachel stopped at the doorway and gasped. Caroline grabbed her by her collar and dragged her into the middle of the room. Her fangs shot out, and she plunged them deeply into Rachel’s neck. Rachel made moaning noises indistinguishable from sounds of pleasure or pain. Caroline drank until the body became limp and there was no more blood to suck out.

  She let the body drop to the floor, and gazed at Zelda while wiping the blood from her mouth. “You saved me. Why?”

  “I think I did it because I don’t see you as being the monster they were making you out to be. You are a being just like any other. You have a right to survive too,” Zelda said.

  “But now you know I’m a vampire. What makes you think I can let you live knowing that about me?”

  Zelda bent down next to Rachel and unbuckled her weapons belt. She removed the survival knife from its sheath and pulled Rachel’s pants down to her knees. Caroline watched with a surprised expression.

  Zelda carved out a slab of meat from Rachel’s thigh. She stuck it with the end of the blade and took a large bite out of it right off the knife. “It’s way too fresh for my liking. But now you know a secret about me. Our secrets can be safe with each other.”

  Bill started to stir. Caroline ended his life quickly. She removed the plastic off of her bed and motioned Zelda to join her. The two spent the night together in passion as the bodies cooled on the floor.

  *

  Zelda put several grocery bags full of meat in the trunk of Caroline’s car. She needed to get home and Caroline wouldn’t need her car until tonight anyway. Zelda would have it back by the time she awoke from her daytime slumber.

  Caroline had some friends that were going to take care of Rachel’s truck and the bodies of the two men. Zelda had known about chop shops stripping automobiles. But had not known about ‘chop shops’ that sold human body parts. The market was larger than she had imagined.

  Zelda had never been in a relationship and was giddy with excitement. She was feeling love for the first time. Genuine love. There were so many things she and Caroline could do together. So many ways they could help each other. The arrangement couldn’t be more perfect.

  Finding food would be less of a chore now. One body could supply them both. Once the trap was set, Caroline could drain the blood, and Zelda would have the body to eat for later.

  It was a perfect match made in Hell.

  The End

  It Came from Black Swamp

  Terrence Hastings closed one eye while pulling at the barbed hook stuck in the lower lip of the catfish. The fish refused to make the task any easier, struggling to flip out of his firm grip. The layer of slime coating its skin made Terrence afraid it would squirt out of his hand and fall back into the water.

  The catfish stared back at him with bulging eyes, begging with a sad face for a return to its nurturing liquid home. The whiskers above its lip and under its chin gave it the appearance of a wise Chinese man. Terrence could have sworn he heard the fish curse when the hook popped free.

  Careful to avoid the pectoral fins tipped with irritating toxin, he let the fish drop into the ice chest with the rest of his catch. Not a bad haul so far, having almost enough for the night’s meal. This would make the third time this week fish would be on the menu for dinner. He didn’t mind, and he knew his wife wouldn’t either.

  Terrence pulled out a fat red worm from the bait box and threaded it carefully on the hook. He returned his expanding buttocks to his lounge chair at the end of the pier and dropped the hook in the water. The plastic bobber floated on the surface looking like a big red eyeball staring at the sky.

  “Hi, honey. How’s the fishing today?” his wife, Patricia, asked.

  “Can't complain. I did hook a couple of bullheads, but tossed them back in the bayou. Funny, when we lived in Minnesota we would have eaten those. There’s so many channel cats here in Louisiana we can be choosy. Channel cats taste so much better.”

  “They sure do.”

  “I guess it all has to do with the diet. Bullheads will eat just about anything, including dead fish. Channel cats only eat live bait.”

  “We’ve been here for two months. You’re not getting tired of the same routine, are you?”

  “Heck, no. I lived the first sixty-two years of my life in the frozen north. I'm enjoying my retirement, feeling warm and toasty in this subtropical weather. Living by the water is a lifelong dream. I'm going to live this dream until the day I die.” Terrence lifted his line to check the bait.

  “It certainly is ‘warm and toasty’ out here. A little bit too much for me. I just wanted to come and see about you. Don’t let time get away.”

  “Baby, I got all the time in the world,” Terrence said, looking up at the blue sky and basking in his new stress free lifestyle.

  Patricia strode down the pier toward the house, careful to avoid remnants of discarded fish guts and dried bird poop.

  “I got a big one!” Terrence shouted.

  Patricia turned and saw her husband lift a large channel cat from the water. The pole bent from the weight with the fish nearly touching the pier.

  “Look at the size of it! I bet it weighs ten pounds!” Terrence stood at the end of the pier, holding his prize before him for his wife to admire.

  Before Patricia could utter a word, a huge white creature leaped out of the water behind Terrence. A long massive mouth spread wide showing rows of pointed teeth clamped down acro
ss his chest and pulled him into the water.

  It happened so fast Patricia didn’t believe her eyes. Terrence was there one second and gone the next.

  “Terrence . . .” she called softly in disbelief. “Terrence!” She ran to the end of the pier and yelled his name.

  Terrence plunged into a netherworld of cool, wet darkness. The air bubbled out his lungs as two inch teeth sank through his soft skin and found bone. It all happened so fast it had hit him like a powerful locomotive.

  The water boiled as the enormous alligator spun over and over, subduing its prey until the struggle ended.

  Terrence’s consciousness faded. He watched his last few bubbles of air float toward the surface. The dream he had been living had come to an end.

  ***

  Clovis Gilchrist sat on his porch cutting trash fish harvested from his traps into strips for bait. Blue crab season was at its peak. His morning haul netted over twelve dozen of the biggest and fattest crabs he'd seen in the last 10 of his 50 years of life.

  Lake Maurepas connected Lake Pontchartrain through Pass Manchac; otherwise known as ‘Black Swamp’ by the locals, as the infamous Black Swamp was located on the northern section of the pass. Gunther Gilchrist, Clovis’s father, built the cypress wood three room house on Black Swamp in the late ’40s. His father ignored the folklore of the Swamp Witch, Addie, and of the tortured souls haunting the crystal waters, a result from an unnamed hurricane killing all but 20 residents of the near town of Frenier in 1915. Gunther purchased the ten acres of land his house now set on for only one hundred dollars.

  A studious man of German descent, Gunther married a young Cajun woman named Bertile. The swamp and the two lakes it connected harbored a bounty of fish and crustaceans, and provided an endless supply of food to live on. The excess catch had been sold at the local fish market for cash. By fate and by heritage, the rugged, but simple lifestyle had been passed on to Clovis, their only child.

  Clovis’s parents died within six months of each other before he reached the age of fifteen, taken by the Grim Reaper in the form of lung cancer, though neither smoked. There were those who blamed the Swamp Witch and her evil spells. Others blamed the ghosts that drifted along Black Swamp, jealous of those who walked among the living.

  Spying a large black cockroach following the trail of fresh fish drippings on the porch boards, Clovis took careful aim and spat a wad of warm tobacco enriched spittle on its head.

  “Take dat, you disgusting bastard. Get you’self on outta here.”

  Though only a lowly insect, its species survived a hundred million years of evolution by sensing when to flee and live another day. It turned and headed back to the pile of rotting firewood near the side of the house.

  The distinct cadence of an Evinrude 250 hummed down the pass. Clovis could identify any boat motor by its sound alone. Engine noises were similar to tones of people’s voices. He knew this particular engine belonged to the sheriff of St. John the Baptist Parish.

  His heart skipped a beat at the thought of the Sheriff snooping around. Self-preservation took control, directing his attention toward the 60-quart ice chest near his front door. He sprang to his feet letting his fish and knife fall to the porch as he rushed over and grabbed the handle of the cooler, intending to hide it inside the house. It was full of twice the legal limit of speckled trout from his fishing trip from the day before, or so he believed.

  Giving it a mighty tug, anticipating over fifty pounds of fish and ice, Clovis jerked it off the porch and crashed off balance against the front door, bruising his shoulder. The ice chest was empty.

  His son, who he affectionately nicknamed Rooter, apparently had taken him up on his invitation for a cooler full of fresh fish. ‘If you want ’em come get ’em. You clean ’em they’re yours,’ Clovis remembered saying.

  The Sheriff was halfway down the pier, his arms swinging gorilla-like by his side. Sheriff Michael Browning filled his 44" waist pants with that ‘no ass at all’ look in the rear. The back end practically caved in. His bottom lip bulged from a quarter can of Skoal, but his lip was in more proportion with his face than his beer keg gut with the rest of his body.

  Clovis remembered the Sheriff from his younger days, how fit and trim he was from a stint in the U.S. Marines. Sitting at a desk job had its way of adding on a few pounds each year. Sheriff Browning now found himself tipping the scale near three hundred.

  “Clovis Gilchrist, now just what in heaven’s name are you doing standing there with that shit eating grin smeared across your face?” Browning said.

  “I don't know what you talkin’ ’bout Sheriff. I was just t’inkin’’bout how my ice chest is empty, and I got no fish to eat.”

  “You can save your sad stories for someone else. I've heard them all before. I'm only here to talk to you about gator hunting.”

  “Whoa, Sheriff. I ain’t be dynamitin’ nothin’. I don’t care what stories you heard.”

  Browning lifted his hands and shook his head. “I'm not here to start any shit, Clovis. But I ain't going to take no shit either.” Browning stopped, and made a face like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “I need your help.”

  Genuinely stunned, Clovis stuck his right pinky in his ear and jostled it about. “You say you need my help?”

  “Don't make this harder on me than you have too. You can think of it as doing a service for your community,” the Sheriff said. “You've been keeping up with the news, the missing people on Pass Manchac?”

  Clovis closed one eye. “I hear t’ings. I travel Black Swamp every day of my life.”

  “A fourth person in the last six months has gone missing. We suspected gators all along, but we got an eyewitness on this one.

  “The victim’s wife reported the gator grabbed her husband as he stood on the edge of the pier in front of their house. The man-killer should be easy enough for you to identify. It’s an albino, and it had to be pretty big for it to get that high out of the water to grab him.”

  As if believing the stories over the last several months for the first time, Clovis’s eyes turned as big as saucers. He uttered two words, “Ol’ Lu.”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean that old wives tale of the Swamp Witch's pet gator.”

  “Dat ain't no wives’ tale,” Clovis retorted. “The Swamp Witch is angry. She warned the town that if dat con-du-minium was built, she would curse the waters.”

  “That senile old woman, Addie Landry? She can't even gum the kernels off an ear of corn. The only curse that woman ever knew is when she was young enough to still have her period.”

  “She may be old, she may be weak, but her magic is strong. I can’t help you Sheriff, you on you on. The best t’ing for you to do is get the permit pulled for construction right now. They is just clearing the land. There is still time.”

  Browning lowered his head. “I know the power of local legends. This one though, I hoped you had grown out of. Sometimes age has a way of shattering both the wonders and fears in life.”

  “Sorry, Sheriff. Some t’ings just aren’t meant to be.”

  “Well, Clovis, I do appreciate your time. You let me know if you change your mind.”

  I ain’t changin’, Sheriff.”

  “Okay. How about your son, Albert? You taught him everything you know. I'm glad he decided to make more of his life and got an education. But there ain't nothing you can do that he can’t match.”

  Clovis sighed. “Maybe, maybe not. I learned the boy real good. He is his own man now. Gator season is short. He helps me make my limit at season’s end. You have to ask him you self, Sheriff. If he’s smart, he’ll say no.”

  Browning raised his eyebrows, as if he could sense the fear harboring inside of Clovis. He went to speak and held himself in check, and then turned and walked away.

  ***

  Rooter Gilchrist huddled inside his Ford King Ranch 250 for the fifth night in a row. He mindlessly rubbed the St. Christopher medal hanging from his neck for luck. The medal was one of the few possessions that li
nked him with his mother, who had died before he reached the age of five.

  Rooter earned his nickname from his insatiable curiosity as an infant. A pile of clean clothes waiting for someone to fold was a mountain to explore. What mystery hid between the sheets of a bed? Rooter always took the challenge. Even couch cushions proved to be doors leading to hidden treasure. He delved right in with no fear of the unknown.

  This is one heck of a way to spend my vacation, he thought. A sentiment his wife, Claire, and his seven-year-old son, Gaston, shared. Rooter put the annual beach trip to Florida on hold. One of the motives for sacrificing his family fun was the ten-thousand-dollar reward for the capture or killing of the alligator menacing the area. The other motive, and more important, was to protect his financial investment.

  Cyprus Point Condominium’s primary goals were to free the wealthy residents of New Orleans and the greater area from the concrete and steel of urban life, and their money. The elite complex would offer the latest in luxury living, with access through Black Swamp to lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain just a step outside the door.

  The recent ups and downs of the stock market motivated Rooter to invest his savings in a local business that ‘guarantied’ to triple his holdings within six months of completion.

  The only way he knew to eliminate any controversy out of the minds of potential buyers was to assure the killer alligator no longer hunted the region.

  His hope of killing the beast quickly and salvaging a few days of vacation to spend on white sands and turquoise water ended the night before. Though a total of ten alligators took the bait thus far, Old Lu remained free to haunt the waters.

  Rooter’s GPS tracker beeped three times, pulling him from the refuge of thought, and back to the dark waters of Black Swamp.

  Exiting the truck and giving his body a quick dousing of mosquito repellent, he waited for his target to travel fifty yards before trailing it in his bass boat.