Dark Things IV

by Stacey Longo

  We walked out the back door and to the smoke shack. He led me around the corner and I felt the blood rush away from my head. The world grew light then dark and seemed to spin. I felt as if I would pass out.

  Annie was hanging from a line. She was nude and split from throat to crotch. Her slightly opened eyes had a horrible glazed sheen of death and her tongue protruded from her gaping mouth. Blood and gore piled at her feet and I lost it. I turned and vomited.

  Wayne suddenly screamed. He fell to his knees and dropped the pistol. “Annie what did those bastards do to you? Annie, oh, Annie. I’m so sorry.” His words trailed off to a nonsensical drone. He sobbed and fell to the ground pounding it.

  I knew I should have gone for his gun, but the only thought in my mind was to get away, as far away as I could. I took another look at Annie’s twisted death mask and lurched toward my truck.

  As I was about to turn the engine I could hear Wayne. His words wailed into the night, “My sweet Annie.”

  ***

  Nothing in the country works fast. It was nearly six-thirty that morning before a sheriff’s deputy met me and another thirty minutes passed before I convinced him to let me go with him back to Wayne’s. Kelly was in the bedroom crying and the children walked around looking scared and lost.

  The sun had cleared the pines behind Wayne’s house, making long shadows. The deputy ordered me to stay in the car while he checked out the area. I waited for an ungodly while until the sheriff arrived. It was about that time the deputy reappeared from the back side of Wayne’s house. He and the sheriff had a few private words together and then the sheriff walked over to me.

  “You say Mr. Larson was still at the house when you left. Is that correct?”

  I looked at his beefy, impassive face and nodded.

  “What time was that?”

  “Don’t know. Three-thirty or four this morning. Why? Is Wayne gone?” I asked, remembering that huge pistol.

  “Not exactly, sir. Mrs. Larson was dead then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind coming with me to the back of the house?”

  I thought of the scene I’d witnessed and knew it would be worse by the light of day. “I’ll go, but I can’t say I can stay. Annie is…Annie is…”

  “I understand, Mr. Tidwell. Normally I wouldn’t ask, but we need you to identify the body.”

  As we walked, I thanked God that Kelly had not seen Annie like that. I didn’t have much strength in my legs and the world felt so unreal. I could only imagine what Kelly would go through. We made our way past the house and to the smoke shack.

  “Can you identify the bodies, Mr. Tidwell?”

  Until then I had refused to look at the scene, knowing what lay in store, but at the mention of the word “bodies” my head snapped up. Annie was no longer hung by the wires running along the smoke shack walls. She had been cut down and was lying on the ground with her head resting on Wayne’s lap. Wayne was propped up against the wall and his lifeless hand held Annie’s face. His lips were blue and his sightless eyes seemed to be staring into Annie’s.

  “Looks like a knife wound, sheriff. Here under the left chest.” The deputy pointed at a hole in Wayne’s shirt while fanning away a horde of flies. There was much more blood on his shirt now than there was the last time I saw it, but the hole was very evident.

  “Are these the Larsons, Mr. Tidwell?” the sheriff asked.

  I nodded. Then the wound the deputy pointed at brought a question. “Was he stabbed?”

  “We won’t know that until the coroner has a chance to do autopsies.”

  “He said they had bayonets.”

  “What was that, Mr. Tidwell?”

  “This morning, Wayne said they had bayonets.”

  “Mr. Tidwell, I’m going to have to ask you to come back with me. I have some questions for you.”

  I nodded and they led me away, but not before I had a chance to see my friends’ faces once more. Though the scene was grotesque and the air smelled of a horrible mixture that threatened my stomach, there was something almost serene about their position. They looked peaceful in a way I hadn’t seen since the days when we all double dated, and I was crying like a baby by the time the deputy put me in the back of his patrol car.

  ***

  That was three years ago. My boys are in middle school and Kelly and I have moved on with our lives. She has a job in a bank that she loves and I’ve been promoted to senior engineer. We’ve made other friends and life is pretty good considering.

  I’d been to Wayne’s house a few times. No one owns it. Everyone says it’s cursed and the realtors have given up. The house is run down and there is graffiti inside. Grass and wild vines have taken over the place, but the rocking chair is still there and I found it a comfortable place to be, because in that spot I was reminded of summers past when me and Wayne used to play games in the woods. I think of the dreams we used to share and the hopes we had and all the silly things boys do when they grow up in the Deep South. I think of these things and smile.

  The memory of my visit here that day is as fresh as tomorrow’s news. I can’t shake that and I think Kelly and I will forever nurse the bruise in our hearts. Unfortunately it is a fact of life so what can we do but go on?

  Wayne’s death was ruled a suicide and I was glad because until then I had been the primary suspect. But the sheriff’s department found a knife with Wayne’s blood and fingerprints just a few yards from the bodies. Actually it was a bayonet. The sheriff’s investigators were able to match it to one missing from Wayne’s civil war collection. They concluded Wayne had killed Annie and then himself so the case was officially closed as a simple case of domestic violence. Even now when I think of that term I can feel my face warm with anger. There was nothing “simple” about any of it.

  Kelly and I have finally stopped discussing it. As I said, we had to move on. Still I know the pain is there. I see it in her eyes and my mirror. Deep down I know we blame ourselves. How could I have misjudged Wayne so badly?

  About two hours later I had decided to head back home. The next day was Sunday, which meant church and herding the boys. I whispered a good-night to my friend’s memories and got up. Just then I heard a sound that brought the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It sounded like a horn playing a tune, but I couldn’t tell for sure as it was very soft and distant. I felt like a deer caught in the headlights and was afraid to move. So I stood there like a fool and waited. After a few moments, when the sound didn’t repeat, I started to convince myself I had not heard anything more than my imagination when it came again.

  This time I knew it wasn’t imagination. It came from the back of Wayne’s property somewhere beyond the pines. I don’t know why I went but I did. Call it curiosity, call it whatever, I just had to check it out. I headed off the porch and made my way across the back yard, careful of snakes and other creepy-crawlies who made night their playtime as I stepped through the unkempt grass.

  By the time I reached the pines, I still had not heard another sound. But I pushed on anyway. About five minutes later I heard it again and it was close this time. I could feel the blood thrumming in my temples and my mouth went dry with the taste of copper as I crept further. It was a strange tune I heard, could have been military, but then…it could have been anything. The tune wasn’t remarkable but the quality was. It sounded in a way no legitimate horn ever should. The raspy quality of its eerie echoes made my sweat turn cold and my balls draw up in their sack.

  I slid over a fallen pine and my feet stepped on a termite damaged branch. It broke with the sound of a gunshot. The horn immediately stopped as did I. My mind replayed the things Wayne had told me and I started to believe. I wanted to run and silently cursed myself for being so stupid. Instead I stayed where I was, listening to the forest and feeling sweat run down my back and onto my waistband.

  There was a sudden rustling of underbrush and I looked toward the sound. Despite the night’s warm embrace my body went cold an
d I felt as if my heart had stopped beating. Tears clouded my eyes and I turned tail and ran all the way back to my truck, making it to my home in record time.

  Since then I’ve decided never to go back to Wayne’s house. Now I spend my evenings with Kelly and the boys. And I know that Kelly wants me to tell her why I don’t go back, but I won’t and I doubt she’ll ask. I think she’s just happy that I stay home. So am I.

  I’m not a superstitious man and I don’t believe in the boogey man. Nor do I toss salt over my shoulder or avoid walking under ladders when necessary. But sometimes I do wonder if there are more things in this world than we are taught to believe. Sometimes I question if maybe dead armies do clash at night in a world they’ve created. And I wonder if the dead believe that more bodies could help them win their eternal battles.

  The reason I think these things is because of what I thought I saw that night in Wayne’s back field under that bright moonlight. You see, after I turned toward the rustling, I saw…I think…I saw Wayne’s face peering at me from behind an old ditch willow. I say “think” because it was only for a moment and even as I glanced, the fog that constituted his face swirled away into nothingness.

  Should I hope it was him or not?

  All I know is that I miss my friends.

  About the author:

  S.W. Morse has been an avid horror fan since reading Dracula at the age of ten. Since then he has worked hard to develop his own unique writing style specializing in Southern Horror. He has two completed books with another nearing completion. Currently he lives in east Tennessee with his family where he spends his time writing and conducting paranormal research.

  A Temporary Place

  by Gregory L. Norris

  “It’s only temporary,” said Bruce.

  But after their few things—the mattress and a stack of garbage bags filled with clothes, stacked in corners like cheap bean bag chairs—were in the place, it felt permanent. A conviction then a sentence followed by hard time.

  The apartment was oblong, in the shape of a coffin, George thought, and oppressive. A second-story rattrap with no defined living space. A collection of square cubicles with dark, fake wood paneling riddled in spots with holes from punches or kicks against the baseboards. The refrigerator sat in the hallway, around the corner from the stove. Somewhere, a pipe leaked nonstop, audible in the silence, but when George searched he couldn’t find the source.

  Two doors joined the apartment to the vacant lower level, and the staircase leading from the center of the coffin down to the first floor didn’t have walls or even a door, which dashed all notions of privacy and safety. The building, at one point in its past, had obviously been a single-residence house. The staircase landing had never been framed in; anybody walking in from the street or living in the downstairs apartment could simply walk up the stairs and enter, easily as they liked.

  “Can we look at the downstairs?” George had asked the landlord. Slumlord was a more appropriate term for the man.

  Sucking on the latest in a chain of cigarettes, he’d answered, “Naw, you wouldn’t want to live there. The place is a real mess.”

  ***

  “I want to go home,” George said.

  “I know, babe, but this is our home now.”

  “No, to our house.”

  “It isn’t our house anymore. It’s the bank’s. We’ll get you another house.”

  “I don’t want another. I want our house. All the money and hard work we put into it. I want the rest of our things.”

  Bruce stretched out on the bed, their mattress that they’d strapped to the roof of the car now sitting on bare, dirty carpet. The frame, head and footboards were still at the house, with everything they hadn’t managed to fit into the backseat and trunk.

  “I can’t talk about it anymore. I’m tired.”

  Bruce crawled into the bed and under the covers, the stale smell of his sweat tangible, terrible. George didn’t say another word, though he cursed him with a look. He hated this temporary place, this ugly, emergency fallback position they had been forced to take after the foreclosure.

  Bruce pulled into a fetal curl. Within seconds, he was snoring, the only other sound in the airless apartment, and a counterpoint to that ever-present drip of water.

  ***

  The refrigerator doors hung open. George plugged in the unit. It rattled to life. The smell of mildew assailed his nostrils.

  What passed for their kitchen was a mess. Old spaghetti sauce stained the electric stove’s top and burners. Some of the cabinets didn’t close properly, and drawers hung at askew angles. No amount of scrubbing would get the floor completely clean; the threadbare linoleum squelched when you walked over it with your shoes. Socks—or, perish the thought, bare feet—were out of the question.

  They needed food, but George wasn’t really hungry. Instead, he suffered an ache in his gut of a different kind that had already eroded twelve pounds off his weakened body over the past two weeks.

  “Bruce, I’m going to the store,” he said.

  The body in the bed snorted, jolted. “Just give me five more minutes. I’m really tired.” Then Bruce resumed sawing logs.

  Saying nothing more, George picked up the car keys and headed for the door. Not the one near the bedroom, bolted and locked, and certainly not the central arch above the stairs, which wasn’t so much a door as a wide-open invitation to anybody who happened to come up from the murky shadows of the empty first floor, but that last door, the one that took him down to the driveway, where their car was parked. The last link to their old life. Their only method of escape from this one.

  ***

  “I can put up curtains, or a sheet,” Bruce had said. “Or we can buy those screens made of fake bamboo that roll down.”

  “You don’t get it,” George countered, eyes wide and somewhat crazy, even he would agree. “Fake bamboo and sheets won’t keep intruders out!”

  “Intruders? What the hell do we have to worry about people breaking into this place for? It’s not like we own anything worth stealing.”

  “Not anymore.” Because of you, George wanted to shout, but he didn’t. What was the point? Bruce had lost his job and, as a result, they’d lost their home. Like a lot of people. Too many people.

  George choked down his anger. He imagined this present ball of rage lodging into the soft lining of his digestive tract where all the others he’d swallowed in silence had gone, turning cancerous, growing, metastasizing, ultimately to devour him from the inside.

  The car was dead—the battery, he guessed, by the irritating sequence of clicks when he turned the key. Whose car battery dies at the height of summer? Weren’t dead batteries a winter ailment?

  Sweating profusely, George exited the useless car and tromped down the driveway, the latest in a long series of defeats barely affecting him. The car battery was dead. Big deal. Bruce could get a new one and change out the old. The voice in his thoughts told him that was never going to happen, because Bruce wasn’t ever going to leave the bed. Still, George walked on.

  He noticed a line of water running parallel to the driveway and dug in his heels. In the muddy gray overcast of the late morning, the tiny stream flowing beside the time-blanched asphalt resembled liquid platinum. George revolved and tracked it all the way to the apartment. Whatever the source of the dripping sound he heard coming from somewhere inside, the result was this slow-moving, accidental waterway. It trickled down the driveway and followed the course of the street as it dipped toward the intersection.

  It’s not my problem, he thought, though he felt guilty for the sentiment, like he always did when something in the world went wrong and nobody owned up. Losing the house was a stellar example. His partner of ten years refused to take responsibility, so George owned it lock, stock, and barrel.

  The water dipped away from the curb and between two weed-choked mounds of tainted earth, then tumbled toward the backyard of a single-story ranch house. Chain link fence covered in white and green aluminum
slats surrounded the house and a small plot of yard. Surely, the heat must be getting to him, he thought, as was the raw sewage smell in the air—George swore the fence was capped at intervals with crucifixes.

  Two people, a middle-aged man and woman, stood behind the fence, tending to a lush vegetable garden.

  “Hello,” the man said, his voice infused with a soupçon of Spanish.

  George waved.

  “You smell that?” the woman asked. George wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or the man he assumed was her husband. “It stinks. It really stinks. Like something has died.”

  ***

  He lugged two bags of groceries back up the hill, struggling to breathe despite the absence of the extra weight on his bones. The notion of eating anything in that apartment sickened him. It wouldn’t surprise him, especially now that he’d seen water pouring out of the place’s bowels, if the house had toxic mold issues. So good for the lungs and the soul, he mused sourly. But it was only temporary, the same acidic voice in his thoughts reminded.

  Sweat rolled off his forehead, down into his eyes. He wanted to puke up the emptiness in his stomach. The thought of what was contained in the shopping bags—milk, bread, pasta sauce, butter, and spaghetti—further nauseated him. If he smelled the odor of the water or was forced to face the neighbors again to discuss it, he was going to vomit so, going on instinct, he bypassed the direct route, turned up one street, made another left, and backtracked to where he assumed the apartment house would be from the back end of the street.

  A vacant lot rose up between George and his destination. Overgrown poison oak trees, their toxic, velvety red flowers in full bloom, brooded over graffiti-covered rock ledges and outcrops of glacial boulders. In the tight press of the surrounding houses and triple-decker rentals, this acre of rock pile might have seemed out of place. But the ominous feeling it unleashed through George’s guts placed it firmly in the same neighborhood as the apartment. In fact, beyond a hedge of scrub and those deceptively sweet red blossoms, which begged little boys to pluck them by the handful for bouquets for their mothers (which George had made the mistake of doing once, and suffered greatly for it), he could see the corner of the apartment house next door to their temporary new place. All it would take was a swift hike past the boulders, up the ledge, and to cross the street. No worries of neighbors and explanations of leaky pipes. No added guilt.