New Fears II--Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

by Mark Morris

  “I… don’t know,” said Lars.

  The man uncrossed his legs and then crossed them in the other direction. “Will you tell it to me?” he asked.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Your dream? Will you share it with me?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  The man smiled, gave a little laugh. “No? Then the least I can do is try to help you fall back to sleep.”

  * * *

  “There was once a man who was not a man,” the man began. He was frowning, or perhaps it was just that his face was slipping. “He acted like a man, but he was not, in fact, a man after all. Then why, you might wonder, did he live with men or among them?

  “Why indeed?

  “But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It just tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.

  “He acted like a man and in many respects he was a man, but he was not a man as well, and sometimes he would forget this and allow himself to relax a little and leak out.”

  “What?” said Lars, his voice rising.

  “Leak out,” said the man. He had pulled his chair a little closer, or at least it seemed that way to Lars.

  “But what,” said Lars. “How—”

  “Leak out,” said the man with finality. “I already told you this is not that kind of story, the kind that explains things. Be quiet and listen.

  “He would relax a little and leak out, and sometimes it was hard for him to make his way back in again. Sometimes people would come along while he was this way, humans, and he’d have to decide what to do with them. Or perhaps to them. Sometimes if he couldn’t get back in to where he had been, he could at least get into one of them.”

  The man suddenly reached out and touched his cheek. Lars felt warmth spreading through his face. Or maybe it was cold, but so cold it felt warm. He found he could not move.

  “Sometimes,” said the man, “once he got into one of them, he would stay for a while. But other times, he would just swallow them up and be done with them.”

  II

  When he woke up it was late in the day, enough sunlight seeping through the gaps between boards to fill the house with a pale light. He was lying on the floor, on the bearskin, and had slept in such a way that he was stiff all along one side, his shoulder tingling, his jaw tight. The other man was nowhere to be seen.

  Had anything really happened? Perhaps he had dreamt it all.

  The ashes in the grate were still warm. The room, which had seemed to him so immaculate in his flashlight beam the night before, clearly wasn’t: the floor was dusty. There was litter and garbage as well and a faint sour smell. The bearskin he had slept on was moth-eaten and tattered, as were the two chairs. The only place that was immaculate was the wall above the fireplace: there wasn’t a stain there after all.

  He quickly packed his duffle bag and made for the door. He wouldn’t come back, he told himself. He was, after all, just passing through. He’d never stayed in the same place more than a day or two, not since his father’s death.

  * * *

  He searched the house, found nothing of value. The dead batteries still weren’t anywhere.

  It was late afternoon by the time he walked the half-mile into town. The town was smaller than he’d hoped, the business district little more than one main street, with a diner, a general store with a lunch counter in back, a drugstore, a feed and grain supply and a hardware store. He spent some time in the hardware store, but there weren’t enough other customers and the clerk was paying too much attention to him for him to lift anything. So he left and went down to the general store.

  He walked down the aisles, considering. One clerk here too, seemingly the identical twin of the fellow in the hardware store, but less attentive. In the candy aisle he slipped a pair of energy bars into his coat pocket as he bent down to pretend to examine something on the bottom shelf. Batteries were on an endcap and a little trickier to pocket unobserved, but when he stood just right he got his body between the display and the clerk and managed to slip a set down his pants.

  He wandered a little more, just to throw off the scent. By the time he was turning again toward the front of the store, prepared to leave without buying anything, it was beginning to grow dark outside, snow just beginning to fall. The clerk seemed to have doubled, having been joined by his brother or cousin or whatever the fuck he was from the hardware store next door. Unless there was a third one floating around. They were whispering back and forth, watching him.

  He considered briefly putting everything back. But he needed the food—it had been well over a day since he had had anything to eat—and he needed the batteries too, particularly if he was going to spend the night outdoors. He needed to be certain his flashlight wouldn’t go out. Matches, too, he thought, otherwise no fire. He found a box of them, slipped them into his duffle bag.

  The clerk from the hardware store was heading toward him, his lips in a tight line. The other clerk, the one who actually worked there, had moved to block the front door.

  Lars headed quickly up the aisle and toward the back of the store. Behind him, the man closest to him gave a shout, and Lars burst into a run, darting through the door marked Employees Only. He swerved around boxes and metal shelves until he reached the back wall. He chose a direction and ran along it until he hit the door, a metal bar slung about waist-level. He pushed on the bar and the door opened to a blast of cold and an alarm went off. And then he was out in an alley, the light fading, snow drifting slowly down. He ran, his feet slipping on the ice, hearing the sounds of the two clerks in pursuit behind him.

  * * *

  He ran until he no longer heard them, then stopped, listened. It was all but dark out now. He walked for a while, catching his breath. Where was he? He wasn’t sure exactly—one of the roads leading out of town, fields on all sides. And then he heard something, a cry from behind him. He began to run again.

  And then in the darkness he heard voices even closer, as if he had not run away from the two men but toward them. He cut quickly off the road and into the field beside it—only it wasn’t a field but a house and its grounds. Almost a mansion from what he could see of it, he found himself idly thinking. And then he realized exactly what house it was.

  But he hadn’t been anywhere near it. How could that house be here?

  The voices drew closer. Would they see him if he just stood still in the yard? It was already dark, but was it dark enough? Would they see his face shining like a buoy in the darkness?

  It’s just a house, he tried to tell himself. Just an ordinary house. Nothing to worry about. Before the voices came any closer, he forced himself to walk toward it, find the loose boards over the window, and squirm in.

  * * *

  Later he wondered if he’d heard voices after all. Or, rather, wondered if the voices he’d heard had been connected to the two clerks, if they were still chasing him. That was, he told himself as he waited in the house, the heart of the matter. Either the voices were the clerks’ or they weren’t. But if they weren’t, what were they?

  I’ll just wait a little, he told himself once inside, just until I’m sure they’re gone. But each time he thought he was safe and made for the window, he’d hear them again. Or hear something like them anyway.

  * * *

  How much time passed? He wasn’t sure. Had he slept? He didn’t think so, but it was much darker in the house now, so dark he couldn’t see at all save for the pale lines of light marking the joins between the window boards.

  He got out his flashlight. It wasn’t wise, not if the two men were still outside looking for him, but he couldn’t help himself—he couldn’t stand the dark, not in here. He turned it on, pointed it at the ground.

  The room, he saw, looked just as it had the night before: clean, immaculately so, the floor itself freshly polished. As if it were not a deserted ho
use after all. Having the flashlight on made him feel better, but seeing this made him feel worse.

  * * *

  He listened. The voices came and went for a while and then dissolved into wind, a lonely sound with nothing human to it at all. He pulled on the boards to look out and see if they were still there—or tried to anyway: the boards wouldn’t give. It was as if they had been nailed back in place since he had entered. He pulled at them, hammered on them with his flashlight. Disoriented, he looked around, tried the boards on the other windows, but they were all tightly nailed in place.

  He went to the front door, unlocked it, rattled the handle, but something held the door shut from the other side. He hit it with his shoulder, then stopped. It had been padlocked, he remembered. Of course it wouldn’t open.

  All he needed was something to pry the boards away from the window. It didn’t matter how they had gotten stuck—it was not worth thinking about. All that mattered was to get them off and get out.

  But there was nothing in the room—the room was empty: he knew that already. He hit one of the boards with the butt of his flashlight, but when its beam began to flicker, he stopped. He couldn’t bear to be without a light. Not here. He needed to find something he could pry with. He would have to find something else.

  * * *

  He found himself going back and forth between the entrance hall and the hallway, but stopping shy of opening the door at the end of the hallway. He looked in the kitchen, found nothing but empty cabinets. The dining room was empty too. He tried the doors to either side at the end of the passage, discovered them both still locked. He kept searching the same empty rooms and finding nothing. I won’t go, he was telling himself, not in there.

  But in the end he did go. He could see the poker in his mind, leaning in its stand just beside the fireplace. He would, he told himself, rush in, take the poker, leave. He would look at nothing, no one. He would think about nothing, no one. He would just come and go. He wouldn’t stay.

  But when he finally opened the door, a fire was already lit, roaring in the fireplace. He couldn’t help but see that. And he couldn’t help but see that the spray of blood was there again on the wall above the mantel, looking even larger than before. Just as he couldn’t help but see the creature in the chair, struggling into, or perhaps out of, its skin. The skin was still on the bottom half of its body, but not the top half.

  It looked at him and perhaps smiled. Moved its face anyway in a way that frightened him.

  “Back for more?” it said.

  “I was just leaving,” said Lars.

  The creature ignored him. “You wanted another story?” it said. “Is that what you came for?” And it reached out toward his face.

  It didn’t touch him, but his face still felt warm. He could not, he suddenly found, move.

  It reached down and wormed further into the sheath. What had not been a hand became a hand. It flexed the fingers experimentally, settling the skin deeper around them.

  “No story,” it said. “I haven’t eaten.”

  Lars felt the flashlight slip from his fingers. It struck the floor with a clunk, then began to roll away, the sound abruptly cut off as if, suddenly, it was no longer there.

  “Well,” it said. “What am I to do with you?”

  The fire roared and then suddenly fell silent, the rest of the room too. In the silence, the creature came closer. First it touched Lars with its hand, then with the thing that was not a hand, and finally it wrapped what remained of the loose, empty skin around him and drew him in.

  THANATRAUMA

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  The limitless sky outside Andrew’s bedroom window was the hue of soured milk and mushrooms. It wasn’t an unusual sky for a cold, late autumn day, with the fallen leaves dark and shredded, streaking the lawns, turned into a decaying filth encrusting the edges of things.

  Last night someone had turned over the trashcans put out for this morning’s collection. Up and down the street the large green cans lay on their sides, garbage spilling over the sidewalks and out into the lanes. He wondered who could have been so angry, or in these times was it a sign of the carefree? Everyone would think a gang of young people did it, but sightings of sick raccoons had been reported in the neighbourhood the past few weeks. Wasn’t it more likely to be one of them? A flyer stuck in his door had provided a phone number to call in case of a sighting, and a warning not to approach, as raccoons were known carriers of rabies.

  To make matters worse, vehicles had driven through this cold variegated sludge and dragged the trash everywhere. Some of his neighbours were already out there vigorously trying to make things right. He’d neglected to put his own trash out; it slipped his mind regularly. Still, he needed to lend a hand.

  But he hadn’t talked to any of these people since his wife’s passing. And now, several years later, how could he even begin? There was far too much that should have been said.

  On such days he longed for snow to cover everything, to provide some semblance that the world had been made fresh. But more often than not the snow did not come, and he’d choose to close the curtains rather than look outside. Which he did now, in case one of his neighbours looked up at the window and saw him spying on all their efforts.

  From inside his body came a soft noise like something breaking. He could feel his deadened flesh falling away, bones slipping and sour organs spilling out. Still, he managed to move forward despite his demise.

  It bothered him, how sensitive he was to changes in the weather, to colours, to atmosphere and mood. It was hard to say how he really felt about anything.

  He’d rearranged his bedroom several times in the years since Marge’s death. He’d first gotten rid of the bed and all the bedding. He’d given their daughters the chest of drawers, the twin nightstands, her armoire, her clothes and jewellery. They’d been happy to receive them, although they didn’t understand why he’d wanted to let her things go so quickly. He didn’t know how to explain, but he felt his life depended on it.

  Later he’d removed key pieces from the living and dining rooms—the ones she’d liked the most—and given them to various thrift shops. He and his wife had had similar tastes so it was necessary to replace some of the furniture with styles not at all to his liking. He wanted no reminders. As a result, some mornings it felt as if he had awakened in a random hotel. Who had chosen such bland artwork? He must have ordered it online, although he couldn’t remember actually doing so. Desert scenes, mostly, a fried-egg sun over plains of crumbling whites. The American Southwest, or perhaps Australia, or some alien world.

  Andrew went over to his dresser and sorted his prescriptions and supplements. He re-read the yellowing paper specifying the proper amounts. He had no idea why he couldn’t remember them, but he could not. He dutifully consumed his pills with three full glasses of water. He had no idea what might happen if he neglected to take them. He doubted that there would be anything dramatic, but he wouldn’t take the chance. His primary focus of late was to avoid suffering. His ancient physician had told him, “You’re actually pretty healthy, considering. Hell, you’re in better shape than me!”

  His eyes began their involuntary flutter. He clutched the edges of the dresser as anxiety grabbed onto him and shook. Several bottles fell over, a half-empty glass. He would have a mess to clean up. “Nerves,” the physician called it. One of these bottles was supposed to take care of his nerves, but often did not. Of course, Andrew had never revealed to his doctor all his symptoms.

  His hands appeared claw-like, the skin stretched. When had his wrists gotten so skinny? He’d been trying to lose weight, but feared that some of his weight loss might be involuntary. How could you tell the difference? He supposed if he suddenly died he would have his answer.

  His vision blurred slightly. Great hunks of flesh began to disappear from his arms and legs. They looked like partially eaten chicken wings and drumsticks. It was enough to put one off meat, but he figured he needed the protein. He gazed down at his nak
ed body. Numerous bits were missing, others dripping. He felt the beginnings of nausea, made his hands let go of the dresser, and ran to the bathroom.

  Once he’d emptied his system sufficiently the visions disappeared. He stared at himself in the mirror. Mirrors had become largely useless. They rarely showed him anyone he could recognize.

  He went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. He’d have to do something about the smell. He hated how his body smelled even at the best of times. He was tempted to crawl back under the covers but would not allow himself that escape. Again, he sensed that his life depended on it.

  He should eat something, although he couldn’t think of anything he was hungry for. Something pre-packaged perhaps. Something processed to the point that it was no longer recognizable. Anything that didn’t look as if it had once been alive.

  Marge had been unable to eat the last month of her life. Not crackers, not even gelatine. She’d put something in her mouth and chew but her throat would not permit her to swallow it down. She had simply lost all desire for it. Similarly, she lost all desire for his touches, his stories, his speech, their daughters’ speech. Marge could no longer bear to listen, and eventually, to talk. She began to live in a world where such activities no longer had meaning.

  He struggled to understand and accept. They’d always talked things through, and when he’d promised to be with her until the very end, he’d assumed he would do so as they talked about this, about everything.

  In the hospital they fed her this cream-coloured liquid in plastic bags through a tube leading into a vein above her heart. They’d sent her home with a supply of these refrigerated bags and shown him how to prepare and administer them once daily, how to attach the tubing and how to disinfect. They told him the bags contained a mixture of nutrients and chemicals. It filled their bedroom with a grainy smell. He recalled a similar smell when he’d been a young man working near a dog food factory.

  Every day he would talk to Marge and tell her what he was doing as he prepared her daily meal: the steps required to reduce the chances of infection, the attachment of the tubes, the readying of the pump. Marge still had nothing to say, but periodically she would say “yes”—whether out of politeness or as some part of her own internal process he did not know. He was terrified, of course, of making a mistake, of doing something that would make it worse for her, but each day he still did what he’d been instructed to do. And her belly did swell over time, although he wasn’t sure that it was from nourishment.