Love and Other Horrors

by Boye, Kody

  Love

  and Other Horrors

  Kody Boye

  Love and Other Horrors

  by Kody Boye

  Kindle edition

  © 2011 Kody Boye. All Rights Reserved

  The following stories are reprints:

  Pedestrians in Fantastic Horror © 2010

  AID Me in Teen Ink © 2010

  Angelita in Teen Ink © 2009

  Bubba in Brave Blue Mice © 2009

  Life in a Fishbowl in Writers’ Stories © 2009

  The Dog on Taylor Road in Writers’ Stories © 2009

  Cover art and design by Kody Boye

  Interior formatting by Kody Boye

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without properly crediting Kody Boye as the sole author and creator of this content. This story is provided to you free or charge and should not be sold in any way, shape or medium, print or digital. It may be reprinted for personal use, but you may not reprint it in an anthology or other media form without first contacting the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situation are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or undead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  Other Works

  Amorous Things

  The Diary of Dakota Hammell

  Forthcoming

  Blood (The Brotherhood, #1)

  Sunrise: The Revised and Expanded Edition

  Utopia

  Wraethworld

  Table of Contents

  Artificial Angel

  And His Name was Peter

  Pedestrians

  Father’s Day

  AID Me

  Life in a Fishbowl

  Delilah

  Boquet

  The Dog on Taylor Road

  Flatline

  M

  The Charity Vampire

  Bubba

  The Eccentric Ways of Linton Garnet

  Angelita

  You and I

  Artificial Angel

  It sits in the tree waiting for the world to end. Wings spread eagle and arms pressed to its chest, it sleeps as though it were a bat nestled inside the darkest of caves, eyes closed and face calm but mute. It’s a thing that few people ever get to experience—the reality of a moment, the assurance of peace, but regardless, this angel is timeless.

  Shifting, the creature blinks, opening its eyes to a world dark and without any discernable light source. Its first thought is, Where am I?

  The thought, though unsettling, is not without purpose. It’s been long since it’s woken from slumber, much too long. The last thing it can recall is bombs exploding to the distance and harsh cries sounding from the ruins of a destroyed city, but the creature isn’t sure this matters. That time is long gone, it knows, and it is not necessary to remember things that have happened in the past.

  For a brief moment, it waits, listening to the sounds of the woods. Then it drops down, landing on brown earth littered with pine needles.

  Stepping forward, but not sure whether or not to proceed, the angel lifts its head and begins to examine its surroundings. Already it is able to make out details from the area—the silent expressions in the bark, the glimmer of bugs in the air. The area has changed. This much is already obvious.

  Is this necessary?

  Necessary, to wake from slumber without any cause or reason—it hasn’t been called, nor has it been beckoned from lands devoid of consciousness by anything higher than a voice. It seems impractical, especially at a time like this, when nothing seems wrong.

  A flicker of movement from the sky catches its attention.

  The angel lifts its head.

  Only one thought goes through its mind.

  Snow.

  No—not snow, but something like it. It’s falling from the sky like snow would, albeit slower and with a greater sense of dread, but it isn’t snow. It’s too thick, too corroded with the sense of unnatural ease to be such a thing. A sad thought occurs to the angel before it begins to cross the clearing, toward where it begins to remember a road once stood. This may not be the world it remembered.

  Like a child not sure of its first step, the angel hesitates, wings shifting and beak drawing air through a pair of twin nostrils. Only when it steps onto the road does it see the result of time.

  So, it thinks. This is it.

  Skeletons linger all around—not of the dead, but of the impractical and weary. Husks of what used to be lumbering towers shiver in the passing breeze, while lights that once used to shine remain dead, looking out at the world like eyes hollow and sunk into the skulls of the old. What should be snow falls greater here, as trees are no longer able to catch its flakes, but that doesn’t concern the angel—it’s the sky. No longer blue, but a shimmering shade of white, it swims across the horizon as though moving through a current, fish streaming up rivers that no longer exist.

  The angel’s wings draw its attention away from the scenery. Their metal gleam saddens it. Never was it a real angel, a being people looked up to. It has always been false, a conduit made only to serve those who created it.

  As it looks upon the world, both saddened and unsure of its prospect, the angel takes a moment for the realization to settle in. When it finally does, it mimics what would once have been considered a sigh, then spreads its wings.

  It kicks off with one foot, then begins to fly toward the horizon.

  Other shapes lurk in the distance.

  And His Name was Peter

  He takes one look at the world and flies away, bound for a place he can never reach, but always wants to be.

  He lives in a world of carnivals and shoestrings, of toys and candy and apples and cake. In this world of fun and sun, he runs through a playground that stretches out for miles, beckoning forth any and all who look upon its glory. In this world—in this Wonderland, as many would feel fit to call it—there is no one who can’t enter. Men, women, children; young, old, black, white; enabled, disabled, sane, crazed—little is left to question when you enter such a beautiful world. One moment you can be lost in a jungle, then the next swinging from iron bars above lakes of molten chocolate. Rain can taste like strawberries, ice the tang of orange and rocks the crisp of brownies, while the dirt you inhale can smell of dust, a pixie’s lost magic as she flaps her wings and ascends to the highest points in the sky.

  Though few are willing to admit it, many are willing to enter.

  This is the real world.

  This is the world that was always meant to exist.

  Wonderland.

  The word a whisper on his tongue, a lollipop in his pocket, Michael Kelly jumps over an airborne swing just as it sails his way. An arc in the wind, a smile on its face, Michael whips between its chains a breath before the seat is able to smack his legs, thus tripping him with its animated tongue to send him on a flying journey back to earth.

  Once through and clear, Michael sighs, takes a deep breath, then leans forward, taking a deep breath and exhaling his worry out his throat.

  Beyond him lays a forest of gumdrop trees.

  In the distance, Michael sees children climbing their trunks, desperate to reach the candy crowns on top.

  Before he can begin to run, the world begins to fade.

  Michael falls.

  Slowly, infinitely, majestically, he is pushed away from the world he has always wanted to live in, from the world that was always meant to be.

  “Michael,” a voice says. “Wake up.”

  Michael opens
his eyes, first perturbed by the wooden ceiling above him, then saddened by the absence of clouds the color of rainbows. It takes him a moment to process that someone has just spoken to him. By the time he has, the owner of the voice has moved to the side of the bed.

  Dressed in a flowery skirt, he immediately identifies her as female.

  “Wake up, honey,” the woman says. “You overslept again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Michael.” A hand touches his face. “Look at me. Here.”

  Michael blinks.

  The face above him clears, shifting into focus.

  “Emilin,” he says, sighing as his wife comes into view.

  “Yes, dear—it’s me.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Shit!” he cries, throwing himself from bed. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “I tried. You kept telling me to give you ten minutes.”

  “Shit! Shit shit shit shit shit!”

  “I’m sorry!” Emilin says, retreating to the far wall as Michael tears through the bedroom in search of his clothes. “I tried to wake you up. I thought you were sick.”

  “I’m not sick,” he rasps, swearing as he trips over a stray shoe on the floor. “God dammit! Why didn’t the alarm go off?”

  “It did. You kept turning it off.”

  Shaking his head, Michael storms into the bathroom and tears the shower curtain aside, barely pausing to compose himself before pushing himself into the shower. The initial shock of cold jars him, but is quickly pushed aside as he grabs for the soap and begins to scrub himself down.

  Every day—it seems that every day this happens. No matter what time he goes to bed, no matter how much sleep he gets, he can never wake up at the time he needs to. Work calls, he tries to say, as he prepares for bed each and every night an hour earlier than he usually does, but it never matters because he can’t get up on time. Some days he wonders why he does it, because most of the time, it doesn’t seem worth it. He’s always stuck at that boring job, at that boring desk that does nothing but sit there. There is nothing magical about it. It’s all routine—all a boring, stupid routine.

  As he continues to scrub, trying not to drift away into his thoughts, he thinks of Wonderland and the gumdrop forest he was so close to reaching.

  I’ve never come that close before.

  A brief moment of disbelief overtakes him as the wintry plain flashes before his eyes. Trees poised atop high hills sparkle in the mid-afternoon light, blinding those who look rather than adventure, while houses in the distance spout smoke from chimneys that extend into the sky. He has never seen those houses up close, but has always wanted to go there. Some say the gingerbread men live there, making snowmen and laughing all day. Others say that the wicked witch lures people in with the promise of goods, only to eat them alive. It is the curse of Wonderland, to be so good without evil. Eventually something will slip through.

  A knock at the door startles him from thought.

  The soap slips from his hand.

  Michael gasps.

  His foot flies out from under him and he goes crashing into the wall.

  “Michael?” Emilin asks. “Are you all right?”

  “A bit dizzy this morning,” he mumbles, done with his shower.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I already said I’m not.”

  “All right. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, but if you are, please don’t put it off. I don’t want you to…”

  One look is enough to silence her.

  The look of disappointment that overcomes her face saddens him.

  She shouldn’t worry, he thinks, reaching for her, but stopping halfway. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.

  “Michael?” she frowns. “Are you—”

  “It’s nothing,” he says, pulling his clothes onto his body. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “But you haven’t even…”

  He doesn’t bother to wait.

  The sole thing he does before he walks out the bathroom door is kiss her cheek. Even then it is forced.

  He can’t help but think that things are constantly wrong as he climbs into his car and begins to make his way to work.

  Seated at his desk, plugging away at the most recent batch of financial forms, Michael tries to distract himself from the morning’s events by throwing himself into his work. Arranging graphs, monitoring spendings, calculating earnings and working toward financial purity, he tries to create an even environment that allows someone without the proper knowledge to read just what is going into the business and what is coming out of it. By the time he’s halfway through his most recent report, he is saddened to see that the business is only continuing to plummet into depravity.

  Whoever said bathroom soaps could save your life.

  The reality that his job will, most likely, not last past this month is slowly sinking in. It’s a knot at the lowest part of his neck that grows like a tumor, then begins to spiral, circling its way up his spinal cord until it hits the curve of his skull. There, he feels, it explodes, molesting his mind and tantalizing his senses with false prophecies.

  It will last six months, he wants to say, when in reality the charts now show that it will most likely not survive past the last week of June, three weeks away from now.

  Pushing himself back, Michael spins around to look out at the city. Manhattan—beautiful, urban, created by the world of profit and birthed by the need of cash, it spirals out below his office like a tranquil jungle in Africa. From his place on the forty-fifth floor, he imagines leafs of a tree shifting, but only sees air-conditioning vents winking in the wind. Where macaws should be there are pigeons—ugly by appearance but beautiful in nature—and where monkeys should be howling cars are screaming, filling the air with metallic reverbs as they plummet into one another and end the lives of children. This, he thinks, is the jungle, a paradise not ground in nature, but nurture. There are no monkeys, no trees, nor are there hidden wonders reaching for the last piece of dying fruit in the forest. There are no ants building homes beneath the ground. There are no elephants bathing their young with their trunks. There are no creatures who look to the sky and see a plane, then reach forward as if to grasp it, then say, ‘Oh.’ There is none of this in this concrete jungle. You are born, only to live life ignorant of the outside world, then die soon after.

  Some say this is the way the world was once meant to be.

  Michael saw otherwise.

  Taking a deep breath, he slides his hands into his pockets and glances toward his desk. Had he looked upon a fellow employee’s workspace, he would have seen pictures of a wife, a child, of a family waiting at home, but on his desk he sees nothing. There is no woman framed within a heart or a case of gold. There is no Emilin smiling back at him.

  Is it wrong, he thinks, to marry for ignorance?

  Closing his eyes, Michael tips his head to the ceiling and breathes.

  Work will be over in three hours.

  He’ll return home to a life that was not meant to be.

  “How was work?” Emilin asks.

  “Fine,” Michael replies, loosening his tie and collapsing onto the couch. “Other than the regular problems.”

  “It’s still bad?”

  “It’s been bad, Emilin, and it’s only getting worse.”

  Frowning, Emilin seats herself in the armchair across Michael, watching him with plain, indecisive eyes. In the slowly-waning, evening light, her heart-shaped face appears even harsher than it normally is, struck by concern and sharpened by doubt. She appears nothing like her normal self. It is this fear that courses through him each and every night when he drives home from work. It’s as if at any moment she will change, metamorphosing into something other than the doe-like woman he has known for the past eight years.

  At times, when waking, he believes Emilin is nothing more than a dream, a China doll sitting in a glass case.

  Always her eyes, he thinks. Always h
er eyes.

  As though waiting for further dialogue, the woman purses her lips, feigning a childhood pout. One cheek puffs out while the other depresses, further construing her image.

  “How was your day?” Michael thinks to ask, popping a button on his shirt.

  “Fine,” Emilin says.

  “Did you do anything special?”

  “I went to St. Mary’s.”

  Michael nods.

  The Catholic church on the corner of the street has served his wife well for the past few years. He makes no further comment.

  Rising, Michael stretches, then makes his way into the bedroom, where he discards his shirt and slides his belt through the loops in his pants. Once the buckle comes off, his pants fall to the floor and he wanders into the bathroom, slipping into the shower and waiting for the water to warm.

  A moment later, he hears Emilin walk into the room.

  “Can I get in?” she asks.

  He doesn’t reply. He turns his face to the wall and bows his head instead.

  The night comes and the world disappears as he is swallowed whole.

  “Hello,” the dalapago says. “How are you?”

  Michael smiles as the creature shifts beneath its pile of snow. First peeking out to see if anyone is around, the blue, wormlike creature tilts its head from side to side, winking beady eyes before shaking snow from its head. Once revealed, it takes a moment to gain its composure before snaking its way out of its burrow.

  As it moves forward, small, barely-visible wings appear from beneath the snow on its back, then expand outward and began to flicker. Like a dragonfly during flight, the transparent membranes whistle against the wind, only illuminated by the fact that they are covered in snow. The dalapago, vain in its exposure to the cold, uses its wings to beat the snow from its body, then returns them to its sides, content with its current frame of existence. It returns its attention to Michael shortly afterward.