Terror Scribes

by Adam Lowe

  Later that evening, in Alison’s room, the tape came to an end. Only this time, there was nothing to be gleaned from the recordings; no words, or screams; just Alison’s questions and the wind. It seemed the spirits were now at peace.

  “That’s it, then,” Kelly said.

  “I reckon.” Alison switched off the tape. “There’s nothing more to be done here.”

  Kelly nodded; in any case, she’d had quite enough excitement for one day. “How about a coffee,” she suggested.

  “Coffee Hell, I need a drink!”

  Alison jumped off the bed and grabbed her coat. “Come on, Kell; let’s go and find ourselves a bar. We can drink a little toast to the dead of Cry Baby Creek.” And linking her arm through Kelly’s, she led her out of the room. “I think it’s time we girls had a little fun, don’t you?”

  Kelly thought that they’d had quite enough ‘fun’ for one day; all the same, a nerve-calming drink wouldn’t go amiss.

  “But what are we going to say?” she asked.

  “About the creature?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing, hon; they’d lock the pair of us up!”

  “So we keep our mouths shut?”

  “Absolutely; I think it’s for the best, don’t you?”

  “Well ..”

  “Come on, let’s go for that drink.”

  So they went to a bar, let the story die and left the locals to their tales; some stones, Kelly knew, were better left unturned.

  And she certainly wasn’t about to start telling a tale about the night she was chased by a Mothman-like creature in the Australian Outback . . . they’d probably think she’d had a touch of the sun!

  David Price has been a published writer since 1996. He edited a magazine called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque between 1997 and 1999, and had a collection of stories called Evil Eye published back in 2001. For more details, you can check out his website at daiprice.weebly.com.

  Bastardising Metaphors in Banchory

  by Chris Kelso

  I look at Deborah in her frock, standing awkwardly with both feet crushed into tight stilettos. Her hair cascading in ringlets, eyes gaping like looking fish, blood smeared all over her crooked little mouth like treacle...

  You know the story . . . you’re walking into your local newsagents for some Winegums and a packet of Golden Wonder crisps, when BOOM—an unknown virus hits your town turning everyone around you into slobbering, brain hungry reanimated corpses . . .

  I know, I know, we’ve all been there, but how did you cope?

  If you—

  A) headed towards your nearest rooftop/government army quarantine base and held out until the virus was properly contained

  B) obtained an extra 40-round magazine for your Glock handgun

  OR

  C) killed yourself

  —Then chances are you dealt with the zombie holocaust as effectively as possible and maintained some glimmer of your precious humanity in the process(for a while at least). If you do fall into this category of people then I must congratulate you (congratulations!). But if you’re one of those rare people like me who tried reasoning with your recently infected loved ones, then chances are you wound up in the same situation that I’ve found myself in . . . shuffling through the streets as a bloody zombie yourself!

  First thing’s first though—I don’t want you to think this is a Romero-style epidemic here. By this I mean that I’m not using zombies as a metaphor for the repression of bourgeois American society or as nuanced symbolism pertaining to the Cold War or even as a flimsy social commentary regarding consumerism. No, no . . .

  This is me writing about my life living amongst the brain-dead AS one of them.

  For someone as well-educated as I am, you’d think I’d take no time in rising to the top of the un-dead hierarchy, but quite the opposite has transpired.

  (Insert formidable silence here.)

  In fact, I’m considered somewhat of an outcast in today’s society. When you think about it, I guess this all does kind of sound like a metaphor, doesn’t it? Sorry.

  At present I’m standing in a queue of zombies outside a truck sat on its axles. Inside are a number of humanoid morsels crying and praying for mercy. There’s a kid who looks like he’s relishing it all and there’s a middle aged man dumb with fright. How has it come to this? My future seemed so bright you know!

  So low is my stock these days that even my girlfriend Deborah has left me for a superior specimen curiously nickname. “Skull Smasher Zombie” by his living dead compatriots.

  They’re inseparable. It’s disgusting.

  My mother continues to smear her reflection with Windolene.

  My father continues to eat with his mouth open.

  My old brown Cinquecento remains unblemished. It was never a great car but it got me from A to B and served me well during my time among the living—nothing too ostentatious.

  My girlfriend continues to be a bitch.

  To think, if I hadn’t caught them both eating each other I’d have been none the wiser. Yes, these are changed times. If you have a single functioning particle in your juicy, delicious brain then prepare for a life of isolation and constant ridicule. This damn metaphor seems to be surfacing at an uncanny rate.

  Metaphor . . . bubbling up . . . foaming around me . . . a-a-n-n-d-d . . . there it is.

  I keep expecting to wake up . . .

  . . . Slide out of bed on a trail of my own sweat . . .

  . . . Grope around for a light switch to beat away the hideous shadow that’s been cast across the face of the world . . .

  But I never do wake up.

  (Pause for dramatic effect.)

  We have these morsels cornered—two unpopular teachers from my school.

  Mr Garitty and Mr Phelps.

  Well, I sa. “we”. I’M not really doing anything besides watching. I’ve been relegated to the back of the group, not that I have any desire to be at the vanguard. I’ve yet to completely abandon my dignity and sense of moral self.

  Yes, I think now’s as good a time as any to seize the ethical high ground!

  There are 3 primary desires of the recently undead—nourishment, sex and television. The casual zombie has no other hidden layer, no buried facet where all their sensitive, vulnerable and knowledge-thirsty components are situated . . . only surface aspiration.

  They’ve all lunged at the human feast, knocking over garbage cans and making some of the most obscene chewing noises I think I’ve ever heard. I can only see a bare human leg sticking out, calf flexed, ankle drawn tight.

  I’m feeling a little left out. My strongest social response is to succumb to crowd politics.

  Before I know what’s what, we’re eating them both alive.

  Their screams are awful and arousing.

  Garitty and Phelps both taste a lot like failure.

  Mmhmmm . . .

  My mother still finds time to fret when I don’t chew properly—you can’t spel. “smother” withou. “mother”, I suppose. In a way it’s comforting to know that some things never change . . . rather like women in some respects.

  Now wait just a sec here!

  I’m not a misogynist; I don’t hate all women. In fact, you could say with a certain confidence that I love most women. But given that my experiences with the opposite sex have proved gratuitously bloodier than an early David Cronenberg film, and as complicated as an Egyptian Sudoku puzzle, you can perhaps forgive these apprehensions of mine.

  It should be noted for posterity that zombies have no sense of decency either. So you can probably imagine the foul hybrid that is . . .

  . . . FEMALE ZOMBIE!

  As indecisive as she is cruel and blood thirsty . . . shrill, moody and in possession of an alluring beauty . . . loving, maternal . . . hateful and twisted . . .

  Casting my eye over the wasted town, I catch sight of Deborah and Skull Smasher Zombie acting out an elaborate oral sex routine. They’ve wrapped themselves in a lotus position, naked
in semi-foetal glory for all to see.

  Deborah is sluiced in sweat and viscera. Skull Smasher Zombie kneads all her bony contours with his fingertips.

  Then, true to his title, Skull Smasher punches Deborah’s head clean off.

  It’s all very sudden, very unnecessary, and I’m sure if my moral centre hadn’t been so dulled of late, it would be a thoroughly shocking scene to behold. But as it happens my moral centre has been dulled. I’m an abomination remember, just like everyone else. Debs is dead (again) . . .

  Oh well.

  A teardrop of semen bled from the eye of Skull Smasher’s penis as he gazed down at Deborah’s twitching, headless body.

  Bet she wishes she’d stayed with me now, eh?

  When I was among the living I had no propensity for violence. But in the past two days since the holocaust I’ve hunted and killed—

  5 disliked teachers

  3 accountants

  A tax man

  A local politician

  Several individuals of ethnic minority

  A doughy faced policeman

  A man parking in a disabled space

  A supermarket cashier

  2 innocent lovers warm in each other’s embrace

  An entire Buddhist men’s club

  An old man we thought looked shady

  A woman who dressed too revealingly

  A man with a book in his hand

  2 Smiths fans

  A vegetarian (guess that’s 3 Smiths fans?)

  A group of loitering teenagers

  And countless others

  You wouldn’t know it to look at me.

  I’m the killer with the kind eyes.

  If I think rationally, I know a person’s life has no meaning beyond the arbitrary importance they themselves give it.

  But this doesn’t excuse my behaviour.

  I’m watching the TV or staring through a window frame.

  I can’t decide which.

  I don’t bother to blink. My eyes are burning on the vista, my brain melted and rotted to mulch in my skull.

  Nothing pleases me anymore.

  I feel bored and tired.

  The burning eye of the sun covers everything in a sort of radioactive yellow. Stink lines from the junkyard start to steam up the glass portal in front of me—a TV, a window, whatever . . .

  Two rusty oil sentinels dominate the landscape here—Brutalized Aberdonian architecture. To my left there’s a busted up old warehouse with kids inside playing around with chemical drums and shards of broken glass—seem happy enough. The rippling surface of the see looks serene. It’s too distant to be real. Nothing pleases me anyway.

  I’m stuck in this crumbling city. Rather in here than out there among the street-smart living dead.

  I miss Deborah.

  Debs and I made passionate love. Passionate might be pushing it a tad. We sought union in beds and on floors, against walls, in the cramped spaces of Cinquecento’s and in the deepest crook of beach coves—we’d fuck anywhere on offer

  I remember the first time we ever kissed. It was in the height of summer 96 where the sounds of lawns being mowed and spitting sprinklers were heard down every block. We’d always been friends she and I. But that summer our relationship sparked into life, something new and unexpected and wonderful. I was as surprised as anyone when she tried it on with me!

  She stabbed me with a stiff tongue—my first kiss.

  I’m certain I was lousy at it.

  Now I’m looking at her decapitated skull rolling down a warm tarmac road being chased by the starving undead.

  If I’m to experience intimacy again, will I need to finagle a zombie?

  Hmmm . . .

  There’s a kid with a backward baseball cap and parachute pants on. He’s gaping idly at a television through a store-front window—new Two and a Half Men’s on—I can’t tell if he’s a zombie or not, but he’s blending in nicely.

  This loneliness is going to push me over the edge, I’m sure of it. Even when I choose to walk amongst them I feel isolated. No-one really connects anymore.

  I hate every single one of them.

  I hate the way they shuffle through life, leaching off of civilised society, eating the brains of the living, moaning and groaning and moaning and groaning . . .

  God it’s just occurred to me the way I’ve been behaving. I’m no better than they are.

  God Deborah . . .

  Light of my life, fire in my soul, sad beauty I’ll miss you’re soft touch . . .

  Oooh . . . new Two and a Half Men’s on . . .

  Chris Kelso is an author, editor and occasional literary agent. He enjoys the work of Trocci, Samuel R Delaney, Burroughs, Bukowski, Alasdair Gray, Octavia Butler, Stahl, Sartre, Phillip K. Dick, Samuel Shem, James Baldwin, McInerney, J.M Coetzee, Hubert Selby Jr. and others. He has worked for Eraserhead Press, Chomu Press, and now Dog Horn Publishing. Dog Horn Publishing will be releasing both his debut short story collection, Schadenfreude, and his novella The Best Years of Your Life.

  Bait

  by Derek M. Fox

  If you wanna know what came out the river in July ‘99 read on . . .

  Locals, what few remain, never stop talking about it, not even after they’ve upped and gone I daresay. If ever you’re out this way I guarantee you won’t stop talking about Cal Winters either.

  I’m Nate, and I got this notion to write it down afore somethin’ happens. O’ course all you writers out there ‘preciate how easy it is to jot down notes when you know a locale; sort of pull on the atmosphere, ensure places are described, add a few finer points.

  Fact is details lessen over time, but I’ll do m’best.

  See, there I was fishin’, my line bobbed once, in fact several times, the rod bent nearly double, so far over in fact that whatever had grabbed t’other end—nigh on pulled me in.

  Snagged on a drowned branch I guessed.

  Aw hell, I’m ahead o’ myself. Tell you what, let’s slip back to the Fall of ‘98.

  Any of you know Calvin Winters? No? Big feller in height and girth, most of it muscle. Most aim to steer clear of him. Times he went fishin’ any others around gave him distance. If Cal chose the east shore, locals settled on the west.

  Illusion or what, that there river would bubble and froth whenever it caught that guy’s reflection.

  Allus used big, barbed hooks too. Pike man to the bone Cal. Had a liking for big fish wi’ big teeth. Predators. Like him I reckon. He was one mean sonofabitch.

  And don’t that about sum it up?

  During ‘98, up till and including Christmas, most of us gathered in the bar at the Hook an’ Tackle—the place to be no matter what day in the season, time o’ year. Had us a high old time, but maybe not Cal Winters.

  Where he came from hell knows; just ambled in to our section o’ New England one November evenin’ a little over a year back. Rented Seb Cowley’s place adjacent to what used to be Cowley’s Boats—rowing boats, pedalos, nothin’ big. Hardly suited our big river. Guess Seb did all right ‘til the stroke got him. Lasted a coupla weeks. Heck, we gave him a good send-off.

  Gotta say everything went fine for a while with Cal. Always gossip o’ course. Out this way small town folk like to know a-l-l there is to know ‘bout incomers—usually store and pub jawing, like it fills in the down time. As for talkin’ to Cal, he kept pretty much to hisself. Few went by the boat yard ‘cept Jenny Travers.

  That Christmas they were having a one to one jaw in the corner by the fireplace. Flames dusted Jenny’s face like a warm caress, twinkled in smoky blue eyes, loveliest eyes this side of any river; gorgeous smile too with a laugh that sounded like fairy bells. That saying’s tacked over the bar, writ and left there by a wanderin’ poet.

  You’ll guess male blood roared every time Jen came by, meaning whenever she walked in any place our heads swivelled like a bunch o’ fairground clowns, us guys admirin’, sort of undressin’ ‘er, doing things . . . In our dreams. I mean come on!

 
Sure you might ask why a gal like her would want to tie in with a bear like Calvin. No finesse, diction proved any lack of real education. That guy’d spit on the fire and fall in raptures over a bottle of rye at least twice a week. And he sure could take his rye well enough.

  He’d walk in straight, an’ walk out the same way, back as rigid as the rod he used for fishin’, drained bottle and fumes lingering. Fit an’ all, like he never looked boozy, no bags under them mean, agate hard eyes, no slack jowls, slurring of words. Nothing like that. Cal was THE MAN whose look stated ask no questions. And yeah, odd times he’d chat about fishin’ whenever he felt like it. ‘Bout how he could make that rod sing, how he’d flick them pike out the river as easy as we might pick strawberries. Used barbed hooks. Wily as them fish are, Mr Pike never swam free of Cal’s hook.

  Lookin’ back I reckon not many did.

  Odd thing, Cal did share his catch. Drop a quantity off at our butcher cum fishmonger, left ‘em for folk that liked the taste you understand. Flavour’s too earthy for me, more an acquired taste.

  Jenny was an acquired taste. Eighteen goin’ on twenty five, that female could run rings around her old gran. Old lady took her in when Jen’s parents died.

  Hey, we got ourselves some shock that New Year’s Eve when Jenny disappeared. Quick as anyone can snap their fingers she’d gone. No note, nothin’. Gran was at a loss. Neither me nor the neighbours dare say anything to the old woman. Going on eighty five, folk made a book on how long she’d last.

  Speculation regardin’ Jenny’s whereabouts was rife, bottom o’ the lake being most likely. Some of us knew she an’ Cal argued some. I mean Jenny did give as good as she got.

  I’m sayin’ we’re a suspicious lot, fingers levelled at Cal. A gang of males checked patches o’ river almost daily, anxious to suss its secrets.

  Long, meandering, and deep, our river held all manner o’ things. Kids had drowned in it; over time tourists who hired row boats came croppers. Yep, a fair few cadavers surfaced from her secret pools. The disappeared we call ‘em . . . suicides mainly.