9 Tales Told in the Dark 6

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  9TALES TOLD IN THE DARK#6

  © Copyright 2015 Bride of Chaos/ All Rights Reserved to the Authors.

  First electronic edition 2015

  Edited by A.R. Jesse

  Cover by Turtle&Noise

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  9TALES TOLD IN THE DARK#6

  Table of Contents

  Deathstaller by Shawn P. Madison

  Witchskin by Rik Hunik

  Tunnel Vision by Samuel Brower

  Sculptor Man, Sculpt Me Something Awful by Alex Živko-Clark

  God of Blood by Chris Capps

  Dinner Call by Daniel J. Kirk

  Mold by George Strasburg

  It Even Casts Shadows by Douglas Kolacki

  Cold Fire by Thomas Canfield

  An End for Some by Jason Lairamore

  Still Born by Ryan Neil Falcone

  Social Studies by Tim McDaniel

  Treasure by Kenneth O’Brien

  Sacrifices by Jim Lee

  My Queen, My Queen by Christine Ruggiano

  Spider House by Bill Pace

  Rain & Iron by Benjamin Sperduto

  Snow Man By Thomas Anderson

  TALES

  TOLD

  IN THE

  DARK

  #6

  Deathstaller by Shawn P. Madison

  The tingle came over him softly at first, like the barely felt pass of an autumn breeze kissing at your neck, and he turned up the tattered collar of his green long-coat to soothe away the chill. Another two steps along the dirty cracked sidewalk in the dark, though, and he knew that the chill was here to stay…at least for now.

  “Jesus Christ,” he spoke in a low voice. “Here we go again.”

  Looking up from his feet, where his eyes had been lingering, as they so often did these days, he saw the busy city street as if for the first time. After nearly an hour of walking, smelling the crass ugliness of the streets and the cretins who inhabited them after dark, he really had no idea of where he was or where he was headed. The street lights hurt his eyes despite their dim efforts to brighten the dark of this city and the glare from the headlights of the approaching cars hurt even worse.

  There were people, many of them, walking along the street. Both sidewalks held their shadows and within those shadows, he knew, no good could be found. This was a desolate place, a place of no heart and no love and no feelings of good for the world. A place where those who plodded along in whatever it was they were currently calling life didn’t care for anyone but themselves and, even then, not much.

  The chill was still there, pulling, directing, asking him to go somewhere he didn’t really want to go but, as usual, his feet started answering the call. His neck felt like someone had just rubbed it with a bunch of that healing ointment that felt cold and hot at the same time—an uncomfortable feeling, especially since he could feel it seeping through several layers of clothes; a tee-shirt, sweater and the khaki green long-coat.

  Nope, this wasn’t the chill of October in the city, not the type of chill that most people started feeling when late summer turned into cool fall and headed toward winter. No, this was a feeling he was all too familiar with. A feeling of bad intentions, of sinister doings in the night, of a situation about to go wrong for some unsuspecting moron who should know better than to be out here on the mean streets after dark in the first place.

  “Damn,” he muttered and flipped down the collar again. So much for wishful thinking. His eyes came alive now, searching for something, he wasn’t sure what yet. Several people passing on the street looked at him strangely, giving him more than a cursory glance of interest, extending their stares just a bit too long, turning them into glares of revulsion as they saw the lights of the cars and the grimy streetlamps reflecting off the backs of his eyes like those of a wild animal caught in the beam of oncoming headlights on some dark and lonely country road. Better yet, he remembered all the red-eye effects that appeared in what few pictures had been taken of him during those dreadful childhood years—the pictures that his parents hid from everyone in case they caught a glimpse of what the flash had caught on film. The red eyes of the devil, his mother had spat dozens of times over the years, ashamed of what she called her son’s horrible eye defect.

  Defective, that’s true. Kat Random laughed, an evil low sound that made the people who were glaring at him give him just that much more room on the sidewalk as they walked past. He let them go, immune to their scorn, knowing that he was a different animal than they were, a different form of life on this Earth. Something had frowned on him at birth, the frown indicating displeasure, for surely what afflicted him was no sort of gift by any means.

  The weird reflective quality of his eyes had earned him the feline nickname back in high school, had earned him many a painful beating by his fellow students and had earned him the loss of any meaningful friendships in his youth due to the all encompassing meanness and cruelty possessed by most adolescents when confronted with the weird, the strange, the different.

  Those memories were far from his mind these days, though, and he was better off for it. That was years ago, at least five, perhaps more, but these days Kat Random moved on an altered path from the reality of his so called peers. What he saw out here in the dark, in the shadows of night, that was usually hidden from all else walking the street were the very things that made them cringe in their beds after midnight and howl in agony come the wee hours. He could see the stuff of nightmares, he could feel it coming from a good ways off, he could smell it, he could hear it and, what’s more, he could actually do something about it.

  Not a gift, this power of his, that’s for sure. A curse more like it. He no more wanted to help the sallow soulless bodies moving past him on the sidewalk, the empty carcasses carrying the essence of what had once been called a life-spark, than he wanted to go back to that dreaded school and the daily beatings or move back in with his Godawful parents. Lord knows, the years that he’d spent in that small pit of a house, crumbling on its foundations within the horrific sprawl of an urban war-zone, cooped up with those two human monsters who posed as his parents, were the worst of his life. The more he thought about those long lonely years…he shuddered.

  Reaching the corner, he turned, following only the direction that his feet propelled him toward and feeling only the chill running up and down his spine. His fingers flexed within the pockets of the old khaki green long-coat, the kind that you could find by the thousands stacked on old wooden shelves inside the stalls of many a traveling flea market, the kind that came with worn patches outlining the bodily contours of some long forgotten soldier, and his ears finally picked up the target.

  The weight of the knives felt good in their sheaths riding both of his hips. He was on a side street now, off the beaten path, and he could hear voices. There were three very distinct voices coming from an alley about two-thirds of the way up this block. His footfalls were nearly silent, his dark blue running shoes absorbing most of the sound of the contact between feet and concrete.

  Sha
dows all around him started moving and Random spit on the ground, trying to relieve himself of the sudden rotten taste that had filled his mouth but not meeting with success. That nagging taste of decay, of utter rot, was just one more thing that made him hate doing this. He sensed more than felt the shadows as their whispery words carried to him on the street. Full of hate, full of evil, the words seemed to stab at him as they crept by, carried up the street on the brisk October wind.

  With eyes focused now, taking in every detail, he heard a faint scream, quickly cut off and turned the corner into the alley.

  A small old man, disheveled and dirty, obviously homeless, barely stood in front of two tall and skeletal looking men. One of the tall ones was holding the old man up roughly by a grimy shirt while the other was thrusting a stiff index finger repeatedly into the man’s chest.

  Random couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t care to, whatever had started this was nothing he wanted to know. However, the shadows moved closer to the three and the whispers in his brain grew louder…just as they always did just before…

  “What do we have here?” Random asked and all three heads turned in his direction. Faint light filled the darkness of the alley from several sources—a few of the streetlights on the next street over, looming over the small buildings whose backs made up the alley, and a bare bulb dangling from an open door leading down into the filthy bowels of the building directly behind the three men.

  Random saw trash littering the small area, a dumpster—most likely the source of the loose trash and the target of the old man’s interest—as well as several black trash bags filled to brimming left outside the overflowing metal refuse container. There were windows visible on the building, one to each side of the open door, both dark. Most of the panels were missing panes, Random saw, and plywood covers had fallen off of both.

  Other than that, the other two walls that made up the alley were sheer brick faces without any windows. A rusty old ladder led up to the roof of the building that made up the left hand wall and a stack of broken cinder blocks leaned against the other. Basically only one way out for the three who were facing him and he was standing dead center in the middle of it.

  “Mind your business,” one of the tall ones grumbled while the other tightened his grip on the old man.

  Random shook his head and laughed, trying to drown out the sounds of those dismal lives being led on the main street not too far away. Car horns blared, shouts of profanity carried along on the night and a low hum of many garbled voices were present in the alley. Along with the raspy murmurings of the shadows. “I wish I could, you just don’t know, but that’s not going to happen.”

  “I said get out of here, asshole,” the same one said, all the while the old man whimpering and trying his best to shrink as far back from his assailants as physically possible. Was that a glint of rebellion Random caught in the old man’s eyes?

  “Or you’ll get it as good as this old bastard,” the other man chimed in.

  “You just don’t get it,” Random said and began walking toward the three men.

  He felt the two tall ones tense and the old one strangely fill with anger but his feet continued on their course—only twenty more paces separated him from the small group at the end of the alley.

  “You see, pieces of shit like you two aren’t even in control of your own actions,” Random said and swept away the two sides of his long-coat, filling his hands with the small blades in a blur of rapid motion. “Can’t you see them? They’re all around you, right now. Telling you what to do, controlling you, bringing misery to that poor old son of a bitch for no other reason than you two happened to stumble past at the right time.”

  “Listen, kid, stop your gibberish and leave yourself out of this,” the one who had spoken first said.

  Random shook his head again and stopped about four feet from them. “First off, it’s not gibberish,” he said, looking up at the two of them, both men towering over him. “Secondly, you’re too stupid to understand what I’m saying. Both of you—idiots. Too stupid to go on living, and weaker than that old man you’re about to kill.”

  “We’ll kill you, too, asshole,” the talkative one said and shoved the old man to the ground.

  While this one took a step toward Random, the other one bent down to pick-up the old man again, and it was almost too easy.

  Random darted in low, using his lack of any real height to swoop in under the man’s outstretched arms, and hurled upward with the knife in his right hand. The blade bit deeply into the tall man’s upper abdomen and Random used all his strength to drive the blade upward in a slicing motion. His victim hadn’t even seen the move let alone reacted to it. The blade met ribs almost immediately, the man’s skin too thin to offer any resistance to razor sharp steel, and hot blood gushed out around his hand. Random pivoted and allowed the body to slide off his right arm while the knife in his left hand plunged deep into the upper shoulder of his next target, the man’s scream echoing off the close confines of the alley. The old man fell back to the trash covered ground as the hand that was holding him instantly released its grip, and landed with a grunt.

  The long terror-stricken scream died suddenly as Random swept the bloody knife in his right hand across the exposed throat before him. Arterial spray sent a geyser of blood into the night, most of it slapping wetly against the far wall of the alley, and the whispers in Random’s head grew louder, more agitated.

  Whirling again, Random brought both knives down into the back of the one he had stabbed in the abdomen to finish the job, the blades thunking home with a satisfying jolt as they dug into flesh right up to the hilt.

  Leaving his blades embedded in his first victim’s back for the moment, Random turned back to the one whose throat he had slit and grabbed the man’s head with both hands. A faint ray of light caught his eyes just so and the dying man tried to scream again but couldn’t.

  “I told you…stupid,” Random said and held on to the man’s face until the eyes went dull. Dropping the body, he rocked back on his heels to watch the shadows crawl out of the two dead men. Slowly, purposefully, they crawled from beneath the bodies and rose into an upright position. While the other shadows had never stopped moving, these two were floating in front of him, still as death.

  Random stood to face them and snickered. He felt their feelers trying to make a connection with his brain but he wasn’t worried. He’d met no shadow yet strong enough to break through his natural mental defenses.

  “Leave us,” Random commanded and the two shadows shot straight up into the darkness of the night sky above the alley. In a cacophony of whispering, filling his ears as if he were in a crowded subway car with fifty people all holding simultaneous conversations, the other shadows drifted in and around the bodies finally shooting upwards to join their brethren.

  Suddenly, all was quiet. Random kept his eyes pointed skyward for several moments, looking for any telltale sign of a possible return, but they were gone. Whatever they were—demons, evil spirits, living shadows…he didn’t know but they always reacted in the exact same way whenever he was called on to dispatch them. Finally, he walked over to the corpse that had both of his knives sticking out of its back and yanked the blades free. He bent over his victim, using the dead man’s shirt to wipe off the blood and looked over at the stern gaze of the old man.

  “It’s ok, old timer, these two won’t be bothering you anymore,” he said and the old man groaned in anger.

  “You fool, you stupid fool,” the old man said. “It was my time, you idiot! Why did you stop them?”

  Random stood up, confusion and disbelief whirling through his head as he tried to figure out what the old guy was muttering about. “If you haven’t figured it out yet, friend, I just saved your life.”

  “Screw that, fool!” the old man said. “You meddle in affairs that aren’t any of your business.”

  Random searched the old man for any signs that another shadow or two might still be lingering in the alley bu
t none of his usual triggers went off. “You wanted to die tonight? Here? In the trash?”

  “What do you know of me?” the old man said and took a single staggering step toward Random. “What do you know of what I’ve endured and what decisions I’ve made, whether bad or good?”

  “I don’t, old man, and I don’t care,” Random said, placing the now clean blades back in his hip sheaths. “All I know is that you were in some serious trouble here, at least that’s what it looked like from where I was standing.”

  “Trouble? Like I couldn’t handle those two bottom feeders if I’d wanted to,” the old man spat. “I chose this, you idiot! I chose this! You had no right!”

  “Okay, keep your voice down, dammit,” Random ordered and the old man winced as if physically struck. “Why am I standing here arguing with such a senile old bastard?”

  “Listen to me, Deathstaller,” the old man said and Random’s eyes widened. “I see them, too. You know what I mean, the dark ones. I’ve been seeing them for the last seventy years. I used to be just like you…but I’d had enough. Do you hear me? Enough.”

  “What are you talking about?” Random said, the words barely escaping his mouth in a hiss. The old familiar tingling came back and he was suddenly on full alert.

  “Yes, that’s right,” the old man smiled. “Even now, they’re coming back. They’ve found more of those zombies to take over and they’ll soon be steering them this way. To this alley. Where I will still be after you’re long gone. Now…go!”

  Random stood there, eyes searching the old man for any signs of deception but finding nothing. He moved back a step and heard the noise of something being kicked on the side street not too far away.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Random said, reaching out for the old man but his hand was slapped violently away.

  “Leave me!” the old man wheezed. “For God’s sake, go!”

  “They’re going to kill you…” Random began to protest but the old man shook him off.