The Other Side

by Daniel Willcocks

  The Other Side

  A Horror Anthology

  Daniel Willcocks

  Other titles by Devil’s Rock Publishing

  Serial Fiction, “When Winter Comes”

  The First Fall (Episode 1)

  Buried (Episode 2)

  Black Ice Kills (Episode 3)

  Masks of Bone (Episode 4)

  Into the White (Episode 5)

  Winter Comes (Episode 6)

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  Anthologies

  The Other Side: A Horror Anthology

  Keep up-to-date at

  www.devilsrockpublishing.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Devil’s Rock Publishing Ltd.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  https://www.devilsrockpublishing.com/

  * * *

  All work remains the property of the authors and may be used by themselves or with their express permissions in any way that they deem appropriate with no limitations.

  * * *

  No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or print other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For all the horror fans (past, present and future) without whom the darkness would remain unexplored.

  What do you want from me?

  Why do you run from me?

  What are you wondering?

  What do you know?

  Why are you scared of me?

  Why do you care for me?

  When we all fall asleep

  where do we go?

  Billie Eilish

  Contents

  Foreword

  Dirt

  Marvin’s Tavern

  Corpse Forest

  Wheels Within Wheels

  Piece by Piece

  Secret Places

  Sheol

  The Cold Dark Forever

  The Fork in the Road

  The Bus

  Click for Ascension

  About the Authors

  Devil’s Rock Publishing

  Other titles by Devil’s Rock Publishing

  Foreword

  “The process of dying is falling asleep. The process of death is waking up.”

  J. Adam Snyder

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  “Death.” To some, it marks the final chapter. To others, it marks the next.

  There have been theories around the Great Beyond since humans were first intelligent enough to think beyond our own existence and ask the great questions. The Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, and virtually every sub-sect of religious faith believes in some form of afterlife. Whether with Hades in the Underworld, or in forms of reincarnation within Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—to name a few—the exploration of Death has a colorful and varied past. Stories of Death are written in every culture and in every language. The one thing that we, as a global community, all agree upon, is that everyone must one day die.

  But what truly lays beyond the curtain? Is there another dimension to our existence? What of the belief in ghosts? Is the paranormal just fiction, or does it hold some semblance of truth in our own realities? Are the sinners punished? Are the just rewarded?

  The Other Side aims to showcase just a glimpse of some of many possible scenarios of the afterlife. When assembling the impressive band of writers you have before your fingertips, I had one focus in mind: to find original, unique, and innovative stories that could bend the reality of what you believe the afterlife to be.

  Boy, did they deliver. In order to sift through the submissions to give you the cream of the crop, myself and my submissions team waded through hundreds of stories and hundreds upon thousands of written words to find those printed in the pages ahead. These truly are the crème de la crème, and I’m excited to present them to you here.

  This collection will take you to the farthest reaches of your realities, pulling you apart piece by piece until you’re left questioning your own existence. We sniff at the repercussions of the living in the wake of a close family member dying, we visit graveyards and say hello to witches, we go to far-off realms, as well as those oddly familiar, and all of these tales have one thing in common.

  To see what lays beyond The Other Side…

  Daniel Willcocks

  October 5th 2020

  Dirt

  By Tom Garback

  Mom’s bookcase has so few paperbacks on its top shelf that I can count them with all three of my left hand’s fingers. The other two digits are somewhere in an east Pennsylvanian landfill, I’m told. She insists it was an accident with the car door, but I wouldn’t know, having only been four or five at the time. I’ve always thought that, if it had been the car door, doctors would have sewn me back together. By now it’s clear that your pointer or middle finger is so small a thing to learn to live without.

  On the shelf sits Poe, the sexist, and Lovecraft, the racist, and Stephen King, your average guy, if no genius. “The dumbest men are the luckiest,” Dad would say, the little he does. Mom likes to call that shelf “the upper crust.” In her mind, there’s something made of graveyard dirt in all things, including people. “You come from dirt, you’re gonna be dirt. See those books up there? They’ve got none; they’re clean. The upper crust of our mad, mad world. It’s about honesty. Nothing’s got more dirt than a liar. Those books tell life like it really is.” Her voice puts bruises on my eardrums, even just the thought of it. “Why suffer a soul made of dirt when you can scape it out whole and call yourself clean?” She’s always speaking cryptically, distantly, like the past has won her over, cast its shade across her eyes.

  That’s how I imagine it, anyway. Same way she might, but with less invention, through long, stretchy folds of time that pile up like ice blocks left on the beach, their opalescent fractures all vanishing on the absorptive sand. That was a game Alison and I played in Ventnor, back when we took family vacations. “Wait and watch them melt,” she’d say. “You can’t stop an ice cube from melting. It’s its nature, once you toss one in the sun.”

  Mom sets steak knives next to our plates, knowing Halloween’s next week, reminding me of the chef’s knife that’s been missing for months. Dad brings out the charred pot pie. “I’ll need some extra time to tame him tonight, so eat up fast.” Alison didn’t need to be asked twice, but I was a slow, picky eater. “It’ll be rough. He gets angrier every day. He fears All Hallow’s Eve. Losing control of himself.” I think of how the paranoia behind lost control is precisely what looses it.

  Mom is talking about the ghost, the one that lives in the room above the stairs. Not the house stairs, but the iron spiral stairs propped on the back porch, with its swirly, spiked railing, just as spiked as the high metal picket fence below, gothic enough to stab out Mom’s anxieties of trespassers, its sandy ring the cold announcement of bad fortune. It wasn’t too dangerous, she’d decided, because Alison and I weren’t stupid little kids who might leap from a second-story window, in escape, perchance, and worsen their untimely blow with picket fence impact.

  The steps, though, they wind up to the guest room on the third floor, where Grandpa would have stayed, had he lived long enough to finish moving in with us. All that had remained was his personal luggage and himself. Mom wanted Grandpa here years ago, maybe from a spot in her heart that had opened up into a hole and wanted filling. This space was as empty now as that room on the third floor.

  The owners before us tore down the inside staircase and threw up a wall, for whatever weird reason people put up walls, like dumb superstition, bei
ng set in some ways. Not when it came to houses, evidently; just fears. My parents were weird, too: went the cheap route, ignored housing regulations, and other mannerly things. They got the iron stairs from the old, dying couple down the street who used to offer us games of penuckle. My parents possibly stole without the couple knowing or lasting the night to catch their stealth, tied it to their truck, dragged it over, balanced it on its hind legs like a circus act, stuck some nails where they could fit them, and called that climb the kind of obstacle Grandpa deserved, a fair welcome. And they were right.

  Every day, for maybe twenty minutes, Mom sneaks up after dinner as the sun’s descent turns the sky to muddled berries. She takes the key tied to her ankle bracelet and locks herself in. “To tame the beast, to clean him out.” Whatever that means, and whoever the ghost is supposed to be. Mom’s never said. Alison’s too scared of the possibility of a phantom to not believe, and Dad and I are too scared of Mom to not at least pretend that we believe.

  So, we eat; Mom sipping pills, Dad his beer, our knives untouched and words unspoken, or maybe it’s the other way around, and afterwards Mom goes to tame her beast, and Alison takes a bath again, and Dad drives to the bar, and I lay in bed to watch men, making sure to wear my earbuds this time, remembering last night’s incident, with Mom walking in and marking the worst humiliations of adolescence. I’d wondered all day how she’d punish me, or at least tell me that she was angry, but by now it seems she hadn’t, after all, been able to tell the moans were men in love, and I wondered if she’d even heard anything at all, or if she’d ever heard the sounds of love, or if her look of nausea from my door was just another way of saying that life hurts.

  You’re bound to think strangely, living with my mom. Flashes of the past stab through the canvas of the present. Once, she said, “We live on the permanence of things that’ve already happened, Michael.” That was before she made the decision to move us near a Levittown, where we’d get a fresh set of neighbors. She’d be more private, swear off fights in the grocery lanes or box office lines. That old scent of 1950’s suburbia, white rubbing off old picket-fences, and apple pies left in the window to mold. We were home.

  Before the move, standing from her bathroom window, looking over her half acre one more time—an acre that would turn to half its size in the house we now inhabit—she saw me on the deck below, sunning up nutrients for the last time, and said, “Nothing’s harder than breathing. Some moments can do you in. But once you’ve mastered breath, everything else is easy.” She must have been thinking about swimming lessons with Grandpa when she was a girl, which she’s yet to tell me the truth about, though she’ll mention them during her worst attacks, when even the pills have worn off, and I must, as always, “be there for her.”

  Our house sat somewhere, somehow, still unrecognizable in the great scheme of what makes up a state, particularly one in the haunted east of our nation, so prone as it was to nightmares of the Gothic past. My own started a few months after the move, near the time Dad’s drinking felt its cruel ascent and all our lives closed the doors on themselves.

  My nightmares came for other reasons too, of course, but I won’t think about them now. They’d turn my head into one huge bruise, its pooled blood beneath staining all my young, healthy skin blue.

  I can’t sleep. All I see are the undersides of eyelids, mine or not. Like movie screens, they show me shapes, and I can make out one of them as Greeks did the constellations, the eight cookie-cut sides of a spinning lamp shade, and it’s Mom getting run over and over by Grandpa’s car, and how pathetic and hilarious and awful, and I see beside them what must be veins, and I think of how slimy human bodies are, like swamp creatures. We can never get outside of them.

  So, instead I wait, knowing that, when I do sleep, I sleep as sound as the dead, despite the house’s stench. All families have a unique set of scents dictated by detergent, raw produce, and hormones. Ours came from mystery, perhaps the ghost, after all. It lingered, particularly rank these days, accented by a sickly sweet odor and stocked with gassy sour, eggs left out, toilets unflushed. It seemed to precipitate from some vengeful heaven set to warn us we had all died already.

  I hear the clock strike twelve, calling out Grandpa’s anniversary and commencing the witching hour.

  A year ago today, he leapt off a goddamn lighthouse. I remember Mom telling me how his old, wrinkly body must have been unrecognizable by dawn, when a fisherman found him because he thought another guy had chummed the waters already, which was illegal in that area, and I remember wondering what kind of animals tear their victims without consuming them, and I remember never seeing his death on the news or releasing an obituary or having a funeral or telling any family, and that was mostly because there wasn’t anyone to tell, let alone anyone who’d care.

  I’m sure he never wanted to live with us, to plop himself down the way he does on his yearly visits, complains again and again about how he can’t sit right because his dad shot framing nails into his ass as a boy whenever he bullied kids at school, and how his backside’s like the night sky in negative, that the doctors never got all of the nails out because of how deep they were, of how embarrassed he was telling them he’d accidentally done it to himself in the shed. It always makes me think of the metal bar Mom got placed in her chest from the time Grandpa ran her over with a car for trying to run away in open daylight. “Nothing gifted to me by him has ever been more mine,” Mom says of that bar.

  That raggedy grand-bastard came over a few days sooner than expected, or a few days after, but never on time, and that made Mom mad more than anything, which was Grandpa’s goal, more than anything. He scrubbed the halls with cigar smoke, raided the overstocked medicine cabinets, mocked us at dinner by asking me if I liked any girls yet, for high school was a whole new chance to start clean—“Don’t you speak of clean,” Mom’d interject—asked my sister if school was treating her any better, for junior year was the most important one, asked Mom if the marriage counselor had lowered her rates, for the wages of a self-employed accountant and a much-too-old auto mechanic didn’t allow these kinds of luxuries, you know.

  Grandpa had jumped to his death, and we’d dodged a framing nail.

  Hours later, Mom stands over the tub, her bloodshot eyes as red as the water. Alison holds her groin, saying how sorry she is, but Mom’s voice is drowning her out. “All Hallow’s Eve is up to no good upon you, now, is it? You’ve never been strong enough to finish it, have you? Before screaming and waking me up? And Michael this time, too.” I don’t breathe. “Put more pressure on it, will you? I’m sure you’re well practiced in squeezing yourself. We were all girls once.”

  “I’ll call for help,” I say, just to make her stop, to wake us up from this otherworldly distortion. “I’ll get towels. I’ll get Dad.” I alternate lifting my feet up and down off the tiles to feel how sticky they are with icy sweat.

  “Don’t do that,” Mom says. “Her cuts aren’t deep, not with the dull razors we got, and that area won’t bleed too much, ’cause she missed the artery.”

  “Stop it!” I yell, but she doesn’t take a throw at me, because she doesn’t hear me, because I haven’t actually said anything, and nothing’s alright.

  “The water’ll clean things up,” Mom goes on. Sweat drips down my thigh, and the warmth makes my heart stop, and I know it’s not a wetness as clean as sweat. “As for your father, he’s out, per usual—quit whimpering, Alison. Blood’s a part of growing.”

  “The ghost hates me most,” my sister pleads, the porcelain light of the tub on her face, and I stop myself from thinking that her eye whites have poured out through her tears. “He made me do this ’cause he wants you to hate me as much as he does. As much as I do.”

  “Don’t blame this on the ghost,” Mom says. “It’s a matter of attention. I was a teenage girl a hundred years ago. I know how it feels to want to cause a scene, hog the limelight, and it is a matter of hogs when you’re a teenager.” Is there steam, or are my eyes clouding over?
“You’ll have to jump off a skyscraper to outdo your grandfather, understand? And, until then, I’m not giving in and letting you have all the attention that you don’t deserve. It’ll help you in the long run. So, press yourself now, and close the lips on your face, too, before something slides out.”

  “Please—” I start, and Mom flicks her head toward me, her hand needing not raise to tell me my place, and Alison stands, the red cascading over prickly shins, the cliffs that separate reality from intolerance, and escaping into the water like a portal to someplace safer.

  “Go back to bed, Michael. These things are womanly troubles.”

  Then Alison screams, the blade pinched between her fingers, a privilege I can only envy, though at least I’m a boy, for a growing girl would surely miss her fingers more, particularly the middle, and Alison’s arm is swinging out, and Mom is turning around, catching a nick in her nightgown, the breasts beneath flashing under the brightness of the room.

  “This is your fault,” Alison says. “You’ll never get your dirt out, will you?” Mom steps back in reply, faltering.

  Then she’s steady. “Try and cut me again, bitch. Our ghost will eat you up. He’ll do anything to protect me. He’s mine. Remember Emma?” I push that sweet name from my mind, and Allison falls back against the wall, vanquished, and slips down with a cold and soundless splash.