Dark Tales: 13 New Authors, One Twisted Anthology

by Vincent V. Cava (Editor)

  So what if my food takes years off your life and gives you a worse complexion than The Toxic Avenger? At least it tastes good!

  -Fat Sal

  It was only morbid curiosity that motivated me to lift the lid. I was interested to know what it was about the place that made Donald prefer it to the fifty thousand other pizza restaurants around campus. Perhaps I should have been better prepared for what I was about to see. After all, I’d surmise that a few weeks of cleaning Donald’s disaster of a room is enough to desensitize anyone to even the most objectionable sights and smells, but for whatever reason I wasn’t ready for what was waiting for me underneath the obese chef’s cardboard portrait.

  I felt my stomach drop the instant I raised the lid. Scuttling around inside the box, crawling over leftover crust, and collecting around puddles of grease like caribou at a watering hole were dozens of those little black bugs! It was by far the most I had ever seen in one place. A jolt of panic darted down my arm, causing me to drop the pest-ridden thing to the floor. The thud must have startled the insects because next thing I knew they were dispersing throughout the room, scurrying for cover in all directions.

  The thunderous blare of Donald breaking wind erupted from the living room, accompanied by a beastly snort that made me cringe so hard it caused my entire body to tremble. I followed the awful noises to find my brother still sawing wood on the sofa. Sordid thoughts of Elizabeth willingly allowing that perverted snake, Chuck Volderschmidt, to defile her hallowed Garden of Eden in Jessica Brakowtzki’s bathroom once again started to swirl through my mind. It was Donald’s fault. He was the reason I had been afraid to ask Elizabeth out in the first place. All the filth he created, his disgusting lifestyle – I had been far too self-conscious to allow anyone close enough to me where they might learn the truth about him. And then it came to me – an answer so simple I was shocked I hadn’t thought of it before. There was only one way that I could ever truly be happy. I had to get rid of Donald.

  Before I get into the next part of my story I want to explain to you that I thought long and hard about how to deal with the situation. A crazy person might have reacted on pure impulse after coming to the realization that had just made itself plainly apparent to me. But I’m no crazy person! I made certain to evaluate every possible option in exhausting detail before finally deciding to kill my brother.

  Once my choice had been made, I slowly crept towards the napping ogre, although I’m sure that due to the marijuana induced coma he was currently sleeping off, I could have been doing cartwheels and he wouldn’t have woken up. Looking down at his chubby cheeks made me feel queasy. Quite honestly, I felt like I was about to do him a service – like putting down a mangy dog that’s blind from cataracts and suffering from arthritis. I reveled in the moment as I cautiously wrapped my hands around his flabby neck, taking care not to wake him before I was in position. Then, in one rapid movement, I threw my body on top of his, straddling his tubby torso and squeezing his throat as hard as I could. Almost immediately his eyes shot open, but his startled, terrified stare only helped to empower me. Donald may have been larger than me, but I was stronger. His muscles had atrophied due to years of lounging around the apartment while mine had become more developed from my daily outings to the gym. Desperate pleas for mercy sporadically leaked from his mouth, but I couldn’t make out a word he was saying (Nor did I care to hear them!). I could feel his windpipe crushing under the grip of my hands. The pressure caused his eyes to bulge from his head like one of those goofy stress management toys that at least one jackass has on his desk in every single office on the planet.

  It surprised me how long it took to finish the job. I must have been at it for at least ten minutes before I was sure he was dead. By the end of it, I was drenched in sweat. Lactic acid rushed through the muscles of my arms producing a mild burning sensation in my biceps and triceps. Donald’s face had turned a greyish hue; black and purple rings encircled his fat neck where my hands had been choking him. His tongue hung from his mouth like a dog stuck out in the sun without a bowl of water. As I looked at my dead brother, not an ounce of remorse lingered in my consciousness. Donald had brought death on himself. As far as I was concerned, my brother was barely alive before I strangled him.

  I knew that keeping him in the apartment would not be wise. Storing his corpse was something only a psychopath like Ed Gein or John Wayne Gacy would do. Eventually his body would rot and smell (even more than the apartment itself) and people would complain. If enough tenants raised a fuss the landlord would demand to investigate and then I’d be finished. My parent’s summerhouse was only an hour and a half from the university. I was positive I could get rid of it there. All I needed to do was sneak his body to my car in the parking garage without anyone noticing.

  ***

  Transporting Donald’s corpse from the living room to my car turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. It was midterms week and most of my building’s occupants were locked away inside their apartments cramming for exams or pulling all-nighters at the library.

  There were always oversized cardboard boxes, discarded by tenants after whatever furniture delivered inside of them had been removed, stacked up next to the dumpster behind my building. I selected the biggest one I could find then headed back to my unit with it. Donald’s limp body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, but the adrenaline coursing through my veins gave me the strength to hoist his hefty cadaver into the box without too much difficulty. I dragged the thing down the hall, into the elevator, and up to my sedan, trying my best to appear as inconspicuous as possible. Luckily for me, I didn’t run into any inquiring minds eager to know what was inside the package I was hauling. Could you imagine! I’d probably be forced to blubber out some sort of pitiful, Jack Tripper-esque excuse if people started asking questions. Just like an episode of Three’s Company, only with less boobs and more murder!

  The drive up to my parent’s summerhouse was a quiet one. I didn’t feel like listening to the radio and Donald wasn’t in the mood to do much talking. I was surprisingly calm for having just committed fratricide. To be honest, I was more relieved Donald was dead than distraught. He was a terrible brother and from what I could tell growing up, he wasn’t much of a son to my parents either. Once the matter of his body was taken care of, I would be able to get back to school and start living a normal life.

  I had a plan, in case you were wondering. Only a complete whack-job would kill someone without an exit strategy. My parent’s vacation home was conveniently secluded and located on a massive lake. When I was little, my father and I used to take his old rowboat out on the water before Donald or my mother would wake up so we could go fishing. We’d spend the morning together, usually catching nothing and waiting for the sun to peak out from over the eastern hills while he spouted off obscure trivia to me about the lake.

  “Yup. This lake has a surface area of approximately 17 square miles.” He’d say to me. “It’s been measured at 518 feet at its deepest point. Better keep your arms and legs in the boat, no telling what could be down there. Just about anything could hide in a body of water this big.”

  He always said the last part just to get a rise out of me, but the sheer size of the lake always stuck with me. There was some truth to his teasing. Anything could hide down there – even my blob of a brother.

  My plan was to dump his corpse in the lake and ditch my car ten miles south of my school (the opposite direction of my folks summer house). From there I would have to find a ride back to the campus; if I could make it to the school before people in my building started waking up, no one would realize I had even left. A little later I could report my brother missing and my car stolen. It wouldn’t be hard to make it look like he had taken my car. I could leave his sweatshirt in the back seat, smear his fingerprints all over the steering wheel, and maybe even sprinkle a little of his hair around to make it seem like he was driving it. Donald had a couple minor run-ins with the law when he was younger. Nothing major – he got h
it with a misdemeanor for marijuana possession when he was 17 and some vandalism stuff when he was a little younger, but compared to my squeaky clean record he looked like a felon. Convincing the police that he had finally gone off the deep end and skipped out on town wouldn’t be a problem.

  I pulled my car around to the back of the lake house and killed my headlights. The closest neighbors lived about a mile away, but I was taking no chances by unnecessarily drawing attention to myself. It was getting late; the clock on my dashboard flashed 11:30. The light from the numbers bathed the inside of my car in a pale green glow. For a few seconds nothing felt real to me – like I had somehow been transported into the plot of a David Lynch movie. I quickly snapped myself back to reality and got to work.

  I dragged Donald’s corpse out of the trunk, and lugged it down the gravel path that lead towards my father’s tool shed. I had one more precaution I needed to take in order to make sure I wouldn’t be caught. If watching hours upon hours of Horatio Caine catching bad guys and solving murders down on South Beach taught me anything it’s that no matter how terrible the crime, there’s always time for an inappropriate stomach-groaning pun (YEEAAHHHH!!!!). If it taught me anything else, it’s that dental records and fingerprints are by far the easiest way to identify a body. Donald may have been dead, but he still had a mouthful of teeth and all ten of his fingers. My Dad’s shed, however, stored a sturdy set of pliers and a handy pair of heavy-duty pruning sheers. I think you can put two and two together and figure out where this is going.

  I rolled Donald’s cumbersome corpse the final few feet through the shed’s door and propped it upright against the wall. I must have inherited my affinity for tidiness from my father; he always kept his things so neat and orderly. Suffices to say, his shed was no exception. I had little trouble locating the pliers I would need to remove my brother’s teeth. The operation, I estimated, would most likely be a bloody one so I decided to reel out the blue plastic tarp that was propped up in the corner in order to catch any “DNA evidence” that might escape my brother’s mouth while I yanked away at his brownish-yellow, smoke stained incisors. I had just finished laying it down on the floor when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye that made every muscle in my neck go rigid and sent a wave after wave of fright pulsating throughout my body. I blinked thrice, silently praying to God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and any other holy deity whom might have happened to be observing the scene that what I had just witnessed out of my peripheral vision was nothing but an optical illusion. Unfortunately for me, my prayers had gone unanswered because my vision had not deceived me. Donald’s chest was moving.

  I was too afraid to turn my head. An hour earlier he was dead. I had even checked his pulse. People don’t just come back to life, I told myself. That was something a crazy person would believe. Slowly, I rotated my neck in his direction in order to get a better look. What happened next was something I have not been able to forget in the days since the incident -- no mater how hard I've tried.

  Donald’s body still sat limp against the wall of the shed – the skin of his lifeless face had gone from grey to pale white during the drive. There was nothing in his cold, empty stare that would suggest any signs of vitality or even a single trace of consciousness, yet his chest was clearly throbbing up and down with alarming frequency. I tried to swallow, but realized my mouth had gone bone dry. With a thud his body slumped to the floor, causing me to jump three feet off the ground. The trunk of his core continued to move. He was laying on his back now; his colorless face turned in my direction. Perhaps against my better judgment, I called out to him.

  “Donald?” I managed to mutter out. There was no reply. The only thing I could hear was the sound of my own heavy breathing.

  Moments later, Donald’s body began to stir – slowly at first, but gradually his motions became more violent. I fought back a scream as his carcass started to convulse and writhe on the shed’s floor just a couple of feet from where I was standing. His arms and legs were flailing through the air while his torso shook and jerked like he was having a seizure. A low hiss seeped from his mouth – a sound that violated my ears while I trembled with fright from the scene unfolding before me.

  No, this can’t be happening. It can’t be real, I thought to myself. But it was happening, and I can tell you with the utmost sincerity that it was very real.

  The hiss grew louder. I covered my ears with my hands and shook my head in disbelief. Donald’s jaw started to twitch as if he was trying to talk. I was terrified of hearing his voice – of hearing the damning words I expected to come out of his mouth. But it wasn’t words that emerged from between my brother’s lips that evening. No sir! What came out instead was much more horrifying. An endless stream of those little black bugs began to pour from his mouth, flooding the room like a biblical plague, and swarming nearly everything in sight. They scuttled along my shoes and up my pants legs. I swatted at them frantically, doing everything in my power to get the vermin off of me, but the more I brushed them away, the more they overran me. My mind was panicky; I needed to remove the filthy things from my person as soon as possible.

  The lake! I remembered. Still crawling with bugs, I leapt over Donald’s now motionless body, burst through the shed’s door and made a break for the dock right next to my house. I was moving so fast the evening’s cool air began stinging my face while I sprinted through the darkness. When I reached the end of the dock, I threw myself head first into the icy cold water without hesitation, in an attempt to drown the bugs still clinging to me.

  In all the excitement and panic, I forgot to close my mouth and hold my breath before diving into the lake. The frigid water rushed down my esophagus in an effort to invade respiratory system, nearly drowning me in the freezing depths. Frantically, I kicked and thrashed underneath the surface, trying to make it to the dock’s ladder while water continued to usurp the air in my lungs. With one last desperate attempt at survival, I grasped onto one of the ladder’s rungs and yanked myself free from the drink, into the night air, gasping and choking in the moonlight. Exhausted, but relieved to be alive, I slogged my shaking body back up to the dock and collapsed on its deck.

  I had little time to relax though; there was still work to be done. Donald’s body wasn’t going to dispose of itself and I knew that I needed to move fast if I wanted to be back at the school by sunrise. The bugs were mostly gone by the time I got back to the shed. They must have scattered into the back yard or the wooded area that surrounded the house when I made my dash towards the lake. A few of them had stuck around and were lingering on the floor and walls when I returned, but I could cope with that. There really wasn’t time to stop and contemplate the peculiarity of what I had just witnessed. I was well aware of the inexplicable circumstances surrounding the little black bugs and Donald’s body – never in my life had I ever heard or read about something so odd or terrifying, but I was on the clock. In order to secure my alibi, I needed to finish the job and get back to school.

  I picked up the set of pliers, dragged my brother on top of the tarp, and kneeled down next to his corpse. Some of the insects were still trickling out of the corner of his mouth. I brushed them away and got down to business.

  I pulled each and every one of my brother’s teeth out with those pliers. His hands were a bit harder to remove with the shears then I thought they would be, but my father’s Dewalt Diamond Tipped Heavy Duty Hand Saw did a satisfactory enough job. I don’t know why a handsaw needs to be diamond tipped – all my father ever did with it was cut firewood, but I was more than thankful for his testosterone fueled purchase that evening. Needless to say, it sliced through my brother’s wrists faster than an emo kid looking for attention.

  I wrapped what was left of his body up in the blood soaked tarp and lugged it all the way back to the dock where my father’s rowboat was tied up. It was late and with the weather as cold as it was, I knew I wouldn’t see anyone else on the lake, not at that time of year anyways. For about twenty minutes I paddled out,
not stopping until I knew I was in a place where the water would be deep. Next, I deadlifted Donald’s fat carcass up from the boat and dumped it overboard. It sunk down into the murky depths, disappearing from sight like attractive people at a “Magic: The Gathering” tournament. I chucked the teeth I had extracted into the lake as well, watching them quickly scatter and vanish below the surface. When I got back to land, I used the hands I had removed to plant Donald’s fingerprints all over my steering wheel and the dashboard of my car before burying them out in the woods.

  I made sure to straighten up the shed so my father wouldn’t find anything amiss the next time he was in it. Before I left the lake house that night, I went inside and headed up to my parent’s bedroom. My father kept a revolver in the nightstand by his bed and I figured it might come in handy somewhere down the line – just a contingency plan incase things started to spiral out of control. Crazy people don’t come up with contingency plans so you can see how clear and level headed my thinking was.